 We've made it. We're here. We have made it. You know when you hit the go live button and then the platform says you're out of storage. Oh no. Clear out your storage or add more or you don't record this. Whatever. That's no good. Figured it out. I'll figure it out next time. We're here. Oops. We take off this sweater here. Get ready for the science because that's what's coming in right now. We have a whole show coming to you full of science on this December 1st. I'm so excited to be here, everyone. I hope you're excited and are ready for the science. As you know, science, it never sleeps. We're podcasting. We're broadcasting. It's all live. It might be edited later, but it's just me and Blair. So let's do this tight 90, huh? We're going to do it. Yeah. Let's do it. And then nobody has to edit anything. It'll be wonderful. I hope you all are prepared because it's time for the show that you know and love as this week in science. All right. Let us begin in three, two. This is twist. This week in science, episode number 853 recorded on Wednesday, December 1st, 2021 science to soothe your Mississippi madness. Hey, everyone. I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we will fill your heads with bio bots, brains and poop, but first disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Today, this is a Supreme Court of the United States of America heard the arguments for a missy step mella. Let me start that over again. Today, the Supreme Court of the United States of America heard the arguments for a Mississippi State abortion case. The case in question, Dobbs v. Jackson women's health organization number 19-1392 targets Roe v. Wade. Comments from the conservative justices suggest that we may see this major pillar for advancements in women's health and educational and professional attainment in the United States over the past near to 50 years pulled out from from beneath us next June. If Roe is overturned, 17 states will immediately enact bans on most abortions. 11 will enact laws that ban abortions at or after six weeks. Most people find out that they're pregnant around this time. Missouri will ban abortion at eight weeks. Three quarters of abortions occur by about nine weeks. Arkansas will ban at 12. Mississippi will get its wish to ban at 15. And so will Louisiana, Utah bans at 18 weeks and so on and so on. Did you know that 99% of abortions happen by 21 weeks, which is the supposed viability line? Those states that protect abortion or have no laws making it illegal will very likely experience a surge in the number of women who travel on average 280 miles to abort safely and legally. But those are only the women who can afford it. The rest, some 100,000 United States women a year will either carry unwanted children to term, perhaps to give them up for adoption, or they will resort to illegal and unsafe abortion methods. Scientific studies have shown that the consequences of not getting a wanted abortion are worse than those experienced by women who get one 14 times as many women die in childbirth as from receiving legal abortions. In fact, four times as many women die from getting colonoscopies as die from getting legal abortions. Protecting women is protecting children. And we support Roe v. Wade here on This Week in Science, coming up next. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know. Good science to you, Kiki. And a good science to you too, Blair. Welcome to this week's episode of This Week in Science. And welcome to everyone else out there. We're missing a Justin. And I think there's some news that we can share with everyone as why he's missing this week. He went to Denmark and he got married. Yay. Copycat. No, I'm kidding. First Blair, then Justin. Yeah. So Justin has found a love and is in Denmark. They were at a Justice of the Peace today. And what is it called? A Justice of the Peace in Denmark? I have no idea. But they did a city hall wedding. But that's very exciting. And so we all will congratulate him when he returns. But for now, he's going to be in Denmark for a while, being married, which, you know, he'll join us next time. Yeah. But now, yeah, let's all celebrate. I see all the chat room there. Woo, woo. But we have a show to bring you full of science for this week. And Blair and I have dug and found the stories that we thought would be great to bring. I brought stories about some bio bots. I might have seen the news this week, reproducing bio bots. We're going to talk a little bit about that. I've also got some solar water. And this isn't something from like a alternative medical clinic. No, this is actually science. And I also have an internet of brains. Oh, my internet of brains. Yes, Blair, what did you bring for the animal? Oh, well, I have a spicy breast milk. I also have hippo poo. And I have fishing monkeys. So all right. And I swear I did not pick those stories for the headlines. They're actually interesting to talk about. All right, not just sensational headlines. We're going to dig deeper into the science because that's what we love to do here. As we do jump into the show, I would like to remind everyone that if you have not yet subscribed, you can subscribe to TWIS, our podcast on all places podcasts are found. You can also subscribe to our video channels on YouTube, Facebook and Twitch. We are TWIS Science on Twitter, Instagram and Twitch, the rest of the places. Just look for this week in science. Our website is twis.org. All right. You want to start with these bio bots? Yes. And I'm really glad that you brought the story because I wanted to bring it, but I didn't understand it well enough to bring it. So I'm really excited. This is great. It's a lot. And it's, yeah, it takes a little bit of thinking about what is actually happening with these little biological robots. And the researchers themselves really talk about the kind of philosophical question that's in existence as to what really is a robot? What does it mean to be a robot? And why can't these be biological robots? And that's what they argue that they have been chosen, designed, basically not programmed. They didn't do any genetic modification. They're just frog embryonic skin cells very early in the Xenopus, the frog life cycle. They go in and they remove some pluripotent skin stem cells from the embryo, and they take those little cells and then they stick them in a little environment, and that little environment determines how the stem cells grow. And then how the stem cells grow determines what they can do. And the outer layer of these little frog cell balls, they're calling Xenobots, is ciliated. And cilia on the outside of cells can allow motion, motility. And so these little frog balls are moving around their environment and able to do all sorts of things. So their movement is random in nature. They have a spiralsh motion that they make. And this motion can be, if you know what the little organism is going to do, you can kind of get an idea of what it can do. So understanding the motion of these little frogs, these little Xenobots can get them to do all sorts of stuff. So what they've done in this particular instance, a year ago they reported on the fact that they had created them and that they had this new model system for discovering how to biologically build robots, little swarm bots. And that's the idea is that you can release a whole bunch of them. And these little balls with the cilia, they move around their environment and if they are there to sweep things up, then they will sweep things up. If they are there to bump into things, then they'll bump into things in certain ways. But it's all random yet at the same time because it's a swarm. There is a bit of complexity that emerges. And there is something of a less chaotic result that comes from the seemingly random movements of these little individuals when you look at them on a whole. It's like if you put 10 Roombas in a room, in theory they would start to figure out a pattern to not get in each other's way. Is that kind of the idea? Right, or they'd bump into each other and go off in another direction and they just keep doing their thing. To them it's like they don't really care who else is there. It's almost like an artificial intelligence algorithm, which the algorithm doesn't necessarily know what is in the world around it. It just has instructions that it's following and that it's going to do. So it's smart in the kind of external sense that it does something in the end, but in terms of intelligence and thought and cognition, that's not happening so much. But it's definitely going about and doing business. Anyway, they took these Xenobots and they were like, hey, let's see if we can get them to replicate because if we want them to exist in an environment for any length of time without dying off because they will die off after a while, just naturally if you don't keep giving them the food that they need. Just the cell feeding solutions that you would normally give them. If you were to release these frog eggs, these little skin, these little skin balls into the environment, they would just deteriorate over time. Frogs shed their skin and frog skin deteriorates in the environment. It's no problem to the environment. Same thing for these little skin balls. But if they die out too soon before their job is done, then that's not getting anything done that you want to have done. So they're like, okay, let's see if we can make them replicate. And in the replication, they started with different designs of cells and they had an algorithm figure out how big the balls of cells, these little Xenobots needed to be in the first generation, what shape they needed to be in order to reproduce the best. And they came up with this kind of Pac-Man shape that seemed to seem to be the most efficient at moving around the environment to enable movement of other stem cells to accumulate those stem cells into little balls, which the researchers and other, little nickname, they're calling them baby bots, because these little Pac-Man like frog balls are going around picking up other little tiny individual stem cells, kind of mashing them together. All those cells get mashed together and go, oh, I like you. And then they start working together and turning into a new frog ball. And so that's how they make baby Xenobots is by just shoving a bunch of frog stem cells together. It's called kinematic reproduction. So it's not actually taking genetic material from itself and like budding or creating a new being or sexual reproduction. It's nothing that has ever been achieved before. But so this kinematic reproduction is more, I guess, of a molecular nature or a physical nature, just from the fact that once the free floating stem cells get clumped together, they like to be together and they want to make something when they're together. And it turns out they make other little Xenobots. Interesting. So kin, because I'm thinking of kinesthesiology and kinetic energy and kin prefix means movement. It's kinetic reproduction because they're just forming a new one with movement. Is this something we've ever observed before as a type of reproduction? I don't remember ever hearing about this. No, this is not. And as far as reproduction, I think reproduction is the wrong word. I think self-organized assembly or self-assembly. It's not reproduction because when you think of reproduction, it's duplicating an existing life form. And how does that duplication happen? Well, in this case, it's not duplicating that little particular Xenobot that's spinning around in circles, scooping up all sorts of stem cells and smooshing them together. It's just that that Xenobot is just collecting stuff because of its random movements. And it just happens to be getting these little other stem cells because those are what's in the environment. And that's kind of its job to do in this particular situation. So they would not reproduce in the wild. They wouldn't survive out of the lab. This is all very sensationalism and places that people have been taking this in the media. I think the words that they're using to simplify it is oversimplified to a point where it may be causing people a little concern. Yeah, so I mean, first of all, reproduction, as you were just saying, not a great word for this. Also, I'm going to push back on the robot thing. This isn't a robot. There's no way this is a robot to me. Well, it can do a task. And if, for example, so the researchers in the study that they publish in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, they showed a proof of concept in which they put these little Xenobots into an environment that had broken circuits in it. And the little Xenobots spiraled around and bumped into the circuits. And by bumping the little wires, they eventually made wires connect. It wasn't on purpose. They weren't directed, but they did a job, which was they connected wires within a circuit that had been broken and allowed current to flow once again so that a signal could be sent. This definition of robot really bothers me. What is a robot? Well, okay, so if you have a ferret run wires down tubing in a wall, is it a drone? No, it's not. It's a trained ferret. Yes. These are trained skin cells. But they're not trained. Well, then that's even less of a robot to me. They were created for a purpose. That's, I mean, a car's not a robot. And it's doing a thing. Until it's an AI Uber. Yeah, I know. It's not a robot. I'm sorry. It's not a robot. So this is the thing, though, is the headline was reproducing robots. Not reproducing, not a robot. But what's actually really interesting here is like, if you put different stem cells not from the same organism in there, would they do this? If you put different cells completely in there, would they do this? If you used abiotic materials, would they do this? And I think that's what's really interesting is like, this is a really weird mechanism that they can do. What's the limits on that? What are the limits? And that's what they're trying to figure out. They don't know what the limits are. They are working through a variety of different tests. And they are, like I said, they're reconfiguring the shapes of these little Xenobots because they can design the Xenobots to exist in different shapes. They're biological. And the researchers said it was very interesting when they first started putting these stem cells from the frog embryonic skin together. They're like, they don't act like an organism, but they like to be together and they act in a very unique way. So it is a great question. Other organisms, would it be the same? I have no idea. Yeah, but the paper is very interesting. It's really actually fairly easy to read as well. They go on to say, in one part, they had previous studies where they reported spontaneous aggregation of artificial particles by groups of wild type, self-organizing, and artificial intelligence designed reconfigurable organisms. So at one point they did use artificial particles and get the bots to clump them all together. And so then they went, hmm, can we replace it with stem cells and see if replacing them with stem cells will get them to make more of themselves. And that's exactly what happened. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, reproducing robots, not really reproducing or self-organizing or self-assembling and robots, that is a debatable topic at this point in time. The authors do say they count them as robots. Blair is not into it. And someone in the chat room, ISS rover, USS rover one says it on CNN, they had said they can walk and swim, survive for weeks without food, and work together in groups. And while technically you could say these things, it's a stretch. It's not, they don't, they don't, or legs. They have cilia, these little beating fibers that move them and that can move them along the surface. Yeah. But put this thing where there's no water. They have motility. Yeah. Survive for weeks without food. Not really. They're not going to survive that long and work together in groups. It's kind of by accident. It's not on purpose. So. Oh boy. Yeah. So anyway, I'm glad that we had a chance to talk about this a little bit more and maybe we'll be able to get the researchers in here at one point to give us some more low down. But I thought we needed to dip behind the sensational headlines that have been making the rounds this week. So we're spicy. Tell me about your spicy breast milk, Blair. Oh, it's not mine personally. Oh, okay. Yes. That I know of. I don't know. This is a study from Technical University of Munich. It's looking at how the things that you eat can impact your breast milk, the taste of your breast milk. Breast milk is the first food that babies eat, of course. They in previous studies have suggested that there is a taste experience in early childhood that influences eating behavior later as they are adults. And the reason that there's this theory is that breast milk doesn't taste, smell, or even look the same every day. And a lot of that is due to maternal diet, which is why it's so important if somebody is breastfeeding to eat really healthy, get the right types of foods, not drink alcohol or eat high mercury foods, because a lot of things can move into breast milk. And so there's still a lot of research going on about what exactly permeates into breast milk and how that impacts the baby exactly. Because even things that do go into breast milk, it's not a one-to-one. So if you ate something spicy, it is not, then your milk is not that spicy. It's not a one-to-one transfer to the milk. But research has already shown that odor and taste from garlic and coffee can enter mother's milk as an odor and as a metabolic product. But other flavors like fish oil or nursing tea do not move into the breast milk. So it's not a clear answer of, yes, your food moves in there. No, it doesn't. It depends on the food. And so one area that has not been studied super well about permeability into breast milk is chili, ginger, and pepper, the spicy stuff. So this research team investigated whether these substances do transfer from food to breast milk and if so, which ones and how much. They used mass spectromic analysis and they showed that one hour after consumption of a curry dish, piperine is detectable in breast milk for several hours. Now the concentration of it is about 14 to 57 micrograms per liter in adults in order to perceive taste, you need about 70 to 350 times that. So it's a teeny tiny amount of this piperine that's making it into breast milk. It seems unlikely, therefore, that infants could perceive the spice ago. Ooh, spicy. But it is possible that this could impact their metabolism and taste receptors for this stuff later on because they have been exposed in a micro dose. Yeah. And there is that, there is that idea. People tell you they're like, oh, if you want your kids to like spicy food, just make sure you eat spicy food while you're breastfeeding. It'll be great. Yeah. I have to say you do that though. And they still like they're not necessarily like jumping at the salsa bar. Well, that's the other thing too is, you know, talking about adult taste receptors, child taste receptors are different too. It's changing throughout their life. And there's things that I'm sure everyone listening and watching liked when they were young children that now seems gross or seems bland. Or, you know, you go back and you eat one of those things you loved as a kid and you're like, this is no good. It's because your taste buds are different. So also looking at other pungents, ginger or chili did not enter the milk. So that's interesting. So it's not across the board spicy stuff. Their plan for continued exploration on this topic is to better understand both the emergence of food preferences and the metabolic processes that play a role in the transfer of bioactive food ingredients into breast milk. So just generally exploring how things move into breast milk from the mother's diet. And then also, yeah, how it's related to taste bud development and food preference, which I honestly never thought about. I think that's really interesting. It's interesting that there's so little that makes it into the breast milk that I think is really interesting. So then we're getting at, like you said, the question of these micro doses and what, how do these micro doses influence anything? And it's also interesting because we know certain things do move into breast milk. Like we were talking last week about antigens for COVID. Those go into breast milk. So is it about the size of the molecule? Is it something else? What is happening that is allowing some of them to pass through and other things to not? I don't know. It's a really great question. But I want to know how can we make the kids like the spicy food? It's good for them. It's good for your heart health, right? Good for everybody. It really is. All right. Moving from spicy breast milk, let's talk about sustainable bioplastic. Okay. Like from corn? No, from sperm. I'm sorry, what? Yep. I'm listening, but this is not what I expected. I know it's not what anybody expected. Yeah. Researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Chemical Society have published their process of creating a sustainable bioplastic and the title of their article, it doesn't use the word sperm, they say, made from biomass, DNA and ionomers. I see. Yes. The biomass DNA, however, came from salmon sperm and in their process of creating the plastics, they wanted to find materials that could have a very low carbon dioxide output, very low and also be sustainable. They said that in their abstract, they say sustainability involves all aspects of the production, use and end of life options of DNA plastics, the raw materials being derived from bio-renewable resources, water processable strategy is environmentally friendly, not involving high energy consumption, use of organic salmons or the production of by-products, recyclable and non-destructive use is achieved to prolong the service lifetime of the plastics and the disposal of waste plastics follows two green roots including the recycling of waste plastics and enzyme triggered controllable degradation under mild conditions. They wanted something, they're really looking at a lot of factors to go into how could they create a plastic that could potentially be 3D printed or could be molded or extruded, how could they create plastics that could be used in the environment and they came to this idea of using DNA, natural DNA and biomass derived ionomers and because DNA is fairly strong, pretty good molecule, they were able to use what they called aqua welding to arbitrarily design products like a cup that you could drink your morning coffee out of. However, apparently in reading their supplementary materials, they went on to say that these plastics when immersed in water would start to degrade. So I'm not really sure that making a cup to drink your beverages in is a very good idea. And then my other question is why they chose salmon sperm in this concept of sustainable bioplastics since we know many salmon populations are declining, maybe because it's an easy aqua culture. That's probably what it is. Yeah, they could get it easily but they say it doesn't have to come from sperm, it doesn't have to come from salmon sperm, it's just DNA. So wherever we have large amounts of sustainably produced, reproducible DNA. I mean, there's certainly enough of it and I think it's fine. It does not bother me. I think it'd be fine. I do think it's it's a big pro con the idea of it being water soluble, right? Like for some things like plastic bags, wrappings, twine, other things that it's mostly going to be dry and used once, it's perfect if it's water soluble. That sounds great. Yeah. But yes, for other plastic needs, cups, straws, saline bags in a hospital, not so great. Not a good idea. And then the other thing I found very interesting though is the irony of using sperm to create a sustainable bioplastic when there are reports of environmental plastics currently causing declines in male sperm production. I thought that was just very good. That was a little interesting there. Perhaps that had something to do with scientists inside jokes, but I'm not sure. I mean, yeah, fix the problem with the source. I love that. Yeah. So anyway, DNA from sperm doesn't have to be sperm, but you could have a sperm-y plastic cup or other things. I really like how the picture I encourage everyone listening who can't see it right now to look it up because it definitely looks like something that a second grader made in pottery class. It's not pretty. It's not a pretty mug. Who made this mug? Mom, I made this today. Beautiful honey. You did such a great job. I love it. Wonderful. Oh, I love the proof of concepts. They're fantastic. Do you have any more stories for the first part of the show right here? No, no, I'm all done. Okay, then I will jump on ahead to my next story which has to do with solar water. We're going to talk a little bit about solar water. Solar water, like I said earlier, is not water that is some special magic water used at an alternative healer location. Solar water is what they are saying is the source of much of the water in our solar system, specifically much of the water here on earth. So hear me out right here. If you're like, wait, what? Solar water? Yes. It's hot there. There can't be water. The sun is the source of water. How do we know this? Researchers got a hold of materials brought back by the Hayabusa mission from JAXA. Do you remember Hayabusa? No. Justin was really into Hayabusa for a while. There was a Hayabusa one and a Hayabusa two. Japan sent out these little spacecraft to go meet up with an asteroid, take a sample and come back to earth. Oh, okay. This is ringing a bell. Yep. Yeah, and the asteroid that they took a sample from was kind of a gravelly clumpy, kind of dusty asteroid, but they brought it back and researchers got their hands on some of these materials and took a look. They took a look, these researchers, from the Curtin University in Australia. They have used one of their special isotopic fingerprinting technologies to be able to look at these little tiny grains of sand, little dust grains that were brought back by Hayabusa. They found that these little grains had water in them and the water doesn't really match water on earth. Then there's other water that has come to earth that we think came to earth on asteroids that it doesn't match the isotopic signatures weren't matching up. Taking a look at these dust grains, they've determined that the solar wind is streaming past, having high energy particles streaming past grains of dust, asteroids that are sitting in the solar system, hitting them on the surface causing oxidation reduction reactions with the materials in the dust grains that are on the surface of these asteroids and also just dust out in the solar system, hitting the dust and causing reactions that create water, water and hydroxyl. Of course, of course. See, that makes sense. Chemistry. But see, that's okay, so that makes sense, but simultaneously to someone who has never balanced an equation before or hasn't in a very long time. That sounds like impossible magic. It sounds silly and stupid to be like, oh, this dust hits the sun and turns into water. Like, what are you talking about? Yeah, it's the solar wind. The solar wind pushes out from the sun and it creates water on the surface of tiny dust grains through chemical interactions. And that water, then the asteroids didn't necessarily have to fall on the planet themselves, like the asteroid that Hayabusa went to. That asteroid didn't have to come to Earth. They think there is enough dust just gradually trickling in from space that it could make up the remainder of the water, the isotopic composition of all the water on Earth. They say, okay, so there are world-class atom probe tomography. Let's see if I can speak today. Our world-class atom probe tomography system here at Curtin University allowed us to take an incredibly detailed look inside the first 50 nanometers or so of the surface of Itakawa dust grains, which we found contained enough water that if scaled up would amount to about 20 liters for every cubic meter of rock. 20 liters for every cubic meter of rock. Now, that's a lot. And if you think of all the random little dust grains coming in and falling down through our atmosphere to Earth over the history of our planet, it's a lot of water. Each individual dust grain isn't a lot, but all of them together really can be. So apologies if I am behind the times here, but so the idea is there was never water on Earth until this? Not necessarily that it wasn't until this, but after that there could have been water on Earth, but it probably got incorporated. It was for a long time incorporated within the rock of the Earth. And then there was the big cataclysmic event that created the moon. And after that point, that created a lot of dynamicism in the crust of the Earth. And from there, a lot of water came up as it was cooling. Additionally, you have asteroids and comets crashing into the Earth, potentially bringing a lot of solar water from the outer solar system. And then you have dust falling back down onto the planet, bringing water as well. Wow. And you're telling me there wasn't a little bit of life in any of that? I don't know. I don't know anything about that. This is, I just, I really, I feel like I'm grounded in real science a lot of the time, but this is something I just can't let go is panspermia. I can't let it go. Don't let it go, Blair. I think it's a good thing. I just think. Anyway, if we got that much water from outer space, why not? Why not a little bit of microbes hitching a ride on some of that? I don't know. Yeah. Why not? But the, if you think, if you extrapolate though, not panspermia, but water being important for life. And if we consider the solar wind interacting with all the dust, the materials in the solar system, how much water is out there? How much water does that mean are on asteroids that we could potentially go live on, on series, way out in the outer solar system? Like how much water is there? That is a huge question if we're going to be colonizing our solar system at some point in time. But then also, what does that mean for water in other solar systems? Because this is a chemical process. Our star is just a normal star. So this is going to be happening in other solar systems. Water, water everywhere. Not a drop to drink. But final intro story, really quick. I did want to throw out a really just this cool repair technology for biological tissues. Out of McGill University, researchers have created a bio, a bio gel that they are saying is this new bio material that can be used for wound repair. And we've talked about hydrogels and others that have been used for wound repair previously. But the thing about this one is that it's specifically created to undergo lots of expansion and contraction, so that it could be used in very dynamic tissues like vocal cords or heart muscle that are constantly being moved and stretched, where the vocal cords and the fun thing about their model here is that they decided to create a fake set of vocal cords to test their hydrogels. Oh no, I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight. Here we go. I'm ready. I hope you'll be able to sleep tonight. Why not? It's going to be creepy. I know it. It's not creepy. It's going to be wonderful. It's just great. But they created some vocal cords that they were able to move at a variety of speeds and that would move at what, 0.25 at their 0.25 speed, a super slower speed and a rapid speed. But okay. Okay. There's no sound with the video. There's no sound. Okay. You don't have to listen to it make weird human talking sounds. Oh my God. Oh my God. Would your voice change if you use some of this stuff with the timbre of your voice change? That's a great question. It would probably change while the healing was taking place. But in that case, it's potentially a situation where previously with other healing processes, you wouldn't have been allowed to talk. But maybe with the hydrogel, you would be allowed to speak because it doesn't matter if the hydrogel's moving while it is sitting there on the vocal cords that are being repaired and allowing for cells to integrate and to create, to heal whatever damage has been done in that space. So potentially, I would probably, I wonder if it would change your voice while the healing was taking place. Yeah. I think though, for vocal cord repair, that's really interesting. But for heart repair, I think that's going to be an incredibly useful advancement. Let's see. Hydrogel, very porous, really tough, but also flexible. It allows the cells to get in there and to start, it basically provides a scaffold where the cells can begin their healing work. Very cool. Yeah. Technology, new things. It's all the advancements. Every single week, there's something exciting and new. This is This Week in Science. Thank you so much for joining us once again for our scientific explorations. We hope that you're enjoying the show. Please share the show with a friend today. All right, Blair, are you ready for some COVID news? Yeah, I'm not even going to make the sound because I know it's going to be a whole thing. Let's get into it. All right, fine. Let's just do it. All right. Digging into the COVID news this week, Omicron. So I'll just leave it at that. No. Omicron has become the talk of the globe over the last week, week and a half. And experts around the world are concerned about this new COVID-19 variant. Lots of questions are still in place about how transmissible it is, how severe of disease does it cause, how protected will the vaccines keep us? If you're two shots into an mRNA vaccine versus three shots, what difference does that make? The United States has finally come in and called it a variant of concern. Countries around the world are concerned. However, at this point, we're still just waiting. The first report of Omicron was around November 9th. Researchers looking at phylogenetic analyses have mapped it back, traced it to an original line from early 2020 where they believe it circulated within a single patient, probably someone who is immunocompromised for a very long amount of time gathering a number of new mutations. It has a number of mutations in the spike protein that are novel. Also, some mutations that have been seen in other COVID-19 variants of concern as well. Some that have allowed for a slight reduction in vaccine efficacy. There is concern as to how that's all going to work out. We don't really know is the big thing. The main Omicron line, however, that they think when it really started growing and spreading was probably sometime early October in South Africa. However, the original patient probably led to some early spread and then that could have spread additionally within countries where they didn't have a lot of monitoring and testing for different variants to be able to determine. Now, we're actually seeing that countries like the UK and Belgium and others are going back and looking at their past tests where they were like, oh, it was a negative on the PCR because it didn't quite show up the right way. And they're going back and looking at some of their old tests right now to reconfirm and they're finding Omicron. It's been here longer than we thought. The first confirmed case of Omicron popped up in California today, the first California case in San Francisco. But I was just looking because Omicron, for those of you who are not familiar with the Greek alphabet, is way the heck down there in the Greek alphabet. I know we were at Delta, which is the fourth letter, but Omicron is the fifth. No, it is the fifteenth. Oh, it's the fifteenth? Yeah. Now, if I start saying things you might remember, there was a lambda strain. Oh, and mu. Yes. There was a mu. There was an epsilon. Yes. There was an iota for a second. So, we have actually moved through men, all of them, except for they skipped over nu and z, which I think is really funny. So, they went straight from mu to Omicron. Right. But I think I just wanted to remind everybody, we've been through 12 variants at this point. This is number 13. So, I'm not saying there's nothing wrong and I'm also not trying to be alarmist. I just want to remind everybody, like, lambda, there was a second where we were all like, oh my gosh, lambda is going to be the one. Lambda is terrible and it fizzled out. So, what's really important is that we all get vaccinated. We get our booster. Everybody in the United States can get boosters now. If you are eligible for a booster in another country, go grab it. This is what we need because asymptomatic cases spread less. Right. So, also knowing if Omicron punches through the vaccine, we don't yet know. It might actually, it might punch through. You might get infected, but still there is good production from the vaccine we think that's going to keep you from getting in the hospital. So, that is going to prevent you from infecting others and just be really diligent. Be really careful. If you're going to go hang out with your immunocompromised grandma, get a test. Rapid test. That's right. Get tested if you have any symptoms or if you have added any exposure or you have just concern. You can get tested. Peace of mind is great. But the point that really comes to my mind with what you're saying, Blair, is it's not just that we've been through a lot of variants is that we don't know which ones are going to have the transmission dynamics to be a problem. And it's very possible that even with all these new novel mutations in the spike protein that perhaps it changes the way that it affects, that it works in our body. Maybe it changes some aspect of the reproduction, the transmission that makes it a little less viable or makes it more, but we don't know. So, at this point in time, that's the thing. We can only do what we have been doing and wait for more information. And even when we get more information, we can only do what we have been doing. Yeah. I think that is kind of what I was getting at, right? Is that that's all we've been hearing all week is omicron, omicron, omicron, omicron. It's like, actually, as an average human, there's nothing new that I can do for this particular variant. It's good to stay informed and know what's going on and remind ourselves over and over and over that this is not over. But yeah, as an average person, there's really not much else that you can do to protect yourself from this variant. It's just a good reminder to stay vigilant and be careful. Yep. Yep. And I've been reading and thinking a lot also about the benefits of not just the PCR testing, but rapid tests and the way that these 15-minute at home fairly inexpensive rapid tests can be used to give us peace of mind and allow us to kind of get on with our lives a little bit more easily is, I think, something for all of us to consider. And if you, yes, it maybe isn't the kind of thing that you can do every single day, but if you have an event that you want to go to, if you know that you've been exposed or if you just have some weird symptoms or you just want to be like, I'm not sure. Let's see. You can take a rapid test. A positive pretty much means, okay, you're probably positive. You got COVID. If you are negative, you are not shedding enough virus at that moment of time. You're either not infected or you're not shedding enough virus for the test to pick it up. If you're not shedding enough virus for the test to pick it up, you're also not shedding enough virus to get other people infected. So a negative result on a rapid test means that you're not contagious. And that is something that is very, very useful. Yeah, I think every child in school in everywhere should be tested every day. I don't every day or every two or two to three times a week, at least. I am shocked that we're not taking advantage of these technologies, but in our infrastructure. But you know, anyway, we do go on in this way. You know, we know so many things Blair. Why don't the governments listen to us? I don't. Because we're women. No, I don't. We're mouthy broads. I don't know. I don't know. Speaking of children, did you have a story about that? I did. Yeah, that I was just kind of I was just diving into here in Europe. The European Union is still waiting for the rollout of the Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for five to 11 year olds here in the United States. We have already approved it and we are well a couple of weeks underway in vaccinating our five to 11 year old age group. The European Union is going to be rolling these out December 13th. This is a week earlier than previously planned. And this is potentially very good news for Germany, for the European Union. This is contingent on quality control, for sure, because you want to make sure you're getting good vaccines out to everybody. But they were able to speed up their schedule and increase production to be able to get these doses out. The Germany is due to receive 2.4 million doses. Is Great Britain going to get them too? Because they're not part of the EU anymore. Yeah, then no. Yeah, the UK is making their own deals and they are doing their own work. So this is different. Interesting. Interesting immediately following Brexit. Like, oh no. Infrastructure. Yeah. So people in Europe, if you are listening or watching, I, this is exciting news for all of you and your families. So we're going to end our COVID update on a high note this week. Yeah, yeah. This is This Week in Science. If you're enjoying the show, please head over to twist.org and click on the frog on the side of the of the web page. Order a twist 2022 calendar made by Blair. This is her annual calendar for Blair's Animal Corner featuring original art by Blair. This year's theme is single line drawings. She has created 12 original artworks of different animals that are included in the calendar, which also includes scientific and geeky holidays for all of us to enjoy. So no wins and fun holidays are coming. Keep track of your schedule and enjoy Blair's art and support twists by buying a 2022 calendar for yourself and as a gift for someone else. That would be great. That would be great. The holidays are coming. The holidays are coming. But you know what is coming right, right now? Blair's Animal Corner with Blair. I have hippo poop. One of my favorite things to talk about. Yay. I love when the hippos get to grace the animal corner. It's so fun. So hippos. I'm trying to think what year was. I think maybe 2014 or 15. I should have looked it up. But definitely in my tenure on the show, this amazing article came out about research related to tracking isotopes from the land into the River Nile and seeing how nutrients move in the landscape because the Nile in general goes through periods where it's not very productive for the fish that live there. And so what they discovered was hippos because they eat on land and then they sleep in the water. They go up on land at night. They munch, munch, munch grass all night. And then they move into the water and they poop. And when male hippos poop, they shake their tail and poop splatters everywhere. And by doing this, they have actually fertilized the Nile. So they've brought nutrients when it is stuck on land, when there's not rain, so there's no runoff. And they bring it into the River Nile. And so by figuring that out, it was suggested that hippos are themselves a keystone species. Now, I've also talked about how keystone species are kind of a weird thing because you're basically saying that this animal is super duper important in an ecosystem more than others, which gets murky because we don't know fully what all animals' roles are in an ecosystem and everybody's important. And it's like if you tug on a thread, everything else. But all that to say, hippo poop has this really important function. This new piece of research from Christopher Dutton, a team of researchers but led by Christopher Dutton, who's an ecologist at the University of Florida, is looking at the microbiome of hippos and how the bacteria in their guts and then in their poop, how that seeds the rivers and how that impacts the entire ecosystem. So what they found was that microbes can escape from the hippos' bowels and influence the environment outside them. This was a new study in Africa and they were looking at hippodung and the pools that they poop in and they wanted to sequence RNA from the poop itself and from the pool. They wanted to look at pools that had moderate flow, low flow, or no flow. So they could also see how this is different depending on what the water level was at and how quickly water was moving. And so if it's more concentrated, how is it different? So the more stagnant the pool, the more hippo gut microbes survived in the wire, in the water, and the bacteria represented a metagut. So their microbes could easily exist outside of the hippo, infect other hippos, potentially boost the digestive capabilities and immune defenses of the hippos in the pond, but it could also impact the animals around them. Wait, wait, wait, is this like, this is not like the ants spitting in each other's mouth from last week? No, no. Well, not entirely unlike that, I suppose. Right, you're talking about this meta gut where it's shared between the different hippos and their my bacteria is going to influence you and your bacteria is going to influence me. So I think the distinction would be that the ants were pooling resources in specific individuals, and this is creating a great homogene. So this is creating like a group gut, kind of, including that in the water. So they create a community microbe in that they can also change the water chemistry, which is left unchecked, can set the stage for massive fish die offs if a bunch of hippo waste gets pushed downstream, stream all at once. So I mean, if there's a lot of poop and a lot of bacteria that it's not, it could be great for the hippos, but not great for anyone else. Yeah. And so following along with that, less oxygen, the better the gut microbes did in the water. So the microbes preferred low oxygen environments, which is also low flow environments, generally speaking. So it's this idea, again, that it's kind of feeding itself, they're propagating, and they're doing better in these stagnant waters. And so, excuse me, when there's a flood, then it pushes it all into the next pool real quick. And that's where it can be a problem for fish. Lab tests indicated that the microbes further altered the water's chemistry. As I mentioned earlier, they created a stronger metagut as a result of the chemistry change in the water. And this actually contributed to a highly toxic, quote unquote, plug of water. So this is that, so not only is it anaerobic, full of microbes, but they also alter the chemistry so that when this stagnant water pool gets pushed forward, it can kill a bunch of fish. So this sounds bad, right? But hippos, remember I was saying before, are an essential piece of the ecosystem's nutrient exchange. And also, they have been living in Africa for a long time. So there is some situation here where this is not detrimental, essentially, to the ecosystem. It's part of the ecosystem exchange. So you could see how maybe a fish kill, fish die off, could be part of population control. But you could also see how if anaerobic, low flow environments are better for these microbes, if there's climate change and drought that lasts longer than expected, then you will get more of this, more propagation of microbes, more chemistry changes. They didn't even talk about this in the article, but that's all I could think about was like, oh, this is usually a weird thing that happens from hippo poop. This is something that could be way exacerbated by climate change. Right, where it would happen either a lot less often or it would happen happen more dramatically. All at once, yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah, when you start looking at it from the climate change lens. The next step for this study is to examine whether the microbes in the pools impact hippo health, either on the individual or the community level. I'm guessing they do. And if so, if those findings have any broader implications on how the environment can change when microbial communities like the hippo and the pond water collide. So this is an interesting conversation I don't feel like we've talked about a lot with microbiomes, where you talk about the environmental impact, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, when we think about seeding a microbiome, it's usually by copper foundry, it's usually by eating poop or through milk or through food or any number of things. But it's not often discussed as like, take a bath and get your microbiome. Right. Which the hippos are doing. Yeah, they're bathing in it and gaining their microbiome. Yeah. Or in the case of the, was it the lung fish that cocoons itself and creates a soil based microbiome that protects it. There you go. Yeah. So this is a, I think this is a a blossoming field, I would say. I think this could definitely use more researchers on it. So I don't think I've ever thought of it so much also as like, you mentioned the meta microbiome. And so in situations like that, it's where does one microbiome end and another would begin. Where does one organism end and another begin in the sense of how deep down the rabbit hole of the environment does it go? Yes. And does your microbiome impact the environment around you? Yeah. Which is a whole nother thing. I'm going to say yes. Definitely. But you know, we could previously, there could be very clear impacts of like, okay, your microbiome impacts your endocrine system and your endocrine system impacts the hormones and sense that you give off. And that can impact situations going on outside your body. Sure. But but this is like directly the bacteria from inside you being outside impacting the environment you interact with, which is a direct interaction that is very neat to think about. It is. But a lot of animals don't defecate near where they live, near where they eat, near where they, you know, there's a place to go. There's a place to go get rid of the waste. And there's a place to do all the other things. Sure. But so there are also lots of animals, like I think about the sloth is the extreme case of that they go to the bathroom like once a week at the base of a tree. And then I climb up again slowly. But that impacts the tree. Yeah. So I don't know. I don't know. Interesting things to think about. So let's stop talking about poop and water. And so let's talk about fishing water. So this is there's lots of liquids today in my stories. Okay, so I want to talk about fishing monkeys. This is a study from the University of Birmingham. And I did say monkeys, not apes. The snow monkey, the Japanese macaque, the one that you see taking a nice hot tub all the internet, they live in some of the coldest regions in the world. And they usually can move around and adjust their their diet when it gets really, really cold and icy and snowy. And there's less resources around. These macaques are native to the main islands of Japan, all of them except for Hokkaido. And the most northerly living non human primate. I didn't know. And they've the snow cover where they live is actually what limits their availability of their preferred foods. Now this study was looking at Kami Kochi, the Kami Kochi area of Chubu Sengaku National Park in the Japanese Alps. And in this very particular geography, they have a different challenge from all the other Japanese macaques. They are in a, they're in a topographical, geological and meteorological space where it makes it extra hard for them to find food in the winter. In other areas, they have wide winter home ranges. When resources are scarce, they can move forage wider spaces. But in this particular area, they're in a deep valley. And then it's surrounded by mountains that they cannot cross. They also have really high population density because there's no way to disperse. So they're kind of isolated. And so they have to overwinter in this really harsh environment. But also in this area, one of the reasons they can survive is that they have hot springs, little hot tubs I was talking about. They also have groundwater upwellings. These are all from active volcanoes. And so these streams, these groundwater upwellings that turn into streams flow without ice cover because of the hot springs and the constant flow and all this good stuff. And so they have access to water. So what these researchers did is they looked through fecal samples. Oh, we're back at poop. So they looked in the fecal samples. I am not surprised. Yeah. And they wanted to see what they were eating. How are they surviving this extremely harsh winter in this valley surrounded by mountains? And they found a bunch of aquatic stuff. They found brown trout. They found river insects. They found mollusks. So they're going fishing. They're going into the water and they are pulling out all these animals from the water. Other macaques have been found to capture marine fish when they dry or when they wash up on beaches. But this is the first published scientific paper of Japanese macaques that posits that they eat freshwater animals in streams and that they're sourcing those animals directly from the streams. So at first I was like, how do they know that just from some brown trout and some fecal samples? But the fact that there was high frequency of that and the river insects and the mollusks means they are going to the river to find food. They're very clearly heading to the grocery store. Seeking it out. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think this isn't a super shocking discovery, I don't think. They're not using fishing rods. But it's interesting to identify how this one population of this species that is so well adapted to living in an extreme environment has found another way to get by in this extreme environment in the case of geographic obstacles. It's going to eat the fish. So I think we're going to find all the food. Where you really get interesting is you take some of these macaques, you plop them outside of the valley, see if they go to see what they do, take some macaques from outside the valley, plop them into the valley, see if they go fishing, see how they learn from each other. So all this kind of stuff. This is where it gets really interesting is you have this isolated population doing this very specific behavior. Is it learned? Is it just part of monkeys being really smart and going, I got to eat somehow? I know there's something in there. I'm doing that. Yeah, there's like, oh, there's something in there. I'm going to find it in the water. I'm not finding anything out here in the snowy, cold, frozen place. There's got to be something where the warm water is. Have they run across the fish when they're playing in the water? They go to the water to drink and they see something that looks foodish. They try it out. They're curious. Is it learned? Right. Is it taught? Yeah. But considering the hot tub all the time, I think that they might be a little more comfortable in water than other primates. Some primates have a really hard time in water, especially a lot of apes don't like it. But these guys have to sit in those hot springs to survive. I mean, it helps them survive. I don't know if they have to. It helps them survive. It makes it less miserable. I think I wonder actually, it makes them very happy. That's why they're like, I live here because there are hot springs. This is a great place to live. Here's a research question, though. If they didn't do that, would their fitness go down? Because it takes a lot of energy to regulate temperature in warm-blooded animals. If they're sitting in that hot tub, they're not burning as many calories to keep warm for that period of time. That might actually be essential to their survival. I don't actually know that. Maybe they are hot tubbing to survive. Who knows? Hot tubbing macaques. Hot tubs make a lot of animals happy. Little fish meal, little hot tub. Sushi and a hot tub. That sounds great. Sounds fantastic. Sign me up. This is This Week in Science. We are here every Wednesday, 8 p.m. Pacific time. We're so glad that you're joining us again for another episode. I have some stories. Yes. Yes. Okay. I have brainy stories. You want to talk about the Internet of Brains? Oh, yes. Is that the original plot for The Matrix? Is that what you're talking about? It could be. It could be. But just like so many technical people in our audience probably have been talking about for years, the growing Internet of Things, all these connected devices that you can track. Your refrigerator, your stove, your microwave, your phone, everything's connected to something these days. You can program things. How many people have adjustable Internet of Things thermostats or lighting systems in their house where they're able to control them from far away even. Researchers have developed a platform that they're calling basically an Internet of Brains instead of an Internet of Things. They are calling it the wireless network for behavioral neuroscience, WNBM. I don't think that is as nice as Internet of Brains. What they want to do is have remotely programmable, globally accessible hardware and software infrastructure of miniaturized wireless networks for behavioral neuroscience research. This means being able to enable remote scalable, modular, and chronic high throughput neuroscience studies. You have a mouse in a cage that has had optogenetics and has little wires implanted into its head electrodes. It has wires coming out and it's in its little enclosure with its wires attached to an array at the top of that enclosure, which might be connected to a Raspberry Pi module, which is connected to your wireless Internet which may be controllable from outside of the lab room where that animal is. Currently, all this research involves a research technician and a research technician can bias the results of behavioral neuroscience studies. If you want to know how an animal behaves, you just want to know how it behaves in certain situations. You don't want to know how it behaves in certain situations while there's a person around. There's been a lot of research through the years that there's always that question of how much are the human handlers, the research technicians, impacting the results of these studies? The researchers have introduced this idea of this way and they sell it with this amazing graphic that it's pretty much like a bunch of brains around the world connected to the cloud. Sure, sure. Sure, sure. With the idea, they think that you could potentially, not that this has happened yet, but you could potentially connect experiments around the globe that could be triggered all at the same time or be scheduled to take place all at certain moments. Why would we want that? I'm sorry, I'm sure there's a reason. I just can't think of it. I'm sure researchers would think of it. Okay, I'm glad I'm not the I'm not the only one who didn't get it. I'm sure research would come up with it. Like I guess it's okay, sure, like circadian rhythms, or like light and be dark, or I don't know. So what they were able to do, they did not enable their studies in a global array for this particular proof of concept, but they were able to show the triggering of either pre-scheduled acts to take place, like the release of a certain neurotransmitter or a certain stimulus taking place within an animal's enclosure to lead to certain behaviors and the data could then be collected remotely as well. And they showed that they were able to throughput the number of animals with just a single researcher on site that normally would not be possible in the time that that took for their experiment. So it made the work go faster. Somebody just wants to go on vacation. Maybe. I mean, I have to tell you as a graduate student, and there are many researchers out there doing animal studies. The animal studies don't necessarily care about your vacation. They don't necessarily care about your sleep schedule. The animal studies sometimes need to be done in the middle of the night. The animal studies need to be done early, early in the morning. And the question is, how efficient could you make it if all those little animal brains were connected to the cloud? Well, then you can just set up an AI to run the experiment. Then you don't have to do anything. Well, you don't. Yeah. I mean, you don't really want that because you always want a person who's responsible and you can't have an inexperienced person on site who's responsible because if something does go wrong, they're inexperienced. They don't know what to do. So you always have to have somebody who's experienced, knows the behavior, knows the animals, knows the technology. Ethically, that is the appropriate way to run the experiments. That's the key question to ethics because AI, we have shown time and time again, doesn't really get the ethics thing. Yeah. It's AI just does what it wants to do kind of. So you're right. The AI couldn't run the animal experiment because they would just do whatever they wanted. AI is going to do what AI wants to do. People, we'll figure out ways to make the experiments work and get the animals to do what we want. Yeah. It's definitely Rick Loveman, the animal version of the matrix. It's the beginning. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if we're going to start with the animals, the next, you know, it's going to be the matrix with the people connected. I do know one thing for sure. It was us who blacked out this guy. Is that the code? That's close. That is, yeah. Anyway, you have another brain story? I do. I have one more brain story and then we're all done. Ping for your brain. Brain ping. It's a technique that has been developed by researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine together with colleagues at Stanford University. They have developed a new method for doing brain surgery that does not use a scalpel. What? Yes. Also not a saw? Not a saw. Not a scalpel. No, no, no. This is great. This is great info. Give me it. Yes. So this strategy uses low intensity focused ultrasound waves combined with micro bubbles to penetrate the brain's natural defenses. So the micro bubbles and the ultrasound mess up the blood brain barrier and the defenses of the astrocytes and the cells in there that are trying to protect the brain. And it allows researchers to do a targeted delivery of a neurotoxin. The neurotoxin then in that localized area can kill diseased brain cells, sparing healthy cells. It only goes after the ones that are sick and should be culled from the brain herd. But it preserves the overall architecture of the brain, doesn't cut a massive hole in the brain. It's focused, it's targeted, it's specific. And it could really give much more accurate control of neurosurgical responses to disorders that don't respond to medication. Yeah, they're calling it ping. Ping, of course. Ping, that's what they're calling it. Ping. Yeah, so it could be used to treat epilepsy in patients who are reluctant to undergo conventional surgery. They've published in the Journal of Neurosurgery and detailed the ability of this process, this procedure to eliminate neurons in a very focused brain area, sparing the cells that they don't want. to get rid of that are in that same area. So you can go in and just get rid of the cells that you don't want to be there. Wow. So it's precise. Yeah, that sounds very precise. And you know, when you think of like the way that neurons are connected and they're all interlocked with each other and they're all next to nestled in and woven with each other, the idea that you could go in and specifically get rid of some and not others is just, that could be like brain surgery magic. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. Yeah, I thought that was pretty neat. Ping. Doing something generally you never want to do, which is mess up the blood brain barrier. Yeah. Yeah, generally don't mess up the blood brain barrier. You want that to be solid, but this is like it's, you know, it's very fast. It's the ultrasound and the micro bubbles get little bubbles and they disturb the blood brain barrier and it gives a chance for that neurotoxin to just go right where you want it to go. Does its job and then it's done. And then your blood brain barrier is fine, goes back to normal. It resets itself and hopefully, hopefully it will benefit people in a massive way. That's awesome. That's so huge. Yeah, I'm excited about it. I hope that it's been demonstrated and useful in laboratory studies. So now the big question is, can we get this to the point where it can be used actually used therapeutically? Which would be good. It would be good. Yeah. Sometimes these things don't make it to the market. So this is also, there's still a long way to go. But you got to start somewhere with big ideas, asking big questions, trying to do things a different way sometimes. And you know, maybe this won't make it, but then this will inspire a future study that then becomes a more viable option that then makes it to market. It's all part of the progress that gets us to better medicine, which is pretty neat. Yeah. Yeah. Oh Blair, thanks for a really good show tonight. Yeah, it was fun. It was fun. Yeah. Miss Justin. So we'll have to ask him all those personal questions about his, about his wedding today when we see him next week. Yes, next week in the after show for sure. For sure. All right, everyone, I think we've done it. We've done it, right Blair? We certainly have. Okay. We have done it. So it's time for me to do all the shout outs. Thank you to everyone for listening to the show, for enjoying the show. We hope you enjoyed it. Shout outs to Fada for your help in with social notes. Social notes? No. I'm putting things together. Social media and show descriptions. Social media and show notes. Yes. Gord for manning the chat room and keeping things above board, helping things stay civil. Thank you. Thank you for recording the show because I didn't record it this week. That's for sure. Rachel, thank you so much for your assistance and for editing the program. And now I would like to thank our Patreon sponsors. Thank you too. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all for your generous support. And if you would like to support us on Patreon, you can head on over to twist.org and click on the Patreon link. On next week's show, we'll be back on Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific time broadcasting live from YouTube and Facebook and from twist.org slash live or YouTube.com slash this weekend science. And if you want to listen to us as a podcast, just search for this weekend science wherever podcasts are found. If you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe too. Don't keep it to yourself. No, no, share it. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes and links to stories will be available at our website. That's at www.twist.org. That's this week at science, T-W-I-S dot org. And you could also sign up for our newsletter, which we'll go on eventually, I swear. It really, really will. It really will. You can contact us directly. Email Kirsten at kirsten at thisweekandscience.com, Justin at twistmissetmit, twispinion at gmail or Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org. Just put twist in the subject line so your email doesn't get spam filtered into an internet of brains where it's there and is obliterated by ping. True. Or that doesn't get, you know, hippo-plugged. Oh, yeah. Or spicy breast milk. All of them are good options. You can also ping us on Twitter. We are at twist science at Dr. Kiki at Jackson-Pillai and at Blair's Menagerie. Go ahead and tweet Justin some congrats for his wedding. He won't read them because he doesn't go on Twitter anymore, but we'll see it. It'll be fun. Anyway, we do also love your feedback. If there's a topic you would like us to cover, address or suggestion for an interview, please don't keep it to yourself. Let us know. Yeah. And we will be back here again next week. And we hope that you will join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned absolutely anything from tonight's show. Remember, it's all in your head. This week in science, it's the end of the world. So I'm setting up shop, got my banner unfurled. It says the scientist is in. I'm going to sell my advice. Show them how to stop the robots with a simple device. I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand. And all it'll cost you is a couple of grand. This week, science is coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method for all that it's worth. And I'll broadcast my opinion all over the air. Because it's this week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. Science. Science. Science. Science. Science. Science. Science. Science. Science. Science. Science. Science. Science. Science. Science. Science. It's the Aftershow. It did it there, we made it all the way through all by ourselves. I've earned a sit. Aunt Pruett. Thanks for joining. Thanks for joining. I bet. I could have read it a little faster. Oh, you're you're sitting down now. I've earned my sit. You've earned your sit. It's my little treat. If I want to sit down I have to put desk down and then I have to move my chair and I have to move the camera. I have to move my screen. I'll do that tomorrow. Do that tomorrow. Tomorrow. Oh this weekend virology. It's a great show. Thank you for joining us tonight, Dickie. Yeah, today's show would be great for the kids. It was a good, very kid-friendly episode. All that poop. Lots of giggling, probably. What are you talking about? Hippo poop and monkey poop. Poop. All the poop. Good night, Steven Rain. All the people. Michelle, thanks for joining us. Michelle Kelly. Oh, Dickie says only one of the shows that's too short. Thank you. We enjoy sharing the knowledge. I do like, I do like try having nice conversation and talking about all the science. It's so interesting because you know, we're on YouTube and you know, the YouTube algorithms lack your shows too long and then but people who like our show are like, your show's too short. I don't, Gracie Kamer, I don't understand your question. Your ball. Did you have an exercise ball ever? No. You've always had a chair, right? Or is he talking about a different ball? I don't know. Do you have a bowling ball behind you or? No. I don't know. I don't know. Gracie Kamer, explain yourself. What happened to your ball, Blair? I don't, it depends which one you're talking about, I guess. Which ball? I have lots of like doggy tennis balls on the floor and nope. Oh, yeah. He thought I had one of the exercise balls. No, never did. No. I've thought about it, but then you just have it, you know? Then it's just around all the time. It's a whole thing and I'm not working from home currently, so I'm like, well, I have one. I use it rarely. It's hard to predicate a question. It is hard. How was your Thanksgiving? It was great. Yeah. Yeah. Everything was delicious. It was a success. Yes. How was yours? It was great. It was a really good, really good Thanksgiving. I burned my buns. Oh, no. I burned my rolls. So we didn't have any rolls with dinner, but that's fine because there were potatoes and stuffing and we didn't really need the rolls anyway. And then Marshall burned, we made him a sugar-free, lactose-free pumpkin pie. Oh, good. Yes. And then he burned it. Then he burned it accidentally. No, he was so excited about it that he was so sad that, but then he's like, okay, if I cut the top off of it. Scraping, he burned part off. He enjoyed his pie. Good. Yeah. Just so you know, there is stevia out there that you can, but it's the same amount, a cup for a cup. It's not like a tiny amount. So you can, and you can use it. It has a starch in it that allows you to be able to use it in recipes. Nice. So you can actually replace the sugar. Very cool. Yeah. If you want to do some of the baking and you want to get rid of the sugars. Tofurkey. I did not have a tofurkey. We had a turkey. Turkey, turkey. Yeah. And it's Hanukkah right now. Happy Hanukkah. Thank you. Hanukkah to you. Thank you. Oh, I forgot to let my candles before the show. I was stuck in so much traffic. I'm going to text Brian. I might run off screen quickly if we're still talking before he leaves because I want to light them with him before he goes. Man. It's tough, man. So it usually takes about 35 minutes for me to get home and it took an hour and 15 minutes. There's multiple crashes on the 101. Grab me before you go to light the candles. Yeah, you got to light your candles. Kissy face. Okay, great. You got to throw an emoji in there, you know. Oh, emojis are like one of the things that I mean, I've had cell phones as long as there have been cell phones, right? Emojis, I'm still like, I don't know what emoji to use. I don't know how to use emojis. That could be very fun. I don't know. I'm always like looking through the emojis and like, I'm like, I know there's an emoji for this in here, but then I can never find it and then I'm just sitting there looking for the right emoji and I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to type the word because that would be faster. So that's one thing I will say for Apple is on the iPhone, if you type a word, it'll suggest an emoji for the word sometimes, which is fun. Oh, that's fun. So like, I can type out the words fingers crossed and it'll go with. I'm a big fan of gifts. I love them. I actually prefer gifts to emojis. Yeah. Agreed. Possible. Yeah. I know you're a good giffer. They're so fun. It's honestly, I wish I could like break down the door at Microsoft HQ so that they could make Microsoft Outlook gift compliant, but it's been so long and they still, you can't put a gift in an email. I think it's very dumb. It is dumb. I should be able to be like, and here is this tweet that I copied and pasted and here's the GIF and like, there's the whole email. I don't need to tell you anything else. Definitely. Instead I have to find dumb memes that are stationary and email those to my coworkers, which is also probably not very professional, but you know what? Outlook is not gift compliant, Paul Disney. I don't know what you're talking about. Maybe Paul can teach you how to GIF at work. I wonder if I had an outdated version for a while. Maybe. Maybe. I haven't tried in a while. Maybe they did update it. Oh, it does work. All right, Paul, you win. But it does. I will try it tomorrow. It says it does. There was a study that came out last week, two weeks ago. Oh no. Yeah. Emojis. I think it was something to do with emojis and men and women interpreting emojis differently. So don't use emojis at work. I use some. I use smiley face. I use laughing face and I use frowny face. And I use thumbs up and I use fingers crossed. I feel like those cannot be misconstrued. They're pretty straightforward. Yeah, but I could see how like a winky face from one person could take that as like, oh, they're making a joke. Are you flirting with me? No, I'm just winking. The one that I'm not convinced that I use correctly is the one that's like this. The like flat teeth beard. As I always picture it kind of like uncomfortable kind of and like uncomfortable slash guilty slash like embarrassed slash I'm going to do what I want anyway sort of thing. Oh, I don't think I've ever thought of it as like guilty or embarrassed or I usually use it for like when I think something is just really off or wrong. I'm like, uh-huh. You know, the grimace. Yes. Yes. Yes. The grimace. No, the grimace is a purple triangle. What? You know, the grimace. I got you. I got you now. Did you hear that it? Some McDonald's franchise announced some months ago that grimace is a taste bud. A taste bud? Yes. It's a giant purple taste bud. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but I think it was a franchise. I don't think it was like McDonald's corporate and I think that afterwards McDonald's is like, we don't condone that interpretation of what grimace is, but you go ahead. Oh, I see people are saying they're calling it the cringe. Yeah. Okay. I also do it kind of like a guilty like, I'm just doing me, man. I feel like there is another one where it's like it's got like the eyebrow up. Blair emojis. You could do those. Yeah. You could make your own Blair emojis. Just take pictures of your face and use them. It would be pretty good. Yeah. Here it is. Okay. Study. I was in psychology today, broken down in psychology today, published in computers and human behavior. 299 students aged 17 to 35 said that they mainly use symbols to message friends, partners, relatives and send seldom when communicating with bosses or partners. The texts, okay. In those texts and Facebook messages, women tended to think of emojis as showing more intense positive or negative emotions. A surprised face with the eyebrows raised looked slightly positive to men and slightly negative to women. Interestingly, the eyebrows seemed to matter. The same surprised face without eyebrows elicited the same reaction from men and women. See, and that's the thing is that they're not the same across platforms also. So I can type an emoji and my iPhone and send it to you and you see the... Wouldn't necessarily be the same. You see a different one. So that causes problems too. Yeah. Oh, here, this one. The neutral face with a line for a mouth looked neutral to men, but negative to women. Yeah. Which I think that's an interesting socialization thing. Yeah. I mean, everybody tells women, I was gonna smile. A smile is neutral to women. If you don't have a smile, you have RBF. When men and women agreed and emoji was positive, women saw it as more positive. That's interesting. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. It's interesting. It's gonna continue to be a problem as people refuse to use phones to talk. Right. As it's all texting and emojis. Yeah. As it's messaging apps and yeah. I think, I think, I kind of think we all need to just get rid of all the texting and messaging apps. Just go back to landline phones with no answering machines, no voice caller ID. I think answering machines are okay. You could leave a message for some, but I think that's okay. Nope. Nope. There's no call waiting. Just like, you gotta call people and if they're there, then they'll talk to you. Boy. I see pros to that for sure, but I also think I'd end up with less friends and that makes me sad because there's definitely people that like we, we text every three or four months and we'll just have, we'll text back and forth for a day and then we won't hear from each other for a while again. And I still consider them really good friends. Right. I think that's the big pro to all this is it allows you to keep connections up with people that just circumstance would keep from happening. There's people that like, there's also the bad side. You keep up with people that naturally you've drifted apart from. And it's kind of, sometimes you should have naturally closed. Yeah. And you keep it open. Yeah. But I think, I think both are happening, you know, so it's tough. It is tough. I think though, there's an, what we need to get away from is always being accessible. Just like the texting and the messaging and the phones and even though people might not answer their phones anymore, or ever check their voicemail. You know, we don't always have to be available. No, that's true. Yeah. My phone sometimes I just like, like, I'm not answering things. I will leave my phone in another room sometimes. Like, this is not the time. I'm going to leave you over there. I mean, and then you're like, I'm not checking my email on Thanksgiving and having to go back to work because Elon Musk emailed everybody at work and was like, you have to go back to work because our rocket isn't working the way we need it to. And so forget Thanksgiving and go back to work. Did that happen? Yes. Oh yeah. See, I was turned off that day. So I didn't know. Right, you turned off and you're like, it's Thanksgiving weekend. I'm home with my family. I'm doing, what do you mean I have to go back to work right now? I'll come back on Monday. I would never, ever, I would not, I would not survive at a company like that. Nope. That's why I work in my basement. Working your basement. Exactly. Yes. Do you need to go? I'm going to go. I think I'm going to go. I think it's time. It's time. We don't need to grimace. We don't need to cringe. You're having, I just, what, what face is that Blair? I don't know. How about this one? This is good one. Like that. I know some people thrive at companies like that, but they didn't, they didn't want to be, those people probably didn't want to be home with their families for Thanksgiving weekend. Baby, those people don't like weekends off. We don't need to manage our time, man. Yeah. Unix and Telnet. That's right. Teleportation, digital teleportation. We are all just an internet of brains. Say goodnight Blair. Good night, Blair. Say goodnight, Kiki. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode. We love that you're here and you spend your time with us. Make sure you include lots of emojis in all those celebratory messages to Justin. Yes. This week. That's right. And I do hope that we'll see you again next Wednesday. Stay well. Stay healthy. Stay connected or don't. It's up to you. Stay curious. Sleep or don't. It's up to you. Sleep or eat or don't. Do what you exercise or don't. Do what you do, man. That's right. I just hope that you do it. Well, we'll see you next week. Thank you. Good night.