 Mine isn't science-y. Science puppets. Mine is related to the imagination. Oh, yours is not science-y. I don't have any science-y puppets at hand. Is that Puff the Magic Dragon? No, it's Figment. Figment the Magic Dragon. No. I'm confused. He's from Epcot Center in Disney World. He's the spirit of imagination. Oh, right. Okay. Yeah. Okay, it's time to start a show. Three, two, this is Twist. This week in Science, episode number 632. Recorded on Wednesday, August 16th, 2017. Sweet Magic Science! Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and today we are going to fill your heads with Magic Mushrooms, Jovial Jellyfish, and the sweetest sweetness but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Conflict, conflict resolution. It's a tricky thing. There are two sides to any argument. Often many sides and many sides may have opposing views that as the conflict resolution process plays out, may or may not get their way and according to Dr. Steppen Bruce By way of the HR advisor website, there are six steps to conflict resolution One, clarify what the disagreement is. Two, establish a common goal for both parties. Three, discuss ways to meet a common goal. Four, determine the barriers to the common goal. Five, agree on the best way to resolve the conflict. And six, acknowledge the agreed-upon solution and determine the responsibilities each party has to the resolution. Now, you can use these steps to improve the relations with your fellow citizens. They work, but straightforward conflict resolution has its limits. It may keep Karen at work from taking your parking space, stealing your stapler, or eating your lunch. But if Karen wants you dead, you need another strategy. And while it may be too late to do anything meaningful to change Karen's outlook, you can rest assured that almost every human being on Earth sides with you. And together, we will stop the Karens of this world with this week in science coming up next. Karen? What's happening this week in science? Good science, Steele Kiki. Can you say that again, Justin? Good science, Steele Kiki and Blair. And good science to you, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back yet again with more science. Oh, what a week it's been. Oh, what a week. I hope that this show brings everyone sciencey happiness, right? There are positive things afoot in the world. And this show is full of them. Oh, my goodness. On this week's show, I have stories about magic mushrooms because those are fun. And dinosaur trees, you know, you get a cat in a tree, put a dinosaur in a tree. Yeah, no, not exactly. And why you should love snowball Earth. Yeah, Justin, what do you have for us? I've got suffering from asthma, micro RNA cures and some truth about e-sigs. Truth. We like the truth. Truth is relative. Anyway, Blair, what's in the animal corner? I have teamwork that makes the dream work for jellyfish. I have eclipse news as relates to Blair's animal corner. And I have terrifying, adorable spiders. Are they dancing? They're only adorable when they're dancing. They're always dancing in here. Oh, you got spiders in your head. Only dancing ones, though. No cobwebs? No, no. Just dancing ones, you know. All right. All right. Anyway, we're moving into the show. And as we jump into our new favorite first segment of the show, I want to remind everyone that you can subscribe to the twist podcast on iTunes in Google Play in the podcast portal on Stitcher, Spreaker and Tune In. We're all over the place. You can also find us on YouTube and Facebook. Search for this week in science or you can just visit twist.org. But now it's time for This Week In. What has science done for me lately? Hi, Dr. Kiki. Well, hello. Firstly, thank you for such a wonderful podcast. I live in Queensland, Australia. I often hear Blair mentioning studies from here in Oz. Every week I look forward to listening to you all delivering science news whilst I'm on the long commute to and from work. I wanted to offer you an insight as to what science has done for me lately. For the past year, my girlfriend and I have been going through IVF. I myself cannot produce mature eggs to use. Therefore, science is intricately involved in our process, whereby she is able to donate her eggs and have them fertilized and the process of frozen embryo transfer to begin. So that I may one day hope to be a mother. I'm often in awe of the amazing opportunities science offers us in these situations. And I am so thankful for its development and involvement in my life. I understand that she just wanted to let us know her story and have a side note to say thank you for your wonderful podcast that enlightens and brightens my week. Keep up the good work. Cheers, Louie. Louie, thank you for writing in. Thank you for sharing your experience with us and what science is doing for you currently. And we look forward to hearing good news about your motherhood. Everyone out there, remember that we need you to write in and let us know about what science is doing for you, has done, does for you on a daily basis. What does it do for you every day? Tell us. Send us a Facebook message. That's right. Go to our Facebook page this week in science and write us a message and we will put you in to read your letter. We want to fill this segment of the show with something from you every single week. So help us. Help us. Help us help you learn how science is making our lives better. And I want to say this segment of the show, it is one segment of the show that brings a smile to my face. It's a positive every single week. Thank you, guys. Let's keep it going. Yeah, you guys ready for some science news? Let's talk about some science news. Let's talk about snow, baby, and how it may be. Ground all the continents to dust and then they went to the sea. Anyway, yeah, that didn't work so well. All right. So the next story, my first story of the show is with regard. It's out of Australia, actually. So it's interesting that our letter this week is from Australia. This news is from Australian National University ANU and a researcher there has reconstructed a timeline of life before and after the Sturtean glaciation. The Sturtean glaciation is what we often refer to colloquially as a snowball Earth. It's that period of time about 700 million years ago when glaciers snow completely covered the planet from the poles all the way to the equator, big giant snowball. This wasn't a partial glaciation. This was everything was glaciated before that period of time. The planet had a bit of life, but it was single cellular bacteria. We had cyanobacteria that were working furiously to convert sunlight into oxygen. But, you know, there was snowball, cold, things were happening. However, it ended and when it ended, things heated up about 650 million years ago really quickly. And it was like a greenhouse effect happened. And all those glaciers melted. So what happened were the glaciers moved across the surface of the continents, grinding up the Earth creating a bunch of gravel and dirt and all sorts of stuff that when they melted, they carried it all into the sea. And so a whole bunch of stuff containing nitrogen ended up in the ocean. And as a result of the big dump of nitrogen into the ocean, this researcher and his colleagues, Joshin Brox, he suggests that this allowed for an explosion of multicellular life and that we moved forward from that single cellular cyanobacteria, very simple life form predominance on Earth into a more complex predominance. Algae became the prominent photosynthesizers. Algae became the things that fed on the nitrogen that was in the oceans and allowed, because of the blooms of the algae that was feeding on the nitrogen and also a bunch of phosphorus and stuff that had ended up in the waters, created a bunch of oxygen and we had a bunch of food and oxygen and explosion of life. And so it was the snowball Earth grinding down the continents, according to this hypothesis, that led to us eventually. But really, yeah, so the Ediacaran explosion that came came later was basically a result of all these nutrients being ground down by the glaciers and then the melting glaciers sending them to the sea where they would fertilize the development of life. Snowball Earth, thanks. Yeah, and so it's a really interesting, how they figured all this out was pretty interesting. A PhD student working in Brock's lab had found a bunch of old rocks and so they went about sampling the rocks and because, you know, we're looking at stuff from a long time ago that was under the ocean that's not under the ocean anymore. And so what they're looking for is fossil evidence of early life, not even fossils of animals with bones and things that you could pick out, but we're looking for chemical signatures. That's what they were looking for. And so looking for these chemical signatures, they were able to find cell membrane biomarkers and be able to, and it enabled them to make this new hypothesis about the development of life. Yeah, the old hypothesis, as I recall, and I'm probably wrong, was that in Snowball Earth, all the single-celled organisms huddled together for warmth and then became, well, that's not how. That's not how. They huddled together around the campfire. No. It's so cold. Come a little bit closer. You know, I have a good name for this story. Brock's Rocks. Brock's Rocks. That's good. The co-lead researcher was this PhD student and her name is, or no, excuse me. She is not a student. She is a graduate at this point. Amber Jarrett. Gotta give the female geologist her due. All right. I guess Jarrett's Rocks, although that doesn't sound as good as Brock's Rocks. But Jarrett, Amber Jarrett, she discovered these ancient sedimentary rocks in Central Australia and they led to this discovery. And she says, in these rocks we discovered striking signals of molecular fossils. We immediately knew that we had made a ground-breaking discovery that Snowball Earth was directly involved in the evolution of large and complex life. Moving on, another Australian story. 400 million-year-old fish jaws were being researched again by Australian National University PhD scholar, Yusri Zhu from China. This study on this 400 million-year-old fish fossil has been looking at its jaw structure. I mean, the reason they're looking at these placoderms, these armored fish from 400 million years ago, is really to figure out, you know, look at it, figure out what traits were there. How did the evolutionary lineage pan out? These placoderms came prior to tetrapods, the four limbed creatures that eventually led to us. It all comes back to us, right? This is what my story is about. Yes, but how am I involved? Yes, well, you are involved because they have found a jaw structure in this ancient fish. It was a pretty major structure in this fish, but now it's like this little tiny thing. So this joint in the fish is in the human skull. It has been conserved, but it's in your ear. It's not in your jaw anymore. It's in your ear. And so there is a direct linkage between Eublair and this 400 million-year-old fish. Anywho, these researchers have been trying to figure out more about these extinct placoderms, and they've been traditionally thought of as kind of a side branch of evolution. Not really one of the main branches, but Chinese researchers have found, or paleontologists have found, Chinese maxillate placoderms. Maxilla, that's like in your upper jaw. It's a fossil group that's researched in Beijing by this researcher, Jing Liu, before she came to this Australian University. And Dr. Liu says the maxilla is the bone that forms the upper jaw in humans. Chinese fish fossils have this bone demonstrating a much closer relationship to human ancestry than previously thought, but other internal structures were apparently made of cartilage and are not clearly preserved. And this particular fossil was very well preserved, and she says that the Australian fossil helps us to interpret these aspects in the Chinese maxillate placoderms. So the big thing about this one is that there was a lot of the cartilaginous structures that were preserved that are allowing them to really take a look at this group of bony fishes from long ago, and it's published in scientific reports. And then moving forward from jawed fishes, let's move right into dinosaur trees. I mean family trees. I'm not putting dinosaurs in the trees, I tell you. Yeah, you had me, you lost me, and then you had me again. There you go, that's what I do. So the dinosaur that I am talking about is called chilesaurus. Chilesaurus, Diego Suoreziae. I really like this dinosaur's name and in its original description there was a paper that came out earlier this year describing this dinosaur. It's considered a tetanurin theropod. Theropods are also like t-rexes and other of those dinosaurs that stand on two legs, yeah with their small arms in front, but it was kind of people started referring to it as a Frankenstein dinosaur because it had a lot of these theropod characteristics, but it wasn't quite theropod-ish. And this new study that is just out in Royal Society Journal Biology Letters suggests that it's not actually a theropod. That what it is is a missing link between a missing link, yes, and it's a missing link between a group of dinosaurs, the ornithitians containing stegosaurs and the carnivorous dinosaurs like t-rex. It's right in the middle between the plant eaters and the carnivores or the meat eaters. I mean it's argued that t-rex is a scavenger, but anyway. So this new study, Matthew Barron, who's a PhD student at Cambridge University, he said that he first thought that this was an ornithitian, but then there was a bunch of stuff and they're like well this isn't quite right. So he says we had absolutely no idea how the ornithitian body plans started to develop because they look so different to all other dinosaurs. They have the bony plates along their back and they have so many unusual features and they've never had a concept of how the first ones could have looked until now. And then this discovery of this chileosaurus, show it, it has legs. It stands on very thick legs of an animal like a brontosaurus. It has hips like a stegosaurus and the arms in the upper body of something like a t-rex or a raptor and they didn't know where it fits. They've got all these hodgepodge of parts. And what are they calling this thing? So now they are calling it part of the ornithitian group. They have redesigned the cladogram. They redesigned the family tree for these dinosaurs and have put it firmly in the branch between stegosaurs and chile and t-rex. So it has bird limbs to one degree but also plant-eating to another degree. This is the chilesaurus? The chilesaurus. Very cool. Was it found in Chile? Yes. Okay. Yeah, so this new family tree, well still under debate and controversial, is called the barren tree for Matthew Barron, who drew it. Yes. He is a cladogram named after him, which may, after some more findings, never exist again. Yes, exactly. We'll wait for some more findings and we will see. But really this understanding the where to put these animals kind of, it helps us understand a bit of the driving factors that play in evolution. You know, what happened to split the stegosaurs to the t-rex? What happened and when? And so it's very interesting. So chilesaurus no longer Frankenstein, now a missing link. Very cool. Bringing together, I love it, bringing together the stegosaurs and the t-rexes, spanning the gap. If they can do it, so could we. That's right. This is This Week in Science. Hey, Justin, what you got? I have, this is a heavily local story. It says, well, it's California, Europe. Elemental sulfur, most heavily used pesticide in California, Europe, may harm respiratory health of children living near farms that use the pesticide. According to new research by UC Berkeley, elemental sulfur is allowed for use on conventional and organic crops. It's used to control fungus, other pests. Very important element in farming. California alone, more than 21 million kilograms of elemental sulfur were applied in just a single year. Studying children in the agriculture community of Salinas Valley, California, researchers found significant association between elemental sulfur use and poor respiratory health. The study linked reduced lung function, more asthma-related symptoms, and higher asthma medication use in children living a half mile or less from recent elemental sulfur applications. Currently, the EPA generally considers elemental sulfur as safe for the environment and human health. Previous studies have also shown that it's a respiratory irritant, mostly affecting, of course, farm workers who are right up close to it. Effect on residential populations, though, especially children living near treated fields, they studied until the study that was published August 14th in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. Sulfur, this is a quotey voice of co-author Asa Bradman, associate director of the Center for Environmental Research in Children's Health at Berkeley School of Public Health. Sulfur is widely used because it's effective and low in toxicity to people. It is naturally present in our food and soil and is part of normal human biochemistry. But breathing in sulfur dust can irritate airways and cause coughing. We need to better understand how people are exposed to sulfur, used in agriculture, and how to mitigate exposures. So still needs to be used, but he's sort of indicating there's maybe another way to put it into the soil or apply it to the crops so that it has the beneficial effect without the negative. For the study, the research team has examined associations between lung function and asthma-related respiratory symptoms and hundreds of children living near fields where sulfur had been applied. A tenfold increase in the amount of sulfur used within a kilometer of a child's residence during the year prior to pulmonary evaluation was associated with a three and a half fold increased odds in asthma medication usage and a two-fold increased odds in respiratory symptoms such as wheezing and shortness of breath. The study also found that each tenfold increase in the amount of elemental sulfur applied in the previous 12 months within a one kilometer radius of the home was associated with an average decrease of 143 milliliters per second and the maximal amount of air that the seven-year-old children could forcibly exhale in one second. So that number standing by itself may not seem like much, but for comparison that 141 decrease, they compared it to what researchers showed in exposure to maternal cigarette smoke which is associated with a decrease of 101 milliliters per second after five years of exposure. So mom's smoking for five years actually almost does but not quite as bad as living near a farm where sulfur is being applied according to this study. The study provides the first data consistent with anecdotal reports from farm workers. It shows that residents in this case children living near fields may be more likely to have respiratory problems from nearby agricultural sulfur applications. So senior author Brenda Ezeknazi, Berkeley professor at the School of Public Health. Given elemental sulfur's widespread use worldwide, study authors call urgently for more research to confirm these findings and possible changes in regulations, application methods to limit impacts of sulfur used in respiratory health. And this study was these kids in this study too were they did a they made a good effort to remove smoking in a household, age factors, these factors, lots of you know lots of other factors within the household that could have led to these. However these are mostly the children of farm workers because they tend to live closest to farms. I think most of the population lives far enough away from a farm that they wouldn't be affected by this. So one solution could just be make sure you know create a regulation that makes it so you can't have residential housing within half a mile. That's so hard to do though. I mean growing up where I grew up there's fields and then there's a road that goes next to the fields and then there's houses on the other side of that road. I grew up in the middle of fields. My house was in the middle of them. And and the central valley the central valley is the only place where they're adding housing is they're taking over farmland which means that like in some places housing encroaches on nature and California housing encroaches on farmland. So as we build more homes we become closer to the farmland and will be exposing more and more children and greater numbers to what goes on on the farm. So the applications method that's probably where they need to concentrate. There is a lot there's another study that came out related to health indicators and pollutants. And so really fine particulate matter pollutants seem to increase stress hormones and also increase other hormones and metabolic factors. So could be part of the kind of negative health cascade of some individuals in in areas where pollution is. And so maybe something related to the particulate size of this elemental sulfur. The sulfur being in the air being in the water. You know are they breathing it. There are more questions to be answered here but obviously there is something going on that needs to be addressed. And it kind of also just goes to show there's no air safe. What do I want to go back to where the fires are? It's so nice. The heart of the urban area? Asthma. I'm going to move up into the mountains up in the forest and then you get the forest fires and you get asthma. Like there's nowhere safe to breathe anymore. Maybe a ship. Ship at sea. That's what we'll do with the children. We'll put them at sea until they're old enough to develop their lungs. Yeah that's feasible. Nope. Nope. Hyperquotic for all you young pirates. Oh I do love that movie but you know what it's not time for that right now. You know what it is time for. What's the time for? Blair's Animal Corner. I'm so glad you asked. Well I wanted to start tonight with some very special animals with some very special teamwork. Those animals are called salps. S-A-L-P. Salp. That wasn't the animal I was expecting you to say. Salps. Salps. People mistakenly call them jellies, jellyfish because that's what they most look like but they are in fact tunicates so they're not related to jellyfish. But they and another organism called a siphonophore which are related to jellyfish. Those are also known as Portuguese man-o-war. They both are colonial organisms that move as a group and researchers wanted to look at exactly how they get that done. So this is actually from the University of Oregon and marine biologist Kelly Sutherland with her team looked at these salps and siphonophores in the ocean on the Pacific Island on a Pacific Island just off of Panama and they used high speed high resolution underwater camera systems to study their propulsion. The reason they wanted to do that is that there's something really unusual about the way these little animals move. When you look at jellies at jellyfish the way they move it's interesting because it doesn't seem to take very much energy. In fact they're technically plankton. Plankton is not necessarily tiny plankton is something that moves with the currents. So jellyfish they don't use that much energy to move and they kind of do this pulsating movement. The thing about that is that during the pulse they move quickly and then they almost lose distance while they're kind of bringing their body back up to its biggest form before they push it back down to propulse again. So it's clunky because it's inconsistent they're not using momentum they're speeding up and slowing down and speeding up and slowing down. What's interesting about salps and siphonophores is that they appear to maintain a constant speed but they move the same way. So siphonophores again they're related to jelly so they move the same way as jellies do kind of by moving a bulb. The salps move by pushing water out of a funnel. So kind of like how you might see a squid move but the way it looks it looks a lot like how a jellyfish moves. But when you put them all together they move at a constant speed they don't start and stop and start and stop. Yeah Kiki's showing an amazing video that kind of shows you how it looks like it's being run by an engine and that's exactly where this research kind of led to was looking at these salps and siphonophores as related to a jet propulsion engine. And what they found is that in these chains or colonies which can be up to 15 feet long they actually all fire their siphons at different times at random times but the way that it's done allows for a constant push and no pull. So this is the most efficient way of moving through water we've ever seen. Okay so that's pretty neat so they're doing this as a group it's like if we all got into a pool together and I kicked for a minute then stopped and then you kicked for a minute and stopped and then you kicked for a minute and stopped and then we'd keep moving. Except it's not kicking it's the human equivalent of a jet engine. Right so imagine if you were if you were moving by going just blowing air out of your mouth fast enough that it pushed you backwards but then you would have to go and that might slow you down or even pull you back from where you came from and then you have to go and that'll push you back again but they're doing this they're doing this push pull push pull in this uncoordinated yet coordinated method so that they actually move steadily without a loss in energy. So one thing to be mentioned is that the salps the way it works they actually are found in chains or colonies and they have this solitary life stage that produces the interconnected colony so a lot of the individuals if not all of them are genetically related. So that means they have a good reason reason motivation whatever it be to work together and that's how the Portuguese Manowar works too. It's the same organism in three different developmental stages living at the exact same time. And I just googled these things so I'd never heard before saying here that they're clones. Yes exactly that's what I was saying so the colony matches closely related they're like the same yes exactly so it's there are similarities here to things that we talk about in the development of the first multi-cellular organism right so there's all these individual organisms that have the same genetic code and came from the same quote parent or whatever you want to call it who are working together which is pretty fascinating. Where this gets particularly interesting is that this paper that I was reporting on from the University of Oregon was co-authored by some people from the Department of Aerospace Engineering and the Autonomous Systems Program of Technion and the Israeli Institute of Technology. So all these people were working together not only to understand how the salps and the Siphonophores were moving but to see how that could be applied to propulsion systems. Yeah and what's more this explains how these salps do an amazing thing every day they go up to a thousand meters that's over 3000 feet they go down during the day and they go all the way back up at night so they call this the greatest migration right because it's this huge amount of space every single day that huge amounts of animals do as part of their daily movements and these guys do that by their jet propulsion. Which they could not probably do if they were just individuals but it's the fact that they're an uncoordinated colony. An uncoordinated swimming machine. Yes and the main researcher says we haven't really moved beyond the propeller when it comes to underwater vehicles multi-jet vehicles present a highly effective means of transport and also allow for swarm-like behavior where individual units could break apart from the colony to carry out different objectives. Well now I'm afraid of robots underwater but yeah I see where you're going with that. Yeah afraid and excited as per you right. Exactly. That's pretty usual. But what else are we afraid and excited about? Are you talking about the eclipse? Yes. It's gonna be dark on Monday for a while. Yeah it's a couple of minutes for many people across the United States. Yes I'm very excited to see it I've never seen it before who knows how I will react. Well a recent study actually a recent group of researchers are getting together to try to get data about how animals react during an eclipse. This is all spurned by looking back at previous studies there aren't a lot of them. The the most related study they could find was a study that was published in 1998 from the Journal of Fish Biology. All the way back in 98 they were looking at fish responding to changes in light during an eclipse and they found that reef fish during a total eclipse, this is in the Galapagos, the daytime fish, the fish that are out when it's light out, saw shelter during the eclipse during totality. It's nighttime this is a weird time for nighttime. Oh snap get in the corral get in the corral. And then the nocturnal reef animals came right out during totality. Another study from Veracruz Mexico found that orb weaver spiders they start to dismantle their webs during totality and then rebuild them when the sun's face is revealed. So I looked into this a little bit for all I've talked about orb weaver spiders I did not know this. Many orb weaver spiders build a new web every single day. Yeah I had no idea. Most orb weavers they are active during evening hours. They hide for most of the day towards the evening. They eat their old web. They rest for about an hour and then they spin a brand new web in the same location. Yep. So this guarantees them that their web is free of detritus. It's housekeeping. It's the best kind of housekeeping. You just destroy your house and just eat it. Yeah eat it all. Bring in the wrecking ball let's start over. I'm gonna start eating my house in Veracruz Mexico during an eclipse. The orb weaver spiders started eating up their webs during totality and then when the sun came back they started building it again like oh shoot wrong timing. Also alarm. Yeah so this brings us to our eclipse happening on Monday. Jonathan Fram assistant professor at Oregon State University wants to do a series of bioacoustic sonars to see where zooplankton go during totality. This is part of that greatest migration I was just talking about. They want to see if the zooplankton turn around during the totality and other scientists want to see what kind of the larger vertebrates are up to and we don't have a lot of data on this. So some of the biologists at the California Academy of Sciences are actually directing people to iNaturalist which is this really cool citizen science app that I've certainly used before. A lot of people use now and they want people to participate if they are within 75% or more of the totality mark. So that's a lot of people 75%. So 75, 80, 90% anywhere in there they want you to participate all the way up to 100 and then the best part is they want you to actually enjoy the two minutes of totality. So they want an observation about 30 minutes before the point of maximum eclipse and the second either five minutes before or five minutes after. So again they want you to experience the totality but if you're near some animals they want to know about it. Any animal behavior they say look for squirrels. Look to see if nocturnal animals like bats or owls begin to come out. They also say that they even want information on domesticated animals dogs farm animals to see if it changes their behavior. Some anecdotal information that we have from some of these researchers that are working together to try to get this information. One of them one of the the researchers from the California Academy recalled during 2012 seeing all of the birds or hearing all the birds suddenly go quiet which is very interesting. Which would make sense when uh when you want to have a bird calm you put them in a dark place. Right. Doug Duncan from the University of Colorado had a particularly interesting run-in with some llamas. Some llamas gathered together to see a total eclipse with him and his fellow astronomers in Bolivia. When he was in another one near the Galapagos he saw whales and dolphins swim to the surface of the ocean five minutes before the eclipse began hung out there till five minutes after the eclipse then went back down. Wow I wonder what internet they were looking at to coordinate it. Right yes so the idea here is that most likely an eclipse overrides normal circadian rhythm. Which I personally would not have expected. I would have expected it short enough that the daily rhythm is so ingrained that it wouldn't actually change very much at all. But it's sounding more and more like it's likely to change a lot of behavior. Another anecdotal piece of evidence from a professor at University of Toledo who was in Venezuela during 2008 said that brown pelicans and frigate birds that had been foraging before the eclipse left the bay they were foraging in 13 minutes before totality and then didn't return until 12 minutes after the solar disk was fully revealed. And that sounds about right also because that would be a situation where that's like dusk where the amount of light that you're receiving at that time point is probably very similar to what triggers them to go roost. Time to leave time to stop foraging go roost find a safe place yeah and then it's dark for only a couple of minutes and then they're like oh it's dawn time to get up and go back. Yeah but it's hard for you to believe that the animals don't know that a full day hasn't passed. Which is where that circadian rhythm comes from right? I think what it does is that it's light triggering behaviors. Right so it's more of an instinctual response of dark this means go find shelter. Yes and the light the sun coming back is dawn and so go back to your foraging grounds go find something to eat go back to your normal operating procedures. Yeah but so if you're anywhere where you can enjoy the eclipse this Monday and you happen to be near a dog or a cat or some farm animals or some birds or you know heaven forbid a squirrel go ahead and take notice see what happens and if you want to log into iNaturalist or you can just do a quick google search for different places you can record eclipse information. If animals aren't your thing there are other citizen science opportunities just for recording what the eclipse looks like you can you can put the proper filter on your phone you can put some eclipse glasses on your phone you can actually send some pictures into a database to help people record this eclipse so the eclipse coming up on Monday will be a really great time to help participate in science and learn something about what this eclipse means but i did think it was very interesting to hear how many scientists are very excited to see what will happen on Monday. Yeah that i think it is very interesting to discover you know because we don't have that many opportunities to really see what happens and to really coordinate an effort so i wish these scientists all the best. Absolutely. So iNaturalist that's where you go iNaturalist. Absolutely. Cool well maybe Blair Blair and I are going to be hanging out together for the eclipse in central Oregon so hopefully if we can get clear skies if the fog clears if the smoke clears from all the fires in Oregon maybe we'll be able to see the sun and also take some observations. Yes. Maybe we'll also be able to shoot a video. One recommendation for anybody who's thinking of going go really early. Don't wait for that day. I'm predicting like end of the world type traffic. Probably right. Yeah i'm predicting like it's just gas stations running out of gasoline because people keep filling up and heading towards the place where the thing's gonna happen and then they can't get there because the freeways it'll look like Mad Max probably would be insane. I think we did it. Is that the first step of the show? Yeah that's I was just very overwhelmed by the idea of running out of gas an hour from Portland. Oh no. Yeah it'll be okay. We're gonna be all right everybody the eclipse. It is not the end of the world. It's not Armageddon. It's just an eclipse and if you're in the path of totality really enjoy it. Take a moment everyone oh and other things to say if they have not been said enough already. Everyone make sure you've got your eclipse glasses. If you do not have eclipse glasses properly certified eclipse glasses because there are a lot of fake ones that are going out through Amazon so they even have the proper ISO number so you really want to make sure you have the correct glasses. There is a list of about 17 manufacturers and and dealers that are around. I don't know how many of you have left. There's probably not time. Maybe there's time for you to do a rush order. I don't know but make sure that they are good glasses so you don't wear your eyes but wait but if you're in the path of totality you can take off your glasses when totality hits because the moon is going to be blocking the sun and you will be able to see all sorts of wonderful things. If you have binoculars you can look at the sun with your binoculars during totality to look for coronal projections and tendrils coming off of the sun from around the moon. If also if you're wearing your glasses the solar eclipse glasses leading up to right up until the totality at the very end there you might be able to see the bursts of light and shadow through the canyons on the moon which is something that I'm looking forward to looking for. That's going to be cool. If you do not have glasses you can always make a pinhole camera and watch the progression of the shadow of the moon or of the moon across the sun and additionally or the shadow of the moon across the earth actually and additionally there are some really neat things you can do with trees look between if you're in a treed area you can look where the gaps between the leaves are and you'll see many suns being eclipsed on the ground at your feet. That's my favorite. Yeah or a colander You can use a colander. You can use a colander. I would probably work fantastic too. Yeah there are all sorts of tricks if you are not in the path of totality or if you're at the leading up to or going away from totality there are many many tricks search for them on the internet there are some fun ones that you can if you've got kids that you're going to be looking at the eclipse with there are some very fun techniques for putting faces making happy faces and doing all sorts of artwork with your with your pinhole cameras and stuff. Yes and Bleak in the chatroom says you can poke a hole in a piece of paper with a pencil. Yep there you go that is the ultimate in pinhole cameras right there so everyone I hope you are all safe out there for the eclipse we still have another half of the show left so this is not the end my beautiful friends we're gonna take a break though we'll be back in just a few moments with more This Week in Science we got more science news coming your way. 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capitalist ma just tell your friends about us tell your friends that you found this podcast this week in science twist and it's amazing tell your friends that tell your co-workers put up a poster do something on social media I don't know do a dance on snapchat that interprets your love for twists I don't do snapchat but I'd really like to see it if you did that how about this Monday for the eclipse everyone take a picture of yourselves wherever you are watching the eclipse and tag twist that would be pretty cool I'd love to see that on instagram on facebook on twitter take a picture tag us let us know what you're doing on eclipse day on monday I would love that but anyway whatever way you support twists we are just glad you are here we really could not do this without you thank you for your support with more this week in science yes we are hey Justin do you have a story for us sure do T cells an immune system are a lot like James Bond in that they are licensed to kill I was gonna ask if they liked martini's shaken and not stirred that too oddly enough they are cytotoxic which means that they can kill cells within the human body unlike 007 these T cells don't always win the fight which is how we get infections and cancers of all sorts an important reason why that fight isn't always successfully has been discovered by a team of microbiologists at the University of massachusetts amherst a micro RNA molecule known as lethal seven has been found to be regulating the attack function of T cells this tiny strand of micro RNA is only 20 to 30 nucleotides long yet it has a huge effect researchers found that when lethal seven levels are low or absent the body's T cells can potentially turn into super killers which is a good thing since these super killers are targeting bad things like cancer and chronic infections as leonid pobazinski explains we get cancer because T cells are not always efficient and cancer can overcome them our lab looks at the molecular mechanisms that regulate cytotoxic effects of T cells and the and finding this mechanism in micro RNA this lab is furthering a kind of newish area of study back to quotey voice when micro RNAs were discovered over 20 years ago people thought it was a product of RNA degradation they were considered used fragments like dust they are so tiny nobody paid attention to them so normally RNA codes proteins but micro RNA does not instead these tiny micro RNA snips found in humans and animals have regulatory activity across the whole genome the specific this is back to quotey voice the specific micro RNA known as lethal seven is a very ancient RNA that existed in the very first eukaryotes and has been conserved through evolution humans and animals have multiple genes that code for it instead of the usual just one gene coding for something also the most important genes are duplicated during evolution indicating these must be very essential things to be keeping going into the future experiments were sparked by the observation that T cells produce a lot of lethal seven molecules all of them as long as no danger is present but the moment trouble appears poof suddenly the lethal sevens are gone which then it seems allow T cells to become functionally cytotoxic and able to clear the pathogens popazinski says the micro RNAs work as a break on the cytotoxic T cells when there's no antigen presence so when they are healthy they rest or so when we are healthy they rest as soon as they are gone T cells initiate differentiation into cytotoxic T lymphocytes to kill invaders T cells inject toxic molecules or grandzines into a cancer or vitally infected cell that initiates its apoptotic apoptosis programmed cell death in experiments with three groups of mice wild type controls mice generally modified to have no lethal seven and another group engineered to have a superabundance of lethal seven researchers found that the complete absence of lethal seven yielded the strongest differentiation of T cells in the killer status if you keep lethal seven T cells cannot become cytotoxic even in the presence of a tumor of virus popazinski says if you have none or almost none functions enhanced nobody knew this before we also figured out that the molecular pathway using transcription factors that regulate the T cell differentiation and confirmed that lethal seven micro RNA is the most critical control so it's not just that there's a correlation that this actually is the critical component to this researchers now hope that this might lead to the ability to modulate immune responses you're testing it on mouse tumor models to try to enhance immune response against tumors using the technique we'd like to develop a way to suppress or enhance immune response we might be able to combine this with adaptive immunotherapy to enhance immune functions so we would use a person's own T cells treat them in vitro put them back as super killer T cells to boost their immune response it's very promising I feel it's a real possibility to go from this fundamental research and have an immediate application so they're obviously very excited to be contributing to society in this but that's a I love how just 20 years ago this is dust just dust just used fragments meaningless stuff these micro RNA and now could be uh could be the discovery of something like this that leads to a wide range of immunotherapy cures yeah so I guess the trick is really here like getting the lethal seven to activate in individuals who have cancer so that it it leads to that process where get out of the way yeah yeah get all the way let's have these T cells go in and kill the cancer let's do it so you just you get those T cells into killer mode yeah so yeah so why is it I mean why is it in people with cancer I guess the cancer is turning stuff off normally is that what's is that what's happening well the way he put it shut it down the way he put it it just overcomes sort of the number of T cells with the antigen that are looking for cancer it's just more aggressive it's just more there's more of it it's more active and so your T cells do attack cancer but just not and create enough numbers right so so his proposal is that okay we just take out some of your own T cells and put them into a breeding program where they're not going to have the the lethal seven so the break is off they're in super killer mode they're all amped they're ready to go in and you put them back in and mass and they go to work immediately so one of the it's one of those things with the T cells too is we have there's an antigen that's looking for something in each T cell but there's it's not that each T cell has all of these antigens that look for everything which is why we make so many T cells so they have to go in with the ones that are going to be looking for this as well um so there's a couple steps to it but but yeah our immune system is is sort of like like yeah there's there's T cells they're going around looking for the axe murderer in the room and there are others that are looking for something else and if they're the one in the room with the axe murder they're not going to notice it exactly i'm just gonna walk right by walk right on by i'm not interested in that scary killer clown not looking for that mask yikes no i'm looking for shop lifters and apparently he purchased that axe i can see that i can see that so so there's a couple layers to that it's it's uh there's a specific uh T cell that he would be in the case of a cancer um out and putting back in um but yeah this is just another wonderful one of those maybe possible cancer curie type things but i do love the fact that it came from an area that with all the research that's been done all the looks that have been done we we can see now a a mechanism of control within the immunity system within T cells themselves that was previously unknown unlooked at and thought to be inconsequential could be the thing that completely changes uh how we how we to combat this disease yeah micro RNAs are uh very and this isn't the only lab working on them they are a very active area of study and there are hundreds of different micro RNAs that potentially control so many different aspects of cell differentiation and of immune system function exactly like this so this is this is exciting yeah we'll see what we'll see where it goes if it's applicable to all cancers or only some cancers or yeah we'll see this is a beginning this is a first step from nothing to a potential cure or treatment yeah and sometimes you're in the forest and you find something and it's not a get that you eat it because you're hungry and that takes you places what what is this thing you found in the forest usually you hear about them growing on cow patties or oh absolutely okay now i know where you're at psilocybe cyanosens otherwise known as magic mushrooms they have been the subject of study for decades and for about 60 years we've been really talking about their psychedelic effects harvard university psychologist timothy leary has uh had did a bunch of mind-altering experiments which got the scientific community all abuzz and more than the scientific community led to a lot of people wanting to try to eat mushrooms he and albert hoffman who was a chemist there's a lot of stuff going on in the in the 60s there related to these mushrooms well research since has shown that there are medicinal uses for psilocybin psilocybin could potentially be used to treat anxiety and depression in people with terminal cancer and also in treating nicotine addiction however they're limited by the mushrooms themselves and being able to get the mushrooms being able to grow the mushrooms and having quantities that are able to give a pharmaceutical dose of drug of the psilocybin compound to people i mean you're not going to say oh you know take two of these small caps and one of these big stems and call me in the morning that's that leaves a certain amount of slop in the in the actual treatment of a medical condition right and so in order to prescribe psilocybin researchers need to be able to make it they need to synthesize it and make it in the lab and have it actually manufactured and in uh in the first study ever to show it researchers have sequenced genomes of psilocybin mushroom species to syllabiant cybins mushroom species to identify the genes responsible for enzymatic production of psilocybin so fungus mushrooms or a fungus we are way behind in our production of compounds our synthesization can't speak the words of compounds from fungal sources bacteria we grow in the lab all the time we've got a pretty good handle on many species and the compounds that they produce we get bacteria to produce compounds for us the fungi are different and so it's been uh it's been very difficult to actually make this happen Janis Frick Felix Blay Dirk Hofmeister from Friedrich Schiller University Gena published an Anguant Chemie International edition uh just recently on this study they used bacteria and fungi engineered bacteria and fungi to confirm the gene activity that was responsible for this enzymatic production of psilocybin and to verify the exact order of chemical enzyme steps to go from the beginning to the end of this synthesis the process includes a new enzyme that we haven't seen before it decarboxylates tryptophan and there's an enzyme that adds a hydroxyl group there's an enzyme that catalyzes phosphorylation which is adding a phosphate and an enzyme that mediates sequential amine methylation steps so they basically created a one-pot reaction they use three of the enzymes to prepare psilocybin from four hydroxy-L tryptophan and the end product is psilocybin and so this is they used genetics to find the genes responsible for the enzymes that create psilocybin in the fungus and then repeated those steps using bacteria and fungus to verify it to actually get to a point where they can produce psilocybin in the lab and so this will set basically sets the beginning sets us up for being able to produce synthesize psilocybin that can be mass produced for medical uses excellent i'm all about more medical drugs that come from natural sources right it's from a natural source but this understanding the enzymatic process gets around having to farm the fungus or any of those yeah it gets around a whole bunch of that so it's a very it's a it's a fascinating fascinating study and i love the fact that it does potentially lead to i mean once we have psilocybin itself completely synthesized and engineered on a regular basis i where is that going to take the the chemical use of the molecule you know how how how often and how how how useful will psychotherapists find it how useful will doctors use it how useful will patients find it i will see where it goes from there but that's that's the whole goal right is to take away the guesswork and to also take away a lot of artificially created compounds that can mess with environment human bodies all these kinds of things so this is kind of the perfect thing is something that that has a source in in the natural world when it's digested and then released back into the natural world it's not likely to make a big impact it's not likely to make a big impact on the internal systems of your body and all at the same time we can regulate the dosage very carefully yeah and that's the big thing is the dosage dosage regulation and i forget the whole word natural completely throw that out of every conversation having to do with any narco product because there's plenty of narcotics that are really rough longer term uh that uh that can be all natural like that's not a differentiation well now you now you're twisting what i was trying to say you know what i was trying to say i don't know that i if i am so is the listening audience but but i i think okay i mean i think i you know this is this is something that was one of these one of these drugs like mdma and lsd that was used successfully early on for therapeutic use and so effective that the the people who were using this uh clinically thought everybody should do this they saw such success they're like just everybody needs to be doing this and then the greater society maybe that's not how you really should do it so and there and there are you know the psychoactive effects of psilocybin are not to be taken lightly i mean the the hallucinations that can come from psilocybin can uh can be very intense so this situation as blair said and what i was trying to say is that it the dosage is very important in this particular case and it may be the kind of situation where very low doses i mean people are talking about microdosing acid microdosing mushrooms these things can potentially be very helpful for anxiety depression whether in a clinical therapy setting or you know is this something that if it's if it if they figure out exactly how the psilocybin has its effect could it be watered down a little bit so you know and is a false context i think that's a great argument but it's not about dosage what it is is i think it's about context uh i you know there's a great great great effectedness and using these chemicals in therapeutic environments regardless of the dosage comparing the dosage to the same dosage that's being used at a rock concert or whatever the kids listen to today the the context of what they're getting at or the meaning of what they're getting at behind this i think ultimately is that if you can use it clinically in certain context then you can uh have a great a great clinical result from it and and the dosage thing i think is a as a side argument that's just has nothing really to do with it i can really disagree because look at medical marijuana part of the problem was that marijuana from a person in the street one strand is very different from another strand you don't get all the information that you need you get a very different dosage once you start to make it medical you can write things on a clear rating scale there are testing processes you can put things in place to make things more consistent it'll still be totally meaningless uh because with anything psychoactive people are going to react to it completely differently and the context of yeah what they're how they're experiencing and the situation they're in is going to affect them differently it's not quite like alcohol and even alcohol which can affect some people differently has a very much how much is in your blood stream to how it affects your your your way in the world is completely and totally different subject than when you're talking about psychoactive so yeah and ed in ed from Connecticut in the chat room saying taking the drugs in a regulated environment is the key and that's exactly what these medical uses would be that's what these therapeutic uh efforts are for for depression anxiety PTSD pain these are all indications that would be potentially clinical in nature and so they would be controlled environments for the most part and this is not like take your uh your isolated psilocybin pills and go home yeah that's it that sounds like a great idea that's not going to happen and and and it's also not necessarily has to be a positive environment one of the most one of the most uh positive usages of lsd was on prisoners uh who had much lower levels of recidivism uh than than uh your typical prisoner who is who is going in and out of the legal system largely because being by i'm thinking hyper aware of your surroundings of four walls of cinder block and some bars probably stuck with them a little longer uh after the experience but lower levels of recidivism when used in prison uh better therapy outcomes when using the clinical environment this is definitely something that should be part of uh the the toolbox of medicine absolutely yeah no and the easier we can make it to be a useful tool the better what you got there justin got a new story oh yeah uh my final story of the eve this is uh this is the east cigarettes some bit of truth about them dun dun dun turns out among us adults who are established smokers in the past five years those who ease use e-cigarettes daily were significantly more likely to have quit cigarettes compared to those who never tried e-cigarettes but were smokers researchers at clinton university's mailman's school of public health and Rutgers school of public health found that over half of daily e-cigarette users had quit smoking in the past five years they quit smoking cigarettes not smoking cigarettes correct compared to just 28 percent of adults who had never tried right cigarettes this is one of the first days to reveal the patterns of cessation prevalence among e-cigarette users at a national level so you know i mean it doesn't say anything to the long-term health effects of vaping or the chemicals within vape but it does say uh in terms of smoking cessation as the e-cigarettes had sort of purported that they were all about early on seems to be working okay now i'm gonna pull a justin and say but that doesn't really matter because most of those or i would guess a lot of those cases have to do with this marketing that's indicating e-cigarettes will help you quit smoking which makes people think that they are making a healthy option right they're making a healthy choice and that is good marketing and incorrect well we know that cigarettes are bad so yeah we know that e-cigarettes are bad as i don't know that they're as bad yet and that's and that's i guess we know that they are bad we don't know that they're as bad and this is that this is the thing oh boy i don't know if that matters justin if you're convincing people no i mean seriously it is it's not it's not i mean you're you're you're drawing a line at your you're putting something in your body that's bad you're inhaling something that's bad you're drawing a line there where uh we we don't know potential risk and so the that for a long time we've known cigarettes increase a lot of risk because of tar because of other pollutants that they put into your body the nicotine is secondary actually the nicotine just causes addiction but it's the smoke itself that causes so many problems e-cigarettes we're finding out that the propylene glycol is not so great to be inhaling not good but it doesn't have the same tar and other factors that you're inhaling in the smoke so is it necessarily the risk factors to how bad it is and so if you're going to make a choice between i'm smoking a cigarette every day and i'm smoking something that's potentially less damaging still damaging but less damaging which do you choose right i would say it it it rings very similar to me to the diet soda debate and we're gonna talk about that next so don't even oh okay excellent let's talk about that a little bit a little bit on the side of that just to finish it up the uh fda has recently delayed rules that they had that would have limited e-cigarette marketing uh which may be a good thing again what i agree with you belair i agree with you it it it's not that you're doing a healthy thing and i agree with kiki it's doing a less healthy thing or less unhealthy thing less it's still unhealthy but just slightly less but i feel like marketing indicates that it is see you're doing you quit smoking you're great no you're still smoking if you're if you're smoking an e-cigarette you're still smoking that's what i'm saying relatively less damaging has this indication that oh you quit smoking cigarettes you're now smoking an e-cigarette you're you're good to go i'm saying run from the devils you know are devils yeah this it's a really interesting uh this here we're still in the world of uh of lobbying money and uh and influence from the smoking industry so it's hard to know even though people are doing scientific research on this topic it's very difficult to separate the the cigarettes from the e-cigarettes the wheat from the chaff in this particular case because there is a smoke screen being laid to confuse people and and lobbying literally literally and and the lobbying money is being used to try and keep e-cigarettes from the market or at least from bringing up as much of the market because cigarette manufacturers are losing money so there are lots of pieces in play here but it's nice to see a good study come out in a journal like addictive behavior so more like this please so that we can make policy decisions based on lots of scientific evidence um and then thinking of not policy decisions but maybe decisions about what you drink or eat every single day do either of you guys uh imbibe diet sodas nope i don't drink soda i don't yeah i don't even drink the non well we're occasionally but very rarely do i have a even non diet soda yeah on occasion usually when i'm on a road trip i don't know exactly what i would say this is yeah my if i'm driving the kids anywhere that's going to be more than an hour i got a soda in there uh absolutely need the caffeine that's my cup of coffee because you can put a top on the thing versus a regular cup of coffee you'll just be spilling around right or you've gotten in it there's a straw and it makes it super easy to be able to drink yeah anyway well a lot of people drink lots of diet soda a lot of people drink regular soda less and less actually but there's been a big question since uh the the war on sugar began uh there's been a huge effort to get people off of full sugar sodas and drinking diet sodas but in the process of moving people from sugar to artificially sweetened beverages we found that the evidence is very confusing and while people do lose weight to begin with there's there's weight loss when you move from taking all those calories in from sugar to not having the sugar related calories from your your beverage of choice a lot of people still run the risk of obesity diabetes and metabolic disease who drink artificially sweetened beverages and so the question is what's going on how come if you're drinking why if you're drinking these artificially sweetened beverages are are you still potentially not losing weight why is your body storing fat what's going on and so a researcher Dana small at Yale University she's a neuroscientist she just published a big compendium of some studies that she's done over the last few years in current biology and she's been studying what's going on in the brain and in the body in response to these sweeteners and so uh one of her studies the the main way that she varied the factors is that she gave she had sweetness which could could be controlled by an artificial sweetener right you can make something different drinks equally sweet and then she also has a tasteless carbohydrate multidextrin that she could mix in and so she basically controlled a bunch of beverages she had all of them the same sweetness so sweetness wasn't the issue but they had different amounts of calories zero 37.5 75 112.5 and 150 calories the subjects consumed each drink six times over the a period of weeks they had it twice in the laboratory four times at home and then their brains were scanned using fmri to see what happened in the reward circuits in the brain and so she was predicting what would you predict if you're the if like yeah these same sweetness but different amounts of calories what's going to happen in the reward circuit of the brain less calories made them want more no interesting okay okay wait a second i think i know the answer to this so i think it's i think it's the sweetness makes you think you've taken more calories than you know i'd give up they're all the same sweetness so uh so she predicted that the more calories were in the drink the greater the activation of the reward circuit in the brain yeah exactly so less calories make you want to consume more right but that's not what she found she found the one in the middle the 75 calorie drink not the zero calorie drink not the 150 calorie drink but the one right in the middle generated the strongest activation of the reward circuit and so she was asking okay if calories are what are is appealing about sweet foods why would the 75 calorie drink be more activating than the 150 calorie drink why would that happen and so she did more experiments and she looked at the metabolic response and that's how the body revs itself up to burn calories basically the energy that's expended to process the calories that you take in excuse me and again it was the same drinks zero 75 150 same sweetness to all of the different calorie variations she found the results repeated again the metabolic response to the high calorie drink and the zero calorie drink was lower than for the middle one and so what she thinks is that sweetness regulates the metabolic signal so when sweetness and calories are matched where they kind of fit together the amount of sweetness fits the amount of calories that you're taking in expectations are matched the brain's expectations are matched and so you have the greatest metabolic response and the greatest brain response as well because you have a matching of calories to taste if there's a mismatch so it's super sweet and no calories the system's like this is weird I don't know what to do and so the metabolism doesn't rev up and it because the expectation mismatch occurs the brain and the body the brain's like well the sweetness wants me to rev up but no there's no calories here or if it's not quite sweet enough and there's lots of calories the same kind of thing well I don't why should I do that and so instead for this high sweetness and no calories you potentially have the body storing fat if you are taking in any other calories at the same time and so she is saying what she suggests is it's a very complex thing but it might indicate that you shouldn't drink all artificially sweetened beverages while you're eating oh because it creates that mismatch that the body can't really deal with and so you may end up just storing calories as fat as opposed to trying to burn through them the metabolism doesn't rev up doesn't do what it's supposed to it's still very complicated still not quite I mean this is a this is a big study and there are a lot of questions still to be answered but there is this you know our love of sweet foods and how that drives our our reward center our brain body systems our metabolism and she says taste can change the metabolic fate of calories huh and and the idea that uh and this article from box I really love the last uh last sentence mark Schatzger is the author of the Dorito effect the surprising new truth about food and flavor he writes in other words take a message here the dream of foods that taste great but have none of the calories may be just a dream there we go yeah it just messes up your body your body goes what I don't know what to do yeah so anyway the take I don't know if we are doing a road trip drink your artificially sweetened beverage and don't eat any Doritos oh no that's not possible that's a good chip do you guys have any more stories I have a silly story about jumping spiders yeah our dancing tiny little adorable friends well I have a story about the regal jumping spider the largest of the jumping spiders at one inch long there have been several accounts so many a total of six of them eating frogs and lizards this is very weird uh this is this is not yet been been documented usually frogs or lizards will eat jumping spiders but there are accounts and pictures six total whopping six sample size we're sure they're not photoshopped right showing the one-inch spiders dining on Cuban frogs that were one and a half times their size and lizards like anoles that were one and a half to two and a half times their own size they don't engage with battles in their play pray they actually inject them with venom and then just wait for them to die and this was the first ever documented case of jumping spiders killing and eating vertebrates of any kind this is coming out of Florida I'd love to know if uh because they're injecting venom and venom probably is costly I'd love to know if they vary the amount of venom the inject based on size of prey yeah I would bet that's pretty standard when it comes to venomous animals I actually wanted to show you the picture really quick before we move on of a jumping spider I can do that eating a frog look at it here we go ah look at the look on that frog's face oh kermit you never knew that spider was gonna come get you did you and look at that adorable jumping spider doing that terrifying thing jumping spider why don't you just go go back to dancing go back leave that frog alone yes and if uh if anyone would like to see that picture go ahead to twist.org again look at our show notes tomorrow after I've had a chance to put them up tomorrow yeah after this shoot goes up tomorrow yeah after it's up so I have another spider-ish story I can move to very quick very quick headlines at the end of the show uh researchers this this story I love this story so much because it brings together spider silk lasers and kevlar yeah so researchers have been shooting lasers at spider silk and they've found that in the right conditions there's a physics effect that takes place where there are non-linear multi-photon interactions basically what happens when they shoot photons through the laser at the spider silk in the spider silk in a particular way um it amplifies the lasers power by basically combining photons together so that uh two photons act as a single photon but of twice the energy towards this combinatoria fact the spider silk can increase the power of the laser in that way spider silk laser gun awesome right um and so the uh the researchers have been able to direct energy because the spider silk then absorbs the energy of these photons and they've been using it to make art and sculpt with spider silk and so the researchers have since been able to focus this laser on different areas of the spider silk to form it into curly cues and to braid it and to cut it into pieces and bond it with other things and yes weld with spider silk they used the laser and spider silk to weld spider silk to the four corners of a mirror and then suspend the spider silk like cables from another structure to suspend the mirror in place so this little tiny little tiny mirror was suspended in thin air by spider silk yeah and then they used it not only to do that but to weld it to kevlar and so the interesting exciting thing here is that uh in being able to add spider silk to the kevlar that um this is this is something potential for increasing the the strength of the kevlar material because we all know that spider silk's very strong yeah so they're welding ish with lasers and spider silk that's pretty there was there was another story this week that i'll just tease so people can look it up later about how spider silk is is organized the fibers and spider silk are organized in such a way that when the spiders dangle on a on a singular piece they don't twirl around and around and around and around and around it allows them to stay stationary facing one direction it's pretty fascinating yeah i've always wondered about that that's really a thing yeah you don't want to just spin yeah you don't want to have to spend your energy not spinning oh that's fascinating uh new research has shown proof of a concept that antibiotic carrying molecular robots can treat bacterial stomach infections these research researchers created uh micro micro motor drug delivery system that is powered by bubbles that when the micro motors they're magnesium based micro motors and when they are put into the stomach they propel themselves through the gastric fluid because of the production of a carbon dioxide gas that they that then shoots out of one side of the material so they have magnesium beads that are covered in titanium dioxide and then the drug pl at plga is put over that and then they're all covered up with this chitosan material and then they can be just swallowed and they put they tested this in mice and they were able to treat a helico pylori helicobacter pylori infection which is one of the causes of uh what's the what's the thing in the stomach anyway one of the poisoning no not food food poisoning ibs oh never mind i'll just stop right there but helicobacter helicobacter pylori um and uh and it worked pretty well and usually they have to add when you're taking a stomach antibiotic they add a proton pump inhibitor and when you add the proton pump inhibitor it works about the same as this molecular motor this little tiny robot that propels itself with bubbles through your gastric fluid to the infection uh but proton pump inhibitors can have all sorts of secondary effects that aren't great and so you don't feel very good when you're taking them so this could potentially be a really nice way to address bacterial stomach infections with robots in your stomach robots yeah propelling themselves with tiny bubbles and then finally uh study this week has found by looking at the national cancer database researchers from Yale found that people who choose alternative treatments to conventional treat medical treatment are five times as likely of dying within five years as people who just use conventional medical treatment yeah so they reported in the journal of the national cancer institute there are a few caveats to this of course they had a very limited database because not everybody says hey doc i'm gonna i got okay i'm gonna go take alternative treatments some people never said that there were no records uh or their limited records from the conventional doctors putting them into the database so there were lots of gaps they only had about 280 records of patients who chose alternative medicine over conventional and they tended to be female young with high education and income and didn't have very other very many other complicating health conditions those individuals from the study the 280 of them were matched with two other patients who were diagnosed with cancer in the same year had matching age race disease disease stage and insurance type but who opted for conventional treatments and then they were followed through the data over time and they found that those in the alternative treatment group were 2.5 times more likely to die within five years of treatment than the conventional group it's dragged down by cases of prostate cancer which tend to progress slowly and so there's no statistically significant difference in mortality risk among prostate cancer patients regardless of what kind of treatments they chose and this is according to ars technica patients with breast cancer however alternative medicine users were 5.7 times more likely to die within five years colorectal cancer 4.6 times more likely to die with alternative medicine and lung cancer were 2.2 times more likely to die if they chose alternative over conventional methods so there's no actual determination if the alternative therapies are the cause of the drop in survival rate versus lack or lack of evidence-based conventional ones this is observational they're just looking at data it's not actually testing to find out what what works and what doesn't work but this is something that should raise red flags for people at least give people pause potentially the beauty of standard medicine is that it goes through scientific rigors and hopefully it means that there are a lot of tested well researched methodologies involved right and the downside of it is of course not everybody has access to it right and absolutely yeah that's if nothing else that this is something that this should point to it's it's not just that trying to be alternative for a lot of people is an option because they heard something read something don't trust their doctor but for for anybody without access to health care for these things the results are are also there and that can yeah absolutely yeah and another thing that this this study does highlight is the fact that the data is not strong the fact that they didn't they were not able to find many patients between 2004 and 2013 that's a wide range of years and they should have been able to find many more individuals in the records and they were not able to so there's a breakdown somewhere between alternative medicine treatment clinics where people may be going for treatment who people who choose to leave conventional medicine if we need to if we want to do another study of this type there there is no way to get that information easily at this point in time to find out i mean and and maybe there is other data from alternative medical clinics that we don't have because it's not in the can national cancer database so yeah questions yeah it does raise there there are questions absolutely we have questions we always have questions do you have questions i hope we gave you more questions today yeah yeah i always leave the show with more questions than i started with really i didn't even know that was a thing now i have to go look some things up oh my goodness everybody did we finish the show we did it we did it we did it we did it and i would like to thank everyone for joining us today i would like to thank our chat room for chatting i know the bunch of people just got booted from the chat room i don't know what happened you guys yeah me too i got booted yeah that was an irc issue but we're back in the irc people thank you for uh for sticking with us through the show and chatting through the whole thing it's great to see your comments there and fata and brandon and identity for thank you for all of your help on a weekly basis and making the show happen hey you guys on facebook hey everyone on youtube thank you so much for watching us over there and i would like to take a moment to thank our patreon sponsors thank you to paul disney jibirton latimore john ratmaswamy richard ono aspiring leo kevin 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far as i know they are finishing up book number seven right now which gives me hope for a very long run of the expanse on sci-fi it's very exciting you guys i'm so excited about next week's show homework everyone if you have not looked into the expanse you might want to so you know what we're going to be talking about right once again we will be here broadcasting live online at eight p.m pacific time on twist.org slash live you can watch and join our chat room but don't worry if you can't make it you can find past episodes at twist.org slash youtube facebook.com slash this week in science or twist.org thank you for enjoying the show twist is also available as a podcast just google this week in science in your itunes directory or if you have a mobile type device you can simply look up twist number four droid app in the android marketplace or this week in science and anything apple marketplace for more information on anything you may have heard here today shannots will be available on 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huh because i have to work tomorrow and we're leaving straight after work what i think i don't know for sure yet but i think i might be riding in a tesla you haven't figured that out yet no we should because won't that affect no we have a backup plan a backup plan i need to send a message to i'm gonna invite some patrons to hang out with us for a couple of minutes while you're doing that i will be right back oh okay i'm done mary oh okay now you can go two minutes okay hold on thanks identity four this is my science tiara got some too many tags though i need to fix that this is an impromptu science tiara hello upside down science head tags here you can just wear them right there right on just the front right there who needs eyes anyway when you've got science to lead you it's my son now it's my science visor rob the spark you put a solar panel on the roof of the tesla yes uh did i say this already i i didn't think i mentioned this before i went to uh did i talk about the the tesla batteries what about the tesla batteries um so they have this at home usage i'm sure i talked about this last time uh they have this at home yeah the the batteries that yeah yeah yeah they've got this the wall battery the batteries they're making yeah yeah so they're uh mishkas is experimenting with this oh cool mishkas for those who do not know is the is a great coffee shop that's been around in davis for many years they make their own coffee roast it right there yeah there uh there's an experiment underway by mishka i don't know who sonisha sonisha sorry thank you uh sonisha is i can't believe i still remember his name all these years he uh he recognized me but he couldn't remember how and then i forgot like i'm like i like you said i went to the the old mishkas not the new one so much but the oh is there a new one there's a oh yeah there's been a new location now for years i don't know that at all but i think i might have he might have known you and that's how uh he came to know who i was but uh but anyway he was telling me but that this is they're experimenting with the idea um they've got a some sort of test underway to see how it works but of drawing down electricity and the non-peak hours overnight and then re-releasing them during the day and expectation on his calculations at least is that this might actually be more effective than the than the solar panels on the roof because the roof space is limited uh but this could be a way of utilizing energy that would otherwise possibly just be going to waste i guess yeah hey strengths yes the power wall thank you for that power wall wait so what are they using what yeah strengths and he yeah he might have thought i was jeff koblin that's right totally um so normally use the solar panels with the power wall that's the way like uh tesla's setting it up so you can have solar panels or you'd have right so this is a sort of innovation on that which is that you just use the power wall to draw down off-peak hours so it's still coming directly from the grid oh but it's off-peak it's off-peak it's in the middle of the night it's 2 a.m to 4 a.m or whatever right um so it's it's basically it could potentially help to distribute electricity use more evenly yeah and and so you're buying it low and you're using it when costs would be high which means you're making sell high which you're making less of an impact when there's the heavy draw so you're making that a little easier and a little perhaps cheaper and then you're utilizing that energy that i guess kind of just is out on the grid and could you know not be being used and that's why it's the off-peak hours they need to get get it out there so interesting concept i i think that has a huge potential super potential yeah that's actually interesting yeah i hadn't thought about that but i if you could add it also i mean the power wall is limited you get a couple of power walls and get electricity off-peak get solar panels that bring in solar energy maybe uh maybe you could get in contact with him during this experiment phase and if it works we could talk to him about how it worked and the uh post-experimental phase right because that would be that'd be a pretty interesting greening how'd it go senisha how'd that all work out yeah yes mishka mishka mishka iponi in the chat room is saying mishka means mouse yeah and hot rod yeah maybe the the there wouldn't be such thing as off-peak any more peak or off-peak well eventually that would mean that all of that if that's the scenario then all the on-peak would have to be cheaper too so you know if you if you just did that then you were you're being successful what do we have in the chat room we've got a bunch of people in the chat room hello everybody are there some new people in here see michael year 17 about year 17 yep for a little while twist oh wow yeah twist can drive twist can have a driver's license that's awesome that's right i wonder let's see we did a 500 episode we anniversary we passed 600 without much fanfare and we'll get to 700 in another year and a half ish no we'll only be it we'll be at about 800 episodes maybe when i when we hit 20 years it's nothing 20 years 800 episodes you know there's nothing strengths will the solar eclipse affect the time of twist next week nope oh why would it i mean unless everything really does go to heck in a hand basket no because twist is on wednesday and the eclipse is on monday it'll be fine i am expecting to be back at work on tuesday doot doot doot bleak is out don't be bleak i'm glad we have our chat room back i told her i told her and rothig is here little mouses that love cables and batteries yes i don't need my cables my cats want to eat electrical cables that is not going to end well oh no that's uh that's why rabbits was once a bad experiment yeah i really like doing other things rabbits were very attracted to and ate through every power cord in the house that was left in if you had it high high power cord they're not they're not great climbers but if it was on the ground power cord is going down yeah so hot rod says we all know eclipses cause time warps and strength says i'm expecting a mad max fury road style apocalypse yeah we would need a lot of chrome paint for that exactly no it's uh or is it the solar panels block out the sun with panels we could do that we could make our own eclipse rob sparkly says cover the world with solar panels too many too many solar panels you guys we could put solar panels in places where there's sun lots of sun shining down yeah start saving up exactly yes and the solar panels will take the sun away and the trees won't be able to grow because the solar panels you know they're like sun magnets they're just like nope i'm going to take the sun and you're going to be dark over there that's not how it works but if you cover everything in solar panels let's build up a parking lot what was that song cover the i don't know what you're talking about the song in my head but i can't quite get there it's right on the tear down to something put up a parking lot yeah exactly that's all i have but instead it would be put up solar panels and so you wouldn't even pave paradise and put up a parking lot thank you i told uh yes yeah we see wouldn't you wouldn't you wouldn't even have a parking lot you just have solar panels no place to park your car no trees no vegetation no lawns no swimming pools it would just be solar panels everywhere australia has decided they have put the big go ahead to the major uh solar collector uh solar array did you hear about this no they've been uh solar called it's a solar tower yes solar thermal south australia it's going to build the world's largest single tower solar thermal power plant these things are awesome looking it's like if our civilization were to just disappear and something like this we're left behind future archaeologists would be coming up with all sorts of ideas about it being a shrine or something shrine to the sun yeah but it's um yeah so south australia has announced to deal with tesla to create the largest lithium lithium ion battery storage facility and it also has plans to build the biggest single solar tower thermal power plant proposed output of 150 megawatts these things are so neat i love the this giant tower and so it's solar thermal and so it there's um usually a salt solution or some kind of water salt solution that gets pumped through pipes and the uh there's a heliospheric array which keeps the tower constantly illuminated by the sun as long as the sun is out and the the light onto the tower heats usually a salt solution of some kind that can hold the heat for some period of time and then can heat water run turbines create energy all that kind of stuff these are i think these things are so neat go australia go with your bad selves it is not the tower of mordor the eye of sauron that's right exactly yeah identity force says for comparison if you're going to compare megawatt output per size a typical nuclear reactor in the united states puts out a thousand megawatts and so this is only going to be putting out 150 megawatts and so there's significantly less power but also significantly less environmental impact yeah just some fried lizards from now and again that's it just some fried lizards not so bad yeah and should be completed in 2020 i love it i think it's great let's see 150 let me look up 150 megawatts powers how many homes google you know what i what i want to know google wants to answer my question for me yeah okay let's see megawatt that's pretty funny with the Boise weekly says that according to the solar energy industry's association the number of homes powered by a megawatt of solar energy depends on average sun sunshine electricity consumption temperature and wind nationally it's 164 homes per megawatt wow and that is powered by a megawatt of solar photovoltaics and so that's photovoltaics solar thermal maybe could be more conventional wisdom says a megawatt can supply a thousand houses what that's a very different number than the 164 that's from um before the internet was invented well i think it also yeah before the internet 2004 no i think it's uh based on average power use and wind power is being produced so solar photovoltaics don't store energy and so yeah interesting so it's like a factor of really how quickly can those megawatts be produced and pumped out to the houses indicates how many houses it can actually fuel yeah nuclear plants are very spendy probably a lot more spendy than this solar thermal tower i would imagine huh yeah and hot red that probably doesn't work incredibly well when it's cloudy either but it's southern australia probably in a region that is pretty sunny most of the time although it's southern australia not northern southern's going to be more temperate and less equatorial what happens to the birds that try to land on the tower yeah incinerated exactly yes right cover wind turbines with solar panels you have solar and wind at the same time yeah and then there's yes rub sparkly the idea of the micronuclear plants all sorts of new ideas we have lots of new ideas i'm laughing at something that somebody said in the youtube chat that's funny that's a funny comment that's a funny comment yak face club i love everybody's names oh my goodness you're a yak face club no you are no you are you said it first you mean good let the record show let the record show blare one player always wins yes let's just blare them you know it what what all right um okay blare so you're coming in friday huh do you know what time um probably pretty close to nine okay well because i'm thinking we're going to crater lake in the morning we're going to try to go early but it says it takes about five hours to hike at all um which means then we'd be leaving by like one or two and it's another five hours plus we met if we have an electric car we might have to stop and charge it so i think it's gonna be another four hours no no it's 20 minutes we're gonna use super chargers so it's gonna take i think it takes 30 to 45 minutes for a full charge and it's uh yeah and it's we're we're getting the long distance one which means you have a 400 mile awesome trip on the charge yeah if we get it we'll find out tomorrow i can't wait to find out if you get it yeah which also means uh i'm gonna be a passenger in a car that's uh being used um that autopilot is being used and i'm gonna be freaking out the whole time so you know how i'm distrustful of self-driving cars i'm sure you can i'm sure you can choose to drive it yes you can but the expectation if we get this tesla tomorrow is that um we will be testing all the features guinea pigs love it good luck and you can take a video of it oh i'll take some videos yeah sure i'll have to see what i'm allowed to post to social media hopefully you can post everything to social media i think i i should be able to i mean you're a media person now yeah yeah not just a zoo employee you have a podcast yeah this is um the the person who i'm going with her husband is also coming works for a certain company oh okay and so that's why we find out tesla yeah we'll find out tomorrow if the test car is available cool yeah well there won't be a lot of um trunk space probably well it has a frunk oh right a frunk it says a trunk guinea frunk you can't that is not an okay word it's the word that tesla uses it's not okay in england in england they call it the boot just put it in the boot no but the boots in the back no no do i need to look up frunk on urban dictionary so i don't like that word i never heard it before but i'm having a visceral reaction yeah that's what tesla calls it as a frunk that's awful i like it front trunk no no that's terrible yes of course we put words together in these ways and that's manto it is a portmanteau but i think it's terrible i don't like it i'm going on record tesla you have a lot of great ideas frunk is not one of them it's not well be sure to tell elon that's right next time i get a chance to you know pull elon's ear my way that's right oh yes flying out says bonnet that's what it's called a bonnet go bonnet bonnet bonnet bonnet and a boot and then in canada you go ute and a boot oh my god um the wedding i was in last weekend uh the groom is from canada and so all of his family kept saying ute and a boot three the boot and i was i was trying so hard to keep a straight face the whole time but but i would forget and then because otherwise they sound very american in their accent sounds very i don't want to say normal but just like something i would never guess that you are from anywhere else right you're too used to yeah yeah and then all of a sudden they'd say oh sorry sorry sorry what are you talking about a boot a boot what are you talking about hot rod no we don't that was all caps hot rod shouting hot rod shouting they were from new brunswick yeah it's the atlantic canada yeah the atlantic side yeah that's what we will say the atlantic side of canada oh frunk strangely suitable for work suitable safe for work suitable for work yeah frunk i got the frunk everybody you got the frunk do you like it now no i don't i hate it you don't like it all right kiki all right that is not what frunk a trunk on the front end of a no no do you see the top definition that's the top one no not in my no oh that's the top but the one on the top on the top oh they have so too the when i opened it the very the very top entry not safe for work frunking on the dance floor um frunk second definition to act very drunk when you've not consumed as much alcohol as you said to act fake fake drunk fake drunk is that like that's fake news of the drunk drunk category oh or when you eat so much you feel drunk you know what oh ian 2005 i bet the frunk got voted way up by tesla people i'm sure it did all recent voted votes by people don't know who don't know what they're talking about i'm okay with tesla fanboys so there's nothing wrong with data tesla fan person right is that why is it only boys okay all right i gotta go i'm about to turn into boys did i say only boys i didn't say that so good night justin good night justin are you done okay i gotta go i got i got a business project over here but i will be back you have an art show when's your art show is it happening uh yeah sometimes did you do your art did you do your art speak for your photo for your art yeah yeah i said obfuscationist painter great good left it at that awesome you'll have to let us know in september when your show is out it'll be the second friday cool cool cool all right all right all right um i will see blare i gotta see we can go we can go yeah i gotta pack blare has to pack she already said that she didn't want to hang out very late so this is all good she always says that though you can't take that that's not always that's like how you say goodbye at the end of the show and then we keep going for an extra hour you just ignore it don't characterize me like that sometimes i stay and i have fun yeah no i agree but you always say no always you have to go no not always i can't i have this i'm tired because i i my in my life and or i have to get to sleep because of my life did i even play the tired card tonight i did not even though a cat threw up on me while i was sleeping last night so i am tired i had to wake up to you wake up to that oh no another reason not to have cats but i did have a cartoonish night like a couple nights ago where it started with the fish tank was making too much drippy water sound so i had to go and like top off the fish tank and then there was a cricket somewhere in the house that started and there's a cricket outside it's like can be a little calming your crickets outside when there's one in your room it's loud and unnerving and you will not go to sleep so then i went from i went from dripping water to cricket to cat cat heat cat fight something outside with the it was just it was like i was like this is a joke this is not really can't be like any one of those could like disturb some of these nights sleep at all three in the same night it's ridiculous all right good night justin good night just say good night player good night player good night good night doctor kiki good night good night everybody thank you for joining us for another show i hope you join us again next week i'm so excited to talk to the expanse authors this is gonna be so fun yes have you guys watched it at all yet uh yeah i've identified it i found out how to watch it that took a minute good good job for you step in the right direction yeah you're gonna be less than four for the interview no i'm gonna watch some before the interview for sure yeah for sure for sure for sure all right you guys for sure we'll be back here next week and i can't wait to hear about everybody's eclipse stories blaire and i will have fun eclipse stories to tell everybody and uh yeah we're looking forward to it i hope you have a wonderful weekend and happy eclipse everybody bye