 this says we're live are we live are we here is everybody there are you are where you are I will wait for the bat signal that says we are live to you and that we are ready to go I believe it is soon said I put the bat signal somewhere away as soon as we go live I'm putting I have oh I see lights camera action yay so we are going live in three two this is twist this week in science episode number 772 recorded on Wednesday May 6th 2020 celebrate the science teachers I'm Dr. Kiki welcome to twist today we will fill your head with effectiveness thanks and commonality but first disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer science it's the one thing upon which the world is now relying to make civilization possible again while there have been significant advances in all areas of science over the past several decades while technology can cross continents instantaneously oceans to to keep loved ones in contact while new medicine can slow prevent and even cure illnesses that once were swift and deadly while we have discovered new planets unraveled mysteries of human origin and learn so much about how our natural world functions while the fundamental way in which the physics of the universe is constructed continues to tell us stories through super gliders super novers and super cool space probes the one thing we could not do is remain vigilant to a threat while novel is anything but new our current predicament was not unimaginable it was imagined it was warned about and not for nothing because it's happened before we humans rely so much on science that it seems as though we've gotten to the point where we're beginning to take it for granted as if discovery was just a natural progression of time wait around new stuff will just show up fix everything as if there's a separate world almost world where all of us normal humans go about our day-to-day business and then this other world of super adulting scientists who are focused on the troubles that might present themselves to the world with all of the resources they need to anticipate complete research and avert tragedy and in a way that's true except for the research funding part if we take one lesson from this threat it is that research not rhetoric creates the security of this country that academic insight not just military might can keep our borders safe and maybe most importantly of all that this week in science is coming up next I've got the kind of mind I can't get enough I want to discover is it happen every day of the week there's only one place to go to find a good science to you Kiki and Blair and a good science to you too Justin Blair and everyone out there welcome to another episode of this week in science we are back again to bring you science because we love talking about science we love learning things and asking questions and digging into the universe so good and yet two universes what two worlds no we are one we are connected we are on the same planet we are on the same planet thank goodness for that and we have a bunch of stories for everyone who is here on this planet with us and wants to share in the science with twists this week I have stories ooh about heavenly bodies dark ones and gassy ones and I also have mushrooms for people oh okay let's see those for later we gotta get through the show first all right I'll say Justin what do you have yeah I've got smart research into making more effective viruses as well as the wireless car charges so we're gonna have smart viruses that can drive themselves wherever they want great or fly this seems like a target shopping list okay I need mushrooms I need a car charger all right let's car charger so yeah and then maybe something else if the show runs run short okay and Blair what's in the animal corner oh I have dolphins salmon and koalas tonight all the animals we love them these are except me salmon we like to eat them we wouldn't call them cute dolphins and koalas those are cute I mean some people might find salmon cute they already catch one people take pictures with them like look at me and my fish and their little baby fries perhaps cute their little fish faces oh salmon yeah little baby fishes are parents as we jump into the show I want to remind you that subscribing to the twist podcast on your favorite podcast platform or on YouTube or Facebook will bring you twists every week that's right we make a new show every week and if you subscribe to us on these platforms you will find us more easily so just look for this week in science if that is something that interests you you can also find us at twist.org our website but now it's time for the science all right jump off the dock and into our COVID update because that is something that's important to do to just get it out there for everybody get get this big news off of our off of our chest for everybody because we're still in this together and we are making our way through it even as our governments try to open our economy and bring people back to work hopefully we are able to do that in a safe manner and that is what a lot of the conversation is about these days numbers of dead and infected continue to increase around the world but the science is something that's important for us to focus on number one the sensationalism of the science is something that will be dangerous to the way that you make your decisions and perceive the world with code. Yeah sensationalism I think the big one that I've seen with COVID that I keep having to stop people about is this idea that if you take an antigen test and you are positive for the antigen then then you can do whatever you want. Yeah this is this is if you if the there is no guarantee that we will have immunity to this this is one of the oh poor key we got you typing it okay there's no guarantee this is the scary thing really there's no guarantee that we will have immunity to this that's immunity is not something that has happened with other SARS it's not something I have with Mervis it's not with the other coronavirus this some there's no immunity you continue to get it which means might not be possible to come up with a vaccine and if you can't come up with a vaccine that means that this is going to stay this way for a very long time now treatments can get improved treatments can definitely get improved so that when people she's not she can't see us she needs a second screen oh no she's doing a full story right now yeah she's in it too this is you can tell she's deep into the story than telling this story and is going to be so it isn't it weird though like she had that she would talk this long and not hear me say anything like me not interjecting me not going oh well wait what about and like not once that should be this is mission no Megan anyway so so so if we can't find immunity Blair yes so is this what do we do what would you hear so that's a good question I mean it's it's a question of if you can find kind of not full immunities but treatments that are more effective than it becomes less scary but I think it's also just a question of with the antigen test it's kind of two sides of it one this idea that if you have the antigen you're bulletproof and so you can go do whatever you want but you know whether or not that's true perhaps we'll find out there's something to the antigen that would be great if you can't be reinfected that would be a best case scenario I think right now for what we don't we know that now but I think the other side of it is that even if you're immune that doesn't mean you should go gallivanting all around town which I think is the part that is the disconnect for me is there are still people that are essential workers who might be new compromise who might be over 65 who might have other issues not to mention the fact that we're learning that people can get really sick at all pretty much all ages now yeah even even in the healthiest of times I think people should really like tap down on the gallivanting there's too much gallivanting taking place in our modern society where did you find where do you pick your words from Blair when were you born anything oh just 1865 I'm trying to born in 1865 oh she just found out oh kinky yeah well whether it was only 11 minutes or so yeah I was yeah I was born in 1865 gallivanting in what was around in Brooklyn New York made my way across the United States wagon yes I think I was looking at my notes I finally saw the private chat that said that I was talking to nobody so here I am hi so all we were talking about we were we were just vamping just chatting about how some of the sensationalism that's happening is this whole idea that the antigen test is this like silver bullet and that we for some reason we still don't know if you could be reinfected or not yeah how is it taking this long take one person who's had it confirmed and you know put a thumb in it let's just one human for just one just one human that's all we're gonna do stop yeah where the antigen test themselves are not being well regulated and so they're all spewing out there with different efficacies and then from there you have this idea that if you have the antigen you can go do whatever you want so that's what I was talking about is like for one you might not actually have the antigen nor do we think maybe that matters but for two even if that did make you immune to getting reinfected which we don't know yet then you still run the the opportunity of carrying and spreading accidentally because you said gallivanting and then I tuned out yeah that's a great point they could go out catch again and then be reinfecting people wow anyway so what story did you bring Kiki do you want to go through it again oh yeah Kiki did you have a COVID story I can I I'm just gonna hang up only the live audience we'll get it I was going for it and now I was like she's been hasn't my point that was like hasn't she been talking too long without hearing me interject at all isn't she getting suspicious yeah I haven't said anything I was that's why I started that's why I started I'm like wow I had to start looking around Justin hasn't said anything and this long can't be right okay okay so we want to focus on the science and I was going to say number one we want to focus on the way that science can be sensationalized because very often the media can pick up on things and run with them and that leads a lot of public dialogue that is not useful and can in fact be harmful so we need to be very considerate of the sources of the information and I just want to reiterate for people to be where the the preprint preprints are awesome for the scientific community and they are wonderful for the for the fast turnover of scientific ideas because scientists are able to get their ideas out faster have them shot down more quickly by the scientific community errors can be spotted more quickly and in in we've seen this all along with COVID-19 how it's progressed that preprints have been a little bit of an issue but recently the LA Times published on a preprint in the bio archive from a group of very well established scientists about their work looking at the genetics of SARS-CoV-2 and mutations in the in the virus the LA Times ran with the headline that said that mutate the study found that mutations are increasing the infectiousness of SARS-CoV-2 of COVID-19 that these mutations are leading it to be to spread more quickly and not just the LA Times LA Times published it lots of other people jumped on it and so suddenly everybody in the world is going oh no we're gonna this is a bad thing we're gonna get it more easily when in reality it was published on a preprint archive and as soon as it was it was published and people got wind of it they started to tear it apart and there are many criticisms of the research in fact one of which is that a lot of it is correlational and it could simply have to do with the data set that they're looking at and they are finding this mutation in places where there are lots of cases where they're all lots of people just because that's the way it's spread not that it has increased or is increasing infectiousness so anyway there are multiple criticisms of the paper yet the sensationalism through a headline is what gets to people first and can lead to a lot of the perceptions by the public so I just want to reiterate to our audience how important it is to look past the headline and to also look past the major media articles sometimes and look for more experts because and make sure that the studies that you're talking about are peer reviewed because that it is one additional level of certainty that you have in in in what you're seeing in the science and if I can add to that I think directly related to that is people grabbing news stories from social media in which the headline is read or digested and that's it so that's kind of the other side of this too right is sometimes the reporting could actually be quite good but because the headline it has the sensationalist headline that's all people take away from it you know the I'm immediately I'm thinking of the murder hornets that were on the internet this week and yeah they're called murder hornets actually what that means is that they kill bees not humans and so of course people read that and thought that murder hornets were killing humans for you it's like it's the court that's the COVID-19 version of the Africanized bees right you know is the killer bees the murder hornets yeah yeah they're coming they're all coming for you yeah but yeah take it with a grain of salt read it read it source so so there's a convenient thing too there's a very convenient thing which is that all research is conducted by humans who have names and those humans with names who have degrees are doing their research at institutions which also have recognizable names you see where I'm getting here so there's there's there are published publications that are doing what you're calling the peer reviewing not just this okay and I think these first paper things are coming out now just because of the the rush in the buzz and people are throwing things out there trying to share it to other researchers this isn't normally the way this is done preprints are I mean preprints are used very often they're big they're gaining popularity they've been used in physics for a very long time but in biology they're gaining popularity and yeah it's that they're throwing it out there for other scientists yes uh so but then if it's in a publication there's also likely people who have reviewed it or who can review it and who have looked there's a whole bunch of really easy steps to having vetted information if it comes from science names and and if if you ever hear claims like you know that that it was too far advanced or for the other anybody else to be understanding or commenting on it that's ridiculous if it's so simple that scientists wouldn't deign to go down to that far and consider something like stop like don't believe any claims just look at names institutions publications if you have that company and a date because there's I can tell you there is a study that I didn't bring tonight there's a study I didn't bring it tonight that shows that tobacco is actually very effective against tuberculosis now no it's a real it's a real research paper uh but it was published in 1909 so it also matters when the research was written that's also very important if it's 1909 not that it wasn't published by leading scientists in 1909 but maybe there's been more added to the story since then so how how recent is yeah so have you ever seen there's an old skit with bob newhart it from saturday night live where he is a therapist and his form of therapy is just telling people to stop it they start talking about their problems and he says okay okay okay stop it that's just that's his therapy he's like but why do I stop it and I yeah I feel like if we could just when it comes to media we just remember to stop it look for the source the timeliness the objectivity and the publication yes I love it stop it there you go just follow bob newhart I want that tattoo that's a really good one just stop it source timeliness objectivity publication it can help every time all right moving on from there though there is another study looking at the genetics of this of SARS-CoV-2 that is published this week uh it's published in the uh it's available online it's a journal pre-proof for science direct and from Elsevier and in this study they look at a number of sites in the SARS-CoV-2 genome and they look at how it transmitted around the globe seeing that there are several places in which there have been reintroductions over and over so that there are multiple genetic lineages maybe in washington state because lots of people came from different places where their particular infection happened to originate and they have found deleted recurrent mutations that might indicate ongoing adaptation of SARS-CoV-2 to us hosts and they recommend that we should continue to monitor these patterns of genetic diversity but it doesn't come to any kind of implications of whether or not it's becoming more infectious or less infectious it just they have a number of new mutations within various strains that are of interest and that could be points for treatments or targeted drug treatments that we could develop at some point and so it's not it checking out these mutations is very important to yes figure out how it's adapting to us and whether it's adapting to us in a way that will cause a worse uh outcome at some point or if we can use it to our advantage or if it's gonna be more symbiotic well i mean and not symbiotic necessarily but like uh they they do something with the coronaviruses don't kill bats um mers doesn't kill bats right the sars doesn't kill bats and as we talked about last week parasites do a better job if they don't kill yeah and and and the the virus is probably doing something as well as the bats also probably doing something to make that relationship work now maybe i've done this over a very vast amount of time i don't know um but i wonder if there is is there's i don't know enough about virology to know if there's a case out there of a virus that entered society was trouble and then was then became sort of just normal less harmful right yeah endemic that's an interesting question so what where within human history it would become less harmful not necessarily because of our medical adaptations but because it adapted to become less harmful to us yes because the because you were gonna you had to suspect that maybe not completely lethal because that would you know sort of turns into a dead end there anyway first first transmission but something that called caused illness that then the really sick people were less likely to interact with others and the one the versions of it the little mutations of it that were less hindrance of a hindrance to catch and persisted and spread more and continued into society it'd be kind of interesting to know if that's a know of an example i mean i must have happened i don't i don't know of an example but that's a great question i hope i don't know honestly we haven't known about viruses really that long in terms of modern science so i feel animal cues yeah even looking at other animals and viruses and stuff i'm not sure that's something that we've been looking at long enough to really be able to catch because unless it's killing things we might not even have known to look for it right you know very interesting question we have all sorts of viruses in us that are helpful but yeah yeah another study that we need to keep an eye on and there have been a few of these where researchers are starting to do retrospective analyses of patients that may have had an odd case of pneumonia or other respiratory issue back before january or february even reports from france of a case that they looked at have they retrospectively diagnosed the patient as having covered but once again researchers are saying there are many many many many many issues with this particular with this particular there are many many issues with this particular good night i love you okay i'm going i love you good night no worries go to bed no just you knock things over this way please go i know t-pose okay you don't have to worry about uh having a hairdresser open who's you got your own hair my focus is shot um anyway but you were saying something about how brilliant that was going no so amazing researchers amazing brilliant researchers are criticizing the study and saying that there are uh critical flaws with the methodology of of the retrospective analyses and that there's a lot of uh there could be a lot of issues with even contamination of the sample that they used for the study uh is just one of many so um once again a single case being retrospectively diagnosed as having COVID-19 is not a study per se it's not an analysis of multiple cases and until we have really well-controlled analyses we should not be making any uh conclusions about whether or not COVID has been around since before January it could have been i mean it absolutely could have been but i'm just struggling with the COVID research is kind of the combo of these these two stories right is that we want to move things forward as fast as we possibly can we all want to get out of our homes we want to get the economy going we want everybody to go be go back to school and all this stuff so that i understand there's an urge to accelerate processes right now and in some cases that's probably something that needs to be discussed and there's things that need to be streamlined absolutely but that is not universal with everything with the word COVID in it because there are really negative things that can happen from us skipping processes in checking on science and making sure things are correct and repeatable and all this stuff it's kind of it's kind of the the catch 22 of it all right we want to do it fast but we want to do it right yep yeah and so this might take uh 20 years it could who knows but you know in the meantime we're working on it i meant that literally though uh i meant because you were saying Blair that there there aren't we haven't been studying perhaps viruses to the degree that we've been studying bacteria and other on this planet it's not as big of a field boy i bet there's a lot of kids who've been missing school lately want to figure out what this virus thing is all about and and want to and want to do something about it you know there's i think the next generation of virologists are going to have a lot more impetus yes a lot more inspiration perhaps than virologists of the past i like that that's a good silver lining silver lining um another question is about the accuracy of some of the tests we talked last week about uh antibodies and their accuracy and we discussed one particular test yeah the false negatives and false positives well since last week the FDA has even turned around and reassessed the way that it allows companies to come out with their uh with their tests for the public and the regulation is becoming a bit stricter there are some 200 tests for serology the antibodies that show whether or not you have been infected or been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 and there have been a few more analyses one of them from a group called the covid testing project dot org um out of UCSF that are they've analyzed independently analyzed a number of the ELISA tests and also the fast strip tests and the ELISA tests take a much longer period of time to run but they are supposedly much more accurate and can give information on viral load or in this particular case the antibody the the number of antibodies or how many antibodies are showing up there's kind of a a if you're looking at the signal under fluorescent light you have a brighter glow if there's more antibody or less there's a less of a glow and then in for the strip tests it's kind of like a pregnancy test it's either you got it or you don't and now those are really quick and the question is they're the two variables of specificity and what's the other what's the other variable there are two variables that are very important uh accuracy and uh what's it is it is it uh precise or is it accurate exactly it's pretty much that's pretty much what it is is it precise or is it accurate and there are these these two variables that are being looked at and the FDA wants them to be within particular bounds and if the precision or the accuracy is within these particular bounds then that's great but otherwise and because it's going to limit the number of false negatives and false positives um but uh so right now though they're finding that a lot of these tests are very aren't working very well and from the COVID testing project they've discovered that many of the tests are really not good early in the exposure so if you're getting these tests after you've maybe five days into being having been exposed it's not going to show very much and they do a lot better after about 15 to 20 days so there's like there's a time aspect to how long you've been in contact with this virus that affects the outcome of these tests yeah which is really strange too because I have I've also heard that the viral load is higher before you show symptoms uh is that it's highest point before you've started to show the symptoms to it which would indicate that it was happening that was happening earlier on but I guess the antibodies show up later much later I don't know yeah and there's a difference in which antibody so the IgM's or the IgG's IgM show up much earlier IgG which is one that is is hoped to confer immunity is one that shows up later um yeah so there's there are a lot of aspects that are why are we still hoping how could how do we not know of anybody who's gotten it twice I mean I got I mean if I could I wouldn't leave the house ever again there are reports of people having gotten it twice okay lots of yeah then that see that sounds like there's not immunity well that's the question that's but there are not a lot of those so the question is whether or not it's individuals who are uh whether it's individuals who are just not clearing the virus and having it researched oh interesting or if they even had it and there's no way to tell the difference if they even had if they had the flu the first time it was called that because nobody tested right and then and then they went out and thought they were immune to it like Blair's point earlier wandered out what is it gallivanting about and then got it for real because they didn't need to wear a mask so why would they right didn't need to wash my hands all the time I've already had it so so the word I was looking for was the mayor of the mayor of Las Vegas thinks she got it no test thinks she got it and is now immune to it with absolutely no evidence right like it's insane so the word I was looking for was sensitivity so the two factors are specificity and sensitivity and uh and those are important aspects of the tests uh additionally and fada in the uh chat room is talking about the release of the antibody tests without full fda approval it is previously unheard of but the reason that the fda went ahead with the what's called the uh emergency use act or uh emergency the emergency use agreements e u a's is because these companies said they had rigorous internal standards and we needed to get tests out and so it was part of the process however now the fda is finding that a lot of these companies that said their tests were great they really didn't have the kind of rigorous controls and standards that we had hoped for which is causing a problem like there's also like this 60 million dollars or 90 million dollars or whatever that was given to a company in Silicon Valley that has never had anything to do with ventilators oh is that the twitter the twitter account thing yeah yeah the administration found on twitter uh making a claim ridiculous but the other thing is the world health organization tried to send us tests before it even really got started here okay why are the why how does how are the other countries testing like everybody and we we're trying to invent it from scratch i don't understand yep but i have to be manufactured somehow and they have to be made somehow right well one of the current one of the concerns with these inaccurate antibody tests is if people are using them to determine whether or not they have been infected then and there are lots of false positives uh then or false negatives people are going to think false positives are going to think that they're protected when they're really not and if there's a high proportion of these faulty tests doing that we really can't be using these antibody tests these serological tests at an individual diagnosis level so we need to make sure that they're accurate um and from what i've read the tests are they're at a level where they are appropriate for using at a population level so if you're looking at lots hundreds of thousands of people that that the level of false positive or false negative your your your error bars essentially um that that is it's acceptable enough to get a general idea of what is happening in the population at large but they should not be used for individuals for the most part so i there are only a few that i had the exact opposite take which is weird uh the the sort of take i got was like if you were showing the severe symptoms and they gave you the test it was going to be reliable enough okay so it's not to use it on a broad no no no so the difference the difference is the pcr test that looks for viral dna versus antibodies which is looking for an immune response in our bodies and the serology is the one that it's been slow to come and these antibody tests were definitely still working on it there are a few uh companies that are making good ones but not a lot of them but there's a lot of them out there um but we have gotten to the point now yes if you get one of the nasal swabs that does a pcr test to look for viral dna then that that's gonna say yes you have it or you don't have it but it's not going to tell you whether you had it right so i think i think he can you just said something that's really key that i'm not hearing elsewhere and i think this is completely changing the way i'm thinking about these antibody tests because i've thought the whole thing is kind of dumb at this point because they're they don't seem to be very effective and they're emboldening people and that concerns me but if you look at it if you can test everybody in a county and decide that the percentage is a good one to start changing your regulations for shelter in place that is the difference is making a population based decision because then your false positives don't matter as much because it it's a percentage of total population it's not a person that you're going to say go do what you want and they can have an exponential impact on the general population so here's the warning though here's why i'm arguing against that because the only number i've heard thus far on one of these tests was a 10 false positive which means if you take that county that has a half a percent of the population with co vid and you test all of them you have uh you you now have 10 of the population showing that they have it in this test right so it depends definitely depends it definitely depends on which test that's why you can't use it for you that's why the FDA that's why the FDA is turning things around and is trying to get more regulation behind these tests and to remove some of the uh to remove some of the FDA can regulate what they want we just need to we just need to buy the test from singapore because apparently those ones work but my point is that you can't you can't uh you the problem with applying anything even if it's just got like a one percent uh false positive then you got to say what's the actual persistence of this thing in actual society if it's actually like a half a percent or a one percent you then your chances of actually catching uh uh anybody with this disease is really small because you're creating a huge number of false positives who didn't even have a symptom didn't have any reason to be tested any reason to be considered i mean but if you can talk you but if you can predict how much it's going to be uh you know and maybe you have two tests that you use to uh to to test against each other in the population then perhaps that is something that can you know but it's maybe you can combine them and as long as you know what the rate of false positives false negatives the specificity the uh sensitivity is then it can be calculated and predicted and you can you can check you can check the numbers um you know but there's there's a lot to be done and that's not being done uh potentially one of the new tests that out there that is coming out is a CRISPR test there is a new diagnostic chip which is a multi uh basically a micro microfluidics chip that can run thousands of tests simultaneously that uses CRISPR they have named it Carmen combinatorial arrayed reactions for multiplex devaluation of nucleic acids isn't that fancy Carmen Carmen uses CRISPR to be able to increase its specificity because CRISPR is very specific to its target so using the Cas9 CRISPR system in combination with their micro array the researchers who just published this in nature suggest that it can be used on a number of different viruses they tested it on a lot of different viruses and it was under development when the whole COVID-19 thing came up and they rushed to add uh SARS-CoV-2 to their analysis and with this chip it's a rubber chip it's a little bit bigger than a smartphone according to the reports and uh it has tens of thousands of micro wells little tiny compartments that can hold little tiny droplets nano-liter size droplets it's so tiny smaller than a human hair and that contains the viral genetic material from the sample they can do about a thousand samples at once so you could take a thousand different people samples and test them all it is not Oxford Nanopore this is a new system that has been it's very similar but it's under development by this group out of MIT and a couple of other uh and the yeah the Broad Institute and Harvard so MIT and Harvard and Harvard's kitchen some of the financing probably yeah but the the platform they say it's it's easily it's easily manufactured it is easy to use in their lab they've been able to do several like up to four to five different runs of these uh these micro well chips per day which means that they could in one lab do upwards of four thousand tests in a day and so the the issue is going to be cost of the analysis machinery cost of the um actually actual manufacture of these chips hopefully they are as inexpensive as they say um but the potential of being able to test lots and lots and lots of samples at the same time for something like COVID gives the opportunity of really uh pushing forward the effectiveness of our of our testing at that population level should be good Cheryl Grossman and face at the Facebook page is saying shouldn't be that that be called Carmina that's right instead of Christopher yes Carmina so that's what I have for the COVID news if you have questions about COVID let me know send me an email kirsten at thisweekinscience.com I'll see what I can do to check things out and look at the information that's out there to talk about it on the show I'd love to be able to clear up any uncertainties that are out there if at all possible Justin let's talk about some other science you want to talk about viruses because we're talking about viruses let's keep it going okay uh I am going to talk slow while this uh this thing loads up here this will all be removed in editing people don't worry about it oh no this is this is what the this is what the cutting room floor is for okay uh so this is an enterprise in Singapore that's coming back Singapore MIT Alliance for Research and Technology aka SOT has discovered a new anti-phage defense mechanism found in some bacteria which uses previously unknown features uh within their uh DNA to protect them all right to protect their DNA so the phages okay are viruses which uh tack bacteria they work by injecting their own DNA into the bacteria where then it replicates using the bacteria's machinery for replication to the point where it destroys the bacteria not too unlike uh what the COVID-19 does to uh human tissue so in this paper uh which is published okay in a journal micro biology there's a name to the publication which means you should be able to track this down plus we're going to provide a link and the show notes that's how it's done it's that easy uh the research team describes a brand new defense system found a bacteria that works in a unique way to protect themselves against the virus this is led by professor lian rong wang at wuhan university the paper was jointly written by a group of the smarts uh anti-microbial resistance in this interdisciplinary research group so this is a group in looking at viruses uh to assist in attacking and tackling bacteria who by the way there are antibiotic resistant bacteria that are also trying to it's not just viruses bacteria haven't given up they're also trying to kill us we're apparently not very popular on the planet uh so what they've been looking at is uh bacterial phages or viruses that kill bacteria and seeing how some bacteria seem to resist the effects of those viruses what they discovered here was that this is really novel too i've not heard about this this is a very novel bacteria what the team just this is quotey voice uh two of uh professor peter c dedan who's co-author of the paper uh from the from smart side we previously discovered a new type of defense mechanism that bacteria use against phages where sulfur is inserted into the dna backbone as a phosphorotylate modification on each strand of the dna if the attacking phage dna didn't have the modifications meaning the virus dna goes in and it's trying to replicate but if it doesn't have this this uh sulfur insert on it the host enzymes chop the dna into pieces destroying it immediately no virus gets uh gets populated this restriction modification mechanism is like a bacterial immune system to protect it against invaders what the team discovered now is an entirely new and different mechanism in which these phosphorothiolates or i don't know l and their thiolates are located on only one strand of dna at very high frequency host defense enzyme then nick one strand of the invader dna to stop the virus from making copies of itself like a surgeon's knife compared to a so there are ways uh not all powerful after all so so that this is not a covid uh story no this is an antibacterial story where we're using viruses as our friends to attack bacteria that are trying to kill us but one of the things that's sort of interesting that I keep kind of thinking if we if we ourselves if the human body is incapable of producing an immune response that protects us or gives us immunity we will at some point have to look for an ally and and maybe it's something like creating a hybrid of a bacteria that's already in our lungs a bacteria that's already in our skin that can facilitate something like this like a hybrid bacteria it's an escalation it's an arms race it's scary but we might have to genetically engineer if not future humans to be resistant to covid 19 if if it turns out and I hope it doesn't that we are not um cannot gain immunity or vaccine or or take something something wild like a a hybrid bacteria that we now I mean we're talking about a probiotic lather up with your anti-covid bacteria make sure you get it in the face mites because they love it too you know everyone loves it we have to start thinking about this perhaps at some point in different ways anyway I thought this was a very fascinating story this is a a way in which bacteria can fight off viruses that we didn't know existed and it comes down to a sort of a genetic self-genetic modification evolutionarily speaking of a bacteria to have this sort of unique dna feature that trips up the trips up the virulent fader invaders doesn't allow them replicate yeah I mean they're talking about their own it's it's their own phages that it trips up right so these bacterial viruses but I just wonder if it would work against you know our bigger viruses or if it would take you know that similar technique you know do we have to crisper ourselves to uh to have ourselves have the little mutation the little adaptation to the viruses the one thing we would need to tackle we would have to have create a bacteria that had some sort of a receptor that looks like a human lung cell for instance like an ace two it would have to have the ace two receptor yeah right we'd have an ace two receptor that we could aerosolize like you'd walk into any department store and there'd be this aerosolized ace two receptor bacteria that could dismantle uh covid upon contact um that would be great and oddly we'd be encouraged to go to public gatherings to get enough and oddly the only side effect is it turns everybody's hair completely white that's fine that's okay I would deal with that everybody's dyeing their hair all the time it'd be a fabulous future but but the white hair is a good base for hair dyeing yeah that's true just everybody'll show up a week later with a with um neon colored hair covid hairdo yeah uh yeah the permanent question the white hair would that be my point though is that there there might need to be uh complete rethinking in the way if our if all of our traditional methods are ineffective and this isn't going to go away we might have to start thinking out of the box and how we tackle it and we might have to start learning from uh not start but again do the thing that we usually do eventually after wringing our hands and beating our heads against the wall find that nature somewhere already has a solution and that we can just off the shelf it and then play it somewhere else and sometimes yeah sometimes we think we need to make things ourselves but really we just need to find what's already been solved by mother nature right what if we weaponize those face mites that's what i'm wondering i'm just gonna leave that one there we're gonna we're gonna let that one simmer for a minute and i'm gonna move on for a moment we'll let everyone know if you if uh that this is this week in science and if you are interested in a twist shirt or mug or other item of twist merchandise some good twist stuff head over to twist.org click on our zazzle link and browse our store it will help to support the show. Is it time for that other part of the show that we love? Blair's Animal Corner? I thought it was the other part of the show. Oh with Blair! Oh man i just have some cute feel good animal stories today no more killer viruses or murder hornets yeah i just i just have some fun stories for the animal corner keeping a nice light like a nice whipped cream um tonight we have a story from Edith Cowan University in Australia listening to dolphin chatter dolphins they make fun sounds they whistle they cheer there you go and so it turns out that a new piece of research from Australia is looking at the unique attributes to whistles of individual bottle nose dolphins they studied in particular western australia swan river and the dolphins that live there from april to september 2013 they systematically monitored an area within the eastern part of the harbor where the river narrows so it's kind of a choke point so it allows them to record a lot of information from these dolphins they made acoustic recordings throughout all observation times with handheld hydrophones they had them over the side of a small craft they lowered them to a meter and a half deep and they matched over 500 unique whistles with dolphin photos over the period of the study so basically they would take a snapshot every time they recorded sounds and could kind of face match who's in this photo and what sounds are rehearing and who's in this photo and what sounds are rehearing and what faces and sounds are in common so they could start to try to assign particular whistles to particular dolphins so basically they're figuring out their voices so the hope is that this could be extrapolated on a much larger scale to be able to track dolphins and that's because normally when we track dolphins it's only during the day and it's through photographing and it's by looking at nicks and notches in dorsal fins when they come to the service so it's not underwater it's above water and it's just looking at their dorsal fin so it's pretty hard to be specific and exact about which dolphin you're looking at especially if it's a younger dolphin or a dolphin that doesn't have a lot of scarring yet on their dorsal fin so if they can instead just go oh that sounds like Jerry you could have identified dolphins you could just by sounds you could have hydrophones that are constantly there so you wouldn't have to wait for it to be light out to be able to take pictures and you could track those sounds across the ocean that sounds awesome yeah so even just with this very short-term study April to September of one year with 500 calls they were able to narrow it down to a very narrow range of possible dolphins from each sound that they heard so they had a pretty good idea of who is who just based on this short-term study so definitely they think that this could be expanded so that we could potentially track these animals just by their voice I have a hard time believing that this is the first time that we've done this yeah so I mean we know that they've been talking for so long and we've been trying to figure out what their chatter is all about right oh are they saying something like wouldn't you think that the like oh they've got these social groups they've got to recognize each other and identify each other and their voices travel through the water so hi people like isn't there's nobody what I don't I don't know I mean this is the first time that I've seen this and as far as we know as far as the the researchers know this was the first instance of this but I think you know we've done a lot of studies or we've reported a lot of studies about people assigning names to dolphins you know the idea that there's a particular call that other dolphins use when they see that particular dolphin we recognize that there's very specific clicks of dolphins that like to hang out with one another so I think we've kind of skirted around this topic but I guess it hasn't been zeroed in on yet right and I I wonder if it is so hard considering they do run in clicks that it's probably really difficult to get it narrowed down to an individual I think the earliest research in the dolphins that was really looking at language that was really trying to analyze language happened at a particular time and the head researcher also segued into lsd and dolphins yeah and I think I think not really I think uh uh first of all I would I would love to have seen where that research went but uh also I think it's set back research on dolphins by some decades of people distancing themselves from is that the one that was it was on drunk history I think that story it was very interesting um but yeah it's it's very interesting to see that that particular dolphins would sound very particular but you know somebody in the chat room is mentioning I wonder why humans look so different from each other but animals look very similar that's to us to those animals they look very different and in fact I think that we all sound very different from one another you could probably hear for example your favorite podcast playing without any other sound cues and recognize that person's voice and it might sound like all dog bark sound pretty similar especially within a breed but two dogs they sound very different so I think it's all dog owner I think a dog owner is going to pick their dogs bark out of a crowd yeah so it's all about familiarity it's not just about being within the species but if you spend all day looking at dolphins you're going to start to recognize dolphins I I talk all the time about how when I was a primate keeper I had to take care of a group of squirrel monkeys that were 18 and on day one they all looked exactly the same and by the end of my training on day five I had to be able to tell them all just by the way that they looked and I I got there it was tough I had to make flashcards I had to figure it out but then by the time I was working in that space it was oh your che your mac like I know exactly who everyone was because you start to recognize its familiarity and so I think that's true with with faces it's true with voices it's true with dolphin dorsal fins and it's true with dolphin whistles so yep there you go fantastic let's track those dolphins what's next uh speaking of tracking animals um salmon another animal living in the in the deep blue um that is very good at tracking themselves they are amazing at being able to start in freshwater leave that space where they were hatched go out into the open ocean spend a long time out there and somehow find their way back in back to where they were born so how do you find the entrance to that river system and how do you find your way up that river to your nesting site this is from Oregon State University and this is looking specifically at magnetite and how magnetic fields might have something to do with it so we we know that there is a chemical component with the way that salmon find their way back home there is a chemical nature of the water in their natal grounds so that can odor right so that they can find exactly where they came from um we know that scent and memory are really closely linked and whether or not we could pick out that's the smell of my nursery just you know from it it might create some sort of emotional or memory response if we could smell a baby blanket from our childhood or something like that so that that makes sense right that there's chemical cues involved when you're going up those rivers trying to find the right branch to get to where you came from but the the kind of second question of that is how the heck did they get from the open ocean to the river system to begin with um in the case of uh some salmon if if they're halfway across the pacific towards japan and then it's time for them to come back how can they turn around the entire ocean to get back to where they came from so um this is a pretty interesting study where they took juvenile chinook salmon and they exposed them to a brief but strong magnetic pulse that is known to reverse the polarity of magnetic particles and affect magnetic orientation behavior in other animals so they they did this magnetic pulse to these juvenile salmon um and then they compared the behavior of pulsed and unpulsed fish and they compared it in a magnetic coil system under a pair of conditions the local magnetic field and one where they made a map like like information grid from the magnetic field that was shifted so one was just like general magnetic fields around and one that kind of tried to mimic what it would be like in the ocean and then they they used the pulse to change what it looked like so um in the local field they behaved pretty much the same but when they used this magnetic map and they shifted it the testing control salmon behaved totally different the control fish were randomly oriented and the pulse fish tried to go somewhere very specifically so that suggests that this magnetite which would have been altered by the pulse that's in their body may play a role in navigation of salmon but the end of implications of that then are that there's a powerful enough magnetic signature that you could follow across an ocean to get to a specific right birds use it but no but the turtles use it we already know that there is we already know that there is polarization we have north pole south pole there are lots of mini poles and so I think that's going to be the interesting thing how it's going to affect these migratory animals moving forward if we have you know these the shift of our poles and how that will change things if if half of migratory animals showed up at the north pole or the true north or the other north what magnetic north fine I get it but they show up to the xyz river and clam of falls like or whatever like they find they find this like right so so say you come from around the columbia river portland organ you're a salmon that's made your way down from the mountain streams you're in the columbia river you end up out in the pacific ocean you swim across like blaire said to japan as you're doing all this you are oriented to the north pole where the let's see if i'm heading that direction it's going to be on my right side the north pole is kind of going to be on to my right and so my brain will get used to that and then at a certain point my biochemistry says time to go have babies and so i got to figure out what to do and so oh how do i get back out well i came this way and it was on my right maybe i just got to turn and have it up be on my left now i'm going to head back and you end up at least somewhere near the coast line of the united states and at that point chemical signatures start drawing you in to where you were born and where you came from and that's the interesting part about where the mix between that broader homing instinct and the more specific yeah so i think also remember that there are animals that can sense electric fields so your heart makes an electric field that little fish under the sand like little halibut shark can detect their heart beating because of the electric field created by their heart and that same structure can also detect electromagnetic fields coming from the earth to help navigate so i think there's there's a lot that's that's the earth is a lot of information that the earth is sending us that we don't always realize and the whole thing is making me skeptical uh about migratory animals in general like if they even exist what no it's amazing already left no i cut him off okay come back now no i don't understand how i still like it's just so incredible to me so it is incredible if you weren't telling me this i wouldn't believe you but justin we've talked about this before with relation to oh no no no yeah and we've talked about the magnetic particles with relation to sea turtles and why now with salmon you know i'm actually denying that it exists who always knows which way is north there are people during the day that have a without without that information if you went on a night hike i bet there's somebody that would be like north's that way there are people with an amazing sense of direction and it makes you wonder is it that they have spent so much time out in nature and paying attention to orientation that their body has been able to take in stimuli given from the earth or is it just that they they've been paying really good attention to cues they have an age where maps never oriented to the direction you were driving and it's a permanent imprint in your mind of what is up the map and what's down the map my point is there's a lot of chemical processes going on in our bodies all the time that we may or may not be aware of and there are animals that if their entire ability to live and reproduce is based on being able to find their way they're going to use every possible input they can't which includes electromagnetic fields coming from the earth and the thing that i can use the stars yes they do so cool the thing that i love about this story and the reason that it kind of gave me a smile even though it's something that maybe isn't that surprising based on what we know already is that i saw a tweet earlier this week that said the the blue whale is the largest fish let me explain and it was because we all came from fish so if you're talking about a phylogenetic group a mono phyletic group of the evolution of animals we are technically fish so i love that because we talk all the time about how fish are the the most primitive vertebrate and how you know there's all this kind of stuff that makes them unlike all the other animals because they're this way farther down on the evolutionary tree as justin always likes to say everyone is evolved as evolved as everyone else but they still have this really basic but also really intricate ability to use the earth's magnetic field to get around i just i i really liked it that was awesome yeah pretty amazing stuff justin doesn't believe it yes daniel you don't ugly back so much that's not that but if you were to describe to me that there's a fish that could travel halfway like there's there's nothing i can grab on to that that makes that makes sense even now even knowing that it's true and i i fished for no i fished for salmon in the rivers and you know i i'm i'm not like actually skeptical that salmon spawn just to make that clear in case anybody out there is worried that justin doesn't believe it's salmon spawn it's not what i'm saying if you were to tell me that without me knowing that i wouldn't believe you salmon are amazing there are many species of animals yeah it's an amazing thing awe inspiring and now i want to say thank you for listening to twist you are the reason that we are able to do what we do every week bring you up to date and down to earth views on science discoveries yes with your help we can do even more together we can really bring a same perspective to a world full of misinformation head over to twist.org right now click on the patreon link and choose your level of support be a part of bringing sanity and science to more people with twist and we're back you're listening to this week in science all right you know what we've got right now do we have what has science done for me lately that's right it's time for this week in what has science done for me lately our writer today says dear kirsten justin and blair what has science done for me lately well by lately i mean most of my life starting at about age 11 this was in 1957 i discovered science and was hooked i remember lying in my bed at night as a boy ear piece in my ear as i listened to my crystal radio how i marveled that this little coil and crystal with no battery no power could bring me voices from all over the world over the years my parents were victims of a merciless barrage of requests for sciency things a chemistry set geology set rock collecting expeditions microsoft set ham radio telescope space for a laboratory at home it only stopped when i moved out i think the last straw was when i built a nuclear reactor in the backyard and my dad had to check to when he got home from work so the neighborhood wouldn't blow up neighborhood wouldn't blow up wait what they did their best to keep up and with their encouragement i eventually went to college i was torn between astronomy and engineering but eventually chose the one with the greater employment potential however i've always kept astronomy as my favorite interest my wife can attest to the time and money that has been invested science has given me a logical foundation for discovering the world it has given me hobbies passions and a career it has given me a profound sense of awe at the universe we live in it has kept me up until 2 a.m to observe the stars or watch voyager sail by saturn it has given me things to say when people ask me so what about our investments in science it has allowed me to follow fields such as astrophysics mathematics and quantum mechanics in a way that helps me deeply appreciate the complexities of the world science has also added many happy and productive years to my life by helping me battle cancer as i mentioned in a letter a while back but perhaps more importantly it has brought me great joy in so many ways and lately it has brought me to twist science brings just as much excitement now at age 73 as it did when i was 11 few things in life can do that thank you for your engaging show i can't wait to hear the next episode yours truly selden mccabe thank you selden thank you so much for writing in and letting us know your appreciation of science it sounds like science has done much for you over the years i love that and i hope there are many other people out there for whom science is a joy in your life and that it adds to what enjoyment you have of things in the world and if you want to write me a letter send a what has science done for me lately sonnet haiku song just a letter to kirsten k i r s t e n at thisweekandscience.com all right all right i think it's time for more science it is time for a little bit more science you want to hear about the black hole in our neighborhood yes hopefully it will not destroy us all it's not going to oh and by neighborhood i mean a thousand light years away so yeah hey black hole see you never bye yeah it's over there see you never now scientists for a long time have been hypothesizing that there are many of these dark spots in our universe where there are black holes that aren't so big that they cause chaos and release lots of energy into their nearby environment now when we think of black holes we often think of quasars because the black hole has such a pull gravitational pull that lots of material is falling into them and creating these massive jets that we can see through you know through our electromagnetic spectrum radio telemetry through space but now using the european the i think is the european yeah european southern absorb observatory in australia the uh not australia i'm sorry i'm putting things all wrong european southern observatory in chile in chile this 2.2 meter telescope in chile has discovered this little tiny quiescent not quiescent just not a not a partier not a party animal about a thousand light years away from us and in the uh looking for it they didn't find like i said big jets of energetic release what they saw were two stars orbiting nothing at all and so what they have what they've done now is set up this uh new system of looking for binary star systems and tracking the movements of these binary or trinary star systems to see what the stars are traveling around are the stars orbiting each other or are they orbiting something else that we can't see ha ha we're one step closer to one of my predictions yeah which was which was a uh uh we would find a solar system basically of black holes black holes following going around black holes like why not if we haven't gone that far out yeah it's just gravity we just need to keep looking right yes and so the quiesars are the anchors for galaxies they're the thing that the get when in the center of the spinning galaxies that's what's in the middle keeping the whole thing gravitationally linked a galaxy right so like the milky way galaxy that we're a part of has a massive supermassive black hole center there are quays and jets that come out of them yes but this is a little one that doesn't really make a peep at all it's just dark and it's dark and quiet and the only way we found it is by looking at the orbits of stars and it seems based on our calculations that this this black hole is a little one it's only about four times the mass of our sun so it's not a giant black hole it's it's stellar mass black hole this is a small black hole yeah that's that's right actually for some reason thought you needed way more than our sun i mean more than four times our sun to be a black hole that's amazing i think that's a sustainable one pretty technical yeah the researchers say that at least four times the mass of the sun can an invisible object especially that seems to have a mass of about four times that of the sun can only be a black hole these are two conclusions of some of the researchers at the european southern observatory we haven't discovered yet yeah the uh this black hole also although it's more massive than our sun is very small so it only had it it only has a footprint of like seven and a half kilometers across so it's a very because it's a black hole it's dense and small uh and it's hidden in a system called hr 6819 and is part of a um it's part of what is the name of the constellation baby black hole yes i don't know exactly toddler back there you go it's a baby toddler black hole yeah and it it's in the middle it's in a southern constellation called telescopium i have never heard of this constellation maybe because i am biased to the northern hemisphere but i find it an interesting constellation telescopium and uh and excuse me not seven and a half kilometers seven and a half miles wide about 12 kilometers wide still very small and it's just a nice little thing which indicates that this i that uh there are probably lots and lots and lots of these little tiny quiet black holes in our universe and there may even be little tiny black holes much closer to us than this 1000 light years away and that is what the researchers are speculating on is that they're these lurkers are out there maybe even within a couple a dozen light years of earth so i just want to throw out there i know we just made the appeal for what a science said for me lately for um poems and things we just said a lot of descriptive words in relation to a black hole that is begging for a black hole cartoon that a lurker a toddler doesn't make a peep um i just i just say this sounds like this is rich with material it is rich with material and i think the one of the other really great things about this is that if you are in the southern hemisphere this is a star system that you can see with the naked eye you don't even need binoculars or a telescope you don't need a telescope to see telescopium nope you don't you do not i would have assumed i know right telescopium you need a telescope to see how do you see it with a telescopium yes no you can see it with your naked eyes at night clear skies if it's in the sky you too can see where a black hole is in is in our visible spectrum which is pretty neat i think because for the most part we just say we can't see a black hole i can't see a black hole you can't see a black hole but we can get as close to it as possible speaking of other out of the out of the chat room really quick uh guava sharma question when a star collapses into a black hole after going supernova do its neighboring stars start orbiting it so my reaction is no it so it's not any more gravitational than the star that was there before it so whatever their relationship was previous is probably completely unchanged that's the thing the the gravity of a collapsed star is the gravity of the star that was there before basically it's the same thing maybe a little bit less actually um just because you turn into a black hole doesn't make you more gravitational which is why like i keep predicting that we might find a console a solar system completely made up maybe on a very large scale maybe not so much actually now after what uh dr kitty's brought of black holes orbiting each other because it's the same if our sun went black hole uh on us the planets would keep the same orbits it would be much colder but they would keep the same orbits it's the same gravity would be there in the center of our solar system unless something a force were to knock them out of their orbits there's no reason for them to move right speaking of other worldly things you were saying yeah speaking of other worldly things another study there's a bunch out of mit this week apparently uh another another yeah another bit of news uh researchers in the uh richer researcher what's her name sara seager from she is the class of 1941 professor of planetary science physics and aeronautics and astronautics at mit she's looking for life on other planets well she's looking to figure out how life could be on other planets and has published a paper in nature astronomy about her and her colleagues ideas of life on planets with hydrogen atmospheres she has done a bunch of studies in the laboratory simulating hydrogen atmospheres with microbes earth microbes very simple microbes like e coli uh and yeast to be able to determine whether or not they can live in hydrogen atmospheres we know that once upon a time oxygen did not dominate our atmosphere and there was a long period of time in which nitrogen and hydrogen were much more dominant in in the atmospheric conditions before oxygen came even the ocean is a largely hydrogen rich environment yeah yeah and the ocean is hydrogen rich exactly and so we know that there are extremophiles who can exist in hydrogenic uh conditions here on the planet but the idea is that she is arguing because of the work that they've done they weren't looking to see whether life could evolve in a hydrogen atmosphere condition they were just looking to see if life could thrive if you stuck microbes in it could they live and they did from this planet slap them and wow and so based on that work they're arguing that we really should be looking at other uh at planets that have hydrogen rich atmospheres uh that oxygen is not necessarily the thing that we should always be looking for i mean if you think about it hydrogen it doesn't it could be in water on a planet could also be in methane right there's hydrogen uh peroxide there's hydrogen just hydrogen gas there's you know hydrogen is a very it's it's not noxious necessarily it's not a bad it's not a like oxygen actually is it caught it it's it was the first it was the first mass death extinction event on the planets when it became oxygenated but it's it's the important thing to remember is our planet life is starting our planet pre oxygen atmosphere yeah you know uh so it almost is illogical to take the leap to only look at uh oxygen rich planets because that's not how it got started here that's not that wasn't the base point for planet earth life yeah i've been so as i've i've mentioned recently stuck inside i've been watching a lot of star trek and i always think it's so funny how they they pretty much only mess around with class m planets which have oxygen they they never go to planets it seems like where they have to be wearing spacesuits makes it much easier right it makes it easier to film i get that but there's i just it started as a 60s tv show so they also had like it's hominins everywhere so right but of course this is part of me that's like why are you assuming like all these planets that aren't class m planets they've got it if there's life on all these class m planets there's got to be life on these other planets why are you assuming that they all need oxygen because nobody wanted to shoot an episode where everybody's wearing like an astronaut suit floating around in half zero but no no it is it is kind of related to similar thinking where we assume that the the place where our life bloomed and is currently thriving if you want to call it that then it has to be like that for other life to thrive it does not have to be that way for life to thrive and it depends on what thriving is right yeah and as robert bigelow says that's what you want to call it yeah as robert bigelow in the chat room says oxygen is a catalyst and hydrogen is the smallest element on the periodic table yeah it's gonna be there yeah so why not expand our view of where life can be justin expand our view why not it's more science and our view of where we can charge an electric car okay with the study that is a little bit like the one i'm going to talk about robust and efficient wireless power transfer using a switch mode implementation of a non-linear parity times metric circuit was the title of the study and so i thought oh no this means my cell phone's gonna get even smaller it's gonna i even could be able to produce a font that's legible to me but this study has nothing to do with that this is uh engineers at stanford that have made a truly functional innovation that could allow i said that as if stanford never comes up with truly functional innovations but no this is a truly functional innovation in a field that we've talked about a lot which is charging electric cars on highways there's been a lot of talk a lot of throwing ideas out there uh but there hasn't been anything actually innovated that could scale to to do it um but that's exactly what this looks like so this which which if you can have uh cars that are getting charged by the road that means you get rid of any sort of range issue with an electric car um and for those that that that don't have this this bigger problem with range you lighten them considerably uh making them much more efficient if the roadway can actually charge them as they go so three years ago this stanford electrical engineer uh shanhui fan and sid asawa war raritt a graduate student in his lab built the first system that could wirelessly recharge objects in motion other than that being really cool it sucked uh the system transmitted about 10 of the power flowing through uh through it which if you're trying to power an electric car battery uh only being able to utilize 10% is tremendously inefficient it's basically a massive waste of time you'd be you'd be better off putting just coal nothing and burning it at that point to make it run uh so but now now obviously that was three years ago now uh they have published in nature electronics and the two engineers are demonstrating their latest version there they have gotten the system's wireless transmission efficiency to 92 percent which your power plant power line to house loses like 50 percent so depending on how close you know you still have the wire issue who's still there but depending on how close the power source is 92 efficiency is insanely high that is tremendous and this isn't a wireless technology that is charging something that is in motion uh technology can only be scaled up to power car moving down the road that's going to take so in the near term system could make a practical wireless technology that could recharge robots say in a warehouse so you could have a central wireless power uh system built into the factory floor robots are running around they don't need to like do the Roomba thing where they pull into the charger once in a while they can just keep going 24 seven uh this is quotey voice of fan who's the the I guess the professor in this in this scenario this is a significant step uh toward a practical and efficient system for wireless recharging automobiles and robots even when they're moving at high speeds we'd have to scale the power up to recharge a moving car but I don't think that's a serious roadblock for recharging robots we're already within the range of practical readiness so wireless chargers emit electricity by creating magnetic fields that oscillate at a frequency that creates a resonating vibration and magnetic coils on the receiving end uh problem is resonant frequency changes if the distance between the source and the receiver changes even by a very very small amount that's why if you have a wireless phone charger you can't charge your phone while you're using it you have to set it down on the charger which uh just avoids the step actually of plugging in a cord but it functionally it has to sit there as if it was plugged in there's kind of no difference it's basically the same uh the key as Saba wore ready to explain uh is uh was that to replace the original amplifier with a far more efficient switch mode amplifier such amplifiers it's not a it's not something that they invented uh they only produce high efficiency amplification though under extremely precise conditions and that wasn't available so it took three years of tinkering theoretical tinkering to design a circuit configuration that might work and when they tested it it worked so yeah they right now they can transmit 10 watts of electricity over a distance of two to three feet not a big deal they say they can scale this up uh to a point where it could handle a vehicle moving 70 miles an hour across it and still be charging um only limiting factor it right now they're saying it would be how fast the battery could actually absorb power as it crosses over their their charges so then more and more charges so there's also the you know humans humans that were burning cell phone towers because they thought they were emitting COVID yeah COVID yeah 5G uh there was a whole campaign against the wireless meters that could be read like there's there's so much so i have an idea i think i can fix this human you you take the car you make the the the wheels metal you put them on a track you create a train yeah exactly so you have these different cars they're connected because they're all going to the same place then you create switches so they can go they can turn to have different so i think we fixed it i think japan already has these like very well designed electric trains so yeah but yeah but we're not going to do mass transit anymore because of uh COVID we all need to be in our separate cars uh so but this is uh Sid Asaba Warovit who is saying the wireless chargers shouldn't pose any sort of a health risk even the ones that they would scale up to that could power cars produce magnetic fields that are already within established existing safety guidelines so uh in magnetic fields already transmit electricity through humans without them feeling a thing although i guess if you're salmon you might notice well uh we have salmon showing up on the uh 80 or five four or five it's trying to kind of get their way back home to consider some to consider so i mean one of the one of the obstacles is of course getting these embedded into highways is a long-term uh sort of ways off thing even if the technology exists today however one of the interesting things that they point out or a fan a fan is saying he can imagine drones so you could you could embed these on rooftops maybe towers uh that sort of thing so if you had drones that could maybe not be small enough that they wouldn't hold a charge long enough to go a great distance but if they have charging points along the way that they pass through uh they could remain charged on their journey and keep flying and that sort of then opens up that uh vision that we got of drones delivering amazon packages to backyards or the the pizza delivery that comes down drops on your front porch i talk about touchless delivery uh if you had a highway of rooftops and towers that these things can just pass by recharge they could stay in the air as long as that network is in place for for i'm imagining i'm imagining uh hoops that are kind of like the uh the goals in quidditch and harry potter to fly through the fly through the hoops but for these the electric road kind of idea ed in the chat room is bringing up there's one in scandinavia somewhere there's also an electric road in san diego and i think there's another one in texas somewhere i mean these electric road ideas aren't new and but they've been i mean maybe it's the technology is too hard to implement too expensive for the actual application and implementation and so well we but we just have we have not seen anything work well enough to make it adoptable and it just that's why this is we've tried things out it just hasn't worked yeah but that's why the the new version of it it's sort of saying like well we tried an electronic handheld device but the palm pilot just sucked so we all gave up we're done right like no that's not that's just the first step um but at 92 efficiency with a what they're saying is i think it was a four foot range um so you would need multiples uh trickling in as a as a vehicle drove um but you could yes absolutely uh you could absolutely see this as that that next step to make that that seemingly impossible uh much closer to reality much closer to something that those other systems can incorporate and work with i think your environmental impact question is interesting though i haven't seen a whole lot of conversation about that how an electric road might impact wildlife in a really weird and fundamental way like bird migrations right it seems to me like it would make sense to to pilot this as wireless charging parking lots right no no or metered parking that's wireless charging but but you can't there aren't plugs everywhere so this is something that would you you could make a huge i mean what's the what's the one of the main stoppers to transitioning en masse to electric cars it's the infrastructure it's the infrastructure yeah if that would be a way that would be a stepping point in between here and the electric road where you could make electric cars way more applicable to everyday life sure your road trip still might not be taken care of truckers still need a way to transport goods but for just the commuter if you're charging just by being parked even while you're at the grocery store no no parking as a function of that then that can be a huge way to increase um kind of testing on this and and and ways that it would work but also its impact on the environment but i'm going to pause the impact on the environment and say there are power lines and transformers and electronics everywhere and this is already within the range of the things that already exist so i would i would pause it there and just say before we give any credence to things that are unproven and have shown to have no effect let's not assume one right let's not create one it's definitely part of it though that's part of it is it absolutely you're right you're right implementation is the environmental impact report but uh but i do i do think roads by themselves are the worst thing before you have a fully electric road you might want to just increase how many people out there have electric cars i don't know it's i'd feel like i'm surprised we haven't done wiring by step parking charging yet that's all i'm saying is i'm surprised we haven't gotten there yet money money money money money adoption just yeah social effort yeah we so i can send you a message from my compiler if i learn a secret language that you then have to decipher on the other end forget it yeah there's been no flatten the curve for electric vehicles yet so yeah just gonna that's the thing like i live in an apartment complex i can't have an electric car because i have no place to plug it in when i'm at home but if the parking spots charge cars just by parking on top of it everyone could have them but there would still be that having to build you can have it you're building the charging spot you're right oh sorry but no but your point was like yeah you could have it you could have the emitter uh on your front lawn or whatever right you could buy one of these install there and then your car parked on the curb within four feet of the thing i guess right now you could you could do that you could make a portable one that you could put that if you maybe chain a couple of them if you had to park further down you're like i'm putting my chargers out nobody messes on just daisy chain a hundred extension court oh my god no thank you yeah as uh jeremy in the chat room is saying if you can wire if you can put in wiring for charging you can put in a plug so if you're not able to put in a plug you're probably not able to put in the wiring for the charging either so i mean there are a lot of things that have to fit together that's why the wireless chargers make me laugh on on phones yeah because it's still a wire you gotta set it down on a thing and leave it there it's thing why wait oh i didn't have to do this oh why an innovation well i love the game changer speaking of game changers i do love things that could potentially help us live better in our modern lives researchers are trying to figure out how to deal with clock shifting and effects like social jet lag or just jet lag and as a result researchers have recently looked at a from the national institute of sciences in beijing they've published a study looking at a mushroom well or a fungus protein this fungus protein has the potential to knock out jet lag or at least make it a lot better the study was published in science translational medicine this week and what they found in their study on mice was that when the mice were given this compound called cordycepin it helped reset their circadian rhythms so that they recovered from time shifting a heck of a lot faster than would normally happen they haven't done the studies on humans yet but what they discovered is that this they have this synthetic molecule version of cordycepin it combined to an enzyme that's called ruvbl2 and that influences clock genes genes that are influential into our circadian rhythm and so the genes get turned on or off and what ruvbl2 does is it's really active in the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus which is where your clock your certain circadian clock gets set every day this is the light sensitive area of our brain that tells us when we're going to get tired and when we're going to want to go to sleep and wake up in the morning cordycepin binds to this enzyme causes a whole bunch of things happen but crucial thing that happens is that a protein is made to leave chromatin so that this the dna gets uncondensed and there's a bunch of genes related to circadian rhythm e-box genes that then get transcribed and so they're thinking that cordycepin is kind of this this key to the lock that unlocks these clock genes and the researchers feel theorize what they say this magic drug can change the clock phase up to 12 hours and a timed regulation of our internal body clock is possible that's what they say magic drug you say magic drug okay note to self buy six pounds of mushrooms that's great so let me tell you more about yeah are we ever gonna get to use this again i hope so possibly possibly get jet lag right now right right some yes well for shift workers are still working yeah yeah shift workers oh yeah i might end up on a graveyard shift soon oh yeah so where do i get this mushroom right so this story of this fungus is very interesting because it the protein comes from a fungus that is cordy uh cordyceps militaris now cordyceps militaris is a version of it's a cousin to a rare fungus that's found in the himalayas called cordyceps synensis and cordyceps synensis in the himalayas is is a like a parasitic fungus that controls caterpillars and then kills them and then it sprouts out of their head and people go it's like it's it's like a truffle for for the chinese and it's become a quote unquote himalayan viagra and it can sell for about thirty five thousand dollars a pound it's become a major source of income for rural Tibetans who go out into the countryside searching for these these caterpillars with fungal erections out of their heads on the on the ground and they dig them up and then they go sell them to people and the reason that it's i mean viagra kind of explains itself it's been known for centuries as a compound the the fungus itself when consumed gives people focus energy and long lasting erections so this the militaris has been used similarly for less money because it can be produced in laboratories and can be harvested very easily you don't have to go hiking in the himalayas and destroying the environment to be able to get it but they have discovered that it has a whole bunch of anti-inflammatory and other also anti-cancerous potentially affects where it leads to tumor cell apoptosis in some situations there are some really interesting metabolic effects of the active ingredients if it's being if it's able to reset uh signaling communications yeah yeah uh then yeah i mean that that's the main driver of cancer is just actually the lack of signaling communication that's taking place to tell it stop growing don't don't grow what new uh vesicles uh take a pause after you've grown for a bit like all that signaling stops reaching the cancer cell and that's why it's doing this thing in the first place so if you have something that is encouraging and resetting signaling uh i can see how that would be beneficial right so it could be beneficial i mean there's a lot of research going on right now right now this one particular study suggests it may be useful for jet lag however the studies have only done on mice yet to be looked at in humans but you know shrooms or a mushroom that has a caterpillar fungus yeah how does like nobody have like a sample and is like yeah now i have a giant lab full of this or a giant work like how's like i mean i get that like people aren't just doing you know making a biofuel or you know uh making a pharmaceutical that can go somewhere if this thing sells for $35,000 or whatever it was how does somebody not be you know instead of just they have one caterpillar at a time okay yeah uh starting in about uh it's about 2014 according to the rabbit hole that i fell down uh chinese labs figured out how to start growing it in the laboratory in about 2016 they there were some pretty major uh major groups that were growing it and selling it and so it's become a thing but still you know in chinese herbal medicine and culture having the original the natural found in the Himalayas is probably always going to be the most sought after as opposed to something that's a little bit cheaper that comes from a lab well yeah but it won't be because all of it will have been found in nature right it's all comes down to the sales person exactly sales is a heck of a thing yeah so so anyway these these cordyceps these shrooms they are something else Justin do you have another story no i have uh i have a wine down at the end of this and then we go into bed what do you guys got okay all right well i was going to talk about murder hornets but Blair brought them up at the beginning of the show so we don't need to talk about murder hornets i mean all i was going to say is don't panic we didn't make the show i thought it was pre-show did we talk about it on the actual show we did the murder hornets are not something that we really need to worry about they're gonna go kill bees so we need to be worried about them for our bees there have only been two dead murder hornets that have been identified in washington so it's not even a big thing and it could potentially be averted could be something we don't have to worry about so murder hornets don't worry about it all the other sides you know what last time i was saying like i think that's a really big bee and that's pretty much it yep the last time i was prepared not to worry about something there's a virus that caused the global pandemic so i'm going to say watch out for the murder hornets watch out for them let's take every action how do you get a whole thing about sensationalism listen to me no did we listen to Blair um i did um so speaking of the end of the show and how we're all going to go get some rest i wanted to talk about very quickly a study that's out this week the looking at memory and how memories get played back while we sleep now this is something that we have studied in a correlational manner before because of fmri and our ability to look at the blood flow in the brain and we've done tests where you get people to do some kind of activity or learn something and then as they're sleeping you try and see if that activity is repeated again in the brain but to date really like i said it's just been correlational but because we have people now who are getting brain implants that are part of a program for brain gate which is allowing it's a brain computer interface that's being developed these people are we have a system in which we have a way to look at people's brains with it's already been invasive we don't have to be more invasive and so researchers took advantage of the fact that these individuals already have brain implants and they said hey can do you want to do the study and so some individuals with tetrapalegia had these 96 channel silicon micro electrode arrays placed neurosurgery in their brains as part of the brain gate to pilot clinical trial and then they had them play simon and you know the game with the lights with the memory game yeah and they had them play simon and had them use their eyes because they're tetrapalegics they're not able to actually move a mouse or do anything but they moved a cursor using the power of their brains to follow the pattern learn the patterns within this game simon and then they had them take a nap and they watched the electrical activity while they were awake playing simon and again while they were asleep play uh and what happened in their brains and their brains repeated the pattern while they were sleeping so we have actual electrical recordings now that we've not had I'm exactly picturing you know the picture of her brain and then it's like red blue yellow green green green yellow blue green green yellow that was yeah but Blair I'm surprised you haven't signed up for this already um well I did at the very beginning I was like oh yeah brain implants oh no thanks oh wait actually it's actually your future it sounds really cool it sounds like your future I mean if you're gonna be ahead in a jar yeah gotta be connected to the outside hop skipping a jump that's just a hop skipping a jump that's right yeah so anyway the researchers say that uh what they did with pre to post task rest uh the correlations with these repeated sequences increase more than the the sequences with the the correlations with control sequences and so it's direct evidence of learning related replay in the human brain which is kind of neat because we've always been like yeah our brain replays stuff and then it's like well we think it does we have this evidence around it but this is very direct which is really cool and a neat way to study it on top of it my thing right is that is that we're going through and going like okay keep this okay throw that away throw that away throw that away keep this okay nope don't won't need that won't need that oh um you won't need your co-worker's wife's name but you do definitely need to remember that pattern from Simon yeah so so this was actually one of my favorite versions of these correlative studies was they had people as students study some material and then they sent the two groups home one was not allowed to drink and one was volunteering to do some drinking every evening remember this one and it was actually the drinkers who were able to better remember because they had no new competing memories because the alcohol sort of subdued the new memory uptake to an extent that the only thing they had to replay from earlier that day was the material they studied was the other group had all this new information like the co-worker's name don't have to remember that gotta throw that out the Saturn pattern I remembered oh I gotta do this on that level of this video game and oh what's this I got some bills do I should probably remember that's gonna be on a Tuesday but not this coming Tuesday the one out they had all this competing information so the pattern didn't keep repeating but the students who studied the material and went off drinking uh that's all that's the last really informationally useful anything that they encountered that day and so they it was locked in better because it I guess we couldn't see or didn't know but that was the correlative that was sort of the assumption of what was taking place yeah inhibitions removed also Belair what you got oh just um koala's licking trees what why I assumed anyway like why wouldn't that yeah so this is from University of Sydney and they're the prevailing theory is that koala's don't need to drink they get all the water that they need from the leaves that they eat and that these cases of koala's needing to drink water after the wildfires is because of extreme dry spells and not having the access to the food and being just generally burnt but now we have evidence that in fact koala's are in fact drinking water by licking trees that they're perched on when it's raining they got 44 observations between 2006 and 2019 so let's back up and hear that again in 13 years they had 44 observations wow so it's not a whole lot but then they also got two other observations of them drinking from standing water one was an adult female with a joey who drank for an uninterrupted 15 minutes and the other was an adult man who drank for 34 minutes straight so it seems like koala's do in fact supplement their water intake that they mostly get from leaves with uh with water when there is rain so that does mean that if there's a drought or anything else that could impact water availability for koala's that that could potentially be a problem i'm gonna have a follow-up question in the after show okay fantastic tree licking koala's justin did you have a final story nope i thought you had one last one that you're no no no my final story is gonna be me sleeping oh okay so i've had normally normally as as fans of the after show will know i'm usually all four hanging out later than anybody else because i've got nothing else to do and i'm gonna be awake anyway i had a uh long week of days a long week of days without much sleeper i am i'm not even on fumes i this is i'm already remembering stuff from yesterday i have uh it's a little sleep you need some sleep yes so that your brain can replay all those memories yes let's let that happen i haven't been able to replay a memory for a long time let's try and let you do that and everyone else out there thank you for listening i hope you enjoyed the show and if you did maybe consider sharing it with a friend shout outs to fauna for his 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in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this weekend and we are at the after show thank you for joining us for another episode of this weekend science we are we've been here and you're here and we thank you we thank you for joining us once again uh justin will be back his fingers crossed i know well his camera's still on he'll be back um i have one question blaire would you be interested in maybe putting some new products on the zazzle store yeah for sure that is a good one i haven't put any of the new pictures up so yeah oh my god i wonder oh sony's asking so i did here see if you can see so what's happening over here wait what are you doing somebody asked what was on my tv oh no i'm showing everyone final fantasy that's fun yeah nice cut scene i wonder i know there are a few places that are doing masks i wonder if we could i wonder if i could get a mammoth mask oh yeah that's fun zazzle um here let me set a reminder and i will work on that tomorrow awesome zazzle store that would be cool what items do we want oh yeah i don't know everyone in the chat room what kind of items do you want or like blaire has new art from this year's calendar that she can turn into products i think mugs are always great okay if the the pillows are always really fun i'll definitely do a pillow yeah yeah the pillows are very fun um i really i like the kiwi tote bag yes it's a good one the phone covers some of the t-shirts are good too like t-shirts i think there is an option so i don't even before asked about fabric i think there is an option to just do fabric oh just to print fabric yeah alternatively you could also buy a t-shirt and make a mask out of a t-shirt if you really wanted a twist mask that would be an option um i've heard that t-shirt fabric is particularly good for masks well they're just a basic cotton yeah for a basic mask with new filter gaurav sharma likes the kitchen apron yeah it would be it would be great to have masks everyone's like masks let's do it plagues plague style crow masks i think you can find those other places yeah amazon for sure pocket protectors oh yeah that's good why is the us pads that's a good one desk pads yeah it's very old school like a blotter that's what i assumed that was my dad always had a blotter when i was growing up in his um office his home office pretty cool thing it's very old school it's very like the majority of your work is being done on paper this is the reason you would have a blotter right gaurav is asking why i don't get why the us is divided over wearing masks well because freedom yeah i don't know i mean of course people are also just wearing them below their nose all the time just and just to now hang hung up he waved i was in for a second oh really oh jeez um that was fast i was uh yeah i was out in the world today i had to go into the office and do a couple things and um stopped at a target on the way home to pick up eggs and stuff and um just the number of people that i see with masks here i know just drive me insane i'm like why yeah why even bother but i mean it also does indicate that um as as a culture we in the united states don't fully understand how masks are supposed to be worn no which like you know it's for all that people are complaining about china and sure there's certain some things they did related to the virus when it was first happening that wasn't good but as a society they've been through this before and they understand how when you're supposed to wear masks how you wear them and that it's serious and it's socially acceptable and all this kind of stuff so yes and that it's not about you it's about protecting others i i do like that i you know america now there's like all these like funny special masks like people are saying they want masks in the zazzle store people are finding a way to make it individual and fun and so i'm that's kind of the the pro of this is i do see people embracing it being like great i'm gonna buy a bunch of fun masks you're like okay great make it an accessory there was one woman um actually when i was in line to get into target today this is wearing hot pink biker shorts and a metallic silver shirt and a pink sequined mask i love it you're doing it you're going to the sequins add more holes though good question maybe the top layer was sequined and there were layers behind it that were not punctured i would i would hope i've been thinking to have a face mask with like here in the picture a face mask with a mouth on it or with a face on it would be great yes like i've seen some really funny ones but uh this isn't the really funny one but to have a mask that a mask with a face on it would be really hilarious just like a super normal one like yeah the cartoon mouths and stuff i'm like oh yeah that's cool that is like what a psychopath wears now look at i'm smiling really i'm smiling if i saw someone wearing that i would i would give them way more than six feet let me tell you i think it's fantastic yeah there are there are some interesting ones out there i like that i like ones that have been uh so there's like clear face masks that have been created for the deaf and hard of hearing oh that's cool yeah they're really neat uh you know the hard to come by but they're so useful i and you know maybe you know maybe they're a bit hotter to wear because it's like a plastic shield over part of it instead of it being all cloth but it allows you to get across that expression that is so important for communication so maybe for communications roles those kinds of masks might become you know more predominant yeah that's very neat i didn't even thought about that that's true because i know for me as far as i know my hearing is fine but when i can't see someone's mouth i feel like i understand less and i guess that's just because i'm a i'm a very visual learner and i process visually and so um i've noticed that i feel like i have to ask people to speak up more or i have to ask people to repeat themselves more or whatever just because i can't see them but i also feel like i sometimes i feel like i can't be as effective as a communicator because my face is covered it's very cool yeah 100 percent yeah i feel like i'm hiding yeah cheryl grossman is saying at least wearing the mask wrong is showing that they're willing to wear one so there just needs to be better communication about how to wear them correctly yeah yeah yeah that's yikes there needs to be a serious information campaign if you're not covering your nose not doing what it's supposed to be doing um our favorite was a couple weeks ago we saw somebody um with a uh like sleeping like eye mask mm-hmm over their mouth it was turned upside down so there was a space for the nose very creative people getting creative too creative it's fine you're wearing a mask for real you could have a t-shirt you could wrap around your face like a bandana pretend you're pretend you're playing you know cowboys or something yeah wear your bandana oh my goodness oh my goodness yeah well yes and uh as people are pointing out if the people at the tippy top of leadership are not using ppe properly it's kind of hard to expect the general populace to do so so if you won't wear a mask in the mayo clinic or you wear goggles and no mask then demonstration is such especially you know we we don't like to consider ourselves necessarily hierarchical as a species but the you know we still are the primates of of our past ancestors and the ones at the top of the pile set an example and we mimic those examples yep and so learning by mimicry is it's really essential for leaders to take that responsibility um yeah but anyway anyway yeah you're totally right yeah right and okay yeah and Robert Bigelow is saying was socialized to mask wearing helping to take care of friends suffering from complications of hiv aids yeah it's not over yeah oh my god Kristen Bell used a thong mask on the last on her last mom's bleeding series oh no oh Kristen Bell I gotta take a look at that oh dear oh dear oh dear um by far one of my favorite things on the internet is just somebody saying Kristen Bell and Christian Bale over and over over oh there you go it's great one after the other Kristen Bell Christian Bale Kristen Bell Kristen Bale Kristen Bell Kristen Bale Kristen Bell Kristen Bale after a while it starts to meld one into the other so Blair did you get a chance to hear the song that I sent to you I sure did not just for me the original yes it's so good it's so good isn't it it is the thing it is getting a little stir crazy yeah but it is the thing that has given me hope for humanity good gotta find it somewhere little eight-year-old girls coming up with very good songs very good songs and if you search it out of the ashes and if you search it's the the remixes and the remakes of it are oh it's amazing that was like that was published like yesterday right like sunday oh yeah sunday so quick it went crazy virally you shared things with me I did I sent the Christian Bale I will watch that I will watch it oh my goodness it's square it is you guys you get so used to a particular aspect ratio and then somebody goes and gives you a four three aspect ratio and I don't even know what's going on right now it's like how it's even used to be taped this is all television just the television of my youth not even my youth my mid adulthood we didn't get 16 nine for we didn't get 16 nine for a very long time I just have to say have we ever vaccinated seven billion people at the same time not at the same time but the flu we do a really good we have a very big effort to throughout the year vaccinate everybody I mean we don't vaccinate a lot we try yeah how long yeah how the vaccine will smallpox and polio there were considerably less people at that point yeah so something seven billion thing so a point that I was talking with marshal the other day about ventilators and we were talking about how ventilators are work and we're and why with COVID they seem to be causing a lot of damage or at least they're associated with a lot of damage in the lungs and and we started discussing the mechanics of how ventilators work and how our lungs work and so our lungs are a negative pressure system so when you breathe it's not your muscles push causing air to be pushed into your body it's your diaphragm expanding and your lungs expanding and causing a pressure gradient down which air flows through your trachea right and so when ventilators work they're a positive pressure system and they are pushing air into the lungs inflating them like balloons and then your body squeezes the air out or the or the ventilator you know pulls the air out if you're not if you're not conscious to be pushing the air out at all and we start so we were talking about why iron lungs were built the way that they were and it was because during polio the muscles weren't working and they created these ventilators the iron lung machines were negative pressure systems that pulled they created pressure that pulled the body cavity like it made your lungs inflate in a more natural way whoa right and so i thought the iron lung would have been the better the better ventilator right it's so it's a very interesting yeah really interesting discussion about wow i mean do we want to bring iron lungs back for coven i don't think so but at the same time maybe there is something that is built on that kind of a mechanics perspective interesting yeah i don't know just really interesting conversation to get into i mean if we're if we're throwing around 69 million dollars for ventilators left and right might be worth looking at i know i don't people don't yeah and if if the ventilators are contributing to the damage because of the way as the air is flowing how can we do it better yeah yeah i mean that's kind of the scary thing about this that i'm trying not to think too much about that i was talking to brian about is that uh we we don't really know what the lasting effects of this stuff is yet nope we don't know how people with coven you know um we were talking about how if you look at a chest x-ray of someone with coven and someone with tuberculosis the coven lung looks real bad um and so we don't know if it's something that there's scar tissue in the lung that you never recover from if it's something that um you you'd get totally better like the flu probably not so this might not be just you know people had coven and they were sick and then they got better sort of situation this might have lasting effects on people's lives after them contracted it which also is a totally different way than people are generally talking about this thing is saying like uh oh we don't want people to get sick but we don't want to shut down the economy but you know maybe some people get sick but a lot of them will get better well this version of getting better might not be so rosy might not be great yeah it's kind of scary yep yeah it is scary it's not just shoot i'm gonna be on my butt for two weeks could be much worse than that yeah it's yeah i know someone uh i know she's a science communicator who apparently she contracted SARS when that when that was making its way around and she said she's still suffering from respiratory issues related to having contracted that and that was years back yeah pretty scary yeah yeah it's not great and what happens if you do get it again because the antibodies don't provide immunity asks she brew mm-hmm we get it again is it worse is it worse is it yeah how does it not is it the same is it like allergies where it's worse every time right right yeah yeah for yarks yeah i there's so many the thing that is everybody's starting to try to go back to normal and there are still so many things that we don't know and that's that to me is the scary part um because it pushing ourselves back is i think i think it's dangerous but you know if i don't know we gotta we have to balance things out somehow we have to figure out how to be able to get back on our feet and working you know we have to people are people are suffering from not having jobs from having to work at home or being in bad home situations there are issues related to what we're doing right now that are not great on their own people are gonna suffer from anxiety and depression and yeah i mean there's there's a lot to be dealt with and how do you how do you balance everything and how do how do we make it all work while trying to you know preserve as much life as possible in the best way possible i think it'll be very interesting to look at how socially our species responds to this because i was also thinking about how even people who consider themselves extroverts like me like i am an extreme extrovert i still feel like going back to normal and going out in the world is going to be emotionally weird and you know you take you take an animal that um even if it's supposed to be a gregarious or a social animal if it's been isolated from other individuals and then you put it in with a bunch of individuals it doesn't really know what to do with itself at first right so i'm just very curious as a animal as a species kind of how socially we are going to get back to our gregarious nature are we going to be like really wary of strangers are we not going to want to touch each other are we going to find ourselves only wanting to be in large social gatherings for 10 minutes before all of us kind of flee in different directions i gotta go yeah like oh this is stressing me out i gotta get out of here yeah oh i think that's gonna be a very interesting question one one i think positive point there are there okay there were three things this last week this two this weekend and one this last week that gave me a very positive perspective on things one was an interview with a scientist that i did last week and he uh was looking at data from of society from for years going back and he says we've had these pandemics in the past and two years after they're over it's like they're over and society goes back to normal it's like right now we're in the middle of it and we think it's gonna affect everything forever and it doesn't that's good yeah but then again it was always those things were never at in the middle of maybe the same social situations that we're experiencing right now with great inequality and climate issues and you know all sorts of all sorts of things that potentially we want to change so there were a couple of articles this weekend one in the new yorker by kim stanley robinson who's a science fiction author and it is it's a wonderful wonderful long read on kind of the choice that we have in front of us and he addresses everything and i think in doing so he does it not in a woe is us negative kind of way but he does it in a very positive way which was amazing and then there's a video that's been making the rounds called the great realization and i'll find the link for it and share it because i think everybody needs to see it because it's like oh yes yes it's a bedtime story and so i'm gonna share it and then we're all gonna watch it and then we're gonna go to bed and have good dreams i love it good dreams of the future it's already been stolen by five million people sign of greatness there it is yeah it's yeah i've been spread everywhere so everyone's stolen it already you always know the great realization i don't i need to find the article share with you too okay here's i'm sharing it i think that's the right one i'm gonna share it in the chat rooms it's a really good video and it made me very happy and positive and so i hope it will make you happy and positive also because i think we all have it is a dwell point and it's a point in history that we're going through right now we have choices to make and i think we can make the right ones because we already have been can stanley robinson new yorker or that's the article and here the article i want to read that and we'll go to bam yeah is it positive things there are positive things in the world among these things and if you also haven't been watching uh some good news with john krasinski you need to be watching that also it's so good so good we all need some good news right now okay blare you ready to go to bed i think i'm ready you're ready you ready to go play final fantasy i saw you're gonna go play some final fantasy with satie no no i think we're gonna we're gonna eat a little more birthday cake and go to bed was today brian's birthday no it was um last saturday but he had a shift the night before and that night so we're making up for it nice tell him happy birthday i know kiki says happy birthday he can't hear me he's like i'm in the zone it's just you you're welcome yeah he's in the final fantasy zone i'm in the zone playing the auto zone okay i only ever used to play it for the cut scenes that was it now it's all cut scenes good night blare there it is running around the biggest sort i ever have seen he started playing it i was like the physics it's like can you imagine try to use a two by four like a sore no it's too big too big okay well anyway we can discuss the physics of video games another day how believable are they maybe not so much unless you're playing humans fall flat oh the goose game the untitled goose game that one's pretty realistic yeah all right everyone thank you for watching thank you for being a part of our conversation thank you for being here tonight blare thank you thank you kiki and have a wonderful week thank you i'll see you same bat time same bat channel that's right wait for the bat signal we'll see you again next week everyone stay healthy stay well and thank you bye i'm not hitting the buttons enough times right