 Oh, I am giggling because people in the discord, oh, you know, you know where we are. We're live. This is This Week in Science, and it is time for our live weekly, but we haven't really been doing it weekly because of weather and power outages and babies and life. We try. We really do try. But yeah, our live weekly show that we try to do Wednesday's 8 p.m. Pacific time. You know, if we make the stakes, if there are more power outages and internet outages and icepocalypse is in the middle of the show, you know, we those will get edited out and you'll never know. It'll be great. And, you know, but you're watching live, so you'll see all that happen. People in the podcasts. So right now, click the likes, the subscribes, the shares, let's make it happen for getting ourselves into the algorithms, however, that works out. And in the meantime, you're here with us and we're so happy that you are. So let's do this show. You ready? Let's do it. All right. We're going to do this. Okay, starting the show in three, two, this is twist this week in science episode number 957 recorded on Wednesday, January 24th, 2024. How is it that day already? I don't know. Filling in the gaps with science. Hey, everybody, I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we will fill your heads with vegetarians, HIV, and old fossils. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Science is a method of discovery. It is a practice that, above all else, requires high standards of ethics, honesty, and dedication to unbiased truth. When science is published, the observations of a few become the observations of the many, replicating and reproducing like a living organism. The documentation of research makes up the body of human knowledge. That is why it is with great sadness that I have to inform you of the death of science. Not that all science is dead, far from it, but that science is not immortal. That it can suffer injury, disability, and yes, even death. Currently, the scientific body has an infection of industry-crafted research papers, a pathology of for-profit publishing, a disease of career-dependent publication, presenting with symptoms of passive peer review, organized infiltration of editing boards, plagiarism, bribery, and outright fraud. The disease has become so advanced that the typical treatment methods of retractions are unable to achieve significant curative results. Damage done to science by unethical publishing standards is life-threatening, not just in terms of lost time and efforts to replicate the unreplicable results, but in human lives lost to derailment of the scientific process and derailment of future progress in many fields, to the living body of science itself, upon which the future of humanity relies, and most importantly, above all else. It threatens the integrity and standards expected each week by the listeners of This Week in Science, coming up next. And a good science to you too, Justin. No Blair. She's not here this week. She's got sickness and all sorts of stuff, and hopefully we'll get her back soon. But all of you are here, so welcome. Thank you for joining us, everyone out there. It's so wonderful to see you. Rachel, cut. Identity four. Is this microphone better? Are we good? Justin? Less roomy. Less roomy. I had the wrong microphone on. Okay, and end cut. Justin, it is so wonderful to see you this week after a week off. I was unable to keep the show going last week because of Portland's icepocalypse. It was trees down hundreds, hundreds of trees down that nobody thought were going to fall, like big old Douglas Furs and Walt, like, power, internet, all sorts of things were out and people froze and it was cold and it was awful. And, you know, your whole opening about science and the death of science and the way things are going really struck me because I'm kind of in thinking since this last week took me back to, like, the 1870s before power lines and before delivery dinners. And to a time when people were still searching for truth, science was still defining itself as science. It hadn't been, you know, systematized as or institutionalized as much as it has been now. And we find the same things striking our culture everywhere. And when things break down, it's just people left. And that's the thing that makes everything. Yeah. And that's why you can't trust anything because it's people. No, no, what I'm saying is that if people work together and come together as communities that we can solve problems in Portland, and I know across the country, United States, I am being North America centric here, people came together to try and help people volunteering at warming shelters, helping their neighbors to find heat to have blankets to do, you know, these are little things, but it's also the in science. If people come together and work together to create the environment where scientists can ask questions, like all like diverse groups of people can ask questions and there are resources available. And there are fewer gatekeepers and roadblocks. Then science can flourish and foster a much better society. And that's exactly how I felt for a long time, but I now. And now. Well, I think there's something to the job of a good gatekeeper that's missed when you get rid of them. And I think that's part of the problem in scientific publishing right now is that the gatekeepers kind of disappeared with the expansion of publications with the open access journals, which on the first hand sounds like open access. Yeah, you don't need a subscription to see this to access this. This is great. It opens it up to the public, but what it also turned into was a lack of gatekeeping and an easy way to charge money for a publication with a scientific name that was getting on the list of accreditation. Okay, so we can talk about open science in this way, but what or open publishing because that's different from open science. Open science is the practice of making data available and open and making methodologies open and available to as many people as possible. So like NASA, making its data sets available for anybody to be able to access and crunch numbers. Open publishing is the practice of actually opening journals so that there's no paywall so that, you know, you don't have to pay a subscription fee. You can just read them. And there is the regulation now in the United States that anything that has been funded by NIH or the NSF or the U.S. government generally after six months, it has to be open to anybody to be able to read. But they still allow the publishers to have that paywall to make money for just a little bit of time. But now saying that the gatekeeping, now using gatekeeping, and I've worked with people who have been part of opening publishing and having journals that are open to begin with where that's the way it is. There is still peer review. There is still quality assurance. There is still, yes, I see your face. Oh no, no, my face, my face isn't saying anything. No words came out. For everybody who's listened to the podcast forever and has never watched the show on video, Justin tells a story with his face all the time. I know where he's going before he goes there. I can't know but my face is open access publishing. It is, yes. But this has been taken advantage of and there are what we call predatory journals that take money from researchers, from people who want to publish, whatever, and they don't do peer review. They publish AI written articles. They publish fake articles, gibberish. There are these predatory journals that people have taken time to start identifying and basically say, this is bad. This article is bad. This journal is bad. These are the ones you don't want to, you can't trust them. And so I think that is more so the issue here. There is still peer review. We have preprint archives and that's not peer reviewed and that's work. The idea behind that was to get work out so that before it's published, scientists can get help from other scientists in making their work better so that they might have a better chance of getting published. You know, you put it out there and you go, but the media got a hold of it and it became, you know, and it's like preprints have become something that is accepted is accepted, right? Hang on, hang on. So I would love to hear more of what you have to say on this. So I'm going to have this rant that I was saving for the end of this. I'll go ahead and do it. I'll move the bit all the way up to the top. Okay, no, no, okay. So it's going to approach a couple of these subjects and I got some pushback because no, but what we can say how it's being framed and I think the problem is bigger. Okay, so now what we're doing is we're teasing everybody because we're going to talk about this later in the show and we're going to save it. So if you want to hear more about what Justin thinks about this issue, you got to keep listening because we have a whole show. Because we have a whole show ahead and we have all sorts of stories to talk about. I have RNA where we don't really expect it, but we found it and what it's doing, what's it doing there? I also have HIV secrets, penguin poop and some old fossils. What do you have Justin? Aside from that. I've got following a 14,000 year old mammoth around. It's going to be kind of fun. Oh, the paleo diet that may have been mostly vegetarian and the world's first successful embryo transfer in rhinos is making it so that the last two surviving southern white rhinos, both female, will have offspring. Wow. What? It's really impossible. And I guess I'll go deeper into why the problem with science is not limited to the idea of predatory publishing anymore. No, I can't wait to dig into it because I'm in the problem with science isn't just a problem with science. Science is society and culture. I can't wait to get into it, but let's do some stories first. So as we jump into the show here, I have to remind you that if you are just tuning in, this is this week in science. If you are not yet subscribed to us, we broadcast stream live every week Wednesdays, 8pm Pacific time and whatever time it is where Justin is on Facebook, YouTube and Twitch. We're on the social medias, mostly as at twist science and you can find our website where there are show notes and links to a lot of the stories that we talk about at twist.org. All right. Time for the science stories. Let's talk about RNA. Okay. We've been talking about RNA for a very long time. RNA is not DNA. Ribonucleic acid. What is ribonucleic acid? Ribonucleic acid, some people hypothesize predated DNA and maybe after chemical processes came to light, ended up making DNA happen and maybe RNA was responsible for a lot of the processes that led to life on our planet. But anyway, RNA, mostly when you learn about it in biology is the messenger RNA that takes information from the DNA in the nucleus, a gene that's been translated from DNA to RNA. It takes it and it goes and it shuttles it outside of the nucleus of a cell into the cell body. So like the nucleus is in the middle, the DNA is in there, it gets translated, RNA goes, I got to go do something and it leaves and it's the traveling part of information. And then it goes, oh yeah, let's make something and it finds the ribosomes and the messenger RNA gets turned into amino acids, base pairs and the gene, not the genes, the proteins, the enzymes, the things that make things happen within ourselves and within our body. We've been finding out though, over the last several years that there are many different kinds of RNA, there's not just messenger RNA, there is like, all sorts, there's all sorts. And they've been learning about these little balls of like cell stuff, they get spit out of cells that like take a little bit of the membrane went there called exosomes, but they spit out. And usually they contain a lot of little pieces of RNA, and people are like, what are they doing out there and there's some hypotheses that suggest that these little exosomes of RNA and little bits of instructions might actually influence like reproduction that they might travel along with the sperm and influence how reproduction takes place and how genes come together and how they how they turn into the information that becomes an embryo. But that's not all. This new study out of Yale published in the journal Cell this last week has been looking at what they call RNA and cell surface RNAs on neutrophil recruitment. Have you heard of neutrophils before, Justin? Neutrophils are involved in the immune response from in mammalian systems and neutrophils are recruited when there's an infection when you have a cut like neutrophils that go there to bite off bacteria and save you. But part of the neutrophil action is that they need to have something on their surfaces that helps them recognize where they're going and what they're attacking and what they're doing. And they just discovered that there are little RNAs that are held on to the outside of these neutrophils. They're called glyco RNAs, so sugars glycogen. They hold these little tiny bits of RNA onto the surface of the neutrophil and without them, the neutrophils just pass right on by. They don't even look at the thing that they were supposed to go attack. So if they get rid of those cell surface RNAs, neutrophils don't work. They're impaired inflammation like the neutrophils don't do what they're supposed to do to help with with fixing the endothelium. But now they know that these neutrophils based on this particular study are involved in. They have what they're called P-glycans or P-selectins. And these P-selectins help the RNAs and the neutrophils affect everything. And maybe this is a way that we can start targeting better inflammatory responses or actually helping to control out of control inflammatory responses by understanding this little mechanism on the outside of one of the cells that's involved in inflammation in our bodies. I just think it's so interesting this whole idea of RNA. We used to just be like, oh yeah, it just takes information from the nucleus and that's what it does. But now it's like it's everywhere. Yeah, that is, wow. So this is completely like they just had no idea this was how this was like the GPS basically for the neutrophils is coming all the way from the nucleus? Yes. And so these researchers, they really were just like, what's going on? Why are RNAs on the surface of cells? What's happening? They shouldn't be there. And so they followed it to the source. And now they realize that the RNA is really like, it's like the hound dog or the bomb sniffing or drug sniffing dogs at the airport. They help those white blood cells, the neutrophils, actually go find where they need to go. Yeah, it's a question. Is this instruction to the nucleus saying we need this or are these sort of tags that are going on looking for a specific thing and then happening to run into it? Yeah, so that's one of the interesting things. They're different from RNA that's found inside the cell body. But they have been migrated. They've been taken out of the inside of the cell. So somehow there's a process that they don't understand yet in which the RNA binds with the glycogen and becomes this component that allows it to be a first responder. And it's essential to fighting disease. More to learn. Why sugar? Why RNA? What's going on? But now we know and this is exciting and new. Exciting and new. Tell me a story. Well, once upon a time in Alaska, there were people and these people lived in different places. And at around the same time, there were wooly mammoths running around while there were people in Alaska. I saw Ice Age. So yeah, so researchers basically did is they got a hold of a wooly mammoth tusk and were able to do get isotopic data along with DNA from other mammoths at the site and archeological evidence that indicates where this mammoth was traveling. Sort of they could tell. They could tell it was like living over in this area eating this stuff and drink from these waters over there over a 20 year lifespan of a healthy female wooly mammoth. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. They're able to identify where the mammoth went based on isotopic evidence. Stuff that they ate. And it's like, oh, well that will be over there and that would be over there. If they ate and water they drank from. So this is also something that we've done in humans for a long time where we have been able to tell like, oh, what was it where the long beards of Italy? We can tell that the the long beards people who are this mysterious group of mercenaries that suddenly showed up in northern Italy and they were there for like a long time. And had a different culture from had replaced sort of a culture that was there in their area and had these traditions that were partly integrated to the Roman ways but also had these sort of more Germanic traditions as well and Hungarian like Eastern European as well. And by by doing the same sort of technique, they could tell, oh, this group actually was born in Germany or this one may have been Scandinavian or this one was from the from morph to the east of based on isotopic evidence within the bone that preserves how it was built. Okay, so they did this to this mammoth. And they also then noticed that this mammoth used to visit all of the known habitats of humans. All the hunting villages and all the places where humans gathered 14,000 years ago. And so then they realized, hey, wait a second. This woolly mammoth probably isn't visiting the humans. What's probably going on is this these early humans have all decided to place their camps where the woolly mammoths go for water where they go and graze and ready. Yeah, yeah. It kind of more shows something about why humans and their hunter gather relationship with the migration of mammoths. Although there is. Yeah, there is some some line in here about this being, you know, the early earliest humans into the Americas where all the 14,000 years is a long time ago. There's sites much older elsewhere in the Americas. So it depends on like if there's another you want to add another 10,000 years to that. And all this the early like we're still talking about there's no current modern Europeans in Europe. There's no there's no pyramids built anywhere. And we're still going to have 10,000 years before or 5000 years before any of that's even taking place. Fine. But OK, so if we're talking about 14,000 years ago, this was like the original idea of when humans. 13,000 14,000 years ago. That was the original evidence, right? That people used to think. No, no, no. But then they found footprints and they found other stuff and like. Well, the original depends on when you want the original. The original was about six or 7,000 years. And then then they discovered Clovis culture. They've shown all these artifacts and they finally dated them to about 13,500 years. So that that was the revolutionary change. There's that guy, Jean-Marc Jean Mars. What's his name in Canada? Who's like, I got the signs of human evidence 20,000 years old and nobody listened to him. Nobody paid attention to him. And then yes, now they've got footprints in New Mexico, potential cave sites in South America that are 20, maybe 30,000 years old. So I'm thinking about the Clovis culture information and kind of like where we were a while back thinking about that. It aligns really nicely with this and also with a timeline of humans as nomadic hunter-gatherers. And this isn't just a one-time thing. Probably this is something that evolved over hundreds, thousands of years where cultures would migrate and follow the animals and go where the different animals went. And so, I don't know, I kind of see this, not just as evidence that, like they're saying humans probably were following mammoths, but I see it kind of as evidence that this probably was something that was well-established. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, and this is kind of interesting. That's me. This is sort of before the fall of Clovis culture, right? This is when the big game was still here. This would be before the Younger Dryas event. So it shows that there was quite a bit of human activity that far back. But yeah, so you were basically... Before they killed all the mammoths. Yeah, or they died out due to the Younger Dryas climate change. But the mammoths, it says here, are well suited to isotopic study because they grow throughout the ancient animals' life with clearly visible layers appearing when split-lengthwise. So sort of like bands in a tree, right? Yeah. The growth bands give researchers a way to collect chronological record of a mammoth's life by sitting isotopes in those layers along the tusk. So then you can kind of move slowly back seasonally through time as these layers are laid down and tell what the chemistry of the water they were drinking from or the food that they were eating. That's amazing. Yeah. I love it. Like they've been trying to do stuff like that with the DNA preserved in teeth of humans, dentin, other old fossilized stratified structures. But yeah, this is it. I love this. This is a... Yay! Yay troubleshooting scientists. I love it. It's cool that it does it throughout the life. Like human teeth stop, right? So whenever they're doing that, like I was mentioning the study in the lung parties and whatever, they're telling the story of where they grew up, right? They can tell where the individual was a child, what region they may have been a child in. But they can't tell anything beyond that because once the human teeth are developed, they stop collecting that information. Right. Our hair works. Yeah. There's other tissues. But yeah, this is great. Kevin here and points out most of the evidence for when humans showed up are underwater now. Yeah. And that's... A lot. That's... And it's going to get worse. That's going to get worse. Well, that's the thing. Because humans are so coastal. We have this huge relationship with coastal waters and that's been true throughout human history to the point where... Yeah. There's... Somewhere between Denmark and the Northern Islands of the UK, it's a little bit shallow, that portion of I guess the North Sea. And for a lot of history, sort of ancient time history, it would have been open. It would have not been covered in seawater, right? So they have found evidence. I think there were like, I don't know, harvesting seaweed or something along the bottom, whatever they do out there. And brought up spear points of some kind, like artifacts from likely Neanderthals that would have been roaming the area. So yeah, there's a lot of human history that is going to be underwater because sea levels are higher than they once were. This is why we need researchers who can snorkel or drive submarines or build underwater autonomous vehicles. Yeah. Marine archaeology. Yes. That's what we need. Moving on from mammoths. We're going to go to HIV. It's not a really clean segue at all. But, you know, it does follow the through line of scientists figuring out new ways to investigate ongoing questions and problems. Researchers just published in Nature, their open access article, the HIV capsid mimics, a very fair and engagement of FG nuclear porans, nucleoporans. What does that mean? Okay. Researchers know that HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, infects non dividing cells. It gets through the cell membrane and then it gets into the nucleus and it has to get into the nucleus of the cell in order to get reproduced. What does it get into the nucleus? That has been a question that researchers have been trying to figure out for a very long time. HIV is large. The capsid, which is the viral coat that encases all of the viral information, is more than a thousand times larger than what is supposed to be able to get through pores in the nucleus, in the nuclear membrane. So, like, membranes, they're these, you know, these lipid bilayers and normally they keep stuff out but if stuff pushes hard enough it might be able to get in. Sometimes there are pores and the pores are molecular constructions, components that can grab on to things inside or outside of the membrane and help them through. And when it comes to these nuclear pores, these channels that they have in the membrane, there are what are called chaperones. And usually the chaperones go, hey, I know you, come on in and they grab on to whatever protein it is and they pull it through or they help it through the membrane. In these FG, which are otherwise known as nuclear disorder, intrinsically disordered nucleoporin domains enriched in phenylalanine glycine, which is FG, somehow, dipeptides. The chaperones are called karyopherans and what they do is they bind a cargo and they allow it to come through the FG dipeptides and into the nucleus. What they found is that HIV has evolved to mimic the karyopherans. So even though it's too big, it has its own chaperone. It's like a kid with a fake ID and showing it and the bouncer is like, yeah, yeah, of course, you fit right in, come on in. And so this is a really interesting, I mean, Blair talks a lot about mimicry in the animal corner and in biology, generally in larger organisms when we're talking about predator-prey interactions. But I think this is just fascinating because this is an example of mimicry at the molecular level. This is how like the real battles are taking place, right? HIV is a virus and it's figured out the key. It's like, oh, I need a chaperone. I'll make my own. Oh, I got some. It looks like a chaperone. I'll get it. So not only is this very, very important for understanding how HIV and other retroviruses make their way into the nucleus of cells, it can also really help us understand how to chemically breach the nuclear membrane in case we need to get drugs into it, in case we need to use it therapeutically. This is something that we might be able to take advantage of ourselves when we are designing medications that can help people. Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting. So then I'm also like, I mean, I wonder when this sort of, like you say, this molecular arms race took place because it likely didn't take place in humans. Right. Likely this happened long before humans were encountering HIV in any kind of endemic type scale. Yeah. Well, we know, well, the idea is that humans were hunting bushmeat and then that was what exposed us to primates that had, from whatever they'd been exposed to, been infected with the virus. So this is probably a very long chain of animal hosts that led to humans, you know, decades ago. But I don't know. I mean, that's the story I remember. And if I am wrong, I hope somebody corrects me because I don't want to share incorrect information. Yeah. Whether it's correct information or not, that's the old story. At least. Right. So, but then, you know, it's sort of like the molecular arms race, but it could also just all have been an accident, right? Of a host that didn't have a negative or interaction with HIV in some way, that this was its method of utilize. Well, I mean, that's how a lot of things happen is that there is what we call a reservoir, right? There is a species that isn't affected by the virus, but they hold it. They hold it. And then it can, and it finds all these interesting adaptions and ways to survive in this host that isn't rejecting. Yes. It doesn't hurt the host. It doesn't help the host necessarily. And, but then when the host comes close to something else that. That's configured a little different. Yeah. I have to say just sidebar tangent. I went on a rabbit hole when I had COVID over the holidays. I started looking into cell membranes and how things are transported through pores and I took physiology. I was a graduate student. I did grad level like physiology, electrophysiology. I knew how things worked. And I have to say, when you really start digging, there's a lot that doesn't actually make sense. Just going to say it right now, there are these structures, the channels, the pores that are kind of, you know, the gatekeepers. They have a charged interior. So if it's negatively charged, then positively charged molecules might be able to make it through. Some of them need a chaperone that guides them through that, you know, that'll hold them and make it safe for them to come through. But there is a whole series of different confirmations and different ways that molecules that you wouldn't think should go through these pores and into cells through the memory that somehow they do. And it's a huge, I got lost somewhere because it stopped making sense. And at a certain point it was like the pressure pushes hard and the things go in. And I was like, oh, pressure gradients, oh my God, that's just the end of story. But then there's also these cells trying to do what they can. Those tubular things that form on the outside of cells that reach out and explore their environment and then send mRNA down the tubes to go into other cells that don't have them. It was really weird. It gets really strange the more detail you collect on how a cell exists. We don't know enough yet, everybody, but I find this very interesting. So anyway, moving on from HIV and how it gets into the cells, let's talk about hunter-gatherers. This story is just from the, this is South America. This is down in the, how is it, the Andean, what is it? Plateau or the mountain? Regiony stuff. I don't know. Where's the Andes? That sounds like it. I only think of the mountains. But this is early humans in the Andes spanning 9,000 to 6,500 years ago. And by doing analysis of ancient human remains, they were able to find, again, I stop a composition of human bones to show the plants and the foods and the meats, whatever, that made up the majority of the individual diets. They found 80% of the diet was plant matter with just 20% being from meat sources, suggesting that these hunter-gatherers were likely doing a lot more gathering than hunting. It's also interesting is that they found that these early Andean people were eating a lot of potatoes, which were developed there by farming. They were poisonous. No, they weren't poisonous. Potatoes were poisonous. Wait, what? Yes, historically potatoes were poisonous. It's thanks to humans and their cultivation of potatoes that potatoes have become less poisonous. So I didn't know that. I knew something like you're not supposed to eat the leaves of potatoes and people who tried that got sick. When they brought potatoes back to Europe, people were eating the wrong part of eating some leafy shoots or something from the plant and got sick when it turned out, it's not the part you eat. Don't do that. Don't eat the green stuff. Yeah, so it kind of suggests though that maybe some farming and cultivation was taking place even earlier than the earlier creation of these things in the Americas. Anyway, yeah, the idea of hunter-gatherers is going around hunting game all the time. Maybe not so much. Maybe it was, maybe farming wasn't actually that big of a leap for humans. Because you can kind of picture, alright, you're doing a little bit of the nomadic thing, right? Well, we're going to go, but you're chasing, not game, you're chasing plants. You know the potatoes grow in this season over here, so you go over there. And yeah, you might kill a couple of animals that are there to eat that happen to be there also. And you go, oh, winter's coming, we got to go over to this place where we know this other tuber underground is going to be. We can eat that because it's still these berries that grow in the winter, whatever it is. And what do humans do like every animal does? They tend to poop and they have trash middens. They have places where they put their garbage and they tend to do these things in the same areas. And some of those things that they poop out are seeds that have been digested and then they germinate. And they grow. And then somebody notices, hey, did you notice that every time we leave this camp and we go to the other camp, we throw out our old potatoes that we took along with us because they went bad. Then we get a potato patch in that spot next year. And then it kind of just evolves into there. And then we're making observations. But it sounds like, I don't know when we think this revolution of farming took place elsewhere in the world, but it sounds like it may have already been in place in the Americas somewhere in the neighborhood of 9,000 years ago. Yeah, I mean, from what I've heard, I think the oldest agricultural evidence is maybe 10,000. So it's right about the same time. I mean, fascinating. People, we've been doing stuff for a long time. You got to pay attention to it. Also, your paleo diet is mostly vegetables. Congratulations on eating the wrong thing again in a fad diet. I think you reported on something like this a long time ago where it was like more grains or something. In Europe, they were finding that people ate quite a bit of grass and grain, and meat was also supplemental. So this is more evidence similarly, but on another continent. If we actually had the omnipotent light of all-knowing science at our fingertips, I think you could basically take every book on nutrition off the shelves. It can all come down. I don't know about all of them. Anything that has to do with diet and nutrition, that's not a negative. If we put the warning labels on the ultra-processed food for the things that we know, the diseases that we know are caused by these ultra-processed foods, we could do that labeling. But all of the health-benefit stuff for diet, a lot of that can come off the labels. It's not that food is healthy, it's just food. Food is just food, but it can be unhealthy food, and I think that's the difference. Yes. Now, I think you're exactly right. The psychological valuation of certain foods over others is actually, we're doing ourselves a disservice, but it is good to know the kinds of food that are available to us and their nutritional value, but not give them value. Moral judgment, whatever. It's just food. Eat what you want. My final story for this little first part of the show, which took an hour, is that researchers have determined a molecular switch that determines whether or not osteocytes, osteoblasts, which are bone-forming cells, become bone-forming cells, or whether they turn into adipocytes, fat-storing cells. Researchers, they're at New York University. They looked at skeletal stem and progenitor cells. These are cells in the bone marrow, and they go on to help with bone development and repair and all. They tend to go into more fat-storing and less bone-forming as you get older. Something happens as you age that creates an environment that tells these stem cells to be like, oh, we've got you got bones. That's okay. You need fat. Have some more fat. And when that happens, you become more likely to have a fracture. This is probably part of osteoporosis and other issues as people age. They looked at the molecular mechanisms in mice, and they were able to look at the gene expression, single-cell RNA sequencing in skeletal tissue, and they found that there are specific signaling molecules that are involved in this switch. And there is a group of them that's what they're called notch signaling genes. And so as you get older and you have bone degeneration, there's more notch signaling gene activity. And so they think this is what's active, and they were able to switch this around in the mice and change the notch activity. And what they say is that they basically showed that they were able to change the phenotype, which is how things worked in the mouse, not the genotype, but how everything came out, in such a way that they changed the mineralization, and they were able to create more mineral for stronger bones in the mice that they were able to down-regulate the notch signaling. So if they got rid of it as the mouse is no mice aged, then the mice had stronger, more mineral-rich bones. And so this could be a target for helping people have stronger, healthier bones as they age. That said, this is not a replacement for doing the things and eating the foods that keep your bones healthy in the first place and make sure that you're aging healthily. But if you do have a condition that is leading to bone mineral degeneration, this, I mean, who knows? It could be on probably available for you kids. But right now, available for mice. They're fixing mouse bones. They're mice are going to get all the good treatment going forward. They always do. This is good news because of all of the goals that we set for aging, usually we start with, I want my parents to be good. I want my mind to be healthy. And so here you are, you've directed scientific medical progress so that at age 150, your skin looks great. Your mind functions perfectly well. And then your hip bones are brittle. It's a sugar cookie. Oh no, we should have started with the foundation, the skeletal structure of the human before we worried about the other things. So this is good. This is another step into humans living forever. And notch signaling genes are involved in a lot of different things within the body. So this isn't just to be taken lightly. And you can't just be like, ah, get rid of notch. That isn't necessarily what you want to do. But if it's approached in the right way, maybe it's a therapeutic target or, I don't know, you were talking about diet earlier. There has been evidence also that weight lifting or lifting stuff that isn't just your body weight can help strengthen your bones because it's giving your bones a struggle. People who are able to walk longer distances are less likely to have brittle bones. All this evidence is to say, there's something involved in how metabolism works and what ends up creating the switch and leading to a regulation of not genes versus... Yeah. Youth blood. Yeah, there's a whole... The bones are just like such an amazing organ. But yeah, the more you use it, the more sort of wear and pressure I guess you put on your bones, the more they build, the stronger they can become. And they're also... You talk about, oh, you gotta eat right. You know where most of your body's calcium comes from? Your bones. Your body uses your bones calcium. Unless you eat lots of good food with sunlight and vitamin D and all the things and you have a balanced diet and then you're healthy. Yeah, you can eat. If you don't have calcium in your diet, I suppose I should say. Your body will still need it and use it from your bones. It will take it. It will take it away from your bones and use it elsewhere. I think the liver might need it or something. Calcium is important for muscle cell function, for nerve cell function, for liver cell function, for basically every cellular function in the body, there is a calcium gradient involved. And calcium is also involved in apoptosis, cell death. Calcium is essential. We need it. So drink your milk and eat your cheese, folks. That's the nutritional... Oh, I want to eat my cheese. Can I eat my cheese? But then if you're having... But this notch thing is... It's nacho cheese. It's always tricky when you find a mechanism. Because then you're like, oh, what happens if I make too much nacho cheese? Is that going to be bad for the bones? What if I don't make enough? What if I've turned it off too much? And what if I turned it up too high? So it's one of those things where you can... You can overdo it. It's about getting it to balance in a good way. So now I've got to study, what is this notch ratio in all the healthy young people? And what does it look like in people who have bone problems? And is there a way that we can regulate to a degree where we're turning one to look more like the other if it has the benefit? I think you've just determined somebody's research trajectory. That's great. Yeah, I think it would be a good one. And you know it's a good source of... also a good source of research projects? Clearing your mind for a quick break. This is This Week in Science. Thank you so much for joining us. This is a very quick break, as Justin has just said before he tried to break his desk. Now that he's off of the video, thank you for joining us for another episode of our science discussion fun. We like to have a good time here. We like to talk about science. We like to enjoy digging into things, questioning things, maybe learning a little bit of something new. And if you're enjoying this as well and you know somebody who likes learning and digging in and trying to figure out things around the world, maybe share the show with them. Let them know that twist is a show that they should subscribe to. Help them out when you're with them hanging out and they're looking at their phone and ignoring you and surfing the internet looking for scientific information. Just be like, I know what you need. And then subscribe to twist on their phone for them. I mean, that could work. Additionally, we do definitely love your support. If you are able to head over to twist.org, you can click on the Zazzle link where we have a link that goes to our store at Zazzle where we have flares, animal corners, twist 2024 calendar. It's available right now. If you need a calendar for the year and there are lots of other great products as well that help to support the show. And our Patreon link is also at twist.org where you can click the Patreon link, get over to Patreon and join our Patreon community and be a supporter at any level that you're able to. $10 and more a month, we will say thank you by name at the end of the show. And there are lots of other fun things that get sent to you from Patreon depending on the level of your support. But I just, you know, you being here and listening and being a part of this whole group, you let us do what we do. Thank you very much for your support. And I will come back, but Justin's not back at his desk yet. Maybe he'll get there. I don't know. I hope you all are doing well and aren't too cold and have been able to get heat and power and whatever you needed over the last several weeks in the Northern Hemisphere. It's been a little chilly in different places. So there you are. Justin's got a warm mug of something. All right. Coming on back with a little bit more twist. Let's keep this show going. Justin, you want to tell us some stories? Well, what have I still got left? Oh, I said the Southern White Rhino was down to two. It's the Northern White Rhino, apparently. I had this story completely wrong. Blair would have corrected you if she were here. Yes. So it's the Northern White Rhino that's down to two. And this outfit called Bio Rescue has succeeded in achieving the world's first pregnancy of rhinoceros after an embryo transfer. A new technique and method used a rhino embryo from a collected egg cell and sperm that was transferred into a Southern White Rhino surrogate mother at a conservancy in Kenya. Now, what's wild about this is that they have, they don't have to do that sort of crossbreeding scenario where they're using a Southern Rhino to make more Northern rhinos. The Northern Rhino is down to the two females, a mother and daughter. However, they have sperm. Somebody was smart enough to collect rhino sperm. Oh, they saved it. OK, I was wondering. I was wondering if this was some kind of gene transfer or like, I don't know what, but OK. Yeah. Stored sperm. They apparently have living cells from 12 different Northern White Rhino individuals stored in liquid nitrogen. So they're now, this pregnancy was induced, what was it, September of 2023 and they are confirming that they are seven days into the pregnancy. And I believe they have 13 other tests, embryo transfers that they have performed. So there's, you know, they have some decent now evidence that they can take this technique that they've been developing and apply it to the Northern White Rhino. So this really is a wildly international, wildly international, but this is, they've got the, currently, they have the stored liquid nitrogen. Is it a minus 196 degrees Celsius is stored in Berlin and another, and in Italy. So there's a couple of locations where they have the banks. This is research that's taking place in Kenya to do the proof of concept. So it's really like a lot of groups working together here at bio rescue, researchers who've dedicated themselves to conserving a species, which is really amazing. And this is where I would always like to take a moment for anybody who has a preconception of what a rhino is. They are not fearsome beasts as they are often portrayed or thought of. They actually, in their day to day lives, act like really big puppies. They spend most of their time playing with each other. And when they sleep, they sleep all snuggled up next to each other. And they're just the sweetest creature. Rhinos are like little puppy dogs. They really are. They frolick in the wild. They play. And it kind of helps to be a big rhino who can get kind of fears if they need to, that they probably don't have a whole lot of predators. Can I show a picture of the embryo? Would that be appropriate that people might like to see that? It's with the materials from the press release and they have the southern white rhino fetus as successful embryo transfer September 24th, 2024. Wait, what? 2024? What year is it? It's 23. That's a miss. Wait a minute. Is this future time travel? Yeah, the captain there has got the... Somebody's been writing the current date and remember, can I write the current date? No, it's not 2023. The text in the article clarifies. No, the little baby rhino looks like a... Just a little baby. Pretty little baby. I wonder how much this kind of technology is going to work in the future, whether sperm banks and storage will allow more species that are becoming endangered to have a chance of coming back. Population bottleneck of two females and then stored sperm. I guess it's a question of how many males do they have sperm? Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't, but I don't know if they're related. I don't know how related they are of those 12. They might even be related to these females. Depending on what that makeup is, it's going to determine some genetic health going forward, but hopefully they can move forward and do this as possible. Adea Wilson is asking, do rhinos learn like puppies? I haven't actually spent that much time in... Talk to Blair. Yeah, we got to talk to Blair about rhino intelligence and cognition and stuff. However, I will tell you that they do... They are potty trainable. Rhinos, as a group, will all go to the same location to poop, and they won't poop where they sleep and they won't poop where they eat and they will take a little walk. Sometimes as a group, one sees, oh, you're going, I'll go with you. And they'll go and turn around. It's like girls going to the bathroom at a club. Yeah, and they'll go into the same spot as a group. I don't know how it's decided, but they all know this is where we're taking care of our business and not over there. Not over here, not over there, not in our play area. So they are, at least to that degree, trainable within their group. I don't know if we can train a rhino. I don't know if anybody's tried. I think somebody's probably tried. Zookeepers. Zookeepers would know. Zookeepers do a certain amount of I don't know. There's beeping and then Marshall goes, oh, my bad. I don't know what's happening right now. I don't know what he's doing. Things are weird around here. We're not quite back to normal since the icepocalypse. We just got our power, I think, fully back yesterday. They replaced the power coupling to the house. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I'm on a battery backup right now just in case things go crazy. Yeah. We've been camping in the basement for the last week and a half and there are, I don't know, we've had little floods and we've got power cables all over the house and we have a generator in the back of the house. Yeah. I'm still in recovery mode, I think. They always say Portland is the city of the 90s. 1890s. 1890s. Yeah. I moved up to the West Hills and I didn't quite envision what it would really mean. I'm in the Rural's, exactly. I grew up in the Rural's. It just was a reminder of what the Rural's really look. And actually, I have to say I'm really glad that Marshall and I went to Burning Man for 10 years because we were like Boy Scouts and so prepared. We did. We had batteries, we had a generator, we had extra food, we had extra water. We got it. Nice. I was like, oh man, Burning Man totally did it for us. Thought it's how to survive. Tangent, though. You want to do a rant, but we were talking about Rhino Poop, so I want to move on to Penguin Poop and then my last little story and then we can rant. Yeah. Yeah, so we've talked before about watching animals from space and the possibility of different satellites to allow us to visualize colonies of animals and specifically penguins in Antarctica and a new study that is just out in Antarctic Science which is a journal has shown that by using the European Space Agency's Sentinel-2 satellite that has a spatial resolution of 10 meters per pixel. Yeah, a little blurry, but it's fine. The researchers were able to identify more breeding sites of emperor penguins based on their poop on the ice. So the researchers were able to identify the colonies. They looked at a whole bunch of different spots around Antarctica using this satellite over the years and several years back I think Blair one of us reported on this news that these researchers were doing this but it had less fine resolution back when they first started trying to do this. They were able to get a smaller number of breeding aggregations in colonies but at this point they were able to identify at least four more emperor colonies and it was identified not just the penguins but because of the darkness of the snow because of where the penguins left their guano behind. That's clever. Yeah, but this is also very exciting because this species of penguins and other penguins are becoming more and more endangered especially as climate change is reducing the amount of ice that's available on the coasts of Antarctica and other southern continents and there's a lot of habitat that's disappearing that many species of animals. In this case we're talking specifically about penguins but that it's just disappearing and so the way that these animals use ice and live on it in order for their habitat to work successfully that way a life might be going away and so it's good for us to know where there are and how many breeding populations there are but with this it brings the number of breeding populations up in a group of animals that is on the verge of getting on the endangered species list so this is good news. Yay! Looking at poop from space! Woohoo! The penguins are really clever. They found a continent that didn't have anyone else on it. We're going to use this. Nobody's here. It's going to be tough. It's going to be tough going but there won't be anyone else here. Perfect. Oh and additionally I must specify that they also used for these four breeding sites the Sentinel-2 and Maxar Sentinel-2 imagery to identify these things. Moving on from penguins let's talk about some old fossils there are lots of questions about when multicellular life emerged on our planet and we've got a lot of dates that go back single celled life there's possibly like 3.9 million years ago like 8 billion. There's some rock fossil evidence that is questionable. People are still debating it possibly as long as long ago as 3.9 billion years ago which would have been like half a billion years after the Earth formed which is this big gap too because we have that pre-Cambrian explosion thing where we got all these life forms but the reason we have this huge gap before we see all this life is because we imagine that they were soft-bodied life forms then they don't lend themselves to fossilization very well. Except that many of them have metabolic processes that involve things like calcium that we were talking about earlier or other elements that mineralize over time and if the mineralization of their metabolic processes is captured in that moment in time against a rock in the mud in the ocean maybe then those minerals can potentially be a hallmark a sign that something living was there and because we understand certain chemical processes there are certain things that work in organic chemistry and there are no certain actual processes that go from one form of energy to another one use of calcium or hydrogen or whatever it is and change it to another formation that can be left over. We're using this evidence also to look for life on Mars and other planets. So in the lab researchers have shown that yeast is multicellular and so that was kind of interesting because they're like, ah yeast we think of it as like a single celled organism but oh it can be multicellular so these researchers published in Science Advances their work looking at a bunch of rocks from a formation in North China includes layers that are 1.6 billion years old some dating that has taken those rocks back further they have taken fossils out of the rocks near the same area they dissolved them and found microscopic fossils and in the microscopic fossils they seemed to see cylindrical cells that were attached to each other kind of like they had cell walls like plants and they think they see spores within the cell walls so they think there were specialized ways of reproducing so what they are saying is that they have discovered evidence that there were organisms that were multicellular about 600 million years before we think multicellular life existed based on this evidence before we have evidence of because I think we think that it's much older than we have the evidence of it's just a matter of again soft-bodied creatures not lending themselves to fossilization not having a shell not giving a good imprint in a rock or what have you yeah so this is still debatable people are questioning whether or not this is what the researchers think that they're seeing but the researchers are themselves convinced that their evidence reveal these morphological details that are obviously multicellular and that can be interpreted as eukaryotic and that eukaryotic multicellular humans were eukaryotes our type of life and probably photosynthesis even may have started earlier than we think a lot earlier yeah I don't know this kind of stuff is always so interesting to me because like I said we're basing our assumptions on like chemistry that we know on current morphology that we know and we're looking at these things that are have been dissolved out of rocks and going this is a thing you know but I think it's exciting the earth captures these things and if it's somewhere in the earth that hasn't so much of the crust is in constant upheaval and in a solution where it's dissolved or it's being pushed down or up into the elements and blown away it turns back into when you find an area that has been undisturbed for billions of years that nothing has changed you can find evidence like this so there's not a whole lot of places on the planet where we can do this so this is an important site for sure yeah it's a very important site and I think it's something that people will be looking at a lot moving forward and continuing to question these results and really determine what they've found and what they're seeing here I think always in science it's based on replication and being able to come to a consensus over time with enough evidence but this suggests that these structures are similar to green algae and but they're so much older and what were they doing there what happened what's going on old rocks so scientists looking at the world questioning things having all sorts ideas they want to publish they get peer reviewed sometimes people go and then there's a debate in the journals and they fight each other in the journals and sometimes they fight each other on social media and which brings us to a new segment on the show that feels like an old segment but it's a new segment called Justin rants about a problem followed by more hope filled words from Kiki I love that addition at the end of it I hope I'm in a mood for the hope filled words at the end of it science has a problem mostly due to publishing practices we're publishing companies with profit motives have very few guardrails when it comes to what they publish they have been for years now many publications looking the other way when it comes to fraud and plagiarism even they look the other way because they make more money if there are more papers submitted we were talking earlier about the new platforms over the last 15 maybe 20 years now of online publishing many many many journals that have sort of spread it up out of nowhere the increase in the amount of papers that are published you know it's like 10,000 a day or more now and each of these it used to be that there was a subscription paid to the prominent journals by all the universities they all paid a ridiculous amount of money for a thin group of papers that were published and that's how the journals survived from the subscriptions and now the the new wave is coming from the researchers submitting their papers to journals 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 a pop, 10,000 papers a day or whatever it is now it's just ridiculous amounts of money are flowing in now it's as bad because science has another problem which is paper mills so I mentioned predatory journals earlier paper mills paper mills are before you get to predatory journals because paper mills are companies that create basically fake research as a business they create these papers and then they sell authorship to these fake papers to anyone who wants to be on a research paper this is increasingly a popular choice amongst people in the medical of industry there are grad students or people who are currently working and don't have time to do research because they're too busy working but want to show that they are doing research or job opportunities it's not just the wanting to if you're an MD, PhD there's a requirement for the PhD part of it you have to publish a paper so there are certain requirements and yeah you need to make money and so by paying to have your name on a research paper you have nothing to do with along with other people you have never met that you're not collaborating with for research that wasn't actually conducted but was published in a real journal getting that paper cited by other papers also helps but that costs extra for that you will need the citation mill upgrade package to your paper mill package don't you just go on like a chat gpt for that that makes your citations up oh no not to and there's also self citation of journals that's increasingly so now you've published now maybe you've published a real paper your real paper has been submitted and you get a suggestion from the editor hey you know what this reminds me and other papers that we've published you should cite them oh okay well I'll add those citations then thank you for that editor for giving me that helpful tip and now that publications other published studies have more citations than they did before and this is increasingly increasingly you will see a normal scientific journal will have in the range of two to three percent self citation where it's citing other studies that they've published before a lot of times if you delve into that it's also because they're very specifically working on you know I think a lot of times people will be citing their own previous research because this is a continuation of that research and the things that led them to start that research and if those are all published in the same journal that's where you end up with this two to three percent and the average for these new generation of open access journals is more in the twelve percent range with some being as high as twenty percent okay so it depends on the journal right it depends on the journal right it depends on the journal right okay so this is a big thing that depends on there some are credible some are less so the peer review process in every major journal even can be considered dubious at best and the retraction rate for bad papers is slow it lacks a way to generate money so most publishers don't even bother with their retractions they don't even bother with internal investigations the vetting process for papers is now really low a lot of because there's like so many thousands of papers that are being pushed through they have guest editors these are people who may not actually even be in the specialty of the paper that they're reviewing coming in and sort of doing the initial review of it they have guest peer reviewers who again may or may not be tied to the journal itself they may not they may be editors who are paid elsewhere so anyway there's this thing called impact factor of journals curated by uh clarivate analytics web of science group they use citations and number publications to create impact factors for journals that citations is part of it that's why there's a lot of self citation going on and pressure to cite within the same journal that's publishing your work so but it's a form of credibility rating that they have put out in 2023 web of science removed the impact factor of 82 journals including one of the world's largest that had a great impact factor and a a wide distribution a large number of distribution by meaning a large number of journals of papers being published within it so 82 journals these are individual research papers but hundreds of thousands of papers published under the umbrella of journals that are no longer considered credible great first step right uh web of science has also been doing things like using AI they've been developing AI because there's such a volume of these papers that they can't humanly read them all humanly investigate them all so they're now using AI to start vetting what's being published by these publishers many of the 82 that were delisted were under the Hindawee publishing brand yeah and they got delisted right after they were purchased by Wiley publishing for a ridiculous amount of something near 300 million US dollars they paid for this publishing company Wiley began an internal investigation after being delisted having their new purchase told AI it's not worth anything and they became so overwhelmed with the retraction orama puke fest of rotated paper mill pulp that they had bought that they have by the end of last year this is all happened last year they bought it last I think they purchased it last year got delisted last year and they have now announced that they are retiring the brand that they bought entirely once they move a few hundred publications over to Wiley which means exactly what when you're moving the publication around but maybe Wiley is going to have a much higher standard going forward for what actually makes it into those publications meanwhile the current edition of AAAS science journal has several stories about science fraud a lower report on a Chinese company bribing editors of publications this is not just now hey you here's a paper we can put your name on it and then hey here's a publication we can try to get into now we just want to bribe the editor of the publication the first place so that they are sure to put you in so that the whole network is complete this is framed though as a problem for like you were saying a lot of the junk journals predatory journals less credible journals but I've been reporting previously on junk Chinese science publishing at all of the major publishers all of the major publishers as if there is a different standard for the glut of these state sponsored papers coming from China that they would just cost too much to reject and I'm looking at you nature I'm looking at you JAMA so nature is Elsevier so it's a different the nature journals are under the Elsevier umbrella corporation and so I think you know that is the the corporation that I've heard people talk about a lot especially with respect to getting rid of paywalls and making papers available to people coming from having been in the academic world met and known people who have edited and actually run journals and worked for some of these companies it's a really interesting ecosystem that we have created because we allowed there to be publishers like book publishers that need to make a profit and there are public companies that have shares that then need to have quarterly returns and in that they have grown like nature that journal is very well respected high impact factor one of the most respected like science nature cell some of the top ones out there but at the same time not all the papers are available to everybody and because of that as more and more scientists fight for open information so that people can have access to information and knowledge the publishers are you know they're holding on to what they've got because they have to make their profits and you know but who's going to pay the editors and at this point in time when you have a peer review or a person who reviews a paper you don't do that for money you do that for free so you have an editor who's probably paid by the journal who's paid by the umbrella publisher and that editor is looking through and goes okay maybe this paper this paper this paper I now I'm going to send them out for peer review sends them out basically asks scientists who have a billion other things to do to read this paper and say what they think how is it is it good is it bad whatever and they do that for free I don't that may be what's going on at cell that may be what's going on at science at nature at all the really good old school journals but not the new ones the new ones scientists have been upset about this because they have too many yeah and scientists have been upset because they're like okay well I mean this is part of my job as a scientist to be part of the community and help the research move forward and feed back into what's going on but they're not paid well they have to get grants and then they're not paid to do these reviews and that's extra time that the university doesn't pay them for so imagine that a lot like there are probably a lot of researchers who are like oh paper mill what oh it's a paper I'll read it they review it and it's fine people need to make a living somehow these days and stage capitalism it's awesome well then you got Gamma who's been sort of a pioneer of this open sourcing right get the information to the people should be able to read this scientific information they're also one of the biggest growers during this open source revolution I recently they have a lot of no you go to they have advertisements but you go to their papers there's advertisements on the pages it's like I'm like old school bloggers making ad money they're like what okay and they're charging they're charging thousands of dollars of course for submissions to they don't have a subscription pay side that's paying for everything and so publishing is really putting it on a website and being done with it at this point right but I recently asked Gemma if I could read the peer reviews on a peer reviewed study that I had some serious concerns about and was told that the information was confidential not that it was behind a paywall and I had to join some other thing but that the information was confidential that was used to advise on the paper and not something that was for publication so some journals will have the you can look up the the peer review you can see what the other you know two or three researchers who read the paper and said oh I would be careful of how you used the frame to the data here or did you did you look at this the way you have presented your infographic could have a little refinement I remember my first peer review and somebody do what other your statistics should not be this yeah you're using this statistics and you should be using these statistics and blah blah blah and I was like oh okay let's do it again alright that's what you do so the one I was looking at was a paper that was connected to Odyssey, Odyssey is this group of researchers and data professionals who have gotten together to use big data sets and they also have an undercurrent of funding from the pharmaceutical industry and this paper had some just findings and conclusions that their own data even seemed to be counter contradicting so I just wanted to see what the peer review looked like on that paper because gosh I had some concerns that this was industry driven and that for some reason it was you know the data just didn't make sense you talked about this like before you left and went on your little sabbatical getting a new job for a while I remember you talking about this paper so you actually did dig in more yeah we reached out to the folks over there and just tried to get you know hey can I see the peer review of this all I wanted to do was read it and was told it was confidential and so for the open access open network JAMA journal to have confidential peer reviews makes me question whether there is one honestly like I have now doubts about the integrity of JAMA as a whole so another story that was in science here recently was about not in the journal in the journal science on the website for AAAS is about a dozen papers by the head of Dana Farber Cancer Institute the head of and three of the senior researchers needing to retract 57 papers published between 1997 and 2017 this all came to light not because of any peer review not because of an internal look within the journals but because a blogger noticed recycled data was being used in a number of places in their studies which could be accidents 57 times or could be data manipulation 57 times 57 times so my point is that if I should limit myself to one here is that scientific publishing industry standards are too low so low at this point that I do not trust you and I was your biggest fan but there was like this is one, oh gosh where is this one going to have been published this was published in JAMA I remember hearing an interview about this because I had to go and keep looking at this this was a a trial of a Chinese medicine compound oh yeah you were yeah yeah yeah how did this go through when you looked into it it had ground up insects and all these different earth and they combined it with a western dragon and said hey it has this positive impact what actually is that impact what is even in this compound like ground centipede this kind of a spider this sort of a flower and Justin is just like making up a whole bunch of ingredients right now no I'm not do you want me to read it hang on do you have the ingredients is it really no centipedes and spiders come on let's see oh maybe I did here we go list in this JAMA article what the ingredients are of the compound but I found a previous publication by the group detailing the proposal for the study to look into the compound which did list the ingredients and they were Chinese scorpions leeches Chinese cockroaches Chinese red-headed centipedes the slowed other outer shell of cicadas red peony root sour juju seed agarwood white sandalwood and synthetic borneal a substance derived from camphor known to be highly toxic now these are all combined and ground up into this compound that I can't pronounce quite properly but it's like something like this it's a Chinese traditional medical thing right and the compound was used with some level of ingredient from all of these things in conjunction with a western medication to treat a thing and show deposit of input now this was so amazing to me that first of all they would not list in their publication what was involved what those ingredients were a list of ingredients but that this could be considered science that this could be considered research and I remember I dealt so far into this that I got into an interview with one of the publishers who was talking about like well we had questions about whether or not we should publish that study but we did it anyway seemed so important and significant we thought we had no you're paid we can tell when you're paid when you're showing ground up centipedes of holistic medicine a state sponsored campaign in China currently having been announced as a goal by the Chinese legislative branch or whatever you want to call is to introduce holistic medicines into western medicines as add-ons that improve and now we're seeing all these research papers that are trying to find that and you're publishing them in your supposedly high impact credible journal I have lost all respect for you Jama you are delisted by me if the web of science hasn't caught you yet they will and I'm really curious so here number one the addition of the western medicine compound it sounds a lot like the homeopathic medicines that are sitting on a lot of shelves and they have things like epinephrine or actual poisons and toxins that can hurt your babies but nobody talks about them that's the active component but it's the homeopathy that's doing what it is for you right so that's number one that's what it kind of rings as familiar and similar to and then the other side of it is I do not think it's wrong for eastern medicine and traditions to try to incorporate themselves into western medicine why are we separate and what are we doing but evidence needs to be the basis and it has to be done right and if what you're doing is putting a mishmash of like oatmeal from the kitchen sink sink in there and you're like hey it's great or how about leeches and cockroaches and cicada shells everybody if you really want to do this yourself in North America there's two cicada populations that are going to be emerging this year it's going to be massive and amazing so find yourself some exoskeletons everyone but yeah I mean look at the components individually we know that there have been years of research into nutritional components like turmeric curcumin trying to figure out what are the anti-inflammatory aspects and how are these food these herbs that different people use how do they actually work and what do they do and are they good and what are the you know like resveratrol how many bottles of resveratrol do you need drink to actually have it have any effect on you you know and I think that is the problem you can't have us and I think you're right for JAMA to put this kind of a study ahead and for the person you spoke to to say that this seemed like too important a result not to publish you're right that's faulty and that study was faulty and there needs to be more control and that's lacking if if eastern medicine practitioners want the stuff they use to get integrated and if western medicine practitioners are excited about that let's do the science right but my problem is if an authoritarian government is demanding research from its scientist community to do a result and they keep finding that result and that result keeps ending up in western papers because there's money involved and somehow it's always significant yeah like no that's bias and that's not okay that's low standard and that's like at this point like this is what said this is the biggest fan of science you can get and I'm like I don't trust any research out of China I don't trust anything in JAMA I have to read the study just word by word and make sure that it's there if it's even in nature because they're the ones that gave me the microbiome study on centennials that was people who couldn't have a birth certificate until 1950 and couldn't prove an age over in 72 like they're doing a bad job and there's great research that's out there but allowing all of this so you know everyone oh doc we need more people in research yeah I think we need I think we need less people in research I think there's too many papers I think you need to not be a grad student and publish a research paper you can just do the experiment and know that you've gotten a result it doesn't need to be published the world isn't waiting to hear about your undergrad study on whatever it is I think so I'll argue back against that I think graduate students do need to publish and be a part of publishing because by doing that they learn how papers are written and they learn how the process works so they can move into future stages of research and lead that research and lead the writing and know what they're doing I think the issue is that the system is set up in such a way that we have hiring practices that are based on the number of papers and what journals you've published in in the first place how high impact are you to begin with oh you published in science you get a job what and then from there so people are like Harvard, MIT, the big schools here in the US like it is super competitive and ridiculously cutthroat because everybody is tearing each other down to get the first result to get the paper in science or nature like that's like because if they do that then they get a job and that's the beginning of their career then once they get in as an early stage scientist they have to keep publishing publish or perish if you don't put out high impact research then you're not going to get tenure you're not going to get grants and if you don't get that then you don't have a lab you can't support a lab you can't support research assistants you cannot do anything and suddenly and I think it's a good system because it keeps the pressure on right doing high impact research but but you can't let them cheat getting there you have to have a gatekeeper and that's the problem where they make the wrong choice they lie they publish false data they create things that will get them published so that they will get the job because maybe they come from a background that expects it of them maybe they have type A psychology they have to do this because they have learned in their life that the only thing to do is succeed and success is publishing and getting a job and I think this is what's wrong because what it creates is a friendly competition is great because it spurs people on but what is happening is we have created a system where it's so competitive and cutthroat and people have to do it and they'll do anything if that's what they believe is where they need to be and you end up with people I knew a postdoc whose paper had been rejected because one of her competitors in the same field was a peer reviewer and that peer reviewer negatively commented on her paper and then just right after published basically the same research wow that's a pretty sketch it's sketch all the way to the top and the reason is the universities and the financial motivation and how it all works and if you get into a university you then have to publish and you have to get grants so you have to publish at a high impact so you have great ideas and you get the grants and then you can hire people and the more money you have the university takes 60% overhead for many grants you bring in so eventually you take the pay for peer review from the paper mill because you need some money or you figure out how to do some crowdfunding you figure out how you can actually make some extra money so you can pay your lab manager because you don't have any extra money because you haven't gotten a grant and you can't do the research and you can't write the paper unless you have somebody else to help you run the lab the whole system is a mess yeah it's not the papers necessarily that's part of it the publishing part of it is just part of the system but yeah anyway thank goodness for you too a good gatekeeper at least when there weren't a lot of publications and so to get published anywhere was a high impact because they didn't just take anybody to publish and they had real peer reviewers because they weren't throwing 500 papers that they wanted you to read they gave you three a year yeah so let's go even further on this though and go back not just to the papers but to the grants and to research that we've actually seen that has shown that there's bias in the reviewers for grants and papers if they know who is writing them and people of color and women are not reviewed well in those situations and they are less likely to get the grants and so you're talking about gatekeepers and you're talking about it historically as being a good thing but in fact I think what we are in the middle of seeing and what you're witnessing and what we're all witnessing with the breakdown of the publishing industry and what's happening with like these mills and everything is that there's a revolution taking place for over 15 years 20 years people have been trying to fix publishing there are a lot of good people who are trying to make it better there are people who are taking advantage of the broken system and because the system has been broken for so long there is a revolution happening within the institutions trying to turn over the diversity in these institutions trying to not make it the thing where oh the black person is the person you know they not only have to run their lab and write grants and do all this stuff oh they also have to sit on the diversity committee and they also have to sit on this other committee because nobody else has that experience and so they're asked to do extra and the whole system like historically we can't look back on it as the good old days I'm going to have to rename this segment sorry this is not called the new name for this segment this is a new new segment Justin Rantz about a problem by less hope filled words from Tiki and that's where I'm going to turn it around and that's what I'm saying is that I think the revolution is needed and it's good and I'm glad that people are starting to try to change things they're trying to create better hiring practices they're trying to create better peer review practices the preprint archives are there for a reason and people are trying to use them well there are good open access journals that are not paper mills and there are people like Elizabeth Bick who we interviewed who was checking papers for false images and made up data and there are people who are out there who are working to make science better yeah I agree with you I agree with you Rantz it's broken but I think that there are a lot of people who believe in it and not necessarily want to be like oh let's fix the institutions and keep the institutions the same let's build something better and I think that's I mean I have that hope but that is where we are going right now and unfortunately as you go to something better you have to tear old stuff down and it looks messy it does and it's going to be incredibly hard to change because if you do like anybody if you show them hey you've been doing something wrong for a long time their self-preservation is going to be ah but there's never been a problem right ah that's it's not my fault oh gosh because you're also showing that a lot of the way that publishing has worked in the past has been inviting fabrication has been inviting the paper mills and maybe wasn't controlled enough you know AI is going to really revolutionize this and I think Web of Science could go a lot further than it's gone so far but granted they've done this just last year got rid of 82 publications so maybe I shouldn't be too harsh because it sounds like they're on top of it but you could do simple things like 82 publications show me a researcher that has been on more than 6 papers in a year I can tell you one of the ones I was complaining about that I was trying to look at the peer review it's a group of researchers that sort of end up on each other's papers all the time sometimes in disparate things one of them I think has been on 20 papers in a year and I'm sorry you have not contributed to 20 research papers or you have you have there is do you know about publication, author order right so first author is the person who did most of the work second author is usually the person who is like their partner and they decided okay I did most the first author did most of the writing or whatever second author maybe did a lot of the statistics or whatever and it goes down the line last author is the person who runs the lab and they didn't necessarily do any of the work but they run the lab I'm not talking about the person running the lab I just want to make it clear that there is a really interesting hierarchy and it's very important and it's the debate very often about authorship placement when a paper is being submitted is actually really important like graduate students they really want that first authorship at least on one paper because it shows that they did the work yeah but then you get the big labs who actually have a lot of people like there are labs out there that have 50 big labs working out there and that primary investigator who runs the lab is on every paper that comes out so he or she they could be on 6, 10, 12 people that you're going to collaborate with this was researchers at different universities across the planet or different labs who are tied through Odsey which is a you're thinking about the Odsey thing I'm thinking about the Odsey thing but I could be talking about the dentistry school in India where students regularly publish studies 2, 3 a month and get them published in journals that are no longer accredited but they advertise that their school has the most publications per student of any university for dentistry or whatever which gives them a lot of prominence and people would like well maybe I should go to that school where they're doing research on it helps the PR with citations to themselves for a study on cotton candy ability to withstand a high wind a lot of times their citations have nothing to do with the study because it's a paper mill so they're just grabbing things from other places where they're getting paid but that's an example run through where did it come from run through are they trying like if you can come up with the algorithm for is this a state policy of some level of internal self-propaganda that the Chinese authoritarian state has been pushing for is this a paper that confirms that whatever view it is like just look at authorship look at connections to pharmaceuticals we can uncover a lot of this and guess what you've published the problem I have is there isn't any mechanism of consequence there isn't any mechanism of like hey you know what we can tell that every study you have worked on is in the the favor of this yeah so I guess when you come down to the government pushed or industry or industry yeah but at the university level we have seen a lot of stories recently where researchers have had their data shown to be false going back there's been investigations into their entire history of publications and big falsifications have been pulled out and they get fired yeah it can happen and then you don't get grants anymore your grants are taken away and then suddenly the NSF is like well you owe us money cause you didn't do it right and then you have to pay it back so here in the US I think at the institutional level for academics is proven and the institution is like yeah we'll follow it up and we'll go with this because it looks good for us to actually like do something let me put it this way then I think that if you are a medical student who has paid for authorship on a paper you did not contribute to you should not be allowed to have a medical way period like you need consequences for this you know they used to have that test whatever that a horrible test people were like oh it's the big medical test they were always afraid of it but they got rid of it it's now a pass-fail anyway it's no longer has a score attached to it and so now the talk is that you have to have these publications because that's the only way to differentiate yourself you should be like I nailed it I was smart and everybody you haven't published yeah I was too busy studying and learning my craft now there's nothing there's a pass-fail so now they have to do these but if somebody and this is apparently where this those pay-to-play in the United States academic circle is the most egregious is in the medical student itself is a very competitive industry like yeah but you want to be a doctor that helps people and you're going to start your career showing unethical behavior yeah there we go this is the way this is the way you separate so I think you really shouldn't be in the field I think listening to your rant and listen to your commentary I don't think that we need to highlight anyone country anyone kind of people anyone government or you know anyone industry but I think the big take home from what you're talking about is that there are not enough controls and right now we are the publishing industry because it needs money and researchers need money there is a big hole and it is causing an unethical behavior it's causing false data to be published it is allowing people to get places that they shouldn't and it's going to hurt people because we're going to end up stuff with stuff like the what was it 20 years of Alzheimer's research that was based on a particular protein that just recently they discovered that the original data was not even solid and so it's the that is the take home is that there it's not just JAMA that's one but all of them the El Sevier the fact that there are paper mills the fact that it's you can pay to be on a paper like all of it it doesn't matter like whatever country a scientist is publishing from doesn't you know but if they're doing good the ones I'm pointing at are all publications in the United States the publications are all in the United States if it's good science there should be somebody who can tell it's good science versus it's not good science and that person is not going to be swayed by money or by influence and I think that's the problem that we have right now and yeah that's what I was saying I hope that's what people are trying to fix and that's what we need to be fixed and I totally agree with you and yeah it's fair to point out if if egregious research is coming from certain sources I think it's perfectly acceptable to point it out I have no I have no problem with that right but if you if you find a trend you find a trend but like that's just one trend like probably others all over the place that you just haven't seen you know so I think yeah yeah anyway yeah I agree science we've got an issue because people need to make money and that's where it's at right now and we have for years together on the show we've talked about the fact that the pharmaceutical industry has hidden evidence hasn't published results that didn't look good and just publish what they want to you know we don't have you know there's like one journal for negative results but nobody publishes it right what are we learning from each other like when it comes to science we need to learn from our failures but instead people are making up wins and that's screwing everybody yeah we can but you know hey journals you can reject more yeah it's okay oh man do you imagine if they did reject more and just the editor is like no no but I'm trying to give you $4,000 no no thank you then if you reject more then you don't need as many peer reviewers viewers yeah I like this so it's bundled stuff too because now it's like there's intermediaries that are like hey I have 20 studies to submit should I go to your journal or should I go somewhere else and then the dollar amount is like multiplied for the like this is just anyway don't trust anything you read don't trust anyone you talk to don't trust anything you don't trust any I'm just gonna I'm going to caveat that with consensus and triangulation so you can read one thing and you can also read a bunch of things but if you're only in like one little bubble of the world you got to step out of your bubble you have to go listen to other people you have to read other things like one paper we've always said this the results from one paper are not gonna change the world right it is the results that get put together over time the change stuff right so yeah no cherry picking except if it's in the spring and there are lots of actual cherry trees and it didn't freeze and rain and nice cherries and go ahead and pick the cherries and they're delicious it's great I'm just constantly surprised though now of just how bad this problem is it's just like people like don't have standards it's worse people who assume would have standards aren't having standards and and the thing that to me I think everything but and then beyond that it's not just the publications then it's media and it's the blogs and the media sites that people go to for information that copy headlines and take you know just whatever it was and they don't question it and I already had lost confidence in them long ago that's why they're not even part of the conversation like they have no credibility on science or whatsoever who cares what they're saying or talking about anymore I don't because they're trash however but I've always loved and I know that a lot of those side predatory publications that oh XYZ Journal that you've never heard of before because it's specific to this paper that somebody wrote apparently I get that those are trash but now when it's when it's in the mainstream journals on a regular basis that's when you say it's gone it's become critical mass I guess is the thing or something like that where now it's gonna be a runaway the chain reaction of like you can kill science you can't it's a living thing of people sharing knowledge and replicating knowledge and if you continue to infect it with garbage that you want to publish and make money off of you're going to kill the thing that feeds you the thing that keeps us warm and healthy and keeps us from dying from the next pandemic you're going to kill it because you're going to ruin the credibility which science if nothing else is a process based on that credibility the ethic of how you work the unbiased truth and it cannot stand for what you are what you are doing it should reject it and it's sad to hear how Tide of a Bind researchers are in and getting their research and jumping through hoops but on the other hand there's a lot of people calling themselves researchers who aren't yep agreed anyway rant out and and still more words of hope we never got to the point I did give words of hope a little bit some people good people are trying to do good things somewhere it's just hard okay and in addition to your rant I was reminded this last week when I lived in the 1890s here in Portland of how much science is useful and how understanding how basic concepts work can be used to your advantage to make your life better we had things going wrong electrically we had things going wrong with plumbing and other stuff but because you had pipes don't let them freeze it was 29 degrees in my house it was so cold no heat I had to try not to let any pipes freeze and keep the water going and but it's because of understanding basic concepts of physics electricity understanding how current works we were able to hotwire our heater our heating system our furnace to our generator we now also have these really cool new lithium battery backup packs that can put out almost as much energy as a gas guzzling generator and they're quiet which is really nice and these things it's engineering that put them together our house is put together through engineering engineering failed when the power lines fell down because of the trees but it's science that helps us understand how to maybe keep the trees from falling down it's science that has gotten us to the point where we understand how the current runs through can run through lines and power a house it's science that has allowed this house to stay slightly above freezing so the pipes didn't freeze it's science that gives us the batteries it's science that formed the basis for the innovation that has allowed our society to move forward from 1890 to 2024 and so we need to foster that basic inquiry we need to foster an environment that allows people to figure out how things work and you know and I agree things are weird right now and they're breaking but they're breaking all over the place but I feel like they're breaking people I think science just needs to spend more time trying to kill vampires oh yeah okay werewolves oh I was thinking paper mills and pulp publishing but those vampires that are feeding off of science or the people's desire to to know more as vultures as vampires drinking the blood of science for their own profit science needs to figure out how to take them down I think AI will help how to do better I think it will help I think right now it's questionable it'll help we need a scientific blacklist we need like this person did I want to know everyone who paid for I want to list of everyone who paid for have their name on a research paper who has a medical license I want every one of those names you can probably do that find databases open source publish that is what I want to see AI can sort through all that data super fast when was it the head of we've sorted we've sorted we've ranted we've had a whole thing that's what's scary I was ready to go again more ranting still not satisfied with my level of disgust oh my goodness don't it's alright to be realistic but have a little optimism and you know surround yourself with the helpers surround yourself with the people who make you laugh surround yourself with the people who challenge you and help you to be better surround yourself with people who help you find your joy let's do that and on that note I want to say thank you all for being here and helping my joy tonight and Justin thank you everyone in the chat room thank you for all your comments and the discord of course thank you for being there closing in on a tight 150 thanks identity gord are in lore thank you for helping to make sure that our chat rooms are nice safe happy places to be Fada thank you for all your help with show notes and keeping us on track and like reminding me to tell you whether or not we actually did have a show going on tonight you know keeping me going thank you identity for thank you for recording the show and Rachel thank you so much for your editing of the show just all of you can't do it without you and especially I have to say thank you to our patreon sponsors so thank you too thank you I did it I said all the names barely thank you all for supporting twist we really can't do it without you and if any of you out there would like to help support twist and keep us going head over to twist.org and click on the patreon link we'd love your support on next week's show we will be back Wednesday next time Thursday 5 a.m. Central European Time broadcasting live from our YouTube and Facebook channels and from twist.org oh and I just forgot Blair wasn't here want to listen to his podcast yes yes so for this week in science wherever the podcast are found if you enjoyed the show get your friends to subscribe to for more information on anything you've heard here today thanks to stories we'll be available on our website www.twist.org and you can even sign up for newsletter that we promise we won't send and you can contact us directly you can email me kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com justin at twistminion at gmail.com Blair at BlairBaz at twist.org just the twist in the subject line so your email doesn't get 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science this week in science science science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be a news that what I say may not represent your views but I've done the calculations long show today yeah it was good maybe Rachael you might edit out all the ranty stuff I think we only have an hour PBS these days. I'm not sure. That was way too long for the radio. Um, I love all you guys for sticking around for our big rant conversation. Um, was it too inside baseball? Like, was that too much? Or did you feel like you, uh, that was valuable? I would love to know if that was something that was interesting. Thank you, zombie Tom Hanks. I just got to make sure that when the rant happens that there's enough context and that we're, uh, actually giving good information a day. Oh, Wilson. Thank you for dancing. I always dance. That's what the music's for. You have to dance at the intro and the outro for sure. What are you doing, Fada? Uh, yeah. Hi, Bob. I've been watching finally for all mankind and I love it. Uh, but it's so dramatic. I don't know. These, these characters, they're bothering me because I get so invested. Thank you, flying out valuable. You need to know that. Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Paul, it needed to be discussed. Mary Gertz, it was on point and valid. Great. I'm really glad because sometimes I really want to talk about stuff like that and I want to talk about the broken systems and I'm glad Justin brings it. Um, you know, but it's outside the norm of us just discussing the science. So it's, um, you're kind of nice to be able to go off format a little bit and do that every once in a while. We have a format. Well, I mean, I, I, did you just, I just died a little inside. I don't feel like, I don't feel like we veer off, uh, of our just brain stories very often. No, no. I mean, that's what I was saying. It's in those, this has been a recurring theme. And it has become more and more consistent over the years. Yeah. And a lot of it came to from, uh, moonlighting as a science journalist and getting lighting, like you haven't been doing it for, I know you were right. You've been writing stories for, I know actually writing stories of, but the difference, the difference there is here I'm selecting stories. Here I'm selecting the stories to talk about. So if something looks, nah, I'm not going to talk about it. I'm not going into, uh, you know, I know actually a lot of the studies that I'm, I was covering are our nature, our jamma, our cell. Uh, they are those and then some from the fringes where, you know, I'm like, okay, well, your mice waits that you took, uh, don't match male rights, uh, mice, but they do match female mice. What you're saying they're all male. The study was on sperm. So wait a second. So like, but, but because I'm not selecting the stories that they're being, uh, you know, tossed at you to write about. Yeah. Yeah. Some of them I'm like, wow, this is an amazing thing that I would have missed because this is not a subject I'm normally sort of scanning for. And so there was a lot of really amazing stories that I got to cover. And there was also a lot of research that, you know, once I delved into what, what was in the paper, you know, the details of the paper, I'm like, I don't understand how this was published. I don't understand how this is published in a prominent impact, uh, journal because well, I think even looks bad. Yeah. And then it's like I was saying with the media, even beyond that, the fact that somebody said, Hey, this is a study that we want to cover and this is a press release and or there are the press release sites that, you know, the, it's all stuff. So typically the ones I get all over. Yeah. Typically the ones I got and it was a good organization I was working for. They're not paid to do the publication. So there isn't a, hey, we would like you to cover our story. Here's a payment for it. Right. They typically also would, if a university has done a press release on a paper, then they aren't covering it. Typically they're not covering something that the university has already put out their breakdown of what the story is. Typically they're sometimes there is other coverage that is out there and other online journalistic sources. Very often I find that I tend to read those after I've done my study, my, my version of it so that I can see if I've missed something, if somebody else has already published on it days before. What is very interesting is how often my version of the, of the story of the write up is completely different than, than what I put the other coverages is like, wow, they actually read the same study I did maybe and got it wrong. Also what I've found was funny. Or they didn't read the study and they just went off the press release. Or it was also funny as then I occasionally go back to try to look up one of my studies like, oh, what was this thing? Because I'm looking up for twist. So I go to Google my, my story to see if I can find it so I can bring it into the show. And then I find versions of my story written by other people published in other countries. Yeah. Typically India because it's an English. Don't you feel like I don't catch it if it's somewhere else, but a lot of, there's a lot of other journalists who don't you feel honored verbatim or yeah, it's a little bit like, oh, I'm getting stolen from you've been recognized. And then, and then also I noticed like, there's this very interesting like, I'll look at it. I'll put out, you know, some of the stories are, you know, fives and tens of thousands of views or whatever. And then there'll be one that's got like 250,000 views in the first week. And I'm like, Oh, wow, people were really interested in this k-bar. And then I find it's on the, you know, it's made the rounds of like, ancient alien conspiracy theory websites, because the whole, they're like, Oh, now I understand why people are in that, in that sphere, that media sphere of ancient alien nonsense, because they got way more hits than I got for the new gene editing technique that might actually cure several diseases is they took. So I mean, this goes, this goes to, I mean, if honestly, years ago, if I really, really wanted this show to be a success, we should have been more sensational. I mean, we do fun fringe stories every once in a while, because they're interesting and they are interesting questions. But we could have totally Muller and scullied it. Yeah. Yeah, but we never actually present it as like the end, like final word, right? It's like, well, this is interesting. And like, it's part of like, okay, so there are these people working on this. And that like, I think that's important. And it's all in the present. Harking stories and subjects all throughout the body of work that we put together. And the problem with us is that I am not the person who's ever gonna say, you know, this is how you, you know, cure worms. I don't know. This is how you lose weight. This is how you do it. I'm not that I'm not going to do that because right. Yeah, we started with the wrong ethic to make money. But I think we started with the right one to cover science. And I think that's also why it can be like, when I'm getting frustrated with source materials that look paid for, because, hey, we've done this show without selling out for a long time. And you already had a good revenue stream and then sold out. Like, I get not having a revenue stream and selling out. That's tempting. But having a big revenue stream and selling out. That's okay. So I'm going to say some words and I'm not going to name names, but there are scientists who have video program streams, whatever podcasts, whatever, who are very popular, lots of downloads. Like, and I think maybe they started out with the right intentions to science communicator or scientists who have decided to be science communicators. And I don't think they've ever actually gotten science communication. Training. I mean, you know, they don't, I watch them do it and the people, I'm not going to name names because that's not going to do it. But I get super frustrated because over and over again, I see people enter the science communication sphere. And right now, there's a huge push from the government, from university, to actually get scientists to be the communicators. And I honestly don't think all scientists should be the communicators because I don't know how to communicate. They're not good. Yeah, not everybody. Some great, whatever. But these particular individuals who have gotten really popular among certain audiences, they don't understand, like, audience, they don't understand who they're talking to. They don't understand what they're doing. And some of them actually have gotten to the point where they, they speculate and they simplify and they sensationalize. And they break things down to basic, like, how-to's and they get on and they have these long diatribes about things they really absolutely know nothing about. And they don't talk as if it's something that they are learning about and trying to figure out. They talk as if they know it. And I am over it. I'm so mad at these people and they get so many more viewers because they give the TV news, they give finality, they give what is like they give like a full rounded, this is the story and a story. That's it. You don't have to talk to anyone else. I give you the story. But if they're also like, and I don't know who you're talking about, but if they're like getting a ride along in a self-driving vehicle, for instance, and talking about the wonders and the greatness of it all, and then all of a sudden you realize like, oh yeah, this was a paid commercial that I just watched that has nothing to do with where the self-driving car is actually at. Yeah. And that's a lot of it. And there are these people doing podcasts and interviewing people and then turning it into like self-help and other stuff. And it's like, you're not a self-help guru. You're a whatever scientist and I'm not going to say. Oh yeah. The psychologists have been doing this for forever. So you can name all those names. Those people are all trash. The whole self-help psychology like, okay, I get it. You did a couple of papers on psychology as a grad student and now you're an influencer and mental health. No, that's not how your profession works. It's not how your field works. And actually, your field is greatly flawed to begin with. So the last thing they need is somebody else going out there and throwing out nonsense and claiming that it's backed up by science. You know who else I could go after? I could go after TED Talks. Good gosh, what a low standard that is. I actually like, you know, it's like one of those things where people are like, Kiki, when are you going to do a TED Talk? Why haven't you done a TED Talk yet? And it was, you know, it's probably one of the things that I should have done to like advance my career, create my brand and do all that stuff. But I couldn't do it because I don't actually like at first maybe they started with good intent. But I think now like there's pseudoscience and no, there's no way to tell the difference. There's no way to tell the difference with tens of millions of views are in that exact category of psychology and that turned into that turned into maybe a Nova special or something, one of these that was all that all the I think I talked about this on the show that the data from the study that they talked about in TED Talk was fake that came out in the like the reproducibility crisis where there's like the group of, I think it's like psychologists, psychology professionals who are like trying to reproduce all these studies and they're like, we can't. The foundational, not just studies. They're also trying to produce the foundational studies for their field and they cannot. Yeah. And it's because fraud has been part of psychology research, bias has been part of psychology research for such a long time because it's hard not to be a human biased about human behavior, I suppose. I want scientists to be, I want people to be excited about scientists. I want scientists. I mean, maybe not, I used to think that scientists should be rock stars, but I don't think they should anymore. I think scientists should just be respected that I think that there are jobs that people do that are worthwhile and some of them are entertainment. Some of them are curiosity and some of them are building rockets that go to the moon, like teaching our kids. We don't value that teachers don't get valued as much. There's so much. Librarians. We need to value librarians more. But anyway, instead, we like watching certainty from people who don't really have the credentials on YouTube videos. And I'm saying this, and I'm going to say it from a place of, okay, I have a PhD. I did wildlife biology conservation as an undergrad. I did physiology neuroscience as a PhD. I've published. I studied a lot of stuff. I don't know everything. I've never known, but it's been my curiosity and I've always tried to come at it from a place of learning myself and trying to help other people learn and not from the place of I know all this stuff. I've learned a lot over the years, but there's all I've learned is that I don't know anything. John Snow, whatever. And so part of this too is what you're identified as a solution is also the problem. One of the things, one of my biggest things I'm a fan of, or humans of history, I'm a fan of is John Dewey. No, it's not. He's a different Dewey. Dewey was involved in all kinds of cool things, but that's completely different Dewey. John Dewey was the education czar of the United States. Wrote a book in around 1905, 1911 somewhere in that range called On Science and Democracy. I think it's called something like this. But anyway, he describes knowledge as a living creature that needs replication, that needs practice, that needs participation from students. And he took us away from the rote where you study words on a board and got kids out into the field to do a nature walk to learn. Or if you're going to learn a recipe for bread, you go and make bread, you don't just memorize the ingredients, these sorts of things. Anyways, part of the problem with science appreciation when people get older is the fact that they were taught everything as certainty in fact. And when you reintroduce science later in life as a conversation is an ongoing living body of information that needs to be replicated and improved and adapt and evolve, they don't understand. It doesn't sound like science all of a sudden. It's like, oh, well, go figure it out first, get to the end and then tell me the answer. Because that's what science, how science is taught in school. So it is, it's a teacher problem. It's a scientist communicator problem. And, you know, that's why this show is great. But it's also a human problem. We always have the conversation afresh and anew. People like safety and uncertainty. Uncertainty is frightening. Fear leads to aggression. Fear leads to actions that are not open and willing to be curious and learn. Right. And so instead they pay to have their name on a paper that somebody pays to have published and then the publication doesn't retract because there's no money in it. I get it. It's a system of fear and cowardice and lack of ethics and standards. No, it's fear and loathing in Las Vegas. That's where we are. Oh, no, that's right. I was about to quote the movie with it. I'm quoting the wrong movie. What the heck is the movie I'm quoting? I don't know what it is. But I want to say everything is under control. And mind the bats. Mind the gap? Mind the bats. Yeah, you'll find out soon enough. Bats everywhere. I gotta go. I know. Well, it's Eric Nats says he can't stay awake anymore through the night and into the following week. But if not, I remember the sounds of it. You guys are prepared. My uncertainty meter is like broken now. Yeah. Thank you for being here. It was awesome to chat. I think I hope everyone has a great week. Zombie Tom, Tom Hanks, you brought up an issue that we should talk about maybe another time, which is how we deal with the, okay, well, stuff is broken, publishing. You can't believe everything you see, but then does it stoke more conspiracy theories and the belief that everything is fake news? And it does. But so let's think about that because I think that's important because that's not what we're aiming for, but it is part of the issue for sure. So I think that was a very important comment that you made in the chat there. And I guess everyone will leave you with that. Not everything is fake news. I just gotta add, though, I just gotta add to that because that is a great point. And the studies that were published showing that COVID could be cured by things other than the vaccine got published. And if you look at the list of who was on those publications, a lot of them were part of right wing think tanks or conservative doctors across the country who are part of a group that I can't remember the name of right now that sounds like the American physicians, but it's got a slightly different name. And they were also pro-smoking back in the 50s. There's an ultra conservative organization who's also pumping out papers that are fake science. And they know all the communication rules and how to hit your emotions and how to use marketing language and framing and all the things. And so it's hard. Our information future is... One of the authors of that paper also became the Surgeon General of Florida. So it's not just that we're stoking the conspiracy theories. It's that the conspiracy theories have infiltrated the asylum, which was where we lived in the asylum, where we believed in our ivory tower, that ethics were holding the tower up. And now we find that the lunatics are on the grass. Okay, I gotta go. Lunatics are on the grass. We all have to go. It's been a long show. Thank you everyone who stayed, who's here. And Justin was great to see you. I guess I'll see you in two weeks. Is that the week? Two weeks? Okay. I'll figure out who I'm going to be here with next week. I don't know. For about three or four weeks. And then it may be every week. Oh my god, really? Don't tease me. I gotta do some logistical sorting out of this. But the hope is that it would be, okay, never mind. Don't tease me. Don't tease me. Two weeks and then never again. No. Okay, then maybe at least every other week. Okay, I can work with that. Good night, everyone. Thank you so much. Stay healthy. Stay well. Stay curious. And stay lucky. We'll see you next week. Bye.