 I don't think something... Does it change? You should probably, when you figure it out, should we do the whole show and whisper? Some ASMR people might really appreciate it. Three, two... This is Twist. This Week in Science, episode number 638. Recorded on Wednesday, September 27th, 2017. You are the 17%. Hey everyone, I am Dr. Kiki, and tonight on This Week in Science, we are going to fill your heads with jellyfish brains, Neanderthal adolescents, and Virgo teamwork. But first... Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. We live in interesting times. Too interesting in some ways. It's nothing like the old days. Yeah, the good old boring days. Back before the smartphone, before the internet, before television, radio, and the printing press, back before the pulley, the lever, and the invention of the wheel, back further still, before the written alphabet, before the domestication of animals, before socks. Because I'm pretty sure socks predate all of those other inventions. I'm talking about way, way back. Early man, sitting gathered together around a fire at the entrance of a cave. Some pondering the images within the flickering shadows at the back of the cave wall, others carefully gauging the distance at which feet can be held from the fire to give warmth, yet not cook like mammoth steaks. Some speculating about the meaning of the migration of the twinkling lights in the night sky, while others nap away, hoping to make the world's best stone axe in preparation for the next hunt. And while we may think of these evenings of early humans as boring by today's standards, they did hold great promise for the curious-minded for so much interesting new knowledge was waiting out there for these early humans. Knowledge that we now take for granted in our interesting times, though chances are, if we run the clock of humanity forward, we won't need to go thousands of years into the future, maybe just a few hundred. We may find that the humans of today have a much more in common with cavemen gathered round a fire than with the humans of tomorrow. We will look back at our simpler times with a vast landscape of discoveries still ahead of us and say, these humans had it so easy. Why they even had this weekend's science coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough I wanna learn everything I wanna fill it all up 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 weekend's science what's happening what's happening what's happening this weekend's science science to you Kiki and Blair and good science to you too Justin Blair and everyone out there welcome to yet another episode of this weekend's science we're back once again to exclaim and proclaim and pull the lovers and roll the wheels I love this internet fire that we have going here let's light a fire here kids you ready you ready I'm born ready alright good alright everyone we have some good stories today I brought stories about Virgo help brains and neuron chips and the 17% Justin what do you have I've got where bird beaks come from what to expect when raising an ant or tall and the secret life of fingers they're right there how could they be so secret I see them right there all the time when you're not looking up to things you don't know about Okie dokie and Blair what is in the animal coordinate tonight I brought animal brains that's jellies and pigeons that's right animals that wait don't even have a brain oh and also jellyfish wait a minute I'm going to have next time I see you in person Blair don't have brains but just wait for the story Kiki it's great I know birds have the best brains you guys because they're jellyfish or just that big blobs of jello in the sea they're just fluid filled bags guys look what they possibly have to say because Blair would not have a story about them unless they had something to say that's right jellies are just fluid filled sacks moving on that was a story alright everyone as we jump into the show I want to remind you that you can subscribe to our podcast if you're watching us on facebook or youtube we have a podcast you can subscribe on iTunes in the google play podcast portal stitch your speaker tune in all the places look for us look for this week in science you will find us you can also find us on youtube and facebook search for this week this week in science above all though you can always go to twist.org but right now it is time for what has science done for me lately what has it done here's a letter of the week as a technophile I surround myself with technology news technology trends and technology futurism fully on a daily basis technology is the real world application of scientific principles it is from the work of electrical engineering the material sciences quantum mechanics and many other disciplines working together that we live in this world of connectivity and mobile and cloud computing the full power of data centers and supercomputers has gone from the ivory tower to my pocket science and technology work in a virtuous spiral science gives us better technology gives us more precise ways to do better science and so on it is for this reason that I look forward to the future I do so with anticipation for what new thing what new discovery is right around the corner one fan of many Dale Moore nice I love the sentence that science and technology work in a virtuous spiral it just pulls a wonderful image and it is so true because we could not have technology without the trials and errors of the scientific method right? observation hypothesis testing results and then the technology helps us do better science the spiral exactly Dale thank you so much for writing in and this is definitely something that is important we couldn't be doing this show the technology that supports us is thanks to the science and the application of that science so yes thank you for that very important reminder and thank you so much for writing in everyone out there you too can write in and let us know what science has done for you lately what does it do for you every day what is important is science to your life we want to know and we want to share your story with our audience so please write us you can leave us a message on our facebook page so facebook.com just look for this week in science on facebook if that is too many letters but we do want to keep filling this part of the show with your stories with what you have to say because you really make this show happen and we couldn't keep doing it without you it's important and they are inspiring and you know who else is inspiring the 17% I'm moving into my science story we're diving in right now this science, this 17% of which I speak is a percentage based on a Pew Research study survey that was just released this last week according to a survey on science news and information today where people get their science news how to think about all this stuff it turns out that there are 36% of US adults, American adults who get science news at least a few times a week but they don't really go looking for it they just kind of get it as they're perusing their news feeds reading newspapers or doing whatever they're doing science comes to them 30% of Americans get science news at some point in time and usually because they're looking for it so sometimes they're looking for it sometimes they're not but they're getting it because that's a great number I think that's at least better than I expected it to be but the 17% 17% of Americans are direct they are directly engaging in searching for scientific information reading scientific scientific stories books trying to get as much of science and information about science as they can out of the world 17% are those people in our audience our audience is the 17% our audience downloads us every week they are searching for scientific information they have found a way to get it every week by subscribing to the twist podcast and maybe other podcasts they probably post stories that they have found themselves on social media sites to share with others our audience are the directly engaged and interested audience and I just want to call out for a second how wonderful it is to have the 17% here with us and now what we want to do is make that number grow yes please I just want to get all 17% we definitely don't have all 17% but these are people these make up our audience but this number will potentially grow the majority of Americans are really not trying too hard to get scientific information in their lives and as of now according to this poll nearly 3 quarters of the public 73% say that the way the news media cover scientific research it's not a very good job that the bigger problem with news about science research is the way reporters cover it something in your house could kill you exactly and so the 43% of American adults say that the big problem when it comes to the reporting of scientific findings is that the news media are too quick to report on findings that may not hold up they oversimplify scientific research findings they're too quick to report on disagreement about findings like the idea of finding bias where there may not actually be any and they cover too many research findings that are not really important so this stuff it is not necessarily health related or other human interest related and when it comes to the scientists themselves people say that the science researchers are contributing to the problem because they publish so many studies it's hard to tell the difference between the high quality and the low quality ones 27% of Americans say that scientific researchers science researchers overstate their research's implications and then it's not all on the media and the scientists surveyed here which was a very large number I believe it was around 4,024 adults ages 18 or older within the period of May 30th to June 12th of this year they say 44% almost half say that the public themselves don't know enough about science to understand findings that are reported in the news and the 42% of Americans say that the public jumps to conclusions about how to apply new findings to their own lives hey that's what we're here for that's right we're trying to have these conversations that talk about the many sides of research findings and the questions that might still be that might still remain most people pretty much distrust social media at this point can you blame them? not really good that they're being skeptical of it because all of it can be largely unsourced something that 33% of Americans say that they regularly get their science news from family and friends who they don't really think necessarily understand the science themselves and even fewer back to 17% again 17% talk with others about science news at least weekly and then far lower than shares found in past surveys focused on talking about news generally or discussion of politics so a lot of people they're just like they're not really talking with a lot of people about science so you know what this show should give you water cooler topics oh my goodness clocktail party topics ways to talk about science things that are happening in the world maybe your friends will find interesting as well I'm constantly bringing up a recent study right? if we wanted to hear it we'd listen to the show I'm that friend as well before we jump into the political bashing of either political party we're gonna do that though? we're not actually because republicans and democrats are pretty equally divided on being active science news consumers however the interesting thing is that democrats are more likely to think the media do a good job of covering science liberal news bias so first of all I wonder where they're getting their news like not the 17% but beyond the 17% what they're calling science news because that to me is a little like something that I hadn't gotten to yet it's a great question the majority of american adults get their science news from general news outlets newspapers the big media outlets they're 54% get their they regularly get their science news from that that source but they think only 28% of americans think that the general news sources get the science right interestingly 12% of the public get their science from podcasts or radio programs same amount 28% of americans think science news from podcasts and radio programs gets it right most of the time yeah so getting it right most of the time in science though that's a tricky one in terms of reporting because you're taking a synopsis of a whole study and everything that we end up talking about is well why was this a good study or here's the problem I have with this study here's what I don't like about that in the speculation aspect I don't know so much if it's the overstatement by researchers themselves when they speculate in pieces that usually seems pretty moderated with might could be further down the road could open a door to a hallway that turns a corner around they throw in a lot of those caveats it's probably more reporting fault for overstating the value of new news three things in your fridge that you should not eat that stuff but I would because I see that it's such a small percentage of the news feeds as they go by have anything to do with science although newspapers still usually have a pretty good story at least weekly that I can find that's like wow that's really great that's like new news it seems just sort of like a barren landscape to be choosing from what's actually getting put out there right it's interesting that when we talk about the science that people are getting when we're talking about news you expect it's going to be coming from news outlets or science magazines or podcasts like our own but other sources of scientific information are places like science centers or museums and then documentaries which are not necessarily news oriented and these places are thought of more highly by the public 54% and 52% respectively of Americans think that science museums and documentaries get the science right most of the time and science magazines are 47% of Americans think that they get the science right most of the time how can you get it like 53% wrong and reporting on a scientific no it's not 53 this is the percentage of Americans who think that the news is reported accurately most of the time 53% of Americans just don't believe in science they're like well I don't get it so it's probably wrong or it's fake news and I don't get it it's probably wrong that's exactly where the science communicator's job is so important right is to be able to explain these studies in a way that feels accessible and so the explanatory chain of kind of question to the results are clear and followable so that it seems plausible because otherwise if I just tell you cockatoos are as smart as a 3 year old child you're likely to say that sounds ridiculous so unless and that's why I like to talk about the the methodology of these studies so often and that's why I find that so fascinating because that really brings the science into an accessible place to a lot of people absolutely yeah and the but it's about the accessibility and what stories are the kinds of stories that people are interested in and they've also found that the type of stories that are more popular are definitely things that are more human human centric so the stuff that could be considered quote-unquote inside baseball or things that are just informational most of the public they don't really bother and they're not interested in seeking that kind of thing out right and what makes information for information's sake right and what makes it interesting is the extrapolation right which is where then this becomes a very intense tightrope walk because that's part of our job too is to make the research accessible by talking about potential implications and so I've got here from the Pew Research Center I'm showing a a graph a bar graph of the top science news topics that have the highest level of interest health and medicine comes in at the top with a net of 70% of Americans getting their interested in it 28 or most interested in 43% are kind of interested not most interested food and nutrition comes in second so these two top ones are just very what's going to affect my life technology again application what's going to affect my life fourth energy and environment what's going to affect my life fifth the mind and brain and this is where it starts getting into this could be like Alzheimer's but the mind and brain is also who am I what is humanity this gets into the more big picture thinking stuff space and astronomy comes in after that and then finally evolution of humans and animals my favorite subject of all is dead last but you could argue that part of this is framing too right that if you explain some of these studies from a lens of some of those human related concerns it's going to become more interesting so this is what I'm suggesting we're going to completely change up the show these are the only topics we're going to report on okay this weekend from here on out I lost Blair she's done I can't be a part of the show if you know what the animal corridor the story is for me to be here I know there's no animals at all human aspect of things there was this sort of interesting documentary I was watching that it was connecting things geological events that sort of thing with modern day human events and technology in the course of history one of the little things that I thought was interesting is because these these early farmers learned how to plant potatoes in Peru they were discovered by the Spanish they were sent back to Europe and it became a starter crop and then a blight happened so this one family had to move to Michigan and the child of one of those poor farmers that moved to Michigan watched a steam powered tractor go by and that was Henry Ford like what you can actually tie in kind of any event through the past a geological event or what have you and eventually get to how it impacts modern day society how it changed your life in some way or the course of human history I have a story about jellyfish that I guarantee you will have implications on humans and I just wanted to give this read this one quote can we grind it up and eat it as a supplement is that what we're doing you round up jellyfish brains no that is not what we're talking about right now this quote end of the article by John Timmer from ours on this survey he says overall from this survey from Pew the picture that emerges is one of a US public that wants to be enthused about science but doesn't have the time and energy to devote to reading science news and is frequently disappointed with the results when they do and while the purveyors of science news receive a lot of blame for this the public recognizes that high driven scientists and the public's own lack of knowledge make the situation worse is there an obvious solution and there is where I will leave the end of this story and I want everyone to think about that what would you like what do you want how do you see the landscape of scientific communication changing it would be wonderful to know and now three things in your refrigerator you should definitely not eat don't eat LIGO or Virgo we need them oh yeah they turn out to be working hard working yes so what is LIGO what is Virgo I keep mentioning Virgo it's not an astronomical sign as well it is but that's not I'm talking about right now LIGO is the the gravitational wave detector that there are two of them here in the western hemisphere and Virgo is the other the European cousin or the European twin triplet of the the LIGO array and LIGO on its own we've got a couple of stories of detecting gravitational waves right these gravitational waves they're able to say oh this is the signature of black holes smashing into each other and a portion of that energy being dispersed into the universe into the fabric of space time and creating waves the same way as if you threw a rock in a pond the top of the pond ripples this is space time rippling and these ripples are sent out and we are in a path I don't know because it's going out through all of space time from the point of origin we are in that path and using our interferometers we can determine how big an impact was or a combining what exactly happened LIGO on its own has suggested that we've seen a couple of black hole mergers that have been big and exciting but Virgo came online in August and suddenly we're able to triangulate where once upon a time we could only kind of just get a general swath of space where we thought black holes had been merging suddenly we have a triangle suddenly we have a third leg from which to calculate a general location for an event to have occurred in space and so as a result we have today just today this morning in Italy researchers from Italy and NSF and LIGO came together and gave a press conference to let everyone know that Virgo worked and the three of these gravitational wave detectors working together have once again detected a black hole merger it's some billion or so light years away from us and they have been able to pretty much determine a square area of space a location where this happened and so this is giving us much more information about the specificity of events happening in the universe around us how far away is it? something like a billion is it a I think it's a billion light years away it's some distant very very far away okay that's a safe distance then it's a safe distance yes and one of the really exciting things also is the use of LIGO and now Virgo to not only be able to triangulate a location in space where things are happening they can use the intensity the amplitude of these gravitational waves that they're recording to also figure out we know how big of an merger has taken place and additionally something that we don't know if this is worked or not but they're trying to pair the gravitational wave signal with actual light signals from space and they think what they may have there is a story because a bunch of telescopes have moved to start looking at the constellation Hydra because LIGO may have gotten a signal of a black hole merger and now they're going to look at a light signal to see if it was the merger of neutron stars so what they're because neutron stars when they merge actually give off light in the radio the radio band frequency that can be picked up by our radio telescopes and our light based telescopes and so we're going to start not only maybe seeing black hole mergers but also these other bodies dense bodies in the universe merging and giving us more information about what's happening where in the universe around us yeah it's very exciting very exciting news and there's a great article that I'll post to over that's it from physics central the physics buzz blog no longer will we talk about gravitational waves as hum drum not that I ever did this is this week in science oh that's a very good question I have my first story of the night which is where do bird beaks come from eggs answer dinosaurs dinosaurs laid eggs dinosaurs many of them had feathers we know birds evolved from dinosaurs one big difference of course dinosaurs had lots of teeth birds have none instead they have beaks so how'd that happen in a new study Shao Wang from the capital normal University of Beijing and colleagues studied a series of dinosaur and early bird fossils to see the transition they found that some dinosaurs evolved to lose their teeth and as they got older they sprouted a small beak so it'd be sort of like okay you lose your baby teeth and then you get your adult teeth and you lose your adult teeth and then instead of instead of getting false teeth later later stage of life you would get just grow a beak but the beak came first right I mean there were dinosaurs with teeth and beaks first right I don't know how that works over time this process happened earlier and earlier until eventually the animals emerged from their eggs with a fully formed beak so there were dinosaurs that perhaps had beaks already but this is sort of this is how that transition happened over time all those birds actually had reptilian like teeth archaeoptery that's 150 million years ago and then the Siberianness from the early Cretaceous that's 125 million years ago but even earlier birds had lost their teeth some modern birds all lack teeth there's one exception some sort of sell them the Hawatson the Hawatson has a tooth a tooth out of the egg picks away at it until it can bust out and then it sheds it it also smells like rotting food so the Hawatson is a fun bird well it's a symbiote isn't it? it smells funny because it's got some back to you they have a weird thing in their gizzard yeah that makes them smell like rotting food fun fact yeah but it looks like it looks like those so there's like the area that would grow teeth that they sort of manipulated and some chickens to grow baby chickens with teeth and it's that same area that the character the process of the beak is being formed so that's the sort of evolutionary trade-off I guess you start to you trade your trade teeth for beaks they looked also across more widely across vertebrates that have lost or reduced their teeth as they evolved this included some fish, frogs penguins, whales and entirely toothless turtles in all cases animals that had lost their teeth were associated with replacement of the teeth by a keratin beak nature's nature's falsies their false teeth it's interesting that that these theropod dinosaurs that they would develop this way I wonder how much yeah I wonder if this is part of the evolutionary pathway or if it was just one weird group of dinosaurs you know it's just one odd group that decided oh I'm a baby and I'm gonna have teeth and I'm gonna lose it and I'm gonna grow a beak yeah but it's not like pretty late in age like once the adult teeth hit all and all sort of falling out but what if this is just a normal evolutionary transition that just you know most life spans are too short maybe to see it play out like people finally lived to be 300 years old and all start growing beaks that's what I was thinking about I'm like what if we all lost our teeth as we get older and then just start getting these keratin beak like appendix 300 years old humans all have beaks I mean if they were full-fledged like duck beaks I actually think that might be kind of cool but really what would happen is your your lips would just get kind of hard and crusty and that would be real gross well I think they would just be the covers they'd be back there at the base and then the beak would grow out that would give a whole new a whole new meaning to the the people who take pictures with their duck face pictures keratin is left there we go oh my goodness dinosaurs losing their teeth getting a beak of course that's how it works but I'd like to see more of this let's find more of the more evidence of these theropod dinosaurs the lineage that led to the birds having this kind of change it's really exciting how much we've discovered just in the short time since I was in college it was just yesterday but we've discovered so much and I remember all of my evolutionary morphology and fossil based classes that talked about what we knew and there are so many things that we know now that I didn't know then that has been discovered yeah that were a question it's fascinating I love it can't wait to see what we find next and so there were actually there were dinosaurs that had both beak and teeth there were some dinosaurs that had beaks without teeth but there were dinosaurs that had both but the ones that had both teeth and beaks had only a little beak had like a small they weren't like big beaks like I would say crusty lit beak dinosaurs as they were known back in those college days gross I'm glad I didn't know your friends in college the crusty lit beak dinosaurs could be a good band name and on that note I think it's time that we move into Blair's Animal Corner what you got Blair? oh we're gonna move way back in time even before dinosaurs to our friends the jellies yeah we can call them jelly fish just so we know we're not talking about jam but they are not fish they are invertebrates they lack of blood they lack of blood they lack of blood they are invertebrates they lack a brain they have nerves but they do not have a centralized nervous system new research from the California Institute of Technology tells us jelly fish sleep huh yes so we know of course that humans, mice, fish and all vertebrates sleep but jelly fish are vertebrates we've discovered that flies sleep they are invertebrates but they have a head they have a spinal they have a head and they have a nerve clump very similar to a brain they have bilateral symmetry they have all these sorts of things but jellies have none of that they are just kind of a fluid filled bag moving through the ocean in response to stigma so why? how? what? so Paul Sternberg from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the California Institute of Technology wanted to see exactly who sleeps scientists debate why we sleep there are lots of theories involving memory learning, cellular recovery but Sternberg wanted to take several steps back to just ask who sleeps do all animals sleep so what he did is he and his graduate student Ravi Nath teamed up with friends at Caltech who studied Cassiopeia these are upside down jellies and if you've never had a chance to see them head to your nearest aquarium that has them check them out they are amazing they are exactly what they sound like they are jellies that repeatedly push down to the bottom of the water column into the sand so that their tentacles are faced up that's actually so that they can catch food easier and because they have a photosynthetic symbiote that helps them get their food because they live in very clean and clear tropical waters where there's not a whole lot of food for them to actually grab with their tentacles so they are upside down like this they are the perfect jellyfish to study sleep in because their space at rest is up against the ground upside down easier to track them easier to track easier to provoke so all other jellies are actually considered plankton because they kind of just move around at the whimsy of the current but these guys have a very specific space that they like to be so it's a very easy thing to study when they are where they want to be and how they act when they're not where they want to be so they went in at night and they videotaped them with their iPhones and recording jellies at night and during the day manually counting individual pulses of the bell they got a clue the Cassiopeia might be sleeping they post less frequently at night they counted pulses of 23 jellies over six consecutive days and nights they found that pulsing activity decreased considerably at night and then what's even more interesting is that when they dropped food into the tanks they woke back up they went back to their normal pulse amount and they say it's like the odor of coffee permeating your consciousness in the morning so it's a it's something to signal to them to be active so that wake up is actually a sign that this is something like sleep and not paralysis or coma or anything like that they're responding to this external stimuli so they also wanted to check on sleep I love this by dropping the floor out from them while they were sleeping so they placed Cassiopeia inside a PVC pipe with a mesh bottom that's like somebody like taking your bed out from underneath you while you're sleeping right absolutely and what would you do you'd roll the sheet off yeah absolutely so they put them inside this PVC pipe with a mesh bottom and then they dipped the pipe into the tank the jellies would rest they'd go to sleep and then the researchers would lower the pipe forcing the jellies to then they were they were kind of pushed off the mesh and they had to go back down to the sand they don't like that Sternberg explains during the day they would quickly pulse their bells and some down to rest in the mesh again at night it took them three times longer to start moving and get back to where they were trying to go so it's as if they're groggy which is an anthropomorphization of course but really it is this transitioning from if you want to call it sleep to awake time takes a minute that's what our groggyness is as well right we're like amping the brain back up so this is typical for experimentation with sleeping with the sleeping animals we've studied before and like other sleeping animals this is the best part when they made the jellies pull an all nighter they paid for it the next day how do you make a jellyfish pull an all nighter well keep the lights on close they they pulsed water at the bottom of the Cassiopeias for six to twelve hours at night so they basically just kept them constantly off of the ground so they kept having to try to push down so it kept them awake and they counted the pulses the next day they were less active they were still definitely awake they were not asleep but they were slower to respond to stimuli and they were just in general less active and even more interesting after they caught up on sleep the next day they returned to normal so jellies sleep it really looks that way but this Sternberg says only brings up more questions do you need neurons to sleep do you need more than one cell to sleep they have neurons they may not be vertebrates but they have neurons right so that's the next question they have a system does something without neurons also sleep does something with only one cell sleep he wants to study sponges he wants to study protozoa and find exactly how far back sleep goes well I think pushes our idea of sleep way farther back on the evolutionary tree than we thought yeah but I mean I will I'm going to bet I'm not looking at research in front of me right now so I don't know for sure but I'm willing to bet that we already know there are circadian rhythms in yeast bacteria I'm willing to bet there are studies that show circadian rhythms of changing metabolic activity absolutely lower life forms and if so I think we the question is not it's where do we draw the line to calling it sleep you know at what I mean are we going to call this a change in metabolic activity right are we going to actually call what the jellyfish are doing sleep right exactly and so that that is a great question what now will we define as sleep and I think that the kind of the thing that they're putting forward through this research is because how do I put this without making it sound like a jellyfish has a brain because their responses adjusted with lack of sleep and because they were able to make them stay awake and because they acted groggy when woken all these sorts of things this made them characterize it as more than a circadian rhythm yeah this made them characterize it as something that that provided a service which ultimately again we don't know what that is right as we talked about just a week or so ago at the end of the show there are some cases in which a lack of sleep might actually be good for you yeah absolutely so there's there's the thing that we spend a third of our life doing that we don't really know why which is now now it's crazy but the experiments that need to happen now I guess are let's try and deprive bacteria and yeast of sleep yes yes absolutely what will happen this is going to be some great comic book material I don't know hot or joke comedian how do you keep a bacteria awake all night um I don't know I put on put on a binging Netflix show about hospital waiting rooms I don't know that's the best I can do um okay so that was the jellyfish now let's move on to the poor pigeons who I slided earlier in a joke um did slight those very smart pigeons because they're so darn smart so I wanted to kind of um put in stark relief here how most people feel about pigeons which is that they dumb they annoying they dumb they gross right so people don't know pigeons they haven't taken the time to get to know them that's right and maybe that little bum-legged pigeon actually has a heart of gold you don't know brain of gold yeah you're right see that's what this study is all about so Dr. Sarah let let's ner from crazy name um of a of an institution that I will not try to say out loud um which is university a technical university in Dresden we'll just leave it there wanted to look at multitasking in humans and in pigeons yes predictions what do we think multitasking Justin are you a good multitasker uh I can either hamburger drive and react to something that's being said on the radio at the same time oh excellent great kiki I can run the show talk with you guys and play with my cat oh that's pretty impressive well pigeons might be better at it than you guys of course they are so um this study showed that pigeons are capable of switching between two tasks as quickly as humans and more quickly in certain situations so biophys biopsychologists who had performed the same behavioral experiments testing birds and humans looked at their ability to basically um stop one task and start another so they what they did is they had 15 humans and 12 pigeons so I will say disclaimer disclaimer pretty small sample size however um it's a pretty interesting experiment so they they had the humans and the pigeons they had them stop a task in progress and switch over to an alternative task as quickly as possible the switch over to the alternate task was performed either at the same time the first task was stopped so they found out they had to stop and start at the exact same time or it was delayed by 300 milliseconds a whopping 300 milliseconds you got in between them telling you to stop and then start the new task in the first case that's when real multitasking is happening at the exact same moment they ask you to stop what you're doing and start something new those being stopped uh doing the first task and switching over to the alternative task they slow down by the same amount pigeons and humans under double stress so it's the exact same amount of slow down cognitively in between the two things in the second case switching from the alternative task after a short delay the processes in your brain actually changes so it's not the exact same wiring maneuver that happens um the stopping of the first task and the switching over to the second task act more like ping pong so there's an order of operations in your brain the nerve cells that control both processes have to send signals back and forth so they assumed that pigeons would have an advantage over humans because of their brain and they found in fact 250 milliseconds faster reaction time in pigeons than humans so let me explain about their brains and kiki feel free to jump in because this is totally your wheel house but uh people would expect that humans because they have this very special cerebral cortex this is where a lot of multitasking complex thought comes from they have cortical layers six layers uh in the cerebral cortex and the structure is thought to be the reason for complex cognitive functions in mammals once again selling birds short quote unquote bird brain because their brain is not like ours but it has very analogous structures it's not set up the same but they have they have areas of the brain that work exactly the same and in this case the fact that their brain is smaller might actually work to their advantage because their neurons are more densely packed in their cerebral cortex they have six times as many nerve cells as humans per cubic millimeter of brain and the distance between those neurons in pigeons is 50% shorter than in humans less distance traveled means speed of nerve signals are faster so that's the expectation that the researchers had and they found that all in all it is potentially true because either the pigeons reacted as quickly or slightly faster in these multitasking experiments can I say that makes that makes good sense to me and I think that you'd probably find that in something like bats as well or probably most birds the act of flying bats have mammalian brains they have brains that are like mice and rats they have a they have a mammalian brain they don't have a bird brain so they don't necessarily it's a smaller brain but it's not structured like birds right but I'm talking about reaction times I would bet you that the reaction times are still pretty quick I bet you because of the act of flying itself we humans we think we move quickly like yes when we're driving sometimes when we're running or riding a bike but we not we're not really moving at that quick speed whereas if you're a bird you spend a lot of time moving much faster than humans sometimes around other birds and have to make really quick decisions while flying changing direction tracking the location of the other birds who are also flying in your vicinity you're trying to not get eaten you're trying to find food the ability to multitask while flying would I think require a brain to multitask in a quicker response time their moments their frame of reference for time is probably much more needing to be at a quicker pace so it makes sense to bring with structure itself in such a ways to be able to accommodate that and that's an interesting point is definitely any animal that does all those things and on top of that an animal that has to live in an urbanized environment has a lot of stressors yeah a lot of stressors that's necessarily the issue there I mean urbanized environments have not been around long enough to have caused brain changes like the ones that they were looking at but in this situation not the urbanized environment but more demanding environments can do that yes but what I was going to say about the brain and what is actually going on in there is that when you are doing something you are cognitively aware of it if you are trying to multitask and you are asked to switch between processes there are a number of subconscious or unconscious processes that are happening below the radar and those are happening in multiple areas of the brain and they are talking to each other and that's all percolating up to your consciousness which has then potentially top down control to change the way that you perform on whatever task task switching then determine means that you need those sub-routines to all switch on their own and then your consciousness to generally come around to it and go yes we are doing this new thing now and so in the human brain there is longer distances maybe more subtasks that are superseding each other because of the consciousness that we have we don't know this for sure but it is very possible that our awareness of our actions actually helps to slow things down and then additionally the bird brain being smaller you have got the areas that are controlling the subtasks being smaller and closer together and if you don't and there is a time there is a time factor to this that you cannot get past the amount of time it takes for an action potential to go down a nerve trunk to get on the dendrite to get to wherever it is going and to then send a chemical signal to change something up there is a very physical limit to that speed so what they are looking at it is interesting these different areas neocortical or paleo structures and where they are and how they are working very possible the human brain gets in its own way where that smaller avian brain does not just because a structure doesn't look like ours that doesn't make it worse I still want the comparative study with bats I think that would be really interesting and I was going to say Justin it is very possible we don't have to do the advanced acrobatics that these birds do or that bats have to do to be able to catch their food so there is and maybe it depends on the bird species as well who is to say that this pigeon who walks around pecking at bits of whatever it is on the sidewalk in the city is not going to be as fast as say a swift or a swallow who is really on the wing in the catching of their prey right absolutely I was watching one of these documentary things where they were looking at chickadees and they compared they had like some sort of task where the birds had to figure out how to get food that was hidden behind a little glass enclosure and chickadees that were from Alaska were like right on it and once from the Midwest couldn't figure it out they were slow as the day is long and I've met all these birds I know so part of what the research was indicating is also having a more difficult survival scenario or having a more a more difficult over the generations of birds that the intelligence and the ability to maybe figure things out was created in that in hardship in hardship and I think flight by itself is a type of hardship if we had to fly everywhere I mean look how many humans there are at a mall if we were all flying we'd be just with our reaction times we would definitely be running into each other constantly I mean we have we have to lay out rules just driving cars you stop here we have a system for getting through an intersection that's going to take way longer than if we just got up and said nobody's there and kept going no we don't get to wing it we have to follow very strict rules in order to avoid running into one another and these birds are constantly doing it so my extrapolation bet for this one would be we'd see it throughout all birds and I think we'd see it in bats too and that would be the interesting test absolutely to do that comparative study absolutely I agree cross species multitasking small birds birds that have a lot of birds around them all right everybody this is this week in science we are going to take a quick break and we will come back after these messages for more stories with this week in science please stay tuned hey 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science and more this weekend science more Justin what you got congratulations congratulations you have just been assigned to raise the first genetically reconstructed Neanderthal baby I'm sure you've got lots of questions about what to expect but unfortunately none of the off-the-shelf child development books are going to be of sure used to you because baby Neanderthals could grow up differently than modern human babies thankfully for you a study led by Spanish National Research Council researcher Antonio Rosas has studied the fossil remains of Neanderthal child skeleton in order to establish differences between growth of Neanderthals and that of regular off-the-shelf human babies according to the results of the article which are published in science both species regulate their growth differently to adapt their energy consumption to their physical characteristics modern humans this is a quotey voice modern humans Neanderthals emerged from a common recent ancestor and this is manifested in a similar overall growth pattern explains Rosas applying pediatric growth assessment methods this Neanderthal child is no different to a modern day child the pattern of vertebral maturation and brain growth as well as energy constraints during development they say may have marked the anatomical shape of Neanderthals so there is a little bit of the difference in the way that we're going but overall it's pretty much the same Neanderthals as we know had a greater cranial capacity than the modern human bigger heads bigger brains Neanderthal adult had an intercranial volume of 1520 cubic centimeters modern adult man at about 1195 cubic centimeters they got bigger brains that of the Neanderthal child in the study was at 1330 cubic centimeters before 8 years old so before age 8 they already had a cranial capacity greater than a modern human adult and at that age development modern day child's cranial capacity is pretty much fully completed so it's about that developing a large brain involves significant energy expenditure continuing quotey voice and consequently this hinders the growth of other body parts in sapiens modern humans that is the development of the brain during childhood has a high energetic cost and as a result development of the rest of the body slows down cost in terms of energy of modern brain is usually high especially during breastfeeding and during infancy this seems to require slowing down of body growth although babies grow pretty quickly I guess it's you know comparative to other mammals animals creatures on the planet and it's kind of a slow transition into the adulthood for humans the growth and development of the juvenile Neanderthal matches that of the typical characteristics of human ontology ontogeny ontogeny ontogeny where there's slow entomical growth between the weaning and puberty which could also be compensating for immense energy cost of developing the large brain and the Neanderthal in fact the skeleton and dentition of this Neanderthal present a physiology which is similar to humans of the same age except this is very interesting the thorax area which which corresponds to a child between five and six years that is less that is less developed so their whole thorax that middle part slower the growth of Neanderthal child however was not complete probably due to energy savings so while the human child had more thorax Neanderthal is not then growing the virgin aspect of the growth of both species is the moment of maturation of the vertebral column and all humans hominids all hominids the cartigel cartilaginous joints of the middle thoracic vertebrae and the atlas are the last diffused and the Neanderthal fusion occurred about two years later than modern humans so the delay of this fusion and the vertebral column indicate that Neanderthals had a decoupling of certain aspects of the transition from infancy to juvenile phase although the implications are unknown feature could be related to the characteristic enlarged shape of the Neanderthal torso so growing their upper bodies longer than a typical human or faster later it forms later they're growing the brain first they're getting ready to do stuff and there was a lot of maturation that was early compared to humans but then there was other stuff that took a little bit longer and there is definitely that we see this evolutionarily this tradeoff between energy for the brain versus energy for other things because the brain loves energy oh yeah to suck it all up and yeah it's a heavy heavy energy load not just in the development but in the maintenance of such a big brain which kind of indicates that how many is in general throughout time really relied a lot on their brain to survive otherwise it would have been yeah that's a good take home message yeah we really hominids we need our brains more so than other animals without it we're kind of soft and fleshy don't have a lot of natural weapons at our disposal no claws, no sharp teeth speak for yourself I wonder what that would mean for something like education we have certain developmental milestones that take place and it's like oh kids are going to start talking about this age and then they're going to start walking at this age and then they're going to start there are milestones we know the approximate ages where these things take place and so I think this is where these things take place and so it would be so interesting that developing Neanderthal adolescent these mental psychological cognitive milestones would very likely be earlier yeah and actually this correct yeah and in this in this example by looking at the teeth the wear on the teeth that this and it was seven and a half year old Neanderthal in this study three and a half feet tall 57 pounds but they could always see wear in the teeth that was using teeth as that sort of third hand handle for skins and plant fibers and was already at work and likely it was probably my guess would be walking sooner, running sooner probably the little bit of the trade off there is also going to be more kids can sort of develop more verbally first and more physically first I would bet again speculating that the Neanderthals children were probably a lot more athletic sooner because they're with a group of they live amongst a group of nomadic hunters who follow game rounds get up and run, come on eating in the Neanderthal family as close to you know the deer we're not a deer on the plane falling out of mom and then running an hour later walking and running I did just have like a haunting image of a baby full on baby speaking in complete sentences you know look who's talking now sort of thing could have been we don't know it's pretty creepy pass me that skin over there I'm going to get at it can you pass me that jerky mom mom time to go mom when boom boom it actually sounds like my children like almost immediately but I bet the Neanderthal probably spoke much later than a modern human did because again there's usually if you have development usually kind of takes off in one of those directions the other first very yet I know but this is the we're pretty darn similar so and now we know that they develop physically kind of similar but the brain usually goes off in one direction of the other first either you have a kid that walks early and does all that but might not talk to a little bit later than the other child who talked right away but was walking much later and I bet just because it was required environment in the society that they were all being born into over hundreds of thousands of years more talking no less talking more walking anyway yeah less talking more walking that's what it was new research out of Brandeis University researchers in the lab of John Lisman have been working on trying to find the holy grail of memory what you want to know what the holy grail of memory is yeah only the penitent man so fast so in the neuron you've got in your brain neurons that are responsible for your memories right and these memories last sometimes for your entire life you learn how to ride a bike right what's the whole the old adage never forget how to ride a bike right you're always going to know how to do this how do you always know how to do it because within the neurons that are responsible we haven't been able to find molecular structures that actually stick around in perpetuity because it's constant cell metabolism things are getting broken down they're there to help make a memory maybe but then a week later they're gone so what is it that actually maintains a memory throughout your life and this is a huge question in research and for years people have had battling hypotheses about what molecules it might be or what aspects of the neurons themselves might be responsible and there is a molecule that is in the synapses the places where neurons butt up against each other and communicate with each other sending their messages back and forth there is a molecule called calcium cow modulin dependent protein kinase or CAMK2 CAMK2 has been a target for years and years of question we find out exactly is it responsible for formation of memories and it turns out that this molecule is very present and responsible in part for this process called long-term potentiation that changes how neurons act and makes them stronger in certain situations and strengthens what's called the trace of the memory in your brain but these molecules get broken down and so they're like what is going on here they did an experiment in mice basically with this CAMK2 molecule and blocking the CAMK2 molecule to see what happened to memories and they did find that when CAMK2 was not available that memories went away they disappeared and so this is more evidence that this CAMK2 might be the molecule responsible for memory permanence but how does it happen what these researchers think happens is that the CAMK2 works as clusters of molecules and so since it's not a single molecule it's a cluster and the clusters then can talk other clusters into doing their job and so they can basically turn other clusters of CAMK2 molecules into themselves so they can go off and die and so there's a constant replacement of these CAMK2 molecules in the exact situation with the same responses over time so even though the molecule itself that was there for the memory formation disappears it pulls in another molecule and says you're going to act like us and then one of them goes off and then someone's like I gotta get out of here I think grab another CAMK2 molecule pull it in and another one runs off so it can be recycled so in the end the molecule is always the same but it's been recycled multiple times and it allows your memory to stay and so Lisman the researcher he says clusters of the CAMK2 could recruit replacement molecules without losing their overall function clusters then would be long lasting even if their component molecules were constantly changing the amazing thing about CAMK2 is that once you turn it on it stays on more or less forever which is pretty cool mechanism it makes sense to me but more research because we want to be sure because this could be if you want to get rid of memories eternal sunshine of the spotless mind kind of thing CAMK2 could potentially be the target what about the other way what about preventing memory loss so this is another interesting question because CAMK2 is implicated in many neurodegenerative disorders that do affect memory like Alzheimer's and so this is a target then for the other direction of memory maintenance yes cool yes so it's a very it's pretty cool I thought this was very interesting although I'm you know I'm brainy like that you know I just love how many elements of our everyday life we still have so little idea about we don't understand why we sleep we don't know how memories work where does memory go right we don't know why we hiccup which we've talked about on the show before and we don't know why we get pruney in the bath sometimes but not other times and that's because we also don't understand the secret life of fingers but I'm not done yet but okay go ahead fingers it is go ahead that was a transition that was a transition go with your bad fingers fingers if you are human there's a good chance you have them but do you know what they're doing when you are not looking I think so yeah I feel like I have a pretty good idea scientists with more curious minds than yourselves wanted to know what their fingers were doing when they weren't looking these are researchers from the University of Birmingham I've been a professor of research and development I've found that human fingertips behave differently when touching something depending on the type of surface that they touch in their paper signings with new management they conducted with volunteers and high speed cameras and here's what they found using our hands and fingers comes naturally We don't really have to think about them. Just utilize them to grasp, poke, swipe, focusing more on what we are trying to achieve rather than how it comes about. This is because our fingers do have some degree of autonomy. We just sort of don't have to be focused on it. They just kind of do it. We tell it to, I pick that up and then they go and grasp and they kind of do it without us having to think about where each individual finger will be placed as we do this action. Finger tips, they've found react automatically when we touch something as well. To learn more about how our fingertips work, researchers asked volunteers to touch and press different objects while the researchers filmed the action with the high speed camera. They discovered that our fingertips secrete a very small amount of sweat when we touch something hard and smooth like a pane of glass. The skin on our fingertips is rather hard in its natural state, but when we touch something like the screen of a smartphone, the nerves and the fingers sense that hardness and sweat is produced. That sweat is then absorbed into the skin, softening it slightly. This allows the hills of our fingerprints to yield to pressure, flattening a little, allowing more surface area contact. The whole process helps to handle hard surfaces in desirable ways, like holding onto a glass of water which would otherwise slip from our grasp. But the team also found that it does not happen instantaneously, it took up to 20 seconds for the skin to actually soften, depending on factors such as the hardness material and some of the differences between the individuals in the study. In contrast, researchers found that when a fingertip comes in contact with something like rubber, the flexibility of that surface conformed to the fingertips, reaching down to the valleys of the prints, thus no softening of the skin was required and no sweat was produced. So. That's cool. So fingertips kind of like Blair was alluding to in the bath when we're in water and we end up with the prune fingers. This is all part of the way that our fingertips just the nerves in them change the properties of our fingertips in response to the world around us for touching, for feeling, for better sensation. Maybe this is from when we lived in the caves. It was dark. Query then. If a person happened to have nerve damage in one of their hands, I wonder if this response would be collected. Probably. So the perni thing goes away. So I would expect these would probably go away too, yeah. So because I drop things a lot from my hand that has nerve damage. So that might be, I mean, part of it is that I'm just not grasping things tight enough. But maybe you don't know that you should be grasping it tight more tightly because you're not feeling it correctly. Right. It's not your grasp, it's your feeling. Yes. Interesting. No. Interesting stuff. It's also interesting that this is a process that these nerves are making decisions based on the surface that they're in contact with that we're not aware our body is making these decisions. We don't need to be aware of so many decisions that our body makes all the time. Right. Autonomic processes, unconscious processes. We don't need to know. Breathe in. Breathe out. So right. So we can just breathe without thinking about it. But then we can also focus on it and breathe. But, you know, there's certain systems that obviously we don't... Sweat. Sweat. Sweat from my fingers. Sweat. And actually, if anything, I'd want to train my fingers not to sweat. That way I could, like... Better for handshakes. Well, no, just in my smart phone it'd be less crazy. Right? Is that where that comes from? Was that... Maybe, probably, the oil on your fingers, but sweat is also... It's touching a glassy surface. Yeah, but the sweat is also antibacterial. So that might... Oh, there you go. Mm. Let me see your finger sweat. Finger sweat. Finger sweat. Well, I need a song. I need a song. Somebody had a neuron chip lately. Yum? Uh-huh. Yeah. No, it's not like apple chips or banana chips or it's not a nice and yummy, tasty snack. But it is something that could potentially lead to computer chips that act like neurons. Yeah, researchers are lurking. Not lurking, they're looking to create what's called a neuromorphic computing architecture to mimic how the brain works at its synaptic level. So there's always the analogy between how a computer works and the human brain works, which it doesn't really... It's not a good analogy because the human brain has a lot of parallel processing going on all the time, multiple ports with lots of differential activation and inactivation through synapses, the strengthening of hundreds of thousands of synapses in a neural network. And to be able to get to the point where we can actually maybe talk about computers and brains in a truly analogous way, we need to make the chips, the hardware more like a synapse. So researchers publishing this week in Science Advances, they report on their new architecture that uses purely optical means. They're using the optical domain via a photonic integrated circuit approach and this optical means will allow things to move at the speed of light with virtually unlimited bandwidth and no electrical interconnect power losses. And so their synapse, it uses phase change material that changes phase when it's activated by light, by photons, combined with integrated silicon nitride waveguides and they've been able to model certain aspects of the synapses themselves by setting synaptic weight, by varying the number of optical impulses that get sent down a waveguide. And this could potentially lead to an approach that might harken non-biological synapses and computers that act and learn much more like the human brain. Because we want that. No. Blair's fears. How? Hard pass. Although that would make it easier for me to upload my personality onto a chip and then live forever. So these are kind of battling concerns for me is my desire to live forever and my fear of robot domination is they're kind of at odds. They should be. And we should always have these combative relationships within ourselves and the conversations we have about the world. I don't understand why we would want to create an artificial intelligence that could think like us. Isn't that just asking for more of the same? But we don't always have to make them think like us. Sometimes we just want to have them use nunchucks like us. Yeah, researchers are testing a new method of training robots and learning like people using an intuitive learning model where the robot actually has a hand that can be controlled by a glove on a human hand, which is pretty cool. But it can also just be on a robotic arm. And it can learn from being trained by a demonstrator. And so they had a human demonstrator actually use the nunchucks in front of the robot and teach this robot arm with a hand on it how to use nunchucks. And so it's thought that if a robot can use nunchucks, it might be able to do other complex tasks. Yeah, it sounds like a great idea. Teach the robot's weapon skills for sure. And even though this is just one thing that they've done, it could be that the AI takeover is so quick that this is the only thing in the future robot overlords arsenal so that we will defeat all humans using nunchucks. It's all we had time to learn. Thank you for teaching us this. It's all we had time to learn. That was our chance. We now have weapons. Now we can fight back. We like it when the robots can fight back. Should I move on to, am I the only one with stories from here on out? Oh, Justin's got one. Justin's got one more. Oh, I got two more. Oh, two more. OK, let me do this one. Old life. Old life. Researchers have discovered, potentially, the oldest evidence of the oldest life on Earth. Yeah, so researchers looking at some rocks in the Labrador area of Canada. On the coast, there are some really old rocks, really far north in Canada along that eastern coast. There's some very, very old rocks. And there's a rock formation called the SAGLEC block. And some researchers from the University of Tokyo went there and have been looking at samples of the rock from the SAGLEC block. And they found evidence of graphite within the rock that has a carbon isotope balance that is indicative of processes that were once alive as opposed to inorganic. So carbon isotopes are very important for determining life processes. And there are certain processes that take place. And they use carbon-12 isotopes more readily. Carbon-12 likes to be turned into carbohydrates. And it likes to be turned into things that life uses. Another carbon isotope, carbon-13, not so much. But it ends up in a lot of rocks and stuff. And so to determine rocks that may have once harbored microbes, they look for isotope ratios that are more predominantly carbon-12. So they looked at these rocks, and that's what they found. And there's the question, OK, these are metamorphic rocks. They probably formed during a very melty period of the Earth's history and what was going on. So maybe they got other rocks from another place blended in and melted with them and looking at the crystalline structure of the rocks. They're pretty certain that this graphite is the graphite that they think from almost 4 billion years ago, 3.95 billion years ago. Now, the oldest little tiny chunk of graphite that's ever been found was in a piece of amber. And it's supposed to be 4.1 billion years old, but it was completely isolated from any other environmental evidence anywhere nearby. So they can't actually say that that one little piece of graphite that was 4.1 billion years old actually is life from 4.1 billion years ago. But this 3.95-ish billion-year-old graphite is potentially evidence of microbes going way back. Nice. Yeah. Thanks, Canada. I like old rocks from Canada. Yeah. What do you have there, Justin? Uromis vika, new species found the Solomon Islands. According to post-doctoral research of the Field Museum in Chicago, who is the lead author of a journal of the Memology Paper announcing this rat's discovery, he says, it's a big giant rat. This is big enough to maybe crack coconuts, I've heard. It's what it does. It could crack open a coconut. It lives in the trees. And eats coconuts. Inches long. It's a big rat. And it was not discovered. Well, it was discovered a while ago, but the locals already had a name for it. It wasn't discovered. I don't know, 18. 18, Kiki. Way out there. Keep going, keep going. It's 18 inches. It's more than a big giant rat. That's what the Memology expert says. It's a big giant rat. Something that's interesting about this story, too, is that the locals, I guess, had been telling people, researchers, about the giant rat for like 20 years and no one believed them. Yeah. Well, they're elusive, I guess. I mean, it's not that you necessarily don't believe. It's just you've got to find one to prove it, right? Climb some trees, people. Well, yeah, it's also a tree dwelling rat. So they're probably like, it's probably just like a possum or something, it's fine. Don't worry about it. But no, it's a giant rat. Yeah. They live in 30-foot tall trees and don't come down too often. So they actually discovered this one because a tree that had one fell. And that's how it got discovered. It was on the ground. Otherwise. Well done, researchers. Finally. Good hard work there, researchers. Good job. You really climbed those trees. Oh, you did it. And my other last news of the day, James Dyson, famous for creating a vacuum cleaner that didn't have a bag, a bagless vacuum cleaner inventor, who holds apparently more than 10,000 patents, his company at least, for all sorts of products, is claiming he's two years into an electric car that he's expecting to be launched in 2020. So we have another. Suction of some sort, I'm assuming. Well, they will also clean the roads as it drives. So there's a little backstory to this. I guess he had pitched to automotive industry and to government industries or government bodies a device that would help remove carbons emitting from tailpipes and didn't get any traction with it. So went away from that many, many years ago. So the idea of combating smog has been something that he has been focused on or had his mind wrapped around at times in the past. So in this case, he's decided to just make a car that doesn't pollute while it drives. Perfect. And you know, there's a couple of things in here that scare me a little bit for him. They're going to try. He says his company is going to develop, create, and produce and be in charge of every single component on this vehicle will be in-house, which that tariff. I mean, Tesla largely did that. But he's not just coupling with another automaker to do this. It's going to test the road. He created a battery company to do this. He's created. He's like making a whole system and ecosystem. And knowing a bit about the auto industry, the auto industry, nobody creates all the components. So I mean, every car, wherever it's made, a lot of the components are coming from far flung places and other, you know, there's the like, we saw this recently. There was an airbag recall that that same airbag recall affected many, many manufacturers because they all had the same source for that component. Right. And if you, right. And so you have a lot of that kind of stuff where like multiple manufacturers will use the same chassis, you know, they'll use the same platform for building. Or they're, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that seems a little daunting to try to start an entire car company from scratch with every component. But here's, here's one. I've seen Fisker do it. They went out of business and then came back again. Tesla hasn't gone out of business. They're doing OK. I think it's going to be too, by doing all those components themselves, it's going to be, this is going to be a very expensive car. It is going to be expensive. It's going to be like the Dyson vacuum cleaners that yeah, everybody buy because they're expensive. Yeah, they weren't that expensive. Yeah, compared to a high end vacuum cleaner, they were cheap. Oh, what? OK. But let me say, though, to your point, if you compare them to a Tristar or a Kirby, a real high end bagless or already bagless vacuum cleaners on the market, by the way. Just to sell vacuum cleaners. So he's not the person to argue this with for a high end vacuum cleaner. So little plastic thing that you bought off the shelf in a box that had a fan first and went, every time you went over a penny. Yeah, OK, there's a difference. But vacuum cleaners aren't designed based on how much carpet you have. It's about how effective they are about removing dirt from your carpet or floor. Anyway, that said, my favorite thing about this story is actually the comments that he makes with recently about this. I really, this is Quoty Voice. This is Quoty Voice for Dyson. I really embrace failure. You learn nothing by a success, but failure is exciting because something has gone wrong. And you've had a real visceral experience. So I like it. And you learn from it. What happens is OK. What happens is you work on a problem and you stumble across a solution. You can never calculate it or sit at a desk and work out a solution. You have to build a prototype and watch it fail and then overcome the failure. I think that's a fantastic way about doing things. Apparently before he came up with his vacuum cleaner, he had created 1,000 versions of it. I think he may have inflated that. But still, that's an inventor. Going out, building things, learning from things. I love it. I love it. Be an inventor, build things, try. And I hope he does try. We need more cars in the electric space. We need more competition. We need more good vehicles for people that are options. Hopefully he can make one that works well, that is cheaper that more people can afford. That's my hope. I'm not counting on it, though. Can I tell you something? Yeah. Can I say something real quick? I have to make an admission here of awareness of where we are in time and space. This vehicle is due to be launched in 2020. And in my head, oh, we'll have to wait a really long time to see that. My gosh, that's so far off into the future. And I'm like, all right. That's like two years. Two years from now. Oh my gosh, 2020, the future is tomorrow. Wow. The future is already here. The one thing I did want to say about the kind of very ambitious decision to try to do everything in-house is that the car was based on this combustion engine. And so one of the reasons I think that Tesla has been so successful is that they have decided to kind of remake how you think about your car in a lot of ways. They're trying to start from scratch for a lot of things because you can't get a car like we're used to without a combustion engine. It's not going to be the same. And so doing something, starting from scratch, making sure you're eliminating all unnecessary weight, changing your aerodynamics, changing all of these things from the bottom up is going to make it more achievable. And so even though, yes, it's an insane thing to try to do, we need inventors who are willing to try insane things to fix some of these very complex problems because us Americans are not giving up our cars. So we need to find something. We're getting an electric vehicle. Yeah, you need to find something to replace it. And on that note, too, the auto industry itself has electric cars and very nice cars and everything else. But none of them have near the range. So this upstart who is reinventing the car and starting from scratch and doomed to fail. Fix it. Actually has... Wait, what do you say? Finish your statement. Actually has a much... No, I'm not going to, forget it. Thank you. Moving on so we can finish the show before 10 o'clock PM. Last couple of stories, Pluto has big ice knives. Big knives of ice. They're hundreds of them fall in high altitude mountains. Highs of ice. Methane ice blades. And researchers from NASA's new horizon mission have been looking at this and going, oh, I wonder how those formed. Well, it turns out there's something of a climate on Pluto. And so there's changes that cause sublimation or melting where it's like evaporation of the methane ice that goes directly into the very thin atmosphere. And so this sublimation is causing spiky ice knives to form. It's a very inhospitable region. The high altitudes near the equator of Pluto. Moving on, Sabertooth, Tiber kittens might've been cute, but they would've got you. So stabby at the end of the show. Yes, I'm going to stab you and it's the end of the show. I've got to go Sabertooth kittens. These Smilodon kittens, they're big fangs, big fangs. Yes, researchers in PLOS this week report a study of postnatal limb bone allometry in felids from the Pleistocene of Rancho Lebrea. So basically they got bones from the Lebrea tar pits and compared how they grew and how these little kittens developed compared to cats that we know of today. And those little kittens, they weren't cute. Little kittens, they had big foot paws and they had big fangs and they were ready to grab prey. And so they might've been cute, like Jaguar kittens or tiger kittens, but you needed to fear them. Uh-huh. Fear the Sabertooth kitten, kitten. Yeah, all right. And that does it. We're done with our stories for the night. I'd like to say we're done with the show and everyone, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Thank you. I'd like to give shout outs to everyone in the chat room. You guys are fantastic. Thank you so much to Fada for helping us with our social media efforts, Identity Four for recording the show and Brandon for simulcasting us into the Facebooks from YouTube. Then I would like to say thank you to our Patreon sponsors of which we have so many and the numbers are growing and the names on the list are growing and I hope to have a new list for you very soon as of this next month. So thank you too, if this actually goes because sometimes it tells me it's not gonna happen. That's what's gonna happen right now, isn't it? Yep, nearer occurred because it hates me. There we go. Let's try that again. Here we go. Thank you to Paul Disney, G. Burton, Latimore, John Ratnaswamy, Richard Ono, Miss Byron Lee, E. O. 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This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. Science. I've got one disclaimer, and it shouldn't be news. That what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just better understand. But we're not trying to threaten your philosophy. We're just trying to save the world from jeopardy. This week in science is coming away. So everybody listen to everything we say. And if you use our methods, get a roll and a die. We may rid the world of toxoplasma. Got the eye. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. I've got a laundry list of items I want to address. From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought, and I'll try to answer any question you've got. But how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour a week? This week in science is coming away. You better just listen to what we say. And from the words that we've said, then please. This week in science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. The show's over now. Fast and stabby under the show is over now. Everybody, go to bed. Here, here. Tell your friends, show's over. Show's over, people. Don't have to go home, but you can stay. We're in the famous words of Tracy Ullman. Go home. Go home. And for a second, I thought you said Tracy Chapman, and I was like, I'm not familiar with that one. Tracy Ullman. I don't know, you might be too young to remember her. Oh, I know her. For sure. That's where the Simpsons started, from the Tracy Ullman show. It's true. That's where I first fell in love with Bart Simpson. Pam, I know it's 3 PM. That sounds like nap time right there, to me. I took a nap at 4.30 today. You did? Oh, my. It's been a long day. Yeah. Getting up early? Kind of. I just have a lot going on in a lot of work. It's a hectic week. I know how that goes. Sometimes in those hectic weeks, a nap is useful. Yeah, and I usually, Naps and I do not get along. But this week, today, necessary. Yeah, Pam, naps are for people without children. Well, no. If your child naps, you can nap with them. Right. Just might be over real suddenly. That was wonderful. I remember those wonderful hour and a half long nap times when they were three times a day. That was the best. And then when the babies are really little, it's like, they're right there with you all day long, all night long, but then you get like three during the day, three hour and a half long naps. They were, that was amazing. Oh, my God. When are they awake? What even are babies? Then, but then your baby falls asleep on you and you're like, oh, if I put the baby down, I can't, what if the baby wakes up and then everything's messed up? And so then you sit there with the baby on you and you can't even like, maybe you can't even reach your book. You can't reach the TV remote and you're just sitting there unable to clean the house until you just fall asleep. Yeah, exactly. Kids, when you nap, there's that question. Do I nap with them now? Cause I'm exhausted. Or is this when I do all the work? All the work, all the time, exactly. And then they stopped napping. Right. And she's helping you, Pam. I know. Let me help you. Oh, okay. That helping is gonna equal double the work for mom. That's what it's gonna equal. No, Twit Refugee. No, my child's the worst sleeper ever. Even now, he's probably not gonna stay asleep. He's asleep now, but he will not stay there. And then on cue, Kai walks in behind you. Hi, Mommy. Hi, Mommy. Can I be on the show? He really wants to be on the show. He doesn't understand why he can't be on the show. I have to keep having to explain to him that it's after his bedtime. Well, tell him to do some science news research. Do some research for me. He's so sweet though. He's like, but mommy, what if they want me to be on the show? Oh my goodness. He is playing a dangerous game. I know, he's like, but mommy, I know I already have fans. I know I have people who want me on the show with you. But Kai, let me explain what an executive producer is. He's starting to ask, it's kind of fun. I'm kind of, I really have to get, I have to get my studio downstairs set up. We have to get a space where we can really play at doing stuff because he really wants to do some video. The problem is he wants to do like Minecraft on this week in science. And I'm like, that's not this. So if you want to work with me, he's like, I want to work with you. How can I work with you? I'm like, you have to do science. So I have to talk him into that. Yeah. He's like, Minecraft is science. I know, right? That's what he has to convince me of. If he's gonna be a good host producer type, he has to know how to pitch, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, Kai is six now, Pam. Everybody wants more Kai. Okay, I'll go wake him up. I'll be right back. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, not. I know, you didn't even take your headphones off. I was like, she's not going. No, she's not going anywhere. Her headphones are still on her head. That's just, I know. Well, at some point, maybe I will get him a Twitch, his own Twitch gaming setup, right? We'll figure out. Oh, people will love Kai, it'll be great. You guys guess where I went? And by you guys, I mean Kiki, because Justin's not here. Where'd you go? I went to the Bigfoot Discovery Museum. Oh, that's awesome. So I have to, here, let me read you. Bigfoot exists. Some of the thing, well, I wouldn't go that far, but I will read you some of the things that they had at the Bigfoot Discovery Museum. I mean, maybe Bigfoot lives at the top of trees. He'd want to fall down with a Bigfoot in. It's like, oh, hey, look, we discovered Bigfoot. We were looking in the tops of the trees. We were never looking up, that was the problem. So they had nunchucks, speaking of nunchucks, they had toy nunchucks in a display. It says, Bigfoot Trade Object. This set of toy nunchucks was left under a deck in Boulder Creek about four years ago. The man was sitting in his hot tub at two o'clock a.m., when something banged up against it. The next morning, he found these neatly laid out under the tub. I told him that if he left some food in exchange, the Bigfoot might come back on a regular basis. He took my advice, leaving graham crackers, and soon he had two of them coming by almost nightly. To stop them from coming, he turned on exterior spotlights around the house at night. So Bigfoot's a real, that's what we learned. Could have been raccoons. No, could have been possums. No, definitely not. Could have been 18 inch long rats. Nah, man, no way. That was the, I don't know, the chubacabra. The graham cracker eating chubacabras? Well, it was really interesting. I was waiting to buy my, oh, these were great. I was waiting to buy my souvenirs. I love you and your souvenirs. And I'll show them to you in a second, but the man whose Bigfoot Discovery Museum it was was checking out this other guy. And they started having this really intense conversation about their experiences with Bigfoot. And I guess the lore is, which makes sense to a certain degree, that it's a species, it's not one individual. Like I always thought it was one guy, it was this one Bigfoot that exists. But no, it's an entire species hiding in the forest. So there's like female Bigfoots. Oh yeah, there's a family of Bigfoots. Yeah, absolutely. And the guy whose Bigfoot Discovery Museum it was, he took out a tooth. And he started talking about this tooth and how it's so similar to this ancient large human ancestor tooth. But that it was a new tooth that he found out in the woods. And anyway, so I bought these three cards. And a tooth. I did not buy a tooth, but I bought this. Aw, thanks Bigfoot. I bought this, this is my favorite one. And then this one. Your Bigfoot and climate change. Oh my goodness. I was like, I have to buy these now. Cause it's true if Bigfoot was real, he would care about global warming. It's true. You know what he'd also care about? Logging and deforestation. Well, there is that too. And if he were round, he'd be like, don't mess up my forests, you know. I mean, but hey, maybe you're out there cause there was an 18 inch rat we didn't know about. But it was so weird to- That's a rat versus Bigfoot. Cause there were different, there were different like representations of Bigfoot at this thing. And some of them were like seven feet tall. And some of them were like 15 feet tall. They had a Bigfoot diorama. And yes, these things were probably 15 feet tall. So not sure what that's about. Like they need to figure out how big they actually think he is. Cause that's a pretty big range in size. Yeah, it's a huge range in size. I mean, well, a child Bigfoot is obviously not going to be as large as a grown Bigfoot. So seven feet for a child, fully grown 15. Where on earth would a pregnant Bigfoot hide? Great question. Or a dead, like how come we've never found a dead one? Dead Bigfoot, right? That's the thing is like, sure fine, they're hiding real well, but when one dies or gets lost in dies or gets sick and dies, like you'd find something. I think so. But it's fascinating that all these people really, truly believe. Do they? Do they? But do they? Yes. Just like so many people really truly believe that there is a flat earth. Yeah. Do they? But do they? Do they? Okay. Unfortunately, yeah. No, it, yeah. I don't know if they do. I'm hesitant to believe people's beliefs. People believe the things that they say they believe. I'm very hesitant to believe that. Well, the owner of the Bigfoot Discovery Museum was having a very nice conversation when he was talking about the teeth. Later it started, they were talking about how people villainize the Bigfoot and they say that Bigfoot is hurting people and that they're, you know, people are going missing because of the Bigfoot. And he goes, listen, they're just like us. I mean, there's good upstanding citizens and then there's crazy people who hurt people. Bigfoot are just like that. There's bound to be some bad eggs out there that are gonna hurt some people. So yeah, but this guy also runs a Bigfoot store. Like, there's a point where you cannot have a change of heart. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, he's had that store, I think he's had for 13 years. Yeah. And he lives in it. Well, he lives above the store. Yeah. Right. So his life is Bigfoot now. Hugh Hefner died. Oh, it was just announced while we were doing the show. Oh. He's 91. He was 91. Oh my goodness. Hugh Hefner, he's an icon. Seriously, if you think about the 80s, he was an icon in the 70s, 80s, yes. I don't know, the Playboy era. He certainly knew how to live life. Who's the... Good job. Who's... His son for a while now and has reintroduced Newdy Pictures, which had gone away, became article only. Oddly, subscriptions started to dry up. And his centic over and sick are going to put naked ladies back in Playboy. Yeah, but unless they do an online subscription, I don't know, print media. Make an app. An app. I'm tired of apps. Oh, see, Louie in the chatroom knows what's up. Bigfoot keeps falling off of the flat earth. That's why we can't find them. Follow the edge. For sure. For sure. Strength, I like that. First time I heard chupacabra, I thought the person Minst pronounced Chewbacca. That's how you say Chewbacca if you've got some big league chewing gum in your mouth at the same time. Chewbacabra. Yes. I have a phone call about the entomology conference that we're going to be at in Denver, the beginning of November. The Denverites out there will be there. I'm very excited. And we could meet up either Sunday evening or Monday evening, probably the, what is it, the fourth and fifth of November? Uh, those fifth and sixth. Well, it could be fifth and sixth. Yeah, I think so. I figure out how to use a calendar. Because I took the seventh off of work. Fifth and sixth. Here we go. Yes. Sunday the fifth. Monday the sixth. Denverites. Anyone out there? I'm very excited because I, of course, I love, I have a passionate love of linguistics and being in an entire convention full of people who study the roots of where words come from. I'll let you take that one, Kiki. Nope. No. I'm going to be, I'm going to be able to ask like anybody there, like, okay, where does this word come from? How did we end up with two words for this? And they'll be able to tell me the entomology. No. Entomology. What? Not entomology. Entomology. Entomology. What are you saying? You're saying the same word over and over again. Not this. Entomology is the Greek. I'm reading it right now from Wikipedia. I'm getting the entomology. Entomon, insect and logea, the study of, the study of insects. Entomology, however. No n. Entomology. E-T-Y versus E-N-T-O. Entomology. So, so is it possible that every time I've looked up a word to find out its origin and that referred to a page with a bunch of pictures of insects, it was, so not all of our language comes from describing insects then. No. Oh, no, no, no. Insects are the first ones to come up with the alphabets. Totally. It was written on the backs of scarab bigopheles. Every time I'd be like, what's the entomology of? And then I would get like some insects study. And then I'm like, wow, we derived our entire language based on insects and on studying insects. That's very true. Then my totally understand, my total understanding of linguistics that I'm very passionate about has been for not. Let me just say. I am hoping that I can find. What? Oh, no. It's gone. Remember those like macro images of the jumping spiders that I love? Yeah. Yeah, the website's down. But I'm hoping there's some really adorable close-ups of jumping spiders that I can buy. That would be cool. There might be. Do you think that anyone will want to see my impression of a peacock spider dance there? At the entomology conference. The entomology conference. They might. Probably. Maybe we can get people up on stage to do a peacock spider conga line. You know what I say to that? Yeah. You say it so loudly. So loudly. Oh, oh, oh, story that I wanted to talk about that we didn't get that. Did you hear the story about the little tiny orange frogs who can't hear themselves? Yes. What? Yes. Did they make themselves deaf over generations of being loud? Basically. They're tiny and they have underdeveloped ears and they can't hear themselves. They can't even, they can't hear themselves and they can't hear others. So if it's a female listening for a male, they can't hear them either. So the males are calling on deaf ears. Right. So they signal in new ways, right? Don't they do visual signals now? So this is the hypothesis that's put forward by the researchers. But what I was wondering, I know the frogs don't have hairs and they're not on webs, but they are maybe on leaf litter on other vibrational surfaces. And is it possible? I didn't see in the study or what we were looking at. I didn't see that there was no behavioral response to the song. Oh, interesting. I like where you're going. I want them to look at things in the way that they've been looking at the spiders. Because spiders hear without ears. Yes. You're so right. And you know, that's the thing too, is that like water, sound waves can create ripples in water. Yeah. So water as well that could be transferred. It's very interesting. I like the way you're thinking. I need to talk to them about what their next research studies should be. Yeah. I think that's a segment that we can have on the show. Not every week, but pretty often would be, let me tell you what your next experiment would should be. We know what you need to do next. We've figured this out. What's next with Kiki? What's next with Dr. Kiki? What's next? What's next? Good night, Fata. What is next? Behavioral response to the calls? That's what's next. Yeah. I mean, they've hypothesized that it's visual. And it could be, I mean, they're bright orange, but I mean, that's really, they really have to be super close to each other. Right. And how do you tell all of the bright orange ones apart? Right? So like, there's that. And then also it'd be very easy to turn out the lights or to put a visual divide between them and see if they still respond. Yeah. Mm-hmm. I mean, I'm sure these frogs are probably calling at night in the dark. Yeah. And they don't know what frogs do. That is generally what they do. So this whole visual idea, I'm like, oh, you guys are neuroscientists and not behavioral biologists, are you? Yeah. Oh, come on. So there is a... Because also they're, yeah, they're all orange. That's how it is. You're focusing on the other things. So one of the things is, one of the loudest creatures on the planet is a frog perp by weight anyway. It produces this super, super high decibel sound that should make it deaf. But its lungs are connected to its ears in such a way as when it makes the sound, it sends an opposite pulse against the eardrum so it doesn't rupture itself. Right? So even though it's super loud and should deafen itself, it doesn't because of this quirk of how it developed or this evolutionary overcoming of the thing. So what if this frog just didn't? This frog just figured out how to get louder and louder and then at one point was destroying eardrums. So then why put energy into really producing good ears if you're just going to knock them out? Yeah, but the females, but somebody has to respond to the song. Yeah. Why would you put energy into producing song? And they're saying that this is just, we're seeing them at a stage of evolution where the song doesn't really matter anymore. And like that's the other hypothesis they have is beyond the visual signals that they've evolved to a point where the song doesn't matter anymore but we're in the midst of, we're catching them in the middle of this evolutionary process. They haven't gotten to their next point yet. I don't know. That they don't use song to communicate during the mating season? 100 years. They won't even be talking. Yeah, exactly. They won't be going... Their ears will start to the back. That's more of a squirrel sound though, huh? That's what a squirrel sounds like. It's more like... That's a pretty good squirrel. Have you heard an angry squirrel though? Like there's sometimes, around here there's little squirrels and they're like... Yeah, I hate it. You've got to tell me. I friggin' hate it. You love... That's what I think, Ed. Vibrations, but not picked up by the ear by something else. And maybe it's in a, just, you know, like again, somebody looked at this so I'm sure they checked. But maybe it's a frequency range thing. No, their ears are not developed. And they checked how the ears are... The ears are not able to respond to the frequency range that they're calling in. Not ears. But if you have a low enough frequency, that's where you're going to feel that way. You're not going to feel it with the high pitched frequencies aren't going to get that vibration from afar. It depends. I mean, not from afar, you're right. But the problems are not that far away from each other. Yeah. So that's... Seat away from each other. So that's really the question. Is if they have another way of sensing the sound... I'd be looking for low end frequency that's traveling maybe through the trillum, through the pond, through the ground. So the first step is to see if they are responding to the sound period behaviorally. Absolutely. And after that, you can look at how it's being transferred and what element of it they're responding to and all these other things. But if they're not actually responding to the sound at all, then yeah, it's probably a vestigial trait that evolution will clean up at some point. But we can't know that for sure until we do a behavioral study on them. So that's where behavior and physiology have to work together. Work together. All right. My head's about to explode. Don't have that happen. No exploding heads. Terrible headache. Yeah. Sorry. Go drink some water. I'm going to go drink some water. I've been drinking water. I'm going to drink some more water. It's going to be great. Maybe I'll drink some actual vodka. That'll be great too. I'm just going to go to sleep. I'm going to read a book. Good night, kids. Good night. I'm the normal of the Expants series, Calibans War. Yes. Yes. It's very good. Good night, player. Good night, player. Good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Say good night, Kiki. Good night, Kiki. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us on This Week in Science. Once again, join us again next week. We will be back. We do this. We come back. We do it. More peacock spider dancing from Blair. layer probably. More science for sure.