 Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. This is the live broadcast of the TWIST podcast. We are here to talk about science because we're this week in science. I hope you are ready for that, this, the science. Let's see, what are announcements, announcements, announcements. Yeah, the podcast is edited. This is not, you get us as we are, live and unfiltered except for hopefully the family felt friendly filters in our brains. Oh, yes. Yeah. Welcome everyone to this week in science. Are we ready to get going? Oh, yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, as we get started, I just, yeah, I'm not gonna remove myself. I'm gonna click this button right here. As we get into it, everyone hit that subscribe button, hit a like button. Do you like us? Hit that like button. Lots of hearts and loves and all the things. Let all the streaming companies know that you like us so that they will boost their sharing of us. All right, so we are beginning. Oh, wait, no, we're not beginning cause I'm on the wrong page again. When am I not on the wrong page? Okay, here, nope, wrong page there too. As long as we're pre-embling. Nope, nope, nope, nope, not pre-embling. We're done? Yeah, we're done pre-embling, we're starting. You're starting. Okay. Okay, no more pre-embling. We are starting in three, two, this is twist. This week in science, episode number 890, recorded on Wednesday, August 31st, 2022. How to make an embryo. I wonder how we do that. Hey, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show, we are going to fill your heads with heat, snot and dolphins. But first. Disclamer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Some scientists went walking out one dark and windy day upon a glacier tested in a scientific way. When all the once a mighty flow of melted ice, they seem rolling down the jagged caps into the Arctic sea. A bolt of fear went through them as the data would imply. A warmer future coming and it caused a mournful cry. Their faces got their eyes a blur, their study soaked in sweat. They're trying hard to spread the word, but the world ain't heard them yet. Yippee-i-oh, yippee-i-ay, green house gases in the sky. The planet is on fire, the effects are going to last. Storms are getting fiercer and the seas are rising fast. People change your ways today or forever you will try to chase that carbon capture. Across a green house sky, yippee-i-oh, yippee-i-ay. Green house gases in the sky, this weakened science on the way. Got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to learn every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. And Kiki is muted. Kiki is muted. I'm, you know... It's good that I was muted because I think my microphone has decided to slowly begin sinking. Oh, I see that. It wants you to practice your glutes. Getting a little bit of love from the chat room. Thank you. That's very kind. My yippee-i-yo and yeas were way off. It's this cool thing I do like days before the show is that I go, oh, you know, I'll sing a disclaimer, which in rehearsal went fabulous. Rehearsal? Yeah, you know, I tried it once. Oh, okay, okay, okay. I thought I missed something. Yesterday. And then the show now is at four o'clock in the morning. I just had my morning coffee and so I'm making a lot of excuses for myself. My yippee-i-yo, yippee-i-ay's were way off and I apologized. They should have been better. Hey, you don't see me singing acapella on the internet live, so. Let me go for it. Yeah, I guess that is that whole risk for award filter that I was missing sometimes. Anyway, Kiki is still muted. I mean, why not? Come on, microphone. Let me go. You just not want to have a show tonight. Oh no, your pop filter. Don't say the letter P at all tonight. I know, RE20s have internal pop filters so it'll be a little poppy-poppy. But it's all good. It's all good. We're good. Look, it's like I can just pop this. Pop, pop, pop, pop it right back in here. Everyone. Am I making terms of noise? Yeah, Karen, that was a rewriting of Ghost Riders in the Sky. Oddly, this came about because this turns out to be my seven month old's favorite song to go to sleep to. Like nothing else, like he struggles to bed time. Doesn't like to take his naps. But if I sing that song to him, of course, I'm gonna say he could just be pretending to be asleep so that I'll stop. It's kind of clever that way. But yeah, I started having to make it because I couldn't remember the real lyrics. The real lyrics are actually gonna not stuck anywhere in my brain. So I was making up lyrics to that song. I was like, oh, hey, well, this might even be a good intro to the show. And then I thought, I'll do it. And that's how we can't get there. Kiki is muted again. What is happening? You're muted. I was fixing my mic. Oh. Fixing, fixing, fixing. And now it's in front of my face and I hope you can hear me. And this is- You sound beautiful. Wonderful. So we can start the show. You know, you have everything set up and then you should move one little thing in a new setup. And the setup goes, Hey, thanks, Rachel. Oh, hey, we have editing. I'll do the Yippee-yay-yay-yay's over again in the after show. Oh, you should edit them in so that they sound right. Sure you will. Sure you will. I'm really disappointed by Yippee-yay-yay's. They were better before. I just feel really, really bad. Justin, let's re-up the good science, please. Because I was muted and my microphone was sinking and everything went wha- All right, ready? Three, two. You can't talk while I'm doing the three, two, one. Because that's the two, three, two, one. Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again with new video setups, new audio setups. We'll see how everything goes, but welcome. Thank you for joining us for this science because that's what we're gonna get into today. I have stories about embryos and rearranging evolution, a little bit of snot and brains because I love pattern finding brains. Brains and pains, we'll talk about. Justin, what did you bring? I have got zombie ice, 7,600 year old tree, oxygen on Mars and what type of break is best to take? Any. Any break at all. Take a break, everybody. Blair. Yes? What's in the animal corner other than a little break from the rest of the science world? I have beetle bacteria and dolphin alliances. Ooh, alliances, like dolphin friends. We'll figure that out already. Well, it is time for us to dive into all of our science. And as we do, and my microphone keeps sinking. Yeah, I see that. I want to get everyone to subscribe to This Week in Science. So if you have never subscribed to This Week in Science before, know that you can find us all places that podcasts are found. We release every single week our live shows, our Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Pacific time on YouTube, Facebook and Twitch. You can look for This Week in Science, also Twist Science. That's what you can look for on Instagram, Twitch and Twitter. Our website is twist.org. If all of this is too much, but if you're watching right now or if you're subscribed and you're listening right now, don't forget to give us a like or a little recommendation to your friends. And I know that we're a podcast, mostly. People listen to the show. So the audio quality is important. But for the video feed, it's really going to freak me out that the pop filter is covering your mouth. Because I can't see your mouth moving. It's just, I can hear your voice in your eyes. You just look very surprised. I get rid of it. You don't need a pop filter. It's got one on the interior of the microphone already. Just lose it. Just bend it out the way. Just get it out of there. All right. Well, you're muted. More muted. You're still muted. I'm messing with my microphone that really... But that pop filter hiding your... It's like if I did the show like this. Like it's something, like you're seeing the video in here and where you can't see the mouth move. There's just something... Here, let's all do it. Freaky about it. We're all gonna hide behind our pop filter. There we go. How do I sound? Oh, you're sounding really good there, Blair. Great. I think if you're the one talking, I can't tell now because I can't see who's mouth is moving. Well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well. I do believe that we are gonna continue talking about science, even though our faces, mouths are covered. We like hiding our faces here today. All right. Let's get to the science. We have some great stories to jump into. So first off, the docket. How about making embryos from scratch? You know, first you add a little... Yeah, flour, a couple of eggs. Definitely eggs. Yeah, well, actually, in this particular case, these researchers from University of Cambridge and a bunch of other universities working together, they didn't use eggs. They didn't use sperm. They used stem cells. And the stem cells were the very interesting thing about this particular effort at creating synthetic embryos. As like at the beginning of the month, I had a story of a group out of Israel who had successfully, synthetically created mouse embryos that lasted up to eight and a half days, which is the same amount of time as this particular technique, but they're using different techniques. And the Israeli group, they had been using fluoropotent stem cells that could be reprogrammed and given a chemical bath that allowed them to start turning into the little embryonic cells to create a blastocyst. This team just published in Nature this week on their effort in which they have been finding just the right balance of different kinds of stem cells. So they're using trophoblast cells. They're using extra embryonic endoderm cells and inducible extra embryonic endoderm cells. A lot of technical words, but really what they're doing is they're finding the right balance between the different types of cells that are gonna go into creating the embryo itself and then the other cells that go into creating the placenta and other supportive cells that actually add to the nurturing ability of the environment. So instead of creating a fake womb necessarily, they are creating this ball of cells that is self-supporting and self-sustaining and has all the things that it's going to need. They were able to show after eight and a half days of this in utero development of a mouse embryo model, they had head folds with a defined forebrain and midbrain regions, and they had a beating heart-like structure. They had a trunk comprising a neural tube and somites, which like little, what could go on to become body parts, tailbud containing neuromusodermal progenitors. Lots of interesting technical science words here that all come into basically creating a little natural, well, synthetic embryo that matched the development of a normal embryo. So let me ask this. Genetically, is this a clone of whatever they got the stem cells from? Is this like a mammal budding basically? Yeah, right. So because it's not sexual reproduction, it's not an egg in a sperm and it's stem cells, this is creating, yeah, it would be a clone. This is not sexual, this isn't sexual reproduction. Yeah, it's not recombination in that manner. Yeah, so that is interesting. So we're talking about it as, and they're not even talking about it in terms of cloning or reproduction so much as creating a model for studying embryonic development. So we know how all these different parts work and how they develop, how the different types of cells work together so that eventually we can create systems where we can grow organs for adults. So that's the key idea that this particular research team is working from. The other aspect that they were quoted on several times is getting to the point of being able to, being able to understand what it is that allows an embryo to latch onto the uterine lining so that there is actual, the fertilization and all of the processes that take place that go into developing the placenta and all that stuff. There are a lot of problems that occur even before the embryo attaches to the uterine wall and there are lots of miscarriages that happen even before that attachment takes place in which women don't even know they've been pregnant but that if the genetic genetically, if things go wrong, then it's going to keep a pregnancy from coming to term at all. So babies, but not babies. These embryoids as they're calling them. Embryoids. Organ farm. Embryoids for organs. Yeah. Yeah. Man, so who knows? Yeah, I love this idea, especially the idea that we could get it to the point of just creating a replacement organ in a dish, if you will. Yeah. Because as much as I would like to have new organs through science, I'm honestly a little bit freaked out if they had to make a whole Justin that they were just farming from. Just the liver. That's all we need. That's all we need. Yeah, just made a liver. I wouldn't feel like, hey, that's me over there. I would feel like, hey, that's a liver I could use later. But if it's a whole me that they had to clone and keep living in the dish. Oh gosh, then I start to have questions about whether or not I'm the right one. You know, test them, maybe. Like what if they test them and it turns out he's a smarter, better-seeing version of me? What if he hit his UPIOs and UPIAs right on the first go around, you know? Then they might look at me and go, hey, we better keep him around because we might need his organs later for- No, all your organs have been around. They don't want those. They won't be, yeah, you're right. Sometimes things stick around for a while when you don't really want it to. I mean, we like ice, right, Justin? But what is this zombie ice? Zombie ice sounds bad. Well, you know, you think that zombie ice would be a bad thing because of the fact that they're calling it zombie. So, and it is, no, that's right. That's probably why they used that term. The current models used by the IPCC intergovernmental panel on climate change predict sea level rise from Greenland's melting ice of six to 13 centimeters or two to five inches if you were so inclined. This is a prediction of sea level rise from the melting by the end of the century. So, that means that most people alive today with or without an organ farm won't be around to see it happen, most likely. But a child born today, pretty good shot at being around for the prediction to see if those prediction models are accurate. However, as often seems to be the refrain around here, the IPCC models have tended towards gross underestimation of the severity of global warming space published in the journal Nature Climate Change. Glaciologists at the geological survey of Denmark and Greenland have been studying ice loss in Greenland and have released a study that pretty much doubles the rate of ice loss estimated by the IPCC by the end of the century as the low end of their prediction. And actually, it doubles the high end of the IPCC's prediction as their low end. And it's all because of zombie ice. Yeah, what's this? Ice, okay, so ice caps, you know, you get more ice in the winter, it builds up and then comes the summer, it kind of shrinks a little bit and then it fluctuates, it goes back and forth. And most ice can grow. It can have other, it can have snow or other water melt onto it and then freeze again. Zombie ice is ice that is no longer in a position where it is no longer able to accumulate new ice and get bigger. These areas of the glacier are in the process of becoming seawater. And their direction throughout future time is pretty much set that way. And it's about 3% of the Greenlandic ice cover now which is not going to recover by the end of the century because it is zombie ice. So it's called that because it's basically already dead. Like its fate is sealed. Yes, exactly. Okay. So even if we follow the Paris Climate Guidelines even if we actually stopped all greenhouse gas emissions today, they found that Greenland's ice loss under current temperatures, current temperatures will raise global sea level by at least 27.4 centimeters, 10.8 inches if you are so inclined. That is the low end. Actually, that's not actually the low end. That's the baseline commitment. That's the already made the down payment. That's what we've committed to in sea level rise from Greenland's ice sheet, even if nothing else changes. The same study said it could reach as much as 78 centimeters or 30 inches of sea level rise from the zombie ice. But it doesn't mean that the sea will rise by this much. That's just the contribution of one major source, not including anything going on elsewhere in the Arctic or in Antarctic regions or anything like that. That's just the Greenlandic ice sheet. Yes, all our oceans are connected. Yeah, and it's, of course, also the lead author on this is a gentleman, Jason Box, who was originally from, let me say, University of Boulder, something like that. But I went to a talk he gave here in Denmark where he was doing a really nice job of explaining why sea level rise also isn't going to be universal everywhere. As the Greenlandic ice cap melts off, a tremendous amount of pressure is going to be relieved from that Northern Arctic region, which will actually allow land levels to kind of rise a little bit because of all the weight and pressure that's no longer pushing down on them. Also, there was a wonderful graph that kind of showed relative predicted sea changes. The North Arctic actually didn't get that much. The coast of California, actually for some reason, was also not as bad as other areas. But most of the world around the equator was the most dramatically affected, which is very unfair because around the equator tends to be regions that have contributed the least. To carbon greenhouse gas emissions, we'll be seeing the majority of the sea level rise. Well, listen to a lot of that. Zombie ice, IPCC reports again underestimated. And again, this is all, the minimum commitment is nothing changes and we had stopped everything today. So... Nothing changes. It's still gonna be a big deal. And the equator is very likely because of the squishing because we're rotating and we have a moon that's going around also. So there's a bulge and the squishing. We're an oblate, spheroid. Very oblate because of that inertia that we have. You're so oblate. You're so oblate. Who's oblate? My child's gonna be oblate. Oh, never mind that. Baa! Ha ha ha ha, but I'm... Shhh! Grouchy Gamer says, I'm wondering what the end result will be? A lot of major water sources seem to be drying up but sea level rise is also predicted. It's all got to balance out at some point. So one of the things that has been a long time prediction of a lot of the global warming scenarios is with all that evaporation of the poles, you are going to also have a situation where there is more atmospheric moisture. So there, while you will have droughts and strange weather patterns that don't match the biomes that are currently there, you are likely also to have more severe storms or areas that get appreciably larger amounts of water. The problem with saying like, oh, well, we're gonna get more fresh water from the skies, we're not prepared for 10, 20% increase in one area over one season. This is like, look at the current floodings that they're all over the news. Well, in a lot of the planet is covered in saltwater and so that rain will fall into saltwater and not help us at all. Oh yes, very much. That's part of it. The parts that do fall over the land should be increased by a percentage as well. So that part- Right, but the drought conditions make it so that they slide right off and don't go into the water table and then they are lost also. Or just you have a river that isn't ready for a, what is it, what's the term atmospheric? An atmospheric river to be added to it? Yeah. What's the part of the states that's being flooded right now? Is it Mississippi? Where they're saying it's indefinitely they're not going to have drinking water. You know, this is, you know, water, water everywhere not a drop to drink because when you have flooding you have overturning of banks, that water that's going through cities that's where you have wastewater treatment plants that have overflowed or water treatment plants for water municipal districts that are inoperable. Having clean water, drinking water is more complicated than just having more water. Yeah, and it'll all be affected even more as sea levels rise because as sea levels rise they push inland and so then you have those rivers in Lake, all the rivers go higher up inland and then the flooding is worse and the ground water table can be inundated by salt water. There's all sorts of issues. Yes, the salt water intrusion up the deltas. Yep, absolutely. Yet to come. Not great. Baking of not great Blair, you have... That is quite the... An important story, but yeah, not great. Let us know. So sometimes science can help us understand common public health and kind of public crises in our populace. And so this is a study out of Florida Atlantic University looking specifically at teen suicide rates and that linked to something called digital self harm. So I didn't even... Yes, I did not know about this which is part of why I wanted to talk about this. We're a show on the internet but I suppose I am no longer in the know with what teens are up to online and so this is really helpful information actually. So digital self harm is the online posting, sending or sharing of hurtful content about yourself anonymously. Yes, and so if you look at traditional forms of self harm cutting, burning, hitting yourself that there's a lot of research that links that to suicidal ideation and attempts. And so they wanted to see through this research if youth who post cruel, embarrassing or threatening content about themselves while their peers assume a third party is the culprit if they do so for similar dysphoric reasons that could learn to similar suicidal ideation or attempts. And so they did in fact find that finding serve as a warning sign that youth who engage in digital self harm may also be engaging in or at risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors. So looking at their study, they showed that approximately 9% of adolescents reported that they had anonymously posted something online about themselves that was mean while about 5% said that they had anonymously cyber bullied themselves with regard to suicidality about 8% of adolescents reported they had thought seriously about attempting suicide in the past year while 5.3% said they had attempted suicide during that time period. The finding within that is that those engaged in digital self harm or between five and seven times more likely to have considered suicide and between nine and 15 times more likely to have attempted to end their life. There was no significant difference across gender or race but as has been the case in previous studies looking at the sort of thing, non heterosexual students were significantly more likely than heterosexual students to have seriously thought about attempting suicide, 24.5% versus 7% ish. So it's a huge difference and to have attempted suicide 10% versus 4.9%. So Samir Hinduja PhD co-author and professor at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice within the College of Social Work and Criminal Justice he's also the co-director of the Cyber Bullying Research Center and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. Lots of credentials from this individual says quote, we have identified a strong association between digital self harm and suicidality. As such, it's imperative for health professionals to screen for digital self harm to address underlying mental health problems among youth that may occur prior to or alongside suicidality. Moreover, parents and caregivers must convey to children that they are available to dialogue, support and assist with the root issues that they may eventually manifest as digital self harm. Educators and other stakeholders must better prioritize the emotional and psychological needs of youth with opportunities for open dialogue, skill building and the provision of interactive and easily accessible online and offline support resources to ensure that those at risk know that other people care about them. So this is just a reminder for those of us that, you know I thought I had a good idea what was going on online but I didn't even know about this thing. So, you know, especially for those people out there listening who work with teens or have teens at home or are close with teens, keep an eye out for this kind of stuff on their social media presences. If they're being cyber bullied by another person that's also not good for their mental health. But especially if there's an inkling that it might be digital self harm making sure that those individuals know that there are resources out there for them and that there are people out there who care about them is really important. I'll also throw out there. I did a youth mental health first aid course a few years ago and it was amazing. I think a lot of them are free. The ones that aren't are pretty reasonably priced but there's a lot of resources out there to be able to serve as a lifeline to any teen in need especially those contemplating suicide. So just wanna throw that out there. There's also lots of self help lines, texts, calls, all that good stuff. There's resources but this is something extra to look at that we know about thanks to this research. I, yeah, I mean, how do you look out for something that's not a physical manifestation? So the other behaviors of self harm there's usually you can find physical signs at some point they're apparent but on social media how do you track that? And how without being invasive of their social media privacy and yeah, this is a new area and there are so many questions and how do you watch for this? And how do you, yeah. Yes. And then I will also say. How do we talk about it? Other teams, right? Other the people who know people online who are being cyber bullied or who are suspected of maybe doing digital self harm. It doesn't all have to come from adults coming out going, hey, I'm here for you buddy. Like peer to peer support is huge with you. So that's also something to keep in mind. If you know, give, if you know a youth in your life that has the resources to become a peer to peer mentor that is also a great thing to get them involved with. So yeah, I just, I wanted to call attention to this because I had no idea about it. Thank you. And I mean, it's, No idea. We were talking about physical manifestations of these things. It's actually an additional one that we normally don't have. I would think because unless this is a, there's a journaling self loathing habit which I'm sure that's the thing when people are keeping a diary or something like that to write down negative self thoughts and self impressions because that's what a lot of these things are is their negative feedback loops in the mind that become these other entities that are attacking the self that we have access to social media and that it could be, it is now what would have been maybe a diary or journaling or that sort of a thing where somebody's jotting down those self harm things. It actually gives us another physical manifestation in the world to try to catch these things. So you're right. Very important that we are aware that that exists and that's a thing to look out for. I found the line that I found out about in my youth mental health first aid class. It is 741741 in the United States. You can text 24 seven and someone will respond. There's also the new 988 number that you can call. And I think they receive texts as well and that is also in the United States. So there are resources. That's all. Thank you for those resources. Thank you, Blair. And moving past that serious note that we should all keep an ear and eye out for, I'm gonna talk a little bit about rearranging evolution. How do new species come about? We've talked about Darwinian evolution and through the years, once upon a time, I said, ba humbug to Lamarckian ideas. And now we've got epigenetics in there doing double time. Sorry, Lamarck, sorry. I never gave up on you, Lamarck, just for the record. I was with you all the way. No, but in this, there's this idea also of just kind of the long march of evolution, tiny changes through mutations eventually leading to, ta-da, a new species, right? There's more to it than that. There's also a process called chromosomal rearrangement and chromosomal rearrangement takes place different time scales for different organisms and mice with their faster breeding times, they have a faster chromosomal time, chromosomal rearrangement time than say humans with our much longer reproductive times. And researchers wanted to dig to the bottom of how rearranging chromosomes, moving around which genes are on which chromosomes and how many chromosomes are involved in the process of making a new organism. Also, which genes are imprinted or basically marked as the ones that are gonna go into creating the organism in the next generation. How all these things fit together and to create these evolutionary paths specifically, they wanna know, how did humans get to be humans? How did we get step by step the different species that branched off until humanity branched off and became Homo sapiens? So we have chromosomes that are 46 chromosomes, right? And we have a different type of chromosomal separation organization than say gorillas. So there are chromosomes that stay separate in gorillas that get fused in the human genome or that were fused in the human genome. So the researchers demonstrated by smushing a whole bunch of chromosomes together, basically fast-forwarding the evolution time scale for mice. They created fusions of chromosomes four and five in mice and they did some other also smush together chromosomes one and two into two different orientations. And so they gave a bunch of different arrangements of chromosomes through their genetic editing. And in doing it, they were able to create new mice that reproduced a little bit more slowly. They didn't, the fusions of chromosomes one and two didn't produce any mice offspring. But others, the four and fives, their code got passed on to mouse offspring even though they had slower breeding. And so the researchers say they experimentally demonstrated that the chromosomal rearrangement event is the driving force behind species evolution and important for reproductive isolation, providing a potential route for large-scale engineering of DNA in animals. So they've created new species of mice then? Kind of, yeah. They're basically creating mice that won't be able to breed with other mice anymore because they're chromosomally going to be different. So yeah, in a sense. That's wild. Yeah, it's a fascinating area of study. And they say their research article is in science, a sustainable mouse karyotype created by programmed chromosome fusion. So there's a, this kind of fusion and work has only really been done in yeast previously. So to have it work in haploid embryonic cells working with mice, it's a pretty interesting step. So, and in this chromosome ligation where they cut chromosomes and created these new karyotypes, there were different challenges and new challenges but they were successful. Yeah, so yeah, chromosomal, chromosome level engineering toward the creation of new species. Oh, humanity, what can we do next? Cool. Where will we take it? Oh, but I mean, will we have much time to do that? I don't know, Justin. Do we have a lot of time to dig around with our, dig around in our chromosomes and make new species? No. Okay. No, the world is ending fast. Actually, this is a, my next story is from Siberia which is recording the warmest summer of the past 7,000 years. So for several thousand years, the temperature of the region was actually cooling a little bit, generally cooling a little over the years. Then for a no known reason, there was an abrupt change over the past hundred years or so with rapidly rising temperatures. Research into the region has been published this week in nature communications. The current warming is well recorded in recent times but finding the history of the climate in the region fell to an amazing collection of wood fossils collected over the past 40 years by a Russian researcher, Stefan Shaiyatov with colleagues from the Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology a branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences began collecting these subfossil wood specimens about 40 years ago. Currently has a collection of more than 5,000 samples. You spend a lot of time measuring tree ring width by dating and overlapping tree rings between different fossil trees. They form a sort of virtual tree that has been growing for over 7,600 years with a tree ring record that can provide firsthand data on what climate activity was doing throughout all those millennia. Not only do they show that the temperatures reached unprecedented warm levels but also the rate of temperature increase is fastest over the past 150 years. Then the rate has been increasing as well. Last century was characterized by a total lack of cold extremes. So nothing in the current record is showing extreme cold temperatures in Siberia of all places contrasted by the occurrence of 27 warm years, 19 of which have fallen in just the last 40. So extreme warm years is now the norm. Research on tree ring-based reconstruction will continue and they're trying to push it back. They think they can push it back another 2,000 years or so from new fossils and that they've been collecting. But I just love the, you know, this is always one of the problems is like, how do you look back? What are this, you know, how do you know? Well, how do we know what we know about past climate? This is one of the ways that's a new one that's been added to the list of things that show climate over millennia. There's all these tree rings overlapping and all these different fossils. Very kind of what you're talking about. I'm sure that we'll get more fossils as, you know, as the ice recedes, as air gets melt a bit and fossils are uncovered as they come out of the ice. Yeah. And you've got to be quick because there's a lot of territory and a lot of ice that's melting all at once. So there's going to be a need for people who have good mud shoes to be walking around and looking for this stuff and artifacts, archeological artifacts, paleontology, and geological artifacts, all sorts of interesting stuff that is going to be discovered as the ice melts. But we're going to have to be quick if we want to recover it. There was another story I didn't bring. Also that went back and looked at some of the climate estimates for temperatures going back like 65 million years when the carbons were really high. It was hotter, right? Yeah, it turns out it was, you know, the 25, perhaps 25% hotter than the other estimates. When they looked at their data, you know, it was much warmer than the past. They think they were looking at seashells or calcium secretures in the fossil record, something of this nature. So that's 65 million years ago. And that's a tough one because that's going way, way, way, way back. But this is a nice, this one here with the overlap of the tree rings. And I love the little hot. It's just hot. It's too hot. This is, it's too darn hot. This is the rent's too darn high. The temperatures are too darn hot. It's getting too darn hot and it's our fault. And so let's do something that's not doom and gloom it. We have to start talking about more energy production. Yes, we can do it. Yeah. I was just gonna say, I really love, because this researcher who started collecting and measuring and finding overlaps, wasn't doing this as a climate change study. They were just really into tree rings. They were really into studying. Sure, sure. Yeah. We're like dendrochronology. It's so cool. Nobody even knew what they were. They're like, I think he studies dandruff. I'm not really sure what this is. And he got enough other people interested, got a little bit of funding. He's been collecting these tree rings that now shows a 7,600 year history of climate and rainfall and all sorts of other things for the region. So I think that's it. I like that. Yeah, turns out, turns out this is, this is where all those conspiracy theories about research scientists in it for the money. Yeah, I mean, this researcher in it for the... Making the dough hand over fist from these fossilized tree rings. Yeah, make great foot stools. Yes. You know, what's been around for a long time, probably definitely longer than trees and the tree rings. What's that? You know? Snot? It's not what? Snot has been around for a long time. Mucus, slimy, ewy, gooey, wonderful stuff that comes out of our heads when we have colds or during allergy season. Mucus that helps many organisms eat to adhere to things, to catch their prey, to have sex. Mucus, it's important for so many things in nature. It's been around for years, but where the heck did it come from? How did we get slime? And it's not Nickelodeon's fault. Why did we get so slimed? No, why did we get so slimed? Why did all mammals and animals end up with so many what are called mucins? Mucus- Lubricants, right? It's just like any machine you need a lubricant, right? Yeah. Learned from nature. Exactly. But researchers at the University of Buffalo have just published their study into the evolutionary history of mucus trying to figure out in mammals where it's come from. And in their investigation, they looked at 49 mammal species and identified 15 times where new mucins evolved from just adding a protein into a mucin. So you had a mucin which is a protein type and there was what they call mucinization event. So mucinization, there was a protein. It wasn't a mucin. Then they got this new part that had amino acids which a bunch of sugars on it. The amino acids with a bunch of sugars got stacked onto the protein and then another one and another one and another one and eventually they have all these amino acids with these sugar brushes. And that's what makes a mucin a mucin. And so this mucinization can basically grab a protein that wasn't a mucous protein before. The process turns it into a mucous protein and then you have slime. And so these researchers are saying that this what's called doubling regions, the repeats, the genetic repeats over time, these regions get duplicated and duplicated and these mucins then become evolved and genetically useful and the proteins are useful for their mucous factors. And anyway, it's very interesting study. Can we now make mucins? Could I take a protein and turn it into a mucin in this way? They did an assay looking for the potential for different proteins to become mucins and identified a whole bunch of proteins that could turn into mucous proteins possibly. They identified commonalities between say mouse mucins and human mucins, mucin, mucin everywhere. But not a drop to sneeze? Not, yeah, no, it's not, I can't take it, but it's not to drink. No, I don't know. Anyway, yeah. Mucinization, I'm gonna call it a mucinization event next time I sneeze. Excuse me, I'm experiencing a mucinization event. Oh, they also were calling this the mucinome. They were like the genome of mucin. So they've now also added the ohm suffix to mucin. So they have a mucinome that they're investigating. Google, yes. So much of life couldn't exist without mucous. It's a pretty important event. Mucinization, it happens over and over again. This means there's an adaptive pressure, makes it beneficial to continue the process, the repeats, the genetic repeats, the something pushes it down that pathway to the organism says needs to be snot. Perfect, it is perfect, it is. And this is This Week in Science. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode, bringing you all the science that's fit to sneeze at, to talk about, to discuss. We're so glad that you are here today. Oh, and at this point in the show, I would like to invite you to invite a friend of yours to join us for twists. Bring them to twists next week. Get them to subscribe. Tell them how much you love twists and share it today. And right now, woot-doot-do, you know what we have coming up right now on This Week in Science? Right, what's next? Blair's Animal Corner. It's Blair. Breach is great at all. Life is lili-ped, no-ped at all. If you are here about animals, she's your girl. Except for giant pandas and squirrels. We got Blair. I was having so much fun dancing, I didn't even pull it up. So first, I want to talk about beetles and their bacteria. Beetles. So beetles, just like us, beetles are just like us. They have some beneficial bacteria that are really important to their life cycle. Specifically, the females, they have bacteria that are beneficial microbial partners. And they start out on the eggs. When females lay eggs, the bacteria are squeezed out of glands next to the oviduct and deposited on the egg surface. Antibiotics produced by the bacteria protect the eggs, the larvae, and eventually the pupa of the beetles against fungi. But where this gets interesting is the fact that when a bug goes through, sorry, insect, I will be biologically correct. A bug is a very specific type of insect. When an insect goes through metamorphosis, it basically turns into a mushy soup in there. See, I'm being scientific. And so how exactly does a bacteria on the surface of a pupa end up in a gland next to the oviduct of an adult when they're in this soupy mess when they go through metamorphosis? No idea. Yes, great question. I'm so glad you asked. So yeah, so the kind of the added confusion to this is that the largest component of this symbiotic mix is a strain of bacteria, a strain of Berkholderia bacteria called LVSTB, which has lost the genes and cellular structures for motility. So it can't move and can't survive for long outside of the beetle's body. So this is quite a quandary. So it turns out that these beetles actually have a specialized pocket on their back. The bacteria hide out in there during metamorphosis. And then when they emerge as adults, the bacteria shuffle back out of these pockets backwards and then into their genital area where they can be held in those glands by the ovidux. So they have modified. They don't shuffle because they lack motility. So they're exported somehow. Indeed. So these Lageria beetles, they're in the genus Lageria. They are able to keep their protective symbionts and facilitate their relocation to adult organs through these modified pockets. Males have the pockets, but they are pretty much only vestigial on males. They contain few to no symbionts because the males don't lay eggs, so they don't need them. They really are there to be put onto the eggs as they are laid. Yeah, so they hang out in these two or three low pockets on the back of the thorax, where not only are they stored, but they are nourished. And then what they think happens is that when they wriggle out of their pupa casing, they think it gets redistributed and spread backwards towards their reproductive tract. The way that they figured this out, they scattered some polystyrene fluorescent beads across pupae. And then after emergence, the majority of these beads ended up on the tip of the abdomen. So that makes it look like they are forcibly being pushed backwards just by the emergence process. Yeah, the way that they then get inside the beetle and colonize the accessory glands, they don't know that yet. So they want to figure that out. They want to figure out which host and symbiont factors regulate the establishment. For example, does the host select for specific symbionts? Like, are there other bacteria? And they're like, get out of here. Only these bacteria in these pockets. And through which mechanisms can they colonize specific organs? Because if by force you're pushing it backwards, that's great. If you get it to the genital opening, that's great. How does it then get inside and into these glands? That is really the last question in this story. But in the meantime, very cool that these beetles have adapted an ability to harbor bacteria during the strange and topsy-turvy reality that is metamorphosis. That's amazing. We'll put you in a little pocket and we'll keep you there somehow. Not really sure, but it'll happen. Yeah, that's pretty mind blowing, really. This is a very, gosh, I'm like, I'm like immediately extrapolating to if humans had to do some sort of thing, right? And it would be up to maybe your midwife or your nurse and your giving birth or when you're born. There would be third parties involved for humans. So there's something I can do a similarity in a mammal, which is koalas. They have the beneficial bacteria in their gut that allows them to eat eucalyptus. The babies eat their mother's poop in order to seed their own microbiome. So that's all this is, right, is a seeding mechanism. But that is a very deliberate thing that is happening. And this is somehow this sessile bacteria is migrating to these pockets and then migrating down. So it's a little bit more strange than that, but it's similar. It's basically you're seeding a microbiome from one generation to the next for a protective capacity, I guess. But you need pockets. Yeah, you've got to have pockets. This is the very first back pockets like this in larva that they have recorded in insects. And I imagine once they start looking, likely there will be others. We have one beetle has pockets. Others will want them as well. Yes, because pockets are amazing. God, I love pockets. We all love pockets. Speaking of things that you only see when you look for them. My next study is from an international team of researchers led by the University of Bristol. And they found cooperative relationships in dolphins that are similar to alliance networks in humans. This is the largest one they have ever seen in animals outside of humans. So you can already guess how I'm gonna talk about this story based on how I started it. But let me give you the facts first. Colleagues from University of Zurich, University of Massachusetts and the aforementioned University of Bristol analyzed the association and courtship data to model the structure of alliances between 121 adult male Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins at Shark Bay in Western Australia. They found that male dolphins in Shark Bay form first order alliances of two to three males to cooperatively pursue courtships with individual females. Second order alliances of four to 14 unrelated males competed with other alliances over access to female dolphins. And third order alliances also occurred between cooperating second order alliances. So we already know dolphins are really social. We know they can recognize each other in multiple ways. We know that they can solve pretty complex logic questions. So all of that information together, it should not be too surprising that they have figured out how to work together. So that's what this is, is the largest one of these kind of quote unquote, alliances that we have seen outside humans. Co-lead author, Dr. Stephanie King, who's an associate professor from Bristol School of Biological Sciences says quote, "'Co-operation between allies is widespread in human societies and one of the hallmarks of our success. Our capacity to build strategic cooperative relationships at multiple social levels, such as trade or military alliances, both nationally and internationally, was once thought unique to our species." You can guess where this is going. Not only have we shown that male bottle nose dolphins form the largest known multi-level alliance networks outside humans, but that cooperative relationships between groups rather than simply alliance size allows males to spend more time with females, thereby increasing the reproductive success. So this is more than just large alliances, these are multi-level social organizations for mutual benefit. The duration over which they consorted females is dependent upon being well connected with third order allies. So social ties between alliances had long-term benefits for courtship. So this also challenges some earlier expectations. One of the reasons that alliances are seen in humans and scientists have probably thought that it was unique to us, at least in primates, is dependent on two features that distinguish humans from common ancestors with chimps, which includes the evolution of pair bonds and parental care by males. But these results show that intergroup alliances can emerge without those features. They have a social and mating system that is more chimpanzee-like. So they associated these kind of relationships that maybe are not relevant. All that to say, I also wanted to throw out that this all came from an anthropology department. And most of the time, anthropology departments research humans and primates. And that's usually where that ends, but an anthropology department who focuses on things like this, social dynamics, taking time to look at non-primate animals is really important because you come across things like this. And that's where I was kind of getting out at the beginning of the story is like, when we look for things, we have to find them. And so we understand how social interactions work in a lot of primates, but especially apes. So it's very easy to analyze that, categorize that, see what's happening. When you get somebody in the mix who understands marine mammals and specifically dolphins, then you can start to look at that. If you look at other animals that have less like quote-unquote human-like interactions, you might find similar alliances with beetles, with ant hills who could ally and help each other out, right? You could find this in other areas in the animal kingdom. So if you know how to look. Wait a second. Are you saying that anthropologists were anthropomorphizing dolphins? Oh, what an interesting thought. Yes, I do believe that is the situation. Well, I think that's their job. Yes, certainly. Yes, that's the idea. Their whole job is to draw parallels between humans and animals and social interaction and all these sorts of things. So absolutely, this shows that dolphin societies as well as potentially those of other animals not yet to be looked at could be valuable model systems for understanding human social and cognitive evolution, which is exactly what you're talking about, Justin. That's what they do. That's their bread and butter is taking lessons learned from animals and applying it to human animals. And so I just thought this was a really interesting case of an anthropology department looking at dolphins. So cool. But also challenging that expectations of what kind of advanced social interaction looks like. And so their alliance is happening with dolphins. We just didn't know how to look for them before. And everybody take a look. Look elsewhere. I bet you'll find more. Oh, Dr. Kiki, you are muted. All those dolphin youth group football matches out in the ocean. Yeah, they serve a purpose. Yeah, absolutely. And then they all team up against the regional champs. That's right. It's an interesting thing that anthropologists do, I think in the study of humans because so much of what we believe to be the reasons for or our great intelligence or the accomplishments of our great intelligence or all of these sorts of things. You know, we invented fire and started using fire and that's a current modern human thing, except actually perhaps the human ancestors millions of years before that were already done. Oh, well, that's our social structure and our inner reliance on each other that related. Well, actually, you know, dolphins and maybe even beetles are doing that too. So maybe that's it. The anthropologists are really in a way cutting away all the preconceptions we have about what makes humans special. And at the end of the day, we're just a hairless ape. Well, and I think it's a good reminder that so much of what makes us special is based on evolutionary pressure that happened to us. It's not things that like there was a spark and we were different from all the other animals. There were social pressures that pushed us into these situations. We were extremely far reached. We had the braided stream. We had all these different hominids in different areas who had to work together or the opposite. Right. So there were pressures causing these things to change that make us unique. And those same pressures can exist in other areas of the animal. Well, I'm still one of my favorite pressures for the human brain development comes about having started as we now have become to realize actually pretty much started as bipedal. But we had these big fleshy feet that were meant for being in trees a lot of the time. And the act of walking and then running created on these fleshy blood filled feet created sort of a micro pumping of blood. Just kept forcing a little extra blood to the brain every step we took. And it's like, nobody's like, all of these other things, this is why people are special intelligent. And it could just be that we had fleshy blood filled feet that we ran around on that kept forcing more blood into the brain and over millions of years of walking and running around. It's like a brain's like, all right, keep giving me blood. I'm gonna make some more capacity to move this thing through here. You solve this bottleneck problem of all this blood. And you get led to greater intelligence. Accidents. Every step you take will improve your brain, your fleshy feet. Pump your blood. Okay, this is This Week in Science. Thank you Blair for an amazing animal corner. I'm hiding back here. No, no, I'm not hiding. I am jumping out asking you, if you love twists to head over to twist.org and click on our Patreon link, please, if you enjoy our program and our conversations about science, please become a supporter of twists and help us continue to bring you twists every single week. Over on Patreon, you can choose your level of support, $10 and more per month. And we will thank you by name at the end of the show. Can't wait to include your name. Thank you all for your support. We cannot do it without you. Hey, Justin, what stories do you have? I've got a, oh, this is a meta study, one of those where they looked at other studies. This is a review of 22 previously published studies. It suggests that taking micro breaks is generally associated with reduced fatigue, increased vigor and better mental health. Oh, wait, yep. Nope, gotta go. See you Blair. And other studies show that if you work nonstop, you won't be rewarded at all. I feel much better. That was a little break. Just a second there. I feel much better having taken that micro break. So, so, okay. So first of all, what really caught my eye in this study was one of the opening lines which says concerns arising over the heavy workloads and long shifts faced by many employees currently in the workforce. And I, it nearly was like a, what non-American location was this study conducted? Caring about workers. And so it turns out it's the West University of Timiora, Romania. So it says, yeah, an increasing number of studies, not covered by American corporate media, are exploring various aspects of employee health. To improve understanding, this is Patricia Albulesco and colleagues at West University conducted this meta analysis of the 22 studies from 19 different manuscripts published within the last 30 years, all of which examined the potential benefits of taking micro breaks from assigned tasks. Tasks varied between experiments and work that included work simulations, real work related tasks, non-work related tasks, cognitive tests, types of breaks varied, as well as times including physical breaks, relaxing breaks, more engaging activities such as watching videos. So statistical analysis of the combined studies revealed an overall association between micro breaks, which I think they've got identified as breaks under 10 minutes. So that's just to the bathroom is what that sounds like, right? I take micro breaks all the time. Maybe that's your micro break, yeah. Well hydrated. Also, isn't this historically, there's the smoke break, there's the coffee break, there's the, you know, anything, there have been historically all sorts of breaks that people have worked into their day to try and have a break. And Blair, we were talking before the show when you mentioned how you kind of, it wasn't accepted that you just took a break. And so you started drinking coffee so that you could say you're taking a coffee. Safe drinking coffee. Safe drinking coffee. Yeah, so they started sipping coffee and now I'm addicted to coffee. Good for you. I got my breaks. Get a break. So they found there was an association between taking those micro breaks and higher levels of vigor, lower fatigue than the participants. And it suggests that micro breaks may contribute to a person's overall wellbeing. No, overall association was found between micro breaks and better performance on tasks. However, so your boss still might not let you take those micro breaks because you're not helping the bottom line when you do just your own mental health. Just your own mental health, right, okay. So this is, however, researchers did find that longer breaks tended to be linked with better performance, especially for creative tasks or clerical duties. So whether you're doing something creative or perhaps rather methodical, longer breaks did lead to better performance than a micro break. But it was less so for more cognitively demanding tasks. I would, that's interesting. So maybe if you're in flow, in a flow state, then that's different. Because sometimes you get into that mode of, I mean, not just creativity, but thinking about something, writing, doing hard cognitive work, but you get in this flow of putting it down and taking a break can break that flow. Right, I'm also thinking about, I was working from home today. I'm very lucky to be able to work one to two days a week from home currently. And I have noticed that what I am physically at work, I'm definitely taking these micro breaks. I'm not doing it intentionally, but like someone will stop by the office and say, hi, I'll go walk down the hall to the restroom and stop by somewhere at one else and have a hallway conversation or I'll walk around the building where I'll go do another task in another room, I'll just kind of like break up my day. But I find that when I work from home, not only do, am I very, very bad at taking breaks when I am at home, because I am at home, I'm in a comfortable space, no one's interrupting me. But I also notice that the last hour, hour and a half of my work day, my brain is for ride. And so I do think this study is also important, recognizing how much working from home is currently going on, because it is harder to kind of make that clear differentiation between kind of working home and how you have like these routines built into your day when you're at the office that might not exist at home. It's a different kind of social-emotional space. Yeah, but this does also support some of those beyond just social-emotional stuff, it supports also things like the Pomodoro timer and other techniques that people use to work for a chunk, take a small break for a chunk, work for a chunk, take a small break for a chunk and kind of enforce those breaks to keep your mental clarity and to keep yourself going, I don't know. So this interesting support. Yeah, a little bit of the differences that they're also pointing out here is, says here there's three attention networks. There's alerting, there's guidance and there's executive control that they kind of reviewed in doing this. And it seems like the short breaks are really good for alerting or attention. We're being able to refocus attention. You take a short break, you come back to your task, your attention level is better. But for the guidance and executive control, the heavily cognitive re-involved thing, the longer break is better. It was the one that actually boosted performance. So, you can tailor, not all breaks are the same. So you might need to tailor the type of break you are taking to the sort of activity you're doing. And that might be further research in the future, we'll tell us exactly what sort of break we should be doing based on the activity or whatever. And then the last story is kind of a big deal. We are making oxygen on another planet. Are we now? I knew we had done a little bit. We're doing a lot now. Yeah, the MIT led, so we've been doing this for a while actually, but they just published the study on the, the MOXIE or MIT led Mars Oxygen in situ resource utilization experiment, aka MOXIE has been successfully making oxygen on planet Mars since February of 2021. When they first got the touchdown on the Martian service. So in the study published in the journal Science Advances, they say MOXIE was able to produce oxygen on seven experimental runs in a variety of atmospheric conditions, including during the day and night and through different Martian seasons. In each run the instrument reached its target of producing six grams of oxygen per hour, which is about the rate they say here of a modest tree back on Earth. So MOXIE is doing the job of one little tree on Mars right now. MOXIE works by capturing Martian atmosphere in its HEPA filters, compresses the atmosphere via a scroll pump, heats it to 800 degrees Celsius. Oh boy, that's hot. Sends it through a solid oxide electrolysis assembly where CO2 flows over a nickel based catalyzed cathode and decomposes into oxygen, ions and carbon. So the, what is this? The researchers have been running a number of these experiments because the Martian temperatures and atmospheric density fluctuates much more intensely than it does down here on the planet Earth. So you can have, somewhere in here it says that the atmosphere's density can double at times, which is not a thing that we normally go through here on Earth. So, oh, here we go. This is Hoffman, Jeffrey Hoffman's professor of the MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The atmosphere of Mars is far more variable than Earth. The density of the air can vary by a factor of two through the air. The temperatures can vary by 100 degrees. One objective is to show we can run in all seasons. And so far, Moxie has shown that it can make oxygen at almost any time of the Martian day or year. And of course, then what's the next step? More Moxies. Sound more Moxies. Yes. So this is in situ, so this is not just releasing oxygen that it brought with it. This is actually converting the Martian atmosphere itself into that oxygen, which will make it, one last thing you gotta pack if you're gonna do a long trip to Mars is if you can set up a whole bunch of these Moxies, create, say, a small forest of them with the trees making oxygen in a place where humans will be, then you can have humans on Mars breathing oxygen that's made from the Martian atmosphere. And they think producing even enough oxygen to create a fuel to get humans back from Mars if we so desire, if they so desire to leave. Yeah, oxygen as a fuel is incredibly important. So that in itself, not just food, oxygen, not just for breathing, it's for burning. Yeah, but yeah, so all the initial testing over this past year or so have been successful. Awesome. I love Moxie. That is, that was one of the experiments I've been most excited about Moxies, Moxie generation, so fantastic. And it's just really exciting when something like this, you're like, is it gonna work? Is it, it should work. It actually works. We're actually producing oxygen on another planet. This is so cool. Pretty awesome there. I wanna not run on the heels of the oxygen here. I'm gonna take all the oxygen out of the room. But Blair, you were talking earlier about like anthropologists trying to figure out like what makes humans so special, what makes, you know, and we're, Justin, we're talking about like, oh yeah, humans. We think we've got it all. And then it turns out there's an animal out there that's doing the stuff that we thought that was just what we could do. Well, we talk all the time about humans' amazing ability to detect patterns and to look for patterns in nature. Well, we're not the only ones who look for patterns. And in fact, humans and our ability to, I don't know, persevere even when sometimes there's no reason to because we think we're gonna get a reward or we think there's some good reason underlying it or just we have reasons for the things that we do. Well, it turns out, Monkeys do that too. Monkeys do that too. Yeah, researchers at Columbia University decided that they were going to dig into kind of the question of what motivates animals to do things, right? What we know that humans will very often continue to try and solve an unsolvable task believing that there's just some kind of trick that they haven't quite learned yet. There's something that they just haven't quite gotten it and there's a pattern there and I'm gonna see it and I'm gonna find it and I'm gonna solve this puzzle. Humans do this all the time. And what is it about our motivations to do these things and do other species do it? Well, at Columbia University, they decided to ask Monkeys if they would try to continue solving unsolvable tasks. And so they set some tasks before some Monkeys and well, these Reese's Monkeys were first trained to solve puzzles that they learned through trial and error. So tried it, they made mistakes and then they figured out the answers and there was a learnable rule and a learnable order during the training but then in the testing period, there was no rhyme or reason and they even started giving rewards at weird times and they just messed up the whole system so that even like what the Monkeys were getting their water reward for it didn't make sense but the Monkeys kept going and they found that there was like one of these Monkeys in particular just kept going and going and going. And then they tried another Monkey that they had not trained as much in this original training paradigm. So they're like, well, what about a Monkey that hasn't really learned that there is a solution? Throw that Monkey in there and see what they're gonna do. That Monkey was even more gung-ho than the original Monkeys. Never tell me the odds. The Monkeys, yeah. Do you think this is related at all to the sunk cost fallacy? I was thinking about that. No, exactly, how far you go and if they've received some amount of water reward and maybe they're gonna get more water reward and the researchers themselves, they say, well, this was a water reward so this is kind of survival-based. Water is something that's very important to an animal. It wasn't like a special treat, right? Where a special treat is like, ooh, this is just exciting and different and not something they get all the time. This was something that is physiologically important to them to get water. And so they wonder whether or not there would be different results if it were a different reward or if there had been no training ahead of time, how it would have turned out. But yeah, it is an interesting question. How much effort you put in before you cut and run, right? Where you go, oh, this isn't gonna go anywhere. This definitely would fit into that. But what they ended up creating somehow is somehow for these monkeys, they created an intrinsic reward task that kept them focused on just trying to solve the puzzle instead of gaming it to reach some solution. And I think that's interesting also. Yeah. Monkeys are getting stochastic feedback, stochastic, not based on really anything that they're doing. And yet their attention is, you know what, I'm picturing. I'm picturing that part of the casino floor where they have the digital slot machines and the zombies, the zombie gamblers that sit there and just keep... It's not even this anymore. It's this now. No, it's not. Yeah. It's not as fun. Hitting buttons just like a monkey on this behavioral task, yeah. It is a non-skill, the least skill, least input from the gambler sort of gambling that exists. Yeah. Where you don't need to think or decide, you just do it again and maybe you get a result, maybe you don't. It's really nothing to do with your input, but you keep inputting. But the difference is you tell the person working the slot machine that there's a way to get a surefire jackpot. If you hit the right buttons in the right sequence, you can do it. What you do is you wait for someone to get up from a machine without hitting a jackpot and you go sit what they were sitting because that increases the point to which the thing's gonna pay out and that's how you went. So it... Which then, but the payout, that's the sunk cost fallacy, right? So how much money will be put in versus the payout first. Whereas here for these monkeys, they're just spending time and they're hitting buttons and they're getting an occasional water reward Yeah, but it's a very interesting situation. So is there, and the researchers say it's very... They were surprised to see that they put in random inputs and got very stable outputs out. And is this because even monkeys have some kind of a belief that there is a structure and that you can convince yourself that you're learning the structure. You take internal cues though as opposed to actually external cues to determining that structure. There's a pattern somewhere. There's a pattern somewhere. Monkeys, just like people. We'll keep on hitting the buttons, pulling the levers, doing all the things. It's gotta be big payout, big money, big winner, big winner. Potentially a big win for chronic pain will also potentially... Big wins again. Yeah, big win for chronic pain sufferers and also for cancer sufferers. A new study published in Science Translational Medicine was looking into a molecule, a metabolite that comes out that's produced by sensory neurons. It's called BH4. And BH4, the more inflammation you have, BH4 gets produced by the sensory neurons and then it drives chronic pain. So BH4 is there in the pathway and the concentrations of it correlate with pain intensity. And so these researchers were like, let's look at BH4 and see what we can find to target it and get rid of BH4. What can we do? And so they looked at a bunch, like a thousand different FDA medications and they found a couple of drugs that are used to treat schizophrenia actually might have analgesic effects along this BH4 pathway, including clonidine, fluphenazine, which is an antipsychotic. It blocks the BH4 pathway in injured nerves and they were able to actually demonstrate the effects on chronic pain, following nerve injury in vivo, so in a living organism. And then, so fluphenazine, blocked BH4, reduced chronic pain, that's awesome. But they also found a link between a lung cancer pathway, the EGFR crass signaling pathway. It's highly found in lung cancer, but it's involved in multiple cancers. This pathway, the EGFR and the crass genes are very frequently mutated in lung cancer. And they determined that this connection actually triggers BH4 or doesn't trigger BH4. So BH4 can actually be stimulated by this gene pathway in lung cancers and start to drive lung cancer and chronic pain in cancer patients themselves. And so this could lead to new treatments using already FDA approved drugs for lung cancer and also chronic pain. Okay, wait, wait, wait a sec, wait, wait a sec. Hang on, hang on, hang on. Which comes first, the, no, no, no, super poor because the way you said it sounded like somebody's got lung cancer and that's causing this BH4 for feedback loop thing to then increase inflammation and chronic pain. Cause if that's the case, that chronic pain in your knee or your lower back should go get yourself your lungs checked. It could be like an early indicator in that way. No, the not always, yeah, the not completely connected the BH4 is in because it's so connected to sensory neurons all over. It was just interesting that they found this link as well tightly linked and correlated to these mutated cancer genes. But they did find in mice, not in humans but they were able to show that when they decreased the amount of BH4 in mouse models with lung cancer, there were fewer tumors that grew. So it reduced tumor growth by reducing the BH4 that was being expressed. So there's not a lot of... That would almost call it the other way then. Then if you've got chronic pain, you better watch out because not risk for lung cancer which is the commodity in chronic pain. Are you gonna throw this at me? No, it's not. Not necessarily, they don't drive them entirely. But anyway, interesting connection, crosstalk between chronic pain and cancer and potentially for both of these things, the big take home from this study is that they looked at FDA approved drugs to see how they would impact that BH4 target and pathway and this could potentially lead to non-opioid chronic pain treatments to reduce chronic pain and potentially help with treating cancers. Our whole body is a Rube Goldbergian machine and we don't know which dominoes are connected. This is what I'm taking away. It's just, there's so many times that we have drugs for one thing that turn out to be good for something else. And it's because there are weird things happening in our body that we just, we don't understand and they're connected in ways that we just, we don't have a handle on yet. But we're figuring it out. That is important. It also is really good when you can get an FDA approved drug, approved for use of something else because it can be used very quickly. Especially if you're a pharmaceutical company, which is the part of this that always should be a little bit of an asterisk that always makes me a little nervous when I hear about a drug that has this great benefit somewhere completely else and an unattended or off-label usage or however you wanna, is because from the pharmaceutical company perspective, looking for these things is a goldmine. You already have a drug that's FDA approved to be safe in humans. You already have a manufacturing process that doesn't need to get recertified or anything like this. You already have everything you need to just make money right away by selling this product to a different group. And so I like that we can all, I understand what you're saying, Blair. My counter is if a drug has been around for long enough, then you can have generics. So that's the other positive thing about looking at FDA previously approved drugs is it's much closer to being away from the kind of proprietary restrictions where you can have generic versions of the drugs and you don't have to wait for that to happen in however many years. Yeah, not necessarily, because then they can say, oh, we tweaked it to services lately. Now it's better for the, this is what happens. But to your point though, also, because of the, what do you call it? The Rubik's Cube, the gold, the thing. The Rube Goldbergian. Thank you, Rube Goldberg. Yeah. Thing about how the body is all interconnected. We make these amazing discoveries by having so many, you know, thousands or a million people on a drug that there's this other effect. And why is that? And now we, yeah, and I love that if there's a way to do a non-opiate painkiller, then the question becomes, are opiates actually addictive or is pain relief addictive? Well, opiates definitely act, yeah. A lot of columbi. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Something that might have been studied already somewhere. But in this, to your point about pharmaceutical funding, the funding for this particular paper was City University London, Harvard Stem Cell Institute, Canadian Institutes of Health Research and Austrian Academy of Sciences and the NIH and the Zastrow Foundation California. So it doesn't look as though they have claimed any conflict of interest or any pharma funds. But this particular technique that they use, they did a phenotypic drug screen to uncover these connections and to be able to see what drugs could potentially modulate these pathways and the expression of these genes. Woo-hoo, good times, good times. You know what? I am searching for a pattern here. Yeah, what's that? That I think we've finished our stories for the day. We have, I am going to add though that Rube Goldberg went to my high school just for fun. What? But then now we can be done. Okay. That is a little bit of trivia that no idea. Not at the same time. That's fascinating. That could have been interesting. Yeah. And actually it was a different building because they had turned down the old high school to build a new one. And technically that was in an unincorporated area so technically it was a different city. All of the loads of things up against each other and then when they removed one of them they all said, no, okay. No. Anyway, let's end the show, Kiki. Why are you stalling? Oh, I'm stalling. Yeah, me stalling right now. Oh, because Blair, I did need to tell you that rapamycin, which we've talked about before on the show as a potential anti-aging drug is a drug that has been approved for other purposes previously by the FDA, rapamycin. However, in its investigations, researchers were trying to figure out, well, do we just give a whole bunch of it to old people and then will it fix some? Well, it doesn't look that way. It looks as though giving a little bit of it to younger people might actually be beneficial. So Blair, keep your eyes out for rapamycin because I think you're still in the window. The anti-aging window. We're gonna keep... I'm gonna start dyeing my hair so I look really cool. Blair, you're still in the window. Just so you know. Still in the window of hope. We still have time. We're just not too late for you. Just close it so quick. Give what you can, Blair. Give what you can. That window closes quick. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of This Week in Science. Woo, we made it through. My microphone didn't give up on me this show again. Let's see if we can make it next week. Thank you for joining us. And thank you too. I gotta give our shout outs for the week. Fada, who's not here tonight but who usually does our show notes and social media. I think Fada is at a conference this week and has been having a big week. So I hope he's out there enjoying himself and I hope to see him next week. But thanks so much for all that help. Gord, Arun, Laura, others who helped keep the chat rooms clean and happy. Thank you for being here and for doing that. Identity four, thank you for recording the show. And Rachel, thank you so much for editing. It is just wonderful to have everybody's help. I do also really, really, really need to thank our Patreon sponsors. Thank you too. 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It's all in your head. And I need to do this, and then I'm gonna do this, and then I go that. 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 robots with a simple device. I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand. And all it'll cost you is a couple of crisis coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientist. This week in science. Science, science, science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science, science, science. I've got one disclaimer, and it shouldn't be news. That what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations, and I- You might just not understand. You just might understand. Thank you everybody. Where'd Justin go? He left early. He's like, I'm out of here, man. Woman. I'm all ready yawning. I am clamping. Oh! Oh, I can still hear the music in the background. It's very quiet. All gone? Yeah. Okay, I could not hear it. Very subtle. Group Goldbergian. Well, fun. So, I mean, if your high school was where Group Goldberg went to high school, was it a challenge to go to class? Was it? That's a great question. I feel like I should Google it. Did they dive in? Goldberg. You sleepy, Paul? I am sleepy as well. The entire day, it is the first week back to school for the child. Man, this is great. He was class of 1900. Whoa! Prize-winning, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, cartoonist, engineer, and sculpture. Yeah. There you go. He's a little high school in the late 1800s. Yeah, a little bit before your time. Just a little. I thought they had something on the website, but it was Facebook. There's probably so many famous people who have gone to Lowell. They're just like, whatever. Carol Channing also went there, and Benjamin Bratt. Who? Benjamin Bratt for Miss Congeniality. That's what I know him from. He's made it a bunch of things. I think, right? Yeah. Where did, where's just nothing gone off to? Yeah. He was also in Doctor Strange. I don't know. That's a more recent reference. I have the odds now. Goobledygook. Oh, my goodness. So tonight's setup isn't even the setup that I'll necessarily have next week. Or I might. I don't know. Thanks for listening to our outro song. I can't see that emoji from over here. I hope that's a good emoji. Oh, yeah. What the heck is that? Like, oh, it says fire. Fire, that's what I was hoping. Thank you. That's the, I guess, the board. What is it? The NFTs now are the board ape NFTs, right? So our song was by the Gifted Apes, which was really a fan of the show from years back. Neal Shirley and his brother, Cash, Shirley, who they're fantastic. They've done a few songs and they've done some. They're always, they're always great. But we love that song. The Gifted Apes. You're back. Did you have a micro break, Justin? Yeah. Was that a micro break? Of sorts, yeah. Sometimes you take a break by doing something else, not just sitting or standing. What are your favorite breaks? Like, do you take a break from one work project by working on another work project? Do you take a break by just staring at the wall? Do you take a break that is going for a walk around the block? If I have to. I do that sometimes. I go on a walk. Sometimes, but it's not really a break. It's hard work. Huh. It's really my bathroom breaks are my breaks. I just kind of like, I'm so bad about it. I will have to pee sometimes for probably 90 minutes. And I'll be in the middle of a task and be like, you're almost done. You're almost done. You're almost done. And my leg starts to shake. And then I'm like, what am I doing? I do, yeah. I have to just stop what I'm doing and get up and go pee. So I don't, like, I will do this with if I'm writing something, I'll put it down and start writing something else like I'm preparing for the show and I'm writing stuff out. I'll start on something and then I haven't got to figure this out. And I'll go work on something else for a little bit and then come back to that story. But my seven month old takes, I realize I do, I give him micro breaks. And our micro break is going to the window and watching because we're up on the eighth store. And the road out there and we'll go out and we'll just watch the cars go by on one side of the house. There's a street out there. And then we get really excited to go by. And they have a lot of buses. So we get really excited with the yellow bus car. Oh, yellow bus. Wow. And then, but that's like he'll just like he'll be crying or fussy or whatever. We'll go look out the window and he's just like focused. Just looking. He's a very curious little guy. And then the other side of the house, there's a kind of a lot of birds that tend to fly by. And he'll just sort of be there looking for the birds to go by. It's are you familiar with the Monty Python sketch Confuse a Cat? I think about that all the time. Oh, you got to check it out. I can't show it because we'll get pulled from YouTube. But I suggest everyone check it out because it's basically the idea that you have to like break up somebody's expectation of reality to like give them Vim and Vigor back. But it's a cat. I'm talking about Confuse a Cat. It's one of my favorite sketches. It's from, I think, my favorite episode of Monty Python, which has the, oh, God, what's it called? The it's the joke. It's the joke that like it was weaponized. I think it's called the joke. The joke. The funniest joke in the world is what it's called. Anyway, so that's it's a very good episode. That whole season is really good. I think that's the first season of Monty Python. It's just timeless. That and the how to recognize different trees from far away. Yeah, that one. That was a little reoccurring cutaway bit where they would just show a tree and tell you what kind of tree it was. Just in one episode, though. Was it only in one episode? I thought they did that in multiples. Yeah, I don't remember at all. And I don't remember that. Gosh, because I'm confident that I have seen every Monty Python sketch ever multiple times and I'm not remembering the Confuse a Cat. Oh, yeah. You got to check it out. I remember Confuse a Cat. Yeah. Bewilder a beast. Monty Python, hilarity ensues. I'm very tired tonight. Yeah. Standing here, very tired. So good morning, Justin. Yeah, it would be all right if we had a very short episode. I don't know if you can tell here but I am fully reclined. I didn't even stand today and my legs are now up. I'm standing here and I'm getting lower than my microphone now. Yeah. I wanted to record YBIOs, though. Do that later on your own. YBIO, YBIA. You could have done it. That's just perfect. We'll just have that. I'm not a bass, though. YBIO, YBIO. YBIO. Change in the sky. Yes. Lots of... The climate is changing here. And now... What's the eyebrow? This is what was speaking me out in the room. This is why I had to interrupt the show. Because it's just disconcerting to be seen in this space when they're talking but not be able to see their mouth move, personally. Why are you talking? What do you mean? Aren't we used to this yet? All right. I guess you're right. You've got all the caffeine. I have all the tides. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good morning, Justin. Good morning, Justin. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of This Week in Science. I do appreciate that you're here with us and we hope that you will be back next week. We've got some interviews coming up in September. Some fun books. The science of how we get rid of our poo and why that's good in a book called Flush by Bren Ness Nelson. I hope we talk about how stupid it is that we use drinkable water for that. I'm sure we will talk about that. And then additionally, we'll be talking about the future with Steven Novella from the Skeptics Guide to the Universe at the end of September. And Justin, I know you emailed me a couple of suggestions and I'm gonna be following those up hopefully. So things coming in the month of September. Interviews coming. Stay with us. But you know, in the meantime, just stay healthy, stay safe, stay curious and we'll see you again next Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific time. Good night. If I can guess, there's my mouse. Two screens is hard. Good night.