 This is TWIS, this week in Science, episode number 610, recorded on Wednesday, March 15, 2017. I'd rather talk science. I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight on This Week in Science, we are going to fill your heads with hyperactive dendrites, stimulated ants, and brain scans. But first... Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer! The wow factor! That thing at the end of a good sales pitch that makes you go, Yeah, that's cool, but I still don't really need one of those things. The wow factor is what every advertiser wants to get you excited. And movie makers want it too. The giant spaceships that take forever to clear the frame. A herd of dinosaurs animated back to life. A car chase involving very expensive vehicles. Or a car chase made up of dinosaurs and spaceships being pursued by advertising executives going, Wow! Wow! Wow! But there's another wow factor out there. It comes when we tune our brains to discoveries in science. When we learn something new. When learning what we didn't think could be true. Or when learning about the sort of thing we just wish wasn't true. The wow factors in science aren't just in the textbooks. They're arriving daily and being reported weekly. Right here on... This Week in Science. Coming up next. What's happening? What's happening? What's happening this week in science? Good science to you Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome once again to another fun filled science packed episode of this week in science. Twis is back! How's everyone doing? Have we survived the beginnings? You know daylight savings time here in the United States. How are you guys managing? I'm so tired Kiki. Justin, how are you doing? I'm doing good. I'm getting an extra hour of staying up late. You always put a bright spin on things. Me, I've been looking at my bed longingly. I really want to go back and sleep some more in that. I'm just so tired. Oh daylight savings time. You are the blessing of later brighter days, but also the curse of lack of sleep. Who needs sleep anyway, right? Can we just adjust our clocks by a half an hour and call it even? Can't farmers just like get up a little later? Can't they just sleep in a little bit when the days are longer? I don't understand why we have to... Everybody has iPhones now. Farmers could just wake up earlier or go to sleep earlier. It doesn't seem like that much of a problem. Nowadays we have those really cool UV clock alarm lights where they slowly wake you with undulating light tones that are like sunrise, even though you might be rising well before sunrise. They're very fancy. Very sciency. Get your melatonin going. And it placed really far away from where I sleep. So that I have no choice but to get up and go to them and make them stop. There we go. And by that point I'm standing. And that's how we start twists too. With the annoying, loud, unstoppable sounds. That's how we do it. All right, everyone, we've got a great episode planned. I've got stories about brains and brainy developments, new views on old ideas, a little bit of, you know, as the science timeline progresses, old ideas, we learn more. Old ideas get debunked. We got a few of those on the show. And potatoes. And Justin, what did you bring? Bad stem cell trial goes badly. No. Misleading labeling and an invasive American icon. Invasive. Interesting. Invasive where? Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, I have hovering parental penguins. I have lazy ants. And I have a special story for save a spider day. Save a spider day. Spider tribute, if you will. Spiders are our friends. Yes, they are. We love the spiders. Insect eaters that like to eat mosquitoes. I like the pot, yes. All right, but let's get into things we like much, much better than spiders even. More science stories. And, you know, of course, we have to talk a little bit about the thing that we don't like to talk about, but we must talk about the end of the world. Which one? And climate. That one. The tattooed lady. Yes. And the end of the world and climate. We've got to deal with climate models. And it was recently, yes, there was a comment made by a certain new director of the Environmental Protection Agency. And about how he didn't, he didn't really believe in, how he didn't really believe in climate change data and specifically the quote that he is talking about. He thinks that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So no, I would not agree that it's a primary contributor to the global warming that we see, but we do not know that yet. We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis. Well, hot on the heels of Pruitt's commentary, there have been letters penned by the American Geophysical Union, and also by the American Meteorological Society. Each one, step by step, refuting and rebutting Pruitt's comments and basically saying, we really know a lot about climate change and the letter from the American Meteorological Society, from 30 individual scientists, 28 of whom are active in climate research. And the letter says, quote, your statement is incorrect. In fact, we know with an exceptionally high degree of confidence that most of the climate warming over at least the last six decades has been caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities. And then there was an article written over at Forbes talking about this year being the 50th anniversary of the first climate modeling paper that really modeled the climate and the predictions that it made have held out. So the original paper was written in 1967 and it looked at various factors of cloud cover evaporation and water vapor content in the atmosphere, all sorts of factors, put them all together, created a model to say, okay, well, this is what we predict might happen. And it predicted that a doubling in carbon dioxide levels would cause a two degree increase in temperature. Well, what we haven't had that doubling, we've had about half that amount in carbon dioxide levels rising. And along with that, instead of rising two degrees, the temperature has risen one degree. So we are following the line, the linear projection of that original simple model from 50 years ago. And so basically what we need to start talking about is not the debate about the models because the models, everybody agrees that climate change is happening and that carbon dioxide is the major contributor and that humans are the major emitter of carbon dioxide on the planet at the moment. The next step now is to move beyond that and the original author of this paper, who's 85 years old now, he's still kicking and talking about science and he says that what we need to be talking about at this point in time is not the models themselves, but we need to be discussing the sensitivity of the models. And his quote, this gentleman named Manabee, models have been very effective in predicting climate change, but have not been as effective in predicting its impact on ecosystems and human society. The distinction between the two has not been stated clearly. For this reason, major efforts should be made to monitor lowly, not only climate change, but also its impact on ecosystems through remote sensing from satellites as well as in situ observation. Yeah, the problem is that is the more steps you get in between the burning of fossil fuels and these things that we're measuring, the more opportunities there are for denial of the process, right? So we can't even come to a consensus on the climate system is being disrupted. So it's very hard to then have the conversation of when you disrupt the climate system, it affects the plants in this way, which affects the herbivores in this way, which affects the meat eaters in this way. So it is kind of tough. I would take that back for a second. One aspect is that we can't come to a consensus. We do have a consensus. No, we, yes, as the scientific community and people who understand science, yes, we've come to a consensus. When anything else that you're hearing, though, has nothing to do with the available data. Let's throw that out there. The denial of global warming and carbon's effect on it has nothing to do with the data that explains how and why this is happening. It has nothing to do with it. So you're talking like almost a different language when you attempt to explain more about the model, get into the details of how it works, really be clear in your language and explaining to somebody who's at least has an ideological or other reason to have a bent against it. Now, to the general public, yeah, but I think that needs just to sort of be more simple because you're not going to have the time to have that audience to walk through all the steps. If they're not reading it, if they're not researching it themselves, if they're not finding good sources of information, it's not going to reach them. One of my favorite things to note when I'm talking about this subject is that we have understood that carbon dioxide is a heat trap and gas and that it comes from burning things. Since the Civil War. Exactly, yes. And that is one of the things that gets debated from the start, which I think is so interesting is that it's a fundamental understanding we've had for 170, 180 years. That's okay. Well, and you don't have to go back too far in time. I think if you just went back five, well, let's see, maybe 10 years now, if even that. The debate was, is global warming happening? Was one that was not a debate in the scientific community? Again, this was the argument against from people who chose to deny this, that it wasn't happening. And then it sort of morphed into, well, it happens, but it's naturally happening. Or even if it's not actually happening, it doesn't mean that it has anything to do with man-made activities. So it just doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter. Unfortunately, we can't be taking baby steps right now. We need to be taking much bigger steps to make a difference. We do need to be taking. We need to be taking big steps right now. We need to be like, yes, long jump activity seems appropriate. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And moving into another story involving the intersection of science and policy specifically here in the United States. A study came out this week in the annals of internal medicine researchers compared, well, observed and compared the health and age of survival for patients with cystic fibrosis in America and Canada. They found that the median age of survival in Canada is 50.9 years. In the United States, 40.6. Average age of survival, or the median age of survival for patients with cystic fibrosis is a decade less for patients in the United States than for those in the country just to the north of us. What they have found is that when they looked at Canadian patients who had universal government-provided health insurance and compared them with United States patients who have private insurance, the researchers found absolutely no difference in the risk of death. US patients with continuous or intermittent Medicare or Medicaid or with no insurance had 36 to 77% higher risks of death than their Canadian counterparts according to ours Technica's article about this. The author's conclusion, therefore, is that the disparity most likely arises, this is a correlation and not causation, but this disparity most likely arises from the availability of universal health care in Canada versus the lack of it in the United States. Give people health care and they live longer? That's a correlation. Give them health care and they live longer. That is an interesting correlation. I think we should look into that. But it is a scientific study that is not appropriate to discuss. Absolutely. I leave it to our audience to make their own conclusions, make their own comments later. This is where social science is so important. It's the intersection of... There's also epidemiology. This is how diseases... What is the difference between the survival rate in some countries versus other countries? Why do some countries patients survive less? Why do some survive more? How can we explain these differences? Is there something that is disease-based? Is it treatment-based? All these things are very important to understand. I think that it's interesting too. I just helped host a middle school science fair and I was looking at all of these science fair projects and I remember being in middle school and being told I could pick from different categories and one of them being social science and basically that translating to doing a bunch of surveys. I kept thinking that that was going to be so boring. I always went for a Petri dish or some sort of data collection that was a little more hard science. But now, in retrospect, that stuff really gives the context and the meaning to a lot of the more hard sciences. It's such an important aspect of the work. Yeah. So, data point. Interesting for conversations moving forward. And my final story for the start of our show. CRISPR. You know, I love CRISPR. Chinese scientists. Oh, I got to love the Chinese scientists for their... They're just gung-ho with CRISPR. And what they have done is taken CRISPR-Cas9 to edit human embryos and I find the use of the term in this science magazine article of normal human embryos rather interesting and a little spurious because what they did is they created embryos that had genetic mutations that caused either beta thalassemia or favism, which is anemia that you get from eating fava beans. I had never heard of that before, but these were the two mutations. So they created these human embryos with these mutations. And then when they used CRISPR-Cas9, they used CRISPR-Cas9 to try to snip and correct these mutations. Right? These are point mutations that could easily be potentially repaired, right? In their report, they said that they had a 1 in 4 or 25% success rate for the beta thalassemia and 2 in 2 for favism. So it worked, but it didn't really work. So basically they were able to correct some, but not all of the embryo's mutations. And so there are limitations to how the procedure works, how specific it is and how well it will work. And so this is still showing the limitations of CRISPR-Cas9 for the potential of actually moving forward to correcting genetic mutations that cause disease in human embryos. Yeah. Yeah. So they're doing it. Researchers are doing it. I'm sure that they created the embryos and probably within, you know, a couple of days destroyed the embryos so that they didn't get too late of a stage of development. But all they were leading it to know was whether or not the CRISPR-Cas9 system would actually do anything. And Edvin Connecticut, you know, you joke, the Chinese don't worry about silly regulations, but the Chinese actually do and they have very strict regulations. It's, you know, it's sometimes fun and funny to make a joke about the research going on in a foreign country like China, but where maybe the regulations are not as strict as they are here, but they have different social beliefs as well where a child is not actually a child until like 90 days after birth or 100 days after birth. So there are many issues socially that go into creating the regulations and what they can do or cannot do, but they're also working on the global scale and working with the international community to work within global standards. And before you assume that the foreign government's regulations are lower or that ours are perhaps too high, my next story is red flags found in Florida. Three people with macular degeneration were blinded after undergoing an unproven, untested stem cell treatment that was touted as a clinical trial back in 2015 at a clinic in Florida. Within a week following the treatment, patients experienced a variety of complications, including vision loss, detached retinas, hemorrhaging, they are now blind. Each patient paid $5,000 for the procedure. Any clinical trial that has a fee should raise a red flag. So first red flag, of course though, isn't that? It is that it took place in Florida. There are no good outcomes in Florida. Second red flag was it was patient funded. This is not how real scientific trials work. There's not enough data or history behind it to get a grant. There could be funded by some corporation looking to use this for medical purposes. Red flag. Third red flag, the experimental procedure was performed in both eyes. It's experimental, meaning the outcome is uncertain. Patients have two eyes. This could have easily been done in such a way avoid total blindness in these patients. Fourth red flag, it was performed in Florida where there are never good outcomes. That showed up twice. A paper document in cases will be published tomorrow, March 16th in New England Journal of Medicine. All three patients were women ranging ages 72 to 88 suffered from macular degeneration. Common progressive disease, the retina that leads to vision loss. Before the surgery, vision in their eyes ranged from 2200 all the way up to 2030, which is really not as that bad, right? Now the patients are likely to remain blind. Co-author Thomas Albini, MD, associate professor of clinical ophthalmology at the University of Miami where two of the patients were subsequently treated for complications to the treatments. Two of the patients learned the so-called, I'm calling it so-called because it says it so-called clinical trial on clinicaltrials.gov a registry and results database run by the U.S. National Library of Medicine which is called a study to assess the safety and effects of cells injected with intravenial and dry molecular degeneration. Some of the patients believed they were participating in a trial, although the consent form and other written materials given to the patients did not mention trial at all. The article is the article written by Albini and there's another co-author here to come up and say Jeffrey Goldberg is a call to awareness for patients, physicians and regulatory agencies of the risks of this kind of minimally regulated patient-funded research. Jeffrey Goldberg is MD, PhD professor and chair of the ophthalmology department at Stanford University School of Medicine also co-author of the paper. There's a lot of hope for stem cells and these types of clinics appeal to patients desperate for care who hope that stem cells are going to be the answer. But in the case of these women participated in clinical enterprise that was off the charts dangerous, Albini says. Patients had fat cells removed from their admins and a standard blood draw. The fat tissue was processed with enzymes with the goal of obtaining stem cells. The pelletate, the dense plasma was isolated from the blood, the cells were then mixed with the pelletate... Platelet? Platelet, thank you, dense plasma injected into their eyes. Patients reported that the entire process took less than an hour. Shoddy stem cell preparation may allow to some of the patient's complications which had been caused by an injection of a contaminant or the cell wash solution to the eye, Albini said. When injected into the eye the stem cells also could have changed to microfiber blasts the type of cell associated with scarring. But even if executed correctly there is no evidence, zero evidence suggesting the procedure could help restore vision. Goldberg and Albini said. In fact, there's sparse evidence that adipose-derived stem cells type of stem cell using this trial are capable of differentiating or maturing into retinal pigment photoreceptor cells. This is like... They could be so far down their path of differentiation already that we don't have the correct chemical instructions to turn them into those other very different type of differentiated cells. They based all of this on pre-clinical research. They're basing this on, oh, this could might happen. Yeah, just theory. They just had theories of like... Which again is why they probably didn't have a grant to do this. This wasn't being done at a university apparently. This wasn't being done... Yeah, this is the problem with so many of these stem cell clinics and studies that people really want... We've been talking for a decade now about the promise of stem cells, right? The medical promise for therapies. And some therapies do work and there are some therapies that are in use currently, but how do you tell the difference between one that is really experimental and one that is well-founded in science and one that you know would and could work? And I call that experimental. I think I was being kind. According to Goldberg and Albini there's a whole list of a courageous things. It lacked nearly all the components of a properly designed clinical trial, including a hypothesis based on laboratory experiments. A time limit of a control group and a treatment group. A collection of data, masking of clinical and patient groups and plans for a follow-up. None of that was present. So this was worse than those middle school science experiments I was just talking about. Yes, much worse. So the FDA, this is apparently not subject to FDA administration approval because the cells themselves were not transferred between patients. Right, it's the same patient, same person. And they were considered minimally processed according to Code of Federal Relations regulations at the time, although these the FDA has updated the requirement on this type of a procedure since this incident. But that's just a word of caution. So when we talk about, you know, hey it's all these regulations keeping us down, preventing us from doing the science, it's not always a bad thing. I want my freedom to find. Yes, I want my freedom to find myself and others. Most regulations that are on the books right now are just to protect us from Floridians. Oh boy. Yeah, yeah. Waka, waka, waka, waka. But I heard Harry Potter lives there so I might go back all bad. Now I don't want to get into that but there was an incident there too that could only happen in Florida. Fair enough. Okay. Oh my gosh. There we go. I think I know what time it is now that we've gotten to the end of the story. You know what time it is. Oh, is it that time? It's time for Blair's Animal Corner. I have some really fun stories this week. So first I have an interesting story about penguins. Maybe we can see some of ourselves in these Galapagos penguins. Penguins have been found doing something kind of unusual. That is something we may actually have seen some of our very good friends doing to support those who may no longer need support. That is, these penguins have been unnecessarily parenting their adult offspring. Oh, they're like penguin helicopter parents? Yes. Helicopter until their kids are like 40? Yeah, so your friend, you know, Dale who lives in his parents' garage who's 35 and doesn't cook for himself. There's a penguin version of that. So Dale may be a Galapagos penguin. So these penguins, they are only the second ceases of penguin to ever be seen exhibiting this behavior. The other is the Gen 2 penguins. And these guys are, the parents are feeding the pre-processed kind of, we call it the fish milkshake, the pre-digested fish that then they regurgitate into their baby's mouths until they're old enough to fish. The adults after they have fledged and they have their waterproof feathers and they should be able to go out and find their own fish, they are begging for food from their parents and getting it. Whoa. Yeah. So in the study out of the University of Washington they followed penguins over several years and when they were observing them they saw some isolated instances. They weren't very often and the adults fed the individuals who had previously fledged, had previously left the nest and they were actively going out and hunting themselves. But they found that they could beg the adults and get an easy meal. This as I said has only been observed in these two species of penguins and they think that this is it. So she was studying or this group of people were studying penguins for about four decades. So that's a long period of time and only saw about five instances of this happening. It was always when there were lots of resources available when times were not tough and it only happened to be as far as the researchers could tell when the babies, well the adults, the new adults I suppose, the fledged adults were asking their parents or a relative for assistance. If they asked another adult they would get pecked at and kind of shoot away. Get out of here. Go find your own food. But then if they went up to an adult that most likely was related the adults would regurgitate some food for them. Okay so relatives continue caring for the babies in times of plenty exactly when there's no stress and so basically they've got little spoiled babies little spoiled brats that continue to ask for food and the parents say okay you can have it. But then of course on the flip side these Galapagos penguins will actually abandon chicks if food is scarce. It's the nature of extremes here. The Galapagos penguins are kind of unusual because instead of molting and losing all of their feathers instead of doing that once a year they do it twice a year and they do it mostly based on patterns that are usually seasonal but not always. So their timeline is not 100% set in stone for these fasting periods, these molting periods and on top of that other penguin species they molt while cooking an egg as it were and then they feed the baby and they take turns feeding the baby sitting on the egg and all that kind of stuff. These guys they don't get pregnant until after the molt starts anyway. So their entire life cycle is pretty unusual compared to other penguins. But it is interesting to see this behavior and now it kind of opens up the question of what other animals are doing this that we don't know about. Yeah but it sounds like it's very energetically determined and extremely rare. She watched them for 40 years and saw it five times. Yeah So it's an interesting question it adds kind of to the evolutionary history of this type of penguin and also that means that when resources availabilities change very quickly perhaps due to climate change that will change the dynamics of these species as well. If they are very quick to abandon their chicks or on the flip side overfeed them you know it's highly variable but if they didn't see that many yeah I guess not that many times only five only five times that's really not that much. Yeah yeah it's pretty much just a blip in the record but it was enough times that it wasn't a mistake basically. Exactly yeah yeah real rare but not a mistake. Speaking of different energetic methodologies a few weeks ago actually about two months ago when we were live at the California Academy of Sciences for SketchFest I talked about lazy ants and a recent study looking at why some ants would be so lazy so it turns out actually for a long time we assumed ants were workers just everybody was working their hardest all the time but since about the 80s we have known that some ants be lazy some of them just are not pulling their weight compared to some other ants and the study that we spoke about in January indicated that actually those lazy ants they were doing everybody a favor because they were they required less energy because they weren't doing anything they could just hang out not eat as much not be such a a tax on the overall effectiveness of the colony because they're saving themselves they're hanging out not eating as much so it's they also walked around with a clipboard so everybody thought they were doing well a new study a new study tells us that there's another wrinkle to this so I just said Hokkaido University and Shizuka University in Japan they were looking at Japanese ants called Miramika Kotokui they're a common ant in Japan they have a good portion of them a certain percentage of them don't work they just kind of hang out and they loaf about and they found that when you removed the active workers the previously lazy ants would work they found this out in 2013 the new study wanted to look at why what causes them to not work and then work why this is beneficial so the colony so they designed a computer simulation of ant colonies as you do they had two models of course I got a computer she modeled the ants on a computer why not yes I should probably make an interactive ant colony so the two models that they built they had either everyone in the colony had the same what they called stimulus threshold the amount of things that needed to get done at what point they would actually start working or variable stimulus thresholds their analogy to this was how stinky the kitchen has to get before you take out the trash or how many dishes are in the sink before you decide to do the dishes some roommates if there's any dishes in the sink they're gonna get done right away those are your worker ants some roommates wait until there's no spoons left they use all of the plastic spoons and then maybe they'll wash some spoons so those are kind of the lazy ants I think that's me okay well now we know another reason why I know a twist house would be a bad idea well anyway so the computer simulation they had these same stimulus threshold so everybody was a hard worker or variable stimulus threshold so different amounts of work needing to be done making them be inspired into work tasks that appeared randomly in the simulations and all tests started with the same stimulus value and then they increased if the tasks were not attended to so basically the dishes were piling up in the sink right and when a worker encountered a task that satisfies its threshold it completed the task it became tired and then it couldn't work until it had some recovery time and fatigue recovery rates were also simulated as variable based on how hard they worked and if no tasks were performed a colony went extinct so then they recorded how long it took for colonies to go extinct sounds like pretty much every simulation the colonies eventually went extinct what they found was that colonies with workers with variable thresholds completed fewer tasks everyone with same stimulus thresholds completed more tasks okay so so far it sounds like all worker ants would be better right but it actually turns out that colonies with variable thresholds with lazy ants they lived the colony persisted longer before extinction because what happened was if they all were inspired to work at the same time they all worked they all got tired all of them stopped working the colony collapsed so basically these lazy ants aren't lazy they're just waiting to take over for the hard worker ants when they get tired oh they're the replacement ants they're the bench exactly they're the bench ants they've been benched and sometimes in the real world those lazy ants almost never work most of the time they're not tapped into unless some great catastrophe befalls the colony there's a flood ants showed up in my house didn't make it home now you need some backups to go out and hopefully had a different direction or heaven forbid there's some cinnamon around then for sure they'd never come so you guys ever tried that put out your ground cinnamon the ants avoid it anyway but I also avoid cinnamon in the ants probably have similar oh this is good to know if that sprinkle some cinnamon on your doorstep Justin will never come over so if there is a twist household I just need to line all my items in cinnamon I get it but if there is one of the things I always try to do though when if there has been if there's been an ant invasion I try to clean the area I use a little soap and water and I scrub the whole area I'm trying to get rid of whatever the ant trails that they've laid down for the other ants to follow because I feel like if I can back them up out to the source they're not other ants just following where those ants went later on and following that same path sounds like what you could do is you could just dump a giant pile of sugar right where they are and then they'll just overwork themselves just a thought don't try that at home but the bottom line of the story is lazy ants aren't selfish they're just waiting and very very patient so that's what you can tell your boss next time I'm not lazy I'm just patient can I tell you I had a friend once who who had a bag of sugar that the ants got to in a cupboard and he noticed though he left it because he was like I used to always like they'd be ants in the kitchen they'd be ants around the counter the ants would be out of the trash and all of a sudden I didn't have any ants and then he discovered it's because they found this bag of sugar in the back of the cabinet and hadn't bothered to go anywhere else since but he was like I'm just gonna leave it because they're not anywhere else it really worked they've claimed that as their own they're in home they're not going out they're not exploring they're not anywhere else in the house now it was like that it was like a sketchy solution but it worked for him yeah right don't try that at home twist is not condone this behavior try it sugar and ants try it and report back science tweet us some pics cabinets with or without sugar and on that note it's time for us to go to our break we have come to the end of the first part of our show we hope you'll stay with us for brains and lots more spider day stuff in the second half of the show we'll be back in just a few moments with more this week in science hey everyone thanks so much for listening to or watching twists we really do appreciate having you as a member of our community love having you join us week after week to learn about the science in the world around us thank you so much it really makes us feel special that you choose to spend a part of your week with us it's really cool if you want to spend time other time if you want to put us on your bodies on your desks we have merchandise we have t-shirts and hats and other various things available at our zazzle store and if you head on over to twist.org you will be able to find all these wondrous wonders just by clicking on the zazzle store link if you click on that zazzle store link it takes you to the zazzle store where you can peruse and find all sorts of twists logoed items, hats, cups, t-shirts tote bags, stamps lumbar pillows with Blair's Animal Corner art all over it lots of fun stuff and polo shirts if you have a very professional environment that you need to be in you can still have sport your twistiness to the world but there are wonderful items head on over to zazzle, 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science you betcha we're back you betcha Justin what you got what you bring so this is a this is a labeling story I guess some folks looked into the nutritional contents of labels that were had terms such as no fat and no sugar reduced salt low fat on food packaging this is out of the university of north carolina chapel hill work peers the most recent issue of the journal of academy nutrition and dietetics in many cases in many cases food containing low sugar low fat or low salt claims had worse nutritional profile than those without claims explained investigator lindsay smith taley research assistant professor nutrition in fact in some cases products that tend to be high in calorie sodium or sugar or fat may be more likely to have low or no content claims so if you're you've got a high fat low low sodium product low sodium I I exactly new taste yo's without petroleum visit red vines or you know other candies that are like fat free free and it's like yeah but you're so high in really bad sugar what okay you're fat free all right for example a three cookie of reduced fat or yo's contains four and a half grams of fat compared to seven grams in a serving of full fat or yo's but both still contain 14 grams of sugar per serving it's lower fat but it's healthy just got all the sugar in there chocolate low fat milk is another example it has the lower fat content but it's still higher in sugar relative to plain milk and higher in sugar and fat like many other beverages you could be drinking the issue stems in part from the US Food and Drug Administration allowing packaged food and beverage manufacturers to assign labels in different ways for different foods as with the examples above if you're a consumer trying to make a healthy choice you assume reduced means a healthier product but that product only has to be reduced in reference to the original food the same product for that specific nutrient if a cookie could also contain higher sugar or sodium so if consumers are only relying on the reduced claim they could potentially end up with a less healthy cookie essentially reduced claims are confusing because they are relative and only about one nutrient there's all sorts of things you know like we talk a lot about how fiber is so important and so maybe if and also we know that fat is important for brain cells so maybe you're trying to reduce your fat intake but you should also be thinking about reducing your sugar intake also because sugar is what your body uses to store as fat so there's all sorts of all these things together you could just eat some carrots but here's an example of also what they're comparing themselves to this is very important so it's you're comparing I guess some sort of standard idea next case of what a brownie could be to what cheesecake could be so a low fat brownie can actually have three times the fat of low fat cheesecake right it's for the same service size it's a meaningless word if there ever was one right oh the meaningless words I committed less felonies than last year so you know that's an improvement marketing arsenic free water it also implies that other water has arsenic in it but if you're going to go by junk food you know if you're buying food food you're maybe looking at the nutritional labels more but if you're buying junk food your brain is already you're already in a search pattern that is not involving nutritional information but if you see the but if you see the advertising that's in big bold letters on the front of the label maybe as you're in that I'm just going to get some junk food you go well I'm getting junk food but low fat's great so maybe there's a bit more of the human behavior of how how you search for certain foods in certain situations being bad but I'm not being as bad as I could be right the new thing I'm trying to do is instead of looking at calories or fat or labels like that I just try to look at the ingredient list and if it's under an inch that I'm more likely to buy it if it's like half the carton and if it's this much stuff then I'm thinking that's probably not very good for me right you know what I do I just do what I want there is that I've always believed that anything is low or light I'm paying the same price and I'm getting less was my theory it looks like a full carton of sour cream but it's light on the stuff that makes up sour cream so I'm really paying twice as much for this than I should be for what I'm actually wanting to get so I guess the message of this is advertising is lying to you advertising is lying to you it's misdirecting you it is and so whenever you based on what they found through this study pretty much everything that they looked at that had a low or less qualifier on it meant that it was worse for you in some other way keep that in mind the healthier food out there might be the one that just calls itself a cookie that's very possible I'm a cookie that's all I am just a cookie if you want a cookie you don't want a cookie just decide that and you'll be better off than if you try to cheat yourself by by buying less and paying more why buy less when you could pay more you know our brains love to figure things like this out they help us figure our brains there are figuring machines aren't they indeed and we like to talk about brains in terms of like the analogy to machines specifically computers right and we talk about oh yeah our brains they're like computers and you have information in and and then it's like digital and you have your neurons that are turned on and off and oh it's either parallel processing you know people come up with all sorts of ways to try and discuss brain processing of information but for a really long time you know we've pretty much thought of you have the neuron which consists of one end of dendrites that collect information they're the receivers of information and they branch out to receive information from other neurons right and they send information to the soma or the cell body which when it gets a certain kind of information goes and does an electrical spike and sends an on signal down the axon you know to wherever the end of that neuron goes where it spews out neurotransmitters or does something to connect with the dendrites of another neuron and so on and so on right when researchers have been thinking about this we kind of have you know the soma is the spiking catalyst the soma the cell body and the axon are the things that are recorded from usually because they're bigger they don't break as easily and they seem to have these big signals and so we've always kind of thought of neurons as kind of on or off they're either sending an action potential or they're not sending an action potential right so some UCLA researchers were like oh but the dendrites what's happening in the dendrites and so they were trying to record from the dendrites and they kept breaking the dendrites and they're like this isn't working every time we try to stick a needle in the dendrites the dendrites break so why don't we take the needles and stick them next to the dendrites so they started recording electrical activity in very very close to dendrites in the area around dendrites exactly in the dendrites but from their analysis what they found they were able because of this study they were able to set up a recording array in the brains of mobile animals so they basically you know they took rats and they stuck needles and needles in the brains and the the rats then ran around their housing for a while and they kept recording what was going on and they found out that these dendrites generate their own spikes 10 times more often than the soma of the cell this has never been seen before never ever been looked at before um dendrites you know basically it's supposed to be like we get a dendrites get a signal and then they send a weak signal to the soma weak signal and that a lot of those dendrites working together sending weak signals maybe they build up to create an action potential but what they're finding here is that these dendrites are active and they have very large voltage fluctuations in addition to the spikes so they're constantly kind of electrically fluctuating along their own frequency rhythm they have no activity and so when they got information from another neuron from the axon of another neuron the spike usually happened if they happened to be up in their activity at the same time as well so it was like two up signals made a double up signal you got a spike so the big thing here is that you have the spikes which is kind of like digital computing right you have the one or the zero but it's this this ongoing electrical fluctuation that's interesting that that implicates that says that there's an analog component to dendrites as well excuse me and there's a lot going on in the dendrites because the dendrites are up to 90 percent of brain tissue so this is like a lot of activity in the brain that we've never really looked at before this we've looked at it we've seen this but not really understood that it was coming from the dendrites and so now this is a new piece to put into our modeling we talked about computer modeling of climate, computer modeling of ant populations computer modeling of the brain people are trying to create artificial brains synthetic brains out of computer parts right so how do you program that well historically it's been using just these digital inputs now they have to kind of take into account this possibility of analog factor as well it's going to be much more the brain is more complicated yeah you're saying our brain is complex yeah and if they did math and they say that the dendrites are about 100 times larger in volume than the soma within the brain so they take up almost 100 times greater volume right and they have 10 more spikes you know 10 spikes for every one that the somas are making this means that the brain potentially has 100 times the computational capacity and you know this means that this means I've had much more potential I could have applied my brain power to if only I knew it was there you're restricting yourself because you didn't think you had the potential I thought I was using the maximum amount of brain power that I have at my disposal obviously this is not true well I can't wait to see what you come up with so this is so that's a pretty cool story about how our understanding of the brain is potentially changing based on new research and another brain study based on based it was written published in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences from wild Cornell medicine scientists this is really cool anesthesia anesthetics how do they work historically the idea has been that we've got this lipid bilayer except the external membrane of our cells and this is the cellular membrane and the historical idea is that that anesthetics are fat soluble and so when they go into your body into your brain what they do is they just dissolve into the lipid bilayer and change the function of the lipid bilayer by kind of mixing in and diluting it and just affect the lipid bilayer and then that's how anesthesia works but these researchers were like well we had some different ideas and so they put some tests together and the researcher co-senior author Dr. Hugh Hemings who's the chair of the department of anesthesiology says we have debunked a century old hypothesis and finally have proof that these anesthetics must have a direct effect on integral membrane proteins and not an indirect effect on proteins through the lipid bilayer to put patients in a coma-like state allowing them to undergo painful procedures with no memory or pain I don't know why I'm giving him that kind of voice but because it's fun you think, you know, we put people under anesthesia all the time right? we had no idea how it worked this whole time that's cool pretty much yeah a little bit upsetting in the 1970s 60-70s researchers started challenging the idea and the idea that proteins might have been a target as opposed to like being affected indirectly that's about when that got started and so there were more studies through the last several decades that suggested that these anesthetics interact with proteins specifically ion channels in the cell membrane and so what they ended up doing is they tested 13 anesthetic agents and they formed a model cell and they put a protein in the thin membrane and then they had a fluorescent dye in the cell that would send a visual signal in ions that moved through this this protein which was an ion channel in the membrane and so the movement of the ions is really sensitive to changes of the properties of the cell membrane so and what they found is when they put the anesthetics in this system none of them changed the movements of the ions through the channel so none of them they basically showed physically that okay we've got this ion channel that's affected by the lipid bilayer and if these anesthetics go into the lipid bilayer they're going to affect and none of them, none of them did and so they think maybe at really high concentrations then the lipid bilayer gets affected but really what's going on is there these anesthetics are just directly affecting ion channels and changing the way ions move into and out of neurons and therefore affecting the activity of the neurons that way anyway one more step toward understanding how anesthetics actually work when we've been using them for decades 100, 100, 100 more than 100 years well does that mean that because the fine points the data weren't 100% accurate of how this thing was working that means anesthesia has never existed right, no it's more that this works we're not sure why we're going to keep doing it but we have a pretty good idea of how much to give you based on trial and error previously on someone your size and that's where so much of it did get started yeah it's true there's a lot of medicine that works this way too this is sort of like we try things we see what works and then we go back sometimes afterwards and find out how and why it was working a lot of science is focused on figuring out the mechanism behind things but it doesn't mean we always need that to proceed greatest example still ever, gravity we still don't know the mechanism of why gravity we don't know but we've got the physics of how gravity and based on mass and everything else and somebody on the moon based on a few simple equations really but the actual mechanism is still hidden that doesn't mean it doesn't exist exactly and that's basically what this is science progressing a little bit further and giving us a new piece of information it's not like gravity it doesn't exist because we don't know the mechanism no, we know it exists, we know a lot about it we just don't know some specifics right? and the same thing with this anesthesia these anesthetics there's specifics that we do not know we know they work, we know a lot of information about things they do interact with and potential targets and other stuff but this is a great study to give us just that little bit more information about the mechanism specifically of how they work which nobody had done it yet and it's go science Justin, you have another story? I'll have some new research by professor Beth Shapiro University of Santa Cruz Genomics Institute and the University of Alberta professor Dwayne Froce identified North America's oldest bison fossils and helped construct a bison genealogy finding that a common maternal ancestor arrived in the Americas between 130 and 195,000 years ago during a long time ago Ice Age official term I think that's what that one was using techniques for ancient DNA extraction and sequenced mitochondrial genomes of more than 40 bison including two of the oldest bison fossils ever recovered one from the Yukon and one from Colorado they reconstructed a bison family tree apparently if you've missed it there's been a long time controversy about the timing of bison arrival in North America oh yes, hot topic it's hot topic in very small circles perhaps so North America they arrived in what's called the Rancho Labrian Land Mammal Age which is an actual name for a long time ago event ecological periods of the continent's history until recently the fossil records from different parts of North America disagreed with each other with a few fossil locality suggesting that bison arrived millions of years ago only problem is most of the old timing fossil sites show no evidence whatsoever of bison so they've got some new advanced ways of looking at the DNA and it kind of calls into question some of those really that the million year ago scenario the new study explored fossil locations again in North America from the Yukon to Colorado and Cody voice bison used what's called the Bering Land Bridge the connection of land between Asia and North America to cross from Asia to North America land bridge forms during ice ages when much of the water on the planet becomes part of the growing continental glaciers making the sea level much lower than it is today explained Shapiro probably not that voice after they arrived in Alaska they spent quickly across the continent taking advantage of the rich grassland resources that were part of the ice age ecosystem their rapid spread and diversification are hallmarks of an invasive species and part of what make the bison's role in the great plains ecosystem so significant so bison arrived in North America and quickly came to dominate the grazing ecosystem that was previously before they arrived held by horses and mammoths for the million years so it's sort of an interesting like we didn't have horses in the Americas for a really long time until the the invasive species of humans came from Europe and really sort of reintroduced them to the continent but they weren't here Native Americans is one of those things that they actually it's sort of a classic view of Native Americans writing bareback on horses but this is an adaptive technology for them the horses were not here so it's sort of interesting to think that perhaps the reason that horses weren't here and to a lesser extent perhaps the mammoths is because bison great herds of bison were grazing everything up so it's sort of also interesting to think of such an iconic species of North America as having at one point been an invasive species yeah so what do you think Blair does that mean we should ever or still should reintroduce a bison or you just against you think it's over for everything well what about things that I've said before would make you think that I'd be a pessimist about that nothing well but wouldn't that mean that perhaps because there aren't bison it's time to put wild horses and mammoths across the that old chestnut I would say that bison proved that they were well adapted to this landscape in the climate that we currently have and that's why they took over for mammoths because the climate shifted away from the ice age it would be if they were already here but if they weren't already here and they're an invasive species and exploiting well but that's kind of another thing too is sure they're an invasive species but what we currently call invasive species are things that we brought so did we bring the bison they just crossed the bridge so they migrated is what they did not everything we brought is an invasive species I think it's an invasive species if it's regardless what impact it has even if it's very small impact if it now currently lives in this space I think usually it's spoken about when it displaces another species but that's pretty much impossible for it not to if it does well so is there a chance though that you could follow me on this that since there aren't bison grazing the American plains we have room for the mammoth again and that could be an excuse to bring it back it's not the right climate for the mammoth no it might be fine we don't know it might be fine says you in this warming climate in North America it might be fine for a woolly mammoth we could have a whole industry of like mammoth groomers I would say more the concern is that there's no native predator to bison right now in most of the Americas so reintroducing the bison is a concern for that reason reintroducing a species just to have bison season to control the population seems like an unnecessary use of conservation of funds so as long as we have an expectation of humans are the biggest predators right wait bison were doing just fine with the biggest predator was the human so if we eliminate ourselves largely from the predator pool they should just be fine so we should reintroduce them to the wild plains but I'm saying we should go back even further and bring back the American horse I think it was a tiny horse I think it was a small little horse and the mammoths as per executive order 1, 3, 1, 1, 2 an invasive species is defined as a species that is 1. non-native or alien to the ecosystem under consideration and 2 whose introduction causes or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health oh to human health is environmental harm or harm to human health oh environmental harm both economic environmental or harm environmental harm or harm to human health so but I would argue that pretty much anything any living thing that you bring into a space that it's not from is going to do one of those things not necessarily it doesn't happen all the time sometimes sometimes when organisms are brought into areas they do quite well and add to the ecosystem because whatever niche they're in has lost it's it's inhabitant and so they're able to inhabit a niche that has been vacated for some reason right so I guess that would be the exception absolutely yeah good point so and that does happen we just hear about the bad stories all the time well because there's much more of them yes there are much more of them so we talk about brain scans on the show all the time right never we never talk about brains brains scans you know and the whole idea of like ooh what if the government could scan our brains and tell if we were lying well some researchers just did a study that's very interesting although very early level that was 40 people a mix of men and women mostly in their 20s and 30s that were involved in this scenario and it's a really interesting study because it was organized by neuroscientists and philosophy of law professors so it's organized by lawyers and neuroscientists basically which is fascinating to me and I just want to investigate that more quite a team up but in this particular study read Montague a neuroscientist at Virginia Tech Carillion Research Institute in Roanoke and at University College London he fMRI scanned the brains of these individuals to see what happened to the activity in their brains while they were trying to simulate smuggling something through a security checkpoint and so there were a couple of situations in some cases people knew that they had for certain they had a suitcase in this simulated scenario got a suitcase containing contraband that they have to get past security checkpoints like at an airport right so they gave a bag of oregano and told them it was weed or something exactly and then they also gave them a variance in the risk of getting caught and so they had up to 10 security check there were 10 security checkpoints and they buried the number of guards that were stationed at these security checkpoints for different people in different scenarios they found that when there's this differing pattern that showed up and when they showed people the security checkpoints that were guarded then offered them a suitcase they had a different brain activity than if they were given the suitcase and then shown the security checkpoints but in the difference their computer analysis of the fMRI correctly classified people as knowing that they were carrying that contraband and were reckless between 71 and 80% of the time so they were able to actually identify this pattern of behavior that basically screams I'm smuggling something I'm trying to lie so this sounds a lot like a lie detector to me it is a bit like a lie detector absolutely so there would be a way to train yourself how to beat it right? just convince yourself you're not doing anything wrong but also I think about when I was a kid and I would go through metal detectors and even though I was doing nothing wrong I would get ridiculously nervous because I was afraid I would get caught for doing nothing basically I still have that don't say Bob don't say Bob I'm in the airport, keep your cool what's wrong with you is that really what's going through your head because we got through a few of these TSA lines together I need to not walk next to you next time that's when I was a kid when you're a kid you think about all the things that you shouldn't do but that's just what I'm wondering about if you're a nervous person anyway around security is that brain activity going to get confused are you able to zoom in on this particular guilt yeah, the researchers don't even really know what's going on and they think it's interesting that seeing the checkpoint first made this difference in their brain responses and he says in the lab he thinks that perhaps the information about both the risk of grabbing a contraband or hot suitcase or countering a security guard had to be on board first so the brain did the brain need to know the risk for it to be activated in this particular way first yeah, so it's an interesting point of it this article from Science Magazine says the lawyers working on the study recoiled at the idea that the results depended on the sequencing of events because people were engaged in risky behavior no matter the order so Montague the neuroscientist is like I'm a scientist so this is the really interesting result and this is what we need to look into more and the lawyers are like not helpful to us that's my lawyer voice yeah, so the jaykins back to square one so the question is um what are we when are we going to learn more about this we need more people more fmri scans of brains to figure out the evil intent of the brain can we detect it and the researchers are very getting yaf philosopher at Yale Law School says there is really no chance that this is going to be something in airports anytime soon because it was very very hard to do the study in the first place so something that big would be much more difficult to do so don't worry, no airport brain scans for now for now yet I think that would be fun a little fun I feel like I'd rather have a brain scan than a body scan personally stick a picture can I have the picture can I have that be in my passport that would be great, that's your passport photo that's my brain scan how fun oh I love that I'm doing an experiment oh, yeah stop do you have dry skin or something I'm itching can you break it out are you allergic to something I'm itchy all over contagious scratching it's not because chicken pox or something like that I mean itches and scratching are contagious and it's been shown in humans and monkeys and now mice as well that just observing somebody scratching an itch can make a person or a mouse we know more likely to begin scratching as well and so this is this is this phenomenon like yawning that's contagious and we're like is this empathy what's going on, right just the word yawning hearing it makes me yawn it's been a couple of weeks I've gone to the entire time but now I'm talking about scratching itches so scratching itches I've noticed this before when we've done usually on account of Blair a story about something itchy or about spiders I talk about spiders I usually talk about spiders or something of this nature where all of a sudden you start feeling itchy oh you said face mites and now I'm itchy okay so now for the first time researchers have published in the journal Science about this we're getting an understanding into the neuro circuitry of why this happens so people have thought it was kind of this urge is like just this instinctual thing but we haven't really known is it empathy is it something else I'd say it's motor neurons it is motor neurons but it's more than that so what they found by studying these mice they first showed that the mice yes they scratched itches in the presence of other mice that they watched doing that and then to take away the possibility of like relatives or mice they knew and sent in auditory cues they showed them videos of mice scratching itches and the mice were still more likely to do it so they're like okay these mice have this contagious behavior awesome and so then they were like let's dig deep into it and they started going into the brain and they found increased brain activity in an area of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus and we've talked about this before but usually related to sleep and jet lag this is the area of the brain that modulates melatonin input it's a visual input from light during the day and the light information goes into the suprachiasmatic nucleus it controls the body clock and then all sorts of neat stuff we've also found that the along this area I talked a couple of weeks ago about a compound called gastrin released that I think maybe it was last week talking about gastrin being this hormone released by fat cells but now we know it's released from bone cells as well but it acts on the hypothalamus well it turns out that something similar that is actually part of releasing gastrin there's a neuropeptine called the gastrin-releasing peptide so that when gastrin-releasing peptide gets activated then gastrin gets released and that affects appetite well when the suprachiasmatic nucleus was up-regulated in the brains of these scratching mice there was a depletion in the levels of this gastrin-releasing peptide in the suprachiasmatic nucleus and so this neuropeptide is being used as a trigger of scratching behavior so somehow this neuropeptide is transmitting signals about itching between the skin and the spinal cord and then when so they I'm like itching and then they genetically modified mouths so that they couldn't produce the neuropeptide they couldn't catch the itching and then when they got the neuropeptide injected back into them they started to scratch all over the place again so this is a really interesting I think it's just fascinating the way that different compounds act in different areas of the brain to produce different functions but this is fascinating that itching is coming from the suprachiasmatic nucleus which is usually like related to jet lag jet lag and contagious scratching that's why I'm so itchy when I get off of airplanes no that's not right nah nah nah nah and then my final story potatoes on Mars Mars potatoes just in time for St. Patrick's I was just gonna say it's perfect potatoes potatoes on Mars I mean we haven't actually sent potatoes to Mars yet but that's what researchers are setting out to do they're setting the stage for doing that and I have discovered that there is a a center an international center it's called the International Potato Center for studying potatoes because potatoes are really amazing actually they are one of the heartiest foods out there and high in carbohydrates and feed people in times of starvation and so there's a lot of work by this International Potato Center basically to find the heartiest potato out there and figure out where can we grow it what's like the worst place it can go and so they teamed up with NASA and took a potato that originated in the Andes up in the mountains they took one of these potatoes and they basically designed a CubeSat that's a satellite one of those little satellites that can be shot up into space they haven't shot it into space yet but they designed a CubeSat to be hermetically sealed with soil simulated Martian soil a recirculating water system and fertilizer that would potentially be similar to you know what you would get from margarine and sewage maybe on a Mars human plantation kind of thing and then stuck it in low pressure and put it on the Martian light cycle and then they grew tried to grow these potatoes in these CubeSats and it worked so these potatoes potentially could grow on Mars and so the next step is to actually put them in space and see how they deal with the radiation aspect of it because that's like the next step but they're going to bring some different strains right so that the basic potato downfall doesn't happen right I think that would happen once it's on Mars I think they're testing multiple strains now and they're looking for the hardiest ones and which ones could work but yeah the potato famine for example was because all of the potatoes were essentially clones of the same lineage of potato so right we don't want that to happen again hopefully we're learning from that experience and we won't found all nutritional value on Mars from a single type of potato I think it's fascinating though it's like oh we could potentially really it wasn't Matt Damon who came up with the idea but from the book the Martian the author of the book not Matt Damon you guys what if I make this movie called the Martian and I star in it and I eat potatoes on Mars that's how it went that was the meeting right totally yes absolutely so Andy Weir Andy Weir the author is the one who came up with that idea maybe somebody else came up with the idea but he's the one who put it in the book he said David's good he probably came up with the book it could potentially work so it's very cool and now we all know about the International Potato Center as well what do they serve in the cafeteria I'm sure it's all potatoes they got mashed potatoes, scalloped potatoes they don't want to eat them potato grottin potato soup potato hash list goes on baked potato potato medallion right Julian Martian fries and martian fries that's right french potatoes oh tater tots how could we forget the tater tots oh my goodness so many potatoes do you have more potatoes let us know tweet us potatoes just tweet us potatoes for the next several days and cute pictures of potatoes that would be nice tell me about spiders too yesterday a lot of people spent march 14th celebrating pi day but I also celebrated save a spider day save a spider day it's an important day to take a step back and remember to thank spiders for all that they do for us what did they do for us they eat insects they eat insects and a recent study from zoologists at the University of Basel and Lund University in Sweden have shown how much spiders eat so for the first time they've had kind of a quantitative analysis they wanted to figure out how much biomass of insects these spiders are eating every year they're about 45,000 species and they have a population density of up to 1,000 individuals per square meter you're welcome for now knowing that spiders have a really important job they eat mostly insects they have actually a much more far reaching impact on our world than we even could have thought before I like to tell kids that spiders are misunderstood because without them I probably wouldn't even be able to see you because there'd be so many insects just flying around be disgusting so these researchers used calculation methods based on several different models they consistently showed that the global spider population had a weight of around 25 million tons and that they wipe out an estimated 4 to 800 million tons of prey every year 400 to 800 million tons more than 90% of that is insects and to give you some kind of perspective on that the worldwide human population consumes around 400 million tons of meat and fish so equal to our meat and fish intake what I think is even more interesting whales cetaceans eat an estimate of between 282 500 million tons of prey a year so spiders not per capita not adjusted to weight or size or anything like that no no no spiders eat the same weight potentially more of food every year as whales right do you mean that each individual spider no no no all the spiders on earth so that means all the spiders on I mean eat more than all the spiders on mars all the spiders on earth their biomass that they process is more than the biomass processed by whales all of the whales on earth something as small as a spider would eat less than a whale right right right you would turns out yeah so there we go that's why we really care about spiders we should never squish spiders if we can help it they are unsung heroes they are responsible for 800 million tons of insects being removed and processed spiders are our friends are our friends save a spider save a spider today I'm just going to let that spider outside my kitchen window thrive if he's out there you're in here he's not bothering you yep that's if I see a spider far away from me in a room I go you hang out over there I just let him be he's my buddy I name him usually and then if he comes near my face it's got to go but I try to remove him without dispatching him you try I do my very very best I have a pretty good success rate well I hope nobody's trying to remove us by dispatching us right now don't do that because we're going to dispatch ourselves that's right that's what's happening right now that's what I was getting to we're going to dispatch ourselves it's time for us to end this show thank you so much for joining us tonight I would like to thank our Patreon sponsors for sponsoring this week in science! 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this week in science this week in science it's the end of the world so I'm setting up shop got my banner unfurled it says the scientist is in I'm gonna sell my advice show them how to stop the robots with a simple device I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand science is coming your way so everybody listen to what I- and I'll broadcast my opinion all it's this week in science this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in science this week in science science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what I say may not represent your views but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan if you listen to the science you may just then understand that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy coming your way everybody listen to everything we say and if you use our methods then a roll and a die we may rid the world of toxoplasma got me this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in science science the laundry list of items I want to address from stopping global hunger I'm trying to promote more rational thought and I'll try to answer any question you've got but how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one this week in science science this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in science this week in science that ends another episode of this week in science we're going to have a short post show tonight I think I have a headache I am tired tired with headache it's daylight savings time crud oh dear strengths what have you put in the chat room pole dancing bears itching bears oh there we go that's funny that's pretty funny that's right have you guys seen this video it's planet earth 2 and the bears are scratching their backs it's really funny I haven't seen that right outside my there's bats flying around just about 10 feet out there they're circling around circling around like these little these chirps where they're sitting at they're so rad these bears are so cute aren't they adorable? yeah in the music yeah let's get down bears are amazing they're just like the perfect mixture of silly and fluffy and awkward and then also extremely terrifying yep I don't know there's the part where sometimes the media accentuates the silly cute funny aspect of them too much yeah and then people try to get up close and then I was watching a video recently of somebody feeding a polar bear through a window had the window open the polar bear was reaching in bad idea grabbing things from the person's hand and the person was trying to pet the polar bear's face and stuff and I'm like oh my gosh you're training that bear that you have food he's going to come break into your house and kill you yeah don't ever do that with the polar bears not to mention they can take your finger like that like you would never even know until it was gone it wouldn't be a struggle it would just be whoop fingers gone yeah yeah as opposed to other types of animals that would simply gnaw on your fingers slowly until you know right you have time to react you would know if a sloth was trying to take your finger right probably yeah spider blare spider blare that's me spider blare I'll be a jumping spider for Halloween peacock spider someday I'll have a punk fusion band called super chiasmatic nucleus that's good it's my new favorite word of the week yeah that's a good one I'm really tired yeah I think it's bedtime I'm just like staring at things right now I'm just like what's that it's bedtime I put all my views cause I feel like it's nine so I could like stay up but then when 6.30 comes by I wanted to die when it's time to wake up and I was getting so good at waking up at 6.30 and then this ruined it no if you haven't heard it yet yeah Ed posted the link to my chemistry world podcast I put it online too but I had fun with that it's about a compound called spermidine hmm so of course I had to bring in Monty Python to tell in the chat once the jet lag connection to the thing explained again the itchiness oh to the itchiness yes the super chiasmatic nucleus is the area of the brain that is stimulated by light input so visual input of light in the morning and it triggers and sets that light input sets the body's clock and so the super chiasmatic nucleus when you travel long distances gets off in its stimulation of the hypothalamus for I think it's the hypothalamus for the release of for the release of melatonin but it's yeah so the idea that you look at bright light first thing in the morning wherever you are to reset your clock when you're traveling is that you are actually stimulating your super chiasmatic nucleus to reset and to change the timing which it releases so how does that work if you're a shift worker you're just screwed yeah because you're like up and down and you're like you've got four days on and three days off or you know whatever shift workers are all messed up and why they're it might be more itchy I don't know it's a good question we should find out yeah because there are extra itchiness in people with shift work yes so it's a really it's a big deal because when your body clock gets messed up it messes up all sorts of metabolic things and then that's why we have so we've talked so much about studies related to health effects of shift work and time shifting staying up late unless you're always an up late person isn't necessarily good so I try on a weekly basis to stay up on a daily basis I try to stay up until 10 or 11 o'clock at night because I know Wednesdays are gonna be my later night right nucleus yeah I love that word too the optic chiasm it's situated directly the suprachiasmatic nucleus situated directly above the optic chiasm yeah and does it where does it where does it send info optic chiasm that is the that is now the name for the I'm going to call my artwork when people ask what kind of art is it the chiasmatic sure it makes me want to it makes me want to really the suprachiasmatic nucleus it really makes me think of like Mary Poppins suprachiasmatic nucleus is quite atrocious even though the sound of it is something I just want to hum the little hum the lie hum the little hum the lie the little hum the lie there you go one day when twist rules media will make that yeah Mary Poppins child neurologist that's right I bet there's a bunch of them we could get in there there wasn't anything about expialidocious it's suprachiasmatic nucleus that's right I don't know why that's what that's what it does for me yeah but yeah interesting why would the area of the brain related to circadian rhythms which then also okay so the releasing peptide actually now that I'm thinking about it because that releasing peptide is related to the release of a factor related to appetite appetite is something related to your circadian rhythm and it directs when you get hungry but why itching why would itchiness itchy is scratchy I don't know why they go together does being itchy sometimes clue something in about your immune system like there's something that you're gonna have to fight off like a pest or a parasite or something and then it wants you to go to sleep to then fight that like go to sleep now make more immune cells or I'm just wondering it might have something to do with being tired and the brain not maybe being able to filter out what's always like this stimulus all over your body these little pinpoints of data saying oh here's this bit of skin there now it's translating louder and now it seems it's something itchy that's sort of a vague interpretation but that's kind of how I would picture it hmm I don't know I have a vague collection of feeling more itchy the more tired I am and I don't know I'd have to like be paying attention right but is this just anecdotal is this just memory going what makes a person itchy so bugs right actual physical stimulus or like dry skin right or an allergic reaction right so all those things maybe could in a stretch be related to the immune system my memory is telling me I'm never itchy in the morning that if I start to get like a little like start doing this or start doing this or start this is like this is like a 2 in the morning yeah this is a post talk analysis though that you're doing so I'd have to start like making notes but I'm a night owl I'm someone who sometimes stays up much much too late trying to work on things well your clowns already recording you all the time so just make it take a video of you when you wake up right no problem I don't know as I wake up my whole face is itchy because I have to rub it yeah yeah yeah like I'm wondering if that's like in the morning you're itchy because you're like waking up all of your all of your neurons right you're being like oh hey we're getting out of bed like you've been sleeping on a hard surface with blankets covering you and pressing down on you and maybe all of a sudden you've released a weight of pressure from your skin right so that could be morning itchy I don't think that's morning itchy temperature change you're in the bed you're getting out of the bed that's a temperature change temperature change can be related to itchiness I don't know all we all we know about Justin though is that he sleeps on the couch right that is true so you're an outlier anyway yeah you're already thrown out you're already not a part of the study you're out too many variables nope hey maybe the cure to morning itchiness is sleeping on the couch I don't know I kind of like like waking up rubbing my face scratching my arms stretching it's kind of the process right get all the bed bugs off get the bed bugs off yes go super charismatic nucleus get all the bed bugs off that's what it's really for wake up itch itch oh look at that bug what are you a spider you eat 400 million tons of that garbage I'm guessing that our primate ancestors and you know our cousins they still do this so yeah that is true look at that that's food itchy scratchiness can relate to food intake maybe if it's bugs yeah I don't know I'm reaching it I'm grasping it straws here I think the important thing we've discovered is that it sounded like there was zero connections and we've already just come up with a bunch of garbage ones so obviously there are connections there are connections there you go that could be tested absolutely I think that's the power of this is that we just went from going like nah there's nothing no and then in just 10 minutes we were like oh there's this connection and this connection and this connection so sure so but then the whole mirror on mirror on thing makes you know dealing with mirror neurons for those who don't remember us talking about this a lot like some years ago so this itching isn't with mirror this isn't a mirror neuron thing it's not they're not involved at all no but this so this center has nothing to do with the well it's visual empathy yeah it's not empathy it's something else like it's well that's kind of where like the immuno response thing came into mind for me was if you're itchy you're covered in something that's about to get me itchy mm-hmm so my immune system is already responding like you're itchy do you have ticks or something like you have lice oh so here's it with the mirror neurons when you watch somebody running your mirror and arms start firing like they're running if you watch if you watch a physical activity of somebody doing something your brain is recreating that activity inside and relating to it and performing it to an extent so somehow by seeing somebody be itchy you're also performing that in your head and therefore you're sort of creating the connection to what might be itchy in yourself I mean it's you're you're somehow you're performing it in your own brain that's causing you to react to a thing that you just saw in something else and wasn't wasn't what do you call it wasn't started by your skin or by something actually causing your skin to be itchy and it comes maybe it's related because your brain needs to shut down itchiness to go to sleep mm-hmm that's a good one you're not sleeping well that's an interesting idea hmm right all sorts of ideas hot ride that just says lice lice it's all about lice it really is just all about lice I know I am constantly watching my child are you itching are you itching it's a need to know every summer when our summer camp a child shows up with lice I am so itchy for the next several days I just like I sit at my desk going like I braid my hair real tight and tie it up yeah the city of Davis is full of lice we get it used to be it used to be like years ago the first child we get this like announcement from the school a child was found with lice at our school and it was like this big panic I know and then it became like a few times a year then it was like a monthly thing and then they just stopped sending it I haven't heard you know because like they're just like okay all of our kids have lice bill forever unless you get a memo saying there's no more lice assume there's lice pretty much that's how it's been lots of kids in elementary school have been showing up with shaved heads oh my god that's one way to deal with it if you don't have the hair or just stop washing your hair because the lice like clean hair I'm so itchy now can we stop talking about lice and apparently this might be why I've never had lice you don't wash your hair it's just being a naturally greasy Italian gentleman I don't know or if you do wash your hair put some oil back into it there's some nice oils you can put in your hair they smell nice other kids who weren't shaving heads were showing up to school with olive oil infused hair and then everybody looks greasy cool but apparently the treatments for it don't work around here anymore like the stuff that the anti lice shampoos the lice have become like super bugs they're into it now that's not good I hate that that's not good there is no cure now ag schools what can you do alright and on that note I'm going to go have lice infested dreams and if you want to get rid of if you want to get rid of those dreams Craig Landon is recommending Okeanos deep sea tv live dives it's wonderful therapy for your brain probably something very nice and underwatery lots of pretty animals I'm just going to sit here it's very water ensconced so it's moisturizing tv moisturizing of your eyes looking good on the hair there Blair that's something that's something there you go alright if we're signing out let's sign out goodnight minions goodnight kiki player kiki player I do want to talk to you on the show really briefly okay the after the after show the secret members only portion of the show Blair's turned into cousin itch I am so done cousin itch cousin itch cousin itch cousin itch what oh my goodness oh wait here we go hold on what is going on you're going to put on the sunglasses now now she gets really cool isn't it fuck Blair right isn't that how it goes right exactly these are prescriptions I can't see though I can't see anything I put this on and now I can't see anything you guys thanks so much for joining us for another episode of this week in science thanks for hanging out for a little bit after the show and I hope everyone had a wonderful pie day I made taco pie for my pie day what does that mean used pie crust and then I put refried beans in the bottom of it and then I put some uh spiced stuff in there with the bell peppers and then put stuff tortilla chips on top and then I served it with avocado we could do sour cream but I did plain yogurt and with sliced tomatoes and extra salsa and so yeah it was taco pie it was very fun it was very fun and I hope everyone saved a spider yesterday or at least appreciated spiders yesterday and I hope that we will see you again next week what is next week next week will be the 22nd and in between now and then oh we didn't even talk about this tomorrow is national panda day today is the Ides of March and we move right into national panda day Friday St. Patrick's Day and on the 20th Monday spring spring is officially coming it's official let's sketch so you guys I'll see you after the equinox when we are officially into spring thanks so much sounds great say goodnight Blair say goodnight Justin goodnight Justin goodnight everyone have a wonderful week we'll see you next week bye