 Hello everyone, here we are, we're doing it. This is This Week in Science. This is the kind of the raw live feed here. We are gonna start on our episode in just a second here. We're gonna make sure everyone has joined us and I'm gonna compobulate myself. So I'm still working on that. In the meantime. Yeah, I'll be compobulated. I think probably midway through the show today. I will have reached compobulation. You know, we're gonna do what we can. There's a baby kicking my ribs right now. It's very fun. So we're gonna get through this show. It's gonna be great. All right. So yeah, so this is like the unedited stuff and then we'll have an edited version that goes out as audio. So if you prefer that. Where is that called the audio version? Is that the- It's called the podcast. It's called the podcast. Yeah. So what is this? This is just a recording session? It's a video. There's video involved. Yes, that's, you know. It's sort of like we're doing a documentary of the making of the podcast right now. Justin, did you write a disclaimer because it's not in the notes? Yes, I did. Okay, great. Just checking. I have a couple of things to fix in the notes. But that's fine. Don't worry about it as long as it doesn't cause any issues in the moment. It could be fixed later. All right. Great, are you ready to do a show? Uh-huh. Okay, great. We're gonna do it. I'm gonna do the things. Here we go. In three, two. This is TWIS. This Week in Science, episode number 922. I'm gonna do it again. Is there really that many shows? Yeah. All right, here we go. Three, two. This is TWIS. This Week in Science, episode number 922, recorded on Wednesday, April 19th, 2023. Fossilized Science. Hi, everyone. I'm Blair Bazderich. Today we're gonna fill your head with bats, electricity, and carbon footprints. But first... Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The following program is a glimpse into the world of science, a world that is all around us, inside and out, across every life form, every interaction of chemistry, and every force of nature. From the beginning of time to the cold, dark, meaningless end of the universe. From complex systems to simple solutions. From a child's questioning mind to a lifetime of researchers' lifetimes in pursuit of answers. And always, no matter how much we have learned, we find there is still much more to know. The world of science is a big world, spanning every known subject and leading us ever into subjects unknown. The world of science is a deeply fascinating place in every direction, mystery, and adventure await. The hardest part is choosing where to start, which is why each week we offer a few suggestions here on This Week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind I can't get enough. I wanna... Thanks to you, Blair. To you, Justin, and everyone listening out there. Welcome to this week's episode of This Week in Science. Thank you all for joining us. We have a great show ahead. On this show, we have tons of science news. We are missing Kiki. She is at a conference this week, but we'll try to make up for her absence with a... We never could, but we'll try to bring some extra science on our end this week so it doesn't feel too light. I brought stories about plastic pollution, electricity, big animals, bat skeletons, and fossils. What did you bring, Justin? I have got some interesting PFAS news. Concrete news. I always like to give an update on the world of what's going on in concrete. I haven't... There's a study I covered. I'm gonna cover here, which is it's just sort of an interesting study on one level, but it might have an ethical question to it. I don't know. I don't know. I'm gonna put it out there and see what everybody thinks. And an amazing discovery on the way to catch a train in Paris. Okay. Very interesting segment this week. As we jump into the show here, I wanna remind you all that you should subscribe to TWIS either on YouTube. If you're watching us or if you're listening, you can subscribe through your platform for podcasts of choice. Also, Facebook, basically just anywhere we exist, if you can tell the analytics that you like us, that would be great. You can help support us that way. So that's why everybody's always saying hit the like buttons or the subscribe buttons or whatever. It's because the more that people do that, the more people who aren't them potentially can get to see it. We'll find out about that. Yeah. Exactly. Then we can tell more people about all this cool science. Of course, you can also go to twis.org to find out more about us or share it to a friend. So, Justin, tell me your first story. What do you have? All right, this is where I'm gonna mess everything up and switch it up real quick. Okay, I was a little worried. I wasn't gonna go off the run sheet this week. So I'm gonna start with the concrete news. Because it's actually, I think it could be a good news segment. We'll see, I'll be the judge of that. Go ahead. Just good news, concrete addition. This is a carbon negative concrete formula. Has been developed by engineers at Washington State University. The proof of concept formula that they've got so far is nearly as strong as regular concrete. So it makes it sound like it's not good enough, but it's comparable strength-wise. But the researchers infused regular cement with an environmentally-friendly biochar. So this is a type of charcoal that is made up from organic waste. And they have, there've been attempts to add this to concrete in the past. It is a method of sequestering carbon. But in the past, researchers have gotten about a 3% admixture before the concrete was no longer binding correctly. So they have some sort of a, part of what they've developed was a beforehand strengthening of the biochar itself, using, and I thought this was clever, concrete wastewater. And this is wastewater that's got a lot of calcium in it. And alkaline stuff, but it's sort of the leftover part of the process of making concrete normally. They used this in a method to harden the biochar and then mixed it in. And they got 23% admixture, which is huge. What's interesting about this is that then once this concrete, as this concrete hardens, actually they got more than that. They got 30%, I'm sorry, 30% biochar. As these cement hardens, it can suck up from the surrounding environment, from the air, up to 23% of its weight in carbon dioxide as it's reaching its comparable to ordinary carbon. That's why it's carbon negative. That's the carbon negative aspect of it. It's actually able to be a carbon sink as it hardens. Wow, okay, cool, but it's not as strong? Well, you know, like they didn't give me the tensile strengths or the whatever, right? Right, right, yeah. They say in one part they say it's comparable and then the other part, then there's also a verbiage that says it's nearly a strong act. Right, right, right. But you don't need all concrete to be the strongest concrete. Certainly if you're talking about something that is gonna be used for patios or maybe even sidewalks, it doesn't have to be infrastructure for a building concrete kind of thing. The other thing is this is just a proof of concept to see how much biochar they could get into this. There's all sorts of things like we've talked about in other cement and concrete updates on the show where we can recreate some of what we've been learning from ancient Roman concrete, which lasts much, much, much longer. This is why the Colosseum still exists. This is why there's all these, we can see all this wonderful architecture from ancient Rome that's still standing because they had some pretty unique cement uses, formulations that we aren't using. But we're also looking for the cheap, easy to make, industrial, all these things, yes. And part of the problem with that though then is, the lifespan also is over. Is that a problem? Or if you're in a capitalist society, is that a good thing? So in the beginning- Talking about planned obsolescence, right? Yeah, in the beginning when you're building everything on a concrete, fantastic. Wow, look, it's strong, it's cheap. It went up quick and now everything's fine. And you'll be back in five years to pay us again. Well, yeah, the repair aspect of it gets tough. What is it? It's something like 100 or 150 years is like the top end of all the concrete that we've used. That sounds like, oh, well, I'll never have to change my driveway. But then, that time goes by and then that means that everything that's made out of concrete needs to get replaced in 100 years, which that's a lot of stuff. What is it? They threw in a statistic here too about how much concrete, what is it? Four billion, oh guys, four billion tons of concrete are poured, produced every year globally. To have to, you know, so then you figure if we, if you start with that number, that's how much we're putting, we're building with it. 150 years from now, we need to be doing that still just to replace everything we've made today. All the bridges, all the buildings, all the sidewalks, all the everything. So they're, and this is, currently this concrete production is somewhere around 8% of the contribution to global warming. That's pretty big. That's pretty big. Yeah, but the question I have then is if concrete is already breaking apart at a certain point, chemically, what is capturing the carbon and when concrete fails, even if it's this concrete, does it release carbon? Right, yeah, well. It's just something to consider because then, if you have all of this new concrete and we use it a bunch and then 100 years from now, it all starts to crumble, we'll have a giant carbon release. That wouldn't be good either, so just, I don't know. I'm curious what the chemical property is and how it's sequestering the carbon and. Oh, there's also like, what is it, concrete like naturally absorbs oxygen? Is it, it was some problem they had in the biosphere. They built the, you know, the biodome or whatever it was where they, they was like, oh, we're gonna take these researchers and put them in this self-contained building that's cut off from the outside world. It's gonna have its own water and its own oxygen, plants and everything. It's gonna be like a, be able to be self-sustaining. But the concrete, we're so much concrete that it sucked up a bunch of the oxygen. Oh. So they were starting to get a little light-headed. How to go open a window, which was biodome too, thank you. How to open a window. And that kind of ruins the experiment Of course, of course. Speaking of unintended experiments, let me tell you about ocean plastic. We know it's a problem. There's a lot of it. There are these things called gyres, which are giant like trash continents in the ocean. Not great to think about, but a team of researchers led by Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and the University of Hawaii, Manoa, they found coastal species representing diverse texanomic groups in the Eastern North Pacific sub-tropical gyre on over 70% of the plastic debris they examined. Okay, so you have aquatic animals in the plastic. Why is that weird? Because they're coastal species and they were in the middle of the ocean on the plastic. They carried more coastal species than open ocean species. So the coastal species were hanging out on this plastic because it was like an artificial coast. So this suggests that past biogeographical boundaries among marine ecosystems, which have been established for millions of years are rapidly changing because of the floating plastic pollution accumulating in the sub-tropical gyre. So like, we had the, gosh, what was her name? We have this amazing biologist on the show talking about the Neustrom, which is this kind of layer of biota on the open ocean and that when you try to scrape plastic debris out of the ocean, you can mess up the Neustrom. Okay, great. This is a whole nother level and is this a good thing or a bad thing? I don't know. It's just a different, it's just we've changed it. So they analyzed 105 plastic samples. These were collected by the ocean cleanup during 2018 and 2019 in the North Pacific sub-tropical gyre. And so this was done by volunteers, non-governmental organizations, all these different groups coming together to kind of try to remove some trash, which sounds like a good thing. And while they were at it, they said, hey, let's do some science on that trash. So they checked it out and they found 37 different invertebrate species that are normally relegated to coastal waters. And that's over triple the number of species of open ocean types that they found in there. They were also reproducing and they found individuals of multiple life stages. So they were like thriving on this plastic. So scientists have already known that organisms including coastal species, of course, colonized marine plastic debris like I was talking about, but until now they were unaware that they essentially have established coastal communities in the open ocean on these gyres. So this is a new- To them it's just an island. Yes, exactly. So this is a new human-caused impact on the ocean that we haven't really talked about yet, which documents the scale and potential consequences that we haven't really considered. So is this a good thing? Are they endangered species? Or is it a bad thing? Is it, are we now bringing invasives to the open ocean that are impacting other invertebrate ecosystems? TBD, I'm guessing it's the second one, but more research is needed. Basically this is just like, whoa, there's entire coastal communities living on this plastic. We gotta find out more. Yeah. The new stream is the reason we might not wanna just scoop up the trash because we're sort of collecting the normal organisms of the ocean onto these islands and on and around about them. But then if the majority of them are from coastal, then maybe the, oh gosh. Yeah, so then is this actually impacting the ecosystem in the new settlement where it's like, you don't even have the right junk in there. So just take it. Is that, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know either. Yeah, so there's more, yeah. So this is like how we've created this false biome. As we do whenever humans are having anything from trash midden, you know, if we're dump the city dump, I'm sure if people went out and just tested where all our trash goes, we'd probably find that there's an interesting collection of microorganisms that are gathering there that probably weren't naturally normally found there. The question is just, I don't know if it would be something that would be you wanna protect, but then again, at this point, we're not stopping using plastic or throwing it away. Right. We're just adding to this island that now we know has at least one form of life that is adapted to it. Yeah. I don't know that the larger marine species are enjoying it as much, but there are food networks that can derive from this. Yeah. So that's really the question, is what is the impact of these species? Is it now an invasive problem? Also the thing that I can't help but think of is if they're reproducing and they have all the life stages represented on this plastic, at what point is the plastic impacting their growth because invertebrates also are very easily impacted by microplastics. So if they're in the, up in the business, as it were, they're like in it, right? Is it impacting their biology in a way that we should be studying? Is it a healthy community? Is it not a healthy community? So it's more just that they've made this aha moment that's, oh my God, there's a lot of coastal species on here. We need to figure out more. So. Yeah. Yeah. The microorganisms are fine, if they are. Yeah, are they? Then you have the beginnings, the underpinnings of a food web there. Great. And then at what point up that food chain is something just scarfing down more plastic than it can handle so it may not be, it might be fine for the microorganisms even, but then somewhere in that food chain, it seems like plastic is just not an organic material. It's just not something you should be eating, anything you should be eating. Yeah, not delicious, not good. No. You know what else isn't delicious is PFOS. Yeah. Tell us about PFOS. So this is a University of Rhode Island research lead study and it's confirming a direct link between certain chemicals in drinking water and human obesity. Specifically, if there's increased PFAS content in blood that is accumulated from the water, it promotes weight gain and it makes it harder to keep a lower body weight after weight loss. So this is a quote from Philippe Gargiang, MD, PhD physician who holds a research professor appointment at University of Rhode Island. We previously shown that children with increased PFAS concentrations tend to gain weight and develop higher levels of cholesterol in the blood. We now focus on adults who participate in experimental study of five different diets in regard to weight gain. Our results add to the concern that environmental pollution may be affecting our metabolism so that we tend to gain weight. Now, there's all sorts of problems with PFAS. There's all sorts of problems with lots of things though in the world and so everything kind of goes and becomes this white noise of like, oh, you're not supposed to eat the organic food this week because there was a news report and then, oh, but you can't eat the non-organic because of this study or whatever it is, right? Like so much of an advantage. However, I think one of the biggest strengths is people's sense of wanting to lose weight, right? And so maybe now people will start to take PFAS contamination seriously because they don't want to gain weight. I know that sounds like I'm oversimplifying all of humanity but I'm probably not too wrong. But Justin, people still eat food that make them gain weight. Yes, yes they do. That's usually one of the, it's usually a main driver. But just follow me on this. If global warming was gonna make everybody gain 15 pounds, right? I think there's a lot of people. But you had to scrub your pan a little harder. I don't know. If global warming was gonna make everybody gain weight and break out in acne regardless of age, I have a feeling there'd be a little bit more visceral rejection of things that are carbon emitting. And maybe something like this will grab people's attention about PFAS. Now, we've also been talking about there's been some recent innovations and figuring out ways of removing PFAS from water and these sorts of things that might get a government funding at some point or some grants but eventually down the road after the researcher has struggled to push their research from one grant to the next kind of a thing. This might be the thing that gets public attention and gets a more governmental focused role. Because weight gain correlated to causes of death is the highest of all of the things that you can do that correlate to all causes of death. Obesity is the top one. So this might be something that would, I know health organizations are aware of PFAS and there's reasons we're trying to remove it from everything. Still apparently in rain here and some products, there's products that are being made still with PFAS even though we understand it's a horrible terrible thing that's everywhere on the planet. But anyway, weight gain is another thing you can add to the list. I think that's an oversimplification and I think that PFAS really messes with your body and so they're pointing at one symptom and saying, oh, it makes you gain weight but really it's ravaging your body in other ways and that is just one result of what's happening. Right, the metabolic system, you're also talking about all forms of diabetes. Time, you know, there's a host of diseases, liver problems, all these things. Your metabolic system is involved in a lot of things beyond weight gain. Weight gain might even be a symptom of other things that are taking place. Yep. So. Yep. But hang on now. When communicating to the public and not this shows public, this shows public knows, you know, as much as I do if not more about anything but to explain things to the general, larger mass of people out there who don't care about the details. Hey, did you hear there's a chemical that makes you gain weight just and it gets into your drinking water and you don't even know you're taking it? Oh, that's really terrible. Let's stop that. Yeah, okay. Keep it simple. Yeah, we'll see. Maybe. Justin, I need Dr. Justin to sell something for me real quick. Can you do an advert for electricity band-aids? What's the matter? Ah, I got this cut and it just won't heal. It looks like you're using a plastic bandage. Yeah, yeah, you know, the kind that everybody uses. Well, not everybody. Now there's something better. Electro bandage. There you go. Is that it? Yes. I am here to tell you about electro bandage. No, it's about using electric stimulation to heal wounds. This is from Chalmers University of Technology and they have done some preliminary research looking at electric stimulation as a method to speed up the healing process, making wounds heal up to three times faster. These are usually smaller superficial wounds, which we don't worry too much about. I personally, I will slap on a bandaid for a few hours and then when it falls off, I just go, eh. And then it kind of heals. But there are people who have very specific ailments that cause small wounds to be a big problem. So people with diabetes, spinal injuries, pleural blood circulation, or any sort of impaired wound healing byproduct of various diseases mean that there is a greater risk of infection of chronic wounds that will not close. And in the long run can lead to terrible consequences, including actual amputation from those infections. So these small superficial wounds might not seem like a big deal to many of us, but to a specific group of people they are a real health concern. And so if you could quickly close those wounds much faster than just letting your potentially immunocompromised body fight to close that wound itself, that could help reduce these kind of fears of infection or other kind of complications from having those wounds. So what they did is they worked on an old hypothesis that electric stimulation of damaged skin could be used to heal wounds. The idea behind it is that skin cells are electrotactic, which means they're directionally, they directionally migrate in electric fields. So if an electric field is placed in a petri dish with skin cells, the cells stop moving randomly and start moving in the same direction. They start to kind of dance in an orderly fashion. So they investigated how this principle can be used to electrically guide the cells in order to make wounds heal faster. They used a tiny engineered chip and they were able to compare wound healing in artificial skin. This wasn't real skin yet. Stimulating one wound with electricity and letting the other one heal without electricity. And as I mentioned, the one treated with electricity healed three times faster. Now the next step for this group is they received a large grant which will allow them now to continue their research this time looking at actual skin cells. And they hope to be able to develop a wound healing product for consumers on the market. So there's your electro bandage right there. And so when they look at different actual skin cells and how they interact during stimulation, they can actually take a step closer to a realistic wound and be able to eventually want people to scan the wounds before they enact the electro bandage so that they can have stimulation that is based on each individual wound kind of tailored to it so that it's extra effective. Yeah. Well, I love how researchers think doctors have all this free time. Well, I mean, yes. If you were a person who's immunocompromised or has diabetes or has these other things that make small wounds problematic. It's problematic. To a doctor that they're gonna scan a wound and then create the customized. Now, that's just what you're gonna have to do because nobody's gonna wait for this to come up. Well, maybe it's a machine you buy at Walgreens, you know? I don't know. Yeah, they do sell, no, I'm not gonna recommend. Now I'm recommending home versions of a treatment for a thing that just got invented. But I am going to use my TENS unit that I usually use for the lower back pain. And if I get a cut, I'm just gonna slap that on. Oh boy, I don't know about that, Justin. No, that's not probably how it's supposed to work. I don't think that's the same. Well, maybe this is why. You're supposed to be creating an electric field where the wound is. Not the stimulating the muscles with electricity. No, no. So anyway, point being, this is nowhere near market yet. They're not even using real skin cells yet. But yes, you could potentially have a smart electrobandaid at some point that could help you heal wounds. I think it's a pretty cool idea. And with that, I think it's time for that time of the show. What time is it, Justin? Is it time for Blair's Animal Corner with Blair? By the, she's your girl, except for giant panties and squirrels. What you got, Blair? I have. Oh, I have so much. Let's see. I brought some extra stuff this week. So first, okay, my first story. What do you think moves faster? A elephant or a gazelle? Well, gosh. So I haven't had to run from either one, but my immediate instinct is that the gazelle is going to be the faster top speed. I know I'm probably wrong because the way you're saying it and an elephant's big and strong and they're fast, you see them run, but that gazelle is just quick. How about like, let's get closer, let's get more down and dirty with it. Do you think an elk or a white-tailed deer is faster? I guess I'm going smaller again. I think I'm going with the white-tailed deer again. Okay, but what about like a deer or a mouse? Okay, so here's the thing I'm gonna do then. Yeah. Because now we're in such a scale difference. I'm gonna go with the mouse of speed compared to body length or something. No, just flat speed. We're just doing flat speed. Wait, it's a mouse versus a what now? I don't know, a deer. Something bigger. Whatever, okay. All right, I'm still gonna go with the deer just because I think they're gonna cover more area, but I think technically the mouse is faster. Okay. It's just the small legs. Okay, I'm gonna ask one more. How about like an eagle and a sparrow? Let's do the rest of the show like this. I mean, definitely a sparrow. Okay, interesting. All right, so the reason I am asking all these questions is that the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research and the Friedrich Schiller University in Gena, Germany looked at animal speed related to body size. They developed a model to look at the relationship between animal size and traveling speed. They used data from 532 species and I had to dig into the actual text here because I got very curious about what kind of species they were looking at. They used 699 estimates of mean or median travel speed taken from 170 studies across a pool of 532 species. And this is where I was surprised from various taxonomic groups, amphibians, arthropods, niderians, birds, fishes, mammals, mollusks, reptiles that spanned 15 orders of magnitude in body mass and five orders of magnitude in travel speed. So they looked, this wasn't just mammals. This wasn't just warm-blooded animals. This wasn't just quadrupeds. This was everybody. Yes. Help me out because mollusks is a whole group of creatures none of which would I, like if I got assigned, oh, you're going to measure the top speed of a mollusk. You're not, you're not comparing mollusks to elephants. You're comparing small mollusks to large mollusks. Is what you're talking about. Okay, okay, fair enough. So you're looking at kind of similar groupings. Okay. But what they found is that larger animals actually travel more slowly than medium-sized animals. So small animals travel the slowest, medium-sized animals faster, large animals slower again. They believed that just, if you're looking at basic mechanics of the body, larger animals should be able to travel faster because they have longer wings. They have longer legs, they have longer tails. But these medium-sized animals typically have the fastest sustained speeds. Why is that? The researchers attribute this to the fact that larger animals require more time to dissipate heat that their muscles produce while moving. And so they have to travel more slowly to avoid overheating. This is a surface area thing, basically, is their suggestion. And so any animals traveling speed could be explained by jointly considering how efficiently it uses energy and sheds heat. So this is how they kind of made this hypothesis and then they were able to reverse engineer it and it worked. So they could guess a traveling speed based on size and their energy efficiency, kind of proving this theory. Is it? I don't buy it. I don't buy it at all. Based on their size, based on this. Matthew, there's lots of math out there. Sure, sure. So I'm in complete agreement with, that was intuitively for me, like the smaller or the medium-sized would be faster. Intuitively that made sense, okay? However, just because of surface area heat dissipation, not buying it. The thing that I think of. Justin, look at all this math. Look at it all. Oh, you know, you put it that way and then I have no argument. Except where is gravity? Where is mass, the ratio? Where is the energy that goes up probably exponentially for a running elephant versus a running mouse, you know? Like, I don't think these, you know, it was one of the things that was disheartening to learn as a child. It was, remember, somebody was explaining to me that King Kong could not exist. Because if there was an ape that big, it would crush its own bones under its body weight. Unless over evolutionary time, it developed really, really thick bones. Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, but then like, of the dinosaurs with very thick bones, they also don't tend to have those long legs and stand up. Yeah, well, is that right? Never say never. But this is like, if it's left out gravity and energy and the like upper capabilities of what tissues can do without breaking under all of those pressures and things and just say, oh, surface area. I get that surface area would correlate to it because if you're bigger, you'll have more. It just seems like there's a lot more physics involved and a lot more anatomy involved than surface area. That would track with absolutely, you know, because we don't have like lead-based life form that is the same, you know, two mice of the same size, that one is constituted of lead and is much heavier than the other. So obviously we're made of cells, which are gonna have, you know. So you're right. So this is a correlation, but it was such a effective correlation that they could map results. They could reverse map their results. So it's a very effective correlation. So you're right. The question now is, is there causation or is there another characteristic that's related to this that can explain it, which is kind of what you're getting at? Yeah. So, I don't know, but... Here's how you see if physics is involved. Here's how you see if physics is at all involved in this and gravity is at all part of this scenario. You take an elephant, a mouse, a mollusk, and a spider and you drop them all from 10 meters height. And you see if there's any accumulated different effects on outcomes based on weight. Don't let Justin in any biological studies with animals. Please. So in the end, these findings actually have significance to conservation because lots of animals deal with something called habitat fragmentation, which is when you end up with human settlements, roads, barriers, walls, buildings, malls, I don't know, in the way of a larger animal habitat. And so they are suddenly fragmented away from these other areas. So if you know, if you can anticipate the movement speed of an animal, you can also anticipate their needs in a habitat space and the potential impacts of habitat fragmentation from human development, from climate change, from all of these different things that are going on. So they say this needs further investigation. So this is the next correlation that they're looking at, right? And so they've identified this one correlation which is middle sized animals are fastest, larger animals are slower than the medium sized animals. They can accurately chart that based on their energy efficiency and their size, great. So if you can chart speed, can you chart the impacts of fragmentation based on their movement speed? It's an interesting idea. Cause then you don't have to spend, you know, 20 years observing the animals to figure out what their range is. And then by the time you're done studying it, it's too late, a bunch of the land is gone. So now you can actually like predict what they need. So, you know, anyway. Justin, you wanna hear about some fossils? I have two different fossil stories. I love fossil stories. Great. I don't often have a lot of fossil stories in the animal corner, but I'm very excited. I have two this week. So the first one is about the oldest bat skeletons ever found. They're, this was found by the American Museum of Natural History, more on how they found it later. It's an interesting story. But they described a new species of bat based on the oldest skeletons ever recovered. This was in Wyoming about 52 million years ago before it was called Wyoming. And this supports the idea that bats diversified rapidly on multiple continents at that time. So it's kind of, it pushes back their origin and kind of their diversification timeline. So while there's over 1,400 living species of bats currently all over the world, in Wyoming, there's this amazing fossil deposit from the early Eocene. They have uncovered over 30 bat fossils in the last 60 years and they were all thought to represent the same two species. Most of them were identified as Icaronicterus. Icaronicterus index. And up until about 20 years ago, they were all that. And then 20 years ago, a second bat species was discovered. Now this guy enters in, this new species was collected by a private collector in 2017 and purchased by the aforementioned American Museum of Natural History. They were like, hey, interesting bat skeleton you got there. How much you want for it? And so this along with a second fossil discovered in the same quarry in 1994, as they've been sitting on in a while, they looked very similar to each other and very different from the other species that they've identified in the past. So between that, they were able to identify that this was a whole new species. They gave this fossil a new name. Icaronicterus guinelli. And so this means that they're different enough that there's a diversification that they didn't anticipate. So the long and short of it is oldest bat skeleton pushes them back a bit, but really what pushes them back is the fact that these skeletons are so different from each other and also so different from other bat skeletons found around the world at that time. So there were bats all over 50-something million years ago. So if there's a common origin of bats, we have to go further. They are the most, I think this is right. They're the most diversified species on the planet. There's like... Well, not species. No? Mm-mm. They're like 1,500 different kinds of bat and they're like represent, they represent like a crazy big portion of the, at least the vertebrate species, I don't know. So they're, it's a family, it's not a species. So species is a specific... Oh, God. Type of a vertebrate? A diverse number of species. So it's a family, it's microchirotera, it's a family of bats. And so, yes, they are very diverse. And so the question is, how long have they been so diverse? How did they get everywhere? How the heck are they related to whales? That's a whole nother story. I don't know. Bats are wild. Was it whales? The one I was hearing was horses. Like, if you're like, they're like more related to a horse than they are to a mouse, I think was the... Well, they're most related to whales. So enjoy that. Most related to whales. Anyway. What? So that was my quick bat story. Now I have a... Wait a second. Yes. But they, and whales, some kinds of whales, they have echolocation. Yes. So is it, is echolocation convergent or is it that far way back? Convergent. Anyway, so yeah, I don't know. Bats, they've been around a long time. We found a really old one in Wyoming. That's pretty much the whole story. I just thought it was really cool. And it's also the only thing interesting in Wyoming. There's two things. That's not true. Yellowstone is there, isn't it? Is that where that is? Yeah. There's Yellowstone and then there's that area around it. Sure, sure. You gotta put it somewhere. You gotta put it somewhere where there's nothing else going on. Next I have a fossil story from University of Oxford. This is something found in amber. And it is both a feather and some bits of bug. Now, this is why this is important. It's about 105 million years old. And based on the timeline, birds didn't show up until about 30 million years later. So this is a dinosaur feather. Nice. And what this bug is, is a relative of germested beetles. Germested beetles or skin beetles are the ones that if you ever go to a zoo or in a Kramer museum and they have a bunch of beetles eating away at a dead thing to kind of clean off the bones, that's germested beetles. That's why they're called skin beetles. But there's a bunch of relatives to germested beetles that don't just eat flesh. They'll also eat decaying old feathers or hair. So they're the custodians of the animal world. They are very, very, very important. Without them, it would be very gross. But so what they found were these larval molts in amber that are related to modern germested beetles. And so the idea is that they may have played an important role in digesting organic matter back then. And specifically, they may have had something to do with cleaning up fallen feathers from dinosaurs. In some other samples, they have found other feather portions, other remains, other tiny minute copper lights, so little poops. And all of this is in intimate contact with the molts attributed to domestic beetles. So they are doing the work even 105 million years ago, they're cleaning up. And so this is hard evidence that the fossil version of germested beetles almost certainly fed on the feathers that detached from these dinosaurs as they fell. And so this looks like a co-evolution over at least 100 million years with animals that molts or shed and these germested beetles hang out. What we don't know is what kind of symbiotic relationship they might have had. Did the dinosaurs care that the beetles were around? Did they help them clean house? It's assumption is that they benefited because by eating dead stuff and old stuff, they are preventing disease. So whether that's kind of an allowed existence or just a beneficial happenstance, I don't know, but they've co-evolved with us and our relatives for a long, long, long time. So we got those larval molts of the germested beetles in with some theropod feathers. Nice. Yeah. Nice. Do we know if we don't know what kind of dinosaur it came from though? No. No, we only know because of the timeline that it wasn't a bird. Yeah. Yeah. So it was a feathered thing. So it could have been what they call an avian dinosaur, which that terminology is confusing to me, but basically they mean one that flies or whether there's one that's just walking around that has feathers. No, an avian dinosaur isn't one that flies, is it? An avian is not, I don't think it's a flying dinosaur. They think it's the, what they're calling the branch of dinosaurs that turned into birds and it has to do with like hip leg structures and stuff like this. Like they can tell like, I guess technically a T-Rex would be an avian dinosaur. I think even though it's, you know, didn't fly, but they would have had feathers, at least when they were young, and apparently lips, which the birds decided we didn't need. Right. Somebody listened to the show. You're always paying attention. But, yeah, what is it? Because it was at the, there was some signature in blood vessels that were being able to be found in the marrow of a T-Rex bone that has led us to believe that the closest relative of a T-Rex alive today is a chicken and an ostrich, which makes some sense, I guess. So this is what's confusing though, is that the article says the feathers belong to an unknown theropod dinosaur, either avian or non avian, but according to what I'm finding out about what an avian dinosaur is, a theropod is an avian dinosaur. Yeah. I don't know, it's unclear. As far as I can tell, they just know it's a feather from 105 million years ago. There you go. That's what we got. And maybe because it's 105 million years ago, right? Because that's also like, kind of in the way back machine, even for dinosaurs, which actually really then, it's a pretty old, it's a pretty old find, to find a feather even, I think. I don't know. So according to the American Museum of Natural History, non avian dinosaurs are all dinosaurs that are not birds. Yes. Okay. That's not very helpful. I don't know. Send me your letters later. We know it's an old feather and it had germested beetle bits on it. The beetle is the star of this story. I don't know why we're talking about dinosaurs at all. They're just an accident in this. No, I think it's actually really interesting because the dinosaurs are incidental but important because it shows that they have, like I said, they evolved alongside this lineage for millions of years. So it's an important relationship, whether they realize it or not, it's beneficial to both. So there you go. And that's it for the animal corner this week. Justin, what do you have? I think it's time to do a station identification and remind everybody that you are listening to this week in science. And if you would like to learn more about any of the stories you hear today, there are show notes and links on our website, www.twist.org and we're a podcast, we're a podcast. So this is this study that I'm gonna talk about. Okay, first of all, I'm just gonna do the study part of it. This was experiments at 48 different elder care facilities in China and they found that giving the residents at the care facilities salt substitutes as opposed to salted food, completely salted food, lowered diastolic blood pressure and resulted in fewer cardiovascular events over a two year period in the study. This is a total of 1,612 subjects, almost entirely men, 1,200 men, 1,230 men, 382 women. Subjects were sort of randomized and they had meals containing either the regular salt, a salt substitute, or which was basically like 62% salt and then potassium. Or they had a cut diet where they were giving them progressively less salt, where they just reduced the salt that they got. And so, yeah, and so they showed some good outcomes for these folks having the salt substitute. Well that's interesting, we know salt substitute, that's the thing you can do if you love that salty taste and but you just don't want to die of a stroke. Well, I've never heard of a salt substitute. What's an example of a salt substitute? So it's still salt, but in this case, but it's less, it's cut with a lot of potassium. Oh, that's like you see low sodium salt and you're like, what are you? How is that possible? Right, yeah. So you still get the flavor from it and you get a little extra potassium and you die of a stroke. So, yeah, and in this, they say that the restricted salt supply was compared to the usual amount of salt and salt substitute, but that just restricted salt supply showed no effect on systolic blood pressure. So in a way, the study starts to hint at the idea that this salt substitute was actually better than just eliminating salt, which might be, you know, because there's potassium in it maybe. Right, did they have a potassium deficiency? Yeah. Well, so part of the thing is they also did this study in an area of, areas of China apparently that like their salt in their food. These diets, the normal average intake was almost twice with the World Health Organization that suggests as a target. You know, the World Health Organization says people should have less than 2,000 milligrams of sodium per day. These were around 3,800 milligrams per day diets. So when reducing, trying to reduce in the restricted diet by 40% the amount of salt they were taking, it's not like they were putting them into a danger zone by reducing the salt of these folks. They were still probably a little bit above what the World Health Organization suggested as the maximum. Okay, so if I have all these results, part of the study though, they point out didn't work. Okay. By having reported some results, researchers have found that they didn't get to actually do the salt reduction the way that they had planned. They planned on having a progressively reduced salt. So you take a little less salt every time you made a meal till it got down to 40% for one of the groups. But it didn't happen. In the paper, they're saying, well maybe it's the study relied on the meal prepares and the facility managers oversee this progressive reduction. And maybe the kitchen staff didn't want to do it. Maybe they didn't like somebody telling them how to cook. Additionally, they had a self-reported data from the subjects that reported that they were able to detect the salt reduction. And so some added salt to their meals. So, and it also creates a possibility that meal prep staff who maybe initially complied and reduced salt in the meals of these folks got a bunch of negative feedback. Oh, they were like, your food's terrible. Right, right. What do you do? I'm not eating this. So, but they don't know because they're saying, ah, there was non-compliance. People didn't go along with it. But they still have, I don't understand how they still include some results of comparisons in the study. But here's the other thing. So they were trying to progressively, according to this, reduce salt and attempted to reduce salt in meals without drawing notice. That's why they kind of did this progressive thing. They didn't want people to notice. So wait, so people opted into this study without knowing which group they were in, is that the deal? Or they didn't know they were opting into the study? That's the question, right? Because here's the thing. This is exactly, I'm glad you got it. If the participants were unaware that they were part of a salt reduction study or unwilling to participate within the parameters of a study, that could be an ethical question. Because the minimum requirements for consent to be informed in human research is that the participant understands what the research is and what it is that they are consenting to. Statements in the paper. This is quoting, that subjects were able to detect the reduction. Suggest, at least to me, that they may have been unaware that their food was part of an experiment in which they were included. So, but then here's the other thing. Whether this consent to be part of an experiment should extend to a cohort that is receiving an alteration in their diet that is otherwise recognized as healthy, you know? Okay, so hold on. We can give them the benefit of the doubt and say that people knew that there was a salt study going on. Okay, let's just pretend that. Let's just say that, okay. And that they just didn't know which group they were in. And if that's true, then they still could have said, this tastes gross, give me more salt. And so I think the problem with this is also how do you stop them from snacking on salty foods in between prepared meals because that can also impact it. So this study requires a non-blinded study. Like, you need to know, you're signing up for a salt reduction so that you don't mess with the results so that you sign up for the salt reduction. Right, right. So then that's the question, isn't it then? Because based on the universal, apparently, non-compliance by subjects, that to me suggests that they were unwilling to be part of that study or didn't know it was happening because of the fact that they're saying that they noticed and were just adding salt as opposed to realizing, oh, I'm part of this study. Yeah, this is for science. This is why we're doing it. Okay, so now also, this is the age cohort, for some reason it's the oldest that had the salt reduction, median age of 72, may have fully consented, been completely aware that they were part of this study and maybe realized, oh, okay, if it was slightly blinded and I can tell what group I'm in, I'm out. 72, I don't like my food tastes. Life's too short, forget you. It's possible that they just didn't want to comply even though they had completely agreed to it at some point. Okay, here's out of the paper. It says- The source material, go ahead. Excuse me, this is from the paper in the notes of the, how the safety or whatever ethical thing. The study was approved by the Peking University Institutional Review Board with a group consent obtained through discussions between the local study investigators, the administrator of each facility, and the government agencies responsible for the facilities. All subjects that did the baseline and follow-up surveys provide written informed consent. Now, the only part of that that I really have a problem with is where they say that all of the subjects that did the baseline and follow-up surveys provided written informed consent. Because not everybody got the baseline and the follow-up. There was a, some group, it's not really explained, that didn't do the follow-up, apparently, mostly. Some of them were bedridden. Some of them were just too ill, apparently, to have blood drawn. They also point out that it was a lot of women who were better educated who refused to do the follow-up. I don't know why. But they don't explain who these bedridden portion or people who were refusing to be part of the study, what cohort they were from. Doesn't explain, were they all from one? Because then you have a signal or is it just sort of random? Anyway, but the problem I have is if you only got informed consent from the people who did the initial baseline participation and the resulting follow-up, that sounds like you got your informed consent at the end. Yeah. The other problem I have with the study- Which is not how that works. Yeah. Ethically, that's not how you're supposed to do it. The other problem I have is that this is done on elder care facilities, which I feel like the grand majority of people, well, maybe not, but a lot of people in elder care facilities have comorbidities already. Oh, sure. So how is a short-term salt study going to negate a chronic or lifetime illness? It just, it feels like you'd have to have a truly massive sample size. To get around that unless you're looking at, okay, we changed their salt for 10 years and these people lived longer. Because otherwise you're just noticing that a certain number of people died during the study and some of them had lower blood pressure and it feels like a little bit of a mess to me. It is especially because they do the comparison to the salt restriction even though they also acknowledged that that part of the study was a complete failure. Right. The other funny, and it looks like they focused on people who died by heart attack or who had not died, I'm sorry, not died of heart attack, but who had a cardiac event. They don't have to have died from it was reduced and the blood pressure was reduced from the salt substitute. What's interesting though is if you just look at the data that they present in that study, there's an interesting chart that gets zero mention anywhere verbally in the paper, which is there's this little graph that shows the mortality rate of the salt reduction group being higher than regular salt. Right. So wait, the group that was, it was supposedly just having less salt, which still wouldn't have been like that low compared to what's considered a healthy salt amount. They had higher overall mortality, but let's not talk about that. Relieved that we won't discuss that in any way. I have so many problems with this study that for something that was so simple of us, it seemingly so simple of a story about, yeah, you know, reducing salt as these better health outcomes, there's a whole lot of like questions I still have about how this was done and the ethical aspect of it too. If you have people who are part of a study who don't know and are, if you know you're part of a study and you've agreed to be part of a study, then why is there such a high level of non-compliance with it? No, that's exactly what I was thinking. Hundreds of people who were in that group, you couldn't go like, okay, we had 7% that just for whatever reason didn't comply so we removed them. Right. But no, it was widespread in that cohort. Whatever you do a diet-based study, it's really hard to properly blind it unless you are, unless somebody can sense upfront and only eats pre-designed food, that again, would also have to be prepared by the same people across the board because that's the other piece here, right? You have the people who are salting their food because it doesn't taste good enough, but then you have the people in the kitchen who are preparing it different at this one elder care facility than this other facility. Because they're like, I'm not gonna let them tell me what to do. The only way that this would have made sense is if you set people up for a meal plan that was delivered. Oh yeah, to have control over that. Yes. But the other, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you got it. Well, and then really honestly, you got to take all these people, these elderly folks, and you got to put them into a lab. Yeah, it's just got to raise them in a lab, in a dish. No. The... Yeah, oh gosh, I forgot what the other thing I was gonna say. But yeah, there's a lot of a lot. Oh, but yeah, but why blind it? Why, why, this is not the kind of thing that you would need to blind for the participants. You blind it for the data outcome, which cohort belongs to which for analysts later. Yes, you blind the people who are analyzing the data. Yes, absolutely, yes. You don't blind the people who are part of the study. There's no need to. You're doing a salt reduction in the meal study. There's, unless you really believe that you're going to create a lower blood pressure psychological effect from knowing that you're part of the good study, which I guess, but I don't buy it. I don't buy it. I think what happened is they experimented on old people. And... Yeah, that is what kind of what it sounds like. It's, yeah, I think... Oh, but then, is that a bad experiment? Like, if the food services at all of these elder care facilities said, gosh, you notice that there's recommendations for a much lower salt than we're giving people and then just lowered it, that's not ethically questionable in any way. Right, then you could actually study the statistics coming out of those areas. Yes, you're absolutely right. There is a way to do this. And it's not this. That's not this, right. Okay, that's enough. All right. Well, tell me about a necropolis, if you would. Okay, so on the way to catch a train or maybe it was getting off a train in Paris, researchers found a 2,000-year-old necropolis. What's a necropolis? It's a place where they put dead people a long time ago. Like a cemetery. Yeah, it's a cemetery, but an old one. Got it, okay. Scientists uncovered 50 graves in an ancient cemetery while excavating ahead of a new addition to the Port Royal train station in the heart of the French capital, Paris. This was from a precursor to Paris. I'm gonna mess it up. The Lutitie, Lutitie, which is in its nearly 9,000, sorry, 2,000 years ago. 2,000 years ago, there was a town there along the Rhine. This is, they had some suggestions. There was a necropolis that was found sort of in that area that was previously excavated. This is a Gallo-Romantown, Lutitia, was previously partially excavated in the 1800s. So however, the only objects considered pressure, only the objects that were considered precious, like they found some jewelry and some interesting, maybe a little bit of gold or something, some coins. Those are the only things taken for the graves. Many of the skeletons, the other burial offerings, artifacts, that sort of thing, were reburied because in the 1800s, archeology hadn't been invented yet. But grave robbing was a thing that you were totally allowed to do, apparently. So this is INRAP team. This is the group of, what is it, the French National Institute of Preventative Archeological Research, INRAP, discovered this section ahead of that new addition to the train station. Like we're gonna dig out this area. They said, okay, let's go take a look first because there had been some finds in the past. Let's just go make sure. And they're finding 50 skeletons. Some of these have coins in the mouth. They're buried with all sorts of jewelry and hairpins. They have shoes either on or next to them. These are people were placed in coffins. And yet some of them have coins next to them. Some have the coin in the skull, which was apparently this is part of, this isn't amazing because this is in France, but this is how there was only a few mythologies. I guess back in the old days and everything. This is called Sharon's Obel. Do you know what they're calling this? This is from Greek mythology. Sharon was the ferryman of Hades. This is a coin. Oh, Kyron. Kyron. Is it Kyron? Mm-hmm, I think so. Yeah, so this was considered like a bribe. Like, hey, this one's got some coin. Help it get across the river sticks, you know, ahead of all these, this riff-raff that's dying in the same day. But yeah, pretty amazing to have this big find. And it also kind of interesting, because yeah, it reminds us that archeology, the way that we consider it now where we collect all these artifacts and want to study them and don't just try to bury them, that went away in the 1800s everywhere but Florida, which is still practicing that today. There's a major development where they found a bunch of artifacts recently in Florida and Florida wants to just cover it up again. Sure, sure. Push the building. Might as well add that to the list of what's going on over there. Yeah, it's the least, but it's still, but it's gonna impact knowledge for of the world, of the past, of the everything, but you know, Florida'll be under water soon. Well, that's cool. Well, plus the, I bet coins are very time-specific, right? So that probably helps them identify the exact time, pretty darn exact time. Coin that they found actually did place the, I think the coin was second century. Very cool. Yeah, this would have been a time of Roman occupation. Gosh, the Romans were everywhere. Romans had like, they didn't even have concrete that they had. We gotta figure out how to make that. But really, you gotta, then you gotta put the stuff in there and make it suck up. Yeah, suck up all the carbon. Justin, did we do a show? Are we done? Oh gosh, is that how that works? I think we may have come to the end of another episode this week in science. Amazing. And we, wow, we're under 90 minutes. Wild. Enjoy the treat, Rachel and Kiki. Well, do you have any last comments before we close out the show? I feel like we need 10 minutes of filler, don't we? No, we don't need that. Ask me more about what's faster. Give me a couple of animals. Yeah. What do you think is faster? A clam or a muscle? Wait, are they the same thing? No. Wait, a clam is not a muscle? No. It isn't? No. What is it? They're different animals. I thought that's, I know you're sure. They're both mollusks. They're different animals. To me, they're all the same thing. This is what I'm saying. I don't know what a mollusk is. No, show's over. All right, I hope everyone enjoyed the show. I learned today that Justin doesn't know that a clam and a muscle are different things. Thank you for listening, watching, chatting, et cetera. Shout out to Fada for his help with social media and show notes. Gord for making sure our chat room stays friendly and sociable and identity for for recording the show. Rachel for your amazing assistance editing, as always. Kiki for being our fearless leader, even while she is away. And we'd like to thank our Patreon sponsors, which I will do by saying thank you Patreon sponsors. Insert list here. I don't have it. On next week's show. Oh, yeah, then I gotta say stuff. We will be back at 8 p.m. Pacific Time on a Wednesday. And then we do a second show, which is 5 a.m. Central European Time on Thursday in the morning, so. It's the same show. Do you wanna listen to us as a podcast? Maybe while you dust your skeletons, you are excavating from your nearby train station. Just search for this week in Science where our podcasts are found. If you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe as well. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes and links to stories will be available on our website, www.twist.org. You can also contact us or email us, contact us directly via email, email direct contact us. You can contact Kiki and tell her, get back on the show. Kirsten at thisweekinScience.com. You can email Justin at twistminion at gmail.com or you can email me at BlairBaz at twist.org. 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And all is coming your way. So everybody, this Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. One disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That what I say may not represent worldviews, but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just get to understand that we're not trying to threaten your... I thought I did it. And then it turns out I did it. You know, we got it at one point. We're gonna have to switch the audio into... Because right now we're using records. It is really tough because you got to pick up the needle at just the right point to stop the sound. See, what you didn't see behind the scenes is that the volume started at, where was it at? 76, okay. And I slowly moved it down to zero over the course of like 10 seconds. You didn't hear that? No. In fact, when I finally got to zero, I scrolled down and it turned back on again. So I don't know. Kiki's more nuanced with it, I guess, but... Anywho, that's the show. We did it. We did a show. That's amazing. We certainly did. And Justin, you didn't get any sleep, huh? Oh, no, I got sleep. It just wasn't long enough. Or rest of enough. When you dream, I don't know how this happens. Sometimes when I dream, I feel like I'm having a busier day than I might have had. The day I was running. Wake up and you're like, oh, I need a nap. You just woke up. I'm like, yeah, but it was rough. I was busy the whole time. I had all these tasks to complete. Yep. Yep. I woke up this morning to someone playing bongos inside my body. At about 4.30 in the morning. And that was it. Oh, my goodness. It's pretty fun. It's fun to be able to feel it happening, but it is like so strange. I was just like, you chill in there. Well, I shouldn't complain about sleep. I'm pretty normal. I should know better than this. I don't know. You do have a baby though. So like you did. It sounds like things are improving, but you did go through just, you know, some of it. Yeah. I mean, it's been for me. My body, you're in a half of, not getting a lot of sleep, but, you know, still that's, my problem is that I'm already kind of like a bad sleeper. Like my sleep schedules have always been a mess anyhow. So I don't think I am as disrupted. Right. See, I am used to, it might have only been six hours, but I am used to hitting the pillow, being dead asleep in five minutes and not waking up until the alarm goes off. That's it. That's what I'm used to. And it has not been that way now for like a while. No. Well, you got just a few more years and then you'll be able to do that again. Just a few. Yeah. Unless you get one of those night scream, night terror screaming children, might be, might have to push that out to six years. Eventually, eventually, they'll be, you know, sleeping longer than you. Right. You got to, you got to rouse them, say you're going to be late for school. Yeah. And then that's when you get to get revenge. Right. Because you're like, it's time to wake up. I don't want to. Yeah. Well, I didn't want to either. But I did for years and years. I tell you the story about how you were born. Yes. Okay. Get up. It's time to go. Oh my. That's going to be nice. I was going to ask if I take sleeping pills. No, I don't take sleeping pills. I have tried the, what do you call it? What's that stuff that people take to help some sleep melatonin? The problem is with that is it's, I've tried it a few times. The problem is it doesn't, sometimes it works. And I'm like, oh, I just took one of these. And I think I'm probably going to still be up for a while. Or that doesn't work. And I have a nervous energy that keeps me up like an extra couple of hours. Yeah. So yeah. I don't really know how that works. So yeah, I just, I don't take anything. I just either go to sleep or don't. That's kind of how it works. Partly, like honestly, I could fix my sleep problems completely with exercise. Like if I, if I was really seriously like, oh, I should sleep, what I should do is, is exercise a whole lot. Like three hours before bed, have a big pasta meal at the end of the exercise, and then I would be able to sleep for the day. And I'm fine. I'm lazy. That happens. I've been told all these things about how napping is this magical time in pregnancy and I have not experienced that at all. I'm not a napper. I'm not a napper at all. You need to learn. You do need to learn because you're going to now, and this is for all, you know, people who have young children, fathers and mothers, new, new infants for the first time. The thing that they don't tell you is, the thing you've been practicing before you got pregnant should have been napping. Right? Because a child is going to sleep for 45 minutes, maybe an hour. You need to put your head on the pillow and take a nap. Or do all of the things in the house that you couldn't do while they were away. Now, that's not going to help because you're going to continue to get tired. You need to sleep when they sleep for whatever brief little cat nap that is. Well, if you're tired enough, if I'm tired enough on nap, but it's still pretty hard. You'll be tired all the time though. And I'm supposed to be tired enough to nap now when I'm not, so I don't know what the deal is. My body's just not used to it. I take naps at night. That's what I basically do. When I was really, really, really sick, I was napping a lot, but that was just because I couldn't eat. Tremendous amount of energy being used. Yeah, yeah. And I was undernourished. So I was just shutting. Less of a nap and more of a shutdown. Just my body being like, and we're turning off now. You have a big day ahead, Justin? No. You going back to bed? No. I need to do cleaning and chores and all the things that I told myself I had excuses not to do. Yesterday, I had to go do it today. Oh, and I think the little man is getting... I think I have got an appointment. Actually, I am doing big stuff. I think he's going to go and get a passport. Whoa! I didn't know babies got passports. They do and it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. Because depending on like his picture now at a year and a half is going to kind of look like him for a long time. But if you do a picture of a baby, I don't know. Maybe I'm just... You're going to get a baby. I mean, if it's not your baby, though, it's like... Because was the passport supposed to last for like 10 years or something? Probably no, for babies, right? Probably for small children. It's probably more often. How often do you need to update a passport for an infant? Five years. Okay, but still, the difference between a six month old and a five year old. Yeah, then no, that is crazy. It's like... Here's this passport for this five year old that I took when they were eight months old. Yeah. That's wow. Every US citizen regardless of age, must have a passport to travel abroad. Newborn babies, infants and toddlers all need passports. So if you have to leave for some reason, you have to get your infant. You have to get your newborn baby a passport. Yeah. But then I'm just saying like you go and they check out the line where they make sure that that passport is you. Maybe they look at your picture and give you a once over. Right? The baby was like, yeah, okay. Yeah, that's a baby check. I don't know. I just think it was awesome. I think babies should have passports. I think they should be able to travel. Oh, man. I think they should be able to travel. Give them some traveler's checks. Pat them on the diaper and just let them go. That's a very dated statement, huh? Traveler's checks. I don't even know what that is. Really? I've heard about them. I've never encountered one in my entire existence. I don't think I've ever encountered one either. But my understanding is that they're like money orders. They're basically prepaid debit cards and paper. Okay. When you put it that way, then it makes a lot more sense. I guess. So, talking about setting the child up, took my son out to a park the other day. Got these little shoes and the weather was finally nice and the sun's out and it's still warm enough where he's big enough to wear shorts and be outside and running around. And you would have think that I had just released him into the wild. That I had kept this captive animal and then it was like, okay. Because at first he was holding my hand and looking. He was like, why isn't there a roof? And then he took off. Like he was not coming back. He's like, okay, I got it from here. Goodbye. Thanks for all the diaper changes. Running around. The weather here in Denmark is actually getting nice. Like, Danes say it's nice weather if there's a lack of cloud cover. Regardless of the temperature. It doesn't. It can be near freezing but it's great weather because sun's out. Moose skies. That's great weather. No, there's more. There's more too weather. And right now it's the springtime in Denmark. And so it's warmed up to an actual non double layered sweater outdoor weather. It's doing that here too. It's the torrential downpours have ceased and But you're in San Francisco. Your weather doesn't count. I'm not in San Francisco anymore, Justin. I work in San Jose where there's actually seasons. Oh, there is. You're in San Jose? That's where I work, yes. I drive to San Jose every day. Okay, that's fun. So in the winter it can be like 30 degrees when I get to work. And in the summer it can be 105. There's actually seasons where I work now. Yeah, that's actually not that far off of Central Valley even. Yeah, exactly. You've never been to San Francisco City Girl your whole life. You've never experienced temperature changes. Weather differences. I was a City Girl for a long time but I went to school in Sonoma State where there were seasons. Sonoma County gets seasons. But that's like a half-hour drive from San Francisco. It's an hour, yes. With traffic. Because of the traffic. No, without traffic it's an hour. Really? Is it that far? No. Yeah. Trust me, I lived there for four years. I'm going to believe you. It got cold enough that there would be frost on the ground in the winter and it got hot enough that I wished I had AC and bought my first fan in the summer. That was my first experience with seasons and then when I lived abroad, obviously there were full seasons there too. That was crazy because in Israel it's like desert. So the summer gets crazy hot. But Anyway I will let you go. Is it bedtime for me? I think it's bedtime. Alright, well say good morning Justin. Good morning Justin. Say good night Blair. Good night Blair. And let's say good night viewers. Everybody out there. Is this radio? I'm so confused. No, this is just video. This is just so they can't hear us. We can be talking about some real stuff. Alright, good night everybody. Good night. Love you, good bye.