 I start this show and every time, Facebook. Is it a problem or is it just look like it's a problem? Because it seems like it works every time, right? No, no, it works. But for whatever reason, every time we start the show, it's like, I'm sorry, we're not going to be able to do this. And then I have to remove Facebook and then re-add it and republish and it's just, I just did it. So, hey everybody, we're live doing the twist podcast broadcast. Welcome. Yeah, we're here. So, right now, it's a whole thing because Justin just woke up. I've been awake for a while. We're on separate sides of the world kind of, or at least in very different spaces. I've had some wine. But anyway, we're going to talk about science. Oh, you can't, then you're cut off on the air. You can't do that on the air. Isn't that like a... No. See something, one of those... Is there a YouTube policy? No, YouTube doesn't care. As long as I am completely above board, no cursing and... Nothing controversial. I won't be controversial. This show might be. No, it's going to be great. There's nothing controversial about what we have to talk about tonight. Eric Knapp. Yes. I'm sorry, Kiki. I can't do that. Yes, we can. And yes, we will. And it's time to start the show. But just as I always try to let you know as we start this, the live program. So things happen. Hopefully Rachel edits them out. And then the podcast is its own separate edited entity. But thank you for being here for this live stream. Is that what we call it now? Broadcast stream? I don't know. Ready to go live? Yeah, go ahead and hit the button. Let's start being live. Well, I already hit the button. We are live. Oh, good grief. Yes. No, we're going to start the official part where Rachel knows that it's time to start the editing. How does she know that? How does... Is there a clue? There's a countdown. There's a countdown. Yeah. Okay, everyone share. Different than the countdown that we already did. Like, share, do the things for the algorithms. Please get us to the top of the algorithms. Make everybody come and listen to the science on this wonderful Wednesday night. I think even if you don't like the show and hit the dislike button, I think it still helps the algorithm. I don't even know. Any attention is good attention. Hit one of them. Hit a button. Any button. We're starting the show in three, two, this is twist. This week in science episode number 946 recorded on Wednesday, October 4, 2023. Science is always Nobel. I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight we will fill your heads with mushrooms, mistakes and purring. But first... Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The following program contains dangerous information related to the nature of reality. Within the words, terminologies and phrases you are likely to encounter here are the tools humans use to separate fiction from fact. The difference is real, as different as a sci-fi fantasy and actual space exploration. A children's story and a study into childhood illness. Any cultural mythology and every molecule that can cure a disease. The information is dangerous because the human mind is a collection of fantasy, mythology and storytelling. Without them, it is unclear who or what a human being is. Assumptions, opinions, beliefs and biases are the underlying conditions blurring the human mind. Responsible for our unfocused actions and responses. They are seductive sedatives, a blissful blindfold, a well-intended illusion. And they have poisoned men's souls, barricaded the world with hate. Goose stepped us into misery and bloodshed again and again. Assumptions, opinions, beliefs and biases. What can be seen without them? What can be learned without them? What can be done without them is science. And there's no better place to start seeing the world for what it really is than this week in science coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to learn if it happened every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know. And a good science to you too, Justin. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. And thank you all for joining us for yet another adventure into the land of curiosity, inquiry, science. Oh, yes. Yes, we are here. Let's see. We've got a lot of stuff going on this week. It's been a big week. I have stories about the Nobel Prize Awards. A new organelle. Again? I feel like we just did that last week. I know. I know. It's like it happens over and over again. And I feel, yeah. Anyway, I got a new organelle. Cats. A new organelle. Wait, a new organelle. You just skipped like you went like, ah, there's cats. There's a new organelle. Yep. Wow. Yeah. And there are many questions about it. So it's an interesting conversation. Mushrooms. We like mushrooms. I got mushrooms and memories. Memories. What do you have for us? Oh, I've got the meaning of stone heads. It has a meaning? Yeah. Oh, I got it. It's just a bunch of rocks. People are like, dude. Hang on, hang on. No spoilers, but it does have to do with rocks. Totally rocks. I have a chilling tale of snowflies, self-amputations, survival, and certain death. Dead time math lessons. Maybe something that's in the future. Future children will rejoice. Counting sheep. Is it a counting sheep? It's math sheep. Sort of multiplying sheep. Yeah, forget counting them. That's the old way. From now on, we're doing a multiplication table of sheep. And this story, I don't know, this is a sort of history study of medieval murder that centers around Oxford University. This sounds like it could be its own podcast, like a whole story. I'm sure it is. There's stories within stories. But it makes Oxford look like the most violent, like a bloody mess. Like medieval university. We'll get into this story later. But you know how we have clubs on campus? You can join different interest clubs. And you can join different sports teams. But there's the secret societies too. But you're still all in the same campus, right? Yeah. Well, back then when the world was smaller, like being part of the chess club versus like the go club or whatever, when everybody had like sidearm knives, anyway. Can't wait. We're good at arguing, I don't think. Anyway, we're good at killing each other. All right, let's talk about it. Oh my goodness. There is mystery in mayhem afoot. All right. Murder. Murder, most foul. Yes, let's talk about all of it. It is spoopy month, so it totally fits. As we jump into the show here tonight, I would love for all of you who are watching right now to share the show with whomever you think needs to hear it. And also like and subscribe. If you're not yet subscribed to us, you can find us as a podcast. Most places that podcasts are around. You can also find us live streaming on YouTube, Twitch and Facebook, 8 p.m. Pacific time ish on Wednesday nights. Our website is twist.org if you are interested in our show notes, links and other exciting bits from the show. Also, we have links to help you subscribe. So if anything, twist.org is the thing that you really need to remember. But now is the time for science. You ready? Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, we started last week's show with the ignobles. So we would be remiss if we didn't start this week's show with the no bells. That's why I was confused. I thought those were the Nobel prizes. That's why I was so confused last week. I was like, I think there was better. Just like last week there was impactful research than turning. What is it? Necrobotics. I think there's more useful stuff. Game machines. Maybe they've been handing these things out so frequently. They've covered everything. I don't know. But now it makes sense that those with the ignobles this week, this is the real hard science contributions type stuff. Yeah. So the Nobel prizes, people who are within the Nobel Academy and all that there are a lot of nominations. People nominate different individuals for science that they've done for publications. There are then a group of people who look over all these nominations and they vote and then there's a decision that is made. Now, we've talked on this show year after year after year about the lack of women receiving various awards. And this year, I'm very excited. Wait, didn't they handle that one year already? They like gave some women their award and now we don't have to talk about it ever again. Can you go back to the way it was? No. But it's very exciting. Today announced the Nobel prize in physics was awarded to Pierre, Agostini, Ferenc, Krauss, and Juliet for their experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter. And so the excitement of this is that attoseconds, if you think about how many attoseconds are in a second. I don't even know. I have no idea. It's like billions of billions. Oh, my goodness. That's one of those numbers that I, when I do think about it, I'm like, ah, it's a placeholder for something very small. It's very, very small. But it is the time frame at which electrons tend to do stuff. So in terms of being able to visualize and resolve molecular interactions that are happening at the subatomic level, the movement of electrons, the interactions of electrons, being able to create these incredibly short, like me saying short is longer by billions and billions of times than the attoseconds at which these pulses of light have been generated. So they're getting down to the limit of a photon and also the limit of what we can visualize and what we can actually work with. So it's a very exciting, I mean, what they've done is exciting and deserving of this kind of award because it's going to impact communications. It's going to impact our scientific investigations at the subatomic level. It's going to allow us to do all sorts of things. So yeah, pretty cool. And that's like, go ahead. Oh, I just don't understand what they did. I would love to explain because you could turn a flashlight on and off, right? And it's like, would you turn it on and turn it off? That's a pulse of light. Yeah, but that pulse of light is like billions and billions of electrons. Billions and billions of photons. Photons, which are packs of electrons. I mean, if you think of how fast you can turn a flashlight on and off, it's maybe the fastest that a person could do it is like on off, like half a second, maybe. But this is billions and billions times smaller than that, faster than that. And so they're using technology to control lasers and go on and off so fast that because the light is such a short wavelength and such a short amount of time, it's like a piece of film. So like when we watch movies, 24 frames per second, each one of those allows us to be able to visualize. This is like getting at the speed of the things that are working at this subatomic level. So we're actually approaching the speed of the stuff that's going on much, much, much, much faster than we are. And so it's allowing us to get to that point of maybe filming it, visualizing it, being able to capture it, understand it, have light interact with a photon. And suddenly you see where it is. How did that photon get scattered? How did the electron get energized? I don't know how they did it. I mean, I'm not an experimental physicist. I still don't understand how you see anything with it because I still will never understand how you can try to look at an electron with another electron. No, no, no, no. But you're not looking at an electron with another electron. They're using laser light. So it's pulses of photons. Photons, I think of them as just like a whole bunch of electrons. Really fast moving photons. Yeah, but those photons hit electrons and then they can transfer energy or get bounced off. And the photons that get bounced off the electrons have a different energy that we can then detect. And so that gives us an idea of what happened in the interaction. Okay. Well, I'm glad somebody got a Nobel Prize for that, finally, because... But yes, there is a, yeah, there's a lot of very interesting stuff going on there. Oh, David has Sabine Hoffender covered it. Is anybody else seen her? It's very good. It's a very good show. I like Sabine very much. I'll have to go check that out later. She's fine. She's fine. I have my own thoughts that I'll keep to myself. Anyway, moving on to the Nobel in Physiology or Medicine. Kiri, Carolyn Carrico and Drew Weisman got the Nobel for their discoveries concerning nucleoside-based modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. And so this is fantastic because they have really recognized the people who did the work to begin what enabled us to have the vaccines that we have now for COVID-19 and that are going to be cancer vaccines and that are being used in all sorts of different applications at this point in time. Yeah. I should have done my homework for the show. What was the lady's name there? She's got the, I just... Carolyn Carrico. Her nickname's Kiri, which I like. But she has a wonderful story. She's the one that was denied tenure at the university. She slept in her lab and she's also just a giving person and now she's like, I want to mentor people and I'm in this place now where I can give back and everything I hear about her now I'm just like, oh. She should be the poster child for sort of what's wrong in academia. The fact that she was denied tenureship as a professor and her work was not taken seriously enough. For so long. For so long and then ends up like maybe saving millions and millions and millions of lives. I mean, she's the one who kept pushing it forward. It didn't have to, like it didn't have to keep going. People didn't have to keep working. She pushed it forward even though it was a, she knew there was something there. Yeah. And this was decades ago. Yeah, decades. And so we could have gotten to the pandemic and be like, no worries. We got this. We got this. It's going to take 20 years. But we're going to get there. Instead, we were ready. Yeah. No bell prize and chemistry. This year goes to a monkey. G by Wendy. Louis E. Bruce and Alexi E. Ecumov for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots. Quantum dots are these nano scale physical structures that react with light. In a quantum manner so that their structure actually allows us to have LED screens. It allows us to have a whole bunch of sensors that we wouldn't normally be able to have. The quantum dots are a fascinating development. And they really, this is a deserving technology for chemistry. Great. They made flat screen TVs possible? Yeah, they didn't make flat screen TVs. But yeah, this is quantum phenomena and these little particles, they're semiconductors. They're really, really essential for LEDs, these quantum dots. They're also being used now for mapping biological tissue because of the way they can be used to bind to different substances and molecules and the way that they interact. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said, in terms of size, it has the same relationship to a football as a football has to the size of Earth. So these are tiny dots. Really, that's quite different. Like when you think of a pixel, go smaller. Yeah. But they, in the 80s, Alexi Ecumov achieved the size dependent quantum effects in colored glass via copper chloride nanoparticles. Luis Bruce later proved in fluid suspended particles that they could do it. And then in 1993, Mungi Bawendi made it practical for production and use. So all three of them are sharing the Nobel for quantum technology. And who knows where they will go in the future? Again, I think a lot of these Nobel prizes, the reason that they're exciting is that they're not just one-offs and it's not just, it's a discovery. But it is something upon which future science and technology is going to be developed and it's going to lead to new things. And I think that is the, you know, it's a door opening discovery, not an end in itself. Well, and they're doing, it sounds like a little bit more applied. Yes. Waiting until something's gotten a good application. Yeah, it seems like they wait for that now, which is probably why a lot of people die before they get the Nobel Prize, because sometimes it takes a long time for technologies to actually, or discoveries to actually be applicable. Yeah. So for those of you out there still waiting for your Nobel Prize in string theory, chances are you will never get the good parking spot on campus. Keep waiting. By the time, if you do get it and you're still alive, you probably won't be allowed to drive anymore. Oh dear. All right. Well, those are the Nobel prizes so far. There will be more in literature and there are many more Nobel's that are given out for peace and other other categories, but these are the big science ones. And so I think they're always worth a shout out. Let's talk about Stonehenge or like, I don't know, Stack of Rockshenge. Why? Oh, the headline that caught my eye here though is the Stonehenge study upends a hundred year old theory. Suggests further discoveries to come. OK. So this is a team of researchers at the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University UK. It might be how you pronounce it. It might not be. They've made a discovery surrounding Stonehenge Stone 80, also known as the Alter Stone and suggests it did not come from the same source as the other stones. So there's kind of basically two sets of stones that make up Stonehenge. There's the really, really big ones which are really, really big. Some of them weigh as much as 55 tons and those ones came from 15 miles away. They've identified where those rocks were sourced. They're sourced somewhat locally, but 15 miles is still. That's a distance to drag 50 ton rocks. Yeah, because this is 5,000 year ago man and women who probably didn't have a whole lot else to do. So they decided we would move big rocks from one location to another because you got to do something. And weekends here, what are we going to do? Let's move some big rocks around. And then it became a thing. One person started to do it and then other people were like, oh, I'm going to also help you move that big rock because I'm also bored. So that's where the big ones come from. Now there's all these smaller stones that they're laying on the ground and around. And these ones are, they're called the blue stones. And they're called blue stones because if you get them wet, they have a little bluish hue or tinge to them. And those rocks don't come from the local quarries. Those rocks have been identified as coming from about 140 miles away. But they're smaller. So we need to do the drag. Much smaller, but they're still big rocks. They're still really big rocks, but they're not 55 tons. But some of them still require 140 miles of many people dragging them or being carried on the backs of mastodons as I picture it. Glaciers? Did glaciers do it? No. So these rocks are actually, they're from the redstone quarry. Not quarry. It's not a quarry. I'm going to mess it up if I don't look it up. Redstone formation. The old red sandstone formation, that was created 400 million years ago when Europe and North America collided. So that stone formation is actually on both sides of the Atlantic, up into Greenland, up into Norway. And that's where they can tell that these came from. And the closest source of that is 140 miles away from where Stonehenge is located. So it's a very specific type of rock that's being used. And they have, you know, passed many studies have looked at these rocks and said, oh yes, they came from this region, this Welsh basin, far, far away. Okay, except the altar stone. The altar stone's composition is a little different. The barium levels are wrong. The composition of the mineralogy involved is off. It doesn't look as though this altar stone, which I think is the largest of the blue stones, doesn't look like it came from the same location. And what it suggests is it may be a much younger formation than the 400 million year old, old red stone, red sandstone formation. And it may become, they think it could come from as far away as maybe Scotland. They don't know. It's a mystery now. It's another going in search of the altar stone origin of stone. Now, why? Why bring all these stones together? Okay. What? I have the answer. So there's all those astronomical theories is like, oh, because it's a clock who are looking at the stars, which very possible because, you know, an oldie really ancient times. That was the only thing on the big screen. It was the stars. But this is also England where you probably couldn't see the stars very much because it's always foggy. Well, out of the year. So what do you guys, you know, and they've gone back and tested a lot of these astrological theories and found, you know, they can fit for a minute, but they're not really great. And so those have mostly been debunked. The real uses of Stonehenge that are archaeologically discovered that I have evidence behind them have all been found before. Or sorry, we're all found after the thing was built. So it was built over, you know, many hundreds of years. It started 5000 years ago. And they say, OK, so it's initially was also a place where they were burying the dead. But when you say initially, initially is about 500 years after they think it was built. So it would sort of be like if modern humans went to a medieval castle and said it started burying people there. And then future later humans were like, oh, the purpose of building the castles is so that 20th century man could bury people there. Like it's even the whole like earliest evidence they have seems somewhat disconnected. Yeah. It's a little suspect. Yeah. Yeah. So they don't quite understand how that works. Now, the point though is it's a place. It's been used as a place of secret healing. It's been used as a place for contemplation. Any sort of exactly selfies is the current modern use. We do a lot of selfies there now. That's the ritual that the current modern human is using. But if there was a local tradition, druidic, you know, town hall meeting, PTA meeting, whatever was going on. If you live near Stonehenge. Right. Come gather here. Incorporate the henge into whatever. Yeah. Your thing was because it was just too cool to like not use. You're going to have your town meeting and the, the musty moldy smelling little convention hall that you built. The old soggy wood. It's not even a convention hall. Take everybody out. We're going to the henge. We're going to talk about the town's business. And then we're going to have a party. The beginning of festivals. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's also, it's great. Perfect. Like that may have been actually the best explanation. You build something like this. It becomes a gathering spot. And so maybe that was the whole point in ancient times. You know, they're trying to add this 5,000 year old, you know, the village. They're like, hey, how come nobody ever visits? Oh, what's here? Oh, I know. Well, create a tourist attraction. Something for people to come from far and away and trade their pelts with us. It was the first tourist attraction. But I, but I like also the idea that, you know, the different stones had different colors when they got wet. So it, if, you know, this is Wales. This is, you know, a wet, rainy area. This is, you know, probably misty and damp all the time. But, or maybe you'd get it went on purpose during the, during like the harvest season or something like, depending on what time of year it was, maybe, but it's interesting that different aspects of stonehenge incorporated stones that had different coloration and different components. And so the altar stone was different. It says red stone versus the blue stone versus, you know, and so it's decoration. It makes it fancy. They didn't have LED splash lights back then. They had, maybe fire, right? Well, they would have definitely had fire. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But it's cool. That's really neat. And back pain. Back pain. Because those rocks are really big. So the very, very heavy rocks that, yeah, that they were sending for sure. Okay. You know what's interesting though? And I just, I'm sorry. Last thing I will mention about stonehenge, and I'll never mention it ever again. Ever, ever, ever. Never. I'm gonna never talk about stonehenge after this. Liar. No, I'm not. I'm not. But you know, like how everybody takes selfies and nowadays, like you were pointing out, like it's very common. Where's the ancient stonehenge art? Like where's the, like, Neolithic cave painting from 200 miles away where somebody has got a cave painting of them and the stonehenge is like in the background. Like, I went there and saw that. Like, where's, did that, did that not get invented yet? Like. It should have been. It would have been. 5,000 years ago. It seems like it would be an impressive thing. Oh, not even 5,000 years ago. Like the medieval Britons were, you know, the Dark Age. Yeah. No, I guess it would be, yeah, is that the, no. No. 5,000 years ago. Older than that. Like, older than medieval. It's older than medieval. Yeah. 5,000 years ago. Oh, no, no. I know the 5,000 years is older. My name is, when's that Dark Ages, that post-Roman, I guess it's before the Middle Ages. I don't know when stuff happened. Before medieval. But post-Roman was like the Dark Ages and like the, as the Roman things that were built throughout London decayed and the people were left uneducated. They didn't know who made them. Right. Like the memory of British history was just completely lost on the people living there. Yeah. Looking at this old, ancient Roman ruins from a century or two past and having no idea who built them. Like that's like, there's an insane disconnect historically between the Roman occupation and then this sort of period of, gosh knows what was going on. But there was a, but Stonehenge fell into that. Stonehenge became somewhat inseparable from Roman architecture in terms of when it was built. So that there were people that thought that this was older. Yeah. Because the people didn't know. Yeah. And so the whole Druidic mythology that we have about Stonehenge came about from people thinking it was built after the Romans. Right. That this was a Druidic culture that had built it post-Roman. And so like there's all like, like almost everything, like if you ever see a headline that says, you know, mystery of Stonehenge, it's just usually meaning misinformation about Stonehenge. Yeah. There we go. Finally debunked. The misinformation. Yes. Again. Yeah. Finally we're identifying it and debunking it. Yes. Because almost everything anybody's ever thought about Stonehenge has been wrong. And that's why I think it was probably just a tourist attraction, something to do on the weekends, because it actually is a better explanation than or as good as anything else that's been put forward. Yo, pre-Roman agricultural festivals, harvest festivals, things related to the solstice, like all sorts of weird. Yeah. I don't know. Whatever. Could have been an agricultural calendar. I don't think so. You know what farmers? Why would you? Why would you bring the big old stones for? Well, here's the problem with the agricultural calendar thing. Farming agriculture societies hadn't worked to do starting early in the morning until the sun went down. They didn't have time for big rock moving. Now, if you're going up and down the countryside and you're hunting and you have time to like, you know, we'll go get the rock and then we'll hunt our way back and we'll hunt our way there, whatever. You know, you can hunt and gather while you're rock collecting, but you can't if you're a farmer. You've got to stick where you are and do your farming work. And they could tell the seasons by the seasons and the stars and the leaves. They didn't need... And they're very square rocks, you know, as opposed to like something that would... I'm a farmer and I dug these out of the ground. So anyway, we're going to move forward past Stonehenge because we want to do a tight 90 here. I will talk faster from here on out. Okay. So a study published in molecular biology of this cell, researchers at ETH Zurich have identified what they call the excluzome. The excluzome. Anyway, it's like plasmids, which are rings within bacteria. They're rings in cells. These little plasmids are... They have little membranes. But this is... These are DNA rings and they're not in the nucleus. They're not chromosomes. They are in the cell body, in like just the mushy stuff that's outside of the nucleus. And so the question is, why is this DNA outside of the nucleus? What's going on there? It's not necessarily DNA that is from a virus, but it could be. It's also potentially they think DNA that has... that the nucleus decided isn't necessary anymore and kicked out. But what they did is they looked in their study that they've just published at these excluzomes and they've shown that the cell nucleus weeds out these DNA rings and deposits them with these plasmids in the cell plasma. And they have a membrane around them, kind of like the nucleus has a membrane around it, except the nucleus has a membrane that as it develops it fills in, like there's the gaps get all filled in and it's a solid structure. The excluzome has little gaps and it's like a baby nucleus. Like it tried but then it couldn't and it didn't. And so what they're trying to figure out is whether or not this is like a hygiene function of the cells to protect chromosomes. These plasmids were kicked out of the nucleus. Maybe they have genes from viruses or bacteria that the nucleus doesn't want in there. Maybe they have the potential to disrupt cell physiology. The big question though they also have in certain cancer cells they have telomeres involved. And so there's a huge question now about whether these little rings of DNA, whether they are involved in immune responses and whether the cells actually like in lupus or multiple sclerosis or other autoimmune diseases, whether there's something happening that includes that the cell reacts to the DNA that's been kicked out of the nucleus. It's not supposed to do anything anymore but there it is floating around in the cell. And then the immune system responds to it. So they know that there's protein that binds on to the DNA in these rings. The proteins that bind on to them can signal cascades to release inflammatory substances within the cell. So this might like if these rings got in there it could tell the cell that there's a pathogen like a virus or something that needs to be kicked out or maybe the cell needs to die and maybe apoptosis needs to happen to control it. But with these excluzome rings they can't really get in there and attack it and kill it and so it's a continued response. And the researchers say the body keeps getting the signal that the problem is still there. And so the pro-inflammatory signaling cascade doesn't subside but continues and continues and continues. But we don't really understand them and now this is just a new thing that we're finding that there's this structure that's like an organelle that's something in there in the cell and it's impacting the functioning of the cell. It's impacting the immune system and how everything's functioning. And they're wondering if maybe this is a callback to early cell evolution that maybe the excluzome was like the early attempt at making a cell nucleus and so our cells kind of still let it happen even though it's not necessary anymore. Yeah. So these are but these are healthy cells. This isn't connected to any pathology. No. Nope. They're just there in ourselves. And they don't know that they contain anything. They don't know that they're holding on to anything. They're just DNA rings. Because it was. Yeah. So two different things. One is there's an organelle that was recently discovered that was sometimes hoarding phosphate. Would that be right? Mm-hmm. Something like that. Okay. Right. And was only releasing it in times of stress. Yeah. When the when the body wasn't producing itself. So it was sort of like a reserve. So there's still hidden mechanisms in cells. You would think the cell because you got the picture of the cell in the textbook you think we got it all figured out. We got it. Yeah. No. There's other little things. So I would love to see this thing studied for. The other thing that was interesting was just reading about a study on Alzheimer's. Mm-hmm. You want to say it's Alzheimer's? Right. That was being caused by mitochondria kicking out DNA and then leaving the cell. Right. And then we could go to neighboring cells and was creating this cascade effect of all the cells trying to kick out. Hmm. This unwanted DNA portion. Yeah. And that was creating like a so it will be it'll be very interesting to as they as they track this and other like my goodness. Here we are the height of our biological knowledge. And we're still discovering stuff at the cell level. Right. Well I mean just in the last decade at the point where we can actually start really looking at stuff at high resolution in the oh like there's there's so much happening especially in terms of not just slices of the cell or just it's a snapshot but like the cell and films of it and how it works and yeah there's so much we still have to figure out. And of course too bad we don't have like a super at a second fast pulsing lasers. Oh my goodness. See this stuff. Real time we could understand cool fast X-rays and all sorts of stuff. Yeah. All right. What do you have next? Do I have something that oh it's time for Justin's animal corner with Justin the new normal segment of the show. That's what completely new. That's completely new. Okay. Just in time. The chilling tale of snow flies self amputation survival in certain death. So this is a story about snow flies. This is in publishing current biology. And the research details how these snow flies which can survive and still be moving around in sub zero Celsius temperatures below freezing temperatures as far as they even recorded as low as negative 10 below freezing. Which is unusual for flies. Which is unusual for any insect most insects. Most insects are just dead at this point. Which is why we like to live in cold places so that parasites don't kill us. Yeah. So these snow flies they can be seen at high altitudes in the Pacific Northwest. Living in glaciers in the mountains of Washington. California maybe as well. When there's snowpack. But they skitter around these little these little what are they called again I gotta find the what kind of insect is it it's not just a fly. It's a you're the one who knows these things. I'm the one who knew it a second crane fly. Thank you brain. A flightless. They're flightless crane flies flightless is the important part to point out because they skitter about on the surface of the snow. It's thought that they lay their eggs below the snowpack and where it keeps a nice study or temperature for insulated. There's been some question about how they survive in these cold cold temperatures. And they hired a bunch of hired they enlisted a bunch of citizen scientists skiers and mountaineers people who are going up where the snowpack is. And they say well if you see any of them they'll catch them bring them back and there will be a bounty. Big reward you'll be contributing to science and they collected about 256 adult snow flies 20% of which were missing one or more of their legs. So they got him back to the lab and they used some thermal imaging to observe how the snow flies maintain their ability to walk through the snowpack. So the large body temperature is well below freezing. And at some point ice crystallization begins to form within the fluids of the of the leg. And this spreads pretty rapidly. Takes about a half second for that frozen leg. Crystallization to move up bodies vital organs. But within that half a second the snow crane flies do something really interesting. They just kick off the leg. The leg is gone. No more crystallization no more icy death. And what they found was that this is actually something that they have that exists in other crane flies and actually a number of other insects that is usually triggered by something grabbing hold of and pulling on the leg. So it's sort of like lizards that have the detachable tail you know catch a lizard by the tail and they just let you have it and take off. I've never actually done that. Have you done that? No I've never done that. Actually how about no I don't think I have. So snow flies these snow flies as soon as their leg begins to freeze they just get rid of that leg. Now in terms of a survival condition it may not seem like getting rid of one of your legs is a great survival but they've got others and you know they've got six we have two. Crane fly life isn't that long anyway like it's better to to live with five legs or four than it is to die today you know it's one of those but a thing must happen like automatically because they also notice that when you pull on a snow flies leg unlike other crane flies that have these sort of detachable legs they don't come loose it's not a mechanical trigger anymore they think that there are neurons in the in the leg that are being that are monitoring temperature change and so when that crystallization event starts to take effect they get rid of the leg they kick it off so yeah I mean you don't you don't want frostbite to result in gangrene that then results in sepsis that then takes you out so if you can naturally avoid the process that is going to take out the whole organism it's going to be better overall and in this case it's that ice crystallization that takes place in about a half a second reaching the vital organs so it's got to be pretty much automatic and quick you got to be ready always be ready to self amputate it seems like a kind of an extreme environment to choose to live in like aren't there warmer places that the snow fly could live but it likes it there it likes it there because there's also not very many things that eat crane flies at that temperature there's not a lot of predators around but what do they eat so what's the ecosystem for these flightless crane flies I don't know what they're eating but I know this is because it lacks actually nothing they only drink water so they yeah they're they're larvae or whatever eat do all the eating and then once you're a full grown crane fly you drink water but you you're done eating so they don't even need the food right they're just there to breed after they're a larva they're just there to breed and they breed on the surface of the snow in full view they have been observed mating for 30 minutes or more this is an unusual activity because normally if you did that any other crane fly would for 30 minutes exposed like that would be eating so they're very well adapted and they're enjoying they're enjoying all the benefits of not having any predators they lay their eggs beneath the snow that place is not really disturbed there's nothing you know again they're hidden away it's such a perfect environment for them that it's worth amputating a few legs once in a while such a nice problem is it's going to probably go away by the climate change all that kind of stuff the snowpack where the snow flies live is predicted to be gone 70% of it will be gone by the 2080s loss of snow packs predicted to increase thermal variability and decrease temperatures under the snow where the snow flies lay their eggs also the things that they eat the plants likely won't be surviving for a whole lot longer the freeze thought cycles I'd love to know though this is a whole thing as glaciers shrink and the ecosystems change so we know mosquitoes are food for lots of organisms these snow flies are they food for a lot like what are they if they are unable to have the ice to lay their eggs on or the water what is that going to impact downstream so like you have to think of it in the food web perspective how is the ecosystem going to be impacted yeah so you know how I was just saying like they don't have many predators because of the temperature yeah but they have some they the predators that do rely on them also don't have a lot of other options anything that's eating a snow crane fly there's not much else to eat doesn't have a lot of options so that impact in an environment like that is going to accelerate quicker be more noticeable up that food chain a lot faster than it might in a more you know diverse abundant life yeah environment interesting okay now I'm depressed but let's not talk about let's talk about something less depressive let's not yeah I have cats cats are nice I know you don't approve of cats most of the time but let's talk about cats their purring is awesome purr purr you know what that sounds like you know what that sounds like what are you going to say death very suppressed aggression purr no I've got concealer on today actually because the other morning my cat was sleeping with me under the blankets and got scared and clawed up my whole body and face to get out from under the blankets and I had scratches to scratch my whole arm which is pretty funny I was like oh that would have been a nice morning to lose my eye okay great anyway that didn't happen I love my little tiny predators that I have in my house you know that I've kept inside who may or may not have talk so I don't know but I love them as crazy as they are and then they come and they cuddle and they go purr but see I make that sound and I have to breathe in and I can't keep making that sound because I'm making it with my tongue as opposed to my vocal cords and it turns out so cats produce the purr with their vocal cords and there has been a debate about how cats produce the purr for a very long time and so in this study researchers were like well we'll just take cat vocal cords put them in dishes and see what we can do with them and see what happens turns out cat vocal cords are really awesome and they're kind of similar to the big cats that roar their larynxes produce the purr without necessarily having to have that like inhale exhale nervous connection so it just they it's like walking where once you start walking you keep walking until there is a command to stop walking you know so there is there doesn't necessarily have to be nervous stimulation to keep the purr going the purr just happens and so these vocal cords are also specially structured and they've got this what they call a pad on them our vocal cords don't have pads we have singers who like to sing really loud and pretend that they can do like vocal fry type stuff and then they get polyps on their vocal cords that have to be removed and maybe they won't be able to sing anymore well cats they have these pads that are like we're already there we're padded we have insulation everything's great it's gonna be good it's all okay they did these stimulations to cat vocal cords and found that this pad is very special and also that the innervation of the vocal cords the trachea the larynx it's all very unique and the cat purr is this it's a very special thing that the way that they've like kind of like stonehenge breaking old ideas this is like a study because they've looked at the anatomy and the physiology and the neurophysiology they've like turned over old hypotheses of how purring happens and we have a new understanding of how kept cats purr at last at last at last we know why and how the cats can purr it's very exciting and so now the question is do we need a new theory of purring maybe we do but anyway these vocal cords make very low frequency sounds similar to human vocal fry but a little bit lower and they don't consciously control it that must be annoying is that my fridge no that's you you're doing it again what am I doing I love this in science they have a quote from Bonnie Beaver a veterinary scientist at Texas A and M University who was not involved in this study but I love this quote purring has historically had a complex non scientific explanation so we've got science to study purring right now it's very exciting purring it's like vocal fry but better and then my final cat story isn't really cats necessarily but related to all sorts of mammals and if Blair were here she'd really love this story because we've talked about fluorescing animals a lot this isn't bioluminescent animals so this isn't like animals going I'm producing light these are animals that fireflies or deep sea whatever creatures no these are animals you want to take with you to the next black light rave that you go to so there have been studies where they've reported different animals glowing under ultraviolet light and it's like who glows under ultraviolet light so a group of researchers took it upon themselves to go through their local museum emology section and expose all sorts of animals to ultraviolet light and it turns out so many mammals fluoresce we've got I mean you'll go under a black light and your teeth and your eyes the whites of your eyes and the whites of your teeth are going to glow but what we find that one trench coat I have is going to it lights up because it's got little what do you call it lint or flule the lint on your black sweatshirt all of it lights up it does so they photographed preserved and frozen platypus specimens because if you're going to look and see who fluoresces you want to know whether or not it's a platypus because they do everything else so yes the platypus fluoresces it's very exciting it's very pretty UV light makes it very lovely and then they looked at a whole bunch of other organisms like polar bears and wombats and armadillos and cats and bats and rats and zebras and all sorts of things and they found that very very very many animals do fluoresce the majority of them are nocturnal so there could be something to do with maybe the the the transition sunset or sunrise when ultraviolet light is very dominant there could be something there that's related to identification and communication but at this point there is no evidence that fluorescence has anything to do with anything and it's possibly just a factor related to just proteins proteins involved in keratin and structures for skin and hair and teeth and stuff okay but hang on wait a second but did you just give us the connection that it tended to be nocturnal animals or is that just no it tends to be or is that just what they happen to look at because that sounds like a connection that seems like it would be very important and not just a coincidence and I would now also want to know about the vision of all of these animals to see if they have some infrared vision and if that became a selection for mating because it would get them easier to find each other over time and things like this there you go yeah we don't know so these are the next questions these are the directions that this research will now go in because it's like hey what are why oh they're fluorescent what's going on we just you know we just looked at mouse pee and we know that fluorescent but jeez there's all this other stuff yeah so it's a it's a big question as to why why do nocturnal animals seem to fluoresce more than others aquatic species are less fluorescent burrowing animals fluoresce a lot also so you know what's happening there is it just that hair is heavily pigmented or is there something else going on we don't know we don't know they can figure out how a cat purrs they can figure out pretty much anything yeah and this has been this has been Kiki's Animal Corner you see how we did that it was Justin and I went in and Kiki is on the way back Gary is asking is Blair ever coming back I don't know you know I sent her on assignment to the Stonehenge she's doing children animal studies right now to investigate the henge and then the study came out that it was like overturned the thing anyway so it's kind of ended up being pointless the trip but she's still there she has not come back from the henge and we're still waiting child return from child henge anyway when I told my family about animal cat fluorescence of course my husband pulled out a black light and they grabbed the cat stop just pause it for a second they forced my cat into pause the story for a second and she fluoresced okay your husband hang on I said the positive story you can tell me whether or not the cat was but here's the thing yeah I know that's black lights a grown adult man yep and you're like oh yeah there's a flashing story he's like let me go get my black lights which he bought at home depot for like eight dollars and he's super excited about because they're like LED black lights and they're super like energy they're replacing his old black lights okay I just want to be clear look at this it's a really cool light they built it he was very excited about his black I mean don't get me wrong I'm completely jealous of the fact that you know I wouldn't even thought to look for black lights in the last 40 years 30 years but 20 years 10 years but anyway and so your cat did fluoresce he said I'll be right back and ran outside grabbed the black light came inside the rest of the cat it's also like new where they were like I could understand like ah we have black lights they're in the attic and they're a box one of the boxes in the garage he's like nope got this no exactly where I've got labeled it on the shelf here's the black light in case of emergency got a mobile battery pack so I can carry it around now my cat's sitting here on the couch looking very cranky sorry causing everything I missed everything but she fluoresced she was fluorescent she has a lot of white fur did you compare it to your other you got like six or seven cats no I have two cats but nobody else can pick up the other cat and I wasn't in the room so we're gonna have to do the experiment over again I will report back but I also want to just like to be sure like let's get some on nocturnal animals I don't even know what that is squirrel squirrel nocturnal like I don't even know what's nocturnal anymore it seems like I don't know I would love to trap the squirrels and the bunnies in my backyard anyway so I could do that bunnies probably aren't nocturnal the bunnies keep eating my plants anyway this is This Week in Science joining us for this exciting adventure into cats, stonehenge, purring fluorescence and so many other things we love that you are here joining us for this episode thank you so much for joining us if you are enjoying the show please head over to twist.org and hit the Patreon link Patreon is really how we support ourselves we're listener supported so you are a huge part of supporting what we do each and every week without you we really can't keep it all up so I 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are interested in twist merchandise we have hats and mugs and bags and towels and shower curtains and all sorts of things really if you go to twist.org click on the Zazzle link you'll be able to peruse our store and see what we have to offer the holidays are coming up so for those of you who do know people who enjoy twist or even if you want to buy yourself a present Zazzles where it's at oh my goodness we are still going with more science and sanity and yeah I don't know when Blair's coming back we haven't talked to her lately but I'm sure she will be back very soon let's talk about mushroom micro dosing how does that sound how many of you out there have are in a place where mushrooms are relatively legal or at least not completely illegal it's interesting here in Oregon and it's been a weird little bit of time psilocybin has been put forward similar to ketamine and other substances to help with depression to help with anxiety to help with a whole bunch of psychological issues and there's a study out this last week hey Justin you're back there's a study out this last week in nature where it's molecular psychiatry one of the nature journals they gave psilocybin to rats but not big doses micro doses so the idea of a micro dose is that it is a sub hallucinogenic dose it is a sub like the dose that would normally make you feel the effects of the psilocybin it's lower than that and so there is an idea in the psychedelic community that LSD mushroom psilocybin micro dosing can be beneficial to behavior and then it can be beneficial to instead of taking citalopram instead of taking zoloft instead of taking all any number of antidepressants that these micro doses can be helpful for a number of things there have been studies with people that have been kind of equivocal as to what's actually happening some studies have said there's an effect there have been many studies where people took micro doses of LSD or psilocybin nothing there was no difference between the control group and other groups we were talking about and then to clarify there's other studies where they did macro dosing where they saw really positive results differences between control groups and control groups and very positive outcomes yes so there's an interesting question right now about if we give little teeny tiny doses over time instead of big doses at one time how's that gonna impact people and the problem with human self-reporting or with any kind of involvement where people are answering questions about how they feel or what's happening the problem with the field of psychology the self-reporting bias is an issue and we also understand the placebo effect is an issue if you want to have an effect you might think that you have an effect and so here is a study with rats not humans with rats so it's not people but they gave these rats micro dose like regimen with repeated low doses of psilocybin at a dose derived from occupancy at rat brain 5 ht2a receptors in vivo so what they're doing is they're looking at the lowest dose of psilocybin that they could give these rats that would lead to the serotonin receptors and a particular group of serotonin receptors these 5 ht2a receptors and there's multiple serotonin receptors in our brains but these specific receptors they created this system where it's like okay we know this micro dose is linking to these it's grabbing on to the receptors are grabbing on to them and so there should be some kind of effect they determined that there was no tolerance the rats were fine there were no signs of anxiety they didn't have any signs of what would be hallucination or anadonia or anything like they were fine they just seemed normal the rats were okay so there was there were no deficits in their behavior whatsoever but over time they started injecting the rats like they're like I'm going to grab you and inject you with a needle which is stressful and so stressful situations are normally going to lead to a comforting response and some animals respond more respond better than others some respond with a little bit of grooming and then they're okay others go down the road kind of compulsive activity self grooming that is kind of OCD levels there's a lot of stuff that goes on and so it sounds like you're identifying then like when I say this amygdala amygdala response in those ones is not turning is it thalamus? for the stress for the fear and anger but the thalamus is the big area that's related to these kind of behavioral responses it's connected to the amygdala and it's all the thalamus is all in there it sounds like there's continually to relive the stress that is being signaled out again and again and again and that's why they keep trying to groom or self calm or self suit and so what they found with the rats that they gave the micro doses of psilocybin is that they had less of that they had less self grouping less self soothing less of the proxies for human compulsive actions and they also had that they looked at their brains and they saw that there were increased expressions of certain receptors related to serotonin increase in synaptic density and so things that would normally be related to potentially PTSD or responses related to traumatic events and anxious responses obsessive compulsive disorders this links in I mean it's rats not people but what they've seen in these rats links has been very highly with work to suggest it could be useful to use psilocybin micro dosing as a therapeutic intervention for certain behaviors in rats and again it sounds like it is a it is all of those sound to me like affecting the amygdala's ability to continue and there was a there's been other research that sort of seems like it's on this thing but it that's why it's so good against things like PTSD is because that is the amygdala part of the brain that tells you fight or flight that in this human brain sometimes gets stuck on and keeps sending the stress the alert the fight or flight and it's like you're in a normal situation at a grocery store but something loud happens and that makes you associate with a previous traumatic experience and instead of just calming yourself you go into an anxiety or a stress response and so part of that also that's involvement is that all of this really high level thinking that humans do is a part of the brain that sort of developed later than the amygdala and the amygdala has communication to that part of our brain but there isn't really a good line back it's really hard even to think your way through rationally logically to soothe the whole ancient part of the brain because it's not built to listen it's not built to listen to the primitive animal for input it's got its own inputs from the sensors that it takes and decides what to do and it's designed to tell the animal how to react so it's not listening to your conscious brain which is part of the problem of addressing things like PTSD disorders is that no matter how logical and reasonable and rational you know that you're not in danger or there's no reason to be upset about something you can't communicate you can't turn off the part of the brain that's saying this screaming this in you sorry my cat just attacking so the micro dosing it may work I I know there's been a lot of push also to remove the hallucinogenic effects associated with as though they were separate I think they're connected I think that the trip that you go on when you take these is part of that process it might be part of releasing yeah who knows is part of that removing the filter and allowing the amygdala to be somewhat maybe even communicated to by the conscious brain and so look I had the therapeutic situations create that create a a comfy cafe environment that somebody can chill in and do this have these experiences make safe places for this to happen but I think micro dosing shouldn't just be ruled out because people are like you don't want people tripping out because you know what people have done this a lot of times throughout history and the latest black mirror had somebody doing LSD and then immediately jumping off of a balcony like who apparently would have been experienced with this too so it's just like that is a somebody said they saw that in a 60s readers digest yeah and that's about how common that would be a story from the 60s in a readers digest and a story from the 2023s 2020s in a science fiction show like those are the accounts that we have of that taking place yeah I mean I agree that we don't know enough and I think we should be looking at all the options and the fact that we have financial and political forces that are influencing what is being studied and what's not being studied I'm excited though because over the last two decades we have seen more research into these substances than previously and it's like their restrictions have been relaxed so that we're actually starting to look at how these things can be used therapeutically and it's really great so I don't know I think there's a lot of fear that has been fomented for a very long time and the best way to reduce it is for all of those afraid people to macrodos and then you won't be afraid anymore no no no no we're not recommending that no we aren't not as a group me individually you're not even I can't even we're not recommending anything at all we're just talking about this as curious human beings you know what I'd be curious to know do you have more stories that's what I'm curious about do you have more stories I do let's hear it so here's a story that I feel like we've covered before but it's new this is in published in Royal Society Open Science it is positive impact of sleep on recall of multiplication facts basically what they did is they took 77 adults and they split them up and had one group learn a bunch of complex multiplication problems right before going to sleep and the other group had the same lesson first thing in the morning then they would go through a series of being tested on that the next next day or being given new problems they were answering these online and they'd have to recall stuff that they learned from an earlier lesson and which group do you think learned better the ones that got sleep the ones that got sleep right after learning so we've talked about this in a few different ways one was an alcohol study which is interesting and one was a study but the idea is kind of like in the past we've seen a pattern of if you don't have competing information the brain is able to lock in new knowledge better so that if you learn all of this complex math first thing in the morning and then say you go on to a chemistry class or an English class or you go to work and have a really busy day where you have lots of duties and tasks responsibilities and things are shifting and then you get home and there's conversations with friends and your spouse and then you're doing some stuff and then the next day you're like hey what were the math questions we asked you at the beginning of your busy day you're like I have no idea I wouldn't remember but if you learn them before going to bed and then get quizzed the next night that knowledge that you were acquiring stuck part of the reason I think is that there's nothing competing with it so as the brain locks something into memories there's only one current thing that it has to work on we're going to talk about this in a little bit because I actually have some studies related to memory in a minute related to this so I'm interested in this let's keep going that's kind of it they don't know what the mechanism coding takes place but they have they do suggest that sleep confer the additional benefit on recall they do point out that they they have the limitation of the study that there is a lack of comparative stimuli with similar complexity of encoding that would demonstrate that this was sleep sleep specifically related or that it was math specifically related so they kind of leave that open but the idea though is if you got a kid who you're messed up you're not going to remember any math if you got a kid who's struggling in math make sure they go to bed make sure that instead of the bedtime story you know put that aside for a minute and maybe do the math lesson right before bed or incorporated into the bedtime story if they fall asleep during the math lesson hey they got to sleep that's great if they make it through though then it may lock it in better it may be when that math classes so also if there's a subject that you're you know and this is tricky because if you're trying to plan when to have classes during a day do you put that hard class it's going to require a lot of memory at the end of the day because in a way if you put it at the end of the day there's less things that compete with it before you go to sleep but if you put it at the end of the day you're also more tired when you come to the class so are you as good of a listener are you as good at paying attention according to this study that doesn't matter so much as having the time to encode they also compared they had people with different ability levels of learning these these math problems and they found that you know you could by taking account of who's just innately good at math versus those who struggled with it didn't matter if they measured up better than their peers on the same level in terms of recall so it wasn't just some people are better at math there were different levels within the group and as those tracked through they still saw improvements in the recall depending on who got to get to sleep right away versus who had to go off and have the rest of their day before they got to go to sleep right away regardless of what group they were in the rest of their day before before they were able to really encode and lock these things in interesting so listening to this show study right before you go to sleep or listening to this show while you sleep main code I like coded in there Gary Ellis this is why I remember Johnny Carson yeah this is why all the jokes from the late night shows are like in your brain exactly and does anybody remember a single episode of a morning show I don't I remember nothing from any morning no mornings are bad for memory also I don't watch morning shows that might also it was time for morning shows I don't know so let's talk about memory stories that were specifically related to memory and how it all works sometimes your brain knows when it's got it wrong and so like you were talking about like okay so maybe it's a program where you're given a bunch of questions related to math and then you're given a bunch more and then like later on you're asked to answer questions about those things that you've seen previously this study was related to words but not math but it was specifically monitoring behavior in the hippocampus in epilepsy patients while they were undergoing surgery so these were awake individuals having their neurons in their hippocampus recorded for their activity and the bottom line of this study that was just published out of the University of Pennsylvania is that the signals in the hippocampus change their frequency like the higher frequency or lower frequency and the frequency of the signals of the hippocampus indicate whether or not you're going to answer wrong or false memory so for example you're given a bunch of words related to flowers rose daisy I don't remember any other flowers but anyway you have a bunch of words and that's your list of flowers and then they test you on it later and you say daffodil but daffodil wasn't part of the hippocampus that you were trained on okay the hippocampus has a lower frequency response like it's like they've got these different oscillations which there's high frequency alpha beta oscillations and then there are lower frequency beta oscillations and so theta oscillations are what are seen when recording and a person is about to say daffodil and answer incorrectly but relatedly it's basically what they're looking at are false memories so they can tell the difference between recall and a logical guess yes wow and so what they were really trying to dig into is episodic memory episodic memory is a memory of an episode in your life so for example every morning you get up you get a cup of coffee you you know have some food maybe it's raisin bran or something like that I don't know what you eat in Denmark or eggs or whatever like every day you kind of do the same thing right? but then maybe one day you do something a little different somebody asks you what you did and you go back to your normal routine of oh yeah I ate raisin bran your hippocampus knows that you're answering incorrectly the frequency of the neurons responses is different so like it's like your hippocampus knows you want eggs and you're it's like is it know that you're wrong or is it the difference like I was saying between the way the brain recalls a stored memory versus the brain logically working to find an answer that would fit because that to me like those are two different maybe processes that are being observed and it can tell the difference between which one's actually actually taking place I'm curious to know whether or not I have recall at all or if everything that I do is just a logical guess like I feel like mine would just be me assuming that I drink coffee because I don't actually remember drinking this coffee I don't know what happened to it it's gone I assume I drink it but I don't recall doing it I'm gonna be in the right your neurons know what you did and then in the recall aspect it is the probability difference of the association right so what is the problem you say I did not drink coffee but you know you come up with that answer but there's a probability difference that changes the frequency of the neuronal response in the way that it is and your hippocampus is involved in not only encoding memories so like while you're sleeping after you've studied the math your hippocampus like you need sleep so that consolidation can occur so that your hippocampus can go boop you go this memory goes over here I need to make this association over here and the networks get created and during the day when it all comes back together the hippocampus again is kind of like the conductor the orchestra conductor and it's like the oboes are flat there's something up right here yeah so it's really fascinating that we have false recall we can be convinced of things like we've seen multiple times people on like legal defense stands like being kind of convinced that they've seen something when they really have it right and then testifying to the fact that they've seen something this is false recall there is actual difference in our in the way that the neurons in our hippocampus respond during false recall which I think is fascinating and it can be decoded and that is going to be interesting so that like this study could potentially lead to some really interesting work leading to understanding when people are actually recalling things falsely or when they're actually telling the truth so yeah I just have this like really interesting this is going to be very interesting because there are people who I have known in life who have photographic memories I know these people I have a friend you just go this date and she goes yeah I know exactly everything that happened on that day and so people with this innate ability can look at somebody of text look at it and then literally read it 10 minutes later they sleep so this is like like I don't mean they read it and then remember it 10 minutes later they can look at it and read it 10 minutes later that's what a photographic memory is it's like a picture it's in their head yeah that's recall when I have sort of a vague impression of the words that I have read that I can make sense out of because I got the concepts all in line and I can talk about them with some level of clarity but I have zero picture in my head of words I have no picture of the words I'm not reading anything so I'm wondering if this test was applied to a task like that between somebody with a photographic memory and somebody without when talking about concepts not necessarily a memory of an event but here's the thing to read versus later one is going to be recall and the other one I'm curious if it looks like a false memory in the way that it's generated because it's not recall it's concept reconstruction so this is a very fascinating subject now I want to get more follow up on this can we get one of these researchers on the this is going to be a fun interview let's talk about false memories I would love to see if we can get somebody involved in this because this is a very interesting area to talk about because you and I too have the different memory types have the different internal visualization types it's all over the internet this week has been huge the apple in the brain thing the Aventasia everybody's like oh my gosh I thought everybody could see an apple in their head and I'm like you obviously have not been listening to twist Jude yeah but then there's a question like is it the same thing for music like I actually hear music in my head so I don't see things I have a vague idea of things in my head but I hear music I hear voices yeah I didn't just say that yeah you did let's move on to my other study related to memory here's the thing here's the thing I just want to clarify something if the voices that you hear in your head yeah are your own nothing to worry about if the voices that you hear in your head are other people's may be a problem if the voice you hear in your head 24 7 is mine not me I'm going to tell you that is not what's happening in my head yeah that's not happening another really interesting study that came out this week related to memory came out in the journal neuron and there's been a huge question for years and years and years about like what are the cells that support memory right we got the neurons I've talked forever about the hippocampus the hippocampus goes and like chunks things out signals go places we've got cells there's a network right and then like when it gets replayed that network gets turned on again and tadaa memory gets replayed in your head but how does this all work and in this study researchers at New York University have shown that not neurons but cells that wrap around capillaries in the brain they're called parasites they work with neurons to help the formation of long-term memories these parasites influence not para sites but peri peri sites so peri sites they wrap around the capillaries and they can influence blood flow so they influence the amount of oxygenation they influence the amount of you know of metabolite removal they're influencing all sorts of stuff about around these cells and so these researchers are really excited because what they're really digging into is this cooperation between all the cell types that are in the brain and like forever we're just like oh it's the neurons, the neurons are everything and then we start going oh it's the glia the glia, tadaa you know and those are the ones that wrap around the neurons oh no, wow there's this other group of cells that they have now identified as really being important in memory they've shown previously that when parasites are lost or malfunction that's involved in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and other dementias they maintain the structural integrity of the capillaries they are also an important part of the blood brain barrier that we've talked about so many times and they release a factor called insulin like growth factor too this protein increases following learning in places like the hippocampus and so these researchers were like what happens if we mess up insulin growth factor too in brains and so of course not humans they messed it up in animals but they showed that production of this IGF-2 by parasites in the hippocampus gets enhanced by learning so when mice were subjected to memory tests and they had to associate a foot shock to learning to identify an object in a location or a particular place in a maze that learning ended up releasing IGF-2 from the parasites in the hippocampus that led to enhanced memory and so the parasites wrapped around the capillaries are working in concert with the neurons in the hippocampus that are involved in taking those things and shunting them out to other places and making sure that long-term memories are stored what cool so there's a what they call now there's a neurovascular unit regulating neuronal responses and functions of the blood brain barrier so you should probably be thinking about this related to brain injury inflammation neurodegenerative diseases and we've never really looked at this before so boom yeah so much we don't know and then the new thing comes out and you're just like oh my god this study excites me the last study I've got one more oh my gosh I've got a last story of course murder in Oxford murder this is a project that has been mapping medieval England's known murder cases has found that Oxford students the population of Oxford students was by far the most legally violent of any studied academics were just supposed to do their academia and like they're like I need to publish this paper yeah school used to be real different it was more Hogwarts I don't know it was kind of like Hogwarts if everybody Hogwarts had a sorter an ax on them and then instead of like I'll out magic you in this test and just win at each other whatever so this is a resource they have called medieval murder maps which I think you can go and google and find I think that's a thing that you're allowed to look at now these are investigations from 700 year old corners in quests and corner used to have a job not only is the you know to try to figure out who did what they were sort of investigate crime investigators as well as just looking at corpses they didn't estimate the per capita homicide rate and found that Oxford was four to five times higher than the late medieval London or York so those are the big cities back in those days Oxford was more dangerous than London 100 times more and actually according to this it's actually the murder rate was higher than it is in current modern day cities anywhere in England I'm just playing around with this medieval murder map which you can definitely go to and we'll link to the story on our website and you'll be able to get to it through this but you can pick the genders of who was murdered or who was the perpetrator and what day of the week so Sundays there were really only like 21 Sunday murders the weekend was not so busy apparently oh my gosh and it's all down King Street wait yeah that's one street you're looking at the murder rate of one street seriously that's the big street oh high street that's like the big street in Oxford yeah this is everybody would go to the pubs and then murder each other yeah that's basically what they kind of found because this was according to this they said Oxford had a deadly mix of conditions students were all male and typically aged between 1421 at a point when you know young men are usually kind of risk-staking they were all freed from being around family or their local priest or whatever they were putting this environment away from supervision this environment had lots of weapons lots of ale houses and lots of sex workers and there was a very diverse population at the university which had only 1500 students but they were from all these different parts of England and they all had very fierce sort of rivalries with each other that they brought with them you know regional rivalries and this sort of thing can't y'all just get along just just study come on peeps yeah so according to this at Thursday night in 1298 some argument between students by street tavern resulting in mass street brawl with swords and battle axes so also by the way by the way so I'm loading up this one here on Thursday night a poor scholar accidentally smites Matilda and kills her so Matilda was a sex worker Matilda who he decided accidentally didn't want to pay and so killed her so I'm gonna smash your head in or I think he it was a stabby fella well there upon Robert smote the doorkeeper two times with an Ashen staff which he born his hand when he would have smitten him a third time Matilda who was standing by leapt forward between them so that she received on her head the blow which Robert to have given the doorkeeper oh no that's a different story than the one I was even thinking of that's Matilda, poor Matilda oh there's so many students attack a constable of the peace harps, vials, insults and a stabbing thank you the researchers say that circumstances that frequently led to violence are familiar to us today such as young men with group affiliations doing sex and alcohol during periods of leisure on the weekends weapons were never far away and male honor had to be protected but I really really love the way that these historian scientists have labeled these events Alan stabs William from Devon in the neck oh Alan, oh William and you know some of these stories too are not just students attacking students there's one where three of the teachers attack a kid from a different region and murder him what the teachers there's infighting and it's just a blade of it anyway this is by the way what you're seeing here is what the Florida school system will it's not already it will look like as they continue to do this everybody carry a gun everywhere even on campus this is why it's not guns that kill people they're right it's people with weapons usually young men who are not risk averse and very sensitive when it comes to their feelings they're going around killing people and this is any place where you allow people to have all kinds of weapons at this age this has always been the case now the solution to all of this why this didn't destroy Britain is because very soon after this period where the murder rate was insanely high in the greatest university London had more murders but it was per capita not per capita though London had way more murders I'm looking at that map right now London was London so one thing that helped clean all of this up the black death came shortly after and wiped out so much of the population that whether you were from anywhere oh my gosh it's good to see another human face I haven't seen walking for days and it's just been nothing but dead people and finally you know yeah this is hours of fun just in time for Halloween medieval murder maps is full of stories of medieval murder for ridiculous reasons and in ridiculous ways this is exciting thank you this is like medieval it's amazing what you do is that as you read the reports of who killed who and why it happened and who was responsible you also have to keep in mind that none of it is true likely because because they had juries of convenience back in those days or judges judge panels of convenience that would try to come up with a reason why it was justified for the person with influence to have committed murder and why it was completely a crime for this person who claims not to have been there to have committed the crime like so there's going to be like there's a very thick layer of whoever's writing this is probably doing so from a very influence at the time medieval time kind of perspective so they're taking whatever information is available to you know and so whoever whoever wrote the history in the first place is influencing what we know now well yeah yeah but the stories are still good but also know that like all the murders are probably innocent all the victims had it coming well maybe maybe not hang on that can't always be true hey science last week we asked people to ask stupid questions and I got a question what do we think about the skinwalker ranch my answer is I don't think about it okay you will have to tune in to the show two weeks ago when we talked about this you did talk about it I did yeah with Brian honestly though my answer is I don't think about it it's not even I don't even really it's not in my zone of awareness I ignore it here's what skinwalker ranch is in a nutshell you can go and see like UFO things and Bigfoot you go there and they like go you might have an experience no no no so here's the real story the real story is that the land was owned by somebody who got to give them a no bid millions of dollars contract to study UFOs and they collected that they created a call center on the skinwalker ranch where they collected stories about when people would report UFOs and they were supposed to filter it up and analyze them and see which ones were real or whatever there was never science fiction stuff happening there until that program and they needed funding and they started telling stories as though they were taking place on the ranch but the ranch itself would never had any form of supernatural anything about it that's not why anything was brought there or done there it was just that's where the guy owned land who got this federal funding from his buddy who was the senator from Nevada and that's the story we don't need to talk more about it we can say we don't think about it it's fine no I did think about it and it turns out like the whole and now and now it's a show and now it's a ghost hunter show because the same people by the way the same person who's like I worked for the federal government actually worked for the skinwalker ranch guy who got this contract he didn't work directly for the government he was doing his UFO investigation nonsense it was government funded but he was working for the skinwalker ranch guy that's the Lozano guy who keeps coming out people knew about UFOs so even that wasn't part of the government but you talked about this two weeks ago we talked about two weeks ago with Brian yeah so somebody was testing me so we're doing a type 90 so we need to wrap it up 20 minutes ago we have to get to the point where I describe time travel oh god wait what no no I think we finished the show we've done it right these are all our stories there we go okay Lauren Laura has some great comments here it's got a good comment going on but thank you everyone for joining us for this episode of this weekend science I do appreciate that you've stuck with us if you stuck with us I know some people had to go to sleep because we got to go and pass our type 90 but if you have your stupid questions be sure to ask us because why not we'll answer your stupid questions also I just want to make a quick correction Lauren Laura is saying out there about anti-vaxxers so I want people to stop saying anti-vaxx and say pro-disease people the pro-covid people yes let's change it up yes you're not anti-vaxxer you're just the pro-whooping cough people you're just pro-disease spread pro-pox the pro-plague the pro-pandemic folks the ones who want a pandemic they're not anti-vaxx they're pro-pandemic they're so pro-pane I can't even handle it okay and pro-pane accessories in our accessories I would like to give a shout out to everybody who's in our chat room right now thank you so much for being here and chatting people in our discord shared some great photos and images that I popped into our live video stream tonight which was kind of fun to do all of you really make this live show even live-er so thank you for doing that Gord, Aaron Lor, others who were here who helped to kind of keep the peace and make sure that our chat rooms are nice places to be thank you for being here and for being those people Fada thank you so much for doing show notes thank you for doing the social media and I know we need to sit and talk about social media stuff I know social media is weird right now Rachel thank you for editing the show and identity for thank you so much for recording the show and of course 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For the recent cats I don't know whatever you do put twists in the subject line because otherwise it's going to get spam filtered into one of our poorly regulated memory neurons or even into you know just some comfortable cat purr where you know nobody does anything because it's purr. You can also hit us up on the platform formerly known as Twitter which is now being represented by a very fascist looking X symbol where we are at TwistScience at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly at Blair's Magery. At Jackson Fly probably isn't there anymore though. We love your feedback if there's a topic you would like us to cover or address a suggestion for an interview a haiku that comes through in the night please let us know. Justin I forgot to tell you I got a book of periodic table haikus sent to me it was to the KDBS like mailbox probably like six how did you get it then no it was like probably from like six years ago and the the new public affairs director was like hey we have a bunch of stuff for you and oh I bet they do because we used to get like 20 books a week or something ridiculous we used to just constantly like we come in there and there would be a stack of new science books which is always a stack of old if we never turned off the mailbox for like how long has it been since we've been at KDBS like 15 years but we're still there we're still there in the year but we are physically nowhere near the campus which means there's a box somewhere in this poor small tight little recording studio radio studio just got mailed to me we keep getting there's like science books they keep what do we do with them they've probably built a fort there's probably guys like oh a nice desk yeah I made it out of science books for the this week in science anyway but there's a whole periodic table haiku book that I need to I'll read some haikus for you anyway we'll be back here again next week and we hope that you'll join us again for more great science news yes we hope and you go and if you've learned ah if you've learned anything from the show it's that Justin has zero recall it just merely fills in what he thinks should be the next logical thing to take place what's the next logical thing oh if you learned anything from your in your head remember is that what it is come on let me go look at the right remember if you've learned anything from the show remember it's all in your head this week in science this week in science this week in science it's the end of the world so I'm setting up shop got my banner unfurled it says the scientist is in I'm gonna sell my advice show them how to stop the robot I'll reverse below the warming with a wave of my hand and all is coming your way so everybody listen to what I say I use the scientific method and I'll broadcast my epic science this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in science this week in science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what I say may not represent your views but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan if you listen to the science you may just understand your philosophy the music worked much better this week we're now in the after show bum bum bum bum last week the music was weird it happened it was a glitch with stream yard but it's all good dude I didn't microdose before the show I don't know about Justin but parent I mean honestly if you listen to Justin he would have macrodosed but I don't think he did that either I think he was very responsible and just woke up and drank coffee and did the show I think he was the more responsible of the two of us anyway we need to do a new podcast called doctor kiki's mailbox I mean that would be pretty funny what do people mail me oh I have a new theory on the formation of the universe that doesn't rely on thermodynamics it's something that nobody ever came up with before me and every other science writer reporter in the world bum bum bum bum um what did we talk about we didn't talk about this week but it was a cool study Justin's out of here so I'm just gonna sit here for a second until Justin comes back a really interesting study sent to me by my next-door neighbor who's pretty awesome Gordon great that climate extremes are likely to drive the next land mammal extinction during the next super continent assembly so basically once upon a time we had a giant super continent the super continent would have impacted climate because you have a big bunch of land that contains heat it's gonna be different than the water um and that was a dinosaur time and that was other things but not lots of mammals and so Pangea broke up and now we have all of our wonderful continents but okay this paper suggests that in 250 million years all continents converged to form the next super continent that they are now calling Pangea Ultima because they probably all grew up on 80s um or 90s cartoons anyway there will be extremes volcanic rifting outgassing blah blah blah um but the warming specifically probably on the interior of the continent will be hostile to mammalian life so you think we have it bad right now? it'll be worse in 250 million years um yeah okay Aran Lore is asking what is Blair doing for a 2024 calendar while she's on leave she's working on it 24 7 honestly I don't think there's gonna be a calendar what no no no no we don't have a calendar like Blair does the calendar I don't have a calendar what are we gonna do Justin Blair does the calendar and she's doing baby right now I'll make a calendar are you gonna make a calendar? you're an arty person yeah do you have time to make a calendar? I do right now but that's gonna go I still have time to do I mean you need 12 images we can you need a cover and then the 12 images and I can help do the rest of it because we have the dates and all that kind of stuff for like special science dates and stuff I can help set it up but yeah we don't have a Blair to do the art that she knows I just committed to a thing without thinking it through Aran Lore look at this I'm gonna post it right now I'd buy a Justin calendar hang on I just committed to a thing with zero zero thought into the amount of time and effort and work that would be required to do such a thing 12 sciencey images I mean so I got an idea we could probably like repurpose I don't know we could do we have to figure out how to do a Blair cover hang on I'll be right back because I'm gonna because I don't know if the things that I make can be used so if nobody knows Justin actually does some really interesting art it's usually multi-layered and multimedia and actually pretty cool but it's not the kind of stuff that Blair's been doing for the calendar specifically with the animals yeah fall Disney oh my gosh let's think more finger painting I love it the only problem is they tend to be glossy so I don't know if they can photograph they are glossy I can see that yeah okay hold on I'm gonna put you on full screen wait wait what's in that is that like bones what is that is that like a horse or something what is that so this is a you're very small on my screen so I can't okay so this is this is two images that were that have been stolen from Celtic coins so this is a oh I think a gall coin and normally this lady would be riding a horse but I put her on the back of the Norfolk Wolf which was found on a coin from I think the 1400s that's so cool yeah and so I grab images that are on coins imprinted on coins in some way and then I mashed them together for this piece but what you've got though like like you've done that it's not just a print like you've no it's not a three dimensional yeah did you what did you do does it paint it is it paper like what did you what is it I used my cock wait what that is normally applied to uh shower yeah that kind of stuff so it's a combination of that and it's a medium uh to make the structured pieces so those are those are uh you can kind of even Hulk yes Hulk right and so you kind of build up the layers and you know you did use different molds and things and and these little weird symbols are also seen in a lot of I take some some images from old stuff I got it this one here's a mermaid on a seaworth and that was kind of interesting actually I like this little wait where is it oh I got the right wrong corner wrong corner I like this little weird sea creature thingy that's swimming about there and then there's a little fish where'd my fish go I lost the fish it's in there somewhere it's a fish I gotta look at the thing where oh there's it he can't see him he's kind of hiding there's the little fish yeah so Frumpy B is saying uh if we cross polarize when you photograph it'll take reflection off Aran Loris has set it on a flat table with even light and take a photo from directly above you can get it without the reflection I don't know like is that do you have enough of those that it could so I have got those and then I'm like would you want to do those as a calendar is that something you'd want to do um it could be or we could do something else then just make all like some new stuff it's just it takes a while to make a painting yeah the stuff you do is not like simple yeah um actually like Justin I don't know if I've ever told you that I really really like your work oh thank you you're welcome you do some really good artistic work and I think it's great and I'm glad you do it thank you uh and I've got some like I have oh god I'm in Denmark right now so most of the stuff I've made is this hand which was uh interesting because it was during the black plague towards the end of the black plague and or no during and it was a German coin with a hand on it and I was always I was interesting because uh people were begging because the economy crashed so I was always wondering if the term give you know lend a hand with actually talking about some ancient times like giving a coin to somebody yeah and I've got the owl of Athena which is my favorite painting I've made but that's hanging on somebody's wall but all those paintings are back in the states so I'm like the problem is I have a collection of this stuff that's not anywhere where I can take a picture of it so it would have to be to do a Celtic coin collection thing uh would be tough right now I would have to do new things I'd have to do them smaller which is fine because when you take a picture you can make it bigger it doesn't matter you don't have to make it that big so then uh yeah all right I'll think about it really hard this week and see if uh I can put together how many how many would I need to make it under let me wait wait let me not from recall but let me ration let me think this through it's gonna be a false memory but I'm gonna say 12 months yes year and usually I would do some kind of big like hypno toad but it wasn't a toad it was like a horned frog um cover but we don't have to like we could do something different and that could be okay but 12 okay oh and I have actually one really amazing one that's also I can't get to good grief but but is this the kind of thing that you could you know would people be interested in taking pictures of them for you to put on the calendar like I think I could probably get I mean would it have to be something better than an iPhone at this point no as long as the lighting is even and it's high result like highest resolution iPhone can take and like there's no like you know the shadow of somebody's hand from above iPhone yeah our and Laura say iPhones take great photos so honestly I think you know as long I think the interesting aspect of it would be to how do you do a cross polarized past I don't understand what that means from BB you just have to make sure it's evenly lit so that like if you're taking the photo from above there's not a light right above it but there are lights from two sides so you have light light coming in from two or three sides but the photo is from above which is actually the really nice thing about these paintings is that as the light in the room changes throughout the day the paintings kind of changed a little bit so because of the texture so these I would think about this week one week we'll think about it this week and see if it's something that 12 ideas or like or see of the ones that you have which ones are sciency and that because part of the fun of it is like we can pick one for each month and then you know like you give a little description of like what it is and so like people know why would you know what is the science aspect of it you know and Blair stuff has always been the animal corner so it's always the animals and everything I wish I were artistic the only thing I do is words I wouldn't mind doing or video I mean it would be great to do flooding out it would be great to have a calendar that I love that one Justin it's so cool yeah it's a really I mean like if you can photo it really well like we like we should tell Prince of it yeah you should tell Prince of it come on all right all are saying December for the Yule I did a really good job with that look at I don't know December for the Yule yes oh I could do mine calendar yeah and then because I'm like I you know the problem with doing visuals from science that aren't actually from the science I'm going to do a scatterplot no maybe I guess it would be fun to do one of those like correlation scatterplots oh Tuesdays and I don't know full moons there's like all these things that are you know the correlation scatterplots that people do where they're like trying to prove that things are related and they're really not confounding the confounding yeah I don't know I mean it's us it's whatever art you like if you want to do that you have art already and so how much more would you need to do I mean I think your art's cool if we could get it is all the time and they're like dude who paints what do you mean who paints yeah yeah and the problem that painters have maybe I'm wrong the problem is that people don't run out and buy art anymore maybe some people do I haven't met them I don't know who like I give art to people all the time because like nobody has art on their walls can I buy your art no it's not for sale I want some I don't have any of your art I would know it's not for sale you don't have any of my art okay I will send you something you have to send me something it's expensive to send me things from Denmark yes but I would love I wouldn't have any of your art I would I have Blair art I have cool Blair art in frames I would love that that would be cool I like art done by people I care about it I will you know the problem is I think I've tried to think about how to do this before and I don't have a whole lot of sciency art that I could do that I could think of because like whenever I tried to visualize what I would even do I had this one actually I did have one good idea that I've never gone through with and this would take too long which would be I wanted to make an archeological site onto a painting where like a part of a bone or a skull or something is just coming out but the painting itself would look like earth like earth that's been like pushed aside kind of a thing and it would even have like a one of the little location flags like lying down in the thing and maybe even have a sort of I love it I need to do it at some point but that's a very involved one it is so that won't be what this is I also had this other idea that I wanted to do which is one actually somewhere somewhere in a storage unit I have a bunch of then I collected from a field I love it and the idea was to articulate them and then put some translucent fairy wings on them and make so that these would be like archeological uncoverings of dead fairies supernatural fairies and then you know pressed flowers and the thing and stuff but they would be sort of just like knocked around and say I'm a dead bird that was partially decomposed have you seen the smashed fairies books? yes it's very much a smashed fairy book but they're decomposed completely and it's just the skeletal remains and yeah so that's another one I would love to do but I don't have access to the bones I don't know if I can make bones fast enough maybe somebody will give you bones in Denmark somebody will give you bones it must have nature somewhere come on somebody has got bones to give you that'd be so cool I love it that would be a fun one a different dead fairy per month oh I need to connect you a friend of mine Sonya she was on a project runway one year she's like a fashion designer and so she made I don't remember which brand but she was instrumental in designing surf shorts I gotta interrupt I won't say who I'll give you a skull now it's too late to say not who I can't tell the story but I'm being offered skulls I'm being offered actual human bones no I need you need to find in New York there's the evolution store in San Francisco and here in Portland I have a painting here that came from a place where they sell skulls I have a Neanderthal skull look it's a bat I have a Neanderthal skull back in the storage unit somewhere it's a replica nobody worried about although it fell once it's missing a tooth or two this is a real bat that's a real bat skeleton with this little tiny thing wait you gotta full screen it it's you it's you I have a real bat skeleton wow that's pretty cool yeah so there are places that you can buy people preserve skeletons and do stuff like that anyway my friend Sonya she's a designer she's an artist but she's also very into nature she collects feathers and skulls and skeletons and things or freezers full of cool things so dude there are people if you need bones I'll put it out on the I'll put it out on the wire in Denmark in Copenhagen in need of small rodent bones don't do the road kill because sometimes it's like illegal to take the road kill but you know like bones it's a good bone it's fine anyway bones are great for art I think they're fantastic I'm a huge fan I'm a little gothy so that's just me I think I want the bone clones from PB I think that's where my Neanderthal came from I love it bone clones the marked has a bat and the freezer Justin has learned not to ask questions such as why and where did you get that from today so I was once married to an anthropologist who was studying at the time you were married were you married you were actually that's right you were married I remember that was a whole conversation never mind it was a whole thing years ago it was a long time ago and I opened up the freezer once and I thought well that's weird you know why did she put one of the why did she put a stuffed animal in the freezer and I thought if it's an old thing you've taken out of storage you might put it in the freezer to kill off anything that might be living in it that sort of thing but I had to move the thing so I could get it out so I could reach the ice cream at the back of the whatever I was going for and as I'm putting it back in I saw this like face of a raccoon oh my god a raccoon trash can in my freezer what's going on question dear brother spouse of mine why is there a dead raccoon please oh yeah I saw it so I bagged it and I'm going to take it to school to get rid of all the flesh no she knew somebody with the beetles there was also like I think they did a lot of boiling yeah that was a grad school I did an internship I did an internship in the mnemology museum department with this wonderful person and so I started learning how to preserve specimens and my favorite part was the beetles and the fact that you just put there they were in their little box and you give them a thing and then they eat it but then everything left is bones and then you take the bones and it's all nice and then you can preserve all the stuff and it's a great skeleton and it was amazing one of my favorites I really really have hidden the my gothiness to the public for a very long time so I think bones are interesting I think the art of what it tells us about nature so all I need to do is settle on a theme for this thing and then I can figure out how to get it done in like the next month and a half yeah month and a half can we put it out in January no I mean we could do pre-orders but yeah we could do pre-orders but yeah but we'd want to have something that people can have before January because people like to start using their calendars and planning ahead ahead of time Justin is learning that maybe Europe is the safer choice than like all of us actually you know what I don't know about the rest of Europe but Denmark is almost identical to Davis what that's like perfect that's like I loved Davis the nicest place but I bet like they hide their racism and all of their aggression Davis is a small town with a big university surrounded by ag land so it's got this highly educated vibe and it also has that salt of the earth farmer vibe where you can make contracts on land for the next season based on a handshake and no contract very like sincere honest people and a lot of education and everybody rides a bike Denmark is highly educated surrounded by farmland and everybody rides a bike low crime high standard of living kind of a thing like it's very similar to Davis with the exception that I think in the city of Copenhagen which is one of the more expensive cities to live in in the world it's actually cheaper to rent in Copenhagen than it is in Davis oh then in Davis then in Davis Davis is such basically they realize hey we have a small town and a bunch of people that need to go to university who don't want to live in the dorms there's not enough capacity there let's charge them an exorbitant amount of rate so it's a letcherist landlord you know exploitation oh I remember it this is our landlord's skull that is really cool yeah it's super cool so we've got some big incisors but there's also a huge orbital cavity so this is a seaman's lord no and it's a small front nasal cavity so this isn't like a deer or something no that's like a saber tooth that's a smiley don it's like a cat where'd you get a saber tooth cat from it's not saber tooth it's too small of a tooth but it is definitely a cat there were short saber tooth cats too you know they were all super long in the tooth I don't remember but just looking at the the front of the face like it's flat and this is a huge orbital socket and it's a big incisor I'm gonna say it's a cat and this is like all jagged this is definitely a predator cat because of the flat face our landlord thinks maybe raccoon or skunk which is also possible the the the the meat I'm gonna look up this is not something that hunted on the planes like a a smiley don or a tiger because the raccoon skulls are too long so it's not gonna be a raccoon skull that's a skunk but it's got antlers wait no it doesn't have antlers no it doesn't have antlers that's separate no I think it's I think it's gonna be what do you call what are those things that skunks also have a big hold on no no skunks their eyes are too small I don't think that's a skunk either no okay so my mammology is like kicking in right now this is not a skulk skunk the eyes are too far back and they're not as big so you definitely don't have a skunk I mean maybe it looks like a striped skunk here but your skull has a I'm gonna share this tab your skull has a very flat front which I think is indicative of more of a cat the eyes are so big yeah like you don't come across like I that's a cat it's a nocturnal animal for sure it's a cat yeah yeah it is a cat it's just not a smiley don it's not as big I would need to the size of it I thought it was big because it looks like antlers back there now if it has the antlers if those antlers were attached to it then it's a it's really interesting also I mean maybe it's perspective or size but it's also looking at this raccoon these images of raccoon skulls like raccoons look like like alien I do wonder like come on what is that it's gonna eat you don't mess around with raccoons everybody yeah get us better pictures I think honestly looking at like the depth of the face is a big indicator also the orbital sockets are huge and then you got to look at I'm just going off the teeth I'm saying cat still I mean the raccoon still has big incisors but it's right behind that though that sort of I took it away that sort of really jagged uh like not a what do you call it a level setting in which teeth are pulling out of the top of the skull but the way the whole thing like someone said bobcat and so here look at this one like I think that's it's definitely a forest hunter like that this is bobcat here um kind of planes thing so it's not like uh incisors are too short to be a saber um could be mountain lion but I don't think the teeth are big enough so I actually I actually like the mark too said bobcat I think like that might be a more so we've got cougar and bobcat next to each other I think I think that's more online with what we're what we're what you're looking at are in lore it's a cool skull really cool here's a mountain lion I think you look at the flat front of it it is much more similar to what you've got in the big orbital sockets like I was talking about now here's bobcat could be bobcat like the teeth are probably I need a measuring tape out there seriously yeah we gotta you have to measure it are in lore we don't know how big it is is it the size of a house cat skull or is it but how interesting I love it thanks for sharing that that's so cool that that skull is really neat but I definitely think it's a cat it's not it's not a raccoon or a skunk I could make the first painting of stonehenge because nobody's ever done that yet what what nobody's ever wait what you you butter do that what's the painting of stonehenge well you could think about so another thing like I like the idea that you do these coins and you do like history history type stuff so let's think about like different months and like seasons and like historically like maybe a journey through time captures in coin form could be possibly like that could be cool if that if that's like possible I don't know or even like you know seasonal seasonal archaeology kind of stuff so like what okay yeah so right now I need anybody who has access to bones collect them up send them to lower free bone haul kdbs davis california nine five six one six now this is the address to our home station which we haven't been to in decade or multiple decades but our show continues to play there thank you kdbs for continuing to play our show for making us still a radio show still a public affairs show which is what we love it's the only thing that keeps us from cursing to like actually if we got rid of them there'd be no reason not to f this s that what the bleep all throughout the whole show because so recently my son he's twelve and a half he's recently like decided to start judging me a lot and so I said the f word about something because of an emotional reaction to something last night it turns and looks at me mom you're cursing so much like what happened like you're cursing so much more than normal like what's going on servant and I was like what am I supposed to say and my husband Marshall turns and looks at our child and says you have no idea the sailor mouth on this woman I used to do you've been holding back for this chat like my dad his dad is like she's been holding back for you I used to do this game with the older kids we were getting in the car going somewhere out an ounce no curse word time out what's that that means you can curse all that you want right now while we're driving and it's okay and I'm just not going to say anything and then the kids would like just immediately start trying to run through the list which gave me an update it was like George Carlin style or like whatever the whatever level they were and I remember like I can't even do it but it was like the English one was like dumb, silly like she didn't have them quite yet and then I thought for a second and went M.F.R and I was like wow okay I think she was six apparently it's in like a Beyonce song and so she'd heard and I had taught them Blither Blather I'd falsely taught them that the word Blither Blather was like the worst curse word you could possibly say you're amazing but then I was like Blither Blather okay but only in the car see that's fantastic good night Eric Knapp thank you for joining us speaking of which it is and R&L yeah it's been that long so many thoughts it's been that long three hours, four hours show what are we doing talking and having a very nice time and I'm ignoring my I'm ignoring the clock okay so I will but I like this think super hard we should check with Blair because Blair might have be like dudes I was like working on the calendar while giving labor like I'm on I'm still on top of everything like I have a feeling she's on top of everything so this is probably for nothing if she is I need to have a conversation with her in the meantime I will try to think of twelve depictions that could be used to represent something of scientific nature maybe I will do it what you showed tonight was definitely scientific nature and like you know archaeology, anthropology stuff so like Blair's calendar has been the animal corner calendar because she does the animal stuff you have a tendency to spend a lot of energy thinking about human evolution and history and so that would be a cool calendar too if that fits you know but at the same time yeah let's just think about it for a week and see where it goes and maybe it's going to be like the spark you have that boom I'm super artistic for six weeks and then who knows or I could just uh come up with nothing what if that happens or I'll just take pictures of my cats okay I'll come up with something hey everybody oh what if I do paintings of cats everybody loves cats right yeah there you go what about a toxoplasma painting layers and layers and layers of stuff in there I think I would have to be 12 things on disparate themes like one might just be like I'll just steal this I'll just steal this and put like a bunch of formulas into a painting that could be one there's one down 11 to go though oh I could do a model of the antikythera mechanism oh you should oh my god that'd be great okay now that's a month's worth of work and then there's 10 more to do no you've already got one with your wolf dude lady writer and then you've got I think no you should do a toxoplasma brain cyst that would be awesome alright twistminion at gmail.com send ideas twist and then give me your suggestions of something sciency that could fit on a small painting I'm going to go to work right now because now I have writing to do oh and I do have writing to do too do you have a child to take care of not this morning I don't have a child this morning amazing but maybe by the time I have gotten enough coffee to start working yeah Arn-Laure says chlamydia chlamydia you have to put the tea in there it'll be a calendar don't overthink it says Gary okay who are you talking to all I do is that's how I go about putting on my pants two legs at a time I don't waste time putting my pants on one leg at a time in the morning I overthought it and realized it's just faster if you do both at the same time if everybody wanted poetry I could do a calendar but yeah you put a poem into a painting a poem and a painting I don't know how to paint that's my thing I don't do art art art I do writing art but my new idea so there was graffiti a couple of years ago here in Portland that I took a photo of when we were stopped in traffic there's still graffiti in Portland by the way yeah I know there's a lot but this one particular thing like it just captured my attention and it was who loved life and I've decided that I'm gonna start cross stitching again so there may be cross stitches in graffiti writing I'm gonna do a whole thing oh that would be very fun graffiti cross stitch like graffiti font cross stitch yeah yeah yeah yeah I want that sweater I want that sweater now I like seriously want that sweater so I actually like ordered a whole bunch of cross stitch stuff and I'm gonna get back in I haven't cross stitched since I was like a teenager but I'm freaking gonna get back in cross stitch because of this stupid graffiti thing that sweater is gonna be amazing yeah I'm a huge fan of that that's what we should do okay now we got into print calendars we're gonna do Kiki cross stitch graffiti sweaters graffiti sweaters that's my interpretation oh it'd be so good it'd be so good oh my god say good night Justin or good morning Justin good morning Justin say good night Dr. Kiki good night good night everyone thank you so much for joining us we stayed up so late and Justin got up and was here I mean now anyway um stay safe stay healthy stay curious stay lucky stay lucky that's the most important because if you're lucky good luck not all the luck good luck only but in fact make good choices make good choices maybe that's all I should just say make good choices and come back next week we'll see you then