 And we're live. I do think we're live. Oh, and Blair's typing in the chat room again. It's always strange when you think that you are not chatting, but suddenly you are. Is it me? No, it's not. It's Blair. Who is it? It's one of us. This is the live broadcast of the Twist broadcast. Thank you so much, Twist podcast. Yes. Thank you so much for joining us for another weekly episode. We're about to go live and I want you to know that what you see here in the next hour and a half for so is not the final podcast. There will be edits and there will be tweaks and the rough stuff will be taken out, smoothed out, and it'll be a shellacked and shiny audio picture ready for your ear brain. And we hope that you enjoy that. But in the meantime, you're going to be getting the rough and the live us, the Twist. And we're ready to do this. So, okay, let's start this in a three, two, this is Twist. This week in Science episode number 844 recorded on Wednesday, September 29th, 2021. Pump up the science. Pump it up while the science is pumping. Yes. Hey, everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show, we will fill your head with footprints, love bites, and heart. But first. If you are traveling to planet Earth, a word of warning. Humans. They're a curious case of a creature that does not seem to have found balance with its environment, despite the environment being one of the most hospitable in the galaxy. Meteor strikes are rare and they have an atmosphere that is not only non-toxic, but also shields them from radiation, allowing them to live, get this, on the surface year round. Gravity levels are a little on the severe side, but only just so. Oh, and they have soil that grows food. Yes, food right out of the ground. Water that distributes itself almost everywhere through a network of clouds and a vast diversity of living things that do all the maintenance for the planet's flora through a myriad of interrelated strategies. The whole system is perfectly self-sustaining while providing abundant resources for the human's existence. I'm going to break in right now because I think you're on your laptop, Mike. Yeah. Tap the mic. No, yep. Laptop, Mike. I thought it was good, but it wasn't. I thought we were ready to go live and I apologize, everyone. No worries. That's my bad. I should have checked the I couldn't let you go on. It's better to stop now and fix the mic. Okay. Oh, is that better? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Move it a little closer. Well, that's why this that's why this is the pre-recorded version of the show that's live. That's right. Okay. But first. Disclamer, disclaimer, disclaimer. If you are traveling to planet Earth, a word of warning. Humans, they are a curious case of a creature that does not seem to have found balance with its environment, despite the environment being one of the most hospitable in the galaxy. Meteor strikes are rare and they have an atmosphere that is not only non-toxic, but also shields them from radiation, allowing them to live on the surface year-round. Gravity levels are a little on the severe side, but only just so. Oh, and they have soil that grows food. Yes, food right out of the ground. Water that self-distributes itself almost everywhere through a network of clouds and a vast diversity of living creatures that maintain the planet's flora through myriad of interrelated strategies. The whole system is perfectly self-sustaining while providing abundant resources for the human's existence. What more could you want from a planet? But the humans don't seem to understand how lucky they have it. In fact, it's almost as if they resent the planet that they are on, spending most of their time in self-made cocoons while doing just about everything in their power to make the outside world less habitable. Considerable effort has been made terraforming the surface to make it less self-sustaining. From covering fertile biomes with rock-hard surfaces to killing off pollinators, sometimes intentionally. They have even begun to alter the chemistry of their atmosphere in an apparent effort to cook themselves into their cocoons. So, if you happen to be traveling to planet earth, be aware of the humans. Oh, and while you're there, be sure to catch the next episode of This Week in Science, coming up next. Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And the good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again, talking about science that we love, we've discovered, we've dug. We have brought these little treasures to discuss tonight. So excited. Also, we are joined by a wonderful guest who's joined us before and hopefully will again in the future. But let me tell you what's going on tonight. I have stories about really old life, ancient, growing in the cracks kind of life. I've got some love bites for you all and a little bit of memory news. Justin, what did you bring? I've got 23,000 year old teenagers, vampire besties and just good news ecology edition. We always love the good news as long as it's really good news. This time it sounds like great news, yeah. Yeah. Blair, what is in the animal corner? Oh, I just have giraffes, rabbits and fish pee. And just a little fish pee. Okay, it's easy to collect. And we are joined by our guest, Dr. Bill Shutt, who has written a book and he's going to talk with us about it. He's going to pump it up, pump the science, pump, pump, pump, pump the natural history of the heart. Great to be here. Yeah, thank you. So exciting to have you back on the show again. I don't know if you'll be around for Justin's vampire news. I do know from past shows you do know a few baddie things. I studied vampire bats for about 30 years. Just a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe Justin, you can, I don't know, bring in Bat News a little earlier. Tease it out? Okay. Tease it out? Just work it in? I don't know. Okay. If you have not yet subscribed to This Week in Science, I would love it if you would do so. You can find us all places that Good Science podcasts are found. You can find us on YouTube, on Facebook. We're on Twitch and Twitter. We're on Twitter. We're on Instagram. And you can find us some places just looking for This Week in Science. We are twist science on Twitter and Twitch and Instagram. And our website is twist.org. All right. Let's dive into some fun science starting the show with really old stuff because I'm feeling really old tonight. Okay. But old life rocks. I just, I just want everyone to know that old life rocks. Well, I mean, really old rocks that are like a billion years older than when the first life was evolved on the planet. They were discovered in Australia, these billion-some-odd year-old rocks that had intrusions, inclusions of life, traces of ancient maybe crustaceans, maybe microbes. They weren't really sure. It's a lot of just leftovers from old stuff. But the conundrum was billion and a half year old rocks. How the heck was their life in them? And these rocks have been around for, we've known about this issue for about 50 years or so. Like half a century, we've been scratching our heads, geologists, biologists, paleontologists just like, what is going on with these old rocks? And finally, some researchers at Western Australia and also at UCLA, they have published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that these 1.7 billion year-old rocks, they cracked a little. And those little teeny, tiny microscopic cracks in the quartz, the quartzite, allowed for the intrusion of life. And so for 50-some-odd years, people have been saying, how could there have been life before there was life? And the answer is there wasn't. We just didn't understand how to differentiate. We didn't have the technology to differentiate between the old rocks and the old life. But now we do. And the researchers, these international team, not of mystery solvers, but of scientists, have been able to discover that these old animal fossils, they could have been concrete chewing worms or crustaceans, little tiny crustaceans, but they dug themselves into these rocks early on. The researchers say most likely the traces were made by crustaceans, which invaded Southwestern Australia during a short-lived marine transgression associated with the opening of the Southern Ocean. These trace fossils in the wrong rocks have been a mystery. We are glad to have been able to demonstrate geological processes that resolve this conundrum. It's not a mystery. It's geology. We figured it out. It just takes time sometimes. Those tiny crabs all alone. Little teeny tiny crabs. Little teeny tiny crabs in the rocks. Yes. So Guaritama says, aren't our rocks ridiculously old? What's special about these? So human lifespan are all very old. But there's just a few places where the rocks haven't been sort of turned over, covered up or reintroduced down to the core of the planet to some degree. There's only a few spots where we have these billion or billions of year old rock formations that are available to us on the surface so that we can study. This is one of those few. I think there's another in the Arctic region, maybe Greenland, but it's very rare to have this billions of year old rock formations on the surface that can allow us to do these pier backs. Some of the oldest rocks that we've been able to find are also below the sea. But for this sort of timeframe, it is exceedingly rare. Exactly. Yeah, they're very old rocks. And it would have been wild for life to actually have been in them before life was alive. Yes. All right, Justin, what do you want to talk about next? Well, what do you want? I've got the 23,000 year old teenagers. I've got the vampire bats. And I've got just good news. And you've got what? Just good news. Just good news. I think with Bill here, we should talk about some vampire bats. Okay. So this is researchers in Panama attached tiny backpack tracking computers to 50 vampire bats. And these some of these were previously held in captivity and studied. And some were completely wild bats that they were all sort of living in the hollowed out tree together. And they tracked their movements, they tracked where where they went. Oh, as they went through their nightly foraging outings. So by day, they all hung out together with a bunch of other bats. And the tracking data showed that the vampire bats were setting out individually to go foraging. These bats weren't going out like you've seen like the mass exodus of the cave where they all leave together and like, oh, let's all go this way to these ones are just leaving on their own. And the tracking data showed that even though they're leaving separately, they are finding each other in the same hunting areas on the same prey and mingling together with the ones that they're socially the closest with in the in when they're hanging out in the log, the ones that they're socially interacting with, which we've talked about this before to this sort of the bats have buddies. They serve a little buddy system where they'll sort of help out. There's a sick bat, the neighbor will come and bring some food or something. They help each other out. They become friends in the cave, or in this case, the hollowed out tree. And so part of this story is just they hadn't necessarily done a whole lot of tracking outside of the cave. There's a lot of study of individual bats within like a cave or a nesting environment, but not a whole lot of where the individuals go once they're forging. And they were kind of wondering like, how did this happen? Is this where you going tonight? I was thinking about going over the that little swamp on the other side. There's some some cows over there. I spotted last way. I think I'm going to go visit them tonight. Go feed over there. Hey, you know what? Okay, I've got some laundry to do. I'm going to vacuum the cave a little bit, but I'll meet you there later because there seems to be almost a coordinated ability for them to find each other once they're out there. Could be calls, that sort of thing, except you know, the distances and the different directions that these bats are going when they're forging kind of indicates that they have either a routine that they are meeting up to find each other, that they're calling until they find each other, or that they are pre communicating where they're going to go that evening. Very interesting. So some of the stuff they looked at too is just the that that that relationship that gets built within persists with the hunting and tracking. But over the course of only two weeks, these backpack computers produce data of about 400,000 individual meetings and interactions, which is a pretty, pretty decent data set to have gathered in such a short period of time. Another thing they did was they also were able to do some recording in the field. Uh, some video and some audio recordings and they caught some some unique vocalizations. Again, a lot of vocalizations have been recorded within the caves when bats are sort of chirping to each other versus when they are like there's a buzzing sound, I guess that is described that when they're not getting along very well when they're like, Hey, back off is, you know, let's let's work this out. I'm not happy with you. But they had this whole different sounds that they were making while feeding. And so some of these are bats that were grouped together on a single cow, you know, sharing meals, which also tended to be the ones that group together in the cave. They spent more time together than than bats that they didn't hang out with once they were forging and hunting. And they were making these unique vocalizations while feeding, meaning that they were also communicating about how well the hunt was going to each other. They were giving each other sort of these updates, whether it was all clear signs that there's nothing dangerous about, or it's like, Hey, this is good. What do you think about your steak? Oh, mine's really good. I'm enjoying this blood meal over here. Just fine. But they had these completely new communications that hadn't been heard before while they were feeding. So I guess my question here is, Bill, after 30 years of studying vampire bats, was there any kind of inkling that bats would have these kinds of close friendships outside of the roost while feeding? Yeah. The work that's being done here that Justin described is being done by a friend of mine, Jerry Carter. We both went through Cornell together. And he's basing his work on the work of his mentor, Jerry Wilkinson, who was the first person to show that vampire bats share blood. Solely on blood is a tough way to make a living. So if you go back to your roost and you don't have blood, these animals can starve in two days because of that diet. So they have all sorts of adaptations that have evolved that allow them to hunt successfully. And if they don't hunt successfully, do things like sharing blood. But I had two species of these at Cornell for three years. And the behavior that we saw every day was just blew us away. And sometimes we knew what it was. They had dominance hierarchy behavior where they would hiss at each other and they had an aerosol come out of their mouths, which basically meant, I'm the dude, sit back. They're spitting at each other and they're like, get back. But they're incredible animals. And I always got the feeling that they were the most intelligent bats that I had ever dealt with before. And it was a whole lot of fun to work on them. Luckily for me, I started working on them in the 1990s when 99% of everything that was known about vampire bats was known about one species. And the line was sort of, vampire bat is a vampire bat is a vampire bat. And I was coming out of courses that said, if you've got three animals that three different species that live in the same place, then something's got to give. And either one's going to migrate away, it's going to adapt, or one of them is going to go extinct. And so I said, there's got to be differences. And this little guy from the Museum of Natural History took me aside and says, shut, you got something. Now shut up and go get it. And so I spent the next 30 years showing that there were these real differences between the bats that you saw, that Jerry works on, our common vampire bats. That's what everybody knew about. The two that I worked on were much more rare and they fed on birds. And that's how they sort of carved out a niche for themselves and didn't compete with the common vampire bats that you just saw, was by taking to the trees and getting by that way. So their behavior was very different. Right. So they were specializing on their food source. Picturing a bat feeding on a bird seems crazy to me because even just by weight, like a bat and a bird the same size, the bats are going to weigh so much more. So we're talking about things like chickens and pea fowl that are up in the trees at night in the tropics. So they fly up underneath the branch and they just bite them on the foot. Oh my gosh. That's awesome. And then when they fly off. Yeah. Now I was picturing little sparrows. I'm like, oh my God, they fall right over. You're picturing the biggest possible bat with the smallest possible bird. They're tiny. Vampire bats are really small. And you know, that's one of the things that blood feeders share, whether you're a tick or a bed bug or a leech or a vampire bat is, as you're small and you've got anticoagulants in your saliva and you're stealthy and you've got sharp teeth. They're so fascinating. One of the fun facts here that I left out of this is that the ones that had previously been captive studied, they showed no hunting difference from the wild ones, which means they adapted. And when you adapt that quickly, when you can go from a captive to being back into the wild, it means a couple of things. It means one, the group has to accept you back. You aren't shunned. You aren't socially in-adept enough. The group is just like, no, you're not one of us. There's something wrong with, you've been captive, you're acting weird. But that they also could learn essentially from the wild group on the hunting strategies and how to get back into the wild and resume that lifestyle. And that really signifies, like Bill said, the intelligence, the social intelligence that's at work within this species to allow them to work together and to help themselves survive, to help the colony survive, and yeah, to make all that work. It's fascinating. Yeah. Thanks for your input on that story, Bill. That was great. You're welcome. My pleasure. All right, Blair. What did you want to bring to us? Oh my goodness. So we were talking about climate change earlier. I think it was in the disclaimer and stuff. But when we talk about climate change, we really focus on the corals. We focus on the human element. We focus on migration and pollinators. But we're not talking enough about fish. It's specifically their pee. And that is because fish pee is a really important fertilizer to those coral reefs I mentioned before, but also kelp forests responsible for a huge output of oxygen on our planet and also seagrasses in all those areas. Those, well, the kelp kind of not exactly a plant, basically a plant. Let's just call it a plant. Seagrasses definitely plants. Coral reefs have photosynthetic zooxantholy inside of them. So all plant adjacent things, right, require fertilizer just like plants on land do. But in this case, it's the pee. And so this is a preliminary study actually looking at the fish pee and its movement in relation to climate change. How does fish pee move? Well, via fish. So as the ocean's warm, tropical fish tend to move out of the areas they used to be in where the waters are a little cooler because it's getting too hot where they are. Sometimes there's clarity impact. Sometimes there's nutrient impacts. The currents change. All these things impact the temperature and other kind of elements of a watery habitat that a fish is very easily going to move out of if it is not what they have adapted to be used to. And so that's good for their survival, but their waste is excreted out of their cloaca, but also directly through their gills has beneficial life sustaining nutrients, including nitrogen and phosphorus like traditional fertilizers. And so if these fish move away from those areas, the ecosystems can suffer. And so this is, as I mentioned, a preliminary study from the Florida International University. And so Will Weed, a PhD student in Justin Campbell's lab in FIU and their Institute for the Environment, that he collected fish from the ocean and held onto them for about 12 hours, monitored their health and examined the water that they were in to calculate the rate of excretion so that you could kind of capture potential for an individual fish and what type of nutrients could be contributed from that individual fish. So then based on that you can look at fish population and then based on that you can monitor changes in fish population and try to get an idea of what's going to happen to these aquatic habitats as a result of fish leaving and therefore their nutrients that they excrete leaving as well. So he's trying to map the larger ecosystem scale, see fish movements and connect them to their ecosystems via the nutrients they provide. So no major findings yet except that these nutrients are being excreted in large numbers. And so based on that kind of those statistics, now it's going to be step two of that experiment to kind of map that out and map it almost in a 3D sense along with changes in populations and distribution. And so this could be a really helpful tool in predicting and protecting ocean health in relation to climate change. So not any huge findings, but I think a very cool idea for a new tool in response to climate change. So now if you are going to do some attempts to do coral implanting or that sort of thing, you got to know where the fish are gone. You have to know where the fish went. You have to follow the food. You have to lure them back and you have to monitor you have to monitor your transplanted coral reef because they didn't have a reason to be there before. So if they're not hanging out now, you can anticipate a die off in your coral. So that's that would be a great reason to monitor that. And if it needs help, you might have to temporarily supplement some of those nutrients until fish establish, right? Yeah. So I was wondering if we could do aquaculture, right? Mm-hmm. Take the water from aquaculture that maybe has the fish urine in it and supplement a coral reef area, see if that helps. Or set up a fish farm on top of your new coral reef. Well, that might be easier than trucking fish urine all over the place. Yeah, depending where you are, I don't know, it might be kind of far away. Speaking of fish urine, did you guys know that there are parasitic catfish in South America that follow the pee? And that's how they and they literally will swim up underneath the gill covers of big catfish and attach themselves to the gills and feed on their blood. Very good. So they're using it as a that's how they're monitoring their prey, basically. Yeah, they're tracking the nitrogen. So if you happen to urinate in the water, then they are there. Oh, no. Yeah, they sometimes take a wrong turn. Oh, no. Bad for the fish, bad for you. Call out and use the ladies or men's room is what I'm hearing. Yes. Okay. Good tip. Yeah, I hope so. Alrighty. You all, if you're listening right now, just want you to know, quick reminder, this is This Week in Science. You're still watching, you're still listening. This is the show. I hope you came to enjoy, and I hope you are enjoying it. If you are enjoying it, share it with a friend. If you recall the last appearances of Dr. Shut, he has joined us on the show to talk about blood, blood eating animals, cannibalism, all sorts of fun topics. He is an emeritus professor, biology at LIU Post, research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, zoologist, and is here with a new book, Pump, A Natural History of the Heart. Welcome back to the show, Bill. Thank you so much for joining us again. It's great to be here. This is one of my favorite shows to visit him, and to be interviewed by you guys is just a lot of fun. Oh, well, I hope we can let you have more fun as we're keeping you up late tonight. So you've gotten bloody, you've gotten cannibalistic, you've done all these things. It seems like a logical path to the heart, but I mean, I need to ask, was it, was the interim kind of a straightforward, oh, this is the next thing to talk about? Not really. I had to sort of be talked into it. I wanted to do stuff that was a whole lot more vile, and I got talked out of it by my wife who said that I'm not going to live with you for two years if that's what you study. And from a sort of financial perspective, my agent and my editor at Algonquin suggested that I look at something a little bit more mainstream. The cannibal book just did very well, and I was thrilled with it, and I'm still getting interviews about that one. But they wanted me to do something that was, you know, that more people might pick up. And so they suggested the heart, and I thought, well, that's got to have been done. And there are hundreds of books written about the heart, and so I did a bit of research. And, you know, the type of book that you're familiar with is, you know, I go through the animal kingdom, and I look at these interesting stories, and I'm telling, you know, I'm educating, and I'm trying to be entertaining and inserting humor where appropriate, and then move into humans and myths and history. I'm a big history buff. And so that book just hadn't been written. So, and I found, you know, I thought this is not going to be weird enough. And I was completely wrong that there are things here that rival cannibalism as far as like weird behavior of folks thinking that they're doing good medicine back in the day. And then in the animal kingdom itself, there's a lot of, there are a lot of neat stories. And the cool thing was that they tied into cardiac medicine, and especially the future of cardiac medicine. So I had a really good time. The learning curve was really steep, and it was a lot of fun to write. But as a biologist, as a zoologist, I mean, you've probably, if you're a biologist, of course, at some point, you've had basic physiology, you understand the heart, the heart, it pumps, right? So I mean, I went through neuroscience training. And so along the way, I got to learn that once upon a time, we looked at the brain as just a bag of goo that was meant to cool the blood, and that the heart was the center of our emotions and our intellect and all these things. What, as you were discovering all this stuff, what were some of these key moments in the development of our understanding? That was certainly a question that I was interested in. Where did that whole idea of the heart as being the center of the soul and emotions and intellect, where did that come from? So when I was writing this cannibal book, I was interested in where did the cannibal taboo come from? When you say the word cannibal, you have this sort of knee-jerk reaction. So the name of that chapter was going to be Blame It on the Greeks. And they changed it, I guess. They didn't want me to get stoned by Greek people. Because that's still, okay, because that's still how the Greeks take care of things. Is that it? By stoning? They haven't, they can't, no, no, they haven't come up with any other way. All right, so Blame It on the Greeks got changed to a different name. But when I started to look up how this idea of cardiocentrism took place, I could have named the chapter Blame It on the Ancient Egyptians. Because it was really them. They thought a great deal of the heart. And as you said that, you know, not so much the brain. When they were mummifying somebody, they would take a hook and shove it up their nose and yank the brain out. Get rid of all that useless stuff. Yeah. And they thought that they saw the heart beating. They saw that the heart could react to different situations by speeding up or slowing down. And the sort of natural response to that was the belief that this was the center of everything. And so what happened was that this got passed down to the ancient Greeks who paid a lot of attention to what they learned from the Egyptians. And so some high rollers like Aristotle and Hippocrates, they were in on this idea of cardiocentrism. And at the same time now you have, if that's what you're thinking about, and they also got a lot wrong the Egyptians and the Greeks picked up on that, they thought that arteries carried air. And that veins carried blood that came from the liver and some of it passed through invisible pores in the heart to the left side and then mixed with pneuma, this sort of spiritual essence that was in the air. So they got a little bit wrong. Yeah. Just a little. But I'm not making fun of these ancient cultures because they did not have the same type of technology. And they did get a lot right. They weren't able to dissect humans. So they did their work on animals for the most part. So at the same time the Greeks picked this up, then you got artists moving in and picking up on this idea of cardiocentrism and poets and writers. From there the Romans picked it up. The problem here though was that one of the Romans that studied anatomy and he wrote three million words that were eventually translated was Galen. And Galen shows up in all three of my books and the problem was not that Galen was a bad surgeon. It was that he got a lot wrong and his works were, after the fall of the Roman Empire, that his work wasn't initially translated into Latin. So it's set. And in the early medieval times, Syrian Christian translators translated Galen's work and they put their Christian slant on it. And so when those translations got translated finally into Latin, the church fell in love with it. They thought, well, this is science that we can live with. And this had to do with all sorts of different, these were things like the four humors and you would bleed someone in order to balance these humors or you'd give them a medics and whether it was mental disorders, there he is. That's in the post office wanted because for 1500 years he literally, his teachings caused a stagnation in the field of medicine that just carried on for this unbelievable amount of time. No one did any work. You just referred to Galen. And that, you know, that was, that to me was problematic. That it would last for 1500 years. I mean, that's having an impact on a field. Oh yeah. Absolutely. You know, when it wasn't until the 17th century, at least in the West, you know, in Eastern medicine, they made, they certainly made advances in the Middle East and in places like that and in India. But in the West, no, it just, it was bad news. And, you know, until folks came along that discovered how the heart circulated blood, that it was really a double pump. You had one side sending the blood to the lungs and back and the other. And this is William Harvey, of course. And then the other side pumping oxygenated blood out to the body and then back. And from there, the advances happened pretty frequently. And until we had a much better understanding, but we were still bleeding. Folks were going to barbers and getting blood right through the 19th century. And of course, there was a two, two barbers. Yeah, barbers barbers were did minor surgery. You know, if you look at a barb, the old time barbers pulled, the red blood, the white were bandages. The bandages. The bulb at the top was where you kept the leeches. So yeah, they did all sorts of fun stuff. So you'd go get an end from your from your spend years since that, since I did that. Shave and a haircut and a bleeding. Well, their business has been cut into a bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So along the way, we had, so we had these these beliefs that kind of were perpetuated for a long time through the church. And it was, it helped them along. And then medicine and discovery started making advances. And we discovered, like you said, the pump pumping action of the heart is this. And this is common across all animals that have a heart. Yes. Yeah. I mean, listen, some of the things that that you can call a heart, if you were a cardiologist, you know, these are not card-carrying hearts. These are these are muscular pumps that that pump up fluid around the body, whether it's an open circulatory system where the stuff gets dumped into a chamber and the tissues get bathed in it, or it's a closed circulatory system like vertebrates have fish and amphibians and reptiles and mammals. But the idea is the same is that you've got that you have, you know, you can sort of demonstrate this if you had a water balloon and you wrap your fingers around it and that your fingers are the muscle fibers. And if you squeeze on that water balloon, you're going to send water bulging out one side. You can think of that's how this pump works in its simplest form. One of the things that I had to emphasize, and I try to do this all the time, is that we have this bad habit of thinking that all of the, you know, anything that's not human is is either primitive or defective. You know, when I was a kid, it was Neanderthals. They were always dragging their women around by the ear or the hair and, you know, they had a club and they were punched over, you know, and we know that that's just garbage. And so, yeah, it's really the same thing with with with organ systems. We think that we've got the best stuff. And the take home here is that no matter how simple these structures are and how different they are, so they all work perfectly well for the creatures that where they evolved. So we need to sort of get that that prejudice out of our out of our system. Justin likes to remind us that we are all everything on earth equally evolved. Because we all started at the same point. Yeah. I've only known I've only known met talk to one heart surgeon. And I was at the time surprised to find out that he hadn't studied medicine. That he had that he was he was a mechanical engineer, who had been studying fluid dynamics was his specialty. And that that's what he was doing for almost entire education. And kind of fell into heart surgery at the end, when he discovered that everything that he knew about mechanical engineering applied to the heart. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No doubt, you know, this is a it acts like a machine. So you know, I talk about the fact that at the hummingbird heart probably maxes out, you're not able we don't think that you could have a heart beat faster than 1250 times per minute. That's ridiculous. I can't even I mean, I can't even move my fingers that fast. Yeah, so in order to pump blood to the wings that are beating so, you know, hundreds of times a minute, you've got to there's got to be another way and the way they do that is they've got a heart that's eight, you know, eight times sought the size relative speaking that then the blue whale heart that that we looked at in this book. And I love how you start your prologue talking about whales. I love that using the largest animals on the planet is how we how you start the exploration of the heart. I love taking that storytelling. And it's, I mean, I'll let you explain the the perspective that it starts out from. It's not just the heart. Yeah. This is this was it was sort of tragic because nine blue whales washed up in Newfoundland in 1914 and and nobody really knew a whole lot about them. My friends at the Royal Ontario Museum, you know, they got asked questions because they had whale exhibits and they were like, what's the largest heart in the world? A blue whale? How big is it? Probably the size of the sedan. But but nobody really knew because blue whales when you throw a harpoonum in the old days sunk. So they were the wrong whales as opposed to the right whales, which is the ones that didn't sink. So this I did not know that that's where the right whale name came from. Yeah, it's the wrong whales in the right way. Swim at 35 miles per hour. And then when you killed them, they sank, which sort of was a bummer for you if you were a whaler. But but they were able to recover because they because three of these didn't sink that they were two and two of them washed up in these isolated villages on the coast of Newfoundland. And and they so there was this huge project to recover these hearts and they so they they brought in construction equipment and they put four people inside the whale to push the heart out of the whale. They'd never seen anything like it. And when they got it outside, when I looked at the pictures of it, it didn't look like a heart. It looked like a giant, you know, a 400 pound soup dumpling is what it reminded me of. And it was so different than, you know, then say a beef heart or something like that, which has got shaped to it. This thing just collapsed. And they think that it has to do with the fact that they dive so deeply, that this is an adaptation for deep diving. The heart doesn't have to beat when you dive down that far. You know, that they can slow their heart rate down to two, three beats a minute. So there was so much that they learned about this. There it is. So so we were always worried about when we were in lab that we'd splash some formalin or formaldehyde on ourselves. And here they were worried about falling into a vat of 500 gallons of it. Yeah, they're trying to fix all those tissues so they don't degrade. Yeah, that must have smelled lovely. So I'm remembering I'd I'd I'd use formalin formaldehyde to fix bird brains in graduate school and we'd leave them overnight. How long did they fix this whale heart with 500 gallons of formaldehyde? These processes from the rinsing to the to the actual preservation each took months. It was they kept it frozen until I figured they could get people to work on it. And then eventually they sent it over to Germany to this place. You're all familiar with the bodies exhibit where they plastinate. You know, so you'll have a guy who's like dribbling a basketball but he doesn't have skin. This was the largest project that these guys had ever undertaken. And so if you look at the the finished product, it's it's an incredible work of art, but it's a whole lot smaller than they thought it was. So they thought that we're going to have a, you know, a big sqv sitting next to it in the exhibition hall and and really they had like a little mini car. So sort of golf cart size. Yeah, there it is. Wow. And there are vessels amazing. Yeah, there are blood vessels that they don't quite know what they are. And look, the heart is bifurcated at the bottom. There was just so much about it that was that was really different. But the heart size was the thing that surprised them the most. You know, if this was a if this was a hummingbird the same size as that blue whale, the heart would be eight times larger. So it's more efficient for the whale's size. And is this something to do with the whale's blood, the whale's physiology? I mean, there's there's always tradeoffs in in the form and the function of animals. So it just makes me wonder what aspects of the physiology led to this difference. Yeah, I think you nailed it. And it probably, as I mentioned, the way that it doesn't sit solidly, if you're looking at it, has to do with diving. And the fact that it's smaller probably has to do with the fact that the metabolic rate of the whale is much lower than, say, a shrew or a hummingbird. So it doesn't have to be as large. It's not it doesn't have to pump as much blood as often. And so this is this is what's evolved over over millions of years, and it works perfectly fine. Did you look at all into like differences in oxygen carrying capacity of blood and how that affects so if you have blood that can carry more oxygen, does can the heart be smaller so that it doesn't have to pump as much blood? The only the only instance that I ran into with that and there are probably a whole bunch that I missed what I looked at at ice fish, which live in the Antarctic and it's absolutely freezing. But but their blood is crystal clear and they don't have hemoglobin. So it's like, how do how did they survive? Their hearts are really large. And their blood they have, they have four times more blood in their body than a than a fish that would a normal fish the same size, plus their so it can carry more oxygen. Plus they have no scales so they can absorb oxygen through the water and cold water carries more oxygen. So they have all these adaptations. So there was a mutation that took place, we think five million years ago, where suddenly they didn't have some of them didn't have hemoglobin. And if they were any place else, they probably would have died immediately because they lived in this really cold area. And and they're not really active. They're they're sort of like sitting weight predators that they don't really have a lot of of enemies. So so that they don't really have an active lifestyle, but they've got all these adaptations now, including what you mentioned, blood that can carry more O2 than than than than a typical fish would have. But without hemoglobin. Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating. Yeah, that's weird. So their blood is clear or nearly clear. That it that's when we think of blood, it's like, it's just going to be red. Right. And it's okay. So we've got clear blood. We've talked on the show Blair about the blue blood of the horseshoe crabs, horseshoe crab. Yes. Yeah. Is there is are there any other colors we need to be aware of? The blue and red cover it and it has to do with copper copper. If you look at the Statue of Liberty and and it has that that that sort of blue tint, that's what happens when when when copper oxidizes when you add oxygen to copper, it turns blue. When you add when you add oxygen to iron, which we have in hemoglobin, it turns red. So that that's pretty much it. And a lot of creatures have blue blood lobsters. Not just the horseshoe crab. Right. But they were the they were the ones that I spent time working on because of the, you know, the sort of medical ramifications of that. And the fact they've been around for a half billion years and now they're being driven to extinction because their blood has got this substance in it that can detect endotoxins. What could go wrong? We'll just blood let a whole species. I'm sure they'll be fine on an industrial scale. Yeah. And we it's an industry. People going into the waters, harvesting the horseshoe crabs, using them for their blood. And we're not it's not sustainable. And it hasn't been what do we do if we kill all the horseshoe crabs that's destroying an animal that's existed in an ecosystem for half a billion years. And also it's also affecting our future. There is some good news. They've come up with tests now that and this is this is a shame that COVID came around for certainly more than this reason. But but they they had developed a new based on DNA technology, a new test for endotoxin that did not use that didn't use horseshoe crab blood. And they were just starting to use it in some major drug companies when COVID hit. They didn't have, you know, they didn't have access to it. So they fell back, you know, of course, there was a lot more testing with all the hospital situations and sterilization that gets done. Because that's how endotoxin shows up. You destroy bacteria by sterilizing it. And the substance that used to be in their cell membrane is now floating around free. And that's the endotoxin. It's not something that they store and, you know, throw at their enemies. So this got pushed to the back burner. And the other thing is that they get used big time for millions of them are killed every year for bait for mostly for eels and welk. And now Cornell has developed a synthetic horseshoe crab scent that they are now passing out to to these fishermen to use instead of chopping up horseshoe crabs. This is called smells like horseshoe crab. And they can add it to I don't know, roll the toilet paper or something. And it's a good that's a good name. I mean, I can't believe it's not horseshoe crab. That would have been good. They should call me. Blair, what should we call our synthetic horseshoe crab scent? Oh, I got you covered. Here we go. Was there anything else like this? You know, we've got whales, we've got hummingbirds, we've got different kinds of blood. Was there anything else that was just really surprising to you as a as a zoologist as you were writing the book? Well, a lot of it to do. I mean, I wrote a lot about human, about medicine and and and some of the some of the things that are coming down the pike are just blew me away. And and and this has to do with folks like like Harold Ott in at at Harvard. There's a real demand for for donor organs, whether it's hearts or kidneys or or livers. And a lot of people die on waiting less thousands of people die every year waiting for a transplant for reasons that that are pretty much commonly known about tissue typing and the fact you've got to ship this thing across continents, etc. But but he's trying to get around that by by taking cadaver hearts. So if you let's say if you so people were like whether you're going to rob graves, I'd like no, if you have it written out that if you die that your your instead of your heart going going to a medical school that it's going to be a donor heart and they so they take these hearts and what what Dr. Ott is doing is putting them through this rinse and it's literally a type of detergent that washes away all of the cells that your body would reject if they had taken that donor heart and transplanted it into you. So what you're left with is something that looks it's it's a white pale white structure made of mostly of collagen. So it's a connective tissue that you don't have an immune reaction to and then he's taking stem cells and this technology exists taking taking cells from a from the person who'd be the recipient from their skin fibroblasts they're called common skin cells so they don't have to go into you and do a biopsy or anything like that converting them into stem cells stimulating those stem cells to become muscle cardiac muscle cells and then seeding this scaffold this model that that that's left of connective tissue and growing a heart that they will then transplant into the recipient they think about 10 years from now they'll be doing that. I think if they can get to that point it's it's going to be amazing and even the amount of progress that they've made in the last 10 years is astounding and I'm you know this this technology just keeps advancing in leaps and bounds I know the they've they've been able to get start getting blood vessels and this is also research that's part of fake meat research right you want a steak that's grown in a petri dish well it's got to have blood vessels in it and fat marbling to make it more real and all of this is the stuff that needs to go into growing a heart too and so yeah all those pieces are going to come together I can't my father's been going through some heart issues recently and so not heart transplant territory thank goodness not nothing like that but the idea that at some point Blair you want to live forever we'll just grow you a new heart yeah well that's the next step right is instead of taking a donor heart and bleaching it out is to just 3d print the collagen yeah they're doing that in Israel yeah I I can't wait I can't wait for my my factory fresh organs someday they're also they're also growing blood vessels because it's really tough to do veins arteries have got that muscular layer so they're easier to knit together if you're doing surgery but veins are problematic because they're so thin so I go into this lab at a Worcester Polytech Institute in Massachusetts and I met this guy Glenn Godet and and he comes out he's got a plate of like a salad so I said I you know it's a little early for lunch but thanks he goes oh no this is what we're using so he takes a spinach leaf and he shows it to me goes you see the veins I go yeah he brings me over to his lab bench and he has these spinach leaves hooked up to these drips with the same type of detergent dripping through them and and what it's doing is is is getting washing out all of the of the the cellular material and leaving cellulose and there's your vessel so now you take human vascular cells and embed them on to that that tube and you tell them to grow around it so that's what they're going because how cool that's amazing yeah I'd ask odd I said well how can you know you've got this heart here how are you going to deal with the fact that you've got coronary vessels that need to supply it and he said nothing you do a friend of mine and and so the next day I met this guy at Worcester Polytech and and he showed me now and that was from a graduate student of his who came up from lunch and they actually used the spinach that they got in the cafeteria so I mean that's the kind of stuff that you know it when you when you ask was there or people ask is was there enough to write about in the heart when I'm used to writing about cannibalism and blood beating yeah there was plenty and and and that was there was a whole lot more than that was there anything that that you left out that you wish you could have put in or that now that you're like looking at it from now that the books published oh I should have kept that in there yeah well I would have but my my editor's thought that it was a little on the gory side so um make a long story short perfect for this show yes long story short if you look at a horseshoe crab right um it so if you look at our hearts they are the the beat itself is governed not by a nerves that come in to stimulate the heart and every time a nerve impulse comes in the heart of contracts right but but there's a pacemaker that does that it sends out a signal from within the heart so so horseshoe crabs are not like that and and many animals they have hearts with with with a nerve bundle outside the heart that that then sends a signal down to the heart and the heart contracts and so I thought well this is a really good I could I could open up with this really snarky line about this is why you never see the aztecs on top of their pyramids holding up a horseshoe crab heart and it's beating uh because it wouldn't be as soon as you cut it out it would stop beating so I had this whole scene written about you know this prisoner who got it was really cinematic it was like writing my novels again they marched they marched this guy up and meanwhile I'm now explaining how the sympathetic nervous system works because his heart is beating faster because all of these stress hormones are getting dumped into circulation and he gets up there and they finally you know he goes through this entire process and it ends with the the priest holding the horn up and it's beating um but but my editors went no use that when you write your next novel yeah so so yeah that's why I was laughing when I heard that because yeah that that was about 1500 words they got yanked out but nothing new when you're writing I think that they thought it's kind of slowed down the um you know it was kind of like when uh when you know um Kubrick filmed the you know when they did the shining they actually filmed the scenes in that in the maze which I thought was the best part of Stephen King's book and then they cut it because they thought it would just stop the movie cold and people would be so freaked out uh and I think that was probably what happened here not comparing myself to or Steve or Stephen King but same idea I don't see I don't see why you shouldn't you know just it's good we don't want to keep you up too late at night I know you're on east coast time compared to us um but if there's like one thing that you think from I guess a modern medical perspective that if people were to read your book to get an understanding of the natural history of the heart how can it help people kind of understand our our modern understanding of the heart and things like heart disease and and cope with our modern setting oh boy that's a tough one um I mean there's been a lot written about now what we should do because we have the wrong diet and we're a lot of us are sedentary and we need to do these things so I go into that as well I talked to this guy Dr McBride who was a specialist in in post cardiac rehab and I said so what works and he said he gave me this long list of things that work you know statins and and and and and meditation or he said spirituality and I went um but um but he but he but he also said he also said red wine and and and dark beer and I celebrated um but but everything in moderation was what he basically that that's what he said you know you don't want to go run 50 miles you want to you want to walk every day and you don't want to drink three gallons of wine you want to have a glass of wine um and a lot of that having to do with the fact that that our our hearts have evolved to not deal with you know they're not they haven't evolved to deal with the the kinds of stuff that we put in pour into our bodies and um and whether it's whether it's recreational or or or dietary and then the fact that we you know we sit around a lot and and don't exercise uh that that's problematic so that was kind of interesting and he went through all of these things about cardiac rehab that that I'd never known um you know one and four people go to cardiac rehab and and those are the people that survive you know a lot of times that you know there's a lot of baggage that comes with a heart attack and it's things like depression and so so I get into that a bit that that whole idea you know if you had a heart attack just I'll throw one more line that year if you had there was a major study done that said that if you had a heart attack and and you were then clinically depressed afterwards you have a 17% chance of dying within six months and if you had a heart attack and you were not clinically depressed you had a 3% chance of dying so yeah correlation is not causation but at the same time that is those are statistics to take to heart for sure I see what you did there huh take to heart take to heart yeah yeah I think I I want to do we all caught it Blair it wasn't that big of a catch okay just wanted to make sure people listen no no no everybody got it you don't have to explain that oh yeah this book is fantastic I've been reading it very I'm really enjoying it as a physiologist I am I'm loving it comparative comparative physiology it's fantastic and then also like like you said covering the modern medicine and the you know how we think about and what's going on in our bodies and our hearts and how we live today and it is it's a natural history of the heart you've written it you've done it and you've you've definitely done it justice and thank you for joining us for another mate believe me this is a lot of fun I really enjoy hanging out with you guys I wish you the best of luck we wish you the best of luck too and next time around yes yeah it'll there'll be another one I hope yeah on teeth on teeth fantastic yeah on teeth the chumpers now and I in the meantime will work on as many chewy puns as I can that's gonna that's how all sorts of teeth are fun they've got all sorts of uh forensic uh angles on them too uh but I love that I love it so if you have if you have a heart this is a kind of a book that might be very interesting uh to you so anybody out there if you have a heart or there's a heart in your family or you know uh you should probably pick up this book to learn more about it if you if you know somebody who needs another heart or needs a heart I don't know I don't know um maybe there's a grinch in your family you can help their heart I don't know there's a grinch reference in the book you have to find it though I'm not gonna say anything about it fantastic and these this book is now available in all bookstores yes everywhere that books are sold uh in any kind of format that you want great and your website is bill shut dot com bill s u s c h u t t dot com and of course I don't have my screen open to it right now but that we will have a link to it on our website and to your twitter account is there any place else that people should go to find you on facebook bill shut author I'm around uh and I love talking if people ask me questions I'm always willing to to uh to try to answer them I like talking to my readers but this is not a textbook so that's that should be a take home message there are a lot of stories it's good yes thank you very much thank you so much for joining us have a wonderful night thank you thank you take care all right everyone this is this weekend science we lost geeky no I'm not lost I just clicked the wrong button I clicked the remove button instead of clicking the uh solo button that's the one that I meant to click on we still have some more twists to come this is this weekend science if you enjoyed the show please consider heading over to twist.org where you can support us through our patreon community click on the patreon link and you can choose your amount of support ten dollars and more per month and we will thank you by name at the end of the show you'll also receive some other goodies by mail you know that twists is listener supported and we also have our calendars that are available on the website now for order so if you are twist.org and you're not really feeling the uh the patreon thing at the moment you can click on our calendar purchase button for order we will be getting those out to people before the holidays we hope because the mail system is going to be crazy but anyway it is now time we're going to come on back with this weekend science to the segment of the show that we know and love as no hold on I can't type anymore bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu bleu my audio computer needs to be set up better la la okay and we're coming back to that time of the show that we know and love as Blair's Animal Corner with Blair. Yes. I have giraffes. Yeah. So this is a story from Pennsylvania State University looking at giraffe social dynamics. So the obviously knowing social dynamics are pretty important. We talk about them on the show all the time when we know how animals are connected to one another and social networks that influences things like reproductive success, population ecology, information spread, and sometimes most importantly, how diseases move through a population. All important things to consider, especially when giraffes are endangered. And in this research team, they examine social connectedness and social movements of endangered messiah giraffes in the Tarangir ecosystem of North Tanzania using data collected over five years. They constructed a social network of more than a thousand free-ranging giraffes during that time. What they found was that male giraffes overall had higher social connectedness than females, which is kind of surprising because do either of you know the makeup of a typical giraffe herd or a tower of giraffes as they are sometimes called. So first, a tower of giraffes. Yeah. Love it. Yeah. And second, no idea. Oh. No idea of the makeup. Much like unless it's like blue eyeshadow. Oh, yes, makeup. No, much like a lot of hoof stock. There is one male and many females. Males that are born to that group are expected once they grow up to skedaddle. And females usually skedaddle until there is a change over in the male, right? And then they can stay. But ultimately, that is how this works. So you would expect social connectedness in males to not be very high because there's one of them and then a bunch of females. You would expect conversely that females would have very high social connectedness because they have to work together within their herd or tower. But this found kind of the opposite male giraffes have higher social connectedness than females. And that means that males interact with greater numbers of other individuals than females. So the older males have the shortest social path lengths of all the giraffes. And this might reflect mating strategy of those males. They roam wildly across landscapes searching for females, searching for a group to join. And so young males have the most social ties because they're kind of they're they're playing the field and they move the most often between groups. So they so that part makes sense. But what's interesting is that these adult female giraffes have fewer but stronger relationships with each other than males and younger females. And so other research from the same group previously found that relationships among male female or sorry among female giraffes allow them to live longer. So the females with stronger social connections actually live longer again correlation. But they found that. So the the reason that this kind of maybe perhaps is the case is that this very large study found that as opposed to previous research previous research giraffes but thought that there were adult females. They have about communities of 60 to 90 individuals of specific region might have a dozen of those 60 to 90 individual groups. They associate more with people within their group of 60 to 90 than with members of other groups. That was the considered kind of understanding of how giraffe social structure works. However, this new study brought light to a new dynamic. The female communities are embedded within larger groups called super community. So these females are talking just to each other in these smaller groups. But there are groups of around 800 to 900 individuals in these super communities. And so there's lots of transfer of communication and interaction between these little tiny communities within the super community. And that is why you're seeing this increased number for males. Is there hoppin from group to group trying to find the right place to kind of get on top. And so they have more opportunity to talk to socialize with other to socialize with other giraffes while they're trying to find where they fit in. And so they they've kind of they're floating around the social butterfly. Meanwhile, the females are kind of more clickish. And are the females though in their super groups of 800 the females are like, Fred, I don't know about Fred. And I mean, are they are they warning off females and other little groups are like, are there is there even though they're the clicks of the 60 to 90? Are they are they talking or the females talking amongst themselves in this super group? Good question. So according to this research, it really looks like the females are focusing all of their attention or most of it on the people in their kind of subset group of 60 to 90. They're really not scooting over to other groups very often to transfer information. So Fred actually could probably get away with a lot more nearby if he cut his losses with his current group for sure. And so these female giraffes are forming distinct and stable stable social communities with a large number of other females. And then these males perpetually searching for mating opportunities are kind of bopping around from female group to female group forming these super communities. This is great because it allows gene flow between between groups. So this prevents any potential inbreeding and allows for this kind of gene flow, which is great because again, giraffes, no matter how you categorize them, seven subspecies, four subspecies, we've had that conversation before, nobody knows. This might be part of the reason that they're having so much trouble categorizing these guys is that over the millennia, they have hopped around so much and there's so much fluidity that giraffes could be kind of like a ring species or they have genetic flow all over Africa. Yeah, that's like not, it's causing these kind of blended lines across subspecies, which I think is was my own kind of interesting that I brought out of all of this. But of course, this is all really important because again, giraffes are endangered. And if we understand their social connections, they can have a more successful time in their conservation efforts. So they don't want to translocate animals into new areas if they are part of a super community that they are removing them from. They if they if they understand gene flow within these super communities, that will help them decide where to bring in new genes from that might not be representative, they're trying to beef up the gene pool, all these sorts of things. But anyway, giraffe herds, towers, whatever you want to call them, are a lot more complicated than we thought. And there's a lot more movement amongst those smaller groups than we thought. Which is good to know. I mean, but as it comes out, how often do we say it's more complicated than we thought? Almost all the time. Speaking of things we always say. I have another story that I have a little bit of a rant, but I'm just going to give you the story first. I'm going to try to not inject my own narrative. It's going to happen, but I'm going to try my best. This is a study from University of East Anglia, and it's part of a really important study looking at endangered animals in Europe. So there's there's something, there's a thing called the Shifting Sands Project. They're one of 19 projects across England that make up the National Back from the Brink Initiative. And so together, they're aiming to save 20 species from extinction, and by doing that benefit over 200 more. So it's a really, really great cause. They're trying to take a smart approach to this. They're not just kind of throwing money at the problem. Research is involved so they can figure out how best to prioritize and save these animals. And so this study in particular that I brought tonight is focused on rabbits. This is specifically looking at wild rabbits in England, and their numbers are declining regionally, nationally, and globally. They have recently been classified as endangered in their native region, which is the Iberian Peninsula. So rabbits, we think about rabbits, we think about something that's all over the place. And part of the reason for that is that there are pet rabbits. So we're just used to seeing them all the time. The idea that they could be endangered seems crazy. But one of the reasons these rabbits are endangered in England is from viruses being spread from commercially bred rabbits. So people have rabbits as pets, or maybe they have them on a farm or any number of things. And a rabbit will get out. And if you see rabbits in the wild and then a rabbit got out, you're like, it's fine. They're rabbits. They're all rabbits. It's fine. It's not all the same. Not all rabbits are the same. They come from all over the world. A lot of pet rabbits and commercially bred rabbits are not native to whatever area they're being sold in. And so it causes all sorts of problems. Not to mention, if you are a farm and you have rabbits that and you're responsible about not letting them get out, they're still depending on your containment. If you're scrubbing out your boots, after you leave your space with them, you can spread disease into the wild land without realizing it. So all that to say, these rabbits are in trouble. And so the reason that this group wanted to look at rabbits is that they claim, there's my hint, they claim that rabbits are keystone species. They hold together an entire ecosystem by grazing and digging. So by the fact that you said they claim, as opposed to they reported or stated or they are, is because I'm assuming you have a little bit of a hesitancy accepting this information. Here's my thing. Here's my thing about keystone species. When I first learned about them, I thought they were so cool. I was like, yes, this makes total sense. Otters, keystone species. Beavers. Keystone species. Beavers, keystone species. There's so many good ones that they are considered a keystone species because they have a cascading impact on their environment. They impact almost everything living in it. Plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, everything. The problem I have with keystone species is the majority of keystone species that we know of and that have been classified mammals. A lot of them cute mammals. Also, what is the threshold for a keystone species? Because my understanding is a lot of ecosystems are like a web, you see, and if you take one thing out, everything is impacted. So what level of impact is enough to make it a keystone species? Are we comfortable saying redwoods are keystone species? Are we comfortable saying that corals are keystone species? And then at what point aren't we just talking about species? No, because there are some species that definitely aren't keystone species like cats, for instance. Cats are invasive, therefore not part of this conversation. Right, but if also if you're talking about say a lion, a lion is not necessarily a keystone species. It is a predator. It is the apex predator. Or is it because if you remove them, the hoof stock will explode in the area, get sick and die on mass. So this is my problem. These are how these things work together. But then you have things like, okay, in the Houston, Texas area, with a lot of the big storms, now we're experiencing flooding because we're putting down parking lots and housing and getting rid of prairie grasses. So are prairie grasses a keystone species for that area because they maintain the ecosystem and keep it from flooding because of their long root systems? This is my point. If I can make an analogy that I think is to your point also, if you were to think of about something like a bicycle, and what's the keystone part to a bicycle? Well, it's obviously the wheels. Oh, so you could go without the brakes? Oh no, that's a keystone part also. Yeah, what about the gears? So you don't need a steering wheel. Oh no, you need to be able to steer them. So that's also a keystone part. What's the part of the bike that you could actually remove from a bike that you really don't need? The bell? The bell? Maybe. The bell? The bell you're going to hit by a car. Oh yeah, see, yeah. So this is kind of what I'm saying is I understand what this project is trying to do. I understand they're trying to prioritize because unfortunately we cannot save every species right this second. So they need to prioritize. Start somewhere. They need to prioritize influential species that have kind of a ripple effect of an impact on the space. I get it. I'm with it. I just think we're using this keystone species definition fast and loose to fit what we want, which is like cute and fluffy usually. Also already starting to disappear and we're seeing what's happening as a result. So that's a lot of it is like the oopsie factor of oh boy, we really shouldn't remove that. That's important. Can you put it back? So it's important. It's important messaging. I just, I think we should be careful about overselling the influence of some species over others because also like the lizards that live there that also dig and graze aren't considered keystone species, but they're being killed unmasked by cats. So yeah, so it's definitely is very difficult to pick and choose. Anyway, back to this, I will just save the ecosystem. Yeah, so what they saw as they, let's see, they tried to figure out what they could do to promote rabbit populations in that area. And instead of trying to like start a breeding program or do other things that we've definitely talked about on the show in relation to bring back endangered species, what is cool is that they found what rabbits needed to thrive in the environment and looked at why that wasn't there. So simple cost-effective ways of encouraging rabbits includes creating piles of downed branches. They're called brush piles and to make sure there are banks of loose soil. And so where this all comes from is actually showing that let's see Pip Muntjoy, Shifting Sands Project Manager at Natural England said, I really liked how he said it, quote, the project's interventions have provided a lifeline for this unique landscape and shown how biodiversity can be promoted by disturbing places, not just by leaving them alone. These rare habitats are becoming overgrown and species are declining as a result of changing land management practices and human impacts. It's our responsibility to restore and maintain these spaces for nature. Some of these species exist only here and if lost will be lost forever. So it's a good reminder that what we think looks like a barren wasteland of a plane actually has exactly what a native rabbit might need. And when we leave those areas to go wild, we reduce our land management or we make it look more manicured that can actually have detrimental impacts to the animals that live there. And so I thought this was a really cool moment to recognize like, okay, we can kind of do an audit of a space where there's an animal we're trying to make sure doesn't go extinct. And we can see like, okay, this is the thing that they need. Okay, so we need to make sure that those things are available to them and also that we're not doing other things here that are counterintuitive to what they need. And so I really like that look at land management because not just this keystone species might have a positive impact from that. If that's what that plane originally looks like, there are all sorts of species that can benefit from it looking like it once did. Yep, one species is not the only species that they all enjoy it together. Yeah, that's a great point. Justin, do you have some stories? Yeah, this is actually a great one to follow. Just good news. That's that news segment where we try to show something positive from an uplifting type of story from a topic that is usually big downer. Try to try to bring you the good version of that. This is the ecology edition. Just good news, everyone. 23 species, excuse me, 23 keystone species, if you will, have been removed from the endangered species list. I just briefly looked over the list. This is actually quite impressive. It includes the little marionna, fruit bat of Guam, more than half a dozen Hawaiian island birds, one plant, eight or nine fish, water mussel species from fresh waters across the United States and Canada. There's the ivory billed woodpecker, which I was amazed about because apparently this is the largest U.S. woodpecker. It hasn't been seen for like 70 years. All have been removed from the endangered species list this week. Credit for the removal has been given to developers, water pollution, logging dams, invasive pet species, feather hunters and private trophy collectors. In each case, humans. That doesn't sound like a conservation efforts, really, if you ask me. In each case, humans were the ultimate cause for the extinction. Yeah. Oh, shoot. I thought this was it because there says that we're getting removed from the list. I assumed. No, no, no. Okay. So I guess there is more than one way to get removed from the endangered species. What's truly interesting about this is previous to these 23 getting removed, there would have only been 11 species removed from the list in this way. And some of these creatures have not been seen since long before the endangered species list was even created. And there's some sort of interesting debate about whether or not it's it's a valuable it's valuable to have the ivory bill woodpecker that hasn't been seen in over 70 years on an endangered species list when nobody has seen it for 70 odd years. Should we still be trying to preserve a habitat? Is there is there financing for conservation for a thing that we've not seen? Does that money then evaporate and then development can take place because there's no more fear of the disturbing the environment of a thing that's already extinct? Or is it time to like face facts that these are not in danger that that we've made these 23 species extinct and that they're not coming back and to recognize that as is an important thing. So some debate about that. But yeah 23 officially although although there is a window there is a window of opportunity here where they can be endangered again if they find them. Yeah because because they've left that they've announced the 23 are being removed. But they've left like a 60 day window if anyone can find one of these 23 species that they've been looking for for sometimes seven or more years. In the next two months. In the next two months they will put them back on the endangered list. Well that's good news. Yeah so there's still there's still some good news if you get out there and and finally start start looking. Oh my oh my sorry. Thanks for that Justin. Next week next I guess you need to read to the end next time. I just need to read to the end of the headline. I just picked ahead of the 23 species removed from the endangered species list sounded really great news. Not like good news. My favorite story this week. Long time listeners of the show will recall that from time to time there's a discovery which seems to fall outside of the sort of more acceptable accepted timeline for humans arriving in the Americas. Which is depending on when you learned it the first time that that date is between 8,000 13,500 years ago 14,000 years ago somewhere in that range. The the that later 13,500 year ago points to the Clovis culture which has lots of aero points that were found and then eventually dated and show some shell mountains of this sort of thing during that 13,000 year range and there's enough of those that that sort of became the accepted the Clovis culture in North America thought to have arrived after the glacial maximum had melted down and then people had come across the bearing into the United States. This has been the sort of very popular thing. So however we as reported on the show before there's two tool marks on bones in the cave in the Yukon that's some 24,000 years ago. There's a cave in Mexico very recently where they found human tools believe to be up to 30,000 years old. Multiple sites in South America that are in the 14, 15, 16 some even hinting at 40, 50, 60,000 years in age. List of outliers continues to grow. So the argument is being made. Maybe they're not all outliers. Maybe we've got enough outliers at some point that the the sort of accepted ranges of time need to get moved. We got to move those go polls. And some of the things can be sort of debated the the 40 50,000 years sites in Brazil. I think those are the Pedra ferrata site. They're based on charcoal that's burned in age and human habitated sites which could have been from natural burnings before the humans got there. There's some sites in North America that are very old too. But again, there's a carbon influence in the soil which again sometimes can can confound a bit of the dating systems. Now new discovery has been made that should quiet any critics of the more ancient timelines. Footprints have been found at the White Sands National Park in New Mexico. Footprints made by a group of teenagers, some children, occasionally adults, footprints that are contemporary to the height of the last glacial maximum when giant ice sheets covered much of North America some 23,000 years ago. There are literally there are tens of thousands of fossil footprints that they have been uncovering in the White Sands in New Mexico. All sorts of creatures whose tracks were deposited around the margins of large wetlands or lakes at times. And then at other times there's more of a patchwork of small water bodies that these footprints are sort of being found around. Tracks with undisturbed sediment above and below them that also contained seeds of grass seeds. These seeds then were radiocarbon dated. Revealed the seeds range from the age of 21,000 to 23,000 years old suggesting humans made repeated visits to the sites over at least 2,000 years. So this is not just some humans walking by. This is sort of persistent survival in the area. And this is also this is concurrent with mammoths and the giant sloths are co-mingling and you know timeline. And they were possibly hunting them and were they hunting the mammoths possibly? So what's interesting is there's a lot of activity that looks like teenagers and children hanging out whether at play. So part of the thing is that there's so much youth that are hanging out in these large groups running around that it has this sort of feeling of a relaxed environment. You know that the kids are out wandering around in the plains by the water. Doesn't mean that they're terrified of predators or on the verge of survival and extinction and fighting for their lives. It's more like all right you kids go out and play. Let the parents get some work done or you know they could be out there foraging to bring stuff back to the household. But it has it sort of paints a much more carefree existence than one of a bunch of huddled mastodon or mammoth hunters who were you know in the midst of starving to death and yeah terrified and yeah. Yeah no they seemed like they were doing just great. Kiki can you go back to the picture of the of the the sandy feet? Okay so I I love this. This like really makes me smile and I think it's because so often when we're talking about ancient hominids we're like looking at a little piece of a bone or a jaw or a tool or a mark left exactly yeah but this like I can imagine a body that goes with this foot and I can kind of just see everybody hanging around with these footsteps and it's just it's so sweet to me. I don't know why it's just like really hitting me. It reminds you of like footsteps on a sandy beach. Yeah it does tell a story. Yeah and it feels like something that I can relate to that like yeah I don't know it's very neat. So and yeah it's part of the thing too is like whenever you find a tool that tool can easily have like ended up in a trash pile or underlamp like these things can get moved around in an environment. So like again I point out so that the the Brazilian site a lot of it is based on dating of charcoal of burned organic material and there's other reasons that things can burn other than human cause even in a site that was seen as human habitable. So you know there and there's also you know whenever there is whenever there is by the sea sort of by an ocean site the carbon dating becomes very difficult because the fats from from ocean in the ocean they don't carbon date the same way that things on the surface the things that are carbon dated that are that are marine life carbon date completely abstractly from the way that things do on the surface it's exposure to the sun or something like the atmosphere that's so different that if you're in a site that's been rendering fish those fats get everywhere and then it's hard to really get a good date on things. The amazing things about this is you have the footprints don't move they don't once they once they once you get these footprints into into these sands they're not changing position and you have you have evidence below and above that you can also use to to pinpoint time. So these are these are some of the best examples of dating uh one of the best laboratories for dating accurately and it's putting it 21 to 23,000 years again height of the glacial maximums this is you got the blue fish cave people up in the Yukon like waiting for the ice to thaw trying to get down maybe right but the idea had always been for the longest time that ice had to melt before humans got down and here we're showing thousands of years of humans living below that barrier which then has implications for all of South America meaning there's no there's no obstacle whatsoever for all of the rest of the Americas to be popular at that time. DNA from modern indigenous Americans scientists have worked out that their ancestors did arrive in several waves uh from Asia but some of which had become very genetically isolated for a long time that cause of that had not really been understood but the idea that you would have this divide of the ice sheet that would last for you know 10,000 years could really be a good example so that also means that that the arrival could be much much much earlier than these footprints because again that's probably what it had to have been that that's the whole reason we thought that people couldn't have gotten down there is because this point right here was impossible many thought if people are already down in New Mexico 23,000 years ago then when when could they have gotten there how much further back in time would we need to go to to to actually make that possible? We have to find the evidence to be able to really figure that out but is it possible that it'll go back to that 40, 50,000 years ago the evidence that you were talking about from Brazil? So that's I think those things then those things that were such outliers that they were criticized because of all the other ways we had to figure out like that that data that was huge outliers could could could have been there now you have a data point that's more solid than pretty much any other data point that you've got out there and it's saying oh no right in the middle of where you said this couldn't have happened this happened and and based on why we thought it couldn't have happened because of the big ice barriers that means it had to have actually started much much earlier which then starts to fit with those big outliers of time down in South America and some of the sites in the United States that we assumed were just two being dated too far back to to match what we thought had happened so yeah much more to learn of course as always always more to learn now we just need to find you know the pathway that everyone came from South America and Brazil and then they traveled up instead of going north and down we're just North America you know northern hemisphere has a bias problem we are very biased northern northern northerly biased everything it's like the earth is oriented to the north in space like everything really but anyway this is this week in science and i do hope you all are enjoying the show i have a couple more stories right here at the very end love bites there are animals and i'm not saying that love bites i'm just saying there are animals that bite each other during their courtship and it looks as though tyrannosaurus rex was one of those species oh wow yeah an analysis of fossilized theropod skull bones about 528 of them in all that they looked at 122 of them had deep bite marks and healed lesions and they were all in skulls that were past sexual maturity so no baby or juvenile skulls seemed to have any of these facial wounds in them that they looked at and so the researchers have concluded and published this week in paleobiology but i think about uh that adults in the of the t-rex species they they went into courtship very aggressively and that the males would fight for dominance and square off against each other biting uh what they what they say is each animal would deliver lateral head swings to seize their opponents skull or lower jaw swing that lateral head swing so they're swinging their head to the side mouth wide open trying to grab on to the other dinosaurs base um and just very sweetly oh just a little nibble very little well love let me just ditch your skull a little yeah uh so they they found that the skulls of smaller dinosaurs other theropods that gave were on the branch that led to modern birds did not have bite marks like this and so they are making the assumption that the violence of the t-rex theropods was left behind as birds came on to the scene and used their feathers to show off and stopped fighting each other so much i don't doubt that they tried to keep biting it's just without teeth you can't hang on you can't you can't you can pinch you'd be surprised is all i'm saying um the cassowary i think is one of those birds that you would probably not want to let laterally swing their head at you you're more worried about the the nail for the cassowary yes that's the i feel like there's a lot of jumps happening in the story i absolutely agree with you but i'm not a paleontologist so you know maybe they know something i don't just kind of seems like bites in the head yeah that that's for sex that's it yeah it's an assumption that just well it wasn't in the youth it was only in adults and so it's it's being assumed that maybe courtship behaviors were aggressive we don't know but it it it seems possible it could also be that adults just happened to get into more fights as they were scavenging for their meals yeah i mean if you think about them like hyenas right they could they could fight over food all the time mm-hmm and they probably did it just becomes more uh more lethal with uh with age as you become a big dinosaur yeah i i thought you were gonna say like you know sometimes you're fighting over food and then the mood strikes and things change a little bit after the tyrannosaurus cute as it were yeah no no cuteness bites love bites love hurts yes um and then last week i talked about how very briefly jumped onto the topic of how dopamine is involved in making association associations so our associate of memory is they found new neurons that are involved in creating these associations in our brains dopamine is tied into that this week research out of uc davis has uh looked at how the brain's memory center the hippocampus activates during the learning of stories and then the recall of stories and what they discovered is that yes indeed the hippocampus is your brain's storyteller it pieces together bits of information events that are taking place in space and time with all their context and links information to help you put together an entire story the way that they determined this was looking at um was looking at people under functional magnetic resonance imaging they actually were watching the activation of the brain as they were telling people stories and they would tell people related snippets of stories and then unrelated snippets of stories and the people would put them together and figure things out and then have to remember remember them but the way that it all worked is they would start with something say like Beatrice calls to ask for advice about a dilemma with her partner melvin gets locked out of his home in the middle of cooking a pizza so these are two completely unrelated melvin's the partner who's uh like that that's just like hey how do you get into a house my partner right so if you in your brain put together those two pieces those two pieces of information as a whole story your hippocampus is right now as you're putting it together activating to link bits of information and so in their study hopefully people weren't putting Beatrice and Melvin together but what they were linking later was another bit of information about Beatrice that Beatrice shows up wearing a cast on her arm after falling off her bicycle so you know that there's Beatrice is having an issue she calls about a dilemma and then she you know maybe has said she's going to come over and talk to you but something happened during the day and oh my gosh you got hurt on your way over to my house to talk about this problem with your issue with your with your partner you know you put together all these contextual bits of information and it's the hippocampus that becomes activated to make that happen it does not activate as much for completely unrelated bits of information so um and in recall if you are recalling information once again the hippocampus gets activated to bring all these bits of information that it has helped network together it's like the connector for the information that has been stored in a distributed manner in your brain so those association neurons that were stimulated by the by the dopamine that we talked about last week that are associated a smell with a certain memory or a fact or you know a piece of information with something else they're getting triggered those little neurons the association neurons are getting told by the hippocampus that they are now going to be talking with these other neurons that have another bit of association and or another piece of information from a different part of the brain so the hippocampus is really a connector and a storyteller of narratives without a hippocampus you can't hold a story together and as i was thinking about this this story it made me wonder if the aha moment where you suddenly put disparate pieces of information together in a new way if that is some in some way related to an activation of your hippocampus allowing a new networking a new association of different bits of information that's cool it's like the Sherlock Holmes like connection yeah yeah is the hippocampus and that's what i want i'd love to know that and that we don't have any way necessarily of knowing that at this point in time unless we get people to have aha moments while we've got them in an fmri machine but i think that's possible yeah have them watch a mystery movie yes a who done it yeah and when when you know you figured it out yeah i know who did it yeah our brain i i just it's so fascinating to me that we have these pieces of neural tissue that once upon a time to go back to the the book that bill shut has has written about the heart we were talking about once upon a time the brain was just tossed away it was a it was considered a bunch of goo and now we're we're understanding that it is this very specialized organ with these specialized nuclei that process information and allow us to analyze information to remember things to create stories and to live understanding metaphor you know and to and to live as storytellers of our own lives our brain helps us do that and it's just thanks brain you're awesome yeah couldn't do it without you buddy i'm gonna do it without you and on that note i can't do it without you this show thanks thanks blare thanks justin thank you i think we've made it to the end yeah yeah another episode wipe my hands get the chalk dust off of them no i don't have any chalk or anything i've got lots of computer files and i want to say thanks to all of you out there for joining us for another episode thank you for enjoying the science and for having the questions and for being curious and coming back week after week thank you to bill shut for joining us to talk about his book i put it down pump the natural history of the heart which is available in bookstores now thank you to fada for help with social media thank you to gourd and arlore and other people who are involved in moderating our chat rooms for helping to make sure our chat rooms are safe and pleasant places to be thank you to identity for for recording the show and thank 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This Week in Science! We did a show! Yeah! We did a little show. Good job, everyone. Thanks for watching, everyone. Thanks for joining us for another episode of This Week in Science. Did you see? We've got Daniel from Australia. Hey! Glad you are learning stuff from us with us. We learn new things, too. That's what we like it. It's one of the fun things about the show is that this is all new information, so we didn't know it either. Nobody did. Nobody did. Thank you for being with us here for another episode. Yeah, we've been enjoying the interviews. I have a couple of other interviews I'm trying to schedule, but there are people who do not want to be up late with us, which means I would have to schedule separate times to do interviews, which I could do as live streams so that they would be live just at a different time, but then it would potentially not involve Blair and Justin if the schedules don't allow. Because work. Because work. That's not so much. Mine's more about time zone. Right now time zones, yeah. But not for... Blair's a little bit harder, unless it were like lunchtime, right? Yeah, that works. So lunchtime is hard because I'm going to work full time right now, and I don't have Wi-Fi where I work. Yeah, what do you do? You work out in the boonies or something? I don't even understand what you do. She's in nature. Yeah, I work inside of a park. Yeah, in a very old building that only has hardwired internet and one bar of service on my phone. Whoa, that's how they keep you from surfing the web while you're on the company time. So yeah. At least... I mean, here's the thing. I do starting in November because I have no free time right now. I do have every other Friday off. Every other Friday in November, okay. In November, December, and January, I think. Some of them all have stuff planned, but if we planned ahead, I think we can potentially do something. So is this a plate situation for East Coasty people, or is this like European people? Well, it could potentially be... There are people I want to talk to in European time zones. Because that's just getting up early. That's not impossible. It turns out as I found. You're able to do it, yes. And we have had people come on and get up at five in the morning to join us on the show. But I like to offer people who are like myself, who do not do well in the mornings, other options if possible. So yes, possibly European time zones, or we have one researcher who I'm working with, their PR person for, he's in Brazil, which is like five hours, eight hours, five hours ahead. No, it can't be five, can it? I thought it would be like East Coast time. It's more than East Coast time because it's further over. Yeah, so it's like two more hours. Oh gosh. So yeah, I didn't recently see a map of the world. So it's just a difficult time. I didn't recently see a map of the world that is apparently a little more accurate than the one that we normally picture is the globe. And like, yeah, it likes, like all of the continents were a little eschewed. Yeah. Which would then put, yeah, it's not quite, there's some simple, there's a little fun fact. There's a little bit of cheating that goes on when people make maps. Totally. A lot of cheating that goes on. There's a little bit of, ah, this looks nice, it like this. Yeah. What kind of map? Yeah, a projection map? Exactly. What kind of a map is it? You got to know what kind of distortion your map is dealing with. Yeah. So one thing that could happen to make that work better is if you guys waited till midnight to do the show on your end, I could sleep in a few extra hours. I wouldn't mind. And then, then the guests would have a more reasonable time at which to participate on the show. That makes sense. I'd be fine with that. Right. Yeah. Me starting a show at midnight. Not on a school night, Bucco. You'd be fine. You'd be great at it. The problem with it is, it's our audience. No, the next day getting out to take my child to school would not be good at it. Small sacrifice for the show, Kiki. Really, we've all, me and Blair have done things even worse, trust us. But the worst time, she was in Israel, it was two, three in the morning. You act like I've never done anything. Time-zone-wise. Time-zone-wise. You'll be fine. You just get through a couple of episodes that way. But the problem is, it's our audience, our live audience that we rely on, who rely on us being where we say we're going to be each week as sort of a touchstone by which to set all other clocks in their houses because that's how- Right. Well, I'm not- Twist. On time we always are. Yeah, our timeliness is not going to change. No. This would be like extra. This would be extra. You would be more than willing to stay up till midnight to start the show, Kiki. I know you would. It's just because of our audience's dependence on the time slot where we show up is why we can never deviate from that. No. We must help our community set their clocks. Oh my goodness. Hot Rod is saying if they have internet at your work, there's probably a modem and it probably has Wi-Fi. You just need the password. No, no. There's no Wi-Fi. This is a decade-old stone building in the middle of a park. There is no Wi-Fi. Nobody's assuming that the stone building had Wi-Fi built into the infrastructure. See, somebody could bring a little device thing at some point. Is there a router? No, there's no router. There's no modem. The wires go directly from the server room. And is it government? Is it government? Into my computer. Yeah, it's government. It's government. See, you can't use it then. No, I couldn't use it. No, I've got it. I've got it. Yeah, it's there. You just aren't... Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Paul, I don't mind the show starting one hour earlier either, but Blair has to have time for dinner, and Justin, when he's in Denmark, does not want to get up at four in the morning. No, no. I'd be more than willing to. I'll get up at any time. But again, it's the consistency to the general audience that relies on the showing up. You can't show up early, and then they get here on time, and then half the show is gone. No, you can't do that to people. No. I totally would, you know, like that would be a problem. I got an email from Bill. He said, that was great. Thank you all. I'll send him a thank you tomorrow morning. Oops, someone bought a twist hoodie. Oh, yes. Thank you, whoever bought a hoodie. Thank you for supporting us. That's great. Yeah, that's awesome. Thanks so much. I'm going to check my email sometimes. Oops, and there's some calendar sales in there. I see you all getting in there, getting your orders in. So Blair, those pictures are not as shiny as the, is Brian gone now? He's off to work. You have a question for him? No, is he healthy? Is he all good? Yeah, he's healthy. Good. He's getting his booster tomorrow morning? He's trying to. Awesome. Love you, bye. Get your booster. Maintain your antibodies. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, we're going to ask me, oh, the, the, they're not as shiny. Yeah. Scanning them does that. Yeah. I'm wondering if there's any way that we could, that we could maintain the shininess in the images. I know not. I don't know. I only know how to scan images one way. We're using a scanner to do the scanning. Yeah. A flat bed scanner. Yeah. Hello, Nicholas. Thank you for joining us. Ah, it's better than expected. Thanks. I'm glad you caught the show live. That's fantastic. Better than expected. I like being better than expected. It's like, you know, in life, when you set out with really super high expectations, kind of be let down a lot. You know, have, have moderate expectations. You'll be pleased more often than not. It'll be good. Yeah. All right. Do we have anything that we need to discuss? Um, next week might be my last show for a tiny bit. Right. Okay. Dates. I know it's coming up. Yeah. You sent an email. I don't think I, I think I need to double check that. You replied to it. I did. It's in, it's in my email. Yeah. So I know it's in there. So I can double check it when I make the schedule for October. Yeah. Send out the run sheet. Uh, yes. So the CDC garb Sharma is asking, why the CDC said we don't deserve a booster shot. And it's not, it's not that we don't deserve a booster shot. The CDC is managing, managing expectations. And there is a balance to be had between getting booster shots to people who really, really, really, really need them. I mean, immunocompromised elderly people in healthcare. And the FDA actually did not suggest that boosters be given to frontline workers like people in healthcare. That was not an FDA recommendation. And it was a decision that the CDC made on their own, which is probably a good decision to help keep the immunity level up for people who are going to be coming in contact with the disease more often than not. But it's, and there's also, I was going to say that the second part of it though, is that we also need to make sure we have enough vaccine for everyone still because we are still trying to maintain. There's a population of unvaccinated people that we still need to try to get vaccinated. And as much as we're vaccinating the United States population, we also need to balance our supplies with the supplies that are available for the rest of the world. And so there's a, there's a push pull. And I think there's something else going on personally. I think that there's some, some, some social science happening here related to the fact that a lot of people didn't get the Pfizer shot. And you're not supposed to get the Pfizer booster based on the current science. If you received Moderna or Johnson and Johnson, they have not figured out if that's the best plan of action yet. And I know for a fact, people eligible for the booster are going and getting the Pfizer booster regardless of what they got first. They're like, let's get it. If you look at who got Pfizer most, it was the same people that were in the first bracket of a vaccination, which are the same people who are now eligible for the booster. So I do think there's a little bit of risk management happening here where they are also trying to make sure that the guidelines for the booster are being followed by not offering it out to everybody and not off and mainly offering it to people who got the Pfizer vaccine to begin with. So I don't think any of that. I think all of that's probably somewhat true, but from my understanding, the recommendation has been you get the booster eight months after your last shot. So the best way to roll that out is just what you said, Blair, create the same protocols of how you rolled it out the first time because that eight months ago is when people were starting just to get from the medical community and everything else. And Pfizer was the one that was available. Secondly, the Moderna has a longer staying rate is effective longer anyway. So there's maybe a little less. If Moderna was much less effective long term, they might have opened it up sooner to those people than to the Pfizer folks because I don't think it's like trying to keep it with the same brand. I think the mixing matching thing you're very early on CDC is like, yeah, go ahead. CDC was not. There was a report that said that people are doing it, but ever said to mix and match that has not been approved. Yes. Okay. So they CDC did not approve. I'm not saying anything has been approved. No. It was suggested that you take what you is available at the time at the time, which would have been you take Pfizer first and then that puts you on track to take Pfizer second for the second for the second. This is also very early on. This is not the recent maybe thing, but in the early on. So the CDC approved mix and match in quote unquote exceptional situations when the dose that you received was no longer available. They did not approve it as a general practice, but nothing had been generally. Well, technically nothing had been approved outside of an emergency type of use anyway. So yeah, we're talking in the same do what you got to do language. No, it's pretty different, but I understand what you're saying, but I still think that's very different. Yeah. Yeah. Fine. And yes, studies have backed it up too. But that's not what I'm saying. But but it had already been like, okay, approved or suggested that you if you needed to take a second dose and the one you took the first time, don't wait until it just shows up and becomes available again, go ahead and take whatever's there was the suggestion. But yes, rolling it out with the same protocols does help ensure that people are keeping that eight month window. And as luck would have it, Moderna tended to roll out later also has the longer staying power. So we also have more time if they need to come up with a Moderna booster shot to develop that as well. Here's the problem. Justin, the official language is now six months. Yeah. So that's the other problem is that all of the vaccines were out six months ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, again, again, all of them were but the but the Moderna has the longer staying power anyway. And Moderna is not so not it hasn't been authorized for boosters yet. It hasn't been authorized Johnson and Johnson hasn't been authorized for boosters yet. I don't care about these people. I don't care about any of these people. This is not who I care about getting the next thing of fire. We need the kids, the children under 12 to develop that one. That's going to be the important one. They're working on it. Yeah, they're working on it. It's taking longer than I thought. The data has been submitted. They have not asked for authorization yet, but all the days all the data is in for the five to 12 days group. It's the biggest priority and then you can pause everybody else to use the entire infrastructure and the entire supply that's to focus. It's not either or it's I think it should be just push everyone else off and just get the kids. Let's get the kids vaccinated. We're worried about the old world or just do kids for the whole world. Just forget the adults still haven't figured it out. That's too bad. Wear a mask, stay home, get out of the way. The children who have been waiting in the wings for anybody to take this thing seriously for them need to be addressed first. Totally. Yeah. Frank Grimm is asking if there are trials for mRNA booster shots for the J&J. Johnson and Johnson is different. It's not mRNA and it is they are doing trials for boosters at this point in time, but it's a different type of, but as far as mixing and matching if that's what you're talking about, like if you had Johnson and Johnson and then take Pfizer or Moderna as a booster, researchers are starting to look at that kind of stuff, but the data isn't out yet. So yes, there are trials. There are things happening slowly, but surely we just want them to happen now as opposed to later. Yeah. And Gaurav, as you were saying, yes, the original vaccine, all of them were tailored. All of the vaccines were tailored for the alpha, the first version of SARS-CoV-2 that we came across. But the thing that I mentioned last week or two weeks ago, briefly after the show, is something that I think is very important is the antibody response versus the B cell and T cell response of our immune system. And what it seems to be that matters is how much antibody is in your bloodstream that allows you to immediately fight off COVID or not. So what the six months is, is a period of waning of antibodies in your bloodstream. Your body is not on high alert, ready to fight something off anymore after about six months. But it does have its resources waiting in the wings. So if you do get infected, you've got your B cells and T cells that can be activated and then can lead to this activation of antibodies and can get rid of the COVID, but it takes time. And so that's why you get COVID, but maybe it's not as intense and maybe doesn't last as long. But because your body will fight it off, your body does have a memory immune response. It's just not an immediate response. And that's part of the problem is that Delta has a really fast reproduction rate. And so it's going to overwhelm, overwhelm, overwhelm too fast. And your body is not going to be able to recruit those B and T cells fast enough. So it's interesting because the mutations are not necessarily like Delta is super different from Alpha. Your body's still going to recognize it. And the vaccine is good enough to help your body recognize it, but it's this reproduction time that's making the big difference and antibody load. So the booster is going to get your body back in high alarm. You're going to have all sorts of antibodies and you'll be ready to fight that virus off. Yeah. I'm hoping this flu shot also does some of that. Yeah. Yeah, just for COVID, but boosting your body, right? Just pay attention. Pay attention, body. Pay attention. Don't let down your guard. And now I'm wondering, because there was a study about the time that the flu vaccine is good. And I was like, oh, you want to time your flu vaccine so that it'll last all the way through spring flu season. So at least until like April. So October, November is like a good time to get vaccinated for the flu. Yeah. It doesn't matter. You're vaccinated. Do it. It's good. It'll just get a top off in December. Yeah. That's fine. It's just fine. Got another one. Oh, no. Paul Disney's flu vaccine clinic canceled. Total boo. Lack of staff. Lack of staff. Yeah, that's a huge issue. Yeah. You're so right. The caseload in the U.S. is higher right now than it was this time last year. Because kids are in school and we're just ignoring it. Yeah, I know. That's a whole thing. I did hear a, I don't know who it was, an epidemiologist, a pandemic specialist. I don't remember. I heard somebody on NPR for whatever that's worth saying that based on the current trend and the vaccination rates, they're not expecting a winter surge like they expected last year. They're actually expecting a steady taper down of cases throughout the winter into the spring. And then at that point, like we talked about last week, it'll just be endemic. Yeah. Which it's not what I wanted for this pandemic, but I guess I'll take it. Yeah, right? I guess I'll take that. Yeah, I think the big, but at least for the United States for sure, I mean, if we can get kids vaccinated, that's going to really affect the possibility, the probability of transmission, of mutation of all that kind of stuff. And we're talking about the bulk of people in hospitals are unvaccinated. That's kids too. Yeah. No, that's definitely when I talked to Brian about his night. Yeah. It's pretty much the same story every time. Like, oh, we had a couple of people come in who had COVID and were vaccinated and it turns out they were there because of anxiety. So, yeah. What? Because some people get freaked out. They get their positive COVID test. No, no. They get told they have exposure. They get tested at the suggestion of whoever, right? They get a positive test result and then they suddenly can't breathe. And so I'm sorry, I shouldn't laugh. Anxiety is a real big deal. But clogging up ERs with people who are actually really sick is also bad. So take some deep breaths. It's okay. So there's that. But then also, you know, unvaccinated people actually with full-blown COVID. So, yeah. That's who's in hospitals right now. But I do hope. I mean, I hope the experts, many experts have been right on, right on with their estimates of how this caseloads and how things are going to progress. And yeah, my fingers are crossed that taper, even though we're very high caseloads right now, what that means is more people are gaining immunity one way or another. Hopefully we can continue to vaccinate people and get further immunity. And then by next spring, we'll be waiting for our fall flu COVID booster, dual booster shot, right? Both of them at the same time. Nicholas in the chat room says, still blows me away that there's so much pushback to the vaccine with all the data on hospitalization. So, yeah, and I literally blame mainstream misinformation campaigns. And I think those people should be who are intentionally putting out bad information, despite they themselves living in a vaccinated bubble, should be prosecuted for mass deaths that they are responsible for. Because people did not generate this vaccine hesitancy in a bubble. They were intentionally misinformed for whatever ratings or political gains people thought that they were going to achieve. These are people who've been vaccinated for everything else, got their children's vaccinated for everything else, and then politics, ratings, whatever the interests that may be should be prosecuted for intentionally misinforming so many people at the point where they died. And I think if you went on the air every night, if we came on the show every night and told people to drink a toxic substance, whatever that toxic substance might be, whatever benefit, this will make you smarter if you ingest this poison. And we did that every night. Somebody should prosecute us for doing so after all the data comes in. It's not something we would do. We would not ingest this, right? The people who have been reporting these things about who have been downplaying vaccinations have been vaccinated. They work in workplaces that are vaccinated. They have all the mask mandates in-house in their organizations while telling people it shouldn't be done for themselves personally. That's calls to action that lead to death, which is something that I thought in broadcasting was illegal. And politics, when you're supposed to be the steward of public health, ignoring all of the information from public health should also be a crime, I think. Anyway, I really do think that we are... It's not... I have a hard time blaming the people who are making bad choices because I know they have been giving bad information and they have been manipulated. And I can be manipulated. I know this for a fact. If I walk into a sales floor for anything, I end up buying the thing that they tell me is the best thing that makes me want it. I can be influenced. We all can. And so when people are professionally influencing to the negative, they should be held responsible, I think. Yeah. It's this crazy thing. We've had snake oil salesmen for, you know, forever. It was a huge thing. Turn of the century. Snake oil salesmen selling their patent medicine filled with whatever, no regulation of it. Alcohol and cocaine and heroin. That was usually a narcotic. It was a narcotic of some kind. And a little bit of sugar. Yeah, a little bit of sugar. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, that kind of... And back then, they got lobbyists to manipulate the politicians to make sure that the patent medicine didn't get regulated. And there's all this stuff. And even now today, the FDA has a hard time regulating things like homeopathic remedies and stem cell treatments because they have to draw this very fine line between fostering entrepreneurship and helping business grow in the United States and also keeping people safe. And there's this fine line that they draw there at the FDA. And it's very interesting when you start digging into the cases where they finally go, no, there is actually poison in that homeopathic remedy. Take it off the shelves. And we're going to prosecute. Or no, that stem cell treatment is actually blinding people. We're going to prosecute. You know, it takes a while to get there, though. And it happens the other direction, too. The whole reason marijuana was illegal in the United States. 100 years or whatever. Oh, yeah. It was Eli Lilly, and I think Bayer... Pharmaceuticals, right? Pharmaceutical companies didn't like that it was a top three pain medication. And it became illegal. Now they could never have made marijuana illegal because the public... Sorry, I guess they could never have made cannabis illegal because the general public relied on it so much. But they could make marijuana illegal because nobody knew what the heck that was. And so they used a different language term for cannabis. Yeah. And got it through. And actually the head of the American Medical Association at the time was saying, why would you do this? Don't do this. Please don't pass this law. This is a medicine that we use to treat pain and we need to keep using it. And they still... Because nobody... Yeah. Yeah, cigarette companies were involved in it, too, for sure. Yeah, it was... Because I thought that was a much later thing. That was later, but yeah. They did lobby against it as well. Yes. If Dr. Justin is not a real doctor... Says it's good. You can totally trust that a guy who calls himself a doctor who's not really a doctor is going to give you the best of advice. That's how that usually works. That's how that usually works. Now, okay. Somebody's saying they got a free feedback with their ivermectin pills. You know, it's getting a quality feedback these days is harder than you think. You might not want to pass up that opportunity. Don't pass it up. Oh, everyone be safe out there. Yeah. Make sure the information that you are using is well-sourced. Not just coming from one source. Yeah. Yeah, we got it. We have to triangulate our information, everyone. That's how we make it through. If I triangulate, I don't mean like going to Brett Weinstein and Joe Rogan, and I don't know who another one is. I mean, like actually finding good resources. Good resources. I need a dream resource right now. I'm going to go hit my pillow and hopefully have some good dreams that I can keep to myself and not tell anybody about. Well, in that case, I think it might be time to say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good morning, Justin. Good morning, Justin. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thank you for another awesome episode. It's so great to have both of you here, to have this amazing audience here. Thank you all of you for joining us for the show tonight. And we hope that we see you again next Wednesday. We'll be back. It's October. Oh my goodness. Can't believe it's already October. Make sure you head over to twist.org and grab one of those calendars. Click this little button. And then that means we really will see you next week. Stay safe. Stay well. Stay curious.