 This is TWIS. This Week in Science episode number 608, recorded on Wednesday, March 1st, 2017. March Madness is here. Hey everyone, I am Dr. Kiki and tonight on This Week in Science, we're going to fill your heads with a crown of thorns, buzzing bees, and mammal madness, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. I'm here tonight to tell you what we're doing. I'm here tonight to tell you why we're here. I'm here tonight to tell you how it all works. And I'm here tonight to tell you that we are in this together. Because when we show each other compassion, when we teach each other how to see things from another perspective, when we learn how to reason and examine evidence, we are able to work together as a community. So yes, we are here tonight to discuss science news. And we are also here to have fun and teach. But most of all, we're here to remind you that none of us is alone. Because we will fight for what's right. We will persevere and we will preserve what needs saving. And we will continue to learn and discover and explore. We are humans. We are glorious thinking, feeling balls of cells. And we will get through this world together. So let's learn what is new on that world we call home. On This Week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn everything. I wanna fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening. What's happening. What's happening this week in science. What's happening. What's happening. What's happening this week in science. Good science everyone. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. And we are here to bring you, oh, so many of the very cool science stories that we encountered this past week to talk about them and to maybe figure out a little bit more than what is in the typical press release or the typical science story that you might read online. We also have a wonderful interview today. So I hope you are all ready to buckle up and sit tight for tonight's episode. I've got tons of science news. I brought stories about Wolbachia, my favorite bacteria. We love Wolbachiums. And I've also got stories about neurons because you know how much I like the brain. You got consciousness. Maybe possibly consciousness neurons. Be amazing. And then our interview tonight is with Dr. Katie Hind and we're gonna be talking about March mammal madness. Don't know what that is. Well, you will find out very soon. Blair, what's in the animal corner? I brought a buzzing story about bees. I brought another buzzing story about bees. Oh, and I also see a story about bees, perhaps that buzz. All right, well, I'm glad you're getting buzzing for this episode. It's all good. You ready? I've got some science. Let's do it. We have an interview. Let's get into this. I would love to introduce our guest tonight, Dr. Katie Hind. She is an associate professor at Arizona State University in the Biodesign Center for Fundamental and Applied Microbiomics, and also in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from the University of Washington and a PhD in Anthropology from UCLA. She also did some work at my alma mater, UC Davis at the California National Primate Research Center and served as an assistant professor in Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Her area of study is mammal milk, so lactation and milk production. And a quote in a story that was written about her is that she sees milk as personalized medicine and a carrier of information that affects immunity, brain function and metabolism in lasting ways. One of the things she also does is that she has created March Mammal Madness. Katie, thank you for joining the show tonight. Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here on this week in Science. Yeah, it's wonderful. I'm so, I saw a tweet. We'll explain the background of how we got you here tonight. I saw you tweet something about the brackets being released for March Mammal Madness. And I went, wait, what is going on here? I know March Madness. And I know that people get their basketball team brackets together or during football season, people are getting their fantasy football teams together. And this was different. And I just thought I started digging in and I thought it was so exciting. And so we reached out to see if you would be interested in explaining March Mammal Madness to our audience. I'm delighted to. This has been just a real labor of love for the last five years. So we're celebrating our fifth anniversary, the tournament launched in 2013. And what I do with a group of 30 other scientists and artists is we spend the month of March working through a bracket just like you do in NCAA basketball at March Madness, where you have one-to-one competitions in single elimination tournament as you work your way to the elite trait and the final roar to find out who is the champion of this year's Mammals. That's so fantastic. Okay, so five years ago you started and how has it changed over the course of the five years? I mean, is it still, you pick your Mammals and just kind of throw them in there? Or what's the process? Yeah, that's a great question. So it started out really spontaneously on a Friday afternoon before departmental happy hour. And when I was an undergraduate at the University of Washington, we, my friends and I really got into basketball March Madness and all 10 of us would fill out our brackets. We'd skip classes for that first round when 64 teams went through a blood bath down to 32. And it was just, it was so much fun, the trash talk, the energy and the fun of it. And I thought, we can do this with animals. And it was actually, as you know in March, there's brackets for everything, everything. So it's Friday afternoon and I was on social media and I saw a bracket of animals and I printed it out and I thought, oh, my lab can do this. It'll be really fun. I gave everybody my one in the lab and we started filling them out and I was like, what? It was 16 species, not 64. And it was based on who was cutest and it was for, and we voted. And I was like, there's no science in this, right? What about this animal, this animal, this animal, this animal, this animal. And so I took the brackets back from my whole lab. Nope, nevermind, we need to start over. Give me an hour. I grabbed down McDonald's, encyclopedia of mammals, you know, that huge tome and I just went through and I made my own bracket. And that first year, it was really a lot of ones that you see really regularly on nature specials or in the zoo. We had a division of carnivores, a division of primates because I'm a primatologist and I have a soft spot for them. A division of browsers and grazers love ungulates and then hodgepodge, which were other species that didn't really fit into a division. And I gave it to my lab and I tossed it up on my blog and I thought, oh, maybe my mom will play. And what ended up happening is a whole bunch of people that were scientists on Twitter print out their bracket and they like started taking pictures and they were like, you know, tiger all the way, honey badgers got this, no it's wolverine, elephant, hippo, right, people were really into it. And I was like, oh, okay, like let's do this. And what it was, it was spontaneously created where you lie, I would live tweet out an imaginary battle based on science and adaptations of these animals. What was their weaponry? What was their armor? What was their fight style? What was their temperament? Were they inclined toward fighting or were they the kind that would run and hide or what have you and we'd vary the environment and people got into it. And it was a little overwhelming but it was so much fun. And after the end of that year, everybody was like, all right, see you March, 2014. And I was like, all right, we're gonna do this for real. Like we need to really do it. And I recruited three people. Two had been like the biggest, most active fans the entire tournament. And then one had been my friend, Chris, who'd actually helped me out that first year because I was actually tweeting some of the battles from the Kalahari in South Africa while I was running around with meerkats for spring break. And I'd stay up until the middle of the night and I'd live tweet stuff in the middle of the night. And he'd be like, okay, here's some information. So I asked him if they'd join us. And so since then we have really structured like each battle lasts about 25 tweets. We have systematic information about their conservation status, their phylogeny, their genetics, their behavior, their reproduction. Everything has multiple citations. And after that second year, people got really excited. And in the third year, a group of tattoo artists that had followed us players in the second year were like, can we start doing art of the animals? Oh wow, yeah. So then we had artists by the year four last year. We had the American Society of Memologists that partnered with us, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. All these people started coming and providing pictures or pictures of collections, pictures of the animals, continued to do the art. And this year, the fifth anniversary, we have new partnerships with Oxford University Press who's made a number of scholarly articles freely available to students that wanna do research. The ASU Libraries has stepped up and made a huge K through 12 resource guide and that we're also joined by the Aldo Leopold Foundation, which is a group that's really interested in land stewardship and conservation and human-community nature connections. And so now we have a team of 35 people that gear up most of February for background work, then we release it in March and it's blown up. That is, so how many people do you have this year who have expressed interest kind of ahead of time? Well, so far, yeah, the last time I checked, the blog had had about 35,000 page views since it was live a couple of weeks ago. And we also, for the first time reached out, I'd gotten a, because of the pictures that you see on Twitter and how people talk about it, I started to suspect that a lot of teachers were using it in their classroom. And so I opened it up and I said, teachers, educators, if you would like early access to the bracket for lesson planning, just send me an email and I'll send it to you a week ahead of time. And we had 250 educators request the bracket. That's great. Oh yeah, all across the country. Kiki, are you there? I am here, I'm just bringing up the brackets so that people who are watching the video can take a look at what we're talking about. Yeah, so we had educators from all regions of the United States and internationally contact us for the bracket. And most of them are middle school and high school, a lot of high school teachers that use it in their classrooms. And depending on whether or not you wanna estimate that they have fewer students, like only 30 per teacher, or a lot of them are talking about how they work with 150 students with this, we're estimating somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 students are playing this through their classrooms in the United States in March, 2017. That is exciting. I mean, that is really reaching a lot of students and I'm looking at your bracket right now and we were talking a little bit about some of the animals in the list before the show starts. And we've got animals in here that are, in this particular year, you've got endangered animals, you've got not very well known animals mixed in with animals that people might actually recognize. And so you're really gonna be opening up the awareness of students and whoever takes part in this of, you know, who are these animals? Where do they live? What do they do? How dangerous are they? Yeah, yeah, and I'll have parents email me and they'll say, you know, we went to the zoo and their kids will remember the animals that battled that year and they'll talk about them. Last year we had an ongoing joke. Our villain, you know, there's always a villain. Our villain from 2016 was the panda bear, which is counter-intuitive, right? Cause they're so cute and people love them so much. And so what we pointed out to them is that it's simultaneously the worst bear and the worst herbivore because it isn't able to very easily digest the bamboo it eats, right? It has a gut of a carnivore and the diet of a herbivore and it has to eat all day long because it's actual energy acquisition from what it eats is so low. And so we made lots of jokes and, you know, they eat, they don't really do much else. And so the panda kept advancing by default and people were getting just furious at it. And so our joke was, you know, we started the hashtag worst bear. And how did I miss this? How did you miss, Katie, if you haven't, the panda is one of the animals that Blair brings up very often in the animal. As being the worst at being any animal, we don't know if they're the most maladapted animals. Exactly. It shouldn't exist. It's the only animal that should be extinct except we saved them. Right, right, right. We made Ian Malcolm jokes. You know, this isn't a condor, right? Nature selected them for extinction. And, you know, they're tiny babies. How often their babies die? How bad they are at mating? I mean, just over. And so I had a parent message me in May last year, you know, too much after the tournament ended. And they're like, you know, one side effect of playing Malamarch Madness is you get really weird looks at the zoo when your six-year-old goes running up to the panda bear exhibit yelling out, worst bear, worst bear. They're like, see that child out? What are you teaching the children? About digestion and adaptation. And it's just been really, really rewarding. And especially, you know, one of the funniest things that happened this year, you know, we haven't even started the tournament yet. But, you know, the educators signed up and they asked for the brackets and I sent them out. And one of the educators emailed me and said, you know, you've changed the bracket design. Are you going to release the retro old-school bracket? I really like that one. And I said, well, I don't really have time to make it, I'll send you the editable one and you can update it. And please send it back so I can put it on the blog for anybody else who also appreciates the really janky equivalent of comic Sam's one that I made, you know, from the beginning. And so Sam emailed it back and then I didn't hear much and a day later I got a message. And the, I want to read it because I have to do it justice because it was so incredible. It said, I have a confession to make. I am not a teacher, but merely an eighth grader who was too excited about the upcoming tournament to wait for the student release. I have been following the tournament since the start and every year at this time I find myself constantly refreshing your page just hoping that the bracket would appear. I sincerely apologize for deceiving you. Aw, that was very cute. That was sweet. Oh, it was so, it was just, it was, you know these are the heroes we need, right? A kid that's bending the rules so that they can get early access to a free animal learning tournament. It was one of the most endearing moments I've had during the tournament. Yeah, he wanted a leg up. He's like, I'm trying to get some insight. I'm going to get my research on early. Yeah. So you start with how many species on the bracket? So the bracket has 64 slots. Okay, so it's an old-fashioned 64. Got it. The start of the tournament, there are 63 that are assigned and there's one wild card battle to get into the tournament. Yeah, so we've got Sabertooth Cat versus the wild card winner. Right, now, typically we have a one-on-one battle for that that we showcase. It being the fifth year and really wanting to dial the tournament up to 11, we decided to do a four-species battle royale to get into the tournament. Oh, all at the same time. All at the same time. Reese's macaque, Fisher, Snow Leopard, and Red Giant Flying Squirrel. And- That's a toughie. It is, it is a toughie. And what we're finding, we don't, for most of the rounds, for the first three rounds, the environment of the battle, the better ranked team, the better ranked species, gets to fight in their home ecology. They get home-cored advantage. After that, when you get to the elite trait, the final four and the championship, the environment is randomized among four preset environments. The wild card is wild. We don't tell anybody what the environment is. We just tell them the species and then they have to guess. And I've had multiple people contact me to say what is the environment they're battling in. Cause they know how important the battle is for determining who's gonna have an advantage and who's gonna have a disadvantage. To make things even more exciting this year, myself and several other biologists made costumes of these animals and we filmed a green screen simulated battle of what we have determined using science is going to be the likely outcome. Okay. Does that mean you already know who the winner is? Oh, yes. So the organizing team, we figure out the entire tournament before it gets released. And we do that so that we aren't swayed by public opinion or what people are thinking. We really wanna keep it as unbiased as possible. And how often do you release results? We have a schedule. So we have three nights a week. We will live tweet the battles for an entire division for the first round. So that's four nights. And then combined divisions as we get fewer and fewer species. It will last about three and a half weeks to run the whole tournament. We play the games, we play the bouts. We live tweet the narration that the scientists have written starting at 8 30 PM on the designated night of those battles. And then after the battles, we storify it and post the link on Facebook at the blog so that everybody can see exactly what happened and why. All right. So they need to follow you on Twitter to be able to follow the lot at the 8 30 PM once the live tweeting. Yeah, they should actually follow the hashtag. That's hashtag 2017MMM. And the other option they have is what you find is a night of battles, there's usually between 2000 and 3000 tweets. Only about 250 of them are the actual battle. The rest is all the spectator commentary as it's happening. And it can get a bit intense. And so what happened was two years ago, a high school junior spontaneously created an account where she just retweets the battle tweets, none of the trash talk. And so if you follow that account, it's called at, let me get the right exact thing, if there's families at home or teachers or students or people that just want the science, just want the battle, not all of the spectator conversation, then it's best to follow the account at 2017MMM let's go. And so that student is now a freshman at Brown University and she continues to maintain the account. Oh, that's wonderful. So she's still helping out and making and helping with the tweeting and her pinned tweet at the top of her Twitter page is that the 2017 hashtag 2017MMM bracket is live with a link to the bracket so that you can access it. So once again, her account is 2017MMM let's go. She's like a cheerleader, LTSGO, let's go, let's go. So can I ask that graphic? So on the right, is that the quacka? I believe that that's, no, it's the tiger qual. Oh, that's the tiger qual. Always get quackas and quals confused. I don't even know what you guys are talking about. This is exciting. They're marsupials. And the quacka is herbivorous. It looks like a mini kangaroo, like a mini smaller than a wallaby. It's one of the cutest animals on the planet. Yes. So the quacka selfie was a big thing a little bit ago. And then the qual is that guy up there. And the qual is a carnivore and but also a pouched marsupial. And yeah, the quacka was made its debut in Mammal March Madness in 2015 in the mighty mini mammal division. So one of the things that we'd run into after the first two years is that the little guys tend to be one and done, right? Like they come up against something much bigger than them and they exit stage left really quickly. And so we created a division of just mini mammals in 2015 so that they could stick around the tournament for a long time. And the dwarf mongoose defeated the phoenix fox. Those darn weasels. You can't trust them. You cannot. Nope. And they battled a where yeti in the final role that year. So we had a yeti. I've never even heard of that. That's a make-believe. Yeah, but that's like a combo of two make-believe thing. Right. Because our yeti battled Rugeru, which is a French Cajun werewolf. It's sounding less like science right now. Oh, oh, thank you for that wonderful opening. I love that. We included a division of mythical mammals because we wanted to teach two scientific principles. One was about the fact that most of the mythical mammals are actually, you can recognize the animal that they represent. So you have mythical stories about these giant hyenas or giant cats or water horses in rivers and lakes or Kulu Kulu, which is a South American myth about a dangerous rat that sucks away your life and your breath. And these are animals that represent danger or risk or usefulness to the people that are creating myths about them. And so they reflect real animals in the world and they share many features with them. But the fact that humans can engage in such complex, abstract thought to create mythical creatures, that we tell each other about them, that some people believe these things. This tells us about social learning. This tells us about credulity. This tells us about the cognitive architecture of humans as a species. And so mythical mammals actually give us an opportunity to talk about really important adaptations in the human mind. Oh my gosh, you're amazing. I love the anthropologist perspective on the mythical mammals. This is so fun. Yeah, we sometimes talk about cryptozoology or kind of the same idea, making things up. But in this year's bracket, so this year's bracket, you don't have as many of the made up animals, but you've got these two animals of one mammal. Right, right. That's one category. Yes. So these are species that, they're obviously one species, but their common name has two animals in it. So, you know, there was a big debate with raccoon dog. I don't know if you've ever seen a picture of a raccoon dog. I mean, this thing is ridiculously adorable. And there was discussion, do we call it, so raccoons, the other name for raccoons, of course, is trash panda. Because they, you know, they had that mask like a panda, but they, you know, go through garbage. So some people were calling them trash panda. Oh yeah, I'll let this picture come up because it's just so incredible. Some people were calling them trash panda. But the other option was raccoon corgi. Oh, I could see that. Right. They're kind of that log shape, like a corgi with the short legs, long body. Yeah, and this gives us a chance to kind of talk about like, how do we give animals common names? Why, you know, what are the attributes that cause people to attach one species to another species for its name. And also introduce people to a lot of animals that they may never have heard of. Yeah. And I saw the hog deer on there. Is that the deer that has the fangs? No, I think that that's the muntjac. Muntjacs? It's kind of cute. It's just like a little deer. Yeah, it's got that. It's got that flat, wet nose. Muntjacs have, I thought the muntjacs did. Mouse deer have the canines. And then there's another one that also is in Asia. Water deer is what I was thinking. Water deer. Right. Yes, good one. Water buck. Yeah. So, but yeah. Neat. Yeah. We have new divisions every year and it allows the game to always stay fresh and interesting. And people are really excited, right? Like we've slowly rolled out and revealed some animals playing like 20 question games on Twitter. Dozens of people play. We ask people the day before the bracket, at least you know what species are you hoping to see. And you basically, it creates this really dynamic community that people are talking about the animals. And so you end up hearing about a lot more than the 67 that are on the bracket. You hear about what they eat. You hear about what eats them. You hear about related species. You hear about the species people wish had been in the bracket. People talk about species from past years and it ends up that you, you end up talking about hundreds and hundreds of species over the course of the tournament. So I, one other question. I heard that there was some controversy about there being a reptile and this mammal madness. There's always controversy. Yeah. I didn't know if you're going to mention that one or our cat scandal, which have led people to write blog posts. Oh, we would love to hear about both of them. Let's talk about the reptile first. So he the monster. So it turns out that there's some really amazing suit anonymous animal accounts running around on Twitter. And they, uh, they come and show up at our tournament. Uh, and so last year, uh, hella monster at ASU, it's a, it's an account, uh, would show up and, and basically trash talk mammals the whole tournament just, just trash talk mammals. And this, this, uh, natic bobcat showed up. This squirrel showed up and they all just trash talk each other. And, and so last year we, we had a gold silver and bronze awards for hecklers of the year. And hella monster was forked tongue above all the others. And one heckler of year. So this year, uh, we recruited. So this year we recruited hella monster into the tournament to put his, uh, or her, I'm sorry. We brought hella monster in the tournament to put her money where her mouth is or her bite where her mouth is. Right. And, uh, and so, you know, people are really struggling because it's in an eight, nine matchup, the first, the first round against meerkat. And there's a lot of fans of meerkats online too. I wonder if having the ability to get bit by, um, cobras, if you're a mongoose has anything to do with it. Well, we're going to be looking at those protein peptides that underlie these different, uh, venoms to understand if the, the meerkat defenses are going to be able to be, uh, effective against what the hella monster is packing. Very interesting. So in, in your bracket, you've also ranked the, the individuals or the, the species, uh, one through 16 in each of the different categories. So, um, yes. So we've got, you know, meerkat versus hella monster, nine versus eight. I mean, they are very similar, similar, similarly ranked. And then you have something that is so far ranked, the honey badger versus the Southern marsupial mole. One, the honey badger is the rank of one because honey badger. Yeah. The poor Southern marsupial mole. Yes. Now this, this is taken directly from basketball March Madness, which is when, when the, when the, uh, arbiters, uh, selection Sunday picks the teams, they give them, they give them their seedings one through 16. And what you find is that the higher ranked a team is the easier its path is to the championship. So the best ranked teams have to have to go up against the worst ranked teams. And so, um, and so that, that structure of one to 16, two to 15, three to 14, that derives directly from the basketball tournament that we're mimicking. But you know, I think it's kind of fair because, uh, near as we can estimate the phrase March Madness is a derivative of mad as a March hair. And that's from European hairs during their mating season, males boxing each other out in the field and bouncing up and punching and not eating enough and getting all scrappy with their hair and being all wacko loon. And so like March Madness as a concept derives from animal battles in the first place. Oh my gosh. I have another question. Circle. Um, what is to stop an animal in about from just hiding and waiting because it is a strategy maybe for some animals. It's a great strategy. And, uh, and we have to, you know, it doesn't make riveting Twitter play by place. Yes. But if we're thinking about a little mole. In the first year, we had possum go up against Armadillo. And so Armadillo pulled up and possum play dead and they just laid there. And, and across the night's battles, we kept, you know, we kept checking in on what was happening. Nothing. Nothing's happening. And so, and so that year we flipped a coin, right? To figure out who is going to win. Um, we, animals don't have to battle to the death. It's not always nature red and tooth and claw. It's more about who, who, who defends the battle landscape. And so running away or hiding count as forfeit in, in this, this, this tournament of simulated imagined animal battles. Um, if we wanted to make a division about who runs away best, um, we could, uh, but it's about territory. It's about defending territory. It's about defending space and holding, holding the high ground and, and, um, you know, really using that, that competitive battling as one of the main devices. However, you can have, you know, two animals might encounter each other in a tree and be eating leaves or fruit or whatever. And one displaces the other, right? So one year we had, you know, a giant giraffe, a fossil giraffe, uh, browsing next to a giant ground sloth. And the ground sloth shifted a foot and then the giraffe shifted a foot further. And so the ground sloth, one, because it caused the other one to shift away. Like, I was wondering about some of those herbivores in there and how that was going to work with that. Yeah. Yeah. And so, and you find over the years we've had to date two carnivores win and two herbivores win. And, and so there's no, it doesn't seem as though there's any kind of systematic bias. Now, one thing that we did, um, is that, you know, a lot of species, their solution to their challenges is to get buddies. Some species are shaped by natural selection to get big, some to get badass, but a lot it's to get buddies. And so in the past we've had a social mammal division where they, where they could work with their team. And that was the year that the hyena clan came out to win the championship. This year we only have one team in the whole tournament and it's a Neanderthal hunting party. And, and people keep asking me how, how many Neanderthals are in a Neanderthal, Neanderthal hunting party. And I said, do your own homework. You know, like go and look at the research. Go figure it out. Yeah. What a research. Yeah. What? So who's won so far? So you said hyena's won last year? 2013 it was elephant, African elephant. 2014 it was hyena clan. Uh, 2015 it was Sumatran rhino. And 2016 last year it was tundra wolf. And we will see over the next few weeks how this plays out. Oh, this is so exciting. All right. I hope everyone out there is going to be printing out their March mammal madness brackets, picking their animals and playing along. And, you know, if you don't agree with the organizers on who should win, at least you're starting a debate about how these animals live and interact with other animals. So it's very exciting. So next week we will see the winners of the wild card bout. That's right. Who's going to go up against saber tooth cat? Who will go up against saber tooth cat out of the Reese's macaque, the red giant flying squirrel, the snow leopard and the. So as much as I would say the Fisher Martin, because I know what those teeth can do personally. I'm going to guess it's the macaque. And there is a video that will be released of this battle. Yep. So next week, March. Sixth. Next week. Sixth 8 30 p.m. What, what time zone? We're doing that one actually at seven Eastern. Oh, seven Eastern. That's the only one that's at seven Eastern. Because my, I also work in the center for evolution of medicine at Arizona State University. And we're having a tournament launch party. And so we want to do it at the end of the work day. So we're going to, we're going to start that one seven Eastern. And then after that, the tournament's at eight 30 p.m. Eastern. The nights that are listed on the, on the blog. All right. And the blog once again is mammals suck blogspot.com. And I love it. I mean, obviously a reference to lactation. That's right. Yes. So we've got mammals suck.blogspot.com. And that is where you can find all the information you need, including the bracket to be able to print it out if you'd like to. Lots of FAQs, lots of history of what has happened in previous years. The old school brackets in case you are interested in that retro look. And art that some of the artists that you were, who's the artist who's done the art this year? So far, the art that's been produced is by our art director, Karen Henning. She's a scientific illustrator and a tattoo artist. And she's been amazing ever since 2015. She started out as a fan in 2014 and she joined the team as the, as a resident artist. And she's been organizing different artists that do different parts of the collection. It's been amazing. That's wonderful. So I hope, I hope this brings more, a few more people into the fun and that we all, I don't know, I'm going to, I'm going to follow along. I want to know who's going to win this year. Is it going to be a real mammal, an extinct mammal, a make-believe mammal or a reptile? Oh, the Gila monster is not going to work. There's no way. Well, right now it's anybody's game. So thank you so much for having me on. And, and thanks to the whole, like the thing about the blog post, it's also great is it lists all the different people that make this and every year it's, it's, it's performance science and, and collective effort. And, and I'm, I'm merely the ringleader of this, of this incredible science circus. And it just, it seems incredible. It looks like so much fun. Thank you so much for joining us. Once again, if people want to follow you online, what's your Twitter account? At mammals underscore suck. That's, that's one of the best. This is, it's so good. So many ways. Thank you so much for joining us, Katie. Thanks for having me on. It's been great. You're welcome. And we will post links to your website and to your Twitter and to the, the Twitter compilation account on twist.org when we post the show. Fantastic. Thanks. Thank you guys. Have a wonderful night. Thank you. Thanks for coming. Well, this has been super fun. Are you going to play Blair? Maybe I'll have to talk to my friends and my coworkers at, at the zoo. We might need to play together. Right. I think this seems like a San Francisco zoo activity for sure. And I'm hoping that we can get Justin in here and, and we'll explain it to him. And then I'm sure he'll get in on this a little bit with his kids. Yeah. All right. You guys out there in the chat room, I see you. I hope that you, I hope that you're already working on these brackets. I hope you're in there. I'm going to be watching you. I'll ask you next week. I'll be keeping up, keeping tabs on my, on my viewers and my listeners to see whether or not you're playing along. Right now it is time for us to take a small break. We are going to be back after the break. Hopefully Justin will join us and we will be talking about more science. There's all sorts of science stories for us ahead. So stay tuned. There's more coming on this week in science. All right. We are in our break. And Katie, if you would like to hang out, you can hang out longer, of course. Or if you are, if you're heading out for the evening, I do have to go home and let my dog out, but thank you so much. So thank you again. So thank you so much for joining us. Have a wonderful night. All righty. Taking our break. Moving on. One, two, three, two. Hey everybody. I hope that you are enjoying the show so far. Do you enjoy us week after week after week? Why not sport some twist active wear? I don't know. Maybe not active wear, but you know, we have lots of things. Do you drink coffee or tea? Need something to put hot liquids in? Maybe a twist mug. There are all sorts of things. You need a place to put your mouse. And there are, there are these wonderful things that we have in our Zazzle store that are loaded, loaded with the twist logo and with all sorts of wonderful art presented, prepared by the lovely Blair, the creative Blair, like the twist lumbar pillow can have it with a bear hibernating or maybe you want it with a banana slug or a mammoth. So many wonderful choices. And there's more than the lumbar pillows there. Let me tell you, you can have a tie or wrapping paper. There's all sorts of cool things. Also, we have wonderful twist trucker hats. Those are comfortable and they, you know, keep the sun off your face, especially something like that might be really useful around August 21st when the 2017 solar eclipse happens and you just have to be out in the sun looking up at the sky. Maybe a twist trucker hat would be the perfect thing to wear then. We do not have a twist lab coat yet. Sorry, it's identity in the chat room. But maybe that's something we can work on. It's on the list of things we will work on for the future. But go browse our Zazzle store. Go to twist.org and click on the Zazzle store link to be able to browse our Zazzle store wares. Additionally, if you're not into stuff, then maybe you can just help us out. Keep us going week after week. Be a producer and help make twists go. All productions need producer help, executive producers behind the scenes to help float the boat a little bit. So if you would like to be a producer for twists, go to twist.org and click on our support twists donate button. Really easy, takes you through a PayPal interface that you can donate very quickly and easily one time or many times. If you're into the whole donating many times thing or even just once, you can join us on Patreon. Get there also through the Patreon link on the twist.org page. Patreon is our patron community where you can actually get little things in return for your support. So $3.14. Get that, 3.14. We give you a nice circular twist patch. That makes sense, doesn't it? For $10 or more, you can hang out with me or maybe Blair and Justin if they come at least once a month. We have a Google Hangout and get to hang out a little bit. It's pretty cool. Talk about whatever you want to talk about. It's a very fun thing. $15 more, you can get yourself a hand drawn picture that Blair puts together for you. Really awesome stuff. Really though, we do need your help keeping the lights on, keeping the internet going and keeping our equipment up to par so that we can keep the show going. If you can help us out in any way, either click on our donate button or head on over to Patreon to support us in an ongoing fashion. If you are unable to help in the financial sense, that's okay. We need tons of help getting the word out about twists. If you are able just to tell people about twists, use social media or even your local cafe. If you go out and talk to people, mention twists. Maybe help them load it on their phone. Do your friends not even know what podcasts are or how to listen to podcasts? Maybe you can help them out and show them an app to download on their phone or where to access things on the web. Be a helper. Help us reach a larger audience. That would be wonderful. Help us grow. Help us be twists to more people. We really could not do this without you. Thank you for your support. And we're back with more of this week in Science. Yes, we are. Justin, so great to have you join us. You missed a fantastic interview. I'll have to go back and watch it. Will, do you like March Madness, basketball, bracket kind of stuff? Yeah, the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl, yeah, the Super Sport Ball thing. Yeah. I'm going for the teams. That orange ball with the stripes. Well, if you're not into the sports ball, you can instead do it with science and with mammals. March Mammal Madness. It's amazing. You'll have to check it. I've only done it with mammals. I didn't stop that. Let's talk about science now. That's what I thought we were. Okay. We're going to talk about science. I got some stories. I'm glad you joined us. I think. I was going to say, are you? I'm not really sure anymore. Okay. My story. Let's go. Let's run with the science and do this show. Okay. We talk a lot about mosquito-borne diseases because there are lots of bacteria and also other pathogens that get sucked up into mosquitoes, live in mosquitoes, and then get passed on to us and cause disease. They're terrible vectors. We don't really like that. And so we're trying to figure out, okay, how can we maybe have a few less mosquitoes in the world? Or how can we make it so it's harder for mosquitoes to get disease into people? Right? We're trying to figure out answers to these questions. Well, some researchers have been studying Wolbachia. And I've talked about Wolbachia on the show before. Wolbachia is a bacteria that lives inside various insects and has some fascinating adaptations for its own reproduction and how it influences its hosts. Now, one thing that Wolbachia do is they cause something that's called cytoplasmic incompatibility. And now what that means is that if Wolbachia has infected a female and it infects the eggs of the insect species and then those eggs go on to produce either males or females, and those males or females are also infected by the Wolbachia bacteria. So males are infected by birth. They don't have the bacteria in their sperm. It's just in the eggs. But there are the cytoplasm of the germ cells has to be compatible. And so Wolbachia produce genes that basically make it that so that if a female that's infected with Wolbachia mates with a male who is not, the offspring will be sterile. Cytoplasmic incompatibility makes sure that Wolbachia gets passed along and is super successful because it can only be passed on and into the next generation by a male and a female who are both infected producing offspring. So both the male and the female have to be infected for the offspring to be viable and then those offspring are also infected and go on to pass on the Wolbachia, right? So the interesting side of this is, okay, cytoplasmic incompatibility. What are these genes that are involved and can we use them to make fewer males and females compatible? Can we use cytoplasmic incompatibility to create more sterile offspring of mosquitoes? And so people have been looking for these genes and trying to understand cytoplasmic incompatibility for a long time in this last week. There were two papers published in Nature and Nature Microbiology that actually started to dig into the mechanism of how this incompatibility takes place. And they found two genes, SIF-A and SIF-B, and they discovered that they are involved in this incompatibility and they have to work together. If one is turned on, one gene's turned on and the other is not, it doesn't make do anything. Their experiment is so fascinating. They basically set up, they turned on these genes, expressed them transgenically in the testes of uninfected fruit flies. So basically they had fruit flies in the lab. That had never been infected, but turned on the genes, the SIF-A and SIF-B, and basically recapitulated infection. So the fruit flies could not reproduce successfully with male fruit flies, could not reproduce successfully with infected females unless they had those genes turned on. So they basically simulated Wolbachia infection in the males just by turning on those two genes. And then they crossed transgenic males with Wolbachia infected eggs and actually got normal offspring. So they've basically set up this whole system where they've got the genes, they're starting to get at the mechanism of how it works. There's another protein that's involved that's called SID-B and it's what's called a D-ubiquitinase. And D-ubiquitin is something that's involved in sending proteins on a path to kind of get munched up by the cell, kind of cell protein recycling. And the D-ubiquitinase actually takes ubiquitin off of proteins and this activity is essential for the incompatibility to take place as well. And so now they're very interested in how this could potentially be used down the road. Could we use something like CRISPR-Cas9 or to turn on a gene drive for these genes to be activated in mosquitoes, for instance, and to lead to, or to deactivate them somehow in mosquitoes that are infected to produce incompatibility in wild populations and reduce possibility of the spread of Zika and other diseases that are spread by mosquitoes. That's what they're working on. And then there was, yeah, there was another study published in genetics, kind of along, let's say, different lines, but along the lines of the gene drive aspect. And gene drive is this process where it's like if you turn on a gene and normally genes, you know, if you've got two chromosomes, a gene has kind of a 50% chance of being passed on to the next generation. But with gene drive, it artificially increases the chance of a gene getting passed along in the population up to like 90%. So it's almost assured that generations to come will have a particular gene. And so they're talking about putting killer genes or genes for sterility into mosquitoes and releasing them into the wild, right? And seeing how that'll work out. But this researchers at the University of Kansas and at Cornell University published in genetics, their assessment of basically nature, because you know, there's mutations that occur naturally and there are lots of crossings and other things that happen over generations to change the probability of maybe gene drive happening. So what was once 90% in one generation, maybe it over time just through natural selection becomes less and less and less. And that's basically what their computer models suggested is that there's really no way to cheat Mendelian inheritance and that the way we understand genetics to work actually works. Nature would work to undo a lot of our genetic modifications even with stuff like gene drive. And so even within we could potentially put genes into species and if we understand the dynamics of the population, maybe know, okay, this gene will become less in frequency within like five generations or 20 generations. And if we know how long it'll take for the gene drive to be reduced, maybe then it'll change the way we approach the situation. Yeah. So anyway, we got genes, mosquitoes, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. All I know so far is that all the experiments in Florida that involve genes for sterility and this gene drive genetic modification have been they have not been okayed and that people have basically said, nope, I don't want this in my community. No genetically modified mosquitoes in my backyard. I mean, releasing a killer gene, what could go wrong? But the at the possibility of illuminating all mosquitoes, even if there's a downside like it creates one genetic freak of a mosquito that like, you know, it's still worth the risk. I'd say we do it. I understand there's a food chain that relies on the mosquito, but it's the only living creature I actually have animosity towards. Yeah, I was talking more the sensationalism of horizontal gene transfer happening from somebody. I'd risk that too. And yeah, it's all silly. If you know the science, you know that all of that would be vetted well before. And if you know the history of science, you know that that now things happen. Also a fair point. And so my final intro story that I think is pretty cool is from last week also published in Nature researcher Christoph Koch from the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington. He and his team have published their really cool study tracing neurons in the mouse brain and they developed this new methodology that's pretty cool where they were able to trace all the branches of a neuron because we know like a neuron isn't just one string, it has all sorts of branches like a tree or like a root system even and what they were able to do is inject individual neurons with a die and sorry this is their new method was not using a die. It was using a fluorescent protein. So they engineered lines of mice that if the mice were given a particular drug it turned on genes in neurons in an area of the brain called the clostrum. The clostrum is an area of the brain that is really highly interconnected. One on either hemisphere, the clostrum is this little tiny area on either side of your brain and it's got connections from both hemispheres going across and they're connected to all sorts of other areas in the brain and so the clostrum Christoph Koch and others have predicted, hypothesized that this might be the area of the brain that is the seat of consciousness because it may put information together from different areas of the brain into a cohesive picture right that maybe this is the integrating this is maybe it's the integrating area of the brain so this is so if we find out that the clostrum is where your consciousness comes from can we look for a similar structure in other species? Exactly that is so right now they are looking in mice because they can take mice and inject them genetically engineer them and inject them with a drug can't really do that so easily with people however there are studies in people that have led to this hypothesis but what they found in doing this new method where they were able to slice the brain of these mice that had had this particular green fluorescent protein activated in neurons right so it's very specifically just they know that these genes are in only clostrum neurons and not in other neurons of the brain so they know they're getting clostrum neurons and they turned on this fluorescent protein and were able to trace them and they found that these neurons are highly as they thought highly interconnected within the hemisphere so to all areas of the cerebral cortex but one neuron in particular the head researcher said that it seemed as if it was almost a crown of thorns it encircled the entire mouse brain it went across both hemispheres and so this is the kind of neuron that you would imagine could you know synchronize brain activity or at least put it together in a way that would allow it to be synchronized more easily and the fact that they've seen it in a mouse brain is suggestive that this could be something we could see in other animals brains and but you know we don't have the link right now we've got some evidence in humans we've got other evidence in mice and monkeys and other primates that the clostrum is this kind of interconnected very interesting area we have evidence that these neurons are very interconnected and go all over the place but we don't have the actual you know if we stimulate this neuron this happens you know it's not we don't have it drilled down to actually see it affect consciousness you know we don't have the step-by-step mechanism we're still just beginning to dig but this is and ultimately when you use a word like consciousness oh yeah it's loaded it's such a loaded word right so so I mean at some point is it like what's the where is the observer in any of this is actually registering that these thoughts are I mean it's sort of like an audio system is the needle consciousness or is it the record now it's the speaker now it's the ear of somebody listening now it's kind of a ridiculous word because nobody can really tell you what it's supposed to mean yeah how do you define it it's just like how we just found out animals were not responding to mirrors because they didn't understand mirrors duh it's because we've been working in a system for humans so when we talk about consciousness we're thinking about our own consciousness yeah absolutely it's a great question so even those those little neurons that are often to the rural areas of the brain and aren't as highly connected are gonna be as much a part of your consciousness as that really well connected one might not be as active might not be having as you know have as much assisting you in your cognitive abilities as much but it's still you know it's part of the consciousness is like the whole whole thing like it always right like if you lose your foot you lost your foot but you're still you and then you lost your you know your both legs and both arms but you're still you because those were just like mechanical parts and then at some point you know you could be a brain floating in a jar and go on hey I'm floating in a jar like you know it's still you all the way down until the last little bit of that that neuron that I guess loses loses the ego yeah so we don't know you know we don't we would guess that there is not just one neuron that is the consciousness neuron but maybe there is you know a group of them and maybe they do emanate from the classroom we don't know we have to we have we still have to load all of the different neuron types that there are in the brain we don't really understand how they all work together yet and I think consciousness is a perfect example of an emerging phenomenon phenomenon yeah emergent yes emergent phenomenon so it's not just it's not a thing it's a group of thing it's a category of events taking place together so yeah so there's the philosophical side of it and then there's the how the mechanism can we find it and that's what researchers are digging for and in the meantime there's going to be lots more of this 3D reconstructing of individual neurons probably not in people in other animals probably like mice and primates and they're really going to be looking to find out you know what is going on where do the neurons in the clostrum go what do they connect to and how and why the how and the why of consciousness another step another step on that adventure yeah Justin what you bring speaking of how and why how old is the earth when did life begin here how did it first get started long time ago this is Blair these are age old questions actually they're not really that old we haven't really as a planet been thinking about this very long only very recently did we even start to attempt to answer them without our mythology and now one of our greatest clues with wonderful implications for the prosperous potential of life existing elsewhere in the universe is pushing the possibilities of how soon life can form on a rocky planet that is otherwise inhospitable remains of microorganisms at least 3.77 billion years old maybe as much as 4.3 billion years old have been discovered by an international team scientists providing therefore this is now this would be this is the oldest evidence of life on the planet ever discovered and we're talking you know geologically the numbers is around 4.5 billion years for the earth yeah possibly 4.3 billion years ago man yeah so we had a couple others there was I think it's 3.46 billion years ago there's micro fossils in western Australia more recently 3.7 billion year old in western Greenland which actually doesn't sound to be too far from this the researchers systematically looked at ways tubes and filaments made of hematite this is a form of iron oxide could have been made through non biological methods so they discovered this and they went okay how could this not be life what possible way could this be something other than a biological remnant yeah they found that they didn't have a very good likely way of doing it yeah they have these hematite structures have the same characteristic branching of iron oxidizing bacteria that are found near hydrothermal vents today so life then life today and that sort of stage and phase not so very different yeah they also found also in millerized fossils associated with ferroidal structures that usually contain fossils of younger rocks so that's also saying that the hematite most likely form bacteria that oxidize iron for energy were themselves fossilized into the rock but the really sort of I think interesting it's interesting to find the earliest evidence of life on earth finding it near something in a scenario where hydrothermal vents were likely there which is one of the main thrusts of the of how we think life might have started here on this planet but it also says going out into the galaxy we may have many many more planets that didn't take that long we think oh life it there it's four billion year old planet but if it only took two hundred million years for life to show up also it's really sort of fascinating about this this is four thousand million years ago four thousand million years ago planet earth was covered all the way around in water and so was another planet in our neighborhood Mars so now can we find examples of microorganism fossils on Mars and where do we look now we got to find the oldest we got to find four billion year old rocks on Mars and send the rover there to go digging because that's the most likely place right so now there's a chance there's a chance we might find we might not have to worry about one of these far off distant earth like rocky planets in the habitable zone we might be able to find evidence of life on Mars if it didn't take that long to form so interesting study from a bunch of micro fossils and some crystals in Canada a lot of implications there yeah absolutely I mean stuff like this I know that there's going to be a big debate about it because it's a chemical signature and it's a chance you know and it's like they're putting together they're trying to make and the thing that's great about this study is they've taken as many views from different perspectives on the evidence as possible so they're like okay it looks like very similar to what we have with hydrothermal vents with this looks very similar to this other thing we know with stromatolites this looks very similar we've got some the similar chemical signatures so they're going around and collecting a big picture of data but it's still that chemical that chemical evidence and so the question is you know is it is it just a chance accident that these chemicals these molecules got laid down in this way or is this was this something that was life because one thing about this is the this particular find is that it would have been maybe in undersea vents and then and then gotten into molten lava you know been basically heated up again and then come out and been exposed again right I think I read that in one of the one of the things I didn't I didn't read that in anything that I've got here I didn't see any that it was it was turned I mean I don't think we would have if this became molten I don't know that we would have this evidence if it was I know because it was so long ago I think the truth about there's very few of the like if this was happening everywhere on the planet most of the most of those sea floors most of those areas aren't somewhere on the surface under ice they've been weathered they've been exposed they've they may have been pulled back in in subduction zones or spread out and covered up deep deep under underground now and inaccessible the amazing thing is the those those oldest rock formations that are on the surface that managed to stay on the surface of this planet is where we found this in multiple locations in Greenland and Canada and western Australia you know that's a pretty good sign that this was you know it was just in one spot but you're finding this sort of evidence across the planet it's pretty good yeah so from the from an ours Technica article this is where I where I got it the Scott Johnson writes that the new va got took rocks I might have said that yeah new va got took it's I'm sorry I cannot pronounce it correctly super crystal crystal yes they were metamorphosed under high temperature and pressure about 2.7 billion years ago so somewhere around half of their lifetime ago they were metamorphosed under high temp and pressure but within some jasper in the hydrothermal vent layers the researchers found tiny tubes and filaments with hematite and iron oxide mineral the size and shape of these structures was fairly consistent especially considering the metamorphic torture they've endured and some pairs of tubes were affected by small knobs and so they say this is still consistent with bacteria found at hydrothermal vents today so it's just so fascinating to think of you know what what this evidence has endured and what we're seeing now I mean I want to say yes because this means that there were there was life in two places on our planet at basically the same time that we basically had that and like I said maybe Mars too who knows if there was water there bright time frame so it sounds like two meteors brought life to the planet at the exact same time well or maybe not you know what that totally makes sense or or it's the basics once the basics of life are in place life just gets started the process of evolution gets started I mean maybe it's just once everything is right in a place and you know we're talking about an entire planet planet Earth you know even early Earth as it was if you have these vents in a couple of spots over the planet why not well and you think about you know you might say it's unlikely that everything would combine and happen in the exact right way but if you have an entire ocean of this constant churning experiment taking place it's not going to take long for it to happen yep it's so great I mean I think it just thinking about Mars and our own solar system and the moon Titan you know we think about the maybe the trappist system planets out there rocky exoplanets that we're finding I mean to me there's probably if not complex life there is microbial life or at least there's little proto-cells evolving all over this universe and I find that an exciting idea and where they develop whenever life first develops anywhere it's the first life there yep great things about being the first life form there even if you're a teeny tiny little it's a bit of a microbe you're the apex predator on the planet so it makes sense too that it might go on for some time it goes on for some time it's very likely to evolve even a little bit here and there and differentiate most planets are going to have a little bit different ecosystem from one place to the other one place you're eating iron maybe somewhere else you're eating sulfurs like it's just one of those things that seems like once it gets started it'll be so natural for that thing to continue and continue and continue so evolution I think has shown us that it's pretty easy for life to adapt to rough situations we have all these extremophiles and all the different insanity that life is well it depends on how you define easy Justin I think really what it is is experimentation plus time 99% of species that have ever lived on a planet are extinct so I mean that so easy but let's move on to your next story we're talking about evolution plus time your next story I think your next story this is a little bit welcome to the Anthropocene Anthropocene era or epoch sorry I said era epoch human industry human ingenuity and good old fashioned human oops has done more to diversify industry minerals on earth than any development since the rise of oxygen 2.2 billion years ago paper published by American meteorologist a team led by a Robert Hayes institution for science identifies a group of 208 mineral species mineral species that originated either principally or exclusively due to human activities that is almost a 4% increase over the roughly 5200 minerals officially recognized in the international mineralogical association being natural to the planet most of the recognized materials attributed to human activities originated through mining in ore dumps to the weathering of slag formed in tunnel walls, mine water timbers or through mine fires a lot of these were also talking about like uranium mines also sort of interesting 6 were found on the walls of smelters 3 formed in geothermal piping systems some minerals formed due to human action can also occur naturally 3 in that category were discovered on corroded lead artifacts aboard Tunisian shipwrecks 2 on bronze artifacts in Egypt and 2 in tin artifacts in Canada 4 were discovered at a prehistoric sacrificial burning site in the Austrian mountains and now we know that as many as 29 carbon related minerals originated with human activities of which 14 have no recorded natural occurrences wow we did that the mineral andersonite for example found in the tunnels of certain abandoned uranium mines in American Southwest places along the tunnel wall sandstone saturated with water that contains elements that form beautiful crust of yellow orange and green crystals prized for its bright green fluorescent glow under a black white good sample of andersonite can fetch up as much as $500 from a collector oh that's not actually that bad for something kind of that awesome as long as it's not actively pretty active I guess it wouldn't be so they also sort of looked at so that was sort of like the new things that we've added to the list they also put it in terms of let's see according to the paper the first punctuation event in the history of earth's mineral diversity occurred during the oxygen increase in the atmosphere 2 billion years ago that gave rise to as many as two thirds of the 5200 minerals that we officially recognize but within the last 250 years of human activity we've added 208 more which is like really like we're on a great pace right it says it's the difference between the blink of an eye and a month in the time it took us to do this no I mean we're talking we're talking millions of years ago billions of years ago for the oxygen event right 2 billion years ago versus 250 yeah and that's why they're saying that the Anthropocene epoch is a good title for this something else that's sort of interesting we've looked at the diversity of minerals how we spread them around the planet and basically it said that glaciers got nothing on us you know in terms of you know you look at mining operations also concrete is also one of those things that the Portland concrete is one of those sort of new elements new minerals in existence and it's like all over the country all over the world it gets exported goes everywhere you look at all the valuable gems the things that we find valuable diamonds and this sort of thing you know they're in every jewelry store museum and you know on peoples and peoples homes across the western countries like if somebody was to come back and try to figure out like how do diamonds form they seem to form in certain malls and certain stores like I don't know how come it would form in these certain places like it would be like really hard to figure out like where did anything come from we've so sort of dispersed right right our mining operations have been so efficient yeah and so much topsoil has been moved and it's pretty amazing really when you think about yeah and now here's this is Dr. Orgalari in the sediment layers left behind from our age future mineralogists will find plentiful building materials such as bricks, cinder blocks and cement metal alloys such as steel titanium and aluminum along with many lethal radioactive byproducts of the nuclear age they might also marvel at some of the beautiful manufactured gemstones like cubic zirconia most of the night synthetic rubies and many others which I don't know if they'll be marveling and I don't know who they are if we're all under the future of research mice who escaped with the sentient gene maybe coming back to see what were those humans up to yeah so the fake jewels in the knockoff Rolex will be around look at this fantastic substance that was created I mean they'll be wondering about a lot of our plastic products too oh the plastic everywhere which you I think we're going to talk a little bit about some interesting uses for plastic things I never would have foreseen in 1950s Tupperware parties and now it's time for Blair's Animal Corner I've been feelin' bad don't bad at all wanna hear about a animal she's your girl except for giant pandas as well bad at all whatcha got Blair? oh I have a whole lot of buzz on the bees so my first bee story for this evening is all about bees and an unexpected use of plastic so a recent study looking at leaf cutter bees mega Kylie as the group they have extremely strong toothed mandibles that they use to cut off usually pieces of leaves hence leaf cutter bring back to the nest and they actually use it to make their nest but we don't know a whole lot about leaf cutter bees and their nest baking their nest making abilities or their procedures or how they do it what they do it for we don't know much yet a new study looking at them found something unexpected researchers found a curious little piece of green plastic in a leaf cutter nest continuing to look they found more and more they found actually six identical pieces of narrow tough green plastic grouped together and it was made like a cell that they would make out of normally pieces of leaves so this appears to be intentional because the bees had been breaking apart these 10 millimeter long pieces and bringing them to this nest in a particular way they were laid out just like a normal cell in their nest and so they're not sure if they collected them intentionally or incidentally but then they continued and this is the first time they've seen plastics used in this way by a leaf cutter bee in their nest they think that it might be an ecologically adaptive trait to help them survive and that's because they do know one of the few things they do know about these leaf cutter bee nests is that they normally use from what they can tell a mixture of resin from plants and sand in cavities when they have these nests above the ground so that it actually they think that it makes it waterproof and fends off parasites so the idea is perhaps this plastic has those similar advantages as well special plastic for fending off parasites and antibacterial plastic yeah I mean who knows let's just hope they're not ingesting any accidentally and then speaking of bees pushing around plastic this is one of my favorite stories I've read in a long time this is about bumble bees being trained to score goals using little plastic balls Queen Mary University of London trained bees to push little yellow plastic balls into holes in a maze this study was done not just because it sounds adorable and awesome but to see if they could if these bees could learn new tasks that had no foundation in natural behavior so they've done studies before that show that bumble bees could solve a range of cognitive tasks but all those tasks usually were similar to or related to a bees natural foraging routine like pulling strings which I think I reported on that last year so in this one they actually wanted to explore the cognitive limits by giving them something that was very foreign in a lot of different ways so the bee had to move a ball to a specified location to get a food reward they were first trained to know the correct location of the ball on the platform and then to obtain the reward they had to move a displaced ball back to that location that they had learned was correct so to a little bit of what it's like to experiment and train bees the bees were trained under three conditions some observed a previously trained bee moving a far ball to a center spot to gain a reward others received a ghost demonstration where they used magnets underneath the platform to move the ball and then the third group were given no demonstration they just found the ball and the ball was already at the center of the platform and they got a reward so that was kind of the primer and then they had to learn how to do it themselves the bees that learned from a live demonstrator from another bee they learned the task quickly but all of the bees seem to learn how to do it so this shows great cognitive flexibility for bees in the article especially for an insect so the idea is that there's a little mammal bias right there sure there's some mammal bias there's also the fact that bees don't have a brain quite as complex as ours they have ganglia they have these little tiny ball of neurons so you would expect that they would not be as able to learn new skills especially ones that have no evolutionary advantage to them but they did it those bubble bees are smart they are smart and one thing I would argue is that they are very social and even though it was argued that this is a foreign task to them the learning methodologies the method they did best with and so there are social animals that learn to watch that instinctively it's in their makeup to watch other bees to find out what to do to go get food so if they're watching a demonstrator move this ball and there's a food reward at the end that's what they're learning they're going to pay attention to that so I'm going to argue that part of this was not really that far off from their natural abilities but the training modalities did test the question of what are they paying attention to and how do they learn right and the other ones did learn it but it took a lot longer impulsive learners here's a new task wait how did you do that show me again and then speaking of bee communication and being social this is just the icing on the cake of the bee stories for this week bees they make a ridiculously cute noise when they bump into each other and the previous assumption was that these communications were used as a stop signal so they were trying to indicate to other bees not go the way they were going to keep them from bumping into each other or to communicate stop communicating but that sound would have to happen before they bumped for that to make any sense right exactly so the new research shows that this sound is a whoopsie no it's like a huh so they found it was yeah the noise actually most likely is a note of surprise so the bees were not manipulated in any way they just recorded them and they they found that it was just when they bumped into each other or when they bumped into inanimate objects they'd go whoops yeah it's like when we were in New York in the subway I think somebody stepped onto your foot and you were like sorry we were like California apologizing yes that's true yeah yeah so bees make whoopsie sounds that's so cool so what did we learn so that recording there actually almost does sound like whoops whoops so what did we learn they've coined it the whooping signal but whoops they also recorded it when they shook the hive so it was just kind of like a the bunch of bees going whoops whoops you shake the hive and the bees are getting scared whoops oh excuse me excuse me I bumped into another bee I bumped into the wall whoops whoops so bees are compulsive learners they're very apologetic or and we should have the weather with all the to admit and mistake whoops whoops so I think the next question actually for that an auditory sound other than buzzing though I mean that is I mean you know that the frequency of the sound changes when they're doing their waggle dance and there's different sound but I think this is exciting that there is this communication so that's the question I think different signals is whether this is communication or if this is like it just an outtake of breath or something or if it's a functional cause or if it's a social cause that's what I'd want to know if it's a social cue like an I'm sorry or excuse me or if it's something that just happens to them biologically when they bump into each other biological bee bumping whoops whoops oh my goodness that's the buzz that's the buzz I like it I like it a lot anybody want to go to the moon how long do I have to go for I've been waiting for everybody for a while and the baby's like I'll meet you there and I went on ahead and uh and nobody's shown up since nobody's shown up well it might be just a weekend but uh Elon Musk has announced this last week that SpaceX is going to send two private citizens on a trip around the moon next year he's got a goal 2000 by the end of 2018 that there will be a private private people going for a trip around the moon now he has had deadlines and given dates for things before as kind of like the excitement and energy to get people in his company I think working harder but whether they will actually hit a 2018 target is questionable there is still a lot that needs to be tested to make sure they can do a manned mission they haven't done anything with astronauts even yet and the idea of sending private citizens before you've tested it with um you know professionals it's a bit questionable and we're still waiting for that $40,000 $30,000 Tesla that was supposed to be here three years ago I love that it's barely on schedule but would that include the training for these individuals they're also supposed to be taken care of by next year there are people who have already put down a quote significant deposit unquote and they have started training already they have already started because they will be going to space and this is not a low altitude or a low earth orbit trip this is actually to space to the moon Alice people need to be trained as astronauts to be able to do it so they have already started their training see that's kind of that gives some accountability to them he's got to send those people up there or they will begin starting their training this year so their training they haven't actually started but they've already put down a deposit and they will begin training this year I wonder what what what would like a pleasure cruise into space what the training for that is I'm sure it's not as intense as astronaut training but it's still you got to have a healthy heart and you got to be able to handle weightlessness and you still have to be able to do some stuff yeah and mostly you got to be rich there you have to be rich exactly yeah but they don't want rich people having a heart attack when they get up there so they got to pay an advance this being the first two private citizens to go up in a space X ship this is a it would be a PR disaster if somebody were to have a health issue up there so they're going to vet these people and make sure that they're very healthy as other private citizens have been vetted for previous trips like to the international space station I mean private citizens have already paid to go to space there is a process at least where NASA is concerned but this is the private space industry this is new space this is the new space industry we'll see where it goes it's very exciting who knows someday the price may come down to the reach of mere mortals Blair we've talked lots of times on the animal corner about the effects of tagging on wild yes yes yes just last week we talked about it yes and so when I saw this study out of conservation biology I thought that you would appreciate it researchers have found that radio transmitting tags have not a side effect that you would expect of you know getting caught on things or affecting their interactions with other members of their species but some tags can be accessed the radio transmitting ones can be accessed by poachers and other people who don't necessarily have the animal's best interests at heart because they give off radio signals people can access those signals to track animals like sharks wolves fish elephants any animal that has these tags on them they can be tracked by anyone who can potentially hone in on those signals and so the paper is saying researchers you got to be prepared for the fact that some of your animals are maybe going to disappear because you are leading hunters and fishers and poachers and nature tourists with cameras to them well I would say good thing we have that facial recognition technology but that could fall into the wrong hands as well I mean we were talking about these unintended consequences of tagging and this is such an interesting one that I had never thought of before and it just it makes sense what you got to do is you got to release a bunch of feral cats and put tags on those too that's right and then just a whole bunch of red rings squirrel and we'll know we would know the tag numbers and the frequencies that are fake but then yeah it'll just throw them off the scent that's right I had a lot of noise or as Fada is saying in the chat room maybe better encryption that works too probably a less wasteful method sure we do decoys with bear traps or just drones just throw a bunch of drones out there with collars on them yeah or you have drones or just little radio controlled cars with cameras on them so that they take pictures of whoever the hunters and poachers are when they arrive yes that's perfect then we catch them and put them in a bear trap there we go Blair you had a story about frogs that was really cool we'll do that the long and short of it it's really interesting and I encourage everyone to go to twist.org to read the show notes and find out all about it but frogs can see in color in the dark huh so in our eyeballs we have cones and we have rods our cones help us see in color and our rods help us see in low light which for us is black and white or close to black and white so our rods don't respond well to colors particularly things like red go away right away and so when we think about rods and cones we think rods are black and white no color receptors there not the case turns out I was doing a whole bunch of research on rods and cones today not just for my own pleasure but about this frog and toad article because these frogs and toads have two different rod types with two different sensitivities to light and this has not been found in any other vertebrates but this is why researchers have long suspected that frogs and toads might be able to see in color in low light conditions this study they actually experimented on these frogs and toads to see if they could distinguish color in extreme darkness and they can I think that frogs and toads have full color vision all the way so dark that we actually can't even see so now what we need to do is get DARPA working on it so we can have color vision night vision goggles right find out how the frogs do it and then let's have our own night vision that's color and I want that can I have color vision day vision goggles maybe we can give that to you too Blair yeah that'll do the trick I just need some some crisper to give me some frog rods that's how that works right that's it, it's that easy just some frog rods frog rods maybe I should just inject I'll just inject some frog rods right into my eyeballs they've got to have drops now you can just drop the sectors in mixed in with the vising fixed it it's super easy just some eye drops it's all good but just take a second and imagine what it would be like to see colors in the dark I had a lot of trouble conceptualizing that it sounds like like a cartoon or something I think when people think about color at night they think oh I can see color at night because when you go down a city street there are neon signs there are color televisions so there are things that are lit with color and those because there's so much light coming from them they do trigger our rods and our cones and we get the color at night that we can see but if it's dark, if you're in the forest you are not telling the difference between green branches and brown dirt you're looking at shades of gray basically so I wonder if the colors that they're seeing bear any relation to the colors that they would see during the day or if it's something else as far as I can tell and this is something that I don't think they've confirmed and also I didn't do hours of research on rods and cones today but I did some and what I found was that basically the way our rods work is a narrow spectrum of colored light that they receive but the way their rods most likely work is that there are these two different hills that overlap but are widespread so my understanding is because they're rods and they are the most sensitive to light that in theory they would see everything but we're not sure yet I love it more study needed what point is that not just nocturnal vision yeah they can see in the dark better than us and then on top of that they can see in color yes that's accurate no it would make sense I mean if you've ever gone to sleep by the edge of a lake and you hear those frogs croaking all the way long they're awake they are awake they want to catch those insects they're awake I thought that was just them freaking out because it was dark as it's so dark somebody turn on the light I can't say and I'll have plenty of frogs and frog rods at my opening of my new nightclub that's right and we're saying frog rods not frog raw frog rod it's going to be the number one drink at my new nightclub called claustrum that's right claustrum nightclub all of a round of frog rods thanks claustrum VIP and on that note I think we have come to the end 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remember it's all in this week in science this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week it's science this week come to the end of another show another couple of hours of science for you to go we've come to the end my beautiful friends lalala lalala lalala lalala lalala lalala nerd hook turd in the village restaurant in nerd hook who's sharing this whiz mic what were you guys talking about toad in the village restaurant that looks like fun nerd hook i want to go there that sounds like fun that's not here that's in south africa or something no not near here they have a wide range of convertibles four by fours and luxury cars available for hire in nerd hook you guys the world's getting hot i didn't want to talk about it on the show it's getting hot in here let's melt up all the glaciers no i don't wanna it's getting hot in here let's raise up all the sea levels raise the sea let's raise the sea oceans and me let's raise the sea let's raise it to the roof and raise it to the roof and sorry i'm making up songs i don't know why making up all the songs all the day long um i spoke with joanna from the uh from north carolina who invited us to the entomological society meeting and she said that she um she said that she was going to put together a proposal and that she'd get back to us when she when she knew so we should find out at some point oh that's right sidenity don't worry about that global warming that's just my mixtape all that heat that's just the science jams what is wrong your face looks unhappy blare oh ignore me you look unhappy you got unhappy face i'm fine see i know yes eric eric and a k both of us we were complaining about the cold of portland this winter and oh let me find you i'm gonna i'm gonna find you guys something uh weather um i love this weather dude at fox news he puts together the best he puts together the best uh write-ups about things so you know how about it being cold in portland oregon you know i moved portland why is it so cold you want to know why it's the coldest since 1978 it's the coldest in portland this year in 38 years wow and oh yes by the way even though spring has not yet sprung meteorological winter has ended because meteorology meteorologists actually uh do a uh a different decision of they they start measuring winter in november as opposed to end of december or beginning of december instead of end of november beginning december instead of end of december it's very cool stuff oh yeah and the tournament ed's got the ed's got the links for following the tournament i got that in the show notes yep ooh ed has a good story for you blare maybe for next week so much is happening on my computer right now i can't even deal what's going on just so many windows opened i can't it's a long story you guys have you ever had one of those can you hear me right now yes i can hear you you ever i'm being nice and trying to be off screen to blow my nose but like i my nose is acting in such a way that i just want to stick a piece of Kleenex in there and just leave it that's how mine's acting right now i just want to be nuts i need i need a snot sponge just to absorb the moisture that is coming from my nose oh my gosh 15 degrees Fahrenheit eric oh i'm so glad i don't live where you live i hope you like it there too cold for me i think i would not be able to deal with that but then again i never thought i could live in portland either and i'm doing just fine here i really like it hot rod yes three snows exactly three snows already it's not normal four here in portland yes gemdoctor also right shakespeak shakespear mendelsen not just meteorologists oh twit refugee i hope it's allergies because i don't want to be getting a cold my nose just started acting funny today and i don't know but my house five-year-old son going he's going on six six-year-old birthday this weekend we have six-year-old birthday party oh you're having that pokemon birthday party we are having a pokemon birthday party that's right we have made approximately 75 ping pong pokemon balls and um oh twit refugee 60 degrees that's amazing i love that i hope it's allergies it's just it's just strange it's that's just an odd it might be allergies i mean the spring is coming fada i'm not saying it's aliens but it's so i'm just now catching up to the show and i'm hey fever i need to get some allergy medication there's something called the screaming harry or armadillo that's a thing yeah yeah yeah yeah and some of these seem a little unfair the main wolf versus the red squirrel like squirrels are not to be trusted never trust a squirrel one of the reasons player doesn't like them no they're not trustworthy oh i'd put everything on snow leopard those those things are just too awesome no snow leopards are kitties they're fluffy kitties the one at the saxu is constantly looking for a way to escape and running up the walls and climbing the the highest part of the enclosures and trying to leap its way through one of the tiny gaps in the the ceiling metting he's like actively like i'm gonna find one of these days i'm going to find a way to get out they need to fatten them up because i think he's been skipping meals on purpose to kind of skinny down to make it through or she i'm not really third ranked most depressing winter in the nation yes go organ but the meteorologists say winter's over really yeah winter's over here the likelihood of getting another big freeze is very small take off your snow tires take the covers off your faucets outdoors need to check my faucets outdoors and get everything's okay but i hope i hope i haven't noticed any broken pipes i don't think is there a place to actually fill out this bracket you do it so you print it out and fill it out yourself and then over the next few weeks there's a schedule on the blog and they're uh they're going to be announcing the winners of each uh each battle on a on a schedule over the next four weeks that could go far especially because it's up against moles and me which one which one do you think is going to go far honey badger yeah honey badger any of the weasel family is going to do really well but honestly i think the fact that the rhesus macaque is in there that's going to be a tough one to beat wait where's it oh is it on that same side where is it in the wild card oh the wild card no uh snow leopard is going to take down a rhesus macaque no absolutely not all day long is this like is this like fight to the death tell me you know this is fight to the death right not to the death no this is not necessarily to the death no no i so i shouldn't just be going to who has the best chance in a cage match that's not how to look at no that's kind of what it is but okay but it's also but it's also it's also going to be in there uh for the they said for the first the first round hang on neanderthal hunting party versus a leopard yeah i do you like that one i think the neanderthal hunting party would get that oh yeah that could go really far yeah wait there's a pegasus right no uh there's a pegasus there's a pegasus yeah there's a winged horse leopard seal versus giant armadillo oh my god i know isn't it so fun it's crazy oh convention crud dire wolf versus tiger that's an age old battle it is so was it what wolf won last year the um some kind of oh i don't know she said some kind of wolf one last it was a it was a type of wolf yeah main wolf no no i'm a main wolf have you ever seen a main wolf they are weird looking i love them let's look at it they look they look like a weird amalgam creature like they look like a combination between like a coyote and a wolf hyena and a hyena and a fox and they stretched it there's a main wolf look at that wolf yeah it's kind of skinny this is funny there's a one of the images deer fox wolf nope somebody's right in line yeah i'm thinking that is yeah exactly that's a main wolf it's a weird weird creature not a deer wolf or fox it's not really a wolf what uh i actually don't know what it's related to that's a good question i looked it up the last one i saw one it's not really a i don't want to look at this ad you guys here you guys don't have to look at us like here skip out there i'm skipping the ad for wicks uh i'm trying to oh god sometimes technology i just i can't get in my drop box i'm starving nuts animal logic christosion genus christosion i usually just go to a cladogram it's closest it's closest relative is extinct by like a million years it's it's closest living relative is the bush dog that's what this video is about but they're canids so they're in the dog family yeah yeah canid day um so dogs wolves foxes jackals dingos but they're not wolves my baby they're not really wolves no they're not real wolves no but they're canids they're fake wolves they're so weird looking yeah they look like a child drew a wolf wrong or like yeah like a young child drew a fox i like them they're cute fun to look at the things that there's a bunch of weird stuff on youtube what are they what do they recommend after i watch this the next video is called hyenas give birth through a pseudo penis oh oh yeah i have heard female hyenas have a pseudo penis because they um they have high testosterone levels because they're dominant yep and so i guess you have hashtag fun fact but you would give birth through it yeah yeah i mean uh no that's not right right no that's that's not how biology works right i don't think that headline is correct no i don't think so i think that they're confusing uh clitoris with a vagina uh sorry guys those are different things everybody you gotta you gotta check your facts people oh justin's like i got it just not comment on this see here this little fellow hanging up at the top that's what you call clitoris that's right i don't know what that's from that was some uh i think it was john oliver show something okay well wait no the uh clitoris of a hyena contains the birthing canal what what when uh that's seems odd odd but true yeah odd but true where's their urethra i want to see anatomy i'm looking for i i have to look for i'm now looking up hyena anatomy on hyenas are the most bizarre creatures they're they're weirder than the main fox for sure yeah hyenas are so strange i think they're more like cat than uh related i think hyena like more cat-ish kind of yeah yeah the way they worked dog like but they're definitely have all sorts of weird feline attributes and they've got strange testosterone things and weird oozy stuff yeah weird oozy stuff yeah they've got all sorts of extra saint land things that they put goo on stuff with so i don't know this is from some memory of thinking of learning about hyenas and realizing that they're just really aren't from this planet they are from this planet they're lovely creatures who i would never want to be uh left alone with hyenas someday i'd like to meet a striped hyena why a striped hyena because they're really cool why so your average run of the male hyena is spotted but there is this um i think it's a subspecies of hyenas that are striped i'm gonna have to look this up now um i seriously i'm trying to figure out i guess they have a urogenital system but i don't get it uh striped hyena hyena phylogenically closer to felines and vibrates whatever vibrates are what's a vibrate uh good question oh binerongs um that's a it's a grab bag uh clade i'm not convinced it's real i feel like bavaria day they're just like uh this is a weird carnivore let's just throw it in there because there's um civets binerongs um and genets there's the bladder here seriously you guys i'm like looking at pictures of i've downloaded a pdf of the urogenital system of the spotted hyena and i'm now looking at hyena anatomy look we've got the bladder what is this figure five entire reproductive tract of the female spotted hyena what the heck yeah how does a male impregnate a female then penis into penis wow that's you really gotta go right down the pipe there huh you really gotta have good aim yeah that would be you yes that is how it would have to work i'm guessing because that's the i mean there's the the the ovaries and the cervix and we've got we've got the vagina and then this is the uh this pseudo penis the pina form clitoris is this long thing wow what interesting anatomy the fascinating you learn fascinating twit refugees out of here people are like i gotta go now what are you people looking at i have to go okay section of this paper is titled functional considerations urination mating parturition and meeting ceremonies fascinating cool cool cool anatomical obstacles do appear with regard to mating as the male has to achieve entry through a small target placed in a position that is considerably interior to the normal location of an external vagina you know you learn something new every day we did this was exciting did everybody learn with us oh ard wolf ard wolf is that in the list are you looking at them they're not i don't think so i didn't hear or say ard wolf but they are related to hyenas haha twit refugee got hit with a power outage oh 70 to 60 70 degrees looks like a hyena yeah what does the ard wolf totally looks like a hyena um and then if you look at the striped hyena they're real cool ain't easy being a hyena player no no it ain't for so many reasons look at this one with his hackles up here i'm gonna screen sure screen share it'll let me geez okay now you should be seeing what i'm seeing look at this guy look at him isn't he cool look at this guy they have cuter faces the striped hyenas look at his little face look at that little face look at that face it's a face are they they're as mean as the spotted ones though right it is face yeah stay the heck away don't let that face fool you they look so dog-like it's so funny look at that screw you guys that's a spotted hyena there's a striped hyena i think they sound different to the striped versus the spotted look at this one look striped spotted striped spotted yeah the spotted have more of like a flat snout yeah the stripes look kind of more like dogs i love the hackles though that's my favorite part is that the stripes get this like mohawk real hard they're furrier like here's us oh that's a striped uh there's a spotted one oh no he's not feeling good um yeah any who's all any who's all look at the babies i don't know if i would get so excited about the hyenas bye oh my gosh my nose is gonna run off my face i hope it's allergy a woman at a store i was at today told me she felt like a turkey all stuffed up kind of where i'm at yeah they did face it's a face it's like a pig dog yeah and the face does look more like african wild dogs oh yes painted dogs strengths people who keep guys people who keep hyenas like pets are crazy crazy people look at this terrifying toy heck that's a striped hyena apparently why does it have those those different teeth like a beaver good oh that's um that's his tongue uh green yeah that's green of course of course what what else should it be what was the book that i read paulo by paolo bachi galupi and it was about oh the water knife great book i think i must have talked about it when i read it um the water knife there's a character who kind of is controlling is like the gangs in arizona and he's got he keeps hyenas there's a scary scene involving the hyenas in the book the messiah don't bury their dead they leave them out exposed for the hyenas to devour them well that's that's a place to go in uh i think it's an is it a no it's maybe it's in the himalayas somewhere very high up in mountains um people get burial by vulture burial by vulture whoa yeah so they're put out on top of this mountain and then the black vultures come and eat them until there is nothing left you know maybe better than being buried in a coffin in a hole in the ground you know i'm down with it i think it's cool i'm donating my body to science to train scientists or doctors then i don't care that's my plan i want to be a science teacher in death i'm leaving my body to a mad scientist in the hopes that they will reanimate me that's good that's good well i'm gonna my consciousness will be uploaded into a computer so i'm not too worried oh right because you're like 10 years younger than us rub it in hey i believe we're all gonna live to be 200 so at that point it doesn't matter i don't know a decade makes a difference Blair not when you're 200 i'm gonna live to be 200 then i'm gonna download my consciousness into a computer yeah so did you guys this is an interesting question did you guys um did you guys uh see that the story this last i guess it was this last week maybe the week before about um you're not this you really aren't the same person that you were when you were younger so that the the brain you had and the personality that you had when you were like 17 is different than when you're 70 no duh right no duh but like it's that that opens up kind of an interesting you know point of like at what point do you download your consciousness like what brain you know what level of brain development or personality development do you do you upload yourself so download well i guess right away has to do the research no first find out what age at which the drinking and hedonism catches up with you and starts destroying brain cells so right before that right before that because then you have learned the most and developed the most um kind of personality before it starts degrading right you want to get the peak what you do is you you download immediately whenever you get the opportunity just constant downloads right yeah multiple every other year just backup yeah so no not backups you're not overriding my overwrite there's plenty of storage space right what if you could have multiple use so that you have like exactly so middle aged you oh my god that means tomorrow guy would finally catch up with today guy put them in a room and then yesterday guy would be there like oh what the both of you who cares i thought this was a question of when you transfer your consciousness into the machine well yeah exactly not when you you know download a copy control c control v it's more of a control x control the situation no no you don't delete the old you just catch a new one and then the all that's not that's not the expectation here we don't what that's not no why not why not how this works why isn't it how this works when you talk about the singularity who is talking about making multiple copied versions of your consciousness that's me i'm gonna clone myself control i'll paste control paste control paste well i'll get the control c and then i'll just control v it all all over the place and it'll be an army of me's working together as a team although somewhat dysfunctionally yeah just a whole bunch of me's running around working on the projects that we all care about fantastic that's the real power in it it's not like okay now there's me and i can go join this hive of humanity again and go through what now i gotta work forever ah forget that it's ridiculous i'll create an entire nation of me's that all have the same goals and work on the same projects together yeah now we're talking now i can get stuff done i have multiplied my creative killing power great and then i will never be able to speak again well no see we would just be the wednesday night show twist crew uh thursday night multiples of myself thursday night another crew would then do the thursday night show then there'd be a friday night show twist crew and the other us could just be relaxing during this time we're doing something right yeah i'm telling you this is this is the real future but then whoever gets in there first just creates multiple copies of uh i hate everything about that and i'm gonna go to bed wow it's 10 30 already yeah i do need to get the heck out of here yeah go to bed maybe my nose will not be running tomorrow morning maybe i'll be able to sleep tonight maybe there's so many maybes in the world you're gonna have to wait until tomorrow to find out everybody who came and join us tonight thank you so much i hope everyone uh joins in the march mammal madness i mean how fun is that one of the best brackets out there i got it i i'm gonna throw down and say that one of the best brackets okay so are we doing this guess we're doing this we're following along all month i'm going to well i'm going to go ahead and make my bracket only with information i already have in my head i'm not gonna do any extra research i'm gonna do the same thing i might look up to find out what there's a couple of them i don't even know what the head yeah right yeah there's a few i don't know what they are either and i'm gonna go i'm gonna go look that up but and it'll be fun i'll do it with kai and it'll be fun to be like what about this animal and who do you think's gonna win and so kai and i will make our bets i'll see if i can get the office in on it too you should yeah whose nose that's right all right everybody monday night what did you what did you say 7 p.m eastern time which is 4 p.m pacific we'll find out who wins the wild card battle that's totally the snow leopard no you're so wrong i can't even begin to explain the ways you're wrong this is why it's so good already already entertaining you're talking about a person that that has worked with three different snow leopards this close so close well not that close more like that close there were bars but then yeah like right here yeah stinky snow leopards i'm gonna go to bed much much more frightening than peanut butter chocolate monkey peanut butter chocolate monkey i want to eat some peanut butter and chocolate baby no he's saying Reese's no it that's not how it's spelled buddy haha also look at a Reese's macaques fangs just look at him look at a Reese's macaque yawn google Reese's macaque yawn you just look and then we'll talk about it also they carry deadly deadly zoonotic diseases yeah that's right you never want to be bit by a macaque oh gosh uh infection city um everyone if you're around tomorrow night Ed are you doing the science island hangout science island hangout thursdays right i've been doing them on sundays oh is it sundays now okay what do i know but um everyone go to science island dot org and uh figure it out hey brandon thank you so much have a great night everyone out there we will see you next week maybe we'll have another guest maybe we'll just talk science i don't know because i don't i have a hard time thinking that far ahead i gotta take plans okay i have a six-year-old birthday party to deal with this weekend yay all i'm dealing with it's gonna be so fun oh my goodness pikachu i summoned you is that how that works i choose you there we go i did it i choose you pikachu all right science island hangout is sunday thank you ed science island hangout sunday check that out that looks like fun um yeah we're done here thank you for joining us good night you guys good night blare good night justin good night kiki good night blur good night good night everyone okay i'll see you soon okay sweet dreams everyone why are you being creepy good night because i'm punch drunk it's time for bed good night