 I'm sorry, it's okay, it's okay, you have to do with the digital picture I sent you instead did you send Justin an NFT yeah I dropped a cool hundred thou for an NFT and then I gave it to Justin I mean you could make an NFT and then not charge anybody and how cool would that be yeah anyway this is this week in science it's not this week in NFTs we're gonna talk about science now and hopefully be a mood refresher a mood lifter maybe continue your upward trajectory of mood since Biden's congressional address this evening maybe you're feeling positive and this is positively about science yeah we're here and I hope that you are ready to enjoy at least an hour of science with us because at least it are maybe longer probably longer hopefully we'll all have a good time some things may be edited for the podcast but the following certain amount of time is live now raw is all the things so welcome to this week in science are we ready to do a show uh-huh I believe all systems are check check all right I believe Justin has loud headphones and wanted us to make sure that we were all checkity check check check check check check oh yeah this for the uh for the pre-show tune up I just want to make sure that we're not blasting the volume because I had to do some volume correction on this side to keep my ear holes from being exploding unfortunately I'm always blaring and this is the first time you've used that joke John Hogan in the chatroom said sounds good that's good enough for me John I'm fine for the rest of the show all right y'all let's rock and roll let's start this show in three two this is twist this week in science episode number 822 recorded on Wednesday April 28th 2021 this show is totally reasonable hey everyone welcome to the show tonight we're gonna fill your head oh who am I who am I hey everyone welcome to the show we're gonna fill I can't do this anymore that's all right just get in everybody come on I want to come in I got this open chair I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show we're gonna fill your head with whales stars and a time bomb but first disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer the following program is unintended for audiences of any age as it contains information presented as news and informed opinion by experts but often is not reasonable people are expected to understand the difference between actual journalism political propaganda and paid sponsorship influence manipulation in all content though it will be considered an unreasonable burden for the program to point out which is which when we are doing it any medical advice supplement testimonials or favorable product mentions are at the sole discretion of the audience to regard as meaningful while some people may be called doctor and even hold degrees of higher education relating to those titles always remember that they may not be that kind of doctor while others who may on occasion claim to be doctors clearly are not no matter what advice they offer or what advice you select to take they aren't your doctor they don't know you or your medical history despite them looking into the camera and you seeing their eyes on the screen the sense of connection you have is an illusionary product of the medium as no actual eye contact has taken place consume this media at your own risk as no legally described human or corporate entity is liable for the content how it might affect you or your loved ones is none of our concern wait a sec this isn't hang on my god this is not our disclaimer this is for a cable news network ours goes like this welcome everyone audience members are encouraged to dance along to the intro music as we begin another episode of this weekend science coming up next i've got the kind of mine i can't get enough i want to discover is it happen every day of the week there's only one place to go to find the knowledge i seek i want to know it's to you kiki and blare and a good science to you too justin blare and everyone out there welcome to another episode of this weekend science we are back again as we do every week with the science news that we thought was worth talking about we brought it we've done it we've got a whole show lined up full of amazing stories i have stories related to shiny stars robots on mars a covet update and news about brains you almost had a poem there just stop just shy of it i know i was right there i'll just leave you hanging because justin what did you bring oh uh let's see what did i bring that's a great course i've got uh milking the most out of milk micro plastic biofilms antibiotic resistant chimps and why science needs to clean up its language yeah science clean it up okay blare what's in the animal corner i have whale songs i have sponges on the move and i have marathon running fruit flies fun fact fun fact i i i tell all of my kids that they were this close from being named whale song like like the words like the word whale song that was the name no i wasn't gonna name but i was actually gonna i was you were almost named whale song and i the last minute it got changed and then do they say thank you no they say but i'm like but you're also free to use it i tell you're free to use it if you want but but then the kids eventually talk and they find out they've all been told this story so it's true for every last one of them every one of them every one they were almost the one you out there you are almost the one to have subscribed to this week in science if you haven't done it yet you can find us on all podcast platforms we're on youtube we're on facebook we are on twitch we're on twitter we're on instagram we're out there if you want to find us though our website is twist.org also look for this week in science we are there let's talk about the science from the week yeah yeah this last week actually two weeks ish have been big mars milestones a lot of mars a lot of mars milestones now you all know that perseverance landed on mars successfully and the perseverance rover has started roving jerozo crater and it dropped a little helicopter named ingenuity cute little name for this helicopter and they at nasa jpl had tested the prototype of ingenuity to show that it could fly in a light atmosphere an atmosphere less dense than earth zone atmosphere they couldn't quite reduce the gravity which is an issue with mars but they showed that it can fly here on earth in a reduced atmosphere so they dropped it off perseverance dropped it off drove away kept taking pictures and looking on back and they tried flying it and below and behold three successful flights now they have hovered about 16 feet above the surface of mars and they have done horizontal movements they have used the camera to take a picture of the landing site of perseverance they i don't know actually it's like 126 feet up anyway they they have been moving this little mars copter around and tomorrow will be its fourth flight and then friday they will have a press briefing about what they plan to do with little ingenuity but milestone they flew a drone on another planet pretty cool and it's robotic it's not controlled by anyone here on earth because there's too much of a time difference so it's all robot controlled all algorithms additionally perseverance has a an instrument on it that is called the mars oxygen in situ resource utilization experiment or moxie for short perseverance has moxie that's a good little tag phrase for all of y'all moxie used carbon dioxide in the martian atmosphere to create oxygen for the first time on another planet terraforming created oxygen we are terraforming a little bit of time yeah so this isn't for terraforming purposes but it is proof of concept boy that's exactly what it's for well it's making oxygen that we could breathe that astronauts could breathe should or mars astronauts should we go to mars and also it's it's for creating rocket fuel because you have the rocket fuel part and then you need oxygen for the fuel to burn so they need to be able to launch from mars at some point in the future about 25 metric tons of oxygen the moxie experiment in about two hours of warming up and about an hour of actually running the instrument it created 5.4 grams of oxygen they hope to build a bigger moxie someday and maybe be able to have more oxygen for astronaut breathing and launching rockets we'll see uh patrick in the chat room says his group worked uh my group at work developed part of moxie oh fantastic congratulations patrick you must be proud of the work that has gone on yeah but still uh patrick says i wasn't there i joined after the launch but still yeah proud tradition of your work yeah we're gonna need more moxie we're gonna need a bigger moxie exactly fada anyway lots of milestones on mars and definitely more to come i mean these are the kinds of things especially the oxygen production these are the kinds of things that you look at and you go huh maybe there is potential for human settlement for rockets on going to mars and returning and it just kind of opens up this proof of concept opens up your imagination to what more can can come yeah those nitty gritty details are the things that move us out of science fiction yeah yeah yep yep having experiments that work exactly jason tell me a story oh is it that time all right oh let's see i don't know which i'm gonna see which one i got lined up here first uh it is oh yes this is the milk one okay so this is it doesn't body good yeah okay we know that this is uh not the most anyway okay this is out of the national this research is at the national food institute uh at dtu danish tech school university in denmark have come up with a solution to use way uh waste way no way yes way yes way so they've got this non-gmo uh bread lactic acid bacterium which secretes a peptide called nissen i think i'm pronouncing it which they have grown on dairy waste so so nissen is a food grade preservative which means it is peptide that is killing microbes uh that could contaminate food or that could make people sick and yet is completely safe for people to eat and this extends the shelf life of food making food last longer making it safer to eat it is not a new peptide this has been around we've been putting this in food as preservative for over 50 years and it's always come from this bacteria but what this discovery is doing is it's sort of utilizing the waste generated when cheese is made so what way is is you take milk from cows and you didn't take out everything that makes cheese you get you got the fat and much of the proteins and all the yummy cheese stuff what you're left over with is way which is like 90 water still has some protein in it now dairies at this point will take that protein out of the way extract that and put that into basically every protein packed nutritional supplement you would get at a sports fitness product store right thing that's that's where that goes uh so but what's left just gets tossed and what they have discovered is that you can actually grow this uh bacterium that they have I think sort of coached so it's not gmo nobody went in and crispered or spliced but it looks like they took uh this property of this uh this bacteria and this property this bacteria and let's just sort of breed them over time and on different substrates until we get what we want which is sort of the you know it's sort of the ridiculous aspect of gmo versus non-gmo which is that if we did it on purpose like specifically and targeted that's genetically modified if we just let nature take place with a little bit of like hey how about you and you get together and you over here but we're gonna put you in this place to live and build it up that way then that's that's not gmo that's just nature anyway so they got it to work uh and it was sort of an interesting thing too because this is aside from all of the ah it can it's you know going to make food safer blah blah blah it's also seems like it can make some money this and this and this and stuff is $50 an ounce which that's you know that's pretty good that's more than silver it's like a it's a precious metal type of uh type of type of earnings you can get off this so yeah uh so another another venue of earning for farmers dairy farmers and another way to keep food preserved longer benefits of bacteria bacteria are they're seriously the future yeah i mean they're they're a past present and future future yes just learning how to live with them and use them to our benefit on purpose you have a lovely uh and you have a lovely uh diagram of the the way that it it that they did this which is just letting nature take its place by putting the right the right bacteria actors together you know this has this property that you like but it doesn't live on the right substrate so you find one that doesn't have the treat you want but oh it loves that substrate put them together long enough sure trade their genes there you go there you go at some point you get exactly what you're looking for oh natural yes we like our cheese oh natural but what's more nature not natural yeah what's more natural natural what is more natural than speaking whale oh should we just take a break in the show oh we are we're just gonna geochemical and environmental research group gurg sounds like a whale sound itself a center within the college of geosciences at texas a and m university is planning to conduct a research program with project seti the citation translation initiative to understand not seti the search for extraterrestrial intelligence no this is with a c the front you see okay got it but it sounds the same unless it's actually pronounced kete and i didn't i'm saying it around citation is yeah yeah but anyway it's to understand the vocalizations of sperm whales off the coast of dominica and the in the care in the caribbean so they're gonna speak whale this is the whole point of this study they built three massive buoys and moorings which gurg is going to deploy in about 6,000 to 7500 feet of water maybe it's jerk i don't know also they plan on working with the university of hypha israel to develop acoustic monitoring systems within the buoys so they're planning on using artificial intelligence and machine learning which will then translate the clicks and other vocalizations of sperm whales into a language to understand what they are talking about they really think now they have the tools to identify and translate the deep structure of sperm whale communication patterns which will kickstart the path towards a meaningful dialogue with other species so their their aim is to illustrate whales intelligence concert potential conservation actions and be able to speak with whales i want to speak with the whales i mean and then we can speak with the the whale space aliens we can get seddie and seddie to talk to each other mm-hmm well we already have whale sounds on the golden record right so we're halfway there um yeah so they're actually using this ai that has already been able to in the past translate two unknown human languages without any sort of rosetta stone or parallel structure this ai has been able to interpret these previously untranslatable human languages so this is their that was their proof of concept so now they think that they can sick this ai on a whale song and be able to speak with whales so wait a second okay interesting now i gotta figure out how you translate a previously untranslated uh language yeah and nobody can check your work truth oh that's what it says it's clearly what it says but but the other thing is i'm like i want to i now want to know what the whales say i have a feeling it's gonna be knock it off do you hear that it's so loud stop killing us why is that big metal fish running into us why are you scared of all the other fish yeah yeah yeah it's gonna be a lot of uh unhappy campers i think i think it's fascinating and if the ai works with whales i hope that they apply it to all sorts of different species who use various signals for communication i mean if the ai algorithm is able to interpret and understand these things that have been so hard for humans to figure out when languages are thing right we talk to each other all the time in all sorts of different ways i yeah i think that could be very very very like just just groundbreaking really groundbreaking earth shaking well it makes me think about two things so one is i know these are supposed to be our short stories but what what is the the viral thing on the internet now where people are teaching their dogs to push on buttons to say words so that's kind of a reverse engineering like the the animals are learning how to communicate with us which i think is very funny but it also reminds me of the baby translator from the simpsons and i feel like this is going to be very similar because a lot of it you know i don't know if they're going to be able to translate whale speech into direct human language but i think they will be able to figure out context yeah this whale is happy this whale is hungry this whale is scared this whale is looking for another whale and i think that is going to be pretty easy to do based on all of this but turn it into a full language and be able to speak back to the whale i don't know we'll see about that i think it's an exciting prospect and i think it's certainly possible but yeah just uh just what a warning just word of warning to the researchers who are working on this do not and i repeat do not use drop on squirrels yeah for a world heard if you if they catch on that you can hear them that's all i'm gonna say i think with animals like probably said too much with animals like sperm whales elephants um others that use so like that use ultrasound for long distance communication i wonder how the ai is going to be able to interpret that because long distance communication is going i mean the time between call and response is potentially huge and to a point where there is no connection anymore to an outside observer okay so then we know we now know the interesting but we now know the words for to whom it may concern right we've already you've done it you've already deciphered sincerely yeah well it's as i feel like most whales are very formal i i just i don't know yeah most animal sounds i can tell you right now like maybe not maybe not more than half but a lot of animal sounds are just i'm here so says you blare yeah well you know you know how do you know how much animals understand there is a lot of variation in sounds Patrick in the chat room who was uh i believe instrumental in the creation of moxie uh says yes we translated prairie dogs oh we did i mean we actually have words we know words that they say or the names that they use for specific animals that show up as threats right and now we know that dolphins have names for each that they name each other they name themselves and use those names to identify each other and put themselves in packs i didn't know that yeah there's lots of animals that we know that have names basically for each other okay so the naming thing is sort of the beginning of this whole language stuff you gotta know we gotta have a sound and utterance to communicate the common to the group to know hey here's what we're paying attention to now here's this thing mm-hmm yeah very important anyway very interesting stuff thank you i'd like to speak whale someday speak to a whale baby but in the meantime i am excited about new results uh for a phase two clinical trial for a malaria vaccine now we've been talking a lot about covid and covid vaccines over the past year but malaria actually kills about 400 000 people every year year in year out not a pandemic just this is a thing that came out but all the time lots of people are dying around the world from malaria and it has been a struggle to find a vaccine because of the speed at which the malaria parasite is able to adapt and change its form and overcome um and uh one vaccine that has been in use for a while now has already it's uh mosquerox it's been deployed with world health organization support in malawi kenya and gana for years it's all it's been in use its efficacy has declined 36 percent so it's not very good now there is a paper in the lancet it's a pre-print the authors are publishing related to their phase two trial they are working out of oxford's jenner institute and this trial involved 450 children between the ages of five and 17 months followed them for me for a year gave them a booster shot and they discovered that they had 74 to 77 efficacy and the world health organization has said that they would like a vaccine for malaria that is at least 75 effective so this vaccine potentially is in there they found that efficacy did start to wane over time antibodies started to decrease the immune response of the kids started to decrease over the year that they were tracked but the booster shot got the antibodies back up again and everything was fine um so this could be the kind of thing that needs a booster shot however if its efficacy is waning it's quickly over a year how often do booster shots have to be given um and how long will it last before the genetic adaptation of the parasite actually overcomes the vaccine so how long will it actually last it's great news for now they're hope it's a small trial they're hoping to get into a phase three trial in 2022 so that they can actually hopefully get actually starting to get it manufactured by 2023 that's their goal their goal is to have results yes we want to reduce deaths from all sorts of things around the world i find it interesting though like we're talking about all this adaptation and the genetic sequencing and all this stuff for COVID-19 and it's like okay we're gonna figure out COVID-19 can we just like do like a one year workshop where all the money and all the resources go to a different different disease every year and everybody works as hard as they can to solve that problem because i feel like the past year for COVID has advanced our understanding of coronaviruses of mRNA vaccines of so many things yeah well and the process behind it's it's kind of honed down the the governmental process in the background i think too and and kind of streamlined that process a little bit which is really good the thing that kind of scares me about this though is that malaria is one of those things that's been around for a long time and we've seen kind of how it continued to mutate and and resist and i think that's what stories like this also kind of scare me about me just because we're we're still in the middle of this and it's almost like seeing the ghost of chris's future of like what could happen if we don't properly beat this thing right so i think this is a really important reminder too of what what's at stake from from not getting vaccinated from not staying socially distant before you're vaccinated and even after making sure that we can actually conquer this thing so we don't end up with a lifelong problem that is continually mutating well we are already it's endemic i mean we're gonna talk about covid in the covid update but yeah things that are endemic you have to continue to adapt with them and we have we know we have things lots of diseases that have been with us for a very long time yeah yeah there's a there's a lot there's a lot that has to be determined and figured out about things that yeah hey i don't know where justin went maybe he went to go get some more coffee but do you want to tell me a story do you have anything for the first part no it i'm all done with my short stories i don't know where justin went he had to maybe he went back to bed all right well on that note i will jump to my next story which has nothing to do with diseases but is far-reaching cosmic man when is a star not a normal star when it's awesome stars are always awesome no when it when it's made of antimatter oh also that yes also that so we've had this idea for a very long time that with the standard model and the way that it works that antimatter and matter collided at the beginnings of the universe and the antimatter lost and there really is not a lot of antimatter left in the universe today and that the antimatter that's there is dispersed and it's all around but it's this mystery of you know what exactly did happen to all the antimatter we don't know where it went and so some researchers for a long time have been like well maybe it what if it didn't all get destroyed what if some of it got clumped together what if some antimatter formed little pockets in the forming universe and what if some of the stars that we see today are actually made of antimatter and not matter apparently light from an antimatter star would look exactly the same as light from a normal star you wouldn't be able to tell a difference just looking at the light from a star and so researchers looked at a bunch of data from an instrument on the International Space Station a Fermi telescope and Fermi telescope to look at 10 years of observations 5800 gamma ray sources in the data catalog they've had 14 points of light that gave off gamma rays with energies that would be expected from matter antimatter and annihilation but they didn't look like anything else they didn't look like a black hole they didn't look like anything that we would normally be looking at out in space and so they have these points of light that are out there that have abnormal signatures but potentially have this antimatter matter annihilation signature which would mean that okay you've got a star it's got a big gravitational pull and that gravitational pull could be pulling in matter from the surrounding system and when the matter and antimatter collide you'd get antimatter matter annihilation signals but it would not be exactly the same as other as just it wouldn't be exactly the same as a black hole because a black hole is made of matter not antimatter it wouldn't be a pulsar because a pulsar is made of matter not antimatter so they have these strange signals and they're trying to figure it out but they're like you can't really prove this researcher is his quote is just fantastic because he's like you know it would be practically impossible to say that the candidates are actually anti stars it would be much easier to disprove that they're anti stars i mean that's generally how science works right it's like how that's how it works exactly you don't prove something you dis disprove things just prove everything around it yeah you you winnow down the possibilities but they've got these weird signals they're like huh they're looking at it and this is another thing that if if i mean we're really not gonna know unless we do a lot of disproving uh if anti stars actually exist they could potentially put a big wrench in the standard model of how they'll fit it'll fit just fine this is the thing every time something's trying to put a wrench in the standard model it just fits it ends up the thing that's oh that's how it works standard models is standard for a reason it's pretty standard it's pretty standard yeah but anyway anti stars who knew just like stars they look just like stars so when you look up at the sky you're like that's a star star light anti star bright first could it be a star i see tonight yeah yes well you know when it wouldn't make any difference this is basically the end of the story doesn't matter the universe is made up of any matter this would be the same then it's just matter well that was it's not but it's also the thing it's it's a how come we're made out of matter and the anti matters anti matter it's little judging yeah little it is just a bit hey Justin did you have a story oh yes uh so we're all aware of microplastics and how much fun they are to have throughout our environment these days delicious yeah yang liu researcher at hong kong polytechnic university uh has come up with an approach to take on these microplastics and get them out of our environment the method uses a sticky bacterial biofilm to trap microplastics the biofilm is then processed and dispersed releasing the micro plastic particles so that they can be i don't know recycled into more plastics or just buried deep in a hole somewhere uh the method uses uh a the bacterium pseudomonas aerogoon i should have practiced this before before trying to say a new bacterium for the first time live on air pseudomonas agarinsosa caps of the microplastics in a bioreactor uh basically the this biofilm aggregates together around this microplastic uh in the bioreactor which is a think of a big spinny kind of like a blender moving sort of slow uh the reaction takes place it grabs onto these microplastics and then by clumping around them gets heavy drops to the bottom of the bioreactor and then it's easy just to scoop out of the bottom at the end of the process so the idea is you could run this through water treatment wastewater treatment plants that's where a lot of our microplastics are escaping at least to the ocean you could also use it at the back end of manufacturing processes so that you could be removing microplastics from stuff that say ends up in our food or in our cosmetics maybe even or waste from making cosmetics uh or from processes that end up in our pharmaceutical supply sort of thing so it's still one of those things that would require a lot of effort and infrastructure around it however so far and the tests that they have been doing they have been successful in removing microplastics from environment I love it I mean this is if we can do it on a large scale that's fantastic if we could have household microplastics removal just inside of running your your water through a charcoal filter maybe you also have a biofilm reactor for your drinking water well and it really the thing would be to put it in your drain right so you can prevent it from going out also well so here's and this is like this big uh leo brings up something and and as quoting is saying this uh that I didn't consider is and bad enough you have microplastics that can build up and be in a system where they don't belong uh but this is uh this is quoting leo uh due to their huge surface area and absorption capacity microplastics can absorb toxic pollutants such as pesticides heavy metals and drug residue at high concentration this leads to biological and chemical toxicity to organisms in the ecosystems and humans after prolonged unintended consumption of such microplastics moreover microplastics are also difficult to remove wastewater plants resulting in their undesired release into the environment so you put these absorptive things into wastewater treatment and then they escape with the waste get rid of the plastics and then at least the pharmaceutical stuff that makes it through the wastewater won't glom on to the plastics as much anymore and be as much of a problem so this is I mean it's solving one part of the problem it's good but it's I don't even think of the microplastics as tiny everything nasty sponges but apparently that's what they're doing that's that's what they do yeah let us grab on to all the nasty things microplastics so nasty this is this weekend science thank you for joining us tonight and we do hope that you are enjoying the show if you're enjoying it consider telling a friend about twists today let's have a COVID update you have good news today everything is tempered these days did we have the bad news first is that how you haven't set up no we'll get in there we will get in there all right everybody I would like you to know that vaccinations are moving a pace our world in data has shown that is reporting that we have reached over one billion vaccine doses worldwide wow that's a good number one billion I mean that is one seventh of the way seventh of the way there yes but even as it would have been only one eighth of the way before the pandemic right ouch ouch no I'm sad but this is bringing me to the rest of the news so the United States we're doing really great at at vaccinations last time we had a COVID update the United States was about to open up vaccines for all all people 16 years of age and older that has happened and hey we peaked and now the number of daily vaccinations is dropping and there are lots of reports of local vaccination clinics actually shutting down and vaccines being moved from place to place because there's not enough demand in some locations so facts this is a problem because vaccines are our non-deadly route to herd immunity so we hope that people will continue to get vaccinated and allow us to get to that herd immunity even as these vaccine doses are getting doled out and each of you that are going out and getting vaccinated thank you so much for doing that India is struggling right now they are experiencing more than 350,000 new cases every day their hospitals are overwhelmed they are experiencing supply shortages running out of oxygen and they have a rising death count and some researchers believe that the reported numbers are undercounting so the true impact is actually potentially much much greater than what we're hearing about on the news and all of it is bound to reverberate around the world in many different ways so that's the bad news our government the United States other governments have pledged their support of India and are sending supplies there are COVID warriors volunteers who have who have started to try and get supplies very similar to what many people around the world did at the onset of the COVID outbreak with relation to personal protective gear and other things to try and help hospitals in that way so there's a lot of work happening and hopefully through people working together India's the what India goes through it it can be lessened but it is it is big and it's not it's not good at it at all yeah exactly Gaurav people are dying in rural areas and being cremated and buried in fields people aren't making it to hospitals hospitals are full I mean it's it it's it's really not not good it's it's awful anyway let's move on to better news I do have good news out of all this the CDC has updated its mask guidance which is exciting data has supported what is it exciting let her let her talk and then we can talk about it we can talk about this yes um they they are have updated their guidance on wearing masks outdoors because data has shown and they're using data that the likelihood of COVID transmission outdoors is extremely low it does still happen however so masks should be worn if social distancing is not possible they're not saying go ahead meet in large groups at a festival or a fair and nobody wear masks that is not what they're saying they're saying use your region reason you know and that's the problem wait a second but I'm I'm the most confused person in the world hearing this because I've heard this you're telling me this the other news outlet people have been telling me this oh there was a big announcement the president of the United States just sat in front of a podium and said this like it this is information and poor here's the new deal okay but here's the thing what point was it not okay to be outside by yourself and not wear a mask that was never it was it was all it was always fine to be outside by yourself without a mask there were places where that was not allowed so from starting from last summer for example in the city of san francisco you were not allowed to be outside your home without a mask period and that's because especially in very big metropolitan areas yeah social distancing isn't possible right and so this is the difference is that also like a lot of places haven't decided what they're going to do about this yet but botanical gardens zoos parks those are places that have mask mandates will those continue we don't know so this actually is a pretty has a potential to have pretty big impacts on how we do things but I think the thing that kind of concerns me about this I appreciate the CDC acting on data and I think that is very important and that helps with support of the CDC and and and belief in the system and I appreciate that I think where I get concerned is that if you look at what the CDC released it's a lot of ifs if you can stay out of six feet if you are not sharing air with that person for an extended period of time more than two to five minutes if everyone around you is vaccinated like there's lots of ifs involved and for example if I am on a hike and I'm keeping pace with someone who is just a few feet in front of me I am sharing air with them actually for a pretty long time so this is the part that kind of scares me is that I don't want to paint with a broad brush but I feel like this pandemic has shown us that sometimes large groups of people are not good with the gray area and and the ifs and the qualifiers yeah I think you're right but so let me give you some quotes from medical professionals great about this so related to the question of what do we know about the likelihood of SARS-CoV-2 transmission outdoors monica gondi mdmph infectious diseases doctor professor of medicine at uc san francisco says the risk of outside transmission is very low because viral particles disperse effectively in the outside air a study in china which involved careful contact tracing discovered that just one of 7,324 infection events investigated was linked to outdoor transmission in a recent analysis over 232,000 infections in ireland only one case of covid-19 and every thousand was traced to outdoor transmission and a scoping review from the university of canterbury concluded that outdoor transmission was rare citing the opportunity costs of not encouraging the public to congregate outdoors overall transmission is around 5000 times less likely to happen outside than inside so if you're the kind of person who thinks about cost benefit analysis risk analysis you know you can make that choice of mask or no mask and you can be comfortable with the gray area of you know 5000 times less likely to be transmitted but if you need certainty just wear your mask you know don't don't worry about it if it makes you uncomfortable just wear a mask and that that'll be fine but just know that there is data out there um it is also a seamshaw he's a professor of community and family medicine professor of psychiatry at baler college of medicine says that what the cdc is saying is that if someone is outside you don't have to wear a mask that's a relief for people who do a lot of outdoor activities the ambiguity ambiguity is gathering size because a lot of people are worried about what gathering size they're talking about and that gets at the if they have another question based on the cdc guidance how should people decide what size small group is acceptable for masculine maskless outdoor gatherings and this is definitely the the gray area because you have less risk to vaccinated people more risk to unvaccinated people um monica ghandi again recommends unvaccinated people in crowds or packed packed situations put on their masks but again if you're on a sidewalk walking down the street it's not necessary and there aren't a lot of people around congregated that's not necessarily as much of an issue um so it is it is vague it it's very vague i'm old enough to remember when restaurants uh had smoking sections oh yeah you brought up yeah you've brought up the smoking before the air travels the air travels so you know you were talking about being a few feet behind a hiker if you're downwind 30 40 50 feet away from a smoker you can smell that i mean it's strong enough to be to be like right so there's even the outdoors this is not going to be perfect but i love those uh i love those numbers about at least the traceability uh the rates being so low uh the other thing is if there's somebody in there in the youtube chat talking about anti-maskers on their facebook channel you know in the study i would love to follow up on this whole pandemic is the rates of std's amongst anti-maskers versus maskers because i have a feeling there's a correlation between who's got what based on that's funny the the the resistance for using uh personal protection yeah yeah i think the the other thing that that um hopefully won't be an issue because we've been doing this for over a year but that i was thinking about was um between the time when they first started saying okay you need to wear a mask when you're inside and then that time when at least in my area there was a crackdown on being outside and wearing masks mask compliance indoors increased because people were habit forming yeah and that's that's the other kind of social science side of this concern that i have is that if you're breaking that habit that we spent a year building is that going to impact people's behavior indoors it won't if it won't if regulations stay in place to keep wearing masks indoors it's very hard to to actually kind of police every single person in an indoor space but yeah i mean it's tough i understand there's lots of factors going on and if we're going to be doing this for another year i hope not but it's going to be a lot easier if you can be maskless outside and i do understand that yep it's going to be some time we will get there especially if people vaccinate the more people who are vaccinated the less spread of the virus there will be the less possibility of transmission there will be and then we'll be able to go maskless all over the place again um and the final story that is great news follows up on a bunch of different questions that we've had one whether or not the vaccines prevent transmission of the virus not just decrease disease severity and we've had some data coming out that yes indeed they do prevent transmission but then the question is well recently we're fine there was a big big article in the new york times about people only getting their first shot and not necessarily going in for their second shot we know that the second shot can confer up to 95 percent protection from going into the hospital the johnson and johnson vaccine was keeping people out of the hospital right and left fizer vaccine keeping people out of the hospital reducing disease severity but after two doses but what about disease transmission what about infection and transmission well a study out of public health england finds that after just one dose of fizer people who became and the astrazeneca vaccine people who became infected with covid so they were protected a little but they got they got sick they got infected they were between 38 and 49 percent less likely to pass it on to members of their household than unvaccinated individuals so the bottom line is that even with one dose you are protected a little bit you're not going to be as sick not end up in the hospital necessarily and you're going to be protecting those around you even more just one dose helps two doses is best if you need the two-dose regime yes but if you're afraid of the side effects you've been hearing those the second dose first dose is easy so just go get the first one and then think about it and the second dose the side effects are really only it's only a half measure to get at least that's you understand what i'm just saying there blare i'm not saying you only need the first one i'm saying if you're not getting it yet let's do the first one and then you can decide and some people have put it off because they're waiting because they haven't been able to get an appointment or for whatever reason they didn't go into their second appointment and it just hasn't happened yet some people are afraid of the second dose side effects and they don't affect everybody they really only affect like 20 to a quarter of individuals i mean that in any way that is like but none of the side effects to this point that i've heard of are severe adverse events they are all just not nice side effects that it's like okay headache sweats fever wake up the next day you're fine i've got i've got i've got an egg tinnitus is one egg sized uh lymph node or something underneath my armpit that has not gone away for what's it been two weeks yeah but you know i also am not in a gonna likely end up in a hospital in a respirator so your immune system is activated joint pain arthritis um some autoimmune disorders may flare up because your immune system is working really hard because of the vaccine but um i don't know it's everything points to being better off with a vaccine and our communities being better off with the vaccine overall fada got the second one this morning okay i celebrate every person who gets vaccinated thank you thank you for protecting your community thank you for being a part of public health public thank you for your service thank you thank you yes anyhow fada yeah let us know about your side effects but that it's good news the vaccine reduces transmission even with one dose this is going to help reduce the spread of the virus let's get there one more perfect perfect that's right yeah yeah get the first shot stay three feet away wash your hands for 10 seconds you know if that's if those half measures are all you can do at least at least uh you're trying i guess we try we try this is this weekend science we've been having a lot of fun so far we still have more stories to come if you would like to keep this weekend science going help be a part of producing the show by helping to fund what we do head over to twist.org click on the patreon buttons and choose your level of support 10 dollars and up and we'll thank you by name at the end of the show it's a really great great thing to be a part of the community of people who help to keep twist going weekend and we week out thank you for your support we really can't do this without you all right y'all it's time for a certain part of the show it's full of what it squeaky things and whoowing things and flappy things and slimy things oh it's time for Blair's animal corner with Blair head no pet at all if you want to hear about animals she's your girl except for giant I have sea spongas what you know spongas you go you you wipe things you do the dishes spongas you know spongos spongos yes you know what you're talking about sea spongos um this sea sponges sorry they um they are what we consider sessile what does sessile mean what does it mean what does it mean oh oh uh um attach to something and not swimming around they don't know yeah not dormant necessarily but definitely not moving so articles are sessile barnacles are sessile um urchins or not urchin sorry anemones anemones are sessile corals are sessile they're not moving around to different places on the seafloor they might move around within their spot to feed but they're not they're not on the move well so sponges have always been described once they're adults as sessile they have a larval phase that they can move around but once they find a spot they plant so researchers this week have described mysterious trails of sponge spicules spike lice spike like support elements in sponges in paths across the seafloor in the arctic ocean um these trails they think are actually traces of motility of the sponges no yes so this is from max plank institute of marine microbiology and um the alford wigner helmholtz center for polar and marine research it looks as though these sea sponges have crawled around in two different positions sponges as i said they were considered sessile they have no muscles they have no specialized organs for moving around they can attract they're spongy they they can retract their external um kind of if there's some sort of external stimulation like they need to to eat they can move their body around a little bit by contracting or expanding their bodies but they haven't really seen in the wild sponges moving there's been a tiny bit of evidence of sponges moving in the lab but they don't know if this is anecdotal there's something if there was a current in the tank there's something going out right so this was from video captured in 2016 this was a survey of submerged peaks of the permanently ice covered langzith ridge in the arctic ocean this there was a towed marine camera sled and a hybrid remotely operated vehicle h rov and this showed the peaks of the ridge covered by some of the densest communities of sponges the world has ever seen so many sponges the researchers determined that the impressive sponge populations were three species geodia par parva geodia hencheli and stiletta raffidio fora nice that means something to you just basically needed oh there were three main species of sponges on these ridges but what was wild besides the fact that this is this huge group of sponges was that there were trails of sponge spicules they mentioned before they saw nearly 70 percent of their images containing living sponges that had trails in them so where there were sponges there were trails the trails were several centimeters in height up to many meters long and they often correct connected directly to living sponges so this really looked like you were seeing the the kind of the treadmarks of these sponges and um like the treadmarks of our mars rover except it's these sponges yes and so uh they had they made 3d models from the images and video to show the way the trails were interwoven and the the findings suggest that the moving sponges they sometimes change direction which shows that they're not just getting pushed or pulled by currents or gravity it seems like they're actually moving intentionally in a direction and that's also because often these trails would go uphill so despite not having locomotory organ systems or or structures or anything that would make us think that they could move it looks like they're they're wiggling around the seafloor and so there there's a few theories about why they might be moving around it could be to get food it could be driven by scarce arctic resources so this is in the arctic ocean there's not a lot going on um but also so I was thinking about these ridges that a lot of them were up on and the way that currents move in water flows that could be kind of a quick condense of very sparse nutrients in the water column so the the the concentration of nutrients might be higher at those ridge points and if that's the case then that might be a good spot for sponges to hang out um so this looks like there's feeding and population density behavioral trends that we've previously seen in sponges when when they're in one spot and it was kind of assumed that it was just the larva picking a spot to settle but now we think maybe they're on the move it's also possible of course that movement might have something to do with reproduction or dispersal but for now it looks like it's probably for feeding and so the next step for these researchers is to do a whole bunch of time lapse imagery and other studies on these wild sponges to see really how much they're moving why all that good stuff so so uh immediately uh the thing that jumps out is that this is in the Arctic which is uh more of a life desert than other places on the planet where you'll find sponges and abundance and so it could just be that because there's nothing else around disturbing the trails they're just that obvious there whereas it's been going on everywhere else that there's sponges but we never notice because the seafloor is just too busy or do Arctic species have to move around because it's a desert and whereas other places they don't just go great questions yeah perhaps to be answered in the future looking at sponge motility yeah there you go who knew so once again a rewrite of the textbooks yeah wow this makes you think so much so differently about those natural sponges that you get for your kitchen kiki say it right sponges thank you you're welcome okay all right moving from sponges to fruit flies i don't know how to mispronounce that let's talk about fruit fleas please flies not please please fly flings anyway fruit flies they're extreme ultra marathon runners or flyers as the case may be so to give you a bit of a background here in 2005 there was an ultra marathon runner that ran continuously 560 kilometers or 350 miles in 80 hours without sleeping or stopping and if you turn that into body lengths which is how we often talk about the extreme movers in the animal kingdom that distance was roughly 324,000 times the runner's body like that oh why would you do that why indeed but you could consider that one of the most extreme cases of single trip movement in humans yeah so looking at fruit flies this is a study coming out of caltech they discovered that fruit flies can fly up to 15 kilometers which is about nine miles in a single journey which does not sound very far except that that is six million times their body length so that would be the equivalent of that marathon runner running 10,000 kilometers and remember that first case that i mentioned was 560 kilometers so that's that's a lot so this is also much farther than most migratory bird species fly in a day so this is a pretty extreme case of animal movement and if you think about fruit flies and how you usually see them they're usually just kind of flying around in one place kind of aimlessly buzzing and stopping and buzzing and stopping so this this seems very different than how you might think about a fruit fly so this is all because of something called or something a paradox that was discovered in the 1940s by theodosius dobzansky and other pioneers in population genetics very good name strong name for a geneticist i would say um who studied drosophila species in the south of this united states and the paradox was that fly populations were separated by thousands of kilometers but they were very genetically similar more genetically similar than could be explained by estimates of how far tiny flies could fly so this is the paradox how are they maintaining this gene pool if they're separated by such space that a fly could never fly they're flying they're flying they're doing it yeah so in the 1970s and 80s there were some population geneticists that wanted to address this paradox so what they did is they coded hundreds of thousands of fruit flies in fluorescent powder and released them in death alley fly be free in the and the group detected a few fluorescent flies in buckets of rotting bananas over 15 kilometers away the next day so that's pretty far you know wind can carry an insect pretty far interesting you bring that up so that was exactly the question how long did it take them to fly there were they just blown there by wind was it an accident so that's what this caltech paper was specifically looking at so they went to the mojave desert and they released a bunch of flies so how does this scientifically work how do you find a fly in the middle of the desert so they went to coyote lake which is a dry lake bed 140 miles from caltech in the mojave desert they had hundreds of thousands of common lab fruit flies drosophila melanogaster and they had traps and set locations and they wanted to measure how long it took insects to fly there so they set up 10 odor traps in a circular ring each was along a one kilometer radius from the the release site so they were just measuring how long it took the flies to go one kilometer each trap contained fermenting apple juice champagne yeast and their products which are come to accident ethanol irresistible to fruit flies it's not a flies yeah the traps also had a camera and they had a one-way valve so that the flies could go in but not out and then they set up weather stations to measure wind speed to your point kiki and they were able to look at the direction at the release site throughout each experiment so they could see how they were affected by the wind they did not put any fluorescent powder on these guys because they didn't want to weigh them down or anything like that but how they did know that these weren't wild flies is that they are extremely rare in the mojave so if you're going to find a fruit fly it's probably going to be one of these released ones so before the release they placed the traps they checked them over time and confirmed we are not catching fruit flies they are not around here then they put these hundreds of thousands of flies in a bucket with a bunch of sugar so that they were energized but there was no protein which means they had a drive for protein rich food which were in those lures so that would force them to disperse in search quote the person who stayed at the center of the ring to open the lids off of all the buckets witnessed quite a spectacle it was beautiful there were so many flies so many that you were overwhelmed by the whirring drone a few of them would land on you often crawling in your mouth ears and nose so that was the spectacle at the center where a mask people even when you're outdoors wear a mask for no other reason wear a mask then the hundreds of thousands of flies you might encounter yes so it took about 16 minutes for the first fruit flies to cover one kilometer to reach the traps which corresponded to approximately a meter per second so they considered that the lower limit because these first flies they they might have buzzed around in circles they they might not have gone on a straight line so this is considered their lower limit of speed previous studies from the lab showed them that fully fed fruit flies had the energy to fly continuously for up to three hours so when they add those two things together you get 12 to 15 kilometers in a single flight even in a gentle breeze and they could go further if aided by the wind wind yes and that distance as previously mentioned is six million times the average body length of a fruit fly so now they were able to propose a model suggesting that each fly it looks as though they are choosing a random direction but they know from previous studies that they do use the sun to help kind of guide them as they go so it would appear that these flies are just starting to fly and they're using the sun as their guide to continue in that direction and they're not just kind of bobbing around trying to find is there something over here is there something over here no they're flying in one direction and waiting to catch a sniff and as soon as they catch a sniff then they beeline or fly line or whatever you want to say to the food source so all this to say this is impacting kind of how we think about fruit flies and how they move impacting how we think about animals that are kind of those marathon runners flyers whatever you want to call them and I think also the thing that I find very interesting about this is this speaks to mechanics of small insects and when we think about invasive animals or pests this could be helpful information to know kind of what a flying insect could be be capable of fruit flies could be the superstars of this or they could be very average we don't know right I think that's a really great point because if something is introduced to an area how long is it going to take for that insect to spread yes and maintain their gene pool because they can spread back and forth yes yeah so that's very that has very huge ecological ramifications yeah yeah wow cool thanks Blair who knew those fruit flies in my kitchen if I chase them out they might run a really long way yeah I'm gonna run six million body lengths oh why did Justin leave right now before his stories there he is oh my goodness well that does it for the animal corner this is this weekend science if you're interested in some merchandise we've got some wonderful Blair's animal corner artwork on some cool products at our Zazzle store so if you head to twist.org and click on our Zazzle link you might be able to find something that you enjoy but right now there's more science for you to enjoy we were talking animal corner stuff so Justin you want to bring us some endangered animals ah yes I was going to let the coffee machine hopefully run through its course before I was needing to talk but I will go ahead and speak do I have endangered animals well I do have an endangered animal okay so this is an infectious disease story but infectious disease is apparently a threat to endangered chimpanzees the very ones that we are most familiar with that were studied by Jane Goodall at the Gombe National Park in Tanzania research there led by scientists at Emory University shows that nearly half of the fecal samples from wild chimpanzees contain bacteria that is resistant to a major class of antibiotics now it's not common for the chimpanzees to take antibiotics being that they are wild so what is going on how do they happen to be happen to be resistant to antibiotics if they don't take them turns out they do take them they take a lot of them one thing the antibiotic is commonly used by people in the vicinity of the park this is published in the journal Pathogens this is Thomas Glashby senior author of the study our results suggest that antibiotic resistant bacteria is actually spreading from people to non-human primates by making its way into the local watershed people are bathing and washing in the streams contaminating the water with drug resistant bacteria where then wild chimpanzees and baboons will drink so this has got a couple of things first of all they also tested people in the neighboring village and found a lot of the people there also have this bacteria that is resistant to the antibiotic that they currently use to treat gastrointestinal problems diarrhea type issues that they may have so this is not on yeah go ahead i'm just wondering is this like why is this is this people tracking it into the park on their shoes is this people using nature as a dumping ground a bathroom like what's going on there well according to what they or they said it was the water supply yeah it's it's swimming and bathing you know this is probably not an area that has a lot of infrastructure around the park so right yeah yeah so uh so phonomide resistance appeared in 74% of the human samples so 74% of the human samples were resistant to uh the antibiotic antibiotic resistant bacteria in them 48% of the chimpanzee samples and 34% of the bamboo samples so that's a pretty striking you know regular domestic animals it was about 17% so a normal domestic you know cat dog pet kind of a thing isn't getting the kind of exposure that the wild animals in the area so partly it's like okay well that's uh not good for chimpanzees their health could be affected by it i guess if we need to give them an antibiotic treatment because they're already in danger thing but that's that's the less likely the more likely scenario this is now we're creating a reservoir for antibiotic resistance in a creature that is not going to get the alternative version of it that knocks out the infection that could that could quell or remove those those those bacteria from the population and we're creating a sort of a pathogen bomb uh out there in nature this reservoir of resistance that we're passing on two other creatures and if you can pass it to a creature they can pass it back they can chance pass it back at some other point or to some other people so anyway that's not great news no no what are we going to do do we keep people out of nature like you've said that's been your your call for years justin or is do we have to figure something else out for antibiotic well i think getting getting better well and getting it's time to admit that we are just done with nature we're just through that we don't need the animals we don't need it just get out right my understanding is that a lot of this isn't just from ecotourism it's from people who actually live in those areas and water treatment not being up to snuff so i think that's the real call to action here is to help make sure that all people on this planet have access to clean water yeah maybe maybe not so the other part of it is also that uh the antibiotics that they're using that the bacteria are becoming resistant to are over the counter uh so people are taking them for whatever reason they feel better and then they're stopping yeah right so so some of it yes is is going to be uh controlling waterways but another portion of that is a responsible informed antibiotic use that's done in a responsible way to prevent uh resistance from building up in the population to begin with and i assume if this kind of thing is happening in this one park that there are examples of this to be found around the world that multiple different species multiple that where humans go where we leave our refuse where we uh where we soil the water that other animals use we are spreading these genes for antibiotic resistance and creating lots of reservoirs it's not just going to be these chimpanzees i mean these animals we have to the the primates we maybe have to worry about for um returning the favor at some point because there is they're so related to us but um yeah i i think it's something that we need to be thinking about everywhere yeah we could be creating all sorts of reservoirs that we're not even aware of uh you're absolutely right i think i think it i think it is likely that it is going to be easier to do or more prevalent in the chimpanzee populations because of the shared maybe a maybe there's a large microbiota sharing that's taking place there compared to other animals i'm not really i don't know that but uh it wouldn't seem to especially if you live in the same region eat the same food uh swim in the same streams your microbiota might be a little closer than in other places i don't know i don't know did you have another story yes yes this is uh konstantina theophanopoulos graduate student their work focused on how the hormone oxytocin influences human speech development she was preparing to use those findings to do a further study to investigate how songbirds uh uh do speech development how they learn development yeah yeah how they learn this thing right at the so she's doing this at rocket fellow university uh she's taking this uh hormone oxytocin it's known to do this human speech influence development see what if how that hormone operates in birds only problem is uh birds don't have oxytocin there goes the whole concept for what i wanted to study uh quoting konstantina theophanopoulos or fun uh shoot i'm saying that wrong konstantina theophanopoulos uh everywhere that i looked in the genome i was unable to find a gene called oxytocin and birds konstantina theophanopoulos eventually came across mesotocin which is an analog for oxytocin and birds reptiles and amphibians so maybe it would work the same maybe it was similar enough maybe it's the same general pathways to take place uh interestingly she started looking to see what else didn't have oxytocin fish fish do not have oxytocin they have isotocin unless it's a spiny dogfish in which case it would be valotocin another different hormone so everybody's got these different hormones similar issues then started to arise when studying other hormones within the birds vasotocin which doesn't exist in humans we have vasopressin but that that's completely different than vasotocin which is in birds and then the oxytocin receptors that she had studied looking for the analog and birds you know she there was this oxtr and mammal studies it might be vt3 or mtr or meso r and other species just a the nomenclature of everything was so different that you would think these systems were completely totally devoid of interconnection right so uh i started getting lost said professor eric jarvis whose lab konstantina theophanopilu was working in i said before we dig deeper we need to make sure we've made the right assumptions about which human and bird genes are evolutionarily related so that digging deeper led to a paper which has been published in the nurture nature uh in the journal nature and the nurture journal nature theophanopilu and jarvis demonstrate that the human hormone known as oxytocin is in fact one and the same gene across all major vertebrate species and lineages the similarities are in fact so striking that scientists advocate for that the scientists uh jarvis and theophanopilu are now advocating for cleaning up the jargon once we're all applying a new standard nomenclature for their hormones known as oxytocin and for vasopressin because that's also the same yeah as the so the this reminds me of how um when i took animal physiology in school all of the structures in an animal's body have names but then when you take human anatomy the exact same structures have different names even though they're the exact same structures in a mouse or a cat or a human they have different names because they're inside a human yeah it's interesting because eric jarvis has been involved in uh the defining and naming the anatomy the neuroanatomy of birds for many years he runs an a bird lab he's he's been he's this is what he does and he studies the evolutionary relationships between different animals and so it's been interesting to watch over the years the conversation about the cortex in humans the hippocampus the limbic system and all these structures in the human brain and then come to find what okay we've got these analogous structures in the bird brain how analogous are they where well they have like very similar structures and what was being called the pallium of birds is pretty much like a cortex except it's not called the cortex because it's structured a little bit differently but basically it's the same thing so he's seen this before so it's an interesting one brain region that uh always got lost in birds that is the hippocampus no i'm sorry no it uh it was the olfactory olfactory yeah the olfactory lobe got lost in birds can't smell because it would fall off of the brain right yeah so but this is also you know and you're talking about we're talking about anatomy level when you get to the genomic level yeah it is insane if you go look up any gene uh you start to find that the gene also has 13 other names that has been given over time it has been discovered over and over again over and over and over again yeah this is partly due to the fact that scientists who were uh we were doing gene sequencing piecemeal to begin with because it was very difficult and expensive and so you have different species of bacteria and different uh uh larger uh complex life forms that have been sequenced separately from the group and everything's being called a different thing and then it started over time realizing oh this is the same code and in your creature as it is in my organism as it is in that plant or whatever right and so then they started combining them saying okay these genes do this but they have still a dozen more names per gene for because of that reason you know uh one of the one of the fascinating ones is the the gene that sporulates yeast uh is also the or that does the involved in the budding off of of yeast the reproduction of yeast is also involved in the production of neurons you know we have these great crossovers but because we have so much different nomenclature across it's yeah we need to clean up the language and it's sooner the better this is the better there's no time like the present to fix your words people well it's not it's not just cleaning up the language and fixing the words it's having somebody take a comprehensive look across comparatively across species boundaries because like you said researchers get into what they are studying and they're not usually if you're studying a bird you're just studying that bird you're not studying humans or mice or chimpanzees or yeast you're studying that bird and so you're not paying attention to the other disciplines of science that may have been involved but sometimes these the discipline disciplines cross and they become interdisciplinary and so this is an example of that and this is the scientific process this is fixing it it's like going hey i saw this thing and now let's organize it better this is the self-organizing process of science which i think is fantastic and it's and it can be difficult too because you can have you know you can have a gene that looks like a gene especially when you start to get into microorganisms and you have things that are maybe separated lineage-wise by uh 50 million years and you might have similar genes that do completely different things that's fine when it comes down to the genomic level name them the same thing if you study that organism you know it does this in your organism fine you're talking about you're talking about the anatomy of vertebrates that do not have that long of a history of separation for a lot of it that do have so much crossover on the anatomy level at the very least in these hormones that are chemically molecularly the same thing they have genes are producing them they're looking the same just call them the same thing if they function differently you can notate that but you don't need you don't need and then you can actually have like you're saying better collaboration because you can have somebody read somebody else's paper on a completely different organism and go oh wow that's interesting i understand that that has a correlation to what i've been studying as opposed to sounds like something very different exactly exactly they did all have the same idea though meso and vaso and tosans and they were all in there but but anyhow i got some studies for you you want to hear some things about brains yes well speaking of you know these people trying to figure out the oxytocin system and nomenclature and they've been putting together using genomics as a tool well researchers at uc davis have been using mouse brains as a tool for determining hallucinogenic drugs that don't have hallucinogenic effects wait what yes so one of the issues we talked about it many times on the show uh with hallucinogenic drugs ketamine mushrooms lsd they show promise in treating mental health issues however the hallucinogenic aspect is one part that many people might not be comfortable with and would probably not want to take the drug as a treatment because of and how many people have heard terrible things through their lives because of the war on drugs and all of the the issues that people lose their minds to hallucinogens and all the bad things bad drugs right so now you're supposed to take them to help you but what if we could find compounds that are related to the hallucinogens yet not hallucinogenic drugs that still bind with the serotonin receptor in the brain and have the serotonergic effect of say lsd or or uh mushrooms but don't cause any hallucinations suddenly you have something that may help people infanord prefect in the chat room is saying that's the point of it that's the part that helps we don't know that for sure and i mean that is a quite that is a question is it the hallucin is is part of it the hallucination that lends itself to a psychological aspect of the brain stimulating itself in a particular way that leads to a certain treatment that i mean is that part of it or does the hallucination have to be there at all and this is a question but we couldn't answer it previously because we couldn't figure out one without the other i thought that was the point of the micro dosing studies because those didn't cause hallucinations right but as the the one study that we talked about on the show a couple of weeks ago found micro dosing doesn't do anything right such it's it's such a small dose it's not doing anything so it seems like the result is placebo effect at best but in this new situation these researchers at uc davis have used optogenetics to genetically modify mice that were already genetically modified to have a nervous anxiety disorder and to to show depressive symptoms one of the things that they do they get depressed and normal mice when they are given sugar water will drink sugar water depressed mice when given a choice between regular water and sugar water just go to the regular water they don't even get excited by the sugar water anymore i know it's like i'm so sad i'm not even going to drink the sugar water man um so they have this model of depression in mice that they were able to access and in their work what they did is they genetically modified the mice so that the serotonin receptor in the brain was activated to show a light when that serotonin receptor was bound to buy a compound that they gave the mice so one of the they gave the mice a number of compounds there were like 34 compounds that they tested three of them actually stimulated the the serotonin receptor caused the brain to light up and they they had a signal two of them were related to five m e o d m t which is known to cause hallucinatory experiences one of them a a z a 154 which is a compound that nobody had ever there's nobody who's ever written about it ever before they didn't that there was like there's nothing this is a brand new thing but they tried it because it was a compound that was related to these others um and it stimulated the receptors but they have this this measure of what the animals do and they found that on the five m e o d m t the animals have this head shaking that they do which is they say a very good indicator of a hallucinatory experience and so on the d m t like substances the mice their brains lit up and they shook their heads around a lot so they were having a thing uh the those with the a a z however their brains lit up but they acted just like normal um and they were also able to show that with these different compounds the mice started drinking sugar water again started doing things they enjoyed again yes it alleviated their depressive symptoms they started doing enjoyable things and they didn't shake their heads around like they were trying to clear them whatever was going on in there uh yeah so this uh what it what they're saying this system can point to is a way to differentiate between drugs that cause certain side effects and have effects that you are looking for as a treatment and this could potentially be used as a platform for animal testing of a large number of these g protein coupled type uh uh stimulatory compounds where they where they hit these where they they access and they stimulate these particular receptors on cell surfaces and cause a sensory cascade a signaling cascade through the cell the there's a large number of them that are used for different current mental health treatments lots of different reasons and if we could go through them perhaps we could create better treatments with fewer side effects it's pretty awesome am i the only one wondering right now what mice hallucinate nope i'm very curious i've been thinking about this all day do yeah do what is it do androids dream of electric sheep yeah so so this requires i think uh longer term study yes uh my sense is that this is treating a symptom and not doing necessarily a radical long-term change like we have seen take place with uh previous experiments with humans and uh psilocybin why would you why would you guess that i guess that because if you so there's something about psychedelics that uh are intense enough that i believe have more than a chemical change take place but it's a psychological reference point if you have delved into a uh a a psychedelic experience there's part of it that is perhaps is somewhat psychotic and some of that is an extreme experience of senses and and thought patterns the rest of which by which when you return to normalcy you have something to contrast an anxiety against or a yeah you have a you have a sort of like okay this is weird i've dealt with weirder this is now something that i can handle totally fine and totally but what if you could create similar rewiring artificially yeah that's the part that i'm having a hard time because i've you know that's whether or not it's a a chemical rewiring that's taken place based on a chemical exchange without your brains the participation or whether your brain's not consciously participating i right is still participating chemically yeah i it is either way but my it's sort of like the difference between having a therapist and taking a drug in lieu of therapy and i am putting a psychedelic trip into the category of spending time talking to a trained psychological professional i'm putting those in that same category and putting the drug thing over on the other side so but yes i think uh i think the best comment in the chat room uh it's like christian rock you're not making jesus cool you're ruining rock and roll thank you vada yeah i mean that's what i that's what i was mentioning earlier is you know we don't know whether the experience requires the conscious psychological input aspect and that is something that needs to be tested and we we need to be able to find the compounds to be able to go okay let's try this and see if it works maybe it won't work as well as the full psychedelic experience maybe you need that we don't know that yet but we do know that these cycle psychedelics at this point are very promising for helping a lot of mental health issues and so what if we could make them available to more people i mean one of the things that did bother me about the uh the wording of some of the some of the the research article was that they um they didn't talk about this aspect just as a way to help more a larger population of people gain access to the medication they were set using it potentially as a way to combat drug abuse that if you get rid of the reasons that people abuse drugs and i mean i don't know people who abuse psychedelics but i i mean they're they're probably out there but i gotta guess that psychedelic abuse is uh the far that's a reaching term that's a red herring i feel like in the let's get rid of painkillers yeah i let's get rid of all pain medicine then if that's the if that's the standard that we're going to use that's so silly yep anyway my last story for the night has to do with uh brain cells more brain cells and um looking at alzheimer's brains the salk institute rust gauge of the salt salk institute and his team published in the journal cell stem cell this week their work taking the skin cells fibroblasts of alzheimer's patients and reprogramming them to turn them into brain cells neuronal cells and then comparing those alzheimer patient induced neuronal cells with induced neuronal cells of non alzheimer's patients to find out what kind of differences there are between them this is an amazing use of stem cell technology this read this taking cells back in time kind of approach or being able to re differentiate cells and give them a new a new leeson existence because normally we can look at mri's fmri's we're getting better at looking at brains from the outside in but you can't take somebody's brain out of their head you can't take pieces of their brain out of their head to sample it just oh you have all this disease let me take a scoop of brain so that i can look at this and do a research study it's really frowned upon it's frowned upon yes but you can do it just saying it's right so usually researchers are dealing with the brains of deceased and they're dealing with deceased brain tissue and so this they were able to show and have showed in previous work that if you take the fibroblasts of an adult and turn them into the neurons of an adult that even though they've changed from skin cells to brain cells they're still adult cells so you're still you haven't taken them back to babyhood they're not baby cells they are adult cells so you are just looking at the the transcription factors the proteins all the aspects of these cells that would be getting expressed in their brain except in a dish in the lab and by doing this they were able to see the difference in the profiles between these healthy and Alzheimer's diseased brain cells and what they discovered is there's like a whole suite of differences first big difference is that the the the brain cells of the Alzheimer's patients don't have as many synapses they don't connect as much they don't grow as many connections to connect to other cells as the healthy cells do they also um what is under the other they also have changed their profile all of their proteins and they have a bunch of genes that are active to also take them into an undifferentiated state kind of like a cancer cell so that they are um less brain celly and more and and less less defined as a cell type this is something that happens in cancer cells as well that the the kind of definition of the cell as the cell sees itself is changed they also find that the cells have much higher DNA damage a lot of cells cell stress going on there's what they call epigenetic erosion so all the windings and the the tight packing of the DNA is loosened up and things are getting in there and getting broken and some things are getting transcribed that shouldn't be transcribed there is oncogenic signaling happening there's a whole bunch of differences that they wouldn't have seen otherwise as a result of kind of taking these cells into so what i'm hearing is if if i know or someone i love is uh is it looks like they're getting Alzheimer's and they're early stages then you want to take skin samples early on to then culture into healthy brain cells to do a brain transplant right that's really what this is about yes the brain transplant because the brain transplant would not change personality yeah it is interesting to know though that for if you're doing stem cell stuff based on skin cells you want healthy skin cells and you want skin cells from kind of an ideal time i guess yeah from the body right yeah you want skin you want skin cells that are of an idealized age not aging so you're gonna get you're you're gonna have some skin cells on ice this is future medicine right they're gonna harvest from you like when you're when you're at the peak peak health like 25 they're gonna take some and freeze it so one of the in the last aspects of this study that's really interesting is they uh they took induced pluripotent stem cells and so that's it's not just taking a fibroblast and a skin cell turning it into a brain cell this is like taking that uh that neuron and going okay neuron we're gonna take you back this is the rejuvenation the the time machine the neural time machine that takes the cell back to its baby state and what they found is that by reprogramming by rejuvenating the cells it reversed the Alzheimer's disease effects and so also they're they're what they're saying from this study is that Alzheimer's disease is definitely a disease of aging so but it's not that everybody's gonna get it but it happens as a result of aging and so perhaps there are things in the time aging timeline that could be treated or where things could be slowed down interesting i'm getting to the point where as many of us are perhaps where they need to hurry up and create the drug that you take that ceases your aging i'm gonna need it sooner then later now we're running out like i thought this by the time i got to this age we'd already be done with aging not still working on it getting like and that's getting to the point where i'm like okay okay you gotta hurry up now you gotta hurry up because i'm not gonna be this young forever and and this young already's got more gray hair than i started with so we need to hurry up get this anti-aging medicine it's still you got time i know you're out there i have a little bit more than you i have a little bit more but it's still it's still coming for me kids today kids today understand you need to really invest and get on this right away you need to stay because you need to do it in your life you can't wait for somebody else to create the anti-aging wonder drug that keeps you from ever getting old and dying you that needs to happen and this generation didn't do it we're sorry we were busy i don't know what we're learning so there i mean i feel like every every year there's more information about what it is that leads to aging we're finding out so many new things and they're all you know there are people out there who are very interested in living forever and so they're taking all of this information and they're starting to put it all together and they're gonna package it into treatments and plans and you know boxes that can get delivered to your house every month yeah the generation before us they gave us they gave us vitamins they said that would do it no vitamins didn't do it oh vitamins oh vitamins remember that remember here's something to make your pee really brightly colored enjoy just passing through you know what the vitamin said you know what the vitamin said after it was swallowed what i'm just passing through that's great i love that they're not completely useless but they're not the panacea of everlasting life or health i don't know i think listening to this week in science is the panacea of everlasting mental health and curiosity so unfortunately it isn't so this is so this is actually i didn't bring this not helping i know but i didn't bring this i didn't yeah i listen to show you live forever because we're one to care but there was a story i didn't bring that uh that said that uh having advanced education does not uh buffer you from neural degeneration it doesn't you just the fact that you keep your mind active on these things and higher doesn't doesn't isn't a buffer against time and age and uh neural degeneration see that's interesting because i just read several articles related to the fact that retirement often is correlated with neural degeneration because you're using your brain less so yeah it's also happens at a certain age typically so there you go it's correlated with a certain age range this study was people who retired versus people who didn't of the same ages but it's fine okay okay but don't worry about it anyway he's trying to end this show is that where we are heading yeah she was doing a closer thing that's what that was is that what it was is that why he was okay so listen to the show and you'll stay smarter forever and transition transition transition can you just say transition does that is that a transition no no you have to be more clever be more clever this week in science making you more clever every day thank you everyone for listening have we done it i think we've done it another tight three hours another tight show there i hope everyone enjoyed that enjoyed all the time they got to spend with us i have shoutouts for wonderful people in our twist community fauna thank you so much for your help on show notes and on social media identity four thank you for recording the show gourd thanks for making those chat rooms flow rachel thank you for your assistance to my wonderful co-hosts thank you very much for being here every week and to our patreon sponsors i say thank you thank you for supporting us on patreon it's amazing for yes so much helping is good thank you too i can get back to my window you know i put the window certain places so i can read it and then it ends up in the back behind thanks thank you carol cornfell jen myronek melanie stagman decram star karen tosy woody ms andrew beset chris wozniak dave bun gave a guard chef's dad hellsnider donathan styles aka don stylo john chiolly geome john lee ellie coffin gore of charmer shubu darwin hannah donald mondes steven alberon dowler darryl myshack stu paulik andrew swanson fredis 104 sky luke paul ronovich kevin reardon noodles jack brine carrington matt bass joshua furie shonanina lamb john mckay greg riley marqueson flow gene telly a steve leesman aka zima ken haze howard tan christopher rappin dania pierce and richard brendon minnish johnny gridley kevin railsback flying out christopher drier mark besaros ardeam greg briggs john atwood robert coburn reedy garcia dave wilkinson rodney lewis paul matt setter philip sheen curt larson craigland and mountensloth jim drapo sarah chavis sue doster jason old stave neighbor eric nap e o kevin parochan erin luthan steve de bell bob calder marjorie paul stanton pa paul disney patrick pecoraro tony steel ulysses adkins brian kondren and jason roberts thank you for all of your support on patreon and if you are interested in supporting us on patreon you can find information at twist.org click on the links on next week's show we will be back wednesday 8 p.m pacific time or 5 a.m central european time broadcasting live from our youtube and facebook channels and from twist.org slash live that's right and if you want to listen to us as a podcast just search for this week in science wherever podcasts are found if you enjoyed the show take out your phone text us to your friends get them to subscribe as well yeah for more information than anything you heard here today show notes and links to the stories that we reported on can be found at our website www.twist.org where you can also sign up for a newsletter if you're so inclined to read reading you can also contact us directly email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com justin at twistminion at gmail.com or me blair at blairbaz at twist.org just be sure to put twist T-W-I-S in the subject line or your email will be spam filtered into an anti-star you can also hit us up on the twitter where we are at twist science at dr kiki at jackson fly and at blairs 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 to in the night please let us know we'll be back here next week and we hope 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 world it says the science 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 hands and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand so everybody lives for scientific man and i'll broadcast my opinion all week in science this week in science science science this week in science this week in science this week in science science science science i've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what i say may not represent your views but i've done the calculations and i've got a plan if you listen to the science you may just yet understand that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to see so everybody listen to every week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science science science i've got a laundry list of items i want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness i'm trying to promote more rational thought and i'll try to answer any question you've got the half can i ever see the changes i seek when i can only set up shop one hour week in science is coming you know and listen to what we say and if you learn this week in science this week in science this week in science science science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in so i was trying to move my finger and my head in opposite directions and speed it up and it gets really hard yeah one way or the other and then try and speed it up oh yeah that's funny suddenly you're like synchronized oh no i just got dizzy that's all that happened we're gonna make you dizzy i'm so dizzy my head is spinning so i'm trying to get the workers to uh they need oxygen so i'm working the bellows you know but they're deep deep underground because i've invented something a gravity turbine well basically it's works like this you dig a really deep hole and you attach a rope to something heavy and then you drop it and it comes through the spin and it turns the generator so i figured we can just drop heavy things down a hole then we have free energy for everybody so i've been working on this this is what i am going this is what you've been working you've been digging been going no no no i don't dig i have workers who dig my the minions are digging but i i'm going i just i work the bellows because they complain they don't have oxygen at the bottom of the hole so that's the bottom of the hole there would be though oxygen at the bottom of the hole the atmosphere would fill it then it might get too hot and get burned off by the heat the deeper the hole gets uh the only person who's known to have jumped out of window while on lsd is frank olson he's an american bacteriologist and a biological warfare scientist who at the time uh jumped out of the tent story building of a tent floor of a Manhattan hotel he was staying at but there is some question about whether or not he was intentionally doing the drug or was thrown out of the window but it became it became frank go go look up frank olson go find out what that story's about that's interesting because um i know someone who uh told me a story from the 70s they were at a party and someone did that it was like a second story window i think they ended up being okay but yeah that so there was also from the 70s a public service a little filmy thing where they showed a person jumping out a second story window that one to everybody from the air is like oh yeah i happened that one time and they all describe like this party this same floor and this same thing it's like that's no you watched the thing you might have been high at the time it's not a real thing watch the public service message yeah yeah the evils of i got in trouble i got in trouble in the ninth grade i think when the they had the nancy reagan's just say no drugs you did lsd in the ninth grade just yes actually i did but this was but they have okay it might have been 10th grade i think it was nice anyway but they had this this spokesperson come from the just say another thing and then they were up at the front of the classroom and they were like there are 356 different chemicals in marijuana hand goes up in the back of the room inquiring mind yes you bend the back how many chemicals are in breakfast cereal how many of the chemicals that you describe are in other plants that we eat how many of the chemicals that you're talking about jesson you're a rabble rouser stop rabble rouser i got kicked out of class i got kicked out of class for asking those questions you are not following the message i got kicked out of the classroom for asking the follow-up scientific inquiry questions yeah but this has always been the thing you can't you can't uh you can't convince some people of anything obviously and then there's nothing no greater proof than a pandemic where everybody's life is that moment you know like hey gosh the whole world can come together if we were just attacked by aliens you know like the independence day movie like today will be independence day across the world we're all together because we have a common enemy that we must know that's not how it would happen half the population would would would say the aliens aren't real the other half would say that would side with them like it's just and then there'd be another half of the people who would be living underground hiding from both of those people there would there is no there is no we all come together with the same ideas on anything ever one of my favorite memes about the pandemic was about um you know i'm not gonna believe any zombie movies anymore unless there's someone running around saying that they don't believe the zombies are real you've got to be kidding i don't believe i don't believe in zombies fake news zombies only killed like one in a million people so i'll tell you what i'll tell you what zombies don't wear masks i'll tell you tell zombies are the ones without the masks whose brains have already been eaten that dares to send me yeah they did not they did not appreciate my counter pointing their uh just say no message fear mongering well it's frustrating because from marijuana is or is that just an alcohol thing question the frustrating thing about all that too is like it's it's very reminiscent to me of abstinence only sex ed the backfires completely tennis is like basically like let's not talk about it just never do it oh no they did it and they didn't do it safely state of Tennessee state of the entire state of Tennessee is the is the model of that where they stopped doing sex education and did abstinence education training of some sort and it resulted in the highest rate of teen pregnancies in the nation there you go that's it yeah well that's also you know like the thing about the drinking age being so high is like then you know 18 year olds and you send them off the call off to college they have to hide their drinking and they're not doing it safely and all these things right it's like if you if you don't stigmatize it they're allowed to drink from the time they're a senior in high school they get to you know they're still live at home they have their parents protection when they get into trouble they learn a little bit more about it before they're off on their own they don't have to hide they can drink out in the open you know there's all sorts of stuff about it that it's I feel like it's a lot of the same and then you know the same thing with drugs is like the whole idea beside behind all of it being illegal means that there's no regulation on any of it right so like so it really it makes it so much more dangerous because you could be thinking you have one thing and you're it's laced with another thing or anything else going on because you're not because it's not regulated or watched because it's all illegal no that's that's a great point that can be so many foul components that made the drug cheaper or cut it into more portions or whatever has been done to it that could be extremely harmful to the human body much more so than the drug you were thinking you were taking or attempting to take because you did your homework on that and that's fine so then you bought your illegal drug turns out didn't have quite the same ingredients as you expected it was padded with something else yeah and and so there's there's that whole of there's also you know the again to go back to like a high school mentality there was one kid in our group of friends whose parent was permissive of drug use amongst the teenagers that's the house that some nights we went and crashed at had we not had that house to crash out we still would have been out everybody was you know one of those oh yeah i'm staying over at johnny's house oh where are you going oh i'm going to billy's house we're still having to sleep but everybody had to sleep over in the same night at somebody else's house but none of it but we were all out you know me uh we don't do that kids by the way don't ever do that but uh we have that one you can have find my iphone turned on and you know exactly where everybody is but uh but that was the sort of interesting thing is like there was this one parent you could you could sort of say it was like the irresponsible parent or the cool parent or the whatever but it was the place that when we're like hey it's too cold or this night's rough let's go find shelter and be safe we had a safe place to go to so there's that too anyway the whole the whole way that america handles well we all way america handles everything at this point is pretty not this is helpful as it could be twisted it's not helpful because it's pro corporate and it's uh a lot of it is also based in the like this is how it's always been done it's just mentality right which is which is so funny i know um we have that conversation in my house all the time about like just because that's how it's always been done doesn't mean that's the right way to do it and also this country is way too young to be stuck in our ways compared to other countries on this planet like we have not been around that long so for us to be so stuck in this is how it's been done and this is what this says and and well we can't change this right now we're so young and i want to know how our solution to every problem became put people in jail yeah well there you and if it didn't fix it if it didn't fix the problem money if it didn't fix the problem put them in jail for longer yeah i didn't fix the problem put them in jail forever slavery is great in america also monetization of humans anymore we just have everybody in jail who are doing all the work for free or for really reduced wages which is basically slavery so it's like modern day slavery that our government is allowing to have happened when our government's us so we're allowing it to happen that's really awesome go united states that's my new song i like it because i get to be both pro america like while i'm singing it and also face some of the grim realities what needs to be fixed at the same time i like it yeah we're too young a country to have all this stuff happen it is what's happening and i have no idea was all of this people have some bad ideas people with money who wanted more money is it money is it all money is that what it is power which is separate from money it can they go hand in hand but they're not the same they're not the same thing they are here yeah they are well i gotta start my day i gotta get going uh it's been really these very positive thoughts oh boy it's been really go study denmark's system of jails and it's does not take government and how they do things there in denmark yeah i'll bring it back but i'm telling you i'm telling you it's gonna require a lot of uh not putting people in jail uh a lot of housing as a thing that everybody should have as a right as well as education and did you know in health care that the further you are away from access to higher education the higher your chance of drug abuse is fun fact fun fact all right good night everybody i like that fun fact have a great say good night are we we're all done are we is it just me you guys i was transitioning but if you're not ready i can talk let me i got my coffee the sun's out i can just i can tell you i we can do this all day i'm just starting my day i actually don't have anywhere to go right now i'm fine oh that's i was trying to that's like a hot that's hot soup to get into there's a lot of you two are up let's just chat chat room is there any question that you have hitler was in control of denmark for a period yes he was and the uh oh the king of denmark uh when they uh was it christian was that his name anyway uh they were they started to they tried to make the the jews wear this the yellow stars to identify them and the king uh put one on and told everyone to put it on is if some of us are gonna wear everyone's gonna wear it yep yep so yeah there was uh an occupation that lasted a little time there are still swastikas prominently displayed uh at the carlsberg uh brewery uh fun fact it predates uh the nazis yeah they used that symbol and it's actually a symbol that's in use it's been in use in lots of um iconography sure but the thing that occurs to me though is it's uh they were uh carlsberg brew was the first like major industrial brewery the world had ever seen they were exporting to all these countries so it's always part of me in the back of the head that like if you first time you saw the nazi flag as was they were starting out as a party it might have been like oh look that's a it's a giant beer sign it was almost like they get they recruited off of free beer it's is the first way that they uh waves that they did it the symbols are still up carlsberg of course has changed their branding good it's a good plan uh but there's some old buildings and such that still have the the statues or the the uh carvings because they predate world war two oh wiz mic has a fly in the house go find out how far it can fly wiz mic hey and there's no flies in the mojave desert has anybody noticed they're like everywhere now used to be you could go to the mojave desert there's no no bugs like they're everywhere yeah i think it depends on the year though uh the bugs in the desert because it really depends on the moisture that the rain that's happened in a particular year because the desert's super dry but it's alive and you know the rains come and then you have the eggs that can hatch and like all the bugs and then it dries up and they go and they can fly in 16 kilometers from various places six million body lengths six million body lengths exactly impressive oh noodles wants a bus update uh bus update is i got some of the solar panels on the roof and i built this roof to handle this exact size of solar panel and then apparently the manufacturer i think is discontinued this specific size of solar panel which means i i got a third of the solar panels i got 400 up there i'm going for 1200 watts of solar power all together i have 400 up but now i have to sort of redesign things a little bit because i need to fit a different solar panel up there and i picked up my batteries i picked up the solar i basically i built my solar system i picked up the solar system i'm going to put together uh this summer so that the bus will be off grid electricity that's cool but right now i'm six thousand miles away from the bus so uh you're not doing anything i want to go i want to go work on the bus but it's too far to commute right now six thousand miles is too far away how long till it's done ah you know you're never quite done well this whole uh pandemic slid everything down because i was supposed to get the thing signed off through my local department of motor vehicles just having things checked off but then they shut down uh for like a year so i wasn't able to do that so i've just been doing the work get 1200 uh of the new unused work yeah i'm gonna get the new ones uh i just gotta get them to fit right for pre-fact i just need to get them to fit right i have because i have built i built this i hope we're built this massive steel uh roof rack to mount all the solar panels on and now i have to read to get plug some holes and move some poles and get the the ones that are on the market that i can get now to fit but it's fine it's just more drilling and working blare you good i'm just getting sleepy you're getting sleepy oh i thought you guys wanted to hang out what's happening now all of a sudden i was ready to go you guys like why are you leaving my party ruined the party and now you're just like just didn't really mean it did you just didn't really mean it didn't really mean it you kind of i was i was just taken by a surprise that's all but i'm ready i was hitting it with the transition you guys like whoa why so soon i was like okay let's keep going i was surprised we were having a conversation and then suddenly it was like zip it's over and now we're talking about buses and blairs falling asleep so all right fine say good night blair good night blair say good night justin yeah say good morning justin good morning justin good night good night everyone thank you for joining us for another episode of twists another evening another justin caffeinated experience another blair and saty experience i don't know what this experience is here it's like my hair experience we got some hair going on here today thank you all have a wonderful week we hope you stay well and we look forward to seeing you and talking with you again next week good night