 Good morning, good evening. Hello, everyone. I said morning first, even though, for Jesus' sake. Well, because it is! Yeah, the sun's been out for a little over an hour now. New day is starting. Yeah, mine is closing. Hi, everybody. This is the YouTube livestream or after stream, depending on when you're watching this for this week in science. How could it be the after stream? Wait. You could be watching the recording later. Oh, OK. Oh, yeah. No, that makes sense. Post stream pre-show. That's how time works. Yes. So this is the bit where everyone watching live is going to see all the things. It is a live show. If you listen to this thing as a podcast later, then things will be edited. Since Kiki's not here, potentially more so than normal. Kiki is abroad. She's stuck abroad. She was supposed to be back, but now she's not. And so now we're waiting for her. So everybody gets your waiting face on. Yes. But you don't have to wait for science. We're still doing science today. So yeah, so Justin and I are going to hold down the fort here. We are going to do our very best. But it is not the same. It is never the same. And so yeah, so we're going to have a podcast. We're going to see how long it goes. A couple of weeks ago when we did it, it was a little under 90. No, it was right at it. I thought we did good. I think we started a little late, so I think in the end, the show itself. And then after editing. Yeah, it was a good 20 minutes of quality. Good 20 minutes, yeah. That's how we were done. Yeah, so we're going to have a show. It's going to be around 90 minutes. We'll stick around for a little bit after that. They know that's why they're here. Yeah, I mean, there might be. I'm just welcoming everyone. Just someone might be joining for the very first time. Oh, if you are. Someone might be sitting next to someone who's loved one or friend watches Twist and they're like, you've got to watch this show. This is not the show. This is not the show. We're about to start that. The part of the show where we explain that it's not the show is becoming longer and longer every week. I'm just vamping because I'm sure I have everything I need. This is the first time you're tuning in. I'm sorry. I'm hitting all the buttons. It's harder. There's Kiki does so much. Is it really? I don't know that you were doing anything right now. Yeah, OK. That's the great part of my involvement in the show. I don't want to do any of the behind the scenes stuff. I just show up and. Hello, Water, here we go. OK, so I do take some coffee. You ready? You ready to start the show? Yeah, I like that one. It's cute. OK, is everyone ready? Everyone got that? All right, I'm going to do this. What are you doing? Just let me start. Just let me start. OK, OK, OK. We already did the countdown. We already did the button. We're supposed to be in the show. No, no, no. You do a three, two, one. This is Twist. This week in Science, episode number 883. Recorded on Wednesday, July 13th, 2022. J-W-S-T-O-M-G. Hi, everybody. I'm Blair Bazderich. Dr. Kiki is not with us today. But Justin Jackson and I will fill your head with space, brains, and lice. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. NASA, one of my favorite government institutions. If you tuned in live, as I did, to see the first color images of the web telescope, you were treated to a 45-minute countdown clock, at the end of which, I can only remember, it is about three and a half hours of distilled preamble conversations punctuated by poor performances of public speaking, mostly by NASA administrators at brief mission recap. Finally, finally, finally, a color-enhanced infrared image. And somebody saying, wow, a few times, followed by an awkward silence, and saying, wow, again. The images, though, were absolutely amazing to see. A planetary nebula in a dying star, bubbling and foaming with jets of material, captured, sliced the cosmos in mind-blowing resolution. And I loved seeing the images once I woke up from my nap. There's a lot of pride at NASA for pulling it off. But it felt like a lead-up presentation was designed more as a sleep aid. I suppose for a scientific government agency doing public media events isn't supposed to be your strongest point, but it could be. It should be. And it really needs to be, because the mission was an awesome undertaking. The results also amazing. The next time, NASA, if you're doing it in-house, open with the astrophysicist, the Amber Strahan. Her five minutes were the best of the three and a half hour presentation. My point is, NASA administrators are not inspiring. Sure, they speak the words like cliff-note versions of a Carl Sagan poetic monologue, but without the natural enthusiastic cadence. You are administrators. You do not go into space. You do not design vehicles. You do not program software. If you do research, that's great, but you should not be the face of space exploration. Speaking of people, better suited jobs other than public speaking, we now present you with This Week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to learn at discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know what's now. Good science to you, Blairla. Good science to you, Justin. How you doing? Ah, I'm doing great. Excellent. Welcome to this week's episode of This Week in Science. Thanks, everyone, for joining us, listening, watching, et cetera, however else you consume this medium. We have a great show ahead. We are unfortunately without a Dr. Kiki tonight, but we still have lots of science to share with you. I have stories about poop, lice, dinosaurs, robots, and some space pictures. What do you have, Justin? It's just a typical day in the animal corner over there. Yeah. Let's see. I've got, oh, nowhere did my thing go. I got better brains through gaming. Oh, no, we lost me. What else did I got? I had some other. You have space pictures also. Yeah, I got some. I got, oh, scratching the surface of anti-science brains, dating ancient Europeans, Webb's really cool planet finding ability, and your chances of getting killed by falling space debris. Something all of us should be looking at. Not zero, as far as I know. No. No. And actually, the number will freak you out. All right, this is in local news. Come on, tonight at 11. 11, 11, 11. Before we jump into the show here, I want to remind everyone that you can subscribe to TWIS as a podcast on your favorite podcast platform. Pick it. We're on there. You can also watch us on YouTube or Facebook. And we will bring you TWIS each and every time new episodes are published through those mediums. If you subscribe, just search for this. Or visit twis.org. Now, I'm really sad Kiki's not here to talk about this tonight. But we must, we must, we must, we must talk about James Webb, JWST. So I know most of our listeners are probably very up to date. And also a lot of them probably watched the live stream like you did, Justin. For those of us that were not able to watch the live stream, according to your disclaimer, maybe that was a good thing. But it was really, like I felt like we were watching that. Nobody was going to remember. I'm too old. But Heralda Rivera opening the vault. And then after like three hours of primetime television, they had just excavated some dirt. Oh, sure. Except we did get the picture at the end. Yes. So on Monday, a bunch of pictures were released. There's actually terabytes of data that are going to be released tomorrow as well. And so there's what's considered the clearest image to date of the early universe. There's just some truly beautiful stuff, stuff dating back billions and billions, tens of billions of years. So the deepest picture ever, I have to line it up. Hold on to find the right one. Make sure I don't mess up my James Webb images. I don't want to share the wrong one for the wrong description. OK. So here is the deepest infrared image of the universe yet. And so Justin, maybe you can help me with this. But my understanding is I've seen a lot of people post online like, oh, it's a colorized infrared image. No. My understanding is that it is a composite from images at different wavelengths. So if somebody didn't go in there and color it to make it look pretty, it's a 12.5 hour composite looking at depths at infrared wavelengths. So this one, this image, this is a galactic image. I don't know how they do the galactic image. I don't know if that's a colorization of an infrared kind of a thing. Probably somebody in our chat room. So this is what I found. When they're showing the composite, so it'll be a composite of, at least that's the way that Hubble did stuff, is they zeroed in on different places and then put them all together. But when we're talking about the other photos, like the nebula and the big cloud of dust and all that, those are colorized. Those are not. Infrared is data. Yeah, we'll get there. We'll get to the multicolored psychedelic one in a second. But so this one is, this is as this area of space that's about if you held your hand out equal to a grain of sand if you looked at the sky, right? That's so wild. This is as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago, because, you know, the way light travels and stuff. And so yeah, this is the clearest, deepest infrared image we have gotten. It's truly beautiful. And there's a lot of information to be pulled from that in the future. And then the other one that I wanted to share was the one that Justin was alluding to, which is the thing that looks like it should be like a blacklight poster, essentially. That's going to be, I'm going to have to get that made up. That's got to be the new backdrop. Yeah, so this is here, I have it pulled up. That's just incredible. So all the stuff that you said, Justin, about how the people speaking at this event maybe needed some extra help. Well, this is what some of them wrote. And it's beautiful. So this is here, let me read it. So this is called the Cosmic Cliffs, web seemingly three dimensional picture. It looks like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening. It's the edge of a giant gaseous cavity within NGC3324. And the tallest peaks in this image are about seven light years high. The cavernous areas have been carved from the nebula by the intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from extremely massive hot young stars located in the center of the bubble above the area shown in this image. The steam that appears to rise from the celestial mountains is actually hot ionized gas and hot dust streaming away from the nebula due to relentless radiation. That's awesome and poetic and beautiful and so cool. I forget the communication director, ladies, named Michelle Baller or something like that. Anyway, she's talking like that. And that's great, but her cadence comes off like she's going over the injury reports of last month's manufacturing floor. And we also need to point out that this belongs to all mankind. And Bob, you're gonna have to be more careful when you're working the thresher. I guess it's just like, ah, no, those are the words coming out of the mouth, but that passion. So maybe NASA needs a hype person. Well, and I don't think it's just a hype person, but I literally, they spent a lot of time interviewing all of their important administrators who, gosh, I'm sure they're awesome at their job because they got it done. They oversaw this giant bureaucracy of a government entity to do this, which is great. But if you're gonna sit your kid down in front of a NASA show to find the new images and want them to be inspired, don't put a single administrator in front of them. Don't put somebody who's gonna drone on like the school vice principal about at, not even at school where they would try to hype it up for the kids, but at a PTA meeting or at a school board meeting. That's what it sounded like. And it's unfortunate and it's fine. I guess not everyone, doesn't even necessarily need to be hyped, but just, oh, I don't know, just a little bit more. Get to the, show the photos first. Like the astrophysicist, what's her name that I was mentioning there before? She came out strong, she came out for five minutes and talked about the features within this photo. Explain what you were looking at a little bit. Or a little bit more. So Justin, I have a solution for you. Just don't watch it live. No, and I didn't, I tried to. And I wasn't joking, I fell asleep with all of the anticipation of seeing this. I fell asleep during it. Cause it was, it droned for, from that 45 minute countdown clock when they're going to show you the image. It was another hour after that before, and then they did it. And somebody went, wow. And there was an awkward silence. And then they said, wow again. Okay, so you realize you're doing that now. Yes. You watched conversation about James. So anyway, let's get back on track here. I understand your point there, there needs to be some good opportunities to kind of like make this public accessible. Absolutely. Because even I, I often take a backseat in the space conversations on this show because that's the part of science that is harder for me to grasp. That doesn't mean I don't think it's awesome. I think these pictures are beautiful and I can't wait to learn what we can about the origin of stars and galaxies and what this feel, this image right here, they think that the data from this image they might be able to find out what determines the number of stars that form in a certain region. Why do stars form with certain masses? It could help them figure out the impact of star formation on the evolution of gigantic clouds of gas and dust. So there's lots of really important science to be done here and lots of cool stuff that we found. And yes, as someone wrote in the chat room, as someone not from the USA, thank you US taxpayers. So this is something that gets funded from all of our taxes in the United States that humanity will benefit from for many years to come, which leads me to the last kind of bit of news I wanted to share. So those are just a couple of pictures. I am sure after all the data that gets released tomorrow, we will talk more about this next week, especially because Kiki will be back and I wanted to save some of it for her because I know she's probably super bummed that she's missing the whole James Webb conversation. But- She's only mentioned it for as long, since before- She only has a necklace of the telescope itself, right? We've been talking about this for forever, yeah. Yeah, so that being said, what I found really interesting was what happens now with the James Webb Space Telescope, which I am sure we have mentioned before, but just to remind everybody, this is not it. This was kind of the first big dump of images, proof of concept, things are working great. So now astronomers around the globe will get to submit requests to use the telescope. They will have their projects selected competitively through a process in which applicants and selectors don't know each other. They'll all kind of be blinded to try to minimize bias. And so over the next 20 years, hopefully at least, this thing will be running and scientists around the world will get to use this telescope to collect images like this and learn more about our universe. Yeah, and I guess one of the things I did learn from the five hour infomercial meeting that I felt like going to a meeting was that, which I hadn't caught before from this is that they're in like range spot too, which is the thing that's not really in orbit that you can actually one of those places where you can just set something in it'll stay there because of the way that gravity is not affecting or is equally pulling on an object. The way that they got in was so perfect that the 10 year mission that they were expecting to get out of this, they think it's gonna maintain its position for 20 years. So we're also just, you know, fun note, we also maybe have doubled the amount of time that it's gonna be able to be there if it doesn't get pelted by too many micro meteorites. And then... Yeah, a lot of our NASA projects last longer than they're supposed to. They're overbuilt, they're overbuilt, which is fantastic. So it could go even beyond that 20 years. You know, fingers. Yeah. Fingers crossed. So... 10 billion dollars. You're right. One of my favorite things that they have released so far, and it doesn't have quite the sexy imagery as the nebula or anything like that, is they pointed it at a planet, an exoplanet, and they were able to capture water signature, along with evidence of cloud and haze in the atmosphere of a very hot, puffy gas giant orbiting a distant sunlight star. So the observation, which reveals the presence of specific gas molecules based on tiny decreases in the brightness of precise colors of light, is the most detailed of its kind ever taken. The Hubble has taken a look at lots of exoplanets, discovered many, many, many exoplanets over the last few decades. Webb got up there immediately was able to look at one and is a huge advance in the amount of detail in its observation, and is gonna be a huge advance in our ability to find other habitable planets. The one that found was WASP 96, which is located 1,150 light years away. That's a good distance. It's a gas giant, but it's not like the ones that we have in our solar system. There's no analog here. Has a mass that's about half of Jupiter, which is supermassive, and it's a little bit bigger, 1.2 times greater diameter than Jupiter. So it's actually much half the half the mass, twice the size, twice the diameter. So it's a big puffy gas giant, and it's got high temperatures of over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, super hot. It's 1,19th the distance between Mercury and the sun, and it circles its star is like our sun. It's very similar to our sun, and it's going around it once every three and a half days. Pretty freakish thing. But the researchers say that they're gonna be able to use this spectrum to look at things like oxygen, methane, carbon dioxide, and it should allow us to make a lot better. Yeah, here's the graphic you got up there. Not as sexy as some of the other stuff up there, but this, a graphic that looks like this is going to find a habitable Earth-like planet at some point, not unlike our own, that we still think based on our one example, it would be the best place to find life in the universe. So it's gonna be able to zero in on planets that we think have the highest likelihood of having life, or a vacation planet should the need arise someday. Yeah, we need a location for New Riza. Great, are we good on James Webb for this week? Yeah. Yeah, we will be talking about it for many weeks. Great, Justin, how do bees talk to each other? I think they just text short messages, they're very buzzy. No, no, no, no, they waggle their butts. Yeah, they do the little bee there. Could this be a way for robots to talk to each other? Oh, oh no. Yes, this is a new study in Frontiers and Robotics and AI. They took inspiration from this technique to devise a way for robots to communicate. The first robot traces a shape on the floor, the shape's orientation and the time it takes to trace it tells the second robot the required direction and distance of travel. This was specifically set up for robots with onboard cameras. They used algorithms that allowed the robots to interpret what they saw and their task was to move a package in a warehouse. And the system allowed them to communicate with a messenger robot, one robot to another robot or a human to a robot. And so this allowed them to communicate even when there are situations where verbal communication or specifically some sort of online communication is not possible. So what they did is they were able to figure out via computer simulation how to set this up so it would work and then they tested it through that computer simulation and with real robots and human volunteers. Robots interpreted gestures correctly 90% of the time in the computer simulation and 93.3% of the time in real life. So it does appear to have some really good potential. The idea is that in space, in an emergency, in remote locations, robots could not communicate using digital networks, a remote, and so when those are not reliable, they need to figure out another way to talk to each other. And so that is why they looked to bees for gesture-based communication and it seems to have worked. Nice. Yeah, you know, the waggle dance for robots. It's the future. Justin. It just seems like they could just send each other text messages. That's the thing. There's no connectivity, connectivity. So they can't, yeah, if you're in a collapsed building trying to rescue people and there's no Wi-Fi and cell service isn't a thing because there's rubble everywhere and cell towers are down. Yeah, but there's other ways. There's other ways of doing that, can you? You can do it direct. I'm sure there's a way to do it. You don't need to do over the interwebs. Like that's for longer distances, you know, I don't know. But yeah, like sure, waggle dance away with the robot. I mean, it's fine. So the other thing that they kind of mentioned is that you could use gestures like a fist pointed in a particular direction that would mean something and that reminds me immediately of training my dog and the fact that when you train animals you often have verbal cues but you also will have visual cues and some animals do better with one, some animals do better with the other, some animals do better with both combined. And so my dog knows to sit or lay down based on certain hand gestures. So this is also kind of like that. Okay. Yeah. What else, what do you have for the beginning of the show, Justin? I've got good news for gamers. Great. Parents of children who are frequent video game players. Hours spent emerged in interactive gaming worlds gives you a superior brain. A few games give you... Oh. Georgia State University researchers strapped gamers into functional magnetic resonance imaging skull caps and found video gamers have superior sensory motor decision-making skills and enhanced activity in key regions of the brain as compared to non-players. Okay. Sample size here actually. Georgia State project involved 47 college age participants, 28 categorized as regular video game players and 19 as non-players. Subjects laid inside FMI machine with a mirror that allowed them to see a cue immediately followed by a display of moving dots. Participants were asked to press a button in their right or left hand to indicate the direction the dots were moving or resist pressing either button if there was no motion. Studies found that video game players were faster and more accurate with their responses. Analysis of the resulting brain scans found that the differences were correlated with enhanced activity in certain parts of the brain, quoting voice here of the authors. The results indicate that video game playing potentially enhances several of the sub-processes for sensation, perception and mapping to action to improve decision-making skills. These findings begin to illuminate how video game playing alters the brain in order to improve task performance and their potential implications for increasing task specific activity. Study also notes that there was no trade-off between speed and accuracy of response. Video game players were better on both measures. Authors quoting again, this lack of speed accuracy trade-off would indicate video game playing as a good candidate for cognitive training as it pertains to decision-making. There you go, video games give you a superior brain. It's, I play a little bit of video games, but holy heck are they hard. Like I can't do the ones that have the double joystick or you move the camera and you move the character at the same time. And I feel like that takes such, yeah, like spatial awareness and coordination that I just don't, I don't have. So I can see how that would help with that. That would help with that part of your brain to be able to simultaneously change the axis of view and move in a vector where you can anticipate how those two characteristics would move together. For that one game that you played, yeah. There's also a- No, that's like most modern day video games have, I don't play any of those now. I only play what are called side scrollers because that's all I can handle. But most of them have the double. Yeah, but you don't have to do a look around thing. You're making, I think you made the game harder than it was meant to be by doing both at the same time. But there's also, we've done past studies that found that there is increased gray scale vision acuity in gamers. That is something that is a plasticity of the brain that gets trained for that improved vision. It's not something like the eye muscles are stronger or it's not anything to do with the eye itself, but it's all taking place in the brain, creating sort of new networks of being able to assess and recognize and act. So, yeah. Yeah, watching my roommate that I am married to play video game games all the time. It's pretty wild to watch him. And I think that it's, I could definitely see how there are parts of his brain that are so much buffer than the same parts of my brain they have to be. And it's yeah, it's because it allows you to be observant of certain things. The thing that really gets me also is when in my brain what I see on the screen, there's no clear place of where to go. He knows exactly where to go on a field of vision to look for a specific thing. And I'm just, okay. Yeah, it's also kind of interesting because I think about this every once in a while. So I have a very architecturally based memory. I remember physical spaces of places very, very well. And every once in a while, I'm thinking of like, oh, what was that really cool building that had that, you know, the house? Where was that house that had like the balcony and then it had the driveway under it? Oh, that was from a game I played 30 years ago or something, right? This is that there is memory, physical space memory that comes along with a lot of those really immersive games. So this brings up an interesting point though, Justin. Is it one leading to the other or vice versa? Is game playing making their brains better in this very specific way? Or do people with those areas of their brain that are more developed do better at video games and therefore play them more? Find them to be more fun? All these things. Well, the only thing with that is the non-gameplayers in this, or like if we were talking about the visual acuity thing of gamers versus non-gamers, you would have to say that those people, that's why they can't do a game. And it could, yeah, that's a good point because it could be somebody who tried a game and is like, oh, it's just confusing and it makes my head hurt. And that's because they have an inferior brain. Yeah, maybe I have an inferior brain. Maybe that's the problem. Oh no, I like the idea better that it makes your brain stronger. Well, we need a causative test. We need a very clear test with a hypothesis that can be tested clearly with isolated variables. So basically we need like twins where everything is exactly the same in their life except one of them plays video games a bunch and the other one doesn't for like their whole life. I wonder how we'll do getting participants for this study. So here's the thing though. So with this, we're focusing on video games and that totally makes sense because there's a, but it doesn't necessarily specify which type of game. So like this is a thing that I would think of then, like maybe it could be also partly just in gameplay. So we could be talking about physical space game, board game, we could be talking about playing chess and if you play a lot of chess, you maybe get better at thinking moves ahead. You become your analytical skills for looking at more than just the thing in front of you maybe improve. So that, you know, it may be gaming on a larger scale, not just in specific types of video games have these positive effects. And Goldezader in the chat room is totally right. The other thing you can do is take a non-gamer, someone who says they have bitually, they never really gotten to games, not a thing, scan their brain, put them through these tests and then say play video games. You are required to play video games for X number of hours a week and test their brain throughout that process see if it changes over time. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, absolutely. All right, so what do picture plants and a Sarlacc pit have in common? I feel like this is from a sci-fi movie that I saw, but I don't really remember all the details. Yes, yes, it's from a Star War. There was a Jedi that returned sometime in the 80s and a man named Robert Fett fell into a pit that ate him. Anyway, that's the Sarlacc pit. Now unrelated to that. Robert Fett. Underground picture plant, that's what I'm actually here to talk about. Science have discovered a new species of picture plant in the Indonesian province of North Kalamantan on the island of Borneo. And it is an underground picture plant. First ever found underground picture plant. It is called Nepenthes pudica and they have these modified leaves which are known as pitchers or pitfall traps where it captures its prey. Usually there's some sort of vapor that comes up off the picture and the animal gets like woozy or drunk or confused about which direction is up and then they end up in the juice and they get kind of dissolved alive and then the picture can absorb all of those nutrients. A lot of the time carnivorous plants like picture plants or Venus fly traps live in areas where the soil is not very nutritious. And so they have turned to carnivory to eating meat to supplement the lack of nutrients in the soil. That's all well and fine but these ones are underground which is crazy. So they actually found it by mistake. So Vaklav Sermak of the Mendel University in Borneo Czech Republic as part of the research team said that they found in this picture plant underground, mosquito larvae, nematodes, worms, a worm that is now a new species. So they found a new species in the picture plant. So this has been not only a new species of picture plant but a new species of worm that was found in there and then Lubos Majeski of Palaki University, Olomuk, who's also part of the research team, talks about how they found this thing. So quote, during a several day trip with our Indonesian colleagues to a previously unexplored mountain, randomly chosen from a number of candidates. We noted plants which were undoubtedly Nepenthe's picture plants but produced no pictures. After a careful search, we found a couple of pictures, a few juvenile terrestrial ones. So and then one deformed picture protruding from the soil. At first we thought it was accidentally buried and that local environmental conditions had caused the lack of other pictures. Still, as we continue to find other pictureless plants along the ascent to the summit, we wondered if a species of picture plant might have evolved towards the loss of carnivory, as seen in some other carnivorous plants. So did they just lose their pictures? Then when taking photos, I tore a moss cushion from a tree base revealing a bunch of richly maroon colored pictures growing from a short shoot with reduced leaves entirely lacking chlorophyll. So they started digging into the ground and they found all these picture plants underground. So as he mentioned, the leaves were white. They were lacking chlorophyll completely. The pictures were red and they think that maybe they've evolved to do this because they live on these extremely dry ridge tops at high elevations. So they think that perhaps this ground is more stable in terms of humidity when you go further down. And so this is potentially, yeah, a way to stay wet during dry conditions. Temperature could be a thing too, absolutely. So all of that. The scientific name that it's been given, Nepenthes pudica. Pudica is from the Latin adjective pudicus, which means bashful and reflects the fact that it lowers, its lower picture remains hidden from sight. So this is just a really cool new species that discovered, but also it's time to start digging. Everybody, this might not be the only one. Yeah, and also I feel like bad for all the worms and nematodes and stuff that it's been eating because you figure the one place you're gonna be safe from carnivory is if you just get down under the ground, you can hide from all the surface, all the birds that wanna eat you, all the lizards that are up there trying to eat you, all the creatures of the jungle or the forest that are trying to devour you. You just get underground, now you're safe and then a plant eats you. Yeah. What are they chasing? Shoot, ha ha, get it. Yeah, that's a pretty picture of the plant we got up there. Yeah, there you go, couldn't do that and read the story at the same time. All right, you got anything else for the quote unquote beginning of the show, Justin? Well, I didn't move one story up, so I can move it by another one down and we can go on from here. We can move on, you wanna move on to the animal corner? Let's do some animal corner. I wanna find out all about this crazy stuff that you were teasing at the beginning of the show. Great, here we go. By the, she's your girl, except for giant parents, girl. What you got, Blair? I switched it up on you, I switched sides. So I wanna start with dog poop. You know I love to talk about poop. There's so much we can learn from poop. And specifically, this is a study on Fox poop, looking at DNA. And it turns out, according to University of Aberdeen School of Biological Sciences, the laboratory of alpine ecology at the University of Grenoble Alps, Forestry and Land, Scotland and Carnagorms Connect. There's quite a few schools. Foxes eat a lot of dog poop. Really? In the Scottish Islands, yeah. Right, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I'm gonna pause it just for a second because animals eating poop. Yes. Because I think a lot more common than we usually talk about, because that's not usually dinner table conversation. So there's coprophage, which is basically the eating of poop. A lot of animals do that. A lot of the time when you hear about it, it's animals eating their own poop, for example, rabbits or horses. They will eat their own poop because their digestive tract does not digest plants wholly. It's really hard to digest plants completely. So cows have the ability to kind of spit up and chew cud and bring it back down and they have the multiple stomachs. They've got the horse and the thing going on, yeah. But these other animals that don't have that, after they poop out the food, there's a lot of good stuff still in there, they'll bring it around one more time. So that's a very common form. Okay, and I'm gonna pause it again because I need clarification. I know that I've asked you this question before and I apologize for not remembering the answer, but I had a dog that on every walk was on a mission to eat any cat poop we could find anywhere. And he bushes and he's up. And I was told, somebody had told me at the time that, oh, it's cause there's an enzyme in cat poop that dogs can't make, which I find odd because my understanding is that cats actually lack some enzymes that all other mammals have, but is that a thing that you're aware of? There could be so many reasons that your dog did that. A lot of animals eat their own poop when they're young. There's a few reasons for that. One being that their microbiome isn't settled and so maybe things aren't digested properly and all the stuff. The other being that a lot of animals that are worried about being predated upon will hide the poop, right? By eating it. So, and then also there's just general like broadening of the microbiome trying to eat all kinds of poop when you're young to kind of culture your own intestinal forest in a sort of way. These are foxes that specifically seem to be seeking out and finding. There is a whole nother reason animals eat poop which is just for nutrients. And so, for example, scavengers, they eat dead things, they also eat poop. Foxes do some hunting, they do some scavenging. They are famous for caching food so they'll find good food, they'll hide it away, come back to it later. If a fox finds dog poop which has human made food in it which is like four to five, like when you buy dog food, it's full of nutrients and vitamins and everything a dog needs, right? Keep in mind like when we take vitamins we pee out most of it. So there is a fair amount of these nutrients we're feeding to our dogs that is more than they can absorb and so it comes through, right? And so dog poop is actually like, it's like probably a very good delicacy because they are fed a whole diet, a whole fortified diet, like a good diet. And that's not always the case for other animals in the wild, they eat what they can get not to mention if you're a fox scavenging and you're trying to eat some berries here, eat some leaves there, eat a carcass here, eat another kind of poop there. So all of these things, the dog poop can be kind of like a one stop shop for a lot of the nutrients that they need. So that's one of the things your dog could have needed could have been poor in nutrients. So the diet they were on maybe was not giving them the nutrients they wanted. And so they were looking for nutrients elsewhere. It also can just totally be a behavioral thing. Now with the foxes, the expectation here is obviously historically, dog poop has not been everywhere. But if dog poop has become part of, nearly 40% of fox samples had dog poop in it. It's pretty big. Yeah, if it has become part of the staple of their nutrients in mind as human civilizations grow and encroach on wild habitats, this is a weird push-pull where maybe providing dog poop for them to eat is helpful. However, there is also the realization that any diseases in dog poop can transfer potentially to foxes because they're canids, so they're closely related. So it's very easy for illnesses to jump from dogs to foxes. Which sounds like less of a risk, frankly, than if it was the foxes poop that was getting eaten by the dogs. But then it brings up a couple of things, right? There's the whole, hey, don't feed wild animals. So if you live in a place that's got foxes and you're not cleaning up your yard very often, you're not only attracting foxes to your yard, but you're now sort of messing with that ecosystem. Right, so ultimately, I'm gonna be very clear here. This article did not go out of its way to say this, but I'm gonna say it right now. Pick up your dog poop. I'm shaking my finger at all the dog owners watching right now and listening. Pick up your dog poop. It's the right thing to do for a bunch of reasons, but this is an interesting piece. Will foxes over time scavenge less if they have come to rely on dog poop? Will it impact their pressure on other species? Will it reduce their cleanup? They're the garbage men if they're taking out the carcasses, right? The kind of like leftovers from other carnivores and other dead things. If they're not performing that vital service, how does that change the landscape? So it's better to just clean up. However, if there is historically this impact on a population, this is something now that we need to look at when we're going to launch a conservation effort on an animal is to look at their feces, look at the DNA sequencing within it to figure out what they're eating because if you find something weird like this, you have to keep it, you have to use it when you kind of take all factors into play, when you look at a conservation strategy. I guess I pointed out there earlier too that dogs during early domestication would eat a lot of human poop, which we reported on that story some time ago here. So yeah, that's just what the canines do. It's not so gross to other folks. It's a whole, it's a different world. So you can give not as gross to other folks. Let's talk about lice, huh? Don't worry, I got a dinosaur for you to round things out. We're gonna talk about lice and we're gonna talk about dinosaurs. So lice, lice co-evolved with mammals over millions of years. The first Laos to take up residence on a mammalian host likely started out on birds and jumped onto mammals from there. This is a study comparing the genomes and family trees of lice and their mammalian hosts. They revealed two trees of lice evolution and that they share a lot of parallel branches and twigs with the evolution of mammals. The branching points where one group of mammals begin diverging into new forms were echoed in the genomes of lice diverting into new forms. So they have been with us for a very long time and they have followed us from species to species. This more newly recognized group of mammalian lice which are the suckers. So there's chewers and suckers, chewing lice munch on skin or secretions, sucking lice pierce the skin and consume blood. That's the one we usually think about. We actually have both types on mammals but sucking lice are only found on mammals. So looking at those lice, they, including the ones on humans, just on a bunch of mammals, they found that these lice originated on a common ancestor of aphrotheria which is a group of mammals of African distribution including elephants, hyraxes and elephant shrews among others. And from there, the lice went on to colonize other major groups of mammals throughout the process, host switching. So this ancient lineage of mammals with the elephants and the hyraxes, it looks like they were the original mammalian host of lice and then they kind of, these sucking lice kind of flourished now that we with our soft skin existed that easily accessible blood. And host switching from birds to mammals is rare. Only a few times, as far as they can tell, this has happened to Madagascar and lemurs, to South American rodents and to some marsupials. But once lice learned how to feed on mammals, they hadn't made that was the way to go and they just jumped from mammal species to mammal species over time. And so as they separated geographically, so did the lice. They probably date back around 90 to 100 million years. Oh, that's quite a ways. Yeah, first parasitizing dinosaurs or birds and most likely jump to us right around the mass extinction 65 million years ago. So you're lice, hopefully you don't have any. But if any of you out there are suffering from a lice infestation, just know they've been with you for millions of years. No shame. Yeah, lice do not like me. Well, good for you. I was on a trip in Greenland where we were interacting with the Canis borealis, the little working dogs. They free range puppies. The puppies, these cute dogs you've ever seen run around everywhere. Apparently they had lice and so everybody got lice, except for me, because apparently I didn't snuggle puppies that much. Well, you know, that's what they always say about lice is that like that means that your hair was very clean. Oh, no, the opposite, it means the opposite. Yeah, this is in Greenland. I don't even think we have- No, you're right. They always say- Running water. That's the consolation for if you get lices. Oh, they like clean heads. That means you're actually very clean. So congratulations, you did shower and you benefited by that. I hadn't showered probably in weeks when I was up there. Yeah, you're right. The grease ball. Yikes. Speaking of a big grease ball, I don't know. You want to talk about a dinosaur with tiny arms? Sure. It's not T-Rex. No, no, no. It is Meraxis Gygass. Gygass. Now, do you have a picture of this? Because I can get, it does look like a T-Rex. You know it. Because I think I saw this story and it's like, oh, it's got a different name. I just looked at it and my ad just called T-Rex. Let's solve T-Rex. Here, I don't want ads on the screen, so I'm just trying to- Here we go. Yeah, so it looks a lot like a T-Rex. You're right, but it's not. In fact, T-Rex did not get their short arms from this individual or vice versa. Oh, interesting. This character M-Gygass, I'm guessing Gygass because like gigantic, but maybe it's Gygass, became extinct almost 20 million years before T-Rex became a species. That's a pretty big gap. They are also very far apart on the evolutionary tree. They are not directly related. Wow, I would have absolutely looked at that and said that's gotta be, that's gotta be then 20 million years. Oh, it's the ancestor to the, but no, convergent. So I wanted to bring this up because of two things. So one is this is convergent evolution. This is multiple times the specific strategy has popped up in the evolutionary record in unrelated specimens. Why do these huge-headed, tiny-armed things keep happening? Obviously, it's pretty impossible to know because we can't see their behavior. The expectation for a long time was just like counterbalance, like their head got so big that they couldn't have big arms or they'd fall over. But the problem is the skeleton, this extremely well-kept skeleton shows large muscle insertions and fully developed pectoral girdles. So the arms had strong muscles. Oh, why are you reading, yeah, something. So they didn't shrink because they were useless. What were they possibly being used for? The guess, the guess is, is that it may have been used for reproductive behavior, like holding the female during mating, which makes sense because think about like how, and I say this lovingly, because you know I love frogs and toads, how dumb the front arms of a toad look. And that's pretty much all they're good for, is for keeping them upright and holding on. So it could be that. They could just be arms for holding on during mating or supporting themselves to stand back up after a fall. So those are their big expectations, I think that mating makes sense. Also, they know that the skull was decorated with crest furrows, bumps and small hornlets. Again, assumption here is that an ornamentation to attract potential mates sounds like sexual selection. When in doubt, that's often what weird mutations are all about. The one thing I wanna mention though, and I'm not trying to call this whole story into question, but the very first thing that you said, Justin is like, it looks just like a T-Rex, I just wanna call it a T-Rex. It was drawn that way. How much of this skull looks exactly the same? And also look at skulls of animals that we currently know what they look like. And I know this is their whole job, is to like figure out how muscle attachments work and where there was extra vascularization and all these things to try to create this picture. But we can't know exactly what this thing looked like when it had flesh. And it was drawn looking almost exactly like a T-Rex. So there's a certain amount of artistic license, I think that goes with these. And while the body plan looks very similar, the face, who knows, I don't know. I'm just starting out there. Yeah, no, it is interesting. If you ever seen a gorilla skull, you would not know that it belonged to a gorilla without knowing about muscle attachments, morphology, stuff like that because the bones with the flesh look like very different creatures. Yeah, absolutely. And that was the animal corner. Justin, what do you have? Oh, what do I have? My goodness. Yeah, you still have some science? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's see, isn't this really to remind people that they're watching the show or something or did we already do that? Okay, proceed. I'm bringing up a story. I'm bringing up a story, here we go. Anti-science attitudes. A new review suggests our disorder of the mind amplified by politics and social media. A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, three researchers who study attitudes and persuasion explain anti-science beliefs and what can be done about it according to the paper. Anti-science beliefs are built on four, count them four, foundations. These foundations are, one, thinking scientific sources lack credibility, which is sort of an interesting place to start. Just believing that a scientific source lacks credibility before hearing anything else is sort of a, how did that happen? Two, identifying with groups that have anti-science attitudes. Okay, that's when, that doesn't make sense. That's when you believe something that science is telling you that's not true. Like, oh, I don't like science. Three, a scientific message that contradicts current held beliefs. That sounds like the last one a lot to me, but I guess that can have a broader application. And four is just a mismatch between how a message is presented and a person's style of thinking. And then they go on to try to answer the question, why does anti-science seem to be on the rise? Researchers point to the rise of social media and a variety of news sources where people can get their own versions of facts. And I just had to stop there when I read that because I thought, I wanted to point out, there are different versions of facts. There are if you go to certain places on the internet. No, no, facts don't have both sides equal time. You don't require equal time for facts. There isn't, well, two plus two equals four. Yeah, well, I believe 2.2, two plus two equals five and all is valid. Well, isn't that the problem though, Justin, is that like part of modern media and how they wanna portray the discourse gives a one-to-one on things. I mean, that was the whole thing that, I think it was John Oliver did where he brought Bill Nye out and then had an anti-climate change person talking and they were yelling at each other and he said, but this isn't representative. And then he brought out 96 other scientists to all start talking, right? I did not see that one, but that's a great example of it. So there has been this sort of idea of equal time that was usually used in politics on news programs. Now, I think all of that stuff got deregulated away where you don't actually have to do that anymore because there's a lot of shows that don't have opposing opinions on things, although they still did this for a long time when it came to global warming climate change issues. They'd bring on, yeah, you're right. The one out of thousands of scientists who are saying that this is a problem and then they'd bring out one of a dozen geologists working for an oil company who would say, no, it's not. Anyway, I got off track there, but that was just sort of a rant there. So that was point to another related development is glowing the growing importance of political ideology as an identity in the modern world. So this is quoting one of the researchers, politics were always around and people had political views. I think that's probably fair to say, going back in time. But politics didn't permeate everything. Science and scientific beliefs were separate from politics at one time, but not anymore because politics today are more and more a core part of somebody's identity, which is just sad. Ideology affects how they react to scientific evidence that has been politicized, such as something like climate change. It says what all four of these bases, these foundations have in common, so they reveal what happens when scientific information conflicts with what people already think or their style of thinking. These kinds of conflicts are hard for people to handle and that makes it easier for them to just reject scientific information that doesn't already fit into what they believe according to Richard Petty Professor of Psychology, Ohio State. So that's a pretty big, that's a pretty big problem. Now they offer some potential solutions for this. None of them sound, none of them sound very good. Why do you say that? Well, so, you know, they give one example of, you know, starting a conversation about mask wearing with people who are anti-mask by explaining that you too feel uncomfortable wearing a mask, but it's for a great, you know, they go right to a, I empathize and there's a, here's the logic behind why it's worth putting up with that slight discomfort. As though, as though there's a logical argument on the other side of that, that's going, oh gosh, I guess it is uncomfortable. But now that you point out that I should do it for other people's sake, I see that, it's just, their examples are very, like, very simple and kind of, I just didn't, it didn't feel like the solutions that their study was supposed to uncover the secrets to getting through to people. Yeah, I mean, the secret exists, it's, you use the same communication strategies that the other side is using, which is, you appeal to the core values of the people you're talking to. You use metaphors to help explain things in simple terms, in ways that are easily repeatable to other people. And you basically just have to saturate with the same language over and over again. That's what they do. And it works. Yeah. Yeah, but I think part of the problem is that they do talk about here is the identity thing. Is when you, once your identity, because now we have to recall too, we're talking about a particular political identity, very specific one in this day and age, which has been conflated to a great deal by a number of the leaders of that party as being part of a specific religion. So now they're, your religion, your belief in God that's been probably handed down to you generation after generation, because, you know, not a lot of people who were atheists go, hey, you know, I never thought about trying that religion thing. I'll go and do that and then teach that to my kids. It's usually something that is a family, generational belief system, has the mistletoe parasite plant of politics that has attached itself to it and said, no, this is the same team. And now so is your opinion about taxes, your opinion about guns, your opinion about global warming. And anybody who threatens any of those opinions is against your God and your foundational religious beliefs and your everything. So when you're trying to have these logical conversations like you're explaining, like use it in the same way. No, but the problem is there's actual language in religion that promotes the value of stewardship and taking care of one another. They don't pay attention to any of that. So maybe it's time to do that. That's part of my point though is if that is part of the identity, if this is all about identity politics as relates to science, that means, I think that's, perhaps they didn't explain it in the best way in the paper, but I think that is perhaps what they're getting at when they try to talk about, you know, empathizing or establishing common ground is you're probably not gonna move that person into the atheistic skeptic evolutionists, like green peace individual, right? But you might be able to talk to them about caring about one another, caring for future generations and taking care of the earth that God gave them in a way that will establish common ground and allow for them to meet you part way. And I think that's the piece is you have to figure out if they are fighting with identity politics with anti-science, you have to figure out how to use that identity to your benefit. And there are lots of scientists out there who don't wanna play that game. And I understand why, but that's why we're losing. Well, and it's also tough because Jesus was very pro-gun against taxing rich people. He was not one of the kind of guy who was like, I'm gonna do something for the greater good of a community type of a person at all. He would not have worn a mask even if he had the COVID. He would be like, I don't care. I don't know. Anyway, anti-science thinking, it's basically what you think it is. It's people feeling challenged by a belief partly, but also people have been convinced of an identity that attacks their identity. And that's what I'm saying. Convince them that environmentalism and science can be part of their identity. Even though it's not part of, I don't have those two worlds living in the same space, but people can. Welcome them to the table because that's what's not happening on the other side. We're not getting welcomed over there. Welcome them to where we are. I don't know. I kinda like the crowd that we've got here now. Yeah, well, you can't fix the planet with half of the votes. Half of the Senate seats, I suppose, is really what it's about. Half of the American ones, anyway. Yes, yes, yes. Anyway, moving on. What else do you have, Justin? Oh, I've got more stories. Oh, I do. I think you have something for humans. You have some rockets. What do you got? Oh, what do I do with the old humans, the ancient European story? So this is an international team from Australia, China, France, and Spain have conducted the first direct dating study of a fossil tooth belonging to Homo antisescer. Hang on a sec, I gotta... This is the part of the show that we're gonna edit out here. Why, what's happening? Ooh, I had a sneeze. Oh, Godzilla. Yeah, got me, but yeah. Okay, I'm gonna do it over. International team of researchers from Australia, China, France, and Spain conducted the first dating study of a fossil tooth belonging to Homo antisescer, which is the earliest known hominin species that has ever been identified in Europe. The tooth used for the study was found at a long, excavated site in northern Spain. I have to be pure clear in the article I was reading, but I believe this tooth was actually discovered back in 2007. But now they've dated it using the latest electron spin resonance and a uranium series, U-series dating technique. The study shows that the Homo ancestor it belonged to probably lived somewhere between 772,949,000 years ago. So this is the earliest European species. It isn't a direct ancestor for current modern humans in Europe. That the European history is about more than the 5,000 year range. But it might be the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. So this would be something that maybe, this, because it's about the timeframe that we think Neanderthals and also Denisovans split from the common ancestor of current modern humans and Homo sapiens. So it could be right around that range, which is a very interesting find. The findings are published in the journal Quartinary Geoconology. And last story of the night that I got here. Oh, that was it, okay, yep. Oh yeah, this is a quick study. Just they finally got around to dating the tooth. Give me those teeth and it was what they expected. Love it, moving on. It was old, it put it actually a little bit older than what their estimates for it were by a few hundred thousand years, I think. Even better, like a fine wine. Yeah, it makes it, that is now the oldest hominin find in Europe. Good, good. Even though they found it a while ago. So, and finally tonight, researchers at the University of British Columbia in Canada have calculated the risk of one person being killed by uncontrolled rocket descents over the next decade at 10% in the paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy. Yeah. Okay. In the paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers described, yeah, over 10% over a decade, which I don't know if that means 10% per year, it must be 1% a year. I think it's 10% over a decade. So like in 10 years of your life, no, no, it's not 1% per year. It's over a 10 year period. No, it's different, it's different. Statistics, statistics, I don't know statistics. Over a 10 year period, you have a 10% chance. That doesn't mean it's 1% a year. Well, wouldn't it, if there's a 1% chance per year, wouldn't that also end up being 10% chance over 10 years? Maybe not. No, I guess it wouldn't. No, it's not the same. Sounds the same to me. It seems like it's additive at that point. Well, yeah, so actually, yeah, it doesn't sound like that's a really big chance, right? So researchers describe the study of casualty risk in the coming years due to rocket parts falling from the sky and killing a person. Rocket parts, satellites, and even space stations have fallen back to the earth in the past and will continue to do so maybe even more often in the future as more and more space junk is up there. Researchers found, as expected, the majority fall into the ocean, but that's not by design. It's just because of statistics, the thing you were talking about. It's a numbers game. 70% percent of the planet's surface is ocean. So when something falls back, got a 70-something percent chance of hitting the ocean. Study found that agencies launching craft into orbit do have the capability of conducting controlled descents of rockets and mission components, but choose not to because to do so would incur higher costs. So too high of an expense for an entire industry compared to the low 10% chance over 10 years of falling debris, crushing one person to death. When asked for comment, that one person said, hey, it isn't too much expense. This is my life we're talking about here. 10%, oh, that sounds really high. Is that 10% a year or is that 10% for the whole 10 years? See, they had some question that we were having. So they found, except for that one guy who they studied and said they had a 10% chance of dying, the rest of us should be fine. So I guess I don't fully understand. One person, the risk of one or more people being killed by an, so one person worldwide? Yeah, it doesn't sound like there's a real big need. If that's the numbers, if that's the data, then it doesn't sound like there's a huge urgency. Unless you're that guy or gal. Let me remind you, 15 people per year die from icicles. About 200 people per year die from 20 or 200 from cows, depending who you ask, it's somewhere in there. I thought cows, aren't they the most lethal animal if you just do it by the numbers? So if they kill more people than any other animal, I would expect it to be more than 200. I don't know about that. I thought that they were the most lethal. So there's, I mean, there's also bees, which is a whole thing. Yeah, so cows, it's only about 20 I guess. Hippos are more than that. I thought it was cows. Hippos are, I don't remember how many they are per year, about, oh, it's hundreds of people are killed by hippos every year. Yeah. Oh yeah, so it's definitely. About 500, about 200, somewhere in there. So it's, yeah, so your rocket, you're fine. Like more people die from getting struck by lightning than that. You're more likely to get struck by lightning than to get hit by this rocket. So I think you're fine. Yeah, it doesn't sound like, didn't sound like a very alarming thing. Yeah, there's like falling out of bed. There's being crushed by a vending machine. These are all things that are in the bathtub. This is more than sharks. So just don't worry about it. Yeah, pretty much anything kills more people than one or a couple of people over 10 years. Everything kills is more lethal apparently than space junk. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, rockets. You'll probably be fine. Any final comments, Justin? Oh, did we reach the part of this show where it's the end already? I think so. Do you have any more stories? No, I don't. I didn't have any more stories. That was it. Great. I still have pictures of picture plants on my screen. I need to get rid of those. Great. Then it's time for us to wrap this baby up. Shout out to Fada for his help with social media and show notes. Gord for manning the chat room, identity four recording the show. Rachel, thank you, Rachel. Again, another week where you're very helpful in your editing assistance. And I'd like to thank our Patreon supporters for their generous support, the support of our supporters. Pulling it up. 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This Week in Science. Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That what I say may not represent your views. But I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just get to understand that we're not trying to threaten. The fate on that is to, I'm learning to use the new sound controls that we got this week. Hopefully it sounded much better than when I play for my phone. That's our show. We've made it. How's everyone out on the internet doing? While we wait for Justin to come back from his after show break. Oh, it sounded good. That's great. Thanks, Gord. Yeah, I got an email from Kiki all the way in another country. She's like, hey, if you have a second, I think you can play music through StreamYard now. Yes. Sat down a little early today to try to figure that out. And it worked. I just had to somehow remember how to use iTunes on a computer because I had to upload the music to StreamYard. And one of them was, I forget whatever, weird. It was like an AIF or something music file. I don't even know. And so it didn't recognize it. I was like, oh, no, they've changed all the controls. All the controls they changed in Apple Music. I couldn't figure out how to do anything. And then I was able to turn it into an MP4. So that was good. But then it disappeared. I did Google. Where did my converted music go on iTunes? Because I haven't opened iTunes on a computer in probably at least five years. Yeah, Gord. Yeah, why would you? I am so sorry, Apple, but that interface, you've ruined it. It was good, man. Like in 2007, I feel like it was peak iTunes. Like they had just gotten, what was it called? It was called like iTunes DJ or something, where it would try to suggest similar music and play a really cool shuffle of your music based on some weird algorithm that would be available in 2007. But that was, I feel like that was peak iTunes time. You should just see all your songs. Make playlists easily. Upload album artwork. Change track name. Like you could do everything so intuitively. And it's a mess in there now. It's wild. But I did it. I figured it out. Nice. I'm talking about how Apple Music is a terrible application now. Yes, thank you, Gary. I'm a genius. Yeah, now you know how to get your tweets profiled. Just compliment Blair. Oh, yes, the visualizer. So good. Just trip out to the visualizer. Who needs a lava lamp when you have your iTunes visualizer? It's perfect. That was when I had my iMac that was shaped like an egg in college. You know the one. It didn't have. I didn't have a. Yeah, but you know the classic iMac, the one that you think of when you think about an iMac. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, the one I think of isn't that one. The one I think of is older than that one. No, it's the first iMac. Oh, that's your type. They're like SC2 or whatever it was. No, that's not an iMac. That's a Macintosh. It's a Macintosh. Thank you. OK, thank you. That's what I think. OK, yeah, the big bubble. Yeah, the egg. Yeah, the big egg thing. OK, I remember that one. Yeah. Will this get us in Twitter jail if I share Google images of the egg? Yeah, oh, gosh, that's a cool looking thing. It was fine. It was heavy as hell. Yeah. I did move it into, you know, multiple dorm rooms. That's a very cool looking thing. So heavy. It had this like handle on the back of it, like, oh, yeah, I'm just going to. And I remember that was part of the allure of it. And the marketing of it was like, oh, yeah, it's an all in one. So you can like, and it has a handle. So you can like, you can just take it with you place it. Like, no, dude, this weighs 50 pounds. Setting up at the cafe. I'm looking at how much it weighed. How come there's no outlets at this cafe? Why would you need an outlet? Oh, yeah. 40 pounds. Yeah, which, you know, it's not that much, except when you're carrying it by a piece of plastic. And it's like a awkward cube shape. And on the front of it is a shatterable screen. Very dumb. Anyway, the allure of the Mac and Josh. Yeah, I had an Apple to see growing up. That was pretty fun. I had the great outdoors. Well, I had a typewriter. I remember I did turn in a few projects that were typed on a typewriter in school. Horrible brother, P touch had like one line of text. Oh, yeah. See at a time and you have to save that line when you finish writing it. My grandparents had, I remember they thought they were getting this like crazy technological marvel. And it was like, I think it was called an email machine. And it was by brother. And it was like it was huge. And it had this tiny little screen that only showed one line of tech. I'm going to look it up. It feels like a fever dream when I say it now. It's I feel like that would be an excellent thing. Like I know people always say like, oh, take a pager and like show that to a generation why person person and they'll lose it. And like, but I wish I could when do I think this was? This was probably like, it was probably the 1990s. Yeah, I had my I first started doing reports that I would have to turn into classes at school. On a mechanical typewriter. Yeah, no, I did. I did that. I I turned in things on a mechanical typewriter and you had to you had to load in the the white tape to kind of fix a mistake. Oh, you had a fancy one. So you had one of the new mechanical typewriter mine. I had to go and I had to take it out and had a I did have the little what the heck was it? Some weird scrollie pen thing had to put the white out over and then you'd have to then you'd never line it up. So then you could not only did you have that that paste over where you made a mistake. Yeah. And then you did if you didn't line it up right now, your text just moved a little bit lower or higher than it was before. And oh, it was a nightmare to find this thing. Nobody in the chat room knows what I'm talking about. It we kind of looked like this here. Let me let me share. Not quite. It looked a little bit more modern. Like it had that beige color that. Computers had in the late 1990s, but it looks kind of like this. Yeah. So I think I had I had something similar to that. I think that's what I was describing, except mine didn't have email. Right. So this one, that was the big deal with this one, is you could plug it into your landline and email. That can't be right. E machines. Yeah, that's going to be a whole that's a computer where they sold you the computer and the monitor and the keyboard all together in one big box. Yeah. No, that's not it. It's yeah, they put cow decals on it for some reason. It's truly strange that I'm like remembering this thing and I just don't. I feel like my parent probably asleep. Otherwise they'd be texting me the answer of what it was. Walt Disney. I learned to type on a pencil. Oh, yeah, yeah, that was my go to. OK, well, I don't know. I give up, I guess, but it was very. I tried to looking things that had some word processing capabilities and they were built by brother. Yes, M.T. knows what's going on. Typewriter looking things, word processing capabilities. Yeah, yeah, that's but that's also what I was describing. Nobody nobody knows who you're talking about with this email. Could it send it to a printer instead of printing it out itself? Was that the big innovation? I don't know. That's crazy. So it's I don't know. AX. Now, now the thing I'm trying to figure out how to do is I want to turn off to really reaching out to the podcast to help me help me figure out how to operate my phone. I got to turn off. I got to get rid of the autocorrect. Mine is not doing well. I have to tell you. Well, they've been getting into this new thing where they're also going to. Autocorrect is features are getting very intelligent to where you can write. It's not just when you write the word, but it can autocorrect after you finished a sentence and fix things. He's like, oh, now that I have more contacts, I can fix some of the words that you wrote earlier, which is terrible. But my big problem is I'm texting in two languages. And it can't it doesn't understand. Do you do a mixture of both? Is that the deal? It's a mixture of both. Sometimes, yeah. And and so it keeps changing all of the Danish words. And I want to switch to a Danish dictionary because then it'll change all the English words. And I just want to turn it off. I have I have me alone. I have the following keyboards on my iPhone. I have English emoji. Hebrew, Hebrew and Espanol. But are they all are they all like because it's you kind of got to pick one, though, right? Yeah, yeah, but you can toggle back and forth pretty easily. So if if it's for a specific, if you're like, I want to type right now in Danish, then you can change it. So that's that's not even because mine is danglish. Yeah, it's a mix of the two. So yeah, the iPhones are now fixing words after you hit send. And it's the thing that they're working on. It's always going to be improving. Actually, I have a friend who's been working in this field who spent some time trying to explain to me that they're getting they're getting to greater context and greater context and greater context so that that you hating it when it fixes the words after you basically hit send and then you look at your message and go, that's not what I meant to say at all. It's trying to catch up to you. It's we're not learning curve. We're we're we're getting into that that brother word processor with the two line screen and two megabyte memory and and that that E function that you have to have another one of those machines in the house connected through your phone line for it to work for it. Well, you can set up your own shortcuts. I have been too lazy and I haven't done it yet, but you can set up shortcuts where like if I type these three letters, this is what I'm trying to say and it'll auto correct to that for you. So if you have specific Danish words you use all the time, you can set them up as shortcuts and then it'll auto correct to the Danish words you want. Wait, say it again. OK, so I have to find it in the phone because I'm lazy and I've never done it. But I'm I'm just going to search for it. Jason Bombardier, never in my life have I ever meant ducking. Yes. See, this is what I'm talking about. So I have been told if you if you want that to go away so you can go if you're on an iPhone to keyboards and then a shortcut, is it here? Yeah, Jason, empty. Oh, yeah, text replacement. And then you can add things so I can add like, for example, I'm going to say, you know, the word that I would say instead of ducking and then I can type that and then I can type it again as the shortcut and then it will fix it or I can say like I always want a certain word to be all uppercase so I can I can change it to say like so. Which is which, though? So it says phrase in the shortcut. Oh, yeah, so I can add. So if I type Justin, but I always want it to say, Justin, like this. There we go. Hold on. There we go. Yeah. Nice. And so then now if I try to text you and I just typed Justin, it auto corrects to Justin. There I sent it to you. But yes, so Jason, that would fix your problem, by the way. So I'm going to delete this shortcut so I don't always yell at you, though. Yeah, but sometimes sometimes it's good, you know, if you don't know how to spell a word, it gives you the right spelling so you don't text like you're as illiterate as you actually are. So that can be nice. Although I did try to compliment somebody on having having the you know, you go out, you go to dinner at somebody's house and they make food and stuff for you. And so you try to say something nice about the food. So I said that I really I tried to text that I really enjoyed eating their casserole. But apparently I miss spelled casserole and it gave me a much more explicit suggestion anyway. Technology, what will you do? Teach your robot to wag its butt. That's what you'll do. But they they are apparently there's they're starting to do more current text training for these systems. Part of part of the problem has been a lot of the autocorrect text has been trained on open source texting from chat rooms and stuff like this that are largely from the early 2000s. The 2000s, that's what we're calling them now. I don't know. Is that the shortcut? 2000s. But but yeah, you know, lingo has changed. Things evolve over time. So it all has to stay current. Just give me my T nine back, baby. My flip phone. There's a term for the phenomenon wherein anyone who corrects another spelling expression, et cetera, grammar and the internet inevitably makes a similar mistake. You cannot remember what it is. Did we do it? I think so. We're both getting really quiet. Yeah, I'm getting I'm getting ready to go start a day. OK, well, thanks everyone for joining us. I hope Kiki's back next week. Jason, go back and listen to the pitcher plants. You'll enjoy it. I enjoyed it. I'm really glad they made it into the show. Oh, I remember. M.T., I know I remember what the term is. The term for the where somebody corrects somebody else and then makes a mistake. You compliment them on being very astute. Yeah, you got it. Say good morning, Justin. Good morning, Justin. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Good night, Kiki, wherever you are. Come home soon. Good morning, I guess. I don't know. Yeah, it's the same time there. I think we'll see you soon. And we'll see all of you crazy kids next week next week for sure.