 There's a lot of interesting looking stains on this cat. Oh, hi, everybody. We're live. Oh, no It's been thoroughly used Oh dear oh The joys I think I think I need to increase the magnification of all text on my screen because I can't see Magnification that's a hand and hands. Yes There we go Everyone this is the live recording of the this week in science twist podcast We're here. It's twist a ween everyone Once a year, it's twist a ween time to celebrate the ghastly and the ghoulish in the world but we got Enough I have my co-hosts back So should we start a show do we sound all right everybody All talk at once that's how I'm like it works, right? If we all sound the same when we talk at the same time, then it's perfect mic levels are perfect. Yes Doing that it's then we find out how far behind the broadcast is from We should absolutely save that for our next live show if we ever have one again Uh, where they ask for a mic check and we all start test testing testing it all at the same time I like it. We often talk over each other. It's only fitting. We tested it at that level Darn it louder Kiki be louder. Okay. I'm louder. It just it taps out on my end and I feel like I'm hitting the red On my end. You're fine. You sound good. Great. Okay. I've upped it just a little bit I don't know but there's glare from my visor. Yeah a little glare in the next one You're just gonna get that you're just gonna have a little glare unless you're in the inky blackness of space Then I feel like it's better I like the glare from Blair and on that note do the whole show like this is that better? I like it. I like it. Are we gonna start this thing? Let's do this thing We're gonna start this show. I never noticed a very prominent chin strap I I don't think I had it on last time and honestly don't know how long it's the last because my chin's getting sweaty Oh Yes, the details behind the scenes. No one will normally know Let's start this show in a three a two This is Twist this week in science episode number 797 Recorded on wednesday october 28th 2020 Don't fear twist a wean Hi everyone. I'm dr. Kiki and tonight on the show. We will fill your head with fear potions and vampires, but first Disgulamer disclaimer disclaimer the united states of america is about to get the one thing it always wants democracy the opportunity to vote The chance to change the direction of a nation or keep it going down the path. It has been on for a while However, the masses choose to vote the results will have consequences good ones bad ones Uh, we will have to live with them because democracy is worth it right Even when we don't like the outcome, but much more so when we do Well, the fairness of elections can always be questioned. We get the electoral process itself The contemptible attempts to disrupt access to voting or the threat of foreign influence and disinformation campaigns questioning challenging putting elections in our microscope is entirely a necessary part Of being in a democracy But nothing is more important than the act of voting itself And this subsequent counting of those votes As election draws near keep in mind that it is up to you to determine the future So make good choices Because without a bright future There wouldn't be a us there to bring you more this week in science Coming up next I've got the kind of mine. I can't get enough. I want to learn discoveries that happen every day of the week There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek I want to know good science to begin blare And a good science to you too, justin blare and everyone out there Welcome to another episode of this week in science We're back with science In a little scary Attitude Yeah, yeah, we're bringing the twiso ween Fever to the show tonight You may laugh You may grow afraid of the science that we bring to you on the show tonight There's some scariness in the world But maybe we'll teach you not to fear it. I have a lot of stories about uh, lissy one about distant vampires They like to keep their distance. They're very nice vampires in that way Lots of fear one story about potentially how we can maybe get rid of some of that fear one about how we like fear And then I think we should discuss trick-or-treat tactics Oh That's a good that's a good idea. Yeah Justin, what do you have? Let's see. I've got uh giant birds of Antarctica the Global cooling is really happening in humans How uh microplastics are getting into babies if you have babies you're you're gonna want to uh wait till the very end of the show Uh ray into the broadcast if you're about it Tonight at nine something may be killing you And oh and an update on uh ice melt in the arctic That might be that might be good news. We don't know. No, it's not. It's not. It's scary And I don't like it. It's like it might be good news. We don't know we'll have to Blair, what's in the animal corner? There's spooky sounds in my house. Um I have a potent potion. I have uh kidnapping and home invasions Trying to keep it on theme, you know That's good Potions, I mean, yeah, and then kidnapping and home invasions got it got it Okay, the animal corner is full of uplifting stories tonight. It's fright night. You know It is as we jump into our frightening show Today, I want to remind you that if you have yet to subscribe to this weekend science You can find us all over the internet. We are all places where podcasts are found Google, apple, stitchers, breaker, tunin, pandora, spotify, radio.com We are also on youtube and facebook look for this week in science or twist And you can find us at twist twis dot org But now let's get into these science stories You want to get started with the haunting? I mean, I'd rather not but it's that time of year. So I feel like I'm gonna have to Yep, we are diving right into haunted houses. So So What is it about horror movies and haunted houses that we like so much? What is it? Do you guys I mean There's an excitement I hate I hate all of it. Actually. So the story is not for me. I hate being scared I'm not with it at all. Okay. Okay Well for those who do enjoy it, there's actually a term in psychology for the enjoyment of fear And the seeking of fear it's called recreational fear and it is that mixed emotional experience of feeling fear and enjoyment at the same time and it's really hard to actually study this in people but some Wonderful researchers in Denmark got the idea to put heart rate monitors on people and watch them through through cameras as they went through A commercial haunted house like every year there are these commercial haunted houses and people go through them on purpose for enjoyment to scream and be scared and Why not? So they got 110 volunteers to wear these heart rate monitors and then they They had cameras surveillance cameras throughout the entire haunted house. And so they had people monitoring the cameras to be able to score enjoyment fear different behavioral responses of the people as they went through these haunted houses And then they had the heart rate monitor data. They tracked all of this plus they had reported feelings Of the participants at the end of the haunted houses as they exited they reported on well I got scared here and that was good and I liked that Well, the result is that this is really the first time that they've been able to put together this real world situation with these kinds of data and they have what they call a couple of inverted u-shape trends where there is high fear And enjoyment and they There's a sweet spot where fear Is an enjoyment are maximized and they seem to Happen at the same sweet spot in the heart rate data That is related to these just right deviations from a person's normal physiological state However, when those deviations became Longer like more than just a second or two and actually turned into A sustained high high heart rate Then people reported actually having fear that was not enjoyable Where it turned into something else and so This this comparison of these of these pieces of data Are really putting together this picture of how our bodies and our hearts and our our brains and our metabolism How they all work together to allow us to have this enjoyment of fear and how that sometimes Is not enjoyable like why Blair you would maybe not enjoy all this Yes Yeah, did these people know that they were going into a haunted house? Yes, I mean, that's Yes, they did. Yeah, I think wanted to these are people who were who would have they volunteered the yes haunted house. Yeah Oh His bread delivery. Can you go deliver that and then? Yeah, I mean that would be or like, yeah, we're just gonna the studies We've got you know, you get your heart monitors on and all this stuff And basically you're gonna see a couple images show up on the screen And you don't have to do anything We're just gonna test your reaction and then through the door burst demand with an axe like And so that's that's who I want to test So that's exactly what I hate too is this at the time of year when last night late at night I was scrolling on instagram And they you know, they autoplay certain videos and this really creepy video started audio playing or this Scary like monster thing like popped up on the screen. I like nearly threw my phone across the room That you should have to opt in to the scary stuff. It's not enjoyable for everyone. No No I have a last night. I came across a website that is it's extremely fun and um It led to one of my friends being scared and it uh, it was called here I'm gonna find it really fast because it really is a very enjoyable thing and it's a good tangent Called looks like you need Iceland calm and What it what you do is you you scream you choose different Icelandic environments to scream into and they have speakers set up in the real places in Iceland and they are releasing our screams into the wild in Iceland. But they play back the screams on the website periodically and so if my friend left it open in a tab on his browser and went about doing other things and suddenly there were screams coming from his computer in the middle of the night. He's like, ah! Oh, that's terrible. That's funny. Yeah, very funny. Okay, anyway, tangent. That's such a great idea. You could just so easily set that up pretty much anywhere. You could. We could just set up the speakers in downtown Davis and invite the world to scream at the town of Davis. That's my bike. I like that idea. It's a great idea, yes. It looks like you need Iceland. Okay, Justin, let's move away from scary haunted houses and why we enjoy them or Blair doesn't and talk about big old birds. Are they scary big birds? So it depends on if you are afraid of birds, I guess to begin with, because then any bird was already scary and then the bigger the bird, the scarier it is. Although I'm not really sure how many people are scared of birds anymore, but they haven't maybe seen ones like this. So the biggest bird, the bird with the biggest wingspan anyway on earth right now is Blair, do you know it? The albatross. The wandering albatross, yes. It has an average wingspan of about three meters or 10 feet up to, you know, you can get up to like 11 and a half feet and like that, which is, I can't even demonstrate, but it's like two of these. Just about crazy. You could put me head to toe, like two of me. Twice. Twice, yes. Put me on top of me. That would be the size of this bird. So that's about half the size of the fossils recovered from Antarctica, which is the old found, it represents the oldest members in the extinct group of birds that used to patrol the southern oceans with wingspans up to 21 feet. Crazy. So these are birds that really, like the wandering albatross already can be up there for like a month and a half and not come down. With the lift that they've got, they can just stay up. It doesn't take much energy. You got a nice- They're soaring birds. Yeah. These are called pellagornifids. These birds sort of the oceans for at least 60 million years. So they actually also are like the longest existing giant bird form, I guess. There's some much smaller ones that date 62 million years ago. I guess they up to about two million years ago that before they went extinct. They found a 50 million year old portion of a bird's foot that shows that they arose basically just right after the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. There's another segment they found that's part of a jaw bone. That's about 40 million years ago. When you combine the data and how big and small and these things should be, it figures to be a skull that was approximately two feet long, which is, that's not, we're not talking a beak, I don't even think there. No, that's just the skull. The skull. I bet it's with the beak. With the beak? I bet, yeah. Yeah, cause usually when you look at bird skulls the beaks are still there cause it's- Yeah. They're attached. Yeah, there's bone underneath the keratin. Yeah. Is that seems like, I mean it seems really good. It's definitely bigger. I mean in ostrich skulls, smaller than a foot. But this is a 21 foot wingspan that's also grabbing a fish out of the ocean. So I don't know. I don't know if it is. I'm guessing, I mean- But please, go ahead. Come up with the last detail, the last most important detail about the skull and the beak of these birds. Oh yes. Oh, they have pseudo teeth. Yes, so albatrosses today do not, they don't have teeth, they just have their beaks and they scoop up those fish very nicely. Yeah, so this one had some of the, this fragment of the jar that they've found has these pseudo teeth that are about two inches long and they look like really sharp. This looks like a bird looking at the skull like with really sharp teeth. But the pseudo teeth are more like fingernail-like material. Needle-like protrusions. They're not needle-like. They actually look, they come up to a nice point. They look like teeth, but they're made out of a material that's not actually bone, but keratin like fingernail-y stuff, right? It's more like little horns, but basically those are designed to be able to grasp on to fish. Slippery fish. And hold them and then swallow them. Not meant for chewing. There's no jaw strength behind it or anything like that. But my favorite part of this story is that the researcher, these were discovered back in the 80s. And they were from Seymour Island in the northernmost tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. This is from a time when it was very warm. There wasn't ice covering Antarctica. And you had all sorts of marsupials living there and ostrich-like creatures and other kinds of big birds and that sort of thing. They had recoveries. They were taken to UC Riverside. They were then moved to UC Museum of Paleontology at UC Berkeley. And then they were promptly forgotten about. They were right there in between the remnants of the craft that crashed at Roswell and the Ark of the Covenant. And just the box covered in dust. Yep, just sitting there. So this researcher close, he stumbled across the specimens. He was poking around the collection, looking for stuff to study as a graduate student back in 2015. He started analyzing these bones like, ah, what are these? What's going on here? And they were totally like under-identified. They had just sort of been found and set there. Maybe it was one of those situations where there's paleontologists or archeologists in the field and they're finding bones, but they're there to study sea mammals. And these aren't sea mammals. So they go into a box. It's not the thing that they're interested in. They still catalog it. They say, okay, here's where we found it. It's maybe 40, 50 million years old in the summit, whatever. Some kind of bird, not the thing I study. Put it in the box, send it to the museum. So this, there's this description here. Okay. He's basically like, he's described as a museum rat at some point in this breakdown of it. We're just like sort of sniffing around the archives and the museums looking for something interesting. And amazingly, like this is like that theme that almost it's a meme of the show. Hey, it found something in the basement of museum that was uncovered or discovered basically, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, but only now is coming to light. One of those, one of those kind of fun stories. This is actually a quote from both. Collections are vastly important. So making discoveries like this pellet, Gornathid wouldn't have happened if we didn't have these specimens in the public trust, whether you see Riverside or now Berkeley. The fact that they exist for researchers to look out and study has incredible value. So much value. I'm so glad there are people who are museum rats who do wanna sniff through the things that other people have put in boxes to get back to later, but never had the time to. For sure. Pellet Gornathids. Yeah, there was another big bird there. I don't wanna be the fish that they're eating. No. That were around for a shorter period of time. Also had extremely big wingspans and are related to vultures, but the pellet Gornathids apparently are not related to anything currently living. So they're not actually, they have a very similar morphology. Morphology and hunting strategies, as I guess, as an albatross, they also can stay up for many, many weeks at a time, they think. It looks in this artist's rendering too, like they took a lot of inspiration from the albatross. Yeah. Like an albatross? Not exactly, but go ahead. Go just bigger. But bigger. Pointy teeth. Yes, exactly. All right, Blair. Move us on in our twist-o-ween. We're talking about some of those fish that that pellet Gornathid is eating? Yes, exactly. So this is the University of Cincinnati, did a study looking at North American freshwater fish called leased killy fish. They're unusual for most fish in that they have a placenta and give birth to live young. So it's something that a few different types of fish do, several shark species do this as well, but it gives them a kind of a bigger opportunity for biomagnification, which is why they were a study of pollutants in the fish and in those freshwater systems and kind of the impact. So they found that fish exposed in a lab to concentrations of five nanograms per liter of estrogen had fewer males and less offspring in general. And the normal concentration of estrogen in streams adjacent to treatment plants is around 60 nanograms per liter. So a lot higher than that. And so this just kind of shows that something we pretty much already had a good idea of, but this is a really good kind of laboratory model looking at specifically what the capacities are for where estrogen has impacts on the fish populations. And they looked at it specifically at the synthetic estrogen called 17-alpha ethanolestradiol, which is an active ingredient in oral contraceptives and is used in hormone replacement therapy. So first of all, if medications are flushed, which you should never do for this reason, if medications are flushed, but also just as they move through your body, some of it is unmetabolized and it ends up in this water treatment systems, which have been extremely well designed to remove lots of other things, but not pharmaceuticals. And so those birth control or hormone therapy byproducts go straight into the water system. Yeah, I think that's, I'm pretty sure that's how pharmaceuticals get in there. Yeah. I'm pretty sure like the people aren't like flushing their unused pills down the toilet. I mean, it happens? I'm sure it happens, but when they're talking to it. You're actually instructed to, if you are instructed to, if someone passes away or if you have a large amount of pills, there's no place to go turn them in and recycle them. Garbage. You can throw them in the garbage, but you are also told to, there are instructions to flush them down the toilet. Oh, that's terrible. So really what you should do is drop them off at a doctor's office because they will take care of them properly. So you can drop them off at, there's lots of different They will flush them down the toilet. No. I mean. So yeah. There's places that specifically can dispose of medications. Unless they're the really good kind, in which case send them to a care of Dr. Jesta, not a real doctor. This week in sign, what the hell, what the hell with the addresses? Your trouble. But anyway, yes. So this is a good reminder, don't flush your pills, but also just something that it's 2020. Why are we not, hopefully people are working on this and trying to figure out how to filter out pharmaceuticals in water treatment plants. But I feel like get on this guys. We're messing up the planet. Yeah. So one way is the FDA says is to remove whatever the drugs are from their original containers, mix them with something undesirable, such as used coffee grounds, dirt or cat litter. Put the mixture in something you can close as resealable zipper storage bag, empty can or other container that prevents the drug from leaking or spilling out. And then you can throw them away. Scratch out all your personal information as well. I had no idea that there was recommended flushing. That's insane. Yeah. So don't do that. Yeah, flushing medicines, because some medicines could be especially harmful to others, they have specific directions to immediately flush them down the sink or toilet when they are no longer needed and a take back option is not readily available. So some drugs, yes, it depends. Right, yes. So anyway, next step for this study is to see if estrogens and androgens do anything to those offspring beyond changing their ratios, which probably. Probably, I mean, these are sex hormones. I mean, the reason we use them at the doses we do is that they control our reproductive cycles and those same hormones. They're a lot bigger than a teeny tiny little freshwater fish. Yeah, hence the small amount that can affect that freshwater fish compared to the larger amount that we need as humans. But I mean, this is something we've talked about before on the show, the effect of our pharmaceuticals on natural environments. And it's an ongoing question of exactly what impacts are we having? Yeah. Our world has impacts on us and we just knock it right back. I'm going to knock you out. Oh, no. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. My flushed pills are going to knock you out. No, OK, let's move on. Yeah. More scary stories. How about sneaky, sneaky parasites hiding in your blood? Yes, there are some parasites that get into your body. They get into your bloodstream and they use you to find their next victim. They use vectors like mosquitoes to allow their passage from one victim to the next. And as they go, they have to hide themselves from your immune system. Dun, dun, dun. So they can survive another day. What I'm talking about. I have co-workers like this, but what are you talking about? The call is coming from inside the bloodstream. Is that what you're talking about? The call is coming from inside the bloodstream. I am talking about malaria. Palsyph... Yes, malaria. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Plasmodium falciparum. Yes, I knew I could get that out. This parasite loves to hide in human red blood cells. And some researchers just publishing this week a study that they did looking at the genes that get activated during different seasons in human hosts for malaria. They looked at 600 people in Mali, Africa. And this was during the 2017-2018 rainy seasons. They recorded diagnosed cases of malaria as well as with fever and suspected cases of malaria. And then they also recorded the dry seasons in between with numbers of malaria cases. And they found that, of course, rainy season, many more cases of malaria, some almost 350 to 400 cases, versus only about 12 to 15 during the dry season. So there is a huge difference in the number and the severity of cases of malaria between rainy and dry seasons. And the researchers hypothesized that maybe the parasite has a mechanism to hide itself in the human body until the season when its vector comes out, when it is better for the malaria. And they discovered there are different genes that get activated during the dry season that change the way that the red blood cells that are infected stick to the inner lining of your blood vessels. So normally damaged and infected red blood cells will get filtered through the spleen. And that's something that the malaria doesn't want to have happen. So during the rainy season, they make your red blood, the infected red blood cells, get all sticky. So they stick to the inside of the blood vessels. But then, and this allows them to stay in the blood and they have their infection and everything's bad. And in the dry season, the gene profile changes, the red blood cells aren't sticky. That means that more cells do get filtered by the spleen. But what happens is the parasite is then able to keep a low profile in its host during the entire year and not activate the immune system and then emerge again when the rain start in the following year. Super sneaky. I wanna know, how does the parasite know it's rainy? How does it know? As soon as the human opens an umbrella, they're like, that's it, let's get sticky. I'm gonna be sticky. Stop the sounds. You're not gonna like my answer, but I'm gonna guess it's hormones. I'm gonna say it's microbiome. All right. It could be. Yeah. We'll just play that game for the rest of this. Yeah. Black or Coles microbiome. Justin Coles microbiome. Yeah, I think this is a typical delineation. This is how you draw our lines on the show here. But like two weeks ago, Blair, you had the story about seasonality in humans and how there's two seasons in humans. And if that's true, maybe there really is some kind of hormonal, bacterial profile, whatever it is that you've got the let's be prolific, let's be healthy, rainy, springy kind of season, and then you've got the hunker down and it's dry. I don't know. And to be fair, in those two seasons, there's gonna be different foods available, which will all to your microbiome. I'm just saying, don't rule it out. I put it in there. I put it in there when I started. It also sounds to me like hibernation or estivation. Right? Yeah, it sounds like humans are a biome. It's a, which is usually hormonally triggered. Just saying. So many things to look at there, but regardless, something is triggering a change in the genetic profile of the parasite, which potentially is influencing its survival over seasons. Which I find that absolutely fascinating and terrifying. Well, and one last thing, not to create too many speculations around this, but I wonder if it could also be affected by the homeostasis attempts inside the body to adjust and regulate to exterior thermal conditions, like as the weather cools, you have a lot more activity going on in your metabolism and your liver and your other organs to try to get to the right internal temperature. And maybe something just in that normal attempt to homogenize to your environment is triggering this somehow. Possibly through hormones. It's pretty. Which I would say probably through hormones that way. Yeah. That's a good argument for hormones. Absolutely. All right, tell me it. Yeah. Moving on from this terrifying sneaky parasite, tell me a tale of sea ice. Oh yeah. This is a, sea ice Arctic update edition. Record lows in October for sea ice. As the unusually warm waters slowed the recovery of ice according to Danish researchers. Diminishing ice comes as a reminder about how the Arctic has been particularly hard hit by this global warming thing that we've been saying for a long time. Since the 1990s, warming has been twice as fast in the Arctic regions as it has been for the rest of the globe, a phenomenon dubbed Arctic amplification. This is a quotey voice of a scientist from the Danish Meteorological Institute, Rasmus Tonbo who is saying, the October Arctic sea ice extent is going to be the lowest on record and the sea ice growth rate is slower than normal. According to preliminary satellite data used by the Institute sea ice surface area was at 6.5 million square kilometers, which is 2.5 million square miles on October 27th, which is the lowest they have recorded in the history of recording the ice. That's the scream of the terrified children of the future. So every year ice that is formed in the Arctic melts in the summer. That is the normal part. Usually reaches a low point of about five million square kilometers, but then reforms that would have been earlier in the summer, not now in October, early in the summer, but it reforms to cover about 15 million square kilometers in the winter. Warmer temperatures are now reducing both the summer and winter extent of the ice. So it means it's just shrinking. There's less of it. They've been collecting the satellite data since 1979. So since 1979, this is the lowest it's been, which is how long we've been looking. Actually, interestingly, September was only the second lowest, right? There was a spike in 2012, which would have been a dip, I guess, a dip in the ice in 2012. It was again, because of an influx of extra warm, unusually warm waters at that time. But then September then was the second since the recorded time of looking at this back to 1979. The Institute said this was following a trend observed in recent years, which is described as a vicious spiral. Vicious spiral. I wonder if that's good. Let's read further. That sounds bad. Yeah. I'm gonna say vicious and spiral is not the good kind of spiral, but the bad kind of spiral. Sounded fun, but apparently according to Tonbo, it is a trend we've been seeing the past years with longer open water seasons, making the sun warm the sea for a longer time, resulting in shorter winters. The ice doesn't grow as thick as it used to since the melting is already in the ocean. This itself does not directly contribute to the rise in sea levels. However, with less ice over the sea, sunlight gets absorbed in the ocean, helping further warm the waters, therefore contributing to more ice melt off glaciers and the like resulting in more. Melting. Not to mention their entire ecosystems that depend on sea ice to survive. Yeah. Hmm. I don't like this nightmare story. Yeah, for the month of October measurements show an 8.2% downward trend in ice over the last 10 years. Water temperatures in the eastern part of the Arctic, north of Siberia, was two to four degrees warmer than normal and in Baffin Bay, hey, that's where I was in the northwestern part of Greenland up there. It was one to two degrees warmer. None of this was good news. I'm sorry. No. I thought the update this week might have, or this month for sea ice might be good, but. No, no. What about 2020? Make two things. Twizzleene climate change nightmare juice. Yeah, exactly. That's what it is. What about 2020 Blair? Oh, just what about 2020 makes you think you'll have good news of any sort? Yeah, it's sort of been that way. It's not been the best of the years. Nope. Nope, no, it hasn't. I didn't think of better ones. Well, let me give you a little bit of good news because if I didn't give you this good news, I might tell you about the giant asteroid Apophis, which is going to just miss us in 2026, that actually because of the way it's kind of warming and the way it's going, it might hit us in like 2068. So yeah, that one. We won't be here. What are we here? I would tell you about that, but I have good stories to tell you instead. So out of Ohio State University, a group of bat researchers have been doing vampire bat studies. Oh yeah, we love the vampire bats because really they are nothing like vampire vampires. You do have to give them a permission to enter your home though. That is true. Vampire bats, oh, that's good to know. And if Blair says it's true, then it really is. Just kidding guys, sorry. Well, I mean, like vampires in our myths and legends, vampire bats do suck the blood. Yes, they want to suck the blood of animals. They usually have like cows and stuff, yeah. Yeah, goats, cows, ungulates, horses, farming animals usually, because they're plentiful in the areas, but these bats, they live socially and we've talked before about their interesting social habits and this team at Ohio State is responsible for some of the cool stories we've talked about how they build trust and make friends and have social bonds and connections in these amazing social groups. Well, they wanted to know what vampire bats do when they get sick. They said, huh, well, a lot of social animals don't go around other animals. You know, as humans you don't feel good, you curl up in bed, you stay home, you don't really want to go out and socialize because you feel bad and they wanted to see whether this happened in vampire bats. So they got some little tiny microchip monitors to be able to do GPS tracking and social monitoring of the social networks on a bunch of these vampire bats. They trapped a bunch of bats and they tagged them with these monitors and then one group of them got, or a couple of groups of them got different dosages of a drug that would make them feel sick but not actually be sick. And so they would have all the bad feelings but not actually have anything wrong with them. And then another group got a placebo injection and then they let them go and all the bats went back to their bat home to be social. And then over the next 24 hours, the ones that got the be sick drug went, oh, I don't feel so good. And they started social distancing. They started keeping their distance from other bats in the social group and they found that the healthy bats, not only did the healthy bats, additionally the healthy bats tended to avoid them. So sick individuals in the social groups naturally became a little bit distanced and isolated which would help the health of that social colony. So it's good to social distance, y'all. Keep your distance, this twist of ween. That's of a vampire bat. Yeah, this is back to me really hoping something like this. Act like a vampire this Halloween. Keep your distance, man, and wear a mask. And maybe someday I'll come up with a wrap that actually works with this, okay. I wonder if vampires would be considered vegetarians. I'm almost like, I mean, they're not really because they're feeding off of an animal product. Blood, blood. However, they doesn't build an animal. Sengu... Which is sort of like vegetarians who like still eat like eggs and butter. They're like, as long as it doesn't kill the animal, they're okay with it. So I guess vampires would be, what'd you call it? Sengu... Senguvores. Senguvores. Interesting. Yeah, so they're not vegan, but I suppose they might be... Nobody's vegan. Definitely not vegan. Vegetarians because it's just, it's an animal product. Like, I don't know, I don't know. I don't know, but this team does amazing work on these bats and this, I think, is really a really interesting addition to our understanding of the social dynamics of these vampire bats. Let's keep this, let's keep this past COVID. If you're sick, stay home. If you have to go out, wear a mask if you're sick. Let's keep this going. Yeah. Be cool like a vampire, yo. Stay home. Don't feel good. Stay home. I don't wanna jinx it, but I was just kind of marveling at the fact that I haven't got some yucky cold in the past eight months. And it's because people are distancing and washing their hands and masking and all this kind of stuff. And so it's like, how could I? If I'm successfully avoiding COVID, I'm probably successfully avoiding a lot of germs. So, yeah, can we keep this? Can we keep doing this? It's the part where we don't give each other sicknesses all the time. Yeah. If you just tuned in, this is This Week in Science. If you're interested in a calendar, the 2021 calendars are now available for pre-order. If you head to twist.org, you can find the link on the sidebar to order your calendar today. Order one for a friend. Plan ahead for 2021. Maybe we'll get to do it twice. That's right, get two calendars. If you also would like a shirt or a mug or some other item of Twist Merchandise for your favorite twist friend, well, they make great gifts as we come into the holidays. So, while you're at twist.org, head over to our Zazzle Store and browse our catalog of wonderful twist goodies that have been placed there lovingly by Blair. All right, let's come back for a little bit of COVID news. Doot, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot. This is the sad, scary part of the show. Wait, the whole show. No, okay, I've got some good news. I've got some things. Okay. Oh, okay, thanks. Numbers, numbers are increasing. I'm not gonna tell them good news in this segment. I can't wait to hear it. There is some good news. I mean, I think there is some good news in here because we're learning things and it's important to learn and grow and change the way we do things. Well, one thing we've talked about a lot on the show is convalescent plasma and there's been a big question as to whether or not it works and it was given emergency use authorization by the FDA earlier this year. However, it had never had a randomized controlled trial completed before that point. Just a lot of data but no controls. And finally, a randomized controlled trial has come out of India. However, there are some issues with that study as well but the trial found no benefit to the use of convalescent plasma on patients with COVID-19. And this does not go along with other reports of getting the convalescent plasma to patients early having a benefit in patients recovering sooner. So still we could use some more studies. People have questions about this one and of course it's always going to be up for debate until people really figure it out but convalescent plasma, this data does not support its use. So Blair, as of now, if you had those antibodies it wouldn't necessarily help, necessarily. Yeah, I know. I thought you had good news, wait, what happened? I'm sure there's good news coming. Yeah, that was my little moment to feel like I could actually do something because I'm the universal recipient. So I feel like giving my, always giving blood is helpful but it feels like the least helpful. Yes. And so, yeah, suddenly I was like, ooh, my plasma, this could be great. But yeah. I know. Oh man. Not so far as the data suggest right now. All right, you might have heard the story this week reporting that people with COVID-19 experience up to 10 years of cognitive loss from having the disease, that you lose 10 years of your ability to think and reason. Great. Well, it's not necessarily the case. Don't jump to conclusions, people. Don't jump to conclusions. Don't go there. So number one, the study that everybody is talking about is a non peer reviewed preprint. Not peer reviewed. Not peer reviewed. I mean, it could have been anything. Fine, okay, it's a study. It has the suggestive power. Okay, so. Where is it from? Where is it from? It's out of the UK. It was published in the Med Archive. It's out of the Department of Brain Sciences, Imperial College London, Department of Psychiatry, University of Southampton, University of Cambridge, University of Chicago, King's College London. So I mean, we've got some good universities and names behind it. That all sounds good. The part that's a little difficult is saying, oh, I get it. It's not a 10 year trend of cognitive deficits. It's a parent 10 year aging of the brain that they were sort of by testing where you would be with some sort of cognitive decline that put you 10 years ahead of your actual age. Yes, they say people from their abstract, people who had recovered, including those no longer reporting symptoms exhibited significant cognitive deficits when controlling for age, gender, education level, income, racial, ethnic group, and preexisting mental disorders. They were substantial size for people who had been hospitalized, but also for mild, but biologically confirmed cases who reported no breathing difficulty and finer grained analyses of performance support the hypothesis that COVID-19 has a multi-system impact on human cognition. Now, this is where we have to get into what exactly they did. They analyzed cognitive test data from 85, almost 85,000 great British intelligence test participants. They completed a questionnaire regarding suspected and biologically confirmed COVID-19 infection as well. They did not have people take this test and then come back later and take the test again. So this is not a, we saw this occur with COVID-19 where we did not see it occur without COVID-19 and we have a pre-test and a post-test. No, no, no, no, this is, they took individuals and they controlled across single tests. This was just single individuals, only testing one time. This is absolute correlation. It is not causative whatsoever. Yeah, but the difficulty, of course, is like you can't give COVID to humans and then test them after you've given the initial. No, but you could, I mean, our infection rate is high enough. You could make a huge number of people take this test and then the people who just happened to get it, you test them after they get better. I totally agree with that. That would be a smarter way to do it. I mean, it could be that there's just a 10-year, 10-year age, brain age difference or testability difference in the people that took the test who had COVID and those who didn't. That's what I was thinking, it could be people who are on the front lines, let's say, who maybe are more likely to get COVID might have just a harder life beforehand. I absolutely agree with that. I mean, it has absolutely been primarily a working class disease. I absolutely agree with that. However, you know, the problem with the correlation is that it's not scientifically sound. The strength of the correlation is that it gives you an interesting place to investigate further. So I don't think it rules out at all the fact that it was correlative and that it's in the preprint or whatever. But I do think that it means that there is probably something worth looking into further. It's not a conclusion. Yeah, and so this is what I wanted people to think about. Number one, not peer reviewed. Number two, correlation, not causation. We only have one test point and just a large sample of people. There is a lot that is unknown. And I, yes, Justin, your point is well taken that this might be an interesting place to start, but it does not warrant the sensational headlines of the last couple of days saying, COVID's going to age your brain by 10 years. That still is speculative. The leap in. It's a leap, yeah. But you could also, just as easily, then I suppose say that based on correlations, it may be that people with some sort of mental cognitive deficit are more likely to get COVID. Yes. Well, because if you're skipping precautions, if you're doing high-risk things, if you're a low-information person who it's not cognitively deficit necessarily, but if you're low-information like, I heard there's a virus, but I won't listen to that anymore or figure out what I can do to protect myself, it's very possible that you're more likely to get COVID if you're low-information absorption. There is so much we don't know and it needs to be evaluated further before everybody jumps on the sensational speculative bandwagon. That's all I'm saying. So good news, don't worry about it yet. From our Minion Tom Santa Cruz, we have a study out of the journal Physics of Fluids that supports aerosol transmission, albeit at a slightly reduced likelihood compared to droplet transmission, which is kind of what we've been talking about. But the big thing is that droplet transmission, the fomites, the bigger droplets that spray out of your mouth when you speak and you sing and you shout and you inhale and exhale heavily during exercise, those are the ones that cause the largest amount of transmission. And understanding that is good because we do know that masks tend to block those larger particles better. So mask wearing is probably going to be very effective at continuing to reduce transmission this winter. So wear your masks. And that comes back to the whole viral load thing we've talked about before, right? You're gonna have, there's gonna be more virus in a big droplet than in an aerosol that you're just gonna get into your body. So that kind of tracks with that kind of thinking. Also just don't breathe around other people. Yeah, hold your breath. Yeah, like if you think you can make it through the elevator ride without inhaling, don't try it. Yeah, well that is why they say on a lot of elevators now, it'll say like no more than two people and no unnecessary conversation is because talking spreads more. And there's never been a necessary conversation in an elevator. Yeah, it's just- When it's functioning, you mean? Yeah. It's the same sort of thing. Like you stare at your all, everybody's job is to stare at the floor lights. It's the same sort of rule for like when men are at urinals sitting, standing next to each other, you're not supposed to chit chat. You're supposed to look straight ahead and ignore the people around you. Wait till you get to your destination or finish your business and then move on. Moving on to trick or treating. Kids around the country are either really sad because they get to trick or treat this year or they are excited because they have some other alternative. What is the situation where you both are? Is it a lie? I'm pretty sure it's a no-go. Yeah, that city of Davis is trying to shut down trick or treating a long time ago anyway, but. Just doesn't like the college students trick or treating. Yeah, it's a little odd. Yeah, it's not gonna happen this year. No trick or treating. Yeah, we have no mandate on whether or not trick or treating can happen in our town, our city, but some cities have completely locked it down and said no trick or treating and other places are allowing it. And I think it's good because overall, just having a plan is better than having no plan. And as for advice from science and from this week in science as to how to handle the Halloween holidays, if you know that kids might be out looking for candy door-to-door, it isn't necessarily a bad thing to leave into like bowls or bags of candy outside on the front porch that people can come up and collect on their own if they want to. The first kid by in my neighborhood would have taken all the things. It's just gonna take the whole bowl. Yeah. Honor system, come on, we all have to be good this year. Kids don't have an honor system. They have a big bowl of candy system that's going all into that right now. And then- Right, and if you don't want to put that bowl, then maybe you can be an industrious engineer and create some kind of a launch or shoot system. Yeah, I was thinking of a candy from a window or a door of your abode. You're like the one slur in the Lorax. Little pale. Honestly, honestly, of all the things that people are doing, as long as you're wearing a mask for Halloween and you're outdoors, you should be fine. Yeah, and wash your hands. You tend to go in your pod. That's the other thing I was thinking of. Yeah, and you just let the candy sit for three days, excruciatingly painful as that may be. I don't know about that. If you could definitely wipe it down, but what I was thinking was like definitely not snacking while you're trick-or-treating, which is always the thing to do, right? Just to pop a candy in your mouth as you go from house to house. Yeah, that's strongly a bad idea. That's out. When did you grow up, Blair? When I was a kid. I was treating in the 90s. They checked our candy for razor blades. Oh, the razor blade thing. Yes, that happened during my childhood as well. And drugs, like they would, who's like went through this forensic scanning on the kitchen counter, which I always suspected was just a way for my mom to take out her favorites, but it's out. Didn't they discover that was never really a thing, right? A lot of stuff was never really a thing. Yeah, I was trick-or-treating right in the heart of that. So they just said only pre-packaged stuff that looked like it hadn't been tampered with. Then you could eat it right away. Right, but that, as you said, Blair, is not a good idea to snack while you trick-or-treat and make sure you bring it home. If you can wait, let it sit for a day or two. If you have a spray bottle of alcohol, you can probably like spray the outsides of all of the packaging, and that might do a little bit to kill some virus. Make sure you wash your hands, for sure, before you, yeah. Just daintily open the wrapper and then use some chopsticks to eat the candy. Chopsticks. Or just wait, wait for this wait like three days. Go ahead and tell a child just home from trick-or-treating still in their outfit to wait to eat their candy, so that goes. Are you gonna do that, Justin? Is that your plan? Oh, absolutely. I mean, nobody's going trick-or-treating, but like that would be the plan. Like it would be a great like character building. The marshmallow experiment, right? From the side of alternatives to trick-or-treating, there are a lot of people being creative with scavenger hunts and some like Easter egg hunts, but it's trick-or-treating hunts in backyards and houses and having kids search for candy in your homes, having scavenger hunts outdoors in places that are out, that are away from lots of people and lots of other hands with things that you've hidden so that it's easy for the kids. There are lots of ways for the kids to have costume and play and trick-or-treating and enjoy the Halloween holiday. There are so many wonderful things out there. You can still have our fear and our fun. Shoebrew in the chat room has an amazing idea, which is just if you are going trick-or-treating, buy a couple of bags of candy and hide it and then switch it out when you get home and they tie them over with that for a while. That would absolutely not work on my kids. Or if you need- They are tracking, because they do this whole barter system afterwards where they like swap out the candy. So they already are in their head like, oh, I got three of these. I got six of those. I got five of that one that's gonna bring me all the other stuff that I like that didn't end up in my back. They already, they're so on it. They're like little Wall Street or stock exchange people at the end of a night of trick-or-treating. Absolutely. I think that one thing you could do is, instead of having a bag of candy at home, so you can have the trick-or-treating candy snacks, have your pockets. Just fill your pockets with candy before you leave the house even. And then you can just give your kids candy snacks so they can get a trick-or-treating sugar high. You can walk along and then stop in front of a house, give them some candy, walk through the next house. Doesn't look like they're home. We'll go to the next house. We'll go to the next house. Throw some candy in the bag. Here, have some. I like it. I like it. That might be doable, yeah. It's more repaid. Yeah. There are lots of ideas. Be safe. I do hope that everyone continues to act like a vampire. Keep your social distance. Let's wear those masks. And not like this, one that actually covers your mouth. The mask I'm wearing would not be sufficient right now. Be safe this Halloween. This is This Week in Science. You wanna help Twist grow? Get a friend to subscribe today. Oh, hey, hey, hey. You know what time it is. It's time for my computer to be asleep while I'm trying to set up a different section of the show. My computer likes to do it so bad. I got you. I got you. I can do it. I can do it. No, I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm ready for. Let's end the little corner with Blair. Oh, here we go. Buy a pet, nill a pet, no pet at all. If you want to hear about animals, she's your girl. Except for giant pandas that grow. They're not uprooted. Get out, Blair. I have a home invasion under the sea. Under the sea. Oh, no. Take it from me, right? Yeah, this is a study from the University of Exeter and Duke University, looking at a fan favorite, Mantis Shrimp. And they're the way that they find their home. So they have burrows in coral rubble and they use that burrow as a shelter, as a place to feed, as a place to molt when they lose their hardened exoskeleton and they have to harden their interior. And so they're kind of extra kind of susceptible to predation. It's where they mate. It's where they lay eggs. And so the competition for the perfect burrow is fierce. They need to be big enough to fit into, but also small enough so that they can use their armored tail to block the entrance well enough. And this group of scientists wanted to find out what made the perfect burrow size. And they found that when you just kind of put a bunch of empty burrows out for a mantis shrimp, they chose the larger than ideal home, probably because they thought they were gonna grow a little bit so they wanted to like grow and do it. However, when they had to fight for a burrow that was currently occupied, they had a different tactic. So they found that overall resident mantis shrimps won the fight 69% of the time against intruder. So if you're gonna try to steal a burrow from another mantis shrimp, the odds are against you to start off with. But this is what's very interesting. When the intruders fought burrows for burrows that were slightly smaller than what the researchers kind of had calculated would be the ideal size, they actually won 67% of the time. If the burrows were much smaller or much larger than the intruder's ideal size, the victory rate dropped to 13%. So it's a very specific kind of a Goldilocks scenario. What is the perfect size of a new burrow? But also beyond that, if they're going to fight for it, they wanna fight for a slightly smaller one. And they think the reason for that is that a slightly smaller burrow is probably occupied by a smaller shrimp. So, yes, bullies. Oh my gosh. They're forcing the little guy out of their home and stealing their home. So they will compromise on size if they think the fight will be easier. And this is the group of mantis shrimp. For the mantis shrimp aficionados, we know that there are stabbers and smashers. These are the smashers. These are the ones with the big club that they can reach a speed of over 50 miles an hour and create a flash of light by vaporizing water on contact. So they will kind of bang, bang, bang to try to punch the mantis shrimp. And then when they curl up, then they use their tail as a shield. So it's kind of like, it's they have their hammer and then they have their shield of their tail. And between that, they're trying to fight for their space. So it really seems like when intruders triumphed, it was because they succeeded in throwing the first punch and delivering more strikes overall, which is like how you win a fight, I guess. But overall, it's how they win a fight is by fighting somebody smaller than them. Also that picking on the little guy. And there's a little one. Kiki, if you click on the story, there's actually a video. You can watch one of the fights happening, which is pretty funny. So. We'll try to find that. Yeah. So basically, you can see these guys kind of, I think this is an unacceptable, an unsuccessful attempt to get into one of those burrows, but you can see how they use their tail to kind of protect and then they kind of end up cowering away from the burrow. They didn't quite make it, but anyway, that's our- I can't get it to open. That's okay. So everyone just go to twist.org and check out our show notes and click on the link for this story and you'll see the quite entertaining video. It's kind of like, let me in there. No, okay, nevermind, nevermind. Nevermind, I'm good. No, nevermind. As you were. Talk to the tail. Yeah. And speaking of invasions, the other animal corner story I have for tonight is about the invasion of mole rats and the following kidnapping of children. Naked mole rats, kidnapping children. It's a QAnon plot. Yes, except it's mole rat children also. Oh, mole rat children. It's not human children, thank goodness. This is a trio of researchers from Washington University, St. Louis, the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission and San Francisco State University. And they found that invading mole rats will kidnap pups from the colonies they conquer. This was the results of a decade long study of mole rats in the wild in a national park in Kenya. So in prior research in a lab, they've seen captive mole rats stealing pups from rivals. But this is the first time seeing this kind of very wild behavior in the wild. So in this effort, they had this long-term study in their native environment. And so in order to kind of be able to manipulate variables, they, in this national park, they captured and marked multiple mole rats from several colonies so that they could kind of follow them and watch their movements. And they noticed one day that there were pups from one colony that all of a sudden were in another. And it looked as though they had been taken forcefully. And mole rats, if you don't know, they can live in colonies with populations up to 300 individuals. And those colonies, they don't build overnight. So they have workers and queens who produce the workers. But if you want to grow your numbers quickly, the larger colony is usually the one that can triumph over a space. And so they actually can steal pups from other colonies to increase their numbers. It's not a spite thing. It's not a dominance thing. It's not a gene pool manipulation thing. It's really, it seems like they just are trying to get to be the bigger colony as quickly as possible. And they've also shown that just in general, bigger colonies do better in the wild, not even just competing with each other for space, but just in general, the colony does better if there's more of them. More workers make sense. Yeah, more workers. It is interesting that they use these pups as workers. As far as they can tell, they don't become part of the breeding structure. So you're still maintaining your gene pool, but you're increasing your numbers for workload. So they're co-opting the baby mole rats from other colonies, not letting them reproduce and making them work. So they really aren't, they're enslaving them. They're little mole rat slaves. Although they probably, they probably don't know because they're probably just raised from such a young age in that other colony that they're just another worker rat. I mean, do they ever notice that they don't get to carpe the DM? Well, I think most workers don't get to do that. Yeah, so probably is not that different. So that's not fair. You know, nature's not fair. That's how evolution works, is unfairness basically. I would like to know how they maintain the, these, you know, these kidnapped individuals as part of the colony and that they don't, do they become integrated in, they obviously don't become fully integrated. They're somehow in the colony, but separate. Well, so then my first question is, do the other like born there, mole rats, are they like also not breeding? The gray majority, yes. Okay, okay. So that's just what it's like to start at the bottom. Exactly, yeah, it just, yeah, they're low on the totem pole basically, yeah. They're not low on the totem pole. They are very, very important for the infrastructure of that colony. Right. Yeah, but I don't know. I feel like I don't need to be some, some change in mole rat society. Yeah. I don't know exactly how. You want a mole rat democracy? Yeah. It's not democracy necessarily. It's not good that far. Just to, you know, a little bit more, everybody should be able to reproduce in this society. That's really, well, I have some bad news about the animal kingdom, Justin, if that's what you're worried about. Yeah. Don't look too close at most hoof stock or primates. In fact, not good news, especially for males. Yeah. In the naked mole rats, their reproductive structure is actually fairly interesting in that they do have a queen who is very, it's like an insect hive almost, where the queen is like a bee queen or an ant queen, where that is the female who is the reproductive female. Right. Yeah. So she's in charge. But she only selects a certain class of other mole rat to read with. Yeah. So she, usually through chemical cues, tries to find a lesser related male to make sure that the gene pool is good and healthy. And so, wouldn't that be the integrated other colony mole rat? That's a good question. I mean, that's weird. I think that would be a good thing to look at for the next, for a future study year. The next 10 years. Yeah. Is maybe they do end up integrating fully genetically into the situation over time. But I mean, the females aren't breeding then, but the males seem like they would be first in line. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's a good question. I don't know a whole lot about it. I just, I do know that they do have kind of a social structure where they can sniff each other and know who is kind of, quote unquote, more important. And the more important mole rat goes on over. Like if they come face to face in a tunnel, the quote unquote, more important mole rat gets to climb over the less important mole rat as they pass. Right. Right. I feel like there needs to be like a, what's it? Is it McMonkey McBean? Whoever did the Sneeches Stars? Like the to go in news. Come on. What's Dr. Seuss? But it's I think that who's the I can't remember the name of the guy who was putting the stars on Sneeches. But an experiment like that, where you neutralize sent differences between them all and just see what takes place. See how it disrupts society. What happens? It would disrupt society like crazy. Yeah. Really would for those because they use their scent for everything. It's very important. It's fascinating Blair. Yeah, I don't know. It's a nightmare society that I do not want to be a part of. How's that? Yeah. Yeah, it's terrifying. It would be terrible to be in a society that had tears of access to social resources within that group that were so disparately different between the top and the bottom. That would be such a nightmare scenario. Oh, what? This is this week in science. Big reminder, the calendars are out. If you're interested in a twenty twenty one this week in science. Blair's Animal Corner calendar. They are ready for order. Head to twist.org. Click on the big toad to get your order today. And while you're there, please help support twists. Your support is what keeps this show going. You allow us to be able to reach out to people and bring science and conversation and a little clarity and sanity to the world. You are the reason we're able to do this. We are a listener supported show, so it's all you. So be a part of making that happen. If you're not supporting us already or you want to make a change to how you support us, click on the Patreon link at twist.org and choose your level of support. Ten dollars and above is how we know who to thank at the end of the show. Ten dollars and more. We thank you by name at the end of the show if you want to be thanked, of course. So thank you for being a part of bringing sanity and science to people. Thank you for making this show possible. We really can't do it without you. All right. Coming back in, you know whose turn it is. Justin, what you got? It's I'm not. Oh, yeah. OK, so the phone story caught my eye because one, it seems really odd. And two, I've been noticing this for years. And you never told us before. Come on. No, I know I've mentioned it at the opportune times when you guys went around. But it's been like sort of a thing for a long time that's been on my mind very recently, in fact, because OK, this story, I got to back up. Two hundred years ago, a German physician, Carl Wunderlich, established through testing all of his patients. That ninety eight point six degrees Fahrenheit or thirty seven degrees Celsius, which you probably used, was the standard normal body temperature. That's what temperature everybody was. Since then, that has sort of been used by parents, school nurses, doctors, anyone wondering whether or not they might have a fever as to, you know, 98.6. I'm fine. Over time, however, and in and much more in recent years, lower body temperatures have been widely reported in healthy adults. Twenty seventeen study among thirty five thousand adults in the United Kingdom found the average body temperature to be not ninety eight point six or thirty seven Celsius, but ninety seven point nine Fahrenheit and thirty six point six Celsius. It doesn't seem like a lot, but that was like the new average. OK, so in a twenty nineteen study, they studied people mostly, I think, in the sort of Bay Area, Southern Bay Area in California, and they found the average to be ninety seven point five degrees Fahrenheit or thirty six point four Celsius. So that's what blows my mind. I am consistently about ninety seven point four or thirty six point three in Celsius. Consistently now. And this is only really come up a lot lately because of the covid times. And so you feel a little weird. You go take your temperature. That there I am still at the thirty six point three or whatever, which is just below the current chill average in California. It's also the lowest I've ever average, but it seems to have drifted down from what used to be an extremely reliable ninety eight point six. So until I saw this study, I thought, hey, maybe they just don't make thermometers like they used to. Maybe the thermometers are just all junk. They're not using mercury anymore. Come on. Digital versus good old mercury. Well, what about like those super fancy temperature machines in the in the doctor's office? Those ones, too. And then like the ear one is the one I've been using. It's also low like every. So I figured I figured it was just that. I can tell you I've been ninety seven seven my whole life. OK. Well, that's that's down there near the California average. You're just above it. But I guarantee I was a ninety eight point six for forever, except maybe it's kind of drifted down to this lowest point it's ever been. Anyway, that's why this like I mean, I was freakishly consistent at ninety eight point six as a youth. I also had this idea that maybe we had calibrated these mercury thermometers to what body temperature was. And maybe they were wrong and just everybody figured out they're wrong. Let's say the new digital is actually more accurate. And this is what body normal body temperature actually is. And that's why it was always lower. Anyway, a multinational team of physicians, anthropologists, local researchers led by Michael Gurvin, UC Santa Barbara Professor of Anthropology in the chair of the campus's Integrative Anthropological Sciences Unit and Thomas Kraft, a postdoctoral researcher in the same department. They found similar decreases that I am describing among the Chimane indigenous population of forage or horticulturists in the Bolivian Amazon. In the 16 years since they have been studying them, they have observed a rapid decline in average body temperature. A point zero nine degree Fahrenheit per year such that the Chimane body temperatures are now roughly ninety seven point seven or thirty six point five Celsius. So they've actually seen this drift in a population in just the last 16 years. In less than two decades, we're seeing this is quoting a quotey voice of Gurvin in the in less than two decades, we're seeing about the same level of decline as that observed in the US over approximately two centuries, although I think I've just experienced this over this same period of time. Their analysis is based on a sample size of 18,000 observations of fifty five hundred adults. They adjust for multiple other factors that might affect body temperature, ambient temperature outside, body mass, that sort of thing. And the research now appears in the journal Science Advances. So there, oh, let's see, let me skip some of this. This is Kraft, no matter how we did the analysis, the decline was still there. Even when we restricted analysis to the 10 percent of adults who were diagnosed by physicians is completely healthy. We still observe the same decline in body temperature over time. So why is this happening? Why is there global cooling taking place in humans? According to Garvin, the finding of lower than expected body temperatures in the US and the decline over time had a lot of people scratching their heads like, is this a fluke? What happened in the study? They confirmed that the body temperatures below 98.6 are found in places outside the US, the UK, and the area in Bolivia, where the chimneys live, is rural. It's tropical, minimal public health infrastructure. Probably not popping NSAIDs and anti-inflammatories all the time. But that was part of the first theory. It's like, ah, it's the access to drugs. I'm using anti, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like all of these modern world is required. The indoor climate controls and blah, blah, blah, blah, all those populations. That's not happening in this population. It has none of that. And they're seeing it. Ah, yeah. So they're saying body temperature, a simple measure, we could easily add this to large scale surveys. Researchers themselves point out some potential improvements to the future studies. first they did not use the same thermometer over the entire study period, but of course 16 years with the same thermometers, you know, pretty long time to have a thermometer, although they did use the same type of thermometer the whole time, just wasn't the same one. So there is a little element of like, maybe if something has changed at the moment, I don't know. First we, the second sample size was smaller in the earliest study years and kind of grew with time. Third, we did not account for pregnancy or lactation, although it didn't come up, fluctuate, if you just looked at those and isolated them. Fourth, we did not account for hydration status of participants, which could affect body temperature to some degree. And last, they did not record time of day, although all of their temperature takings were between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. throughout the entire study period. So it didn't likely really directionally bias it. But the fact that they're seeing it there in the United States, in the UK, it's one of those things that's like, I kind of noticed. I kind of noticed this was taking place at my own. For you personally. Yeah, me personally, but you know, maybe it's the thermometers. I don't really normally check that often. It might be once a year that I would take a temperature, but now I've been doing it a lot. And I'm like, I'm a low body temperature person all of a sudden. So the question about this is, why? Why? Why? Why is it? Is it because we're the temperatures are going up globally? Is it? Is there greater humidity? Why are humans cooling down? So the answer is, we don't know. They don't know. That's what I was thinking too, is the planet's getting hotter. But also we, a huge number of human beings now live in climate controlled existence. So your body has to work less hard to maintain temperature. Yes. And it could be because people are all healthier. It could be because we spend less time having infections. It could be all of these things except that this group in Bolivia has none of that going on. They still actually have a morbidity factor associated with infections. They have their climate control is blankets. And none of the things that people could have been, hmm, we should follow this and that or the other, none of that exists there. And yet that trend has taken place. I'm kind of then wondering if there isn't some global viral microbiotic thing that's taken place that just has downregulated humans to have a lower body temperature to keep it comfortable. I don't know. But it seems like a really weird thing to be taking place globally. And nobody really noticing or talking about until this study. I guess they've been studying it. They've been studying it. But have you heard about global human cooling? Yes, I have heard about it. Yeah, I have heard about it previously. But yeah, this is a very interesting study in the population that they're adding to it. So yeah, very interesting. I've always kind of been a whatever my temperature goes up, my temperature goes down. My temperature just temperature things. It's all around 98.6. I'm always, you know, it's always, there's always error bars in everything. I just assume there are error bars in measurement always. So I'm like, it's close enough. But I mean, like again, I used to be ridiculously hitting that 98.6, not 98.4, not 98.8, 98.6. You are an anecdote. The whole I absolutely am all of the people are it's an interesting story. I absolutely am accept that the fact that this weird low temperature that I'm consistently getting hits the California average. So that makes it feel like, even though we need a lot more research and study, but it makes it definitely feel like California, something in the water. I don't know in the air. What is it? I don't know. I can't tell you. There's a lot of smoke in the air. That's for sure. It's hot right now, hot in California. But I'm not scared. I'm not scared. Justin, do you have any more stories? Do you want to be scared? Yeah, are you gonna scare me now? Oh, I forgot I had a teaser for people who like babies. New research shows that high levels of microplastics are released from infant feeding bottles. So formula or even the the the pumped breast milk containers are pumping children and babies full of microplastics. Research also indicates a strong relationship between heat and microplastic release. We knew that. Warmer liquids, far greater releases of microplastics. So let's see. Let me get down to key findings. This is sort of important stuff. Okay, so they estimate exposure to 12 month old patients to microplastics in 48 countries and regions and have published their findings in the high-profile journal Nature Food. So I'm just gonna, I just want people to know that, you know, the same way you like to let people know, you know, that when there's something that's like three, that's like a meter, that's like three feet, that a 12 month old patient, that is the same as a one year old baby. Correct, correct. In most countries, in most countries. We needed to clarify that. In most countries, yes. In some country, they are beginning their second year. So the team under tech, the team under tech global survey, and they estimated this in the microplastics in the 48 regions, following the current guidelines for infant feeding, bottle sterilization, and feeding formula preparation. The average daily exposure for infants is in excess of one million, one million microplastic particle of things per day. However, in Oceania, it was 2.1 million. In North America, 2.3 million. Europe was 2.6 million particles per day. So the level of these microplastics can be reduced by following a modified sterilization and formula preparation procedures. Their recommended sterilization and formula preparation procedures are sterilizing infant feeding bottles, sterilize the bottle with these new World Health Organization recommended guidelines and allow them and allow to cool, prepare sterilized water by boiling in a non-plastic container, rinsing the sterilized bottle with the boiling water, and then rinsing it out with cooled off, that cooled off sterilized water three times. For preparing the infant formula, prepare hot water using again non-plastic kettle cooker, and prepare infant formula in non-plastic containers using at least 70 degrees C water. Cool to room temperature, transferred to prepared formula in a high quality plastic. So what I'm hearing here is that for the... Don't heat plastic. Yeah, don't heat it. Or if you heat it, you can sterilize the bottle so you can put it in boiling water in a kettle or whatever and boil it with the water, but then let it cool so that the plastic is not hot when you put anything in it. So it's not hot. Hot plastic is plastic that moves. Yes, so I think what they're saying is it's okay to use that hot water, but then you have to let the water you boiled. Cool it. Cool it out all the way, and then use that. Rinse it off, yeah. Room temperature sterilized water rinsed the plastic bottles after they've been sterilized so that you get any plastic bits off of them that would be transferred to food. So I mean cleaning the surface. I don't have a baby, so I don't know, but do they make glass bottles? If you have access to glass bottles, use glass, because that would be different. But I think pumping mechanisms are usually all plastic, so that's probably where things get a little extra. And they've tried to take out all the harmful stuff, but if it's plastic, it's plastic. That's the thing that's going to be... Yeah, but then also how many microplastics am I ingesting every time I wash my plastic water bottle that's supposed to be BPA free or whatever, but then still it's probably releasing plastic particles if I'm heating it up. So then this would be good stuff to consider for that too. Absolutely, yeah, I agreed. Yeah, so at 70 degrees Celsius, they found 16.2 million particles per liter when they increased the temperature to 95 C, which is boiling in a little bit more. They've got as much as 55 million. So that increased temperature... Releases the plastic. Release the plastic. So there's just another thing to put on the list of things to worry about when you're having a baby. Room temperature water was about 600,000 parts per liter, so much, much reduced. Incredible. It's like... This goes along with a lot of the stories that we've talked about over the years, where there have been the studies finding that you microwave your food in plastics, then the plastics are getting released into your food. If you have food that's in plastic wrapping, but it gets heated just by the sun or by temperature that those plastics can release into your food. So this is just along the lines of all of that research, this heating plastic, that especially if you're just dealing with an infant whose hormones, microbiome, are going to be affected by these plastics, and that's going to affect their development, potentially you really want to take care. Thanks for scaring us, Justin. You're welcome. Yay. Okay, now that we're all scared, I think we might be able to get rid of some of these fears. Yeah, researchers are trying to figure out how to get rid of fears. Sometimes you have fear that is debilitating, that won't go away. You know, Halloween, seriously, clowns, I don't want to see them. I don't want anything to do with that. But through fear extinction learning, that's like exposure to a fear inducing stimulus over a period of time, you extinguish the fear through a learning procedure over time, getting rid of that fear response, it's great. You can move on with your life and not be stifled by that fear, which would be pretty awesome, could be very awesome. So researchers publishing this week from McLean Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital were published in Nature Communications on neurons in the amygdala, the central amygdala. And we've talked about the amygdala in the brain before. It is the fear focused part of the brain. This is the part that the amygdala fires up, your fear response gets going. This is your fight-or-flight response. This is involved in all sorts of psychiatric responses. And in looking at this, they were trying to figure out what mechanisms are involved in the extinction of fear response. So they were examining how different gene pathways get activated within neurons in the amygdala. They looked at specific neurons called cotocotropin releasing hormones. Cotocotropin are releasing hormones. They start the pathway for releasing your stress hormone, corticosterone, and then the stress fear response gets started. So they're like, okay, how does gene expression work to mitigate this? And by checking out these amygdala neurons, they were able to discover that there is a mechanistic molecule, a regulatory gene called CREB. This CREB is a, it codes for a protein called cyclic AMP response element, binding protein, blah, lots of names. And when CREB gets overexpressed in these cotocotropin releasing neurons, the mice in their experiment got way more afraid. They were super afraid. And so then they were able to reduce the CREB through experimental methods. And when they did that, the mice had a reduced fear response. And so based on their studies, they're thinking that they could focus on CREB as a target for controlling fear and potentially leading to mitigating treatments that can make people live less fearful lives. I create super soldiers. I mean, I think about that. And I think about how like, it would be great to get rid of fear, but of course we need fear. We can't get rid of all fear. That would be bad. That's part of what keeps us alive. But if you have a debilitating fear of flying, and you need to get on an airplane, that would be super helpful. Or needles. People who have needles, agoraphobia, just fear of the outdoors. There are so many fears that can lead to real disruptions in life. And sometimes the cognitive behavioral therapies, the things that therapeutically, behaviorally, we try to lead to extinction, reassignment of the reassociation of the fear memory. So instead of being fearful, it becomes a better memory over time. It's hard and it doesn't always work. And perhaps there are other ways that it can be done. Or maybe it'll help with super soldiers. Right, Justin. Aside from cats, I don't really have any big fears that are considered unreasonable. But I have a lot of things that I would consider cautious nature. I would be afraid of overriding a good, conscious, conscientious, cautiousness about danger in a day-to-day environment. Yeah. Well, one thing about CREB and the cyclic AMP response binding protein, this is not only found in these neurons in the central amygdala, too. So you'd have to make sure that if you were targeting a response, targeting, it's really targeted. CREB is found in neurons all over the place. It's found in cells all over the place. This is a big one. Yeah. So it could have off-target effects that would be negative side effects. Yeah, I don't want an air traffic controller taking this. I wouldn't recommend this to electricians or people who work on communication towers, maybe. Or people who have some sort of high-risk job. I would think that there's a healthy amount of sort of fear of what you're working with that keeps you safe. I think that plays into the extinction piece because if you do something enough, you become less afraid of it over time. So in those cases, if you're working on telephone poles every day, you're probably, even if you started a little bit afraid of heights, you're probably not anymore. Yeah. Yeah, except you still have like story that I'm sure they told you when you were in training camp or whatever it is about the awful things that happen to people who forgot the protocols. If I may, I've worked with dangerous animals and I've worked with people who've worked with dangerous animals for decades and you keep a healthy respect and you know about the fear you're supposed to have, but you cannot help but build complacency to a certain extent if you're around it all day, every day. Because it is exposure. Yes, there is that, but I will say there are different personality types as well. And I did gymnastics as a child and there's a point when you get to balance beam and floor, all of the events really starting to do much more advanced balance beam dismount. Right. When you start doing back hand springs on the balance beam, when you start doing double backs, full twisting tricks on the floor, giants on the high bar, these are all things that you know they're dangerous and you know they're starting, you have to really trust your physical ability and you have to trust your coaches and you know you're going to mess up sometimes. If your gymnastics don't trust your coaches, that's number one. There's higher rates of injury. No, no, I didn't mean to say that. Let me clarify this. We covered this on the show before. The higher rates of injury, of hospital taking injuries in girls gymnastics, then there are in professional hockey. It's more dangerous. But what I was going to say, it is dangerous, but you at a certain point make up you decide whether or not you're able to move forward with the fear of some of those moves. And there's a certain point. There's no desire to overcome your fear and safety to police the coach. That never happened. There was a point where I went, I can't do this anymore. I'm done. I'm afraid and I'm okay with that. My fear wins and it is good. But not just fear, there's also anxiety. What's the difference between fear and anxiety? Anxiety is all in your head. Fear could be more of an external stimulus and you could swell in your own anxiety for hours just sitting on your couch. Fear is certain and anxiety is uncertain. This is when I started pole vaulting in high school. And on the first day of pole vaulting practice, this new coach told this story about pole snapping and somebody getting skewered by the thing. I didn't have a chance to google anything back then, so I didn't get to find out that that happened once in the history of pole vaulting and that it's been done thousands and thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands of times without any that stuff happening. So I overcame the fear and continued to practice, but the anxiety never left. Every time that pole hit and I felt the bend, there was this like, don't break, don't break, don't break. The anxiety is there because it's uncertain. Is it going to happen this time? It's not that you know you're running and when it hits the ground, it is going to break and you're just waiting until the point that you do that. It's certain. No, it's uncertain. So researchers publishing this week in the Journal of Neuroscience, we're studying this difference between fear and anxiety and apparently there is an overarching criteria. It's called the Research Domain Criteria Framework and it currently guides the US National Institute of Mental Health's like how they are trying to discover brain circuitry that underlies different disorders like anxiety and depression and other mental illnesses and so they were looking at this and there's a lot of evidence already that suggests that well based on this framework, fear and anxiety exist in two separate neural circuits, but there's been a lot of evidence recently that suggests that they don't yet it's not yet been exemplified in this framework that the US National Institute of Mental Health uses to guide everything that they do and so in this study they really wanted to nail down whether or not there are different circuits at work and so they shocked people because that's what you do when you need to figure out fear in people. It does feel like they find an excuse. You apply electric shocks. No, this is just this one. This is a vision study. We should shock them. It's the how it affects the vision. Now, let's save it for the one where we're doing fear and anxiety. It's like bankmen from Ghostbusters, you know, just applying the shocks, but what they ended up doing is they had different groups of people where they had a threat of a painful electrical shock and the threat was either signaled by a countdown timer that went three to one and then they got a shock so it was a certainty that they would get this painful shock or there was a random string of numbers like 17, 5, 37, 9 and then the shock would be applied at some time that they didn't know after what number it would come but it would come so that was their uncertain threat for anxiety and while they were doing this, yes, they were looking at their brains and they looked very carefully at regions of the amygdala that we were talking about and also a different area of the brain called the bed nucleus of the striaterminalis, the BNST. And when they were looking at these areas and doing the shocks, they ended up discovering that lo and behold they pretty much respond exactly the same that there is really no underlying neural difference between the two regions that our National Institute, the NIM, US NIM, currently says there is that there is a difference between fear and anxiety and that anxiety is in the BNST and fear is in the amygdala this study says no absolutely there is no difference in how these circuits respond to the certain and the uncertain threats and so they say that the based on their research and based on their work and the work of others that our guidelines for how we deal with mental health need to be changed, how we study it. Okay so this is good but does that the only thing is the differentiation at least in my brain of fear versus an anxiety would be like the dream I have where I'm walking along and I sit down at a bench at a park and then I noticed that right across the path there's a mountain lion who's just lounging there paying attention to me. Oh that's fear! Do I try to fight a mountain lion? No I need to run but that run too fast because it might chase me like what I need try to look bigger than I am whatever that's like an immediate reaction type of like what do I do right now in this instant fight or flight versus an anxiety it feels like I'm running something over and over in my mind on this like loop and it's just gonna keep bugging me and it's not a fight or flight thing it's I can't run away from it and I can't really like knock it down because right now it's just in my head so how is it the same circuitry if it's affecting if I if I'm not experiencing that immediate fight or flight adrenaline rush that I'm getting from fear. I feel like our response is way different right so what I was thinking about related to kind of this study model was there are some people who when they go and get a shot don't want to know when it's coming they want to look away and they want it to just kind of be a surprise when it happens and there are other people who want to count down and like three two one poke right and I am one of the people who likes to know when it's coming makes a huge difference to me I spent a couple hours in the dentist chair yesterday and that was a big bummer but I've had dentists who don't tell you everything that they're doing while they're doing it and I've had dentists who tell you everything that they're doing while they're doing it and I do way better with pain and the whatever fear for scariness of what's going on if I know what's coming and when it's coming and that doesn't mean that I I fear it less it just kind of means I'm ready for it right so like I could see how they could have similar origins but I feel like psychologically there are different results right so it depends on you know I mean this is this is the beginning of the circuit of the of your psychological response fear or anxiety it's not the entire circuit this is just that one part of the brain like these are these are networked to various parts of the brain that lead to however you respond to things and how you feel but I'm thinking of you know fear and anxiety as you know it's the it's the fear of getting up in front of a crowd and talking or the fear of talking in front of a microphone these are just these you're afraid of doing it versus the anxiety of thinking about oh what if I what if I say something off what if I embarrass myself what if this happens what if that happens and you just run through all the possibilities what if this what if that and you can't stop it that's leading you it's leading you up to that fear but then kind of backing off just a bit because it's not certain because it doesn't have a a certainty to it it's very somewhere somewhere in the brain there's a desk that this uh initial trigger comes across like is this something we can do about anything about can we do act can we do anything about this right now no send it back let it loop around again that's anxiety can we do anything about it not right now send it back send it back yeah how about now oh that's a big cat yeah we should run yeah exactly yes yes that's exactly it can we do I think that is it can we do anything about it now immediately yeah interesting yeah exactly oh brain no wonder anxieties loop they can't do anything about it right now yeah stop thinking about it stop thinking about it you stop thinking about it you stop thinking about it you stop thinking about it have we come to the end of the show did we did we make it are we out of the stories well I think we're out of stories we are out of stories we haven't been hit by an asteroid yet halloween is coming happy twist a ween everyone it's been fun all these ghastly and terrifying fear inducing or maybe fixing tails that's good thank you for listening I hope you enjoyed the show thanks for dressing up Blair even though it's hot in san francisco that's all right this is worth it it's the only time I'll get to dress up this year I think so I'll take it take what we can get to leave yes and I'm going to rattle my chains of our I don't know I'm either like I was telling Blair I'm either a like a beastie boy or Chuck D from halloween's of the past that we need you need to enjoy what you got or I'm a ghost I'm a ghost of halloween past halloween of the future telling us to be careful and socially distance and wear masks and wash our hands look like the lead running back from the 49ers right now okay there we go there we go all right shout outs everyone oh actually before shout outs to my wonderful co-hosts who are back thank you for coming back congratulations Justin on safely traversing the the air travel of the world to return oh that part was easy get getting here was easy the being here is still scarier than anything else and Blair congratulations on your recent wedding thank you you got what I didn't even know I was wed he got married yeah we have congratulations thing and it's been enough days now that I feel like I can sigh some relief that I think it was all that really happened it was yay all right we can talk about that more in the after show all right shout outs to fada for helping with social media show notes the youtube chat room thank you identity for for recording the show thank you gourd for manning our main twist chat room keeping that going really appreciate that and thank you to our patreon sponsors and the boroughs welcome fund for their generous support thank you too Chris Wozniak Dave Dunn vegaard chef dad I did it again Hal Snyder Donathan Styles aka Don Stilo John Scioli Guillaume John Lee Alleycoff and Maddie Perin Gaurav Sharma Mike Shoemaker Sarah Forfar Donald Mundes Stephen 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the world so i'm setting up shop got my banner unfurled it says the scientist is in i'm gonna sell my advice show them how to stop the robots with a simple device i'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand and all it'll cost you is a couple of grants coming your way so everybody listen to what i say i use the scientific method and i'll broadcast my opinion all this week in science science science this week in science this week in science this week in science science science i've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what i say may not represent your views but i've done the calculations and i've got a plan if you listen to the science you may just dead understand that would not try to threaten your philosophy because it's this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science science science i've got a laundry list of items i want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness i'm trying to promote more rational thought and i'll try to answer any question you've got how can i ever see the changes i seek when i can only set up shop one hour week in science is coming your way listen to what we say and this week in science this week in science this week in science i'm a dork deep inside justin go he took a break got my got my rave glasses on what i really need are like some really big rimmed like black square glasses to go with this in the chain i think that would be amazing i think i need to get myself a pair it's always good to have multiple pairs of costume glasses oh yeah wow daniel smith yes yes time for star wars jokes hey blare what was the temperature inside a tonton that's really good hey brian what was the temperature inside a tonton luke warm yeah he knew it he knew it he's like i got this of course he knew it of course identity four has 65 bottles of wine in his house going to drink them all then stocking up for next week huh is that for the holidays or is that for the holidays or is that all for just next week yeah 65 bottles of wine in my house 65 bottles of wine i had an election and then i fell down 64 bottles of wine on the wall yes wait michael 79 says blare you changed the mantle i did change the mantle what someone noticed you changed the mantle yeah it's good uh yeah we got um we got some photos back of us which we didn't have in the house at all so none yeah oh my god there we go straight nice photos nope just doesn't come back yet it's nice to have nice photos photos of your life the bowling trophies over you guess you i guess i can move them over so i don't know if i'll ever bowl again you will you will we will bowl again we will bowl there will be strikes galore it'll be fine maybe not this year maybe not next year but just is yelling and you're muted you're muted why are you muted i didn't mute you i just came in but i would agree let's strike except i'm not working right now so i don't know what i'm talking about okay we're not going to talk about the election because predicting is we've seen how that turns out yeah uh so uh my um uh what is it twitter handle is at jackson fly which is right there yeah uh at jackson fly if you want to hang out with me uh on election night uh maybe i don't know if you too want to hang out too but uh where are you going to be uh science island uh i don't know i was just thinking on the twitter like hang out on twitter and yeah like hang out on the twitter uh there's gonna be plenty of people probably chatting about the election as it is but uh maybe we could create a pound sign that we could all yeah that we could all so here's the thing though here's the problem with hanging out on election night is we're probably not going to know much no we will we will we will we will know oops we will know on election night uh absolutely definitively and unquestionably whether or not our democracy is going to fall apart so here's our here's i know we weren't talking about this now but if you're gonna make me feel better that's fine if are you gonna say something you can you can continue this statement if you're going to make me feel better in some way it yeah it won't end on election night but it might still be fun to hang out and uh hold each other's hands uh wipe each other's tears or cheer along whatever your politics are it's fine you can bring it um but maybe we should like create a pound sign uh what do you want to call it a pound sign science island i don't know island pound sign science island and then we can like hang out in that little group and watch the election take place i think that would be fun if you wanted to go to science island you could go to science island too but it doesn't work for me it won't it that would oddly it will not work on my remote setup uh out in the farmlands i don't know why but it has like massive issues out there where twitter works fine yeah but not in the farmland yeah that's right the farmland twitter we're trying but the for some reason that one has like it requires more than my computer will do jg says hashtag we are all going to die no no it's going to be fun hashtag winter is coming winter winter is coming it's already cold i'm so cold why am i so cold i want it to be cold it's not cold enough here for me i'm like i've been wanting it to be cold weather this whole time we've been stuck inside because like what do you want to do when you're stuck inside you want to like bundle up in sweatpants and a cozy sweatshirt and get under a blanket and like sip tea and not feel guilty for beautiful weather and you're like i want to go do it yeah exactly i wasn't i wasn't denmark up until uh about last week and only the last week that i was there was it cold before that it kept it was like mostly spring weather uh this late which i thought was odd for denmark but now being back in california it is still warm out during the day it's still very warm and this is i like i'm old enough to remember being a kid in the same town and all the leaves would be gone and it'd be cold crisp the mist in the air had been would have been here for already a month i know that's weather not climate but gosh darn it it's been like that for a while now yeah speaking of weather versus climate buns glazing from twitch says does global warming get you warmer winters or does it not work that way well it depends it depends in some places you get colder winters yeah so right now right now it is unseasonably warm in northern europe and scandinavia it's unseasonably warm the thing is the the predictions from the model in oklahoma yeah the predictions for the models at least for for europe are that the conveyor belt of the atlantic which normally brings warm it has warm waters move north and also brings warmer air currents keeps that area warmer than you would imagine so uh london is as far north as juno alaska yep yeah uh so so if that if that conveyor belt of the atlantic slows down you could see actually like really cold temperatures take place in areas that aren't not normally that cold uh california seems to just be drying out and heating up it and that sounds like that's just going to continue to be the trend but yeah ice storms were places uh we had you know somebody said uh i can't remember which uh politicians global warming denying politicians says there's not more hurricanes there are more not more tropical storms than there have been in the past and that's a true statement it's not that there's more it's that the ones that there are are more intense and it was funny like we talked about this about how like yeah it was like the earliest uh big tropical storm happened earlier than normal this year at the beginning of that sort of season and then we got wrapped by a bunch of hurricanes bunch of really strong powerful ones and and there are uh i think this year a couple of times there there have been hurricanes lining up in like multiple multiple hurricanes just basically lining up ready to come on in there were two hurricanes in the gulf at the same time yeah so so it's but that's so the things are changing it's sort of like weather and climate it's not that those are more hurricanes it's that they are getting uh going from tiny hurricanes to really big ones with a lot uh a lot less trouble i guess they have the right conditions to get bigger and bigger each time so yeah yeah yeah waters being redistributed around the world so there's more rain in some places less rain and others um the the central plains are there's news popping up that the central plains are starting to show signs of dust bowl type behavior again uh but there is you know which that's that's drying out right that means that water is moving to other places there's like you said greater hurricanes there are random ice storms places where there aren't usually that things are shifting around definitely moving but what global warming means is that the entire global temperature average is increasing it just means there's a lot of change that's happening as that increase happens and and who whoops we're doing there okay microphone throw the computer around uh well we will continue to have low information people claiming that this is not taking place let's keep in mind they're low information people they're not looking at any of the information if you don't look at the information that's out there that's uh i'm not even gonna bother with the whole credibility issue of science whether science is really a thing or it's just things that people make up that's that's the thing that only seems plausible if you're a almost zero information person yeah if you don't look at any information it's easy to say it might not exist i've never seen any data that suggests global warming is the thing why i don't read i don't i don't research i don't listen i don't pay attention to information so i can disregard it because i don't i've never seen any information that says this is happening doesn't mean the information isn't there that we we live in a world where we have this much access to good information you know i i think we need to start reorganizing our education systems to focus much more heavily on sourcing of information and i mean some of that is happening some of that happening i also think that all of these social media platforms have to realize that they have taken over the field of journalism they are that fourth estate now and they can't just be chat room level allowing people just i mean open public forum yes but i think i think we need to dedicate each one should have this sort of duty of dedicating a fact-checking mechanism to well yeah content that they put out so that's the thing is social media they have their algorithms but they don't actually put out content it's people and news organizations who put the content and share it on the social media platforms so correct so what the social media platforms do is they foster that public public square discussion around these stories the trouble is that the algorithms and the there's there's a lack of fact-checking and the way the algorithms have worked is have been able their are biased groups with agendas who have been able to do an end run end run around reason to get misinformation and propaganda out into the public square at much higher quantities so it's hard for individuals to be able to fight back exactly push those to push those arguments back so i would take i would take the model of i'm gonna mess up the country i think it's estonia i think it's estonia that they're most uh the most popular public right you were talking about that the most popular television show is one where they spend an hour a week debunking uh russian disinformation programs locally and abroad yeah so what i'm talking about is uh is to be a simple thing i guess maybe but a a top trending bogus claims like the little thing you see like these are trending issues here's the top trending disinformation right so you can you can see like here's the thing you're saying here's why it's not true but you you can't do it for everything and i don't expect that but you can have like a top 10 hit list of here's the top 10 trading trending bogus claims that we're seeing across our platform whether it's twitter or facebook or whatever it is because i i think that there is a i don't want there to be moderating i don't want people to not be able to to have free speech however there is an increasing element of screening fire in a crowded theater which is not protected speech which is you know we don't protect it's endangering people yeah we don't protect russian disinformation programs from uh infiltrating this country we don't do a great job of stopping them right now but we don't protect them as free speech right having having a algorithm that says hey this is trending a lot and we fact checked it and here's why it's wrong uh i think would be very healthy for our society yeah it would be great people do disregard sources that disagree with them that's fine but uh have have the other information available to them because with the low information with the way those algorithms work too is you end up in a feedback cycle of only hearing so if you've gotten one of these algorithms that send you down the rabbit hole all you're seeing are confirming uh statements around the same disinformation and you're not getting outside of that box so is that really then a public forum no that that becomes a captive audience situation that becomes a self-reinforcing self-reinforcing but i see it as is also as you push that person into a town with one newspaper that's owned by the you know company stores owned by the the lumber company the mining industry that owns that town basically runs that town whatever it is actually happening in this in in the U.S. as well but yeah that actually but i mean it uh it it deprives people the algorithms that that suggest in uh you to only see this content also deprives you of other content yeah and so people are staking out territories of human beings on social media with disinformation programs and pulling them into uh a one track isolated viewpoint so i think the social media has to has a ethical obligation to society to also take over that thing that they have largely helped destroy because it's you know the information age and everything journalism uh and apply some of those ethics to their system and if you think and if you think from the perspective of um okay so there's a the the percentage of the population that are already decided and totally uh invested in their point of view is smaller than the percentage of the population that is undecided or that does not you know is still kind of like i don't know i don't really have an opinion right so from that perspective if the algorithms then every time a piece of misinformation or propaganda or whatever um every time something of that sort gets in front of somebody on say their twitter feed or their facebook whatever social media that that the algorithm then in recognizing certain phrasing certain words specifically follows posts like that with alternative posts and makes it makes a concerted effort to instead of make the rabbit hole go toward more you know more fringe viewpoints flat earth um you know anti-vax whatever instead of instead of tunneling down and into that smaller smaller smaller niche where they can get reprogrammed and have their minds made up by seeing only a certain kind of content expose them to wider and different arguments like actually sift through the content to be able to add a wider wider viewpoint and perspective yeah be the world be the world media provider really and garb i yeah if you believe in a conspiracy theory it's hard to uh get it debunked because you've already made these connections when i'm more talking about then is perhaps limit maybe pulling a few people out early hey this looks interesting here's all the reasons why this is a trending i thing on the whatever media platform here's why it's not true here's a satellite view of the earth here's science here's whatever you need to know that the earth isn't flat and then maybe you know they don't fall down the hole far enough to get the brainwashing i like the the nicknames that people in the twist chat are coming up with for uh for facecracker that's good that's good there's good ones in there the face brain but it's not my brain it's not it doesn't know me at all where did blair go she just kind of disappeared and didn't say goodbye what happened did she text and say where'd she go ah there she is i see you now she's not listening i see you oh but anyway okay science let's let blair back hello hello so tell us about your your your magical marriage experience um well is there anything that you're happy to share with the audience yeah i have a few pictures some of these were on social media but um not all of them out to the street yeah how cute you are so um yeah so that was it was a very unusual morning of a wedding because we just like got ready in our house and like drove to the venue together it was very funny um so from from this shot it looks a little bit like you you jump from the back of the limo to the front seat and are hanging out with the driver oh sure i was gonna get married and then i met this guy he's way better yeah um yeah and then pretty flowers they mask your they match your mask yeah we made a bouquet uh we my mom and i made it and actually brian was very helpful three of us did it um yeah and i have my satin mask great um yeah so that's so cute yeah um so no it was it was very it was very pretty it was um we what we were in sutra park so we we got done with the venue oh that's the date Romeo Romeo we are for our time i'm right down here you have a ladder throw down your hair oh yeah fetching a vash fetching a vash and he's like come down i did not jump get the ladder um yeah and then did you tell him did you tell him that his did you tell brian when you're up on top of the the wall at sutra that his mother smelled of elderberries yeah no the photographers thought we were nuts enough for me to be running up the steps like wait wait right there like ran up the steps um and then he was he was like fine do whatever you want it's just not going to go on my website and then he started like taking pictures and readjusting me and stuff he was like actually this might end up on my website yeah that's awesome yeah um yeah and so we yeah we just had a few people there uh it was like you just kind of grabbed the spot and then we went to a local like beer garden sort of thing afterwards with a few people so and yeah we all had our masks on the whole time except for that except for beer gardening yeah and except for you know vows and a kiss the kiss of course but yeah you have the wing the wing the wing now which i don't oh there we go there you go people are talking about uh the handmaid's tail in the in the youtube chat jg says congrats on your marriage if it was voluntary oh my god it was voluntary um have you know it's not a black dress it is a black jumpsuit there we go um makes for climbing castles much more easily yeah absolutely well and i asked all my um bridesmaids to wear jumpsuits as well even though we didn't like really take any photos together or anything it was still it was fun but um yeah unfortunately these are like all the photos i have because um that we had a professional photographer there but we obviously don't have those photos yet and uh i didn't have my phone on me really really the whole time so this is pretty much all we have right now but hopefully we'll get some good photos later and then we're still supposed to have like a legit wedding next year hopefully whenever hopefully when yeah when when things open back up again and you can have groups of people yeah to celebrate yes yeah well i mean they told us they were like oh you could still have the wedding but you have to reduce the guest list by like more than half um you have to only have 15 people at the ceremony no dance floor no happy hour the buffet will be like free like wrapped plates just like okay no wait yeah that's right we can have a year celebration let's have a first anniversary fingers crossed next year jeez yeah but um no i'm really happy we did it because um next year is still like a pretty big question mark so it's not like we've waited around for something that may or may not happen at a specific time so like we we did the thing that's moving forward and we can kind of move on with our lives and hopefully we can have our big party next year but yeah we're not like sitting waiting around well congratulations that's so wonderful yeah yeah a little bit of happiness yeah it was it was a lovely day everything went perfectly um like i said i mean to my knowledge knocking on all the wood it's been almost two weeks now nobody got sick good like that was my number one concern was like i'm dragging my parents out of the house like i hope it's okay yeah it sounds like it sounds like you did everything as safe as possible yeah with a pod yeah and masks well done well done doing it right yeah it's gonna get i mean at least that's one of the good things about the the late summer the warm fall in the bay area you're able to have nice outdoor gatherings and you know it's the indoor aspect of winter is gonna be upon us Thanksgiving is going to be a lot harder Christmas is going to be even harder to be able to put all this stuff together and bring people together i mean in California and we're kind of lucky because you could potentially just like bundle up really well and as long as it's not pouring rain you could still potentially do things outside yeah but yeah if you're in Michigan it's different so it's i do feel for the parts of the country that get hit really hard in the winter it's going to be a lot more difficult to be creative and may and stay safe without marginalizing the importance of being around the important people in the time of year that is designed to make you sad like do you know like it's pretty tough to say you can't see your family or your friends at a time when you always have and a time that also is hormonally making you sad because it's yeah the time that you're supposed to cuddle up and see family and higgins right iterate something that i've mentioned a couple times i think previously this is really stupid what we're doing yes yeah we do a hard shutdown heart oh did i this is really stupid i think i said that what we should do is a hard shutdown for six weeks hard shutdown no everybody's stuck up before thanksgiving have a feast at home whatever six weeks that how how is this number too hard for all of the globe to understand everything that you're doing is just putting off it's like the whole planet is procrastinating from taking any action six weeks quarantine everyone then we're done yeah understand how easy that is how simple of a solution we we don't have to invent anything we just need to stop doing everything yeah six weeks pretty much there's so there was a network analysis study there people you know modeling how this spreads and transmission and all that in science last week that's really interesting what they pretty much have put together is that the majority of transmission happens within households which makes sense because if you're in a household you are with those people all the time sharing space and so if like one person goes out into the world and brings it back into the house that one person is going to spread it to probably more people in their household than who don't know they have it and have gone and interacted with their individual people but that's the thing so the likelihood of transmission what they're saying is households are the biggest the likelihood of transmission is highest in households because that's where all the air is and people are spending all their time together and then the likelihood of transmission decreases as you go out into the networks but so you have these network effects where the highest transmission occurs in the super spreader events in public spaces places where people cohabitate like nursing homes and prisons but the the likelihood of transmission it still happens a lot because there are a lot more people out in the world out in the general public than in like one house but the likelihood of any one individual person is lower out in the in the world but they have this whole this whole map of how the transmission chains take place and the bottom line is that if there are still significant that the bottom line is that COVID-19 is going to continue in the human population similar to the flu as long as there are pockets of population around the world that have the potential to spread to travel to other areas in the world that keep the virus going so my pockets do you mean like 80 000 people a day getting it pockets or are you talking about probably smaller even yeah much smaller so like New Zealand so New Zealand is not where people are people are not leaving New Zealand and bringing COVID to the rest of the world that's not happening anymore because of the way they handled it san francisco has one of the lowest transmission rates the lowest infection rates in the entire united states because of the way the bay area has handled this whole pandemic the bay area is doing amazingly it's hard but they have they've done an amazing job so okay so i'm a little confused but are you saying that you think that people should all stay away from home for six weeks yeah we should all stay away from home who live on the streets scatter okay i want i want to go back to that main thing though that is we get all the camping for six weeks we can stop this go in the wild we can stop the entire thing six weeks now we could have stopped in february because it's taken six weeks off and been done by mid march april maybe we could have done this in march done been april maybe the problem is it's because it was it was done piecemeal this was not and or not at all like or not at all or someplace the fact that some places chose not to others did the fact that some places locked down others didn't of course it kept spreading once it was around the world it's going to keep going around the world unless people shut it down so it has to be like you're right justin it has to be a concerted global shutdown unless of course you have you have an area that has zero infection rate what's what no you know you got nothing zero and they they've started they even need to join in it has to be a global thing and then zero to low up to the disinformation people uh what do we do about them i don't know yeah see that's the thing if people are going to refuse to do the things that help keep society healthy that would help to put this pandemic in its place um then yeah we we it's gonna be a long time because people don't want to play so i feel like that's why you only want to play you tie a you tie a check to it right you say like there has to be here's five grand no there's six weeks or something i don't know i don't think that necessarily has to be in a financial incentive to it actually i think you could pull this off by getting the big banks and the insurance companies that back big banks to say hey we're going to suspend all recovery of payment from loans and mortgages and everything else for the six weeks pause it it starts up as if it was the next day at the end of the six weeks the banks aren't going to be in trouble for whatever leverage they have therefore the people who they're loaning money to aren't in trouble for any leverage that they have all the way down to rest just press a global but who pays for food though right i mean and there's there's are you making are you making a paycheck during that time for six weeks no so so yes uh one of there's a lot of people out there who don't have six weeks worth of grocery money saved and what about and what about food and what about no what about food that's growing that needs to be harvested what about uh farmers need to work there's there's always an essential i know but the essential is a lot less of the population than we have called the essential it's like the whole grocery store thing if we had enough time yeah we have two weeks look far look okay if you don't have you're talking about can you afford groceries for those six weeks to buy them in advance look if you're not paying rent for the next six weeks you can most people are gonna that's half or more of their income so that that's going to be fine for most people in california stock it's like 65 to 65 percent of their income goes to rent if they're if there are a mortgage if they're off the hook for that for six weeks they can afford food if they didn't have money to begin with now you're talking about social safety net for food programs that also has to happen that's what they did but if you're making no money for six weeks okay so what they did this is what i'm saying even if you're not paying for your rent what where they didn't shine it in wuhan the way they shut it down was everybody had to be by by forcing a rest or being actually having people there's houses that they nailed boards across the front door to keep people in but they brought everybody food that was their only essential worker was the people bringing food to all the people yeah so they were brought food but you have to yeah you have to have rent you have to have rent suspended you have to have more mortgages suspended you have to have all like cost of doing that for six weeks which i've been talking about for a long time if we just had done it at any six week interval going back it's just not going to happen yes yes we'd be done it'd be over we can't even get a second coronavirus relief check pass so so it's not happening you can't even send a little donut to people who are in trouble right now so how are you gonna make the the widespread changes needed it's actually because it's not hard it's really not hard i think it's hard it's not saying it's not hard to to recognize that people need stimulus right now either that's not hard all right half of every city's budget goes to police so they can be the essential workers that bring food everywhere whatever like it's like yeah it's not going to be an impossible task i mean do a comparative of the revenue the earnings lost the unemployed the prolonged the torture is slow stupid way that we've been attempting to tackle things for almost how is it going to be a year and we're still doing this when six weeks can solve it that's insane that's just stupid it's just stupid i don't know i don't i don't think that you keep beating on it like we can do something about it yeah we agree with you is the thing we agree with you we've agreed with you many times but why why is it that why is it that i mean if it's such an easy thing how come it's so i mean add it to the list it's such an easy thing yeah i mean i think it's an easy thing conceptually i think it's when it comes down yeah something like that when it comes to actually getting seven and a half billion people i'm sure i'm i said uh justin the world is a lot more complex this ain't a simulation video game yeah i don't know i think the actual simulation of economy turns out to be absolute uh nonsense we have a complete worker shutdown basically millions and millions of people less people working than from higher unemployment than ever before uh like nobody's seen unemployment rates and yet the stock market hit its highest peak ever like tell me economy has anything to do with how they teach economy has nothing to do with how they teach economy it's just it's nothing to do with it money's made up it doesn't actually uh it's just it's just an invent in a social contract and when society breaks down the contract doesn't even make sense you have the highest stock market ever when industry is its lowest when workers are at the highest unemployment when everything is a mess and the stock market is the highest it's ever been it's well it's because nonsense wealth doesn't trickle down no of course it's not linked to the economy the stock market is probably pretty indicative of the fact that we have several billionaires in the world but it does not impact it's not it's not indicative of the of the general populace hey we're not cutting paychecks anymore what are we gonna do i don't know it's uh but okay so can i tell you something this is also this is i don't know if you should i should probably not talk about this can we talk about hang on let me just say this one last thing that i shouldn't talk about you know what's gonna happen there's a lot of foreclosure taking place you know our wall street is putting its money we've talked about putting its money in companies that buy those those foreclosures and then are gonna rent them back to people they're buying all the houses it's bad they're buying all the houses and you're going we're gonna have a renter society for forever now yeah not really gonna be fun anyway i'm done ranting i'm sorry i took up a lot of ranting air space there is honestly justin there is there is a lot to rant about these days so yeah next week is going to be interesting for sure but that's episode 798 next week that means we're mighty close and then let's see if i have a calendar here how how did how did i get off on this i thought 800 was going to be different place maybe i i miscounted somewhere along the way 798 you said is next week yeah 798 is next week and then 99 and 800 will be november 18th guava has a correction 797 do you mean let me see what does it say at the top of this run sheet let me go up here and check i don't think it says 797 yep 94 25 96 97 i don't think i missed 10 anywhere 10 episodes anywhere okay yeah we're at 797 798 799 oh it'll be three weeks will be that 800th episode oh erica saying youtube says it's 796 oh that would have been me mistyping things then thank you thank you everyone you can change that right because you know it's not a computer that writes these things in youtube it's my fingers hmm wibbly wobbly timey wimey brainy messy upy things yes wait how do numbers work yeah oh yes dried fake news on youtube again photo this is episode 797 that we did this evening which means next week is yeah so we're hitting 800 in three weeks in november um i feel like we should have some kind of a celebration i'm also very tired planning things is hard for me these days we should have just you know what we should do we should just get together uh and hang out and talk about all the good times yeah you want to get together we can have some beers play some pool talk about old times new stuff uh what's been going on we can do some science experiments yeah could sequence some dna there we go could be fun uh what can we do for 800 800 huh should we ask for people to send in something like video or like message news that we could play tell us what this weekend science means to you yeah how like little how how on twitter or yeah maybe twitter we could do like a hashtag and have people tweet to the hashtag videos or messages or we can make one of those pound signs pound 800 twists all right greenpaw oh this one 800 twis i'm never gonna tell if it's plastic or bio metal what it's plastic twist blooper compilation that's just a twist compilation that's oh i need yeah if i were to do some kind of um if we were to do some kind of blooper compilation yeah i should get kai to go through and listen ah no i want to hide that oh why didn't that work it's very funny um yeah people could share their favorite memory from twist and then we could if we had enough time we could try to find the the um the actual recording that they're referring to look at this i can show that don't think fun look like what i just learned we can do that's very cool that's groovy barbecue science oh there's carol in good morning and good science that's so cool you know that was possible look at me learning things essential lives worker so so uh yeah blare married an essential worker i was one briefly mm-hmm was one for a couple a couple eight weeks or so he just left in his scrubs it's pretty wild actually it's really nice when things are in lockdown and you're an essential worker uh that's the best way to be working right now is when everybody else isn't freeways are open there's no traffic there's no people to run into and interact with on the streets it's it is great job security i was like well no matter what you'll still have a job yep um so that's cool um it was pretty wild i did it before just said sounds like bedtime is drawing near because i yon oh the yon again the signs they know the signs mm-hmm but twist special stories about things we knew for sure that were proven wrong by new science oh look zdbb gtx441900 says want to become famous with a name like that how how could you not i know i'm not over on twitch to ban hammer that person oh yeah oh well oh um physics police in the youtube chat room wants to know where i went on my honeymoon so i did um we did two nights at a resort in napa which was much cheaper than normal because most of their amenities were closed from covid yeah so we just went and like ordered room service and um went to the pool which was nice because there was no one there so we got to go swimming which was very fun then like went to their outdoor restaurant which was basically empty and then hung out in the hotel room it was great and then we did um four nights in a cabin in uh amongst redwoods up in the snow macoste so that's beautiful yeah and they had like a hot tub on the deck and they had a wood burning stove and um yeah it was romantic it was romantic and it was like very calming and it was it was really good it was exactly what we did where else started you started the yon's lair um i didn't put a mask on for five days which was wild that's amazing it was insane like the world felt normal yeah i do that i go for days without putting on a mask but it's because i haven't left my house right see i have Sadie so i have to i put a mask on to take her out which i didn't do at the beginning of the pandemic i think we talked about that last time a couple weeks ago but like because i was just like oh i'm just running outside to the lapattia grass and running back but there's a high likelihood that you'll like run to someone on the stairs or have to walk down a pathway that someone else is walking that so i mask up now every time i go out so i don't usually go more than a few hours without putting a mask on yeah oh it was not on fire yeah it was the whole the whole time leading up to it i was like will both locations still exist when our honeymoon starts will we be able to breathe the air let's see what happens and yeah it's uh the the fires in napa and Sonoma county um became contained like a few days before we left like great perfect timing let's go yeah that's wonderful yeah i'm so glad to hear a little bit of a little bit of happiness yeah so good i want to have a nice little vacation that would be nice yeah i should rent a house on the coast just for a week yeah kai can take care of himself in the house your march will go yes oh he's almost old enough to stay home alone yeah you have another family in your pod right yeah yeah i think it's 12 just leave him with them just you guys deserve some uh some escape just the two of you jalex and the uh chat room youtube left a comment what is more contagious covert or yawning and reading the word yawning made me yawn i think i think if you catch covid from reading the word covid it would uh be about equivalent with yawning yawning definitely wins identity four calls it sleep rona oh boy he said he's yawning i caught your sleep rona well also yawning is related to how much you empathize with the person and covid definitely is not true yeah not related at all all right everyone's yawning it is time for us to head toward toward bed 800 episodes soon enough y'all are we dressed enough are we going to dress fancy don't we always in my denigret was the last fancy dress was that that was 500 that was 500 so i mean stop yawning stop writing yawning in the chat room people it's making me yawning control oh i mean let's see can we can we do this for two more years and do thousand episodes and that's four more years right wait no is it oh yeah four 52 weeks in a year oh you're right you better map four more years four more years four more years stop stop stop everybody stop right oh no maybe we'll get fancy for episode 800 we might need to we might need a reason to celebrate dress up a little bit pop celebration little celebration science yes maybe we can uh yeah we can bring in some a guest or something yeah maybe like half a normal show and half fun stuff yeah would love i don't know i always find this show so interesting four more years of science i find this shows just she's gonna be a little girl as fun as it is i don't even know how you could make this more fun like i really don't oh i think about like twist mcgannon type stuff is all okay mcgannon was was so just drinking live on the air yeah okay no or like we could play games would be fun like like so i did a whole virtual newlywed game with brian or um uh uh my uh made of honor and his best man like work together to come up with questions and stuff and then we had to like write it down and reveal it and see if we matched it's all like that something like that would be pretty fun no no no what's the um is there could we do some kind of like uh uh i i feel weird not doing a podcast episode because we do have like the podcast you know it's like the show right we didn't do yeah got to do the show but i wonder if we could do you know the tabletop um like uh i forget what it's called where you try and raise money for uh for good causes and you play by by playing a game and we could play we could and you you can pick like any game and we could play like a science game or something uh drinking game yes i understand it is 4am uh now that we start your time but yes you can because it's we're gonna be for cause of some sort we haven't figured out yes you can drink along with that uh jg says go to bed justin you were all over the place yes i have been up since three o'clock in the morning because i'm still like in some mid-atlantic time zone somewhere between i was in carol's time zone which is now which started at 4am we've been going so it's like seven in the morning and i didn't sleep the night before kind of a scenario right now so i am absolutely jet lag loopy uh absolutely that's great advice jg i should go to bed yeah maybe we could do some kind of combo where we have yeah like a part of the the show show we have a celebrate but then we have a 800 celebration that would be like the after show and you'd have to go to youtube to watch it and you have to or facebook or twitch but you have to go to the live stream to watch you have to go to the stream where that's aired to watch it it won't go out necessarily over the podcast podcast but we could do things like play games and um yeah that could be fun twist game night that could be fun i remember the last time we had a game night ever twist blur yeah i do we got fired we're older and wiser now you got fired from a station for having a twist game night i wasn't even there i know you weren't even aware how much fun we had destroying a relationship with a broadcast channel i had no idea i came i'm like what happened well what happened everything was going fine until it turned out nobody was really in charge of the studio right and i realized that we were invited to an event and assumed someone was having some oversight and apparently they thought we were in charge yeah if we weren't but uh no not at all hey jenny kate i don't know if we're gonna play pandemic it was a great story girl it was totally up can we tell the story is it possible what was did you play cards against cards against humanity yes so we're playing a backstage we're playing a backstage and then we decided because it was like 11 o'clock at night so we're thinking safe harbor which is a thing where if after a certain late hour you know you can put some obscenities in the radio and broadcast some little off color because it's in the safe harbor late late night kids should already be in bed so it turns out we were at a tech oriented channel that broadcast streaming everywhere in the world right but so if i may provide a little bit more context also it was for a particular show on the network where people played games and they were it was it was just a stream of people playing games and usually it was video game nintendo or mario or something so they did video games but then they did this board game fridays or something like that and they invited us to attend the board game friday situation and they told us to bring whatever board and card games we wanted playing something backstage who brought cards against humanity that's a puzzle piece i never put together i brought it but i'm not the one who said that we should do that that was you okay so so so here's how that if you're not familiar with the game it can get exceedingly crude and vulgar with the language so while we're in safe harbor in california it turns out that in nine hours later in cheerio london town where the young kids are who are tuning into their favorite tech show on a monday or sunday morning what they got was justin blare and a bunch of other people who'd been drinking whiskey and playing this vulgar game falling out of our chairs laughing at the crudest language possible i love both of you both of you i really thought someone was in charge i'll take uh some level of responsibility and absolutely recognizing that they thought we were in charge i had no i we were a guest on their program i assumed the person who hosted and produced that show was was telling us what was okay and was not okay yeah but we would think they would take responsibility as producer yes yes yeah but we were actually hosts of another show who at the end of their show was left with the crew whose job it was to set up and do stuff for the show people who apparently we were there were no producers present kiki wasn't present the other producers the other directors of the station nobody else there were engineers present which i did think you know you would think that you know there would be something about that where somebody would be like oh you're not allowed to square or something like that right right we got nothing we got it was just like yeah go for it wait wait wait player what do you mean we got nothing you knew if you knew better you knew better if you didn't know better i didn't know this whole situation was about i was invited to do a thing and i did the thing i will admit i will admit to being severely might you invited to play cards against humanity on the internet for all to see i mean yes yes so anyway yeah uh we got we got uh we got uh separated that relationship after some people got some nasty emails i wrote i wrote a very uh strong email in defense of all of the crew who uh who didn't know what was coming and took full responsibility for it which usually gets me out of trouble but this time it didn't um so don't do that every time i won't do that i won't make that mistake again taking responsibility for sucks it's not it's not worth it but i didn't really feel bad because it never occurred to me that this was coming on at seven eight o'clock in the morning or in and that my my character had tuned into your tech friendly show to find the most vulgar i i just honestly destroy i didn't i i was operating under some some weird assumption that what we were doing was not different from what they normally do right okay i knew we were off the rails i i absolutely knew it and i had to believe that they were filming it i didn't believe i was like i can't believe we're getting away with this this is really awesome i was like they're probably gonna give us a medal and bring us back every week to do this because this was so amazingly fun naive Blair had been on twist for less than a year i think at that point but again i will keep saying i didn't realize i didn't realize how streaming globally didn't yeah it wasn't yeah looking back on it it does seem like a duh but this was yeah it was in like 2013 or something it was like it was yeah yeah it was yeah it was very early in the streaming world it did yeah you're right it didn't really occur it didn't occur to me that this was no something somebody could be watching live at six seven o'clock in the morning it just felt like we were doing late night radio which is where we had just come from which is a radio station you get into the late night hours that's when you play the uncensored version of all the albums yep because it's safe harbor and you're loud and it's fine but i applied i played safe harbor to a thing that runs 24 seven at every hour somewhere globally everywhere that's not how that works apparently oh and you and the internet is forever however i do believe it was up uh it was up uh on justin tv when that existed um then i lost uh i lost yeah it was a i started just i lost the link but i don't think it i think it might have just gotten scrubbed because that tech show had a little bit of tech pull and might have gone and we're gonna remove that file if you don't mind and they're like that's cool it's from that guy who we think is cool so we'll just do it but if anybody can find it i would love to watch it again i would not i think i'd be mortified no i don't think you would because i think it was the way i remember it was very entertaining but you were also under an influence or two i've been thinking a little bit but i was i do remember falling out of my chair i do remember that one or two of your card put together because you were killing it you were winning i'm very good at that game you were very good at that game and there was a couple that i remember i just couldn't talk i couldn't talk for a for a while because they killed it so hard and it was a nice table it wasn't just me and blaire there was like six eight of us i think they're like eight of us we brought like the whole thing because i'm so horrible i don't like to commit crime by myself so i made like all the crew come join us like no no no get out from behind the camera you done setting up lights yeah you're part of the show too you get in the shot you get in the shot everybody get in here and they're like oh we get to be in front of the camera this is fun and then almost everybody thought you were in charge oh well you can act like i'm a jerk but yeah uh i made it so that just we got fired uh not anybody else carol an oh my god so worldwide web was just a concept for you so i think also part of it was that like podcasts had like really started to take off at this point and so i had been listening to all these comedy podcasts that are explicit and like those are available at any time to anyone they're just labeled as explicit so like i think there was also a part of me that just was kind of like this is how they operate great okay i was coming at it with yeah and so we had podcasts which are pre-recorded which you put out or you don't find and you had like late night safe harbor where it's okay it's just people are up this late yeah live streaming globally was not a thing i hadn't really been identity for says in your defense that network was just making it all up as it went along and it also it wasn't 2013 it was earlier than that it was like 2010 you think yeah 2010 2011 absolutely 2013 i was uh full time uh in davis uh it was nowhere near that place uh for years it would have been after blair started with the show so i started and it was yeah and that's 2012 because it's after blair started what blair started after i had kai yeah like how did kai months after yeah how is kai is he eight he's nine he was born he was born in 2011 yeah and so i started january 2012 mm-hmm and last in the year okay hmm yeah and then um klarab's new life bucket life bucket list item is getting wasted and saying expletives on a global radio show i mean i guess that is a good way to look at it is like enough time has passed that i don't feel as terrible anymore i still feel bad but i'm like bucket list now it is kind of a fun anecdote that's like a it's kind of cool thing like we were we were on live on the live internet doing what's what's fun is that here on art my own show i'm like oh i would never say in here that's what's also terrible about it like i would never do that here but yeah that uh that dean carol smith or whatever was uh that the letter that got sent to the station that i saw the one i saw at least oh god i didn't see any of the explicitly detailed things that they had heard that their eight-year-old had heard no yes and so right now i mean that was a really long time ago i think that eight-year-olds probably killing it in comedy clubs because they learned all the good comedy words really early i was like oh vulgar place i am totally doing that so yeah i'm thinking i think it was 2012 i think i was still an intern i think i was brand new yeah i think it was before i left for israel i think it was like that summer yep oh yeah it was before definitely yes yeah so i wasn't even a co-host yes you're still an intern that's right even you couldn't say i became somehow by default as people left the building i became in charge and like do you want to do it i'm like yeah and then everybody went to work i was like oh that's what well i don't feel nearly as bad than if i was an intern i know you're just an intern like everybody else left and i think but you know blair now i can just say just i blame it on the intern and i don't even think i even think the show that we were following was like a temp show it wasn't like a permanent fixture show yeah yeah i think it was yeah by default i somehow became the person in charge by just by other people leaving the building yeah no wonder i never heard about these letters if i was the intern oh because i never heard about this is new information for me no it all got it all got sent to me because i had to explain or they didn't have to explain they were nice enough to explain like hey so here's what we here's why we're doing some image rebuilding uh the person who's in charge has put their blood sweat and tears in many years into this effort of this station it's a little upset with your behavior and i couldn't help but empathize like yeah that's terrible yeah i'll take full responsibility what do you mean i'm getting consequences i took responsibility that's usually how it happens i'm really bad at uh not taking responsibility for things it's it's one of those character defaults like i think i would i think i would do a lot better uh by not taking as much responsibility but i'm like yeah i can actually see why why that's my fault and it probably was some bad decision making on my part no doubt i need to i'm actually looking back through old emails oh geez like will i will i find it oh my god i've never looked i have never looked i don't know if i was this email though because i've been really a long time ago i don't know yeah i was a long time ago i don't i don't even know what i would look for and i'm not to give out where this was but i uh when i tried to search my uh email i got a whole bunch of stuff from twitter a bunch of twitter notifications for some reason so many anyway jg wants to know why are you letting this go on this is exactly how it happened it just started and it kept going and it's gonna stop yeah earlier said trust me just cut it here this isn't going to end well no it's not oh well what do you think you have it no no anyway no i don't have anything that mistakes were made but we became our own entity which is cool we already were no no no we were we were but we still became more i guess independent we were already independent we were just like being kindly freely hosted we weren't getting paid but we were just being allowed to participate in a larger operation with a lot more visibility and and to this day to this day still amazed by the studio that that it was in the operation fantastic operation fantastic people i got to do one show live from that studio in person with you that was very fun we had so much fun like that it was really fun was that and we also had some fun episodes where we were disembodied heads on screens and then like we had people that were coming behind the screens and doing hand gestures yeah so it's like the head on the screen and then oh my gosh we had so there was so much fun and creativity taking place it's actually uh it's probably a bad good thing that we uh broke with them but i think we could have had so much fun and done so many more creative things if it just wasn't for the fact that british people are such uptight people about vulgarity and children like get over it what's happening here can you making a green screen she is wonder why she's gonna become a floating head i'm like oh maybe it was this old me if i could if i if i had if i had my uh my my green screen i could i could make that wait maybe i can hold on oh no i think i have to go out to fix it oh wait no so stream yard do like green screen stuff oh they do this is where i hang out in the bricks do do do do do do do do do do do do do that work yeah yes yay floating head do do do do do floating head too much fun too much fun episode 800 that's right i could pull out the chain that's a really good green screen wow it works very well dream yard has good green screen so yeah every all the emails that i have from twit are from jammer b and they're all in 2010 but december of 2010 and then they stop and late this i wonder if it was around was it around christmas oh it might have been yeah it might have been around christmas no it can't have been because i was gone 2010 no i wasn't i didn't exist yet in 2010 so how could we have been out there before you existed yet to be seen wait no how how could wait hang on a second did you were there before it started yeah oh interesting okay yeah no i think i think it was like summer 2012 i would like to invite you all to my new home i have a grand piano yes in my new home with the fireplace and my large couch tinkle the iris ivory keys episode 800 what games are we gonna play hmm in stream i've got an idea world no i've got an idea i actually i don't know if i've played that game since then it's left such a nasty taste in my mouth tarnished yeah baby want to know no that's a no no no no um we'll find a physics game or we'll find i have a yeah what science games can we play we'll figure something out we'll play some games we'll have some fun um but that's not next week next week hopefully we will be celebrating all right everyone i think it's time to call it for the night if you have ideas for episode 800 please let me know um in the meantime yeah i'd love to have messages from people little video messages or audio messages that we can play you can send them on twitter what do you think hashtag twist 800 does that sound good or 800 twist twist 800 twist 800 twist 800 that was a good it was a good story physics police says tinkle the ivory sounds like a guards against humanity answer oh no it does oh dear everyone yeah okay so if you twitter or yeah you can socially share your comments on 800 episodes and use the hashtag twist 800 we will share information about it using the hashtag twist 800 um but if you want to share messages that you don't want to share socially but you would like us to play on the show then please send them in an email or a private message i guess however but yes i think that works 800 episodes we always need to celebrate these this is another two years milestones another two years seriously 20 years and 800 well well over 800 episodes 800 podcast episodes that's good thank you everyone um thunder beaver you imagined that yes this is what my house looks like and yes of course i have a butler yes yes well my butler cleans the house and brings me coffee in the morning breakfast what what time zone are you in that it's daytime it is always sunny in this time zone is that philadelphia that you know the sunny side of the moon that was not a scientific comment you know that right good night blare say good night good night justin oh somebody wrote yawn in the chat room it's time so long farewell all have a wonderful week everyone take care of yourselves be healthy have a happy halloween yeah happy halloween enjoy the holiday and if you're in the united states practice some self care next week before the show maybe on tuesday yeah on tuesday and wednesday practice a lot of self care but we will be here at the end of wednesday pacific time 8 p.m um next week to be it be be doing life together um yeah self care get sleep eat well take care of yourself we can do this we'll see you next wednesday thank you bye