 We are live for a live Twis Halloween Twisoline broadcast this program of this weekend science this science podcast we record our recording of the broadcast while we stream so if you're live you're catching all the glory and yeah no we will edit some stuff out later for the podcast so this is it everybody you're here you're with us and we are so glad you are because it's go time is it is it time friends go time might be go time might be go time begin again three two this is Twis this weekend science episode number 848 recorded on Wednesday October 27th 2021 is this spoopy science hey everyone I'm Dr. Kiki and today tonight we will fill your head with brains disguises and mummies oh but first disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer there are werewolves around here there are werewolves around here and they're waiting for the moon to appear there are witches in the woods there are witches in the woods and I don't know what they're brewing but I hear it's very good there are vampires in this town there are vampires in this town and they're waiting for the sun to go down there are mummies singing songs there are mummies singing songs and I don't know what they're singing but the black cat sings along there's a horseman without a neck there's a horseman without a neck and he seems to be mumbling this weekend science is coming up next was that it is that the musical intro for the song the music is spooky it seems we've already lost one of the hosts tonight who will be next I hope it's Blair who will be next I hope it's not me got the kind of mine I can't get enough I want on every day of the week there's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek good science dear Kiki and Blair and a good science to you too like oh my god we're gonna go have a bunch of science let's get it everyone it's Twiso and we are so glad that you are joining us for another episode of this week in science Blair's back from her Hawaiian vacation am I back or did I leave myself behind I think you have brought your vacation home with you judging by your Hawaiian shirt shade hat bleached blonde hair zinc covered nose and very large sunglasses I mean sun protection is important you know but just on the nose apparently just on the nose I mean that's a bit on the nose for heading home on a vacation anyway yeah Justin's bought brought a bit of the pirate flavor it's a bit if I'm still for further away or maybe I needed a hat from here it just looks like I'm wearing like a fancy lounge jacket but there's it's piratey it's a piratey lounge coat it's for the pirate lounge after after you're done at a hard day at sea you head into the pirate lounge yeah I've brought as I don't know a momentary tank girl inspired always welcome yeah my pink pink wig like shiny shades and a little pink furry because you gotta have fun outdoors all right everyone now for the science okay what do we have on the show tonight I have no aliens I have no neutrinos and friends because maybe I'm zombie tank girl could be Justin what'd you bring I have got mummies and uh lots of other ancient people's stories all all all mysteries of of the ancient peoples being revealed tonight I love it you are you are I don't know digging up the the treasure of the long dead past when I'm on the show sounds like it sounds about right for a pirate all right come on all right hula girl what is in the animal corner oh I brought uh rabbits in disguise I brought hippos because I gotta bring hippos when they're in the science news and then I also brought kissing prairie dogs oh that just sounds very sweet yeah I can't wait I love prairie dogs all right everyone if you are in you're in but you know if you haven't quite jumped in yet you know you can subscribe to this weekend science look for us all places that science podcasts are found this weekend science is what we're called you can find us also on facebook and twitter and instagram youtube twitch all over the place some places where twist others twist science but you can always go to our website twist.org all right time to dive in to this big witch's brew of scientific information all right I'm gonna start it off with aliens there was a signal from far away that we thought could possibly be intelligent life elsewhere first contact we finally did it oh my gosh what does this mean is this a great day for humanity or is this the horror of knowing that there's others out there who might come soon even later stop okay so breakthrough listen part of SETI and it's anyway a bunch of researchers had thought maybe they did find something out of Proxima Centauri which is far away but it's one of our closest neighbors actually close enough close enough and it does have what we think could be life holding planets around its star so we thought maybe just maybe but then the analysis went in and the researchers are like let's go check everything again and see what happened and basically it's radio interference we are this we're listening to ourselves again sure sure ah ah what gave it away was it that was it we finally deciphered we finally deciphered the transmission and it's like well all right folks need to be careful out there it was gonna be a lot of traffic on the 10 and on the 405 and on the 101 so stay off the freeways if you can thank you so the researchers who have published in nature astronomy uh they they say you know that they really thought if you had detection of a signal it had a particular signature frequency change that only showed up when you were pointed at the source of the signal signal then that's something that's pointed at you right so this is a special signal that's it but uh they have realized that that isn't really the way it worked so they had to go and peek at it a lot more and it does really just turn out they used uh machine learning algorithms to figure out that uh it was interfering equipment and they were able to determine that it's it's us that's it is anybody else notice that remember no aliens for for halloween this year we if anybody else notice that we always get the signal when jan is making popcorn in the microwave because it seems like it seems like there's a little bit of a correlation there i don't know if anybody else is notice yeah the researchers say the frequency of the signal drifts in a way that is consistent with inexpensive crystal oscillators such as those commonly used in computers phones and radios kind of stuff you'd find all over a research lamp well isn't also wasn't one of the very first times we thought we had we got a signal from aliens it was pigeons no no no no no no no no so so what's that one no there's the what you're talking about is actually the discover discovery of the microwave background radiation which the researchers the researchers thought that the signal was interference and so they went up on the roof with shotguns and cleared out pigeons yeah like cleared out and got rid of all and then they still got the signal but they didn't know what they had then there was another lab that was actively looking for the background radiation that couldn't find it and here they just were like hey we got the signal and then somebody like some more learned researcher i think in the department went uh i think i know what you guys got and you need to publish right away right away because that's it's big it's big but this is not big it's not aliens but at least we're learning more about how we interfere with our search for aliens which will allow us to pinpoint that potential signal in the future that we've been waiting for yeah tell me it's not waiting for i'm kind of i'm stuck i'm very much on the fence because yeah the history of at least humans going someplace uh where they have a technological advantage over other humans has literally never ended well for the people who are being visited i don't know at some point maybe we're just gonna get like the the spam calls from an alien civilization oh you think oh gosh an entire planet of scam marketers yeah oh no oh no that would not be okay Justin what do you have uh what do i have oh so this is uh this is kind of an interesting story uh part of the silk road this is an area geographically intersecting eastern and western cultures it runs uh from you know all the way through the western asia to eastern europe and was through many many many many you know thousand years plus uh a trade route through which all sorts of disparate cultures and peoples agriculture language there was a great deal of our language common words within languages that were formed there it's one of the reasons we have very similar words for things like water and different kinds of food that are shared amongst languages throughout much of the world because these were very important things to be able to get across like my horse needs water my camel needs water i need something to eat uh so it's it's this very storied uh area the silk road right so back in the 90s they discovered hundreds of naturally mummified human remains that are about 4 000 years old and a region of terram basin and so there is this sort of interesting a lot of uh speculation around who these people were they were thought these mummies had very western physical appearances uh they had slightly different types of clothing there was felted wood wooden uh woven clothing they had cattle and sheep goat wheat barley millet they had cheese they had stuff that seemed out of place although over time they discovered actually those were pretty common in the area they were less uncommon than than had originally been thought but they were buried in boat coffins in the middle of a desert also a sort of an interesting twist why do these people have boats in the middle of a desert why would they bother bringing their boats with them so these uh the terram basin mummies have been a long enigmatic mystery and so eventually yeah there's all these ideas they thought they might be descendants of the there's this known group of yamnaya herders who moved around there's a brand jade society the black sea region the southern russia that could be them it could be some central asian culture that was that was traveling there but nobody really knew i mean even even groups as far down as the iranian plateau were rumored to have been responsible for being these people uh and then something got invented and finally i got applied which is they did some dna testing oh thank goodness for the dna testing because with all the myriad of theories about who these people could be the dna analysis has come back with some very interesting results they took uh this is action this is a lot of a lot of universities this is the jillian university institute of vibrate paleontology and paleoanthropology max plank institute revolutionary anthropology soul national university korea harvard university lots of big brainy people got involved in doing the analysis and they they took some of the oldest mummies in the area and they took a bunch of the old even older excuse me even older uh remains from some of the surrounding neighboring basins and cultures and they found to their surprise the terran basin mummies were not related to any of the ancient neighbors in fact they don't have any admixture with the peoples that had populated the region of that time they don't seem to have mated outside of their group the this is and they're saying this is a very isolated population because it's it's rather uncommon for a group that persisted for for you know uh thousand maybe a thousand years or at least many hundreds of years in the region to have had no admixture at least in the the oldest mummies that they that they analyzed they did come back as being close most closely related to what is known as the ancient north eurasians this is a group that is uh thought to have been sort of widespread but they only have a few really good examples one is from a 24 000 year old boy that was discovered in Siberia the the population on the planet that has the greatest relationship uh the highest known proportions of shared dna with these you know 4 000 year old people this uh mummies along the silk road near new or what is it uger territory native americans have a 40 percent hit oh wow yeah yeah that's fascinating all right so so what does that what does that tell us well right so it means that uh human started in north america and migrated to well no no i don't think that yeah well it actually it actually could it could mean that this is a population that made it all the way to the americas and then came all the way then died oh and came all the way back because you're only talking 4 000 years ago now and now we know native north americans going back 24 30 000 years the you know the idea that they travel that they traveled from one continent to the next and throughout that continent and nobody ever went back nobody ever went the other direction so that's a possibility another possibility is this is an isolated group that was connected to the first north americans the problem with that though if you think about it is this is only 4 000 years ago this is only 4 000 years ago whereas the oldest member of this group that has been found uh to be solidly of this of this group of islet is 24 000 years in cyberia which sort of matches that from cyberia over to alaskan down but at 4 000 years ago with 30 000 years of history in north america there's a great chance that this group traveled the other way and it would explain having boats it's hard to explain a group that comes from cyberia down into right down into the silk road who bothered to bring boats with them unless they were a people who had traveled some vast distances with their boats and no matter where they are they're gonna bring their they're gonna bring those boats with them because they're gonna come against water again it's eventually yeah or they will eventually go home or eventually to head back again you know the boat needs to be important to you even if you're in the desert if you need to connect you know catch a you're thinking maybe one day i'm gonna catch that connecting was it a desert when they all died so at 4 000 years ago they have a still a pretty decent idea of of that it was still kind of a desert territory the silk road was except for all the humans traveling uh could be desperately yeah it could be uh have sort of all sorts of disparate uh climate uh along that road but for the most part and certainly where they were they were in the desert and if you look at that boat it's kind of a carved out canoe looking thing like a canoe they're portaging and you can use your boat to carry a bunch of your stuff and your multi-purpose so the next thing i wanted is that yeah what's so one of the other things is uh well there's also some there's also something that they found some cultural evidence that there was a belief that there was a dog guarding the afterlife which is something that goes into Native American territories but there's also something that happens in Norse mythology to an extent yeah and one of the mutations they found in one of these uh whatever they call again the the ancient north people whatever is one of the first mutations for blonde hair so this is a group also right that's in the more ancient this could be a group that desperately went up into Siberia and then traveled along a sort of northern band the one thing that's missing from this i'd love to find out is if there's any evidence that they had dogs with them uh because that four thousand years ago that i mean they might have yeah why not they would have helped something to pull the boats because i have a other or something they pulled those dang boats because otherwise like that's that's a lot of that's a lot of work you just row through the sand that doesn't work very well it's just not gonna work very well Blair but an extremely surprising find uh not something not something that when they when they went looking to reconstruct the origin of the Terran basin mummies they had no idea that their biggest hit was going to be North America that's yeah that's fascinating it really makes you think about the movement of humanity where people have gone yeah yeah super cool thanks for that story mummies perfectly in tune all right Blair yes you've got a costume you've got rabbits with costumes yes okay so snowshoe hairs talked to you about snowshoe hairs a team of researchers for multiple institutions throughout canada have been looking at snowshoe hairs because they are an animal that changes their costume with the seasons so during the warm months they're brown and dark which helps them blend in but as autumn passes the dark fur falls out it is replaced with white fur which allows them to blend in with snowy backgrounds snowshoe hairs are one of the classic examples of this there's also arctic foxes that do this and some other animals as well but uh the the big problem that these animals that have seasonal changes in their fur would have is climate change because depending on whatever signal they're using to change the color of their fur that climate change might be causing problems and so previous research with snowshoe hairs has found that um at least for them it's tied to the amount of daylight not the temperature outside so they're going to change to white whether or not the temperature has changed enough to start snowing it's all about their circadian rhythms oh that's kind of and badly then you would think however how's this for some just some good news or oh yeah i'm seeing that somebody brought good news uh there we go um so they're actually doing great for the first few weeks of winter they are standing out starkly against the dark snowshoe backgrounds they have these bright white coats you would expect that they would be snatched up and eaten immediately however they tracked 347 hairs using accelerometers as they progressed through seasons from 2015 through 2018 and they found that the mortality risk for hairs during the autumn months actually was reduced by 86.5 percent what why most likely it is because they foraged less because they had a warm coat on and therefore didn't have to burn as many calories keeping warm so they were actually exposed less yeah so they found from these accelerometers they were foraging between 17 and 77 minutes less daily during the autumn changeover so that means that our less exposure every day is enough to reduce how easy it is to get eaten yeah less owl fox exposure absolutely yes so the metabolism rates were lower because they were wearing their warm coats so this is interesting for a couple reasons so one being that like evolution usually has a pretty good handle on this kind of stuff right yeah if it would be better to have a thicker coat more important than to be camouflaged you would think this would have shook itself out by now however this weird fluke of rapid climate change has exposed this odd strategy that we have not yet seen and therefore this might actually push evolution in a really interesting direction in response to climate change well that really is just good news you know what occurs to me though what about all the things they're getting predated on last what about all the animals that rely on uh preying on them good question so if it's something like an arctic fox where they also are going through the same thing perhaps it doesn't matter there's a larger arctic fox population there's a larger rabbit population hair population arctic foxes don't need as many calories because they're right for so yes so there's there's all this weird it balances out yeah it could potentially balance out that is assuming that other animals that predate upon them have similar advantages i don't know for sure what the queue is for all of the predators in the area if they are related to daylight or if it's temperature because that's not unique that's not that's not universal i should say so i think with a carnivore we got that uh i don't know i have a feeling if there's if there's less of them getting eaten hopefully there'll just be more of them those are the foxes and the owls and the what have yous have a chance because if they're just staying in the burrow all day and the poor little foxes are not staying in the burrow though they're they don't have to stay in the burrow get out just worried about the fox yeah well i mean keep in mind rabbits live like two to six years so it all shakes out but they multiply like rabbits yeah it all shakes out in the wash and we'll see i think the interesting thing is to see how this moves forward with climate change and claim a changing temperature zones changing habitable zones and yeah rabbits can move but how far can they move and how what will they need to do yeah and i think on the whole we're looking at a mass extinction event we know that yeah but there are situations that's scary talk about halloween yeah i know there are situations where um there's going to be weird new and extreme evolutionary pressure so there are weird adaptive radiations that we will see as a result of climate change it's not going to balance out the bad stuff but it's still we'll see some interesting stuff yeah it's gonna be very interesting yeah very cool um let's see how uh twist a wean i've got big bowl of candy for all the physicists but you know what i'm gonna give them a box of raisins or an apple because there's no sterile neutrinos according to the micro boon experiment here in the united states at the department of energies fair me national accelerator laboratory no sterile neutrino candies for the physicists well no sterile neutrinos well no wonder there's so dang many of them i know i know so there are three neutrinos that uh that are known according to the standard model and they they switch between their different flavors all the time but there was evidence from a another experiment called the micro that the mini boon experiment an energy signature that hinted at what researchers thought could be a fourth neutrino which they were calling the sterile neutrino and if it were real it would mean not standard model not standard physics so the physicists went back to the drawing board they made a bigger not a mini boon it's a micro boon but it's a bigger experiment so anyway it's uh this experiment uh was meant to test using liquid argon time projection chamber to be able to really see how these neutrinos which usually are neutral and they don't really interact with anything yet we think they might be involved in like why there's more regular matter in the universe than antimatter in the universe so we think they're really important but they tend to just pass right through stuff and they don't interact with anything very well but these liquid argon tp tpc chambers this experiment could have just really figured it out and so they got a whole bunch of data out of this over the last few years and it took them a long time to crunch all the numbers and finally finally the data is out and that's it three kinds of neutrinos the electron the muon the tau no sterile i'm sorry no extra candy for twissel ween physicists it's standard model or bust at this point now go back and think about what you did well okay to be fair to be fair every time when they got that signal originally it did correlate to janet making popcorn and the micro would you stop with the popcorn running and when we're doing the experiments we plug it in if you unplug it and you plug it in and you unplug it it's kind of right yeah so yeah so the i guess what was it what was the the thing that was in the original experiment that uh that ended up just being loose photons or something that was yeah so that's the that's the uh what they're seeing now is that this these are photons and this 170 ton neutrino detector has just it's gone against the original evidence from two from 2010 that had that anomaly that they thought it could be photons but it could also be something else really cool and they had to test it out and see right you got to check all the possibilities um and this this low energy excess is what they call it um it's not sterile sterile neutrinos and the researchers who are involved in publishing this work they say yep now we know that uh it's it's photons that's it not electrons yeah but the researchers are still very excited because we've moved science forward you disfavor a hypothesis you know you're oh that hypothesis is not right now we know a little bit more about the universe we can figure things out some more yeah except then they found out that you're gonna give them raisins nobody wants raisins come to my house pretty nobody likes rain and give you apples and raisins not even caramel apples that you can use your teeth in an apple's okay but a raisin raisins not a fan not a fan at all tell me what you are a fan of do you have another story oh uh what am i a fan of uh fan of 1876 uh that's uh that's when the US military waged a preemptive strike on Native Americans in South Dakota on land that actually been ceded to the native peoples for for hunting and forging on all that kind of stuff uh one of these where there was a reservation but then there was all this other land that was like here this is yours to go hunt in uh so yeah there was the battle of greasy grass just alongside Yellowstone the bighorn river it pitted major general custers seventh Calvary regiment against the gathering of the Lakota and northern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes that were led by crazy horse and sitting bull and they had gotten together to sort of discuss uh some land management stuff what to do about with the new hunting grounds how to you know sort of a multi-trib get together to talk about stuff when the seventh Calvary with the element of surprise sent troops down to start firing on the village unannounced little did they know that they weren't just attacking one small village but a gathering of tribes uh they were quickly outmaneuvered and overwhelmed most of the seventh Calvary including Custer died that day uh the battle i think last they say it lasted as long as it takes a hungry man to eat his dinner is how it was described by one so more than half quick it was pretty quick there was initial flurry and then the the battle against Custer was over pretty fast uh yeah half the seventh Calvary was killed the rest fled and when the battle was won by the native peoples and the larger war eventually would be lost sitting bull was there of course as one of the leaders he went on to have a very storied life and was eventually assassinated in 1890 by the US government a man claiming to be claiming to be the great grandson of sitting bull has been asking for his remains to be moved to a different ancestral land saying he's not Lakota so he wasn't from the south dakotas he was from a different area according to the family oral history story so moving the remains of legendary figure is not something that's easily accomplished for starters there are actually two burial sites officially listed for sitting bull one at fort yates north dakota and another at moorbridge south dakota it is considered unlikely that he is buried both places uh secondly there's the uh are the man urmila point and his three sisters actually the great grandchildren of sitting bull has to get determined too so a lock of hair uh from sitting bull had sat in the smithsonian museum for almost a hundred years it was returned in 2007 and the story about this caught the eye of a danish researcher who's been mentioned many times on the show professor eska willerslev uh quoting here sitting bull has always been my hero ever since i was a boy i admire his courage and his drive that's why i almost choked on my coffee when i read in the magazine 2007 that the smithsonian museum has decided to return sitting bull's hair to urnila point and his three sisters in accordance with the a new u.s legislation where it was giving back stuff that was in museums that didn't belong to them uh he added i wrote to the point and explained that i specialized in the analysis of ancient dna that i was in my era of sitting bull and that i considered a great honor if i could be allowed to compare the dna of urney and his sisters with the dna of the native american leader's hair when it was returned to them it ended up taking 14 years of to find a way of extracting any usable dna from this you know this lock of sitting bull's hair and they had to actually wait for new techniques to come around as well as develop new techniques to be able to get the dna and do the analysis and the results just like most people who imagine they are related to somebody famous through family oral history and birth certificates they were a hundred percent correct urnila point and his sisters are the grandchildren of sitting bull uh the new technique that was designed uh developed here could actually be used uh for old dna that might previously have been considered too degraded to analyze anything from analyzing ancient historical site uh burials to modern forensic identification of maybe cold cases or a found body that has been there for seemingly too long before and this whole thing had to have been this hair by the had been sitting in the museum like on a shelf or something like this uh room temperature for almost a hundred years wow so this is not this is not a shelf for i mean i mean very often in the smithsonian they've got things at least preserved behind uv tempered glass so that it's not going to be it's going to be blocking at least the degrading rays of the sun you're indoors where probably not getting a lot of light anyway so but if you're if you're if you were if you were preserving something like this with the intent of doing a dna analysis right just frozen right or you sealed it froze it and not touched it right and in room temperature is probably lower than like the standard male likes the office temperature to be or yeah well that's very specific somebody having somebody having problems at the workplace thermostat nope okay uh so yeah that's it but it could be used for a lot of things uh so the next step is they actually think they can use this technique on the two burial sites uh the two presumed burial sites to determine where sitting bull is actually buried uh so that he can be returned to the proper ancestral ground because sitting bull was a massive travel he even took his tribe up to canada at one point uh always refused to sell land or negotiate uh with the u.s government this research interesting was funded by the danish national research foundation uh funding research in the americas that the u.s government is not interested in learning more about apparently uh it's all the stories you want to tell right the stories are told by the people with the funding i'm glad this story is getting told though it's fascinating this kind of historical work is always very interesting speaking of history i've got big fangs big big fangs but not really fangs maybe more like very long teeth they're tusks so don't really fangs at all more just tusks i've got tusks you're really walking back your headline i know i'm sorry sorry not sorry researchers have just uh published in the proceedings of the national proceedings of the royal society be excuse me on their work to trace back to the progenitor of tusks where the heck did tusks come from there are many mammals with tusks blair can you name some animals with tusks walrus uh hippo uh elephant um hippo babarusa wait wait back up a boar wild boar boar but hippo has tusks i thought they just have big teeth no it's ivory hyraxes warthogs oh yes hyraxes little elephant warthogs yes all right so what exactly is a tusk anyway these researchers realized as they were trying to figure out where tusks came from that they're actually considering a tusk has been fairly ambiguous in the animal world for a long time and it's just kind of like these extra long teeth and sometimes it's a tusk and other times so they defined a tusk or tusks they have decided that it has to grow throughout an animal's entire life so it can't like grow and then stop it has to continually grow and the surface is made of dentine rather than having a hard enamel like our teeth our teeth they they begin as dentine but then they get an enamel coating um and so that does not happen with tusks and so when they made this distinction they were able to weed out a bunch of animals from the tusky corners of the of the phylogeny so they could figure out who have tusks who don't have tusks rodents don't have tusks they just have very long teeth for instance and they have determined that going back about 270 to 201 million years ago the disinodonts are the ancestors of the of the tusk in mammals these are the first organisms that got tusks disinodonts were kind of mammalie kind of reptilian they were not they were a little before or right around the dinosaur age and they were they were creatures that didn't all get tusks in fact it was kind of convergent evolution throughout the disinodont family oh they're cute i'm looking at photos they're very cute our current understanding of what they would have looked like they they except big fangs i mean tusks come out of their roundy faces oh yeah but if you don't look at them fanged disinodonts uh these these were where tusks came from and now we have a true definition of tusks and we can understand a bit more about the evolution of teeth and where tusks came from and the ecological factors that would have led to the development of tooth like toothy appendages so you're going to have a need to use these teeth very regularly hence they they keep growing throughout life they don't have that hard enamel shell like elephants they use their tusks as tools and there is a little crossover between this study and the study another study that came out this week that found that there is a group of elephants that have lost their tusks due to evolutionary pressure this group of this group of elephants was hunted down to very very small percentage of its original population and naturally there was six to seven percent of the population that was born without tusks but after the population went through this bottleneck it created a real issue and so now you have a whole bunch of elephants in the population who don't have tusks now this happened in in Mozambique and researchers looking into the tusks of elephants determined that it is a genetic issue that is dominant and recessive so what's happening is when females have this dominant gene they end up tuskless however the recessive part of it is if males end up with the other gene then they die so it is linked to male lethality oh gosh tusklessness leads to male death and female survival just no tusks and they tied it to a couple of genes that are related to enamel production and also dentin so these are very interesting things to be looking at specifically in the here and now as we're watching adaptation and evolution take place in response to environmental pressures like the hunting and killing of these elephants leading back to where tusks originated and why in the first place and how the genes have been involved in this tooth formation versus tusk formation for so long over 200 million years yeah disinodonts with tusks to now elephants without i'm obsessed i'm going to keep this page of disinodont pictures open forever just look at it when i'm bummed just look at the cute little disinodonts it looks like a mixture between a hippo a naked mole rat um and a triceratops yeah it's got a very triceratopsy kind of face yeah oh oh they're cute this story is getting a little long in the tooth though so this is this week in science thanks everyone for joining us for another episode of science fun on this twist so we episode we do hope that if you are enjoying the show that you will share it with one of your friends additionally we hope that you will head over to twist.org and click click click click on the calendar blairs blairs animal corner 2022 calendar is now available at twist.org get your calendar planned for 2022 today all right we're going to come back for a very very very very very very very very very very quick COVID update because this is the one piece of news that has me excited this week the FDA panel that has been looking at the 5 to 11 Pfizer vaccine dosage safety has recommended that it be allowed and authorized for children in the United States we just need CDC then right that's what we need yeah yeah so we're waiting on the CDC and uh the states are currently the White House is working on getting doses out to the states the states are working hopefully i mean this happens all the time i'm like please actually system be working yeah you're supposed to be doing the work to get the supplies where they're needed at this moment in time so i'm really hoping that's happening um a big question that i've seen people ask and i know people uh there was a new york times article about this as well um if your child is 11 going on 12 it is better to get your child vaccinated now than to wait until they turn 12 if you're worried about the third of a dose 5 to 11 year old dosage versus the full dose 12 and up dosage something is better than nothing it seems as though the antibody titers that they're getting in the in the age group are great and so having immune protection is going to be better especially coming into the holidays than not having it yeah i don't regret getting the j and j vaccine for one second because i got what i could when i could and i was protected sooner yeah and now you can mix and match you can get another j and j i need my appointment i'm gonna get a Pfizer next week what are you getting a Pfizer modern is the good one that's uh they're all they're all good it's a better one though is i and i can pick and choose is i picked the one i think the mRNA i could get soonest is what i picked yeah yeah no good choice uh but i have i was kind of joking about this last week but there's been like enough of uh uh i don't know it's just negative press or less positive long-term uh resulting stuff where uh i i wonder how many people are going to go back for a second j and j i mean we ran into people in uh on our honeymoon that we're saying they were going to go back for the j and j okay and the side effects still are rare we we hear about them because the media loves sensationalism uh they're you know and and the effectiveness of the j and j added the second j and j dose added to the first brings it up to the effectiveness of the initial Pfizer dosages so it's basically like oh you had your your two shots just spread out over a very long time the effectiveness does increase to about 96 which is amazing so but the FDA in the united states has also said mix and match if you would like so if you are concerned about side effects you have more choices at this point in time give me that mRNA which is great i'm so excited yeah i'm like i had the mRNA and i'm like well maybe i guess maybe i should get a j and j that's the one i'm gonna go for next just to have the walking down the vaccine buffet line oh yes a little bit of that oh yes a little bit of that take one of those oh it'll be so good okay well on that note if anyone does have questions about the vaccines about COVID-19 SARS-CoV-2 please let us know or do definitely check the cc website for information it is time now for that time of the show that we love that we missed so much over the last couple of weeks but that's back now hula girl hang time oh wait what no that's not the what no oh sorry it's time for Blair's animal corner with Blair what you got Blair did i get it did i get it all there we go okay what you're trying to take that zinc off don't you know we're putting more on okay good cover it up anyway uh let's talk about hippos shall we yes please uh so i took my sunglasses off so i could do this science for real um so hippos just the gift that keeps on giving so um i want to talk about renowned zoologist cambridge university professor richard laws he sadly died in 2014 but his friend david walton a scientist at the british antarctic society or british antarctic survey excuse me got a hold of uh richard laws's studies he had a scientific legacy from 60 years of hippo research from Antarctica no hippos there but all the way up to african savannah so he studied a lot of animals but he had specifically a huge stack of notebooks about hippos notebooks maps scientific data all sorts of amazing stuff he had rare and detailed measurements of almost 3 000 hippos collected from 1961 to 1966 in Uganda and all of them were neatly recorded and categorized and so these this research was going to be tossed but instead it was handed off to a group of hippo researchers because this was the perfect opportunity to look at hippo body size now let me tell you about hippo body size they're unusual why do you think they're unusual either of you any any guesses what's what's unusual about a hippo body they have a very large mouth they do have a large mouth and a very small tail yes that spins that spins when they go poop yes that sprays poop everywhere very good but what's really interesting about them is that the males are so small even though hippos can weigh 6 000 pounds the males are small that's because according to other size ratios of male to female size differences in other animals that are similar that are one male with a large harem of females that are semi-aquatic all these things will lead you to believe that these animals the males should be huge compared to the females polar bears males can weigh 1000 to 1500 pounds females are only about 500 for elephant seals they can weigh way more than females are on six times larger than females um so there's there's all sorts of kind of size disparity between males and females in these other examples and is and i guess in part of that the the one of the reasons that the males are so big is they right they have to fight other males for their harem so they're constantly having to defend themselves so the bigger you are usually the better you are at surviving and having more offspring because you can fight off the other males better if you're bigger so you're half right usually so it's a no no no so the reason that you're half right is that it has to do with fighting other males for dominance but the kind of key there is that when animals are sizing each other up to fight they do something called antagonizing behaviors so they'll like they'll like hey so so okay oh yeah that's pretty intimidating okay great hey hey check out my giant my giant rack of antlers see how big they are i could really mess you up or use yours a little bit oh yours are yours are that big too hey i can make big sounds can you make big sounds oh oh that's pretty similar to see how big i am i'm gonna turn to the side so you can see how big i am see how big i am that's right that's right right away so that's that's usually so yeah so some of that they they resolve a lot of the conflicts without actually having to fight to the death because either one is good at bluffing because they have more confidence or one is very self aware and it's like oh that one's actually bigger than me i know i can't take it i don't want to yes if males in these scenarios did not cut bait some of the time yeah the population would be halved constantly right hurt themselves they would die yeah it would be no good and you have to you would never get big enough to win because ultimately you have younger males fighting older established males and the younger males will eventually go oh i'm not going to win this one and they'll they'll leave so that they can though then grow larger to then win later right so this is this is key to um to competition within a species is you have to be able to have these antagonizing behaviors you have to be able to size each other up and not always end in actual combat so this brings us to hippos the research suggests a couple of things one being the reason that the males are around the same size as the females is that there is these territorial fights happen in the water elephant seals i was talking about before that are six times larger as males they fight on land even though they're not well suited to be on land at all but they're on land so you can so they can size each other up they can they can see how big they are they can resolve this thing on land hippos are fighting in water where they're largely submerged you can't see how big they are but you know what you can see how big their mouth and their tusks are speaking of tusks so that's where kiki's comment comes in hippos have giant mouths so so that is the antagonizing behavior that they use is that the water reduces the advantage of large body size in a territorial contest and instead the visual sizing up is forced on the yawning and the gape of the jaw so that the size of their tusks and the size of their mouth is really what's important the other piece of this research that's really interesting is based on what they eat hippos are vegetarians they're herbivores they get that big eating plants all day or all night but when they do that caught myself but when when they do that the idea from this research is that there's kind of a carrying capacity for weight on how big you can get eating grass so basically based on their body mechanics the fact that they're sitting in water cold water all the time that affects their metabolism they're eating grasses all the time and so this research suggests that they have reached a maximum body size then they have they have reached that physical limit with their physiology in the size of a female and so the male really has doesn't have much farther to go so the males they're like at that's it yeah the females could keep getting bigger if they wanted uh probably a little bit yeah but you have to figure in the metabolic input of being a mother mammal which is a whole extra thing so there was a picture that you had up there of the teeth all looking like a bunch of tusks sticking out of the lower jaw there and uh Daniel in the chat room is saying I always thought their teeth were more blunt yeah me too I I assume they had big old like cow molar type things going on in there uh and I you know with a couple I remember seeing a couple of the big lower teeth before but that picture you had up with one with its uh its mouth open there yeah yeah it's a bunch of jaggedy tusks I guess poking out of it yeah yeah so they they have yeah they have these uh modified teeth that have become tusks that are specifically for this it's for fighting with other hippos it's for defending their territory as well and it's why hippos are one of the most dangerous animals in the world so they don't do the food chewing thing I mean that the cow is eating grass and it's chewing food and has all this like four stomachs and all these things to deal with it and this this thing it looks like it's I don't even know what those tusk teeth would be good for but see that's exactly it that's what they're good for they're not good for anything related to food these guys are chomping on grass so they have the flat molars in the very back of their mouth they just have these modified incisors they're not even canine teeth they're modified incisors for um for this competition poking each other yeah absolutely and that's why that's why they're so dangerous they run at 35 miles an hour they weigh 5 000 pounds and they have teeth that stick straight out they run how fast wait they run how fast 35 miles an hour oh my goodness they are a car with a spear at the end yeah 100 yes so that that's how most people die from hippos it's because their hippos are are mostly aquatic they sleep in the water during the day they get out of water to eat grass they make these pathways with their big flat feet that look like foot paths for humans they're not and then you are in between a hippo and water which is the one place you don't want to be that's a threat a threat to them they turn around they open their mouth they stick those teeth out and they run and that's how fast can they swim they don't swim really at all they walk on the river bottom they're terrible okay so you might be all without swim one better than you can I'm just saying if I'm stuck between the hippo and the water I mean who know which way to go yeah you're saying run to the water uh no because I think they're in trouble either way it's the same it's between a rock in a hard place it's been between a hippo and the water yeah yeah because also there's probably crocodiles in there if you're in Africa but anyway yeah um what it's just not getting any better the the bottom line of the series is the weed based on this found 60 year old data set we now know a lot more about the about hippos and how different they are from other mammals with similar social structures based on this one piece of evolutionary biology and so there's this intense male competition which was expected but it does not pressure large body size it just pressures that big mouth those big honking tusks and so they the difference between males and females is not so much controlled by competition but instead by environment diet and physiology do the lady hippos and maybe I miss this the lady hippos have those tusks as well they do they're not as big okay might make eating easier maybe that's why they're bigger yeah yeah yeah let's move let's move on from all this scary scary from stabbing to kissing is that what you want to do stabbing to kissing yes so this might be spooky in its own way if you have a problem with small rodents but um prairie dogs uh they greet each other with kisses imagine being kissed by hundreds of prairie dogs so this is a study by university of arizona arizona behavioral ecologist uh jennifer rudolan and um she has studied prairie dogs for nearly 20 years she has discovered that they have dialects they collaborate they they have cultural differences between colonies and so she has spent much of those 20 years huddled in prairies hiding from prairie dogs in flagstaff arizona watching them from afar she's watched the bower predators she's watched them learn speech patterns she's and then the other thing that she observed and started to study was thousands of greeting kisses so prairie dogs greet each other with a kiss and individuals that kiss each other and don't find afterwards belong to the same social group and territory so this is like a potentially like a de-escalation thing it's a recognition thing there's lots of weird stuff it's like it's like the european french hello but then if it doesn't go well then suddenly you're like i don't know in the in a basketball i don't know yeah it's always it's always awkward it's always awkward oh hey nice to me oh you're going in to kiss my cheek oh that's nice sir i didn't know thank you um yes it reminds me of that friend's episode when chaylor monica caught kissing and then he goes and he kisses all of the other women in the room on his way out the door anyway anyway moving on um great color from this research she's found that the more times they kiss the stronger their connection makes sense right she observed 80 prairie dogs spanning 14 different social networks and for a long time prairie dogs have been assumed to have a hierarchical social structure they're in most prairie dog literature if you do some light reading of some prairie dog literature you'll find that it says that there is a single male and a harem of females that is not what was observed in this study the fact wishful thinking by a researcher out there staring at prairie dogs weekend and week out yeah it's uh it's definitely it's a it's a common thread in zoology where it's just kind of that's the baseline assumption right is is that the the baseline assumption is that there's one male and a bunch of females and like you have to prove me wrong animal by animal right but anyway point being there's a bunch of males and females in these social structures and not everyone gets kissed equally their community bridges those that kiss members of neighboring social groups so they're in with the neighbors and then there are also hubs those that get kissed by everybody the popular prairie dogs and so influencers yes the influencers indeed and so she mapped the intricacies of their social dynamics she looked at how many friends they had each of one of them had that's considered a degree of centrality in social network analysis and then looking at how many connections an individual prairie dog facilitated which is known as betweenness centrality and so in social network analysis they they found that you know previously we found that predators environmental conditions food availability all contribute to the ebb and flow of social internet interactions and most animals and that proved true here as well so there was an ebb and flow in who was kissing who and how well it was received essentially and they're what's really interesting is that another kind of assumption made with prairie dog society because they are pretty complex is that it would be a fission fusion dynamic which is what you see in most animal societies that are studied for their social dynamics this is where resources directly impact social behavior so that means a group might split up to forage when resources are lean maybe seasonally and then they would come back together when resources are abundant they don't want to overload one resource source but what we saw with prairie dogs they maintain a territory year round they maintain a social group year round and the amount of food that's available will change the way they interact with each other it'll change the strength of those interactions the frequency of those interactions but it won't move the prairie dogs physically it won't change their relationship to that space or those resources it just yeah it's a persisting in the same area over a long period of time they have to have a stronger social social network but it's a malleable it is but it's supposed to like a migratory animal that might not have those connections to the neighbors they might not have that sort of yeah fada has I think the best comment in the chat room there when you kiss a prairie dog you kiss every other prairie dog they've had contact with yeah that's right yes the mono mono goes through a prairie dog colony and their neighbors just like a prairie fire so the the reason this actually matters other than just be like oh prairie dogs kiss is that there's implications for conservation so prairie dogs their population historically was trashed in the 1970s-ish I don't remember exactly but their their population was ruined because they were hurting crops they were hurting people's lawns and they all got poisoned we tried to eradicate them essentially no surprises there and so that impacted a bunch of animals nearby all of the prairie dog burrows helped with animals that need burrows the black-footed ferret I'm sure we've talked about on the show before and you've heard of their population crashed because there were no prairie dogs to eat so their impact they actually impact about a hundred species in their ecosystem so the presence of prairie dogs can impact a hundred different species that we've recognized of animals right so they have a pretty big impact on their space so we care about these prairie dog kisses because they're this can impact the best way to do proper prairie dog conservation a lot of the time the focus is on having up resources does this colony have enough resources great it should do fine but there's other factors so how the animals are interacting especially in high stress situations might change how they respond to conservation efforts so for you know I think we talked about this a couple months ago but behavior isn't usually integrated into conservation activities and so the behavior right now that's distracting me that needs to be figured into how I do the show from day to day so that's you know something to consider we have some some ghouls on the screen but tusks yeah there's tusks there right there very good okay tusks it's good okay indeed but so okay back to the prairie dogs so the prairie dog kisses so these are important for conservation efforts because what happens a lot of time if people are wanting to do some construction around prairie dogs if it's going to disrupt prairie dog landscape they'll move them but if you move what you consider a a like social click of prairie dogs and you're not considering the kisses then you might be removing bridge individuals that are connecting nearby colonies and that can have a huge kind of domino effect on that prairie dog population as a whole so if you're going to reintroduce or relocate prairie dogs you can't just move them there's the resources are not enough you have to look at the the population dynamics the social structure and consider that when you relocate these prairie dogs so you got to watch them kiss that's the bottom line you got to watch them kiss you got to write it all down who's kissing you you have to take the kisses with you you have to take the kisses I'm gonna reveal a little bit of ignorance where are these prairies they are in the United States no they're like California New Mexico Arizona Utah like all of that area okay so these are western prairie area area I didn't know that I don't like prairie home companion I don't think of being anywhere near California Nevada you know it's it's you're right that's not there's prairies everywhere okay these are like western home on the range that's that's this area all right okay so so you know it is there do we humans do the humans need to go everywhere and I think you'll find that they do if you ask those mummies just stay away just stay out of there stay out of the prairie dogs but sometimes you got to build a golf course disrupt the no you don't you really don't there's enough golf courses just stay away just stay away people stay away if you love nature stay away oh yeah there it is it's nowhere near where you said no it's nowhere near where I said here it is it's the place I know I know this is the I don't know geography okay well no that's fine it's like I had no idea either okay so this is actually you get at the kissing prairie dogs to pay attention to the territory I mentioned some of the four corners I got those four but it's nowhere near the corners so but what this is what's interesting about this is this is great planes territory current range or historical range kiki because that actually to me looks like what was uh treated natively graphical distribution of the black tailed prairie dog Sonomas Ludovicianus wow so that's all the way up in Montana down into parts of Texas and you're right new Mexico's in there Colorado both the Dakotas I got some I got I got like a d-minus it's three states that you said it was in okay don't ask me to name states I'll fail that's fine but one of them is the one you're in anyway but that's a very interesting map because that's very much the great plains so the great plains is all through that and so that's also the prairies is the great plains yeah it's the same thing that we talk about like the traditional bison buffalo grazing lands is also where this is okay I'm sorry I had no idea where the buffalo I'm looking to because this is very confusing and the prairie dogs play where seldom is heard a discouraging word because those dogs have been kissing all day there you go very well done okay okay okay everyone thank you who's bringing up all the maps is that you Blair trying to find one I was I gave up because there was such a nice transition but since it's it's been smashed I'll tell you what I was showing you I was showing you the historical range of the Blackfoot and ferret because the historical range of the Blackfoot and ferret would show you the historical range of the prairie dog right okay and so that's actually much closer California's still not in there so I'm not sure why the because this is the thing is that ferrets are not allowed to be pets in the united they're in California because of this but they're not in California so I'm I don't I don't know but yeah look at see look at this one this is the historical range of the Blackfoot ferret so it's it's getting much closer to California yeah and it's including a lot more of the states that I mentioned for sure but yeah I know I was curious about that because which matter we're looking at yeah yeah I've like never been anywhere where there's a prairie dog like I've never been here but I didn't know they live underground yeah no no but I'm yeah yeah but I mean I've never been like any like I've traveled throughout California I've traveled the western states to the most part but I've never been anywhere where it's like oh out there is where the prairie dogs live we were in New Mexico yeah I guess I have been we had we did get all the mech it's in New Mexico that's right I didn't see any prairie dogs then either and you may or may not see prairie dogs wherever you are but where you are right now is with twist we hope that you are enjoying this show it's twiso ween here 2021 that in itself is scary don't be scared though head on over to twist.org and get yourself a calendar and get ready for 2022 there's no reason to be scared of that it's just another year another calendar full of amazing art from Blair so head over to twist.org get your calendar for 2022 today all right we're gonna come on back now with some stories from Justin it's your turn what do you have uh I'm actually gonna do just uh I'm gonna do one more story okay just one here the Falkland Islands have you heard of this before I mean you've heard of them I have heard of the Falkland Islands okay without looking up where are the Falkland Islands don't ask me geography where's the Falkland Islands but I mean there's a middle of some sort of body of water because there are very good okay you're right you know exactly where they are then I actually doubt that most people could on a on a Hawaii it could pick out the Falkland Islands uh on a map at least most at least most Americans uh if you're Argentinian or uh from the UK you probably have a much higher chance oh yeah there's Argentina so these are small islands off the southeast tip of Argentina they are thought to be one of the few places on the planet actually discovered by Europeans because they were discovered to be uninhabited in 1690 by an English ship heading to Peru it was settled uh nearly a hundred years later by the French and then the British and eventually the Spanish as well it was then abandoned and resettled again in the early 1800s by Argentina until a raid by the US Navy in 1831 dissolved the government a few years later the British government took it over Charles Darwin visited the Falkland Islands in 1833 he noted the unusual occurrence of a single terrestrial mammal species a fox-like candid uh known as the Falkland Islands wolf or the Wara in his journals Darwin observed that Wara's lack of fear its inquisitive nature was likely to going to uh class it with the dodo an animal which has perished from the face of the earth he wrote 1876 the Wara became the first candidate to go extinct in modern times as a result of over hunting of this little fox 1982 1982 pretty recent history the UK and Argentina engaged in an undeclared war over the islands which lasted a little over two months there were beach landings there were boat bombings uh planes firing on each other this was an actual war between the UK and Argentina most people don't think of as one of the great wars because it all took place around in and around these islands and uh yeah the British the British won that one won as one might imagine so anyway this is findings from a totally unrelated findings from a new university of Maine led study are suggesting human activity on the islands predated the British discovery by hundreds if not thousands of years this is Kit Hamley National Science Foundation graduate research fellow led the investigation she and her team collected animal bones charcoal records and other evidence from across the islands over multiple expeditions and examined them for indications of human activity using radiocarbon dating and other lab techniques one of the notable signs of pre-European human activity derived from an 8 000 year old charcoal record collected from a column of Pete on New Island one of the names of the islands New Island located in the southwestern edge of the territory according to researchers the record showed signs of marked increase in fire activity then 150 years uh was that the bc or no 80 150 80 and then abrupt significant spikes in 1410 and then later in 1770 which would have been when the the sort of European colonization events were taking place by the French researchers gathered sea line and penguin samples on New Island near a site where a landowner had discovered stone projectile points that were consistent with technology of indigenous South Americans over the past thousand years and they found that these bones are sort of heaped in piles that looked like kind of mounds that would be created by humans who were uh hunting and then taking them back to a specific point and dismembering them for food so it looks like the indigenous South Americans likely traveled to the islands between 1275 and 1420 and prior dates can't be ruled out because there's some evidence that thousands thousands of years 8 000 years earlier there may have been human activity one of the things they also found was they found a tooth from one of Darwin's extinct Falkland Island foxes the Falkland Islands wolf so this is also one of those things that one of the questions was is this lone mammal that Darwin finds in 1833 is it actually a native or could it have been brought there and released and that's maybe you know maybe this had been a domesticated type of a fox and that's why it wasn't afraid of people uh but no this tooth dates back about 4 000 years so oh i'm sorry actually uh uh what would be 5 450 years bc wow according to the radio carbon dating so this this little fox somehow ended up isolated enough on this island to become its own species and had been there uh you know now we have the oldest record of it going back you know 5500 years before people well yeah or maybe but maybe the people had been there also you know uh even going back further because there's some evidence but they think that's what it was it was uh it would have been an island that humans would go to for short stays they would go there you know do some do some hunting and fishing in the area but eventually return to the sort of mainland uh but if it is if they can find the 8 000 year old evidence you know again this is a people right this is a people who colonized two continents it would be really weird if they didn't keep looking if you keep exploring like yeah i mean this is this is an island this is an island that the settlers uh you know the Spanish settlers Argentine in the Americas and stuff hadn't known was there even didn't even know was there like they got discovered by accident because a British ship was going by and was like what's that uh it looks like land and went check it out it's like oh that's not where we're heading uh but they you know they went and kind of checked it out and took a little bit of inventory of some of the life that was life forms that were there but uh and said let's plant a flag it's ours now come back later and then the French went there first so yeah yeah yeah yeah i have i have no doubt uh i have no so and but there was a do you just anybody know what the Falklands war like i feel like i missed that one i would have been a child at the time it was taking place but the UK and Argentina at war with each other like battleships like beach landings the whole thing crazy it happened and i think like i think the population on the islands is something around 3000 like there's not like i don't even like there's not like why are you fighting over that because it's land and we could put things on it yeah i guess so resources land it's important to somebody oh my goodness i have a couple of brainy stories to finish us up okay yeah so yes brains my zombie tank girl is coming to get you back when i was in graduate school i studied bird brains and one of the questions we were interested in in the Clayton lab where i worked was whether or not the brain was prepared in some way a little baby bird brain whether it was ready for experience whether it just grew on its own or whether it was like as soon as it got an experience that related to spatial memory whether storing food or navigating whether that caused or allowed for growth and all the evidence seems to point to in the birds that we were looking at that were food storing birds and also in birds that were migratory it's like as soon as they get that experience it's like the brain is the hippocampus in the bird brain is just sitting there little doing normal little hippocampus things and then you give it one seed to store and it proliferates and suddenly you have neurogenesis and the brain grows i'm like it's like wow okay this is a really interesting adaptation for energetics and also because birds they have to manage their weight and so it's if they're not going to have those experiences maybe they don't need to put the energy into it right so how many other species have this kind of preparedness in their brains the waiting for experience some researchers at Drexel University just published in a journal called the science of nature and i actually had to double check that that was a real journal because i was like really this isn't like a kids book or something or just somebody making it up because yes i'm called science in a journal called nature they're like let's call it the science of nature uh the science of nature yes but they have published their study looking at neural expectation in termites turns out that termite brains are ready to go when they need to for the right opportunities termites have casts right it's a hierarchical stratified population where different portions of the termite colony have different jobs there's kings and queens that at some point get wings and they get to go out and fly and be free and reproduce and then go make a new colony and turn a new thing and then there are others that don't get to fly away they still get little wing buds like they kind of wanted to almost fly away but they never got that chance and so which of these termites is getting ready for the right experience for that ability to take advantage of going out into the wide wide world leaving the colony and exploring well these researchers looked at termite brain tissue and they determined that there are the termites are investing in brain regions that are their purpose their function is to deal with the cognitive demands of flight and this happens before that experience actually happens so as a it's different from the bird brains where the birds the experience happened and then neural proliferation happens in the termites they're like which one of us will it be we all must prepare and so the termite brain gets ready to go whether or not the termites gonna end up out there so is it are you saying is it a matter of free your mind and your wings will follow or is it or is it like interesting so is it is it really is it just like is it really just come down to peer encouragement peer pressure like ah yeah sorry son i i wish you i wish you were gonna be a flyer but nah you'll be working in the the wood mine with your old man tell you that i'll never have wings and fly make your dreams smaller right and it's like oh you never get to do it i guess if that's the case i just won't grow wings being like that's weird like they've already gotten their brains kind of ready they're ready for the cognitive cognitive demands but then they don't have to and the wings don't have to grow and the stuff it just they never make it past that kind of nymphal stage and they just become regular colony adults and they don't get to fly if you if you want to go very new age with this i feel like you could say that this is like you know the goldfish syndrome but for your brain right like your brain is going to grow to the to the container you put it in right so like reach for the stars and then again son then again son do more if you don't have wings you can't fly but then you're not gonna the chances of you being eaten by a bat much less it's not all bad it's not all that it's true these termites the ones that aren't flying they're mostly going to get eaten by what honey badgers bears yes they're going to be eaten by those animals that want to dig into that dead tree meat kinkajews who knows kinkajews oh fantastic yes yes well the kings and the queens that make it into the outside world they're ready to take up their ruling status their wings their vestments of greatness as well as their brains they're ready to travel da da da okay now moving on into why why why why are we afraid of things sometimes how do you when you walk into a building or a new space and you're kind of like oh it's super creepy what's going on around here you know how sometimes you just get get goosebumps for no reason that you like consciously explain you're like i know it's fine everything's safe but it's just a bank but something about the people here is just unnerving me i was going to go much darker with it and say you know you mean like every time that i walk around at night by myself as a woman oh no wait there's a reason for that one though well it's dark right there's dark um it's also being alone not having yes yeah being a woman outdoors alone in the city area yeah okay all these things beyond even that it's we're like that plant is making a scary shadow and no i'm creeped out there's yes yes exactly so researchers of the university of toronto have been interested in what are the basic components that lead us to have certain feelings even before we are consciously aware of the things that are around us in a particular space and so they uh they did a study and determined that individuals we process particular features of danger very quickly without conscious control because it helps us avoid danger and we know that this is true like a snake maybe you don't know it's a snake but you see a long vertical shape you go oh that's you jump away from it and then you look back and you go oh that was a stick but if you you are lucky you go ah i didn't get bitten by a cobra you know that's great so they looked backwards to see all this they published it in scientific reports and they found that there is an emotional aspect to very specific features they used a picture set that is used in uh psychological research all the time it's called the international effective picture system and it's a database of about a thousand images from people to beaches and furniture and rooms to things that are actually disturbing like natural disasters and banks banks things that evoke different emotional response and researchers use them in psychological studies when they do want to evoke particular emotional responses well these researchers took away all of the color context they took away all the stuff that was the real stuff in the pictures and left lines all that were left were lines and they found that people viewing these pictures that just had lines vertical lines horizontal lines broken up jaggedy lines long open free lines they had emotional responses in the same exact way as to the full contextual content wow so the subconscious brain is able to either reconstruct the image but not necessarily translate it to the conscious brain but still react to it on the visceral level yes wow exactly so if i'm not wearing my glasses i would be equally creeped out even though everything's fuzzy exactly you would you'd be like okay it's fuzzy but i know that this is that's that's jaggedy or this is whatever and so what when they took everything out they found that the lowest level features that were able to trigger emotional responses were consistent across types of landscapes so open horizontal lines which remind us of landscapes of beaches those seemed to give positive effective emotions whereas like i've said a couple of times already like jagged broken lines are short angular are negative and threatening so just taking out all the other context these very basic aspects of imagery can affect our emotional response to things that we see and we don't even know why it's just lines we're like ah my intuition yeah and so the question because we have this thing going back you know people babies are afraid of snakes right we have these kind of built in fears and so the question is at what point are these fears fears that are actually genetic that are that wired in from birth and which are learned and what components are genetic and what components are learned in the way that the circuits are all wired together so you know long open horizontal lines leading to positive happy you know it's turning off your amygdala making things happy and fuzzy or you know the jaggedy stuff turning on your amygdala making you angry afraid these are very interesting questions i'm sure they're very deeply ingrained evolutionarily i mean it would make so i was thinking about not to bring it back to you know my trip and everything but i was snorkeling and we were around a bunch of a fish there were a bunch of like reef fish and it was awesome but there was one moment where there was this huge school of fish and they started kind of moving erratically and splitting apart and i felt my heart rate increase like i knew i wasn't about to get eaten by a shark i know did you did you but did you i know that that's extremely unlikely really really i know did you really know know that it couldn't happen but something about the way the fish were moving kind of got my heart rate going and and you know think about it we came from fish so if the fish are scared suddenly there's probably something very deeply ingrained in me to know if a prey animal is scattering that's not good of course i do remind myself like oh no they're probably doing that because i look like a predator but i'm the bad guy there's still you know this piece that's that's very that's that's very visceral that's okay some things amiss and evolutionarily there would be a benefit to responding to that and to responding to i don't know i guess shapes that indicate bad stuff there would be a huge benefit to that yeah i think it's you know our conscious mind is too slow to keep us alive it has to be faster what are the things yeah so now it's figuring out what are the things that are affecting the unconscious mind and making us react before we're ready and i guess yeah so many questions about it so many questions but as we head into i was gonna say too i just really quickly throw in uh there you got into a conversation with somebody who does dream studies yes i did yeah there's been a couple of great study great interviews that's on the website now uh a recent interview with somebody stationed who isn't part of that like i don't know if it was covered in that way yeah like the people who have sort of uh premonition type dreams oftentimes could it could just be that that subconscious brain which is doing is capable of much more than it can translate to our tiny conscious eight brain can do a lot of insane calculations probably does a tremendous amount of predictive power constructing all the known events of our current reality with the possibilities and then pick some stuff out then you dream it you dream it through a little bit it spills over now if your dream doesn't happen if the things it's playing with the running possible futures doesn't pan out you don't think twice about it now when it hits you're like oh i had a premonition dream because it totally says but it's probably the brain doing that all the time trying to have that predictive of best or worst fears or things that could happen that you hope for or things that you hope won't happen can happen in dreams as you're sort of playing with the scenarios that's whole that that's uh i like this study because it's showing that that there's a part of your brain that is much smarter than you and maybe if there was a way to tap into it if there was actually a way to elevate that part of the brain we would just all go insane immediately by having too much fear predictive insight into what's going to happen next and kev be in the chat room brings up a really important question which is can this research make haunted houses more scary which i bet that it can yeah so i mean if you can take advantage of the angularity of sharpness of broken angles and broken lines maybe you know who does that your haunted house scarier you know who does that uh magnificently uh tim burton yes oh yeah yeah there's yeah there's something definitely to be to look in you know look at your favorite horror movies look at your uh you know the things that make you fearful look at the things that make you feel comfortable and happy and take a look at them from this perspective of how they're constructed try and break them down a little bit in your heads but it's halloween so we're all about scary all the teeth big fangs big big fangs big tusks pointy pointy hippo tusks all right have we done it we've done it yeah we've done it oh you might not have thought we would have made it to the end of this haunted episode of twist but we have we made it and i 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Blair, come back for vacation, okay? No. No. Blair is still lying on a beach with a Mai Tai or a piña colada. I mean. I'm very jealous. I'm very jealous here. It is when you make it, you know? Yeah. Gore of Sharma is right, you are a total mood. Making waves with my office chair, it's great. Yeah, and this does look like it's a chocolate covered something, but it's, I don't know, a big, a little flexible big foot thing. I don't know, he's funny. I haven't quite figured out how to play with him. I don't know, he's weird. You think he would move around and he doesn't really want to move around very much. Oh geez. I love a big foot. He's a big foot. I mean, very important, so. Big foot. I'm important. I'll put him over here staring at me while I do the show. He'll just distract me. Oh, there's Justin. He came back. Yeah. Pirate Justin. All right. Yeah. It's so hard to tell because it's you have to see it's a long jacket. Oh, it's got good buttons. You got to have good buttons. All right, Blair. Got under balloons. It is the after show. So divulge some of the fun things that you did. Okay, I'll get closer to the mic. Okay. What's the story? The backstory here is. Backstory. There's a little backstory to this, right? There is. Why do you want a vacation? You met a boy. I met a boy through the marvels of modern science. Oh, you made one. Oh my gosh. No, you found this guy. It turns out you liked each other a lot. And to the point where you decided that's it. I need to get this in writing. We are going to be together forever. All right. That's true. That made my nose really red. And so then there was some sort of ceremony. Yes, there was. Yes. In which you said nice things to each other. We did. Yeah. And then. Yeah. Yeah. How was it, Justin? Did you enjoy the ceremony? Oh, I. So I had unfortunately a conflicted schedule where I had another engagement at the California Academy of Sciences that day. You'll believe your day. It was a crazy day, but I made it back to the after the ceremony. And everybody was very, it was very lovely. And oh my goodness. You're, I don't know who the person, the human being is who you're, who gave the speech when you two were sitting there. Yeah. Your best friend who gave, gave this amazing, incredible wedding tribute to you and Brian's love. She did an amazing job. And I remember the whole time, like she's saying these beautiful words. And I remember thinking good grief. I could never give a speech like that for anybody. Like I would just be terrible at saying like that, that kind of stuff. Yeah. She was amazing. Oh my gosh. There's a picture of me. There it is. Looking almost like I don't fit into that jacket at all. Yeah. Yeah. No, her speech was so good. Yeah. It made me cry a lot. Yeah. It was very sweet. It was such a sweet one. I liked your dad's speech, Blair. Yes. Oh my gosh, your dad. Great. I hung out with Blair's parents a lot at her wedding. It was sweet. They're pretty rad. They're rad. Yeah. I was like, hey Blair's parents, how's it going? Yeah. So I don't recognize the gentleman in the picture, but that's not the guy you married though. No. No. Am I allowed to show? Yeah. Picture pictures? Good ones. Good ones. Good ones. Let's see. Why do we want it? Yeah. So we had a wedding. It happened. It only rained in the last hour. So that was funny. When we booked the venue, they were like, it's only rained like two days in the whole, in the last 200 years. It's only rained twice on this day. Yeah. I got it. It was so cold. This is a very cute boomerang. Yeah. I got a cute little GIF. That's like boomerangie. It's super cute. I didn't share this one with you. Google photos made it for me. Oh, that's really cute. Yeah. I'll send that one to you. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have a lot of pictures yet because the photographer hasn't sent them yet. And I didn't have my phone all day. So. You weren't taking pictures. You're going to get some great pictures from that photographer. Yeah. I think actually Kiki took the best photo though. It's the one, it's the look back. Yeah. I got to find that one. That's such a good photo. I think that's better probably than anything that's going to come from wedding photos. I like this one. This is my. This is my. Oh. That's pretty nice. Justin's like, I don't know how to focus my phone. How do you do that? How does it work? This is my favorite photo. This is a fan. This is like, yeah. That is awesome. That's a great pic. They were walking away. I'm like, no. Turn it around. Turn it around. Turn it around. Let's do that. Oh my gosh. Yeah. That's fantastic. I got a good one. So cute. Yeah. We're all so happy that you finally got to celebrate. Put off for so long. Finally. Phew. It was like right up until the day it was happening. I was like, is this really going to happen? Is it going to happen? Yeah. Is it going to go? Is it going to go? Yeah. I mean, Kiki, we're talking about whether or not we should actually make plans for it because we're like, what am I really going to do at this time? Maybe. I mean, it was our last shot. We weren't going to try again. So yeah. There's one in here that if I can wait, hold on. The cake was frozen. It was really hard to cut. Oh, wait. I think I took this pick. Yeah. There's the one. Right there. That one. I have a hippo. There's the cake. It's a cake. Is it going to taste good, Brian? I don't know. Is it frozen? It was like an ice cube. Just take the picture. Why won't the photographer take the picture? Do we have to do this right now? No. Yeah. Photographer was very much in the way of the photos. They tend to do that. Like standing right in my wedges. Yeah. Yeah. It was cute. So then the day after we jumped on a plane and went to Tropical Paradise. It was great. Woohoo. So where in the Hawaii's? Because I understand there's more than one island. There is. We were in Maui. All right. Is that what they refer to as the big island? No. No, it's not. What's the big guy? Were you in Lahaina? We were in Kanapali actually. Kanapali, okay. But we visited Lahaina a couple of times while we were there. But the thing about Maui, which I didn't realize until we were on our way back to the airport and we overheard the shuttle driver talking about it, which I wish I had known the whole time we were there. We had this amazing hotel room with a balcony that was facing the ocean and from it you could see two other islands. And I guess on a lot of the Hawaiian islands, you can't see other islands based on the direction that you're facing and how far it is between the islands. But we were, we could see Lanai and... And Lanai is not really a populated island. No. Apparently there's only like one resort on Lanai and one night there is like $5,000. Oh, the other one that we saw was Molokai. Cool. Is that? Yes, that's the one that we saw. So, and then when we went down to Lahaina, we also saw Kahaloa, which is the crazy thing about that island is that it was a nuclear test site. Yep. And so there's no humans allowed on or around it. Wow. Not only the radiation, but also there's a bunch of undetonated mines in the water and on the island. What? Yeah. Super dangerous. However, however, however, the resort there is only $5 a night. You can stay there if you don't really care much about your life. How has that not been like fixed? Fixed. I don't understand. I don't understand. I don't get it. I don't know. I mean, I guess the plants thrive over there. Apparently there's, the joke was there's a lot of three-legged goats, but... Ugh. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But the other thing we did that was really cool. So we went snorkeling a bunch. We saw a bunch of stuff. I saw Sea Turtle and followed it at a safe distance via snorkel for like 10 minutes. It was so fun. I'm glad that you followed your own advice Blair. You're like, you know, you didn't go like super tourist. I'm going to touch the turtle. Oh, God. Just because you were there. No. The really touristy thing that we did was we got in a submarine. What? A real submarine with... What? We went 130 feet underwater. Wow. And there was a sunken ship. And we saw eagle rays and reefs and all sorts of cool stuff. Yeah. And so they have the... It looked exactly like the submarine ride in Disneyland. They had the circle windows along both sides. Nice. But it really did dive underwater. It was so cool. Oh, that sounds amazing. Yeah. That was really awesome. And we went to a Luau and yeah. We did as many things that we could do safely. But you didn't need a rental car for because you can't get rental cars right now. So. And that's a picture you took? No. No. I just found one of an eagle ray on the internet. Yeah. Okay. I want to go into submarine now. That's so cool. So you could see stuff in the submarine. Because my fear would be like, well, we're going into submarine and you go down and it's just dark. Yeah. And then you're like, well, oh yeah. It's dark when you go deep down underwater. No. I guess it's a hundred and something feet. Yeah, it's a hundred and something feet. You could still see. Okay. There's still enough light at 130 feet. But did you have to... Did it just go straight down? I mean, it's a submarine so it's pressurized on the inside. I didn't have to do any weird... Interesting. Staying at a certain level. Yeah. What's really cool is because it had one of those like glass bubble fronts where the captain sat. They said like, if there's a crack in that, it costs like $80,000 to replace it or something. So it docks all day. So there's duct tape from the shore. Because they don't want a boat accidentally smacking into it, right? So we got to... We had to take a boat out into the ocean and then it hooked up to the summer... The submarine surfaced right in front of us. It hooked up to the submarine and then we went onto the submarine from a boat. It was so neat. That sounds like a blast. Okay. I want to go. Yeah. It was very fun. I want to do that. Or maybe there's a ride at Disneyland. I might just... That might be enough. Yeah. That one doesn't go fully underwater though. And it wasn't... Wait. It wasn't the... What was it called? It was at the Atlantis? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'm seeing pictures of it right now. Oh, bring it up. I want to see this. Yeah. This is a commercial now. It's now a commercial. No. I don't think that's totally fair though. That's like... Who was... Guava was in the chat room saying, I didn't even know you could go on submarine rights. Yeah. Neither did I. I had no idea that was a... Yeah. There it is. What? Yeah. I totally wanna go. Yeah. That's exactly what it looks like. All right. I'm in. Yeah. That's cool. I would like to go on a ride. Yeah. We need to have a twist honeymoon. Yeah. I'm going to go on our honeymoon. Well, I should be at conferences like in Hawaii and the Bahamas. Whatever it is. Let's book it. Let's book one. Yeah. I'm sure there's like a marine science conference and some... I'm not even kidding. It doesn't have to be science. Marine Margarita contest. Just then, then it's a choice expense is what I'm saying. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We can do some recording stuff. Sciencey, sciencey. We can make a little video and do a thing and suddenly, yes. Oh, there's the ship. There's the sunken ship. Sunken ship. Yeah. That, I would do that. That would be so fun. It was so fun. That looks awesome. And is Hawaii, I know they were having a bit of a COVID spike there for a while, but how are things? How were people? How was it all? That's a very confined space. I don't know if I'm enjoying that. I'm like, oh, yikes. Yeah, everyone wore masks. No, every restaurant we went to and there we had to show our vaccine cards, not even photos. We had to bring the actual vaccine cards and show them everywhere we went. So that was, that was actually really encouraging and great. So knowing that, that everyone had to flash a vaccine card to do all the things that we were doing, made it, made it feel way safer. I think we even had to do it to get on the shuttle from the airport. Like it was locked down. Yeah. Yeah. And there was a whole screening process to get into Hawaii also. We had to upload our cards to their website. We had to do a health screening. We had to go, then even after that, at the airport, we had to go check in with the Hawaii desk and show them our vaccine cards. They're being very careful. Also, it was almost impossible to get a dinner reservation anywhere because all of the restaurants, all of the indoor anything are still at 50% capacity there. Yeah. So we had to stand by for a lot of tables at restaurants, but that was also fine because we would call restaurants, they'd say, like, oh, we're booked up for the next six months. I think a lot of people are booking things without even fully booked. Maybe not making it out there. Exactly. Maybe not making it to Hawaii at all. Maybe not just showing up. You know, who knows. But yeah, so we never had to wait too long for a table. And I assume it's Hawaii. They kind of have hospitality down. So while you're waiting, they're probably bringing you drinks. We never waited long enough for there to be a problem. Yeah. Yeah. I always say, I don't need a table. Just let me sit at the bar. I'm good. I'll eat it. Yeah. We did that one day. We got sushi at the bar. Yeah, but the crazy thing for me was even though I knew this, I'm not, I wasn't so silly that I like didn't look this up. I knew there was a time difference, but I think my brain didn't understand it because I started on the Pacific Ocean. And I landed on the Pacific Ocean. But it's five hours later. It's a five hour flight. It is a three hour time difference. So the thing that happened to us the night we got there that was insane was we landed and it was Hawaii time. It was 3pm. Okay. We got our bags. We like, we waited for the shuttle. We took the shuttle. We checked into our room. We unpacked a little bit. We called down to the restaurant. They didn't have bookings for that night. We were like, oh, we're getting hungry. We like went to the store. We got a snack. We ate some Maui sweet onion potato chips and like had a beer. We were like just chilling. Then all of a sudden I felt like I was going to die. Like I basically, I expired that night. Like the first night I got a stomach ache. I got a headache. Felt terrible. I got into bed. I took a 45 minute nap. And then I woke up at 9.30. Which was midnight. And you're at night view. Yeah. And your poor, your poor groom is like, oh, so this is what I'm in for. Yeah. No. So like I woke up and he was like, oh, I figured out why we feel so terrible. It's 1245 right now. I was like, no, it's not. He's like, no. Yes it is. Late. You both are like, it's time. Yeah. So that was the first night. It was just definitely like a total distortion. Yeah. That was really hard. And we were waking up at like 6 a.m. every day because it was 9 here and falling asleep at 9 p.m. But like that was all fine because. Perfect. Yeah. There's not a lot of nightlife where we were. And all the snorkeling is good in the morning. So it worked out. It was great. You didn't need the nightlife. Well, they didn't know if there was one. I guess you're married now. So you don't need to play in the singles. No, all my friends who who like, I know a few people who have condos in Hawaii or they have family from Hawaii. And they were all saying like, oh, if you want the nightlife, don't go to Maui. I was like, I'm good. Yeah. That's not why I'm going to Hawaii. Thank you so much though. Maui is lovely. Yeah. It's great. But it is weird that you're like, wow, I'm flying five hours. That's as far as long as it takes to go to New York. It's like, but the other direction. Yeah. Just over ocean the whole time. The whole time. And then we landed in the middle of a, what was it? A bomb cyclone? Yes. So that was a fun landing. Oh gosh. Oh yeah. Cause you were there ahead of it. I didn't even think about that. I was like, oh yeah. Like Tahoe just got topped up. But like in a day. So I heard a toll booth washed away on the Bay Bridge. There were entire streets flooded in San Francisco. And we had to land in the middle of it. So that was fun. It was, it was not the smoothest descent I have ever experienced, but I'm sure they're used to it. Oh yeah. They're for sure used to it. And it wasn't even the worst. Like I've had way worse drops on descents when there are air pockets versus a storm. The air pockets are way worse. So, so the whole plane screamed a couple of times if he dropped like a hundred feet. No way. And I was like, I didn't like that, but I didn't need to scream from that. I've definitely experienced worse. Yeah. I have a, I don't think that when, It's fine. We're going to Hawaii. It's just like a ride at Disneyland. It's okay. Yeah. I don't think that I would die screaming. Even in a plane crash. I don't think like screaming would be like, cause I don't feel like that's going to do anything. Right? Like if it was going to like make the outcome a little better, I'd scream louder than anybody. Yeah. It's not really going to help anything. Let's see if I can take this hat off without ruining. My vest is shedding. I think I have inhaled some of whatever this. Fo-rabbit or whatever. Pink rabbit fur. Yes. There we go. There's like pink fibers all over the place here. I'm like, there's white hair all over me too. So costumes are awesome. We need them more often. So is this like, are we going to twist a wean every week? Just costumes here on out? I'd have to, I need a budget. Yeah, you have to have the twist budget, Kiki. But I'm totally in. I could... Look at this fun hair. It is fun hair. I like that. I might just try to talk with a different accent every week. Okay. That's good. Put on a different facade than my normal Justin facade. Which facade it will be this week? Oh, I don't know. The one that we use every week. Well Blair, it's wonderful to have you back. I'm excited to be back. Yeah, it was a lot of fun to have you back. Especially for a fun twist a wean episode. Yeah, I got excited. Yes, I love it. I'm glad you had a great holiday. Yeah, it was fun. When are you going to have another one? No. I have to tell you, having the wedding was very fun. Planning the wedding, some of it was fun, but some of it was a big drag. So I don't look forward to planning another wedding. Fair enough. Definitely. I feel like I'm getting a glance at Auntie Blair. Yeah. I need like one long hair. Yeah. It's like a few decades. You also have some big Hawaiian bead necklace. You go back there every year. We're used to you with your long hair. And I'm like enjoying this super short, spiky look like this. So the thing is, I think I would be really tempted to do this. I have a black wig that looks like this kind of two. And I love the way it looks. My hair wouldn't do this. My hair is curly. So it would be different. It would be a curly fuzzball. It was this length. I don't know if you process it enough. It would look like that and it would stick out. Just fry it, please. Just fry it. That's totally fried. It's okay. Don't get the Karen cut, Blair says Garov. No. I bought this for my good Omen's costume a couple of years ago. I wore my bit of feather that was on my microphone. Here is a little homage. We'll play so much. I do love this wig, though. The pink color is one of my favorites. Yeah, it's very good. I think I could have pink hair. Yeah, of course you could. What if I dyed the bottom half of my hair white? It's like reverse Cruella. If you were doing it before Halloween, then at least you have a proper excuse. Do you think you could actually get your hair white? Yeah. It would look like this though. It would kill the curls. It would make it look like straw. It strips everything out to get it that white. I'm just sharing hair care topic tips and insights. I've never been able to get my hair lighter than an orange if I've tried to bleach it. It's just too much. Are you trying to do it by yourself? Yeah, is that you doing a box? Yeah. Doing it multiple times. Does it matter? No. Hair care professionals, color professionals know how to counteract color, how to strip color, how to do more than just the peroxide. I'm not talking about peroxide. I'm talking about the actual... Your scalp is burning. You're not supposed to burn your scalp. Yeah, but that's how you get the good... That makes your hair fall out. Yeah, it totally happened. It totally happened. Way less hair than I used to. That was also probably around the time. That was probably around the time that Argentina and the UK were in a war in the 1980s. So it was a long time ago. Yeah, seriously though, I feel like it was like a 1990s rite of passage. For, yeah, 1990s, late 90s, especially for people to try and bleach their hair. Yeah. Like just to do it with box and... There were a lot of bleaching attempts. I have yellow hair and a few photos. I dyed my hair blue-black for quite a few years. I like that. It was fun. Actually, I might have a photo. Hang on a second. Better living through chemistry. The reason I never did it again is that I wanted to grow my natural color back and it took years. A long time. Especially when you have long hair. Yeah, it took so long and it was just a box. But yeah, it took so long to get my natural color back. What do you have, Justin? I actually have a photo. You have a photo? The blondest my hair was able to get. And it was just orange. And this is after... I'm like, this is orange. This is just orange hair. I couldn't get it to go. And this was like multiple bleachings. And just the hair was like, what? This is all I can do. And you're like a cat with the dark scalp underneath too. Your scalp's just like, no. Look at this goofy kid. Hey, everybody. You were so cute. Oh my gosh. You were such a baby. Oh my God. My head is itchy. Baby Justin, my goggles have an elastic band and are squeezing my head. Oh, she has hair again. Long hair. It was all in here. Oh my goodness, what? The secret is the bald cap. The bald cap. A little twist. That's amazing. Yeah. That's my favorite part of wearing a wig is everyone's like, where's all your hair? It's in there. It's in there. Don't you worry about it. Yeah. I don't know. At some point when my hair decides to go white, maybe I'll let it go like salt and peppery and be like, hopefully get towards like that distinguished gray kind of look. But I might just say forget it and go pink or lavender because the lavender-haired little old lady, I think I could do that fairly well. You definitely could. All of my gray hairs are showing up right here. You're getting a streak. But I'm hoping. I'm hoping. That'd be awesome. I'm really hoping it comes in as a streak. My aunt had Cruella, like a single streak that went across the front, like this beautiful white streak. It was like Cruella de Vil almost. It was like rogue from the X-Men. Yes. It was just a single streak. And I was like, really? How did you get that? Why did you? Well, I want that. I'm going to get salt and pepper. I know it. I am a fan of chemistry when it comes to my hair. And wigs and all the things. Oh, Gord had gray streaks. Yeah. Now you can't call them streaks anymore. I say let's all blame 2020. 2020's fault. Yeah. I mean, that's when I got most of the gray hairs. This is 2020. Noodles is going more white than salt, salt and pepper. Used to have more colors than... Noodles in the discord chat says, I had all colors Rodman had before Rodman had them using manic panic. That was the one. Oh, yeah. That was the go-to. Yeah. I dyed my hair what I thought was going to be red. It was called poppy red. And it ended up being bright pink. Yeah, we can see it. And what's amazing is that it never changed back. It was permanent hair dye. Never, ever, ever. I did a red. I did red streaks once, very 90s. Like big fat streaks of red. I love it. And they had chunky streaks and they ended up being orange. You're like, that's not what I want. That's not what I want. That's not the one. Yeah. Manic panic is fun, but you have to be willing to let it go if it's not what you wanted. Because it will end up being not what you wanted most of the time. But it can be very fun. Eric Knapp says he's been going gray since the Falkland Island War. There's no blaming 2020 for that one. Yes, I'm going to be intellectual. There it goes. Are we done for the evening? Yeah. Sadie will be up at 3.30. Wait, doesn't she know that it's not Hawaii? She wasn't even there. No. I bet Sadie was so happy to see you. Is she bored of you now? She's like, you went back three days. It was like two days and then that was it. I think you picked the perfect place to go for a honeymoon. I've been to Hawaii exactly once and actually I don't think I've ever been angrier. Then the first day or two I was in Hawaii. Because it was just like, how come nobody told me that there's an actual paradise on earth? Hawaii is amazing. Postcards and stuff and you're like, ah, somebody airbrushed or fixed the picture up. No, that's Jurassic Park is Hawaii. Yeah, it's Jurassic Park. There's an actual paradise on the planet. What you would picture with white sandy beaches, the outside weather is fine day and night. Occasionally rains, but it's a warm rain. There's a foggy mist over that little mountain over there and people are friendly. The tropical jungle. The Kwanapali coast is like, ah, crazy cliffs. It's so beautiful. On one side there's a little like, yeah. It's just the whole thing is gorgeous. I was like so mad. Really nobody was like, you have to go to Hawaii and see paradise because it actually exists. We were waffling between Maui and Kauai and the reason we didn't pick it in the end is the rental car issue. When I go to Kauai, I need a rental car because of all these paradise spaces. To get to. It's not developed enough that there would be a bunch of lifts that you could just call. It would be a lot harder to get around if you didn't know a car. Kauai is an interesting island too because it's got a road that goes almost all the way around. It's like a big U-shape of the road. You can't just go around. You have to sometimes go quite a distance to get all the way around the island. Not that far. Nothing's that far. One thing that did a couple of things. Actually, it has this, oh, what's the beat of the beach from Puff the Magic Dragon? Song? Oh. It's like rebel-y. No. Anyway, supposedly it was written on this one beach that's in Kauai. Oh, okay. Honolay Bay. Honolay Bay. Honolay Bay, you can walk out and the water will be from waist to chest high and you can go out hundreds of feet. There's this beautiful, the surfers way out there and people are frolicking in the water and then there's this creek that's coming from inland and so you can kind of sit and it goes out into the ocean and there's a temperature difference. This is kind of a fun, neat place to hang out. First night, or first couple of days, also when I'm mad that nobody told me about Paradise, hanging out, walking way out into this swimming around, playing around. And then go have the sushi at the bar and then there's this guy talking at the other end of the bar. He's like, oh, I forgot to mention, it rained, the warm rain and I've got the warm rain and the creek water coming and I'm like, right there. And there's this guy talking and he's like, yeah, it stays like this. I'd never go out in the Honolay. Yeah, yeah, because the rain brings all the sharks. I'm like, what is that about the sharks and the rain? Why would sharks be attracted to rain to a specific, like it didn't make sense. Oh, it rains and so now the sharks come to the specific beach and it makes no sense. He's like, ah, it's because there's a there's a freshwater creek that goes out into that bay. I was like, yeah, I was hanging out there earlier today. He's like, okay, well, the rain happens all inland. There's a lot of chickens. There's a lot of little farms and chickens and stuff. And so a lot of that waste from the chicken farms and some dead chickens and old chickens and occasionally chickens just gets washed out. They come right up to the creek, attracted by the smell of the blood of all the dead chickens and all those stuff. So I'm like, oh, that's right where I was. So the whole rest of the trip I didn't go in the water because he's talked about because he told the story about being in that bay and a tiger shark coming up and grabbing them and he said the thing that's the scary about those is that bay you can't see very well and tiger shark doesn't see very well. It bumps India and it's going to take you. Once you first. It's going to try to drag you out because it doesn't know you're not prey because it can't see you any better than you can see it. It just finds you and it's going to bite. Didn't go into the water the whole rest of the trip. I think I was there another week. Oh boy. Justin's Hawaiian Vacation is a horror movie. Don't go in the water. Don't go in the water people. Stop. So, okay. However, however, on that island, giant lush amazing avocados grow everywhere. Everywhere. Like you can just walk out your thing. They call it the garden island for a reason. Like where you can grow avocados in your yard just like with a hedge or like you got a grass lawn or something anywhere else where you can just grow stuff. They got avocados growing all over there and like that. Oh, I would never I wouldn't even need to buy food. I just live off of avocados all the time. I'd have to buy some sour cream maybe to go with it. That's about it. Blair needs to tell you something about tiger sharks. Yeah. No, I'm looking at Hawaii's website and they have a shark incident report. And the last one on Kauai. So, there was one in February of 2021 but there was no injury. Was it Honolabae? No. And this was no injury to the human. The shark bit the nose of the surfboard. The next one at Kauai was at June of 2020 Kekaha Davidson's Beach 100 yards from shore. So, also that other one was 100 yards from shore. There's no way you're swimming that far out. So, these are both surfing entries. On Honolabae, you can pretty much get out almost that far walking. You wouldn't even need to be swimming. It's a very weird 300 feet. Yeah, it's a very weird bay because you can walk way out far. Now, there's a breaking surf much further out, like a couple of football fields where the surfers are. You almost can't see them too well from the shore. But that bay is like very bizarrely situated that it stays. Like the California coast you walk out 20 feet and then you drop off a cliff, right? We're used to that in California. This bay is situated very differently. So, okay, so here's the first actual injury from a tiger shark in Kauai that I found is February of 2019. This is Honolabae. It's 320 yards from shore. So, like practically a thousand feet. So, that's out where the surfers are. And this was puncture wounds to left leg. That's out by where the surfers are out there. And I did feel like for our first line of defense, like sharks are going to come in. They got plenty to choose from. But the way the guy described it was that they weren't actually looking for humans. So, it's the fact that when you get into the bay, where the people can walk around, the visibility is bad because it's, you know, the tide's still coming in and out and it's still churning up. And that's why he thought at least the attack was more. I don't know. That's much more recently than when I was there. What is the thing about, if you're afraid of sharks like I am, one of the quickest remedies to it is not going into the ocean. There's a quick way to deal with it. Yeah. And that's what I chose. I chose not to go into the water anymore. Yeah, I mean, just like Don't go in the water. I don't know. It's, you're so much less likely to be bit by a shark than a million other things. Yeah, but if you stay out of the water you have no chance. But it wasn't just that yeah, the chance of the shark it was that this guy was telegraphing specifically he avoids that beach when it rains because the chicken farms chum in the sharks through that freshwater tributary to make absolute sense. That's a very specific period of time. I don't think tiger sharks can handle freshwater. Yeah. It's not that they have to go up the creek at all. It's that the chicken remnants from all the chicken farms up in the hills get washed out into that bay. Yeah. And that's what brings the sharks in. I'm just saying if there's any freshwater current that's hitting the water in that bay they're nowhere near it. We're going to have to go back a decade and a half find that bar and you can have this discussion with the guy with the shark bite marks in his leg. That's what I'm saying is if there's to your exact point I'm just really quick. You can argue with him all you want. The way estuaries work, right when it rains. Define an estuary. Freshwater is coming into the salt water. It's not a river though it's just a creek. So when the river or creek or whatever is providing freshwater to the bay, that's what makes it a bay, right when that? No. It's called the bay. You're right though. It's much more of an inlet. It's just the way it's situated. It's not being filled by freshwater to any degree. There's a tiny creek pouring into the thing. It's really kind of an inlet in like a crescent shape. But it's not like the bay, like your bay area that's being fed by a bunch of rivers combining and then pouring freshwater into it. It's a very different scenario. But hotly bay, it's ocean still really. It is except if you look at the topographical map you can see it looks like there's some water mixing and lots of turbid water along the edges. So whatever. Point being I take issue with this theory because if the whole point is that freshwater is getting fed into this area and pulling nutrients with it anything that's in that freshwater current that freshwater current is going to repel a shark. So I'm just saying there's some conflicting information here. Here's what we do. We go out, we find some sharks. We get some fresh water and we mix in a bunch of chicken guts and we pour that into the water along with you snorkeling. Now, if your theory is correct, the sharks will move away from you. If my theory is correct I'm sorry Blair. I don't know. Anyway The other problems that sharks don't want to eat people. But that was the whole point he was making too is the visibility of that bay. They get close to, they get close because they get the chum coming out. They come close but they can't see anything because the way that bay turns the water over and the visibility and then they bump into one of the hundreds of humans that are wandering around out there. But you know what? You're probably completely right. But it didn't matter. It was enough to affect my thinking that I will never go in an ocean again. Now it's not just during the trip right after the rains when the chickens are chumming. It's just the ocean ever. It's just never. I'm a mammal. I'm a land mammal. To be more precise because there are some ocean mammals but I'm not an ocean going creature. I should stay out of the ocean. That's my theory. Haudley Bay is a famous place because of its calm spots for children to play in the surf. Like I said, you can really walk way, way, way, way out there. It was voted best beach in America multiple times. Yep. Okay and see there's that tributary coming out there. That must be where I was hanging out. Going and watching some people that it had it was a spot where the water was coming out fast enough and at these interesting wells they pushed sand up so that they were surfing in stationary waves. Oh neat. Right here. I remember something like that. I kind of remember. Actually I think the one but go back down pull that map back down. I actually think one of those lower ones. Okay there's the oh gosh I remember being a little wharf thing but I think it was one of those. It's probably that beach park. I think that might have been one of those. So I'm also finding out that Haudley Bay is in fact a true estuary. Oh. It has a mean discharge of 216 cubic feet per second. It's the second largest river in the state. Wow. A lot of water that gets onto Kauai. So it's also possible the way the island topography is that it's not very wide but is very deep of a river. Yeah so that's also possible. It's also kind of yeah there's some actual mountains in there. The mountains from Lost. Remember they would show the misty tropical jungle mountains in the distance of Lost. That was all Kauai. If anybody remembers that show that somebody wrote a pilot for and then immediately it had to like keep making up stuff. Yeah. And it ruined in the last season. They had no art in the first place. Ah we got a bunch of people crashing into stuck on an island and everybody picked them up and they were like oh gosh now we have to write a whole 400 hours of show to go with this. Two hours. Well I think they only took it a season at a time which was part of the problem. Yeah it was never there was never an exit strategy and then one day they're just like okay it's over. We're done. Bye. Don't worry about it, it's purgatory. You know I said it wasn't purgatory but it turns out it's purgatory. I hope you enjoyed the ride gone. I did enjoy the siloed 70s science quarantine. Oh yeah. That was pretty rad. That was pretty awesome. All right everybody. Say good night Blair. Good night Blair, say good night Justin. Good night Justin. Good night Kiki. Good night everyone. Thank you for joining us for another episode of this week in science. Twist away! That sound of the slurping at the bottom of the tiki cup oh you know shows over. We'll see you again next week everyone. Oh I may be back online this Friday with an ecologist talking about the I'm forgetting the name of the science thing. It's a science thing on our channel talking with the researcher that we've talked to before food web. Yeah about that ecosystem that's right at the top of the newstrom. Yes. There is a hashtag save the seas that Mr. Beast and we have tried to get going to try and raise money for ocean conservation and cleanup and so we're going to be talking about the cleanup could destroy the newstrom so that's a problem. Yeah so we're going to be talking about that hashtag save the seas. We're going to be talking about the plastic. Yeah so we'll be talking about the ecology and the plastic and all that kind of stuff and having a little chat so like six o'clock p.m. Pacific Time on Friday if anyone's interested in joining but until then and also until next I can make it I can totally make it. Awesome. No she says no no. I will be finishing up at an event no actually I'll be working because it's Friday. She's getting married again. No I'm not. No I'm working though. I like this honeymoon situation so much I'm going to keep getting married. Park's in a form on Friday at an event so. Okay we'll have a great event and everyone if we don't see you this Friday we'll see you next Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific Time for more This Week in Science take care goodbye.