 Hello everyone, we are here, I love that little, it's just so melodic, I get just sitting and listening to it all day long, but we have to do a show instead of listening to that melodic intro forever. We're going to do science, we're not going to do science, we're going to discuss the science that has been done and the discoveries that have been elucidated, illuminated. Oh, I like elucidated, elucidated is a fun word. Yeah. Oh, hi everybody, so glad to be back and so good to be here with the whole team, I'm so glad you all are here too. So this is the science podcast, this weekend science podcast, and you know how this goes, we're going to do this whole live podcast broadcast, not edited, wherever we make mistakes, it's all there for you to see all of it, but we will probably edit stuffs out for the podcast because it's a little bit better if it gets edited out. The audio will be better, the cast is replaced by a younger, better looking group of people. Intelligent mice. Everything's better on the podcast. Better looking mice, you got it. Yes. But this version is how the sausage is made. How do we make the sausage? Well, you're about to find out because we're going to start the show right about, right about now, the Funk So Brother. We're going to start this show, I'm going to try doing the music that Blair set up from last week, see how that goes. We'll give it a shot, try new things. We're going to do this whole thing. If you have not yet subscribed, make sure you subscribe, make notification bells, give us a like. Let's get out there on the live stream recommendations for the YouTubes and the Twitches and the Facebooks of the world. Okay, we're going to start recording in a three, two, this is twist. This week in science episode number 884 recorded on Wednesday, July 20th, 2022. How to moonwalk. Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show, we will fill your head with imagination, earwax and woodpeckers. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer in the ongoing battle between science and science deniers. Science deniers are winning. There is no deficit of information when it comes to climate change and environmental health benefits, sustainable energy preventing the spread of diseases and the health benefits of reproductive rights. The facts, the data, research and scientific consensus are all there. And yet science is losing ground to a coalition of anti-scientific beliefs. They found home in a political system that has been funded by anti-science sentiments for decades starting with evolution. Then the harmful effects of smoking were, let's just say cast in a much more glowing light. The heavily funded attacks on science after warnings about global warming, billions of dollars were spent relentlessly publicity campaigns and a deluge of multi-platform misinformation assassinated the public trust in science just to support the goals of a few industries. Once that had saturated the minds with fear that science was part of a political agenda, all science, all expert advice remained framed as opposition to a political identity with the heavy lifting done by church leaders, big tobacco, fossil fuel companies. It allowed for any anti-science beliefs to walk through that door. A motley crowd of religious authoritarians, white supremacists, flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, UFO enthusiasts, and a general cast of homophobic, xenophobic, anti-American extremists. A coalition of the willfully ignorant educating others to distrust science. Brainwashing them into fearing and resenting knowledge, inoculating them from learning, reason, and curiosity. And right now, seems to be working. To what end, how far will it go? Well, the end of science funding and the silencing of scientific experts. That is the goal of the anti-science coalition. Science still has a majority of support in the United States and, thankfully, the rest of the world, but it is slipping. One of the best things you can do to support science is just learn about it. Once you have knowledge, it cannot be easily taken away. And nowhere is that knowledge more easily on display than right here on This Week in Science. Coming up next. To find the knowledge I seek, I want to know what's ahead. Good science, do you, Kiki? It started again. And it keeps going, and it keeps going, and it keeps going. OK. Back up in the show, we'll just go to bed. Say it again, Justin. Oh, this is two intros. Yeah, let's do it. I'm ready for more. Good science, do you, Kiki? Oh, it is the editing part. Oh, good science to you, everybody. How are you doing today? Why? Oh, pretend the music's going, and it's coming to an end right now. Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. Is that what I said? Is that how you? Well, you can, when you edit, you can stop it at any time. I think that's how it works. It's not like somebody's back to cutting, it's not like the old days, we had to cut the tape and tape it back. Too much sausage. Too much bacon. Whatever it is. Too much processed meat product. Good science to you too, Justin and Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are all here today, ready to talk about science. Blair with her cephalopod mug, that's pretty fantastic. Oh, yes, very cephalopod-ish. Yes, many tentacles. Now, tonight, it's not cephalopod night. Unfortunately, you can't have that in your world. But, you know, we can't do that every night on this program. Tonight is, though, today has been the 53rd anniversary of Neil Armstrong's moonwalk, the Apollo 11 landing on the moon, and the moonwalk that changed humanity forever, made our horizons larger, made us believe that we could dare to do great things together as humans, as a cohesive society on this pale blue dot, right? Oh, we did it. We've been striving together ever since. Yeah, that's what I got from your whole intro there. Together ever since, except for the people that thought that the moon landing wasn't real. I don't want to talk about that. Anyway, we have science and technology to thank. We have math and human computers to thank for the past of our space industry. And as we move forward into the future, we've got a lot to look forward to. Maybe more moon landings, maybe some Mars landings. So exciting. But days like today, it's amazing to take a peek at history and think about what we have done as humans and also consider where we have yet to go. We have lots of good choices to make, exactly. All right, tonight on the show, we have so much good science for you. I brought stories about hunger after a day in the sun. Big dinosaurs, lava tube microbes, emotional memories, and language based on imagination. What did you bring, Justin? Oh, what do I got here? Oh, I've got helpful gonorrhea. No, what? It's. Path. Well, maybe not after you hear this story, especially you, Blair, you're going to be very thankful for gonorrhea here in a few minutes. Oh, no. Oh, boy. That is a sound bite I'm not fond of. Evolutionary U-turns, hot-blooded mammals, mystery salt. Salt. And then, oh, what was the last one I had? Oh, and then an update on the red deer cave people. Oh, fantastic. Blair, what is in the animal corner today? I have woodpeckers. I have bears. And then before that, I have saxophones and frozen organs. OK, I was with you on the forest creatures. And so you suddenly took the U-turn to or the exit. It was a swift exit to saxophones. You know, I have other interests in biology besides animals. Hey, it's just making more editing. What are you guys doing? Enough with the chitchat. What part of biology includes the study of saxophones? I can't wait to find out. You're going to hear. Awesome. Everyone, as we jump into the show here, I do want to remind you that if you have not yet subscribed to the This Week in Science podcast, you can find us all places that podcasts are found. Just look for This Week in Science on your favorite platform. We're also on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch, where we stream live weekly at 8 p.m. every Wednesday night Pacific time. And we can be found as Twist Science on Twitch, on Twitter, and Instagram. If all this is just so much information, head over to twist.org, where you can find our website and all this information. Time for the science. Let's actually dig into it right now. It's so good to see both of you. I just am having fun chatting just at the top of the earth. Yes, I missed everybody while I was. OK, but while I was away, the big, big news came out, and I did not get to chat with you all about the NASA Web. Yeah, this is like some sort of Murphy's law and terrible thing because you've been talking since before they launched for years. I've been talking about this telescope since the earth, like since before they knew they were going to build this telescope before years existed. You've just been talking about it forever. This has been Kiki's favorite subject is the James Webb Telescope updates all along the way. And then it takes a picture and she says, where is she? Yeah, this is a better picture than that. Not here, nope, yep, yeah, yeah. Well, I was on the planet so I could still appreciate the view outward. Anyway, since those amazing first images were released last week, there's been this up and this down and this flurry of information. And people have built little apps so that you can compare and contrast the old Hubble images with the new Webb Space Telescope images and where we used to find awe and wonder in these images from Hubble. We're now like, whoa, they're covered in dust bunnies. What's going on? Look at the crystal clearness of the Webb. So one of those images looking back, back, back, back in time was able to reveal apparently published as a preprint now because it's only been a week since this image came out but the data suggests that we have now beaten the record for locating the oldest galaxy in the universe. Going back, the old one was Glass Z11. This one was discovered probably formed about 400,000 years after the Big Bang, or sorry, not 1,000, 400 million years after the Big Bang, 400,000 years, very, very short period of time. 400 million years after the Big Bang. Well now they have what couldn't really be seen on the Hubble image, a red-shifted galaxy known as Glass Z13 that they think goes back to 300 million years after the Big Bang. Kind of in that same area of space as the other old one but these are star-forming luminous galaxies very, very shortly after the Big Bang. And I wanna clarify, this is not the oldest galaxy. This is the oldest galaxy we've seen, right? Okay. Yeah, cause this is also that. We have discovered. Right, okay. We just haven't seen anything older but this is pushing by finding this, what it's doing is it's pushing the envelope of those earliest galactic formations back and back and back. And so as it does that, it changes the way that we think about the timing of things and how things formed. What is the process of galaxy formation? How, you know, how active do they have to, were they possibly that early on? How did we get luminous galaxies 300 million years after the Big Bang? Big question. And I was complaining quite a bit on the show about the rollout by administrators telling us what's going on, cause it was just dry and terribly uninspired even though they were saying Carl's saying he asked words, two minutes, two minutes of Neil deGrasse Tyson. And I was like, oh, now I kind of get it. Like a bunch of stuff that was just, they didn't even talk about. But when you're talking about, this is the oldest we've seen and now. But what we're looking at in an area of space, he described as, if you took a grain of sand, held it out with your arm and held it up to the sky. That's how much coverage. Yes. I said that on the show that was part of the NASA release. Was it part of the NASA release? It was. I missed it. Yeah, I said it. But that's, but that's, obviously listening, very carefully. See, I can't tell you and Neil deGrasse Tyson, it's the way, the both so passionate when you speak, it's hard to tell the difference, but it's such a tiny decimal bit of the sky that we're even looking at. And it was so full of stuff. It's this teeny, teeny tiny little sky full of things. I'm starting to think, I'm starting to think space is bigger than we thought it was. It's bigger than we can even really conceive. It's so big, it's so much space. Oh yes, it is. And there's plenty of room for everyone. Well, anyway, so all this stuff is coming out and it's really exciting to not just have pictures now, but have papers being published from these first images that are being released. This data is coming forward. And now we're gonna be really getting into the meat of what this space telescope is gonna do for us. It's gonna give us information about the universe that we can use to modify our models of the universe, basically. But, oh my gosh, end of May, as it was getting ready to get out there. Micrometeorites, collisions. And while this isn't unexpected, they actually created it to take a certain amount of micrometeorite impact, there is one section that was impacted more than other sections in this particular bombardment. And unfortunately, it seems as though it's going to be, it could potentially be affecting the way that it functions, that this particular section is going to be more damaged than was hoped. They didn't actually, their models did not account for micrometeorite hits as big as this one. And so now they're like, oh, wait, what? We didn't expect that at all. So is our concept of that area of space, which is a Lagrange point, which does collect stuff. And they were expecting to get this micrometeorite hits. They weren't expecting it to just be alone in space with nothing, but they didn't expect this kind of damage. So while they can adjust for it through software and other things, they can't fix it. We're not going to be sending a repair out mission out there anytime soon. And so what they're thinking is that they might have to adjust the orientation and limit the amount of time that the telescope is facing in the direction of orbit. Because that seems to be the direction in which most of these micrometeorites will be coming because they're in orbit too. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. So the space telescope basically can't look back over its shoulder. Nope. Good thing it's in an orbit. Well, there's also spaces kind of going off in every direction. I don't really, I have a really bad sense of direction when it comes to like, what's the center of the universe or the center of our galaxy even? So, you know, it's all very confusing. Once you're floating around out there, I would imagine. I think they've got it figured out and the scientists who are going to be working on this will be determining the best way to extend the life of this space telescope, multi-billion dollar telescope that it is, it is still an experiment of its own because these are places we've never gone really. I mean, we've sent other things out to the Lagrange point out there, but it's all an experiment. What's out there? What's going on? We need to figure it all out. So exciting. So very, very exciting. More science from the web. What else do we have going on? Justin? This is a story everybody's really excited about. Pam in the chat room, I hope you've finished your lunch. Researchers University of California, San Diego found a set of human gene mutations that protect older adults against cognitive decline and dementia. This is actually a while ago. They found out in a new study published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, they traced the evolution. How long that gene has been with us when and why it appeared in the human genome. They were looking to see the origins of this mutated gene. And the findings suggest selective pressures from infectious pathogens like gonorrhea promoted the emergence of this gene variant in Homo sapiens and inadvertently supported the existence of grandparents in society. So longer life through gonorrhea. Yeah, the bio, so. Yeah, that was not a direction I was expecting this story to go. But I mean, that's a benefit. That's great. Yeah, the biology of most animals is optimized for reproduction. Once you have reproduced, usually the planet doesn't need you anymore. You've done your job, you can go and die now. Humans are one of the only species that is known to live well past menopause. And according to, we've got the grandmother hypothesis which is that because older women provide important support role to our slow rearing children, our little bambinimis that take like, they can't even walk, let alone run for years. It's very slow development with humans because of the giant grain, I guess. So that requires more young. So maybe that's why groups were favored, the longevity was favored in groups for that sort of child support. But this new finding might be offering us another reason. So when researchers compared the human and chimpanzee genomes they found that humans have a unique version of the gene for making a receptor CD33. And this little change, isn't a really big change but it's the CD33 is a receptor expressed in immune cells. So the standard receptor binds to a type of sugar called a celic acid and something that all human cells are coated with. And this is how the immune system recognizes same. So the immune system is like, all right, we're looking to get rid of bad stuff. And it goes around, it checks and it finds this little receptor CD33 and goes, oh, nope, that's one of ours, move along, there's nothing to attack here. Part of the body, keep going. So it prevents autoimmune response. CD33 is also something that is expressed in brain immune cells in the microglia which helps to control neural inflammation. However, those microglia have an important role in clearing away damaged brain cells which also have that same celic acid coating. So how does it know to get rid of them? It doesn't. Right, it's just recognizing that signal molecule. Yeah, and to recognize that signal molecule and it says, oh, no, you're fine and the plaque builds up and you get dementia risk, Alzheimer's risk, that sort of thing. So somewhere along the evolutionary line, humans picked up an additional mutated form of CD33 that is missing just a simple sugar binding site. So it really took and that mutated receptor no longer reacts to celic acids on damaged cells and plaques allowing microglia then to break down and clear out, take out the garbage of the brain. So other research, several research had found that the power levels of this variant gene were found to protect against late onset Alzheimer's. Researchers at UC San Diego found that this particular version of CD33 was also not present in Neanderthals or Denisovans. So these are our close evolutionary relics. We checked, they checked the chimps the long time ago. We had the common ancestor. Nope, they don't have it, but we've got it. And now our cousins, our near cousins also don't have it, which suggests the wisdom of care for healthy grandparents having them as an advantage over other, that longer longevity, that having the grandparents may have been a huge advantage over those other hominin species that have come along, which would also push the mutation forward, but how did it start? Very likely with a disease like gonorrhea, which does two things. One, it can be detrimental to reproductive health. So it's either, once that disease spreads, it becomes a selection filter. If you can't overcome this, then your species is done. And how did we overcome it? Well, some folks with this mutation for this non-sugar binding CD33 receptors, they managed to survive. And the reason is, gonorrhea is one of those few diseases that has that same salic acid coating and appears to be part of the body to the immune system. It tricks it, it mimics it. It's the wolf and sheep's clothing and it gets in and the body goes, oh, I guess you're fine, even though it's got like fangs in a cake. Yeah, so it's the, but this is the mutation, the pressure, the evolutionary pressure is that arms race and that particular sugar on the surface is, allows it to sneak in and the mutated CD33. Was able to find it and identify it and attack it. Yeah, exactly. So, and then survival, those individuals move on to later, yep. So the longevity of humans may come down to good old fashioned gonorrhea. Still not a great idea to want to get, to not take it seriously as an STD. I don't think anybody was advising that. We're not, we just want to make sure. It's still a very serious STD. But well then again, if you're gonna get an STD, like if it just, like if there's no choice, that's probably one of the ones you want. Just hope that you're one of the mutants. That's all. There's worse ones, is all I'm saying. If you had to choose. If I, I don't want to choose. Okay, we're not choosing this, but I need to find out right now, Blair, what is the worst instrument for COVID? Yes, anything in the brass section. Like wind instruments or just brass. Not just wind instruments, brass in particular. This is a study from Colorado State University. And early in the pandemic, CSU engineers were working in a bunch of ways to try to quantify respiratory particle emissions from things like singing and music playing. I think we talked about the singing study on this show. After that, they wanted to move on to instruments. There are a couple of reasons for this. One being, you know, when is it safe to return to certain recreational activities? But other, the other reason I think ultimately is they wanted people to feel like their sacrifices in early days of the pandemic were actually useful. They weren't in vain, right? And so, spoiler alert, they were helpful. Is basically what this study is about. Good job. Yeah, so they used cutting edge aerosol measurement chambers and recruited volunteers to perform in the chamber while aerosol admissions from themselves or their instruments were analyzed. They had 81 volunteer performers of both sexes and varied age between 12 and 63. Some of them played wind instruments, including bassoon, clarinet, French horn, oboe, piccolo, saxophone, trombone, trumpet and tuba. And they also had singers and people just talking in there too to kind of compare how these things all worked. So in general, musicians spread a lot more aerosols than people singing in general. Brass instruments, on average, produced 191% more aerosols than woodwinds. Being male was also associated with a 70% increase in emissions from instrument playing, most likely due to long-sizing capacity, but they're not sure. The louder playing of brass instruments was associated with higher particle counts, but louder playing of woodwinds was not. So they... Is that because woodwinds have a tendency with all the keys, you're covering things up, and so maybe... So this is my opinion, based on playing a woodwind, saxophone is a woodwind. You have the reed in the way. The actual hole that's just a hole is like, the equivalent of two pieces of paper next to each other where it's really hard to see, it's maybe a millimeter of space in between that reed and the space in the mouthpiece. And so even though you are pushing air through, if you're talking about aerosols, a lot of it hits that reed before it moves forward. I was interested in this because reed and brasswind players, they're spit coming out of our instruments all the time. So it sounded like COVID, yeah, not a good idea for sure. But the other thing, speaking of the keys, is they also tested bell covers. So the measurements with performers using bell covers in order to kind of stop the particle spread or slow it down, seem to work on trombone, tuba and trumpet with an average reduction of 53 to 73%, but no reduction in woodwinds. And that's because of the clickety-clackety keys. So the fact that there's all this air coming out of the keys on the side of the instrument, when you actually measure how much air comes out of the bell, and I play the berry sax that has even more keys than a lot of normal saxophones, by the time you try to measure any airflow coming out of the bottom of the bell, unless you are playing one specific note, most of the air is coming out of the sides of that instrument. And so if you're trying to put a bell cover on, that's really not gonna help. So this confirmed playing instruments, huge spreader of aerosols, and there was no safe way to do this during the early days of the pandemic before people were vaccinated. Similarly, I would argue I'm gonna tack onto that. If you're in band class and you're not feeling great, just tap out, keep that mask on. Because I'm sure in the early days of reopening schools in particular, I'm imagining that kids had to wear masks all day, except for in band class. I'm very curious how that worked out. But ultimately, this is something you have to keep in mind, we know that singing and laughing and yelling increased aerosols, but playing an instrument for sure is gonna rocket that COVID all over the room. Woo-hoo, no, not exciting at all. Yeah, I remember seeing images of kids going back to band classes with masks, with slits in them, so they could insert their instrument into their mouth to play. And I remember thinking how ineffective that would be if it's actually airborne and you're just blowing the aerosols out. Yeah, but at least you got the inhale protection there a little bit. For the person, right, the inhale for that, for the person possibly, possibly. This happened like I kind of think I would have expected. Those brasses, I tried to play the trumpet when I was a kid. Oh my goodness, there's so much pressure. John, I'm gonna step away. Yeah, there's so much pressure that you have to generate to get that thing to even make a sound, let alone play it, like get to the point where you're playing. Just sounds like spinning. There's really nothing in between all of your saliva and your entire instrument with brass instruments for sure. Yeah. There is not. Yeah, you never mopped a band room floor. Oh, my favorite is the saxophone with the little spit release valve on the bottom curve. Anyway, we're moving on, you know. We can see your show notes. Oh, hi, show notes. You see what's up next, everybody, show notes. What's up next? We're moving on from spitting on the band room floor to where did the big dinosaurs come from? What allowed dinosaurs like T-Rex to succeed where other dinosaurs were previously succeeding? What was the thing that led to that? Well, according to a new study that has been published in Science Advances, Morgan Schaller, Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a team led by Paul Olson, who is a geologist at Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. They have looked at evidence of ice formation in grains of sand, lake sediments, minerals that they're finding, and they found that there is this unique assemblage of these little tiny grains and minerals that are indicative of having been rafted out into deep water by ice. And this period, about 200, 201 million years ago, Pangea started to split apart. Pangea was rocked by volcanic eruptions. I mean, volcanoes and volcanic eruptions and earth-shaking splits happening to this giant land mass were obviously affecting the animals on its surface, but during that change, 40% of all four-legged land mammals were wiped out in what's called the end triassic extinction. And they didn't really know what was the thing that killed them all. Volcanoes, all right, whatever, but volcanoes aren't land, you know, the lava and the magma flows and the eruptions. Those aren't landing all over the animals, you know? So there were other ecosystem changes that were affecting things. And so this evidence of these frozen earth grains being rafted out into deep water, what they have taken from these little grains that they looked at, they have determined that there was a change in the temperatures. The volcanoes led to global cooling that was very short-lived, but rapid enough that any animals that did not have feathers or hair insulation died out. And so dinosaurs survived. The dinosaurs that had hair and feathers were the ones that survived to live on. And so they had this leg up on the non-insulated animals like, Blair, your prehistoric crocodiles, sorry, they just had to disappear. The waters froze, the crocodiles were like, I'm gonna be like part, I'm too cold-blooded, I can't deal. And then they died. But then the big thing after it is that it was this, what they think is that it was this very short-lived freezing that it was really cold for 10 years or so, 20 years, a few decades. Like not, this is, it's on the level of the kind of climate change rapidity that we're seeing happen right now on our planet. However, it went from a much lower carbon dioxide level to after all the volcanic eruptions, 1,000 to 4,000 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and then it heated way up. And so it slowly ramped back up to super heating. And so there became more plants, these giant dinosaurs could feed on the plants, they could stay really warm, but then because it was warm, like then everything, and then, of course, we know there was an impact that led to the end of the dinosaurs. After all of that, and then you got hit by an asteroid. And then the Jurassic, end of the Jurassic period, you know that KT extinction. But it's just, it's very interesting that they didn't have any evidence of polar glacial ice sheets in this time period, but they found this molecular evidence of freezing to these little grains of sand and stuff to show that there had been this really cold state, and then rapidly after a much warmer state, a greenhouse state that led to warming. But it's just, what's also fascinating is that it happened so quickly, only animals that survived were the ones that could handle extreme temperature shifts and rapid changes. So they had to be very, just flexible animals. They had to be able to deal with cold temperatures, hot temperatures, all the things, and the ones with insulation could do it better. So it's a neat new idea. Is that what happened? So I wanna say, I like that the feathers are fur, which feathers, some of the dinosaurs we now know would have had, the fur maybe not so much, but also size you would think would help too, because there's a certain size where you're creating incredible amounts of interior temperature. Right, and the large dinosaurs probably were creating enough heat to be able to maintain themselves during that period of time. Yeah, but anyway, it's that big question, right? We've talked for a long time about the word dinosaurs, cold-blooded, warm-blooded, and now it's kind of like, ah, they were warm-blooded, kind of like in this middle area, it's a spectrum. But Justin, you have a story about some hot-bloodedness, right? Yeah, let's check it and see. Mammals, as we've talked about before, are warm-blooded. We have high metabolisms that maintain temperature and depend of our surroundings. Among animals, only mammals, birds, are warm-blooded. And so that's sort of one interesting thing, because just what we're talking about, birds are just direct from some of the dinosaurs, so it might go back in ways that we hadn't been taught in a little kid's school. Anyway, so we're able to keep ourselves warmer in those events, where suddenly there's icy temperatures for decades. We can do just fine. Humans need clothing, but most furry, feathery things can survive with high metabolism and some good cover. So it's been kind of a mystery when mammals evolved to these higher metabolisms and this warm-bloodedness. When you study in nature, scientists point to an unlikely source for determining when ancient mammal ancestors became warm-blooded. It's the earwax. So by studying the tiny structures of the inner ear, they were able to determine about when through the fossil record we became, mammals became warm-blooded. So within the ear, there's fluid that allows us to keep our balance. And basically, I love this study because it didn't require a new technology. It just required a figuring out a solution and making good observations. If you are cold-blooded, a cold-blooded creature, you have thicker, more viscous ear fluid. If you're a warm-blooded, high-temperature creature, it's much more fluid and it squishes around more. And it has to be able to move through the channels of that inner ear in a similar move. So if it's very viscous and it's not moving, it's very thick, like honey or whatever, you need big channels for it to be able to ooze through. Whereas if you've become warm-blooded, much thinner channels are required to get that same amount of movement taking place. Anyway, so just that they look through vertebrates and they found that tiny canals filled with fluid that help us balance and the size of those canals was enough for them to determine when. And it's pretty long time. So they say to track evolutionary changes, researchers compared the size of the inner ear of 341 animals, 243 living, 64 extinct. They found that mammal ancestors didn't develop the kind of inner ear structure ideal for warm-blooded animals until 233 million years ago, nearly 20 million years later than scientists had previously thought warm-bloodedness evolved. Based on those, the other thing that happened right around that same time, we started getting furry. That's when, so it's at the same time that the ear is changing, fur is showing up on these little mammals. Gotta keep the earwax warm somehow. Gotta keep that, and it also helps, yeah, helps keep in all that heat for that high metabolism that the body's, the heat you're generating now. So yeah, makes sense. And it coalesces with other observations in that record. And it speeds up the timeline. It shows this evolution took place in less than a million years. It happened in a really quick period of time. Yeah, it could happen that fast. That's incredible, the inner ear, the inner ear to tell us where to go. So wait, wait, can I ask one quick question though? I'm just thinking about like a alternative theory for you. Okay. If hair showed up at around the same time that these holes ended up shrinking, is it instead possible that the hole shrank because the hair in the ears, in and around the ear hole, prevented stuff from building up in the same way nose hairs do? Wait, what? I didn't even think. So like, you have- The hair in your ears keeps stuff from getting into your ears. Yeah, and it like, it like moves stuff around on the inner ear. I don't know, I just feel like that also is part of the story. Having hair in and around the ear is part of the story of your earwax. It is part of it. Why is that like that? Even on really hairy animals, isn't that usually a little less hairy area on some- It's less hairy, but there is hair and often a lot of the time the hair around there is more wiry. Okay. Well, I think that once part of it is you don't need to sun yourself any longer. So you don't need to get an internal temperature raised by sitting out in the sun. So it frees up those bodies to then be covered and not need that direct interaction. And if you're working with a high metabolism rate where you've got a lot of heat, you might not want to get rid of it. You might want to be hanging onto it and conserve it longer so that you can go longer distances or survive longer in cold areas. Yes, I think I understand why more bloodedness exists. I'm saying that the earhole for wax shrinking because bodies are getting hotter, what I am suggesting is perhaps it shrank because there were hairs to change the way wax builds up in the ear structurally. I mean, but wax doesn't come into the ear from externally. It's created within the ear. There are genetic components to your earwax. Like even among humans, you can have stickier or more fluid earwax. There's a variation in the earwax that you can have in your ear that's genetically determined. Yeah, I think these are very interesting questions though, Blair, I think you need to run an evolutionary experiment in which you genetically modify some kind of creature to have more ear hair. We could genetically modify a Justin. I bet we could use- Or you could just shave someone's ear. No, he's probably getting more ear hair as he ages. Oh wait, what? Just take twins and shave someone's ear hairs off. You're done. Save the ear hairs and see what happens to the earwax. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Can't hear us anymore. Let's see, Blair, why do you like frozen rat livers? This is such a fun story. I was very excited to bring this story. It's not really about the rats. This is a human medicine advancement that I'm very excited about. Great. So this is from Massachusetts General Hospital and they think they've figured out a new way to store organs for transplant. So it, I'm very excited about it. Did you know end stage organ failure is the number one cause of death in the United States? I didn't. So the ability to replace organs with transplants could save millions of lives around the world. A big part of the problem is not the lack of organs, but the availability to get an organ from a deceased individual into a transplant and contestant is the wrong word. What's the word? Subject. Somebody who's on the list and been approved for a transplant, getting it to them quickly enough because the organ cannot survive that long outside of the body. Clinical standard for organ preservation is hypothermic preservation at four degrees Celsius, but that is just a few hours to move that organ from the deceased into someone who needs it. In the study, they succeeded in freezing rodent livers to extend preservation during transit five-fold by adapting strategies they found in the animal kingdom. They were looking at a type of frog, the wood frog, which goes to high sub-zero temperatures, which is about as low as minus 15 degrees Celsius. And they can stay alive at those temperatures for weeks to months. Now, in Kiki's story, it was cold for 10 years and that's why those crocodiles didn't survive. But it was weeks to months, they might've been okay. That's because a lot of animals have actually found ways to survive being frozen temporarily. And so they mimicked this. They used this high sub-zero temperature range from negative four to negative 20 Celsius. And they were able to have a deeper metabolic stasis in these frozen rat livers than their standard of plus four. And this avoided many of the above-mentioned challenges of cryogenic storage, which I didn't actually mention yet. Well, anyway, if you store things too cold, they can actually- They can get ice crystals. Yeah, they get ice crystals. And that breaks the cells. And then the cells- The blood can't move and the- Yeah, yeah, it just completely falls apart. We know this. You can't use a totally frozen rock solid organ in a person afterwards. But so this is- Not even after you thought. It has to be frozen very carefully. This is partial freezing. So this is what the frogs do too. So it is a thermodynamically stable frozen state. There is frozen parts of the body and unfrozen parts of the body so that it limits ice damage and excessive dehydration. Dehydration is the other big thing that can happen. Freezer burn, basically. Right. And so by mimicking the frogs, they were able to keep this liver going for five times as long. Amazing. And this is partially because they had been looking at really, really low temperatures like negative 80 Celsius is what they've tested in the past. They're like, let's freeze the heck out of it. No, just do a high sub-zero temperature range like they do in the animal kingdom and you might be able to keep organs going for a lot longer. I think it's fantastic. I mean, you don't want it in your own body until after. It's heated back up. They heat it back up, get rid of those cryor protective agents and heat it back up again. That's important. Get it in it. You want a cold liver. Yeah, speaking of heating back up, when you've been in the sun all day long, are you, you come inside, are you hungry or not? No, not at all. I don't want to eat anything if I'm too hot. Been out in the sun. Yeah, Justin, what about you? I don't know, it depends on where you want it. Like, I don't want a hot pizza right now but maybe, yeah, maybe some ice cream. Well, according to a new study, researchers have determined that after spending time in the sun, men are hungrier than women. There you go. Yes. Yeah, they looked at, 3,000 Israelis of both sexes, all sexes, including self-reports from students who had spent time in the sun, combined with the results of a genetic study in a lab model. And what they've determined is that the skin itself is, it produces metabolic and endocrine signals that affect hunger in the brain. And these signals turn down hunger in the female brain, but turn it up in the male brain. That's funny. Which is, yeah, it's a little funny. You can kind of go, why? We don't know why, but this was the result that they found. We don't really understand the why behind it, you know? But what, and the interesting aspect of this too is that sun exposure in the skin, it activates P53, which is a cancer related protein. Usually P53 is going in, checking on cells, going, you okay? You healthy? I need to kill you. And if it's a cell that has been damaged, has a mutation in it, you go, oh, you're a bad cell. And the P53 turns on an apoptosis cell death cascade that leads to cell death. But apparently P53 is also involved in producing a hormone called ghrelin, which stimulates the appetite. And so estrogen in women blocks this interaction, but not in men. So anyone who has increased, and we can say, they don't have to split it just by the genders, but say anyone who has increased levels of estrogen in the places where this ghrelin is going to be, the P53 and the ghrelin, it's going to be blocking that action and will lead to an inhibited appetite, less estrogen, and you will see a more stimulated appetite. That's kind of why this turned out this way. It's just maybe a thing that happens, just because we happen to have these different hormone levels. Yeah, there might not be any evolutionary reason, really. It's not going to hurt or help you too much, I don't think. Right. But it is very interesting. So the take home messages, if you're going to the beach, just make sure you stop by that ice cream shop for the guys on the way home. So maybe it's just an idea that's saying it just looks like it's an accident of body chemistry and triggering this and not- Hormones be crazy. Evolutionary advantage in any way. Yeah, I mean, yeah, is it? Did this happen because of evolutionary pressures or is it just one of those things, a quirk? Is it just a quirk? Yeah, and I still don't know whether or not hominins in general loved living in caves or visited them once while. We find lots of fossils in caves, but that's also a place where they're going to be really, really well preserved. So anytime somebody died in a cave, maybe we could find them. But if they died out there on the tundra or up in the valleys or wherever you're out there outside, you don't really find the bones as much. So my first instinct was like, oh, yeah, it's because we lived in caves all the time and then the men go out and they're like, oh, the sun's shining, so now I'm hungry. But something's telling me to go find food because there was one study I didn't bring that mice are found to get an endorphin rush from drinking water or eating foods that are a good source of water. It's because all of our animal brains are so dumb that we need the brain to tell us, okay, you're hungry, you're thirsty, go do the thing, the basics you need to live, I'm gonna give you a reinforcer for it, otherwise you just starve to death, not realizing that you needed food. The other reinforcer, thinking of things that are important, so P53 is part of this skin repair from sun damage process, but additionally, if you're out in the sun, this is part of possibly a, hey, we've moved from winter into spring, the sun is out, if you're a male, eat more food because mating season is coming. Gotta be ready to fight, be territorial, whatever. I mean, you'd think the same thing for the females of the species also, I mean, because the gestation period of whatever is going to be very resource, it's gonna take lots of resources, so yeah, I don't know, I don't know anything anymore. I think you know a lot, Kiki. I only know that we're gonna take very quick break, well actually not a very long break. This is, This Week in Science, thank you for joining us for this week's episode of the show. If you are enjoying the show, please tell a friend today, we all want to get more people in here, loving the twists. Oh, and if you're watching live right now, make sure you hit those like buttons, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, that will help us show up in the recommended streamings that are going on, so tell a friend, share it with a friend on social media, if you're watching live right now, and then like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like. There you go, it's good. And notification bells, because those are important too. You wanna know when new episodes come out. Okay, we're coming back, and it is time on This Week in Science for that part of the show that we love to call, Blair's Animal Corp. Love's our creature. Buy a pet, will a pet, no pet at all. If you wanna hear about animals, she's your girl. Except for giant pandas and squirrels. Put your cap, Blair! Thank you. So, first I have a story about woodpeckers. I have bad news for everybody. I'm sorry. No! I'm here to disappoint everyone. Woodpeckers, what does everyone think about woodpeckers and how they survive banging their head against the wall over and over? They have magic tendons and lots of padding in their heads to keep their brains happy. What are you gonna tell us? No, they don't. Man, okay. Yeah. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. But I thought that was a known thing, that they had to think and it worked and that's what prevented them from getting concussed. So I was doing some digging. So there's been a lot of theories around that. They've looked at the tendons in their back and their neck and they think that there's something about that that helps them reduce shock. They looked at their skulls and even there have been some experiments of modeling football helmets after their skulls and necks because they thought they were so good at shock absorbing. But I also did some digging and I wanna say we talked about it in the animal corner but I can't exactly recall. There was also a study in 2018 that showed that these guys still had brains with protein kind of scarring all over it that made it look like their brains are still doing a lot of bouncing around in their head. And so- So what I need to know now is this on the level of brain damage that we are seeing football players with this brain trauma and do woodpeckers then have aggression issues? Right, great questions. So part one, researchers analyzed high speed videos of woodpeckers and found that they do not absorb the shock of their impact with trees at all. Part two of that is it does not appear to be forces consistent with concussion. Even the strongest shocks from over a hundred pecs that they analyzed would still be safer for the woodpecker's brains based on their calculations and that they are lower than what we consider a human concussion. Which is why you don't see a whole lot of woodpecker linebackers in the NFL because they couldn't handle the pressure. Yeah, so there's a couple things going on here. They think a lot of this has to do with the fact that they just have a smaller brain. And their whole bodies are smaller. Think about how- Little massive force though. Yes, yeah. So if their overall mass of their head that they're hitting against the tree, even if it's very fast, if the mass is low the overall force is also lower, right? So the fact that they're little tiny birds helps. But on top of that, the fact that their brain is small also means that it's not at the very edge. I picture our brain and our skull and the fact that everything's maxed out, right? But these guys they have a tinier brain so there's less at stake I suppose and there's also just generally less force. So, yeah, and I really, those of you listening check out the videos, you can really see, it looks so jar, it looks like they're breaking their neck every time they do it. And that's what I would argue is why- You can see the shock that will grow their head. Yeah, and I would argue that's what those tendons are about aren't about protecting their brain but it's about protecting their neck from injury. That would be my guess just based on these videos and what this research found. But the real reason this research is so important is exactly what I mentioned before. Engineers have used the anatomy of the woodpecker as a source of inspiration for shock absorbing materials and helmets. If woodpeckers are not shock absorbing, that's bad. Yeah, what does that mean for these shock absorbing helmets? And this isn't some crazy new technology. This is high speed video. We've had this for some time. So I think there was an expectation, this was kind of like leading the witness almost in this, like people were like, ooh, woodpeckers they must get concussions, right? The only way they can't is if they're absorbing the shock somehow. And then that was the hypothesis and whether it was, I'm sure it wasn't done intentionally but I wanna think that it was kind of, it was looked for so much, it was found. And new research is showing maybe that's not actually what's going on. And so I just, before the animal corner did a story about getting inspiration from animals for organ transplant. And so getting inspiration from the wild animals is great because evolution is a great tester. And like that's the best field testing in the world is evolution. So if you can properly model an adaptation that exists in the world, in wild animals that is a great place to go to try to do things that we make ourselves. However, you have to make sure that the adaptation that you're choosing actually exists and actually does the thing you want it to do. Yeah, that's the part that's kind of shocking. So a big part of the helmets that you were talking about that was being designed for the NFL, a big part of that is to protect players' health. But the bigger part of it is to reduce liability of the NFL and make it look like they're doing something. And help the PR of it for sure. Yeah. And that's why there were these, like I searched football, Woodpecker and there were pages of hits about using Woodpecker, Woodpecker's inspiration to make better, and it was headlines like, Woodpecker's saving the NFL for future generations. Okay, not exactly. That's a spin. Yeah. Yeah. Oh boy. What's your next study, Blair? Yes, female bears. They have quite a challenge when it's time for them to hibernate with their cubs because not only do they need to find a place that is not too close to other female bears and cubs and is not too close to a road or other predators or maybe has other resources that they need while they're getting ready to sleep. Also maybe not too far away from, the human's very hard. But the other thing they have to do is make sure it's not too close to any male bears. And that is because male bears like to kill baby bears so that the females will go back into estrus and they can try again to have babies this year. That is a thing about bears that you all know now. But... Yeah, similar to many other species of mammals, you get rid of the offspring and then it provides a stimulus for the female to try again. Yeah. Got to do it again. It's the game. That's the game of evolution, right? You're trying to propagate your DNA. This is how male bears do it. And so females, one of the things they have to do when they have cubs is make sure to stay far, far away from males as much as they can. So this new study from Nottingham Trent University, Spanish National Research Council, the Biodiversity Research Institute in Spain, the University of Lyon, and the Czech University of Life Sciences wanted to look at cantabrian mountain bears, they're brown bears, over 20 years. And their numbers have been growing, which is good. That means conservation work is working. But that also means that once the dominant females have started occupying the best locations, things with good resources at higher altitudes, near rugged terrain, and away from bears and humans, then the other bears that weren't able to get those best spots start to go to the next best thing, which surprisingly ends up being somewhat closer to humans than researchers would expect. And the hypothesis is that this is because where humans are, male bears are not. And so humans, though dangerous to bears, are not as dangerous as the males. And while you might think, like, yay, humans, we're not the worst, the problem is. All right, there's always a catch. The problem is, if females, in a way, if females are being pushed into areas near humans, the likelihood for human-bear conflict rises over time. That can be car strikes on the road, that can be bears wandering into people's backyards, and there being altercations, and then that bear being disposed of, there can be any number of things that can happen from human-bear interaction just because of the fact that they're getting closer together. So this is important in recognizing, okay, conservation work, we're doing great. Bear populations are rising. But now, based on this research, we know that as bear populations rise, they will actually start going into human space or adjacent to human space much sooner than anticipated, because they're not going to fill out wild space first. They are going to go to that human-adjacent space much earlier because it removes that male-bear threat. So that means if there's a lot of good bear area near a road, bearia, maybe you want to close that bearia during a very specific time of year, when the females and cubs are getting ready to go down for hibernation or when they first wake up. You can close that for a short amount of time and way reduce the amount of interactions that would happen otherwise. So there is management strategy that can be created from this information. If the bears play along. Like I've seen, the only time I've seen a bear with cubs was wandering down the road in South Lake Tahoe, but through an area of rental winter house cabin kind of things. I was very surprised. I've seen them also wandering near people, but either very rural or on the edge of a camp to come and check where people have been making food and that sort of thing. But this was the only time I'd seen them walking down a road. And it was a mother bear and a couple of cubs trailing. And it seemed like the most insane place for a mother bear to be taking the cubs until this started. Now I realize that was the safer choice, maybe, than if there's a male bear in here. Yeah, still dangerous, but safer. But nobody is like, oh, no, let's go kill the bear in Tahoe. But it was actually a bear. But actually it was maybe a mile from the casino strip. It was not that far away from it. I'm sure they see bears there all the time, hanging out at the craps table. Don't eat thumbs for that one. Just push the dice. Throw the dice. Toss the die. Roulette, too. Yeah, so the next time you see those mama bears with their cubs, yeah, just know that they're getting away from the abusive spouse or potential spouse. Potential spouse, exactly. Yeah. Hey, this is This Week in Science. We are here again talking about science. We're also glad to be here and we're glad that you're here with us. If you love this program, be a part of making it happen every week. Help us produce this show by supporting us on Patreon. If you head over to twist.org, click on our Patreon link. It'll take you to our Patreon community where you can choose your level of support, $10 and more per month. And we will thank you by name at the end of the show. And there are some other fun gifts for various levels of support. But it is your support that does keep this show going. Thank you all of you who are already helping us out. And I know you, you right now who are listening, you're going to be the next one to help us produce twists. Really can't do it without your support. Thank you. Alrighty, Justin, did you have some science news for us? Yeah. So evolution turns out to be a thing. It's a progression of change over time leads to the diversity of species in all life on the planet earth. Life forms that are pioneering physiological change to challenges in the environment, predation and reproduction to find their best niche. Meach are the drivers of evolution. One such pioneers to change was Tectalic Rosea, aka the fishapod. It's a three meter long half fish tetrapod thing with gills. But it's got bones and its limbs that allow it to lift itself up and lumber around on land. This creature came ashore 375 million years ago and what is now Arctic Canada. While some may see this creatures in transition from sea to land, Tectalic Rosea likely very happy with its in-between status. Where would, which way would its future lead? We still don't actually know. It may have been a complete dead ender, there's still looking at that. But a close relative was just discovered that decided, I like being a fish. Done with all this land nonsense. Going back to the sea full time. Who needs these legs? Yeah, Kiki Tani, Wakey Eye is the name of the new fossil found. What are you saying about me? But Kiki Tani, Wakey Eye, Wakey Eye. Wakey? It's the name of the new fossil anyway. Kiki Tani, it should be a new favorite creature. Yeah, it includes partial upper and lower jaws portions of the neck scales. Most importantly also features a complete pectoral fin with a distinct humorous bone that lack the features that indicate walking on land. Instead the upper arm was smooth and curved more suited for a paddling life underwater. But the uniqueness of the arm bones of Kiki Tani suggests that it returned to paddling water after its ancestors had spent some time using their appendages to walk around. So this is what we might think of as a U-turn but this is just the plasticity or the flexibility of life pursuing niches. There's nothing to be gained by being on land and you can get back into the water because you're in between place, stay to the water if that's where it's working, stay there. But at first they thought it might actually be a juvenile because it's only about a meter. It's a third of the size of the other thing that they'd already known about. The study is published in Nature. The name Kiki Tani comes from the Inuit word Kiki Kualuk or Kiki Tani, a traditional name for the region where the fossil site is located. So there's that name. The species designation Wakey Eye or Wakey is in memory of the late David Wake, eminent evolutionary biologist, University of California Berkeley. The fossils were discovered 15 years ago and sat in storage as so often these situations happen. Sat in storage, nobody looked at it and they didn't really look like much. They knew there was some fossilization indications. There was an indication that there was some scale fossils on the edge of some of these rocks which is why they had been selected but it didn't really look like you couldn't really see the the fossils that were encased inside the rocks. A CT scan that was conducted just a couple of years ago revealed the pectoral fin but it was a terrible image. It wasn't really useful and the solution would be you trim the rock back a little bit and you'd get another CT scan but the pandemic closed the lab. Right as they were making this discovery, campus facilities finally very open. They got a better scan resulting images revealed the nearly complete pectoral fin and upper limb including the distinctive humors bone in great detail. So they did what whales did before it was cool. Yeah, returning to the water because who needs to be up here on this land? Yeah, nothing up here yet. If it's not working out for you, it's just not working out for you. Every time I go in a pool and I get out, all I want to do is return to the water. Go back in the water. That's all I want. You're like the opposite of a Jaws movie. Yes. Just get back in the water. I guess the tiktalic has been used as a meme for this whole pandemic thing. You're like, I'll just stay in the water. I don't need to evolve any better than you thought. But yeah. And then my last story, my last very last story ever today is an update on the mysterious red deer cave people. So we found this was a thing that was found and they found the bones and they thought, oh gosh, we don't know what this is. You've got homo sapiens. You got Denisovans. You got Neanderthals. And then they were saying, oh, but this thing is different than all of them. This is, they discovered this years ago at a cave in southern China. I think we reported about it at the time. Now it's being published in the current and the general current biology. Researchers suggest the mysterious hominin is a modern human. Previous morphology work had a hard time classifying the fossil because the skull cap had characteristics that looked Neanderthal. But the brain was smaller than that of a current modern human. And there were some other little hints that sort of pushed them into thinking it's, it's got to be this archaic hominin of some sort. But maybe anyway, they got some DNA. According to the researchers, red deer cave people were modern humans, not an archaic species. But they do still have some unusual morphological features from those. So it's more an example of diversity of homo sapiens than ruling out, ruling out of archaic influence. While the sample is of a maternal dead end that isn't directly found in current modern humans, they did extrapolate that the individual was linked to East Asian ancestry and was also linked to the East Asian ancestry of Native Americans, according to the study. It says here, combined with previous research data, the findings led the team to propose that some of the Southern East Asia people had traveled north along the coastline of present day Eastern China through Japan and reached Siberia tens of thousands of years ago. So I found this interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that the Japan connection to Native Americans has been debunked. It was, it was an idea based on morphological comparisons to an ancient population of Japan, but then, you know, not that maybe three, four years ago, five years ago, not even five years ago, DNA was obtained from those ancient Japanese populations and that that DNA showed there was not a relation. They were not, there was not an ancestral link to Native current Native Americans. So, and again, these red deer cave people are dated at 14,000 years old, while Native American history is at least double that. So there's timeline issues. And it's not to say that Native American ancestor signal isn't also present in red deer cave individual that they were looking at, but is in every case where they've tried to give an explanation for the Native American populations in the Americas or the Native American population, the example they give as having that ancestral link is much younger than the populating of the Americas. Okay. So, you know, I mean, we saw this in the Tamir basin, folks were like, oh, look, they're part of this population that is, you know, expanded into the Americas. And there's even this sort of mystery group that we have only seen, basically through DNA, and I think one fossil find, which was the, I think, ancient North Asians is what it's called. And that ancient find is less than 20,000 years old. And so still we have Native American examples of populated Americas that go back maybe even 10,000 years past that. So there's still a, there's still a big problem. You know, 14th, and in this case, you know, talking at least 10, 12, 14,000 years between this link and DNA and Native American populations already being in the Americas, if you went one direction, you could have come back because you also didn't have an Ice Age for most of that time. This is also what we've learned about the populating of the Americas. It was already there when the glaciation was taking, which it was at its height, which means they didn't just go around it, but were likely in the Americas ahead of the glaciation event. So there's all sorts of timelines, but I just find it interesting that some things in anthropology persist, and it, gosh, everybody had pushed Kennewick Man, the ancient one, to be of this Japanese population. If you go back and look at 2016, 2017 articles at the time, every single one of them mentions it because it was a theory people were pushing ahead of the evidence because it fit with what they wanted it to be. And that's a problem. And when it came out that there is no link, that there is, that it is not, you know, there's no link to these, I can't remember what the name of them was, the ancient Japanese population that predated the current genomics, but yeah, there wasn't a link. And yet it still seems to like show up. I've seen it show up in several of these versions of the populating of Americas. They want to push them through Japan for some reason. Yeah, that's an interesting pathway that they want that to take. But the big take home here though, I guess, is the Red Deer people that was just modern humans, mystery people, and yeah. Not a missing archaic on and to itself, yes. Right, not a special branch, yes. Well, I'm disappointed, but. Yeah, it's more fun, right? It's way more fun. It's more fun, I love the idea. We'll find others, it'll be okay. We just go out there and look, archaeologists, get out there, find them. I have a couple of stories for the end of our show. Yeah, are you ready for some stories? My first story, I had to wait until after 9 p.m. Pacific time because it was embargoed until 6 o'clock Central European summertime, which is 9 p.m. Pacific time. So I put this one at the end of the show. I put it towards the end. It's right there. This is breaking, breaking. Breaking. Yes, published in Frontiers Journal, Frontiers in Microbiology. Researchers have been delving into the microbiological inhabitants of volcanic habitats in Hawaii, lava caves, geothermal vents, places that have, we think of lava, magma, hot stuff. What's going to live there? Well, lava caves, lava tubes at one point, yes, they were formed by flowing lava, magma beneath the surface of the earth. And they have since cooled and hardened. So they are simply volcanic rock with lots of minerals. And who are the microbiological species that come in to inhabit these spaces once they have gotten a little bit older? So they looked at these kind of older habitats and then younger, like under 400 years old, active geothermal vents, much hotter, there's a lot more stuff going on in them. They compared a number of these lava caves and geothermal vents in Hawaii, which as we know, the Hawaiian islands have been formed as a chain of oceanic volcanoes, right? These volcanic islands are ongoing in their eruptions. But how does life exist in extreme environments? This is the big question that they were getting into. Nobody had ever really looked into this before in Hawaii. However, they had determined that there's lots and lots of microbes in these volcanic habitats. And so they said, oh, which ones are where? What's living in different places? Anyway, they found out that there are some bacteria that have never been identified. Ooh, surprise, surprise. From a group called chloroflexi, these chloroflexibacteria, they seem to be not incredibly dense in terms of their population numbers, but they are in all of these habitats. And they are hub species. Very often, these chloroflexi are bacterial species that they haven't identified specifically. They just know they're in a certain group because they looked at one particular gene. And so they're like, oh, this group has that mutation and this group has that mutation, but we don't know who the individuals are. Anyway, chloroflexi are hub species, which means that they interact with other species very often. And what they, the key take home from this study is that there are lots more species in the, or there's high number of species in these lava caves, these older lava caves. They've got lots of stuff going on, lots of numbers of individuals, lots of interconnectedness between different groups. And it's obvious that it's like they are the later stage of ecosystem development as far as microbiomes go, and that the very dynamic geothermal vents are the spaces in which there's actually even higher bacterial diversity. And very often, what they seem to see is that there is competition between bacteria of the same group. And so in the earlier, younger ecosystems, there maybe are more of the same kinds, same groupings of bacteria. And then in the later lava tubes, there are fewer. So if you have a chloroflexi, you only have like one chloroflexi. And that they, they all kind of these groups, they fight for certain roles within the ecosystems. And that if you have one bacterial species taking up one particular role in the ecosystem, you're not going to need another one. And so they fight for dominance in those ecosystem jobs. And then additionally, they also, their data suggests that there are interactions between these bacteria that may indicate that the bacteria rely on each other in, especially in these extreme, more extreme environments of the geothermal vents, that they might actually, one species might do some metabolic function that another species doesn't have. And they might rely on each other in that way. So there are some really interesting interactions going on between all of these organisms. And it could give us clues about, number one, how life can exist in extreme environments. Number two, how life, how life progresses from, hey, hot lava to actually becoming ecosystems and microbes inhabiting these areas. And then three, what maybe could have or could in the future live on some other place like Mars. So they're looking at these lava habitats also as like simulations of possible other planets like Mars. Hawaii, it's got all sorts of biodiversity, but they don't know what they're doing. So there's microbial dark matter in these places. And they still need to figure out what some of that dark matter is. Move. Great, I love it. Let's keep looking at this stuff. Moving on from bacteria, I want to talk about the brain because I love the brain stuff. Emotional memories. So when you're remembering things, very often how you remember them, you remember them in either a positive or a negative light. So it's like, oh, that was such a happy, happy dinner with my friends. We had such a good time and you have such a positive aspect to it. Or, oh my gosh, that night that we went to that movie and that thing happened. Can you believe that? Oh my gosh, I don't even think I liked that movie. Like everything was bad. The popcorn tasted terrible. Everything was awful. Yeah. So your memories get emotional tags on them. And we know that this is in part impacted by how our amygdala, our basolateral amygdala, is working during the experience of an event and then how it gets laid down as a memory. But there's always been this big question of really, truly, what is it that ties together a memory as a positive memory or a negative memory? And what is it that really solidifies that affect within your brain? And so some researchers just published in Nature this last week, their research out of the Salk Institute, looking at these fundamental processes, how you remember whether something's good or bad. Bad apple, good pie, how do you remember? Can I guess? Can I guess? Yes. If it's especially good or especially bad, would it just be the frequency with which you replay that memory in your head? That is a great guess. But no. But it's not the right answer. Not the right answer. Yeah, so the idea behind the affect of something in animals, if a human, an animal, any animal is going to be seeking out an experience again, that experience should probably be associated with good feelings. Also involves maybe in dopamine reward system, right? If you want to avoid something, it's going to, you want it to be negatively associated. Don't go to that dark alleyway again. That was a bad idea. Don't eat that weird fish stew. That was a bad idea. So you want to have these associations. It helps with survival. It helps with learning. It helps with our ability to be motivated to perform various functions in our daily lives. And so they have in their research, this researcher, Kay Tai, she discovered a group of neurons in the basolateral amygdala that helps to assign valence. One set of the neurons was active when things are good. And one set of neurons was active when they were bad. So it's like, ooh, awesome. The neurons are in charge. She went even deeper and her team was able to determine that there is actually, it comes down to one molecule, a hormone signaling molecule called neurotensin. Neurotensin is also involved in vasodilation of our arteries, our veins, like our blood flow. Vasotensin is very important in the body, but it's very important. That was where it was first. Neurotensin was discovered first with relation to our circulatory system. But we know now that it's very important and active within the amygdala and the hypothalamus. And they knew that this neuropeptide is produced by the cells with this valence processing in the basolateral amygdala. But there's some other neurotransmitters in there too. So they're like, it could really be anything. And so they used CRISPR to take neurotensin out. And those mice that they took neurotensin out of could not learn good. They only learned bad. They could not associate positivity with anything. That's the opposite I would have assumed too. That's really interesting because I would have assumed that the neurotensin was readying for a fight or flight reaction. Like this way it's going to let the blood flow to be a higher volume because you're getting ready. We're going to fire up that heart rate. We're going to, oh, this is terrible. We got to fight or flight it real quick. And so I would have think that eliminating that would have eliminated that negative emotional response memory, but it did the opposite. It did the opposite. Yeah. And I think that's one of the interesting results of this is that what it implies is that our brain, the animal mammalian brain, of course, this is mice, but we can probably assume the mammalian brain is very similar in this regard in general, that the default state without the neurotensin, the default state is fear. That's what's going to keep you alive this year. I don't like it. Run away. Oh my gosh, run away. You know, default state, preserve self, everything's scary. So I guess Kiki, my question is based on this research, because I was hoping that you were going to say the opposite, just like I was just saying, because I could see very clear applications of that. Like for example, in PTSD, right? Yes, exactly. So based on this research, is there something that could come out of this that could help humans? Yeah. So if we could use therapeutic agents to target the neurotensin pathway, you could add neurotensin to a system. I mean, it's a peptide, so it's small in size. That's one of the things. This is a hormone. And normally we think of hormones as kind of these big bulky molecules, but neurotensin is actually a pretty short peptide. So there's the possibility that we could be able to get stuff that targets it past the blood-brain barrier maybe to get into the brain to have an effect, or there could be other pathways to be able to get into it. But yes, we could manipulate it, increase neurotensin and lead to, yeah, reliving PTSD treatment, the reliving of experiments, re-experiencing them, but with increased neurotensin to try to give them a positive affect. Yeah. There's lots of nasty things you could talk about with PTSD, but I'll give you a really silly example, which is I went through a really terrible, disgusting, knock-down, drag-out breakup while I was eating hummus and pita chips, and I was not able to eat hummus for, god, I think close to a decade. And I think that, I mean, I would have loved it if you could have just fixed that, because that was one of my favorite foods. And I was like, this is ruined. It's ruined. It's terrible. I hate it. I hate hummus. Hummus is ruined. I can eat it now, but for a while it was a problem. Yeah. So it could, this could not just PTSD, but just anxiety in general also, which is becoming more and more of a problem for people. You know, yeah, we could make hummus better for everyone. But I'm wondering now if there's also, yeah, gosh, yeah, if there's natural deficiencies or blockers or something like this that are in there that, like you just said, lead to things like anxiety disorders or, yeah, like, we should test the psychopaths. Figure out, figure out. Yeah, well, so the one thing I'm wondering, so neuro-tensin, like I said, it's responsible for some physiological functions related to the circulatory system also. And neuro-tensin is one of these hormones that tends to be more locally released, although I do wonder, like, is it, I don't know, have these researchers looked into the drugs that already are on the market to treat targeting neuro-tensin, you know, blood pressure, because there are drugs that do target that pathway already. And how did those affect the affect of individuals? Was there a difference in these people's affect before and after they started taking those drugs? So there are actually tests, there are, there's probably data already out there on drugs that are already on the market. So that could be very cool. But then there's the question, does it have asked, I mean, can you get past the blood-bring barrier? Is there a difference there? Because you, you know, yeah, you want to, they don't necessarily want to be affecting blood pressure while you're trying to make something, somebody happy or think more positively about something. And my final story for the night has to do with where language came from, our complex language with all its if, ands, and buts. We have so many aspects of complexity to our language, and it seems as though our language just came out of nowhere. Where did it come from? How did we get this ability? And researchers historically have come forward with the idea that it was our, it was a co-development of our, of our speech systems, the physical speech production systems, and the brain ability, the brain structures and ability to actually produce complex speech. But a researcher has just published a study looking, it's a study and also a review of this whole field in research ideas and outcomes. These, it has some experimental findings, looking at this question of language evolution and in, in kids who have had language development issues. And what his study shows is, and all of the stuff he's reviewed, the bottom line is that his hypothesis is that we could make sounds, but our ability, and maybe we could do sign language at some point. But along with our mental ability, like to start creating things and imagining things, that it was that imagination, that creative ability that came first and that preceded the ability to imagine the things that we wanted to say and then would lead to the more complex speech production. When he's, when he's talking about we though, which we, I mean, yeah, so he starts, so the idea, so he says he comes in this paper that voluntary constructive imagination must have been acquired by humans after our ancestors split from chimpanzees six million years ago. Apes do not manufacture stone tools. So that suggests they have a limitation on their imagination. And Blair, yeah, they do construct various tools of different kinds. And so yeah, they have a we'll just go with this for a second. And then he says that our ancestors started manufacturing crude mode one choppers 3.3 million years ago. This is an indication of voluntary, this voluntary imagination two million years ago were symmetrical mode two hand axes. And then that's like a develop a level up on our design and imagination ability. There's like an Einstein homework erectus who figured out like where there's hundreds of thousands of years, it was 400,000 years after the mode two that we got mode three tools, you know, so looking at these, the evidence of our tool making ability and the time that it took, it was 70,000 years ago that we really extended our tool repertoire and had bows and arrows and needles and art and jewelry and all sorts of stuff. And that's about the time that researchers recognize modern voluntary imagination ability. And it was around there that our language probably popped in. So here's the thing with that though. We just just talked about keeping the same technology alive and passing it down for hundreds of thousands. How do you do that without language? Yeah, language. But is that not language? Yes, hundreds of thousands of years of just oh, grunt. Watch me pay attention for hundreds of thousands of years we passed down cutting what was a cutting edge, literally technology. Come on. Well, and what I was gonna bring up is if you step outside of hominids in general, do birds not have imagination? Okay, so with songs. They do. And so this researcher also looked at speech abilities in various birds. And so although there's this, especially some birds that are very good mimics and do recombinatorial songs, you know, we have gray parrots and others that can really start to mimic language, but they don't really put together combinatorial language with multiple aspects of context and meaning. So what they're what he says with this is that evolution of sound articulation is independent from and also a simpler process than improving voluntary imagination. But I love the I mean, this is, you know, still, this is a hypothesis. This is an idea that this researcher is putting forward, he's put together, you know, his basis of facts, right? He's put together these various levels, you know, human evolution, in our tool making ability, also our speech ability, whereas little kids, they can create sounds and start to speak at a young age, like, you know, by two years old, your kid is saying a lot of words, but it's not until later that they start really putting together complex combinatorial language. And so if we think of it from a phylogenetic perspective, you know, maybe that indicates the ontogeny in some way. And then also, you know, there's sign language, there's the birds who don't acquire it, you know, so it all kind of comes together in this researcher's beautiful package that the ability to speak isn't the thing that allows us to speak with the complex language that we do. It's the evolution of voluntary imagination that led to this, that the voice box was maybe there, but it took creativity imagination to get to the point where we could make the mouth sounds that we want. Yeah, I don't know. I just feel like she's limiting, they're limiting the the definition of imagination so specifically that I, it's tough for me, like think about a bower bird and what they make in their bower and the fact that they can conceptually understand what things will look like to someone else when they are putting things in one space, that brings to me a concept of imagination because you are able to conjure up what something will look like when you put it in a place when it's not there. And it's creative and it's, that's, I think, I totally understand that language is something very special that we have and there has to be specific things that brought us to that space, but I'm struggling with this in particular with the imagination thing. But this is also, this is also has to be understood as a, like the, like we were talking about like the Native Americans passing through Japan first idea. The creativity first has been a theme in a lot of anthropology as well. It's our creativity that gave us the advantage over Neanderthals. It's because of our hand-eye coordination and our use of art and our creative mind that, oh, but it turns out the cave paintings you're talking about are older than current modern humans and had to be Neanderthal. Oh, okay. Well, then it's the creativity of, stop it. You were, you studied art first and you got into anthropology because that also wasn't a hard thing to get in, get into at least. Not as good at as hard. Get, be good at as hard. There's a lot you have to- Getting into, not as. Not as hard, not as high. You didn't have to be good at math. It's fine. So you did art, man. So there's a lot of that that has these creativity first hypotheses that keep getting obliterated by something that was separated from us by 800,000 years of evolutionary history and Neanderthals also having all of this skill sets already there. And then they, oh, but did they talk? Well, they couldn't because they weren't creative. Oh, but now that's their cave paintings. Now we find Neanderthal art and statues made. And so then, well, well, forget that part. So there is an element of good information and data collected and it's fine to speculate and come up with ideas and generate ideas to pursue, but you don't have evidence that we were not creative, that we were not using language. And it's one of those tough things because you don't have time machines yet. But when we do, we find out all these answers. I'll tell you about it later. I don't want to know spoilers. Yep. I mean, this kind of a paper, it's thought provoking and it's something that we could, you know, we could chat about this and where, you know, where did, what about imagination and what about different species and language and what, you know, how did it influence that? But when it's put together in this kind of an evolutionary way, it's a just so story in a certain sense. And here's my data and it's just so. It imagines us as having less language skills as me for longer rats or prairie dogs. The word you're thinking of is meerkat. We talked about this last week. I don't know why I keep calling them meerkats. Yeah, because I just try to avoid cats when they're right again. So, but less language skills than a bird for millions of years of hominin evolution. We just couldn't figure it out. Irrediculous nonsense. That's what that idea put that idea, poppy cocks is probably a kind of bird, better language skills than apparently hominids had for millions of years. Just put that idea in the rubber sheet. It's time to let it go. Ah, oh my goodness. I'm going to let that go. We're going to let it all go. Hey, Blair, you had like one more story from earlier in the show that I missed. You, or did Justin, somebody had a story that we missed about? There was a COVID story that was jumped over. Jumped over the COVID story. I wasn't going to talk about that. I didn't read it. I forgot I put it there. Okay, you don't have to talk about it then. What was interesting is we had a guest who was talking about. We interviewed the biological anthropologists who were doing this study. And now the study is out. And it's too bad we didn't talk about it. I totally forgot to put that in there early and totally forgot it was in the COVID corner. That episode of TWIS. Find the ladies who talked about menstrual patterns related to COVID vaccines. Yeah, so the bottom, the big take home is yes, they did see an effect that women did seem to see a significant portion of women did seem to see changes to their menstrual pattern or their lack thereof for women who had gone into post menopause even that there were breakthrough bleeding moments. And so changes because of vaccination for COVID. And so instead of it's not a dangerous thing, but just maybe it's a thing that you need to tell women about you might see some changes to your cycle. So that's the bottom line. But yeah, they found some data. There's more to be done. And ask them questions about their reproductive cycle that we should maybe do that in things. Yeah, do that more for more vaccines too. Because I would bet that we would find it for a lot of them. Do that in pharmaceutical tests. Do it in everything. This is the problem. It's not gross. It's fine. It's how life happens. Get over it. Take care of people with uteruses. Thank you. Good night. Yes. And on that note. And on that note. Yes. Take care, fellow humans. Those with uteruses. Definitely. I think it's we've come to the end of the show. Did we do it? Yes, we did it. I would love to thank you for a great show. And I want to thank all of our listeners for joining us for this episode. Shout outs to Fada. Thank you so much. Especially, I mean, this is extra thanks to everyone over the last few weeks as I haven't been here. But Fada, thank you for keeping up with the show notes and social media and making everything go on that end of things. Gord, thank you for being here and in our lore and everyone who helps keep these chat rooms above board and good places to be. Thank you for being here every week. I done it before. Thank you for recording the show. And Rachel, thank you for your editing assistance and other assistance. And thank you to all of our Patreon sponsors. Thank you too. Paul Ronevich, Kevin Breardon, Noodles Jack, Brian Carrington, Matt Bates, Boatbedo for Texas, John McKee, Greg Riley Marquesson, Flo Jean, Talia Steve Leesman, aka Zima Ken Hayes, Howard Tan, Christopher Rappin, Dana Pearson, Richard, Brendan Minnish, Johnny Gridley, Remi Day, Flying Out, Christopher Dreyer, Artianne Greg Briggs, John Atwood, Rudy Garcia, Dave Wilkinson, Rodney Lewis-Paul, Phillip Shane, Kurt Larson, Craig Landon, Sue Doster, Jason Olds, Dave Neighbor, Eric Knapp, E. O. Kevin Farachan, Aaron Luthien, Steve DeBell, Bob Calder, Marjorie Paul D. Disney, David Simmelay, Patrick Pecoraro, Tony Steele, and Jason Roberts. Thank you all for your support on Patreon. And if you, you would like to support us on Patreon, head over to twist.org and click on the Patreon link for more information on next week's show. We will be back Wednesday, 8 p.m. Pacific Time, broadcasting live from our YouTube and Facebook channels and from twist.org slash live. Hey, want to listen to us as a podcast? Maybe while you use your imagination to do some arts and crafts, just search for This Week in Science, wherever 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 directly, email Kirsten at Kirsten at thisweekinscience.com, Justin at twistminion at gmail.com, or me, Blair at BlairBaz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist, T-W-I-S in the subreddit line or your email will be spam filtered through a baritone saxophone. Go through the curl, go down, go back up, go out the bell. I'll be playing a low A at the time, so all of the vowels will be closed. Go shoot straight out of that into the atmosphere and get stuck, smack onto the James Webb telescope at the second Lagrange point. Wow, that one's really not coming back. Or you can just reach out to us on the Twitter where we are at twist. Science at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you would like us to cover or address, a suggestion for an interview, a haiku that comes during the night. Please let us know. We'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from the show, remember, it's all in your head. This week in science, this week in science, there we go. This week in science, it's the end of the world. So I'm setting up the shop, got my battering pearl, 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 for all the warming with a wave of my hand, and all it'll cost you is a couple of grids coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say, I use the scientific man, I'll broadcast my absolute science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That's what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just then understand that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy. We're just trying. Weird to try and control it on this, but it's nice to have it all in here. But turn it up, make sure it doesn't loop. There's a button. Did you see there was a button? Found the button. I depressed that or I like unselected that button on all those tracks last week. I assumed it would carry over, but it didn't. It did not. And of course I didn't notice it, but what is this? This is called feeding the ducks. We can have background music feeding the ducks as we discuss all the things. Yeah, these are royalty free tracks, so we won't be putting face in YouTube jail. Feeding the ducks. Feeding the ducks. Yes. Feed the ducks. You know what I want to look at while we're feeding the ducks? Ducks? What are we going to look at? Do you have more pictures? Yeah. Yes. Awesome. There we go. You know, just a COVID cover for a flute. Wow. Wow. I mean, that would really help you get your fingering right. You can't look at your hands while you're playing. Yeah, look at this one for the saxophone. What? Yeah. Well, you're just basically wrapping the instruments in like N95 material. Yeah. Probably not N95 material. No, no. It's definitely a surgical mask material for sure. Oh, there's the ones with the holes in them that you were talking about. But these are the things, this looks more like what they tested. Yeah. Yeah, the actual bell cuppers, which are, they're just, they're going to be just dampening, right? They're just stopping airflow at the end of the instrument. It's like, let me put a plug in that instrument. Is it piccolo, I think? Piccolo. Feeding the ducks is very chill. Oh, John Staley, thank you. Oh my God, look at this one. What do you have here for me, Blair? Look at it. I am the masked man. I am Zorro. I come with my flute. Gosh, that's just, that's a nightmare. You do not know what is in this bag. Oh my God. What is in the bag? Oh, thank you. That's definitely interesting. I know COVID safer. That's, it's not COVID safe, it's safe for slightly, slightly. Just put the orchestra in individual tents. Put them in a tent and then just, you know, microphones and then you'd have speakers in the place where the audience is and then you just listen to the show. Unrelated, Kiki. Yes. Do you have anything you want to talk about in a newsletter? Because I'll have time to put one together this weekend. What? This is our summer newsletter. Yeah, Justin, do you want to write something for our newsletter? Because I'll have time this weekend to put one together. You're muted. Our yearly newsletter. Yes. We've got a newsletter. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. I could put something together. Okay. Well, email it to me before Saturday. You have two days. Oh gosh. I have two days. Yeah. All right. What's the theme of this newsletter? Up to you. Oh. It could be from the desk of Justin. Uh-oh. As long as it's twist related. Oh man. Or twist relevant, I guess. Twist relevant would be good. Relevant. Like, what's your favorite science movie this month? Or are you doing any science summer vacations? Have you, I don't know. Like, I don't know. Or the history of anti-science propaganda. Sure. Yeah. Or something. I will figure it out. I got till Saturday. As long as it's family friendly. You have till Saturday. Family friendly. All Saturday. I'm doing it. Well, I have all Saturday. He's a day ahead of you anyway. Okay. I have all Saturday. All right. I'm just making it very clear. Okay. I plan to sit down and do it on Saturday. And what do we do with this newsletter? Do we print it out in 12 days? I'm going to go to Kinko's and print this newsletter out and leave it at cafes. I have things to show you guys. You do. Oh my goodness. I've been thinking about newsletter recently also. Oh yeah. Lego bird. I love that. Cute. I also have a polar bear. Is that Sadie? No, it's a polar bear. It's a polar bear. I like that polar bear. That's cute. I have this Saddleback-ish. That's a pretty fish. That is cool. I love Blair's Lego creativity. I have this Euromastix. What? That's awesome. Did you make all these up? Yeah. This is great. And then this is my favorite one. This is the frog that we watched a couple weeks ago and ended up in YouTube jail. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's what I've done so far. Those are awesome. I haven't decided yet how I'm going to finish them off. Like if I'm going to, I might, I'm considering taking pictures out like in nature with them. Oh, that could be cool. Or I'm considering like doing an arts and crafts background of some sort. Yeah, I like the diorama idea. The pro con. So the pro with the doing it like in nature and taking pictures is I think it'll reproduce into calendars better. The con, the pro for the arts and craftsy background is that then I can make shadow boxes that we could send out. And the Lego could get sent out to somebody at a very high level. But you'd have to tear it down and give instructions on how to make it again. Oh God. That's the whole point of Lego. You don't. Where's going to craggle these? So listen, nobody has already made Lego. Justin, you'd be surprised. Also, this is art that I made. This is not something that I have instructions for. You would have to create them. No, that's not what I'm doing. I'm making I'm making art, Justin. I'm not making a Lego set. There's a difference. No, there is. Yes, there is. Don't you dare tell me how to do my art. Okay, fair enough. You can't do that, Justin. Do you tell people when you give them your art, Justin, this is how you make this painting. Here, I'm going to rip it up and hear the instructions on how to put it back together. Yeah, I do tell people how I make it. But I think when specifically when it comes to Lego, that's how come it's, because if you just went and it's like, oh, here's a toy made out of Legos, you'd go, oh, here's a crudely made cheap piece of plastic toy. That's no fun. Nobody wants that. The whole thing is, it's oh, it's a puzzle. You're giving somebody an already completed puzzle. That's not how that works. I think they're great pieces of art, Blair. They're fantastic. They are. I'm 100% giving props for the design. That is awesome. That is art. But it's also a puzzle that you're then handing somebody. It was a puzzle that Blair solved in her brain and she made it. And it's not for anybody else to make it. They can look at it. And if somebody gets one of these from being a Patreon sponsor at some point in the future, they will have the choice of whether or not they want to take it apart once they own it and try to put it back together. Or if they, you know, want to let like the three old. Oh, and there's no instructions. Oh, terrible. Hey, gotta give them a little bit of crackle. Send a couple of pictures of all you're doing right now. Justin is telling me reasons to not send this to people. Right. No. No. Did you glue them together? You didn't. Not yet. I know. Identity four probably has more of your art pieces than many people out there, Blair. I know Identity four is gonna for sure want these on my computer, not like me. Come on. Not enough. I know. I know. You don't have to make instructions, Blair. Don't listen. Yeah. Don't worry. I'm not. I'm not listening at all. Do you know how long this took? I'm sure it was just a minute or two. I think the diorama boxes kind of thing would be really cool, but maybe you just need to do like pick one and try both, see what the pictures come out like, and see what the diorama looks like, and then decide which direction to go. Yeah. Because that's my thing is I think the dioramas might not photograph very well. Yeah. If you can get good exterior shots, then that could be the right way to go. It just, it can be, that can be a, that can be tricky. At least with the diorama box, you can control lighting. You can play with it. You can adjust it. You can tweak it in so many ways. When you're going outside, you go, oh gosh, it's overcast and I'm getting terrible. Yeah, but you're forgetting, Justin, I have access to 28 regional parks now. Wow. Okay. Yeah, this is true. She has ecosystems galore. Yeah. I have the Santa Cruz Mountains. I have the LV so slew. It's too bad you don't like the outdoors, Blair. Oh yeah. Hey, if you go to the Santa Cruz Mountains though, watch out for mountain lions. That's the thing I always hear about Santa Cruz Mountains. You're just afraid of animals, Justin. I'm afraid of big cats. I'm more afraid of big cats than I am of anything else on the planet. That is, that is nightmare juice for me, is seeing a big cat in the wild. Oh no, terror. Out of, just the thought of it right now and I've got like the little neck hairs are standing up like, oh, oh, that would not be cool. Schnaggo, oh my gosh, Schnaggo took, took count of how long our show is today, a tight 125. Nice work, everyone. Well, Kiki was gone. We had to catch up. We had to catch up. There are some things, if Rachel's still watching at this point, you can edit a whole bunch of stuff out. Just edit out. Don't make, I don't want to release a two hour podcast. I mean, some people like that, but. Hey, we were talking and then I, but you weren't here. And it was a question for you. So is, do we have an hour and a half slot at the KTVS now? Oh, Sadie, we did. I don't know if we do right now. We did for like almost a whole pandemic. Have an hour and a half long slot. Now maybe the students are back and they've got people to fill slots. I think it's getting more filled up and we are back to having an hour slot now again. Okay. And they do the editing for it. They figure out what they want. Are you? KTVS? No. So you edit to an hour for them? Or Rachel does. Or just, or it just gets cut off when they're like. Well, on a show like today, it was like the first section up until Blair's Animal Corner. That was almost an hour. So they can just like cut it off right there. Oh, you're done now? Okay. Okay. So they don't edit, but they might. Just fade it out. Yeah. Just fade it out when it's time to be done. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. That's why it's one of those things that's important to state at the beginning of the show. Hey, head over to our website. And you can find the whole show over at our website. Oh, so because I was worried last week, because I think we had like an 85 minute show or something. Like we were just shy and I was worried that we had a long enough. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But But even then with like carts and yeah, yeah, exactly. That would still. 85 would. Yeah. But you have to use all of it. Yeah. Yeah. With all of the other in, yeah, like Jess was saying, the interstitial stuff, the radio station has to add would take up probably about five minutes and it would be fine. Yeah. But I think we're down to an hour now. So I don't think it's as big of a concern. Last week's show flew. Oh, you guys were quick. You were quick last week. The week before we were right around 90 minutes also. Wait, was there a show the week before? Wait. Yeah, didn't we do? That was the one we were. You're right. That was the one we were off. Why did I think we did two without you? It was that we did. There was what there was the January, not January, June 29th, June 29th. That's the one that was also close to 90 is what I meant. Okay. That's I'm just. We can do 90 if we have no guests and there are only two of us. This is what I'm learning. Well, I mean, I could bring less. Like I could have ditched the livers. I know we could all really wanted to talk about it. There's good stories. You need to we need to talk about the science. I can't wait to see Rachel's note. Cut Blair's hummus anecdote. Yeah, yeah, I think that one could go. All right, Jess, you're telling me what what mine is going to get cut. Okay. You can do the nasty mood today. I'm not trying to be nasty. No, I just He's salty. Oh yeah, that could go. Oh, people are going to take apart your art. They have to. Otherwise, it's garbage. Okay. Okay. I might be a little bit better. This is true. I'm a little axe edge to grind for getting left alone in a breakout room at a skeptic skeptical conference skeptical conference. Did anyone pop in? Yeah, the people like nobody nobody was knew what we were there or who we were because we didn't we didn't do we didn't get because we discombobulated thing. We didn't get to even announce that it was coming on that we were going there. None of that happened. So nobody that so the person of a genie was very sweet. He's very sweet. Yeah, she was very sweet. And she she hung out with me and a couple of other folks stopped by and had some some ranty conversations. The the Bill Nye was on the show there. He was he was fun. And did a did a Jeopardy show like a fake Jeopardy show. Oh, cool. Jeopardy. That was that was pretty. That's fun. Did you enjoy the conference itself? Did you get to see much of it? I did get to see a bunch of it. Yeah, it was it was cool. It was cool. Nice. I spent a lot of time like the first I think the first day of it. I think almost every speaker was talking about homeopathy. Yeah, there's a lot of lot of focus on homeopathy this year. That's interesting. Like it just seems like a very quiet thing right now, I guess. I don't know. So I guess with covid and everything. Yeah, so not as quiet as you might think it might not be reaching you or me. One of the speakers was bringing a running down the very popular homeopathy covid cures that were that have been circulating in India. And it was pretty hilarious because you know, like one of the big ones that circulated a lot that got a lot of people is that you know, salted onions is a way to be covered. And he's like, one of the things is the study is done then because that's a very common thing that people are already eating. This is this is part of a staple diet in India is salted onion. So if it worked, you wouldn't have needed it. Right. Everybody's eating it already. So that's how like terrible like some of it some of the advice was. You know, so a lot of it a lot of it focused on that. And it was interesting too because one of the speakers was a trained homey of path and and his parents were homey of paths back in Germany. So it was like he was second generation of doing this and this guy's gone on to become a doctor doctor. But was was listing off some of the things that have that can be used in homeopathy cures. And one of them was a duck doesn't matter how you use the duck, the presence of the duck or the absence of a duck is on par with any other homeopathy cure. So I'm putting on the feeding the duck background track. This is what it's called and the chat room. Hey, how come you don't highlight the Derek shit comments and put it up there so everybody can see it. That's a good no not that one. No, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah, the one right above it. That's the one. There's the one. No, no, no, this one. Somebody patting Justin. Hey, it's all Derek. Derek really knows how to get highlighted. Oh, Pam. Yeah, toxoplasmic gondii. It's the bigger the cat, the more toxoplasmic gondii you got to worry about. That's not good. Mountain lion toxoplasmic gondii. Let's see. Fada was trying to get a question popped up to the top. Kira in the YouTube channel wants to know which episode did we talk about Sir David Attenborough and the Apple TV plus dinosaur show and them not doing really good science with a fossil they found. They pushed it out ahead of actually peer reviewed science. That was the one. I don't recall the story. I don't remember. I don't think we did it was an after show. It wasn't an after show. I don't think we may we might have brought it up in the show maybe. I don't remember the conversation at all. Well, it had to do so there was the it's the the the story that the archaeologist guy the dinosaur guy has been trying to tell about the dinosaur extinction and how everything happened within like a short few hours because of that big inland surge up the Mississippi river valley I think and there's the the whole site where they found like crystals from the falling molten glass from the molten glass right in the fishgills and there are fossils in all sorts of orientations in the mud in the muck and so they've got this one really cool site and there have been a few papers that have come from it but they had I think if this is the story there was the dinosaur David Attenborough did dinosaurs a whole show on it but I was just very upset that it was more just like fawning over this one particular hypothesis and not really talking to other dinosaur experts who have actual like real big criticisms about the work that's been done so but I don't remember exactly when that was I think you're gonna have to go back and watch them all again Kira I don't remember it being uh unless I was not here I was saying the same thing but we weren't both not here just yeah well you see I mean that's the thing I think we reported the story when it was like the first news of it came out but then there was like some other stuff that was coming out but it was only basically this this document this this BBC documentary this dinosaurs thing that was coming out and yeah I don't like science through media so I was mad about it that's all I remember well but you know here's here's the Justin defends Justin defends uh scientific uh incompleteness in in media science is a conversation oh sure we always know that this is a conversation you can't wait to the for the definitive as much as I uh gosh all the the Native Americans being from this Japanese fisher culture as annoying as that is start that conversation anyway if it's not completely right we'll fix it uh there's there's there's a conversation to be had there regardless don't want to knowingly ever put out bad information or misleading or intentionally right yeah you don't want to knowingly put out bad information but if you what happens very often in the media is that things are presented and I'm you know it's presented as this is real this is this so these are this is the fact yeah and then people watch the one show and that is all they think about as opposed to the conversation that we know and the the the debates actually about the details but if we wait that's where I get annoyed if it's done right it's right but whatever yeah but if we wait uh you know the problem is well I've seen Novus specials uh talking about gravitons right it's not a thing we've discovered we actually still don't know and still haven't found the mechanism for gravity we know it's related to mass and moment it's like we know relation that we can we can figure it out well enough to put a satellite in a Lagrange point and go to the moon and back and rocketry and all that f f equals m a stuff is uh plenty for all that but but we don't have a mechanism that doesn't mean we can't talk about it so if people don't understand that it's a conversation that's something to introduce but it should I agree that if they presented it as fact and as not here's one idea of what how this all might have gone about and a lot of that again it is I'm still the ancient one and the characterization of the ancient one was was one of those it was one guy who had the theory of this Japanese ancient morphology matching Native American and made that connection who's also the guy who mysteriously was hanging on to the bones that kept disappearing and reappearing and wanted to study them uh and there was all the legal battle over the ancient one uh that took place and then the end the papers and the and the the the reports and the articles were all I just wasn't there I found the episode episode 871 oh 871 that's a good episode yeah I like that one yeah what episode number is this 884 I really was like 871 we're not even there yet no where are we how'd that happen no I don't remember it was more than three months ago yeah I was uh it was a while maybe not even here or if I was I did not slept yeah I took I would I think the were you on that let's see yeah it was April 13th episode 871 and I'm going to scroll through our text messages it's how to find out what there's the show was April 13th April 13th oh you know it was Justin you were there you talked about uh primate default mode network organization I did oh no like close it I should have been there for that April 13th yeah but that was like three months ago that might as well have been three years ago there's so much content that flows through this show I know I have a hard time remembering what we talk about for sure yeah you both were there you don't remember that particular episode you were both there it's fine I believe you there's so much science that has happened yeah it's hard to remember all the stories but we have to remember them maybe write them down because we have to figure out our favorite ones for the end of the year it's been six months I still think one of my favorites is the goldfish driving the car right at the beginning of the year yeah it's fabulous I think I even said I've done it this is it this is all we're gonna go with and again it's only because I have uh less than the goldfish's memory uh I think a couple of them from today I like I liked about my stories was the way they were found like one was this this fossilized in a rock that didn't seem interesting that you know got scanned but then they couldn't look at it again they couldn't go back and do a good scan a better scan for a while but it was one of those delayed finds in the box kept everything went back and finally had a post stock or something that could go down there and look at it and continue the study and finds a new species with the really really interesting implications and then the the ear canal one because I really like that because it didn't require a breakthrough in technology to get there it took I mean that's conceivably that is a discovery that could have been made 20 something years ago 40 years ago maybe even if maybe but uh but that understanding uh that that that accumulation of knowledge to understand how your canals work and how they should uh differ how they would differ between cold blooded and warm blooded and and then going out and doing a quick study on that purely observational science that's unlocking uh a a long held mystery in in science about whenabouts and how that came about the warm bloodedness of the mammal I think I I think I remember sometimes more how was how a study got got uh got going or how they made the discovery then then the actual details of the study and then and then or the other one gonorrhea leads to greater mental longevity you know that that one is that one is so that whole grandparent uh the grandmother theory or whatever it is I mean the question we don't know I mean the grandmother hypothesis we've been wondering for you know I mean this doesn't answer it but it's like why did we start having longevity why did we start having grandmothers like is it because they help the young like what is going on there so it's going to be that but then yeah but and and you can see how to get there that yeah and you can see that that as a benefit would make oh group a of uh early homo sapiens versus group b of homo sapiens they don't have that brand one is going to be better because there's going to be somebody to watch the kids while everybody goes out hunting and foraging and and maybe being able to have an accumulation of knowledge to pass down knowledge and lessons learned uh to skipping a generation even that that that vestige of knowledge being there to pass on important wisdoms to a next in the next generation would also be an advantage but then knowing that part of what makes that advantage possible is because uh uh some group of humans survived reproductive age gonorrhea because they had a this genetic mutation mutation that made it yet another selector that makes that so it's and they think it was interesting I don't think I actually talked about in the study is that they think this uh this would have started as an attack on an invasive disease that this became a benefit but then migrated because then that that receptor the migrated to other parts of up to the brain and then found a new role in the brain which could have been off target role that could have been negative but this one happened to be positive and that's part of how natural selection works it's not it's not that oh gosh now our kids are so slow to develop we need to have uh older old people and so then you start pushing in that direction evolutionarily now it's these happy accidents that make it so there's a group now that has this longevity that has mental capacity much much further beyond menopause that adds all these downstream events to the the pods of humans that uh that have this this trait so cool yeah oh we'd like to think it's our art and our creativity and our philosophies uh that led to early human success nope it was gonorrhea and old people and now and now the old people are catching more chlamydia and gonorrhea and the retirement homes well i mean at that point there are drug resistant versions of these diseases starting to pop up careful out there kids yeah stay away from old people who want to have sex that's but that's always good advice not just today always good advice yeah all right everyone i'm still on an edit note on now i don't know if we want to talk about old people having sex with young people on the show i don't know if that's the after show health warning oh okay after show after show yeah i mean for the video i mean yeah we're already not doing these vids videos for kids so we're fine these live streams yeah there are thing is it bedtime i think so i think it's bedtime i'm still on europe time good morning summer time yeah good morning i've been up all night again it's getting better it's getting better you're right justin it is easier going the europe to us route oh yeah but it's but it's rough waking up every day yeah the other way is hard say good night blare good night players say good morning justin good morning justin say i don't know what time it is kiki night kiki yeah good something everyone all right everyone have a wonderful week thank you so much for joining us again we do hope to see you here again next week and in the meantime if you are traveling internationally or on domestic flights oh wear a mask maybe wear multiple masks it is a disaster out there in the world and uh you know and if you're heading to denmark yeah if you're flying to denmark bring an air conditioner bring an air conditioner i will pay you cash cash money the second you land everything's getting so hot right now whatever you paid for it europe is so hot france is on fire i left right before the fires london hit a hide at high of 104 degrees things are without air conditioners no air conditioners you can order one on amazon right they don't have no they don't let amazon into denmark then go to your local target it's a union country okay then find a shop it sells box fan there's a way i know i know a way to do it go to get a box fan but you but it's it's amazon from uh uk and germany and they don't have air conditioners there either they're they've never heard nobody does nobody has air conditioners because they've never had to really have them and it's also just wear your mask and just oh we can do this people no we can't we walked on the moon we can do anything together moonshot yeah okay you know what our moonshot is getting here together next week let's do that more science next week next wednesday eight p.m pacific time thank you everyone and take care thank you so much bye good night good morning stay healthy stay sane stay curious and imagine it