 Welcome everyone to another podcast broadcast. Oh yeah, we're back for another episode of this week in science. We're gonna be here for a couple of hours. A tight 90, let's do it. We're gonna talk about science. It's gonna be great. We're gonna have a lot of fun. All of you in the chat rooms. I hope you have a lot of fun. Tell your friends that we're here. Get the word out. And yeah, this is our live podcast broadcast. So no cuts here. It'll all be cut later in the podcast version if it needs to be. Hit the likes, the subscribes, et cetera. And is that everything? Are we ready? Let's do it. Yes, let's do it. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, yes. Okay, let us begin in a three, two. This is twist. This week in science, episode number 911. Recorded on Wednesday, February 1st, 2023. Will the dodo fly? Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we will fill your head with Bigfoot, dodo's and fun guy. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. A giant green comet is passing by Earth today. One that has passed by the Earth before some 50,000 years ago. We only mention it because like so many things we talk about in following program, it's just really neat. There are a lot of neat things on planet Earth. Not the least of which is you. You and the overall generalized sentient hominins sort of way. Specifically you is no doubt very neat and interesting and multifaceted in your particular way of existing, living on a most rocky planet with a molten lava core orbiting a nuclear fireball like you do. But just keeping it generally human for the moment, what a wonderful thing that is to be. Sure, there's the problems usually caused by other humans but there's also all of the solutions often created by other humans. Not to go so far as to make a point about anything here but there is something to be said for having the ability to think and to do. Without it, I can't even imagine what there would be to talk about. Humans have brains capable of understanding just about any concept. We think that's really neat which is why we have brought you a selection of interesting concepts pulled from the scientific research of the day for you to wrap that really neat brain of yours around. Here on This Week in Science, coming up next. ["Science 2 Kiki and Bla-Va"] I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough I wanna learn everything I wanna fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek I wanna know Good science 2 Kiki and Bla-Va. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back to talk about science. Yes, if you are a fan of the show, you know it's because of the science we're here for. We're here for it every single week. I have stories this week about asteroid asymmetry, some fun for the fungi, or fear? I don't know. A big map and a little bit about mitochondria and alcohol but no, those aren't the same stories. Justin, what did you bring? I've got bigfoot meats, big data, squid panes, hydrogen upgrades, and Neanderthals skulls. Lots of Neanderthals skulls everywhere. Blair, what is in the animal corner? Yes, I have dodos. I have jet lagged fruit flies. And what's... I also have bigfoot. Too bad I got to say what stories I'm doing first on the show and therefore that's how you get there first. That you have a bigfoot and you have a bigfoot, so together you have bigfoot. Riga, I think we're doing this one together. Because it turns out that it's something I did not know about Blair, is she's a huge bigfoot aficionado. Yes, I am. Blair is something. Well, every once in a while we have to go down that path of... Cryptozoological. Yes, that's exactly where I was going. We're gonna head down to the Crypto Zoo. And, well, not crypto, but you get it. You get it because you're here for the science. All right, as we jump into the show here tonight, I wanna remind everyone that if you have not yet subscribed to Twists, please do. You can find us as a podcast, places that you find podcasts, and you can find us streaming live weekly on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. Pacific Time on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch. We are Twists Science on Twitch, Twitter, Instagram, and Mastodon on the Universodon server. And if you head over to twist.org, you will be able to find all sorts of things, links, show notes, and ways to subscribe to Twists. Okay, enough of that. Let's jump into the science. Have you ever wanted to know where all the matter is? I mean, it's all around us, isn't it? I mean, you look at the astrophysicist. It's missing, right? It's so much of it is missing. We don't know where we put it. So this is the thing. You don't necessarily go, what's the matter to an astrophysicist? You say, where's the matter? Because they don't know what all the matter is yet. So don't ask that question. But thinking about where all the matter is, researchers have taken data from a couple of very large telescope surveys, the Dark Energy Survey, which was serving from a mountain top in Chile over six years and the South Pole Telescope that looks at traces of radiation from right after the Big Bang. And all of this data was combined and put together to look at, to make a picture of the universe so that we could get an idea of where both regular matter that emits and reflects light is and also dark matter, which is matter that's not visible, but we know it's there because it has mass. It has a gravitational impact. And that's exactly what these researchers have done with the data that they've collected is they've been able to take all of the gravitational effects, take all of these surveys together, stick them together and give us a picture of where in our view of the night sky, there is matter. And this is- And according to that picture, the entire universe is a Dalek, Dr. Drew. The entire universe, yes. So we get to understand how matter is distributed, where it's distributed, and then we can start to associate that with more visible data from these telescopes that we have now looking at the skies to be able to give us an idea of what is causing the various amassings of data in different places. So they're using things like gravitational lensing to be able to determine when things are layered in space, really, because they're behind each other and not necessarily all in lumped in one spot in space. But the researchers say that all of the data, it all seems to fit so far. The amount of data of matter they expected, the distribution of matter, how it all is fitting there, they're like, oh, this is great, it all fits together. This fits the puzzle of how we think the universe should be working and how it should be put together. And then though, they're like, it's not messy enough. So an astrophysicist from the University of Hawaii, Eric Baxter, has said in a press release that it seems like there are slightly less fluctuations in the current universe than we would predict assuming our standard cosmological model anchored to the early universe. So if we were to take the early universe as the starting conditions, and then based on our understanding of math and physics and everything and extrapolate outward, then there should be more clumps and the universe is not messy enough. It's not clumpy enough. It's kind of neatly spread out according to this new survey. So now this offers an opportunity for other researchers to be able to do different analyses of the data, to use different telescopes to be able to take a look at these views and to be able to figure out, you know, are we looking at it from the right angle? Is there something else that we should be using to be determining whether or not we have a good perspective on how the universe looks and should look? Yeah, it's really tricky because all of the knowledge we have of the universe is based on our observations from this one perspective. And then dialing it back, sort of back engineering it to how it could have started. So, yeah, our perspectives, of course, are very limited from this little moist rocky planet, trying to figure out how the entire universe formed. I know, we have one view. Like, we're not even like, oh, let's triangulate from multiple perspectives in the universe to be able to get idea. Nope, we're just looking from one space and just jumping to conclusions. So, yeah. As we do, and as we must, because we have no other choice. We have no other choice. Send the robots. There's something fun about the universe being less messy than we expected. If it was more chaotic than we could have imagined, then, well, you know, you're missing a whole bunch of chaos. And I said, no, actually, it's a lot more boring. And we thought it might have been. Yeah, our universe is, did not just needs to be more clumpy, everybody. Get to work, let those universal dust bunnies build up a little bit more. It's like when you're a kid and you find out that after you go to bed, your parents just go to bed. They don't stay up eating banana splits all night like you imagine. No, they're tired too. They wish they could go to bed before you go to bed. Very often. But speaking of dust bunnies, sometimes those dust bunnies look like things out there. And sometimes when people are out in nature, they see things and they're like, ah, it's the Pacific Northwest. It's got to be a big foot. Yeah. Justin. So, so this is part of the infrequently recurring segments. Did we really need a study for that in which the answer is always yes, even though the results are maybe what they, what we thought they might be, might be what we expected. So this big foot meets big data. American lore has long claimed a large hairy hominid who's roaming deep within our forests. The cryptozoological creature called Bigfoot or Sasquatch has been reported all across the United States and Canada, but most often in the most densely forested areas, thousands and thousands of sightings dating back many decades have been reported. Over the years, there have been genetic and microscopic analysis of supposed hairs, feces, other specimens attributed to Sasquatch found that they're in the wild, which after analysis, none of which have been attributable to any unknown creature. Despite the advent and expansive use of digital cameras, including personal cameras, phones, wildlife, motion detector cameras, no definitive still image or video of a Sasquatch has ever been recorded. And yet the legend persists. Okay. So there's a study likely to make some new cycles this week that finds Sasquatch sightings correlate significantly with black bear populations. In fact, what is it Blair, you also like to say? It's, there's one Sasquatch sighting approximately for every few hundred bears in the region. And you could almost, you could actually predict a lot of Sasquatch sightings just by knowing how many bears there are in an area. So based on the statistical considerations, the study asserts that it is likely bears that people are seeing and not bigfoot. Yeah, fair enough. But yes, Blair, what do you think about these correlations? So as someone who's worked with black bears and also someone who's visited many bigfoot museums, some of this makes sense and some of it doesn't. And so I don't claim to believe that bigfoot exists because I don't. But if you look at some of the detailed quote unquote accounts, some of this works very well because like black bears like to move around on their back legs sometimes. And they look awkward and kind of weird and they kind of swing their arms back and forth. So in that way, it totally makes sense. Some of the favorite bigfoot stories that I've seen have to do with kind of leaving things for bigfoot and bigfoot bringing you rewards and having these people who live in the woods and cabins having exchanges with them where they might leave some grandcrackers out and bigfoot brings them something shiny. There's lots of animals that do that too. Definitely a black bear could be doing that. That's totally possible. Also crows, right? But some of this didn't seem right to me. So one of the things was that they claimed that this makes sense because black bears can be similar to the size of humans. Similar is a stretch there. Black bears vary in size a lot but there's not many of them that are big enough to be confused for a human. Maybe from far away. But isn't that bigfoot's whole thing is that he's like seven feet tall. There's no black bears that are seven feet tall when they're standing on their rear legs. So this is a pretty big problem for me. Also all of the fuzzy photos and things like that do not look like bears. They look like humans, which obviously the likelihood is that they are fake and created by humans, right? But it's, it's- When you- I gotta pause. I gotta pause. It's shown to be actual fakes and people. Right, I have to pause for a moment. When you say all of the, now granted I'm not an aficionado but I did a little Google searching for best images of Bigfoot. Yes. And I didn't find anything that I would consider even a fuzzy image that I would interpret as a seven-foot hominin. That's nothing. Yeah. And the eyewitness accounts of a seven-foot anything is I'm sure from a great distance in the deep woods. And like you're not- I will say that the foot indentations, the foot indentations could very easily be the rear feet of a bear. Yeah. And a lot of them also have been, have been found to be like some of the best ones have also been found to have pores on the bottoms of their feet. Which also these big pores in the bottom of the feet would happen if you had a latex and a mold Yes. That had air bubbles. Yeah. Also the calloused foot pads of things like bears also kind of have cracks and dimples in them. So that would be more likely a result of that as well. So basically what I'm saying is I believe it's possible a lot of them are black bears. But not all of them. I think you have to remember, you have to keep it, you have to remind yourself that some of the big foot lore is fabricated. Some? So that's, no, that's what I'm saying. Some of it could be black bears. The other stuff is just made up. And you have to kind of include those in the conversation because there's these other pieces of it that I think are, that don't fit perfectly in the bearer kind of. And there are nature myths and there are stories that go back as people in the chat, various chat rooms have been saying in different cultures around the world, there's Yeti, the big foot, there's a number of these large hairy creatures. One of my favorites, the Rugeroo, which is in Louisiana. Right. These, there are myths that they stem from and these could be animals, these could be other sources, but then we perpetuate them and people are also out in the forest and maybe they're scared and they see something shadowy on two legs going off in the distance. I would run away. I would just, I saw a big foot. No, I would more likely think it was a black bear. But, you know, there are, the human psyche wants to believe. Yes. This week also brought us a cartoon bear face on Mars, which like the past human face on Mars just illustrates that human imagination can often be the first thing that we use to see things with. Right. When looking at an otherwise ordinary world. I didn't notice that there were some areas on that map of the correlations that had no bears, but still had, you know, not Pacific Northwest numbers of bear sightings, but did have a big foot sightings. Yeah. But did have big foot sightings. Florida for instance, which doesn't have any bears, but does have. Well, so they might be counting the Rugeroo or something like that, like a swamp monster in that then. Well, they're looking for big foot. There's big. Yeah, so they might be counting. Big hominins. Yeah, I don't know. Florida does not have bears, but it does have an active population of Floridians. It does have an active population. It also has alligators, which like human behavior. Alligators can act weird and rustle things and climb trees and do weird things. I think the big overlap with the bear populations and the high number of sightings and some of those little clips of videos that I did see that did look like something furry moving around in the far distance looked to me like a bear. Yes. And interestingly, they didn't correlate this positively with brown bears. I don't know if that's brown bears don't do as much hind leg walking. There's almost none left in the United States, so that's 25. There's not that many of them. And where they are too, I figure is less populated areas with humans and probably people who are a little bit more tuned to surviving and understanding nature if they're living out where brown bears still exist and are less likely to assume big foot because they're more concerned about a bear. Well, you have to remember also though, brown bears are without a doubt so bear-shaped. They're rounder, they're less awkward when they're on their hind legs. They have these huge round heads with huge big, cute fluffy ears. Don't confuse it. Like we saw on Mars. Yes, but so that's the other thing is that if you see a grizzly bear, you know that's a grizzly bear. They also don't walk around on their hind legs doing stuff like this all the time and like batting and stuff. Black bears are goofy. Black bears are so silly. And I really think that's the piece of this that really made sense to me is the behavior of black bears fitting into this weird erratic forest man idea. The reason I love big foot is that the beautiful lush forests of the Pacific Northwest are feel like a magical place and they feel so separate from urban life. Yeah. And I just like the kind of mysticism of keeping it its own space kind of separate from human civilization because it is magical in its own way and like a weird, I don't know, like. If there's anything that could be left over from a time before modern society started to impact everything. Like. Yeah, yeah. And it's a place where you can really feel submerged and feel separate and I just love the added lore of it knowing that it's all made up. But it's so fun to immerse yourself in that and kind of imagine that you're in this magical place which I love but all that to say I totally buy a lot of the sightings are black bears but I do not believe that the falsified evidence is black bears. David Hunn, the chat room is pointing out that Florida does have black bears. It's a very small population compared to elsewhere for the number of Floridians that claim to have seen a big foot but I think still, you know, maybe especially maybe the rate of big foot sightings go up also when you have just some black bears because then you aren't used to seeing one don't expect them. Yeah, sure. Yeah. I like the idea that there's a magical temperate force being, but we should have a big foot preserve. That's pretty fun for us. That's a nature, yes. We should have colossal bring them back from extinction. Oh, we'll get to your story in a bit. There we go, we just need to get some DNA. Yeah. We'll get there. We will get there. Let's move out into the solar system for just a minute again, looking at space but looking at our space close to home. One of those big lovely planets with rings out there, Jupiter. We love Jupiter and Jupiter has a bunch of asteroids that are in its orbit and people have thought historically, oh, look at all those nice asteroids. They're in the Lagrange points. Oh, look at why are they lopsided? Why are there more asteroids in this one Lagrange than the other Lagrange? And so a team of researchers has been taking a look at these Lagrange points in Jupiter's orbit and they're proposing based on solar system dynamics that once upon a time, Jupiter didn't live where it lives now and that our solar set, we've talked about this on the show before, but that at one point in the time, the gas giants were closer in and everything maybe has moved around and because of that, we've ended up with objects in places where we wouldn't necessarily expect them based on just the location of everything right now as it is. So it's kind of similar to the first story that I brought which is we're looking at everything right now and trying to keep an idea of, okay, how did it get there? What's our hypothesis about our solar system? How did it form? So the researchers have determined that there were different evolution paths for these asteroid groups that exist in the L4 and L5 swarm Lagrange points in Jupiter's orbit. And this asymmetry has come about specifically because Jupiter used to be closer in and at one point it moved and so the gravitational pull was disrupted, it got booted out into the outer solar system at some point and what they're calling this is the grand TAC hypothesis. This isn't the first time that anyone has come up with this but it might solve a bunch of problems about how we look at the distribution of matter in our solar system and it also solves this asymmetry with this particular, for this particular idea. So the asymmetry happened when there was an outward migration of Jupiter as well. So Jupiter moved out and then it moved back in and so you end up getting this, excuse me, higher population of a certain kind of asteroid called the Greek asteroids within one of those Lagrange points. So it has Greek L4's Trojans in their L5 and there's more Greeks than Trojans because Jupiter moved. It's just another story of how things aren't static. We're just a moment in time and we think things are the way they are. But they're not. Still shot picture frame. They feel like they're static because we are a blip. A blip, yes. It doesn't make me feel insignificant, I'll tell you what. I love that, but I love that kind of thing. It's like, oh, insignificant, life is meaningless. No, oh my gosh, there's so much more out there. So much significance to just the fact that we exist as this blip. But anyway, let's move on from blips and asteroids to, you wanna talk about squids? Is that what we wanna talk about right now? Well, this is what I would call the best solution so far when looking for ways to reduce the carbon footprint of human activity. One of the biggest targets out there is buildings taken together, not just one building, but all of them together. Buildings consume about 32% of the global energy supply. 50% of the electricity consumed globally, around 25% of the greenhouse gas emissions are used in buildings and heating, cooling, lighting of our modern cave dweller lifestyle. That is by the way, more than manufacturing or transportation. It's just keeping the buildings warm or cool or well lit. And it's gonna get worse as the future brings more humans. There will be more buildings required and global warming increases the fluctuating temperatures, requiring more cooling and heating of the existing buildings. University of Toronto researchers have found a novel approach that will reduce the energy consumption of buildings by about 43% over the best existing technologies, moving us much closer to that net zero goal. I like that. And they did it by replacing traditional windows with squid skin. Wait, what? Squid panes. Tell me more. Lead author of the study published there, the Raphael K says, the key is controlling the solar energy that energy is producing. Energy that enters buildings, which we talked a long time ago about Earthship Biotexture, which is a completely off-grid building system and very much focused on controlling solar energy. Right. There are systems already in existence that can block light. They're very primitive ones. You can have curtains, you can have blinds. You can have automatic blinds that open and close based on the temperature of the interior of the building to try to add a little heat or block a little heat to make the building more efficient. You have electrochromic windows that have tints in them that can automatically darken, kind of like automatic sunglasses. If you go out into the sun, the glasses will darken in reaction to the light. But these systems don't discriminate between different wavelengths of light nor can they control how that light gets distributed spatially. Excuse me. According to K, sunlight contains visible light which impacts the illumination in the building, but it also contains other invisible wavelengths such as infrared light, which we can think of essentially as heat in the middle of the day in winter. You'd probably want to let in both, but in the middle of the day in summer, you'd just want to let in the visible light, not the heat current systems. People who can't do this, they either block both or neither. They also have no ability to direct or scatter light in beneficial ways. The system developed by K and the University of Toronto team leverages the power of microfluidics. Prototype consists of flat sheets of plastic that are permeated with an array of millimeter thick channels. They can pump fluids through these little channels with customized pigments, particles and other molecules that can be mixed into the fluids that control what kind of light gets to pass through them, such as visible light or near infrared wavelengths. And they can also control to some degree which direction that light is then distributed. So you can get light further into a building or block more light as you may desire. The sheets can be combined in multi-layer stacks with each layer responsible for a different type of optical function, thereby controlling intensity, wavelength tuning and scattering, transmitting light indoors, how they like. So tremendous amount of control can be achieved. And let the heat in, they can end the light, you can block some of that heat but still let the light, the visible light go everywhere, strike it further into the building, all this sort of stuff. So this is a great optimization of solar energy coming in. Yeah, really interesting taking the inspiration from the way the skin of squids works. Yeah, so in a few species of squid, their active camouflage is a pigmentary layer of chromatophore organs and a more structured layer of protein cells. And where those overlap, they can together mediate color, spectral, reflectance and spatial pattering of the light. So it's really an amazing sort of piece. The same team has previously worked with the camouflage from chameleons and the sort of crystalline structure of their skin which can selectively reflect light through again a multi-layered tier which they're using for facades. So in combination, you have windows, squid-based which can control how light is getting into the building, what heat is or isn't getting in. And a skin of a building that can control, if you want to keep the building cool, you make it a very light color. If you want to absorb more heat, you can darken the surface of the building. You can, oh, in an emergency, you can make your building look like an innocent tree or a forest. We're only a tree here. It's awesome. You can theme it up for the holidays. You can actually do some really fun stuff with it. So Justin, I have a follow-up question though. Yeah. Doesn't it take energy to push fluid through these windows or manipulate the crystals in the facade? And does that play into the 43% or is that a separate piece of this that makes it maybe less efficient than it could be? So, okay. So they say here, if they had just one layer, this is Kay, and if it's one layer that focuses on moduling transmission of near infrared light, not even getting to the visual, they could save about 25% anime on heating, cooling and lighting energy over the baseline. If they had two layers, they would that gets into that infrared and visible, it's more like 50% reduction in that building's energy consumption. And that's over systems that have automatic blinds and chromatic window. Right, but so my question is, does it take energy to manipulate? Of course it does. Of course it does. But that's the point. So they've done the comparison not off of a building that didn't have a system because the chromatic windows and the automatic blinds take that same realm of energy. So they've compared themselves to systems that are already using energy to manipulate the solar energy, right? But yeah, this is pumping micro fluids through a pane. It's not a heavy energy expenditure that's taking place. I'd just be interested to see because is it equal to moving an automatic blind or is it more? Well, it would probably, yeah. Is it less or? Well, they did. Okay, so say it's the same. Say it's a little bit more. Yes. Say if it was even a little bit more, twice what it takes. That's still nothing compared to a compressor running a building wide air conditioning. Sure. Nothing compared to a furnace heating a building that the solar energy passively could have taken care of. So, but that's I think why they use their comparison against existing systems that are already using some. Energy, so you have a compared, something to compare it against, yeah. You know, with how this would work, I think the big question is how much would these cost in the end production? How much manufacturing could actually take place? Would construction actually adopt this? How can we get the government to add regulations that or stipends that help to add these kinds of windows to buildings? There's so many questions related to the affordability of this kind of thing because it's going to be more expensive than just a regular window. Well, that was my other thought. She was like, do you have to replenish the fluid? Like, does it biodegrade over time as a body might? Do you, oh, I got to refill my window fluid. Yeah, it might, you know, and we are talking also about the research phase of proof of concept. So, is this still something that we want to do in panes of plastic? Could we convert it to panes of glass that might be more stable in high wind situations or something like this? So there's all sorts of, but the overarching thing is- And the cost savings though, yeah, the energy saving, long-term cost savings that would be more. It does look to be scalable. The materials all use the microfluidic material. All of this is very cheap. These are all very cheap. It's a lot of good science behind it, but it's cheap materials in the end. It's sustainable, it's a sustainable solution that directly reduces energy consumption at the point of use, which is also all of the, all the efforts we're making to create an alternative energy that isn't polluting. Here's one that just says, whatever you're using, we'll leave that aside for the moment until you figure out the 40 year away plan for a fusion or whatever you're dreaming on. And let's just figure out a way to, to one of the biggest sources of energy cut it in half at the point of use by using a giant nuclear fireball. It's right there, always on and controlling how that energy is used or avoid it. Yeah, they're always- I think it's the best idea for a long time. It's a great idea. I mean, this is the kind of thing it's going to change the reflectance of windows. So skyscrapers are gonna have fewer birds fly into windows. You're gonna have- That's a good one. Big buildings, if you have, this is going to impact the overall energy outlay. It's going to change the amount of, if it's air conditioning or heating, this is carbon dioxide, usually consuming processes or not consuming, but releasing processes. So I don't know, it seems great. There's always trade-offs to things, but this is the kind of solution that it has an immediate, it can have an immediate effect. And it has an economic benefit, which they're not talking about directly in this study because they're thinking about the energy consumption as a carbon footprint in the telling of the story. But if you were to tell any business that their headquarters, that $30,000 a month electricity bill or whatever it is, could be cut in half, that might be worth looking into. And then it's every building. So one of the things that I like about this too is, to some extent, there's retrofitability of existing buildings. You don't have to completely gut the infrastructure. Right, if it's a film that you can apply to a window, as opposed to install a whole new window, then that is a game changer. You have teams of people go in, add the film, it changes everything. Instead of getting your curtains, you get squid skin. Squid skin. Squid skin for businesses. Squid skin for the window panes and then chameleon skin for the building facade. The services, yeah. The future's gonna be way cooler, I think, looking than anybody else. So colorful. Oh, yeah. Let's talk about the future. The future is gonna get hot and climate change is going to change those bugs that are going to impact our health. And while we have been focused on bacteria a lot, we've been focused on viruses as a result of this pandemic we've been living through and we're like, oh no. The things that we don't talk about very often are the fun guys. Those fun guys. Yes. New story out of Duke University School of Medicine has determined that, and this is, we've talked about stuff like this before, cryptococcus denaeoformins. It's a pathogenic fungus. It's gonna make it better at being pathogenic. It's gonna make it better at living. It's going, they tested it at high heats and they've published their research in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that it's going to make the fungus have more jumping genes and they're gonna get up and move around which is gonna lead to more mutations and there's gonna be changes in the regulation of all of these genes. And the heat stress of adapting to the higher heats the researchers say is going to be the big issue for speeding up these mutations. And the thing is from a public health standpoint it's harder to control because we don't, it's not like, oh, we gotta keep the people away from each other. So the people don't give each other the viruses. It's not the thing that you breathe on each other. Fun guy are all around us. Their spores are in the air. We inhale them. They're- They're in our blood. Yes, the fun guy, the fun guys are always around. Those fun guys. And a lot of people might be aware, a little bit more aware of fungal infections right now because of the TV show that's very popular at the moment. The Last of Us. Are you watching it either of you? No, I'm aware of it. I'm aware of it and I don't know if I can watch it. I'm not, I mean, it's a zombie show. There is a fungus which is a fungus that we've talked about also on the show. It's like, ooh, fungus that might impact intelligence and other things. It's like the fungus that turned the bees into zombies, basically, but- Yeah. Bees, ants, crickets. There's a lot of zombies in nature. That's one of those things that you have to pause and you're just like, oh yeah, and zombies aren't real. Actually, there's many examples of zombies in nature. Oh dear. So fungal infections are increasing because we have a lot of people who have weakened immune systems or very often because of the pollution in our cities and other places. Also because of underlying health conditions or genetic disorders that predispose them to having weakened immune systems. Pathogenic fungi are increasing because of the warmer temperatures and they're probably infecting more people. There's more mutations taking place. We are really, we really need to be keeping an eye on the fungi. We do. And that old adage, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. We have to go find a bacteria that has formed a resistance against the fungi and create an antifungal based off of bacteria. And if the bacteria get out of hand, well, we gotta go find a fungus that's got an antibacterial property. This is just endless. This is endless once we start down this road. Yeah, so this endless road, this endless road, well, we may have a new vaccine, actually. The University of Georgia has developed a possible vaccine for fungal infections. Dun, dun, dun. So our pathogenic fungi are starting to be cut. They're getting their drug resistance and all that kind of stuff just like the bacteria. So, oh no, that's no good. It's because everybody's got myconazole or something in their medicine cabinets. But this University of Georgia study, they've published in Precincts of the National Academy of Science, NEXIS, they have determined that it is able to, or they have designed it to protect against the three most common fungal pathogens that are responsible for more than 80% of fatal infections. And they looked at four preclinical animal models, including non-human primates. And they were able to determine that it showed broad cross-protective anti-fungal immunity in those models. So they're moving forward to future clinical trials. So this vaccine is targeted at aspergillus candida and pneumocystis. And so who knows, perhaps in the future, we will be trying to get people to pick up a little bit of vaccine acceptance for not just the flu or RSV or COVID, but also for the fungal guys. Those are viruses. Right, so those are viruses. Yeah, those are viruses to the gym. Get them worked out for all these different things. Okay, I don't wanna get all anti-vaxxer on everybody. Oh God. But I might, I might end up being one with this. So here's a for instance. Here's, we're gonna give you a vaccine that protects your body against bacteria of several order. Oh, that sounds nice. But wait a second, my entire gut microbiome is made up of bacteria that I need to function These aren't bacteria. These are funguses that are pathogenic and this is not targeting the non-pathogenic fungi. I understand it's not targeting. Yes. I'm just saying we also have fungal microbiota. We do, absolutely. And we have fungi that are doing work we don't quite understand yet as they get into our blood system. They may not all be pathogenic. Now I know this isn't blanket protected body from all fungi. I know they're trying to be very targeted here but I, this is one of those that they better do was my waggy finger thing is happening. A lot of research before they try that out in any human model. So I mean, there are vaccines for bacteria currently. Yes, there are. Like Tdap is all bacterial pathogens, right? So that's part of the process is making sure you're not killing the bed. Make sure it's the targeted is the important thing. Yeah. Targeted is the whole aspect of it. Yes. And as we have seen there are a lot of questions that are not just what are the fungi doing on their own in there but also how are they interacting with bacteria? Because there have been some studies that have shown that the interactions between different fungal species and bacterial species have metabolic effects or change the way that drugs are metabolized or there are lots of interactions that still need to be taken into account but when you're talking about pathogenic fungi that are really causing disease and hardship for a large number of people you start to get to a point where it would be great to have a vaccine. In the meantime, until we hopefully come up with some other great anti-fungal strategies we need to help our immune systems and we need to be concerned about the fact that the warming world is going to be changing the way that these microbes evolve with us and it could cause them to be more pathogenic. It could be a real problem. Maybe not. I was gonna say Candida, isn't that the one where you can basically starve from Candida, right? It totally decimates your digestive system and you can't metabolize any food and you end up in the hospital and people fight for their lives on that. So this is something that could definitely be used today but could become way more helpful in the future too. And how often, I mean, if you can treat it in hospital, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes. People die. Is it the kind of thing that's prevailing up? Well, here's the thing. So the issue is, Justin, it's not for the majority of people and for the majority of people, bacteria, fungi, all sorts of things are not the big issue but there is the percentage of the population that do have health issues that predispose them to having an immune system that can't fight off the fungus, that can't fight off the bacteria. And so these are the populations that the vaccine candidates are going to be most successful with and for. Yes. And as long as the drug companies keep a narrow range of clientele as their goal and don't try to make it a widespread thing that everybody does. Because we are entering a back and forth battle between bacteria and fungi that have been going on for billions of years. Yeah, I think that's a good point is we've been using antifungals for decades. So the vaccine is way more effective and way less likely to create more dangerous strains than antifungals are. If antifungals are beat, yeah. Like the finger thing happening. As long as they test this very thoroughly before any widespread vaccination if anything takes place. And we hope the shot. I'm not sure we understand the fungal microbiome yet. And that's kind of my argument. Like we're starting to get the bacterial micro, like interactions, we're starting to learn that in the last five, 10 years. I'll agree with that. We've been figuring that out. We don't really know the fungal economy as well. We just know the bad ones that when it's bad, it's bad. Yes, we can start with the brain-eating fungus. The fungi that we like to eat. Or, you know, the, yeah. I don't like brain-eating funguses. Nope, no, thank you. Yeah, okay. No brain-eating funguses today. This is This Week in Science. We are here with you to talk about science and to have a whole bunch of fun. And we hope that you enjoy the show. We hope that you enjoy it every single week. And if you would like to help support our show, that's how we support ourselves. Listener support is the way that we do it. You can head over to twist.org. We'll click on our Patreon link. And we need to Patreon. Then you choose your level of support, $10 and more per month. And we will thank you by name at the end of the show. And I can't wait to read your name at the end of the show. Get your name on there for next month. But now we're gonna come back more This Week in Science. It is time for that wonderful part of the show that we love to call Blair's Bigfoot Corner. Blair's in the library. Wish. That's all. By Ted Lilliped, no pet at all. If you wanna hear about this animal, she's your girl. Except for giant pandas and squirrels. They're not on the road. What you got, Blair? What you know about the dodo? It's dead, dead. It's dead, dead. You're right. Yes. We killed it. In about 1681. When the last dodo was killed. It was a combination of the fact that they were very tasty and too friendly. But also that pigs and other introduced animals brought by Portuguese sailors also thought dodo eggs were delicious. They were just too delicious for their own good. The big bummer. Well, colossals at it again. In March 2022, they sequenced the dodo genome. And now they have announced they will be de-extincting and rewilding the dodo. Awesome. Why? So here's the deal. Okay, thank you. The asterisk to the asterisk on this, as it always is, is also this will help us further genetic resource tools focus on birds and avian conservation. So it's just, it's the big, sexy fundraiser that got them $150 million that they're excited to bring them the dodo but really we're gonna use it to help endangered animals instead. So their intentions is to bring the dodo back and this will be through genetic rescue techniques and the de-extinction toolkit. And I was like, that is fake. And so I did some more research and I found out first of all, that where is her name? The one of the women, one of the researchers, a woman from Colossal, I'm trying to, gosh, I totally lost her name. But her last name is Shapiro. I know that. But she said, quote, it would be disingenuous to say that we're recreating something that's a hundred percent identical to something that existed. Beth Shapiro. Beth, thank you, Beth. She's a lead paleogeneticist at Colossal. Right, right, right, right. So yeah, that's the thing. What we're trying to do is create proxies for these species that are adapted to environments that are there today. So this was true with the mammoths too. They're gonna be hybridizing it with current extant species. It won't be a mammoth. This will not be a dodo. Well. I hope they're not mixing the mammoth and the dodo. No, they're not. They won't be doing that. The, there's gonna be. Here's the question, though. Hold on, let me tell you how they're doing it. Okay. So they have many significant technological hurdles, ethical caveats and unanswered questions. But this is their intention. I want you to hear how bonkers this is. Okay, so unlike with mammal projects where they would genetically engineer sperm egg, implant it in a kind of analogous mammal to mature, which as we know, when mammals grow inside a mother, the DNA gets all mixed up and jumbled and that also makes it less of a mammoth, right? In this case, since it's coming out of an egg, they're gonna work with primordial germ cells. They are gonna extract these germ cells from a bird egg like a chicken egg. About a day after it's laid, they'll culture it at a dish. In the dish, they're gonna make DNA edits to the germ cells to try to match the DNA sequence that they sequenced of the dodo until it becomes as dodo-like as they can. And then they will re-implant the germ cells back into the egg and then they can incubate the egg. Brilliant. There's no way they're breaking anything doing that. Oh boy, that's a lot of eggs. Then the thing that hatches, the thing that hatches will be a chicken still. But its reproductive cells will contain some dodo-like cells. Yes. After fertilization, those cells might grow into dodo's. So go ahead, Justin. So chicken and the egg, as we've discussed too many times, already, egg comes first. You didn't have chickens before you had eggs that could make chickens. So in the dodo, and you're actually even in the mammoth, your end result isn't that first hybrid. It isn't that first elephant mammoth combo. What you're really starting with is the closest thing we could do by pure genetic alteration. And you're right, you're gonna get a mix. Some of this, some of that, not the complete thing. But you still have more DNA that didn't take that you can add back in. You have, if there's a lot of elephant DNA in your new mammoth hybrid, next time around, you can do this again through your hybrid and get closer. So you're not going to get it, that dodo, that very approximate dodo, the first run, but in subsequent generations, you can get much closer than you ever would in a first run, right? So this is, if your goal is dodo or if your goal is mammoth, starting with these iffy hybrids gives you a platform upon which to build to get move that needle further in that direction, as evolution did in the first place when it moved things towards mammoth or more move things towards chicken or dodo. And as they move things forward, they're gonna be developing new technologies as investors are investing money in this biotechnology company. And what they're going to be doing is patenting a whole bunch of techniques and using that to be able to license technology out and make further money into the future and possibly spin off other companies that will then hold the technology knowledge of how to de-extinct, how it is tagged to reproduction that is tagged to this genetic health. And suddenly you have a group of companies or even a monopoly that are basically holding your genes in the future generations, genes hostage. Here we go. Well, hostage, look, we are in a situation where what was it, 20, 25% of the world's bird population is not threatened by global warming. No, no, so that piece of that is really great. We're at a precipice of mass extinction, the seventh in the global history. They are gonna make a killing off of this technology with all the things that are going extinct. All the people who want to save this butterfly, save that bird, do that. How much money is gonna go going into maintaining populations through these technologies? And that is great. But in terms of rewilding the dodo, I just wanna say- What else are we spending money on, Kiki? Where is he wasting it? Where? You know where dodo's were found the last time we noticed them anywhere was off of a teeny tiny island off of the coast of Madagascar. Do you know what it's like in Madagascar right now? Do you know what it's like in the islands around Madagascar right now? It's not good, the rainforests are disappearing. Everything's disappearing. Everything's going away. I don't know where these dodo's are going. This really feels like they would be making these to put them in zoos. They would be making them for the novelty to be able to come see the traveling dodo exhibit that goes around. And what is the point of that? It's- That certainly bothers me. Yeah, they're not going to be a part of solving our egg crisis, our egg shortage. They were like one egg a year, like very slowly reproducing organisms. They're apparently delicious, I don't know. Well, actually the story might be the eggs were delicious maybe that the actual dodo's may not have actually tasted that good, but they were, the explorers who first saw them had zero fear of humans. So unlike other animals that would run away, they could wrangle them all up and put them on the ship and compared to basically the dried biscuit that sailors are forced to eat on a daily basis, anything was better than that. There's a poem by Henry Carlisle called dodo. Years they mistook me for you chanting your name in the streets pointing grubby fingers. Today in the Natural History Museum, I saw why dodo. You look the way I feel with your sad, absent minded eyes and your beak like a stone age axe. Even your feathers, dingy and fuzzy, what woman would want them for a hat? With a name like didus ineptus, where could you go? Wings too small to fly with and feet so large and slow. You are not very palatable, men slaughtered you for sport. Hogs ate the one egg you laid each year. Sometimes I think I know how it feels to be scattered over the world, a foot in the British Museum, a head in Copenhagen to be a lesson after the fact and entity in name only and that taken in vain. Wow. So yeah, we gotta bring him back. See, now where are you with me? We gotta bring the dodo back. For what? For all of us who feel like dodo's in our daily life. That's a bad reason. That's a bad reason. All right, do you wanna move on? Let's move a jet lag, we got some jet lag here, yeah. Great, because I'm tired of my jet lag. No. You know who are jet lag though? Female fruit flies, specifically after mating. This is a study from Cornell University. They found that seminal fluid protein transferred from male to female fruit flies during mating changes the expression of genes related to the fly's circadian clock akin to jet lag. There have been many studies looking at sex peptide from fruit flies. I'm pretty sure I've reported on quite a few of them and how they impact fruit fly behavior, but there's a lot of question as to the exact mechanism. After mating, sex peptide has been shown to elicit increased egg laying, aggression, activity and feeding. So let's see, okay, increased egg laying, great, good for reproduction, aggression, great. Keep the other boys away. Activity, yeah, you gotta prep for the babies. Feeding, gotta feed those babies. While reducing sleep and reducing interest in mating in previously unmated females, once they've mated, they're not interested in any other men. So these very same behaviors, they were changed directly related to sex peptide, but basically they were also able to see those same behaviors linked to times of the day. And what they found was that one way that the sex peptide might be actually impacting all these different factors is by confusing the circadian rhythm of these female flies and shifting their internal clock. So they wanted to explore this, see the kind of mechanism going on. So they examined transcriptomes, which the RNA sequencing that reveals gene expression. So basically the mechanism by which genes are turned on or off at many different time points. And so they wanted to see the order in which things happened. In the first four hours after mating, they found the expression of genes involved in female fly metabolism and the circadian clock. They don't know what triggered these because it wasn't sex peptides, but they think it might've been pheromones or some little fluid proteins. These were short-term effects. Four hours after mating, the researchers discovered that sex peptides specifically cause changes to their circadian rhythm regulation and genes that regulate the circadian clock pathways. So the sex peptides specifically messed with the circadian clock four hours later. So basically, it was almost like a stop gap with some other mechanism. They think either pheromones or seminal fluid proteins, they're not sure. But then after that, the sex peptide kicked in, messed with their genes that impact their circadian clock. So in the future, they wanna see how long the effect lasts and whether this happens in other organisms. Since so many organisms have circadian clocks and the genes that control circadian clocks are highly conserved across the animal kingdom. So is this happening in other species? I don't, it's pretty, it's a neat idea. It's a, I don't know, it's a really interesting question. And the, you know, people talk about getting sleepy, I wanna take a nap after the, after coitus. You know, there's, what other behavioral changes occur and is it the, you know, what about the short-term activation and then that long-term activation that's a little bit, you know, not permanent, but a little bit more dramatic of an effect. Yeah. What does that mean though for the fruit, the female fruit flies? So after it happens that like, they're like, okay, now I need to go eat and go to bed. Or, and it keeps them away from other males, right? So they're gonna be like, okay, I'm done. I don't need, yeah, I'm not active anymore. It's time for them. So that's the other question. Does this happen specifically in species with a lot of competition for females? Does it happen all the time? Does it impact circadian rhythms in different ways depending on what things are like in that individual animal because flies, they're dealing with a very short lifespan. So every hour matters. And so you could see how it would be so urgent that they be like, no, this is your focus now. Leave all other men alone and take care of these eggs. And that's it. Right, I mean, that's a, you know, what about birds maybe who have a single partner? What about say cats who have multiple partners? What about, you know, how does it affect, how do these different signaling molecules affect things differently? Or do they? Yeah, how about herds where you have one male and a bunch of females? It wouldn't be very effective to have them be aggressive around each other after mating, right? So yeah, so that's the question. Is sex peptide impacting animals across the animal kingdom? Is it in similar ways? Is it in different ways? I'm gonna guess different depending because it's, you know, it's all going to be molecular pathways affecting neural pathways. And, you know, the timing is gonna be important and also what those specific pathways are. And hey, if we can cure insomnia while we're at it. There we go. There you go. The best cure ever. Justin, do you wanna talk about sea water? Yeah, so as we continue to wait for fusion energy that is 20 to 40 years away and always will be has been for 70 years. One solution might be hydrogen. Maybe. Hydrogen economy for energy production for all its promise of creating energy out of the most abundant element in the universe and leaving only water and its wake is really not here. And is also in that category of 40 years away and always will be, it seems. So it's the most, in the most basic form of this chemistry, hydrogen is heated or used with electricity to create oxygen. Heated with oxygen, sorry, hydrogen is heated with oxygen forms a chemical reaction that forms water and out of that chemical reaction a large amount of energy is released. While there are hydrogen cars on the road today it is by far the least practical application of this technology. There won't be hydrogen cars in the future. The volume of hydrogen requires even when compressed to 700 atmospheres contains about 30% of the equivalent energy per volume of gasoline takes up, it's horrible, you'd have to have giant tanks of this that also need to be pressurized so they're gonna be very heavy and they don't work in cold weather. And then on top of it, the usual issue is that you need pure water, you need fresh water as opposed to anything that has anything else in it because you've got these electrodes that can't take the crudding up that happens and there's a, yeah. So that's, and that's for the production of the hydrogen in the first place. Itself, yeah. Right, so this is in the use of it as an energy just everybody who's thinking about hydrogen cars, forget it. We can use electric cars, that's going to be the future and we can have hydrogen power plants that are supplying that electricity to the grid. So that's the first thing we need to focus on. We need to change the scale how we're thinking about hydrogen and how it's gonna interact. So then there's the bigger problem that you're pointing out which is how do you get hydrogen in the first place? Currently, nearly all, something like 95% of our hydrogen is produced using fossil fuels. Electricity from coal, natural gas along with methane in the process breaks apart the water to extract hydrogen in a process called electrolysis which also relies on platinum and uranium as catalysts which are they themselves very expensive and rare, hard to get. So hydrogen isn't really so much a energy source at this point, even when we are effectively using it, it's more of a transfer medium like an expensively awkwardly high pressure battery. Right. So in it, and like you're saying it typically requires pure water which means deionized fresh water which is also a finite and contested resource or desalinated heavily treated salt water that adds tremendous expense on top of everything else. So forget I mentioned it. Cause desalination, that's not easy yet. Not easy, not cheap. So forget I mentioned to any of this hydrogen economy. Okay, so we're done, the story's done, right? Oh, and a completely unrelated story though. A team of researchers published a paper in the Journal of Nature Energy detailing a novel method for performing electrolysis on un-treated seawater with a cheap catalyst. Basically leapfrogging a bunch of giant hurdles for hydrogen. According to the researchers, it worked just as well as the existing high pollutant expensive methods. We still wanna do some more extensive testing to see how well their catalyst aspect holds up over time. One of the reasons for using all of this pure water and these really expensive catalysts is there's chemical reactions that take place, especially within just seawater, which current systems are why current systems are using pure and desalinated water. But so far they have not seen any of the normally precipitating formations on electrodes that are suffered by these other systems that then bog everything down and stop the process. If this technology bears out, it's a tremendous game changer. If we could scale this, the hydrogen economy could actually, which has been rather dismissive of in the past, you'd actually become a thing. There's just a few more advances in material science, problems with hydrogen under that much pressure. Maybe we could use less pressure, but hydrogen under pressure also tends to destroy the tanks that it's contained in at a very rapid rate. Those little hydrogen molecules under pressure get in everywhere and destroy things. So there's still some things material science needs to do to make this a replacement for fossil fuels, but it looks, it's not like this research has done a tremendous amount of the heavy lifting required for finding a source of hydrogen that can be cheap and not reliant on fossil fuels to produce. And with that piece out of the way, the rest of the components in the line become much simpler. Granted, we need to get rid of the idea of hydrogen cars. We got to just, I know, I love the idea, but electric cars, you're just, hydrogen is just another, right now, another storage method for fossil fuels. It's like the electric car that's charged up off of the coal-fired power plant. It's that same problem with, hey, our end result looks great as long as we only look at this piece. Yeah, we could rewrite that one old song. Another word for using fossil fuels. Yeah, yeah, very nice, very well done. Very well done, yeah. And my last story tonight is... What you got, what you got? Oh, this is gonna be a fun Neanderthals skull story. A cave in Spain has been found to contain a large amount of skulls gathered there by Neanderthals. So these aren't skulls of Neanderthals, but animal skulls gathered together in one place by Neanderthals. Oh, that's where I left them. Yeah, there's a... Interesting that it says that there's a lack of teeth or jaw bones and there's evidence of cut marks leading researchers to believe that the animals were initially rendered elsewhere, where probably wherever they were killed because these are big animals. And the skulls were brought inside with a secondary round of processing that then took place, possibly related to removing the brains and soft tissues in and around the skull. This behavior, they say, seems to have no subsistence-related purpose, but to be more symbolic in its intent. And whenever archaeologists say something has a symbolic intent, it's helpful to remember that that's just a way of saying they haven't really figured out why. They were making a museum. Yeah, I actually very much agree with you on this. So Neanderthals sites are usually associated with very strict subsistence activities, hunting, processing for the consumption of animal resources, preparation of tools for the use of hunting or rendering animals and the use of fire for warmth or cooking. So there's not a whole lot of frivolous Neanderthal activity that we've noted. Occasionally we've seen odd things collected, artifacts such as novel stones that aren't from an area. There's that one example at least of a seashell that came from quite a distance away that was found in another cave. This cave discovered in 2009 during an archeological survey of the area, which has some other Neanderthal and interesting old cave areas. It's a zigzag cave, it's 80 meters long, two to four meters wide, and has collapsed. It lost its roof through erosion some time ago. And in there, there are some Neanderthal remains. There's the remains of a young child. And there's evidence typical of Neanderthal, flint napping, tool making, and some pretty extensive fire use, including what seems to be a large fire, sort of pit or fire area in the cave. The skulls that were collected were found adjacent to that fire area. And these are mostly ancient cows, extinct cows, bison and urochs that were European cattle back in... Oryx? Oryx, is it uryx? O-R-Y-X? A-U-R-O-C-H-S, uryx. Oryx? Oryx. It's a Google how to pronounce it. Anyway, there were also deer skulls, but interestingly, all of the deer skulls still had antlers. So no female deers and no male deers that had lost their antlers previous to... Both males and females, they're antlers. Is that... Well, lose their antlers. Okay, so these were all with the big male antlers and still attached, so they hadn't lost them. The largest skulls in the collection were from two rhinoceroses. Those would be big. Those would be big. Spain had rhinoceroses 50, 60,000 years ago, which if you didn't know, now you do. So all of these skulls, what I found very interesting is they either had horns, antlers, or of course the rhinoceros with its nasal horn. Single tusk, well not a tusk, a horn. Yeah, tusk, yeah. It's a horn, it's a horn. It is a horn, yeah, very specific term. The Danish word for rhinoceros is, I think nasal horn, they just call them nose horns. The nose horn animals. And this collection being approximate to the fire pit area of the cave would have given them a great ambiance in that flickering fire light. Researchers do some speculating whether these could be, I think their best theory is that these are trophies, maybe a hunting shrine, or may even have, they say, further symbolic ritualistic, magically imbued meaning for the Neanderthals. I disagree. My best guess, keeping with the utilitarian Neanderthal behavior, is I think they might just be there for training purposes. This is the fact that they've only brought skulls that have defenses built into them. Neanderthals are thought to be close up hunters, even though we have some examples of spears that could have been thrown. But they have to, by and large, get pretty darn close to their prey. Right. The fact that they're by the fire makes me think they did this practicing at night, because if you're a Neanderthal, daylight's for hunting. Daylight is for hunting and gathering. Daylight means you gotta go out there and start tracking animals and going out, chasing, or going on to go catch something. Gotta eat, gotta catch something on the daylight. At night, you can't go out hunting. What are you gonna do? Well, we got the fire to keep warm. Hey, it's also, we can see, hey, why don't we practice? Why don't we do a little bit of hunting practice, and you grab the antlers and I'll make sure I can stay out of the way of them, and somebody else can charge with the big rhinoceros horn. We learn how to sidestep that or avoid that. I don't know. It seems like that is a much more realistic use for Neanderthals who, to their credit, maintained a technology of tool making over tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years. Actually, probably inherited it from Homo erectus for a technology of stone tools that's really millions of years old. Even the cave paintings that we've seen that have been attributed to Neanderthals look to me like a game plan for hunting. They look like, if you were to strategize, they'd be like, okay, we got one, and you're gonna wave the big stick and here's the animals running away from you, and they said, we're gonna be over here hunting them. They all look like hunting strategy. So what better thing to do is to bring home some practice elements of your most dangerous prey. That's my thing. It's a fair hypothesis. And I think you'd have to think about like, well, I mean, there's is the hypothesis that it could be this mysticism, spiritual purpose. There's the, could be more practical. We're hunting trophies. It could be hunting trophies. Look, we got this big horn. Right. I mean, into the sense of it being more practical and less of a spiritual thing. I mean, what else are they finding? Are they finding other little trinkets? Or they find, you know, it all depends on the context of what is being found together with all this. So maybe there'll be more of a story as they uncover more things as they, you know, take a look more into this cave and this area where they found the bones. But yeah, it's the big interesting aspect is that it's not a graveyard, that this is, it's something purposeful. We just don't know what. Yeah. Too bad there's not cave paintings next to all of them. Identifying what they are and why they're there. Yeah. We're like in a little box down into the right of each one. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, in that sense though, it would be like a museum collection as well. And again, keeping it the fact that it's by the only light source in the cave makes me think that they spent some time appreciating them aside from just a collection of trophies. I think they, I think they played with them. Right. It might have been their toys for the kids. Could have been, you don't know. But as Harjar in the YouTube chat room is saying you clean them by the fire and toss the bones. But if there were more bones found, then it would be more of a garbage pile. Right. And so that's the thing that's also the thing they're pointing out is that there is not evidence of the rest of these large animals being rendered there. And the fact that the skulls are typically left behind when you've rendered an animal and taken the meat. And these are the big animals. It's a heavy thing to lug around a rhinoceros head. It's not a pain to clean also. They didn't save the squirrels and the bunnies. And yeah, the fire may have helped do some of that cleaning too. You know, you cook a skull a little bit to get off all the little bits. Yeah, but the brains are so hard to get out without a dremel. Yeah. And so, and there is some evidence of some puncture wounds that they think that they use to remove the brain matter. Yeah. So. Because that's gonna be very nutritious and also stinky if you don't get it out. Get it out. I think in the bottom line here is that Neanderthals had to be good communicators and teachers to maintain the technologies that they used for. We don't have a language on this planet right now today. That's 20,000 years old. You know, 30,000, 40,000, 100,000 years old. We don't have anything like this. You needed a way to communicate and teach probably verbally, but also with anything lying around. You know, if you were... Sticks and skulls and bones and... If you imagine that limited language and having to see somebody make a stone tool and observe it in order to know how to do it yourself, then absolutely these skulls with antlers that you're waving around is how you would have to teach the next generation with visual aids. You couldn't just explain it in enough detail using language if the language is primitive, which it may not have been. It may have been very sophisticated. They may have had a very nice Shakespearean accent too. They may have. Talking about brains, I have a brainy story related to, yeah, not how we teach the brains, but brain development. Researchers just published in Science Magazine this last week their work on the mitochondria in neurons. You talking about the powerhouse of the cell? The powerhouse of the cell? Yes, I am. I'm telling you about the powerhouse. This powerhouse is very important because it supplies the energy for the metabolism for the cell and so it allows the growth of the cell to take place at a certain rate. So these researchers who have published this story in Science, they had been working on an idea of neuronal growth based on some intrinsic property of the species it came from and the neuron itself. And so mouse neurons, they grow a lot faster than human neurons and we've had this whole conversation about how human brain development, it takes a lot longer and so that's part of how we have the cognitive processes that we have and why we have the intelligence that we have that we don't necessarily see in other species because we're not looking carefully enough. But the researchers had looked at an idea that maybe the mitochondria are involved in the development somehow and so these researchers had to figure out how first to basically mark a neuron when it was born so that they could keep track of it and be like, okay, you were born and now you're this old and what they, so basically you have a clock to be able to figure out how old a cell is in the brain and so they incorporated a promoter region, a little genetic element called neuro D1 into some different cells and they looked at respiration rate of the cells and the oxygen intake of mouse neurons and human neurons and they found that when they changed the oxygenation rate of the cell that they were able to promote the metabolism of the mouse neurons so that the oxygen consumption rate was like 10 times that of the human neurons. So they determined that the mouse neurons are using more oxygen and they're respiring more quickly than human neurons and so then they were like, aha, let's look at the mitochondria and so then they slowed down the mouse mitochondria. They sped up human mitochondria and they were able to get neurons that developed at the exact same rate. They were able to implant mouse neurons with human cells and get the mouse neurons to grow at the same rate as the human cells and so this could potentially be one of those sticking points about, oh, if you stuck a mouse neuron into a human brain or if you stuck human cells into a mouse brain, why don't they match up entirely perfectly? Well, this could be one of the things that allows it to happen. So the mitochondria comes down to the mitochondria. Now, this doesn't necessarily give us the underpinning of our intelligence, our cognitive abilities, all that kind of stuff, but understanding how the mitochondria are involved in the development of neurons could also help us understand neurodegenerative disorders. It could help us understand some developmental disorders where neurons don't grow at the appropriate rate and we haven't been able to really figure out why and so the researchers are just focused now on looking more specifically at these neuronal mitochondria and figuring out how they're involved in the health and development of the neurons and the brain. Yeah, because if we can find, if we end up finding that there's a problem with mitochondria and neurodegenerative diseases, then we have finally a target. Yes, and there have been other stories that have suggested that mitochondria malfunction are a part of aging disorders of the brain and that there are other specific, like mitochondria, there have been a lot of studies over the last few years that have really started to pinpoint mitochondria as a very important aspect of the neurons, which are the subunits of the brain. Oh, and for anybody out there who is interested in in vitro fertilization, a study came out this last week in the journal Molecular Human Production about the dangers of alcohol use. Wait, what? There's dangers of alcohol use? What are you talking about? So this is the, in the way that we talk about pregnancy and conception, it's all on the woman. Yes. Ladies, do not drink. You must change your diet. You must be- No hot tubs. No hot tubs, you must be the pinnacle of health and you just, you be perfect and then you will be able to conceive- Exercise, but not too much. But not, you don't want to bounce up and down too much, but the problem is, is that we've been focusing on the female side of the IVF question for a very long time and- I am shocked. Yes, yes, yes, yeah. I thought you would respond that way, Blair. This is why I was like, I got to bring this story. So researchers have recently started looking into, okay, what if we started looking at the male side of the equation? So we say, hey, ladies, eat well and don't drink. But what about, what happens to the chances of successful IVF if the man is drinking? So they did a study- I don't like where this is going. They did a study not in humans, in mice. So it's a mouse model, not a human model. So that's a big caveat here. But they pretty much had the mice in an abstinence from drinking group, a group that drank the legal limit of alcohol. So they were drinking like a 6% body weight or whatever, alcohol, I don't know. And then they had a group that was over-drinking and were getting drunk like 10% alcohol, blood levels. And they let the mice drink for like six weeks. So there's a part of this that I'm like, like do you just let them drink for six weeks? Like how were you controlling when they had the alcohol or not had the water and had water anyway? There's so many variables there. That's crazy. Not to mention how long six weeks is for a lab mouse. Yeah, but that- Six weeks for a lab mouse. But so it was chronic, it was a chronic voluntary, they volunteered to, they said it in voluntary, voluntary over-drinking. Right, so what they did is they gave the mice, they gave these mice dead-end jobs. With, you know, I had them living paycheck to paycheck and the rest took care of itself. Just exactly. And these mice who drank any amount over the six weeks were less likely to have success in the in vitro fertilization. So they took the sperm from the mice, they stored them, they transferred them to embryos and then looked to see what the rate of conception actually ended up being once female mice were implanted. They found that preconception paternal alcohol exposure disrupted embryonic gene expression and two critical regulators of the trophectoderm stem cell growth and placental patterning. This is FGF4 and EGFR. And there was lasting impact on the histological organization of late-term placenta. So there's placental histoarchitecture that was affected. Also altered regulation of pathways that controlled mitochondrial function, oxidative phosphorylation and some other imprinted genes. So which genes are getting expressed and how? So there's a take home message here that perhaps all the mess, this is mice, like all these caveats still stand. This is a lot of alcohol for the mice. This is mice, this is not people. But if you are in a situation where you're spending money on attempting to conceive and you wanna give yourself the best opportunity as possible. So perhaps there should be messaging for the men to live that wonderful lifestyle similarly to the women in those relationships. For six weeks. For six weeks. Right, well, but for humans, that's like months. But anyway, I think the thing that's really interesting here is when you talk about fertility tests in humans, in men, it is always, always, always, always, always sperm count related. Yeah. Yeah. Does whatever the man is doing impact sperm count. There's a little bit of conversation about sperm quality, but that's all this other stuff you're talking about. The idea that's impacted. That's quality, right? That's gonna be, that's not necessarily count. So if all these mechanistic factors of gene and placental production are being affected, that is quality. Right, and I feel like a lot of the sperm quality conversations in human fertility is like motility, shape, like all these other things that are not directly related to what could happen late term. Like the fact that you're talking about late term placenta stuff, like that's so far down the line, past just like did the sperm make it to the egg okay? Which is really what it's always been about before. Did the package make it to the destination? After that, it's up to mom, right? But it's not, this is proof that it's not. Which it's 50% of the DNA. It is, 50% of the DNA and there's a lot of, not just the DNA, but also RNA, very small molecule RNA that is also packaged with the sperm that has impact on a lot of genetic factors and expression. And so, and those are the small molecule RNA are going to be more likely to be epigenetic and based on recent environmental exposures. So stress or poisons Well, not even say poisons, but it doesn't be dawn of humanity when all of our great achievements being started taking place. Didn't that sort of correlate with our alcohol use? Yeah, we just need to chill out. It's, it's, you know, everything's about. It's totally, everything in moderation. Right, I've actually been in it so much. The other thing I'm thinking about now is. Chemical induced. If you loop it back to my fruit fly story. Yes. You have the genetic package of what is in the sperm and the quality of the sperm, but we also do not yet know about the impact of seminal fluid quality or, or what would it be? Like a, like potential problems with seminal fluid as a result of behavior, right? So it's the more we learn about kind of the holistic mechanism of the part that the male has in that. I'm very curious to see if in the future, if we're going to find out that like the hormone releases directly after fertilization due to the proteins and seminal fluid can have an impact on fetal quality. It's possible, right? It's possible. All this stuff. Yeah. I mean, there's no reason. So, you know, but we tell them, go nuts, do whatever you want. Do whatever you want. Just the woman has to worry about it. So that's, is that true though? Because like I, I mean, I feel like we've, at some point in the covered, or talked about this, that there's a six months, you were saying I was joking at six weeks before, but six months before conceiving if you're trying, that the men should also be taking their vitamins, avoiding devices. Like, I've always heard that. So it depends. It depends who your doctor is. Yeah. It depends who your doctor is because there's, there's not, you know, the jury's out. There's still research coming in. The, what I hear most from, you know, all of my friends of child bearing age that are going through this is that the, the man might be told also not to go in hot tubs for like, maybe a week before you try to conceive, but sperm is created so often that like, a lot of it is understood that the long-term stuff that you, something you did last week, that's not gonna impact your sperm, you have new sperm now, but it's, that, that can't be true. Your body is a system, right? And other than that, like, until you have trouble conceiving, most of the time men are told, do whatever you want. You're not even thinking about it. They're what you need to know. Yeah, I have four kids and they all came from just hugging somebody for too long. Like, all of my kids, all of my kids were like, I'm learning something interesting about John from just now. Yeah, I'm not accident, because if you figure out how a baby's is going to figure out, like, oh, okay, well, now that's how that happened. But there wasn't a whole lot, I'll just say there wasn't a whole lot of pre-planning involved in any of my wonderful, beautiful humans. Right, and so, and it all depends, but this specifically was looking at the situation of in vitro fertilization, and if you're, you know, if we're going to be talking about, you know, all of the things that a woman has to go through to make that possible, there are also conversations that should probably be had that relate to, like Blair said, the quality of the sperm, not just the quantity and different things that men can do as well. The partners can do in conjunction. And it is interesting because also, just the last note is when you have a pregnant spouse, as a man, you often become somewhat of a support animal in the whole process. And so, if you're really planning to get pregnant, and this is a thing that you're having to take the extra steps to try to achieve, you've already walked into the territory of support animal. So even if in the back of your mind, this doesn't make a difference or this doesn't matter, that doesn't matter anymore because you're now a support animal and just do everything that you're being asked. That's how that works. Be a partner, be supportive. Yeah, it's a big step. Like it is ending this show. Sometimes it's a very big step from one to the next. We made it, we did it, right? All the stories, we got through it. Thank you, everyone, for listening. I hope that you all enjoyed the show. I would love to give some shout outs to people who help with the show and make it possible. Fada, thank you so much for your assistance in show notes and show descriptions and social media. It's so great to have you working on that. Gord and Arne Law, others, thank you for keeping our chat rooms nice places to be. Identity 4, thank you for recording the show. And Rachel, thank you for your editing assistance. And of course, I would love to say thank you to our Patreon sponsors. 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It's all in your head. Science, this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, it's the end of the world. So I'm setting up shop, got my banner unfurled. It says the scientist is in, I'm gonna sell my advice. Show them how to stop the robot with a simple device. I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand, and all is coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientist, week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, science, science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That what I say may not represent your views. We got a plan. We made a plan for the end of the show. It's the after show everybody. Oh, home, what? There he is. Oh, look at him go. Oh, there goes Bigfoot. There he goes. That's a black bear. That's a ape costume. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So good. I love it. I love cryptids. They're so fun. I think I brought a Loch Ness story very early on in my twist tenure. Oh, you might have. Yeah. That's great. I'm gonna log, am I logged in? Here, we don't open that. I'll share this picture. There's it. Wait, there's, where's Justin? Did he close it? I removed him because he was gone. For those interested, we are on the Mastodon twist science at universodon.com is where we are. The thing is Mastodon is not all API'd together with like our social media publishing platform that we use yet. So I don't know, I have to see if I can add the Mastodon thing to our social media stuff. So we could actually start posting in Mastodon more often because right now it's basically just when I remember it which isn't all the time. You gotta send me a link with old people instructions on how to sign up and create a handle for the old. My problem is, I'm not looking to add new social media. It's the problem. Only remove, yes. Yes. So if I lose Twitter, I will lose Twitter. I just, I really don't know if I have it in me to get a new one. So I just want the one that I can use to communicate directly to the people who are watching this show. And so if there's something that comes up that's interesting that's not during the show or prepped for the show, you can throw it out there or if people can get feedback to me which I guess there's already enough ways to do that. You got the email address for you in a sec. That one works. But I don't care what anybody else is talking about anymore. You're right. Like I don't need to hear from just the general buzz of the hive mind. I've listened in a few times and I've gone, eh. Hive mind. People keep telling me to get TikTok, but I'm just gonna watch my TikToks on Instagram that are four weeks old. And you know what? That's fine. That's all I can handle. I'm so sorry. I really don't care about that. I don't have the time to do any more content production for a TikTok. Oh my dude. It's the short term. I want to find longer term content or longer. Longer form. Longer form. Thank you. Yeah, content. Like, oh gosh, like. Like us? Yeah, like this. Like this show is pretty good. Like that we do it. Yeah. I wanna, yeah, I wanna tune into this show. That's what I'm looking for. Where can I find that? Yeah, but then I gotta listen to my voice. Oh gosh. Yeah, that is. Yeah. This show has gotten me a lot more comfortable with that. Yes. I will say like when I started doing the show, I was like, ugh, my own voice. And now it's just like, yeah, that's it. That's what I sound like. Can't change it. That's the sound my vocal cords make. Oh my gosh. Except when they make that sound too. Oh my gosh. I'm destroying my vocal cords. I miss the old days when I was young. I would spend a lot of time communicating with the dead. That was, talking to, well, it's Ty, I say it's a conversation with the departed, if you will. At, I would say at. No, no, it's not at. No, no. The dead stopped listening a long time ago, but they will talk your ear off. They will communicate. Are you talking about the Grateful Dead? No. They will tell you all about the most intimate details of their lives that they lived, their wish to do in Zash phrases. They will tell you stories that they have sometimes imagined up. You mean books? Reading books, reading books. That's the thing I remember. You remember reading those book things? I remember books with how you would keep, you would have these books that would allow you to communicate with the dead, the departed. These tomes of ancient necromantic communication. Yeah, they're books. I miss books. That's what I was going to get at. That's right. The good old days. I love reading books, but I have to stay up late and read them after my child has gone to sleep. And so then I stay up late and then I'm tired the next day because I'm like, this is my time. And then I'm like, why aren't I sleeping in my time? Because I want to read this book. Blair, it's kind of funny what you said about parents wishing they could fall asleep before their kids were put to bed. Because there have been a few times when I've been asked, what time did he fall asleep? I assume right after I did. Or maybe at the same time, was very adjacent when he fell asleep. Yeah. Because it's so hard. Yeah, it's so hard to put down a snuggly tired Bambinini and then maintain consciousness at the same time. They've been sending you sleepiness signals the whole time. Yeah. That's the cure for an insomnia. Who should we have? Or not ready to sleep. What dead people should we have have a conversation on chat GPT? So actually it'd be really interesting. I would love to really get Socrates. Because I am convinced. Wait, just get Socrates? What do you want to talk to Socrates about? What did you want to talk about? And it doesn't matter anything because Socrates, from all of the reading that I've done is the Greek equivalent of Larry David. Everything Socrates writes is like one long curb episode. He's absolutely one of the funniest humans, I think that has ever existed and with a very dry kind of a sense of humor too. So I would love to see in AI really bring that out based on his writings. I think that would be fascinating. So the chat GPT says it's difficult to say exactly what Socrates would think about genetic manipulation as he lived over 2000 years ago and didn't have access to the scientific advancements that could make genetic manipulation possible. However, based on his philosophical views, it could be argued that he may have concerns about the ethical implications of intervening in the natural processes of life. Socrates believed in the importance of wisdom and self-improvement and may have been skeptical of the idea of manipulating the genetic makeup of living beings for the purposes of achieving specific outcomes or traits. He may also have expressed concern about the potential consequences of such manipulation and the responsibilities that come with wielding such power. So the thing is, if you've really read Socrates thoroughly, you would also then find that the next thing he said after voicing those concerns was how disappointed he is in the current state of people self-improving and that there needs to be something better than just human will. He would take it all away. He would take away all of those and make the argument for it immediately after having argued against it. This is sort of the beautiful thing about it is that Socrates attacked everything kind of from both angles and with a great sense of humor when he does like callbacks. Oh. He does callbacks that. What's the guy who does all the self-help stuff? Or just any of them, any big famous self-help person? Just need a name. Give me a self-help person. Oh, the guy who had people walk on coals, right? What? I have no idea. Tony Robbins. Ah, Tony Robbins, there we go. Do Google it, I can't remember. I know, I can't remember. Robbins. About success. Oh, chat GPT's thinking about it. I don't know. Oh gosh. It has some issues today. You broke it. I think I just broke. You broke it. Socrates is known for his Socratic method of questioning, which was designed to encourage people to think deeply about their beliefs and to examine their own understanding of the world. If he were speaking to Tony Robbins about success, he might engage in a dialogue with him in this way, asking questions to help Tony reflect on what he believes success to be and whether or not his definition aligns with the good or the highest form of excellence in Socrates' view. I don't think chat GPT knows who Tony Robbins is. I don't think chat GPT does know who Tony Robbins is. That's great. Yeah, but then he's gonna take it away. So one of my favorite Socrates quotes or stories is somebody's asking him to write a treatise on something, to write something down about his philosophy. And he says, no, I never write anything down because once you write something down, you're stuck with it. You can't change your mind on it because you've written it down. And then the guy asks him, this is like, well, can't you make an exception? He says, unfortunately, I just wrote a whole thing about how I never write things down. So I can't. Which is just, it's silly. It's in a very logical way. Oh, he might have appreciated some aspects of Marie Kondo's philosophy as he believed that material possessions were not necessary for happiness and well-being. He made therefore- Fairly wore pants. I've appreciated the idea of decluttering and simplifying one's life. For shoes even. Apparently he was barefoot everywhere he went. This aligns Marie Kondo's ideas of sparking joy aligned with Socrates' belief in living a simple and meaningful life. Back in the day when people only wore sandals, you didn't even do that. People wore sandals to work all the time in the Greek days. He went barefoot. This is a slacker amongst the Togo wearing people. Chat GPT's fun. It's silly. We could ask it all the questions. It doesn't really know anything. It knows things. It makes things up all the time too. Chat GPT hallucinates. It plagiarizes. It has, I don't know, kind of like a college student. It's still learning. And how are professors going to be able to check papers now to see if they're AI generated? There have been some tools that have started to be produced, one by a college student actually who thought that would be a turncoat. Yes. Yeah, there are tools that have been created because of this signature that an AI created paper might leave. And so there are certain aspects that can be discovered. Interesting. Yes. Yeah, so there's like, it's so interesting though because it is going to affect education moving forward. It's going to affect the way people work. And there are gonna be people who just use it like the cliff notes, right? And just answer directly, straight from the cliff notes or people who use it as a place to kind of springboard their thinking. Yes. That's kind of what I was thinking because that's what everyone was worried about with the internet, right? It's like, it's gonna ruin academia because people will just be able to search for things online. It's like, what if we're not in control of all the learning? That would be disastrous for the university system. When I was in high school, was it high school? College, maybe it was college too. We couldn't bring calculators into, it was a high school. We couldn't bring calculators into the classroom. Yeah. Same. Because calculators are gonna ruin our ability to do math. No, I remember when my entire research library was two CD-ROM disks of the Encyclopedia Britannica and whatever was on there I remember when my research library was an entire shelf of Encyclopedia Britannica. No, I had that too. They had the shelf when I was younger. And then there was the older than me. Oh, shoot. It was funny. Those are the ones that you could only buy you could only buy from the door to door salesperson. Oh yeah. Sure. Yeah, I have to go to the library and I have to check several encyclopedias because this one thing I'm looking for is random or obscure and not in every encyclopedia. It's like, yeah, it's, I think this is exactly that Kiki. I think it'll turn into a springboard. People can use it to ask what Socrates would have thought about something and then go, hmm, do I agree with that? Let me find some resources to cite to back that up because that is not what chat GPT is doing. Chat GPT does not have receipts. So like. No receipts. Yeah. That's what you need for scientific papers. This is exactly why. Wait a second. Or sorry, academic papers. That's exactly why you need. Can you not go into chat, whatever it is called and ask it for references? Where it got its information. Yeah. Can you get a reference? Cause if you can get a reference out of it then now I'm intrigued because now you can use it as a research tool. Yes. Oh no. There was actually some a report that was released by some academics who wanted to use it as a research tool. But then so they asked it for papers, research papers on a certain topic. And then the list of papers they discovered was entirely made up. That chat GPT took researchers names. It made up titles of papers. They were, I love it. Made up. No real. That's brilliant. I love it. I love it. Yeah. It's happening so fast too. Cause I think that was like a week or two ago. You know, it's just like people are just like trying things out and it's speeding up, which is fascinating. Which is, this is also, yeah. Cause what I just saw from this fake Socrates was an assimilation of what people think Socrates thought about things and not how he communicated in the already selective text of what other people wrote down about what he said. Because apparently his mode of operandas would be talking both sides of every issue to exhaustion. They're not really picking a side or having a belief. Cause he was a philosopher. Cause he was just thought, he was thinking about all the ways you could look at stuff. He was entertaining, which is the only reason they wrote down anything he said. Otherwise all his insights would have been, you know, just ignored. This is gonna be mad, man. Shubrew, I don't remember. I want to say it's encyclopedia Britannica that I had. It could have been world book, but now I'm wondering if it's a Berenstain, Berenstain bearer's situation where I'm, it's just because it's, you do Britannica. The real question is, did you have the whole set? Or were you missing one or two random letters? Because I feel like that was most people's houses, right? I think my house had like, maybe 18 of the alphabets. And then they stopped payments. Check bounced and it couldn't get to the rest of the encyclopedia. I don't know how that happens. Like you, you weren't home that day when the door-to-door salesman came by with tea. I don't know. Nope, you don't get this one or it's you did not update your monthly payment of $99.95. One of my parents there was a, was a librarian in the reference section at UC Davis. So I had not only access to the library, but of course access to a tremendous library at home. I never wanted for ability to look something up. You could look things up very easily. Oh, but now there's an interwebs. We have a little baby who walks now. He took his first couple of steps, really on his own yesterday and then walked around the house the rest of the day. So little work. Didn't look back. He's like, I'm up. I'm going, I'm walking. And he knows, he knows a joke. Oh, he does? Or you know the, can you do this? Oh no. Can you make a joke, Felix? He's like, it's early. Oh no. What did I do? He says, I went too early. Too early for me to make jokes. Oh no. Oh no. He's like, dad, I need my coffee. Oh no. Who are those people? There's little people on the screen. Oh yeah, you almost did. You did? Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. You almost did it. Let her do it. Let her do it. Oh no. See, we can get people to do that if you... This was all a trick. I feel conned, Justin. You carneed me. Good morning. Good morning. The morning world is happening over there where you are. I like that jacket. It looks like something I wore in the 80s. Nice and color blocked. Yeah. Oh, it's still the 80s in Europe. Oh yeah, that's right. It is. They never left. They never left. They got to the 80s when it... Oh, I like it here. It's good. The hairstyles, the fashion sense. Perfect. We'll stay. Yeah. Never look back. Work. I think 80s clothes were on the whole pretty comfortable, except for like all the leotards. I don't know about 80s fashion. I'm waiting for it to change again. Lots of stretchy clothes, which is good. I do like the socks. Baggy clothes, which I appreciate. Lots of sneakers. People wearing sneakers. Yeah, but without socks. No, the women wore sneakers with really tall socks that were like bunched up above them. They have the big leg warmer look. What's happening? No silly baby tricks today. Not this morning. Not yet. He's warming up. Oh, he does an amazing mountain lion and personation too. We've been going through and doing animal sounds, practicing goes a lot. And he's growling. Specifically mountain lion, huh? Well, he thinks it's a Jaguar. I'm doing a mountain lion and pointing out a Jaguar. Cause I don't know what a Jaguar sounds like. Let me hear this mountain lion from you. It's very loud. But mind everybody's ears. No. Not bad. Not bad, right? Motorcycle, right? Is that what you're trying to do? And then you got the tiger. The thing that we think is a lion sound is actually a tiger. Yeah. Yeah, that's like the thing you think is a eagle is a red tailed hawk. Yeah. Zebra? Oh my goodness. I had no idea what a zebra sounded like. Can you do a zebra? Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, You can't hear my weird noises. Do you know, can you do some animal sounds? I think he just did the mountain lion. Okay, here we go. Oh, did you hear him? Oh, yeah. It's good. It's good. Very good, little mountain lion. Yeah. Can you do a fox barking and or screaming? Well, what does the fox say is the problem? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. What does the fox say? That song will never die. I love that song. So good. So good. It's so good. I love it. Oh, and then the peacock? The peacock is Peacock-a-doodle-doo. No, that's incorrect. I don't know what a peacock sounds like. Like that, like what I just did. Where is it? Ah. Oh, gosh, stop it, knock it off. It's a peacock. Okay. Elephant, that's a tough one. Oh, yeah. Very good. Ah. No, you got, you got, no, coward. My mom, my mom like blew out a blood vessel in her eye being an elephant once. Elephant is tough. I just, I just stay away from elephants. You pretend you're going to play trumpet. Like pierce your, like, and then blow up your cheeks. And then. There it is. And there's also like, there's like, animals speak differently in Europe, or at least in Denmark. Oh, yeah. Yes, yes. Like what does it, frogs are saying like, or what is it, ducks? Rap, rap, rap, rap, rap, rap, or something like that. I mean, that's closer. Something like that. But horses quack. It's like, it's all frogs make rasp sounds. It's all nonsense. They got it all wrong. They've never heard really. It's all the way. The chicken or the rooster is different in like every country. That's my favorite one. Rooster, the sound a rooster makes in every country is just so cool. I need to find the list. Oh, that's interesting. My favorite is in Israel, roosters say. Cuckoo, reekoo, cuckoo, reekoo. That's very, it's exactly like a rooster. No, I don't know. They have different species for roosters then because that's got to be just different. Cadet is French. Sorry, Cadet. Is he making noises now? He's a good growl. That was a good growl. I loved that. Oh, did you see somebody clapping? In Chinese roosters say wow, wow, wow. In German, they say key, carry key. Key, carry key. That's similar to the Israel. Yeah. In Spanish, they say key, carry key. Key, carry key. Key, carry key. I don't know about that. But I mean, English cockadoodle do, I mean, that is not what my rooster says in the morning. Oh, that's exactly what I hear roosters say. Cockadoodle do. Yeah. I mean, like, I was like, I'm like, I always thought that was like, one of the best. Really? Yeah. Oh my God. I found a huge list. In Dutch, it's koekele koe. Koekele koe. Koekele koe. Yeah. Oh, that's right. Icelandic. I think this could be Scandinavian metal band. Gagalago in Icelandic. That's just, there's just too many different. I don't understand. What is the horse say again? Rensk. Rensk. Rensk. Rensk. That makes sense. Rensk. Rensk. Let's see. They don't even have horses. In Italian roosters say cheery chi. And in British, it's, it's what's his name from Mary Poppins. Chim chimini, chim chimini. Yeah. Chim chimini. Oh, you know what the most amazing animal sound that I discovered? Aside from the zebra, which I didn't know. Porcupine. Oh. Can, can you play a porcupine? I'd rather not. It sounds like someone being attacked. No. No. What kind of porcupine, Justin? What kind of attack? I like it when porcupines are eating things and they're like. Yeah. That's me. Yeah. Okay. I thought you meant like their vocalization. Because then they just sound like they're screaming. Really? That I didn't hear. I heard something that sounded like a cartoon. Yeah. Yeah. There is a, so lots of zoos they do. So I know San Francisco Zoo, but Oregon. The Portland, Oregon Zoo, they have videos of their cute porcupines like eating, like going up and eating something and it sounds like they want to talk to you. Yeah. They're so adorable. Yeah. But when, when they want to be loud, it sounds terrible. Well, stop torturing them, Blair. That's how you avoid that sound. That's just their default sound. So we've got screaming foxes. We've got screaming porcupines. We've got, why do so many animals sound like they're screaming in the forest? Porcupines, they sound like. Like that's what porcupines sound like. I hate it. It's really upsetting. I bet porcupines and foxes are why forests had like dark forest. Oh yeah. Reputations, you know, it's like, oh, don't go in there. The city means. Those and barn owls together. Yeah. Just make haunted forest for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Barn owls are believed to be the origin of banshee myth. Really? Yeah. But they're so cute. Yeah. Look up barn owl sounds, Justin. Oh, I've lived around barn owls all my life there. Amazing. Amazing. Well, speaking of owls. Yes. It's time for some of us to be awake and others of us to be asleep. I'm a night owl. Morning, Justin. Yeah. Good morning, Justin. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thanks for joining us. We love you hanging out for our after show. Yes, bedtime already. So we'll be back again next week. As we said Wednesday, P.M. Pacific time. Connect with us online somewhere and we'll see you next week. Have a great week. Stay curious. Stay healthy. That's a hard part right now. And yeah, stay curious. Okay. See you later. Ever since you said that, Justin, it's made it. I can't anymore. Good night. Good morning. Good night.