 Hey everybody, welcome to this week's podcast broadcast of this week in science. We are going to be podcast broadcasting, and this is the live-ish thing. It's live right now, which we're doing it. And if you're here with us right now, right now, then you're with us live. But maybe you're watching it later and it's not live, but it's still where it would be streaming. Anyway, the stream, we take it, we edit it for the podcast. It's taken out if it should be taken out. And so the final product is not necessarily what you will be seeing in this live podcast broadcast, right? But if you're if you're listening to this later, you didn't hear any of this because all of this was already removed. Exactly. It's exactly it. OK, everybody. You're in the studio with us right now. This is how it goes. Let us begin to make the science sandwich. Starting in three, two. This is twist this week in science. Episode number 919 recorded on Wednesday, March 29th, two thousand twenty three. How to do the science dance. Hey, everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show, we will fill your heads with hotness, stress and death. But first. Disclamer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Imagine for a moment a world without disease, a world without death, a world in which people are free to live their lives without cancer, diabetes, dementia, heart attacks or lung disease, a world without extreme cases of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia or neurodevelopmental disorders, a world where children meet their great, great, great grandparents and the dog you grew up with is the same dog your children one day play with. One thing, a future like this will require a much different approach to society, sustainability will have a far greater importance in managing the resources of an undying world. Population pressures will require a rethinking of every aspect of our economies, our source and use of energy, our definitions of work and compensation from food we eat to the waste we produce. Everything will need to be rethought, reimagined and re-engineered. This modern age of miracle medical science, this undying world is not the age we are living in, but it is the age we are now building. And the solutions that will be required are the solutions we have needed for some time. Solutions provided here each week on This Week in Science, coming up next. Got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to learn every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. Science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are so glad you have joined us once again in the Science Studio to discuss all the sciencey things we like to discuss. We have a great show for you up ahead. We have science, many sciencey things like I said, there's hotness. I've got some hotness. I've also got some stress for lizards, some cockle burs for your life and signal strength and multiple sclerosis. Justin, what do you have? I also brought some hotness. Back to the question. Twenty twenty one, how hot was it? Also, so hot, the cows were given powdered milk. And then I'm going to get into ancient genomic immunity, Penn State researchers replacing humans with robots and the death of the scientific mega journal. Oh, no. Or maybe, oh, yeah. Oh, yes, yes. Yeah, it's going to be. It's a very, the subject is very nuanced and has many sides. Well, I can't wait to get to that. Blair, what is in the animal corner? I have skeptical fish and I also have some transparent human skin cells from squids. You do. Can you show us? I wish, but then you wouldn't be able to see me. Would you? Oh, OK. So hold on, let me turn it on. Oh, wow, those really work. There you go. Oh, my goodness. OK, everybody, let's dig into the science. But before we begin, I would, well, I have to tell you, I'd love to tell you that you can find us all places, podcasts are found because this show was a podcast. We stream weekly Wednesdays, eight p.m. Pacific time ish. And this is on YouTube, Twitch and Facebook. We are Twist Science on Twitch, Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon. And if all of this is just a lot to remember, then go to our website, twist.org, where you find show notes and all sorts of other fun things. All right. Let us begin the show. Far away, far, far away from our wonderful planet. There exists a system of seven other planets around and a red dwarf M class star. These planets are close to their star. So they get a lot more heat than our earth gets from our own star. But how nice would it be to take those planets temperatures? Is it trappist? Is that the one? Yes. So I'm talking about the trappist one system. And this system, like I said, it has about. We have found seven planets around it. So exoplanets far away from us. We have been looking at and we've checked them out with Hubble. We've checked them out with with other space telescopes with other with other things, Spitzer Space Telescope, trying to figure out what's going on over there, whether they're at our atmospheres on these planets, what kind of orbital system they have, whether they're rocky, whether they're gaseous. We've been trying to figure all this stuff out. It's been kind of hazy. Haven't really been able to determine what's going on. And so we have finally. Put the focus of the mirror instrument or the miri instrument from the J-wist looking at this trappist one system at a specific planet called trappist one B. It's like the second planet in that little system, right? If it's ABCD, all of the planets get little letters. It's very, very close to its star. But how do you get a temperature of something that is so close to something that's already really hot? Right? How do you do this? So the M dwarf star, it has two hundred two thousand five hundred sixty six Kelvin's. It's very slightly larger than our sun, but not quite as hot because it's it's old. It's ultra cool. Now, what we know from. Finding these exoplanets as we find the exoplanets based on how they transit their stars or how sometimes they move behind their stars. Right? So they're going around the stars at a particular rate. And when they move in front, the light of the star dims and when they move behind, well, it doesn't really change, right, because it's going behind. But because of this, they could determine that. All right, we've got this rocky planet. Figure it's rocky because of the mass and the way things are moving around and the signals that we've gotten so far. So it's close there. I think it is locked, orbitally locked to this to the star so that one side is always facing. It's always like the like the moon is to the earth. It's always it's always facing us. And so it's got like a termination line. There's a hot side and there's a cold side. Now, if it has an atmosphere, that atmosphere would distribute the heat from the hot side around the planet to the cool side. And you would expect one particular kind of temperature. It would expect a particular amount, number of kelvin, Kelvin's degrees centigrade, degrees Fahrenheit, whatever. If there's no atmosphere, you would expect that there's no real distribution of that heat easily other than through just the rock of the planet. And so there are two different models for what we expect and what we thought would be there. And when the J-wist was focused, the Meary instrument was able to look at the infrared radiation from the star and the very slight point one percent change in the in the in the radiation from the star. As this rocky planet passed behind the star, they were able to actually determine the temperature that the black body radiation based on black body radiation of this rocky planet based basically what was subtracted from what was there when it was just facing the star. And so everything lines up with the models that there's absolutely no atmosphere on this particular rocky planet. It's orderably tightly locked to its to its star and it almost exactly what we measured matches up with our modeling of a dark surface rocky planet with hat, which has no atmosphere and no redistribution of heat. So we didn't think we could go live there anyway, but it seems a lot less likely that this this planet, which is sitting at about 450 degrees Fahrenheit, it it seems unlikely as a place for a little warm in any life. Right. It's a little bit warm. But now this gives us a new way. We can use Jwist to look at other exoplanets, to be able to discover different systems, to be able to determine how our models actually fit to measure data. And this and this is very exciting also because our measured data does fit our model, which is very, very closely. That's that's pretty it's pretty awesome. Yeah. But anyway, good job. Another another job well done for the Jwist. Aren't we glad we launched that thing finally and that it's working? Yeah. I have to say I hasn't broken yet. Doing great. Not yet. Is that that's the that's the crucial point is how long will it last before eventually some bit of debris, a little tiny yeah, something runs into it and knocks it out. But Hubble maintained. But, you know, they just they don't make stuff like they used to, you know. They just don't make things like they joking. In this case, NASA better make things like that. NASA makes things better than they even used to. That's the that's the cool thing about they over engineer to the point that the is those little rovers that were supposed to only last a few months lasted for years and years on Mars. And it's a lot of them are still there. They're still going our robots and happy birthday to themselves annually. Just doing a great party that maybe someday we will be invited to. But in the meantime, we're going to have to deal with all the hotness that's going on here on our own planet. What's up, Justin, with our hotness. Yeah, the summer of twenty twenty one, especially in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada was was hot. It was a hot one. How hot was it? It was so hot that trees were seen luring dogs with treats. Wait, what work that one out? It was it was so hot. The local bakery only served toast. It was so hot. It was so hot that temperature records were set by tens of degrees in many places. Wildfires broke out and at least fourteen hundred people died. Well, that wasn't great. That wasn't funny. No, yeah. New assessment suggests that by the year twenty fifty, we will be experiencing heat waves just like twenty twenty one about every other year. Well, three rings. There was a tree ring study incorporated into this. There is three rings of the region show that the event is the worst, hottest summer. And at least the past one thousand years. Yeah, I mean, it was it was hot, right? It was a very hot one for a lot of people. It was hard to remember. We're stuck inside still at that point. So fires, nobody noticed. I don't remember. I was I was indoors, I believe. Yeah, what's sort of interesting about this study, too, is that so they say there is there is another another hot period that took place around the year nine hundred and fifty. But that was much cooler than this current hot streak. The new study shows that the last forty years driven by human influenced warming has been the hottest period in the last thousand years. And that twenty twenty one was the hottest summer of the hottest summers in that entire span of time. Also sort of interesting, though, is that they they had to do all of their tree rings from elevation, from from sort of mountain elevations. Because turns out the tree record for the low lying areas doesn't go back that far on account of wildfires and people cutting down all the trees to put houses and stuff. So they had to go up. So they they were doing comparatives of what would have been a cooler climate. And we still were one and a half degrees seasonally higher than than the average. At the at the cooler elevations. So it's a yeah. Every by twenty twenty twenty fifty, I guess, which that's like a long way away. Isn't it twenty fifty? That sounds like the distant future. No, no, Larry, you're not paying attention to years and numbers like that. You're so young. Twenty fifty every other year is going to be like that. But but now that's also the thing, though, is that that's their their original prediction from an earlier paper was it would be once every 10 years, we would have a summer like that. And now it's every other year. By the time we get there. Yeah, it may be. Oh, we'll never have a cool summer like twenty twenty one again. Well, I remember the old days when, oh goodness. But yeah, it's just going to keep getting hotter. Apparently it has. They think it has something to do with an effect that they're calling anthropomorphic climate change, something we might want to look into on this show. Yeah, but I'm wondering also how these cycles all tie together as you know, we just ended a three year El Nino, La Nina cycle. And we finally, the meteorologists have said that we've switched to, you know, from what was giving us really hot summers and wet winters for the last three years into the into a different kind of of weather phase. And so there's the El Nino, La Nina cycle. But then there's also the Decadal Pacific Oscillation. And then we also have, you know, globally, other cycles that occur through the Atlantic Ocean and other, you know, other parts of the world. And I'm wondering how the anthropomorphic climate change that's occurring, the carbon dioxide that we're putting into the atmosphere, how it is shifting all of these different cycles and what those are, you know, how those different influences are coming together. Yeah. So is there are already, we've already been noticing what do you call it, a jet stream changes. Yeah. This is showing up quite a bit in the the airline industry because turbulence tends to take place at areas of where the where there's big changes in the air stream, the jet stream, where these fast moving narrow bands of air are coming one way and then they kind of push it off. So this is where the high turbulent area is. And airlines usually have traditionally plotted courses around them. But those are moving. And so airlines are having to find maybe different routes. And so what that implies is that weather is also going to be different. Like all these like, oh, we have the, what do you call it? The Pacific Coast is undulating. Whatever thing it was, you would mention in there, Kiki. The Decadal Oscillations. Yeah. Thank you. So we have a name for this because it reoccurs. Yeah. And it's regularly somewhat definable. Yeah. We if that changes, then our poor weather people predicting the weather like, I don't know, back to you, Chuck. Yeah, there's a there's a lot and especially if this study it is more West Coast focused because of where they took all the tree rings and what they've seen there. And so that, of course, is going to have been influenced a lot more by, you know, like you said, you know, use the Pacific Ocean by the El Niño La Niña, also these other things. But I don't know, I don't know. Maybe I'm going to go hide in the shade. I'm going to just go hide in the shade for the summer, hang out like a cat. Isn't that what cats do Blair? Hang out some cats. Yeah. I have a very strange study about Pumas, mountain lions, cougars, whatever you want to call them. I guess the study published in Landscape Ecology and it's all based on this very specific way that Pumas, cougars, mountain lions hunt. The they're they're kind of they will chase prey, but a lot of their behavior has to do with waiting for something to happen by and then they will chase it. They're not doing a lot of stalking long term they're not doing a lot of tracking. And so is this the ambush hunting? It's it's not. I wouldn't exactly call them ambush predators because they're not jumping out as something comes by like an alligator. They're OK. But but it's it's kind of in between the two, right? Because if something like if that's why you have to watch out if you're if you're a runner that goes through mountain lion areas and you like to run through parks is because you run right by awaiting mountain lion, their instinct is to chase that thing that ran right by its face, basically, right? But they're not going to do long term tracking or anything like that. So when they do that, when other animals, when other carnivores hunt, they will dismember their kills. They'll bring specific pieces back. But on top of this kind of specific way that they hunt, Pumas also maintain intact carrion, so the intact kills. And they will then kind of pull that off into the shade or into the bushes. And so what happens is I think even we reported on the show at one point. They get spooked and they will leave an entire kill and they will come back for it. And so with humans, that causes problems. But otherwise has things normally work in the food web. This actually helps feed other animals because of kleptoparasitism. So basically they get spooked, they leave an entire carrion and then other animals will come and eat that dead animal that has been left whole in that space. And so the Pumas contribute a disproportionate amount of food to other wildlife. So they are feeding other animals. So this creates a very interesting dynamic in their biome. They only consume about a third of what they catch on average. And the rest supports scavengers. But the other thing that it supports plants. So yeah. So in this study, they looked over a nine year lifespan. Pumas were estimated to have created approximately 482 temporary hotspots of nutrient soil in this one area. And so what they what they posit, which I feel like is kind of a leap if I am being honest, is that they are essentially gardening. So like so they they bring their carrion gardening with blood. Yes, it is always in kind of a very dense area that that that puts nutrients in the soil. That means the plants grow very well. And then deer come and eat those plants. That allows them to catch their food. So is is it on purpose? Or is it just a function of how they work? And it makes them work less hard to get their food. What happened first? Was it a happy accident? Are they doing it intentionally? I feel like that's a stretch. But that is something they would have to they would have to return to that same like they would have to show that they've done this kill in this spot enough times. I don't know. And they do. It just seems like they're describing the cycle of life there. But exactly. Yes. And the amount of time it takes between the deadfall to the new kill time involved. Yeah. I mean, that's serious long term planning for a meal. Yeah, I agree. Not that it's not possible. Yeah, but it is not. It's impossible. Interesting idea. And it's also, I think, a good highlight of why top predators are important in ecosystems. It's beyond them thinning out the herd and controlling populations. Sometimes they're feeding other animals. And a lot of the time they are adding nutrients to soil. And so they are changing the landscape based on where they kill things and where they eat things. So it's a good reminder about kind of this cascading impact of predators in a space. I think it's a beautiful example. Yeah, I think they'd have to do a whole lot of work to go to the actual like intent to prove the inside of it. But but in a sense, metaphorically, you know, yeah, metaphorically, metaphorically, they are gardening. They're gardening. Yeah. Yeah. The intent of these top predators, yes. And I wonder, too, if they're having the then the same effect that the the wolves, when they reintroduced them to Montana in areas, they found that there was a reforestation effect. The reforestation effect came from deer who are now wanting to spend more time in open areas where where the where they could look out for wolves. And so we're dropping seeds out in the fields. And so then then trees would will be growing there. And it was also because there were less deer to eat trees, though. And there were also less deer eating. Yeah, that was a big part of it. Yeah. And it's all a part of it, though. I mean, you have a lot of deer. They're going to eat the trees. It's going to be bad for the forest and all the other animals. You get the wolves in the wolves are killing the deer. And it's interconnected like a system. But when that's biological, and go system, there it is. Well, there it is. That's where we all are. And speaking of those ecosystems, humans have huge impacts being the impactful animals that we are on this planet. And we've talked a lot about how how naval operations and the sound of ships and motors, these giant vessels crossing waters, what the effects they might have on marine life. But a group of researchers just published in frontiers in amphibian and reptile science. Their work done at Fort Carson, U.S. military installation near Colorado Springs, where there's lots of transport aircraft, F-16s, Chinook, Apache, Blackhawk helicopters, all these big aircraft coming in, landing, leaving regularly. And in the area, there are a number of animals we don't usually pay attention to. But these researchers were checking out the Whiptail lizard. So the Colorado checkered Whiptail lizard is is uncommon. But there are several populations of them in the area around this Air Force installation. So the researchers actually coordinated with the military to have them spend about a week without doing any landings or or any takeoffs during a particular time period of the day. And then they measured the same hours of the day and had them, you know, had them do certain flyovers and landings and all sorts of things. Anyway, what they found is that it the sound affected the lizards. They grabbed they sampled the lizards. They checked out males and females. They looked to see the females, how many eggs they had, what kind of cortisol, their stress hormones, how they were affected. They also looked at glucose, ketones, reactive oxygen metabolites like alkoxy and hypox, hydroperoxy free radicals, which are released by mitochondria during stress. So basically, they're figuring out how stressed out all of the aircraft were making the lizards. And in doing all of this, they found out that, yeah, the lizards were getting stressed out, but they they didn't move around a lot more. They didn't go hide a lot more. They tended to have this mobilization of energy resources and they started eating more. The lizards were stress eating. Wow, biologically, why? Because the stress was mobilizing energy resources to deal with all of the all of the oxygen use and the increase in cortisol and the females that were reproductive at the time seemed to be more susceptible. They had a higher increase in cortisol, but so they didn't they weren't running around a lot more because that would be potentially putting themselves into danger. But they were finding more food and eating more food so that they could keep up with the energy. Like, it's like you get so they're on high alert, they're on high alert. And they're, you know, just if you run into people who've had way too much coffee in the morning, that's they're vibrating and you said they tested males and females. Yes, they tested these are and females. These are not the whiptail lizards that are all female. That I don't believe so. No, they don't know. OK, because I was like, whiptail lizards, aren't they all female? But I think there's only some species of whiptail lizards. No, these were it was males and females and because they didn't want to influence the females of the population too much, they made sure to mark their mark the individuals they caught and only caught every female one time. OK, we're not going to we're not going to stress you out even more. But yeah, so there were big, big decibels on flyover dates. Noise readings at ground level ranged from thirty thirty three thirty four decibels up to about one hundred and twelve decibels. Nine non flyover dates. It was about thirty to fifty five decibels. So the question is a doubling of of noise level. Will this result in anything seems like no. Yeah, I don't think it's going to change anything at all. But but it is an interesting way for researchers to understand how these human activities do impact animals and if the animals are having to find more food to burn more calories to just exist in an area which they seem to be doing just fine as there are several populations in that in that particular time. It is an adaptation to stress eat in these in this particular species. Well, I guess if you identified an endangered species and it had a breeding season, you could reduce your your fly days in that time. Yeah, I don't know. I know it's not going to happen. Or maybe a concern or maybe you can or maybe you can change, you know, the the lower level of the flight deck so that planes and helicopters that are coming in don't go below a certain altitude or maybe there's a, you know, you shift out of a certain area during a period of time and approach the landing strip from another direction. There are alterations, but I don't know. Anyway, yeah, lizards, stress eating, who knew? It happens. What else would we what do you want to talk about? You want to talk about some eyes now? What are we looking at, Justin? This is Penn State researchers are looking for a way to replace humans with robots. Oh, great. OK, I'm not stressed at all. Yeah, this is not because the researchers prefer robots over humans in terms of robotic companionship or anything like this. But because engineers who we trust with designing safety into every build that they make don't trust humans when it comes to safety. Well, there's enough examples of not just mistakes, but overlooking things for monetary gain that maybe machines could do a better job. But in this case, they're looking at at post stress, I guess, building inspections. So building will show some sort of structural damage, maybe due to a natural disaster or an earlier poor structural design that's now showing up with the age. And so what we do is we send in safety inspectors who are humans to assess the damage before any occupants can return to the building. Researchers at the Penn State Department of Agricultural Engineering studied how building inspectors make their assessments by analyzing gaze patterns with eye tracking software. So what they were they're kind of interested in doing long term is is training robots, maybe drones to go into one of these stressed buildings. And they figured by by testing people who have been trained engineers in structural damage and how to assess it, they could teach the robots where to look and what to look at. This is a quoting from a corresponding author, Rebecca Napolitano. We are looking for a way to capture how an inspector thinks and makes assessments on a building site to understand their intentions and diagnostic choices, studying where they look and for how long at certain points on a building can help them do that. So they asked 10 architectural engineering graduates to assess two building facades while wearing these eye tracking glasses. These glasses have two cameras to measure movements and positioning of the eyes simultaneously. So they picked, of course, facades of buildings that had, you know, an interesting array of peeling paint, grating bricks, cracks, some water intrusion and erosion near the foundation and their data was all over the place. Each of the inspectors looked at something. They all looked at everything. OK, but some lingered much, have much longer on certain aspects, on certain features. And they ended up assessing that if one of the one of the assessors had experience with water damage in the past, they were more interested in the water damage feature than the foundation crack, maybe, or the peeling paint. Or if somebody else had been studying more the the integrity of bricks, the cracks seemed more important. No water damage in the peeling paint, all that. So they all sort of had a bias. Which both made the entire study useless. No, which does mean that, you know, maybe there's a good reason to have a robot that's looking at all things sort of equally. Maybe it's not. Maybe it needs to be trained on what's the more important thing. You know, it's sort of I don't know how much they can pull from it because everybody had such a different approach. The other thing is, if I was being asked to do this experiment and I just spent years in engineering learning how to assess building damage. And then the other smart software kids came over and was like, oh, yeah, we want to track your eyes and see how you do it so we can train a robot to take your job. And be like, OK, I'm going to look at all the nonsense. And they're like, oh, yeah, you got to look up at the clouds. That's the really important part. You're discussing building damage. You got to stare at the clouds or maybe the ground. I think it's interesting they're trying to train robots on humans when the hypothesis of it all is that a robot could be less like subjective than a human. So so it seems very counterintuitive to me. Yeah. And as Daniel Smith is saying in our YouTube chat, most structural problems are interrelated. And that is that is a point I wanted to bring up is that, you know, if there is water damage, that can cause structural damage leading to cracks. And if you've got different kinds of materials at play, maybe the water, the pH is going to influence the deterioration of those materials more or less. Yeah. So it's all interrelated. And and so you have to, you know, maybe it is that a machine learning system can be able to put it together, all the pieces together more effectively than an individual who has been training for a long period of time. I don't know. What is what is it? What's supposed to be 10 years or 10,000 hours of work before you you get the experience before you're an expert and you just kind of know things that you can't really explain anymore? It's probably because you've seen all those interrelated issues more than once. But why would why would testing where the eyes are looking be better than just giving a robot a list of things to check? Yeah, like I thought that was I mean, the concert of the study, I think my guess is. And this is this is this is just a guess. That they got access to these eye tracking software glasses first. And then came and then came up with a way to use them. Well, I could be wrong, but that would be my guess. That would definitely be my guess. Although, you know, the other thing is like you said, Justin, like if you had any idea and you were an expert and you're like, oh, the robots take take the future future jobs, take my job. If you were going to bias things, you know, maybe reporting, you know, filling out a spreadsheet would be less accurate. Well, the other thing is the machine learning aspect of it versus the human expert sort of hidden knowledge kind of thing is going to be trigger because you can imagine like a machine learning AI building, inspecting robot deciding that all historical structures must be taken down. Like, yeah, it's demolition immediately. There's cracks, there's water damage, there's mods. This thing's too old. Get rid of it. Makes a difference also where it is, you know, here in Denmark, there's plenty of 500 year old buildings sitting around. No big deal. But in San Francisco, there is nothing that is more than like 50 years old, probably. All right. That's a bit of an exaggeration. Oh, exaggeration. When was the big 19, 19 or something? Oh, 19, 1906 was the big one. Yeah, that knocked the whole city down pretty much. It burned about half the city. Yeah. A lot of buildings still remained though. There was the big ones called down. Most of them burned down. It just burned because the water pipelines broke and you couldn't put out the fire with hoses. Yeah, this is also to add to the multiple times that the various gangs in town got angry and like the Italian mafia decided it was time to just burn down one area of town. And what? Whoops. Oh, why is everybody blaming the Italians? No, no, there are some great stories. There are some really great stories of old San Francisco. Yes, yes, burned down on purpose many times. Not just during just during disasters, earthquakes. But sometimes you can prevent disasters and we are hoping, looking for ways that we can prevent the next flu pandemics and other viral pandemics. Researchers have been looking as well for more of a global vaccine. Let's call it a global vaccine, something that you can use to vaccinate against all flu strains. And a group from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital just published their work on the H3N2 flu virus in science advances. And they were looking at one part, the H part of the flu virus, the H part and the N part. The H part is called the hemagglutinin part. And that is the part that gets into cells that basically finds a cell and goes, I'm going to stab you and I'm going to invade you. And that's the hemagglutinin part. And so that's the part that a lot of researchers are looking at. And they're like, maybe we can do something to make a vaccine that addresses the H part of the flu virus. And that'll be good for all of them. And nobody will get sick from the flu anymore. So they found that this hemagglutinin needs to be really stable and also resistant to acidity to be really effective. And the hemagglutinin, it has to get past so you have like mildly acidic cells in your nasal cavity and then even pass that in your lungs. Apparently, it's like more highly acidic. And the researchers found that there's a mutation in hemagglutinin that makes a virus grow better in eggs and causes a mismatch, makes the vaccine incorrect. And so the mutation makes the virus the little part unstable and it doesn't it doesn't work well as a vaccine. So what they're determining, what they've pretty much determined is that the amount of acidity or the pH that the hemagglutinin part that is controlled by this particular mutation in the H of the hemagglutinin that it reacts to the acidity in the cells and it needs to be able to get past the nose to get into the lungs to cause the real flu problems. And so they need they now know have determined because of the acidity that they have seen the hemagglutinin react to that perhaps one way they can test to see whether or not their vaccines are going to work in the in the next year to prevent a pandemic from happening is to test their vaccines against different pH levels to see where the the hemagglutinin breaks down and whether or not it will actually whether or not it's actually going to work. So can I revise it for a second real quick? So is the idea that the vaccines that we have made already are losing the structure that the T cells would need because by the time it's been produced in the egg and then reproduced I guess the vaccine doesn't have the structure of the original. Yes, or that the the virus that's gone around a bit has changed enough that it's already yeah, already different enough that it's still going to make it past those defenses. Yeah, so they're but but when you come down to kind of more of a pharmacokinetics aspect of, you know, how the virus is attaching to a receptor. So receptor binding it's this is driven by acidity apparently with the hemagglutinin part of the flu virus. And so if we can if we can address the hemagglutinin stability, it might be able to we might be able to figure out number one, whether or not a particular flu virus is more likely to cause a pandemic. And number two, by looking at our vaccines and the bits that we're using for the vaccines, how well they might work against the different strains. So it could be down to a simple acid test. Or the next cold season. Yeah, take a couple of lemon wedges and show them a few notes to make your nose more acidic. That's right. Yeah, yeah. So acidity, I had I had no idea that, you know, the environment in your sinuses is slightly less acidic. It's more mildly acidic than the the lung environment. It's a little bit different. And the pandemic virus has to hit that sweet spot to be able to make it through the gauntlet. For infection. Yeah, no, I didn't. Anyway, acid, it's how we may may discover then the next pandemic flu virus to be able to defend against it. Fingers crossed. And oh, Blair, by the way, if you ever have gone out into the field and gotten all those little sticky invasive birthing stuck all over your pants and your little jerks, the little ones, all the all the little cockle birds is what they're called these little cockle birds. Worse, you always think you got them all and then you get home and there's one you step on one or there's one between your toe or where there's one, you know, a bunch that go on to create nasty little hair hair knots in the back of your dog's legs or whatever. They're not wonderful. The cockle birds, we don't like them. They're invasive for one thing. Who wants them? No wonder. But perhaps perhaps these nasty, invasive, annoying weeds could be useful to fight aging. Yeah, should I eat them? No, no, eat them. No, how do you immediately go? So here's number one. Do I eat them? I will eat this wild weed. Just the hopes that the thing that science has covered somehow translates into me just being able to eat the thing. Well, that is a cue into my my anti aging methods that I don't do a lot of topical applications, which is probably that's good. Can you eat your way to a healthier life in a certain respect? Yes, but not with cockle birds. Cockle birds can be extremely harmful. The fruit extract can be harmful. Apparently, it has a constituent that's toxic, carboxy, atras, atras, atrachdilicide, carboxy, atrachdilicide. It can hurt your liver. Isn't that great? So you don't want you don't know. So definitely don't eat it. Got it. No cockle bird fruit extract. Don't don't go there. Additionally, so this this extract from the plant that they that they studied. This is the first time they have looked at it in its particular role as a potential wound healing agent and skin protectant. It's been explored for rheumatoid arthritis and cancer previously. But this time you're like, oh, what can it do for the skin? And it has a lot of compounds that can help with anti inflammation, antioxidants, they were able to show that it influenced collagen production, benefited wound healing and also benefited damage from UVB radiation in the skin. So it can be and also be protective against UVB radiation. So perhaps sunscreens eventually will be developed that have cockle bird fruit extract included in them. OK, hang on. Before we go all cockle burry about everything before we go. Yeah, half cockle bird. Yeah. Is there a mechanism? Because then I'm like, what is what is it? Because aren't we past the point where, you know, magical plant has interesting effect? Justin, have you looked at the beauty industry lately? Because no. No, I know that's how they don't. I know that's not how they advertise things. But but that's got to be at some level. So that's this. That's the next question is the researchers because they have found these influences on collagen and UVB protection that they are going to study the biological mechanisms involved. So they don't know yet how exactly they do the this cockle bird juice does what it does. Second point here is that the collagen synthesis seems to take place in a very special happy spot, a little sweet spot where it at low levels, it doesn't do very much in the little perfect space place. It helps increases collagen synthesis. But then if it goes past a particular point, it starts to be harmful and do bad things. And so if I'm just going to put this out there, if you start seeing cosmetic products in the next few weeks, a couple of months with cockle bird extract in them, I would suggest potentially avoiding them until more information is out because there is not an understanding of the proper concentration to be using in cosmetic products at this point in time. Yeah, the thing I'm trying to understand is keep using my generic face sunscreen. And that's eat, eat Blueberry, you know, like have a good Mediterranean diet, get your fish oils in there and age gracefully, I suppose. Yeah, do what you can with that. Yeah, or otherwise just age. You could also just do that. It's you know what that's going to happen no matter what you want to do. It is sunny knocks in the chat room saying my my grandma did the VIX thing to me. I had that too when my grandma's that was also my grandma's go to you get a cold, you put VIX all over the chest and just like sleep like this and he said mentholation all over you for the minute. The only thing one of the things that I'm looking at this or at least the press release of the study is I mean, I don't I don't want to judge too much. But we they're stating that they don't know what the right concentrations are exactly how it works. But this was a South Korean study who are known for their cosmetics industry. Who are also pointing out that you also the best cockaburra out there isn't Southern Korea. Don't get the Chinese stuff is that they're saying this in the pair and I'm like, look, it's like what do you mean? You just told us you don't understand the right concentrations of how it works. It's true willing to say but the South Korean is the best cockaburra. Don't get the Chinese version when you get this. Yeah, our plants better, but we don't know how or why or if. Like I'm I've got my my a big big Justin skeptical asterisk now floating from that throwaway comment. Yeah. Yeah. I think we can, you know, a lot of things that are potentially going to be helpful for cosmetics industry stuff. They're we should be a little skeptical skeptical of to begin with because. But but only but only use the cockaburras that are grown in my backyard because those are the good ones. And the rest of you won't see the same effect. It won't. I think the big take home message here is don't drink cockleber juice. Don't go don't go rubbing your face in the cockleber bush. OK, it's not a good idea. Don't do that. Oh, we should teach that to all the kids. I know they won't listen. Kids never listen to the adults in the room. But if you're a kid and you're listening to this week in science right now, know that we appreciate you being here. All of us lifetime kids, kids forever. People with kids who wish that they listened to us. Anyway, we're all a big family here who appreciate science. And we are so glad that you are a part of this week in science audience. Thank you for joining us. And in the next part of the show, we're going to have a lot more fun and fantasticness. But before we get there, I just want to remind you that in case you are really enjoying this week in science and want to be a part of helping us do our show every single week as we do, you can head over to twist.org, click on our Patreon link and choose your level of support. Every every level, every bit of support helps us do what we do. We really can't do this without you. Thank you for all of your support. And on that, we will come back with this week in science, too. Blair's animal corner. Hold on, I have to scroll. I didn't scroll in time. Doodle, doodle, doodle, doodle, doo, scrolling to Blair's animal corner. With Blair. By Pez, Milliped, no pet at all. If you want to hear about the animal, she's your girl. Except for giant pandas and squirrels. What you got, Blair? Hey, we were just talking about being skeptical. I want to talk to you about skeptical fish. So wait, yeah. We picture them like a fishy bob. I just I don't know about what you're saying. They're right there, fishy bob. It's more like fishy bob darted away. Like there's a predator. I don't know if I believe him. I'm going to stay here. So in the coral reef, fish, some of them, some alone. Some of them swim in groups. Some of them school. They're paying attention to each other. So even though there's a bunch of different species of fish in the coral reef, they're all kind of paying to attention to each other, to be aware for predators. Everybody's getting eaten by something, right? When fish around them startle. Any fish around them is more likely to flee themselves. But in these large dense schools where fish around them can dart for no reason. Then individuals might be more willing to take risks and tune down sensitivity to the startle response of other fish around them. So that makes them less likely to free when a neighboring fish does. So this is analysis of footage from underwater camera observations in specifically coral reef fish in Maora French Polynesia. They looked at individuals in schools of wild foraging fish as they flee for shelter or not, even when there was a no predator or threat present. And they would do this on average about every eight minutes. It's a very frantic life. So they collected all of these observations. They use new computer vision tools, machine learning and computational modeling to analyze their behavior. And they found that these fish do, in fact, adjust their sensitivity to the signals produced by others based on the past history of what they've seen. So they basically acclimate to the social environment they're in and adjust their responsiveness to that. So when there's a lot of visual motion, they kind of reduce their sensitivity to it. They're just like, everybody's just moving around a lot. It doesn't really mean anything. When there's less visual motion, when everything is pretty still and all of a sudden somebody darts, that increases their sensitivity. Now they go, oh, gosh, maybe there's a real threat. I should also flee. So we call this a dynamic adjusting of sensitivity, which is something that you can look for in animals and actually appears to be pretty preserved throughout the animal kingdom. So there's an idea that this is kind of an ancestral trait from fish that has carried on through the rest of vertebrates, potentially. I don't know. Who knows? More study is needed. But so. Wow. But yeah, that's a leap. But what an interesting one. Well, I mean, it's if we can figure out when in like, we were talking about AI. Was this in the aftershow, maybe last week? But we were talking about AI learning about lies and truth. In any system, it's going to be beneficial, right? For the individuals in that system. To know who's lying, when to trust, when not to trust, what's what's misinformation, what's real information. Yes. Yes. So that's exactly it. Is that any brain, specifically a more complicated vertebrate brain in social situations, have a need to cope with misinformation and that that could be driven by evolution because you don't want to waste energy unnecessarily a bunch. You also don't want to ignore important signals and then get eaten, right? Evolutionarily, there's a lot of benefits to being able to tell the difference. Yeah, who to trust, who not to trust. When fishy Bob, like you said, he's the one who's like, I'm going to make them think there's an attack, someone attacking. I'm going to zip this way. And he does it one too many times. You know, and then there's the fish crying wolf sheep sheep. Wolf feel. Wolf feel. There we go. Thank you. Yes, you're welcome. I'm here for it. Yeah, so that is the kind of the suggestion from this is that this could be something that is conserved throughout the animal kingdom. Possible would make sense, especially because they claim that it's a very basic neural circuit that's at work here. And so because of the simplicity, that could be widespread and conserved throughout evolution. So it's possible. But yes, much, much, much, much, much more study would be needed to figure this out. Much, much, much more. In the meantime, we know that fish assess the quality of information given to them. So now, but now, but now. OK, so they've been they've been looking at these small groups. So is it is it possible that some people is it possible? OK, go ahead. OK. No, I was just going to say, is it is it all the fish? Every kind of thing. We're looking at one species in this case. So you're right. They need to first and foremost, look at other fish. That is step like zero basically in extrapolating this data. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Can I also extrapolate that it means that some people are less skeptical or handle misinformation worse than a fish would? Yes. And before a modern time, they would not have survived to reproduce. That is the expectation here. Yeah. Oh, oh, no, we've created a system where a system where very little selective pressure actually exists at this time. So unless you make your own fatal mistakes on your own bodily person, it is pretty hard to select out specific things in humans. But anyway, I think most much of the last century got rid of all the people who don't know who don't have the instinct to look left and right before crossing the road. Maybe I don't know about that. I think that's been reduced quite a bit. Some say it covered wagons on highways to figure it out. Hey, do you ever wish you were invisible? No, all the time. Never. Oh, yes, opposites. I see. Yeah. No, because people will be running into you all the time. We totally don't talk about trying to cross the street. Even if you look left and right, you can't expect anyone to ever slow down for you even a little bit. Right? People just constantly walking into you. You would make a terrible squid or octopus, then, Justice. Standing there at the counter, waiting to make your order for food and air back there, cleaning the kitchen like you don't even exist. No, you see, you turn it on and off at will. Yeah. As a mother, I would be, oh, sitting on the couch, reading a book and suddenly I put, mom, where are you? Put my book down, go invisible. Nobody can see me. Not to be found in the house. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, well, if that's something you wanted someday, you could have that thanks to squid and octopus cells. Not really. Really, this study is about using cultured human skin cells to play with the mechanics of cephalopod cells and how they can camouflage and appear transparent. And of course, right away when I tease this story, somebody said, if you were transparent, your organs would show. So that's not actually what's happening with octopuses and squids. They are matching their environment. They are changing the reflectivity of these structures in their skin cells to appear like they're not there. So they're not they're not turning their skin transparent. And then you can see their their innards. They're blending in with their environment. And so a lot of the mechanics with how this works are still being figured out. Scientists are still flabbergasted on a lot of the the ways that this happens in the cell and the triggers that happen in these cells. The issue is you can't at this point culture squid cells in a lab. You can't do it. So the whole point of this study was to. Replicate the tunable transparency of squid skin cells in mammalian skin cells, which can be cultured. So that was that was that was step one. They were able to get this kind of transparency structure in mammalian skin cells. Awesome. So now they get to manipulate it and figure out how the heck it works. And so this all came from a lab that had made invisibility stickers, which I can't remember if we talked about it on the show or not, but it sounds very familiar. It used bacterially produced squid reflected proteins that were adhered onto sticky tape. So they made these invisibility stickers. Very cool. So then they were like, well, if we were able to use it through bacteria, what if we could do it in mammalian cells? So they tried to capture the aspect of the ability of squid skin tissues to change transparency within human cell cultures. This is from University of California, Irvine. They so in the cephalopod cells, there are leukophores, which have particle, a particulate like nanostructures composed of reflectant proteins that scatter light. It's a bunch of nouns you don't really need to know. So basically these these these specific proteins called reflectants, they clump together and form nanoparticles so light isn't absorbed or directly transmitted. Instead, it scatters, it bounced off of them. It makes them appear bright white so they can adjust the clumping of the reflectant to adjust the wavelength of light that gets sent back, if any, at all. That's the part. So amazing is like, yes. I mean, just first off, you have cephalopods who are able to sense the colors of their surroundings and then somehow control all of the reflectants, which are little nanoparticles inside of their cells to create little reflective nanostructures that reflect at that specific frequency of light. Yeah, that's amazing. And now we're figuring that out. We are completely shelving the question of how they figure out how to do what they should look like. Right. Yeah. So like that's for later. Yeah, right now we do it. Can we do this in cells? OK. Yes, yes, yes. So they were they wanted to see if they could engineer mammalian cells to form these reflected nanostructures stably so they wouldn't immediately kind of like fall back apart so that they could control the scattering of light. So they introduced squid derived genes that encoded for reflectant into human cells. They then use the DNA to produce the protein, the reflectants. And what they found worked for them was that introducing salt to the cell culture. Changed the clumping of the nanostructures. And so systematically increasing the salt concentration allowed them to get detailed time lapse, 3D images of nanostructure properties as they became larger, the amount of light that bounced off the cells increased that turned their opacity up. So if cells allow the light through with little scattering, they're more transparent. If there's a if the scattering happens a lot, then they appear opaque and more apparent. That's called. So then what's really funny is right in the middle of this very exciting study, the COVID pandemic hit. Yeah, that's what it is. We're going to continue to hear this in all of our studies, like how did they pivot and still learn anything? So at that time, the lead researcher developed computational models that could predict a cell's expected light scattering and transparency before an experiment was ever run. So he was able to figure out like, what should I do in the lab when I can get back in there to maximize my time and figure out how to manipulate the reflectant in the right way? And so from all of this, the results are that they think that scientists will be able to better understand from this kind of data set how squid skin since squid skin cells, say that five times fast function without having ever cultured squid skin cells. Right. And so salt is obviously a big part of the question here and how they have manipulated it. Now there's a question of is salt concentration, something being manipulated in the squid? Is that part of the methodology in their skin or did we just find a worker around, right, in my valley in skin cells? We don't know. And so there's a bunch of applications, of course, potentially of using reflectant and all sorts of things. One of the really cool ones is that you could use it as a molecular probe to track structures in cells with advanced microscopy techniques because they can't be bleached. And it could also have implications for better understanding of cell growth and development if you can use it as kind of a tracking substance. So lots of cool things there. Of course, also, there's the opportunity to make biological structures with reflected in them that could change their opacity, right? Of course, that's obviously what I was thinking about. But this is kind of, this is step, you know, this is step 1A. Can we have biological, basic, like leather jackets? Would you have to feed it, though? Or would you have to be, would you have to, like, take your saline drip with you everywhere, right? Yeah, you, instead of taking your cephalopod skin jacket out of the closet, you're taking it out of the saline storage tank. Yeah, exactly, right. Yeah, so it's, they have some ideas here. They have a methodology to do more experiments, which is really great. But yes, at the end of the day, even if they figure out exactly how reflection works and how you can physically manipulate it molecularly, right? You still have to figure out how the squid's nervous system is telling it what to do. So this is a huge onion of questions and will remain one, I think, for quite a while. And I can't wait to find out more. This is very exciting. Yeah, reflecting, what will science do with it? There are so many, so many ways it can proceed. I still want to take that big question down from the shelf, but we'll leave it there for now. Oh yeah, it has to stay there for right now. Leave the big question on the shelf. Leave the jacket in the saline tank. If you are enjoying this weekend science, you can also head to twist.org and click on the Zazzle link and then go to our Zazzle store where we have all sorts of very cool products that you might actually put on a shelf or in a closet or on a wall or on a couch or really real products that you're not gonna have to wait for some far off, long future date to actually get, you know, and in purchasing them, you do help support the show. But Justin, what do you want to talk about? So this is out of, this is research from the Francis Crick Institute, published this week in Current Biology. They looked at the diversity of genes, coding for immunity and some really old people. This is about, Near East Europeans about 8,000 years ago came in mixed into Europe for the first time. They have 677 individuals dating from Stone Age Europe. They wanted to see what these early farmers immune systems looked like. So they have the whole genome sequencing. They found something pretty interesting actually. So according to this about 20% of the ancestry of late Stone Age people was traced to the local Indo-European hunter-gatherers. But what they found from the study is that 50% of the immunity genes from this smaller contributing population were present in the early farmers. So you have maybe 20% admixture initially with the hunter-gatherers, but more than half, around half, maybe a little more than half of the immune genes derived from that local population. So this is, I think kind of interesting because one of the things that we know happens when humans switch to agriculture and farming is that they will suddenly be set by all sorts of new diseases. We shrink by several inches in terms of average height. Yeah, this was not an easy transition by any means. But this study sort of supports that showing that there could have been an exposure to a lot of things that humans weren't used to before. But what's also interesting is that the local population that had been existing in Europe for thousands of years may have already had immunity to whatever these new farmers were experiencing because their immune systems were selected preferably in keeping that farming population alive. Also kind of shows that the diversity, that admixture of different populations increased, I say increased immunity, we may only be looking at the survivors, right? Anybody who didn't look both ways got hit by the mastodon or whatever was running around 8,000 years ago, right? So whoever was, didn't have immunity to the local diseases did die off. So we're only looking at the survivors, but it shows for the amount of population that's thought to have contributed to these stone age farmers, quite a bit of it came from the local hunter-gatherers who may have had a more robust or in a more locally attuned immune system. That's fascinating. Yeah, but the, I mean, they're local, they're hunter-ring. Hunter-ring and gatherer-ring. Yeah, hunting and gathering in the local ecosystem. And so perhaps that, and if they've been doing that for a very long time, then perhaps that has had a massive influence on the adaptation of their immune systems. But yeah, that then individuals coming in and trade happening and the ad-mixing, right? It's what I said. Ad-mixing with a heavy preference for the local immune system. And it's one of these things too, is we are now encountering global, it's redundant to say global pandemic, is we're encountering the age of the novel virus pandemics. Yeah. It's an interesting thing to realize that we may not be done with all the bottlenecking or the mass selections on population from disease, unless science can get there first and come up with ways to avoid having natural selection applied to us humans. Well, potentially, could we figure out what microorganisms are in various places? I mean, we do prophylactic vaccinations for people who are going to certain areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, or to India or other places. When you're traveling globally, there are certain diseases that we don't have to be inoculated against here in the United States, but they go, you should get vaccinated for that before you leave. But if there were more understanding of that, what are in the local area? What is in the local area? What kind of bacteria? What viruses? Is there some kind of probiotic prophylactic that you could take for a couple of weeks and get your immunity up before you even get someplace? And how would that influence things globally too? I don't know. Last story I brought tonight is an interesting article on phiz.org about the death of open access mega journals. Question mark. So there's a big stress test that's been happening in scientific publishing for a while and there's more coming. When we talk about traditional publishing, the way it kind of used to work is that universities, research institutions all paid a subscription to a handful of publishers who produced a number of journals with papers in it. Now, if you have this subscription, you could read all of these articles, which was very handy for researchers to keep up with what's going on and other universities and what other research is being done. And if you were part of one of these institutions, it was also a pipeline to do your own publishing because the fees for publishing were all covered by this subscription, usually, generally speaking. So that's sort of how publishing worked for a long time. If you wanted to just read a science article, you know, on the internet, for instance, you would have to either make this institutional subscription that nobody can afford or buy each article at an obscene price, right? This is, and so open access journalism in the scientific field came along and we had things like plus one scientific advances that started publishing scientific research papers in a way that everybody could read them. So this was like, ah, this is finally we are allowing this to happen. So the model that they used was though they would charge whoever was looking to get published and they would charge them a fee to process the paper to do the reviews. And then, and this is how they made their money. So one is you just have a subscription based paywall. The next was everybody who applies has to pay to get their paper in just to handle the bills. And then everybody can read this research. It can be shared freely. There's no paywall involved. Well, the mega journals came about when they realized, hey, there's a lot of people who will be willing to pay to have their journal, their paper published. And so we're going to take lots and lots and lots of those and charge higher and higher fees and make a decent amount of money and we'll make it all open to the public so everybody can see it and then so this is the mega journals started where they started publishing larger and larger volumes. Now some of those are plus one and was a scientific advances. I think was the other one I was mentioning or scientific reports. Excuse me. Yeah, but I was going to say plus one is one that that was started. It's when it was probably that was the very first. Well, yeah, plus the public library of science was the first open access research journal. And it's the first one that tried the model and it grew and it grew and it I think is the biggest or not the biggest but it's mega because it kept going and it gathered a lot of support and then looking down this list of various of various other journals. You've got scientific reports which is Springer. You have nature communications which is also Springer. You've got frontiers and immunology immunology which is the frontiers line and you have MDPI as a publisher for a lot of them. Elsevier is another mega. There are a lot of already big name publishers of scientific journals who jumped in after they saw that this was an opportunity. So there's a big conversion to this. So yeah. So what in the traditional method they didn't care about the number of papers in the traditional old school subscription based what they got paid was for the number of journals basically. So they would come up with more and more journals that were more and more specific to topics and they would package those up as parts of the subscription. What initially like close one is very general. You'll find papers from across the scientific field. Same thing with scientific reports. But then they specialized right now. There's started specializing bio plus computer whatever's. Yeah. Yeah. So so now the specialization there was some fear that maybe this is going to start and fringe on traditional scientific publishing because they're publishing a lot more than anybody else. Okay. In these in these specific ones and it's open that everybody can read. So why wouldn't you. So there's a there's a whole other aspect to this. Some of this gets kind of kind of crazy. There's a this is the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health which is an M. D. P. I. published. Journal. Published 16,889 full articles in 2022. Now compare that with the American Journal of Public Health which published 514 articles the European Journal of Public Health 238 articles American Journal of Epidemiology had 222 articles the same year that this one journal International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health somehow managed to publish 16,889 full articles. So one of the things though that affects is impact factor. Impact factor is how journals are rated and it can tie into how your paper is perceived because the prestigiousness of the journal that you've published in can be something you can levy in your research to get grant funding to get promotions within the university to get tenure that sort of thing. Impact factors create a curated by this company called Claritive Analytics Web of Science Group. They have this very interesting formula where they use the average sum of citations received in a given year and two years previous and then divide that by the sum of the citable publications over the past couple years. So what's happened then is there's this gigantic push to cite journals to get their impact factor higher and this has always kind of been a thing but it got really kind of out of control. So some of the big online journals PLOS One and Scientific Reports PLOS One self-sites 2% of the time Scientific Reports cites itself about 3% of the time. The open access journals by M.D.P.I. There's 11 of them that were in this data set. Self-cited 12% of the time huge increase and there's some fear that there's been reports of scientists being pressured by, you know, there's some that have been scandalously in the news. I think it was, I'm going to get in trouble. Elsevier, I think, got in trouble because somebody got denied publishing because they didn't cite the journal enough. That was a single issue apparently. But there's lots of reports. This pressure to self-site tends to affect assistant professors more or people who are publishing for the first time. They tend to get more pressure because they might be more susceptible to adding in citations and then, you know, the research is like, I don't care, this is my paper that's the important part, not the citation. So, you know, but it's gotten a little out of control. One journal, Animals, has 22% rate of self-citation suggesting that a great deal of what we know about animals has all been published in this one journal. How else would 22% of the citations self-refer to the journal? Yeah, I mean, all animals. Everything, animals. Yeah, it depends on the type of study. That's an interesting one. But there's also a thing, especially with animals where a specific lab will study a specific species and have a bunch of different publications about that one species. And if they are consistently publishing with the same journal, then that happens very easily. Yeah, and so some of this too is just by the volume you could see these are specialty articles with 16,000 papers. They may all be interrelated and could all self-site each other on some level. But on the other hand, there is this fear that this is playing with the algorithm of impact factor. And there's some other questions. So now there's been a delisting that happened a little over a week ago. The Web of Science, the folks that come up with that impact factor rating, removed nearly two dozen journals, including the International Journal of Environmental Research when it published the 6,889 studies in 2022 alone. Many of the journals were published by a publisher, Ndawi and MDPI and had their impact factor ratings removed. Ndawi is known for its, I think it's known for the fraudulent studies or for a lot of fake studies that come through the journals. In 2021, it wasn't. In 2020, it wasn't. 2021, it got bought by Wiley for $300 million they wanted this confirmation because look, it's the MDPI one, but that 1,680 something in that one journal, 16,000 something, they charge an average of about $2,500 a study to publish there. So this is a big business. Wiley saw this in Ndawi and bought it for $300 million and then looked under the hood and then started issuing thousands of retractions. They were discovering papers that were filled, you know, they were finding thousands and tens of thousands of citations that did not seem to have anything to do with the subject matter of the studies. So they, It's as if those papers were written by machine learning. My machine learning. So here's the other fear. Here's the other fear on top of this. Okay. So this is unfortunate. This is a little bit longer story. The the the web science folks have put out a newsletter not really explaining in detail why they delisted and this 19 of the Ndawi journals got delisted. This they got rid of 50. Apparently there's another wave of this coming. There's they're really removing their rating system from a lot of these mega journals. These big publishers. It says they don't go into details of what they chose but they say we have invested in new. This is from the vice president. Nandita Kauderi vice president of web of science. We have invested in a new internally developed AI tool to help us identify outlier characteristics that indicated journal may no longer meet our quality criteria. Very diplomatic. Couple of the things that might be a problem. Peer review process. You have suddenly tens of thousands of papers and not hundreds going through that they are constantly hiring this process of guest editors to review as as peer reviewers who generally speaking may not be reviewing studies that have anything to do with their field of expertise. And I'm going to add to that that there are complaints across academia about the overloading of peer review because you are expected as part of your scientific expertise and community to peer review papers. But you do it for free. You do it. You are asked by journals editors all the time. Can you review this paper? It's in your field. You say yes because you need to do it a certain amount of a certain amount. It's like volunteering for your science. A lot of people they're struggling to get their labs funded. They're trying to get their own papers published. They don't have time for this. They're not getting paid. Meanwhile, or are they a lot of well maybe these guest editors are usually they're not it's a hundred million hours a year is the estimate of time that's being spent by free reviews. Now for a lot of these mega journals because there's so much pressure and thousands and thousands of more papers being published and there's another issue with it in the turnaround times which is a normal journal has about 200 days or so between submitting and publication some of these journals are promising times turnaround times of 31 days as low as 31 days 40 days 50 days. There are incentives for reviewers who may not be reviewing something in their field because they're guest editors to get a discount on their own publishing from these publishing houses if they can turn them in quickly. So they're not paid. It's not here's money. It's here's a discount that's not money. So that's not a bribe. That's just a discount for good job at being fast at a thing that normally takes a lot of time and thought. So there's all these issues that could be out there. One of the one of the things though is now we've got the AI that's coming along. That's going to also further stress test. So we may we may have seen the death of these open access journals to some extent because if suddenly if suddenly these these journals that are pumping out tens of thousands of of papers don't have impact factor if it can't help your career to do what I'm going to call self publishing of your study at this point based on what I've seen from the how the numbers the costs and the review and then the fallout from all these unreviewed or fraudulent studies self publishing your study is going to do as much for you as self publishing your book and handing it out to your friends just go down to Kinko's print it handed out to your people around your institution or wherever you are we wrote a paper great or share it with one of these institutions if you want to pay $2,500 for them to do it or why ever but no gravitas because because the answer question that the thing that's really like they're telling like oh the integrity of the publishing is extremely important who are these thousands of people paying thousands of dollars per study to have a study a fraudulent study with fake citations the paper puppy mills out there who does this benefit because that's the list I want I don't know I don't even care about any of the rest of this integrity issue I want the names and I want to I want to do a whole show someday just talking about the research researchers like calling them up hey you published a study under your name that was completely bogus what do you do doctor what oh he's okay you're busy I got it patient oh it's surgery well good luck anyway I don't really care about the business model aspect of it but the integrity aspect of it has to be there we have to be able to trust science I think it may be I think the problem is that the time for it to go the problem is that so much of science has become a business model and that where you know I don't know how you don't have it be driven by money in you know in any regard well yeah well in the very olden days you had the gentleman scientist who was funded by their rich parents or their rich friends from the gentleman's club and they got to go sail off to an island and come back and write a big thing about it or they got to just do whatever they did the little tower in the college did university in London and they're okay without without going without going back that far yeah we covered it's early on in this show we covered to one degree or another early on this show and I now I'm going to leave it out because I don't remember I think it was Lancet but again it could be wrong what the who the Australian publisher is that Lancet anyway they were one of these publications a lot of paid industry advertising papers were making their way in around the process and then they would be higher you could hire a company owned by the publishing company separate from the paper to consult with getting your paper through which was basically a pay to publish method in the old system so that so having levels of corrupt activity by both publishers who are greedy and by people who may want to put out papers for their own career interest this has been going on but this is that this is also we talked about AI finding fraudsters allowing for them but also catching them is going to be a really interesting thing going forward because it can also be applied backwards in time so if you have published a fake study out looking at you people out there AI is going to find you out and we're going to do a whole show where we put your face on the screen and talk about how you published a fake study AI is watching you that's right oh what's real and what is not anymore I have some things to bring up for the last little bit of the show here we talked previously about the possibility according to a study from this past year about the Epstein bar virus being responsible for onset of multiple sclerosis and people with a predisposition for multiple sclerosis another paper has just come out related to a different a different organism clostridian perfringes that produces a toxin called epsilon and their work not in humans but in mice suggests that this epsilon toxin could potentially be something that opens up capillaries and blood vessels and allow or the and allows the toxin to get into the brain to initiate autoimmune activities that end up leading to the myelin degradation that leads to what is called multiple sclerosis and so they had healthy mice and mice that they gave these bacteria to and those healthy mice were able to they had really nice healthy capillaries bacteria nothing happened to them but when they gave them or when they gave mice that had a genetic predisposition to an multiple sclerosis type disease that does autoimmune disorder that degrades the myelin and they gave them the the bacteria it within the intestine broke down the boundaries the toxin was able to get into the blood cells and was able to get to the brain and compromise the immune system. Yeah so once again this is showing a link between gut and brain health gut and immune system gut and the nervous system and the and that that fragile interplay the interface between our genetic predisposition and the organisms that we come into contact with the ones that end up in our guts the ones that can lead to particular disorders in some individuals and not at all in others so whereas you know healthy people who don't have genetic predisposition to multiple sclerosis could come in contact with this bacteria it have absolutely nothing happened there is the possibility or an increased probability right that this particular interaction now that we've seen in mice could be leading to something similar in people and so of course this is something that needs to be investigated a bit further but it it gives us a little you know one other possible possibility for a target to look at for some for maybe a subpopulation of individuals who who have multiple sclerosis. So if it's being caused essentially by a bacteria in the gut yeah if you took an antibiotic is it too late if you already have multiple sclerosis or could the myelin sheath rebuild if you clear out the toxin right and so this is this is the question and the researchers were we're questioning whether this this treatment could neuralize the top if you treated it somehow targeted the Epsilon toxin whether it could halt new disease activity or because very often there's this relapsing or remitting at aspect of multiple sclerosis where the disease will halt halt where it seems to halt for a period of time and then suddenly sometimes get worse again and so if there's you know some aspect to gut changes bacterial bacterial influences there are lots of anecdotal tales of changing your diet influencing how your multiple sclerosis plays out you know and I say anecdotal because there's still you know very it's it's hard to say you know you bring down inflammation and maybe that can help to a certain degree but it's an autoimmune disease so once your immune system has already become sensitized you know how do you how do you really bring it back and stop the autoimmunity right all together yeah huh yeah so perhaps an antibiotic perhaps something that targets the Epsilon toxin itself perhaps you know depending on if you catch it early versus late after right so this is you have to do you have to do a check of your microbiome regularly if you have a genetic predisposition and say like oh man this one bacteria the levels are increasing we need to put you on antibiotics right now and you could prevent it from showing up yeah yeah I'm starting to I'm starting to agree with you more and more player that the microbiome checkup should be a mandatory like forget the whole thing right annual poop test please forget the thing where they they they make you turn your head and cough and all that that's you know how many one thing we really need to forget that time to be funny I've never been asked to do that. Well now well my doctor always does that one that's different depends on the doctor you go to be the thing yeah. Yeah very cool yeah so possibly you know this is another another pathway to the pathogenesis of this autoimmune disorder and to leading to treatment to halt that pathogenesis which would be pretty awesome now as I was going to say the other thing is whenever we're talking about a genetic predisposition and we found something that can take advantage of whatever the DNA defense or repair mechanism whatever is there that's that's the intersection mechanistically causing it this might not be the only thing that triggers it to so it also gives an interesting place for researchers to look for other gut microbes that could access these same pathways and to build a profile of the dangers of the thing microbiological dangers to people with their predispositions so very fascinating story. And in other fascinating thought provoking stories researchers who just published in an open access nature communications journal there. Yeah it's a good one wrong with open access there's nothing at all researchers they've been wanting looking into the question of what is it in our brains that distinguishes. What is real from what is imagined. What happens in our technical fish. Right this exactly in our brains it's not a hamster running in a wheel it is really a group of a school of skeptical fish. Yeah OK. Anyway the researchers. Looked into what they call one trial per participant psychophysics so looking at reactions within the brain with computational modeling neural imaging to show how brains respond to what is real and what is imagined what's there and what is not there and they they really showed that in the brain judgments of reality. Our intermixed and there's this balance where the brain at one point goes no no no this is totally imagined this is all me I know this is all me and if you slide the lever a little bit to the other end of the spectrum the brain goes I know this is all coming from outside me I totally know this but there's some place and maybe that's where the uncanny valley lies somewhere in the middle there's a place where the brain goes. Yeah it could be one or the other and it's a very intermixed signal yeah and so you see a combination in the brain of the imagined and the real and the real. So in this experiment. The researchers were looking at the accounts of basically our brains monitoring of reality and they had a number of trials one trial per participants they had a number of different situations where they had people looking at a fixation point and then they had something a noise image and then they asked people to imagine things and to basically tell them how vivid their imagery was what was there what was not and they had a combination trial where there actually was signal in the noise so there was real stuff in there for the brain to pick up on that wasn't specific wasn't just noise. And the the researchers found that there was this definite combination of what people saw they imagined and what they what they thought they saw versus what was actually there what they could imagine was there. And then when they as they move forward they looked at areas of the brain that were being involved in the vividness and the imagination versus actual perception and they found that there were a number of different areas that were involved in kind of the different stuff and where there are some visual cortex areas that are always involved in both because your mental imagery can also be visual in nature very often. There were there were parts that were more or less activated so for instance the interior insula was active on both sides of the brain and much more active in truly perceived situations than in where there was greater imagery or imagination but there was overlap as well so. Anyway yeah so there's a little bit of overlap it says so far brain can tell the difference between reality and imagination right so the brain does know this. But what this implies is that there is going to be a point at which we are able to actively either we are going to be able to actively manipulate the brain to cross the thresholds so that reality is not perceived. No no no you can't tell the difference but we don't we do this all the time isn't this like the whole isn't this what movies are. Yeah and we. We're. When we jump in a movie and suspension of disbelief right we're like reading a book also like you're really thrilling book yeah but as you're doing it you know your brain knows it's imagined your brain knows you're you know it might be a real book that were movie that you're watching but it knows but it's not a truly real so you know you're watching a movie right but if you read even a novel and then you go to bed and you hear a weird sound down the hall then your imagination is telling you something from something you read is real. Does it does it count that sometimes I can't tell if the refrigerator is making a weird noise or if my tinnitus is acting up. Is that is that the middle. There you're there you're. Is this is this one but once I'm inside the inside the house isn't it but it's real. It's still a real sound. Okay I guess I don't have any unreal what if they are unreal what if I don't have tinnitus what if I've imagined it. But there are so there are hallucinations the. Disorders of reality monitoring like schizophrenia you have sent you have the sensory aspects of. The brain not being able to tell the difference of whether it was externally or internally triggered. And that's you know that's the difference. There's an effect actually this paper talks a bit about an effect that was discovered in 1910 by a female researcher Mary Chavez West perky and this is called the perky effect. Which she discovered there's a mechanism that might underlie perceptual reality monitoring in healthy observers. The participants were instructed to imagine various objects at a certain location in a white wall while the participants didn't realize it images of the same objects were simultaneously projected to the same location. All participants failed to notice the presence of the real stimuli reflecting that quote if I hadn't known I was imagining I would have thought it real. Okay. I need that study to be done this hundred and ten years later. Yeah. To see if people are like surprised like I can get in 1910 you might have not seen a projection. Before. Yes. You know what I mean? Yeah. So voluntary control something outside of something needs to be updated on that study. Yeah. Apply to anybody on the planet. Yeah. Question of it even does the perky effect is is be the skeptical about the perky effect. I skeptical fish don't like it. Gosh now I have this imaginary fish bowl in my head. These little skeptical fish swimming around. I got to pay attention to my imaginary fish or are they real? I don't know. Will you ever really know if the skeptical fish are real? Is what you're seeing real? Is it what's happening here? Do you? Can you even know? Anyway, they discovered their findings are inconsistent with the perky effect. People tend to discard information sensory information when they are when they're imagining and they challenge a proposal that the intention of volition associated with imagery is used to classify an experience as imagined rather than real. So there's definitely an interaction between source mixing internal versus external, but this leads to, like I said, the potential for investigating more disorders around sensory perception and also investigating more as we evolve technologically in the virtual realm of how the brain is able to tell the difference between internal versus external and what is real and what is inside me and imagined. It would be a very interesting study to have to be looking at the brains of schizophrenics having a hallucinatory audio hallucinatory episodes where they can in these episodes they can be aware that the thing isn't real but still viscerally be experiencing it simultaneously. And then if there's a way then to narrow that overlap to that would be extremely helpful to a subset of people who are suffering from that sort of a disease. Exactly, yeah. Anyway, oh the brain, it does create our reality. It really does. In conjunction with our bodies and our environments, our brain is that filter through which all we see is created. I think we did it. I think we've come to the end of the show and I hope your brain is creating just a fabulous world for you right now. Fabulous reality. Did we make it? We come to the end of the show? We're here. Maybe 120 minutes but anyway, maybe we have come to the end. I do want to say thank you to everyone who's in our chat rooms. Thank you so much for chatting with us throughout this whole time in our discord. Thank you for those of you who are there in our discord. Vada, thank you so much for your help with show notes and with social media. Gord, Arun, Laura, others who help with our happy chat rooms. Thank you for keeping the places safe and happy for all participants. Thank you for recording the show. Rachel, thank you so much for editing the show. I would also like to thank our Patreon sponsors because you know without our Patreon sponsors, we're nothing. 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Email Kiki at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com Justin at twistmanion at gmail.com or me Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org Just be sure to put twist T-W-I-S into the subject line or your email will be sent in a rover to a tidally locked exoplanet circling a red dwarf star and we won't see it. Maybe our great great great great great great great great grandchildren will but we won't so. We will hear everything we had to say about the world on Twitter where we are at TwistScience at Dr. Kiki at Jacksonfly and at Blair's Menagerie We love your feedback if there's a topic you'd like us to cover or address a suggestion for an interview a haiku that comes to you in the night please let us know. We'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. Hey, if you've learned anything from the show remember It's all in your head this weekend science this weekend science this weekend 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 tell them how to stop the robot with a simple device I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand and all is coming your way so everybody listen this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science this weekend science science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what I say may not represent your views but I've done the calculations and the after show this show was so long I think we already did an after show Blair, how's it going? I agree you still dancing? No I'm imagining I'm in bed right now No I'm imagining you stomping your foot when you say No Yeah I need to get Yeah, Justin will be back in a moment he probably went to get himself another cup of coffee He's like six deep I think at this point I'm like oh you obviously Justin he's listening to us in his headphones right now I'm sure because his earbuds he said his earbuds are on you Justin don't have any appointments immediately after the show apparently maybe Felix is still sleeping I have a tremendously busy day ahead as always Blair you do look tired maybe you should say good night Good night That's all we got That's all I do want now I have this whole desire to create a website called The Bad Report or the The Bad Impact and just list researchers who attach themselves to fraudulent papers like a negative impact website for just public shaming purposes Well there is there was a blog that I think got picked up by a larger group but the Retraction Watch like they it's not The Bad Report so Retraction Watch which is run by Ivan Oranski has been around for a very long time very reputable and they basically keep tabs on papers that are being retracted studies that somebody put in a thing and maybe it will get retracted and ooh this one actually did get retracted and this is what happened but they don't catch everybody because of course they can't but they've been very influential in I think tracking and making public a lot of the misbehavior that's happened in the research institution over the years You gotta send me a link to that because I gotta go check it out Retraction Watch I didn't really so I go through what I would consider pretty credible sources I go through usually when preparing for the show I'm selecting from journals that have the highest impact ratings that's not the thing I'm looking at but it's something like any stories that come out of nature or this sort of thing tend to be have a credibility to them that is obvious in the paper when you read it you know I've read I've seen papers that I've there was one and I don't want to pick on anybody but the research article was talking about it's a highly debated issue and then cited in 25 year old paper yeah like how is that a highly debated something's already and then as I proceeded to read I was like oh gosh this is terrible and so this sort of thing happens where you know you come across a study that sounds like it's interesting based on the title and you go and start reading it and what is this what even is this thing yeah there's another so there's also there's retraction watch where it's like a journalistic slant on it telling the stories and then there's the retraction watch database and so you can actually search it to search researchers and search for different retractions and it's so they've got lots of things for you and then retraction so like maybe I'm just a naive country science communicator and don't know all the intricacies of this big old science world but it seems to me like there could be a good reason for retractions like we did this study and we were very confident and how we put it together and everything and then we found out through a later genomic analysis that we had actually been looking at the wrong micro bacteria that had been misidentified before this day so there could be like I get it there can be a whole list of reasons why a good study could require retraction yes many reasons but sometimes the fact that wily, poor wily publishing lifted up the hood on this 300 million dollar publishing vehicle that they had purchased and went oh gosh it squirrels on treadmills all over the place here rats have been chewing at the wires and publishing with fake citations like that must have been horrifying for them they had to stop the publication of some of the specialty papers for like a couple of weeks and they said it cost them like nine million dollars and they're probably not done and now now they're like a giant portion of that vehicle that they purchased has been unimpact somebody purchased a scientific lemon somebody's got to pay 300 million dollars and it's going we did it and guess what my guess is you're probably trying to do it again why wouldn't you I mean if you were that successful at a thing fraudster criminals who were successful at crime tend to repeat I would guess I don't know it sounds like it's a big problem I'm glad that the web of science which by the way you actually didn't know web of science existed yes yes it's a wonderful database also not just for impact factor but also for searching for studies yes now I have a whole other thing I can check out yeah there's good databases out there oh Blair is like now like slowly slowly falling sliding down her chair slumping laughing off into oblivion yeah before we disappear into our own separate oblivions I would like to wish Sunny Knox happy 18th birthday anniversary anniversary and a twist of anniversary what do we get twist of Sunny Knox says hey I've been listening to twist for 18 years as of this year thanks for being with us that long really appreciate that you're here to tell us that right now this show hasn't been on the air that long where were you talking about oh gosh wait a sec what year is it I'm yeah I'm still it's been on that long today hahaha oh Blair I'm so sorry it's all my fault I got carried away how many cups of coffee yeah yes it's not getting carried away it's getting excited I have to start my day and I got an extra hour of sleep cause now finally the difference in the daylight savings time is over so I'm all fresh I got that hour of sleep that apparently I needed badly that one hour made all of the difference and then six cups of coffee and then and then it's always energizing to hang out with the two of you and our wonderful audience oh it really is but here on this particular coast it is getting later and some of us do need as much rest as we can get these days I'm going to go through these attraction databases and do some public shaming you go do that you go get into public shaming feel like that's a good courage choice for me ahh oh sunny knocks at least I don't have to get up as early as we used to have to get up to make it to the radio station to actually do the show in the morning although I don't know this is like doing that now it's great to I'm on the late night end of it now I've gone to extremes why can't we do this show at like noon cause I have a job why do we have to have jobs what we should do is start charging for papers to be covered on the show there you go and then we're going to have a business model but then we're going to have to do more than a dozen shows a week we're going to have to like really raise the bar how much do you think we could charge to cover somebody's story would question our credibility we wouldn't mention that we're charging it we'd keep it a secret I ruined everything it was another good idea throwing away gosh during it ah say the say the things in the right way so that identity 4 doesn't have to yell at us that it doesn't work that way say good morning Justin good morning Justin say good night Blair good night Blair good night kiki good night everyone thank you for joining us for another episode of this week in science we are looking forward to seeing everyone stay healthy happy and well rested in their own wonderful realities next Wednesday 8 p.m. pacific time and so whatever stay safe stay healthy stay curious look both ways avoid the uncanny valley look both ways because maybe you're in England maybe you're in the US you don't know