 talking about this after the show we're talking about things because there's an after show did you know that there's an after after show also where the host can talk about things yeah but anyway this is this week in science and we have made it in the nick of time to do our live broadcast of the twist podcast with all of the hosts for the first time in a couple of weeks which is very exciting I think we're all very happy to have Blair back I'm happy to have me back to yay yes Daniel yant we want science and Paul Disney we want it peer reviewed and so that's what we're going to be talking about on the episode tonight we've got lots of stories peer reviewed and otherwise the show is about to begin are you ready to start ish Justin do you have a disclaimer yeah okay so we can start this show which is the live broadcast and not the actual end podcast the end podcast is its own little edited version of this live thing that yeah and it's not called the end podcast that's a different podcast wherever you look for it there we are this is not the end this is the beginning starting in a nice little let's see if I can pull my there we go starting in a three two this is twist this week in science episode episode episode episode episode episode episode yep it's right there that's this type of show today starting again in three two this is twist this week in science episode number 831 recorded on June 30th 2021 how hot can it get hey everyone I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show we will fill your heads with heat heads and hope but first disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer everything and I do mean everything is more complicated than you think it is it's comfortable to know things to put them in boxes of identifiable categories and say this is this that is that and they pretty much works the more we simplify and the more confident we are at it so it's kind of hard to say that there's anything wrong with this strategy because it works for pretty much everything that we know but let's me forget here's a quick reminder all the things we put into boxes are not actually in those boxes reality is complicated and every slice of the complicated is itself complex and within the complex slice of complicated there are nuances from which new complications can arise and even when we get to the point where we are truly understanding an aspect of a nuance from a complex slice of the complicated we remember that it's all connected in ways we barely comprehend and this realization should serve as a reminder that whenever you hear a very simple answer to any question chances are it is either mostly incorrect or another episode of this week in science coming up next I've got the kind of mind I can't get enough I want to the one place to go to science to you Kiki oh and Blair's back hello we missed you Blair I missed you I'm so happy to be back so excited that you are back again Blair welcome back I have to take the animal corner back from Justin so you better and we have a good episode with Blair's animal corner right where it should be in the corner coming up I have episode I don't know why I keep saying episode today this is the word I say we have lots of great stories I have stories about brains because I love the brains coming up at the end of the show I've got some hope for malaria maybe and also a little bit of neutron star eating oh and it's hot I heard you bring Justin in the Pacific Northwest it's been yes it's better but it's been Justin what do you have I've got not one but two ancient archaic human evolutionary findings stories this week glow-in-the-dark mRNA and guess who loves global warming it's not me it's gonna be snakes it's about snakes like Blair what's in the animal corner oh I have a story about snakes too but this is about spiders that eat snakes I also have wait wait wait I'm sorry I'm sorry I have to correct you you misspoke yeah your your story is about snakes that like to eat spiders but you unfortunately no although I have a story about mantids that that take a doom filled dip and I also have hot birds hot birds let's tweet about it okay anyway it is time for the show but before we get started I do want to let you all know that if you have not yet subscribed to this weekend science you can do that all places that podcasts are found look for this week in science twists you can also find us on Facebook YouTube Twitch Instagram Twitter where we are twist science in some places so search for twist science if you don't find us under this weekend science and our website is twist.org all right let's dig in to the heat to the hotness it's getting hot in here how hot is it it's so hot man it's it's been breaking records right and left and if anybody out there has been keeping track of what has been going on it is a once in a millennial millennium event not a millennial once in a millennial that's like that that's gotta be a movie once in a millennium event and as we've talked about so many of these hurricanes her occurring in other places around the world heatwaves and droughts are also extreme weather events that occur more often thanks to climate change and so we've got record temperatures we've got fires we've got permafrost melt hey Siberia what's going on there and these are just a few of the predictions that are coming true sooner than expected because of our warming climate and the big question is will this once in a millennia event in the Pacific Northwest and actually across the entire West will it happen more often will heat domes that cause temperatures ground temperatures like the one reached in Washington State of 145 degrees Fahrenheit to be reached more often normally the temperature is what's called a dry bulb temperature you have a thermometer that is a few feet four or five feet above the ground it's testing the air temperature it's not touching the ground it's not going to take be influenced by concrete or the ground temperature itself emanating the heat so they've got it high enough up that hopefully it's just a measure of air temperature we hit temperatures in Portland Oregon of 116 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures were reached the hottest temperature in the Pacific Northwest was reached at about I think was 123 degrees Fahrenheit that is British Columbia that is Death Valley desert hot temperatures yes these are not supposed to ever get those there no and the infrastructure is not built to deal with these temperatures so we also had roads and yeah there are stories of you know Siberian permafrost melting and how that's going to impact buildings in Siberia in Russia how it will affect the railroads how it will affect the the roadways but we often here in America think of that's a far off Siberian tundra that's not here it's not an American problems it's a Canadian problem well no it's also an American problem I'll tell you what else is an American problem is wildfires specifically on the west coast here and with the extremely dry winter that we had and now with these temperatures oh and it's a holiday this weekend where people like to set things on fire I have concerns so thank you all thank you to our friends that we have concerns but yes we have concerns that we have brought up on the show a few times is the fact that there is a difference between weather and climate and that the sense people somewhere else but Catherine Heyho at Kehoe Heyho has a piece out that she's got on the Twitter climate versus weather I think it's also on YouTube NPR but it's a it gives a very nice sort of update to the concept of weather versus climate because it's used it's used on both you know whether you're believing in science or you're denying science people point to whether to deny climate change and then people who believe in climate change will attribute everything to it even when it's just weather but the sort of interesting thing that gets pointed out is that record breaking temperature is actually kind of a normal thing it happens across our country every year it's the coldest day it's the hottest day it'll happen what's different and is available in that data is the number of hot days that are records increasing while the number of cold days they're showing up still in smaller numbers but they're showing up in new places where they weren't having is so it is again complicated yeah it's complicated and the one of the issues that we that came up here is that yeah okay it was a hot day 116 degrees but it cools off at night right you'll cool down at night that didn't happen temperatures were above 70 degrees all night long which that's the normal that's high 70 degrees is higher than the average temperature for June in Portland Oregon so so what we're experiencing is the kind of weather that is made possible because of a change in threshold due to climate change but we have this change in weather that results in higher daytime temperatures and also higher nighttime temperatures and life has a hard time rebounding when those temperatures don't drop at night so lots of things to talk about here and to consider but I just yeah Blair you brought up the big point at this weekend in the United States is a big weekend for fireworks and explosives and incendiary devices and if you are doing that are we no please refrain leave it to the professionals watch it don't set off neighborhood fireworks just don't you don't want to be the reason that all of California or Oregon or Washington goes up in a giant because everything's so dry and hot yep don't be the next cause of an Eagle Creek fire all right but anyway have everyone stay well stay cool let's try and avoid having other places around the world become like Jacobabad Pakistan where the temperatures reach above 50 degrees Celsius on a regular basis in the summertime with humidity and get higher than is possible for the human body to survive we don't want that to happen anywhere else we don't even want it to happen there so climate change is a big part of it and we need to start making our moves with organizations that can help make changes talk to your legislators this is a science and policy issue regulations and corporate incentives can help make a huge difference in what happens down the road yeah well and what one other thing I want to mention is that you just said the the roads are buckling because of heat so here's the proof the written out very obvious proof that climate change consideration is infrastructure and so when we talk about infrastructure funding through the government and you want to separate it out from this divisive thing called climate change we don't want to talk about it this is part of infrastructure it has to be part of the conversation it has around the country dealing with aging infrastructure that was potentially not it was not created at 60 70 80 years ago was possibly built not with these extreme weather events in mind so there's a lot that needs to be great point Blair all right Justin we're using our big brains to tell everybody about you know what's happening here but did you find a brain or a skull a cranium so I didn't find it but there has been a new human skull found in China it's a new human it's got its own species and everything but it might not be a new species but it might be as the story goes so far skull is discovered back in the 1930s in Harbin City in China at the time the man who found it thought it might be special but decided to wrap it up and toss it into a well because that's what you do also they were under Japanese occupation and thought that turning it over would disappear it from from from anybody's ability to appreciate this thing so on this gentleman's deathbed as the story goes I'm just I'm just gonna hide it from everyone just I found this thing and I'm hiding it to me fell down about it for like a couple generations on the deathbed going on I'm sure on the deathbed tells the grandchildren oh by the way the well we've been drinking out of all these years yeah I might have thrown a skull in it some 80 90 years ago so anyway 2018 children find this grandchildren find this they turn it over to paleo anthropologist and it turns out it is the largest ever Homo skull ever found it's also one of the most complete skulls in the record and as big as that is it's even going to be a probably a little bit bigger of a controversy I guess it's I'm sort of hedging whether it's like going to be a controversy or it's just science going to do its due diligence but Chinese scientists are saying the skull represents a newly discovered human species named Homo Longhi or Dragon Man which I appreciate the Dragon Man is the cooler name so I'm already voting to to go with that no matter what but is it new or is it the first skull of a Denisovan ever found that's what the conversation is going to be about going forward previously discovered hominin known just by the finger bone and a partial mandible I think there's a little bit of a skull cap out there too but lots of genetic information we got DNA from the toe I think we got it from the jaw as well and we have tracked Denisovans through peoples of Southeast Asia who have Denisovan ancestry so there's also something called Homo deliensis that's in the region which is another ancient human so it's another thread to be pulling on there two things to keep in mind one the controversy is totally meaningless doesn't matter what the thing is called at this point right now it does not matter what we need to just do is study the thing too it's really cool so some of the findings of the skull is that it looks it's definitely not human but it has features that are much more current modern human than maybe we would have expected if it is a Denisovan says researcher Kwangji professor paleontology have a geo university this fossil preserved many morphological details that are critical for understanding the ablution of homo of the homogenous and the origin of Homo sapiens which again origin of Homo sapiens it's being almost looked at as like an ancestor there's some claims that it's more of an ancestor to modern humans than Neanderthal all of this is morphology there is no DNA extracted at this point it's possibly there but they haven't done it so and even if it if it shows up and it is a Denisovan it's not going to be a human ancestor there is ancestry for modern humans that have some of this so it is some of our ancestry as Neanderthal is but you know it's the braided stream all all the way throughout all of this this conversation so this this head is big though you're saying it's a big head it's a big head which kind of they're saying matches up with that big jaw bone or mandible that they found in Tibet because how tall are Denisovans they're shorter than us right well we don't know maybe maybe not yeah that's the thing with this big skull the biggest Homo skull ever found there is some desire to call it taller or bigger right more robust they could also just have big heads yes exactly so so Neanderthal has a little bit larger cranium than a current modern human but they weren't thought to be exceptionally tall they are thought to be sort of stocky and are not thought to be but then we found skeletons we have we put the pieces together we can tell they're not giants so there's you know there's a lot of this is some more quotey here like Homo sapiens they hunted mammals and birds and gathered fruits and vegetables and perhaps even caught fish I don't know I mean you can learn a lot from a skull I don't know that there's a lot of stuff here that has me scratching my head about how the conclusions have been bridged from skull to everything else that's in this although although actually I have to take that back one of the one of the no I don't have to take it back actually I'm gonna keep it there I'll keep it right there because there isn't any other information on this one about other tools or any artifacts that are associated with this because they don't have the site remember this was found and the location is being told where it's found is part of how they've also traced it to being about 148,000 years old at least maybe older because of the sediments that the the person who found it said he was digging out I think to make a bridge or something like this he was it was a construction site so they went and tested soil there but this is we are 90 ish years 80 90 years away from the discovery that wasn't really well documented we have word of mouth stuff so there's a lot of like this is a great terrific amazing find and there's all this missing data that doesn't allow us to do what we would normally do if we had a find of this caliber so more more to come up but it does remind me at the early at the this year I teased out a statement about by a bunch of people in the field who are saying there's big stuff coming in Asia that's gonna change everything and this may be what was being hinted about is this is this fine yeah I mean what it comes back to those you know if you come across something like this don't hide it and think about whether you should turn it over if you want to help the scientific community then this kind of a find you have to be able to you stop you alert people you let them you let them assess the site I mean probably what happened is this goal was taken everything else was excavated for the bridge or whatever and a lot of other evidence was lost however I will say so part of this was this is in 1930s and it was very exciting time for for this is when I think this is like to tilt down man but it's also Neanderthal discoveries were first emerging like it was kind of global news that there was this exciting past that was being found and and it's just it's possible that by not turning over this skull that could have been a trophy or could have been destroyed or who knows what fate it had just by accident I think it turned out okay mm-hmm what I want to know is in the 1930s what kind of wrappings existed that maintained this thing at the bottom of a well for 90 years I don't think Timmy's in the well I don't know I just want to make really bad taste poor taste jokes about things in wells but anyway let's move away from this amazing find that may have big implications we might have a piece of in skull yeah big maybe that's why they should start there ziploc bags 1968 by the way it wasn't like it was probably wrapped in cloth but I'm guessing oil skin oil skin I'm guessing that it because it didn't have access to oxygen if it's submerged maybe they just threw it in the well well why I'll put it in a bucket through it in the well I want to know what else is down there I bet they're a bunch of spiders down there oh maybe some snakes yeah yeah absolutely you know what's wild spiders eat snakes did you know this whoa yeah so spiders eat snakes now this is something that apparently the science you community knew nobody told me but yeah so spiders eat snakes and first you're thinking like big big spiders tiny tiny snakes right no so this was specifically looking at what spiders eat snakes what snakes they're eating what their relative body sizes are and where they live because this was a consolidated analyze study of snake eating spiders around the world around the world this was yes can I guess is what are you guessing really big spiders really small small snakes no no I just I just said that's not what it was it's not no so so this is over 300 reports all over the world they eat snakes spiders on every continent except for Antarctica because there's no spiders in Antarctica or so it tracks but 80% of incidents were either in the US or Australia Australia you got it you got it of course where all the terror animals are in Europe hey I can't wait to go to Australia one day I'm obsessed with Australian animals overall but they have a lot of deadly things so I'm not surprised but in Europe less than 1% of the reported incidents occurred so there's not a lot going on in Europe with spider eating snakes and mostly it is some of those teeny tiny non-venomous snakes in the blind snake family they look like giant worms kind of they're the ones being eaten by spiders but in Americas and Australia they spiders there are spiders from 11 different families catching and eating snakes this is not an unusual thing that happens so it's a it's a pretty diverse kind of phylogeny of these spiders all over the world and what they found was that overall the spiders using the bigger snakes had no surprise stronger venom but specifically it appeared venom that was good for us so stuff that could incapacitate or kill humans also helpful against snakes yeah so the photo the photo that we got up right now that makes a lot of sense black widow uh-huh taking out a scarlet snake I've always had respect for black widows growing up in the Valley of California everywhere they're in every garage they're a bit terrified of them yeah now even more so spiders these spiders like I said they were from they were 11 different families they and they can out fight snakes from seven different families so this is a pretty diverse response and those snakes can be 10 to 30 times their size imagine taking something down and eating part of something 30 times your size that would be one big pizza if we're doing some rounding I can do this in my head right now so let's see a 200 pound human right times three is 600 so we're talking about a 6,000 pound animal so we're talking like a rhinoceros like imagine hunting and eating part of a rhinoceros with like no tools pretty well but I'm just gonna bite ya yeah anyway the largest snakes cut by spiders were one meter in length that's approximately three feet that's a pretty pretty standard size snake and on average they were about 26 centimeters so you can think about that is as about 10 inches most of the snakes caught were very young so that was the thing is they were young they were fresh freshly hatched snakes they were perhaps foolhardy not as good at getting away and the the venom from these spiders often were key the the black widows brown widows and the redbacks in Australia were all really good at doing this because they have that extremely strong neurotoxin but also because they have very strong webs and so there is some overlap here with the spiders that are dangerous to humans and the spiders that attack snakes and so we think that that has something to do with the fact that the neurotoxins on vertebrates can be kind of catch all there's there's definitely a lot of overlap on what works on a snake and what works on a human because we have spinal cords and very similar nerve systems right yeah and so we do have yeah we come from you know we come from similar a similar place we're all just fish so so when you boil down when you look far back we're not that far back from each other okay so so that one thing I there's a couple of things that I have too many things snakes I know eat insects right so snakes would typically be something that might hunt a spider yeah I'm not a lot okay but yeah but is this is this a defense mechanism or is this a hunting strategy no no they're eating yeah they're they're chowing down on them this is not like ah you got too close so I bite you so I don't get disturbed no no this is a really good question so they'll catch a snake and they will sit there and eat for hours two days that being said when they they abandon it while there's still some left ants was flies molds come and take the rest but they do eat for hours to days it's a community meal it's a community food bank and these guys like snakes also interesting correlation between the two they're very like boom and bust with their feeding strategy so spiders can eat a lot and then not eat for a very long time so can snakes very interesting so they obviously a lot more research is needed to find out what components of their venoms target vertebrate nervous systems but they actually think this this initial study could help learn about those neurotoxins and help us with anti-venoms for spider bites for humans and just understanding more about vertebrate nervous systems in general because we also use venom sometimes to develop medicine right so all of that together means that this information kind of cataloging what spiders eat what snakes could help without a lot because about 30 percent of the snakes that they attack are also venomous so that they can eat venomous snakes as well which is just my venom's better than your venom so it for example back to australia brown snakes in the same family as cobra's considered one of the most venomous snakes in the world get eaten by redbacks which are australian black widows so okay so so my new plan then for the perimeter fence of science island is to have it also be a black widow sanctuary i don't know about that i feel like that might i think that would i would choose i would choose spider over snake oh it's a venomous spider over a venomous snake oh i would not any day i would definitely not you can you can plop a snake in a cooler you can pick it up with a big stick you're pretty good you can i'm not getting anywhere near it spider don't even worry about it okay i got traumatized by one way i've been traumatized by a rattlesnake thinking of things that like to eat other things what about black holes not black widows but even bigger objects yeah black holes they're just like i'm numb i want to eat everything and we've talked previously about discoveries made by lago and vergo our gravitational wave detectors that have detected black holes merging with one another also detected neutron stars merging with one another also detected different sizes of black holes and so there's all sorts of these new ideas like there's a bunch of variety out there of things merging with other things the one hypothetical situation that they had not yet discovered was a black hole eating a neutron star but now they have found it they have discovered yes ripples in the gravitational waves that have jostled our planet gently in spacetime using lago and vergo together they were able to detect two instances of black holes devouring neutron stars now when we've previously seen a neutron star merger there was all uh there were detectors that detected the light that was emitted at the time of these stars twirling together and so there was a gamma ray burst that could give all sorts of information out at the same time but you know for these we weren't lucky enough yet that we know of to have captured any of the light frequencies uh that would be indicative of what actually happened so just dealing with gravitational wave analysis at this point in time but these two things they have uh two signals the stronger signal triggered three all three legover go detectors on the 15th of january 2020 and it was a black hole that they estimate to be about the size mass mass of six suns oh it's a little baby one not too big it ate a neutron star that was only about a star and a half a sun and a half in mass this is a little baby interaction yeah baby yeah and then ten days prior to that they found that they had seen other evidence of a nine solar mass black hole merging with a neutron star of 1.9 solar masses these happened one billion light years ago one million light years one billion light years away so these distant ancient events does that mean that the black hole is now the that many solar masses larger bigger yeah so that's the question what if it has the mass of the neutron star is it just additive i don't know the math that i think it just is i think it should be the nice thing about gravity is that you just add mass and that and there you go yeah it seems that that's how it should work yeah anyway the researchers are now they're questioning whether or not black hole mergers whether it's a black hole with a black hole or black hole with a neutron star whether or not they always give off some kind of light emission whether there's always some gamma ray burst or something and they've determined that black holes often rotate a lot more slowly than they expected them to and like it's the rotation of the black hole that determines how how quickly a neutron star gets devoured and how close it can get to the black hole before it gets devoured because if it's rotating really really really fast it's just going to start ripping stuff together pretty quickly so anyway they've discovered that according to their merger gravitational wave data there are some very fast spinning black holes out there but there are others that and the majority of them they found so far which is not many yet to really base a universal standard on but it seems as though a lot of them spin fairly slowly much more slowly than originally anticipated so now researchers are looking to hopefully find light from a black hole neutron star merger they haven't done yet of okay do you have another human so as if one ancient human ancestor okay human story wasn't enough analysis of recently discovered fossils found in israel suggests the interactions between different human species were even more complex than previously believed unless you are a longtime listener to this show in which case you know it's pretty darn complex all right it's you kind of used to it at this point they are suggesting that at least some of the neanderthals ancestors came from the levant research team led by televieve university published their findings in science are describing recently discovered fossils from a site called neshur ramla in israel this site dates to around 120 to 140 thousand years ago fossils found by dr. Zeidner of the Hebrew university during excavations of neshur ramla they were digging down eight meters so they were way down deep and they found large quantities of animal bones horses deer cows stone tools and lots of human bones human fossils consist of a partial cranial vault and a mandible researchers made some virtual reconstructions of the fossils to compare those with other fossils from europe africa asia the results suggest that the neshur ramla fossils represent late surviving populations of humans who lived in the middle east during the middle pleostine period uh this is quoting rolf kwam who's a bingham binghamton university anthropology professor is also part of this the oldest fossils that show neanderthal features are found in western europe so researchers generally believe neanderthals originated there however migrations of different species from the middle east into europe may have provided genetic contributions to neanderthal gene pools during the course of their evolution other fossils from this approximate time period are difficult to classify taxonomically because they seem to be mixes of neanderthal and modern human this is one of the regions where we know humans in neanderthals intermingled but these fossils seem more neanderthal like in the mandibles and less neanderthal like in the cranial vault but both clearly distinct from modern humans which is sort of again a pattern that's sort of been matching both neanderthals and humans where the diagnostic skeletal features of each species appear first in the facial region and then later on in the cranial vault so we we change our face before our our our brain sack describing the significance of the find dr herskiewicz said it enables us to make a new sense of previously found uh make new sense of previously found human fossils add another piece to the puzzle of human evolution and understand the migrations of humans in the old world even though they lived so long ago the researchers did not attribute the find at nescherama fossils two-way new species rather they group them together with all of those early old fossils at several sites that have been difficult to sort of classify because they're looking at admixtures of neanderthal and current modern human very likely so uh they're they're just they're just basically saying we found a melting pot of human in neanderthal here in the levant which makes sense there would be a melting pot there was overlap this all makes sense but this overlap and there's also a bottleneck or the middle east between africa asia and europe that the it's it's sitting in a a very uh a very good spot for for different humans to have run into each other over right yeah that's cool i love the virtual reconstruction stuff that they did trying to put together based on the because you all we always wonder it's like okay you have these bone fragments how do you put together what the rest of the skull looks like and so to create these virtual reconstructions maybe they're starting to get there a little bit more i don't know that's really interesting i'm liking this picture because it it definitely i feel like it gives me a better idea of how they do those but there still does seem to be a lot of like it's and i guess well if it's this big here and you've got this notch here it's probably this big here yeah yeah which there is there's so much that you're there's so much it's very calculated assumption and i understand that but it is still assumption which is very interesting like these guys could have have had like a huge flat flat head that's kind of that's not in proportion with the area around their eyes and could have squished it's but you know they were like well it's probably around the shape of a of a all these other skulls that we've seen which makes sense but there's always and there's always weird outliers you know it's yeah and you know we have such diversity within humans too that it's whenever you find one skull like okay they found the biggest hominid skull ever uh in china maybe that was the biggest human ever but uh but but ratios over all of the skulls that we have found over over you know all of the when it starts to it starts to fit pretty nicely again into these boxes and categories we label it and we narrow it down and say aha that's it but then you're right we probably know it's all statistics yeah yeah things that are statistics but in practice a lot more is uh vaccine development and one important vaccine that we are having we've had so much trouble for getting a vaccine even considering how many people are affected by the parasite every year is a vaccine from malaria and there have been clinical trials for some vaccines but there really is not anything other than the anti-parasite paracital medications that are used currently to be able to get rid of the Paris parasite infection but resistance is coming up and so a vaccine would be really great to be able to fight off malaria well there is a new very small like 56 people in this very small clinical trial that is taken place uh and it's for a vaccine Sonaria's PFSPZ vaccine now this vaccine is very old school in the way it goes about being a vaccine it's not all fancy mRNA like the new versions this is going back to inoculating with virus this vaccine there are three types they're generated creating live parasite from mosquito salivary glands which is very unique and they uh for PFSPZ which is the one they're looking at the virus is irradiated so they use radiation to kill the virus so it's live but dead freshly dead freshly dead only freshly dead yes and then there are a couple of other ones PFSPZ GA1 has a genetically weakened parasite that gets injected and then PFSPZ CVAC is injected into somebody who is on malaria drugs anti-malarials very interesting strategies for how they're going about doing this however that said this limited trial of 56 uh volunteers the participants were either taking pyre pyre pyre methamine let me get the word right pyre methamine which kills liver stage parasites or chloroquine which kills blood stage parasites and they found that higher doses of the vaccine resulted in efficacy in stopping or blocking infection of up to 87.5 percent which is really good yeah it's really good this is the highest ever achieved for any malaria vaccine it's again really small trial this trial was a basically in a a very limited situation this isn't real world application so if you're going to apply it in brazil or africa you're going to come across people who are eating different diets who have different ecological environmental factors there might be other parasites in their blood that could limit the effectiveness of the vaccine we don't know any of those things yet but it's appeared very in a limited sense effective which is this is you know a little bit of hope for malaria the researchers who are involved though they keep saying and maybe it'll get there someday malaria infects hundreds of thousands of people around the world every year it just doesn't affect anybody in america so there's no operation warp speed for a malaria vaccine but if there were they think they could probably get a vaccine within five years and otherwise we're just going to keep throwing mosquito nets at people yeah and mosquito nets and anti-malarials can be effective the world health organization just announced that china is malaria free they went the last three years with zero indigenous infections and that has been through a very very stringent program of monitoring of using anti-malarial medications of genotyping strains that they find in infected people in the country so it was a long hard road but china reached zero malaria it's one of those things that you're right we don't think about uh or talk about much of the united states uh i had the pleasure of uh being friends with a physicist here at uc davis who was from india and uh explained what was talking about some some story about malaria that was in the news whatever and he was like oh yeah i've had it like four times like it's like it's not just yeah it's not just a random occasional thing that has an outbreak somewhere it's kind of like an omnipresent uh disease and as climate change happens it will reach places like the united states it will reach the rich countries that have been you know have escaped the effects so far um yeah so we are short-sighted to ignore problems like these absolutely yeah this is this weekend science thank you for listening to the show we hope that we give you a little hope for the world with all the science that we bring weekend and week out if you like the show please recommend it to a friend let's come on back for a little covid update is it a good one sure go i think it's a fairly good one uh so our cdc director wilenski is doubling down on her view that people in the united states who are vaccinated should be able to go mask free even with the rising cases of delta variant which is now up to 20 of all reported cases in the country places like israel have shown that their vaccinated population is holding the line or at least seems to be and this is part of the evidence that i'm sure uh the cdc is using in making their guidelines as the cdc is creating guidelines for the united states specifically and not like the whole the the world health organization which has to look at all the countries around the world where their significant population of individuals not vaccinated at this point in time vaccinated individuals do seem to be overall protected the risk to infection even with the delta variant is drastically reduced compared to unvaccinated individuals and so far the cases that israel are reporting they are not reporting deaths they're not getting into hospitalizations and deaths in the way that they're earlier uh that their earlier ramp their earlier wave seemed to do so at this point in time they are still very they're still a low number of cases very very low similar to last year around this time and the united states also cases have dropped around around the country but there are pockets where cases are starting to increase los angeles is starting to recommend masks be worn again indoors um or again we're looking good uh our cases are down and today was the first day that we're supposedly open for business you can make your own choices um wherever you are that's what the cdc in the united states is is saying is that states can make their own regulations localities can make their own regulations and but so can businesses so that's the other thing to remember is regardless of what the minimum threshold the federal or the state government has put out there uh i don't think there's a princeton davis town right i don't think there's a business in town you can walk into without a mask on right now it's it's very variable yeah i went shopping uh last weekend and went to three stores in a row and two of them required me to wear a mask and the third said you can take your mask off if you're vaccinated so that kind of variability is part of the problem and the confusion and what could also contribute to problems moving forward so uh it is well documented at this point that masks do contribute to a reduction in transmission even with vaccinated individuals so even if you are vaccinated and you do get infected if you wear a mask you will be less likely to spread it to other people even though you already have a reduced probability of spreading it to other people because you have less viral load there are a lot of factors at play but the one thing that we're learning is that masking is effective and there is a study out of duke university that found that uh that masking can prevent covet 19 transmission in schools they did a statewide analysis of uh the last year and what happened in schools with masking and no masking in north in the north carolina school districts for k-12 education and charter schools and their take-home message is that they don't necessarily have to close schools again and they don't even necessarily have to provide six feet of distance for students as long as masks are involved if masks are involved the kids will be safe um and that they did not have transmission of virus when masks were included in schools i mean and and to all the people who you know 18 months ago said oh kids will never wear masks kids have learned great they're doing a great job so adaptable and they're some of them are doing better than their parents they'll be like mom put your mask on it's yeah it's i i think this is really great news for the kids i think the thing that still kind of amesses me up is that if i'm vaccinated and i get covid and i don't know i have covid because i don't have symptoms because i'm vaccinated but then somebody else nearby is not vaccinated but is not wearing a mask for whatever reason they can get covid and get really really really really sick and for the two weeks before they get sick they can then spread it to a bunch of other people and so i think this is the part that still is so such a bummer because we're all working off the honor system and um you know at least in this country and uh we we have proven to not be stellar at the honor system in the past and i think this is still kind of an issue but you know the other thing that i i keep trying to remind myself is at least a lot of countries most countries if you're leaving the us they want a negative covid test regardless of your vaccination status before you can enter their country and at least as long as that holds we can prevent more worldwide spread like was happening at the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020 when nobody knew and it was just hopping all over the globe so you know what i really hope for covid for the future of covid at least from a worldwide scale is that we don't drop those i think that is really essential to preventing this from going absolutely crazy yet monitoring testing is a huge aspect to being able to keep it under control especially with regard to things like the olympics and they've already already had issues with uh with athletes from different countries being tested at when they arrive in japan and finding that they are covid positive and then having to quarantine and so this is um this is this is a it's still a big deal it's not it's it's not as big a deal as it was in january when we were having a huge wave all over the place australia is going through it right now it's their winter they're in the middle of it and probably going to hit a pretty huge wave because they have a very large unvaccinated population unless they maintain their strict quarantines which a lot of areas are doing and they're also installing travel mandates between different parts of australia and new zealand so there are a lot of ways to manage the spread but the yeah ventilation masking these are and vaccination vaccination is protective you add the things together and they all reduce your risk um but i do hope that people in the northern hemisphere do enjoy a bit of their summer because check your the number is in your local area if you are vaccinated you may get it but you may not get it as badly may not the risk is lower um outdoors outdoors is a lot safer than indoors and summer is a wonderful time for outdoors keep testing keep doing these things that's it for my covid update does anyone have anything else no no oh well then thank you for being a part of this episode of this week in science we appreciate the time you have taken to spend with us if you do enjoy the show every single week take a moment to go over to twist.org and click on our patreon link you can choose to support us at just about any level of your choosing ten dollars and more per month we will thank you by name at the end of the show we really can't do this without you thank you for your support so now we come back to ju- wait no not just just wait no that was just one week no wait it's mine i won't want to give it back you don't want to give it back it was never yours to take you know what it is everybody it's time for blairs animal corner what you got there oh i have some truly wild science i'm pretty excited to tell you all about parasites that convince their host to go jump in a lake um this is a no this is the cricket one that makes them jump in the pool yes so this is a study from kobi university looking at a parasite that usually infects crickets and mantises mantids um to yeah so they they're called hair worms which sounds so gross and they is it your hair or are they worms it's it's a little bit of column a little bit of column b um anyway they infect these these insects and convince them to take a long swim and never come back um and so the way that they do that has always been kind of a weird phenomena like it for over a hundred years this this this was discovered about a hundred years ago but um they don't know how they make the insects do this and where this gets weird is the fact that so normally i would say okay killing your host is being a really bad parasite but in the in the hair worm life cycle they gotta get to the water yes they reproduce in water so they they are nematomorph parasites they live inside insects but they reproduce in rivers and ponds so to get there they manipulate their host to jump into the water and essentially kill themselves they whisper in their brains go jump in a lake so this is what they sought out to do how the heck are these hair worms convincing these animals that they're inside to kill themselves in water this is crazy um and so what what is the kind of what is the mechanism that's driving them towards water to take this forever dip and so they had a theory and i i'll try to bring this from beginning to end so you can kind of follow me so originally it was thought that it might have something to do with the reflected light on the surface of the water but there are other forms of brightness in the wild there's forest openings there's sand there's grasslands there's things that reflect sunlight and moonlight there's lots of reflective surfaces so don't really think that's what it is and if they were attracted to every single occurrence this manipulation wouldn't work because it would only work i don't know one out of ten times or something like that so wouldn't effectively and consistently bring these hair worms home so they thought that perhaps it had something to do with the polarization of the light polarized light is a type of light where the electric field of that light oscillates in only one direction and the light reflected off water contains a lot of horizontally polarized light and it has been shown in the past that anthropods use horizontally polarized light to seek or avoid water so with this information they know that water creates this horizontally um polarized light they also know that arthropods are capable of seeing and detecting that polarization so those two things together and especially the fact that they can these insects can use that information specifically related to water means this is now we have a working theory they have a hypothesis does the parasite use the animal's ability to see polarized light to make them go toward polarized light so here's step one they made a cylinder they divided into three sections polarized light on one end unpolarized light on the other the mantid was placed in the middle and then they saw what happened 10 minutes later and they moved towards the polarized light over the course of these tests they use different strengths of light to see what strength of light was best and they wanted to see if that was if brightness had anything to do with it so aside from the polarization what about brightness so they chose polarized light compared to uninfected individuals when you have the infected ones they went for the polarized light and they found a particular uh type of light about 2 000 lux that was chosen as the best brightness for them um but then they double checked it they did not choose polarized light if the angle was vertical instead of horizontal so it's definitely this horizontally polarized light and the infected individuals are going after this not the healthy ones and this was regardless of strength of the light they could change that all up and down but it what they went for horizontal over over vertical every time and so okay yes they are attracted to horizontally polarized light then they took it outdoors and that's what we're seeing right now on the screen is the outdoor experiment they wanted to see whether infected mantids would jump into a pool reflecting strong horizontally polarized light they set up a mesh enclosure there were two pools pool a had the horror horizontally polarized but dim light and pool b the reflection was brighter but weakly polarized so they released them poor buddies in between the two and observed quote unquote their entry into the water sorry buddies and among the 16 infected mantids that exhibited the behavior 14 entered pool a strongly reflected horizontally polarized light the other kind of funny thing is that they found that a lot of them did it at midday so they were also in the initial experiment they walked more in midday so there is also some sort of circadian rhythm potentially related to this um that has to do with the attraction to this horizontally polarized light or their activity in general who knows but so there's there's something about the specificity of the time of day as well so this is the first time in the world according to the the people who wrote this paper so you know maybe there's a little paper out there somewhere else we never know right when people make these comments but this is the first time in the world that parasites have been shown to manipulate the ability to respond to light so this is a very specific behavior that they are impacting through their their parent parentization so the next step the next step of this is to actually figure out the mechanism is what are they manipulating in the body of these animals to have them react a certain way to a light source which we don't know yet yeah what I think is so interesting about this is that this does hint at a mechanism instead of just saying oh the fungus makes the ant climb to the top of the tree and bite onto the tree until something eats it you know yeah it's zombie right it's it's this is actually this the whole life cycle is kind of telling you okay this is what it's making it doing and all these experiments are allowing them to figure out that it is polarized light so now this actually gives us a direction that researchers can go okay polarized light how do the mantids perceive the polarized polarized light what are the mechanisms in the eye for polarized differentiation at the molecular level between polarized and unpolarized light how does the signal get interpreted by the mantid brain and is it at the level of the brain or at the level of the eye that the parasite is having its effect yeah so so is this impacting perception right or is it impacting response yes can they see the polarized light before but they ignore it because water bad right that's kind of that's kind of how i'm uh that's sort of like how i'm like uh seeing this too is that's just how they bring mantises see light and identify water and so if that's the thing that they're being told to go to that's already what they use to identify it then that's they're going to it's not necessarily their eyes are getting tricked uh it's still got to be a motivational response on some level and basically changing a motivational response so like in the case of toxoplasma gondii where it makes an animal that normally does not go out into the daylight or is you know isolated seek out daylight and other organisms cats that would normally eat it makes mice attracted to the scent of cat urine and but it's this friendliness not afraid of lions and yeah but also uh like rabies who makes you randomly hydrophobic great there's yeah so there's lots of mechanism based questions here that could potentially be cracked at so very i thought just a wild a wild idea to be able to look closer at this i love it i love it when science can look at a question in animals and go okay let's start figuring it out and yeah they were able to come i mean the creativity to come up with experiments to solve this problem and to start asking these questions in the right way to be able to think i mean this kind of stuff is so cool how best to drown a bunch of praying mantises without any confounding variables what are they looking at what are they looking at more do they look at me or do they look at the pond let's see indeed indeed um so speaking of water let's instead move to fire fire bad fire fire is indeed bad um so this is this is very i feel like a um prescient conversation based on the conversation we were having earlier and what's going on on the west pressure um anyway um this is a study from the from washington state university and this is looking at songbird's response to wildfire is it their response and how they move around their environment is it their response and what they eat no this is the response in their plumage and hormones yes so uh just through kind of happenstance just normal bird surveying stuff that you do if you study birds uh it was discovered that habitat destroying wildfires in australia were followed by male red-backed fairy wrens not molting into their ornamental plumage so they start they most of the year they're this very kind of drab good camouflage of of brown but normally when it when it's time to find a a lover um or you know the other half of the genome of your babies um they they molts the males molts into a red and black ornamental plumage so it's it's very striking but that wasn't happening after some wildfires then they they checked some hormone levels in these individuals and it found lower testosterone so here's a question is um the testosterone is responsible for the feathers so a testosterone spike is what gives them their ornamental plumage so are the wildfires suppressing testosterone or are the wildfires impacting behavior that secondarily impact testosterone this is the question right um so they measured birds fat stores they measured their stress hormones they measured a bunch of other things to see if anything else had to do with it because if you're super stressed after a wildfire then that might suppress some of the more energetic um kind of expense energetically expensive things that you might be doing like you know losing all your feathers and regrowing once yeah so this this is an important thing to count out but it turned out that they were not stressed they did not show stress hormones that did not appear to have anything to do with it it was only interfering with their testosterone and therefore their colorful plumage so that's wild yeah so no stress hormones just a change in testosterone levels but you would expect that their testosterone levels would be changing because of the stress of the wildfire right right um so while they were looking at wildfire impacts on long-term survival of birds they they kind of happened upon this and decided to really jump into it head on and try to figure out exactly what what the mechanism here was so the the hypothesis was that testosterone is an evolved response to a wildfire it was beneficial for these songbirds to suppress testosterone after a big catastrophic event like this and the that hypothesis comes because wildfires destroy their habitat obviously so it's not just that like oh no where am i gonna live it's no no no there's no place to live this is not the time to have a baby so then the the male birds inhibit or delay their breeding signals they end up looking just like females when when breeding season comes so that they are then unattractive to females because they don't want to be tied down right now so it's a response because the likelihood of expending energy into mating and then also taking care of a baby would probably end in bad things it's a bad use of energy so they might be better to wait till the next the next opportunity the next year essentially right because if there's a fire perhaps it has reduced resource resources maybe it just all sorts of things are not going to go well for a clutch of eggs yeah yeah and so they they did a really thorough check they looked at blood samples and they did this for five years at two different sites so they could compare birds living at times and places experiencing wildfire and not across these different locations across different years they looked at temperatures they looked like i said at stores home runs they looked at all these other things um and so it really just felt like the wildfire and not the dry season it's not just it being dry and they're not being a lot going on like oh we are having a drought no it was specifically the wildfire that suppressed a testosterone therefore suppressed feather color and so um really the expectation here is that it's it's male driven to reduce the amount of chicks that are born after a wildfire it's the selfish male hypothesis yeah yes you know i just really need another gear to find myself that fire really was tough yeah you know just you know i don't really know what i want to do this year so yeah yeah i really need to focus on me maybe next year yeah can you just stand character like that for the rest of the show no it's you are really awesome uh anyway i might have to for one of my later stories oh you can feel the patriarchy just swelling up inside of me anyway this story could be used for future implications on other species that have coloration signals to mating and places that historically didn't have wildfires that now may yeah and another way that wildfire seasons mess up nature anyway all of that climate change ah okay that's it it's all connected man yeah it's all connected totally thank you for being a part of twist hey did you want a twist t-shirt or mug we have some cool sciencey goodness t-shirts and mugs in the store right now so if you head over to twist.org and click the zazzle link you can check off check out not check off well you can check off purchasing them from your to-do list but you can also check out the items that we have available and support twists in the meantime time for some stories from justin what you got going on global warming oh yeah it's pretty bad like people are talking about how bad it is we've been talking about how bad it is since before anybody else no never except for a few scientists we're talking about we've been talking about this like weekly for many many years now uh but global warming might actually be good news for some california residents new cal poly study finds that rattlesnakes are likely to benefit from the higher temperatures combination of factors makes warming climate beneficial to rattlesnakes rattlesnakes by the way are found in almost every part of the continental united states but they're especially common in the southwest uh rattlesnakes are experts at thermoregulation because of course they're cold-blooded they don't really have a choice they have to pay attention to these things they found that when given a chance so they I guess they had these snakes and they could sort of decide which uh along a a a myriad of different temperature scenarios where did they feel the most comfortable where did they most coalesce and turns out snakes uh the rattlesnakes prefer to body temperature of 86 to 89 degrees fahrenheit that's lower than I would have expected well but it's also much warmer than the averages that they will experience in nature so average body temperature of a coastal rattlesnake was about 70 degrees for if they went inland it was just 74 so yeah the higher temperatures the happier they are cody voice this is uh hailey krauel we're supposed to see uh we're surprised to see how much lower the body temperatures of wild snakes were relative to their preferred body temperatures in the lab there's a lot of ecological pressures in nature that could prevent rattlesnakes from basking that's when they go and hang out in the sun catch those rays uh but they're when they're there there's a increased risk of exposure to predators a warmer climate may help these snakes heat up to temperatures that are more optimal for digestion or reproduction uh krauel is a graduate student researcher and the project lead of this study longer periods of warmer temperatures could also give them a longer active season uh giving them more time to hunt and feed and reproduce as well so because they don't regulate their own body temperature like a warm-blooded creature does they need to rely on surroundings to provide heat which usually drastically restricts their activity in cold weather remove the cold weather and you have snakes that are not drastically reduced in their activities they're just gonna keep on keeping on uh addition to the seasonal changes on snaking rattlers could spend more active hours during any given day being active rattlesnakes they say here uh eat mostly rodents but can also eat insects but apparently we're gonna try to avoid those black widows yeah it's can i can i say one thing about this though is that active rattlesnakes are actually if you're trying to not be bit as a human it's actually kind of better most rattlesnake bites happen when you step on sleeping snakes so when they're active that's when first of all if they hear footfalls or feel footfalls they're getting far far far far away but secondly they use the rattles that's the whole point right is you're too big i don't want to bite you or eat you please leave me alone so if they're awake and active that actually means they're going to be more actively trying to keep away from you which is helpful okay so so okay so there is a silver lining to global warming then less uh less likely to be bit by a snake because they're more active in a wake yes however you have rattlesnakes now probably moving into places where people are not used to rattlesnakes and so they don't know rattlesnake etiquette so for that reason they might actually be more likely to get bitten but when you describe humans moving into areas where yeah so there's that both going in each direction humans are going to get bitten more often that's what's going to happen what you described uh Blair perfectly illustrated my one time almost getting bit by a rattlesnake you almost stepped on a sleeping one yeah it was it was at night and this is how country i grew up we had a crushed granite path from the trailer to the outhouse which was enough distance away from the trailer so that you know was far enough away and along this crushed granite path at night i went walking because in the middle of the night i had to do number two oh no i was this is me at like seven or eight years old or maybe younger gosh and then there was this like bunch of stick or something there was a bunch of debris and i was about to kick it off of the path because it's night but a granite's like kind of light colored so you could see the contrast it was about to kick it when something in the back of my head clicked and it was that's a coiled up rattlesnake which was there at night on the granite path because it was using that heat from the ground oh but you're right yeah if it was warmer it probably would have been like i don't need a granite path i could be anywhere i would have so if you're in rattlesnake territory let me just give since we're talking about it a couple pointers here so if you're if you're on hikes first of all never wear open-toed shoes on a hike wear closed-toed shoes second of all stay on the trail there's a million reasons to do that but this is a big one and then the third is if you think you're moving through a space where there could be snakes you stop you take big stopping steps because that will wake them up that will give a nice vibration and they're going to get the heck out of there very good tips uh find that in fact here is uh this is actually something that you mentioned in your earlier study about snakes not eating a whole lot apparently they are very efficient uh in their digestive systems or in their uh their use of food says here an adult rattlesnake needs only 500 to 600 calories to survive for an entire year that's about one ground scroll yep uh although uh additional calories uh to make up for the energy spent hunting and bearing young and other activities that snakes might do with it so they might need to eat a little bit more than that but uh it's like yeah it's interesting uh humans need three to four times that many calories per day yeah just a little bit of a problem though energetic needs for metabolism yeah yeah so if snakes can't leave though to if they're in an area like where they currently are and it gets too hot for them then they end up actually being active more and need more food so that's a whole nother issue potentially as well so they had if they were awake more often and more active then they'd need more calories and so then they'd be eating more ground squirrels and maybe taking that ground squirrel population that sandiagans complain about I don't know all right eating more raptors and feeding more raptors but what are the so anyway the silver lining of this story is they're saying that there's a a bubble of an ecosystem that's going to really enjoy global warming and it's going to be snakes and vultures yeah there we go there we go but if you are in the dark what do you need to be looking at Justin anything oh this is actually this is a buried the lead this is the biggest story I think of the the week if not the year so far uh researchers at Chalmers University of Technology Sweden they succeeded in developing a method to label mRNA molecules I mean wow and follow the path of mRNA through cells in real time using basically a microscope without affecting the properties or subsequent activity protein formation of those mRNA this is a breakthrough that is going to have game changing effects all sorts of research so most of us are now kind of familiar with mRNA we got the major vaccines that thanks to science and RNA there are we have the Pfizer and the Moderna our mRNA based vaccines RNA based therapeutics actually have a whole bunch of things that they they're working on that our opportunities to prevent treat potentially cure many many diseases currently though delivery of RNA therapeutics into cells is pretty inefficient mostly because we don't really know what we're doing in the research what we get are snapshots of given time points where we can go and look at something and see okay did the mRNA get there how much of it's there compared to what else is there but this is an active ongoing system so when you have your time points for research and you have to kill the cell to find out what's going on in it you end what was happening in that cell and you have to kind of string it together with a bunch of other dead cells that you killed at different times to try to build the picture it lacks some important details about what's going on but it can also create inaccurate data that then frustrates scientific process progress in process right so great benefit of this new method oh i'm actually quoting now this is ellen espioner associate professor of the department of biology and biotechnology who is the second lead author of the article the great benefit of this method is that we can now easily see where in the cell the delivered mRNA goes and in which cells the protein is formed without losing RNAs natural protein translating ability new method recently presented in the journal american chemical society will make the development of new treatments more efficient as well as add a wealth of knowledge to pathologists biotech engineers anyone who's interested in studying physiological processes in cells whether they be human or plant it's huge that's amazing we've known for a while that mrna plays a lot of regulatory uh roles within cells and within processes but again without the ability to sort of observe how they're going where they are what they're doing it's sort of been a mystery we can attach some importance to the presence or lack of presence but the research behind this method was done in collaboration with chemists and biologists at chalmers that's the swedish uh technical university and the biomark biopharmaceuticalists at astrazeneca which is interesting because you hear astrazeneca and you go aha they made a vaccine yeah it's a company that made a vaccine but they're actually even though their vaccine is not mRNA based the company is actually one of the leading mRNA therapy researchers in other arenas so they're part of this uh for for good reason the method involves replacing one of the building blocks of RNA with a fluorescent variant which apart from that everything else remains the same natural properties does the thing the mRNA did before fluorescent units can then be used to produce the messenger RNA without affecting them being translated into proteins they can then allows the researchers to follow functional mRNA molecules in real time seeing how they are taken up into cells with just the help of a microscope so this is this is almost as big I think I think this might actually be bigger than what we've learned about the microbiome in terms of the human health physiology this is a missing ingredient I don't think it's bigger but what it does is it's a tool that will allow that uh investigation into that to take place where is where are short sequences of mRNA being distributed where are they getting inserted how are they acting what's you know what is acting um yeah but it's it's thought to be it's believed to be mRNA is one of those things between genome as a blueprint right and uh epigenetic uh outcomes and this is long thought to be where a lot of that regulatory aspect of expression is actually controlled in a weird way right so being able to to finally visualize it means the whole genomic field also gets to take a big step forward with new research it's huge yeah we like to see things visual visualization is amazing that's gonna yeah that's big cool story I like it uh taking you into a couple oh there's my there's my show notes that was fun show notes everybody I'm going to take us into uh from I'm going to take us into some microbes and into your gut for a moment and then into your brain because I like to do stuff like that so apparently according to some new research out of an international research team this is Singaporeans researchers in the UK Australia Canada US and Sweden led by principal investigator professor Sven Peterson National Neuroscience Institute of Singapore and visiting professor at Lee Kong Chan School of Medicine in Nanyang Technological University they've looked at gut microbes that metabolize tryptophan nice amino acid that is supposed to make a sleepy they're supposed to be in the turkey at Thanksgiving that's really not the thing that makes you sleepy with the turkey at Thanksgiving but we like to say it anyway would you remind me every Thanksgiving because I forget it from here it's like the turkey it's not really the turkey it's like a piece of locked in information that refuses to leave my brain yes well hopefully this study will lock itself into your brain really amazing these microbes usually the groups of microbes are uh microbes that can be dangerous to humans pathogenic microbes like E. coli these microbes metabolize tryptophan and secrete little molecules that are called indoles and these indoles apparently we don't know whether they actually do travel through the bloodstream between the gut and the brain but indoles according to this study they mediate the development of new brain cells in the hippocampus so these indoles trigger the birth of new brain cells in an area of your brain that's responsible for forming new memories and helping your cognition so you can already see where this is going with its implications for how tryptophan or bacteria or even imagine this just indoles could be used to fight the ravages of aging on the brain if you can continue to stimulate the birth of new brain cells these uh indoles they mediate signals that lead to regulatory factors that lead to the production of these new brain cells the neurogenesis in the hippocampus and this is published in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences the researchers do wonder you know is this the kind of thing that could lead to dietary intervention could you also just eat tryptophan rich food if you have these bacteria but knowing that these bacteria are usually pathogenic species of bacteria do we really want to feed them all that much so could we just go if it gets you a better brain i think shot i'll need the help let's go there let's go there but there are many indole rich foods broccoli cauliflower the brassicas these cabbages they are rich in indoles and so perhaps eating indole rich foods are what can help keep your brain happy and healthy into long age we don't know this for sure yet but it sure is a nice thought i love it i'm gonna go buy all the broccoli yeah which also like isn't broccoli a derivative of mustard so then just put mustard on your broccoli you should be good yes all the mustard all the broccoli mustard covered cauliflower some pathogens on top of it with the slice of turkey and you have the recipe for the perfect brain yes exactly you need the microbes though that are in there but uh yeah it's very exciting new neuroscience research that could potentially shift not just how we eat for old age but it could understanding these mechanisms of new neuron formation could lead to treatments for stroke and brain injury oh yeah which yes that's awesome yeah could these are all far off possibilities at this point in time speaking of i don't know this isn't like a near possibility but do you have you ever boiled a lobster no i've been present but i've never done it myself right so yeah lobsters we catch them people put them in the pot and there's this question as to whether or not they feel pain now as researchers neuroscientists and perceptual researchers will tell you there's no way to know if they actually feel pain as we define it but they have no they have they have nerves and of course they have probably mechanisms and temperature sensors that allow them to stay out of too hot waters so they don't get boiled naturally anyway this work out of ucsd in pharmacology biochemistry and behavior investigated the question of what happens if you um give lobsters pot thc pot not just put them in a pot but if you give them thc before you put them in the pot does that change the way that they act as they are boiling i would imagine i would not i would imagine no i think if you took a completely sober human if they were trying to bridge this sort of morphoprosession the thing going on and a somebody who's very stoned and you threw both of them in boiling water i bet they both scream yes and it appears as though that's what happens with lobsters as well except no none of the screaming just the thc does appear to enter the lobster through the gills they did tissue analysis to see whether the thc had actually made its way into the lobster and yes indeed lobsters can inhale and the lobsters then their behavior does change so their claw waving and their various behaviors do change as a result of the change in thc levels in their tissues however when boiled in a pot of water the thc did not seem to change their behavior in any way right right right right right thank you uh eknap 49 in the chat room so how do you want your lobster baked or boiled both what uh both yeah both baked yes oh boy yes so what a wild what a wild study my my thing is i i understand you want to you want to feel like you're not causing pain i do understand that yes but also like is there a larger um kind of extrapolated meaning of the study because i i kind of scrolled past this uh in my research as well and i i couldn't help but wonder like i'm i'm hoping there's something else that this can be applied to as well at this point the the conclusions that they they make do not indicate that there's more that can be learned other than an understanding a greater understanding of how uh lobsters and potentially other shellfish crustaceans uh do have uh how they detect temperature so hot water no seception as it is termed it just feels like people want to feel less guilty about you and that's where and that's where it came from so the uh the rationale as they so they're they're study vapor exposed to uh deltonine tetrahydro cannabine cannabinial oh tetra night tetrahydro cannabinine gotta i can't talk chemistry chemistry today tetrahydro cannabin cannabinol shows low slow's locomation of the main lobster homaris americanus rationale despite long history of use in synaptic physiology the lobster has been a neglected model for behavioral pharmacology a restaurateur proposed that exposing lobster to cannabis smoke reduces anxiety and pain during the cooking process it is unknown if gill respiration in air would result in significant thc uptake and whether this would have any detectable behavioral effects i love this this sounds like uh this sounds like the restaurant tour was walked in on he's like what are you doing here you're supposed to be cooking the lobsters he's like i'm uh uh maybe trying to i'm trying to help the lobsters here well this is no but but this is this is not too far of a cry from a range uh you know cage-free range animals you know i guess this is uh your your meal was uh raised on an organic farm where it had plenty of room to run around it was bad nothing but organic food and the very best marijuana that we could possibly supply it like you know and at least it was entirely confused before it went into the pot like just you know just you know if you didn't eat this it wasn't going to do anything uh with its life it was a procrastinator yeah so according according to science uh if you are cooking lobster it's not necessarily going to benefit the lobster once it's going once it's in the water yeah there you go but you should know there you go and there we go have we come to the end of another episode oh yeah oh yeah Blair says oh yeah we're done already we did it we're all done all right well if you have any questions for us out there you can send emails to gearston at thisweekandscience.com or uh you can leave us a message on our facebook page thisweekandscience thank you i hope you're all staying cool wherever you are i hope you are vaccinated if you can be i hope you are staying safe and thank you for listening to the show thank you to fada for your help with social media and 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Who's full of science and goodness? Yeah, full of science and goodness. Who's full of science and goodness? Aw, full of science and goodness. Ooh, 20% off of Salvos. Science and goodness mug. Below. How's it going, Blair? Pretty good. Oh, here comes Justin. He's coming back. This week in science. So you had the Zazzle store up there, I think, for a second? I did. I'm going to speak about the quality of things purchased on Zazzle. Yes, this is a good conversation. So I'm talking about this, the older version, the pre-Blair version. That's still there. This one here, I know I'm selling now, which this feels weird on the show, but I've got, people know your mouse pad is not supposed to last a decade and a half. Yeah. It just is not, this thing's still in great condition. And I'm actually like very impressed with the quality of the- It's right there. There's the mouse pad right there. There we go. Right there, the mouse pad. There's quite a few mouse pads in that store. Yes, the cephalopod. I've literally had this thing for, I think, for a decade and a half now. That's a long time to have a mouse pad. That is really outliving what it's expected life was, so. Look, there's a science, a twist poster. Let's see, Gorov was asking if there are indoor doormats. Do they even buy the leggings? Such a great idea. I haven't ordered the leggings because I'm just bad at shopping and I keep meaning to. Gorov, I'm now totally, I hope they have one in there because I would love a twist doormat. That would be amazing. Right, that'd be fun. Oh, here, I didn't mean to show this off, but look. That's a pretty foam cover. You like that foam cover. This is the, this is the second of the show we like to call the in-house commercial. Oh, I'm also, wow, I'm doing a lot of it. I'm wearing the sweatshirt right now, too. Awesome, twist. Oh, look, there are doormats. There are? Okay, let me see. I'm predicting an entire new line of Blair Schwag coming through. There are doormats. So Blair, I'm going to let you do that. I mean, I can show, but then, I mean. Okay, yeah, let me, here. I'm not good at the. You can watch me make it like we've done in the past. That's what I was going to say. Okay, yeah. Welcome to Twist QVC. You better hurry. Quantities are limited. Blair, I'm not saying you are a doormat, but I'm sure you can make a great one. Oh, they're not limited. Well, okay. Okay, what's it in? Yeah, you make a great doormat, Blair. I'll show you what kind of doormat I am, if it's okay with you. That you make. I'll show you what kind of doormat I make. I really show you. A doormat. So what's the difference between these? Probably size. So why are you looking into this? Why are you looking into this? Nolan Richardson posted something, which may have been troll bait or may have been an honest question. I don't know, but I didn't see them post anything else, so I'm just guessing. And so you're like, let's talk about it. Yeah, so let's talk about it. Is scientific truth a universal truth? There was one way back there. It was way, it was like the middle of the show. And Gord, I think, had a nice answer about it. Science is about the questions more than it is about the answers. But I will say that there is something universal truth about some science that is applies, meaning that it applies beyond our planet. It applies throughout the entire universe. And the fundamentals of what we understand about chemistry, as an example, are going to be chemistry throughout the universe. It's going to be, it's like one of the fun things that allows scientists to sort of understand what might be happening on far distant stars and planets is that the chemistry of the universe is the chemistry of the universe, not the chemistry of Earth, not the chemistry of what elements we have, what things are interacting because of temperature ranges and pressure ranges. Yeah, that's going to change when things are in what state where and all of that. Sure, sure, sure. But the building blocks that we have to encounter as Earthlings are the same building blocks we would encounter anywhere in the universe. And that is a universal truth that really, if you think about it, for this one little pale blue rock floating around one dusky red rosy star in billions within the solar billions and billions of galaxies and then the phenomenal astronomical things of scale that we can say words and put numbers, but they're still incomprehensible scales upon which the universe exists. Those building blocks. Can I add it to the stream now Blair? You definitely can. Absolutely the same. Door mats. Door mat making time. Yeah, I mean, I think when you come down to the question of universal truths, it's questions of physics and mathematics. You know, like you were talking about it kind of depends and Anthony is saying depends on the science. Yeah, it's like there are some universal truths and even for biology and there are physicists who have delved into the questions of what are the basic physics of life? What are the physics at play that allow for the chemical interactions that allow for life to happen? And so there are some interesting chemical points that are universal for life on earth, but that could be different for life in another place if it's based on different chemistry. But the chemistry itself will be the same. I mean that the that what those building blocks will be the same how they're arranged how they get utilized. These are sort of and it's sort of and there's a weird way that we go down right to the hard science. We talk about the universal, but then on some level, you know, the science of communication is likely very universal. You know, that that that science that life or the communication that life has all of these whether it's a chemical communication, whether like whatever level communication or information transfer is taking place at, there's sort of etiquette or process or regulation that can kind of define what communication must look like between other life forms as well. So I don't know about that necessarily. I mean it all depends on how you perceive and if your communication is based on vibrations or on light shows or there's so many different ways. I mean communication, the universal truth for communication is that there's always going to be a sender and a receiver. Right. That's the universal truth, but how it's sent and received. Well, yeah, but my point in that is that we can see how many different forms of communication on this one planet. Right. And we can't talk to dolphins yet, although... Oh, yeah, actually we can. We can. We're just bad listeners. It turns out we can actually we can actually talk to them and they can understand what we're asking. We just suck at listening back. Oh my God. So there was this really funny article last week that somebody posted to me and like for a hot second I was like, what? It's one of those articles. Is this real? There's no way. Is this real? Of course it was like a satire site, but the the story was the dolphin seen to stop smiling as when humans turn their backs. Oh, oh gosh. Oh, wow. That's hilarious. When the cameras are turned off and the dolphins think no one is looking at them, they stop smiling. It's like the far side cartoon where the cows stop being bipedal only when they're swimming around. No, they become bipedal. Yeah, right. Humans are here. Time to act like cows again. Humans are gone. Everybody back to bipedal. Yeah, well, yeah, there's so many interesting aspects to all like, yeah, life, the universe. I mean, there's the one question because we are so limited in where we are in the universe. There's been a question as researchers are looking at expansion in the universe. And we have like our local constants. And we are pretty sure that the constants are pretty constant everywhere, but they might not be. That there might be places where things slow down, speed up, change in our own universe, but we don't know that because we're not there. But everything that we can see and measure from where we are so far appears to be homogeneous that it all works together. It's just always that weird thing when like, sometimes in some sci-fi somewhere where they go somewhere to mine the specific thing, like they need to mine an asteroid somewhere. Are you going to find anything in an asteroid that you can't find on a planet? More of it. You're going to find more of it. Maybe concentrations. There is like, yeah. What was it that was that one really big asteroid that had some crazy quadrillions of dollars of iron on it or something? Only problem is if you bring that all back to the earth, disaster. Disaster! Blair's making art! What is this one? Well, this is because this is what Garo specifically asked for. So was the... Is it a doormat? It's a doormat. It's square. I feel like this needs to be smaller. It's pretty. What if we do this? Oh, geez, that's not what I meant to do. We like it. Yeah, universals. That's why I mean universal constants. We think they're not just fudge factors. We think they're constants and constant throughout the universe. And science is this wonderful way of trying to get rid of the bias inherent in our human brains. Unfortunately, we're not perfect at doing that, but we do the darn best we can. At Knapp 49, the chat room is saying the minerals mined from asteroids can be used in space. Cheaper than lifting minerals out of earth's gravity well. Very good point. Yeah, if you're going to stay in space, it's good to use in this space. Yeah, and then you're one of the belters from the expanse. Belta lauda. Very nice. Oh, guess who I had dinner with this week? Who? Ty Frank, one of the authors of the expanse. Dang, he just hopped off and was like name dropping. I did. They were just lovely. And his wife is really cool, and I hope we can get her for an interview on the show. What does she do? She studies the interaction between humanity, humans, and their engineered environment. So I need to look, have a conversation with her, sit down and see her work, and see what she's working in. But the way she briefly described it, I was like, ah, I want to hear more about this, but we're having other conversations. That falls into the conversation I was just sort of having, some of the universal truths. But although this might be a very earthly universal truth, but if you look at the way we design cities, we have arteries for roadways and people to transport. We're like the heme, we're like the blood vessels to the thing. And we have waste removal. That turtle is a great doormat. Waste removal, I mean, we've basically, our urban infrastructure is very biologic based. It's the same type of systems you will find in biology you will find in the heartbeat of a city in the way that it functions. That sounds like a, it sounds like a fun talk. Yeah. If that's, that's what's being said. We have, yeah, I need to find out specifically. I haven't, yeah, like I said, I haven't dug into it. Posting products for sale. Woohoo. Garib likes the tortoise. It's a good one. It's a good one. I like the tortoise too. I might have to buy myself a twist mat. Here, let's see. Turtle, tortoise. Noodles is asking what the doormat is made of. Science, I can tell you in a second. Yeah, we'll find that out. As long as it's not made up of hair worms, I think it would be okay. Yeah, as long as it's not all hair worms. Gord, if you're talking about the expanse and you finally watched the first episode of the expanse, yeah, the first episode also isn't even like the best episode. It just gets better from there. It actually took a couple of episodes for it to really get going. Then it's just amazing. Okay. And the books are amazing. The books are great. And if you're into tabletop games, they also have a TTRPG. Really? Yes, the expanse came out of a TTRPG. So, okay, you're saying, you're saying letters with words? Tabletop role-playing game. Is that what Dungeons and Dragons is? Is that when you have like rolling dice and you have like books or something that explain the game to you? Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah, so we have bath mats in here. Oh my god. They have black, oh, they have bath mats. Oh, do they have towels? Definitely, they definitely have towels. Now I'm shopping. Now I am totally shopping. What do they have? I'm no longer selling and now the customer. Throw blanket is very fun. Fleece, Sherpa, Serving Tray, Acrylic Tray, Acquatic Horm. No, it's summertime. Blair, it's summertime. Maybe we need some beach towels. Yeah. I mean, it's winter in Australia and maybe the Australians can get ready for summertime. Yeah. Okay, so let's see. So, and shower curtains. Yes, Mary Ann. Let's see, how great, perfect feeling. Non-slip rubber is what it is. Non-slip rubber mat. Mary Ann, yeah, shower curtains. Hey, where's my twist? Shower curtain. How can I not have that? Nice. What does Brian want? Yeah, what do you want from Dad? Yeah, what of my art on what thing? You can think about it. On everything, dear. Of course. On everything, dear, Sidney. All right, have a bunch of things. I can't think of a place where I wouldn't want to see art, honey. I would like to see your art everywhere. Anyway. Gosh, I've got all the right answers to these questions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah, so it's acrylic. Here, let's see if they have towels. 100% asking. Oh, wait, this isn't where I want. This is what I want. From BB, I'm sure we could get temporary tattoos made. For sure. For sure, for sure. Congratulations. Now we have accessories. Off to school. Oh, a shower curtain could have a collage of Blair's art. Wouldn't that be fun? Yeah, with different tiles. Especially from the stained glass collection. I just want that would be great. I want this. There is a shower curtain. Yeah, here's the thing. I'm going to get so ridiculous. It's going to be too much. I have a shower curtain. I'll have the towel and the bath mat. And I'll just be like themed in twists. Twist thing. My twists bad, pull up my twist blanket, laid it my head on my twist pillow. That's just your... I kind of feel like that's how I want to roll. This makes it easy. Oh, I want you smaller, though. Wait, wait, Anthony besides saying $50. What's $50? Placement? Maybe the shower curtain. Is it really? Oh gosh, that's a part of the problem with Zazzle is that it's expensive, but that way also he doesn't have a garage full of stuff we're trying to sell. Yeah, that's sort of the trade-off. And I'm really bad at the post office, so. Yeah, Zazzle is much more reliable for sending you the thing, and it's going to be more expensive than it is worth. Except that's how you get your twists. Gorov, the items usually take about 24 hours to post, maybe a little bit less. So. The last time when I did the mug and shirt, my piddly contribution to the store. Oh, that was nice. Actually, wasn't it way... Okay, wait a sec. Technically wasn't that Marshall? No. Wasn't it his art that was on the twist mug? The sciencey goodness? Oh no, no, no, not that one. Okay, nevermind. Wait, which one? The one I had the mug, I had I think the original mug, which was like the original shirt that I still have somewhere. Yeah, those were old. That was Marshall's design a little with the... Yep, yep. Yeah, those, I loved the old design, which I think we found somewhere at one point, and it might still be in our cafe press store, which is the... They are the cloud chamber trails, which were very cute. I know, is it warming up noodles? Makes it harder to wear a hoodie. I hear New York is having a heat wave, just like the West Coast did. It was like, East Coast, West Coast, let's have heat waves. And then if you're in Detroit, you can flood. Woo! Yeah. Too damn hot. That's fun, Tiling. Yeah, I kind of like it. Here, check it out. That's fancy. Check out that shower curtain. I like it. It's water themed. Go ahead and... Oh, okay. My heat wave experience, I didn't talk about my heat wave experience. It's like, what I did last summer, what did I do for the heat wave? Oh, you got your shirt. It's a great one. It's an old one. What did I do? What did I do? So, last... Look at that. Yeah, those have the cloud chamber trails. It's so faded. You're muted. So, like I was saying, I like to play with my... No, I have a point. I'm like, what's going on there? There's like holes all throughout the shirt. Oh, you need a new one. I do need to know it, but this has, yeah, the cloud chamber little squiggles on it. Wasn't it Marshall did this one? Yeah, as it was. And it has the old Nassalization fun. They had this as a mug also, but that mug is long gone. Didn't last as long as my mouse pad, which is just indestructible. I don't know because I haven't tried it, but I hear that you can actually put out a fire. A wildfire, California wildfire can be put out by throwing one of these onto the fire. No. And it will surprise... That's what I heard. I don't know if it's, like I said, I don't know if it's true. No, no, no. Oh, what was I going to say? So, ages ago, not ages ago, yeah, ages ago Marshall made these things, but I'll try and find them. I did find them at one point in the cafe press store. They were still in there. Now I have to remember how to get back into cafe press. But okay, this weekend the heat wave, it was 108 on Saturday, and that was the day that we left our house and went to a friend's house that had central heating and air. You don't have central air. See, this is the thing. Why would you? It's Portland. It's Portland. We don't. So we had... But we left the house with our cats in it and we left it with, like, two room air conditioners chugging along, trying to cool the upstairs of the house just to kind of keep it cooler. And we have two ceiling fans, one in the upstairs bedroom and one downstairs in the living room. And then we had three additional fans running in the house to just circulate air through the house. By Monday, which was the hottest day, the basement was 80 degrees. The bedrooms upstairs were like 95, maybe up to 100, and the main floor of the house was close to 90 degrees. And Portland, which is never supposed to be that. And that's what that was like, us using all the stuff to keep the house cool so that it would be cool when we were able to come back how cool-ish and our cats would stay alive and the fish would stay alive. And that was with Marshall coming back at least once a day to check on everything. But we're not alone. And there were people reporting that their apartments and their houses were well over 100 degrees on Saturday even before the hot temperatures, the really hot temperatures got started. There is a pocket of California I have discovered that does not heat up. It was those high triple digits a couple of weeks ago here. And I took my daughters to the place that is like, you know, the island where they found King Kong and it was like surrounded by fog and mist. There's a little area like that along the California coast. From the Pacifica, is it? Down to Half Moon Bay. Doesn't care. It was 108 degrees here in the Central Valley. It was probably 100 degrees in San Francisco. We went down to this place called Rockaway Beach. There was fog rolling over the highway as we approached. It's like, we don't care. Doesn't matter. Microclimate. It's amazing there. Yeah. How hot did it get in Davis this last weekend? This last weekend, I don't know. But we've gotten into that 108, 9 degrees for days on end here already. When you're like in a place that's hot all the time, people have air conditioners. People are, I mean, I remember living in Davis. But yeah. Yeah. So that's the thing. It's like, it's unseasonably high here. It's breaking records. But every building constructed, every tool shed, everything, like everything has air conditioning because it's expected that that's going to be part of your existence is avoiding the sun for a while. Yeah. Check it. Oh, Gorov 72. That's perfect. 72 and sunny. Oh, Alameda is a pretty nice place. I love that. I love Alameda. I'm very jealous that you live there. I love a town that has its own tunnel. It's got like a Batcave tunnel entrance. And a bridge. There's like three ways to get on to Alameda. Boo. Then I don't like it anymore. But it used to be, am I right, that it just had, you had to go through this tunnel and that was the only way to get there? I mean, it's had a tunnel, or it's had a bridge as long as I've been going to Alameda, but I don't know. Okay. I've never been on the bridge. I only take the tunnel. The tunnel, yes. Alameda is a place I would like to live. That's really one of the nicest places. One of our best friends lives there. We go there all the time. That's great. I like Alameda. What would happen if you made it really big? What happens if you make it, oh, multiples. Down, potentially. That's kind of weird. If I make it really big, it tells me that it's like not, it's not a, what's it called? The quality isn't good enough. Oh, okay. Not a high enough resolution. Got it. Yes. Thank you. My particular. Yeah, if the Mad Max type apocalypse ever happens, you got two tunnels and one bridge, apparently you got to take out and then you are safe from the rest of the world until they rediscover boats, I guess. That's pretty funky. Yeah, I don't know. You might, you know what you might have to do, and I hate to throw this on you this late at night, but you might have to make a new piece of artwork tonight. For a towel. Not tonight. Just, you know, just do it right now. I am currently making 13 more as we speak, so don't even worry about it. Oh, that's cute. Yeah, I think I might. I mean, we could just do, I mean, I like your art. Your art's great. Something that's nice and horizontally is the best probably. Yeah, yeah, like boop. Could just do the big twist logo, but that's not your art. No, I tried it. It didn't really look at it on the beach towel, but we can try again. Maybe you could help me find the right way to do it here. Twist. The fish, the fish is like, twist. What? Twist. Twist. There's an issue. What's the issue? The image is larger. Then it is, and you go, okay, cut it off. It's okay. Cut it off. Do you have to crop it? No, it's, oh yeah. It's saying like, the quality is no good. Like I can't. We need critical thinking says, some of the worst places in California when it gets hot is when it does not cool it. Night, like red blood. Yeah, it wasn't cooling night at night here. We're in the Delta region, but there was no wind for a lot of those hot nights where it just was not dropping. No Delta breeze. California is a weird state though. We're so big. We have like the Death Valley area, which has some of the hottest temperatures the United States ever experiences. And then we've got these areas up in the Sierras that are some of the coldest because they're both elevated. And to get to these winds that come ripping through there that put that wind chill factor down into the brrrrrrr. I'm really confused about this LA news. What is the LA news? I think who is it? Michael Jobin said firework explosion in South Los Angeles. 5,000 pounds of fireworks. So apparently what I'm what I'm getting from this is that it was these fireworks were illegal and they were seized from a South LA home. But what I'm confused about is that it says the LA police responded to an explosion. And this is at the scene where they had confiscated the fireworks. But there was a planned detonation that resulted in a fireworks explosion. I'm like, is police detonating and were they there to begin with? I'm very confused. Very confused. These are all good questions. Anyway, big bada boom in South LA. People were injured. That's no good. It's a lot of fireworks. Oh, this looks good. Whoa, but you. What is that? It's a beach towel. That is awesome. I like that one. So like we'll make it. Nice. Twist beach towel. Hey, you looking for a twist beach towel? It's like everyone's like, look at that product. That's going to be amazing. We've got cool beach towels. Thanks, Blair. That's awesome. I would not have done that. That looks like a hot beach towel. Absolutely. Yeah. But that's kind of what you want, right? When you get out of the water and you're all cold. Give me something that's got some a little bit of heat to it. It'd be so it's so cool. It's hot. So hot it's cool. Or if you're going to a pool, then it doesn't matter. Yeah. All right. It's late o'clock in the evening. It's late o'clock. It's all good in the western front. We've all survived another week making it through. I hope everyone else is doing well out there. I hope everyone's doing all right. Nothing on the docket. Yeah, I did it for late o'clock. Fourth of July this weekend, everyone. That's a big holiday. Wait, how is that possible? Don't explode anything. Okay. Oh gosh. Please don't. We like science and science and chemistry and chemistry likes flamboyant chemical interactions, but you know, we don't want that to be influenced by climate change right now. So let's think twice and be smart. Use our heads and let cooler thinking prevail when it comes to. Well, warming is causing droughts in a dangerous wildfire. I got an idea. Let's put a bunch of carbon in the air with flammable materials. Perfect. Yeah, don't bust out that flamethrower. Yeah, it's a poor idea. And yes, tomorrow you can flip your calendar over because it's a whole new month. We are entering the second half of this wild year, which I'm trying to think optimistically about the rest of the year. I'm trying to think optimistically about the rest of the year because there are things that we want to have happen, people that we want to keep seeing. We want to see in person things we want to do right there. I got a thing or two specifically for sure. A thing or two. I've tried to do twice already, but I would like to actually get over with and move on to the rest of my life. Identity 4 just shared a really cool picture of a flamethrower in the discord. I love it. Yeah, let's be cool, man. Let's be part of making this year a great year for everybody. Let's move it all forward. Is it time to turn it off? Time to close the show? It's time, it's time. It's time. All right, in that case, say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night, Keke. Good night, everyone. Have a wonderful week. We hope to see you again next week. Take care.