 We're live, and this is This Week in Science. We're ready to begin our show in just a moment. Just want to let you know that you're watching This Week in Science, the weekly science podcast, and this is the live broadcast of that podcast recording. Not everything may be in the final podcast, but this is here, all of it, right here, right now. Welcome to the show. Hello, hosts. Are you ready? Ready, ready. Check. Soundcheck, Justin, say some words. Checkity, check, check, checkity, check. Checkity, check, check, check, check. We're here. We're ready to roll. Kevin Unique in the chat room is Groot, and Shoebrew is not here, but he is here. Okay, time to start the show. Hitting the button. Ready to go. One, two, three, two, this is Twist. This Week in Science, episode number 825, recorded on Wednesday, May 19th, 2021. How to use your memory. With science. Hey, everyone. I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight on the show, we have lots of things to fill your head like iconic sounds. Oh, wait, I said it wrong. I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight on the show, we will fill your heads with memory, iconic sounds, and googly-eyed deterrents. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Know your enemy. You may not think you have enemies, being that you are such a nice person and all, but they don't see it that way. No, they see you as the enemy. And by default, that means you have an enemy and are an enemy. How do you defend yourself from this fiend? First, you must know your enemy. You will know them by their words, chosen to influence, not inform. You will know them by their actions, spreading fear, not facts. You will know them by the constant deflections, away from knowledge, away from truth, away from reason, empathy, and compassion, and away from the most important strength of our sentient, modern minds, our knowledge of reality. The only thing now standing between you and the enemy, the only thing that can preserve your freedom, your intellect, your pin number, and protect the health and safety of your family, is this week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough, I'll do discoveries that happen every day of the week, there's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek, I want to know. Good! Good to see you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of this week in Science, 825. That's quite a, that's quite a several. We've been bringing the science, we'll continue to bring the science every week. And tonight on the show, we have some fabulous stories lined up. I've got stories about, what do I have? I have stories about iconic sounds, repairing hearing, and thumb brains. Thumb brains. Thumb brains. What did you bring, Justin? I've got in search of life on other planets. Teachers don't care if you're smart, why horses are a thing you've heard of, and how to not forget things. I don't want to forget things, I want to remember things. This is going to be the twists, helpful, handy tips in the Justin section of the show. Blair, what's in the animal corner? I have those googly-eyed deterrents you mentioned. I also have two new ways of breathing. One involving bubbles, and one involving your rear. Yeah, we'll get to that. My ear? Did you say my ear? Sure. Well, posterior to that, you need to tell everybody that this is this week in Science. And if you are not yet subscribed to the show, you can find us all places that podcasts are found. Look for this week in Science. We're also on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch. Our website is twist, T-W-I-S dot o-r-g, twist dot org. Are we ready for the science to dive in? Okay, let's bring the science. Okay, I just have to get it out of the way, top of the show. Just talk about it before we go any further. The natural formation, the arch, Darwin's arch, or the arch of Darwin in the Galapagos Islands has collapsed. And a group of scuba divers who were on a boat actually saw it collapse. It apparently collapsed due to natural erosion causes. And instead of now being still called Darwin's arch, it's now potentially going to be called the Pillars of Evolution, which I kind of like. It's got a nice ring to it. It's got a nice ring. The Pillars, it's now two rock towers that come out of the water instead of a nice arch formation. However, it just got me thinking a little bit about humans' effects on things. Dan Rather made a post about this arch falling on Twitter. And I replied, haha, it's finally something that humans didn't have anything to do with. But in thinking about it, I was like, well, actually erosion has probably increased because of our effects on climate change and increases in storms and heating and wind. And yeah, so it probably, we probably helped it along just a little bit in the last 100 years. But I'm just gonna, you know, stop it right there. Other news, China landed a rover on the surface of Mars. It has a mission to look for fossilized microbial life. That's what it's looking for. This makes China the second country in the world to land a rover on Mars. So wait a second. So it's looking for fossilized? So it's basically just got a camera. It's got a camera and rocks. It doesn't have rocks. It's gonna be looking for rocks. It's gonna be drilling. It's gonna be digging. It has a drill. Okay. It has a drill. It'll be digging and it has a camera. It's gonna be driving around checking things out. It's gonna go find Curiosity, shake its hand. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. So new locations on Mars being explored. Nice. Yeah, by Chinese robots. Now, additionally, this is my last short entry story just to get it off because these are just stories I didn't need to talk about a lot, but I love them so much. There are over 50 billion birds on the planet. There's at least six birds to every human being on the planet. According to a recent survey that took place over the last decade involving citizen science efforts to be able to report on bird sightings. They looked at something like 92% of all the recognized birds on Earth that they were cataloging and estimating, because of course we couldn't actually count every single one. There are estimates being made. These estimates put house sparrows in the Billion Bird Club. There's over a billion house sparrows on the planet. So every time you go sit outside at a restaurant and you're like, oh, look at that cute little house sparrow. There's a reason you're seeing house sparrows. There's a lot of them. They're very successful, along with European starlings, ring-billed gulls, and the barn swallow. Very common birds worldwide, all in the Billion Bird Club. I would have assumed perhaps erroneously that chickens were the most popular bird. That is maybe something they did not take into consideration in their count. Yeah, they're probably counting wild birds. Wild birds. Yes, wild bird sightings as opposed to the factory farmed kind. Yeah. Yeah, but I wonder actually if we were to look into the number of animals, number of farmed birds, how many would be in there? I bet. Definitely chickens. Even the most of the farmed birds, it would be chickens for sure. An extremely quick Google. There are 25.9 billion chickens on the planet Earth. Okay. Okay. There we go. So they're well in the Billion Bird Club. That's over three chickens per person. Is that enough? We are set. It's not. I mean, everyone can have mine. So I think you're okay. You're set. Still feel a little light. Get your chicken. Even with all three of your chickens, still feel a little bit light. Everybody gets at least three. Come on, everyone gets their three chickens. I'm not going anywhere without my three chickens. It needs to already be in the pot. Yeah. But maybe I'd be finding other kinds of life if I lived on a different planet. Justin, do you want to tell me about life on other planets? Oh, that sounds like an intro to a story about scientists searching for extraterrestrial life. Yeah. And we have talked about this from time to time on the show. Life extra elsewhere might not look like life on Earth. It might be different. It might have slightly different constituents. So if we have sensors that we've designed here on Earth with our expectations of what life should look like on Earth based on our one-off experience, we might be missing life elsewhere because our sensors aren't looking for how it could possibly be different. This is a new study by a joint Japan and US-based team led by researchers at Earth Life Science Institute at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. And they've developed a machine learning technique that can assess complex organic mixtures using mass spectrometry and reliably classify them into a biological or a biological category. And they took a bunch of... Basically what they did is they've fine-tuned this with a bunch of things that they built in the lab versus naturally occurring organic compounds that are associated with life to some organic compounds that haven't been associated with life. And they've gotten it down to about 95% accuracy using this mass spec. Which doesn't sound like... Sounds pretty good to me, 95%. But if you get that 5% false positive or missing 5% out there in space, that could be a problem. But they basically... Right now, the only ways that we are currently looking for life elsewhere, we are listening to radio signals from advanced intelligent civilizations, which we should also tell them we are now on YouTube and Twitch. So it's not just radio. They can look other places. Also... All sorts of places. All sorts of places. They also look for the differences in atmospheric composition around planets and stars. And now, like you said, we've got... We're on Mars, digging in the dirt, looking to pull samples directly from the soil to see if there's organic compounds. Curiosity, Rover suggested, that there was organic compounds on Mars. It's not exactly evidence of life, but it does sort of tell you that there is possibly the makings. One of the things that we have learned is that while we have life on this planet that started in a particular way, it wasn't the only way that it could have formed. There are slight differences that life could have taken at the outset. The fact that we have life that all seems to be from the same origination point, as again we've talked about on the show, is likely because once any kind of life got established, the niches fill up, and then anything else trying to come along later after all of these biological niches are filled, is immediately starting at the bottom of the food chain. And so trying to build up from the first step of life on a planet that already has all the niches filled with predators, exceedingly difficult. Which is why, perhaps, the only way that life has formed on planet Earth is the way that it happened to have formed, not because that's the only way life can form anywhere in the universe, but because that's what happened first here, and once it starts, kind of hard to have a second branch or another type of life sharing the same planet, starting from the start. Right, okay, so if I'm understanding this correctly, then it's the reason that we don't have multiple different life trees of different forms, is that basically one tree took off, started using all the resources, taking control of niches, competition got going, and there's just no room. Something else would have to come in and out-compete to be able to make it. And it would have to out-compete sort of like if you were a newborn and now you have to take on every MMA fighter, who's in the league, just to get a shot at being noticed. I mean, because you have to, that every part of that step of that organic life's evolution has to beat out whatever is there. And it's too much of a competition. When life starts first, you have a whole planet to expand into, to find whatever resources are there, you can differentiate and tackle it in all these sort of different directions. And every time you arrive at a new resource, you're the only one. You're the only one even using this resource. So that appears to be sort of what has happened on this planet. So they've created this system. Just an aside, it still just makes me think about, you know, why have we not seen or where is the evidence for other kinds of possible starts that never got the start? Yeah. And it's because it just wouldn't make it. Did it ever happen? It wouldn't have made it. So no, and the thing is, you don't have to go backwards. It could happen tomorrow. It could have been a month ago that an absolutely new form of organic life began on planet Earth somewhere. Possible. And then it died. And then it got eaten. Oh, it was eaten. It's like, oh, I like your chemistry. I like your chemistry. Let me use that to fuel my well-established chemistry. So I feel like you could follow me here. I feel like you could look at this kind of like in an analogous way to how you use kind of field development to talk about evolution. Like you see a similar progression and you can apply it to this larger concept. So we have multiple domains or kingdoms or whatever you want to call them depending on when you took biology. You have these different types of life on our planet. And yes, they are all based on similar building blocks, which I get is what this is really about, right? But still within that, these different domains or kingdoms are so different from each other. So I think that you can apply that understanding to the universe and understand because just like just in saying the reason that plants dominated whatever they dominated if it could be the intake of CO2, they dominated that because they were the first on the block to do that. You could see that kind of in a meta view of the universe where different types of organisms popped up and they were the first to this specific type of niche. So I always, this is like the thing I always bring about the show is, okay, but why are we looking for that? Life could be anything. But I mean, it's just it goes to show that the way that organic chemistry works on our planet, the way that life supporting chemistry works on our planet is the way that it got moving fastest first and then and then run away competition for resources. Push, pull, push, pull, push, pull all the way. And basically what they've done here is they've trained their computer algorithm to detect within a mass spec signature of what compounds are available. They've trained it to identify complex what they're calling prebiotic chemistry. So figuring out what those sort of having already figured out what those other precursor chemistries might look like what other combinations could have been possible seeking that within the mass spec. So it's a couple, it's a little bit very interesting. It might be able to categorize places to look for life a lot easier, a lot faster. This is something that could be very easily mounted onto a probe through deep space and taking analysis of things and sending it back. It's not a high resolution, high power necessity to run mass spec. So it's a nice tool that we can add. In other news UFOs have been seen daily by our government and they're just now getting around to telling us about it. Have you heard about all of the UFO stuff in the news? I've been avoiding it. I was too and then and then there was this interview with Obama where he's like, yeah, yeah, no, we don't have aliens. I asked and we don't have them locked up anymore. But there is stuff flying around that we have no idea what it is. We get those reports all the time. Yeah, but that could be a satellite from another country that we don't know about right. It could be space garbage. It could be anything. Unidentified flying object means classified. It means unknown to the government and they're not going to tell you about it or unknown to the government and they're just going to go, oh, we don't know who's that is or what that is. It's unidentified. That is it. It doesn't mean the a word. No, but we will be reporting on this. We will be reporting on this because sometime in the next month or so they're going to do a apparently a government report transparency thing where they're going to dump a lot of this has been classified encountery stuff for public consumption. Yep, it's coming. We will talk about that. That was going to happen this year. That was because all those people rushed Area 51, right? Isn't that one? No, no, no. This is a massive tangent. It's because we accidentally declassified like three videos. So then you have like reports of a pilot, which is just whenever I've heard anybody describe a thing, you know, like that's a person saying something that's meaningless. But it's the with video it becomes very interesting. Anyway, we'll talk about that. Yes, you're right. That is a tangent for a future show. I don't know if you had a story for that one. No, this was the story that it's the end of this story, which is we're looking for for alternate molecular signatures for the possibility of life on a distant planet through a mass spec high-tech. Meanwhile, they're just buzzing. There's UFOs buzzing airplanes off the coast of San Diego. We're like, oh, should maybe look at that too. Well, there is a lot to be looked at on our own planet. It's true, especially googly eyes. I like googly eyes. Do you like googly eyes Blair? Yes, I like googly eyes. But do you know who doesn't like googly eyes? Oh, Oh, no. Yeah. A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the UK and one in Estonia have worked together to create a buoy that will repel seabirds. Why? Because they don't want stuff pooped on? No. It's because actually something much sadder. Seabirds are caught in gillnets all the time. So literally hundreds of thousands, some people think over half a million seabirds a year are drowned when they are caught in gillnets because that's their whole thing is that they dive quickly into the water to snatch up fish and a gillnet is designed to be invisible in water. And gillnets catch fish. So then the seabird goes in and they're like, oh, a fish! Then they're stuck in a gillnet and they can't breathe in underwater. So that's a problem. Aside from just getting rid of gillnets which would be great researchers are trying to figure out how to save seabirds at places where gillnets are erected. So to start with seabirds their creatures avoid eye contact with other creatures and the googly eyes they found were really good deterrent and so they put them on the small pole attached it to a buoy and then on the top were these big googly eyes. They were big enough so that birds even with birds of poor vision like geese I didn't know geese had bad vision tell them next time I pass them you can't even see me right. Geese can see them and so they kind of scare away these birds by looking like they're looking right in their eyes and the waves that make the buoy bob back and forth give them this looming effect plus the little the center piece of this thing makes it turn with the wind so then as it turns slowly birds in every direction get looked at by these googly eyes I think this looks a lot like Johnny 5 I don't remember it does a bit yeah from short circuit yes so anyway they selected several sites near the gillnets they counted how many birds approached and how many attempted to fish and then they set up their googly eyed buoy and then they counted birds and over the course of 62 days they found the number of birds that tried to catch fish near the gillnets by about a quarter about 25% not great but substantial that's that's a lot if you're talking about hundreds of thousands of birds and that was for up to a distance of 50 meters in every direction and what's really interesting is they yeah they also found that the birds were less likely to fish near the buoys even if the buoys had been removed for up to three weeks afterwards so they were like I don't know that things gonna come back yeah so that's a pretty good deterrent yeah keep them away absolutely also just don't put up gillnets please and if you're buying seafood if you can buy sustainable seafood usually that means it was not collected via gillnets so you can look into sustainable seafood also anyway fewer gillnets mean that we need fewer googly eyes to deter birds I think googly eyes look good on everything anyway it's true this should be on more things and if you have ever had the opportunity to find the large dinner plate size googly eyes to apply them to things that those are fine I know Kiki and I have both been in a home where everything has googly eyes on it and it is just so satisfying and if you're listening hello and we're not just saying that because we are backed by a big googly eye yeah big craft big craft that's where the big money is so that's where we go and now we pandered big craft I gotta put a call into Joanne later anyway oh tell her Michael says hi she wouldn't take his call anyway oh my goodness that's because she's out running around with the hobby lobby okay now and Beverly don't forget her and Beverly I'm going to move away from sight the sight of googly eyes onto the sound of googly eyes no not the sound we'll get back to the sound of things later but for people who are born congenitally deaf there is no current way to give them their hearing back if you're born deaf your brain is going to develop without hearing and for years there was this idea that there the proteins involved in the inner ear there's one specifically called Odoferlin that is being studied by researchers at Oregon State University in biochemistry and biophysics these researchers have been checking checking out Odoferlin and it was known this protein was known to be involved in encoding hearing information but the experiments that they just did using using gene knockout technology they were able to increase Odoferlin's activity or get it out of the cells so that it wasn't there and they could see how the hair cells how the cells of the inner ear developed with and without Odoferlin they were able to determine that this protein that had only before been thought to be involved in information encoding that sound transferring the vibrations into nerve signals that is actually involved in sensory cell development and without Odoferlin the sensory cells mature less quickly they don't mature as well and so now they're trying to figure out how they can use a smaller form of the gene a truncated form of the gene to be able to introduce it as a new mutation like to using CRISPR introduce it to people's ears maybe to young children's ears before they've passed on past the plastic period of sensory development and hearing development and potentially fix the Odoferlin protein in people who are congenitally deaf now they haven't done anything in humans yet but in their study that was published in molecular biology of the cell they tested whether there's a portion of the protein that's necessary in being able to get it get this new mutation into the sensory cells and so they did find that there's this particular trans membrane domain and the trans membrane domain is a part of the gene that goes across the cell membrane so there's part of it outside and there's part of it inside the cell so it's definitely involved in some kind of cross membrane ion channel transduction some ion movement across the membrane but anyway they're studying it in zebra finch zebra fish at this point they're transparent and they don't have to be in big tanks they just have to be in these small amounts of water and they were able to find that a lack of the membrane domain led Odoferlin to properly link in the way that it was supposed to link the neurotransmitter to the cell membrane and so less neurotransmitter was released and they say our study suggests Odoferlin's ability to tether the vesicles to the cell membrane is a key mechanistic step for neurotransmitter release during the encoding of sound and so this this whole study potentially is going to lead researchers on a better understanding of how hearing develops in the ear, in the brain what proteins are involved, how they're involved and potentially be able to treat mutations in Odoferlin that lead to deafness at some point in the future so it's very interesting I'm super excited and stuff like that the idea that very isolated genetic modification could take place in the future where maybe it's eardrops or maybe it's just a small procedure that where researchers doctors go into the inner ear to apply the the treatment and suddenly you have a fixed cell suddenly you're able to turn vibrations into sound into those nervous signals that your brain can then pick up and translate so it's very exciting down the road, nothing yet but it's incredible information very cool I seem to have acquired the lighting director from the film Casablanca that's fantastic you can see the lighting scheme of backdrops made of shadow there's this very bright light being reflected actually it burns it's even direct it's bouncing off of a building right now, it's crazy so this nice story is also fun what makes a great student would you say what makes a great student what makes somebody a great student it depends on the teacher well I mean like objectively it's cool anymore you don't have to keep kissing up to teachers I think asking questions is really good and engaged if the student is engaged is paying attention is curious and wants to gather more information I mainly mean because some teachers hate it when you ask too many questions I know from experience okay so what's the answer? is it the agile mind able to race ahead of the lesson and pull conclusions from the content as if the student were in conversation with the ancients from whom the lessons of knowledge were derived in the first place nah is it the spark of enthusiasm you're talking about the student shows for the work their ability to work well with others in the class and the mark of being prepared for a good future employee once they graduate nope that's not it is it the mind for being academically efficient getting good grades and knowing how to operate within a read and regurgitate system of education no that's not it either according to at least not in the eyes of typical university staff according to the journal of educational review the ideal student is punctual organized and works hard that's it that's what they want and want you to come in and do the schoolwork and be on time and have your stuff together when you get there and this is why I always get my son always gets comments at the end of every quarter your child is disorganized seems to have issues organizing himself and getting his work in on time how do you do on the test? did you pass the test? okay then shush it's fine shush his job isn't to make your job easier his job is to know stuff to learn it but yeah I get at a certain point if a student is organized that means that they are putting the information together in an organized way no not necessarily so if I go back to school I just need my trapper keeper and to put all the papers in the binder in the white right binders right folders they want you to organize basically they want you to show up on time hand everything in formatted and with you know stapled properly or bindered three ring bindered properly or however they want you to submit the work they want you organized they have the ability to you know print out a document or make a copy of a thing if they didn't have time to copy it from the whatever the thing is this is the result of a new study that involved the survey of a thousand students and staff at British universities as well as a focus group with 132 members of both of those groups participants were asked to write down the top five and least most important characteristics of an ideal student interestingly that list was slightly different between the two groups the academic skills employability skills and intelligence and strategic approach were ranked in the bottom three actually by by the staff and the students although did rate employability skills much higher than the teachers presumably because they may want to get jobs as a result of their education so you said these are university professors right now so it says university staff but I'm assuming it's teachers because why would you be talking to the admissions people right but this is this is my follow up is I want to know what the student body size is of these universities and what their class sizes are because if you are in a class of 20 students the student who is asking questions who is engaged who has an interesting conversation around the topic you're discussing is going to pop out and way more than the person who's organized but if you are assessing your students based on 200 essays you've collected from your lecture hall and you get almost no interaction one on one with those students throughout the semester your rubric is very different on which students are the best how easy is it to make a comment based on how organized they were in formatting their paper or whatever yep yeah yeah I'm still upset that just being smart doesn't doesn't cut it nope you got to work hard well I think smart without using it you got to use it correctly come on to be a good teacher you can't just teach to the smart kids that's like teaching 101 right if you have the kid that jumps to the end of what you're talking about you've lost half the class so that's not beneficial to everyone else who's there yep teaching is about getting everybody through it trying to get everybody to understand it regardless of their starting intelligence yeah and that's the part of it I don't like that's the part that's always popular to me yeah this is why I'm a terrible student apparently too is that the organized part is my lowest priority and being able to say something smart is my highest priority and so I've got everything backwards from the way a teacher wants it but it's also I guess fair to say that the teacher's job is to feign interest in what's going on in somebody's head and so the quicker that they can check off a comment that's applicable to that brain the easier their job is and the quicker they get through their day and go and home and drink alone I don't know I think you're oversimplifying just a little I know we're in the quick stories here but just from my experience in informal education I feel like having that conversation and understanding that somebody get something is so important and so rewarding but if at the end of the day they don't care enough to put two words together on paper to explain what they've learned it's kind of insulting and I think that's part of what this is about too is about valuing the professor's time and it's communication both ways education takes engagement it takes involvement a teacher's not just going to put information out there and the student just takes it and that's the end of it there's interaction yeah the interest can't be skin deep is basically my point yeah I want you to listen to some sounds and tell me what words you think they represent okay ready for this okay right okay one more time wait are we like is this like charades but with sounds this is one of those things that when tell we're like we won't be able to know what it is until we're primed we'll be like oh we know what it is well actually it's this but you were primed the wrong way it's like one of those psychological sounds like a can opening okay so you've got a can opening alright any guest Justin uh checkers checkers alright we're going to move on to the next sound wow wow that's definitely a can opening no what is that that's uh that's somebody saying right yeah so I could go really literal and say like tiger or I could say fierce okay good okay we'll go to the next sound I hate that so my word is hate are we just supposed to associate a word with it yeah what does this word it's word charades this sound what word is this oh stop it don't do it again wait three more times just because I didn't hear it that time because somebody was screaming over it bloop bloop okay I've got a bloop from Justin and hate from Blair and the final sound huh huh huh huh huh hang hooray it's hot so Blair says hooray what is okay I will not keep anyone waiting any longer for the answers here the first sound is meant to represent the word cut so can opener was very close cut I need an example then I'm off yeah Blair you totally nailed tiger oh good nailed it that was that sound second sound was tiger the third sound that Blair hated was water that's not water that's like gloop supposed to be water that's like bubbling mud and this and the last sound huh huh was good was good supposed to represent the word good the reason I'm bringing all of these sounds is that researchers from the University of Birmingham and the Libnitz Center General Linguistics in Berlin discovered that iconic vocalizations so sounds not words per se but sounds similar to body movements that have that represent words and have gone on to create sign languages and even languages themselves that there are iconic vocalizations that convey a wide range of meanings and they used sounds like this for these vocalizations for 30 different words different meanings that are common across different languages and they looked into people across 28 languages 28 languages 12 language families groups from oral cultures speakers from the Palakur living in the Amazon Forest speakers of the Dagi in the South Pacific Island of Vanuatu there were a number of people and they say that listeners from each language were more accurate than chance at guessing the intended referent of the vocalizations for each of the meanings tested now in the test it was a bit easier than what I just played just playing the songs well not songs but the sounds at you they were played the sounds and then they could choose a word from a list of 5 so they had a 1 in 20, a 1 in 5 chance of getting it correct and so but they picked across languages universally these vocalizations seemed to underpin meanings and so the researchers suggest that their findings challenge the idea that vocalizations have limited potential for iconic representation demonstrating that in the absence of words people can use vocalizations to communicate a variety of meanings I mean we've got sounds like huh? meh yay but uh aww but I think it's a very specific it's a very specific uh room full of nerds if we're gonna get uh huh uh huh uh huh that happy is not that one I didn't buy for sure that guy was happy for sure uh huh he wasn't happy it was good it was good meh anyway a lot of fun potential for vocalizations sounds to have predated and maybe been ancestral probably been ancestral probably in combination with body movements to represent ideas there were probably vocalizations and movements physical and auditory charades that were played by early people to create languages to create communication that was shared across individuals so it's just a lot of fun to be able to play this kind of game well and think about communicating with somebody who doesn't speak your language they're talking at you in their language or you're talking at them in your language and you can often get meaning across with the combination of inflection and body movements and inflection is at the basis of what this is about it's about sounds that convey meaning even if you don't understand if it's gibberish to somebody yeah the words themselves could mean nothing but the way it's conveyed could get the entire idea across yeah sounds it's very very interesting alright somebody is not though somebody is that are you wrestling your mic oh yeah I am I was touching it I'm sorry I didn't hear that this is twiss if you just tuned in thank you for listening if you've been listening thank you for listening I do hope that you're enjoying the show and if you are enjoying it please share it with a friend this week covid update for the week this week the cdc is kind of going through it after they completely switch directions on their mask guidance not one week prior the head of the cdc had been in front of congress saying we gotta wear masks max we're important it's really good and a week later the cdc changed its guidance to say that vaccinated individuals can go without masks indoors and outdoors and accept in places like hospitals healthcare locations or on public transit public transportation or any private place that's still saying to put your mask on yeah but what it is the horn its nest is basically that it punted the whole situation onto business owners to decide whether or not to check for vaccination whether or not people have been vaccinated upon entry but now we're getting to a point where people are required in some locations to wear masks to enter indoors locations it's great wear your mask if they if you're vaccinated just wear your mask or if you have your card and you can show that you're vaccinated if you could prove it do that if you feel comfortable wearing a mask and you're happy doing that but I mean don't make a big deal out of it let's just try and make it easy on everybody I think the real issue is that 30 something percent of the United States is vaccinated so we're at 37 percent of the United States that are vaccinated and that I do think you're right Blair I think that was one of the other issues is that just the week prior she had been saying that we would continue to wear masks until vaccination rates were widespread everybody you know we're starting to head toward higher vaccination rates lower case rates and it seems as though they've just given up they had said that they were going to wait until we were below a thousand cases a day across the country and they've just completely given up on that I also knowing that we're about to hit the summer craziness again and if we look at you know I realize people are vaccinated out there which is great but if we look at anything like infection trends from last summer we are about to go into a period that could really be problematic so I I'm not thrilled the timing seems less than perfect yeah and from a science brief from the CDC themselves they they reference a study that says in one study complete relaxation of prevention measures prior to adequate vaccination coverage resulted in essentially no reductions in SARS-CoV-2 infections and this was a study in which they simulated various vaccination rates and different non-pharmaceutical interventions mask wearing social distancing all that kind of stuff and they adjusted the percentage of these different things and really in their simulations not simulation not real world just a simulated study if vaccination was not adequate and you relax the prevention measures the SARS-CoV-2 infections stay high they don't get reduced it's a combination of things we have to deal with absolutely yeah so to be safe so when you're around other vaccinated individuals you can be safe without a mask but if you're around groups crowds where you don't know the status of everybody else you don't know if you have immunocompromised individuals kids under the age of 12 who are not yet vaccinated all sorts of people who are vaccinated but for whatever reason their immune system is not taking the vaccine as well people could still be at risk so let's all just calm it down and be nice to each other wear masks in public so this is why this is why what they just did was exceedingly dangerous because what was said was that if you're completely vaccinated and don't have COVID you can be with somebody else who's completely vaccinated and doesn't have COVID but nothing else was said and the way it's heard is masks off masks as usual send the workers back to the front line dealing with the indiscriminate public because we're done having so hey let's all have another wave let's have another spike all those hospitals with more sick people and let's have a lot more death because gosh darn it we have to open the kiosks and don't forget in this the communication, the science communication around this was poor absolutely and we have to remember that there are new variants that are more transmissible we talked last week about how they're more transmissible in kids and who are not vaccinated yet no they're not even allowed to be vaccinated they're not even allowed to get vaccinated to children and so you just don't care is what you're saying you just don't care about them I care I'm gonna wear the mask in a store I do too and please remember this generation that's going to be deciding the fate of old people whether or not social security do we think we need that you know what I kind of recall a time when I was a child and not able to be vaccinated when they were like who cares about the pandemic you know what buh-bye because that's what I would I think that's totally fair they should just off anybody of a certain age who's like we're gonna get vaccinated and skip the children that generation should just absolutely commit parenticide the entire generation that came before I totally agree with that yes well let's wear our masks let's do it for the kids let's do it for the kids another study so we do know that the CDC is frustrating everyone guidance is not great and even Fauci came out this weekend and said be prepared for us to update our guidance because they will probably spend a week figuring out why everybody's frustrated and make up some new rules because I mean you hope that our public health our governmental public health institutions have things in control but everybody is still playing the new pandemic game the we've never done this before pandemic game and there are a lot of mistakes and it's really unfortunate because lives are at stake yeah another study in contrast to a study that I reported on last week that posited SARS-CoV-2 viral integration into human DNA there's a new study out this week in the journal of virology suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 cannot integrate itself into human DNA so now we have one study which has gone through bigger reviews, revisions that says yes SARS-CoV-2 is a retro virus getting into your DNA and then another study saying nope that is just an artifact from the way that the the study was run and the question still remains so I put it to the virologists and the molecular chemists and molecular biologists to please figure this one out because it's an interesting question does it, is SARS capable are coronaviruses capable of hijacking cellular machinery to integrate bits of themselves into our DNA, is it possible big question and Justin you have an interesting question as well that you wanted to talk about oh yeah, so there's 18 scientists from research institutions that are now urging a deeper dive into the origins of the coronavirus they published last week in the journal science and they are arguing that there's not yet enough evidence to rule out the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 virus has escaped from a lab. Why is this important? Because there's a report from the World Health Organization that came out that said it definitely couldn't possibly know way that it came from a lab in China the problem is it was pretty much based on data that was being offered by essentially the Chinese government so you have to take with a grain of salt any information that's coming from China about this of course because all information that comes from China has to be approved by the Chinese state and if not they will literally shoot the messenger of that information so these researchers have come out from various institutions and said hold up wait this is David Reilman, Dr. David Reilman, Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University who is one of the signees, signers of the paper we believe this question deserves fair and thorough science based investigation and that any subsequent judgment should be made on the data available also stating that they and their colleagues have looked at this and even though that they are like experts in their fields they don't believe there was enough information or data in this report from the World Health Organization that could actually come to the determinations that the report came to within that report they found that the the chance that it was an accident a laboratory leak was deemed extremely unlikely the likelihood that the virus jumped from a source animal to an intermediary species and then the humans was considered likely to very likely yeah also this was sort of interesting other pathways that were investigated direct jump from animal to human without the intermediate host was considered possible to likely transmission from the surface of frozen food products was possible under this study yeah frozen food products what are first of all what are you freezing that you think could have had covid virus and is that really higher possibility covid crunchies don't you eat those than a lab oh gosh revinda gupta professor clinical microbiology university Cambridge who's also a signer of the letter said he would like to review lab notes from scientists working at the institute of virology this is a research center where the coroner viruses are studied in wuhan which is why that there's a pretty decent interest in that lab as being a potential source of its exposure to humans you also like to see the list of the viruses that have been used in the institute over a five year period something that has apparently not been made transparent which is a thing that you would think would be curious a piece of a point of interest at this point tedros adhanam guberisis director general of the world health organization actually expressed a similar opinion when the report was released saying although the team has concluded that a laboratory leak is the least likely hypothesis this requires further investigation potentially with additional missions especially with specialist experts which I'm ready to deploy let me say clearly that as far as the world health organization is concerned all hypotheses remain on the table so even though the world health organization sort of put out this report or put out this report based on a chinese scientist provided data they still haven't completely signed off on it being the end all be all of the situation now another thing to keep in mind too is while this is an ongoing thing we don't know one of the things that we have not found is any animal source this is there were something like oh I got it in here 80,000 wildlife, livestock and poultry samples have been collected 31 provinces in china none of them turned up a SARS-CoV-2 antibody or snippet of the virus's genetic material before after the outbreak so thus far after what sounds like a pretty extensive search so far could have been missed it's still out there we could easily have missed it but having looked at that and not found it it makes you think there might be another source if it was collected in a lab if it's in this lab it could have exposure to humans over a prolonged period of time of working with a virus that might otherwise not have been something that was infecting humans right away it could have been something that was an exposure over time and any lab keeping a virus in it is very difficult they're tricky they can sneak a ride on humans if the PPE isn't perfect and part of the coronavirus studies is that they're usually not BSL level 4 they're not biosafety level 4 which is the highest level of sanitary keep it in a bubble kind of prevent protections usually they're level 2 or 3 so there is a little bit more there's a bit more relaxation on how techniques are done the safety precautions that are in play and they have had viruses escape or go out previously there have been American labs that have had viruses go out with people from BSL level 2 and 3 labs in the past so it's not to say that it hasn't happened ever that things have left the lab what we're concerned about is gain of function research whether or not that was ongoing doesn't appear that was happening necessarily at the Wuhan lab where and I've also I've also read different statements that it doesn't the proper in the scientist notes that have been provided the communications that have happened there isn't evidence of this exact strain of the SARS coronavirus being in the laboratory like that's not something that they were working on so it's it's still it's a it's a big question where is it if it was in the natural population if we want to find it out in the wild where's that reservoir where are we going to find it what animal species did it come from we have no idea if it was from a lab there's still you know there are outstanding questions I at this point I think I've seen more evidence to the contrary but that it is similar similar to what the who director said the general director where it's the report found it to be like the least likely option it's still you know it's it's science so it's like this is the least likely scenario but we don't have all the evidence to concretely say it didn't come from the lab there's still there are still some possibilities but most of the evidence suggests it did not so and anyway yeah I don't know that that's true at all but we should I think researchers should continue to investigate the question of the source because it will help us understand this whole pandemic and SARS coronaviruses even further and that on its own is important if it can protect protect people moving forward and I just want to clarify too that the 18 the 18 research scientists from universities across the world including Stanford and Cambridge and these examples here are saying no you cannot say it is the least likely you do not have data that defends that point of view out of options yeah out of all of the options they do have data that suggests it's the least likely no no they're saying they are saying that yes it'll yeah it'll I think it needs to be they're saying the data that was represented that was used to state that it was the least likely does not support it being least likely or most likely or any likely they're saying you're not working with data that reflects your outcome at all from the World Health Organization report they're saying that report is junk and we need an actual investigation there were issues with the investigation because they were definitely handled by the Chinese government they weren't allowed into certain places they didn't get the who the group of researchers investigators who went to China to put this report together they they did not get to see everything and that is something that was apparent very soon after the end of that investigation so and I think that what the World Health Organization director said wasn't that he's agreeing that it's the least likely he's saying that even though the report is stating this we still need a proper investigation as well he seems also be stating that don't put a whole lot of weight on this one report that was generated off of potentially biased data that's all well and how about we just put any lab with current viruses in them at the highest level of biosecurity from the spy board sounds like a great idea well any any lab that's doing gain of function research for sure mixing different variants together and no it's not say it's somebody's like is this mean COVID-19 is a bio weapon no it's not that it's a bio weapon it's just it's not that it's engineered either because that's been looked at and that doesn't seem to be the case at all what it means though is that if you're going to work with with things that are potentially dangerous biologically to the world and creating a dynamic you need to use the greatest security and even then even a level four can have a breach so it's none of it is but the lack of transparency if that is what is taking place which has you know it's been a problem we have New York City had a lack of transparency about the COVID outbreaks okay like everywhere is doing as was like a lot of politicians are hiding things because they want to look better or look like they're handling things better which just makes the problems worse which is why we need absolute transparency in these things and we need a decent investigation because we still don't know where it came thank you Sadie we still don't know where it came from yeah it's true we don't yeah exactly we still don't know where it came from we need to figure that out and that I absolutely agree on agree on that for sure that does it for our COVID update this is this week in science if you are enjoying the show please consider supporting the show you can find our patreon link at twist.org click on that link and choose your level of support over in our patreon community $10 a month and up and we will thank you by name at the end of the show there are also other fun rewards for being patrons we can't do the show without your help so thank you so much for all of your support it's time now for the wonderful animal breathing air filled portion of the show oh Blair's the animal corner with Blair how much do you like to breathe all the way oh I run into respiration I love it I don't like it when my sinuses are full take a deep breath in and out doesn't that feel nice yes what if you could breathe another way so this is suddenly an episode of South Park so this is a piece of research looking at the delivery of oxygen gas or oxygenated liquid through the rectum this is a look at artificial respiration artificial respiratory support we already use it in other ways you know like you get intubated and stuff like that as clinical management of respiratory failure which could be as a result of pneumonia acute respiratory distress any of those things related to COVID for example and so the ability to go in and medically assist with respiration is very important so Takanori Takebe of Tokyo Medical and Dental University and the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center wanted to look at using the rectum for artificial respiratory support the inspiration for this come from sea cucumbers freshwater fish called loaches certain freshwater catfish all these animals use unusual forms of respiration many of them they're intestines it's a very absorbent surface and so the idea here was to provide evidence for intestinal breathing in a mammal so that we could try to kind of translate that into human medicine so this is looking I just need to jump in here and comment on the use of the word breathing because when you think of breathing it is the air your lungs deflating and deflating breathing is your respiratory system process it's not specifically just respiration respiration is a metabolic process which is the transfer of oxygen and carbon dioxide your cells respire very good point I used breathing for comical effect but I think it is very important everybody's using breathing in the headlines because it's like what people understand and I get lungs are not involved there are no aviola used in these processes and this is not allowing animals or people to breathe out their butts unlike turtles we've talked about on this show before they can breathe through their butts because it is a passive thing that is just part of their normal processes and so that is what's happening in the sea cucumbers in these fish is they are breathing through their intestines because they're in water they live in this stuff and they are saturated by it and so they can pull oxygen out of the water so even then it's not breathing it's respiration but that's not even what this is about this is a step even removed from that that's rescue respiratory assistance so there's a difference from that so we have breathing which is using the lungs and you're using that to pull oxygen out of air and push it straight into your okay so that's all happening then there's respiration which can be done by pulling oxygen out of water through something that is not a gill or a lung in this case you're just using membranes through the intestine and then there's this third thing that's even a step removed that is a kind of manual how do I put this without it sounding really upsetting there's no way forced um contact with oxygen in the rectum to aid someone who does not have good oxygen levels so here's the actual study they designed an intestinal gas ventilation system to administer pure oxygen into the rectum of mice so they're just putting air up there without the system no mice survived 11 minutes in extremely low oxygen conditions they all fell short of 11 minutes but when they were ventilated rectally um 75 percent of mice survived 55 zero minutes in normally lethal low level oxygen conditions so that's huge so that's the one so that's just air but this is not going to fly for human medical care because intestinal gas ventilation requires abrasion of intestinal mucosa if you're not a doctor you can tell that sounds bad you don't want that so it's not clinically feasible it's not good to push a bunch of air up there it's not what it wants it's not good for the bacteria that lives there abrasion you're just disturbing the mucosal lining it's going to mess everything up it's bad so instead the researchers wanted to look at a liquid based alternative so they used oxygenated per-fluorochemicals they've already been used in other medical processes in humans so they're already biocompatible they're already clinically approved so they used intestinal liquid ventilation in rodents and pigs via this liquid per-fluorochemical they received when they received this intestinal ventilation they could walk farther in a 10% oxygen chamber and more oxygen reached their heart so also their skin looked better they were less cold their skin had more oxygen in it they didn't see any side effects so this all looks good so the next plan is to expand their pre-clinical studies to pursue regulatory steps to kind of figure out what potential side effects there could be and how they can do this in the best way possible in order to move to clinical translation so the lead researcher Tekebe says the level of arterial oxygenation provided by our ventilation system if scaled for human application is likely sufficient to treat patients with severe respiratory failure providing life-saving oxygenation for example if you have pneumonia if you have pneumonia or if you have a collapsed lung if your lungs are not working for whatever reason intubation is not really going to help you so how can you get oxygen to a person whose lungs are not currently working this is how this study might seem very silly going through your rear and all this kind of stuff but really this could be life and death for people in hospital situations yeah uh you know like when we determined didn't we that the reason people yawn is when they're having an oxygen deficit no because last week we talked about how it's actually about cooling or cooling okay that's right not about oxygen at all not about intake okay yeah so anyway um it could be some day that somebody goes to the hospital and their life is saved by a uh an oxygen I think the idea the idea behind this is really quite interesting that by supplementing the body through different methods where if the lungs that respiratory surface is taxed maybe because you've got a virus that's attacking your alveoli and your membranes right maybe the blood vessels there are inflamed maybe for some reason you're having issues getting oxygen transfer at that cellular surface you've intubated somebody for ventilation to help them but if you can help their body systems from a different place from a different angle to be able to support the oxygen needs of the body of the cells to be able to survive then if that helps it helps and so it's the idea is really a fascinating and exciting idea um I think that it is ya know people it's shocking to people because there's a bit of a joke factor to it but at the same time if this they're doing the animal studies if they can go through the clinical trials and prove that it really is something that works in human patients this is something that could make a huge difference in survival listen if you're in the hospital and you can't breathe anything goes and honestly there's a big difference yeah I'm wondering if those perfluorinated compounds they're talking about they've been used safely in people or perfluoro oxygenated compounds I wonder if these are compounds there are oxygenated liquids that have been used previously to submerge animals humans in a liquid to get there and you inhale into your lungs for oxygen transfer there are situations where that is proven useful I wonder if this is the same kind of liquid hmm I don't know good question I don't know anyway it's an interesting story that's fun so from that I want to talk about scuba diving lizards of course because we're going to go yes I mean they're connected it's all about oxygen so this is a team of evolutionary biologists from the University of Toronto looking at a nulls type of lizard they are able to breathe underwater and it's been observed that these guys can dive down underwater for a really long period of time and there's been a lot of kind of observational stuff related to that and we know for example they can dive underwater to avoid predators and they can remain submerged for as long as 18 minutes which in the grand scheme of the animal kingdom is not crazy long but if you think about just a normal terrestrial animal that's a very long time so how are they doing that looks like okay Sadie wants to know how how? it looks like they make their own scuba apparatus and by that I mean they use their hydrophobic skin to breathe out a little bit out of their nose and they exhale a little bubble that clings to their skin they then re-inhale the air and back out and back in and back out and back in we know the oxygen doesn't all go away the first time you breathe in a breath of air so there's a reserve of oxygen that they're working off of in that bubble so they're calling it a scuba situation because it's like a re-breather on a scuba tank right and so the way that they checked on this is they're not just blowing bubbles for fun they measured the oxygen content of the air bubbles and they found that it did in fact decrease over time so they were re-breathing the air back in and out from this bubble over and over and of course this helps avoid predators longer so this would be an evolutionarily advantageous thing to do and this all started with just some observations back in 2009 and then later in 2019 but they really wanted to test this and in the end they still have some interesting questions so they have some funny hypotheses for future study which is really what I thought was interesting about this is for one they think the reason they're so good at this is not just their hydrophobic skin but also that they think they push out the air from their nasal passages and mouth and windpipe which don't make contact with their lungs so they're able to basically use this air that's not getting oxygen pulled from it anyway to be able to push it out with what's in the lungs and mix it all up and pull it back in so it's less depleted because they have that reserve in the rest of their body but they also think that it helps them rid their body of carbon dioxide they have a hypothesis that the carbon dioxide in the bubble from their lungs dissipates into the water because there have been previous studies that CO2 because it's so soluble in water and because the level of CO2 and the bubbles is higher than the water it follows the gradient and so it actually leaves the bubble and goes into the water and in turn they think that it might even act as a gill to absorb water or oxygen from the water which is something that aquatic beetles do by the way they use little bubbles, they exhale they have this gas exchange and they pull it back in so they really want to look into this and see how intense this bubble is helping them as a scuba tank I find it amazing, I mean it's one thing for an invertebrate beetle to use a bubble like this for respiration but for a larger organism these animals, they're small but at the same time this is a significant bubble and process for them to be able to use it like a rebreather to be able to swim underwater for such an extended period of time this is a big deal how come I don't know how to breathe a bubble out of my nose that I can rebreat with so admittedly while I was first reading this story I I kind of like breathed air out into my mouth and then breathed it back in and out and in and out and in and I don't think it helped me at all no no and anyone I'm just missing something anyone who has tried to inhale the air out of a balloon and blow it back into a balloon and use a balloon as a rebreather you find that you pass out fairly quickly that you very quickly deplete the oxygen in that balloon and fill it with carbon dioxide why is that though why are we so much I guess better at breathing I guess because we're so big and metabolically complicated but yeah it's pretty wild and of course they had to throw in here the researchers mentioned that it's too early to tell if lizard rebreathing will lead to any particular human innovations but biomimicry of rebreathing may be an interesting proposition for several fields including scuba diving rebreathing technology which motivated our naming of this phenomenon so yeah it's possible but also I think isn't that kind of what they already do yeah I guess the part that we would want to key into is the pulling oxygen from water and releasing carbon dioxide yeah that there is a diffusion of oxygen from the water into the bubble into the body of the anol right and the diffusion also of the transfer of carbon dioxide out into the water and so how do you turn a bubble into a membrane that can make this work that I don't get that how do you create the diffusion gradient that allows that to happen but not it's extending your lung yet with just this buckle cavity with this yeah I think that's the thing I'm most interested in regarding this study even though it's the thing they haven't actually studied yet but stay tuned stay tuned maybe around episode 1000 you'll hear all about it stay tuned for more scuba diving lizards on future episodes of this weekend science yes and I was thinking just as a complete aside about there's this scuba diving lizards and the oxygenation through the posterior I'm wondering if freedivers will take advantage of either of these kinds of research for their freedives yeah I mean I'd love to do it dive down in a pool say see you in 10 minutes could you supplement the time that you could stay underwater they hyperventilate to be able to get oxygen in below the carbon dioxide out they have huge lung capacities they've also trained so that their actual metabolism is different so that they have the slower exchange and I'm just wondering if you had the liquid oxygen in your gut in your colon if that would allow you to stay underwater longer it seems like yes it seems like yes but this is just a question that came to me while I was standing here alright it's time for Justin to tell us some science oh what do you want to know about let's see you're going to extend the animal corner with some more animal stories let's talk horses a horse is a horse of course of course yeah a new study of ancient DNA from horse fossils found in North America and Eurasia shows that horse populations on the two continents remained connected through the Bering land bridge moving back and forth and interbreeding over times over hundreds of thousands of years so the new finding was based on genetic continuity between the horses that died out in North America which was not very long ago that's about 11,000 years ago that's before Egypt that's before our current population of Europe was in Europe this is time when the Americas were actually still the Native Americans were pretty much both North and South America 11,000 years ago North American horse died out and then gets introduced reintroduced later by Europeans again so this study is in molecular ecology it's available online corresponding author Ben Shapiro Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Santa Cruz says the results of this paper show the DNA flowed readily between Asia and North America during the Ice Ages maintaining physical and evolutionary connectivity between horse populations across the Northern Hemisphere so this Bering land bridge that we sort of have thought about I always sort of picture it as a series of little islands between Alaska and I guess Siberia and Russia but it's actually it's much more expansive than that from it gives a couple of landmarks here from China river and Russia to the Mackenzie River in Canada there were extensive grasslands between those two places because so much of the water that would have been in the in the ocean was now an ice on land somewhere with these massive glaciers that had formed and so there was this place where horses and mammoths and bison and other Pleistine fauna were just seeing about and in this area in between these horses that had gotten separated about a million years ago were able to get back together to breed again to switch sides maybe even anyway this result is showing that the North American horse that had gone extinct is maybe more a little bit more of a reintroduction to North America than it is an invasive species perhaps anyway new findings are going to fuel controversy over the management of wild horses United States descendants of domestic horses are brought over by Europeans many people regard wild horses in the United States as an invasive species others consider them to be part of the native fauna of North America at this point but whatever the white people in America decide about what constitutes invasive or not will likely be taken with a grand assault by people who are actually native to the Americas and in other other news memory is a weird thing we all have memory yes huh we all have memory we all don't remember do I we all have memory of some form have I learned anything in my life do you have memory we all have some form of ability to recall things but we don't all have the same way of doing it and we don't really talk about it a whole heck of a lot about how our memories operate have you ever met somebody who has a photographic memory no I have a friend who has a photographic memory for dates she's able to remember exact dates when things happened which I've always found fascinating how do you do that I've met one person who actually has a freakish photographic memory where they can look at something and recall it days, weeks, a month later no problem and the way it works with them is it's like they're taking a snapshot like a picture like photographic memory is the exact way to define this they're taking a picture of it and it's not that they're recalling what it said it's that they can be reading it for the first time a month later because the text is saved right the visual is saved in their head they don't know the information but they can read it from the memory so this is a long term versus short term memory storage is that what you're talking about it's just memory it's just however you want to regurgitate something that you have learned so anyway compared to that sort of memory though that ability to take a picture of something and recall it at any point later most of us need a lot more help we need some techniques so Australian scientists looked into an ancient Greek technique of memorizing which I actually heard about for the first time in a Sherlock episode which is that the mind palace the mind palace and that memorization technique is basically one of taking like a childhood home and placing bits of information around in the mental memory blueprint of that house so that you might associate certain information with certain rooms or areas of that house something that's already well imprinted in your mind the rooms of the house or where the bathroom is or something like this you can lay other information on top of that and apparently get a pretty good recall out of it so they were studying that and they compared it to a memory technique developed by Australian Aboriginal people which have a very interesting because they have a word of mouth tradition and oral history so they have to pass everything down over 50,000 years through that oral history so memory becomes very very important you got to remember the stories of the ancients to retell them so the next generation you can hear them and that sort of thing and what they do is actually very similar to that mind memory palace technique where they have areas of the terrain, areas of the land associated with the information but then they also take an extra step and they build a little story around it to go with it so they tested these two techniques as well as they had a third group of these were all medical students who they were testing these memory techniques on and they had a third group that basically watched a video on thumb twiddling and then they gave them a bunch of information on butterflies they tried to find something that wasn't something they were already studying but they threw a whole bunch of butterfly names at them and they came back and tested their recall at 10 minute and 30 minute intervals based on techniques and it turns out the aboriginal technique with the narrative and the sort of locations was the most effective as folks were three times more likely to correctly remember the entire list than they were prior to training on the technique the students using the memory plate palace technique were twice as likely to remember just perfectly if they had then they had before they had studied the memory palace technique interestingly there was about a 50% improvement over pre-training performance by the group that watched the thumb twiddling video or whatever so thumb twiddling ain't for nothing is what I'm trying to say there's something to that as well but more importantly the survey found the students who used the aboriginal technique also found it to be most enjoyable technique the memory palace technique I've always thought that in the memory palace you're supposed to you put things in places in your memory palace so say you choose your house to be the palace and you go around your house and you put things in a particular order in the house and you're supposed to also associate them potentially with something kind of bizarre so that's part of the memory palace technique where that kind of bizarre association because of the novelty of it also allows the item to be associated with the thing that is already in your your memory deep memory of a place that you know very very well and so that kind of the novelty that fits really well with this what you're saying about the aboriginal memory technique of telling a story because along with the story you're creating context and you're creating novel unique aspects details that are going to link all of these items into the locations in the memory palace in the landscape that are there I can see how that added detail the contextualization the giving the brain more to chew on as a reason to put things down in memory can help you go through it quick side note YouTube moderators feel free to smash all trolls the third comment that person had put out they were already tagged as a troll it's not what the chat room is for it's not for a conversation for people who are trying to stir up garbage or say not spout nonsense just feel free to boot them I don't have to give warnings or do any of that stuff to somebody trolling just boot them immediately when you see that kind of jump there's no need to allow it's not censorship you're just not invited anymore that's all it is it's like you can go leave our party please just like a person without a mask on can't come into my establishment no you're just it's rules and you're just it's okay you don't have to mean to be offensive it's just you have a certain smell about you I don't want to breathe the air around you it's all it is trolls smell that alright let's dive into some brainy news move past move past the memory palace can you you brought a brainstore I brought a brainstore what? that's surprising isn't it I thought we were taking the week off I gotta find an end to that story I brought one one brainstory the thumb brain your brain will expand to accept a new thumb apparently researchers looking at a new prosthetic thumb a robotic thumb that's being developed by researchers at the university college London they published in science robotics about their study to see how this robotic third thumb how it affects the brain because a big question is how do our brains take in new devices as we learn to use them and how does our brain change to accept these kinds of devices so the research started with the design of this third thumb by designer Danny Claude she designed the third thumb to latch onto your wrist and hand and to for all intents and purposes stick out of the side other side of your wrist as if it is an additional digit that can be used and it is controlled by controls on the feet that you can move your feet around to control the movement of the thumb and it's this really interesting device they trained a bunch of people on how to use this third thumb to do all sorts of daily tasks and in the process they said hey let's put these people in an fMRI and see what happens to the motor cortex of their brain usually before the use of the third thumb each of the fingers is very distinct in the motor cortex of the brain it's like there is a spot for your thumb your first, second, third fourth and fifth fingers so there is a specific spot where the neurons are active to move and use each of your digits in your brain upon the integration of the third thumb this distinction went away and it became more of a finger area in the motor cortex so the finger area de-differentiated to a certain extent wow and it seemed as though even after training had taken place and individuals had stopped using the thumb for a week that de-differentiation it stayed in the brain were they still able to type? yeah they're still able all the normal stuff is still happening but it's fascinating that the brain was plastic enough to pick up the new digit and we pick up new devices all the time but pencils we drive cars as extensions of our bodies vacuum cleaner anything is an extension of our bodies we learn how to use them and we learn how to manipulate them but in the case of something like a prosthetic to either replace missing limbs or in this case add limbs add a digit to the body the question is if you're adding on how does the brain deal with that what if you wanted to have multiple robotic arms that you control with your brain or that how does this get integrated how much can our brains handle and what's interesting to see is that the brain can handle the extra thumb it learns how to use it it integrates it but it does there's that plasticity but at the same time it affects the way that the brain interacts with all of the fingers but this was a short period of time right so yeah maybe given more time it could have maybe it would have differentiated back and maybe it would have added a new digit a new thumb into the motor cortex we don't know that so you know what it makes me think of is like old school video controllers video game controllers like a psychogenesis that have like three buttons and a directional pad right and if you if you were someone who used that and only that and then you handed them an Xbox controller with like triggers on it and all this different stuff right then they you would I bet you would see similar stuff happening in the brain where you'd see completely new areas lighting up from when they were using that initial controller and then eventually it would kind of settle back into the normal video game space right because I mean it's I think adding on extra stuff at that point it's just a tool I feel like so but it's interesting because it's it is a tool but it's so in the case of a video game controller it's all the motions that your thumbs are normally going to make it's just learning how to coordinate them with the video game right so a different controller you're just learning that coordination for a different game different controller so that's that's going to be a learning process of just motor coordination but in the case of like a full additional thumb that you can use in addition to your other thumbs I mean that's adding that's more than just coordinating in a certain extent I feel like if this connected to your brain it would be a better test right it's not directly connected to the brain in this yes absolutely because I think that's that's the part that I keep getting stuck on is because it's just a it's kind of a pedal based thing yes it still feels kind of just like a tool right I think you're right yeah absolutely yep so that makes me think if I was operating this somehow just with my big toe shouldn't the space in your brain for your big toe become bigger no yeah I know I feel like the big toe the fingers could have stayed differentiated and the big toes like I got this let me just throw in and it would be like I wonder if my big toe is differentiated from the rest of my toes I don't feel like the rest of my toes have their own motor your big toe probably is but the the other one the other toes it's when the doctor tells you to wear your toes and you're like how do I even how do I use these yes yeah so it's an interesting interesting study I think there's a lot more work that could be done there because the future of augmenting the human form is we're just getting started with that and it has the potential to be very interesting depending on you know how many of these tools we can integrate how much can our brain do how plastic can it be and what happens like an extra thumb does though sound like something that like is like a wish of a neanderthal you know it's like an old wish I don't know that's as crucial now I will tell you as someone who has nerve damage in my right hand and drops things all the time I would love a second thumb on my right hand it would be it would be so helpful would you put it on the same side just to replace the thumb I'm just checking do they have two thumbs on one side is that a koala thing really I had no idea koalas they're all thumbs they are my last story for the night is an interesting story related to the biochemistry of Alzheimer's and how Alzheimer's and the proteins involved potentially get their start in the neurons in the brain researchers Massachusetts general hospital were trying to figure out how amyloid beta gets produced amyloid amyloid beta is one of the proteins that when it's all gunked up in the neurons is thought to be a neurotoxin that causes Alzheimer's disease or at least in part a part of the cause of Alzheimer's disease they've published in cell reports looking at the mechanisms of how this all works and they dug into a bunch of into a bunch of questions related to where in the cell and how does amyloid beta get put together alright so first off a long time ago this team the researchers involved they discovered the first Alzheimer's disease gene called APP you down at APP that's amyloid protein precursor and when this protein gets cleaved or chopped up by enzymes first beta secretase and then gamma secretase the byproduct is amyloid beta so APP is the first step in the chain toward amyloid beta so they started looking into amyloid the APP and trying to figure out okay where does APP come from well the lab that was in charge of all this research they looked at the brain's nerve cells and in a study using mouse neurons they were able to determine that there is another form of APP that's called PAL APP but it's not friendly PAL APP means that this amyloid precursor protein went through a process called palmitolation palmitolation turned it into PAL APP then PAL APP gets transported on a raft of lipids there are lipid rafts rafts in our neurons that are called they're mitochondria associated endoplasmic reticulum membranes mamms, mamm rafts these mamm rafts grab up the PAL APP and take it for a ride and when the rafts take PAL APP for a ride they go oh here's the beta secretase and then the PAL APP gets all chopped up and that makes amyloid beta so in their study they started blocking or up regulating the mamms they got rid of the rafts or they added more rafts and they found that it totally increased or decreased the production of amyloid beta in these mouse neurons in a dish so they were able to really and they were able to use a a drug for a protein that's involved the sigma one receptors that could potentially be used to target a particular receptor that can control the rafts that can control the production of amyloid beta and stop it from ever happening so potential intervention for stopping Alzheimer's disease yes please we'll see where it goes this show has really made me optimistic about this in particular I feel like everyone talks about curing cancer in our time and there's been interesting strides and stuff but it really feels like Alzheimer's might get figured out in our lifetime they're really getting close that's not saying much Blair seeing as how I can't live to be 200 years old you're going to live forever that's right well that's knowing your lifetime in that case it better hurry up I love this I love the idea of everyone I know and even people I don't know not getting Alzheimer's that would be great it would be great let's keep our memories not just through memory palaces and storytelling in our brains associated with landscapes we want to keep our memories working and our memories working at the cellular level as well yeah yeah so you down with APP no way no way I'm not down with APP you're not allowed on the raft buddy get off my raft no rafts for you alright have we done it we made it to the end of another show yes we did and this is Eurovision week has nothing to do with science but I really want to know who you think is going to win Eurovision this year everyone send me your hopes your votes I want to know who will win Eurovision 2021 but what is Eurovision it's a singing contest for competition for all of Europe and Australia I thought the British win that one every year but they lose every year that's the only thing I know about it what do you watch it on Kiki not to give free plugs or anything I watch it either on YouTube or through the Eurovision website through a VPN okay I'm going to throw in with Buddhist palm in the chat room and say Lithuania Norway says Gorov here we go it'll be fun it's a fun weekend a fun respite from some of our worldly concerns a song contest did you watch the Netflix movie and does it reflect what Eurovision is actually like it does okay great because I haven't seen either so that'll be my intro it's a comedy but it was very well done okay great alright but on that note thanks for listening to the show everyone I do hope that you enjoyed it I want to thank my co-hosts for their amazing co-hosting thanks so much Blair and Justin for another good show thank you Fada for your help with social media and show notes thank you Gord for help in our main chat room thank you Identity Four for recording the show thank you Rachel for all of your assistance I also want to thank our chat room right now our YouTube chat room went through some things this evening thanks for sticking with us and yeah together we can all make it through a little bit better so I'm glad that you stuck with us this twist community thanks for being here everyone wherever you are and big big 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Just search for this week in Science where podcasts are found If you enjoyed the show get your friends to subscribe as well For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes and links to stories will be available on our website www.twist.org and you can sign up for a newsletter That's right You can also contact us directly email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com justinattwistmenina gmail.com Or me Blair at BlairBaz at twist.org Yes, all the domains are different Just put your twist T-W-I-S in the subject line Or your email will be spam filtered into let's say bubble on the nose because I didn't want to get gross Bubbles are nice I took the less obvious choice Alright moving forward You can also ping us up on the twitter where we are at twist science at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly and at Blair's Menagerie We love your feedback If this is a topic you would like us to cover or address a suggestion for an interview I could, it comes to in the night Please let us know We'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news And if you learned anything from this show Remember It's all in your head Show them how to stop their robots with a simple device I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand and all it is coming your way So everybody listen to what I'll broadcast my epic in science This week in science Science This week in science This week in science This week in science Science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news At what I say may not represent your views but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan If you listen to the science you may just yet understand that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to save the world from jeopardy So everybody listen to everything we can science This week in science This week in science Science This week in science This week in science Science Science I've got a laundry list of items I want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote more rational thought and I'll try to answer any question you've got So how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop power to what we say and the I.N.S This week in science This week in science Science This week in science This week in science Science This week in science This week in science This week in science I love those twist leggings and we are in the after show show Has anyone bought them? I haven't yet But have they been bought at all in there? They have any sell sells? I haven't looked I gotta check out the products See if they've sold That tank top is really cute too If I do sell myself Cute tank top So adorable I like the back too Kiwi fabric all over it Kiwis Especially for our friends Downanda Specifically Justin New Zealand This is the after show everyone Thanks others Justin Thanks for joining us for the whole episode And I do want to say The merch looks awesome doesn't it Gaurav Working on it I love the way that the Blair's art in these can lend itself to fabrics and that can be printed and that's very fun Very pretty I'm gonna put this year's stuff on there pretty soon So that's a perfect thing for you to email or tweet at me Is if you want a particular image from this year on a particular item I will do that Yeah That's great If you want a particular image on your clothings Blair might be able to make that happen She is the one Because as we learned in previous episodes Dr. Kiki is not the one Well that's probably because I have spent many hours wrestling with Zed Zazzle I figured it out Hey did they have duvet covers Duvet covers I don't know Products That's an interesting idea Let's see There's no way Cause then you can get like We can make twists duvet covers They have them They have them They're very expensive Oh I bet They're over a hundred dollars That could be worth it So I'm thinking either A giant mastodon Or just the twist logo That would be a little narcissistic of a host of a show Sleeping a giant twist logo But I also feel like it's very important to stay themed in life I'm gonna sleep in my logo See my products Create custom products There's a lot of things out there that could be printed on Ooh what is this A photo collage fleece blanket We could make a Ooh custom photo collage clock Square we could make a twist calendar art wall clock So here's the question though Would the mammoth go Cause that one's You'll be on the top Say whatever Well I mean he's But he's landscape So are you putting him You're not putting him sideways Oh I see what you're saying No you're right I don't want to be the other way I haven't done anything portrait in a long time You're right Yeah Melizond you can absolutely just thrift some bed sheets for your comforter It is literally two sheets that are sewn together But we're gonna print a giant mastodon on it Yes I mean there's I don't think I can So I want It's gotta be at least a queen size Which is basically going to be It's eventually going to be square anyway Let me see here Come on get to work How about a puzzle Oh a puzzle Yeah that's a really good idea How do I do it on the pillow This is what I don't know No This is what I don't know I gotta tell you This is what I don't know Here do you want to I can show people what I'm doing If you want Yeah you can show people what you're doing But I just found Y'all I just found Photosculptures Huh? Photosculptures huh What? This could I don't know why but this would crack me up Oh my gosh Hold on Blair I gotta show you what a photosculture looks like Could you imagine Let's see Our twist team photo That's a photosculture Did he get off the desk Oh my god Sadie's on the desk Did you know my dog is a cat Yeah So this is interesting I actually wanted to do I found it there's a place in Canada Where you can There's probably more than just a place in Canada This is something I found on the interwebs You find it in the interwebs I discovered one day on the interwebs At least at some point There was a place in Canada where you could go and get 3D scanned Uh You could sit in a booth in a 3D scan you And then they would 3D print A bust of you You could make your own little sculpture We could do that We could do 3D sculptures That we could send out to people then Like bobbleheads except they need to be bobbleheads If they're anything It would have to be bobbleheads Yup Justin do you want this duvet cover or what I think that looks awesome Oh my god That looks super rad Oh it's gonna say like Oh yeah it's pixelated Cause it's so big Blowing it up too big Yeah I bet there's a You'd have to up res the original image To be able to do it I don't even know how to do that Alright never mind But that looks awesome $169 How much $169 Okay but what does a duvet normally cost Like $40 What is What thread count do you buy $40 Noodles wants a twist puzzle Wouldn't that be fun They do puzzles I cannot sleep in $40 third count Well My face never touches the duvet I don't know Oh page unresponsive Alright What about the rest of your whole body My body doesn't touch My body doesn't touch the duvet I don't know what you're talking about How do you sleep without You levitate above the No it's called sheets A top sheet It's called do you have a bottom sheet A top sheet And a duvet If I'm top sheeting It's because that's the only thing I need It's no other time Do I bother with the top sheet Why Because you use the duvet cover Because you can take it off Of the comforter The duvet and wash it It's a blanket in a sheet Also I really like that You can have flannel sheets Those are extra cozy And then you can have Minion sheets when it's warm out But I put those down The science Of blankets Let's go down to the bottom You do not change your duvet covers I don't have a duvet cover I have a comforter Because my body doesn't touch My comforter cover Because she has sheets I don't touch it Because you've got the sheet How often do you wash the comforter That's inside your duvet though Justin Never Because I have a duvet cover That's the whole point of the duvet He who lives in a Duvet house Shouldn't throw stones Or what If you're in a duvet house The duvet is going to catch them Pretty paddedly It will, it will Let's see All of my art from this year is on my Google drive LL Bean has great comforters They're very nice They're cold weather But I understand what you're Saying Gorov Those catalogs Oh yeah I recently started getting I think because the internet knows I work for Parks and Rec now And it also knows I'm in my mid 30s now It started sending me LL Bean Like ads Just ad nauseam Just LL Bean and Eddie Bauer Is like all I'm getting as I suggested Ads I'm like my algorithm Is very specific I live in Portland now And I'm middle aged So I'm cold They're sending me the LL Bean Catalog They want me to buy turtlenecks And fleeces and boots And then they're also sending I've also started getting I don't know why it's the Sundance Catalog So it's like a store That is based on Sundance Colorado Yeah it's like Yeah This is part of the The algorithm too is I belong To both REI and sports basement So It's definitely also part of it Sports basement Because you can get things Cheaper I love sports basement I love it so much I love the fact that you can buy The last several pairs of Converse I bought Were from there and they were like $30 This is My place to be Ooh a twist Sleeping bag Yeah I have an ad blocker So I did the ad blocker Plus hot rod like you're talking about But they recently I don't know if they were Acquired by somebody or something But now You get more ads If you pay them They will block all ads If you do not pay them Then they will let ads through From companies that pay them So I I uninstall the ad blocker Plus from all my stuff That sounds like That's like mafia techniques You're not going to give us the money Then we're going to give it to the one Who does give us the money That's the way it's going to go Plus I ended up having to Disable it Like basically if I wanted to do any online shopping Because there was weird There were weird cookie things happening That weren't So I had it off for most websites anyway Nothing greater Than cookies for later Than golf with a gator A ride in an elevator That's a child of the 80s and 90s thing Nothing greater than golf with a gator It's gator golf What are you talking about? I have no idea what you're talking about It's just making nonsense Sounds Hold on a second Let me unscreen share it again No clue these words That players just know Somewhere there are people who understand What I'm talking about It was gator golf Look at him go I feel like Sometimes kids pick up on something And they focus on it But it's not really shared It's like nobody else Is paying attention To that thing It's gator golf I have to find It looks a little bit like It's built off of the hungry 1994 Gotta be it You're not gonna be able to hear it But I need a video So We won't get kicked off YouTube right Because you can't hear it It's on YouTube The thing you're playing is on the YouTube How can you get in trouble from YouTube If it's on the YouTube Yeah Golf with a gator Golf with a gator I get it now Alright Yeah that's very specific memory I don't think that was a big Crazy or fat You remember this It's like how also I could probably recite the entire Ad for the Shane Company In the video You know The Shane Company In Cupertino and Walnut Creek That's a constant Very international And online at It's been a while Since I listened to KGO I can tell Bringing back memories The gator golf thing is an ongoing Joke in our household though I have to text them right now That we're talking about It has come up Anyway I'll send this out In Twitter I feel like I want to hear if people remember this I'm sure people do I have no recollection Of golfing With the gator Does anyone remember it Nobody in the chat room is saying that Oh Thunder Beaver's partner knows all about it There you go What is this Garov I could speak what Simlish The pooter What? Simlish Yes Blair What's Pooter tutorial What did I just Click on What did you click on I didn't send you anything No someone in our chat Wiz Mike sharing The pooter What is that I don't have this sound on Does it make fart noises I'm listening It's a little device that makes farting Sounds What a weird video Okay Anyway It's funny Trying to Oh good Lovely Okay I have Great I have my art I'm gonna make a jigsaw puzzle Here I can share my screen again What should we do which one Maybe the lemur Lemur The lemur When I was at the zoo People always would accidentally call them Lemurs Oh man It's not a lemur I'm at the lemur cafe Like No you're not You're not there Sorry bud These would be too hard I feel like I have to find something that has more colors Oh those would be so hard Oh my goodness It's just like It would be better for one of these Here is a blank puzzle With all white pieces Yeah All pieces of the same color They don't have a square puzzle Do they This is the problem I keep doing my art in weird shapes Well there's a Square What's the right shape for art Again That's a good question Nowadays the right shape For art is the Shape that fits on products Oh I hope not One of these might be good Mike What do we like Bright colored Oh maybe one of the bright colored ones The stained glass ones Yeah the problem with the stained glass Is that it's Darn square But I could still fit it That's a darn square Darn square Now it's a Darn square How about What do we want You want a turtle? No we don't want a turtle So Justin you're coming back Next week To the US of A I'll be back in the United States Yeah And you'll be traveling On the Wednesday night Thursday morning Yes Cool And then you'll be back For a little while Uh-huh Any plans We should be aware of Any plans Such as Going back to school Getting another job Making other plans Working on your Job stuff There's school stuff There's bus stuff Bus stuff Bus stuff You wouldn't understand it's bus No you wouldn't understand There's some high priority things And then there's some other priority things And then there's also Bus stuff You have to speak bus Language to understand it properly You have to speak bus What is this Dad scanned these and this one just says Fish There we go How come all that fish's eyes Are on the same side How come your eyes are not You ever think of that Well both my eyes are on the front side Front side, yeah exactly Okay Whatever Whatever buddy Bifurcation There for a reason That would be a fun Puzzle Yeah Would anyone want to make this puzzle in the chat room Who wants a fish puzzle Fish puzzle But that puzzle's not enough pieces It's like 20 pieces or something You need like a thousand piece puzzle to make it interesting It's like a child's puzzle Here's a 520 piece puzzle It's getting there but you really gotta go for more You need more than that Now it's gotta be at least a thousand Otherwise there's no point Big What else should we try Insect What do I think insect is from last Oh I think I know what it is I have to I have to go to wake To go be awake for the day I have to go To be awake for the day now Okay Thunderbeaver likes 500 to a thousand pieces A thousand Minimum Thunderbeaver says the more difficult the better Okay how about this one These are the weird shaped pieces too You can't just have standard pieces Here's this one I like that weevil Jeff weevil Yeah I think I'll do this one There's enough stuff on it like this area will be really hard Yeah But this is all going to be easier Because of all the lines Maybe we'll sell this one There's going to be a lot of But the background behind all these That's going to be hard How expensive are puzzles normally How much is it It's $40 Is that normal I don't know what the price is And nothing seems like a normal price to me On anything anymore Well Zazz this stuff is always more expensive Because it's the print on the demand Stuff It might be reasonable It's no way to tell anymore 252 pieces is $21 less But anybody who's over The age of 7 Is going to be bored by that And I'm apologizing right now to 7 year olds Who are probably underwhelmed By a 250 Piece puzzle 1,000 piece one 1,014 piece That's the minimum size For a puzzle Identity 4 was a 2 piece I would like just One piece puzzle Never mind just give me the picture Cappy I agree Doing something down there Let's see anything else $18 Not next week But the following week The following week So maybe we can start planning ahead for Movie time We will be in the same time zone Fun to do that And like Yeah I'd love to Brainstorm Movies that we could watch And I'd love to We did a bit of brainstorming last show I also Would love to get brainstorm Ideas from both of you On Guests that we should invite If you have thoughts Oh gosh Yes I do tend to like Guests who are In North America time zones Because other time zones Are difficult I don't know How many people when I get up early in the morning Like you Justin Speak with us If they're down for it That's great Figuring out time zones is also Interesting Some polls for movies I can do that I also think that When you find it convenient To come down to the bay area We should all be in the same Space since we're all Vaccinated at the same time That would be fun That would be a lot of fun Could do a live viewing of a movie I don't know That's still possible huh That could happen Yeah, twist starts pretty late We're kind of east coast guests But they don't want to hang out After their interview Usually identity 4 The east coasters are usually like Hey that was a lot of fun I'm going to go to bed now It's midnight So that's why if we could get Some of the Europeans Central time To get up early enough to do the show Then it's still Too early to do anything So It's not like they have anywhere to go Nobody's even going to work At this gosh awful early hour in the morning People are just about starting to wake up And central European time I think we should watch Mars attacks That's what you said last week I know I think we should I really like all the men in black Movies So Brian was just saying yesterday He wanted to rewatch those movies I love those So that would be great Good Yes dried Talking is hard Early in the morning It is difficult Justin can do it Blair can do it I cannot I love Live viewing outside That's always fun With Mike All capped Yes men in black I have support for men in black Dr. Becky Smith Hurst She's in the UK I have been Fiddling around with the idea of having Like a A twist interview Separate show Where it would be a different time Of day for people in different Time zones I don't know if that would be possible For both of you though What time of day Yeah It would be like 8 or 9 in the morning To handle Time zones for people who are in the UK Or So depending on the Day I could definitely Do that Depending on the day I could do almost any time Okay Not for long Because They just lifted The telework Whenever possible Restrictions So We'll see but I'm salaried so That does mean that I can My work day is flexible sometimes So I can Hot red are you suggesting that we would All hang out and chat in discord While we watch a movie together I was thinking that we would do it on Do a watch party I don't know we would be on twitch or something I don't know we can talk about the technicals If you all have Ideas on the technicals of a Of a watch party The nice thing about doing it on discord Is that you're not talking over People's movies You're just typing Right well it would be the same thing for like twitch too Oh you do it on twitch that way too Yeah We would all start the movie In our separate locations At the same time And then We could even do A chatty beginning And then we could also Have an intermission if we wanted to And then have a Pre-post or just a pre-post Or Or none of it Do I get to eat red vines? I'm in for all of it as long as I get to Eat red vines Or none of it I must have the red vines Yes Okay Go do Day time things Out as well Bedtime Bedtime for bonzos Everybody watch Eurovision If you can You're in Europe You can watch it Justin You can watch Eurovision On Saturday the finals are on Saturday Unfortunately I don't have a television It's so sad You have a computer Yeah but I don't use it For that Okay I'm not interested In the popular media No it's because It's like It's poison For brains That's why What TV in general? Is that what you're saying? Yeah Bad for brains If you watch too much television Your brain turns to mush and it Okay now you're sounding like my dad I think I heard that a lot of times growing up I did definitely I heard that a lot too Brain's gonna turn to mush Come out to mush Not if you're watching this week in science No if you listen to this quality quality Programming Your brain is actually improving in its Killing power Okay so Dr. Becky Schmetherst What's her name? That sounded right Schmetherst Okay I gotta find her I just have to write it down in Write it down in the note pile That's what I need to do Okay Good morning everybody Are we ready? Are we gonna say more things? Hey say good night Blair Good night Blair say good night Justin I can't Oh I can't You can say good night to me that would be the The light thing to do But then he would say good night Blair He has to say good morning Justin Say good morning Justin Good morning Justin Cause he's the shit Anyway Good night Kiki Good night everyone Thank you for joining us for another Episode of the show Thank you for Being kind and compassionate And exploring ideas Being curious And allowing other viewpoints But also Getting rid of the ones that are trollish Never tolerate the trolls Never tolerate the trolls But let's talk about different ideas That's what we can do here Let's discuss But not tolerate aggressive Behavior Really appreciate you all so much Thank you for joining us for another Episode of TWIS Have a wonderful night, morning, day Wherever you are And we'll see you again next week