 Welcome to another podcast broadcast of This Week in Science. We're back again, Facebook is for some reason given me trouble. I'm gonna just remove that Facebook post right now. It's gonna take a second. Tonight on the show, we are going to try and do a tight 75 so that Justin can get out of here and get on the bus or train or whatever it is he does there in Denmark and go to work this morning. And for those of you in the know, this is of course the live broadcast of This Week in Science which is a weekly podcast you can subscribe to. That's the edited version. So this kind of stuff and any audio or troubleshooting stuff gets edited out along the way. Hit the likes, hit the thumbs up, hit the hearts and the notifications, send the links to your friends. And are you ready to go Justin? Let's do it. Let us begin. Beginning the show in officially, three, two, this is twist. This Week in Science episode number 962 recorded on Wednesday, February 28th, 2024. Leaping into science leaves a mark. Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show, we will fill your head with ancient meat, ovarian vestiges and tales from humanities past, but first. Just clamor, disclaimer, disclaimer. There sometimes seems to be little reason for why a world run by humans is run the way it is. Without disparaging human beings in general, painting them all with the same broad brush stroke across an incomprehensibly blank canvas of meaningless words and endless ideological selfie posts. Humans don't seem to understand that their actions have consequences, often negative ones, for the very planet upon which they live. And yes, we can see you. There are specific humans doing things that are pretty neat. Discovering galaxies billions of light years away, curing diseases, uncovering the lost histories of life on earth and searching for answers to basically every question. For humans who are interested in a world where all humans are curious, where human potential is positively pursued and where the consequences of actions can be foreseen, then you have come to the right place. All the neat things that humans are doing are here. On This Week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want you, Kiki. And a good science to you too, Justin. And everyone out there, welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again to talk about all the science that happened that we wanna talk about in the last week. We have great show ahead. Thank you so much for joining us. I have stories this week about fingerprints, the heart of a supernova, brain activity, and something like ovarian tongues. We'll get to that. What do you have for us, Justin? Wait, what was the last one? Yeah, yep. Blah, blah, blah, blah. I have a life on the moon story. What? What? Yes, maybe. Maybe. Ancient food source becoming a new food source. We have brain circuitry for a better living and dehydrating the planet to combat global warming. Okay, I don't know about that last one, but okay, sounds interesting to discuss. That is interesting as your last one, though. And it will be my last one, just so y'all know that's the last story I will tell you tonight. As we jump into the show to find out more about all these subjects that we have just teased for you, I want you to remember that this week in Science broadcasts, this podcast stream on Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook live weekly around 8 p.m. Pacific time. And we are available as a podcast. So you can find us places that podcasts are found and subscribe, right? You subscribe, you'll get a new episode every time that a new episode is published or that we go live. Look for this week in Science. Remember to subscribe your friends if you happen to be borrowing one of their devices. Yes, that will work. It's important. Let me just see your phone for a second. I hear you're listening to a new podcast. You can also just go to twist.org, our website for more information, but let's dive into all of that science. Wanna start with the space? Let's go. I'm going to space. That is where we are going to begin. We begin far away in the past. Because really, you know, when I think about how light travels through space time, anything that we're seeing now happened in the past. So back in 1987, researchers, a bunch of people saw a supernova dubbed supernova 1987. Hey, that was a good one. It was like a big bright light in this kind of distance. It was. It was very, very a big bright light. It's about 170,000 light years away in the large Magellanic cloud. And this is so close. It's outside of our Milky Way galaxy. It's a neighbor, but it's a dwarf galaxy. Anyway, this star was larger than our own sun, about eight to 10 times the mass of our star. And it went supernova. And the researchers were like, oh, okay, is this star as things explode out? It also implodes in, right? So the mass collapses in on itself. And that mass could either be a black hole or a neutron star. And so researchers have been trying to look at the light that comes from the area. They've been trying to figure out the signatures of the radio waves and stuff that's been, that we have, that we've been able to look at in the past 37 years. But oh, lo and behold, the J-WIST space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope used its near-cam and was able to look in the infrared and get past the clouds of dust and gas that have been hiding the actual core of what happened to that star. And keeping us from seeing what was going on. Also, can I just point out, I love the fact that J-WIST has to use the near-cam. It's near. 187,000 light-years away. Near and for red, I think it's, yeah, it's a spectrum. But yeah, it's not near as in close, but bloop-dee-bloop-dee-blop-dee-blop. The near-cam and other components of it have been able to look at the Miri MRS Argon-2 and near-spec IFU Argon-6 have been able to take a look at this particular supernova remnant. And for the first time, researchers have been able to determine that, Right there in the middle, something glowing. Yeah, they've been able to see because infrared can get past the light-scattering dust and gas and get into, it's looking at the heat patterns of what the energy, the heat energy that's coming out of there. Anyway, neutron star is what they think they've got. Finally, they've got the evidence that they've been seeking, says Mike Barlow, who's part of the team behind the discovery. And they've been trying to process it and find the neutron star and the gas for all these years. But now, now they know. And there's a compact object that has a certain signature that is indicative of a neutron star, as opposed to a black hole. There's also what they call rings of circumstellar gas that you can see kind of around that central image. And there's additionally, outside of that, more stellar debris dust, other hot gas stuff that's out there, star stuff that's been ejected. But because of the signature that they've gotten from the near-cam, not this far away object, has been determined to be a neutron star. So this is really cool. It's super cool. Yeah, I love it. A mystery from 37 years ago, which this was the first time in like 400 years, researchers had seen a supernova bright enough to really be talking about and taking a look at it in this way. Also the first time in 400 years where they had a really good way to view it. Yeah, exactly. First time in human history, actually. And along that, not J-WIST, but going out into space, but coming closer to our own solar system, we remember the DART mission, which was a double asteroid redirection test from NASA, trying to basically run a craft into an asteroid called Dimorphos, the moon of another asteroid. And they did and it was successful. And there was all this stuff that splashed out of the impact of this asteroid mission, the DART mission. An article in the conversation from Ian Whitaker says that the impact itself was kind of like, it's 580 kilograms was the spacecraft, hitting an asteroid of about 5 billion kilograms. And that's equivalent to an ant hitting two buses. But the 580 kilogram asteroid was also traveling at six kilometers per second. And so results that they have been able to publish just this last week in Nature Astronomy have shown that this impact didn't just leave a dent in the surface of Dimorphos. It actually changed the structure, so it mushed Dimorphos into, it's like if you were to push into a balloon or a water balloon because of the weak construction of the surface of Dimorphos, it's just a bunch of loose stuff on the surface. The impact caused a lot of material to be blown off. And that material was shed, they think is about 20 million kilograms of material that came off the surface. And they slowed down the orbit of Dimorphos around Didymus by about 30 minutes, 33 minutes. I think that might be a good example of the Newtonian force equals mass times acceleration. Yes, that's great. Not a lot of mass coming in contact, but my goodness the acceleration makes up for it. Yes, when you're going that fast and able to hit at a particular speed, it enables a really big impact. And so 30 minutes have been, the orbit of Didymus around, or Dimorphos around Didymus, it's been shifted by 33 minutes. So they shifted the orbit and the shape of the moon. There's a bunch of this trailing stuff now. And so because of all of the debris that's fragmented into the orbital space, we've got that is gravitationally shifting how the moon is moving. So anyway, it's a very interesting result. They're looking at it from actual results versus their simulated impact. And what they did is actually more than what they expected from simulations. Although I also heard that it's already self-healing. It's already the gathering its little bits back with gravity. Yeah, the good news about this is it does support the idea that we could protect ourselves kind of if we had enough advanced warning of an asteroid on its way to Earth. Not something really, really close, but if we knew about it before it was into the solar system, maybe we could shift it just enough so that. And honestly, we could probably do so on a time scale that NASA normally doesn't shoot for. We could probably do it a lot faster. One of those planet-ending ones, we could probably be like, you know what, let's put everything else aside for a minute. Focus on this one thing. That's what I would hope. But I've seen just look up and it felt like that would also be a possibility. Could be a possibility. All right, so now we're in the solar system. Let's talk about the moon. We love our moon. So way, way back in time, February of 2019, an Earth probe was orbiting the moon. It was supposed to be the first private spacecraft to perform a soft landing on the moon. And those words I just said, was supposed to be, probably gives up the fact that it wasn't. And I still don't know if we have. I don't think there's been a. I don't know if we can count the things that land fine, but then fall over. Been a lot of that. I think that China and India have done OK. But is that private? No. The private spacecraft. Yes, private spacecraft. Odysseus or whatever, whatever. It's on its side. It's not going to last long. It broke a leg. It's not dead yet. All right. It's going to have, yeah, like later next month or something, it's going to get a day of sun and then be frozen forever. So on board this Earth probe, for some experimental reasons, was a small crew of tardigrades. Now, if you're not familiar with tardigrades, you've never listened to the show. But these are very small scale animals. Microscope needed to really see them. But you can find them all over the place in algae. You can go get some get some moss or whatever from one of your bricks in your backyard. If it's wintertime, yeah, get a microscope. Take a look. Probably got them. Yep. And they've been experimenting quite a bit because they seem to survive very extreme conditions. And long periods of time without water, they can get completely dehydrated and then come back to life. Freezing temperatures of space they've been exposed to and were able to survive. So they were doing some space experiments, I guess. Anyway, this probe was going around the moon, little Earth probe, and decided, oh, hey, let's land. And so it started to land. But it turned out it had some orientation issues, classic gyroscope failures, a reverse thrust bust that ended up dropping the little Earth probe with enough speed, again, that F equals MA thing, to shatter it across the lunar surface. A football field of debris was scattered, regardless of what sport you think of when you hear football, close enough. Just scatter all over the thing, the probe is destroyed. Question is, what happened to the crew? The Centres Nationaux de la Research Scientifique, in France, kind of was looking at this. And so the tiny, cartigrived lunar astronauts, they have all the evolutionary training they need to survive in extreme conditions. These are, they've been exposed previously in experiments to temperatures as low as 272 degrees Celsius, as high as 150 degrees Celsius, and survived for several minutes. Over the long term, at high doses of gamma radiation, gamma rays of 1,000 to 4,400 are much worse conditions they've been able to survive. All of this, by the way, much worse than they will encounter on the moon. So this crew is actually ready. So what happens to them when they crash on a moon? Chances are they were still viable, that they would survive. Everybody was playing it down. No way, no possible way they'd survive. Of course, they were in like a, they were in a, like their stasis, ton, or dun state, and they probably just, yeah, they should have just all died. Yeah, and on top of that, if they, when, during the impact, if they were somehow embedded in the dust, they could be meters underneath the moon's surface, deep underground there. So it looks like, with the hard landing, they would have survived. However, that's what these researchers are saying. Yep, that the impact, at least, wouldn't have been enough. Would not have been enough to kill them. However, the moon's surface may not be, may not have anything that they could use to reproduce. So even though the environment on the moon and getting underneath the soil of the moon would protect them even further from prolonged radiation or the worst of the worst temperatures, the lack of liquid water, oxygen, and micro algae, the things that all animals need to live are not there. At least they're not there in the abundance that they would need to reactivate, let alone reproduce. So colonizing of the moon by tardigrades, according to this research, extremely unlikely. Unless they're just waiting for the right conditions, maybe they're just still in their survival state, hibernating, waiting for water. The other thing that though, like that's what the researchers have to bring. What Justin has determined is that, this is a private space exploration and gosh bless the private sector, but they don't always have the same appreciation for contaminating other things in their environments. As NASA attempts to. Yeah, so if it's a dirty probe, if they maybe didn't have as clean a clean space as they thought when they were doing the build out or anything like that, if there was other stuff there, that might be on the moon as well. And maybe the tardigrades could take advantage of that. Yeah, maybe there are other microbes as well. Tardigrades, other microbes, who knows, we have to wait and see. We've placed now though, we've placed now, the most likely animal on this planet to be able to survive the moon. And we may have also sent some micro organisms that of different type that may have a chance of surviving the moon, especially if they did have a clean room and these still managed to survive which NASA runs into all the time, hey, our clean room have found something living there eating lead paint. And we didn't think we'd live in our clean room and so now we have to figure out how many of those you've put in this space. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm gonna, even though the science now says it's very highly unlikely and maybe even impossible. So you're saying there might still be a chance. I'm keeping my, well, it's the only chance human earthlings have, I guess. It's the only chance earthlings have for being on another planet currently or another galactic body or whatever. So maybe. It's not an open and shut case, that's for sure. One thing we do know for sure is that humans, other hominid species have evolved here on this planet. We have fossils in the fossil record. We've been looking into our closest relatives. We've been looking at the fossils of our ancestors trying to figure out how this braided stream of evolution took place, what ended up happening. But somewhere along the way, we went from being, we went from being primates with a tail to hominids without a tail. Well, I think, yeah. What happened? What happened to our tail? How did we lose our tails? How did that happen? You know, I think when we lost our tails, first of all, they were probably not prehensilled. So it's not like we could grab things with them. And so we were probably like, oh, this is useless. Just keeps getting in the way every time I try to sit. Yeah, it was like a conscious decision to get rid of the tail, yeah. No, no, not at all. But it is a very interesting bit of research that has just been published in Nature this last week where researchers looked at genes in our lineage to determine kind of a model for how we may have lost our tails. And in this study that they call on the genetic basis of tail loss evolution in humans and apes, they have determined that or they've found evidence that there is... And apes, just apes, that's fine. It's fine, it's fine. They have found evidence that there is a very specific genetic insertion that took place within an area of genetic code that's called TBXT. Now, this is an interesting one because this gets into the difference between introns and exons. So exons being the translated form of DNA that turns into transcribed into RNA and gets made into a protein. Introns that are supposedly not coded coding regions and so do not get turned into proteins, but introns can also impact exons. And so this element that they're calling ALU, ALU, was inserted somewhere along the way into this area of genetic code called TBXT. And TBXT is an intron. It's a non-coding portion of the genome, but because this ALU element decided to get in there and stick itself in the middle, that ALU element was like, okay, there's an ancestral ALU element that's already here, hey, friend, what's up, we're family. And so it changed the way that TBXT got encoded and it led to what they call a hominoid-specific alternative splicing event. To test this, they genetically modified mice using CRISPR-Cas9 to put ALU into TBXT in different isoforms of this ortholog, a bit of genetic code, this TBXT and different amounts of the ALU involved in different amounts of TBXT being coded for and turned into a protein or not. It basically ends up leading to no tails. So mice who, yeah. They're monkey freaks, primate freaks, those apes. Yeah, so they think this is what happened that this, what they call it, it's this exon-skipped transcript that occurs because of the way that this alternative splicing event takes place. But the real interesting thing that goes beyond just how this genetic insertion led to the change that led to the loss of tail or that they could show in their genetic tests and also show in their experiments with mice, what they found is that the mice who had tails, the ones that were expressing specific amounts of the tailless version, the ones who lose their tails, like humans, they had a higher likelihood of neural tube defects. And so it's possible that the no-tail phenotype was advantageous in a lot of ways, but because, but it also, there's a trade-off to have the every once in a while neural tube defects occur. And so this is potentially a direction to start looking at, how can we identify and be able to maybe help with some of these defects before they lead to natural abortions or lead to developmental issues with children. So anyway, from apes, from primates with tails, Allu jumped into the mix. And because Allu liked Allu in the tubics, mice lost their tails. And now we know more about neural tube defects possibly. And also the things that are necessary in our own genome to have ended up. The bad news is your baby has a tail. The good news is they're likely not to experience any developmental challenges. Exactly. Yeah, I'm gonna take the tail. I'll take it. No, no. I don't want a tail. You don't want a tail. You don't want a tail. Maybe this is the real reason apes started to leave the trees. It's because they just were bad at balancing. It kept falling out. Yeah. You have all this evolution based on maneuvering around with a tail and then as it disappears, it's like, oh, hey, wait a second. My balance is always off. It's not off. My tail's off. Okay, tell me something else. I want a story. Tell me science-y things. Do you have science-y things? Yeah, we can go back to talk about the brain a little bit more. This is, Yeah. So sometimes there are connections in the brain that aren't functioning well. We see this in disorders such as Parkinson's, dystonia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette's. It seems to be kind of a prevalent issue. This research published Nature Neuroscience. They did something kind of amazing. They investigated questions of brain circuitry, like larger networks of brain connectivity by analyzing data from 534 electrode implanted patients in 561 patients across, 534 electrodes implanted in 261 patients across the globe, 70 patients had dystonia, 127 with Parkinson's, 50 with OCD and 14 with Tourette's. And they used software algorithms to sort of see what firing mechanisms were taking place, how the circuitry interacted. And what they discovered was that the circuits that they did identify partially overlapped. So it reflects then that there are malfunctions reflected in the symptoms of the study that were not wholly independent from each other. So they could see some symptoms that are shared by patients with these afflictions. And then they can actually start to point to, aha, this is why we can see the brain circuitry as it's overlapping here or if it's avoiding this area when firing. So the researchers findings already have benefited a few patients fine tuning precision electrode placement made it possible to alleviate symptoms of severe treatment resistant OCD. For example, this is quoting from one of the researchers, we plan to refine this technique and zero in even more precisely on dysfunctional brain circuits for specific symptoms. For example, we could isolate the circuits involved in obsessions or compulsions in OCD or other co-morbid symptoms commonly found in these patients like depression, anxiety disorders to individualize treatments further according to the researcher. You know, it's almost, this approach though, this approach is, it sounds very like there's definitely a lot of potential here and sort of rewiring your brain. My only fear is that like- Right, just rewire it. I just, you know, it's like, hey, my house, I don't know, we're just gonna just rip out those old, or maybe we'll leave those old wires there. I don't know, just whatever. Let's put some new wires in. That'll be great. Let's do that. Just get a rewire. We're gonna skip this region and move over that region. But, you know, I mean, aside from the sort of cyberpunk apocalyptic future that we're all going to be heading into, there is, like if you were afflicted with something that is messing with your brain, which is your home, which is where you live within this skull, this is our existence. Functionality within the skull between the ears is all important to how our lives play out, right? Something is dramatic as being able to go in and sort of have some of the negative circuitry shut down. Yeah. It sounds very positive. I wonder though, how extreme your symptoms have to be to get to the stage where you would prioritize invasive electrodes into your brain to help with the rewiring as opposed to something that is a little bit less invasive. Or maybe this can start helping us get to a better way to use the electromagnetic or alternating current type treatments from external sources. Or I don't know, like you said, just discovering how these networks overlap so often figuring out how the various treatments that we have and the ones that are going to come in the future, like how we can really fine tune the treatments for people. Yeah, one of the things they point out is just that that the research is kind of showing that more than one brain region is responsible for the improvements of any given symptom. And they suspect that the neural networks themselves are transmitting the therapeutic effect. Like they're more like initiating the circuitry change. And then the brain like goes, oh yeah, I know how to use this. Ah, I'm gonna go take this and go over here. We'll take over this job and okay, I get what you're getting at. We'll fix it, we got it from here. Seems to sort of be like they're almost, it's almost like they're starting the catalyst and the brain is going, okay, we don't want this region working, we'll use other ones, we have another way. So what they think this means is that at some point in the future, they may be able to have approaches that are non-invasive like the magnetic stimulation that you were talking about. So that there isn't the need for brain surgery, but that we can affect the brain circuitry from outside of the skull. Which would be amazing, but yeah. The understanding of how these networks work together, how the synchrony of the firing occurs and how messages get shared from like you said, one part of the brain to another and it's not the part you treat necessarily, but it's the brain that you have to think of the brain as a whole interconnected organ that is going to see what is input and go and do something with it. It's very comforting. I think it also points possibly to the productivity of mindfulness and meditation and other things where you're exercising certain brain circuitry and if that is empowering it to make changes upon its own or make other collaborations in the brain, that aren't there and some of us may be able to do it just by ourselves. Skip by with a little help from my friends, but I'm doing it by myself. Okay, yeah. We're gonna. You're brain friends. That's what I'm gonna say. You're all your little brain friends. We're gonna be together. I have so many little brain friends in there. All right. Yeah, let's talk about all their fingerprints. Well, I mean, if you are at a crime scene and you're there as a detective, we know that from any cop show for the last few decades, it's like, oh, we could use the blacklight and see what's around there, but we've got special dust that you can dust for fingerprints and lift a fingerprint maybe on a piece of tape or special stuff that then goes into the files for your crime solving. But we've also learned that there's a lot of environmental DNA and also the fingerprints that you are leaving behind may contain dead skin cells and may contain genetic information from perpetrators. So how do you take a fingerprint that doesn't destroy that genetic information through that physical process of fingerprint collection? Researchers, this is out of research out of Shanghai Normal University in China, University of Bath in the U.K. have just published their work in the Journal of the American Chemical Society about their cool, water-soluble, nontoxic fluorescent spray that makes fingerprints visible and also does not destroy genetic information. Woo-hoo! So they have this spray that can be sprayed over in a crime scene, it's portable, they can do really quick imaging and it's fluorescent. So you can use like a blacklight and pretend that you're a detective at a rave and get those fingerprint signals be able to additionally collect the fingerprints in a way like swabbing after you've taken a picture, right? Or get on the look at those fingerprints, you can take a swab and actually be able to extract DNA that could then be used in the solving of the crime. A quick note to any current or future criminals, if you aren't wearing gloves by now, just get out of the business. It's day one onboarding for being a criminal who's wearing gloves, like if you... Just wear it, yeah. Wearing gloves and wiping the crime scene down, right? We need a different profession. Yeah, so anyway, the researchers are excited because they have the spray that has two different colors of fluorescent dye that's available. It's been isolated from green fluorescent protein from the wonderful jellyfish. And the dyes are... There's yellow, LFP yellow and LFP red and they bind through ionic charges to negatively charged molecules. And then the dye gets locked in place and then they can see it. I said blacklight, but it's a blue light that you can shine on it. And the spray doesn't damage prints. The researchers from Bath say the system is safer, more sustainable and works faster than existing technologies. Can even be used on fingerprints that are up to a week old. Wow. Dun, dun, dun. So who knows, future of crime fighting could all be in fluorescent fingerprints. Future fluorescent fingerprints. That's pretty cool. Sorry, that's very cool. Oh, I'm still sharing. Wait, am I sharing? I'm not sharing. Okay. Do you have a story about something that is colorful and or sometimes? Uh-oh. No, blue-green algae, maybe? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll go from... So this is researchers from University of Copenhagen have succeeded in using blue-green algae as a surrogate mother for a new protein that they have coached from the microalgae to produce a meat-like fiber protein strands. Sounds delicious. Yeah. Maybe. But the kind of point is that it's already, it's coming out in a strand form, which is more meat-like. So currently, they're using algaes to make the fake meats. But it takes a lot of energy and it requires a lot of processing to get it back into a sort of meat-like form. Right. What they've done here is it seems like have gotten it to produce it in a way that's already producing several steps down the production phase. And what this means is that it's going to retain more of the nutrients that it had initially. It required less processing, less energy to produce. So making it much more sustainable. And this is, also, I love the fact that it's blue-green algae because my understanding is blue-green algae is perhaps one of the first life forms on planet Earth on the plant scale, I guess, or fungal scale. Like it's one of the earliest multicellular organisms. One of the earliest ones to lead us to having oxygen on the planet. Yeah, one of the beginnings of life as we know it comes from blue-green algae. Cyanobacteria, yeah. And it was probably one of the first big food sources for planet Earth to get everything started and then to see it returning again to its prominent role, this food source number one. It's pretty brilliant. I don't know. I mean, there are a lot of algae that are currently being used. Like you said, spirulina. I also think cyanobacteria are being used in other places. The pea proteins are being used. There's all sorts of meat alternatives, but I don't know. We are going to have to come up with an alternative that is better for the planet than the cattle that we currently like to enjoy as a nutritious protein source. Not just protein, but also all of the nutrients where we've talked about insects. People don't like to think about insects as like really good, but it's like, hey, crickets. They're really, really good for you. This is Paul Eric Jensen. I'm a humble guy from the countryside who rarely throws his arms in the air. And if you know the dance, that's the dance. They don't throw their arms in the air. There's no throwing them in the air. Like they don't care. Not a whole lot of that going on. Not a whole lot of that going on. But he goes on, but being able to manipulate a living organism to produce a new kind of protein which organizes itself in the threads is rarely seen to this extent. And it is very promising. So that's the throwing the arms in the air moment. It is very promising. It's very promising. Also goes on again, also because it is an organism that can easily be grown sustainably as it survives on water, atmospheric CO2 and solar rays. This result gives cyanobacteria even greater potential as a sustainable ingredient. So, whoo! Maybe these algae are the way to do agriculture in the future. We'll see where it goes. Minimizing the need for later processing means that you capture more of the initial nutrients in the proteins. Reduces again the energy required to produce and allows for a less of a bioreactor centric. You know, you can perhaps do large farms of these. Maybe it's still bioreactor all the way. It would be still, yeah. Something of a tank where they'd have to be grown and bioreacted, but yes. But that's a thing we can do on a pretty decent scale currently. But yeah. But then you have to put them together in a way where the strings line up so that they're kind of like muscle cells and then like, yeah, it's like, oh, look. No, no, you don't. I think this is, I think this is the mistake that people keep trying to make is making it meat like. I agree with you. I don't want to chew meat. I've never been that person. Yeah. Make a new thing. Yeah, just make a new thing and call it whatever you want to call it and people will eat that and it'll be fine. It's fancy, it's new, it's exciting. Ooh, don't you want to spend your money on it? Yes, you do. So you're green. Oh, wait. Ooh. Look at every day. This is This Week in Science. Thank you for joining us for another fantastic episode of Science Discussion and of the weekly news. If you love the show, please make sure to share with a friend. We love that you are here right now. If you are interested in supporting the show, you can head over to twist.org. Click on the Zazzle link where you can find show merchandise. We still have calendars for sale for Blair's Animal Corner 2024 calendar. Year's not over yet. And I mean, February right now is of this moment, so it has one more day in it. There's a leap in day to look forward to here, where I am. And if you would like to support us in an ongoing fashion, click on the Patreon link and the Patreon link will take you to our Patreon community where you can choose your level of support in an ongoing fashion in a monthly manner, $10 and more per month. And we will thank you by name at the end of the show. So honestly, we appreciate you being here. We can't do the show without you. Thank you so much for your support. All right, let's come back. We've got, I think Justin, you have one more story to talk about. I have a couple more. Yeah, you wanna do it? Should we? The last one is, they're talking about geo-engineering the stratosphere again. No. So in the past, they've been talking about, oh, we could put reflective particles up there or zinc particles or whatever, and doing global temperature change management on a scale such that we could prevent the planet from going into the worst extremes of global warming. And these ideas generally have sort of been thrown out and then rejected and brought up again and rejected. And we bring out, hey, we can do this thing. And the science generally says, no, no, we'll solve the problem elsewhere. Don't worry about it. And then this group has actually a new version of this idea for dehydrating the stratosphere to some extent. So by targeting rising moisture, seeding it with cloud-forming particles right before it crosses into the stratosphere, geo-engineers could cool the world within intervention far more delicate than past schemes. Simply drying the stratosphere might only take as little as two kilograms of material per week, according to the researcher. This is at the Chemical Science Lab at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. That's an amount of material that helps open the mind to imagine a whole bunch of possibilities, says Yooka Schwartz. So intentional stratospheric dehydration, as it's called, could only cool the climate moderately offsetting roughly 1.4% of the warming caused by increased carbon dioxide over the past few hundred years. But for geo-engineers who have talked about cooling the planet with other methods, it's, they say it's a very new idea. So the idea is that they would go, there's certain points on the planet in which there's these tremendous updrafts. One of them is in the Western Equatorial Pacific Ocean. Regionette is about the size of Australia. And in this area, the air pressures, the air just sort of moves up naturally. So along its journey, much of the water condenses into the clouds, rains out of the air. But what they're thinking they could do is inject bismuth triodide, a non-toxic compound. It better be. Used in lab studies of ice nucleation into the 1% areas most right for water harvesting. So yeah, in the most optimistic scenario, just two kilograms a week of seeds, 10 nanometers in diameter would be enough to convert the moist air parcels into clouds. And with this, and this alone, it could create a sort of little bit of cloud cover that would protect us from the sun and I guess create more cooling. Yeah, so water vapor has been known to be one of the forcing factors for atmosphere heating for a while, for climate change. And so there is a concern that as the climate gets hotter globally, that there will be more and more condensation of water in different hotter areas and into vapor. And that vapor is going to get into the atmosphere, making it more likely to hold on like Blair likes to say, like that nice warm insulating blanket to the heat that gets past it and into our atmosphere. Yeah, it's taking that moisture out of the, it's taking the blanket off. It would be thinning the blanket, right? It would be instead of allowing that blanket to be like a nice goose down, it would be thinner or maybe a summer blanket or just a sheet if we could do it right. But I find this interesting the idea of engineering our atmosphere is always I think very frightening to me and to a lot of people because like the brain and once you push things a certain direction, what, how will it keep going? And we have our experiments and we have certain models for what's gonna happen but often we don't really know what will happen until we start doing stuff. But the thing is, of course. Yeah, this is like intentionally keeping water vapor from going into the atmosphere in very specific areas. Right, and so the thing to keep in mind is when we're, when we talk about being afraid of geoengineering the atmosphere, we have to also admit that we're already doing it. Oh yeah, we've been. Yeah, it's a part of the problem. That's sort of how this problem came about is we've been working on it in the other direction for quite some time. So it's not that we'd be entering the category of geoengineering an atmosphere, it's that we would be adding a different, trying to push it back the other way a little bit. It's interesting. I think it's an interesting idea. I think all of these things, if they are well thought out and applied appropriately and with communication, so that people know risks, benefits, everything before decisions are made, then I think that's, I'm all for it. Keep studying. Connection is also happening in different places in the world already to some great extent. Like, I think it's Saudi Arabia has a very intense cloud seeding program where they will. Because of their desert conditions. Yeah, if a cloud comes by, they're gonna go and get it, basically. Let's make that cloud bigger. Let's get a lot more. We need that. They send the planes out there, they sprinkle it with stuff that makes that water condense and drop is. Yeah, silver, iron oxides, other good things. It's like looking up and seeing clouds go by in the desert and going, it'd be nice if that start raining right now. But now they can actually do it, so. We are learning so much. We're already there. We're already there. We'll see where we go from here, where we end up, right? How are we gonna get through all of this together? That's how we're gonna get through it all. We need each other. We need other people. But oh my gosh, how do we interact with other people? How do our brains keep us going, trying to help us make decisions and act on social situations? With wild abandon. With no eye towards consequence. Some brains, yes. Oh dear. Hope not. Yeah, that's how part of my brain, no. Ignore social consequences and say what needs to be said in the moment. Filter free. Well, in this particular research, which I am really, really interested in following to see where they go from here and what they end up doing. This is a study published in Nature, Human Behavior Researchers, led by a Virginia Tech team, computational neuroscientist Reed Monogu, working with international scientists. They just published their work conducted on Alive, Awake, Parkinson's disease patients while they were undergoing brain surgery. So in Parkinson's disease, the dopamine producing neurons, the area of the brain that's responsible for producing those neurons starts to die away. And so not enough dopamine is produced and that leads to behavioral and physiological changes. And a lot of people will end up going for deep brain stimulation. And so they get brain surgery where they stick a battery-powered electrode that zaps their dopaminergic neurons to keep the dopamine flowing on a regular basis. Kind of like a, what is it called? Would the heart thingy? Yeah, anyway. The heart zapper, where it keeps your heart pumping. Anyway, words, what are those? These researchers didn't work on a huge population of patients. They got four patients, but this is not mouse research. This is not like looking at fMRI, just images of the brain from outside. Like these researchers figured out a way how to stick electrodes deeply into the brain, measure the activity of neurons, and everyone's like, oh, neurons, active. That's been a thing for a while. Okay, whatever, electrophysiology, right, whatever. They can tell the difference between the activity of dopaminergic neurons, serotonergic neurons, and noradrenaline-releasing neurons. So they know when different neurotransmitters are active in the brains of a way. Is it just the responses? Are there different charges that they're producing or? Different, yeah, different signals that they're producing and they've been able to, with machine learning, figure out how to measure the baseline of each of them. So basically using optogenetics and they've been working on this technology for a long time, stimulating certain neurons and measuring the activity and the output from the neurons. They've been able to go, okay, this is a serotonin-releasing neuron. This is what it looks like. This is a dopamine-releasing neuron. This is what that looks like. And so knowing that, they stuck electrodes into the substantia nigra of these people who are awake and responsive while they were in brain surgery and they gave them the game. It's like a take it or leave it ultimatum game where it's like, okay, we got $20. Let's split it, okay? I'm gonna take 16 and you get $4. Deal. Right, that is what you should do because if you leave it, you don't get anything. So you either take the deal, the split, or you get nothing. And- Well, the other person found the $20. I don't even know why they're giving me $4. It seems like- You responded great. I'm better than them keeping the whole $20. Right, so you- I hear you telling me. If you are an economist, if you're a person who's been trained in this, whatever, people know they should accept a small reward over no reward at all, right? I want a reward, that's good. But when people know they're playing with a computer, they play it logically in that way. When people think they're playing with a human, $4? No way, you can do better than that. They don't take the deal. They get no money. Why do they do that? What's happening in the brain that makes that happen? And this is a very standard, like this is a typical reaction for people, computer versus working with humans. And this is just hypothesizing about human behavior, but maybe it's like, when you think you're working with a human, even though it's a take it or leave it kind of deal, maybe it's like, oh, maybe the next time they come with $20, it'll be different. Or maybe this is something, this could be an ongoing relationship, maybe because of the social aspects of our brain, maybe there's something happening there. Not sure, just me hypothesizing. Yeah, yeah, that last hypothesis is the one that kind of, like the way it registers with me is like, the reason you would reject the deal is maybe because you're like, you're breaking the rules on sharing. Like I get it if you took 12, because you did the administrative work or something and I only got eight, like there's somewhere in there where when you got down to only getting $4, you felt like the other side was breaking some sort of sharing rule that humans are supposed to follow and that you're like, no, that's not how we do it. It's like getting cut off in line. You're both gonna stand in the same line. But yeah, the fairness aspect, yeah. Yeah, so they've got these electrodes deep in the brain. But we are already trained not to expect fairness from the machine. Right. We know. Anyway, people have this kind of baseline of dopamine that's just kind of there all the time and measuring kind of keep and track of past results and future results. And the serotonin they found is more just like, what's happening right now guys? How's it going right now? Oh, where's the steel? Oh, that's a deal. Okay, whatever. And so in their measurements of the differences between these decisions that people were making computer versus human or rejecting or accepting, they were measuring the dopamine and serotonin levels in this area of the brain. And they found that dopamine shifts a lot more with the human case in making those reject or accept decisions when humans are involved than it did with the computer. The serotonin kind of did its thing, but like the dopamine was really involved in reflecting the value of the difference in the offer or the split that was happening. So anyway, this is the first time that I've really heard of an experiment like this happening, measuring neurotransmitters actively being released in the brain as decisions are being made, affecting human behavior or as a part of the decision-making process, behavior process, this is incredible. It's incredible research. Can I add one more thing? One more, we have one more study and I know you have to go, so. I know I have to go. But the other thing that sort of occurs to me, like what I was thinking about here is that if the computer gives you a bad deal, it's not because it's evaluated you. It's not because, and so you can't take it personally like this is a reflection of how. It's just a computer. Of how they think you are or the kind of deal that you would take. It's just, it's spit it out. If it's a person and they've offered you a really bad deal, it's almost also like they're making a judgment of you that allows you to be insulted by the deal and that could also cause the rejection. So there's like a whole bunch of layers. So many layers. That are involved in human to human interaction that we dismiss immediately when we're dealing with machine. Yeah, so big question. How is the future of machine learning and AI and human interactions with machine learning algorithms going to be going to be impacted by understanding our brains in this way? Will it be impacted? I don't know. I'm just asking questions here. Last story doesn't have anything to do with dopamine or serotonin. It's all about my ovaries. Well, not mine particularly, but just ovaries in general. Let's talk about Ki-Ki's phone. Anatomy. Anatomy. So there is a structure in the male testes that's called the REIT testes. And the REIT testes is part of the testicular structure that sits kind of on top and it's between where the sperm are and the epididymis. And so its function is maintaining fluid and transporting the sperm from where the sperm were born into the epididymis to get them to their future, their future wherever they end up. So researchers have looked at the REIT testes and they know it's function and they're like, yeah, okay, this is important. This is good, we know. And then throughout the years, researchers were like, okay, so there's this thing that's similar that we think it comes from the same tissue developmentally as the REIT testes. We'll call it the REIT ovary, because there's two ovary. There's one on each. But people studied a bit and then we're like, yeah, okay, what does it do? Oh, it looks like it has some structures that are similar to kind of what the REIT testes does. But okay, there was like a paper in the 1985 that was like, hey, maybe this is important. We should be looking at this more. And this might actually be like an analog and it could be a sensory organ and part of really being important for controlling certain aspects of how the ovaries function. But it was female genitalia, so nobody was interested. Yeah, and so apparently, like according to this paper, it is a pre-print in bioarchive, by the way, this pre-print, they state that and they reference a 2021 textbook that this REIT ovary, i.e., is completely removed, not even part of the ovary and anatomy anymore. Like just nobody's looking at it, whatever. We're just gonna take it out. It doesn't exist anymore in the textbooks. So these researchers for the last few years have been like, okay, let's take a look at this. And their paper has investigated this structure that has been thought called vestigial at best. What was thought to happen? Part of the whole like, why men have nipples. It's not so much vestigial, but it's the, what is it called the shared platform kind of scenario? Like men have these useless nipples, but it's only because they start with one basic design and you have that minor sexual differentiation that takes place very early on. And then from there on, you know. Yeah, you know. Well, so the researchers, they did a whole study and they have determined that, yes, indeed, it does this REIT ovary, i.e., comes from the same developmental tissue. It has discrete regions that persist into the adult life. They have, there are secretions that help and there are additionally ciliated aspects to this organ that exhibit cellular trafficking capabilities. There's tubular epithelial characteristics. And additionally, that it helps to get stuff flowing towards the ovary. And there are proteins that might be important in this organ and the lumens of the cells for ovarian function and are very, these cells are really closely associated, they say with vasculature and macrophages and are contacted by neuronal projections. And so the analogy of it being like an ovarian tongue, that it's like the ovaries sensory appendage, that it's out there going, hey, oh, that tastes good. Okay, let's keep going. Let's like, yeah, ovary, do your job. And it's very. So what you're saying is this completely unstudied, often removed from textbooks, bit of anatomy, could actually be very important to reproductive health. Yes, very important. And could be a part of some reproduction issues and yeah, should be looked at. Anyway, it's not vestigial, it's important. It's a part of the female anatomy, stop ignoring it. Don't ignore me or my ovaries and their entire anatomy. Thank you for being here. We have reached the end of the show. Justin, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, everyone out there, thank you for being here. I hope I haven't ovary, ovary done it. It is time for us to complete the show and I just do have to give a few shout outs. Shout outs to our wonderful helpers who make this show possible. Fana, thank you for show notes and helping with the social media, show descriptions, all the things that you do for the show. I don't need for thank you for recording the show. I know Gord couldn't be there tonight. Gord Arnlor, everyone else who helps to keep our chat rooms nice places to be. Thank you. I see all of you in our chat rooms, YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, Discord, all of you. Thank you for being here and talking this evening and being part of the conversation. Rachel, thank you for editing the show. And of course, I have to say thank you to our patrons. 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I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hands. Come in your way. So everybody, this week in Science. This week in Science. This week in Science. Science, science, science, science. This week in Science. This week in Science. This week in Science. Science, science, science, science. I've got one disclaimer and it's- We have completed this week in Science. It is a post show right now. Justin had to go. He's got work to go to. And I wanna say thank you to all of you who joined us for this fun show. Get to talk about, you know, ovary tongues and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, snago in discourse. I wasn't even gonna try feeding a very intangue to the AI. Ooh, ooh, don't feed that to the AI. No, only the human brains are fed to the AI these days. Maybe some of those fingerprints, fluorescent fingerprints. I don't know. It was fun, Paul Disney. Thank you very much. I'm so glad that you joined. Thank you Fada for joining again. We, this, I don't know what'll happen next week. Justin, I think, is back every week right now, but it sounds like every other week we need to make it quick. But it was kinda good. Trying to rush through it a little bit more. I think it did make the show a little tighter, more snappy. And we'll see what happens next week when Justin doesn't have a time limit. We'll see how that one goes. Yeah, all of y'all, thank you for joining us on the Wednesday evening of your week or wherever you are, whether it's your Thursday morning or whatever, I hope you all are doing well. Yeah, it's leap year tomorrow. Happy birthday to all of you who only have a birthday once every four years. I guess, cheers. Enjoy your young age, because of course, biological aging doesn't happen if you're a leaped baby. Have a great Science Week, Fada, and everyone out there actually, I guess, have a great Science Week as well. I'm gonna take this opportunity to bow out, try to think if there's any other news or things that need to be related before I go and I'm not think of anything offhand. So, yeah, I'm gonna have a nice night. I hope you all have a good night. If you're on the East Coast, it's an early night for you too. Everyone, once again, thank you for joining me and Justin and everyone else in the community for this whole Science Fun discussion. Have a great week, look for good science, have great conversations, and stay safe, stay healthy if you can, stay curious, and of course, Justin's favorite, stay lucky. Happy leap year, I'll see you next week.