 We are here for another episode of this week in science Let us let us begin this podcast broadcast live streaming this I'm back blares out Justin still here. You know, we just rotate play tag It's a it's the great science race We're glad that you're here with us right now if you're just catching this we always broadcast live Wednesdays 8 p.m. Pacific time and Then I take the audio turn it into a podcast. There's some snip snip snip editing involved Thank You Rachel for that and then the podcast goes out so you can catch all of the twists here or there Are you ready to start Justin? Yeah Yeah, okay, let's do this show Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa I'm gonna get around to actually getting my ducks in a circle any day now beginning in Starting in three two This is Is Twist this week in science episode number 870 recorded on Wednesday, April 6th 2022 our brains or brawn better I'm dr. Kiki and tonight on this week in science. We will fill your heads with honey tech squid games and fungal phenomena but first Disclamer disclaimer disclaimer Recently a brawny Republican us and a candidate asked a question He said at one time science said man came from apes if that is true Why are there still apes think about it? Okay, I will first of all if there were no apes There would be no humans since humans are a kind of ape Mostly hairless bipedal ape with a big brain and great technology, but an ape all the same What's striking though to me is that this creationist hot take has been around for a really long time Comedian Tim Allen posted almost the exact thing five years back on Twitter He said if we evolved from apes, why are there still apes again? The answer is if there were no apes there would be no humans No Twitter no Tim Allen and no way to answer the question because we would not exist So it's a bit like asking if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it Does it still make a sound and the answer to that is of course? Yes, because that's how object permanence works something babies learn in their first year But philosophers spent centuries worrying about this until science came along If we can interpret the original question to be asking why are there still other apes? it just reveals the cartoon of Evolution that they are still working with in their heads. It's wrong It's just wrong and we can blame science communicators past for that the infographic of a chimp like creatures slowly becoming upright as evolution transitions from knuckle dragging to bipedal from hunched over caveman to a modern-day upright posture It's fundamentally incorrect Nowhere in the six million ish year human ancestral record that our forebearer apes walk on their knuckles Not like a chimpanzee not like a gorilla. We were pretty much upright from the beginning that is something other apes have evolved into the longer fingers for climbing in the the knuckle walking is Relatively new because they evolved that way They we have a common ancestor one that likely climbed trees and walked bipedally back and forth But evolution isn't linear since that time we in the other apes Experienced different pressures. We evolved in different directions and it is actually a really good example about evolution works And it's the same reason Sharks are fish and yet there are other fish why people have pet cats and yet There are still lions and tigers why they're over a thousand species of bat ten thousand species of bird and while there are several there were several species of Humans living at the same time We are now down to one Though through our DNA the traces are there of pasting interminglings, which means they never really left us all together So the question why are there still apes is actually a really good one to think about There are still apes because without them we wouldn't have this week in science Coming up next It's just It's just the two of us just the two of us we can science if we try Oh, yeah, we are here to talk about So much amazing science this week and we're so glad that you are here with us Because we do enjoy this thing called talking about science this week in science Welcome everyone Our show ahead. What do I have? I have stories New stories about the climate countdown Brains versus brawn and fungi that just might phone home What do you have Justin? Fungi oh gosh, what did I bring today? Uh, I have a Uh, honey tech industry Uh news update which actually will be the first of its kind that we've we've done on the show, I believe Uh, let's see honey tech industries incorporated Yeah, I've got evolution versus racism accelerating drug discovery in a bubble Uh, EPA is going to cancel something that most people probably thought was already canceled already banned And uh in the Justin's animal corner segment of the show, uh The secret life of squid will be revealed Oh squid have so many secrets. They have a very secret life below the ocean surface as as it is All right, so we get to dig into secret lives and I don't know cancelling What okay I'm interested about all these things and I hope that you are as well As we jump into the show I do need to remind you that if you're not yet subscribed you can find us all places that podcasts are found We do broadcast live on youtube twitch and facebook Every Wednesday evening at 8 p.m. Pacific time. You can find us by searching for this weekend science We are also twist science on twitch twitter and instagram. Our website is twist.org Now it's time for the science Do you want to count down? 10 nine Eight wait, wait, wait. What are we counting down to it's very important? I know that I need to either be hiding Or like have a camera. Yeah, just you know too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and temperatures going above one and a half degrees Celsius and when that's going to happen and how much time we have left to Uh make changes to the way that we do daily stuff. Okay, so it is the go and hide one No, I'm not gonna I am not gonna say it's the go and hide one because this is part of uh, Well, the international Wow, what does the p stand for ipcc? International people No, no, it's not I just completely blanked on What the p stands for in the ipcc? Anyway ipcc Intergovernmental panel on climate change it's much bigger than a panel though It's hundreds of scientists working together with policy makers government officials business people to try and get the clearest message out about climate change science and Things that we can do strategies for approaching uh this Very serious issue in our world This latest report They just put out is part three of the sixth Intergovernmental panel on climate change report and this part three stresses That we need to do something now that we're running out of time and you might because I thought I was over call all of the previous iterations. Oh, yeah of this. They were like plenty of time No, no the new worry about here. We looked at it. It's fine Yeah, so back the the first part the first couple parts of This this sixth panel report They discovered that uh things are a lot worse than they thought they were so the models are actually Underestimating how much things are changing and how quickly they're changing and so the clock has gotten run forward a little bit faster So this report And I'm sorry, I didn't interrupt again I feel like that's been every report. Yeah, I feel like because what happens the more data we get the more they're like Whoa Oh Oh gosh Nothing like well, you really hope that it's going to be like hey everything's okay. Look we got more data Everything's better, but that's not what our understanding is actually Giving us more information on how dire the situation is We need to do something this report was approved by 195 governments and the Negotiating session for this third part of the report ran over schedule Because there were different groups Russia and Saudi Arabia in particular Who were pushing to like soften up the language about what we need to do about also fuels But they didn't soften that language up. This is a 29 hundred page report and it focuses on Our options how we're gonna how we need to curb emissions how we need to capture carbon How we need to mitigate these global warming impacts Hundreds of scientists 65 countries involved They all came up with their scientific language for what they wanted to say And then they had to work with the politicians and the politicians were like no Well, I mean you're saying this but you really say this right and then a scientist scientists had to say No, I wasn't saying that at all. I really want to say this and the politicians come back go You don't really want to say that because we can't really do that And so they went back and forth and back and forth The politicians really really working which is what has happened in all of the other IPCC reports previously The politicians really working to soften the reports and soften the blow and make it not seem as bad as it is because Nobody wants doom and gloom So this Time around the scientists are really coming out of the woodwork to say this is serious We need to do something. We need to have done it yesterday. So yesterday won't work. So let's do it today We can't wait till tomorrow. We have today. Just like, um, what do you always say, Justin? Uh, now is the moment which you can do and that is exactly what the scientists are saying About climate change and they this report does say that we have the scientific understanding and the technology currently To address this it's a matter of will and it's a matter of politics and economics as to how we do this So there were key points from the report this, uh suggests that global emissions need to peak at the latest by 2025 and then decline rapidly for us to have a 50 percent chance of limiting warmening to 1.5 degrees celsius 2030 and hitting at zero in the early 2050s in order to meet the goal and Given what we're currently doing we're probably gonna more likely hit three degrees celsius rise above pre-industrial levels. So we're overshooting significantly at this point So we have also Price drops. So that was the bad news. Good news wind solar Batteries all these technologies prices are going down because we've had enough investment over a long period of time The technologies are advancing and we actually have um, and we have Momentum behind them and so these technologies are becoming better and better and more easily available and effective um And in fact global energy intensity, which is according to this nature report a measure of the amount of energy required to drive the economy It decreased two percent annually between 2010 and 2019, which is that's a great trend We're we're reversing what we've been doing previously. So we're on the right track. We just have to keep going and more So let's see we need to also uh Only slightly Really we need to to stop all of our fossil fuel emissions We need to keep fossil fuels in the ground and that the existing and planned fossil fuel projects are going to exceed our carbon budget It's already it's too what we're planning is too much. We got to we got to change track Maybe those planned fossil fuel Projects turn them to nuclear turn them wind solar figure out what else we can do because that's what we need to do Uh, we the nuclear has like that one Immediate the draw, right, which is that it's carbon-free But then it also has that and then you dig a hole and you put the radiation On the waste underneath the ground or what we do is we get the bacteria to come and eat it up Eventually, but we don't have that right? We don't have them yet. We will someday The problem with the nuclear is we then we're talking about a waste that is toxic for tens of thousands of years Yes But if it's hidden away, you'll never know it's there. Anyway, moving forward. I'm not going to debate this right now This isn't part of this particular topic. I'm just stating the stating the findings of the ipcc Uh, so we need to Expand forests improve agricultural practices. There are technologies that we can subsidize carbon capture technologies And also we need to we need to find ways to get carbon out of the atmosphere and additionally Good news from this is that there we are looking at global economic growth Slowing a bit if we implement all of the changes that are necessary for Fixing climate change, but Climate policies will Later economic benefits Through improved health and reduced climate damages. So it will balance out eventually It's just not going to be a Right now kind of thing. So this is a very we have to look at things from a long-term planning perspective And not a short-term perspective And wealthy nations need to financially assist Low-income countries because low-income countries very often are not the ones that are causing the problems and are Most impacted by climate change. So these are the the big news is from the ipcc report. The big take-home is You you could be sad today Hide under your blanket. Nope. Nope. Nope get up get up. We have work to do Okay, that's what we got to do. We have to and and we are really at a point where it's technology It's political. We need to get corporations and policy makers to move on this rapidly This is where we need to go Yeah, and there's that there's that the thing you were saying at the top about how in the past the government I don't know. Maybe currently the government has been United States government has tried to water down information or all how the politicians are like, well, let's change the language You know, that's not a thing that that they would be willing to walk out on that thin rope and reinterpret military intelligence military intelligence saying hey, here's the threat assessment of xyz Like yeah, but let's change the words. What do you mean? What are you talking about changes? We just gave you this is intel. Yeah, but we don't like it So we want to you to come up with a different way of thinking about the whatever it is You know, you have some of the the the brightest Mines out there the educated folks out there who've been studying this for years So we're giving you intel giving you results giving you the latest data He's like, yeah, we're gonna change the data You know your desk, why don't you take your desk and move it down into the basement But I'm keeping just the red swing line is actually Yeah, but good news. Here's the here's my I'm bringing a good news story Justin just good news kiki's good news We do finally have eyes in the sky to really make Our uh detection of carbon dioxide emissions More close to real-time. I mean not real-time real-time, but at least analyzed and Understood within a month or two Which is much better than we have done previously New report is out now Using data from nasa's orbiting carbon observatory to the oco2 And also the geo-scattered earth observing system And they were able to measure drops in co2 emissions during the covet 19 pandemic from space They have daily and monthly data products available to the public So this opens new possibilities for tracking the collective efforts of human activities on carbon dioxide carbon dioxide concentrations in near real-time So there's some pretty fun stuff out there, uh showing that yes We did have a drop in carbon dioxide when everybody stayed indoors and stayed home. It happened. It was great We can do it again But now we now we can really see what we're doing and when we're doing it and what's influencing what weather patterns are influencing What fires are doing to influence? You know, we can see where all of these different sources are coming from and how the dynamics of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are changing day to day so with the oco2 you too Could keep an eye on carbon dioxide Eyes on the sky Tell me a story Okay, uh Move over high tech industry Now there's something way sweeter and stickier too The honey tech industry I'm I'm a fan. I'm all I love this I'm in I'm buying stock right now Uh researchers have been uh looking into creating more biodegradable renewable solutions for uh, the next Wave the next generation of computers and computing power Uh, which one of the main candidates of is uh neuromorphic computers These are systems designed to mimic the way the human brain works Uh One of the interesting things about the human brain is that it's really amazing Really, it can do a lot. You think yes, uh, and it uses very little energy And and actually not a tremendous amount of space Uh Compared to you know some supercomputers and what have you in the world. So Uh, this is uh thing zhow associate professor of washington state university school of engineering computer science He thinks that honey Is going to be perhaps the material of the future I need you to explain this you you need to explain this now I I can't I just I just be my science honey pot Uh, but this this is uh, this is uh, zhow. He says uh, honey does not spoil It has a very low moisture concentration So bacteria cannot survive in it and it means uh, this means the computer chips Will be very stable and reliable for a very long time And uh, their engineers have been able to use honey to make a Memorister Which is uh, uh the computer component similar to a transistor that cannot just process Uh, but also store data in memory This is published in the journal of physics d the researchers show That honey can be used to make memristors Uh further courting is out. This is a very small device with a simple structure But it has very similar functions to a human neuron This means if we can integrate millions or billions of these honey memristors together They can be made into a neuromorphic system that functions much like a human brain So they tested they tested honey memristors ability to mimic the work of synapses With high switching on and off speeds of 100 and then 500 nanoseconds respectively The memristors also emulated the synapse functions known as Spike timing independent plasticity and spike rate dependent plasticity Which are responsible for learning processes in the human brain And these are they they're using they've got this down to a pretty they're they're working on getting it to smaller and smaller scales uh The the team is trying working right now to develop them on a One-one-thousandths of a human hair and bundle many millions or even billions of these together So that they can create a super computer made out of honey Components so and one of the things that they kind of point out to is uh the Fugaku supercomputer uses upwards of 28 million watts Human brain 20 Yeah, like we're not like when you when people are like, oh that guy's not the brightest bulb in Actually, none of us are We've been running on led brains for a really long time Or at least yeah, at least low lumen bulbs. That's for sure So we can this is also, you know biomorphic computers organic sourced materials You have to points out it's like, you know It means you would have to avoid spilling coffee Uh on these computers of the future But then you don't want to put coffee on your computers already That's already a good idea So There you go This is fascinating. I mean it I would I would love to know more about the physical properties of Solid honey, right? So, I mean I know the Chris honey when you leave it in the jar and it Crystallizes and gets hard, but no it doesn't necessarily spoil and you can always heat it up and it melts and then you can And you can use the honey again. Um, yeah, I just I would love to know more about how They created this and more of the reasoning behind Really, I mean yes, it doesn't spoil but why? Really why honey? I thought that same thing like like the computers get heat you going on in there Like the honey like like you said you warm it up and then all of your circuitry like oozes away Once it's heated up. So so did they add something to the honey to make this organic Insulator this organic material Yeah Work in a particular way. Is it just honey? What kind of honey? Does it have to be like clover honey or can it be Something else For they've been working with a lot of these been I guess working on different organic materials that could be used to replace the More toxic components that we have in computers currently Uh, great and so it's sugars. It's different proteins one of the other ones that they they got a lot of What pretty deep into was was aloe like aloe vera plants producing So really Way outside of the box. Yeah But finding things that can work finding replacements for for for the current components Green sustainable electronics possibly Very cool Speaking of green electronics, how about solar panels that work at night Oh By starlight or are they digging infrared? What are they doing? Yeah, so uh, we've talked previously about research that uh, that uses Thermoelectric gradients to produce energy just based on the difference between Temperatures Between the ground and the air And in this particular case these researchers at stanford university who have published in applied physics letters aip publishing They've constructed a photovoltaic cell That does the photovoltaic thing during the day gets solar energy during the day But then at night Takes advantage of the thermoelectric gradient and radiative cooling. They have a heat sink that is Underneath the solar cell And that heat difference You know is just enough To allow for a thermoelectric effect that allows for the creation of electricity Because of that temperature difference and this product that they've created they say is completely off the shelf. They did not specifically like fine tune it so that the nighttime radiative cooling parts Work more efficiently with the solar parts and they say that you could probably and they they might work work on it to create something That can be more efficient, but With what they've done here. This is really engineered Just to see if it would work And they say the most expensive thing in the whole setup was the thermoelectric itself We managed what we made it to do here is build the whole thing from off the shelf and components have a very good thermal contact And the most and that was the most expensive thing was the thermoelectric electric They are going to optimize it, but the energy output that they that they had was Was on par with normal solar cells and the fact that it continued to put energy into the system overnight Was pretty good and they say that the device generates 50 milliwatts per square meter So you would need about 20 square meters of one of these of photovoltaic area, which is an easy roof To make that work less than a roof Yeah Yeah, you were saying this is sort of the first story in the show or top of the show or something about the price drops For for solar and stuff. It's it's absolutely affordable and accessible now like it's Never been done never been before Great time if you're in in that position you can put some solar panels on the roof go for it Absolutely And additionally uh in addition other good news. I've got this is this is the part of the early stories Which is solutions oriented? Rice university has created a Method for turning waste plastic into a carbon dioxide Absorbent material Okay, so now please tell me that this is not a plastic industry's attempt to say hey Plastic waste actually good for the environment I don't know, but I really hope so So This work was supported. I'm looking down further the work was supported by the department of energy Which that's great department of energy wants to wants to deal with energy issues and saudi aramco Which is a fossil fuel company So there's some yeah interesting points here, but Uh, what they've done is they have a chemical process. It's a process called Piralization they pyralize the plastic Uh, and this is usually during the plastic recycling process But if they pyralize it in the presence of potassium acetate it creates porous Particles of the plastic that are able to capture up to 18 of their own weight in carbon dioxide at room temperature Wow Yeah, so it doesn't need to be especially heated But they can create these things. So the question is, uh, what happens to these plastics after They've absorbed all the carbon dioxide. What do we melt them down in a furnace and and release the carbon dioxide? Yeah, I mean great if you're trying to capture the carbon dioxide to I don't know make more bubbly water Which is possible Yeah, it's a it seems like a fairly simple process the lab estimates the estimates the cost of carbon dioxide capture from a point source Like post combustion flue gas would be 21 dollars a ton Which is very inexpensive and if it's using waste plastic That is potentially a good use for a lot of that plastic waste out there Yeah, I guess I guess there's a plastic waste meaning the plastic that's unrecyclable Yes Yes, exactly waste plastic We just need to figure out how to make more of that We don't need to make more waste plastic. We have plenty. I think we have enough waste plastic to last us To absorb carbon dioxide for the next century If yeah, but this is a it's an interesting technology. So just another point that the technology we have the technology now To do the things that we hope that we can do Are you going to tell me about sparkles now? Yeah, this is uh, okay, so uh question How many different molecules can you synthesize on the head of a pin? Yeah, the answer is uh 40 000 more than 40 000 and you can analyze them while you're synthesizing I was going to say 10 time. What is it? Avogadro's number 10 times 6.0 something Yeah So in a in a brand new nano scale High throughput methodology developed in Denmark the amount of material required to test molecular solutions to build Maybe vaccines or pharmaceuticals agents Has been dramatically reduced The new tool speeds up development of all of this stuff By more than one million times According to researchers while minimizing costs, of course minimizing the energy and materials needed And it gets results within seven minutes All right, while this method is extremely concise reduction in extraneous reagents The name is a bit verbose single particle Combin combinatorial Lipidic nanocontainer fusion based on dna mediated fusion Or as they have abbreviated it sparkled The method works by using soap like bubbles as nanocontainers with dna Nanotechnology multiple ingredients can then be mixed within these little bubbles And you can do it on a mass scale utilizing A bit of machine learning as well You can run Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of experiments Simultaneously and again results in about seven minutes of what your outcomes are This is quoting somebody this is quoting Nikos Hadzakis who's associate professor of the department of chemistry University of Copenhagen the volumes are so small The use of material can be compared to using one liter of water And one kilogram of material instead of The entire volumes of water and all the oceans to test the material that would correspond to about the size of Mount Everest so It's kind of a other analogy, but it's massively massively reduced The amount of actual material they need to have present in their experiments And and so this is this is sort of a trend. I've heard of other versions of this Sort of that have been uh being worked on being developed Over the years. This is all a move to get really high throughput experimentation This was the is the craziest scale Of that that I've heard we've heard of versions of this in in machine learning trying to look at what the Chemical interactions might be but this one's physically doing the experiment so Great you have the machine learning The algorithms said, okay We should put all these things together and see what they do because we think this looks like a good target That looks like a good target and then they come up with thousands of potential good targets This is actually being able to Put those molecules together and analyze how they interact Uh, and then this is uh meta meta Who's uh one of the authors on this saying saving infinite amounts of time energy and manpower Would fundamentally would be a fundamentally important for any synthesis development and evaluation of pharmaceuticals Uh, that is uh, I think at the university was uh currently no postdoc at uh haved university united states What we have is have a dad at very close to live readout That means that one can moderate the setup continuously based on the readings adding significant additional value We expect this to be a key factor for industry wanting to implement the solution Uh, so yeah, there's all sorts of places in the applications for this as they've published in the journal nature chemistry And there's a sort of fun side note where they were they discussed, uh Being afraid to talk about their project Because they were they're like I was saying there's like so much Interest in this and there's so much research into doing high throughput They didn't even like some of them were like I didn't even want to talk to my old professor about what I was doing because They didn't want they wanted to publish first. They wanted to you know that desire to publish the work and get it out there well, it it yeah, if this is an area where People would jump on that and might Throughput their work faster and get to publication faster and there are you know so many stories of uh Reviewers denying publications and then going and doing the studies themselves and you know studies being stolen and Yeah, but this is I mean the cost effectiveness of Therapeutics of finding molecules of creating molecules like all of it if you can save company's money It is worth so much Yeah, and it kodiess is pointing out too about how machine learning It's basically has to have the human Knowledge it input into it in the first place Yeah, and so it's working with models of human knowledge that haven't actually necessarily been tested so Yeah, it's it's very it's very tricky to Rely on that and and especially if you get okay. I need a solution for this and it gives you 40 000 Solutions and you're like oh gosh, which one okay, I'll try this one one. Yeah in the lap uh being able to connect a physical experiment to a throughput that is you know Much larger. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness that is going to revolutionize uh The way we look you know like this this can be The time frame that we came up with the vaccines For the pandemic. Yep. Yep was amazing was actually unprecedented in a lot of ways Right because we put so many resources behind it and also it had been in development not specifically a covid vaccine but SARS and other mRNA vaccines had been in development People of the future and by future. I mean In the next couple years They're gonna be like wow. Yeah, it took them like almost a year We got this the next brain damage. We took care of in seven minutes. Yeah. Okay. Well comparatively faster but future people future humans Future humans I don't know. Hopefully all these machines will be doing all the work. So it'll you know Keep us able to do all the fun creative work that humans like to do Yeah, that's what they're gonna leave us to Yeah Anderson's progressed to the point that uh, we just need you to all do creative time now. Yeah, just oh, it's art time humans Go get your crayons. Okay I like you I like your vision of the future Well, let's look to the past very quickly at as uh for this last story for this first section of the show Some researchers just from the university of Edinburgh have just published their results of a study in science looking into How mammals survived After the dinosaurs all died out so Once upon a time there was An asteroid a big one and then boom boom fires climate change no food death dinosaurs died and Well, not all dinosaurs. We still have birds, but mammals that allowed mammals to go burst Out of their little hiding places and become dominant or at least we like to think we are dominant on the planet next to plants So these researchers looked into the high the question of whether or not it was because mammals were Brainy and they thought their way out of problems or whether it was because they were brawny and they Stronged their way out of problems Or in any case maybe Intimidated or fought their way out of problems So the researchers looked at body weight They compared the sizes of mammals brains and you might go. Oh, but how do they study mammal brain size when indeed There's really no soft tissue left over from those early instances of mammals let alone dinosaurs CT scans of skulls. That's what they did. So they took CT scans of skulls and were able to get uh The volume of area that the brains would have inhabited in these ancient animals and by comparing Mammal skulls and bodies from different eras after the death of the dinosaurs They were able to determine that the mammals that survived initially after that great die-off Were the brawny ones Body size increased relative to brain size. So brain size got more stayed the same, but body size got a lot bigger So basically animals maybe got a little bit dumber, but they were stronger and they were able to Get food they were able to fight off competitors they were able to intimidate Braun won at first But then when resources started to become scarce in different ecosystems because mammals had expanded and filled up so many niches Braun no longer started to win and it was the Braininess of primate primates that allowed primates to start taking dominance in uh various areas And so that's what they Hypothesized based on their work and their comparisons of body and brain size through the years Braun was good when there was lots of resources and they needed to fight a lot But then they needed to get smart And here we are Yeah, uh one of the It's an idea that Had not the mass extinction of the dinosaurs taken place That uh much of mammal evolution would have taken place anyway And and part of that is based on the global cooling cycles because we already the mammals were pretty diverse We weren't dominant by any means we had a pretty diverse range of things going on back in the dinosaur days But as temperatures cooled on the planet That in alone would have opened up a lot of territory That would have been sort of mammal only, you know, like no no cold-blooded Uh dinosaurs allowed or very few of them would have been able to to handle some of the the colder climates So we could have still we actually could have had A planet that had both dinosaurs and some sort of like ape like intelligent creature Or intelligent mammal of some sort living on it at the same time That would have been, you know, uh a fun, you know, maybe we could really have the Flintstones could have been a thing Could have been wasn't Might be an alternate timeline But this This is this week in science and we hope that you are enjoying the show Thank you for joining us tonight. If you are enjoying the show, please share it with a friend today Let's come on back for a little bit of covid news Covid the fun that keeps on giving the roller coaster ride You never wanted to get on in the first place All right, there's a new variant. There's many new variants But this new variant found in the uk is called xe It is the love child of omicron ba1 and omicron sub variant ba2 It's recombinant. It's these two sub variants that rake bind and they're like ta-da And so now we have z z and z Is potentially more transmissible than either ba1 or ba2 ba1 being more transmissible than previous variants ba2 being more transmissible than ba1 so Yay greater transmissibility, but we don't know whether or not it is Any more dangerous or less dangerous, but because it is a recombinant variant of the origin of the omicrons Researchers don't think that there is more of a public health concern than you would already have That what we're looking at is probably going to end up being About as dangerous as the previous omicron Um Yeah, so again, there are also other variants if you didn't know this xe variant. There are other variants there's xa xb xc xd and um, you haven't even heard about them because They weren't that much of a concern after they found them but now The question is how are we going to continue to find these variants? Now that many governments are reducing the amount of spending that they are putting into surveillance The uk and denmark the united states have all begun winding down their testing and surveillance and so When we do have case numbers Test positive test cases We don't actually understand the How real those numbers are in with comparison It's almost as if we're going back to the beginning of the pandemic again because our surveillance is becoming less now the world health organization has come out with a strategic document and In that strategic document They really say hey, we should be putting money into surveillance Testing is really great because then we know what's out there and what we're looking at And in their most recent epidemiological report, I'm going to read from it right now. It's a little bit of a Slog, but I think it's pretty important and I hope Politicians are listening the world health organization is concerned about the recent significant reduction in SARS-CoV-2 testing by several member states Data are becoming progressively less representative less timely and less robust This inhibits our collective ability to track where the virus is how it's spreading and how it is evolving information And analyses that remain critical to effectively end the acute phase of the pandemic Decreases in testing unless done judiciously as a part of a strategy aimed at maintaining robust surveillance where it is most impactful May affect the capacity of countries to identify cases and enable their timely treatment or isolation And implement other necessary control members with the consequent risk of increased spread of SARS-CoV-2 This may translate in an increase in hospitalizations and deaths and significant strains on health care systems Particularly in areas where public health and social measures have been lifted and where vaccination coverage Is in decline Yeah furthermore reduced testing impacts the capacity of countries to detect emerging variants early Ultimately impairing response efforts. COVID-19 remains a public health emergency of international concern And it's too early to reduce the quality of surveillance The uncertainty around the characteristics of emerging variants limits our ability to confidently predict the behavior of this disease As the evolution rate and risk of emerging variants are still high Which could undermine prevention and medication measures Yeah, uh It's just too bad. This thing isn't more deadly And I mean that and it's a terrible thing to say, but I do agree with you, right? We would have Yeah, if it was just much if it was more lethal if it killed more people quicker It wouldn't have spread to this point It's this it's this sweet spot of Transmissibility and and lethality that's making this like the worst Yeah Because there's enough Enough people who don't see it who haven't felt it who who it's outside of their Their lives other than you know, their jobs being affected or other things that it's just enough that It's there's deniability still which yeah anyway, it is Killing a lot of people and part of the way that it goes about its dirty business is by Causing cascades of inflammation and a new study out this week in nature Is looking into antibody mediated infection of blood Monocytes blood monocytes are immune cells that are like they're like the hall monitors in your blood They can't be corrupted because it is the if the if the hall monitors on the take Then this is going to be chaos Right, so these monocytes get infected occasionally and the monocytes are like no way But SARS-CoV-2 is like i'm gonna divide and or not divide I'm gonna replicate replicate replicate and the monocytes are like whoa I can't deal with this But they are infected and it's a problem and they try to abort and call this abort system But what happens is they The monocytes because they are like the immune cells, right and they're being damaged They pull the fire alarm. They're in the hallway and they're like fire alarm fire drill and so It causes the body to Do to help the infected cells die by pyroptosis Or fiery death and this is the initiation of Inflamasomes and the inflamasomes are like your body just goes we're burning up We're just gonna burn it all you burn it all down and we can rebuild But you know sometimes it's too much damage and the way that your body reacts to that inflammation and the fiery death Is not good and that can lead to your death so Researchers are saying that uh when this pyroptosis occurs. There's no way to treat it. You just have to Control it as much as possible and hope that it goes out Well on its own You know, but the issue is is that it's causing that problem and so for whatever reason In this particular study they compared people with COVID-19 and healthy people and people with pneumonia Most of the people who came into the hospital had with COVID had some amount of pneumonia as well But what they found is that people specifically with COVID-19 had higher levels of this pyroptosis and so it's um Yeah, and so there's something happening in the way that SARS-CoV-2 uses antibody Antibodies to get into these monocytes that leads to this process and somehow it does it better than other diseases like pneumonia More fiery death from SARS-CoV-2, but at least now they're seeing what is happening and so maybe now You know you find these little pieces of the puzzle and then maybe you can fix it That's what we hope no more fiery death Or let's control the fire a controlled burn Yeah, I find it. I mean these kinds of mechanisms there's a cnn health article about this in which a researcher who is Donna Farber a professor of microbiology and immunology at columbia columbia university Saying that this whole this whole story that they put together. She said I think it's really elegant and Okay, stop appreciating Stop appreciating the beauty of science for a moment Fiery death fiery death Ah fiery death. Yes That's all I can't be wasn't trying to make fiery death sound fun and cute Or maybe I was because you know it helps us all get through it a little more easily We've all been through it This is this week in science. Thank you so much for joining us for another fun filled science filled episode We do appreciate you joining us and we hope that you continue to enjoy all the science that we bring you week after week We try and be uh, we try and be transparent. We try to be credible We try to have the best science news available for you and fun discussion of what's happening If you do appreciate what we're doing consider heading over to our patreon account You go to twist.org and click on our patreon link And you can choose your level of support 10 dollars and more Per month and we will thank you by name at the end of the show We really can't do this without you. Thank you for your support All right, I guess wait this is this week in science and we're gonna come right back right now with What are we coming back with with a little? um I think it's time for there's animal corner with justin and kiki Justin and kiki's animal corner What you got justin and kiki? Oh Oh, I'm glad you asked We have so much science what you got justin I've got camouflage whole body camouflage Octopus is Do it cuttlefish do it So should we be surprised to see that squid? Can do it too No, uh, this is one of those things that I kind of You know, I we wouldn't be I wouldn't be talking about this probably if uh player was here I'm pretty sure she would have scooped up this story Uh, but I would be I want to know what her reaction to this is published in scientific reports scientists from the physics and biology unit at the okinawa institute of science and technology Have shown that some squid at least Camouflage to match a substrate as a way of avoiding predators So Finally, this has never been seen before Squid tend to live in the open ocean Uh, so they're not around like the the floor very much of the ocean They are very hard to keep alive in captivity And so maybe that's part of why this is this has gone unnoticed But since 2017 scientists at the okinawa institute have been Culturing a species of oval squid In captivity because they've managed to keep them alive then They had an accident Or rather an accidental observation Researchers were cleaning the tank to remove all the algal growth that had taken over the bottom of the aquarium When they noticed that the squid who were still in the aquarium at the time Were shifting colors as they passed over the demarcation of the clean and the algae covered floor Now, yeah, if you can find it that oh, did you uh, did you play the video of it there? There is video that we have for the YouTube version of the show at least Of the squid. Oh, look they're very cute looking little squids. They're so cute. Yes Little squidy squidwards and then At some point in this video, maybe it's the maybe it's this one. Okay. So here it is You see the the clean part and the unclean part Of the floor of their aquarium and they're just quickly switching Colors for their whole body to sort of match the substrate So yeah, this and what we're seeing here is the more of a controlled experiment They follow up experiments on this. They kept several squid in the tank that had cleaned half of the tank leaving the other half covered in algae They placed the cameras in there so that they could capture and these are the results They when they were On the clean side of the tank, they were light in color and as soon as they move over to the algae covered portion of the Tank they promptly become darker to match On covering and ability squid were not Somehow known to possess. Did we not know that they have these color changing cells in their skin? apparently not Or if they did, you know, it might have been talked of it. Well, they have a common ancestor Then with the with the cuttlefish and the octopi perhaps and maybe it was something that they their ancestor shared in common, but now they don't have it now But apparently never seen this in squid I think this interesting this point is really interesting here from uh by Dr. Ryuda Nakajima If substrate is important for squid to avoid predation then that indicates that increases or decreases in squid populations Are even more tied to the health of coral reefs than we thought Which is I think that gives you know the conservation angle on this is when we understand more about how How animals live within their environments and how they interact with their environments and something likes like squid octopus cuttlefish who are Using the coloring of the substrate. It's not just oh a tank substrate. It's like they are using Their surroundings in a coral reef to determine how they look And I I just wonder if they would be Like octopuses or cuttlefish. Uh, we haven't seen it Possibly using color since they can change color. Have we not seen them use color to communicate? Like there's so many more questions that I am I want to know about the squids Yeah I want to see I want to now I want to see a giant squid Doing changing colors Well, you gotta test all the other squid now. Yeah, this is just one species of squid. What if it's the only one? Yeah, these cephalopods cephalopods and their color changing abilities. It's so interesting. Yeah, and also their vision right squid eyes, they're really good eyes, but If you're changing colors all the time What are you looking for in another squid? What are you checking out in your environment? Like I think this is going to be very interesting Squidly research Oh, I wait till the researchers get it into their little tentacles What about bats Do bats bats don't change color? No bats go they hide in their caves during the day except for the daytime bats the Date those those there's a lot of diurnal bats. There's a lot of bats. Some bats are diurnal some are Uh crepuscular some most are nocturnal. We like to think of bats is the bats that come out at night and then go back in the day after they've done all their they're eating Vampire bats in particular We know they they roost in groups and they have very strong social bonds We know that vampire bats share blood with each other so that if one bat in their little social group Is hungry and didn't find enough food They will regurgitate blood meals for other bats in their group that there's this reciprocal arrangement in sharing food and meals and These these bats they know each other they hang out they got they have long term relationships And that's all well and good when you're growing up with your family In your neighborhood, you know, you're just all you go to your school and all that kind of stuff You're like, this is my neighborhood. These are the bats in my neighborhood But what about when you go off to college as a bat? Do you bond with your college roommate? Wait a second There's bat college Well, apparently at Ohio State some researchers Gave bats the equivalent of college roommates. They published their study in the journal biology letters And the researchers They wanted to see They wanted to test interpretations of how relationships form In how social bonds form in vampire bats specifically. How do they? form their relationships and so they Forced young bats to live together with another bat for one week And then they tested the bats to see how long those relationships lasted They used a camera system to identify the bats and then be able to With infrared surveillance Be able to follow the bats multiple hours a day to be able to see who they were grooming Who was grooming them who they were hanging out with and during The various study phases. They also yeah, they were looking at bat grooming interactions of five seconds or longer And so the researcher says from early on they had potential to start grooming Uh grooming relationships And then we did the forced proximity phase to see if we could increase rates of grooming in random pairs We then measured grooming during the post-treatment phase to compare pre versus post-treatment grooming turns out Bat college roommates have long lasting relationships. They're not like me and my college roommate Who never spoke again That faithful year During the forced proximity phase. They had two partners they could interact with in the post-treatment phase They had at least 20 other available partners. They knew some beforehand Uh, so some of them they had friends before and then they were like, oh, here's my college roommate um and the researchers say So the fact that the preference was visible and clear and throughout the entire nine weeks is a meaningful result And the effect was clear in all the ways we statistically analyze the data So they don't really understand how social bonds form in the wild from this particular study But what they did determine is that living in close proximity Is what is required for Building a relationship In these bats living in close proximity Made the bats better friends A stronger relationship than just having come From the same general area where they had been trapped or grown up And and yeah, there's not a lot of online in the back community long distance Pen pal phone call kind of things going on either. Yeah, but yeah. Hey college bat college roommates Call bat college roommates don't drive them baddie They become friends Isn't that nice? That's nice Oh, hey, it's this week in science We love this week in science. You love this week in science, right? Do you love it so much that you want to buy a t-shirt? Yeah, I bet you do head over to twist.org and click on our zazzle link We have some new shirts and pillows in the store. I hope you take a look at them All right, Justin What is just in Uh this just in hi So This is kind of interesting when the epa environmental protection agency has proposed a new rule To ban asbestos Now If you're of a certain age, you may remember a time when asbestos was being removed From buildings around the world due to its cancer causing ways It was a huge deal It was in everything homes offices hospitals schools. They all had asbestos had to be removed There were hazmat dressed crews that were coming in and doing these removals at tremendous risk Uh, it had been put into the buildings over the years as a I believe as a fire retardant Reduced fires or something like this, but it turns out the asbestos way more dangerous than fire Um We've known that yeah, spent a lot of money getting it out of buildings Uh throughout the 80s And so you might think Okay Why is the epa now? banning asbestos If we already got rid of it and the answer is because we didn't You might think that we did what but we didn't ban it actually they did I take that back. Uh, they did ban it in the late 80s but then chemical lobbies with some congressional help, I believe Remember tort reform That was being talked about. Yeah, one of the big focuses of that Was meselfine lioma Which just sounds like and you've probably if you had a tv in the last couple decades You probably saw commercials Meselfine lioma if you think you have if you want to set up if there's a case There's the lawyer commercials for you if you have this disease turns out that's just from asbestos That's the cancer you get from asbestos So there's all this like trying to limit damages to that industry And trying to prevent the epa From being able to enforce its ban and it was successful In the early 90s it was successful in keeping big portions of asbestos In operation creating phase outs or just keeping it They go 2016 Uh, I guess that would have been the obama administration Passes a new law that gives epa more power to tackle toxic chemicals that are Being used by industry or out there in our society And so now finally under this new law if they have opposed A rule that would ban asbestos completely Okay, so the only real Place that we're I'm laughing. I think the okay, so Ah It's calling this we're just it's come out and said we're finally putting the end of the use of this dangerous asbestos chemical in the united states And so it's like, okay. You finally now it's we have finally gotten rid of it Uh, the american chemical council or excuse me american chemistry council Which sounds sciency, but might not be is a lobbying group for the chemical industry They attacked the epa proposal saying you can't get rid of asbestos Because it could cause substantial harm to america's drinking supply so in the the Clean the need for clean water They're saying And this is like wait you're you're arguing on behalf of clean water But against banning of asbestos what's going on here and it turns out chlorine Is manufactured Utilizing asbestos asbestos, okay so so and chlorine Is used about 98 percent of public drinking water in the united states And the treatment water treatment facilities They use some form of chlorine based disinfectant And so they're worried about supply chain disruptions as they Look for different ways to form chlorine. It's not the only way chlorine is used. It's also used in batteries windmills solar panels Still not made out of honey. They got asbestos involved in there So so there's there's always an argument to be made by by uh, you know Keeping some of these toxic chemicals because Used correctly as you might assume They would be just fine, but it's also sort of like hard to understand like america's clean drinking water Has relies It doesn't have asbestos in it, but the chlorine relies on asbestos. So it's and there are and there are uh Types of chlorines that are created with asbestos filters Yes, this sort of thing. It's most consumer products. It's already gone But I don't know. I thought I was sort of it was sort of interesting because I thought asbestos Was out like that was such a bad thing that you would you know, not be Utilizing it. Yeah, the fact that we're still utilizing it is odd, but at the same time, you know, just can we just get it Not put it in buildings anymore not use it in in relation to people's breathing Because that's the big one those fibers those little shards the fibers that get in there and getcha And then uh, here we go still in your mother's house leave it in your mother's house Oh, yeah, don't touch it. Don't take it out. Don't touch it And it's fun as it is to to draw with your finger On lead paint. Don't do that. Don't do that either. Nope But that's like those things like if somebody was like, yeah, we're gonna get rid of lead paint now What? How could we not have done that already? Oh lobby gang industries fantastic. Okay. Tell me about uh, what is this? Evolution and yeah, so uh evolution states Blanket all species of organisms Have developed through the process of natural selection. There's inherited variations that over time Increase or could even decrease I suppose an individual's ability to survive to reproduce this is the basic idea of evolution But and we've of course it's been proven out From genomics to zillions of studies that have taken place. Evolution's a thing In the darkest of interpretations, however, it is coined survival of the fittest And it is occasionally used as a straw man argument Against the theory of evolution and against science in general as being a philosophy That is a breath of any compassion Because oh if it's survival of the fittest then it should just be a doggie dog world And that's what the scientists think which is not a thing, but it's a straw man argument where you Created a fake which I've just done too. I've also created a straw man to exhibit the straw man And then it's also been used by eugenics to claim scientific rationales for bigotry and pseudoscientific Um Race-based nonsense It turns out though understanding evolution Might actually have the exact opposite effect of those This is according to university massachusetts amherst research published in the journal personality and social psychology It says disbelief in human evolution Is correlated with higher levels of prejudice racist attitudes and support of discriminatory behavior Against minorities immigrants and the lgbtq community And it's not just in america. This is across the globe. They did uh also had 19 eastern european countries 25 majority muslim countries israel was in this And across everything low belief in evolution Was linked to higher bias prejudicial attitudes towards others and also interestingly less support for conflict resolution Oh interesting. Yeah No, we don't have to resolve the conflict Fight it out Yeah, just write it out. There we go researchers analyze data from the american general social survey Pew research center Bunch of online crowdsourced samples they accounted for education political ideology Religiosity cultural identity scientific knowledge. They had all this in there and they found though that the believing in evolution Relates to less prejudice regardless Of what other group they were in You know, there weren't like more prejudiced people who believed in evolution in one group and less across categories Believe for understanding and process of evolution Was connected and correlated to being less bigoted so Religious beliefs and political ideology were measured separately from all of this Again evolution remained a consistent thread between less prejudiced response The data showed and failingly That the disbelief in human evolution is a driving factor and most consistent predictor Of prejudice comparison to other things. So so they they took the day and just said, okay, now we have this group Uh, these these ones say they believe in evolution. These ones disbelieve it and they predicted what would happen and And it followed suit the israel-based study people with higher belief in evolution were more likely to support peace amongst palestinians arabs and jews And the study involving islamic World belief in evolution was associated with less prejudice towards christians and jews the study based in eastern europe Where often orthodox christians are majority a belief in evolution was linked to less prejudice towards gypsies jews and muslims My findings suggest that teaching evolution Seems to have a side effect that might make for a more harmonious society That's all we got to do teach the evolution science, of course make sense I mean, well, I mean that it's it's also a you know, it's it's a litmus test To find out what kind of a person you're talking with Oh, what are your thoughts on evolution? You right and there are there are sort of I'm very curious too because then If that trend continues there's also our groups in which there are more or less people who will believe in Evolution and so then it's would be sort of interesting that to follow that thread through these other groups and see if that also But I love that that's just the thing You know there's I've always had this sort of idea that if you could separate all the people in the world And to just like mindedness You'd have these really interesting Pockets right either be the the town of the science minded folks where everyone's working either for towards a brighter future Uh working in the lab doing experiments or they're just spending all of their free time Going to interesting talks by Right and then you got the music town where it's like people who like to dance move there, but it's also musicians There's like endless jam sessions scientists who are musicians. I mean the problem is there's so much overlap All right, right you have you'd have the fashion focused town where people are all dressed amazingly and they got all this Very close and then there'd be the racist town Because that's the thing too of like minded folks Well, all these people they just couldn't even wait to move there So they could be in a town consisting of only their own kind and then once they get there they quickly discover that Racist people come from every ethnicity and every religion in the world Every every political background. So so all the races go and they find yeah, you're surrounded by racists in a multi-cultural melting pot prejudice Prejudice knows no boundaries Yeah and so So I guess what the world really needs then is we got to talk about evolution more We got to bring that subject here more often. Yeah, I love the idea that by understanding evolution it gets you more in touch with The animal kingdom in general and more connected with life on earth Which then we can lead you to a more harmonious view Of how of everything Yeah, one of the things that they kind of yeah, one of the things they kind of point to is If if you have it in your mind That humanity has a shared history shared origin a shared history that we've sort of all been in this together Then it it you're less likely to other The other people In the world who who maybe think or look different Maybe it's a step in that direction We can only hope But in the meantime, I want to talk about uh fun guy Can we can we talk about how how how funguses are Are communicating and they're going to take over the world. Oh goodness So we've done all of this for nothing All this evolution all this trying to get along all this fighting about stuff Fungus is just going to swoop in Funguses Yeah, they swoop in Swooping in researchers publishing in the royal society open science journal There are a researcher Adam Adamatsky His paper language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity Dr. Adamatsky has taken Fungi and recorded their electrical activity And in recording their electrical activity was able to discern as people have previously that there seem to be distinct differences In the electrical Potentials that are recorded in different places in the fungus In response to certain things the fungus is doing. So for example, the fungus is Is burrowing its way through Some kind of substrate it had and it's reaching out little tendrils of the micro risa To kind of burrow through it has one particular kind of signal if it reaches a hardwood block There's a different kind of signal. There are different electrical potentials and so Coming from a perspective of Of natural machine learning and also language production this researcher has looked at these electrical potentials from the perspective of syntax grammar And determined that there are Very specific signals that are being Propagated For very specific reasons Whether or not this is language like whether Yo, I found some wood to eat, you know, whether it's language per se whether there's you know, real grammar words Uh reflecting symbols You know that is highly unlikely and I would debate it very fiercely But the concept that there could be repeatable standard electrical signals that occur in response to regular repeated stimuli that That a fungus might come in contact With this is fungus Is multicellular a fungus will Move into its environment. It comes into contact with dirt. It comes into contact with plants It comes into contact with other Funguses it comes into contact. Uh, it has to communicate within itself Related to here's a food source. Here's water. Here's nutrients, you know, there are Messages Chemical or electrical. We know that there are electrochemical signals being sent So there's no nerves but There is conduction And it's regular and it's repeatable at least in a couple of different species Uh, and the big question is are these signals the same across all fungus species or are these signals Species dependent are the environment dependent. We don't know any of these things, but it's an interesting question and it's an interesting perspective to be looking at You know the the electric the electrical communication the electrical internal communication Of a of another organism In this particular way and could it lead us to interpret Signals from alien life at some point in the future That's the next big question That's a very interesting question actually part of part of what we're talking about is We can think of as Automatic communication unintentional communication, right? This is what we're determining as a communication is just the response The seen over a thing much of the way that we can though see this sort of take place in the brain when When a brain is having certain types of activities you can see certain certain types of electrical output from a brain kind of a thing Does it mean that it's communication or is just this an affect of its activity and that sort of thing and and so We might assume too like what you said that that alien life would be sentient and have that part of the brain that controls Logic and the engages in things separate from sort of an automatic. What if the aliens show up and they're just on automatic fungus pilot Right, and so there's travel at some point. Yeah, there's another study. That's also out this week that discusses how slime mold which we know as a Unicellular organism that has really interesting communication within itself It also can be can act as a multicellular organism when it's feeding on bacteria and so you give slime mold a big bacteria clump to feed on and it goes wild and it's like Let's feel lots of different cells and those little cells eat and fruit and do all sorts of stuff And then they're like, oh, it's time to grow. We will be one And they but they communicate that somehow There is chemical and there there is communication happening, right these these slime molds these funguses. They don't have nerves. They don't have a brain in the sense of a brain that we have but they They have behavioral capacities. They are able to survive. They exist. They change They adapt and they survive How do they do it? Yeah, so the abstract of this paper in the royal society says assuming that spikes of electrical activity are used by fungi to communicate and process information in mycelium networks We group spikes into words and provide a linguistic and information complexity analysis of the fungal spiking activity We demonstrate the distributions of fungal word lengths Match that of human languages. We also construct algorithmic and lis-semple complexity hierarchies of fungal sentences and show that species S commune generate An s schizophilium commune Generate the most complex sentences So there is differential complexity But the question is is this an appropriate interpretation of the results? Is this actually Based on what we're looking at an appropriate comparison against human language. I'm going to argue it's not um, but it is an interesting approach to studying this this question I'm going to actually take the other uh side then and say not only uh Is this articulable language? But I believe network tv has been using fungi to write their Their shows for a long time and we're just now catching on to them Oh The fungal networks I mean, that's why it's network tv Yeah, that's why how do you think it's a coincidence? I tell you it's been in the plain sight hiding in plain sight hiding in plain sight um We know that our brains shrink as we get older they expand and grow when we're younger but Recent work has suggested that the majority of fmri research is limited Because of sample size that the results that we've gotten for many many studies Probably should have had many many more brain scans in them than they did so, uh There needs to be Greater sample size in order to have reproducibility Knowing this and also having a young son neuroscientist yakub sidlitz Uh Decided that they needed a metric for brain development and it just wasn't out there We know that there's changes in the brain throughout life, but what happens really and so uh sidlitz Accumulated was able to gather sending emails to different researchers around the world Was able to gather more than 120 000 brain scans To create comprehensive growth charts for brain development So we know that, you know, you justin you take your new son into the doctor and at one point they say Oh, your doctor your child is going to six foot two or your child is going to be five foot four Or you know, you can expect this based on height and blah blah blah blah blah We don't have that for the brain. And so, uh, this is what sidlitz has created publishing the study in nature this last week Uh, they have created an mri Growth chart for brains brain scans Uh, do very significantly from person to person. And so that's one of the big challenges about creating a predictive chart To be able to give to pediatricians There's a lot of training that needs that that would be or interpretation that would need to go along with brain growth charts to help Pediatricians understand that oh a big brain isn't necessarily one that's functioning really well A small brain isn't necessarily one that's not functioning very well There are aspects to these charts that would definitely need to be tweaked to allow them to exist in clinical settings and beyond the scope of this study but it is An important start to really understanding how the brain changes Throughout development for a human being and we've never had this before pretty amazing One thing I love about this story is that sidlitz thought that uh That they got a lot of replies to the emails they sent asking If uh neuroimaging researchers would send them brain scans they were wow everybody wanted to share them But they think it was basically because people were bored because of the pandemic A little bit of downtime For some of those collaborations where you got to look up something. Yeah, uh, it is interesting what you said about the uh My the doctor has not given any estimations on on height of the child but he uh He's been growing. He's been growing at a centimeter a week Uh, which is a little frightening because that would you know, I I did my own calculation And it turns out by the time he's 10 years old He should be about 18 feet tall Oh Grow kid grow I need to like figure out how to feed this Keep keep feeding him. He'll be the tallest kid in the world Um one thing that was surprising we know that uh in late adulthood what you have is Yes, there is a small amount of shrinkage of your cortical regions and other areas of the brain But the thing that starts to grow are your ventricles the ventricles are the fluid containing spaces within your brain and Surprisingly, there is a rapid increase in the size of your ventricles from about 50 years of age onward Woo Well, not necessarily it it's associated they associate it with aging and mental decline Um, what do just tell me how i'm supposed to grow my brain kiki and i'll do it Well, the normal is that your ventricles grow, but I don't want mine to be normal I don't know about the idea of being average I don't want my ventricles to be terrible. You don't want to be you don't want to be average. I've seen the average It was not impressed Um and moving on to my last story beyond the average uh beyond brain growth charts um One thing that's standing in the way of creating synthetic brains using artificial neurons and even um artificial intelligence with neural networks is our understanding of the brain architecture and so blue brain, which is a project the big blue project is out of epfl's epfl and they are working to Push forward artificial brains and so what they have created is They're using algebraic topology Which is a math field understanding the surfaces of objects. They've developed an algorithm that Can artificially generate large numbers of unique nerve cells. So from a small number of starting cells the algorithm can then Create a brain what they call this algorithm is the topological neuronal synthesis And it can synthesize millions of unique neuronal morphologies In being able to do this they've published a paper in cell reports and it categorizes dendritic morphologies reliably to digitize synthetic dendritic morphologies from all layers and morphological types of the rodent cortex This is going to enable the rapid digital reconstruction of the entire of entire brain regions from relatively few reference cells and understanding the structure The architecture of the brain can potentially help us understand the function of different areas of the brain Specifically what goes wrong in disease when some of the structure is damaged so One day artificial brains will enable us To not have to use brains to study brains But until then It's all brains all the way down I still want I Want a little bit of artificial brain now that I know my ventricles are going to be full of fluid At some point there we go, right? I want I want the artificial brain that I can use You're gonna get I want access So your hunt your your your your ventricles are growing So what we're going to do is we're going to get you a honey neuromorphic tech chip That has been designed by the topological neuron synthesis algorithm Here we go to maximize Your mental function. Yes And and how are we going to make all that happen? We'll just run it through the sparkled Machine and that'll that'll give us our solution Seven eight minutes And thanks. Thank goodness. We have all this technology to help us live longer better and more smarter because of course We're going to fix climate change Yeah, well because we we're going to start thinking harmoniously and caring about each other Because we're all going to learn about evolution This makes so much sense. It does. I think we have a good plan. I think wait this show Brought it all together. It's a good thing. We're at the end of the show now We did it Yeah, I might start following a part again. I know don't break it apart. We have a nice little package tied it up in a bow Thank you For listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. I would like to give shout outs to the helpers of the show fata Thank you so much for your help on show notes and social media Gord, thanks you. Thanks you. Yes. Thanks you. Thank you for being in the chat room Uh identity four. Thank you for recording the show and rachel. Thank you for Editing. I'd also like to thank our twist sponsors Thank you too Teresa smith ritt james schaefer chauffeur james chauffeur. Tell me if i'm pronouncing it wrong. 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If you listen to the science, you may just get under. We're not trying to upset your philosophy. No, no, no. I'm not singing anymore. It's the after show, everybody. Don't know where Justin went. I'm gonna click, click, click, turn, close all my windows there. Should I remove Justin? Let's just wait for him. Yes, Justin does connect all the way from the Netherlands, Denmark. Thank you, Rogue Land-ish, for joining us for another episode. How was the conference? The conference was wonderful. So, let's see. The conference, I was very, very busy trying to make sure that all of the in-person stuff synced up with all the virtual stuff and that the tech crew was doing what needed to be done and shoo, shoo, shoo. I was very busy. There were incredible talks, lot of great information on communicating science. And also, just beyond communicating science, talking to people with different belief systems, different identities, people who are prone to extreme ways of thinking, extremism, hatred, trolling, all that kind of stuff. How do you talk to people in various groups? And there was some very, there were some great insights. There were some fun moments. There were some really good conversations that happened. I got to, we got also to screen Brian Dunning's documentary. He's the executive producer. And I'm blanking on the name of the director, but his first name is the same and is his last name. I'm blanking on it. But Brian Dunning's documentary, he runs Skeptoid podcast and his documentary that's gonna be coming out on Amazon at some point fairly soon, I think, is amazing. It's really good. I highly recommend it. And I hope everybody watches it. It's about the misrepresentation of science in supposedly scientific TV shows and documentaries that science entertainment stuff. There were some very interesting interviews in there, very eye-opening as to the kind of stuff that gets passed along as factual entertainment. Yeah, I have a big problem with that stuff sometimes. Yeah. I watched a TED Talk with, we'll get this right, Dan Gilbert, talking about happiness and these sorts of things. Anyway, in that, he did this presentation stuff and he's like, he throws up this chart and he goes, just so you know, whenever, you know, the scientists show you a chart, there's lots and lots of data. It's a big data set behind it, above, above, above. And when he said that, it just, it irked something. Why not say, in the amount of space he took to tell the audience that his chart had a tremendous amount of data behind it? That it was a big data set of people. You know, it's like this many people versus this many people in happiness or something. I can't remember the exact context, but. And the amount of space he took to tell people that there was a lot of data behind it, he could have just said what the numbers were. So I went and looked up the study that he was a part of and that he was referring to, and it was 12. Each of the bars of people were 12 people. And not only that, the data that the study had, oh, maybe it wasn't, the data that the study came out with, these two bars looked even. In the study, they were not. So even the infographic was misleading. He was misleading about the size of the data set and he misled because the infographic was completely inaccurate. And I started to do this like further dive, further dive down and looking at the research papers behind it. And it's almost like they were unassociated with the topic he was sharing. And he had all these testimonials is about like, this one guy, he went to jail and then they let him go. And because of DNA evidence, it had absolved him of the crime of murder. And yet he was saying it was glorious. It was either the time I spent in there was just fine. And I'm still a happy person. But the reality of that story was there was no DNA exoneration. He had just been released for time. And it was actually a murder he had committed. So in reality, if you look at it, it was him saying like, I had done it again. And there was some like, it may have been one of those like possibly justifiable type of things, but still like everything I looked at and Dan Gilbert's TED Talk on happiness was either incorrect, refutable, or just a lie. Is the best that like, that's the way that I would have to like the infographic he had to have looked at from his own study and put up was misleading. And it can only be intentionally at that point. So this is my problem with a lot of the TED Talks. I mean, it's a lot of TED Talks, I think are basically as good as like, I don't know, I don't know, YouTube, for you, for, I mean, just- Wait, we're on the YouTube. I know, I know, generally, but- Wait a second, you can't blame YouTube. I can't blame YouTube. No, I mean, A high school presentation? TED Talks are sensational. They are hyped for a particular format. They do want to have real information, but there's no peer review. And they're assuming that the speakers that they have coming to talk have been, either their information has been peer reviewed before they share it, or it's not just being, something being spun, but there is also the fact that the way that they want you to format the talks is you are spinning because it has to be attention grabbing. It has to be this, I have a message for you. Right, and so the danger of that is then people can buy into it, because- Yeah, so easily. Gobert also wrote a book on happiness, even though his research that he was doing, he was talking, and a documentary series by PBS, where he was doing, talking about positive psychology, which has an element of interest to me, but is also very much what's, it's basically have pain thresholds or determined by marketing companies and insurance companies and all that kind of stuff. And in that, there's all these people on the PBS documentary, might have even been in Nova. Oh my gosh, it was something, there's like segments for ease, having talks with, oh, who's the TV psychiatrist? Who's not a psychiatrist? Dr. Phil. Dr. Phil. Dr. Phil makes, it shows up in some of this. I'm a psychiatrist, but not really a psychiatrist, so let me help you get in a fight with your family. You've got the back-seeing-denying Kennedy guys in there talking about something for some point, but it's like this world. Oh my God, yeah. It's really, like, and all of a sudden, I'm like, this is that whole down the rabbit hole thing where there was, somebody took a thread of something scientific and turned it into, and also I had a really hard time connecting. It was a little piece, right? And I had a little bit of science. Really stretch connecting any of the content in this documentary about happiness to the points that were being made. Like, it was like, okay, you're making some kind of an argument here, but the science then kind of like, we'll get that out of the way, we'll stop talking about that. Say like, happiness is completely relative and you can just choose to be happy and that's, oh, gosh. Anyway, but that's just one, that's just one that I went down to this whole, like starting from a TED talk and that one line where he's like, oh, just trust me, there's a lot of data. I just wanted to see. And you're like, what is the data? Then you're like, wait a minute. Because I was just so stuck on the point that this is a presentation on his work that he was putting out in the same space in the same space that he said, trust me, he could have said, here's numbers that easily. And the fact that he didn't was, I was like, oh, wait a second, I gotta know. Yeah, well, that's like a, yeah, that's a- Dan Gilbert brought, sorry, bad TED talk. No, and he actually, I also did find he apparently got a lot of heat from it, probably from the academic community because he did do a correction on numerous points of that talk, but left out also some of the more egregious ones. Like he didn't mention at all the trust me or the infographic being completely wrong, so therefore the inclusion didn't mention the fact that the study he was talking to in relation to happiness wasn't about happiness, wasn't part of that study. So he created a new, you make a hypothesis and you have to stick to that as the thing that you're testing. He chose a new result, a new thing that had been tested by that study completely. All the things you're not supposed to do in the scientific process. And those were left out of his corrections. It was just all of the misinformation, other misinformation in there. I don't know, really bad. Dan Gilbert, any day we sit down and talk about your work and you can try to justify to me why that infographic of your own work was such a lie. Because popularity is more important than facts. Yeah, well, I mean, it's also psychonics. Give me my new musical. So we kind of know that there's like a little bit of reproducibility problem at the very core of the fields. If there is not, if there is not, Yeah, Gilbert studies. If there is not neurology studies behind the pharmacology, behind the, if you don't have that chain of connection between the different disciplines, I don't think it can hold credibility because a lot of these studies are very unreproducible when it's just talking about human behavior without mechanism. Don't have those neurological mechanisms. If you're not like, ah, this is a hormonal cascade that causes this, this part of the brain is activated. If you don't have any of that, I'm very suspect. Interesting. Anyway, I think, I think Dan Gilbert is actually involved in the reproducibility project. Yeah, probably steering it away from anything he's ever touched. If he's involved in that, then I have even doubts about that, about the numbers they ended up with. Okay, wait, wait, here it is. Okay, okay. No, no, yes. Okay, so here's an article from Wired. Psychology is in crisis over whether it's in crisis. This is from 2016, so this is six years ago. Let's see. In 2015, a group called the Open Science Collaboration published the results of its reproducibility project, a three year effort to redo 100 psychology studies. The result, it only worked about 40% of the time, didn't go over well. Psychology establishment is fighting back. Along with some colleagues, Dan Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard University, has reanalyzed the paper about reanalyzing papers, and they say that it's wrong. And in fact, the public's conclusions about the paper are even wronger. Yeah, so, yeah, it's all careers at stake. Yeah, it's all careers at stake. I can imagine. And his conclusion with his colleagues, reproducibility and psychology is doing great. Great. Oh, I wanna follow up on this conversation. Interesting, yeah. Oh, lightning rod, I hope that your giant tornado. Wow, that sounds wild. That is a little bit scary. Stay inside, stay safe. Yes, water gives wind weight for sure. What was the next thing that I was gonna say after your Dan Gilbert thing? There was something I was gonna bring. My brain went bloop, a bloop, a bloop. Maybe if I go backwards. Oh, what else did I do? Last week, I gave a talk in Rochester, New York. Oh, yeah, how'd they go? What's that about? Apparently it went okay. Yes, apparently it went all right. I did it, I talked. They didn't record it though, as far as I know. So that's unfortunate. But if anybody would like me to come and give a talk at a local institution or a place that would fly me out and pay me, I am happy to try and give this talk again. Yeah, I will also. Can I volunteer for this? Cause I would also, if you want to pay me to fly some. Actually, I don't really feel like flying right now. No, I'm good, nevermind. Oh, I know what it, there was a thing I was gonna say at the end of everything that we just said. I did sport a hat at the conference last week. I did. There is one thing I wanted to point out that. Not last weekend. That despite the self-recantation of most of the things that were presented as facts by Dan Gilbert on Dan Gilbert's TED Talk and the other things that he didn't recant. It's still a TED Talk that you can watch on YouTube. It hasn't been pulled. Right, it hasn't been pulled. And it's just like how, it's unfortunate because I have enjoyed many a TED Talk. And now I have like, gosh, now I've got this very, some of them are okay and some of them are like, but now I have this, it's a big cloud over. Now, this was also very early. This was, I think the early 2000s when he did this first TED Talk. And in one of his recantations about the thing where he's like doing this whole list of corrections and saying like, okay, this example I gave was, turned out not to be right. This example, I don't know where I found that fact from, but I guess I thought somehow it worked pretty good. That's gonna be like a super popular TED Talk. That was gonna be good. So even though he had to like, basically admit that a lot of what he had presented wasn't correct and left out other stuff that wasn't, he didn't correct the stuff that was also incorrect. Despite all that, it's still up and getting views. That there still exists. Oh no, but in that recantation, he also said the other telling thing, which was like, yeah, you know, it was the early days of the internet and I didn't realize how many people would be seeing it. Like you would have prepared better if he knew more people, like that's the excuse for a Harvard psychologist. Oh, grief, goodness, gosh, oh golly. But he did sell a lot of books and made documentaries. Looking, fake documentaries, what do you call it when you're doing a documentary about stuff that you're kind of making up? Is that still a documentary? A mockumentary? Is it a mockumentary? Yeah, a mockumentary. Somebody was asking if there is a TED talk that kind of takes down giving TED talks and there actually is a video that this one guy did that's so perfect that I wish I wanna find. There's one that was, I don't know if it was a John Oliver thing or a... It's this one. It's where they were like hugging and getting endorphins. It's like, yeah, just hugging, endorphins, there you go. Science, what if I told you? I just, that's all I can really remember. What if I told you that I can give you an endorphin rush? I can give you an endorphin rush. Here's one, that's pretty funny. There are others too. It's parody. Yeah. But this isn't the original one. I think this is one that somebody copied. There was one even before this. Oh, maybe it's this one. The how to sound smart in your TED talk. Maybe this was the first one. Yep, that's the one. Okay, let me share this one. Copy and paste. There's that one. That one's a good one too. A couple of them. One was actually done at a TEDx. Which is... That's fun. It's pretty funny. The TEDx is like the minor league of the TED talks. And so for TEDx to come up and be like, I only made it to the minor leagues, but I want to make fun of the rest of the organization. That's pretty... Yeah, apparently, there are certain TEDx's that are the feeder TEDx's that, if you get into them and give a good talk, that maybe the major TED will invite you to give a talk. I don't know the TED hierarchy of the world. There's a whole process of funneling people toward the TED, whatever. Yeah, mockumentary. You're pointing out that my camera is flickering? I don't know, does it always flicker? Or is it just, I tried changing resolutions and stuff like that. I didn't do anything. Oh, you know what I bet it is, if you have fluorescent lights? I don't. And there's probably a mismatch between your camera refresh rate and your lights. Yeah. Yeah, that's probably all it is. Yeah. Different lighting. But this is the same lighting it's been for like a couple of weeks or months even. So I would think that this is, maybe it's been everywhere. I don't know. I don't watch the show. So I don't know. Maybe it's the new time zone changes that are causing it. Yeah, it's totally the time zone. Blame it on the time changes. Thank you, Lightning Rod. We like, we're just not. Oh, it's only taking place on the wall. On the wall behind you, yeah. That's why I was saying it's probably a mismatch between the, like, because it's a right wall behind you. No, actually it's not, it's actually the wall. Is it flickering? Oh, weird. Yeah. Yeah. Your wall's flickering. Can you stick your hand through it? My wall's flickering. Is it, can you put your hand through it like the matrix? Wow. Am I still dreaming? Is this real? Is this real life? Is this happening right now? Yeah, how's that refresh rate? Flicker fusion refresh rate. Yeah, it's really slight. But sometimes, like, if you're sensitive to fluorescent light flickers, to CRT screen refresh rates, these kinds of things can be disturbing. And yes, as Flying Out is saying, mushrooms will do that. Brrr. I just felt like I had a neon sign over my head saying he's on drugs. And now I do. Yeah, of it. Flash, flash, flash, flash, flash, flash, flash. It's crazy here. I'm not paranoid. Good night, Moodle. I'm hallucinating. Time for slumber. Did Al Gore do a TED Talk? Was that? No. Long time ago, if he did. Probably, I mean. That wasn't that. Did he do an inconvenient truth? Truth is a TED Talk? I don't think so. I think he had his own. He had a whole hour-long talk for the inconvenient truth. That was, like, an hour-long thing. Yeah, Eric Knapp has the funny joke about it, though. Ha ha. Inconvenient, not incipient. What's incipient? At this point. Exactly. At this point, for sure. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, everybody should go watch Dan Gilbert's TED Talk on Happiness from the early 2000s. And then just look up everything. Every story you're offering- Homework assignment. Every- Look up the studies. Every study, every infographic up there. Look up every single thing that the man presented as evidence for his argument or support of his argument. And you will find they were manufactured. Yeah. I mean, that's, I think, when I listen to TED Talks, it's usually with, I don't know, it's either I'm watching something that it's somebody I know who is like, I know they're like a good researcher and they're not going to be selling something whack-a-doodle or it's a science communicator I know. And they're going to be doing something accurately. And if I hear something incorrect, I would tell them. But otherwise, it's for like, just kind of the happy-go-lucky inspirational-ness of it, but not for the, I'm going to take these factoids out of the TED Talks to go tell my friends about it. But of course, people are hearing that stuff and they're going to go repeat lies. They're going to repeat these falsehoods and inaccuracies. They're going to be like, oh, someone so said this in a TED Talk, because TED Talks have weight, right? Yeah, and I think too, and the, you know, not surprising, Dan Gilbert is trying to support the... The book sales. His book sales and his career, but his career then isn't a psychologist and he should stop being one. I mean, that's, go the Dr. Phil route. How do you, how do you got to still be? You know, somebody, Lightning Rod says they have a question. Lightning Rod has a question. Shouted. Is there any news about the gigantic bubble under the Antarctic? Well, I don't know anything about a giant bubble. Is there a giant bubble under the Antarctic? I knew about the ice shelf that broke. Let's see, bubble under and arc, arc. This is an overlap, Garza, between people who listen to TED Talks and read motivational books. I actually would bet, I would bet that there's less than you would think. I think that the folks who are probably checking out the TED Talks are less, much less likely the, to be the motive. I feel like the motivational book people, it's, I think it's a different thing. I think there is an overlap. I think there's an overlap and overlap. Oh yeah. People want short motivational inspirational things and it's like, you're going to take this information and you're going to use it and it's going to change your life. Oh my God. Off you go. Off you go. You're going to listen to this 18 minute, super excited talk. I should actually do them because, emoting, generously across the stage. Because it has been scientifically proven, scientifically proven by a lot of data sets and a lot of studies that showed based on, really a lot of, just trust me, a lot of information, a lot of research, a lot of scientists looked into it and they found that this week in science podcast, actually makes your IQ 30 points higher. Yeah. Yeah. That's science. That's science. At least a 135 IQ, which is genius level. That's the top 1% of all thinkers. And what if I told you that it also just by listening a couple hours a week, made you not just a smarter human being, but a healthier one too. And what if I told you that it elevates, it elevates- What if you did? What if you did tell me this, Justin? What if you did, what would that mean? What would happen? I want to know. My brain needs it. Do I have to go and watch more TED Talks now? Do I have to just start doing this for all of them? Because I only caught that one line and that set me down this whole thing. Now actually, you know what I want to do? I want to do responses. Fact check TED Talks. That's a 20 year old TED Talk and I still want to tear that one up. But now maybe it's time to do that. But you know what? You know what we would want to call it? You'd want to call it TEDx. Because that's the perfect name to counter it. But they were like, oh, people are going to make fun of us. Keep branding. They got to brand it, you know, how they go out and they brand the opposition. There's no giant bubble under Antarctica as far as I'm aware, but there is a lot of bubbles. There's lots of ancient air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice. Million year old bubbles. There's also glacial erosion. Yeah, I don't know about a bubble under Antarctica. No idea. There are two new lakes buried deep under the Antarctic ice sheet. I don't know. I can't answer that question. If you understand that TED Examination, oh dear. So. TEDEd. Okay, I'll have to check out TEDEd. That's the one where they do the animated cartoons related to stuff and those can be pretty fun. Because nothing, actually, I'm a little jealous. I was going to make fun of it, but I'm like, that's always what I wanted to have on this show. I've always wanted to have like. Animations. Discourages. It's totally impossible because these things take months. Like I just saw on. Like we'd have to do like maybe one short one. No, it's just a turnaround for animation. You know, it's still on. But I've just saw, what was it? The PBS news hour thing. It caught my eye because they were talking about the white sands, the footprints, the 23,000 year old footprints in New Mexico. Yeah. That just came out on their news program. We talked about that. Months ago. Four months, five months ago, something. Months ago. Yeah. It's been a really long time. We're on it. So our paper to talking about it is within the week. Almost all the cases. So to get an animator to put together the... It's just takes time. We're not that show. We're not an animated show. One of those cartoons was static images. We're only the lips move. That's what I'm doing here. Then I don't have a job. Yeah. I can't have that. I'm the sock puppets. I'm the sock puppet of the show. You can't replace me with another sock puppet. That wouldn't add anything. Wouldn't subtract either. Probably wouldn't take anything away from the show. It wouldn't be adding. No. Wouldn't be adding to the show. It might. Happiness is spooning with your contented pets. Last Friday was hug your cat day. I hope everyone hugged their cats. Oh, and I really hope that people were not taken by surprise when fake science stories ran around the internet on April Fool's Day. Oh, well, you know what? I didn't see any fake anything. Oh, you want to hear this? I missed it. I missed it completely. This, so somebody, I think his name, Virgil, Twitter, I don't know if I'll be able to find it, but Virgil sent me a story, Last April Fool's. Let's see, that's April 5th. I need to go way back. That means that's a lot of tweeting. Last one, you mean? No, no, no, this last week. Oh, just, okay. There's a lot of scrolling for me to, I do a lot of Twitter. Yeah, you've got like a million, two million, 40 million, 10 million Twitter tweets. I don't have that many. What? There's a lot on Twitter is what I'm trying to say. There's like a lot of people saying a lot of stuff. Okay, so this story, what was this story? No, no, it wasn't Virgil, it was iBookery on Twitter who sent this to me. And it's just such a fun headline and something you really, really would love. Scientists Discover Blue Whale Song is Beethoven's 9th. Nice. It's pretty funny. Oh, I did wanna share something. Yeah, but they say marine biologists have analyzed a body of blue whale recordings to discover that one pod has been mimicking Beethoven's 9th symphony. Basically saying that researchers had been playing music underwater for some reason. Yeah, and now they're, now they're... And they're mimicking it. Yeah. But it would be really fun if the whales could mimic our music. Something fun, this is, this is an old survey. Gosh, I think it's originally was done in 2009, something like this, from Pew. This is regards to people's understandings of evolution. One of the sort of interesting things they did is they figured out that depending on how you ask the question, you can get very different results. Yeah, for sure. So if they had a two-phased questioning, like do you believe that evolution guided the path of mankind, or do you believe that it didn't, basically? You got a much higher number of people who didn't believe in evolution. But if you offered three-phase, but it's the part of those, that was the second phase to that was if you believe in evolution, do you think it was guided by a supreme being? And then there's a certain percentage of people who believe in evolution, who also think it is guided by a supreme being. But when they first were like evolution versus not evolution, that group apparently moves over to the no evolution side. If given the option evolution, evolution guided or not evolution, they will go with evolution guide. So basically it works out to like 80 something percent of Americans believe in evolution if you give them all three up front and it goes down to like 60 or something percent if they have to sort of choose between what they think is religion at all or, right? Yeah. But my favorite thing, so I went and I was looking at some of the, oh, go ahead. No, no, go ahead. So I got just sort of interested in this. I sort of went and looked at it, especially in relation to the study of saying that people are more compassionate when they believe in evolution to sort of see who those groups are. According to this, like they have all the different religions listed here and what percentage believe in evolution. Jehovah's Witness, only it's 20% believe in evolution. Which I thought was, that's the lowest on this. The highest are the atheists in agnostics. The atheists, 95% of atheists believe in evolution. And then here's the part that I had a little bit of issue with. 2%, which is 2% overall, but it's of those that believe in evolution and the atheists believe it's guided by supreme being. Wait, wait, wait, wait a second. So, I don't know, somebody see that. And now people got in and just played with the survey or answered wrong or just didn't know and ended up in the wrong part of it. But I did like, that was my favorite, that was my favorite percentage. Because you always have the percentage of just saying, I don't know. Yeah. And then you can break down of the people who don't know. Why don't they know? Well, I've never heard of the subject before or I've heard so much information, I can't decide. I just don't know. Or I don't speak English. Right, whatever the name is. I just don't know. I don't know. Or I just don't know. I don't care. They keep going forever. But I just loved it. Of the, yeah, 95% of atheists believe in evolution and 2% believe that evolution is, guided by a supreme being. Are they Scientologists? Yeah, I don't, I don't know. Actually, that's a great question. Can you be an atheist Scientologist? Because it's aliens, right? Isn't that the... And then there could still be a supreme, maybe that's what that is. Because there is most. Maybe that's what it, yeah. Scientology is not listed as a religion on here. Well, no. So maybe they can be claiming atheism. Yeah. Interesting. I wonder, yeah. Interesting. Right, Gord, atheists. I don't know. I'm right, Eric Knapp. You'll get a percentage that'll say yes to the question, are you dead? It's true. I think there, you know, the people who just mark C as every single answer, the answer to every single question. Yeah, according to this, more men believe in evolution than women. And the younger you are, the more likely you believe in evolution, which is a good sign for the future then. Oh, gosh, this is interesting. Would you think that graduating from college or attending college, some college would increase your belief in evolution? More college, more belief in evolution? You'd think. Exactly true. Yeah. I got it right. Yeah, of course. Yeah, more education and more understanding of. I think so. Science, wow. Okay, so Kivagos and Scientologists not believe in a supreme being. They've just got, what is it, the Tom Cruise and then the guy above him. Kivagos says they don't believe in a supreme being. That's about it. It's just what's his name, who wrote the book? Elron, yeah, but he didn't, wasn't he like, I guess he kind of put things in motion, but wasn't he pretty much gone before it was like a superculture? Did it overlap? I thought he did. And did we ever find him? Didn't he just disappear at sea or something? Isn't there mystery and intrigue? I have no idea, but I just realized that even though his initials are Elron, he obviously was like the King of Elves, right? From Lord of the Rings, Tolkien. So yeah, I'm a geek about a lot of things. No, I'm not though. I'm really not. I'm not a Tolkienster. Like, have you told me Elron was the head elf or have you told me it was Kiebler? I just as well believe you. I mean, I wouldn't. Kiebler Elves, but that wouldn't make sense with my linking of things together. And he was a writer, so maybe he was. He was a science fiction writer. Right, but he was probably influenced by Tolkien. And here's my pseudonym, my pseudonym. I don't know. I think if I was going to join a cult created by a science fiction writer, it would have to be Gene Rodden there. Yes. And that's it. I would draw the line there. Yes. Beyond that, I wouldn't. Yeah, that was actually, so I went in Rockchester. Maybe Rocksterling. Rocksterling. I would totally not have joined Rod Sterling's cult. First, but if it was full, then I would be in Gene Rodden. Grumpy Bee says, wasn't Kiebler Elrond's cousin? Sure, absolutely. From Lothlorean. Yep. Elrond Kiebler. Yeah, I was right. I didn't even, I was a mistake. I don't even know how. Yes, you can just guess these things sometimes. It's amazing. Oh my God. I'm losing my, losing my, that's funny. Right. If you're joining a cult, you have to get in early. It can be the upper management so you can get the money. That's right. But that's called a pyramid scheme, which are illegal. But hey, tell it to the Pope. That's right. I think the great thing about joining a cult is early, is that they can bring in tremendous amounts of money, which is why we're starting this weekend's science, cult of science, because we're going to use the word science. And that's why science is, and so people should join and give over a percentage of their monthly income. What is it called? A tide. Religion, they call it, yes. It's a tithe. Tithing. Then we can build a mega science studio where we do talk about science. That's right. Head over to Twist Patreon. It's not a pyramid scheme. What you'd want to get in early. You can't say it's more of a flat triangle on a two-dimensional piece of paper than it is a three-dimensional pyramid. That wouldn't even make sense. No, it wouldn't make sense. Oh, Justin, I tried to send you a calendar, but they said it was going to cost me $125 to send you a calendar. So I gave up. No, that's fine. That's fine. There's also, it's not just shipping and handling. Denmark has a lot of taxes on imports. Yeah. And I was very shocked. Yeah, that one's a lot. But I've run into some weird stuff where I was like, ah, well, I'll just order it. And I can't find it. So I'll just order it in the States and have it sent here. And oh boy, yeah, it can be very expensive. Yeah. I bought these refrigerator magnets, which I think are cool. I would really like them. But I had to pay double. Oh, ouch. For them. You're like, why? That's expensive. So I made more shirts and things. Here we have a new science shirt. It's a word cloud. Look at this word cloud. Nice. Oh, that's off of the, oh, is my thing in here? Where's mine? I don't know. What was your word? Objective. Objectivity. Objectivity. Yeah, that's in there. It was one of the bigger ones. It's probably, yeah, I have the word cloud on a different thing. That's very cool. Yeah. But it's all the words are in there somewhere. I didn't realize it was going to a shirt. I had to create a bunch of fake accounts and said my name. Justin, Justin, Justin, Justin. If I had a cult that had done it for me, see this is, I need cult followers. I want, you know, I like to say the supreme leader or the fearless leader. I'm going to be ahead of a cult. It's got to be. I'm going to have to be referred to as the feckless leader. Feckless? Really? That's what you want to be. We need more feckless leaders in the world. Oh, I got to take one word. I have so many facts. I'm not feckless. I call it objective. Oh yeah. You can have a brainy, a brainy science pillow. Oh, that's cool. Isn't that cute? Brainy science pillow that says twist. Brainy science pillow. I think that's really cute. I think it would go nicely on my orange chairs. I might be buying myself some pillows. I was excited. I like this. I'm really excited about this new design. I like it. Were the pyramids actually built before the pharaohs claim them? Was it actually a landing site for alien ships? If so, the aliens did a really good job about making sure there was tunnels built for burying dead pharaohs and their families. It seems like they dual-purposed it pretty quick. If it was. There's a lot of bad Egypt information. For the longest time, Egypt was a very popular, mysterious, interesting thing. It got all sorts of conspiracy theories that have been built around Egypt long before a lot of other things. Before it became a trend to do this. It was also thought of as the most ancient of worlds. So many thousands of years ago, the dawn of time right after the earth was created. The pyramids of... No, actually, there's been billions of years of the planet. Bipedal humans have been around for like six million years. Not humans, but human ancestors. Bipedal apes have been around for six million or more years. They didn't come from nowhere six million years ago. And somebody was like, oh, he's gone now. A huglan who was saying something about, well, the apes have only been dominant for the few thousand years. Oh, gosh, I wish I could have refuted that in real time. It's been millions of years. Yeah. Millions of years of being a pretty much top predator, occasionally losing out to a hyena or a lion or something like that. But taking down big game for millions of years have the apes using tools, weapons, utilizing fire. I think people underestimate to some degree that it's been millions of years of hunting. Hunting, fire use, toolmaking, and language. You know, we think of languages as a new invention. The written word is the languages that we have, which is also, I'm going to change it again. That's the point about the, you know, we're talking about the nuclear power, how the waste can last 10,000 years. Yeah. We don't have a language. 100,000. We don't have a language on the planet right now today. That's 10,000 years old. How are we going to communicate to people 10,000 years from now when they're digging up the mysterious tomb? They're like, oh, there must be something valuable. Maybe it was an alien landing place with all this concrete. Maybe there's buried treasure and tombs inside. Let's go find out and then everybody's dying from radiation poisoning because they're busting up one of these waste facilities, nuclear waste facilities, thousands of years into the future. How do we even tell them to beware? How do we communicate? When you start talking about handling nuclear waste, you're making a 10,000 year commitment to having to manage these facilities. You have to create a cult that just protected and managed and maybe create the curse of the nuclear facility waste management program cult. Whatever. You have to create a whole religion just to keep that information going off into the future for the next few thousand years. I want a truth cult. 20,000 years. Put a skull on it. Yeah. What if it's in the future and it's cephalopods? Find it. Soft tissues. What are they going to do with it? The soft tissues. My solution is, of course, grabbing the character from the IKEA instructions and making infographics for the future. That IKEA guy can help you put furniture together without any language. It probably works for keeping people. The assumptions that you're going to be made are the same as what you're making about pyramids. They're going to be wrong. We were wrong about mummies' curses not being true. I can't wait. I can only hope. Only hope. This is my hope. That science will help us keep our better natures going into the future so that we will have more understanding of evolution. More people working together. It'll be that bright future we dream of. I can only hope. I hope it's here. I have it. You ready for bed? I'm ready for bed. No. I'm starting my day. I know. It's almost 8 o'clock in the morning on Thursday. Amazing. You're well ahead of me there. Say good night, Justin. That's me. Say good morning, Justin. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. I hope everyone has a wonderful week. We'll be back again. Keep your skeptical hats on when you're watching Ted. Go fact-check some Ted videos if you've got a moment in your week. But on the other side of things, we hope you all stay well, stay safe, and stay curious. We will see you back here again next Wednesday night. Thank you for watching. Good night. Good morning. Good night. Good morning.