 This is TWIS, This Week in Science, episode number 589, recorded on Wednesday, October 19, 2016. Livelier than a scrotum frog in Lake Titicaca. Hey everyone, I am Dr. Kiki, and today on This Week in Science, we are going to fill your heads with a thinking machine, human-like generosity, and lithium! But first... Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer! We live in the modern world. The newest age humanity has ever known, which is always the case really whenever people are describing the present, even the dark ages in Europe during a major setback in knowledge. Most folks living through it probably had no idea there had been a more modern world left behind. And as progress pushes forward through every aspect of our lives, as we automate more processes, speeding up production, as we compute larger datasets faster, as our population grows and the need for workforce shrinks, as we fill every open stretch of land with farms, paved roads, cut and paste houses and coffee franchises, as we push nature further from our daily lives and alter the climate upon which nature thrives, we see the results of our efforts. Planet-wide warming, depleted fishing, hunting and farming grounds, diminished freshwater reserves, increased wildfires, intense storms and hurricane seasons, and over 100 species of plant, insect and animal going extinct every day. What for? To what end? Why are we so set on this path so dedicated to a goal that we cannot even envision how it ends? And what a vision. No wonder we don't ask how the world will look when we are done destroying it. The answer of course is that we don't care because we won't be here to see it because we can't imagine that change taking place in our own lifetime. And our children, we obviously don't love them enough to ensure that it doesn't happen in theirs. Thankfully, there are some people left who love this planet enough to protect it. Unfortunately, they aren't running the country. But they are here with us now listening to This Week in Science coming up next. Discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know what's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. Science to you, Kiki and Blair. And good science to you, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. Twists is here yet again to fill your heads. Not with magic, but with science. Science. Science. Things that people have been discovering, things that have been published and talked about in the last week. So many great things are happening in this world. It is amazing. On this week's show, I have new stories about lithium and how it might work in our brains. An update on Planet X and a very deep mind. We also have an interview with the director of the Maryland STEM Festival. And this is going to be talking about what to look forward to during Festival Week. It's going to be coming up pretty quickly. So hold on to your hats. Justin, what do you have for us today? I've got denisovian genes, the rediscovery of the Higgs bison, and tool making monkeys. Tool making monkeys. Like apes, like us? No, no, no, no. George was an ape. I'm talking about monkeys. Fascinating. All right, here we go. And Blair, what is in the animal corner today? Oh, I brought a whole bunch of animals acting like humans. Why would they ever want to do that? This doesn't make any sense. Well, they're not holding debates or anything, but they're doing other cool stuff that we'll talk about. All right, good. And on this eve of the final presidential debate, we must go on with the science. Because there are so many happier, better things in this world to be filling our heads with and doing with our time. Like STEM festivals! Oh my goodness, you all know that we're going to be heading to Baltimore for the Maryland STEM Festival in, oh my gosh, two weeks November 4th. It's coming up quickly. Very excited to be part of the opening ceremony for the Maryland STEM Festival. And here with us tonight to talk about the Maryland STEM Festival is its director and also the chair of the Stemulating Minds group in Maryland, Phil Rogovsky. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. Thank you very much for having me tonight. And thank you for joining us in our opening ceremonies on the 4th. Oh, we think it's going to be so much fun. You have no idea. It will be. It's going to be amazing. We have a beatboxer coming. And it's, I'm not going to spoil the fun by telling you what's going to happen. But let me tell you it is going to be amazing, laryngeal goodness. Sounds wonderful. Yeah. Okay. So Phil, can you tell us how just in the first place, how did you get involved in STEM outreach activities and come to become the director of the Maryland STEM Festival? Well, it basically started back in 2010. My son and I went to the first USA Science and Engineering Festival in DC. It happened to fall on his birthday that year and he wanted to go. He's always been interested in science and technology. And he had, we both had a great time. It was a wonderful event, the first of a biannual event. And he just made a comment about, gee, it's a shame a lot of my friends aren't here. But I understand, you know, it's a ways to come to, to go into DC from where we live. So the idea germinated in my head that why don't we try to do something like this at his school. And so we had a STEM night at his school and it was very popular. And a lot of people said, why don't you do a countywide event? So we did a countywide event and that went very well. And then back in 2014 at the, again, back at the USA Science and Engineering Festival, there was a meeting by the STEM Festival Alliance. And they were talking about the trend of what they call regional STEM festivals that aren't in one location, but are held over many places in an area, in a region. And the gentleman running the meeting turned to me and said, well, how come Maryland doesn't have one? And I said, well, I don't know. And I'm thinking in my head, yeah, it would be nice, but I just don't have the bandwidth for it. Yeah. But as it turned out about a month later, there was an event called STEM Trek where there were some very important people in Maryland STEM ecosystem. And I went to them and talked to them and they all thought it was a great idea and we got the ball moving and since it was kind of my idea and I took the bull by the horns, I became the director and we moved forward and we were working on our second year. We had a great year last year. We had over 330 events all across the state of Maryland. We estimate about 50,000 people attended and this year it's just growing and growing. That's wonderful. Yeah, I'm just wondering though, I mean, talking about not having, you know, worrying about how much can I do this? Do I have an bandwidth to get this done? What is it like to organize a statewide or a regional festival? Well, it's obviously a lot of work, but it requires the support of a lot of people and I've gotten that support and support keeps growing. This year we developed a great partnership with the library systems. Last year they were the organization that hosted the most events and this year they wanted to become even more involved in their hosting events but they've also been helping with the planning and preparing the marketing material and getting the word out. So it requires a lot of my bandwidth but it requires the support of a lot of people to get this done. And this is something, are you doing this in your spare time? Yes, I am. I am impressed. This is amazing. That's a no mean feat to do that. Can you tell us a little bit about how it's changed from last year to what you're expecting to see this year at the festival? Well, there's a lot more diversity, a lot more events, a lot more people who are aware of it and are looking forward to it. So that's the main thing. This year we've got a lot more with STEM touching on the arts. A gentleman came up to me earlier this year and said, I've written a play about STEM. Could you guys produce this? He said, well, we can, but why don't you reach out to one of the community theaters? And he did and so there's going to be a play called Hypetha's Math. It's about an Egyptian female mathematician and it's part of the STEM festival this year. People just hear about it and they want to do what they can to become part of it and people are coming up with great ideas, new ideas that we didn't have last year, such as a play about math. So it's just phenomenal. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say there probably are not very many plays about math. No, I don't think there are and especially about Egyptian female mathematicians. I'm sure he wrote that first. Did you say when and where that's going to be? That's going to be at the Strand Theater. They're calling them workshop so it's not quite a fully rehearsed long running show, but they're putting it on a couple of times towards the end of the festival and I'm hoping I can get to see it and it just sounds wonderful. What are some other things that you're really excited about? Oh, quite a bit. I like the things that have funny names. There's an event called Slime Science. How can you go wrong with Slime Science? We have an event, Spaghetti Engineering, seeing what you can build with spaghetti. Who doesn't like to play with their food? I hope it's not cooked spaghetti. No, I'm guessing it's not, but wouldn't that be neat? They should have both. They should have cooked spaghetti and uncooked spaghetti and just see what different things you can come up with both. One thing I think is going to be really cool, and this is right up Blair's alley, is the zoo is doing a special program on polar bears. They're going to have an all day event talking to the people who take care of the polar bears and talking about researching polar bears. That sounds like a great event. Actually, that's going to be on Saturday, so if you're not leaving too early, maybe you can catch some of that. Look at Blair's excited face. Guys, guys, guys. For our audio listeners, I just want you to imagine Blair's excited face. She is so excited about polar bears right now. There's all sorts of programs about math and astronomy and zoology and computers. A lot of robotics events. I mean, that's always big. Kids love robots. We have countless robots events. We have a robotic rodeo where they're going to try to get as many robots as they can into the space they have. If it's STEM related, we're trying to bring it in, and people are putting the events out. That's great. Are you focused more on events for kids, or is it just whoever has events, you'd love to bring them into the, become a part of the festival, or is there a particular focus of the Maryland STEM Festival? We try to encourage family events as much as possible. We want the whole family to be involved in science and technology and mathematics and engineering. Now, we do, most of the hosts have designated a certain age group. Some, it's all age groups. Some have some events for six to 18 month old children. So we've got a lot of events for toddlers and preschoolers. We have events for every age. There's some adult related or specific events. There's an event on teaching adults how to solder, and there's something about the joy of winemaking. So, yes, I knew that would get that reaction. Polar bears and wine. We're trying to get everyone. You know, the phrase we try to use is, we're trying to create a culture of STEM, like the culture of sports and foods, and try to show everybody how much STEM is involved in life, and also try to show everyone how fun STEM is. I mean, we encourage, we want the events to be fun. With names like Slime Science and Spaghetti Engineering and where math meets men, it's obviously they're fun and they're not intimidating. There are things that will hopefully attract people, especially students of all ages, and especially the ones who are not necessarily already predisposed to STEM. I mean, that's part of the mission of the festival is to attract the students, especially the people in general who don't think of STEM as for them, who maybe are a bit afraid of STEM, who have some trepidation, who think, you know, STEM is for, you know, Sheldon Cooper and not for them. But we're trying to show them that STEM is for you. It's part of your life. You may not think about it, but it is for you. Another thing I like to say is every part of STEM is for everyone, but there is a part of STEM for every person. I think that's a very good point. So you may not like robotics. I mean, some people don't like robotics, but they may like astronomy, or they may like zoology, or they may like food science or chemistry. So you just have to find what part of STEM you like. I think that's fantastic. Are you going to be driving around Maryland during the week of the festival, checking out as many events as possible, or are you... I certainly will. It will be ten fun-filled, but hectic days. You know, I was going through our book with trying to decide, you know, which events, but it was so hard because, like I said, we have this year, 460 events. And while Maryland's not a huge state, it is a good-sized state, and there's just some corners I won't be able to get to, but I'd like to get to a whole lot of events because they're all fun, they're all exciting. Last year, there were a lot of... a lot of hosts that said, we weren't sure how it was going to work out, but, you know, after they ran the events, they said they couldn't wait for this year's festival. So I'm looking forward to all the events, and I wish I could go to all of them, all 460. Yeah, it's wonderful. It's wonderful that it's growing, and I think these statewide or very large regional festivals are really neat because very often you find cultural events like this cloistered in areas where there are lots of people. So you would expect this to be happening maybe in Baltimore and nowhere else throughout the state and expecting everybody from the far reaches of the state to have to drive hours to be able to get there. But because you're developing this festival with events everywhere, that means there's something somewhere for anyone who's interested in finding it. Yes, our goal is to have an event within 30 minutes, 30 miles of every Maryland resident. Maryland is broken up into counties. There are 24 counties, including plus Baltimore City in Maryland. Last year, we had events in 22 of the counties. This year, we actually were able to manage to get hosts in every county. And we hope to grow in that. Some of the smaller counties, some of the ones a little farther out, only have one or two, but it's still a start. Hopefully, we'll draw well. I hope people will love them. I think we'll see. I think we'll see. Well, I think it's fantastic, and we for sure are excited about being there ourselves. It's going to just be so much fun to come to the Second Maryland STEM Festival. And if everybody's interested, you're there in the Maryland area, somewhere in Maryland, somewhere near Maryland. Are you on a border to Maryland? Drive into Maryland. There's a STEM festival from November 4th until what date, Phil? November 4th through the 13th is 10 days. 10 days of a lot of STEM fun. So if you are in the area, again, as you mentioned, if you're neighboring in Virginia or D.C. or Delaware, you're still welcome to partake in the fun. Absolutely. And what's the website that people can go to, Chris? It's very simple. It's www.marylandestemfestival.org. All spelled out. Maryland spelled out STEM and Festival. And it lists all the events, and it has other information. It lists our partners, our sponsors. It talks about some of the people who are involved in putting the festival on. It's a really fun site, as you can see. Again, fun is the operative work. We want everyone to appreciate and enjoy the fun of STEM, and hopefully they'll want to get more involved. I think it's just fantastic. And I hope that this is the second of many years for the Maryland STEM Festival, and we can't wait to meet you in person. Phil, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Thank you very much. I've been looking forward to meeting you on the fourth. Looking forward to it. Have a wonderful evening. Thank you. I especially said, you know, how many of the scientists that we've interviewed who have told us that their interest in this thing that they ended up pursuing for a lifetime started on a field trip, started on either class field trip or an outing or going to an event like this and getting a little bit of just a little bit of an exposure to what's possible and what's out there. And then remembering that throughout their education and then pursuing it later in life. I think it's fantastic. I'm very happy that you're doing this. I can't wait to go. It's great. And additionally, he mentioned, Phil mentioned earlier, the STEM Festival Alliance is actually a growing group of individuals who are working throughout the country to bring more STEM festivals to more places. So if your local area does not yet have a STEM Festival, the STEM Festival Alliance is someplace you can look for help. I think they even have a festival incubator now to help you get your festival off the ground, which is kind of cool. So, but anyway, we're excited. November 4th, we're going to kick it off grand opening of the STEM Festival in Maryland. And I think our show starts at 2 p.m. Eastern Time at the National Aquarium. If you're interested in going, I believe you just have to gain admission to the aquarium. And then you can come to our show, which is fantastic. All right, everybody, are we ready for some science news? Let's do it. Let's do some science. Okay. Thinking machines, right? The AI, are we terrified of the AI player? Yes, I am afraid of the AI. You know this, the very least, the Google cars. I'm terrified. I'm terrified of the Google cars. Well, the self-driving cars need to be able to potentially think for themselves to get you a route from one place to another. I mean, they could be programmed and told exactly where to go remotely, potentially maybe a map program telling them what to do from central command or something. But ideally, our machines to be intelligent should think for themselves and not have to be programmed to do everything. And in trying to get there, trying to make this a possibility, Google has a company that they purchased a while ago called DeepMind, and Google's DeepMind in London have been working on this problem by adding, basically, you know, they've got an AI neural network program that has the ability to do basic learning. But now they've added external memory. They basically gave a learning device, a memory device, a place to store things that it learns. So it's not just running algorithms. It's running algorithms and learning and storing those memories and using those to plan. And that is something that happened in this instance in which they gave this computer algorithm that they're calling a DNC, which stands for a differentiable neural computer. It consists of a neural network that can read from and write to an external memory matrix. And so it's kind of analogous. They say this in their abstract to the random access memory in a conventional computer. Like a conventional computer, it can use its memory to represent and manipulate complex data structures. But like a neural network, it can learn to do so from data. And so they did supervised learning, and this amazing program was able to take a look at the tube map of the London Underground and determine the best path from one place on the map to another, the shortest path that it should take to get from one location to another. Which doesn't seem like a terribly huge task. This is something that we do all the time, right? We go, oh, it's a map. You look at it here and you go, I could go that way, I could go that way, and you just figure it out. But for a computer program that has not been programmed to do this, it figured it out on its own by looking at the map and at every option that it could take at every stop along the map. And then it remembered and it was able to make a plan. That's pretty cool. Yeah, it's super cool. And then additionally, they were able to do something similar with a family tree. So there was family tree input and then basically a question was asked about. Okay, so who is Freya's great uncle? And the algorithm, the learning, this DNC, was able to use the algorithm and its external memory to determine the relationships between individuals in a family tree to be able to come up with the answer, the correct answer. But Fergus, of course, Fergus is Freya's great uncle. Duh, everyone knows that. But one of the most striking things from this that they did bring up in their discussion is that it's not simply that they're using the data source and this DNC was learning and using this memory, external memory device. It was actually able to plan. Come again? Because it was using its external memory, it was able to make a plan of how to take action. And they know this because they used a particular test which is called a mini-sherdle-oo. You're a mini-sherdle-oo. A mini-sherdle-oo. And it's basically, we've played these before and I'm going to show this picture here. When you were younger, you may have enjoyed games in which there was a square with a number of smaller squares within it with numbers that you could slide around. And when you initially get that board, the numbers are out of order. And you have to, there's maybe one or two blank spaces within the system. And you have to slide the numbers around to put them in the correct order. Two-dimensional Rubik's Cube. Exactly. And in this task, the DNC was able to, over time, increase the number of squares that it was moving around and become more accurate. And over time, basically it learned that, this particular, say number four is over on the left side and number two is over here on the right. And I need to move these around this way. And to do this, I need to move this up and then move that over. And the way you make a plan before executing an action, the DNC was able to do this to solve this task as well. This is not good. This is, this is terrifying. It's a little scary, but at the same time it does, it's huge. It's not, you know, this computer is not thinking for itself yet at a complex scale, but... And this is good news too. This can be used for good, for sure. I recognize that, that it definitely, it could be useful to have a computer that could tell you varying outcomes from different actions and then to be able to select the right... Plan. Plan or decision based on that. That could be hugely important to us. So what are you afraid of, Blair? I don't want to perjure myself against the future robots. Okay, so then don't. My advice is don't. Also, I would say that we don't want to... Stay on Team Twist. Twist is for the world coming world robot domination. We've said it number times. We're on record. Also, though, I don't think we should anthropomorphize our future robot masters. I think the darkest things that can happen to people are things that are done by people. And I think they have people motives when they do them. And I don't think the machines will have people motives. Absolutely not. Which could be a really good thing. It should be very thankful that we haven't... At least unless we do somehow imbue them with some sort of human motive to things. I think we would find that actually intelligence without the ape brain leftovers might actually be pretty beneficial, benevolent, and peaceful. Maybe. That's fine ways for us all to get along. Stay tuned for my segment. I have some other AI. Maybe not with us. So Alex Graves, who's the research scientist at Google DeepMind in London, who led this work, he's the first author on the Nature paper, which is available, open access to read. He says, I'm wary of saying now we have a machine that can reason. We have something that has an improved memory, a different kind of memory that we believe is a necessary component of reasoning. It's hard to draw a line in the sand. Dun dun dun. And then Demis Hassabi, according to the Guardian, he's the founder of DeepMind. He plays down concerns about humans being hunted down and killed by artificial intelligence. And he says, this smart intelligence says, we're decades away from any sort of technology that we need to worry about. So decades, Blair, we've got decades. Oh, just mere decades. Remember, I'm going to live to be over 200 years old. That's right. Well, get your spoon now. Start digging a cave. Oh, no. Scrape away. Scrape away at that little cave underneath your house. Okay. Scrape it away. You just hide in there. It's a little Blair made spoon AI shelter. Okay. That's where I'll be during the break if I disappear. That's right. This spoon dug AI shelter. It has to be dug with a spoon or else it's just not, you know, no, I don't trust any new fangled shovels. Listening to you. Yeah. Have you guys ever? Shovels have ears. Shovels. Shovels got to use a spoon. All right. I'm going to lose it. All right. Have you guys heard? You know, we heard a lot of people say, Have you guys heard, you know, we heard, we talk about our solar system all the time. Did you know that our son is, has a little tilt to it? No. It's got a little whipple wobble going on. Our son's got a little whipple wobble. Off its access. Yeah. Well, you know, it's not really the sun. The sun just seems that way. It's just that the entire orbiting plane of planets around the sun is at an angle. And it shouldn't be, but it is. And so that makes the sun seem like it's at an angle, but there's a little whipple wobble in the system. But McKee, why? Why? Why? Why? That is the question. It's the universal solar systemic question. And researchers publishing a new article. They are presenting. It's in the upcoming issue of astrophysical journal. It's already been out in the archive for peer review. And it's presented yesterday at the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences Annual Meeting. They say it's Planet Nine. You know, this big giant planet, like maybe Planet X, not Nibiru, you know, whatever. We've been talking about this big giant planet that's way far away from the sun, way out there. And maybe like Jupiter and Saturn threw it out there early in the solar system's development. But it's giant. It's way more massive than the Earth. And so it probably has a very significant gravitational influence on things in the solar system. And if it were maybe in here in the solar system and possibly flung out at an early stage of development of the solar system, it really could have affected how the solar system set itself around the sun. And according to the researchers, Brown and Backin, they've done a number of models in which Planet Nine's angular momentum could have had this massive amount of impact. So take its mass, its angular momentum at how it's spinning around, orbiting around the sun, way out there like a yo-yo, way out there, that it could have changed the plane of the planets and affected the spinning cloud to have a around six degree tilt off flat. So maybe Planet Nine did it. We don't know why Planet Nine would have ended up in an odd off-axis orbit that would have affected all the rest of the other planets. We don't know why it would have done that. Maybe, like I said, could have been ejected from the solar system. Also could have been a lone traveler that came in and started influencing the solar system. But there is a path in the sky that has been predicted now by many people working on this hypothetical Planet Nine. And so Brown and Backin are going to work through the year looking for signs of Planet Nine in the sky. Brown says it might take about three years for them to find it. But they think within three years they will have found Planet Nine. That's totally crazy. Yeah, I think it's so wild that some early on, some massive object just got in there and because it's whipping around so much, it whipped everything into a weird little frenzy, changed the whole plane of the solar system's orbit around the sun. I think I do that it could still be there. I feel like our solar system is mapped. We get it. We've seen it all. We know where everything is. To find out that there could be a big planet zipping around somewhere that we just don't even have noticed. It's so awesome. Crazy. I love it. We don't know everything. There's so much to find. Couldn't have been there, but now isn't there somehow? I don't know. Yeah, that it was there. I don't know if it needs to still be there. It could have gotten smacked into something and might be the Oort Cloud now or whatever. I don't know, but does it have to still be there? It's been a while. That's a great question. I think we would have noticed. Don't we have people looking up? No. Maybe not. Always have people looking up at the night sky. But it's really far away. But I think if somebody might have seen it and been like, oh, what's that? Oh, it's probably nothing. No, you would be like, oh, that's, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. But see, Justin, you're forgetting that the earth is flat. So planet nine is below us. I'm sorry. No, no. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's a different show, Vlad. It's a different show. Blair. Yeah. Don't be a scrotum frog. No. How dare you? All right. This is this week in science. Justin, what you got? I've got a huge red flag and archaeological identification of early hominid tools. And that giant red flag is being raised by monkeys. Wild bearded capuchin. Capuchins. All the ones that wear the hats and have the little, have the symbols, the organ grinder, organ grinder monkeys. Yeah. They have been observed deliberately breaking stones, creating flakes that share many of the characteristics of those produced by early stone age hominids. The capuchin flakes are not intentional tools for cutting and scraping, but seem to be the byproduct of hammering or percussive behavior that the monkeys engage into extract powdered silicon or lichen from stone. At no point did the monkeys that they were observing try to cut or scrape with these flakes. According to the study that is published in Nature the research team says the finding is significant because archaeologists has always understood that the production of multiple stone flakes with characteristics such as concoital fractures and sharp edges with the behavior unique to hominids. Paper suggests that scholars may need to revisit their criteria for identifying intentionally produced early stone flakes made by hominids. And then this is a lead author, Dr. Thomas Prophet from the School of Archaeology University of Oxford who says, within the last decade, studies have shown that the use and intentional production of sharp edge flakes are not necessarily linked to early humans or direct relatives but instead were used and produced by a wide range of hominids. There's one of the oldest that we think is a tool find that we believe might not have been a direct ancestor to us, homo sapiens, but would have been a cousin that has maybe since disappeared. However, this study goes one step further in showing that modern primates can produce archaeologically identical flakes and cores with features that we thought were unique to hominids which also sort of brings up like the what came first, a monkey with a rock or a human making a tool. Like could it be that they're early human because we are such fantastic adapters, right? We're inventive too, but we're also fantastic observers and adapters of nature around us. Are you saying that we stole tool use from monkeys? We stole technology from monkeys. We picked up after monkey and found all these sharp tools. We said, wow, these are really useful. And after maybe a couple of months or years or maybe a hundred years of sitting around a tradition of sitting around waiting for monkeys to bash rocks together, you know, actually we could probably do this ourselves. That checks out pretty well. I feel like that's pretty likely. Yeah, I guess because the monkey has found something of nutritional use for bashing these rocks together and trying to get something out of it. And humans, I don't know that we ever tried to get some sort of silicon. But maybe we did. I mean, if the monkeys were doing it, maybe we were too. And maybe then we, it's maybe all the way through our evolution we've been bashing rocks, trying to scrape lichen off of rocks, trying to get trace nutrients. I mean, people eat sand and rocks now, you know, pika. If you're missing trace nutrients, you want to lick walls and eat dirt, you know. Which is what they think these monkeys are doing for the silicon. And it's very possible that all through the evolutionary path that all of our ancestors have been bashing and crashing and bashing and at some point someone went, look at this little sharp bit. I can use that for something else. I like the idea of watching monkeys first better. But what if much of the hominin tool use turns out to be we were just licking rocks. They weren't even using the tool. Licking rocks, licking frogs, you know. Hundreds of thousands years ago they were just licking rocks. Don't say licking. Yes. What kind of frogs, Kiki? What kind of frogs were they licking? Don't even. So I think it's likely that the tool use and the, I don't know, I guess the neurons required to figure some of this out probably goes way farther back. Farther than even just primates. We see what you could or could not call tool use, but definitely an understanding of using foreign objects to get food or to achieve some sort of goal way far down in the lineage. And we talk about that on the show all the time. So the likelihood that everybody's using tools, it's a matter of time until we see it. Kind of like the vocalization thing. We thought that only certain animals vocalized and communicated with one another. And it's becoming more and more and more obvious that everybody's doing it. Yeah. And they point to that in the study too. They say that Dr. Prophet says the findings challenge previous ideas about the minimum level of cognitive and morphological complexity required to produce numerous flakes like these. So we underestimate things, don't we? I am. And we do. But it's a sense that humans have taken to, when I say humans too, this is not entirely, but largely this is a sort of white European sense of superiority over things and people. It's not just nature that the Western world has thought itself superior to. Western man has also thought himself very superior to other humans. Much of our history. So not surprising that we would have done the same thing across the animal kingdom. Well, we are part of nature. We are a biological organism. We are a primate. Now we are. Now we are. Now we are. But we haven't always been in the minds of the West. That's the thing. European man did not think he was part of nature, but sort of placed amidst it. And this is this big learning curve that we're having to unlearn even the basic principles of being on the planet that some other humans have known for thousands and thousands of years. It's the Western mindset that's actually just coming to this point of view. And if you are coming into this point in the show, this is this week in science, but you know what time it is? I think it's that time once again for... Blair's Animal Corner. That's the one. Creature by Ted Billiped. No pet at all. Want to hear about your animal? She's your girl. Except for giant pandas. That'll blow, blow. What you got, Blair? I have a whole bunch of animals doing things that previously has been considered very human. So very apropos of the conversation we were just having. But we're jumping way out of the taxa here. So you've been talking about primates right now. I'm even jumping out of the mammal repertoire and we're going in to look at birds. I love birds. And we're going to talk about a member of Corvidae, one of my favorite groups of birds. Those are ravens and crows and jays. And in this case, magpies. Magpies are famous for a few things. Mostly stealing things. And in particular, stealing shiny things. But these magpies in a recent study, Azure winged magpies have been found to do things that previously we thought were something that just humans did. And that is that they show what I would extrapolate from this study to be what we call random acts of kindness. We call that pro-social behavior. And what that means is that they are doing something for someone else in their social group or in their species without expected reciprocation. Wow. So what would be the better? And also it does this have to do with how related they are to the individual. Right. And it doesn't appear to. So in this study, they took these magpies. They had them land on a perch and the birds operated a seesaw mechanism by landing there. And that would bring food into reach of other group members. If the bird wanted to try to grab the food for themselves, they would have had to leave the perch and the seesaw would tilt back. The food would go away. So they could never get the food by sitting on the perch. But they pretty consistently would perch themselves there, continue to deliver food to other members of their species across all of the experimental sessions. And at pretty high rates, actually similar rates to humans and cooperatively breeding primates. They only operated the apparatus when group members could actually obtain food. So for part of the study, this seems mean, they actually blocked the access to food even though the food was rolling forward. It kind of got stuck before the other magpies could grab it. And then the magpie who was landing on the apparatus kind of gave up after that once their buddies couldn't reach the food anymore. So this, in theory, supports the hypothesis that raising offspring cooperatively promotes the emergence of pro-social tendencies because these magpies do raise their babies in big groups. So they need to now do tests on non-cooperatively breeding birds to see if this is directly related to that trend or if birds are just kind of nice to one another. I'm gonna say no. I'm gonna say that this is definitely related to the lifestyle habits of a species in question and that this is not going to be something that will be generalizable over species or across species. But this also remembering that these are corvids, which means they're super smart. It's a very smart group of birds. So they definitely know. I would guess that as corvids, these magpies know that when they provide food for their specifics that also help raise their babies, healthy adults make healthy babies if everyone's helping out. So I would even challenge the finding from this saying that there's not a direct benefit to them feeding the other individuals. That in fact, they get something in return and that is they have healthy adults helping raise their babies. But this is definitely something that is complex and is something that has been considered fairly uniquely human and at the very least, very primate. Which at the same time, humans throughout our history have been tribal, which could be considered and many individuals have been involved in rearing of young and that could be considered cooperative breeding, social, cooperatively breeding groups, which is comparative to this situation. Absolutely. Don't we all remember it takes a village? Yeah, it does. And now I think we've got helicopter moms and all sorts of weird stuff going on. I think the same tests in humans now could not get the same results. Yeah, what an interesting point. Ooh, maybe the birds are better than us. I think so. And in another story of where animals, they're just like us. It's like stars, they're just like us. Fish, they're just like us. Trigger fish have been shown to be fooled by visual illusions just like humans from a recent study from the University of Queensland School of Biological Sciences and Queensland Brain Institute. They had trigger fish tested with the same visual illusions that they used to test humans. They used the lightness cube illusion test. In that experiment, it looks kind of like a Rubik's cube. And on the top of the cube, there is an orange square. And on the side where it's in shade, there is a square that is brown. But they are both actually the same color. It's an optical illusion. It's like the dress. Exactly. It's the blue and black or white and gold dress debacle all over again. It's an optical illusion based on reference points that your brain uses to assign colors. So that is something that we know humans do based on the dress, but also actual behavioral experiments where they rewarded individuals for identifying different colors. They did the same test with these trigger fish with a food reward. The fish took to this test very well. Apparently they loved the test. I'm projecting here, anthropomorphizing, but they eagerly partook in the test for a food reward. And so they were trained to approach and pack it one colored square, orange or brown. And then they received the reward. But when they were presented with the illusion in which the orange and brown are actually the same color, the fish preferentially chose the square that was most similar to their trained color, even though they were both the same. So they think the target is lighter colored and they perceive the two colors as different, even though they're the same. So that makes sense because these animals of the trigger fish are from the Great Barrier Reef. This is an extremely colorful, extremely light, dynamic place. So all of these animals, especially trigger fish, use colors to identify each other, identify threats, identify food, identify safe space, identify males from females, all these sorts of things. So they need to be able to analyze and see different colors. Therefore, it would make perfect sense for them to be susceptible to the same illusions considering light and dark and shade and sun and all those sorts of things happening in the shallow reef. Absolutely. I think, yeah. When you take into account the dynamic range of vision that these fish on the coral reef must be capable of, our eyes, we can see what we can see because of our brains. So it makes me wonder how much of this is actual visual processing in the fish? Visual cortex. Which then begs the question, has the visual cortex changed much since fish? I mean, fish are the most basal vertebrate, right? So the wiring that they have in their brain to discern color and light and dark has got to be pretty similar to ours if they're having this same confusion. And so that means that stuff did not need to change since fish. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. Also, I would love to do the experiment to see if Blair is still colorblind underwater. I would assert that yes, yes I am. Is Blair a fish? Is Blair a fish like? Yeah, we can talk about it more in the after show, but I might actually have some colorblind glasses coming my way pretty soon. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I've been talking about this. Awesome. We'll have to do that test once I'm wearing them and see if it's any different. That's right. All right, everybody, I hope that you can see clearly now that we've gotten through the animal corner. It is time for us to take a break. We will be back in just a few more moments with lots of more stories here on This Week in Science. Stay tuned. The methods and hypothesis suggest that hey, you should join us at the Maryland STEM Festival November 4th opening ceremonies at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Maryland. It would be so wonderful to meet you in person if you could join us at the aquarium. That would be so much fun. We will be interviewing a NASA scientist, an aquarium biologist, and we will also be joined by beatboxer and vocal percussionist, Shota Kay. We are going to have so much fun. I mean, you could shake a stick at it if you wanted to, but I don't really know why you would. Hey, kids, get off my not very sciency lawn. I don't know. That doesn't sound like fun. So please, I hope you do if you're in the Maryland area, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, anywhere around there. Virginia, come to the show. Join us at the National Aquarium November 4th. 2 p.m. Eastern time is when I believe it will kick off. All you need to do is buy a ticket to the aquarium, and that will get you into our show. We'll give you more information on exactly where it will be in the aquarium as we get closer to the date. If you're not able to join us, don't worry. We will be live on the air, so we will be streaming to the Internet the whole time as well and hope and really do look forward to seeing you at the STEM Festival in Maryland. Check out more at Marylandstemfestival.org for more events in the Maryland STEM Festival in the beginning of November. TWIS also has merchandise that you might enjoy. Head on over to TWIS.org. TWIS.org is where you can find all sorts of great things related to the show, and one of them is our Zazzle Store. You just got to go to TWIS.org and click on the Zazzle Store link at the top of the page, the menu bar. Zazzle Store, it'll take you to the Zazzle Store where you will then be able to see all of our products. Blair right now is holding up her phone cover, which is a wonderful Tyrannosaurus Rex art that she drew for last year's or this year's Blair's Animal Corner calendar and for our Patreon sponsors. Oh yeah, it's a lovely phone cover. You're a wonderful model for that phone cover, Blair. You can pick up more products like that or products that are emblazoned with the TWIS logo just by clicking on over to Zazzle. Other ways that you can help our show out, I mean, part of the proceeds of these sales do go directly to us and the show and help support the show. So by buying our goods, you are helping to support the show. If you would like to support the show in other ways, we also take donations through Patreon and PayPal. 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This week in Science Directly. Or, again, you can just go to the Patreon link on twis.org to be able to support us through Patreon. If you are not able to support us financially but would like to support us in kind, we are wonderfully, we love your help getting new listeners and viewers to TWIS. Share us on iTunes, share us on whatever platform you listen to or watch us on, share us. That is one of the biggest things that we could use help on. There are also other ways that you can help artwork or website stuff for lots of things. If you have an idea of how you can help, let me know. I'd love to hear from you. We really could not do this without your support. No, we could not. I mean, we'd be doing it, but we'd be like just talking to ourselves and it would be super boring and we want to do more. We want to bring you more and we can only do that with your help. We thank you for your support. We really could not do this without you. And we are back with more this week. Oh, yeah. Justin, tell me a story. Birds do it. Bees do it. Naughty man told the Soviets and homo sapiens did it and that last group did it together some 50,000 years ago. And as we attempt to tease out the who got what from that genetic lottery swap of hominoid bopping, one winner stands out. Tibetans. Next to some Denysovian derived DNA, Tibetans have the E-PAS-1 gene, E-P-A-S-1, which makes them less prone to hypoxia at high altitudes. This is a recent finding inspired by this example computational biologists, Fernando Rackamo, David Marneto, and Emilia Huerta Sanchez have developed statistical tools and simulations to successfully identify the signatures of these interbred genomic regions. This is in Quoty Voice. Many studies have focused on the patterns of archaic interagression at the genome-wide level. We realized we knew very little about what to expect for a local region of the genome, said Huerta Sanchez, who led the study. She goes on, we wanted to know whether the patterns of genetic variation observed at the E-PAS-1 gene could be used to identify other intergress regions that were also beneficial for modern humans. So they looked at genomic regions of present-day human populations that looked extremely similar to Neanderthal or Denysovian genomes and also very different from the genomes of other present-day populations. They went through this list. They've adapted their tools to examine 1,000 genome datasets and identified and expanded on a number of promising candidates and genes within these regions. These mostly, it turns out, are including things like genes involved in fat metabolism, pigmentation, and the immune system. So they speculate these unique changes may have allowed our ancestors, Homo sapien ancestors, to survive your eurasia during the pleucine and may have been passed on to present-day populations. So this is a fantastic... So they're zeroing in now on those things that we've kept, those beneficial genes that have given themselves home and Homo sapiens going forward, or at least western-ized, non-African direct descent, recent direct descent, people who have this cross-pollination to Denysovian and Neanderthal. So it sounds like we're going to be getting many more of these stories to come as a result of it. This is fascinating stuff. But the Tibetans, can owe their high altitude less prone to hypoxiness to Denysovian genes that got in there, stuck around. I think that's so interesting. I mean, we've been trying to figure out exactly when and where that mutation came about, why it came about, where the Tibetans got it. And it may not be a mutation. Right. That's what they thought is that it was a mutation that arose. And it still could be, but it would have been... Denysovian mutation. A mutation that could have taken four or five hundred thousand years earlier than it appeared in the Tibetan population. It potentially changes the story about hypoxia in Tibetans. So that's interesting. Right. And so some of this is also like... We've talked somewhat about the show about how long it would take a trait like pigmentation. You know, is it being in the sort of northern European area for twenty thousand years? Is that not 5,000, 8,000, 10,000 years for skin to become lighter? Is that enough time? Or is the pigmentation going to come from a population that had been there for half a million years? Could this be a result of interbreeding with Neanderthals? Things like they've already talked about in the past. It's very likely that Neanderthals contributed red hair and freckles and possibly then you could extrapolate on that lighter skin pigments as well. So I think we're going to more and more learn that modern human differentiation might be less evolutionary. Direct evolutionary change within the Homo sapien line and an adaptation of genes from intermingling with Neanderthal and Denisovia. So in a way it's going to sort of push back how long maybe it takes for these sorts of traits to evolve. They still evolved just perhaps in a different population and over a longer period of time. Yeah. Baskin-Naton. Love that story. I have a story about lithium. We're going to calm ourselves down, right? Stabilize our moods, everybody. Are you talking like lithium ion batteries? Like I should lick a battery? No, I don't lick a battery. That's not the story. Robots in the future, maybe. Maybe I robot control. I know robots with psychiatric disorders. Exactly. Nature will come full circle at that point when they're just trying to smash battery. Must... Tell me about the lithium. So lithium has long been known to act as a mood stabilizer and it has been prescribed for bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, many other disorders in which people experience very agitated states and need to be stabilized and calm down. And people who take it, they do complain that it also removes... It causes lack of affect a little bit because it calms you down so much. But it does get rid of these crazy peaks and kind of this neural hyperactivity. It's been this big question of how exactly does lithium have its effect on mood and on the neurons? And there's a new study that really wasn't out to discover this. They just used lithium in their study and they had... They were looking at abnormalities in brain development that lead to psychiatric diseases. And so they were looking at mutated mice that had a mutated pathway that's signaling pathway. It's called the WINT pathway, WNT. The signaling pathway is mutated and there's a particular receptor that they were looking at. The genetic sequence of it is a form of something called DIXDCI. And it's a key gene in this WINT pathway for a receptor. These mutants don't have this DIXDCI. They don't show it. And so as a result, the WINT pathway isn't stimulated the way that it needs to be. And the mutant mice are antisocial. They have a lot of anxiety. They just want to... They don't try to swim when you put them in water. They're just like, I'm gonna drown. This is like depressed mice. They're not happy mice. And so they had this model and they imaged the brains and then they also gave the mice lithium and in one part of the treatment. And what they found is that the mutants treated with lithium. They looked... They did very, very high resolution imaging of not just neurons, but the dendritic spines. And the dendritic spines are the little... It's like little tree branches that are coming off the tree branches. Like little leaves that come off the tree branches of your neurons. They are the things that... Dendritic spines are what actually lead to synapses. And so the mutants with this misinformed or non-existent receptor DIX DCI and their WINT pathway, they don't have very many dendritic spines on their neurons. But when they were given lithium the mutants tended to have an increase in the number of dendritic spines on their... on their dendrites of their neurons that made them look almost the same as normal mice. And so what is suggested here is that lithium is blocking an enzyme that inhibits this WINT pathway and therefore gets the WINT pathway moving again. And if the WINT pathway is moving it allows the formation of these dendritic spines creation of receptors things that are needed to communicate with other cells. An important side note this is... it's unblocking a path. It's not... it's self-stimulating greater... greater growth. So no... Exactly. It's a very... Give yourself a mental boost. This is not... Right. This isn't going to boost anything. It's not going to make your brain grow more dendrites so that you'll be smarter what it's doing. No. It'll just unblock if you have something keeping them from occurring naturally. Exactly. Yeah. It just unblocks it. But this is, you know, the big question is you know, we have these drugs and we know some selective serotonin uptake inhibitors re-uptake inhibitors. We know where they work and kind of how they work, but lithium is something that's been used for a really long time. We don't know exactly what is going on to allow these drugs to have the specific effects that they do and the more that we understand about how the drugs work to benefit the brain and benefit behavior, the more we might be able to create drugs that work even better and are even more specific in one side of this and on the other side it'll allow us to understand more about the nervous system and the brains, the genetic pathways, the cellular signaling pathways that are involved so that we know what is going on going wrong in certain behavioral impairments. Well, not to mention that helps us make better combinations of treatments. It helps us know which combinations to avoid. Yeah. And it's just so much of medicine has a correlative basis. So we know that giving a certain treatment yields the result we want. But we don't know what the cause of it is. We haven't done the drill down. It's a very important part of the medical field and of research is finding out why certain treatments work. It's really going to make our medical care better. That's awesome. Take this. What's it do? I don't know. It'll make you feel better. And then it's amazing that they're befuddled to discover that it doesn't work on everybody. Right, but thankfully research and statistics and many, many, many years of research and statistics help us know that there is a high likelihood that treatments work. Even when we don't know exactly what it is that does it. Absolutely. Just like what you said before. It just makes it better when you do know why. Yeah, absolutely. Justin, you have any more stories? I do have more. You're on the bison. No, I mean the boson. No. Boson, bison. Did I bring that story? Yeah, you did. Is it hiding again? Oh my God. Oh yeah, here we go. This is ancient DNA research. Kiki, well done. Kiki, well done. Research, yes. Ancient DNA research is revealed that Ice Age cave artists weren't bad at recording the animals they saw amongst them. They were actually quite good at it. In fact, once that piece recorded a previously unknown hybrid species of bison and cattle in great detail on cave walls more than 15,000 years ago. Mysterious species known affectionately by the researchers as the Higgs bison because of its elusive nature originated over 120,000 years ago through the hybridization of an extinct ancestor to the modern cattle and the Ice Age step bison which ranged across the cold grassland apparently from Europe to Mexico. I mean it was all over the place. Research led by the Australian Center for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide published in Nature Communications is real that the mystery hybrid species eventually became the ancestor of the modern European bison or wissent which is still there but just kind of barely non-preserved. Finding that a hybridization event led to a completely new species was a real surprise as this isn't really meant to happen in mammals. Said study lead professor Alan Cooper, director the Australian Center for Ancient DNA director who still seems to be grappling with the fact that nature doesn't mean for things to happen. Things simply occur when they can. Genetic signals from the ancient bison bones were very odd he says but we weren't quite sure a species really existed so we referred it to it as the Higgs bison. International team of researchers including the University of California, Santa Cruz and Polish bison conservation researchers and other paleontologists across Europe and Russia they were wet looking back at bones and teeth that they found in caves across Europe, Urals and the Caucasus to trace the genetic history of the populations of this Higgs bison. They found a distinctive genetic signal from many fossil bone bison bones which was quite different from the European bison or any other known species. Radiocarbon dating showed that the mystery species dominated the European record for thousands of years and at different points but alternated over time with the step bison which had been considered previously to be the only species of bison present in the late Ice Age Europe. Dated bones revealed that new species and the step bison swapped dominance in Europe several times in concert with major environmental changes caused by climate changes. This is Dr. Julian Soubir from the University of LA. When we asked French cave researchers told us there were indeed two distinct forms of bison art in Ice Age caves and it turns out their ages matched those of the different species having dominance. We never guessed the cave artists had hopefully painted pictures of both species for us. Cave paintings they depict bison with either really long horns and large four quarters which is much like the American bison today or with shorter horns and small humps which is more like the modern European bison. They were doing their sites. They were out there doing their nature observation and painting. Recording in their cave notebook the horns too long, sometimes they would give them too big. No, they were actually accurately depicting different bison that we until just now didn't really realize it existed. Yes, the tunnel field guide. Right? Yeah, once formed new hybrid species seemed to have successfully carved out a niche on the landscape and kept to itself genetically. It dominated during their tundra-like periods without warm summers and was the largest European species to survive the megafaunal extinctions. However, the modern European bison looked genetically quite different as they went through a genetic bottleneck. They went down to 12 bison in the 20s almost when extinct. That's why the ancient form looked so much like a new species to us initially says Professor Cooper. Professor Bess Shapiro University of Santa Cruz first detected the mystery bison as part of her PhD research with Cooper at the University of Oxford in 2001 and she says 15 years later it's great to finally get to the full story, get the full story out. It's certainly been a long road with a surprising number of twists. That's kind of fun. This is, you know, 15 years after something, you know, there seems to be something here this is worth looking into and now now she has her answer. Fantastic. I want a Higgs bison t-shirt. Yeah, that would be awesome. I was just going to think that I am dumb. It's bozen. That would make for a fun maybe next year's calendar. A catalogue of extinct mammals and you could have the Higgs bison. There you go. We've already used the mastodon. Or did you do a mammoth? I did a mammoth. Oh, you could do a mastodon next time. I could. Dotto bird? It would be a whole year of extinction. How about another story about space? Yeah, we've got a couple of there are a couple of cool space stories out there. Or do you want mind control of yourself? Both. Space first because we like the space so today we had the XOMARS mission making it to Mars. So seven months ago a craft was launched by the European Space Agency and the Russian Federal Space Agency. It's the trace gas orbiter. It was also traveling with the Italian Space Agency's Chaperrelli lander. So it traveled all the way, this XOMARS mission has traveled all the way to Mars. The TGO, the trace gas orbiter has successfully inserted into the atmosphere into orbit around atmosphere. But into orbit around Mars. But Chaperrelli's landing has yet to be confirmed. There was a loss of data just ahead of touchdown. The ESA and the Italian Space Agency don't really know what happened but hopefully they will have more information tomorrow. This XOMARS project is the Xobiology on Mars project and it is a three way venture between the ESA, the ASI and Roscosmos and it is the concept is that it is going to go to look for trace gases that could be indicative of life on Mars and additionally the Chaperrelli lander is going to be doing further roving missions on the surface of Mars. But we don't know whether the Chaperrelli lander is okay. We'll find out. Hopefully we'll find out tomorrow. So breaking news. Breaking breaking and hopefully it's not a breaking rover news. Because you know what? So far only NASA landers or rovers have survived landing. So it would be nice to have the Italians in that club too but so far NASA is the only one that has surviving rovers landers on the surface of Mars. Additionally, New Horizons remember New Horizons, the mission that went out to Pluto? Took a bunch of pictures and we've been oohing and awing over the cool surface of Pluto and it's moonsharing for months since. Now, I mean New Horizons didn't stop, it kept going right? And so New Horizons is continuing out into space and they have it on track speeding towards an object in the Kuiper Belt known as MU69. MU69. It's just an object in the Kuiper Belt. Nobody knows what it is. It's a rock. It has a red surface. We don't know what this red surface is. It might even be redder than the splotches on Pluto in Pluto's little heart. The estimate is that New Horizons will arrive at MU69 on January 1st, New Year's Day 2019. This object measures a couple of years to go but it's going to get closer and closer and it is actually going to make a closer fly by of this object than it did of Pluto. Knowing that it's got a pretty good camera on it, we might get some very interesting images of this Kuiper Belt object. The object measures about 20 to 30 miles in diameter. It is 1.6 billion miles beyond Pluto. Not from the sun. 1.6 billion miles from Pluto. That's far. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is pretty, this is very exciting. The red layer suggests that it might have tholins, a class of molecules formed through ultraviolet radiation of simple organic compounds like methane and ethane. It doesn't form here on Earth but it is abundant on the surface of icy bodies in the outer solar system. So it's not surprising if it does, if polin checks out as the compound on the surface. And scientists according to Gizmodo have confirmed that Mu69 is part of the cold classical region of the Kuiper Belt. And this doesn't mean that it's like cold sounding classical music that plays there constantly. This is an area of the Kuiper Belt that contains some of the oldest objects in the solar system. You know, it's pretty far out, man. It's a bit far. It's a bit far. I think this is exciting. I love these craft that we have headed out beyond where people have ever been, headed out of our solar system. You know, it's just like the Voyager craft, the New Horizons craft is taking us places that and giving us a view of our solar system that we would never have otherwise. And it's it's wondrous. It's wondrous and wild. And then view of our own brains. You want to have my final story? Yeah. Yeah, okay, so we have self-control, right? Some of us. Some of us more than others for sure. Certain amount of self-control, right? Yeah. The question is, you know, where does that self-control come from? What is the area of the brain that's responsible for deciding whether or not you're going to eat the donut now or you're going to wait for two donuts later? Oh. Are you going to take the money now or are you going to wait for three months to get the money? Lumpsome or installments for the lottery. Yeah. Up front now. Now, now, now. Yes, our brain loves now, now, now. But there is an area of the brain that researchers just published a study in scientific advances on an area of the brain called the Tempoparietal Junction. Tempoparietal Junction. And it's a brain region that the researchers say in getting into this work, they're like, you know, you look at the literature and you look at this neuroimaging data for gratification studies, delayed gratification studies. You look in the neuroimaging data and nobody ever talks about it, nobody ever makes any conclusions about it, but this area, the Tempoparietal Junction is also active during delayed gratification. So they're like, okay, let's try and do something with it specifically with this area of the brain and interpret the results. And so they used magnetic magnetic impulses to turn off the Tempoparietal Junction in individuals in these studies. So subjects underwent 40 seconds of disruptive transcranial magnetic stimulation. It was where, you know, take a magnet, magnetic induced magnetic coil and magnetize your brain in a specific area and the electric currents that are induced by the magnetic field inhibit the activity of this brain area, specifically the posterior Tempoparietal Junction. And then the people had to do a task and they spent 30 minutes doing it. The task for some subjects was to make a choice between a reward and it could be anywhere between this was Swiss study they're in the University of Zurich, so it was 75 to 155 Swiss Francs for themselves or another reward that was shared equally by themselves and another person. And this other person could have been someone they know or it could have been a stranger on the streets. Then there was another task in which they were given an immediate reward of somewhere between 0 to 160 Swiss Francs or, if they waited for 3 to 18 months they would be guaranteed 160 Swiss Francs. Ah And then in the final task people were told that they needed to take the perspective of a virtual avatar in a computer situation. And then take that perspective of the avatar and indicate how many red dots were on a ball that the avatar would see but not what they were seeing, but that avatar. So the finding with this TPJ, the Temporoparietal Junction being inhibited is that people really were less able to take the perspective of others. So they were less able to take the perspective as in the third task of the virtual avatar if their Temporoparietal Junction had been inhibited. And they were less likely to share money with other people and they were more likely to take money up front instead of waiting for the certain larger prize later. They are having trouble putting themselves in their own shoes in the future. And so the reason that delayed gratification works sometimes and doesn't work others is that it has to do with you being able to visualize the needs and the wants of your future self. Because your brain separates your future self as almost as if it's another person. Wow. That makes you the ability to rationalize the fact that tomorrow Justin has never done anything for right now Justin. Tomorrow Justin, he's going to hit up my bank account for all the work I did today. He's going to spend the money I made on stuff that he wants that I don't even get any peace of. He's going to complain that I stayed up too late. Even though he's the one that's getting up that early you know, there is but Justin, Friday Blair is getting a paycheck to pay for the things that I bought on a credit card today. That's true. And then that's yesterday Friday Blair is going to be like, wow yesterday Blair spent how much she never sets me upright. She always puts me in the hole so that when I get my paycheck I don't even get to spend it. So you're right. Because of the way yesterday Blair acted and the fact that tomorrow Blair will never do anything for you really it should all be about right now Blair shouldn't it? Okay, fair. Should it all be about right now Blair but I mean that's a question and it's interesting to think about how these different areas of our brains have evolved to allow us to not always take the perspective of right now but there are situations depression or drug and alcohol abuse or just life experiences that lead to areas like the TPJ having less and less influence not letting you take the perspective of other people's making you maybe a little bit more selfish and not right now needing of things. So it kind of for me it makes me think about the idea of like okay we we've talked about mindfulness as being a muscle that you need to practice maybe in situations we need to start teaching people how to think of themselves in a future tense in a future situation so that if you can visualize yourself in the future more often maybe in situations where you're kind of put on the spot to make a decision between now and later now versus gratification now versus gratification later maybe if you practice you'll be more able to make choices that are beneficial for future you. Yeah and this I was alluding to towards the end of the disclaimer today you know people do sort of act as though the nothing bad can happen to the planet and the environment while they're here like this won't be in their lifetime and they also act as though it couldn't possibly even be in their children's lifetime right but you have to imagine that at some tomorrow the impact will be severe and if it's not to you it could be your children if it's not your children at the very least maybe it's your grandchildren right but this is this attitude of of ignoring the gorilla or elephant or just whatever you want to call it in the room seems to be something we've gotten very good at. Yeah oh people we're so good at that good job people. Let's try a little longer term thinking. Yeah I'd like everybody to take this moment to look into the future think of yourself in some far off future what do you need what do you want imagine future you become friends with future you that's what you need yeah hey Blair who do you want to be friends with jumping spiders I know they're so cute they're the greatest I want more jumping spiders in my future so jumping spider brains you'll appreciate this we've learned a lot about spider hearing from an accident probing through poking around in jumping spider brains at Cornell University Gil Menda at Cornell and Ron Hoy as well as Paul Shambl they all have been working with neural recordings in the brains of jumping spiders they have a new method where they can explore how jumping spiders process visual information and they started recording one day from an area deeper in the brain than they had gone and as they moved away from the spider a chair squeaked on the floor the way that the neural recordings are done they set up a speaker so that you can hear when neurons fire they make a really distinct pop sound and when the chair squeaked the neuron went pop and you did it again and the neuron went pop this is interesting because it is previously been understood that spiders can only hear over a short distance so it was expected that it's only actually even a few centimeters are so away and especially with jumping spiders they rely mainly it was expected on sight and tactile clues but this new information tells us that these jumping spiders can hear from quite far away in fact they went outside of the room from the spiders and they still responded to clapping sounds so they can hear a lot farther about three to five meters away then we had previously thought and in fact on their feet on their legs they have sensory hairs and they found that these these four legs had these sensitive neurons and that actually these hairs are maybe how the spiders registered far away sounds so now this completely changes our understanding of how spiders see and hear and experience the world and now they want to start they're starting now doing neural recordings on fishing spiders wolf spiders and other spider species to see if this is also true for them so stop talking smack about that spider across your room you can hear you and they might get sad poor it I don't know if they get sad no they won't they don't understand English but we've talked about the jumping spiders and how they you know drum on webs to for mating dances and how there is you know hearing is the is vibration right it's vibration of air molecules that hit in our ears the timpani spiders don't have ears so to speak but they do pick up vibrations they're so small you know so something is moving in such a way as to vibrate those the strings in the web just enough there's no reason why that wouldn't be considered quote-unquote hearing it if it's something that the spiders can be can respond to yeah absolutely so we don't know if they're they're hearing exactly like we hear feeling and they're feeling it they can sense the sounds and they responded exactly like they would to any other threat they froze and then they went about their day and then the sign just clapped and they froze spiders so they they can hear they can hear from far away it totally changes our expectation of how spiders experience the world so stay tuned for more from spiders the spiders are listening spiders love twists the spiders love twist turn it up turn up the twist I talked about spider dancing and spider webs and spider sex spiders love twist that's right this is one reason another reason why spiders are such amazing dancers once more with feeling let's see it spiders I want to see it learn to see you dance I also would love to take this moment to thank our patreon sponsors we have reached the end of the show once again and we've gone through all of our stories and it is time for us to thank the sponsors thank the sponsors and I would do that 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week in science this week in science we bring you of the things the science end of show now time for talking hi everyone hello hello we like to join now you come here we talk now you see yeah yeah okay so yes I started doing my research on the button and I think I've fixed the button for ordering calendars so I think I have something that I can put on the page now I will need a picture of cover art I haven't finished the cover yet okay but I'm gonna work on it tomorrow night so cover art then you wanna I can give you one of them I'm gonna do it right now as we speak here let me send you one of them and you can just pick one no oh what do you have one of the pieces the option for cover art well I have some of the pieces but I don't have the cover done yet so give me one second hold on okay yeah I think I figured it out for shipping there's a certain point at which it will be most beneficial for me to purchase the flat price packing on the lobes from the post office what's up what but for most things people are gonna order just one calendar and so it's just good just to have a single cost it's when people order multiple calendars that things start getting weird it's just weird I tell you but I think I figured it out which one do you think should be the cover no wait I'm supposed to look at a window hold on hold on I'm doing too many things at once where are you there you are I opened firefox and it covered up chrome and I've got so many things open right now what do you know which one you showed me hello Janiskew what's happening the club is up that's right I have to figure out how I'm gonna how I'm gonna like package these like I really liked the the black background that said Blair's Animal Corner I like it yeah so I might have to get back in touch with Patrick Patrick I thought I liked it having a little bit of an outline and I like the border around the images so I'm gonna hold up the calendar now so the images last year I like the fact that they had the border around them and that they had the twist and the Blair's Animal Corner on every page indeed indeed and I think because of the new size it'll just be a little shorter yeah it's gonna be as much black it's gonna be like this is not quite right but something analogous to 8.5 by 11 yeah so I have eight to show you right now there's three more the three that I just showed everybody on screen I haven't scanned those in yet so I'm gonna screen share so you can decide if you want one of these for the button so okay so that one which one can you see you can see the prog okay so I have the prog I just definitely know I have Nautilus Nautilus might be the best one Nautilus is awesome I have bird I have a rabbit and then the antlers on that thing I have a necklace only real animals then I have this the Garibaldi where's the Garibaldi oh wait I have to change my screen share alright the Nautilus is pretty awesome right there we go Nautilus I think is winning so far so then there's the Garibaldi can you see the Garibaldi then there's the sand beautiful the banana slug there's the banana slug is also really good banana slug flying through the forest he's not flying he's not flying he's like I have a super banana slug that's really easy there's trees I'm very impressed this is like Bob Ross Bob Ross painting with that's right I was inspired by Bob Ross then there's the grizzly bear sleeping grizzly bear cute so you can make one of them put one of them up for now and then we can change it to the cover when I finish the cover at this weekend if you want I can send you both of those items what say you I don't know I don't know if I need an image for images do help pre-orders do you want the Nautiloid yeah yes I mean that one okay that would be great uh no that's not what I want tool box what is even happening here okay there we go okay that's what I want appearance menus so I want to change new from clipboard now I change things so rarely every time I have to go in to do something on the website I'm like what did I do not oh but you know what problem is going to happen okay so I have eight scanned in I have three more the dragonfly, a mammoth, and a chameleon that makes 11 and then I have the cover and I'm going to do a hippo and then I'm done so I just need help making them look like a calendar and then I need oh we need to open up that google doc again to edit which holidays yes okay let me find the link and then I can share it with everybody let's see search oh dear it was a spreadsheet not low variance holidays there it is I think I found it okay if somebody can update all of the all of the dates and share share the link I will share you guys in the chat room you want to help with the calendar there's a calendar link in the chat room okay I sent you the noteloid awesome thank you because the holidays are not going to be on the exact same days true words so since this is from last year's calendar we're going to delete all the entered into calendar what was category F what are all those things which month got it clear where's clear add it to the calendar ed I like it yeah so should I delete all of those dates that are these days well some of them don't change some of them don't some of them are number based like you know our birthdays right that's not going to change next year right I want to say hey to everyone who might be watching in on youtube right now there's the youtube live we have a little chat room over there and there have been a few people hanging out and watching over here which is fabulous Gary Peters Derek Cheney Ashley 389100 those are the saticus cct cct what blitz blots where are you seeing these people we're on youtube and our youtube live people are commenting live in your face he's over there in your face someone calls himself no in your face Karen right it's good the whole group Felix Osig Bonanno yeah Eric Knapp and then Paul Disney jumped in over there watching multiple chat rooms it's going to blow my head apart so many chat rooms yeah everybody if you had the twist calendar you would know Blair's birthday is coming up on to Selenberg 12th and Justin's birthday is just the day before that that's right we did that on purpose just to make it easy it's just done you guys have some birthdays in December there you go Justin's birthday and then after that on Wednesday it's monkey day these things happen okay let's see what do we need to figure out we don't have to worry about next week twissoween next Wednesday oh molday is this weekend wampai and molday like avagadro's number of moles um twissoween so if you have costumey things we will wear them next Wednesday ish I've got a still don't have a costume keep procrastinating yeah let's see November I don't know my holiday plans we've got the beginning of the month going to Baltimore that's cool okay good start yeah Thanksgiving um I hopefully will not be traveling but if I'm traveling I might not be able to do the show on the 23rd okay whatever you need I'd be willing to take it off I think we we went back and forth on it yeah we go back and forth on it um or not do it I don't know if I'm going to be driving if I'm driving then it'll be I mean it's always a pretty stressful episode to do yeah but I'm willing to do it like I'm I'm very I very mixed feelings about it like definitely I take Thanksgiving very seriously and I will be cooking all the way before and all the way after but um I also hate missing twist so exactly plus I won't be there the week after that and then you won't be there the week after yeah okay maybe in the happiest place on earth go with that wait you're sleeping on my couch what's happening I was like snuggled on my bed you know what the happiest place on earth is I believe it's my couch but I could be wrong um yeah okay and then players in the happiest place on earth and then birthdays and then monkey day and then we have a week and then everything's cool for the holidays because the holidays are on the weekends so we don't have to skip any shows at the drop any shows at the holidays this year yeah everything for shows for the end of the year we should be right on track and if we do not cancel the November Thanksgiving show the last show of the year will be episode 599 which means the first show 2017 will be show 600 that's right that's right another hundred down folks can't believe we're almost there um feels like yesterday we did our 500 episodes episode um let's see so yeah year in review will be the last week of December did we put that on the calendar it is it says twist year in review I don't have to overthink this it's right there it's right there so easy and then yeah and it should say on the next year's calendar on the first week of January twist prediction show right say that we'll get to that point we're getting there in the calendar making got it Tijuana identity 4 I don't know what your happy place I don't know about your happy place yeah that's weird identity 4 is going to dress up as a text in a chat room for twist a wean don't know how I'll be able to identify you chat septicon it's not disney world whiskey renegade where have you been disney land disney land disney land disney land that's right disney land that's right yes for the big 30 I am going to disney land with my man you have a man now my mom your mom but yes I also do have a man now I have a possession my mother was what I was saying you're in possession of a man what bring him out come on I beat him out and all and then there was there was like a lot of sparks and then some smoke and then out he came out he came there he was layers man there he is layers man oh my goodness anyway yes I'm going to disney land with my mom funny for my birthday very nice since I am entering my third decade on this planet we need to put the eclipse date on there for 2017 also that's in august important eclipses and stuff I got in free once to disney land actually I've gotten into disney land for a number of times but I got in on twist credentials no way way in fact I got four comp tickets no way way you're going to have to tell me more about that well I don't know that it works anymore so I tried the last time I was going to go to go through the same source and apparently it's not as easy as it once was used to be to contact this guy in the media department you find out when you're going set aside tickets at the will call it was pretty easy just made a phone call but apparently now everybody's in the media and so they're like yeah we need some people who aren't there's a vetting process now so I didn't get them the last two times I tried so it used to be real easy and then before that I used to have friends that worked for disney animation that would get me in on like employee days where there were no lines and you could just go to but there's always like a couple major rides that would be like shut down for renovation or whatever but most of the park was open for anything totally bizarre actually the first time I went when there were crowds I was like wow okay this is crazy so there's the eclipse in August 2017 that I'd like to get people together for in Oregon so there is a plan there's like a crazy music festival that's happening there's a party already at least one RV including a public affairs KTVS cat I know and a long time friend of the show been a guest host on the show Pamela they're gonna be out there they're gonna be out there watching the sun whatever happens whatever you like I got a balance between there's this Oregon eclipse there's a total solar eclipse gathering from the 17th to the 23rd what day is the eclipse on though and who will still be conscious enough to see it after that one yeah let's see some are the 21st right in the middle of the festival of course it is that's a really long event I don't know if I could go and be surrounded by that many hippies for that long I might actually hurt somebody my whole girl in life is to create a space where I'm only surrounded by hippies why they smell what do you talk about they smell they do hippies smell or I don't maybe it's not hippies I have issues with the hi we're gonna have this eclipse party and the magical spiritual feeling and art is gonna be all these new agey people ducking about don't you feel like you know this is just a moment it's amazing yeah fuck that those are the people I'm talking about that's like I actually get violent it's like the electronic that would totally make me aneurysm knocking crystals out of people's hands but that's not what I considered like hippies to me hippies are like yeah we're gonna get together and like figure out how to yeah we're gonna make some good food and have some music and it's gonna be nice you can I'd be able to collect rainwater to irrigate for next season's crop yeah kinda stuff I'm cool with that I'm with down to earth practical things totally down to earth people yeah you know because something like the eclipse is going to be just such a wonderful moment to bring people together I mean we get people together in a moment like that and just something happens and it's just like the power of the universe you know we are the center of the universe you know you are the center of the universe I am the center of the universe we are the center of the universe and if we're together it is such a powerful force to make the universe really move around us yeah and I actually kind of agree with everything you just said there though I mean that's what happens when people get together if they become the center of the universe right like that's fine wrong with that the earth is flat so so you can't be in the center because it's a flat disc so when you're on an airplane and it feels like you're going around the you're just going in a circle you see it's all you can just they avoid flying close enough to the edges for you to see it because they're keeping it a secret exactly it's a conspiracy yeah that's a different kind of now that person is neither a hippie nor even a new age that is called a fundamental Christian conspiracy theorist it's a conspiracy theorist I feel like it's not necessarily I think it's very much imbued with religion sometimes not entirely maybe not but I'd say then the origin of it came from religion within the family at some point like it's one of those concepts that is pretty easy to let go of if you don't think that it somehow threatens the theology that you were taught but how does a flat affect theology because it was taught through theology and even if it's not at the core center of a theology whenever you give up any bits of your theology it threatens the rest of them like domino effect or house of cards so people make really big arguments about very strange things this is why people fight the idea that the earth is more than 6000 years old that dinosaurs walked with man how hard is that to let go of and still keep the rest of the things that you're believing in intact well it's because you've built this house of ideas and as soon as you pull bricks out closer to the foundation especially the more you're afraid that the rest of it is being attacked at the same time I understand well it's hard because the bible doesn't talk about the earth being flat so it's hard to say that that has a basis in Christianity so it's more that it lends itself to fanatical people and not that it is tied to the specific religion and that fanatical people also get tied to some religions and so it is an association but not a an actual attachment you know what I mean there's a difference alright so who's believing that who believes that the earth is flat there are people who are not Christians who believe the earth is flat these flat earth are groups on social media or on the internet they cross all sorts of weird lines they're very odd intersections it's I mean just like people who think the moon landing was fake they're not all one demographic some of them are completely unreligious it's like anti-vaxxers otherwise totally on board with science totally on board with them with the fact that the bible does not need to be completely accurate some of them are actually agnostic or atheist but they don't understand why vaccines are important it's a weird it's a weird thing the conspiracy theory thing I think you'll be hard pressed to find one specific demographic that works across the board yeah and actually as I'm looking through it I'm not during the early church period the spherical view continued to be widely held some notable exceptions so yeah not necessarily not necessarily viewed within Christianity yeah I can go I just emailed Patrick asking him to help me yeah we should give him some sort of credit on the back page I realized we didn't do that last year we didn't do any credit we just talked about art yeah we just had some references for ourselves on social media but it might be good just somewhere like oh yeah put a link to his art like does he have a website for his art I don't know I'll ask him yeah sure he's definitely an integral part of the process renaissance of idiocy yes look at my planet expression accepted instead of wearing cool renaissance clothes people are wearing like yoga pants yoga pants hey I'm gonna drink my shot of wheat grass and then I'm gonna get my triple latte mochicino decaf and I'm going to go on a jog stroll with my little baby here and then I'm gonna take a two hour mommy and me yoga class and then we're gonna go again and get some lunch at the new salad place that's gonna be fantastic meow and then after lunch I'm gonna meet with the other moms because you know moms always have to stick together and we're gonna get together at that new bistro down the hill and you know it'll be during nap time so it's perfect so I can have a little glass of wine and I can hang out with the moms and we can chat all about not liking being moms this sounds like it's coming from a place of familiarity I don't know what you're talking about are there hippie moms in Portland? oh yeah totally are there any that are are there any that are are there any that are there's my goats there's there's goats I'm sure there are goats in Portland somewhere there's all sorts there you want it you're gonna find it in Portland Portland's got everything you want to walk into a music store period at this point yeah Portland but on top of that in Portland it's awesome not only will you find records but you're likely to encounter cassettes yep I love cassettes I like cassettes I don't really I have an old cassette player with all I have cassette deck I don't know where it went I have through the history of my life of moves and going places things have disappeared from my life I have a Walkman I have a Walkman yeah you say Walkman I have a Walkman Walkman Walkman I also have a Discman I have one of those too yeah that hasn't disappeared neither has the Walkman but the dual cassette deck that disappeared and so did my bread maker no idea no recollection I'm sure I gave these things to people at some point in time I said you need this I don't you need this but I have no recollection whatsoever God it is we're working on got to get that going I have my you gave me art you have a knot on the you're ready I'll put a thing on the page I'm going to send that art out to those two people also I haven't done it yet awesome you have there what you need for them I just have to find it now in my inbox right who is it page the slug has been claimed the slug the flying forest slug and the oh I had a request for penguin but I didn't make a penguin so a surprise couldn't that be the cover no the covers planned okay I'm doing another is it a penguin no could you fit a penguin into it no it's actually if you want to know I don't no I'm just kidding that was me joking I want to know are you sure I'm positive it's going to be the same animal from the cover last year but done in this new style so it's going to be a horned frog again horned frog whatever you want to call it it's going to be a horned frog very nice horny frog no, horned frog sorry it's hard to tell hard to tell the horned frog is what my screen saver is when I get off my camera not a horned toad what the Google images honestly you know what you want no idea images what you want no look at all these horned frogs like this one this is the kind that is my screen saver did we decide 20 is fine still fine for just for the calendar? yeah I'll do $20 for the calendar plus shipping same as last year but the shipping will be more representative of your cost this year right? yes look at all these adorable horned frogs look at this one look at this one no look at this one look at that one I remember what I searched horned frog I think you might have a bad mic there what? what? I think you might have a bad mic there a bad mic? why? it's picking up breathing or something it's crackling occasionally it sounds like you're sniffling but I know you couldn't be so what? it's debate joke oh okay got it how dare you compare me to Donald Trump oh my gosh oh my gosh it's trying to eat a human do you see this? I can fit it in I'm going to make room look at this look at this I really didn't think it was that small that's a baby look they get bigger this is a bull frog that's not a horned frog eating a lizard this is an albino one of my favorite things in the entire world look at him wait go up for a minute right there dead center but a little bit up that? I'm pointing just past it let me see that guy what is that? he's a horned frog of some sort he is amazing he's like I am the emperor of a vast region of space accidentally landed here on earth it says bell's horned frog difficult to say species ID of frogs on the internet is kind of dubious you don't just look on the internet and go hey I know what frog that is I got that not that open a pdf whiskey renegade is saying I'm surprised it hasn't got political yet right after the debate that's because there are no politics or policy in the debates there was nothing there you can't like talk about people making personally about it look at this animal thank you Ben Roethink yes Rigel from farscape that's what that frog looks like I bet that frog farts helium look at this one take me to your lizard so you look at the size on this one Justin that's nice very round yeah very round they're just mouth that's all they are that's why they're called the pacman frog look at this one he's on a bun I hope he's not actually going to get eaten here this is what their full grown size looks like Justin that's what I was looking for do you have jpegs no jpegs I could convert it to a jpeg there's my froggy nope up there in the water there he is it just doesn't really say which no kiki I can hear I got it that's making me happy 2017 hashtag blur's animal corner calendar I hope cephalopod week is every year of course it is okay let me take you to your lizard I love that that's funny but why would you get taken to a lizard he's named Phibian blitzblotz sorry all scrotum frogs are dead but yeah it's sad to hear that when you just heard they existed not all scrotum frogs are dead they are just endangered now because Lake Titicaca is being polluted and additionally because there are fish in the lake that have been brought in for like fishing and tourists and stuff and those fish are eating the frogs yes he said you wanted a jpeg a jpeg would be great good yeah jpeg would be wonderful let's see about this check out the yanescu link in the chat room that's why I was being so fascinated with the frog we kept reminding ah maybe it's a little bit I can't remind you of this guy somehow from Farscape oh that guy yeah Justin I was gonna be a pirate but then I don't like my pirate pants didn't show up I don't know what happened to him my pirate shirt showed up too small and now I'm like nothing's quite right it's just gonna not have a costume don't just have pirate gear on hand chat room you're freaking out I have pirate gear on hand great you guys just keep pirate gear lying around totally doi are we screen switching too much? no we're just talking a lot we're talking over each other sorry Justin B Justin B yes yes so this scrotum frog is not known really it's the common name it's the scrotum frog it's name is telmatobias the titicaca water frog one of the largest aquatic frogs in the world it has very baggy skin which is why it is called the scrotum frog gross yep according to phd student and national geographic explorer Jonathan Colby says their wrinkly skin is an adaptation to help them absorb more oxygen from the water possibly because they live at such high altitudes huh I just sent you the pdf pdf jipig jipig oh the jipig yeah I sent you the jipig my eyes are tired my eyes are tired now what just happened ah not a Lloyd there we go where's the downloading there we go download and then I upload hoorah hoorah thank you that is helpful thank you okay I'll stop looking at horned frogs I could do that all night little horny frogs no it's not what I want to do no I'm not hitting the buttons right obviously I need to stop doing things I'm going to break my website what do you mean stop doing things I'm going to end up breaking the website if I keep keep clicking on buttons buttons buttons ah there we go that's what I want no not under image widgets yeah primary sidebar widget add a widget hit the button create button select code copy let's see if this works save and publish here check see if it worked that did not work I broke it oh it's too far down that's enough I did it I did something I'm so proud of myself ooh where is it I'll put it there save and publish there we go pre order now just using the old picture you can change it later right we order for 2017 now yes I can change the image later but I just want to put something out look I have something on the website ta da did it so proud of myself hope I didn't mess everything up this is very exciting calendar up there I did it you guys I did it website bloop de bloops bloop de bloops yeah website bloop de bloops putting things in the places hmm discount for 2,000 calendars I guess if we ordered 2,000 we'd have more of a discount from the printer that is true are you talking about calendars from the year 2,000 because those don't exist they don't exist so you can have them for free imagine it we don't have any 2016 calendars left there are two really we sold them all really we were left with there were two and one of them was like mine I've got mine down here there were two left and those are just going to be like things that go in the twist museum someday so I wonder if if I don't need to send all of these out um the originals if we instead of just outright selling them if we should auction them auction them I guess yeah I don't know if we did like a twist mageddon style show again that could be one of the things that we do it's a good idea I like it twist mageddon we'll have to find out if there's any like end of the world kind of event coming that we could yeah mageddon around or we could do 600 hours for the episode of 600 nope how about 600 minutes how long is 600 minutes 10 hours 10 hours I can do that we could do that 600 minutes for twist 600 yeah that's fantastic totally doable yeah or 600 seconds is an hour but we never could make a show that short yeah only an hour no yeah I could start some sort of cult activity that predicts the end of the world on a specific day but this is very unsure about which year what happened so that every year it's possibly the end of the world maybe not we don't have the year down we don't have the year exactly right but we know it will happen on this day of the Roman and then later European and many times changed calendar that we all now agree upon it will happen on this specific day year on now solstices hot rod once 2017 2017 calendars 2017 it's too many if you want to pay for them all we can have identity for you right it's 10 minutes not an hour 600 seconds da doi paying any attention I'm deleting the row that says there's a total solar eclipse on March 9th because I think that was this year 2016 deleted boom god dunch I just edited our calendar hot rod according to who does the world end on June 22nd at 10 46 a.m year on now okay next square root day is not until 2025 well it depends how far out you go for square root right is that really is it only oh hot rod decides that see yeah the next square root day will be 2025 yeah that's the way it works alright so we will delete square root day should we just delete it from the calendar delete it from the list or leave it there delete it row delete it you're dead to us square root yeah but if there are things yeah do you know at Jupiter we can get rid of that one because that was this year mm-hmm um yeah if there are things that happened this year that we didn't have on the calendar we could put on adding things um special twist we know if we're doing twist in New York and we're going to need to put that on the calendar I haven't heard from them I should email him because I haven't heard from him at all which potentially means he's not doing it mm-hmm yeah which is a bummer that would be a bummer of bummers I could enjoy going back to New York City I wanted to make it a thing no I like having an annual visit to New York it makes me happy I thought that our visit to Maryland was the same thing oh I didn't I didn't think that I thought it was in addition to in addition to because we like to do cool things yeah yeah science science there are some good lists so how it is oh my back hurts that means it's time to go yeah alright November 7th day oh hot rod seriously you're predicting the end of the world alright that's good to see I like it it's good you're putting yourself out there predicting there's an anonymous panda a holiday's sheet what do you mean an anonymous panda so when you scroll over the people editing the sheet there's an anonymous platypus anonymous rabbit I'm wary of you but I'll accept your presence anonymous rhino a okay by my book anonymous panda what are you doing anonymous panda calendar out of my calendar no we like the panda wasn't there something new about pandas or something that we love them we all love them you love a panda you go love a panda you go love a panda just take the panda you love the panda eric and ak we have a great night wait do I have a newsletter does who have a newsletter us should we have a newsletter that sounds like intern work I know should we have a newsletter I don't even have a mailing list I've been the worst business person in the history of the universe everybody knows if you're going to do anything collect emails send a newsletter it'll be a value add I am not organized enough okay shift my thinking around I'm going to be a good business person but I do not have a newsletter I could write I mean Justin could put we could put the disclaimers from the previous month in our monthly newsletter monthly newsletter here are our disclaimers I could write a little editorial about some dumb animal stuff I could do that absolutely that would take five minutes and maybe put a couple pictures in right that would be super easy yeah newsletter and we could each pick our favorite stories that we reported on that month and link them in there hey what's happening in the next month no Ben Ben shout I will volunteer to write a thing and send Kiki some pictures and then the intern who we have not yet hired we'll put it all in Mailchimp an intern will do this with Mailchimp exactly newsletter Blair no fine maybe I will do it yes exactly I thought we did it it was a story about it pandas are not extinct not yet pandas are not endangered they're not endangered extinct would mean they're gone which would make Blair very happy come on now that's not true don't misrepresent me maybe my first blog entry for the newsletter needs to be about my true opinion on pandas right explain to the listeners every episode we could talk about your relationships with different animals pandas squirrels yeah that's right that's okay Nate easy mistake alright no the old intern has to do the work so that's Justin right Justin Justin see nose goes Kiki Kiki what nose goes nose goes Justin has to write the newsletter you're writing the newsletter what's a newsletter I've forgotten how to read or write by the way didn't I mention it I just forgot I didn't use the skill for a long time and now I don't know how to do it we're gonna make a monthly newsletter that goes out via email to our listeners why are we creating something that they're immediately going to not open I know news news apparently it's a added value thing right well shouldn't we just write more content for the website instead why don't we just do more show content like I could do exactly what I was just saying where I just write a little mini essay about something and just send it to you and you just post it on that little sidebar do you want me to do that because I can I probably have some actually I have some stuff that I wrote and sent out to listeners in response to questions that I could just edit slightly and send to you alright I can do that more website content is good also can I show you guys thing powder it's something really fun today what you do today let's see is it in downloads I'm playing with the soft tags is in downloads tag so let's see if I can screen share soft tags is this one of those what is it ASMR things liking soft tags I don't like the noises look what I did today soft tags look at you you're educating it's the first ever climate change zoom mobile nice you seem to be that's cool an ethnically non-diverse part of our country it's called San Francisco deal with this okay I mean it's called a San Francisco Catholic school wow here check this one out we're talking about solutions solutions yeah and here I am hold on it is now identity 4 powder finger holding a hedgehog aww is that a real hedgehog yeah what does that have to do with climate change you showed up with their stuffed animal collection yeah so the zoom mobile brings live animals to class what does it have to do with climate change she said this was a climate change so I brought five different animals with five different ways that climate change affects their life history so for hedgehogs they have habits that are directly related to the seasons what they do that's really special is they estimate so they hibernate but from heat instead of from cold so they do that when it's hot and dry in the african savannah and then when they wake up they wake up when it starts to get to be the rainy season and then they start hedgehog families and so if the dry and warm season starts to extend that will throw their their seasons out of whack they will not wake up at the right time to start a family they also and I didn't say this to the children of course might estimate too long and starved die so that was the hedgehog I also brought a tortoise because turtles and tortoises have temperature dependent sex determination so if it gets too hot there will be only girl turtles that's not good I brought a chinchilla because they live on mountains so whereas other animals will flee north in the northern hemisphere or south in the southern hemisphere towards the poles to chase their desired habitable temperature in mountains they flee up the mountain but at a certain point there's no more mountain to go up so mountain animals are more susceptible to that change then I brought a snake to talk about just the difference between endothermic and ectothermic so warm-blooded cold-blooded and how they're used to a wide range of temperatures if they're too hot they could get sick because they can't regulate their body temperature and so they will instead follow their desired temperature and we want snakes to stay in our space because they rid us of pests because they eat mice and then I brought a tiger salamander to talk about vernal pools and those are seasonally wet pools that will completely dry up and the salamanders will kind of dig down into the mud and wait until it gets wet again and obviously drought especially in California where tiger salamanders live will throw off these seasonal pools and then they won't be able to come out and they might dry up so salamanders so that is what I brought and then after all that depressing facts we talked a bunch about solutions so hopefully the children left empowered that's cool talking about solutions is always important in education you never bring up a problem without a solution or you bring up a problem and you talk about other problems that have had solutions and you say this is a problem what solutions do you think we might come up with and you start inspiring people to come up with solutions so yeah and if you know if you have something in mind sometimes you can inspire children with the right scaffolding to come up with the solution that you want which is especially helpful you can inspire children with scaffolding yes scaffolding is a term used when you give them the tools it's almost like the foundation of a building to then build a building of ideas is that the definition of it the definition of it is you got a foundation and then you build a building of ideas on top of it okay before we go I just want everyone to know that as far as I'm aware the news of Jennifer Lopez producing a futuristic bioterror trauma for NBC called CRISPR is true direct that is the stupidest thing I can't even I can't even this is like almost as bad as the electronic music festival New Age hippie people CRISPR aka clustered regularly interspersed short palantromic repeats is in the procedural thriller set five minutes into the future that explores the next generation of terror DNA hacking if the project moves forward each episode will explore a bio attack and crime from a genetic assassination attempt on the president to the framing of an unborn child for murder the show's central character is a scientist with a CDC paired with an FBI agent in the same vein of castle romance will blossom between the scientist and the FBI agent as they team to bring down a diabolical genius with a twisted God complex her former boss the drama will see mentor and protégé battle for control over the human genome in a game of cat and mouse in which the future of our species of disease could one day be eradicated past oh CRISPR is in so much trouble this is going to be such a bad this is maybe it's a teaching moment maybe it's a TV show right maybe it'll get canceled super fast I hope so that would be nice might not even make it to air that would be it that would be even better anyway one can dare to dream can't we dare to dream I know it sounds terrible doesn't it identity for sounds terrible okay I love the chat room the comments in the chat room are just like what no Chris TV is dead Nate TV is totally dead already here right okay I'm tired my eyes are tired I think my jaw is tired from the talking how many orders for calendars have we gotten I don't know I logged out of PayPal I don't know I just want to know if we got one while we were standing here while we were standing here let me check you should put a counter on the website does it go into my oh a counter might be nice no nobody bought a calendar how darn it who's gonna be the first one we'll put an announcement app pre-orders orders and stuff yeah yeah I sent stuff to Patrick so we'll see hopefully I'll have everything ready but um the guy from the place that we ordered them from did email me today to check in I was like I'm almost done goes hi Blair I want to send a quick email to see how your project was coming along he's like buy 100 calendars please yeah if you have any questions as you continue with your project please don't hesitate to contact me I'm always happy to help looking forward to hopefully reconnecting with you soon okay I get it he wants to make a sale I'm hurrying you've been talking to me since March I understand hmm I don't have a pen what happened to all my pen my my my yes these calendars will be 8 and a half by 11 instead of what were they 12 by 12 which was a nice size but it was difficult for shipping so I think 8 and a half by 11 will be much easier to ship there are more standard sized envelopes and stuff but I already have all the 12 by 12 envelopes so it doesn't much matter at this point you can still do it that way just all my yeah in terms of I think we can we can buy I can get into what I was saying before if people order more than one envelope or more than one calendar then I can get the flat rate envelopes and those cost less so it'll be like 2, 3, 4, 5 calendars however many fit into a flat rate envelope the shipping will be cheaper yeah and I have to I have to read this card I bought this card and I just love it run run like a pack of wolverines is chasing you run because the disco police are trying to get you for dancing the hustle too many times when you were a kid instead of studying your Latin run because they're going to put slugs all over your face when they catch you run because a miscreant with a mohawk from the Symbianese Liberation Army is going to pinch you with tweezers in the soft fleshy parts under your armpits if you don't run faster run faster run faster run faster run faster so it's going to look like this Ed from Connecticut just pre-ordered a calendar thank you that's pretty so it'll be black again around the borders and this is going to be blown up a little bit that's 8.5x11 yeah that'll be wonderful we could not even have a black border and just go edge to edge with it potentially no I like the border and I like like I said I like having the twist and there's animal corner identifiers that's a good point we'll do that we should have calendars you guys thanks Ed one calendar thank you Ed all right I'm going to say it now good night Kiki good night Kiki thanks everybody for watching tonight I'm super tired now and my eyes hurt like I said it's time for me to go to bed I hope everyone has a wonderful night a wonderful week and don't forget about the awesome holidays that we have coming up this week which are we had a lovely day this week 16th tomorrow is world statistics day the 22nd is Wombat day and the 23rd is the whole day there is a chance that it's actually today or the day after tomorrow you may already be in world statistics day so don't be a statistic today please plus or minus a day plus or minus it may have already happened maybe now it may be the two days we're going to celebrate it in the mean of the possible place somewhere in that normal curve awesome I got to go good night you guys thanks so much for watching and hanging out with us and helping with calendar stuff you guys are awesome bye co-hosts good night