 This is Twist. This Week in Science, episode number 630, recorded on Wednesday, August 2nd, 2017. Sci-Fashion! Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and today we are going to fill your heads with hypnosis and fashion and body snatchers. But first... Disclaimer! Disclaimer! Disclaimer! From this point on, you proceed at your own risk. That said, welcome to Planet Earth! It's a nice place as far as planets go, and depending on your tastes. Geologically active, though only modestly so. Temperature ranges are mostly stable, depending on your sensitivity. Its surface is mostly water, liquid form, though some of it remains frozen. Radiation levels, more stable than most, thanks to a robust magnetic field. All in all, not the most remarkable rock upon which to contemplate the universe. Until you notice its one exceptional feature. As some of you may have already noticed, Planet Earth is teeming with life! And what a wonderful diversity variety and we got a complimentary complexity of life forms there are. The organisms that have risen here are some of the most marvelously amazing metabolisms you could ever imagine. Perfect subjects for study, as I'm sure you will agree. Watch your step, try not to disturb them too much as you conduct your research. And while you are here, be sure to tune into... This Week in Science, coming up next! With new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. Yeah, science to you Kiki and Blaire. And good science to you too, Justin, Blaire and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back yet again with a whole show full of science. There was some big news this week, very exciting stuff going down in the sciences. Very exciting stuff that we are going to talk about today. So I hope you all are ready to fill this wasteland with science. As is our way. Exactly. So on this week's show we have, as I said, lots of science news. I have stories about CRISPR, social echo chambers and hypnosis. And we also have an interview coming up in just a few minutes. Justin, what do you have? What do I have? Where did my stories go? I had some interesting stories in here earlier. Oh yes, real life body snatchers, magnetic roboviruses and why drinking may be good for old people. And hopefully may be semi-old people, people on their way to be old people. Maybe. And Blair, what is in the animal corner today? Oh, I brought aggressive spiders, cheating fish and snake bites. That's the drink, right? No, snake bites? No, never mind. I was putting pieces together but not in the correct way. Alright, I'd be a terrible puzzler. But first, we are going to jump into our new and one of our most favorite segments on the show. This week in, what has science done for me lately? This one's a very short one from Minyan, Ilias Tanira. Science has saved me from respiratory disease syndrome as an infant. That is what science has done for me. So Ilias, we're glad you're with us to share your story of what science has done for you in particular. We're very glad that science saved you so that you could listen to twists and share just as anybody can share with us. Week after week, we're going to try and fill this segment of the show with stories from our audience. All you have to do is send me a Facebook message on our This Week in Science Facebook page. Leave a message, tell your story. It can be short and sweet, like Ilias's story, or it can be a little bit longer and more involved. Don't go too long. We're not talking like an hour long thing. I mean, that's kind of just our show. Don't go on as long as the post-amble for sending in. Ooh, burn. Why you got to be so harsh, huh? Anyway, you can send us a message on our Facebook page. This Week in Science on Facebook. Tell us what science has done for you lately. We're going to fill this show up. Keep them coming week after week. I want all our audience stories. Thank you, Ilias, for sharing with us once again. All right, everybody. Now we're going to move into our interview. Our lovely guest has been waiting very patiently since the beginning of the show. I'd like to welcome Jaya Iyer. She's originally from India, and she got her PhD in fashion merchandising from Iowa State University. She's taught fashion buying, and she's even written a textbook on fashion in emerging markets, widely used in universities. She worked in apparel manufacturing and exporting, and she was the former apparel buyer for ThinkGeek. So if you bought t-shirts and clothes from ThinkGeek at any point in time, you were probably, thanks to her handy work of choosing items, probably appreciating some of her wonderful finds. So thanks to inspiration from her daughter, Jaya founded Svaha and became determined to change the landscape of apparel. Welcome to the show, Jaya. Hi, Katie. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. We're excited to talk with you. I mean, there's been a kind of movement lately. There's a lot more going on in the kind of geek apparel world than there used to be. I mean, maybe you could have like a Star Wars t-shirt back in the 80s, but there weren't funny science t-shirts. There weren't science necklaces. There weren't things just, there wasn't clothing that was inspired by science. And so I just love to talk about this a bit with you, but before we get started, what is Svaha? Can you tell us what your company is, what it's about? Sure. So I started Svaha, as you mentioned, because my daughter once told me once that she wants to grow up to be an astronaut, and I couldn't find an astronaut design on a girl's t-shirt. And so I created the line. I mean, considering I had the background, obviously it was much more helpful for me. And then I started with the kids line because I noticed that there was this huge gap in the market where you couldn't find science-themed clothes or technology-themed clothes, how it does. And so I started creating that. And then as I started making this, a lot of moms of these kids or even just other women said that, hey, I want to wear that too. Why isn't something like this available for me? I mean, they appreciate it's available easily, but not really dresses. So I was like, yeah, sure, why not? And so I started making dresses for the men, and they were all science, technology, engineering, and math-themed. And we also have the art element, so we call our line the steam line. And we started making this, and it just took off. I mean, people were so happy that they were able to wear these dresses. It showed their passion for the subjects that they were teaching or studying or just working in. And it's just been such an amazing reaction that we have gotten from people. I think there's just this whole movement about women in STEM or girls in STEM. And people just want to be able to express it through their clothing. And I think that's what has helped us. And for example, when there was March for Science recently, we had a huge number of people wearing our clothes because they wanted to show their love for science and through the designs that we have. And so we have a lot of school teachers who wear them, college professors who wear them, and students. And so it's just just been an absolutely amazing experience, so I'm launching this. And I guess adding pockets to the dresses helped a lot too. This is an ongoing problem, right? Women need pockets in their dresses. Yeah, so how do you get the ideas for your different designs? I'm going to bring up your website as a screen share for the people who are actually watching. But where do you come up with the ideas for your dresses and for the fabrics that you use? So believe it or not, most of our ideas come from our customers. Well, we started it. So we decided we wanted to have one science, one technology, engineering and mapping. We started it. And then after that, we constantly get emails. We just have to do one Facebook post saying, hey, we're looking for a technology design. And by the time we look at our Facebook next, there'll be 200 comments with 200 different ideas for a design. We actually, for example, for our technology designs, the C-language, it's been written by one of our customers. The Java design has been written by one of our customers. So the C-language, the code that's actually in the fabric, is real code that somebody wrote? Yes. What is it for? Does it explain that it actually outputs Fibonacci series? Oh, that's fantastic. So you could potentially use this dress for teaching coding even. Or to cheat on a test. That's right. Why did they have to go with that part? In fact, a rocket science dress was, you know, we found some of the formulas and we did that. It was inspired by hidden figures. But we know someone who's a professor in aeronautical engineering in MIT who actually helped us create this. She gave us the formulas that we need to put on the dress and another student helped us. And so all of our designs come from professionals because obviously there's no scope for error here, right? We can't make mistakes in our designs because it's the professionals wearing them. Right. And these professionals particularly are all about fact checking. So I'm sure that people are going to be going over the design, either the equations or the code with a fine-toothed tone. Fine-toothed tone. Fine-toothed code, if you will. Thank you. Yes. I have a question on Twitter about how our code compiles. There was a quick discussion among coders about how this code actually works. They have tried it and how it's, yeah, you're right. It has to be perfect. Otherwise it's not going to work. I'm reading right now the Rocket Science Dress. It contains the secrets of gravity losses, simulates rocket propulsion. Kiki, they have glow-in-the-dark solar eclipse earring. Maybe we should get those, you know, for a thing. I have a dress too, a glow-in-the-dark. Actually, one of our most popular ranges right now is our solar eclipse range. Nice. Yeah. So did you, based on the idea that the solar eclipse is coming, did you specifically design to this event? Of course. Of course. I mean, also we realized that there were a lot of people already, you know, there were basic solar eclipse t-shirts available already, but there was no one making dresses. So we figured, why not? So we added some polka dots and made them glow-in-the-dark to create something different. Oh my gosh. You have an infinity symbol, infinity scarf. That's genius. I love it. The most popular design of ours though. Oh my gosh. So what are the most popular items? Do you find that the people who are buying your clothes fairly broadly represented across the science technology engineering math? Are they fairly broadly represented in what they're purchasing or do you have more of the technology people buying the coding outfits or one group over another? It's difficult to say specifically that it's only science people who are buying it or only technology. We have designs. Our most popular design is glow-in-the-dark constellation dress. We launched it during our Kickstarter campaign. It's been almost two years and it still is our best seller. But then other than that, the DNA dress is also a DNA in the jellyfish glow-in-the-dark. I'm looking at this glow-in-the-dark jellyfish dress right now. That's really cool. It's cute. And then you go into a party and suddenly you're lighting it up. I saw you have an octopus dress too. We do. So we have a whole bunch of customers who are marine biologists and they absolutely love our whole list of octopus and jellyfish. We're actually working on a squint to design that octopus in the dark. It's an awesome group of customers that we have that constantly send us emails. And the thing is when our customer writes to you saying that every time I wear your dresses, I get robbed by multiple people wanting to take pictures of my label because they want to go and look for these dresses. So it's just an amazing feeling when people do that. It really is. Why do you think now? You worked at Geek, which has been probably part of pushing forward the market for geek-inspired products. But why do you think now there's this growing market? Why do you think you have such a wonderful clientele for these science and clothing and accessories? Yeah, I think it was mainly because of the gender stereotype. The number of women, first of all, the number of women who are entering the STEM fields is increasing at a very fast pace. The number of girls who are being encouraged to enter these professions is increasing. So a lot of people are now wanting to dress that way. They want to show their love for their field. And earlier it was like, so if there was one woman in a team of 200 coders, she didn't want to stand out. She wanted to blend in and just be in jeans and T-shirt and didn't want to. But now they're like, no, why should I not stand out? Why should I not wear something that makes me show that I'm feminine, I like to wear dresses and I'm still a coder? And I ran into the same thing that you did. My daughter kept picking out things that were in the boys' section, which is fine, who cares. But it was like robot pajamas and little rocket ship shirts and that sort of thing. So she's got this whole assortment of boy clothes that have that cool stuff that she's into on it. But yeah, just looking through this, this is fantastic stuff. She's going to love everything in your collection here. But it's really hard to get, because she still wants to wear it like exactly. She wants to wear the dress. It's a robot dress and it's like, that's hard to find, honey. How do you explain that? Absolutely. I still buy boys' T-shirts because I want the shirt with the robot on it. And I want the shark shirt. One of my favorite shirts is a shark shirt that's supposed to be for boys. I saw, I might be spending some money. We actually had people tell us that why do you not have pajamas and science technology-themed pajamas? Because if you want some of those, I don't know if they're even available, but if they are, they're probably going to be in the men's section. So we actually are working on a line. I'll show you one that I have. This is a binary pajama, which says sleep in binary. Oh, great. I think the ones glow in the dark. That's very exciting. What about some yoga pants, too? Next, that's next. I like talking about doing the range of sleepwear. We have melatonin, molecular formula. Yes, I want that. So how do you go about it? I mean, you're developing a very dedicated clientele, getting the word out about these clothes that you're making and the designs. But how do you decide at what point? Okay, we're going to do pajamas. We're going to make yoga pants and suddenly grow that catalog of items. How are you managing that balance of the merchandise and growing it? We did this at a very slow pace because we didn't want to get into everything and not figure out what's going to work, what's not going to work. So we started with girls' t-shirts, then we did dresses, then we did women's dresses. And then we had a lot of men reaching out to us saying, okay, why are these beautiful designs only on women's clothes? We want them. And then also, there were a lot of dads reaching out to us saying that, so we had mommy and me dresses, for example, signs. So then the dad said, I want to match my daughter. So why don't you make me something that I can match my daughter with? So then we started making unisex t-shirts because a lot of women wanted to wear t-shirts, too. And then we had multiple people right to us over and over again about pajamas. So that's when we said, okay, Christmas time is a good time, pajamas can go well together. So we decided that. And now we have people who are telling us we need to do socks because apparently there are no dinosaurs, socks or girls. Yeah, that's a travesty. So we're planning to do that. Baby clothes. So we have done it one by one. We started off with one room office in our house, and then we moved to the basement, covered up the entire basement. And now we are actually moving to our warehouse because we have outgrown the house. So as we are growing our team, we are getting more space, then we decide, okay, we can do this. There's no end to how many categories we can add to it because there is such a huge demand for it. And there's really nobody who's making something on the lines of what we are doing. So, yeah. I think it's wonderful. So do you think, do you hope that your clothing is, I mean, you said that it allows people to express their love of science or their appreciation of certain scientific subjects or technology, whatever. But do you think that the clothes or hope that the clothes can also inspire interest and curiosity about science? Yes. In fact, one of our customers wrote to us saying that her daughter was wearing one of the dresses because she wanted to match her mom. But then she started asking her questions about, you know, what's on my dress, can you explain to me? And I feel like that's a great beginning. Just this morning, one of my customers sent me a picture of her daughter going back to school, I think somewhere in Arizona, and said that my daughter is seven and she wore her DNA dress because she's so proud that she knows about DNA at seven years, she's a seven-year-old. And it just so happened when she went to school, her science teacher, a new science teacher who came to teach was also wearing the exact same dress. That's great. It just was such an amazing moment for her. So the science teacher will never forget her now, you know, and connect so well with her. That is fantastic. All right. So where can people, if they are interested in finding out, perusing your catalog, where can they go to find out more information? So my website is swahausa.com, S-V-A-H-A, USA.com, an easier one that also redirects to my website is ghostingo.com. And so it's ghostingo.com, and if you go to that, it redirects you to my website too. So that's an easier one to remember. That is fantastic. Well, I really, I think it's exciting that you are embarking on this fashion adventure and that so many people are appreciating clothing that you're making, that it gives people an outlet for their scientific appreciations. And also, as you said, it is helping to inspire younger generations. It's meaningful clothing. It's meaningful fashion. So thank you very much for what you're doing. Thank you. Thank you. It's amazing. It's unfashionable about it. So it's in a show in my work, I feel. Absolutely. Well, I love that you're listening to the customers as well and that the things that they are suggesting are ending up on the dresses and on the shirts and that it's kind of a, it's like a community project almost. The scientists coming in and saying, how about this? This would make a really great, great item. And you say, okay, let's try that out. Crowd sourcing. If you used a Kickstarter to crowdsource the funds to get this off the ground, and now you're crowdsourcing the creative ideas as well. It's fantastic. So Jaya, thank you so much for joining us this evening. I hope that, yeah, I wish you all the best and I'm going to probably spend a lot more time looking at the items in your catalog. And I know Blair will also. Me too. And Justin. Yeah. My kids are both going to get to pick something out for sure. Thank you. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful evening. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. So that was Jaya Eyre from Svaha, a science, technology, engineering and math inspired and themed clothing apparel line that I think, I think it's exciting. There's so much, there's such a, the market is bigger and better now. The designs are getting nicer. People are making cool stuff. I like it. I like it. All right, you guys, do you want to talk about some science or should we take a quick break? Up to you, captain. Captain. Aye aye. Aye aye. Well, I think we're going to take this moment. Actually, yeah. Jump in. Do it. Jump in. Just jump in and do it. I think we're going to talk about a bunch of science like the big story from this week. You guys, gene editing of human embryos. What? This one. You know I couldn't stay away from this story. Yes. Yes. I can't wait to hear what you have to say about it. Cause I had some, some thoughts. I'm sure you do. All right. We will get to those thoughts in just a second. Let me explain what's going on. If you haven't seen the news in various news outlets yet, a Portland, Oregon, OHSU Oregon, I think it's OHSU researcher has published a paper with his collaborators from other organizations. Yeah, OHSU, Oregon Health and Science University, Shukrat Metallipov has published the work that he and his collaborators did in using CRISPR to edit the, edit human DNA and to fix a genetic mutation for that causes a heart disease. And they basically correct, corrected a disease causing gene in embryos. Now the way that it worked, we've talked before about Chinese efforts on this front and what the Chinese have done. Their efforts have not worked very well. In fact, one of the problems with CRISPR is that there are a lot of off target errors. And what that means is that CRISPR goes in like a pair of scissors and is supposed to identify specific places in the DNA to snip and cut and pull out genes and potentially replace them with other specified genes. And so what happens a lot of the time, is it the specificity isn't so good. And so there are lots of snips and cuts in places where they shouldn't be. And what happens when a gene is in a place where it should not be, it gets expressed funny, it mucks up the works and things go horribly awry. So the Chinese found in their experiments doing this kind of work that it was very unspecific. There was not a lot of efficiency. It wasn't working well. Steps needed to be taken. And so what Shukrat and his collaborators have done is that they have changed the timing of the addition of the CRISPR. So what the Chinese did previously is they had an egg and sperm come together for fertilization. Sperm fertilized the egg. They let it divide a couple of times. And then they added their CRISPR soup, right? Shukrat and his colleagues have added the CRISPR at the exact moment of fertilization. So it's kind of this dynamic period in what the cell is doing anyway. And so they think this is what has allowed them to get very high efficiency. They don't have a lot of these off-target CRISPR effects. So they, in effect, successfully were able to edit out a heritable heart condition that can cause sudden death in young individuals. And this is the first time this has ever been done in the United States. The study itself was up against a whole lot of ethical board review ahead of time. They even split up the usual study review team into two separate groups so that one group only reviewed the actual scientific methodology of it, and the other group reviewed the ethical aspects of it to decide whether or not it should be something that would move forward. Sudden done, they did move forward with it. It was successful. However, this is where people jump to the human editing. It's going to be Gadica. And we're going to be editing our babies tomorrow. And that's not really where we are yet. This, hopefully, eventually will lead to the ability to potentially fix mutations that lead to death, that lead to disease very early, especially in the IVF world where in vitro fertilization you could screen embryos for certain traits and disorders and then get in there and make sure that you've gotten rid of the mutation you want to get rid of. So this is probably potentially something that will be used down the line in techniques like in vitro fertilization with individuals that have heritable diseases that are pretty bad. Yeah. So caveats, the embryos were not implanted in any people. They did not allow the embryos to go past developing for just maybe, I think it was a couple of days. They really did not develop very long. So this is not, these weren't like, oh, they made babies. No, they did not. This is very small balls of cells that they could look at to see how the cells were developing. Okay. They're just human cells. I got human cells. I could rub my arm right now. Oh, look at skin cells. Human cells falling all over the floor right now. What a mess. What a mess. Yeah. And then, and then additionally, they've only done this now on this one trait that is a single gene mutation that leads to this disorder. And so they don't know if this is going to work in other single gene traits. It just happened to be one that was very mutable to this technique. And additionally, many disorders are the effect of multiple genes acting in concert or multiple mutations. So when people talk about, oh, this could potentially cure cancer, CRISPR could cure cancer. A lot of times there are more than one mutation involved and it would not be so easy to apply. But sometimes if you find just the right one. Yeah. If you find just the right one, but yeah. Okay. So just everybody who's going, huh, huh, huh, but genetic mutations, designer babies, but at the end of the world, just everyone take a deep breath. Go. Much too soon. This is not ready for the big time yet. Everybody chill. All of that is coming. Not yet. Relax for now. But yes, all of that is coming. And what I think actually the most fascinating thing about when we get into the age of editing, the genome, it will start like this. Like there's a trait that we want to remove. It's totally negative. If we remove it, we can see no immediate consequence. And there may not be one. But now we're going to try other stuff. We're going to branch out. We're going to get better at, you know, having more intelligent babies that can keep up with the future of technology, this sort of thing. What's going to be really fascinating about it though, isn't that phase, but the ones that come after and after and after, because if these genetic markers aren't there, they will not be showing up in that following generation. What you're talking about is a complete change of evolution. That we are editing the germline. Yeah, we're actually editing evolution now. We've taken control of so many other aspects of being a human life form on the planet. We've hijacked our brains to be able to do all these amazing things that they weren't specifically designed for, but that we've utilized them to do things like mathematics and language and dance and everything. All of it. All of that is us hijacking this biological creature that we got our claws into, as it were. And now that evolution we have now control over too. Where the human body goes into the future, we're getting the first couple of steps into actually taking charge of that. And I don't think it's something to be afraid of anymore than it should have been frightful when we first learned language. I think this is something that humanity is going to use for the betterment heading forward. I do think so, and I think part of what's going on right now is studies like this one in particular here in the United States is going to hasten the conversation that's taking place around regulating this technology and regulating the use of CRISPR for editing human embryos for gene modifications, whether it's in a pregnancy or as for an adult human being. But this is something that needs to be talked about because the technology will get used. People are going to take this study and others like it and even if it's not FDA approved there, people are going to run with it and move forward with it out in the wild. But if we have an international conversation about what's okay, what's not okay, what we want from it at this point in time, it can also be an evolving conversation as our societies evolve over time. And we can have that conversation, Kiki, but it will be purely academic at some point because like I'm saying, this is the rebirth of languages is another step that humanity can take. At some point, we're going to invent the genetic printing press and all the conversations that we had about which direction we think the future should go, but are going to be gone. And then people will all get access to this at home. We'll have home printers, we'll have blocks. Our ability to take control of this over time is only going to increase. And so all the conversations and all the regulations and all the ethical discussions we're having now at some point won't matter because people will be able to do whatever they want as humanity has shown itself. But if the conversations are happening, if we have people like Josiah Zainer out there promoting the DIY bio movement, if we have people from like the like Shukrat Metallipop working toward making this a usable technology but also talking to the regulators, making sure that there's a conversation on all sides by different people so that it's going to set the tone for the social paradigm in which the technology will be used. In the short term. And in the long term. I don't think the long term. It will set the tone for how it develops. Everything has a basement layer and there's a there will be a there's a particular environment in which the the topic, the idea ferments, right? And it's going to ferment and grow into something. If you think about if you think about medicine, which is how I perceive this latest breakthrough being used. At least this particular one. But if you think about medicine, let's talk about drugs, medicinal drugs. When those things started getting worked out, there were concerns, I'm sure. And we all sat down and we discussed how to regulate these things. They are used in other ways, but by and whole, because people got in front of the issue when it started happening, there's at least infrastructure. Yeah, and maybe if we can have an international conversation between nations and researchers about what's going to happen, we won't end up with an orphan black situation where a company is completely unregulated and is able to basically do what they want. And that will cause more social upheaval in the long run than trying to create an environment that is open to talking about this. We can be open to talking about in California. They can be legally Kansas. They can be going full bore forward with it in China. And they can be finding some halfway in India. We can, we're going to be in a world where we don't set the rules for this, is all I'm saying. Absolutely, yeah. The cat is going to keep scratching until it gets out of that bag. It's not going back in. It's not going back into the back. There's probably already clawed its way out the bottom of it and it's going on somewhere. Be ready for that idea. That the future is going to be different than the now. It's going to be scary because you're living now and you don't know what the future is going to bring. But in the future, it'll be like, oh yeah, it's just like having a cell phone. Everybody has their jeans edited. I want to mention also though, the way this story hit the world. Because I think that if you look at headlines and subtitles for this news story, especially on social media when you see friends that share, we all have the friends that read titles and then share them without actually reading the article. We all have those friends, right? But when you look at that, it sounds like this futuristic, crazy world that we live in. When I read a couple of these headlines, I thought a CRISPR baby was born. And I went, no, that's not right. And I read the article and not until the very end of most of the articles does it say, these didn't develop into full embryos. They were not implanted, blah, blah, blah. So again, blah, blah, blah. Be a skeptic. Read the whole article. Lean what's actually happening here. Because this, while very important and very exciting, is part of the natural progression of how CRISPR has been going, I think. And I think it's very exciting because I think this is going to save lives. Sure. And another exciting aspect of this is that this was research done in the United States. This is research not done in China. This successful study is homegrown in the USA, everybody. I'm looking across Portland at OHSU almost every day. Thanks, Oregon, for not outlawing this research. But they did have to, there was no federal funding allowed for this study because of regulations and restrictions to human embryonic research that are basically restricted by the U.S. government and the use of the funds. So the money that was used was from private grants, private funding, the Scripps Institute was involved as well, I believe, and also international researchers from Korea and Japan. But basically the collaborators shook the piggy bank to be able to come up with the funding to make this happen from private sources. This is not federally funded because of our government's restrictions. Which is absolutely nuts. It's like trying to fund the space race with just private funds. It never would have happened. We wouldn't have satellites. We wouldn't have gone to the moon. We just wouldn't be part of it. We watch it from the sidelines. Luckily the main researcher was here in the United States and not in Korea. Luckily the study is the product of American innovation in this particular case for us. But it could have as easily been in China or Korea or elsewhere and we would have again been on the sidelines going, oh look, they're passing us by because of our restrictions. But many conversations that need to be had. Absolutely. Hey, you guys want to talk about hypnosis? Do you want me to talk about hypnosis? No, I have a story about hypnosis. Oh, okay. Yeah, so remember when we interviewed Eric Vance about persuasion and he was talking, we started talking about the fact that he went in to get hypnotized and just basically couldn't get hypnotized. He's not a suggestible person. And so I was very excited to see this study come up. It's a study in which the researchers used EEGs, electrodes on the head to record brain activity and they hypnotized patients and then to see how the hypnosis was working, they broke up their group of volunteers into three groups. They had highly suggestible people. They had mildly suggestible people and people or mid-range suggestible and then people who are not so suggestible at all. And then they had controls as well. And they wanted to see how hypnotism changed visual perception. So the idea being that when you're hypnotized, if you're told that there's something obscuring your field of view, how does your brain... I mean, you can see still there's nothing in front of you. So what's going on in the brain? And so they did this really interesting paradigm where they used a game. It's called the oddball game. And they presented participants with a screen. There's a screen in front of them. Then they're presented with triangles, 80% of the time, squares and circles the rest of the time. And participants get asked to click on only the squares. And so the decisions have to be made fairly quickly. Most of the time it's triangles. And your brain kind of is like, triangle and the brain recognizes the triangle and then has to suppress the urge to click because it's not a square, right? And so the urge to click is going to be strong. And so the brain has to figure out if it's a square and it should allow the clicking to happen. So there's a lot of stuff actually going on in the brain to allow this task to happen, but it's mostly suppression of an urge. Okay, so it's 80% triangles coming across the screen. And they're told only click on the squares. And so a circle comes up and that's probably the harder because now you've been so focused on, ah, it's a triangle, ah, it's a triangle. And so then you're suppressing the urge to click square on the different because it's the wrong different. Yeah, exactly. And so the researchers were able to figure out, you know, record what was happening in the brain and they looked at a particular trace which is called the P3B trace and it's associated with how the brain is responding to rare events. And so in this case, the rare event would be the square, the circle in the square, right? Because the triangle is kind of like it's always triangles. So the trace, the electrical activity of the brain shows an increase in the potential or so the wavelength or the frequency, it increases. If you're looking at it as a line on a graph, on a sheet of moving graph paper, like a lie detector test or something, the baseline increases the potential when the object is recognized. So it's all, it's a triangle. And then it goes back down to zero. Everything was suppressed, nothing happened. For circles, you see the increase in the potential and then it's like the suppression is slower and it's not as strong. So it doesn't go down to baseline as quickly. And for the square, because they don't have to suppress it, they're like, ah, square, click it. The electrical potential goes up and then stays up. All right? And so the brain is just like, I get to do this. I don't have to suppress anything. And so that's what happens in normal patients. So in all of the projects that got hypnotized, it's basically the same. So in all the groups, you see the change in that potential as they're recognizing the object, triangle, circle, or square. There's an increase in that potential for every single one of these three groups. However, and also, and when they're looking at the triangles and the circles, nobody can tell the difference basically like the hypnotized and the control groups and the triangles and the circles, the way the potential changes. It's basically the same. For squares though, the recognition response happens. So it like the potential goes up when it recognizes the square. But then the increase that happens for the button pushing because this, you get to push the button. Remember, so when they're hypnotized, the groups are told you're hypnotized and there's something in front of your field of view. You can't see this thing. You shouldn't be able to pretend, they hypnotize them and say, there's a block of wood obscuring your view of the screen. And so for the triangles and circles, the brain is acting exactly as a normal, exactly as the control group does in the hypnotized. But for the squares, you get instead of the increase in the activation, it's like a muted increase. So it's less and it actually gets suppressed. So the brain is suppressing the activation that allows it to click. Even though based on the increase in potential for all of them recognizing the objects, it's obvious that the brain is seeing the object. But because of the suggestion that there's something in the way, the brain goes, oh, I'm supposed to suppress this now. And it was significantly correlated to how easily suggestible the individuals were. So in the low suggestibility group, this effect didn't really work very well. But in the high suggestibility group, this was just spot on. This was just the way it worked. And in interviews with the subjects later on, they found out that the more realistically the participants kind of saw the wood in their mind's eye as they were hypnotized, the stronger that suppression effect for clicking the square was. Wow. Yeah, so there is something about suggestibility, performance. And so there's definitely the truth to this idea of how suggestible people can be and in being to be hypnotized. Yeah. There we go. Yeah, I don't think I'm a suggestible person. I've never actively sought out being hypnotized, but I don't think I would see a block of wood at all. Maybe, but maybe you would hesitate still and be like, OK, now I'm supposed to see a block of wood. I don't see it. All right. I guess I'm going to click. Maybe you come across the same way. I'm looking for it. I'm giving it a shot. Nope. Still not there. I'll go ahead and click that. Yeah. So our brains can change our perception, which, you know, that makes sense. This is where it happens. Yeah. And in this world of changing perceptions, one thing is true thanks to a, as shown by a recent study in the Public Library of Science, that we don't like to change our views when it comes to information we find on social media. Hmm. Yeah. So the study published in plus one looked at a bunch of data from Facebook quantitative analysis of 54 million users over five years, 2010 to 2014. And they looked at how users usually consuming scientific information and conspiracy based information on Facebook interact with debunking posts. And so what they found is, yes, people who frequent scientific websites or scientific posts and scientific groups and pages on Facebook, that's pretty much where they stay. They don't really go to the conspiracy theory ones. And vice versa, the people who are into the conspiracy theory stuff, they don't go to the science side either. So there's echo chambers in Facebook as people have postulated through the years and they definitely are at work. And both groups interact very similarly with the information in their echo chambers. So they kind of in within the groups, everyone kind of acts the same, but some people are looking at science information and some people are definitely not. So then they looked at how the people in these groups interacted with 50,000 dish debunking posts and tried to find out what was going on there. And basically what they found is that if people responded to a debunking post, it was very negative. I was like, you don't know what you're talking about. This very negative response, not a constructive conversational response. And posts, debunking posts really pretty much remained confined to the scientific echo chamber. And only a few conspiracy theory users engaged with corrections that these debunking posts. And then after they did engage with the debunking information, they started liking and commenting on conspiracy theory posts more. So their interaction with the conspiracy theory stuff increased after interacting with information that would be debunking their beliefs. So what we find here is social media, Facebook. There are echo chambers. People like to stay in their echo chambers because they reinforce their firmly held beliefs. And then when those firmly held beliefs are challenged, they dig in their heels and stick to those firmly held beliefs even more. I'm right and you're wrong. Yes. But wait a second, though. Hang on. In the two examples we've given, chances are one is right. I have a feeling that the folks who are frequenting conspiracy, and I'm assuming it's not just they're at this flat, but I'm assuming it's not just one conspiracy that they're clicking into, right? I'm kind of assuming here, and maybe I'm projecting onto this, that it's multiple conspiracies, right? Not just a single conspiracy, but more than one far-fetched bit of propaganda out there. I feel like those people are probably just idiots anyway. But that's... Well, no. You could see them in their other activities throughout their day. I'd be like, oh, yeah, that fits. Right? And I think there's probably some fault on the scientific sites of seeing science attacked constantly by trolls and being like, you know what? I'm going to give a quick response, but then see you. I don't care. I would say, yeah, this study might mean more if you took a two-sided debate that was more two-sided. It's just something like gun control, and you just looked at groups that were... That's two sensible conversations taking place on either side of that. What I'm saying, though, one is a conspiracy theory, and one is science. But then at least on this side, this is a political decision that has two sides. Which is conspiracy theory? Not necessarily. Obama's going to take your guns. And I remember when he came door-to-door and took everybody's guns. But that's what they feed... That's what they're feeding that side. You're painting with a very broad brush right now. There's some individuals that want to keep their guns that do not believe in the conspiracy theory that you're preaching to. And so what I'm saying... I haven't met either of those two individuals. It might be well off to look at something that is two-sided that has people emotional, but is not based on a conspiracy theory. Well, I think the actual usefulness of this is if you have a piece of propaganda and you put out some fake news about it, and then to then go back and create a debunking site that does a really bad job of debunking your fake news to get people even more excited about your fake news. Right. I think that's the way to do it. Something like that is not necessarily what we want to have happen, but that's the way it kind of works. And so the researchers say in their conclusions that they say, on our perspective, the diffusion of bogus content is some way related to the increasing mistrust of people with respect to institutions, to the increasing level of functional illiteracy, i.e., the inability to understand information correctly affecting Western countries as well as the combined effect of confirmation bias at work on an enormous basin of information where the quality is poor. And they go out and say, current debunking campaigns don't really seem to be the best options. And their findings suggest that the main problem behind misinformation is conservatism rather than gullibility. Moreover, our results also seem to be consistent with so-called inoculation theory for which the exposure to repeated mild attacks can let people become more resistant in changing their ordinary beliefs, indeed being repeatedly exposed to relatively weak arguments could result in a major resistance to a later persuasive attack. Therefore, when users are faced with untrusted opponents in online discussion, the latter results in a major commitment with respect to their own echo chamber, thus a more open and smoother approach which promotes a culture of humility aiming at demolishing walls and barriers between tribes could represent a first step to contrast misinformation spreading and its persistence online. So basically, don't attack the information, try and build bridges is what is coming out. And as I'm looking at this study, there is a site now dedicated to debunking this study. And it says here that none of this can be true because science can't prove that bees fly. So, yeah. Science doesn't prove things. It disproves things. Actually, bees fly. Oh my goodness. What a world. What a world. So, go outside and talk to humans. I think is the moral of that story. Is every once in a while. Get out of your echo chamber, you guys. Close your laptop, put down your phone, talk to a human in real life. Science says... It is a diverse planet. If you get out there, you're bound to run into some humans with different points of view. And the oceans are also diverse in teeming with life. Oh, yes. And in all of these oceans, there are body snatchers just waiting to turn the unsuspecting into dinner. And no, I'm not talking about sharks. What are you talking about? Recent research from Swansea University has found that our oceans are full of microscopic body snatchers. The research led by Dr. Adity Mitra and Professor Kevin Flynn at the University College of Science published in the Royal Society of General Proceedings. These show that predatory microbes, which enslave prey to acquire photosynthetic capability, are abundant. They're everywhere. They're in every ocean. They're all over the place. They're single-celled planktonic mixotrophs. These are organisms that can find plant-like and animal-like behavior within one cell. According to the story, traditionally mixotrophs are considered as curiosities, but rather irrelevant to the overall food web. As soon as something is considered irrelevant to the overall food web, guess what? They find out it's relevant to the overall food web. So these have been, I guess, misidentified a lot, too, as part of the problem. But they're now finding that, yes, these creatures are everywhere. They're in all the oceans. They're a big part of what's going on in there. They come in two basic forms. One type steals the photosynthetic factories from their prey during digestion and uses these chloroplasts to make food. Not by digesting them, but by actually taking the machinery and hanging on to it while the rest of the organisms is being digested. Well, the other version of this is enslaving whole photosynthetic prey communities within their body. And then they drift around in the oceans like microscopic greenhouses. It's like, you live here now. Live in my belly. You will also be in my belly. What are we doing? I don't know. We're in the belly. But it's nice. Marine researchers have apparently been 50% of these organisms as animals when they are actually eating and photosynthesizing all within one cell. So they sort of, that cell becomes the host for these other cells. Sort of like, what we do to some extent. Good body snatchers support fisheries while the bad ones can actually be very toxic. And yet we know very little about them. Susanna Lellis, Ph.D., first author research said a biographical analysis of approximately 100,000 records showed that different types of these mixotrophs dominate different parts of our oceans during different seasons. And Dr. Mictra says, over the last five years we have worked as an international network exploring the importance of mixotrophy in global oceans. Our findings broaden the scope of the new mixotroph centric and paradigm that we have proposed. This has the potential to overturn a century's worth of understanding of marine ecology, at least add to it. And we need to take the mixotrophs more seriously and include their remarkable impact in mathematical models that we use to predict climate change and aid in environmental management. So, yeah. Yeah, these are probably these guys are probably at the, you know, at the base, the basal part of the food web. And so they probably have a huge influence on much larger organisms and the entire ecosystem as a whole. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating that seasonally there are different that different groups of them are dominant in different places. I think that's just fascinating. That's real body snatchers. And so, but they're not animals. No, that's not. They're just microbes. Or they're, are they like, they're a plant animal. A plant animal? They're a plant animal. Mixotroph. Mixotroph. Kind of like a fungus. Which is like a plant animal. Not a fungus. Mixotroph. Mixotroph. And this is where biology is so interesting because life it's not these discrete categories. We like to put everything in boxes. I talk about this often. To our own detriment. Things don't fit in one box like me. Like you. That's why we have a box a smaller box next to the other boxes that we can put those blares in. Yeah, I feel like I have a foot in one box a hand in another and my head in another one. You're so boxy. You know what we're going to do right now though? We're going to take a quick break and when we come back it's going to be all about Blair and her many boxes. That's what it's going to be. This is This Week in Science. Thanks for listening so far. We are coming back with more science in just a few moments. Stay tuned for much more science on the way. Hey everyone. Thanks for watching and thanks for being a part of the twist community. If you are interested in really supporting the twist ongoing efforts of bringing you a podcast week after week after week there are lots of ways you can do that. One way is to buy our merchandise because every time you buy a t-shirt or a little pin or other things portion of those proceeds go towards supporting this show. You can find all our fun merchandise in our Zazzle Store and to do that you head right on over to twist.org It's the easiest way to get there. It is the portal to all of the fun twistiness on the internet. So head over to twist.org and click on the Zazzle Store link. 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Yes, certainly. So a set of studies actually from National University of Singapore looked at findings of the relationship between personality traits of spiders and their decision-making. In humans, generally, do you think there's a trade-off when you work faster? Yeah, I work better with faster. The better the work, the better it is. You work faster and make mistakes. Yes, exactly. So generally speaking, your decision-making abilities are depleted as you speed up your decision-making timing. So when you make a snap decision, often it is wrong more. So these sets of studies were looking at behavioral profiles of individual spiders, my favorite kinds of spiders, jumping spiders, of course. And they wanted to see if this directly affected their ability to make decisions. So in the first study, they wanted to do, again, behavior profiles on jumping spiders. This was the jumping spider, Shalabiata. And they are not the peacock spiders, but because they're a jumping spider, they're closely related, right? So they're also very adorable. So the way they measured how aggressive these spiders were by poking them with a small, soft brush, spiders that attacked the brush were deemed to be more aggressive. Sounds to me like the scientists are actually being aggressive, but there we are. Yeah, so we have an aggression scale for the scientists. Right, right. Some of them were jamming. I don't like spiders. I'm just doing this for the credit. Anyway, so those that ran away from the brush were not considered aggressive. So once they determined the personality of the spiders, then they assessed how spiders made decisions. So then they were given a choice of selecting a large or small piece of preferred prey. The large prey is associated with better quality, but it is also usually more dangerous to attack. Small prey, lower quality, easier to attack. So then the researchers studied the time the spiders took to make their decision and the choices that they made. Research showed that the spiders who were aggressive made decisions faster than their docile counterparts. They were quicker to make the first move. Makes sense, aggressive, right? But in addition, they found that the choices were as accurate as those made by the docile spiders. So accuracy was not affected by the amount of time they responded. So this means the personalities of the spiders are related to the way that their brain works because there's not a direct loss in quicker response time. So this is not what they expected to find, right? Because it's not what happens in humans, but as we now know, spiders and humans are not very similar. In these seconds, however we've been finding out that spiders and people, we have so much in common. Right, right, right. I have eight eyes. I just love to wrap gifts in my own silk. Anyway, so the second study was looking at these same jumping spiders, Portia Lebiata, but they were looking at their interaction with their common prey, another type of jumping spider, Cosmofasus umbratica. So jumping spiders eat each other, turns out, sorry. So first they wanted to test the aggressiveness of the predator. They did that by putting mirrors in front of the Portia Lebiata spiders. So just like with the brush, if they touched the mirror right away, that deemed them as aggressive. But if they went far away from the mirror, ran away, docile. Then the researchers assessed the boldness of their prey, the Cosmofasus, by introducing a mock predator that they made out of putty and paper clips and then observing the prey's behavior. So now they have identified aggressive and docile and brave and less brave of the prey. So now that they have identified all of these guys, then they wanted to watch the predator and prey interactions. So they placed a single predator and a single prey together to record the forging performance of the predator. This test was conducted in a bunch of different pairings and they found that aggressive predators fared better when catching a prey with unpredictable behavior. But docile predators performed better when hunting a prey with predictable behavior. So the first one is kind of an early bird catches the worm sort of situation. The second one is the slow and steady wins the race. So it depends on what kind of prey you're going after. Well, that would make sense. I mean, you're going to have different strategies for different kinds of prey and being more aggressive for an unpredictable prey is going to help because if you don't know what the prey is going to be doing at any one moment, just get it over with. Right. Get them. Right. Take it down. Get them. Yeah. Because if they're unpredictable, you have nothing to gain by observing them. Yeah. Right. Absolutely. What do you think is the next step of this study after this is publishing? What do you think? More research. Find out how long it will take before the aggressive spiders take over the laboratory. Right. Right. Now, actually, it's what usually the answer to questions like this is it's genetics. They want to find out if the different personality traits are related to genetics are related to things that they learn and experience if they're environment. What causes these different personality traits? So that's kind of the next step. I'm going to go team genetics on this one. I'm going to guess that these are genetic phenotypes. Okay. For 2018, Kiki predicts that jumping spiders will be found to have personality traits based in genetics. You heard it here first all the way back in August. That's right. Speaking of... Real quick. I want to throw in real quick. Dogs and cats and fish and I mean humans. Yeah. Yeah. Personalities. Partially in genetics. A little bit of a side here. There's a story I didn't bring tonight, but they did analysis of genomes that revealed that spiders and scorpions had a shared ancestor 400 million years ago. And that this ancestor was one that made new copies of all of its genes and its genome. Something called whole genome duplication, which is their type of event. Very cool. That sounds like a superpower. Yeah. Yeah. I think I need to make my whole genome again. Yes. I'll clone myself. There we go. Sign me up for one of those. So speaking of personality traits, I'm going to move on to the personalities of fish, particularly the cleaner wrasse. A fish that has a symbiotic relationship with other fish on coral reefs. They clean off as their namesake would imply the parasites from other fish. They get to eat and those other fish get parasites cleaned off. A recent bit of research from UK, US and France all together looked at the effects of boat noise on the Blue Street cleaner wrasse. And they found that both the cleaners and the cleanies are affected by boat noise. Nobody likes it. Yeah. They don't like giant humming sounds, turns out. In noisy conditions, cleaners are more likely to cheat by nibbling at their client's protective mucus layer rather than cleaning off parasites. You know when you don't feel like eating the whole meal and you just want to lick off some mucus, you know when you feel like that? No. Well, the cleaner wrasse is feeling that way when it's stressed by the boat noise. So they just click, they clear off some of that protective mucus layer. They don't eat any of the parasites and clients are more likely to stay and just let it happen. Dr. Sophie Nadelic of University of Exeter said, cleaners were biting their clients during boat noise and instead of leaving or retaliating, the clients let the process go on for longer than normal. This suggests cognitive impairment on either or both parties. They observed 24 blue street cleaner wrasse cleaning stations and 17 of the stations, the cleaners cheated more often on their clients by nibbling at the mucus. So what explanation could be that they're distracted, that the cleanies, the clients are distracted by boat noise and the cleaners are taking advantage of that to just cheat, to just eat the mucus. But it is also possible that it is distracting the cleaner wrasse as well. So this is pretty interesting because obviously the parasites, the fish don't want those on there and coral reefs are really important. The whole reef kind of is living in this intense ecosystem. So if you take out any one animal or if you take out a whole bunch of fish that suddenly aren't being cleaned properly by the cleaner wrasse, that could have a pretty big impact on the coral reef. This makes me think about the story from the end of the show last week about Australia opening up areas to commercial fishing, more areas than once were allowing commercial fishing. And if that's what's happening, they're going to have more boats fishing and more noise in the coral reefs. And if there's more noise, you're going to have the greater parasite load. You're going to have more sick fish, which is going to lead to a sicker coral reef. Well, I know just from personal experience, and I'm sure most people listening can relate to this, the you get in a space, you kind of acclimate to a sound, maybe a fluorescent light, whatever it is. And then my air conditioning unit that's been running this entire show because it's hot in Portland. And then you step outside and suddenly it's quiet. And you notice kind of your eyes had been scrunched, your eyebrows had been scrunched. They kind of start to relax and your shoulders had been up and they start to go down and kind of start to wiggle back out of it. And then you realize how tense you were from the noise pollution. This is happening worldwide. Noise pollution is something that we need to be looking into. And as we're trying to find new methods of moving around, new methods of transportation, if we can move away from combustion engines, we will also be able to move away from a lot of noise pollution. Just a thought. And it should be something that's part of the conversation in future engineering. If noise was part of that. Although all electric cars have to make a noise now. Because otherwise people will run other people over, is that why? Yeah. So people can kind of get an idea that they're even there. Oh, no. Because just the rubber rolling on the road. No, for reals. Rubber rolling on the road makes no noise. It's like a ninja sneaking up behind you. But the sound, because I got to test drive these cars that's now out. This electric car. And the sound it makes is kind of odd. I equated it to, if my kids leave the electric organ on, but aren't playing. It's got this weird, but harmonic. It's like this weird harmony thing. But it's really weird. So there might be new weird sounds. For sure. So it's something we need to consider maybe doing environmental impact reports on sound instead of just on space. Anyway, the last story, I just want to bring my quick story in to close out the animal corners. We're getting towards the end of the show anyway. Where is the most deadly snake? Where are the most deadly snakes in the world? California and Australia. Australia. They're the most deadly snakes in Australia. How deadly are they? So deadly. Actually, it's not. That sounds like the setup to a joke. Yeah. How deadly are they? In a 10 year study, 10 years, 10 year synthesis of data from Australian snake bite project published today in the, not today, on the 31st. So a couple of days ago in the medicinal journey of Australia, they found that 90% of cases of reported snake bites, people are bitten by either a non venomous snake. Venom is not injected when the snake bites, AKA they had a dry bite, which does happen quite a bit. Or they're not even bitten. They just got a stick bite. So let me explain dry bites and stick bites real quick. So stick bites, they just, their head just jabs at you. They don't even open their mouth. They go, get out of here. Get out. A dry bite. So a lot of venomous snakes, if they recognize a human, they know a human's way too big to eat. Venom is, I've talked about this before on this show. It's really energetically expensive to make. So they're not going to waste it on something too big to eat unless they're terrified. So a lot of the time venomous snakes bite people. It's a dry bite. They don't even inject venom. So they looked at about 1,500 cases of snake bites from all around Australia. They found that on, there were on average just under 100 and venomations a year. So that follows with that, that statistic I just gave you and about two deaths a year. So the most common snake bites were from brown snakes then tiger snakes, then red-bellied black snakes. Brown snakes were responsible for 40% of envenomations. What's interesting is, the reason I brought this story is that regardless of which venomous snake bit someone, and there are some weird venoms in Australia. There's a lot of snakes that have kind of standard venoms that just shut down your systems. But then there are other ones that just, your blood pressure plummets and we still don't know why. But in all of these cases, the things that were most likely, the thing, the one thing that was most likely to save somebody that was bit by a venomous snake was immediately administering CPR. Huh. Yeah. So I would not have expected this at all. I don't think it would have occurred to me to give CPR to someone who had been bitten by a venomous snake. No. Because they're not choking, they can breathe. Why would I do that? Turns out CPR is the best thing you can do until medical professionals arrive. The only way to actually help a person that has gotten bitten by a venomous snake is to give anti-venom. However, you need to keep their heart moving at a reasonable rate in between when they were bitten and when they're administered that anti-venom. And the only way to keep that going and to keep them from degrading brain tissue is to give them CPR. Interesting. Yeah, absolutely. And what's even more interesting. I just want to be sure that the person's heart has stopped before you administer CPR. I mean, isn't that one of the big things? Yeah. You don't just administer CPR to somebody whose heart is still beating because you can potentially cause a heart attack. So that's interesting. I think I was just bitten by a snake. So first of all, this is mostly, we're talking about compressions only is what we're talking about here. Compressions only. But on top of that, a fireman recently told me, if you try to give CPR to someone who doesn't need it, they'll stop you. So if someone gets bitten by a snake, they lose consciousness. It sounds like the thing to do. What's also interesting is that anti-venom, it does save people. They found that in about 6% of patients who were given anti-venom in the study were given it unnecessarily. So be very aware. Get as much information about the snake that bit you as you can. It was sneaky. It was long. And that one in four patients given anti-venom had an allergic reaction to it. One in 20 had severe anaphylaxis, but they got urgent treatment for that because they were already at a hospital and therefore survived. So I would still say, take the anti-venom. Moral of the story. Give CPR to those who lose consciousness if they are bitten by a venomous snake. Avoid snakes. So actually, people trying to catch or kill a snake were 14% of all snake bite cases. That's pretty high. Just leave them alone. Wear long pants and sturdy shoes when walking in rural areas or in urban areas in Australia or when gardening in Australia. Right. And then also, yes, that's the other thing. Be alert inside when in Australia. 31% of snake bites were near houses and 14% were in buildings. So ultimately, don't go to Australia. Just don't go to Australia. Excellent. But remember 90% of these bites were not venom... not in venom... in venom at all. So snakes not to be feared. Remember two deaths a year. Not a whole lot. That's, again, less than the vending machine. Remember when I was talking about that? Beware of vending machines. Just don't go trumping around in snake territory. Although I have to throw into the vending machine thing. I don't think my vending machines are spontaneously falling over on people. It's somebody trying to shake loose a snack and making decisions. Snakes aren't spontaneously biting people either. Not so much. I don't know. Unless all 14% in the house were somebody just trying to catch them. I don't know. It was a lot. You don't necessarily need to be aware of the snake. For the snake to be aware of you and to want to protect itself. Whereas a vending machine will not think that you've gotten too close to it with your dollar. It will spontaneously fall over on you. I've got a couple of quick studies here for the end of the show here. Very cool research that was sent in by David Eckerd about researchers at the California Institute of Technology who've been trying to figure out how the brain recognizes faces and what is the neural code for putting faces together. I mean, we've talked about that before on the show about the Jennifer Aniston neuron or the grandmother neuron that basically single neurons respond to certain faces and we do know that there are certain neurons that are like this neuron responds to that person. And we have those in our recognition neurons in our brains. But the neuroscientists at Caltech are looking at these areas in the temporal lobe on the side of the head that specialize their patches. They call them face patches very technical that respond to faces. All the neurons in these patches respond to faces. And so they've been looking into figuring out how the cells in these face patches actually work. What they've discovered is that the firing rate of each face patch cell corresponds to separate facial features. So the cells work together in a network with some dialing up and dialing down tuning in to specific bits of information. So they are then multiple neurons lots of neurons really work together to combine to create an image of the faces that are encountered. They did this study looking at primates. So this was not on humans but they use primates to be able to decipher this. And what they are able to do now is if they just scan the activity of these neurons in the face patches they are with very high accuracy able to recreate the face without having actually seen it. So the actual pattern of the neurons we are able to read from the brain now to determine what the face looked like. That's crazy. That's wild. That's mind reading. Yes and so these monkeys they were presented a particular face and the brain activity was scanned and then the computer algorithm put all that information together to create a predicted face and so this image that these images I'm showing on the screen right now for our listening audience the image on the left is the initial image of the monkey saw and the image on the right is maybe some softer edges there's some slight differences. You know what it is. This is very similar pictures the predicted image very much matches. The predicted image does more than that. It's more symmetrical and we've talked about this on the show before where symmetry seems more beautiful the more symmetrical the face the more beautiful it is and it's maybe because that's how the brain is storing how a face should look. It's only storing half the data. Yeah but it's creating a symmetrical version of it so when then actually somebody walks in with these very symmetrical and features we go ah that's a good looking person right? And the less symmetrical a face the less we attribute beauty to it so I think that's fascinating if the monkey's brain created a more symmetrical version of the human that they saw. Wow mind blown. Yeah well that's definitely just about the effects of kind of the brain blending multiple faces so if you are in a group of people you are seeing the brain sees you as kind of the average attractiveness of the group your face is judged as that average attractiveness and so maybe these neurons kind of get overwhelmed and instead of really looking at all the facial features of each individual very carefully the neurons are responding kind of to a general a general group face but this is published in Cell and this facial code the brain's facial code is going to be used to help scientists understand how these cells incorporate identifying information so sex, age, race, emotional cues that's another interesting aspect of the recognition of faces how recognizing not only who the face belongs to but also what emotional state they're in and also remembering names how does that loose association of face cells that combine to create that image of a face get associated with a particular name of a person yeah so there's a lot of things that they're going to be looking into here object recognition, facial recognition potentially this information could also be used to help computers with facial recognition as well out of some very skeptical of it no way no way I'm sorry but no that's not possible that that happened it is possible and the interesting thing here recordings from just 205 cells were enough to be able to create the predicted faces so the researchers says it really speaks to how compact and efficient this feature based neural code is no this is the craziest thing ever yeah that's what this is and I still don't believe it like there's something wrong with this I need to go look for a debunking site because you go look for your D, I'm glad you're looking for the debunking site I gotta go find one to reconfirm that it's possible that you pulled an image like that from a neuron from a cluster a cluster of 25 of them 205 205 even still if that can happen then we can record a dream and watch it later that's what I'm saying this is not that what an interesting point it's just not it can't be possible why not stupid skeptical let's record our dreams I want to do that I want to watch my dreams on television I know wouldn't that be awesome what did I dream last night oh let me just I'll cue it up we'll just watch it here for those of you dreaming of the solar system researchers have from NASA's Kepler space telescope have potentially detected the first exo moon we know Kepler's been looking at exo planets right looking for planets around stars outside our solar system and they've found thousands of them now but this is a signal they look so part of the way that Kepler works is that it looks for the transit of a planet in front of the stars and star is giving off light when a planet transits in front of it there's a dimming of the light now to find a moon orbiting around a planet orbiting around another star they had to look for a shift in the dimming that came before the dimming and then after the dimming so they're looking for wiggles in the light on either side of the planetary transit across its star and they've been looking and looking and looking and they think they may have found it Dr. David Kipping from Columbia University in New York says caution we would merely describe it at this point as something consistent with a moon but who knows it could be something else spoken like a tree scientist it is not a moon it is something that appears to be according to 90% of our evidence the moon I've got a bad feeling about this yeah so this signal has only been observed during three transits so it's a very small sample size they don't have a big data set yet at this point so they want to have a few more transits to be able to really confidently announce we've found the moon but they have assigned at this point in time a level of four sigma which is alright it's not too bad right, sigma I always forget sigma the higher the number of the more yeah so something like six sigma you've got a very very like 99.9 air traffic control four it's okay it's not great but they could probably use some more data and this candidate moon they're calling it Kepler 1625 B it's around a star 4000 light years from Earth and it's a very large planet gas giant around a Jupiter mass planet that was potentially captured later on in the evolution of this planetary system but they're calling this moon you want to know what they're calling it a neptune instead of neptune a neptune oh scientist it's got to be tricky because it's got to be a big moon right because it's probably around a gas giant probably something bigger than Jupiter it's a neptune sized moon it's a Jupiter sized planet which is probably a neptune sized moon this is a weird system which is probably spinning around so close to its sun that it's spinning around often enough to even that's crazy is there anyway got any more stories Justin? I have several left we're just getting started I've got good news for moderate drinkers older adults who consume alcohol moderately on a regular basis are more likely to live to the age of 85 without dementia or other cognitive impairments than non-drinkers according to University of California CNDA with School of Medicine led study the findings published in the August issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's disease in particular researchers found that among men and women 85 and older individuals who consumed moderate to heavy amounts of alcohol 5 to 7 days a week were twice as likely to be cognitively healthy than non-drinkers cognitive health was assessed every 4 years over the course of a 29-year study which as I scroll down had 1344 adults in it nice cognitive health was assessed also using the standard dementia screening test known as the mini mental state examination the only bad news in the study may be in what constitutes moderate drinking definition of moderate drinking up to 1 alcoholic beverage a day for adult women of any age and men 65 and older though for some reason it goes all the way up to 2 drinks a day for adult men under age 65 that is moderate heavy drinking which also that helped in the study heavy drinking was fine up to 3 alcoholic beverages a day for women of any age and men 65 and older but 4 drinks a day for adult men under 65 so even heavy drinking but if you drink more than that you're categorized as excessive and you weren't covered under the results of the study drinking was categorized using gender and age specific guidelines established by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism so yeah drinking not necessarily so bad is there any chance this is a correlation thing where if you have the onset of Alzheimer's you don't end up drinking as much as you age forget to drink no I don't it could be partly that although this was people who didn't didn't drink within this study one of the factors though might be these were all participants were 99% Caucasian and 99% of them had at least some college education they were middle to upper middle class suburb San Diego folks so they're a may have not been suffering from the economic aspects of being old that a lot of people would have to deal with so there's some of that involved but with those factors like poverty taken out it less cognitive decline as you age if you drink not bad if you are looking for a reason to be doing more drinking next I've got magnetic robo viruses whoa what they've been developed by races nanotechnology enabled water treatment engineering research center a.k.a. Newt the Newt team combined nanoparticle clusters with viruses that attack bacteria bacteria typically are an essential part of wastewater treatment they have the enhanced reaction rates and resistances to stresses and they do a lot of good in there but on the water distribution water storage side they can cause problems they can shelter pathogenic microorganisms they can actually like corrode metal so like pipes and storage tanks can get corroded by having these bacteria in them so one way to clean the water of bacteria before it hits the pipes is a virus phage these virus phages disperse in solution though and largely fail to penetrate biofilms so they don't work great yeah and phages for people who might not be familiar they attack but they're things that attack bacteria these are little viruses that attack the bacteria that are in the water right right and they used a group of different viruses that attack different bacteria yeah so these were combined then with nanoclusters of carbon sulfur and iron oxide that were further modified with amino groups the amino coding prompted the phages to bond with the clusters at first which left their infectious tails exposed and able to infect bacteria the researchers then used a relatively weak magnetic field to push the nanoclusters around sort of a remote control for their magnetic robot viruses uh so yeah images showed they effectively killed E. coli and P. aeruginosa over the over around 90% of the film that they had created in 96 different well plate tests whereas the phages alone only 40% so more than twice as effective nice so we need to to destroy bacteria after they're no longer once they're no longer beneficial we have them they're great and then now we want to get the clear it out and so we throw in viruses magnetic viruses and then to get go wrong get the magnetic viruses out but I think these are being considered for more industrial use not necessarily then you can you can take a magnet and be like go over here I want you over in that spot and you can tell them exactly where to go until they inject RNA into things that are not magnetic oh now that would never happen and then the last story which I didn't bring that was the 400 million years ago the ancient ancestor of spider and scorpion and say it was kind of an interesting event though they used whole genome duplication but that didn't mean it used its whole genome in the next generation there would be sometimes doubling ups and sometimes deletions when they actually believe that in the beginning of mammalian evolution this was taking place where the whole genome was transferring over but then what actually got activated was sometimes causing duplications deletions and they think this is what may have accelerated the split from the ancestor to what is now scorpions and what is now spiders help me figure out what is new here because spiders and scorpions are both erected so we knew that they were pretty closely related before they did the genome from the human genome sequencing center and they actually got to look at it and see how closely they are related and this is what puts it way back so is closer or farther away than we thought it's where we didn't know it was it's well according to so according to kind of the categorization of spiders and scorpions we knew they we had placed them somewhere in a shared ancestor or had we we had yes they're both arachnids they're both arachnids they got the ape going well they're in the same group we knew that they were closely related so I'm curious if the timeline matched what they expected or not it doesn't say whether it matched or not it's the first time they can see it nice probably the genome duplication is the aspect that's really the interesting thing for sure yeah oh my gosh I think we've done it we've come to the end of another show we've made it all the way through the stories that we've put on our list although there are many more out there and they will continue to be released until the next episode of This Week in Science so I'd like to take this moment everyone to thank you for listening thank you for watching and thank you to all our Patreon sponsors thank you Paul Disney John Ratnaswamy Kevin Parachan Tyrone Fong Sir Frankadelic Dana Pearson Paul Stanton Arlene Moss Ben Rothig Alvarez Brian Kondren Jon Crocker Artyom Shuwata Steve Mishimski Gary Swinsburg Phil Nodeau Matt Sutter Jason Olds James Paul West Adam Mishkin Aaron Luthin David Simmerly Tyler Harrison and Colombo Ahmed thank you for all your support on Patreon and if you are interested in supporting us you can find information at twist.org or go directly to patreon.com slash This Week in Science and remember you can also help us out simply by telling your friends about twists I also want to give a big shout out to identity 4 Paul Disney in the chat room who helps out by recording the show every week for us also Fada who helps with show notes and social media and also Brandon 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she's busted from nuclear radiation she's got she's yeah yeah see look at her she's all busted yeah her giant airy her lack of hair Mary Curie you have some trouble madame how was your birthday my birthday was so fun yeah I had a very very good time it went to the river of the weekend and it was beautiful and then last night went to see the Violent Femmes and Echo and the Bunny Men at the Oregon Zoo at the zoo I saw your status it was a zoo concert it was really fun it was great it was very enjoyable some zoos have really good like amphitheaters for that yeah this was great big lawn area like just fantastic so it was a very fun evening yeah that was a good birthday and I got some fun sciencey funny things I got a mermaid oh and this is not from a Heather and Jojo but from someone else who's a guinea pig fan she's got guinea pigs on her belly oh my goodness that mermaid has a guinea pig tattoo that's good this mermaid has a guinea pig belly tattoo oh shelly oh shelly and now Marshall for my birthday got me many bird masks oh I now have very many bird masks also you got a coloring book which is great because it's National Coloring Book Day I forgot I was going to say something about that it is National Coloring Book Day and my coloring book is the Existential Coloring Book with Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Pigeon Man Pigeon Man oh yeah thanks chat room happy belated birthday Kiki thanks Justin this is my favorite existentialist word search uh huh you see that there's nothing so I remember when I was in AP Lit in college or no in high school we were reading Waiting for Godot and we were supposed to write a paragraph about existentialism and Waiting for Godot and one of my classmates just pasted a black box where the essay was supposed to go oh my gosh and handed it in and the next day he's handing out all of the graded papers and he goes, Jillian I appreciate your effort I laughed do it again write a paragraph write a paragraph it was so great oh my god it was funny it was the beginning of that class when he assigned it to us too oh my god he was such a great teacher we were reading Waiting for Godot and he walks into our class and we're all waiting for him and he just goes everybody get out we're like what what? it's like take your assignment and leave just get out of the classroom okay so we all get up and we start to walk outside and most of us just sit kind of outside the door in the hallway and start working on the essay some people actually left but about five minutes later he opened the door to the classroom he was like now you may come in and it was all supposed to be kind of an exploration in existentialism oh my goodness but some people actually left yeah so they got it they broke with it they actually passed that test but he was like everything is meaningless the only things that have meaning are things that you assign meaning to yeah yeah so Nietzsche is to me like one of the most hilarious authors I get belly laughs reading him and it's not not at it's intended he is like his era's Larry David like he goes into exploring those nuances like I wish I had an example but it's very much like an episode of Curb oh my goodness monsters might take the air let's take the air by become a monster and if you gaze for long into an abyss the abyss gazes also into you he who has a why to live can bear almost anyhow dick tell you're right teachers never give an a plus for creativity when I was applying to colleges I don't know if I told you guys this before but I applied to Stanford and I applied early action and which means it's harder to get in but if you get in your it's you're admitted early and you are committed and it was like a whole weird thing that's I applied their early action I was convinced I really wanted to go to Stanford and I had to write this essay about why I wanted to go to Stanford and I decided I was excited go big or go home right so I wrote a limerick that was the exact right number of words like it was it was long it was a long limerick but I wrote a limerick about the the pointlessness of writing college essays and about like and about like how weird it is that you're supposed to apply to colleges and decide which colleges to go to when you're not even an adult and stuff like that like it was just amusing on the college application process but it was it was in sound sound limerick form it rhymed just like it was supposed to it sounded great it was long it had a narrative but I was like you know what and it did not pay off okay so here's a here's an issue quote that is very much like my philosophy of everything okay he sums everything up beautifully right here you have your way I have my way as for the right way the correct way and the only way it does not exist and I think that's the important thing that when when people put the big black box of meaninglessness over existentialism they're ignoring that that it's really about it's it's a real true freedom in existentialism which is no you're not doing your life wrong there isn't an actual right way there isn't a meaning above your life or above your existence above your experience your experience is your life it's the same thing and and there isn't it's not it's not that thelessness of life is necessarily a disparaging thing it's actually freeing right oh my gosh there wasn't good thing that life doesn't have a specific point otherwise guess what probably nobody you know is is achieving it right now right like well what a bummer that would be life has this one specific thing that it's all about if you're not doing it you're failing no that's not how life works we'll all have a different way through this I like my wavelengths you can have your wavelengths they can have their wavelengths and we might do a mash-up at some point where both those wavelengths are seamlessly one into the other and then you know often they go into their own trash maybe there's destructive interference and you saw about and we should consider everyday lost on which we have not danced at least once and we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh and he does he finds ways to get laughs he's a he his writing is comedic at its core which which I don't think most people go into so I didn't go into it thinking that he was going to be a Canadian but but Nietzsche is a comedian Nietzsche or whatever Nietzsche everyone Nietzsche how do you want to pronounce it great more like Nietzsche yay am I right Nietzsche yay oh my goodness all right you guys I'm gonna go to bed yeah I'd agree with that I'm tired from my concerts birthday celebrations last night I've not been sleeping well and I think I know why I think I've been staring at my phone right before bed and the light we did a study all about it the light from the phone like your natural your circadian rhythms are waning and then you stare at this bright light and it makes it makes your body wake back up again I think it's what I've been doing the rest of the lights on right no it's like I get back in bed and I like turn on my alarm and all my lights are off and I like my email one more time and then I go to so I sleep with the lights on you do are you afraid of the dark Justin no but what if I wake up but also what about the environment that's so much electricity it's not that much it's not that much I got the led lights that's bad that's not so bad for your circadian rhythms anyway well if I was circadian you're really worried about that whatever that is say good night Blair say good night Justin good night Justin good night Kiki and good night everybody thank you so much for joining us again for this episode of twist we hope to see you again next week take care have a great science week bye