 No. Ah, I forgot to do the thing. Sometimes I get ahead of myself, but we're here. Hold on. Hold on. We get to start now. All right. Now we're really here. This is this week in science, the weekly podcast broadcast live. No Blair this week. She is on a holiday. And this is the live business. And if anything here needs to be cut out, it will be cut out for the podcast version. So remember, you can always subscribe to the nicely better, hopefully more better cleaned up podcast version. That's all over the place, but click all the likes and the other things that we can hit the algorithms in the places where you're watching live. Hello, bumbling biochemist. I am a bumbling podcaster, broadcaster. You ready to start the show, Justin? Let's do it. All right, let's have a show. We are beginning in three, two, this is twist this week in science episode number 924, we come recorded Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023. May the fourth has quantum microscopes. Hey, everybody. I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we will fill your heads with aminos, heavy metal and textbooks. But first disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer published in 1859 on the origin of this species, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is one of the most important scientific theories ever proposed. It changed the way we understand the natural world, our place in it, as every explanation that preceded it was wrong. Not just a little wrong either. Not fuzzy on the details or mistaking correlation for causation wrong, but critically fundamentally irreconcilably wrong in every way. Before Darwin, species were thought to be generated like NPCs in the simulation created by a divine being remaining unchanged throughout time. Understanding evolution is foundational to the understanding of biology, providing a framework for understanding the diversity of life on earth, how organisms are related to each other, how they change over time and adapt to their environments. Evolution is key to understanding how ecosystems function, how they are affected by human activities and how that affects humans. It underpins everything in genetics as genetic variation arises through evolution, passed down from generation to generation and is essential for studying the genetic basis of disease and traits which informs disease risk and the invention of cures. It's also critical for understanding human history, the deep evolutionary history of how humans evolved over time, how they are related to each other and animals, plants and bacteria too. Microbiology is at its core a study of evolution, gained traits, lost traits, adaptive responses to changing environments. So it's extremely disheartening to hear that one of the most populated countries on earth, India, evolution is being currently removed from textbooks for children. So hopefully this trend is reversed because otherwise a tremendous portion of earthlings will grow up without being interested in this week in science coming up next. And a good science to you too Justin and no Blair this week she is on a holiday but we're here to have a great time and talk about all the science with you out there. Thanks for joining us for another episode of This Week in Science. We have so much fun and serious topics to discuss this week. We're really looking forward to bringing them up. Are you ready to drop that science beat Justin? Yeah let's do it. Okay let's see on this week's show I have brought stories about quantum microscopes. Can we haze them? Yes may the fourth make them so. Okay we'll talk about that in a minute. Photosynthesis there's some new fun stuff related to photosynthesis in Bose-Einstein condensates making amino acids out of the air and then uh pollinating frogs, heavy metal heavy metal seals and reading your brain. What do you have? Heavy metal? I have one we got I've got a letter from about 1800 scientists and science pro-science folks in India about the textbooks removing Darwin. Have we got a little read on that? Talk about that I've got a question one of those question mark headlines are the aliens listening question mark it's gonna be kind of a fun story. Black ice on the Greenland ice sheet what that's all about and getting beyond the blood brain barrier. Oh I know this story I'm excited about that one yeah that's gonna be a great one okay so for all of you out there if you are just tuning in for the first time this is where I tell you that if you want to subscribe but you can find us all the places podcasts are found we stream live here weekly on YouTube Facebook and Twitch Wednesdays 8 p.m Pacific time until the show ends usually hopefully kind of a tight 90 minutes and yeah there's a little eyebrow raise there from Justin and we are on social media if you would like to follow us as Twist Science on Instagram and on Universal Dawn and we are this week in Science on Facebook and Twist Science on Twitch there's all sorts of things out there if you want to find us you can find our website most easily twist.org let's get started let's get into the little teeny tiny wonderful things in the world and how do we see the little teeny tiny wonderful things in the world Justin with a microscope yes microscopes now we have microscopes that use all frequencies of light to be able to see smaller and smaller and smaller things we've got electron scanning microscopes we've got microscopes that use x-rays we've got microscopes that are using all the different light wavelengths however light is limited in how it can be used to visualize things in cells because as soon as you start using particular frequencies like green or red to to boost the amount of resolution that you have by using a very very fine frequency of a particular frequency and boosting the power of that wavelength what happens is it gets very damaging and so we can only look at tissue that we don't mind destroying as we look at it so to do things like look at cells as they're dividing to look at anything that's alive without destroying it as you're envisioning it well you have to it's hard we are limited we can't see all the things but now there may be some work that is published in Nature Communications out of Caltech that will be allowing us to see at higher resolutions and in effect is using quantum entanglement to double the resolution of light-based photonic microscopes to the Heisenberg limit okay oh i didn't know there was such a thing such a limit yes yes there's a limit so light we have Heisenberg's uncertainty principle that's related to where and Heisenberg's limit dictates how far those photons are going to be be going and also it involves the entanglement aspect of whether or not light is a is a particle or a wave now in this particular work the researchers were able to instead of just using one photon like one photon of light goes down a microscope and bounces off of whatever you're trying to look at and comes back to your eye get magnified through glass and oh that's exciting we get to see it more clearly well in this particular case they entangled entangled two photons so they have created quantum microscopy by coincidence oh now we need a coincidence principle limit top of the uncertainty yes so uh you have an object that you want to look at you have two entangled photons you send them down separate paths they interact with whatever material at a exact point in tandem and because they're acting in tandem and they're entangled it can actually double the power of the microscope and that's how it's going to allow the power of the microscope to be doubled without make increasing that intensity of the light beam so it's like sending a single photon the strength of the beam or the amplitude of the beam is acting like it's a single photon but because it's entangled you get the power of two for one so it's like a twix candy bar microscope sorry but this microscope will be able to massively increase the resolution of our microscopy doubling it so that we will be able to now see the interiors of cancer cells without destroying them in the process of their division we will be able to look at living living cells at living organisms and be non-destructive in our science and this what they're what they're using they think that there's no theoretical limit to the number of photons that could be involved so potentially the interesting aspect of this is potentially they could entangle more than two photons to go from not just doubling the power of the microscope to quadrupling it quintupling it to the power at 64 it becomes a bit mind-boggling if researchers are able to use more entanglement with more photons the resolution will just go up and up and up but they do know that every time you try to entangle a photon the probability of the entanglement is reduced and so that it just becomes difficult in itself and so you need quantum computers and this whole thing quantum i don't know quantum mania everyone question yes i have so many question did they build a thing or is this a theoretical thing they have built it yes they have built the thing they have built it so but it's it's a lab microscope so we've got optical apparatuses that you know laser beams that are shining yeah shining light they're bouncing them along paths using mirrors this is like this is an engineering lab microscope this is not a microscope that's in a box that you can take home at this point in time but it could be the kind of microscope that is developed to become a product that would be used in in high-resolution microscopy in those places that have the capability to be able to manage the quantum entanglement aspect. Trinity, I'm just trying to think what do you think the best highest use of that is I mean where do we want to catch the a living cell that's not going to be destroyed well there are so many aspects of biology that we haven't really viewed yet we've been using the slack linear accelerator for I think they changed the name of it the Stanford linear accelerator they have their line act and they've got another x-ray production device that they've been using to make little movies high resolution movies of the insides of cells but this is the kind of thing where instead of relying on single images taken over time we might actually be able to view things taking occurring that molecules interacting with each other mRNA interacting with ribosome yeah that would be that would be really useful yeah yeah so if we're looking at the internals of cells and can get to molecular level stuff that's the level that would be very exciting but even just being able to observe you know just just the insides at a much higher quality and resolution would would make things better and prettier for what we can see and you know it's like take going from the Hubble to the James Web when you step up in resolution yeah or or don't step up in resolution yeah but drop in power because then I'm thinking if you were trying to monitor something like stem cells that you were going to put into a put into a patient you'd want to you'd want to not be doing any damage but you would want to be looking to see if they are at that mature state and ready to go and so you would be able to verify that potentially with a microscope that has the same resolution as now but but less power so there's less chance of doing damage exactly yep yeah it could be it could be huge it's uh you know it's a very when it is used is going to be the question because at this point it is still in an engineering lab and it is not a product that research labs can put into into play but it is uh it is something that could become very useful in the near future and I see this moving forward very rapidly fun times and quantum land what do you have for us oh well I guess I was going to start off by just sort of reading uh this is a statement put out by the breakthrough science society in India it's part of their response to textbooks having evolution removed so these are uh ninth and ninth and tenth maybe eleventh grade textbooks that for the science portion of you know your regular standard everybody goes to school this is this is 24 000 uh school systems with millions and millions of students throughout India or being impacted by this so the government did has this this group called I think insert and during the pandemic they scaled back the sort of learning modules this is the deciding that you know we're gonna do have you do less schooling at home during the pandemic just to make because it's already stressful enough which kind of makes sense however what they what they cut out during that was they left out things like Darwin they also left out a lot of other interesting things we might talk about but no we're just gonna leave out parts that are crucial to your understanding no yeah just gonna leave out some of the points so anyway pandemic ends students are back in school and they decided that they were going to rationalize the education system their words content rationalization oh by leaving Darwin out now they still get it I guess in the the last year of what would be like high school or something but that that's it so this is a letter from the scientific community objecting to that and it sort of just this is the intro to it the country's scientific community is seriously dismayed to see that the theory of biological evolution which is an integral part of science syllabus in the tenth standard I guess it's the tenth grade has been dropped it was first dropped as an interim measure for syllabus reduction during the corona pandemic but insert states that it is dropped permanently as a step in content rationalization scientific community feels that students will remain seriously handicapped in their thought processes if deprived of exposure to this fundamental discovery of science the fact that the biological world is constantly changing that evolution is a law-governed process that does not require divine intervention and that humans have evolved for some species of from some species of ape have been the cornerstones of rational thinking ever since Darwin proposed his theory of natural selection expressing these concerns the scientific community has issued an open letter signed by more than 1800 scientists science teachers educators science popularizers oh well maybe that would be us and rational minded citizens condemning this directive by the insert so but like I said it's not the only thing going missing there's apparently a whole lot of history of india oh dear is being removed apparently they've they've removed all mention of the where are they the moguls which was this india islamic india the rulers of india the you know the main religion of india for all I got like the Taj Mahal are we familiar yes the but the history of it or the Taj Mahal's been just the Taj Mahal building just picture that gone that you know the folks that built that were where is islamic or muslim and that's being removed from the history which is interesting because the building is still there but this is my fear it's like when that building goes down you that is the point I think when india will have gone completely uh into this this regime that has a religious bias sciences against this so is history you know and science is a big part of that for sure yeah so is all of a lot of science gets tied up into this desire to change history like a lot of science so it's really unfortunate because again big portion of the population of the planet is going to be kept a little further away from science going forward and at that I think is one of the very big points there is that if this educational system is country wide not continent wide uh country wide you know that this is one of the largest countries and growing countries in the world and if you know it it would be allowing um a lack of information to be reaching one of the most rapidly growing segments of earth's population so so there's that is is is absolutely like and then the other part is what happens when you get rid of good information yes make room for bad information right so people have questions if kids have questions but it's not in the content then you know have they given they've just taken stuff out but have they made room for how information is supposed to be added back in for kids who want more well actually so the there is there is some comments from uh folks that work at the this part of the government who are stating that you know well they can go on the web if they want to look stuff up like that they're taking out they're taking out real numbers no uh let's see we've got um in math the just looking through this so text contents of the textbooks have been rationally rationalized in view of the following overlapping with similar content in other areas in the same class similar content in lower or higher classes the difficulty level content which is accessible to students without interventions from teachers and can be learned through self-learning or peer learning and then content which is irrelevant in the present context i think that's making massive assumptions i mean every it's not it's making how much how much how many of these school kids i mean that's the big argument here in the united states how many of these school kids really do have access to all the information to following finding real educational information as opposed to biased information yeah and it's very agenda driven too apparently so this is also it's fitting with a familiar religious fundamentalist context yeah i mean and to not throw stones living in glass houses which even if you live in a brick house don't don't throw stones don't throw stones it's just not nice but yeah florida i mean it's the thing but if florida exists in florida is you know i don't know who's following whose lead but there's a this is happening in the united states too it has been and this has been a battle for years and years with intelligent design with textbooks we've talked about it for decades textbooks being written so that they don't include information related to climate change or the the link between carbon dioxide and increasing temperatures we have textbooks that have been edited in states across in conservative states across the country or in school districts across the country where they are trying to take out information related to history related to science and so this is not yet this is this is nothing new it's just same game different country right but the the stakes are huge and yeah i agree this is a it's a big deal hopefully they can do something right yeah and it's by the numbers too it's also a part of the thing like you know it i'm not sure that uh i won't say i was gonna say i'm not sure we were going to get any great sciences out of florida in the first place but uh that's not fair i know uh but certainly uh you know india you got a billion people like the the smart science kids are going to uh be in greater numbers there and and uh to hear that they're going to be discouraged or you know it's like one of the things too it's a it's a funnel right yes early you get that interest going in science the more you're moving through the that funnel towards becoming scientists the longer you wait to try to spark that interest the less uh individuals you will have going along that path so partly it's yeah you know talking about a billion uh or more people and and if you have these grades where the possibility of out of this population of a billion or more people how many of them are going to make it to grades 10 11 12 where this more this information about darwin and evolution is b is being included you know it's not being included in the lower grades so like you're saying it's not just getting kids interested in it it's getting them exposed to the information so that they have a basis for understanding the more complicated content later but also if they leave the schooling system because of whatever forces end up leading to that out that that outcome they have had instruction and they have some place to start yeah yeah it may it makes me sad i want as much information for children as possible right we should think kids can kids are smart kids learn things kids pick things up very quickly oh yeah and you talk to you talk to the these these people who are scientists as we occasionally do as you are one of and and you when you say when well when did you first get interested in science it's not like oh well you know it's my second year of college and i took a science class for the first time i thought hey that's that's not no no it typically starts much much earlier you know most most physicists or something like this are kind of know that they're interested in this or cosmologists or know that they're interested in this by like age 10 they're already like you know knowing the names of the planets or paleontologists may have already known all of the names of dinosaurs that a brain can hold in one time by the time i liked i liked i liked making mud pies and playing with worms who knew my interest in science came much later well no that's not quite true that's that but that's even that's not even that's not true i wasn't interested was there uh from watching all those those nova specials and then from a couple of good science classes at school yeah yeah but yeah we can't put all of the oh the contents available to those kids that are interested it's out there it is but the schools are there the educational system is there to give a basis for everyone and if that and if that is the basis for a democracy then when you lead away from that it's putting another little hatchet mark in the pillars of democracy let's talk about uh photosynthesis and how cool and interesting photosynthesis is you want to do that yeah yeah okay so photosynthesis we know light hits the leaves the leaves of the plants and the trees and photosynthesis is the process of turning that light energy into the air that we breathe using up the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and yes justin's pointing at a plant yes plants they are good air cleaners good oxygen producers they're wonderful and photosynthesis is the key to this there are little chloroplasts within the leaves that uh have specialized structures within them photo system one photo system two which lead to the movement of energy through the cells and allow for that transfer of light for electrons and ATP creating and the whole process to get started that ends up releasing oxygen in the first place so researchers are really really interested in looking at how the energy moves through these chloroplasts and the photo systems and there's one study that's out today or this last week related to figuring out the last step in uh in photo system photo system two which is leads to how the electron moves around so basically one photon it's like a game of baseball one photon gets in there's a batter up to bat the batter whoo hits the photon whatever gets electron moves through the photo system one spot and so you've now moved from your ground state of zero energy to one and then another photon comes and that uh that electron moves to second base and you've got another electron on first base another photon you've got an electron on third base and then another electron comes in you've got a home run and you make a you make oxygen and so it was this last step between third base and home creating the oxygen everyone's like hi we gotta figure out what's going on here well they figured out some more steps super awesome but there are other questions involved which is like really it's not as direct as that the electrons like there's no baseball diamond set up in the cells of these leaves that's but i just transcending the electrons i know i just learned that so now so now imagine that that that baseball player who's running from home to first to second to third and back home again that instead of hitting every base in between each base it's like a completely random obstacle course where it's like this way looks great no this way looks great i'm gonna go down this slide because that makes it faster and i'm gonna go over here that means great if sports was actually like that i would totally watch the baseball player is finding the easiest fastest way to get to each base okay so that's the electron the electrons baseball player the electron is like just i'm gonna get there as fast as i can in the easiest way possible and each time it's kind of different how it gets there and so it's this randomized path through the chloroplasts and the photosystems until the oxygen gets actually released because you have enough energy built up okay so some researchers at the University of Chicago looked at what they see as internal to this movement these electrons every time they move they also create a hole next to them and the electron and the whole partnership is called an exciton and this exciton as it moves around it's very similar to where they've also seen excitons turn up in Bose-Einstein condensates these superconducting materials we only see them work and allow this specialized really easy electron flow in highly crystallized structures at sub freezing temperatures the plant has this in a very kind of randomized not highly crystallized way just kind of randomly popping up in there it works really well we've never put it in our models because that makes our models for photosynthesis too confusing researchers think maybe we should be putting in our models for photosynthesis now but they're finding what they're saying are these islands that independently within these photosystems act like little baby superconductors like little Bose-Einstein condensates at room temperature because plants are working outdoors whatever and you know when they're in the sun maybe it's a little warmer than room temperature right these plants are doing they're doing the work and they're creating out of non-crystallized structures these little islands that act exactly the same and allow a more free electron flow how does that happen we don't know but basically there are little baby baby tiny Bose-Einstein condensates popping up in little islands in plant leaves and making it easier yes hard jars path of least resistance making it easy this is published in prx energy as of april 28th and the researchers are very excited about you know what this could mean for creating future photosynthetic materials of our own for solar materials for harnessing the power of the sun for understanding creating superconducting superconductors at room temperature they're all sorts of potential understandings that could come out of actually including these excitons into the models for photosynthesis and making the models of photosynthesis a little bit more complicated so that we can actually start modeling reality a little bit better yeah it's always nice it's always nice to have the model as close to your reality as possible close close to reality yeah i think that's the part that um you know is is that's what we want but we have to start out with the spherical cow right you start out with the thing is like oh yes the cow it might have legs let's just make it a sphere the sphere with maybe little stick legs makes it easier for the math makes it easier for the modeling but it isn't real but then you have to start including information that makes your cow look more like a cow and that's what what has happened with climate change modeling right it's gotten more accurate we've gotten better resolution i don't think we're working with a spherical cow in our climate change modeling anymore we're much better yes anyway uh it's very i think it's very exciting i like thinking of these little exciton islands in my plant leaves nice superconducting plant tell me something else justin do you want to tell me something else aliens i'll tell you something else yeah so islands and space that's what uh solar systems are planets on them uh so this is kind of an interesting take because i've been thinking that we are going silent as a planet so radio waves television broadcasts radio these are waves that have that don't just bounce around on the earth they go out into space and they keep going out into space and for 70 years or so we were broadcasting a beacon in the universe of these semi-intelligent radio waves these unnatural radio waves broadcasting out into space so anywhere you know 50 to 70 light years away if there's a planet out there with folks that can hear that are paying attention they might say hey this one area there's one planet over here releases one solar system is making a very strange signal and then they would know hey there's some people over there named the rickardos or the honeymooners or whoever whatever television show they saw first right okay but then we've gone all digital and we're starting to stream and now maybe now there's no signal right maybe the signals are like okay there's still some radar signal here and there but nothing like it used to be in the heyday of broadcast right we're getting we're getting soft and and hollowed out right it's just less right right well according to the scientists of the university of manchester and maybe not this is professor mike garrett team leader of the project and director of a giordio bank center for astrophysics at the university of manchester and i'm gonna try not to do the fake british absent yeah try try your best although we have fewer powerful tv and radio transmitters today the proliferation of mobile communication systems around the world is profound while each system represents relatively low radio powers individually the integrated spectrum of billions of these devices is substantial current estimates suggest we will have more than 100 000 satellites and low earth orbit and beyond and uh beyond before the end of the decade the earth is already anonymously bright in the radio part of the spectrum if the trend continues anomalously not anonymously the earth is already uh anomalously bright in the radio part of the spectrum if the trend continues we could become readily detectable by any advanced civilization with the right technology this is this is different than what a lot of people have said they're like we're getting quiet we're going away yeah we're going quiet and so no one's gonna hear us and so it's just we send a message nobody hears it somebody else sends a message we don't hear it but no so models uh which demonstrate the signals the aliens might be receiving from the earth were generated by seddy the search for extraterrestrial intelligence at the uh at their hat creek radio observatory the modulation of the radio leakage generated by mobile communication towers on earth as it rotates on its axis as it might be measured by an observer located at benard's star which is i think one of the closest star to where we are simulations show the earth's mobile radio signature also includes a substantial contribution and and that has come a growing as the world's countries become more and more developmentally uh technologically enabled yeah next the team is going to extend to to uh other contributors such as wi-fi wi-fi yeah yeah you know because wi-fi it's like oh gosh it's not that it's tiny little you know but if it's in every if every house is broadcasting it's one thing when every house was receiving signals why did the towers have to be so powerful so they could send that signal to all those receivers now every household has one or more and these things generating frequencies so hmm but that we have to wonder about i mean there's so much attenuation i wonder i wonder how that would end up growing over time if you're additively putting it together with your neighborhood or uh you know the whole planet that that to me is fascinating that yeah yeah how much are we adding yeah we always jump up and down at the same time on one side of the plant we need to scooch the earth out a little we'll do it we'll do a wave everybody jump on the count of one it's a little less it's a little less exciting than the tv and radio broadcast signals going out because at least with those you had a had this imagining that they would be watching uh you know television following television and then commercials and everything else and the news of the planet as these waves uh got to them right probably it might be a little difficult to pick up an actual channel that that far away but but this was this to me would seem much more like just noise yeah yep but it's not going to be listening to people's conversations or watching an individual tiktok but there will be a signal or maybe they will i i don't know like we also are assuming technology right like the receiver technology like what are they maybe they're like super advanced the other thing is you know maybe not like life i have no doubt life exists everywhere throughout the universe it's just probably fundamental property of nature at this at this point based on everything we know in this one little planet but intelligent life so yeah let's look for let's look for space wi-fi signals let's uh like kevin unique is saying that you know these uh signals aren't coherent frequencies are constant having multiplicative power outputs i see synchronicity all the time it doesn't take much to put together a spike there's noise in specific frequencies so it's just if we can figure out like this study is doing the specific frequencies that we should be checking out for intelligence what can we boost and also what should what else should we be looking for that we're not looking for even though we're doing a bunch of scanning but and that's a great point too because if we know the frequency that we're the loudest at we would want to use that to send out a signal if we were hoping to communicate because that's the place that people would be tuning into you tune in you know if you have nothing but silence on the radio and you tune in there's this one like you're like oh i listen to this weird sound coming from space and then we can modulate a signal over that we can have a one-way communication system to the universe ooh one-way uh barnard star is a small red dwarf in the constellation ophiuchus at 5.96 light years from earth it is the fourth nearest known star to the sun after the three in the alphas and tari system so i thought alphas and taris stars were uh were closer but this and it's the closest star in the northern celestial hemisphere so it all depends on which part of the planet is pointing in a particular direction so barnard star and it has the largest proper motion of any known star 10.39 seconds of arc annually so it's got a lot of motion i don't know what that means but it's a good target let's aim at it let's send our let's send our kick our kisses and hugs and kisses from earth to barnard star meanwhile here on earth in order to survive the coming climate change apocalypse we will be figuring out what to do with our carbon dioxide oh my gosh we're using more and more land to feed the cattle to grow the sugar to make protein yes a lot of manufactured protein is actually a product of sugar fermentation sugar takes lots of ground to grow and that again is not sugar that we're necessarily eating it's going into our livestock feed supplies anyway protein needs building blocks so the fermented sugar usually is used to create these amino acids the building blocks of the proteins and to then create a hydrolyzed protein of sorts you put it all together make a protein powder and or a crumble and make food pellets and feed it to the animals and the animals are healthy healthy so are the bodybuilders and the sports junkies who like to protein pound anyway we also in addition to we need to figure out how to use up our carbon dioxide because we have too much in the atmosphere it's making it too hot we need to stop doing so much agriculture for the livestock and if we're to get to keep eating the livestock we have to figure something out there so researchers have just published their study cell-free enzymatic l alanine synthesis synthesis from green methanol in the journal chem catalysis what does that mean cell-free enzymatic l alanine synthesis synthesis from green methanol well what they've done is they've taken carbon dioxide captured from uh manufacturing sources so carbon dioxide capture using it as a source for the production of energy chemicals and fuels in this particular case the fuel is methanol they are converting carbon dioxide to methanol using solar energy in this particular case so it's not using any additional energy off the fossil grid in what they have designed they have a multi enzymatic cascade using 10 enzymes to then produce the necessary amino acid l alanine l alanine is the first of many that they hope to be making to replace these fermented sugars that we're using to create proteins that we use to feed the livestock that we use all this stuff that just use creates more carbon dioxide uses more land in their situation they'd be reducing carbon dioxide producing l alanine using less less ground space and less uh agricultural space than would be taken by plants and uh also if they're using solar energy or other sustainable energy sources to be able to power all of this it could be uh energetically less demanding on the environment in in its end form yeah so that produced amino acids we're figuring out how to do it it doesn't sound sexy but someday it's going to be what's going to be keeping you alive on the space station or on that rocket ship to mars or when you get to mars because you can't grow any plants or in your uh in your cubicle or in your cubicle in the mega mega skyscraper in that one part of the planet where humans still are allowed to go outside yes possibly yes i don't know i mean you could whatever future make up whatever sci-fi future may come but i like to think of it as uh an optimistic step uh or a promising step forward um in the multiple pronged solution that it provides yes jg first thing picture a solar cow oh i love our chat room i don't want a solar cow no no solar like i guess i guess this is a solar cow in effect it really might be it's a greenhouse gas cow well no solar cow that's good do we have any more stories for this first part no this is a part where we go to the break when we come back as with kiki's animal corner it's not Blair's animal corner that's for sure not this week what what thanks for being here everyone this is this week in science and we want to say thank you for joining us for another episode full of science fun and discussion learning hope you're learning a lot this week if you are enjoying learning don't keep it to yourself share this week in science today with someone you know will appreciate it and additionally if you are really enjoying the show you know you can head over to twist.org and become a supporter of twist by clicking on the patreon link and choosing your level of support everyone ten dollars per month and up we'll get thanked by name at the end of the show fifteen dollars in month and up you'll get a sticker every once in a while like every three months you'll get a new sticker who knows what it's gonna be but you're going to get it okay now we will come back with i'm not gonna play the song because it's just not right to play the song when she's not here but it is not Blair's animal corner i feel like it should be a game show but it's not going to be all right justin to really get this started we want to talk about frogs frogs are so cute and nice and they're dying but you know we think of them very often as these amphibians who are just involved in insect control or maybe they are the canary in the coal mines for pollution and climate change warning us about what's happening but in this new study we find that they may also be important for pollinating flowers yeah so a species of brazilian frog known as xeno heila truncata it's a tree frog and it is a a frog that likes to hang out in the milk fruit tree in brazil these little frogs eat the fruit of the tree they drink the nectar and they climb into the flowers of this milk fruit while they're there sipping the nectar oh right just like a small insect might do or a bird possibly and these frogs yes they crawl in and the researchers discovered as the frogs crawled in and the frogs crawled out they were covered in little pollen grains and the frogs were going bounce and jump it around between flower to flower transferring pollen grains because they had been stuck to the moist skin of their backs this is the first time this has been seen in an amphibian species it's not or in a in a frog species specifically so they don't know if this is yes the effective way that the one of the effective ways that this milk fruit tree becomes pollinated or if this is something that is an evolved adaptation if this is by accident i mean it seems very much like it could be by accident but the fact that these frogs do love this particular fruit so um is one particular point of how this relationship may be taking place but again it does really put the you know the arrow in the center of the of the target or the nail on the head of how important frogs and amphibians are to so much of ecosystems and the little roles that they play and you lose frogs to climate change or pollution and we may also be having them disappear from other important aspects of the ecology no frog if we took the frogs away what would happen to the milk fruit trees we don't know that for sure yeah it sounds like very much to me like this like because you're just possibly like wow how did your relationship start did they may have replaced a different pollinator right so right maybe there was a thing that lured the frogs there in the first place a tasty insect or something right and now and now it's you know and the now they're the pollinator because they like to hey it's like oh the flower this is a good flower yeah maybe they were going in there for the insects to start out with and then they're like no you know i really like the energy that i get from this lovely nectar this milk fruit tree nectar that's that's all i need moving from frogs these cute little frogs in brazil to fur seals let's talk about heavy metal these are some heavy metal seals they they really are heavy metal seals these fur seals they're called the one fernandez fur seals because they have been found on remote islands off of the coast of chile about 600 kilometers off an archipelago that is also known as the one fernandez archipelago and so these are the the one fernandez fur seals these fur seals they hang out there and they hunt off the coast of the archipelago off of the coast of the of the chile of chile and these researchers who were studying these fur seals of course we're analyzing their poo because what's the easiest way to find out about what a fur seals going out and hunting and eating then you grab their poop because they're pooing on the rocks on shore and you can it's easy to find and you can be like oh now we know what they've been eating and so they publish their study in the royal society open science and determined that these fur seals were eating something that was massively contaminated with heavy metals oh no yes mercury cadmium and this is a super isolated environment so the researchers are like how is all this heavy metal getting into their diet where's it coming I guess can I guess go for it what do you guess my guess would be a coastal fish that is in a heavily industrialized area that is also heads out to the archipelago and that they're eating those fish and that's how it is moving up the food chain you are very very very very very very close very close but not specifically so instead of just fish these seals love to eat squid and octopuses that they find and also fish but that they find in the area off the archipelago which happens to be a a a gyer it is an area where the there is not a lot of mixing and there's a bunch of it's the south pacific subtropical gyer so there's a lot of ocean yeah there's tons of ocean plastic they think that this plastic patch is bigger than india this is part from their their article they wrote for the conversation in addition to the plastic you have phytoplankton that are existing in the gyer these don't have really high concentrations but there's other zoo plankton along with the algae the phytoplankton so the phytoplankton has have evolved in this area where zinc in the gyer because for whatever reason zinc is low phytoplankton likes zinc here there's not a lot of zinc so apparently the phytoplankton have evolved to use cadmium so we've got cadmium filled phytoplankton the phytoplankton get eaten by zoo plankton the zoo plankton get eaten by fish so we have this cascade like you were talking about of bigger and bigger bigger stuff where the cadmium is getting is is building up and building up and building up in all these organisms as it goes up the food chain ending up eventually in the octopuses that defer seals love to eat however the octopuses mollusks anyway they know they don't know about the octopuses but they know that mollusks are able to take heavy metals and isolate them and they have an organ that is called a hepatopancreas it's like a liver pancreas it's all mushed together their hepatopancreas is able to isolate the heavy metals and so the animals live without the toxic effects of the heavy metals and then the so the octopus does fine is doing great the first seal eats the octopus and they think that the first seal is just eating everything right eating the hepatopancreas where it's all built up and that but they think that the first seal should be getting sick the levels of mercury and cadmium that are in the first seals poo suggests they are massively either ingesting massive massive quantities of these heavy metals but they don't know like what's happening because the first seals are not sick they seem to be fine and healthy they're getting rid of a lot of toxic heavy metals so what's happening have the first seals evolved a special mechanism of dealing with heavy metal poisoning we don't know and that is the that's the key take home of the story is these are these are heavy metal seals they just it's passing through them somehow or they're dealing with it it's not making them sick like it would make us sick interesting so so there's a geyer region yes it was also intriguing uh geyer if it's if that means that there's less uh ocean floor motion it's like we talked about this in the in the story uh not too long ago about the region near borne home which is a massive sort of kind of inland sea it's not an inland sea it's it's connected to the ocean but still it's it's really far away from it and it's and it's an area where there isn't very much current on the sea floor there's not a whole lot of motion and and so a lot of heavy metals there have built up just from drifting down to the bottom over the years right it's like high concentrations of lead and other things right you know so that's another another thing that could be adding to this uh this this sort of heavy metal toxic environment is just dropping from the atmosphere where yeah where things are ending up we don't know enough about how I guess metals like that are mixing from the atmosphere that's a really great point I don't know how that would work not that it wouldn't but yeah but it means that it sits if there's not if there's not a deep uh ocean floor current to displace anything it's just it's all rests on that top you know a couple of inches it's going to be very different than the sea floor below it so it'll be evidence you should be able to see all the evidence of of lead fuels dropping in I don't know how many ships go through that area but I have no idea yeah no no clue yeah I mean yeah there's multiple multiple questions here right where does it the heavy metals come from see how they're resisting this this heavy metal and diet because that's not something we can do so if we we don't we don't eat the whole octopus we only eat the tentacles so we don't have to worry about the heavy metals throw we into there I don't need octopus tentacles either I'm not a fan but people are not getting the heavy metal poisoning from octopuses because we're not eating the organ that is isolating the heavy metals within the octopus's physiology but when we eat heavy metals when we have things in our in our environment in our diets that are heavy metal laden our body can only get rid of so much and we we get heavy metal poisoning the toxic toxicity effects are really damaging and so if we could figure out how the fur seals are naturally managing their their heavy metal levels could be very beneficial to us hard to say that's fast revolution wait but it might yeah it might be you know a thing that's already there right yeah so and so then then you encounter this this new thing in the environment and it doesn't affect you because you already have something that's you know able to counter the hard drives has got a good point though are they looking at whales whales but then you know there's there's a lot of other things in that environment including the fish themselves right yeah do we so this is definitely going to be an interesting area to to study for sure yep always interesting things to study so many questions out there in the world how does it work what's going on Justin what's the next question that we have to answer oh gosh i'm supposed to have a story ready aren't i yeah good to it okay where does it oh yeah this is an interesting one so it turns out the glaciers of greenland are teeming with life this is headed by a professor professor uh alexandre anesio with a group of researchers from the department of environmental science at orhus university that's here in denmark they have discovered that microbes have adapted to life on ice and not just one or two species not just a few extremophiles living on the on the glaciers but several thousand different species this is quoting alexandre anesio a small puddle of melt water on a glacier can easily have four thousand different species living in it they live on bacteria algae viruses and microscopic fungi it's a whole ecosystem that we never knew existed until recently so we know that life finds a way don't wait it's been we have found life several kilometers underground without living without sun or oxygen there are billions of microorganisms that eat minerals down in the bedrock we found the clean room in nasa there was a bacteria that was specifically eating paint in the in the clean room there uh what else we've got uh oh we got the tardigrades they got to go to space come back we took they took a colony of more than 3000 tardigrades outside a satellite and sent them in orbit around the earth for 10 days and then they're exposed exposed to the you know vacuum of space and you know all the the radiation that would be lethal and 68 survived so life life does find a way but until recently researchers believed that the ice had too little nourishment to sustain life plus it's really cold but of course the scientists were wrong and gleefully so because now they have something cool this day so there is nourishment it's just incredibly small quantities explains anesio one of the microorganisms on the ice that the researchers spent the most time investigating is a small black algae the algae grows on top of the ice and actually tints it a little bit black what's interesting there is when the ice darkens uh it absorbs more heat when it absorbs more heat there's more ice melt so the researchers think that the this growing what they're saying is growing patches of this black ice from the algae yeah is accelerating ice melt now it's not because of global warming right but what they're saying is that because global warming has is extending seasons it's extending the amount of time that the black algae has to spread and so it's gaining more territory or terror it's getting territory more rapidly than it has in the past is in a more sustained way and they think it could be increasing the surface melt by 20 percent that's that's a lot that's cool it's very that's extremely significant um yeah i and as it grows that impact will be greater and greater yeah and and part of why i guess that they they think that the the reason they have this black pigment is actually designed on the algae's part to protect it from the radiation of the sun but that heat kind of like mel like a melanin or yeah a little uh fungi or algae melanin little uv protection so that it can survive the solar radiation and and it's you know and they can only use the water that's present when it's melted so you start to see this synergistic effect yeah you know a very great example of evolution too where where a species is becoming successful because its adaption adaptation to one thing solar radiation is increasing its its biome its environment the environment in which it can inhabit and so it grows yeah this is reminding me a lot of uh the the permafrost melting as well so we have the permafrost which is supposed to be frozen but it starts melting and there is a natural breathing that it that takes place to this ecosystem over the seasons as it melts slightly might the bacteria within the permafrost get warmed up they release methane there's other stuff in the permafrost that gets released but then the more the melting happens the more the methane is released the more the methane is released the more the melting happens the heating the melting and it's a feed forward cycle and there are a lot of those how do we put the brakes on that's what we need apparently nasa is very interested in this uh this fungi as well because the one thing is you know there's not a lot of water in space but there is ice so one of the things that would be be more likely than than uh than searching for microbes in an arid dust on the moon for instance would be looking for the ice patches on the moon where water is present and if something can live there where water is present where there's and there's no atmosphere to speak of and there's just radiation something like this this this algae would be a type of candidate you would look for uh you would want to be able to find a signal of or a sign of uh on another planet yeah for sure i want to find the signal it would be that's extremophile if i ever heard one what else do you have oh yeah you want more do you oh yes give it more science what did i say i was oh this story yes yes yes so so now i don't really i don't really completely understand this story but uh there's a okay so can you explain maybe like i'll actually start by asking you a question keke yes can you explain to me the blood-brain barrier because i i have it wrong i have it wrong in my head and i understand technically what it is is there's boundary between the brain and the blood that's why they call it the blood-brain barrier uh huh but but where it exists because i pictured it sort of like a hair net like just covering the brain but it's covering the the blood-brain barrier is actually covering the veins the vein the vasculature yeah so it's the vasculature of the vein yeah so it's like uh it it's like a skin it's an epidermis of stories it's it's tight tight cellular bonds that line the blood vessels so that it makes it very very hard for anything to squeeze through little tiny things can can diffuse through down their gradients water can go through osmotically across the across the barrier but it's when you get to be big molecules they they get to be too big to pass through but really the these are it's not a barrier it's not a sheath it these are cells right right so they're wrapped in a couple different kinds of cells including some types of neurons but they but they're not it's not a it's not a covering over the whole brain it's the individual vascular veins that are going to the brain that are wrapped as opposed to when they're wrapped but the veins in the rest of the body aren't wrapped the same way right not as tightly no but we do have the same kind of control in our gut so when we talk about people yeah so there are levels of like cellular adhesion and tightness at different places in the gut and that you know different areas throughout the body depending on how much movement you want between an area and the blood or the other or the blood and other cells you know it it these barriers as we call them um are very important to impede or allow movement of molecules it's a normally carbon and oxygen and water they're allowed to go through with the blood brain barrier but it's designed to keep out pathogens bacteria larger molecules that shouldn't be there one of the problems which is a great thing because we don't want these things just making it to the brain all the time it'd be terrible but one of the problems with this is that then drugs that we want to go to the brain can't get there and so when when a cancer or some pathology meningitis or something toxoplasmosis occurs in the brain we don't have access to get a treatment uh to the location right this research that was uh i've just completely lost because i have too many tabs open is using here we go is using a new technique of scone planted ultra an ultrasound device that permeates so basically that that sheath that you're talking about around the vasculature it kind of uh makes it loose you hit it with this the sound wave these ultrasound waves and it just kind of relaxes it permeates it becomes more porous and so by targeting the vasculature they can and then injecting you would just take a drug in in some instance right that drug is now circulating through the bloodstream but it goes through those veins they go by the brain but normally can't get through because oh it's you know there's like a big red rope velvet rope there it says you can nobody can pass unless you're at least this small or whatever it is it makes it permeable to the drug and they've uh this the report i've got here in front of me is showing that they were able to get a chemotherapy drug to the brain utilizing this system this is uh this paper is published in hoance that's amazing apology yeah and so the other thing that this can do so it's so this now just opens up this opens up there are there's a there's a long list there's a huge long list of theoretical treatments that could be applied to ailments of the brain but they've just been shelved they've been sitting on the shelf because there's not a way to get through that blood brain barrier at least not safely so in an animal experiment in a lab setting you can do a gene therapy treatment by placing that gene therapy into the brain now the way you do that is rather traumatic right okay not something you would translate to necessarily to a human patient by being able to target a specific area where you are doing this permeation you could also not just deliver drugs or chemotherapy drugs or you could also do gene therapy treatments with this so this is this is opening up this ultrasound device opening up the brain literally is opening up the brain access to all of the things that science has waiting and already developed already experimentally tested a lot of different things because again in the in the animal model you can puncture your way in to test a gene therapy a drug whatever it is yeah and so we have shown effectiveness on trials up till human then we we've had to stop because there's no way to safely attempt these therapies this this could be that thing that allows all of these all this research is collecting dust all these treatments all these potential cures we're talking Alzheimer's Parkinson's disease meningitis metastasized cancers all sorts right we're talking about a huge list of incredibly pernicious diseases that are that that is an alter so i guess part of it's just because ultrasound is i mean this this utilization is obviously very very but but not new like it wasn't a revolutionary new technology that was required it was it's the use it's the application came along now so i don't know i think this one's very exciting so yeah the so this is the the question is okay we're at this point still it's going to be for people who have something that's fatal right that you have a a brain cancer that's going to kill you because you don't want to be sticking something in your brain you know a drug in your head like that you unless you know that's exactly what it's going to do is it's going to have a specific effect which is get rid of that cancer and help you survive you don't want to go putting random holes in your vasculature you know what if there's something else in your bloodstream at the same time bacteria other things at the same time when you ultrasound that blood brain barrier just to put a drug in so if you're doing you know this is still not going to be something to be taken lightly it's going to be for the serious think for serious uses yes so but now but now this is this is in a this is that's in the beginning okay so first of all yeah first of all this will become more specialized for sure permeability also uh heals i guess uh recloses yeah then 24 hours and that's that's important you're not leaving the door open no you are for i mean 24 hours you got blood circulating it's a lot of time for if it's already there but you're not leaving that is a permanent situation the other thing is i would think that you could get to because you can be targeted with this i mean you can focus this beam you can decide here's the location in the brain that we want to access with a gene therapy you can apply this to that direct area you could even input that uh the the gene therapy or the drug or whatever it is into that specific region instead of just having it circulate the blood you could actually become much more targeted with this going forward yeah i mean at this point it's still a skull a skull implantable grid of ultrasound emitters so you're still putting a hole in your head the ultrasound is not like a little thing a cap like it's it's not that it's not something that you're you know going to your hairdressers and you sit inside and it's like oh the little the little beam that you have no ideas taking place is doing anything is is is ultrasounding into your head there is there is impact this is still early this is early days i think at the big point is the potential for where this is going to go it's exciting but um yeah opening up the blood brain breaker huge this is it's massive this is this is not something that has been done before in this way i'll just be clear there is a there's a infographic involved in uh in this i don't think it's the scale the the aperture that they're showing no no no no no it look i think that's being implanted to allow this i think it's much larger than the actual device but um yeah i don't know i think this one's going to be one of those gosh there's we we've talked about this a tremendous amount of times you know oh new treatment we could could if it could but if we can't get there so then it can't we can't try can you get in there can you get into the cells how do you get Alzheimer's plasma osmosis meningitis metastasis all these uh horrible brain ailments and more uh that now scientists can at least start experimenting on people yeah but starting with starting there not starting there starting with phase three trial after having done they're doing the research they're not yeah this is still clinical trials yeah they're still doing the work and they need volunteers for the clinical trials that's true yes yes it's very important that they be volunteers yes uh let's see this last week big news out about uh brain reading and decoding people's brains uh study published in nature neuroscience on may 1st semantic reconstruction of continuous language from non-invasive brain recordings people have been very excited about this story headlines or across the board sensational sensationalizing it um the researcher is part of it i think is because everybody's uh big into artificial intelligence right now the work for this group out of ut austin has included machine learning and a an algorithm art of an algorithm to learn brain activity based on fmri's that are monitoring the brain of volunteers while they are listening or while they listened in this case to a bunch of podcasts and heard people talking and were listening to the words that were being said and then so the decoder this machine learning system had to learn what a particular person's brain looked like when it was thinking particular words when that person was thinking particular words and so they listened to a bunch of podcasts and then had to say a bunch of words and had to think a bunch of words and they later had uh the participants had the fmri reading them as they were imagining telling a story or listening to a new story and the research uh has reported that the machine learning algorithm i'm not going to say artificial intelligence because i know patrick is going to get on my patrick pecoraro you'll you'll you'll talk to me a bit about that one this this machine learning algorithm was able to kind of not all the time but about half the time produced text that closely matched the intended meanings of the original words that the participant was thinking so wow the so it's like 50 percent of the time it could kind of do it but it didn't really always do it and it was only for the people it was specifically trained on so this mind reading ai that has been uh your brain decoding ai that headlines have been spouting about if you've just been reading the headlines you have not been getting the full story because this is not doing it yet this is not general brain reading or brain decoding these are very specific instances of people who have been who have been trained and the ai is learned from the machine learning algorithm was trained on them um but there were in experiments for example as it says in the press release a participant listening to a speaker said i don't have my driver's license yet had their thoughts translated as she has not even started to learn to drive yet so there's some context you the contextual is there i disagree that it's not here yet look but that's that's only about 50 percent of the time but only on people that had been trained on but that's that's the whole thing look this is it'll get infancy yes this is the infancy of this technology so if we were if we were 50 years in and it did that we're like maybe it's not a thing that can really be done reliably you know uh if you ask the kids today when was the telephone invented they're not going to include the thing that was connected with a wire into the wall i don't know what that thing was that's not the phone phone has got apps and that you watch movies on it that thing was a that's a listening device the old folks you stay at walk box yeah so so when we're when we're comparing you know when was when was when is when can you have recorded music well yeah it was it was there oh really you know in the 1800s on a wax tourney thing but i mean this could be the same what is it alexander grambel or whatever or exactly picking picking up the phone and i don't know who who did yeah but the problem was like he kept you know he kept trying to use this thing and then the guy on the other hand on the other side's like yeah hi yeah no i know i i don't want to talk right now yes i know yeah it's very exciting that you invented the phone and you gave the first prototype to me but you can't keep calling me all the time because no i know you have nobody else you can call but this is like i have a life i need to do other you need to make more of these and send them to other people so that okay i'm gonna let you go all right well i know who that is i don't even need color id it's only one other person with a phone anyway yeah we've moved way past that but at this point in time we do only have i don't know one lab with this brain decoding device because it does rely on time need on an fmri machine so it's only wherever fmri machines are found and people who have the algorithm to implement this process and the time to train individual people on the brain reading and um they're hoping that they can transfer the process to more portable brain imaging systems there are others that don't have the same kind of resolution as fmri but perhaps if the algorithm learns specifically enough they won't need the same amount of resolution as the fmri uh but this is the this is where we are we are at this is an fmri based thing for specific uses and individuals at this point in time but yeah maybe someday it's going to be you know the patch in your head where you click a button and your computer knows exactly what you're thinking it's gonna be scarier than that it's gonna be scary but my prediction is they're going to use like microfacial eye tracking so that it won't need the fmri it won't need the brain waves anymore it'll use that to train the system to find ways to read yeah i know i'm gonna walk around make it really wear faces all the time you know what the you know what it's gonna translate into i gotta keep making these faces i gotta keep making these things you're gonna have to concentrate to do that uh my last story for the night uh has to do with anorexia nervosa and some researchers out of the university of kopenhagen kopenhagen right near you right right close to you kopenhagen kopenhagen is that how it's pronounced sort of so this so i just so the right not just even the american ear the rest of the world can't pronounce danish properly okay this is my so nobody can yeah it's fine great uh anyway uh this research which recently was published in nature microbiology i find absolutely fascinating and apparently you wrote a an article about it that i wasn't aware of but i think it's a just a fascinating study anorexia nervosa is known as it's a disease where people die of starvation because people become less and less likely to eat they starve themselves um karen carpenter was one of the large uh i guess older celebrities uh to have succumbed to the disease and the question is for the longest time has been is it just psychologically based does somebody become anorexic for because of social pressures and other psychological uh reasons and does that then persist is it just a psychological issue and this research suggests that that is not the case at all and that there may be a very large component of anorexia nervosa nervosa that is linked to the microbiome and they haven't been able to determine cause at this point in time it could be the social pressures lead to the the lack of eating the lack of eating changes the microbiome the might let that change in the microbiome then goes on to change other factors within the the gut and the brain that then lead to a persistence of the lack of searching for food in a person but they don't know that for for at this point in time what they have determined it by manipulating microbiomes of mice and looking at the microbiomes of healthy women and women with anorexia uh they were able to determine that there are differences in the bacteria that are present there's some bacteria that are that have skyrocketed some of them that have been lost altogether bacterial genes and metabolites that are expressed in the blood have also changed and there are uh also increases within the anorexic group in a particular compound called indole 3 propionic acid which in the gut slows down digestion slows down the passage of food and then it makes you feel full so you're less hungry and you don't want to eat so your digestion slows down so anything you eat is just going to take forever to go through and you're just not going to be hungry even if you haven't eaten in a very very long time uh they took the bacteria from the anorexic women and implanted them into mice and the mice actually ended up having weight loss that was similar to the anorexic situation they additionally had a group of mice they they put mice on restrictive diets and the restricted diets also led to this but those with the anorexic microbiomes had a much faster weight loss and more permanent waste weight loss and then there were genes in the hypothalamus related to appetite suppression that were released so the the genes in the brain were changed as well within these mice so they're able to determine that there's actually physiological uh signaling changes that are occurring as well so again we don't know exactly what's happening to cause anorexia in the first place but there are some aspects of this that are perpetuating and we were talking a bit about the climate feed forward stuff the the brown the black ice and other aspects of that this is this looks to be a very similar situation yeah so this is you know my take on this kind of is that it it sounds like a natural self-defense mechanism yeah the the body is unaware of in on one level the psychological drivers i would say and so it says okay i'm in a food restricted scenario i need to slow down digestion because i'm going to need a continual use of of these nutrients over a longer period of time until i find food again also it was having an appetite reduction effect on the brain yeah and so yeah so that's kind of like i don't have food you know our ancient ancestors you can't spend your whole time in the pangs of hunger because you need that energy to go and eat you go find food and so it's helping fight off starvation it's hard it's helping buffer or and protect the the body from starvation and in the case of of anorexia it ends up facilitating the disease yeah i think that this this kind of research is going to really help our understanding of anorexia and will move whatever treatments have been used in the past away from solely psychological research or psych psychological treatments which i think you know if i don't know what treatments are currently being used but treatments any treatments that could be used to change the gut microbiome to increase appetite to lead to the jump start of wanting to eat again is potentially helpful it's not going to solve those initial problems so certainly mental health approaches are important as well but you know to see that there need that that this is bigger than just a mental health issue that there's a holistic aspect to this it's really important to take into account yeah we're finding more and more evidences we were talking about uh a forms of depression that have been linked to the microbiota we have we've talked uh here about you know the the resistance to feeling hungry and also having lower energy output because again it's the bodies trying to conserve energy uh in this anorexia microbiome we're finding these these gut brain connections uh to be extremely significant and so and so there there should be you know any treatment of uh behavior that is being facilitated by molecular signaling from the gut needs to also be addressed in the gut otherwise you're gosh you're you're really you know you're really challenging people to to do something about it when it's not their fault you know there's a there's a yeah also a recent study about uh UTIs uh urinary tract infections that that found that multiple infections uh tend to be facilitated by genomic changes in the urinary tract and and this is this is a treatment that that it's so it makes it so you're much more likely to have recurrent UTIs if you've gotten some in the first place and you know you can imagine for generations it's been called an hygiene issue yeah yeah well it's not it's not a hygiene issue it's a genomic alteration in the lining of cells that's facilitating additional uh infections so so you know I think I think the mental health industry is going to have to come to terms with this to some degree too that the things you've been doing aren't going to be enough or they're just wrong also possibly that there are physiological molecular basicies for some of the diseases that have not been addressed in all so it's not just mental hygiene is my point you can't just keep putting it on the individual well your mental hygiene needs to be better and so they go oh I will think positively I'll do like think positive it's going to change everything yeah I'll think positively and but now I have another UTI so it didn't work so I must not have thought positively enough yeah it you know the the the trauma of bad treatment right yeah the the stress and anxiety caused by by following and adhering to a treatment that doesn't work over and over again must be exceedingly frustrating so things like this are very important yeah forget the cranberry juice you can still do that if you like it but that very juice is delicious it can be wonderful but these poor people who are pounding cranberry juice and you know like the instructions for UTIs are just like you know here's how you wipe yourself here's how you clean yourself like okay I mean if you're a 50 year old woman who's getting recurring UTIs it's not your hygiene it's there's other things involved right there's hygiene is a place to start but it's not the end of the story it is the it is if you know okay you know how to wipe fantastic let's move on and we're going to talk about these other aspects that are very important as well and other things that we need to be aware of yes and I I think yeah it's not all one thing or another and it's not going to be all pharmaceutical it's not going to be all positive thinking happy happy but if we can look at the system right it's the gut brain system and I just pointed at my brain as I said gut and I pointed at my gut as I said brain because that kind of as well it's true that's the point yeah exactly right yeah and so it is one in it is a system and that's how our bodies work and so whenever we take anything as independent and try to work just on that one thing I mean that's what scientists get in trouble for right not being interdisciplinary enough you're just in your bubble and your glass tower there yeah but yeah yes please mental health professionals please pay attention to this and doctors please please pay attention to this kind of research because this is the research that's going to help save lives and make lives better this is the kind of stuff that is going to matter and it's amazing to me that that we haven't known more about this previously yeah why is this taking so long yeah but I think that's it for me for stories do you have any anything else no I think uh I think I'm good I think we did a really good job just the two of us on this tight 90 tonight yeah yeah absolutely totally all right everyone thank you so much for joining us for another episode of this week in science we are so glad that you were here talking with us in the chat room hanging out with us over there youtube facebook twitch I see all of you in our discord as well everyone who is here for the live thank you for being here it's great to have your interaction also thank you to fada thank you for show notes and social media work thank you to identity for for recording the show justin thanks for getting up early and doing the show with me and Rachel thank you for editing the show it's really wonderful to have you doing that work and to our patreon sponsors as always thank you for all of your support specifically to just by the way kiki yes because the other week we didn't have uh when you were here did you make it a appetite it no so you have to read all the names twice today to make up is that what you said I was gonna do yeah yeah that's what I promised the audience you'd say each name two times as you went down the list so do I say Craig Greg pot pots or Craig pots Craig pots you guys say the whole name twice yeah Craig pots Craig pots yeah how about I say the name and then you say the name oh it will take you long because I was like wait what did you say how do you pronounce it again it's easier if you do it Craig pots Craig pots Marie Gertz Marie Gertz Teresa Smith Teresa Smith Richard Bad Richard Badge Kent Northcote Kent Northcote Rich Loveman Rick Loveman George Chorus George Chorus Pierre Verlezob Pierre Verlezob John Watt this Ratna Swami John Ratna Swami Karl Kornfeld Karl Kornfeld Chris Wozniak Chris Wozniak Vega chef's dad Vega chef's dad Hal Snyder Hal Snyder Donathan Styles aka Don Silo Donathan Styles aka Don Silo Alley coffin alley coffin Regan Regan Dunn Dunn Mundes Dunn Mundes Steven Alberon Steven Alberon Darryl Meischach Darryl Meischach Stu Paulik Stu Paulik Andrew Swanson Andrew Swanson Fred S 104 Fred S 104 Sky Luke Sky Luke Paul Ronevich Paul Ronevich Kevin Burden Kevin Burden noodles noodles noodles Jack Jack Brian Carrington David Youngblood David Youngblood Sean Clarence Lamb Sean Clarence Lamb John McKee John McKee Greg Riley Greg Riley Mark Hasenbloh Mark Hasenbloh Steve Lee's Meneke Zima Steve Lee's Meneke Zima Ken Hayes Ken Hayes Howard Dan Howard Dan Christopher Rabin Christopher Rabin Richard Richard Brent and Minnish Brent and Minnish Johnny Gridley Johnny Gridley Cymie Dave Cymie Dave Flying Out Flying Out Christopher Dreyer Christopher Dreyer Artyom Artyom Greg Riggs Greg Riggs John Atwood John Atwood Rudy Garcia Rudy Garcia Dave Wilkinson Dave Wilkinson Rodney Lewis Rodney Lewis Paul Paul Rick Ramis Rick Ramis Kurt Larson Kurt Larson Craigland and Craigland and Sue Doster Sue's Doster Jason Olds Jason Olds Dave Neighbor Dave Neighbor Eric Knapp Eric Knapp EO EO Adam Mishkan Adam Mishkan Kevin Parachan Kevin Parachan and Luthan Aaron Luthan Steve DeBell Steve DeBell Bob Calder Bob Calder E Marjorie Marjorie Paul D Disney Paul D Disney David Simmerly David Simmerly Patrick Pacararo Patrick Pacararo Tony Steele Tony Steele and brief and if you would like to support us on Patreon please head over to twist.org and click on that Patreon link on next week's show. We will be back broadcasting live Wednesday 8 p.m. Pacific time and again at 5 a.m. on Thursday Central European time just on our Facebook channels and also from twist.org slash live. Yeah and if you want to listen to us as a podcast just search for This Week in Science wherever podcasts are found. Don't go like to your shower and shout for This Week in Science unless there is a machine like Alexa or Siri or something who will give you podcasts while in your shower then maybe that will work for you. Yes if you enjoyed the show get your friends to subscribe too. For more information on anything you've heard here today show notes and links to the stories will be available on our website www.twist.org. You can also sign up for a newsletter. Yeah newsletter mailing list there we go you can contact us directly email me Kirsten Kirsten at thisweekinscience.com Justin at twistminion.gmail.com Blair to ask her why she didn't show up tonight haha she's on holiday don't email her about that at BlairBaz at twist.org to Disney's whatever uh put twist somewhere in the subject line that's right so your email doesn't get bubbled by a sound maker and then burst through a barrier like yeah no don't do that you can also hit us up on the twitter for now where we are still at twist science at dr kiki at Jacksonfly and at Blair's Menagerie we love your feedback if there's a topic you would like us to cover or address a suggestion for an interview a haiku that comes due in the night please let us know we will be back here again next week and we hope that you'll join us again for more great science news and if you've learned anything from the show remember it's all in your head this week in science this week in science this week in science at 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 this is coming your way so everybody listen to what i say i use the scientific method for all that it's worth and i'll broadcast my because science this week in science this week in science science science this week in science this week in science this week in science science science i've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that's what i say may not represent your views but i've done the calculations and it's the after show where did justin go i don't know he's probably gone to get coffee or maybe to get his son he's probably gone somewhere he's having a lot of fun and i don't know what i'm doing i'm just standing here and i'm here with you because science is cool i should have just turned the mic on echo for that right hard jars maha but instead instead i'm going to have a short cheeks from saying all the names hard jars i love that you chat a lot i think that's wonderful i like that people interact and are part of the show and have things to say and are thinking because that means you're thinking about what we're doing and that in itself is very cool so thank you for joining us thank you for being here what's happening you get yeah so we're back what the bumbling biochemist at the beginning yeah said just wondering how do you find and choose your stories so we may have different techniques i'm kind of curious uh yeah mine is osmosis i fall asleep with the internet below my pillow and when i wake up the next day all the stories have found their way into my laptop into your brain yeah yeah it's very similar i mean i have bedbugs who read to me at night except they're reading to me while i sleep from all the science journals you gotta give them the right reading material something to chew on even yeah so i do i do my my searching uh comes in a certain way so i have a side writing gig for the science x network and so they send me assignments so those are not i get a couple of assignments they could be on anything for some reason they send me a lot of medical research uh so i write those up so i'm writing a couple stories a day that were just assigned that i had no selection portion of for for and so i've been pulling from that quite a bit because oh they send me some interesting stories and once you hear about a story you want to share it so i've shared a bunch of those on the show recently but usually i will scan through the headlines of something like fizz.org or eureka alert and uh yeah yeah it's after a while of scanning through these i was like hey somebody's writing this let me go let me go ask why why who gets to do that you can oh apparently any dimwit any dimwit you came with credentials i came with this show was my credentials and a little bit of a little bit of lab work but a little work so so sort of scanning through there and then you'll get uh sometimes a very uh concise story outlined in a press release and sometimes it's not as concise but it's still interesting so then you go to the the study itself and you pull out the the more interesting information you know uh examples of this are sometimes there's there's studies that that sound interesting but there's not enough there's not enough in the press really saying that they did a thing you got to figure the interesting thing is like how did they do how did they do it yeah that might be the whole part of the story that's like the real interesting thing not just the not just the result or not just the discovery sometimes it's the method and sometimes it's negatively correlated like i don't know how many other saints uh writer people are doing this but i think about 10 of the stories that i cover also on this show are kind of picking a part of study like there's sometimes when when i read it sitting away there's you know there's a there's a problem either in in the methodology or or in you know what's not being looked at or in your sample size or you know that sort of thing but i start usually eureka alert because it's a nice aggregate and fizz.org also a nice aggregate medical express where where a combination of people writing about science or press releases from the universities or researchers themselves are available to sort of scan through so highly selective uh on this program uh and then the writing side is is completely just assigned here's here's the research paper good luck yeah i have again yeah similarly i have specific websites that i like to go to that i kind of trust but it's it's a matter of skimming through and finding what i think is going to be interesting to talk about you and sometimes it's good and sometimes it's not but oh justin left me he could have just said goodbye hi hi hey oh you i was like oh you left you could have just said goodbye and it was time to go here's a fun fact uh if you're if you're on the the tab where you're streaming don't click a link the other i was gonna say the other big one i go to is is of course uh triple a s uh which is also i mean that's what eureka alert is yeah the ones that they profile in the in the science journals or nature journals when they when they put them up on their front page usually those are a little bit more impactful stories but on the other hand those are also usually stories that are already getting more press coverage like this is sort of an unwritten aspect of the show but we've talked about it sometimes if there's a study if you know by the time wednesday night or thursday morning comes around and a story is already being covered in the mainstream press to correctly we will sometimes just skip it yeah because you know and and honestly this job is is daunting on one level because there are now thousands of stories because of what i would call the junk papers the junkification of junkification of scientific literature is the real thing there's mega journals that are taking you know so so also the journal that it's in can matter yeah i think you know the i i i definitely take into account the journal but also the institution that it's coming from also whether or not i'm familiar with the researcher i don't have to be familiar with the researcher but you know it that's like one of the things that i can take into take into account but yeah i you know as and i think there's reputation goes a long way in science so that you know i do try to leak try to find fun and forward thinking and interesting stuff with interesting angles but um yeah i don't know i try to stay away from the junk or and occasionally occasionally i can't resist and picking at it it's like picking picking at a pimple or a scab well i don't i don't know about that but you know there is is sort of like the the the algorithms behind twitter and facebook where which is that if you outrage people they interact more totally would work on me uh but i do it with with uh science studies so i'll read it i'll look at a study and and i'll go oh this is terrible the way that they've constructed this or yeah i don't know there's the the recent one that just sticks out my mind was the actually there's a couple um but there was the the there was a oh what is he he's an economist he's a pension this guy does pension work studies economics he's an economics professor but specifically has a history in working with government on pensions and things like this and used the gonfret's law which is this 1800s equation that says that you know uh once you get to a certain age up to about 80 you know the the the death rate is about eight percent per year and that this is how you know you can calculate the longevity of humans this way oh yeah yeah yeah i remember that one i talked about that one but it was i like i like being able to joke about to dig into it yeah well so this is you know and and so this prediction that he came out with is based on you know 80 being the new 50 or whatever nonsense people living longer with medical science showed these prediction graphs that showed people and again it was also country specific yeah which i don't recall seeing that specific data for why one country's diet like like what information is being used to make it so in italy people are going to live to 141 years by the year 2050 or you know but but it's only 136 in uk or whatever like like there were some levels of nonsense involved also it quoted the bible in the introduction which i thought was interesting or cited never seen the citation great citation unless you're doing religious studies or archaeology or prediction model of human biology and longevity showing it going out to 141 years that we're going to be living longer and longer while leaving out all references and information of biology of solar senescence of telomeres of all of the things that we know exist let's do let me ignore all of science and take a mathematical model and the thing that also bothered me about is it's coming it's being published right as the political effort in the united states is looking to replicate what's happened in france they got out to 64 years we i wish we had 64 years we're already passed that right let's change the retirement age they want to retain now they have a study that you point to was like hey a science study said that people are going to live longer so we should make the retirement age later well it also has to do with wealth it has to do with access to health care which the united states is horrifically under serving its population when it comes to medical access and it's not gonna get any better and and on top of it the average life expectancy in the united states is actually gone down a little bit yeah and it's in it's right now it's it only gives you a couple years after the current i know what we need to do is increase the retirement age as our mortality yeah so if anything we should be reducing it if we're if we're if the united states is a wealthy country why would it be increasing the retirement age shouldn't it be reducing it how come nobody's reducing the retirement age anywhere on the planet with all the progress with all the technology with all the wealth and oh why isn't it going the other anyway but that was an example of a study that actually pissed me off when i read it i actually got mad at it because that's junk it's it's junk it's junk in it and it's junk that i think was designed to serve a political purpose yeah there's nothing yeah linking the authors to but that to anything else yeah but it but it you know why else write it economist and a and someone who works on pension stuff like that yeah that just a policy expert on pension who was going to make this statement at the time in a state where the by the way we were one of the senators is pushing for this you know like just i guarantee that study is going to make its way into the congressional record i guarantee it i guarantee it it's going to be used but if it's a wealthy country if capitalism is a success if capitalism is set as a successful model we should be lowering the retirement age not increasing it otherwise it's a bad system we need to try it in try something else try something that's got a lower i'm not voting against you on this i i i'm i'm i'm here with you on it and not the sort of thing you think about until you get to be my age and then you're like hey wait a second and since we are our ages what i'm thinking about now is maybe we should go take some time off you know i i feel like retiring right now let's retire a little bit sounds like a good like for a week because it's in tight another one there's another one in there hold it he's he's muted but there's another one it's weighty it's tickling the nose it's uh no there it is okay one more it's in threes isn't it always in threes for you no twos okay i do two slightly bigger sneezes and i find uh the third one is then unnecessary totally unnecessary say good night kiki oh good night kiki say good morning justin good morning justin good oh everything we don't have the last thing to say good night kiki no that's already done good night minions good night pageants good night twist listeners good night youtube we do say science podcast thank you for joining us for another episode of the science and our after show and our pre-show and all the fun in-betweens and we look forward to seeing you next week in the meantime stay safe stay healthy and stay curious stay educated stay interested stay interesting don't be boring and if you don't have anything nice to say don't say it okay i think i found my favorite one good night everybody and remember don't be boring don't be boring i love it that's my favorite