 Hello everyone, we are back again. It's Wednesday, it's time for twists. What is twist? Twist is this week in science. We're gonna talk about all the stories that we think are super exciting or just cute or funny or just worth discussing tonight on the show. And while we're here, why don't you click a like, click a subscribe if you haven't done that yet, but we're gonna get this show going. We're a podcast, we're broadcasting live like we do every Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific time. And my cat is so nicely scratching at the door. Just, she wants to come in. I can't hear it. Yeah, good. We'll make sure that doesn't happen. But if it did happen and we had to stop for some reason, that would be edited out for the podcast. This is the live broadcast. So all the cat scratches are left in and the podcast itself is hopefully edited to utter perfectness, perfection. I know words. Let's start this show, yeah? You ready? Yeah. I'm perfectly ready. I'm always gonna one up. I know how it goes. All right, let's start this show in three, two, this is twist. This week in science episode number 889 recorded on Wednesday, August 24th, 2022. How big could lizards get? Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show, we will fill your heads with water, drought and sleep deprivation. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Climate change. It's not a mystery. We know who done it. It was us. How it was done. Relentless unregulated carbon release. Why it wasn't stopped? Financial interest blocking legislation through lobbying and misinformation campaigns. How bad is it? Pretty darn bad. Thousands of scientific studies have quantified the degree to which we have already altered the climate and committed to changing it for years to come. What are the consequences? Really, really darn bad. Thousands of scientific studies have made increasingly dire predictions based on current observations and deep understanding of the past, including some potential mass extinction events coming our way. What still remains a mystery is how anyone considered a stakeholder in the outcome of the planet's habitable stability would continue to obstruct or deny the changes urgently needed. We have one planet. A good one, the best we've ever seen. And we should do everything in our power to keep it that way, as earthlings, as humans, as the most sentient living creature the universe may ever know. Caretaking our planet is the most sacred duty we have. The only thing possibly more important than maintaining a habitable planet, the only thing we will want, even if we leave this planet our castaways aboard a colony ship bound for nowhere, is enjoying yet another episode of This Week in Science coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to learn everything. I want to fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know. Science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again to talk about science. Because that's what we do on This Week in Science. But science that basically happened in the week. It basically happened. Right. I mean, it doesn't quite work that way because the science actually takes usually several many years to get to the point of publication. I thought all of the stories that we were covering just only took place within a week. Hot off the presses. That's right. Publication. Boom, all the things that we love. And we do hope that you will enjoy the show tonight. We have so many fun stories. I have a water world, some gene therapy. Drought is bad. Okay. And artificially detecting things and zapping brains and memory and stuff like that. Justin, what did you bring? Just good news. Giant lizard edition. Fishy global warming findings. What Americans don't know about Americans. And bipedal old times. Huh. Bipedal. Okay. So yeah. I'm curious about this one. All right. Blair. What is the animal corner holding in store for us? Well, hopefully that's not a smear campaign against reptiles, but we'll find out in a minute. In my section, I'm going to talk about another plea for canceling daylight savings time. We'll get to that. But then also in the animal corner, I have frog brains and B brains. It's very brainy episode. Anybody who is brainy or likes the brains. Or has one. Or has one. You like, you have a brain. You might like this show too. Yeah. Yeah, you. You. I know you have more than one neuron in there. You with something bigger than a ganglion. You too. Can enjoy this show. And this show, as you know, broadcasts live every Wednesday at eight PM Pacific time on YouTube, Facebook and Twitch. You can find us looking for this week in science. You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter and Twitch as twist science, T W I S C I E N C E. And we are on pretty much every podcast platform out there. If you want to watch us or listen to us after the fact, look for this week in science. Our website is twist.org. All right. You want to jump into it? Shall we do it? Yes. Bring on the science. Raise the science. All right. This world, our earth, we think of it as such a wet watery world. But did you know that really only about 1% of the earth's mass is water? Isn't that surprising? So is that it's because it's all mostly a lot of it anyway. It seems to be stuck on the surface. It's stuck on the surface. There is a lot in rocks contained in molecular form. I mean, there's a lot of water on earth. It's nice and pretty and blue on the surface. We have water vapor in our atmosphere, but when it really comes down to the mass of our planet, we are a rocky planet. We are not considered a water world. But magma, I suppose. Yeah, lots of magma. Lots of other elements that are involved in there, but researchers have been searching for other worlds, exoplanets that are out there that might be covered in water, that might actually be super earths in size and mass and in terms of how much water they contain. And so some researchers from the Université de Montreal and the Institute for Research on Exoplanets, they've recently announced their discovery of a new exoplanet discovered by TESS, which is T-O-I-1-4-5-2-B. To be or not to be a water planet? Well, anyway, this water planet is a super earth. It is larger than our planet, and it's got some really interesting characteristics. One specifically being that it is orbiting one of a two-star system, one sun of a two-star system, one star of a two-star system, and these stars are really, really dim. They have a lot less energy than our sun. So even though this super earth that was discovered by NASA's Space Telescope, about 100 light years from our own planet, goes around its star about every 11 days, really, really fast. Yeah, a year is 11 days in this water world. Even though it's so close to its planet, so close to its star that it's able to orbit that fast, it's still within the watery potentially habitable zone because it's not as hot there, right? Deep-wised water, they think. I mean, we still have to send James Webb on the case of this exoplanet because they think that this is one of the most likely candidates that they have found for a real water world. Not one where the water's frozen, not one where it's water vapor, but actually one where liquid water exists on the surface of the planet similar to our own. But it's too big. Yeah, 70% the size of our planet. So bigger, 70% larger. 70% bigger. So by my back of the envelope, napkin math, that means it's going to be 70% harder to get out of bed. Right, but if you're in water, maybe women in it already, I don't know. I need less gravity, not more gravity. I just don't need a lot less gravity either, but just a little bit less. Keep looking, find me a slightly smaller planet, one that makes it so I can get out of bed a little easier, maybe one that makes it to the point where I can duck in the NBA regulation. But then your joints, Justin, your joints and your bone mass. See, it's a feedback loop. The trade-offs are going to end up equalling out in the end anyway. I don't know if my bone mass is going to be so heavily effected. I spend a lot of time on the couch these days anyway. But it would be a very watery couch. So I am out there running and impacting the joints to create that feedback loop of getting bone growth. These planets that are suggested to be water worlds or ocean planets, this planet they think has up to 30% water, which is substantially more than we have. And in this super earth zone, they're thinking that this kind of a planet is a really interesting one to try and find and look at because it's transitional between rocky planets like the inner planets of our solar system and the hot Jupiters, the gassy planets that make up our outer solar system. So this kind of a planet is going to be very, very interesting to take looks at. And maybe, who knows, find those wonderful hints that could tell us whether or not there is life in... Because we know the universal solvent is water. Things dissolve in water. Life has begun in our planet in water or in mud anyway. But water might have made it possible in other places like this as well. And it would be very interesting. You're suggesting Justin to discover what kind of life would live and evolve on a planet like this. And I love that we have a new toy. And we have... In the James Webb. Because we've made discoveries like this in a sense and have been many, many times over the last decade. We keep finding cool stuff. Now we have a new toy to look at stuff with. And this week, James Webb... Thank you for that segue. James Webb came up with... They've released some more beautiful pictures of planets in our own solar system. Jupiter has been in James Webb's eye. And in this, we're able to see in infrared using the instruments of the JWST, the aurora of the poles. We're able to see the heat of the great red spot. That is some white hot storminess there, everyone. You see the darkness in other areas, but it's giving us a lot of information about what's happening there. And not only are we looking just at the planet, but they are also taking a look at the ring system and the moons of Jupiter. And we are really being able to see the activity of the planets in our solar system in a brand new light. Yeah. Yeah. But not only our own planets, but exoplanets like this new discovery as well are going to be in the JWST's slice. The rings... What? Yes. You wouldn't think, right? We don't talk about Jupiter's rings. We talk about Saturn's rings. Jupiter has rings. Uranus has rings. There are very... These very thin bands of material that are out there. And we just... Dainty. Subtle. They're subtle. Yeah, it's very nice. It's like a very little dusting right there. JJ and the chat are saying it looks blue and infrared. And so the thing I've learned about how these... how they're getting these colorized images in the infrared is something beyond the human visual spectrum. So what they do is they take that spectrum of infrared that they're capturing this imaging in and they break it up into those sections that our cones of our eyes operate in and they just sort of shift it. They just sort of translate it into human vision spectrum. So it's not so much... That's nice of them. It's not so much that they've gone in and colorized things like you would do to a black and white image. It's filters. It's like they have different filters to pick things up. It's that they've actually taken that range of the infrared that they're viewing in and moved it as though it were... Transposed it as though it were the range of human vision. And that's where those images come from. Yeah. And there are people working on these images who are citizen scientists and it's data. So there's a lot of this... It doesn't come in as pretty pictures. It starts as data and it has to be turned into the pretty pictures. And there are people around the world, scientists and citizen scientists who just love to do this work. And a lot of these images were developed by, as the story that I was looking at from NASA's blog, by a citizen scientist, Judy Schmidt of Modesto, California. And she processes these images for NASA and researchers very often. Cool. Yeah. Very cool stuff. Justin, what do you want to talk about next? I've got just good news. The somewhat reliably positive segment of the show where we look at a subject which might otherwise bring the mood down with a little bit of a positive spin. Just good news, giant lizard edition. The study of climate change induced mass extinctions in the deep geological past has found that such events aren't all bad. Researchers at the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University exploring the impact of environmental crises on evolution during climactic shifts. They found that it caused two of the largest mass extinctions in the history of life at the end of the Permian. The first was 261 million years ago. And then there was another 252 million years ago which that one alone eliminated 86% of all animal species worldwide. That was a huge extinction event. What they found is these horrific climate-driven mass extinction events which were global warming events were just good news for reptiles. Reptiles became the dominant group of vertebrate animals living on land after the 252 million year ago mass extinction. Previous to the Permian global warming extinction events the vertebrate fauna that dominated the synapsids, a.k.a. ancestors of all modern mammals which I didn't even know that the mammal ancestors were the dominant life form before the dinosaurs. I thought we only got our opportunity afterwards but it turns out we already had our shot and global warming ruined it. Ah no, people are reptiles too. After the Permian extinction and the Triassic period reptiles evolved at rapid rates creating an explosion of reptile diversity. This expansion was key to the construction of new ecosystems these rapid rates of evolution, diversification according to the new study in science advances began in connection to the steadily increasing global temperatures through a long series of climatic changes that spanned almost 60 million years of the geological record. What's interesting about this is we have sort of classically looked at the expansion of dinosaurs as a result of the mass extinction event because hey they opened up all the niches in the food webs and everywhere else and reptiles rushed in to fill them. What this is saying though is that reptiles were already undergoing mass diversification due to the temperature rises ahead of the mass extinction events. So while that did play a catalyst in their development of course the diversification that was taking place this sort of rapid evolution amongst reptiles started based on the temperature level temperatures then. So just a global warming well bad for what do they call those mammals might actually not be all bad and sea life too. Really bad for sea life. What about reptiles that live in the ocean? So actually that's a great question so they did talk about that because one of the things that they also found was a lot of like smaller dinosaurs smaller reptiles have the ability to sort of just move just create new habits maybe go underground can have all sorts of things for some of the large ones that increased body mass created so much heat that getting into the water became a way to cool off. And so if you're like you know people have talked a lot about they maybe there's giant sauropods the what classical would look like a Brontosaurus kind of a thing they like maybe they were in the water because of buoyancy to help carry all that weight and that sort of thing but it could just be about also helping cooling off and a lot of reptiles went started like transition to being sea reptiles because of the because of the heat and they also moved really far north you had dinosaurs up in you know arctic regions and stuff because those were very tropical event climates at some point so yeah global warming can cause mass extinctions for most species but actually might be a benefit if you're a reptile I think Kiki's frozen I think I am too we're both of you are from no I was waiting for Kiki to say something and then she never did you do the inhale like like I'm going to I did an inhale to say something and then I was like oh maybe though we're going to move on to the next thing and then I waited for Kiki and then I noticed she wasn't moving at all so I will just say to extend this out a little longer waiting for her to come back so you said that that these reptiles moved to the to the poles because some did but so then isn't that an exposure of a niche and not related specifically to the temperature yes yes this is this is after the fact so but what they what they what they discovered though was that was that there was really rapid and some and some forms of reptiles I guess the ones that went on to become some of the survivors actually some of the smaller ones had much slower changes things that ended up being alligators and turtles I think had still maintained a very slow regular pace of evolution but many lines of reptiles at the time because they would look at you know looking through the geological record they would go what or how does this keep how can we keep finding all these new dinosaurs that look really related to this one but it was only like a million years later and now there's all this different versions of it well so okay so here's another problem with this though is that reptiles are a polyphilatic group so they're not actually all evolutionarily closely related no so that's the other kind of weird question I have about this is do you mean the ancestors of lizards and snakes or do you really mean reptiles meaning also turtles and tortoises and alligators and the group that is tortoises, alligators and that sort of area where some of the slower evolving ones if I had read that part yes but so they were so you're really only talking about the the seropsid ancestor which is lizards and snakes ancestor they had this very quick evolution as a result and there's another one that's like extinct are you talking about the tuatara because they're endangered or tuatara was also slow I think one of the slower ones so that would make sense because lizards and snakes are seropsids they're closely related throughout evolutionary history but yeah these three other reptiles are they're not they're only put in because they're like oh they're cold blooded in the name of scales but really they're like it's not a proper grouping it's like we put all the things that look alike in a box sort of thing so those ones are slower but the much larger ancestors of crocodiles turtles and dinosaurs could not lose heat as easily and had to quickly change their bodies in order to adapt to the environmental conditions so it's just the what do you call them the what is it seropsid the other one tuataras they maintained the slow evolution thing for some reason but pretty much everything else was just in relation to the heat had to go through some rapid evolutionary change kiki you're back we just we dove real deep into reptile chat while you were missing ah okay so you haven't moved ahead no we were about to we're gonna go on without you so do you want to hear my bid as to why daylight savings time needs to end forever amen yes please let us know why you really want to get rid of daylight savings time so we have a peer reviewed publication out of UC Berkeley um this is looking at uh three separate studies looking at the impact of sleep loss on people's willingness to help others in the first study scientists placed 24 healthy volunteers in a functional magnetic resonance imager fmri of course to scan their brains after eight hours of sleep or after a night of no sleep they found areas of the brain that form the theory of mind network which is usually engaged in empathy or people trying to understand people's wants and needs those areas were less active after a sleepless night that's study number one they say quote it's as though these parts of the brain failed to respond when we are trying to interact with other people after not getting enough sleep okay so that's no good study number two they tracked more than online over three or four nights during that time they measured the quality of their sleep how long they slept how many times they woke up and then assessed their desire to help others such as holding an elevator door open volunteering or helping an injured stranger on the street you guessed it a decrease in the quality of someone's sleep for one night to the next predicted a significant decrease in the desire to help other people and in the third part of the study they mined a database of three million charitable donations in the United States between 2001 and 2016 the number of donations changed after the transition to daylight savings time 10% drop in donations immediately following the transition the same dent in gift giving was not seen in regions that did not change their clocks or when they changed them back so it was directly related to loss of sleep so it really looks like lack of sleep impairs basic social conscience making us less desiring to help other people so what does this mean first of all please stop daylight savings time it's hurting society second of all sleeping sleep is important sleeping in or getting sleep or catching up on sleep does not make you lazy does not mean you are being inactive it actually means you are preparing your brain to be an altruistic helpful member of society so when sleep is undervalued that can be a problem societally just for like people on the street but also as some of the researchers point out sleep deprived doctors nurses teachers this is a problem too right if your job is directly related to helping others and being empathetic and your job is designed for you to miss sleep that is a problem it's a big problem so get your sleep if you had a crummy night sleep maybe call out sick get your sleep you need your sleep that is part of you being a functioning member of society and also can we all just stop messing with the clocks please it's hurting society it is messing with the clocks that reduce yeah when we do the fall back every year the spring forward it's no good it's no good for anyone and then we decided oh no we're going to go permanent daylight savings and there has been research and experiments that we've tried in the past that have shown it's really not a great idea but it doesn't help people go back to how it was why are you doing that yeah this is a really good argument with scientific evidence for pro-social reasons why I need to sleep with benefit society as a whole just one hour later school starting times how about later work starting times how about that why not so that's important I think okay how long are kids in school six hours seven hours yeah those are the same hours people should be working maybe a little less so they can go pick up their kids drop them off and pick them up well the system was designed for a stay at home parent that's why how are we still using that system and I know what they're going to say well we'll just make the kids stay at school for a nine hour no that's not true yeah but you have to pay hey extra for your see it's all part of the system that's not what this is about though it's all the system man this system is our brains you don't have empathy probably for me yes the administrators they're getting enough sleep and they're making these decisions you're right that's very possible as well there are probably many work decisions being made as a result of lack of sleep in in cultures work cultures that push people to work and be apart and sleep less do more and suddenly we have a lack of empathy in our society I wonder how that came about okay let's talk about something that you're really going to like with or without sleep Blair okay researchers at university college London have started a new set of experiments not working on a lot of kids but they've published their findings in the journal brain in which they are using gene therapy to correct color blindness in children yeah four kids with achromatopsia and achromatopsia is caused by disease causing variants to one of a few genes and these particular genes they go they create the molecular structure of the color sensing light cells the cones so there are fewer cones that can sense light they can work within the eye lots of rods so the color blindness is complete very often these individuals also have nystagmus and other vision problems they have photosensitivity and other issues they have used a dino virus gene therapy which has been proven to work in some other situations for its safety and so now they're testing it in the limited number of kids to confirm whether or not it's safe to use and they had four kids between the ages of 10 to 15 years old so not young but having grown up with a limited number of cones and a majority of rods within their eyes they're completely color blind they treated one eye out of the two eyes on the face and they compared them also against non color blind individual or color blind individuals who were not treated and normal vision people and in the process they didn't show results in all four kids but two of the kids ended up after six months with brain signals so showing that there was a signal getting from the cones in the eye to the brain that there was a change signal for color receptivity that was they were unable to distinguish it from normal visioned people yeah so with this we may actually be able to salvage some of these humans as productive members of society just might be able to get that pilot's license after all that's right you know there's a couple of jobs that you're not allowed to have exactly Blair that's not fair it's fix that yeah so the science really does confirm the speculation that gene therapy offered to children and adolescents can successfully activate these dormant cone photoreceptors and the pathways they're connected to to give light sensations that were never experienced previously cool yeah so who knows hopefully this this limited will grow and we will see this becoming a treatment moving forward that could lead to full color vision for you know or or not or replacement a significant replacement of color blindness in children it's I'm gonna have to look but I wonder if this is the human trial of the study that we reported on the show years ago in squirrel monkeys it was gene therapy in the eyes so I'm gonna have to look it up because I feel like it probably is which I love seeing science progress in real time and and move on to those next steps but I can't I can't wait to hear more about this it's awesome you're like maybe me but at least future generations yes well I mean it's a sexling trait so if I ever have a son I think he's guaranteed to be colorblind so this would be helpful you're like yeah so kiddo mom gave you something not so good I'm sorry sorry about that my fault Justin you got some fishy going on over there very fishy news coming out of the climate arena international team of researchers has found that approximately 90% of all marine life on earth will be at risk of extinction in 80 years time if greenhouse gas emissions are not curbed in the paper published in the journal nature climate change group outlines their study of thousands of marine species and how climate might impact them in the future specifically they looked at 25,000 species including fish, bacteria plants, protozoans living in the top 100 meters of the world's ocean they found that under the worst scenario in which emissions lead to global atmospheric temperatures of three which actually isn't the worst scenario for where we're headed that's right now where we're trending history to five degrees celsius which is really really bad approximately 90% of all marine life would disappear poof gone dead earth has not seen a die off as great as these projections since the great dying 252 million years ago hey that's when the giant lizards showed up that's when the million ancestors is the dominant vertebrates on the planet from the just good news story early remember that it's all coming around they also found that if emissions were cut to the extent outlined by the Paris climate agreement which is the thing that we're not currently tracking keeping global temperatures increases to below 2 degrees celsius the risk of extinction would be reduced by approximately 30% that's a big number so it's all big percentages it's all big numbers but it makes it they're talking about the year 2100 they're talking about the year 2100 which is the less than 80 years from now we could lose 90% well it might take a few years oh no if it gets up to 3 to 5 90% of all marine life that to me I don't know now I'm not an expert on food webs and how interconnected biological life forms are on our planet but it just seems to me that could be one of those collapsing structures not ideal for sure for sure yeah anyway really really really bad we should probably do something about the global warming thing yeah what should we do what could we do just stop just stop emitting carbons please just knock it off who are you talking to though you're not talking to the average listener I am I'm talking to everybody it's everybody and because you know you know there's some people who aren't going to try you might have to try a little harder because of them be the carbon offset you want to see in the world well on the coattails of your I guess the risk which isn't really great for the fisheries all the fishes of the planet researchers realize they really hadn't looked into what happens to plants when they're exposed to drought for long periods of time I have a guess so there's you know we have droughts the western coast of the western states of the united states have droughts a lot France has been going through a drought lots of fires there's droughts all over the place they've experienced desertification turning to deserts because they have such extreme droughts and yet we haven't really studied specifically what happens to plants during drought and what happens to their ability to store carbon dioxide their ability to grow so what do you think happens to plants during drought Justin you had an idea I think they might dry out a lot and two things two predictions one prediction is I bet their roots go deeper and the other prediction is I bet their next generation develops quicker because we've seen something like remember some story we did like this when plants in a lab were given a drought like condition when they were given water again that next generation tried to get to I don't know seed again faster than the previous generation they said oh okay the weather is going to change and it's going to do it forever maybe we don't know but let's have our next generation try to go to seed quicker so we can take advantage of a shorter wet season those are all my predictions these are great great predictions well the researchers reported their initial results from 100 shrubby and grassy sites and the grassland ecologist Katie Wilkins who worked on this study is quoted as saying there was catastrophic loss that plant productivity in water starved areas declined by 88% and Wilkins says what surprised me was just how dead it was yeah so it was the much simpler answer of they die in this study they were able to get researchers from all around the world from Iran, from Germany from various states in the US all across the world they got researchers to use standardized testing methods to limit the amount of precipitation that square meter areas in different research sites would actually receive and so they were able to block and give and simulate drought conditions for a number of different areas and so the neat aspect of this is that it's not just one spot it's worldwide lots of different biomes where they're looking at stuff like this like Iran that has struggled with drought Germany that's a lot wetter and the difference between the shrubby places and the grassy places they found that number one, biodiversity helped to maintain the all the plant life and their ability at their productivity which is also a measure of their ability to store carbon dioxide over the period the year long drought like period additionally shrubby areas did better than grassy areas the other thought is that shrubs like you were talking about deep roots shrubs have deeper roots than grasses very often so those shrubs also might provide some shade so not as much desiccation occurs to the ground and the roots are able to get a little bit more water and so they're thinking that areas that have shrubs and grasses may do a lot better because then you have a mix. Germany those areas although they were simulating drought conditions the overall areas had a lot more precipitation generally those areas were a lot more productive so it also has to do with the kind of general situation that the drought comes into what kind of historical precipitation and water storage has there been so there are some very interesting results from this but the big result is not a question at all and it's what anybody could say plants grow less plants are less able to store carbon dioxide because they're not growing as much because a lot of them are dying because they're not getting water One interesting thing that this is making me think of is that California wildflowers tend to be more fire resistant than other plants they also exactly have much deeper roots and we have whole tree species that are dependent on fire for the all the pine tree with the cones the pine cones are those those are seed bombs that go off during a fire they explode out and then they are planting themselves in the aftermath of a fire so for those who are looking at California's drought and fire conditions is going oh gosh this is terrible yeah well we may have gotten there during a wet season because all of the plants in California are really dependent on fire but at the same time there are limitations deep roots but that's the problem is the drought coupled with the fire creates a lot of bad stuff because they're used to fire with seasonal rain and so when you remove the seasonal rain then the fire goes way out of control sure sure sure and there's no water to help to germinate the seeds that have just been also that hang on a lot of California poppy is the state flower that can actually make it through an entire season those seeds can lay dormant in the soil and regrow later so California is used to naturally having drought conditions is what I'm saying and it's used to also heavy amounts of rain and fires being able to take place as well so not everything you're seeing is unusual what you are seeing is the man-made conditions the lack of indigenous burning plus the way that we've developed the state and adding grasses there used to be grasses in California a year drought is fine perhaps if it's been a number of years that have been rainy when you get 15 or 16 years of drought however suddenly that's a situation that is historically unprecedented and the plants can't deal with it so and you're diverting water towards the desert away from areas where it normally stays there's a lot going on that we do to kind of tip the scales and make it can we just stop killing the plants please Kiki is a screen shared picture of my garden with dead dry garden I don't have a green thumb I'll just be honest I don't know I need to be watered every day everyone this is this weekend science you know what we like to be watered every week we like to water your science garden with our science news and discussion we hope that you find it refreshing and that you will share it with others because who keeps the fruits of their garden to themselves you always share those fruits with others I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore this is this weekend science thanks so much for listening let's talk about COVID right now okay if we must who grows fruit in a garden strawberries tomatoes or fruit tomatoes or fruits it's a vegetable yes it's a vegetable we're talking about COVID now yeah he just doesn't want to talk about COVID okay first off the press is this week that I thought was a fairly significant study published in psychiatry research this week researchers analyzed people who had been hospitalized or infected with COVID-19 and the likelihood of developing schizophrenia from either of those situations and they found an 11% increased risk for the development of schizophrenia with hospitalization from COVID-19 suggesting these are their words that schizophrenia should be assessed as one of the post-COVID-19 sequelae so long hey that's my schizophrenia yeah so 100 issues with that first off schizophrenia is a spectrum of disorders and very often we suggest that it's genetically based so maybe there is a genetic predisposition between people who end up hospitalized with COVID-19 but they found that it was not just infection with COVID-19 but hospitalization from COVID-19 and what this indicates is that the brain infection that COVID-19 SARS-CoV-2 virus we know can get into the brain and can cause damage and that damage can be long term and could potentially lead to the triggering of genetic factors predispositions that could lead to these situations or I don't know they haven't completely it's not like causal so in this particular study no no no because there's other versions of this that I've heard COVID is doing this now drug use has done this having a baby does this working certain jobs my point is though it seems to be more of a revealing a stress factor that reveals a thing or brings to the surface I think that's what it's also a lot of teenagers will get diagnosed for the first time this is a lot of stress and hormone and things taking place in that time of age where could have just always been there but it's a manageable or unnoticed situation so I wouldn't get to the point where I'm thinking that it's causal like you're saying but more revealing cases situationally based on stress but with the damage that SARS-CoV-2 can do to the brain like you're saying pre-existing brain pathology and it may make individuals more vulnerable to the virus getting into the brain and causing further problems than it would have otherwise which will then predispose the infection to lead to a severe outcome severe outcome for COVID-19 and then also to the schizophrenia outcome which perhaps would not have occurred otherwise yeah wouldn't have occurred otherwise but I mean it's like yeah if you never hit puberty maybe the schizophrenia didn't also you know what I'm saying like there's all those factors puberty is something that happens to everybody COVID-19 is a preventable illness what would be more interesting is that if I'm completely wrong and and it turns out there's a way for there's a like this is a thing with cancer cancer is caused by some unknown vapor or maybe whatever yeah but it can be a virus can cause cancer whatever the whole time we've been attacking it as a genetic issue and it's really a viral infection that causes all cases of schizophrenia that would be very interesting if that were true I don't think that's true I think it's going to be a genetic predisposition some sort of stochastic evolutionary attempt to have minds that think completely differently Blair you had an interesting story about variants yes our variants of concern this is a study looking at the alpha beta and gamma variants of concern or VOCs and how they think they might have originated and so this is a study by scientists at Emory University and the University of Oxford and they built a mechanistic theoretical model to study the emergence of variants using existing data and software that they developed and the model rules out a theory that variants of concern emerge from sustained transmission of acute infections the idea that basically just like by having so much COVID around and so many people infected by COVID that it was able to mutate just because it was pervasive instead this supports the theory that each variant evolved within a single individual with a chronic infection so this is the idea that essentially long COVID in a specific individual gave rise to each variant so what this means is it's important to treat it it's important also to Kiki's point not get it to begin with but also it's important to track those with long COVID to see through genomic surveillance new variants emerge within individuals with long COVID there was very early on very very early on this might have been during the first lockdown even we had a story where there was like an 80 year old woman with leukemia who had presented as infected and was still expelling virus for something like six months in that condition why you wouldn't need another host you've been you're a virus replicating for six months in one host that's more than enough enough opportunity for errors to create mutations you give the medication you vaccinate the host but the virus continues doing what it's doing with the immune system and this one was pre-vaccination too this lady and she was asymptomatic the entire time too she didn't get sick probably the suppressed immune system didn't create the at least from that first generation of COVID it was a lot of times the immune system overreaction that was taking people to the hospital she didn't experience that they said in this article it could be long COVID but also it could be asymptomatic individuals who are carrying it for months not knowing it that's where it could come from but maybe eventually maybe eventually COVID will turn out like other coronaviruses we can always hope a new study published in JAMA this last week looking at the incubation period of COVID-19 caused by all the different variants of concern the different SARS-CoV-2 strains the Gamma Omicron we're going to keep going they found that early on we knew that the incubation period was much longer the average pooled incubation period for alpha was 6.57 days even though for a lot of that it could have been up to 14 or so days so the CDC and the World Health Organization they all recommended at the beginning of the pandemic if you're exposed you should isolate for two weeks at least to be sure that you are not going to be a carrier that you're not asymptomatic that you're not potentially exposing others because you haven't gotten symptoms yet and so these researchers looked at these pooled incubation periods from systematic analyses of 141 different articles on these different variants and they found that Omicron variants are down to 3.42 days so this is partially because it's a lot more infectious so a smaller dose infects you faster, infects a larger number of cells faster or the same dose will get in you a lot faster and make you sick faster but in that you know you're sick faster potentially the CDC's new advice of staying home for five days is actually potentially more accurate and that we could you know if you know you've been exposed stay home, keep monitoring yourself make sure you wear a 95 mask check and see how it's going before you decide to get out into the public yeah although there are tales and stories these days of the attitudes of the public that COVID is over and oh you've got COVID that's no big deal just wear a mask or just come to the party anyway it's not a problem well the other problem is you have to have sick time to be able to not go into work also which not everyone in the United States has that's the other little sticky thing yeah so the environment is changing for us socially but my fingers are crossed that even though Omicron is more transmissible generally people are having milder infections which is great and you know the number of incubation days is more similar to other coronaviruses and fingers crossed it keeps going in this direction even though there's the possibility of more variants popping up I just want my flu shot this winter to be a flu shot slash COVID shot and that would be great yeah I'm really hoping everyone gets their stuff together and figures that out in time for well Pfizer and others have put in their bids to have their new variant vaccines ready for fall immunizations so potentially there will be Omicron vaccines ready for you with your fall flu shot so maybe it's not in one shot but you can just make one visit I'll just do both arms super vaccinated there you go it's that's how we're tough it's all good yeah that's enough of COVID everybody it's over no it's not over the show isn't over we have a lot more to come this is This Week in Science this is This Week in Science and we really appreciate your support if you are enjoying the show please head over to twist.org and click on our Patreon link to show your love and support for twists click on that link and it will take you to our Patreon page where you will be able to choose a level of support to help $10 or more a month we will thank you by name at the end of the show and now it is time for the time of This Week in Science that we know and love as Blair's Animal Corner whoops what you got Blair it's Kiki's Animal Corner go ahead Kiki I have nothing so if you imagine that this is a bee taking a walk this is a bee on pesticides oh no so for our audio listeners I would like you to imagine Blair walking her two little fingers across her hand like a nice little tightrope walker and then those little fingers became a drunken wobbly mess so this study from University of Oxford and it's looking at essentially the line test that hopefully no one listening has had to do because everyone is responsible and does not drink and drive but if you were pulled over and you were given the sobriety test they might have you walk on a line and see if you can do that or if you kind of maybe veer off that is also a test used by neurologists to diagnose neurological disorders like ataxia which is where parts of the brain that coordinate movement are impaired so that's a fun fact we could do the same test on bees to see if their brain has been damaged by pesticides yes so insects have an innate optomotor response which is how they orient themselves in a straight trajectory when they have something that might steer them off course while they're walking or while they're flying so the research was to challenge the optomotor response of walking honey bees to respond accurately and timely to videos of vertical bars that move from left to right so the idea was they were kind of walking on a straight line just like the sobriety test that we were talking about before and then this kind of like a treadmill almost moves the vertical bars to give the bees an optical illusion to make them think that they have veered off course so in a healthy optomotor response the bees motor system orients them back to the illusion of a straight line but in these four groups of wild caught forager honey bees they had some of them drink an unlimited 1.5 molar sucrose solution over five days either pure or contaminated with 50 parts per billion of imidacloprid 50 parts per billion of sulfoxaflora the harder it is to say you know it's a bad chemical and 25 parts per billion imidacloprid and 25 parts per billion sulfoxaflora simultaneously with the imidacloprid basically they took a bunch of pesticides and they fed them to bees and then they had a control group that's the easier way to say that right so then they have them all walk on these lines and all bees were less good at responding to the flow of these bars when they were narrow or moving slowly than when we were moving fast or they were wide within speed the bees who had ingested pesticides performed poorly compared to the control so for an example they turned quickly in one direction and then didn't respond to the direction in the other way it's kind of like you veered off of course on your sobriety test and fell over the asymmetry between left and right turns was at least 2.4 times greater for pesticide exposed bees than for controlled bees so they weren't ambiturners for sure they can only handle one side I think it's going to keep turning left turn in circles they also showed that with molecular techniques that the pesticide exposed bees had elevated proportions of dead cells in their brains optic lobes which is important for processing visual input similarly the key genes for detoxification were dysregulated after exposure so they damaged their brains and took away their ability to fix the brain damage essentially and took away the ability to break down the pesticide that was causing the problem so it's like the pesticide is like I'm going to break your cleaning equipment I'm going to stick around here and I'm going to just keep dousing you with dopey stuff and you're not going to do well right and so all of these specific things they found though the dead cells and the detoxification dysregulation they were variable highly variable across bees not in direct correlation with the responses that they saw behaviorally so that means there's also other things happening in their body that's causing them to act this way so looking forward the researchers say to fully understand the risk of these insecticides they need to explore whether the effects they observed in walking bees also occur in flying bees the main concern there is that if they are unable to overcome impairments while flying obviously that has huge effects on foraging navigation and of course validation so not being able to fly in a straight line would be pretty bad testing the flying is next but essentially it's not a surprising finding that ingesting pesticides hurts bees it hurts us and we're much bigger so isn't this kind of the explanation or part of the explanation behind how the pesticides hurt bees in multiple different ways so we've heard previously for years that pesticides can damage the ability of bees makes them more sick makes them unable to get back to the hive that there are these behavioral effects and it's like what is going on how come they can't get back to the hive what are they doing like how do they lose their way well they can't go home they're drunk they don't know which way is up poor guys yes it's too early but is it too early to extrapolate then maybe the benefits of having organic produce or not using insecticides in your own backyard garden so that you can yourself avoid coming into contact with this sort of thing definitely that I also saw there were other studies that came out this week about brain problems related to roundup I didn't bring that to because I felt it was just too much but yes there's pesticides were I think by and large approved for use because they were this amazing godsend of oh my gosh we can feed everyone and we're playing catch up now there's other impacts of these pesticides that were not anticipated so the difference though that we that needs to be clarified here is that when you're talking about a metacloprid and other pesticides in that category it's a pesticide it's meant to affect insects it's meant to mimic nicotine and so mimicking nicotine is something that can definitely affect pests, insects, mammals you know it's all in this pathway so this is something that is something we should be considering closely however glyphosate and roundup the difference there is that it is an herbicide and it is not meant to affect any molecules that that mammals have so the and every study that has maybe not every I have not done a comprehensive review of the literature but in speaking over the years with researchers we have heard that many times that the research on glyphosate and its effects on anything outside of the plant world is greatly overstated so I don't know I think I've even reported on a few there was one that I think now that I'm recalling it it was a little bit of an iffy study because they used roundup and they found that it killed mosquitoes but it was also a concentration higher than you would ever use in a garden and the study that about glyphosate this week they're talking about C. elegans they're referencing convulsions but at quantities that are much much lower than what we would be using in gardens so the question is what other things are going are there other contributing factors this needs to be looked at in a larger sense and replicated we need to look at this stuff very seriously I'm not on I love organic yes all that it's great we want to live in this world can we do herbal and pest control that's natural where we plant plants that help to keep certain pests away and we have plants existing in ecosystems that work together naturally to not to be biodiverse and add to plant product productivity we have so many issues because we're monoculturing everything we have giant fields of lettuce and that's it we have to control them environment is something we've created that we can't manage anymore I think my point is still that I think there was a moment where pesticides and herbicides exploded their use it was definitely something that was like oh my gosh this changes everything and there was still this overwhelming theory at the time that you know it's kind of like the dilution theory of like it's just a little bit it's by the time it gets to us it's there's so little of it left and it's I think that for the animals that live out there the native plants but then also ourselves I think there's there's a lot more study to be done on the things that we are currently using and I think that's kind of the thing that I would like to see more yeah but we need yeah we need to really seriously look at stuff like this particular study that you're talking about did looking at effects that we have been witnessing for years and years and years how is it what's it what's it doing and why is it doing that all that said if you're using randup in your own garden you're just lazy go pull those weeds yourself well let's talk about lazy frogs instead shall we yeah let's do it talk about camouflage v smarts so there was a study that came out this week from University of Zurich along with researchers from China and the Netherlands investigating how frogs have adapted to selecting pressures on them over their evolutionary history so there are lots of animals out there that want to eat frogs many in fact and so they study the evolution of antipredator adaptation in over 100 species of frogs what they wanted to see was that there are some species that have an escapist strategy where they use their very big brain to out smart and out run a predator there are others that use camouflage so they basically just count on the fact that they look like something else and stay nice and still and that gets them through most of the time so these two different strategies kind of conflict in their own way because if you are camouflaged you cannot be conspicuously colored for mate selection and so you have to there's a push pull, there's a trade-off right are you going to be brightly colored and really fast and really smart or are you going to camouflage and just bank on not being eaten as your main draw I guess or I guess you could be both if you have something in a different visual spectrum than your prey or your predator interesting I think that happens sometimes all the time a predator species will evolve the ability to see those wavelengths so again that's its own kind of arms race so the findings from this study over 100 different species of frogs was that frogs with few predators may rely on escape strategies to survive their relatively large brains allow for a flexible flight response and their muscular hind legs take them far away very fast but frogs that have many predators it's not as helpful to be fast because you're surrounded by bad guys and so that also takes valuable time away from searching for food if you're constantly running away because there's so many bad guys so it is more likely that you would have camouflage looking at the evolutionary history of these 100 different species they found surprisingly that evolution led in a shift from cognitive predator evasion to camouflage and therefore smaller brains so these weren't just different strategies that came around at similar times just like some of them this worked some of them that worked no the suggestion is that camouflage actually isn't an ideal strategy as it often is talked about when we talk about animals camouflage is like the tip top right probably just because we think it's really cool but it's actually a secondary adaptation for when the energetic costs of being smart and fast are too high researchers do want to conduct further research to determine if those links apply to other strategies like poison glands like where do the poison glands fit in this whole narrative or if this similar drift happened in other animal species or groups of species and so I definitely think that this applies to humans 100% because I've always felt that people who wear camouflage as a fashion choice are less smart than interesting now I get it it's an energy tradeoff if you're not intelligent just wear camouflage the brain is something that takes the majority of our metabolism takes a lot of our metabolism so having a large brain especially if you have to go to jump to do all sorts of evasion tactics even though the brain can help you reason those things out potentially at a certain point or even help with the neural processes for the just instinctual reactions even at the same time yeah yeah so I can't do it I just gotta look cute like this leaf don't see me researcher Lou polled our study highlights that research on brain evolution has to consider metabolic costs as much as it focuses on cognitive benefits so their study further suggests that the changing of habitat and of prey can alter energetic investments so basically when we're looking at brains bigger is not always better if the energetic cost can have negative impacts in the long run so that's an important thing to keep in mind but I love this idea that we have a kind of a map now of the order of different evolutionary strategies I think it's fascinating and I can't wait to hear more about frogs and other species it's very cool more comparisons Justin you want to start talking about some science that I can do that real quick oh let's go ahead and jump into bipedal old times bipedal old times bipedal old times bipedalism is considered to be an important first step in human evolution talking about how these things are prioritized we see it appear right after chimpanzees in the classic human evolution infographic that goes from chimp to upright caveman to modern man slumped under a table at Starbucks down on all fours looking for somewhere to plug in a laptop but we have known that this unfortunately classic image of chimp demand stuck in most people's minds is false as chimps and gorillas evolved into knuckle walking only after splitting from a common ancestor with humans and that human ancestor never went down the knuckle walking path that's not an ancestor of the current modern humans or ancient humans a forearm and thigh bone found in the desert of Chad of a 7 million year old human ancestor has been studied now previously they had found portions of the skull and a jaw and some teeth of this and and from that they extrapolated that this was an upright bipedal human ancestor and just because of how the head would have had to connect where the connection would have been to the spine and there was some controversy about it some people were like no that's not enough information you can't tell from that and some people were like yeah we're pretty sure we looked at the data and it seems to fit now they have a forearm and a thigh bone bunch of measurements analysis took place looking at the external morphology and the internal structures using micro tomography imaging biometric measurements geometric morphometrics and biomechanical indicators compiled all this stuff the collected data was then compared to current and past ape fossils chimpanzees gorillas orangutans myseem apes members of the human group astrolipithecus artipithecus ancient homo current modern humans the structure of the thigh bone indicates the creature was usually bipedal both on the ground and also likely while hanging out in trees according to the results from the forearm this bipedalism coexisted in a boreal environments with the form with a form of quadrupedalism so they could kind of move around on all fours but it's an a boreal clamoring that is enabled by hand grips firm hand grips that is different from the strategies used by like a modern chimpanzee different from like on the ground quadrupedalism or in tree even the in tree quadrupedalism is different than how chimpanzee would make its way through the tree in the hand use the conclusions of the study including the identification of habitual bipedalism reinforce the concept of a very early bipedal local motion and human history even while other modes of local motion were also practiced this is I can't say the name of this creature but I'm going to give it a shot say Helen say Helen Thrapas Chadensis you can find this is published in nature study reinforces the idea bipedalism that's where we started it's not a a new thing it's the thing we have to get we got to get rid of that we got to get rid of that evolutionary infographic we got to go find where that thing is and delete it from the internet well you got to you got to show the braided stream too that's the other that's the other thing it's not this direct path at all because you'll start from this little bipedal tree climbing thing which is very not even ape like it's got this very interesting brow that comes out it's almost like a sun visor of a brow of bony brow that sticks out you have to start from it and then yeah part way through you have all these others that show up and like hey we're all here well humans aren't the end either so that's like the other problem we're not the last so then it really just should look like a bunch of hominids at a party yeah well really what we need to do is take this we hope that we're not the last hominid yeah well we got to look at our evolution as not a pyramid leading up to us but basically the other direction where there was an organism and it's branched out and there's now a whole bunch of different organisms still living but yeah that braided streamer you would have you would have to have the other lineages of hominids and then they bump and then there's this one and then it bumps over to this one and then they it's a much more confusing map than that little infographic but we should at least get rid of the chimp at the beginning of it because it doesn't belong there at all and then my last story tonight is oh this is interesting pop quiz get your number 2 Tychondrosa ready what percentage of Americans support climate action what would you guess what would you percent percent of Americans who support action on climate what would you say that is 70 oh that's a good that's a high number I would say 60 both of you is a most Americans yeah that's that's because you're kind of into no according to a recent study you're skinning wrong people 66 to 80 percent that they gave a range how do you do your whole study and then come up with a 14 point range it's because you have like a mostly and then absolutely and so they have to it's because it's all qualified right well as long as it's anchored a little bit that's it's they're doing statistics there's real reasons behind those percentages for sure 66 to 80 percent of Americans support positive climate action same poll what do Americans think the percentage of Americans who support climate action is that's 37 to 43 yeah I was going to say 40 yeah yeah you guys you're right with them they didn't even they should just ask you you've got the numbers I love it we are now representative of most I've been reading these these climate communication papers for like about 10 years so this is Greg Sparkman the papers first author of it he's associated Princeton at the time is now assistant professor Boston College it's stunning how universal and shared that is among every demographic the researchers the study did find as one might suspect that conservatives under estimated national sport for climate policies to the greatest degree but also the the left leaning group believe that a minority of Americans support climate action as well the misperception was the norm in every state across policies among every demographic tested including political affiliation race media consumption habits rural versus suburban most Americans think a minority of Americans care about climate change while the opposite while the opposite is true well what if you measured the amount of airtime that people get to talk about these things in media and talk about the actual positive solutions that are available to us and how much opportunity there is so there is it is a little bit lower in the conservative media digesting diet in terms of perception of you know I actually care about this issue but the fact that it's everywhere tells you exactly that that's exactly the same conclusion I came to it is just being underreported the loudest voice is not always the most representative well wise words Blair I disagree with that actually I think if the louder person usually the one who I will believe because the quiet person had the conviction if the quiet person had the conviction to yell louder yeah and they were just shouting it out but here's the thing that's why this study has the result that it has some interesting correlations and social media has the results it does if you were in a city or an area where there were visible protests marches or actions being taking place you had a higher evaluation of how many people cared how many what percentage of people cared if you're at rural area maybe where there's not you might be a little bit less but the fact that most to a super majority of Americans believe we need to take these actions that's fantastic news now we just need to now we just need to get the other get them to understand that they're not in a minority that they can talk about it that their friends and neighbors also think this and if you have an unpopular or fringe idea you might be less likely to share it and talk about it and want to gravitate towards doing something if you realize that hey we're all in this together we're all on the same team and we all want to do something about this it should make taking those actions much easier yeah that's why one of the climate actions that you can take is talk about it more so that it doesn't feel like a faux pas and it doesn't feel like something that people are alone thinking about because then climate action is downstream it's consistent with what everyone not wants it's not you're not swimming upstream trying to get something done by yourself it feels more achievable it feels more hopeful it feels more possible I would I would venture to more science marches huh I would venture to guess that our audience even beats that 80% I bet our audience is is close to 99% because they'd turn us off if they weren't yeah because you wouldn't listen to I mean I don't know I don't know how many we've been talking about this for the duration that this show has existed which is a really long time people who listen to twist they're in the know we were we got there ahead of a lot of pro-science people even you know in terms of really talking about this issue and and it and it's still amazing to me that we haven't done more sooner faster quicker with the urgency and everything else involved but now that we know that everybody's on our side everybody's believing and thinking the things that we're thinking that's really a fantastic that's the you know can I change my just good news fix the climate party this was the just good news segment of the show forget the thing where the dinosaurs are gonna have a great time once this mass extinction this is even better than that good news is knowing that the American population wants to do something about it now we just need to convince them that they're not alone you're not alone you're not alone look behind you you are here with this weekend science we're here with you you're not alone we're talking about science with you thank you for joining us for this episode if you want a twist t-shirt or beach towel or other fun thing head over to zazzle.com this week in science we also have a link on our webpage twist.org to our zazzle store where there are all sorts of great products that you can can peruse and buy and enjoy fun times fun things support twists wear cool stuff Blair made all sorts of lovely things for us they're wonderful alright I have a quick few stories before the end of our show here talking about some brainy things because I like brainy stuff and I did want to kind of go back very quickly to the glyphosate story and I did say that I had that I thought that there hadn't been a lot of evidence showing glyphosates negative impacts on mammals on people however there are a number of studies that show that glyphosate may have effects through the GABA system the GABA A receptors that are very important in our brains in the basal ganglia specifically for motion and have been linked to increases in Parkinson's yeah diagnoses but yes in the particular study that is published this week in nature.com science advances open access scientific reports you can read their study and they had concentrations that were thousand times diluted from previous findings of neurotoxicity using over 300 fold less herbicide than the lowest concentration recommended for consumer use so interesting we'll see where this goes yeah that it is potentially impacting through the GABA system is intriguing and concerning not great at all and I don't know enough about it to know whether or not it creates a reservoir of use because you know just damages neurons when you talk about dilutions in these studies the critical question is can it concentrate? does it have a body half life because if you're like I'm using the safe amount every day does it bio accumulate? thank you that's what I'm looking for is there a bio accumulation factor in there too because even if you are using it at a much lower dose than the study but you've used it a thousand times well there you go yes alright so other stories moving on the artificial intelligence speaking of Parkinson's is being applied to detecting Parkinson's disease MIT researchers have developed in an AI artificial intelligence device a neural network that has been trained to detect Parkinson's symptoms from breathing and it can be used remotely using radar like system which basically has little pings off of your body cavity and can distinguish different breathing patterns and patterns that are indicative of the tremors stiffness and slowness that often come along with Parkinson's and so this is a kind of tool that could be non-invasive alternatively it could be used with a belt like a heart monitor type belt that is worn around the chest that measures expansion and contraction while people are breathing but it is highly accurate and could be really useful in discerning Parkinson's progression and how the disease changes over time and also be able to remotely send information to a doctor so that that information can be tracked and used to enhance treatments so good uses of artificial intelligence not necessarily invading our privacy but helping us treat our treat our neural disorders but if you do have a neural disorder like Alzheimer's or something like that you're losing your memory you're not remembering things as well researchers have also recently published in Nature Neuroscience their study looking at 150 volunteers between the ages of 65 and 88 who received 18 to 20 minutes of tax do you know what tax is tax is transcranial alternating current stimulation so electrical stimulation to specific areas of the brain they were trying to use very specific frequencies of electrical stimulation for a specific time period to specific areas of the brain to see what kind of results they could get and they determined that individuals were able to recall words from a list of 30 words that was just presented to them minutes before their brain stimulation it became measurable these improvements as soon as two days after their brains got zapped and those improvements lasted for about a month just after a single brain zap so what I'm hearing is that electroshock therapy was not super useful was close to being on to something it was close to being on to something it's refinement is what's happening here more of a blunt object as opposed to very targeted technique exactly so it's the specificity it's not the whole brain that's being stimulated areas and they're seeing that there are very specific results that are occurring in the specific areas of stimulation and they're hoping that this work is going to be applicable to Alzheimer's patients and other individuals with memory loss other impairments so that we could potentially use these not invasive in the sense of a needle you can put a cap on your head and get a little bit of a memory boost but maybe we can help provide better aging for people as the populations around the globe age more and more faster better, stronger, older people you gotta keep my memory up so when I'm reporting on the effects of climate change in 2100 I remember these conversations we had today it's incredibly important you can remember the term transcranial alternating current stimulation I didn't remember that now I need a zap get it zapped and finally this particular study just has a lot of personal interest for me the study of how we remember where we are in space we remember where we are navigating through the world our hippocampus is involved in that along with some other brain regions but we have place cells these particular cells that become active in different places to help us create spatial maps of different of different spaces so you'll have place cells active that let you map a room and then you leave that room and some of those place cells might be active but in a new network a hallway another room different spaces and these neurons they connect together these place cells connect together to help us navigate our worlds and know where we are in three-dimensional space how does this happen? oh my goodness this is such a huge question what about these networks? well researchers are really interested in this engram or this network of neurons that are being activated at the same time and they're trying to figure out what's going on inside the neurons once you've been plopped into a new location so imagine that you're in star trek and suddenly you have been ro-ro-ro-ro-ro-ro-ro-ro-ro-ro-ro-ro-ro onto the surface of a new planet your brain suddenly has to figure out where it is you have to navigate, create a brand new map of what's, of where you are and then suddenly Scottie beams you back up to the space ship and then your brain's like oh ok but then Scottie says hey we got to beam you back down red shirt and you're like, oh, man. Oh, no. And if you want to be the red shirt, who is not the one who dies, you better remember where that cave with the nasty floor sack was. So that's where the red shirt named Jackson died in that cave. It just came down and then that strange creature like shoved them off the thing. Oh, yeah. So if your last name is Jackson, don't go on any away missions into caves. Don't go into those caves. You got to use the two handed punch downward. The only way. I don't know how you're right though. That's the only place anywhere in any form of real or imagined combat where this put your two hands together and then punch somebody because that will make all the difference. Yeah, for sure. For sure. For sure. For sure. Anyway, the transporter, sorry, back to the mice. Back to the mice in their transporter. Well, so these mice, you know, you can't really do a transporter. So in this research situation, they put they put electrodes in the mice is the mice is them the mouse brains while the mice were alive so they could record while they're active, but then afterwards, then they sliced up the brains and they had to figure out what was happening inside the cells. While the mice were active, they put them in a virtual reality situation. They basically put them in a 360 degree environment and had them walk on a ball in a loop so that their environment was being projected on the walls around them. And they had to walk on this ball to be able to navigate wherever they needed to go in a maze that was being projected. It's a pretty interesting behavioral setup. And so this is only possible because researchers from a couple of different labs teamed up to work on this. One, a behavioral lab that works on spatial memory and the behavior in mice and another lab who works on the cellular signaling and the stuff that's going on at the genetic level. And so they did the behavior stuff. They got the mice to go, oh, I want to go to the reward. Oh, I don't want to go where the no reward is. I want to lick this thing. I don't want to lick this thing. And, you know, to do the behaviors. Anyway, transporters apps them out. And so then they're looking at the red shirt mouse's brain. And what they were able to determine was that a gene called FOS, there's a family of them, these FOS genes, they're considered immediate early genes. And what happens is these genes get transcribed and they make a whole bunch of other stuff in the metabolism of the cells in the transcription process of proteins happen. So they're like the marker of stuff happening. And very often, people who study the FOS genes, they use it just as that marker. And they're like, oh, look, you put the thing in there. And then, look, the FOS gene's going, that brain cells active, something's happening. This study is the first time that they have linked causally the fact that the FOS genes are causally responsible for the place cells becoming active and for the actual creation of a sense of space for the ability of this navigation to be able to take place. And so this is the first time they've been able to actually go these FOS genes and the proteins they make. This is a little pathway of creating the engram of spatial memory within the brain, which is very exciting. And it's very important. And we can think about this little mouse on a ball having its FOS expressed in its brain after it's been transported onto its little ball planet having to navigate around. Humans have FOS in our neurons as well. And so our place cells very likely have FOS activity. And so if you are that little red shirt on the planet, you better hope that your FOS is working. So that must have pretty good FOS because I think I have pretty good spatial memory stuff. I'm curious if there's a sampling of humans that don't have that ability to build that. What happens if you don't have FOS, right? What happens to those cells? Is it just confusing like constantly like walking into a room and you're like, okay, let me look around and see where everything is again? Or is that just like you keep hitting your shin on the same thing every day in the same place? I'm never gonna remember this one. Because that is me, for sure. Yeah, so these researchers when they blocked FOS in some of the mice, they actually kept them from in this study, they knocked FOS out in a subset of the neurons in the hippocampus and they saw that the cells had less accurate spatial maps of the environment than nearby neurons with normal FOS expression. So the maps in the cells were less stable across days and they say that means that they were less reliable as memories of the environment. So yeah, a lack of FOS would make memories harder, spatial memories harder to form and hold on to. They would slowly just, they'd go away a lot faster and wouldn't be as accurate. Space blindness. We might not have any FOS. That does it for me. Are we, are we good? Did we do this? Yeah, I think we, I think we have done it. Another tight 90. Oh, by the time it's edited down, it's gonna be great. It's fine. It's wonderful out there. Hey, everyone out there. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of This Week in Science. We are absolutely thrilled that you decided to spend 90 minutes of your day, maybe a little bit longer with us to enjoy science. I want to give some shout outs to people. Definitely. Thank you to FADA for helping with social media and show descriptions. Getting that done is amazing. Identity four, you're not recording tonight. I hope that everything is going well. But identity four, thank you so much for being there to record our show every week. 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We'll be back here next week. And we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from the show, remember, it's all in your head. with a wave of my hand. And all it'll cost you is a couple of grand is coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the science. This week in science, science, science, this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may So that's it's weird. It's the after show. So for some reason, when you start the bumper music at the end, there is like a five to 10 second delay before I can hear it. And and you guys are already dancing and I'm still like waiting for music. Yeah, it is. And I noticed it over the last few weeks, but I thought it was just pick up. And then I was like, Oh, is this shut am I like five to 10 seconds delayed? Because then that wouldn't make any sense other than I just seem as though I was cutting people off when they were talking. And that, you know, so that would be annoying. But it is. But it is I think there's like the channel that you're playing it through, because Blair's hearing it right away. She's rocking and rolling and dancing to the music. And I'm like, Oh, the music didn't start. And then you're both like, I'm like, Okay, well, maybe you should just be dancing to no music. Some reason I don't I can't hear it until partway through the song. That's a very strange tickety up. Anyway, I don't I can't tell you this explanation. We've gotten it wrong. I read specifically from the abstract in my correction when I made the correction. I read it from their abstract specifically. So I didn't mistake anything. Yeah, I read it from the abstract. So but the paper I can I will I can put the link for everyone in if I don't know if it'll put it out for you can read this yourself as well and come to your own conclusion. Here you go. So it's there. What is that? I don't know. It's because I'm looking at it. And I had to scroll down. I don't know. There's a lot of things in there. Is that even a thing? I don't know. You probably don't need anything after the numbers. Let me say that again. Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff in there. Let's see if that works. Oh, nope. Not available. Yeah. So that's it. That whole thing does so it sounds like round up is still it's like the EPA has been saying now that the it's fine. The World Health Organization says it may cause cancer. There's like massive lawsuits that are big round up lawsuits. Yeah, that's right. And then there's other people who are saying no. So, yeah, there's a there's a little bit of especially when you when you try to google something for information and all you see is law firms looking to represent you in a class action lawsuit one after the other, then you're like, okay, sounds like there's something to it. But then trying to find that study that that's based on can then be pretty difficult. So, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, you know, who you should be able to look at, though, you should be able to just study farmers, farmers in general. So this is the question, right? The people who do the dusting of fields, the people who are the farmers, the farm hands who work, is there a higher prevalence of Parkinson's and GABA related disorders? There's a so I don't know that that's a great question. I feel like we've reported on something similar to that before. I know that the chances of all sorts of diseases are higher on farms. But then there's like, so many levels of then you have to look at, like, are we actually tracking and doing these studies on the people who are working in the fields who may be not as well documented or not that willing to or integrated, however you want to say, to become part of these studies? Or are you talking about just people who live in farm areas who might have higher rates of of cancers? There's a lot that and we should probably go back and look at this because I feel like there's data out there at this point. There's yeah. So from the yeah, this paper is really interesting. So the distinction is that commercial herbicides are a mixture of chemicals. Roundup super concentrate is 50.2% glyphosate. The other 49.8% is the adjuvant. The adjuvant improves the effectiveness of the active ingredient is composed of surfactants, buffers, buffers and emulsifiable oil activators. One of these adjuvant surfactants, poly ethoxylated taloamine POEA has been found to confer toxicity in a host of invertebrate, aquatic and mammalian models. Exposure of human cells to ethoxylated adjuvants also resulted in significant toxicity. Both POEA and Roundup were found to affect intestinal muscle activity, particularly POEA exhibited high toxicity towards smooth muscle. The European Union in 2016 placed a ban on POEA, but it hasn't been found to have any neurotoxic effects. So in the US, no similar legislative measures have been taken. Thus, it stands to reason that POEA or a comparable surfactant is in the current US formulation of Roundup. Many studies have not directly compared the effects of Roundup to those of glyphosate. Those that have found that Roundup induces higher levels of cytotoxicity and DNA damage compared to glyphosate in human cell lines. So then we're not even talking about the same things then, because then we're talking about, look, our product doesn't cause any harm. But on the other hand, there was some really crazy like product recently. Oh gosh, give me, I'm going to need a minute to figure out what it was, but it was something you would think would be perfectly healthy, normal and fine. And there was like this benzene being added to the thing to help it as a delivery mechanism or something that was leaching into the product. Oh gosh, which is pretty recently too. But yeah, so then if they're studying just around it by itself, you will get no effect. If you study it then in its delivery mechanism, then maybe there's all these other ingredients and one of them is involved. Right. It's complicated. Yeah. But yeah. No, anyway, with this, please. Yes. And courts can get it wrong. Yeah, the court courts get it wrong. Courts in science sometimes is just mind bogglingly terrible. Well, you first you have lawyers who are arguing different sides based on their side's legal needs. And then you have the sides trying to tell the scientific story. So they have the science communication side of it. But then they also have different experts who come in and are witnesses in particular ways. And they level of experts. Yeah. And then the judge or a jury has to discern all of the the accurate stuff, the stuff that's evidence based or not evidence based based on all that testimony. Yeah, that's yeah, science by trial. You hope that the science is clear enough that the evidence will bear out, right? Yeah. And unfortunately though, what ends up happening is like I don't know how much Monsanto has spent on researching the ill effects, potential ill effects. Probably a lot, but they're not publishing it. Well, no, but I mean, so here's the thing. There is somebody puts out these studies that say, Hey, there could be a problem with your product. So then the next thing you want to do is then spend a bunch of money on research to see if that's true. Problem is, then you have a bunch of industry funded research that like you say, doesn't need to be made public. Or like how you indicate doesn't necessarily need to be made public. Yeah, by and by and according to physics, police in the chat room, life by phosphate is so safe that they have to use unrealistic doses to show negative effects when they go after the manufacturer. The best target are there in active agreements. So and it's the actually it's the only roundup study that I remember. And we did this one a really long time ago. This would have been 50, 16 plus years ago. This would have been a really long time ago. And it was a study about how roundup was killing mosquitoes. But the thing was, yeah, it was it was just like this worm study, they had such a high concentration, I think we made fun of the study. Like, you could at the concentrations, it would been like, you could just take the mosquitoes and pour water over them and see how many of them died at the at the level of immersion that they were doing. Yeah. But again, don't use it at home. Go weed your garden. It's good exercise. And just don't be lazy. If it's your garden, if it's if it's if you got if it's the grass and the side, you can't read your lawn anyway. What are you doing? It's a trout. Although, although, again, do what it wants. Cut the grass again. We're talking about drought in California. That there's a lot of water. There was a lot of talking and we need more water. There was a lot of talk, though, about the increased risk of flooding with global warming, because this is going to be more moisture in the air. So when it rains, atmospheric rivers, or yeah. And you know, none of it will absorb into the soil because it'll all be the Sacramento, the Sacramento area in particular. There are areas that were designated as flood plan because the Sacramento area has always had major flood events. This is, you know, now it's like a couple million and a half people, something like that live in there. There's a whole weaves. I remember growing up that would just they were almost like we got when the water gets too big and they'd let it out and so you'd get these like artificial lake looking things and there's they sense of built. They developed them. They put housing there now. And there was some period of time where they weren't even allowed to get flood insurance because they were they had to sign a thing because they were buying in a flood plane. But don't worry about it. Huge swaths of Sacramento area and capital of California there are building houses and flood planes. There is there is out in that south of Davis. Go go out the mace boulevard. You take that as far south as you can down to the next county. There's this really interesting. I think I've talked about this before. There's a farmer's shed that is raised up about 10 feet out in the middle of this field and it's raised up and they put the place to park the tractors and stuff on this thing this farmer built and it's always looked like an odd thing like oh gosh the farmer wanted a view so he built himself a little little plateau out in the middle of his land. Well it turns out that that that farmland used to flood so severely every year that in order to have a when next time that the farmer was like next time this happens I've got high ground. I'm going to build my own high ground to prevent flooding so. I've got a picture that I've got up right now. One of the top most likely areas in the United States to have catastrophic flooding. Yeah this picture that I have up right now it's a little small but it's from Scripps Scripps Institute of Oceanography and they have recently published a study projecting atmospheric river flooding damages in the future so what's going to happen in the 2090s versus the 1990s and if you look in the map you can see that the largest dollar amount of damages is going to be oh in the Sonoma area Bay area and then Sacramento so it's like right through the delta the Sacramento river delta valley area there's going to be significant issues because of the ability of the levees and the the delta system to absorb all of the water that's going to be. And I think that's an underestimation because if you look the entire central valley. I don't know it's their estimation. Oh no no no I think that's right I think that's perfectly fair but what I'm saying is the entire central valley used to be an inland lake. Used to be an inland sea. Right but then we built on it and we moved everything around and we created the delta we created our levees and our farmland and it's not and it's not that anymore. It could be again it could we don't have to live there. My point is when the earth is colder there's less water that's moving around in the system. Oh yeah so you're saying that it's it should be an inland lake again. It might be maybe not in you know 2090 but uh I'll let you know. By 2290 at this rate yeah it's going to get rid of all the ice and you just have monsoon seasons every every so it's going to be an inland lake again just the water's going to rise and it's just going to be the whole central valley of the underwater. Other places other places are hot and humid everything is everything's going but we can do something about it and your neighbors probably think that we can do something about it too isn't that exciting to know. That's fantastic that is good news. It is good news. Blair needs to go to bed. Say good night Blair. Good night Blair say good night Justin. Say good morning Justin. Good morning Justin. Good night Kiki. Good night everyone. Thank you for joining us for another fun filled episode of This Week in Science. We do hope that we'll be back again next Wednesday 8 p.m. Pacific time for the live stream but remember you can always find us recorded one way or another. Hit subscribe. Click those like buttons. Mash mash mash. If you haven't done it recommend us to a friend. Get those notification bells. Have I said enough things? Have a wonderful week. Stay safe, stay healthy and stay curious.