 Are we ready to rumble? Well, we are live. I guess that means I should start the show. This is TWIS. This Week in Science episode number 619 recorded on Wednesday, May 17th, 2017. Timing is everything. Hey everyone, I am Dr. Kiki. And tonight on This Week in Science, we are going to fill your heads with history, origins, and randomness. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Intelligence is the one thing we depend on in modern society more than any other. With it, we are healthier, more prosperous, more secure, and more free. Without it, we will be sicker or poorer at greater risk and beholden to others. And of all the intelligence out there, the most important, the most precious, the most pluripotent with potentiality is that which was not known before. Hidden knowledge, that once revealed by science, can make up for prior lack of intelligence about an issue. And propel us along a path unseen to us previously. Following our programming contains such previously unknown intelligence that, if shared with the adversaries of the United States of America, could lead to greater dialogue on important issues that affect all mankind. Issues that put into perspective tensions over trade and territory minutia. Issues like global warming, disease prevention, sustainability, our common origins, like how half a dozen hominins were walking the earth at the same time. And have you seen the billions of galaxies that the Hubble has brought into view? So if you find yourself in casual conversation behind closed doors with potential adversaries and wish to tout the intelligence that you are privy to, look no further than This Week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn everything. I wanna fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening, what's happening, what's happening this 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 another episode of This Week in Science. We're back again. We're back again. We have so much wonderful science ahead. And maybe people wanna take a break from the craziness of the world and be surprised by the smoothness of science. So smooth. On June 10th and 11th, I wanna remind everyone that we will be in Philadelphia at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Hall for the Young Innovators Fair. And you can find information on that at younginnovatorsfair.com. And I've got tons of science news. All right. What did I bring today? I brought stories about quantum teleportation because that's always a little weird. I've got stories about randomness, but not so that you can be random. Maybe so that other people can be random. Random is good. And also trees are on the move. Trees. Yeah. Is that like in that book, the, what are they called? The Ents? The Ents? Right. Like the Ents. They're on the move. That's right. That's right. That one book, what was it called? What was it called? What was it called? Well, there was the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. Something about the jewelry. Ah, that's what it was. The Lord of the Rings. Yes, yes. Absolutely. Justin, what did you bring today? I brought the origin of life. Microbes, regulating your genes, an atheistic survey, and, and bumblebees, taking over Detroit. What? That's a good thing, I think. I want to hear the buzz on that one. Oh, Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, I brought three different kinds of animal parents. Right in between Mother's Day and Father's Day, I thought we'd explore some of those new findings in what it is to be a parent in the animal kingdom. It's hard. That's just all there is to it, no matter what. It's hard. Yes, we'll explore different ways that it is difficult tonight. All right, we've got a great show ahead. And as we get started, I would like to start with our new segment for the show. What has science done for me lately? Minion Julian Sammy wrote in to say, at the end of July, 2015, I checked myself into a hospital because I couldn't breathe. Five days later, after an emergency tracheostomy, the diagnosis of laryngeal cancer was confirmed. I call August 17th the day of the short knives when two highly skilled professionals cut my throat. After the total laryngectomy, the anatomy of my neck has been drastically reconstructed. So what has science done for me lately? Well, let's see. I breathe through a hole in my neck between my collar bones, but I'm still breathing. I count that as a win. Be well. That is a win, absolutely. Be well, Julian. Thank you for writing in to let us know what science has done for you lately. And anyone out there, anyone, everyone, please send me your thoughts on what has science done for you lately? I wanna know. I want a different answer every week of this year from our minions. So that means you guys need to email me. My email address, Kirsten, K-I-R-S-T-E-N at thisweekinscience.com. Okay, diving into the big stories. I've got some really fun stories here. So we know we're affecting the earth, right? There's all these humans all over the planet. We're building buildings. We're doing agriculture. We're, I don't know, eating all the fish. So long and thanks for all the fish. You know what we're also affecting? Radiation that's coming into the planet. Yeah. Yeah, this is a very interesting study coming out of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Researchers just published in Space Science Reviews. There's a comprehensive paper on human-induced space weather. Now I wanna say that again. Human-induced space weather. Not humans are changing the climate on earth, but we're changing space weather. I know. We're changing space weather too. Like our influence is starting to leave the planet. And one example of this is that we have created something of a radiation bubble around the planet. And it's gotten stronger as we have developed our radio frequency transmissions. Now, this bubble that has been discovered by these researchers, it is made up of very low frequency or VLF radio communications. And these kinds of communications are very low frequencies. So they're the kind of frequencies that are used to communicate with submarines. So say, things sending signals through the ground, underwater to be able to kind of get into stuff. And so this is the kind of technology that we use to communicate with our submarines. And as we have tried to be stealthy, our communications, we've got more communications and different communications and there's these communications, don't just stay in the ground. We're transmitting them all over the place and they are getting stronger. They've gotten stronger since like the 1960s, stronger and stronger. And what researchers have discovered, using probes in our atmosphere, they have discovered that the outward edge of this VLF bubble, as it's expanding outward from our planet, corresponds almost exactly to the inner edge of the Van Allen radiation belts. And these are charged particles that exist around our planet in these belts and they're held there by Earth's magnetic fields. But researchers who were involved in this think that maybe these Van Allen belts might have come in closer to Earth in the time before we were shooting out all of our very low frequency signals. And that what has happened is that our very low frequency transmissions have pushed the Van Allen radiation belts a little bit further away and that the normal place they would sit around our planet as based on our magnetic field would actually be much, would actually be closer to us. And so these very low, what's going on here? How is this happening? These very low frequency transmissions are actually, these are little particles that interact with radiation particles. And so what they're finding is that we've got signals and stuff that are actually interacting with the radiation that's coming in toward the planet. And in another part of this study that was fascinating some data from the Cold War high altitude nuclear tests became available and they were able to determine that they were to use this data to actually see how these radiation mechanisms so like high altitude nuclear nuke blows up lots of radiation given off. How does that perturb the magnetic field of the Earth? And how does it hinder the magnetic field from protecting the Earth? And then what their big question that they're looking at is how can we learn from this data, from our transmissions, from our nuclear tests in the atmosphere, maybe how to protect satellites and astronauts from space radiation and space weather? Yeah. Is there stuff we can do to actually make our bubble bigger? Can we artificially increase the size of our protective shield? Yeah. And I think this leads directly to putting submarines in space too. Haven't we already done that? Those are called space marines, Justin. Geez, why are you doing that? Space marines. Oh, the International Space Marine Station. Yes. Back in the 40s, have you, whenever they looked at the future like they would do with the radio plays or even some early film, when they would put mankind into the future, exploring space, they would basically put the spacecraft was basically a submarine. That's how they sort of imagined it would have to be. And even like it would be pinging space, like boop, boop, like they would have space sonar. Space marines. Yeah. What are you saying? That's not what we're doing? Yeah, that's exactly what we're doing, Black. Okay, great. Because I like those tin tubular, totally tubular, man. So anyway, humans are creating our own little protectivey bubbly blanket that is changing space weather. And, oh, one fun thing that I didn't know about, there was one of these high altitude nuclear tests, which took place on my birthday, August 1st, but a few decades before I was born, 1958. This teak test was conducted over Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean. And on that same day, the Apia Observatory in Western Samoa observed an unusual aurora. And so this is in the Pacific Ocean, over the Pacific Ocean, they observed an aurora, which is only usually observed at the poles, the north and south poles, where the magnetic field is really strong and they've got the cosmic rays and particles coming in from outside and interacting, these electron interactions with the atmosphere. So they think the energetic particles released by this test followed the Earth's magnetic field lines to Samoa and induced the aurora. And so it's kind of interesting that the radiation and the energy that was created from this nuclear explosion in the atmosphere, that that energy would actually kind of tune in with the natural energetic pathways in our atmosphere to create other energetic events elsewhere. Over Polynesia, yes. So there's interesting stuff to be learned as data becomes unclassified from these old school nuke tests during the Cold War. Now, we talk about communications, right? And you wanna keep our communications secret, right? I have special communications, well, quantum communications, quantum teleportation is potentially one of these ways that we can do that. And researchers in China for the very first time have achieved something that I don't understand. It's called direct counterfactual quantum communication. And- Oh, oh, oh, that's easy. Oh, that, yeah, yeah. So it's where magic happens because of physics and Harry Potter becomes like a reality. That is basically what I'm going to say, but in different words. So this is a different quantum teleportation than we've talked about on the show previously. In previous- That's your grandfather's quantum teleportation? No, this is new and improved. This is new fangled quantum teleportation. So quantum teleportation we've talked about before is the result of quantum entanglement. And you have to have two particles, usually they're together and they're entangled when they're close together. And then you can take one of those entangled particles, however far away you want. And because they're entangled, if you change something about one of the particles, then that same aspect will change on the particle that's very far away. And thus you have information transfer over large distances that's instantaneous. But the problem is, you've still got to take these particles from one place to the other. And so you're still transporting particles between locations to get them to these places. So researchers are trying to figure out how they could set up a system that doesn't involve actually transporting particles. And they say they've done it. And they've instead of using entanglement used a phenomenon that's known as the quantum Xeno effect. And the quantum Xeno effect is this strange thing with quantum systems. There's the Schrodinger's cat experiment where it's like you don't know what's going on inside of the box, but then you open the box and suddenly you know what's happened, right? So basically you are determining the state of particles in a box, right? You're determining the state of particles in your experiment. And so in a quantum Xeno effect situation you have an unstable quantum system. So it's potentially anything, it's not stable, it's doing whatever it is in your box, right? There's all sorts of stuff happening in this box. You have no idea what's happening in the box. But what you do is you get something in there to repeatedly measure it over and over and over very quickly so it's basically, it doesn't know what's going on. And so these unstable particles never actually decay. And so it's kind of like having, it's like you've got a pot of water. This is the anecdote that people use to explain this and it's like having a pot of water. You know how there's the idiom, a watched pot never boils? That's what this is. This is the quantum Xeno pot that never boils because it's being watched, right? Just being watched so it can't do anything. It can't change its crazy unstable state. And so it's like a frozen boiling pot of high probability. So anyway, they've taken this quantum Xeno effect and they have transferred a quantum state from one site to another using this effect without any quantum or particle being transmitted between them using photons because we know that what can photons be? A particle or a wave. A wave, man, right, a particle or a wave. And so if you put them in the quantum system, they will be waves. They are not particles in a quantum, unstable quantum state. So they set up a system where they had a few different options for what the light would do. They had zero for white and one for black and then they had an inconclusive result that would get rid of stuff. And basically using a set of zeros and ones and photons passing through a series of inforometers, they were able to transmit a GIF or a GIF depending on which way you like to pronounce the word, but one of those little moving pictures that we all like to send each other over Facebook Messenger on the internet. They sent a black and white image from one place to the other, but never actually sent any particles to transmit that image. Abra, cadabra, poof, poof, magic, quantum magic. Yeah, and so it needs to be verified by external researchers still at this point, but this is a definite possibility for the next step in quantum teleportation. This paper was published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in case you are interested in checking it out yourself. This is crazy. Right? It still kind of sounds like that. I don't get it. No, there are. Also, Iggy, the one part of this I don't understand is that a watched pot does boil. Not if you have ADD. If you have ADD, it never boils when you watch it. It just takes too long. Sheer stubbornness has resulted in me watching a pot boil several times. It's an idiom. You lead an excitation. It's an idiom. It's not actually truth. What watch pots in reality do boil, but in a quantum world, oh boy. This is this week in science. I hope we just can use you. In a quantum world, if you watch a pot less, it does boil quicker. It's true. That's what we just learned. Exactly. It becomes a little more stable. It does what it wants to do. Boils faster if you don't look at it. Justin, I'm looking at you. A lot of questions these days about where we are going as a planet. But before we even get there, we still haven't answered how we got here in the first place, in the early beginnings of life on Earth. How did this whole thing get started anyway? Religions often have creation myths that seem to simplify the process. Abracadabra poof. And life is abundant. But the real story is much more complicated. But it doesn't prevent scientists who study the origin of life from using a little abracadabra poof of their own. This is University of Illinois. Gustavo Sistano Anoles, professor of the Department of Crop Sciences. He explains all living organisms have a metabolism. Instead of life-sustaining chemical transformations that provide the energy and matter needed for the functions of the cell. These metabolic transformations are assumed to have occurred very early in the life, primitive life of the Earth. Organisms probably replaced chemical reactions already going on in the planet and internalized them into cells through development of enzymatic activities. Gustavo's study looked at 249 genomes of different organisms in a searchable database known as the gene ontology database, the G.O., which not only allows the genes to be sort of searched through and similarities, but actually has descriptions within it about what those gene functions are. So, quotey voice of Gustavo again, you can take an entire genome that represents an organism like the human genome and visualize it through the collection of functionalities of its genes. The study of these functionomes tells us what genes do instead of focusing on their names and locations. For example, we can find out what kinds of catalytic recognition or binding activities a gene product has, which is much more intuitive. The best way to understand an organism is through its functions. So, they looked at the number of times functions appeared in the genome, right? Certain functions where it's got this information on how to do this thing more than one place. The idea was that older gene functions, such as the catalytic activity of metabolism, would likely be shared by all organisms, right? We all need to have a metabolism to be alive and would be found also in large numbers. While one recent gene function, while more recent gene functions are gonna be found in lower numbers and smaller subsets of organisms, they made a frequency tree that traced the most likely evolutionary path of molecular functions through time. The base of the tree, you know, those things that we all have in common, these are gonna be the ancient functions, right? In the top, there are those branches that are going up near the top reaching out, reaching out, these are gonna be the more recent add-ons to the gene functions. They found near the base of this tree of functions, the functions related to metabolism and binding. Quoting voice again, it's logical that these functions started very early because molecules first needed to generate energy through metabolism and had to interact with other molecules through binding, says Gustavo. The next major advancements in this were functions that made rise to macromolecules, which is where RNA may have entered the picture. Very important, this is now, this is higher up and RNA is now entering this picture. Next came the machinery, the integrated molecules into cells followed by the rise of functions allowing communication between cells and their environment. And finally, going up, up, up, you start to see functions related to highly sophisticated processes. What's a highly sophisticated process? Things like muscle, skin, a nervous system. These are kind of far further out. These aren't nearly as ancient. The findings are running contrary to the sort of popular ideas of RNA as a first step of life, but rather a metabolism first origin of all life on the planet. Aside from shedding light on the past, following the progression of these molecular functions through time might even predict where life on earth is headed. People think of evolution as looking backwards, Gustavo says, but we could use our chronologies and methodologies to ask what novel molecular functions will be generated in the future. Pretty cool and you know, very sort of make sense of the sort of way of looking at it. Look at a whole bunch of life forms, see what gene functions they have in common and those most likely are the oldest. Right, trace it backwards. Just go take it backwards and be like, all right, where'd we start? How did organisms mutate out of that? And it really, I mean, more and more studies keep coming out suggesting that this metabolism first, I mean, RNA first, yes, but even before that, it's just this kind of chemical processes. Metabolism first, that maybe there were these pseudo cells that were in the muck and the mud, just in the mud, just little pseudo cells that were doing things, what they're doing in there. And maybe that's then RNA came in because then maybe they're communicating with each other. Then maybe that's how it all got going and this is a neat way to be looking at that though, to take it from the genetic standpoint. And then at the end, like you said, taking it to the future, I mean, there is the big question of where is everything gonna go? Is people still ask the question, are humans still evolving? What's gonna happen next? What would change? Why would it change? And this is an interesting way to start looking at that in perspective. Or as I kept thinking on this, it's also a way of looking at how diseases might evolve going forward too. Where are these further out branches away from our origin? Gonna put us in more jeopardy to the environment that we encounter now. So it's an interesting tool. It's gonna be, I can't wait to see how the reaction of those early origins of life react to this if we start to, because the RNA thing is very popular right now. So I'd like to see this sort of argument of ideas unfold a bit more. Yeah, I love your idea too of looking at diseases or even if we're gonna talk about kind of, like we wanna talk about viruses maybe, or maybe wanna talk about the development of antibiotics. So how do parasites, how do bacteria, how do viruses take advantage of our cellular machinery? How do they gain access to our cells and cause disease? And what genes are they taking advantage of? What genes are they using? What, how can we use this phylogenetic method to figure out our Achilles heel? Oh, I've got a story like that in a second. Oh, well, that's a great segue. Moving on up to, not the second half yet. Right now, you know what time it is? What time is it? It's time for Blair's Animal Corner. Creature, great as well. Five-bed, little pet, no pet at all. Wanna hear about this animal? She's your girl. Except for giant pandas as well. That'll go for her. What you got, Blair? I have, I'm starting off with a story of a great dad. Justin, do you think you're a great dad? Ah, no, I'm all right, I'm not bad. Let me ask you this, how many times a day do you nip at your offspring to remove debris? Oh, constantly, it's like. How many times a day do you fan them with oxygen-rich water? No more than once. Okay, so if you were an anemone fish, you'd probably be an okay dad, but not great. Anemone fish dads do a lot of parental care, particularly of the eggs when the eggs are growing. They are constantly nipping at them to remove debris and they are constantly fanning them with oxygen-rich waters. They will do this with their own eggs or even if they lose their eggs, but there are some stranger eggs from an unrelated nest that replace theirs or nearby and they are not being cared for. They will care for those as well. That's what such good dads they are. Recent research specifically was looking at why. What makes them such good dads when so many dads in the animal kingdom don't care for their offspring at all? So University of Illinois student Ross DeAngelis and his psychology professor Justin Rhodes were looking at, what do you think might control behavior? Pure parental behavior, what do you think? What is it always? It's hormones, it's hormones, hormones, hormones. So they were looking at hormones. I was gonna say like, I was gonna say like annoyance level. Yeah, those eggs just won't stop crying. I know. So they were looking at isotocin, which is analogous to oxytocin and us, which is the hormone, the love hormone, the hug hormone, the mother hormone. These hormones that we already identify as being directly linked to parental care in mammals. So isotocin is the analogous hormone in fish and they found exactly what they expected. When they blocked isotocin from the fathers, they stopped taking care of stuff. Yeah, so it was pretty much directly related. They, without that isotocin, they stopped tending to their young, they kept drifting away, they weren't even protecting it. I don't really care. I have no feelings for these unknown eggs. The next thing they looked at was arginine vasotocin. So arginine, sorry, yeah, arginine vasotocin, the analogous hormone in humans is arginine vasopressin. And this hormone, also they suggested potentially had some influences on parental care. They blocked the vasotocin and they had less aggression than untreated counterparts, but they also became even more attentive to their offspring. Yeah, so blocking the vasotocin made them better fathers. Why is that? Well, the hypothesis is that it's actually reducing aggression and thereby reducing vigilance in nest defense. Which means they just have the blinders on, they're just nip, nip, nip, fan, fan, nip, nip, nip, fan, fan, fan, not paying attention to other animals, anemone fish, anything in the area. So that's the current hypothesis. But really what we know from this is that these two different hormones are both affecting parental care directly in these anemone fish. So you could see that, potentially there's lots of parallels that could be drawn from here. They, right, and they've already done a lot of, there's been a lot of experiments on aggression and hormones related to aggression. There's been a lot of experiments on oxytocin in parental care, but mostly it's been on females. So this is kind of an unusual combination of these common elements in an experiment. So it opens a lot of other questions. I do think it's important to mention though, even though it wasn't mentioned in the article anywhere, that anemone fish are sequential hermaphrodites. So they start, all of them start as males. As males. And the dominant individual, the larger individual in a mating pair is the female. When the female dies, the male transitions into a female and finds a male to mate with. So also now we have the animal giving the most parental care as the beta, as it were, as the non-dominant individual. So is that related? And are hormones related to that? Hormones absolutely have to be related. I mean, if we're talking about- Right, so they're related to the transition. Yeah, for sure. They're related to the transition. They're gonna be related to the parental care. So it raises many extra questions that are not answered in this article. So I think that also, that's a whole extra element to be looked at, is that if we pick, for example, meerkats, a female dominant society, will you see oxytocin mirrored for parental care in males or in the lower ranking females? Will that have more of an influence on them than it would on the dominant females who do not tend to young? Yeah. Or are they low in oxytocin? There's a whole sorts of questions here. This to me- So if Nemo hadn't left. Yes. So yes, to answer your question, Marlon would have turned into a woman and he would have mated with the son. Are you happy now? No, that's, I wasn't going there. I was just gonna say he would get a mom back. Yes, Marlon would turn into a female and then he would mate with Nemo. So there you go. That's nature, not revealed in the Disney movie. I'm finding some interesting parallels between this study and the prairie vol meto vol research, which is some of the leading research into the oxytocin vasopressin system, where you have prairie vol, I think it's, I'm gonna get it mixed up. One of the species is monogamous and the other species is not. And the monogamous species, the male sticks around and helps with rearing the babies and the other species that doesn't happen. There's mating and the male takes off and goes someplace else. And oxytocin levels are different between the males in the difference, between the different species. So you have higher oxytocin levels in the monogamous species than you do in the non-monogamous species. Yes, and prairie vols, as far as I can tell, are monogamous. Yes, prairie vols, that was this one. Yeah, so definitely these are all kind of intertwined, but it kind of just leads back to my common thread on this show, which is that it's hormones. It's hormones, it's all hormones. We're all ruled by our hormones, which brings me to my very next story. Okay. It's about female fruit flies becoming more aggressive towards each other. So, why would they be more aggressive after? You'd think after they'd chill out for a little bit, they have some egg fertilization to tend to, you know, no. They get really, really aggressive. They start headbutting each other. They challenge each other. So, the new hypothesis is that it has to do with specific proteins in fruit fly semen. This is a new trend we've been seeing in the last few years of proteins or RNA that's in the semen. Mind control. And things. Be a seminal fluid. What? Yeah. Okay. So, go on with this study. A team of researchers from Oxford University, they examined hundreds of fruit flies. They assessed the impact of mating on female fruit fly behavior and to what degree it alters their levels of aggression. So, what they did first is they took fruit flies and they tested them for aggression levels if they are virgin or if one of them had just mated. But then, they tested them looking at if they had mated, but there had been no delivery of fluids. So, basically they took sterilized males and still let them in and they mated and then they saw what would happen. And it really looks like the aggression is directly related to the transfer of fluids. What would be causing aggression though? So, is that, I mean, normally we associate aggression with testosterone, but would that be transferred? They don't think it's testosterone. So, they think it is the sex peptide carried in seminal fluid that binds to sperm. And they think that this is also, so they also found that this specific peptide was involved in elevating female aggression. So, something about this peptide is directly causing the aggression as far as I can tell. So, there's a few ideas of why this might happen. So, one would be that they want to, that they're just being aggressive to everyone, males, females, whatever, because they don't wanna be mated with again. The other option is that they're protecting resources because now they need them because they're about to grow babies. Right, let's like step off, this is mine. I need resources. I need the energy to support the eggs and the sperm that I'm, these offspring that I'm going to be developing soon. Right, and yeah, so the weird thing is that it was always if there was fluid transferred, but it was regardless of whether or not the females produced eggs afterwards. So, reproduction was not a contributing factor. It was only the transfer of this material. Yes, so what they're taking from this information, so this is absolutely crazy. We don't know exactly what the peptide is, if it's the peptide specifically, if it's something linked to the peptide, what's in the peptide that's causing it. All this stuff is TBD, but in the meantime, they don't know if this is a positive or a negative. You would assume it's a positive because it's something that exists and has maintained, but knowing whether female aggression is beneficial helps understand fruit fly population dynamics. So for example, having more aggressive females might result in females doing less well in the wild. So if it's negative, that means they could use female aggression to control pest populations. If it's a positive, then if sterile animals get out by pest control efforts, anything like that, then reduction in aggression would be a good thing to control population. So these are all things kind of to be considered, but I just think it's fascinating there's yet another case of mind control via seminal fluid. Yeah, and one that obviously transfers to humans. Right. What? What? Yeah, I mean, because that's what always happens. Well, nevermind. Right. Yeah, nevermind indeed. Nevermind. Yeah, so anyway, yeah. I mean, it just makes you wonder how often, I mean, this is something that's being found more and more often. How often is there something in seminal fluid that changes behavior in animals? How often? How many species? Which species? I wanna know. I wanna know. And then actually, I'll really quick just tell you by my last parental story since it's just a mere few sentences, but it's right in line. It's about tadpoles, poison dart frogs. They are, the males will actually transfer tadpoles to ponds when they grow up. So they lay their eggs in plants that are above the water line, but have kind of a cup shape. So there's water inside, the offspring hatches, they drop down into a pool, and then if they're not moved, they eat each other. Normally, dad shows up, he dips kind of his rear end into the water, one or two tadpoles jump onto his back, he goes to a pool, he deposits them, he comes back, he makes a few trips, everyone's dispersed into their own separate rooms so nobody fights and eats each other. However, it's been recorded. Just like in humans. It's been recorded that if other frogs go to a pool, sometimes they'll try to get on that other frog too. And so a new piece of research from, ooh, Riehe Universität Brussell and Trier University in Germany. Those researchers took these little tadpoles and they tried males, they tried unrelated males, they tried females, they tried males and females of a different species, and they tried 3D printed frogs. And the tadpoles tried everything except for the 3D printed frogs. And as I said in the show notes, for them it is any ship in a storm. Any dock in a storm, any, what is the phrase? Any- Any frog in a storm. Any port, any port in a storm. Any port in a storm. Any port in a storm. So they're, you know, the frog is their port. So the tadpoles, they don't care who is coming to get them. Mom, dad, a far off cousin, as long as it's not plastic, they're down. Because otherwise they'll eat each other. And along the lines of cannibalism, we are going to be talking about not cannibalism. I have sent out an invite to Bill Schutt, the author of cannibalism. Hopefully we'll be getting an interview with him sometime soon to talk about his book on the subject. Ooh, why do we, why the animals of the same species eat each other? Why is it- I always say, any stake in a storm. That's the phrase, right? There you go, that's the phrase. Any stake in a storm. Yeah, and along the lines of, of your fruit fry, fruit fry, I can't remember the fruit fry. The fruit flag mating story. Next week we will be interviewing Richard Prum, who is the author of a book on mate selection, The Evolution of Beauty, How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World and Us. Nito. Yeah, I got some good animal behavior. Kind of very, Blair's Animal Corner-centric kind of interviews coming up. Yay. So just letting everybody know. We have come to the end of the first half of our show. It is time for us to move on up, take a little break and have more science coming to you in just a few moments on This Week in Science. Stay tuned. These are shows the way to go. Let the time of participation start. The only thing time. Hey everyone, I hope that you're enjoying the show and that you will continue listening. Right now I just wanna tell you about a few things. Remind you once again that on June 10th and 11th, we will be in Philadelphia at the Young Innovators Fair, which is a wonderful fair science, a STEM, I guess a STEM focused fair slash festival expo for the youth. 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We're gonna keep on moving up. Gonna keep on moving. All right. Gonna keep on moving. I feel really random right now. Sometimes I'm kind of random, right? Things make sense to me, but they don't make sense to everybody else. It can be kind of random. The world is random, I've heard. And now a study suggests that artificial intelligence bots should be random as well. They shouldn't know everything and be perfect. Oh no. Yes, this is good. We don't want, we need to create robots with personality imperfections. This is what we need. We need fairy cups. The, yes. Them to be just as unreliable on some level and quirky as us humans. Absolutely. And so a new study that is just out this last week worked on this exact idea, wanting to know how bots, AI, artificial intelligence could help people solve problems and what the best kind of bot personality for helping people do that would be. And so Hirakazu Shirado and Nicholas Christakis at Yale University asked volunteers to play an online game. And each person involved in the game controlled one node out of a network of 20. And the nodes had different colors, like green, orange or purple. And people could change the node color at any time. And the goal of the game was for no two adjacent nodes to have the same color. The trick here is though the people who were playing it could only see their color and the colors of the nodes that they were connected to. And so sometimes there were conflicts that came up between different nodes in the network. And to be able to settle conflicts with the neighbors that they, you know, a couple of neighbors away that they couldn't see, like they changed their node color and then the neighbor two nodes away would change their color and it would pose a conflict to the node in between, right? So how do they solve that conflict? The network had to achieve this goal of having all of the nodes not sharing their same color next to each other, et cetera, within a five minute time limit. And then if they did, they got cash money for being awesome. They recruited, yeah, they recruited 4,000 players in all which is awesome. And then they put them in 230 randomly generated networks. 4,000 people? So cash rewards like, you get a dollar, you get a dollar. Yes, this is science. Well, I didn't give them much money, right? Some of the networks had each node being controlled by a person. So all of them, all 20 nodes were controlled by a person, 20 different people playing. Others had three of the most central well connected nodes already colored so that they fit one of the solutions. Some of the networks had 17 people and three bots, these artificial intelligence programs. And in some networks, the bot controlled nodes were central and other times they were off on the edges. And then the bots also varied in how they played the game. So how much randomness went into their choice of color. And so in some networks, they, every one and a half seconds, they picked whatever color, they were not random. They definitively picked whatever color differed from the greatest number of neighbors. And this is what most people playing the game tried to do. But in the random noise, sometimes it was 10% of the time they would just pick randomly as opposed to choosing logically. And sometimes the randomness was 30% of their choices. 30% of their actions were random. So they might pick yellow even though their neighbors yellow already. Exactly, just because it was a random choice and it wouldn't be on purpose. Yes. So all of the networks with their bots, they know that their artificial intelligence networks were good and were good at this game because they all performed the same as networks that had all people. So if there were bots in the game, it didn't change the result, they all performed the same. Bots didn't muck it up. Simple strategy, they can employ it just like a human. Exactly. So the networks where the bots were central and then randomized their decisions 10% of the time did better than the all-person network, all human networks. They solved the game within the time limit, 85% of the time versus 67% of the time for 100% human. And they dramatically reduced the median time that was spent on the task. It was 103 seconds for this centralized 10% random bot network versus 232 seconds for the all-human network. So this time difference was really decreased. And the 0% or the 30% randomness did not have this effect. So there's something about this, just a little bit of random, but not too much random. You wouldn't think 30% would be too much random, but it was. I sort of think the centralized location, right? It is sort of like starting a game of tic-tac-toe and there's already a zero in the middle. I mean, I can see how this being very central and being like, okay, here's what we're putting and we're gonna lay it down like this. And as they're going through the three-year, you know, I guess nine different options, how to set this thing up? Well, it's really, yeah. Having a central core that's already decided and then that would proliferate out in both directions at some point. So I kind of get how that works, but not so much why being more random or less random, unless it's in conflict, the more random is in conflict with itself. Yeah, something that the randomness seems to have done is that by this random just picking a color that sometimes conflicted with their neighbors, sometimes was great, this noise affected the way people started making their choices. And so people that were playing the game seemed to start kind of making these conflicting choices, suggesting that there was this learning effect and that even though we might have really sophisticated smart AI programs that people can learn from these dumb, quote unquote, dumb AI programs as well. And then this randomness also, there's another idea here. We know that there's a certain amount of randomness inherent to evolution. Mutations, for example, that this little bit of randomness might be the thing that does illicit change and a better solution than absolutely no randomness at all. But I think it also depends on how stubborn it is. Because I'm getting a picture in an experiment I haven't actually seen all the way through and how they're doing it. But if I'm getting this right and you have the ability to just change your color based on what you see left and right, having something just as aggressively obstinate as your neighbor picking your own color might tell you, oh, they're doing that because they can see what I can't see, which is the next node. And this is the flows coming this way. We're doing the wave this way now. I thought the wave was gonna go that way. Oh, it turns out it's going the other way. So I'm just adjusting to an obstinate neighbor or to a neighbor who I assume can see something as basing this off of more information than I have. So, and that can work both directions from that AI being obstinate and saying it's yellow. I don't care if both of you next to me are yellow. Doesn't matter. I'm picking yellow. And therefore you're gonna have to make your solutions based on that going in each direction. There is a, you know, looking at how- There's more of this sort of question. That's it. This randomness is more like being absurd of in saying it starts right here. Right, exactly. Yeah. And so, you know, maybe, you know, with the centralized aspect of it, the obstinate aspect of it, you know, there are a couple of things that we can consider as AI becomes more integrated into systems as we move forward and potentially becomes integrated into decision-making systems that, you know, maybe are involved in lots of things that we do in our lives, you know, that maybe this little randomness will make computers even better at ruling our lives some day. It's just more obstinate. Like, so you're going and you're trying to complete a maze with a robot partner. And you go, hmm, I think we should go to the left. No, we're going this way. No. No, but I think left is, no. Okay, and then the next intersection. Okay, well, why don't we go right? No. Okay, why am I even here? From this article in Science Magazine news section by Matthew Hudson, he ends the article with a story that's told by one of the authors of this paper. He's the author, Christakis says, he has a friend who's wealthy but considered by many to be difficult. He told me he's never been asked to be on a board of directors because he's very contrarian. When I showed him this paper, he said, this is fantastic. This vindicates my way of being. This is why jerks like me should be on every corporate board. Yeah, there it is. Yeah, that's it, that's it, that's it, that's it. That's what you're getting at, yeah. Oh, no. Nope. Oh dear. So moving on from randomness regulating our decisions, how about microbes, Justin? Okay, single-celled microorganisms. Cover practically every surface on this planet, including human skin, but they're also as much of the inside of our bodies as are our own human cells, bones, and other organs. They are part of our immune system in charge of our metabolism. And as we've been learning lately, can even influence our behavior, our decision-making, our choices. Now, Duke researchers have shown that microbes can manipulate the molecular machinery of host cells, triggering patterns of gene expression that consequently can contribute either to health or to disease. Work was conducted on zebrafish and mice. And they said, could have implications in human inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. This is being published in the journal Genome Research. Scientists have been finding tons of links between our trillions of residential bacteria, virus and fungi, and all of these human conditions. Enter John F. Rawls, author of the study and associate professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at Duke University School of Medicine. Rawls says an important gap is remaining in our understanding of how these microbes are actually influencing health and causing disease or holding off disease. And in this study, they specifically looked for the impact of microbiome on specific regions of the genome, which regulate genes that turned on and off at a given time in the given tissue. They were looking at the gut. They compared these genetic regions in two sets of mice, one that had their bellies loaded with microbes. In a nutshell, what they discovered was that genes normally active to allow microbes to be present were turned off by the microbial load. They don't know how they did this. And this is one of the annoying things about reporting on specific genes. Is that they don't give every specific gene, like a user-friendly name. This is HNF4A, but we'll just call it the tummy gene for now. The researchers noticed that the microbes were turning off this tummy gene that would normally not create, would allow the microbes to be there and would have no inflammatory reaction whatsoever. Which is an important, they say, genetic trait. This is one of these ancient genes that allow microbes to live within the gut of these mice and of us and of anything that's got microbes in them. They share this gene in common. But yeah, somehow they were blocking protein landing spots in the DNA or they may have been, inactivate the proteins, the DNA binding activity and modifying the protein itself. No, no, the exact mechanism, but the expression of the gene itself was being turned off in these experiments, which is something that I hadn't seen before. So if they can figure this out, how it's doing it, this could create a whole new microbial, pharmaceutical strategy for activating this gene and those that have it turned off, which will allow their digestive systems to work properly. Yeah, or maybe it's different species of microbes. Some species turn it off and allow inflammation to run amok or maybe it's like during, maybe there are certain synergistic times in people's lives when certain diet factors and bacteria and other things all align to allow the microbes to turn off this gene and allow the inflammation to actually start causing a problem. I mean, I guess the question is, would this evolve because inflammation creates a more hospitable environment for the microbes that are there? Or inhospitable. Well, I think it's sort of interesting that it's with the large microbial load that the inflammation takes place, that it turns off the gene that makes it so it's okay for it's almost like somebody at the door is like, okay, okay, we're overcrowded. I'm gonna start flashing the lights off and on. I know it's annoying. I want some of you to leave, right? It's almost as though it could be a self-population control device. It could just be an affect of the population, like you said, that's there of specific microbes that are there that got into the room but shouldn't have or aren't normally there. But I think the really interesting thing too is just that we think of our genes as this set blueprint. I mean, we're less and less so now the more we've been doing the show. Epigenetics and everything else that's taking place. We know the environment has a factor. But the idea that the microbes themselves can make genes that we already have that are functioning and just turn them off or turn them on or change the way that they interact or express themselves. It's really fascinating. Again, it's another one of these stories about the gut microbiome that tells us we're just at the beginning of understanding a whole host of directions that this is gonna take us. I get it, host, host. That's right. The whole story was just so I could say that. It was just all a little bit of a thing. It wasn't even that much. But yeah. Our ancestors had these interactions and we descended to continue to have these interactions even though they may or may not be beneficial to us. Right? And then what's beneficial to us right now might not be or what's not beneficial to us now might have been a hominin ago or several generations ago with a different diet or a different condition or different genes. There's so many questions on this. Like the things that, again, I keep harping back to the six or seven hominins that were on the planet at the same time. We had different genes of various. And so there could be microbes that persisted in the hominin for a half a million years that are now in us for the last 50, 60,000 years. And it's still a new environment. Like there's so many questions that we have yet to be or might not ever answer. But a lot of directions we can go down to try to figure this out. And I'm so glad people are trying to figure it out. I love it. That's interesting. Oh, microbes, try to control me. Will you? Yep. Yep, doing it right now. They're doing it right now. That's right. Oh, yeah, there's another study, I think, out of Ireland, microbes from your gut control your anxiety levels. They're related to your anxiety, maybe. Anyway, yes. American trees are moving like the end. Follow their desired climate. And yes, we've talked about this before. Climate is changing and the trees are moving accordingly. However, new study... Come to California. You've got plenty of them for trees. Well, this is the interesting thing. Trees on the east seem to be moving to the west. The west is the best. And a new study in, what is it? Science advances on the divergence of species responses to climate change looked at the abundance of 86 tree species and groups across the eastern United States over the last three decades. And they found that even though there's this temperature shift, and you'd think that the temperature shift might be one of the main drivers of the movement of trees, this temperature shift that is moving kind of warmer weather a little bit further north, cooler, a little bit... Everything's moving a little bit up north. You'd think that things would be moving poleward, but they found that more tree species are moving westward than toward the pole. And why is that? This is east coasty trees, though, right? This is only east coasty trees. So is this going to be soil salinity? Could this be microbial shifts? Could this be humidity? The way the wind is blowing. I don't know. And the shifts, they say, are primarily due to the movement of subpopulation abundances in the leading end edges. So along the leading edges of these trees' habitat lines, the ones in the front of the charge are the ones that are making the moves the most, and the ones along the back, the stragglers at the end, are the ones that are more likely just to kind of stay there and die off. And so it's these trees along the leading edges that are causing most of this shifting. And additionally, it's associated significantly with changes in moisture availability. And so these, so Blair, are you pinting? Oh, no. Tree's got a drink. And so species that have similar traits, drought tolerance being one, wood density, seed weight, and also evolutionary histories, they found that angiosperms are more likely to go west and gymnast sperms, like the pines, are more likely to shift toward the poles. And so they're looking at this in terms of how is climate affecting, climate change affecting the populations of trees? How might it affect their future movement? And what they're indicating is that this moisture ability effect is what's going to have a stronger near-term impact on how and where tree populations are moving, then are the changes in temperature. However, temperature is kind of related to moisture availability as well. One thing I'd like to see overlaid on top of this, though, is some of the lines of like deer population in the area. You know? Right. Yeah, animals that might be... Might be seedling trees and then kind of keep them back or sort of set boundaries for them or make it more difficult for them to grow in a certain direction. Like I'd want to see that overlaid, especially because we're talking about an encroachment area, an area where they're going into territory along an edge where deer might normally have been in this like open valley prairie land or whatever it is that they're encroaching on. And if they're not there... Yeah, well, there are many, I mean, there are many species shifting. And I think one of the big questions here is as we have mixed forest populations, and the evidence suggests that mixed forests are more resilient. As these populations split and the angiosperms go one way and the gymnast berms go another way, are they going to become less diverse? How is that going to affect the ecosystems? How is it going to affect the way that the ecosystems are able to support other animal life? How are they gonna be able to do that? So how are these different populations going to move and change? But that said, even though there is a call of concern from these researchers saying, hey, we don't really know what's gonna happen, right? I mean, their last statement from their abstract is this change could lead to changes in composition of forest ecosystems, putting the resilience and sustainability of various forest ecosystems in question. They're calling an alarm. Whereas there are many other researchers who work in this field. I tweeted very briefly with Jacqueline Gill, who is over on the East Coast and is a paleoecologist. She has looked at the, and her advisors, before she became a professor, all the people she's worked with, looked at the movement of tree species over millions of years. And they're looking at vegetation response to climate change over millions of years. And in her view, things have changed, they will change again. So in her response when I asked her about it earlier today, she said, movement is a good thing. We want species to track their climates. The composition of forests changes and we'll continue to. The forests we have now are different than when Europeans arrived and the forests before that. Same species, different assemblages. And so maybe she's saying the species will survive just the way that they are put in combination with other species will be different. So alarm, don't be alarmed, I don't know. Don't panic. Don't panic at this point in time is what we're hearing. Don't panic. And other researchers have been tracking, speaking of researchers tracking things. Other researchers from UCLA and the University of Houston have been tracking groundwater lost in California's Central Valley from 2002 to 2016, which included two droughts, one from 2007 to 2009 and also the most recent drought which is more severe from 2012 to 2016. During the two drought periods, a total of 16.5 cubic kilometers and 40 cubic kilometers of water were lost respectively. And the studies published in geophysical research letters. Dennis Lettenmeyer, UCLA professor of geography who led the study said, for perspective, the amount of material associated with the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens was about one cubic kilometer. So we're talking about 40 times that amount in the recent drought worth of water being lost. And the implications of what they found in their following of groundwater and where it went and what most likely happened to it is that although there were losses during both droughts, this more severe drought recently had a lot of groundwater losses because even though farmers have shifted slightly to less irrigation, there have been more tree crops that can't be left fallow during dry years and require lots and lots of water. So the changing of the agriculture in California has affected how much water is used and where the groundwater goes. So studies like this are very important, especially if for California and its agricultural system, especially if drought is going to become a more regular part of the climatic cycle as we move forward. The question is how resilient will agriculture be in California as drought continues? So perhaps more money on drip irrigation and concentrated irrigation. Finding crops that require less. I think it might be even though almonds have become a big money maker for California farming magnets. It is something that is affecting the sustainability of the entire system. So there are questions to be raised about how agriculture is being done in the Central Valley of California. Yeah, I've talked about this before. The Great Nothing, that area of the southern stretch of the California Valley, which is essentially a desert type area, is now almond orchards as far as you can see. And it makes no sense that we were doing this heavy, heavy water dependent crop, water resource dependent crop during times of drought. But there it is. Like you said, there's a few people who are making a lot of money growing it and they're not going to stop. Yep, unless something makes them. Like regulation or just efficiency. Regulation. Oh, science. Policy based on science. Policy based on science, that would be. It would just be ridiculous. Why would we do that? But wouldn't it be nice? And since we're not going to talk about science and politics right now, let's talk about science and religion. Oh yeah, quick question. How atheist is America? Well, widely cited telephone polls by Gallup, Pew, suggest US atheist prevalence ranges from three to 11%. But in the US, there's a heavy stigma leveled against religious disbelief, which might make people a little less forthcoming with their answers. So this research group used an indirect measurement technique. Psychological researchers have found that atheists based on this method of asking people big questions may represent anywhere from 20 to 35% of the US population. The study, how many atheists are there? Appears in the journal Social, Psychological and Personality Science based on the results, just as there are and have historically been. This is a quotey voice of Wilger Vaze, University of Kentucky. Just as there are and historically have been closeted gay men and lesbians out there, there are probably lots and lots of closeted atheists out there who don't even identify themselves as such an anonymous polls. The authors surveyed 4,000 people across two studies of 2,000 people, each in the nationally representative samples, they used an indirect sampling method, which gave participants a list of things to look at and then record how many of the statements, but not which specific statements are true for them. The idea being this technique allows them to infer the overall preference for things on this list or not on the list without specifically admitting anything directly. And it has been used previously to estimate a prevalence of various undesirable criminal behaviors. Within our sample, one in three atheists in our online survey did not disclose their lack of belief. Highlighting the level of stigma associated with lack of belief says co-author Mazine Najil, University of Kentucky as well. Gervais says he was surprised just how far the indirect measurement diverged from established polls of religious disbelief. Our best estimate is more than double what the Gallup telephone polls estimate. Gervais and Najil expected a much more modest gap between self-reports and direct measurement. They say this might have potential impact for science because researchers have been developing testing theories on how religion works based on the idea that it's super ultra prevalent, like almost everybody. Well, even if it's 35%, that's still pretty darn prevalent. Oh no, yeah, well, they're talking about the 3%. Right, right, that's true. So, okay, so, Justin, this is my question. But prevalent 35, oh, yeah, what? Why do we care? Well, because if it turns out atheism isn't that rare, it might challenge a lot of prevailing theories, says Gervais. Basically, I mean, those of us who study the natural foundations of religion need to question our bedrock theories and assumptions that there is this need to believe that this idea is already there in our minds before we set about being told as children. He doesn't go into it, but I'll say, yeah, children, you can convince children of anything. But what's actually sort of interesting about this story, you guys are on to say it's important to note that the results weren't crystal clear and perfect. Their estimates are pretty noisy, says Gervais. It's 26% as a best guess, but it could be a bit lower or higher, could be 20, could be 35. We also had some findings that made us question the validity of the very task we employed. Well, there you go, what? The authors appreciate that even with the noise, their research was accepted for publication. Here's Gervais' summary. Social psychology has been taking a beating lately for producing results that are too good to be true. And it's a real feather in the cap for this journal that didn't pressure us at all to put out the perfect paper rather than just transparently communicate what we found, including the good, the bad, and the ugly. So this is interesting too though because this article and more like it could then result in people being more open on actual polls. I think that's part of the problem too, is that if they think they're part of 3% of the United States and that their family has beliefs and their entire county has beliefs and maybe their entire state has beliefs, there is a pressure to not identify and so potentially. But if you're part of a group that makes up about a quarter of the entire population, then you're not so alone. Not so alone. And that's somebody who has been an outward extroverted atheist, right? My whole life. Like there is this thing, sort of like being the first gay man on the planet, I guess, that would have been pretty fantastic to be that, right? Because it's like there's people always coming up to me like, Psst, yeah, I totally, I believe that's true too. Like Hush Jones, like why are you whispering? So I can't talk about this. Why can't you talk about this? Why is this a thing you can't talk about? People are very afraid to talk about it. They're afraid of ocean repercussions, work repercussions, the whole kind of thing. I'm in a Facebook group, actually, for atheists and there's a lot of outspoken atheists. There's a lot of closeted atheists and there's people who seek support in order to come out as atheists. And you get to help them along this journey in some state where it's not a very accepted thing to say for them to make the conscious decision to come out, tell their family, tell their friends, all of the resulting stigma. It's pretty crazy. Actually, there was one person in the group who did get let go from their job after they came out as atheists and they had to sue the company. Oh my goodness, because that didn't follow the value system of the company, right? Which is illegal. But just, and even though evidence has supported atheists as moralistic, if not more than individuals who follow organized religion, making moral choices, it's not, yeah. Very interesting. And truth and etiquette. Jashli, you're like, you just like to push people's buttons. If most people were atheists, then you would argue that there's a gun. That's possible. Fair point. But here's just the soft poll and I'll leave it at this. If everybody in your town decided to go to church tomorrow morning, there are not enough seats in all of the faiths collectively combined. There's not enough seats to seat everybody, even if they took shifts all day, one hour shifts all day. There's not enough seats, there's not enough Pew seats in there for this to be the majority of the country in my belief. Yeah, well. And going back to the scientific aspect of this study, I think it's an interesting way of getting at what people believe without directly asking them. I think that is a very, I think using subtle techniques to be able to elucidate people's underlying drivers is, I think it's a fascinating way to go. And I mean, they question whether or not it worked out okay, but more study should be happy. We should get more study on this for sure. And this is important to recognize because we make a lot of decisions as a country based on the idea that religion is a big part of our society. And if it turns out that that's no longer the case, maybe it's time to readjust some of those things. And for anyone who's listening in or watching right now, we are just reporting on this and we are not saying in any way one is better than the other. It's just, these are different ways of being, different ways of existing and behaving in the world. Right, and in order to properly represent the wide swath of people that are in this country, it might be help to identify real and accurate categorizations, absolutely to have better categorizations and identification for sure. And moving on to our final stories for the night. This one's fun. Fada, thank you for sending me this one. I do love this. We love the dinosaurs, love the dinosaur stories, especially the T-Rex who used to be this fearsome beast. And now we know it was mostly a scavenger, but you know, you should still be very terrified of meeting a T-Rex because according to this new study of a T-Rex bite strength, they have one of the strongest bites in the history of animals, scientific reports. They lassoed crocodiles, they lassoed crocodiles and got them to bite on force transducers. One of the researchers says, this is quite a spectacle. I call it bull riding for scientists. They took what they knew about the crocodile jaw muscles and bite forces and then used that to make their own 3D models in a computer that could reveal the T-Rex's potential bite strength. And this, the researchers say T-Rex was basically eclipsing the highest forces known for any living animal today. So those big jaws did deliver a pretty hefty bite, which was probably important for this scavenger species that needed to bite into bones to suck out the lovely marrow. Mm. So, but just like with alligators or crocodiles, you know, their bite force is very strong, but their opening force is not. So you can hold an alligator's mouth shut with your bare hand. Right. So with a T-Rex, if I just sat on it, would it not be able to open its mouth again? I'm not exactly sure of the musculature for opening. Yeah. Okay. Just checking, it might be good to know. So what they equated it to is 8,000 pounds is like setting three small cars on top of the jaws of a T-Rex. That's basically what's pushing it down. And they say that although this T-Rex had this really, really strong bite, this is not by any means the strongest bite ever. They say that the biggest, strongest bite ever probably went to the largest crocodiles that ever existed that were probably 35 to 40 feet long with bite forces around 18,000 pounds. Wow. So definitely not something I'd want to see on a fan boat tour. And those were likely killers as well. Yeah, exactly. They were the killers, not just the scavengers. So, you know, you'd like a little bit of salt if you're taking a bite on a nice meaty meal. Right? I love salt. The sea salt these days. Well, some researchers published in Scientific Reports of their analysis of 16 sea salts from eight countries and lo and behold, microplastics within each and every one. Not a lot of microplastics. Not a lot, but little tiny, tiny microscopic particles of plastic were found. They used filters in spectroscopy. They found one to 10 particles in the 16 brands of salt. They didn't report the brands. And most of these fragments were shards of old plastic products that showed signs of weathering. So this is not contamination from any packaging material of the salt itself. And the materials, we don't know how much of them could affect human health at this point in time. The researchers estimate that people might consume around 37 microplastic particles from sea salt per year if all the salt in the diet came from sea salt. But there are other places where you can get lots of salt and there is a study that suggests that shellfish loving Europeans may consume up to 11,000 microplastic particles a year. Still unknown how that plastic affects human health. I'm sure it's fine. I'm sure it's fine. It's great. My salt takes wonderful little plasticky. My salt tastes wonderful. Plastics will be our legacy, whether we like it or not. That's more already. That's what we're leaving behind is just so many plastics. This beautiful plastic beach, it's lovely. Like plastics through the hourglass. So are the days of our lives. Yes. All right, who's got some more stories? I have a fun story about dogs. So if I told you that you had to do a 20 minute presentation for a couple of thousand people in about five minutes, no time to prepare. How would you feel? Yeah, awesome. Where'd you find 2,000 people? Most people who don't do a weekly science podcast would be pretty stressed, particularly kids. Kids are very commonly stressed about public speaking or about doing arithmetic. And so a study from the University of Florida put these children in stressful situations and then they were randomly assigned to either experience that stressor with their personal family dog present, with their parent present or no social support. And as you may have guessed, having a pet dog present when a child is undergoing a stressful experience lowers how much children feel stressed out. Children who had their pet dog with them reported feeling less stress compared to having a parent for social support or having no social support. It seemed like having the parent there didn't really help or hurt the situation. But having the dog there, that made a difference. They then tested saliva to see if this was related to cortisol to stress hormones, oh, we're back to hormones. And they found that kids who underwent the stressful experience with their pet dogs, their cortisol level actually varied wildly. So they were reporting themselves as less stressed, but whether or not they actually had less cortisol depended. If they actively solicited for their dogs to come over and be pet or stroked, their cortisol was lower. If their dogs hovered around or approached children on their own, their cortisol went higher. Maybe they were stressed out about keeping tabs on their dogs, who knows. So it was kind of all over the map, but in terms of self-reporting, having the dog there reduced stress. Dogs, good for stress, better for stress than parents. Well, what they're saying is actually it's pretty interesting is that middle childhood is when children's social support are expanding. So they're less attached to their parents, right? But their emotional and biological capacities to deal with stress are still pretty immature. And so right in that window, when they don't care as much about their parents at seven or 12 years old, that is when they still do not know how to deal with stress. And so bringing a dog into the picture actually could help emotional, the maturity of emotional health and wellbeing over time. So it could help them learn how to deal with stress by having the dog there, that's kind of the implication. So- Ed from Connecticut says, try that with a cat, not gonna work. I begged a diver. I bet if a kid had a cat to pet. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've certainly when I've been house sitting, you know, watching a movie that's, you know, a thriller or dealing with something that's stressing me out, maybe having a bad phone call. If the cat's in my lap, I definitely feel better. Yeah, and it might not just be the dog just having a pet. Yeah, yeah. Therapy animals are a real thing and we're finding that out more and more. Absolutely. All right, are you gonna talk about the bees? Oh yeah, so where are all the bees in Michigan? New study of native bumblebee populations in southeastern Michigan cities found, not surprisingly, that increased urbanization as measured by the proportion of impervious surface area was tied to decreases in both the abundance and diversity of bumblebees. However, that pattern did not hold for Detroit. There, the higher urbanization seemed to be correlating with increased bumblebee abundance when compared to less urbanized areas. So everywhere else that they studied, 30 different sites, the more urban it was, developed it was, the less bees. But then they got to Detroit and it was the densest urban landscape that they studied and it had the most bees. They have a sugar plant over there or something, what's the deal? I don't know, why? So University of Michigan students who conducted the studies suspect that the large amount of vacant and idle land in Detroit may be boosting bumblebee populations by providing tall grasses, rotten trees and plenty of nesting sites and flowers and food. Sorry, Detroit. So. Not good, necessarily. Your loss is the bees game, so. How much define is that the bees will move in to your neighborhood? The bees though. So this is maybe a high density urban neighborhoods should implement outdoor vegetation that there should be more open space. There should be more natural areas. Yeah, and so this is just further evidence for those things that we call those natural habitats, even if they're just land that's set aside to just grow wild. I mean, if it really is vacant land where the weeds, the flowers have grown, the grasses are tall, that there's a few hollowed out tree stumps here and there that aren't getting removed and hauled away. That's like the easiest thing to implement anywhere. It's just to leave the land alone. Just don't do anything with it. Let the land alone, but keep doing the science. And there's not enough of that in California. I think I always marvel at how manicured and manipulated and managed the land in California is. I mean, it's a big state, but the central valley is diced and sliced up into the smallest possible portions of micromanagement. And I think we need to, as a statewide initiative, we got the right governor figure out a way to convince them to just create, not that state parks so much, more like county refugees for nature, to just, just not for humans to walk around and take pictures, but just let the weeds grow. Just let the flowers be there. Let them, let it grow. Don't cut it down. Don't go in there with a weedwacker. Certainly don't use one of those leaf blowers. Just leave it alone. Just leave it alone. Well, we hope that you will not leave us alone and that you will join us again next week because we have come to the end of our show. We did it. We did it. We've run through all of our stories. Once again, I wanna remind you, Young Innovators Fair, June 10th and 11th in Philadelphia website, younginnovatorsfair.com for more information, and we will be there and we hope to see you there as well. It is time now for, oh yes, whatever you did. It's time now for me to do Patreon sponsors. You guys ready? You guys ready for this? I'm gonna make it go right now. We have a new video. It's the same video, but it's new video. Thank you Patreon sponsors. Chris Clark, Paul Disney, Jibberton, Lattimore, John Ratnaswamy, Richard Onimus, Byron Lee, E.O. 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Just Google this weekend science in your iTunes directory, or if you have a mobile type device, you can look for twist, the number four droid, app in the Android marketplace, or simply this weekend science and anything Apple Marketplace-y as well as something called Stitcher, which I still don't know what that is. For more information on anything you may have heard here today, show notes will be available on our website. Kiki, website. We have one. Yes, on our website. Yes, our website! Our website is www.twist.org. That's T-W-I-S dot O-R-G, where you can also make comments, answer conversation with the host and other listeners. So everyone flock back to the twist.org site. It's back in action. Or you can simply contact us directly, email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekandscience.com, Justin at TwistMeaning at gmail.com, or Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist T-W-I-S somewhere in your subject line, or your email will be spam filtered into oblivion. You can also hit us up on the Twitter where we are at Twist Science, at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly, and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you would like us to cover or address, a suggestion for an interview, a haiku that comes to you in the night, please let us know. We will be back here next week with a guaranteed 10% randomness, and we hope that you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from the show, remember... It's all in your head. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science, it's the end of the world. So I'm setting up shop, got my banner unfurled. It says the scientist is in, I'm gonna sell my advice. Show them how to stop the robots with a simple device. I'll reverse all the warming with a wave of my hand. And all it'll cost you is a couple of grand. This Week in Science is coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method, and I'll broadcast my opinion all over. It's this Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science, science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science, science, science. I've got one disclaimer, and it shouldn't be news. That what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations, and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just better understand it. But we're not trying to threaten your philosophy. We're just trying to save the world from Japanese. Japanese, Japanese. And this Week in Science is coming your way. So everybody listen to everything we say, and if you use our methods, and instead of rolling a die, we may rid the world of toxoplasma. Got the eye. It's this Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science, science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science, science. I've got a laundry list of items I want to address, from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought, and I'll try to answer any question you've got. So how can I ever see the changes I seek, when I can only set up shop one hour a week? This Week in Science is coming your way. You better just listen to what we say, and if you learn anything from the words that we've said, then please just remember it's all in this Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science, science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science, science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. The after show. Don't you know, don't you know, don't you know we are in the after show. Tiny Spicys among the twists. Where are you Blair? I'm here. Hi. Tiny Spicys wants to talk to you. No, Spicys. I want to talk to you. Get out of here, Spicys. No one wants to see you. Yuck, I hate it. I'm holding his head in his hands. Oh my gosh. Oh, don't you like me? Oh, no. Nobody likes you, Spicys. What is going on? Yes, Hot Rod. It's not me. Spicys has two left hands. Stupid Spicys. I would like to thank my friend, Justin Silver, for spending hours helping me fix the twist.org website. He dug into the site. And he fixed all of the hacking. He found the hacks. He pulled them out. He fixed it. I do need to now make a new website on a new server, though, because, well, not a new website, but I need a new server. The better security. Security, you know, so that factions that you don't want in your website, I mean, yeah, your website. Don't get into your website. That's what I would like. Yeah, gosh, you have to make a branding website. That's like a lot of oof, oof. Well, I don't have any bushes. I know nothing about it, but I'm happy to help. Let me know. Thank you. I'm just taking a picture of Spicys. Teeny, tiny gum doesn't have any gum. Why does he need gum? He wants to know. Why do I need gum? Well, yeah, in our website, yeah, it was copy, paste, and then we modified it, and so it was a bunch of work to make it happen. And I have all this backlog of years of twist website stuff. So there's a big database. Oh, no, identity four. Someone got a password. That sucks. That's probably what happened with my website. Passwords. But I've changed them again. I changed them multiple times, many times. And unlike John Spicer, I will not give them out in a press conference or my Bitcoin numbers or whatever it is. There's a phone number. It's seven alpha. Never mind. He's going to cry into his left hands. Gross. I know. You love the hands so much. I'm just going to put them right here. The one that says hi, Blair, right here. Hi, Blair. I know. Which is worse, Spicer's face or the hands? He's got two left hands. No, how did you know this is not how he does his White House reports? This is not how he takes questions. One minute, he's hiding in the bush. There's been a bunch where he's just doing an audio podcast version of it, where he's like, he doesn't have to have the cameras on him. So this is going to be the next one. OK, I've come out here to give a version of what may or may not have been the intention or the overarching meaning of the words sent by the president. It may or may not have meant that he did or didn't hear, think, or believe the statements that he said at the time directly before or after he said them. Hopefully that's clear, and I'll take no more questions. That's a rough job. So rough. It's always a job. You know, though, I got to tell you. I couldn't do it. I wouldn't want to do it. That's been the job that I wanted to do. That has always been a gig that, to me, looked like the most fun out of everything that goes on in politics. That one looks like the most enjoyable. Like, I would thrive having that be my gig. I would really love it. I think I, and I think, honestly, I could do a better job than Spicer. I could do a much better job than he's doing. Much better job. He gets, you know what the problem is? He now perpetually looks flustered. And you can never do that. You can never do that. You've got to get up there and smile. When somebody says something, and who did I learn this from? I think I learned this from Buchanan. Pat Buchanan was saying, the way that he learned how to debate, he might have learned it from somebody else. But the way he does it, when he's on camera, when he's debating, and somebody says something you disagree with heavily, it's just grin. Show your teeth. It makes the other argument look kind of ridiculous. Like a friggin' Reese's MacKat. MacKat? Yeah, like that. Just bury your teeth. Don't just smile at them. Do it in the way that the other ate you. By looking flustered. Show your all-in teeth. You just, you know, it's like red meat to the White House press corps wolves. If you just smile, if you laugh when somebody says something. Here we go. OK, all right, next question. No, no, I get it. That one was a joke. All right, go on to the next one. Yeah, it wasn't serious. Let me, oh, it's the same question. OK, I'm still smiling. But again, I feel like I've already addressed this. I'm going to go on to the next. Seriously, you've got to be able to come up with it. OK, maybe this isn't my calling. Maybe I would be pretty good. I would be terrible at it. Maybe, maybe. Oh, stretching it out. But really, at the point where the poor guy must not be getting any, like, talking points going out, or any insight into what's going on, because. Mr. President, I have to have something to tell them. You're fine. He keeps coming out and saying stuff like, well, you read the tweet just like I did. You saw the speech as well as I did. Just like I did. You read the newspaper that I read. I guess we're done here. We both are just observing from the outside, aren't we? Oh, my goodness. Hey, you guys, I have questions to ask you. Great. OK, I need to buy things for our stage in Philadelphia. What was I going to ask you? Oh, yeah. So they're going to give us a 20 by 20 foot stage. Let me see if I can find a picture too. And the stage will have draping on the backside and the sides to hide us from other vendors or other people who are there. And this is an example of a podcast, The Brick Show, that was at one of they do another expo that's Lego related. And so this image is kind of the setup that those people had. So we'll have the draping that's around it and a table with a drape on the table. We'll have the elevated stage. There will be a bunch of chairs out here. And then they will also give us microphones and maybe a TV and a computer, which would be awesome for displaying things to the audience. And then they said they just really want us to be able to show up and bring our computers and ourselves if we need them. But I think you see how they have a thing behind them and then they have this pop-up tent thing? Do we want to get a pop-up tent? I don't know if we did a tent. But you know what might be cool is a branded tablecloth. A table in front, right? Something that hangs in front. Yeah, that's a twist on it. Yeah. I just bought a few of those at the zoo. I could send you a link when I get to work tomorrow with the company I did. We got a black tablecloth with a logo printed on it. And it was pretty reasonable and it delivered quickly. Nice. OK, yeah, a tablecloth would be pretty easy to pack. Are we at the on-profit? No, we're not. OK, is there any sort of special status that I can use to try to get a discount on? No. OK. But then they've also got this thing in back of them. And I was thinking, I could get what Justin has behind him. Let me think. What would be another? So I'm thinking the twist, the big orange twist logo. Like what's, let me find the right pitcha. Pitcha, pitcha, pitcha. So we'll get. Yeah, so I guess we could do one iteration of the logo on the tablecloth and a different version of it on the backdrop. So I'm opening. So this is what I'm thinking for the backdrop behind us. Perfect, yeah. Just have that printed, right? And then for the vector files. Yeah, that would be perfect. And rivets along the top of it and a couple on down the side. Yeah, and rivets on it, exactly. And then. Yeah, Justin, don't you have info on the place you bought yours from that you could send? I don't know where it was from ago. But I've got these little rivet things all around it. OK, it can't be that simple. And then for the tablecloth, this one. But do the black background white writing? Oh, you think the black one with white writing? Just because white tablecloths, in my experience, look like garbage within five minutes. OK. They don't have a long life. Black tablecloths have a long life. OK, so we could do. So this as a tablecloth, but the other way, reversed. Yeah, I would actually make it the same kind of material as the backdrop. It's just durable, reusable. You fold it up, you put it with the other one, you could take it to the next place. And they're going to put a tablecloth on the table. I know that I've done some looking, and they have these tablecloth drapes where they're like, they're not as wide as the tablecloth, but basically they're made just to have the image in the front and then they drape over so that they don't just slide off the table. They're like a runner with your image printed at one end of it. Yeah, absolutely. That might be good. So there's something in front. OK, so I'll work on that. No canopy tent, and then I OK. So just those two things for our logo stuff. Do you think we need any like brochures or displays or anything else? Thanks, I got any four. I think the badges and the buttons is good stuff. Yeah, I think just a normal swag is fine. Normal swag, OK. Normal swag. You guys, we all need to bring our business cards because that's easy to hand out and give to somebody. And then I think I'm also going to invest in a Wi-Fi hotspot so that we can have our own Wi-Fi Verizon. So I've got my camera thing that broadcasts directly to Facebook and Twitter and Periscope. That thing that you bought for Sketchfest that didn't show up, right? Yeah, it didn't show up in time. I've got that. And so if I can attach it to the Wi-Fi, I'll get a Verizon has a Wi-Fi that it works with. And then we can also hook our computers to the Wi-Fi, I think. And then I think it should all work. But I'll have to test it. Twist branded water bottles, right? Well, I have one of those. Hold on. Contact in the desert. What's that? That sounds like a rave. See? Oh, look at that. That's what the stickers are for. Someone put a sticker on a water bottle. And I picked an orange one. So it was just like our logo theming. There you go. Good and clever. How did I pick up these glasses to be orange and black? Ooh. So I have a question. You said 10 to 5 both days. Yes. So what are we doing with that? The whole time that we're there. Like, do I need to be prepping science experiments? I don't think we could. Yeah. Good luck getting them on a plane, though. So what I'm hoping, Ulysses is going to be there that weekend. And what I'm hoping is that I'm going to check with the people running the show to find out if there's a list of people who are going to be there to see if I can send emails ahead of time to get interviews with people who are at the expo. Because I think that would be fun to talk with different people about what they're doing. We'll have to have a whole bunch of just science stories ready to go. Do we want to dip into the past? Or do we want to try to keep super-duper current with everything? Yeah, that's a good question. Because I mean, I could certainly dip back and do like, I could do a compilation about a bunch of different stories about tool use or something like that. You know, like, that's what we do. I mean, that's, yeah, that would be an easy, that would be great. I could, you know, I could be much crisper or something. And I could, we could pretend that I'm from the future. And I could do stories that are coming out five, 10 years from now. That's great. I like that. You have to dress like it, then. You have to dress in italics. Oh, yeah. So I'll in tinfoil, because that's how people roll in the future. Yeah, of course, yeah. With big shoulder pads. Yeah, and so this is a family. No, no, they're never coming back. Give up on the dream. Shoulder pads are never coming back. No, they never look good in the past. They will never be something that's socially acceptable again. We had that brief interlude in the 80s where we also thought Australia was fascinating. No, shoulder pads. That's it. It's done. And it wasn't over. I'm really not OK with neon either. Neon clothing and shoulder pads need to go away. Although the big hair I could, I could live with. I went to an 80s party this last weekend. That was pretty. Isn't there one every weekend in Portland somewhere? Somewhere. Yeah. It was the 90s were alive in Portland, right? The spirit of the 90s. Yeah, it was an 80s party at a roller skating rink. So we went roller skating and I learned exactly how bad I am at roller skating. Oh, no. Well, how long it had been since I roller skated last. It's been a while. Been a while. No, not sharing that picture. I was thinking I could share my roller skating picture. But instead, I will just share this roller skating picture. Is it Xanadu? What? No, I went roller skating. I know. I went roller skating. I did. Spicy went roller skating. Spicy was the idea. Spicy went roller skating, too, among the skaters. Can I confirm or deny that ice skating occurred? I know. Oh, my goodness. I wish I had a good picture. I don't have a good picture of my roller skating outfit. My friend, oh, maybe I'm my friend. President is a strong and decisive ice skater. He's a skater. He would have been in the Olympics if he wasn't busy running a multi-billion-dollar company. President is a fantastic ice skater, roller skater. Any kind of skating. Skateboarder, too. Excellent skater. Let me show you. Here we go. He may even skate on the presidency soon. Here's my 80s roller skating outfit. I had the knee-high socks, jogging shorts, tiny tights, and a giant cell phone. Yes. That's awesome. Only missing a headband. And big hair. I was missing a headband. I had a wristband on. You can't see it. I did have a wristband. Oh, I see it. Pink on the side there. Yeah, I got it now. Pink on the side, yeah. I had big hair. I had blue eye shadow. I was working it. I was working it. Working it for the 80s. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, so brainstorm ideas, blurry. We're going to have like seven hours a day. And there's going to be, I think we can take breaks. We will be able to take breaks in between. But we will not at the same time. Not at the same time. Someone always has to be manning the stage. We can just pull random people under the stage. She right. Absolutely. We can interview kids, parents do random interviews. It'll be so fun. This is it. I'm doing the quiz show. We could do a quiz show. Great. That would be great. Which of these actually, like cryptozoology, which of these creatures actually existed? Right. That's great. And then we have a fabulous prize where we can bring up some of the kids to give the answers and then give them away fabulous prizes of undescribable value. Do we have t-shirt, old t-shirts or anything that we would want to give away as prizes? I mean, I can't. I'm not giving a kid my old t-shirt. That's just weird. No, that's not what I meant. I meant the older versions of the twist t-shirt if we have, you know, like the robot domination t-shirts. You have some of those lying around, right? Yeah. Not a lot, but I do. It might be nice to clear some of that out. What? This stuff is history, man. Of course. So you can keep a few, but I'm just saying you don't need, you know, to get out the hurt a little bit, make some new t-shirts. Yeah. So we have just our general, our stage, general stuff that we'll be doing for hours every day. Then we are also going to have a 20 minute stage slot on one of the, one of the state, one of the official stages that's there. So we're going to have like a 20 minute show each day at this other stage, which will be like, it's opportunity to be like, hey, we're this big in science and do something. I mean, 20 minutes is such a small, right size thing. Sounds perfect for a quiz show. Or we could each do one story. Yeah. But we always do that. We should go and do something totally different. But the point of the main stage is to expose all of these people to the show that we offer. Yes. So the mini stage is perfect to do silly things we don't normally do. Yeah. Because we're just filling time and we're just in like, look at our personalities. You're going to like us. All right. Ladies and gentlemen, we're just treading water here for seven hours. Don't really have anything prepared, but. Hey, we did 21 hours. Any talents? They want to come up on stage and do for the rest of the audience. I know you'd be more comfortable if there was a dog up here, right? Right. Exactly. Identity four. Thank you. Or Justin can just do one story. Yes. Let's see. Over on YouTube, Barry, I'm not even going to try and say what, I don't know. Barry over on YouTube says we should have a plasma globe on our stage. It might be a cool set decoration. It has a science feel to it and people tend to notice it. What if we just got a whole bunch of Erlenmeyer flasks? Right. Then the mighty Chabunga says a plasma globe with a sign that says, please do not lick the plasma globe. That's great. Good job, you guys. That's funny. Oh, Joshua tree. Contact in the desert. I'm not going. I'm thinking I might put, if you're open to it, Kiki. What? In the zazzle store. Hats kind of in the style of the red hat with the white writing. We'll do a different color. Probably orange with black writing. Yeah. That says it's all in your head. And then it'll have the crystal on the back. Yeah. We should have it. It's all in your head thing. Maybe I'll make it right now. Wow. We could have that. We should have it. Right. It's all in your head. Remember the sign in for the twist store. Because if not, this is going to take me a minute. Crap. No. Funny. I think you mailed, you emailed it to me, right? I did. My cookies have been cleared at some point. Oh, I hate it when my cookies are cleared. Yeah. No, I clear my cookies all the time. You should clear your cookies all the time. Because websites don't need to leave their cookies on your browser. You don't need that. Yeah, but I don't remember any of my passwords. I don't think that has to do with cookies. Isn't it? Contact in the desert. Joshua Tree. It sounds like it would be fun. Speakers, conferences. Starry skies. Ooh, I did it. That looks like fun. I'm not going though. Yes. Save that password. Thank you. Give yourself a more difficult one. Sign in for yourself. Make yourself a more difficult password. Let's see. I want products. Armando, Dr. A on Twitter. He liked our, he liked the space Marines. Hashtag space Marines. That's good. I'm tired. Let's see. How do I make a new thing? How do I, how do I, I don't know how to do anything like that. Yes. The more bits, the better. I have, I got, what's one of those password programs. It does all the password helping. I got a password helping program on my laptop. I need to, I just need to install it on this computer and connect the accounts so that everything is safe. Yes. Last pass. I think it's last pass or something like that. Yes. And Pat, there's like a password generator. So if you want a password that's completely random that no one will ever figure out, it'll just give you one. Cool. Whiskey renegade asking, is this going to be broadcast live to watch here, have a chat room? I do hope so. I'm, I don't know exactly how it's all going to work out. We're going to see what we do. And likely we won't know until the very last moment. Yeah. I don't know exactly what, um, yeah, I don't know exactly what our internet connectivity is going to be like. And if we'll be able to, you know, I do know that the one camera that's made for streaming that I have that I can take because it's really small and wonderful, um, that it go, it broadcasts to Facebook. I'd also go out to Periscope as well. But I need to test these things. I need to get a phone that can work with it. An iPad or a phone that can work with it. All right. Yeah. I think we've reached the end of our ability to continue rambling. Yeah. It hasn't been seven hours yet. I'm one or two and a half hours in. We wouldn't even be at the halfway point yet. For day one of the big show. That's true. That's right. Not even the halfway point. Two and a half hours. Easy seven. We'll see. We'll see how it goes. All right, you guys, if you have any advice for us ideas for what we should do. Yeah. Sleepy time now. Yes. Identity four. Yeah. Good night, Justin. Yeah. If anyone has ideas for what we should do in Philadelphia on our hours of podcasting, streaming, et cetera. Let us know. That'd be very helpful. And thank you for joining us tonight. Say good night, Justin. He's already good night. Good night, Kiki. Good night, Kiki. Good night, Spicer. Oh, Spicey. Oh, look at that. Hi, Spicey. Hi, Spicey. Why does he look nervous? Why does he always look nervous? Flustered. It's a red car. Exactly. I won't look flustered. Good night, Blair. Good night. Oh, that was an electoral map. Again, this week, I'm just going to show you everybody, the electoral map just so there's no confusion. Okay. First question. Okay. I'm going to hold up the electoral map in response to that question. Second question over there. Whatever your name is. I don't care. I'm just holding up the electoral map. Right. That's job security. That's how you do that job right there. Know who you're actually presenting to. Not the Mac in public. You're presenting to the boss, the CEO of the comfort tree, country prey. Good night, everybody. Good night. Good night, everyone. We hope to see you again next week.