 This is TWIS, this week in science episode number 565, recorded on Wednesday, May 4, 2016. May the 4th be science-y! Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight we are going to fill your head with a bit of ketamine, dung beetles and traumatic insemination. But first... Very recently, in a galaxy right where you are now, TWIS, a new knowledge. It is a period of scientific discovery, a science-y podcast striking from a hidden studio has done their best to inform the public about current science knowledge. During the podcast, the hosts managed to retell cutting edge news that could lead to break through cures, advances in green technology and yes, even a death star, or a supernova, with enough power to destroy an entire planet, several entire planets in fact, if they happen to be orbiting the star before it goes supernova, pursued by sinister agents of scientific ignorance, Princess Kiki and Blair reach out from their podcast, custodians of the recent research that can save their people and restore informed thinking to the galaxy. Also there will be lasers, robots and spacecraft and bizarre lifeforms and justin mind-tracks and much much more, so may the forth be with you here on This Week in Science, coming up next. This Week in Science, what's happening, what's happening, what's happening, this week in science. Good science to you Kiki and Blair. And good science to you Justin, Blair and everyone out there, welcome to yet another episode of This Week in Science and tonight as usual we have a very May the 4th-y show, well it is May the 4th for us, so that's where that all comes from, slight saver of fights. If you weren't already sick of it, or maybe nostalgic for how sick of it you were a few days ago. Well no, we probably have some podcast listeners where it's Christmas. I get to love May the 4th. Still catching up, this was the May the 4th which explains everything you just heard. Yeah, alright, but we have got so much science, science, science lined up on this week's show. I have new stories about the waters of Mars, ketamine for depression, 1 trillion bacterial friends and we have an interview on the subject of pollutants at sea with UCSD researcher Amro Hamdoon. What do you have for us Justin? I've got sometimes a runestone is just a runestone and oh man, those were the dung beetles I was looking for. Oh no. And Blair, what do you have for the end of the corner? I have, let's see, computers, training dogs. I have a possible chance to bring species back from the brink of extinction and then I have, oh yeah, traumatic insemination worse than we've ever heard before. Wow, wow, okay, this is going to be a full animal corner, this is going to be a full show and I hope you guys are ready to jump in to a little bit of ketamine. How does that sound? We have talked before on the show about how ketamine has been used of late for relieving serious depression. It has been shown many times in there, ketamine clinics popping up across the United States here in the Pacific Northwest. I actually know a doctor who runs a ketamine clinic, but anyway these clinics are popping up to help people for whom antidepressants do not work and they do not bounce them out of standard of serious depression. A single dose of ketamine is able to relieve these depressive symptoms long enough for other antidepressants to be able to take effect. So researchers are trying to figure out how does ketamine do this? What is the magic mechanism of ketamine that seems to bring people out of the state that they are in that nothing else works for? So in the past we've talked about a particular receptor on nerve cells called the NMDA receptor which is involved in memory and all sorts of other interesting and long term, long term potentiation which is the form of cellular memory that occurs at the level of the neuron and how it might be, how it might affect it directly at that receptor because we know it binds to it tightly. So researchers were like, alright let's take a closer look at this. So there are some NIH National Institute of Health researchers, National Institute of Mental Health as well and University of Maryland School of Medicine, a lot of other researchers coming in to be able to work on this study and they looked at ketamine and another closely related drug to see how well each of them worked. Ketamine does a really great job. They find in previous studies they found that ketamine seems to bring female mice out of depression more so than male mice. So there's an interesting difference there. I'm just going to put a pin in that and let you think about that while I go on in this study. So there are other chemicals that target the NMDA receptor and they don't have anti-depressant effects. So it's like, alright what's the difference? And so they looked at another chemical, they're like alright it affects the receptor, it doesn't have the anti-depressant effects in mice either. So okay, let's look at some other stuff. Two different forms of ketamine, they looked at stereoisomers. So these are molecules that have the same 3D structure but they're the same chemical structure but they're in different three dimensions. So it's right and left-handed molecules. The form that has the higher affinity for the receptor, the one that binds better, connects to the receptor better, actually is not as good of an anti-depressant. So they go, huh, alright that's weird, that's not what you would expect. You would expect that if it's through this receptor and it's the ketamine action through the receptor that the stereoisomer that binds more highly would have a bigger effect. But it didn't. So they went back to this knowledge that female mice have something different going on in their brains with ketamine than male mice. And so they looked specifically at the brains of female mice to see what was released and they found that metabolism in the female brain happens more quickly. And they determined that there's a metabolite that comes out. So a byproduct of the metabolism of the ketamine molecule within the brain that is higher in female mice. It's called 2S6S2R6RHNK or hydroxynor ketamine. They call it HNK or HANK, we can call it HANK. So they looked at the formation of this metabolite and they tested a couple different forms of the metabolite and they found that one specific form of this metabolite had anti-depressant like effects in mice that are very similar to ketamine lasted for three days. But it doesn't inhibit the NMDA receptors in the same way that ketamine does. It doesn't have the other effects of ketamine. It doesn't have dissociative effects. It doesn't have euphoric effects. It doesn't have tranquilizing effects. So nothing affected sensory processing, physical activity or coordination. But the depression was lifted in these mice for several days. So now the researchers are thinking this is a cool direction to go in to look for potential drugs for treatment of depression. Yeah, that's brilliant. So that's, you know, it is showing the complex nature of what actually is going on in the body and when we are, when we're looking at the effects that a drug has or anything in the environment has on the body, we can assume, ah, yes, A plus B equals C. It's this drug. It's this molecule that does it, but it's this cascade of the side effect. This other, what comes of the metabolism of that drug and not specifically the drug itself and now that it's narrowed, we don't necessarily need the whole drug and everything else that comes with it, with its trade-offs and side effects and everything else. And you get begin to drill down. You can isolate then. This is the actual thing that's causing this positive effect we want. Can we create this effect without the rest of it? Brilliant. Exactly, because ketamine is also known to be addictive over time. And so you don't want something that's addictive if you're trying to treat the problem. You don't want to cause a new problem. Although, to be fair, to be fair, if one of the effects on people who self-medicate with lots of drugs out there are self-medicating. Right. Is it addiction or is it like, this actually helps. And that's why I'm wanting to do it again and again. That's a very good question. So it's OK to be addicted to, like, carrots, right? Nobody complains, I can't get enough carrots. I got to have carrots, a little bit of carrots every day. Well, if you did eat too many carrots, you would turn orange. Yeah, you can have vitamin A poisoning, I suppose. You can overdo anything. But I'm not talking about overdo, but sort of an addiction to a certain food, which is interesting because we're going to be talking about this in the second half because I'm going to have to admit to an addiction to eating tuna, for instance, which I think plays big into the interview that we're going to have in the second half. But yeah, but this is interesting. I mean, in one experiment, they took mice and they gave them the option of giving themselves ketamine or giving themselves Hank. And they liked to self-medicate with ketamine a lot more. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. I guess my whole theory of just wanting to do carrots every day, nah, they slipped into a little extra kick from the drug. Yeah, a little extra kick, exactly. Yeah, so this is just one direction that it's neat to know that government-funded research is looking in this direction and that they've allowed, that they've funded research in this way that gets beyond the properties of an addictive drug, right, and gets into more of a, hey, this is helping people now. How do we actually harness the chemical components of what's going on to be able to use it to our benefit? Right, and remember we're talking about government. Sort of health and societal effects are the sort of legal mechanism things that shut down access to a drug or allow it. And it's one of those things that you don't, from a more like arts and liberal arts point of view, hey, wouldn't it be great to come up with LSD and marijuana and all these things that have been associated with really creative artists and musicians and things throughout time and just figure out a way to isolate a little bit of those effects that do lead to that creativity and maybe don't have a social consequence as much. But there's no research for that. There's not a whole lot of research into how to make, how to give artists that tour. Yeah, yeah, let's focus on fixing depression first. But I'm telling you, most artists, if they just could, never mind. OK, moving on. All right, some reference to Antonia again. Moving on, so the next step with this is to let a bunch of chemists start looking at the chemical structure of this HNK to figure out exactly what it's binding to, because it's not inhibiting the NMDA receptor. Maybe it's up-regulating something else. So like an AMPA receptor, like there's stuff going on that we need to know that we don't know still. Lots of questions, so much needs to be addressed before it actually becomes something that we can use as a treatment. Next story, what was my next story? My next story, oh yes, Waters on Mars. Oh no, no, that's not what I was going to do. Sorry, I'm going all over the place this evening. Have you guys read the story about the weight loss study involving the biggest loser contestants? The scientific study about weight loss? No, I haven't read that one. So I read it in less time, it takes me to actually follow the course and just give you money and have something that makes that, so I lose weight. Right, no, yeah, so there was a TV show, there is a TV show called The Biggest Loser, and several years ago researchers went, hey, we should use this crazy sample of people who are focused on losing weight and keeping the weight off and kind of having that social pressure of keeping it off by becoming television reality stars. We should follow them and see what happens to their weight gain, weight loss, metabolism, et cetera. And so they followed 14 contestants from The Biggest Loser and they, from, what season was it? Anyway, they followed them for six years after the original airing of the season in which they lost weight and published their findings in the journal Obesity and their findings suggest, this is the nutshell, is that our bodies, if we lose a lot of weight, might purposefully, on purpose, slow down our metabolism to help regain pounds and to get back to some kind of a what they're calling weight set point. But somehow maybe our bodies have a set point that they get to and want to maintain that set point. What they've looked at though, in this, what I'd like to point out about this study, is that many of the contestants, they found that after six years, only one of the contestants weighed less than they did after the competition. The other contestants gained back a lot of weight, a lot, a lot of weight. And they found that the contestants' metabolisms were burning at about 500 fewer calories, or if you want to speak scientifically, the kilo calories is the actual measurement, a day that would be expected for someone of their weight. So their body, even if they were eating an appropriate number of calories, their body was still like, nope, nope, you got to gain weight. So I'm going to keep this metabolic rate a little bit slow so you're just gonna creep back up on the scale and have to work that extra bit harder. Now the thing about this whole study is that this is like a very hardcore situation. It's a competition in which people are trying as hard as they can to lose weight as fast as they can. So they are dieting in a way that they would never normally diet. They are exercising sometimes 12 more hours a day, putting their body through physical exertion that most normal people would not do on a daily basis. And so after you finish the competition, you're not gonna keep doing that, right? So your body is basically over the course of the contest being in a stress situation. And so I wonder how this really relates to how people lose weight in normal situations. If you simply adopt a new diet, a healthier diet and lose weight slowly over time with a realistic exercise schedule, does the body need to set the metabolism in the way that it does? Maybe is it at first, maybe it's like any kind of habit, at first the body does want to get back to its set point, but maybe you give it a new set point if you keep at your weight loss goals long enough and steadily enough. And this is something, you know, I mean the question is people do gain a lot of weight back after bouts of weight loss and why is it? Is it because people try to lose weight too quickly? Or is it because there is, specifically, this is always going to happen, your body will always fight back against you? Right, well I think also just the biggest loser as you mentioned before is such a unusual situation. I mean once you enter into the real world, you have a lot more difficult decisions to make with your food, you're probably going back, a lot of these people are going back to households that have unhealthy eating habits. So the unhealthy food is around all the time. But ultimately, you're not spending eight hours a day in the gym, which is what you're doing when you're on the show, so. Yeah, and most people, you know, are lucky to get in that hour of exercise or half hour of exercise that is recommended per day. It's not an easy thing to do. So the interesting point also the researchers made is that gastric bypass seems to be more effective than people who have similar weight losses. So there's something about surgical interventions that the authors think might reset the body's weight set point, but nobody's looked at that really yet. Fascinating. Losing weight by exercise and starving yourself, your body fights back, fights back against you, but if you just, you know, make your stomach smaller, bypass a little early, your body's like okay, what can I do? Yeah, so those were my first couple of stories for the show tonight. Justin, what you got? Oh, what do I have? Let's see here, I've got, this is a, researchers have found an evolutionary connection between dinosaurs and dung beetles. So an international team of scientists uncovered the first molecular evidence indicating that dung beetles evolved in association with dinosaurs. Findings placed the origin of dung beetles in the lower Cretaceous period with the major, first major diversification occurring in the middle of the Cretaceous. This timeline places their origins approximately 30 million years earlier than previously thought. Studies published in the open access journal, PLOS ONE. They discovered that beetle populations and evolutionary diversification coincided with the ecological domination of flowering plants. So all of a sudden flowering plants are showing up everywhere, everywhere, everywhere in the Cretaceous. Most of these, most of the beetles at the time were herbivores, they ate the plants. So it kind of makes sense that they were following this plant thing. But, these, okay, hang on. So beetles ate these plants. The plants were abundant 130 million years ago. So why did they switch to dung? Their main food source is already in abundance and everywhere. Because these plants were showing up everywhere, so were the dinosaurs that ate them. And where you have dinosaurs, you have also a lot of dinosaur dung, which not only propagates more flowers because of the fertilizer and the seed transplantation, but is another resource for an industrious, young herbivore beetle to take advantage of. Look, it's already all this matter. It's easy to get to, and I can just take advantage of that. So, boom. Dinosaur poop, boom. Dung beetles. Easy connection there. What was sort of also interesting I thought in this is that with the extinction of the dinosaurs, there was also a major extinction event amongst beetles. Of course, it was across all populations on the planet back then, but specifically dung beetles nearly went extinct, but enough of them survived to continue on. The findings also challenged previous research that associated the origin of dung feeding with mammals, although the study also indicates dung beetles diversified at their greatest rate in line with the major diversification of mammals, but illustrates this was actually a second big diversification event, not the only or the original. Yeah, just thinking about the bronosaurus or the apatosaurus and the amount of matter that would be created is a huge niche for these guys. Yeah, and they'd found, like this is pushing it back to 130 millionaires. They had found, I think, 80, 90 million year old corpillite fossilized dinosaur dung that had tunneling in it that looked like it came from dung beetles. So they knew there was this relationship there, but as we sort of think of the lowly dung beetle as it gazes up to the stars to sort of direct it on its way, we gotta realize, these activities, this behavior's been going on much longer than any of us perhaps suspected. We're the newcomers. All our new fangled technology doesn't change a- Back in my day, we roll around dung. Rolling a dung ball is the same now as it was 130 million. It's actually perhaps easier now than it was 130 million years ago. Were the beetles bigger back then? Right, they probably were bigger, but yeah, that's a hefty task. Of course, I don't know enough about the corpillites that we've gotten from a dinosaur. I don't know that even the apatosaurus could have been not the giant cow patty that I imagine, but could have been like, the many, many, many, many, many, many pellets of like a goat or a rabbit or kangaroo or something. Well, I for one, I'm really glad that the dung beetles did not go extinct with the dinosaurs and that they were able to adapt or at least certain members of the dung beetle family were able to adapt and keep on rolling. And I guess, do you know what time it is? It's time for Blair's Animal Corner. It's time for Blair's Animal Corner. It's about that time. Little pet, no banana. She's your girl. Except for giant pandas. That's the girl. That'll go, go, go, go. What you got, Blair? Oh, I have the greatest gift that science news has given to me this year. It is a new twist in the story of traumatic insemination. So, everyone, I hope you're well rested cause there won't be any sleep in tonight. So, the twisted winged parasites of the species Stylops abenae, they reproduce via traumatic insemination, but they have an extra wrinkle in the way that they reproduced. Via a new study, they found out this was especially interesting because these guys are endoparasitic. So, the males are these free flying, twisted winged fly looking things. And the females spend their entire adult life inside of a host. And I have a fun little picture here. I think Kiki has some too. But I have a fun picture of what it looks like when you have a full grown adult female living inside of what is essentially a bee abdomen. Or a wasp abdomen. So, you can see right here, there are little kind of heads poking out of the back section of the abdomen. Oh, goodness. So, when you look at a bee or a fly and there are the black and yellow bandings, if you could imagine at the point of between the end of a black band and the start of the next band, which is the yellow, where the yellow hairs come off. It really is, it's like segments that come together. And one goes underneath the other and they have just burrowed right in there. Right underneath. Right in there, underneath. And they're just sticking their little heads out. Yes, yes, just peeking out. Meanwhile, they are occupying about 90% of the abdomens of the cavity inside the abdomen. So, there's not a lot of room for any of the host left in there. And eventually, the male comes along. Usually, once an adult male is flying around free-flying, he only has a few short hours to find a female. He finds her inside her host. And he, ever so gently, stabs her in the neck with his hook-shaped appendage. So, what we have going on is the female burrowed inside of the abdomen of another insect, like a bee. And then the male comes around and has to stab through the abdomen of the bee to be able to stab into the abdomen of the female. The neck. The neck of the female. The neck of the female, yes. So, before this study from a university in Germany, they thought there was a cavity that the male copulatory organ was going into. Made perfectly for the delivering of seminal fluid. But no! Because wouldn't that be just the way it was put together? A perfect delivery. Oh, what is this? But it turns out there's no reason to keep the female alive because the reproductive strategy gets even more interesting. So, the hook-shaped appendage is stabbed into the female's neck. The seminal fluid goes directly into her body cavity. The seminal fluid goes through the female's body cavity, finds eggs. The eggs are fertilized. Then, the eggs grow inside the mother, inside the host. Of course they do. Yeah. Then, as the larva grow, they eat their mother inside the host. And of course, eat the host as well. No, that's where this gets interesting. No. Okay. So then, the larva just make their exit. And then if they're females, they need to find a new host. If they're a male, they have just a few short hours to find a female. The act itself of stabbing the female in the neck lasts up to 30 minutes, most likely to reduce sperm competition. Right, because if you're in the way, then there's no other male coming in to be inseminating. That's no drive by stabbing, my friends. That takes a while. But so after these larva make their way, as far as we can tell, the hosts don't die, but they are sterilized. It's interesting that the hosts don't die after all of the trauma that they go through, they're able to survive. That's fascinating. Yeah, so why allow the host to survive? Why indeed. So this is something that I tried to do some extra research on, because I found in this article, in this press release, it didn't say anything about what happened to the host in the end, and I was dying to know, dying to know. So I did all this research on these specific endoparasites, and I looked at their life history and life stages, and I looked at other endoparasites. These guys are really an interesting case of not killing the host. You can see the advantage in that, in that that means there's no chance that the host will die before your offspring get everything they need from it. So you always think of parasites. The most effective parasite keeps their host alive the longest. Yep. Yeah, and you can imagine. Why even a new parasite could go into that host and use it again. That would be advantageous, right? I don't know if that's ever happened. I don't think that's been studied yet, but that would certainly be a pretty great way of keeping resources around for future generations. So the other thing is yeah, absolutely, if this bee is killed, and they could be near the end, they could be maybe ready to hatch and go away, but if it died just a little bit before, then it's not flying around. It's gonna be privy to predation by anything that can find a non-moving ant and decide to eat it. So I mean a non-moving bee, like ants perhaps, and decide to swarm and devour it. So good strategy. I would think that the white sterilized thing is more just because you've utilized the abdomen and probably a lot of the region where that takes place. It's not like, ah, we'll do this. There's no intention or benefit that the parasite gets. It's just a side effect of having been parasitized. But yeah, since they're not using the host for nutrition, I suppose you could reparasitize. It's worked once, why not a second time? Yeah, I don't know. I think this definitely needs some more study, guys. I'd love to hear more. Stop this thing and everything you said. It's that the males are born and only have a few hours in which you dramatically inseminate a female. I mean, I guess the game plan is already there and the genetic memory of what you're supposed to do with your hook appendage. You don't have to spend much time figuring that out. But finding another parasite, and anybody, is it, God, this is a immensely hard problem. Now you're just going around checking bees. Oh, never mind, not parasitized, go on to the next bee. Oh, what an interesting point you brought up. There's actually a way to get around that. So these mining bees, they hibernate underground or in mounds or hives. And the ones that are parasitized usually come out early from hibernation, which is a key that those are the bees for you to look at if you're a male. So then that's the population available to you, so that's perfect. What you hope is that this will continue as climate and temperatures change and be hibernation periods, that the stylox life cycle when the males come around is timed correctly to when the female hosting mining bees come out of hibernation. And I would guess without knowing, speculating, right? That certain bees, like all the bees don't just come out of hibernation at the same time. So it's not just that previously parasitized bees come out earlier, it may be that that's how those, that the bees that are the early risers are the ones that happen to time up and then get parasitized. And then that just keeps going. That just keeps going. Well, I don't know, that's an interesting point. As far as I can tell, it's a chemical cue from the parasite to make them come out early. But I don't know how intensely that has been studied either. I think that this entire life history needs to be looked at more closely because I am just fascinated. Yeah, yeah. Well, it looks as though the researcher, Miriam Pinehart, who is working on this topic, she looks thrilled to be working on it, so hopefully she'll be finding out more from it. I saw, oh man, I saw that picture and I was like, oh, I hope, I hope. She has a big smile on her face. She seems like someone I'd love to get coffee with, right? Let's talk about it. Okay, let's talk about your next story. Do you want to save it till later so we can get to our guests sooner? Sure, okay, let's, yeah. I can do a quick version later, I don't want to. Okay, we will do a quick version later, so that's it temporarily for the animal corner. We are going to take a quick break and I'm going to say a few things. We're going to bring our guest in and then we're going to talk about tuna. Well, not just tuna, but pollutants in the sea and what we should know, you and me. This is This Week in Science. We will be back in just a few moments. Please stay tuned for more. Things you've heard with more than intuition. The line of reason shows the way to go. The method to high-part participation's hardly on the free time. Put on a pair of goggles and go look your phone. Hey everyone, if you enjoy twists, why don't you head on over to twist.org and check out our Zazzle store. We've got a link where there's a whole bunch of really cool merchandise that you may enjoy, tote bags, you know, get a little twist logo action on a canvas bag, going to the grocery store, kind of a thing, a t-shirt, a hat, a mug, all these fun things that can help you express your love of twists while at the same time help support twists and all that we do. That's twist.org, check out our Zazzle store. 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Okay, you sound good. We've got video, we've got audio. The audio is the most important though. And I'm gonna put the music on and bring you in. Do you have any questions before we get going? No. Okay, awesome. Cue the music. The message of vaccine in your brain. This miracle cure leaves no time and no pain. We wanna skeptic again. I can't believe you believe in that plan. We disagree, but I still give a damn. And we're back with more of this week in science. Yes, we are, and we are joined by our guest this evening, Dr. Ambrose Hamdoun. He is an associate professor of biology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. He has a PhD in physiology from UC Davis. We were there at the same time. That was fun. He also held an NIH NRSA postdoctoral fellowship at Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University. His general interests are in the fields of developmental biology and environmental toxicology. His current research focuses on the defense and survival mechanisms of embryos and the biology of the accumulation and elimination of chemicals in marine animal cells. And the sea urchin is usually your animal of choice, but in a recent paper that was published, your lab found that persistent organic pollutants in the ocean accumulate in the tissues of tuna, inhibiting cellular defenses of cells and humans and mice by binding with essential transport proteins. Fun stuff, Amro, welcome to the show. Thank you, thanks for having me on. And Amro, that last bit was terrifying to me. Yeah. Because I am a four to five can of tuna a week, because it is my type. If you took everything on the grocery list and looked at the thing that I consistently buy and consume the most, it's tuna. Me too. Oh no. So we're doomed. So we're doomed. This is sort of a good news, bad news story. So the bad news is that there are really contaminated fish out there in the ocean and they account for about 3% of the fish that we caught that you probably don't wanna eat. The bad news is there's no way to know when you buy your fish at the store which one's really contaminated or not because we don't have a really great mechanism of labeling fish from the point of capture all the way through to the supermarket where you buy the fish. So I wish I could tell you which can of tuna to buy but you're sort of on your own. It wouldn't stop me. This is the thing. It'd be great to narrow down the right can, like hold it up to the light and like narrow that once in a while. But 3% I'll take those odds. That's right. Well, we know where some of the most contaminated places on the planet are. So that's one way we can kind of reduce those fish in the food supply. And we also know what the contaminants are so we can look for them. So there are ways to do that. And one of the things we're working on now is ways to look at these contaminants more cheaply and rapidly so that anybody could do just what you're talking about. Hold the tuna can up to the light and determine whether the tuna that's in there is clean or not. And an important thing to add to all of this is that these contaminants are not unique to fish or seafood or tuna. They're really everywhere. But fish, we focused on fish because fish tend to have the highest levels of these chemicals as compared to some of the other foods that we consume regularly. Yeah, because fish, as they swim in the ocean, they breathe, they eat, they're surrounded by, they're in a bath of anything that's around them. Whereas other animals have to go searching for specific food types. And it's a little bit different. And top of the food chain there with the tuna too. That's what I was gonna say, yeah. Like with mercury, that's the big concern with mercury, right? Bioaccumulation is huge. Yeah, so the idea is that not only are they swimming around in the ocean, the ocean's large, but the ocean has been used sort of as a dumping ground for a lot of these environmental chemicals. And of course, all of our land sources of chemicals like agriculture drain into rivers and they ultimately end up in the ocean. So we looked at fish in the Gulf of Mexico, for example. And those fish have very high levels of these chemicals because the Mississippi River is a great carrier of contaminants that would normally be on land and end up in the ocean. Can we talk about the contaminants themselves for a minute? I mentioned briefly that they're persistent, organic pollutants, but what does that mean to the layperson? Or, and to me. That's a good suggestion. Yeah. Well, actually the reason I came on the show is I was hoping you guys could explain my paper to me. But if I did not knew it, then, so I think basically they're chemicals that hang around. And a lot of things that are in the environment break down. And after a few days or weeks or months are essentially gone. Persistent pollutants are this class of chemicals. They include really famous things like DDT that really arguably spark the modern environmental movement, Rachel Carson's work on pollution. That the idea is that these are chemicals that don't break down and they have this really unusual tendency to move out of the environment and into living things. And as a result, because we eat other animals, they end up in us and humans, all of the chemicals we looked at in our study are things that you can find in the blood or in a human body of every American or probably every person on the planet. So whether or not you think you can try to avoid these chemicals, but they're really persistent, they really stick around and they just sort of end up in you. Yeah, they're things like flame retardants, which are the chemicals that are put in the foams that make up couches. Or they're delicious. Yeah. Yeah, and I know of people who are working very hard to get flame retardant furniture outlawed and to get these flame retardants taken out of our furnishings so that we won't have them in our home environments anymore, but they're still gonna stick around. So the state of California just passed a law that requires labeling of flame retardants, labeling of furniture that contains flame retardants. And actually the person that's probably done the most work on this, or one of the people who's done a lot of work on this is Arlene Blum, who wrote the book, Anna Perna, and she is actually a chemist from UC Berkeley and pointed out that a lot of these flame retardants, the structures of these flame retardants, when you ban one of them, what happens is that people make another structure that's very similar and use it and they get the sort of same outcome. So she pushed hard so that we could have kind of, at least labeling and the ability to know what it is that's in our furniture or in our house. Our major exposure to some of these retardants is just household dust. Just dust. Just household dust. So you're gonna be picking up a lot of flame retardants from those, stain repellents from your carpets. How many chemicals did you look for in your particular assay? We looked for 40 chemicals that are three major classes, pesticides, flame retardants, and PCBs. These are legacy electronics chemicals. And then there's, we also looked at some plastics related compounds like phthalates and bisphenol A. Yeah, okay. So what do they actually do? They attach to this transporter and how did you, what's the story behind how you figured this particular inhibition of the transporter out? How did you determine all this? So we were trying to understand why it is that certain chemicals are so persistent. And the idea being that if you can figure that out, you can make chemicals that don't persist. So that would sort of be the, that'd be sort of an amazing thing to do. You can make a flame retardant that keeps your laptop from bursting into flames, right? That's a good thing. But then it breaks down over time. But then it breaks down and it doesn't end up in you and it doesn't have any problems. And what we thought was we would find some chemicals that this transporter, which is a really important cell defense, would latch onto and eliminate, get rid of. And that would give us some clues into which ones are safer and which ones are worse. And we looked at these persistent chemicals because they're precisely the kind of thing we worry about in terms of environmental chemicals. And the unexpected thing for us was that rather, so they latch on and what we show in the paper is they actually bind right where they should if they were going to be expelled or eliminated by these transporters. But instead of being eliminated, they sort of hold on and they prevent the transporter from actually doing its work and they actually slow it down. So the consequence is that the more of these things you get exposed to, the less effective your body is going to be at getting rid of chemicals you would otherwise get rid of. So do you have evidence or are people looking for evidence of it actually influencing immune function and having downstream effects? Or is this just the first study showing, okay, we know that it blocks the activity of these transporters, slows them down, they don't work as well, and now there are chemicals getting into cells. We don't know what happens next. Yeah, so the idea that this could happen was proposed about 20 years ago by a Croatian scientist named Branko Kurleck, and he suggested that maybe what makes these chemicals so persistent is rather than being pumped out or eliminated by the system, they actually slow it down or bog it down. And it's been shown in a variety of different organisms and cell lines and different test scenarios that this actually occurs, but nobody really had a sense for how this occurs. Does it occur through some kind of predictable binding to the drug transporter? Or is this just some general effect of weakening a cell and making it not work? What our paper shows is that this occurs through a very specific binding to residues in the transporter that are evolutionarily conserved. So 15 of the residues that bind PBDE, which is a flame retardant in a human, the same 15 are also present in the same transporter from a tuna. And what this means is that if you want to begin to design chemicals to be recognized and eliminated, you actually have some targets that you can work with. And we think in terms of human health impacts, we don't know, you raise a good point, we don't know who is going to be affected most by this, but our concern is obviously about vulnerable populations. There's one in particular that we thought about and that is human neonates. So normally this protein, P-glycoprotein, sitting around in your gut and it's keeping nasty things that are in your diet from entering into your body. Human neonates in the first six months of life tend to have relatively low levels of these protective proteins in their gut. So they're already kind of at the threshold. And breast milk tends to concentrate a lot of these pollutants. In fact, in villages in Africa where DDT is still used for malaria control, the concentrations of DDT and breast milk are as high as 30 micromolar. And that's well within the kind of range of concentrations that we saw causing problems for this defense system in a test tube. So we think this paper should encourage our policymakers to think a little bit about this pathway as being a kind of potential way in which chemicals can cause harm and maybe think about what are safe. We don't have exposure limits for these sorts of things. Think about what our safe exposure limits should be. And one analogy might be to think of these as being a bit like endocrine disruptors, right? We have chemicals that we think of as being like hormone mimics. These are immune system weakening chemicals that we might want to think about. How much of them we want to eat? How much we want in our food? How many cans of tuna Justin should eat per week? How much tuna? But maybe as an adult, you don't think about it as much. How much should you feed your children tuna? Or how much, you know, if you're pregnant, how much tuna? We tell pregnant women not to eat tuna because of the mercury, like Blair said earlier. But maybe there are other reasons. That's right. Most people think of mercury as being the major contaminant to worry about in tuna. And it certainly is. It can be at very high levels in very high trophic level tuna. We looked at yellowfin tuna, which are somewhere in the middle, as compared to, say, bluefin or skipjack, which is what's in a lot of canned tuna. And even there, we found quite a bit of these persistent pollutants in certain fish. But again, the good news is you can avoid this if you know where your fish comes from and you know that it's a place where there are relatively little human activity. I live in Portland, Oregon now. And that sounds like the kind of farm to table activity that we joke about on shows like Portlandia. I now know the name of my tuna because I went to the tuna farm. And it seems like this test, too, that we could apply to the can could be applied when they're selling this tuna to market. They could apply this then and say, OK, do you want to buy one with the level of contaminants? Then you can't label it like, contaminant free. You have to go to that, send it to a black label tuna can. I'm kind of thinking I should just go to my own doctor and have them write a couple of tests and just see. How full of contaminants are you? I'll be sure not to eat any Justin then. Do I have? Like he said, like the doctor turns me like, Justin, you need to stop eating couches that I know I've been doing. So that's kind of my question, too, is we're talking about these contaminants and it sounds pretty scary. But there's lots of things that we talk about that's in our food or in the air or in our water that are also scary. Where is my freak out level on this? Am I at like a six? Am I at an eight? Am I at a three? How bad is this? Yeah, I don't think it helps to freak out ever. So I'd encourage a zero freak out level on this. I think there are other types of food that also have these contaminants. For the average American, the primary route of exposure is through meat and dairy. The reason simply being that we eat a lot more meat and dairy than we eat fish. So not eating fish is not necessarily a solution. If you eat, you will be exposed to these contaminants. And you don't really get a choice. I mean, environmental chemistry is this interesting experiment because there is no control population on the planet. We all have these chemicals in our body and we don't know exactly what the effects are going to be. But I think there is an important lesson there in that before we make compounds and put them into the environment, we might want to look at some of the factors that influence their bioaccumulation and really avoid making chemicals that are going to enhance bioaccumulation or reduce our ability to eliminate other types of chemicals that we would normally keep out. And do we have any good contenders for a non-persistent chemical that could do some replacements? Well, we showed in our study that simply changing the stereochemistry of a molecule can dramatically change its interaction with a drug transporter. So we looked at two chemicals, dildrin and endrin, which are stereoisomers of one another. And we found that one of them acts as this very strongly inhibitory molecule and the other is 20 times less potent. So I think even looking at very simple solutions like what stereoisomer of the compound you use will help. The other lesson, and I think it's one that isn't really new in environmental chemistry, but we see it again and again, is that when you take up an organic molecule and you remove all the hydrogen atoms and you replace them with halogens, you really reduce the ability of metabolic enzymes to break it down. And of course, you know the reason why is that carbon-halogen bonds are some of the most stable bonds in nature. In fact, the most stable bond in nature is the carbon-fluorine bond. So non-stick chemicals are chemicals, for example, where all of the hydrogens have been replaced with fluorine atoms. And that makes an incredibly slippery, wonderful molecule that doesn't stick your egg. It also makes one this very difficult to break down in the other. So it'll be there much longer, but it won't be in our biology. Yeah, yeah. Which is a trade-off, but I guess that if that's, you know, if we're not worried about the fact that it actually exists and are worried about it being taken up in organisms, I would think that's an excellent solution. Well, and there are non-stick alternatives that don't require the use of, based on the way a material is shaped or organized that reduce how sticky something is that don't require the use of these chemicals. So the question might be, you know, do we really need these things in all of the applications that we use them in? Is it really essential to have stain-repellent carpets or can we replace some of those carpets with other materials that might not require the use of, they're still pretty stain-repellent, might not require the use of these compounds? I'm ripping out my... Yeah, I kind of think about when antibacterial came into the market and we started putting it in everything. Antibacterial hand soap, antibacterial sponges, antibacterial everything. No bacteria. Antibacterial comb, that was the weirdest one. Yeah, and then all of a sudden, we were like, oh, maybe we don't need antibacterial in everything. Yeah, that's right. Maybe it's actually a bad idea. Yeah, it's kind of productive. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And bacteria are, bacteria, the emerging kind of literature on bacteria says that they're pretty good for you if you have the right ones. And so we were constantly messing with them and creating more harm than good. And I think we sort of repeat this lesson over and over again with environmental chemistry. We make something, we use it before we fully understand what the consequences will be, and then we sort of try to catch up with it and change it. And our goal is that environmental chemistry become a more predictive rather than reactive science. That's a good idea. So how does it feel to you? I mean, I know you've been working on the environmental chemistry angle and developmental biology angle for years. And now it seems, how do you feel about starting to push this into also the socio-political side of things to try and actually take your research and say, okay, we now need to start making some recommendations. Oh, well, that's what the FDA and EPA do. And what we can do as scientists is really give them the best information available. One of the things we didn't know, as I mentioned before this study, is whether this transporter inhibition phenomenon occurs through some kind of predictable binding. So knowing that, they can now begin to look at this and ask questions about how much of these chemicals we should be exposed to in our diet. But there are people who do that and do it very well and that's their job. So I think giving them the information is probably our role. Awesome. And what's your next step? Are you going further with analyses of this sort? Yeah, so we're now working with people in the Department of Pediatrics here at UCSD to get a handle on when in early life an animal might be or a human might be very sensitive to these classes of compounds. We know that things like drug transporters in an early embryo stage are not always on. They're periods when they turn on or off. And so when they might be especially low, might be windows when an exposure to a small amount of these transporter inhibiting compounds would be problematic. So we're trying to track those developmental windows down. And then we're also looking at other defense proteins. We're trying to take the same model that we applied here for looking at how one chemical or one transporter is affected and look at the other transporters and other parts of the chemical defense system. People often call this the chemical immunity system or the chemical defense system and see how they might respond to these same kinds of exposures. Yeah, it's an interesting way to put it. I mean, in articles that it talked about, oh, this affects your immune system. And so the way that we normally think of the immune system as the T cells in the blood and beta B cells and everything, this is different. This is like skin. This is like a barrier. This is a door. And I think you're quoted in several articles as calling it a cellular bouncer, which is right. Yeah, it's just another interesting level of, okay, we have a barrier against the environment. And our body has to choose what it's gonna bring in or not. And sometimes it can't. Yeah, I think one of the things that we now appreciate about how cells work is that in addition to having a system that protects us against pathogens, things like viruses and bacteria, we also have a very elaborate system in the body to protect us against foreign chemicals. And the reason for that is that plants and animals and bacteria have always been making molecules to defend themselves, to prevent other things from eating them. And in response, their predators have been making strategies or proteins, evolving strategies or proteins to overcome those toxins. So we actually have a very elaborate system to protect ourselves from chemicals. And it's pretty effective against the classes of chemicals that it evolved to protect us against, where it falls apart is against things that we never see in nature, like things that are highly halogenated. Yeah, we're creating an alien environment, in a sense, but one that we didn't evolve to deal with. That's right, that's right. And bringing up the DDT question again now with mosquitoes making their way into the United States, there is talk from many to bring DDT back into use in more areas of the world, including the United States for mosquito control. And so this is something that if we want to stop these persistent compounds from actually having developmental effects, we need to figure it out one way or another. Yeah, DDT is a very interesting study. Of course, it's still used in places where there is malaria and malaria is a terrible disease. And so any strategy that can help reduce the human death toll to malaria, certainly valuable. That said, DDT is not a perfect solution. Insects rapidly evolve resistance to DDT. And as a result, after a few generations of use, it becomes less effective. And there are other strategies, of course, that are necessary in parts of the world where there's a high DDT burden. There's often also poor sanitation and other issues that need to be addressed before you can really sort of stamp out the problem of vector-borne disease. So I think DDT may be part of an arsenal, but it's certainly not the silver bullet that it's sometimes portrayed to be. Boy, are you gonna go sea urchin-tasting anytime soon? Bring it to something. It's a malaria breed's contempt. Right, a little bit too long. I don't eat my research animal, so that's a good rule. It's an important rule of science. Yeah, Kiki, how do zebra finches taste? Yeah, never, I never had the skewer-roasted zebra finches. That wasn't quite the... I can see like eating a teeny-tiny wing or a teeny-tiny jump stick. I'm sure some people might enjoy it. People eat everything, I don't know. Oh my goodness. Amro, this is just, this is fascinating. I think the point, the perspective you're taking on it is a very positive action-oriented perspective that I hope is the message that's being picked up by people as opposed to the many headlines that we see that are the fear-mongering, be afraid of your tuna kind of thought, but rather, hey, we need to keep working on this and there is action that can be taken as opposed to being afraid of our food. Yeah, that's right. I think, you know, I've been asked about this and I eat tuna, I think it's a healthy food and there's certainly plenty of advantages to eating tuna, but I think where we can go with this is to make sure we eat the least contaminated ones and I think people are going to want to eat less contaminated fish. Oh yeah, that's, I mean, given the option. I have a choice. That's right, that's great. But I know I'm curious too, and this is probably a longer different conversation about because it seems like the profit side of chemistry is about creating the newer, the better, the efficient product and is probably more so now, but still less so concerned with the environmental downstream costs of it further, further down. So I do hope the discoveries that you're making get incorporated into the production of new chemistry that'll facilitate it, the brighter, better, more efficient future. Although I, because, you know, because that is the profit-driven segment of all of this, I can see that as being a challenge. I think green chemicals are profitable and I think there is a demand and market for them. I think the chemistry industry recognizes that and I think it's important also not to think of these industries as single entities. Some companies in the chemical industry have taken very bold moves to eliminate chemicals that are found to be persistent. An example of that was the 3M company choosing to voluntarily kind of phase out perfluorochemicals when they found out they were persistent and other companies have not. So I think, you know, I think it's, there's always a danger of painting with a broad brush when we're thinking about these industries and how they might react or how much they want to do to avoid making persistent chemicals. Some are quite proactive about that. Yeah, and I wouldn't, I mean, and I'm not meaning to think that the profit side of the chemistry industry absolutely doesn't care downstream. But again, in looking at like we've come up with this great new product, let's spend five, 10 years testing it in various ways before we release it. That's the part that I find is gonna be the difficult challenge. But if we have things like this, you know, where you can look and see how it affects this transcriptor, you know, if they have a set of things that they can quickly and actively test the new product on and with, that might accelerate their ability to bring the products. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And I think there, you know, the current laws that govern these sorts of things don't necessarily require that kind of testing you're talking about. Although in Europe, a law was passed several years ago called REACH and it does require this kind of testing, but the very challenge is exactly what you brought up. What do you actually test with and what do you look for? And this could be one of several things you could look for in addition to whether or not, you know, an animal dies when you put it in the water with this thing, because really we're not, you know, the big change in how toxicology is happening these days is we're no longer really concerned with eliminating the incredibly toxic molecules that are going to kill something. We're now looking for much more subtle effects of chemicals interfering with hormone systems, affecting our, you know, pathogen defenses or chemical defenses, and that's going to require a lot more thinking about these kinds of biological pathways that we could test. Many organoids. Many, yeah. Many organoids in dishes and you test it on them. Maybe that's the future of this testing, we'll see. Amro, do you have any other big plans for your research future? Any more, any other studies that you're working on that you're excited about? We're also looking at cells called primordial germ cells. These are cells that give rise to eggs and sperm. Some of them will be happy to hear that. And they're specified very early in embryonic development. These in most animals are set aside in the first five days of life. And then they basically hang out and wait until the gonad develops and then they migrate to the gonad and they begin to divide and then produce in, you know, whether they're male or female eggs or sperm. So one of the things we're looking at now is how these cells protect themselves because if they acquire mutations in early embryonic development, unlike mutations that will happen in any other part of the embryo, mutations in these cells, of course, will be passed on to future generations. So we're very interested in how those cells might defend themselves, whether they use transporters or other pathways to do that and how environmental exposures might affect them. And then I think that keeps me more than busy. Yes, it sounds, these are some broad directions to go in and there's a lot of research, a lot of experiments I'm sure you're coming up with. Yeah, yeah, the people in the lab which I would come up with fewer. I remember being a grad student in a postdoc once. Yeah, that's enough, that's okay. Yeah, I still, yeah, that's right. Once upon a time, many suggestions. All right, I won't keep you any later tonight unless you would like to stay with us for the end of the show. We've got a few more science stories that we're going to cover on the way out of the show, but thank you so much for joining us tonight to talk about your work. I appreciate it, take care, bye guys. Have a great night, bye Amro. Great, that was Amro Hamdon and he has published a study in Science Advances looking at how persistent organic pollutants inhibit cellular transporters and how that affects the transport of chemicals across the cells and potentially influences our immune system and affects cellular health, affects development, et cetera. So very interesting research, very interesting research. Yeah, he's been working on stuff, really interesting stuff for years. I'm very excited that we finally got him on the show. It was cool. Yeah, we have more science news coming up right now, everybody. Justin, you got a story? This is just sort of a fun story. This is the Ruk runestone. It was, I guess, put up sometime in the late 800s in the Swedish province of Ustergötland. It's about 10 feet tall and it's got runes sort of scribbled all over it, all the way around it, all the way around it and it's sort of been, it's the translations themselves indicate that the translation is telling us of a riddle, that it's asking riddle-like questions, like I'm going to ask you a bunch of riddle-y questions is what's written on the runestone and it's sort of been prevented from being translated or deciphered properly and part of what they are now saying is it's because previously they were thought to be references of heroic feats, kings, wars, viking-y tales stories that were encoded within these riddles, but they in fact now are starting to say, it seems to really just be talking about the monument itself, the Ruk runestone is all about the Ruk runestone. That's a nice twist. Yeah, says Homburg associate professor of Scandinavian languages at the University of Gothenburg. The riddles on the front of the stone have to do with the daylight that we need to be able to read the runes and on the back, the riddles are probably having to do with the carving of the runes and the runic alphabet itself. So it's sort of is like, just- It's like a snake eating its own tail. I know, it's sort of like just all about the making of, look at this, I made a really cool runestone. Check it out, this is the best light to see it in, right? You should look at it from this angle. And they're like, why are you here? What are you doing? What are you looking for? What are you looking at? You're looking at my runestone, isn't it awesome? Like this is sort of what this mysterious ancient runestone is sort of a selfie of the runestone carver making a runestone. No, we could say. So call the runestone before it's ruined. So it's not ruined, it's, or before it's a run. That's terrible, that was awful. Okay, stop punishing me with these. I know, today has been way too punny. Way too punny. Oh gosh. I got more, are you good? I know you do. One of the interesting things of this is they're sort of saying how it seems to go, like it says secondly say who. First guess what, secondly guess who, but then it seems to skip to the 12th in a series of questions that the stone is asking you. Previous researchers assumed there was a oral version of this message that was missing nine of the riddles, but they came to a different conclusion. They say if you let the inscription lead you step-by-step around the stone, the 12th actually appears as the 12th thing the reader is supposed to consider while looking at the runestone. So that it's not skipping, it's just wrapping around. Oh neat. Kind of like, so anyway, century of people assuming they were supposed to read really deeply into the significance in the historical verve of this stone and it turns out it's just sort of a tongue-in-cheek look at my runestone, okay, proud. It's like the ancient version of a video game, like hey, you wanna go read the runestone? Well, and I think there's a little lesson in this and to sort of bias of interpretation when looking at any sort of data. The early people who looked at this were looking at it as a historical, legend-telling importance and so everybody else after has been trying to decipher that historical saga-esque importance to the writings and have overlooked the obvious that it's really just sort of, you know, look at me. But isn't that neat? I mean, all of a sudden, before writing runes, there was no way for anyone to, there were no pictures, there's no real way to pass something down beyond your years of life, right? You could tell stories to people that would then be passed down, but it's different than actually having something physical, a remembrance of you. There's no yearbook from your high school, right? And so this was like writing that allowed somebody to leave something behind that could potentially stay in the environment for a significant period of time and last much, much longer. And I think it's also important to note that people weren't like more intensely serious and in the past also. There's hieroglyphic runes or hieroglyphs found in the catacombs of the round of the pyramids or at least in the stone cutting areas of stone workers having sex with the queen, okay? Right. Right, like they were, they had their little jokie, like porn. Oh, then the humans and the world, the Romans and their vomitorium and the pictures of all this stuff, yeah. But I mean, this is like the workers like, yeah. Like, I mean, this is, people have been lighthearted and unserious to some degree throughout the centuries. And I think that is really an important lesson to take from history. What is it? It's only serious when you're supposed to be on a date. You're not that different now. If people could have taken selfies back then, they would have. Yeah, and instead. If people could have taken selfies while planking or owl-ing, they would have. What's owl-ing? It's when you squat down on your feet on top of something, you make yourself really small and look like an owl on top of something small. So if all of the statues of, there we were, Egypt, the giant monuments with Pharaoh's faces on it, those are the original selfies. That's what that was. It's all the aristocratic portraits that were commissioned. Selfies have been with us forever. It was kind of hard to afford a really good version until recently. Oh, and I guess there is also koala-ing. I recently found, I just found an image here. Yes, we have deading, where you hang off something, planking, where you are planked, and then owl, you sit like a little owl, and koala-ing, you kind of tried hang on something like a koala would. And what was the first one you said? Deading. That looks like an attempted planking. What's deading? It's like an attempted planking that you just freak out. You're just like, you got on the thing and you're like, Deading is for people with poor core strength. Yeah, yeah, plank. Oh, I see it. Oh my God, this is great. All right, all right. Moving on from there, Blair. Yes. You got something? Yes, absolutely. So I have actually some really great news about animals on the verge of extinction. And a new study that came out in zoo biology this week suggests a new idea to bring animals from the brink of extinction. In particular, they were looking at northern white rhinoceroses. And there's only three of those left on the whole planet. And this new study looked theoretically at using these three live animals, stored tissue samples, cell lines, and sperm from these and already deceased rhinoceroses, then taking that, developing stem cell technologies, collecting, generating eggs, sperm, using in vitro embryo production, embryo transfer into surrogate mothers, pregnancy maintenance, and rearing of offspring. They think they could actually establish a viable, self-sustaining northern white rhinoceros population. Wow. This is. That would be amazing. Huge, you guys. Considering other rhinos have completely died out. Right, but this is also related to that. And that's why in the show notes, I say something about a seed vault. Because I always talk about this, storing genetic material of species on their way to extinction or extinct, we could, given the right techniques, bring an animal back from extinction if you have a similar animal to use as a surrogate, if you have enough samples. The thing here is, if you have enough samples and something similar enough, absolutely. So I see two things here. I see one, remembering the importance of storing these things, getting ourselves a, quote, seed vault. And keeping this valuable genetic information, that's one. Two, keeping populations going in zoos and wildlife parks and sanctuaries. Because even if there's not space for them to go out in the wild, if there's a chance for them to go out later, and we only have a few left, we're going to be kicking ourselves. But then on top of that, the potential of maybe tweaking some genomes. This is something I took a little extra step here, thinking about all of our talk of CRISPR and things like this. If we could just eliminate bad things that are recessive that show up with inbreeding in a species, if we know that, that can also help diversify and keep healthy a population. There are animals that have had a complete bottleneck, genetically, like the elephant seal. Luckily, they didn't have any enormously terrible recessive genes pop up in repopulation. Right, so it could genetically minimize the effects of a population bottleneck. Yeah, so this is fantastic that people are actually starting to run statistical tests and models to try to figure out if this is actually possible. We have opportunities to use it, because honestly, what do we have to lose? If we have three northern white rhinos, the likelihood of them coming out of that without some intervention is zero from three individuals. Because in the F2 generation, in the second generation, it's going to be direct inbreeding. That's the only way. So no, it's fine. So we literally have nothing to lose. And we can actually experiment on this and see if we can make it happen. So I totally agree with you. I would totally do this. I'm all for this. I do have to challenge you on the thing that you knew I was going to challenge you on at the beginning of this, which is if we are bringing back something that has been out competed even if it's just by humans, does it have a proper environment to go back to? Isn't this like my desire to reintroduce the woolly mammoth? Nope, completely different. But it is a good question nonetheless. It is a good question nonetheless, because there are a lot of animals that are on the brink of extinction that also have no space due to political, socioeconomic, climate issues, all sorts of things that might make their habitat missing. My understanding is that the northern white rhino does have space it could go in. And the rhinos, the big thing with the rhinos is that they are not going away due to habitat destruction because of war-torn areas. They are going away because of rhino hunting, poaching for the horns. That's it. That's the reason. So they're a perfect poster child to try this with, because they have a place to go. They have a niche to feel. Phil, if people can stop killing them, then they have a perfect place to be. So luckily, we are in this day and age making great strides in that as well. So if we can grow the population in zoos and sanctuaries until it is a safe place for them to be out in the wild, that's a win-win. That's great. We like win-win. How would you like to have one trillion friends? That sounds like a lot of work. A lot of. I wouldn't get to the content I care about on my Facebook if that many people were. Are we talking Facebook friends or friends? Well, maybe if they weren't friends, necessarily, but bacteria. Oh, yeah, I would hope to have more than that. And not just individual bacteria, but species of bacteria. I'll take more than Maria. It's a big part. So there's a big question as to how large the bacterial tree of life is on our planet currently. How much of Earth is taken up by microbes, right? Researchers at Indiana University are now estimating that the number is somewhere between 100 billion and 1 trillion species. Right now, the cataloged number stands at about 10 to the seventh, which is about 1,000th of a percent of those 1 trillion species. 1,000th of 1% is what we currently know of. There's so many that we don't know. It's amazing. The researchers published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looking at data from 20,376 surveys of bacteria, archaebacteria, microscopic fungi, plus 14,862 sampling efforts on tree, bird, and mammalian communities. Looking at these things from 35,000 locations around the world. And they demonstrated that they demonstrated the abundance of the most dominant ocean bacterial species scales with a total number of individuals across 30 orders of magnitude. And then they used this data to predict the existence of around 1 trillion microbial species worldwide. That's a lot. And it's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot. There's a lot of bacteria. I mean, and most of them, many of them, there's bacteria, archaebacteria, fungi, things floating in the air, things in the dirt, in the soil, things in the oceans that we have not yet sampled, that we have not yet identified. However, it's amazing that we've already, I mean, looking at data from over 20,000 surveys of the microbial kingdom, 20,000. And we've still, this is like a little scratch in the surface of what's there. So what is the dominant life form on planet Earth? Microbes. There you go. Do they weigh more than us? Oh, yeah. It's a great question. I'll tell. Oh, yes. Yeah, it's a great question. I've heard, when you say us, though, I think that's. Right, because part of our weight is bacteria. Yeah, I mean, I've heard that just the sub, what is it? The sub-ocean, like if you go down, I think, 20 meters or so, just the bacteria that lives in soil, under the oceans, under the land, across the planet, makes up 10% of the biomass of the planet. Right. And that's just that soil. It's not in the, I'm not talking about in the ocean, in the air, in us, on anything. In the soil. But just in the soil is like 10% of the biomass of the planet. So that's a pretty significant number. Quite significant. Yeah. What's up next? Did you have a story about dogs, Blair? Yeah. So how do you guys feel, hypothetically, if you had a dog about a computer training your dog? So this actually, I mean, when you say a computer, I mean, if I could get my dog to watch television, I think that would be great. But it never seemed to care. I mean, that's actually something that's always interesting to me, is that the TV, my dogs, I don't know. There's no TV in this computer. But I've heard dogs do it. But if I had the vacuum cleaning robot that could take my dog out for a walk and teach it some tricks, all four of them wouldn't have any problem. If Roomba could take the dog for a walk, not just go around the house, but take it up and down the block and bring it back, no problem. That'd be awesome. So the big issue with training animals is that the best way and the most effective way to train them is to identify the behavior you want, catch it the second it happens, make a signal, and then treat it as quickly as you can after that. So that's why people use clickers. This computer from North Carolina State University was strapped onto a dog. It was motion sensor. And this was training a dog to sit. And then the other element of this computer was a dispenser that a human would hold in front of the dog. And when the dog sat, the motion sensor identified the sitting motion and sent the signal to the dispenser that dispensed the treat. So they thought it would be much faster, more efficient, more accurate. Turns out they had to pick. It was either going to be correct 100% of the time or fastest after the behavior was exhibited. But there was a trade-off. So they found that with 100% certainty, the reinforcement was too late. If the reinforcement was given immediately, there was a high rate of rewarding the wrong posture. So doing this against a human, they found that humans were 100% accurate, but their response time varied hugely. And this modified computer now was 96% accurate. That is a pretty good accuracy rating. And while the average response time was the same for the computer and the trainer, there was variation in the human version. There was incredible consistency with the computer. So as soon as the computer sees something, it's going to go identify and treat, identify and treat. Whereas a human might see something and be thinking about something else when they see it and go, oh, the dog just did that. And then give the treat a few seconds later, or be right on it and give it immediately. Or fumble with the clicker, or not be able to grab the treat at a time. There's so many elements. And so this is something that consistency is the number one key with training, consistency, consistency. So this could be something that actually could be used extremely well to train service dogs, for example. So this is a great tool that could help people figure out how to train their own dog with assistance. I don't see this as replacing the human trainer, but being a tool that trainers use to great effect. I think it sounds pretty awesome. Knowing that dogs are social creatures, you would hope that this weren't implemented with dogs in a large kennel situation, where you have hundreds of dogs wearing these training devices, having their treats dispensed on signal from a little bowl in the kennel cage without human intervention or interaction of any kind. That kind of situation, that's not going to be good for a dog knowing that dogs are so social in nature. So taking the human out of this, especially if you're looking for help with service dogs or police dogs or any kind of animals where human interaction is key, you can't take the person out of it. It has to be used just as a helpful training tool. Unless you're training those dogs to learn. Right, it's an army of dogs. I don't like that. Instead of clone army, it's a dog. Robots sicken German dogs on people. Like, I can see this is now. I don't like that one bit. We can clone dogs, right? This is where the clone army starts. No, I don't like any of this. Can't we? We're talking about robots that are going to train dogs, but we're already talking about robots that could give human companionship at a some level. I'm sure we could teach a dog to pet and say reassuring things that dogs like to hear and make facial expressions that are even easier for a dog to read than the human expression. So I could see this going really far. I much prefer the idea of this pack being strapped onto the dog like in the test, but to have the dispenser in the hand of the human. The human gives the verbal command. When the dog does it, the reward is dispensed like clockwork, right? That I think is really the key to this is we could take it to some crazy sci-fi extent, but I do actually see this having real value in the very near future just as the next step of the clicker. Everybody uses clicker in animal training now. Now you have the next step in the clicker. It's a motion sensor. All right, yep, all right. Yep, click, click, you get a treat. Maybe we could use this with Justin. Oh, but we just told him, now it'll never work. Oh, it'll never work, right. You have to, you can train humans, I've done it, but you can't tell them that you can't tell them. Wait, wait, you've trained, I trained humans. I've trained three humans. I've absolutely trained, I've straight up clicker trained a human and they didn't know. That is hilarious. When they found out they were very upset. This is a story I have to hear about in the after show. This'll be an after show story. My last story, my last story for the show tonight is the waters on Mars. We've been talking about water appearing as dark streaks on the slopes of on Mars seasonally as things heat up, cool down and heat up again. But researchers haven't really been confident in being able to say that it's like a salty brine water coming from the subsurface kind of coming up and they just haven't been able to confirm that. How do you confirm something like that? Well, of course you do an experiment here on Earth. That's what you do. So the researchers created a chamber in a laboratory that the inside of that chamber mimicked the conditions on the surface of Mars and they covered a block of frozen brine with sand similar to what you would expect to find on the surface of Mars, right? They increased the temperature and what happened is the temperature increased because of the pressure of the atmosphere and the speed at which the temperature changed. That salty brine boiled immediately and so you have this salty brine boiling and thus forcing its way up through the bits of sand and forcing grains into the air because it's boiling, right? Bubbling out of the surface and sand is kind of like boiling out, pushing the sand out of the way. The sand gets burst out of the way and then slides down slope, which would then create the shape of the flows that they have seen from a distance on the slopes, the surface of Mars. So it's an experiment that confirms that this could be happening on Mars, but we haven't actually been to that place yet to actually test it and see it with our own eyes on Mars. So this is still just an experiment on Earth. Interesting, all the same though. I love the, let's make Mars here on Earth aspect of it. Let's see if this works. See, that's the second time biodome would have been the perfect thing to do tonight. Yeah. First time the chemicals, see how it plays out, second time, making Mars. Biodome. Biodome, that's right. All right, Jesse, what was your story, your last story? Oh, I'm good, I'm good. Then my last story, we're already at two hours. Well, I could do this one more story. So. Are you sure? I don't have to. Well, let's go to the end, let's end the show. Yeah, yeah. This is like the least decisive show in the history of TRIS. We have a rundown and we are all just like, nope, we want to do this. We have a rundown and we did it pretty decently. I had, I had this, this is another story I had that had to do with more human origin and sort of genetic-y stuff of Eurasians and why Neanderthals sort of decreased in their percentage. They used to be three to 6%, neither like 2%. Part of it is maybe it was inefficient genes, but also some of it. But you know what, I didn't have time to really condense the story, so it's like four pages long, so it's gonna be too rambly. So let's go to next week and maybe I'll pick it up there. All right, so on that note, it is time for us to end this episode of This Week in Science. We have decided it is good. And I have also decided that I will take this moment to say thank you to our Patreon sponsors. Thank you to Paul Disney, Kevin Parachan, Keith Cursell, Steve DeBell, Melissa Mosley, Jesse Moreno, Patrick O'Keefe, Jason Schneiderman, Rudy Garcia, Gerald Sorrell's Greg Guthman, Alex Wilson, Dave Neighbor, Jason Josier, Matthew Litwin, Eric Knapp, Jason Roberts, Patrick Cohn, Chris Clark, Richard Onimus, John Ratnaswamy, Byron Lee, E.O., Jared Lysette, Ulysses Adkins, Brian Condren, Jake Jones, Mark Pasaros, trainer 84, Advardis Rimkis, Brian Hedrick, Cassie Lester, Sarah Chavez, Leila Bob Calder, Shane and Tara Ginsberg, Marshall Clark, Charlene Henry, Don Comerich, Galeri Garcia, Randy Mazzucca, Ed Dyer, Ted Steele, Tony Steele, Dave Freidel, Craig Landon, Daryl Lambert, David Wiley, Robert Aston, Deborah Smith, Mitch Neves, Flying Out, John Crocker, Richard Porter, Christopher Dreyer, Andrew Dolinger, Sylvain Westby, RTN, Pixel Fly, Shu Wada, Steven B., Dave Wilkinson, Steve Muschinski, Rodney Lewis, Braxton Howard, Phil Nadeau, Rick Ramus, Salged Sam, Matt Sutter, Emma Grenier, Phillip Shane, James Stompson, Kurt Larson, Stefan Insom, Michael George, Russell Jensen, Mountain Sloth, Jim Drapeau, Tara Payne, John Maloney, Jason Olds, James Nowiles, Paul West, Alec Doty, Aluma Lama, Joe Wheeler, Dougal Campbell, Drew Craig Porter, Adam Mishcon, Aaron Luther, Marjorie, Paul Stanton, David Simmerly, Tyler Harrison, Ben Rothig, Colombo Ahmed, and Gary Swinsberg. 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Science, science. Science, science. This week in science. I don't know. It's the post show. This is where anything goes. Welcome. Welcome to the Twist Post Show. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Oh, I'd really love Justin to come back, so you can tell us the spiders. So everyone who's watching right now or who is in the chat room, this is the story that Blair said that she would not be able to get through completely, would not be able to get through on the air because it's spiders. It's not. It's spiders. It's just spiders. So I'm just going to screen share the GIF here. This is a spider world. This is spider life. That's all. I don't know where Justin is. He's going to miss out on this story. I'm trying to. There we go. Okay. Hold on. I'm just going to start with the visual here, because this thing has a GIF going in the top of it, and so I think that was always part of my problem was that having to read this thing, looking at this GIF, and I just could not keep it together. You couldn't look at the GIF and read it at the same time? It's just I can't. Do you see what's happening here? I don't know. It looks like there is one spider is upside down, the larger spider is upside down, and there's a smaller spider. What part of the spider is that? The abdomen? The thorax. It's the lady bits. It's the lady bits specifically. Yes. What's he doing to the lady bits, Kiki? So that would look as though the male spider's mouth parts are on the female spiders. He's just going to town. Yep. They're not making out, Dave. Is that technically, can we use the term technically? I have to look up definitions right now. Well, they use it in the story. They call this the first ever account that they have found of spider cunnilingus. I was wondering if that was the word that we would use. What species of spiders are these, Blair, and why would this particular spider engage in this? Great. So these are, right now, oh, somehow Safe Search is on on my Google search. So searching for spider cunnilingus, I don't get any documents matched. I need to open up my search. I don't know if you want to search for that. That doesn't sound like a good time. I feel like you're going to get some weird stuff, right? I'm trying to find out. Just to catch you up here, here's a delightful gift of a male spider. He's the tiny one. Doing what now to the female spider? Searching her lower abdomen for mites. What a good guess. Yeah, apparently not. Oh, gosh. Now I realize he's trying to remove a plug. No, what a good guess, though. That's a great guess. That's a fantastic guess. Interesting. So these are Madagascan Darwin's bark spiders. Cerocistris Darwini. So they're from Madagascar. The females are several times larger and heavier than males. They have a lot of the kinky stuff going on with spiders that we've talked about before. That's sexual cannibalism, genital mutilation, all that kind of stuff that we've talked about before. They do all of it. The second part, so far undocumented until now, the males routinely salivate into female genitalia. Oh, so the saliva may have some function. Indeed. Kiki, let's not go too unanthropomorphizing on this. It's like an alien species looking at human porn and going, oh, so the salivation into the reproductive world is some sort of a higher reproductive attribute within the female of the species. Right. So here's one of the scientists speaking that way. Oral sexual contact seems to be an obligate sexual behavior in the species. All males did it before, in between and after copulation. It's only obligate if it's reciprocal. No, no, no, listen to this. This is very interesting. So all males that they studied did it before, in between, and after copulation, some of them up to 100 times. That's a lot. I know, right? That's a lot. Wow. I was going to say something risque. Anyway, it's very interesting because this species of spider also produces, as far as we know, nature's largest webs and toughest silk. Now we add to the list one of the first ever cunnilingus-like behaviors known in spiders. And right now I think perhaps the world record of epic. Perhaps, yes. So we've seen lots of this, of oral sexual contact in mammals a lot. We see a lot of fallacia-like behaviors in mammals. Cunnilingus-like behaviors, in general, much more rare. Ain't that the truth? It's interesting the last sentence of the abstract. The last sentence of the abstract. Well, its adaptive significance is elusive. Yes, it's elusive. Yeah, it basically means we're looking at this and going, we have no idea. So here are the current suggestions. Is that the oral sexual encounters could be a mechanism for boosting the male's chances of paternity, of course. I can pleasure you seven times till Sunday. I am a good dad. Please don't eat me yet. Okay, but here's the thing. You don't know anything about if there would be some sort of positive influence on the female side of receiving this behavior. We've not isolated the fact that there are, right, there could be all sorts of good things going on there. There could also be nothing. It's impossible to know. I mean, these species practice genital mutilation. They also, their close cousins do plugs in the female reproductive tract, or they have male genitalia break off in the female. If she has a lot of feeling down there, that's not going to be good. So I would be kind of surprised if there's a lot of feeling down there. I have to think there's something else going on. So the way that it boosts paternity could be a few ways. So one could just be by jeopardizing her time by monopolizing her time. So just knowing there's no other spiders getting in here. I'm good to go, right? It could also be a chemical signal that would indicate that she's already been with another guy. So go find somebody who you'll have a better chance of being a father with. It could also create an environment that would favor one male's sperm against another male's. That's the part that I actually think would be super interesting, is if the saliva is somehow this beneficial thing to this one guy's sperm and then if somebody else tried to show up, his sperm would get eaten up by his rival male's saliva. The acid in his saliva. Yeah. Yeah, what? Yeah, it could also just be something that signals the male's quality. So there you go back to something that she's getting out of it. I mean, if these females are also cannibals, sexual cannibals, and the male is doing this up to a hundred times, it sounds like she should have a large window during what she could say cut it out and eat him. But she doesn't. And why would that be? Just puzzling. I'm just, I can't, and then there's all these videos. There's so many videos, you guys. I can't even, I'll just put them in the chat room. You're welcome. Oh, dear. But it's all gone. I just scroll up to the gif again. I can't even look at this. It's spiders. He just, he really looks like he's getting in there. He's just, wah! I just can't even. I love that you're like, it's just spiders, Blair. It's spiders. But I love that you're looking at it this way. I love it. Oh my God. No, there's just something, it's something about that gif that I just, the way it's like abdomen shaking while he's doing it. I don't know. But the females just, just not moving at all. She's just chilling. Oh, really? No feedback whatsoever? Hey, if you're not getting feedback, you're probably doing it right. I don't know. I don't know, maybe. I would disagree with that, but I'm not a spider, so I don't really know anything about it. I just can't deal. I love the chat room. You guys right now are cracking me up. No, Ben Rothig, this can't be the title for 565 because this is the after show. We've saved it specifically for the after show. Okay, so on the heels of this... Spider boating? Spider boating. Ed's wondering if it's going to be the next subreddit, Spider porn. I wonder if conservative spiders go to church on Sundays. Right? And then, yes, add some berry white to that video, then Blair won't be able to look at it even more. Oh, my God. Oh, man. That's pretty good. That's some pretty good. Oh, man. All these videos, I just can't stop seeing them. Spiders. It's like looking into the sun. I just want to, so bad. Why? It's just spiders. What videos? What are you talking about? Let's watch this one. All the videos at the bottom. Okay, let's watch one. This female's moving around a little bit. Interesting. There's one. We'll watch that one. That looks like he's wrapping her in a web. Oh, snap. He's about to get eaten. I'm looking at the third one, actually now that I look at it, is labeled sexual cannibalism. There you go. That was right. Well, this one is labeled oral sexual encounters. There you go. So there are encounters happening here. It's just a spider. It's a spider on top of another spider. This is where the GIF came from. Which one? Oh, that one. Yep, that's where the GIF came from. All right, let's look for the next video. Opportunistic mating. Yes. And here we have the larger spider and the bigger spider. The smaller spider. Justin's not even... He's out of here. I'm still here. You've got to watch the cannibalism one. I'm much more comfortable with that. Opportunistic mating was nothing. That was nothing. Not very anything. Look, these are spider videos. Come on. Spiders. And now we have... I don't understand why that makes it less weird, but you just keep saying, it's spiders. It's just spiders. I would say... I think it's very interesting. You can't watch it because you're imbuing some kind of human emotion. There we go. Feeling onto it. Oh, that one got dead. Oh, he's going to get eight. Basically, the lady sits still and enjoys it unless she doesn't enjoy it and then she eats the male. You're doing it wrong. Have you ever done this before? Now you'll never do it again. How to know if you're doing it wrong as a spider. Oh, emasculating. Wow, they've got a lot of mate binding. They've got interesting videos in here. I just think the fact that it's spiders makes it... Wrapping her up in a web. He's binding her in a web. It makes it way... See, they call this mate binding as opposed to bondage, which we would call it in... in people. So spiders are like properly kinky. Respectfully so. Well, the males have a reason to tie up the female because... They don't want to be eaten. They don't want to be eaten. I think it's fascinating. I think that in an animal that people don't even want to admit can feel this really intense social behavior is happening and we don't know why. I'm blown away. I think it was also just that the video of it looked about as awkward and clumsy. As you remember. No, as it should. Is what I was going to say. Rude. Oh, I'm sorry. You had such a pause there that I thought somebody should finish that thought for you. It seems like when you see videos of other animals doing complex sexual behaviors like that, it always kind of looks like they don't know what they're doing. I don't know. It's kind of funny. You guys. Good story. Good story. I have another story. My dog turns 14 tomorrow. Oh. Mm-hmm. I actually did see a story today about labs and about... That's exceptionally long for a lab to survive. There she is the year I got her. Oh. Yeah, so I read a story. It wasn't as dynamic and interesting as I would have expected. So I didn't bring it to the show because it was... Labs are so good at being service dogs and so smart because they love food. Mm-hmm. That's why they're such good service dogs is they're extremely food motivated which is also why they are one of the most likely breeds to be terribly obese. My dog's not though. Your dog's doing great. This is... Once again, I'm beckoning back to my days, my months lab at UC Davis as a summer high school type job under Professor Neil Sharkey. The lab that they had me working on my stuff on was shared with a group that was working on a robot to perform the incision of a hip surgery. A robotic arm that would do the chiseling out of the hip bone. It had this titanium implant that they would put in their hip and all of the tests that they were doing were on labs because labs have the sort of first thing that goes out on a lab is the hip. And so the research was trying to perfect this technique to later be used in humans in offering up hip replacements for labs. Interesting. Her main issue right now is her back legs aren't great. Those are the hips. She's lost some muscle mass back there because she's had some nerve degradation and stuff. My first dog was a black lab and that's towards the end she couldn't get up and go anywhere. It was really rough. This little girl turned in 14 where I can't believe it. Oh my god. I got her toy that she'll destroy in probably two minutes. Awesome. Happy almost birthday to her. Yeah. Preston, did you have some other story you were going to talk about? No, but I didn't want to hear about the snap training of a human. Yes, the snap training of the human. Here we go. This is Blair's story. Oh, I had a clicker. I don't know how appropriate it is. What exactly is a clicker? Not being a dog trainer. Hold on. I think I have one. Of course she has one. There's a lot of things in her drawers. Stop. Yeah, I don't think I have to put my hands on it right now. I really wish I could because it's like you can describe it. It's like a sound kind of. Yeah. It's a little metal. Oh, I know exactly. If you do it rapidly, it sounds like you've got a turn signal on. Yeah. That's the thing that you do as what it's called a bridge to identify the thing that you liked that your animal did. And then before clickers people used verbal bridges like good dog is actually a bridge. Good boy. You have to do it the second that you see the thing that you want and that gives you time to deliver the reward. It's an identification for them of the thing that was good. It's like an auditory identification before you're giving the actual physical reward. Right. So first you have to link the sound to the reward and then once the it's like it's taking Pavlov's dogs like a step further. So they heard the bell, they salivated because they expected food, right? So that's just taking it a step further and taking that bell to signify something good. So that means to those dogs like I did and then my treats coming but that was the thing that I did so I know my treats coming, right? So that's, okay, so yes, Dave in Jurassic World, Chris Pratt used a clicker so wrong which was the hilarious part. So you use it once when they do the thing that you like, right? It's not used as an attention getter which is what he did. He also clicked it a bunch of times in a row. There was so much like oh, it was ridiculous but it was theatrical which I'm sure why they did it that way. So anyway, so that's the clicker, it's the bridge. It bridges you from the desired behavior to the food. So I may have done that with a person and they didn't catch on right away and so So they did something you liked and clicked it and said like thank you so much for doing this. Or did you actually give them food? I tried it with treats but it's too obvious. Alright, fine. I'll tell you. It's water under the bridge, whatever. So I lived with somebody at college and this guy he was so pissed when he found out but I clicked if he did something that I liked and then I would like give him a kiss on the cheek and be like oh, thanks for doing that. But it was working like the house was cleaner things were working out let me tell you for like 2-3 days and then he realized it and then he'd do everything and he we had a pretty huge fight That was so awesome. But I mean it was working. I'm pretty sure every animal trainer I know has done it but you it's people don't want to think of themselves as something so simple but we're animals and we work off the same basic principles and dopamine and reward centers and behavior modification and all these things do cross these boundaries it's fluid we're not this totally separate thing and this is what all of marketing and advertising is based on and actually one of the stories I didn't get to tonight had to do with the fact that disbelief and global warming is tied to belief that there's an economic cost to it that the economy would suffer if we took on something like global warming and these people they did a series of like sort of prepping them with a saying how the economy is driven by the public sector and another group would be given something to read that says the government actually controls the economic output of the country and some were given nothing to read and those who who had read that the private sector that controls our economy were more likely to believe that putting resources towards global warming would be harmful to the economy those who had read the thing that said the government was in control thought it was less likely that spending government funds on this yada yada but it just and reading that reminded me of a commercial that if you watched the televisions that I've done for only a couple shows but I've seen these commercials and they've come up a lot in trying to watch just like primary coverage which is that I'm an energy voter I like the fact that our economy is good and energy is driving our economy it's a very sort of vague creating the idea that there is something creating the concept that you can based on energy is good for our country alone and think nothing of anything else and be like I'm an energy voter that's how I'm voting for energy and that's all I'm thinking it's ridiculous unless you realize that these people have already done the research and already realize that if you get people to think that energy and the economy are the energy is the sole driver of the economy and anything that we do with that system is going to create uncertainty in the economy you have accomplished the goal of getting people to become skeptical about global warming so we are click click that simply train every day well that's more a different psychological principle but it's all based on the same ideas it's all based on the same networkings of our brain but it's a little bit different conditioning in the way that we were talking about would be much more it's about it's a lot more I don't know it's hard to describe but it'd be like every time you say global warming you have to start the sentence over again and every time you say climate change you get a dollar that would be like conditioning in the way that that a clicker would work one of the interesting things and Kiki you're muted for some reason why are you interested in typing number of times in this show and Blair might actually be too young to remember what? you may be too young to remember but there were I think three basic marketing techniques that were being applied and trained sort of or exploiting youth on the Saturday morning cartoon commercials and they were all serials and in the serials one was a the Lucky Charms guy and and you had to you had to the child had to go and get them away they had to go catch them and take away this thing that he didn't want them to have so that they could have it and another was a rabbit who really wanted it and then it was the power of the child to deny the children were denying the treat which is also very empowering to children who don't get to deny I always felt so bad for the tricks rabbit yeah but it was also like empowering children because the children are doing the denying and the children don't get to deny somebody a treat they're always the ones being denied the thing that they want so it was really empowering this inner desire to have a child to have that sort of control like an adult and like a parent would and then there was what was the Toucan one Toucan is Fruit Loops but the cuckoo for cocoa puffs that guy never got his treats Toucan Sam Toucan was going to lead you to the treat follow me I'll just give it to you but you got to do what I want it was all these different types of circulation based on the inner power struggle of a child in what those desires were and even as simple as those categories of serial commercials may have seemed and innocent as they may have seemed those are major themes in marketing and advertising across the breadth of all advertising today it's the thing that's unachievable that we're going to let you have a big truck that you get or whatever denies somebody else access to the road or denies the but it's not conditioning no it's done enough times so this is conditioning is like a very specific routine and it's done the same every time to make it where it's done like Blair said you have this bridge and the reward and it is done this conditioning like when we talk about conditioning in the nervous system there's the model of the aplizia where you have a shock and that you know an electrical shock is applied and the aplizia withdraws it's siphon and so there are like these very particular things conditioning again there's for like rabbits there have been experiments that are done where something happens and then there's an air puff to the eye or there's an air puff to the eye and then there's something else and so the rabbit learns to blink before the air puff comes so like conditioning is a very specific set of training and nerve nervous response right like associations yeah it's a specific association and so when we say conditioning it's like it relates to this animal behavioral technique but there are other forms of training or of psychological manipulation and that's what you're talking about and the advertising and we use the general term conditioning but it's not the same thing when we're talking about it right and so conditioning for cereals Justin would be more like the fact that they had prizes in them no no no I want to still disagree with this a little bit longer and then I'll cracker jacks I still want that prize every time even though now it's just a piece of paper I want it. I think that the repeatability if you look at how many times you see a single commercial and that the theme of the commercial then leaves that specific product but graduates on to further and further and further products that you will see and have repeated and repeated and repeated in watching the commercial you know that there's a reward you get accustomed to the idea that there's a reward theme reward feel reward attribute to it and if it causes any anxiety like I might not be able to have this or somebody is wanting something that I've got and I want to deny them this or whatever that theme is you are now predisposed to knowing that there's a reward coming and reacting accordingly but you know I might be over it again it's different it's also a psychological technique but it's different because you're not getting your reward that's where I disagree I'd say that the reward is already in the commercial without having bought the product that's not the same thing it has to be something that you gain that is kind of more tangible than that there's nothing more tangible than the pursuit of happiness within humans and if it I mean that is that's what we're doing with the commercials but that's like the end of the line is the happiness but what the reward is the stuff that gets you to the happiness the commercial and beaming a release of happiness in your brain but I think it is and I think that's the thing I think it already is and then when you're in the store and you see this product you've already got that connected with the happiness that's how I achieved it watching the commercial now I can achieve it again by purchasing not exactly the same I don't know Mark they sell a lot of products they sell products because they're using other psychological techniques it's not a punishment and reward system it is a little bit all of those cartoon kid serial commercials create an anxiety just because you say it is Justin doesn't mean it is that's one thing that I want you to remember here is that if I say that's not what that means you can't then just say but that is what it means but they do create that's not an argument they create anxiety and they finish it with a reward to the ego or the inner angst but again you're using the word reward in a different way somebody uses the word theory in a non-scientific way if you're using the word reward in the way it is scientifically used in conditioning techniques that's not a reward so I think I think it's definitely psychological reward that's not a thing in conditioning that's not a thing I don't know how that's not a thing I don't know how a physical treat trumps a psychological treat I think they're the same thing I guess is what I'm saying if you're getting pleasure from watching a cartoon then the cartoon is the treat but then the cereal has nothing to do with it correct but it represents the reward the cereal becomes the play if you're conditioning and what we're talking about it has to be by the cereal you get to watch the commercial that would be a reward system by the cereal you get to watch the commercial you like the commercial so by the cereal is a completely different model and it is not related to conditioning so obviously the disadvantage that the commercial marketers cereal marketers have is they can't have you taste the cereal so the psychology of advertising is not what's being argued here what I'm saying is instead the cereal becomes the click the cereal I think that this is the cereal is the click and then the only way you can hear this click again because you know there's a reward that comes after it is to seek out the cereal or nag your parents so I think what is happening is this is more along the lines of with children is more along the lines of imprinting that you see something often enough and it imprints so that when you go to the store you go my mommy I want that cereal and it's a reward in itself because you there's an image of this cereal imprinted into your psyche because it's not the cereal it's the rabbit you've imprinted on the rabbit it's the power that it was the reward that was given in the commercial and the cereal is the click is the tone and you want that click or tone to take place so you can get that reward but it's already I don't know I don't know if I agree with that you're talking to an animal trainer and a neuroscientist you always wanted sugary cereals and were denied them but because it worked on you because it worked on you does not mean you know the processes I've had time to break down why it was I wanted all these individual cereals because I never had them I never got to complete the reward cycle and I know exactly how to break down how it played on me so you were left wanting and you never got the reward so how is that out of conditioning the commercial gave me the reward every time and the cereal was the way I could do it again without having to wait till Saturday I could do it all week long I didn't have to wait until Saturday to get the reward I could do it all week long or it was the sugar that was the reward but it wasn't because the sugar isn't there in the commercial you don't have that yet you don't even know what that is it's a reward in itself it's not the fulfillment of the inner angst the power struggle of a child but it's a reward so it suffices so then like yeah it's it's own reward it's a different reward but it's a reward I got something out of it if I succeeded in the process so I think that instead of trying to debate the terminology that we're using here instead what we should be trying to do is infiltrate political offices with animal trainers with clickers yes and then we will train people to respond you know who are voting on issues like climate change and what not we will train them to respond a particular way and to vote then a particular way yeah the problem here's the problem with this though clickers clickers in political offices clicker training based on this very simple idea that the behavior you want will eventually happen on its own I'm not convinced that'll work in politics alright we'd have to use punishment in politics which is a whole another thing oh yeah negative reinforcement so you could do what my what was she one of my English teachers low energy yeah so one of my English teachers in high school I think I've mentioned this on the show before too when you had to get up and talk to the class if you said like you had to start over I love that at any point if you were four minutes in talking about a Shakespearean sonnet and you said like she would make you start over yeah I I stopped saying like fast I did this to my children I may have psychologically scarred them but whenever they would say um I'd go um oh I love um I so like tell me more about um um is my favorite so I want to talk to you about um oh let's talk about um um is my favorite subject you know I spent four years studying um um no that's not what I meant um oh you meant um the other um with the small case you yes that um I love that um too so I think my kids might be psychologically scarred on well everybody has a verbal crutch but I think the one thing that is really important to remember about that is that science is better or science silence is better than a verbal crutch which is the thing that's so hard to learn when you're figuring out how to speak in public is you want to feel every single silence as your brain processes what you're saying with um I don't know uh something to say um so that there's no awkward silence time it's like uh I am this is exactly why Leonard Sesskin believes that uh Hawkins has such a uh devout following oh it's because he doesn't use that's right and there's these big pauses between everything he says which has this creates this sort of like importance of you're hanging off of everything he just said and he never has like um that is in there and it's all the direct information and then the silence is in between get everybody hanging on the edge of the seat and then he delivers the rest of it and people are like that's really good strings here's the thing I'll tell you what I want it's great so and see that's my verbal crutches so uh Rorix asks even if you weren't abusing the word would you get in trouble for saying like of course I would not get in trouble if I said that the flowers Romeo likes Juliet something something something or Romeo likes Juliet I was allowed to use that but if it was used like to say I don't like a summer bag I'll never get through this I was like um so like here like Romeo's trying to like explain that like uh he's totally into her life she's just awesome stuff heck oh my god like wow remember when I used to do Shakespeare it was great and and you know there are uh people have verbal tics but if they have I feel like uh people who know that they have verbal tics have created a way to have their verbal tics still and not have it sound like everybody else's verbal tic I mean I think that at least the first step to getting rid of the um and the like is like a Bernie Sanders let me just say let me just say and then he's got time to formulate the actual thought and then with Trump it's true it's true it's true so just sit there and rattle off it's true for a while and I'm gonna tell you about and it's true this guy who's doing this thing it's true and you'll do like they have it's the same they could be saying um right they could be saying like but instead it's let me just say it's true it's true let me just say it's true they have a different they've transformed their verbal tic into something else and so it sounds just sort of like um they're normal cadence at the White House Correspondents Dinner the they put together a compilation of silly things that Obama did whatever and I guess his verbal crutch was let me be perfectly clear oh yeah he likes to be perfectly clear he's really in trying to be perfectly clear all the time oh my gosh um alright where are we at Keeks the Keekster I'm doing things so I don't have to do them tomorrow hooray typing things I'm like I'm gonna sit here and I'll do some work while everybody talks that's nice where are we at it's bedtime goodnight everybody love you remember next week next week this is very very important uh show next week I would like everybody who is here tonight to attend next week's show it's gonna be huge let me just say it's gonna be a huge show it's true it's true you know what else is gonna be huge turtle day later this month that's right that's coming up on the 23rd that is very it's a couple of weeks away celebrate your turtles celebrate your turtles bring a towel hold on this is important I've got something that's also important let me just say also what I have to say is important it's true all tortoises are turtles no all turtles are tortoises it's not right I think so because now I'm a little conflicted on what I was gonna say maybe it's not true but I was very proud of my daughter she's about to turn three later this month she knows the difference between a tortoise and a turtle isn't that crazy the way she says it is that turtles swim tortoises march that's fantastic what about box turtles so the only box turtles we see are in water box turtles don't swim but they're in shallow water at the zoo so we don't know but they have this big tortoise when she saw it we know marching she's like it marches that's a tortoise tortoises march turtles swim that's perfect if you want to be scientific about it now I thought I had a good thing going now also sign up Blair is it possible so they have this vet center at the Sacramento Zoo with a window to the public and my daughter we saw they were looking at a snake and it's all she talks about now and all she wants to do is go up to that window and it happens to be right near the giraffe exhibit so they got it kind of closed off right now because that's where the baby giraffe is hanging out eventually they'll reopen it do they do regular check ups at zoos at specific times like could I get a schedule for when they're going to have because that would be really awesome because that's our favorite thing is to see all the vets looking over an animal probably not too tough I'm going to have to bribe somebody at the zoo to find out you could email them and say that you're from a reputable science podcast I'm just going to tell them I have a child that's really into every time they're looking at an animal I'm going to tell you as someone who works at a zoo that's awesome and we love to hear that but that you're like everyone else but I am like everybody else everybody says but I'm special and my child is special I have special children it's true goodnight everybody say goodnight Blair say goodnight Kiki goodnight everybody thank you for joining us once again and we will be back next week and we look forward to seeing you all in the chat room and hope that you will join us once again goodnight frog says goodnight frog says goodnight support us on Patreon get a frog or a bunny there's a frog and a black tailed jackrabbit and a nautilus and a blue-bellied roller do a red river hog okay alright moving on see you next week everyone bye