 ER. This hangout is on air. What? Super excited. We're here, hopefully, people in the chat room will let me know that we are good to go. Ready to go? Are we here? Do we sound good? Yay! Yay! All right, we have a link. Everything looks good to go. So let's start this show. Oh, wait, I forgot to plug in my- I knew! There was a reason I was delaying five seconds. There we go. I've plugged in my music now. Okay. That was my cat. My cat just knocked my mouse off the table. Sure, blame your cat. I do blame my cat. Run away, cat. This cat is lurking. She's checking everything out there. She's going to cause trouble. So I'm just warning you now. Troublemaker Cat is on the prowl in the house. We are starting this show in three, two, this is Twist. This week in Science, episode number 706, recorded on Wednesday, January 30th, 2019. Life at the interface. Hey, everyone. I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we are going to fill your head with speaking brains, mouse flocks, and floating life. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The way it works is like this. You have a question, you ask that question, or more likely, you Google that question. In any case, you get an answer. Sometimes that's all it takes to satisfy a curiosity. All it takes to acquire new knowledge. Other times, the questions we ask lack sufficient grammar and past knowledge to be answered simply, requiring more questions to be asked. On occasion, the questions don't even have answers yet. This is where the curious-minded questions we come up with can take us in many directions. They can propel us out of ignorance. They can pull us towards knowledge and maybe a little of both. And perhaps most importantly of all, they can lead us to This Week in Science, coming up next. What's happening? What's happening? What's happening this week in science? And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again to talk about all the awesome science that we found during the last, well, no, it's not all because there are a bunch of stories that didn't make the cut. You know that? We can't talk about everything, unfortunately. So these are just the stories that excited us the most this week. This week, I have got stories about, what do I have? Brains, speaking brains and satellites and fires. And we have an interview to talk about life at the sea-sky interface and jellyfish because jellyfish are awesome. Justin, what did you bring? I've got a church asking science to protect it from nature. I've got another ancient hominin update, as I seem to always bring. And the whole question of how quick the sea might be rising might be rising. And Blair, what is in the animal corner? Oh my goodness. I brought the most artsy bees you've ever heard of. So excited. Artsy bees. I know they've got that whole hexagonal honeycomb thing going on, but there's more. There's more. And friendly mice. Oh, nice. I like friendly mice. And I can kick them out of the house easier. Anyway, before we jump into the show, I want to remind everyone that you can subscribe to This Week in Science, all places that good podcasts are found. Look for This Week in Science or TWIS. Look at twist.org is a place that you can go for information about this stuff. Now, I would like to interview, I would like to introduce our guest. See if I can speak tonight. Our guest tonight is Dr. Rebecca Helm. She is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. And she specializes in the evolution and development of jellyfish. And recently she wrote an article that was published on the Atlantic's website. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. I'm really excited to be here. This is a lot of fun. I hope we have a great fun conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. I mean, this is, it was a quick Twitter, a Twitter interaction where I said, I saw your article and do you want to be on the show? Yes, totally. I do. And then when we danced in the beginning, that was really just the confirmation that I needed that this was really, you know, decision made by fate. Right, exactly. That's my basic criteria. Do we start by dancing? Yes, we will be there. Yes, we do. Yes, we do. We start by dancing. We have the energy and we jump right in. So aside from dancing, I mean, let's talk about jellyfish to get started. How did you get interested in the work that you do? You know, it's always a really layered process, how you get interested in something. But I think that the really basic curiosity started when I was maybe like 15 years old. And I grew up in Arizona, and I really didn't go to the ocean very much. And, you know, Arizona is not a particularly water-rich state. And so the ocean always fascinated me. But I thought actually I wanted to study alien life. So there's this field called Astrobiology that's all about like studying, you know, what life might be like on other planets. And I just thought that was so cool. And I was from, I'm from the town where Pluto was discovered, the only American town, right, where a former planet was. It's still a planet. It's still a war planet. It's still a planet in the title. No, it's not the same. It's like how many more planets are there? Like a million, like, it's the best known of all the dwarf planets. Famous dwarf planet. It was still a planet when I was a kid. Exactly. And so it had a big impression on me. And I was like, okay, this seems doable. Like the ocean is so far away, space is way closer by distance, right? And so I was like telling everyone, you know, like you do when you're in high school and junior high, like this is what I'm going to be when I'm going to grow up. And then at some point it kind of dawned on me, like we haven't found aliens yet. And so what do you do? What do you study? And I started soul searching and watching all these documentaries of like, I don't know what I'm going to be, you know, like you do again when you're 15. And you think you have to have it all figured out. And I just jellyfish. It's like that's the most alien thing I've ever seen. So it's like that was actually a thing that I had that I was going to say at some point here, which is that jellyfish are the most, the largest, most alien, like life form that I can think of. I mean, there's you can go down and you can talk about like there's weird funny guy or whatever. Like, but for a large scale, difference from what we see in the rest of the animal kingdom, jellyfish can't really be matched. Yeah, I mean, it's like they don't even have a centralized nervous system. You know, so it's like when you try to imagine what it's like to be a jellyfish, it's like there's just something in my brain that like short circuits, you know, like I can't even imagine what it must be like to perceive the world through, you know, like eight mini brains all along the edge of your body, like it just can't do it. And so that to me, it's like, okay, that's like pretty alien, right? If you're like powers of imaginative empathy, just like falter in the face of it, it's got to be really weird. It's got to be incredibly weird. And they also, they differ a lot in their life cycles too. And since that's what you study, can you tell us a little bit about their life cycles? Yay, I'm so glad you brought this up. So jellyfish have this really wacky life cycle. It's the most complicated life cycle of any animal that doesn't like live inside some other animal, right? So parasites have really wacko life cycles. But for those animals that aren't parasites, jellyfish are kind of like it. So they, they spend most of their life looking nothing like jellyfish. And I like to draw the analogy to plant because they start out, you know, when a, when a boy jellyfish and a girl jellyfish, like make baby jellyfish, right? Usually it's a quite an uneventful affair. They just like spit out eggs or sperm. So like broadcast spawning. Is this something that they always do? Or they're like spawning events where the whole community is doing this at once. I mean, it's not like coral where there's like one night under the full moon. So it's kind of slightly more ever present. Like if you go swimming at the beach, there's a good chance that you will like swim through some jellyfish sperm at some point. Along with many other animals. That's just a beginning. That's the ocean. And so anyway, it's like, they just sort of spit it out of their mouth anus cloaca thing, which we still as a community haven't decided what we're going to really refer to it as. But anyway, this mono hole, we call it the manus. Like casually. But you know, that doesn't, that still doesn't get. Doesn't describe it. Yeah. Yeah. Also spit out here. Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked. So gametes come together. They fuse. They make essentially what looks like a pill, a little swimming fuzzy pill. And that sort of analogous to the seed and it swims around. It's sort of dispersed by the currents. And then it settles on a particular spot and it grows into this second life cycle stage we call the polyp. And it looks like a tiny sea anemone. That's about the size of a breadcrumb. It has this little column shaped body and these tentacles all around a mouth. And it's basically like a little self cloning factory. So polyps can catch food. They can eat. They, you know, spit the food out through their little manus, right? And they clone themselves and they make other polyps. Wait a second, wait a second. So the babies is making babies of them. They're making clones of themselves. Yeah. Yeah. So you have one, you know, one embryo that's now like hundreds or thousands of individuals. And then when the season changes, those will start turning into jellyfish. So they basically switch modes. Oh, look, there's a little infographic. Yeah. And so they go through this process that we call strobelation because the first person to describe it, he thought this little stack of, you know, that kind of looks like a little upside down pine cone, right? The little purple thing. He thought that was its own species and he called it a strobola, which means pine cone in Greek. So they form these little pine cone looking things. And there are tons of tiny jellyfish all in that little pine cone structure. So each layer is a jellyfish. So it essentially sections its body up to make like a whole stack of jellyfish and this jellyfish conveyor belt. And then when they're done developing, they just pop off the top and swim away and start the whole life cycle over again. So basically the most developed is on the top, they pop off when they're ready to go. Right. The next one in line. Okay. Okay. So what is genetic diversity then look like within a jellyfish community if there's, I mean, it's, they're not just cloning because there is breeding going on, but then followed by this large cloning event. Tons of cloning. Well, it's hard to get a handle of what the jellyfish diversity is in the oceans, but the best way to answer that for me would be to talk about freshwater jellyfish. So all over the United States and the world, there are jellyfish that live in lakes and small ponds and quarries. And you can see thousands of jellyfish. So, you know, I went to a lake this past summer, and I mean, it was just like they were everywhere. They're called cherry blossom jellies or pear blossom jellies in China, because they really look like the little petals of a tree as they're sort of falling. And so, I mean, they're beautiful, but the amazing thing and the frustrating thing for me as someone who studies reproduction is that they're usually all one sex. And we think that's because only one little polyp colonized each lake and then just cloned itself for decades and decades and decades. And so, you know, it's like a lot of house plants that are all actually genetically identical, you know, and scientists are, you know, botanists just kind of clone them and clone them and clone them. So, I don't know if that totally answers your question, but you could have entire population within a lake that's that is pretty identical. Yeah. And unable to reproduce, but able to clone itself in perpetuity. That's another word, but it's close to word like. So, I've always known about the, you know, saltwater jellyfish. We know, you know, and the jellies that wash up on the beach and all you're supposed to watch out don't, you know, even though Portuguese Manowar are not really jellyfish, still kind of in that grouping in that area. And are they, what is the day in the life of a saltwater jellyfish like? And is it different from a freshwater jellyfish? I would say there are probably some differences, but I mean, the ocean is so big, so it really depends. Like if you're a saltwater jellyfish in the tropics and you live in these really nutrient, poor, super clear waters, then the day in the life for you is that you probably have algae living in your tissue, just like coral. And so the golden jellyfish in Palau that people go swim with in those big jellyfish lakes, you know, all they seem to be concerned out is just, am I the right distance from the sun? So my algae are happiest. And they have all these really endearing behaviors, you know, where they're like swim over to one side of the lake where the sun is really nice, you know, and then they'll kind of follow the sun as it passes around the sky, right? And if it gets too windy, they'll kind of go down and if it's really cloudy, they'll go up. If you're an open ocean jellyfish, then you're probably spending most of the daylight hours deep where it's dark and safe and visual predators can't just eat you. And then you're probably going through this really intense migration as the sun sets to get to the surface where there's more food and then back down, you know, as the sun rises again. The jellyfish can have symbiotes, they can have these algae that they are totally fascinating. Do they have a microbiome? I mean, are they, are they, what can we glean from this? You know, I have heard probably one of the more interesting things I've heard. I mean, there are a lot of really cool things happening about the microbiome. Unfortunately, I'm not really a microbiologist. Like I like microbiology and I pretend like I sort of know what people are talking about when they talk about it, but like I don't really know, you know. But one of the cool things I heard was that jellyfish mucus, because jellyfish just are such, they produce such prolific amounts of mucus whenever they're stressed, right? It's just like their go-to thing to express their feelings of like snot everywhere. And lots of like, it's so yummy for bacteria. And the mucus is really good at trapping oil and it actually may provide this kind of substrate so that oil-eating bacteria are more likely to digest oil if jellyfish have kind of swum through it. And jellyfish seem to do pretty well in oil spills. Now they do not seem to do well once you add dispersant, but crude oil itself is just like not, not too bad for them as far as we know right now. And so the idea is like, maybe we can just dump a bunch of jellyfish there and they'll kind of churn the water and then these little bacteria will grow and kind of like help manage the spill. That's a really good idea. It's an interesting idea. I mean, a question that is definitely on people's minds as we look at the oceans and fisheries is the increasing numbers of jellyfish versus fish. And one of your, one of the articles on your blog I saw had to do with jellyfishing. Yeah. Georgia's third largest fishery. Really? Yeah, which is, is weird. And people are like, Georgia, the state? I'm like, well, yeah, Georgia, the state. I mean, right here, I mean, they've got great jellyfish. Why wouldn't they be fishing? Yeah, they want to be like, Jordan, the country, right? Like somewhere super not here. They're the ones eating all those jellyfish. But wait a sec, wait, wait, we're eating jellyfish? Yeah, who's eating the jellyfish? I don't know about how did I've never eaten jellyfish. It's quite popular in some circles. I was served, I went to this amazing Chinese buffet for a wedding dinner. And jellyfish was one of the main appetizers. And I wanted to like it so bad because I know that it's like, oh, this booming business and all this kind of stuff that I know it's more sustainable than like shrimp. And so I wanted to like it so bad that I did not. I've had jellyfish like every way that I know it's prepared. And I've only liked it fried, which is just kind of also like not even really, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, there's nothing left. Oh, fried cardboard. I gotta tell you. I mean, I mean, in the south, they fry anything, you know, you fry you fry anything makes it edible. There you go. Yeah, they're mostly exported. So I mean, the market is like they catch them in Georgia, they're the cannonball jellyfish, there's really cute little round jellyfish, they don't sting. A lot of people that vacation sort of Georgia Carolina's area know them as like the jellyfish that you like throw at each other, which is mean never do that. But that's always the story I hear when people tell me about them. So yeah, you can you can just process them and then make a salad out of them. And it kind of it's kind of like eating like chicken cartilage, like the texture. So I was scared off of swimming in the Baltic Sea once because there were there were some kind of red stinging jellyfish and there were warning signs everywhere. Yeah. And so other than stinging, so it's a two part question. One is, what are the ways in which jellyfish defend themselves? And then the follow-up is at what stage does that develop? Like is this is this do polyps have a way of stinging or defending themselves from being eaten? Yeah, they sting. I mean, they don't really sting people because they're like, you know, this big and stuck to the bottom and they're adapted to eat like little shrimp and stuff. But you know, swimmers itch or beach itch or whatever it's called, where you know, it's like you'll just get like this rash underneath your swimsuit. That's caused by those little seeds, those planulite that'll swim around and they've got cells and, you know, it's kind of a lose lose situation like they get stuck in your swimsuit and freak out and sting you and then you freak out and then now everybody's just freaking out. So they have different defenses as they go through these different stages. Yeah, I would say so. I mean, they're totally different habitats that, you know, each life cycle stage is adapted to live in. And so, you know, polyps are like so robust and you can keep them in the lab and you can go home for the holidays and no one has to feed them and you can come back two weeks later and they're fine, you know, in like a little bowl of water this big. And then jellyfish on the other hand, it's just like, I'm sorry, I can't go to the movies with you, right? I have to like babysit my jellyfish and like they can't touch the bottom and the water needs to be perfect. And it's like to put it in as an around space so they don't get stuck in the corners. That's my favorite thing about working in an aquarium was to be able to go behind the scenes and see these circular jellyfish exhibits that had the jet coming in one side. They're like, yeah, they'll get stuck in the corner and I'll die. Totally. Yeah, it's the worst. Like the wrong parts and your whole like lab will flood. No, it's really frustrating and it's like, how do you have the same genome? So what kind of jellyfish do you have in your lab? Oh, so I don't have the Medusa stage, which is like the jellyfish stage, but I have a bunch of polyps and I have, you know, like the Atlantic and Pacific Stinging Nettles and Moon jellies and this really pretty one, I don't know if we can pull up a picture called Cephea Cephea, which is blue and it has this like really lumpy top. And who else do I have some Cassiopeia, which are the upside down jellyfish? Those are my favorites. Those are so good. They're very, I love them. You just like have to put them in a window. Oh, they're so good. So in your studies, it sounds like you don't have any Medusas in your lab, so probably not often. At the moment. At the moment. UNC Asheville. So my jelly tanks are done and they're coming. Very excited. Okay, so how many times have you been stung and follow up question? Does it get less painful as time goes on? No, so God, I don't know. I mean, like probably not too many times, like three or four times maybe. So I started like really handling jellyfish when I worked with this guy, Steve Haddock at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Yeah, that's the bumpy one. Cephea, Cephea. They're really pretty. So I started working with this guy, Steve Haddock, like more seriously in terms of like going out and collecting like bins of jellyfish. And he told me to always wear gloves because the field that he was in that I'm sort of now a part of was founded by this guy, Bill Hamner, who was an ornithologist and developed an allergy to bird feathers. And so he like switched. You had to find a whole new. Yeah, so he had to find a whole new career. And so he went out on a boat with his buddy and then they were catching nets and they were coming up all like gross and just straight. And he, you know, being an ornithologist was like, why don't we just go down and look at them, right? And then ended up founding this whole new field. But because like his whole career was changed because of this exposure allergy, we've all been pretty good about like not just recklessly like, you know, touching everything. Right. But I've been starting like three or four times. And the first time that's really memorable was also the most embarrassing. So there's this like idea that jellyfish don't sting if you touch them on the top of the bell, but that's actually really only true for some species. And for others, yes, it's totally not true. And so I was in France, I was doing field work. I didn't speak French. I was on the boat with like a bunch of marine biologists who are from France. And we saw jellyfish and I just like reached in the water like a dumb dumb and grabbed it. And then of course, it like hugely stuck me all over. It was like sticking my finger in an electrical socket, right? I mean, it was like complete and it bruised for weeks and weeks. Yeah. And I had a scar. And I mean, all of the like French biologists were like, what is she doing? You know, some little American grad student just like grabbing jellyfish. So yeah, that was that was the first time. And it's really something like I get why people really hate jellyfish because, you know, I, yeah, and I wanted to hang out with that jellyfish, right? Like my mistake was like a mistake of over enthusiasm, right? But if you don't even want to be around jellyfish and then you get stung, then yeah, that's like pretty rough. Let's take this conversation from the, you know, you put your hand into the jellyfish environment, right? You as humans who usually exist upon land and on boats in the air and then these jellyfish are existing at the surface of the water, right? This is where we usually interact with them. And tell me about this ecosystem. You've been talking a lot about it on Twitter and trying to educate people about it. And I'd love to have you tell our audience about this particular ecosystem at that interface between the air and the sea. Right. Yes. Yes, I've been talking about this a lot here lately. It's cool. Nobody knows about it. And so I feel like I've sort of become this like advocate for this ecosystem called the Newston or the Plouston depending on whether you're, you know, sort of being like more USSR Russian scientist literature or American scientist literature. But it's this whole ecosystem that lives right at the surface of the ocean that uses water tension to kind of act as a barrier. Right. So when we think of like coral reefs, they're all stuck to the bottom and kind of pointing up. And the Newston is just that whole concept, but like literally flipped 180. So that there's the up for a stranger, for the Stranger Things fans out there. It's the upside down. But not a creepy, not a creepy though. But beautiful. Like extra pretty. And it really is. It's like super colorful. Like because these animals are living at the surface, they're often this really vibrant blue, which may be kind of camouflage. So they blend in with the surface or really vivid pinks. The most famous, but probably also the most infamous member of the Newston is the Portuguese Manowar, right? So that's like kind of the most recognizable, but it's not the only one by a long shot. So there are these little by the wind sailors. Yes, I love them. Oh my God, they wash up on Ocean Beach in San Francisco all the time. They're great. They're so neat. And you know, the first time I saw them, I thought they were plastic, right? Because they form these really like very plastic looking sails. But then they have this like blue kind of fireworks body underneath. And they're just gorgeous. And they sort of just float around like little sailboats. And they also have algae that live in their body, these photos synthesizing those and belly that they use in this really nutrient poor environment out in the open ocean. They're blue buttons, which look kind of like by the wind sailors, but they don't have a little sail and they're round. They're very endearing and they beat. So they they're kind of like they have this little heartbeat looking thing going on. And so when you see like a little meadow of blue buttons, it's just kind of like all these little blinking blue suns. You know, they're about like that big. And let's see, there are these snails, these very existentially angsty surface snails that swim. Oh, those are beautiful. I love blue buttons. They're just, oh, and look at them all. Oh, okay. Yes. Yeah. And so and then there's a snail called Jantina or Jantina, which is the violet snail. And they're these really beautiful purple snails, but they make this raft out of their own snail slime. So they like dip their bodies into the air and build these bubble rafts. And they float on the surface of the ocean and they're super heavy. Like their bodies are really heavy. And so if they let go of their little bubble rafts, they'll just sink into the abyss and die. How big are they? They're like that big. You know, I mean, the shell I saw was like maybe that big. Like was it like a sand dollar size kind of a thing? Well, I mean, sand dollars can come in all sorts of sizes. Like a garden, like as big as a garden snail. Yeah. Yeah. Like a generous garden snail. Generous garden snail. Yeah. Like not a wimpy garden snail, but like the honking ones. Yeah. And they, so they actually eat like Portuguese Manowar. And so they can't steer. I mean, it's just like stresses me out thinking about them because they're just, they're floating on this raft. They like don't know how to swim. They can't steer. And they just have to wait until they bump into something that they can eat. And on top of that, they're also cannibalistic with each other. So they like need to bump into other snails in order to mate, but then they also might eat each other. I mean, it's just like nothing. You've got nothing, you know, everything is hard. Yeah. So those guys are really fun. Blue Sea Dragons are probably the most popular. And yeah, I mean, like their whole Etsy pages just dedicated to like Blue Sea Dragon. So these are all animals. I mean, they're sea anemones that live on the surface. They're barnacles that only true open ocean bug is actually a water strider that lives on the surface of the open ocean. Really? Yeah, there they are. Oh, not that one. That's in the middle. But yeah, the ones that have those are new to Branks, aren't they? They are. Yeah, with the little jazz hands. Yeah. Yeah, Branks with jazz hands. That's how I will always think about them. And they actually use them like little hands. So they eat blue buttons and by the wind sailors, and they'll like bump into a blue button and they'll actually grab on with those like really fat little fingers and like hug the little tentacle and then take like anybodies tiny little bite. Why is everything so violently blue in this ecosystem? So right, like I've heard that it's because it's sun protection, but then I've also read that it actually doesn't make sense for it to be sun protection because the absorbance isn't right. So then other people said like, well, maybe it's camouflage, right? You know, birds eat a lot of Newston. And so like if you're a bird and you're looking down, you're looking for anything that's like not blue water. And so maybe blue kind of helps them blend it. So yeah. Anyway, it's just like this really amazing bizarre kind of inverted coral reef. And the thing that's really fascinating to me about the Newston is that, you know, as I'm really getting into the literature, it's like scientists can go without seeing any Newston for days and days and days, and they'll just come across this island of Newston where now they're, you know, basically wading through Newston in the middle of the open ocean. And we don't know when they form these islands, where these islands happen, why, how long these islands last for these like weird living islands. We know that those open ocean water striders really like to lay their eggs on things that float. So maybe, you know, they're kind of crawling around on these islands and reproducing. We know that a lot of fish actually use Newston as a kind of temporary or permanent shelter. So sort of like coral reefs, fish will hide in between the tentacles of Portuguese man-a-wars and other things like that. Yeah. I mean, there are little crabs called flotsam crab that they don't, I mean, I don't just don't even understand flotsam crabs. They're so weird to me. They look just like little seashore crabs, but they have chromatophores like squid. And so they can actually change colors. What? Yeah. And they can change from like really like vivid purple to black to white to green to blend into whatever Newston they're hiding on. That's amazing. The chameleons of the sea. The chameleons. Oh my God. Yes. So it is a truly bizarre world. We don't know a lot about it. There was a lot done kind of sort of, you know, in the middle of this sort of USSR, United States, like Cold War, oceanographic thing that happened after World War II where sort of everyone realized like we need to learn more about the ocean if we're going to sort of an unfortunate motivator, but there it is. So there's a lot of work done. And then it just kind of, you know, like just sort of people forgot about it. And it's like, you know, everybody knows what coral reefs are. Everybody knows what hydrothermal vents are. I mean, not everybody, but a lot of people. And almost no one has heard of these floating Newston islands. So this is my introduction. And yeah, but now the thing that people are familiar with are the gyres and the garbage patches. Right. Right. In this conversation. Right. And so, yeah, I think that I think that a lot of people unfortunately know about all the trash and they know that seabirds eat trash and they know that sunfish and turtles eat trash. I don't think a lot of people know why these animals are eating trash. Right. And it's because the trash looks like Newston or looks like jellyfish. You know, if you look at a blue button and you look at a bottle cap, right, you know, even from like 10 feet away, floating on the surface of the ocean, right, it will be really hard to tell them apart. And so now there are these projects that people have proposed to go clean up all of this trash. But the problem is that the trash is happening and is, you know, occurring in the exact same place as these animals are living. Right. Because they're all there because of the prevailing winds and currents. Exactly. So the exact places that the trash is really being concentrated is of course exactly where a lot of these meadows of Newston can be found. And so if you want to talk about cleaning up trash, you can't do it without talking about cleaning up the Newston on accident as well. I mean, you can actually, I mean, people have been talking about cleaning up trash without talking about the Newston for years now, which is sort of why I decided to like jump into this whole internet discussion. Right. So there's potential for something. I mean, if it becomes part of the conversation, I feel like we got some ingenuity, we got some innovation behind us as a species, right? There's an opportunity to come up with things kind of like turtle exclusion devices and things like that that could somehow by weight, by shape, by something squishy versus not squishy. I don't know. I feel like there's got to be something that we could do. I think you can't get rid of them. You can't just go and scoop up or remove the plastics because you're now in an endangered ecosystem, which is being endangered parts of the... Well, I don't know. Well, here's the thing. But that's the question. The Newston environment itself, okay, with the plastic islands. I mean, not that we're doing. Yeah. So leave it alone, but don't add more. That's sort of the kick that I'm on at the moment. I mean, there are like huge ghost nets and stuff. And I feel like increasing legislation for losing a net, right? Or something like that. So industries don't just cut their nets when they're tangled or when they're broken or whatever. Coming up with some sort of way to compensate vessels that actually collect nets would be really nice. But in terms of all this microplastic, I mean, even something like the Ocean Cleanup Project, which is the big project that I've been kind of like, hello, please don't forget about the Newston. They're not collecting the little plastic either, right? They haven't been able to, even though they want to. Right. Right. I mean, there's no easy way to do it. And then if you add on top of that, that a lot of these Newstonic animals, I mean, I told you, right, when I first saw by the wind sailor, I thought it was plastic. I mean, they literally have that kind of consistency in their body. So it would be really hard to come up with some way to like sort the Newston from the plastic, you know, especially when it's like they actually look like plastic themselves. So then would you say that like it's like cleaning up these plastic islands would do more damage to the ecosystem than they would actually do good? That's what I'm worried about. And that's why I'm talking about these Newstonic islands and these weird animals, because I think that everybody that wants to see plastic removed from the ocean has the intention of, you know, wanting it to be removed. So life is better in the ocean. Yeah. Right. So that you don't see it anyway. So it has to be for the betterment of that ecosystem itself. And you know, even if you don't care about the Newston and you're just in it for the turtles, it's like, look, turtles eat Newston, right? And so you can't go and clean up plastic and say, well, you know what, the Newston might all die. But you know, the turtles, it's like, no, the turtles are eating plastic because it looks like these animals. Well, I think there's a there's a huge kind of Newston jellyfish, which are both kind of in trouble from the ocean cleanup perspective. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think this, this in a lot of ways boils down to this kind of like PR problem with the ocean and bodies of water in general, where when you talk about the ocean, like if you did a Google search for the word ocean right now, I talk about this at work all the time, you kind of see a Google image search is a great way of kind of getting a good idea of the majority of people and how they think about a thing. And so the ocean, if you do a Google search is blue, it's clean. And most of the pictures have little or no life in them. Right. And when I worked at Aquarium of the Bay at the San Francisco Bay, everyone always said the exact same thing about Bay water. Ew, it looks so dirty. You're like, actually, it's full of life. And most of what you're seeing is the stuff that makes things alive. And you know, there's this misunderstanding that clear, blue, clean ocean with nothing in the picture is what we want. And I think this is part of that, right? Like you don't think about the fact that the surface of the ocean is just covered in gook and crap that is actually alive. Right. Pretty, pretty gook. And you know, and not only the good gook, but the things that are out there need that gook. Like flying fish lay their eggs on floating stuff. Right. That's where they lay their eggs. And then the floating stuff gets really heavy with eggs. And it kind of sinks a little deeper than all the babies hatch. And then within two weeks, they have tiny wings and they're back at the surface being like little tiny flying fish. And so if there wasn't stuff like constantly floating out into the ocean, we wouldn't have these flying fish, right? We wouldn't have these open ocean insects because they only lay their eggs on stuff that floats. So for example, you know, the reason why it's hard to say, like is the newston being harmed by plastic? Well, we know that these little bugs that live on the surface of the open ocean seem to be doing really well right now. Right. Right. They're like very happy because they have tons of stuff to lay their eggs on. Right. We know that like floating barnacles seem to be doing pretty well because they like to attach to something really early in their life to kind of get their start and get their anchor. And so if there's something floating out and it's plastic, well, I don't really care. So, you know, I wonder if a solution might just be in something as simple as, I mean, granted, it'd be great if everybody stopped using plastic and, you know, disposing it to wind carrying it. That's not going to happen. Is it a color change? If we made it a mandatory thing that like all plastic bottle caps had to be orange, or something that's not normally a color that would be present or available, like all the plastic bags have to be instead of clear, they have to be opaque. And or I think they have to be a, maybe again, a red color or something. I know. Plastic bags would be tricky because jellyfish come in like every color. All right. So, I'll still lose the plastic bags, but maybe something like the bottle caps or some of the other things that might be less identified by. You know, I've thought about it. And I actually, I've thought along those same veins. Like I wonder if you look at the plastic that's in bird stomachs, if there's an overrepresentation of certain colors relative to what's floating out in the ocean, right? And if you can figure that out, and if it did turn out that there was some color that they were really into, and you just stopped that color from being produced. I mean, you know, it's kind of like a patch when what you really need is a fix, but right? I mean, even taping one bird is worth it, I think. And there's the other idea of instead of going out and cleaning up the whole ocean, maybe let's just stop putting stuff in it. Yeah. So keep it, keep it from washing out of the waterways. Right. Is there a way that we can filter stuff at the mouths of the, of the estuarine areas areas that are headed out to sea? Well, I love Mr. Trashwheel. So Mr. Trashwheel, the Baltimore Trashwheel, you know, which is just like a waterwheel for those who haven't seen it. It looks like one of those old timey water mill wheels that people would use to really build by streams to like churn wheat or something. And it has a like big googly eyes, little net and sort of trash sort of funnels in and that just kind of pulls it out. And that's, that's been working really well. I mean, I also think that, you know, we have to be putting pressure on, on the producers of plastic, right? As consumers. So, you know, I was at the grocery store yesterday and they're now like wrapping single potatoes in plastic. What? Like, you know, yeah, I mean, it's like, why would you do that? Are naturally wrapped. I have a skin. Come on, there's Mr. Trashwheel. Yeah. So I mean, that kind of stuff where it's like, not only am I not going to buy that potato, but you know, I might take a picture of that potato and at the person or the company that's, you know, wrapping that potato in plastic and say, you know, I want you to know that I didn't buy your potato because I think it's a subpar potato. You're going to buy your potato because I didn't want your plastic. Absolutely. It's about not making the, the consumer feel guilty or like the, the onus is on them. It's about making the, the only option, the good option or the easy option, the good option. So we have, we have, and we have some actually, some recent news, which I believe is going to, for its own selfish interest, create that, that, that biodegradable plastics and that move to paper, which is the last farm bill. Okay. Well, it isn't at all because it's, they just approved hemp for mass production, basically, which means you're going to find these odd bedfellows of environmentalists and Southern traditional tobacco growing lands, both during the hemp to do, you know, hemp instead of trees for paper, hemp instead of for, for biodegradable plastics instead of plastics. So we, we're on the cusp, I really believe, of getting away from the production of these problems. It's hard to find a plastic bag anywhere in California anymore. We actually have to like, like, knock on a secret door and have the password to, it's, it's really, there's been a serious emphasis in this coastal region to get away from the plastics. So I think there is real, the actionable hope very much on the near horizon for this. Absolutely. And I think one of the, there are still so many questions outstanding though. I mean, it's great for us to reduce our trash into the ocean or plastics into the ocean that would be affecting this, the newston. Right. But on the other hand, we don't really understand the influences of our trash on the newston other than we know, okay, the animals that eat it and get it in their stomach instead of regular food, that's bad. Right. But we don't really know, like, what are the benefits? There's habitat benefits, like you've mentioned. So there's pluses and there's minuses. And we still have so much to figure out about what's good and what's bad. It's killing off all their predators. And I mean, you know, the reality in nature is like those ideas of good and bad are things that we really put onto nature. Right. And it's there, it's just equations and balancing out those variables. Right. And if you are a huge fan of blue buttons, then yeah, maybe this is great because all the birds that would be eating the new buttons, you know, I mean, right. It's, you know, it's, it's like you can always cast the villain. But I think, and I don't want plastic in the ocean, but I also think we need to recognize that it's complicated and that marine animals have a complicated relationship with plastic. And you know, with things like the ocean cleanup, you know, the big frustration I have is that they've raised millions of dollars to do this. I think that that money could have been spent to understand the open ocean better, to understand the newston better, to try to get a handle on what the problems actually are. But instead, it's like this quick fix idea. Right. Like we don't want to change our consumer behavior. We're really happy doing what we're doing right now, which is why, you know, a lot of the potential funding that the ocean cleanup is hoping to get is, you know, from companies that make plastic carbon credits. Yeah, I wonder if, if maybe someone could have done a very cool research project where they removed entire bits of plastic from an area and measured the health of the newston there, and then left another area the same and see what happened. Because until you take this giant kind of arm and sweep it all away all at once, you know, you won't really know what's going to happen. Right. And they're not, I mean, and this is the big beef that I've been having is that they have this really seemingly comprehensive environmental impact assessment where they talk about things like harbor purposes, right? And our harbor purpose is going to be impacted by this open ocean boom system like hundreds of miles from any harbor anywhere, right? And it's like harbor purposes are rarely seen in the open ocean. And they don't mention the newston even once, right? And so that is like, yes, there could be amazing studies that could have been happening for the last five years. I don't even know if they knew about this ecosystem before I started tweeting and blogging, right? And even when I did finally hear from them, they, you know, the person that reached out to me was like, Oh, well, we've been noticing your tweets on jellyfish. And it's like, No, I'm not I mean, I love jellyfish, but this is the newston is the issue right now. It's like cotton surface, right? Jellyfish, you already said in your impact assessment, they're going to die. Right. So while I think that sucks, at least you just went out and said it like it was, right? But you didn't even mention the ecosystem that would be most impacted. And that is what I find, you know, very concerning, very strange and, you know, like alarm bells ringing kind of situation. And I guess I guess if you've gotten to the position where you're ahead of a thing that's raised millions of dollars and your mission was to go remove plastics, it would be really difficult to turn around to everybody behind you go, Actually, this is probably not a good idea. Like at this point, like they've committed beyond reason, which can be a very hard conversation to have with somebody who has a, even if they'd agree with you, be like, I would, this is right. This is my job now. Right. Well, what is it called the some cost fallacy? Yes, we've already spent all this time and all this money. And so this is where, you know, for me, like raising awareness is so important, right? Because even if they know, they might be using that exact reasoning right now to just proceed as if they didn't just pretend it's not an issue. But if all the people that supported them, you know, start raising the alarm, like we want you to look at this, this is important, this matters to us, then I think that will really get their attention and sort of force them in a position where they have to, they have to recognize that their system could do a lot more harm than good. Right. And if their whole point is, Hey, we want to make the ocean better. Right. If that's really what we're all after, then, you know, sometimes it means that you have to really drastically change what you were going to do. Oh, and here's the thing that here's the thing that now suddenly is frightening to me. If this was, if this was a near coastal event, I mean, you could make an argument for a new environmental impact study. Right. Look at the cost benefit. If this is in the middle of the ocean, who governs? Yeah. Yeah. Actually in their email, they said, well, we didn't even have to do an impact assessment. Like we, we look at how great we are that we did. I mean, I didn't say it like that, but I was like, you're right. I mean, don't you want to know how what you're going to do? Yeah. Right. Like I, I guess I, I appreciate that you did it. But also, I mean, that just seems like, of course you would do it. And yeah. And I mean, it does kind of also get into this really interesting sort of unclear territory of how do you regulate products that are harvested from international waters, right? So it's like, even if the ocean cleanup is like a total ecological disaster, there may be other reasons why, you know, investors are interested in this, right? And it could have very little to do with cleaning up trash. And it could have a lot to do with like, maybe this is breaking new legal ground. I don't know. I actually don't know very much about international maritime law, but I do know that it's really complicated and it's very opaque, and that there are a lot of issues surrounding, you know, what people are allowed to collect in domain and things like that. Wow. That is a fascinating point. And we have been talking for a very long time. It's absolutely great to chat with you. Can I ask one last, one last quick question? Can you please set the record straight for me? It sounds like you say jellyfish. Oh God, are we going to go into that? Yes, I say jellyfish. So no, no, this is something that I have been talking about for a long time. So in, in the aquarium community, I know you always say like, Oh, they're not fish. We call them jellies. But here is the problem that I ran into as an environmental educator is that nobody knew what the heck I was talking about shoes. Yeah, or, or the stuff you put on bread or whatever. Yeah. So there, I feel, I feel like I will never say koala bear. That's not going to happen to me. But it's because if you say koala, everyone knows what a koala is. Okay. So, so here, can I throw this at you? They're not bears. You know what a sea is? Like the letter or like the, Oh, you mean sea star? No, I meant seahorse. But I love porcelain because it's obviously not a porcelain. Well, yeah, because like starfish, it's not a fish sea star. You can say sea star. But jelly is like, what, what even is that? So you say jellyfish, I, I concur, make the science accessible. It's like a couple things. One is, we do say jelly, but we mean like anything that has the feel of jelly, right? So that's like all the jelly things in the world, the gelata of the ocean, if you will, right? You know, jellies. So jellyfish to me is this thing. And I also sort of feel like, you know, if you don't know that jellyfish aren't fish, then we need to talk about what a fish is. And like no judgment. That's fine. But I feel like that's an opportunity for learning and growth. Right? Like if you don't know that a jellyfish isn't a fish, well, then that's great. Because we get to talk about what fish are and we get to talk about what jellyfish are and how they're not the same thing. And now you know about two things. Right? Great. Yes. Excellent. I love it. Opportunities for Education. And if people want to educate themselves about you, okay, where can they go? Oh, so I have a website, but it's a very modest little website. It's just my name, rebeccaarhelms.com. Oh, there it is. Yes. I need to update it and add prettier pictures and things like that. But it does have all of my scientific papers and links to all of my social media things down at the bottom, kind of hidden far away. Yes, right there. So I write for peepsie news and I have a personal blog, jelly biologist, sort of about all things jelly, but more things to do and then Twitter and other places. So yeah. Yes. I mostly live on Twitter these days. Yes, that is that is me on Twitter. Yes, Rebecca, our helm on Twitter. Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been so much fun. Yeah, this has been wonderful. Thank you. Yeah, we'll start out with a dance. We dance through the interview. Can we end with a dance? We can dance it out. Thank you. This has been really great. I want to I want to just like do other nerdy stuff now so you guys can keep inviting me back. Keep doing nerdy stuff. We will. Absolutely. Let's keep in touch. I love that. It would be wonderful to have you back again. So yes, let's stay in touch. Let's talk on Twitter and have a wonderful night. Thank you so much. You too. Thank you. All right, everybody out there. We are going to move on to a quick break. And after that, we will be coming back with some more science news. We've got some talking brains. We've got some ancient hominids. I don't know. Justin's got caves. Blair's got artistic honeybees. And we'll be back in just a few moments with more This Week in Science. Thank you so much. Hey, everyone. Thank you for listening to This Week in Science. Thank you for watching right now. If you are watching, thank you for being a part of the twist community. If you would like to enhance that experience, become a true supporter, a big supporter, a financial supporter of This Week in Science. Let me show you a few ways that you can do that. First off, one of the best ways that you can place that you can start if you'd like to help keep this show listener supported is heading over to twist.org. Twist.org is where you can find links to all the things that can help twist out. So first go to twist.org. And if you are interested in twist goodies like shirts and hats and other things, you can click on our Zazzle Store link. That Zazzle Store link takes you to the store where you can find these wonderful twist logo items, items from Blair's Animal Corner calendars from years past. 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All of you out there, I just want to say thank you so much for being a part of what we do. We really could not do any of this without you. Let's see if I can get the music out of here. And we're back with more This Week in Science. Yes, we are. And it would be time now for This Week in What Has Science Done for Me lately, but I don't have any. Well, science did nothing for somebody lately? Yeah, we're out. This is the first week. I will officially say people have not have, I mean, this is this has been going over a year and it's been amazing all the stories that people have sent in. We've had haikus, sonnets, stories, we've had tales from personal life. We've had so many different ways that science has been a part of people's lives, things that science have done for people. But we don't have any stories. Although technically it was a very opportune week because we just did an hour interview for a first class. Yeah, we just did an hour interview. Very rare current. We're going to save a little time. That's right. So I would like to remind anyone, if you appreciate this part of the show, please be a part of sharing for this part of the show. Send me a letter, send me an email, send me something to Kirsten at this weekinscience.com or leave a message on our Facebook page. That's facebook.com this week in science so that we can fill this segment of the show with stories from you. All right, moving on up, let's talk about some science. You want to talk about, let's, we talked a bit about California in the last, in the interview and talking about, no plastic bags in California, but you know one thing that California has plenty of? Don't say it. I am. Fire. California. I'm just going to wait for you to start burning again this year. I mean, Oregon hasn't been great either, but part of this has to do with drought. And a really interesting study came out this week out of the Australian National University in which they were partnered up with the Grace Satellites and they have been a part of the program that they're using the Grace follow on satellites, which are developed by American German and Australian scientists. And they were using these satellites to look at moisture in the soil. So they're pretty much checking soil from satellites above the earth for how much water is available in the soil to affect growth and the condition of grazing land, crops, forests, and other things that will either affect agricultural abilities or affect fires down the road. And so thank you. Don't play with the can please. I can hear it. It's bugging me. Sorry. Go to sleep. My child is still awake. Edit point. So these these researchers from the A&U University or A&N University, Australian National University, were basically checking water presence and matching it. They looked at fires that occurred from during a period of years between 2000, I think it was like 2007 to 2011 and used their satellite data to kind of see if they could predict when those fires might have happened. And the data and the predictions lined up very closely. It's actually pretty striking that they can predict potential fire risk one month away, for sure, and as far ahead in advance as three months. And so it yeah, so the reliability decreases, of course, after up to three months, but it's still incredibly accurate. And the idea is that, you know, we've talked before, Blair, like you, I think you, I don't know if it was you or Justin, someone had a story about water in the soil in the Rocky Mountains, or not the Rockies, the Sierras, and how that water in the soil might affect the trees and the trees ability to withstand fire and drought moving forward. There was this whole water cycle that we were talking about that seemed like it was going to be really important moving forward. And this is starting to get at addressing it, looking at it from an analytical perspective and a predictive perspective. So beyond even just predicting the weather, we now potentially can predict which areas are going to be most at risk for fires moving forward. Yeah, it's very cool. And in their data, they actually looked at California, Southern California, not Northern California, but they looked at California as one of their test areas for predictions. And we're surprisingly accurate in matching up the soil moisture levels to when fires occurred during their test range of data. There's so much that this can be used for that's good. I mean, in Northern California, the huge fire that we had here, one of the people I work with actually their parents lived in one of those areas where there was an entire cul-de-sac where almost every single house was lost, except for theirs, because they cleared the brush around their house. And if you can go to a community and say you are at extremely high fire risk right now, I can almost guarantee you if you don't clear the brush around your house, you'll lose it. People might be better about that. Evacuations might happen sooner. There's a lot of things that could happen that could spare a lot of hardship and potentially even human life if we can know what to expect. So there's another take too on this, which is native plants versus non-native. Our native plants are used to California. If you look at the root system of a California poppy, it's a taproot. It just goes straight down. It's as deep as the plant is tall, because drought is not something that's completely new to California. And there was this interesting thing I said. I didn't bring it because I didn't know where we were talking about this, where they burned various plants, native plants versus non-native, but here. And native plants have a much less propensity to catch fire and a much less propensity to also spread that fire. Grasses are not native to California. They were very handy for the settlers when they got here to feed cattle and sheep and the like, but native wildflowers used to be everywhere. So another thing, aside from just clearing brush, might be to plant something that out competes that, which is brush, which is native plants that aren't going to burn like the non-natives and are going to also use less water. And so you can have pretty flowers and protect your home at the same time. And then there's also the side of it, which is plants that can, one of the things their study discovered is that plants that are more resilient are those that can tap into deeper water sources and, or areas that are more resistant, resilient to have more plants that are not just surface plants with little tiny root systems that don't go very deep, but are plants that actually, you know, they dig into the soil. And if you look at your native plants, again, they're used to California going, like there's like, I mean, I granted global warming is contributing a lot to this, but if you go back through the tree ring record of our ancient old growth, you also find that people kind of, or at least Western people, kind of discovered California in a 100 year wet cycle. We're used to being, the state has been much more arid for a great part of its history. So the idea that we can sustain, you know, the levels of agriculture everywhere, or these grasslands, which are not native, and push out these native plants that can survive here and have adapted to do so over millions of years, and are also adapted to the fire seasons. It's all kind of ridiculous, if you think of it that way. Yeah, it's very ridiculous. Well, I mean, I don't want to say ridiculous, but I will say that this is one of those things that is not natural disaster. These are largely man-made disasters in a lot of cases, when we've replaced the flora that prevented this from happening with flora that actually encourages these things to happen. It's not natural to us. That becomes a man-created problem. Yeah, and we have created a lot of problems, but it's also in our power to figure out how to fix them, which is leading me into the next story. What is this sound? Could you understand that very well? Exterminate? Exterminate? That wasn't exactly what it was. How about this? How about this recording? 5, 2, 3, 2, 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Yeah, totally. It took me a second, but I caught up with it. So the first one was reading the same list of numbers that the second recording was. However, the first recording that you heard was a representation of early approaches to reconstruct speech that used spectrograms, which are frequency models of sound waves, and linear models. So just straightforward sound in, sound out, brain waves in, brain waves out. So the researchers, Columbia and neuroengineers have actually created a system now, which you heard in that second recording based off of a vocoder. So musicians everywhere rejoice, a vocoder and deep neural network to reconstruct speech. They recorded from the auditory cortex of epilepsy patients when they were undergoing brain surgery and had the epilepsy patients listen to sounds and recorded what the brain waves, what brain waves were in the brain as that listening took place. And then they took those recorded brain waves and put them into their neural network and vocoder system to create the best reconstruction of human speech to date. And the idea is that this will allow people people who have neurological issues who are unable to speak, who have locked in syndrome, any number of issues that have led to an inability to speak that potentially this could give one the ability to speak if we could read brain waves and allow them to play out through a brain interface system. And hopefully it's not just intergalactic planetary, planetary, intergalactic. But it would be that if that's what the person were wanting to sing. Yeah, sure. Trying to shame the Beastie Boys, what's happening? No, no, I'm not trying to shame them at all. But that's like my first reference, earliest reference of a vocoder in action. Yeah. Yeah. So these researchers, it's really, it's interesting what they've done. They're using technology, similar technology, these computer algorithms to recognize speech are the same technology used by Amazon Echo and Apple Siri to give verbal responses to our questions. According to Dr. Mezgarani, who is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia's Foo Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. And Dr. Mezgarani teamed up with Ashish Dinesh Mehta, a neurosurgeon, to create this. And they asked these epilepsy patients to listen to sentences spoken by different people. They could measure their brain activity. So they're using basically almost off the shelf speech recognition technology and and then putting it through the vocoder, which enabled the sound to be produced, but it was cleaned up by neural networks. And so they basically used neural networks to teach it to create a better sound. Wow. Yes. It's a lot of layers. It's a lot of layers. But when it when all is said and done, they're probably going to improve what they've done here. Right now, they said that people can understand the sounds that their their model develops about 75% of the time, which is above any other previous attempts. And, you know, they're just going to go up from here. So I believe that we will be seeing these speech to computer or speech to speaker interfaces, brain speech to to speaker interfaces popping up in the future. That's this is going to be exciting. So 75% of the time, that's definitely more than I understand some humans. But I immediately started wondering, like, if you were doing this for someone in Great Britain, would you give it a British accent? If you did Australia, would they have an action just like your Siri can be many different voices? You'd be able to use the same technology to be able to make it familiar in whatever space you're in and represent yourself a little bit. That's pretty cool. My phone case is TARDIS, and therefore my Siri has a British accent. Absolutely. Yeah. So you can read more, find out more about this paper. It is published this this week in, I believe, Nature, no, I'm sorry, Nature Scientific Reports. So I believe it is publicly available if you're interested in looking into it more. This is exciting stuff. Justin, what do you have for us? Oh, my goodness. I completely forgot that I had stories. This is Oxford. I did. Like, I was like, ah, that was like we did a show. We did. Oxford University scientists have played a role in some research identifying earliest evidence of some of the first known humans. So there's actually two studies that have been produced in Nature, and they are kind of redefining what we knew about Neanderthals and Denisovans in southern Siberia. So last year, the bone fragment was a yielded genome of a daughter of a Neanderthal and Denisovan parents, which was the first evidence of interbreeding between these two archaic human groups. But we hadn't really done a great job of dating it. So in this research, the Oxford team obtained 50 radiocarbon ages from bone tooth and charcoal fragments recovered in the upper layers of the site. In addition, they used more than 100 optical ages, which is a technique that I don't know exactly how they do this. I should have looked into this a little bit more. But it's that technique that allows scientists to determine how long it's been since an artifact was exposed to sunlight. Okay, so they pulled all these things from the caves and they sort of, and they can actually do that much further back than they can do regular radiocarbon dating, which sort of has a point of beyond which you can't effectively date things. The optical being able to sort of tell the reaction that would normally happen in something exposed to light, how long it's been because there's also things. Anyway, go look up optical aging in archaeology. So they found a minimum age for bone fragments of mixed Neanderthal, Denisovan ancestry, by using a uranium series dating technique. So they threw everything and the kitchen sink at all of these fossils and fragments to see what they could come up with. The study found that this cave was occupied by Denisovans from at least 200,000 years ago. They found that the stone tools in the deepest deposits likely were as early as 300,000 years. Neanderthals show up on this guest list of the cave somewhere between 200 and 100,000 years ago. Denny, which is the girl of mixed ancestry within Neanderthal and Denisovan parent, probably around 100,000 years. So what this of course is indicating though is then Denisovans and Neanderthals had an overlapping in this cave or in this region over many tens of thousands of years. And for Denny, the girl with the parents of different arcane humans to be 100,000 years, really means that that interaction was both likely very frequent, but also disparate because they had determined that she has a complete Neanderthal and a complete Denisovan parent at 100,000 years. So even though they were around for tens of thousands of years, they may not have been in very close contact as well. Interesting. You're telling me this was a half Denisovan, half Neanderthal child and they named her Denny. Does that mean her last name is D'Earthal or what? Denny D'Earthal. Like what? Okay, anyway, sorry, go ahead. So a lot of the evidence of Neanderthals are around the interglacial period, which is about 120,000 years ago when the climate was relatively warm, whereas Denisovans are found in many of the colder periods. So there's also something sort of interesting, maybe telling about these early hominins' ability to adapt to different types of climates. So also, you get to around the 50,000-year range and for this part of Southern Siberia and Mongolia, humans, even 50,000 years ago when things, the archaic hominins there start disappearing, humans aren't really thought to be there, except then this Oxford team also identified what is now the earliest evidence of Northern Eurasia current humans. And they put these dates between 43,000 and 49,000 years ago for our current humans to have gotten there, which pushes that date back about 8,000 plus years. I think we were high 30s for when that first happened. So it's sort of interesting that I've talked a couple of weeks ago, too, about this child skeleton that was found that seems to have both Neanderthal and Denisovan and modern human aspects. So while we're sort of just getting this information in on this hybridization of events between Denisovans and Neanderthals, there's likely a three-way Venn diagram with the current modern humans arriving there and also jumping to the school. What's very interesting though is there isn't a whole lot of at least Denisovan DNA that we've been able to identify in current human populations. But then again, we don't have as big a picture of what it means to be Denisovan DNA versus Neanderthal, which we know to be part of that system. Right, where we know Neanderthals and humans mixed widely for a very long time. Like, Denisovans maybe weren't the same kind of timeframe or geographical area of mixing. Ish, except in oddly in very far east southern Asia, there are really big spikes of what we know to be Denisovan DNA in those populations and some that are, I think, in northern Siberia. So we've got these little points that are very disparate themselves in terms of distance where Denisovan DNA is showing up in current human DNA. I'm just wondering if the Denisovan Neanderthal, half and half, maybe it wasn't successful in combining with modern human DNA. Because all these things were different genetically somewhat. And so think about how a wolf and a dog can have a baby, but that baby cannot reproduce, right? I'm just thinking that I'm surprised that all these different hominids match together enough to make complete genomes. There has to have been some issues there somewhere down the line. So that's why I'm just wondering if there's some combination of these three populations that didn't result in successful offspring. So it's a great question. And part of this is we know it was successful because it's in current human DNA. But you don't know, I'm saying you don't know what kind of striation of it. Like maybe you needed to be at least 75% Neanderthal before you could do that. But we kind of do, because we also know that a lot of fertility issues are traceable to Neanderthal DNA, for instance. But also the survival, I mean, this might not have been a negative amongst these populations. They probably overlapped this pretty well because they lived in smaller groups. And they were, so smaller populations were actually a benefit versus getting pregnant and having children every time, right? So part of what we would might be consider roadblocks to reproduction as a current human was actually a beneficial thing to these small populations that were nomadic, not to have so many children. And to think that they survived maybe together for many tens of thousands of years, if not 100,000 years, and we only left Africa 100-ish thousand years ago. And maybe some people might point to, you know, there might be some future, like future hominin, looking back at our current hominins and going, yeah, because they were so fertile, they over reproduced and created a population bubble. So determining what is or what is not a beneficial reproduction is only decent in hindsight. Hindsight is always better, but we're looking forward to the rising sea. Is that right, Justin? Oh, yeah. So this is okay. So as long as we're on the subject of humans, right, university study, questions, reliability of how sea level rise in lowline coastal areas is measured. So to cut to it, there is a technique called tide gauges. And they look at an average of 20 meters into the earth to sort of determine the subsidence, how the earth is sinking in relation to these lowline areas, around coastal areas where sea level is also rising. What the study points out is kind of just obvious if you had all the data in front of you. I mean, it understood it and can read it and figure it out what it was and which is what they did is that 60% of the subsidence, sinking of ground in these lowline areas happens in the top portion of it, the top five meters. So the 20 meters that they've been using is the gauge, this 60-ish feet of soil and how much it moves versus just the most of the change in height actually happens right near the top. And so really that's all you really need to pay attention to if you're looking out for how flooding will occur on the surface. Based on the way that they're looking at this, all of the estimates of how communities in lowline coastal areas will be impacted by global warming have been grossly underestimated, which is, you know, not good news because the news was already dire. And unfortunately, for I don't know how long we've been talking about our global warming stories and updates, I think as long as the show has been a show, the news hasn't really gotten better or more rosy. But this is just another layer. But one of the things they can do then is if they use this new technique and identify the hottest of the hot spots that are in jeopardy, there could be more efficient city planning. Basically, people should just move. Move further inland. Go find some foothills that will be above, well above sea level. Altitude, altitude, altitude. That's what the future real estate is. Altitude, altitude. Oh my, have we made it to that other part of the show that's actually going to happen today? Blair's Animal Court? Yeah. I have some very exciting stories tonight. My absolute favorite one is all about honey bees. And would you believe it? They are their very own art critics. This is a piece of research actually coming out of a program in Australia on the television called the Great Australian Bee Challenge that involves having just random households raise their own bees, but also it involves some information about bees and some recent research on bees. So it's kind of brought some new attention to bees in general in Australia. But through this, we have learned that bees can tell the difference between different art styles, and they can learn that difference in just one afternoon. Yes. So there was research done in the past looking at, this is Dr. Judith Reinhardt's team from University of Queensland, Queensland, and this original study, they were able to train bees to tell the difference between paintings by Monet and Picasso. This study in particular took it one step further. They wanted to take two pretty abstract impressionists, but that had very different art styles as well. And so they wanted to compare and contrast Claude Monet and paintings by, here we go, Australian Indigenous artist, Non-Girna Maraweely. And so these pieces of art were, one piece of art from each artist was put in front of honeybees, and they put a small blue dot in the center of each of these paintings. They had right on that blue dot a little bit of sugar water. And every time they visited the Maraweely painting, it was just normal sugar water. Delicious. On the Monet painting, they had a little bit of quinine. So quinine, right? Quinine. But it's bitter. It doesn't hurt the bees, but it is bitter. So it doesn't make them want to go back. So they were building a preference to avoid the Monet and go for this Maraweely painting. So then they showed them two paintings by these artists the bees had never seen before. And every single bee in the study went straight to the correct painting by the Indigenous artist, not the Monet. So here's what's happening here as far as we can tell. Bees are really good at processing visual information. They have to find flowers, which are colorful and different textures. They have to be able to access all this different visual information. And they have excellent color vision, better than ours. Actually, I should say better than yours. Obviously better than mine. Bees can see ultraviolet. So it's different. It's better. It's more discerning for what they're looking at, which is flowers. And so if you think about what a painting is made out of, lots of different colors and also textures, which is the other thing they're looking at, structure, edges, things like that, these bees were really good at being able to identify a difference in type. So we know bees didn't evolve to differentiate between artists, but since they did evolve to be able to differentiate between flowers and the pollen inside and the nectar that they get, they're pretty well set up for this. And so what we've learned is that bees have this quick processing complex. They're able to process subtle visual information. And this can help us understand how bees forage. But I think what else is interesting is that they're calling this kind of the first situation where I'm trying to find exactly what verbiage they use, but basically they're like, this is the first rudimentary invertebrate that has been able to discern between visual cues of a type or something like that. But I would say, if anything, this gives us a really good idea of methodology for future tests on animals of this type. Because I think it puts it in a category and a frame that frame like a painting that we can understand as humans. But we're really just teaching them categorization. So I would bet you could teach a pigeon how to do this. They're really good at learning categorization. Yeah, but the other thing I immediately thought of is like, this would be an interesting application of being able to train bees. So a lot of farmers will raise bees, but it's sort of a little bit like raising ladybugs. Like you want them to pollinate your field or you want them to eat the aphids in your garden, but ladybugs will go and leave. They're adventurous. They're going to take off. They're not even going to come back. They're going to leave your garden because they're predisposed to. But if you, for instance, wanted your bees to only work at pollinating your cornfield or your soy field or your whatever, you could go through a few stages of training them on a plant with just visuals. And then once we're encountering the real thing, they'd stay on your field and those tomato fields across the road would look like nothing because that's always where the quinine is. It's a really interesting idea of animal husbandry that could come with this. Yeah, or if you know that colony collapse is potentially coming due to a hot spell or a cold spell or any number of things, you could potentially find a way to teach the bees to go somewhere else or go inside or yeah, there's lots of opportunities there, I think that you could use it for your own game or you could also use it in conservation in a pretty cool way. Nice. You could train bees away from invasive species. Yeah, I think that would be better. That would be a lot harder. But I don't know. Just put every picture of a wasp or an ant and make sure it tastes nice and better. Right. But I meant like other plant species. Oh. I thought you meant the zombies. No, I meant more along the lines of this is the plant we want to encourage pollination on in this field or in these meadows in this region. So you spend a little time training your bees with an incentive towards the image of the plants that are maybe the native or whatever and the quinine and the invasive, even though they're both beautiful flowers, whatever, and then which you set them out into the wild, maybe they avoid, maybe they only go to that plant that you're trying to get a foothold in the air. That's very fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. Well, moving on from bees to mice, also social creatures with complex relationships. The recent study looked at social relationships between mice. And if we think about the loner mouse, we think about the mouse maybe that was homeschooled and didn't play with other mice very often and didn't go away to college. So they really just stayed at home and did their studies went to the library went home. When it's time for that mouse to grow up and enter the working world, it might be difficult for that mouse to make friends. But now there's hope. So this is a new study from Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. And this was using a video-based behavioral analysis system for long-term behavioral tracking of mice in social situations. This software is called the Multiple Animal Positioning System, MAPS, and can automatically and separately analyze social behavior of multiple mice in group housing. So with MAPS, you can perform automated long-term video tracking of each mouse under social housing conditions. So you can really toy with different social relationships and see how mice react. And that's all what this study is about. This is looking at maternal separation and social isolation during development and how that affects their socio-emotional and cognitive behaviors as adults. So in this study, they took male mice and some of them were housed in groups and some of them were reared in social isolation during adolescence. I know. To be a lab mouse. Although honestly, this one probably not as bad as some other lab opportunities that are out there. But to detect behavioral differences between mice, they took mice from the same rearing background. So for loner mice, for social mice, and they were placed in chambers with all of the same type of mice in them, and then they recorded their behavior. Both groups of mice began to explore the experimental chamber almost immediately. But the way they kind of worked with each other was different. The group house mice began to huddle in one location within two hours right away. But the mice that were what I'm calling the loner mice, the mice reared in social isolation stayed far away from each other as they possibly could. Until two days later, they started to huddle together. So social isolation did result in a big way in deficient social relationship formation in adulthood. Now here's where it gets especially interesting. I'm not surprised by that so far. But it sounds like a Darwin award. But yeah. Yeah. So in the next experiment, they took two isolated and two group house mice. They put them together. The group house pair were huddled together right away. Of course, the two social mice found each other right away. The isolated pair stayed kind of far away from everybody else, including each other. And then when you saw them kind of mixed all together, the isolated mice, it took them more time to find the social life with the social mice. But it took way less time than when they were only with isolated mice all together. So the mixed house mice were a little bit intimidated by the extroverted mice. Right. And the introverted mice were able to talk to each other. It's like the peer pressure thing, right? Absolutely. But I think of it more like, oh, there's a new kid in school and some sweet child says, hi, nice to meet you. Do you want to see where I like to eat my lunch? That really seems what that's like to me is that there's a mouse that's used to talking to other mice for lack of a better phrase. And so they keep going up to this mouse that's kind of antisocial and it kind of forces them out of their comfort zone. It forces them to make that connection a little bit faster. Whereas if everybody's off in their separate corner, you're kind of at a standstill and you still have to wait for one of those isolated mice to make the first move to kind of get everybody in together. So this shows us that they really do respond to the social background of other mice that they're housed with. And one of the lead professors also says, additionally, visual observation of video images revealed that the group house mice reduced their activity or even became immobile when approached by others, which suggests that this low activity or being composed might be an important factor for establishing social relationships. So this actually might have some implications on humans. Obviously, we're not taking humans that are in isolation and throwing them into a nightclub to be like, here, figure out how to be social. But if we can use this maps system to really evaluate kind of what the body language of a social mouse is and how mice that don't have that body language kind of vocabulary, how they respond and how they warm up, it's actually something that we could potentially use in humans that have social difficulties. So people with autism spectrum. Exactly. Or you could go a lot less extreme than that and just say like, I was thrown into a lab. Okay. I feel like the first social mouse that the place has ever seen. Right. Yeah, exactly. But so yeah, so there's something to be said there about recognizing different humans roles in an environment for sure. But also I think if you're looking at humans with special needs, there are opportunities here to find out how to work with individuals to learn those social behaviors and become integrated in society because that's what everybody wants. And it might be a thing like I've heard talked about like the, you know, separating kids with those special needs may not be their benefit. Such a good point. Exactly. Absolutely. Yeah. There we go. Maps for mice. Maps for mice. Let's go to some quick, quick stories for the end of the show. I want to talk a little bit about Baby Talk. Researchers at York University discovered by looking at babies who were raised in families that speak more than one language at home that they looked at these babies brains while they were listening to languages and they found that an area of the brain responsible for attention is actually getting into development earlier in these babies brains. And so what it means, what the implications are, is that learning a language turns on your attentional system and the attentional system is something that underlies all of cognition. So if you can imagine a little baby lying around listening to these languages trying to go, oh, that's a language. Oh, that's a different language. Oh, I got to pay attention to that. I got to pay attention. You know, figuring out what these influential people in their life are saying to them and how they can respond using those kinds of words. The complexity of multiple languages stresses the attentional system in a way and forces it to pay more attention. And that leads to advantages in the brain that are recognized throughout life. And so this is this is potentially why learning a language when you're young, learning more than one language when you're young is beneficial. Why learning a musical instrument when you're young is beneficial. I think this study, if looked at a little more deeply, I think that that's really what we're going to see here. I would think there's a lot of people out there that probably think, oh, I don't want to speak multiple languages to my baby when they're first learning because I don't want to confuse them. I don't want to, you know, make it harder for them to learn. But you're actually helping them. That's really good to know. I like that. You're super stimulating the brain into action. Yes. Yeah. So it's good for good for the brain. Absolutely. And maybe now we know why. Blair, Justin, do you have more stories? Oh, I have a two sentence one. For the first time ever, the axolotl genome has been sequenced. This is at University of Kentucky, I believe. And the thing that's really cool about that is that it's enormous. It's about 10 times larger than the human genome. But the reason this is really interesting is that the axolotl is famous for being able to regenerate limbs, tail, spinal cord, eye, the lens of the eye, half of the brain. And so being able to crack this genome is the first step to understanding how they do that. And if there's anything there that we can use to help us do that. They're also super cute. And they are cute. So let's understand them more. I like it. Justin, what's your last story? This is a church turns to science to save it from nature. So there have been diagrams when it comes to just about anything. Apples and oranges, for instance, are often used as things disparately apart from one another. And yet they are both round, both edible, both growing trees, both have seeds, and are both popular forms of juices. So stop using those disparately different things, people. Nature in science overlaps so much that it's often hard to talk about one without mentioning the other. But what about church in nature? What about church in science? These things don't seem to have as much overlappiness. However, in the following story, church science and nature find a way to overlap. It's all thanks to fungi. Scientific survey at eighth century old cathedral Seva Sevela Cumbria, old cathedral Cumbria, which is the only Romanesque cathedral in Portugal to have survived relatively intact since ancient times. Scientists retrieved a particular peculiar slow growing microcolonial black fungus from the crevices of this ancient church. The culprits lodge branch like structures into the stones forming fissures and cracks, also producing polysacrades that trigger corrosion. Which is not an ideal situation seeing as though this is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Oh yeah, don't want that to happen. So after sampling it was determined that this was a species of a whole new family in the order of the sooty mold fungi. Scientists hypothesized the species may have arrived at the old cathedral with the limestone that was used for its construction. This limestone came from nearby and such limestone also happens to have been used on many statues and various other periodic construction. So these are also sites that have different black fungus issues. So this family of fungi are well known for their unique resistance to extreme temperatures, high solar and UV radiation, severe droughts and low abundance of nutrients. They can survive in hot cold frozen deserts, salty acidic hydrocarbon contaminated sites, and deep down in size open exposed rock surfaces. Basically they don't care where they are, they're gonna thrive. So scientists are being called in to study and see if they can come up with something that will fight this black mold that is tearing down the churches. This is therefore a crucial cody voice of one of the researchers. To gather deeper knowledge regarding their biodiversity, their biological, ecological and physiological unique characteristics in order to span our knowledge regarding these fungi and at the same time allow the development, improvement of tools to protect stone monuments from their deteriorative effects. Yeah, you found this fungus that eats rocks, eats the stone of these old buildings that took hundreds of years to build sometimes and we don't necessarily want them to fall apart thanks to nature. But how do you kill something that is extreme in its ability to survive? Yeah, I find some sort of irony. Is this ironic or is it, I don't know, there's something, there's something about, there's something about having to save a church with science. An 800 year old, do you have to also reframe the time frame of this? The 800 year old church now has to rely on science to survive. Is it irony? Is that how that works? A little bit. It took a while. You know, it also took a while. Oh, the show? 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And all it'll cost you is a couple of grand. Science is coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method for all that it's worth. And I'll broadcast my opinion all over the Earth. Cause it's 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 one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That's 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 get understand. But we're not trying to threaten your philosophy. We're just trying to save the world from jeopardy. And this week in science is coming your way. So everybody listen to everything we say. And if you use our methods to better roll and die. We may rid the world of toxoplasma. Got the eye. Cause it's 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 thoughts. And I'll try to answer any question you've got. The help can I ever see the changes I seek. When I can only set up shop one hour a week. This week in science is coming your way. You better just listen to what we say. And if you learn anything from the words we said. Then please just remember it's all in your head. Because it's this week in Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This This weekend science, this weekend science, this weekend science, this weekend science, this weekend science, this weekend science. I'm muted and I'm tired. Uh oh. I am so tired. Seriously, I'm like, and energy, where did that go? Maybe I should sit here with my eyes open and fall asleep. I don't sleep with my eyes open. Oh, that would be creepy. Okay, I have a question. I'm trying to figure out answer to. I don't know if there is an alternative but for our live twist show. Do you think, I mean, do you think it would be a problem if it's not in Portland proper? If it's in like downtown Vancouver, which is just north of the Columbia River. Like Canada? No. No, Vancouver, Washington. What's happening? No, Vancouver, Washington. That's not close. That's very far, Kiki. So it's in a different state. Yeah, but not. I mean, it's like just up the road. It's like, it's over a bridge. So I always get weird going over bridges. I have a problem going downtown. It's like this huge track, even though it's only like 12 minutes away. I would be excited to cross another state off of my list. I've never seen a state of Washington. Yeah, identity four, that's your state. Yeah. So everyone, we're working on getting this twist podcast thing working out. And there was a theater that we were looking at in town. I don't know if we'll be able to do it or not. But if we do, we may have, not have good internet there, which doesn't mean it's undoable. I just have to know that I can bring a wifi hotspot. Right. You know, I have, with my cellular service, I can bring the hotspot, but if there's bad cellular coverage in the theater, then that is not going to work. So, yeah. Yeah. So the wifi may be an issue at this little theater that I was looking forward to in town. Right. But then there's also, I guess, some kind of contract issue. And so maybe we might have to do it in Vancouver. Yeah. Which is just a little bit more of a drive, but I'm just afraid. I'm like, will people come? Yeah. I'm not on the list of places that are possible father. Because I'm doing this in conjunction with a group science on tap and also with science talk for the conference. And so there are particular contracts in place for the theaters they use and how many times a month they get to use them or, you know, the various aspects. And so, yeah. So I'm a bit confused, but I don't know. I just have a thing. Why Vancouver though? Because that's where one of their, because they try and hit different locations, Portland on both sides of the river in the port, greater Portland metro area. And so, yeah, those, those are not, I know, I love those ideas father, but they're not on the list of theaters. So, and since this isn't just a lone twist thing, it has to be, it's with science on tap. So it has to be through their theaters. But so, yeah. I know. Vancouver, Canada, maybe we'll just go there. We're not going to go there, but I just, I have a drive, a thing about driving just a little bit further and I'm afraid nobody will come. I'm afraid none of my friends from Portland will come. Like if it's raining or something, they'll be like, I don't want to go outside. That's in Vancouver. Why nobody goes, who goes to Vancouver if you're in Portland? I know. We need a bus. You're right. With us. I'll drive. I know. Oh, you got a bus. Justin got a bus project down the road. Yeah, it's, I haven't picked it up yet. I'm actually still plotting when I'm going to do this. Where is it located? It's Bakersfield, which is about 300 miles straight shop, 300 miles of driving. It's not like it's out of state or anything though. No, which is actually part of why it managed to fit criteria when some elements of the bus may not have. For instance, does not have a working speedometer. Oh, so I started Googling how to fix the speedometer on this year, uh, make or type of vehicle type. And I was like, okay, there's resets you can do. There's like all the stuff, but it's stuck at a position. It says it's going 45 miles an hour, which means it's a motor, which is this whole other thing. And I started to delve into YouTube videos on how to fix the motors. I'm like, ah, this is really annoying. It's sodding irons and buying parts. And like, there must be a better way. And so I found a GPS speedometer. 40 bucks. So I bought it. The thing is you had to, I had to choose between a USB mod and when it plugs into a USB or a cigarette lighter. And, uh, I'm like, okay. So the bus is a pretty old. It's a 94. Probably didn't have a USB, right? No chance. Um, but it's also probably too new to be a school bus with a cigarette lighter. Like, like it's 1970 something bus may have still had a cigarette lighter. So, you know, the bus driver was covered, but I figured this one probably didn't. So I have this little booster, this, this, uh, jump box. It's a very tiny jump box, but it can, it can handle a large, uh, a large term on a vehicle, which also has USBs for charging phones. So I got this thing. I plugged it into my little battery pack. And I sat down off on the road to test it, to see how accurate it was. And right off, I was like, oh, this is rough. I'm going 14 miles an hour. It says I'm going 22 miles an hour. Like, well, at least I won't be speeding. And then, and then I like thought about it for a while because it was still off the whole time I was driving. Pull over, pull out the little user manual. Ah, hold down the button, bing, convert from kilometers to miles per. Suddenly this thing is absolutely in sync with my speedometer in my vehicle. Uh, so I solved that problem. I have now a GPS speedometer that, uh, can overcome the deficit and never have to repair the, the analog thingy that's in this vehicle. So as long as I have satellites, I suppose, uh, I'll be able to drive with a speedometer. And I still haven't even seen the bus. This bus is still 300 miles away, but I'm already fixing it. I'm already working on it. How did you find it? Uh, I found it through an online auction. Uh, I'd been perusing interwebs for a real long time. There was a certain criteria I was looking for. I had been looking at newer and I had been looking at a completely different engine and transmission. And, uh, closest I found was like one that was more expensive than this, but it was in Eastern, uh, Colorado. That's far. You have to drive through. It's far. And in an unknown vehicle, which went on these auctions, unless you go and inspect them, all you really know is that maybe they run. Uh, but you don't know a whole lot beyond that. So this was the closest, the cheapest, and it, uh, the size criteria was exactly what I wanted. So it's a gas engine instead of a diesel. I've been looking at diesel to get better gas mileage. It's supposed to last longer specific types of brands of diesel, please. Um, but then I realized I'm not going to be doing that, that long term of trips and I'm not going to be putting a lot of miles on. So I don't need the indestructibility of certain diesel engines, uh, that I'd been initially looking at. And the worst gas mileage, uh, is going to be okay because it's not going to be. Uh, I don't expect it to be doing as you know, I'm not going to be cross countrying in this thing. And the cost of replacing this particular, uh, GMC made engine is much cheaper than any of the others. Uh, and it's, it's still largely available in production because it was a common engine for a very long time. So, and, but the big thing was it's the longest of the short buses. So it's the, it's, it's the, uh, a little more manageable. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it'll have more room than, uh, than some of the others that were, were out there. Are you going to paint over the windows? Nope. Really? No. And, uh, so there's this thing. Are you going to have curtains? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Okay. I'm actually going to, I'm going to tear out the interior, not just like take out the seats, but I'm going to pull up the floors and the take down the ceiling and the walls and the insulate everything too. The other big hurdle of a question I have is whether or not to raise the roof on it because at right about the six foot mark, once I add insulation to roof and ceiling for this other, uh, size, I won't be able to stand up straight. Raising the roof seems like it'd be really expensive though. Uh, it's not so much the expense of it as it is a lot of welding and metal fabrication and, uh, yeah, it's pretty, it's a pretty aggressive thing. And because I do love the native windows, uh, I don't want to replace them with the RV side slidey ones. I like the up at the down, uh, and I like windows all around. I like the light. I don't want to, I'm not going to be blocking things off the sheet metal. And this one because of its extra length also has a weird emergency door. It's got the one all the way in the back, but it also has a street side driver side door, which is not a usual thing and makes the roof raise much more complicated. Saving the windows is, is, uh, complicated with the roof raise. Having that extra door to, to, to build around two is a whole other extra layer. So I'm determined at this point, uh, whether or not if I get it home, it makes the trip, uh, whether or not, uh, I would just be willing to live with it being a little bit shorter than me. You probably could live with it. Most of the time you would just be driving it or sleeping or sitting and eating or watching, watching stuff on the internet. Yeah. How are you going to get internet in there? Satellite man. No, no, I won't be, I probably wouldn't bother a satellite. Satellite has download, but zero upload. So just go to an RV, RV place and do, do just all the RV hookups. Well, actually I can honestly, I'll probably just use cell signal. And, uh, when it comes to the show, I'd probably on the Wednesdays, I'll probably be pulling up next to a Starbucks somewhere, which I hear there's a few of them around for Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi is so unreliable. Yeah. Okay. So here's the other aspect of this. I mean, I'm not, this is, we're talking a year from now, by the way. Yeah. Year long build, but it, and, and with some other caveats of, uh, being able to lease some farmland, uh, to, to, to plant it on, uh, Justin could be a little bit less high def, uh, in future episodes. Less high def, huh? Yeah. I mean, there's, there's some potential with my, uh, current work being maybe amiable to me doing the show from our facilities. That would be great. This would be good internet, most likely. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Uh, that, that is one discussion that's taking place. Another would be, uh, the, the, there is a potential of having really good Wi-Fi, uh, that most people aren't willing to pay for. So one of the other, uh, possibilities is that I have a friend who's got a, a street that has plenty of parking and I pay for their, their, I pay for them to have a higher speed internet connection. Right. And then you have a, you have the password. And yeah. And I, and I just, you know, uh, utilize it on the Wednesdays and tell them not to be watching movies or whatever. Right. So there's lots of, there's lots of workarounds. Uh, so far I've dedicated about it's, it's things I think, I think I've got it set. It's about 14, maybe 14 and a half feet long, uh, four feet on either side is already going to be counter space and kitchen. Um, the bed takes up one whole side. It's going to be a toilet. Maybe not, maybe not a shower. Uh, I might just get a gym membership instead. When we get to that year from now, if I decided to try to do this full-time career. Um, but, but I do, I do, I am very curious to see, uh, what the energy usage is of the things like the monitor, the sound board and the microphone. Are you going to put solar panels on this thing? Yes. Okay. It's going to be solar and it's going to have the onboard water. Yeah. Because I know with, um, the, we get our, we, we had to get an inverter for the, um, water filtration system and stuff that worked off of the, the, uh, van engine. And, um, there was parts of it that worked really well and there were parts of it that were a little complicated and were never quite right. Well, so, so part of this, part of this too is, and that's just the ratio I still need to get sorted is how much of it do I really need as far as solar versus how much, uh, battery capacity. So, so if you think about it, you know, if I'm not, if I have this, this, this large solar, uh, array on the roof, but not a whole lot of battery, it's just not going to last that long because it's only stored so much. Whereas if I have a lot of battery storage and even a weak solar array and I don't tap into it that often, I can actually bank enough to do a two and a half hour show like tonight. Right. Um, so there's lots of, lots of stuff to investigate yet still that I haven't figured out. You guys, there's measles up here. Yeah. Is that up there? Yes. Oh, God. It's not in my house, but it's a huge thing. It's showing up in, in unfortunately, liberal bastions of anti-vac mentality. And it's not even necessarily, no, it's not even necessarily liberal. No, it's, um, but I mean, the, the population where it started is in, uh, Southern Washington state across the river. And antivac preppers. Yes. Yes. Like the other sided things. Um, yeah, but they're, they, like so far it's like 34. I, there was some number I read today, 34 out of 38 people infected were not vaccinated or 34 to 38 people hospitalized so far and were not vaccinated. Oh, not hospital. I wasn't just infected. I don't think we were aggressive enough with the messaging, uh, at the time this anti-vac stuff was going on because. Yeah. Uh, because there was the, the idea that mercury, uh, in the vaccines was causing autism. And so even though there was no evidence to it, and there's still no evidence to it, right? They pulled mercury as the preservative, right? And they've pulled it. They've pulled it from flu vaccines. They've pulled it from all sorts of vaccines. And then in the following years, rates of, uh, flu and, uh, autism actually rose to which I had asserted that means then you have to, you have to assume, uh, based on the, the littlest detail of knowledge that you've applied to this, that mercury actually prevents autism and reduces flu symptoms. Therefore we need more mercury than with their previous. Well, I mean, this is as logical as the argument was against in the first place. So, yeah. Um, nothing, nothing about the, the, the, this conversation or this argument against the vaccines has, has really made, and, and yes, there's a possibility that you will survive the measles, the mumps, the influenza, the whatever, just the whooping cop, whatever, without having gotten the vaccine. But now you have a person walking around unvaccinated who is carrying and killing elderly or young or immune suppressed folks. There's a, even if you can get away with not needing it, you're actually causing societal harm by not having joined the, the, the, the rest of us who have attempted to eliminate this as a thing that kills pandemically. That's just, there's no argument for that. I've ever heard that, like I even think is rational. Nope. Nope. I mean, if you can't get vaccinated because of a medical condition or a health condition, that's one thing, but you can get vaccinated, get vaccinated, protect people. I need to do this. I mean, we had measles butt kicked. Like over a decade ago, right? And it's coming and it's come back because of people not vaccinating. And it's just stupid. And because people aren't vaccinated enough, there's the possibility that there might be some kind of resistance forming in measles. And so maybe we'll have to come up with another vaccine later. Yeah. So there's a lot of sorts of questions right now about whether or not measles is possibly mutating in some pockets to be, to be resistant. But we don't know that for sure, but it's a, it's a question. It's a question. Silly. And then, so there's this article that like, you know, the local coin television, they published an article. I got so mad at them because they, everything was at first all about the science and everything. And then it's like, oh, journalism, we've got to show both sides. Show both sides. Even if one doesn't make any sense, isn't representative and is wrong. And they did. And they picked this woman who, and then the, of course to share the article, they use her as the tweet. So she's the one getting the quote and getting the PR and getting public exposure. And she's, you know, an author and has written a book and her thing was, well, everybody should just eat, eat nutritious foods to support our immune systems and then we'll be fine. And, you know, I think people should get measles because then they'll have lifelong resistance and be protected from cancer. Those of us that survive. Those of us who survive. And I mean, this doesn't take into account people who are immune suppressed and have issues and like, I'm like, not, I mean, no, it's that. I'm so angry. I'm so angry. But I'm also very tired. It's just frustrating because other health issues, nobody's going to tell you to like, not take medical advances. Like if you break your arm, these same people for the most part aren't going to say like, oh, well, you don't know what those chemicals in the cast that they make do for you. So you should just, you know, put it in a sling and call it a day or like, oh, it's good for you. It'll like, it'll make your bones stronger. But you know, you're saying this and there actually is an interesting resurgence. And I mean, Justin, maybe like you hit on it is kind of, I don't know if it's the prepper community, but there's something that surrounds that and kind of a housewife, Pinterest kind of prepper community. Like people are questioning, you know, oh, we shouldn't, you know, why do we use toothpaste? You know, we could just, you know, pick up a thing. I mean, I know Justin, you do your own toothpaste thing sometimes, but I know you do. Because also if you, if you, if you brush your teeth with chicken soup, like literally you, you do almost as much good as if you just use toothbrush. Yeah, brushing your teeth is good. Yeah. But there's this, there's this pulling thing where there's like a, there's like this waxy chew that you do where it's like, they call it pulling and you're supposed to chew on this stuff, this thick stuck stuff in your mouth. And it's like, you know, it goes way back, you know, and so it's people relying on old ideas, you know, what, what was passed down, right? You know, it's like, yeah. And I'm like, really? I mean, yes, some old things are good and they've survived, but, you know, new things are not all bad because they're new and modern technology and products, a lot of them are good. I mean, yes, sure question, but there just seems to be this whole, like, I don't know, it's very interesting. And I think it is part of the anti-vax. I think it is part of this. Yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting, weird and a bit scary actually. Everyone, everyone have their own thing, but, you know, I mean, it really is, it's questioning what we have achieved. Yeah. And sometimes I agree with it. I agree. Look, I agree with, with the way that midwives approach childbirth versus the way hospitals do. And I, and, and I'm going to argue with you there. I love the midwife approach, but have it in a hospital where there's medical support. Yeah, but you also like how far away is that phone call? Like, I mean, like. Yeah. Yeah, we'll argue about that. Yeah, we can always argue about all these things, but one of the, there is, there is the problem with all of these arguments is that there is a grain of truth. Yeah, that's exactly why somebody starts down the road of. But there might be a better way. Yeah. Which is the whole point, like it's the whole field of medicine is us trying to find the best way to keep everyone from dying. Or the whole healthier, live, not necessarily not die, but live healthier lives while you're alive. And also to bring the entire show full circle. This kind of was my disclaimers. Like you can ask a question and Google and get an answer. Yeah. Right. But a lot of the times the grant might not necessarily be a reliable answer and the grammar of your question. If you don't have a depth of knowledge in this field, when you first ask a first question into a field, you know nothing about it may answer very little for you. You may have misinterpreted the entire premise of the field that you are asking the question in. And the problem, I think it becomes a people's ability to continue to learn and work through all of the layers of detail to get to a thing where they can actually make an informed decision. And so. Yeah, that's what we've jobs died because he didn't believe cancer couldn't be cured by meditation and nutrition. Yep. It happens. There's, there's, you know, there's, there's not a, there's no vaccine. Or. Believing what you want out of the information. Yeah. So anyways. It does seem like to me and it's the after show. So I'm going to say something that's probably a little bit like, like, like controversial, but it, it stems from like two very specific like narcissistic areas to me is like the selfishness that the gamble that I make with my own child is not going to affect other people. I don't care how that's going to affect other people. Yeah. But secondarily that I am the exception to the statistics. It is, you know what? Maybe all these other people needed medical intervention, but I am just going to try super hard and do everything exactly right. And I will be the one that didn't need the medicine. And I feel like it is this very like it's this inward thinking instead of this community based thinking, which I think is something that's kind of missing from this narrative is, is we need to find a way to communicate about this where it's not, you're being stupid. You're not listening. You need to vaccinate. It's the right thing to do. Instead of saying the packing and not going to get through to anybody as a community. We protect each other in all these different ways. We get car insurance so that if I run into you, I can pay for your car. And if you run into me, you can pay for my car and we pay taxes. So all our children have schools and we need to get vaccines for our children so that every child in our community, even the immunocompromised ones, stay healthy and alive. And like it needs to be this community based thing, which unfortunately, because our society has privatized healthcare, that is a difficult way to go. If, if healthcare was public and universal, then it would be very easy to say, this is just like your taxes. Get your kids vaccinated. But like, because it's already this so specific privatized, specialized individual thing. It, it, I think it makes an extra barrier in the conversation. And part of it also I think has to do with trust. I mean, one of the, one of the things that like is the source of my distrust of dentists. For instance, is having been lied to by enough people in that profession to where I'm like, I, you know what? I discount all of the knowledge base of that entire field at a point where like, eh, I don't, I really don't trust anything a dentist says about the health of tea. At this point, I honestly don't. I really don't. I found a dentist I trust. And I think it comes down to, you know, if you find a mechanic, you trust which auto mechanic. It's a doc doctors and mechanic. The dentist is a mechanic auto auto mechanic and mechanic. You know, you find the person you trust, right? And that's also part of it. Right. But I mean, I think it has to do with whether you trust. Government in general. And versus, you know, and you infer that to the vaccine that's being read recommended it. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a lot of societal trust issues. I think that are at the basis of a lot of these resistances to things that may be like public health policy that are based on science that fought their way to become a public health policy against government. Maybe even. Well, and to your point, like perceived as big government or other, it's attached to other things that they don't have trust in. Well, so with the dentist, why do people not trust dentists because they think that they're giving them unnecessary procedures to pay for their next Cadillac or whatever, right? And so if you think about the medical field, even if you take like the every child must get vaccinated regulation sort of thing aside completely. And you just say, my doctor told me I need this vaccine. Based at, you know, as someone who was royally messed over by health care billing and taken advantage of in that way. And I had to deal with it for years afterwards financially. It was a problem. I understand why people might have a distrust when a doctor tells you you need a thing and you know you're going to show up and have to pay for it later. So if it was less of a profit based system and less of a private based system and it was more covered and people had insurance and you didn't have to pay for things to the extent that you do, you know, it might be easier to be told by a doctor like this is what I would recommend for you at this time. You need this vaccine before you go to college whatever it is. If if you're not thinking about all this other distrust and this cloud of concern around your health care, if all you had to worry about was this is my doctors. This is my doctor's recommendation in my personal best interest period. But I wonder if it also I wonder if it also because if you look at the timeline, I wonder if this is also if there's some sort of correlation between the over prescription of antidepressants and things like Ritalin and the age of parents today who are against vaccination. Oh, interesting. That's right because that was a huge wave that hit right about the time that people would be parents today. And if you were for being prescribed stuff that you maybe didn't really need and messed with your head or caused issues as a youth and now you're an adult and just permanently don't trust the advice of doctors because you were being prescribed stuff that you in retrospect may not have needed like that wave hit right about the time that people who are not vaccinating their kids are now in adulthood. There's a lot of interesting. Could be an interesting connection. So somebody out there do the study because right. Yeah. But the CDC does there's a vaccines for children program. So even if you're especially if you're low income, middle income probably don't qualify. But there's this vaccines for children program where the CDC buys vaccines and distributes them to state health departments and public health agencies and then those agencies distribute the vaccines to private physicians office and public health clinics. And so for some, you know, it's they try to make it easy. The CDC, the government is there like this is an important public health issue. We are part of this. Yeah. I really like that at my workplace, the nurse comes to the zoo for I think it's two days, two weeks in a row, different days. So you hit everybody because you know we're open seven days a week and we all get the flu vaccine. And it's just so every time I like kind of skip up to the trailer and I go take the vaccine. Everyone's like, why are you so excited about a shot? I was like, yeah, free health care. I'm excited. I don't have to make an appointment. I don't have to go into the doctor's office. I don't have to remember, put it on my things to do list. No, they're just at work. And I just take a nice stretch of the legs, walk and get my coffee, walk up, get poked, go back down. And then you have a sore arm for the rest of the day. And then maybe two days. Hopefully, yeah. I'm tired. My child is over here sleeping, but I'm going to try and carry him up the stairs. He's heavy now. It's like 70 pounds. He's hard to carry up three flights of stairs. I know. It's not too long from now, Kiki, that you'll be able to tell him Marshall's not home. Hey, I have twists. Go read in the other room. I don't want to hear a peep. Put yourself to bed. Stop that. You were not going to be that mother. I do not believe that. But he will be able to be a little more independent so soon. I can't believe it. It's just hard. I mean, I'm all the way down in the basement and have his bedrooms all the way upstairs. That would be kind of, you know. It's very far. It's far away for a little kid. You have to be in a state where you're not going to be able to do that. It's for that to work. Which will probably come sooner than you want it anyway. So no need to rush it. No, no, right now. Come on. I was silly. All right. I will say that I know that. I at work. You never can tell what kind of parent you're going to be, right? Like, the dogs that you are planning on. They don't. I'm the bad cop for sure. But I think there is something to be said, and people always get mad at me when I liken working with children to training animals. But it is a similar mental process. If you're like a child trying to test boundaries and you're an animal trying to figure out, you you want to actually encourage the children to test boundaries because it's them finding their feet. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. That's the difficult most difficult part. No, it's not quite the same as animal training. No, no, no. It's not the same. It's not the same, Blair. You're totally wrong. Okay. Let me finish. I'm not saying all together it's the same, but I'm saying that something that I think, you know, at least working with teenagers in isolation, just in the teenager realm that I think is consistent between those two realms is that like if you set a boundary, you have to follow through with it. And, you know, it's something that I know teens don't like at the start of our relationship at the beginning of their volunteer tenure. And by the end, a lot of them appreciate the investment because they recognize that it takes more work to stick with things and to follow through with somebody that's maybe difficult. And so I think. And I hope your kids have that fortitude. Say goodnight, Blair. Okay. Well, now that you've just made me sound like a jerk, we can go ahead and end. No, it's just it's about like emotional investment and follow through. All right. Time. Anyway. All right. Not yet, Mama Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. I am exhausted. I will see you all next week. And yeah, Twitch stream 1pm Friday, twitch.tv slash Dr. Kiki, if you're interested. Other than that, catch you on the social medias and we will talk to you in a week. Bye, everybody. There's my button. There it is.