 This is Twist, this week in science episode number 666. Recorded on Wednesday, April 11th, 2018. The devil's in the science. Hey everyone, I am Dr. Kiki, and tonight on this week in science, we are going to fill your heads with sharing, enslaving, and smarts. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. What is a number? Does it mean more than a count, a measure, a label? The number of this show tonight is many things. It is the largest rep-digit triangular number. It is a Smith number. It is an apocalyptic number. It is an evil number. But then so are Pi and the Golden Ratio and put to the same standards. However, this number is said to be the number of the beast, referred to in Revelation 13, 18, here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. And his number is 666. Yet this is an example of a time that a number is not just a number. In this case, when written, it was a code. The old Hebrew words used to write the number 666 were in fact pointing to Nero Caesar as the root of all evil at that time. One man who was beastly in his actions became a number feared through history. And this is just a show. This Week in Science, episode number 666 coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn everything all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. Good science to you, Kiki. And good science to you, Blair. No Justin today, I'm afraid, for those of you out there. Unfortunately, he is taken ill and hopefully is using science to bring him back to us for next week. Oh, but Blair, you and I have a great show lined up ahead, lots of great stories. And as usual, we're back again to talk about the finer science in life. I have stories about a finger bone, food sharing in birds and fixing a brain disorder. What do you have for us in the animal corner tonight? Oh, I have a border wall. I have the origin of viruses. I have the solution to all climate woes. And I also, I also have a smart, friendly lemurs. Smart, friendly neighborhood lemurs. Yes, that's right. We love the lemurs, leaping lemurs, everyone. It's time to get this show underway. As we do jump into the show, I wanna remind you that if you are not already subscribed, you can subscribe to us. All good places that this week in science is found. You can find us on iTunes, the podcast, or Google Play podcast portal, Stritcher, Spreaker, TuneIn, YouTube, Facebook. Just search for this week in science. You can also visit twist.org for links to subscribe to a bunch of those places. So let's jump in to the news. The big, big story this week comes out of San Francisco. Comes out of the Gladstone Institute in San Francisco. For a matter of fact, it is an institute, private institute that is associated with the University of California, San Francisco. And the Gladstone Institute is known for a lot of its really cutting edge research. It originally brought Shin-Shinya Yamanaka, or Shinji Yamanaka, the first person to really get stem cell research underway. And they've been doing great stem cell research ever since. And this work is no different. Yeah, Dong Huang and his team, he was previously at the Gladstone Institute. He's not there anymore, but he and his team just published a study in Nature Medicine about a gene related to Alzheimer's disease and how they approached fixing this gene, ApoE4, which seems to be the root of all problems Alzheimer's related. Research has suggested that there is a gene, ApoE3, that in the majority of people is totally fine, creates the ApoE3 protein, no problems in the nerve cells in the brain. But in a number of individuals, one mutation will change it to a form known as ApoE4. Some people have single versions of this gene. Some people have double versions of the gene, ApoE4, which makes the ApoE4 protein, which is kind of a messed up protein. And it does not do what the ApoE3 protein does in the nerve cells. It actually damages nerve cells, causing the buildup of tau tangles and all of the traits that we attribute to the cause of Alzheimer's disease. In this paper in Nature Medicine, these researchers took skin cells from people. They used genetic and chemical controls to turn those skin cells into nerve cells, brain cells in a dish. And the individuals that they took the skin cells from were either didn't have the normal ApoE3 gene or they had one or two copies of the ApoE4 gene so that they could see exactly what happened in these brain cells in a dish. What they found is, yes indeed, as we thought ApoE4 is pretty responsible for the mucking up of the functioning of the brain cells. And then they're like, well, maybe we can fix it. And so they used something that they call a structure corrector to actually go in and physically correct the structure of the ApoE4 proteins. And it reversed the damage to the brain cells in the dish. Wow. Yeah. So the two big things in this study or three big things. Number one, human cells, not mouse cells. They did this, they know that there were issues with the mouse model of Alzheimer's and they wanted to know if their hypotheses bore fruit in human cells and they did. So they found that, yes, there were differences between the mouse model and the human model that explain why maybe some treatments and some drugs that have been in study but using mice and then were taken to the clinical trials at the human level and they didn't work. And this might explain why. So number one, worked in human cells. Number two, they actually really figured out. They showed that it is the presence of these ApoE4 proteins that causes the cellular damage and they showed they could fix it. Wow. So my understanding with Alzheimer's, the way a doctor explained it to me before was that you basically get Swiss cheese brain. So things just start to kind of, it almost in my brain, it turned into this idea that parts of your brain are basically disintegrating. So the ability to reverse that seems so crazy to me. That's extremely, that's a huge, this huge ray of hope that even if my understanding before was, even if we figured out what was causing Alzheimer's, maybe we could prevent it in future cases but you couldn't go backwards but it's starting to sound like that could be possible, which is- Right, so instead of continuing to cause the buildup of these tau tangles in the brain that mess up cellular metabolism and signaling, it actually, it starts to fix that because the structure of the protein gets adjusted so that at least those tau tangles are no longer created. So it gets, there's no further damage at least and possibly in getting in there and fixing the proteins, it's, the cells are able to start cleaning themselves up. That's great. So then I would wonder if you could regain cognitive abilities. Well, that would, yeah, I mean, that would be the hope. I mean, once a neuron is dead, a neuron's dead, it's not coming back. And so like you're talking about this Swiss cheese brain that occurs, which is a great picture to put in your head but these tau tangles, they mess up the metabolism of the cells, they do lead to cellular sediments eventually, which is cell death, apoptosis of cells so that cells start to disconnect from other cells because they're not communicating with them anymore. They're not working properly and they start to die out. Okay, so we anticipate not gonna get people getting their memories back most likely. But if you know that you are someone, I mean, for people who are far down the path of neurodegeneration as a result of this, it's probably, it'll halt the process, but it might improve it slightly, but it won't get, you know, you won't get that person back. The big thing is to catch people who are early in the disease to maybe do genetic screening because we do know that if you have one, if you have one ApoE3 gene and the other, one copy of ApoE4, that ApoE4 can lead to an increased risk of Alzheimer's and dementia. If you have two copies, your risk doubles. So if you know that you have that genetic variant and you can maybe start taking medication to fix that, or if there's something that can be done early in the process of the neurodegeneration that can halt the process before it gets too far down the path or even before it even gets started, that that would be where it would really make the biggest difference. So this also means that we think that Alzheimer's then is hereditary. In part, yes. So that also is newer information. Yeah, so the fact that we know that it runs in families, we know that there are genes that are responsible. This is not, you know, ApoE4 does not 100% explain it, it's a proportion of the population, but at least it is something that is now seeming like it's attainable, right? That we might be able to get there. So this is still research in a dish in a lab, but these were human cells, not mouse cells. They're looking at a genetic target, at a protein target, and maybe just maybe this will lead to a treatment where others have failed. That is fantastic. Alzheimer's is such a crazy thing that if you haven't actually experienced it with someone in your family or someone you know, it's, yeah, it's pretty much indescribable and it is devastating. And this is so great to hear. I'm so happy that we are moving on the way there. That's awesome. Yeah, it's very exciting. That's why I say I started off the show with it because this was a big exciting news. Science, yes. Moving down the path, moving down the path. And from, you know, the future of where we will possibly be helping people, how about the past of where humanity has come from? This is a story that I think Justin would have brought to the show. So I'm bringing it because he's not here, but there was a finger bone found in a desert and it tells a story. Where's the rest of him? Well, that's a great question. I don't know, but it's a, this is a very, it's a very interesting story all on its own. Researchers from various universities in Europe and other places have been traversing the Middle East, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, various areas looking for evidence, archaeological evidence of humans, humanities migrations. And one researcher, Dr. Hugh Grukut, he's from the University of Oxford. He and his team would drive back and forth past this one area called Al Wusta. And as they were driving past, I guess they would see little bits of what looked like bone, animal bone and a variety of things, like just poking up through the desert, but it wasn't their dig site. So they just kept on driving to their actual dig site where they were gonna go do work. And it was a few seasons of this, driving past and seeing the bones and going, what's going on there? Until finally they're like, okay, we have to do this. We're gonna stop and we're gonna start digging things up. And so in Al Wusta, they came across many, many animal bones. So there were some 380 stone tools nearby, a bunch of bird bones, reptiles, hippopotamus bones. So this was an area that the bones and the evidence suggest was fairly fertile. There were a lot of animals there, which would, and hippopotamuses, but you would think that maybe there was water available and what is now a dry arid desert at one point in time in the past, was wet and fertile and supported a lot of life. And so they found a bunch of stone tools so that humans could have been living at this site, but as they were digging through the bones of all the animal bones and the tools, they found one finger bone that looked like a homosapien bone, like a metatarsal, or is it a phalanges, phalanges, metatarsals? Well, phalanges is funner to say. Phalanges is more fun to say, but a finger bone, I'm getting my hands and my feet mixed up in the nomenclature, but a little finger bone, like the middle between the first and the second knuckle on the middle finger, that's the bone they found. A phalanges, says Grally Bear. So I have the phalanges are proximal, intermediate, and distal, the metacarpal connect to the fingers and the carpal bones on the wrist. Okay, so it's the phalanges, phalanges. There you go. Got it, the fingers, the phalanges. Now, this bone, they dated it to about 85 to 90,000 years ago. And it's sitting in the Saudi Arabian desert. And it's a human-ish bone. They think that it's Homo sapien because this possibly could have been around the time that Homo sapiens were moving out of Africa, but there's a possibility that it's another Homo species that was doing the walking around because when you're just looking at a little phalanges, there's a lot of similarities to the bumps and the way that they look to other fingers. So there's still a question for sure as to whether it's Homo sapien, but based on the stone tools nearby and other evidence, what they think is that this single finger bone brings humans into the Saudi Arabia area, crossing possibly either through where the Red Sea was or to the south of the Red Sea, out of Africa toward Eurasia about 90,000 years ago, which is more recently, it's earlier than thought, not more recently, it's more recently, less recently. It pushes back the migration of humans out of Africa even further, a single bone. Unless a hippo in Africa bit off someone's hand, swallowed it, swam to Saudi Arabia and barfed up the finger. That's a possibility also, there you go. Yeah, so hopefully, I mean, this is a needle in a haystack. This is a single finger bone. The fact that they found a finger bone is neat. Maybe there's more there. Like you said, where's the rest of them? Fossilized bone, sometimes if the conditions are not right, the bones don't last, they get broken down, the bones don't always stay there. So the fact that they found a bone there is really exciting to begin with. Maybe they will find more. But at this point, it sets up this out of Africa movement out through Eurasia earlier than people had thought. Well, I mean, the Middle East is really close to Africa. It's very, yes, very close. Yeah, it's attached. So I buy it, it makes sense to me. I mean, why would they stay in Africa necessarily? You know what, we didn't stay in Africa, obviously, but the question is, did it happen? Did the migration happen in one single migratory wave where there are lots of independent migratory events over a long period of time? And who knows, I am not an archeologist, but I would say the possibility of tribal groups, early groups of ancient humans following the wildlife, following the weather conditions that are conducive to them being able to hunt or scavenge in a way that supported them, that you might end up with many migratory events over a period of 100 or so thousand years or several tens of thousands of years for sure. Yeah, and if you think about it, if you think about how the Middle East is kind of this place that has a really, really rich past, if at some point it had a much more desirable landscape, if as you say, if there's hippos there, that probably means there's water and if there's water, there's more plant life. So it would almost make more sense that humans pushed out there when it was a nicer place to be than that they pushed out there and settled when it was a barren desert. Yeah, and one of the researchers on the study says, it shows us that humans were moving across the interior, the terrestrial heart of Eurasia, not along the coastlines. But if they were following the animals, yeah, when you go where you are. Follow the food. Home is where the food is. Yeah. And my final story to open out the show, it's for the birds. This is a story for the birds. I do love bird behavior studies. It's what my PhD was in. So soft place in my heart for animal behavior and anything that involves a species of Corvid, which this study does. This study was published in Biology Letters and is entitled Mesotosin Influences Pinyonjay Prosociality. What does that mean? Well, what they were looking into is these Pinyonjays have a behavioral quirk in which they seem to share food with each other and they live in these kinds of social communities where they kind of help each other out from time to time. That's not to say that it's altruistic behavior, but they're helping each other. Rising feathers lift all birds. So the researchers wanted to see what could potentially be behind underlying physiologically and physiochemically the behavior of this pro-social behavior. So pro-social promoting sociality. And they turned to what molecule in mammals leads to social bonding behavior? The hug hormone, oxytocin? Oxytocin, yes. Well, birds don't have oxytocin. What they have is something very similar, mesotocin. But... Birds can't hug anyway. Birds can't hug exactly. And the whole lactation thing, they make their bird milk, but it's a little bit different story. But maybe they have this molecule, this chemical in their bodies, that maybe it is response, it's similar in form to oxytocin. Maybe it has a similar function in birds to oxytocin. So the researchers set up this neat little task where they had the birds, they gave the birds a situation where they could choose to give food to another bird if they wanted to. They had a neat cage situation where the center cage contained the bird who was gonna be deciding whether or not to be pro-social sharing food or not. And on either side, there were two more cages. One cage, either the left or the right, depending on the trial, would contain another bird. Or it would contain no bird. And then there were two trays that had food dishes on them and there were wires that the bird, the choosy bird in the center cage could choose to peck at and pull at. And depending on which side, which wire on which side of their cage they chose, they would either, the experimenter would push that corresponding tray toward the bird. Now, the treat for the birds that was in this food dish was meal worms. This is a yummy treat for birds like a pinion jay. They wanna snack it up full of protein and lots of sugary carbohydrate calories. And the birds themselves on a regular basis were more likely in the first experiment when it was like, okay, the researchers wanna know, are they gonna be pro-social and choose the worm that will get themselves and the other bird food? Or are they going to just not really care and pick the food dishes at random? First experiment, they were pro-social. They more often chose the food dish that would get themselves and the other bird food. They're not altruistic at all. The experiment showed if they weren't getting food, they didn't care. So it was only about themselves getting food, but if they were getting food, they were more likely to help out the bird in the cage next to them. The next step in the experiment was to give the birds hormones. So they had two groups, either a high mesotosin group or a low mesotosin group. And then there was also the control that didn't get any hormones, whatsoever, they got saline. And these birds, they gave them hormonal nasal spray, which I really would love to know how they sprayed the mesotosin into the birds' nares, into the, you know, your sample. I'd love to know. Like are they grabbing them because then they also have stress hormones raised? And oxytosin, and this is one of the questions, very good question. This is one of the questions brought up in the study because of the results. And let me see if I can show you this window here with the results in it. The, in the results, the high mesotosin group was more likely to be prosocial than any of the other groups. The low mesotosin group, well, they were kind of prosocial, but, you know, the high mesotosin group was more likely to choose the tray that got themselves and the other bird food on a regular basis. The issue though, like you bring up, the saline group was less prosocial than the first experiment. And you'd think if they're not getting any hormone, that they should still be prosocial, but they really weren't. And so the researchers think maybe the handling increased stress in the birds and made them just like, I don't wanna do this, you know, and it's a J, opinion J. So they'd actually sound like that going, rrrr, rrrr, rrrr. Ha ha ha ha ha. The question however though, oxytocin and mammals is known to ameliorate the stress response. And so it is possible that the group, the high mesotosin group maybe had the same kind of effect where the stress was chilled out by the mesotosin. And so it was the most likely group to continue to be prosocial. As far as they couldn't just aerosolize it and just kind of. Yeah. Just breathe it in. Well then you don't have a controlled amount going in, how do you control how much they're inhaling? Yeah. But anyway, these birds, this is the first evidence that there may be some kind of hormonal control over this prosocial behavior in birds like the opinion J and others. And I look at it, it's a very small sample size of birds. This, I mean, they really didn't have a lot of animals. And so what they were doing, I look at this as kind of like a pilot study that should be looked at in greater depth. But I do like what they've got, what they're getting into here and the question of, you know, whether other animals have similar effects when their hormones are similar to the ones that we know about. We know what happens with us with oxytocin, at least to a certain degree. How does this other similar, not the same, but similar hormone affect these other animals? And how is it a part of their behaviors? So anyway, yeah, birds, they're actually very selfish. That's the reality. Aren't we all just deep down? Yeah, I'm definitely more willing to help somebody when I get mine too. That's right. I get to have a meal warm. Oh, you can have one too. I'll help you. Want a piece of pie? I want a piece of pie. Let's have pie. Yeah. I'll bake you cookies, but only if I get some dough to eat in the process. That's right. Dictel in the chat room is saying, so these birds are like my kids. Yes. Very concerned with fairness. Yes. Very concerned, very concerned with the fairness. So that does it for my opening stories. Are we done with the show? No, I go home. Can I take a bath now? No, oh, oh, it's not bath time. It's time for Blair's Animal Corner. Yes. Buy a bed, fill a bed, don't pay at all. Want to hear about a animal? She's your girl. Except for giant pandas. That's the world that I'm no more. I want to talk about the wall. The wall. That's a great album. Pink Floyd. So good. No, no, no. Not that wall. What? The wall that may or may not be erected along the southern border of the United States. Oh, tie down the wall. Don't build it. So the wall, you may have your own opinions on it, whatever they may be, due to political or other beliefs. But there's another side to this wall that's very important to discuss. And it relates to science and it relates to animals. And that is research done by conservation biologists on the environmental impact of said wall. So let's talk about it. The University of Texas at Austin did a very extensive study looking at previous studies, serving areas, looking at potential scenarios of where this wall would end up. And they looked particularly at how this would affect endangered plants and animals. And potentially more importantly to some people, how this would affect ecotourism in Texas. So Texas is pretty big, pretty big space. A lot of plants and animals live there. There's also a lot of different types of habitat in Texas, even though, I don't know, for me, I've driven through Texas once in my life. It looked fairly homogenous as you drove through. Not the case. There's a lot of different kinds of little habitats in Texas. The border wall that's proposed would cover about 1200 miles of border with Mexico. And that would contribute to habitat destruction, habitat fragmentation and ecosystem damage. So currently in Texas, there are walls along about 100 miles of the border with Mexico. And Congress just exempted the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge from the new fencing project. So hopefully it would go around it. But many miles of new barriers are set to be built on other federally protected lands. And most of that is in the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. So right off the bat, it's a National Wildlife Refuge. What does that mean? There's national wildlife in there taking refuge from the agricultural and metropolitan areas in Texas. So when they look at the potential places that this wall would go, they see a huge potential impact in habitat destruction and degradation caused by construction. So before the wall even goes up, the actual construction of the wall will level and destroy a lot of areas around it. But then on top of that, they're looking at damage to what's called tamaleep and thorn scrub, which is a particular micro habitat that was once all over Texas, but now is extremely rare and fragmented. So when you fragment habitat, basically when you think about that, we've talked about a little bit on the show before, but that's as if if you have 500 square miles of forest, but there's three freeways running through it in different sections. That means even though you have 500 square miles, you might only have four square miles in a certain place before you hit a freeway, which means whatever plants and animals are in that segment, it's as if there's only four. So when you fragment habitat, it's as if the rest of the habitat is completely inaccessible to most plants and animals because they cannot cross barriers that we create. So when you fragment this thorn scrub, all sorts of organisms cannot branch out through other habitats to get to the other areas of thorn scrub, which affects all sorts of things. First of all, animals and plants just need space, but on top of that, it creates a genetic bottleneck in each of the fragmented areas because they can't find a genetically diverse population to breed with. Right. So for example, the ocelot, which is an extremely endangered wild cat, and it's on the endangered species list, it has had huge habitat loss throughout the southern United States. There's about 120 left in Texas, and this would potentially run right through where the ocelot lives. So this is also true for black bears and endangered plants like the wildflower Zapata bladder pod. So plants and animals getting cut off by this border wall. The other problem, pollinators. So seed dispersing animals and plants could get hit smack by this tall wall. But what I think is even more interesting is that if you're building around the floodplain of the Rio Grande, there are different ways that you could build it that could have different effects. So they don't want to build right up against it because of the floodplain. It could damage the wall that they just tried to build. So then if they set it back, that pushes it into riparian forest ecosystems along the river. So then organisms can't access the river because there's a wall in the way. Additionally, if it's the barriers. There's more. Yeah. If they're too far from the river, they trap wildlife trying to escape floods and act as levees, which actually pushes water quicker towards us. So this is where, again, it affects us. It doesn't just affect the plants and animals. This could cause huge floodplot problems. And remember, I think it was two weeks ago, Justin talked about how Texas is actually really susceptible to flooding and sea level rise. So this could actually augment that effect. And last thing I will mention is that in terms of ecotourism, I had no idea, but bird watchers alone generate over $300 million in economic activity in the lower Rio Grande Valley. So by eliminating, bringing these birders to this area of the Rio Grande, you're actually taking a huge economic stimulus out. So there's a million reasons to reconsider certain elements of this wall. But if nothing else, you're actually taking away economic stimulus from those southern states by putting barriers in the way of migratory species. So hopefully, here comes the hopefully part. Hopefully this study and more studies like them will be recognized as these processes keep moving towards building this wall. Perhaps that will change the way it's being built or perhaps it might not come to full fruition. We'll see. But I think it's important and I'm glad that they're looking at it. I mean, environmental impact is definitely important and is part of so many projects that are a part of our infrastructure today, taking, assessing how what we do is going to affect the land, the animals, the organisms around us. And we do need to take stock of that. And then everything goes into the end cost benefit analysis, right? What are the risks? What are the costs? And what are the perceived benefits? And that is how we do the science. We figure out what may happen. It's not a known quantity, but what is it? What are the probabilities? What may happen to these plants and animals? What may happen to the rivers and their possibility of flooding? What are the costs? What's it going to cost us versus how much will it benefit us? And how does that stack up against the perceived costs and benefits of just building it? Yeah. Just have it there. And this is where it might come down to us to demand that these environmental impact reports be performed because as a federal project, they don't have to, which is the really scary part. Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is a project that is being, that is being pushed forward for national security reasons. Right. Right. And, you know, you're not going to have toad tunnels. We've talked about the toad tunnels and the underpasses that have, you know, that are for bears or for wild cats to be able to go underneath large roads so that their environments are not broken up. I mean, we talked about habitat fragmentation many, many times on this show, as you mentioned. And if the plants and the animals don't know the borders that the humans create. And so, but at the same time that the border for human purposes is a border to keep things out, people out, and it'll also keep animals from moving across. So, yeah. Yeah. I can see where this research is coming from and see why they're finding the things that they are. We will see if it is taken into account. Right. Absolutely. And if we're given an opportunity to ask or demand our civic leaders to take these sorts of things into account, that's our call to action. That's our time to shine. It's supposed to be of the people for the people, right? Stay tuned, I guess. Now onto some lighter stuff. Thank you. Yeah, that lemurs like to be friends with smarties. Let me explain. So in some cultures, maybe the smartest of us are not the best at making friends. But in lemur culture, being smart is actually extremely advantageous for your social connectivity. So this recent study found that regardless of age or sex, lemurs who are more likely to learn to solve a new task and retrieve a food reward are more likely to make social connections. So they put these lemurs through a test where they had to retrieve a food reward, a grape, by opening a drawer in a plexiglass box. So this is something that they had never experienced before. Not many lemurs have seen plexiglass boxes before. And plexiglass boxes don't just grow on trees, Blair. Yeah, absolutely. And they found that the lemurs who were frequently observed by others solving this task had, they received more affiliative behaviors, that's like grooming and stuff like that, than they did before they learned. So learning how to do a thing made them more socially connected as a result. This is the very first study to show a relationship between learning and social network position as a feedback based relationship. So learning made them more socially connected, but also social connectivity was an indicator for success in the food trial. So it went both ways, which means learning influences network connections and position, but is also influenced by it in the other way. So my question is how do we know if it's like we've talked before about boldness as a personality trait? And so is it actually or inquisitiveness, curiosity, the likelihood that an animal is going to reach out and connect with another individual, go investigate a plexiglass box that it's never seen before? Or how do we know that it's not, that it's intelligence, it's smarts that really make it? Or is it just the perspicacity of certain lemurs to investigate the world around them? Yeah, that is a great question. So this might not necessarily be smarts that we're measuring, but whatever it is that leads them to be able to solve this task, both more popular, more centrally positioned lemurs solved it better, but also lemurs that were not previously well connected, who were watched solving the task then became more socially connected. So just by watching this shows that if lemurs watched television of other lemurs that they might like it, they'd learn it, they'd learn it. Yeah, absolutely. They would say I want to be friends with him. He's good at what he does. But so it's a very weird push-pull that I don't see in studies like this very often. They're usually trying to parse out which came first, what is the result, what is the cause. It goes back and forth with these two factors. They're just inextricably linked that if you're popular, that means you'll be better at figuring things out, and if you're good at figuring things out, you'll be popular. Yeah, it's fascinating. Or at least you will be in the lemur world. Yeah, absolutely. I don't know. Our distant, distant, distant primate relatives, the lemurs. Yes, distant, distant. But oh, so cute. And not as distant as some other things. So definitely, they don't have quite the prefrontal we have going, but they have more than a turtle. So indeed, indeed they have more than a turtle. I wonder though if this is the basis. If we see this in these prosimians, this basis for sociality and intelligence or boldness in figuring things out, if this is something that is a basic nature of primates in general. Yeah, well it would push evolution forward so that you would be more likely to get better at finding food and be better at foraging and problem solving as a species which would benefit everyone. And the more intelligent and able-bodied you are doing that, the maybe higher in the hierarchy and more popular you are because you've got all the food. Yes, absolutely. You've been able to find all the grubs. Which then makes you a better candidate to have babies also in which case it would be beneficial to be socially connected. I think we just figured out all of animal behavior right now Blair. There we go. Nutshell. Nutshelled it. All of evolutionary history. Figured it out. Here we go. All right. We're done. We're not done. We still have more of the show to come. We're going to take a short break. This is this week in science. We'll be back in just a few more minutes. Lemurs or no. We have more science to go. Stay tuned for more this week in science. I have my volume off. Hey, everyone. Thanks so much for watching this evening. We are glad that you are here with us for the show. I'm glad I'm here with you to be doing this show. For those of you who would like to do more than just listen, we would love your support to keep this show going. You know, we are listener supported. We are supported by your donations and your purchases of our merchandise. 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Now, if you are interested in not the stuff, not the giving of the money, that's cool. You know what? You can send people to TWIS. Get people to subscribe. The more people we have in our audience, the more the merrier, the better things will go because more of those people might be able to help us out by buying our stuff and donating money. Get people to go to TWIS.org and click on that subscribe button. Oh my gosh, you're not subscribed? Go to TWIS.org. Click on that subscribe button. Subscribe to us on YouTube, iTunes, PayPal. Let's make this happen, everyone. Let us grow the TWIS Minion Army. Everyone out there, regardless of how you're able to help out. Again, this show is supported by you. You make this show happen. We really could not do this without you. Thank you for your support. We're back. We're back. Still missing Justin. Justin is still sick. Oh my. He's in the ether. He's in the ether. That's right. Hopefully you'll be better for next week. But it is time for this week. And what has science done for me? TWIS team. I love your show. And I've been listening for you. I love your show. And I've been listening for years. One episode a while back made me laugh when you were talking about trucks. And you said that one ton trucks weighed one ton. They actually weigh about 2.5 tons. That was me. I said that. That was me saying that. Good job, Kiki. But anyway, what has science done for me lately? This is short, but to the point. I'm a mechanical engineer in my 50s. And I have been working in the automobile industry for my entire career. However, instead of boring you with all the advances in automotive science and technology, I want to talk about what science has done for me lately in regards to medicine. I recently had a torn meniscus in both knees, which made it painful to walk. Yeah, both knees, ow. I had arthroscopic surgery done to both knees, done separately because the doctor told me if he did them both at the same time, I would not have a leg to stand on. The science of arthroscopic surgery made the procedure quick, had minimal scarring, and had me walking without crutches within a few days. Pain that I endured, endured for months, went away immediately after surgery. Every week listening to your show, I'm impressed hearing about new advances in medical science. And I hope for the sake of mankind that a cure for cancer is just around the corner. I've known too many wonderful people that have passed on due to cancer. Thank you to you, Justin Blair, and everyone behind the scenes that make this show possible. Roy Leponen. Thanks, Roy. Thank you, Roy. Thanks for writing in. I'm glad that your niskers, Kai used to call them. My friend Shauna had her meniscus torn, and she was telling my son Kai who was about, I think, two and a half at the time about her meniscus, and I wanted to call them the niskers. They're like whiskers, but on your knees. Shauna's got bad niskers. Well, I'm glad your niskers, your menisci, meniscuses have been repaired. And thanks to the science and technology behind the minimally invasive surgery that allowed you to be repaired and for a fast recovery. Thank you for bringing that to light. I really appreciate it. And everyone out there know you can send me your stories of how science affects you every day or, you know, just kind of generally. What has science done for you lately? I would like to know. Please write in. You can send me an email, kirsten, k-i-r-s-t-e-n at thisweekinscience.com or leave us a message on our Facebook page. That's facebook.com slash thisweekinscience. Send us a message. Send me a message. I'm going to fill this show with your stories, this segment of the show with your stories. So help us keep it going. Now on with the science. Great. You got a story, Kiki? Oh, I have so many stories. I just kind of kept adding stories to the show. I was like, Justin's not going to be here. What am I going to do? And I just kept throwing stories in the rundown. So let me know if I go on too long. This one, again, really sad Justin's not here to have this conversation because I'm sure he would make it hilarious. But as it is, you guys, those air dryers in bathrooms, maybe we should just get rid of those. Really? Yeah, maybe we should just stick. I mean, I know it's trees and all that. Let's stick to the paper towels, maybe or air dry. Pants dry is what you mean. Or myself personally, hair dry, I use it to re-moisturize my hair, scrunch those curls, those little waves back in there. Research published in the April issue of applied and environmental microbiology led by the University of Connecticut. Oh, they found that these air dryers in bathrooms, they suck in bacteria and bacterial spores and then spray them all over the place. And they also found that when they added HEPA filters to the dryers, it reduced germ projection by about four-fold. Great, let's just do that then. Yeah, so we could have the filters and that would change. But so we do know already that dryers like the Dyson and dryers the blade, that that one is very likely to spray out significant amounts of bacteria and viruses at about child face level. So we can avoid those as well. But the study does go in line with a lot of other studies that these dryers, these air dryers, they not only pick up bacteria that's kind of swirling around the room in the air and direct the bacteria and microbes, viruses at your hands, they probably also harbor bacteria themselves, which then they spray onto you and your hands into the room and into the air. And some of these bacteria are bacteria that can be picked up in the air by the flushing of toilets like Clostridium difficile, which causes significant gastrointestinal problems. This could be launched into the air by a flushed toilet picked up by the air dryers and circulated around the room even further or directly into your hands. So you're not necessarily keeping your hands clean by using these. And there's an interesting point brought up by ours, Technica, that University of Connecticut School of Medicine where the research took place. Paper towel dispensers have been recently added to all 36 bathrooms in basic science research areas in the Connecticut School of Medicine that have been surveyed in the current study. So the University of Connecticut actually took the evidence from the study into advisement and has installed paper towels in their bathrooms. So then I would be interested to see things like distance from the toilet in a restroom and if that affects it and what direction the air flows and how hot the air is I feel like there's a lot of weirdo variables with these things because there's not one design. I mean you have these guys but then you have there's other ones that are the accelerators I would use those and I feel like those are the worst because they push down with such force that it's hitting the ground and then I feel like you're stirring up bacteria from the floor. So yeah, I'd be interested to see maybe swap the toilet if you swap the floor and you swap the sink and then you kind of saw what the culture was in there based on how far you are from all those things. Yeah, so one of the experimental conditions that they used in this study was to actually not have the hand dryers working but to place sterile fans in the room to change the convection of air through the room so they put bacterial plates, they had still rooms where they didn't allow the air dryers to be used, they had other that had bacterial plates placed in them then they had that was kind of their control, no movement of air then they had plates that were put in the line of fire of these air dryers and the air dryers were in the room then they had another condition where they actually had fans in the room to blow air around just generally around but not with the air dryers working and they found that, yeah, just the convection in the room increased the bacterial colonies that grew on their bacterial collection plates but with these air dryers the numbers went up significantly. Wow, that's very interesting so just air flow washing and the air flow and yeah, the fans themselves increased the amount of bacterial deposition but well, what if we put the dryers outside of the bathroom? Right, there is that but then that doesn't get rid of there's just bacteria everywhere the dryers are still and if they are harboring bacteria themselves they're going to be blowing those bacteria at you or if it's it's just a jet of bacteria bacteria bacteria yikes, no thanks no thanks for me, I'm going to continue with my hair drying technique, I think I don't know if that's any nicer cleaner yeah, paper towels there we go do you want to do a story? Yeah, absolutely so speaking of filters this is the perfect segue to another really gross thing we don't want to release out into the world and that is our good old friend carbon dioxide so a University of New Mexico study actually patented work from this study has found something they have deemed a memzyme which is a membrane that acts like a filter but is near saturated with an enzyme called carbonic anhydrase which is developed by living cells that actually has been used to pull out carbon dioxide efficiently and rapidly from emissions so this was seen as okay, we are currently burning fossil fuels at an alarming rate it's contributing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere this is a problem so how can we significantly and inexpensively reduce carbon dioxide emissions and this memzyme has found a way through a water based membrane that's only 18 nanometers thick that incorporates these enzymes to capture 90% of carbon dioxide released and that is 70% better than current commercial methods it started a fraction of the cost so these all sound like great things better, stronger, faster, cheaper this enzyme can rapidly and selectively dissolve carbon dioxide the membrane can capture carbon dioxide molecules from coal smoke it turns gas into carbonic acid and then bicarbonate and then it exits downstream as carbon dioxide gas which they can then harvest with 99% purity to do what make more fossil fuels so that's where the story starts to lose me the idea here is to continue burning fossil fuels pull out the carbon dioxide and make more fossil fuels with it so it's it's isolated carbon dioxide that can be used for other functions can be tanked put in pressurized tanks and sent away make some soda with it or something but their main use of this harvested carbon dioxide as listed in this interview with them they kind of multiple times point towards oh but it can be harvested to make more fuel so here's where I soap box for a moment is that I think that where we currently stand we know carbon dioxide is a problem it is the number one contributor to the warming warming world for a bunch of reasons even though some molecules are better at trapping heat carbon dioxide is the number one factor because of latency and concentration so knowing all of that and knowing that we can't go off of fossil fuels tomorrow removing carbon dioxide through filters in our current emissions I think is a great admirable thing to pursue right let's stop putting it in the atmosphere let's remove it for our emissions don't put it in the atmosphere yeah yes but this is not a silver bullet this is not great we can start burning with reckless abandon now because we can harvest it and we can we can pull out the grown-ups and it's fine I'm loving your reckless abandon burning the fuels yeah this is my own personal disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer is that this this is great I love this idea they took this from something they saw in living cells with with lipid layers and they they were able to augment it and turn it into something that we can use right now cheaply and effectively great fantastic but we can't lose sight of the fact that producing carbon dioxide is still something we should not be doing for a bunch of reasons so let me jump on this right here and take this story to a better happy place okay so reported this week thanks to David Eckerd for sending this story to me is the right now the carbon X prize which was launched in 2015 it's a 20 million competition that is aimed at trying to get teams to develop carbon capture technologies to be able to take the emissions and do something with them and they announced the 10 finalists this week the 10 finalists are now going to take their technologies that they've been trying to develop and put them in real world situations so these 10 teams are going to build two locations one in Wyoming it's the Wyoming integrated test center and they're going to be looking at how they can take CO2 from a coal-fired plant and do whatever they're going to do with it the other is in Alberta it's the Alberta carbon conversion technology center or not Alberta in Calgary Canada and here's what the 10 teams are going to be doing a company called Breathe from India is going to be working to use a catalyst to produce methanol for use as a fuel and petrochemical feed stock carbon cure from Canada is trying to create more environmentally friendly concrete that's great and we know concrete has large carbon dioxide emissions so that maybe this could be interesting C4X from China is making chemicals and biocomposite foamed plastics carbon capture machine from Scotland is trying to produce solid carbonates for use in construction carbon upcycling UCLA from California is developing concrete replacement that absorbs CO2 during production we have carbacrete from Montreal Canada working on cement free carbon negative concrete made from waste produced during steel production C2CNT from the USA is producing carbon nanotubes so that's an interesting one carbon upcycling technologies from Calgary Canada is producing graphitic nanoparticles and graphene derivatives for use in polymers concrete epoxies and batteries batteries cert from Toronto Canada is creating new building blocks for industrial chemicals and new light from California is using biological systems to create advanced bioplastics so over the next couple of years these teams are really going to put their technologies to the test and the XPRIZE is expected to be concluded in 2020 so in a little less than two years we may have some really great technologies that will be taking the CO2 from these emissions the gases that are produced from the technology you just reported on this capture technology capture that CO2 and actually use it for these different purposes so the ball is rolling Blair it's moving that's awesome I love all the concrete stuff this is that's something people don't normally know about is how how harmful concrete production and movement and construction can be absolutely I love it and then I love that you know new petrochemicals industrial chemicals and carbon nanotubes new polymers new uses for graphing I mean there's chemistry at work making our hopefully hopefully making our lives better all over the world we have the answers we just need to find them and implement them they're out there they're out there you want some more answers cool technology things reporting this week from University of Bath in the UK researchers are reporting a new patch that can help diabetics test their blood sugar without actually using blood no more finger prick no more finger prick this adhesive patch uses microfluidic arrays basically these little sensors that pulls glucose across its diffusion gradient through from between cells by your hair follicles so really this patch just needs to be able to sit on the skin cover up a couple of hair follicles and it will be able to pull pull the the glucose from between your cells and give an accurate measurement and this is something you would wear all the time like a Fitbit and you could just open up your phone and go smoke blood sugar right now yes and it would send information to your phone you would not be poked you wouldn't have a hole in yourself I mean we still have the issue of actually delivering the insulin or the glucose glucose is easy to ingest it but insulin you may still have to give yourself an injection or it might tell your insulin pump to do something but if you don't have to prick yourself why do it this actually this could change millions of lives oh yeah wow how fantastic it's super fantastic it's very exciting the new technologies that people are coming across are published in nature nanotechnology if you are interested in looking into this a little bit more so this needleless blood sugar monitoring that they are trying to create to help people live their lives better and that said we know that some causes of diabetes we have type 2 diabetes type 2 diabetes which is genetic type 1 type 2 is the one you get from diet type 2 is the one you get from diet type 1 type 1 diabetes mellitus well maybe not all of it is genetic a recent study suggests that our favorite parasite toxoplasmosis gondii that infection with this parasite in the pancreas can lead to disruption of insulin production and reduction of this insulin expression and changes in serum glucose level not all the time excuse me not all the time but oh toxo persistent toxoplasmosis infection that is in the pancreas can debilitate the pancreas in some cases keep your cats inside people keep your cats inside the news of the birds is better for your body but it is just interesting that this is a new possible cause of this disease so fascinating toxoplasma keep your cats inside keep your cats inside the litter may be smelly but keep your cats inside tell me another story oh my very last story today is about viruses they old and no the virus viruses yeah research published in nature this week found that viruses have an ancient history much more complicated and interlinked with ours than we may have expected researchers from University of Sydney and the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center looked for RNA viruses in 186 vertebrate species previously ignored when looking at viral infections they discovered 214 novel RNA viruses and they found them appearing in healthy reptiles amphibians lungfish reifend fish cartilaginous fish and jawless fish they then compared this RNA to the RNA of other viruses they found that these groups of viruses are millions of years old and that they have been existence for the entire evolutionary history of vertebrates so it looks like these viruses evolved alongside us from fish to amphibians to reptiles to birds to mammals there is a common link here and so fish in particular they say carry an amazing diversity of viruses and virtually every type of virus family detected in mammals can now be found in fish they even found relatives of Ebola and influenza in fish they have been around as long as we have been around they have been around because the evolutionary histories of viruses match those of the vertebrates they are found inside the researchers concluded that these viruses have had a long evolutionary history tied to ours they do say as an asterisk the fish viruses and many of these viruses that they found these RNA viruses are not of a health risk to most of these individuals but particularly to us this is nothing we have to worry about that there is new RNA viruses discovered in fish now we should not eat fish anymore no no no they are interlinked with our history and there is just viruses they have been with us forever we heard recently about not just viruses but various bacteria that have also been evolving alongside us what was it recently it was the herpes virus there was a story we reported on a few months back about the herpes virus actually being something that has been with our primate ancestors going way way back to before we were humans and so I think this is a really interesting point in that we know that some viruses like the flu virus or rhino virus or others they make us sick right but there are probably many viruses that don't and as Justin's brought up before we're learning about our microbiome and how bacteria benefit us and our digestion and what possible symbiotic relationship could we have with viruses as well yeah absolutely I mean what beneficial things could happen or at least just completely neutral it makes sense it's if we are really these these bacterial spaceships for the bacteria running our systems as it were I'm not surprised to hear there's some viruses in there as well kind of steering things along history the virus is my co-pilot yeah and along those lines there's a new study out related to birds or about birds from researchers at Lund University in Sweden these researchers looked at the genealogy of over 1300 songbird species those that are from Africa that exist that are sedentary in Europe and just kind of stay there and don't migrate also migratory birds that breed in Europe and then spend the winter close to the equator researchers looked at all of these different animals these birds from these different groups and looked at the immune systems of the groups so the sedentary birds those that don't leave northern Europe migratory birds that go to different areas so they find that African African sedentary birds have a more varied and extensive immune system then either European sedentary birds or migratory birds and so what they think is basically that because of all the diseases near the equator that if a bird could migrate to get away from it then they did and that throughout evolutionary history birds instead of up regulating their immune system which is costly takes a lot of energy to keep the immune system constantly fighting off bacterial or viral invaders instead of doing that they just flew away flew away but how exactly did that happen where they flew away didn't get sick and went do you think it's safe to go back? nah yeah so I think it's interesting the migratory birds they've moved away from the disease central for their breeding season so they breed in Europe and then they go back to the equatorial disease ridden areas during other times of the year but they don't up regulate their immune systems they don't have more genes responsible for fighting things off in their immune systems than the sedentary European birds who just hang out in Europe where there's less disease so I don't know how that works specifically the researchers say when the migratory birds breed they have moved away from many diseases and therefore do not need an immune system that is equally varied another advantage is that the risk of damage caused by the immune system drops considerably if the immune system is less complex so they think that other animals also have similarly built up immune systems and they believe that their work could have broader implications say for vertebrates or possibly even humans and how we move and migrate and how our immune systems have compensated comparatively anyway birds very interesting fly away from the disease fly away I'd be interested to see the timeline of how that all happened because I would guess that some individuals or some species migrated for food supply and as a result did not get sick and then that was kind of an advantageous thing to do and it snowballed and became the norm it is an interesting thing it's like the immune system being the driver of this change I'm not so sure about that I mean when I think about birds that migrate versus those that stay in one place it's very often that the migrants are more environmental generalists they're more able to leave a particular habitat and go to another habitat they're all sorts of behavioral and cognitive facets that are different just stay in one place there are lots of and the brain size is even different between migrants and non-migrants really that's fascinating there's all sorts of things that change migration versus non-migration but then among the non-migrants you also have the ones that are really specialists and they stay in their very specific habitat they don't ever go and they just stay where they are versus say the nomads who they follow the food you have the sedentary you have the nomadic, you have the migratory and they're different levels of these lifestyles birds they have so much going on so much going on you know who also has things going on who? ants that's true now blood red ants from the species of formica sanguine sanguine of blood they go to other colonies they kill the queen steal the ant eggs bring them back to their colonies and this is of other species of ants they go to like a peaceful ant like formica fousca they take the babies bring them back to their colony and then raise them like their own except they make them do the grunt work and the formica fousca they don't put up a fight they don't care they are slaves that they they don't realize they are they're part of the colony how does this happen and how did it evolve? researchers molecular biologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and his colleagues they looked at the genetic relationships of 15 formica species to make a family tree for the ants and what they found is pretty interesting they found a few different lifestyles within these groups of ants that they sequenced and put in the phylogeny they discovered that there's one group that goes back for this evolutionarily that are free living and they just do their thing they don't have anything really to do with other ant species but then there was a split at some point in the past and an entire branch evolved that was of parasitic ant colonies and these parasitic ant colonies what they do is more like a brood parasitism where they go into another ant species colony and lay their eggs in that colony and get the other ants to raise their babies and then they found that the most recent evolution is the slave making ant and historically in this ant research it was a question now was this a separate evolution was it its own behavioral trait that came of its own accord or is this slave rating behavior something that came from the parasitic colonies and is the parasitic colony more of a transition to becoming an enslaving ant and according to this research it seems as though being a parasite comes first and that it is indeed a transitory behavioral phase along the evolutionary tree so somebody went in and killed a queen and went oh crap did we have some of our eggs in here took them back and then went these aren't ours but well they're here hmm wow that's very interesting yeah so you know one of the questions about this is this was 15 groups of ants where there are hundreds thousands of species of ants and so is this really comprehensive enough to tell the story and to answer this conclusively well the researchers went back and did a few more analyses and they say that the results still hold but more research needs to be done to be certain but there's another researcher according to an article in the news segment of Science Magazine the AAAS publication Suzanne Foitzick she's an evolutionary biologist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mann's Men's Men's in Germany and she has discovered genes that may be responsible and involved in creating a chemical disguise that then tricks ants into welcoming these enslavers into their colonies and so are there genetic adaptations how do the ants that are born from another species but in the enslavers colony how come they never question their own being there is it because from the time that they're born they are familiar with the molecular odoriferous cues the chemical cues or is there something else going on yeah this is a crazy complicated behavior for a tiny little ant and I can't wait to hear more and more about it I know these little tiny ants going in taking the babies making them slaves to do their dirty work yeah wow interestingly as I was looking through this paper this is a behavior that has been known about since before Darwin Darwin actually suggested in his book on the origin of species that slave rating in the genus Formica might evolve progressively through an intermediary type of brood predation so it was this Darwin who actually hypothesized that the brood predation was the primary transitory stage gosh he was one smart cookie he really knew his stuff I know interesting so yeah I kind of want to go back and find that part of the book check it out I just can't believe how much he got right so much very little information right very little information but he worked doggedly at it and it was mostly just observation though the grand majority was just experimentation lots of observation comparing, contrasting thinking you couldn't manipulate hormones or sequence genes or anything like that he was just supposing he supposed right a lot he did he did and I'm glad he had yeah I'm in a place oh Darwin props I miss you although you're still with us Darwin is with us all the time all the time in all the things we come to the end of the show yes we'll still be with all of you in all of the things but only you know in our hearts because the show is over yeah I'm going to go I don't know if I'll take a bath tonight but I might go take a bath you should I might go take a bath just go lie in the bath soak up the sciency juices you know I don't know does that make you want to take a bath now nope whoopsie stay out of the bath there we go but it's full of sciency juices sciency bath juices one could say that H2O is a sciency juice it is a sciency juice I think we should start selling bath bubbles that are the twists sciency bath juices yes sciency juices for your bath from twists oh there we go there we go it's a new merchandising angle here we go everyone out there we have come to the end of our show thank you so much for being with us throughout this show for all the science that we brought to you this evening all the fun that we were able to discuss all the things that we were able to learn thank you to all of you who are in our chat rooms hey chat room thanks for chatting over on youtube in thechatroomattwist.org slash live also over on facebook your comments are welcome and I do pop in to all these places during the show and take a peek and additionally I want to say thank you to identity 4 for recording the show to Fada for help with social media and show notes and Brandon for helping out to simulcast to facebook I would also like to take this moment to thank our patreon and youtube sponsors because you know what we have a youtube sponsor ljmoon thanks for donating over on youtube during our donation pitch over there I do appreciate that and our patreon sponsors mark tyrone fong keith corsell robert greg briggs나이éroだ Is s Marjorie vo dar представля經 sericos Bond All we and nine Kyle Washington, Eric Knapp, Richard, Brian Condren, John Ratnaswamy, Craig Landon, Ed Dyer, Tony Steele, Alex Wilson, Steve DeBell, Andy Groh, Joshua Fiori, Charlene Henry, Harrison Prather, Ken Hayes, Richard owner, Miss G. 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But how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only shop? This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. End of the show. Nice arting. Oh, DickTel says, did you see DickTel's comment? Yeah I'm I'm writing it down right now. Hummingbird. Hummingbirds, that would be fantastic. So these are the requests I currently have. You have requests? I have requests. That's awesome. A rubber ducky, that doesn't count. Oh, kitty paws. A peregrine falcon is a request. Sea turtle of some sort is a request. Bison is a request. Piranha. A piranha? Is a request. Piranha. I just like that. Bat, which we do talk about bats enough on the show. I'm also going to write. Yeah. I don't know if I'm going to be able to do all of this. So I have Hummingbird. I'm going to go Tasmanian devil, perhaps. Do you like the Tazzie? The Tazzie devil. Oh, identity four. It doesn't have the recording for the first 10 minutes. What? We'll do it over again. Nope. As long as it's on YouTube, I can make do. I can make this happen. Oh, a cat. You could maybe do a cat. Ah, DicTel has a Hummingbird in his lab logo. Great. Then I'll put it on something in Zazzle and you can order them for your lab. There you go. Synergy, you see. Synergy. So my plan is, I don't know if I should even tell you. But my plan is to take some good old fashioned washable markers. And it's OK, Ed. And kind of like just do very broad strokes, kind of some scribblies, and then spray it with water so it looks like watercolors. But I'm going to do some practice first. Yeah. That sounds fun. Where'd you come up with this technique? Well, ooh, a Harlequin shrimp. Oh. I love how excited you get about stuff like that. That's me. My mom is an art teacher for elementary school students. And I was kind of asking her about some fun, like, color mixing opportunities. And this is one of her favorites. I actually did it with her class a while ago. Oh, that sounds like something that might look good. So we'll see. We'll see. TBD, ultra clean washable. I'm listening on it. I'm pretty excited. I'm pretty excited. I'm excited. I'm going to start up. Is it J? Before I did that, I spent about 45 minutes looking for my drawing equipment because I couldn't find it in my new house. Oh, yeah. The moving. The moving. Which box was that in? You know, here's what happened. I put all of my arts and crafts in one place, and I had unpacked that box. Except I also carefully saved out my sketching stuff in a separate bag because I didn't want that to be inaccessible in my packed box. So that was in a random bag, just in a pile of bags still, that I have not finished going through in the bedroom. So after 45 minutes of going, or it's not here. OK, it's not here. But I put it in here. No, it's not in there. Oh, great. Is it in? Oh, is it in that bag I checked, but I didn't empty out. Better dump it out on the floor. It was that 45 minutes of that. But then I found them, so it was fine. I still have things that I haven't found from my last move. And the question is, when I do find them, it's been three years since my last move, so do I still need them? Right. There is that. The things that I have yet to unpack, I feel like I'm now going to unpack them in a different lens of like, I haven't used you in six weeks. How essential are you? Mm-hmm. All right. Are you going to go get it here? And I not bath, not bath. It's going to be my bed. Oh, your bed. I'm going to get my bed too. My not bath, the not a bath bed, not a bath bed. Let's see. Do we have any? OK, so for those of you who were around for the very beginning of the show when I was late, we were late by like, I don't know, a long time. 20 minutes. I think we were 20 minutes. 20 minutes late. I was trying to get everything working in our studio downstairs, but we had some problems with the call software that was supposed to bring us together. So what I need to do to tie everything together is find a time to get you and Justin, hopefully, but one, at least one of you. I need to go down to my studio and I need to play in it. There must be play in the new studio so that I know how everything works. And I will have no problems in the next show getting you all together. I am free Monday night. Monday night. OK. I could be free Monday night also. That sounds good. I'll see if we'll see if Justin could do that. Like between six and nine. That's great because I don't want to do late. Yeah, I don't either. That's what we cut off at 9 o'clock is for. It's for my bed. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, let's see. Kai gets home at 6.30. 7.30 is his bedtime. So depending on if I can get Marshall to put him to sleep, 7.30 ish. Or if Kai wants to be a part of the figuring it out, which he would potentially love to do. Yeah, that sounds lovely. 6.45. I'm putting you in my calendar. Yeah, I like this idea. OK, Monday, April 16. Where is my calendar? I'm putting 6 o'clock and I'll just be around. Yeah. Possums are not annoying. I like possums. Also, you mean opossums, identity four. Possums are something else entirely. They are super cute as well. Let's see. Ki. No, possums. Confirming software tests. No, possums with their scaly tails and their blossoms. Those are opossums. No, American possums are possums, right? No, those are opossums. The ones in Australia are called possums. Gosh darn it. I always get it backwards. OK, so American opossums. Australian possums. Discord, hot rod. I liked that one that we used. It was really neat. The one that we used is great and it will be perfect. Yes, I just need. I probably did something wrong because I jumped in and I was trying to make it go. I was trying to make it all work. And I thought things were going to be set up as they had been when I left it two weeks ago. But my husband and child have been in there and they moved everything around. Taylor's oldest time. Yeah, so I went down and I was ready. I was like, I think I have just the right amount of time. Oh god, I have to set everything. I have to bring up all over again. So that things didn't go as quickly as well as smoothly as I wanted them to. So yeah, Taylor's oldest time. I need to give myself more time in this new studio to make things work. So if people are around Monday night, who knows? Maybe we'll stream something. Just twist tech playtime. Oh, Bleak raised a baby opossum. Opossum or possum, Bleak? You need to be very clear here. Yeah, Bleak, are you in Australia or North America? I returned nine months later with its own baby. Oh my gosh, that's adorable. Opossum. That's so sweet. Oh, it came back to you with its baby. No, it is possum. What, Bleak? You're confusing the heck out of me. No opossum. No opossum, possum. Possum. It was a possum. Got it. It's a possum melody. It's the thing that you sent a picture for, the brush tail, I think. No ligers. No ligers. No ligers. Ligers are very, they're a crappy thing. They're a terrible thing. They don't have a complete set of their genome, and so they are sick. They're sterile, aren't they? They're sterile. They have indeterminate growth, so they grow until their heart explodes, basically. They live like two years, if that. How does that have indeterminate growth? Yeah, so they're missing some of the genes that make them stop growing. So they just grow and grow and grow, because the chromosomes don't line up, because lines and tigers don't have the same set of genes. But they have enough of the same genes that. They have enough that they can make. They make something. They make something. So there's a thing that is sick its entire life and should not be a thing, and it's made for its own exploitation, basically. So I am extremely anti-ligar. I'm sorry. It's something that occurs. It doesn't occur in the wild? I mean, or is it? It has not. It is starting to happen once or twice in the wild as the result of these animals getting pushed closer to each other because of human pressure. But those animals die in the wild right away, because they are so sick. So it's something that is not natural. It's not something that you want to have. So kids always go to me, and they're like, do you have any ligars? And I'm like, no. And you shouldn't want that, young Jimmy. A teaching moment. Do you really want to create something that's only going to live on this earth until its heart can't support it anymore? And sickly its entire life. But seriously, maybe they're like the beautiful snowflake that's unique in that it only gets to be on the planet like a mayfly for a short time, and it's very special while it's here, Blair. I don't know if I would call them beautiful. If you've ever seen pictures of them, they often have like snub nose with half of their like nasal passage missing. And like they get like. Do they get cleft palate? Yes, they do. They get all sort of like every genetic problem you could possibly get, they end up with because they have an uneven number of chromosomes. Yeah, it's really yucky. Fascinating. I don't know how we've never had this conversation about ligars before. But also ligars are the animals where a lion is the male and a tiger is the female. And there are also tigons, which are the tiger is the male and the lion is the female. And they look completely different. Okay, hold on, hold on. We need, I need pictures. So, ligar, we're gonna have ligar. And then we've got, what are the tigons? Sometimes they call them tigons. Sometimes they call them tie-ons. It's like a lion. Oh, a leopon? Is that real? Yeah, probably. I haven't heard of that one, but I wouldn't be surprised. Very sad. So it's like, okay. So it's like a lion. Hold on, I can do a screen here for everybody so you can see also. So the, it's amazing. They have very lion-y features, but tiger-y stripes. You're seeing all the pretty ones because those are like the upvoted pictures. I know the ones that people take pictures of, right? Yeah. Rawl. Yeah. Rawl. Look at this guy. Yeah. But, but, but where's the, where's the one? Oh, there's one all the way on the left. He looks like a walrus. Yeah. This guy looks like a walrus. Polo. And then we have ligers. They're giant. Is that real? Yeah, they're enormous. I don't know if that's real. Might be. But yeah, they, they have indeterminate growth. So they, they get huge, look at this liger. Whoa, he's got a weight problem. Oh, and they all get fat. That's another thing. They all have, they all have metabolism problems and they, all of them get diabetes and yeah. They're all sick for pretty much their entire lives. They're big. Yeah. Wow. When you said they had this indeterminate growth, you were not lying. Yeah. Poor things. Yeah. So who are these people who are like, look at my beautiful liger? Yeah. Here, what about this one? Oh, that's an unnatural pairing. That's part Swainson's Hawk. Yes. Oh my goodness. My mouse keeps going away. I think I need to mouse batteries. Oh my goodness. Wow. But where did that other one go? Tyon or Tygon, depending. So the Tygon, yeah, we looked at the Tygon first. Oh, we did? I thought we were looking at the liger. It said Tygon. That's what I was looking at was Tygon. Male Tygons are infertile, but females are capable of giving birth. Yikes. So they can pass on that not quite complete genome. That's super weird. What was the... Let me see if I can find that other one. It was Leopon. Is that real? Hmm. Yeah, Leopon, a hybrid resulting from the crossing of a leopard with a lioness. Yikes. A head of the animal similar to that of a lion while the rest of the body carries similarities to leopards. They're produced in captivity and unlikely to occur in the wild. But they have beautiful spots. That's why people make them. Because they've got the beautiful leopard-y coloring. Yikes. Well, look at this. He's got the... Yeah. And what people do to animals. Yeah. Oh my. Don't see what you want. We can make that. I feel like you could just do that with genetic engineering now, and then they wouldn't be as sick. You could just make a lion with spots. With spots. That sounds like it would be a lot better. Yeah. They're pretty little snowflakes in the world. The island of Dr. Moreau. Good night, Fada. Thanks. Yeah, no thanks. No. Unnecessary, especially because all of those species are in trouble. So breeding them would actually be beneficial to the world. Right. As opposed to spoiling potentially usable breeding individuals for making pointless cross species. Being whatever. Whatever. Got these amazing animals. Why don't you create a breeding program? Oh, speaking of breeding programs, we went to the wildlife safari in Southern Oregon. It's near Roseburg in like central, Southern, not really central. It's off the I-5. It's like 10 minutes off the freeway. Fantastic. They have the largest cheetah breeding program Oh. In the world, I think they said. They had, at the moment, they had something like 22 cheetahs that were there. And we saw these little baby cheetahs and we saw mama's and the teenage boy cheetahs and all the cheetahs. Yeah. That's awesome. The teenage boy cheetahs are very hard to breed in captivity, but they do a really great job of it. They have this one area you drive through. So this is one of those in your cars. You drive through this whole wildlife preserve and there's rhinos and giraffes and they had hippos and bears. Like they had, and they had like this one area that was a riparian wetland area that they had been working on to make it like, you know, really a great spot for native wildlife to be at, because there are lots of birds and water fowl that were in there. And then you drove around and you get to see the cheetahs. And they had this one area as you're driving through, they called it lover's lane. And they said that was the area that was off limits to all visitors because that's the private area for the cheetahs that they're trying to breed. Cheetahs, it's the honeymoon suite, they need their privacy. I saw that you encountered some ostriches. We saw ostriches, we also saw emu. Uh-huh, ostriches can't be trusted. No, we also saw they had various kinds of deer and they had this one area where it was not ostrich, there were some, but more emu than ostriches. Emus are silly. Yeah, they were silly, very dumb. Emus can be trusted to be silly. So they dumb and silly. Yeah. But yeah, I got to see, here's a giraffe that I got to see, he was right next to the car. He was so sweet, he was just standing there. Oh, there, you see my giraffe that I got to see. Oh, yeah, here's one of the, if you can see, there's one of the cheetahs. That's awesome. Yeah, beautiful cheetah pacing around. So these are the little, these are little kittens. They're probably little, they're right there. They were very excited. We were there when there was a zookeeper or a gamekeeper who had been in their area and you, in zooming out on the picture, you can kind of see her truck that's over here. And they were very attentive at the front because she had just come out and she had some kind of a hollow ball on the end of, on the end, it was like a fishing line almost. It was like a stick with a rope and the ball was attached to it. And the ball looked hollow, like you would probably, maybe she was putting meat in it or something and using it as a big cap toy. That's awesome. But they were attentive. They're like, where'd that go? They wanted her to come back and them with it. That's great. Yeah, and then we got to feed, we got to feed the deer. That's super fun. The deer came up and they said hello and they ate these little food pellets out of the cups. Yeah. Did your car get injured in any way? No, actually. Yeah, it was all good. I went through a drive-through safari park in outside of London and that one our car got kind of messed up because we went through an area where there are monkeys. Oh my goodness, ostrich. My son was really was like, roll up the windows, roll up the windows, it's gonna get us. Yeah, that's what I would have said. Roll up the windows, it's gonna bite us. I was like, okay, we'll roll it up. But yeah, we went through this area where there were monkeys and one of the monkeys jumped and sat on top of our car and there were signs up everywhere that said like, if monkeys land on your car, you have to wait for them to leave before you can drive through and it tore off our aerial, tore off the antenna of our car. I'm like, what's that? I'm gonna take it. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, the instructions we had where you could drive through, you wanted to stay, you were supposed to close your windows except in the area where feeding was allowed. You were supposed to close your windows so that you would be fine and the animals would be fine, except, and you could just keep driving slowly, except if there were a rhino in the road. If there was a rhino, you wanted to stay clear of it. And so just stop and wait for the rhino to get out of the way. Don't try and drive up to the rhino. Oh man, that same Safari Park outside of London, there was a rhino that kind of sort of charged at the car and we had to kind of floor it and go forward a bunch. Get out of here, there's a rhino! And they just ran right past us so I'm running past in our rear view mirror and we're like, oh! The rhino is attacking! Oh man, so fun though, that's awesome. It was so fun, it was so fun. I highly recommend it. Super great adventure time in Oregon. Yeah, all right, well, not bath time it is. Yes. Bed time. Bed time. I'm gonna go soak in my own science juices of dreams. Sheets and dreams, that's where I'm going. Oh my God, I gotta start selling bottled science juices. Yes, everything is a science juice. I know, science juices for your bath. Science juices for your dreams. Oh, liquid chemicals just for you. Steep in your own science juices. All right, everybody, thank you so much for watching, for listening, and good night Blair! Good night Kiki! Good night, thanks for a great show. Yeah, it was fun, we missed Justin, but it was still very fun. We did miss him. Hopefully he'll be back healthy next week and we will have, you know, all the commentary that you guys could imagine that he would have been saying in stories for this evening. Oh my goodness. Okay, we will see you next week. I do hope come back again next Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific time for more science. See you then.