 10 year olds, everyone. You live with them and you live with them. This is This Week in Science. We are going to do our live broadcast of our weekly podcast right about now. Are we all ready? Is everything there in the chat room? Can you see us on your video screens? Are we 5x5? Do you hear us? I see notes from identity 4 that we're live. Kevin Unique? Hello, everyone. There you are. Live, live, live. Good. We're live. All that you see and hear tonight on this episode of This Week in Science may or may not make it to the final episode that is released as a podcast. Because I don't know what people are going to say. So you get to watch it all right now. Because we are starting this show in, oh wait. Do I have three things? I didn't write. Oh, no. I don't have three things. Blair, why didn't I write down three things? What is wrong with me? I don't know. I don't know. What are you girmumbling about? I need three things for my intro, honey tarantulas and a bit of light. How's that? I put something in our private chat. Oh, you did? Good. Good. Private chat. See, this is what happens. This and BeetleP. Thank you very much. Got it. All right. This is the part of the show that I should have done before the show. This is not going to be in the show. Oh, yes. ID 4 wants everyone to talk. Check. One, two. Check, check, check. Check, check, check. The arsonist had oddly shaped feet. Check, check, check. Justin, say some words. Blair is making me laugh too much to say anything. The human torch was denied a bank loan. And now, now I think it's time to start the show. Whoa. Okay. All right. All right. All right. Everybody's sounding good. Check, check. ID 4 is okay. We made it through that far. Yeah, hot rod. Check, check. Say something too, hot rod. We are beginning the show. I'm quiet again. Always quiet. Okay. Turning it up just a little bit. Starting the show in a three, a two. This is twist. This week in science episode number 821, recorded on Wednesday, April 21st, 2021, putting science in the light. Hey, everyone. This is Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we will fill your head with tarantulas, beetle pee, and a bit of light. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Nothing is in the way of the world doing all the right things to prevent climate emergency from taking over that looming, dooming, glooming over our planetary future, like a dark foreshadowing cloud of something dystopian, ready to burst with wondrous metaphors. The sort of mechanisms used in literature to alert readers of the dangers to come, that the story, in this case isn't fiction, is a little bit of a problem. Instead of literary props that hint at the action ahead, we have scientific papers that spell out the threats, the causes, the solutions, consequences, and outcomes in great detail. If you watch the news these days, you won't hear anything about it. That's because there's no story arc. There's no reveal. There's no ratings appeal. It's just spoiler alert after spoiler alert. Like, who done it? Where the real killer is revealed on the first page. A mystery twist movie where the big secret is revealed in the trailer and the title gives away the inevitable end. And so, with nothing left to the imagination, nothing left to interest or entertain, the public simply switches the channel, tunes out the emergency warnings. Or they might do that if the emergency warnings were ever aired in the first place, but they aren't. You won't see it covered anywhere. While we seem to be saving the end of the world for some sort of late century news cycle, we here will continue to bring you the boring news about the planet you were on, the universe you were in, and the uneventful discoveries about how everything works. Here on This Week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to learn everything. Our discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again to talk about discovery, curiosity. Findings. Lots of findings. Things of interest to our brains. And we do hope that you enjoy the hour plus that we have in store for you today. What did we bring to the show? Well, I have some stories about, what did I bring? I've got news stories about chimeras, honey, T-Rexes who are kind of slow. And we have an interview tonight with Greg Gabur. Yes. Looking forward to that. I'll be introducing him in a bit. Hello. Justin. Yeah. What did you bring to the show, Justin? I've got why humans aren't all bad, traveling tarantulas, and is shift work really bad for you? Spoiler, yes it is. Spoiler, we've talked about this before. Blair, what is in the animal corner? Oh, I have coffee, dogs, beetle pee, snake venom, bam. Bam. Well, we are going to get those stories out there for you all. But before we jump into the science, I want to remind you that if you have not yet subscribed to This Week in Science, you can find us at twist.org. You can also find us on YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, and every podcast platform that's out there. Look for This Week in Science. Twist. All right, everyone. Let's dive in to some fun. Chimeras. I would be missing a step if we didn't talk about monkey human chimeras today. I know that we talked about them a little bit over the weekend and our special crossover show with DTNS, which was loads of fun. Yeah, it was a lot. Yeah, and that podcast episode is going to be released to patrons only, so if you're not a patron, that's the place where you can listen to the podcast episode. However, chimeras, when you think of chimeras, maybe it takes you to mythology and the idea of these beasts that are half lion, half man, half bull, a variety of animals that are mixed up together. Is that a thing? A griffin? A griffin? Something along this line. Yes. Is it one of those type of creatures? Exactly. An amalgam of creatures that work together as a creature with the abilities of these various creatures that somehow makes them stronger. All right, so here is the bottom line for research, scientific research that is looking into putting human cells with the cells of other species. The idea is that we could one day be able to produce organs for human transplantation that would be acceptable to the human body, not rejected by the human body as transplants from other species are now. We have to use lots of anti-rejection drugs and that we could have a source for organs for people and we really need a source for organs for transplantation. That is a dire need for the health of humanity. So we're working on this. So far, human pig chimeras haven't worked out really well. About one in 100,000 pig cells is human when we try and put human cells into pigs. It doesn't work out very well. And so we've tried it now. A group in China went through a lot of review, a lot of ethical review, bioethicists taking a look at the study to see how they were going to produce it. In China, there's another researcher from the United States who was involved in this, Ispizua Belmonte. And he worked with this team in China to achieve this goal of a human monkey hybrid. Now, this is not a full-grown animal. This is a clump of cells. An elasticist that was allowed to exist for less than 20 days, not allowed to come to term. This is a ball of cells. There is nothing to this. It's not even an animal. But that's also so far, isn't it? So far. And at this point, they don't have a plan at this point to allow anything to move past the ball of cells stage. At this point, it is looking to see if they can do it and what happens. Pretty neat stuff, though. They can actually see this combination of human and monkey cells as the chimera, this embryonic ball of cells, grows. And they have a video, which is just amazing to be able to watch. I'm going to see if I can find it right now and bring it up for everyone to take a look at. But they've got a video. They've marked all of the human cells with a red florescing protein. And in that way, they were able to track the cells to be able to watch them as they integrated into the blastocyst to see how they integrated. In the process of the blastocyst growing, they discovered that the human cells didn't really like to go out with the monkey cells. And they were like, I'm going to be over here. You go do your own thing. And the human cells that did actually make it inside this embryo were, they kind of hung out with their own kind of cells. And so there are obviously some issues with integration that the researchers don't understand yet. And to that issue on top of it, there were a number of places within this human monkey embryo in which the human cells just didn't take at all. And so this is not exactly a successful experiment in terms of the end goal of creating a human monkey hybrid that can create organs. This was not successful, but it did give information and that aspect of it was successful. You know what this reminds me of is cat chimeras, which are completely different, of course. But you're telling me about how the human genes and the monkey genes kind of stayed apart from each other. But that's it. Not the genes, but the tissue. Or the little cells in the ball of cells. We're like, I mean, this is the human area and the monkey ones are going to be over here. Right. And so when cats, when there are two embryos that fuse, they end up with this very stark difference in the way that they look. And so it could be similar that as it's developing, these two genomes are like, I'm different. Keep me apart. I would take it away from the genome aspect of it, though. And the reason why is because the genome is more ingredients, sort of. And you get then the tissue that forms based on this. And what's interesting is that the tissues themselves have a level of communication to each other that genes don't talk like this. But tissues do. Tissues are in communication. Tissues are relying on their neighbor and the signaling from their neighbor and how that neighbor is signaling. So it's sort of interesting that even when you get these genes combobulated together where you're trying to create the hybrid activity, when it gets to the tissue level, they don't speak the same language. That to me is sort of fascinating. Yeah, and another aspect to this is that they looked at the transcription factors, the proteins that were being, the genes that were being transcribed and what was getting turned on in the process. And they found that in the human monkey hybrid cells in those areas, these balls of cells did not differentiate and didn't develop at the same rate as either a only human or only monkey blastocyst would be developing. It slowed down the development by putting them together. And so there is miscommunication. They found there were different pathways turned on. There were unexpected proteins and genes to be activated. So there's a lot to be learned here. And they're maybe looking at potentially which pathways do get turned on and how those could be important for the moving forward in this technology. And Blair, I see the mosaic cats, these chimeras. Are they from that mirror universe? Star Trek episode or that cat? But I am black on this side and white on this side. You're from the other universe. Well, anyway, there is a whole lot of work that still needs to be done for human monkey hybrids. This is not a portent of the ape man to come in the future. There are a lot of issues that still need to be worked on. And it does sound as though they are really doing their best from a scientific perspective to take ethical moral issues into consideration in the work that's being done. That said, it was done in China because no other countries would allow it to be done. But we also have to understand what the first and second choice options were. The first option was just harvest organs from poorer humans in third world countries. That was option number one. That's where we were headed. That was the first option. People were like, what if we clone ourselves and then harvest the organs? We're going to clone humans and then steal the organs. That's almost as bad as the first one. The third option was like, and a lot of hybrid that we can harvest the organs from. People were like, okay, that's not nearly as horrible as the first two options. Yeah, I think that's a really, this brings up a really good point, perhaps a future conversation for future crossover episodes. That Justin watches too much dystopian sci-fi. No, but just that if you're going to do the preliminary testing to see if this is possible and viable, that means at some point you want to grow a full chimera. So the ethics conversations have to start now because it's going to take a long time to figure out the kind of rules of engagement for this future realm of study. Yep. And if you think I'm talking about dystopian future, Google India, kidney black market. Just, yeah. I think I don't want that in my search history. It's already a thing that's been going on. It's not a distant future scary thing. It's a now yesterday and for decades actually thing. Okay, but so you're saying that and that makes me go, huh, humans are bad, okay. But Justin, can you tell me how we're not so bad? Well, they're not. Well, so the invasive species that is currently destroying the world's air, water, soil, disrupting phonophilia, selling each other's kidneys to each other, pretty much putting plastic into every earthly orifice isn't all bad or at least wasn't always all bad. Human recklessness and resource harvesting is relatively recent. We're kind of a new thing. According to new research published in the proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, PNAS, human societies for the last 12,000 years have been reshaping the ecology across most of the earth's land surfaces. We sort of tend to think of this as a new thing that we've gained control of everything on the planet. But according to them, actually indigenous people have spanned the earth and have been farming and hunting and managing the wildlife around them for more than 10,000 years. The difference seems to be a more modern approach is where you got the sort of resource, the sort of clear cutting of every resource imaginable. But yeah, they look back over 12,000 years. Three quarters of the terrestrial nature was inhabited, used and shaped by people, says one of the researchers. Areas untouched by people were almost as rare 12,000 years ago as they are today. So granted, there's a lot more of us. We're doing a lot more transformation. But there was an interesting statistic that was in here. This is from somebody from the... Peno... Indian nation notes that indigenous people currently exercise some level of management of about 5% of the world's lands, which is sort of a little off-putting if you understand how much it was just saying that the people had been managing the majority of the terrestrial areas on the planet. And now the indigenous people, those people who've been apparently managing that land for a while, are now only managing about 5% of the world's lands. But in that 5%, 80% of the world's biodiversity exists. So while indigenous people have been excluded from management access and habitation of protected lands in places such as the U.S. National Parks, the track record says maybe we should let them have a larger voice in how things are operating. But yeah, humans. Not always bad for the environment. We haven't always been, and maybe we can relearn some of the lessons that we've forgotten or that we pushed away because we were so, so bent on... And you know, here's the sort of interesting things like... Teaming land. If you combine it with the indigenous thing, then it makes sense. It becomes very nimby all of a sudden. If you are living in a beautiful forest, you're not, hey, you know how we can make money? Let's level our home. Let's knock it down. You know, I bet that... I bet if you're in a really nice big house, you don't go, you know what? I bet there's plenty of copper in these walls. With all the wiring and the lighting we got, we rip out all the copper. We could cash in on it. Nobody does that because they want to live in their home. And so I think that the point of that story also is that if you live where those resources are, they're not just resources to exploit, they're part of your home. They're part of the infrastructure of your home. And I think that's what happens when people have power over land in which they do not inhabit. They can see it separate from being home or habitat. Yeah, that it's in a combination of the two. 12,000 years of history, huh? We can get back there. We can do it. But Blair, maybe I'm forgetting things a bit. Is there maybe some coffee? Could help me remember? You want to talk about coffee? I love coffee. We should talk about coffee. We should talk about coffee right now, okay? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I have not had any. I can't speed up. Using coffee is really, it's impacted by climate change because coffee of those tropical plants, it's really temperature sensitive. So you can't get too hot or the coffee. You'll lose all the coffee. And then what will you do in the morning? Just cry. I was actually hurtened by this recent study where they actually, it was less of a study, more of a discovery. They discovered a type of coffee bean that was thought to be gone. And I didn't know this. There are over 100 known coffee species. I guess I just really hadn't looked into it. We get, the world gets all of our caffeine from just two. Arabica, which is the superior brew. That's usually what you're drinking. And Robusta, which is usually used for instant coffee. So that's why instant coffee is so gross. It's a different bean. This is what I've learned. And it's, Wait a sec. Wait a sec. It's an acquired taste. It's bad. Even these coffee researchers say it's bad. It's gross. So the issue here is that in the multi-billion dollar coffee industry, over 100 million farmers are earning a living, doing coffee. And so the problem is that Arabica is from the highlands of Ethiopia and South Sudan. It's a cool tropical plant. Its average annual temperatures are around 19 degrees Celsius. And it is really sensitive to temperature change. Any change past that 19, and it starts to not do so well. But Robusta actually is more robust, you might say, and can endure up to 23 degrees Celsius. So this other coffee, Stenofila, can tolerate conditions similar to Robusta, but it tastes good too. Here's the thing. It's more resilient and it has good taste. Now they thought it was gone in about 1954. It completely disappeared. Stenofila from studies, from records. And so it didn't get used because they thought it was gone forever. But they found it growing wild in Sierra Leone in 2018. And then they started testing its temperature tolerance and its flavor. They did blind taste tests. They found that this coffee was good. And they do think that it could become commercially available, but it would take some years because they found this vulnerable plant. It's listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. And so they would have to cultivate this, kind of tame it to be farmed a little bit, find the right place to grow it, create an industry for it. But they think in some short years, this thing could pop up in your coffee cup in the morning, and it might be a lot more resilient to climate change. Boy, they should have kept it a secret. Now you know what's going to happen. These sort of baristas, coffee snobs are like, I got to get that, help my hands on that bean. I got to just try a cup. And they all try a cup and then it's all gone. Nobody can have any. Yeah, this is the beauty. That actually puts money into the farming of it and creates more culture which actually makes it more available and the population more robust as well. Yeah, I love the idea because we've been talking so many times on the show about the potential plight of coffee and chocolate. Two very important compounds that we really enjoy in our culture. And if through climate change, it gets harder to be able to grow those beans in the places where they're known to be grown, you need a more robust plant. So why is this plant vulnerable if it is robust? So what happened to it? So it's more robust to climate change. That does not mean that it's more robust to invasive species that are poaching all these other kind of, you know, habitat destruction that Justin was just talking about. Got it. So yeah, so it's still a rainforest species and it's still, therefore, in a lot of trouble. So we got to save it and cultivate it. Save the coffee. Save all the coffee. We made it. All right. I think we've got some more stories, but let's jump into our interview. Are we going to dive us forward a little bit in time? To now. To now, everyone. You're watching This Week in Science. And if you like the show, please tell a friend. We'd love it if you helped spread the word. I would love to introduce our guest for the evening. Dr. Greg Burr is a professor in the Department of Physics and Optical Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he studies classical... Charlotte. Charlotte. Sorry. I think I just typed, typed, typed, typed. The University of North Carolina, Charlotte, where he studies classical optics and the wave nature of light. He's also the author of Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics, which I fully approve of. Welcome to the show, Dr. Gerber. Oh, thank you. Great to be here. I've just been enjoying listening to your early discussion. Yeah. We enjoy talking about all the things. And your visit to the show tonight came about because of something we were talking about on the show last week related to laser beams and scattering light and the possibility of light making its way through objects, through opaque surfaces, which is a fascinating idea. And someone shared a post of that with you and you're like, wait, what? You could talk to me. And so we're talking to you now. I'd love to get your comments on this story. But I'm also so excited to get to talk with you on the show because you were on my old show, Dr. Kiki's Science Hour years ago when I was not on my show because I was in maternity leave. Yep. Oh, wow. Yep. I remember that. I didn't know if you'd remember that. Yeah. Yeah. So you had a wonderful conversation with Brian Malo. And I wasn't there and I was sad. And now I get to talk with you. So I'm very excited. And we all get to talk with you. So it's a gift to everyone. Yay. So welcome. And just to start off, we're not going to dive right into that story because I want to bring people into who you are and what you do and how we can, how you can help us understand what we were talking about last week. How did you get interested in optical physics in light? Like why the waviness of light particles as opposed to the particle aspect of light particles? Well, part of it is my history as a confused graduate student. I originally went to graduate school to do high energy physics because I thought I wanted to study the secrets, the fundamental secrets of the universe. I still do technically, but there's plenty more to study. And so I was doing a lot of work and experimental high energy physics, but started to feel like it wasn't for me. I wrote a blog post about this years ago. There were like a handful of reasons. It wasn't like there was one particular reason. It's a great field. But there was just like a bunch of little stuff that made me think maybe I don't want to do this with my whole life. And a friend of mine was working for Professor Emma Wolf, who was one of the big names in optical science and theoretical optical science. And my friends said, hey, why don't you go talk to him? And so I talked to Professor Wolf and he dumped this pile of papers on my lap that he had written over the past three or four years. And I really fell in love with the elegance of the wave nature of light. The mathematics of the wave nature. If you look at pictures of waves, everything looks really beautiful and sort of elegant and smooth. And that's really how the mathematics feels too. It really makes sense when you look at all the pieces, they fit together perfectly. The quantum nature of light, the idea of light is this quantum particle. We're still actually trying to figure that out. I don't think anybody really completely understands how to, we can predict experiments great, we can do experiments great, but trying to understand what it all means is still kind of a big question mark. So I love the elegant mathematics, which is what drove me in. And I'm still trying to personally figure out all that quantum stuff. This could be some deep, deep quantum soul searching on the personal side. So what is it about optical physics that you work in that you find really interesting? What just drives you? What do you want to figure out? Well, a lot of what I like to do now is, the way I describe optics these days is, if you look at the history of optics over the past literally thousand years, it was all about understanding what light can do. Like, okay, light can go through this small hole, it can't do that. And just sort of setting down the rules. Over the past kind of 20 years or so, the story has changed and people have realized that a lot of these rules we have taken for granted aren't really rigorous rules and they can be bent. And so the story has become more, instead of what can light do, the story has become how can we make light do whatever we want it to do? Yeah, what can't light do? Yeah, so that's a lot of what appeals to me is seeing all these different ways we can break the rules. I mentioned like imaging. The wave nature of light means that when an object is too small, you can't really see it anymore or get a picture of it with ordinary light. But people have figured out that by doing a variety of different tricks, you can see things smaller than the conventional wisdom would tell you you could get away with. And it's really fun to play with. It's both the fundamental part and the practical part because you're trying to get around seemingly fundamental rules, but then you can actually do something with it in the end. If that makes some sense. Yeah, so when I think of imaging, you know, it's a lot of light bouncing off of stuff and then we are really taking, we are recording or viewing that reflected light, right? And so with X-rays, it's a bit different. That's just more energetic light when you start thinking about it. But how do you break down like the various wavelengths and what they can do and how do you start looking at that? Well, the different wavelengths, it's really in the end, it all comes down to how they interact with matter. That's what makes the difference. So yeah, X-rays are really high energy, high energy photons, we would say, light particles, and they just barrel through stuff. Some of them get absorbed. That's what allows us to take X-ray photos. And it makes the math really simple because you just shine X-rays in one side and on the other side, you just measure how many got through and you know they all came through in a straight line. You can figure out, you can deduce kind of roughly what they went through. At other wavelengths, different things happen. If you're looking at infrared light, that tends to be connected to, that tends to excite thermal vibrations in molecules and atoms. So that's what makes things heat up. And ultraviolet light tends to kick electrons off of items, which is part of why it causes cancer, and does a lot of chemical reactions. So breaking it down, the behavior of the light really comes from our matter-based perspective that we're always looking at how these different wavelengths interact with matter. And that gets us to an area that you're interested in, which is the inverse problem. And that is looking, can you explain the inverse problem? Because I know if I try to explain it, I'm going to completely hack it to bits. Sure. Yeah, I'm actually trying to write an explanation that makes sense myself these days. So I think I've been thinking about it. Well, one way to think about it is most problems in physics are sort of a cause, they follow sort of a cause and effect scenario. So you say, here's an object. I know what this object is. I hit it with a hammer. I want to predict what happens. When you use the laws of physics to figure out what the effect is, if I use a hammer as my cause to whack an object, I can use the laws of physics to figure out what the effect is on the object. The inverse problem is going the other way around, saying, suppose I measured what happened to this object that I smashed. Can I now go back and figure out either what the object was in the first place and deduce what the cause was, what I hit it with? I often describe it like a crime scene investigation, that at a crime scene you show up, you want to know who did it and you want to know what was done. You've got a certain amount of information. You're trying to backtrack and figure out who did it, what the cause was of the phenomenon. So an inverse problem is reversing the cause and effect rules that we usually use in physics. We go from an effect to a cause. Isn't this how we talk about the Big Bang? To some extent, yeah. In a sense, that's very much a sort of inverse problem, that we've got the existing universe at as it is. We kind of know the laws of physics, so we're kind of backtracking and trying to figure out where it all came from. And we talked about X-ray imaging. That's another example of an inverse problem or CAT scans you can get. You take a lot of measurements. You don't know what the object is you're imaging. You measure what happens to the X-rays and then from knowledge of what happened to the X-rays you try and figure out what the object is. And so when we're coming from a matter-based perspective, is there anything that we are aware of that might be there but we're not perceiving it because we don't know how to measure to get the cause? Well, to some extent... Like invisible objects that are there. Well, I'm not... That happens to be an area that I study is sort of invisibility theory. I don't know that there's anything there we're not seeing, but this is actually a problem for an inverse problem. This is why there's a whole mathematical field called inverse problems because pretty much anytime you're using your eyes you're also doing an inverse problem. You look at something, your eyes detect the light, you deduce what that object is you're looking at. But those are really simple problems that you don't have to worry too much about hidden things. Though there are tons of optical illusions that show that there are a lot of problems in the way our eyes detect things. But you start doing like computed tomography where you take a bunch of x-ray images of a person from different angles. You take all that data and you mix it up in a computer and get out an image. And now you run into the question, okay, I did all this math, but how do I know that I'm actually seeing everything that's there? And this ends up being a... That's not talked about a whole lot, but there's this intimate connection between invisibility and inverse problems because in the context of a particular problem, if an invisible object exists, if invisible objects in principle exist, then you can't solve the inverse problem because whatever you measure, there's always the possibility that you're missing something. And I use the crime scene investigation argument for that too because there is the risk when you're studying a crime scene that there just isn't enough information present at the crime scene to solve the problem. And that's also where invisibility and inverse problems come together is you really worry about when you're studying a new type of inverse problem, whether there's enough information there to figure out what you're trying to look at. And so is that just a matter of us needing to catch up with the unknowns that might still be there? I'm picturing this crime scene happening a really long time ago where this crushed body is found at the bottom of a cliff base, but they haven't figured out gravity yet so they're like, something big must have stayed. That's the only solution because they're very squished. Right there. Yeah. Well, one thing to use the technical term, all the technical terms in physics are often very boring. They use what's called prior knowledge because sometimes you don't have enough information on the scene to figure out what happened, but there's extra information you could bring into the picture that helps. So in your case, you find this guy lying crushed on the ground. You say, well, I can't tell if he fell off from a big height or he got stepped on, and then you look over there and there's a big cliff. You go, okay, now I can use that information. All right, that helps me. Context, yes. So that's a big trick in a lot of these sort of imaging problems is taking advantage of information you already have. Like in medical imaging, we know that the patients that were imaging is roughly human-sized. So even the size of the person is an important piece of information. We know we're not imaging somebody the size of a house. So when you get that data, you have some context. If you get a solution that says, this person is the size of an elephant, you know that's not the right solution. Right, it's good to have those limitations on you that set the boundaries that can contain the information that you'll find that will be relevant to what you're looking for. So from the invisibility standpoint, how close are we to invisibility cloaks? And I mean, is Harry Potter around the corner or is this like going to be like, you know, super secret CIA tech? This is one of those dangerous questions to answer because I'm on camera being recorded about it. I know. So it's fair. I could give my conservative estimate is any time from tomorrow to 100 years from now to never. That's a super meaningful answer. Thanks. To give a little context. So not in the past. No, definitely not in the past. And there is it down quite a bit. There's a lot of past. That's billions of years we've rolled out right there. To give a little context. So in 2006, the first papers came out about the theoretical possibility of invisibility cloaks. And I had done my PhD work on some invisibility stuff. So national newspapers contacted me and said, what do you think about this? And they naturally asked me, when do you think something will happen? And I was like, well, you know, you say five years and nobody's going to remember what you say in five years. Well, it turned out it was more like four months that they only made they made a flat invisibility cloak. It was just a small thing. They were sending waves through this small slab. And it was designed for microwaves and it was not perfect. But they surprised me by already knowing how to demonstrate the principles. But to give a better answer to your question, it's kind of hard to, it still is kind of hard to say. There are a lot of really amazing advances that keep happening. So one big problem with invisibility cloaks is that so the idea of an invisibility cloak is the light comes in, it goes around some hidden region and goes on the way it was. But the catch is, is that the amount of time it takes for the light to take that detour has to be the same amount of time it takes for light to go on the outside of the cloak. Otherwise you could detect that time difference and you could see that something was there. Well that means, but that means that the light going through that cloak is probably going to have to go faster than the vacuum speed of light. And we know that it can't do that. Or well it starts to get technical but it can kind of do that for like one frequency of light or one wavelength or a very small range of wavelengths. But so you can make, you can make an invisibility cloak that would work for a really particular shade of red. Which may be useful. But so that's been a limitation, but last year somebody else, I was talking to another podcast person about invisibility stuff and they're like, oh did you see this paper? And I was like, what paper? And some researchers kind of found a clever way to partially get around that limitation of this will only work for one color. So the biggest problem is still materials. In order to make an invisibility cloak that guides light that way, you have to be able to control the structure of matter in three-dimensional space. You have to make a three-dimensional object and kind of be able to control the structure of the matter almost on the atomic level. And we... This doesn't sound like something that you'll be able to just throw over your head and walk around with. But this also sounds like a hard way to do it. Why isn't it just, you know, cameras on one side, wear a screen on the other? Why isn't that just like the shortcut version? That's a very astute question because that has been done. And in 2003, there was a Japanese research group that they did. They made a retroreflective coat and they had a projector on the front and a camera in the back. So the person looks completely see-through. And it's a really eerie image of them just sort of standing there with their face not visible sort of waving around like a ghost. What I thought was really cool... But they're not really invisible because you can still tell that they're there. But the really cool thing about this is what you can do with it. And that is, in their case, they're trying to design a transparent cockpit for an airplane or for the interior of a car. So that you're in your car... Yeah, you could look... You could see if you're about to hit that car right to your left because you can literally see it. Or if you're flying an airplane, you'll know if there's a plane right below you because you just look down at your feet and you can see it. So that's one of the things that fascinates me about invisibility research is it's not clear if we'll ever make a really practical cloak where somebody can walk around and they'll never be seen. Yep, exactly. But there is the possibility that this sort of technology of making things at least virtually see-through will have a lot of advantages. I guess if you try... I can imagine the advantages for entertainment. I can imagine advantages. I'm sure there are political or... Mostly I'm going in the media direction, but maybe that's because I spend a lot of time in the media. But from the other perspective of how things like this work, I mean, you have light not really going through things, but this is what that paper was about last week creating... Wait a second, not really going through things? Wait, I thought it was going through things. You're ruining it. Oh, no, I'm sorry. It's just difficult. Yeah, so last week, the story was about a class of materials, class of light called Scattering Invariant Light that the researchers showed they could get to pass through a zinc oxide coating, a zinc oxide quote-unquote object. What do you think about this work? Oh, it's actually really cool. And part of the reason that I was like complaining on Twitter like you should have me on, you should have me on is because I'm familiar with the earlier work of these researchers. They've been doing similar work since like about 2007. And the idea is that, yeah, you've got some sort of material. It's strongly scattering but not absorbing. So the light doesn't get sucked up by the material. It just bounces around in it like a ball and a pinball machine. And so any light that comes out the other side is basically randomized by the time it comes out. This is the difference between like a transparent object and a translucent object. If you have a translucent piece of glass, the light's definitely coming through but you have no idea what's on the other side of it. Yeah, you don't get any image through. But these researchers have been developing this idea that if you pre-structure the light in just the right way, you can start transmitting images through it. Yeah, for a general take, it's just a really cool approach. And it again fits that idea I was saying before of optics is nowadays about doing things we didn't think were possible before. Like if you go back 20 or 30 years, nobody would have said, hey, we can get light through this sort of opaque scattering material. And these folks have shown that by this new technique that, yeah, they can probably even send images through. How does this happen? I mean, so scattering as a random chaotic process versus scattering as they're calling it invariant. So obviously there's going to be predictability about how the light is going to move through the surface. Are they predicting this at atomic scale? No, from what I understand looking at the paper, they really took a particular material. They basically just measured, they sent a bunch of light beams through it to get some idea of how light transfers through the material. They don't care about the structure of the material. They only care about how light gets through it. So you send a beam in the upper left corner and you see some of it comes out in the lower right and then you send it in the upper right and it comes out the lower left, something like that. And you put together this table, basically like a list of saying if I put light in here, it comes out here. And along the way they figured out that they could make the so-called invariant modes. And the idea of an invariant mode is they were able to mathematically calculate that if you send a beam of light into the material with just the right patterning, it will go through the material as if it had just gone through air. That is wacky. So basically they model the beam specific to the composition of the material while looking at the backside to sort of get the image in focus. So they're cheating. If they move this like an inch over in the same material, it might not work if the composition is a little different. Yeah, so yeah, I think though if it's the same type of material, I think things will work out on average. But yeah, if you used like a different material or they were using some sort of material deposited on a piece of glass, I think. If you deposited it in a different way so that the structure was different, then you'd have to restart. But it's really... So we're not quite at the... because I've invested so much money in X-ray glasses over the years. The back of the comic book. I was hoping every year there'd be like a new edition because no one's didn't seem to really do the trick. But we're still not there yet. Yeah, this is... well it's kind of like invisibility, I keep telling people. I'm like, it's really, really cool and it helps us understand a lot about light but we're not at a point where you have to... we're nowhere near a point where you have to worry about your personal privacy. Right, you don't have to worry about the invisible person sneaking into your house. And we don't yet have to worry about the laser beam imaging system that's going to see through the walls of our house. No. Cover your webcams. Still cover your webcams. I think that's the... Other than that. Exactly. So at the nano scale, like when light is interacting with... with bits of atoms, right? When light is interacting at this nano scale, can you predict what's going to happen? Yes. Well, yeah, if you have a material, that's sort of the... what we would call the forward problem or the cause-effect problem in physics. If you know the structure of the material, you can do the math. We understand pretty well how the interaction of light with matter. Though there is a catch, because when you get beyond the light interacting with a small... Well, how do I put this? It's very easy to do the study how light scatters off of a really small object, and it's really easy to figure out how light scatters off of a really big object. When it's an object that's somewhere in between, then things get really tricky. And then we know in principle how to solve that problem, but in practice we don't have a lot of good tools to do it. And this also goes back to kind of the computed tomography, the x-ray tomography stuff. We know how to... We know how to use visible light with... we know how to use x-rays to go through an object. How x-rays travel through an object. So we can work with that. If you try and image the human body, the interior of the human body with visible light, now there's so much more scattering and the problem is so much more complicated. We still don't really have a good handle on that. And as you've probably noticed, we are not transparent, so the problem is quite difficult. Yeah, and even with cells, just cellular imaging, not even a living person, a body, a whole body, you have to usually kill the cell in the process of imaging it. The process of imaging itself destroys it in the x-ray. So there's this... Yeah. Getting inside of biological structures is hard. By coincidence, my former PhD advisor, Emil Wolf, he invented this technique called diffraction tomography, which is sort of the... It's like computed tomography with x-rays, but it works with visible light and the light is scattering. But it only works when you have really, really small objects. But it so turns out that for people who are interested in imaging cells and getting three-dimensional structural images of cells, it's a great technique. So even recently there have been a few papers that have come out where people said, we need to take a living cell and we can actually get some three-dimensional structural information of this cell while it's just sitting there doing its thing. Amazing. Yeah, we need movies. I want movies that are not visualizations or I want the real movie of the act in walking down the myosin. Right. We want those, the real thing. But yeah. In our chat room, somebody wants to know, interesting, all this is very interesting, but how many cats does Greg have? Technically, I have five of my own and my roommate has one, so there are six cats floating around at home. And are they actually floating? Have you managed... They're part of some sort of experiment you've been working on. No, I figured out that over the past 300 years there's been enough research on cats falling all over the place. No, they're just pretty much sitting... Their cats are mostly just laying around, except when I'm trying to do an important Zoom call and then they're... Pay attention to me. Yeah, then they're sticking their tails or whatever in my face. But in your book, Falling V-Lines and Fundamental Physics, you took inspiration from your cats. How did that... Were you just watching your cats and you're like, how do they always land on their feet? And now I am writing a physics book. Well, the original thing that got me started on the book was my blogging because I love to read and write about the history of science and being a really super big nerd, I tend to get bored and late at night I'll just go browse old scientific journals. So I'll say, all right, let me start in the year 1850. I'll pick a journal and just go look through and see what interesting scientific papers have been written. And honestly, I worry that even my scientific colleagues find me boring at times because before the pandemic I was going to meetings like, let me tell you this little cool bit of trivia and they're like, yeah, it's a bedtime, I think. But so I found this paper from 1894 which was the first high speed photography of a cat flipping and landing on its feet. Oh, fantastic. And it turned out it caused quite a ruckus, caused quite chaos in the scientific community for a while. So the first thing I did is I wrote a blog post on that original paper. I'm like, oh, this is cool. History of science, physics and cats, three things that I love. And then I got curious. So I was like, is that the whole story? And so I kept doing literature searches and I just kept finding more and more papers of people studying how cats land on their feet in different fields of different scientific fields going from 300 years ago up to the present day. People sort of scientists constantly wondering how cats do it. And at that point I was originally talking with my publisher about writing a book on the history of invisibility physics. And I contacted him and said, yeah, I think I'm going to write a cat book first. And they were just sort of like, okay, whatever. Oh, yes. Here's the... Because the cats are amazing. Yep. There's a... The quote in the original 1894 translated paper from Nature says that the expression on the cat's face in the photographs indicates a definite lack of interest in the science of it. We're phrasing a little bit. It's so interesting too, because so many animals I can tell you from personal experience do not land on their feet. Right, right. Yeah, if you... You can look up some very sad images of people that people did back in the day of dropping dogs that are trying to land on their feet and the dog is like paddling in the air, desperately trying to turn over. And it's always done with cushioning. And nowadays I tell people there are enough videos online. Please don't drop your animals. So just go look it up. You don't need to do these experiments anymore. That's okay. We've done them. And now that I've written this book, it's kind of amazing that I see this motion in other animals. Just last week, somebody on Twitter shared an image of a mongoose fighting a cobra. And the cobra strikes at the mongoose and the mongoose flips to its side. Its tail starts kind of doing a propeller. And I see it twist its body and I look at that and I go, it's doing exactly the same motion that a cat would do. And so different animals have evolved the same sort of writing technique, but for different purposes, for cats, it's because they think they're cleverer than they are and they fall off a stuff a lot. For a mongoose, it's an ability to maneuver when it's hunting its prey. This is rascal, by the way. A new cat makes its way through. They shall all make their way through a procession of cats during the podcast. I love it. I really suspect they know that they're on camera and they just want to make sure that everybody else knows that they're there. Well, either they know they're on camera or they know you're talking to no one and they're like, we need to check in on him. Yep, that too. It's like, I'm right here. Talk to me. So what interesting findings did you have while you were researching your book? Quite a lot of surprises. One of which is that the earliest physics paper I found where somebody tried to explain how a cat lands on its feet is from the year 1700. So Isaac Newton was still alive when the first physicists tried to explain how this worked. They were wrong, but it was amazing to just find this. The other thing that I love is that 1894 paper, so Etienne Jules-Marie, the photographer, he was a physiologist. He really just was dropping every animal. He was studying the motion of everything. And one of his colleagues said, why don't you drop a cat? So he dropped a cat. He took the photos. I don't think he expected much to come of it, but he took his photos to the French Academy of Sciences and the French Academy had a huge argument over it as they said, from what we understand of physics, what you've shown us is impossible. Oh, wow. And journalists had a field day. I had a friend translate for the book, a French journalist who was just mocking the scientists. This fellow was just clearly having a great time going, OK, here are the greatest minds in the world, and they're having this practical, almost a bare-knuckle boxing match over how a cat lands on its feet. And so that was just a delight to find that. It's an interesting story of how science works, because people had only in the mid-1800s, people really understood that rotational motion has this sort of conservation law, that if something twists this way, something else has got to twist the other way to make up for it. It's what we call conservation of angular momentum. But in those early days, people hadn't thought about it too much, so they thought, well, if something's falling, if something's in free fall, it can't just turn over, because it would just be spontaneously rotating would violate conservation of angular momentum. But Mary's photographs showed exactly that. They showed a cat being dropped, and then the cat's like, oh, I'm in free fall, and it flips over. And so the French Academy was having this big argument about how this happened. To their credit, by the time they met again like a week later, they'd all said, OK, I think we figured it out. We're good. But it was a little embarrassing. It was a perfect example of the old adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. They thought they understood this problem, they hadn't really thought about it that much, and they were totally baffled when they were faced with the real world. The real world. It doesn't fit what my mind thinks. There was another version of this that happened with horses running, where all the artist depictions, if you look at the old paintings, there is a point when horses have all of their feet off of the ground when they're running really fast, and it's when they're outstretched. You'll see this in all sorts of gigantic, huge works of art. Type that take up the side of a house, kind of like big paintings showing horses doing this. And then there was this bet that took place where they had to do, what was it? It was either Stanford or somebody made this bet. Leland Stanford. That's right. That's right. I guess he won the bet. It was like a dollar bet or something, but they had a high-speed photographer go and take pictures of this horse running by, and it turns out there is a point when all of the horses hooves are off the ground. But it's all tucked up underneath. Yeah, it was sort of the opposite of what they had thought. Not to sound too smug, but I actually talk about that in my book as well. Oh, nice. Because that whole idea of high-speed photography was such a game-changer for science and naturalism. There were all these things that people took for granted, and then they were shown how it really was. And the artists were actually kind of offended because they had argued for years about the proper way to show a horse galloping. It just would not look too... I know, just imagining this grand painting with a horse tucked up underneath itself. It's not as expansive, yes. And now as I'm recalling, I think it was Mulridge who did the photography for this. But Leland's bet was that, yes, that there was a point when all the hooves were off the ground because he had an art collection with horses doing this Superman move. And it turned out that somebody else argued that never happens. And it turned out he was right. It was just not how he thought he was right. I mean, it happens when they jump, but... Right. But in a run. In a run. Yeah. High-speed photography is so... Yeah, I was just thinking about how many studies I have brought to this show that are dependent on high-speed photography. And it's, you know, how do butterflies move? How do dragonflies stop from falling? That was a really good one. How do spiders jump? It's all based on this high-speed photography. So then if we get even faster, though, and we're trying to figure out how light is operating, isn't there a problem at some point because doesn't light kind of just ignore time at some point pretty much and just go, ah, you know, that's your photography. You can't like chop up. Can it keep up with it? Yeah. At some point. In fact, I can say that there have been... There has been research done, experimental... Experiments have been done where people have been able to photograph the motion of light. And they use what they call... They're what called a streak camera. And the idea... I don't know how I can explain this because it sounded better when I wrote it in a page. But they actually have these images of... So they actually had a beam of light. They flashed like a light bulb. And their camera was fast enough that you can see the reflection of the light as it travels over a surface. So you're actually seeing the motion of light. And it's a bit cheating because in order to get a full image, they have to do like... Basically a streak camera can only take a picture of a line of pixels. Because what it does is it separates out the image by... It sort of keeps track of the time in the vertical direction and takes the picture in the horizontal. And so in order to get like a two-dimensional movie of light moving, they had to do the same experiment over and over again and sort of... You're talking about the inkjet printer, right? Yeah, practically like that. The perforated sides. So it's a really cool... And I don't think anybody knows what to do with it. It was sort of a proof of principle like, hey, we can actually make a camera that goes fast enough to see light as it travels. So again, one of those things that nobody would have thought would have been something you could actually do and somebody managed to push the technology to get there. Now that we have the technology to get there, where can that technology take us? Because that's always like in science and technology, that seems to be... It always... These ideas build on each other. Yeah. Well, yeah, I'm not sure. It seems like if you have a camera that can go that fast, I imagine the next natural thing would be to see whether you could design it to measure things that are... Not light itself anymore, but try to measure reactions like, I don't know, atoms emitting light or absorbing light. Try to get images of these sort of quantum level effects that are usually too fast to keep track of. This is just really off the top of my head because when I first saw that camera fast enough to watch light move, I was like, well, that's really cool, but I have no idea what you're going to do with that. Sometimes proof of concept is just like... It's a gift in itself. Yeah. Science for science's sake. Yeah. And as I've learned, whenever you see something like that and you say I have no idea what you're going to do with that, somebody's going to eventually find something to do with it. So I'm not wise enough to predict it all. What do you want to do with the invisibility stuff that you're working on? My own invisibility stuff is partly to... partly I'm trying to really understand the physical limits right now is to say... to see whether we can understand how to make a perfect cloak that works for all colors of light. So part of my research is really along those lines of thinking how we can improve the existing theoretical models to make something that works better. Also, another aspect of invisibility that really intrigues me is the idea of using it for protection instead of just hiding. Because the... So this idea of guiding waves around an object, that should work for any type of wave. It's not restricted to light. So people have actually proposed seismic invisibility cloaks. So I can stick something in the ground around a building, say, so that if there's an earthquake it can guide some of the energy around the building and might make the difference between... it might make the difference between the building surviving or not. And in that case, it doesn't have to be a perfect cloak. It just has to do enough to improve the resistance of the building. And there have been some seismic tests of this done. In 2014 some folks took a pile dry... they went out to like a quarry, they dug a bunch of holes in the ground to mimic the structure of an invisibility cloak. They used a pile driver on one end and hammered it down to create shallow seismic waves and then measured what vibrations appeared on the other side. We're able to say, yeah, by putting this pattern of stuff in the ground we're able to partially block these minor seismic waves. And so partly my work is still very fundamental but I always also have an eye towards it would be really cool to see some of these invisibility and cloaking concepts go towards practical protection applications like that. Yeah, that's pretty impressive. I was also thinking you could make pretty... maybe pretty cool solar panels or where you could just, you know, just move all... you could do a whole surface or a wall with this and then instead of having all the solar panel on the... you just move it all over to one solar panel that can handle a high intensity beam that's all of the other light of say one wall on one side of a building down into a small space and just have that be the little collection device there. There's not sorts of things you could do if you could control that. Yeah, and this is sort of broadly speaking this is a lot of what people are doing with this idea. The whole idea of invisibility is connected to what people call metamaterials these days. The idea that you take you... if you can control the structure of a material on a scale on the order of tens of atoms or hundreds of atoms, then you can create optical properties that you don't find in materials in nature which we call metamaterials and with metamaterials people are doing all sorts of things like, hey we can make solar panels that collect more light than you would think they should be able to or make invisibility cloaks or make a lens like a camera lens that's flat you know most of our cameras we have multiple lenses and you get this you have a really nice camera you have a huge lens and so part of the idea is well we can smash these lenses down and make a lens that works just as well but it's just this thin sheet and people have been trying to do that for years I don't know if they've actually how well they've succeeded or not but that's sort of still ongoing stuff that people are interested in. Again, breaking the rules of the way people the way things are traditionally done and saying we can just try and do that in a completely different way and ignore all the rules and see what happens. Yeah, and I love the application of things where things are taken from one-air arena and then are allowed to take different forms in different arenas so if you're talking about a lens that you can use to collimate light then maybe there's another way that a lens like that could be used a thin lighter lens would be really useful on telescopes or on on telescopes especially if you're going to be launching them into space, right? And speaking of space then you got radiation diversion devices for habitats on Mars or on Earth maybe this is what we need to do is figure out how to do a protective wave guide to get some of that solar radiation to go around Earth and not just go right into it yeah Maybe. We're thinking on bigger scales I don't know. Never works to think about it because I mean in my career there have been all sorts of things that I've seen that at first glance I'm like this just looks ridiculous this will never work and then like a few years later somebody's like oh look here's a practical prototype so I've learned to keep my mouth shut at those moments and if it's not obviously wrong I'm not going to criticize it let people be creative people can take take things places yeah is there anything that we've missed talking about? What are you doing? Next are you writing another book? Are you what are you working on? I mean I know pandemic is kind of affected everybody's lives but yeah as it turns out I'm right I'm now writing that history of invisibility physics book that I alluded to earlier it's a invisibility also has a longer history than you'd think I can trace it back in science I can trace it back 100 years in science fiction I can go back you know 200 years so the book is a bit of okay here's what the science fiction author said here's what the scientists did and sort of the interplay between what's how science fiction authors thought it would work and how it ended up actually working or not working Very cool so we'll definitely have to get you back on to talk about your book when you're done with that so one quick question about invisibility can I ask one since you brought up the science fiction thing if I myself was invisible would I need to take my clothes off to be invisible yeah it depends on the type of invisibility you would use like if you were going to have an invisibility cloak that would guide light around you then you could keep your clothes on if you were doing some sort of chemical invisibility where you were altering your own body structure to make you invisible then you'd either have to be able to apply that same process to your clothes or lose them and you'd have to shave your head because that material is not going to be affected all the hair has to go all of it it's like the worst green screen ever and nobody ever explains what happens when you're invisible and you get dirt on you I mean you can stand in a room for 10 minutes you're covered in dust big dust bunny it's a funny shape of dust like a person that's weird that wasn't there before you almost asked my favorite question at the end there I think you kind of did but then maybe you backed off of it which is is there a question we didn't ask answer? um I wish I had a good answer in the form of question to that question well then there is it then we covered it all the answer is 9 to that question right and this took us back to the inverse problem in our questioning yeah we'll start with the do you have any good answers and then we'll formulate the questions to go with those later getting panic flashbacks to my phd defense now same no I'm good this has been fun oh it's been so great thank you for joining us where can people find you and uh yeah and your book that is out right now my book has falling felines and fundamental physics you can find it through any bookstore or online booksellers by from Yale University Press um megaboor is what it's under um otherwise I have my blog which is called skulls and the stars skullsandthestars.com I write about it's really sort of a hobby blog so I write about science history of science dungeons and dragons book reviews of horror fiction that I find entertaining whatever catches my mood um and I'm also on twitter is Dr. Skyscull there you'll find me often just making darky comments and ranting about things um and sounding viral comments yeah sounding borderline unstable though usually it's an act I I have to say I have to just admit to our listeners here that yours is one of my favorite twitter to read I yeah it is it is amazing it's very well curated of you know absurdity and uh candor and like age and quirk it's great I love it well thank you I I yeah I really just try and be honest and also try to be informative and not too grim I think that is uh that's a good balance and hard hard to take yeah yeah thank you so much I don't want to keep you up too late tonight it's been wonderful to speak with you your cats thank you it's been great talking to all of you live and hopefully we can do it again sometime I would love that thank you so much have a great night you too bye take care bye all right everybody that he said live because obviously he is he pre-recorded that on a VHS cassette a decade ago and and new could predict all of our responses all the questions and the answers he's that good a physicist yeah that's right he just laid it right out there hey everyone thank you so much for joining us for this weekend science that was a fantastic interview if you loved the interview you know we love to bring episodes and interviews and shows like this to you every single week so you can help us out by heading over to our patreon page go to twist.org click on that patreon link choose your level of support and help us keep doing this show week in week out your support really is what allows us to do this show ten dollars and more a month it's really not that much it's like less than a cup of coffee per week we're asking ten dollars and more or more per month and we will say thank you by name at the end of the show we really can't do this without you thank you so much for your support and now we're gonna come on back into the next segment of our show this is this week in science and it is now time for something we love to call Blair's Animal Corner Oh I got so excited dancing I didn't even open my stories No first I have a story kind of a callback from a story a couple weeks ago I have a new study this time from now I lost it already University of University of University of Pennsylvania yep there it is okay I found it it's because I kept clicking back to the story from several weeks ago from Italy there's like no but that's not it no that's not it it's a proof of concept study once again on the efficacy of dogs sniffing out COVID so this is looking at specifically trained detection of COVID-19 and this was with 96% accuracy that is better than some COVID tests we are currently using so the thing that's really interesting about this is that they pulled dogs that had no experience in scent training they got eight Labradors and one Belgian Malinois they had never done medical detection work before and first they trained them to recognize a distinctive scent a synthetic substance known as a universal detection compound they used a scent wheel so there were 12 ports they had different samples in each port and they rewarded the dog when they found the UDC so after that then they started training them to respond to urine samples from SARS-CoV-2 patients and discern the positive from the negative samples the negative samples had the exact same inactivation treatment beforehand so they made sure they controlled for anything possible going on with the way that the urine was being processed and after three weeks of training all nine dogs they were able to readily identify the COVID positive samples with 96% accuracy their sensitivity and their ability to avoid false negatives was a little bit tougher because of a couple things one is their testing was very strict so if a dog walked by a port containing a positive sample even once without responding they couldn't circle back to it, that was a miss and the other was that they were thrown off by a patient that tested negative but who had recently recovered from COVID which totally makes sense that they would carry compounds that maybe would end up being a red herring in that case there is they have shown that some people even though they've recovered symptom-wise do carry a low viral load in their blood for a long time that they actually it takes a long time to wane for some people so that's interesting chat room wants sample size I said eight Labrador retrievers and a Belgian Malinois so this is nine dogs and this is a proof of concept study but this is also coming out of the same dog training lab that has previously been used to identify things like ovarian cancer so this is again, this is something that is coming from a pretty a pretty fleshed out pretty robust precedent of dogs being able to sniff out medical issues and so this is something that is piggybacking on that and again, if dogs can do this this could really benefit a lot of the ways that we do COVID testing in the future so I'm on the record saying I don't believe any of this yeah I recall that, that's why I brought this yeah and it really makes perfect sense you know the dogs don't factory sense their ability to smell is like living in a world with all of the colors and the numbers and the letters and everything else and the connotations of and the mental connections between what you think about a color and what it feels like and all that all at once in their olfactory they've got such a high fidelity sense of smell that in nature it is utilized for sniffing out molecules drifting in the wind or latent ones that have been left somewhere on a plant or on the ground so they can track and repurposing that nature can be anything can be any molecule well but also just think about how how many animals depend on being able to tell who is sick how many animals are there in the animal kingdom that we see treat sick individuals differently for whatever reason, maybe they isolate them maybe they give them extra care it depends on the food, it depends on the animal and the social connections they have but this is a very common response not to mention, I do think that if we did some studies on humans in this, this would be a thing because have you ever been told that you have sick breath because this is something that I have experienced no, no, I have experienced some other people this is a thing, right is that you and you know this could be totally unrelated but still there's an opportunity for there to be chemical signaling happening at every level whether we realize it or not yeah, I also, but it was to your point, I was going to follow up with the canines also sniff out the sick because that's who they want to eat yes, also they're also sniffing out the sick bison because it's going to move a little slower than the rest they just need to separate it from the herd a bit and then they'll catch it well, not to mention, dog can tell if you're about to have a seizure or if your blood sugar drops these are very good at these medical things so it's anyway there's a whole lot of stuff here and basically you're going to see more and more of these stories propping up, we don't think this is our last coronavirus so this is a good thing to have in the pocket even if it doesn't get figured out by the time Covid's over which it never will I just want to make it clear, I'm now on the record as completely believing it you flipped that's great I appreciate that okay and next I would like to move on to beetle pee so this is from people pee to beetle pee yeah, so Justin help me say Copenhagen Copenhagen Copenhagen Copenhagen from University of Copenhagen sounds terrible going out of my mouth anyway this is looking at beetles and how to kill them currently on earth today one in every five animals on our planet is a beetle there are a lot of beetles on our planet about 25% of global food production is lost due to insects mainly beetles so if we could find a way to control beetle populations particularly around agriculture this could be beneficial the problem is how do we currently control insects with insecticides that paralyze an insect's nervous system the problem with that is it's not very species specific nervous systems are similar across insect species and if you use insecticides they tend to kill everything including bees butterflies you name it so it would be beneficial to come up with an insecticide that would just target the pests themselves without getting into the whole philosophical conversation about what really is a pest we are going to recognize we have the agriculture that we have and we need to protect it so knowing that researchers from University of Copenhagen Copenhagen is fine wonderful Copenhagen they have discovered which hormones regulate urine formation in the kidneys of beetles what does that mean so that means that they can cause beetles to create so much urine that they die of dehydration basically they pee themselves to death so the the inspiration for this study very interesting ancient Egyptians they knew that if they mixed teeny tiny pebbles into grain stores that the stones would scratch away the waxy outer layer of beetles on their exoskeletons which is there to reduce evaporation and so it would kill beetles due to fluid loss from evaporation because they damaged that waxy layer with the stones of course they would sometimes end up chomping down on some stones in their grain stores but it was worth it because it wasn't infested with beetles so knowing that they wanted to see if they could find a chemical more targeted way to use this kind of inspiration so they were able to design a molecule that resembles this hormone the big kind of question mark here is that in this research they had to inject the hormone into their bodies so that it would then regulate your information and so this study does demonstrate that the beetle will regulate their kidney function first of all they do it totally different from other insects and second of all that they can affect how that kidney function is working through this hormone injection to fatally disrupt the fluid balance in their bodies so now the next step is going to be to figure out how to get it into beetles through their exoskeletons by feeding it to them somehow they have to figure out the kind of the delivery method to prove kind of the secondary proof of concept to see if it could actually work as a pesticide but it appears to be very effective at mimicking that hormone and making them just pee forever until they die wow I think there are a lot more things to consider I mean okay it's great they've got this unique protein is it really unique are we sure if we get this chemical into the environment because that's probably how it would have to be released to be taken up by the beetles right could it have any other effects but it's a fascinating idea I mean it would be like giving somebody a whole bunch of coffee never letting them drink water nah essentially diuretic you're gonna do much yeah this is why I'm kind of of two minds here so one I totally agree with you because yes this thing mimics this hormone might it also mimic something else in another species we don't know might this hormone have something to do in another species we haven't found yet we don't know so I agree with you there except for the fact that our current pesticides we are just spraying out there neuro inhibitors just like let me just destroy the nervous system of all things with exoskeletons out here so I think in a vacuum yes we need to be more measured about this but recognizing where we live in the current world maybe it wouldn't be so bad yeah I mean unintended consequences if we can figure as much out as possible before putting anything in the environment that's always the better course of action although we've done so much wrong maybe we can start doing things better yeah right yeah and then speaking of doing things better I have one more quick story in the internet snake venom this is from Clemson University looking at snake diets and the type of venom that they have in their body and they found that the number of prey species a snake ate that did not drive venom complexity but the types of prey species and how different they were from each other evolutionarily did drive venom complexity so the snake 20 different mammal species not very complex but if it eats a centipede frog a bird and a mammal very complex venom so they have to have an arsenal that is more diverse to be able to eat all of these different things which help us create better anti-venoms one which you know we have a whole database of anti-venoms in the United States worldwide it's pretty amazing but it could be better and so knowing the most you possibly can about snake venom will save lives definitely but secondarily venom is also often used to create medicine and so the more we know about venom there's a potential for unlocked drug capabilities that we don't even know about yet so for example snake venom derive drugs treat heart disease high blood pressure blood clots makes sense a lot of venom are anti-coagulants right so they can take a lot of that information and help human medicine so not only is this helping us understand snakes better just evolutionarily and for the interest of the study of snakes but it's also helping us save lives from snake bites and potentially unlock some interests for human medicine that's fantastic that sounds like it's win-win-win-win-win-win-win-win right one more about snakes is win-win-win-win-win-win yeah also because they're cool they are cool they're so cool just and dropped out I don't know where he went his internet seemed to crash um and so I don't know where he went is my internet okay? your internet's fine great good do you want to tell us some science while we wait for Justin? yeah that's exactly what I'm going to do I just wanted to make sure it was not my end as well last minute checks arm waving little bit of arm waving hmm do you appreciate a bit of honey with your tea? a little honey in the cocktail you might be drinking a little honey on your peanut butter and banana toast oh banana out of here right well okay so you know bananas could be a little bit radioactive and it's because of the potassium they take up well a lot of plants actually take up potassium and they can actually get fooled by radiosesium which is radioactive cesium and take up this radiosesium in place of potassium and it gets incorporated into their tissues and into their pollens and a researcher and his students just found that flowering plants across the country probably are still incorporating radiosesium from the nuclear tests that we did back in the 1950s and 1960s and that honey samples brought by the students when they went away for spring break back to the campus half at least half of them a little more than half of them were radioactive and had radiosesium in the honey it's not a lot of radiosesium it's not going to kill anybody it's not dangerous it's well well below dangerous radioactive levels but what this implies is that there's all sorts of foods that we eat all sorts of things in our environment that are sticking around and that decades ago over 50 years ago that we did nuclear bomb testing and the Russians did nuclear bomb testing that it got the radiation ended up in the atmosphere it ended up in the soil and that is still circulating and that some organisms can concentrate that radioactivity and that it continues to cycle and concentrate so future scientists will find our bodies and see them full of isotopes and plastic what are they doing what are these people how did they even live but it's an important part of figuring out how our ecosystems work to understand stuff like this so may not have been too surprising to a lot of people but a lot of people eat their honey because it's healthy and maybe going to go oh no radioactive honey but it's not that bad maybe just a little bit of radioactivity it's fine it's totally fine and then I wanted to dive into some fun stories about T-Rexes because for whatever reason this last week there were about three stories about T-Rexes they were so fascinating so first off T-Rexes were slow and imagery in movies of these storming T-Rexes able to run at 30 miles an hour that's really really not likely they were very very heavy and most likely T-Rexes were very slow only walking maybe moving at about 3 miles per hour 5 kilometers per hour well if they were scavengers what are they running for they're giant nothing's hunting them so were they hunting or not another study found that T-Rexes in I love this in a quarry in Utah that is called the Rainbows and Unicorns Quarry it is a they found a number of fossils many of them seem to be a group of T-Rexes individuals that died together and their hypothesis it was the result of either some kind of biological poisoning by a microorganism or fire or flooding the preferred hypothesis at this point is that they died due to a flood all together but their bones are all found together adds more evidence to a growing body of fossil evidence that T-Rexes were not solitary hunters that they were group they were social group animals and maybe they hunted in packs or in a cooperative manner or scavenged in a cooperative manner think about turkey vultures there's always a bunch of them because they're following the scent right? right if they're scavengers so maybe maybe the other hypothesis there isn't that they scavenged together but maybe they followed the scent slowly moved their way to the dead thing and then a group of T-Rexes fought each other over dead things or a carcass fell into some quicksand and then they all just kept following it in they all kept falling in which is yep highly likely and finally the last study was another piece of work estimating and this was in nature I believe but another piece of work estimating the number of Tyrannosaurs that had potentially lived on earth they estimated it to be some 2.5 billion dinosaurs over a period of 2.5 million years mind you so this is a long period of time but that there could have been at any one time about 20,000 adult T-Rex individuals between 68 million and 65.5 million years ago yeah this was in science just to let you know there are about 9,900 tigers left on our planet to give you an idea here and if we think of T-Rex as a major part of the ecosystem how and how big they were how many other dinosaurs did there have to be for 20,000 T-Rexes to be crawling around at one time so the num it when you start thinking of ecosystem interactions and number of individuals to support individuals then you start realizing how many how many dinosaurs there were we need to find more rainbow and unicorn quarries yeah and I also looked up there's about 39,000 giraffes left on our planet and around between 12 and 15,000 bison American bison so more than there are bison just picture T-Rexes roaming around and I'm going to picture them in big groups thousands of T-Rexes with their little arms what Justin sorry all right so I'm going to jump on ahead I was going to say the only place I've seen bison is in the Golden Gate Park so like at first I'm like yeah but when do you ever see oh yeah if there were T-Rexes running around Golden Gate Park that would be pretty interesting just go to the Midwest there's plenty of bison yeah and this is interesting also because of the fact that this study specified only 20,000 adult T-Rexes because they only looked at that form and now we know that juvenile and adults had different body forms and they survived eating different kinds of foods so how many juvenile T-Rexes were there? lots more so yeah fascinating view of that was it Cretaceous period of North America's history this isn't like all over the world either it's like North America anyway my final story for the night I want to talk about a glance a gaze what happens when I look into your eyes what happens when somebody you catch somebody looking out of the corner of their eye and then looking at you what does it make you do how does it make you feel do I know them or not I feel like it's very dependent on if I know they were not regardless of whether you know them other people's gazes capture our attention and a new study that's out this week from the University of Geneva finds that when people make eye contact with other people it solicits that attention not only is attention solicited that cognitive process distorts temporal perception so you actually overestimate you actually underestimate the amount of time that was spent consciously aware of that gaze because your brain is working on it and so time is dilated when people look at you and you look at them you have mental time dilation because of people's eyes looking at you so the researchers had different situations and measured what was going on in people's cognitive functioning and they measured their perception of time had them tell the researchers how long this thing took or that thing took as they were looking at these faces and they had these faces look at the subjects either just a face staring and not moving a moving face where the eyes came to look at the subject just the eyes moving to look at the subject inanimate objects and they found that the eyes moving and the head moving are a very important part of this time dilation so if there is just like a mannequin with its eyes straight and you recognize your brain recognizes that as a human face nothing happens because that face you might have passed its field of vision but that face is not really looking at you it's just gazing into the distance but the faces that moved and the eyes that moved whether or not it was just the eyes moving or the whole head and eyes moving those elicited time dilation in the brain so this also gets at this question of how masks are potentially affecting our ability to communicate with people they're not affecting our gaze and even if your face your mask your lower face is covered your eyes are still going to be able to elicit solicit attention in other people's brains and start cognitive processes that lead to connection so human gaze is a whole thing with dogs too oh yeah so dogs are really good at following human gaze but for example wolves are not great at it I thought this was happening again I thought it was the opposite okay I'll double check but I'm pretty sure that I thought that the wolves were actually better because the whole point of that study was the fact that we thought this has been this sort of shared history training up of dogs watching us and us watching dogs over the millennia and then it turns out wolves are just better at it than dogs so my recollection is that this was their proof that dogs and wolves have a much farther back evolutionary convergence and so this was actually an indication that it was something that dogs developed completely separately and in their own timeline apart from other canines I remember the result of that being completely the opposite so we have to go look at this we have to go find this out well I found the study it's from 2019 so way so I had it backward I'm going to go find my study I'm reading it right now we'll talk about it in the after show it's fine I'll put this in the show notes for later but anyway gaze is something that we study with humans in relation to other animals is my point gaze is an important social signal not just human to human absolutely yeah it's important it's important across animal species and it is interesting also for different species animal interactions the animals we interact with whether there are other human animals or dog animals or cat animals how do the gazes interact but amazing that just catching a gaze can affect your sense of time mental time dilation with a look hey Justin hey yes if my internet might be getting wonky here so if I start breaking up just let me know okay so when you think of a creature that travels really well when it has spanned the globe a super disperser that goes everywhere one creature that probably doesn't come to mind is one of those you'd find everywhere anywhere kind of creatures is the tarantula tarantulas are very much like hobbits from Tolkien's Middle Earth they're not fond of big adventures they prefer to keep to their burrows only occasionally leaving to find food or mates unlike hobbits though tarantulas are absolutely everywhere so how did this six out of seven continents have tarantulas on them so how does a big hairy spider that doesn't like to leave the burrow that has usually a very tightly controlled area within which it operates how does that creature end up spreading across the entire planet international team of researchers including Carnegie Mellon's University's Sir Shah Foley set out to sort of figure out how this came about they did basically like Genomic 23 and the type of thing for the tarantulas trying to figure out where their where their genes come from they've published this in Peer J this is where it's been published so they use transcriptomics to build the generic tree of spiders and then time calibrated their tree with fossil data and despite the fact that tarantula fossils are extremely rare they were able to sort of backtrack tarantula emergence from places so they've found now that they consider the Americas about 120 million years ago Cretaceous period so aside from there being 20,000 t-rexes there are also plenty of tarantulas in North America at the time and South America as well as India, Australia all these places that they reached they did so mostly a long time ago they found a couple lineages that colonized Asia about 20 million years apart from each other but they actually made it across the boundaries between Australia and the Asian islands where many other species sort of had a hard stop from exploring into and basically what it came down to why the tarantula is so successful such a global trotter is that it's really good with niches they're just really good at finding a little spot in the food web and owning it without forcing anything out or competing too much with anything in fact there's been the species that they inhabited I think Asia at the time were both a forest dwelling like an arboreal, like a tree dwelling version and a burrowing version that didn't interact with each other because they both had their little little niche and they just kept to it little burrows kept to the little hobbit shire didn't explore didn't like rabble rousing didn't like troublemakers and just by doing that they're really good in fact some of the continental conquests that they made were because the continents moved away from each other or crashed into each other that's how they got from India to Asia the continent crashed into the other continent but it's like okay it's one more continent we'll just take that we'll do that whether by burrow, by tree by air, yeah just as long as there's no flying tarantulas next yeah but the looks of it it's just by not being by being invasive not being too off-putting when you get there not taking up much of a footprint even though you've got eight legs shift work shift work let's hear this bad news but no, so here's the thing it's often been aligned as bad for your health but will this new deeper dive study make us rethink benefits associated with a flexible work schedule no, there's nothing there's nothing good coordinate research from the University of Waterloo shift work is just plain bad for human health causes all sorts of health related issues that affect our defense against disease and infection because when you mess with the circadian clock you disrupt the sleep wake schedule and feeding patterns and these are the things that actually are part of your immune systems rhythm as well interestingly though it appears as though it affects men worse than women men have a larger negative reaction than women according to this study we've talked before about hormones being involved and just such an interesting question as to what would make that make it work that way why? what does melatonin or any of the circadian clocks how does that affect the immune system differently in the different sexes with different levels of sex hormones and so next I need to figure out what if there is anything that actually helps because there's melatonin you can buy you can buy sun lamps you can eat chocolate we talked about that on the show I want scientific studies that actually shows what can help offset that one would be day job day job not everyone can be a day job everyone can work towards a day job even if it's a little less money when you get hurt in the middle of the night and you have to go to the ER you're very happy that there are people working at night in the ER absolutely so if this is affecting inflammation I'm just talking about Brian now now we're just talking about Brian so we start understanding exactly how shift work affects everything and then we can start really targeting the responses and the treatments to it but if what we are looking at is a disruption of the inflammatory physiological response then how can you ameliorate inflammation right so the next I think the next step would be regardless as a shift worker what would be the things that you could do in your life to decrease inflammation anti-inflammatory diet I mean you don't necessarily want to take NSAIDs every single day because that's not good for your liver and kidney but is what else can you do to just reduce the possibility of inflammation part of it too is I guess there is natural times like you're not supposed to get an infection right before bed because your body is better prepared to fight off infection the next morning that's why you always feel really bad right before bed time I don't feel good anymore your body is like no go to bed yeah but there is natural cycles of our immune system sort of beefing up and shutting down these cycles that we go through and when you mess with circadian rhythms and you don't let your body have those sort of natural cyclical processes that take place on a daily daily basis it's overproducing or underproducing or just giving up on you completely don't let it give up never give up never give in and in the case of the men I guess the the immune system tends to overreact leading to potential higher rates of sepsis oh yeah so the men are so strong that they're feeling extra bad well I mean there might be some sort of like ancestral biological thing about men getting more infections or this is man flu this is just more man flu stuff but I mean similar that like COVID is an inflammatory disease and men are affected worse more often so it's you know there is precedent and man flu is a real thing yeah I was going to say Blair this is probably the first time I've ever heard you say that men don't overreact do you think? men aren't overreacting they actually feel bad yeah when they feel bad they feel bad come on yeah as someone said in the chat men do have a higher stress level than women so it's tough to be a man well it is because we have to not only do we have to deal with all the stresses of you know society and all this we also have to deal with women you should just show yourself out right now Justin bye Justin see you never bye tune in next week to find out who the third host is it's Rachel isn't it it's gonna be Rachel oh have we made it to the end of the show yeah did we do it we got through all the stories this was a fun show why not have gotten there soon enough a minute earlier I would have been okay thank you for helping to host this show thank you everyone for listening and shout outs to the people who really helped this show Fada thank you for help with social media and the show notes extra work this weekend with the crossover show very very appreciated that you spent time on that Gord thank you for Manning the chat room identity 4 thank you for recording the show again being there this weekend it's fantastic everyone who did show up live on Saturday to see our crossover show with DTNS thank you so much for being there love the fact that you joined us for it was a really fun show it was really great and again if you are a Patreon sponsor then you'll be getting that show in your podcast feed over there as well when I put that in I guess it is time now to thank our Patreon sponsors also oh and gosh darn it Rachel I forgot Rachel Rachel thank you for your assistance very much thank you now I tried to have a meeting and then you went to Denmark and now I can't have a meeting thank you to our Patreon sponsors thank you too Carl Kornfeld Jen Myronik Melanie Stegman Karin Taze Chris Wozniak Dave Bunn Jonathan Stiles John Scioli John Lee Ali Koffengorov Sharma Shoebrew Darwin Handen Andrew Swanson Fred S-104 Kevin Reardon Jack Bryan Carrington John McKee Greg Riley Steve Leesman Dana Pearson Johnny Gridley Christopher Dreyer Greg Briggs Robert Coburn Dave Wilkinson Matt Sutter Kurt Larson Sarah Chavis Jason 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I've got a laundry list of items I want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought and I'll try to answer what you've got. But how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour, listen to what we say and make in science. This week in science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. This week in science, this weekend This week in science boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom Everyone in the chat room wants more Roger and Tom on Twists Noodle says we need to, we need to take Roger from DTNS We will take him I don't know We'll get Tom every week, yeah We'll get him up, we'll just do a crossover every week We'll be no problem We'll be no problem Glad you enjoyed the video on demand Gord We are in the after show right now It's the part of the show that's after the show but that's still kind of the show Saturday was a lot of fun Identity 4, that was fantastic What's the movie for tonight? We're watching together, everybody I'm going to bed Me too I came home I left, I came home today and my son and husband have been binging on old Godzilla movies Oh, that's fun Yes, so I came home to my son furiously telling, explaining to me that the son of Godzilla and how incredibly bad it was and then he had to show me and for anyone who has never seen son of Godzilla I think I've seen most of them Baby Godzilla is Let me google it Interesting looking Fun, oh God, Godzilla Baby Godzilla That's it Oh no Yeah, yeah, baby Godzilla That's Oh no Fascinating, what were they thinking? He looks like a monkey I don't know, no, he doesn't He's No, it looks like the baby from Dinosaurs TV show Not the mama Not the mama Not the mama Yeah, maybe a little bit like that It's got a flat face and I guess they must have They dropped him first day on the set and they were like, it's fine It's fine, it's gonna be fine Oh no, baby Godzilla is and you can find pictures on the internet But watching it move What? Why are they all smooth skinned like a frog? Yes, so Godzilla looks more crocodile-y and baby Godzilla is like more frog-ish It's weird Like a naked ninja turtle Thank you very much, Gaurav Yeah Have a good night, Fada Yes, Godzilla movies are great with MST MST 3K treatment for sure I think that's how I saw most of them Here we go But yeah, and then the other one the other one they saw while I was gone was Godzilla versus Mecca Godzilla which again is another good one with aliens and a What is it? Sir Caesar, King Caesar, something like that Ooh, ouch, Stephen Rain Godzilla represents the atomic bomb What was the study you found about the dogs and wolves? So I have six studies open Oh wow And they're all conflicting Really? Unfortunately, yeah So there's one from 2003 saying that the that dogs or that wolves where did it go? So here's one from 2003 saying that the same dog-human communication via faces cannot be achieved in wolves even after extended socialization So that happened in 2003 Interesting That's like the opposite of what I just read Right, in 2011 they Is this the one? I think yes, where they domesticated wolves and then the wolves did well at gazing and actually did better at gazing far away than dogs But the up-close thing I think the dogs still did better at puzzles or something I don't know So that was in 2011 Then in 2019 there was a study about the facial muscles and how dog faces are structured to be able to receive the human gaze and repeat it back in a way that wolves cannot So dogs are better about telling humans I get it October 2020 is saying that dogs are staring at the back of your heads just as much as they're staring at your face So that happened in October of 2020 And then the same That was a Smithsonian study Also a Smithsonian publication from 2018 found that dogs and wolves their convergent origin is way further back than we thought So this is what I'm saying This is a mess We don't know I think that's the answer as I can say with distinction jury's out Okay The one I think I might There is one with the pointing that I think that the wolves might have been better at The pointing thing I didn't find the pointing one No, I didn't either But I do remember talking about that one at some point So I don't know where that one hid There's one Both dogs and wolves are able to follow communicative cues to find hidden food However, without direct eye contact neither dogs nor wolves chose the correct object Interesting So they both relied on eye contact to find the correct one the first time round In the absence of a human to show them where the food was located only the wolves were able to make casual inferences and the experiment wolves showed the understanding to cause an effect that dogs lacked But both of those This was University Veterinary Medicine Vienna Both were able to track eye contact Just fine Interesting Yeah, so I think I mean, first of all, we could say like more animals probably do this than we think so it's not that weird if wolves could do it because probably like one study I looked at said there was even a recorded instance of a tortoise following human gaze so like is why is this the thing that we're deciding is the big difference between dogs? I don't even know Well, I mean, I think the argument that was made is that whether or not this is a shared communication based on domestication or the reason of domestication is because of a shared ability to communicate and I think that's all it is and I think that is where the 2003 study came from because they were talking about the expressiveness of dog faces That was the one Oh, was it? Okay So yeah, so anyway, that study I think that's what that's about is about establishing the two-way connection Dogs being able to mirror us with extremely unique yes to dogs and that wolves were not really interested in communicating with humans in the same way I'm not gonna tell you what I think I'm gonna take your cues, find out where the food is I'm gonna go eat it and I'm gonna go take a nap Yeah, which is also why dog training and wild animal training are they have similar fundamentals They're pretty different Anyway, yeah, I don't know Yeah, it really sounds like they don't know It really sounds like there's not a statistical difference between dogs and wolves because they're keeps being these studies saying one thing or another So if they did a meta-analysis I'm guessing there wouldn't be much there But yeah, that's a big assumption because I don't know what the sample sizes of each one of these was like maybe a couple of these sample sizes were 10 and a couple of these sample sizes were 200 So, you know, really difficult to say I wonder, you know, this is communication, non-verbal communication through gaze, right? So, can humans use our gaze to tell another species about something that their attention needs to go someplace else? Do these other species use gaze as a part of their communication to even begin to understand that we could do that? So, if wolves, and so if dogs are doing it it means that wolves probably can do it but maybe with, I mean, maybe it's just the emphasis on it to the emphasis on different There's also a question of what we're studying at this point This is an international study show that 60% of Eurasian gray wolf genomes carried blocks of domestic dog DNA So, if they've been cross-breeding for the last couple of hundred years anyway Yeah, that was another one One of those studies was comparing wolf dogs to dogs So, a wolf dog hybrid, I think, to just normal domestic dogs which like, okay, now I'm not so sure about this But I don't know Anyway, Gurav wants to know what my curriculum for training Sadie is and when you know your dog has learned as much as they can It's time to stop It's never time to stop Dogs really like training They need like puzzles and stuff It's like a fun way to give them an exercise of the brain So, either continue doing what you're doing and just spend time working with them every day or try to teach them new things I teach dogs tricks when I, I probably annoy people I always ask first But when I visit somebody's house I often will end up teaching their dog a trick Well, I'm sitting there If the dog is okay to get lots of treats I'll teach them something real quick Because it's just, it's very fun Dogs want to learn They want to, they want to please And they like treats I think, you know And now we get into weird anthropomorphism But I would not be surprised if there is a satisfaction in doing it right and getting your treat right away Like, I did it I did the thing she wanted So, you know, there's something to that too But to answer your question She currently does sit down, touch She'll touch her nose to my hand when I move it around Shake, other paw And then she's, she's medium at cum She's, she's not great And then the thing that she does that's very impressive is she does weight And so you can put a treat on her foot You can put it on her nose You can put it on her head You can put it on her butt And she will wait until you say, okay And then she'll eat the treat Off of her butt? Yeah She's, she's so long Remember how long she is? That's right She's long and bendy My cat is not getting the I'm petting my cat right now She, she's like, she keeps coming in here And she says, hi, hi, hi You were gone for two days Hi, hi, hi Where'd you go? Hi, hi, you wanna, you wanna go to bed? I like sleeping, let's cuddle Hi, hey, let's come play with my toy Okay, here's my toy You wanna play with me? Okay Oh, yeah She's my kitty My, yeah, Marshall said that he didn't even see her for two days and then I came home and she came out Oh boy My kitty All right, I gotta go start the day You gotta start a day Good time for me Sun's up 10.30 What is it there now? 7.30 7.30 in the morning Yeah That is a great start to the day And Denmark just like fully opened Fully Do you have to wear a mask still or are masks not a thing anymore? Yeah, masks are still a thing but you can now go to all of the restaurants and do all of the things and move in Apparently though, there is a centrally, I have a centralized everything here so you have an app basically on your phone that can show that you have had a test within 72 hours so I do believe you need to show that to get seated at a restaurant you have like a social passport for a recent test you can just like, yep, there it is come on in, boop, boop, boop so I think they are doing like you have to have that test good within the last 72 hours but yeah but there's testing and I think we got the states pretty much has testing available on that scale now, I believe finally so Yeah, it's more available now Yeah, there is a prediction or the predictions keep coming out from the IHME international something metrics health metrics evaluate anyway, this group out of the University of Washington and they do really great metrics on stuff they're really good at predicting things and for people who have vaccine hesitancy I'm going to ask everyone who is getting a vaccine who got a vaccine plans to get a vaccine please talk to people that you know who are hesitant about why you're choosing please try and talk with people empathetically without attacking them you know, don't joke about you know, people who don't get vaccines you know, mother nature, natural selection blah, blah, blah, it's going to fix this we don't need more people to die we don't need to Well, you do make a good point though, Kiki now that you mentioned it, I hadn't thought of that but it is sort of like But there's also probably people you know who can't get vaccines which is exactly why this is so important Yes, there are people who can't get the vaccines so I, Mike and the prediction from this organization this research group is that because of vaccine hesitancy and new variants that we are going to see a bad resurgence of COVID in the fall to winter so late 2021 into 2022 this is going to continue and we're going to have to keep doing measures and we're all tired so the one thing that we can do is try and help people understand how important vaccination is and how important it is to helping us safely reach herd immunity so that we can diminish the spread of the virus and avoid this predicted future that this group has seen so I don't want to go there I want to have a nice winter I want Blair to have a good wedding I want all sorts of cool things to happen in the future I don't want to feel like we have to wear masks all the time and that we have to be so vigilant all the time I want us to be able to relax and rest and we can only get there if everybody works together and 50% vaccination rate is not going to do it we need 75% vaccination rate we need to get people vaccinated and it's up to us to talk to our friends talk to our family talk to the people that we know about why it's important because they're listening to their news sources and getting convinced but maybe they haven't heard the words that you have to tell them so just, yeah just putting that out there because I want to be open in Denmark I don't want Denmark to close I want things to open anyone I don't know anyone who has said they didn't want or wouldn't get or hasn't already gotten don't know anyone I don't know who I don't have anybody to talk to you're lucky that's great you're surrounded by people like that but there are many of us who aren't fully surrounded by people who will be vaccinated and I think we all should be so it would be great yeah 50% faxed half faxed that's good people who've gotten the Johnson and Johnson you're one and done I know I'm a limited edition I'm a woman under 48 who got the Johnson and Johnson vaccine there might not be any more of me well done they might, yeah that might not be a thing anymore yeah, maybe not well, I don't know I guess it's based on numbers though yeah I mean that's the last thing I heard was that they're probably gonna release it for men over 48 or people over 48 in general first and then continue studying and then maybe later release it to everybody else so it does seem like I'm in a special club yeah yeah, anyone who can get in there get one of the two shots here at least partially there here starting that does diminish the chances even just one of the two Pfizer shots one of the two Modernas yeah it starts diminishing returns on that on infection rates I don't know if this is true for you guys but when I got mine because mine was a whole special like come get them while they last sort of thing I didn't know which one I was getting until I got there and it does not matter to me at all it wouldn't matter because they all protect me yep get whichever vaccine you can get Pfizer does not have a single shot vaccine Pfizer is only two shots yeah Gorav's getting the second shot on May 3rd that's awesome muffins that would be so sweet yeah, say thank you to the the pharmacists for it to the healthcare professionals that help, yeah but anyway don't forget you get a treat too that's the rule that was the rule in my house growing up you get a shot you get a present and I have carried that on into my adult life you get a shot you get a present you get a feeling you get a present if you have to go through something like yeah you get a present whether that's a nice meal or a special drink or you know that's why everybody in her family has diabetes well it used to be I would go straight from the doctor to Toys R Us and we would get to pick something under a certain dollar amount anything you wanted in the store nice good old Toys R Us the children today will never know my kids actually got to see it right really yes we had one of the one of the biggest oldest stores in existence in Sacramento at the Arden Fair Mall wow and we got to go over there it was like one of the last of the clothes we got to go over there in the final days when they were like selling off store fixtures at this point like like they were selling the stands that would hold the toys even like everything was and so yeah they were like they got to see got to see that sad yeah that's not quite the experience that I recall oh no now there's nothing that's going to really replace no a giant toy store with the toys that are all out and that's all that's there compared to a toy aisle it's just not it's not the same vibe but there's no reason to pay for rent if you could just have a website I guess I don't know and especially because like you would go to the toys or us hoping to get that particular action figure that particular toy and maybe they would have it and maybe they didn't and now since you can just order exactly what you want on the internet it's very different get whatever you want Mr. Fiendish over in the Twitch chat already had a first shot Kyva Go is asking what if you get the Pfizer shot and then a Johnson and Johnson one there's actually a story about that that it's not recommended because nobody has tested it and theoretically you would be protected your body would would have you would be so here's the answer here's the answer go to the health care folks when you get your if you're getting a first shot of anything they're signing you up for your second shot right there on the spot yeah you have a date to come back now yeah so it happens there's a story of one guy who did it there's this there one there's one guy who got like he he went and got like one of each or he he got them mixed up he's fine yeah this did happen to somebody because he didn't pay attention so early on early on the CDC had said that because we didn't know if we would have what levels of which at what point like there was distribution problems actually there was no distribution there was problems but the CDC is it was saying if you've got one and say it's Pfizer and then for some reason Pfizer is not available in a month get the other one it's fine well but also we might all be living that lifestyle pretty soon that hasn't really been a 12 months when we need a booster shot and we have to do this whole rodeo again they're they're probably not going to tell you to keep with whatever brand you started with they're gonna they're gonna tell you to get whatever so it's it doesn't really matter it's all creating immunity it's all creating anybody's so in the at the end of the day it doesn't really matter you're not supposed to mix or match them right now but I do think it's funny that eventually we might all be mixing and matching eventually yeah and when you hear about when you read the news also about the Pfizer everybody's talking now about the Pfizer's third shot it's not like it's like two weeks later it's like next year third shot oh it's like a booster shot yeah and I think it's important like they go oh third shot and you're gonna have to do one a year so what are they gonna do that's your fourth that your fifth year just know it's a booster shot yeah it's a flu shot like just the way that they're talking about it in the media right now is really bothering me yeah because people don't want to hear about how the number of shots by talking about three shots people are like I gotta get three needles poked in me like it's gonna make hesitancy even worse and so the way that they're talking about it is really like very sad instead of explaining that this is how the human body works and also viruses mutate and so it is likely that we will need it's accurate a booster next year yeah like that and everyone understands what a booster is like we've all gotten boosters as kids hopefully should have gotten boosters as adults yeah yeah yeah who are these people listening to not us obviously I will tell you I know people who came to me and told me things that they read on Facebook that were totally incorrect and they were not gonna get the vaccine and I had to have several conversations with them and then they got the vaccine but like it's tough because if you hear if you hear things from something you consider a trusted source yeah you might not know you might trust in them for a lot of things like brands of baby bottles and what park you're supposed to take your baby to and all these sorts of things right oh this baby food is really good like you could be in this mommy and me Facebook group that's really great information and then if they put out there that if you're breastfeeding if you take the vaccine and it's gonna have implications on your child I understand is all I'm saying I understand how sometimes a trusted messenger can say something outside of their wheelhouse but somebody who's not used to being a skeptic about these sorts of things doesn't know to say well they don't know about that they were pretty right on about the sensitive skin diapers so I'm sure they understand exactly how viruses and vaccines work I mean this is if you listen to a science podcast weekly you're probably not thinking that way but not everyone does that so like for a lot of people science was something they did in elementary and middle and high school and that was it so that's a big part of our job right is to get people to understand that baseline science information so that they can be their own judge but there's so many people out there who don't feel like I think that's a lot of it too right they have their own imposter syndrome of not feeling like they can interpret the information themselves so they depend on interpreters and if their interpreter is not a trustworthy interpreter then that leads to problems but anyway Steven right the only news I watched now is twist it just seems like other news outlets have political motives so do we I do at least I'm completely politically motivated if the science doesn't say something that I like I oh no that's not Trice Shade anyway exactly or you change your mind we saw you actually change your position isn't that a crazy thing do you see that anywhere in the world that people will like I don't believe that at all here's some evidence wow I completely believe that now that was wrong hey it's a good exercise you should everyone should go out and find something they don't believe and change their mind about it the self-driving car I completely changed my mind on that so always been for that there you go I want to I wanted to take a nap on my way to work that would be perfect I was not with it all right drive me drive me and then set an alarm for 15 minutes after you parked I don't want to be late but I don't want to be too early yeah there is no COVID shot for animals but perhaps there will be because these vaccines work for humans so I'm sure we're going to be vaccinating animals with similar formulations because we do know that other animals get it and it would affect affect agriculture farming right so the the San Diego Zoo chimps did get the COVID vaccine oh wow yeah ahead of a lot of humans too which is also hmm yeah that was the whole thing but you know ultimately depending on their exhibit type and the fact that they are in common space with other hominids on a daily basis every day they potentially are in a high-risk category so they're also an endangered species so it would be great not to lose them to COVID but yes they they got the vaccine keep it going the chat room I don't believe in Scientology should I reassess I think so I think you should reassess maybe there's another reason that you should not believe in it that you hadn't thought of the first time around maybe you'll find more problems if you look at it a little bit that's right more research do more research more research might just and if it doesn't then you know that's a path you could potentially walk down I suppose and some level of reality that can't fully address should we go yeah I'm gonna go make breakfast so yeah anybody who wants uh uh frittatas come on over I like frittatas you really have big frittata morning frittatas and yeah that sounds delicious yeah let's go to bed everyone or get up and do your day where are you it's sleep time it's wake time it's middle of the day time depending on where you are so lucky to be joined by people all over the place yeah what is it you're supposed to what are we supposed to say right now say good night Blair good night Blair say good night say good say good morning Justin morning Justin good night good night everyone thank you for joining us once again and we will see you once again next week have a good week