 Hello everybody. Welcome to the weekly podcast broadcast of this weekend science. We're so glad to see you here. Thank you for joining us for another episode. We're gonna have fun with science. House of fun. Wheel of fun. House of science. Wheel of science. Oh, of course, Facebook. You do it again. I knew it. It looks like Facebook does not want to enable this stream. So we will re-enable the stream for Facebook. Save the changes. Hopefully it'll work. Oh, Facebook. We are on the YouTube, the Twitch, and the Facebook. And if it's working, we usually go live a little bit right after 8 p.m. Pacific time every Wednesday. So make sure you hit all of the subscribes and shares and likes right now to help us get the algorithms going so that we get shared so that we end up in people's views and suggested videos right now so that if people are watching, they might be able to join us. That would be pretty awesome. Make sure you share with your friends on your socials wherever you are these days. And yeah, we're both here tonight. Yeah. So you ready for a show? I am. Amazingly. I wasn't sure. Oh, get up really early in the morning for the show. I looked at my computer and here's a bunch of stories laid out. And so whatever yesterday Justin was doing, he managed to put the show together for today, Justin. So good at that. You are so good at planning ahead. Okay, let's do this show starting in three, two, this is twist. This week in science episode number 945, recorded on Wednesday, September 27th, 2023. Don't be afraid to ask stupid questions. Hey, everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we will fill your heads with scams, weed and worms, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Science is an ever-evolving journey of learning new things. Where we are today, the knowledge we have gained could not have been predicted 50 years ago. Where we go next, the knowledge yet to be discovered cannot be predicted today. At least not specifically, but generally speaking, we know exactly where we're headed. Towards a future of knowing everything. How things work, how they interact with other things, and how to enhance or suppress the way those things operate. It may be difficult to imagine at times the things we have yet to learn. We don't even have names for them yet. But in time, as the unknown things are discovered, the unknown things will be named, and then we will know what to call them. In the meantime, we will keep an eye out for new things here on This Week in Science, coming up next. And a good science to you too, Justin. And welcome to everyone to a new episode of This Week in Science. We are back again. Oh yeah, to talk about the science. We always love to talk about the science, as opposed to all the other things that might, you know, be keeping us down. I don't know. Anyway, we like to lift people up. Where's science? Optimism. Yeah, I have no idea what could be bringing anybody down because I am now living Denmark. That's where you live in Denmark. The happiest place on earth. They don't have blooms here. Oh, it's really interesting. It's a really, it's a really strange thing. You're like, I think I'm going to have a problem and somebody comes around. Problems and controversies and come to a country where everything's fine. All right. Well, we're going to have a great show. We really are. I'm just letting you know right now. But as we stream this broadcast tomorrow, we'll be Ask a Stupid Question Day. So in honor of the day, I invite you to send us your stupid questions this week, and we will answer them in future programs. Well, we actually already got one in the chat. Aaron Laura says, How does Justin not have any gray yet? Oh, man, I do. I do. The trick is that I never tie my hair. I'm never going to do that. The trick is to get your hair wet before airtime and then you can't see it. But this is all gray, all through here on both sides. So thank you for talking about my youthful appearance, but it's all a ruse. Well, at least they're asking about your youthful appearance instead of mine. So that's good. I'm happy. Yeah, what do we have on the show tonight? We have, I brought stories related to the physicality of cells, some space news. I've got some igno bells, which we love so much, and also some brainy stuff for the end of the show. What did you bring, Justin? I've got a public service announcement about scams. Engineering feet has converted saltwater into fresh water without electricity. I got some really old wood, oldest wood ever. And a potentially controversial story about weed. Potentially controversial. Well, we're not going to bias anyone right off the bat. There we go. Yeah. Yeah. It's potentially, it's a story I was doing for Medical Express that took a turn I wasn't expecting. And I'm the one writing it. And I didn't know I had this opinion. And apparently I did. So we'll get to the very end of the show. We cannot wait if there's nothing better that is discovering new opinions here on This Week in Science. Okay, if you want to subscribe to us, you can find us on YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook, where we broadcast weekly 8 p.m. for our live podcast broadcast. That is then taken, turned into a real podcast, and you can find us as a podcast on just about every place podcasts are found. Look for This Week in Science. Our website is twist.org. You can find us as Twist Science, a lot of places. And I think that's kind of it. We're ready for the science? Almost. Let's do a quick sound check, because there was a comment that Kiki might be on the quiet side, or that I might be on the loud side, which sounds like how we are in person. That sounds about normal. Actually, tap, tap. Yeah, that's the right mic. All right, mic, tap your mic. Oh, wait a time. There, that's your mic. Yeah. It's all good. Can you gain up a bit? Or is that a? They always have it at the same place. I can. It's fine. All right, all right. I'm not hearing the live feed, so I don't know. I just hear you and I hear myself, but I guess I don't really hear myself, so I don't know. I just hear you. So I'm turning myself up just a little bit. Okay. Here we go. Are we ready for the science? Let's do it. Okay, let's start off with some fun. We love science fun. Woohoo. Every year, the Ig Nobel prizes are given out prior to the Nobel prizes. This year, they were handed out on Thursday, September 14th at the 33rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. And this is a webcast. They're going to be doing a live in person version later in November, but for right now, we know that the prizes first in chemistry and geology are to Polish and UK scientists, Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks. Why do scientists like to lick rocks? Well, you'll have to find out in the paper Eating Fossils, published in the Paleontological Association Newsletter number 96 from November 2017. So it sounds to me like this is an old geologist methodology that probably at some point they realized it's not as accurate. No, actually, no, you got to talk. You really do need to dig into this one because it is a it is very tried and true methodology. Certain rocks, you know, you can lick certain rocks, you know, you can't lick certain rocks. If you're in the field and you lick them, they help you determine what family of rocks they're actually in and what compounds are in them. So the chemistry is involved. So there's a lot of interesting aspects to why geologists lick rocks. It's true. Seriously, rabbit hole this one. It is great. A literature class. Can you picture the classroom when everybody walks in? They ever is like, oh, hey, we've got a rock on their desk today. Today, what we're going to be doing is taking notes. We're going to lick rocks and take notes on what you notice. A literature prize goes to France, UK, Malaysia and Finland for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a word, a single word. Many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many times. The paper is the induction of Jean-Méry in the laboratory, word alienation and semantic satiation. Yes. The jamais vous never seen or the before, the sense of having seen it before or no. Yeah. It's like, ah, it goes away. Mechanical engineering prize, India, China, Malaysia and USA for their research in reanimating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools. Oh yeah, we covered that one. Yes, we covered this story. This is the one in which they were using spiders with kind of hydraulic forces to use them for new arcade games. Yeah, basically, they pump into the, I guess, the spider and they would actually grab onto something and then they could release the blues and they would, yeah, it's going to come in handy someday. Yeah, this paper, Necrobotics, Biotic Materials as Ready to Use Actuators. Oh, Necrobotics, it sounds so terrible. It's my favorite. Seriously, it's my new favorite future science. Okay, public health prize goes to South Korea and the USA for inventing the Stanford toilet. This is a device that uses a variety of technologies, including a urinalysis dipstick test strip, a computer vision system for defecation analysis, an anal print sensor paired with an identification camera, and telecommunications link to quickly monitor and analyze the substances that humans excrete. Yes. Yes, you heard me right. You heard me correctly. So we reported on this toilet a while back and I remember that I remember the monitoring part. I forgot completely about the how it how it how it identifies. Yes, yes. It scans that so it's kind of like, yeah, I can ears very individualized the iris of an eye the fingerprints are very individualized. So too, I suppose would be the part you're aiming down at the toilet. Well, you know, we could really actually use that technology in other fields that could be, you know, talk about high security. I'm the only one that can open this is scanning. Oh, how were you able to get into that vault? Well, you know, on Valentine's Day, someone gave me a chocolate anyway. Serious know what you mean by that. And I hope I hope nobody gets that joke. Okay. Communication prize Argentina, Spain, Colombia, Chile, China, USA is for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward. Oh, paper, neurocognitive signatures of phonemic sequencing in expert backward speakers. Expert backward speakers. Yeah, that would be that would cause my brain to completely derail to try to become an expert backward speaker. When do you? How do you? Where do you use that? How does it occur to one to even begin training and training skill? Yeah. Well, this is something when I remember like as a kid trying to do the alphabet backwards. I mean, pig Latin. Yeah, the alphabet, but But they didn't keep trying to do that. No, but I guess they're probably expert pig Latin speakers as well. A medicine prize USA, Canada, Macedonia, Iran, Vietnam for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person's two nostrils. It could not be quantification and measurement of nasal hairs in a cadaveric population. According to their abstract, what wait, there's no abstract available. Come on. Gotta give me an abstract here. Nope, no abstract available. That's too bad. I would like to know. It's one of those studies though too. It's like you're quantifying a thing. You can quantify anything. It's like, well, we're going to compare the number of hairs on a mule to the number of hairs on a hair. Like, okay. Yeah, I don't. Yeah, I guess there would be limited benefit in knowing the symmetry of nasal hair. Yeah, I don't know why I honestly am curious as to why that would be a question you would go about quantifying. In nutrition, Japanese researchers took home the prize for their experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food. Electrified straw, so. Ow! Electrified chopsticks every bite. How did that change the taste of your food? I don't like it. Augmented gestation using electricity. Yeah, so they're conveying information humans cannot perceive with their tongue. I don't know whether it worked or not, but that was their new methodology. So anyway, in the education prize this year, Hong Kong, China, Canada, UK, the Netherlands, Ireland, USA, Japan, very cross-cultural here, got the prize for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students. And their title of their paper is Boredom Begets Boredom, an experience sampling study on the impact of teacher boredom on student boredom and motivation. If your teacher is bored when they're making the lecture, it's a pretty good chance the students are going to be bored as well. That sounds completely reasonable. I think it's very reasonable. Yeah. Like that really makes sense. And then we have two more. Psychology prize goes to Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz for their work back in the late 1960s for experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look up when they see strangers looking up. Okay. Okay. Okay. Out of all of these nobles, like sometimes you can go, oh, you do an experiment just to practice doing a kind of an experiment. You just didn't have anything. You're going to count nose hairs, see if you can do it, see how you quantify it. This one is just fun. This one is just giggles. Yeah, they found that as the size of the stimulus crowd was increased, a greater proportion of passersby adopted the behavior of the crowd. So the more people are looking up, the more people you're going to get looking up. The final prize, you can't resist it. You see three or four people looking up into the sky, you're going to be like, oh, and then of course you don't see it right away. So you keep looking, scanning, trying to figure out what's up there that they're looking at because sometimes things are hard to see. Oh, that's hilarious. I love that one. Finally in physics, Spain, Galicia, Switzerland, France and the UK are awarded this prize for measuring the extent to which ocean water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies. Basically their title of their paper says it, intense upper ocean mixing due to large aggregations of spawning fish. The anchovies, they go crazy. It mixes the water. It's a whole thing. It's like a force of nature or something. And that's it for the Ig Nobel Prizes for 2023. Congratulations on the new inductees into the hall of Ig Nobel honor. And we will be looking forward in the next few weeks to the Nobel Prizes as they are announced, as they usually are. But those are all going to be for boring stuff. Here's the thing we expected to find and we found it and it's in the field that everybody else is studying. That's always also exciting to see who they've given it to. Yeah, we're super excited. So we'll be looking forward to that. But let's get into the new recent science. What has happened this week? You have a warning for us. Yes, Justin. Yeah. So this is something I wrote up for Medical Express. It was a short kind of study, 644 older adults. And by older adults, 85.6 was the average age. They were part of the Rush Memory and Aging Project map and ongoing cohort study, looking at conditions related to aging. What they decided to do was they tried to trick their participants with a mimicking an information scam or a scam where somebody pretends to be calling from the government and needing information from them. Of the 644 participants, the majority, 68.5%, 441 of them did not engage at all. So they got a variety. They got some got emails and some got things in the mail with a phone number they needed to call. Others got a direct call from the scam. 68%, 68.5% hung up or never called to engage. That's great. Congratulations. You win by not engaging. You did it. 97 or 15% of them engaged skeptically. These I like these folks. I like these folks. These are probably the more savvy ones. They're like, hey, you sound like you're scamming me and want to tell them about it. Then sadly, 106 or 16.4% of the cohort were part of the conversion group. Of those converted, nearly three quarters provided personal information to the scam. How is this different from other age groups, though? We're focusing on these older adults, but is this just normal or is this a particular problem? They don't have the normal group. I know that these scams do hit people of all ages, but it's much more common to hear about it happening to the elderly. They looked at why these different groups of people or different people had fallen for, not engaged in all, or had been skeptical about it. Those in the skeptical engagement group, turns out had the highest cognitive scores and the most financial literacy, but the thing that was sort of overriding in the group that gave up personal information was that they had the lowest scam awareness, meaning they were just less likely to have heard of scams. And they just aren't thinking that way. So they're just trusting, yeah, because why would anybody pretend to be the IRS or the DMV or the whoever is calling? Why would anybody even do that? That would be the point of even having my personal information. They're not me. They can't do anything with it. So this is according to the National Consumer Law Center nonprofit organization. There are 30 million robocalls from scammers daily in the United States and the results are about $30 billion in theft each year. It is estimated that 70% of Americans do not even answer the phone if it's an unknown number due to having received so many robocalls in the past. And the problem is the do not call list that was established. I think everybody's on it now. The problem is it only works with legitimate businesses. The do not call list does not work with scammers. Now a lot of telecom companies have developed, you've probably all seen it, the scam likely that will appear on the phone to let you know that that call that's incoming is likely a scam. So that's huge. That's a huge step. But there's also spam emails that can go out that claim that you have made, verifying that you've made this purchase of some amount from maybe a company that you an Amazon or something like this that you do have transactions with. You go, oh gosh, I didn't make that purchase. I better respond to this. Or you get a text from the bank. Don't click on anything. A text from the bank saying, oh, hey, there's a problem with the account, right? Don't click on anything. Just delete it and then call the source. Call your bank. Go to your account on Amazon directly. Do not click. This is my public service announcement. Okay. Right. So this is the public service announcement because it turns out that just knowing about these scams is the thing that prevents people from falling from the scams. Yeah. Okay. So things to know, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IRS, computer support from Best Buy, Geek Squad, credit card companies, do not call consumers and do not transact any business through email. They've spent billions of dollars creating their transaction platforms They do not call. They do not email. This is not how they communicate with you any longer. They do no business this way. And they never transact any business through gift cards. Anybody asking you to buy a gift card is a scammer. And the reason they use gift cards is because it's uncraceable. You can get a number over the phone, redeem it on a computer halfway around the world. And there you go. The other common scams that are of note are low-cost vacations where we just, we're doing a promotion where we want, you know, for $600, you can have four nights at a hotel and wherever you want. That's a scam. Extended warranties. You get calls for extended warranty. They want to, oh yeah, it's an extended warranty company or putting a warranty on your car. That's a scam. There is student loan forgiveness, apparently, has been a scam. So you also look for whatever's in the news. PPP loans, student loan forgiveness, additional benefits through social security, anything like this over the phone. All of this is going to be a scam. Additional insurance for the elderly over the phone, also a scam. Debt collection can be a scam. You also have to watch out for if you're looking for a job because there's fake job postings that exist, which is why if you see a company that has a job posting on one of the posting sites, whatever they may be, go direct to the company and look for it. For that, because you don't want to give your information to just anybody over the phone. So anyway, if police charities do this too, all sorts of charities will go to a dedicated website for the company if you're really that interested, but do not respond to any community. Trust no one, except for me right now telling you not to trust anybody. Trust me right now, and then after this, don't even trust me. No, continue to trust us. I hope we're a trusted source. We're helping you. My favorite one though is personal information. I don't want it. I really don't my favorite scams. I've gotten this call a couple times. I've gotten it from both FBI and from the DEA, where an agent calls about a car full of drugs seized at the border. And it's connected with my information somehow. And so they're going to be sending the police to my house unless I can figure out and I can start a case. But the only way to start a case is to agree to send $500 via gift card. Again, because that's the only way they can get money. No, it's not the only way. You also, here's another very important one before we move on. Never allow any form of remote access. If somebody is on the phone asking you to download an app onto your computer, do not do it. It is, you know, a scam where they're saying they're going to be refunding you money that you obviously didn't pay. It doesn't exist. There is no automatic geek squad charged from your Microsoft account computer. There is no Amazon MacBooks that are being purchased halfway across the country. It doesn't exist. What they're going to do is get in and manipulate it so that it looks like they have accidentally refunded you too much money, and then you need to send them gift cards. It's always more gift cards or log into your bank account and transfer money directly. Yeah. So they can do that. The only problem is that gets flat for any significant amount of money. So what happens then is you get a text alert from you on your phone, a third-party verification with the code. And the scammer will ask you for that code because they know they're getting prompted on your computer because they've taken over and they're hiding it from you. They think they're getting, oh, what is the code to complete the transaction? And so they say, just so that we can make sure this money makes it to your account, can you verify the number on your phone? Bank accounts, life savings have been drained this way. Absolutely. Yep. So don't fall for scams and tell people. Tell the elderly. Tell the naive. Tell the savvy. Tell everybody. Keep repeating it. Yeah. Yeah. Keep repeating it. Repeat and repeat. Just over and over again because let's help the people. Yeah. Cannot. And you don't know enough to help themselves. Help them. And the best way that we can get the word out is for everyone listening to go out right now, get a gift card for $499. And mail it to... Oh, my goodness. All right. Well, let's move on from gift cards into the real gifts of the universe. Space news from NASA this week. Two stories. First story is, yay! Osiris wrecks the mission to the asteroid Bennu. Successfully returned a sample to Earth this last weekend. The deserts of Utah were graced with a canister dangling from a parachute as it floated at many thousands of miles an hour towards the surface of the Earth and needed to be slowed down. Anyway, this canister was then taken very carefully after a crash in the desert. Very carefully to Johnson Space Center in Houston. And since then, it's very exciting. They just today or in the last 24 hours have opened the canister lid for this sample. They have a laboratory set up that is a clean box that this sample is within. So everything is being done in a way to make sure there is no contamination by people of this sample since it has returned from space. They opened it up and they saw that there's a bunch of dirty looking dust on top of the stuff inside. They don't know what it is yet, but there's more work to be done in the preparation of this sample for its next steps in early October when it will begin to be analyzed and there is apparently going to be a live stream on October 11th at 11am Eastern time. They're going to work together to complete the disassembly process and reveal the sample to the world. So we can all see this sample of a chunk of rock and ice that was brought back from asteroid Bennu over this is a wonderful mission like this is similar to the Hayabusa missions. This is the strategy and tactics involved to make this happen are many, many years in the making. And so this is a very exciting opportunity for us to figure out what this class of asteroids is made of, how it evolved, all sorts of stuff, letting us know about our solar system. This is also the one that is projected to potentially hit the earth in like 160 years. Yes, in a while, not right away, but in a while, yeah. And if that happens, it will most likely fall into the water. But if it doesn't, it's a big one. It's not one of those like civilization enders, but it could take out a large farm in the Midwest or a bunch of farms in the Midwest. It could do enough damage that it would be like, really something if it hit where people were. The thing is that there's mostly water on the planet, things are. However, the idea of deflecting it is going to come down to what this is made of. Because what was it? It was actually the Hayabusa mission. Itaqa, the asteroid, turned out to be like mostly gravel. Yeah, very means if you went and did a thing to try to push it, it would maybe, you know, just sort of like break up out a little bit. It's not going to get moved off, of course, because it's structurally not one solid object. So knowing whether or not this one's a solid object or not, we'll let the folks 160-ish years from now be able to decide whether they want to try to deflect it or just let it go. Just let it go. Well, for now, the the craft that returned this sample is still on its way further into space off to look at another asteroid, a Pophis. So it is heading out to look at more things. It's not done yet. Wait. Yes. It can do that. Yes. It just dropped off the sample and kept going. The craft is like, see you later. Got another asteroid to meet up with. Hey, just dropping this by. I hope you like how I drop it on your doorstep. That's some next level NASA. It's just staying out. Cruising around. It's amazing. I love it. Yeah, this is wonderful. And speaking of things smashing into each other, NASA has also been working with the Durham University location of the distributed research using advanced computing, DRAC, super computing facility in the United Kingdom. And they've been trying to figure out where Saturn's icy rings came from. So the Cassini mission gave us a really up close view of the rings and let us know, hey, these rings are basically only made of ice. So where would all this ice have come from? How could it have come about? And researchers have a few hypotheses about how that could occur. But in this situation, they created a simulation for the impact of two primordial moons of Saturn that probably got knocked out of whack by the sun itself. So the moons are orbiting around Saturn being held in check by Saturn's gravity itself. But they're also being impacted by the orbit around the sun. And so it's possible. They think that these icy moons were knocked out of their orbits just enough so that they ran into each other. And these icy moons crashed. And according to simulations, gravitational forces from Saturn would have kept all that ice right around Saturn and would have led to the formation of these moons. So the formation of Saturn's rings is thought to have occurred only a few hundred thousand years ago, not a thousand, excuse me, a hundred million years ago. So possibly during the time of dinosaurs, this was occurring. But then the question that this leads to is how dynamic is the ring system of Saturn, right? So we're looking at it from a fairly stable perspective, right? You know, just looking at the sky for being able to see the rings of Saturn for a very limited period of time. And this is, you know, millions of years, but at the same time, for icy planet, not icy planets, icy moons like Enceladus, where we think there might be liquid oceans under which there could be life contained in the methane liquids under an icy crust, is it possible that life could be coming about if that Jovian, not the Saturnian moon system is so dynamic? Is it possible that these moons are young? Is it possible that life has occurred and then it's smashed to bits? Is it possible that it may yet, in one of these more stable moons that we think of as more stable, be smashed to bits? I don't know. What does it mean, everybody? And if we're looking at it on the, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of years, hundreds of millions of years, what time frames are adequate? Very good question. So I've gotten, I've come to the opinion somewhere recently that life exists pretty much everywhere in the galaxy and therefore probably the universe. Anywhere there's an earth-like planet, certainly. Now, maybe even moving that into some non-earth-like planets, if we do find any signs of life on Enceladus or, you know, one of these icy moon things, if we find a good signal of life, that opens it up even more. Yeah. You know, because it's just, it's going to come down to chemistry and physics for the basic building blocks. And then time, right? And then time. What forces are, what forces are there? What, you know, you've got the chemistry, you've got the building blocks, right? Do you have the right temperatures? Do you have the right acidity? Do you have the right amount of time? And there's just a certain amount of that that's, when you say the right, we're not just talking about what earth is today. We're talking about actually really wide span. What is it, 10% of the biomass of the earth or something like this is living below meters, 10 to 20 meters below the soil surface, all around the planet. Yeah. So what we expect as an animal on a planet, life to look like, isn't the only way that life looks. And it's not the only condition that life can exist. Yeah. It's just the only one that's interesting. I, yeah, but I think it's a, you know, an interesting question brought up and it's, we look at things from our human centric perspective where it's just, this is what it is. But there are so many millions of years of dynamics moving on around us. And I love that we can use these supercomputers now to be able to come up with these simulations that give us an idea of various possibilities and support or refute various hypotheses we might have. Yeah. It's just physics, man. Oh, it is. Yeah. Tell me about chemistry, though, and engineering. There's something important there. So there's a, there's a thing that we talk about every once in a while. New, I don't know why it's, it's an ongoing theme because the world is running out of freshwater is why it's an ongoing thing. Turning saltwater, which again, three quarters of the planet, even more may is covered in engineers at MIT and researchers in China are turning sea water into fresh drinking water with a completely passive off grid device inspired by the ocean and powered by the sun. So the configuration of this device allows water to circulate in swirling eddies in a manner similar to the thermo-line, thermo-highline circulation of the ocean. Circulation combined with the sun's heat drives water to evaporate, leaving salt behind. The resulting water vapor can then of course be condensed, turned into drinkable, pure, fresh water. And through some trial and error, they've managed to design it so that the leftover salt continues to circulate through and out of the device rather than accumulating and clogging or being filtered. Oh, so that is, that's one of the things I wanted to ask about because I think this is huge for salination, for all sorts of, you know, what happens to the salts? Do we have membranes to clean? What's going on? So from what it can look like, they did something kind of, kind of clever after, okay, so let me see if I get, so the initial design, which the team tested on the roof of the MIT building, efficiently converted the sun's energy into evaporated water, which is condensed into drinkable water. Success, but the salt that was left over clogged everything up. So that, you know, you could, you could run it for a while, but the leftover salt, settling and accumulating on the device made it so that it was, yeah, didn't, didn't last too long. You'd have to replace the whole thing. It gets full of crud. Too expensive. Keep replacing this configuration. So then they, and follow up effort, they devised a solution with an added feature that helped circulate incoming water as well as any leftover salt. And this design prevented salt from settling and accumulating in the device. And it desalinated the water though at a relatively low rate. So it slowed down the system so it wasn't as efficient at creating fresh water. In the latest iteration, you still have, it's expensive for a different reason. Yeah, it just takes, it just takes too long. The team landed on a design that has achieved both a high water production rate and high salt rejection so that the system can quickly and reliably produce drinking water for an extended period. And the key, according to this is that new design is a combination of the previous concepts, multi-stage system of evaporators and condensers that is configured to boost circulation of water and salt within each stage. So part of what they're, they're taking advantage of is having the salty water keep moving through the system, keep moving through the system below the surface. And that generates something similar to the thermo-highline, the temperature and salinity differences, which seems to actually be accelerating some of the evaporation maybe, and keeping the salt from settling and clogging. And then later it can be expelled. And one of the big problems with desal systems is that they are usually very electricity intensive. So it's one of, it's like the, the energy water nexus, right? So the more fresh water you want, the more electricity you need to desalinate. Yeah, so this is a completely off-grid pass of no electricity added. That's incredible. It's a big box and it's tilted a little bit. I think that taking advantage of gravity, moving things down the different stages or compartments of this. From the test, the researchers calculated that if each stage were scaled up to a square meter, it would produce five liters of drinking water per hour. And that the system would desalinate, desalinate water without accumulating salt for several years. Given the extended lifetime, the fact that the system is entirely passive, requiring no electricity to run, the team estimates that the overall cost of running the system would be cheaper than what it costs to produce tap water. Which is ridiculous. So now I want to know, okay, calculations, great, but real world, I need them to get on it right now and build not just a meter big, but I need a building, a warehouse size. Let's do it. Let's just see. Does it work? Three things that they don't mention in the study. You just got to bring it up. Okay. One way to get the salt water from. The ocean? Okay. Or from the bog water in your marshes? Yeah, yeah. Part of water treatment, tap water cost is water treatment plants. That you still need some element of that, but I don't know. I don't know how much microbial of whatever's floating around in the water can survive the evaporation trip. I don't know. This would probably be something that goes along with a water treatment plant. There currently are lots of desal plants that are that line the coast, different countries that are more desertified, but are coastal. These would come in handy, very handy. The western states are going to be undergoing huge drought issues into the future. It's not going away anytime soon. So if the coastal regions can be where the oceans are, the salty water can be taken advantage of, that can lead to water sources that can be trucked in places. Not that that fixes the problem, but it helps. Another thing? The expenses of the deal. What do you do with all that salt? That is the big question. Is it going to be because if we've separated and say that it is like the water that comes off it, no, the microbes don't even like to go up the evaporation things. I don't think you have to look at that. Now you've got this salt brine that you could turn into salt, I suppose, but you still have. You'd have to make sure you have the right salts. You have to make sure that it's not toxic salts. You have to make sure that you have to isolate the sodium chloride from other metal salts that might be in there. And then the last final one is what happens if we do, if this catches on and the whole desertified portions of the planet, especially during the climate change and the heat that's coming, we turn it on, we go after this and use up all of the salt water. Where are the fish going to be? No, that's not going to be. We're not going to use all the salt. That's a whole different question. But I do think that the effluent from these kinds of desal operations, it's really important to think about that because right now there are big desal operations that just put the stuff that's left over right back in the water. And so it turns into a really toxic brine area. And so it can actually be really ecologically damaging. So this is definitely something to consider. Proskons, fresh water is going to be a big issue for agriculture and so much for people moving forward. Yeah, this is important. This is huge. If it really, really works in scales up, it's huge. If it scales, if it scales, that is the question. How big does it have to be? How much, how, yeah, will it still work in the same way? Or as it scales, will there be other factors involved in how it works? I don't know. Anyway, I have a couple stories about our physical cells. We like to think about, you know, ourselves as physical beings, right? You can push against your table and you feel it. But, you know, you could get in a fight, you'd feel that. But you know, a hug, you feel that. That's nice. But you don't really think about the physicality of the cells in our body, themselves, right? Our sensory cells are the things that let us know that we're touching stuff, whether it's a hard surface or a soft surface. But it's not just our sensory cells that are mechanical in nature. There are two studies out this week that I thought were really interesting. One studied in nature biomedical engineering that looked at the how bodies reject biomedical implants. And very often what happens with biomedical implants is that the implants stress out the body and there's a scar tissue that ends up forming around the implant. And because the scar tissue forms around the implant, it basically isolates the implant from the rest of the body. And so in a large number of cases, the implant has to be removed because the scar tissue is built up so much that it's not effective anymore for whatever its purpose was. So how do we reduce the scar tissue or how do we make, do we want to reduce the body's reaction to these devices? Anyway, researchers have looked at all this stuff and it turns out that it's the immune system at an immune response that's responsible for this scar tissue. And people historically have thought that it was due to some kind of chemical interaction. But a group of researchers that put this study together looked at these capsules that were implanted in women who had breast implants. They had 20 patients who had breast implants that were removed and 10 of them had severe reactions to those breast implants and 10 who had very mild reactions. By looking at the reactions of the proteins and molecules in the tissue around that implant, they found there's a protein called RAC-RAC2. And it's really highly expressed in the patients that had the severe scar tissue reactions. And what that was stimulated by was mechanical stress, actually just the implant itself bumping up against other cells. And then immune cells coming into the mix and going, ah, what do we do? But because of the mechanical bumping and jarring, it caused those immune cells that had RAC2 to do big RAC2 signaling and invite more immune cells to come. And because more and more immune cells came to the area, they all started going, ah, we don't like it and built a fibrous wall. And so you end up with the fibrinogen leading up to the scar tissue around it. I wonder if there is an attempt first to attack it like it's a cellular thing, like try to kill it. But it won't die. Yeah, it's still there and the cells are being bumped up. We don't have a solution. Just wall it off. Well, normally if there is a solution, you wouldn't continue for it to happen, happen, happen, right? And the immune cells wouldn't need to call more and more immune cells. And so, but it's not just a chemical stimulation that's leading to this immune response. It's actually the physical mechanical stimuli of bumping into the immune cells that's leading to it. So they went downstream and they found that if they could block the expression of RAC2 animals that they could block this scar tissue response and lead to much, much reduced up to threefold reduced production of these fibrinogen tissues. So the question now is, you know, is this something that you could look at to determine if somebody has the genetic profile to have a higher RAC2 response? Do you give them a drug that can block the RAC2 after you've given them an implant? Is that something that would be worthwhile? So is this something that it could actually be conjugated onto an implant itself so that it's not a drug that's necessarily given but is slowly just part of the implant and slowly leached out and just part of the interactions of the implant with the immune cells around it? Which could be pretty interesting, but it's a different kind of way for these researchers what they say is that it's just a different kind of way to look at implants not just as, you know, interacting chemically with the body but actually the mechanical stimulation that occurs and how that impacts the cells themselves as well. This is also what happens when surgeons leave sponges behind. Yeah, yes. Is they get walled off, they get surrounded, they can look like a tumor later and then going to do biopsy and they will find, oh, oops, you had surgery in this area, yeah? Yeah, okay. Okay, and the second study that I thought was really interesting, again it deals with the immune system, but this time they were looking at how immune cells bind to antigens. So normally an immune cell, a B cell, has a receptor on it that is like looking for weird things, weird little bits of protein that cells are holding out going, this isn't supposed to be here. And so when that B receptor cell goes and bumps into the antigen, it's like, okay, okay, I'm going to grab on to that, oh, we don't like that, okay, now we're going to make an immune response, we're going to eat this cell, okay, that's done. But how does that happen? We think of it again as usually occurring on a very chemical level, but it turns out that there are mechanosensitive ion channels, cat ion channel, which is a positive ion channel, usually like sodium or potassium that gets stimulated by physical mechanical deformation of the membrane of the cell. And so in this study that they just published in Science Signaling that is suffered that B cells are really strongly stimulated when this particular mechanosensitive channel called piezo one gets stimulated and it needs to be mechanically stimulated for the B cells to respond to antigens that have been presented by the membrane. So if there's a cell waving an antigen out, it's like the immune cell has to bump into the other cell and do the handshake and that handshake needs to be a firm one that really shakes the immune cell. And when it shakes the immune cell, it gets that mechanosensitive ion channel to open up and then the immune cell, the B cell goes, oh, okay, now we eat you, you're not good, we eat you. We call somebody to eat you. We call someone to eat you, yes. And so this in this study, in itself, it seems kind of small, but what it potentially means is that as we look at how to design vaccines for the future, it's how can we create vaccines that work really, really well when they're membrane bound to be able to stimulate these mechanosensors to be able to really activate the potential of a vaccine in the body. Or prevent it from happening. Or prevent it from happening. So one of the interesting things in the COVID severity cases has been recruitment of killer T cells, or lysing T cells, CD4s, to buy, probably likely buy the B cells without, but it's, the virus actually attacks the B cell so that the B cell, which normally has kind of a doorman saying, oh, there's too many lysing the T cells around here, rest you go home. You're not letting anybody else in tonight if you're a T cell. That gets broken down by the virus, which then it just keeps recruiting. And so a lot of the damage from the severe cases of COVID were because of this B cell signaling pathway. The immune system. Allowing more damage to be caused to cells than needed to be to clear virus or attack. It wasn't even attacking virus, it was attacking cells that may have been, had the B cell attacked. Yeah, so there's the complement immune system, which slides in line with like the, I forget all the particular terms for the different names of the immune system. But there's like the immune system, that's our skin, that's the way that we move and like sweat and that kind of stuff. But then there's the B cells and T cells. And that's another part. And then there's the complement system. And the complement system is really part of the confusion and a lot of time those signaling cascades that lead to inflammation problems and yeah, real severe disease. It's a mismatch between one system and the other. Is it innate? Is it the innate? The innate. In the experience, there's the one through experience. But yeah, the B cells and T cells, those are like your experience. There's the innate, which is your skin and your sweat and that kind of stuff. And then there's the complement system, which is its own bucket of worms. So much fun stuff when you get into the immune system. But I think this adds like another interesting level to, you know, how cells interact with each other. We forget that down at that cellular level, it's a bunch of bumping and jostling and moving around. And that in itself is important to the ecology of those cells and how everything is maintained biologically. And that is also a thing that is missing. Like when, when you are trying to chemically formulate and genetically formulate and create a picture of what is taking place and then have a drug target with a chemical reaction. If you've missed the fact that once you get there, you've got to shake hands really hard with the other cell. Your entire thing that works on paper, that chemically should all interact, isn't doing its job. Exactly. Because you missed that physical. Because you missed a physical, mechanical interaction. Oh my goodness. Yeah, I could see that people stand up late at night sleeplessly, their hair turning gray. You could watch it turn gray because everything should work and it doesn't. Body is very complicated. And it's a real thing. It's not a thing on paper. Oh, biology and our listeners. Everyone, I am so glad that you're here with us for this week in science this week. Thank you so much for joining us and taking this time with us during your week. We're so glad that you're here. If you are really enjoying the show, make sure you head over to twist.org. Click on the, what is it? Patreon link. Oh yes, Patreon. That is how we bring everyone together to support the show. If you're interested in helping support the show in an ongoing fashion, become part of the Patreon community. Join there and support us for as much as you can per month, $10 and more a month. And we will thank you by name at the end of the show, $15 and more per month and you'll get some stickers. It's pretty awesome. There's other things as well. Additionally, you can click on our Zillow link and head over to Zillow. Get some really awesome twist goodies. We've got shirts and hats and stickers and other things for sale over there. And if none of this works for you, just, you know, tell a friend about twists this week. Make sure you get a friend to subscribe to twists. Do that this week. That would be a huge help. All right, coming on back to the show, still no Blair, but Justin, you're just in time to tell us about the science you brought. This is the thing we've talked about in a few different contexts on the show, which is wooden artifacts, rarely surviving from ancient times. Well, we have so much evidence of the past through stone tools and the occasional fossils. We have very limited information about when and how hominins were using a more kind of basic raw material in wood because it it doesn't survive. It doesn't survive the test of time. It's too organic. It breaks down too easily. Now, new earliest evidence for structural use of wood in the archaeological record has been discovered in waterlogged deposits at the archaeological site Calambo Falls in Zambia. This is dated by luminescence dating to at least 476,000 years ago. Take another 23,000 either way. So 450 to 500,000 years old. They have found preserved two interlocking logs joined transversely by an intentionally cut notch. Now, that might not sound like the most exciting thing in the world, but it is. So one of the logs is over four feet long, what's left of it there. And the authors are suggesting it could have been used as the base of the structure. It kind of looks like the, if you are a certain age, it kind of looks like the notching of a crude Lincoln log or the like a log cabin where you notch out the ends somewhere near the ends of the wood and then you stack them on top of each other and then they're kind of linked to make, they hold their place. So very much looks like the oldest log cabin I've ever built. Expert analysis of stone tool cut marks on the wood so that these early humans question mark shaped and joined two large logs to make a structure. So the age 450 to 500,000 years ago, this predates what current modern humans call modern humans. We're only supposed to be 200,000 years old. We think we've pushed it back a little bit more, but not by much. Seriously? What? Yeah. So this is highlighting something that archaeology has also been hinting at for years. There are places on this earth where we have found the remains of Neanderthals, Homo erectus, islands far out to sea where regardless of climate, there was never an opportunity to walk to. We have Crete, Nigerian, Philippines and Indonesian islands have records of Homo erectus. These are places where a swimmer with Olympic modern human swimmer abilities would find challenging to reach, let alone a pod of early humans that didn't have a practice pool. So it has been suggested that boats, some form of crude wooden flotation device may have been needed to traverse these scenarios, but we don't have any records of it because wood doesn't survive time. And there's no evidence of woodworking and wooden structures that old. No. Until now. Because wood would break down unless it's fossilized or, yeah. Yeah. The conditions in which, you know, bone will fossilize are better than you will get a preserved wood. And even if they're side by side, the wood will degrade. And the, of course, the stone tools that were used to work this we have seen. And it may be, it may be that there's other stone tools, stone axes that we have thought of as meat rendering or, you know, crushing nuts or something that have been woodworking tools all along. We just don't know because we haven't found any evidence to suggest that they were doing woodworking this far back because now we have conditions for making that happen hadn't occurred until this finding potentially. Yeah. Yeah. This is a buried waterlogged find. 476-ish thousand years ago. This is in Africa. So this isn't Neanderthal. Maybe a little bit older than, this isn't an Neanderthal. So Neanderthal should already be out and proto-Neanderthal somewhere in the Caucasus or Europe. They may, they should be heading that way, at least out in the Levant. This isn't, this isn't likely early current modern human. At least it would have to be pushing that back a lot further. So right now we don't know. The timing would, yeah, the timing would suggest what for, I mean, this is South Africa. So this is going to be. Is it? Or is it India? In Central Africa, I'm sorry, Central Africa. Yes. So we are earliest, you know, I mean, part of the problem too with Africa is that. Could be anybody. Well, it could be anybody, but it's also, it doesn't have, you know, the places where you're most likely to find preserved skull fossilization for that process to be slow enough tends to be very cold environment. So Africa for as much early history as we've gotten out of Africa, it's actually a terrible place for fossils. It's just so big that we found a lot. But in terms of conditions for preservation, it's terrible. Is it possible that early humans, modern humans go back further? Yes. Is it possible that other humans that we have not yet even fully understood to have existed have created this? Yes. Is it possible that one of the humans that we have found some evidence of, but don't have a good timeline for how long or over what territories that they live, like whatever the thing is that they've been finding in Morocco, like whatever that is, which is looks kind of like a neanderthal and kind of like a current modern human, but it's too old to be either. And it's like, what? There's all sorts of mysteries yet to be. But again, terrible fossilized architecture. But this shown woodworking, I think is pretty amazing. This is the oldest actual structure made by humans of what ever found on the planet. And I think what the evidence that they've looked at to make this seem like it was built, that it was structurally modified by humans are the repeated scratch marks that exist in particular directions that don't make sense. So if you just put two pieces of wood together and they rubbed each other over time, they wouldn't make the same kinds of scratch marks that they've seen on this fossil. Oh, and they've also within that site, big site, they have found the tools. The tools are also there. So it's not just the wood isolated from, but there are also. This was their shipbuilding factory? Yeah, yeah, kind of. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't look like they're, I don't know, maybe it's for the river, but I don't know if this thing floated. It looks to me like the beginnings of a shelter, like the log cabin. But they also found different carved stick configurations when they called it digging stick and they don't know what it was for. It might have been a stabby stick. You don't have no idea. Or a kid, children's toy, you know, if we're throwing rocks up in the air and hitting them with the stick, you don't know, you weren't there. But there's all kinds of other evidence in the area of some messing around with wood and having all the tools to do it, which was, which was what the site was looking at to begin with. And then this got discovered. And now they're like, oh boy, one of the things that too they mentioned in the study is this might change the view of nomadic early hominins. But it doesn't really. But it doesn't. They were nomadic. Because nomadic doesn't mean just wandering blindly across. It usually means you might have like a seasonal home, might have a winter home, might have a summer home, but you go back to the same locations usually, seasonally. So this place might not have been lived. Even nomadics may not have lived in one location year round. They likely lived in that location just about every year. Generally. Yeah, for maybe thousands years later, you know, nomadic is very, we're just stationary today. That's the thing. That's what's different. What do you do? I'm a nomad to my kitchen and then to bed. I wander around them times and seasons of the day. Maybe I go to the grocery store. Yeah, I think this is an incredible find. I think this is the kind of discovery that that we've been looking waiting for, you know, that is the kind of thing that takes the data that we've been looking at and going timelines of hominin, of homo, whatever species. They don't make sense, but we don't have all the fossils yet. We need more bits and pieces, and this is one of those pieces of evidence that'll fit nicely into the tapestry. It's a while to me like how many new hominins. Like there was already plenty of hominins in the past. And since we've been doing this show, I think there's been like four or five more added. That's just wild. How many hominins, how busy they were getting into all sorts of things. My final story of the evening is also something I worked up for Medical Express. It's out there somewhere in the world. Safety concerns about youth access to online marijuana dispensaries. This is researchers from the Stephen and Alexandra Cohen Children's Medical Center of New York. They published in JAMA Pediatrics and they basically did a data collection from 80 websites that offer that are marijuana dispensary websites, 32 different states. And they were kind of focused on things like the shipment regions that they would send to product types, age restrictions and verification, delivery and pickup options, warnings, disclaimers, payment methods, this sort of thing in relation to underage access to dispensaries. So upon arriving at a dispensary website, 56 of the 80, 70 percent prompted users to either click to have to, you know, like, are you 18 came up on the screen? And then they had to click. Yes, if they are or no, if they aren't and then don't get access to the website. It's unclear because they weren't studying how effective the actual button click screen was. My guess is not very, in terms of deterrence. Three websites asked for specific birth date. We were talking about scams earlier. Never give your real birth date to a website just to see the website. No, you don't give your real birth date. Any, I mean, don't give, yeah, don't give your real birth date. You don't do that. Right. So what's the point of asking somebody's real, buddy's real birth date if nobody's going to give their real birth date? Nobody's going to do that. Nobody's going to do that. I bet you, I bet you if you looked at the other side of that data. No, but if we caught you lying, G will occurs. I bet you if you looked at the other side of that data, yeah, this is all just disclaimers for, you know, lack of liability thing. Well, you know, they clicked the button, so they lied, not us. We didn't give it. But I bet you if you looked through the other side of the data, they will probably have a lot of those people who were filling that out, who were born on April 20th. None of the sites required age verified, verified age documentation to enter the website, which I would be weird if you had to like show your ID to your computer in order just to see a website. And my goodness, websites would get spoofed and spammed. Like this would be like the epicenter of every scam fishing expedition from here on out, right? That would be terrible if that became common. Age verification was required when completing a purchase or upon receiving a marijuana product from 53 dispensaries. So 66% required some form of age verification to actually receive the marijuana product. 15 or 18.8% did not require any formal age verification during the purchasing process. And if you're underage and listening, no, I don't know what sites those were, sorry. Age verification methods included government-issued identification at 40 of the dispensaries, medical marijuana identification number was needed at 21. Self-reported birth date was sufficient at eight. 53 dispensaries offered a pickup option, and many offered delivery. 67% also offered delivery. Half of the dispensaries provided legal information, disclaimers, well, many didn't. And 22, 27% offered delivery across state lines from the dispensaries location, which is sort of interesting because that could be sent to a state where it's not legal or differently legal. Depends, yeah. Anyhow. So now we know there, this is all these different. There's not a uniform way that an online dispensary operates in today's environment. Yeah. So according to this, only one in five dispensaries required, one in five dispensaries required no formal age verification at all, at any stage during the process. 20%. Yeah. The authors conclude it is imperative to require strict age verification procedures prior to cannabis purchases online and to establish stringent surveillance of online marijuana dispensaries to protect youth. That's where that story concludes. And this is where we're going to go into the, what did you take home from this that surprised you? Well, the question is, how would it protect the youth? How do we protect the youth? How does it protect the youth? Because like the thing that, you know, providing marijuana in this sort of structured way, where there's a, where it's regulated, where there's a measure of safety in the interaction, purchase interaction where it's not coming from a black market. And there's a level of safety, especially since the United States has a fentanyl lacing crisis where people are dying of overdose from taking the thing that they didn't know was in there. How is this protecting children? If the adults are all saying, yeah, we love the new system of legally being able to get marijuana without having to deal with criminals or funding the black market, why would it then be okay to send the youth to the black market? Why would you want them in the black market? I'm not saying make it, it shouldn't be legal. It shouldn't be like intentionally authorized. But if we just, the loopholes that are there might be okay. And here's like, here's sort of how I come to this conclusion because currently there are, what is it? What is this? This is according to the monitoring the future national survey results on drug use, which is a CDC cited report, which is one of the main go-tos for the National Institute of Health to point to when they're when they're talking about statistics of drug use. The prevalence of marijuana use in 2022 amongst high school seniors, 38.3% have at least tried it once and many, I think it's like 6% of them are daily users. 38.3% though have tried it. So you're saying you would take 38.3% of seniors and send them intentionally to the black market to go procure the marijuana. Now you might say 38.3%, that's a problem. That's a high number. Actually it's not. It was much higher in the past. When it was more illicit, right? When it was more illicit, when it was illegal. So 2012 senior age marijuana use, 12th grade marijuana use was reported at 45.2%. 47.8% in 2002. It went all the way down though, surprisingly 32.6% in 1992. Oh, back those kids of the 80s, they weren't doing the marijuana. 58.7%. The class of 1979 had the highest reported marijuana. These are people who are now running the country, right? Like, oh, the kids today. They got a problem with the kids today. Too lazy. They don't work hard enough, right? Class of 1979 had the highest reported marijuana use at 60.4% of students according to the national survey that's been going on this whole time. Okay. It also wasn't as strong back then. Yes, it was. Yeah, actually no. So another thing that's in this survey, which is really interesting because you always hear that, but they actually surveyed for duration and intensity. And it looks like duration and intensity has been the same the entire time. Interesting. Yeah. I think they may have needed to smoke a little bit more to get there back around. Right. Yeah, exactly. That's why they're... It wasn't as bred to be as strong each strain. But I just meant you got a duffel bag of it instead of a Bami bag. Anyway, we're not talking about that. No, we're talking about safety and access. Yes. Access to marijuana over the history of prohibition has clearly not been an obstacle for the American youth in acquiring marijuana. And now that the adults are all happy, who were these kids, by the way, the adults who are voting for and utilizing dispensaries were these kids. Now that there is a safer, legal, taxable system, you would... I'm just saying maybe not close all the loopholes. Here's an interesting statistic too. California or figure out how to do the loopholes better. So like for a moment here, instead of just having a website where you have to click a button that says I'm 18 or give a birth date, how about if you're going to be getting from a particular dispensary, you have to actually have a relationship with that dispensary where they have your information on file. So they know exactly your idea. You've you've turned in an ID. They know, you know, no, you know, you got to keep the loophole. Oh wait, but this is for kids. This is for adults. I mean, and so then if it's kids, they won't be able to get it because it'll have to be an adult. Yes. And so they're going to have to go down to the drug dealers who aren't specializing in marijuana anymore because they're all the dispensaries. They're selling harder drugs later with fentanyl and then the kids are dying. So forget it. Keep the loopholes. This is a slippery slope argument. It's just wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Allow the liability disclaimers. Here's the thing. Also, they kind of point out like one of the things that they recommend is like there's too many anonymous ways to pay. And that would be one of the ways that you can kind of control youth access. The problem is that wasn't created by the dispensaries. That's the whole federal banking law, unclarity thing where like major banks wouldn't take deposits or do transactions for the dispensaries. So that whole anonymous industry is the fault of law. It has nothing to do with the dispensaries choosing that path. Yeah. But I don't know. It looks like the American youth have been made up their mind a long time ago. And they're figuring it out. I mean, I don't know. We can protect the youth as much as we can by talking with them honestly about things and being honest about the fact that, hey, if you start smoking weed before you're an adult or if you start drinking before you're an adult, it is going to impact your brain in a not so beneficial way that, yes, you're going to survive, but your brain isn't done maturing until your mid-20s. And you start getting into this stuff in your teens and it leads to lifelong patterns. I know people who are lifelong marijuana smokers who have had entirely success, pretty successful. I mean, there is a team. Yeah. I don't know. I think this is a very interesting question though. Yeah. What do we do to protect people? But how do we protect people from themselves? Well, the other thing is, I didn't realize how much. There's $4.6 billion since legalization started that the state of California has collected in the taxes, which is a fraction of the price. Oh my goodness. I should have been doing illegal drug selling of all those years. It's a multi-billion-dollar industry for marijuana. Who would have known? And the only way it could have been that is if it was already accepted by the population. But the fact that just the taxes over those like five years or whatever it's been is like $5 billion. And then it's the price of the thing on top of it. That was a huge industry that the criminals must be really upset. That's why they've moved into different areas. Oh boy. Well, let's talk about the brains of all these criminals and their emotions. They must be feeling, being upset, all that money that they used to be making. Better have my money. Better have my money. So where do our emotions come from? You feel things, right? And emotions build up to lead to your overall mood. Otherwise, mood can also influence how you feel a certain emotion. So if you're overall happy, feeling good, I'm in a pleasant mood. Okay. You're more likely to respond positively to things, as opposed to negatively. So your emotions may stay more positive, unless, of course, you're like in a bad mood, and then you're going to respond in a more angry or upset way to somebody potentially, as opposed to in a more positive or neutral manner. Where do all these things come from? They all come from biological need to survive. These are all behavioral strategies that animals have had building on them over eons of evolution. So what are the mechanisms that have evolved over time to lead to what we now consider emotions? And the difference of a human having an emotion and something like AI that can only, or sorry, Patrick machine learning, that can only simulate an emotion. Well, these researchers just published their work. They're out of Nagoya City University. They just published their work in genetics. And instead of working with mice and rats and other more related mammalian species, they went down to the worms. And they decided to work with C. elegans, because it's very well known in the lab sector. Its genes are well understood. We've sequenced its genome and we're able to impact it very significantly in the laboratory. And its emotional range is just much broader than you would expect. You would not expect them. Yes, exactly. And so the question is, okay, emotions in a worm, how does this connect? Well, they're not really looking at the emotions, but they're looking at the behavioral repertoire of these worms. And they found that these worms, they really like their food that they eat. And so they eat these little bacteria and the little bacteria they like, they follow those bacteria. They love those bacteria. Those bacteria are very important to their survival. They're going to do just about anything to hang out with those bacteria and be where those bacteria are. However, when they applied an electrical stimulus to the worms, the worms went wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, and they tried to wiggle their little wormy way away from that electrical stimulus as fast as they could. And in fact, some of those worms, they kept wiggling and wiggling and wiggling way longer than really should be recommended for a normal worm who's trying to get away from an electrical stimulus. And so the researcher said, what's the difference between these worms that keep running and running or wiggling and wiggling and wiggling and these worms that they wiggle for a while and then they stop and then they go back to their looking for food. First, the fact that these worms don't just wiggle a little bit as soon as the electrical stimulus is over and then go, oh, the stimulus is over, I'm done. They don't do that. They keep wiggling a bit longer than would be not, than you would expect. It's usually like, okay, we stimulate you with electricity. That's danger. You wiggle to get away from it. Stimulus goes away. You stop wiggling because the stimulus is gone. But these worms, they're like, uh-uh, I'm gonna keep wiggling. I'm still wiggling. I'm still wiggling. And then, like I said, the other ones kept wiggling, wiggling, wiggling. So what this suggests is there is a pathway that's inherent in the brain, the nervous system of these worms that leads the worms to preferentially not go after their food to escape from danger and to continue escaping from danger until they're really sure that they're away from it. And they say that this could, this could be attributed to an early mechanism that might lead to emotions because it could stimulate some areas using similar chemicals, neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, very similar to our hormones that would leverage these advantages of these worms. So they found that these worms, basically they were able to isolate these neuropeptides. They were able to find genetic mechanisms that underlie the production of these peptides. They were able to change the levels of the peptides in different worms. So they were able to create worms that ran longer than you should and worms that would not run long enough. And in doing this, what they think is that if they can kind of balance this idea, like a basic idea with like depression or emotional dysregulation, that those worms that run too long, then maybe they don't have the neuropeptides that tell them to stop at the normal time. And so the signals that get turned on for fear or anxiety or being upset, sadness, that those signals don't get turned off. And that maybe this mechanism is something that is very basic to biology. Well, isn't that what the amygdala does? Right. Yes. Yeah. But is it like the mechanism? Yes, it's a stimulus response. But what is happening in there? What is it that's, you know, the basic mechanism like this is going into like deep into like not just the emotion, but the neural chemical signals that are occurring at a very basic level and are there preserved genetic components that are there for a reason for survival? And that if we understand what those preserved genetic components are, that maybe those genetic components could become targets for treatment. Yeah. So you'd get an injection into your amygdala that is like, okay, we can turn off these signals now. Yeah, turn it off. Because the amygdala, that's the problem with the amygdala. This is why the amygdala is such an issue at the core of so many different things. It's problematic. It has a hard time receiving signals. It can send them, but it doesn't take back the information very well. Because it's the primitive brain part. I'm speaking in like primitive monkey brain, or maybe worm brain now, I don't know. It sends out all those distress signals, but the thinking part of the brain that goes like, okay, yeah, that was alarming, but I'm watching a movie right now. I don't actually need to run. Thank you for the fear response, but I am good now. And then if you have a problematic amygdala, it keeps telling you to run even after you've left the movie theater, even if you're home, now you're home in bed at night trying to sleep. And because the fear response was triggered during the movie, your amygdala is still telling you, hey, get up and run. Like, I need to sleep. This is already in the past, but telling the amygdala that it's okay to chill out is very difficult. Chill out. Apparently it's like the basis behind like most PST, or PTSD. PTSD, yep. Over activity. Amygdala centric. The amygdala continuing to fire the danger, danger, danger, long after and just not receiving the cease and desist orders from the the main consciously thinking brain. Yeah. So the worms don't necessarily have a main consciously thinking brain, but they do have neural networks. They have these, you know, these ganglia of nerves that act to allow basic responses. But these basic responses are also mediated by these neural peptides that either accentuate or negatively impact survival. And that's where we came from. Everyone worms. No, we didn't count the worms. That was a fish story that I didn't bring. Did you see the fish skull story? I didn't see the fish skull story. They think they found the first skull. Oh, the very first one? Yeah, like, yeah, like the very first one, like, the only one, the first one. That was it. This is the first one we made. It was like a fish with like a collagen wrapped head where the brain was becoming separately protected from the rest of the body. I didn't bring it because I started only the last second didn't have time. But there's never enough time for all the things that we want to be looking at. Never enough. So the next study has to do not with the amygdala, but with the with the brain and our response to loss. So what does the brain do when we lose things, whether it's people or stimulation or a job, you know, you grieve, right? We have a loss reaction and we adapt to loss. But in some cases, loss can be maladaptive. We experience loss and that can impact us very negatively. And why does that happen? So this research, which I'm not exactly sure really gets it lost. But I mean, I am not a rodent. So this is not something necessarily. Anyway, these researchers had mice in an enriched situation. So they had a bunch of mice, and they gave them a wondrous world to live in, lots of things to play with, all sorts of stuff to do, other mice to hang out with. It was like Mouse Disneyland. Yeah, they had a great time. And then they took it away, made the mice live by themselves in sterile, empty boxes. No, yes, they did that. They did that to these mice. And so, you know, this is making a equivalent to going to Disneyland and having to go home and having to go home, taken away from all that stimulation, sterile box, sterile town with no rides, costume characters, go back to your house, things aren't as magical. Okay, so they, yeah, they took them away and they had a two week period where the enrichment was removed, and then they looked at the brains of these rodents, and they found that there were some significant changes in different areas of the brain. So these rodents, it seemed as though the brain became less plastic. And there were particular areas that were more affected than others. But overall, what they saw is the molecular response was to downregulate a whole bunch of molecular commands that normally lead to plasticity of the brain, connecting, making new connections, as if the brain kind of stopped. And then they saw that there was a change kind of in the insulation of the brain. So all of the cells that normally support the brain and the extracellular matrix, which actually physically supports the neurons in the brain, those became more insulating as if they were putting armor around the neurons and holding them in place. So I think it's a really fascinating result that they found here, where looking at the genomics, the proteomics, the various aspects of what was happening, and also in the physical changes to the brains after the enrichment was taken away, it led to significant changes that could be equivalent to loss. But then the question is, you know, is it just that all the enrichment was taken away? And is that just what happens when you take away enrichment? I mean, and in a sense, is that, I mean, that's not just what loss is. But I don't know. I'm still struggling with this one a little bit. But I find, I also think it's really interesting that the discovery that the support cells, so the microglia became smaller, they became less phagocytic, so they were breaking down fewer cells that needed to be broken down. They weren't doing the work that they needed to be doing of cleaning up the brain. It's kind of interesting. It's kind of interesting. I don't know. Do you think it's an equivalent to loss, taking Disneyland away from mice? I don't know. Well, what is it locking in, though? It's interesting, because you know what it almost reminded me of? The study of students who drink versus don't drink after and when they're studying. And how well that they do on an exam on that. Like it almost was like locking in information after a lack of stimulation, where you're not competing against that anymore. And so maybe your, that's the important thing is the thing that was that stimulating event. Right. Don't lose it. Yeah. Hang on to the magic. Yeah. So I mean, whether it's loss or this is maybe just, kind of looks more like learning to me. But it's like, it's like, we were learning, the brain was changing, it was plastic and everything was really exciting. But now, oh, it's all taken away. So stop. Yeah. We're changing. Right. Stop. And let's lock in what we have learned. Yeah. That's how I kind of read it. That's the sense I'm getting of it as opposed to, yes, why are we not being more plastic and changing things right now? Because there's no more input that we're interested in. There's no more, there's no more stimuli to learn from. Which makes sense from like a lack of enrichment. It's like, okay, all the stuff. But you know, if you lose, like in your experiencing grief, because you've lost a person, I mean, you're still in a world with all sorts of enrichment, and there's all sorts of stuff going on, and there's still the potential to learn, and there's still stimuli. So I don't know. I think I'm just having issues with what they're trying to get at with rodents, which is a very complex human interaction. It just doesn't, I mean, there could be, there could be a lack of interest in the current sterile environment. But like that was the whole thing with studying and drinking, is the students who actually drank at night tended to do better on the exam the next day, and the idea behind it was they stopped adding memories while they were drinking. Their brain shut down. So the only thing the brain had to lock in in that sterile environment of the drunken brain was the information that they'd learned in class, whereas the non-drinksians went out, they saw a movie, they talked with their friends, they watched another thing, they looked something up on the internet, they had competing plasticity and enrichments that didn't lock in the study as well. So what this looks like when you're showing this lack of enrichment period post a high enrichment period, just like the process of committing things to memory, to locking those things in better, and if there's nothing else to work in. So don't let it go, don't clean up the trash because we've got nothing to replace it with. Nothing yet, we might need it later. Yeah, but I think it's really interesting that a lot of this response was immune and support structure for neurons and not the neurons themselves. So, I mean, there were neuronal changes, but a lot of it was like the immune system, the microglia and the supports, the extracellular matrix. Now I want to see a version of this. It has to be on humans, which is going to be tricky. Or maybe you can figure out how to get... So what we need is we would need a rat to go up in front of a classroom of rats and teach something very excitedly about, oh, there's cheese. Oh, you got to find this way to get cheese. And then another rat to come up in a different group. It's like, and to get the cheese, you must approach the trap from the correct angle. How do you teach? How's the teaching? How do you teach? It's boring. So like, yeah, I have the unenthusiastic learning environment and the enthusiastic learning environment and do the same thing and then take it away and see which one gets learned better. Maybe that's the problem of the unenthusiastic teacher from the earlier story we were talking about is that they haven't created that enrichment environment in the first place. They're trying to teach to the sterile room where that's not where you add information. That's where you lock in the thing that came before it. Exactly. Well, it turns out in my last study is a study in current biology. This last week, researchers looked at babies first time in the lab at the age of six months, final visit into 18 months old, and the researchers looked at interactions between mother and child and imitations of the mother and the child. And so the question was, when do kids start imitating and why do they start imitating others? And from this study, they have concluded that babies imitate people because people imitate babies. They found that mothers who were more sensitive to the reactions of their kids were more likely to interact with them and to copy what their babies were doing. So if the baby did something, the mother would be like, and imitate what they did. And those babies were more likely to begin imitating their mother earlier and to continue the imitating behavior with other individuals. And so they think, this is not just for mothers, but interactions between parents and children create the situation that leads to imitation. Imitation leads to learning. And so there's this very basic feedback loop that we think is just in the brain. It's like, oh, babies, they imitate. No, people imitate. And then babies learn to imitate, which I think is fantastic. Yeah, imitation is a really rare form of intelligence. I mean, it occurs in the animal kingdom, but not a lot of the animal kingdom. Right. So if you think about it. See a behavior and imitate it. Yeah. A lot of primates can imitate, but how many of them during raising their offspring, the way that humans don't on their babies, how many of them are making imitative faces, are doing imitative behaviors? Is this how long ago did humans begin this imitation behavior? And is that one of the things that sets us apart a little bit? It also makes me wonder about child development and parents who are, or children who are raised in environments with parents, or even just individuals who are less responsive, where they don't have that input for imitation. What does that mean to how the child develops and how they learn to learn moving down the line? And not just how they learn to learn, but how they learn to interact socially, because a lot of the social cues we have are based on the subtle art of imitation. You make other people comfortable by imitating body language and leaning in in a similar way or leaning back to make, you know, there are certain things that we learn to do. And if you're not being taught to do that from a very, very early age. We're talking to you, close stalkers. Yeah. And is there a sensitive period? Is there a period of time during which it's a really essential period of time that children get this imitation behavior? Is that is that important? And so this is a, I think a very really interesting and important study for just our understanding of child development, social learning, and then human behavior moving forward. I think it's also evolution. How did we, did we start imitating? Is that something that really led us on? I don't know, to be human? Yeah, it feels like this is probably a very ancient human-y thing. We've had even more expressive brows in the past than we have now. I don't know if they could do this. I don't know if you could raise your eyebrows when you had a brow ridge. That would be difficult. Raise the whole page. I don't know if the animals could actually raise an eyebrow when both are there. Maybe they just look surprised all the time. Or brooding, probably more brooding. Yeah, it's interesting. It's very interesting. Which, who's imitating who? Because they definitely do pick up characteristics, but they definitely have their own personalities. Two. Yeah, as a parent, I can totally see, picture myself just following their lead without meaning to and tending to or thinking about it. It's just, okay, that's how you were talking, so I will speak your language. That's where baby talk comes from, right? You're imitating the baby. Okay, I'll talk to you like you. Okay, that's great. We're going to do this like you. It's all, yes. Anyway, people imitating babies leads to babies imitating people and so on and so forth through the end of time. Have we made it to the end of the show? I think we might have. I think we did it. Everyone out there, don't forget to send us your stupid questions this week. I'd love to get your stupid questions. Don't be afraid to send them. There are lots of places. I'm afraid to read them. It'll be kind of fun. I cannot wait. Anyway, hey, everyone, thanks for listening. Thanks for being here tonight. Thanks for being in our chat rooms. Thank you for being in the Discord. Thank you for watching live, if you're watching live right now. Shout outs to Fada. Thank you for your help with social media and show descriptions and show notes. Gord and Arnaur, thank you for helping in the chat rooms, making every place happy and wonderful to be. Identity 4, thank you for recording. 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You can also hit us up on the platform formally known as Twitter where we are at twist science at Dr Kiki at Jackson Fly and at Blair's Menagerie and I'm starting to do a The other thing that I'm gonna stop doing pretty soon is science, excuse me, Psy-X files, where I've been putting the stories that I wrote for the other science-y outfit that I've been putting there. But I probably won't be doing that one too much longer. We'll see. We will see. And we will be back here again next week. We hope that you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from this show, remember. It's all in your head. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science, it's the end of the world. So I'm setting up a shop, got my banner unfurled. It says the scientist is in. I'm gonna sell my advice. Show them how to stop their robots with a simple device. I'll reverse below the warming with a wave of my hand. And all of this science is coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. 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 just add under... Hey friends, it's The After Show. Thank you for being here. Justin will be back in a moment, I'm sure. Yes, Fada, a tight 90-ish. 90 plus 30. Maybe? How did that work? 90 plus 30. Metric minutes, exactly. Oh dear. Yes, Luma Lama. Luma Lama exists in our hearts. Hello, Hobo Joe. So great to see you. Yeah, thank you for joining. All the science. Woo-doo-doo-doo. We're like the science news talk show DJ people. Dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum. The black plant parts in rocks. Are you talking... The marked... There's that... I'm not liking. The black plant parts in rocks. Did that question ever get answered? What was going on in that conversation? Okay, there were tacos. I hope the tacos were good, Fada. You had tacos. I don't know about the black parts in rocks. Fossils? Is that what you're talking about? Pollen? The marked... I don't know what you're referring to. It's all in your peptides. That's right. We've done this show. We've brought you all the peptides. Rock with black parts in it, like a plant. I hope you... I don't know. I don't know. Marble? The striations? Maybe it was intrusions? To intrude sediment that was laid down for that rock? Don't know. Yay. We've got a little bit of a boost on the universe. The universe of Don from a couple of people. Thank you very much for doing that over on the universe of Don. Oh yay, and Fada had delicious peptides. That's wonderful. Yeah, maybe a fossil plant. Yeah, coal. It's a thick layer of old black dead plants decomposed. How's it going there, Justin? Hey, everything's fantastic. What's going on? I'm just chatting, waiting for you to come back. But, you know, get ready for... It's the after show, so also being tired. Oh no. Okay. Yeah, because it's late there. It's very late there. Yeah, it's late. It's even later for our east coasters. It's early there. Is it, what, seven there now? Here? Yeah, yeah. It's just coming on. Seven in the morning. You have a whole day ahead of you. Oh yeah. Yeah, I do. We have so many things ahead of us. Your cat is giving you the evil eye, Gary. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Yes. You should definitely feed your cat. I mean, the kitty cat evil eyes, they end poorly if you don't take care of them. That's how that's what happens. I don't know if I have anything after showy to talk about. Oh, it's great show last week, if you didn't touch it. We rambled on. I started to listen to it for a little while, yeah. We rambled on for quite some time. We have Christmas lights, which, uh... I do have Christmas lights, yes. I can see them. Can you not see them? No, right now? Yeah. Oh, wait. There they go. Now they're gone. Oh, where did those get turned on? I think I did it last week trying to play with the buttons. Because I have access to stuff now. That's true. I have all sorts of weird access that I don't know what to do with. You're like, what do I do with all of this? I remember clicked on it and nothing happened because it was on the other side or something. I don't know. But, uh... I mean, I could take away your access. That was so nice. Yeah. It's tempting. You're like, I really don't want this responsibility. No, it's not that I don't want the responsibility. It's that I know the responsibility is in good hands. And we just did a Christmas show in September. We did. Were those there the whole show? They were there the whole show. That's awesome. I thought for the longest time, I was like, oh, wow. Kiki's just feeling festive. She decided to put them up. And then at some point, I realized, oh, you know, I was clicking around on stuff last week. Maybe it's something I did. Oops. Now we've got fireworks to put the fireworks on because it's fancy time. It's the after show. Let's have fireworks. I did a study this last week. Yeah. The cover to study that... Oh boy. I don't know if I just uncovered, like, a possibly illegal scheme, much like the oil companies say, oh, we believe in global warming, but then they hire a nonprofit organization. They give money to a nonprofit organization that's like, oh, global puts out all these bad global warming hoax. I think I've found a connection that's like this healthcare analytics and marketing company could be working with a drug company to put out research that says a drug that they're getting sued for actually doesn't hurt anybody. And it seems, and the data doesn't match the conclusions and like all these things. And I'm like, either I have just pulled off the lid on a huge conspiracy of misinformation. This is just how the pharmaceutical drug research industry works. And I don't know. I don't know which it is. I don't know which it is. And I don't know how to... I'm not going to be able to delve into the details of any of it. But what was really curious, though, is I learned something that I didn't know. So this was a paper in JAMA open. JAMA network open. This is the one, Renitidine, right? Renitidine, yeah. Yeah, Renitidine. And they have all these, they're saying that like they found no evidence in a very short-term study of cancer incidents. And they have hazard rates that are really high. They do go down and touch the one which means you could call it insignificant result, technically used. However, I'm curious of how you can have an insignificant result that you then say is significant for its insignificance. If the rest of the hazard rate is so high, it kind of doesn't. And it doesn't fit with some of their conclusions. Anyway, also it's unclear if they got their hazard rate for ovarian cancer using the, from the way they laid out the information from using the entire cohort, which was, you know, 30 to 40% men who likely didn't encounter ovarian cancer. So if that's included, which it looks when you just look at the data lines that they use, they use the whole cohort of men and women to derive the hazard ratios for ovarian cancer. And all of that data too, with the increased hazard ratios, is buried 50 to 60 pages deep into the supplemental material. It's at the very end of 60 pages of stuff that you have to click away from the main body of the text to get to. Anyway, the thing though, the thing though that I learned that I did not know is that peer reviews are not public always. So nature will tell you who peer reviewed it. Many times you can actually click and read the peer reviews from a lot of journals. Very often peer review is anonymous. But yeah, so it can be anonymous. And yet still you can read what the peer review said. So that happens also. So here's like four peer reviews. They don't say who it is, but you can read their peer review of the study. So there wasn't any peer review or mention of who peer reviewed it. And I was curious because the story was offered for publication and published 45 days later. There's also inconsistencies in how they represent the paper. They say it's 11 giant cohorts with a million people covering six countries. But for the primary they used four cohorts, two of which were in the U.S. So really three countries and four cohorts were like 400,000 people, 500,000 people. Not the 1.1 million over 11 cohorts that the study keeps representing itself as. This is also a drug that was pulled off of the market like two, three years ago. And there's a ton of lawsuits. So the fact that it's coming out. And it also skips over one of the major connections and also looked only at first time users for a short period of use, even though this drug was on the market for 20 plus years. So it seems like with the data from healthcare records for the prescribed, not just the over the counter, you could look at 900,000, 100,000,000 users versus people who never used it. But instead they narrowed it down to people who had used a competitor drug for the same thing. And so that. Well, they're doing it, what they're doing is they're doing a comparison. Right. We know these other ones cause, we know these other ones cause cancer. Is this reverting causing worse? Is it worse? We know the other ones don't. And so it is worse. Well, a couple of them do, but they left those out. They left the ones that don't have NDMA, which is this carcinogen that was being produced as the drug, within the drug, as it was getting an extended shelf life we're supposed to eat. Okay. That's all that. So dimethylamine. Which either can cause DNA damage, usually in replicating cells, which can lead to cancer, or because of a specific enzyme that people have tenfold differences in amounts in, couldn't go the other direction, pivot to causing cell death, basically, it can be a degenerative disease. One aspect of the potential, ways that this chemical interacting with humans causes damage by only looking at cancers. They left out the fact that a lot of the cancers, upper uterine and ovary, were actually showed a very high hazard rate, again, despite touching the one. But in their data lines, they show that as though it was the full cohort of 900,000 people or whatever it was, or 400 something thousand people, sorry, and not separated by sex, which is a very odd thing, seeing as how it's very unlikely that the normal societal wild type rate of getting and acquiring any of these cancers, ovarian cancer, is likely very low in men. There was problems with top problems, but the fact that they would come out with a drug comparative, which is a kind of thing you can do for safety, but it's also something you do for marketing in a pharmaceutical scenario, versus people who took it, versus people who didn't, which they could have used their full cohort, they narrowed it down. So like they had 170,000 ranitidine users in Europe, but because they compared them to people who used alternative drugs, that weren't really available in Europe. In the UK, I think it went from 174,000 down to 633 people as part of their cohort, because they had to narrow it down to the, anyway, I had all sorts of problems with this. But the thing that got me was that I had asked, I sent a message to the head of the public relations information officer for media relations at JAMA to see if I could get the copy of the peer review, because I'm just curious in a 45-day peer review, what was pointed out? Was any of this pointed out in the peer review? Did they raise any sort of a concern whatsoever? And I was told that that information is private and confidential. Not who did it, but just the information of the peer review. So then how is this 45-day from receiving to publishing, and the peer review took place? How is that, did it happen? Or is this part of what has now become the puppy mill paper scenario where they're just pushing things through, stamp of a peer review, but nobody ever gets to look at it, because it's private and confidential. So then what's the point of a peer review? If nobody can look at the peer review. Yeah. And again, if you didn't want to publish it with every study, but requesting it? Yeah. The peer review is that's not part of the publication process. The peer review happens. You submit an article. The editors go, hey, this looks interesting. I like it. Send it out for peer review. The peers look at it and go, your stats are bad. You missed this. Shouldn't you be looking at this? And then you have the reviewers' comments and changes, and you address them or you don't. But you address them, and then the editor decides whether or not you have addressed them sufficiently in your revision that comes back as a basis from that peer review. And then if you've made all the changes and done everything they like, then it gets published. Yeah. I've read the peer reviews in journals online before. So it is. So some publish. Yeah, yes. Yes. Those are going to probably be open access, and very likely going to be like preprint servers. So preprint servers, you can, you know, you put it in and then you get people commenting and giving reviews. How do you make your changes before you even put it in for publication, actually, in those cases? I mean, that's what the preprint is for. In a preprint, but also in the non-preprint. So now I got to go and find examples. I know that I've read a ton of archaeology peer reviews where people are. Interesting. And it's usually like a little link. Sometimes it's connected to the supplemental or in the supplemental material where you can click on over into and look at. I guess I just assumed that, like, yeah, sometimes they have a link to it and some just don't bother with it. But I didn't realize that even if you request it, you're not allowed to see it. In the open access journal of JAMA, like, I get what you're saying, like, here's this super specific paid access paywall journal that's only providing the peer review to the researcher to better present. In the open access spirit of here's all the information. Here you go. We're sharing. But oh, the peer review is secret. And it took the least amount of time to publish from receiving this, which means there was the least amount of time for things to be looked at for peer review. And that's the one that, for sure, you're not going to see. I don't know. That bothered me. But I guess it might just be normal. Again, that's just normal. It could be normal for the pharmaceutical companies to have somebody in a company that is associated with marketing for drug companies be on your study, be part of the design of your study, be part of the analysis and interpretation of your study. I guess that's normal. I also noticed, though, that this research group, number of the researchers here and the company that was involved with them shows up, if you Google, in Google Scholar, personal fees from this company, you will get a list. They also have their conflict of interest disclosures. Yeah, they do. And Dr. Yu reported receiving personal fees from IQVIA and serving as Chief Technology Officer of Phi Digital Health Care. Posada reported serving as contractor for A-Bridge AI. Grants from U.S. Department of blah, blah, blah. So IQVIA also has institutional fees from Amgen, Estelis, Janssen, Synapse Management Partners. So IQVIA also has somebody, this is also interesting, right? IQVIA has somebody from IQVIA listed as an author. They don't disclose a conflict of interest, even though the lead researcher is like, oh, I got money from the company that's also on the paper that's listed there, if you look through it, as part of design, interpretation, supervision, they're listed all throughout this paper. There's somebody who is doing strategy at IQVIA. IQVIA's strategy is about gaining access to patients. I'm not saying they're going to try to bring Rennidine back, but it was a $4 billion a year drug. And it says in the paper that it's been removed from most markets around the world now. Oh, yeah. Except apparently India, who's like, where you're going to see a lot of pro-Rennidine research, probably coming out of India, because they have not knocked it out completely. But it's also interesting that like... Their first author is from IQVIA. No. No, no, not the first author. Isn't it Dr. Yu? No, he's not. He's at a Korean university. Okay. There we go. A little further down. Sarah Seeger. There you are. So if you go look at the... There's also Nexus with this. I thought it was a nonprofit, but it's not, it's a .org. Odsey, which is partly involved in trying to standardize health information that's collected. And as that gets standardized, then we can look at everything everywhere, all at once. And there are a bunch of data scientists. It's kind of a cult, private company. The thing is a lot of their directors are now employees of IQVIA, who have now become directors there. All of the studies pretty much listed on Odsey's website are studies that have this same sort of nexus of researchers. One's the first author here, then there's the sub-author, and then somebody else is the first author. And always with an IQVIA employee on that listing. Some of those listings, the IQVIA employee says, I work for the company over here at IQVIA that has all these ties to industry in terms of marketing, receiving money to try to promote the company's interest. Yeah, but I mean, I guess I'm looking at this though. And the study doesn't say that it doesn't cause cancer. It does. No, that's not what it says. It says it doesn't, and it says it does. It's looking at the comparative risk of cancer associated with renitidine versus other antacids that are used. And so prescription antacids. And basically it's like, it's not that it doesn't, it's basically saying it causes cancer at the same rate that these others do. It's just as safe as these others. But the other ones are thought not to have any additional cancers. That's not what it says. That's how they present it. That's not what it says. Maybe that's the way, yeah, it doesn't. If you read it carefully though, that's not what it says. Because it also, in one sense, it says in one line that based on this... Was not associated with an increased risk of cancer compared with the use of others. Correct. Yeah. Correct. So it's the same. It's the same risk of cancer. You can use renitidine or these others. Your cancer risk is the same. That's what they're saying. Even though the hazard ratios for certain cancers, now that's true. If you look at all 16 of the cancers. All of the cancers, yes. Yeah, that's the same. You get hit by a bus and then the doctor shows up, the paramedics show up and they're like, what happened? Oh, he was clearly not hit by all kinds of vehicles. Clearly, there's no risk of danger from helicopter. He's fine. No, he got hit by a specific one. No helicopters, yeah. Specific hazard ratios. Yep. That makes sense. Female reproductive are exceptionally higher than the rest of them. Which is so weird. It isn't because... Well, I guess it's the dividing cells. Yes. That's what it is. Exactly. And I went to try to drill down and say, like, are any of these cancers women of reproductive age? Because it was a white... It was from ages, I think 20 to wherever they could be in this. They specifically withheld age-specific information of the results because of privacy. They didn't want anything to get... There's a possibility that this anonymous data that they curate and provide could have been de-anomaniased, I can't say the word, by... De-anomized. Thank you. By knowing the ages of the women. A non-anon until the break of dawn. Which is unfortunate because the fact that this drug is known to interfere with DNA replication and cell replication means that the fact that it is upper uterine and ovary is high. And even the claim that stomach wasn't. Again, it touches the one, but that hazard ratio at 117 is 17% more cases of cancer. 17% in that group than in the other, 17% is a lot, 26% for ovary cancer, 20% for upper uterine. I don't know, I thought the whole thing was fishy. And then if you look at all of their other studies that they do, they're all doing the same sort of comparatives for safety. Doing manipulation in a way. It feels like it. It feels like it. But the thing is I don't know if that's a correct practice or if that's normal pharmaceutical research, because either way, that's why you don't trust anything that touches industry. And then the tricky thing is here is you can't tell it's touching industry if the lead researchers always represented as somebody from a university and then deep below them, sometimes not explaining that they work for a major marketing pharmaceutical marketing company. They're on the paper because they provided direction or assistance in some way. But that assistance, there's a level you have to reach to be listed as an author on the paper. You have to contribute it to some substantial way. Otherwise you can be in a thank you for assisting with here's the data collection methods that you can be used. Let me train you on that. That's a thank you. That's not an author. But the author who is working for Inclivia is listed as a concept design analysis interpretation supervision like they're listed all through the roles, not just not just a cursory. We helped because there's an interaction between databases and the information. That's interpretation. It's an interpretation of results. And this person works for a pharmaceutical marketing company that has the marketing lingo that you would expect a pharmaceutical marketing company to have, which is getting access to patients by leveraging data. Yeah. And if you think about it, it's, you know, okay, we have this information, we're going to do this study, but you know, this company is going to be involved and you know, you don't want to make it reflect poorly on the renegedy, you know, so it doesn't cause more cancer. It doesn't, you know, not bear. So how do we do it? Well, we have to look at 16 different cancers. That's how you do it. And how else? Well, we start with 11 million people, but then we narrow down that list using almost entirely one American cohort that had a follow up time of two and a half years. And it's different from, it's different from the Asian cohort, which is different from five years. Seven years in the German one, which they wiped out completely. And the ones with the longer cohorts that they used, that's where a lot of the cancer increase shows up. And it's a minority because they used, I don't know, off the top of my head, what the 75, 80% of the cohort is from that one American short term cohort. So it also, yeah, you have to like really read the study, though, because they do have a paragraph because where they say that the results from South Korea and Spanish administrative data sources or the meta analysis from Asia demonstrated an increase in cancer risk less than 20% in the renegedy group compared with other H2RAs group. This inconsistency in the results prevented us from ruling out a potential association between renegedy and cancer development, particularly in certain ethnic groups or ethnic systems. Right. Now, the other overriding factor there is that those studies had twice the follow up time for a short term one to two, three year study on cancer development for first time users. These weren't long time users. This is, they started when they just started the drug. So the fact that in two and a half years, you're suffocating cancer, but not that much. But in the studies that went twice that distance, that's when they started showing up tells me that it's a time, not an ethnicity health care system. And they do have that line, like you said, can't rule it out. But at the end, in the conclusion, go down to the conclusion, like it's one of the last lines of the conclusion, where they make a recommendation about follow up. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Further studies with longer follow up periods are required to confirm these findings. Yeah. Oh, so maybe it's above that line. There's a line where they say based on what we see, there's no need. Proactive cancer screening. They do not support proactive cancer screening or surveillance. Yeah. And it might be reassuring to previous Renitidine users. Yeah. Great. So it's kind of a little mix of language. And so what can happen then is you can pick it out because they're contradicting themselves in a way like we would need a longer term study to really rule this out. And by the way, there's no need to monitor patients who have used Renitidine for cancer because we think they should just be assured that they're fine. They should be assured. That's a very strong conclusion to make on a thing that you say you aren't sure about. Statistics and meta-analysis and key hacking. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. They won't answer. I'm not surprised. Yeah. I think it's interesting. I'm actually not terribly surprised. I do. Yeah. I think this is probably pretty standard for industry-related publications that they want to have the most positive result published, you know, the one that reflects best on what they're doing. And they're going to try and work with results to present them in the most positive light. Yeah. If you look at, I understand, you and I understand, looking at this, this is an industry study. When you see this in any rewrite publication, it's, you know, whatever's the, I can't remember the name of the university in Korea, but Korean University researchers find no relation to cancer. This is all, this is the headline, just feels like a super sneaky. And then also, you know, who's doing a lot of that advertising and pushing out those messages. It's the company that helped direct to the study whose data they use, whose employees on every one of a bunch of OZI stories. There's a different IQVIA employee for different ones, but they're all through. You just look up the IQVIA employees in Google Scholar. I mean, this is how I could have had a better publication list. I could have worked as a interpretive designer for a pharmaceutical company. Got my name on a whole bunch of publications. And then I'd be like, look, I have hundreds of publications before the age of 40. And now you got to look for if they're a member of OZI or if it's an OZI research, because now OZI research is likely going to be the name being used in the research instead of IQVIA, because now the IQVIA employee is also a director at OZI. So now an OZI research can find an OZI is a .org, which I've seen written up as a nonprofit, but it ain't. I can't find any nonprofit explanation on their website. They take donors and partners from every major pharmaceutical company, but there's nothing that says I can't find any letters of incorporation of any kind actually in the United States. Probably not in the US. I don't know what kind of organization it is. It looks like it's a private partnership of some sort, but who knows if it's owned or run? I don't know. It seems like it's all smoke and mirrors. But anyway, it either is hugely requires an investigative reporter to go and do some digging there, or it's just how the pharmaceutical industry works and has for a long time. And I think that's more like it. That's not good. I think that's more like it. Yeah, I know. Anyway. Thank you for discussing that. I saw you posted it in Facebook and I didn't get a chance to like dive into it. But I'm glad that. Yeah, yeah. It's good to hear about. I'm tired now. OK, rain is full. Say good night, Kiki. Good night, Kiki. Say good night. Say good morning, Justin. Good morning, Justin. Good night, everyone. And Blair, wherever you are. Blair, wherever you are. Good night, comb. Good night, moon. Good night, comb. Brushing the air of the moon. Yes, good night. And then there's that one page that that book is such a scam. There's one page is like goodbye, nobody is all blank. Like how lazy is that? Hey, we don't have we have an odd number. We need one more. I just leave it blank. It's like goodbye, nobody. That one, I think is rather creepy. Also, you know, it's creepy. Why are we saying goodbye to nobody? You know, so it was creepy on that book. Go back and look at it. The mouse. The mittens, the little rack that the mittens are, changes. One time it's a rack. It's got socks and mittens. In another picture, it's a smaller rack, and it's just the mittens. Why the change? You think I don't notice these things? The mouse. This is, yeah, but I'm watching. I'm always watching for the inconsistencies in any report, even if it's goodnight moon. All right, goodnight minions. We'll be back again next week. Thank you for joining us. We hope that you have a good end to September and a brilliant beginning to October, as we will see you in the first week of October. And stay safe. Stay healthy. Stay learned. Stay curious. Stay. Lucky. Be lucky at all times. Be lucky. The best way to prevent bad things from happening. That and not stepping in front of a bus.