 Hello science lovers we are live Blair and Justin we are live it has happened no more naughty words children we are here to talk about science we're gonna do a podcast right now and I hope everybody is ready for some science fun as we dive into the science this evening and bring you the weekly broadcast of the this week in science podcast in which we talk about science and all that kind of fun loving stuff and in the process sometimes there are things that don't make it to the podcast so whatever you're watching right now is full unedited full of bleepers and bloopers and my microphone really doesn't want to stand up yeah no to care that now they make my desk shorter whatever it takes stay microphone stay I know I try and do all the things all the things to make it work as well as I can are we ready for this are we ready for this show yeah all good mm-hmm say a word Justin a word thank you very much Blair happy Star Trek Day happy Star Trek Day to you yes those of you who are celebrating it out there let us begin this thing that we call a podcast in three two this is twist this week in science episode number 841 recorded on Wednesday September 8th 2021 science is still hot stuff hey everyone I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight we will fill your heads with a spark some smell of vision and some more good news but first disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer you might not think about it often but space is a really big cold place with occasional nuclear fireball has the odd gravity well capable of devouring nuclear fireballs it's an insane place and it's where you live which is also insane because for the most part pretty much everywhere that we know of is extremely hostile to life which is what you are but you lucky lucky you you happen to live in a one place we know of where life can and does actually exist and of the life forms on that one place where we know life can actually exist you happen to be the most intelligent species now what can you do with that quite a lot or very little at all it's mostly up to you which is pretty amazing for a tiny creature living on a wet rock in a universe of incomprehensible size you still have a choice in a universe where giant gravity wells can eat nuclear fireballs by the billions you still have a choice no matter what forces are swirling around you in the cosmic dust no matter what the laws of nature happen to be inside the belly of a black hole no matter what matter is ultimately composed of you will always have a choice to determine your own future and we are just happy you chose to hang out with us here on this week in science coming up next i've got the kind of mine i can't get enough out there's only one place to go to find the knowledge i seek out science to you kiki and blare and a good science to you too just in blare and everyone out there welcome to another episode of this week in science we are back another week many more science stories oh we have so many fun stories and i have to say blare in my stories tonight i am going to encroach on blare's animal corner because i brought a lot of animals you know what there's enough animals for the whole world to have its own corner i'm happy to share wonderful because i have cats i've got ducks i also have um some hummingbirds and uh we'll see what else goes in there justin what did you bring i've got a nasa second chance i've got uh oh i've got at the end of the show i'm gonna have good news uh just a good news segment uh this time i don't believe you i think i've got it figured out now i think i get the i've also got some uh some news on policing in america and the development of an artificial lifeform that can eat and poop but it's not alive not alive but can eat and poop okay let's it's got the basics down right there so just needs a few more a few more additions blare what is in your animal corner i have leaping lizards and discerning dogs and then before that i have a non-animal story about a smelloscope smelloscope well this smells like it might be an amazing story i can't wait to hear it all right are we ready to jump in to all of the science fun yeah let's do it yeah let's do this all right before we do so i would like to remind you that if you are not yet subscribed to this week in science you can find us all places the podcasts are found google apple spotify stitcher speaker soundcloud all sorts of places you can also go to youtube facebook and twitch we are this week in science we are also twist science twi s c i e n c e on the instagram and twitch and twitter you can just find our website at twist.org we hope you subscribe all right i've got a spark just a little spark of science everyone to start the show so just in a couple of weeks ago you had an update about the national ignition facility laser fusion a facility that had reached a new threshold they were very excited about the amount of fusion that they had created right yeah it lasted for an imp of a percentage of an inf of a second but it was like the biggest uh the biggest outcome they'd had yet so this week i have a story that is fusion related not lasers but magnets so one of the other ways that researchers are trying to create fusion is in the form of tokamax these kind of donut shaped rings that are wrapped in magnets and they use massive electromagnetic fields to contain plasma so they they shunt a bunch of energy into the coils of the magnets that starts a current flowing and you get a plasma that can be contained on the inside and if a high enough magnetic field is reached it's possible for that plasma to actually hit fusion to actually reach a point of fusion but they've been reaching for certain like thresholds just like the national ignition facility and mit and a startup company that they have been working with called the commonwealth fusion systems just this week they reported ramping up a new model for their magnets it's not actually the tokamak yet but what they have done is they've taken advantage of new ribbon like high temperature superconductors so there's another magnetic tokamak kind of fusion project that's over in europe called eater it uses low temperature superconductors this is newer high temperature superconductors so they don't have to reduce the temperature of the whole system quite as far to get to the point of superconducting yeah that's such a pain because then it's not always like here's all this complicated stuff that we have to pull off oh and we have to be as close to zero as we possibly can right it has to be start basically the dead of space yeah so then how big how big can you even try to make a thing you then have to dance like it yeah okay so that's a huge limiting factor they've potentially been able to remove absolutely and so what they reported with these new magnets designed using these high temperature superconducting ribbons and it really is it's like a thin ribbon like you'd wrap your hair in if you were making a bow and they've created these magnets and we're able to reach a 20 tesla magnetic field in there that's a lot of cars that teslas are measures of magnetic force and this is the largest highest magnetic field that we have created using these superconductors today so this is proof of concept that they're magnets work and they have the magnetic power that should be necessary to get their project to work and their project is called spark and it will be using a number of these different magnets to be able to wrap the doughnut and to make the electromagnetic magnetic field go all the way around and eventually contain plasma and actually create a fusion a fusion field so they have 16 sub magnets that are stacked up inside a case and that's what they tested now those those they were able to show they could replicate the 20 teslas near absolute zero but not as close to absolute zero as they would have to if they were a low temperature superconductor and they were able to show that it absolutely works they're going to take all of these magnets now and put them together into a the tokamak and it's going to be a compact design because of these the fact they're using these low the high temperature superconductors that allows the magnets to actually be smaller and so the eventual fusion reactor will be much smaller and potentially something that could produce a lot of energy and they're hoping they're going to be producing energy as soon as 2025 what yeah nice their goal it's 2021 now and their goal is 2025 but they're on schedule they are on schedule like they're already they already have uh they already have everything in place other than this higher capacity right so they're swapping components at this point they're not like starting from scratch no yeah that's so the exact that's exactly the concept they are using all old ideas for building the tokamak the new idea is the high temperature superconducting magnets and so using these magnets they can scale down the design and hopefully reach the amount of electromagnetic force that they actually need so they don't have to reinvent the delorean they just need to slap the flux capacitor on exactly like oh let's take that delorean put a flux capacitor you've got it exactly okay nice it's i love that it's 16 magnets not 15 not 20 16 16 it's gonna take 16 that's just what it is yep and it's it's a good timing for all of this because just you know other things in the news this week to kind of put us in the sense of why we need to be pushing forward on fusion and taking ourselves off of fossil fuels a study out this week suggests that the economic cost of climate change could be six times higher than previously thought and basically that things are going to cost a lot of money and we're going to lose a lot of money and it's not going to be as hunky dory economically as a lot of economists have been kind of hoping it would be and additionally researchers published a study suggesting that we need to leave at least 60 percent of the remaining fossil fuels that are in the ground in the ground 90 percent of coal needs to stay in the ground for us to be able to stay at that 1.5 to 2 degrees celsius warming that we are targeted at at this point in time and in order to do these things we need to get off of fossil fuels and fusion energy is one possible way to do that ultimately we just got to slap the coal and the fossil fuels out of people's hands toga mac toga mac toga mac i'm like right i want this cheer i want us all cheering for the toga max we're getting there the other thing that is also important statistically to point out about economists is that 90 percent they're 90 percent right when they say the economy is going to get better because over time the economy increases 90 percent of the time it just gets better like every year so it's it's kind of an easy job like it's not it's like predicting so far has been in the california summer but but it's gonna the real trick is whether or not they can actually predict or just hope or play the odds anyway i'm gonna can i move my story i'm gonna move my last story up to my first story because the story you just told is perfect to add the good news uh just good news no you're gonna ruin it we need to start off with good news i'm so excited so that this is the segment that dares to take on some of the most horrific unbearable and overwhelmingly terrible topics the kind that too often make us kind of feel uh hopelessly nihilistic about humanities chances for survival in the future and finds the good news story about them uh this week so it's time for just good news global warming edition orca is the name of a new direct air capture and storage plant in iceland so direct air capture systems what they do is they they move air through the thing it takes the carbon dioxide out of the air and then it therefore reduces the amount of that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere the orca plant uh and you should go google this somewhere because it's pretty pretty fascinating looking plant the orca plant uses a carbon capture technology to take the co2 out of the air mixes it's with some water sequesters it deep underground or can also recycle it the system has these huge fans they look there are there on these uh modules that look like shipping containers with just sort of fans on the sides of them uh and so those move the air through they have carbon dioxide filters inside that filter the material inside the collector once the the filters are full the collector closes and heats up to like a hundred degrees celsius like it's super super hot this this sort of rarefied high concentration carbon dioxide uh is then schleffed off because of the heat and it mixes with groundwater and then gets can get stored at least in case of orca i think they're doing a deep underground storage where apparently over time it hardens and becomes like stone underneath the ground and is never heard from again so the orca system will capture 4 000 tons of co2 per year making it the world's biggest climate cleaning facility ever built and it's already making a huge significant step i think it actually technically opened today it went online uh making a huge step in counteracting co2 pollution generated by people everywhere so 4 000 tons of co2 a year that's approximately the same as the emissions of 870 cars or 533 average us homes and it's sort of like people like why would they put it in iceland because iceland is sort of a strange location it's it's sort of known for having pretty decent air quality you know it's out there in the middle of the ocean it doesn't have a whole lot of but it has hydroelectric it has hydrothermal power so it's such a green place to begin with like why would you put it there well that's exactly right he nailed it it's running off of the hydroelectric it's using geothermal heat to do that rapid heat increase for the schlepping off of the the carbon on these filters but yeah you feel like you should put that in like los angeles or something or someplace with a lot of cars you know or but someplace like in the in the central valley the fires we could just put those everywhere here in the fires but yeah the estimates for the amount of sequestration studies indicate that by mid century this century 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide will need to be removed from the air every year to keep the much of the earth habitable so we're going to need a few more of these by a few more yeah powered by toka max yeah so if you do the four billion it's a lot that so we need we need two and a half million of these in the next 30 years yeah so not a couple is your point it's not it's it doesn't fix the problem it is and not an or yeah like so many solutions right blair yes yes but it's but it's great news that's fantastic let's people we can do these things we can make these things happen well and like remember the first solar panels the first solar panels were like kind of garbage right so maybe this will breed uh innovation within this same the same technology and it will get more compact and more efficient over time and as long as we survive long enough and are able to stop using carbon now maybe eventually we can get to a point where we can start pulling it out at a reasonable scale that would be great i love it so yes please i love it powering these things by the toka max generated energy fusion energies and the other energies that because that's really what all has to come down to right eventually is an energy source that we can use to heal the planet that isn't destroying the planet twice as fast as we can heal it yep solar's good so i'm a huge fan of solar like i can't still understand why there aren't wide swaths of the country just covered in municipal solar power plants but how do you know if things are working like what if an installation goes wrong like a transplant blare i thought you were going there uh yeah so i love this story um so something that uh you may not know unless you are the recipient of a lung transplant is about 50 percent of lung transplant patients are diagnosed with chronic allograph dysfunction or chronic rejection within five years of the transplant basically a lung transplant is a hail mary that ultimately seems like it only works about half the time so that sucks um and if you could know if a transplant was going to fail it was going to be rejected currently that is the most important cause of death after lung transplant not a surprise and there's really no good treatment available other than trying again doing a re transplantation if you figure it out in time you can potentially save somebody or at the very least buy some extra time some extra years if you know that the lung is failing and the sooner you know that the better chance people have of surviving so the problem is how do you assess the success of a lung transplant can you predict or diagnose if they are going bad yes justin i i it's the if the patient survives yes is how i would determine success yes then that and currently that's basically what we have so it takes several months to diagnose if a lung transplant is going to be rejected they test lung function they need to visit they measure it against peak lung function then if it drops below 80 percent they need to investigate further they need to look at potential treatments see how they respond to antibiotics there's all these kind of long list of things that doctors have to do to go are you sick or is your transplant failing and so enter the e nose it's an electronic nose that can detect with 86 accuracy if a lung transplant is beginning to fail this is coming out of the Netherlands at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam Rotterdam it's gotta be it's gotta be more complicated a pronunciation than that yeah go ahead so so then there is a a cue in your excellent if you're exhaling your breath i should just say the regular word i could find breath that that is uh that has signal has a molecular change or so what are they looking for in this thing that signaling i know that's where you're going but i yeah yeah absolutely so yes so the e nose hat is the small device you breathe into it has sensors that detect chemicals called volatile organic compounds vocs they're present in about one percent of our exhale breath and it varies depending on metabolic processes in our body including the processes going out of the lungs and so when patients breathe out into the e nose the sensors not only detect the pattern of the volatile organic compounds in the breath but also the the results are taken into account in relation to the ambient air in the room then they take that information and then they can compare the e nose visits uh e nose readings at each visit and then they can kind of follow progress and so in 86 percent of cases researchers found that the e nose was able to discriminate between this uh 68 patient sample size of whose lung transplants were stable and whose were not so it seems like a very good non-invasive early clue to potential lung transplant failure and of course you know this was 68 people this was not yet a clinical trial this was really a proof of concept and uh it looks really good looks really good if we can breathalyze people if there's other things that works hailing that can give clues to our our physical health that's great i am all about this kind of technology where if whatever metabolites are coming out in my breath you know i mean even just a drop of blood every once in a while i'd be happy to do that as well just you know these these sensors that can pick up the oddities the things that aren't quite right and that yes yes more of them and it's star trek day as we discussed at the beginning for star trek day this yes this is exactly that there are breathalyzers you can plug into your smartphone so this is something that this is way far in the future but i don't think it's sci-fi i think this is something that we will see is something that you can breathe into on your smart device that can help track it's not going to take the place of a doctor but if it's no example if you are a long transplant patient you could do this daily and that information could get sent to your doctor right so for sure there's no why why would you have to drive yeah why do you have to go places the technology can be with you whenever you need it yeah yeah so i love the uninvasiveness of this that's that's uh uh huge superpower but i also you know as we're as you're talking about like initially how do you separate the noise from you know what's what's just can you imagine like right now like with all the wildfires and everything all the particulate matter in the air if you've had a lung transplant plant and no way of really testing it and you're having trouble breathing it could be what's affecting everybody or it could be your lung surgery is going awry and you did not really know the decipher that would be terrifying oh my goodness yeah this thing needs to get developing out there available to uh physicians or patients even everywhere yeah and 86 success is uh that's not bad at all not bad it's very good considering there's not really anything else that can and do it can do it at this stage of the transplant right which is really like you're working it's not like the more invasive version is 95 percent effective we got nothing so so it's pretty great and it's really like it's actually like that for like if if you've ever like we've all done at some point done the dumb thing where we have like a fever and some nausea and maybe a joint ache and we've gone to one of those diagnostics online or maybe you had the little medical diagnosis book at home kind of a thing yeah and like it's all noise because it's all like the same symptoms and it's the same thing like how do you tell you've cancer you're dying differentiate anything so any any tool out there that can separate away a bunch of noise from an actual thing that's taking place is huge so very very huge speaking of noise in the system i'm sticking to the climate change kind of the climate change news tip for this story and i just want you to know that animals out in the world are adapting to climate change by shape shifting they're shape shifters well not real shape shifters but uh some new research looked at a few of the ways that different animal species adapt to rising temperatures by changing the size of their ears their tails their beaks their legs even various appendages often change size to allow for heat loss so that species that are getting hotter in high in higher temperature climates can actually manage their temperatures more readily so they identified a bunch of different examples that they call shape shifters including many species in Australia and they found that a pattern is very very very widespread and that we might see fundamental changes to animal forms as a result of climate change so we're going to find that some animals like elephants african elephants they pump warm blood into their ears to help with some of that heat dispersion what if their ears keep getting bigger beaks of birds have similar functions and they actually found that yes indeed bird beaks are getting larger they looked at many species of australian parrots and they found that the beak size of gang gang cockatoos and red romped parrots increased between four percent and ten percent over about the last 150 years so there's quite a quite a variety the divergence between different species probably species limitations being part of that and also other ecological factors but that's one of the big questions now is which species are actually going to be able to adapt and change the size of their appendages and what factors in their environments are going to keep them limited that are going to potentially make them easier to spot by predators that are going to change their ability to find a mate and reproduce how how are these adaptations going to change the animals moving forwards won't those won't those adaptations not make it very far i mean because we're talking generational changes right these are generational changes these are adaptations that are that are fully within the the purview of the genetic structure of the animals as they are to grow is kind of like what we've seen darwins finches in the galapagos do over several generations we've seen beak sizes on several different species go bigger and smaller bird size get bigger and smaller and those birds are still the same species yeah they're still the same species they're just changing within their changeability factors so does this mean humans of the future will have much bigger ears right our ears gonna get bigger no man we have air conditioning don't worry about it we're just gonna have better insulative clothing in the winter better heat wicking clothing in the summer and better air conditioning well also our selection is like all over the place and we have pharmaceutical care so like this we've really thrown evolution out of whack for humans at least at least with respect to how we adapt according to these climactic factors right so um we're not going to potentially change in the same way but we will definitely change technologically because that is our adaptation at this point in time but or as the economists might say survival of the richest yes unfortunately ouch and um so anyway the researchers think based on their study that they are predictions that they can make about which species might be able to to survive over other species based on based on a variety of factors so um they're they're expecting that starlings song sparrows seabird small mammals um are likely to change appendage sizes in response to increasing temperatures and we may we may see more of this as more researchers start looking for it and um and so keep your eyes out for little rodents with larger ears who knows could be climate change do you have another story here justin oh uh goodness yes uh nasa's perseverance mars rover has started its rock collection i've got it the space agency tweeted alongside a photograph of a rock of course slightly thicker than a pencil inside a sample too i've got it nasa that's your tag i've got it not not rock on not perseverance pays off or nasa was a rolling stone none of that you went with i've got it okay i don't you you don't need me to tell you how to build a rover obviously you've got that figured out but you really should hire someone for these press releases uh someone who can give you i can give you options that even if they're not great maybe a little bit off brand would still be better than what you came up with but if you like being boring say so in fact there you go another boring day on mars see it's that easy nasa just put a little bit of effort into it but no i've got it all right this sample was collected on the first of the month uh a little just over a week ago but nasa was initially not sure that they'd actually collected it because they couldn't get a decent picture of the little containment portion that they've got there they took pictures but the picture the lighting was bad or something they just couldn't tell what they had so they finally got the lighting right they took a few more photos and they could verify that in the transfer tube they had their sample and they actually took it not down to the ground they like found a rock and drilled into it so they have like an actual rock core in there uh thomas zerbuchan associate minister of science likened the achievement to the first samples of rock taken from the moon which are still being studied by researchers today perseverance is sampling and catching system is saying is the most complex mechanism ever sent to space because just that capturing system alone contains over 3000 parts uh right now it's collecting rocks it's got about eight more rock samples it's going to be collecting and once it sort of finishes that it's going to move to a different region in the crater that is thought to be much more rich in clay minerals where it will take many many many more samples uh this is the one that's actually maybe the more interesting it's interesting that they're starting with the rock uh and then moving on to the clay samples i would try to i would have thought of doing it the other way around um did you know cut the easy thing first be gentle with the blade and but maybe you don't want to throw any cut the rocks i don't know but then go into the clay second but that's the one that's got most likely uh the higher chance of finding signals of life uh on the foreign planet at least if it's anything like earth that's where a lot of our mineral and fossil deposits from life sort of build up over time is in that that sort of clay so uh but yeah and then and then uh joint mission with the european space agency sometime in the 2030s is going to try to collect those samples and send them back to earth at which point nasa scientists will exclaim i've got it i hope they do your package has been delivered you'll get it they'll get a text yeah i'm packing just on your got it you got it come on try harder all right how about we take a listen to this little little snippet of biology what do you hear when you hear this that that sounds it sounds like me losing all sleep this evening is what it sounds like hang on hang on uh that sounds like a duck dressed like a human trying to order fish at a at a barn or red lobster well it was a loud recording there's a bunch of noise in it but did you hear somebody saying you bloody fool you bloody fool no you didn't he didn't hear somebody saying you bloody fool it sounded like human speech but it sounded like gibberish to me you'd have to prime me with it not playing okay so if you play now if i if i play now what do you hear you bloody fool oh i heard it that time i heard it that time you bloody fool now i can hear it so there's a researcher carol 10 kate and he is at leiden university and um he's been working on a book about vocal learning and birds and in researching for the book he was going around and heard a story heard a tale of a duck that's had learned to say you bloody fool because it was hand-reared duck accent the duck the duck and set the duck and set accent yes i could hear the duck accent i didn't realize it was a british duck way of the hard bees you know i couldn't i couldn't yeah so it was it was not it was an australian uh rearing so it was more of an australian accent of a duck that is known as a musk duck now the surprising thing about this is that ducks are not supposed to have vocal learning and this is a recording that's 34 years old that was taken and put into some uh biological library and this researcher from leiden university went and listened to it and listened to it lince listened to it and tracked down the story and yes indeed discovered that this duck had for whatever reason been turned into a wildlife uh rehabilitation location and the was was hand-reared right by a person not by another duck and in this odd situation in which a musk duck had never found itself before instead of just going like like other ducks it said you bloody fool and what this implies like some other species that we never thought were vocal learners because the sounds that they make when they vocalize are not necessarily the kinds of sounds that you have to go through a learning process to practice and learn from somebody else and they sound so similar to other conspecifics other individuals of their species we just think they don't learn these things but apparently these musk ducks they have a very long uh juvenile development period where they're taken care of by their parents for an extended period fed by their parents which is very by the mother which is very unusual in ducks very very often they are water birds are very precocial and so this this duck this individual recording we haven't seen the duck because it's probably long gone by now but it's a very interesting happenstance to give us insight into a species and as to something that yes Blair we didn't think that they did because we just never saw it happen and show me a second duck show me a second duck show me a duck alive today recreate the thing i feel like this has to happen i feel like this this recording at the university like every first year biology student or whatever somebody in the first year trying to go after a doctor or something the universe is like you know you know a mystery bloody fool soft oh you mean the the talking duck what are you guys are kidding me act no no really if you go look in the file somebody should look into that again one day and then some student after several weeks of listening to the recording of you bloody fool finally goes oh i get it i'm a bloody fool i'm a bloody fool that's what i hope you say too i want the videotape right no videotape just the audio tape yeah it kind of it i don't know it just i i totally believe other animals are capable of vocal learning that seems silly that anyone would say they're not however this is a sound i have never heard from a duck before exactly it's very like breathy the fact that they it sounded like they were making like a b and an l sound and their tongue is like stuck to their hey i don't hey i gotta i gotta talking duck here should we should we film it and do some audio now i think the audio enough would be fine it's a talking duck if people hear it that should convince them like how is it how did you not that never like now really it's a talking duck we should i need the receipt i think give me a give me an audio tape of it it'd be fine it's just making a noise everyone knows what a duck looks like that's not exciting yeah and i like stop it yeah i mean i remain skeptical i remain skeptical remaining skeptical is very good what we know now is this is a singular situation and if other individuals find themselves in the care of a musk duck then perhaps you too can teach the young duck well but you're in the care of a musk duck something really bad happened one one duck species no no no ducks are really closely related and their evolutionary divergence is not that long ago so do with all the ducks find another duck they could do this it can't just be the musk duck i don't believe that right so it'll have to be you'll have to find a species that maybe has a very different interesting communication pattern like the musk duck that has a longer developmental period where it's being taken care of by its parents maybe there's a different social structure than other ducks i mean these are the kinds of things that biologists and behaviorists really have to start looking at and and teasing apart to see how it works comparative studies um and these kinds of um hand rearing studies where they're separated from their normal environment to give us that idea but i have a feeling that we just fell for a 50 year old snipe hunt it's very it it it might not be a snipe hunt it's a musk duck hunt mm-hmm you bloody fool and on that note thank you for being a part of this week in science this week i hope you're enjoying the show if you are enjoying the show please take the time to share the show with a friend we'd really appreciate it if you could tell somebody about twist today okay all right let's come on back with some COVID update yeah no no um i have an update it's not good no it's not good nope numbers are up and we're acting like we're all back in business everybody COVID-19 cases are climbing in children increasing 10 percent over the last week transitioning between august and september to make up 26 of all cases over 250 000 out of a nearly a million cases in just one week were children there were 750 000 pediatric COVID cases in the month of august alone this is the largest jump in child COVID numbers since the start of the pandemic and school has just begun thankfully although numbers have increased in the hospitals we are not seeing a large increase in the number of deaths as a result of COVID and one of the reasons why this might be is the fact that kids don't have an as active and adaptive immune system as they have an active innate immune system the adaptive immune system is kind of what gets adults in trouble when it comes to COVID-19 it's the antibody responses it's all of the T cells and B cells and other protective cells that all come into activation because they kind of recognize the coronavirus factor of SARS-CoV-2 that overactivate against things causing a lot of inflammation and researchers are hypothesizing at this point that one of the reasons that we may not have seen such such terrible results in kids as we have seen in adults could be because of this difference in how the child in the adaptive adaptive immune system works as compared to its the innate immune system so this is a good thing so let's keep the kids out of the hospitals if we can everybody there a snap in the chat room is asking any news on vaccinating those under 12 yeah so there is likely an emergency use order that's going to be coming out within the next couple of months right they're they're now reacting to what's happening here and trying to accelerate things they're trying to accelerate things but still they don't want to make kids sick so what happened is the FDA instead of asking to follow up on um on clinical trial patients for two months which is what the original clinical trials asked for they asked for six months of follow-up for kids who have been in the clinical trials and that's why we're not seeing the data come in yet from Pfizer that we need to see come in and so hopefully Pfizer will be completing that some of those studies for at least the five to twelve year range this month in September that's one of the estimated timetables that that we're looking at yes and then the the fouch the fouchy uh had uh i just heard in an interview where he's he's expecting that we we could see it uh in october uh that that could get rolled out that quick it's not a promise it's not a guarantee but um but if the data looks good they will they'll work it definitely there's definitely a problem with not doing it at this point and you know why just sending those kids to school that's an experiment in its own yeah i just i just i'm so angry about so many things but mostly it's like you just you can't take a time out like i consider myself to be a rather impulsive person but i can walk away from society for eight weeks without a problem but society can't walk away from you justin society wants your taxes come on but along those lines though people do want to get vaccinated people want their kids vaccinated there's been a ton of stress related to all of this one thing doctors have said if you have a child there is a workaround but they're asking you to please do not do it which is that now that the Pfizer vaccine has been approved for 12 and over as a actual vaccine the co co co co co community co community that i can i can't remember community community can have its off label uses now that it has been approved so there are workarounds but uh researchers are asking you for the safety of children because these trials have not come out please do not take that workaround unless it's really uh an emergency what are you saying i just still don't understand it like what because it's been approved as uh as a medication as a vaccine there are doctors can now prescribe it as off label uses what would be an even though they're not really supposed to but what's an off label like use i don't even it hasn't something that it so it would be to use it for a younger age group for a kid for a kid for a vaccine oh i see what you okay so it would be someone's the thread there off label is the prescription is for a certain use but if it's actually it's not what i've heard supposed to be used for and i'm not gonna talk about the other drugs that are doing that right now i hear it's actually like uh horses who take it nope find that they have a lot less heartworm when they take the Pfizer vaccine no right but you know we're talking about all this stuff and we're like oh man it's so stressful everything with the pandemic has been super stressful but researchers uh just published a study in plus one this week suggesting that just getting the first shot of you know a two-shot Pfizer dose reduced Americans stress levels that that Americans reported that people in the united states reported improved mental health after having a vaccine so vaccines can help your mental health yeah my husband getting one dose improved my mental health yeah he worked at the hospital so that was perfect yeah i can totally attest to that if there was a huge sense of relief like one one layer of doom disappeared just one layer but it's helpful yeah and there were uh there are a lot of people who felt that relief um this spring that um that mental health mental distress peaked in the spring of 2020 but has been improving significantly since then or at least had been um thanks to delta the delta variant we are seeing breakthroughs happen a lot more often i saw a report this last week published uh in a it was a newspaper so not a journal but researchers were estimating now that if you're vaccinated you have a one in five thousand chance of becoming infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus delta or any other uh one in five thousand that's up to you to think about your risk but what is allowing the delta variant to do this it is just really great at reproducing it gets inside of you and is like i'm gonna be in your cells and use the machinery to there utmost and so they just let this delta variant is like just going for it in there it's going to get in there replicate replicate replicate do all it can but how does it get there in the first place it has a lot more bifurcated spike proteins on its surface so its surface is just packed with way more spike proteins and so there's a lot more for it to come in contact with on the surface of your cells it's also as you may have heard is is getting past slipping past some of a lot of our neutralizing antibodies so we're seeing a lot more of these breakthroughs happen right now but now it's not completely breaking through for everybody and the other wonderful thing is that people who do actually have a breakthrough infection are usually not ending up in the hospital so you may end up sick stay home but you hopefully will not end up in the hospital and you also have a reduced probability of long covid which that's pretty good so it's still these are all like you think of the good you think of the bad there's a lot of balances now there's risks there's a lot of things that we need to take into consideration but it's not all bad news right now um what else can we do to protect ourselves have a good diet yeah what was that story i i looked at it and i was like nah it was like eat your vegetables right eat your vegetables that sounds like not worth it yeah so you know it's a correlation not causation but looking uh over three million eight hundred eighty six thousand two hundred seventy four million person months of follow-up of thirty one thousand eight hundred fifteen covid-19 cases they found that people who had better diets and were eating more vegetables were less likely to have gotten covid-19 like me eat your vegetables kai eat more vegetables i'm gonna make you eat kale okay that's spinach okay oh that's a verbal contract that's a bit too much i love spinach it's like my favorite we love spinach it's delicious especially with butter a little cumin yeah all right i like to put it in my tuna sandwiches spinach and it's a final good news in some final good news if you were infected with covid-19 and then you got an mRNA vaccine apparently you might be super human i mean super immune yeah and there was an npr report talking to a number of researchers who have been looking into a variety of different questions related to vaccines and infections and how they work and they don't know if the reverse works as well so getting vaccinated and then getting covid if you're super human at that point as well but so far it looks like those individuals maybe not all of them even but people who are infected then got the mRNA vaccines you're like covered your body's like coronavirus what's that i'm gonna recognize them all okay they found they found that people can you still be transmissible though so it comes down to right yeah that's that's the big question but it sounds like it sounds like no it sounds like these people are immune and that their bodies recognized SARS-CoV-1 they recognize the MERS virus they recognize SARS-CoV-2 they recognize others yeah they're recognizing all these coronaviruses and their cells are fighting them off so super immunity but we don't know exactly when that combination works and when it does it like whether you had to be really sick or just kind of sick the first time there's a lot of questions so if you have not been vaccinated yet don't try and get covid and before you get vaccinated just just go get vaccinated well can't you can still get it after like you can get vaccinated and then go get it that's like the safer way to do it really that's what we recommend the safer way to live to live now like i'm still getting frustrated though on a continual basis with the idea of immunity uh this is this is the thing that i think is extremely damaging you know we have we have all the more that people have gotten vaccinated the more that they have become selfish in terms of dealing with the virus because now that they're vaccinated they want everything to return back because they feel invulnerable and that's why part of the reason we're gonna get this continuing spread until it does affect all the children or it does mutate again because we're continually to keep this reservoir alive partly by having this unvaccinated group but also partly by the vaccinated group going around and licking door handles because they think they're immune to everything don't lick door handles still wear a mask be careful we still need eight weeks to shut down people it's still the only solution it's probably not gonna happen for the children for the children we will definitely not for the children i mean i don't know what we didn't do for the not gonna do it now i have no faith in humanity i have faith in our twist audience though speaking of which thank you everyone for joining us for this episode of this week in science and if you are listening now and enjoying the show i'm gonna ask you to please head over to twist.org and click on the patreon link if you haven't done so before if you have done so you can do that too click on that patreon link and maybe update your support if you'd like to give more or if you haven't given before check it out our patreon community allows you to support twist in an ongoing monthly fashion at the level of your choosing ten dollars and more a month and you will be thanked by name at the end of the show and we have lots of fun gifts stickers and t-shirts and things of that sort and i do hope that you will consider supporting twists and our efforts to bring you science every single week thank you for all of your support we really can't do this without you all right i think it's now time to come back to talk about some really great topics animals in blair's animal corner uh what you got blair thank you i can't start without it um so i'll start with dogs um dogs they uh they're very discerning we know this already they're very good at reading their humans right yes and to kind of follow in the vein from the birds that we were talking about before here's something that is quote-unquote uniquely human and it is the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others what does that mean that means understanding the motivation behind actions and so this is a study looking at whether dogs could understand human intentions or whether they are just responding to outcomes so how do you figure this out well a team of researchers in Germany conducted an experiment looking at how dogs reacted to food rewards when they were withheld intentionally and unintentionally so this is part of the unable versus unwilling paradigm which as far as these researchers know this is the first time it has been used to investigate dogs and the unable versus unwilling paradigm is where test subjects react differently to a human experimenter who intentionally the unwilling condition or unintentionally the unable condition withholds a reward so do i not treat the dog after doing what i asked them to do because i don't want to or because i dropped the treat and it fell under the door right does the dog react differently depending on which of those conditions happens and is it because the dog understands what's going on in my brain or are they simply acting in response to what's going around them kind of the the result of those intentions so they looked at 51 dogs each of them were tested under three conditions and each condition the dog was separated from a human by a transparent barrier of large plexiglass like we've all become very used to in these strange times the situation was that the experimenter was to feed the dog pieces of dog food through a gap in the barrier so there was a slit in the middle of this transparent barrier and the unwilling condition the experimental experimenter suddenly withdrew their reward through the gap so they showed it to them and went oh never mind in the barrier and placed it in front of themselves so the dog couldn't get to it in the unable clumsy condition the experimental brought their reward to the gap tried to pass it through the grab gap but dropped it to where the dog couldn't get it and then in the unable blocked condition the experimental experimenter tried to give the dugger award but was unable because the gap in the barrier was blocked or too small so they kind of went to put their hand through the barrier and didn't make it in all conditions the reward remained on the tester's side of the barrier so no matter what that dog did not get that poor treat I'm sure they got plenty of treats later it's okay um so we would expect if they understood the motivation behind those actions that they would show different reactions in the unwilling compared to unable and that is exactly what they saw so when dogs waited before approaching the reward uh they the amount of time they waited was really what they were measuring the prediction was that if dogs are able to identify why the humans withheld the treat they would wait longer before approaching the unwilling condition trying to convince them to give them the treat if they knew it was a mistake if it was the unable condition they might rush to try to help alleviate the situation to get the treat right this is all based on the idea that dogs are trying to perform a task to earn the treat basically and so not only did this happen the dogs waited longer in the unwilling condition than the unable but they also started offering up more behaviors they would sit they would lie down is the idea is they were trying to say like no please I deserve a treat and they would stop wagging their tail doing the good things yes but but see if they dropped it accidentally or it didn't fit through the hole then they would run over to the other side of the barrier and say like hey hey that's fine hey do you need help getting that um so the idea is that this does appear to indicate that they can understand the intention behind the action of the humans of course further study is needed because there's a million things that could happen that would cause this change behavior besides understanding intent for example was the trainer's body language different in those cases did you respond um kind of subconsciously to movement from the dog in a particular way there's all sorts of things that could have happened how how are they talking to the dog did the tone change right there's all sorts of things that could happen in this case that could indicate much more behind um motivation other than just being able to recognize like oh they wanted to give me that treat but it didn't work out and as much as we like to think that you know a trainer is being exactly the same to every single dog you know every dog is different every trainer is different sometimes they just don't get along sometimes the trainer might just be like you know um i'm trying really but they're not yeah yeah so i think it's it's definitely one of those things where uh i would love to see something like this done with an ipad and a dispenser where like the dispenser gets stuck then the dog tries it has to you know i could i would love to be able to take the human idea out of it but then you're removing intent right then you're just looking at mechanics so right yeah it's it's a different question it's really hard how do you how do you test human intent without humans so i think you have to kind of then parse out like maybe can we map their brain while they're doing this the human and the dog it would get crazy to try to figure this out but i'm sure i i i look forward to seeing those crazy studies where they actually try to get to the bottom of this we just we need to have our you know our human synthetes our androids that always do everything the same the dogs will never know yeah perhaps um but yes it but it did make me feel a little bit better because i don't know if any of you have ever stepped on a dog's but but they make a sound and you just you want to go up in the corner and die because you feel so bad you're like i didn't mean to but like if they understand intent then they know it's a mistake which makes me feel so much better so that's i'm hoping that's the implication here is that a dog knows when when you step on their tits he's accidentally that's my fingers crossed but we'll see cats may or may not understand intent but they sure know that they know how to take it out on you yeah i think no matter what not only do they know intent but they also don't care you stepped on my tail and they run away hiss and run and then there and then they go pee on your laundry that you know it's great um great so from that i would like to move to uh extremely clumsy flying lizards okay this is this is a study from you berkeley and this is the culmination of 15 years of flying gecko research this is uh you see berkeley oh and also more recently it was brought to max plank institute for intelligent systems in stuttgart germany that actually is one of my favorite parts of the story is when it moved to max plank so sit tight um but they wanted to look at how geckos use their tails to maneuver mid air because as we know lots of lizards use the tail to kind of like identify where they're gonna go and then and kind of like steer and air make sure they stay right side up they also use their tail to run across the surface of a pond they use their tail to propel they use their tail for balance but these geckos are using their tail for something else and so the the kind of the the reason that they they discovered this is that they were studying the way that these geckos glide through trees and they found that in 37 times over their field seasons over several field seasons in singapore these geckos the asian flat tailed house gecko just bonked their heads straight into the tree just took a terrible landing just absolutely terrible went head first they call it a header in the research just fully bonked into the tree and you would think they would then tumble to the ground aha no high-speed video cameras recorded their trajectories and they found that despite the fact they were going about six meters a second or 21 kilometers an hour or as justin would say 21,000 meters an hour or as those people who still do standard would say over 200 feet per second or about 120 gecko body lengths per second that's very fast they they kind of they move their head up and down before they take off side to side view their landing target they get really confident and then they smack right into the tree have a terrible landing but then they grab the trunk with their padded toes their back toes as their head and shoulders fall backwards they do this crazy like a matrix bend and the leverage of the pressing against their tail allows them to kind of slowly move back up and go right where they meant to go so they don't fall down kind of head over heels that wow braces them and allows them to stick to the tree so really phenomenal crazy thing that these guys are doing something we haven't seen with lizard tails in the past and it does mean i think it's worth looking at tails across the animal kingdom now to see who else is doing this but where this really gets interesting is that they then took it to robots so there were robots that were 3d printed they were given tails some of them were given no tails they had velcro feet this is all kind of mimicking the geckos and they threw them at walls it was robot catapult so they were able to toss these things at the wall this was at the max plank institute toss them at the wall without actually hurting any lizards in the making of their science yeah so they made this soft robot that looks kind of like a gecko they as i said they had the velcro feet and then the tail was supposed to have kind of the same flexibility and tension as a gecko tail and so they were able to make this mechanism where it would press downward when the front legs hit a surface like the geckos tail reflex so the robot had a similar success as the gecko they had a pretty good time so in the wild 87 percent of the geckos with tails successfully landed on a vertical surface why do i say with tails because all lizards sometimes they lose their tails yeah or most lizards i guess there's a few exceptions but most lizards can lose their tail so um when they had when they did not have tails the the tailless geckos fell a lot more frequently tailless robots they did pretty terribly they only were able to land successfully on a vertical surface in 15 percent of trials and the real geckos had an 87 percent success the robots had a 55 percent success not having a brain pretty good not bad at all and so that's a lot of just biology there or at least biology inspired engineering right yes absolutely and so one of the things i really liked about this was that um the researchers mentioned like you know tails are a pretty important part of a body and so when we're designing robots if we're trying to make animal movement quadrupedal movement climbing crawling the tail actually is kind of important until recently it's it hasn't been considered as important as legs or wings but some animals actually could potentially be recategorized as pentapedal needing that fifth appendage for locomotion this is a locomotion this is not falling off of trees yes i was literally aerial movement it is i was literally just observing this in my backyard uh the other day because i've got this tree with some sort of little berries or something that's in the tree i'm not even sure what kind of tree it is but the squirrels have been in my and they've been at work they've been getting these little husks off and eating this little nut or whatever the thing is and they've been really busy up there and they've been going out on the extremities of these branches and i was watching and it was it was that tail was completely while the the the arms and legs bent forward on a tiny branch leaning forward and working with its hands and that tail is articulating to counterbalance the entire time uh and i noticed like the squirrels also have bigger butts than i thought they did but but they have got to work but their weight distribution along with that tail is designed exactly for that to allow them to perch in otherwise an insanely precarious way that they wouldn't be able to do without it yeah yeah absolutely so not only just studying animals keeping in mind if their tail is a really important part of what they do but next step when you're when you're making robots it's something to consider if you're making a quadrupedal robot does it need a tail it's not just for flash although it would look fabulous but it it might have some good function when you want to take that thing for a ride and if you are enjoying this weekend science you can ask yourself do you need a tail or do you need a towel if you need a towel you can head over to our zazzle store go over to twist.org and click on that zazzle link it'll take you to our zazzle store where there are a number of wonderful products that have been put together by Blair with Blair's Animal Corner calendar art we've got mugs and pillows and towels you can get a beach towel with the twist logo emblazoned all over it it's a fantastic towel end of summer i gotta tell you or if you're in australia summers coming maybe maybe that towel will be timely head over to zazzle and give our merchandise a look but make sure you you've got to down two pints otherwise even with the towel you'll be in trouble trouble all right just in what's just in ah that's a great question okay so there's a uh there's a peer reviewed medical journal JAMA uh and they have a JAMA JAMA pediatrics is part of their portfolio published study this week titled police exposures and the health and well-being of black youth in the us what it found was shocking unless you are black in america in which case it was probably just pointing out things you already knew systematic review of 29 studies that included 19,954 participants uh looked at police exposure and they found it was associated with multiple health outcomes for black youth specifically including adverse mental health risk behaviors as well as impaired safety concluding that police exposure should be considered a critical determinant of health uh so they it's a pretty comprehensive thing because they again they they this is one of those studies where they looked at other studies this is 29 different studies in all 20,000 participants so they went through a lot of stuff but some of the findings that kind of stuck out at least for me in the there's 15,967 youth treated for uh legal intervention injuries in california hospitals over a 12 year period uh the overall rate of injury was 11.9 per 100,000 years black boys aged 15 to 19 years old had the highest rate they were at 200.9 per 100,000 now remember the overall rate was 11.9 but if you happen to be black it was 200.9 uh white boys were also up there above that average at 57.7 uh girls were much lower although if you were a black girl the same age as the white girls in the 15 to 19 range you were 4.3 times more likely to have an injury at the hands of police the relative inequalities between black and white youth were even greater at the younger ages uh 10 ages 10 to 14 black boys had 5.3 times the injury rate of white boys and black girls had 6.7 times the injury rate of white girls that may and out of everything uh yeah race seemed to be determining factor uh the rate amongst black girls actually was higher than all other groups except for the black boys so they actually the the rate at which they were injured was higher so i misspoke before that the girls were much lower so what the study seems to be indicating is that there's enhanced violence towards children that is being permitted i guess or practiced at least by police departments towards specifically children of color this is like sort of the definition of institutional racism when you take an institution yep and you look at its data we were talking about removing the human being sort of from the experiment well in a way when you look at large data sets you don't have to concern yourself with the individual or the instance or the particular of a specific what was the tonality involved what was the circumstance when you're looking at massive amounts of data 20 000 individuals over a 12 year span and you see these massive trends and these massive disparities i mean honestly i think the numbers are all high too high probably in all of the categories but the disparate amount means that there seems to be there is uh excessive violence being acted on children of color in the state of california which considers itself to be thinks of itself as being uh more progressive of a state so imagine data in states where they're not another state yeah imagining that yeah and i think you know there there's two pieces to this too just kind of on the trying to inject some action and solutions into this is there's there's demanding better of those institutions obviously that's the given but i think on top of that knowing these numbers then if if you are a white individual and you see a person of color being treated poorly by law enforcement your chances of being hurt by that law enforcement is pretty damn low compared to that other person so it's it's also a good reminder that intervening is always helpful wait wait wait wait wait wait wait hang on let me verify so you're saying if a police officer is is getting physical with somebody you should video it say something video it say something intervene say for it to stop call for help all of the above i think i think so and i think that i think the most important thing is if we can use this kind of information i mean yes we all have a place to if we see something to say something but if it's not just that it's also using this kind of information working within public health systems working within the institution of policing to try and teach new methods to try and change the institutions to try and make sure that these negative interactions between police and youth of color don't happen or at least don't happen as often so that the negative ramifications to mental health to physical health to later you know ability to thrive in life is not negatively affected you know we need to change this data needs to this needs to be this needs to be institutionalized the understanding that there is a big problem that needs to be acted on yeah and then one of the other things that always also occurs to me in any of any of these these sort of conversations is is housing if you are in a suburban white neighborhood and your parents are at work and your friends come over you're hanging out in the backyard if you're rough housing with each other if you're doing a little things whatever the kids do sometimes these days um you're you're on private property behind a fence and you're not seen if your lower income anywhere in this state you're not going to go home you're going to be out in public spaces doing the exact same behavior right but now you're exposed but you're exposed to police presence so what really needs to get educated is that it's not it's not the jobs of the police necessarily to uh be using the full force of their training when youth are involved period period like like let them get away with their thing that they're doing it's not worth it for society for you to send a child to the hospital yeah we need to we yeah and we also need to question where where police are interacting with children and why that's happening in the first place so that that can potentially be changed yeah yeah yeah it's important what's the next one Justin you got one more oh uh yes this is interesting too uh researchers have developed an artificial cell like structure uh out of inorganic matter that can autonomously ingest chemically process and push out a material basically that's like the one of the essential functions of a living cell it can metabolize a thing yeah sort of so this is uh published the ATP involved probably is not yeah yeah the articles published in nature uh and it's uh it's a thing that they're calling cell mimics and they've actually sort of proposed a range of things that this might be able to do so this is new york university and university of chicago describing they have this fully synthetic cell mimic that when deployed in mixtures of different particles this the cell can perform an active transport task so it can autonomously go in there capture certain molecules that are in this uh chemicals that are in the solution then when it's inside it concentrates it stores it there and then it can uh expel the material later which so depending on also what's inside it there can be a chemical process that takes place that can transform the chemical that they're taking inside and so when it when they expel it it has been changed in some way reverse they can also go into a mixture with a molecule inside and be coaxed to express it and then add it to the environment so they created this spherical membrane it's about the size of a red blood cell this is super super super super tiny uh they've got this polymer on the outside they pierced a microscopic hole in the spherical membrane so there's this little channel that matter can be exchanged with uh so in order to perform the task right you would normally need in a living cell you would have a ATP mitochondria you'd have some sort of uh energy for an active transport in this cell mimic researchers that have this chemically reactive component inside the nine-hour channel itself that is triggered by light so you have to add a little bit of energy to it and then when you've activated it with the light it acts like a pump when the light hits the pump it triggers the chemical reaction turning the pump into a tiny vacuum pulling cargo into the membrane or expelling it out again so some of the things that they're thinking they might be able to do is oh what is the cool thing they grabbed uh E.coli they they send it out and we're sucking up E.coli bacteria with this thing so they could grab a little bacteria and then you know it could be then you could pull out these little cell mimics that would be great can we can we put that on my kitchen counter can we use this for environmental cleanup yeah they uh so this could be yeah you could use this inside the human body is what they're even saying oh wow so you could use this to like you've had an infectious pussy something you could sort of put these in there and they could sort of suck up all the E.coli or whatever the whatever the infection is uh so they also they they think they could use this for water purification uh cleaning microscopic pollutants they think they could possibly use this for drug delivery uh so there's a there's a lot of potential for this little this little Pac-Man this little slurpy little Pac-Man thing it's biological but not biological it's it's not all it's 100 non-biological there are no biological components that make up this uh mimic it's an easy bake oven it's a teeny shiny easy bake oven right you put some ingredients in comes back out different a cell mimic can kind of work that's very fun that that that's awesome i mean if it has absolutely i mean it's got it does have biological chemical components kind of so it's these chemical reactions right or these environmental reactions so you can actually yeah right so you could preload it so say there's this there's this molecule that's a terrible awful horrible thing but you have this other chemical which if you combine it with it it might be able to counteract it but then it may it's also maybe it makes it toxic whatever the thing is you still don't want it so it goes in there pulls it in makes it inactive but then you can still pull out the cell mimics and so that yeah it's all sorts of potential possible activities for this but it it looks pretty cool you look very cool little tiny cells we're eating things up like pac-man all right well i don't have cells right now but i've got some more animals to end the show with do you want cats or hummingbirds yes first one and the other okay all right i'm gonna start with the hummingbirds we're gonna talk about hummingbirds who can who know the smell of danger right and this is really fun out of uc riverside the researchers have just published their work in behavioral ecology and social socio biology their work looking into the olfactory behavior of hummingbirds who have been shown in previous studies as pollinators and nectar feeders to remember the locations of flowers that they have fed from and thus pollinated remove the nectar that they've pollinated really great memory for flowers so they know not to return to a flower that has no nectar in it i mean why would you want to do that but the researchers also we're looking at hummingbirds and going look at that long skinny beak they're little tiny heads they probably can't smell of course they can't really yeah yeah exactly Blair of course they can the researchers of course you know many research they're not seabirds they don't have giant nares and olfactory bulbs they're not going to be able to smell these little tiny hummingbirds of course they can and the researchers at uc riverside who worked with hummingbirds they showed for the first time that hummingbirds can not only smell insects but that scents might help them stay out of danger when they're looking for nectar so say there's a dangerous insect somewhere nearby or the scent of a predator on some of their plants that they are feeding from these birds are able to use scent to avoid dangerous situations they allowed over a hundred hummingbirds to choose between sugar water feeders or sugar water plus a chemical and it was a number of different insect chemicals to signal the presence of an insect the feeders looked exactly the same because of course you can just take hummingbird feeders with the red sugar watery looking feeder chemical or no chemical so the only thing that's different is the scent and they were able to determine that the the hummingbirds were able to to tell the difference between scent deposited on flowers by European honey bees attraction chemicals secreted by argentine ants and formic acid from some ants which is known to harm birds in some cases formic acid can hurt their little eyeballs so the hummingbirds are really avoiding formic acid they avoided both ant chemicals but they were totally fine with honey bees they're like whatever honey bees you're awesome I'm going to ignore you and they had they had another compound called ethyl butyrate which was just a a test compound it's present in human food and the researchers say it smells like juicy fruit gum which is not a scent known in nature and the birds didn't care about it birds don't care about juicy fruit gum so now the question is we've been looking at hummingbirds looking at flowers and feeders from the perspective of their visual senses what role does scent play in their foraging behavior especially now that we know that birds not only can use it to potentially identify sweeter smelling flowers if they can also identify these harmful scents that they don't like as well how does it influence the decisions that they make while they forage uh very much lee yes right a lot birds they're gonna they're gonna use their sense of smell it's fascinating to me i mean it's like you i mean if you walk up to a place where you want to eat and it smells bad you're gonna be like oh i i'm gonna go now thanks yeah it's this is just leftover uh propaganda for when from when the scientific consensus was that most birds can't smell yeah just left over but now we're a little tiny tube mouth with that tongue and the little brain of course they can't smell yes they can of course they can yes they can and they use it very well yeah yeah but we can't worry about what what science used to think uh because we've since learned that flowers can hear right right there's that crazy story about the the the sound of bees making this certain flower spike it's sugar uh content for a very in a very rapid way so that it could attempt vibrations they like it bees by smell so bees can smell flowers can listen now i want to know now i want to know if the flowers are listening with the hummingbirds i want to know if they're spiked because if the hummingbird can smell and the flower can make a scent and the flowers can hear you're probably got communication of that yeah fly by and then let's spike the sugar let's put the scent out so let's get the hummingbird over here so yeah yeah let's do it um has anybody ever wondered where tabby cats got their stripey fur from they used to be lions or tigers or something like they just shrunk over time they were big tigers but where did the lions and tigers get their stripedness from where did their patterns come from all of these different designs that make our kitty cats so unique and pretty from their parents the species what from their parents from their parents well very good Blair yes indeed they do yes they do and in fact researchers just publishing in nature communications this week out of let's see do we see which university these researchers are working from uh stanford medicine researchers they have determined that all of these patterns and variability have come from a particular gene d k k four d k k four of course the stripey gene it's a stripey gene i didn't think of that and this gene is active during during early embryonic development and they discovered that there's a thickening of skin tissue in certain areas in fetal cat tissue and it's like a pre pattern and it mimics the patterns that adult cats eventually get in their fur thick areas mark patches of fur that are going to be darker and thin areas mark patches that are going to be lighter and they call this step establishment and it happens way it's really early in fetal development way before the hair the follicles is even going on there and so the researchers took a look at this pre patterning and in they they were like okay what are the cells that are involved in this they looked at the makeup of those cells in the thick and the thin and they found that d k k four was really really active in the thickened areas of skin but not in the thin areas and so from that point they went to abyssinian cats they looked specifically abyssinian cats which have blurring colors in their coat that have all the sorts of squishy markings and it's like a bunch of gradations as opposed to very specific lines and they were able to just they were able to identify mutations in this d k k four gene that make it look ticked that make it look not tabby so if you remove d k k four the thicker areas get less thick but they don't go away altogether they get smaller and they get more packed together so what happens with white cats they're patterned too but they found that that there are two processes that are important here one that forms the pattern during the embryonic development the d k k four that's in there and then there's another translates pattern into pigment in the hair follicles and when you have solid colored cats that aren't striped you have instructions that produce dark pigment everywhere and in white cats you get instructions that override those early patterns and tell it to have no pigment anywhere and so there's an interaction with these follicular instructions at that second level of development that get rid of the stripes so all cats at some point in development were striped wow all cats at some point in fetal development were headed that direction they all had markings and strippings and blurls and whirls but then other instructions came it came into play and we have black cats or white cats less striped cats yeah it should occur that it would have something to do in the fetal development stage because uh was it i can't remember who's rabbits or puppies now i think it might have been puppies it could have been rabbits but we had this story this would have been a this would have been a long long time ago we were talking about on the air where the stress level of the mother uh the pregnant mother i'll say it's puppies why not determined coloration it had a huge effect on it uh and to the point where if they were in a more relaxed environment you got maybe uh lighter tones or more puppyish ears you had like a different furry outcome because a lot of it was controlled in the mother's stress level hormones right while while pregnant it was part of the foxtrot study too i think was an example of that where stress levels the calmer as they sort of bred for calmness and more relaxed animals that were calmer on humans less skittish and that sort of thing they got those more puppy-like features but it also might have been because uh the mothers were more relaxed and the hormone levels were different so then it triggers the expression of genes differently and so the question is then is yeah it's a you have an early gene that says this is what your pattern's gonna be remember this but then another instruction that comes along later and goes no no we're really stressed out you're gonna be dark brown and that's it and then you have to wonder then you have to wonder is that there by accident or is that something that was selected for in terms of is there is there a stress factor that that is required yeah right right is there a predator that's causing this stress that you hide from better if you have the darker pattern or if you have if there's nothing and you want to be more camouflaged for hunting is there a different pattern that's right like there might be uh benefits to both but then i still don't understand like how arctic foxes like will they be white in the winter and then like change their coats to like you know brown or red and like in this story was about why cats have stripes i have no idea i'm not going to answer that question here when i feel remiss because there was a study a while ago too that uh all the yellow coloration in dogs comes from a 12 million year old wolf species yeah they traced it all the way there and there's apparently only a color a couple of colors in dogs uh but they could trace them to animals that weren't multicolored because the modern day dog is a is such a mishmash but they could actually be pretty pretty but you can actually backtrack like the genes that are present for like the although yellow yellowish intonations are all genes that go back to this one wolf species 12 million years ago that's not related to the that's older not related to the gray wolf and then like the darker colorations might come from the gray wolf but they actually backtracked just a handful of pigment genes to predecessor wolves going back you know millions of years to make up the modern day dog so i still think it's from tigers they just have to keep looking back i don't know yeah let's look at the embryos of tigers and see we see if that's what is with cats i mean i would say it's a common ancestor between tigers and cats actually well thank you blair for that specification 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That what you said? How are you doing? I'm OK. Air quality is not great here. Oh, is it not? Yeah, it's OK. I mean, I've been really lucky. I don't think it's gotten over 100 in AQI in the last week. And I know there's other areas like where Justin is, where it's been solidly over 100 for two weeks. But it's just enough that I just have this like constant like it's not quite post nasal drip. It's just it's irritation in your throat, right? And it's I'm not somebody who gets allergies. I'm not a sensitive group normally, as they would identify with AQI. But it does kind of feel like just like the longer we just sit in this 60s to 80s AQI. Yeah, it just kind of gets worse and worse. Yeah, can you clear up a little bit? That'd be nice, OK. 60 to 80 doesn't seem bad. It's not bad. It's not good. Yeah, yeah. It's not great. It's like you can tell there's something amiss after a long time. Yeah. Oh, my God, I've got the yawns. I've been so tired today. Same. We're like, I'm going to take a nap. I'm so tired. Yeah. Time enough to sleep when you are. Gaurav, I missed it. I missed a comment. Should I look back? Was it not? Oh, yeah. Oh, it's narrow. We're saying that he saw you. He's been saw you when he was 13, been listening to you since then and is now a med student. Oh, my goodness. I did not see that message. And it's all because of you. That's so awesome. It might have been other factors. There's probably other factors involved. From what I've heard thus far, it sounds like it was 100% your. 100% me, no. Well, that's fantastic. Oh, thanks for bringing that up again, Gaurav. I missed it entirely. So that is. Yeah, it was very sweet. You know, y'all are wonderful. And it's just every once in a while, you get those comments that's just like. Which is amazing, too, because for a 14-year-old to be a med student, it's. I know. Exactly. Last week, there was a comment that made me sad. And it cut to my core. It was like somebody who knew how to hurt me. Oh, no. And so it's really nice to have one that it's like, uplifting, helpful. You all are wonderful. And you always are uplifting all the comments that I've They're always wonderful. But yeah, it was it's. Oh, we're just in go. Oh, you're back now. I'm still here. I don't know what happened. I don't know either. Yeah, yeah, Fada, you were wonderful. In the YouTube helping out there with that one. Is it deleted? I think it's still in there somewhere. It's not bad to the. Yeah. Oh, I don't like that. Didn't that's awesome. My I probably reiterated this same story too many times. But my favorite comment of all times was from a listener who who couldn't stand me as your new co-host. And hadn't listened for a while, but missed missed the guy who at the beginning of the podcast. Right. Yes. And I thought that guy was terrific. But this new guy is terrible. And then it was but it was all I've been the only new guy for how many years. The only guy on the show. And so it was both like I got a complimented for being like great co-host and like despised in the same comment. And then that same listener did like keep listening for a while. I was like, OK, it's Justin. I think I got a similar one once where they said, oh, yes. That's right. They said, like, I don't like this new intern. Bring the old intern from last year back. And it was like, oh, that was me still. It's almost as if humans are dynamic and their behavior and and attitudes and like not every change over time. Yeah. And you know, and this show is a very like we go we go through peaks and valleys of time and situation and energy levels like they're like, I don't. I can't tell you how many different time zones and or like part like like I've done the show and then gone to work. Yep. I've gotten off of working on directly to the show. Yeah. Like, you know, like this and it says it is a strange dynamic that changes like, oh, my gosh, when we were first doing the show, it was an hour show and we had as much content and we had as much content as we do in the two hour show because we just had woken up and had like three cups of coffee and then hit the air live and just talked fast. And we were younger, but we talked much faster. But we didn't we didn't dig into things as much. We're like, OK, let's move on to the next one. It was much punchier. I think just sometimes not always either. But now we get the transition to an evening show. Yeah. This is sort of everything's winding down a little bit more. People are more relaxed. It's a different it's a different vibe for sure. I believe. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think also, you know, it's what's really what I I appreciate about how we do the show is that we are. How we are and who we are. So that, you know, if we are tired, OK, we're trying to keep our energy level up and do a good show. But sometimes we're just tired, right? And other times we're super hyper. And other times we get the giggles. And other times we're, you know, snapping at each other. You know, like we've gone through so many different attitudes. And yeah, you know. And when you I mean, that's like the personal aspect of it. But like when you watch the news or you watch programs that are. News ish. Everyone sounds the same every single day. They make sure that it's news writing, it's news presentation, the personality, like you get a personality, but real personality is kind of taken out of it, I think. Well, this is this is actually people. People kind of expect you if you're doing a show to always be the same. And I'm like, I'm going to try. It's not going to work really. No, but oh, gosh, Dave Chappelle has a bit about this where he talks about like he was always impressed with the the way that anchors deliver the news dispassionately. Like there's something there's something almost reassuring about. And today in foreign country, thousands of people died in a tragic accident that could have been avoided had they had regulation laws in place and moving on to sports. You know, it's just like, oh, we're going to go to sports now. OK, I guess that that was fine. You know, that was that was OK somehow because it was so dispassionate in a way. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's all right. OK. That's the news. All right. OK. Soothing voice, very like disconnected from the horrors of the world. It's just sort of reiterating the awful things that happened in some foreign country or in a city like yours, but halfway across your country. Something terrible happened. And now we're going to go on to weather. Mm hmm. Let's move along. Don't know if that's a good thing. But then again, you know, if the news reporters are just doing like reaction stuff, you know, it's like people are dying. There's a bunch of dead people in foreign country that you've heard of before. Like that would be like it's just like, oh, gosh. Oh, there are there. There's some entertainment channels that are more like that. Yeah. I'm trying to remember. Maybe it was like an NPR thing. I don't remember, but there was recently there was an there's a special episode of a podcast or something that was all about why news announcers talk that way. And it started in the I think it started in the Midwest. And now the thing is that newscasters talk in the same way in Philadelphia, in LA, in Wisconsin, in Texas. Often if they're open owned by a central network, they're often fed the same bit stories that they're repeating. But they are also able to move anywhere across the country and pop into any news station. They're marketable. Yeah. And it's amazing because I'm just I can't imagine that anybody's watching. People do, man. People watch the local news every morning with their cup of coffee. I have never done it. I can tell you I never will. But there are people out there that do it. I do wonder with the invention of streaming if that is going to disappear, because I do think all of the people I know of that watch local news say this delicately or of a certain generation. Well, I guess it's also because I live in a small town. Be respectful of your elders. Yeah, I just noticing a trend. I live in a small enough town that the local news is about the next couple cities over, like it's never right. We don't have a local news in town. We have a local newspaper, which outside of the Chamber of Commerce stories is very thin. There's like usually not a whole lot of even reporting going on locally about stuff. So yeah, there isn't really like, gosh, like, yeah, like half the city could be on fire and it wouldn't be on the news. The nearest town's local news story and maybe it would in a foreign city. There's a fire. It's burning half of that foreign city that you've probably heard of before. And on this weather, you know, it'd be just like a blurb that we wouldn't get actual coverage. Blurb. Blurb. Talking to our discord. There's also a thing like that. We actually don't do a classic reporting style. We do. We do a conversation. Yeah, it's conversational. It's storytelling. And yeah, even with in conversational looking shows, it's scripted. It's prewritten, usually. And there's very little live, honest conversation that you'll actually be able to witness in a medium anywhere. Like there's there's very few. I mean, podcasting is the thing that's sort of re revitalized that as a created that format, because there's a lot of podcasts where you have a group that does do this sort of discussion stuff that we've been doing since before they were we invented it. But for we invented it. Yes. Invented conversations. We did. But we didn't patent it because we wanted there to be more. Yeah, we kept we kept conversations open source. Totally. Yeah, we kept it open source. Very much like they could have done with some vaccines or something. But, you know, for the common good, there's some things like conversations or life-saving vaccines that should be open source, but whatever. Gaurav, you get your news from the Apple News Feed. I get a lot of my news from the Google News Feed. I wonder how different my news would be if I got it from the Apple News Feed. Well, in both cases, depended on your search history. Totally. Yeah. But I'm just wondering based on things like that. Where'd Blair go? So they're like, I'm out of here. Bye. One of the things that I do for a giggle is because I look up a lot of I look up a lot of stuff on the YouTube's. There's a lot of interesting things on the YouTube's. It's one of my sources for going and finding interesting lectures. Or if I have a question on how something works or what's it. It's a great place where you can casually browse the world without reading too much. Uh, what's fun to do is to not be on my logged in profile on the YouTube's. And then it seems like an endless array of bloopers, fails and challenges. Right. It's like a very different. It's extremely different immersion than the stuff that will pop into my feed. And it should be like this. We should have like a holiday where you do like a log out of your feed, but still be able to or like the telecom companies. They should also be like algorithm free day. Like here's the internet without your personal feedback. Right. This is what the internet is like. If we turn off our algorithm. Yeah. Like an algorithm free day where everybody can go online and be like, oh gosh, do you hear about that terrible thing in that foreign country? I've never even heard of it before. The terrible thing or the either the terrible thing or the foreign country. I've never heard of either before because I was in my feedback loop and it didn't tell me these things. Yeah. People would be coming online. They'd be like, the internet's not working anymore. I don't know. I'm looking for things and my news feed's all weird. It's like, I don't know about these people or these things. What is this? But then then and then we can do that socially, too. Like there could be like an event that is the fill in the blank event where you've been invited to show up, but it's not a pre-selected event. So it's not people who like your kind of music. It's not people who are into your sports type team ball. It's not people who are into your recreational, educational, it's just random people. And it would take the filter off of socialization. But then maybe those are there for a reason. Yeah, for corporate reasons. For advertising reasons. Personalization to keep you inside your happy little bubble. Make everybody happy. We have a Volk 101. Nice to meet you as well. The marked, sometimes I try to stay away from news, but I find I like to be informed. I listen to, I listen to up first every day. It's 15 minutes long from NPR and it's like exactly enough for me to know if there's something I have to look further at or whether I can move on with my day and maybe not be depressed. I go I go to Twitter to see what's trending for me. And I look to see what the news stories are that Twitter is passing up to me. And then I check a couple of hashtags to see what people are talking about to see if there's anything I'm missing or if there's anything worthwhile. And yeah, and then I check my and then I check my Google news feed. And then I check Reddit. See, I don't have time to read anything in the morning. It's the only the news I'm going to get. There's a lot of very glaring to my ears. Yeah, glaring, scrolling. Yeah, it was a little bit of alarm goes up at five and I roll out of bed. I can't believe you do that every day. Blair, I just started waking up at six thirty now. And I'm dying. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I did like four weeks. I did four weeks of three thirty to four o'clock in the morning recently, and that was, yeah, that was not. No, that's what I woke up for. I was not fun at all. Part of the time for Twists in Israel was three thirty. But I guess, yeah, the show is what time is the show when I'm in Denmark? It's like four in the morning. It depends on what season, whether it's daylight savings or not. That's that's the one. I think it's probably the better show for me, because that's the one where I have nothing else in my mind from the day because the day just started. And I've had a pot of coffee just hoping to be conscious for the show. And then I hit the show like a wake. See, that was like it's like it's like old school. Yeah, it's like the old way of doing the show. My my experience was that I don't recall any of those shows. I really don't like. I think we were looking at some clips from some of those shows a couple of years ago, and I don't remember saying this at all. It's all a blur. Oh, Grouchy Gamer, if I watch one animal video and then YouTube says 90 percent more animal videos, I'm like, yes, more animal videos. All about that. What's crazy, it's it's it's been I was in Israel nine years ago. Right now, nine years ago. I left like a week ago, nine years ago. Yeah. So, yeah, it's it's it's a trip that it's been that long. Way is a trip. You've been on the show nine years then. No. Wow. I have been on the show. So yeah, so I started. So this January will be my 10th anniversary year. Yeah, it's coming up of Blair's Animal House. Yeah, I will take that 10th anniversary show off and you can just have Blair's Animal House. Sure. Sounds great. Oh, that would be lovely. What do we do? We think the Internet Today helped society in a good way. Bring out the knowledge or made it worse by taking away your privacy. Oh, you know, it's one of those. The net is Devils Bargains. Yeah, I really do believe the net is positive. Like, why do people think science is cool and why do people like know how to do random stuff you've never know how to do and it's the internet. It's the internet. You taught you you find people that, you know, maybe you're in a small town and you don't know anybody else like you and then you can meet other people like you online and suddenly you have friends in other places and you don't feel so alone and that has helped a lot of people. I mean, there's a lot of positive. You're right, Blair. Yeah. Oh, it's even just like, you know, how do I fix the cabinets in my kitchen? I can look that up on YouTube and I can try to do it myself. It may or may not work, but I can try. You can go to Home Depot and spend five hours trying to find somebody to help you. Yeah, or you just buy it online for curbside pick up. And then you don't have to wander around Home Depot to see the internet for the win again. Oh, random kind of like the what is it on Wikipedia where there's like the button you can hit to be surprised and like Google there's also a button on Google that like it's kind of the the I feel lucky button where you can just let the the engine find you something randomly. I think that would be fun for YouTube, too. Scary, potentially, but fun. Yeah, there's certain videos in there, but that's an interesting idea, Grouchy Gamer. I don't know. I mean, so many of us, what is privacy? I mean, privacy is a concept that we have come up with in our modern world with our houses and our walls. And it's this it's not the same in every culture. It's something that we have defined as a very American concept. And really, so here's here's how I push back on that a little bit. Yeah, but I mean, we put our phones in our pockets, so we take them everywhere. And like we I mean, sometimes you have to give up a little privacy to have more things, I think. I mean, I think that's the devil's bargain that I'm. Well, OK, but my pushback on that just would be that that those things that you consider privacy are not being private or being exposed or not being exposed. Don't matter at all. Right. Yeah. As long as your society, your form of government is not tyrannical, as long as you have limitations on, you know, what government, what right? Because. Because it can be weaponized. Absolutely. Privacy can be weaponized. And there are countries in which privacy is weaponized or lack of privacy is weaponized. It just happened in our own country. Yeah, just to put it out there. We have a tyrannical government in our. There's there is there is a country state in our United States that has decided to to weaponize privacy, weaponize information against women, against people who help women. So then it matters. And so then all the arguments so then all the arguments that people make about I don't like having my all my details out there, all my information out there suddenly becomes extremely important and crucial that they be protected and that we safeguard them. So an amazing like, right? How fast, as you point that out, how fast that not needing to protect your privacy because in whose hands is it going to be in? That would it matter or could it affect me even to suddenly it really matters suddenly over a course of weeks and months, laws enacted that makes your privacy absolutely essential to your your liberty. Yeah. So when you've got to keep control, but in the meantime, I mean, nobody cares. What you're buying at the grocery store, you know, how many painkillers you're taking. I mean, that's that's your private stuff. Nobody cares about things. And does it like am I the only one who? Yeah, I like Google the thing three times and now I've seen 80 ads for it. You're not the only one. But no, no, but I much prefer that from the rotisserie of ad buys that used to take place for things that I would never want to look at. Because I will I honestly, I will I'm a sucker for an ad that I like. I'm like, oh, they're showing me that thing that I was looking at, but it's a different version of it by a different company that I didn't think about. And now I'm going to click on this and find out more about it because, you know what, that is the thing I was looking at and investigating and thinking about buying. So of course, I'm going to click on it now because it's showing me something I'm actually interested in as opposed to, gosh, why do I have to sit through another like video about incontinence or a reptile dysfunction medicine? Or why do I have to like, why are they because it used to be those are advertisers just hoping that you need that. Yeah. But if they have a big enough budget, if they have like, oh, my gosh, the the E.D. Pills must be such big money that on the old television systems at night, they would just be every other commercial or it's like the car commercials or the whatever the thing is that has a big budget to spend that month and so you have to see their commercials over and over and over and that was just annoying and like that makes people. I don't know. I I get really frustrated. I know that the algorithms are smart enough to not do this. But like when you when you buy a big ticket item that you're not going to buy again for years. Yeah. And then it continues to show you that every day. Or if you're buying an item that is specifically related to a very sad or traumatic occasion. Yes. And it continues to show you that thing. Oh, gosh, pop up casket commercials six months later. No, no, that's not OK. That's a very there are all sorts of things that you get. Yeah. All sorts of things that people keep getting fed or just reminders of things that have gone wrong. And it's just it's awful. Yeah. Because that's the time to get rid of those things out fast enough. That's the time to get kill the cookies. Killing the cookies are the cookies. And I know it's totally true that like you could you could also you can search things. That's just especially funny in the age of like coronavirus when you have when you're on zoom meetings all the time. And especially when you I don't know, do research for a podcast where you talk about animal sex and poop and other stuff like that. And disease and then your analytics cause like catheters and ed pills and sex toys to show up on your suggested ads because of the research that you're doing for your science podcast. It's especially interesting. And then you're like, oh, I want a screen share this. Oh, but I can't get rid of it. But I can't. You need ad blockers, Blair. Yeah. No, I had I had a blocker plus, but it went bad. Oh, that's a bummer. But anyway, yeah, no, not to mention, a lot of sites don't work with ad blockers now. They just don't function. Yeah, they've changed. Yeah. So that's a whole thing. But anyway, yes, I think it's very annoying that like you can't in the age of zoom and screen sharing that you can't just be like I don't want I don't want to share my analytics with the people that I'm in meetings with. It's very annoying. No, you don't want to share. Anyway, and yeah. Poor Blair. Exactly. No, it's not poor. Poor Blair. I guess nobody struggles. I get to research crazy stuff every week. I love it. Blair, you're not the only one who has the weird advertisements being delivered. Yeah, like, am I going to get lung transplant information now? I'm sure I will. He knows by it today. All right, everyone is tired tonight. I'm tired. I'm going to I need I have to get up early tomorrow morning. So earlier than six thirty even. In that case, say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night. Tiki. Good night, everyone. Thank you for being with us for another week. We hope that you have another wonderful week ahead. Stay safe. Stay well. Stay healthy. Stay kind. And stay curious. Keep up the science thing. Thank you. We'll see you again next Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific time. Good night.