 Hopefully that old beast continues to work. We're waiting for the queue. But people can see us on the internet. My computer, my phone computer is telling me, you need to turn off your volume. Turn off the ringer, so it doesn't ring in the middle of the show. It's my internet. I like this ring, it's like straight up IRC, I love it. It is IRC, that's right. It's like a robotic control. I'm wondering if it stopped working for me though. Chatroom on my end is saying they can see you. Okay, there it is. There it is, it got going. All right, so my chatroom was slow for some reason. But now we're here, so let's get started. In three, two, one. This is Twist. This week in Science episode number 649 recorded on Wednesday, December 13th, 2017. Right in your backyard. Hey everyone, I am Dr. Kiki and tonight we are going to fill your heads with space, bacteria and brains, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Time, it's the thing that flies when we're having fun and oh how it slugs along when we wish we were someplace, anyplace else. Time, whether it's the worst of or the best of, we plan for it, manage it, set it aside, save it up, fall behind it, lose track of it, never have enough and all too often spend it on ways to kill it. Time, it's on your side regardless of what zone you're in even if it occasionally gets away from you. It passes, it heals wounds, it wounds all heals, marches on, waits for no one and when in doubt it's the one thing we can be confident will one day tell. And while we fritter away the moments that make up the dull day, remember you're always young and there's always time enough to make it a new day. As TikTok wibbly wobbly as it may be time is the stuff that dreams are made of and immune to where there's only ever one moment that truly matters only one moment that ever really exists and that moment is now. Now is the moment in which you can do and now is always the best time for This Week in Science, coming up next. Got the kind of mind that can't get enough I wanna learn everything I wanna fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek I wanna know what's happening What's happening What's happening This Week in Science What's happening What's happening What's happening This Week in Science Good science to you Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin, Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again to fill your heads with all sorts of science on tonight's show. It's a birthday week. Oh my goodness, you guys. Happy birthday to Justin and happy birthday to Blair. Monday was Justin's birthday. Tuesday was Blair's birthday. And now we're here to celebrate everything in style by having a show. So we're here to celebrate living another year. Yeah, I didn't die. It was great. You made it. You made it another 365 and one quarter days through the year. A trip around the sun. Pretty awesome, right? Yeah. It's pretty good. Congratulations. Virtual high five, Justin. There we are. There we are. All right, on tonight's show, we have all sorts of science news for you. I have stories about, well, Juno. Juno, the spacecraft around Jupiter and other spacey things. And we will have an interview to find out all about the easy ways that you can dig into your own brains and maybe the brains of others. And that'll come up in just a few moments. What do you have, Justin? Oh my gosh, I have got cities in the sand. Also microbial moodyness and laser fusion. Every day it's laser fusion. Straight out of Dr. Evil. Okay, Ann Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, I brought some hot birds, some panda poop, and the age-old question, cats or dogs? Dogs, no, cats, no, neither. Well, we know how Justin feels about it, but we're gonna explore some science. I like exploring science about questions that don't seem very science-y. I know, we'll get to that later. All right, before we jump on in, I would like to remind everyone that you can subscribe to the TWIS podcast. All places that good podcasts are found were on iTunes, Google Play's podcast portal, Stitcher, Spreaker, TuneIn. You can find us on YouTube and Facebook and all sorts of great places just by looking for This Week in Science. You can also find us at our website, twis.org. And this is pretty much it. If you wanna get a calendar, one of the new calendars made by Blair, one of the new coloring calendars, if you are interested, today is like the last day, you can order it if you wanna get it for Christmas. And I've heard that the mail system is backing up and things are arriving late, so get your orders in if you want to get this calendar before 2018. And I'd like to remind everyone also that if you are interested in finding us in San Francisco, California on January 18th, we're gonna be at California Academy of Sciences for the SF SketchFest event. We're really looking forward to that. Can't wait to see you there. All right, so let us move directly into our interview. I would love to introduce our guest this evening. Dr. Greg Gage is a neuroscientist, engineer, and co-founder of Backyard Brains, which is a company working on making neuroscience accessible to everyone through affordable neuroscience equipment and also the promotion of citizen science or actually citizen neuroscience investigations. He's spoken at the PED conference several times and also appeared on Netflix's White Rabbit project. So Greg, thank you for joining the show tonight. Thank you, Kiki, I'm really excited to be here. So I'm excited to chat with your audience about the brain. Well, I love the brain. I have a personal affinity for the brain. I hope everyone who is wandering around and cognizant of this moment in which we are in now appreciates the brain in some form or fashion as well. But for you personally, how did you go from engineering to studying neuroscience and then starting this company, Backyard Brains? Yeah, it's an interesting thing. The whole idea of neuroscience is actually really closely related to electrical engineering. These are, I think, personally, I think some of the best neuroscientists in the world are former engineers or former physicists that have kind of drifted over into this field. Because the brain's electrical organ and so how we probe the brain and how do we like learn how she works is through a lot of these kind of basic engineering principles. You put a wire next to a neuron and you record the occurrence. And then you start to read out these brain patterns and then using a lot of engineering or statistical techniques, you can start to understand a little bit how the brain's working. So it might sound like it's a little bit, these different fields at the beginning, but they're not actually that far removed. How did I get into starting Backyard Brains? So when I was in grad school, we would go with my lab mate, Tim Marzullo, into classrooms and talk about the brain and talk about the kind of stuff we were doing in the lab. And we realized it was a challenge that we couldn't quite bring $40,000 worth of research equipment that allows you to put electrodes inside of animals and bring them into the classroom to show how cool our research was and how cool the brain was and what it does. And so we kind of had this self-imposed engineering challenge and we wrote an abstract for the largest science conference in neuroscience called Society for Neuroscience. I've been there, it's huge. Yeah, and in the abstract, we said, we're gonna try to make a recording rig for less than $100. And if you don't know, the abstracts, you submit them around February, March timeframe and the conferences until late in the year, like in October. And so we said, we're gonna try to do this, stop by our poster and see how we did. And then if you didn't show up, you would have seen our first prototypes there on a table and we kind of pitched it as if it was the cure for the zombie apocalypse. Like if all of your loved ones were taken over by the zombie virus, this would be the way that you could save them. You could finally go to Radio Shack and make your own recording kits to be able to record from the brain and try to figure out what's happening with the zombie virus. And so that is how we started the company. And we actually weren't doing it to start any company. We were just doing it, it was kind of like a little bit hipsters do, they kind of build stuff for their own enjoyment. But then I think it got picked up by the journal. And we can have it themed around zombies. Yeah, zombies, but I think the zombie thing, which is just kind of us just having fun. But we got picked up by the journal Nature and then we got on the Nature podcast, NeuroPod. And then from there, I was, I'm still in grad school with Tim and we're working in publishing papers and being all proud of what we're doing. And not once did I get one damn email from someone saying, hey, I really like that paper you did on fast-making interneurons. It's really important work. Keep going on it. But this little side project, this little stupid thing I was doing on this $100 spike with Tim is like four emails a week. Like, hey man, I really love what you do. I wanna buy one of those kits and like slowly realize that maybe the side project should be the real project, right? It's funny because the part of the brain I was studying is the basal ganglion. It's a thing that sort of changes as through learning and memory with rewards. And so like, I'm slowly getting this more rewards for this thing, this $100 spike thing. Dopamine, dopamine, dopamine. And then also dopamine sort of. And so we started this company while I was in grad school and yeah, it took off. And we've been able to turn this into a non-traditional postdoc into a non-traditional academic environment. So we kind of train students and write grants and publish papers. And we do all the things that scientists do complain when people don't cite your work, all the good stuff. And then we're just not at a university. And so we raise money through some through grants, but mostly by selling our kits. And so we have our little inventions that we use to publish the stuff we actually sell to people that are interested. Like your audience would probably be like eat the stuff up because it's like for nerds or for teachers and classrooms and stuff like that. For both. For both, exactly. For both. All of the above. Yeah, talking with you last week or so, I thought it was just fascinating. It's this kind of, I don't know if you would call it, it's non-academic, but it's academic. It's a pseudo-academic. Yeah, more like non-traditional academics. And so we kind of run the company like a lab, like a research lab at the university. So we have various projects going on at any time. And we're our lab, we have lab meetings instead of like business meetings. But we are a company at the end of the day. We still have to produce things and go to conferences. Now we have a vendor booth, which is kind of fun. But we still go to society for neuroscience and we still sneak away and go see posters and we still present posters, but it's this mashup between a company and a university. So from the company side of things, why is it important to you to be helping people learn about neuroscience? I mean, like the reason why I didn't, I didn't mention at the beginning, but I didn't go to grad school right away. I actually worked at the industry for like 10 years. But this idea that the brain is such a mystery, it actually drives me crazy because I feel like there's more known about the brain than that's out there. And if you would read these things on the cover of like time with the mysteries of the brain reveal and stuff like that. I was always kind of curious, are there really these mystery, I mean, like what is it that we know what we don't know? And so that information wasn't quite getting out to the general public, which is why we started going into schools and we started explaining them about what neuroscientists do, what do we know, what do we not know? There's a lot of stuff we do know. We do know a lot about the sensory information that comes into the brain. We know a lot about motor aspects are coming out. We're starting to learn a little bit more about different phases of sleep and spatial memories and stuff of stuff, but there is a lot that we don't know about consciousness. And I think that's what gets people riled up. And I just feel like there's so much misinformation about the brain that's out there. All these people that do mind control, like put their headsets that are gonna do something. If any of that worked, we would all be wearing them as like, but I think this is the public misunderstanding. I want to mind control my six year old. Yes, but I think if the general public actually knew how neurons worked and how we can pick up signals from the brain, I think we'd be a lot more skeptical of these claims that come out. So yeah, I don't know. I find the idea of teaching, we don't teach neuroscience in school. We're trying to change that, but we have so many diseases. One out of five people have a neurological disorder and there's no cures. And so it seems like we should be doing something about them. So we're, we just got a grant from the NIH to create a full curriculum for KFU-12. So we'll be able to take a one year course on neuroscience and we're gonna start everywhere from stuff that Blair would like from insects and animals all the way through to humans and sort of understanding how we can record from our brains through EEGs and the limitations therein of that. So that's cool. Yeah, so, and then on the other side of it, you said you also do research. So you're making this equipment, selling it to individuals, selling it to teachers, making it easy for people to do experiments, but you're also doing science. Yeah, we do science. We do do science. We eat our own dog food. So we create kits, they look like this right here, they're little boxes with a little battery on them and then they're just bio amplifiers. And so just like many things probably on your show and in science in general, you do things by making them bigger, right? And so like, you know, microscopes make little cells bigger and, you know, telescopes make distant planets bigger so you can see them. PCR amplifies DNA. Well, this is a bio amplifier and what it does is it takes the small amount of electricity that's in a neuron or that's in a group of neurons like in the brain and amplifies it so that we can measure it and we can hear it and we can see it and we can do all this, these manipulations with it to really understand how it works. And you've done some demonstrations. Now, one of these, you mentioned consciousness that we don't really understand yet. And you've done some experiments with plants that, where you've shown that you can record and also record the electrical activity from plants. You can stimulate activity. Yeah. And actually, what's cool, this is all kind of fresh research. I mean, there was just a paper that was released two days ago, so on December 11th and it was about this idea. So what we were showing, we just did a demo at TED this year looking at acts of potentials within plants. And so like, I didn't know plants had acts of potentials. I know that animals have them but I didn't know plants didn't. So that was kind of like a cool thing for us to kind of realize and see that we can actually record using the same equipment that we always do. And so Venus fly traps, mimosas pudicas which are sensitive plants, sensitive mimosas or people called tachminats, have these beautiful spikes and they look just like our acts of potentials. It's just, they're a slightly slower timescale. So like, but the paper, as I'm saying, this stuff is still evolving. So if you take things that you would take to knock yourself out, if you feed these to plants, they stop having acts of potentials as well just like we would. So they have these, the same drugs that kind of work in humans also work to stop these acts of potentials in plants. And so yeah, cool stuff that's happening all the time. And the fun thing that we try to do is we try to come up with a way to kind of leave someone with like a sense of wonder about it. And so with the plants, where we can record acts of potentials from the Venus fly trap. And you can also show that the Venus fly trap is actually doing a calculation, which is kind of cool. They will, if you touch the hairs of the Venus fly trap, they don't just snap shut like a spring, you know? They're, you actually have to touch it twice. And it has to be twice within 20 seconds or else it won't close. And so it's actually doing, it's trying to figure out if there's a fly inside of it. So which is kind of cool. And I think we demoed that if you touch it twice quickly, then it will close, you can see these spikes. But the cool thing with what we try to do is we try to take it one step further. So we hooked up the Venus fly traps acts potentials to these electrical impulses and we fed it into another plant. So when we touch the Venus fly trap, we can make another plant completely move because of the spike. You're showing the ubiquitous nature of acts potentials. You can actually send them from animals into plants back into animals. And we have these, almost make a matrix of, you know, cockroach human plant and then hook them all together. So we've got a number of demos with cockroaches by recording from their brains and we can stimulate them. We make a cyborg cockroach that you can walk around the street with with your cell phone driving the cockroach around. So each of these experiments we do sort of shows some basic principle of neuroscience. And we try to do that in kind of a compelling way that you won't soon forget. I think the first time you see a cockroach driving be remote controlled, you're going to remember that. Yeah, absolutely. There were two studies out this week. There's an anesthesia study that I think you were referencing that just came out that was in the Annals of Botany where some researchers actually did this kind of electrical measurement and they with Venus fly traps and mimosa plants and showed that various anesthetic agents decreased the action potentials and they potentially showed because of one of the experiments that they did that the anesthetic is actually acting on the lipid membrane of the cells which has been an ongoing hypothesis about how anesthesia works because this crazy thing we give ourselves anesthesia all the time and don't really have a great idea about how it actually has its effect. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, it's funny and we don't, a lot of anesthesiologists don't actually record from the brain when we're doing that. Emery Brown is over at Harvard. He's been really pushing, trying to get the anesthesiologists actually care about the brain a little bit. So it's a, it is a, so yeah, there's still a lot to be learned about that, about what's going on there. There's also, so with sticking with plants, I mean, there's all this cool research that there was a nature paper last year that shows that plants can do learning. They can actually like figure out from a cue which way that the light would have been if it had the light been there. All these kind of weird, you know, you can teach plants things. Anyway, so it starts getting this like this, this kind of gray area, but if you do these very careful controls, I think you could say certain things. I wouldn't really call it a social learning. I don't know what to call it quite yet, but there are plants are doing some pretty weird things and we're actually to do a summer project. So like one of the things we, the fun things we get to do at back care brains is that we get to reproduce experiments, especially ones that we're thinking a little bit dodgy, you know, like this one seems like, hmm, I really can a pea plant really remember where a light was. So we're gonna, we're gonna reproduce that one. So hopefully if you, I could share with you, I could do a quick update next year and tell you if pea plants can learn associative learning or not. But right now, I think it's good to be skeptical. And unfortunately in science, we can't spend a lot of time reproducing other people's results. But hey, at back care brains, we can do that. So we're gonna do that. Yeah, I think one of the interesting things also is the, not just the behavioral, you know, if we can talk about plants behaving, but the behavior responsive aspect of the plants to light and this potential learning and memory, but you can actually with the equipment that you have, you can also look at the electrophysiological signature of these plants and see if it changes in response to different light signatures and how it changes. Yeah, so this is, yeah, so there's this, and there are not a lot of people working in this field. No. It's actually, which I think is cool because that makes it perfect for citizen science. I mean, this is like, if you want to publish, you know, results that no one has looked at yet, I mean, this is wide open. So this stuff is cool. And that botany paper, a student could have done that. I mean, there's nothing really that complex about this. Anyway, so no, it's fun stuff. And a lot of our invert stuff, we work a lot of invertebrate animals. This summer we were working with squid, octopus and just basic behavioral studies, like just understanding how to, like the California two-spotted octopus, we know that they like to be alone, but what happens when they are together? So we were doing, just putting a GoPro camera and just put two octopuses together and just kind of watched their behaviors. And by analyzing the videos, we found a whole bunch of cool things that no one knew before. And so it's they approach each other from the sides. They don't go directly at you. They'll kind of come from their sides and they have this flash of color change right before they attack. So we can do all this, tell you all the stuff and we're gonna publish this paper on just something that anyone could have done by going to a pet store and just figuring it out. But I think it's like people don't quite know what questions you really have to ask. I think that's the hard part of science is figuring out what is not known and what can I do to push the body of knowledge a bit further. And so like what I like about what we do is that we do it in a very DIY way. So we don't really use any expensive equipment. We just use stuff that you could find around your house or find at a makerspace and then set up either reproduce or try to ask new questions around what's going on in nature around this. I think it's just wonderful to be able to allow people to do that because so often it's just you read something in a book or you have to kind of take things at face value. But there are a lot of things now where people are peddling say like you mentioned we are electro our nervous system is electrical. It's electrochemical in nature. We have there's small magnetic fields that are created because of the electrical current that runs. And so people try and take advantage of this with certain things like I remember was it last year or two years ago there's like a bracelet that baseball players were wearing to try and help me. And yeah. There was a new thing that I just came across this week which is grounding or earthing which is the idea that the earth is a big ball of electrons and electrical wires need to be grounded so they don't, if we found ourselves by not wearing shoes and walking on the earth. This means we're not doing our jobs, right? So I mean, you can. Maybe there are experiments that can be done there to, you know, what's. I'm sure we can do that. I don't want to discourage people from doing that. I just don't think the results are going to be that significant. I love this. I love to see the baseball staff. So the people wearing the magnets versus not. Probably not that different. I'm going to say. Well, maybe there was some placebo effect, right? There is. I mean, placebo effect is a real effect. And so it is true. We have to do blind controls with our magnets. Make them un-magnetized somehow. Yes. There's even this group that are super responders to placebos. There's a certain percentage of individuals who will respond better to a placebo than to a real thing. That's cool. Yeah, and they mess up studies all the time. Because they just have this profound response to believing that they've received the treatment. So, I mean, and how the placebo works, I mean, it's completely off topic, but that's a fascinating thing. We don't know how that thing works. I mean, like. How does our, it would be our sensory system, communicate with our brain and our brain communicate then with our body to say, you're going to be healthier. You're going to feel better. Your pain is going to be decreased. It's all going to be a little better. Yeah, at the base level, it's just neurons. That's what's cool thing. It's like all like the, what's your grandmother's basement smells like and your first kiss and the placebo effect are all just, are all just literally just spikes from neurons inside the brain, right? So it is kind of cool to think that at some level, that's how it works. But what we're trying to figure out is how do these networks sort of work together to build these behaviors and super responders. So what's the product lineup look like? What's the- So we have, we work with, my favorite stuff is working with invertebrates. So we have a big thick skull on our brain. We have a bunch of skin between our brain and the skull called meninges and we have hair. And we have all this stuff that really makes it hard to really drill into your head and to get to the neurons. And so- So you have a special drill that you've sent out. That's exactly what I'm saying. The kids, okay. Yeah, that's about, you know. So to get around that, what we work with are sort of like cockroaches and worms and things that have nervous systems very similar to ours. And so our nervous system evolved into this kind of brain and spinal cord about a half a billion years goes 500 million years ago that evolved. And we don't think it's changed since then. And so the neurochemicals and the electrical acts potentials are all the same between, you know, a little small tick and you. And so what we work with, we work with a lot of invertebrates. We just kind of record from their brains by just pushing pins right through the cuticle into the, so they don't have bones and stuff like that. So when you push a metal wire right into the, a little small wire into the insect, you can actually push up right against the axons. You can start recording all these signals as if you were drilling a hole into your head and stuff like that. So that's our, my favorite thing to do because then you can start asking really interesting questions about how do behaviors relate. So we're talking about placebo effect where we look and look at how does a dragonfly hunt so successfully? Like they have like a 97% success rate. A lion has like a 20%, you know, killer sharks have 50%. But this little dragonfly has 97%. So how is that? So you can ask that question pretty, pretty simply. And you can just record from its neck. You can see that the eye is sending all the, all the visual information about where the prey is to the wings. So it becomes a reflector. They just, they don't even think about it. They can automatically control that. So you can actually do these experiments by pushing a, just laying a wire on the neck of a grasshopper and then our, sorry, a dragonfly. And then, and then zipping a little fake fly around. You can start to make a little careful measurement and you can start to see that this particular neuron would cause this wing to do that. So that's the question we can ask about how fast do you have to move to catch a grasshopper? So these are all our inverse stuff. And then we have on the human things, we found out that some people don't like insects, apparently. And so, I don't know who those people are, but so we have some teachers apparently don't like touching the cockroaches. And so we have human, human electrophysiology as well. So we record a lot from the muscles, from the electromiogram until our motor cortex will send out commands to our arms. And so we can put an electrode on here. It's a bit of a biohack. So it's kind of like you're amplifying the signal through the muscle fibers and you can pick that up really easily and then record that. And that's kind of a one synapse away. So you have your motor cortex, which then synapses on your spinal cords as your first neuron. And then your second neuron comes right out to your muscles. And so you're actually recording from the output of the brain through the muscles. And then what's cool about that, that you can use that signal as a control signal for kind of doing brain machine interface type of stuff. So you can have robotic claws that you can get to move when you move your hands. So and then there's a huge field in bio-medical engineering about how to decode brain signals in a meaningful way. And so we have labs that students can then figure out how to take an Arduino, feed in these muscle signals from the EMG and then send it to like a computer to control a game, people playing like, you know, pong and whatever, whatever. And then, or to control robotic devices and stuff like that. And then one of our, we did a talk a couple of years ago where we hooked up one person to another person and we had used the output of one person's brain to stimulate the other person's brain. So whenever we would detect the EMG, we would amplify and stick it to somebody else. Like one person would control, the other person would move. And so it's just really, just a simple, stupid engineering hack that just seems to really have an effect on people when they see that. So it's just like this question about free will, like who is controlling that iron, you know. So it's been fun. And then we have, we could also do any signal that comes out of any living thing, a plant, for example, which I'm not recording from the brains of plants, even though I don't want to say that on quiz. Do not have brains. It was a joke. All right, so what we do is we can record from massive amounts of neurons like from the brain and we can record the EEG and show that you can actually record beautiful rhythms. If you close your eyes, you can get the alpha wave, which is if your brain turning into this idle state, waiting for input from the eyes to record this alpha wave from there. We show that you can't really control much else with the EEG. That's the brain wave coming out from the wave. You can do a couple of things, but not quite what people claim. I can fly an airplane using my brain waves, but no. I'd like to see that data. So we do that when we can record EKGs pretty easily. This putting on your wrist, you can record the heartbeat to the PQRST waves. EOGs, which is like your eye, your eye is like basically a battery. And as it flips around, you actually create this current which you can easily detect. So what we try to do is we, and we, those are kind of the basic biosignals that we do. And then the fun part is then going to conferences and digging through the literature and finding out what questions can you ask about the brain given these things. And so that's where we've been working with students over the summer. We kind of run an internship program, which I will announce that we're going to be opening that up in February, so in a couple of months, applicants to come in. And then we train them all in our maker space and how to laser cut in 3D print how to basically make tanks and things. And I think next year we're going to, we're hopefully going to work with bees, honeybees and jumping spiders and some. You're making spiders. Yes. Yes. Your favorite. Yeah, they say, have you worked with it? Yeah, so like, I'm not sure what we're going to do yet. And there's some cool work coming out of Cornell where people are actually, I didn't know spiders were under high pressure, Blair public nurses, but they, you know, so they only have, like, we have muscles that move our arms both forwards and backwards. But spiders only move it in. And then when they go out, they just inflate, right? Yeah, it's like hydraulics. Hydraulics, yeah. So they kind of walk really kind of funny because of that. But for me, as a neuroscientist, it's tough because if you put a little pin in there, they explode. So Ron Hoy at Cornell has figured out a way to do this. And so we're going to try to maybe look at that technique and then jumping spiders, you know, they just kind of jump out and they catch their flies and they fly into the questions. How can they do that? How do they just service the flies? You can do these visual experiments with these guys and figure out what they're looking at, what are they seeing and what can they tell us about what it means to be us, you know? You can interview a jumping spider maybe in a couple of weeks. I just think about the physics involved, trying to think about trajectories and things when you're trying to catch things in midair. That's a lot for a little spider to deal with, yeah. So I'll go back to that dragonfly thing because there's only 16 neurons. I mean, you can count them in your hand and feet, I guess, but 16 neurons, eight per eye, that will tell you exactly where the prey is and where the prey is going in real time. So these little six, you can decode from these neurons exactly where the little fruit fly is that he's gonna be about to eat. So I'm assuming because of the way nature works, there may be something very similar with that. No one's figured these out yet, but I suspect there's probably a target selective neuron when the jumping spider sees something and then it sort of figures out the physics of the entire thing and then it's a reflex for him, but it's all this cool neuro-program he is going on inside that brain. I mean, they got a little dragonfly. If you look at its head, it's like so small, but it's like doing something, it took us a long time with these guided missile systems to be able to do, and they're just doing it without even thinking about it. So it's kind of cool, these computers in these little small brains, right? As far as getting a place for people to start with experiments, I know you've got a page on your website that is full of experiments. Yeah, so our goal is to try to democratize these things. And so we have getting started with, and we get started with neurons, and we can do this experiment. You can, yeah, so we have, at the end of each one, we, I mean, there's a lot of open-ended questions inside, and so we try to leave with a few ideas of places you can go and sort of expand upon this and do your own thing. So I think for a lot of people, the EMGs, the electro-myograms are the easiest way to do that. And so I gave it to you a demo. I actually brought, by chance, because I- By chance. By chance. Not literally by chance, because I was supposed to be in my office today, but I'm at home, and I didn't unpack from my trip last week. So I have my demo came here. So I will show you, without further ado, what your brain signal at least sounds like. Because that's a cool thing. You just stick in the path that the trip catches on, and- So this is like a little bit of gel, and so one of the only trick with neuroscience is like figuring out how to get the wire to get to the electricity, right? So these are little patches, and there's a little bit of seawater kind of in these gels, and the electrolytes allow the electricity to flow from the skin into the metal, and once it gets to the metal, the electricity just forms with it. If I turn this on, so we can hear that sound. That's like the electrical activity from the brain that comes out, so then what we do is, as scientists, you know, it's cool, that's observation, then you can hear it, and you can write down, I heard a sound, but we want to be careful scientists, right? So we want to, we take our phones and our iPads and our tablets, you can plug it in, and we actually do the real raw measurements of these things. And so this is the electro-myogram now. And so you record this, you can put markers in there, and you go back, and you do very careful experiments about what's going on inside that thing. This is just my muscle, you can actually look at which finger is this one really, so it looks like it's that one, more than the other, so we can probably- Not so much your pinky. Yeah, not the pinky, so it's this one right here, but it's just like, this is like the rubbing, this is, I don't know. So anyways, this is the type of stuff that's a very simple demo. And I can, you know, since I'm here, I will do one more, which is kind of fun. So this is the Arduino now, so your audience is probably highly familiar with that. So we've taken this, the same kit now, and we've merged into a little form factor for here. And if you put it on here, so now this is like the cheapest brain machine interface that you can make. And so like, this is like the, the hello world of Arduino is you turn the LEDs on, right? So this is- That's right. This is how- Flex your muscles and turn on some lights. It's like a, I always say it's like a love meter, you know, it's like cold fish, I don't know. Red hot lovers. Heart Throb, yeah. Heart Throb, yeah. Heart Throb. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right, so then, I'll say one last thing, and this is our cool brain machine interface. So this is the, our claw. And so what we can do is, if I could do this, I can now control real machines in the real world. This is just a- Yes, super cool. A servo that we've laser cut to a pair of cockroach legs that look like a claw. But the idea is that it's just, from my brain is sending a command to the, to my arm to move. I'm detecting the brain signal. And every time it reaches, we just translate that into a command for the servo. So you get kids that really understand how, you know, and people when they see this are like, oh, okay, now I can see how this, you know, if you're paralyzed, maybe this could be helpful for somebody, right? And so there is an entire field of people looking at these type of assistive devices, right? And there's DARPA, the defense researchers are giving lots of money to a lot of researchers to figure out how to help soldiers that come back with missing limbs and spinal cord injuries and this sort of stuff. And so this is the kind of the DIY, the neuroscience for the 99%. So we are not the DARPA people. We are the, we are the, maybe DARPA is going to end up with pilots who can fly a plane just using their brain from the comforts of home. But the rest of us, that's gonna not. The rest of us, yeah, that's not gonna be us. That's what we do. We kind of make these kind of fun kits that allow people to explore. And hopefully, I mean, they'll, we're doing these publications for to be scientists, but also trying to encourage others to, one of our stated goals, we'd love to see, you know, a scientific paper get published where the corresponding author is just like a home address, right? It's just like some amateur that really, I mean, that'd be success for us. I mean, to be like having some new piece of knowledge about the brain coming out of just some kid who was curious about songbirds or something like that. You can imagine what people could do with this type of technology. Yeah, and it's not, I love, it's just part of that. It's this kitchen garage science, or, you know, as the name of your company, elegantly states the backyard science. That kind of brains, you know. That kind of brains, you know. And it is taking science out of the laboratory where, you know, it's $100,000 million pieces of equipment. And you're using these, like you said, it started from pieces from Radio Shack. Now, literally quite literally. Now, I think that are within reach, financially for a lot of people. Well, and for a lot of teachers too, trying to teach a science that they're not super comfortable with, like neuroscience perhaps, because there's not a lot of textbooks and things like that for this topic, to give them a kit, to give them something that's a very clear goal for them to work on with their students is a huge gift. So I can imagine that would be really amazing for a lot of teachers. And science is being taught now. I mean, my daughter, I think in fourth grade was getting some science, but now in fifth grade has weekly science classes. It tends, they're weekly. Yeah. Like that's the kind of thing that didn't used to show. Baby steps, baby steps. So I'm just excited because I'm like, looking at all these backyard brains things. And I'm like, okay, I'm gonna get my hands on these and I'm going into my son's classroom and I'm gonna bring the science. Yeah, I'm gonna bring it in. Great. I'll bring it, I'll bring it to the kids if the kids classrooms aren't gonna have it there. Absolutely. Yeah. Oh, Greg, this has just been so much fun. Hey, man, thank you guys. All right, then if you ever have me out in the future, I can give you updates on our, we have new projects coming out. We're doing a songbird detection things where we want to be able to make a device that listens for the songbird calls and then figure out what bird it was. And then we can geotag these things and put them all around the world and be able to detect migration patterns. And we have a new project that we're starting with some students in January. What, Songza for birds? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it'd be like, yeah, like a Shazam. A Shazam, that's what it is. Yeah. That we can have like, but we're gonna get some other data and some temperature and weather and other sensors on there. But try to make it really low cost so that we can have sort of like, this is our, like, we do citizen science, but like most citizen science is like, you know, people are collecting little bits of data and then some big scientists is looking at it. But we're trying to do it the other way around or we try to give you the tools and you do the science. But it's our first foray into the other one which is where we get people out there to collect data. Then next year we're doing one on the same idea, but instead of like just listening for songs, we're gonna have the microphone continuously on. We're gonna be monitoring like the insects that are in the area. Each, you know, insect has its own frequency that it flaps its wings at. So we able to detect that, detect frogs. We have a crashing frog population. So we're gonna try to do these long-term recordings and then try to glean some information, some citizen science information about what's happening in the environment just by listening. So it's gonna be, that's our next year's project. So. I get interpreting sound apes. Yeah, so sound apes. And so we have, we have some projects right now where we are listening to like the electric fish stuff. We do a lot with fish. So electric fish have tones. And so we're working on a project. Now we're trying to shift the fish, electric fish when they're, when they have two of them up next to each other, one will jam the other one if at the same frequency. So they figured out this way it's called a jamming avoidance response. And one fish will change its frequency to go up and the other fish will go down. And so we're using the Arduino to make a fake fish and sort of make this fish move. There's a fish piano. Yeah, so that's the idea. We're trying to make an electric organ out of electric organ. Nice. I don't know if we get that to work, maybe we'll do a talk on that one day. So that's. I love that. That would be awesome. Yeah. It's electric. Yeah. It's kind of weird. That's literally the thing called the electric organ. It's actually the pure part of the fish that generates the tone. So, cool. Anyway, so these are just some of the future projects that we're working on now. And so maybe some students will be working on them. They're listening to this for next summer when we do our internship. And that would be wonderful. I hope that we can send some applicants your way. Cool. I can't wait to find out more about what you're doing, because I think it's just great. And so thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you? We are at backyardbrains.com. We are a for-profit company. So if you remember that, remember to maybe pay us something because we're trying to do the not do the nonprofit thing where we bang for money. We're trying to create value so that people can sleep. We'll think this is cool and we can continue to do it. Yeah, it makes good stocking stuffers. The robo-roach is only about this big. Perfect gift for that nerd in your life. All right, well, thank you guys so much for having me on. I do appreciate it. I might just have to be my own Santa this year. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful time shoveling your snow over there. Have a great day. Cheers, bye-bye. All right, everyone. That was Greg Gage from Backyard Brains. And what fun. I'm definitely going to spend some time investigating the experiments that they have because I think it's so neat making neuroscience. The brain, I mean, everybody talks about rocket science and brain surgery as being these crazy, complicated things. Neuroscience, we can all figure this out. We can all learn it. We can at least have fun with it, right? Science is new. All right, everyone. So we are going to take a quick break because this has been a nice long interview. So let us take a break. And then we will get to the second half of the show, full of science stories. I've got Juno, Blair has hummingbirds, and Justin has bacteria. I've got some stuff. Oh, yes, I do. Yeah, this is This Week in Science, and we'll be back in just a few moments. Hey there, everyone. Just want to say thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being a part of the twist community. We love that you are here with us week after week after week. But to keep the show going, you know, we got to pay the bills a little bit. So now we're going to talk a little bit about that first announcement, though. Calendar. I mentioned it at the top of the show. I'm going to mention it again. 2018 coloring calendars for Blair's Animal Corner and Twist are available now with beautiful hand-drawn art from Blair and monthly reminders of the wonderful geeky holidays throughout the year and your weekly reminder for twists as well so that you never forget an episode. You look at your calendar and you go, I missed twists. What? Well, I have to make sure I catch it next week. Or, oh, I need to go look at YouTube. Or, oh, I need to download the podcast. All these great things like that. They are available now at twist.org. Head over there so you can get your calendar before 2018. Come on, supplies are running out. And SF SketchFest January 18th. We have a Facebook event that has a link to the Cal Academy SF SketchFest nightlife event where we will be performing. And tickets are on sale there. And you can go to facebook.com slash this week in science. Look in our events to be able to find that event and look for tickets. Or you can go to sfsketchfest.com to look for the California Academy of Sciences nightlife event and we'll be in there if you find it. January 18th, San Francisco. You can always tweet to me or send me an email or send me a message if you're confused. We talk to you about things like this. OK, and now on to merchandise and twistily related things. You guys, you guys, you guys, this week in science, our website twist.org. You know it is the home of all the stuff for twists, right? Our episodes are there every week. Additionally, it's the place where you can go if you're like, hey, I need a twist mug. And you can head to twist.org. And if you go there and click on the Zazzle Store link, that will take you directly to our Zazzle Store where you can do things like find a twist mug or a tote bag or a t-shirt or stamps or wrapping paper. Do you need wrapping paper? They actually have wrapping paper for sale. It's pretty amazing. There are mouse pads, all sorts of lovely things. Still time before the holiday is done. That's right. Makes great gifts for the twist lovers in your life. They're on the Zazzle Store. Heading back over to twist.org, every week we ask for your support. If you're, you know, you can buy our merchandise. A portion of those proceeds do go towards our show and our cost of doing business. But the main way that we support the show is through direct donations from you. In two ways, you can do that. We have PayPal donation buttons all over the website. The main one, there's a donate button on the sidebar on the twist website, the twist.org. Click on that yellow donate button, and that will take you to a PayPal interface where you can donate once to make a donation. If you want to get a recurring PayPal donation going, you can just click on one of the episodes. So say the most recent episode, scroll to the bottom of the show notes, and there are pink buttons. And there's one that says one time contribution, another says $10 per month recurring $5 per month, or $2 per month. And these will allow you to donate using PayPal to This Week in Science on a recurring basis. And that's the thing that our other place for patronage is how they work, Patreon. Patreon allows you to support us in an ongoing fashion. There was a bit of a kerfuffle this last week, and things have shifted around a little bit. So last week, Patreon came out and said they were going to change their fee structure. And unfortunately, it was going to hit $1 and $2 donors very hard. And additionally, for the way that we had our Patreon setup with single donation, single episode support, as opposed to monthly support through Patreon, it was really going to hit people especially hard. So I went through, and I've been thinking about changing us to monthly support on Patreon anyway. I did it. I finally did it. But what that means is that any of you out there who were supporting us at $1 per episode, that level of support shifted to only $1 per month. And so unless you go back into your Patreon account and update your level of support, I mean, it's fine if you want to keep us at $1 a month, that's okay. But if you would like to support us at an equivalent amount of around $4 to $5 a month, you are going to want to jump back in and update your support. Many of you already have done that. Thank you so much because really changing from the per episode to monthly support, it dropped our income through Patreon from about $1,500 on average per month to less than 500 at the click of a button. And that was a little bit shocking to me knowing that it's holidays and there are bills coming and all that kind of stuff. But the last few days have been great. People are really pitching in and updating their support and we are building it back up again. So I just want to remind everyone out there, if you would like to continue supporting us on Patreon, please do so. They came out today and said they are not instituting the fee structure change yet because a lot of people didn't like it and spoke out against it and they realized it was a bad idea. So we're realizing Patreon is still a good company. They are a good company for creators and we're gonna stay there for a while. And so we hope that you will stay there with us if you want to be a part of our little community there on Patreon. But if you are there, please consider updating your level of support that would really help us out. If you do not want to continue to use Patreon, like I said, we have PayPal and there are options available all over the twist.org website. Whatever you do choose though, you know what? Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Look, look, look, here's my show notes. I'm showing you the show notes right now. I've got my thing that I read to you all the time. But whatever you decide to do, if you don't want to support us that way anymore, Patreon, PayPal, whatever, it doesn't matter. Thank you for listening to us. We hope you like us enough to share us with people you know. And we hope that you continue to listen to us. And for all of your support, around the web, in your cars, in your homes, thank you so much for your support. We could not do this without you. Mm-hmm. And we're back with more of the second science with the different bumper music than usual. I forgot about that song. That's a fun song. I know I talked too long. So, I talked a lot longer than normal. A song from a compilation album we had years ago that we haven't heard for a while. It was fun. It was fun. Yeah, we have great old compilations and songs on them. Every once in a while, it's nice to bring them back. I kind of listen to the same things all the time on the show. It's kind of the YouTube-friendly songs that aren't gonna ding us. Are the ones that don't need it to us already? Yeah, that aren't copyrighted other places. But anyway, we're back. And you know what time it's for now? It is time for our favorite, well, one of our, we have so many favorite segments. I love this segment, though. In this time of fake news, it's nice to be inspired sometimes. So, it's time for this week. And what has science done for me? Nightly. Nightly. And today, I bring in a long-time listener of twists with his writings of what science has done for him lately. Around the turn of the century, my great grandfather who worked in the railroad yard was injured, infection set in, and he died from the wounds. Today, he probably would have been treated at an ER and maybe spent some time in a hospital. My grandfather was diagnosed with diabetes around the 1920s and had to quit his job and have injections daily. He went into a diabetic coma a few times, became depressed and took his own life. I was diagnosed as borderline type two diabetic at 54. My nutritionist helped me develop a healthy meal plan. All my vital signs are better now, not to mention my slimmer waistline. My father became clinically depressed after retiring. He never got better and his depression likely contributed to his death at 70. When I retired, I became interested in all the science available on the internet, including a show called This Week in Science. Twist keeps my brain active and feeds my positive outlook on life in contrast to my father, grandfather, and great grandfather, Ed Dyer. Nice one, Ed. Thank you for sending that note and sharing with us. Thank you so much for sharing that, Ed. You have been a long time listener of Twist and it's wonderful to know that you're here with us week after week and day after day too. We see you on Facebook and all over the place and I love that science has made you happy and given you something to think about, something for your brain to chew on. And I think Ed might actually be a almost longest time listener because he, I believe, was listening to the show even before I joined it. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. He might have to arm wrestle Pamela for that. Wait, wait, wait, yeah. Thank you, Ed. Thank you so much for writing in, yeah. It is inspiring and everyone, we need to know what science has done for you lately. Please write us. Leave us a message on our Facebook page, facebook.com slash thisweekandscience and we really still wanna keep filling this segment of the show with something from you week after week after week. Let's keep inspiring everybody else with our ideas of the good that science does in our worlds. Science time. Science time. Hey, do you know what? What? What? I love Juno. Juno is like my favorite spacecraft right now. So Juno is flying around Jupiter, right? We've got Juno doing these crazy orbits around Jupiter flying close to Jupiter's surface, doing these dives and recording all sorts of stuff, taking amazing pictures too. If you're not following some of the pictures that are coming out of the Juno mission, oh my goodness, they're mind-boggling. And this week, one of the studies that came out, the big feature that we love to talk about on Jupiter, the great red spot, right? So the Juno cam has been taking amazing images and because of these images, we're getting a view on Jupiter that we have never had before. We're high resolution images from a fairly close distance are really giving us a wonderful picture of the winds, the atmosphere, this surface that we can see of one of the largest, Jupiter's the largest planet, the largest planet in our solar system. This great red spot, it used to be wide enough to contain two Earths. It has shrunken since the 1970s. It's now maybe we can squeeze in about one and a half Earths into the diameter of the big red spot. But in its last dive through, Juno didn't only take pictures, Juno also recorded from other instruments that are on the craft. And these instruments were able to let us gaze deep within miles, hundreds of miles within the great red spot. And so the researchers who are working on Juno, they were able to use Juno's microwave radiometer to be able to peer using microwaves, microwave frequencies to be able to kind of look inside of the great red spot. And they were able to determine that the great red spot is, well, at least they penetrated down about 200 miles into the planet's atmosphere. And it was all still great red spot. I mean, that's further, where is that? That's like the International Space Station distance from Earth, it's deeper than our oceans. The great red spot, the storm that keeps going. It can potentially tell us a lot about our own atmospheric sciences because why is this storm continuing for so long? Why is it so massive? Why does it continue? Why is it so huge? Juno found that the great red spots routes go 50 to 100 times deeper than the Earth's ocean and are warmer at the base than they are at the top, said Andy Ingersoll, Professor of Planetary Science at Caltech, he is a co-investigator on the Juno mission. Winds are associated with differences in temperature and the warmth of the spot base explains the ferocious winds we see at the top of the atmosphere. So it's kind of like funneling that wind through. And they think that the spot has existed for over 350 years, but in the time that we've been looking at it, as we've seen its size diminish, we wonder what the ultimate fate of this storm is going to be. Additionally, Juno has also been looking at radiation coming from the planet and another researcher, Heidi Becker, who works on Juno's radiation monitoring investigation, she says, the closer you get to Jupiter, the weirder it gets. We knew the radiation would probably surprise us, but we didn't think we'd find a new radiation zone around the planet. And so what they found, as Juno did one of its dives, they found a new radiation zone that's just above the atmosphere of the planet over or kind of near the equator. And it includes energetic hydrogen, oxygen and sulfur ions that are zipping around really fast, almost at light speed. They're highly, they're super fast velocities, right? And what they are is these ions are high energy, heavy ions that have been pulled off of Jupiter's moons, Io and Europa. And so the moons actually there, the moons atmospheres have these atoms or ions in them and they get sucked from the moons by the planet and then they get stuck around in this radiation belt in the planet's atmosphere. And their electrons get stripped away by the upper atmosphere of Jupiter. So they end up being these. They're not neutral anymore and they become very highly charged. Yeah, so there's interesting stuff happening around Jupiter. We are learning more as we swoop around it time after time and as close as about 2,100 miles is as close as Juno gets and we're gonna keep learning more and more about Juno. And if you get a chance to take a look, there is a visualization that has been created by NASA's visualization team that uses data out of JunoCam and computer generated aspects to actually allow you to take a deep dive into Jupiter's great red spot based on the microwave radiation data that was collected. And so they have created this fly-through that lets you imagine what it would be like to move dive into the great red spot if you possibly could. The temperature goes up over 500 Kelvin as you dive down about 200 miles beneath the surface of the atmosphere. So it's not something that we would be capable of doing and surviving anytime soon but it's nice to imagine. But Juno did it. No, Juno didn't go into it. Juno swoops. It's just a greeting. Detect did it. Detect, yeah, just went over and scanned it, looked for microwave radiation that could be measured and based on that microwave radiation we've been able to kind of piece together the inner structure of the great red spot. This is why science, I think. I look at stuff like this, I'm like, this is amazing. We are doing amazing science on a distant planet in our solar system. This is like the brilliant stuff. Closer to home though, a pretty cool study and this one's a quick bit of news. Some university students, grad students and undergraduates built a CubeSat that was launched and has been in our atmosphere. These researchers are at the University of Colorado Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. They created a CubeSat, it's called the Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment that has a small energetic particle telescope that measures the flux of solar energetic protons and Earth's radiation belt electrons. So the instrument on this experiment is called the Relativistic Electron and Proton Telescope. And it integrated little experiment, otherwise known as Reptile. You have to be a couple to put together a good one. Yeah, so it was launched on NASA's 2012 Van Allen probes mission and has been studying energetic electrons near the inner edge of the Earth's radiation belt and has been able to confirm that a hypothesis that for a long time, people have said, we don't really know where these high energy electrons on the inside of the Van Allen's belts come from. Oh, oh, it's alien mind control. Wait, no, it's a government program that controls other, wait, no, it's... They were, the hypothesis has been that they come from cosmic rays but nobody's been able to confirm that before. And this grad student telescope cube set has confirmed it. So yeah, so the head of this study, Professor Jinlin Li, a professor at CU Boulder's Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department, says we are the first, we are reporting the first direct detection of these energetic electrons near the inner edge of Earth's radiation belt. We have finally solved a six decade long mystery. Yeah, and they published this paper in Nature this week, which is a pretty big splash to come in. And speaking of splashes, the way that this whole process works, they basically showed that this process is called cosmic ray albedo neutron decay or CRAND. Cosmic rays enter the Earth's atmosphere, collide with neutral atoms that includes electrons that are trapped by the Earth's magnetic fields. And when they collide, then those, it creates a... This is a technical term. Yeah. Technical, highly technical term. They collided with neutral atoms, create a splash which produces charged particles, including electrons. And those electrons get trapped and that's what they were able to measure. The trapped electrons that came from a big from the cosmic rays. Running into things. Exactly. Yeah, go grad students, go CubeSats. Little tiny satellites can do a lot of work. And then bringing it here to the surface of our planet, another study actually confirmed that it... Yeah, it's possible that life's building blocks like ethane and methane or ethane and methane that they may form on icy substrates in the vacuum of space. And they showed it here on Earth in a simulated, very cold vacuum environment that when they had low energy electrons impact on molecules in ice that there were chemical, chemical reactions that got triggered and started and create lead to the formation of methane and ethane and they also have showed the formation of formaldehyde, a little bit more complex building block. And the fact that they've been able to do it in this, it just puts more. I mean, I feel like every year, multiple times per year, there's another study saying, we've found life's building blocks in a cloud in outer space. We showed that we could create life's building blocks in a cloud in outer space, yep. And then all of the Earth-ish like habitable planets that have been discovered, it's, boy, it's just at this point, we just could probably assume it would be a ridiculous accident of the universe that life isn't on a multitude of planets up there. Yeah, the building blocks have the potential to be everywhere. So that just, yeah, the likelihood is there. Justin, would you maybe say that life finds a way? Life finds a way, yeah, definitely. Thank you. Thank you. Speaking of life finding a way, tell me something about sand. Oh, well, it's almost summer. In Australia. Well, like, I mean, okay, so it's winter now here, but it's summer, it's somewhere we're entering summer. We have Australian listeners in the summer, man. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, half the planet is about to enter summer. And when it is summer where you are, and you're planting your bare feet on sandy beaches, building sand castles, and picking grains of sand from bathing suit crevices, take a moment to appreciate the company you're in, from your fellow sunbathers and the ever-present seagulls to the occasional sea lion. But what about the beach itself? Researchers from Max Planck Institute of Marine Microbiology in Bremen did a little digging and found granular metropolises. The sand, it turns out, is a thriving community. Between 10,000 to 100,000 microorganisms live on each grain of sand. Wow. These are from samples taken from the southern shores of the North Sea near the island of Hegeland off the German coast. The bacteria do not colonize the sand grains uniformly. While exposed areas are practically uncolonized, the bacteria huddled together in cracks and depressions. They're either hiding from potential predators or from the daily grind of sand as it gets swirled about in the tides, or maybe they're just not there because of that grinding action, and that's all that's left is the microbes and the niches. And it's apparently a pretty diverse community of bacteria. Thousands of different species coexisting on each individual grain of sand. Interestingly, more than half of the bacteria species and groups were found on all the investigated sand grains. Others only sporadically were found, indicating that there is on this beach a core community while the rest may simply be tourists. And is this primarily wet sand? So this would be a wet sand area, yes. Because I imagine that top layer of dry sand baking in the sun, probably not a great home. Maybe not, maybe not as well as the others. The sand dwelling bacteria play, they say here an important role in marine ecosystem in global material cycles because these bacteria processes, for example, carbon nitrogen compounds from seawater, the inflows, the sand acts as a purifying filter. Much of what is flushed into the seabed by seawater doesn't come back out again. And this is a quotey voice from one of the researchers in the project. Every grain of sand functions like a small bacterial pantry. They deliver the necessary supplies to keep the carbon nitrogen sulfur cycles running whatever the conditions may be that the bacterial community on a grain of sand is exposed to, thanks to the great diversity of the core community. There's always someone, there's some type of bacteria present, able to process the substances from the surrounding water. So yeah, it's, you know what it reminds me, it's very important, here's a who. Yeah, that's true. Well, I was wondering- But it's not just one flower, it's every grain of sand on the beach. Right, I was wondering if beach bunnies would have somebody who spends a lot of time on the beach, would have a slightly different microbiome than those that do not in the same area. Yeah, you know, that would be fun to see if there's sand microbes, marine microbes that can survive on human skin well enough. At least in the crevices, that's what they like. At least in the crevices. I'm gonna think twice about the sand in my crevices. Every time I'm on the beach now. I mean, it's never a good situation to begin with, but now you just have another reason to be more concerned. It gives me no meaning to the I-contain multitudes. Yeah, there you go. And being a single-celled organism isn't all bad. Maybe you don't have a nervous system. Decisions about your own individual quality of life, and you may be able to control your movements by using a network of protein molecules that interact in a special way, much like nerve cell circuits in our brains. And with this, you can go wherever you want to sort of. Scientists at AMALF have developed a microscopy method that allows them to see how individual bacteria use this protein network to make decisions. They discovered that the bacteria are surprisingly diverse in what they're calling personality and mood. Team published its findings in the scientific journal E-Life, December 12th, and no doubt has spent a fair amount of time anthropomorphosizing their petri dishes, perhaps going as far as taking them to company. Christmas parties, which was likely held in the lab anyway, so it's not like they had to bring them. They found that E. coli can interrupt an otherwise straight-swing motion with occasional tumbles that set it off in new random directions. But the reasoning for this, or the impetus for this isn't necessarily random. Tom Shimizu, group leader at AMALF systems biology group, says that E. coli use sensor proteins to detect things like food molecules, toxic chemicals to decide whether life is getting better or worse as it swims along and controls how often it tumbles to make sure it ends up in a good place. This was, I guess, somewhat known E. coli behavior from past research where they could do experiments where they could sort of see that the averages over hundreds of cells would be migrating away or towards sort of moving different reactions. Yeah, this quorum sensing and moving, yeah. But this is Johannes Kiekstra, PhD student and the group Shimizu has put together, led the effort to develop this microscopy method that enabled the researchers to see how the protein network in each individual bacterium would respond to changes in the environment. The bacteria used in the experiments had the exact same DNA sequence. So these are all identical quadruplets, however many there. So same DNA grown under as idealized as possible identical conditions. Nevertheless, researchers discovered that the protein network of each of them behaves differently in a cool environment. Quoty voice from Kiekstra, each bacterium seems to have its own personality. For example, we found that the chemical concentration to which bacteria respond considerably between bacteria. Apart from the clear differences in response between bacteria due to personality, Shimizu and Kiekstra also saw that within each bacterium. Molecular activity could change considerably over time. They witnessed that the way protein molecules and bacteria interact to control movement was not steady, but varying in time. They would have these sort of quiet environments and then with no change in the amount of food or toxins and then the moodiness of the cells means that the mechanism with which they decide to tumble or swim straight does not receive steady input but itself is varied. Researchers believe these varying molecular messages are caused by chance of vents within the cell, which is something that's interesting because there's a, I've heard of stochastic strategies in cells before, which, I mean, they're randomized and maybe this is how they're being randomized, but it's actually sort of a survival strategy to have a bit of randomness in the way that decisions are being made or the way that things are being expressed. For instance, in people, a lot of this disappears thanks to natural selection. If half of all people early on say we're not afraid of lions and the other half were very afraid of lions, at some point everybody would still become afraid of lions because that's going to eventually get sort of passed on. Those who weren't, except for that one family down the way that's actually has pet lions, like everybody else who was not afraid of lions was eaten. That's not how they'd all be eaten. Yeah, so having a little bit of randomness in decision-making and personality type, you can really see being a beneficial evolutionary trait for all life and all organisms. And then on top of that, there's sort of mood differences in this population that's microbial populations can be immense in number so they can sort of afford to have different personality and then sort of change that strategy with mood. Now, I'm saying personality and mood a lot. And I can see Kiki cringing a little bit from the massive amounts of anthropomorphization going on. That's right. But I would like the audience to think for a moment that consider perhaps that we have simply been anthropomorphizing people for much too long. And that our moodiness and personalities might actually just be evolutionary traits that we share in common with E. coli. Yeah, well, I mean, people talk about your mood. So you're not feeling good because you're tired, right? You didn't get enough rest because the light was on all night long. You can have the same thing happen to a bunch of E. coli or yeast. You leave the light on too long so they don't get to go through their rest cycle and maybe they're fatigued. And maybe so then maybe they don't act in this more exploratory mood. I say mood, quote unquote. But yeah, I mean, a lot of what we call our mood or our personality, personality we've shown, spiders have personality, all sorts of invertebrates have what we would call fish have personality. These are different strategies for engaging with other organisms in a social way for communication. So personality potentially comes out of engaging with other organisms of your kind. And then mood potentially comes from how you respond based on stress factors and other stimuli. So these are two descriptive words that, yeah, can be used to potentially describe the behaviors and activity of the lowliest single-celled organism to man on our wonderful pedestal way high up here. Mm-hmm. They're gonna say, we think that the bacterial individuality that we found is not due to either nature being the DNA or nurture the environment, but rather random events like molecular collisions inside the bacterium's single-cell. This is their speculation, or they define it as noise. And that this noise, because there weren't new proteins being produced during the experiment, the noise came from within the cell itself. And that the mood swings themselves were sometimes pretty drastic, or they were surprised by how drastic that they were. And Keeksler says that because we know that bacteria can prevent these messenger molecules from interacting so randomly, we think they likely do this for a purpose. And again, before we get become too afraid of anthropomorphizing, life exists because life has strategies that it takes out into its environment. And we shouldn't over anthropomorphize humans to the point where we separate ourselves completely from having basic survival strategies even within our personalities. Yeah, I can agree with you about that. I think we have separated ourselves because we're like, oh, we have this big brain and we're people, we talk and we do all these things that other animals don't. That makes us totally different. And so we have, I guess, in a process way we separated ourselves, isolated ourselves from the rest of the scientific inquiry. I think that there are researchers who are bringing it back around and trying to bridge that gap again. But once it's ingrained, it's hard to get rid of. And then this is, they say that the new insights on noise and biochemical networks create biological or biotechnological opportunities, helping engineers build systems that are either more robust to noise or make use of it optimally. So then you kind of think, well, what are we talking about there? Well, we're talking about, you know, little vocational training, little education for the cells. So they'll fit their role in society a little better. Yeah, fantastic. Okay, we'll educate those little microbes, those little single-celled organisms. Gonna get them some education so they can manage their moods a little better, understand their own personalities so that they can manage their moods and those social situations that are so requiring of that management skills. You don't know what time it is right now. Oh my goodness, what time is it? It's time for Blair's Animal Corner, finally. You know I've waited two weeks for this? Yeah. Ooh. A creature, bite dead, feel a pet, no pet at all. Wanna hear about a animal, she's your girl. Except for giant pandas that's called, and that are no, no, no, no. Whatcha got, Blair? Oh, I have terrible news. Oh, no. I just played the start of it because we missed it. What happened? What happened? Climate change, guys. It's gonna affect the hummingbirds. Oh, no, that's like one of the best animals that ever existed. Hummingbirds, they're adorable. They really add ambiance to your front porch if you put out some nectar for them. They also are pollinators. We talked about pollinators on the show. Yeah, they are pollinators. They're important to certain habitats, especially because there are flowers that have adapted very specifically to be attractive to hummingbirds, to be accessible to hummingbirds, and to be pollinated by hummingbirds. The problem is, as the climate changes, the hummingbirds have new pressure. With climate change, specifically with the element involving global warming, there are areas where hummingbirds live that are more sunny and that are warmer. And they are beating their little hearts more than a thousand times a minute and need to feed constantly to supply that energy. If they spend too much time in direct sunlight on a hot day, they can overheat. And so they can't be in so much direct sunlight. But that's what we're seeing more and more of with climate change is more direct sunlight and a higher overall temperature. So now hummingbirds are starting to dodge sun to go into the shade at various points of the day, much more than they ever have before. This is a study coming out of George Fox University in Oregon. So they found, first of all, they're ducking into the shade. That's a problem. Additionally, they are finding hummingbirds to be less social when it's very hot out. Oh, because they're trying to keep them hot so they're trying to minimize their body temperature rise. They're not as active. So they're not- Well, they're trying to avoid that. Interact, they're not flying. They're not- They're also trying to avoid- They're trying to avoid the reproductive dance, right? So that's the other thing is that they're actually seeing a reduction in reproduction attempts as a result of higher temperatures. And what's more? These guys, when they sleep at night, they actually go into torpor. Because if you think about it, again, their little hearts are beating 1,000 times a minute. And that means that they need food constantly while their heart is going that fast. So in order to be able to fast long enough to sleep, they actually reduce their body temperature to a point where it counts as torpor. They can reduce their body temperature by 50 to 75% at night. But with warmer nights, they can't lower their body temperature as far. So that causes a problem. All of this together, it's a lot of impact on hummingbirds. So if they're feeling this impact, where are they gonna go? They're gonna chase the cooler temperatures. Plants don't move as fast as animals. And the plants that the hummingbirds depend on to feed on are not able to move as quickly. And that's really the problem here, is that the climate change is happening fast enough that hummingbirds could potentially move to follow comfortable temperatures, but they won't have the plants that have evolved side by side with them to give them a food source. I don't like this story anymore. So it's an interesting look at a very specialized animal, which is what is going to have the most problem with a changing climate. Yeah. At first, these guys are canary. They're a hummingbird in the coal mine. These are animals that are extremely specialized, so they're going to take the brunt of the pressure at first. But as this continues, less specialized animals will also take a hit. So that's why I think looking at things like hummingbirds, obviously people love hummingbirds. And if hummingbirds disappeared, we'd all be very sad because they're awesome. But ultimately, they're telling a tale to us. They're giving us a clue of what to look for. But I think the big problem here is the pollinator connection and the fact that these birds, along with bees and other insects, are pollinators for plants. And if they move, if the pollinators move or if the pollinators die out because of the heat, the plants will not be pollinated and the plants will not be able to reproduce. Right, and they're kind of stuck, right? And the plants don't move as quickly as animals, like we said. If you're the pollinator, you won't stay where the plants are. And if you're the plant that needs to be pollinated and the, like, stuck, they can't, but they have a hard time coordinating that maneuver. It's, you know, slow environmental changes over millions of years, it creates a stepwise evolutionary hand-in-hand process. You create this super fast change in a space, there's gonna be consequences. But potentially, you know, we'll see how it all works out. We might lose some hummingbirds, but then, you know, maybe there'll be some other animal that steps into that empty niche in the environment and says, hey, this part of the ecosystem is mine and then we'll start to thrive. We don't know. Yeah, it'll be giant cockroaches. That's how it's gonna step in. Maybe it'll be huge ones. Who knows? Because we know cockroaches pollinate now, so yeah, it'll be big, pollinating cockroaches. That's great. Absolutely. And moving on from side-by-side evolution to convergent evolution, another one of my favorite topics, I want to talk about red panda poop. I want to talk about giant panda poop. And I wanna talk about lemur poop. What do these three animals have in common? They are in no way closely related. They have diverged from the time dinosaurs were around around 83 million years ago. Oh, yeah. What they have in common is all in the poop. And that's because all three of these animals eat bamboo. Oh, they're bamboo poo cousins. Exactly. So. Who twins is? Panda, the word panda. I think I've talked a little bit about this on the show before, actually means bamboo eater. The red panda was the first animal deemed a panda before the giant panda. They are not in any way related. The giant panda is closely related to bears. Red pandas recently have been put into their very own category, but if you have to assign them to something, they're kind of close to raccoons. And then lemurs, of course, are prosimians. They're primates. They're kind of an ancestral model of what became monkeys later, if you look at them, they're representative of that. So these three types of mammals, other than being mammals, otherwise you wouldn't expect to see a lot similar in their gut, but they found that they share 48 gut microbes. More than 12% of their microbial makeup was shared across these three species. To give you kind of a point of reference, there were, as I said, 48 shared amongst the bamboo lemurs, red pandas and giant pandas. If you look at ringtail lemurs who do not eat bamboo and bamboo lemurs, very closely related species, they only shared eight types of gut bacteria. The food shapes the poo. The food shapes the poo and the poo shapes the microbes and the microbes shape the animal. And bamboo being very tough to digest, it takes some microbial specialization as we've discussed previously. Absolutely, yes. And the other thing you'll see too in speaking of convergent evolution for bamboo is that the giant panda and the red panda both have a special claw for shucking bamboo that, yeah, it's completely convergent. There's no shared ancestor there with that trait. So bamboo is really tough to digest, is hard to break up, is hard to pull down and all this stuff, they're very well-equipped to a very specific food source and you can see how animals that are completely unrelated and have been genetically separated for 83 million years have this huge part of their makeup in common. And so they don't have to be genetically related to share a huge amount of their microbiome. But okay, so I'm wondering, we learned that the giant panda at one point in time ate meat and still is adapted to eat meat. So do the red panda and the lemur, is there any similarity in there from being carnivores at some point in time? That is a great question. So is that where it diverges between the three? Right, so as far as lemurs go, lemurs are mostly herbivores. So the ring-tailed lemur is eating fruits and vegetables and seeds and roots and stuff like that. So I would say my guess, and this is not based on anything in this research, it's just based on the animal knowledge kind of peripheral to this that I have, my guess is that a bamboo lemur would not have nearly as much stomach or tummy issues as the panda does because they at least have the baseline microbiome to process cellulose and other things that are kind of harder to break down. The red panda and the giant panda both come from a lineage of omnivore lifestyles. So that is a great question to then look at the shared gut bacteria amongst the two types of pandas versus other carnivores and to kind of look at that as well. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, yeah, that gain and function that allowed them to start digesting the bamboo and to use to specialize on that food source as opposed to others. Absolutely. Would you like me to close out the corner with my final story real quick? Okay, dogs and cats, bring it. Okay, so I brought this story because I saw it all over the internet. The headline was, okay, we finally know dogs superior to cats. Dogs smarter than cats. What? This was, yeah, this was the headline that was all over the internet. Oh, I think I saw it and went, man, fake news. Yeah, so the headline. I didn't even read it. This is one of these situations where the headline is so misleading because really all they found out is that the sheer quantity of neurons in dog cerebral cortex are greater in number than cats. Which is not surprising since they're larger than cats for the most part. But the other thing I really wanted to bring up just before people look further into this, this would be my thing to everybody is look up the story, read it for yourself, think about it. What do dogs do that cats don't do? Dogs are extremely social and they, as we've talked about on the show are specifically attuned to reading expressions and information from a completely different species, us. So they have evolutionary pressure to have a social context within each other and to be able to jump species boundaries to be able to understand what we are doing. That's part of their evolution, right? So of course to say one type of animal smarter than another is way too oversimplified. I would argue that it takes more neurons to be able to read another species and to be able to read each other in a complex fashion in the way that dogs do. If you wanted to test them on problem solving or on hunting ability or any of these other things that could be other measures of intelligence, I don't know how that would come out but the argument here is that the sheer number of neurons is what is in play when you're looking at how quote unquote smart an animal is. So the first thing I would do is I would test cats ability to catch frisbees and dog ability to climb backyard fences. Right, or dog ability to sneak up on literally anything because that's pretty terrible. And if you actually read the study, the study isn't really asking the question about cats versus dogs. Like you said, it was looking at animals with different specializations, different behaviors. And so they looked at cats, raccoons, dogs, lions, and bears. Right. And somehow, raccoons would win. The headline becomes dogs are better than cats. My favorite quote from it actually is one of the head researchers says, I'm 100% a dog person. But with that disclaimer, our findings mean to me that dogs have the biological capability of doing much more complex and flexible things with their lives than cats can. At the least, we now have some biology that people can factor into their discussion about who's smarter cats or dogs. No, oh my gosh. Okay, so I'm gonna use that researcher as an outlier. Yeah. Right there. It's just looking. I mean, the example they have, so the bear, the brain is 10 times larger than a cat, but it has about the same number of neurons. However, the raccoon has a brain the size of a cat with the same number of neurons as the dog. Right. So, okay, the cats versus dogs thing, just make it go away. Yeah, exactly. That's, But they, no, so, there's a way to present the story that's interesting. They looked at neuronal quantities in these different types of animals. And instead of boiling it down to smartness or anything like that, we've learned that animals with different types of skill sets have different numbers of neurons that are not directly related to the size of the brain. So, And it's interesting also that bears are fairly, they come together to be social at times. They rear their young, the moms rear their youngs, but really the males and females stay apart. They're very isolated individuals until they come together for breeding season. Cats, they are solitary hunters. They do have prides, like lions will do that. But, and I watch my cats around the house. They are very connected to each other, but they like their alone time, you know? So there's, And dragonflies are more efficient at catching their prey than cats and with far less neurons. So, yeah, I mean, I just wanted to mention it because it was around and I wanted to, again, remind our listeners that headlines are not always representative of the science and even conclusions drawn from research are not representative of the science. But anecdotally, anecdotally, are totally biased against the outcome of their science. Yeah. I think it's safe to say if we anthropomorphize intelligence for little bit and define it as that which is useful to human society, dogs win. Dogs have way more jobs in society than cats. Dogs are, dogs do have more jobs with human society. I will, I will give you that. Well, yeah, because dogs evolved alongside with humans back to the first story that I was talking about. We evolved side by side. So, there we go. And cats have just been around going, what can I get from you? Yeah, exactly. How can I use you? Oh, you would like to worship me? Yes, please. That's right. Okay, moving on from there. Justin, do you have one last story? Very quick headline. Yes, fusion. At last, almost. Laser-driven technique for creating fusion. Need for radioactive fuel elements and leaves no toxic radioactive waste is now within reach. Once again, almost, say researchers. Dramatic advances in powerful high-end density lasers for scientists to pursue what was once thought the impossible, creating fusion energy based on hydrogen boron reactions. This is like, I feel like it's not as bad as the cold fusion desktop fusion stories that we used to get plagued with. But laser fusion's been a thing, Kiki. You've been tracking this one for a while. Yeah, so National Ignition Facility has been trying to do laser ignition for fusion using deuterium for a long time. And they still haven't gotten to the point where they have ignition with more, where it's a sustainable ignition that can release more energy than they put in. They can do little ignitions, and it works kind of, but they haven't quite gotten it to the place where they need it to be. There's also going to be ETER in France, which is going to be another fusion facility that's coming online here pretty soon, which people are very excited about because they're doing it, they're doing ignition a little bit differently. But in the whole story, though, I mean, part of it is what do you use to create the fusion energy, right? So this is a paper in the Scientific Journal of Laser and Particle Beans today, lead author of, say, Heinrich Hora from the University of New South Wales in Citi. International colleagues are arguing, and international colleagues are arguing that the path to hydrogen boron fusion is now the viable path. So it's different materials, but you use a little bit different approach here. They've got the hydrogen boron fusion is achieved using two powerful lasers and rapid bursts which apply precise nonlinear forces to compress the nuclei together. Hydrogen boron fusion produces no neutrons, no radioactivity in its primary reaction, and then like most other sources of power production, like in this example, coal gas nuclear, which will add heating liquids, like water to drive turbines. The energy that's generated from this hydrogen boron fusion event converts directly to electricity. So if it works, it should just be that much more efficient and on top of- That's nice. That would be kind of cool, converting it directly to electricity as opposed to heating water and then making steam and then pumping the turbines and then making the electricity, right? Yeah. And then like the ITER and the National Admission Facility, they have to heat fuel to the temperature of the sun. They do. In order for that to work. But for this approach, temperature needs to be a little bit higher. It's three billion degrees Celsius, which if you're like me and not familiar with Celsius, that is approximately 200 times hotter than the core of the sun, which is how I measure things in sun cores. It's there's a lot of decimal points. It's still hasn't caught on with anybody, but yeah, dramatic advances in laser technology, they're claiming are close to making the two laser approach feasible. Spatial recent experiments around the world that indicate that an avalanche fusion reaction could be triggered in the trillionth of a second blast from a petawatt scale laser pulse whose fleeting bursts pack a quadrillion lots of power. And if scientists could exploit this avalanche effect or it says a breakthrough in proton-borne fusion will be imminent. Yeah, so that's the if. That's the if and it's been, the National Ignition Facility had this big thing and it was like, if this happens, blah, blah, blah. And now this is the next, if this happens, then we'll have this avalanche and blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, if you can make it happen. I am glad people are working on it. I hope someone makes it happen because fusion energy would be amazing, but this is not, and this is not like you said, this is not cold fusion. This is not the desktop fusion of our parent's generation. This is. No, this is lasers. This is lasers. This is a different fusion. And this is scientifically feasible if not made possible by engineering just yet. It's gonna happen. Surely the only reason I brought it is because we've done a few of these fusion laser around the corner stories over. Over a decade, but that would be quite, if they can get this, just that, for instance, if they got this to work. Just make it as hot as the core of the sun. Yeah. No, no, 200. 200 times solar cores. Yeah, yeah. But then again, it's like the outside of the sun, hotter than the core of the sun. Yeah, before fusion and a bunch of unlimited free energy, maybe they'll get around to engineering plants that can glow in the dark so that we won't actually need reading lamps. What? What? No, no, when we see the stars. That can't be the reason. Now we have to explain to Blair. Because you couldn't turn it off. You would not be able to turn it off. No, that might be a little bit annoying, but you know, I don't want to read anymore through the plant out the window. Yeah. They did. You put a blanket over the plant. Yeah. So researchers at MIT have published in nanoletters, the journal Nanoletters, on their study to create glowing plants. So they used a molecule, a couple of molecules, coenzyme A and also luciferase to increase the glowing of plants. Now, previous work has been done to make glowing plants and there have been art exhibits and little things trying to make like tobacco plants glow, but the problem is that they've used genetic modifications that have been very species specific and they haven't really been able to get just any plant to glow. And so what this researchers are trying to do is create a methodology by which you could potentially have any plant. You could have your little ivy plant. You could have a little Arabidopsis plant glow. You could, whatever you want, you could make it glow. You cannot read by an Arabidopsis. Yeah, maybe not too small. If you have a bigger plant possibly. And so they've created, they package the components of a molecule called luciferin, which you might know from jellyfish. It allows jellyfish to glow. It's where it was first dis- and it also, it allows the glow of dragon, not dragonflies, of fireflies. Thank you very much. I was thinking dragon's fire, it was all linked in my brain somewhere. So luciferin, luciferase acts on the molecule luciferin and then the coenzyme A removes a reaction byproduct that gets in the way of the luciferase working. So it actually increases the glowiness of the plant. And they've packaged it all into nanoparticles and the nanoparticles, they've done this system where they put the plants basically in a solution and then put the solution under pressure to force the nanoparticles into the leaves of the plant. But someday what they hope that you'd be able to do is just spray the nanoparticle solution onto the surface of the plants and then the plants would just take it up. But really they, when they started, they got plants that could glow for about 45 minutes. Now they have plants that can glow for about three and a half hours. The light generated by one 10 centimeter watercress seedling is about 1,000th of the amount needed to read. But they're working on boosting the light that gets emitted. Yeah, watercress is tiny. They're working on boosting the light that comes out of it and how long the light is emitted by the plants. The ideas potentially someday have plants that you could read by. I read by the light of my plants, my plants. I read by the light of my plants. But why? Okay, well, because it would save a tremendous amount of energy. Except for the energy required to make the stuff. There's that argument. Initially, you eventually just find a way to genetically engineer it into Ivy. You grow it up the side of the wall. Now you're not spending countless dollars on LED lights, whatever, to light up the parking lot so that people can find their parking spaces easily. You now have tree-lined highways specifically engineered to shed light upon the roadway. And you're spending less money on energy, which is, I mean, think about how many lights are on all the time. Lights would power it themselves. So before we follow that, though, I'm gonna wanna see some research on whether this affects their photosynthesis capabilities. Well, they wouldn't be photosynthesizing during the day, but I mean, during the night. Right, but whether having this coating or whatever it is on them, if that's going to reduce the amount of energy they can uptake. But it's not a coating on them. It actually gets, so in the situation, the nanoparticles get taken into the cells and this becomes part of, it's an enzymatic process that gets this luciferin molecule to activate from within the cells. Right, but I guess my question is whether it would be blocking some of the movement of sunlight or other things inside the plant structure, it would be something I would wanna look at. I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to, and trying to solve a problem with plants and then creating a new problem when we're reducing the amount of oxygen we're getting from these plants. Right, so that's what I'm saying is, whatever you kind of tweak with something so essential to life on Earth, like plant life, something to look at. Up sides, down sides, you know, that's... I think they're using the energy of the plant itself so that probably would have some downstream like maybe plants don't grow as quickly or maybe they have to work a little harder. Right, if they're not storing all their energy at night or if they're not using it for growth at night, then yeah, maybe it could affect that. And strengths in the chat room also brings up light pollution, which is an important question too. If you have glowing plants that are on all the time every night, is that going to cause problems in nearby habitats? So... Oh, and yeah, the ability to see the stars at night. But again, a place like San Francisco where you can never see the stars and things are lit up all the time. Anyway. But the plant's keeping the mockingbirds awake. It's not street lights anymore. It's like, oh. I just sort of picture glowing lawns. Shoot out that street light. Like something people would do at night. There's this make their lawn glow. Right. My goodness. All right, you guys, that brings us to the end of the show. Let us know what you think of the story. Do you want glowing plants in your environment? I'd love to know. We, once again, if you'd like to find out about the This Week in Science Twists Blair's Animal Corner Calendar, head over to twist.org soon. Cause it's almost 2018, right? We'll look it up before 2018. Yes, I've sketch-fest January 18th in San Francisco, California at the Cal Academy of Sciences. And we have a Facebook event page advertising that if you are interested. It is now time to give our shout-outs. I would love to thank all of the people in the chat room for their time. People over on YouTube, on Facebook. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you for being here. Everyone in your cars right now. Everyone listening on the bus. Thank you for listening to us. Really appreciate you being here. And I would like to thank our Patreon sponsors, especially because of the big hubbub this past week. You don't know about it. Go look it up. Find out what happened with Patreon this last week. But all of you, thank you so much for sticking with us and for helping us out on Patreon. I am now going to get around to thanking you. Thank you to a Honey Moss, Aaron Luthon, Adam Mishkon, Alec Doty, Alex Wilson, Andy Gro, Arlene Moss, Artyom Ben-Rothig, Bill Curzy, Bob Calder, Braxton Howard, Brendan Minish, Brian Hedrick, Brian Condren, Brian Hone, Bruce Cordell, Byron Lee, Charlene Henry, Christopher Dreyer, Christopher Wrapp and Colombo Ahmed, Craig Porter, Dale Bryant, Dana Pearson, Daniel Garcia, Darwin Hannon, Darrell Dave-Neighbor, Dave Wilkinson, David Friedel, David Semerly, David Wiley, Donald Trump, the dubious, Dougal Campbell, E.O. Edward Dyer, Emigre D'A, Eric Knapp, Eric Wolf, Felix Alvarez, Flying Out, Gary S., Gerald Sorrells, G. Burton Lattimore, Gerald O'Niago, Greg Goothman, Greg Briley, Haroon Sorrang, Hexator, Howard Tan, Alumin Lama, Jacqueline Boyster, Jake Jones, James Dobbson, James Randall, Jason Dozier, Jason Olds, Jason Roberts, Jason Schneiderman, Jean Tellier, Jim's Dr. Bo, Joe Wheeler, John Atwood, John Crocker, John Gridley, John Ratnuswamy, Keith Corsel, Ken Hayes, Kevin Parachan, Kevin Railsbeck, Sonia Volkova, Kurt Larson, Larry Garcia, Leila Louis-Smith, Mark Mazzaro's, Marjorie Mark, Marshall Clark, Matt Sutter, Matthew Litwin, Mitch Neves, Mark Howbell, Mountain Sloth, Nathan Greco, Orly Radio, Patrick Cohn, Paul Stanton, Paul Disney, Phil Nadeau, Philip Shane, Randy Mazzucco, Richard Henricks, Richard Onimus, Richard Porter, Rick Ramis, Robert Aston, Rodney, Rudy Garcia, Salgud Sam, Shu Wada, Sir Frickadelic, Stephen Insam, Steve DeBell, Steve Lessman, Steve Mishinsky, The Harden Family, Todd Northcote, Anthony Steele, Tyler Harrison, Tyrone Fong, Trainer84, and Ulysses Adkins. Thank you for all of your support on Patreon. And if you are interested in supporting us, you can find information at twist.org. You can click on the Patreon link or you can click on the PayPal donation buttons. Also remember that you can help out simply by telling your friends about twists. It's that easy. And on next week's show, we're gonna be back again live online Wednesday evening at 8 p.m. Pacific time. You can join us live and join our chat room. But if you can't make it, don't worry because everything's recorded and it will be online at twist.org slash YouTube at facebook.com slash this week in science or as always at twist.org. Thank you for enjoying the show. Twist is also available as a podcast. Just Google this week in science in your iTunes directory or if you have a mobile type device, you can look for twist, the number four, Droid app in the Android marketplace or simply this week in science in anything marketplacey. Apple Marketplace. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes will be available on our website. That's at www.twist.org where you can also make comments and you can start conversations with the hosts and other listeners. Or you can contact us directly. Email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com just in at twistminion at gmail.com or Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist, T-W-I-S somewhere in your subject line or your email will be spam filtered into oblivion. You can also hit us up on the Twitter where we are at twistscience at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you would like us to cover, address a suggestion for an interview at a haiku that comes during the night, please let us know. We will be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from the show, remember. It's all in your head. Science, this week in science. This week in science. This week in science, it's the end of the world. So I'm setting up 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 global warming with a wave of my hand and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand. This week, science is coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method for all that it's worth. And I'll broadcast my opinion all. It's this week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science, science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in 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 then understand that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy. We're just trying to save the world from jeopardy. Jeperdy, jeopardy. And this week in science is coming your way. So everybody listen to everything we say. And if you use our methods to roll it and die, we may rid the world of toxoplasma. Got the eye, eye, eye. It's this week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science, science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science, science. I've got a laundry list of items I want to address. From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought and I'll try to answer any question you've got. The help can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour a week. This week in science is coming your way. You better just listen to what we say. And if you learn anything from the words that we've said, then please just remember this week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science, science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science, science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Hi everybody, it's the end of the show. Another show, don't you know, don't you know, it's this week in science by calendar before you go. Yeah. Hot touch, hot touch. I can't wait to see how everyone colors it. People are already treating at me coloring pictures, and it makes me so happy. Isn't that great? Yeah, we have some from, oh, iBookary just sent us a YouTube of a hummingbird heartbeat. Thanks, iBookary. Where did those go? We got too many tabs open. Let's see, who got John Thurme? Said he got his in the UK. We also, I think Brian Condren got his. I got mine. You got yours, yay. Oh, here's the marked. The marked has been colored in coloring. Oh, come on, open up. Silly hoot, sweet. You're slowing everything down. There we go. The marked, colored in his pangolin. A purple pangolin. I like it. It's a purple pangolin. It's a one eye, one horned flying purple pangolin. Flying purple pangolin. That's right. Yeah. And then what else? What was the other one? Who else? What? Oh, sweet, why are you choking? What month is the pangolin? Why are you bugging? What was the marked? He made a nice green toad also. Let me show you his toad for the cover. He thought he marked. I did see that one. Getting into the coloring. I didn't know it was green though, so thank you for saying that. It's green and kind of a, it's like a dark green forest green and a lime greenish or puke color. That is not what I thought it was. When I saw it on the internet, I thought it was black and yellow. Oh, yeah, that's kind of, yeah, I can see that. But nope, nope, nope. Yep, I like the dark green, that's cool. If you ever have any questions about what colors people are coloring, or maybe people should send you a Pantone chart with all of their color. They can just say, I made a purple pangolin and that's great, that's a good start. That's all I need. Purple pangolin. But if you come to Sketch Fest with your calendar, I'll sign it for you. Ooh, yes, yes Blair will. And we might have a few to sell there in person too, potentially. Maybe, I'm hoping. If they hold out. If they hold out, I'm hoping that we won't have any calendars left, but. Figures crossed are sold out, but if there are any left. I don't know, yeah. We'll see. We'll see. Who are you guys? Yeah, tell your friends to buy these. So I make them again. Yeah, I have to come with a new medium for next year. How am I going to make the 2019 calendar? Oh, cool. Identity Force says he's going to do watercolors and paint some of them with his mom during vacation. Awesome. Oh, strength, no chi after show tonight. He is in bed where he should be. It's after 10 o'clock. Yeah, last week he was awake still. Oh, no. This time. Because you were you were out of town, but Marshall was out of town also. Oh, no. I didn't have anyone to put kind of bed. Oh, no. It's very hard to put to bed. He's like, oh, good mommy. He was just piping up through the whole show and he was just like, I love this. I've got to hang out all the time. Oh, no. He was into it. He was very excited to be able to stay up and listen to the show. No, you all got a treat last week, the chi show. He's ready. He's like, when do I get to do my own show, mommy? I saw how you updated the Patreon goals. Yes, the wording. And I loved them. OK, awesome. I just, yeah, I was I was scrolling through not just the pledge levels, but, you know, the thing on the left side where you're for total. And yeah, I liked them a lot. They made me smile pretty big. I'm trying. I'm trying. We'll see. We'll see, everybody. I put a bunch of goals out there. Let's see if we can. Let's see what we can do to do one of the goals. What was it? Where was I? I think I was it was the where was it? Oh, yeah, $30,000 a month. If we could get up to $30,000 a month, that's the high goal at this point at this level. Consider those day jobs done. I'll bet I could even get Blair to move to Portland so that we can create science content all day every day. You know, I bet you probably could. That's right. That's right. At 30 grand, we'd have we would all have. Yeah, we would have our salaries set. We would be able to pay our rent. Yeah, I do. Oh, what's the goal? What's the goal? Oh, 30,000. That's a that's a very high goal if we can get there. But that would be we would not have and none of us would have any other jobs. This is what we would be doing. I was a network all the time. I would still have. I would still have. Because you like having so many jobs. Maybe maybe Justin just wants to have another job. We'd have other jobs. He just loves cars. He just loves cars. That's right. Yeah, that's that's right. Yeah. That's what it is. That's what it is. Yeah. If we could. Yeah, it would be it would be fun to be what's the word. Financially, sicker. Yeah, that's a thing, right? People achieve this. It's amazing. To be a fan. Oh, man, I was thinking I was thinking, you know, this this thing with patriotic made me start thinking about all sorts of, you know, take nothing for granted. Right. You know, it's like, we've got this wonderful audience and they're helping us do this. And but at the same time, you know, it's all in flux and it all depends on what people are able to give at what times and even if we were to go to an advertising model, that's the whims of advertisers and, you know, the whole thing is just everything's so uncertain. And then I was like, maybe I should just get a job. I'm just going to I'm just going to go work for somebody else. And then I'm like, you know, that's not even certain. I mean, somebody they'll just be like, I hired you, but I don't like you. You're no good. You're fired. Nobody would ever say that to you ever. But the thing that could happen is you could work at a place or for a person and their funding can get pulled or they could lose, you know, credentials or whatever it is. And you'd be out in a second anyway. There's no certainty in anything. There's no certainty in anything. And so that's freaking me out right now. But this is the thing. This is the thing is becoming comfortable in that uncertainty and learning that the uncertainty is not something to fear and to have anxiety about all the time. But the uncertainty is something that is just a fact of life and that we all just have to just make plans but be flexible. I would also argue that this week in science, one of the longest running podcasts ever, out of all of the uncertainties. It's a, that's very true. It's pretty certain. It is pretty true. So, I feel pretty comfortable. You did talk. There's a part in two, Rob the sparkly. Yeah, what? Oh, never mind. She'll find out soon enough. What? That's enough out of you. No. Yeah. Yeah. So, Patreon. You guys probably didn't pay any attention to the whole hubbub. Well, I saw a tweet from you, whatever date, what was it, the 11th? And I just saw a couple keywords and went, what? And then I clicked on the link that you had and then I started Googling some things. So I actually did. And I just kind of watched from behind, behind the screen just to see, because I was like, I'm not, I'm not going to freak out. I'm not going to freak out. Because just what we were talking about, twists, twists will go on. I'm not going to freak out. These people care about our show. If they care enough to give to us now, they will find a way to give to us in the future. I'm not going to freak out. I'm going to let Kiki take care of that because it looks like she is all over it. I was all over it. And I was internally, I was freaking out a little bit, but I was trying not to lose it. And then I saw your response yesterday. And I was like, oh, she's got it covered. She figured it out. This might actually be better in the long run with the monthly plans. And yes, the fees are garbage, but maybe we'll just lose our one and $2 a month donors and they'll go to PayPal. But the higher level donors will stay on Patreon and they'll still really enjoy the feed. I was like, okay, probably okay. And then, what, 30 minutes before the show today, I saw the thing that you posted today. Yeah, and so part of it was the question of, wow, Patreon, you're rolling this out and all these people are upset and it doesn't seem like you're listening to anybody at all. And there's all this, people are talking and there are slide decks up online from people involved in the business who basically are, had in their slide deck, basically trying to get rid of low earning creators and focus mostly on high earning creators on Patreon. And so it's like, whoa, what's happening there? And then they just recently took $60 million in venture capital funding. So that's good for growth. And then there's this kind of commentary from Jack Conti that might have been hearsay about him saying something like, oh, but we have to make these fee changes and they're definitely going through because we just have to keep the lights on. And then it's like, we keep the lights on. You just took $60 million in funding. What do you mean, just keep the lights on? So there's like, we're all these swirling stories and then finally, and Patreon for a week, basically were silent. And they were all like on Twitter, they were only responding to kind of the bigger name people and not really interacting with the larger community. And so it was just really weird, but they didn't come out with like an organized response for a week. And so it just kind of left people going, what's going on? And have you just turned to the dark side and away from the creators and the patrons? And are you just going for the money? Are you trying to get bought by a bigger company or something? It sure did look that way. And then the thing that they issued, I guess today, I did notice that they said a couple of times in there, yeah, we probably should have asked creators and patrons before we changed this. And moving forward, we'll do that. It's like, yeah, you can't change something where people are currently, essentially when people, you hold people's current credit card numbers. You cannot just change a thing with almost no notice that will affect individuals that are currently paying for a specific service. Like, if they were going to make this decision and not take outside ideas and not take outside feedback and not have adjustment plans, then you have to give a bunch of notice to creators and patrons so that we can, you know, do an informational campaign. How people, what's going on, tell them to adjust their levels in response to that. Have us adjust our level so you're not doing it all in one day. Yeah. Yeah, so anyway, they backed off of it, which is good. And I'm glad that they did that. And I'm glad they're gonna go back to the drawing board. The statement that Jack ended up making, I find really interesting because they said they were trying to make the change to do away with some individuals who pledge on the site and say, you know, pledge like $100 at a $100 level to get certain rewards, but then cancel their donation before their credit card gets completely charged. So they end up paying like a prorated amount. So they'll pledge $100 and get a bunch of rewards, but then end up only paying like $3. And I guess that's happening to a lot of creators, but I don't know, I kind of feel like those people are going to be in the minority and that, you know, even if people are doing that, you know, maybe they get a twist T-shirt, that's awesome, you know, the way that our stuff works. It's not like pieces of art that are being sent out. I don't know, but except for your hand-drawn stuff. But... Well, or you put something in the Patreon interface where you can indicate who has paid and who hasn't. Oh, and they have that. Right, so then you only give perks to those people who have paid. Or you only give perks to people who have been... You make a statement and say, I send out perks after you've been a donor for two months or something like that. Right. I don't know, but I feel like Patreon making this huge change to the fee charging structure like to get back at a few bad apples, like a few free loaders. It really, it hurt the entire community. And so it's like, I can handle a few free loaders here and there because the vast majority of the people who are a part of our community are freaking awesome. Well, there's always going to be people who try to game a system, any system, right? That's always going to be a thing. And yeah, maybe you sent Patreon sends a nasty note to people who do that and they tell them that's not what this community is about. But I... So, what happened? Patreon changed their fee structure basically. So there were different add-on fees. Some were standard, like I think it was 35 cents on any pledge, right? And then there was a percentage after that, right? Wasn't it like that? Yeah, so as it is now, there's a 5% platform fee that the creators get charged to use Patreon. And then, so like kind of a service fee. And then there are a number of fees that are like credit processing related and other things. And by the end of the month, it usually the total that ends up coming out of the creators pocket is the 5% plus like seven to 10%. And so you get a take home. You have a net out of the, or you have a gross out of the net, right? But they changed it so that all those credit card fees would be charged to the donor. And so instead of it, if you pledge a dollar, instead of it being you pledge a dollar and that's all you pay, it would be you're suddenly paying a dollar and 38 cents because of the processing fees that are added on top. So you're not just, there's no just donating a dollar. And then for our system where it was like them being charged every episode, instead of being charged $4 at the end of a month with four episodes, it's $1.38, $1.38, $1.38, $1.38. And so suddenly- Right, instead of just $4 and then, well- A little bit of change. Yeah, it's like, and if with, you know, yeah, I did all the math the other day, but yeah. So what I did, and I'd been thinking about changing to monthly anyway, just for stream- So we're saving our Patreon's three to four processing charges a month. Yeah, but if Patreon goes ahead with this fee structure, which right now they've backed off of it. So yeah, we'll see. But in the meantime, if people decide they don't like Patreon, we also have PayPal. And so you can just use PayPal. PayPal works. I also have a, you know, I have an address. Just mail me a check. Send some cash. Send some cash, that's right. Yeah. I know there's so many charges in this world. You can just send Twists a PayPal lump, you can. Go to twist.org, that's www.twist.org. And there's a donate button. You can send me a PayPal lump with Mike. Yeah, yeah, you know, a PayPal lump. Oh, Janice Gu, you're funny tonight. Oh my goodness, he's in a good mood. There was a, not even a 4.0 earthquake, but there was an earthquake nearby. You know, Wallops? No, I don't remember what the name of the town is, but near someplace outside of Salem-ish area between Portland and the coast. And supposedly people felt it. I didn't feel it here in Portland. Rob Sparkley said that he felt it sitting in Salem in an old government office building. And Janice Gu says he felt the force awakened in the Portland area, and it was just a new Twist episode. And you guys, oh hey, isn't it tomorrow night new Star Wars comes out? Uh-huh. That's exciting. Are you gonna be Princess Leia? No, and I'm not going in at opening night either. It's, I have trouble staying awake for a midnight showing of a film. Yeah, me too. That was rough. I settled for an 8.40 showing next week, and even that I was like, I think I'm gonna go see a matinee on the weekend. Like I'm gonna get home after mid, oh no. So I kind of had to get my arm twisted on that one, but I'm really excited. Yeah, oh Rob, thank you. Molala, that's what it is. M's, W's, mental flipping of the letters. Molala. Molala. Is that the correct question space? What? What's that big piece of driftwood in space? Mua-mu-a-ma. Mua-mu-a-ma. Okay. All right, next week, less vowels, people. A few less vowels. All right, third couple of consonants in there. Mix it up a little bit. Yeah, so, yeah, Seti, tonight, they are looking at the, their breakthrough telescope. They're looking at that interstellar interloper. Mua-mu-a-mu-a-mu-a. So we should have data from that at some point that will tell us whether or not cell phones are being used on the asteroid that flew through our solar system. No, not cell phones, but the telescope that they're using should be able to pick up radio signals as faint as a cell phone call from the surface of it. And the whole idea is that, hey, it's a really oddly shaped thing. And, you know, if you were gonna build something to send on a long trip, wouldn't you want to make it kind of shaped kind of like a cigar? So it wouldn't run into a lot of things in this long, weird shape. It doesn't look like anything that's an asteroid we've ever seen. So, hey, maybe it's, you know, hollow when there are robots inside or maybe there's alien, yeah, maybe it's alien tech and maybe it's spying on us. Full of tardigrades. And if it is alien tech spying on us, it's certainly not going ring, ring, hello. It's not calling us. So I don't know what they're gonna pick up. We'll see. But yeah, I think it's just a shard. It's a shard. For sure it's a shard. For sure it's a shard. It's for sure a shard. For sure a shard. Yeah, so hopefully I will see the last Jedi before next week. I don't know if I will for sure, but I'm working on it. I won't see it till after our next show. Okay, I'm working on it. There's no spoilers, people, come on. Hopefully the asteroid is an alien ship, but it's probably not gonna be. It's surely a shard. Hopefully we will sell more calendars. I think we will. Yeah. Hopefully we'll update their Patreon support or shift it over to PayPal. People. I just sold two calendars for cash at work. Yeah, let me know if you need me to send you more. Okay, I'll keep you posted. I might need more. Order them. Yeah. And I'll send them to you. Yeah. We have a good system that way. Yeah. Okay, you guys, it's 1030. Yeah, let's go over here. I think I need to go to sleep. I would like to go. It's really, really cold in Portland, but I need to look outside and see if I see any meteors, because it's the geminid meteor showers tonight. So if you are not so tired that you need to go to bed, go stand outside for just a little while because there might be some very wonderful meteors. The geminid, which I wasn't aware of. Wait, let me see. We're passing through, normally, meteor showers are, because we're going through the tail of a comet, but I think we're going through the, we're actually going through like a shattered asteroid and it's a rock comet. It's not a normal comet like you think of of ice and all that kind of stuff. It's like an asteroid that's little bits and pieces. That's right, yeah. The object is called 3200 Phaethon and it's thought to be a Palladian asteroid with a rock comet orbit. Yeah, and that's tonight. Tonight, tonight, tonight, get outside or just maybe NASA has pictures. No, come out and see it for yourself. Go outside, everybody. Maybe I'll wake Kai up. The meteors tonight peak at 2 a.m. I'm not waiting. Not forgetting. But they can be seen as early as nine to 10. Which is perfect right now for us. Right now. And maybe for those of you on the East Coast, it's a perfect time for you to step outside and look at the meteors. So this is a great time to take a break, check out some meteors, everyone. Oh, Wiz Mike is watching it on NASA TV right now. Nice. Everyone, thank you for joining us. If you are stuck in the snow, might make for some wonderful, wonderful meteor shower viewing environment. Little chilly but snow. So romantic and wonderful. Everyone out there. Thank you, thank you, thank you. We're gonna go now and we'll be back again next week. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Good night, Kiki.