 This is TWIS. This Week in Science, episode number 592, recorded on November 9th, 2016. In it together. Hey, everyone, I am Dr. Kiki. And tonight on TWIS, we are going to fill your heads with Neanderthals, assassins, and chickens, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Ladies and gentlemen, step right up, step right up. The American Side Show is about to begin right this way. Don't be bashful, don't be shy. There's no way to walk on by. Give the tent with the painted orange top a try. Why? The things you are about to see cannot be unseen. That which you are about to hear cannot be unheard. It will be over when it's over. It is guaranteed to leave a lasting impact. You won't soon forget. And your complacency is the only price of admission. That's right. Just sit back, stay home, and assume for the best. Because what could go wrong? Right behind the tent flap, sirs and madams, you will find out soon enough. If you aren't in your out and you're going to miss out Big League. This way, right, that's it. Two at a time, quickly now. That's it, everybody in. Hey, you there? What's the matter, friend, saving your complacency for a rainy day? Wait, you're headed for the wrong tent. That's no side show. That's This Week in Science. Coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to learn everything. I want to fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know 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. Science to you, Kiki and Blair. And good science to you, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We keep it coming week after week after week. What a great show we had last week in Baltimore. Wasn't that a great show? That was so fun. So fun. And the Maryland Science Festival is still going on if you are in Maryland. Be sure to check Marylandstemfestival.org and look for events that are taking place near you somewhere in the state of Maryland until the, I believe the end of the week or actually middle of next week or something like that. No, the weekend, this weekend. Yeah, things are going on and on and on. Science, science, science. And oh my, what a wonderful bit of carnival barking for the opening of the show today, Justin. Thanks for that. Of course. Yeah, got me. And then our show, this is, I think, I think it's the most excited I've felt all day. So here we go. Let's get this show going. Yeah, I appreciate, you know, on the carnival theme, addressing the elephant at the carnival if just for a moment. Now we can move on and enjoy an amazing hour-ish of science. Science. And on this week's show, I have a lot of science news. I have stories about plants and their affinity for light, music and how it all takes connection to make it work. And yes, yes, I do have a story about our next president because that happened last night. So, and there is actually science news. Neanderthals. Yeah, Justin, what? Neanderthals. You have Neanderthals? Okay. No, I was commenting on, oh, wait, yes, and I do have Neanderthals here as well as the earliest life on land ever discovered was discovered. Oh, I kind of gave up the whole story there. Well, there's details. And, and age old question, how the chicken crossed the road? How? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Or when? Why? It's a combination of all of them. Oh, all right. I can't wait to find out about that because, you know, this is a question people have asked themselves time immemorial because, you know, chickens. And children. And children, that's right. Children constantly asking this question. And Blair, what's in the animal corner today? Oh, I have the spiders for dinner that I teased in Baltimore but we ran out of time to talk about. I'm very excited about that one. I have horny lizards and I have terrifying creepy crawlies. I'm so excited about that. Not nightmare juice. We need more of it. Chalk full to distract. It's a distraction. Right. We just need more nightmare juice. Oh my gosh. Add it on. Pour it on. Scare me awake. Big ice filled cup of nightmare juice before I go to bed. Thanks a lot, Blair. Okay. Let's get into the show. I'm going to just get this done with before we move forward. Last night was or yesterday was election day in the United States and the United States has elected a new president of the United States, Donald Trump. And today news has come out as to the individuals that he will be choosing for his cabinet as and also as his transition team. And the transition team is very important because they kind of go in and do all the groundwork, all the research before the president elect actually gets into office and people actually have to hit the ground running and do work. So they're the team that starts doing work before the term actually begins. So this is important because it's related to the environmental protection agency. Trump has reportedly selected Director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Myron Ebel. Ebel, Myron Ebel to head the transition for the Environmental Protection Agency. He has been called an elegant nerd and a policy wonk by Vanity Fair according to an article in Scientific American. He's the chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition. This is a bunch of nonprofits that quote question global warming alarmism and oppose energy rationing policy. And in a biography submitted, this is again according to Scientific American, when he testified before Congress, which is something he does fairly regularly in relation to climate science issues. He listed his recognitions as being featured in a Greenpeace quote field guide to climate criminals dubbed a misleader on global warming by Rolling Stone. And he was the subject of a motion to censure in the British House of Commons after Ebel criticized the United Kingdom's chief scientific advisor for his views on global warming. He is called the Obama administration's clean power plan for greenhouse gases illegal and said that Obama joining the Paris climate treaty is clearly an unconstitutional usurpation of the Senate's authority. In 2007, he told Vanity Fair quote, there has been a little bit of warming, but it's been very modest and well within the range for national variability and whether it's caused by human beings or not. It's nothing to worry about. He's going to be heading the transition for Trump into the his next term. So his term. So this is just a taste of potentially what we have to look forward to on the science front when it comes to science related to climate and how our government puts policy together story over silver lining. Please. Yes. Is there a playbook for that just just I just because it was brooch and we'll move on quickly silver lining to that is Florida is pretty much sea level and marched as it is. So won't be long before. No longer an issue. Secondly, I do feel as though for the foreseeable future here this show will less be about scientific inquiry for me. Then it will be a vehicle of escapism. I think that's that's great in the short term, but in the long term we need to start thinking about how we as citizens are going to demand that this gets looked at because it's not it's clearly not front of mind enough. We need to all around the United States start to look at this important topic and make it clear to our officials that it matters. Yeah. And in addition to this, there are other things that are related to science education. He Trump is looking at hoping to dismantle the common core standards, which science is not a part of the common core as it stands. There are separate science standards, but I would assume that those would kind of go part in parcel with a dismantling of common core. You'd probably get rid of national science standards as well. Education is a big part of what this show is about. Educating inspiring inquiry and inspiring curiosity. And so that is what this show will continue to do regardless of what happens in Washington. Moving on into some more really interesting stories based on that inquiry researchers want to know what can we do with CRISPR in relation to humans. CRISPR, the gene editing technology that we've been talking about for a little while now. Researchers at Stanford University have published a paper in Nature This Week reporting or actually they published a paper in Nature in October and then there's another paper that was published by University of California Berkeley. Both of these reporting success in using CRISPR to edit human cells. The paper that was published by the Stanford team corrected mutations underlying sickle cell anemia in human cells. They were able to, they reported a 30 to 50% survival rate and correction rate in the cells that they edited and these cells lasted when transplanted into the bone marrow of mice for up to 16 weeks. Co-author on the study said this week that they have enough preclinical data now with mice, so animal models, that they are hoping to seek federal regulator approval for a human clinical trial to test the approach. Yeah, designer babies, here we come, right? No, not designer babies, but with the potential to, if you do a bone marrow transplant, you're dealing with hematopoietic stem cells that come from, these are stem cells that are like, they make the blood, they build your blood supply and so if you can do a bone marrow transplant, take out the diseased bone marrow that produces the blood cells that have the sickle cell shape that is part of the problem with sickle cell anemia. Do a bone marrow transplant with cells that have been CRISPR'd with a fixed, the mutation repaired, suddenly you have the opportunity to have a treatment. People with sickle cell anemia undergo bone marrow transplants and blood transfusions regularly as it is, so this is not, it wouldn't be necessarily anything new and this could be a huge, huge help to people who are stricken with this disease. So very cool stuff, CRISPR, let's hope it gets regulatory approval, that's pretty awesome. Pretty soon it won't even need it, but this is the dream. This is the dream that science has been pursuing ever since the genome was really discovered is the ability to affect change at this level in real time, not, not, you know, warding this off for a future generation, but by actually being able to change a gene or two or affect the cell in such a way that it functions currently in a human as a therapy, not as a preventative for future generations or an altering of genes before birth kind of a deal. Right, right. This is the dream. This is a fantastic example of everything that science has been working on in this direction. Yeah, so fingers crossed that, you know, we can get trials moving in humans and that those trials are successful. That's something that it's so far successful in mice, but people are not mice. We always have to do human studies. And then my final story to get us going, Zika, we are still worried about Zika, you know, it's making its way with mosquito populations into the United States and it is endemic in areas around the world. It is a huge problem, especially when it comes to women and pregnancy. We do not have a vaccine yet. People cannot yet get vaccinated so that they would be produce natural antibodies to Zika and be able to fight the virus off. But researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Vanderbilt University School of Medicine have identified an antibody called ZIK-V117. This is an anti-Zika antibody that was collected as one of 29 that was collected from people who had recovered from Zika infection. So these people basically built up natural immunity to further Zika infection. So if you like the cold or the flu when you're exposed to something, your body creates antibodies that can help your body fight future infection off. These people created anti-Zika antibodies. This one neutralized five Zika strains in the lab. Among those, they picked like one of the most lethal strains of Zika and they just pumped it into these mice and they're like, okay, people don't usually die from Zika. So we're basically going to give a deadly dose of Zika, a deadly strain and a deadly dose to these mice and then we're going to give them these antibodies to see what happens. And this antibody protected the mice from Zika. Not only that, they gave it to pregnant mice. The antibody protected the females and it protected the offspring of those pregnant females. Nice. Yes. One of the co-authors says, we did not see any damage to the fetal blood vessels, thinning of the placenta or any growth restriction in the fetuses of the antibody treated mice. The anti-Zika antibodies are able to keep the fetus safe from harm by blocking the virus from crossing the placenta. Science works. Yes. And so the idea here now is that we don't have a vaccine yet but maybe just maybe we can use this kind of this antibody as a therapy that people can take in the meantime. So you're going to have to keep taking the antibody because you don't have it naturally in your body. You kind of have to like a pill every day or a shot every once in a while to kind of keep the levels of the antibody up in your body while you're pregnant. But this is something that could very well help to protect pregnant women and their unborn children from harm from the Zika virus. That's great. Just like with your prenatal vitamin, take your Zika antibody. Exactly. And it could also be something that, you know, it's been shown now that Zika can get into the sperm, get into the testicles of men and kind of stick around there for a long time. So this is also something that pregnant women and their partners could also be treated with the antibodies as well, just to see. Yeah. Yeah. So they don't know whether these antibodies can clear persistent Zika infection from people's bodies but right now they're working to get a better understanding of how Zik-V 117 binds to the virus and actually inhibits the infection from taking place. And one of the great things about this also is that like with dengue virus, sometimes there are bad reactions between different strains and different antibodies. So there is a possibility that Zika vaccine could actually worsen symptoms in people who encounter the Zika virus later on. This happens with dengue virus already. We know this happens. And so this is called antibody dependent enhancement. And it's been seen with Zika in a Petri dish but not actually in people in the wild. So with this particular antibody, it is just effective. It was no problems. All good. Yeah. So far so good. This is really exciting. Yeah. Go medicine. Go biomedical research. Let's do it. More, more, more. This is This Week in Science. Justin, what you got? Oh, hey, Mike. I didn't even know I ever had a story coming up. So let's see. Yes, the age old question often. No, no, I'm not going to do that one yet. I got another one because this is the top of the show. Hang on. Here we go. Neanderthals, that's it. There we go. 30,000 years ago. They were there, gone. But always with us, right? A bunch of us anyway. In the form of DNA, sequences that are scattered throughout our human genome, there's bits of stuff that we can trace back and say, eh, that came from Neanderthals times. New study by Genesis University of California in Davis illustrates traces of our neanderthal. Slowly being removed by natural selection. What? Yeah. Natural selection got rid of Neanderthals. In our genome, yes. On average, there has been a weak but widespread selection against Neanderthal genes, says Graham Koop, professor at UC Davis Department of Evolution and Ecology and Center for Population Biology and senior author on a paper describing the work published in the Journal of Public Library of Science, Genetics. That selection seems to be a consequence of a small population of Neanderthals mixing with a much larger population of humans. Neanderthals split from our mutual African ancestor over a half a million years ago. They lived in Europe, Central Asia, sometimes even into, well, Northern Asia, which is like Siberia-ish. Not Siberia, but just Northern Russia, Northern Russia areas. We've also found them there. Now, thanks to DNA samples retrieved from a number of fossils, we have enough data on the Neanderthal genome to identify their ancestry within our own gene pool. When the most modern humans left Africa 50-80,000 years ago, spread throughout Europe and Asia, they interbred within Neanderthal. The first hybrid child would have been about a 50-50 mix of human and Neanderthal genes and could have themselves bred with more modern humans, more Neanderthals, or other Neander-human hybrids. So what happened to all of this Neanderthal DNA? Today, Neanderthals genes are a few percent of human genome of people with European ancestry. It's actually a little bit more common in people in East Asian descent. It's almost absent in people of African ancestry, with the exception of swaths of North Africa where there was people who went back to Africa after migration. So what happened to it? Coop and postdoctoral researchers, researchers Ivan Jerk and someone Ashbacher devised methods to measure the degree. I totally mispronounced your name. Sorry. Devised methods to measure the degree of natural selection acting on Neanderthal DNA in the human genome. One hypothesis has been that Neanderthals quickly became genetically incompatible with modern humans. So their hybrid offspring were not fit in the evolutionary scheme of things. They either failed to thrive in the society or they were not fertile. However, researchers found something different. Rather than a strong selection against a few Neanderthal genes, they found weak widespread selection against many Neanderthal DNA sequences that it is slowly removing from the human genome. That's consistent with the small isolated population of Neanderthals mixing with a larger population of humans. Interpreting in small populations, which is what the Neanderthals were, I mean genetic variants can remain common even if it's not like a really good thing. You could have these sort of negative genes or these genes that have drawbacks to them. But because you're kind of stuck in this small gene pool, they stick around. There's not an alternative. There's not a replacement. Yeah, that's exactly it. It's like everybody's kind of got this deleterious mutation already. So that's what the offspring are going to have. And it's not deleterious enough to just kill everybody, wipe out the whole group. Right. It's just kind of just a little bit. It's like, you know, oh, it's a clubfoot. You know, your, your foot's just turned inward a little bit. It doesn't really. Everybody's bow-legged in this down. Yeah. But when they mix it with a larger population, natural selection starts to act against those variants, greeting them out. Says here, human population size has historically been much larger. And this is important since selection is more efficient after removing deleterious variants and large populations, you're excess or excess. Weekly deteriorous variants that could persist in neanderthals could not persist in humans. We think that this simple explanation can account for the pattern of neanderthal ancestry that we see today along the genome of modern humans. And this is always something that I've sort of disagreed with, although the findings are consistent with other recently published works. Neanderthals have been more numerous. When we first encountered them, we might have a different mix of neanderthal and human genes. So. This is also very similar to like the Bonobo and chimpanzee study we were talking about a couple of weeks ago, where it's, you know, probably a small number of individuals mixing into a larger population. And then it just kind of goes away. What were you going to say? Well, the part of it that I just, that still bothers me in this about what is it. I keep thinking, gosh, the neanderthals must have had some very advantageous genes for them to still be in the numbers of two to 4%, depending on what population that you're looking at. Those must be extremely strong because just the large mix of humans of generation after generation after generation, you know, over tens of thousands of years, you could expect to see almost nothing of the neanderthals. Or, you know, or if it was there, we are making this argument that there were these genes are just slowly being removed. It doesn't necessarily have to be deleterious. It could just be overpopulation growth and mixing of humans on a planet. You know, there's no reintroduction point for neanderthal at this point. And it also does maybe indicate that we're, even though it was a small population, the population of humans may not have had to be that much bigger at the time except that there must have been a lot more, according to the way I'm reading this, there was a lot more in breeding. It wasn't a one or two or three or four off. It was these communities, this small community of neanderthals and this larger community of humans, which I can't imagine was that big, but I don't know what the numbers of population they're talking about here, must have been a kind of common thing. And then, yeah. That's another aspect to it. Yeah, that maybe it was small populations of neanderthals and larger population of human, but it was, inner breeding was common. It became common. And maybe that's why there's so much left, even though they're not necessarily beneficial genes. I mean, we've talked before about these neanderthal genes, potentially being the cause of allergies or autoimmune disorders. And so there, you know, there is a question as to why they did, the genes did or did not get weeded out of our genes. Yeah, and then, and then so as, and again, if it's a smaller population, that entire population may not have gone extinct from starvation or lack of hunting grounds. These populations could have just been assimilated. Absorbed. Absorbed. Like an amoeba, a paramecium engulfing its prey. The humans have begun the neanderthals. Resistance is futile, because I'm kind of tall. Assimilate or be destroyed. Right. So there's like, there's a lot to learn here still. And so again, this continues to be a topic that fascinates. Fascinating. Neanderthals will always be fascinating. Always. Said the neanderthal. Said the neanderthal. There we go. If you just tuned in, you are listening to This Week in Science. Hey, you guys, do you know what time it is? Oh, yeah. Thanks. So cool. Is it bedtime? Yeah. Blair needs a nap. No way. Blair's in charge now. Time for Blair's Animal Corner. Whoa. Oh, well, let's get right into the nightmare juice, shall we? Yes, please. Yes. So let's talk about giraffe assassin bugs. Not only are they terrifying looking, but they have a very interesting way of catching their food. They eat spiders. That's good. So the spider dinner I was referring to earlier is eaten by the assassin bug. Not by us. Sorry, guys. But the assassin bug, you might think that's a good thing until you remember all the ecosystem services that spiders provide. Then maybe it's not a great thing. All right. Right. Right. They're kind of important. But the way the assassin bugs eat the spiders is what makes them so nightmare-inducing and fascinating. They sneak up on spiders in their own web. They drive their beaks or their mouth parts or whatever you want to call them into the bodies of the spiders, killing them quickly by sucking out their innards. Oh. So that's the assassin bug. The giraffe variety has a long neck and they sneak up on spiders in their own webs while spiders are waiting to catch prey. So we've talked a bunch on the show about how spiders catch prey in their webs. They mainly recognize when a fly or something else is caught in their web by the vibrations. So we've talked before about how spider silk is kind of like a guitar string and they can pluck their own web to kind of communicate or figure out what's going on. They can listen to the web themselves. So how does the giraffe assassin bug sneak up on a spider in their own web? That's crazy. That's not possible. No insect can be that agile. That fleet of foot, that whatever. Well, Macquarie University in Australia has discovered the secret. How do they do it? They wreck up the place. So they do. So Fernando Soli from Macquarie University took spiders, he put them in the lab and he encouraged them to spin a web. He aimed a laser at the webs and then released the assassin bugs. The assassin bugs stalked the spiders. He filmed the results. The assassin bug. And they found that the bugs actually used their fore tarsie, the tips of their front legs, to grab the strands of web ever so carefully, pull them apart, tearing the web and then ever so carefully release the strands, avoiding recoil, avoiding vibration and then moved on to the next one in a straight line for the spider. The sensor revealed that the technique allowed them to go up to the spider without causing any ripples in the web. They also played with wind. So they had fans on varying levels in the lab at different times and the assassin bugs greatly preferred when there's wind because it kind of masks what they're doing even more. They also varied the timing of their web tearing so that it could not be in any way rhythmic or anticipated. That's sneaky, sneaky little bugs. That is an intelligent bug. Yeah. So next time you tear down a cobweb, think about how an assassin bug does it. See if you can tear one strand at a time and release it and one strand and release it. I think this is my new favorite bug. Although I'm glad that they don't live on a more macro existence. Where like... Knock, knock, knock. There's knocking on you. Knock, knock, knock. No, you wouldn't even hear him knocking. And that's the thing, you'd just be sitting there on the couch watching television and it's like, oh, where'd my innards go? Suddenly your house is gone because they've taken it board by board and you didn't notice. And someone sucked out my innards. Oh my goodness. I'm dead now. For the pictures of the assassin bugs in general, many different species of them. The question is, is this only the giraffe assassin bugs or is this all assassin bugs? Because I recently, I see assassin bugs. I've seen them before. Really? Yeah. They live in Oregon? Yeah, I'm pretty sure I've seen them before. Interesting. Well, the giraffe assassin bug is very weird looking. It's long neck. It has that super long neck, but then it has the four-tarstee in front. So it's almost like their arms are up here and they have just like the longest torso. It looks very odd. I do know that different assassin bugs. Go ahead. They're also called kissing bugs. So usually you see them during mating season when there are two of them together. But no, thanks. But I do think that different assassin bugs eat different kinds of spiders. So to assume, for example, if an assassin bug eats a funnel web spider or a trap door spider or a spider that does not use web acoustics to catch their prey, obviously they're not going to employ this technique. But I think that is definitely the next step in this process is to now look at other assassin bugs that eat spiders out of their own webs and see if this is happening across the board because then you can find this very complex adaptation much more basely in the like evolutionary history of these guys. Terrifying. Crafty. Oh, I just found out more terrible things about these guys. Oh, hit me. Yeah, these assassin bugs, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are saying that moving through Central and South America but now rising in Southern United States, infections of chagas disease which is caused by trapanosoma cruzi parasite spread through the bites from the assassin or kissing bug. It bites around the eyes and the mouth when you come out to feed at night. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah, chagas disease. Oh my gosh. Around the eyes and mouth while you sleep. Oh, God. I already didn't sleep last night. Now, tonight, what luck do I have? Well, let's forge on ahead, shall we? Let's forge. Yes, please. Let's forge. Thorny Devils. Okay. Thorny Devils, aka Thorny Dragons, aka Thorny Devil Lizards. They are known for being very spiky. They're also from Australia. It's like the Australian Animal Corner today. But their barbs actually don't keep us away. They're not venomous, nothing like that. It just makes them look like they really would not be delicious to eat. And they live in a few different habitats, but this species that they were looking at, the Aachen University in Germany. I think I said that right. They were looking at a species in Australia that lives in the desert. They wanted to know a little more about this animal's insane adaptation for drinking. A few years ago, researchers found how these animals drink. They don't drink normally because they eat ants and their mouth is so adapted to eating ants that they cannot sip or lick water. So then how would else you get your... Did they just live off the liquid within the ant? Listen to this. I'm leaning into the mic. They have teeny tiny folds and crevices in their skin that overlap, that create a tube-like capillary system that carry the water like blotting paper up to the mouth. So there's this amazing video that I will share with you now. If I can figure out how to screen. Oh, I think Kiki has it. Kiki has it. You got it. Don't you worry. I got you. You just talk. Okay. So they... This is insane. I've never heard about this before, but you can watch it move just like blotting paper from the tips of their toes as they stand in a puddle through their entire body up to their face, to their mouth. And then if you watch them long enough, enough water collects in the back of their throat from this capillary action that they swallow. There he goes. He swallowed. So that's not enough craziness. The question now is, that works fine when you're standing in a puddle, but how the heck do you get wet enough to move enough water like blotter paper to your mouth when you live in a desert? So these researchers, again from Aachen University, captured some specimens, took them back to the lab for study, and they tried allowing the lizards to stand on sand that had been wet. Some water moved up their legs into the capillaries, not enough to do anything. Eventually they found out it was about this weird habit that the lizards have of pushing sand onto their back and panning it down onto their back. This means that over time, gravity pushes the water through the sand onto their back and then moves downward through the capillary action. Eventually enough water reaches their skin where it moves to their mouth like a straw and into the back of their throat, and then they can drink. Wow. That is awesome. So I think there's something to be said here for the use of capillary action highly underestimated. You can have skin folds line up perfectly so that stepping in water brings it up fight gravity to your mouth and beyond that can pull enough water out of sand to give you something to drink. So I wonder if there's part of that capillary action is just the folds pushing it along or if you could actually be sort of like using your body as a straw. Well, if you watched the video that Kiki shared, their head wasn't wet until the very end. No, no, and it wouldn't be, but that's what I mean. But like, if there's like a little bit of a sucking action that's that's going on, once their face is wet, then they can kind of encourage more movement. Is that what you're saying? Well, they're causing a pressure, I guess, like how a straw works. So I would say it would be more likely that there's some sort of charge because water is fairly electrically charged. I don't know if there's something going on molecularly that is allowing the water to move faster. I would say most likely it's just physics. It's just the fact that these these channels are moving are perfectly aligned so that the water is suctioned just like blotting paper to the mouth. And it's just capillary action is also used in plants. It's how water goes from the roots to the shoots. And it's interesting too, because if you look at this thing. Capillary action is how straws work. Yeah, if you look at how if you look at how your point fair point, plus one. That was my point. Hang on. If you look at this thing for those of you who are just listening, it this this thorny devil dragon lizard looks like it's covered in kind of like rose thorns. Yeah. And that's also sort of an interesting thing for a desert creature that's you know, there's lots of prickly stuff in the desert desert. Just there's an there's just not a lot of life in the desert. But that's totally false. And that is a very common expectation for the desert. The desert is teeming with life. The reason that everybody's so spiky in the desert is that blood is water. And so the easiest way to get water in a desert is from eating other living things. And also I think the spiky the spikiness it's not the same as it does add surface area. But at the same time it probably I'm wondering how it affects evaporation. That's a good question. I think it would depend on what the spines are made out of. So if they're just made out of keratin and they're not a part of this capillary network, it wouldn't in theory affect it very much. And I also wonder if this capillary action would work on a larger animal. This is not necessarily the thorny devil fits in the palm of your hand. It's not like a giant Komodo dragon, right? You know, right? And it's also very interesting because it's in a reptile. Reptiles have watertight skin. This would not work so well in a mammal that has semi porous skin, for example, it would all just get sucked right in and that would kind of defeat the whole purpose. And that's why stay puff marshmallow man. Exactly just giant sponge. But that's why I found this so fascinating is I had to read the headline a few times because reptiles can't absorb water through their skin and that's what it sounded like was happening and I had to dig deeper and actually they're just moving it over their extremely water repellent skin towards their mouth. Yeah. Yeah, perfect. It's just a directional straw. That's like Justin said it's just like he's just covered in straws. That is so loud. So cool. One wonderful straw. It is so cool. You know what else is cool? Just science in general and it's it's cool to be enthusiastic about science because there is so much to learn. This is a big wonderful universe and we have more science coming for you in the second half of this week in science. Stay tuned for more after this. The methods in the hypothesis. So I hope they lead you to twist.org. Did you know if you go to twist.org right now you can pre order the 2017 calendars which are still in production. Blair is finishing up the artwork. Our friend Patrick Harnett from Baltimore, Maryland artist there is helping to finish the calendar with us and we are very excited that we can offer this calendar once again with science holidays reminders to watch twist every Wednesday and all sorts of beautiful art from Blair. We're very excited about this so twist.org. 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So help us produce twists either by supporting us, buying our merchandise or donating to Patreon or through PayPal or supporting us and producing by telling people about it. Be our help us with marketing. Tell people about twist. This is what we need now more than ever. How more than ever. We thank you for your support. We really could not do this without you. Treatments from holy men leaves me slightly queasy deep down in the abdomen and then start the lives that they lead need adjusting. They drive to the bookstore and blindly start trusting the miracles and cures all laid down in black. Never even bothering to stop and they. And we're back with more of this week in No, yeah. Hey, Justin, what you got? An age old question often asked by children as we discussed, why did the chicken cross the road? And no matter what answer you give a child, they will come up with a different response. Is it the answers just to get to the other side? At first, but then as it gets, it just starts there and then it goes. But it is also the subject of a recent scientific study. The question has been broadened a bit to include not just why the chicken crossed the road, but when, where and how chickens are everywhere on our planet today. But that was not always the case. Main wild ancestor of today's domesticated chicken is the Red Jungle Fowl Gallus Gallus. It ranges from sub Himalayan northern India to southern China and Southeast Asia. It was first domesticated about 7000 years ago. Give or take about a thousand years somewhere in that range in tracking archaeological finds of domesticated chickens. Researchers occasionally find clues to an ancient world of agricultural trade. So they can sort of tell they know the origin point of the domesticated chicken. So when the chicken starts to pop up somewhere else, you go, aha, there was some sort of connection from this place to that place. In this case, the discarded bone of a chicken leg still etched with teeth marks from a dinner. Thousands of years ago, provided some of the oldest known physical evidence for the introduction of domesticated chicken to the continent of Africa. Research from Washington University in St. Louis has confirmed this based on radio carbon dating of about 30 chicken bones on earth at the site of an ancient farming village in Ethiopia, finding shed new light on how the domesticated chicken crossed ancient roads and perhaps ancient seas. To reach Africa, eventually every other corner of the globe, our study, quotey voice, provides the earliest directly dated evidence for the presence of chickens in Africa and points to the significance of Red Sea and East Africa trade routes in the introduction of the chickens as Alina Wolda Kyrros, lead author of the post-doctoral anthropology research in arts and sciences, Washington University rival of chickens in Africa and other routes by which they both entered and dispersed across the continent are not really very well known. This is one of those things we're still just figuring out previous researchers research based in representations of chickens on ceramics and paintings, plus some bones from other archeological sites suggested that chickens were first introduced to Africa through North Africa, Egypt, the Nile Valley about 2,500 years ago, which is, you know, that's a sort of a landing route. That's kind of what you would maybe expect. The earliest bone evidence of chickens as opposed to sea chickens. Most of them flying there on their own. The earliest bone based evidence of chickens in Africa dates to the late first Millennium BC from Egypt, approximately 685, 525 BC. So what is that in about 25? Yeah, that's the 2,500 years ago. However, this study published in the International Journal of Osteoarcheology pushes that date back by hundreds of years. So some of these bones, they were they did the direct radiocarbon dating and they found that was popping around at 819 to 75 BC. So that's 2,800 year old chicken bones that they've discovered here. Despite their widespread modern day importance, chickens remains are found in small numbers at archeological sites. So again, not a whole lot of evidence for this. One of the tools I think I always find this very interesting and important. They did linguistic studies of ancient root words for chickens in African languages, which by themselves suggest multiple introductions to chickens to Africa following different routes. So from North Africa through the Sahara West Africa and from East African Coast to Central Africa, scholars have also demonstrated the biodiversity of the modern day. African village chickens through genetic testing of those chickens. So combination of tax. But if there is a sort of Arabic root word for the chicken, you know, well, wow, this chicken might have come originally was introduced by this sort of a trade route or connection between ancient peoples. But it says here it's likely that people brought chickens to Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa repeatedly over a long period of time over a thousand years of being entered up introduces bull to kiddos are archeological findings help to explain the genetic diversity of the modern African chicken resulting from the introduction of diverse chicken lineages coming from early Arabian and South Asian context and later Swahili networks. But it says here. Yeah, our study also supports the African Red Sea Coast as the early route. So these these chickens, they may have it may have come still across land. It may have been. Well, as part of what they also link this to was some marine activity. Some early mariners were active about the time these chickens showed up. So they could have showed up on boats 2800 years ago and and and you've gone. You've gone. We can't couldn't hear you. You've gone mute there. Kiki. I was saying it could have been sea chickens. No, it really could have been sea chickens and part of it might not necessarily have been a trade route per se, but if you're going on a long trip and you bring your chickens with you, you have, you know, this is an easy way. This is before you could preserve food very well for these long trips. So you'd want to bring something that was living and also small enough to be portable and then they could breed more chickens. They could produce eggs while you're not eating the chickens like there's a whole host of benefits for traveling with chickens. If you're not allergic to them. Well, yeah, I mean the easiest way to keep meat from spoiling is to not kill it yet. Not have it be dead. That's fantastic. All right, have but let's take it further with birds in the sea. One issue with birds and the ocean and this is exciting because earlier the Neanderthal study was a UC Davis study written by Andy fell who I know very well from the UC Davis media office and this is another UC Davis study from my this week is just loaded with it. I'm so excited from one of my advisors in graduate school from her lab Gabrielle Nevitt one of her graduate students now a Matthew Savoca is working on the this is something that's been an interest of Gabby's for years is the sense of smell in sea birds and Blair remember we were talking like a week ago and you were like wait birds can smell. Yeah, I I've been well I knew that some types of birds could smell but it has been the conventional wisdom wisdom quotes for a long time that most birds cannot smell. Well, most birds can smell in fact turns out birds can smell just that normal smells and I think I've mentioned this before it's a misnomer because when we used to do brain research with birds the olfactory bulb would just kind of break off it's not connected very well to the rest of the bird the bird brain and it would just break off and people just thought they didn't have an olfactory bulb when in fact it was just left behind in the brain case the rest of the tissue in there can't believe that anyhow just nope just a just a quick note though if you're taking it removing a brain from a brain case make sure you go back and check the brain case very carefully for hot tip you heard it here first always check the brain case there you go well in this particular case we do know that seabirds use scent and they are very very amazing at picking up scents across the ocean and in fact Dr. Nevitt has been a big part of showing us that seabirds are able to pick up the scents of the compounds that krill give up so the oils that krill that krill emit that they that comes out of their skin or their shells it soaks up through the water and creates like an oil slick on the top of the water and then that oil slick vaporizes and there's a plume of krill scent that seabirds can follow to find patches of krill in the open ocean kind of like mods to mods and pheromones to be able to find their mates they the birds fly across the oceans zigzagging until they come and find a plume of scent that they can then hone in on and be able to find a bunch of krill underneath the surface they can dive down and eat it one thing they also eat is a lot of plastic and some species of seabirds eat a lot more plastic than others and so Matthew Savoka graduate student in Gabrielle Nevitt's lab and and Gabby Nevitt and another graduate student have published an off an article in the November 9th Journal Science Advances and it explains why they eat more plastic why do these birds just keep eating plastic from the ocean so I thought it had always had to do with their bright colors and shininess and nope nope nope it's not the bright colors and shininess because that's not really what they're attracted to with the food that they eat it's the smell it's the smell and they discovered that they used plastic beads to that are made of the three most common types of plastic debris high density polyethylene low density polyethylene and polypropylene in and they threw them into the ocean in Monterey Bay and bodega off the California coast they and these were in mesh bags so that it what the beads weren't just floating around in the ocean and they could collect them again but they could also see what the birds were going after and they found that the plastic actually smells of a sulfur compound called dimethyl sulfide DMS which is a Q released by algae and other organisms in the water that coats the floating plastic and DMS is a scent that like krill give off this is one of the scents that the birds use to find their prey turn and so the algae covered the plastic in the ocean and give off the same scent that as the food of the birds that the birds want to eat and so this is why some the seabirds that track the scent of DMS to find prey according to this this article are nearly six times more likely to eat plastic than birds that do not track the scent of DMS wow yeah well add to the reasons plastic in the oceans is bad yeah plastic in the oceans is bad okay this is this is just the study is fantastic it really gives us something to queue to clue in on as to what's going on naturally though and why these animals why these birds are eating the plastic maybe we can figure out some some way to stop it well a great way to stop it is something good that came out of all of our results from yesterday so far it looks like California is banning single use plastic bags statewide so that was something that since the study was from UC Davis in California and they did the study in Monterey where the Monterey Bay Crane was very heavily talking about the plastic bag ban that is great news that it looks like this is actually going to go through because the easiest way to stop birds from eating plastic is to put less plastic in the ocean there you go let's let's do that exactly but does that mean I can't get my plastic bags for my produce at the supermarket like when I'm there all sorts of caveats but you can't get your single use take out bag that's that's fine and where we the produce bags and this kind of stuff they're trying to move to biodegradables though stuff going on and that's that that's the key thing that I think that the other lesson that we can learn from this perhaps is that there might be a way to remove mask eliminate this molecular scent from the plastics in some way like we could just could be another ingredient to our thing that you take out of the process of manufacturing the plastics in the first place so that we can continue to litter because we will because humans can't be trusted with a thing that we that that will make it less attractive or make the scent less you know I don't know that's such a dangerous game to play because if you're adding more chemicals to plastic that will also end up in the waterways and you don't know what those results are yet yeah preferably removing something or augmenting the process it might be it's more just knowing that that all of this plastic and bird stomachs is not a fluke and it's not birds being stupid and it's not all these other things is the fact that we're putting something into the ocean that doesn't belong that smells like their food let's not do that agree but knowing that most people won't heed this just and that's defeatist we can talk about later but that is a defeatist attitude let's let's let's take this conversation to the after show which if anybody watches our youtube channel our after show is after the show and we have discussions about things that that don't fit within the regular confines of our podcast so let's move on and keep keep the stories coming so Justin you teased this earlier earliest life on land ever yeah well yeah that's what it is so a team led by a semi-naven and free at the free university at Berlin studied things from South Africa's barbaton greenstone belt the rocks in the study are some of the oldest known on earth not the oldest but some of the oldest they're near the oldest with their formation dating back 3.5 billion years in a layer that has been dated at 3.2 billion years old tiny grains of the iron sulfide mineral pyrite were discovered that show telltale signs of microbial activity these signs are recorded both in trace element distributions as well in the ratio between the sulfur isotopes 34 s 32 s in the pyrite using instrumentation installed in post-m in 2013 the scientists show that the fraction of the 34 s in the core of some of the crystals differ characteristically from that of the same crystals rim indicating that the exterior of the grain involved a processing of sulfur by microbes also called biogenic fractionation so the composition of the rock the shape of the crystals layering visible in the field all indicate that it was derived from an ancient soil that developed on a river floodplain 3.2 2 billion years ago which is giving us the data when this thing would have been sort of fossilized and I suppose you would say field the data collected during the study imply that braided river systems transported the sediment containing the iron sulfide crystals is interpreted that the microbes living in the soil at a level that was continually shifting between wet and dry conditions subsequently producing the rim overgrowth on the pyrite crystals based on this evidence scientists conclude in their publication in journal geology that they have found evidence for biological activity on land at this very early date in their research then pushes back the date for the oldest evidence of life on land 300 million years earlier than previously documented wow so couple of little caveats yeah yeah there should be couple of little caveats in here oldest life on land but there is from a riverbed it was maybe wet and dry but you know this was also the water was necessary and it was probably submerged a lot of the time so whether you want to count this as life on land or not this is probably as good as it gets and as close as we can come to that at this point it is not the oldest evidence of life though on the planet as we reported in the past from Western Australia there are signs around 3.5 billion years ago and in Greenland very recently we talked about this 3.7 billion year old stromatolites which are even more direct evidence of microbial activity but because of its location on wet and dry lands this is being tagged as the earliest to have survived on land as opposed to rock formations in the sea okay so that's the specific of it that's the locati this one is on land the other ones we believe were were microbes that were under sea at the time of got it fascinating cool it gets older and first life on earth not flippers not plants of course are and and not really that long after I mean yes it's billions of years ago but not really that long after the oldest life got started in the sea no 3.7 to 3.5 billion years ago to 3.2 billion years ago yeah not that land not that back today did pretty well back then and the Greenland formation rock formation but with this one was 3.5 billion years old although that you know the part that they dated it's 3.2 but the formation itself goes back as much as 3.5 the Greenland formation went back 4.1 billion years ago that's I mean the earth is just over this and and so pretty much as soon as there was planet earth stuff living and and granted the exceedingly difficult part of this is that there are only portions of rock that date back that far that we have access to that we can actually and study there are these little places a few points right we got Greenland we got Australia we got this area in South Africa very few places that we can actually study and they have life but like you said before it's the life got started very soon after the the conditions that it could start in were available it just it just goes and as we're looking outward into the universe outward into our own solar system it just if you look out and you go there's got to be more out there it's almost as if life finds a way yeah like this but it's but I think that's the amazing thing about is we have very few places that we could even look for this evidence on the earth and when we go there we find it so imagine all of the places that are no longer accessible because the earth turns over there's all sorts of things that remove rock formations seduction induction lava flow yeah just getting covered by other stuff and where we found so this could have been global I mean this may have well been everywhere we're talking Greenland Australia and Africa right these are separate points very separate points in the globe where we find this it's very likely that planet earth was a microbial home almost immediately after its formation which exactly you're right does have massive implications for the potential of life throughout the universe absolutely other things that are just really cool plants you know plants are all over the planet that's a it's our green planet right it's pretty amazing and we've talked before you know Blair brought up a story about the invader plant that sticks its roots and the other plants roots and sucks up you know the plants genes and uses those plants genes to do I'm gonna do what I want it's like the honey band honey badger of plants well plants in general might be doing a lot more than than we think and one thing that researchers at Seoul natural National University in South Korea have discovered using Arabidopsis hey Justin how's your Arabidopsis it's long since that it was it was it was it had a good run but I I have a a brown thumb you tried all right well anyway Arabidopsis Thaliana is a part of the mustard family a little flowering plant used as a model plant to study genetic aspects of development and other aspects of plant growth anyway something that people have looked at in plants for a while as they've got these receptors called phytochromes and phytochromes are light receptors now it makes sense when the phytochromes are found in the stems and the leaves right where light can touch it but they're finding phytochromes in the roots and so they said what are these phytochromes doing down in the roots and what they discovered they they put these plants in the dark and they attached little light sources to the stem of the plants through an optical fiber and they discovered that the stems of the plants act kind of like fiber optic cables and transmit light to the roots oh that's cool the roots are just having a like a disco tech underground so it's not it's not like lots of light it's not like you can see down there or like other organisms could use the light to move around and do stuff but anti antimicrobial thing like certain frequencies of light to get microbes to back off or there could be aspects of that but with the phytochromes what the phytochromes when they get triggered by the light they produce a protein called HY5 which promotes root growth so it's like hey there's a signal from the stems of actual light going hey we're getting lots of light here it goes down to the phytochromes and says you should grow and support all of our growth up here because we're gonna grow stems and the and the leaves are gonna grow roots should grow to support that too and so they engineered the plants to have phytochrome mutations in the roots they discovered that HY5 production declined and then they put mutations into the HY5 itself and the roots got all tangley and stunted and they didn't do very well and so they found basically that it's it with experimentation they found that it wasn't chemicals it wasn't anything like just glucose or sucrose or any plant chemicals leading to the root growth it was actually this light signal so stems act like fiber optics to the roots they they evolved to use this information in tandem with their stems it's genius it's genius well done mother nature brava good design there absolutely hey you got some snakes yes so what is the creepy crawliest of scaries for you Kiki are you afraid of snakes I really do not like snakes you do not like snakes so do you ever see snakes where there are no snakes no no I'm I mean it's not like you know the recent Mexico flight snakes on a plane yes that really happened recently that really did happen well I know that I as much as I love I see I see spiders more than I see snakes I see spiders so I don't I don't anymore but when I lived in the foothills and actually there were rattlesnakes around I would occasionally like double check like okay a stick or something like that because that was my constant fear having encountered a few that I would get rattlesnake bit and die on the spot yeah that makes sense when you're in the area yeah yeah exactly it doesn't happen to me like around town yeah so new research from Nagoya University indicates why that might be that we are spooked and see snakes or spiders sometimes where maybe they aren't it's actually based in evolution it's because spiders and snakes are can be venomous again I don't want to demonize snakes one in 10 10 snake species are venomous so not a lot but they can be dangerous to us out in the wild and so recent research looking at visual awareness of snakes in humans indicates that we might be more on edge more prepped to recognize snake shapes than the shapes of other animals so there's a tool called a random image structure evolution rise used to create a series of 20 images of snakes birds cats fish and they ranged from completely blurred to completely clear from I think it was one to 20 yes and the they then asked subjects to view these images and in order of increasing clarity until they could identify what they were looking at so it would start at one two three four eventually you'd say that's a snake or that's a cat and the algorithm algorithm made it unbiased and random and they found that overall the snakes were well identified between six and eight on that image most yeah looking at it myself I would probably see a snake at around step nine or ten yeah I wouldn't until 13 but I blame the colored one is back in white image yeah but everything looks the same so but those are the snakes are between six and eight it looks like a dirty image until like a scrambled TV channel all the other animals didn't get identified until the ninth or tenth image that might not sound like much of a difference except that out of 20 that's a pretty big jump to consistently be that far ahead needing more clarity to identify it so the humans were able to pick out snakes even in dense what could be dense undergrowth in terms of the scrambled picture so their indication from this in what they confirm as snake detection theory is that the visual system of humans and potentially primates have evolved in a way that facilitates picking out dangerous animals like snakes so I say next is spiders my personal opinion yeah for me I yeah black widow spiders it's kind of the same thing just in living in an area where there are rattlesnakes it's like I grew up in the central valley they're black widow spiders and like the basement of my house I grew up in many black widow spaces yeah they're all over the measure black widow spiders it was just constantly like oh my gosh that's the web that's the spider it's that enlarged abdomen you don't even need to see the the hour glass on her it's just this enlarged abdomen that's why we have false widows right is that that's all you need to indicate I don't want to mess with this animal so I say that's the next step in snake detection theory is spider detection theory either that either that or special snakes on a plane detection theory I have a couple of quick stories we've talked before about the this phenomenon of people who are indifferent to music really just couldn't care less about me one way or another so some researchers have looked into this a little bit more deeply publishing and proceedings of National Academy of Sciences they used functional MRI scans to track brain activity in three groups of participants now not huge groups 15 people so take everything with a grain of salt but one group identified as indifferent to music one group identified as normal just music's fine and then the third group identified as having intense pleasure from music and none of them were musicians none of them had been trained in music in order to reduce any bias that might come from it from from the study they each subject was asked to provide two pieces of instrumental music no vocals that they found emotionally pleasing and so this was kind of hard for the ones who are like I don't really care about music what do you mean and so they supplemented this music by taking music matching from Spotify and then they imaged people's brains while they listened to these songs and then there were other activities that they could match it against that are traditionally rewarding as well so the idea is that okay these people are indifferent to music so they're not getting the normal brain reward right if you like music that means that your brain is rewarding you there's something involved in the reward system so they had them do other things that were also fundamentally rewarding like gambling you know that's another nice thing to do and they found that these people had lower blood flow in areas involved in the reward system of the brain when they were listening to music but there were no differences in blood flow to the reward reward regions when they were gambling and so they found they looked at the auditory areas of the brain and they found that there's just like really there's no connection between the auditory areas of the brain and the reward system part of the brain in these people who are indifferent to music whereas in people who like music there's there's definitely a collection a connection and people who are highly interested in music derive great pleasure from it there was a very dramatic and quick connection between the auditory cortex and the meso limbic reward system so is the indication here that if you don't like music it's because it's hard your your brain is hardwired to not like music and so that's the question they don't know causality because this is just a point in time in people's lives and so we don't know whether or not it's I don't think I like music I'm going to be indifferent to music and that changes the brain from that point forward or whether these people are born with just no connection between auditory area and and the reward area of the brain so that's the next the next step is it causal and in what way huh yeah and then in a final story just because you know soylent right we've talked about soylent we never actually tried it ourselves this is the kind of new I don't know it's like a nutrition shake kind of thing that it's for you know it's the it's the nerd culture nutrition shake the meal replacement system suddenly it started making people violently ill gastrically violently ill and there's been just a lot of reports of it just everybody who's who's it's start it started and all of a sudden just people reporting all sorts of trouble with this product the company's been trying to figure it out and they thought that maybe it was a soy ingredient because soy is a known allergen and can cause gastric problems and so they're like oh maybe it's this soy blend the soy protein that we're using but what they've discovered is that it's not the soy protein it's an algal flower that they're using this flower is made of dried algae chlorella proto-thicoides strain s106 grown in giant tanks by Terra Via Holdings Inc. under the product line Alga Bia now the thing about it is that it has been approved for use in foods by the FDA as of 2014 signed off as a generally recognized as safe ingredient G. G. Raz but there were notes the submission to the FDA the authors noted participants in several small human trials of algal flower reported gastrointestinal upset including nausea cramping and bulky stools this is according to an article in ours technical so it's possible that this algal flower even though it has been identified as a generally recognized as safe ingredient is really not all that safe or at least it's safe but just makes people's tummies really upset yeah so very interesting I'm still confused that people are drinking soilet that that's a good marketing technique to name your products soilet so it is fine come on it is confused yeah so wonder yeah it could be this the Terra Via senior vice president Mark Brooks insisted that the flower is safe saying our algal flower has been used for more than 20 million servings of products and we are aware of very few adverse reactions in no cases will the algal flower identified as the cause but it is a possibility yeah but name of flower name of food that somebody can't get like constipated on like it's sort of oh yeah oh so it's like food you put food in our food how dare you this was supposed to be humans it's it is a big question you know they're taking all sorts of ingredients putting things together in a novel way algal flower excuse me algal flower really is a fairly new addition to our protein our protein our protein intake it's not used very widely as an ingredient this is new it shouldn't necessarily cause problems but you know we don't go around skimming algae off the top of ponds all the time so but then again this is we're also talking about like as we keep learning you know that's it may be just based on your microflora and that's yeah and so and we don't know why some people are getting sick with the soil and other people are not you know it's not like everybody who's some people can't handle dairy I mean this is this is this thing you know this is there's there's all sorts of reasons for people's reactions to food that aren't universal to all humans because we have different microflora we have different genetic makeup we have different things going on within our bodies so if you eat it and it's been fine keep doing it if you keep having to the constant poops or whatever as the adverse affect stop you stop eating that thing so you figure this out but it's also if it's something that you it's this is a new product the soylent is a new product and it's something that is experimental and if people it's not just one person reporting this adverse reaction but many many people then they really need to look into it because it's not just hey you should just this one person should stop taking it it's there's something wrong with the formulation this is affecting too many people they need to change the formulation so yeah well any more stories anyone I'm good they're all good we got to the end of another quote-unquote hour of this science congratulations time is relative yes very relative this long we stretch time here we have a warping a time warping for our hour thanks everyone for watching the show thanks for being with us thanks to those of you who hung out with us at the Maryland stem festival last week it was super fun loved being in Baltimore such a good time Patrick thank you for being a great host just it was really really fantastic but right now I'd like to thank our Patreon sponsors thank you to Chris Clark Paul Disney G Burton Lattimore John Ratnaswamy Richard Onimus Byron Lee EO Jared Lysette Ulysses Adkins Kevin Parachan Andy Keith Corsell Jake Jones Dave Freidel Mike Rick Raw James Randall Eric Schwalb Bob Calder Mark Mazzaro's Ed Dyer Trinity for Brian Hedrick Layla Marshall Clark Charlene Henry Don Comerich Valerie Garcia Randy Mazzucca Tony Steele Steve DeBell Haroon Sarang Melissa Moseley Alex Wilson Jason Schneiderman Rita Garcia Greg Guthman Dave Neighbor Jason Dozier Matthew Litwin Eric Naff Jason Roberts Richard Porter Dara Lambert Rodney David Wiley Robert Aston Felix Alvarez Darren Darwin Hannon Cosmic Gypsy Brian Hone Orly Radio Brian Condren Pixelfly Marked Nathan Greco Hexator Deborah Smith Mitch Knives flying out John Crocker Christopher Dreyer Ben Rosig Sylvan Westby RTM Shuwata Dave Welkinson Steve Mishinsky Rick Ramis Gary Swinsburg Phil Nadeau Braxton Howard Salga to Sam Matt Sutter Emma Granier Phillip Shane James Dobson Hercurt Larson Stefan Insom Michael George Russell Jensen Mountain Sloth Jim Drapeau Tara Payne John Maloney Jason Oldes James Paul West Alec Doty Aluma Llama Joe Wheeler Ducal Campbell Craig Porter Adam Mishkon Erin Luthan Marjorie Paul Stanton David Simmerly Tyler Harrison Colombo Ahmed Thank you for all of your support on Patreon. 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This Week in 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 unburled 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 and I'll broadcast my opinion all over the Earth This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in 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 better understand But we're not trying to threaten your philosophy We're just trying to save the world from jeopardy This Week in Science is coming your way So everybody listen to everything we say and if you use our methods better roll it and die We may rid the world of toxoplasma God the eye 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 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 So how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour a week? 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Alright, everybody Ed from Connecticut is saying Minion Hangout Tomorrow 11.10 midnight on si.org ScienceIsland.org ScienceIsland.org Slash Science Island Chat You can hang out with Ed and Pamela and Australia Pamela and Chelsea Oh, sweet little girl Thanks, everybody, for watching the show this week I hope that we were You know, in addition to your week a distraction from things that you're not necessarily interested in thinking about right now You know, it's good I'm glad that we had this time together You're here You're here and I'm so glad that we had our trip last week with Baltimore Everything went very well Got the show all out finally Fada has been doing a great job of helping us out with the social media side of things which is something I definitely did help on with traveling and flying and posting and just having the help to do that was fantastic Also, Brandon helping us from Infinity Networks who's been helping us to stream to Facebook and he totally took that over was able to do it on Friday which is awesome because Wednesday night is our slot and people put time aside for that and then for him to be able to do that also on Friday was going above and beyond and is hugely appreciated So, Brandon thank you so much for helping us stream to Facebook last Friday also You guys in the chat room you are fantastic This is what I'm working on these days gratitude things that are great There are a lot of things that are great and there are a lot of things that will continue to be great So, one of those things I haven't gotten details yet on when it's exactly going to be but January 19th we are going to be in San Francisco at the Cal Academy of Sciences Nightlife for SF Sketch Fest So we'll be doing a 40 minute show Oh, good There you are, Brandon Thank you so much and Identity 4 also on a weekly basis Thank you for recording the show for me because that is another huge thing So I don't have to think about the downloading and the recording and the catching the stream or all the things It's a lot of things There are a lot of moving parts to do this show and Identity Thank you for doing that every week I really appreciate that and everyone for just being here so much Yeah, it's amazing It's amazing You guys Join us for the show every week I love it Thank you so much Yeah, January 19th SF Sketch Fest Super excited about that I don't know exactly what we're going to do there yet whether it'll just be us 40 minutes You already know what we're going to do I absolutely know what we're going to do We're going to bring the science and we're going to do it live and we're going to do it awesome You guys look I'm indoctrinating children with science fact Look at you being an educator science medecator I'm talking about chemistry and also climate change Science and meditation What were we disagreeing about earlier? We don't need to talk anymore about it No I feel like it's just going to end with a lot of yelling and I'm sick of yelling right now Ultimately I think that single you use plastics are not an inevitability and that actually it's really easy to make decomposing single use plastics and that is actually a economically advantageous thing to do because we have the technology Yeah, but what if they still smell like Cruella? Well, they will break up in their gut or in the ocean before it becomes a problem so it'll be fine That sounds a little because it'll be made out of corn or potato or something else perhaps the algae themselves I don't know that would be that See now you're thinking outside of the box That's that's it right there I've been here the whole time Let me curtsy to you real quick No, no, no, no that wait I don't know what that was I live outside of the box Oh Yeah That would be fantastic and then and then it might even be like encouraged to litter like every time you litter you feed a bird Well If we could just figure out a way to get ourselves back into the ecosystem in a way like that like if we're going to make the plastic out of algae why don't we just blend that into our Soylent Oh, yeah Oh, that's a great but that's a I love I love the whole concept of that of of like you put your sprouts into the biodegradable algae bag and just plop the whole thing into the blender bag included It's like rice paper It's part of the recipe I said easy to get reusable cloth shopping bags instead of plastic I now am the proud owner of about two dozen Oh God I probably on a hundred that's great I have a closet full of them now just because it never like you I think I've talked about this before but you go to the grocery store you've got your bags you're really happy that they were in the car they load them up but you maybe you maybe you ordered too much you or you shop a little more and then you had bags so you buy one more bag and you carry all these bags into the house and the next day you're out driving and you're like oh got to do some shopping you stop by and then you realize you have no bags in the car they're all in the house when you unloaded the groceries you forgot to put them back into the car and so now you're buying more bags and I've done this enough times that I've got quite a collection and what I've noticed too is if you bring a variety of bags like I'll throw the brands out there because why not I've got the local market is the nugget market I've got the co-op market bag I've got the Trader Joe's bag I've got like from different places and I'll have like just an assortment and I'll bring like you know a whole bag of bags in with me and then throw them I've noticed that they they always whatever store you're at tries to prefer their bag first to load up they'll they'll sort through they'll rummage through your sack of bags and go oh okay here's some Trader Joe bags we'll use those ones first and hopefully we won't get to the others we'll really pack it full and that nugget bag won't be seen or if you're at nugget the other way around but yeah and it's you know they're kind of fancy now they've they're artistically decorated and it's a good thing there's nothing wrong with this um oh my God I keep writing yabby and autocorrect she's taking it to rabbi yes rabbi shells we were going to make plastic bags out of rabbi shells okay anyway um no I've I've I'm good at getting them to the car but I'm not very good at remembering to take them into the store or I will often not take enough into the store so then what I do is I just forgo the bagging process I've got all of my groceries into the car loose walk out the security guard is like hey what are you doing and I have to show them the receipt it's fine they get to the car but I kind of prefer this because I feel like because grocery stores don't give bags freely anymore the art of bagging groceries properly has been lost I feel like even people who stand there and bag they used to be a very fine science like cans at the bottom then frozen food then eggs on top like it was bread on top like very clear but now I feel like because people are trying to stuff everything into the two tiny bags you brought they just it's all the rules are out the window so I'm kind of happier to be able to like wheel everything out to my car and then take my sweet time packing my groceries exactly how I want them in the bags because otherwise you're rushed to and you're in the line so so bad bagging is a pet peeve of mine and I and I do trace it back to like I must have been five or six or seven years old I don't know how old I was I was very very young though and one of my uncles or somebody it was my grandmother's house I found this book on on that was like a training manual on how to properly bag groceries and it was very detailed like it was like it was a manual and it was only about bagging but it was like thick little manual on how to do this properly and I remember it like finding this and reading this book that somebody some of my somebody in the family must have like gone out for this job and gotten this manual and that's why I was in my grandma's house but I remember reading and so it's always stuck with me which is again the importance of early introduction to children on subjects and concepts of learning what why why why it is so important that children what you were doing exposing them to elements of the scientific theory because things like that stick with you for a lifetime they really can take root and so I've got a bagging pet peeve I'm always raiding my bagger's ability to have assessed the groceries that I've brought even to the point where I'm trying to help them out by like if I've got canned goods and soft goods together and my my cart I always try to put all the heavies on the little conveyor belt first so that even if they just do it in order of what showed up first the order of what goes in to the bottom of the bag is correct and I have to say I have to say I would rate the the Trader Joe's uh is being excellent baggers Trader Joe's are excellent baggers so I would say my Safeway baggers excellent baggers as well typically yeah I'm one of those people who I also put items onto the belt in a particular order hoping that they will bag them in that particular exactly that's why if you had your headphones off this is what I just said no that's what I'm saying I do the same thing I do as well but I will say I'm going to call out I'm going to do a little call out hopefully we don't get sued worst baggers I have encountered that the target store like I almost don't well that's because they like barely even sell food they're like it was an after thought but I definitely had I've definitely had like my eggs at the bottom of the bag there and then like the giant refill of hand soap on top of the eggs like what and I did I did like the grumpy old man sort of telling the kids to get off the lawn thing once I really honestly had to just like just I'm I'm going to go over to the next station and just it's okay like are you yeah I'm unbagging everything you just did and I'm redoing it because that was ridiculous what I just witnessed oh see I probably people hate me at these stores because I bag my own stuff I don't even let them I'm just like nope I got it thanks don't go ahead and that to me oh no that's going to go in my purse no I got it especially a target because you have the tiny items I'm going to put that in my personal bag like I don't want soap in with my food I'm very particular and some things I don't want bags for at all like they try to bag laundry detergent I'm like this already has a handle right I'm okay right so I yeah I usually don't even let them back so so there is a socio-economic layer to this too though right I think there's I think there's an element of what you just said that slightly depends on how close your driveway is to your home oh and if you are even in a car do you have a car exactly like we were talking about this in the cab about like treasure island forgot to put any grocery stores and nobody put a grocery store there but they put a lot of low-income housing and these people have to you know travel by mass transit Oakland or yeah yeah well this is the toll of which way they go to work but there's also like they have to travel mass transit to get groceries you can't just load up a trunk full of cars and take a couple runs of going back and forth so yeah there's all sorts of elements Brandon just posted in the chat room nationalgrocers.org special program best bagger championship oh there is actually a there are videos you can watch yes you can watch the final round of this year's competition maybe we should yes and I'm trying to think if it was something that was put into a movie or if I've actually watched a documentary on this I've seen it and I can't I've seen a movie or is it part of an actual documentary on I think I saw it on like local news when I was younger I feel like they were like oh and young Tommy Johnson just won the best bagger contest up in Salt Lake City let's see how he won yeah thanks for that Carl I'm live in Salt Lake City with Tommy Johnson who managed to put the cans at the bottom of the bag Tommy how did you get to be here today how long have you been bagging a whole four years since you were 13 that's fascinating what now that you've won what do you plan to do well I plan to go to the Disney Store and bag everything there oh Blair though the fact that you bag your own groceries do you think you could compete against these ultimate baggers I mean they are fast look at them look at them no absolutely not choosing their items they are bagging efficiently and quickly these baggers are they're intense yeah I don't think I can I don't think it would be my groceries judged appropriately also because I I'm more like okay all my frozen food I just like literally throw it into a bag and I'm like okay that's a bag because it's all frozen I want it all to be in there together I also want to know I'm very meticulous about the order I'm going to unpack my groceries so usually I'm grocery shopping after work I'm tired I'm hungry right so I want my frozen food all in a bag so I know to unpack that first thing right then I know I have my bag of like refrigerated and vegetables and stuff like that that's getting unpacked next and then I have my bag of stuff that I could unpack in a few hours tomorrow whatever and then I have my totally one that was nice and then I have like my bag of like non food right so that's more what I do is I'm like a very strategic about the order in which things will exit the bags wow so ten thousand dollars for winning the championship that's not enough these people deserve more if you're a champion bag or you're worth way more than that but okay that's amazing they have state contests and then it goes on to the national championships let's see we just missed New York's state championships which were Saturday November 5th Massachusetts for Wednesday October 26th let's see if there's anyone Virginia was November November 5th nope nope nope okay no more the the two two thousand this is all for 2016 national championships are coming up oh my god that was fabulous they're so serious right salty ash oh my goodness all right I gotta go yeah it's late and last night was a late night for many of us and so I'm a little tired I think I I think I need to go go to bed maybe have another glass of whiskey we'll see yeah okay but I need a quick moment with y'all and off air after show just to discuss a little are we in trouble? no okay what are you talking about? all right everybody we will see you next week make sure you check out the science island hang out tomorrow evening with Ed in Connecticut scienceisland.org and I'm going to try really hard to be there because I think we're going to be ranting ranting about what? after show after the after after show did something happen? I was just up watching Netflix last night but we will be back again next week everyone thank you so much for spending this evening with us we so appreciate it and we hope that you have a fabulous sciencey week ahead love yous