 I wonder if I can add this, make a Facebook right now. Also, I'm going to try. We're going to go now. Rika, Rika19, I'm not familiar with the lingo. The five by five, I don't know what that means. I have no idea. You guys say that. It means you sound and look. It means you sound and look great. I think my only. Oh, thank you. Just say that, it'd be a better compliment. I think my only awareness of Trucker lingo was from, like, what were the movies with the bandit, whatever, Smokey and the Bandit. Yeah, I'm dating myself here. That's a big 10-4. Yeah, mine all come from C.W. McCall, which I understand nobody's ever heard of. But he's got some great Trucker songs, including, like, the best disco Trucker song ever. And we're live. Hey, everybody out there, I just want to let you know that if you're starting the show with us on YouTube, on Facebook, on twist.org, slash live right now, what you are seeing is the live broadcast of the This Week in Science podcast. If you want the edited, pretty version, then you'll have to subscribe to the podcast. But I think we're about ready to start this show. Big thumbs up, everybody. In three, two, this is twist. This Week in Science, episode number 775, recorded on Wednesday, May 27th, 2020, to health with social distance. I'm Dr. Kiki, and today we will fill your head with skillful bees, translucent frogs, and some sociality, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Some information is not universal. When we use a number, we can agree on what it is. Three is three. There are three hosts on this show. That is a fact we can agree on that. Whether three is too many, just the right number, maybe not enough hosts, we may or may not agree upon. An important thing is that, to remember, is that in today's media world, the things that we are used to as being facts, like a number being a number, are often less reported than opinions. And actually, those opinions are usually manufactured to influence people towards some sort of an agenda. Because of this, you have to understand there is a difference between the information you may be getting and the information others may be getting when it comes to, oh, I don't know, things like COVID-19. What are the right practices to prevent its pandemic spread? Global warming is also on that list, how democracy works, capitalist economies, healthcare, what that should look like, the value of education, the value of science. Whether or not scientists are part of a corrupt cabal of deep state liberal fascists who are duping the American people into staying at home over this made up pandemic, so that only poor, godless, liberal, elite immigrants can take advantage of the reverse engineered alien technology that it has been harnessed to make the best fruit smoothies the history of the world has ever seen. In this time of pandemic problems, let us not forget the one thing we face that is worse than this pandemic itself, human ignorance. With all the other problems the world may face, ignorance and the ease with and seemingly increasingly number of Americans who will believe absolute nonsense is perhaps our greatest danger. It's the one thing when people are convinced to act against their own best interests, this we kind of are used to. It's quite another though, when they act against everyone else's. We must find a way to put an end to human ignorance before human ignorance puts an end to this weekend science coming up next. Can't get enough, I want every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek out. Science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair, everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back bringing you all the science that we wanted to bring to the show tonight. And unlike some other big historical events today, we are not postponed. That's right, our show is go for launch, ready for lift off. Yeah, if you haven't already heard the NASA SpaceX crewed launch was scrubbed today at about 16 minutes before launch due to weather. That's unfortunate, but everyone is safe, which is the most important part of this. And the plan is to try again on Saturday so you can watch it this weekend online if you are not in the area of the launch. Our fingers are crossed for everyone involved in this historic event. And remember, bad weather is just the earliest way of saying, don't leave. Stay here, we'll miss you. That's right, stay around a while. Stay home. Stay grounded. You think there's a pandemic down here? Just don't worry about it. Just hang out. All right, on the show tonight, science news that I brought. I've got missing matter and Neanderthal genes for better birth. And we have an interview coming up to discuss the interaction of social interactions and our health. What do you have for us, Justin? I've got skillful bees, stretchable words, and what didn't kill the dinosaurs? What didn't kill them? That, do we know? A lot of things. Oh, you can't. Yeah, well, I can narrow it down now. I can narrow it down now. But it's not the 65 million year ago. It's like 200 and 12, 250 million year ago. How much longer? Extinction event has been called. It's sort of getting an interesting update. All right. And Blair, what is in the animal corner? Oh, I have some frogs. I have family matters. And I also have some narwhal whispers. Whispering narwhals. Whispering narwhals. That's a good name for a jazz band. Yeah. Soft jazz. Soft jazz. Exactly. With a horn section, as we jump into the show here, I want to remind you that subscribing to the Twist podcast on your favorite podcast platform, YouTube or Facebook is going to bring you twists each and every time a new episode is published. It really will. You look for This Week in Science, if that's what you'd like. Or you can visit twist.org to find more information. And now it's time for our interview. I would love to introduce our guest. Dr. Jenny Tong is an associate professor in the departments of evolutionary anthropology and biology at Duke University and a faculty associate of the Duke University Population Research Institute. Her lab studies interactions between genes and behavior and the relationship between social behavior and health. Welcome to the show, Jenny. Thanks. It's great to have you here. And I would love to know, just to start out, how did you get interested in your field of study? What led you down the path to primates and social interactions? Right. Well, basically, my story is I took a class. As an undergrad in college, I happened to stumble into this interdisciplinary program on forging social ideals. My first semester of college. And that ended up being something entirely unexpected, including a course taught by a woman who'd spent a lot of time out in Tanzania at Jane Goodall's site following chimpanzees and studying baboons. And she both taught great science and told great stories. And it really got me hooked on the idea of studying social behavior from the perspective of evolution and with a little bit more experience from the perspective of our genes. And so from the perspective of our genes and our experience, there's always been the nature-nurture debate, which really shouldn't be a debate. We're pretty convinced at this point, are we not, that it's a mix of the two. It's not a dichotomy. Yep. But there are so many, I imagine there are so many factors that are involved in social behavior. I mean, what do you include in social behavior? And how do you study that? And then how that feeds into the gene behavior feedback loop that an organism has? So one of the biggest factors in any individual's social behavior when we're thinking about species like humans or other species that we study where they know each other for a long time. They make friends with each other. They make enemies with each other. They know who is friends with each other outside of their own relationships is what other individuals are doing around you or to you or with you. That's not in your genes. That's actually in your environment. It's the environment that's shaped for us or for a baboon or for a meerkat by other humans or baboons or meerkats. And much of the work we do asks how that type of environment, as opposed to environments that we maybe think about more commonly like what you're eating or whether you're smoking or whether you've exercised or whether the weather is good or bad, we're interested in how that kind of environment shaped by interactions with other individuals influences your body. And I bring in genes because one of the ways my lab asked that question is to investigate how social interactions with others actually breaches deep down into cells to change the way that our genes are actually regulated. So this is with the assumption that if I'm nice to somebody or if I'm mean to somebody, is that going to affect them at the cellular level? I think the evidence suggests that it can. We're often not talking about single instances, right? You give somebody a journey of walking down the street. But we all know that actually what can often make or break our day, what often gives you an adrenaline boost, right? That's a physiological reaction that we're all really comfortable with, right? Butterflies in the stomach or that shooting fight or flight response, those are physiological responses. Those are responses our bodies can have even when nobody has touched us. That's happened to me when I've opened an email that I liked or didn't like the contents of, right? And so you can imagine if that happens over and over again in life or in a more serious thing if you're in the type of social environment that creates sort of a routine low level anxiety or chronic stress, then sure, yeah, that can have an effect on your body. And all of our cells carry the same DNA more or less for our entire lives and all of our cells have exactly the same DNA as each other. But they're doing different things and our bodies are changing all the time. So one of the ways that happens is not by changing the DNA sequence, of course, but by changing how the genes in that DNA sequence are sort of turned up or turned down and so on. And that's one of the things we're interested in. Actually, a lot of working animals now suggest that you can take out all these other factors that really complicate how we think about this process in humans, like differences in diet or differences in healthcare access and so on and really just focus on manipulating social relationships and you see these kinds of consequences when you measure gene activity. Yeah, wasn't there a study that was, I think it was initiated by somebody who had been studying stress and hierarchy and baboons and they took their study over. I think you might be looking at her. No, maybe not, maybe not, one of your colleagues, maybe. And took it over to, no, maybe, I don't know. I just remember that the study was fascinating. It took it over to the British Civil Service and they had a hierarchy there and when they had noticed stress levels and poor health outcomes for the low ranking baboons, they saw similar like heart disease was increased and like all these, like the lower you were in the civil service, the more stress you were under and then more negative health outcomes people had if they stayed at these lower levels of the hierarchy. Yeah, so you're talking about Robert Sapolsky, he was the baboon guy, the baboonologist, who is a great communicator of science and someone who's actually had a lot of different manners of influence on my career, but he started studying baboons in the wild in Kenya and was interested in the effects of hierarchy a number of decades ago and started tracking things like how do low ranking versus high ranking baboons on this sort of social status ladder that they establish, how do they regulate hormones that are associated with stress? How do they regulate measures of cardiovascular function that you can take in a wild baboon if you happen to have it asleep for just a few hours? And then he didn't work directly with the British Civil Service Study. What you're referring to is this famous landmark study called the Whitehall Study of British Civil Servants that was led by a guy named Michael Marmot, Sir Michael Marmot, who reported exactly the sorts of phenomena you're talking about. So the British Civil Service, these are all white-collar employees of civil service. Nobody's getting bitten or chased. I don't know what they're going on in the British Civil Service that I think they can assume that day-to-day that's probably not a thing. They basically have desk jobs. So we're talking about hierarchies. So the Brits are really good at defining job categories. So they have job categories in this sort of ladder, like hierarchy too, kind of in some ways, like we can measure in other animals like baboons. And yeah, and so Michael Marmot described these elevated rates of heart disease, especially in people who had lower status occupations in the civil service. And remember, this is Britain. So they all, they have national healthcare. Oh yeah, that's the great thing. That was it. It's not like in America where it's like wealth and then you have a healthcare disparity. No, they all have the exact same healthcare. That's a beautiful thing to be taking out of the equation. That's a controlled variable for sure, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So he said, you know, look, you're still seeing these differences in outcomes and, you know, we can still see them even if we take into account whether certain people smoke more or whether they exercise more or less or so on. And his interpretation is that it has a lot to do with how much control you have over your job. Yes, but also your sort of life and the sort of imbalance between effort and reward. And so you're probably thinking about them together because they've actually written a few papers together saying, hey, you know, this is what we see in baboons and this is what we see in people. And isn't that remarkable that there do seem to be some parallels and, you know, honestly, some of the work that my colleagues and I have been doing has been very much inspired by some of those observations. Yeah, and I wanna talk about your most recent paper here in a couple of minutes, which does look, which reviews a lot of the animal research that has been done in this field. But a quick question before we jump into that because it's related, there's another recent study that you published in one of the preprint archives of baboon epigenetic markers that the alphas, the ones at the higher end of the hierarchy actually have major markers for epigenetic aging. And I love that the last phrase in your abstract that these alphas have a live fast die young epigenetic profile. Can you talk a little bit about how that compares to the other, to the lower levels of the hierarchy? Sure, I mean, it actually relates to what we were just talking about and what we think people in Whitehall probably are not doing, which is running around chasing each other and getting in physical competition, right? So we study female baboons and we study male baboons in this long-term field study that I'm fortunate enough to be involved in, the Ampcelli Baboon Research Project. And there's a big difference between how females determine their hierarchies and how males determine their hierarchies. Females kind of, their hierarchies don't change a lot over their lives. Mm-hmm. Is that me or is it just her? No, no, it's Jenny. So we have a pause, so I'm gonna guess that the hierarchies and the females don't change, but I have a feeling they live longer too. So they're- There's less competition overall. You just kind of come to terms with your spot and you're done. Well, but no, I think it's also, no, I think it's also like that they aren't fighting. Like if you are the top baboon male, you gotta keep it through intimidation and physical dominance. Right, so you're getting lots of fights. You're gonna be intimidating people. So you're gonna be stressed out a lot, but you're not stressed out in the same way. Yes. As the lower males. With the females though, I think it is gonna run with the age. Like the older females are the matriarchs and as long as they're alive, they got it. But you can be the male and be the top and lose that position to a more aggressive, without dying actually. But you can lose your position. You have to be at like peak baboon grumpiness to be the top banana in a baboon troop. Peak grumpiest, you're the risk taker, the grumpiest, the strongest. Gotta be aggressive. The loudest, the meanest maybe. Wow, yeah, a little rude. I did not kick out Jenny. Why did you kick her out? She was in the middle of explaining stuff to us. It wasn't me, I promise. Hopefully it was it. I haven't heard from her, I'll go check my email, see if there's a note. Maybe something happened to her computer. So I feel like Kiki, you were amping up to this question. So I'm just gonna check. Put it out there. Maybe we'll get back to it. But I'm hearing a lot of this like uncertainty and not having the agency to make change and all this kind of stuff as these main stressors that were impacting these animals because they were lower in the hierarchy. And I feel like that's what I was looking up was the tweet that I quoted last week which was meetings lately are mostly, we don't know much. It's in version two. What we do know we can't tell you, everything is going to change. Given the above, please make a plan. So those people that are currently working have like very little agency, things are changing every day. Like this is a huge stress level that people are dealing with professionally over the course of, we're already at three months. That seems like something that could have some pretty big impacts down the road. Yep. So I think that we will get to that conversation. Thank you for coming back. What happened? Do we have a, we're back. Hi, Jenny. Hi. Sorry, I'm calling in on my phone because despite the fact that I've been on video conferences the whole day, it's decided to drop out on me now. Oh, fair enough. Here we are. Here we are. Sorry about that. No, that's fine. I have been there. Audio and video are great if you want to, yeah. So the last- So that's the top males were having some issues, but then you are about to contrast it with the sort of how many female in the group. And that's when we lost it. Yeah, so I guess probably what I was getting at was that, so males reach high rank, they reach high status by physically competing with one another. And females don't. Females are mostly sort of helped into the, ushered into the rank hierarchy by who their moms are. You know, they get a big family, familiar advantage. And so, you know, in many respects, we're starting to think that the hierarchies in females are actually a better model for a lot of the sort of chronic social stress or stressful social environments that we are often thinking about in humans than our males are because those males are actually, the ones at the top of the hierarchy are the ones who are expending a lot of their energy and their time and, you know, are potentially in stressful social situations because of the need to sort of make it to the top and then keep their spot when they're there. It's a huge benefit to them because if they make it to the top, that's how they have mating opportunities. That's the most likely way that they're gonna have babies. So from a Darwinian fitness perspective, it's probably worth it. But, you know, we're starting to put together evidence from both the epigenetic aging sort of stuff and also from other work that some of my colleagues are doing on stress hormones that, you know, it might be worth it, but it doesn't mean it's cost-free for these guys. Right, so there's a trade-off. There's this, there's at some point physiologically a cost. So Kiki, sorry, for some reason I can't hear you. Yeah, I've had this happen before where just one of the panels just drops out for some reason. Really? I can hear you, Kiki. That's so funny. I can hear Kiki, but I've been there when the two of you were interviewing somebody, a fourth person, I guess. And I couldn't hear, I couldn't see or hear the guest, but you were both, oh yeah, oh yeah. And then asking questions, I'm like, I'm not seeing the same show. But Jenny, I do have a question to this. Is it, so the males, they can sort of get to this position of power within the troop and then can they get demoted and then stay in the troop and then start to experience like what it's like to be an underling or do they just leave after, if things don't work out? They can do both, they have options. Sometimes none of them good, but they can lose rank and they can decide, I've had enough of this particular social group and that social group over there looks like it's got some better opportunities for me and they can make a move and see how they do there. Or they can decide to stick around and sometimes they have longstanding social relationships that they've already established in that group. I don't know if we have to still use scare quotes around this word, but the idea that there are friendships in baboons and particularly friendships between males and females actually goes back a long ways. There was a time in which we were really, really not supposed to use that kind of terminology because it's anthropomorphic. So, I mean, I can say that they often have strong social bonds with especially females in the group. And so that might be an incentive to stay even if they drop in rank. I think you've been getting groomed. That's my friend, you know, I mean, that's decent. You don't let strangers groom you, typically, I wouldn't think. If Jenny can't hear me, you can. I think that the best indicator is a friendship, not only that, but they groom you. You groom them. You do so more with each other than you do with other individuals around you. It's not so different. The currency is grooming, which isn't something that we as humans do quite as often, but those kinds of patterns of consistency and reciprocity and sort of discrimination in favor of another individual that you're around a lot. Yeah, that looks a lot in many ways. I think a haircut has much higher currency these days than it used to. I think that's growing. That's right, yeah, yeah. So Kiki, you can't hear her, but she can hear you. And she has a question, which I'm gonna put through the telegraph. Yes, we're gonna put it through the telegraph. So I'm wondering if there are... So she's wondering if there are... Not just negative effects to social stress, but also positive. But positive. Well, yeah, was that the right question? I'm seeing it. No, that was like... I'm imagining what it's gonna sound like to listen to this podcast. And that's what the shake was, I'm sorry. Yeah, we're just posing some very low-level social stress on ourselves right now. Are there positive aspects of social stress? Well, I'm gonna try and probably incompletely answer that from the perspective of are there positive aspects to stress? Like we have a stress response, and that stress response has evolved to help us deal with things that are not quite right, that disrupt the way our bodies normally function. And so if you are a male baboon or female baboon, for that matter, and you're being chased by another individual in your group who has three-inch-long canines, it's good to have a response to that, right? It's probably a much better idea to mobilize your energetic resources, which is one of the things that some of these stress hormones do, and get your butt out of there, right? And that's an appropriate response. I think the question of whether there are positive or if you wanna think about it in the context of evolution and natural selection, adaptive components to a chronically stressful situation is still a bit of an open question because we know that chronic stress starts to change actually the way stress responses work. Actually, your body, your cells stop paying attention to those immediate responses in the same way that they do when it's just sort of this acute kind of stressor. Understanding whether that has benefits has not been very easy, in fact, right? Because maybe it's better that our bodies make that adjustment relative to not making any adjustment at all, even in the long run. But from the perspective of just asking, okay, if we look at an individual who's chronically stressed and an individual who's not chronically socially stressed, who's doing better from the perspective of health outcomes, diseases, susceptibility, living longer, generally speaking, where there is a detectable effect. And here I'm talking about both humans and a variety of other social mammals. It's better not to be chronically socially stressed, right? It's just unclear that that's the right comparison that we need to make to understand the evolution of this response. But is it true that if you take the word chronic out of there, right? If you look at a life without stress, devoid of stress, versus some stress. Like your dog chewing on a squeaky toy. Yeah, like when I tried it. Yeah, there's some sort of benefit to that, right? Like a life without stress at all when you're not using those kind of pathways and mechanisms, there's potential drawbacks, aren't there? To be honest, I don't think we know because I don't think there's been a life without stress. I'm trying to think about how you would do that kind of experiment. Well, actually there's probably, I mean, my guess would be you would have to look at somebody who, you might have to look at a form of a spectrum of a personality disorder or something where they don't, what somebody might not literally feel of any kind of a fight or flight response. But you'd have to take it away from something that is the norm of any organism to do so. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's like, yeah, maybe psychopaths actually don't get stressed, but that might not be the point of being stress-free either. There are things like positive stress that are motivators. There's helpful levels of stress that if it's not enough, you might not be as engaged or if it's too much, it might be deuterious. But it's a weird balance. Well, yeah, I was thinking more along the lines of captive animals where you can look at them and you can say, okay, they have never felt that they were in danger of being predated upon. They have never had to look for food. Everything has always been brought to them. They haven't had to forage for bedding supplies, right? And then versus you can do things like spray scent markings for animals that they might compete over space with in their space, make them more active, right? So I think that that's kind of where I was looking at this from was not necessarily human, but with animals, you can kind of see that anecdotally, it looks like it would be beneficial to have some sort of stress at some point in your life versus none ever. So I think this actually relates to the idea that our social interactions are potentially a major cause of both rewarding outcomes, but also stress. I think you couldn't, we do these kinds of experiments that I'll just be really concrete, right? We study social primates in captivity too and they live in groups together and they all have enough to eat and nobody's gonna eat them. And they actually all have universal healthcare too, right? And as much as that exists for captive primates. And their stress because they interact with each other. Now it'd be much worse for them if they weren't living with each other, but living with each other, they form dominance hierarchies. They push each other around. They negotiate social relationships with each other that are not always producing the outcome that a particular individual wants, right? So I think again, for intrinsically social speech, like we have people that we love in our lives, right? And we're much happier that they're in our lives and not in our lives, but that doesn't mean that they never stress us out. I think for a social creature, it would actually be very, very difficult to imagine a life without stress, right? And a life that, yeah. Even in the absence of all those things that we usually think about as environmental stressors, we still have each other. I think this is a great segue into the review paper that we wanted. Yeah, this is a great segue into the review paper. Oh, there's a segue into a review paper. I wanted to ask, so your review paper in science, can you tell us more about what you looked at, what you concluded, and how potentially it's related to this conversation we're having right now? Sure, totally. Okay, so I should be, I'm glad you brought that up, partly because I want to make clear that this idea that our social environments are a major determinants of our health and well-being is like a really old idea in the social sciences. Colleagues of mine who work in sociology, if you tell them, well, I learned that social isolation predicts a shorter lifespan. They'll say, well, Durkheim told us that, like in the late 19th century, right? This is old, but understanding why that's happening in humans, is it because we live in these weird societies that are very different from maybe our evolutionary past or is it because lower socioeconomic status has correlated with smoking behavior or is it because if you're sick, then you can't finish your education, right? All of these possible pathways are acting together. It's been hard, even though the observations have been in humans to understand what's going on and whether there is a fundamental biology to what are often termed as social determinants of health. So one of the things we were really interested in is taking results from the last 10 years and just trying to pull them together to ask, well, what's the evidence that social integration versus social isolation or being high or low on a status hierarchy that we can measure in other species has similar kinds of outcomes, especially for lifespan as have been observed in humans. And these kinds of studies have only recently started to be done in other wild social mammals because you need to follow animals over their entire lifespans to know, you know, what happened to them and when they died. And so often you need decades and decades of individually centered data to get this. But people have started to have those kinds of data for a lot of different species now. And what it looks like is that we are really not alone in these kinds of phenomena. So what I mean by that concretely is that there is now evidence that less socially integrated, more socially isolated, whales, dolphins, baboons, resus macaques, horses, also live shorter lifespans than other individuals who are around them who are experiencing the same kind of physical environment who are socially integrated. And similar kinds of patterns have been described for early life social adversity and for differences in social status. That combines with some other studies that we reviewed that are really focused on captive animals where you can do a lot of that fine scale control that Blair was talking about. You can give them all the same diet, right? You can rule that kind of thing out. And in some of those contexts, there's also really good evidence now that chronic social stress imposed by things like low social status translates to higher rates of heart disease, higher rates in some cases of vulnerability to respiratory viruses, higher rates of things that look like a pre-diabetic kind of syndrome. And so put together, I think it tells us two things. One is that we didn't invent the dependencies on the social environment. This seems to be something that evolves often when animals evolve to depend on living together with each other. And two, that if we all understand the social determinants of health, studying other species might be a really valuable way to get at that question. Yeah. One thing I've been finding interesting is there are rising levels during this stay-at-homeness of domestic violence. This is usually the thing that people talk about when they talk about what stresses you out, it's usually work. And now they don't have that other stress. They don't have this competing stress from having a home life stress. Are we also now, have we developed, do you think maybe, I mean, this is, you're allowed to speculate a little bit on this show. It's okay. I'm sorry. The study isn't done yet. I think that's the speculations. Okay, okay, good. Because it seems like when we were breaking up, we had sports to stress about. And you're like, team was gonna do greater than it did terrible. So we were up or we're down and then work was going good or bad and we were stressed. And then we got home and things were okay or maybe they weren't, but it was just that one day we had to argue and now we're fine. Now, like everything that we're going through is just in this one social group of home for a lot of people, for most people who are staying home. It's interesting that that's resulting in domestic violence because we don't have a lot of the other stresses that we would normally put ourselves through to sort of dissipate where our attention to stress is. Does this make any sense whatsoever? Yeah, I think. So interestingly, I think it relates to some of the things that we point out in the paper are different between humans and the other animals that people study, the sort of social term of health in, which is that in other animals, basically your social environment is completely structured by the other individuals that you are actually physically interact with, right? So we're really talking about social relationships between that other baboon that you can see right over there and then the one over there and the one over there. But we humans are really sophisticated and tricky species and we have social relationships with people that we aren't physically adjacent to all the time, right? We think about social status in the context of wealth and income and educational attainment and social prestige and all this sort of stuff. And we can still do that. And in fact, anxiety about unemployment and about social disparities related to the pandemic, that those may not be about people who are in the same household as you, but those are still social pressures that are causing a lot of stress right now. So I think we're still part of those larger environments. And it's actually one of the things that makes this topic so hard to study in humans is that we are members often simultaneously of a bunch of different social communities at the same time, right? And so as you say, things could be going great at work but poorly in your social environment at home or they could be going swimmingly at church but you're doing really poorly on your softball team and which of those things are salient to you and to the outcomes that we care about in terms of health. It can be tricky to disentangle, right? They may interact in complicated ways. So there's a sense in which when we study other animals we're really, really simplifying that picture because then it's really just about sort of simpler notions of status and integration among the other individuals directly around you. And that's a benefit of studying animal models, right? We study animal models because they simplify something that's complicated in a way that can help us understand it. But it's also a limitation because we just, we don't have the same sort of complexities of stigma that can be projected over Twitter among people that you will never ever meet and yet can have strong effects on people's certainly mental health. We know that quite well. As we're coming to the end Blair I think you had a question about the constraints on choice that people are feeling right now. So I think that if you asked that Jenny, it would be great. Yeah, so obviously all the stuff that we're talking about has a lot of implications on the crazy, unusual, unprecedented times we're dealing with right now as everyone likes to say. And I think, we've talked a lot about social kind of relationships but I think the other side of this pandemic that is, I know affecting me and must be affecting other people. I'm kind of curious based on what you know about stress and social dynamics and stuff, how this might be related is this idea that you have so little control over all these different variables related to your job from day to day. So I read this tweet last week and I'm gonna read it again. It was meetings lately are mostly like this. We don't know much but we do know we can't really tell you. Everything is going to change. Given the above, please make a plan. So just kind of living in this constant like fight or flight of, I'm gonna do this and it might be worth something and it might be worth nothing and just kind of this high level lack of control but also high stress moment professionally. I'm just kind of curious if based on what you know if you expect to see any kind of long-term impacts from that on us as a society? I think a lot of people are really interested in that question and I mean, I think we'll certainly see long-term outcomes on society from the pandemic and teasing apart how much of that is because of the physiological exposure to stress. And yeah, I mean, uncertainty is massively stressful especially in the way that many people are experiencing it right now. I mean, I think there are gonna be a lot of long-term outcomes to this pandemic due to exposure to the virus in a straightforward way due to the fact that it's massively magnifying health disparities because of who's being impacted and because people aren't pursuing regular medical care. All those things are gonna happen. I think your question is, is there an additional factor on top of that that's due to the direct experience of stress itself? I think it's possible, right? The closest I can tell you is that we've done some work asking about whether when we look at the particular types of outcomes we look at like sort of gene activity for example or stress hormone physiology, is it about what you're experiencing now or is it about what you were experiencing a year ago? If we can actually construct it so that what you're experiencing a year ago, for example, your place in the social status hierarchy is not correlated with what you're experiencing now. And by and large for actually, for several years we were like, it's all about what's happening right now. Like you move up in the hierarchy, you look like you're high ranking, you're high status, you fall down in the hierarchy, you're low status. And in a sense if that were the case then one would hope that once an experience an incredibly population level stressful experience like the pandemic paths that we have a lot of scope for recovery. We actually just did an analysis last year and we went, oh, actually, yeah, a lot of it's about where you are now but we can see the signature of where you were in the past too. It still gets carried around at least about a year later which was the amount of time that we had to study this and in Reese's Maccax, the signature of gene activity still told us something about whether a year ago that individual had been doing really well or doing relatively poorly in its group. Do we know? We didn't know how long that lasts. We don't know if that is really parallel to what we're happening right now but it says, yeah, it's possible, right? It's possible that we may carry a baggage of extended stress forward over time. And obviously, I think the jury's still out on that but it's a fascinating question to look at. Monkeys, baboons, don't meditate. I'd like to remind you of my grandmother who grew up through the Great Depression who had the biggest, most packed pantry that you could ever possibly, canned food, like everything could shut down. The pant, like if this was going on, she had food for like a year. All canned goods. But for like a year and frozen, she had like two freezers in the back. But also remind me of the, is it a Norwegian or Swedish farm that they, where it was like generations later, you could see the stress that prepubescence had gone through in times of feast or famine on their grandchildren. Like the epigens, yeah, yeah. Possible. Those are hard studies to do because you got to go through multiple generations. And you got to starve some of them, which is... Well, yeah, I wouldn't do that. And that's what scientists like to call a natural experiment. And I think the thing that you bring up about your grandmother, right? Like that is, I think what you're describing is long-term behavioral change, right? And so what that means is that you have an experience and then say it happens now and we all start hoarding toilet paper into the future, right? And there's something about hoarding toilet paper. Right, where the paper becomes the thing. Exactly. And that has an immediate physiological response. Then you have a long, I mean, those are both long-term effects of an experience, right? But they're long-term effects that we might think about in different kinds of ways, right? There's a long-term effect. Yeah, I'm thinking about. Yeah, and instead of like... Keep that in your mind, right? Yeah, instead of being like, there's four roles left and I'm stressed, we need to get... Now you're like, I'm down to my last 60 roles of toilet paper and that stress is kicking in. That's right, time to fill up another closet. Yeah. So as we kind of look forward to the next stage of all of this, is there anything that you can take from what you've learned studying non-human animals and specifically baboons that maybe we could apply to managing stress in ourselves? Oh, boy. I am so averse to making any sort of recommendations for what other people do. So I'll try and turn that around and say that doing this kind of work has helped stress to me the importance of trying to hold people that I care about close and to try and check in on them. And we were talking a little bit before we went live about the natural introversion of many scientists and I'm among them. I like interacting with people, but then I have to go take a nap afterwards. And I think working in this area does... It just makes me walk around all the time thinking, boy, one of the most important things in our world is how we interact with other people. So I'm sure that's at the forefront of my mind more often than it might be if I hadn't gotten the chance to study the baboons. Nice. Well, Jenny, we wanna thank you so much for spending some time with us today. This is fascinating. Hopefully we can dive further into this subject another time. Where can people find out more about you and follow you online? You can follow me on Twitter at JTong5. You can check out my lab website at tongue-lab.org. You can check out the Ambicelli Baboon Research Project, which is even more interesting at... Gosh, Ambicelli Baboons. AmbicelliBaboons.nd.edu. So those are all good sources of information. Perfect. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Jenny Tong. We are going to take a very quick break. I hope you will all stay tuned for more This Week in Science coming up next. You can always tell it's gonna be a good interview when they dance to the opening music. It's good to do. I'll take that as a compliment, not necessarily. Some people feel like, am I supposed I'll just pretend I'm a statue. And then you can see the lean back as they shrink in camera. But that would feel even more awkward. You know, to go back and forth between your awesome moves and then just be like... Yeah. Now, you're right there. You have to assert your dominance in the space by... Well, that's right. Of membership. I just want you to know and I'll see you. Join the social group. I'm so sorry. I don't understand what happened here. It's super weird. But it was really fun doing this. It was so weird there. It never made sense to me. It was wonderful. Thank you. The whole concept was that we went to one server and then it gets bounced back to us. But obviously we get different feeds, which is really weird. I don't know. That's bizarre. Well, Kiki said it was wonderful if you could hear. Thank you to work on my reading skills. It's almost midnight here, so I'm gonna head to bed. But I really appreciate you having me. Thank you very much, Kiki, for inviting me. It was really fun talking about all this stuff. You're welcome. She said you're welcome. She says you're welcome. You're welcome. Oh, no. Oh, my God, that was one of the best ever. Oh, man. That was wild. It was wild stuff. It was wild, wild, wild. I have a feeling Justin is moving out for his little break, but our break isn't gonna be that long because we do wanna keep the show moving. So I would love to say thank you for listening to TWIS. You are the reason that we are able to do what we do every week, bringing up to date and down to earth views on science discoveries. And with your help, we can do even more. Together, we can bring a sane perspective to a world full of misinformation. Head to TWIS.org. Right now, click on that Patreon link and choose your level of support. Be a part of bringing sanity and science to more people. And we're back. You're listening to This Week in Science. Higgy, you got a COVID update for us? Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. I do have a COVID update for us, foe show. And I just want to let you know that the numbers of dead continue to increase, but the rate of new death seems to be plateauing in the United States, if not decreasing slightly, which is good news. However, the World Health Organization warned this week that the first wave of infections is not yet complete. We are not out of the woods yet, so don't become complacent. They continue to suggest people wash their hands, wear masks, and stay home when possible. Now, big questions enter into how we're going to move forward with all this. What are we going to be doing? How are we going to treat people? We have talked previously about convalescent plasma, and a couple of studies out this week suggest that this convalescent plasma, Blair, do I need to define it? Should I tell you what the convalescent plasma is? It's blood from people who had it and didn't die, right? Ding, ding, yes. You get it correctly, yes. Oh, Tom Hanks is what I'd like to consider. And so it is plasma. It's not the blood, it's the plasma. It's the stuff that's not the blood cells, and that plasma contains antibodies if the person recovered and was able to fight off the disease. Now, these antibodies vary in their concentrations in different people's bloods because some people didn't have a very strong immune reaction to the disease, the virus in the first place. Some people might have had a really strong immune reaction. Other people may not have had a lot of virus in them to fight off. And so there are a lot of factors that go into play in how much antibody is actually present that could be able to do work on people. That said, there have been a couple of studies, one looking at rhesus macaques and another looking at human patients, and there were a few previous as well. This one in human patients most recently looked at a fairly large sample size. However, it wasn't completely controlled. It wasn't a double blind randomly, random controlled study. But what they discovered is that the patients that were given convalescent plasma did recover seem, they recovered more quickly, slightly more quickly than patients who did not receive the convalescent plasma. And there did seem to be a reduction in the number of individuals that went to the more severe disease states and required ventilation if they were given the convalescent plasma early. So there is a timing in which they think the plasma may be beneficial. So earlier the better, but the jury is still out on whether or not it works. Now that said, there is another strategy that people are using. Let me see if I can find the article that I was looking at, I was just talking. So there's another strategy that has been used in the past that's not convalescent plasma, but is a, it's called hyperimmune globulin. And what they do is they take a lot of blood from a lot of people and they pool it. So instead of taking- I was gonna make a joke, mix it up in a big bowl. I was like pretty much that, yeah. That's what they do. And so they call it hyperimmune globulin. And so it's the difference between taking a bag of plasma from a single donor and giving it to a single recipient versus they're taking all the bags of plasma, mixing them all together and concentrating it so that it is a known concentration of antibodies within the hyperimmune globulin. And this was attempted for the H1N1 virus when that came around and there was a large amount of this convalescent, the plasma that was made into this globulin for H1N1, but then that ended up being mild and they didn't end up using it. But researchers are saying now that this is gonna last for a while, they don't foresee it going away and they think it's going to make a difference because there are studies now showing, there's a paper out in nature showing specifically how an antibody binds to the SARS-CoV-2 receptor or the SARS-CoV-2 virus and they're showing mechanisms where you have studies showing that antibodies are giving some immunity that they, and we're having this good news that antibody or at least convalescent plasma treatment is having a slight effect or at least an effect that's promising enough that major controlled studies are going forward. They're very least this mixing bowl of antibodies could give a more consistent supply to doctors, which if there's research to base up how much is needed to cross a certain threshold can actually be actioned upon as opposed to it's got a number of antibodies and we don't know how long you should be doing a transfusion and it does give at least a dosage if you will schedule effect to it, which is, yeah, that's smart. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is smart. It would be an interesting way to move forward with this and so hopefully the controlled studies looking at the plasma will find a bigger benefit and that will hopefully convince companies, people, whoever does this that compiles all of the plasma to make the globulin that can then be used leader after leader to be able to help save lives because we are going to need those treatments. Now on the other side of it, we keep hearing schools can't open until there's a vaccine. We can't do this until there's a vaccine. We can't do that until there's a vaccine and there was an article out in stat news this week that I think is a very important one written by Helen Branswell called the world needs COVID-19 vaccines. It may also be overestimating their power and what it goes on to say is that, what we've talked about previously is that vaccines are not always 100% effective. In fact, very rarely are they 100% effective. Often they need boosters or they only confer a limited period of time for resistance. So the flu virus, you have to get a new because the flu virus mutates so quickly you need a new vaccine jab every year. Hopefully the coronavirus does not have that happen. Hopefully we've seen so far it doesn't appear to mutate that quickly. So hopefully it'll be, we can get a vaccine and it'll confer a certain amount of immunity but it's likely that it may only confer about 50% protection. Maybe we don't know, we have no idea how much protection we're going to get and the researchers moving this forward still think there's a quote from Vincent Munster who is the Chief of the Virus Ecology Unit at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana. And he says, if we push the disease from pneumonia to a common cold then I think that's a huge step forward. And that's another aspect of if you don't have 100% resistance or immunity from a vaccine and it's only partial, does that mean that you still get slightly sick but then it's just a cold and it's not something that puts you in the hospital on a ventilator. And that's a win in a public health sense. Along those lines, there was a survey also this year of people to see whether or not they would get the COVID-19 vaccine and 50% of the respondents said that they would. So how do we get that number higher is the question. 50%. Yes. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, people everywhere. I'm quite convinced that half of the people on this planet are idiots. I don't have another way of saying it anymore. It's just getting to the point where, you know what keeps running through my head when I keep seeing these people arguing against wearing a face mask or whatever it is. That's just ridiculously dumb at this point. I keep thinking of when you brought up the Bob Newhart psychology. Stop it. Stop it. Just stop it. But I really think stop it. No, but we've got to do something about stop it. This is gonna take about most five minutes, probably three, that's the average. But go ahead and say what your thing is. Okay. And stop it. That's it. Like I don't have another response to these people anymore. I really don't. That's just all I have now. So I have a question. How was the survey administered? Do you know? Yes. Yes, so this survey, let me get to the bottom of my article. This was an AP NORC poll of 1,056 adults conducted May 14th to 18th using a sample drawn from a probability-based Amerispeak panel designed to be representative of the US population. Margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4.2% points. I just, my problem with sampling this is that there's still some self-selection going on and who responds. Usually, yes, there is, but I think it's interesting enough. Yeah. People, what we have to do, and Justin, I think this is to your point, yes. I want people to, you know, let's all have a conversation and can we get over, can we get past this? Can we do the things we need to do to get past it? But we have to address people's fear. We have to address their misconceptions. We have to understand why they're coming from, where they're coming from. And one of the things that I'm going to continue to say is that just because we are pushing the speed of vaccine development forward, what that means is it is resource allocation. We are allocating people and time and money to getting this done because this is a very serious, very serious situation for the globe. That does not mean that it is short changing the way the vaccine is getting produced, that it is going to produce a less safe vaccine than other vaccines, that it will not go through the testing that it needs to go through. We need to, it's not just fast. It's going to be fast and good. Yeah, well, it may actually really... It may actually, there's a lot of money going toward it. Yeah, so it may actually be short changing the investment. That's the thing that's at risk is not the outcome treatment. The thing that is most at risk with all of this is the money that is put into it. Usually money put into something in a pharmaceutical sense is done very stepwise so that there's the least amount of financial exposure if it doesn't work out. What they're doing is they're taking that sort of protection away and saying let's spend and lose if we have to to get there. And that is the risk that's being taken is financial risks and not health risks. No. I think that's the part that is a big disconnect is I'm hearing a lot of narratives that are, the implication is like, oh well, because they pushed it through, I'm getting it as soon as they're done with the mice. It's like, no, that's not, there's, we're still gonna do all the steps. You can volunteer to be part of a trial. Yes, absolutely, but there's still gonna be trials before everybody's getting it. And I think that, like you were saying, that's this kind of disconnect is, just because it's going faster, doesn't mean we're all lab rats now. That's not how this works. That's not how it works. No. Yeah, Charm in the chat room. Charm in the chat room. But herd immunity needs 70% social immunity. This is an argument that I don't know that I quite am right or understand, but it seems to me that herd immunity can be any percentage in its lending to a reduction, or the term we're currently familiar with, a flattening of the curve. It could be 30%, it could be 20%. You will still be flattening that curve, but the highest, the higher the amount you have, obviously, and you can throw vaccines into part of that herd immunity at some point when some of us have it and some of us don't have access to it yet. You are still slowing the rate. So the greater it is, I guess it just means it can be... Yeah, when it's less than sufficient, when it's a percentage of the population that's less than sufficient to stop the spread of the disease, then you don't have herd immunity. You are the larger the percentage you have, the greater or the, yes, the flatter the curve will become. It's 30%, you flatten more slowly than if it's 50%, 70% is going to be great, but you can't just say we need 70% because it does depend specifically on the population you're talking about. And some populations may need to be close to 100% to have protection. Other populations, it might be less, but it depends on the individuals that make your population up. Yeah, and I'm gonna need some extra up-number. Isn't the 70% also partially based on the idea of a percentage of the community being immunocompromised, older, too young? Like that is exactly what that 70 is from, right? Yeah, the idea is that you're protecting that percentage of the population. Yeah, but it's not quite that simple. So if, because this is a magnitudinal growth situation, when we're talking about, if we had a 20% herd immunity at the beginning of this outbreak, it wouldn't mean we would have 80,000 deaths instead of 100,000. It might mean that we had somewhere like 40,000 because a lot it would have- But herd immunity is specific to the, I thought it was specific to the state of a population when it is immune to- It's protected from a virus, from a disease. Yes, yes, but still having some herd immunity, having some immunity within the herd. Yes, just immunity within the herd. Having some immunity within the herd. Having it, we were at 20% when this thing started, it wouldn't have just reduced at the death toll by 20% because the rate at which things grow, every reduction reduces 10, which reduces those 10 getting another 10s. Like it's, so it doesn't have to, we don't have to get there to say that we've gotten to that point, but we do absolutely also to your point, need a vaccine. That would be sufficient. Even if it wasn't the silver bullet vaccine, even if it was 50%- Oh, it'll help for sure. It will help, yeah. Yeah, anything is going to help us, but at this point there are, what the stat article was suggesting is that we can't pin all of our hopes on a vaccine because although we are pushing things forward, we don't know if any of them are really going to work. There's a lot of promising stuff right now and all the promising stuff is getting all the news and it's fantastic. There's an adenovirus vaccine that just got great positive results in China. The Moderna vaccine is moving forward. There's the Oxford vaccine is great. There's all sorts of vaccines that are moving forward at pace and it's fantastic, but we don't know if we're going to have something in 18 months. We don't know if we're going to have something in four years and to pin all of our social efforts on the advent of a vaccine is not a good idea because we don't know if it's going to come. So we need to use other methods like contact tracing and social isolation for infected or for exposed individuals. We need to have methods, mask wearing. We need to adopt social and public health measures and basically have a plan in order to move back to more normal behaviors even before a vaccine comes out and because that's what we're going to need. Yeah, you need to prevent transmission. You need to prevent infection and then you need to prevent fatality after infection. Like you need all of those different arenas. And I also want anybody who's watching any news networks that are arguing that we should be going out and resuming business as usual, notice that they are all broadcasting from home. Yeah, they are. They're all already. They're not making that advice that they are giving you. Yep. All right, let's move on from COVID-19 and into some fun science. What about bumblebees? Justin, you got bumblebees? Well, if you give me a few minutes because of the state of my computer, oh, here we go. Okay, so in the new normal, that is global warming, spring is getting sprung earlier than it ever has before. Thanks to temperatures more typical of early summertime that we've been having in the spring, many plants were already in full bloom by mid-April, a good three to four weeks earlier than in non-global warming normal days. So these new normal seasonal anomalies are resulting in food web uncertainty by disrupting the timing of relationship between plants and birds and insects and other animals that have seasonal predation habits or reliances upon each other. And this is the case study from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. They were looking at plants and their insect pollinators and trying to see how that relationship has been affected. Research team led by professors Quansuela de Moreas and Mark Mesher have discovered that one particular bumblebee behavior or one peculiar bumblebee behavior may be carving them out a niche. It may actually be a skill set that these bumblebees have. They find that bumblebee workers use their mouth parts to pinch into leaves of plants that haven't flowered. The resulting damage stimulates the production of new flowers on those plants. That bloom earlier than those on plants that haven't been given this mouthy bite nudge. Amazingly, bumblebees have a trick to get plants to produce flowers earlier than they normally would. Researchers first noticed the behavior during the other experiments being undertaken by one of the authors. Pollinators were biting the leaves to test plants in the greenhouse, of test plants in the greenhouse. According to the voice of Fodenini Pasha, oh, I'm gonna mess up your name, I'm so sorry. They're one of the researchers. Our further investigation, we found that others had also observed such behaviors, but no one had explored what the bees were doing to the plants or reported in effect on flower production. This is a quote actually from Mesher. Following up in their observations, researchers devised several new laboratory experiments, also conducted some outdoor studies using some available bumblebee colonies and a variety of different plant species as well. Based on their lab studies, researchers were able to show that bumblebees, propensity to damage leaves, has a strong correlation, still correlation, with the amount of pollen they can obtain from those plants. So, it sounds like bumblebees have been before. They kind of get how to, it's like almost like a little bit of plant husbandry, isn't it? A little. They're like, if I bite you, you're gonna be better to me. I was thinking it was more like tickling somebody until they sneeze. Who sneezes when they get tickled? I've never. You look like a feather under the nose. Makes you sneeze. No. In cartoon, they're like going away, right? Yeah, hair on my nose makes me sneeze. But anyway, that's where what I was thinking was like. You live in a strange household. You should probably not have shared that, probably. Probably has some deep psychological, This is a really interesting thing though. I mean, why would this physical damage, to have a, figured out a mechanism, why does this physical damage lead to more pollen production? And how did bees figure out this relationship? So interesting. Well, bees care about flowering plants. So, if this is, when I say care, if this is just sort of a random behavior that some bumblebees at some point started doing, okay, for whatever, a gene that was supposed to get them to go look for another plant got tweaked and now they have this behavior where they just get mad at the plant for not having flowers and they bite it. They get stressed out like, oh, you stupid one. But then it turned out, the plant responded by flowering early. So the behavior continues. Those bees that have this biting activity towards the plant. If you're asking me to explain the evolution of this behavior, I'm just guessing. Don't, don't guess, no. Yeah. Something like this. Well, of course that's the next thing is to go look for the mechanism within the plant that does this. But it is sort of interesting that the bumblebee has something in its bag of tricks to handle the early spring, to handle the plants that maybe haven't flowered yet or flowered too early and get them to flower again. So bumblebees will survive this. It's fascinating. Now I wanna know the mechanism. I wanna know why, I mean, is this really just correlation and it happens to just be a, oh, that happened? Or is it really causational? That's, they have, they need to figure that out now because I wanna know. Is it co-evolution? Which is what I was wondering. Is specifically if the plant wants to know when the bee, wants to know when the bee is there. Because it behooves them to let the bees pollinate. So. This is how the bee lets the plant know that it's there. Yeah. I'm here. Bite. Flower. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. It's not. Hey, it's me. Do your thing, I'm here. I'm your friend. Hey, you got that package for me? Look, this is pretty dramatic. Tomato plants, tomato plants that got bitten, flowered up to 30 days earlier than those that had not been targeted. In the life cycle of a plant, 30 days is pretty huge. It's huge. Yeah, it's a big difference. Mustard plants were 14 days earlier when they got the bite. So there's a pretty strong, it's pretty dramatic correlation as far. They think it might have something to do with the, during the development stage of a growing plant, a young plant might be something in there, but. Yeah, yeah. They were studying bees. They weren't studying the plants. Now they got it. Now they have to study the plants. So I don't know, I'm just imagining now going around biting the postal carriers to get them to bring me more packages. Okay, Kiki, you do need to stop doing that. This has gone on too long. I'm here, bring me more packages. That's not gonna work. Oh my goodness. All right. Well, if you're here, you just tuned in to this week in science. If you are interested in a twist shirt mug or face mask of twist merchandise. Yes, go to twist.org and click on the Zazzle link to browse our store. Our face masks are in now. It's exciting. Go get a twist face mask, a Blair's Animal Corner art face mask. Oh, and it is time now for Blair's Animal Corner. With Blair. By pet, nilla, pet, no pet at all. If you wanna hear about this animal, she's your girl. Except for giant panellists, girl. In that animal corner. Kat, Blair. Did you know? Nope, that there are frogs in Mexico and South America that are translucent. Translucent. Sounds like a wonderful model animal for researchers. It does. That means you can see into their insides. It means you can kinda see through them. So they're called glass frogs and scientists have known about them for a while. But this new study from University of Bristol, McMaster University and University de las Américas quito sought to establish the ecological importance of glass frogs and their translucency and have found what they think is a new kind of camouflage. So they're not all the way see through. So they're not transparent, even though they have been explained for a very long time as the kind of quintessential transparent camouflage example. But they're not transparent because true transparency would mean you could see all the way through them. But these guys, they still have a green hue. So they're always green no matter what, but they are brighter or darker depending on their background. And the change in brightness makes them match their background better, which is usually green leaves. So it's helpful that they're green. But there was something missing here because if it was really just to match their background, they could just be green and it would probably be fine. So why do they have this translucency? And even more interesting, they discovered that the amount that they were translucent was different in different parts of their body. Their legs are more translucent than the rest of them. And so when their legs are tucked to the sides of them, it actually creates a diffuse gradient from leaf color to frog color. It makes them fuzzy around the edges. So they have deemed this a brand new form of camouflage called edge diffusion. So if you can't see the edges, you're just generally gonna be harder to see. Yes. So this is also the reason that a lot of animals are striped or spotted or like splotchy in coloration is to break up their body shape because even if he was the perfect color green for that leaf, if he jumped onto a different leaf, he would suddenly be a frog shaped green blob. So you wanna be a different shape. Even if you don't match your space perfectly, you wanna make sure that you're not a animal shaped blob of whatever color you are. So there's different ways that animals do that. But in this case, they're saying that this edge diffusion allows their edge to get specifically very like fuzzy. So it's really hard to tell that that green blip that doesn't quite match the leaf is a frog. It could be a droplet of water. It could be moss. It could be any number of things that is also green but is not necessarily a snack. So it's really, it's a wild idea for a new way that animals might be using camouflage. So they studied this with behavioral trials in the field, computational visual modeling and computer-based detection experimentation. So all of those things together allowed them to kind of build this theory of edge diffusion. So this is pretty cool. It's not every day that you discover a new method of camouflage. And so now the question is, yeah, it's very cool. And now the question is, when you go back and look at different species, how many of them are using this? Yeah, yeah. So the other thing that I thought was really interesting is that kind of one of the reasons the researchers wanted to dive deeper into how GlassFrog transparency works is that transparency would be the best camouflage. That's very clear. Like if you can look exactly like whatever you're behind or in front of, that's the best way. That's the best way to evade detection and evade being. And you don't have to have weird melanophores or the things that the octopuses and squids have. Right. Yeah, chromatophore. Chromatophores? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And when you're looking for transparency in camouflage, you can usually find it in the aquatic environment. And it's because animal tissues have a similar refractive index to water. We're all bags of liquid. We know that. So it makes sense, it's similar. But when you take a bag of liquid, an animal of any sort, and you put them up on land in open air, they have completely different refractive indices. They have different ways that they act. And so transparency is way less effective in terrestrial environments. So even though they often call GlassFrog the poster board example of terrestrial transparency, it's starting to be clear that they're not. So first, are there terrestrial transparency examples out there if we rule out the GlassFrog? But second of all, and perhaps more interestingly, who else is using edge diffusion? Yeah. I feel like there's fish that do this. Yes, there are the fish, there's, yes, there are. But terrestrial, yes. That's the question. Yeah. Who does it on there? Yeah. To translucent insect wings, count. Yeah, so they're definitely very light colored spiders that kind of see through a little bit, they're not invisible. So yeah, it's a good question. I'm now looking it up. I'm trying to find out. Transparent animals on land. Well, while you're looking that up, I'll transition to my next story, which is actually a follow up from a story I've did a very long time ago about competition for mates amongst siblings. So I don't know how long ago this was, but I brought a story about fruit flies. It has since been repeated with red jungle fowl, and it showed that males competing to mate with a female show less aggression when they're related to each other. And that's unusual because usually the more aggressive male is more likely to mate. So you would think that everybody would be aggressive no matter what because they'd want to succeed. But this is all based on this idea of the selfish gene where basically because those two males are related, either of them winning and getting to mate is a success for their DNA. So if they can get any of their genetic material passed on, that's a success. So they don't want to kill each other trying to compete for a mate because then they both lose the opportunity to pass on that DNA. However, if the competitor is unrelated, they don't carry the same DNA, the male is more likely to do everything possible to mate, which means fighting as hard as he possibly can, even if he harms or potentially kills the female in the process because it's worth the risk, ultimately. The DNA talking, not me, the DNA. So the DNA says I can, yeah, nevermind. So that's the previous study, okay? Now this is a new study from University of St. Andrews, the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse and the University of Valencia. And this is showing something pretty interesting, which is that through mathematical modeling, this is what they call kin discrimination, this kind of reduced thing, how hard you're fighting if you're fighting against a sibling. It actually creates more aggression overall in males because their number of opportunities are reduced so the stakes when they finally do let loose and fight as hard as they can are highest. So they actually compete harder, their aggression is increased, and the likelihood of hurting each other or the female is increased. So even though you might think at first it would be better to be competing with relatives for mates because in that moment, the competition is less fierce. In this case, in the long run, it's worse for everybody. Wait, that wasn't the punchline I was expecting. Worse for everybody. Worse for everybody. So one of the lead researchers said, quote, although males who are competing against brothers will ramp down their harming behavior, a male who is able to tell that he is competing against non-relatives will then ramp up his harming behavior and overall this means that there is an increase in the amount of harming in the population as a whole compared to with what would happen if males weren't able to tell who their brother is and who is not. So in this case, being able to recognize your kin actually is worse for the population in the long run. And in this case, I would say definitely the female because when you're fighting harder for access to the female, the female is more likely to be injured. So, yeah, it's wild. It's, there's no winning if you're the woman on the side of this is the problem. And that's why we say for this reason, as one of many, but this reason is a great reason for us to be human and not ducks. Yep, absolutely. Yes, the image attached to this is quite rough. Yeah, it's a harsh reality that, we've talked about it a lot that the sperm is cheap and eggs are very expensive. And so the name of the game for most males are to mate with as many females as possible. And so that can create some very interesting dynamics. And you would think that if you are surrounded by loved ones and you would therefore not fight as hard, that that would be a good thing, but it was better to not know who you're related to in the mating game, it turns out. Fascinating. Yeah. Fascinating. Well, I think overall though, for beyond kin discrimination when we're talking about the passing genetic mutation on potentially recessive diseases that come with things like incest, it's good to know who you're related to. And it's, but in terms of, and that's a different trade-off, right? Yeah, and that's a totally different recognition system too. And there's internal stuff that happened there too. Sometimes if DNA is not compatible between a male and a female, that they'll have trouble conceiving. So there's lots of things that hopefully would help with that. But yeah, this is more of the, yeah, just not wanting to get hurt each other if you're related. Not knowing. Like you go ahead, man. Your success is my success, bro. Oh my goodness. All right. Well, this story is bringing me a little bit down. And so I want to talk about some strong women. Yeah. I want to jump into the quick science news for the end of the show with a story about some strong women out. Is it about me? No. I don't know. Have you had your DNA sequence to determine whether or not you have a Neanderthal gene that determines your progesterone receptors? No. No. Okay. What? What? Yes. In a study that is published this week out of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Keralinska Institute in Sweden, researchers have determined, unless it's published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, researchers have determined that approximately one in three European women have inherited the progesterone receptor that they have from Neanderthals. 29% of European women carry at least one copy of the Neanderthal receptor and 3% have two copies. Researcher Hugo Zeberg who worked on this study says the proportion of women who inherited this gene is about 10 times greater than for most Neanderthal gene variants. These findings suggest that it was positively selected for. Yes, and so the progesterone receptor, what they think is going on is that the progesterone receptor from the Neanderthals allowed better fertility so that the molecular analyses revealed that these women who have this receptor produce more progesterone receptors in their cells, which could then increase sensitivity to progesterone. So if you have more receptors, there's more little fingers out there to grab the progesterone that is circulating in the blood. And that progesterone can then increase protection against early miscarriages and bleeding. The study showed that women who have this Neanderthal variant tend to have fewer bleeds during... So after all of our conversations of the potentiality of just being outbred by Neanderthals, does this mean that maybe humans weren't going around outbreeding Neanderthals? I mean, we definitely... They definitely had smaller social groups, but they had smaller social groups than we had after Neanderthals. I don't really know that they had much smaller social groups than we had before we encountered Neanderthal. Yeah. And sort of this thing like, there's always been this like, humans just outbred the Neanderthal. But this led to, but this led to yeah, but if it was a mixing of Neanderthals and humans together and then the progesterone receptors in humans allowed humans to survive... Current model. Pregnancy, fewer miscarriages actually survive pregnancy, bear more children, which the study showed that the women with these variants gave birth to more children than women without the variant. It's a very compelling story. Well, and it makes sense, doesn't it? So Neanderthals had small pods of humans. They didn't, their kids grew up quicker, but they also kept smaller groups. So they may have had less children. Much more important evolutionarily, the forces that be, if you're not gonna have a lot of children, they better make it. They better survive. Yeah. Whereas, you know, human children, you have them, you don't have them, there's more, there's always more humans. So yeah, it's sort of interesting how these two sort of different strategies, once they got mixed, there is a successful hybrid of the two that's going to sort of out compete and stick around. It's a pretty amazing number for how many people have this, for how small the overall percentage of Neanderthal DNA is in even the most Neanderthal human today. It's very, it's small. Yeah, it's like 2%, I think. It's a very small percentage of Neanderthal DNA in the average person. The average, yes. Yeah, but for Europeans, there's a higher percentage of course, but this is like far and above the most genetic variants from Neanderthals that have persisted in humanity. And so this is really interesting. So why the rest of it persisted? Yeah, there's linking, you know, all the chromosomal linking and all that kind of stuff, but it's good. Also, another study this week, we've asked many, many times, where's all the matter in the universe? Right? The normal matter, the stuff baryonic matter. We know that there's a lot of stuff that we can't see and that we can't, we don't know where it is, the dark matter or the dark energy, that stuff, that's not what this study is about. I'm talking about regular matter, the stuff that makes us up. Well, we're missing a large percentage of that. We've been missing a significantly huge amount for years. Quick question, the real matter, the regular matter, the normal matter that we call it, which is like 4% of what makes up the universe. We've been missing most of that 4%. Yes. It's using edge diffusion. That's why we call it edge diffusion. We don't even have all the whole 4%. Yeah, that's an estimate. It's an estimate. And actually Blair, it is using some amount of diffusion. It's another example, Blair. Yes, so a few years back, there was a study that suggested that, oh, it might be in these wispy tendrils, the web, the cosmic web that holds everything together in between the galaxies in the universe. But there hasn't really been any proof of that until now, researchers at Curtin University working with the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research. They looked at fast radio bursts from other galaxies and then looked at the way the frequencies of these radio bursts reached Earth and were able to look at the distribution of the frequencies. They assumed that if the light, the electromagnetic radiation coming from these fast radio bursts, if it interacted with any matter between where it was emitted and Earth, then that would slow it down and disperse, kind of like making a smear on a piece of paper or the way that sunlight can get separated in a prism, that it might get spread out a little bit. And so they looked at this smear of frequencies and pretty much from looking at five fast radio bursts from different places, different galaxies, and doing these estimations, they say they have found all of the missing baryonic matter in the universe. And it comes up to about 5%. Oh, we have moved up in the universe. We've moved up, yes. Not by a small amount. Thanks, smear. Thanks, frequency smear. But this definitely needs more samples. Five fast radio bursts is not a lot to be estimating from. And so they're hoping that they'll be able to use some other methods and also additional observations to be able to really nail this down and figure out if indeed it works. But the idea that they had about matter slowing things down and it worked and they have an estimate and it's kind of neat. And so this is our evidence that, yes, that's where the matter is hiding. It's diffuse and it's just out there. And their estimates are that there is, what was it? One atom of baryonic matter per square meter in the universe. That's the average. It's just like the weakest coffee you've ever tasted. Super weak. It's like so weak. And oddly, this study was sponsored by the gynecological consortium, which reminds you. What? Frequent smears, matter more than you think. Thanks, thanks, Justin. Sorry, I had to. It was still. Hey, you know what? I'm gonna run through my last two stories really quickly. Stretchy words are on the rise. Thanks to social media. Words that used to have vocalization are starting to encroach into the written word more than they ever have before. It's a trend that has been noticed by some researchers who publish in close one. Things like, dude, hasn't been completely removed from vocabulary, but it is now showing up in print in ways it never had before. The stretching of the words can also have different meanings. This is Tyler Gray and some colleagues at the University of Vermont in Burlington who presented these in the Open Access Journal, close one. They're looking at things like the difference, the different ways in which stretchy words are used and how context in a stretchy word is sort of tied to that word. So if I say, yes. No, no, no, Justin, you're saying yourself is, yas. That's another spelling. But that's excitement, yes? But if you take the same different words, you take the word sure. If you take the word sure and stretch it, what happens? Sarcasm. Yeah, exactly. So the way in which a word is stretched, either augment, sorry, emphasizes the meaning of the word or it changes the meaning of the word. So there's this whole other thing that they're putting out there about how stretchy words influence language. It's sort of like an accent upon or an inflection upon a word. My favorite one that I use very often is S-T-A-H-P. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. So good. It's a good one. Team of the University of Rhode Island scientists and statisticians, they went back and did a really thorough look at the mass extinction event that occurred 250 million years ago, which has been debated. There was an asteroid that hit Canada that has like a 750 square mile lake where the impact took place. So that obviously killed off the dinosaurs of the day. Of course, there was also this massive heat wave thing that took place, climate global warming thing was taking place, this climate change, that definitely also killed. So but according to the research, it was neither. Actually neither. Many of the dinosaurs, after you go back and you grab all the statistics and you look at where things were found and you look at the soil samples and you do the deep dive into us, majority of the dinosaurs were going extinct before the asteroid hit. And you know, you're talking about something that's a couple hundred million years away. So when this was first looked at, things might have seemed like they were overlapping and they're pretty closer or pretty close on top of each other, but there's a host of dinosaurs that there's no evidence of existing six million years. Six million years is a long time, a lot can happen. Six million years before the asteroid, there are some that survived the asteroid and died before the global warming event or the global climate change event and there's some that made it soft. So what they said is it looks like a lot of the big species that they had tagged as extinct by these events became extinct at very different times, separated by sometimes tens of millions of years. So they don't posit an explanation for the extinction of many of these lineages that they looked at, but what they are saying is they don't seem to be associated with this asteroid event or with this climate change event that took place at that time. There were a lot of extinctions taking place maybe for very different reasons. Some could have been associated with but a lot of the big species they looked at they were separated by time by too much to actually now be associated with those events. Yeah. Some might have, there might not have even been a mass extinction, it just might have just been hard. Right, just a spread out extinction. It was hard and it was an edge diffusion of extinction. Right, that's just hard. And you're talking over millions of years too, which that's all humans have. We have a few million years. We're gonna have more time. When you think about it, where are we gonna sit on the evolutionary record when somebody millions of years from now looks back and we're like a blip will be a blip compared to dinosaurs. It will be a max, it will be the pinpoint, it will be the absolute cause of mass extinction for a lot of species. We won't be, we won't be, we'll be the asteroid that did hit and did the 65 million year ago when it hit at the right angle to take out as many life forms of, that's what we'll be, that's all distinction. We'll be noticed. Some cephalopods in the future will be like, oh yeah, the humans. Yeah. I think the assumption that this 200, 215, 220 year old extinction, yeah, 215 that it wasn't an extinction. It was years, millions of years of things dying. I mean, would climate change as we consider it has only been ongoing for about a little more than a hundred years. So this is- And really, it really accelerated the impactful stuff. It's been 40 or 50. Oh, well 50, yeah, 60. Been a while, yeah, yeah. No one's getting there. It is. Been a while. We've been avoiding this for a while. It wasn't a hundred years when we started, but it might be now. Well done people. Yeah, compare that to millions of years, yeah. Timescales, people don't understand like the whole point of like, we've been there before. Yeah, technically, but every life form had five, 10 million years to adjust to things, maybe to get to these extremes of heat. Yep, yep. Hey Blair, what's your last story? This is a fun story about geophysicists working in the Greenland Fjords. Fjords? They've been working there for several years. They were studying the sounds that are made by melting glaciers. Turns out those sounds are pretty cool. It's just basically a bunch of cracking from ice fracturing, bubbles melting. They say it's like fizzy drink underwater. And after a few years of doing that, coincidentally, a population of gnar walls started summering in those fjords. And one of the researchers said, quote, I realized working in the area and not paying attention to the elephant in the room, the key endemic legendary Arctic unicorn just flowing around our glacier was a big mistake. So with the help of Inuit hunters. Wow. They were able to record various calls, buzzes, clicks and whistles of narwhals. That's at least a hundred meter deep for a minute. It sounds like a frog. It does. Narwhals are notoriously difficult to study because they are shy. Sorry about that. They're shy, they are skittish and they spend most of their time deep in the freezing Arctic Ocean. So they're really, really hard to capture. Plus when people put underwear or microphones down attached to small boats, the narwhals just, they leave. They can't really get very close. So they actually used the knowledge of the Inuit hunters in the area to figure out how to get close to them. So they, these hunters were very familiar with the cetaceans. And so they were able to go on a hunting expedition, get up really close to those narwhals and use their same underwater microphones that they were using to capture the sound of the ice to capture these first sounds of narwhals. That's exciting. Yeah. Being able to hear. That clicking, that was really fast clicking. That was going on. That was really gravel. That, I wonder if that vocalization is like echolocation from a bat. It could, so it could be, and that is one of the theories of what a narwhal tooth might be for. It's about echolocation. Most likely it's not. Most likely it has to do with sexual selection and competition probably. Also, there's a theory that it could have to do with electromagnetic reception. Right. Which is why they don't like the microphones. No. We don't know. We don't know why they have this giant tooth. But yeah, it could be related to sound. And if that's, even if that's not the main reason, we know that other cetaceans use their mandible to channel sound through like belugas use their big melon on the top of their head, it's called. And they use their jawbone to help channel that. And so do dolphins. So it would make sense if one of your teeth connected to that jaw is sticking out that it's going to help conduct sound, even if that's not the main reason that they developed it. So. I feel like we covered the thing where they could taste with that tooth, too. It was chemo reception, something like that. Yeah. I think there might have been. So, all purpose unicorn horn. Yeah. I don't know. But anyway, we know a little bit more about them. We know what they sound like. And then we also know a couple of things about their behavior that we didn't know before. They get way closer to the glacier ice than they thought that they did. And they got to watch some of them do foraging behaviors, which they haven't really observed a whole lot before. So. Yeah, I'm learning more about the unicorns of the sea. Yeah. And it's great. The cooperation between locals with indigenous knowledge and understanding of the animals and the scientists allows the scientists to do more. And hopefully to do it in a way that's respectful and helps the community also. So all of it hopefully becomes a wonderful synergy. You mean they cotton ate one of the narwhals at the end of this? Like that's not what I'm saying. That's what the community is, Zarda. Honoring local knowledge is really important. That was the Oxpecker story from a few weeks ago was directly related to that as well. So it's really a moment for scientists to remember to kind of like leave all of their preconceptions at the door and meet people that live alongside these animals where they are first and learn from them and then combine those two things together, I think is the really great opportunity. Yeah, very great opportunity. And I think we've come to the end of our show, yes? Yes. Yeah, we have done it, everyone. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please share it with a friend. Special thanks to our guest tonight, Dr. Jenny Tong. We will have links to her website and to her social media on the Twists webpage, the episode podcast page. I'd also like to shout out my thanks to people who help with the show. Thank you, Fada, for your help with social media and show notes scored. Thank you for manning the chat room and ID4 for recording the show. Thank you so much. Also, I'd like to thank the Burroughs Welcome Fund and our Patreon sponsors for their generous support. Thank you to Paul Disney, Andrew Swanson, Stu Pollock, Ed Dyer, Ken Hayes, Craig Landon, Tony Steele, Alex Wilson, Steve DeBell, Joshua Fury, Philip Shane, Ed Love Science, Mark Mazaros, Richard Porter, Sky Luke, Brian Condren, Richard Eric Knapp, Bill K. Jason, Roberts Matthew Litwin, Jack Bob Calder, Dave Neighbor, E.O. 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This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. Roadrunner. 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 any question you've got. How can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour? We just come in the way. You've got a justice to what we say and if you learn anything. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. And that is the end of the show. You're doing arts. I am. This is a new calendar. It's a giraffe weevil. You were so close. Oh, I was so close. Giraffe weevil. You were so close. I was like, she's not going to know what this is. Look, look. I want to say giraffe. You're so close. Yeah, axolotl. This is a blue tongue skink, but you wouldn't know that because I haven't colored your tongue yet. I can't color it's tongue. I feel it was skinky. Yeah, the tiny legs. It looked pretty skinky. I did give away, yes. Roadrunner, sturgeon, lemur. Thank you everyone for watching. Oh, I'm yawning. This is a sturgeon lemur. Golden frog. It's a frog that was thought extinct for a very long time. I will see you about Justin putting the story in the run sheet, Fada. I don't have it either, so I don't know. I can go look for it. I don't know what he did. That's funny. Brian Burwell says, the music sounds so different when played at the intended speed. Oh, that's very funny. Yes, that's what you get for listening to us live. The music played at the intended speed as opposed to pitch shifted when it's supposed when you make it go faster. Do you listen to us at one and a half time? Two time? Some people listen to our show at three times speed, which I think I don't know if I could handle. I can't imagine what that must be like. That must be absolutely, I can't even. You can't even do it. I can't, it's too late. I can't talk, can't even think of words to say that. You can't talk the best? I can't talk the best. It's too late. I have a dessert that my child made. Well, I helped him make it, but it was all his thinkings. That's great. It's whipped cream. It's, and we were limited on, he wanted to make a cake and we were limited on what we could make because of ingredients. We didn't have any vanilla, but we ended up making this Italian sponge cake, fresh whipped cream and chocolate dipped strawberries. That was his. That's so good. And I think there's also a chocolate drizzle on the cake under the whipped cream. He's a regular little baker, this one. He's got fancy stuff and it also gave us time to work on adding ratios. Smart. Yes. I use that all the time when baking. Like I'm doubling this recipe. They ask for four tablespoons, but how many tablespoons are in a cup? I don't know. Right. Yes. I know that there are three teaspoons to a tablespoon. I think that's one point in the cup. Other way. Three tablespoons to everybody's Googling. Three tablespoons, 16 tablespoons to a cup. I wouldn't have known that. 1.3 times. Yes. Exactly. It's not just doubled. That's an interesting choice. Gaurav Sharma wants to know why the tongues of skinks are blue Blair. Oh, well, they're trying to scare off potential predators. So bright colors usually mean poison or venom. And in this case, it's probably related to the fact that they live where a poisonous adder, a type of snake is that has blue on their body. And so they open up their mouth really big and stick their tongue out wide. Basically be like, stay away. I'm dangerous. Skinks are not dangerous. I mean, you don't want to get bitten by a skink, but they're not dangerous. Yeah, it's not. Yeah, they're not venomous or poisonous, but. They're cute. Skinks are cute. One of the animals that you can always pet, like a zoo somewhere. Yeah, they're a pretty mild. They're always bringing up the skinks for, yeah. Yeah. Night powder. Yeah. Well, I mean, also they're like, I love everything. Like, they have a shovel-shaped head because they dig with their head. And they have teeny tiny little arms because their arms just get in the way when they dig with their head. So over evolutionary time, the eggs have gotten smaller and smaller so they could just tuck them by their side while they dig. So they're basically like a legless lizard while they're digging. I remember. That's great. I love it. Just get in there. Gotta get in there. And skinks in captivity, when you give them like dirt to live in and stuff, a lot of the time you'll come in and they'll be napping with a big pile of dirt on their head because they will have nestled into the dirt just right. And their head is fully out of the dirt but they just have a little dirt hat. It's so good. I love it. Oh, little skink. I love your dirt hat. It's so good. They're just, they're pure, they're pretty little clothes. Ah, ah, they get yawned. You yawned. I know. How was your sleep this week, Justin? Better? Oh, no. No. I thought you were, you're done with your... Oh, I got woken up by, I got woken up a couple of nights ago by a... A rooster? Yeah. A what? A dingo. No, no, no, it sounded like, I thought it was, okay, so in my dream stay, I was trying to figure out why there were hyenas. Coyotes, huh? At the farm? Coyotes, yeah. They were coyotes and they were making this amazing like, yep, yep, yep. Yeah, yeah, but it mixed with a little bit of bark and a little bit of howl. But a lot of that, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, like, and it sounded like a, like hyena sound, kind of. It was really, it was really strange. And I don't know how many there were because it was very dark out, but it sounded like there was a hundred of them. Yeah, yeah. It was, it was very loud, you know. Fun fact about coyotes, I think I shared this when I learned it last spring. They only have a dominant male and female in any specific territory. And if you hear more than, if you hear or see more than two coyotes, it's usually their babies. So they have them until they're like a year old. They'll keep some of them a little extra long to help them raise their pups. But a male and female only in a specific space, that's it. And so if you think- Yeah, that was definitely more than two. Like people think- It was a bunch. People think when they go to the Presidio in San Francisco that they've seen like 10 coyotes. You just move around a lot. Over and over again. You just see the same coyotes over and over again. Although some friends of mine were hiking in the Bay Area in San Francisco. I forget where they were, but they were on a trail and apparently some coyotes came off the trail and like grabbed the, they were with a child. And it was like a couple of adult women and a child. Yeah, and the coyote grabbed the child's jacket and tried to pull the child off the trail. So probably they were very, very, very, very close to a den. Right, maybe. Because yeah, that's like the only reason coyotes will do that is they think that dogs, that's why dogs are so at risk during coyote well-seasoned because they think that they're potentially a threat on their den. Hanuk wants to know what Justin's shirt says. People assume that time is a strict progression of cause and effect. But it's- A big ball of wibbly, wibbly, timey, wibbly. A lot of my subjective perspectives. Yeah, it's a Doctor Who quote. Yeah, Doctor Who. My favorite, what are my favorite episodes of Doctor Who? Blink. I think my favorite episode of Doctor Who ever. It's really, it's awesome. It was raining when we met, it was the same rain. I could chill, I was just thinking about it. Identity four is getting attacked by crows in his yard. They're mad about it. Sharma, Sharma, Sharma, it says it is so hot in the Bay Area, it is really affecting my sleep schedule. Okay, okay. It's like a hundred degrees in Davis, right? Yeah. No, no, no, no. That was what, that was a few days ago when it was just warming up. Yeah. I remember that day when it was like 104 and it's like, yeah, VacuVille was 103 today, Woodland's 105, Davis was 104, and the Bay Area is 78 degrees. And people are, you know what, do you know what happened? I still get SF alerts to my cell phone and to my email. And so I was alerted that got an email from the Bay Area from the city of San Francisco telling warning people that they would need to be, you know, drinking water and to be aware of the coming high temperatures. Yeah, and it is, okay, but this is a great example, though. This is a great example of global warming, though. This happens once in a while to New York City where they have a heat wave and people die because it gets to be 85 degrees over a few days. If nobody has an air conditioner, that heat becomes unmanageable. You know, it could be 104 in Davis, but everybody has air conditioning cranked up to knock it down to 68 degrees. If you live in a place where you've never had to turn on an air conditioner, so why invest in one and you don't have one? And it gets into the upper 80s and you don't have a mitigation strategy. So yeah, it's relative. But it's a great example of what the problem of global warming is. This is exactly it. There are ecosystems and biomes that don't have mitigations to a temperature increase. Even if it doesn't seem like a big deal to you, to that particular community within this biome, that is game changing. Yep, yep, yeah. Yeah, well, so the Bay Area at least, I think we're done. It's gonna be like mid-60s for the next 10 days. So the Central Valley is supposed to be done too. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I still keep an eye on California's weather. Alameda. Yeah, Sharma says, I think my house is 110 degrees indoors. My landlord says Alameda did not need air conditioners back in the day, which was a long time ago, back in the day. You could be talking about 15 years ago, 20 years ago, there was a thing where people who lived in the Bay Area or even Napa area, just west of the Central Valley would buy cars that did not have air conditioners. And they would build cars and that they would only send to the coastal California that didn't have air conditioners because nobody wanted to pay extra. My college car didn't have an air conditioner. I don't have my family. Yeah, at some point in the auto industry. My family just didn't have a lot of money growing up in the Central Valley, so we didn't have air conditioning. So we had what we called 460, we had 460. Yeah, we had 460 air conditioning. Four windows down, go 60 miles an hour and don't pull the car down. Yeah. Perfect. But that's, yeah, these sorts of things have been changing oddly. When I started dating Brian, he lived in Palo Alto and his apartment did not have air conditioning. Medium. So. Where's the old normal? Hot. Got very hot. Noodles raises a hand from a New York City apartment. I mean, I remember when I moved to Sonoma County for college, I bought my first ever fan. Ever. First ever. Had never used a fan in a house before. Because it got to the high 70s in Sonoma. No, it got to 108, actually. Did it? Yes. So a fan does nothing. May June, it would get over 100 degrees, yeah. So, but I had never had to go buy a fan before because I grew up in San Francisco and it never got hot. I tried to explain to people. What is this? When I used to work summer camp, when I was in college, I would wear, like, really, I would wear a scarf and fingerless gloves during summer camp in San Francisco. Like, that's what summer was in San Francisco. It was socked in fog. It was freezing. And, you know, now the beaches are full. And I'm like, you would go to Ocean Beach to lay out? Like, what? Do you think this is Southern California? Like, what is this? But it's the right temperature for it now. It's crazy. I have summer clothes. I've never had summer clothes before, living in the Bay Area. That's like, I'm just, yeah, it's very weird having seasons now. That's like a thing I would go to other places to experience seasons. I come back to San Francisco where it was always the same. But now San Francisco is getting more seasons. But it's still cold in the summer more often than not. At least the fog comes in. And we still got that. So the last couple of. The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. That's great clothing. Yes, so true. You suffer through it. Yeah, some places you just got to suffer through. So speaking of not necessarily suffering, we have our new twist face masks. Yay, they've gone live. They've gone live on the twist. By Justin's request, there's the mammoth. We have a mammoth. We have the turtle, which is cute, folded, and then unfolded. I like the turtle for that. Folded, not folded. Which one do I want? Then you've got the standard twist. Oop, I can get 20% off my order. I like this one very. It's pretty loud. It's very loud. I like it. Twist in your face. Send your face, twist. I still want this hoodie. Yeah, I want that hoodie, too. Hello, hoodie. Yeah, we should all have that hoodie. We should wear it. Is that our coronavirus present from Chris? No, right? We should all have the hoodie. And then if we're ever allowed to be live in person, again, we can all wear it. That would be very fun. Garov Sharma got the mammoth and the red panda mask. Awesome. Nice. Yay, H-N-E-K likes them. Sweet. Sweet. Ed from Connecticut, you got the black one. Yay. Awesome. I'm glad. I've been, um, I wonder, Kiki, if you've heard the latest. I'm going to go ahead and ask. I'm so in on all the latest, you know? The latest. You know, I'm so well-connected. No, what? Are we worried about petting dogs in relation to coronavirus? I'm trying to figure this out because previously, dog parks were closed. And I thought that was because there was this concern that, like, you touched the dog. Somebody else touches your dog. They got whatever was on your hand now on them. But I also wasn't sure if they closed just because they didn't want people congregating. That's also it, because people were being not wearing masks. But it's outdoors. But it was, like, because a lot of other parks had already closed, their people were just congregating in the dog parks. And the dog parks were really crowded. So they closed them because it was actually a health issue. But this is a good point. The CDC has reversed a lot of their stances on the ability to contract through touch. They're now saying it's much more difficult to contract through touch than they initially thought. And that the aerosolized or the breathing air that can be standing in a space for hours after somebody's left, who is contagious, is a higher level of concern, which is why they're telling everybody's getting mandatory. Like, I don't know. San Francisco sounds like it's doing something different now. But you cannot go into a business in Yolo County without having a mask on. There is no such directive whatsoever about gloves. They're still saying wash your hands. I would love it whenever I go anywhere. Yeah. But there is no glove directive. But you have to have a face mask to go to a lot of places of work. Everybody who's working is wearing them. And if you are going into a grocery store, if you don't have a mask. Like we said, there was like that thing where a guy went into Costco and didn't want to wear a mask, and they told him to take a hike. That's kind of how it is everywhere around here. You have to have the mask, but there isn't a big emphasis on the touch. They're almost saying that the mask decontamination or spraying down of things between people using kiosk or whatever to get a keypad to pay for something is now considered perhaps more a confidence builder than it is actually a prevention technique. Right. It's important. But I mean, OK. I say do everything. I say yes. I say do everything. Yes. Manage your risks. And going and petting other people's dogs, if you go sanitize your hands afterwards, or wash your hands afterwards, make sure you don't touch your face between petting the dogs. And if you let other people pet your dogs, just wash your dog. I know. That's the thing, right? So I'll tell you exactly what's going on. Your dog is super cute, and people want to pet her. Aside from that, I want really bad to be able to give my parents some dog time. Really, really, really bad. But I don't know if that is safe. So I mean, I could give her a bath right before we take her over there and use gloves, I guess, after that until we hand her off very antiseptically. Yeah, you could totally. Staying out with her for a bit. Yeah. You could totally do that. You could absolutely do that. And I mean, it's also how, well, I guess, because Brian goes out a lot, that's the big concern. Yeah. Yep. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so. Yeah, so I mean, according to the CDC website, I just found it. It says. I know. They've changed it. They've changed their, go ahead and read it. They've changed their thoughts. Yeah. So right now, it says, do not let pets interact with people or other animals outside of your household. Yeah, it's pretty straightforward. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So it's helpful. I mean, I think it's being in contact with. And so yeah, in a pet, if somebody coughs or sneezes in their hand, touches the animal, you've got instant transmission. People, if you're not washing your hands all the time, you're playing with your animal and doing things. And because they've reduced their thoughts about surfaces being a mean transmitter. And they haven't necessarily found a point where it's like, yes, we know somebody touched that box and it was transmitted. Mm-hmm. But there is still through contact and through close association. Yeah. But then at the same time, they're not worried about nature play space, generally speaking. Like wood. They're like, ah, it's in the sun and it's porous. So probably that. Concrete, yeah. Things that are outside in the sun. Yeah, the sun is probably disinfecting all of that. The UV is disinfecting all of it. So just leave your dog outside for a long time in the sun. I love it. Yeah. What? All right. I think it's time to say good night, Blair. Oh, you hit your end. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. You guys, you keep going. I just keep going. You hit you're tired. You hit your tired end. That works for me. I started there. I've been this is the only place I am anymore. And I've got two more days before I can sleep. So what? Say good night, Blair. Are we are we going to see you next week? Do you know do you have a schedule? Yeah, I've got a few more weeks of knowing that you will see me. And then I don't know. The future is a mystery. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. I wish you well. Thank you for joining us for another episode of This Week in Science. We will see you again next week. More fun and more science, more conversation with friends. See you then.