 position says bananas so many bananas all the bananas bananas and pajamas it is time for the this week in science podcast live broadcast and we are here once again to do this thing that we call science podcasting and um yeah like i say every episode this is live there will be an edited version that will go out as the podcast we all good team uh team good team go everybody's ready Blair is podcasting from a secret location not the first time see your location that is not my living room that's all not the living room not the normal hello everyone welcome welcome welcome are you ready for another show we're here i'm standing up i decided that i was gonna find a way to stand up and so i like my chair but i don't think i need that discomfort so um are we gonna do this yes make this go live hello carol and one grouchy gamer we're doing it so going live in a three a two this is twist this week in science episode number 804 recorded on wednesday december 16th 2020 twist the season to hibernate hey everyone i'm dr kiki and tonight on the show we will fill your head with sparkles specs and faces but first disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer seeking knowledge is a natural ingrained human trait the availability and access to information these days is unlike any other time in history but seekers of knowledge must be wary for not all information is knowledge and too often information is used to mislead intentionally willfully and with purpose this practice is an ancient one greenland isn't green it got that name from a viking who was trying to get more people to join his icy settlement that ended up badly every religion you can think of try to point to the one that is evidence based one that in the light of scientific knowledge may have shrugged shoulders and conceded to reality on any number of points these are beliefs that cannot be refuted by facts and in politics honesty while scarce spin propaganda tools of the trade we know false beliefs that cannot be refuted by facts amongst the loyal there's no accident it is engineered why do they do it because it works deceit is a path to money fame and power for some there are the criminal minded ones that we're familiar with the Ponzi schemes tax frauds real estate phone scams we expect these people to wind up in jail eventually but there are also those whose business it is to misinform worse than that they seek to make you immune from facts and it's working with great results we see it in over 300 000 dead americans from covid 19 we see it in decades of gun violence discriminate discrimination criminalization of poverty and we're watching as the climate is compromised to the point of no return all of this continues as long as people have false beliefs that cannot be refuted by facts there is no substitution for real knowledge and experience in this world which is why we bring you reports from those who have it here on this weekend science coming up next waiting for the music it's going i'll just pretend i'm i'll just pretend i'm buffering buffering buffering buffering buffering it's never gonna it can't be smiling while buffering because it's never in your face it's always okay ready three i've got the kind of mind i can't get enough i want to learn every discoveries that happen every day of the week there's only one place to go to find the knowledge i seek good 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 weekend science we are back again to talk about the science all three of us this is our last episode before we take a very short holiday break we will not be here next week but we return before the new year with our top 11 of 2020 the top 11 countdown is our next show in two weeks i hope y'all are ready for that are you ready co-hosts are we ready i mean i just want to make sure it's not all covid i don't know there's more science yo i just want to make a promise to everyone if you guys are okay with that that it won't all be about covet i i think that's a very good promise to make okay great it can't it can't be about covet i mean hey look if you are if you're interested in this weekend science without covet uh we are at 804 episodes oh yeah you can probably dial back just not that far uh over the many many years we've been doing this and find episodes practical information you might have just missed 750 something without covet for sure that's right a whole year without covet but this week yeah we've got our covet update like we normally do because that's what it seemed but there's a lot of science about that this year but we have other science and i have stories about extinctions touch got a story about touch and computer coding and where you where you do that in your brain oh it's interesting is that in my brain do i is that language is that math is a great question great question and science has figured it out yes justin what did you bring for the show i've got less hurricanes but not in the necessarily good way uh oldest furthest galaxy ever ever ever fun uh stop landing the mongols and we might need to start learning about maund that's all about maund yes we've talked about maund on the show before i'm not gonna i'm not gonna i'm not gonna talk it up right now you can talk about it when you talk about that story yeah talk about it when you talk about it justin but i'll talk about it when i want to talk about it which is when i talk about it when you talk about it i'm glad we sort it out what's in the animal corner oh i have spiders in space and um fish talking on their own am radio station and what you know we'll talk about it when we talk about it but well i want to talk about that one right now i want to know right now what's this about they have their own frequency that they can talk through the water and it's like a am radio but i mean we're gonna talk about it when we talk about it and i don't know how else to tell you that which might be during blairs animal corner yeah probably yes so you got to wait for that one but let's jump into all these fun stories so we can talk about these things that we want to talk about and get to the point when we talk about them if you are not yet subscribed to this week in science you can find us everywhere podcasts are you can find us in the google podcast play area you can find us in the apple podcast area stitcher spreeker tune in spotify pandora the radio doc all over the place you can find us look for this week in science you can also find us on youtube that's where we broadcast live as well as on twitch we are at twist science twis c i e n c e twist science on twitch and on facebook we also broadcast live there as well again look for this week in science you can also go directly to our website twist.org to find out more about any episode all right calendars i have mailed things out from this point on we cannot promise any more calendars arriving before the christmas holiday but calendars are on their way to those who have ordered them so far if you would like a 2021 calendar they are still available and they will be until supplies run out so get your calendar today i can try and get it to you before the end of the year in time for 2021 because that's when you need it if even if you open it at christmas it's like ah i can't use it for two weeks what a rip i thought i was going to be able to use it right now exactly if you get a new year's gift that's when it's really gonna be useful there at twist.org click on the horny frog link all right you guys ready for the science so ready so ready we were born ready for the science all right my first story is about evolution and we talk a lot about evolution and we've talked about extinction events and we you might have heard us and maybe in school or in your own exploration of evolution you may have heard of things like the about the kt boundary where a bunch of organisms died and then new organisms radiated out and potentially the the dinosaur extinction that made room for mammals to adapt and grow and take up all the habitats that dinosaurs had been taking up until that point and that led to humans yay and so when we think about evolution we normally think all right it goes along at its kind of normal pace and then you have a big extinction event and that makes room for organisms and then you have what's called radiation and so in our minds we tend to pair extinctions with radiations first the extinction then the radiation of species because you have space species can take over well some researchers decided they were going to use artificial intelligence to look at the patterns just look at all the data in extinctions and adaptations and radiations over the years scientists at the earth life sciences institute at tokyo institute of technology used machine learning to examine the co-occurrence of fossil fossil species they found that extinctions and radiations are not connected it happens sometimes but generally not so much that more often they're completely separate well wait a second so i guess i guess it may be a uh some sort of a problem in terms or in timing and when you were because obviously there've been many extinctions big extinction events and obviously there is life everywhere yes so life must have at some point radiated everywhere or just radiated have to be like you do it fast like i mean you know like now after that extinction life just moseyed into every niche in biome yeah well the idea was that we've had is creative destruction and this is the concept of evolution really that you have destruction extinction and that allows the creativity of evolution to take to take over but the data does not support that at all they compared the impacts of extinction and radiation across the phanerozoic eon uh this is it represents from about 550 million years ago to uh from about 550 million years ago to the present day and this is where we have fossils in the fossil record and before this there weren't really any fossils so there was nothing really to look at and so looking at all these fossils what they found is that many of the remarkable periods of radiation like you're saying just in kind of this moseying it occurred when life entered new evolutionary and ecological arenas so there was also the king there was the cambrian explosion of animal diversity there was the carboniferous expansion of forest biomes and this did not rely on extinction events they don't have any information on bacteria because no fossils um and there are about five the big five mass extinction events the end permian mass extinction about 70 of species estimated to go extinct they suggest we're now entering another one the Cretaceous tertiary extinction like i mentioned the kt boundary um they the kt dinosaur event has conventionally been thought to have been like this wasteland that allowed for the radiation of species and if that destruction hadn't taken place the ideas that the radiation would not necessarily have happened but all of the data they're looking at suggests that there was a lot of stuff around and it wasn't necessarily the creative destruction that necessarily led to the radiations that then took place this this is going to be a hard one for me to unlearn i know um just because everything we understand about like empty niches and how that creates like a vacuum that animals that are trying to figure out the best way to use that niche like that is that is fundamental to a lot of how i understand life progressed and you know mammals right or the whole thing was that these mammals were little shrew things and then once the dinosaurs were gone they came upstairs that's right here yeah there's nobody up here come on up i mean there was that too at extent but to justin's comment from before it's the time scales that we're talking about were so large that this radiation took place over a long long period of time and all the radiations that have happened took over took place over hundreds of thousands to millions of years geological time scales are hard for the human mind to wrap itself around and we like these tidy stories and just from the from the machine learning perspective the artificial intelligence does not see the same pattern that we have decided was there yeah yep yep yep well yeah so what they're they're they're coining a new term they uh they're calling uh destructive creation instead of creative destruction they found that in the phoenix era species that made up an ecosystem at any one time are almost all gone by 19 millions late million years later and then when these extinctions or radiations happen the turnover is a lot faster so these extinctions and radiations drive a lot of species turnover and there's a real question right now to do with this new era that we are entering the Anthropocene and the this sixth extinction that has been suggested is that it's eroding biodiversity that was already disrupted but it will take at least eight million years for the biodiversity to revert to the average of 19 million years of of disappearance so we are erasing things a lot faster than they would normally be erased yeah and you don't get them back uh that's that's the crazy thing you know uh you there would have been i think that mammals would have done okay blair uh we would have been able to come upstairs very very reasonably soon right if they're if the if the asterid had missed uh because it might have come upstairs anyway well no because there was a global there was a global ice age that was coming anyway uh and and you know there were dinosaurs in a Canadian tundra where you were looking at polar bears a while back you know that's not a place you would think dinosaurs could survive why the climate was tropical up there there were alligators crocodiles or something in in montana so there there's challenges now that we've talked about on the show that say that dinosaurs might have been somewhat endothermic so yeah dinosaurs dinosaurs could okay they were bigger they could just have internal heat just based on their size however however there were also the climate was tropical i mean there was plant life in and the like in greenland uh swampy uh alligators living in montana like it was a different climate once that all got cold and you had this suddenly maybe perhaps inaccessible to some smaller dinosaurs maybe couldn't go into handle the cold cold weather little furry mammals would have had to find time and could have could have uh radiated that way i want to radiate to your story that comes up next justin what story do you get what story do you have to tell us i have a story about high resolution supercomputer simulations um artificial intelligence to supercomputers we're so techie today i know this is in the journal science advances it's uh looking at global warming and it finds that global warming will reduce the number of hurricanes in the indian and pacific oceans yay well unfortunately there are no hurricanes in the pacific and indian oceans uh technically they have uh typhoons and tropical cyclones right but other than that they're exactly the same thing as the hurricanes that hit the us south and east coast every year those numbers are going to be going down in that area it's different ocean there's different uh dynamics going on they predicting a reduced number this is out of south korea's ibs center for climate physics at pusan national university they ran their computer model simulations for present-day atmospheric gas composition and then doubled and quadrupled co2 concentrations uh over time they ran for 13 months this simulation on one of south korea's fastest supercomputers named elif it's generated the equivalent of 2001 terabyte hard disks of data it's a really big number lots of bits that's a lot of data and they found yeah overall you're gonna they're gonna be experiencing less hurricanes typhoons and tropical cyclones however the ones that they do experience uh looked to be bigger stronger and will travel further inland because they will be uh much higher rated numbered uh what do you call it so worse hurricanes and the uh india south uh pacific area but but uh less of them overall all right so i mean it's good news good news bad news good bad news uh because like the smaller ones you can handle and then actually what they really then they also cranked the thing up to like 11 just just see what would happen like these silly humans like really really don't learn and double the quadruple it again what what happens and they what they saw was this interesting effect of a suppression of hurricanes uh they started to become suppressed they started not to form what ended up happening instead though was you just had torrential downpour everywhere all the time so there was there's a trade-off for sure there's a trade-off because the energy in the water is going to stay somewhere if you take it all out of the ice it's going to be in play somewhere in the world yep somewhere and uh yeah just to tack on to this story there's another story in the news about just how much carbon dioxide plants can take right and we might be hitting the hitting the maximum for how much carbon dioxide plants can use we're getting there we're almost a peak plant that's right let's do something Blair what news do you have for us oh well i have a way that we can get more clean water so that's some good news i knew you had something positive have anything to do with melting icebergs well no it actually has to do with nano diamonds so i don't know how achievable this is but let's let's explore nano diamonds we could make those yeah totally so um oil recovery methods and other industrial processes make really really really really really hot wastewater and so the the problem is not only do you have to clean it but you actually have to cool it before you clean it then you clean it through osmosis membranes then you have to heat it up again before it can be considered reusable so all that to say uh that's a lot of energy and that's a lot to go through to decontaminate water um and uh the way to get around that potentially is with nano diamonds so researchers have previously explored a little bit with embedded tiny nano diamonds which are carbon spheres produced by explosions in small closed containers without oxygen and they put those on these membranes and in these previous studies they effectively and quickly filtered large volumes of water but they didn't test with the hot water which is really the thing here how can we effectively quickly filter water without cooling it down just to heat it back up again and so this research team looked uh they attached amines to the nano diamonds bade them in ethyl acetate solution to prevent them from clumping and then added a monomer that reacted with the amines to create chemical links to the traditional membrane base and so they found thicker more temperature stable membranes which had an improvement in their performance so by increasing the amount of these amine enhanced nano diamonds in the membrane they had better filtration rates and this was even after nine hours at 167 degrees fahrenheit so they it seems it seems um promising it gets some nice clean water it does seem promising and you know i i did say we can make nano diamonds and it's true synthetic diamonds are easily made actually and yeah that's that's the kind of thing that we can use our technology to do so this is not this is something diamonds come from carbon carbon is plentiful maybe we can take the carbon dioxide in the air and take the carbon out of that and turn it into nano nano diamonds and use it to clean the water the question is is the energy used to create the nano diamonds still less than the energy it takes to cool the water down and then heat it back up again this is a good question yes i would i would guess that in the long run yes i would say you know if you can mass produce the nano diamonds and they can be used over and over then this could potentially be a benefit but um yeah in the short term i feel like it's yeah it's not probably not an improvement yeah they have to be they have to be reusable for it to i'm reusable diamonds they're the toughest thing ever what's more it's gotta be reusable right reusable nano diamonds i would imagine just wash them off use them again it'll be good you know what we wash off and use over and over and over again what our faces oh okay so you're gonna say something gross i don't have anything gross to say i just want to talk about the human face i want to talk about the wonderful face that we that we share around the world and researchers decided again yes they're using technology using artificial intelligence to determine how often these faces these facial expressions that we use to express emotion how often they are used similarly around the world it's published in today's issue of nature and the researchers from uc berkeley say this study reveals how remarkably similar people are in different corners corners of the world in how we express emotion in the face of the most meaningful context of our lives this was a worldwide analysis of facial expressions from uc berkeley and google they used machine learning technology a deep neural network to analyze six million video clips on youtube for facial expressions these people were in countries around the world 144 different ones and this is the first time that they have really looked at what was happening so they used the machine learning to determine all of the different expressions that are associated with 16 different emotions that they defined so shock awe happiness a bunch of different things the machine learning uh was looking at the position of the faces related to all of the different muscles that create these looks and then in addition to just identifying the facial expression and tying it to a particular emotion they then compared that to the context in which the video was taking place so um watching fireworks for example people dancing or whatever you could imagine these different scenarios that were taking place in videos what were people looking like what emotions were the expressing and how in the videos and did the facial expressions line up around the world and lo and behold yes they did yes they did the uh expressions that they looked at they pretty much found that there were nuances in facial behavior but they're all similar around the world our emotions are similar in similar situations awe during fireworks displays contentment during weddings uh concentration the furrowing of the brow uh when performing a physical task doubt at protests pain at weightlifting or other physical work um they're all these all these faces show how completely similar that we are as humans and the researcher dasher keltoner says this supports darwin's theory that expressing emotion in our faces is universal among humans the physical display of our emotions may define who we are as a species enhancing our communication and cooperation skills and ensuring our survival so even as we feel so divided around the world we can look at each other and know that we can understand each other at least in our faces yeah i i really live living abroad um nonverbal communication was a big deal for me yeah i got very good at it by the end of my six months and uh yeah facial facial expressions are a huge part of it i wondered i wonder if you couldn't see someone's face that you're trying to communicate with if you didn't share their language but you could still like act things out um would it be as effective and i don't think so acting things out works people people use body language improvised sign language all the time part of it i think is my point i feel like i really it was a very important piece of the puzzle for me for sure for sure justin want to give us another story oh oh yeah this is a team of tokyo university astronomers used kek one telescope to measure the distance of an ancient galaxy galaxy they deduced that the galaxy g n dash z 11 is not only the oldest galaxy but is the most distant which also kind of makes sense because wouldn't that be the way that well it would be the oldest to us anyway but it is the oldest and the most distant oldest meaning perhaps closest to the original thing that might have happened that made it so that there was space instead of nothing uh yeah so the distance it defines is a very boundary of our observable universe beyond that i guess it's just darkness blackness void can't see anything nothing's making it through yet team hopes the study can shed light on a period of cosmological history when the universe was only a few hundred million years old so here's a galaxy in our universe that's a galaxy of the universe is only a couple hundred million years old at this point that's when we were talking about these mass extinction events and we're talking about covering hundreds of millions of 500 million years was it from the kt event this there was a whole galaxy that had radiated and was caught in its own orbit must have probably had a black hole in the middle i don't know professor no burani kashikawa from the department of astronomy at the university of tokyo driven by his curiosity about galaxies sought out the most distant one we can observe to find out how and when it came to be uh this is quoting voice uh of kashikawa from previous studies the galaxy g n dash z 11 seems to be the furthest detectable galaxy from us at 13.4 billion light years yeah and it is or uh 134 nonillion kilometers for those who aren't familiar with that it's really far yeah 134 nonillion kilometers is approximately the same as 134 decillion meters 134 by 33 thank you so much for that according to kashikawa measuring and verifying such distance is not an easy task uh they measured the redshift of g n dash z 11 redshift being the way that light stretches out becomes redder the further travels but they also had to look through certain chemical signatures called emission lines that imprint distinct patterns in the light from these very distant objects by measuring how stretched these telltale signatures are they could figure out how far the light must have traveled and it gave them a distance for the target at that many many many zeros it's a 134 followed by 30 zeros if you're doing the kilometers it's a lot of minus zeros that's a lot of zeros i'm just thinking just for a quick moment though 13 13.4 billion light years away that is that's like over that's about four times no three times the age of our solar system we're at about four and a half billion years so our solar system could have come up three times in the time that this one galaxy if you had a starship going warp 10 it would take you 1.3 billion years to get there well but at what time you start time travel so that's all it's 9.9 warp 9.9 so i think isn't war isn't warps a factor of uh speed of light i don't know i i believe so except that warp 10 is funny just if you're following the real canon in the lore it's a whole never mind it's a whole thing it's a thing it is uh this uh ship at warp 10 you are everywhere all at the same time yeah i think that happens every time it's just more noticeable then okay but yeah they uh okay so they looked specifically at ultralight uh the area electromagnetic spectrum expected to find the redshift chemical signatures kornikashikawa the Hubble space telescope detected the signature multiple times in the spectrum of g n dash 7 or z 11 excuse me however even the Hubble cannot resolve ultraviolet emission lines to the degree we needed so we turned to a more up-to-date ground-based spectrograph an instrument to measure the emission lines called moss fire which is mounted to the kek one melis uh telescope in hawaii moss fire captured the emission lines from g n dash z 11 in detail which allowed the team to make a much better estimation on its distance than was possible from previous data pretty amazing farthest and oldest galaxy and it doesn't even have like a really catchy name g n dash z 11 it's all right i guess you can sing it you sing it out yeah you can sing it out i mean it's the it's the the season of elf you know hi i love you i love you i love you we can turn anything into a song it's okay it's that season it is fodder in the chat room Blair at warp 10 you devolve to a salamander and have egg babies with your captain yes that's the episode where that happens and that's why because you're at all places and times at the same time so you devolve it's a whole thing i'm just telling you the lord of the cannon behind warp goes completely off the rails and to every space in time in that particular episode that's the whole thing is that just because they didn't have their warp one is like just didn't have the heisenberg dampeners on that's all that's right you gotta have your own dampen the uncertainty yeah uncertainty principle dampeners they had to have those they must have been faulty you know where there's not a lot of uncertainty where computer code oh computer code computer code yes and while people learn various languages in which to program there's been this just the way we think about it it's a language computer programming you read the computer programming language and so researchers wanted to know does our brain treat computer code like a language or something else so they studied it yes they did researchers published in e-life this week the valina fedorenco the fedric a and carol j middleton career development associate professor of neuroscience and a member of the mcgovern institute for brain research is the senior author on this paper and also there were researchers from mit's computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory and tufts university in the study they used functional magnetic resonance imaging and the researchers showed people snippets of code little bits of code and asked them to read it to say okay you read this code what will the code do what's it going to produce what is that code for and when they were looking at the brain looking specifically in the language regions of the brain we do have language centers of the brain that allow us to understand language and produce language that's not where activity was happening no no no computer programming code is not a language to our brain even though we might mentally consider it that that way it's metaphor really because the coding task mainly got involved in what's called the multiple demand network and this is in the frontal and parietal lobes in the brain and is needed when you are holding lots of information of different kinds in your brain at the same time so when you're solving puzzles or when you are uh doing yet crossword puzzles really uh there are lots of skills that take on this multiple demand network but it is in relation to skills to things that take lots of different kinds of information so math and coding you you you said may ask this justin earlier whether it was a math center and yeah math and coding rely on the same brain areas and possibly mechanisms i was picturing the way that i i mean i don't code but i i do a little bit of um web editing and i'm not formally trained at all and so i have to kind of use it i think translator part of my brain actually that i would use in an escape room is like if i do this then this happens but i do this then that happens so in order to get this i need to do this and this and that and this and that did it work no okay let's do it again yeah yeah so that's totally that's that's where i feel like my brain is at what i'm doing that kind of stuff yeah so this this in itself because there's not a specific area of the brain that is like this is the coding area of the brain um so there's no real answer as to yet yet as to how how the or what the best way to teach coding is because we can approach coding as a language but we have to understand that the brain is not interpreting it as a language so should it then be taught as a problem solving tool uh is what are the best methods for future education in coding and how can we how can we teach it most effectively and that's the the the big question moving forward and you know maybe it maybe it is somewhat like math you just got to do a lot of it practice makes perfect possibly yeah but i find it very interesting puts that question to rest coding nope nope you're not learning a language i think people will still use the metaphor though oh yeah well then code code uh code makes sense but language uh doesn't anymore yeah i think it's fair to call it a code yeah it's instead of a coder you should call yourself a code breaker blue a crypto something cryptophile is that what it's called cryptographer cryptographer i just went to cryptonomicron so anyway it's time for me to tell you if you just tuned in you are joining this week in science this week in science is a weekly science program we talk we have fun we enjoy curiosity if you are interested in an item of our merchandise please check out our zazzle store at twist.org click the link zazzle and you'll be able to find our store where there are all sorts of wonderful items for that will help support this show moving forward and make you feel pretty cool because you'll have some twist gear that'll be pretty awesome yep all right you ready for the COVID update yeah let's have it hopefully there's something good this week it's all good it's all good i've only got good news i didn't bring any bad for you does that does that kiki does that mean that there isn't any bad news no it just the stories i brought are all good news okay really truly all right so i would like you first to know if you haven't heard vaccines are being distributed around the united states health care workers and those at extremely high risk are being vaccinated around the united states for COVID-19 this is momentous it is amazing under a year vaccines went from concept to manufacture to delivery and and it and hopefully we will see see things really improving over the next several months but this is really great news we went from last week kind of fingers crossed that the FDA would give an emergency use authorization to Pfizer and oh yes they did on on a on a weekend night no doubt and then Monday morning the first injections began vaccines are out and now the big decisions are going to be who's going to get which vaccines and when that's the that's the really big question moving forward there are the Pfizer vaccine so far is the only vaccine that has been given emergency use also use authorization medan is next in line we can probably probably be certain that oxford astrazeneca's vaccine their adenovirus vaccine will be next up after that and then there are a suite of other types of vaccines and that are made with different strategies and also nasal sprays are coming up this is a big question and a friend of mine brought it up on facebook this weekend since this is a respiratory disease why are we getting a muscle shot for the vaccine so to answer that question number one is that the intramuscular injections tend to lead to a stronger systemic immune response and so your body your whole body is going to be immune and able to fight it off fight a virus off or an invader off more more effectively however there's this question about the nasal mucosa and the respiratory tract so this is a respiratory disease if your your body itself is going to be good at fighting things off but your nose is the first line of defense shouldn't we really be focusing on your nose and your respiratory tract there are very few inhalable vaccines we do have a flu mist there is a flu nasal spray that you can inhale and that was one that was worked on very hard the company that did bring that flu nasal spray to the market is also working on a COVID-19 vaccine and it is I believe it's it's on its way to clinical trials now there are some other researchers who just published in cell this week about a new methodology to create inhalable nasal spray vaccines and they hope that it will not just create a COVID-19 vaccine but eventually vaccines that will be highly effective against all respiratory diseases anything that will attack you through your nose or your or your lungs that these inhalables will give first line of defense priority to your respiratory system and then that will like then lead out to the systemic lead to systemic immunity these researchers think that instead of multiple shots you'll be able to go get one nasal spray sniff and and you'll be good to go researchers in Spain just started a clinical trial there's another clinical trial in the UK for nasal spray vaccines for COVID-19 so if you are afraid of needles there might be something on its way for you in the near future which is pretty cool and then beyond that inhalable antibodies are moving forward there is a company just published in bio archive their research on inhalable antibodies and the antibodies would be neutralizing antibodies the kind of thing that your body would produce but instead of your body producing it you'd have a daily nasal spray that you would sniff in the morning and it would stay within your nasal mucosa and within your respiratory tract protecting you and neutralizing any COVID-19 SARS-CoV-2 virus that enters your respiratory airways and so it would be a preventative as opposed to a vaccine preventative but the kind of thing that you could that you could take on a daily basis if you are unable to get the vaccine for some reason so this is a different direction that people are looking AstraZeneca and there's another question that people have been asking which I think is a really great question it's like well what if you know I'm supposed to go get these two shots these is these vaccine you get one shot you wait a month you come back and get another shot but what if they run out of the kind of vaccine that you got can I get another one of the vaccines and will that work just as well can we mix and match vaccines and doses nobody knows this yet but AstraZeneca is partnering with Gamalaya the Russian company that is producing the Russian adenovirus based vaccine and they are going to test this question as to whether or not you can take the AstraZeneca virus and the Gamalaya the not virus the AstraZeneca vaccine and the Gamalaya vaccine and and I don't I'm not sure about the timing of it whether those two shots would be the exact same time but whether that would challenge your immune system enough to create the kind of immune response that would be efficacious in protecting you from protecting you from COVID-19 so of course my my knee jerk reaction was like no don't do that that seems wrong obviously that's not gonna work and then of course my actual scientific part of my brain was like oh wait if they're supposed to work the same way if they're two vaccines that are using the same mechanism why couldn't you mix them why couldn't you right so AstraZeneca Oxford Oxford AstraZeneca uses an adenovirus vector and it's the same adenovirus for both of the two doses the Gamalaya vaccine uses two different adenovirus vectors so why couldn't you that is it they're using the same spike protein as the actual thing that your body is gonna react to the adenovirus is just the vector to get it into your cells why not and so we don't want people trying this on their own but but I think it's very exciting to see that these companies are are thinking in this direction and and they're thinking about it in in terms of potentially the scarcity issue of will there be enough doses of vaccines to get to everybody who needs them at all times but the other side of it is also can you get people to come to both visits to get the two doses and if you can do both of them with this mix and match in one sitting that could it could potentially solve a whole bunch of problems interesting well and I'll say just probably what Justin would say he stepped out for a second but the good news is all this stuff is in the in the works but it doesn't mean anything if you go out right now and get sick so you're right this is the home stretch this is home stretch let it into the tunnel stay home don't do anything risky because pretty soon you could be vaccinated and do all of the things so you just have to you have to hold on long enough to be able to get the vaccine and to not already be in the ICU that's what needs to happen yeah yeah I mean that's I mean that's the bottom line really we need to we need to stay healthy long enough to get a vaccine we need to stay healthy long enough to stay out of the ICU all these things work together everyone keep it up the holidays we can make it through I know that in the UK they're talking about relaxing some precautions over the Christmas holiday maybe keep your Christmas small still don't take advantage of relaxation just take advantage I look okay my perspective on this year's winter holiday is for the first time ever I don't have to drive to all the family and I don't have to host any of the family I get a very quiet holiday and it's going to be very nice I'm looking on the bright I am I am miss bright side here that is for sure send your family the presents and open your presents together over a video call and then yes you have the whole rest of the day to yourself to read those books to go for a long walk outside you know it's gonna be great yes it's going to be fantastic all right I had another story but I don't really feel like talking about it because that was enough COVID for one show it really really was so we're gonna move on forward again thank you so much for being a part of this week in science thank you for being here thank you for bringing us into your lives if you want to help twist grow tell a friend to subscribe today that would help a lot all right we are coming back right now with that special part of the show that we know and love as the panda squirrel poo corner no wait Blair's animal corner with Blair what you got Blair oh my goodness I have a tail I have a tail whoa wow have you always had a tail I have a tail you never noticed TLE oh spiders in space um so did we did we did you both know that there are arachnauts on our planet there's spiders who their entire job is to go to space someday I did not notice yes so this is something that NASA has has worked on for a while uh wanted to see how spiders act in zero gravity in 2008 it was all part of something related to um inspiring middle schoolers to do science I don't know um but they took specimens going to them to the international space station but um chaos ensued so a spider managed to break out of his storage chamber because of course chamber so it was double containment at least into the main chamber so there was a main spider that they were trying to get to to build webs in zero gravity and then they had a backup spider the backup spider got into the main chamber with the main spider and they just made a mess basically so so that experiment out the window um they couldn't open the the chamber for safety reasons obviously because the spider actually got out onto the space station that would be that's what I thought it happened when you said it escaped in containment I was immediately like yeah anyway so that was a bust not to mention they brought flies up for food and they reproduced more quickly than they thought they would in space and over time the larva crawled out of the breeding container onto the floor of the case into the experimental chamber and after two weeks they could not even see the spiders because there was so much fly larva so anyway in general they learned some things in 2008 so then in 2011 um they brought four spiders of the same species um two they flew to the ISS in separate habitats two stayed on earth in separate habitats so that they could um compare and contrast how they built webs in a zero g and in just norm same container yeah so uh they they wanted to have these identical conditions but uh alas there was another problem this this experiment turned out okay overall but they they thought they were bringing four females into this study but spiders are very hard to sex when they're juveniles and so unfortunately two of them ended up being male but one of them was on the space station and one of them was on earth so okay great so our variables are still controlled that's fantastic um and so then they were able to go ahead with the experiment and this is actually what this is about so they were able to analyze the symmetry of spider webs and the orientation of those webs about a hundred spider webs um using 14 500 images so they could use um all sorts of um analysis to figure out kind of the difference between these two basically they wanted to see if these webs had similar properties or different properties to they like they do in gravity so first of all on earth spiders build asymmetrical webs with the corner towards the upper edge which once I read I was like oh yeah um and when resting spiders pretty much always sit with their head downwards because that's how they can move quickest to pray the direction of gravity so when they looked at all of these images they found that webs built in zero gravity were indeed more symmetrical than those spun on earth their center was closer to the middle the spiders did not always keep their heads downwards but that makes sense oh there's a but I mean I mean I was gonna say that it makes sense that they wouldn't always keep wouldn't always keep their head downwards because what is down in micro gravity and then the symmetry the symmetry kind of makes sense because if they're building it out in a symmetrical way it's gravity that's distorting the web ultimately yeah right so this is where it gets interesting though they had on their hands another confounding variable they did not think about that actually created an interesting discovery there were lamps and what they found was that it made a difference whether the spiders built their webs in lamp light or in the dark when they were built in lamp light they were asymmetrical as terrestrial webs orienting the center of the web towards the light and angling their body away from the light so basically they were they were treating the light source like a bait no they were treating the light source like the sun basically so it's like yeah so it gave them an idea they figured away from the light was down so they first of all they were very fortunate that the lamps happened to all be attached at the top of the chambers and they didn't just kind of put them where they fit because if they were all over they would have had no idea or they would have had to do all of this again but so they were all placed in the same place so that gave them this clue that the lamps had this impact so the spiders rested in arbitrary orientations when the light was turned off but then when it was on they used it as an aid when gravity was absent so of course having a backup system for gravity in general seems surprising for a species that has only ever lived on earth why would you have a backup system for lacking gravity it doesn't it doesn't make any sense but they're using light as this backup system for orientation the only hypothesis that researchers threw in here is that their sense of position could become confused when they're building a web the organ responsible for for their their orientation sense registers the relative position of the front body to the back and during construction those two body parts are constantly moving around so it's possible that the orientation that they could be getting from gravity is out of whack because they're just spinning all over the place making this web and so using the light might be their secondary source now this is totally not yet tested no it's just a theory here based on what we have because otherwise why would they have a backup to gravity but but so but this was only in the zero g that the lamp affected it wasn't on earth um so that's a good question right yeah so i think that um that probably is is a good next step here would be to mess with light orientation on on earth but my understanding is that that gravity is the main pusher for that so so because here's if i'm thinking like a spider which i don't i don't often but in this case i'm going to throw myself out there i'm going to be a spider and i got a light source be it the sun be it a lamp be it a street light be it a porch light whatever it is i'm going to want to orient the center of my web towards the center of that thing and i want to be on the business side which is where the bugs are going to be heading towards that light source which is opposite from from where that light is so that i can be ready to pounce on things as they head towards the light source and get caught in the web and it's just maybe i'm just thinking like a street an urban spider uh versus a country spider but that's spider country spider um that's i think that's not my understanding my understanding is that spider webs are pretty universally upper is where the that kind of center of the web is um so the other kind of weird thing here is that there are spiders that build their webs in the dark so right um when you're talking about earth dwelling spiders there are some that don't appear to use the sun at all um but orb spiders do and they and they i i not they don't use the sun i mean they obviously do but um we know that they build their webs during the day and then they eat them at night and then they build a new one the next day so so circadian rhythms are very seem to be very important to this type of spider yes and yeah that so i i did not mention yes it was orb weavers that were part of golden silk orb weavers just the best um and most terrifying spider web makers because the thing about orb weavers they're beautiful they're beautiful they're terrifying they're really good at making webs that are invisible because they take them down every night and rebuild them every day and so there's no detritus on there so you could walk face first into the orb weaver web which i have on the stand i don't like it um but anyway uh they might be using light as well as gravity anyway moving on orb weavers are beautiful and wonderful oh my god just let them build all across the front of your house no yes just go outside with the stick in the morning i don't know uh ever left again i don't know what kind of spiders it is but there's uh we have i think they're field spiders of some sort that build all sorts of big spider webs out there in the fields and there's a certain time of year when we'll get like a decent wind uh and i think it's in the spring or the fall some some in between but all of a sudden it can occasionally start raining spider webs in town well they're just they'll just be drifting down you're like what is that is it a plastic bag for letting me know it's a big it's a big spider web oh but why because they get lifted they've laid them out over the farmland and then the wind comes picks them all up into the drops them down again it's kind of fun no it's okay let's talk about fish i don't think there's spiders in those webs we could talk about spiders in the aftershow okay so let's talk about fish on there am radio this is a story i wanted to hear first yeah it's i mean it's a stretch i was using some flowery language but this is electric fish from brazil's amazon rainforest and um the this is research from the new jersey institute of technology looking at the brazilian amazon basin and the way that electric fish communicate this is the first time ever that electric fish have been captured in the wild in caves communicating so this is some some brand new information here um so they actually can communicate over long distances and they actually do liken it to am radio is why you know that whole descriptor there i'll explain why in a second um this is looking at cave adapted glass knife fish it has about uh 300 living members that we know of the whole species and has evolved from surface dwelling relatives so not that they live on land they live in water still they're fish but they're they're up top they're in the sun they're not inside a cave where it's pitch dark and so um it looks like they have these cave dwelling fish have sacrificed their eyes and their pigmentation as many animals who live in the dark do but they have gained more powerful electric organs to enhance the way that they sense pray and communicate with each other which is where this gets really interesting they analyze the fish's electric based communication and behavior uh the way they did that is they placed electrode grids throughout the fish's water habitats to record the measure and measure the electric fields generated by each individual fish they uh then the team analyzed the fish's movements and electricity based social interactions they were able to track more than a thousand electrical based social interactions over 20 minute long recordings taken from both surface and cave fish populations they could compare and contrast and they discovered hundreds specialized long distance exchanges they are really talking back and forth to me it almost sounds more like a cb radio in a in a truck um so of the nearly 80 species of cave cave fish known today that have evolved from surface dwelling fish all have developed sensory enhancements of some sort uh but this is definitely a first is this enhanced electricity for communication over wavelengths um so it's also partially potentially because even the water itself in the amazon river is very murky and so the the surface dwellers might already have some of this technique already which is why it was so easy for the cave fish to kind of augment and turn up the capabilities of this particular skill and so they can communicate in absolute darkness through their electric fields it's yeah it's pretty wild um so this is actually as I mentioned is the first time that they've been able to continuously monitor cave fish in their natural settings and so this was very cool to see them outside of the lab but uh yeah it's uh it seems like the strengths of the electric discharges in the cave fish were about 1.5 times greater than those in the surface so definitely augmented and uh they can go where was it they're only like 10 centimeters long but they can go in same lengths considering that they can go um uh meters they can go meters at a time with one electric communication and though they're only 10 centimeters long these little fishies so they can detect prey they can communicate communicate with each other and uh they have variable electric fields so that's kind of what they do the wavelengths change so now we guys just kind of what they're talking about yes yeah we have to decode it for sure so so then okay so don't this already starts making me think like do other is this happening other places um yeah I would say yes so sharks have right they have like this ability to at least sense sense electric signals yeah electric signals I wonder if they're able to produce them in a way that the they can see what another shark is doing some distance away yeah I mean or how is feeling is this a whole secret yes fish ESP world that we're just it's possible I my understanding is that the the shark electromagnetic sense is is pretty much limited to the electric signal that a heart would give off it's pretty different from this kind of am band that they're talking about here but um it's possible I mean if if the mechanics exist why not yeah so these are these are uh I'm assuming deaf uh and uh blind well they're definitely blind Carol Ann Benoit is asking what frequency this oh that's a good question and I'm seeing in the abstract of the paper that the uh they routinely found both surface and cave fish with sustained differences in eod frequencies that were below 10 hertz despite being within close proximity of about 50 centimeters uh and the relative let's see pairs of fish also showed significant interactions between eod frequencies and relative movements at large distances over 1.5 meters and at high frequent high differences in frequencies often over 50 hertz so it's a wide race looks like a wide range of frequencies mm-hmm yeah it's uh it seems like quite the cacophony um one of the one of the researchers said um quote this is the first time we've been able to continuously monitor the behavior of any cave fish in their natural setting over days we've gained gained great insight into the nervous system and specialized adaptations for cave life but it's just as exciting to learn how sociable and chatty they are with each other it's like middle school is what uh Daphne Soares from the New Jersey Institute of Technology says so i mean that really does get at you know these are interactions between individuals and is what is going on there and what are they talking about as goldizator from our twitch channel is asking could they identify individual fish signals like unique voices and like that'll probably be something that is yet to be determined right yeah yeah i i think that based on their grid that they set up they could identify which signals were coming from which fish just based on the way that they were um recording them but in terms of then being able to isolate them and figure out which is which yeah they have not tried to do any of that yet again this is the first time they've ever recorded this so i think it's it's exciting preliminary results it is uh and uh interesting kelan benoids pointing out that uh they were very very low frequencies and she says ah that makes sense and it does make sense because you would uh lower frequencies should travel further uh and so you would have a longer range communication that way yeah we think it's all just being quiet down there in the cave nope there's all sorts of chit chat going on lots of chit chat they love it fish talk they talk a lot they sure do be sure who is that who's over there there's a lot of that jim jimbob you know just talking stacy where are you just talking just talking this is this weekend science thank you so much for joining us today and if you are able we would appreciate your support we appreciate your support in listening to us but if you can head to twist.org and click on one of the links to donate to twist especially during this holiday giving season we now at patreon have annual memberships and you can choose between paypal donations or joining our patreon community the links are available at twist.org click on the patreon link to make your donation choice and ten dollars or more per month you will be thanked by name at the end of the show if that's what you wish we really do appreciate all of your support and we need your support to keep going to keep to keep running this ship and also to keep trying to spread the curiosity and sanity and science that we appreciate so much thank you thank you and also look we need it for the brass tacks kiki has got a feather that's not a loose feather from a down comforter that's not that's not a hair choice that went bad that's uh if i'm not mistaken kiki this feather has a clip on it that is holding down a button on the defective mic so that we can hear you no it's just my headphones so that i can hear you so that you can hear us okay okay it's the headphones right and i it's decorative also it's a nice little it's a holiday decoration yeah there was some there was some question like should should we mention that kiki has a feather stuck in her hair that she might not have noticed that fancy it's a very fancy holiday feather all right let's come back now Justin it's your turn to tell some stories oh no okay i don't know if i have any more oh wait yes stop blaming the mongols it everything wasn't their fault okay i mean there's some things what some things ganga genghis genghis i don't even genghis con and the mongol hordes yeah you know they get a lot of flak destruction well you know actually they were not that destructive if you just like conceded defeat right and then if you conceded they're like okay keep your religion and everything will go around you and you can be part of the community if you didn't know if you showed resistance they just then they just leveled the town so there's you know bad if you aren't a mongol but there was a what what are people blaming the mongols for i want to know what you're talking about for a long time they've been uh they've been blamed for the destruction of center central asia's river civilizations these are ancient ancient civilizations that happen have a couple of rivers which we're starting out a civilization from scratch access to water lots of it is a huge benefit it's one of these hubs where agriculture can get started for the first time this new technology requires the bandwidth of access to water so you uh you know centuries of of booming civilization then the mongols invade and suddenly after that nothing that whole area falls apart and for a long time they have blamed the mongols for somehow mismanaging or ruining the economy or something turns out no actually climate change at the time had dried up those rivers so that they weren't as lush and so this infrastructure of lots of lots of people who had made their livelihoods through agriculture much of it through ancient irrigation networks uh drier conditions looks like are the real cause this is a research led by the university of lincoln and uk they reconstructed the effects of climate change on floodwater farming in the region and found decreasing river flow was equally if not more important for the abandonment of these previously flourishing city states then the arrival of the mongol horde so climate change climate change worse than the mongol horde wow i think that's the uh let's take a message there wow and it's it was a region that had been uh pillaged and plundered and overtaken and changed governments and religions like many times previously and then specifically you know the last one holding the bag was the mongols and everything went to silt uh but apparently it's because the climate change had taken place regional climate change had led to drier conditions and ruined the flood irrigation i don't know if it's still really irrigation if you're just flooding i guess that's you know whatever works and then my last story tonight uh hey there's a challenge to dark matter being a thing that's important uh this is a an international group of scientists this is from case western reserve university astronomy chair stacey mcgall has published research contending that a rival idea to dark matter hypothesis more accurately predicts a galactic phenomenon that appears to defy classic rules of gravity so astrophysic say because uh this is significant because it further establishes the hypothesis called modified newton dynamics aka a mond or modified gravity as a worthwhile explanation for cosmological dilemma that galaxies appeared to buck the long accepted rules of gravity traced to sir isaac newton in the late 1600s so according to this uh for decades we've measured more gravitational pull in space than we think should be there there's not enough visible or norm matter to account for all the gravity thus the dark matter dark matter proponents uh theorize that most of you known universe is actually made up of material that doesn't interact with light making it invisible so if we can't see it it's not there except we can see the effects the gravity step matter must be there to account for those effects that we see in the gravitational pull amongst galaxies and it's been that's a popular thing that we talked about quite a bit on this show mond theory counter explanation introduced by physicist morty high milgrom from wiseman institute israel in their early 1980s says this gravitational pull exists because the rules of gravity are slightly altered instead of attributing the excess gravitational pull to an unseen undetectable dark matter mond suggests that gravity at low accelerations is stronger than would be predicted by a pure newtonian understanding in addition mond makes a bold prediction the internal motions of an object in the cosmos should not only depend on the mass of the object itself but also the gravitational pull from all other masses in the universe the external field of fact it's reaching out to everything which is sort of interesting because it's starting to sound like what quantum is sort of doing when they're trying to describe every like bit of particles actually have to spread it out across the entire universe once you get small enough to see where it is milgram said the findings if robustly confirmed would be the smoking gun proving that galaxies are governed by modified dynamics rather than obeying the laws of newton and of general relativity so there was a hundred and fifty galaxies in this test which is a small sample size billions and billions and billions but still you know um agon collaborator is led by kyle hind k from sejong university in south korea say they detected this e f e in more than 150 galaxies studied now now right away i have a problem with this they tested 150 galaxies but then they detected this effect in more than 150 is it like 150 ish right yeah like how do you say that they you can detect something and more things than you said you were going to detect because that's because then i mean because what that leads you to say is like but did you not detect it in any that weren't included in the study six out of five dentists recommend right yes yeah yeah there's a little problem there but that's at least with this is but this is just the blurb this is that this is not the study itself that i'm i'm looking at here this is just the press release blurb so there's some confusion that is probably 150 ish it says they detected it in more than 150 galaxies studied that's that's a problem just just if you wrote this as a press release you should stop yourself and go why am i saying this or why did they say 153 and that's more than 150 but it's it listen but it's they say okay they say they detected this e f e in more than 150 galaxies studied okay fine their findings are published in the astrophysical journal you can go look at it there the external field effect is unique signature of man that does not occur in newton-einstein gravity maga says this has no analogy in conventional theory with dark matter detection of this effect is a real headscratcher team of six astrophysicists and astronomers includes leader author che another contributors from united kingdom italy united states uh this is chai uh i have been working under the hypothesis that dark matter exists so this result really surprised me initially i was reluctant to interpret our own results in favor of mond but now i cannot deny the fact that the results as they stand clearly support mond rather than dark matter hypothesis yeah uh the group analysis oh group analyzed 153 rotational curves of disc galaxies as part of their studies the galaxies were selected from the spitzer photometry and accurate rotation curves spark database created by another collaborator uh in addition uh they also had this is university of oxford was involved this is case western this is i mean this is a pretty a big group of people from big universities this is not an outsider crackpot hypothesis one off physicist who's got this uh interesting math that may not have been looked at yet this this is a pretty decent group uh who are jumping in uh to this study that's got this conclusion uh who is this one here this is oh another researcher here uh lelly i don't know where they're from but they say because the external field effect on rotation curves is expected to be very tiny we spent months checking various systematics in the end it became clear we had a real solid detection yeah so it's either a real solid detection that uh that pushes dark matter out or maybe there's some combination or i mean this is this has been an ongoing debate for decades so it'll be really interesting to see how the astronomical community really talks about this paper and where this paper ends up going um now that these results are out i find what i find interesting they've got when they're looking at the very very gravitationally uh these these these galaxies that are around a lot of other stuff and there's a lot of gravitational stuff going on they're like really detecting at high sigma value they're like yes this works the gravitational stuff and the average overall is four sigma according to their paper and i mean that's that's pretty good i mean four sigma it's no six sigma but four sigma you know four is better the lower the number is the better isn't it no the higher is it the higher i thought it was i thought it was one of those weird lower numbers no i thought you wanted the least number of sigmas anyway uh this is a quote from uh migah here who kind of sums up what you're sort of saying i came from the same place as those in dark matter community it hurts hurts to think that we could be so wrong and by hurts it's not like pride it hurts is oh my gosh we spend a lot of time but a lot of time you have to do all it is you have to be rough you have to do all the things you have to do it to find out you have to lose a spider in the space station to understand yes it says uh milgram predicted this over 30 years ago with mond no other theory anticipated the observed behavior uh rod haglund's comment from the chat on youtube not the first time mond theorists have found a smoking gun and this is very true and we've talked about some of these stories through the years so um yeah i think i i that's why i say the any one paper is not ever enough and then it comes down to the conversation that happens within uh within the community of scientists where do they take it what studies happen on top of it what additional analyses happen um yeah so this is by no means putting the nail in the coffin of dark matter uh but it is an interesting result for sure i don't know mond the mond theorists they want it to be right dark matter theorists they want that to be right everybody wants their ideas to be right nobody wants to be wrong unless of course it's finding the truth right so so the truth is so ultimately uh what would be the most fun is for everyone to be wrong about the whole picture but each of them to be correct about the part and then you have to just bridge the gap between the two to find out what's really going on that which which is a way that sciences tackled a number of big issues in the past until you get to einstein and he's just like no you're all wrong and then it stands for you know 115 years that can't be right einstein oh 115 years later i really hasn't been wrong about anything well let me take you to some studies that are pretty cool not necessarily right or wrong but kind of awesome researchers publishing in the journal physical review letters have they decided to talk about making neuromorphic chips with magnetic material this is very very exciting this this paper of theirs these researchers are at hemhold zen from dresden at dresden rossendorf the hzdr they've demonstrated a new approach to neuromorphic hardware these are uh chips that interface with neurons right computers the brain that you could put a computer together with a brain if you had chips that could work with the neurons and could connect could connect and translate electronic signals or chemical signals back and forth so far it's all been run on traditional processors but these researchers have a new approach targeted magnetic waves generated and divided in micron sized wafers wafas these little tiny wafas um they are a disc of iron nickel it's just a few microns wide there's a gold ring around the disc and then gigahertz alternating current gets flushed through it when it flows through microwaves get a get admitted and then the disc elicits spin waves and the researchers say the electrons in the iron nickel exhibit a spin a sort of whirling on the spot rather than spinning rather like a spinning top they use magnetic impulses to throw the electron top slightly off course and this is a disturbance that then gets passed on because if you can imagine a bunch of spinning tops and few of them get disturbed they're going to bump into the things next to them and the things next to them and so this disturbance will get transmitted through the material and this is the spin wave getting transmitted like a wave through the material and this can be used to transport information so this group that's working on this chip discovered that the spin waves generated in this magnetic field can be split into different waves two different waves and the researchers say so-called non-linear effects are responsible for this they are only activated when the irradiated microwave power crosses a certain threshold and this is the point at which it becomes interesting because like neurons when a threshold is crossed that's when you can activate an action potential in a neuron so this is really an interesting parallel to how real neurons work and the researchers now are trying to determine how they can control these split spin waves and use them to uh to basically create a neuromorphic chip that could act in a way that the brain works um yeah it could deal with situations these neuromorphic computers could process more information more brain like um and i said i said earlier these neuromorphic being able to communicate with with neurons the other aspect is that set up in a system a network the neuromorphic chips all together in a network could act like a brain more like a human brain and process information um in a very networked way and and process large amounts of information at once very much like a human brain yeah that's frightening yeah it's super cool yeah i think i think it's a really fun uh fun advancement to be able to develop a technology that has these parallels to how the human brain works because as we try and create artificial technology as we try to create technologies that require more processing power multiple parallel streams and and crossover between those streams intercommunications very networked manner um we know the human brain is an efficient design and yeah it could it could lead a lot of the computing designs of the future hmm fancy fun times yeah skynet here we come but you know that's the thing there's the there's the you're almost saying we're going to take a very powerful we're going to create a very powerful genius into whose hands we're going to place that we don't know that's kicking the can down to the future some future desk spot or collection of well-meaning researchers will have access to this but we're going to create it anyway because why not because science because science science it's one of the it's one of the few places where i'm like like the we're talking earlier about all the faces uh emoting similarly emotively boy that can be misused with the amount of facial recognition software that's available in desk body countries or in highly corporate uh capitalistic societies either way yeah i mean taking that facial recognition technology i mean this is not neuromorphic chips but if you've got neuromorphic chips running ai's that are doing the facial recognition and potentially crowd control and they're looking for people's emotions to determine whether or not people are ready to to riot or are they having a really good time or or what is more insidious more insidious you uh take a selfie with your phone and it decides that oh you look a little sad today you could use a purchase that makes a purchase comfort thing at the tune of about 300 dollars if we pick the right item like this is and then suddenly that's your ad like hey feel better with this new winter coat that's going to make you feel way better or buy me this my google assistant really wants to know me i don't want my google assistant to know me as what as much as it wants to yeah um make my life easier i'm so looking forward to the to the as much as i am tied to technology constantly there's going to be someday i'm just going to go straight john savage cut the cord run to the wilderness and just not come back i'll just be done with all of you i just won't come back he went to the forest everyone he will not be on he's he's gone to the land he will not be on the podcast again enjoy your soma i've took some with me just ease my transition rather than well one of the things about being human is that we have we not just our facial emotions we have this amazing sense of touch what is it that allows us to have this sense of touch that we have what is it nerves brains nerves right nerves and brains exactly you've got our sensory system that allows right yeah that's why i can't feel in my fingertips because i i got some nerves damaged by a weasel that in your in your fingertips there there are bare nerve endings there are there are little nerve endings that that that that detect temperature there are our our voltage gated channels that that help it detect acidity there are burning there is uh there are also these capsules the mysner corpuscles at the end of some of our sensory nerves that we know are involved in allowing us to feel very fine vibrations and the very fine vibrations can help you determine the the feeling of a small of a slightly rough surface versus a very smooth surface whether or not something is actually vibrating beneath your fingers to be able to feel these things we have very very fine resolution thanks to our our sense of touch and the most interesting thing is that for years we've been like yes the mysner corpuscles and the nerves these are the things that allow us to touch and allow us to feel the touch there we go thank you nerves i'm i'm i'm sensing there's more to this story but it goes deeper yes it's all because of a protein not just the nerves but a protein called usher usher in usher in is essential for our sense of touch it is located in these mysner corpuscles researchers at uc not uc berkeley nope you're always going to say the wrong thing but this team at the max delbrook center for molecular medicine led by gary lewin they did this study to figure out exactly what was at the core of our sense of touch using patients who have what's called usher syndrome usher syndrome can affect can affect multiple sensory uh sensory systems blindness deafness and the inability to sense vibration in the fingertips are some of the traits of people who have usher syndrome they recruited patients who have the specific kind of usher syndrome that can't feel vibrations in their fingertips and then they measured how well these patients versus controls were able to sense pain temperature and vibrations in their fingertips at 10 hertz and 125 hertz and this is basically mimicking like i said touching a rough surface versus a slightly rough surface and these patients did just great at feeling pain at feeling the change in temperature but they were four times less likely to pick up on those 125 hertz vibrations and one and a half times less likely to detect the 10 hertz vibrations so then they were like okay something really is going on with usher with with with these usher patients okay we know that this is a mutation in the gene responsible for the protein usher in so they did the same study in mice that had this that had this gene that's called ush 2a or did not have the gene they had mice that had had the ush 2a taken out rodents were great at the temperature and the change in the the the pain mice with ush 2a were better at detecting the vibrations than those without it so this is really giving pinpointing that usher in is responsible for the sense of vibratory touch in the mysner corpuscle they found usher in in and around the mysner corpuscle when they went looking for it usher in in all sorts of other places but specifically they found it in this mysner corpuscle and so this is something that is new newly understood it gives a new nuance to how we understand our sense of touch and the fact that there's this this protein that's involved that that helps transmit the vibrations to our nerves in some way so what other elements are involved that we don't know about yeah so i might have like a lot of this you know you know like when you get a cup of coffee and you put your sleeve on it you have extra usher in is that what you're saying yeah and you put you put that sleeve on the cup of coffee so you can hold it i still can't hold it it's still too hot for my hand i have to have them ice down the coffee doesn't have anything to do with temperature i'm super temperatures that like i cannot i have to wait till the thing cools to below room temperature otherwise i feel like i'm burning my mouth and i can't even hold i'm like grabbing two of those and a napkin to carry my cup of coffee out no it's really like nobody else i noticed that no one else is having this problem around me but i just can't even hold on to the thing because it's so hot anyway but it's not the usher and that's just a vibration sensor i need this might be some other protein yes usher in is usher in is going to be involved in a lot of other systems but specifically they have temperature was not one of the temperature was not one of them but vibrations specifically vibrations in our sense of touch so the next time the next time you run your it's proteins all the way down yeah the next time you rub your finger over a surface and can feel the roughness of a surface say thanks for usher in that in do you have a next story i can transition to real quickly it is the end of the show as we come to the end of the show i do want to remind everyone that we will not be back next week for the podcast we will though i think are we decided we do we want to do a twist holiday party next wednesday that i don't have to edit and turn into a podcast yeah so for anyone who's here live next wednesday 8 p.m pacific time we're going to have a live holiday party it's the 23rd of december is that correct 23rd of december i'm going to bring kai if if you know this is this is a company party so if you've got you know family kids we can we can bring our christmas treats bring your eggnog and um maybe maybe we'll sing some christmas carols or i don't know play deer pong something like that deer pong it's like when you put cups on all the antlers of the deer and then you try and bounce balls into your neck that's that's just you i think no i think i read about that and doctor sus if you have any questions or if for for us um if you have any ideas for our top 11 stories of 2020 which will be our last show of the year at the end of the month the last wednesday of december the 30th we will have our top 11 stories of 2020 if you have recommendations you can email me at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com or you can leave us a message on our facebook page but i think that does it do you do you both have any any holiday messages before we say good night merry twistmas everyone and to all a good night that's right all right thank you all for joining us so much we do hope that you enjoyed the show there are some calendars left so if you are interested in a calendar head over to twist.org and click that horny frog to get yourself a calendar for 2021 shoutouts to fada for helping with show notes and social media gourd thank you for manning the chat room and identity four thank you for recording the show once again really appreciate all your help and very much thank you to our patreon sponsors and the boroughs 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When everyone sings, we like to sing. We do like it. Oh, shoe bill costumes for humans, the most like life of life like of costumes, huh? Yeah, Justin's mic was too hot tonight, especially when he was yelling. I think he must have- It was very crackly. I didn't hear the- Yeah, it wasn't crackly. Just at the very high end. At the high end, yeah. I think I'm wondering if he hit the little switch on the back of his microphone. Oh, yeah. There's one of them that's real hot. That's true. Yes, I'm wondering if that was hate. Where did Justin go? Wherever he goes when he decides it's time for him to take a break? I was gonna wait for him to get back, but I'm gonna run away. Can we do next week as a Zoom video chat so we can see everybody and have them ask questions? I don't know if we could do it as a Zoom video chat that- I mean, I guess we could do part of it as a Zoom. Yes, we covered the ignobles earlier this year, Gaurav Fosho. We did- I always try to cover the ignobles because I think it's a very worthy award. It's a couple of weeks before the nobles, so I always try to cover both of them. Yeah, but we could potentially do Zoom and if- I was thinking also there's this cool platform called AirMeet that I like and I think we can stream to YouTube from AirMeet and AirMeet allows people to sit at tables together and have conversations and you can go from table to table to table and talk to different people. Yeah, that's one idea. Yeah, there's also Jitsie, very similar. Yep, I see you saying Matrix Thunderbeaver. Yeah, so I don't know. I mean, I don't know that I want a completely open Zoom call where everybody can join because as much as I love that, that just opens up the possibility of Zoom bombing, which I'm not a fan of. Right. Yes. What if we just- I think we need this announcement for all of them. What if we just send it out to our Patreon patrons? I could send it out to our Patreon patrons, that's a great idea. And then whatever we do, we can usually stream from Zoom to YouTube. That is possible. It is possible. So am I going to have to actually think about this before Wednesday? Do I have to think? I'm trying not to think next week. That's my plan. I want to do very little research, I suppose, research. No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, I can set up a yeah. Yeah, I'm not a fan of Zoom, though. Zoom is, I know Carol, the whole point is to make it hassle free, exactly. And fun, just fun. I'm not a fan. The reason I'm not a fan of Zooms is that everybody ends up on a screen together and it's just like, and it's super overwhelming. Yeah. So I don't like all the people on one screen at the same time, which is why I'm thinking air meat could potentially be something that we could do. What are we contemplating? Is this for next week? Or is this for next week? Yes. A way for us to have a party. I don't know. Or we'll just come here and do the show without the show. We'll just have a party here like we do. That sounds reasonable. Yeah, I'll think about it. I'll think about it. And if there's a sign up. Oh, mix and drinks. Oh, Steven Rain. Yes, I can do that too. We could also do a thing where we like interact with the chat room. Yeah. Yeah, totally fun. Yeah, we can do something. Well, Thunderbeaver can host and password protect things like servers. Could do something. I don't know what matrix is. Goop talked about it before. Look at me yawning. Oh my goodness. It's 10 o'clock at night. So I'm standing again. I made a standing desk tonight and I'm like, this is way better than sitting in the chair. Yeah. I'm still trying to figure out how to set up a lying down desk. Every desk is a lying down desk to you, Justice. Which I had during our Christmas weekend. Yeah, air meat. You don't have to download anything. It's browser based. It's no, it's easy. It's browser based. You don't have to download anything, Caroline. It's pretty cool. It's the holidays almost. We'll get this podcast out. Blair's already on holiday. Yeah. I'm in fact, I'm going to run away in a moment. Let's see. What night is it? It's night seven. Seven. Night seven. Yes. Do you have five more nights of Hanukkah? Is that 12? Oh, eight. Eight. No, it's the 12 days of Christmas. Yes. The eight days of Hanukkah. Yeah. Okay. I always try and go back to the lyrics of the Adam Sandler song about Hanukkah. Eight crazy nights. And eight crazy nights. I have to go through the lyrics before I can get to the number though. Yes. Quiz time. Yes, go have like the trivia idea. I like the trivia idea too. I can roll out some trivia for next week. So I already made some holiday trivia. I made a holiday trivia deck for work that I couldn't just use also. You guys want to do that? It's already done. So zero work is the beauty there. I like that. Yeah, I think that would be cool. Questions is work. Yeah, bring that. Bring your trivia deck. Done. Double duty. That's great. Do you still have MailChimp? Yes. Okay. Because I know you had it because of the zoo, but I was wondering if you still had it. Oh, no, that was a separate account. Oh, cool. Okay. Good. I made a separate account for us. She just automatically associated it with the zoo because of the chimp factor? Yes. Yes. Yeah. No, I can definitely populate the bones of a newsletter this weekend. That's easy. Yeah. I have things when I get home. So, yeah, no push, but this, yeah, I think it would be good to send one out for the holiday. Yeah. For the end of the year. Yeah. You're going to quiz us. Yeah. You can quiz us next week. Great. Yes. Next week, wherever we are. Test the knowledge. I don't know. That could be dangerous. Test the actual knowledge of the hosts of their favorite science show. You might learn more than you didn't want to know about integrity. Apparently, Blair knows a lot about warp drive. Apparently, she knows the canon. I just saw the episode is the thing. When I watched Voyager when it was first on TV, that episode was the only episode that I remembered at all because it was so gross because Tom Paris was like flaking and lost his tongue and stuff. But then rewatching it, yes. So basically, here, I'm going to ask Brian because he's sitting right here. So basically, right, it's because warp 10, they're simultaneously at all points in the universe. Yes. Okay. So why did that turn him into a salamander? They're saying that that's evolving them. Oh, it evolved them more. It didn't devolve them. Salamanders are more highly evolved. It was still in the DNA. It was just randomizing the expression of DNA within the biological host. Sure. Yes. Yes. So then he turns into a salamander and then he kidnaps Janeway and it takes her to warp 10 so that she also turns into a salamander so they can make salamander babies on a class M planet. So that's warp 10 turns out. So. Yes. I don't, okay. Salamander babies. So anyway, on that note, it's all axolotl from here. Have a wonderful mini holiday getaway Blair. Thank you. Thanks. And I'll see you guys next week. Yeah. And before anybody leaves, I want to talk to you in the after the after show really briefly. The after the after show got it. Just for a second. Okay. Okay. So, okay. We're gonna call it an early night tonight. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Have a wonderful week. We hope that you'll join us for our holiday party next Wednesday at 8 p.m. Have a wonderful week, everyone. Stay safe. Take care. We'll see you soon.