 Hello everybody, welcome to Nerd Night East Bay. We have an awesome show tonight. Let's see, we've got the Oakley Public Library. If you didn't catch them on your way in, you should definitely take a look at the break because there are a list of resources related to the talks here in here. There's Shades of Sugar and the Pie Shop with awesome treats for you to eat. And the bar, in addition to across the board, low prices especially for Nerd Night. There's a special deal on cocktails. You get a discount if you order two at one time. So who are you kidding? Lush is. Just get two cocktails at once. Save yourselves some money. So our first talk is going to be about spiders and other wreckheads. We love spiders. We're nerds so we love spiders. But our culture has a really interesting relationship with spiders. They're one of the most popular horror monster movie creepy creatures. If I gave a 20 minute talk to myself, I couldn't mention every film that has used spiders, even just from Hollywood. Here's a classic. This is Tarantula from 1955. The 50s were full of giant spider movies. There were gazillions of them. Here's one I particularly like, Horrors of Spider Island. This is an awesome poster. This is from 1960. I haven't seen, I don't think I've seen any of these movies that I'm going to show you. I just like the posters. This one's Tarantula's Deadly Cargo. This was a TV movie from 1977 jumping ahead from 1960 to 1977. Monster movies, as you probably know, were really big in the 50s. A lot of that was anxiety about the atomic bomb and the effects of radiation. So you had all kinds of giant creature movies, spiders among them. And then that sort of had resurgence in the late 70s and 80s after Jaws and Alien were big hits. So I think this sort of came in that time period. It was a TV movie where a plane that's carrying tarantulas from South America crashes because the tarantulas get loose and you know how deadly tarantulas are. But they make great movie bad spiders, yes, because they are larger than their typical house spider and probably easy to control. Kingdom of the Spiders, also from 1977, and often giant spiders. Then you guys might remember Arachnophobia from 1990. Here you have the trope of these swarm of spiders, more so than the giant ones. Eight-legged Freaks gets us back to Giant Spiders 2002. This is just a sampling. For everyone I'm showing you, there are like dozens more. I'm going to erase the spiders from 2007. Anybody seen this one? Apparently, very schlocky. I literally haven't seen a single movie I'm showing you. Maybe I will. So in addition to all the movies that are like the explicit topic of the movie is giant or swarms of spiders, the spiders are also frequently used to just create creepy moments in horror movies, adventure movies, any kind of suspense movie. Doctor No, famous tarantula scene again with tarantula in 1962. I don't know if you all remember something like it this way comes from 1983, but there's this scene where the two boys their bedroom gets overtaken by tarantulas and it's terrifying when you're a little kid. Raiders has this scene in the beginning where the spiders, of course, that are all the giant spiders and the world of the rings and all the movies that she loved. It's just a small sampling. So are spiders such a great movie villain? I don't know. We all just have this cultural terror of spiders that's not necessarily related to the psychological condition of all of arachnophobia, but just a more ooh, we're creeped out but we as nerds know that spiders are really great. They do awesome things. They're wonderful to have around for many reasons and they're fascinating interesting creatures and we're going to learn a lot more about them in a moment. So, of course, we're all going to try to spread the word. Spiders just want to be our friends. This is one of my favorite memes. So I just thought I'd share it with you as a contrast to the overarching cultural aversion to spiders. We want to spread the love. Don't be afraid. So, we're going to speak more about spiders and other arachnids as the very knowledgeable Lauren has been doing. Is that good? So, what I want to talk to you guys today, tonight, is some of the really amazing evolutionary adaptations of arachnids, which includes spiders. So, the first thing is there's a lot of spiders out there. In fact, there's a lot of arachnids. There's over 100,000 known species of arachnid and that's probably only about 10% of the actual diversity on the planet. So, that's really a phenomenal amount of spiders that are present in the world. This lovely volunteer is here demonstrating upside down in the book the tree of life of arachnids and you can see in this kind of blurry picture is down here is a bunch of spiders with hands covering some of them and then we have scorpions over here and those are the two groups that I'm primarily going to be talking about today. But what I want to point out first is that in terms of spiders and natural history and what we know about them and all of the really cool things that they do is not very much. In fact, there's still a whole lot left to discover. So, here's a few of the unknown or appreciated spider groups including Solifugee which are just totally bizarre and basically not absolutely nothing about them. Apileonids also called Danylongweeds the most popular urban myth about them is that they're extremely venomous but their fangs aren't quite big enough to penetrate our skin. Actually, they don't have venom. These down here they're often called vinaigroons and vinaigroons are really cool and I was always told by my mother that they're good when they're in the garden because they eat brooches and that's probably true so if you have any vinaigroons around you shouldn't step on them. Also, don't make any poison with the exception of vinegar that they squirt out of their ass even here is really cool stuff and so perhaps the one that we're most familiar with is spider silk. It's not just one general type of material for all spiders on the planet but they make all sorts of silk and one of the main types of silk that they make is called major ampulate silk and what that is is it's sort of the radii in the web it's the big major strands of silk that are holding the web down into the plants or whatever the webs attach to but the cool thing about major ampulate silk is it's the strongest material known to man. It's stronger than steel and it's more tensile than Kevlar so if you could expand it sort of pound for pound it would literally be the strongest and most tensile property known to man whether it be man made or naturally occurring but what I want to talk to you guys tonight about is not silk although silk is really really cool it has all kinds of other fascinating properties that I'm not even going to touch on what I want to talk to you about is venoms and so venoms is one of the things that I study that's really fascinating about arachnids is this sort of cocktail of venoms that many arachnids produce in particular spiders and scorpions and so for example a single individual scorpion might produce 200 unique types of venom and so it's DNA actually codes for all different types of venom and those venoms can be specific for crustaceans, for insects for humans for all different sorts of things whether it be prey or predator so there's really an active research field sort of burgeoning around the study of venoms and so I want to give you guys a few examples of why we should continue studying spiders and continue discovering them because who knows what we're going to figure out and so the first is an example from this giant spider down here I apologize because most of the names have been cut off but this is a spider from Brazil they're actually quite big they're like hand sized they crawl around in the forest and as a spider biologist they're slightly terrifying but they're not going to kill you that's the good news, most spiders won't kill you in fact if you live in the Bay Area there aren't any spiders that will kill you but this one in particular produces a venom that causes pre-apism is that better? and what pre-apism is it causes an erection so it's a good opener for talking about sex and spider sex which I'll get to in just a minute and so it causes pre-apism in humans and so it's obviously being studied as a possible drug to treat our entire dysfunction next up in case the pre-apism drug works it's a treatment for chlamydia which is the case of this lovely little animal here and he actually produces a peptide in his venom glands that is an antimicrobial and it's being used as a potential treatment for chlamydia speaking of really nasty microbes there's another venom peptide this one is produced in a scorpion and these scorpions here they're found in Egypt unfortunately we don't have them here but what they do have is they have a peptide that's produced in their venom and this peptide has been experimented with as a treatment for MRSA and so this kind of gross image luckily it's blurry because it's really disgusting is mouse skin and the mice have been infected with MRSA and this is sort of over time and this is untreated skin this is a placebo which remains about the same and this one over here is one that's been treated with the scorpion venom peptide and while it's difficult to see in this blurry image the skin is nearly cured of MRSA after just a few days which is awesome we know that's a huge problem in hospitals these days so here's another one and this one is really my favorite example because at the heart or at my heart really I'm a scorpion biologist so while I study many arachnids I always true love the scorpions and this scorpion is called the Egyptian death stalker it's again found in Egypt it's look at how beautiful it is though really ok but what this scorpion does is it has a peptide that for some reason targets mammal cells and the reason that scorpion venom target mammal cells as you might guess is not to eat mammals but rather to defend themselves against mammals so mammals are the most voracious predators of arachnids that's the most feared animal on the planet if you're an arachnid and so what these scorpions have done they've sort of engaged in evolutionary arms race with mice and so the mice that ate them developed immunity to their toxins and the scorpions in turn developed more potent toxin to evade this immunity and vice versa and so finally they've evolved really potent toxins that would kill a meddle well that's maybe not the best for us it actually can be because in fact for some reason some of these toxins target specifically cancer cells in the brain called brain ileomas we don't know why they target them but they do and what somebody's managed to develop using this very cleverly is a paint and so what this does is they attach a fluorescent dye to the toxin the toxin is injected into the body goes straight to the brain ileomas and paints them with fluorescent dye and then a surgeon can go in with a microscope and excise only the cells that are infected with cancer and leave intact all of the healthy brain cells amazing right and that's just a few of the things like I really want to move on to the spider sex like let's get on with the good stuff but I wanted to talk to you first about the same thing so that you'll be less scared of scorpions and spiders in their venoms but here's a few of the other things that are currently being researched as possible treatments from scorpion and spider venom including muscular dystrophy chronic pain, Alzheimer's disease congestive heart failure and not to mention pesticides to save all of our food crops but there's all kinds of amazing behaviors that arachnids do so for example arachnids are the fastest animals on earth that's just a fact no debating it, they're the fastest they may not be the fastest underwater now but maybe they were 430 million years ago but they are the fastest animals on earth today and that includes trap jaw spiders which have the fastest closing jaws on the planet faster if you've ever heard of trap jaw ants there's even faster than trap jaw ants these spiders right here they're called flaties they have the fastest turning strike speed of any animal on the planet this is a little bit more than a cheetah although scorpions can navigate by star light so scorpions actually they have a configuration of eyes and a triangle and this configuration looks up into the sky figures out the relative position of the stars just like a GTS from your phone figures out where you are using phone satellite towers and then they can figure out where their burrow is based on where the stars are and there's a reason that they need to do this and the reason is that burrows are expensive they're like 2 meters deep a 2 inch scorpion dug it and it cost them like at least 50 crickets and so they have to get back to it when they go out looking for food at night and so they've evolved this adaptation of being able to actually navigate back to their burrow on a sand dune with no distinguishing features that lets you figure out how to get home there's no roadmap but the stars take them home which is amazing but what's even more amazing is spider sex exactly and what there's no better way to start out talking about spider sex than with these guys right here and so what you're seeing in this semi fuzzy video is a male spider this is him right here and these are his sexual organs right here and this is the female's abdomen and he's punching a hole yeah a hole through her abdomen directly into her uterus to deposit a sperm like these spiders actually said like never mind we're not going to have a genital opening anymore we're just going to go ahead and let the males just stab our abdomen in and deposit their sperm and that's actually a fact and the name of this spider is herpedicus sadistica here's a scanning electron micrograph of his the tip of his pout and you see this kind of like this sharp spade combined with an epidermic needle totally bizarre oh I forgot to mention he first bites her to sedate her and then carries her off before dramatically inseminating her but that's not always the case more often than not the females are the giants and so here's a picture this is the golden silk orb weaver and so the golden silk orb weaver is a giant spider it's really quite big if you've never seen one you can come see one of the California Academy of Sciences and here's the male and the male lives as a parasite in her web it's gonna get better I'll tell you about it in just a second I'm gonna make a slight diversion to talk about this guy I feel like when you talk about spider sex like the most common comment that people make to me are don't the females eat the males well yeah they do one thing that nobody talks about is that first the males have to convince the females not to eat them long enough to inseminate her and so here's an example of a black widow spider and this is the male he's tiny just like in the golden silk orb weaver and he's strumming her web to let her know like hey I'm actually not a cricket don't eat me I'm gonna come and inseminate you here you're gonna see it there it goes his sperm I think he just went into her genital perculeum but that's kind of the end for him that's where it begins and ends he just put all his energy inseminating her and now he's contributing his energy to the next generation which is great but more often than not the male spider doesn't get eaten it doesn't always make evolutionary sense for them to get eaten to volunteer their body and flesh for their young so they do all kinds of other really weird stuff so here's again a female there's a male right there again he's super tiny and here's his reproductive organ right here his pout and here's his other pout they normally have two he self cascaded himself and stuck his reproductive organ into her genital opening so that nobody else could meet with her and now he's just hanging out on her web making sure that nobody else comes around and so this is a case of male eunuchs and so here's a normal male see he has two pouts one two they look like little boxing gloves up in the front here's a male that's cascaded one of his pouts he's left it inside of the female probably as a plug here's a male without any pouts and so the question is he's already created a plug what happened to the other one and the answer is really amazing it turns out that male eunuchs are faster stronger and have greater endurance than males with pouts and so if you want to protect the queen you've got to cascade yourself so it really makes you a better warrior and so this is actually a scientific fact so people have done actual behavioral research and determined that male eunuchs are stronger and last longer than males with the nuts so well here's another common one maybe you've heard about this one before this is a nutchal gift here's a male he's this little guy right here he's not as little as the others and he's presenting the female with something wrapped up in silk but as it turns out some of the males are sneaky they're not always honest as they appear to be and in the case of this one what he's actually done is wrapped up nothing like a piece of leaf and he's like here you go I got this for you it's a delicious fly and she's not going to tell it's way too late but there's some other weird stuff and there, sometimes a male gives a gift sometimes the gift is himself in the case of male spontaneous suicide and so in these viruses it turns out the male will court the female he'll inseminate her and immediately after inseminating her he just dies he's still stuck inside of her and he's just dead attached to her totally weird nobody really knows why probably it's both a combination of a genital plug and an optional gift so she eats him and he still gets to plug her so that no other spiders can make her but what's really cool in spiders is this really complex courtship behavior and so here's an example this is a peacock spider and these guys are really tiny they're like the half the size of your pinky nail and these guys have evolved through sexual selection and you'll need amazing courtships and you can see, if you go on YouTube and look up peacock spider, there's this guy who's made amazing videos of all these different species so these guys are found in eastern Australia and what they've evolved is these flaps on their abdomen that they open up for a display so I want to show you a video so here's the female, you can see she's brown not very exciting and we're going to see the male in just a second these guys are hard to film he's getting her attention he's like hey hey hey hey check me out, check me out wait for it and it's going to be good he's got to really make sure she's paying attention first oh oh oh he got shy now he's going forward he's really all over it and so he's going to lift his tail up on the way those flaps and really shake his tail feathers those flaps combined with arm waves and if he does it right if he does the right series of steps in the courtship ritual he will get to make with the female she'll let him actually approach her and in these fighters it works really well they have amazing vision I mean it's really usually I highly encourage you to watch these YouTube videos so this guy got lucky but what's really crazy is so you saw this it's amazing like incredible you never knew that a spider could look like a peacock so just now but what's even more amazing is what you didn't see or what you couldn't see is what you hear and so this is called multimodal communication and what that means is they're communicating in more than one mode so not only is there visual cues where the female can see his legs waving around saying like hey hey hey he's changing to me and his beautiful peacock tail popping up but I'm going to play a video for you and this has sound and you're going to see what's actually happening are you going to play this sound? it's good, it's going to work so this is actually a different species he doesn't have the amazing peacock tail but this is a really great sound example that I wanted to play for you and this is work done by Damien Elias who's over at UC Berkeley I mean that you can't see he's coordinating the arms it's getting good, he's rubbing up the meaning of the noise of this sort of percussion combined with visual stimuli is the entire courtship and I wasn't exaggerating when I said I could go on for hours sometimes these courtship rituals in jumping spiders might last for 12 hours I mean talk about stamina so these guys are really just absolutely fascinating and if you want to learn more you should check out the Elias Lab at UC Berkeley so this in ending this talk without talking about a couple of other reckonance particularly my the ones nearest and dearest to my heart and that's because of the cuddlies look at these how cuddly they are and so scorpions they take a different approach and so rather than jumping around and waving his arms the male he runs right in grabs the females hands and starts dancing with her like ballroom dancing eventually he starts kissing her in something called calisceral massage where he actually chews on her mouth parts with his mouth parts like gently, like caressing her if he gets it far enough then stings her no big deal, it's just a little stink and this is called the sexual sting I don't really know what he's injecting probably some sort of aphrodisiac that lets him even see how little he is he's pretty small, she's a lot bigger she can definitely and he's holding onto her hands which means he's like a direct target for her tail where this thinger is pretty brave but if he makes it all the way through if he compilates with her and is successful she's pregnant it's bliss he leaves, I mean he's gone but she gives birth and in fact she gives birth to live babies she's actually pregnant unlike most other arachnids scorpions give birth to live young which is why they've been on the planet longer than any other terrestrial orthopaed obviously and then the babies crawl up onto her back and she takes care of them just like any other good mom until they follow her back and she eats them they get big enough to go out on their own and then they leave as little scorpions but in other arachnids like these amylopiges right here that maternal care lasts longer so here you can see hers have come off her back they actually don't give birth to live babies they lay eggs but they take care of the eggs and then the babies crawl up on their back just like scorpions that were trying to copy them but then the mother she has these long, it's hard to see in this picture because these guys are really good at blending in these long legs that aren't used as legs, they're used as fuelers they're kind of like antennae and they're full of sensory hairs and stuff and these babies will just hang out around her for years literally years, these guys live years and the mother will touch the babies with her whips and the babies will touch the mom back and they'll live like that for a long period of time until they become grown up, boy or girl, tailless scorpions and move to a different part of the cave and continue their courtship reaches and so with that I just would like to thank you guys very much but first I want to show you this very last video before I see you I'm sure you guys have lots of questions about Iraqis because who doesn't but this last video which is these are sun spiders or wind spiders or I don't know they have tons of snakes camel spiders as another one we don't really know what they do because we don't know anything about them but we do know that this is how they mate with the male just he just chews on her for a long time like 20 minutes and then when he's done he runs away really fast so this is a video it's one of very few videos ever made and actually quite a good one on YouTube he's just 200, he's got his fangs all up inside of her he doesn't have any venom so we don't really he's doing it really well I have one before you even ask it you didn't get bit by brown eclipses they don't look here so now's a good time go up in the evening what you're seeing on that video is the males you just walk on any trail you will see male tarantulas out in mass looking for females and you'll never see the females because they don't come out they stay in their burrow the male goes in there does his business and moves on but yeah this is a good time of the year like from now through the end of October probably before it gets cold good question so I think the first, yeah sorry how did scorpions find, how did scientists figure out how did scorpions navigate by starlight so the first answer is that scorpions and sand dunes have eyes that are in a more triangular position so the eyes are pushed back on the head compared to scorpions that don't live in sand dunes and so the question was raised why would that happen there's not any other obvious reason that it's helpful if you live on a sand dunes to have eyes in a more triangular array than otherwise and so the theory was proposed that perhaps it's to enable triangulation and some people did some experimentation and figured out that in fact if you change the orientation of the stars versus the magnetic compass the stars that they're using oh also they come out on moonless nights I should mention that so you can see the stars better how common and how dangerous are black photos in the bay area well black photos in the bay area are as dangerous as black photos in any other area they're for sure I mean black photos like a little hotter in here so they're not super common but they might be in like places of your basement that are warm and moist and there's common as the prey items that they eat so if you have broaches you might want to take care of that so we're going to take a quick 10 minute break Alex Preston is going to come back with a demo on how to marble paper to encourage you to check out our food vendors as well as the Oakland Public Library every month the Oakland Public Library brings a list of resources related in talks last month they apparently write out so now's your chance to grab that before they're all over Rick Karnesky, I'm one of the co-bosses around at East Bay and I kind of like science a lot so I was particularly taken by the H.A.T.A. Tribune article of this astronaut saying that we should start taking the flight out of science and with that in mind I'm a particularly big fan of the Bay Area Science Festival which is coming up in October also a big fan of Kishore Ari when he presents he usually shows embarrassing pictures of other people and gets them to show embarrassing pictures of him instead he'll show you an embarrassing picture of me and Kishore on my t-shirt I've had a lot of fun with Kishore planning special night activities what did you become a favorite Kishore tell us about this I think you should tell us about this so first of all thanks for having me back at Nerd Night East Bay because I really shouldn't be allowed to be back given the kind of hazing that I do of my friend Rick here does anyone know the guy on my left on the right who is that awesome gentleman no he is a local treasure his name is Rusty Schweikart he's an Apollo 9 an astronaut yeah 9 less than 11 and he came to a nerd night that we did why are you standing funny I'm standing funny so I can stand right in this part of my face not why you're standing funny here why are you standing funny in that picture I had that sexy lab coat because my pants kind of look like that in that picture so that's kind of how Kish sells the event to his friends officially he sells the event like this this is sorry I'm going to stand right here this is an excerpt from Bay Area Science Festival's report for the event it was apparently extremely successful they took all of your money and used it to fund other science events apparently we did let's see how Tom Coburn considers your event I think we should add Republican Tom Coburn from Oklahoma what's his waste book so this is going on my CV Republican Tom Coburn comes out with a list of the most wasteful science government funded science projects in the country and we made the list you know what I'm mad about I'm not mad about being on the list that's a badge of honor I'm mad we were so low on the list we were in the 80s right and we lost my yeah that was a pretty bad bear but what was awesome is he mentions this event where we took over an aircraft carrier in Alameda, USS Hornet we always do a special event together between our nine the bay area science festival we took over this aircraft carrier to pick up the Apollo 11 capsule who's been in the Hornet because it's a fucking awesome place to go it is one of the treasures of the Bay Area so we took over that aircraft carrier for the night And all the docents on board were veterans. So I came in to work the next morning after this came out, and I waited by my phone to get a call from press. I'm like, please call. Please call so I can tell you how this guy wants to shame us for having veterans on board. You're really calling that professor with cheats on treadmill. Yeah, that's true. So what are we going to do this year? Should we do anything? I mean, there's three people that want us to do something based on the audience. So I would like to thank Kishore personally. So we've already had two internet at sea events, and we're going to have a third. Alcatraz is pretty sweet, and Kishore just did a walkthrough today. I did a walkthrough. So we're basically taking all of this, minus a little bit of the posters you see in the bathroom, and taking it all the way to Alcatraz. Well, they're not spritzing on that in terms of posters on the internet. So it's poster builds, I believe. You see lonely signs that say Indians go home. There is a sign. We did a walkthrough of the event today on the island, and we're taking all of internet, all the things that you love about internet, booze, scientific talks, tours of locations led by scientists and engineer types, and putting them on this brilliant little island. So we're going to have talks inside jail cells. We're going to have Adams, that goes. Yeah, so I'm going to show the ticketing link. And before I show the ticketing link, I will preface this by saying that we've already sold 75% of the tickets after Kishore and I announced this at United San Francisco less than two weeks ago. So go to this now. There's about 150 tickets left. And everyone in San Francisco is like, I don't care what's on there. I'm just going to try to try this and booze. I respect you, so I'm going to tell you what's on there, and then you're going to snap your tickets. So first up, we're going to have Adam Savage on the island. Yeah, wow. Adam's been there before. Adam's going to do two half hour versions of his podcast. And for the first half hour, he's going to talk about how he escaped from the island using just materials that were available on it during the time it was open as a prison, which was pretty bad ass because he made a fucking ramp out of raincoats and sailed all the way down the runway. So he's going to talk about it, and he's going to hang out and talk shit with us. So that's the first one. The second one is he wants to, so he really likes the movie The Rock. Any fans of that? Because I'm not. It does not hold up for these movies. He wants to talk about it for like a half hour, just how it makes that movie. I'm working on something else with that. So the science talks. So Lindsay Dorgue talked here at Nurnite East of Disco Plans. So she'll be back. Claire Simeon, one of the great Nurnite North Bay talks. She talks about sea otters. So she'll be back to go and advance the slide. And Bob. Bob hasn't given Nurnite talk yet, but he's obviously very. Yes, something he really likes. I like Bob. He's a UC Davis prof. And he discovered gloomy melanchines on the island. This story is really bizarre. So it's amazing. And we got approval today that he's going to take a group of people out hunting for them. So you can go with some research or something like Cal Academy along with Bob. They're going to try to track them down. It's going to be pretty sweet. Plus we're going to have some awesome surprises on the boat and maybe a surprise too that we're just not going to announce yet. So thanks for sure. And you should all check out the other activities in the area of the Science Festival running. What are the days? It's October 22nd and November 7th. If you're asking me for my personal favorite, you should check out Creatures of the Nightlife at the Cal Academy on October 29th. It's adults only. We're building a science pop-up haunted house with a drag queen. I don't know what that means, but it's going to be amazing. So thanks for joining me. I am also excited to go to our next talk. I'm not sure if you guys remember paper. We used to have this thing. You should talk to the public library about this because they have all manners and awesome things. But I thought I would highlight a few. First of all, the Edgesley books used to be really awesome. Our speaker, however, is going to talk about what is usually on sort of the front flaps or the covers of the books. This beautiful marbling effect that is really unique, like a no-to edition. We're going to have the exact same pattern. I know he'll show you how to make it. One of my favorite things about this is that they say don't judge a book by its cover. And marbling is exactly why you shouldn't do that. First of all, who's going to find this fucking boring book? Advice from former Truman to his daughter Mary upon her going to service. In a series of discourses designed to promote the welfare of true nutritional service, it's a morality book. They sold a lot of copies of these. They had beautiful covers like this. Over time, this would ward away to this. So this is the cover of the book saying Woman of Pleasure. So this is Fanny Hill. This is that book, a book that was two scandalous. It's one of the most banned books. And it was basically hidden under these beautiful, beautiful covers. So let's talk to you about the process of making those covers mothers. Here's Alex Preston. Hello, everybody. Alex, I never did any marbling before January 1st, 2015. And then I went to work for a company in Northern California, Jakarta. We make everything that's related to doing t-shirts and stuff like that. I'm a t-shirt artist that happened my whole life. And I found out, oh, your first job is to we need to make a marbling kit. I started at the beginning, and I learned everything about marbling the hard way. But there are some great resources on it. So let's talk a little bit about marbling. First of all, it comes from, you can imagine, it's because the patterns often look very similar to patterns you find in stone naturally. So this is sort of a faux finishing thing that's been going on. There are multiple traditions. It was at least invented independently twice. There's the Japanese version, which is suminagashi. And that one is basically they float these inks on top of water. And then you print paper from the inks that are floating on water. And then in Turkey, they came up with ebru. And anybody who's really a fine marbler these days calls themselves an ebru artist. Not a marbler, because that's more crafty. Just a little distinguishing. And then European, there's this domino method that was basically imported from Turkey. I don't think Marco Polo brought it, but probably someone just roasted it. The Japanese suminagashi is really interesting because it's very pale, very transparent. And they actually just use water. And the way they're able to do that is they use solvent-based inks, like alcohol inks, that float on top of water. They're less dense than water, so they float. And you get these really beautiful designs. You don't have a lot of control over it. It's very random. And so it's more of a process than you just let the process go out. The ebru is interesting because it's the most figurative of the marbling arts. People actually paint images. And they actually do figurative work, which is unusual because the whole reason they started doing marbling was because that's, again, figurative work is against Islamic law. So it was very random and sort of like an abstract art. And then they actually got more into stuff like this. These are actually, they cut them out and made these sort of silhouettes with pen and ink over top of marble papers. And they're really, it's really amazing. You should check out every videos on YouTube. They're great. And then the Italian domino. Domino comes from, the word comes from a, before the game, it comes from a kind of cloak that hides your face, has a hood. And the reason it was called domino was because it was a hidden art. Basically people tried to keep it a secret so that they could make money from it. No one else could. These guilds very carefully hid their secrets. And even the apprentices that worked for marblers didn't know the whole process. So sometimes they would like have them do it, but they wouldn't tell them how to make the size that they floated on or how to prepare the paints. And each person would know a little bit, but only the master marbler would actually know the whole deal. It's pretty cool. And this is, they did this with watercolor. So, or wash. And wash is basically an opaque watercolor. And this is, the big difference between this and what we do today is that watercolor is not permanent. It'll rewet, so if you get it wet it'll start running. And they just, on those old books that Rick was showing, those are actually have been coated in beeswax to be waterproof. Today we use acrylic paints and when those dry, everything's cool, it's all good. And it's permanent after that. So, let's talk a little bit about the science. Density is super, super important. It's basically the most important thing. You have to, you have to float the paints where it's not gonna work. If you just drop some water-based paint into some water, because it's both water and something else mixed together, it's more dense than water. So it will sink. So we know we need to make the paints lighter than what you float them on. So, for the kind of marbling I do, we actually mix a marbling medium. And the medium can be several different things. In this case we're using Kara Jeanin. Some people say Kara Jeanin, but I think that sounds weird. So, I'm just gonna go ahead and change it. I've decided it's gonna be Kara Jeanin from now on. Kind of like how it used to be Jigawatts, but now it's Gigawatts. So, somebody just made that decision, you know? So, that's my turn. So, basically what's going on is, in the Suminagashi method, you've got something that's lighter than water. It's either oil-based paints. Actually, you can just do that on top of the water. The Japanese just use solvents. So, the solvent is actually less dense than water. It floats on top, and you can just put a piece of paper down over top of it and pick that up. The paints that we use in the more European method are water-based, and so they would be basically in this level. And so, you basically have to make the water thicker in order for the paints to float on top. And that would be your marbling medium. And so, there's several different ones. Memphal cellulose is a synthetic that never goes bad. Bacarygene is, they actually add that to things like chocolate milk to make them real smooth. So, it's actually edible, and it can also go bad. So, bacteria grow in it, it'll start to smell like sulfur really bad in about four days if you leave it out in this kind of climate. The other thing, we almost used Traga Camp gum in this as our marbling medium, but we found out the only place you can get that is Iran. So, importing that is kind of difficult, and we tried to do an underhanded deal with the Turkish people to get it into the country, but that didn't really work. We went back to carrageenan, and that's the best thing. Anyway, so it's pretty cool. Carrageenan actually comes from moss. You boil the moss, and you get this gum comes out of it, you have to filter it and all this stuff. But now you can just buy it in a powder and it just makes it up and it's good to go. But the density, it's all about the density and surface tension basically. You want to break up the surface tension so that your colors spread across the top, and that's basically so that the colors don't sink down to the bottom. If they sink to the bottom, you can't print them on the paper, and that's a lot like making an ice analogy isn't probably good in this climate, but if you've ever been on a piece of ice and it was like cracking, you're supposed to spread your body weight over it because that spreads the weight over a larger area, and that's basically what happens with the paint. You want the paints to spread out so that they don't sink to the bottom. Okay, so what about electrostatic interactions? These are positive and negative charges. The cellulose, even though you may not know it, even cotton or paper is very slightly negatively charged because the hydroxyl groups that are normally on the outside get oxidized by the oxygen in the air and they become negative, so you need something because most paints are actually negatively charged, you need something to help those stick, and what they use is something called alum, aluminum sulfate, and these aluminum ions, they attract to both the cotton and to the paint, and those help that stick together until the paint dries. So basically you do need to prepare the either fabric or paper before you site the marble, and what's really cool about it is as soon as you touch it to the surface, the paint just gets stuck right there and it doesn't move after that, so it doesn't smear around or anything like that. Basically as soon as you touch it, your painting is done, and it's really fast, really cool, and I'm gonna show you in just a few minutes. Let's talk about a couple of the patterns. These are the really basic ones. This is considered a stone pattern, and that is one where you just drip the drops onto the surface, they float around, mix together a little bit, but you do get distinct colors, you get color separation, and that's partially because of the synthetic gull we use. They used to use ox gull, but with acrylic paints, you just need to use a synthetic detergent, and that basically makes a little fatty layer between each color so that they don't mix together on the surface. If you wanna mix the paints together, you have to do it in a little cup before you add them. This is the Guilt Get, and this is a really basic pattern. It means back and forth. I think that's Latin, and you basically move your skyless back and forth this way, and then you move it back and forth this way, and you get this cool pattern. This is the basis for a lot of the other patterns. And then non-périe, it's a French word. The French believed they invented marbling, but it's not true. And there's a lot of French words that are involved in marble as a French word as well. The, this is a combing technique, and it literally means without parallel, so there is nothing better than this in terms of how cool it is, I guess. There are other things you can do afterward. This is also the basis for a lot of different patterns, so it's, but it's really pretty. It's cool. I'm just gonna talk a little bit about the resources I use. This guy, Galen Berry, is really awesome. He studied marbling forever. I call him up on the phone sometimes when I can't figure out what the heck is going on. And he has a really nice understanding of marbling. This guy is the guy who set it off. Marbling was totally secret, and when book binding became less popular and started mass producing books, he was just like, I'm gonna tell everybody what's going on, and so marbling doesn't die because they weren't marbling like paperbacks. So in 1894 he published this book and it really exploded after that, and people started doing it at home before it was like something only a master would do. This one, this book is also really great. If you really wanna know the different patterns, they have like 50 of them, and they are awesome. And this one as well, they get a lot of great information on this book. So you can check out that list if you like. But now, let's do the fun part. Let's do some marbling. Woo! Woo! Okay, so we got a little webcam going on here. Hopefully you'll be able to see it really nicely, and okay, adjust for the light. So normally you would add the colors in the order that they spread the leaves to, they spread the most, but I designed the system so that it didn't work that way. You can basically add them in any order you want. When you put the paints on the surface, I usually like an eyedropper, they spread out all over the place, and the thinner your marbling medium is, the less dense it is, the faster the paints will spread. So we're not seeing much here, huh? Hmm, better, I think it's better. So I really wanted to see these bright colors though. That's blue. Is that okay? Okay. It's supposed to be like really shockingly beautiful. Everybody's like, oh my God! So the cool thing is you can do these little, you can do bull's eyes and all this kind of stuff, but basically you want to get this done really quick. If you don't put the paint on fast, it starts to crack up on the surface, you don't get even colors, but it's really simple. Once you get the paints floating, so the really hard part is getting the paints to float in the first place. What you do is you mix the gall in with it, and when the gall mixes in, you get the colors, you can tune all the paints so they spread the same amount. So let's talk about the different patterns. Let's talk about a geltgett. A geltgett means back and forth, so what we do is we cut the colors in two, and we can just push it back and forth and we get this beautiful design. And then this is gonna be the basis for most of our other patterns. The geltgett's really nice, you can do all kinds of stuff with it. And then I use different tools, combs, and rakes to make the different designs. So that's the geltgett. Can you kind of tell what's going on? And then you take something like, this is a really fine-toothed comb, and I put the comb through it at a 90-degree angle to the up and down motion I just did, and I get a perfect non-peri, as the French say. Can you tell? Oh, nobody can tell. My light is too bright. I swear if it was, oh no. Man, it looks so good. It looks so good right here. Okay, so what do we do? I'm gonna show you the paper so you'll be able to see it. So what we do then is we take our paper, this has been treated with alum. It's super absorbent, it's ready to grab this paint. So I'm gonna lay it down on the surface, and I'm gonna grab the paint, and then I can show you and you'll be able to tell. Maybe. And that's it, and the painting is totally done. Really cool, and it's fast. And then you can do things, you know, you can like clean it off, you just need to put some towel paper on there, and you just skim the top of a layer of paint off, and then you can do your next design. Or you can leave the paints in and do another design immediately, which is what I'm gonna do right now. You don't wanna do it too many times because it'll crack up on the surface and you'll get it different. It won't look quite as nice, but it can be cool to do it that way. So, let's talk about some other designs. Basically, we start with the gel get most of the time, but you can also do the gel get in a different way. You don't have to do it with your stylus, and there's a way that the people who make professional marble papers do it, and they use what's called a rake. And the rake is just a bunch of sticks, taped at regular intervals. It's a really wide toothed comb like this, and I just tape some, I literally tape sticks to another stick. So I can do the same thing with the gel get. This time I just push it once this way. I move it half an inch or so, and I push it the other way. I can do that super fast. And then because my comb is so wide-mount, I can actually do it the other way really fast as well, and push it back that way. Now I've got my gel get. That's the basis for most of my designs. And then we can do things like, the funny thing about marbling is, the whole point of marbling is the really fine designs you can make, and how nicely the lines are. How nice the lines are. So I can do it on very here, and then I go back the other way, and I get the Chevron. And the Chevron's super cool if you can see it, you'd love it. So because, that's not working that great, or you can't see it, I'm gonna start doing, well, my favorite design, which is known as the Spanish Wave. The Spanish Wave happened in the 1600s, and a guy went to nerd night, got way too drunk, and then went to Marble immediately in the morning when he was super hungover, and his hands were all shaky. I think he had the DTs. So when he was doing that though, it made, he was shaking in such a way that it made an awesome design on the paper. So I'm gonna show you what happens when you do that. Instagram sometimes, people think I make computer generated images, but they're really three dimensional, and they're all wavy, they look great. So yeah, they're super, super cool, and I'm really famous for it. It's also good, because I'm not that good at laying it down gently and nicely. I'm really good at the wave part. So let me show you another one, and you can come up and look at this if you want after, okay. And, so we talked about the gall a little bit. The gall is to make, you can make holes in the design with the gall, because the gall is just basically a spreading agent, right? So I take like a toothbrush here, and I just, oops, I dripped one big drip in there. See that? I dripped one big drip and it's spreading the whole thing, but if you flick it on, you get little holes everywhere. And that's super cool, you get a, this is called, this is actually called the Italian vein. And so they did, the Italians invented this, and you can really break up your design, and you want to do this last, because you see like, I just put this gigantic hole in my design. So you don't want that, that ruins the bath for like the rest of your marbling process. So you really want to do this last if you can help it. But the cool thing is, it looks great. I'm going to get this awesome stony looking pattern that has a bunch of holes in it. So otherwise, you can also use it on fabric, fabric looks great too for marbling. I marbled the shirt that I'm wearing, and people make silk scarves and all kinds of things with marbling. Yeah, I guess, I really wish you were seeing too much more detail, but that's okay. I think you got the point. I'll take questions. Great question, because I do have green and orange. I didn't get to it, but it's absolutely true that different pigments spread differently. And the hardest part of this entire project was definitely getting the pigments to spread at the same, all to the same size. And it's really a fine tuning process, and there was a ton of work involved in that. But once you get it, they all work great, and it's really easy. There are pigments that you can't use because although the gall will make pigments spread more, there's nothing you can do to make them spread less. Unless you can, so you're basically breaking surface tension when you add the gall to it. So you can put something down that spreads a lot and then put one that really spreads a lot after that and it won't spread as much. So it's like this whole balancing act to keep the colors from sinking to the bottom basically. Anybody else? Yeah. How did I get interested in ancient marbling? I read that book by Joseph Appner and it was like blowing my mind. I meant to reread it before tonight, but I didn't have the time. It has some like really, he's Hungarian and he has like some really mind-blowing statements about it and like what kind of man you are if you can't marble correct things, stuff like that. So yeah, it's just, it was really a matter of, I really like, I really like these things. It's like tie-dye or something else where it's a process you set in motion and you're not in complete control of and I really like that because you end up with things that you wouldn't believe. Yep, it's because a lot of, what's that? Oh yeah, why do most of the patterns square with the back and forth? It's because, you know, it's like, you can do whatever you want with marbling because there's so much freedom if you're supposed to experiment, it's built into the way it works. But one of the reasons is they wanted really complex patterns because specifically in the Ottoman Empire, they used this as a counterfeit, countermeasure. So people who tried to copy government documents or money or things like that weren't able to do it because every marble was different and so they knew exactly what was going on. And even if you look at paper money today, Ben Franklin suggested they marble paper money to begin with. You look at that, it has all kinds of marble designs in it and so basically the more complex pattern, the better it was. And they even did things like, when you talked about the edges of the books being decorated, they were very often marbled because especially because the very earliest books were accounting books for money. And you could tell if someone had ripped a page out of the book because the edges were marbled and so you couldn't cook the books back then. If we had, you know, the computer stuff is a lot easier to fake. When you have a marble book, you can't fake that. And Ron should have been using those, right? Last question, anybody else? Thank you very much, I'm happy to share it with you. So we're gonna take a quick 10 minute break. Alex is gonna be around here and he's gonna clean up a little bit but you could come up and see the marbled stuff and ask him any more questions. We'll be back in 10 minutes to talk about feeding and ejaculation. I hope you had a good break and had some shape to share and say, are you guys lovely stuff and enjoy some drink specials? Did everybody? You couldn't lick it up? The sexy sex talk? As if sexy, sexy spiders were enough sex for you. Now we are gonna have some female ejaculation from Danny Mahanek. Not, well, you got my name. There's a sign-up sheet in the back if you didn't notice it where the librarians are sitting. It's for our mailing list so if you wanna keep updated on what the next show is gonna be about and the date of it and stuff like that, that's a good way to do it. You can sign up for our mailing list. I promise we won't spam you. But also, we're always looking for interesting new topics for nerd night talks and the fact that you're here suggests that you're probably a nerd and there's probably some area that you're super nerdy about and you're thinking, oh, I could maybe give a talk about that and if you think so, then you probably can and I highly encourage you to sign up for the mailing list and pitch your talk really briefly. It's not a commitment just because you put your name down and your topic at the top doesn't mean you have to do it. We can work it out, we can see if it would work or not if you have the courage but it's really, you know, a couple beers, you don't mind. It'll be fine. So sign up. So, Danny's talk is going to be about female ejaculation which is interesting in a lot of different ways. It's interesting from a scientific perspective. It's interesting from a sociocultural perspective and to me, especially, it's interesting politically because it's like bizarrely politicized and I'm not gonna get too much into it but I was reading up about it today in the interest of this intro and it turns out that people have known about female ejaculation for millennia. It's not really a very new thing. This little excerpt here is from Secret Instructions Concerning the Chamber which is a fourth century Taoist text. Apparently there's a lot of Taoist sex guides and they're just like, yeah, that's a thing. But this is a good example. So, the yellow ember asked, how can I become aware of the joyfulness of the woman? This is a good question. And the immaculate girl replied, there are five signs, five desires, blah, blah, blah, and the five signs and desires are, you know, red face, breasts hard and nose perspiring, throat dry and saliva blocked, slippery vagina and the genitals transmit fluid. And each one involves a suggestion for what the man should do in response. They're not really each of the four word of consent here. Oh, your nose is sweating. Great, that's a yes. But what's really interesting about it is the distinction between the slippery vagina and the genitals transmit fluid, then that's when you're done. So this is an ancient text that's distinguishing between lubrication and ejaculation. And there was actually a lot of this. Here's some Western or Western examples. Hippocrates, in the 400s we see, definitely noticed that he called it female semen. He thought it was necessary for the lady to get knocked up. Aristotle, a short time later, was like no, and she doesn't have to, she's still getting knocked up. But it is a thing. And he said that the female ejaculate far exceeds the man's in volume, I guess. Claudius Galenis, also known as Galen, really interesting guy that I learned a lot about today in my reading, had a lot of theories about sex and sex organs and a really different, sort of pre-modern conception of sex and gender, which is really fascinating to me because we have this really binary concept of sex and gender that really kind of came out of the Enlightenment. And but his idea was that women have to ejaculate regularly or else they get fluid pulled up and it would be very painful. So that was his theory. Maybe, maybe not. And I feel like that they all like about that, like being a little white man and they're like, female ejaculation, what can we learn? Which is kind of the history of it when it comes to the, well, yeah, the Western study of it. So jump way ahead to 2014. And you have the British Film Board classification of saying that films, porn films, featuring female ejaculation are banned because it's not a thing. And PPP films aren't allowed and that's all it is. That's basically what they ruled, that female ejaculation doesn't exist. It's all urination and it's just a trick and an urban myth and they talk to the best scientists and they know this to be true. And so any film that you can't have waterworks, I guess, in British porn films and so they classify female ejaculation under that rubric, which is kind of luck. This is something for well over 2,000 years, humans have been aware that this is a thing and now it's like a big debate. And yeah, I wonder what happened in the 18th and 19th centuries where it went from scientists or pre-science as we know it, but it went from people inquiring about what this was and what its function was to essentially either denying it exists at all or demonizing it, it became a sign of, especially in Victorian times, it became a sign of deviance or sexual impurity and all that stuff. And we still, I think this demonstrates that we still kind of deal with that today. But I think it's real. And here to explain a lot more about it in depth is Danny. Thank you, Rebecca, for that historical perspective. And thanks to all of you for sticking around for the last talk of the evening on a Monday night. I am going to do everything in my publicly, socially appropriate powers to make it worth your while. So, again, a calculation on a Monday night at a bar on purpose, because what do you do on a Monday night at a bar at the last speaker? This is what you do. And this topic really incorporates a lot of my areas of interest, anatomy and physiology, women's health, sexual health, things that people don't generally talk about in public, on stage, with powerpoint presentation. And so, let's just get right into it. I made one of these introductory slides and I noticed that nobody else did this. So I'm going to skip this and trust that if you really want to know what my background is, you'll read the bio that I wrote for NerdNight, because I would really like to just get right into it and reserve my time for that. So if you really want to know my background, I guess you can ask me dirty questions and answers or you can read my bio. You do me. Here's the one thing I will tell you about my background. I'm a teacher. I teach anatomy and physiology and health. And that means that I think a lot about lesson planning and I think a lot about how I'm going to teach things to other people. So one of the things that we're going to do at the beginning of this talk is, I'm going to set some expectations for you as best as I can. One of those is I want to be really clear on what my approach to this topic is going to be. So I am approaching the topic of female ejaculation in what I consider to be the true spirit of NerdNight. I am going to nerd hopefully with you more than at you on this topic, but this is not meant to be an instructional how-to. If you want to know more about how one goes about engaging in this behavior, I have resources for that at the end of my talk, but this really is very much an academic nerdy pursuit for its own sake. And so I want to be absolutely clear that that's really my goal. Also, I'm not going to be showing you any porn. So if you were sticking around for the last talk of the night, hoping to watch some free porn on a big screen, let me just disappoint you right off the bat and point you to the exits because you're not going to get that out of my talk. And in all seriousness, there are situations where using pornographic materials are completely appropriate for sexuality instruction, and that's not what I'm going to be doing here. So you know what to expect. Also, there's a whole lot of different words that people use when they talk about female ejaculation. Here are some of them now. One thing I want to note is that none of these are my words. This is all taken from the scientific literature. Yeah, right? So whether this is just experts in the field describing what they see or people doing some kind of a historical perspective on words that folks have used to describe this behavior in the past, here's kind of the variety of vocabulary that we have going on. In some cases, folks use these words interchangeably to mean the same thing. In some cases, folks use these words to mean slightly different variations. The term that I'm going to stick with is female ejaculation, to mean any time that I know, it's so exciting. I'm already getting whistles on the third slide. To mean any time that a vagina bearing human releases fluid from the urethra at orgasm. So that's my definition that I'm working with. And this is the term that I'm going with, okay? We'll get into the subtleties and we can arm wrestle about which one means which after my talk. I am completely aware of the fact that this is even picking this one is not a perfect choice because not every vagina bearing human identifies or walks through the world as a female or a human. And for the sake of picking one term, this is the one I'm going with. And again, we can totally arm wrestle after my talk. Okay, so now that I accept that all up, here's kind of the major questions as I see them in my study of this topic, which is why does female ejaculation or female ejaculation happen? Where does female ejaculate come from? And what is it in terms of biochemistry, in terms of consistency? What is this fluid? We're gonna go through each one of these bit by bit. So again, the working definition for female ejaculation that we're going with for the duration of my talk is the release of fluid from a urethra of a vagina bearing human at orgasm. And just to be clear, because I'm a teacher and I like us all being on the same page, orgasm is the part of the sexual response cycle where someone climaxes. So where someone gets to kind of their peak physiological change that they go through during their sexual response. That's what we're talking about. All right, everybody ready for some anatomy? Woo! Here's the female external genitalia, everyone. If there's nothing else you take away from this talk, this, friends, is a vulva. It's not a vagina. If someone tells you that, correct them. Every time you call this a vagina, a puppy dies. My powers for good. All right, so before you get overwhelmed by this larger than life-size vulva, here's the salient points for our talk this evening. We're gonna be talking about two openings. This is the vaginal opening, which leads to the vagina, also known as the birth canal, which ultimately connects to the uterus. And then slightly anterior to it is the urethral opening, which connects to the urethro, which is the tube that connects to the urinary bladder. So kind of the quick and dirty is that urine will come out of here, menstrual blood, and possibly babies, in certain cases, would come out of here, yeah? Okay, so these are the two bits of this anatomy that we're gonna be concerned with tonight. I don't wanna shortchange the clitoris. Yes, we're all very excited about the clitoris. We're not gonna talk about the clitoris a ton, because in female ejaculation, we don't talk about the clitoris a whole lot. I know, we really focus on the vagina. That said, there are some folks who female ejaculate where clitoral stimulation is either required, it's the only thing that happens. Anal stimulation for some folks is required, but kind of the canonical view of female ejaculation is that it is very much associated with vaginal stimulation. And so for those of you who are very attached to the clitoris, that's why you're not gonna see your good friend, the clitoris, much this evening. Okay, internal structures. So in this case, our model is facing this way. We are looking at the abdomen and the pelvis, and our model has been mid-saturally sectioned, meaning that you've been kind of cut down the middle, and visually, not really. And opened up so that we can get a side-on view of her internal reproductive organs in her lower abdomen and her pelvis. So a second ago, we were just looking at the vaginal opening and the urethral opening. Now we're looking at what those connects to internally. So the vaginal opening is going to connect to the vaginal canal, which is this muscular tube, also known as the birth canal. If you were to look down one of these with the owner's consent and the help of a speculum, you would potentially see a cervix at the end of it, which connects to uterus. And we are also looking at the urethral opening, which connects to the urethra, which is the tube that opens to the urinary bladder, and the urinary bladder connects to the rest of the urinary system. This is where urine is stored until you get the urge to vicarate, to pee, and then out it goes through the urethra into the outside right. So there's one part of this center structures that we need to pay attention to, and that's right about meow. And this is what's known as the Grackenberg spot, aka the G spot. And this is a location that is on the anterior wall of the vagina. It's on the wall of the vagina on the belly button side. So the scab belly button would be right about meow. So the G spot would be found on an anatomy diagram about halfway between the vaginal opening and the cervix on the anterior wall of the vagina. If you were trying to find this on an actual human and not on a diagram with that person's consent, you would be looking on the anterior wall of the vagina, aka the belly button side, about two knuckles in. And what we talk about in terms of trying to find that is a little something called the cum hither. You're welcome. G spot simulation is frequently associated with female ejaculation, the release of fluid from the urethra in someone who has this anatomy at orgasm. And so a lot of folks get caught up in what a G spot is. If you read the news, we're probably aware of the fact that G spots are constantly disappearing and reappearing. We have them, we don't have them. It's all very exciting. So there's a couple of running hypotheses as to what the G spot actually is. So hypothesis number one is that, I'm not saying poke it with a pencil. I'm not saying poke it with a pencil. Hypothesis number one is, this is actually an anatomical structure. So I'm an anatomy professor and I can tell you that no anatomy book that I've ever seen in my entire life actually has a G spot drawn and labeled in it. And so don't get all indignant just yet. It gets better. So some folks say, no, it is an actual anatomical structure that some folks have in varying degrees and it should be labeled in those textbooks. Hypothesis number two is, that does not exist. One of the, I especially say my favorite quote not because I think it's real but because I think it was some really interesting wording but one of the scientific papers that I was reading referred to it as quote, the gynecological UFO in this topic area. So like it just doesn't exist. It's made up. And hypothesis number three, which I personally consider the most likely is actually there's a whole bunch of stuff going on in both the anterior wall of the vagina and also surrounding the urethra. And what folks have suggested is that all of these structures exist in human females but in some folks they are situated or oriented in such a way that when you push on this area it feels pleasurable and may cause female ejaculation. In other people who also have those structures they may just be oriented in such a way that they don't cause that same sensation. So it's not that it is a defined anatomical structure in and of itself. It's more about how the anatomical structures in that area are arranged. Open area of research, how about it? Okay, so question number two is where does female ejaculate come from, right? Because there's a fluid coming out of the urethra. What's the source? And there are two hypotheses. One is it comes from something called the female prostate which I will describe in a second. And the second is it comes from the urinary bladder. So female prostate, hypothesis number one. So now we have our internal reproductive system model with the person spacing this way and she's kind of ticked as though she's having a pelvic exam. And we're going to be focusing on this area right here. So the area surrounding her urethra and including that anterior wall of her vagina. And the urethra, it's urine, you peed yourself. Some people have said, no, it came from the female prostate. There are actually some reports of females being told by their physicians that while they were bathing some old backwater got up into their uterus and then when they orgasmed, they orgasmed so hard it ejected that old backwater right now. And then there were some people who were like, oh, we don't fucking know what it is. So it seems like the main thing that folks are really concerned about. And indeed one of the things or one of the ways that subjects are often found in some of these studies is that people are really concerned that it's urine because it's coming out of your urethra. And so what you see is folks showing up at their doctors thinking that they are suffering from urinary incontinence, the inability to hold their waters during sex. And really what's happening is their female ejaculating. And so what a lot of these studies are doing is trying to prove that it's not peed. Another kind of common study setup is comparing it to male semen and looking for common biochemical components in female ejaculate and male semen. So this is sort of the mélange of things that have been looked for in female ejaculate and how they compare. So in terms of source, at least for some people, the source of female ejaculate is common to urine. For some people, they both come from urinary bladder. For other people, female ejaculate can come from the female prostate. In terms of amount, it varies. And again, it seems to vary with where it's derived from for folks where it comes from the female prostate, it seems to be smaller in volume whereas for folks where it's bladder derived, it seems to be much more likely to be copious in volume closer to urine volume. In terms of components, PSA and PAP have been found in there, which are both found in male semen. And then they also often look for urea and creatinine, which are commonly found in urine, but tend to be found at really minimal levels in female ejaculate. So here's a model that has been proposed because remember I said at the beginning there are all these words we use to talk about fluid being squirted out of urethra as like orgasm and whether they all mean the same thing. And there's great controversy over this. And so one of the models that's been proposed is that there's actually different things that can go on for different people. So some folks create a fluid from their female prostate from those lands that surround the urethra and that comes out at orgasm. And that's called female ejaculation. And there are some folks who create fluid in their urinary bladders and that's what comes out at orgasm. And that's called squirting. And that tends to be a thinner consistency and a higher volume and so on and so forth. And then there are some folks who do what's called a mixed form ejaculation where they have fluid coming from both places and that's what comes out. So now we have models for this. So then the question is, so what? And what I would say is that this is very much a your mileage may vary situation. The take on message any time I talk about sexual practices in a public setting is, some people do this, some people don't, some people wanna do this, some people don't. So again, my goal here was to be, to nerd about this. If you would like more resources on how to do this, here's some that I think are pretty lovely. Good vibes. These specifically, so these two are specifically how-tos. This one is more of a nerd out about different types of people getting questions answered and kind of an informational research on ejaculation and squirting. And this is kind of a more general if I want to be a little bit more experimental in my sexual practice, what might that look like? Which might involve female ejaculation for some and might involve other practices for others. So that's what I have to say about that. I don't take questions. So the question is, why is this so unknown and why isn't this an obvious thing? The my honest answer is IDK, I don't know, but I can think of a couple of reasons why this might not be talked about. One is, again, going off of a lot of the studies that I've seen, this is often confused with urinary incontinence, right? When a fluid comes out of a urethra, the first thought is, I have lost the ability to control when I urinate. And I really don't want to talk about that. Or if I do talk about that, I am going to my doctor and free gather about that. And so in that respect, given that that's often the context in which people start talking about it, it doesn't entirely surprise me that it's not widely talked about. And again, part of the reason that I talk about it in context like this is to sort of make it less taboo. It's like, yeah, it's Monday, let's talk about female ejaculation, what's up? But I think part of it is there's this fear, like as soon as you start talking about fluids coming out of your bladder, you're peeing on someone during sex, and there are people who do that on purpose, and then there are people who don't. And for the people who don't, that sounds very stressful. So I think that might have a bit to do with it, that's my guess. Also, complete lack of research funding. If you look at the studies that have been done, if you're used to like, pub metting something and getting really satisfying like, high sample size, cross sectional, double blind, NSF funded, this is not that. This stuff is anecdotal. I mean, some of the studies I was reading had a sample size of two digging on the studies, that's what they had to work with. Two women walked in thinking that they had lost the ability to control their urination, and really they were female ejaculating, they were like, sweet, let's do a study, do we have your consent? Good, right? And they were basing their conclusions off an N of two, which for me, I'm a bench scientist in molecular biology, you do not operate on an N of two. But that's what they have to work with. And it's a lot of self-reporting, and it's a lot of estimation. And so I feel like there's not a whole lot of consistent models. I feel like there's not a whole lot of consistent research protocols. And again, I suspect the fact that this is kind of a taboo subject doesn't help that. So Rebecca's question is, is there any speculation about what advantage this might confer evolutionarily in terms of passing on your genes? I haven't heard a whole lot. The one thing that I saw was that it might have some kind of antimicrobial property, like maybe it provides a flushing, so that if there is any kind of infectious material in the genital area, this might help to prevent that. And that was a wildly speculative hypothesis that I saw no data for. But that's like the one thing I saw, something that a female sexual response cycle, ye old masters in Johnson, for those of you who are sex nerds out there, the old 1966 linear. And even for females, there's what's called a resolution phase, which is the kind of return to not sexually aroused. And I've never seen that differentiated in terms of whether someone female ejaculates at orgasm versus whether they don't. So I don't know. That's a really interesting question. You know, Vente. The question was, the asker commented that the studies seem to compare female ejaculate to urine, and not so much to the vaginal lubrication that happens before the person ejaculates. And he was asking whether there was any studies that did that, not that I'd ever seen. And again, it seems to me that there's a limitation in methodology, like trying to, like we go back to the skin's glands, trying to grab what comes out of them, or trying to collect the lubrication on a vulva to analyze it. I don't know if anyone has figured out how to do that, whereas it's relatively straightforward to capitalize a bladder and grab what comes out of that. And so it seems like one of the major limitations as I've observed it is, how do you grab the stuff that comes out of the female prostate, or how would you grab the lubrication and actually analyze that? Because when people do mention that that happens, they actually say, oh, we saw this stuff come out. We missed it. It actually says that in some of the papers. So it seems like, again, there's not well-developed protocols. Yeah. Open area for research, friends. Thank all of you who have figures for one hour today. Denny's gonna stick around a little bit to answer any questions you might have. It looks like the library line's still being worked. You still have maybe an interesting public library card, and if not, you should come the next month to get one. You should definitely buy some desserts and whatnot. We always conclude during that, you stay with a short calendar of the upcoming events coming up next month, as well as the coupon for next month's event. So, October 1st in San Jose is the October fest. They'll tell you how beer is made and give you some. Stardust and hops talks to you about how what's in comments. So we've sampled the tales of comments. We've looked at that, and you can drink beer and learn more about it. There's food science and the Bay Area Science Festival is coming up. Kishore talked a great deal about that. Lots and lots and lots of beer night. We're mostly excited about two things. First, the next beer night, East Bay, is a week early. That's because of the Alcatraz Takeover. Again, that's beer night on Alcatraz.edepright.com. We'll have talks on dams, we'll have talks on TE, and we'll have talks on cannabis botany. Use the code EARLYBIRD for $2 off. Wear your Aloha t-shirts and bring a taking mug while in the contest. Auto is going to give out some great prizes based on whoever has the best t-shirt or the best mug, and we'll give every person spent the code to use for next month. See you then.