 Okay, who's got the worst lighting in the world, and who can't really do anything about it? Justin, you're quoting Tom Waits in the chat room. Well, this is a little bit here and there, you know what I'm doing. I got a Tom Waits record for my birthday today. Oh, that's very nice. I got myself a couple of them. Oh, Tom Waits for the birthday? That is a fabulous celebration. I love, I love. Celebrated our birthdays with Tom Waits. That's kind of cool. It's just fantastic. You guys, seriously, Tom Waits and this team, it is a bond that keeps us together. It does. Sounds like I am hearing a potential twist field trip coming up. Oh, yes. Tom Waits house again? Yeah. Yeah. Whenever he does his next concert, and usually it's in like Tennessee or something, but we could just combine it with a live show. He actually shops, I don't want to say where, but a thrift store not far from where I am sitting. Because it's low-key and I think, where my understanding is he can get stuff that wasn't super trendy five years ago, but more stuff that he would have bought new. The closer he gets to where I live. When I went to Sonoma State, I was always hoping I would run into him because he lived in Petaluma at the time. Yeah. He actually has shopped at the record store where I repurchased my birthday Tom Waits house. Which one? Birthday. It's called Armadillo. Armadillo. I got Nighthawks. Oh, no. Armadillo is sorry. Armadillo is the music store. Yeah. What's the name of the album you got? I had to get Closing Time again. Closing Time. Good choice. Such a good one. Yes. One of my favorites. Everyone, you did not know. It's time for twists. It is birthday time though. It is birthday time. So as we get this show started, I would like to wish my co-hosts happy birthday. Happy birthday. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Happy Blair Day, Blair. Thank you. Happy day after Justin Day, Justin. Thank you. It's like one of my favorites. But day after Justin Day. I feel like day after Justin Day would be one of your least favorites. Have a little bit of a headache, maybe. Technically, I consider every day to be Justin Day. So they're all my favorites. Oh, I see. So every day is both Justin Day and day after Justin Day. And then the day after the day after Justin Day. And the day before Justin Day. The day before the day before. All right. Good days. And it's also time for a show. I think it's more kikis. Yeah. Okay. You know, unlike many of our viewers, I am not used to the East Coast time difference. So I feel you, all of you who are with us at 11 p.m. 11-11 right now to start this show. New York City, it's amazing. But really, I'm starting the show at 11 o'clock at night. Okay, you guys, we're doing this show so we can get a quick 90 in so I can go to bed by one in the morning. Tight 90. Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. So starting in three, two, this is twist. This week in science episode number 699 recorded on Wednesday, December 12, 2018 science birthday show. Hey, everyone. I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on this week in science, we are going to fill your head with deep life, dark matter and junkie finches. But first disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Don't put all of your eggs in one basket, which on the surface may seem like an unreasonable and deeply flawed analogy. Yes. There's the hole. There goes the basket. So goes all the eggs. But if when collecting eggs from hens, you attempted to carry multiple baskets, the risk of dropping a basket would obviously increase. And how many of us actually collect eggs from hens these days? The modern equivalent might be, don't put all of your eggs in one shopping cart. Okay. So you've got a dozen eggs. You put six in this cart and you put six in that one. Still looks like the egg to cart ratio was off. Now you need a third cart. Four eggs per cart. That seems a little less risky. Unless you happen to be walking down an aisle where someone else is attempting to push three carts, because now the risk of being cut down at the achilles by a shopping cart has gone up dramatically. When it comes to being a life form on planet earth, we are all in the same basket. And until that changes, we need to act like it. Because where goes the earth, so goes all of us. And nowhere is that made more obvious than this week in science coming up next. Oh, I totally forgot that was my job. Stand by, stand by. So as Blair spools the music, I will just remind, we'll let everyone know that I texted Blair early this evening, asking her to take care of the music for the show. Because I'm not at home. And I'm reading. I'm reading. I don't have the visual. I didn't have the visual on some reading. And I'm just hoping that like somebody is getting ready to hold the audio next to the thing for this, this sort of normally not a problem problem. Here. Coming up next. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know what's happening. What's happening. What's happening this week in science. This week in science. Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of this week in science. We are back again. And it's birthday week. It really is. Everyone out there, I want to have you join me. Please join me for just one moment to wish Justin and Blair another successful year around the sun. They made it one more. Let's do it again. Good job team. Happy birthday. Yes, I did die. Yes. You made it. You made it. Yeah. You made it. Sliding in, sliding in, keeping going, going around. The bases. We went around and this year, I believe is also the past the million mark download. Anniversary for for twits. Oh yeah, we've got all sorts of, we have lots of millions of downloads. Don't you know this? Lots of millions. I don't, I don't get the, I thought it was just we over a million, is more than a million? More than a million? More than a million? More than a million. Oh, it was a better birthday than I thought it was. It's a wonderful birthday. We have, yes, thanks to all the people out there joining us every week. We have many millions of downloads at this point in our broadcast career. How neat. Yeah, so happy birthday. What a gift. Turns out I need to update my resume. Yeah, there you go. All right, everyone. Let us move ahead into our birthday science show full of science news. And I've got some science news about missing uterus memory, deep life, and, well, I just did the birthday wishes. So there we go. What do you have, Justin? Oh, I have stories about the dark matter through the ages. I've got stories about climate change. And then I've got another story Oh, yeah. Oh, this one's gonna be good. We finally may have been able to witness the structure of a cell wall. Oh, that's exciting. Yeah, and Blair, what is in the animal corner this week? I have spider milk. I have Finch food. And I have toothless whales. OK, I just lost it. at spider milk. Okay, can't wait for that story, but that will come up in just a little bit. You know, it does a lot of good. Is that like a movie, Finch Prize? I mean, you'll just have to wait to find out. We do, we do. Everyone, as we jump into the show, I would like to remind you that you can subscribe to the Twist podcast, all places that podcasts are found, iTunes, Google podcast, Portal, also Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, Spreaker, TuneIn. We're also on YouTube and Facebook. Look for this week in science. You can also go to twist.org. Visit twist.org for information. But now it's time for the science. All right, Blair, you weren't here last week when we talked about my uterus. Well, not mine specifically, but we talked about uterus transplants. Yeah, you talked about that dead person's uterus that then birthed a baby, right? Yes, we did. Right. That crazy science fiction headline that is real life. It is real life. And so one of the questions that came up as a result of that conversation was, you know, how does losing something like your uterus, how is that similar or dissimilar to losing a limb? How would a transplant of a uterus potentially affect you psychologically? And that's not something that we really have an answer for because really in research, people have stuck to looking at the ovaries a lot more as influencers of psychology, specifically usually a woman's mood because the ovaries are very tied to our hormone cycles being, you know, releases of follicle stimulating hormone and lutein hormone and all these things that affect our estrogen levels and progesterone levels and really affect our functioning throughout a month. We know that the uterus is also involved in releasing hormones and has a huge hormonal role to play, but the function of the uterus with respect to memory has never been really delved into before. And so some researchers at Arizona State University decided to take a look at this, and they didn't look at it in humans. They looked at it in rats. They took female rats and they gave them operations. They either took out just their ovaries, just their uterus, both of them or neither. And then they let them heal up a little bit and had them do a memory task. We're going to put you in a small body of water and have you remember the location of life-saving platforms, you know, something that could be kind of useful for them to remember, right? And this is a fairly standard memory test in the rodent literature. We do this a lot to study how well different drugs or different interventions affect memory in rodents. Can I just, before we get to the rest of it? What? Because I want to make a prediction. I want to speculate. I want to do some science speculating. Okay, okay. And say more surgery, more memory problems. That's going to be my prediction. Okay. So what they found is that the only group that had a really hard time with this memory task was the group that only had their uterus removed. So uterus and ovaries actually performed better than just uterus alone. And so they said, this is four groups, each with like 14 or 15 rats in them. Maybe this is just an artifact and this is not a correct result. Yes, small sample. They did. They found the same result. So do you think it has to do with the fact that part of a system, but not the whole system, was missing? So just hormonal, mechanical, bodily confusion issues were just short circuiting the rat's body basically or? I mean, it's possible. But the question here that really, I mean, yes, we want to know why only removing the uterus had such an effect on rats. The second question is, if it were humans, is the same thing applicable? Because something like a third of all women will have a hysterectomy by the age of 60. But they only take the uterus out in a hysterectomy? Yes. Only the uterus is removed. So this could potentially lead to a decision to also remove ovaries in these sorts of surgeries in the future? Right. And so part of the reasoning of leaving the ovaries in is that the ovaries still produce hormones. And so you can continue to have hormonal fluctuations that are healthy and that we think are good for memory and for preserving brain function and general physiological metabolism, right? But if those signals are supposed to be arriving at a uterus that's not there, they're still there and going somewhere else and causing confusion, as Blair stated. Yeah. So memory problems are associated with menopause, correct? Yes. Okay. So we know that this system in general can definitely be related to memory. We also know that there's hormones released post giving birth to make you forget how bad birth was. So for sure we know the system is related to memory in a lot of different ways. This makes sense that messing with it would have a cascading effect on memory if you kind of zoom out in that way. But yeah, this is kind of baffling to me because we usually like to blame hormones for everything. But in this case, keeping the hormones made it worse. Yeah. I mean, it's not necessarily, yeah, it's not necessarily keeping the hormones though because the ovaries were still there producing hormones, doing what the ovaries do. And when the uterus and the ovaries were removed, the rats were better at this memory task. So there's something going on with the uterus in this system that we don't understand. And it could be related to these menopausal memory problems that you mentioned. We don't know. I mean, there have been so many questions about how estrogen is involved in memory issues as women age. And for years, it's been like, okay, women need to take estrogen hormone therapy, right? And then it was like, oh, estrogen hormone therapy is going to affect breast cancer. Oh, we can't do that. And so there are so many unknown variables still here. And it's fascinating to me. But I'm wondering also, so there's the removal of the uterus that can, I mean, we don't know if this affects humans in the same way as it did the rat. That is nothing. We don't know that yet. So people with hysterectomies or planning to get hysterectomies, don't let this concern you because this is still the best science we have. This is still going to help you. Moving forward, we might have new information. Yes, we'll see. Wait a second. We have, we don't have to do a human research study where we require people to remove their uterus in order to study this now. No, they're women without this is happening all the time. It's like a common procedure. Yeah. So all we really need to do to follow up is to look at that population or subpopulation of humans and see if we can discern differentiation. Ah, no, we need to, we actually need to track backwards or find those who are already part of studies who have had this, but we can then say, oh, let's look at this other aspect of this group we've been following and see if we can differentiate their past from their current condition in terms of. And then if we can just get a couple of humans to also take out their ovaries, we'll be awesome. And I'm sure, but you know, I'm sure that has happened as well for various reasons. Ovarian cancer, right? I mean, I'm sure it's happened. You're right. The other thing is also we've always got to keep in perspective when we're talking about anything having to do with the mind that one major difference between mouse and man is that mental capacities are completely different. So that which causes memory fatigue, I'll call it making up words for a mouse, may be totally insignificant to a human mind. Yep, exactly. And quick question. Would there be any good analogy of kind of this effect by taking male rats and injecting them with kind of the hormone cocktail you get from ovaries and seeing if that would affect memory? I would guess they don't have the same system. So they're lacking the same receptors, the same pathways that a female rat would be missing if they removed a uterus-ish, right? Yeah, but it's still tying it directly. It's still trying to tie it directly to, you know, it probably is related to hormones, but it could be even something else as well. But that would at least, it would rule that out, right? As being like, it's just the hormones. You'd be able to rule that out if you did that to male rats. I don't think so. And the reason I don't think so, and maybe Kiki's got a different is because it's like trying to remember a song that you actually haven't heard versus one that you did hear, but forgot the words. I feel like it's the attempt to reconnect a bad interconnection. Like keep the constant attempts to like, no, there is a receiving end to this. I need to keep sending the signal until I get the feedback that it's been received. And I feel like that's more the thing that's causing the mental fatigue is this system that's not closing. Whereas I don't think that that system would be in place in a male, and therefore it would be like, oh, this doesn't even belong anywhere. Gone. Yeah, that makes sense. That's a cool analogy that I get. Yeah. Well, taking it to the other extreme kind of back to where I started with, you know, affecting memory when a uterus is removed from rats, what happens when a uterus is transplanted? So is there a recovery of function when a uterus is returned to the system? Yeah. So that is, I think that's another question that could and should be delved into in the future. So many questions to answer. Kiki just threw down a bombshell right there for you to grab up. Right. And speaking of bombshells, oh my goodness, one of my favorite projects, we've interviewed scientists from this effort a couple of times on the show, the deep carbon observatory. They've been studying what goes on with carbon deep within the earth. They've been trying to figure out, oh, what's carbon doing in there? They've been analyzing, doing all sorts of things. Anyway, they just reported at the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting, they reported finding carbonaceous life within the earth's subsurface. So this is like bacterial life, right, microbes and stuff. They call some of them zombie bacteria and other microbial tiny forms of life. They are so abundant within our planet. It's like 10% of the biomass on the planet, something like this. I know it's 245 to 235 times greater than the carbon mass of all humans on the surface of the planet. And that it is the size of this deep biosphere, 2 to 2.3 billion cubic kilometers. And the cubic mass of deep life, 15 to 23 billion tons of life. This is the carbon mass of life under the surface of the planet. Not the sparkly shiny stuff like us that's on the surface, but the stuff that lives within our planet. Yeah, so I remember like talking about under the ocean and it was being estimated at 10% of the planet's biomass was biomass, was microbes under the ocean. But the numbers you're talking about sound bigger. Yeah, going further into this, a little bit further into this story, deep life scientists say that about 70% of earth's bacteria and archaea bacteria live in the subsurface of the planet. They're already most of the life on planet earth, biomass wise or otherwise. And if most of the most is stuff we didn't know was there, first of all, there's a lot more life on planet earth. That's awesome news. The other thing is every life form that we consider life forms that isn't a bacteria is a minority of the life forms on the planet. We are not, why this planet? Wow. Yeah, and we thought we were outnumbered by beetles. There's nothing compared to this. Nothing compared to this. This is so such a huge, it creates an awareness of where we are and what our planet contains. There's a much more biological diversity on the planet that we then we could even imagine to the continental subsurface, let's see, the rocks in various locations. There was one team led by Kara Magnavosco of the Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Biology in New York and her subsurface scientists looked at things like global heat flow, surface temperature, depth and lithology, which are the physical characteristics of rocks in various places. To estimate the subsurface of the planet, the continents of the planet hosts two to six times 10 to the 29th cells, which that's on an order of magnitude with, you know, one of those really big galactic in scale. I gave up on trying to count all the stars long time ago. There's a lot. You'd have to be counting forever. But this is a much bigger number. It is. This is a bigger number than that. Some of those numbers that's so big that it's just like, yeah, it's big. I don't really know what it means other than it's real big. Well, okay. And they put in this, but in this also, they've been able to not just see genetic diversity. They've been also been able to start putting limits on life in terms of how hot can life take it and still exist, right? Even in a zombie state or an archaea bacterial state, what kind of pressure can cells take? The energy, what kind of energy sources have to be available in the rocks for these organisms to be able to survive even in a minimal state? And the front runner right now for the Earth's hottest organism is Geogema borosii. It's an organism that lives in seafloor hydrothermal vents and its cells grow and replicated 121 degrees Celsius. Microbial life can survive up to 122 degrees Celsius, which is in lab culture, not out in the wild. But yeah. So this is something that's always fascinated me, is that different types of bacteria have different internal turgur turgur? Turgur. Turgur pressures, which is a sort of internal pressure that's that's different than the external pressure that they're in. And so I've always imagined like there's some that like kind of makes sense, maybe whatever, like I think it's E. coli, like if you if you look at its internal turgur, it would be somewhat related to have have evolved maybe 10, 15, 20 feet under water or underground. And there's some bacteria that just have really high internal turgurs. And these could be derived from different ways. But I have always pictured it as what if that's where this this evolved initially? What if that's some hint or some clue to the environment that it was in that the internal had to be just maybe a little bit more than the outside, but not drastically more. And the idea that then we have, we have really deep into the earth bacteria that can that have that have to sustain intense pressures externally, gotta have a little more on the inside than the outside to really survive. So this could also sort of be like we have the tree of life where when things started and when branches came up, there may be some sort of calibration for how deep in the earth anyone bacterial life form. Right. And there are some of these microbes that have life cycles that are really long because they have such slow metabolisms and they live on energy that they get from the stuff in the rocks that they live on. And so they have kind of these geologic scale times, lifetimes. I forgot about this aspect of it. This, this is long life and possibilities of the, I mean, that's what it is. It was just some of the longest living life forms on the earth because of could be bacteria. Yep. Yeah. So yes, bacteria, this wonderful, amazing, the microbes of the world, they outnumber us by a lot. We should say thank you for them letting us and letting us live here with them. Yeah, because if we don't, the bubble up out from beneath us and take over the whole planet. That's right. That's right. Let's see anything else from this story. So there are some comments from here. Jesse Osobel from the Rockefeller University, a founder of the Deep Carbon Observatory. She says, says they are not Christmas ornaments, but the tiny balls and tinsel of deep life look like they could decorate a tree as well as Swarovski glass. Why would nature make deep life beautiful when there is no light and no mirrors? Because beauty exists whether or not you see it. That's right. It's not necessarily always in the eye of the beholder. But anyway, little Christmas time thought as we head into the holidays and we've got our own little birthday celebration show. That's right. All right, Justin, what do you have for us? Oh, this is interesting. So this is from the Astrophysical Journal via University of Texas at Austin. Astronomers found a galaxy really, really far away that happened to show the effects of dark matter gravity taking place. And this would be, I think it's about 10 billion years old or 10 billion light years. I think it might be the same thing. I think I just reiterated. And the effects that they saw match what we see today. This was using the Kleck telescope from Hawaii. You're not actually intending this study dark matter, too. So this is one of those fun little accidental discoveries. It's kind of big, but sort of wasn't what they were looking for. They were actually looking to see why they were producing so many stars so rapidly in this particular galaxy. But one of the galaxies surprised them. So this is a, because of the random angle at which the Galaxy DSF-G850.95 was studied with the telescope, the data provided an extremely detailed record of the speed of the galaxy's rotation in the center of the galaxy, all the way out to its farthest reaches. I call this a rotation curve. This measurement is the thing that the astronomers used to determine how much dark matter is in a galaxy. So they did the calculation. And it turns out that the amount of dark matter that they would expect to find in a galaxy of this size is what they expect to find when we're looking at something much closer, much more recent in history. Which then debunks the idea that somehow, in any way, dark matter has been growing or increasing over time throughout the universe. There's an evolution or an influx of the dark matter itself. So a nice new pinpoint in our understanding of dark matter, a fun, because the accidental discovery, you go looking for one thing and something else pops up that's actually maybe more important than the thing that you started looking at. It's also really exciting. So yeah, that's, let's see, where is the, there's a quotey voice something. This is a quotey voice, might not have as much dark matter and our formula different from galaxies to the present day universe was the theory. The galaxy we found is a clear counter example of that, where it seems to have dark matter behaving in the normal way as it does in the present day universe. So that's Caitlyn Casey. The University of Texas, Austin. Okay, so dark matter acts like regular matter really. Even in the billions of years ago past, like there was this idea that there was an influx or a change or there was something that was. It was one idea. Yeah. It was the one idea. It eliminates that. And it's actually, I think there was another thing suggesting that that was maybe not true, but this one is like a good, a good nail in the coffin of that concept. It seems like dark matter was something for a very long time that we used kind of as the scapegoat when we couldn't figure something out, but also as lots of these kind of mystical elements kind of along the same vein. And the more and more we learned about it, it's just pretty normal. Yeah. It's like been around. Yeah. Although, although it does still, it does still remove we remove lipstick stains from shirt collar. So if you need Dr. Justin's dark matter stain remover, be sure to send your dollars here now. Yeah. Put a black hole in your pocket. Oh, and if this wasn't enough to confuse you more about the dark matter, dark, dark energy stuff, isn't there a whole, there's a whole new idea about the, about dark fluid. Yes. No. But this is, this is like. Is that like the stuff in, it's a small world, you know, the dark water? Is that? Yeah. I feel like this is a spherical cow physicist thing. We're like, okay, take everything we don't know and try to give it a single type property that's congealed together. And they can do it because they're really smart, but it also doesn't mean that that's a thing that's dark fluid. Well, with the dark fluid idea, they put dark matter and dark energy together. And so they're not separate concepts anymore, but rather one concept dark fluid that has a negative mass. And so it's this changing of a sign in the equations from positive to negative mass goes from positive to negative. This is suddenly decided it's a, it's a, it's a fluid, as opposed to matter or energy. And it solves the equation. However, it as Justin said statically, yes, but as yeah. But what's come out of it now, you know, this is a researcher who's, this is theoretical. They've played with the equations and they've come out with a simulation that if, oh, if we do this, look, it all works out. And so now is the time for the science to occur to for researchers to figure out if this other researcher is wrong or right. And the comments should be coming fairly quickly and heavily in the next month or so on this. At least I would imagine. Yeah. But anyway, it's good to know that there's research out now that just on the dark matter side of things. This is something we can count on. It's some stable stuff. It likes to do what it likes to do. That is good. All right. If you just tuned in, this is this week in science and I do believe it is that time in the show. What time is it? It's time for Blair's animal corner. Oh, speaking of things that you can count on, especially during the holidays, you can really count on dear old mom, right? Mom, she took care of you from the time you were a little itty-bitty. And then when you were big enough to take care of yourself, many of us may have stayed at home and let mom continue to care for us. Of course, I'm not talking about your friend living in your mom's basement. I'm talking about spiders. Spiders, spiders, spider moms. They do a lot of special things. We've talked in the show about how spiders give parental care. A couple of weeks ago, we talked about a colony of spiders that care for the young together. Well, it just got crazier. There is a jumping spider that mimics ants. First, let me just get that over with Toxious Magnus, a jumping spider that mimics ants. They give milk to their young. Okay, so let's talk about different things we call milk. In the mammal world, there are mammary glands that create milk, which is a nutritious liquid that feeds babies that has lactose proteins in it. And that's like this mammals. Yes. So this is like a very specific thing that we call milk. However, monotremes, like platypuses and echidnas, they make a milky liquidy secretion without having full mammary glands that has a different type of lactose in it. There are beetles and termites that give a milky secretion to their babies. There are birds that give milk crop to their babies, which is like predigested food, but also with some other nutritious liquids in it. So there's all these kind of weird other things we call milk in the animal kingdom. So this spider, this is the first time we've seen a spider who uses something that we might call milk. So they have a specialized organ that looks a lot like a mammary gland. These droplets leak from in a furrow, an epigastric furrow, where spiderlings suckle. They go to retrieve this milk. They suckle? Yeah. I mean, I get like, there's some sort of nutritional package that is presented and devoured, but you're talking now about suckling. Yes. Spiders. Spiders. Let me get to the part where this is actually interesting and puzzling to science. That part was like, oh yeah. Cool. Another invertebrate that has like a milky thing that it does. Cool. So that like was not the most surprising thing that happened. They actually found out about this because researchers looked at these jumping spiders and looked at their breeding nests. And they found that the breeding nests had a bunch of individuals that appear to be adults living together. They are non-colonial spiders. They know this. They don't work together. They don't group raise young. So why were there's all these adults in the nest? So either there's several adults or there's one adult female and several juveniles, like teenagers, basically hanging out with moms still. So this brought them to look at this a little closer. They took these spiders into labs and looked at them in the field. No spiderlings left the nest enabled able to forage until they were 20 days old. And if they were blocked from taking milk from mom, they died within 10 days. So milk was their only source of nutrients for 10 to 20 days. Where this gets even crazier is that some spiders stayed for up to 40 days. Now these spiders usually live about 50 to 60 days. So some of these spiders were staying with mom, taking milk, getting the their nest that they were living in with mom cleaned by mom through most of their adult life. Thanks, mom. Yeah. So this is kind of bizarre. One thing that they saw was that once they hit sexual maturity, it was pretty much only females that were able to stay. Males were kicked out once they hit sexual maturity, still older than you would expect. But this is probably to prevent in breeding, of course. But they also found that there were direct correlations with improved success as an adult, improved foraging as an adult, all this kind of stuff with the longer time with mom. And that mom was not negatively affected by this. So this is kind of bizarre. One milk, two, keeping the babies longer than normal, three, not negatively affecting mom. All that together. And the other the other that you didn't even mention is that the increase when you had nests with with 40 day offspring still in the nest, the increase in spider con activity in around those nests. And one entomologist says about this study, out of 50,000 described species of spiders, you can bet your boots. This isn't the only one that does it. So the idea is milk like fluids happening outside of the mammal family likely to be all over the animal kingdom. And we didn't even know that. Wow. There you go. Spider milk. That's what I thought made being a mammal special. And in fact, it's in mammal and that like it's how we defined. So we said, what is how should we define ourselves? It's breast milk. That's how we define ourselves. Well, you can also say hair or fur at some stage of your life that's on some part of your body. Yeah, I think that's everything. Yeah, it's definitely more important, but it's it's looking less specific the longer we look. I think this really also is interesting. It's in the finding itself that not thinking that these are social species, they're not social generally, but they are rearing their young for an extended period of time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's kind of changing the way we look at that also. Like maybe there's solitary and there's social and there's this kind of middle ground, which is like, my children are okay, especially my daughters, everyone else get the heck away from me. Yeah. And then it's interesting the difference that the males are kicked out earlier than the females. And I, you know, so what's going on there as well. This just opens up again so many questions. So many questions. I love it. I feel like that the spider societies are a little bit more female oriented anyway. Oh, they definitely are. And so that's part of it too, is that this particular type of spider is female. It's female heavy because it's polygamous with one male. Is that a word? Fomogeny? I don't think so, but okay. We have to invent it for the spider world. I don't know. But it weighs heavily on the female side population wise. And they think it's because of this polygamy. But now also like the one male will fertilize many females. But it makes sense that if you have these females giving this very long, potentially lifelong care to their own babies, that that kind of monopolizes them. So you need more females. Anywho, from spiders to finches, Darwin's finches. They are the poster child for his research in the Galapagos, particularly looking at adaptive radiation. You think about the finches with all the different beaks for the different type of foods that they eat. The idea is that they had a common ancestor in the Galapagos about two million years ago. Since then, they evolved into over a dozen species with different body size, beak shape, feeding behavior, all shaped kind of by this pressure of the different types of food. So they all found these different niches. And so the ones with the best beaks for those new niches did best reproduced kind of this very quick change in these finches. And so a lot of studies have been done on the Galapagos as a result of that, I'm sure people wanting to walk in the steps of Darwin, check out these finches. And something interesting is happening in the Galapagos. In on Santa Cruz Island, there's two forms of medium ground finches, a small and a large one. And they looked at Santa Cruz Island, which is where the university is. It's very urban. And they repeated the same studies at a more secluded site. And they found that in the urban space, the two types of ground finches are kind of blending together. So they're seeing a lot of similar measurements among these two different species. So they're not really seeing two different beak sizes anymore, where it's urban. Studying data collected by researchers in the 70s, they can see the two types of medium ground finches in that space. So it's not that they were never there. They were definitely there before. And now they're starting to kind of blur together. This, the hypothesis there is that has to do with urbanization and human population. Looking closer, they saw that these Galapagos finches were eating a lot of human junk food. So they used egg crates. They filled some of the egg crates with natural seeds and others with human junk food, chips, cookies, rice. They tested to see if the finches were feeding on human food and what their preference was. They weighed the food before and after to see how much was eaten. My first thought is, well, all the finches are going to go for the junk food no matter where they're from. Not so. The finches in the urban area exclusively fed on human food nearly. And when they repeated the experiment in the isolated site, the finches ignored the trays of junk food. They only ate the seeds. So it's familiarization that has led them to this diet choice. Where this also gets interesting is that there's a non-urban site that has a lot of tourist activity about 12 kilometers from an urban site. So pretty far away, they found strong junk food preference in those finches as well, which means it's not human population density, but most likely it's just human activity. It's human behavior that is the main driver for the preference for human food. So it's not people living there. It's just people moving around and dropping stuff and throwing stuff. So it's just the presence of humans. Now sloppy humans. Yeah, they want the next step is to do genetic analysis because knowing that there's this correlation of where there's people and where they're eating junk food species are starting to blend does not necessarily mean that one is causing the other. It sounds good in theory because they're not using their very specific beak tool to get specific food and therefore fitness is completely skewed. So it makes sense. But their next step is to do genetic analysis to see if there's an increase in gene flow across species or if there's weaker genes showing up more or if there's something in the genetic flow that we can kind of key into on why this is happening. Yes, there's probably a couple of both, right? There's enough to bring two groups of differentiated species of finch to different finches to the same area. Crossbreeding will take place. There's some natural selection, stuff that takes place. But it's also, you know, you look at the diversity of the Galapagos finch over the two million years. You have to also realize there's all what all the diversity you see, there's a lot of in between. And a lot of it was, yes, it is the beak for this and the beak for that, that made it convenient to use this or that resource. But also, if there were two different flowers with two completely different ways of getting at them, and two or three groups or four groups of finches that were there that were interbreeding at the same time, that that also played into which then further next generation selected what thing to eat next. So, yeah, but it's really cool that finches evolve quick enough for us to really sort of being able to track some evolutionary trait. Hopefully, it's enough for us to pump the brakes, which I think is also then a whole another question of like, are we messing with evolution or are we just a factor of evolution? So, this whole thing, I mean, we say evolution, but what's actually happening is, I mean, it's adaptation, is they are adapting to the available foods. They are adapting to what is there and what they can access. And in doing that, the junk food is going to be higher in fat, probably less nutrient wrench, possibly, but like higher in fats and sugars that are going to give energy and be and allow sustenance on an energetic level. And so, that is potentially going to lead and maybe the junk food is more easily accessed by a greater variety of, as you said, Justin, beak shapes, whereas seeds, the beaks adapt and have evolved over time through adaptation to be very specific for specific seed types. And so, with the junk food, it's a different story. And so, these animals, these birds are able to come together over a table of junk food. There's also a story that nobody brought this week. Did anybody see the chicken ears story about the Anthropocene being able to be defined by chickens? The bone chemistry? Yeah. The bone chemistry of chickens, the morphology of chickens, the structure size and everything of chickens has changed in 70 years. So much because it's an domesticated creature. And it's, it can be considered a different species than any, the chicken of today, the poultry product chicken of today is different, is distinct from that which existed 70 years ago. And it's based also, not just on the, it's not natural selection, where we call manual selection, oh, domestication of species, but also the feed that they receive is globally sourced. There's nothing to do with what's locally available to them. So usually, there are confines of local selection ability, like the junk food versus the seeds in the snare you're telling. And there's this whole other crazy thing when you say, no, we're going to take a grain from India and another one from China. And we're going to drop them both into the feed for all of the bird, for like a million birds or two million or a hundred million birds and have them all eat that globally sourced from different regions thing. And their entire chemistry of the creature changes and how they evolve changes. So we're getting to see in this story, like how there's like these microcosms that take place, but there's this larger scale that we're intentionally, accidentally impacting other species to change the way that they are on the planet by doing it domestic. Yeah, so I think the food for thought I will give our listeners as we go into the break is as we are in the Anthropocene, as humans are a part of our world, it's not called the chicken at the scene, but okay, sure. Great. So as we go into this, this era and humans are everywhere and our impacts are everywhere. What impacts of that are to be stopped and halted? And what of them are to be recognized as just a new external factor? Yeah, and the particular piece of interest within this study is that they're looking at an area of the planet called the Galapagos, which has been isolated until fairly recently when we allowed people to go there for research and also tourist reasons. It is increasingly becoming urbanized as a result of having to deal with all those people. So the people who work in the tourist industry, the people who give tours, the people who manage the researchers, there is urbanization occurring as a result and all of the trappings of that that come along with it. And so the tourist industry that is also helping to preserve the Galapagos is in effect affecting it. Oh, absolutely. How far do we want it to go? Right. And because it's on an island, the genetic stock of all these animals is reduced, and therefore adaptive radiation is extremely easy and quick. If you love nature, head to a place where either Kiki or Blair is right now, New York, San Francisco. Go to someplace with a really high density of other humans. Stay away from nature. If you love nature, never visit the Galapagos. If you love nature, never go to Yellowstone. If you love nature, stay the hell away from camping altogether. And if you love nature, stick with us for a little bit longer because it's time for us to take a break. Yeah. I was going to say, buy a parking lot, bust it up, build a garden, invite nature back into the city. If you love nature, don't go out. Oh, everyone, thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining us this evening on this Week in Science. We do appreciate the fact that you are joining us here on the show, spending your time with us once a week. All right. So let me tell you, if you're interested in helping Twist out, here are a few ways that you can do so. First, head over to twist.org. Twist.org is the place where you can find all things twisty. That's right, twisty. It's my word for the evening. Let's be twisty. First off, calendars are now available. Have you gotten your calendar orders in yet? That's right. Go to twist.org, click on the Twist 2019 calendar button. Buy yourself a calendar. Buy one for a friend. Try and order them now so you can get them before 2019 comes. Come on, everybody. The clock is ticking. I mean, the calendar is ticking. Anyway, it's happening. Get your calendar now. Second, you can head to twist.org if you'd like to help and potentially find gifts or other presents for yourself or other people. Click on the Zazzle Store link. It'll take you to our Zazzle Store, where you will be able to peruse all of our twist items, mouse pads, t-shirts, mugs, hats, wonderful items, many of them with the Twist logo, others with art from Blair's Animal Corner calendars of years gone by. Back at twist.org, another way that you can help us out is by direct donation. 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You can become a patron at an amount of your choosing. $10 a month, we will say thank you at the end of every episode. We will say your name at the end of the show, $10 a month. You can do that. It's the same as a nice cup of coffee once a week. I think we're worth it. Don't you help us out on Patreon. That would be wonderful. And finally, back at twist.org, if you or someone you know might like subscribing to this podcast, if you haven't done that already, click on that subscribe button and find yourself at Google Play, iTunes, or YouTube, the way to subscribe and get this week in Science in your life on a weekly basis. You know, we couldn't do this without you at all. And we thank you for your support. And we're back. We are. We are back. Oh my goodness, more this week in Science for everybody. We have so many more science stories coming up. But before we get into more science, it is time for one of my favorite segments of the show this weekend. What has science done for me lately? Oh, you've got quite a little pitch to your voice. All right, this week, the letter comes in from Ellie. Hello, Dr. Kiki. I'm Ellie pronounced like Ellie, but it's a guy's name. I'm from Lebanon and currently doing my PhD in molecular medicine in Cyprus. My work is on the role of natural killer cells in multiple sclerosis, specifically when it comes to EBV infections. Being in a specialized virology lab, we rarely get to see or hear of science news outside our fields. That's why I find twists such an essential part of my week. So much so that I've gotten in the habit of writing one of the topics I hear on this week's twists. It's found some fans who now enjoy my weekly twist update. Let me tell you what has science done for me. It has sparked my curiosity in the workings of every day. It's let me pursue my studies in a field that's so vast and unknown. And most of all, it's allowed me to tinker in the working of biology and dabble in other sciences outside of biology. So thanks for your hard work and enthusiasm. Much love to you, Blair and Justin. Ellie. That's awesome. It's so great, Ellie. Thank you so much for enjoying the show. And I'm so glad to hear that we have inspired you to even delve even deeper into some of the topics that we discuss every week. That is really what we do this for, to try and get people not only to learn a little bit while we do the show, but also to wet their curiosity and to keep digging. So thank you. It's wonderful. And Ellie also commented he's got a science and art webpage, a blog, and he does a lot of work in Cyprus and in his from his previous university work in the area of the intersection of science and art. So he's not just a science, a science PhD student. He's also a science communicator and making efforts in his world in a similar way to what we're doing. So I applaud you and thank you for sharing. Remember, everyone, we need you to write in to let us know what science has done for you lately. What does it do for you every day? What does it do for you every week? What did it do for you today? Anything in particular? Let us know. Send me a message on Facebook. It's our This Week in Science Facebook page or you can email me at Kirsten, K-I-R-S-T-E-N at this week in science.com, I believe. Justin, you're muted. So my attempt to fill in for the frozen Kiki was not effective. Oh, I think it's time for more stories. You're right, Kiki. Let me see. Cornell University-led study has shown that Midwest agriculture is increasingly vulnerable to climate change as a result of the region's dependence on, of all things, rain. Ariel Ortiz Bobea, I'm guessing at the name. I'm probably not pronouncing it right, who is an assistant professor of applied economics and management set out to assess the impact of extreme weather on agricultural productivity in the United States. Quote a voice, we're trying to get a big picture idea of what is going on, said Ortiz Bobea. Again, probably mispronouncing. The data captures every state's agriculture over the past 50 years. If you see in the aggregate data that something big is happening, this really captures massive processes that are affecting many people at the same time. The resulting paper, growing climactic sensitivity of U.S. agriculture linked to technological change and the regional specialization has been published in Science Advances. These pinpoints, specific regions in the United States, that are growing more sensitive to extreme climate shocks. The one that put up the right flag, the biggest area of concern was the Midwest, where rain-fed field crops like corn and soybeans have become increasingly vulnerable to warmer summers. They used state-level measures of agriculture productivity that capture how inputs, the inputs being things like seeds, feed, fertilizer, equipment, herbicides, are converted into economic outputs, the stuff, what's they got out of it. Researchers mapped that information against 50 years worth of climate data, 1960 to 2004, and seeing what would happen if weather was treated as an additional input to that data set. The results showed an escalation of climate sensitivity in the Midwest in the period of the 1960s and 1970s. It was a two-degree Celsius rise in temperature during the summer resulted in an 11% drop in productivity. That's pretty significant. It's a multiplier. You get two degrees, you get 11% drop. After 1983, the same additional rise in temperature caused productivity to drop 29%. So now you're watching this scale and it's increasing the negative effect with the same rise in temperature. So while these damaging summer conditions only occurred 6% of the time, researchers indicate that an additional 1% Celsius warming would more than quadruple their frequency. So it's not just the percentage of the negative output, but it would quadruple the frequency of the negative events to roughly, in their estimate, once every four years. So with climate change, with the like, oh, it's only one or two degrees sort of conversation, I always kind of talk about fevers. Okay, so like your body temperature is 98 degrees ish, 99 100. Oh, you're not going to be feeling too good. You might go home early from work. 101, 102, you're definitely not going to work today. Maybe not going to work tomorrow. 103 104, you're probably starting to go to the hospital. So it's just a couple of degrees that can make a huge systemic change and problem in your own body. And the earth is just like that. A couple degrees different can make a huge difference in a system like this. And when we're talking about a couple of degrees, this is climate couple of degrees. So the whole earth, which means local variations could be 10 degrees, 15 degrees hotter. Quoting voice again, losing almost half your profit every four years. That's a big loss, says Ortiz Bobia, a fellow Cornell's Atkinson Center for Sustainable Future and person whose name I am surely messing up at this point because I've said it differently about every time. Well, that means you might have gotten it right once, right? Right. I just want to be right once. Midwest is growing more vulnerable to drastic climate variations because of specialized crop production. So they're very much into cereal and oil seed crops. Most of the agriculture in the Midwest is corn and soybeans, says Ortiz Bobia. That has implications for the resilience to climate in that region because they're basically putting all of their eggs in one basket. And that basket is getting more sensitive. Yep. There you go. Yeah, this is one of the big issues with monoculture, these big factory farms, big industrial agriculture efforts where they put these huge tracks of land that are all one kind of a crop. What happens if something shifts? How does that crop react? Do you lose all of it? What's it going to do? And if it is lost once every four years, nobody's going to continue to do that. That's too much. There's all of the efficiencies of economy that come with it. You have the buyers who then are in that region or the processors who are in that region. And so then it's like, that's why you keep growing the crop there because there's a logistical benefit for it. So these problems are self-created or self-sustained or self-evolved or there's probably some other self-something that you could say about it. But they do, it's a natural evolution towards a solid steady system which would work beautifully if all of the factors remain the same. And if you change one little factor like, say, the global climate and local weather and have things going to predictably foreseeably play out, then you've invested heavily in an unsustainable system. And that's one of those things that is, you're right, absolutely missed in the climate change conversations, that we have massive investments that happen to over time and throughout generations to construct these efficiencies that are no longer efficient. The weather isn't the weather you expect. Yeah, but there's even stuff that we don't expect, effects that we don't expect to work out. So for example, there's another study that came out looking at batteries and people using sustainable energy and battery applications to try and save money on their energy bills in the future. And the study found that even if people start putting like the Tesla power walls in their houses to hold on to energy from solar or from other stuff, they're not always going to have that energy. And when the batteries drain, if they don't have energy, they're going to pull energy from the grid to fill themselves up. And that energy is going to come at any time, and it could come from any source because it's just coming from the grid. And so the study did. Your electric car in Kentucky is running off of coal. But the study determined this, listen, the study determined that even if people are putting the effort into being better, more sustainable human beings, individuals that without regulations that go along with it, without larger policy level implementation, nothing, things aren't going to change. And in fact, people will be using more energy that's dirtier. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So anyway, the things that you think you're doing correctly aren't necessarily always right in track unless there are other levels being taken care of simultaneously. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, you guys, you know, when you imagine things, uh-huh. Do you really feel like you're imagining things? Or do you feel like you're dreaming? Or do you feel like, man, that was so real? I really imagined that. So, so, so I actually the first time that you invited me to be a co-host on the show, I thought that I had dreamt it, but I thought I should show up just in case. And actually to this day, I'm not actually convinced of whether or not I dreamt it and showed up because I dreamt it and the dream convinced me to show up. Or if you actually did and I followed my intuition correctly that it actually had happened and I showed up. I still to this day don't know and I shouldn't have brought it up just in case. Piki, don't tell him. Don't tell him. Floating in the air. This is just a very long dream, 13 years in the making. Yeah, I think. Wait, what are you getting at? I think, I think dreams I've definitely thought are real, but daydreams and imaginations. Yeah, I've never really felt like it really happened that I can think of. Well, to your brain, you're daydreaming and you're imagining it's real. Yeah, researchers at the Cognitive and Effective Neuroscience Laboratory at CU Boulder, Colorado University Boulder, published an article in the journal Neuron where they did brain imaging of people while they were imagining. They took 68 healthy participants and had them associate a sound with an uncomfortable, not painful, just not nice electric shock. And they were divided into three groups and either exposed to the same sound, which is obviously paired with that shock. It becomes threatening, right? So they were either exposed to that or asked to imagine the sound, play the sound in their head, or asked instead to imagine pleasant bird and rain sounds. But no further shocks happened. And so they used fMRI and skin galvanic response testing to look at skin response measures. And in the groups, we had the imagined and heard threatening sounds had really similar brain activity. However, the people who imagined bird and rain sounds, there was all a little bit different. But the in the ones that heard and also imagined the threatening sound, they had an increase in activation in the auditory cortex, which processes sound, even though one of the groups was only imagining it. The nucleus accumbens, which processes fear, there's the threatening sound aspect. And because that shock is coming and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is associated with risk and aversion. And the all of these subjects eventually when they didn't get this shock with it, they experienced what's known as extinction in which the stimulus eventually no longer led to a fear response at all. And the brain learned not to be afraid, right? And so this just shows that imagination can be as strong as reality at teaching your brain new tricks. That makes sense. I think it's, but I do think there's a difference between responding to imagined stimuli and thinking something really happened. Those are, those are kind of different, right? So like, but your brain, if the brain doesn't know the difference, if you're imagining something that you know is kind of scary, and you're thinking through whether or not it's real or whether it's imagined is to your brain, pretty much the same thing. I'm going to take a short tangent and tell you that I've had dreams that were so beautiful and sustaining and just full body bliss, perfect. Like this is where I want to be for all of time. That as soon as the alarm went off, I forgot the dream. Like that's the dream that immediately forget that you want to dive back into, but it's already gone. And it's because your brain is doing a self-preservation. Because it knows you're not going to make it through the day, knowing that there's this better place that you were. And you could have gone back and stayed there. I don't think that's how it works, but okay. You got to go on with this. Maybe not in your dream, but I'm good at it. Yeah. So I want to, I want to take this. There's another study I would have stayed. There's another number. There's another study that's linked. That's linked up to this brain power, right? Like what is the power of our brain to affect our perception of the world? Our brain is the perception of our world, right? But what about also our perception of ourselves? And Justin, you have talked on multiple episodes now about some gene that you have that allowed, that should make you a high endurance athlete. It gives you a 3% advantage, but you have to still do the 100% competitive as an extreme athlete for that 3% advantage to even matter. Right. So let me talk a little bit more about this. And there's a study that I think this might be, is it the Kreb 1 gene? That it's this high endurance gene. Anyway, researchers were, they did a study to basically see how the results of genetic tests could influence people's perceptions of their abilities and actually not just influence their perceptions, but also influence their behavior and how their bodies work. And so they took a group of about 115 people and they gave them genetic tests. And in some of them, they told them they had the high endurance version of Kreb 1, and other people were told they had the low endurance version of Kreb 1. And then they put the people on a treadmill. They gave them an endurance test. And what they found is that the, in the people that were told they had the low endurance version, they did worse on the run it on the test on this actual like physiological test. They, their bodies, and this is, this is weird, their bodies removed carbon dioxide from the blood less efficient, less efficiently, their lung capacity dropped, and they stopped running 20 seconds, 22 seconds sooner than people who had been told they had the high endurance version. I totally get this. Okay. Because ever since having read that thing, that lying in 23 and me that told me I had this, this super extreme athlete gene thing correlation, I've been like, huh, well, I was getting a little tired, but you know, I've got extreme genes. I should be able to keep going. This isn't going to be a problem for me. I'm an extreme athlete. I'll just rely on that for a moment, because that's going to be that little extra. No, like that has been, that is now always in my head. Whenever I'm like, in a physical thing, I'm like, good thing I'm an extreme athlete, otherwise it'd be tough. So I get like, if you were told specifically like, you're going to get tired, as soon as you felt tired, you're like, Oh, there it is. Yeah, it's right. That makes sense. I'm tired now. I just find it, I find it interesting that it's not just that they ran for less time, but they also had less lung capacity and a poorer ability of removing carbon dioxide. And normally, you know, carbon dioxide removal is a set point that's, you know, that is neuronally set. But there are receptors in your brain that measure how much carbon dioxide is in your blood, you know, by pH. They're basically pH sensors in your brain that go, oh, pH is too high or too low, got to change respiration and affect the way you read. So that to me is, I mean, it's not just they stopped running sooner, but their metabolic ability. Oh, absolutely. I will take attitude and enthusiasm over actual skill ability or knowledge any day. Like that attitude and enthusiasm and interest in moving forward is way more useful in any scenario than simply having physical trait capabilities. Yeah. And so moving on, there was another group of about 100 people that they tested for a version of a gene that influences how full we feel after we eat. It's called FTO. And so these genes, because they influence how full we feel can affect whether or not people are predisposed to obesity. And people are told at random that they had, not based on the actual test results they were told at random, they had a version of FTO that would make them hungrier than average or one that would make them feel full, normally full, sated after eating a meal. And the interesting thing about this is that the ones that were told they had the gene that would make them feel hungrier didn't actually feel any different after eating. But the ones who were told they had the sated version that they wouldn't, they felt less hungry on average after eating and they had higher levels of a hormone that indicates a feeling of fullness. And so it's not just a perception that's changing in this imagining, oh, I've got this gene. It is actually a, there's a physiological change occurring in some of these individuals. And the interesting thing is, like you mentioned, the effect that that gene would have on your physiology, Justin, is about 3%, right? If you actually did the exercise to become... That's gonna be the other 100% that you have to do, but it's this... But the difference between you and somebody else is this tiny amount. If you do this extra amount of work. All the work. And what they found in this study is that the amount that was changed just by the mindset was greater than the amount that would have been due to change based on actual genetics. Oh, so that's great. So I'm at 7% advantage now. Because I've got the right attitude. I've put in no work, but I'm already 7% of the way there. That's pretty good. I'm liking this more. So this is sounding like scientific backing for those, like, get rich quick business and success coaches that you pay a lot of money to, you show up at their weekend and they go, here's the secret to success, folks. You've got to believe in yourself. Make a vision work. Picture yourself where you want to be. And guess what? You'll be there. You know, buying into a supplement, even though it doesn't actually maybe contain the thing that it even said it was that might, if it was the thing that it said it was, might not actually even do the thing that it was being claimed. People's minds are very powerful. Yeah. And so the idea here also is that if you want to lose weight, you know, you can maybe think yourself closer to it. If you, if you think you're at high risk for obesity, thinking that and being aware of it can actually help you be at a higher risk for obesity. So there is a certain aspect of mindset that needs to be taken into account when genetic counselors are counseling their patients on the results of genetic tests. So by telling somebody they're predisposed for something, it might actually tip the scale to give them that disease or problem potentially. Well, depending. But yeah, but I, but I, but I do think there is a, there's a word that already exists in the human language and we're all familiar with when it comes to getting people to apply themselves productively and it is encouragement. So if you encourage somebody by telling them that they're pretty good, naturally, you're a natural at math. You're really good with language. That person's more likely to go, you know what, I'm going to take on some math problems. I'm going to go write something. You know, like, like this is kind of how we're wired, where we almost need somebody to tell us you're good at doing a thing for us to feel braver or be emboldened or to let our, our, our, our natural abilities, whatever they are, go further in that direction. And it turns out when you get encouraged to do something and then you do more of it, you get better at it because you did more of it. And so you're better at it and they're right. And so you do more of it because they were right again. And like, that's how this whole thing works with humans. We're very, we all need a good pat on the back. By the way, you two are doing a fantastic job. Thanks, Justin. Thanks, Justin. Oh, I'm sorry. So are you. So are you. So are you. Speaking of which, Justin, let's get another story on here because I'm going to finish this show. So we're going to do my last story tonight is from researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University. They've given us the clearest look at a cell membrane and its components, revealing some unexpected structures. So cell membranes. This is the outside thing that keeps the turgid pressure on the inside. They're largely formed from a molecular sheet. It's a fraction of the thickness of a soap bubble surface in which there are two layers of lipid molecules packed with hydrophobic hydrophilic bits pointing inward and outward and they keep the insides on the insides and the outsides at bay. So it's kind of been mysterious exactly that whether or not there even was a structure because the way that we examine these membranes is by using a detergent to separate and that actually washes away the lipids. And since lipids make up much of the membrane structure, there goes the structure of the thing that you were investigating, and you sort of get left over with what's remaining, which has been modeled as a fluid structuralist lipid layer. There's an often cited paper apparently that compared it to different weights of olive oil being poured together is what makes up this barrier of this membrane. So the research team that was doing this investigation with a non-detergent, we started to find distinct hexagonal structures inside the membrane so that they led them to propose that the lipid layer might actually be acting as both sensor and energy transducer within the membrane protein transport system. So this is how things are expressing through the membrane, how things are being absorbed from the membrane, when the membrane knows to let something express or be absorbed might have a lot to do with this structure. So this is a quotey voice of Joaquin Frank, PhD of Columbia University, who happens to have won the Nobel Prize, I believe in 2017, chemistry. The most surprising outcome is the high order with which lipid molecules are arranged and the idea, they might even cooperate in the functional cycle of the export channel. It is counterintuitive since we have learned that lipids are fluid and disordered in the membrane, which according to the study is not. So one of the important aspects of this study that will be, and of course there could be plenty more going forward, but one of the most immediate is that so many pharmaceuticals are targeting membrane as a way to enter a cell or interact with a cell and a better understanding of that membrane by which the pharmaceutical product molecule is supposed to be interacting could be revealed by the discovery. So we're talking about that little diagram I had to draw a gazillion times in college of it looks like a teeny tiny little jellyfish touching another teeny tiny little jellyfish that is the cell wall, right? So now we're gonna have to reprint all of the textbooks, just scrap them all. Thankfully they were pretty low resolution to begin with, so you can just put a couple lines of text in there, some hexagons and be like it's just drawn some hexagons. Yeah, I don't think we're gonna have to rewrite all the textbooks for this one, but no, but we may have to rewrite some pharmaceutical formulas. We may get the better insights into how things are transported, exported, imported. How those thermodynamic interchanges occur that affect the chemistry, pharmacodynamics indeed. That's right. Hey everybody, did you hear about the supernova that happened? When? When was that yesterday? No, it was Narsan, was it? No, well it was about 2.6 million years ago. Oh, it wasn't a problem for us, but it may have been one of the reasons for the demise of marine megafauna like the Meg, Megalodon. Oh, the good old Megalodon. Yeah, where did it go? Why did it disappear? Why? Yes, so I mean the take-home message of this is that maybe cancer killed the Megalodon. So about 2.6 million years ago there was... Uh-oh, about 2.6 million years ago. There would be isotopes. There would have been an increased amount of cosmic rays impacting our planet and there would be a record of that. And so researchers who published in the journal Astrobiology this last week looked for deposits of iron 60 isotopes and they looked at these isotopes. They said they've been doing research like this for about 15 years and always in the past it's been based on what we know generally about the universe that the supernova should have affected Earth at some time or another. This is Adrienne Malott, Professor Emeritus of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Kansas. This time it's different. We have evidence of nearby events at a specific time. We know about how far away they were so we can actually compute how that would have affected the Earth and compare it to what we know about what happened at that time. It's much more specific and so they've got these iron 60 isotopes that he says are a slam dunk about the timing and distance of the supernova. As far back as the mid 1990s people said hey look for iron 60. It's a telltale because there's no other way for it to get to Earth but from a supernova because iron 60 is radioactive. If it was formed with the Earth it would be long gone by now so it had to have been rained down on us and there's some debate about whether there was only one supernova really nearby or a whole chain of them. This guy kind of favors a combo of the two. A big chain with one that was unusually powerful and close. If you look at iron 60 residue there's a huge spike 2.6 million years ago but there's excess scattered clear back to about 10 million years. The team they found other evidence of supernovae in the architecture of the local universe. They've got the local bubble in the interstellar medium. They've also just basically come up with this idea that well if this happened around the time of the Pleistocene-Plaistocene boundary where there was a marine megafaunal extinction about 2.6 million years ago maybe these supernovas went off, rained down a whole bunch of cosmic rays which increased these mutation causing particles impacting the Earth just enough to possibly lead to a bunch of mutations and cancer and death. So anyway death by cancer to Megalodon from a supernova. Yikes what a tough way to go. Yeah yes he says specifically one of the extinctions that happened 2.6 million years ago was Megalodon imagine the great white shark in jaws but it was about the size of a school bus they just disappeared so we can speculate it might have something to do with the muons. Basically the bigger the creature is the bigger the increase in radiation would have been. Yikes yes death by muons. There we go um do you want me to real quick talk about my um giant aquatic fossil? Yes please. Okay so um this is a story all about 2.6 whales. Wait wait wait I can barely understand you how come you lost all of your teeth while you were starting to talk to us? So 2.6 whales aside from sounding ridiculous um actually tell us a lot about the evolution of baleen. Smithsonian scientists discovered an important intermediary link in the evolution of baleen by finding Maya Belena Nespite a whale that lived about 33 million years ago in the Smithsonian kind of bank as it were and took new CT scanning technologies to analyze these fossils looking at um its ability to hold teeth which it did not have any did not have any anchoring spots for teeth and um based on the CT scanning technology the jaws were not stable enough to hold baleen at all which means this whale did not have teeth nor baleen which shows us the intermediary here um this 15 foot whale was likely without baleen and without teeth. So I don't know it gummed its food to death? Yeah I don't know if I believe this is an intermediary. So yeah go ahead. Well I mean if I was 33 million years old I probably wouldn't also have teeth but but you never you know like we we find these creatures and how do we know that this is like a link a transition and not something that like nature tried and actually didn't. I mean that is possible for sure that's a very good point and I think that they would probably have to try to do some genetic testing or more um physiological kind of tree building to figure that out for sure um but the they're they're kind of reasoning for this is that um sperm whales for example have teeth in their bottom jaw but not on the top so they're not biting or chewing. Narwhals only teeth are long tusks not used for feeding. They're beaked whales that even though they're classified as toothless toothless whales have no teeth so there's there is proof of whales eating without the use of functional teeth um so there's a precedent here which makes the researchers think this could potentially be the case. So the the new scanning technology tells us likely no teeth likely no baleen based on the timeline and the physiology of this 15-foot whale we think it is probably an intermediary on the way to baleen. So so again though again though with with this whale we're we're very when we're going back in time we're very much looking for the transition. What if whales are like finches? What if where this whale what what if the environment that this whale is swimming in doesn't require teeth actually it's just ah if you go open your mouth real big and get your dang teeth out of the way you'll actually take in more food. I mean we we pretend that everything in the past was a transition to the future right and everything present is a is a wildly uh varied uh niche that has been filled but it could be so for a period of time wherever this whale was teeth actually gotten away but it's not that baleen didn't work somewhere else concurrently or wasn't where you should be going or heading to if if you were trying to be more efficient. So here's here's what we have. We have toothed whales that do not use suction in their feeding. We have baleen whales that have um the throat and bones and cheeks and retractable tongue of a suction feeder. That's how they pull the the water across the baleen to catch their food. This is a whale that has suction feeding techniques and structures but no baleen it would appear. So that is trajectory you're right. So it looks like a good trajectory. It does. The baleen they think showed up around five to seven million years after this buddy. So they their current fossil record makes it look like there was not any baleen concurrently. So the researchers they're good at what they do. This is this is definitely this is their job. I just needed to probe a little bit with some obvious questions. This is the god to defend if you're going to present. Yeah yeah of course. Always be ready all's fair in twists and science it is and we have made it to the end of another episode. We have I would love to say thank you to everyone for listening to our show or for watching it if you are watching it over on YouTube. Thank you to Fada for helping with show notes and putting helping with our chat room and with social media identity for thank you for helping with recording of the show. Gord thank you for help with the chat room moderation and to my co-hosts happy birthday. Thank you. Thank you for joining me tonight. I do appreciate it on you. I mean it's the day after Justin's birthday but it's birthday. But as we discussed every day is just in day so. I feel like it's just yeah it's every day is a day for each of us being here but it's very wonderful to be able to share it with you today. And I would finally like to thank our Patreon sponsors. Thank you to Paul Disney, Richard Onimus, Ed Dyer, Philip Shane, Ken Hayes, Harrison Prather, Charlene Henry, Joshua Furey, Steve DeBell, Alex Wilson, Tony Steele, Craig Landon, John Ratnaswamy, Mark Mazaros, Jack Matthew Litwin, Jason Roberts, Bill K. Bob Calder, Time Jumper 319, Eric Knapp, Richard Brian Kondren, Dave Naver in Jeff, Paul Ronevich, Kareem Benton, Sue Doster, Dave Wilkinson, Dent, Ben Bignell, Richard Porter, Jacqueline Boyster, Noodles, Kevin Reardon, Kristoff Zucnerac, Ashish Pants, Ulysses Adkins, Sarah Chavis, Artiom Rick Ramis, Paul John McKee, Jason Olds, Brian Carrington, Christopher Dreyer, Lisa Slazowski, Jim DePo, Greg Riley, Sean Lamb, Ben Rothig, Steve Lessam, and Kurt Larson, Rida Garcia, Marjorie Gary S, Robert Greg Briggs, Brendan Minish, Christopher Rappin, Flying Out, Erin Luthan, Matt Sutter, Mark Hessenflow, Kevin Parachan, Byron Lee, and EO. Thank you for all of your support on Patreon. And for those of you who are interested in helping us out on Patreon, you can find information at twist.org. Remember that you can help us out also simply by telling your friends about twists and twist.org. On next week's show, we will be back yet again for, do you know what number? Oh my gosh, that's going to be the big 700th episode of the podcasting. Yeah, so we're going to turn into a religious podcast. No, I'm kidding. The 700 Club. Nope, that's already taken. We will continue to podcast science. We will be talking about more science, but 700, it's going to be a little bit of a celebration. Birthdays this week, 700 shows next week. I hope that you all can join us for our live broadcast 8 p.m. Pacific time next Wednesday evening live at twist.org slash live. You can join our chat rooms also at YouTube and at the twist.org slash live. But if you can't make it, don't worry, the celebrations will be recorded and you can watch them or listen to them searching for twist.org. Yes. Thank you for listening and enjoying the show. Twist is also available as a podcast. Just Google this week in science in your iTunes directory. Or if you have one of the new mobile devices, you can look for Twist, the number four, Droid, App in the Android marketplace, or simply this week in science and anything Apple Marketplace-y. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes will be available on our website. That's at www.twist.org where you can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts or other listeners. Or you can contact us directly. Email kirsten at kirsten at this week in science.com. Justin at twistminion at gmail.com or Blair at Blair Baz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist, T-W-I-S, somewhere in your subject line. Otherwise, your email will be spam filtered into oblivion. You can also hit us up on the, I think it's called Twitter, where we are at twist science, at Dr. Kiki, at Jackson Fly, and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you'd like us to cover, address a suggestion for an interview, a haiku that comes to in the night, please let us know. We'll be back here next week for 700, and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. But if you think you've learned anything from this show, remember, it's all in your head. My advice, show them how to stop the robot with a simple device. I'll reverse all the warming with a wave of my hand, and all it'll cost you is a couple of grids. Big science is coming your way, so everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method for all that it's worth, and I'll broadcast my opinion all over the air. Because it's this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news, that what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just get understand, that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy, we're just trying to save the world from jeopardy, and this week in science is coming your way. So everybody listen to everything we say, and if you use our methods, instead of rolling a die, we may rid the world of toxoplasma, got the eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote more rational thought And I'll try to answer any question you've got But how can I ever see the changes I seek When I can only set up shop One hour a week This week in science is coming your way You better just listen to what we say And if you learn anything from the words that we've said Then please just remember it's on your head Cause it's 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 And we have come to the end of another show I'm sitting on the floor of a hotel bathroom I am Yikes Was my audio okay? Yeah Is your bathroom notoriously good for audio? It can be kind of echoey But I'm on a blanket And I have this shower curtain behind me That's where Weird Al recorded my Bologna It was in the Davis bathroom No, Cal Poly, right? Yeah, bathrooms can be great for audio They're kind of echoey with all the tile and hard services But you can cover that up This microphone's alright It's a blue yeti, I think Hi, Yon I know Noodles wants to share the story of their dream Maybe Noodles just type it up in there quickly We'll read it if it's suitable for the internet Do we need to discuss, I guess, once Justin gets back What are we doing next week at all? Or do we want to text about it later? We should... Where did he go? I don't know what we're going to do next week We should figure something out I had ideas but then nothing ended up happening And all of a sudden it was mid-December And I went... It's an Apple Store dream I actually just got my battery replaced too It's almost the end of the warranty window Is James Klein being mean in the YouTube chat room? Come on, people Noodles says I went with my battery replaced at the Apple Store today And while waiting I wondered what would happen if it went wrong Dreaming the worst When I played out all the possible outcomes Would they replace it? Would I take it home and it fail and have to come back? Turns out it was a brick once returned to me And they replaced it on the spot But I was not sure if I was living a dream I had Whoa Sounds like you just, like, incepted that to happen Right I will dream it real There's a robot in our chat room What? There's a robot in the YouTube chat I don't know if it's a robot, it's just a rude person Ew, a rude boy Yeah, thank you for booting Amphada I didn't like the rude people, every once in a while, you know They pop in, they got things to say, they're not nice So I watched the new Wreck-It Ralph the other day And it's all about the internet And without spoiling really anything I will say that Is it better if it's the first one? I like the first one better Okay But there is like a very quick, like, life lesson They just kind of threw in there It's kind of very brief about, like, never read the comments Yes I was like, oh, yeah, that's true Yeah But, you know, for the most part Our community has great comments And I like reading the comments Because people have great things to say Funny and some, you know Good insights, great stories Yeah Input Yeah It's just every once in a while, people come in And they're like, I need to say something Pay attention to me The thing that I think people forget about the internet Is that it's essentially infinite And there's a million versions of all the things So if you don't like this one, there's other ones for you The ones who like it have stuck around So, like, if you don't like it You don't have to be mean You can just not listen Yeah, but Look, I'm going to be the spokesman for mean people for a second Just say, you know, that's what they do And it's not, they're not going to leave the positive comment On anything that they like Because they're not inspired to do so They're only going to leave the negative comment Because they have, you know, they're wired that way Just that's how they are It's okay We know how the rest of their lives play out So we should feel a little bit sorry for them We should have a little compassion for the mean people Because they're not going to The only thing I have to comment on anymore On the internet is loose and loose So I think there's negative comments There's a difference between Like a Yelp review that says Oh, I got charged twice for delivery multiple times At this restaurant Or like, I like science podcasts And I like this science podcast But I like my podcast to be 45 minutes And this one is too long for me Like, that's a helpful comment for people who are browsing As opposed to just like I hate this, it's terrible It's very different But I think we're becoming more attuned To that And we, like, I look at I certainly look at a lot of political commentary these days And I go, eh, Russian troll Yeah Like, and it could be on either side of the political spectrum But I'm like, eh, they're really That's got to be a Russian troll That's the only, they're creating derisiveness And this wasn't even a derisive thing Like this wasn't even a thing that you would You should be seeing a lot of derisiveness And this is bots We live in a world of commentary bots So we should be more and more Immune to their effects But I did just want to point out one thing Very important for everybody to understand That the internet has been drinking Not me My neck tie is asleep, you know The internet is also made of cats Oh, that's true That's true, yes The internet's been drinking Not me Not me The internet is made of cats What? What else do we need to talk about? We need to talk about next week Next week Next week We should start a text chain And think about this when we're being more productive Yeah, it's one in the morning Yeah, I think you should go to bed We'll all go to bed And start a text chain tomorrow To figure out things Yes, we'll go to bed and then have a chain Yeah, bed, then chain Then figure out the things This is the order of events That sounds like a very weird suggestion Have a show Yes, oh wait, hold on But Identity 4 got a calendar in the mail Oh my gosh, I'm ready Wait, hold on You have them? I didn't know you had them Yeah, I just sent them out I sent out the first batch Right before I left for New York Because I knew I was going to be in New York for a week And I wanted to get things to people So I sent out the first batch of orders Of calendars And so Can you open it? They were what? Identity 4 got in the mail And then he said I can't wait to see all the pretty art Did you open it? I want to see it Let's see what comes out Oh that's right Because you weren't here last week When I got them And I was like, look it Oh my god Look it, look what I have I was holding onto it last I didn't watch the show So I didn't know that happened Or maybe I had it on Thursday Or Friday Maybe I had it on Friday Yeah but I have the calendars I mailed Saturday My first day Flying out Got calendars Not opened That's a lot of restraint Twist Christmas morning Present opening That would be fun That would be fun Kiki you want to go to bed? I beat the calendar to New York City It's true Oh yeah Hopefully it all makes it Hopefully they all make it I have my fingers crossed I hope everyone gets their calendars Sometime very soon Gosh darn it I mailed calendars on Saturday If you had ordered by Saturday I mailed them Yes So they're in the mail We have an order Somebody from France ordered four calendars That's exciting We have our Australian contingent Who have ordered calendars I've sent some to Australia So once again they're going to be like What's up with all of these American holidays people? Okay There's always a zucchini day That's for everyone Ed I know for a fact Yours is in there I mailed it I know for a fact Yes That it's exciting to know that a few have made it That's awesome Identity 4 is very close Being in Seattle to Portland Flying out where are you located? I have to sneeze Uh oh I know Oh So Cal Okay, so California people West Coast people West Coast people have received Their calendars It will get It will get here to the East Coast It will What was the other thing? I might get to be on Star Talk What? On Friday What? Yeah Might It's not set in stone yet But Did Neil deGrasse Tyson Did you talk to him after a show? No No, no, I didn't do That didn't happen but Yeah, here in New York And I tweeted a couple of things And the producer was like Are you in New York? Are you available this Friday? Yes Yes, I'm available So as soon as I have a link As soon as I have information I will let people know Yeah And suddenly My trip became a tax deduction So, you know You can find science everywhere That's what my tax Attorney tells me Exactly, yes Not only can I He's a tax attorney Not only can I do your taxes I can also defend you When that doesn't fly That's awesome Yes, Twitter is my friend Hot Rod, it's true I like the Twitters Okay, but we should go to bed And we need to talk about Episode 700, which is next week And, oh, Ed I got your top stories Of 2018 Good stories Those are good picks Blair and Justin Not only do we have Episode 700 coming up But in two weeks We have our best of We have our best of So it'd probably be good to start Reviewing the past year To Alright, as long as I don't have to do Any kind of personal inventory assessment That's for next year That's the one after that That's the one after that, yes Prediction show Never doing that again Why? Here's where you wanted to be Here's how things actually are No, stop But the thing where we Talk about the things That we already talked about And that we like talking about I'll always love that episode That's like one of my favorite It's Maybe Slightly incontention With the episode where we try to predict the future Because that's harder And so I appreciate that a little bit more That's the next episode after that That's the one after that We have to get on these talks When we reach out Like a condensed, it's like the best Thing That twist is done All consolidated into one episode And that's as good as it can get But I still I kind of have like a soft spot in my heart For the one right after Where we try to do something More difficult Which is predict the future Of science They're both good episodes This is the best month of the year Of December It's because There's something about it though There's something about the thinking About all this stuff a little bit more That there's more work involved in it for me There's definitely more work for sure This is always the toughest month for you I never of course feel Any of that extra stress Or layers of I will say it works out nicely Because I do feel like Towards the very end of the month in December Less and less scientific Papers are getting published There is a pause There really is There's always a pause Even if you look at A Tuesday After a three day weekend You'll see there's like There's less And if there hasn't been a holiday For a while there's this weekend Before a holiday where you're like How come there's not as much to choose from This is really weird It's very interesting because guess what Scientists are people too But there's always like one story That comes out that I'm like really You had to do that this month When I'm doing these other things Now we have to stuff it into January Somehow There's always one Hey guess what Kiki I just placed an order for calendars Yes Strong I just want to sell out guys I just want to sell out Tell your friends You sell out That's all I want Just tell everybody Blair's a sell out Blair would like to be a sell out Of calendars Opportunity to sell out So I could So I could turn it down And show that I wouldn't sell out If ever the opportunity To sell out That's not completely true We've not sold out The show Yeah we've had the opportunity Many times We've had many opportunities to turn this Into something like Okay this week on this weekend science We've replaced Justin with somebody Much younger and more handsome There's a blonde lady who Actually never studied science Who's replacing Dr. Kiki And instead of Blair we got a puppy That's weird We've had the We've had the offers And turned them down Many many times so actually We're not sell outs I was just saying about the The Bonnie and Python sketch where there's An interviewer who's interviewing a duck A cat and a lizard But to be fair That's exciting it'll be a thrilling Thrilling interview To be fair a couple of these offers Were nice Not that I would sell out That I would give up what we've got going now Some of these offers were nice I just want to say like I would never Ever but some of them I wouldn't even have to have a Job which I'm still But I still No I'd prefer this Doing this over The financial security of Generations of my family No but still I think this is Better than the things That I could have If you knew Alright well on that note Say good night Blair Say good night Justin Good night Justin Good night Kiki Good night everyone Thank you so much for joining us Again and Justin and Blair yes again Thank you for joining us on your birthday Thanks so much for having me What an amazing birthday present To spend it with you lovely folks And all of you in the chat room And talking about science Yay So everyone have a Wonderful week we'll be back Again next week more science episode 700 we cannot Wait to see you then Thanks