 Okay, you ready to do a show? I definitely don't know how to do it. How is it? Testing? Testing, testing. Get up on it. Get up on it. Get up on it. Good. Are we doing an audio check, sir? We are going to be recording our podcast. So for a moment. Testing, testing, testing, testing. Hello. Thanks everyone for coming and sitting in bleachers here with us for podcast hour. Did everyone dance like a peacock spider already? If at any point you feel the need to be a peacock spider. Perfect. A wonderful display. You can go dance with the spiders. Are we good? Good morning. Okay, fantastic. Are we ready? Always. Is everyone here ready? Let's have a show. Starting in. Let's see if I can make this phone work. It's not my phone. I'm going to have music. Starting in. Three, two, this is twist. This week in science episode number 754 recorded on Thursday, January 16th, 2020. Live at Sketchfest, 2020. I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight we will fill your heads with a hot target grade. We will have a show where you can find the best spots and sugar pigs. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Despite all the rescue animals you have posted on social media, regardless of how much time you have spent separating your recycling, disrespectful of your attempts to buy locally sourced organics, in full middle finger to every hybrid vehicle on the road, the world is coming to a hot end and it's all your fault. You're silent opposition to fossil fuel industry lobbyists when unheard. You did nothing radical and nothing radical happened and so nothing stopped the climate from radically changing. It's all your fault. When you aren't alone, there are billions of others just like you. There is anonymity in such big numbers and with the whole human species implicated in the crime, there is no shortage of witnesses and accomplices to point at. It's all your fault. Okay, you're making this feel great. We feel safe thinking things will get better. That somewhere, somebody else is adulting, but positive thinking without action is just mental masturbation. And while masturbation does have its perks, it probably won't save the world and it's all your fault. What happens next is this. All of humanity gets science educated in a hurry, supporting emergency federal funding for science at military spending levels. Scientists do their magic when it's saved and it will be all your fault because you tuned into this week in science. Coming up next. Yeah, baby. Over, there we go. Everybody can dance if you want. It's mandatory. It's mandatory dancing. It's everybody's doing it. You're not gonna be the weird one. What's happening? Good. Science to you. And a good science to you too. Justin Blair and everyone here at Cal Academy the sketch fest tonight tonight. Thank you all for coming and joining us tonight. We are so excited to be here, and I am absolutely thrilled that weather be darned. Yeah, San Francisco is going to get here. It's hard. It's shut down whole freeways when it rains here, but we're here. We did it. We are here. Yes, the freeways might be flooded, but we have made it and we're so happy. We have a great show. Hopefully, you'll enjoy it. We have a good show ahead tonight. I have stories about life, the universe, and everything. You know, the small stuff. Yeah, followed it. And those sugar pigs, I mentioned just a minute ago. Sugar pigs. They're so sweet. What do you have, Justin? I'm not eating a gummy bear, but like bacon flavored. No. No? Okay, we'll find out. I've got robot embryos, G-spots around your massive black hole, and why humans suck at being earthworms. Oh boy. Okay, we're getting into some real deep talks there. Okay, fill it. Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, I have hot tardigrades. I have toxoplasmosis, and I have bad taste. I'm so sorry. And bad taste. Yeah. You're fitting it finally. Oh, God. How dare you? It comes from me. That's what's amazing. All right, let's jump into the show. But before we do, I want to raise, everyone raise your hand. Are you subscribed to this weekend science? Oh, all of these people, without any hands raised, I implore you, find this weekend science. We are on all podcast directories where you like to get your podcasts. Look for this weekend science. We're also on YouTube and Facebook. Just look for this weekend science. Or you can go to our website, twisttwis.org. You can find us, we're there. We have like 20 years worth of shows. So there's a lot of material there. If you want to go back into the deep history of science, 20 years old history of science. Let's get into it. Talking about old things, researchers published a paper in which they talked about a new method to look at meteorites and to determine the age of materials within the meteorites. They reported finding little space granules that are 7 billion years old on our planet from a meteorite that struck our planet on the continent of Australia. They found this meteorite back in the 60s and really just were like, oh look, it's a nice hunk of space metal. That's great. But they knew there were little interesting bits to it and it was only now, decades later, that with technology we were able to look at the way that cosmic rays have influenced material within this meteorite. A lot of these granules are made up of a compound called carborundum, silicon carbide, very hard stuff, very common in our universe actually. This silicon carbide gets affected by cosmic rays and the longer the cosmic rays are puk puk puking into these little teeny tiny bits which hundreds of them could fit on like the dot at the end of a sentence, the period at the end of a sentence, hundreds of these little space granules, little dust particles could fit in a period. And so cosmic rays have been puk puk puking, hitting these little teeny tiny particles for billions of years and over that time it affected the makeup of that molecule and changed its isotopic characteristics. So it is a slightly heavier molecule than it was previously and so they were able to use a new way of looking at these carborundum bits to determine the age of these little teeny tiny particles within this meteorite. They found a wide range of dates, the oldest probably around seven billion years old. So our sun note, four point a half billion years old. So is this, can we consider this an interstellar object because it's been floating around since before our sun was there? The meteorite itself is not an interstellar object. These dust particles are. I mean, everything in the universe came from something once upon a time. We had this wonderful astronomy presentation prior to our podcast where we talked about how once upon a time it was all energy and then things coalesced and things swished into other things and then they started turning into matter and things that we could see. And over time, stars started developing. We know that stars, when they reach a certain size they reach a certain age. They're gonna go supernova and when they go supernova they spew heavy elements everywhere. And so that starts the seeding of materials all over the universe. And then those little bits and pieces go into other stars, the later generations of stars. And what this research actually found which is really interesting is they found many different ages of dust particles from just about 4.6 billion years old which is slightly older than our solar system to seven billion years. And they had some in there around five billion years old. And what is said to them is that there were periods of star formation. So kind of like a fireworks display where a little firework goes off. Pew, a firework goes off and then you get to the finale and it's like boom boom boom boom boom and there's all sorts of fireworks going at once. There were different periods of star formation in which they were way more active than other periods. And they discovered this because these granules travel through space together. Some of them are kind of sticky, they said. So there are these little tiny space particles that float around in groups based on where they came from and when they came to be. And this all came from a meteorite that landed out in the middle of nowhere in Australia. Yay. Yeah, Australia. Good, brilliant, cool, of course, brilliant. So fire. Yeah, but moving on another story that I thought was really amazing this week published about phosphorus. How many people think about phosphorus on a regular basis? Oh my goodness, there's a lot of hands coming up here. Okay, very surprising. But phosphorus is a very important molecule for what? Matches. Matches, you can say matches. How about agriculture? Yes, fertilizer. How about life? Life? Yeah, very important for life. And so researchers have been trying to figure out, right? Those magic ingredients for life. Where did life come from? Well, you have to have the starting blocks somewhere. So where does phosphorus come into it? And they use the Atacama radio array in Atacama, Chile, the Arecibo radio telescope in Chile to look out into the universe, into areas of star formation and new galaxy formation and looking out that way. You found radio signals that told them that in these massively dynamic areas where things are being created and big forces are happening on astronomical scales that there are these pockets of gas, of empty space that open up within the smashing and the bashing and the crashing and the making. And the empty pockets along the walls of the pockets, phosphorus forms, that's where phosphorus shows up. And it's from those little pockets in the middle of these astronomical galactic birth places where phosphorus comes from. And then they went another step. They looked at a comet. We had a reset emission that went and looked at the comet, a 67P Garrison Mob chair manco and this comet, it's amazing. We set a crap there. We have amazing high resolution images of this comet but also the image, not just the images but we have information about materials on this comet and whole low and behold, phosphorus is on this comet. It's not just on our planet. And so they tracked from these pockets in space in the middle of space, back to our solar system. Phosphorus, this track of life thinking that if there's phosphorus on comets and once upon a time our planet was bombarded by comets that perhaps this is how Earth got the building block. One of the very important building blocks for life and that comets are how it traveled through space to make it possible. And knowing how common this is as an effect throughout space. Life is everywhere and all that's the only conclusion I can come to. Well, I feel like it's hubris to assume that all of the building blocks for life started and ended on our planet. We are truly interstellar species. We think about it, right? Like all of this stuff had to come from somewhere. So it makes sense to me that you would need kind of all these different types of bombardments over the time for when Earth first happened to when life first happened. It makes perfect sense to me that it's all kind of interstellar garbage. But it's a matter of- And hubris is rarely right about anything. That's true. Yeah. Never gotten anything. Yeah, come on. But it doesn't matter how do these little bits of what make us up, of what makes life possible. How do they mix together in the universe to become that beautiful souffle that rises versus the one that like in my kitchen at home falls completely flat? Yes, I've been watching too many baking and cooking shows lately. This is this week in science. Justin, what did you bring? Okay, when somebody says robot, like I just did, robot, what do you think of? What comes to your mind? Robots. Robots. Robots. What kind of- What kind of- Terminator. Here's the good one we got. The ones that came from my oddly might defend on age, but I thought of the old Boston space robot, not the new one that's kind of scary looking, but I remember the old one with the big bubbles seep through it. Robots. Yeah. Roof, right? Liquid handlers, if you work in a lab, you might see those a lot. Those might be your robots. Articulating arms that build cars, all kinds of robots. So what are robots made out of? Metal, make some plastic, a little bit of rubber here and there. That's rubber stuff. So if you were gonna make a robot, you would start with that, and you probably wouldn't get around to using frog embryos. Wait, what? Frog embryos. Frog. But somebody thought, hey, that's actually the best place to start. I'm gonna make a robot out of frog embryos. And they did. That could just be the whole story right there. But this was published January 13th in the Proceedings to the National Academy of Sciences. They repurposed living cells straight from frog embryos, and the cell moved them into a living machine, a millimeter wide, what's it called a Xenobot. 100% frog DNA, 100% not a frog. This is, they created this thing, actually kind of interestingly, by using the, I think it's called the Deep Green Supercomputer at the University of Vermont. And they went through thousands and thousands of potential design ideas and came up with one, and the main thing it needed to do was move in one direction. And they straightened these cells, they stitched them together basically, and they created a thing that is running on the energy that existed in the embryo itself. It's not powered from the outside. They're looking at this as a prototype that might be able to deliver medications. They may be able to do exploration of areas that are very hard to get to in the world, or that might be contaminated, something like a new food facility, or something like this. That would be a very slow discovery process. Oh, and that's not how big they make it. Right now, right now it's a blob of cells. I'm thinking frog embryo, it's pretty small. That can move in one direction, whether it can make it larger. I mean, is it going to move at a scale of slime mold, slowly lurking over the surface? Right now it's moving slowly, it could move faster. So one of the other things is it has a lifespan, shorter maybe than most robots. But that lifespan when it decays is just some dead life material. It's the kind of thing we're used to. So talk about bio-decreability, it's 100% perfect, no toxic op, do anything like this. It also can self-repair. There is the regenerative properties, and probably the folks that worked on this studied regenerative properties and frogs, they can self-regenerate. So they can cut this thing almost entirely in half. It stitches itself back together and continues on its mission. Because cells can divide, they can heal, they can regenerate. And especially if you're talking about an embryonic cell that you're talking about, extreme regenerative properties. Where we get to trouble is if it turns into two complete robots, if you cut it in half, that would be trouble. And then you get into, instead of the gray goo, it's just on slime, I don't know, taking over the earth. It's an interesting thing to me too, because it's going beyond synthetic weight biology. And sort of saying, okay, let's not reinvent biology, it kind of works really well for most of life on the planet. Let's just utilize it in a completely different way. Is there anybody who's freaked out by a living robot? There are a few, there are a few. I'm not surprised. I'm just a little concerned. I feel like it could get away from us real quick. No, it's too much madness. Two words, Boston Dynamics. Right, oh my God. You're right. Big dog. Yeah, right, that was the beginning of robots. A lot. But also yeah, but that's another one of those things. You're still mad. The first thing they did with big dogs kicked the robot over a bunch of times. This is the infancy of the robot and we're going to keep kicking it. What's it going to learn from that? And then this one, it's almost in half and see what it does. Yeah, they're going to have to have a rough childhood. So we better be careful no matter what happens. Let's just hope they don't figure out how to reproduce. No reproduction. Yeah, just come in half. Well, instead of time to reproduce, you know what time it is right now? I think it's time for Blair's Animal Corner. With Blair? It does like if I can get it to start. How do you make it go? I didn't do it. Creature with a great ass ball. Five bed, feel the bed, no bed at all. Want to hear about the animals. She's your girl, except for giant animals at school. With Blair. So I want to start the Animal Corner tonight to talk about toxoplasmosis. You're sort of toxoplasmosis, all right? So we talk about toxoplasmosis a lot on this week in science, mainly because I think it's Justin's main reasoning to dislike cats, but... It's the other way around, really. But I have some really interesting breaking news about toxoplasmosis that will change the way we think about indoor and outdoor cats, forever. So toxoplasmosis, one of the things that makes it so kind of infamous and scary is that it actually can affect the behavior of some of the animals that it infects. So toxoplasmosis in mice gives them this behavior where they actually go up two cats and get eaten. And why is that, Justin? Why do they do that? Because, well, the reasoning was that they were attracted to the scent of cat urine, is what this is about. Right, and so the reason that the parasite, T. gandhii, would want the mouse to get eaten by the cat is that it passes through the cat's digestive tract. That's where it... Only place we know of that is reproducible. Exactly. So it has this idea that everything we've known about it has this fatal feline attraction involved to it, that mice are gonna go straight up to the cat and go, hello, get eaten immediately. It's your favorite meal. It's also been linked in humans to schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, and bipolar disorder, as well as traffic accidents and suicide attempts. And it's estimated 25% of the population in the planet is currently infected by toxoplasma gandhii. And some countries are significantly higher. Well, I was left out there with the leading cause of child blindness in a couple of countries. Yeah, it can actually be fatal if a pregnant woman gets it. That's why the... If everybody knows that the warning label for pregnant women not to handle clavimosa, it's not because there's anything bad in the clavimosa. It's a warning to stay away from cat food. Yeah, exactly. In fact, more than 40 million people in the United States currently carry toxoplasmosis. You could be a carrier right now and not even know it. It can lay just latent in your body and get passed to other people in your brain. But this study from University of Geneva that I wanted to talk about kind of changes the narrative a little bit. So we've thought about this fatal feline attraction for about 20 years as a big part of what toxoplasmosis is and does. But this new study looks at actually the cause of that and what's actually happening in mouse brains. And it's not so simple. It's not just that they're getting pushed right into the mouth of the cat by the parasite. They actually infected mice with the parasite for five to 10 weeks. And then they put them through all these different kind of test conditions. So in one of them, they put them through an elevated maze versus a lower down maze. So the elevated maze kind of puts them more in danger because mice are burrowing animals. So they like to be underground and kind of blow to the ground. They also have them near different types of urine, bobcat urine, guinea pig urine. They have them around other animals that could be a threat and they tried to play with them with the researchers hand. More than just I think them playing with mice was about if they avoided a predator, which we definitely look like predators to most animals. And what they found is that they didn't show a preference for interacting with some things over other things. They just appeared overall more curious and less anxious. So there really was no link to cats in particular in any of these study conditions. So it really just seemed like they were less anxious in general. And then they looked at their brains, which is where this really gets interesting. They use light sheet microscopy to look at the brain distribution size and number of cysts. The cysts are the cause of this issue with toxoplasmosis. And they found that the outer layer, especially the brain regions involved in processing visual information were covered in cysts when they were acting kind of different and had different avoidance behaviors. So the cysts number and distribution varied across mice. But so that showed it was kind of random, but the frequency of cysts and inflammation therein is what seems to cause the change in behavior. So how many cysts you have in your brain from the toxoplasmosis? That's gonna make you less anxious, which I don't know if that is a good thing or a bad thing. So people might think that's great. Yeah! I'm gonna make you more sociable. I don't need to talk about that. So does something, do we know, we probably don't, if these are male or female mice? I do not know. Usually studies use male mice. Usually, yeah. Right, that makes sense. In male humans, toxoplasma-gandia infection tends to be associated with novelty-seeking, which is very interesting. And women has a very different behavioral manifestation. Are you talking about the crazy cat lady? Crazy deal-takers. Because this study claims to have debunked the crazy cat lady hypothesis. Oh, here we go of toxoplasmosis. There it is. But they didn't use female mice, because in female humans, it tends to create guilt issues. And one of the things that anybody's lived next to, or I'm sorry, if you are, a cat lady, there is, it is about taking care of all of and any... Okay, well, I'm not pointing for your care. They're just building numbers so that they can take down the hoax. That's all that's taking place. They're just trying to gather enough cats. So you said the frequency of cysts in mice versus the frequency of cysts in a human brain with toxoplasmosis does not create the extreme behavior change that you see in mice. So that's their theory, is that it could kind of push you into the less anxious, more curious, more sociable realm, but it's not, you're not gonna go crazy cat lady, bolted. That's not gonna happen with this. That's what the study says, according to the study of the cysts. But in general, I think it's very, it just makes you less anxious. So the cats were, sorry, the mice were more likely to just rub up against a researcher's hand or check out the guinea pig urine or the bat-bob cat urine. There was no differentiation at all for cats specifically. They're not seeking out cats, they're just seeking out. But the uptick... They're just not afraid. The uptick in color accidents, that's the comparison that's associated with Dr. Paziganya. Could be that less anxious. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I can make that. I can break a little bit later. I'll break a little bit later. Your speed is fine for this one. Or maybe you just have sizzling with your brain and you're in trouble. No, dear. Oh, speaking of cats consuming their owners, there was a study written about this in the Washington Post, that they've reported on it this week. And apparently cats do and will eat humans. But as to whether or not they will eat you, their owner, that is still a question that wasn't really talked about too much in the report. Basically... Cats? No, so have you heard about the body farms where forensic scientists studied deterioration of bodies? So there's a body farmed and they were watching some bodies and waiting to see what happened. And their video showed that some feral cats came in and you know, if you're going to eat, and there's something to eat, you're going to eat it. And the cats came back, they take the specific, each cat kind of found their own body and stuck with it for several days, coming back to the same body to feed off of it over time. So yes, cats will eat people if they're really hungry, but maybe they'll love you their owner. That has not been tested. Just putting that out there, that is a question yet to be answered. So interesting. So many cats. I have cats. But my number one thing is, there's supposed to be hunters. They're not supposed to be scavengers. Right. They're supposed to be hunters, not scavengers, but when you're hungry, you're going to be a scavenger. That's like the meat eating here we talked about, right? It's any food is food if you're hungry. Vegetarian sharks. Yeah. Okay. Well, I have one more story for the animal corner today. And it's about tardigrades, which are amazing little creatures, little animals. They're known to be invincible to many things. The vacuum of space, radiation, dead hydration, death. They had one that was desiccated and dead for a hundred years and they reanimated it. So tardigrades are pretty amazing and invincible in general, except global warming, they kill them. I know that. I know that. We ruin everything. This is something that flummoxes me. Yeah. So they can handle everything, except apparently getting two degrees Celsius warmer. It does not. But if we're getting colder, they would be fine because they would probably just go into torpor for their little desiccated hybridation. Yeah. So they're these amazing little animals that have their six legs and they're also called water bears or moss piglets. But they have this kind of razor sharp little tube of a face. Anyway, when they get desiccated, when they dry out, they go into a tongue state, which looks like a little barrel. And they can do that for, like I said, up to a hundred years as far as we know. But new research found that their extreme temperature capabilities are not great. So they have this one species of tardigrades that they found in rain gutters in, I think, Norway. They have a medium range of time, but where do you go look for your science? Oh, Norwegian rain gutters. Yeah, rain gutters. Obviously. So tardigrades can live basically anywhere that it's wet. So if you even just grabbed a little piece of moss from a nearby pond, there's definitely tardigrades in there. So if you have any sort of microscope at home, you can look at water bears, which is really cool. You don't need a high intensity microscope. It's pretty easy. But their medium lethal temperature is about 37 degrees Celsius. They go up just 0.6 degrees Celsius. They pretty much all die. So they also found that if they had them in the tongue state, they were dried out and they were kind of dormant, they could stand 151 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes. Wow. So even that desiccated state couldn't take it. Yeah, they could stand 80 degrees Celsius for one hour. So they really don't know whether the tongue state, if they can withstand anything more than they're used to for more than an hour. But really, this is just a good example of how if the warming happened gradually, they might be able to adjust and adapt. But because it's happening so fast, these guys who are invisible to almost everything else, we could possibly throw at them, can't handle warming of just a couple degrees. If anybody is interested in looking at Tartigrade's friend Arielle Waldman has made a website called Life Under the Ice. She spent a season in Antarctica digging in the ice and she made a microscopy lab. She basically taught herself microscopy petition to go to Antarctica and dig up Tartigrades and they left her and she has created some great videos in this website, Life Under the Ice, or Life in the Ice, and we can see all of her Tartigrades and lots of other little creatures and some of them are unidentified still at this point. So there's some cool stuff to see on your website. There's lots of kinds of Tartigrades out there. So cool. And they can handle it when it's very, very cold. But they just can't handle it. I really like the idea of our hot Tartigrades. Come on. Hot Tartigrades. Oh my goodness. Okay, take a quick moment. I would love to tell everybody this is This Week in Science. If you are not subscribed, you can find us all places that podcasts are found all over the internet. Look for This Week in Science. Our website is twisttwis.org and at that website you can find our merchandise. We have a zazzle store. Click on the zazzle link and you'll be able to buy T-shirts and mugs and all sorts of cool twist gear. And Blair makes these wonderful calendars and much of the art from previous year's calendars has been turned into items in our zazzle store. So you can get a phone cover or wallpaper. No wallpaper. I don't know. You can search. There's wrapping paper on there. There's a tie. That's wrapping paper. I like the mammoth lumbar pillow personally. It's a very nice pillow. Additionally, we are listener supported by Patreon and PayPal. So you can click on the Patreon link at our website. It'll take you to our Patreon community. And if you're interested in helping us continue to do this show and into the future, then I would be much appreciated. Patreon is a wonderful crowdfunding community and you get special things, little gifts from us for becoming a patron. All right. Should we get into some more science news? We are at the Cal Academy and this is S&F Sketch Fest Night Live event. Thank you everyone for joining us for this week's In Sciences presentation. Are we doing a presentation tonight? No. It's a show. It's a show. This is a show. We're gonna get a table. It's pretty awesome. It's just another show. Thank you all for joining us. We're so excited to see all your faces. Taking time out of your nights to come talk about science with us. Justin. All right. We're gonna go a little out of order here. You're going out of, what else is new? You're always out of order. Welcome to Planet Earth, everybody. This is a fantastic planet. If you haven't been here before, it's very rare in our solar system to be this wet and have this nice of a climate. You're lucky to be here. You're one of the few sentient species that has ever walked this planet. And one thing, if you could please stop stepping on all of the rest of the life that is here, we would really appreciate it. This is all horrible. So I shouldn't have brought this for tonight. I should have saved this for a different day. You're just full of bad news today. This is a new study that looked at the footprint of humanity on wildlife. And it's not good. It's really not good. It's like size 12, 13, or a billion. So anybody who's living in San Francisco, I thank you for living in a high density metropolis like this. You're doing more benefit to nature by living in the city and not wanting to be that close to it. Because the rest of the world that keeps trying to get close to nature, so they're away from the rest of us, they're the ones who are doing most of the footprint. So you living in Davis? That's a house, that's a small town. I admit, there was wildlife there before we farmed it, but that's part of the footprint. So this is showing that 84%, 84% of vertebrates have their ranges that are exposed to intense human pressure at this moment. And about 16%, that's the rest of it, isn't off the hook. They actually have it worse. They're in the entirely exposed under the footprint of humanity. So especially, this story sounds really bad, but then you can look at what has just taken place in Australia, where we may have just lost from the planet, from all of evolution to this point, life forms that we won't see again on this earth. Because of fires that were largely brought about by both human manipulation of landscape and global warming. Just something to think of. So this is, I shouldn't have brought it tonight. I'm gonna, but part of the thing is, I do seriously wanna thank everybody here for living in a high density environment. Next time you're complaining about the traffic on the freeway, next time you can't get a decent seat on the park, you're doing a tremendous benefit to the planet by keeping all the humans in a very tight, confined space. The less spread out we are, the better for the environment. You know the bad thing about this though, recent study determined that people love the environment, but they don't wanna help the environment unless they experience it on a regular basis. So you have to go out into the world and into the environment to appreciate it and to want to save it. Or to everybody in where there are the existence. Or maybe talk about the natural environment. The parks in the middle of the cities, but yes, being close to nature helps people want to help nature. Look, that's the park, the manicured version of nature. That's good enough. It's good enough, hey look up there. The artificial nature, that's all people should know. Should we mess with sugar? Yeah, tell me about those bacon flavored sugar pigs. Sugar pigs. So we've heard a lot over the last few years about how sugar is not good for us. But hey, it's great for us because our bodies love sugar. It helps to give us energy to do everything. I mean, we wouldn't have things like glycolysis and gluconeogenesis in our metabolic pathways if sugar were not so important. And so sugar is a very important part of our diet. However, the way that we respond to sugar, there's been a question as to whether or not it's addictive. How do people make sugar as addictive? We've got a few hands. A few hands, a few not hands. Well, a researcher said that he was going to test this question. He said, I really did not want to find out that sugar was addictive. I really wanted to find something else. But he took 12 pigs, 12 mini pigs. Why pigs, you may ask? Well, they're not little tiny rodents and the foldings of their brain are much more similar to the human brain. A lot of their physiology is actually very similar to human physiology. And he gave half of the pigs two liters of sugar water a day. That's a lot. It's a two liter bottle of soda a day. And so one app, he gave the other group just regular water. So we have the sugar pigs and the not sugar pigs, the water pigs, yes, sugar pigs and water pigs. Here we go. Then he looked at the brains of the pigs. They didn't kill the pigs. This is something they were able to do through mapping the brain using imaging technologies. They probably killed the pigs after the research was done anyway. They may have, I mean, sweet bacon, sorry, I don't mean to eat bacon. They looked at dopamine receptors in the brain and opioid receptors in the brain. Dopamine and opioid receptors are highly involved in the reward halfway. They found that in five of the pigs. So we're talking about a very small sample size here. Yeah, that's a tiny end. This is a tiny end. And so their significance was limited. But in five of the pigs, they looked at their brains on the first day. So after they were given one hour of 12 liters, two liters of sugar water, they looked at the brain and there was no change in the dopamine receptors. But the opioid receptors had already started to change after one administration of sugar. So forward a couple of weeks, they looked at the brains of all the pigs at the very end. The water pigs, no surprise. Their brain didn't change. No change in the receptors in the brains. We do know that in people who are addicts, drug addicts, we find a down regulation. There are less dopamine receptors in the brains of people who are addicts. There are fewer opioid receptors in the brains of people who are addicts. They found this in the brains of the pigs after two weeks. Both opioids and dopamine receptors were changing. So this is a hint that, yeah, sugar, it can have addictive effects similar to addictive drugs, but this is modulating our behavior. It's modulating this reward pathway. There are still, this isn't like, yeah, sugar's addictive. Boom, we're talking about a very small sample size of pigs and a lot of sugar and a lot of sugar. And the way that the study was done, there are other factors that could have affected it. In fact, they gave the pigs only one hour of sugar a day, and it was the same time every day. So maybe it's not necessarily the sugar. I mean, there's little things that could have affected it behaviorally that could have changed its button. More and more data is arising that sugar, it's potentially addictive. And is that a bad thing necessarily since it's so important to our physiology and to our metabolism? I feel like, in theory, no, because of what you said, it's important to our body, but now that sugar is in most food and definitely all processed foods, that becomes a problem because you can't detox. It's always there. It's everywhere. Yeah, sugar. And it's probably wiring in our brains that had we found this 2,000 years ago in earlier humanity, find a sugar source, a high energy source. Our brain is telling us, go back, get more, that work, do it again, do it again. This will give you a life longer. And so it's, it's not like a negative thing about sugar itself. It's just our brains are wired evolutionarily to want this cheap, easy energy source. Bold brains in modern times. Yeah. Yeah. What's the other story? Stradivarius from UCLA's Galactic Center Orbits Initiative have spotted a new class of bizarre objects, the center of our galaxy around the supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A. So this is currently published in The Journal of Nature. And they're saying these, they have the kind of these objects that appear at first to behave like stars and then as they got closer to the black hole, they looked a lot more like a gas. Like they started to expand massively. And as they went by the black hole at the closest point, huge portions of that expansion got ripped off and started heading into the black hole. And then the thing headed on its way again. It's a really interesting object that they discovered. They named G1. And they were puzzled by it because it's the only one that they had seen like this. They just thought maybe this is some kind of crazy outlier. So they kept looking and they've now come up with five more. So they named them easily G1, G2, and G6, right? So this is, Jen. Sorry, I did it in the hallway though. So one of the interesting things here too is that this is when we were looking towards that inner core area around where our black hole that sort of anchors our entire galaxy spinning around it. Things are a lot more populated there than they are there. So we actually kind of lucky living very worldly as we are in our galaxy. Because it's, and I didn't know this until I was reading this particular study, but it's a million times more dense with stars in just that inner core. I might have been, I'm sorry, that's, I just quoted the, it's a billion times more dense with stars. So it would be an amazing night sky if you were living on a planet in that inner core. But one of the things that they run into is they have, they have gravity pollution. So we are not really horribly affected by the gravity of another star system. But if you're in that inner core where billions of stars are swimming around, you might get grabbed by something else. This is actually what these objects are. That would change everything. And that's what these objects are though. They discovered these G1 through 6 are binary stars that have merged and they're gas on the, and this is a process that normally takes from our observations, our estimates, a million years for two of these binary stars to sort of become one together without doing a supernova or something. Here they're thinking, actually this might be very common. This might be happening all the time in this hot dense inner core of our Milky Way. All the time. I'm glad we live only here though. It's a lot nicer. It's a meaning to him. But according to your previous, I like our boring neighborhood. We were supposed to live where it's more densely populated. So should we? So we'd have gravitational pollution that would be extremely magnetic fields that would contain other magnetic fields apart. It wouldn't have to worry about them. And there's no parking. You know where we're in the core of our... Sounds like San Francisco. Okay, so good news about the ways that we can potentially impact this bad news, the human footprint. What is one of the biggest carbon dioxide polluters that we know of? Concrete. Concrete. You're right. Absolutely right. It's concrete. Concrete and the methods that we use to make concrete emit carbon dioxide all over the place. Bad for the atmosphere. Bad for everything we're trying to do right now. Researchers have just published about their new methods. Similar to your Kragmiba robots, they are using bacteria to make concrete. And instead of just spreading bacteria on the surface of blocks of concrete that have already been made, I'm just saying, hey, bacteria, be like glue and just hold the surface together nicely. They have discovered there is a particular group of bacteria that in part of their metabolism, they form calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate is a very essential part of concrete. And so they mixed these bacteria with sand and a little bit of fluid and a bit of humidity. They grew a concrete block and then they chopped that concrete block in half and they grew two concrete blocks. And so they've discovered that they have a potential potentially exponential way of growing concrete in a way that actually will take carbon dioxide out of the air because it's metabolism of these bacteria as opposed to being a net emitter. The problem is a lot of places that are making concrete and using the modern methods of creating it, they are also very dry places. And so far, these bacteria need humidity to be able to survive, they need water. And the idea is that they're going to try and genetically modify the bacteria to make them more resistant to dry conditions. This is potentially not just awesome for our own planet, but these scientists are also looking at Mars and thinking they could send some basic materials, a little bit of water, you mix it all up and suddenly you're growing a habitat on another planet. So hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. It's sci-fi, it's the future. It needs water, it needs water, this is. Wouldn't you want it to need water and be in a dry environment? Because if you made a building out of these bricks and put it in San Francisco, then every morning when the fog came in, it would grow. And before you know it, your footprint of your house is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. This would be a problem. How do you stop it from growing? Right, I think that would have to do with the frog robots. If you haven't got it with more frog robots. This would have to be the life cycles of the bacteria. So you would create the concrete and then take them out of the conditions in which they would grow. So the concrete they create actually is as strong. The bricks they created were as strong as regular concrete. Basically concrete, just made by bacteria. So you have them in a nice wet condition, they're growing, making concrete, and then you take them away and then they die. And then you're just left with calcium carbonate and sand and bricks, bricks. So the buildings would be made of dead bacteria. Yes, yes, they would, yes. And bacteria, you put bacteria back also. Bacterial poop, yeah, very hygienic, beautiful. It's gonna be wonderful. The world is going to be amazing in the future. Are we ready for some quick stories? Ah, there, tell me a quick one. Oh my goodness. So lazy moths taste gross. What, when have you been eating moths? I haven't, but bats have, okay. So this was a study where they took moths and they put them, five different species of tiger moths. They put them in a fight arena at night, which is where they just attract bats. So bats would just swoop in and feed on the moths. And they used infrared cameras to figure out who was getting eaten and who wasn't and how the moths were reacting. They found that the moths that had yucky taste, that tasted really bad, didn't really dodge out of the way of bats at all. So they found that out by looking at which moths got spit out by the bats. So the early moth catches the worm, but the lazy moth spits that out. I like that one. I'm gonna roll with that one. Except they also have to taste terrible. The lazy moth. It's a question of which came first, right? Are they bad at agility and therefore developed distasteful chemicals in their body so that they wouldn't get eaten? Or did they get lazy because no one wanted to eat them? Yeah, I think it would probably go that way. We don't know, yeah. But they do think that based on this, they've identified these specific compounds that make moths taste gross and they think that they could extrapolate this to extinct insect species. So if they can find the same compounds in those animals, they hypothesize that that means that that animal was probably not very good at dodging predators. Because they wouldn't waste that energy, right? Like if you dodge out of the way of a bat, you might end up caught in a spider web or you might use up a whole bunch of energy that you have to replace later, right? So there's benefits to being slower or lazier, but. Yeah? Yeah, if you can. Neanderthals, Neanderthal study. Really good, this is, it turns out Neanderthals, they went diving for a shelf. So we found this study a little while back and it was just the morphology of the ear, the inner ear has what looks like swimmers ear and modern current humans. These Neanderthals, some of them had this as well, which made scientists think maybe they went diving, maybe they spent some time going underwater for this stuff. Then they went and looked at, this is a cave that was discovered in 1949. They had 171 examples of tools made from shelves by Neanderthals and they went and they re-examined these. And what they found was, well, about 80% of them were so, had that rough sort of texture to the outside, meaning they were probably just picked up off of the beach. A lot of them were shiny and would have been plucked from the sea floor and the Mediterranean when they were still alive. And so we have, it's also sort of interesting because we know that Neanderthals have a larger lung capacity than modern current humans. Like potentially hold their breath very long. Yeah, they might have really been able to like hang out down there and do the searching. But it's one of those things that just takes another one of the pins away that we assumed about Neanderthals as being just the game hunters and just the large predator chasers. They went by the beach, they picked up shelves. They went swimming. Maybe they were swimming two kilometers deep for alligator corpses. Sorry, what? Researchers wanted to find out about the ecosystem in the very deep sea. And we don't know a lot about this ecosystem other than it's very dark. And there's, since it's so dark, there's not a lot of food available to the animals that do live down there. And the animals that do live down in very deep sea two kilometers or so, they survive off of what are called food falls. And that is when a whale dies, its corpse falls to the bottom of the ocean. It gets cannibalized, scavenged by the animals that are down there. The researchers wanted to know exactly who was doing what in the Gulf of Mexico at this great depth. So they threw three alligator corpses into the bottom of the ocean and tethered them to the sea floor. So they weren't just floating around. No, no, they were tethered to the floor of the ocean. One of the alligators was eaten up by giant, was it cats? No, giant pill bugs. They're big pill bugs, big pill bugs. Like roly pollas? Like roly pollas. They're isopods. Isopods at the bottom of the ocean. Yes, that's the gnomus gigantius. Hey guys, look it up. Anyway, they ate one of the alligators. The other alligator, well, one of them, it looked as though its tether was ripped apart and shredded and the alligator disappeared. We don't know what happened to that alligator. And then the third corpse, they determined that the bones became covered by a bone-eating worm. Bone worms, bone worms, those are that. These worms are little worms, they eat bones. It's great, but they, not just any old ozodax, some brand new species that had never been found before. Very exciting, ground fuzzy, bone-eating worms, eating alligator corpses at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. But why alligators? I don't understand. Because that's where they had my arm. Because there's literally no reason that I could see. Right, so the question is, would they eat a food source that they had never come across before? How do the animals in the ecosystem interact with the food that comes to them? Is it they like certain things or are they going to eat whatever? The other part of it is that alligators have a very tough outer covering that is going to make it difficult for certain types of animals to be able to eat them. And they wanted to see how the life forms dealt with that. And it appears that they all dealt with it very easily. I don't want to throw a bunch of shade at this research, but... You got it. Whales not only have thick skin, they have inches of blubber. Yeah, sometimes even more. These animals have to get through to get to the meat. I'm not surprised. Not surprised. And just, yeah, of course, you're going to eat anything that comes to you if you're waiting for things to fall to the bottom. So you would have done this study by killing whales? No. Theater meat, I mean, they're probably from Florida. Lots of theaters in Florida. Go to the Gulf of Mexico. Makes it easy. We have so much more science, but unfortunately we have come to the end of our hour. So we can't tell you about the sequencing of the genome of the giant squid, unfortunately. Huh? What? South American coyotes, I have that too. Or South American, or beauty sleep. There's so much more science out there. We'll have to tune in next week. You'll have to tune in next week. I would love to give a few shout outs right now though. I'd love to thank everyone here. Thank you again for coming out and joining us. Thank you so much for being in our audience. Thank you to SF sketch fest for bringing us here tonight. Thank you for Cal Academy for making this possible. Thank you to our volunteers who help out with the show every week. Identity four who records the show. Fada, who helps in our social media chat rooms and also with our social media and the descriptions of stuff. And Gord McLeod, who helps in another chat room. I'd also like to thank our Patreon sponsors. Are you ready for this list? Ready for this. Paul Disney, Ed Dyer, Andrew Swanson, Craig Landon, Ed Stoupolic, Phil Shane, Ken Hayes, Harrison Brather, Charlene Henry, Joshua Fury, Steve DeBell, Alex Wilson, Tony Steele, Richard Porter, Marcus Arrows, Bob Calder, Jack Matthew, Litwin, Jason Roberts, Bill Cabe, Eric Knapp, Richard Bryan, Conner and Dave Naver, Justin Taylor, P.S., Josiah Zaynor, Howard Tien, Donald Mundus, Sarah Fort, Vardanke, Matt Bays, Darwin Hand, Patrick Paglararo, Ben Bignell, Jen Tellier, John Ridley, Corinne Benson, Adam LeJoy, Sarah Chavis, Rodney Lewis, Tiffany Boyd, Malcolm Slough, Seth Grafton, Steven Alderaan, John Ruppusami, Dave Freidl, Darryl Meyshack, Paul Ronevich, Sue Doster, Dylan Wickl, Dave Wilkinson, Newtels, Heather Mirdin, Christophe Zuccherich, Ashish Panty, Lizzie Dackins, Artie Albrecht, Ramis Paul, John Nicky, Jason Noltz, Ryan Carrington, Christopher Dreyer, Lisa Zuzuki, Jim Graffo, Greg Riley, Sean Lam, Steve Deesby, Kurt Larson, Brittany Garcia, Marvin Marjorie, Gary S. Robert, Greg Briggs, Brenda Minnish, Christopher Rabin, flying out, Erin Lutham, Matt Sutter, Mark Hessens, Loca, Erin Carrington, Kyren Lee, and E.O. Woo! To our Patreon sponsors, and if anyone is interested in making that list longer, you can go to patreon.com, or just twist.org, and click on the Patreon link on our website. Next week, we are gonna be back, our usual time, broadcasting live at twist.org, slash live also on YouTube and Facebook at 8 p.m. Pacific time on Wednesday. Wednesday is our live broadcast night. We're gonna be talking next week with Dr. Mariba Jop. He is an astrodynamicist who's interested in the growing problem of space debris. Oh, it's gonna be a good conversation about space jumps. So I hope that you will join us next week. Thanks for enjoying the show. Twist is also available as a podcast. Just Google this week in Science. Anywhere you look for stuff, then it'll come up. And if you like the show, you're supposed to tell other people about the show. Yeah, tell your friends. Tell your friends, steal their phones, download the podcast, we'll find it later. For more information on anything you heard here today, if you wanna look up some of the articles that we talked about, show notes will be available on our website at the www.twist.org. While you're there, you can also make comments. You can start conversations with us or other listeners. Yeah, you can contact us directly. Email Kirsten at kirsten.wikenscience.com, Justin at twist.org and at gmail.com, or player at playerbaz.twist.org. Just be sure to put with TWIS, T-W-I-S, someone to subject line, otherwise, the world will happen. Band filtered into oblivion. You can also hit us up on the Twitter where we are at consigns.doc.qt. We got Jackson flying at Blair's Menagerie. We love it. There's a topic you'd like us to cover, address, a suggestion for an interview with Haiku that comes to you tonight. Please let us know. We'll be back here next week, not here, but on the internet. And we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you learned anything from the show, remember, it's all in the book. Thanks. Yay! And we got some buttons there for anyone who'd like to grab something on your way back. I have a couple of calendars, too. I'm gonna have a strap and robot through the simple device. I'll reverse the warming with a wave of my hands. And darling, oh, it's just coming your way. So everybody listen, what a scientific method This week in science, this week in science This week in science, this week in science This week in science, this week in science This week in science, this week in science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be me 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 understanding But we're not trying to bring you to the last little page We're not trying to save the world, but we definitely Got to say it, say it, say it This week in science, this week in science So everybody listen, do everything we say And if you use our methods to roll it down We may need the road to talk about what's got to be our Week in science, this week in science This week in science, this week in science This week in science, this week in science This week in science, this week in science This week in science, this week in science I've got a long list of items I want to address From stopping global scandal to dressing lock dance I'm trying to promote more rational thoughts And I'll try to answer any questions you've got But how can I ever see the changes I see When I can always set up top, what are we? This week in science is coming your way You better just listen to what we say I know you've learned anything from the words that we've said That we used to remember this morning This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science the music all the time. Slated music. And room noise. Do you need 30 seconds of room noise? Everyone's quiet. Room noise. Quiet house room noise. Ready to go science. I've got an extra phone here. An extra one? Good night everybody. Thanks for watching. I appreciate you being there. We'll have good audio out for this later. Thank you so much for watching the show tonight. Good night.