 fun. If you are watching this right now, you are watching the live recording of the twist podcast. Anything you see over the next two hours may or may not be included in the final podcast. So you'll have to just watch if you want to watch everything or subscribe to the podcast if you would like the pretty edited version for your ears. Are we ready for a show? I think I've gotten the cue that we are live and people see us. So let us start the show in a three, a two, and this is twist. This week in science episode number 785 recorded on Wednesday August 5th 2020. Why are lemurs? Hi everyone. I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight we will fill your head with happier cows, spinny sperm, and toxic webs. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The following program might be considered politically biased because it is almost entirely science-based. We have not taken time to include the other side of the arguments. We will, to the global, the world is round knowing full well that there's still a robust argument amongst a few individuals somewhere on the world who have a different view of how the universe works. We will talk as if global warming is real and manmade and getting worse despite the politicians with ties to the fossil fuel industry not being entirely convinced. We will talk about extinct life forms, ancient DNA and evolution without explaining that most of the world still underpains cartoonist children's stories as their origin. And we will talk about the very real threat from a pandemic virus. We will not allow anyone here to call it a hoax, not when there is now one American death every 80 seconds from COVID-19. Wear a mask, wash your hands, stay home or better yet head for the hills and don't ever plan on coming back. Whatever you decide, remember that if we all just took the drastic step of doing nothing together for just three weeks, we would be done with it. Instead, we're just beginning another episode of This Week in Science Coming up next. I answer you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We're back. We're here. We have the science. We do. And we have a scientist who's joined us for the evening. It's going to be very exciting. Tonight on the show, I have stories about spinny sperms and also new natural protection for multiple sclerosis and limits to our brain. Tonight, we're going to be joined by Dr. Lydia Green, who will be talking to us about lemurs. It's going to be very thrilling. Justin, what did you bring? I've got the body of an athlete. Just not sure what sport it's suited to yet. Juno discovering activity on Jupiter and better mouse memories. You have better mouse memories? Better than bitter mouse memories. Blair, what's in the animal coring? Those two. I have a few of those two. I have cows. I have frog vents. And I also have bad pandas. Frog vents? Are there ever any good pandas in Blair's animal corner? I think if we took a look back through the past, probably not. It's always bad pandas. I think we should have a twist sticker or t-shirt or something. I think you need to make some art, Blair, the bad panda art. Is that like bad wolf? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's perfectly good. I'm writing it everywhere. It could be good. As we jump into the show, I would like to remind all of you that subscribing to Twists will bring you to us every single week. Right? It's a subscription to sciencey goodness. You can find us on YouTube, Facebook or just about any place podcasts are found. Look for this week in science or head to our website, twist. T W I S dot O R G. It's now time for the quick science stories. Let me start us off with some Martian ice sheets. I've got so much sibilants right there. That's kind of crazy. Ice sheets for Mars. Yes. Using an algorithm, taking into account erosion processes. Researchers at the University of British Columbia and their collaborators analyzed over 10,000 Martian valleys and compared them to subglacial channels in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. They found similarities that led them to a new hypothesis that no, there never were any free flowing rivers on Mars. None of that watery river surface. No, these river like channels that are seen on the surface of Mars. Today, we're formed by meltwaters beneath ice sheets like those that used to cover much of the earth. The idea would be even more supportive of life on Mars as thick ice sheets would protect microbial life from radiation. From radiation. Yeah. Yeah. And provide a kind of constant environment for them to live in. So ice sheets, that's the new idea now. Hmm. What say you? Are you sad? Yeah, I like this idea. No, well, because then what you have is especially under a melting glacial thing is you have ponds, you have subglacial waterways, you have you have you have actually kind of a very robust. And then as you just point out in the beginning, that which I had the protection from radiation, which would have been crucial for Earth like life to to have survived there would also be helpful. Yeah. Yeah, because Mars has never been all good news for potential life on Earth. Yeah, Mars has never really been known for having a big magnetic field to protect anything on its surface from solar radiation. Earth has a lovely magnetic field, which we say thank you to every day. Thank you for protecting me, magnetic field. I mean, I do, don't you know, Justin, tell me about that athletic potential of yours. Will you be leaping across the surface of Mars? Well, you know, so this is the thing, like I have always felt like I am an athlete. I just never found a sport that I'm good at, but there may be help on the way. This is this is a new paper by University of South Australia sports scientist Professor Grant Tomkinson. And he analyzes how a new portable kind of Jeep. I think it's like eight thousand bucks, 3D whole body scanner can spot athletic talents. Also monitoring changes in bodies over time. So this is a field called anthropometry for and I'm not sure where to put the emphasis. It has been used for for a long time to identify talent. It's used for this very thing, improve performance in athletes and check their health and that sort of thing. But it's usually done with different kinds of scans, even X-rays. Well, with this, according to Professor Tomkinson, 3D scanning is less invasive than manual tests. And because it is fast, large samples can be easily measured. There is no need for physical contact. It doesn't require a lot of expertise to run the machinery. And it can measure body surface areas and volumes, unlike X-rays doesn't, of course, emit any harmful radiation. For this particular test, there was 49 athletes, 30 women and 19 men. They subjected them to a series of 35 second long scans and got millions of measurements within two millimeters of accuracy about their different body configurations. And so what they're doing is they're basically finding people who are already really good athletes in their fields and sort of figuring out what makes what is the what are the measurements that make a good long distance runner versus somebody who can lift a lot of weight or whatever the whatever their athletic skill might already be. But but but but but but that doesn't take into account muscle fibers and short the fast twitch versus slow twitch fibers and what proportion of the fibers in the mud like what. So so if you think about it, I mean, this was a lot of like sort of what I've looked at this too was like, well, how much information are you actually getting out of there? They're looking for small things. They're looking for asymmetries is something as big as scoliosis, one leg being longer than the other arm lengths overall in terms of giving reach. But then tell me that my crooked spine can't do a back bend. No, I know. No, no, no, no, no, just maybe not in the Olympics. Right. OK. Sorry. Didn't mean to break that bubble. But I would think that you could tell, perhaps, that the different twitchy muscles based on how they lay upon the leg. I mean, the that that that sort of bulky calf muscle is probably more of a lifter's muscle than a runner's long distance runner's muscle or sprinters muscle more than a long distance muscle. So there may you may be able to sort of see that because they especially they say marathon runners have very defined physique, shorter, lighter, longer legs relative to their torso and then they saying they can also track changes in and whole body and lean mass using the scanning. Is it like that? So I mean, you're not going to replace the combine event in the NFL where they're putting people through the leaping in the running, who's fast and it's not really going to replace any of that. I could sort of see it being used as a training skill. But I do like the idea that you could use it to tell what type of athlete body you most resemble. So you'd be like, oh, I might get, you know, get a little print out. It's like, oh, I should invest some time playing badminton because apparently I have a badminton athlete's body. I didn't know. Haven't been playing well hard enough. I should go now. That's what I should go try doing because maybe I'm better suited to it. There's this is also hard to use to not work out, right? Exactly. Well, you know, I'd go for a run, but I did a 3D body scan. It turns out I'm just not a runner. Just not a runner. Yeah. It's reminding me very much of those career aptitude tests that are given to you in high school and they tell you what you're going to be. When you're based on your skill in high school, your knowledge in high school, you're going to be a secretary. You're going to be, you know, an astronaut. None of the options on that test ended up being science communicator. None of those options were available. Can I tell you what my top two were? Can I? I remember this test because it led to a summer job. My top two were scientist and actor. That's great. My two were park ranger or chef. You're right on what you feed animals. You're right, isn't it too? OK, so it was accurate for you, not for me. I was never very good at tests. We're not supposed to be good at the test. You're just supposed to be honest. Yeah. What did I tell you? I don't even remember. I looked at it through it like that says nothing about it. I think it said you should go in the army. And I was like, no, no, just because I'm violent doesn't mean I want to throw inanimate objects across a room and scream. I just want to kick just some chins. No. You could see that on the body scan. Right. You can see the lumps on my on my shins. According to our test, you work with somebody who has a temper. Yes. I don't know. It'll be interesting to see where this goes, whether it's more than, you know, so many of these kind of IQ tests, you know, these very general. They're trying to do very specific stuff. But is it really going to tell potential or it will it be more used as a tool for refinement? You know, yeah, as a slight disclaimer. Caviar to this, I have seen a lot of commercials for some sort of like instead of having a health care system, just walk into this body scan and it tells you everything you need to know. No, it won't. It's not good like that yet. It's not taking any blood samples. It's running a little bit of electricity to your body and going, oh, it's testing your heart rate like that's fine. But that's not really replacing your doctor anytime soon. But the timing of this coming out and that being popularized or advertised kind of makes it a little to me a little bit suspicious that this is coming out right now. This may I mean, I just science by press release. Yeah, yeah, science by press release a little bit. There's no results. Didn't say like it was just it's like, hey, we can look at maybe it'll just help, you know, our our genes fit better in the future. No, but that's actually probably one of the highest best uses. Yeah, no, this is absolutely true. A hip leg but scan before you like buy a pair of jeans. You print your jeans. There you go. Oh, yeah, or just order off the rack. But really are skin tight. No, just for tailors. This is like probably, yeah. And then you can you walk into your body scan. You have that recorded depending on how much you fluctuate. You go back with more less frequency and then you can order your clothes online custom fit because they've all been tailored to you. That's probably the best use of this technology. Yeah, I think so. Could make us happier in the future shopping. But Blair, what's going to make cows happier? Well, I don't know. But I do have a study related to how we can tell if they're happy or not. So we know that cows actually are social creatures. A lot of people don't realize that. But people who study cows certainly know that and that they have complex social relationships that change and the group dynamics constantly evolve. So a team of Chilean and US scientists spent 30 days observing a small herd of dairy cows that had recently given birth to understand a part of their a particular part of their bovine interactions, which is social grooming behavior, also known as aloe grooming. And the reason this is kind of so important to look at is because you don't just throw a bunch of cows together on a field and call it a day in dairy production systems. They're constantly shuffled into different groups, depending on their lactation stage, nutrition requirements, where they are breeding, et cetera. And every time they do that, they have to reestablish their social structure. So knowing how to kind of read their behavior, know if they're adapting to their new social structure well or not, is really important because a happier cow is a healthier cow. And a healthier cow definitely makes better food products and will live longer and will have more babies, et cetera, et cetera. So by looking at this, they looked at over 1,300 aloe grooming events from 38 cows during this month long experiment. And they found a lot of different behaviors and patterns of those behaviors. They looked at things like animal age and social rank. And they found, for example, that cows tend to groom individuals that had previously groomed them stuff we've talked about with other animals. So a mutual cooperation. But they also tended to prefer individuals of a similar age, suggesting familiarity from growing up together or just recognizing their similar age, I don't know, some other reason. And then they also found that older individuals groomed more cows than younger ones. So aloe grooming could be also related to seniority in some way. So all of this to say, they could actually look at how the grooming was happening, how often it was happening and who was doing the grooming to kind of draw conclusions about if the group was acclimating well after kind of a remixing or not and move forward, therefore. So they know that this is something that could be used in the future for farmers to monitor the social aspects of cows and the emotional relationships within their group. And if they are able to see that cows are grooming each other, that means that they are getting along. But if grooming declines, that could be a sign of impaired welfare. And that is a great opportunity to check, make sure nobody's sick, nobody's not getting along, maybe check your stress hormones. There's lots of things you could do, right? Once you kind of recognize that there's this trigger. So I just wanted to bring this story because I think it's important for us to think where our food comes from. If you're a vegetarian or not, you might still drink milk. If you're a vegan, you might, I don't know, still wear leather or use other products that benefit from livestock in some way. And it's important for us to understand their social structures because that can help us take better care of them. He didn't know I didn't know that I was engaged in this social grooming behavior. I've never noticed it. And that is the reason I brought the story. I think it's a lot of people don't know how complex cow social structure is. I don't have to drive by them on Highway five and see him sitting around. I think that's it. Oh, yeah. Think of think of the moo cows, but you don't think about them as individuals, as a group, how they get along with each other. That's right. They're social animals, so it's yeah. They have noticed that they do cluster, even if they have like a ton of room to go wander around. They will all sort of hang out together in whatever patch of if they like you during. But I guess my local cows are very, very well adapted to each other. I think Davis on the whole, their moo cows, their happy cow. They're pretty happy. I mean, they really like to the point where I've also sometimes like spread out, what are you doing? There's like all of this acreage you have here and they're all like clustered up right next to each other. Like the what some of them are like pinned in, like even if they wanted to go for a walk, they're not going anyway. Just speaking of happiness, let's talk about sperm. Always always when you think of sperm, you think of that little flapping flagella going from side to side, swimming the sperm toward their final destination, death or egg. Yeah, apparently, though. Apparently, it's almost always death, almost mostly death. Yes. But apparently, sperm don't really swim. We've had the wrong idea for basically as long as we've had microscopes. So stop. What? Yes, they spin. No, no. Yes. Well, there's a new investigation. Yes. Of sperm motility, motion of sperm. Determined that we what we saw as this side to side motion was actually an optical illusion because we were looking at sperm as a 2D image through a microscope. It's like a corkscrew into a bottle of wine. Is that what you're saying? Yes. So the instead of flapping back and forth, what happens is the head of the sperm spins like a top and then to compensate for the spinning of the top, the flagella actually has a lopsided movement that only it's asymmetrical. It only moves to one side, but because the sperm body is spinning, the movement of the flagella appears to be going back and forth. So did they all spin in the same direction? Yes, I think they do. But I think that when they don't spin in the same direction, they don't do as well. I don't know. Actually, this is a really interesting question. Does it depend on the hemisphere? I do not know. I think, yeah, that's a really great question. Or do all the other have the same spinning sperm? Isn't that the hemisphere? I thought the hemisphere came down to who designed the toilets. Yeah, I think that's true. I was making a bad joke. Yeah, but no. Which I always welcome. Yes. Yes. So wait, now I'm confused at the propulsion. Like, what's moving the spinning if it's not the flagella thing? But the flagella is moving. It's part of that propulsion. It's just cork. Yes. It's like a corkscrew. It's like they're like corkscrewing through the fluid. Right? Yes. It's like a spinning top, like a corkscrew. It's kind of viscous fluid. So it's like. So it's they drill. If you could imagine if you've ever used a drill that has the handle on it that you spin around the drill bit. That's kind of the way I think of it and how they're moving. But they move in three dimensional space, as opposed to just this two dimensional back and forth movement. And they have this and it's all rotational. Today will go down in history is the day I learned. Sperm spin. I'm never going to forget it. It's great. It's it's it. And like I think this understanding could affect so much understanding of sperm motility and issues with infertility. Yes, sperm competition. And like Lydia brought up the, you know, if there are sperm that swim in different directions, what does that mean? You know, is, you know, what are how are the molecules set up within the sperm for the molecular motor to move? And how does that affect how they how they perform? And how they fertilized and how they fertilize. Yeah, they fertilize. And I think that makes me picture them like like how the NASCAR cars all get really close to each other for drag. Like if they are like not agreeing on a direction, do they not make it as far? That little group. I think are they working against each other, sending little turbulences if they're not spinning the same way, if they're not working as a team initially, at least like ducks flying and like the one in the lead has to like go to the back. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. And it really, yeah, you're right, Justin. What does it mean for turbulence? And how do they deal with that? Oh, this has so many layers of complexity now that I never, ever considered sperm so complex they spin. All right, tell me about Jupiter, Justin. Oh, yeah. So there was activity. There's activity on Jupiter that we weren't aware of before. This is NASA's Jupiter orbiting spacecraft, did you know? Sparking new questions about the gas giant. Is it unexpectedly discovered lightning in the planet's upper atmosphere? This is published in August 5th, which is like this today. Journal nature, Jupiter's goushous atmosphere seems plastered from the distance, but up close, clouds, royal and a turbulent chemically dynamic realm for this research paper. Yeah, this is this is one of my quoting. Jonathan Lunen, professor of physical sciences and chair of the Department of Astronomy at Cornell University. On the night side of Jupiter, you see fairly frequent flashes as if you were above an active thunderstorm on Earth. You get these tall columns and anvils of clouds and the lightning is going continuously. We can get some pretty substantial lightning here on Earth and the same is true for Jupiter. So previously, Voyager 1, Galileo New Horizons had all observed lightning of some form going on Jupiter. But they couldn't really tell. It looked like it was coming from deep down inside. Juno has a camera that is designed to detect much dimmer sources of light and it's also just sort of more able to tightly control its focus as opposed to its resolution and sort of depth of field than the others. And yeah, discovered lightning where we actually didn't expect it to be possible. And what they think is happening is that there's ammonia that is in the upper atmosphere. There's water and other elements there as well, but they would normally freeze at this far out from the core of this gas giant. They would be expected to be frozen, but if there's enough ammonia there, it keeps the freezing from taking place and therefore you can continue to have this electric activity taking place. So cool, something we didn't know. This is also Yuri Aglumov who is a postdoctoral candidate at Cornell saying, shallow lightning hadn't really been expected and indicates that there's an unexpected process causing it. It's one more way in which Juno's observations show a much more complex atmosphere of Jupiter than had been predicted. We know enough now to ask the right questions about the processes going on there, but as Juno shows, we're in a stage where every answer also tends to multiply the questions. Hmm, Juno nothing. All right, I couldn't help myself. Yeah, from what I think is amazing is we've seen Jupiter, we've had images of Jupiter, the great red spot, all these atmospheric clouds for so long had ideas about what's going on, but now that we're actually there and we've got Juno spinning around it and making these passes and getting in and looking at different areas of the atmosphere and really digging into it, we're starting to find out so much more and it's amazing that Juno is still going. It was supposed to be destroyed by radiation and crushed by magnetic fields long ago. So this is pretty cool. Lightning, it's awesome. Very cool. All right, last quick story. Orb weaver spider webs might contain neurotoxins. Of course. Of course. Already the most terrifying spiders, in my opinion. Might as well throw that on there. I love orb spiders. You know, the way the dude listens off their beautiful orbish web. The way they build a new spider web every morning so it's extra see-through so you walk right into it. The fact that they love to make them right at face level. Yes, yes. It's all great. This story specifically spoke to me today as last night as I was pulling toilet paper off of a roll, a spider scooted out from between the sheets of toilet paper in my toilet paper roll and yeah. Anyway. No thanks. That toilet paper roll. Yeah, not exactly where you would expect. No, but anyway, yes. You think, you walk through a spider web and you're like, no big deal. But maybe it's just because you're really big. This week, a reporter, Christy Wilcox reports on a paper that reports neurotoxin-like compounds in the silk glands of banana spiders and these neurotoxin-like compounds might allow them to weave webs of doom for their prey. There are many tales of researchers who are interested in these spiders or the general class of orb spiders and how their prey, even before being bitten by the spider, tend to show some listlessness or symptoms of what you would expect from neurotoxin poisoning and that's what led to this direction of inquiry are these kind of symptoms that the prey species were exhibiting and they've found that in other species' nests when they've rinsed the webs and then exposed prey species to the stuff that comes off of the webs in solution that it's caused neurotoxic effects. So we think that maybe it's a general thing that all orb spiders might be capable of putting neurotoxins in their webs and wouldn't that be helpful if you've got a prey item that's across the web from you? Yeah, you don't want them struggling so hard, they might pop off. Slow it down. Yeah. Or they could even be dangerous to you. So some considerations there when you next walk through an orb spider's web. Or the next time you rewatch Lord of the Rings. Oh, yeah. Oh, dear. Yes. Oh, good point. Very good point. If you just tuned in, you are listening to This Week in Science. If you're interested in a twist t-shirt or mug or other item of twist merchandise, head on over to twist.org and click on our Zazzle link to browse our store and support twists. We have face masks too. Yeah, we do have face masks. Oh, show. They are our most popular item right now. Yes. Which makes me so happy. Thank you, everyone. Way to meet demand. People are being safe. We're protecting people. And buying our stuff. Yeah. All right, time for the interview. Tonight we are joined by Dr. Lydia Green. Dr. Green is an NSF postdoctoral fellow in biology in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University working at the Duke Lemur Center studying the ecology of Madagascar's lemurs by looking at their poop. Welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. It's great to get to talk to you. I came across you on Instagram and your Instagram account at lemur scientist. And I was just smitten by all the lemur photos that you posted. They're amazing. The animals are amazing. The photos don't do them justice, but we try as much as we can to highlight them. They're amazing. Do you ask them to pose for you or is this... So the lemurs that we have here at the Duke Lemur Center are so used to having people around them. And so they don't mind at all. They're like quite hams for the camera. The lemurs in Madagascar are much harder to photograph because they're so much less habituated to people. And so for those guys, it's usually a long lens and very blurry and millions of horrible photos before you can find one that you can maybe can zoom in on. So it's a real treat to see them up close at the lemur center. How did you get interested in lemurs? What led to your interest? Serendipity, I think. I came to Duke as an undergrad after a sort of failed attempt at a professional ballet career. And I came to Duke for college just because it's where my mother thought I should apply and I got in sort of miraculously, I think. And I needed a work study job and I went to the work study job fair and there was like this table with this sort of life-sized stuffed shifak, which is the type of lemur on it, a stuffed animal that was like a my size. I was like, what is that? And they said, we're recruiting tour guides for the Duke lemur center. And I was like, the Duke lemming center? And they were like, no, Duke has lemurs. We have a center for lemurs. And I was like, ah, tell me more. And so they were recruiting tour guides and within my first week of college, I basically signed up as a work study tour guide. And from there, just kind of snowballed. So I started taking classes in anthropology. I joined a lemur focused research lab. I sort of began my own research projects. And it's just one of those things where you fall in love with these animals so quickly and most of us never turned back into anything else again. So yeah, it's sort of a black hole you fall into, a great black hole. Wonderful. It sounds like it wouldn't be one you'd want to escape from. No. When I think of most, how most people probably have interacted with lemurs, it's maybe at zoos or through nature documentaries. And in specifically in nature documentaries, we see lots of behaviors that people like David Attenborough tell us about and make very special. But what about them fascinates you the most? So I think everyone's drawn at first to just the look of the animals. But when you sort of get steeped in lemur biology, the diversity of species, I think is what really starts to become fascinating and the origin by which that diversity arose. So I'll take like a few minutes just to sort of get the basics of lemur sort of biogeography going. But if you picture it 50 to 60 million years ago on earth, when the dinosaurs start to go extinct or totally go extinct and mammals start to arise and primates start to evolve in mainland Africa, Madagascar had already been an island for like 30 million years. And so one of the biggest questions in lemur biology had always been how did lemurs get for early primates get from mainland Africa all the way over to Madagascar. And it turns out that the evidence points to a sort of early primate ancestor rafting across the Mozambique Channel from mainland Africa to Madagascar, a small colony of sort of pre lemurs. And when they got to Madagascar, the small colony of lemurs stepped upon an island where there was a lot of open habitats, diverse habitats. There were no mammalian competition, no mammalian predators. And so these animals just sort of exploded in adaptive radiation. And so from a small founding event to the 108 species that are extant on Madagascar today, as well as a bunch of species that have gone extinct. And so we just get this sort of enormous diversity of species that arose from this sort of crazy serendipitous event of lemurs getting to Madagascar in the first place. So when you start to sort of look at that story and unravel the sort of way by which these creatures came to be, you become all the more fascinated by the myriad different directions that the species sort of radiated into and how they carved out lives for themselves. Sort of a ramble. Kiki, you're muted again. It's because I go in the back and I try and find images and then I come and I mute myself so that there goes no tick, tick, tick, tacky on the keyboard. But I am fascinated by that, I guess the way that the movement of Madagascar geologically, how that converged with the movement of the species across oceans and then how it also created the ecosystems, the environments in Madagascar, which led to that diversification and how you're looking at time, geology, ecology, like all these pieces falling into place. Yeah, we say Madagascar is sort of one of the greatest natural experiments that sort of Mother Nature has given us. So during Pangea, Madagascar is the sort of sandwiched between India and Africa and it's also attached to Antarctica a little bit. And as Pangea starts to break up, Madagascar splits off first from mainland Africa and then is attached to India for a while during the beginning of the journey across what is now called the Indian Ocean. And so Madagascar then separates from India about 80 to 90 million years ago. And at that point, Madagascar was quite far south. And so for the past sort of 80 to 90 million years, it's been isolated but drifting farther north. And that drift has also had, oh, look, you've got a perfect map of it. And so that northward migration also has big implications for the types of habitats that have been on Madagascar as lemurs arrived and then also as the other mammals arrived because we think there were three other rafting events that brought over the rodents, the tenrex and the carnivores as well. So you're exactly right, this interplay of geology, of ecology and of time becomes really critical in piecing together the story of Madagascar's mammals. They didn't all come over in one big raft. No, we think that there were four rafting events. Genetic dating really points to there being four distinct rafting events, just kind of crazy as well. So you can imagine lemurs get their first and they were there for a number of million years before the carnivores showed up. And you can imagine the lemur the first time it laid eyes on this carnivore that had just arrived fresh on shore and was chasing it around and it had never experienced anything like this in its history. Oh my gosh. There's also, it's got to be for the, you said 108 different species that are there now. So one of the things about Madagascar is right, it's not just an island of a forest of one particular type. It's for just a kind of a somewhat small body mass. It's actually got kind of a diverse set of biomes to it. Yeah, so Madagascar is famous for having a real diversity of landscapes. And so you've got like rainforest in the east. You've got a central high plateau that has endemic grasslands. You also have Western dry deciduous forests and then you have a Southern spiny desert. But then within each of those ecosystems, you also have sort of micro habitats and you have pockets of micro-endemism. So even within the rainforest, you don't get the same, you don't get the same assemblages of species in the Southern tip that you would get in the North. So you have this crazy, crazy micro-endemism. And I guess the mouse lemurs are one of the best examples of this that these tiny little primates we now recognize 25 species all over the island of Madagascar. And so each one has its own little habitat that it lives in. So yeah, it's mind-blowing actually, how much micro-endemism. And the lemurs are an example of that, but a lot of the herps and the birds and the micro mammals also show this kind of crazy speciation. And it's just because there's so many diverse, that the ecosystem is so rich. There's so many different, it's like somebody chopped up Madagascar and said, be everything. Yeah, and there's a number of theories to explain sort of why you get these pockets of endemism. And the one that I'm most familiar with has to do with watersheds and rivers. And so in some of these areas, you get almost sort of like parallel rivers and different groups of species will live within the boundaries of the rivers. And so the rivers actually provide the natural boundary that differentiates species, which is kind of cool. So you just cross the river and you might find different lemur species all of a sudden. That's amazing. So that gets at the, you know, there's the idea in speciation of when is it actually a distinct species as opposed to a subspecies and when can cross breeding take place? Is it reproductively isolated or is it geographically isolated? Do you know for the species in Madagascar, how like, how does that, there are diurnal daytime lemurs and nighttime lemurs. So those are gonna be separated by time. But what is there separating the lemurs, do you know? Well, I will also point out that there are cathemeral lemurs as well. So that's an activity pattern. Cathemeral, I haven't heard this one. Yeah, so you can be awake basically at any time. And so we see this in a lot of the species of brown lemur, like the blue-eyed blacks and other ones that you can find at a lot of zoos around. And so what this means is they can be awake either, they can either do nocturnal or diurnal lives and they can change throughout the year. And so often what you'll see is when it's really, really hot, they'll choose to be awake at night when it's cooler to forage and doesn't waste as much energy. And then when it's cooler, they'll choose to forage during the day. So you get the seasonal pattern to that activity, which is really, really cool. So yeah, you have diurnal, nocturnal and cathemeral species. Yeah, Madagascar's crazy. That's my word of the day, cathemeral. But to the bigger question of maintaining sort of species diversity, that brings in sort of the concept of niche differentiation. So we do have 108 species, all 108 don't live in the same forest at the same time, but these 108 species basically stem from 15 groups, 15 genera. And so in many habitats within Madagascar, you'll have representatives from most of those genera, often living simpatrically, but you more rarely have multiple members from the same lineage living in simpatry. So the Shafaks are a great example of that. There's nine species of Shafak and no two species lives in the same habitat at the same time. So you have three different rainforest specialists, you have four different dry forest specialists, but none of them ever meet. So every forest you go to, you can sort of find a different assemblage of species, but you'll be able to recognize like, oh, that's a brown lemur, oh, that's a Shafak, oh, that's a mouse lemur, but it might be a different species. That is fascinating. So at my zoo in our lemurings, but we have seven different species in one forest, and we have the black and white roughs that hang out at the very tip top of the tree, and we have the ring-tailed lemurs that are like the ground lemurs, they're always down on the ground, and the crown lemurs are kind of in the middle. And so it seems like that's how it kind of works in Madagascar as well. Right, so you have this temporal differentiation where you can sort of be diurnal, nocturnal, and you have this sort of strata differentiation where you exactly right, you have rough lemurs up in the canopy and ring-tailed lemurs being more terrestrial, although those two species wouldn't ever meet in Madagascar. But then you also have differentiation by diets. You've got leaf-eating lemurs, fruit-eating lemurs, lemurs that are more insectivorous, lemurs that are more specialized, more generalized, so you can differentiate by diet. So there's so many different ways that these animals differentiate within their habitats, and that's why these habitats can really support this diverse array of species. And on that mention of diet, diet leads to poop. And so can you tell us a bit about what you're studying specifically and why you're looking at it? Yeah, so I study the gut microbiome of lemurs, which means I do need to collect a lot of poop, and luckily lemurs provide bountiful samples for me. So it's a nice research area because it's so productive. So basically what I'm really interested in is understanding how this gut microbiome relates to the diet of the animals, and whether that diet is across species, so comparing a leaf eater to a fruit eater to an insectivore, but also comparing things like how within a species, seasonal change in environment will change the microbiome, how changes in habitat quality or landscape might be reflected in different microbiomes, and all those sorts of variables that are related to diet. So most of my work is basically following around lemurs with tubes and waiting for them to finish their morning coffee, and then collecting samples noninvasively, so all of my work is noninvasive and hands off, which is really nice as well. And then for the microbiome, usually what I do is sequence marker gene that is common to all bacteria and archaea, and that gene allows us to figure out which microbes live in which samples and at what relative abundance, and then we can piece back together which inhabitants were there and at what time. And that can really help us figure out how these microbes are adapting to different diets and within these different host systems. What kind of microbial populations? Like what is normal with the diversity of different diets, more insect eaters, plant eaters, fruitivores? Fruitivore, yeah. Fruitivores, yes, I almost went fruitarian and I said, no, that's not right. It works. So what kind of divergence do you see in the microbial gut populations? Is there a big difference? Yeah, so what we're sort of piecing together in Madagascar is the same way we were talking about these assemblages of species is that within a habitat you'll have many representatives from different lineages. And it's become clear that the microbiome relates to your lineage. So a Shafak living in a dry forest is gonna have a microbiome that looks more like a Shafak from a rainforest than it will from a brown lemur that lives in its habitat. So you have these clear patterns by the type of lemur. But then within these lineages, you have clear structuring by the type of habitat that they live in by the diet that they're eating. So you have sort of multiple layers of different patterns that we can compare. And we even find fun things like for four lemur species living in the same habitat, so they're simpatric and they're all leaf eaters, but they eat slightly different leaf-based diets. We can see really, really clear signatures in their gut microbiomes that might help them survive on those sort of very, very different diets, but within this dietary category. So there's a lot to play with. What are you gonna do with the understanding of the microbiome? I mean, I can see understanding how to feed the captive lemurs better, but what, I mean, is there more beyond that? Yeah, so a big one is understanding how we can help keep our animals healthy and well in captivity and understanding diets and nutrition and things like that. I think from an evolutionary perspective, I'm really fascinated by understanding the sort of symbiotic relationship between animals and their microbes and this idea that microbes allow us to do things that we couldn't do on our own. Microbes have this incredible wealth of metabolic capacity that we as eukaryotes don't have. And so there's a lot of functions that our microbes confer on us and different animals end up getting different functions based on which microbes they have. And so microbes can enable leaf eating. They can enable living in particular areas or at particular times or eating different diets. And so understanding how microbes underlie specialization, ability to adapt, I think that's a really, really fun place to be in science right now. And I do think it has conservation implications because if we wanna understand why certain species are more susceptible to habitat loss and climate change, microbes might be part of that answer if microbes are really what are enabling animals to do certain things. So I think we sort of wanna picture the whole, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, no, there might even be like a little bit of a biotech aspect to this too. And I remember a while ago we had a story where there were, I think 40 gut microbes that were the same, 40, maybe it was even 80 that were identical between red pandas, regular pandas and a panda lemur, bamboo eating lemur. And also some of them were even apparently in termites, which is also eating like a very wrapped up. And so you start to look at something like this and you get this idea like, okay, well, if we ever need to break down bamboo as a biofuel or something like this, maybe you'll look to these creatures and how they've been doing it as a diet to find candidates for creating the enzymes in order to do it. But also, yeah, as climate change tends to affect things, knowing, and if there's a plant that's not going to survive anymore, but you've got an idea of what would still grow when it's closest to what their diet was before that their microbiome can handle for maybe a relative who's eating it somewhere else on the island already, that becomes huge for conservation as well. Well, so to sort of think about Dr. Aaron McKenney who wrote the panda paper and the lemur paper that you're talking about and sort of to invoke an Aaron McKenney sense here, what Aaron helped me think about when I was a graduate student because she was a couple of years ahead of me and we collaborated on some of these lemur projects is if you think about it, gut microbes have been around since the evolution of a one-way gut. The evolution of the gut system itself went hand in hand with the evolution of the gut microbiome. We've never had a gastrointestinal system that doesn't have microbes in it. Those two came together. And so there are definitely microbes that are shared basically across all of us because they were probably around when the gut first evolved and before we all diversified into the different species we see today. So there are definitely bugs in our microbiomes that are consistent across lemurs, across chimps, across termites. So things that pop up a lot like previtella, bacteroides and you see these sort of these microbes all over the literature and all over every sample. But then you do have these microbes that seem to be like species specific or diet specific. And those could be a really interesting place to play for looking at metabolic capacities that we don't yet know about. And again, this is where Madagascar I think becomes fascinating because it turns out that some of these lemurs have actually quite a lot of like unassigned taxa in their samples. They don't match against online databases that are mostly built from human and model systems. And so some of these species of lemur I blast their microbiome against these established online databases and like 30% of the microbiome comes back as like no idea what that is. We don't know what that does. And so who knows what untapped potential is in these consortia in terms of what they're able to do. And isolation and naming potential, right? You get to name them all when you, that's just fun. That's just a blast then, right? Yeah, I don't see myself like culturing like trillions of bacteria for the rest of my career just for the naming rights, but yeah. But just the couple of them, you know, it's Christmas presents. Do lemurs, we know that in like koalas they have a fecal transfer from the mother to the offspring. Is there anything like that in lemurs? Yep, copper phagee. So that's the term for poop eating. And so we do see copper phagee especially in infants and usually from mom. So it's not that unusual to see an infant just go up to mom and we do think that that's a way that they're potentially seeding their microbiome. In some lemurs, there's an idea of what's called Sika Trophy. And so, okay, so back up and give a little bit more context. So within the lemur gastrointestinal system you have the intestines, but you also have the structure called a cecum. And in the human system, it's kind of what the appendix is but in lemurs this appendix is like fully blown out and really elaborate and complicated and especially in the leaf eaters because the cecum is the powerhouse site of microbial fermentation. So if you're a leaf eater, you basically shunt your leaves into your cecum where microbes attack it and turn it into nutrients for you. And so there's a suggestion in some of these leaf eating species that they actually excrete the digestive from their cecum and then they eat it again. And then by this point, the microbes have attacked it and have released all these nutrients in it. And so by re-eating it, you are really, really quickly able to absorb all of those nutrients much faster than you could otherwise. And so there's not only copper phagee, there's also this idea of cecatrophy in some species. So crazy question. Yeah. If you took one type of lemur as a baby and had it raised by another type of lemur and then they ate that mom's poop, what would that mean? Would that mean that they could then shift their diet? No, I think it's the big take home. I think if you had a leaf eating lemur raised by a fruit eater and trying to eat the diet of a fruit eater, it would probably not survive very long. I think the example I showed up on a screen right now is a fallivorous lemur. This is a leaf eating lemur. And you look at the craziness of this gastrointestinal system and you imagine trying to stuff a lot of fruit in that system that's gonna ferment very quickly. This animal can not just adapt to eating a fruit based diet. And this is because feeding strategy, which is what evolution tells you you should be eating and your diet usually match, right? So evolution says you should be a leaf eater. You've got shearing teeth. You've got the gastrointestinal system and the microbiome to support leaf fermentation. But if you go on just eating fruit, the system wasn't designed to support that. And so it's probably not gonna adapt very well. Interesting. And I doubt we would ever get ethical permission to do that experiment anyway. So the only real reason I'm asking that question is that I know that Madagascar is kind of a limited space, it's an island. And there's a habitat destruction issues there. And so I'm just trying to imagine how you could push a population that lost its space into a new space that maybe required a different tactic or a different type of plant or something like that. So I think that's a fun idea to think about. But what I would say, especially for these leaf eaters is that they and their microbiomes are so specialized on the diets in their micro habitat that they've evolved to eat. That this is a pretty specialized and co-specialized system that you can't just uproot and move it somewhere else. And sort of a great example of that is the fact that most leaf eating lemurs do not survive in captivity. Most of the lemurs that you're gonna see under human care are your omnivores and your fruit eaters. And it's really, really challenging to keep these species, these leaf eaters, healthy under human care because they're so specialized on the specific diets that they eat. And so things like translocations, moving animals around might be doable if you're moving them sort of within the same habitat type, but you're not gonna be able to transport a rainforest species into the dry forest and poof, that's probably not gonna work. How about do different types of lemurs get along? With each other? Yeah, with a different type, not within the group, but with other groups. Because I don't know anything about, I don't even know if they're more baboonish or bonobo-ish with themselves or each other. I don't know where they fall in this group. I don't do baboons. Yeah, I don't know, I would stay away. Yeah, they're terrifying to me. So there's sort of the question of how do lemurs respond when they meet other lemurs of their own species, but then how do lemurs respond when they meet lemurs of different species? And those are two completely different kettles of fish. So lemurs do have territories and so they do maintain their territory. Some species are more territorial than others, but in general, when they come across a conspecific, a member of their own species that's sort of invading their territory, they're not gonna behave very kindly to that. But we often have the case where species will live really, really close to members of other species and not care at all. And so actually at the lemur center here in North Carolina, we have large forested enclosures where we can put multiple social groups of different species into the same forested enclosure and they get along just fine. But we wouldn't necessarily... Yeah, you put in another one that matches one that's in there and then it's like mating competition problems all of a sudden. Now there's a reason to keep that group away from this group because they might steal my girlfriend lemur. Right, and I won't go into like, there's a whole research area of animal friendships that I don't study at all and I don't know much about it, but I will say I have seen in Madagascar cases where you've got a brown lemur species and a shifox species that tend to hang out together. And so the guides will often say that the way they find the shifox is by first finding the red-bellied lemurs. And so I don't know if they hang out because it's the best tree and everybody wants the best tree or if they're actually hanging out with each other for a particular reason, like predator avoidance or something like that. But yeah, you do sometimes see these guys hanging out together and it makes you feel like, oh, even if it's not much really happening. What have you enjoyed more in searching for lemur poop going to Madagascar and searching in the wild or having it easier in the lemur center, at the Duke Lemur Center? Yeah, there's definitely something really nice about working at the lemur center because you know you're gonna get those samples. Like there's just no way you're not gonna get that science done. And you can also sample them at a much more consistent and routine frequency than you could in Madagascar. Like I know I can watch Beatrice all day long and get every sample she excretes that day if I wanted to. So there's something really nice about having that kind of control over how often I can sample, but nothing beats seeing lemurs at Madagascar. Just nothing beats seeing them in the wild and the like hours you'll spend like staring at the forest floor trying to tell like fecal pellet from leaf matter. There's just nothing like that. It's like it's a really wonderful experience. How many times have you been able to go? I think seven. Amazing. Oh wow. Yeah. So my wife is also a lemur biologist and she's been working in Madagascar for much longer. And so I've gotten to really learn from her and get to hang out on a lot of her field missions. But the longest I spent, we spent together in Madagascar was I think six months at one time. So yeah, so these are her big work days. They're picking the right, that's picking the right field. And the right wife. You could be, yeah, because you could study like, you know, an Arctic thing or a harsh desert environment or like something where it's like, oh, I've got to go into the field again. Oh, I've got to wear all this or keep drinking water all day. But you picked like one of the most beautiful places on earth. Well, it's not without challenge. And so I think in hindsight, we tend to romanticize these experiences. Like, ah, that time in the field is so nice. Madagascar is like a real challenge, especially in the rainforest. It is steep. It is full of leeches. It is like, I fall a lot. I rip my clothes all the time. Everybody laughs at me, including myself. Yeah. And it can be a real challenge just to hike into some of these areas to even see the lemurs. So yeah, I like run a lot here, not because I enjoy it, but because I just don't wanna be that embarrassed in the field ever again as I have been. So a lot of folks work in the dry forest cause it's a lot flatter and a lot easier, although it's like incredibly hot and dry there. So yeah, it's beautiful and wonderful, but it is not without challenge. And especially if you're someone like Marina Blanco, my wife, she works on the nocturnal animals and tracking those guys is a whole other like drama. Yeah. Imagine trying to walk the mouse lemurs. You tap out, you're done with a day. Tap out, she goes out for the night. Exactly. I'm like, see you later. So yeah, I mean, trying to follow a mouse lemur around, you know, it's way 60 grams in the dark, exactly in the rainforest it's pouring and you're sort of hiking up hills. And yeah, I'll stick with the diurnals and the cathemerals. Yeah. That's a little bit better. That's another interesting aspect of ecological research that I've always been fascinated by is the bias of where researchers go and when they go and how it affects the data that we collect. Yeah, and I think, yes, hugely yes. And for the microbiome field, one of the things that excites me is that we might, by using fecal samples, which we can collect noninvasively and from anything that poops, which is basically everything, we can actually level that playing field in terms of who we're studying. So a lot of the problem in things like characterizing what animals are eating, it means that you have to rely on animals that permit you watching them. And so a lot of our information about animal diets comes from well habituated populations that have been studied for a really long time that often live in well-protected areas. And so we don't have nearly as good of an idea of what some of these sort of more at-risk populations might be doing or might be eating because they're scared of people. And so something like microbiome science where we could use species to actually reconstruct diets, either using microbiome sequencing or other types of sequencing, would enable us to really study more animals and sort of get rid of some of that bias that has been traditional. What kind of outlook is there currently considering climate change and deforestation and other human impacts on the environment and lemurs? Yeah, so this really sort of sobering thought about climate change is that the future of lemurs in Madagascar is so dire that climate change might not actually become the principal threat. Some of these species are projected to potentially go extirpated in terms of populations are extinct in like really the sort of near future. And so a lot of us are much more focused on deforestation rather than sort of the less long term but less immediate effects of climate change. So deforestation is a really big problem in Madagascar. Lemurs obviously need the forest to live. And so yeah, it's pretty scary. We just recently, I just was able to attend the IUCN Red Listing Workshop for lemurs. We just recharacterized the threat assessment for all 107, now 108 species of lemur. And so many species were uplisted to a higher threat category based on burning that's been happening particularly in the West. So yeah, it's a scary time to be I think a lemur researcher but it's also exciting to sit at that interface of where research-based conservation could actually come into play to think about how we can use research tools to inform conservation action is sort of an exciting place to be. Yeah, how you can go in and collaborate with the local communities to find ways to enact conservation, to find ways to make it say this is in your best interest too. How can we work together? And I think even not beyond local communities but in addition to working with local communities what gets me really sort of hopeful is being able to work with Malagasy scientists and see the enthusiasm for conservation and for science among my Malagasy colleagues and being able to have all of our perspectives as part of a team is a really exciting place to be. So part of the reason I love working in Madagascar is getting to share that science with our Malagasy colleagues. That's wonderful. Is there anything that you think people really need to know about lemurs? I think getting to appreciate the diversity of species is really something that not a lot of people think about immediately a lot of people think of like ring-tailed lemurs or rough lemurs because it turns out that actually we have not that many species that are living in captivity. And so if you really start to look at all the species that live in Madagascar you're gonna see a wealth of diversity that you wouldn't get to see just by going to your local zoo but definitely go visit and support your local AZA accredited zoo. But just getting familiar with all of these species that you'll never see unless you go to Madagascar. So things like sportive lemurs and woolly lemurs and the injury all of these different types of dwarf lemur, fork marked lemurs, the hairy ear dwarf lemur. There are all these species that you wouldn't know about so make sure you really appreciate the diversity that's out there. And the dwarf lemurs they're really interesting because they hibernate. Yes. Right. They're the only primates that hibernate obligately. So every dwarf lemur of every species and every habitat hibernates every year. Have to. They have to. Jeans say sleep. Well, so that's an interesting question because in captivity especially in the earlier years before they realized that they were hibernating in the wild they wouldn't necessarily have the environmental conditions that would promote hibernation. So it's definitely a combination of your genetic machinery but also the environmental conditions that trigger hibernation. And I should probably tell you to let Marina talk about this at some point because this is really her area of expertise. So I can sort of be a bad mouthpiece for hibernation in dwarf lemurs. But so I think it was known for like a long time that these guys would go through seasonal fattening and seasonal weight loss and that they would become sort of sluggish but that you need to have the right environmental conditions at the right time to really trigger them to go into hibernation. But in Madagascar they all hibernate. Have you collaborated at all on the microbiome of the dwarf lemurs? And we are doing that right now. And actually we were gonna submit a sequencing run before the coronavirus pandemic inhibited us from doing lab work. But we've been collecting samples from active and hibernating dwarf lemurs both here at the Duke lemur center and also their wild counterparts in Madagascar because there was this fascinating paper that came out in bears who also hibernate. And what the researchers did was they collected poop from active and hibernating bears. And then they took that poop and they showed that there were microbiome differences but they transplanted those fecal samples into germ-free mice. So they gave mice the microbiome of an active bear versus a hibernating bear. And the mice that had the active bear microbiomes actually got fatter and gained more weight on the same diet then did the mice that had the hibernating bear microbiome. So the conclusion of this paper was that the microbiome is part of the machinery that helps you get ready for hibernation, helps you deposit the fat in order to be able to hibernate. And this for anyone that studied hibernating animals was like, oh my God, I wonder if this is what's happening. So there are also groups studying squirrels and all sorts of Arctic hibernators as well. So we are working on it. Oh, I can't wait to hear the results of that. I hope that, let's get the labs back up again, everybody. Slowly, but surely. Things will go back to normal eventually. Especially a sequencing lab. You could send one person to go work with some liquid handlers. That's all they really need. And then they can find a PCR machine. That's it. That's one person can go into the lab and take care of all that. Yeah, very, luckily I don't actually do a lot of my own lab work. I send it to a national lab where they are much better at it than I would be. So I do the first preliminary steps and then I ship everything off and rely on experts to do a lot of that PCR prep. My sequencing is a very lonely job. They should have that. They should be going constantly. There's no need to shut that down. Yeah, when I entered graduate school, my PhD advisor said to me like, you have to figure out how you wanna spend your time because you can't be good at everything. Do you wanna be a field rat or a lab rat? And where do you wanna focus your energy? And I was like, I wanna be a field rat. So. Yeah, it's good to know the lab skills so that you know them. But yeah. Yeah, it's hard to do all the things. It's good to, yes. Doing all the things. It's always difficult. I don't wanna keep you too late because I know it is getting late there. It's tomorrow here. It's tomorrow already. Oh my goodness, it is tomorrow. So where can people find you and find out more about the Duke Lemur Center as well? So you can check out our website lemur.duke.edu. You can also just look up the Duke Lemur Center on Facebook, on Instagram, on Twitter, and on YouTube. There's a ton of information and a ton of content out there. You can follow me on Instagram at lemurscientist. But definitely check out the Duke Lemur Center as Facebook especially. They post like a ton of things like baby announcements and research updates and things like that. And there's a lot of amazing, amazing photographs and information there. I'm gonna have to do that. Yeah, that'll be like the recipe of your matter. Can we get a tour once the world's back to normal? Yes. Once the tours are back open, you can definitely come for a tour. My stats might be a bit rusty, but I think it's usually like 30,000 visitors a year come to tour the Lemur Center. So we do have a full comprehensive education program that runs and we're moving all of that to virtual right now. So there's a lot of virtual content that's also posted on our social media. You can hear me rambling a lot. And I understand that there's somebody, will be somebody wandering around in a full body lemur costume? Yep. Yeah, we have a full lemur mascot that you do see around campus occasionally. Yeah, I luckily do not have to wear that. I'm very short. Yeah, but that's too bad because then the lemur could have been busting out the ballet moves. They do call the Shafak's dancing lemurs. Have you done dance your PhD? I considered it and then I realized that that was a rabbit hole from which I would never return and that I would spend a lot of time like choreographing it and that I just, yeah, I just left it, let it be. Well, coronavirus. Maybe I can dance my postdoc. Dance your postdoc, exactly. I would love to see it, the dancing Shafak's. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. It has just been wonderful talking with you about lemurs. Oh, thanks for having me. It's been fun. Thank you, it has been fun. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week and have a great night. Hi everybody, thank you. You are listening to This Week in Science. Thank you for listening to TWIS. You are the reason that we're able to do what we do every week bringing you up to date and down to earth news and science views. That's right. And with your help, maybe, just maybe, we can continue to bring a more sane, maybe not completely sane, but at least a more sane perspective to a world full of misinformation. Head over to twis.org right now. Click on the Patreon link and choose your level of support. Be a part of bringing sanity and science to more people. And we're back. You're listening to This Week in Science. Yes, we are. Oh my goodness. Time for a COVID update. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. I do like this, I do like this COVID music. Yes. According to the Johns Hopkins COVID trackers, the U.S. remains number seven in terms of per capita daily incidents and number one in terms of total daily incidents. India is poised to surpass the United States should we begin to decline a little bit more. Also, the World Health Organization data suggests a global plateau for daily incidents is emerging, which that could be potentially good news. Hopefully we are plateauing a bit for this wave. And now in the midst of Shark Week, we find ourselves searching for that evil lurking just beyond sight and wondering if it's safe to go back in the water. I mean, really, whether or not we can send the kids back to school. Mm, mm, yes. Well, although they don't present with symptoms as often as adults, they're the study out looking at the viral load in various age groups with mild to moderate symptoms, not the most severe symptoms, but the ones that don't really show much symptoms. And they found that young kids often have as much if not more virus than adults. And this doesn't say anything about their ability to actually transmit the virus now, but they have a lot of virus. They have all the virus. They have lots of particles in there. So, oh, additionally, a separate study found that 10 to 20 year olds transmit virus as readily as adults. So this picture of kids as a viral Petri dish kind of still holds school, not gonna be this virus-free place if it happens. Also, two studies modeled different scenarios for returning kids to school. One in the Lancet found that in the United Kingdom, a substantial proportion of the symptomatic population would have to be tested regularly and up to like 80% of the population would have to be tested. And contact tracing and isolation would have to be implemented and strictly followed if the schools are to reopen and not trigger a second wave. The second study in JAMA looked at college age students and concluded that all students would have to be rigorously tested every two days to ensure safe campus reopenings. And this would cost about 400- It's more than two days to get your test results back. Results of tests. Right. Okay. Yeah, so they looked at various of a right in the JAMA models, the different scenarios they looked at had tests with different amounts of sensitivity and specificity. So, differing amounts of false positives and false negatives. And they determined that you could have tests of up to like 70% sensitivity but the specificity needed to be like 99%. So one of the two measures needed to be incredibly accurate but you could go with kind of a rapid, less sensitive test that are more or less expensive but still students would have to be tested every two days. And the cost would end up being around $470 per semester if you're looking at a cost of like 10 to maybe $20 per test. So that we're talking cheap, not the best tests but yeah, and I'm just trying to imagine a college environment where unless it's a saliva test you wanna go in and get screened every two days. Yeah, but wouldn't that put 30% of the students in isolation at all times if it's 70%? It's terrible. So this is the part I'm not hearing from a lot of these studies. It's a difficult thing to really test or model because you have teachers that are coming in contact with different cohorts of kids. Especially if you're at the college level. And then you have whoever those students of any age are going home to. If they're in college, if they live in a dorm with six other people those people aren't in the same classrooms. We don't know what they're doing if they've been to a kegger or a store lately but for the kids in school, what of those parents are nurses or doctors or paramedics or janitors at the school or just anything else. It's just these social circles. Yeah, that's why everybody all at once has to pretend that they got it and isolate for three weeks. That's, I mean, that's the answer without a vaccine. It's everybody for three weeks. I just keep thinking about that study they did with the buffet, the fake buffet where they had one person that had the COVID like paint on their hand or whatever and everyone ended up with it, right? So if you have one kid whose parent touched them as they put on their jacket and then they touch a desk and then the teacher touches that desk and then the teacher takes it home and then the teacher sees other kids the next day. But even then, yeah, but even then if you were talking about gloves and hand sanitizer people are breathing it into an atmosphere in which that nobody can escape. So that's the, it's the air for us to be able to get it. There needs to be more conversation about teachers not just like their ability to spread from one cohort of students to the other but also the risk to teachers. I'm seeing a lot about the risk to students but not a lot about the risk to teachers. I think that's a very fair point. There is a website that Marshall sent me COVID-19risk.biosci.gatech.edu which allows you to dig into different counties in the United States to be able to assess the risk of going to events with certain numbers of people. So based on the case incidents of COVID-19 in your area or areas where you know people or maybe traveling, you can zoom in to the map to find locations. So for instance, if I click Multnomah County, Oregon, the current risk level is 68% that there will be at least one COVID-19 positive individual present at an event within the county of up to 100 people. And you can change the size of the event to be able to dig into different levels of risk. And so it's a pretty cool map to be able to start judging what risk you feel you're willing to put yourself in, right? How risky is something? There are some counties, so for instance, Columbia County, Florida, for an event of 25 people, there is a 99% chance that at least one COVID-19 positive person will be at an event. So that's a pretty cool map to be able to will be at an event. So based on the data, and this is based on seroprevalence data, so they assume that there are 10 times more cases than are being reported. So the rate may be lower where there's more testing availability. So it's not an exact estimate, but it's still very interesting to be able to kind of put into numbers. Oh, there are this many cases in my county. There are this many deaths. What does that mean, you know, or the rate is increasing of incidents? What does that actually mean? What is my personal risk? And so it's a- That's very interesting. Yeah, so it could be a good tool. There was a conversation in Congress where a Congress person who is, I'm not a fan of, kept pressing Fauci on whether or not, you know, the protests. Protesters have been arrested for being out there. The thing that Fauci didn't say, that I think I'd point out is that we didn't see any protest related spikes. And part of what you'll also notice is those people are wearing masks. I mean, when you look at the protest footage, people are wearing masks and they're outdoors, which are two things that massively reduce risk factors. Keep wearing, just wear the masks. If you have to go out, make sure you've got your mask on whenever you're interacting around humans. Yeah. And be outdoors whenever you can. City of Davis did something interesting along this lens. They did kind of reopen a lot of the bars and restaurants and that sort of thing. But all of, Kiki you'll be familiar with is G Street. They got rid of the parking on G Street and built platforms where the parking was. So ever all these restaurants, they got instead of having their indoor seating, they have now taken over the street side where all the parking was and put these platforms and have, you know, outdoor chairs set at good distances. It's one of the things that they've done about this because being able to space out and being outdoors are two massively reducing things. However, I'll still point out, if anybody has been downwind of somebody who is smoking a cigarette, who's like, you know, 40 feet away, this is how, that was something that was in their lungs that's now out of their lungs. That's how easy it is for something to carry to where you are far away too. So you still need to have your mask on even if you're outdoors. But the combination of those two things massively. It's the indoor and the non-mask wearing situations that are extremely dangerous. And so the being outdoors, the physically distancing from other people, wearing masks, these are all social distancing measures. These are all things that we're doing to reduce the spread of this virus. And so the ability of businesses to reopen more normally of schools to reopen, all of these things are contingent upon people continuing to follow the social distancing measures. We will not be able to open schools. We will not be able to get back to anything closer to normal unless people continue to wear a mask, physically distance, you know. Try and stay outside really at this point. Winter is going to be interesting. This is, that's all I have to say about where that's gonna go for the time being. But my last story for our COVID update segment is lurking in our immune systems. This is again, this evil from Shark Week. Not Shark Week. Nefarious. Nefarious, no, there's an ancient power that today is understood as a functional bridge between our innate and adaptive immune systems. It is this bridge between the responses from what we have since birth and then what we develop in our immune system, the adaptive immune system as we encounter various pathogens that allows an integrated host defense to pathogenic challenges. And while the proteins that comprise this what's called complement are nominally part of the innate immune system, they can be recruited by actions by antibodies. So the antibodies that get triggered can then recruit the complement proteins and complement proteins then help boost the adaptive immune response. And according to a recent study, this is potentially how SARS-CoV-2 virus is taking advantage of our immune systems. A recent survey of viruses discovered that coronaviruses tend to be mimics like their molecular structure is similar to complement and coagulation proteins. What have we seen a lot of? Weird coagulation issues and weird inflammation issues in COVID patients. Based on these symptoms that we've seen and also this survey that found this kind of mimicry within coronaviruses, another group of researchers did a study in which they hypothesized that people who have hyperactive complement systems would be more likely to have severe COVID-19. And so they published a study this week in Nature Medicine that reports that people with age-related macular degeneration who have overactive complement systems are at increased risk of developing severe COVID-19, exactly what they hypothesized. And so the finding suggests that the drugs that we have that work to inhibit complement could have use in treating COVID-19. So, yeah, so this really interesting logical path that researchers have been following to kind of dig into what is going on in this complex interaction between virus and immune system. Very interesting stuff right there. Yeah, complement. And I honestly, why call it a complement? I mean, it's a complementary system, I guess. These namings. Oh, scientists. If you just tuned in, you are listening to This Week in Science. Wanna help twist? Leave a positive review for us today on your favorite podcast platform. All right, Justin, tell me a story. Okay, so this is a drug candidate that has been developed by SOC researchers that was previously shown to slow aging and brain cells by itself, pretty awesome. But now they've successfully reversed memory loss in a mouse model, where the mouse were engineered to have inherited Alzheimer's disease. So this research was just published online in the General Redox Biology, also revealed that the drug, which is called CMS-121 at this point, works by changing how the brain metabolizes lipids. This is Quoty voice of Pamela Mayer, who's the senior staff scientist at the lab of SOC Professor David Schubert, and is also the senior author of this paper. This was a more rigorous test of how well this compound would work in a therapeutic setting than our previous studies on it. Based on the success of this study, we're now beginning to pursue clinical trials. So this is a molecule that is reversing memory loss. So basically what they did is they had, these were nine-month-old mice, which they claim is the, or uses a model of equivalency to middle-age people. And these mice are beginning to show some deterioration, some memory problems. And they kind of liken it to the point when somebody might go in to do some cognitive testing because they've been having like an increased cognitive problems in their life. Maybe they know who they have Alzheimer's in the family. Maybe they don't, but it's enough for somebody to maybe go to the doctor to get themselves checked out. So that's when they began the treatment at this nine-month point. They, it lasted three months. So they now 12-month-old mice, both treated and they had untreated ones were given a battery of memory and behavior tests. In both types of tests, mice with the Alzheimer's-like disease that had received the drug performed equally well as the healthy control group animals, while the untreated mice progressed in their disease-poor performance on the test. That's pretty significant. This is not, this has not been an easy disease to treat, let alone, you know, there have been plenty of things that have attempted to just sort of hold where you are. But this one was doing a reversal. This one removed cognitive impairment from mice that were already experiencing it. And so when this, they discovered that when it came to the levels of lipids, fatty molecules that play some key roles and cells throughout the body, mice with the disease had several differences compared to healthy mice and those who had been treated with the drug. In particular, researchers pinpointed differences in something known as lipid pre-oxidation, which is the degradation of lipids that produce free radical molecules that can then go on to cause cell damage. Mice with the Alzheimer's-like disease had higher levels of lipid pre-oxidization than either healthy mice or those that had been treated with the CMS-121. Quoting voice again. This is, oh, this is a postdoctoral fellow, Gaines Ates, who's the first author of the new part, new paper. Not only confirmed that lipid pre-oxidation is altered in Alzheimer's, but that this drug is actually normalizing those changes. They went on to also show that the drug lowers levels of the lipid producing molecule called fatty acid synthase, fassin, which in turn lowered levels of lipid pre-oxidation itself. When the group analyzed the levels of fassin in brain samples from human patients who had died of Alzheimer's, they found patients had higher amounts of the fatty acid synthase protein than similarly aged control groups who were cognitively healthy, which suggests, this is why we have mouse models. This is the, which suggests that the fassin could be used as a drug for treating Alzheimer's disease. Other groups, while the group is pursuing clinical trials, they help other researchers will explore additional compounds that may also be treated by attacking fassin and lipid pre-oxidation according to what you're getting. Right, so they've got a drug, they've got, they've got targets and it works in mice, so fingers crossed it actually works in people. Yeah, and I like that this is Mayer again. She said there's been a big struggle in the field right now to find targets to even go after. So identifying a new target in an unbiased way like this is really exciting and it opens lots of doors. And it's one thing to open a door and have a path to a potential, as we usually hear in these early stage attempts to tackle a disease, but extremely exciting to have already had at least a mouse model example of it operating, having chased down from looking at other patients, having chased down where you think you might be a good target and having it work is a little bit further down the path than often we're even talking about in the treatment of these diseases. So beyond the correlation, we have a drug molecule that seems to have impacted positively and now having, what they're basically saying too is, hey, we did something that kind of works here. Everybody else should steal this idea right now and attack here and see if we can do it better than we can because we just want to get this disease off the plate. We're not trying to corner, let's fix it, let's get this done. Just fix it. Yeah, that's cool. Speaking of fixing things, there's a study looking at multiple sclerosis. Researchers say they have found the holy grail, and now whenever, yeah, that's sensationalist. It's a buzzword, for sure. It's a buzzword, sensational speaking, but. Somebody recently asked me what the equivalent of that is without having a religious aspect to it, what would be the most equivalent to finding the holy grail. And then when I came up with, was finding the weapons of mass destruction. You're looking for something that might not actually exist, and you went to a war in the Middle East to find it, like. That's like the. The holy grail is the thing. It's the thing. Yeah, it's a very common cold to be a holy grail. Yeah. I still say it's starting a war in the Middle East to find something mythical, but okay, fine. Okay. Apples, oranges. They're the same thing. They're both round and edible. They're very similar. They both have a peel. They both grow on a tree. They're not that different. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh worked on finding a way to help protect nerves in multiple sclerosis. In multiple sclerosis, there's a process called demyelination in which the myelin sheath around the axons of nerves is damaged. And when that damage happens, it affects nerve transmission, makes it less efficient. And then also the axons then shrink and wither away. They basically become less and less and less able to function once that myelin sheath is gone. So the researchers were looking for mechanisms within the body of people who don't have MS, the cells around neurons that work to protect and to support myelin sheaths. And so they have found something that they call ARMD. And ARMD is what they are calling axonal response of mitochondria to demyelination. What happens is in normal situations when myelin is damaged and no multiple sclerosis is present, mitochondria are activated to travel to that area of damage, mitochondria being the energy powerhouse of the cell then are able to energetically support the processes of repair and support the axon of the nerve that that glial myelin is a glial cell and that the myelin is protecting. And so this is something that happens regularly, but when multiple sclerosis is in play, it's not enough. The ARMD, the ARMD can't act enough to maintain the axons. It just, the deterioration just continues to occur. And so they thought, what if we could enhance this axonal response of mitochondria to demyelination? And so they targeted mitochondrial biogenesis, mitochondrial transport, and they ended up finding a drug that is a commonly used readily available diabetes drug that does this. And in their mouse model that they studied, that they tried all this out in, they were able to show reversal of demyelination in a mouse model of multiple sclerosis when given this diabetes drug. So it is one of the first times that a drug and potentially a manner of protecting the nerves has been developed for multiple sclerosis. And so similar to what you were talking about with the Alzheimer's study where this is a target, this is now a mechanistic process within the myelin that can be targeted by say this drug that they found or are there other better ways to activate those mitochondria to support? Yeah. So this is a couple of really interesting discoveries for some very big diseases that affect a lot of people. So I like to think we were talking about COVID where earlier in the COVID update, it's a little depressing, but there's some hope out there. People are still working on some really big solutions. But if you are trying to maybe someday hope that your brain will work, like, did you see that movie Limitless where there's a drug and you can take a drug and your brain, its capacity was limitless. You could do it. Well, it was all based on the idea that that's not really true, right? That you only use like 10% of your brain or something. Right, we use all of our brain, but we don't necessarily use every bit of it all at the same time. And this study that was just released out of the University College London was looking at the energy demands of the brain and really they're trying to figure out how attention, how when you're focusing on something and because you're focusing on something, you are not able to pay attention to other things, how focusing your attention kind of limits your ability to pay attention to everything. Well, maybe for you. I love that that's pretty darn well, but if I'm reading something, I sometimes can't hear. Somebody can be talking to me and I don't even know that they're talking to me because reading shuts everything else out. Whereas I can carry on a conversation audibly with like three people and be listening to the fourth paper, not a problem, but if I'm reading, it's just becomes tunnel vision. Yeah, and so why does this happen? Why aren't we able to maximize processing and what is the limit to this processing power of the brain? So there are, there's study that was published in the Journal of Neuroscience. They were basically looking at this idea of how much energy it takes to run the human brain and the senior author, Professor Nili Lavie, says, we know that the brain constantly uses around 20% of our metabolic energy even while we rest our mind and yet it's widely believed that this constant but limited supply of energy does not increase when there's more for our mind to process. So our mind is just, we're at this 20%. It's just, we're not taking any more energy from the body. That's just kind of what we've got. And so they wanted to see how the body was basically divvying up that energy during the different situations. They used a new method of noninvasive optical imaging that they've developed at the University College London in which they use a broadband near infrared spectroscopy to measure oxidation levels of an enzyme that's involved in energy metabolism in the mitochondria in the brain. So most fMRI looks at blood oxygen levels and it's this kind of, it's not an exact measurement because it's a parameter that can be measured that like, oh, well, if oxygen's being used then the brain's using energy, right? It's some kind of activity. Right, some kind of activity but we don't know what that oxygen really is an indicator of and this is more specific in that it's actually measuring energy use in the mitochondria. And so using this technique and looking at the brains, the visual cortex of about 18 people, they gave them tasks where they increased the difficulty of the task and then had them pay attention to different things. So basically asked them to have singular focus and then tried to distract them and or tried to get them to multitask on things and look to see how the brain allocated energy and they say that really what they're finding is that the brain is going to fail to process some information because it just is taking that 20% and it goes, okay, you're focusing on reading right now. That is where the energy is gonna be and the energy that would normally go to other brain areas that are more for hearing or, I mean, they're only looking at the visual cortex in this particular instance but looking at other aspects of visual processing, they found that the brain down-regulated the amount of energy that was being used in those areas. So really less energy processing, less nerve activity in areas that are not doing the work. They say the last quote from this article is, during recent months, we've heard from a lot of people who say they're feeling overwhelmed with constant news updates and new challenges to overcome. When your brain is at capacity, you are likely to fail to process some information. You might not even notice an important email come in because your child was speaking to you or you might miss the oven timer go off because you received an unexpected work call. Our findings may explain these often frustrating and experiences of inattentional blindness or deafness. But there's overload and there's a hard limit on our brain capacity for processing according to this study. I like the COVID lens on that because I think there's a lot of conversation about the emotional toll that all of this takes and like, come on, it's a pandemic. People are emotionally strained. We are physically strained in our brain, it turns out. Our brain can only handle so much. Yeah, and that's something that, yeah, potentially it could be taken into account for how much work people are capable of, how many tasks people are considered capable of and as work-life balance is struggled to get to find maybe workplaces can take this into account a little bit more. Yeah, we've covered this to some extent before, but this is also the effect of just being poor. Right, because that is a stress there. There's a constant stress level and if all of your mental activity is focused on the task of just having enough to survive for the other, yeah, you don't really have sometimes times to make longer-term plans or really focus on things like pandemics and global warming or any of the issues that you might be interested in if you didn't have to just concentrate so much of your time, energy and stress on making ends meet. Do you know what time it is? What time is it? I think it's time for Blair's Animal Corner. With Blair? That's all. Buy a pet, live a pet, no pet at all. If you aren't here about this animal, she's your girl, except for giant pandemics, girl. There's an animal corner. What's your cap, Claire? Well, I have a story about pandas tonight, but it's about how they're the worst. What now? Bad pandas. They're just the worst. The worst pandas. Yeah. In every category. So let me explain. When you think about animal conservation or when the average person thinks about animal conservation, what comes to mind? Of course, the panda. The panda is an extremely high-profile animal that lots of money and time and effort has gone to try to help save. And all in all, it's been pretty successful for the panda. They were removed from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Endangered Species List. That's what our guests mentioned before the IUCN red list. In 2016, they're still vulnerable, but they were no longer listed as endangered. So that has worked. But critics like myself say, but we need to save more than just pandas. The response usually is that if you use a charismatic individual as the main kind of selling point for a conservation topic, then by saving that animal, you will inadvertently or in some cases intentionally also save other animals that live in that same habitat. And so that's been kind of the reasoning behind panda conservation for a long time is even though, yes, they may be an evolutionary dead end and they always have an upset stomach and they're terrible at breeding and they get lost all the time and I could go on. They still make a good focus for conservation because they are so charismatic, bring in money, and therefore help save other animals that live in bamboo forests. Well, as I mentioned, they're the worst. This is a new study looking at other animals that are endangered in panda habitat and how their population has done since panda conservation has begun. So new research has found that leopards, snow leopards, wolves and doles, they're also called Asian wild dogs, have almost disappeared from giant panda habitats since the 1960s. They looked at survey data from the 1950s to 1970s with information from almost 8,000 camera traps taken between 2008 and 2018. So they had their survey data then they had their camera traps and they found that leopards had disappeared from 81% of giant panda reserves. Snow leopards from 38%, wolves from 77% and doles from 95%. Pandas are really bad. So they face a lot of the same problems as pandas. Pandas have problems with poaching, with wildlife trade, with habitat destruction, the predators face poachers, logging and disease. And the key challenge seems to be that pandas have a home range of about 13 square kilometers. That's about five square miles. But the large carnivores I mentioned can roam over 100 square kilometers in habitat. So the fact that they save these small little islands for the pandas kind of don't do squat for these other animal species. So in the end, one of the lead researchers says they call for future conservation to see beyond a single species or animals with enormous charisma and instead focus on broader restoration of natural habitats, i.e. what I usually start yelling about on the show. Save habitats, not animals. But these also, I mean, the territory is all in China. I'm surprised that there's any wild animals. Just from the activities of Chinese, there were Chinese fishing boats off the Galapagos, like a fleet of them over the last couple of weeks that had to get chased off. Like who knows what they were going after? But yeah, if you picked one animal, you say, okay, this is going to be a controlled thing that's a publicity thing. We'll send it to zoos. We'll lend it out for a million dollars a visit or whatever the thing is. Yeah, it's became a commodity and I don't think it's ever been a conservation effort really for anything beyond a commercial enterprise. So I think conservationists would disagree with you. There are huge projects working on establishing these protected spaces. There's breeding efforts where they release pandas in the wild. We've talked about studies on the show where they've done studies on animals that are born in captivity and if those pandas can thrive in the wild. And so there's actually, there's a lot of good conservation work going on. My argument is that it's for one animal and an animal that I don't know if their niche is actually that important. They're not really good at surviving. Like maybe let's try for somebody else that could do a better job. Anyway, it's maybe try for something like the dole which has lost 95% or just try to save the bamboo forest, which is what we're really looking for. So I'm going to say it's like save the biome itself. This is the, you say, okay, here's this sort of biome that reaches from here to here. Here's the population of different animals that are there. We're just not going to let humans go there. That's kind of- Yeah, kind of protect them all. Yeah, it's kind of the conservation union. I mean, and other animals have gone that way. If you look at orangutan conservation efforts, for example, it is 100% focused on saving rainforests. It is not focused on saving orangutans. They use the orangutan as like the poster child. But all of the efforts are focused on saving that habitat, which of course the rainforest are like the most biodiverse habitats on land on our planet. So good choice to save the rainforest. There's lots of animals that are going to benefit from that besides the orangutan. So it's a good reminder that that's where that's where to go from here with animal conservation. Thunder Beaver says, charismatic is subjective. Especially when it comes to the panda. So it is and it isn't. I will say that some studies, I've looked at, look at what makes an animal charismatic or cute, usually charisma has to do with cuteness. Cuteness, right? And that's all based on infantilism. Do they look like babies? Do they have little baby eyes? Baby eyes, do they look fuzzy? So the more they look like a puppy, the better they're likely to do. And pandas definitely look kind of cuddly. Oh, I wouldn't have black around their eyes. Doesn't, it takes away from the fact that their eyes are beady little eyes. Makes them look big like a teddy bear. Yep. Yep. Do you, let's stop talking about pandas. Do you guys want to talk about bugs crawling out of frog butts? Cause that's what I want to talk about. Yes. Yes, I do. Now that you say it. So, you know, predators, prey, that's all life is about, right? The rat race. So prey can get away from predators a lot of ways. They can escape before they're eaten, but there are some that can escape afterwards. For example, some animals can survive the digestive systems of predators and are excreted in feces and then they escape. But it takes a while. It's passive. I think we've talked about that on the show before too. There's like, there's larva that actually pass completely through before they're pooped out. But this is the first time we have seen a quick active escape from the body of a predator after being eaten. This is from Kobe University. And researchers found that the aquatic beetle Regimvartia attenuata can actively escape from the frog, pilofilax nigromaculatus. In their digestive system. Very well done. Well done. Thank you. Phonetics. And where this comes from, how do you actively escape from the digestive system? Well, it is not enough to just crawl your way through. You must also get out at the end. Knock, knock, knock. So frogs don't have teeth. A lot of the time they don't kill things before they eat it. So usually the digestive enzymes are the ones that kill the prey so they can swallow stuff whole. And so these beetles have to not only scoot through quick enough to not get eaten up by digestive enzymes, but they also have to be able to get out the last leg of the journey as they, as you might say. So the sphincter muscle on the frog is the pressure keeps it closed. So the tiny beetles actually have to encourage the frog to open it. So they stimulate the frog's gut to promote excretion. This is true in this frog species and four other frog species that they tested this on in a lab. So how do they stimulate it to promote digestion? I mean, is it like poke, poke, poke, poke digest, poke, poke, poke, or is it chemical stimulation? Like what do they know? I do not believe they know yet. They do know is that if you chopped up the beetle and throw it into their body, it would take them over 24 hours to poop it out. But if they were alive when they were swallowed, it would take about, I think it's about four hours. It would take way less. So the beetle itself being present at the back door, at the back exit would maybe be enough for the frog to be like, oh, it's not my usual time, but I guess I've got another one. Here we go. Let me just take care of some more business. I mean, it would not seem logical that it's just, it seems like it's ready again. Yeah, oh no, that's definitely what it is. It's not like the frog's like, what's happening to me? No, they're going to poop for sure. That's part of the deal. But how exactly are they doing it? How is it encouraging this to happen? Oh, it's about six hours. It happens about six hours after they're eaten. So a quarter of the time. A quarter of the time, yeah. Yeah. Amazing. And every single one that was excreted within those six hours alive and active. So, okay, so many questions and so many thoughts here. Mostly, I mean, this has just taken me back to so many cartoons growing up where main characters end up in the whales, in the gut of the whale, or, you know, I think there was a schoolhouse rock that talked about the digestive system and they're inside the digestive system. You know, you end up in there and there's always this idea, fiction though, that you could get out. But it's not fiction. It is real. Yeah. So this is my question. The frog's not getting any nutrients from that beetle because it's not being broken down. Why would it keep eating these beetles? Why would it keep eating these beetles? This is the question. Well, to be fair. It just doesn't care. It just, I wouldn't eat anything. No harm. It seems it out. To be fair, if you eat enough of them, it creates a line at the back and then the ones at the back of the line end up getting digested. Would they though? I don't know if they would. I think so. I think eventually they'll just conga out of there. Make a nice conga line. The gut escaping conga line. That's how they stimulate their way out. Oh yeah. That's a survival technique that I don't think I've come across before. Yeah. So this is totally new. We never talked about this before. This is, as far as we know, the first study to report successful escape of prey, insects from the vent of a predator. And from the vent. That means the butt. That means the butt, the cloaca, the all in one hole, as it were. And this is the first where we've seen that they promote excretion to escape. So this is a whole new strategy out there that needs to be studied. How do they do it? How do they promote excretion? Why do the frogs still eat them? And this is, yeah, so many questions, but this is the first time that they've seen it. So that in itself is how common is this? But the fact that four other frogs, then four completely different species also did this with this beetle. And this beetle is just tough. This is tough little beetle. Eatin' me isn't gonna do nothing about it. Don't eat the beetle. Here's some teeth. Yeah. Oh my gosh, what a fun story to end the animal corner on. That was fantastic. We have one question for our This Week in Science questions. And we've talked about this a little bit kind of in passing, but the email we got said, hope you folks are staying safe over there, both physically and mentally. We haven't had a case in our state for a couple of weeks now, so fingers crossed. My question for Twiss is that for the last six months, there's been a large increase in personal hygiene from social distancing to hand washing to the use of sanitizer or just staying home. We've been exposed to less pathogens and the drop in common diseases like influenza have been quite marked and measurable and people are still having babies maybe more than usual later in the year. Hey, lockdown was boring, right? As you know, the hygiene hypothesis is the idea that a decrease in exposure to microorganisms, particularly in children, leads to greater problems with allergies and immune diseases. I know time will tell, but do you think we will see more problems in the upcoming months and years? Or will this be a worldwide experiment to disprove the theory? Kurt Larson. I don't know, I think for me, I still have a dog, so I'm still exposed to a lot. And you're still going outside. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I think that is the big side of it, is we're still going into the environment. You're still eating food. You're still getting groceries from various places. You are, if you have pets, maybe those pets are going outside, bringing things in. Perhaps you have children and they're in a small group, maybe not as large as they were. So the hygiene hypothesis, I think, really is more so like absolute cleanliness and also this real avoidance of germs that we've had as a society over years with the idea that people in rural areas have fewer allergies. People who are exposed to cow pastures, for instance, have fewer allergies than people who grew up with animals or... Yeah, but there is something to be said about washing your hands way more, which we've learned really how often and how carefully we all washed our hands before, which is not great news if you're worried about disease, but maybe was good news if you're worried about this. Yeah. I think you're right, Kurt, though. I think it will be a good test. I think that you absolutely could see a potential of higher allergies and also people getting a lot more cold. Oh, he froze. Getting cold because you're inside so much? Yeah. You're a long way back to us. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, he froze for a second. Yeah, we missed cold. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Okay, first. People being cold. Without the kids going and getting the germ factory. That they normally do in preschool and first and second grades and throughout that period. I think you could see people who haven't had this much exposure and have immune systems that are more likely to get colds. And I think those colds get a little tougher to deal with the older you get. I think there's something about that young immune system that can take on all these colds, always have one lightest snot coming out of one side of the nose and the other and still be going about every activity as if nothing was happening. And I think those kids. We need quite a test for that. Yeah, and I think that the kids not getting exposed to as many colds because, say, Blair was talking about how with the school groups mixing, suddenly there'd be a new summer cold or something to that effect. But if you have fewer kids mixing in groups, what it means is, yeah, so kids are going to be exposed to fewer coronaviruses. Kids aren't going to be exposed to the flu this year perhaps. Maybe that lack of exposure will lead to different vulnerabilities as they age. Or maybe we'll kill some stuff. We need some stuff we'll peter out because it can't spread. That's the other thing. Stuff that's not going to be spreading as much. But there's not that, you know, amazingly, there's not, I don't think there's that much stuff that has a pathological effect on you. Really. But there is cross, there is evidence that being infected by some viruses does convert some amount of immunity to other viruses. And so even though so you may, we maybe have never been infected by SARS-CoV-2 before, perhaps you've been infected by lots of other coronaviruses because you're around kids all the time. And so perhaps that makes you a little, maybe you get milder symptoms if you get SARS-CoV-2. Or, you know, there are even different varieties, different genera of viruses that prefer. Now, what will be kind of interesting also though, is that with all of this staying at home, our microbiomes are probably becoming more unique to our immediate families. And isolated to our home. Yeah, so we're not sharing microbiome out with the world so much. And we're creating our very own specific brand in the house between Blair and her dog and her main squeeze and Kiki and the cats and the kid and her man. And me, it's just me. And your rooster. Doubling down, oh, the rooster's gone. Rooster's been gone for a long time and nobody knows. I thought it was like, you know, it's a farm. I figured it's, I've been feeding the rooster, was warning the rooster, getting kind of big. Might want to, don't want to be the biggest rooster on the farm at any point. But no, it wasn't the, it wasn't the, it turns out it's not the farmer. So we don't know. It might have been coyote. Yeah. Might have been a, yep, yep. I've heard coyotes a few times out there. Yeah, I think to the end of the questions, to Kurt's point there, like, we are kind of about to see an entire generation of experimental conditions, not just for this, but also for the mental impact of this on all the kids who are losing potentially a year and a half of school and the social interactions they're in. It's going to be, it's going to be a wild ride. It's going to be a very particular marker in our society that we will see. But it's happened before. And for people who are like, who are saying things like, you know, this is going to affect humanity in such a way, you know, we are adaptable. If nothing else that we've talked about on this show so many times is the adaptability of humanity and our ability to weather very odd predicaments, to be able to take things and stride and continue. So yes, there may be issues, there will be issues. We know that, but what they are, we don't necessarily know. We can try to make some predictions, but we've gone through these storms before. It will happen again, but we're going to be fine. And also something to keep in mind. We have casually been had access to what we now would consider pretty harsh drugs. It used to be very commonly prescribed by doctors and recreationally or prescription. We've actually, we've had a lot of these markers throughout the eras, outside of disease that we've done to ourself or chemicals in our everything that we've tried to get out. Now that we know that everything causes cancer that we made stuff out of to cook with. Right, Christ, cause cancer, what? Yeah, it's bad, but it's not as bad if you cook it on your Teflon pan with the, like this is, like we've done a lot of mistakes that this compared to those probably, they used to like painters used to retire from being house painters when the lead poisoning got too bad, like this is, like we've had generations that had lead painted everything and we survived. Like that's, it's not the end of the thing. It's a marker. It's a hiccupy marker in terms of, in terms I think of the schooling. By the time we're done, a million Americans being dead is not going to be any hiccup by any means. But in terms of having missed six months of school or eight months of school or a year of school, it's the technology age anyway. Like kids are probably running more from a YouTube video than they do sitting around a class waiting for recess anyway. So if you put them in front of, you have access to, you're doing that, but if you put, it has to be the right one. That's what they're watching. Yeah, yeah, but if you put your kids in front of educational videos, they're probably learning more interesting stuff than they would be getting necessarily in a full day of school. For 30 minutes, and then they're bored. Well, yeah, because now that's the entire day of learning that they're used to getting in school anyway. So I mean, it's like you've condensed it and now they can go and play for the rest of the time. I don't, but I, so from. I'm not against structured learning, but yeah. Back to the hygiene hypothesis. I really think that I don't, I think this is a blip and I don't think that it is as going to be as dramatic in terms of the hygiene hypothesis and that effect of, you know, leading to greater problems with immune systems and allergies. I think it'll just be, hey, you haven't been exposed to that coronavirus before or haven't been exposed to the flu before. And so it'll be your immune system not knowing how to fight some things off. And so I think that is just more likely, which is just normal functioning of the immune system. But we will see, won't we? Yeah, yeah, I think it could get those heart ticks of allergies later on. I can see that, yeah. We'll see. If you have a question for us, send me an email, kirsten at thisveganscience.com. You can also leave us a message on our Facebook page, facebook.com slash this weekend science. We'll do our best to answer whether we answer your question. That is to be debated. Thank you for enjoying the show. We have come to the end of another show. We've done it. We've done it. Thank you to our guest tonight, Dr. Lydia Green for joining us this evening. And remember, you can find out more about Dr. Green's research. Follow her on Instagram at lemurscientist. Shout outs to Fada for his help with social media and show notes and trying to herd the cat show that is putting together this weekend science. Gord, thank you for manning the chat room. Identity four, thank you for recording the show. And I would like to thank our Patreon sponsors and the Burroughs Welcome Fund for their generous support. Thank you to, oh, it didn't change the page. I was gonna do it and I was doing other things and then I got, give me one second. Apologies to all. 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I'm trying to promote more rational thought. And I'll try to answer any question you've got. But how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour to what we say and the science? This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. Science. Science. Science. Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. Science. Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. We're in the after show, so Eric in Alaska says, fun fact that Circus Song is called The Entry of the Gladiators. Fun fact. Tonight's show was not funded by the juggalos, Thunder Beaver. I mean, I mean, maybe it was, actually, I don't know. I mean, aside from people's names, I don't know how they spend the rest of their lives other than supporting Twists. So you know what? We may be supported by some juggalos. I don't, I can't say these things. We are definitely not affiliated. No, no, we're not. That's for sure. That's for sure. Yes. Beth Bennett says about the frog. To be fair, that frog's brain is pretty small. So the frog thinking about things. Yes. I mean, it's all religious. All religious. Gaurav Sharma, so sorry for. Throwing that. Vent escaping beetle story at you when you were eating. Well, you should know better. When we enter the animal corner. Yeah. Hello, wing of tech. Hello, hello. Oh, my goodness. Gaurav, the Beirut explosion was that that's horrific. I mean, I think we're all unfortunately a bit numbed because of coverage of. Wars around the world and various, you know, various fights and bombings and other things. But stuff stuff that happens like what happened in Beirut this week is it's shocking to everybody. It made its way around Twitter really fast. Did you hear about this, Justin? You're looking squinty, squinty eyebrowed. Yeah, it was a couple tons of chemical that had good story I heard that was taken off an abandoned ship or something and stored there for seven years. And then they also put in the warehouse fireworks and other things and then I think it was a fireworks factories warehouse and they had stored it there. And there are there are a few different stories. Some one report I said heard said the fire started on a ship and then spread to the warehouse. I didn't hear that another. Yeah, but some for some because it was down at the docks. Maybe that's why there was story about a ship at all. But yeah, the warehouse. There was the warehouse that had fireworks chemicals in it. And it went well, did a big boom. The way I heard it was two different things. Like partly it was storing fireworks, but they were unrelated to the seven years of two tons of what was it? Something that's not supposedly that it's not an explosive by itself. But yeah, if you ignite it, I guess it becomes and there's tons of this money and something. And I got to have to go find the version of the story right. But yeah, I had nothing to do with this one. Money is something nitrate sulfate. I don't know. I'm only ammonium nitrate. Yeah, ammonium nitrate. But yeah, I wonder what it was. It was ammonium nitrate. No, I'm kidding. I'm joking. You're just like, no, but I actually know what it actually was. I'm nitrate. Yeah. But yeah, so it's like two and a half tons of it that was just being stored for seven years. Yeah, yeah, I saw I've seen some interesting interesting calculations based on the blast and how the diameter of the blast as the explosion occurred and using that change the speed at which the diameter of the blast or the blast radius, I guess, expanded. So there was one calculation that someone shared with me online that an engineer had attempted to calculate backwards to the equivalent amount of TNT based on that changing blast radius. So there's some interesting analyses that have been taking place, but it's amazing how fast people are like, oh, that was a nuke. There was a mushroom cloud. And just because there was a mushroom cloud doesn't mean that it was a nuke. It just means that it was a very big explosion. Yeah, Gary Loubert is saying my number. My number is way off. They say it was 2,750 tons. Yes, 2,750 tons of ammonium and nitrate that had been spitting in this warehouse for six years without anybody's being anybody's responsibility. Wow. That's what warehouses are for, all right, they? It's like, you know, it's like those storage spaces that you rent where you put like your old furniture that you can't bear getting rid of, but that you're never gonna use again. Yeah, it's supposed to be regulations and things in place to prevent things like this from happening. But again, the version I heard was this was confiscated off of a ship and stored there. And then nobody's like property, nobody's responsibility, nobody really, other than don't touch it. Apparently for six years happened after that. So yeah, that's not cool. Yeah. But yeah, it doesn't sound like any kind of... A lot of people are injured and dead and homeless now because their apartments have been destroyed. What if your car was carved out of C4? Nothing. Identity four, nothing. Don't you need to actually give C4 a stimulus to make it explode? I'm gonna totally be on a watch list right now. Yeah. But yeah, so without a government response, something that could have been handled with very few deaths spirals into something that has caused much destruction and many deaths. Not unlike what took place with COVID here over the last six months of inaction. People don't like red tape, we all get it. That's annoying. But having regulations and laws and responses that are based on science and material handlers in this case should have been sent in to assess whether or not this was okay to have there. Good night, Fada. Yeah, it was very similar to the port of Tianjin that exploded in China. Yeah, very similar. There have been a few of these kinds of explosions over the years and they're always just shocking. We had an aircraft carrier explode in San Diego. Texas like every year has some big factory or fertilizer depository or chemical, something blows up and takes out. It's usually in rural Texas, because that's what Texas is. Yeah, Eric in Alaska is going back to the Halifax explosion, which was the largest man-made explosion before Hiroshima. Yeah, another big one. I don't even know what that is. What is that? Look it up. 1917 Halifax explosion. Ooh, Eric in Alaska says it's a munitions ship that blew up in Halifax Harbor. That was even before we had the big booms. I'm sure everything is in boxes tied down, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Anyone have any good news from this week? Good things happen? No, nobody's got anything good. Blair wasn't listening. She's like, what? Hello? Just said goodbye to my EMS worker for the night before he goes back into the fray. Yeah, how are things in San Francisco? I know that in California rates are up. They were okay for a while. For a while I was like, any COVID last night? He's like, no. But now there's definitely some every night. But it does seem like they're talking, like they're getting ready for the storm. Like they're all bracing themselves for it to get really bad. Hopefully it doesn't. Yeah. Hopefully people are staying home and hopefully they're wearing masks and it doesn't get worse. Well, now that like, past the peak. Summer's over. Maybe people will stop making dumb decisions. I don't know. Oh, we still have Labor Day, come on. That's true. You're right, Labor Day's gonna be a whole thing. So whole another holiday coming for people to make dumb decisions. Come on. You're right. This is the year of living simply. The year of, you know, practicing, practicing distance and keeping in touch with people in different ways. We can do this. I mean, can we? We can. I mean, I can, you can. Just it can. We are. Most of our listeners probably can. But can we do this? I really hope so. Ah, Gaurav Sharma says it seems like we're getting better at treating COVID symptoms. So that's some decent news. Agreed. Gary Lubert says love is real. Agreed. Eric in Alaska says the weather's been nice. Agreed. These are all very good things. Thunder Beaver got a new mobile office back. Good job. Identity four pulled lots of onions out of the garden. If you like onions, that's great. I love onions. I love to saute an onion. Ooh, a brown bear. Eric in Alaska saw a brown bear at a safe distance last week. That's a big boy. If you weren't in Alaska, Eric, if your name didn't say you were in Alaska, I'd be like, nah, you saw a brownish black bear. Because that's a big thing is people say, I saw a brown bear once. I'm like, yeah, how big was it? Was it as big as your car? No? Okay, then you saw a brownish black bear. Yeah, that's, yikes. Brown bears are no joke. They're so big. I just want to stay away from bears. They're too big. I got within like five feet of a coyote this past week. So it's getting, it's darker in the mornings, but my alarm goes off at the same time. And I take Sadie out for a run. And so I went outside at like 5.50 in the morning. And, oh. Mm-hmm, I heard the words. She's like, I see, I hear you. Sweetie, come here. She heard the word block. And so I took her out to go to the bathroom and stuff. And I like, I saw a dog just like trotting towards me. I was like, where's your owner? And then like, as it got closer, I was like, nope, that's a coyote. And it was just, it was just kind of like minding its own business, just like walking from point A to point B. And I could have reached out and touched it. It was so close to me. Luckily, I went to a talk all about coyotes last year. And so I knew what to do. And so I like, back to the little bit started clapping, started shouting, just like, get out of here. And then he didn't leave. Like the kind of just was like, was looking for me. I picked up a popcorn and I threw it at its feet. And then it like turned around and was like, all right. And then like started to trot away. And then at one point like sat down and scratched its ear and then got up and continued to trot away. Just like not giving a crap. No. I think that's one thing that we're gonna see. It's the impact of humanity that normally makes these animals fearful. They're getting bold. They're finding food. They don't have as much food because all of the trash and other things that maybe they depend on or the rodents that feed on the trash that humanity produces and leaves out, it's not there. They're getting bold. Wings, a wing of Texas. I suspect raccoons to be bathing in our pond with waterfall in our front yard. What do I do? Leave out towels, very small towels. Very small, nice towels. They'll be like, oh, thank you very much. That was a good bath, it was lovely. I don't, I don't think they're bathing in your pond. Drinking the water, pooping in it. I think they're drinking the water. They're probably drinking it. Yeah, to my knowledge, raccoons are not super into taking a dip. I think it's an interesting question though, which animals do take baths? Yeah. I mean, they're so fluffy, they probably wouldn't want to. For virus to spill over, asks Gorov, does the human have to consume the animal or even being a zookeeper can do it? So consuming the virus doesn't really do much. Yeah. Unless it's something that is a virus, not respiratory, but more systemic, and it's, you're eating raw meat, you know, maybe, but that's usually more often like a parasite or something. So wasn't Ebola, bush meat, blood to blood contact, like you're cutting up a butchering an animal basically and you have a cut on your finger somewhere and that's how the virus could get in. Yeah. Yeah. And then viruses, the respiratory viruses, that's just going to be, you know, going into a cave where a bunch of bats are and they're guano and it's just aerosolized in the air and you breathe it out. Or types of bird viruses that you can get that way or from rat species. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not consuming, yeah, not normally. I think consuming the one that I've really heard of, it's not a virus though, it'd be the prion. You know, when you consume deer meat that has the, I think it's kurokuro, but it's not kurokuro. It's the virus that causes. Kruzfeld Jacobs, Kruzfeld Jacobs. That one. I think Blair's tired. How can you tell? Do they look from standing to sitting? Yeah, as previously mentioned, that 545 alarm comes real quick. It comes early. Yes. How's your work, Justin? Oh, I'm not. I'm done. I'm done working. I'm now a countdown to leaving the country. Really? Yeah. Anybody know how phones work? I got a new phone. It's unlocked and I moved my SIM card from my old phone to the new phone and it, I don't know if my carrier settings aren't on the SIM card or what. Did you, it's Apple products? Yes. Okay, so do some Googling, put your SIM card back in the old phone, plug your phone into your computer and then you have to like start a process to transfer from one phone to the other. So I transferred all the data I got transferred. Just had me hold the phones next to each other. But that's something else. It seems to go to your carrier's website and say like I'm activating a new phone and then it'll be like, all right, now turn your old phone off. Okay, now plug in your new phone. Okay, I got it. And then with the SIM card in the new one. Yeah, yeah. Okay. You don't actually need to move your SIM card. In fact, they don't, my phone, I have an iPhone 8, it doesn't have a SIM card. Oh. What? Yes it does. Uh-uh. Yes, yeah. I have a XR now and it has it. Yeah. I got my daughter in eight, it had it. Well, then you don't need to transfer the SIM cards anymore. That's not a thing, Yes, you do, yes you absolutely do. Yes, yes, I'm not taking your advice on that. In fact, I got this phone so I could have two SIM cards in it. Then let me ask you this, Justin. Why did you ask? Well, no, they're getting the carrier settings updated via computer from the website. That makes total sense that something- They told me not to pull out my SIM card. It told me very specifically. It was like, nope, we're gonna do it all. That just does not make all of the sense. Your SIM card is your like carrier information and your contact and all those things will get transferred. Really? Yeah. Then why do I have two SIM card slots on this one? Probably for international travel. So you could put an international- Exactly. Carrier on it. But then I don't need my regular one anymore? So what you're saying? I'm saying that you don't need to physically pull your SIM card out of your old phone. Find this information dubious. However, I will take your advice. I think that makes sense. Although, actually, if you bought an unlocked phone, maybe you do. Yeah, it's not- If you didn't buy it through Apple, you might need to. Or through your carrier. Then you might need to. Through the carrier makes sense, yeah. But I bought mine through Apple. Okay. And I didn't need to move my SIM card. I just did this like a couple of months ago. You don't have a SIM card. Or if I do, it came with one of the- Have you left the house with the phone and used it? Just asking. You know I'm working full-time off-site, right? But is there Wi-Fi everywhere? Like these things are important. Oh my God, Justin. Justin. Claire is too tired. The level of condescension is like thick. Oh no, it's not condescension, it's absolute dubiousness. Because this is what I thought the whole point of a SIM card was. It was like that's how you make your phone do cellular. Yeah, well, it's 2020, no dude. I get that, but then why do they have like more slots now than they had before, if it's like the obsolete- I think that's so you can do both. I think it's, if you wanna have like dual carriers, then you might need a SIM card in there. But if you have a phone, it's basically just the computer, right? Yeah. That's like linked up to a network. It does seem weird that the chip, that I had a little chip I had in there from, I don't know, 10 years ago with my first iPhone, it's still necessary to put into this newer phone. That's the thing, I don't think it is. I don't think I have one anymore. Eric Knapp says carriers are going to e-SIMs. Yeah, there we go. And away from physical SIMs. There we go. See, I'm not full of it. I didn't say you were full of it. I was just like, then why is this a thing still? Why does it have like- You gotta program the computer, man. Why are CD-ROMs still a thing? I mean, yeah. Why do their computers still have those? Like- Yeah, that's right. I put the ROM back in CD-ROM. I remember. I remember when they were called DVD-ROMs. All right, all right. No, I'm learning from you, Blair. I'm not trying to be condescending in the very least. I'm just like, not getting it is all. It's an okay boomer moment I'm having. Just let her be gentle. You're not a boomer. You're not a boomer. I'm saying Apple doesn't have SIM cards, but my Apple phone has two slots for SIM cards. She can't just tell me the thing. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's for international travel. Okay. So you could have an Italy SIM card and a Greece SIM card in there. Yeah, that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna have all these different phone numbers in one phone. Okay, you guys, I'm gonna turn up my input on my audio because Identity Force says that I'm still quieter than you guys, which is all the time, even though when I'm just recording into my audio recording software, I have perfect levels. They're perfect. But apparently I'm quieter than you both by about six decibels. So I'm going to turn it up right now, just turn up the level and see if that works. Did that work? Am I now even with, or am I louder than Blair and Justin? I can mark it. It still sounds very warm. It sounds good. You don't sound overexposed right now. I don't sound, don't like to be overexposed. The sun, my skin, it doesn't go well together. Identity Force, am I still six decibels? Yeah, everybody talk at the same time. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now Justin, you're being super quiet. I'm not being very quiet anymore. I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, quiet. Identity Force just says it's louder than it was. Great, great, okay. I do think that is how knobs work. I mean, I can turn up the aux, I can turn up the gain, I can turn up the level, level, level. There's a lot of bottom knobs. Sony knobs. That's what I gave up on the mixer. The mixer, I had, it had like a hundred knobs. I made myself a little more gain. How's that? How's that gain? Oh, wait, now you say now that's better, but now you're behind. Oh, did I make it too loud? No, no, that's fine. I can hear you lack of clear anyway. Why are you whispering? Oh, now you're real hot, Kiki. Okay, I'm gonna turn it back down again. Turn that gain back down. Justin, talk for real. What do you mean? I'm like, I'm fake talking. I know you are. I'm absolutely not. When do you leave, Justin? Do you have a flight already? Oh, yeah, I do. I need a calendar to figure it out, but let's see. What is today? The fifth. Less than two weeks. The 17th. That's great. Better balanced, better balanced, better balanced. Better balanced, better balanced, better balanced. Okay, so in about two weeks, week and a half, we're gonna be dealing with Justin. On Denmark time. On Denmark time. Oh, yeah, I've been doing this for a short, oh. Oh, gosh, what is it? Five o'clock in the morning? Yeah, until time changes help that out. Slightly. For a bit. For a bit. No, it's five o'clock in the morning. Sorry, it's five o'clock in the morning there is when I would do the show. Yeah. Which means. You have to get up. No, it's eight o'clock here still. Cause you guys are in the same time zones, you're not. We don't change. No. No, you'll stay the same. It'll be me that's operating in the morning. It'll be a morning show. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer, everybody. It'll be like that. It'll be you waking up at four fifty five. No, I'll be up at four because I got to prep for the show. I got to find my story. Drinking coffee. And. Yeah, it'll be a completely different scene than than this one here. When I was in Israel, we were still doing seven thirty. And so for half the time I was there, I had to do it five thirty. And then for half the time I was there, I did do it at four thirty. They will go at four. Yeah. I remember those shows. You don't know. I don't. I really don't. Thank you. You're OK. Oh, my goodness. He's barking from the bedroom. It's like too lazy to get off the bed, but still like, what's going on out there? Come back to bed. Actually, according to this, I can just dial a number, maybe. I don't even have to be connected to a computer. Yeah, you could do that. What? What? For his phone activation. Oh, for your phone activation. OK. All right. My dog's. Yes, over there. She's gone. Because you said walk. Yeah, well. Now the dogs like. She needs to learn context clues. I'm sorry. Learn, learn, Sadie, learn. All right, everybody, friends, thank you for joining us for another episode of This Week in Science. Thank you for joining us and spending so much time with us this Wednesday evening, learning about lemurs and their poop and learning about. Beatles that aren't poop, but act like it and all the other science fun. Yeah, Beatles crawling out of frog butts. You're welcome. Incredible. I want to go hug my cat, too. I'm going to go hug my cat. Be careful, there's no Beatles crawling out of his butt. Is that is it just frogs that eat this beetle? I just know I'm curious. You don't know. I don't think. What happens if Justin eats the beetle or a bird with a bird? They crawl their way out, knock at the door. Excuse me. I need to leave, please. Yeah, excuse me. Excuse me. Would somebody please open the door? I'd like to go now. Yeah. OK, Blair, for next week, I really, really want some bad panda art. Bad panda. OK, bad panda, bad panda. I mean, seriously, I'm like thinking of about pandas with all sorts of social issues. Say good night, Blair. Night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thank you. We will see you again next week. And in the meantime, we hope that we see you on the interwebs. Have a wonderful week.