 I'm getting there closer here so we're live now Blair is adjusting her mic with her old mic stand and her autofocus camera we're trying to get the microphone a little bit closer because noted that Blair was a little quieter testing one two three how's that Justin it's good are we good identity for the human choice could not acquire a bank loan the arsonist had oddly shaped feet what did I miss you know just like almost 20 years ago no big deal a movie that I never saw okay homework okay how about now better worse yes hello testing one two three identity for you got it I've got a weird headphone so things change it's better they said okay I'll try the third one real quick okay testing one two three testing testing oh it's flat I like the second last one you got it back to number three okay number three behind door let me double check out so I'm just gonna yep okay because the camera speakers that would explain everything no no you're on the right camera that's for sure everyone thanks for joining us on twist tonight if you're watching live right now that's it that's the show we're done no I'm kidding our first podcast everybody our first podcast ever it's hard sometimes to get the audio right before we go live because what you hear is not necessarily what we hear and as much as we do stuff in the back end here it doesn't sound that way to all y'all out there so they're stop moving your autofocus is freaking me I'm so hot guys I don't know right now is it hot in San Francisco having a really really warm fall I can't go back just gets warmer and warmer in the Bay Area in the fall but you know we can talk about climate change I have a fan so right before we went live I said you guys let's do a tight 90 we'll get in we'll get out oh it's much better that fan you know I use as much metabolism to make more heat to move the fan as I am dissipating with the fan but it's fine it feels as you heat yourself up you will also vasodilate and instigate all those natural cooling mechanisms like sweating that will allow the evapotranspiration to take place a little bit better and cool you from the surface you might be able to hear me you might be able to see me I'm glad you can't smell me welcome to the live recording of the twist broadcast everyone another episode of twist and if you're here watching live well then you are watching the stuff that people listen to the podcast aren't going to get to enjoy so I hope you're enjoying it we are going to go live are you ready for a show I'm ready for a show we're ready to record in the three that the three to this is twist this week in science episode number 795 recorded on Wednesday October 14th 2020 what is room temperature but super cool I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight we will fill your head with ants bears and covid the ABCs of science but first disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer whatever you think about the state of the world keep in mind that the world of today is but the yesterday of tomorrow and what is left to say about the world of tomorrow that hasn't already been said the one thing there have always been those that think that think things might get better optimists and of course there are always those that think things would get worse pessimists and depending on which one of you listen to more you are more likely to think one way or the other and depending on what state of the world you happen to be tracking you are probably going to be right or wrong or maybe even both CDs aren't going to last vinyl has a better sound than digital CDs are the future digital music is here to stay both right wrong both regardless of how you think about tomorrow there is another way to envision it one that is neither through the optimistic nor pessimistic lens but rather by following scientific perspective breadcrumbs of what's to come of what is possible of what is probable of what is most likely to be our tomorrow has always shown up first as published science and the best way to catch a glimpse of that world of tomorrow is right here on this week in science coming up next and a good science to you to Justin Blair and everyone out there welcome to another episode of this week in science we're back we're back with all the science all the science that you are looking forward to because you've been looking forward to the science since last week because that's what we do we come back every week to talk about the sciency things ABCs of science I have the science news I brought fishy smells fluorescent bears and fluorescent bears and potentially negative positive selection potentially negative positive selection it's gonna have to suss that out with the devil it's a lot of words in a row work that out everyone Justin what do you have for us I've got systematic racism skin circuits covid spursies and how pandemic kept the Paris climate accord promise that I can't wait to hear about that Blair mmm what's the animal corner gotten store I have some be guts I have some really smart ants and I have a real quick story about kind birds I always knew they were so kind I love them so much yes I saw this story and I thought I wonder flares bringing this story and I went to go put a story into our rundown and there it was there it was you better believe it oh yes oh yes alright everyone let's kindly dive into this show but before we do I want to remind you that if you you have not yet subscribed to this week in science you can find us all places that podcasts are found stitchers freaker tune in radio calm apple Google Spotify all the places go look there look for this week in science you can also do the same on YouTube and Facebook or look at our website TWIS org okay let's do this science thing are you both ready for some scientific action superconductive what what temperature is no longer a limiting factor when it comes to superconductors wait what well it is but not unless so they've broken a barrier scientists physicists publishing in nature researchers from the University of Rochester New York have created the world's first room temperature superconductor again world's first room temperature really room temperature yeah okay so superconductors conduct electricity without any resistance it's like the electricity just flows man and it does it it can counters no resistance there's no draw on the electrical flow very efficient stuff the idea of room temperature has been something researchers have been after for a very very long time because normally they're doing it when it's super super cold right because then there's not all the jiggly jiggly knockety-round atom activity stuff going on exactly and magnetic fields and atomic interactions they're all very important for the super conduction to take place and so yeah it's usually sub subzero temperatures we're talking about but no oh no 15 degrees Celsius which is the equivalent of a very very balmy 59 degrees Fahrenheit yeah it's not bad it's not terrible I mean that is a very cold room temperature that's a normal day in San Francisco yeah superconductivity while wearing a jacket yes so all it takes to create this new room temperature super superconductor is a few atoms of carbon hydrogen and sulfur squeezed at 203 degrees Kelvin and 155 giga Pascal's of pressure between two diamonds with a laser oh yeah and when that pressure which is over like over two million times atmospheric pressure a lot of pressure these giga Pascal's when that when that pressure happens just right the atoms just go chemistry magic and they do their thing and they turn into a superconductor and the electricity just flows but they have absolutely no idea what the final molecular conformation is so if somebody were to ask these researchers well you know like in their paper so what is this superconductor material look like they don't know it just happens it's under such intense condition still while at room temperature that it they still have more investigation to do but that room temperature barrier has been broken so from now it's investigating the structure and moving forward to decrease that pressure a little bit to make make us live in a superconductor world practically make one in your kitchen practically you know just take a couple of wedding rings little kids laser pointer totally can do it yeah someday someday okay Justin did you have a story that's gonna not be fun to talk about no I have none of my stories aren't fun to talk about the person I got is racism it's that thing that we often think about American society these days in terms of police as in racist police officers being bad actors in society specifically when it comes to black citizens while the anti-racism protests have been oddly countered by people claiming that they are pro police it's a which is interesting because it's a different argument than the thing that's being protested sort of like saying that you don't want cockroaches in your cereal and then having somebody else go oh no you don't like cereal cereals awesome why do you hate cereal you're like no it's the cockroaches that are getting into the cereal that are the problem and then so that so anyway there is there are people who apparently like cereal whether or not it has cockroaches and they don't seem to care in examination of police have a story about this but we don't need it we don't go off on a sideline yeah I mean yeah cockroaches are leading to the deaths of many innocent Americans across the country and so something should be done about it regardless of whether or not your cereal doesn't have them examination of police departments in major US cities by a management by management professors at the Indiana University Kelly School of Business which sounds like an interesting place for this to come from right found that it may not just be individual officers on the beat who are acting from a place of bias so then we've we've gotten but the actual police departments themselves which so now you have the closed box within that closed box of cereal that has not been open no cockroaches can get into it no interactions in society there's still cockroach feces apparently they consistently found that black officers were more frequently disciplined for misconduct than white officers despite an essentially equal number of allegations being leveled and this included allegations of severe misconduct quoting here from the paper itself from the research we found a consistent pattern of racial differences in the formal recording of disciplinary actions in three different major metropolitan cities Chicago Philadelphia and Los Angeles our results showed that black officers were more likely to have recorded cases of misconduct despite there being no difference between black and white officers in the number of allegations made against them it is impossible to know whether these differences are due to racial bias versus some other unmeasured factors however it is noteworthy that the pattern of results is in line with what what theories of racial bias would predict and with evidence of racial disparities and punishment in other settings in other settings meaning the previous studies that have shown that black people are more likely to be charged more likely to get the maximum charges by prosecutors see higher discipline rates in schools the we think we talked about a little over a year ago the the two and a half times more likely to be shot by police the fact that they're in this in the number is not just slightly more to its they are more than twice discipline more than twice as often as white officers which does fall in line with all the other statistics across other segments of society when discipline is involved in differences in racial in Philadelphia this so in Chicago they were disciplined more than twice as often as white officers in Philadelphia it was 48 percent more likely than white officers to have been disciplined allegations of misconduct could even be include things like lack of service verbal or physical assault so it was sort of a wide range after controlling for the number of allegations of misconduct they found that black officers were disciplined actually at an even higher rate 132 percent more often than white officers so that's not a hundred percent meaning equal and then 32 percent more it's a hundred it's twice and then another third okay as often just as biased by police against citizens has been very slow to change the professor's right it is likely that any bias within police departments has also been slow to change they found no differences in the number of allegations between black and white officers one of the sort of things that is sort of interesting too is that they found that allegations made by other officers are more likely to result in disciplinary action than allegations made by the public and that black officers were more likely to be accused of misconduct by other officers then by the public which is what is sort of driving these numbers as well so then then when you look at it then you can see oh there might actually even be a bigger golf within these numbers also an interesting just I know some of the information that they that they called for this the study had to be achieved through freedom of information acts simply requesting this information and then from the police departments for this transparency was not enough they actually needed freedom of information acts the lawyers and the involved to even get the information in the first place to to look at this for those of you who are pro-police fine let's just look at the police officers racist I am pro-police I think I think it's great to have police I am glad that there is that there is scientific inquiry into questions of how the system is built though because I do see that the evidence everything's pointing to there being a major problem with race and things need to be fixed and so if we can get closer and closer and closer to being able to I mean have have more arguments I mean yes there's a lot of how to fix it you know where to change it it's not just in the policing on the street but within the police forces themselves I mean this is this is systemic it's institutional things need to change I think you know part of this too is that there's a systemic racism in in everyone everywhere every place that you've grown up there there's things that are baked into it and we would like to think that police officers are the best of us so the people that know how to be measured and to shoot everyone in the resort that they are trusted that they are impartial it's reminding me of another conversation we're having right now like who's supposed to be on the Supreme Court it's supposed to be the best of us it's supposed to be people who are impartial and honest and don't have these biases and of course no person is like that but how can we make sure that the people put in these positions of power are the most like that possible and are given tools to nurture that part of them and not these other more ugly parts of them that are baked in or how do you change the system so that the system does not allow for or can can weather some of these biases can can you know can be like the you know the pH yeah what do you do right now and how do you fix it in the long term right and those are two very different conversations there's a lot of there's a lot of work so yeah I might suggest that one of the things is that the the way that police are portrayed through our television movies they're they're a common character and they're usually pretty violent and being shown as powerful with a gun and they'd actually spend about 95% of their training time training for violent altercations despite the fact that that's less than 2% of their job so what what we're doing is we're attracting also individuals to become police through these mythos that predisposes them to have some sort of aggressive or desire for power I think I think it's important if we showed policing as more of the Columbus if the world if you can anybody remembers this this police officer show as more of the thoughtful reasoning question asking maybe more in the lines of you know they interact more with the homeless than they do violent criminals they interact more with people with mental illness than they do with violent criminals if we showed that I mean it doesn't maybe make for as exciting television but you might attract more people who do want to be honest brokers of law and who do want to you know the who is the show with the protectors of the people just yeah they're just there to support people in business like you be there in the neighborhood your friend neighborhood police officer yeah we don't show that so it shouldn't be a surprise that we have a militarized police departments but also this but this one when I was saying it's in the argument of of course whether the police are acting racially and within our society and whether you just want good you believe the police are fine despite them being racist the point is the racism is affecting police officers and their careers if you do truly care about police officers know that they are also suffering from this racist environment that's a great point it needs yep that's a great point all right now that we've talked about these problems let's talk about some kindness and sharing yes um so you know we've all been there we've tried to uh encourage maybe another individual to share to be generous to show empathy for someone else who has less if that's a toddler or a friend or a relative um but this uh recent study that was um with uh Utrecht University in the Netherlands University of Vienna and Swedish Lund University I hope I did okay um I don't I don't think they have the that's the Yiddish count in Hebrew coming out anyway um showed that uh birds might show some empathy sympathy and might have some instinctive behavior uh that allows them to help one another so there there was earlier research from uh the main researcher looking at uh how birds sometimes do things for other birds which isn't too surprising considering that we see that kind of stuff happening across different types of animals you know we see animals assisting one another if they're social or not we can still see this kind of altruistic behavior popping up but they wanted to see if it's instinctive if it's ingrained or whether it's flexible and how they take into account the need of the other animal how is their observation of kind of what diastrates the other animal is in impact their action this was on azure winged magpies and uh gave one a bunch of mealworms the other one done and then there was a mesh in between them so the the one with the abundance of mealworms could feed the one without through the mesh if they so chose and they did find that they are inclined to share but they do seem to identify if the other individual has mealworms or not they're not just always sharing their food they're saying oh you don't have anything let me give you some of mine females mostly shared only if the others had left nothing but the males tended to share no matter what was going on so the females are a little more choosy they think that that might have to do with a quote unquote advertisement from the males look at me i'm so generous i'm very physically fit and you should come check me out uh but anyway uh with the females they they really wanted to see if the other individual needed it or not before they shared and they didn't need to beg the they shared food whether or not the one without mealworms kind of begged for help so there's a whole question of whether this is sympathy whether this is empathy what all that means it depends on how you define all that stuff they'd like to look at this and further individuals see if they can observe it in the wild see what other bird species do but ultimately if you want to call sympathy or empathy like recognizing the hardship of another individual and wanting to alleviate that hardship that's what this looks like that's really interesting i mean it's a huge question about social animals to begin with you know what maintains that sociality what kind of what kind of relationships do they have where they where they give to each other or don't we we know vampire bats do with regurgitation which is so interesting because that's life or death just regurgitated blood yeah just a little i'll give you a little taste of my of the blood i ate today yes yeah yeah it's so interesting to think that other birds would now the magpiesies as you're winged magpies now i'm just wondering in terms of passerines they like these are these are smart birds these are smart social birds these aren't like little tiny bush tits or warblers these are these are bigger brain they're little they're probably a bit more complex in their social behaviors but i don't know i would i would love to see other social animals tested in a similar way to see how it turns out yeah totally and i would love to also see if these are birds that they that were raised together in the lab if they're physically related genetically related so these are all things that i would then wonder is at what point do you care or not care because i think that's really what empathy is right if it's if it's kind of bring boiling it down back to the selfish gene of your success is my success of my genes then it's it's kind of old school altruism that we've seen before but if it doesn't matter if they know this individual or if they're related then i think it fits better into this empathy category yeah so um uh florida scrub jays are a social social breeding species where you'll have uh offspring of parents helping to raise the next generation because they haven't left the flock and they haven't moved on to find their own mates and it is more advantageous advantage advantageous to them genetically to help rear their parents offspring because they're related and that's a definite genetic benefit but when it comes to yeah something like this i don't yeah with the bats they're in the same cave right but they they don't necessarily have to be related so i don't know yeah different different different different stories for different species it would be very interesting to work that one out definitely very cool very cool all right moving from birds let's jump into fish fishy smells that is can can the two of you smell with like the fish smell like when you go to the definitely i can also see your page there if you're meeting oh i forgot to stop the screen there's the whole story no uh yeah no i can smell the fish down the hall for sure jesson can you can you smell fishy smells i can't smell anything not today okay they're making fun of me they're calling me saying i have covered it no uh yes so like a fish market uh like yeah hits me from halfway down the the city i have to say though as someone who enjoys eating fish i don't hate it it's not like an assault on the senses right it is to me it is to me like like i i start to i like walking down to uh fishermen's wharf in san francisco or that fish market that was in seattle kind of a thing uh i'm like yeah if i if i actually just grew up by the sea i would probably wouldn't eat fish no i think he's going to be used to it but see fava in the chat room put he really brought up the thing you know what i cannot handle when someone puts fish in the microwave at work that smells terrible why would you do that yeah that's bad everyone but move it into the science it's genetic it's genetic how bad that fishy smell smells to you you're a version to the fishy smell it's genetic researchers looked at those Icelanders and uh looked at their genome for mutations in olfactory genes in olfactory receptor genes specifically and they found there's one particular variant for a gene called tar t a a r five and when it is mutated just the right way people don't smell the fishy smells as much they don't they don't get to smell it as much they don't find it as aversive so there's a reduction in in their sending of fish additionally they found another gene variant variant p lice 233 asn in gene or 6 c70 yes if you are a geneticist you are loving these letters and what this gene does is it changes your ability to smell cinnamon or and there's another variant in there as well in the same gene family that also changes your ability to smell licorice oh the liquor smell the licorice smell yes so these are the the molecules that are specifically involved for the fish smell are trimethylamine and so this tar 5 gene reduces affinity for trimethylamine the orc 6 or 6 c70 gene changes the the ability to smell trans anethol which is also in fennel and licorice root and all sorts of licoricey smelling things and also the cinnamon gene is trans is an increased affinity for trans cinnamaldehyde which is the scent of cinnamon so i might have extra ones of those genes because if there's even a hint of cinnamon uh i'll pick it up i will i will absolutely smell i cannot stand it to me to me it's the same smell as burnt hair human hair interesting it's the same thing it's a and it's i think i might have been in the past life like some sort of insect that liked bark and then i got to the cinnamon tree which is and it was it's poison it's a to you it's right it's an insecticide and to you it's also not great for you and so it's wonderful that you can smell it and only thing i don't like about christmas it's the only thing i don't like about christmas but in general for results like this to be able to to be able to determine that these uh you know specific mutations change our ability to either to smell these things at all so diminish or enhance function or to change tolerance for certain compounds in the air it's you know this is all a genetic it's all genetics and it's really interesting that we can tie such such very important smells these are big smells fish licorice cinnamon that we can tie that to genetic variants well they're they're tied to locations right so that kind of makes sense yes tell me about some tattoos justin uh so it's not tattoos but this is more like henna like where you can just sort of draw it on and then wash it off later this is printing sensors on skin which has been a problem because the process of bonding the silver nanoparticles that uh together in order to make circuits for a sensor typically require temperatures around 572 degrees fahrenheit 300 degrees celsius uh which is just fine if you're a silicon chip but you wouldn't want to try that on the back of your hand like henna uh enter uh hanyu larry chang professor at the penn state department of engineering science and mechanics was published uh in acs applied materials and interfaces the cody voice the skin service cannot withstand such a high temperature obviously to get around this limitation we proposed a sintering aid layer so sintering is that that's sort of bonding melting together reprocess a sintering aid there something that would not hurt skin and could help the material sinter together at lower temperature so by adding a nanoparticle mix to the mix uh the silver nano silver particles sinter at a lower temperature about 212 degrees fahrenheit or 100 degrees uh celsius so that's still too hot uh chang says who points out that uh still too hot to put it on skin so we changed the formula again we reworked it we read it uh and found that they could get it all the way down to room temperature room temperature sintering a layer consists of a polyvinyl alcohol paste the main ingredient in a peelable face mask as well as calcium carbonate which comprises eggshells the layer reduces printing surface roughness and allows for an ultra thin layer of metal patterns that can bend and fold while maintaining electromechanical capabilities when the sensor is printed researchers use an air blower basically a hairdryer to get an air blower and then they uh and also they use it to remove some moisture that is used uh as a solvent for this sort of ink that they're using chang says the outcome is profound we don't need to rely on heat to sinter the and so what this basically means is they can print onto your skin a sensor these sensors what do they do these sensors are are capable of uh precisely and continuously capturing temperature humidity blood oxygen levels uh heart performance signals uh and they also have linked the sensors to a network with wireless transmission capabilities to monitor this combination of signals from remote uh processing says is also environmentally friendly uh it can handle pretty tepid water for a few days even a hot shower remove it and you can actually take it off and reuse it uh because it doesn't just fall apart kind of I guess peels off like a big sticker oh interesting yeah so okay wait so it's a big sticker so help a colorblind girl out here um is this person's hand like super angry looking like does it look irritated like kind of red so yes yeah uh I on that photo that person looks like the almost like their thumb is backlit like that there would be light coming through it it's that red but um yeah and then I you kind of see like an outline where it's not so red near the circuit but not on the circuit but I'm wondering if that's the actual that's the part that peels off maybe yeah I I think this might have to be to do with how they took the photo but you're absolutely right it couldn't be that they were this was like the early trial back when it was still 100 degrees Celsius and it burned the heck out of their hand no no we're going to cook you and the sensors yeah so they they're sort of playing with this but you can uh you can imagine perhaps that this would be a uh an interesting sort of interface then if you can have a remote uh converse with somebody else's body sensors I don't know how you would actually use this other than monitoring somebody in a way that you already could but of course this is the baby step of showing proof of concept and these are very big looking uh circuits that they have printed on this person's skin in this picture at least but as we talk about heading to a future where we are going to be more integrated with computers and technology wouldn't it be nice to have a human machine interface that didn't require them drilling wires into your brain yeah yeah that's what that's what I was thinking exactly yeah the idea of if you can do what you need to do by just putting it on the surface that sounds great sounds fantastic uh moving on from from basically henna tattoos of electronics let's talk about fluorescent bears I'll talk about fluorescent bears these are like bears that really like raves is this like is this tardigrades it's tardigrades it's little water bears indian scientists and this is scientists in india we're uh looking for water bears tardigrades all over their university campus the indian institute of science and they were looking for new species and they brought a whole bunch of water bears back into the lab they wanted to see what happened and they had a UV germicidal lamp and they irradiated the bears with the UV light and a whole bunch of them died a whole bunch of them were like I don't want to take that and they died except for these reddish huge bears and when they put them under UV light they discovered that what happens is they have fluorescent proteins somewhere under their quote unquote skin that take the UV light and convert it into non-damaging radiation so they fluoresce and get rid of a whole bunch of the energy from the UV light thus protecting themselves from the damage that UV can normally cause to little organisms and humans so new species of tardigrade hi sady new species of tardigrade and she's just so excited she loves the tardigrades it's okay new species and a new mechanism of protection by these little bears so they fluoresce blue which is very exciting is there any chance that the fluorescent part is not just a byproduct of being UV resistant oh that it I they don't know much about these organisms at this point in time but they do they just know that they have these fluorescent pigments and so now the I guess the question is where did it come from why did it get there we don't know because there's lots of aquatic things that fluoresce yes which just seems like an interesting coincidence yeah I mean it could be that it happens to protect them from UV but it it's very interesting especially when we're starting to think about how to protect organisms in outer space if this is an additional mechanism of protection yeah so anyway the scientists think it's likely that they evolved okay here it here it says they think it's likely that the tardigrades evolved fluorescence as a way to tolerate the high UV doses that are typical in southern India but what if they were also trying to communicate with each other no no no I think everybody's got it wrong I don't think it's communication there's so much water it's like where is the other one word tardarades tardarades got it okay okay yeah you got it if you just tuned in you are listening to or watching this week in science if you are interested in helping the show out please head over to twist.org and take a look at our zazzle store we have a lot of products with the twist logo and also that involved Blair's art from her annual calendar which will be coming out soon calendars are coming and you can go to zazzle.org by going to twist.org and buy some of our merchandise and help us out help support twist. All right it's time for the COVID update with over one million deaths internationally and the US now reporting about 650 to 700 COVID-19 deaths daily the virus continues to spread around the world interestingly due to safety concerns AstraZeneca has not yet restarted its phase three vaccine trial Johnson and Johnson paused its trial this week and Eli Lilly has paused its antibody trial and as a reminder this is okay this is how clinical trials work and we shouldn't let shouldn't let politics or media get our hopes up about treatments before they have been fully tested and vetted for safety. I feel like this should help encourage people to know that it's going through the right due diligence and that it's not getting pushed through because this normal this happens all the time due diligence yes so like so trials will stop when somebody has a bad reaction you have to kind of assess it figure out why figure out if there's a high probability of it happening again restart it again know to monitor for these new things right so this is normal so this is actually really good because it means that things are working like they're supposed to yeah and and there's they're not they're not barreling ahead through normal processes right so so there was a nervous moment when out of the entire cocktail of treatments that the president was was given he was like I think it all came down to this Regeneron this one drug this Regeneron Regeneron Regeneron I think that was the one that did it can't tell I took like eight things but I'm pretty sure that's the one that was I think that's the one and it turns out that yeah and it turns out that they I guess the owner or CEO of that whatever is a big donor of course the head of the Regeneron said very responsibly I must say said uh he's a test case of one off with a bunch of other things that's not evidence that our thing works yeah okay he actually doing the trials yeah and the president was like ready I'm going to take some of the government budget and just buy that for everybody and the head of that company's like hold on wait wait we have actual work to do yeah do that yeah which I thought was uh very responsible and very great to know that there are adults still involved in the process yes yeah there are some there are some adults in the room all right speaking of um I don't know not of rooms yes speaking of rooms the transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 the virus that causes COVID-19 has that's that's a big question about what what kinds of environments it spreads most easily in uh where it is most viable big question a new study came out in uh nano letters researchers looked at different environments that could potentially hold the virus cooler more humid environments to warmer drier environments trying to get an idea of how the virus would stay lofted in the air and how far it would spread they found that cooler more humid environments enhance the virus's ability to spread as droplets whereas warmer air might favor aerosols and the results suggest this is why we potentially saw a continued spread during the summer because the aerosol transmission as droplets dry up the little particles of the virus continue to stay lofted in the air maybe within that smaller range of one to two meters however their results suggest that in those cooler more humid environments the droplets in the humid air stay lofted much much longer and may travel a much greater distance up to six meters from a source and so is this also why flu season is in the winter probably similar right yeah yeah but one of the things that they're thinking from this study of a of the virus in the air is that this might explain a lot of the transmission at meat packing plants because of the refrigerated rooms the refrigerated rooms are really cool and humid to keep the meat fresh right and so it may be the perfect environment for droplets to stay lofted or to travel look further distance and so maybe their suggestion their final suggestion is that with this information we might be better prepared to look at different environments and do very specific precautions in different environments based on whether or not we expect more droplet or aerosol spread so so i mean that which is important when i that's that's good um however the entire conversation around aerosolization and the different little precautions that we can make here and there to make adjustments still reminds me of the oldie times which you two are too both too young to remember where you would have a non-smoking section of a restaurant right that would end here and then the next table right would be the smoking section and all the way back at the very back of the non-smoking section you could smell cigarette smoke you're inhaling cigarette smoke it didn't matter because it travels through the air because air moves it's not just where the sneeze goes the air hovers so like we need to think of all of these conditions of social distancing everything else in terms of if there's a smoker in the room right you're going to smell the cigarette smoke which means you're gonna inhale the virus it's going to travel essentially in the same pathways as that so so for all the little mitigate yeah i was just gonna say that the difference though is that so smoke is more of an aerosol and and droplets are going to be different and so that's what this this study is specifically addressing is that there's there is a difference in how the air how it affects the travel of the virus how the movement and the transmissibility of the virus so i actually i see this as good news if i may because i've been kind of freaked out about what the winner is going to do to covet because even people who are trying to be responsible but are still being social or doing it outside hopefully most of them at least in california but anyway is you know so that's part of it right it's like people can be outside and when the winter comes and it's cold people are going to come inside for their social events but what we know about cloth masks is that they're pretty good at keeping droplets from moving back and forth not great at moving at keeping aerosol yeah so if it's getting colder but that's going to force people inside but people are going to wear masks while they're inside then actually this is kind of good to hear because it means that despite people maybe getting closer together if it's cold then the masks might actually do a better job at preventing spread right if it's cold if you if yeah i guess if you crank up the heater it's not yeah it's a fair point so so don't turn on the heater if you're just keep it cold everybody make everyone wear a coat inside yeah so like really big buildings like uh large large uh things venues um malls a big mall a big walking mall uh they'd stop running any sort of airmovers in the winter to keep it warm because they actually heat themselves by human body temperature just walking through with so many humans walking around that they just that's enough to contain the heat yeah but it just also means that no fresh air is moving through like there's no solution to to outside of stop that's still the solution yeah listen i feel like a crazy person and if you can't stop keep your distance try and keep as much distance as possible stay outside if you can but if you can't wear a mask wash your hands keep your distance minimize your time indoors and if you've had contact with someone who's been sick then quarantine yourself yeah we're going into month 10 yeah we if we take six weeks back in January march but it's still true every week it's not it's not stopped being true or necessary or the thing we all need to do well perhaps in the new year one thing that people have started doing is washing their hands more there is data out through the cdc this week that uh there was a survey of people to see whether or not messaging about hand washing has changed people's behavior and apparently pandemic is having people wash their hands more except for people who were involved in the food or health industries because they were already washing their hands a lot those are there two things I really hope that we keep from this pandemic one is people properly washing their hands and the second is people wearing a mask when they're sick yeah oh and three no handshakes just knock it off yeah now we can lose the handshakes for sure yeah um in terms of wearing masks more data is out from another location again cdc this week released data from arizona that supports the use of social distancing measures to control the spread of coven 19 definite correlation with mask mandate measures and the reduction of deaths and cases in arizona and then my final story related to cdc data is um basically if we want to predict future outbreaks and how they're going to affect older populations we need to look at the young people first data suggests that uh throughout the pandemic group win groups of young people between zero to 18 and 18 25 years of old years of age start getting coven 19 then and testing positive for coven 19 then within a few weeks you start to see numbers rise in elderly populations so there is a link between younger populations to older populations and so the whole argument that we should just take people who are going to get sick and make them stay home and just keep those people out of regular circulation it doesn't that doesn't fly it's not going to work because this thing spreads and we've talked before about asymptomatic spread so and pre-symptomatic spread so Justin do you want to save your covid stories you have a covid yeah yeah those are second happy stories they're not actually covid is in the title but they're not actually about the covid itself oh i got to get through a shout out real quick to uh earl chen and youtube chat room who's just catching up and yes what's that show with the whistling yes the anti-gryph yes that if the anti-gryph was the image of policing in america i think we'd have a lot less aggressive uh policing there would be more hijinx though i think what's that in india instead we got all barney fife yeah maybe that's maybe that was the problem we got all these guys who are loading that one bullet yeah exactly oh oh everyone this is this weekend science if you if you want to help twist twist twist what is the name of this show twist if you want to help twist grow get a friend to subscribe today oh blare yes i think it's your turn i think i wait hold on i can't start yet hold on nope wait i think i hear something do i hear something in my computer is it speaking to me is it saying something less animal corner with blare oh i have a lovely story sent to me by a fan of the show uh justin jackson and about uh gut bacteria in uh in bees uh yeah no actually i texted justin earlier today asked if he found any good animal stories and uh sent this right over it was a winner um so this is this is a very appropriate uh story for why are you texting justin for animal stories there's a whole story remember how last week just was like i didn't find very much i found so much stuff i had that problem this week i only found a few that were interesting i was like that's so funny i'm having the opposite experience this week you sent me this right away so anyway anyway uh so this is a very appropriate story for justin to have sent in because it's about be microbiomes so um we know that something really important to honeybees is being able to tell who is a part of their their group and who is not because it turns out with honeybees um there are uh kind of intruder bees other honeybees that will come in in the fall when plants stop producing nectar and everyone's kind of stored up all of their honey for the winter and they will rob other colonies of their honey and if they're able to come in and rob honey then they will go back to their own nest and say hey they're really bad at guarding their honey over there go raid their place so then they'll just raid this other uh beehive and that beehive will end up starving if they can't make it through the winter so there's a lot of pressure to be able to have proper bee bouncers as i think of them to be able to tell who belongs in the hive and who does not and so for a very long time the assumption was that this was all based on uh cuticular hydrocarbons or chc's in their skin that had a particular chemical signal this is true however the the thought was that this was based in their genetics because all of the bees in a colony are related but this new study finds that their chc profile is actually dependent on their microbiome so their gut microbial community is something that impacts the hydrocarbons in their skin which then impacts the chemical signals the smell i guess of the bee that indicates whether they belong there or not so they have specifically colony specific microbiomes wow so not genetic it's not genetic it would make sense that their microbiome would share because if i may just remind everyone how do honey bees pass nectar from one another throughout the colony oh that's right they stored in their honey crop and then they regurgitate it into another bee's mouth that makes sense then they do that over and over until they're closer to the honeycomb and that's where it gets barfed up for storage so honey is vomit that has been vomited many times over and over you're welcome everyone sipping your morning tea okay i want to go put some in my tea right now back to it so if they're sharing this this food they're barfing into each other's mouths they're going to share a microbiome so that tracks yeah and so this is interesting though because it impacts a signal that then impacts behavior so the microbiome is key to have the colony as a whole functions how they maintain defense and it does so much more than just their immune system so they they also found looking into this they wanted to try to figure out drill down to the genetics of what changes their skin components and all this kind of other stuff but they also wanted to see behaviorally how the microbiome impacts these things other than just their genetics so they they actually develop different scent profiles as they age which i think is really interesting so when they're younger they the gatekeepers have a tough time they can't always let them back in the bee bouncers but once they've been out into the world their microbiome changes quickly and their scent changes quickly so it's the colony microbiome but it's also being impacted by the outside world where the nest is but this is where it gets interesting if you grow a honey bee in isolation it never develops a complete microbiome and so it really they need each other and they need the outside world to get these chemical signals but they also then took honey bees from different colonies and swapped them as babies and when they raised a group of newly hatched bees in either their own colonies or their unrelated colonies that they saw actual microbial community crossover so it's it's nature and nurture as always it's both so the microbial community is impacted by the locality of the colony the conspecifics in the colony and then also by the environment and somewhat by their genetics it's all of it it's all of it so they found 14 microbial taxa that were different between these different treatments if they were raised individually if they were raised in a colony if they were raised an individual in a different colony six were similar between bees that shared the same hive environment when they grew up regardless of their genetics so basically they found these 14 microbial taxa in the microbiome and six of that 14 was solely based on which colony they were raised in so that was a huge impact on their signaling to their community they they basically they then tried to put them back where they belonged and they were unrecognizable they were not allowed back in the you can't come back home yeah yeah who are you i don't know who you are this looks like a fake bid you're not getting in exactly yeah yeah you made this at kinko you're from one of those other colonies you're here to steal our honey no this is i live here so add it to the list of things that the the microbiome does that just has impact on animal lives it's interesting because this is a very social species how the microbiome biome is involved in that sociality uh i wonder how i wonder if it has uh influence on recognition in other insect species that are not as social yes and then also does it have an impact on i don't know like naked mole rats and how they recognize each other yeah anybody that has a chemical cue involved which is basically all of animals yeah it's if you can't smell it you could have a hormonal response to a to any sort of chemical reaction chemical signal whatever so yeah i i think it's we're likely to see microbial influence on a lot of things but we also know that in humans microbes influence hormones that can influence behavior and microbes can influence our brain and all this kind of so you know we're just we're just bacterial buses basically we're we're just driving them around um so moving from uh bees helping each other and recognizing each other to ants helping each other this is a very cooperative animal corner today especially that those birds earlier in the show so ants uh in particular black imported fire ants which i learned all about when i was doing some research for this story they are a type of fire ant originally from south america but they were accidentally introduced into the united states around the 1930s they think through the port of mobile at alabama alabama and it was probably in soil used for ships ballasts uh ballast water it's usually the reason for a lot of important uh introduce species but anyway black imported fire ants in the united states uh they they have been studied for their ability to um kind of adapt to living in a watery environment and so um they can swim they can create rafts we've talked about how ants can kind of cooperate to make rafts and stuff like that um but this is a new form of what could be considered tool use in an invertebrate so when provided with small containers of sugar water in this case they were little it looks like bottle caps of sugar water when provided with that and they would just kind of use the surface tension to go down to the water grab some and then come back to the colony to bring the the sugar water back but when they used when they they used a um a surfactant I think it was um to yeah the surfactant to destroy the the surface tension then ants just started drowning in the sugar water and their response was to use sand to create kind of a ramp out of the water and then to move the sand create a path of sand down off the side so that they could use it to to kind of create a gradient to move the sugar water quickly and efficiently out of the container towards where they're trying to move the sugar water to engineering ants wow yes yes yeah so they they responded to an unusual stimuli you're not often going to come across water that doesn't have surface tension in the wild so they responded to that unusual stimuli by kind of improvisation engineering I don't know what you want to call it but they were able to kind of build a structure that did what they needed and so we're showing a video right now or you can actually see how first you just see a lot of ant death which is very you see a lot of ants going in and getting stuck and then they start to kind of gather around and recognize the issue and then start collecting sand putting some into the cap and then the rest kind of up the side to create a ramp and then as time continues they create it looks it kind of looks like an aqueduct I'll be honest uh when they're done with it it really it's impressive I I'm not sure human toddlers would figure this out so it's pretty cool it looks like crystal growth or something though the very organic nature of how it's being built totally yeah is you know there's obviously some kind of instruction they see they seem like little I don't know little computer bits that they have their they have their instruction they're following their instruction and they are making a program go making a program run but yeah but it's also interesting as you can this is like high speed uh what do you call it uh time lapse yeah imagery showing the this uh being built you can in this you can really pick out the loafer ants because all the ants are sort of here then they're gone they're just they're moving around so fast and then every once in a while there's an ant that's just there through all maybe they almost drowned maybe they need they need a tick maybe they need to catch their breath um so after five minutes they actually siphoned almost half of the sugar water out of these little containers wow and they never observed structures like this from ants when there wasn't surfactant in the water when the surface tension was good enough for them so they so they think this is a pretty sophisticated tool use but they also think it's interesting because it recognizes increased risk and adjustment based on that risk so sure quite a few ants died but then they were like guys we can't just keep sending them in there we gotta we gotta adapt to strategy um so of course the suggests that ants and other social instincts may have considerable high cognitive capabilities which yeah of course sure um surprise animals are smart they don't i don't agree that they have high cognitive capabilities but i mean we've seen from swarm robots and other you know just simple programs that complexity can can emerge from simplicity so very simple very simple instructions can lead to something like this emerging from it so i think the uh the the connotation of cognitive cognitive abilities is it's a bit much on my side of things okay but then again you're charging strategies sure okay but let's take let's take a very advanced piece of human technology whatever it is pick something anything the pencil okay google google all right is there an individual human that really can comprehend and fully understand all the implications aspects in the building of and you know is do it does any one individual have the higher cognitive ability to really fully conceptualize implement right the back end of google i can ask i can i can query google but i don't know the back end yeah it's many many many individuals moving their little grain of sand along in programming and coding and and that makes the thing uh that looks like such a high cognitive high i think so i mean i can see how you might anticipate that just a lot of ants would die and then they'd be like forget it this is too hard oh yeah just walk away just walk away they're like let's overcome an obstacle let's do this go team uh and it doesn't look like they continue to lose ants at a certain point it's like the first round dies and then they've come up with a workaround so yeah i wouldn't underestimate how many ants does the colony allow to die before they give up you know what is the what is the genetic program the limitation for risk to the colony feel like we've this has come up before yeah and it actually i think the answer was in those ants that i was noticing who aren't doing anything who obviously aren't helping yes um ant colonies have uh a a large contingent of lazy ants yeah a lazy ant story which is just in case this direction we've decided to go down all turns out to be as a spider ant trap or something like that you know like let's uh some of us should just chill don't work too hard today we might need you later yeah yeah we might well we can all take inspiration from those ants let's stick with it everybody everyone push their little grain of sand will be and if what you're doing isn't working maybe try something new yeah group maybe try something new yes cooperation apparently is as good as being cognitive yeah i think that really actually what it's about right is that one ant by themselves probably wouldn't figure this out so that they'll group yeah yep hey everyone calendars are coming that's right get yourself ready for the Blair's animicorn twist 2021 calendar links will be available soon get your hip no toad link will be at twist.org thank you for listening to twist you are the reason that we're able to do what we do every single week you're the reason that we have the support that we need to make this show go forward but we can always use more and to be able to do more and bring you more to be able to produce what we produce better and with your support we can bring more science to more people so if you would like to support twist please head over to twist.org click on the patreon link and choose your level of support ten dollars a month and above you'll be thanked by name at the end of the show thank you for your support we really cannot do this without you and we're back we're back yeah we're back again fans i'm i'm saying that for those of you who are listening to the podcast because Blair is fanning herself i am it's hot in san francisco all right let's talk about some evolution let's talk about a really cool study that i found this week that just kind of made me stop and go what this is so neat researchers at embl heidelberg embl is the european microbiology lab molecular biology laboratory they have been looking at the expression pattern of proteins in fruit flies and the expression pattern of proteins in fruit flies is dictated by the transcription translation of genes those genes are regulated by what are called enhancers little bits of dna micro rna little sequences that get in there and either tell the transcription mechanism to do more more more more more and up regulate and make lots of protein or to make less or to start at a different place or stop at an earlier location so these enhancers really change the way that transcription and then protein expression actually occurs and it's kind of been thought that enhancers they influence biodiversity but exactly how influential they are has been underestimated so these researchers at embl they got together with a group at genelia research campus and the advanced light microscopy facility at embl to build a robot they built a robot that was responsible for taking care of little baby fly embryos so you have a robot managing the fly embryos that are being developed in the study and automating a microscope pipeline to take little images of the little mutated little mutated flies as they're developing so basically they had they built a robot scientist to do the study for them but in the study it really could only be done now with the technology that we have because of the high throughput nature of this study they created more than 700 completely unique randomly generated mutations within a single enhancer that goes and affects a gene so these 700 mutations they are very specific point mutations in these little sequences of dna that then go tell the tell proteins how to be expressed what they found is that it was basically like watching evolution take place the researcher timothy fukua graduate student working on the study says our study shows that what we have known about enhancers was oversimplified it shows we have to study enhancers at much greater detail than ever before they were able to find that even simple point mutations they said whenever we changed a single letter of the enhancer dna sequence we created a significant change to the pattern of gene expression that it drove we also found that almost all mutations to the enhancer alter the gene expression pattern in multiple ways for example one mutation controls not only where the expression pattern is within the fly but also when and how much of the gene is expressed and so looking very deeply at how these enhancers affect the the distribution of proteins in the fruit fruit fly has is starting to lead to some really interesting understanding of of not just fruit fly development but how genes are regulated during development and how these enhancers play a role in that but it's just really interesting to think about you know changing one mutation at a time but they also found that certain mutations were likely to have happen with with certain probabilities and so they really were playing evolution they were doing little randomized mutations to see what they did very cool yeah yeah so it's just in flies but we start with our fly models and our robot scientists and eventually move up to see how some of the things that we learn there affect genetics at a more complex level in mammals but this also gives us insight into what happened before we got here how evolution even you know what is the raw material for evolution right for natural selection what is that raw material it's speaking of selection let's move on to my positive my what did what did I what did I call it the the negative positive the negative positive selection possible negative positive selection possibly negative yes researchers publishing in cell this week have published a study looking in the looking in the genome at this particular gene locus 2q21.3 sound familiar to anyone no okay this locus is the gene that holds or this is the the the genetic sequence that holds the gene for lactase this is the locus responsible for our ability to digest milk some people got it and some people don't but it has been very positively selected for since the advent of ranching cows of starting to drink milk in a more dietary sense when we became less nomadic and and settled down so over several thousand years it has rapidly spread through a large proportion especially of northern european descent individuals and has positively positively influenced that aspect of digestion and of course this this is the the natural selection uh of the past that i believe took place which is everybody started drinking milk and they slowly pushed out those that became flatulent as a result right yes you just sleep outside yeah who got eaten all right so they looked at uh they looked at this particular uh at this particular locus of gene sequence and additionally looked at what else is involved in this locus what else is associated with it and they found a micro RNA called micro RNA 128-1 my R128-1 now it's located in the center of this positively selected locus it's a metabolic regulator it's very important for metabolism in mammals so a bunch of experiments showed that uh it's it's important for uh the ability to digest fat and also for glucose tolerance and what they show in this study is that oh it's connection to the positive selection for lactase has also potentially linked it to an overabundance of obesity and glucose intolerance in mammals so it may be just drinking the milk not just another genetic factor that is being co-selected for that is negative yes so it's negative um yes that's exactly it that it has negative effect effects and so the fact that it has been dragged along means that it is increasing rates of obesity and uh and diabetes type two diabetes and that it could be involved in that and it might be this micro RNA not necessarily the gene itself but the micro RNA could be a target for for treatment for some of these things and in a mouse model when they changed they upgraded regulated this micro RNA they increased obesity and insulin resistance in the mice down regulated the micro RNA they led to decreased obesity and decreased insulin resistance glucose tolerance um so it the micro RNA is very important it's been dragged along positively selected for um and it's just an example of things that kind of co-evolve because they're in the same associated locus of genetic information in our DNA so the good sometimes comes with the bad and we it's interesting to kind of unravel that as we move forward yeah and it also is another reason I feel bad for for folks who have studied and written books on nutrition you know it's one of those like because the correlation may have been there you know drinking milk it might be associated with the higher risk of diabetes oh so you should stop drinking milk it has nothing to do with whether you drink milk or not because it's already in the genes yes dragged along from thousands of years of selection yes yep it's already in there yeah so anyway a lot of interesting genetic stuff that super fun super fun but it is time for your stories Justin yeah speaking about the super fun uh published in the royal uh the general royal society open science scientists from the university of Cambridge gathered data from five different countries the UK the United States Ireland Mexico and Spain and they have identified how much traction some prominent covid conspiracy theories have gotten within these populations and the results are alarming if not entirely unsurprising okay so let me go through this list here covid 19 was engineered in a lab in Wuhan China despite the fact that there's no evidence within the genome of this virus having been altered in any way and it appears in nature in several other forms that have already been found deadly and southeast Asia is always pretty much where viruses emerge due to the biomes and the population density more than half of the humans on the planet live there in dense conditions so things tend to um if there's a communicable disease it's gonna make it through the population there quicker than it will anywhere else still between 22 and 23 respondents in the UK and the United States rated the conspiracy reliable what wait 22 to 23 percent of UK and United States rated it reliable that covid 19 was engineered in a lab in Wuhan China in Ireland that became 26 percent Mexico 33 Spain 37 percent okay so uh that's there's that um but it was but it was created as part of an idiot plot to enforce global vaccination despite the fact that there isn't one in place to enforce 22 percent of Mexican population rated this is reliable one with 18 percent in Ireland Spain in the UK uh as well oh sorry uh 18 percent in Ireland Spain in the US only 13 percent in the UK found that credible that's still a very high number so these are all very extreme numbers yeah 5g telecommunication towers are actually causing a virus or at least worsening covid 19 symptoms because that is how nature and physics conspire to to uh to harm low information people uh 16 percent uh Mexico 16 percent in Spain 12 percent Ireland 8 percent in both the UK and US rated that as reliable yeah so this is uh Dr. Sander van der Linden co-authent director of the Cambridge social decision-making lab certain misinformation claims are consistently seen as reliable by substantial sections of the public we find a clear link also between believing coronavirus conspiracies and hesitancy around any future vaccines as well as flagging false claims governments and technology companies should explore ways to increase digital media literacy in the population otherwise developing a working vaccine might not be enough uh there is a kind of a fun thing that they've created uh previously it's the in the social decision-making lab they have a project called go viral which is the way I had to google I went go viral UK uh you could also put in social decision-making lab that should also help you find it it's a short sort of online choose your own adventure game that teaches you how to be a a misinformation disinformation social media um troll no no but but it shows you how quickly and easily these things can propagate in this sort of game environment um and you can get a score to see how nefarious you were uh compare it to your friends I actually did pretty good I'm not gonna lie uh yeah that makes sense I believe that so so some of the interesting things here uh they had as part of the survey a numeracy or a math test some math tasks that they they gave their respondents first before they went on the declaring things and levels of trust um if if they scored high in the math skills they were significantly and consistently uh less likely to be susceptible to false information and this was across all nations being good at just basic math which by that it almost indicates that people who are believing in conspiracy theories are bad at math they can't logic or add somehow the uh well I mean it's part of the like if you say like 80 percent of the 50 percent of the 25 percent of the 10 percent of people have reported these symptoms from this situation it's like okay so once you add all those things okay it's actually like one person is what you're talking about yeah exactly oh and so that's going to come up again uh in just a second so uh being older being older okay boomer actually was linked to lower susceptibility lower susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation in all nations except for Mexico or it was actually averse the young people were less susceptible to it than the old uh identifying as more right wing politically conservative was associated with higher likelihood of believing COVID-19 conspiracies and falsehoods and Spain Mexico and Ireland but not in the US and the UK it was uh it was which I find found surprising seeing as how there seems to be this left right issue of mask wearing in the United States it seems the conspiracy theories seem like a huge part of right wing talking points and theology or ideology right now but but maybe that's the 80 percent of the 50 percent of the 20 percent of the 4 percent of kind of a thing it might be that even though these are proliferating the media all of these views from the right wing in this country the actual beliefs of people don't reflect that and that those ideals are actually fringe thinking in the United States as they don't even show up as a blip in this survey at least uh trusting that politicians can handle the crisis predicted a higher likelihood of buying into conspiracies in Mexico Spain and the United States so the more you trust the government to handle it the more you also believe in the conspiracy theories which is interesting since at least one of them I think it sounds like it's a government conspiracy but UK and Ireland this was not true uh social media was linked to misinformation susceptibility in Ireland UK and the United States they also asked participants about their attitude to a future uh coronavirus vaccine found increased reliability of misinformation that meaning that they believed the misinformation was associated with the likelihood of not getting vaccinated or saying that you would not get vaccinated as well as a decrease in the odds of someone recommending vaccination to vulnerable friends and family those are people who are at most most vulnerable to the coronavirus the COVID-19 trust in scientists was associated with an increase in the likelihood of getting vaccinated an increase in the odds of recommending vaccines to others and an increased uh uh or decrease in thinking that misinformation was reliable so this is now we're talking about this uh as as oh you've got the game up fantastic you've uh we're talking about this in terms of COVID here but there is misinformation uh on so many levels one of the interesting things I find about the the Wuhan lab created uh virus story is this is not the first time we've heard this type of a story there was uh in the 80s mid 80s uh a russian uh one of the kgb created story that ran in an indian newspaper and this thing called the patriot was an english newspaper in india that claimed that the united states of america had engineered the AIDS virus in order to uh attack african americans with um it then got later many many years later showed up on the nightly news in the united states and became this huge conspiracy theory but it was intentional misinformation campaign we are seeing so many of them uh that seem to come from very on high that get repeated very easily with no information with no uh journalist integrity of course with no fact checking with uh they are they sort of say that governments and social media need to take this on I do think that there there was a role within the united states um I don't know if it was in the cia or if it was the state department that used to go out and counter false information that was created by these russian kgb misinformation programs we need something like that within social media I think the the social media groups need to hire like a big team of journalists that may not be doing news but may just be dedicated to rooting out false information because this is obviously we want to be an informed public in the first place we like to have news we like to have good news that we can trust done by journalists with integrity but at this point in this information age it's just as important to have journalists working full time at weeding out bad information because there is such a proliferation of it and it is harmful and it is dangerous and it is something that needs to be tackled there's a there's also apparently a oh I don't have it but we should I should find this estonia this is a small little country I think it's kind of near Belarus it's very close to russia they they got liberated from Russia a little while ago they have a television show and a wet they have a one of the most popular things that they do on television like americans might tune into uh the singing show or the dating show or that thing that everybody talks about around the water cooler the next day they have a show like that that just debunks a russian disinformation program that are being applied to them and it's like the most popular thing oh what is their propaganda saying this time aha here's all the facts here's what you need to know nice and they have a website dedicated to debunking it which is also a very popular website in estonia um we need something like that I believe in the united states or anything they need it in the uk they obviously need it in spain and Mexico and Ireland and that's just the countries that they looked at they probably need we probably need this everywhere at this point and it should be an incorporated department within every social media company it needs to be a department with that our governments are actually focused on we don't want governments in charge of our information but we do need a vetting process for all the bad information that now exists that people have access to uh my last story also a covid story uh says here well covid 19 poses the most immediate threat to human health at the moment the first half of 2020 saw a tremendous decline in co2 emissions yay good job pandemic yeah researchers found that in the first six months of 2020 8.8 percent less carbon dioxide was emitted than then that same period in 2019 uh which is a decrease of 1551 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in april when major countries were in that full-on shutdown mode emissions declined by a whopping 16.9 percent study published in the is published in the latest issue of nature communications kind of shows a couple interesting things ground transportation was the greatest reduction all the working from home or they may be just not having a job uh co2 emissions decreased by 40 percent worldwide from the sector the power sector energy production was down 22 industry uh production of co2 down 17 percent the residential sector what do you think happened there up actually it was down a bit too uh dropped by three percent uh interesting yeah well they know why largely because it wasn't a normally warm winter in the northern hemisphere so people didn't have to use their energy consumption was decreased despite the fact that people were staying at home more uh what's also kind of cool is they uh they had their these estimates were based on a wide array of data but um they had very precise hourly data sets because they tied it into electricity power consumption in 13 countries daily traffic volume in more than 400 cities worldwide daily global passenger flights monthly production data from industry in 62 countries fuel consumption data from and for buildings and emissions from more than 200 countries uh so they were actually able to collect this data in a sort of day by day and sometimes hourly uh formats they have real pictures and you know that you can sort of zoom into and in a way and sort of drill down on what was going on during this week that was different from another week so we could correlate it to things like weather or when the shutdown was going on that sort of thing so uh yeah uh despite all this of course i uh it you know there there was like this is the lowest we've seen it since uh or the biggest decline in in in emissions since this event or that event or this event it kind of doesn't matter because we're still at magnitudes uh of carbon like we're back to like oh this is like way back in 2008 emissions or something it's not really like we've reversed anything so i mean we can we can hope that this changes some people's relationship with a commute in the long term we know that's probably happening at least in the bay area i know a lot of um big office buildings have shut down because they've discovered that productivity did not take a hit by having people work from home they were like we were working from home from now on like let's turn them into condos yeah so so i know that um you know i hope that commute carbon emissions will stay reduced they won't be down where they are now but hopefully they won't go back up to where they were but i also wonder if um especially since there's a lot of kind of by belt tightening happening at the very beginning of the pandemic because everyone wasn't sure what was happening at their jobs or their income and things were very scary if it changed people's relationship with consumption at all you know buying things buying new things throwing old things away you know i i i have hope that this may be adjusted some people's relationship with the consumerist nature of the united states and you know the western worlds in general i think a lot of people started buying more things because they were stocking up sure yes in terms of food i think that's true but i think in terms of recreational spending um i know at least at first recreational spending for things that you can do at home yeah things you can do at home things you don't need yeah yeah also i know a lot of people learned how to cook for the first time in their adult life from being at home so that might also help yeah rick steves the the pbs travel travel guy the travel guy he just posted something about he's learning how to cook for the first time in his life there's nothing like the sweet sound of a knife slicing through a crisp onion and he'd never experienced that before a period you know he's got a job where they pay him to travel around and eat out at restaurants yeah he's gotta be really really you never want to like scramble an egg for yourself in the morning whatever okay but fair enough fair enough but yeah there's a whole bunch out there a lot of things that if we can potentially hold on to how they changed life for the better and can potentially continue to change things for the better help us all as humans live more sustainably and in you know in in a more holistically sustainable manner you know there's a lot we can do out there not just staying at home yeah and change is possible it it doesn't always take a pandemic but maybe it it took that for us to recognize that changes to to our our kind of our way of life is possible yeah change is not only possible it can be good it's always hard but it can be good yeah which like you might rather do it now when you have a choice as to how and when rather than when you have to do it i'll uh covid when things have gotten so bad from climate change that there's no choice at all just a thought just we all probably would have rathered have a month notice before the entire world shut down wouldn't that have been nice well we have 50 years notice right now we can do it now 50 years before the 50 years before the next pandemic no 10 years no 50 years before all those impact with climate change is more what i but we can also do it uh when it wasn't spring and nice out you know we can also do like let's take uh the sort of late january through february and we'll just use that to to check yeah when i want to stay inside and stay home anyway yeah when it's like too rainy and foggy and snowing or whatever your local weather it's earth month yeah yeah exactly shouldn't that be in the spring when we're all outdoors no this is about us being on the earth month yes this is about respecting the earth letting the earth heal giving it back to them respect the earth month yes respect the raccoons yeah they demand it respect my authority all right everyone i think we have made it to the end of another show have we done it oh we did it we did it we've done it we've talked all about it thank you for being here and for being a part of it i wanted to say thank you and give shout outs to fada for help with show notes and show descriptions gourd thank you for manning the chat room and keeping that going through all the net splits and other other issues that occur identity four thank you for recording the show and as always thank you to our patreon sponsors and to the boroughs welcome fund for their support thank you too chris wozniak dave bun vegaard stiff sad i wait please email me and tell me how to pronounce your name vegaard skiff stad vegaard skiff skiff skiff stad i don't think it's gonna matter out i didn't say enough for them any i didn't i don't think you got i don't think you're getting closer i think you're just saying the same thing over and over again yep yep sure i am so if you want me to pronounce your name correctly maybe you know phonetic pronunciation send me an email i'm sorry howl snider donathan styles aka don stylo john chioli geom john lee alikoff and matty peringore of charma mark shoemaker mike shoemaker sarah for far dan old mundas steven alberans darryl my shacks too pollock andrew swanson fred s 104 karin benton sky luke paul ronovich ben bignell kevin reardon noodles jack brian kerrington matt base joshua furie shawn and nina lamb john mckay greg riley mark hesson flow jane telly a steve leesman ken haze howard tan christopher rappin richard brendan minnish melazon johnny gridley flying out richard porter christopher drier mark masaros artyom greg briggs john atwood melania is a russian super spy rooney garcia dav wilkinson rodney lewis paul matt sutter philip shane curt larcen craig landon mountensloth jim drapo sarah chavis elix wilson john ratna swami sue doster jason olds dav neighbor mathew litwin eric nap e o kevin perichan erin luthan steve debob calder marjorie paul stanton paul w stanton paul d disney patrick pecoraro ben rothig gary s tony steele ulysses adkins brian kondren jason roberts and dav fridel thank you for all of your support on patreon and if any of you out there would like me to say random words at the end of the podcast you too can support us on patreon and put whatever name i don't know what i just i i'm i'm asking for it right now aren't i it has to be g rated it has to be g rated please yes yeah i think there have to be limits that's right on next week's show our guest will be jaziah zaynor he has joined us before oh he will join us again we'll be back next week i will be back next week blare and justin will not uh yeah most likely most likely so justin even though you're not gonna be here where can everyone find us next week uh next week uh the show will still be wednesday at apm pacific time broadcasting live from youtube facebook and wherever else twist uh is oh twist.org slash live if that's your preference or you can look for us at the other places if you if you want to listen instead of watch you can search for this week in science or podcasts are found so you can figure it out you guys are smart if you enjoyed the show get your friends to subscribe as well get them to download some podcast app on their phone they'll never know it'll be happy surprise yeah for information on anything you've heard here today there are show notes links to stories you can bruise them on your own they'll be available on our website www.twist.org you can also sign up for our newsletter you can also contact us directly email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com justin at twistminion at gmail.com or me blare at blarebaz at twist.org just be sure to put twist twis into the subject line or your email will definitely get spam filtered to the bottom of a container of sugar water with surfactant so there will be no service tension so there will be lots of ants yeah if swimming or dead ants isn't your thing you can also hit us up on twitter where we are at twist science at dr kiki at jackson fly and at blairs menagerie we love your feedback if there's a topic you'd like us to cover or address suggestion for an interview a haiku that comes to you in the night please let us know we'll be back here next week in spirit but kiki will be here for real and we hope you join us again for more great science news if you've learned anything from the show remember it's all in your head this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science it's the end of the world so i'm setting up shop got my banner unfurled it says the scientist is in i'm gonna sell my advice tell them how to stop the robot with a simple device i'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand and all it'll cost you is a couple of coming your way so everybody listen to what i say i use the scientific method for all that it's worth and i'll broadcast my opinion all this week in science this week in science this week in science science science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science science i've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what i say may not represent your views but i've done the calculations and i've got a plan if you listen to the science you may just get understand that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to speak in science this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in science this week in science the 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 but how can i ever see the changes i seek when i can only set up shop one hour a week in science is coming your way you better just listen to what we say and if this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science science science science again science this week in science see after show yo boom boom boom boom yes in the background you can see Justin's art he's sitting in front of it during the show it's nice to see him doing his art it's pretty awesome pretty awesome your calendars look so great it's all done all done what do you have there a what is the shoe bill giant yeah it's a shoe bill just look like a giant murder bird yeah that's generally what a shoe bill is that's that's the reputation it's a dinosaur that is that is a dinosaur i'm looking forward to actually putting this on um a phone case in the zazzle store i think it would come out really good i think it will come out really well i think some of the other ones will look really good on zazzle merchandise also ha shoe brew had a funny joke password joke in the chat room i like this one too thank you i like that this one giraffe weevil will be very good on things and of course i gotta do a frog always you know i love frogs always a frog um for like my last day at the zoo they named a frog after me oh that's sweet yeah justin's back yeah a smoky jungle frog is now named blaire nice that's the saffron zazoo that's awesome yeah and here in this exhibit you see blaire yes you can tell her apart from the other frogs because she is the baddest one oh but she's the baddest because she has the the best personality so she's the best getting to the fruit and stuff yeah so is it a pregnant frog or is it no just just a frog wings of tech wing of tech is saying last day at the zoo um sad face um are you at liberty too did you tell last week what you're doing no i think i should wait because i haven't had my new employee orientation yet so i don't know what their rules are for these things but i am great i am changing careers as it were yes i'm working i'll just do what i did about this day before i'm moving into the park circuit so parks are nice yeah yeah i'm changing careers too yes how's your change going justin yeah i well i have no idea what it is yet i don't know what i'm doing don't figure that out my this is my mid fall considering a career change because maybe my mental health would be better if i were just completely stay at home mom slash teacher slash chef slash maintenance person slash yeah homeschooling and trying to do work it's very there's a combination of things there for sure for sure oh identity for full-time drunk i tried that it doesn't go well no no there's a there's a there was a meme or a cartoon that i saw i think it was a rabbit and it's got all this booze next to it and it's like i'm not an alcoholic i'm just throwing a party and then the next frame was post covid i'm not throwing a party i'm just an alcoholic yeah perfect yeah exactly changing realities that sounds great bruce bruce cordell just need to find a dimensional door yes that would be nice careful careful when you get to the other side he just don't never really know i mean one thing that i learned from the hit 90 show sliders she never can tell if you're going to the the dimension where the men get pregnant instead of women or if you're going to the dimension where aliens take your eyes out at birth i actually walked through such a door i actually walked through one of those doors in 2019 i was like i can't take this anymore i'm going through the dimensional door and then i ended up in 2020 so here with the rest of you it's trust me it's not the grass may seem greener on the other side but it might be because nobody's walking on it anymore yeah so what one of the one of my favorite tweets actually about this is like uh i think someone figured out time travel it keeps going back in time to try to fix 2020 but every time they do it they actually create a butterfly effect and make it worse there's uh it's just great um uh it's probably everybody's seen it i'm just the last one but it's this uh i should find it so that i'm not just describing it we can provide a link but this girl this is uh this woman does this this amazing uh bit where it's april uh and it's uh future her from june shows up oh yes yes and then i was like like i gotta tell you about what's coming it's like what what is the cover do we i was like this is this cover it's nothing what do you mean oh there's a lot more going on and then so it's just let's know that like things are gonna get worse two months from now and then like august her shows up to the june her it's like wait what are you doing here like wait what no don't tell me good news of badness oh i can't take it and then the october one shows up and she's just smoking and she's like do we're gonna do this really we're gonna do this but it's the most hilarious uh yeah that one went viral i guess she is a great actress i thought that was like one of the most amazing bits i've seen but she's been updating i guess every two or three months with the new version of this and so it's like she has to like sort of break she's about to break the Ruth Bader Ginsburg mirrors and then just decides it's too much yeah just decides it you know i'm not i'm not even gonna tell you why what is it nothing nothing everything's just gonna be fine oh but you might want to do another cosplay run wasn't it oh my god it's everything yeah somebody somebody can find that link on i think on the youtube's and put it into the chat rooms for me because i don't uh know what it was called or where to find it somebody showed it but it was brilliant oh 2020 oh explaining the pandemic to myself is the title of the piece explaining the pandemic to myself it is hilarious and also really only only now can we look back and see how uh great a year it's been yeah well i'm uh i'm i'm finding a way to uh enjoy the end of my 2020 good large life events so that's helpful yeah yeah good for you yeah gotta work that out figure it exactly player buzzer isn't gonna be intimidated by a little virus no way new job doing life new job who dis new job new husband oh i'm so sorry i really like brand no he he's now he's gonna be my ex boyfriend because he's now i'm gonna be my boyfriend i know that's really yeah yeah one of my favorite podcasts uh viable boyfriend the host refers to his wife he goes my ex-girlfriend who is now my wife ex-girlfriend after i got married i kept calling marshal my boyfriend for a very long time i just could not switch over it was like oh we did we actually did get married oh yes oh looks like hot rod hot rod found it hub rub hub rub hub rub you have found it hub hub hub hub hub hub hub um noodles get new masks man i i don't use the ear masks at all anymore i have like two of them that i use to take the dog out but all my other masks are tie-back masks yeah i love them you can always take uh the ear masks and like cut them and or you can add string to them and make them tie back masks you can also take a strip of fabric sew two buttons onto it and put it behind you yes that would work too yeah it has to be just the right length wait you're sewing buttons into the back of your head no onto a strip of fabric or you can just buy um tie-back masks i found one etsy seller who i love who does like just build a calip around your ears it's fine you're gonna need it for a while oh goodness i need to go finish my taxes yeah you should do that yeah okay i'm gonna go do some more wedding prep i'm uh oh my gosh jesson's gonna have a day jesson's gonna have a day how are you feeling i'm feeling good i'm feeling nice cold medicine kicked in no i don't take cold medicine the covid medicine i would be asleep uh already you don't take the non drowsy basically like meth version of cold medicine no no the only stuff that i actually you know what's funny uh is i have the um i have the cold medicine that doesn't have the nighttime cold medicine that doesn't have the cold medicine in it yeah i can't remember what it's called but it's the same ingredients in the drowsy cold medicine that you can take the little cup of and it helps you go to sleep at night is it quill or whatever yes yes that's it yes that's that's it um hot chip just take some benadryl those little pink benadryl yeah those are no no she's not kidding about taxes so i'm not not season got extended almost in over the infinite horizon this year because they're like we don't i want your view to send us stuff the taxes yeah and then they like and then it was filed and then i filed an so it was late and then i filed an extension and now this is like the last tomorrow is like the last day of the year to turn in last year's taxes yeah i mean it just i just have to pay fees to the government if i miss otherwise i mean it doesn't really matter actually because they charge you fees they charge you interest anyway if you owe money so oh boy it honestly honestly doesn't matter but yes i have to go go add up numbers in columns right now do my taxes um eric in alaska wants to know where everyone's gonna be next week so justin i'll be in the air it seems like uh so i have to like still do the math i i might might stop jump in and just say hi uh but uh yeah i'll be getting at least being last minute was just trying to get to an airport i'm kind of going back to the us of a day uh not a great time justin to come back yeah just don't why you gotta vote no you did i have to vote i'm coming to vote is that why you're coming back so no there's other reasons too but um like you know your pro progeny they have to see you yeah um uh but yeah the uh the mail-in voting thing hadn't started yet when i left and then started like pretty soon after i left uh but yeah so i gotta go and and make sure that that happens nice um i will be in the woods we're doing a we're doing a mini moon we were gonna have like a legit honeymoon like do a Costco vacation package go somewhere tropical but obviously can't do that right now so we're pushing that next year to our actual big wedding date doing it then hopefully fingers crossed everyone get your crap together so we can have a real wedding please thank you um and so instead we're just we're doing an Airbnb in the woods for like a week because we got we got the time off anyway yeah thanks so trying to find the the fun where we can celebrate find that fun and yeah among us would be fun my my son kai would be right there leaving the pack if you want to we could definitely get a bunch of people on a on an among us server my son would i would be the one who's totally sus because i have no idea how to play i have no idea sus that's suspect so among us have you ever have you did have you ever played a werewolf oh yeah or mafia mafia yeah yeah so it's a it's a game where it's a game where two one two three people in the game they're like 10 of you on a spaceship and one to three people are alien imposters who get to run around and kill people but they have to act normal and everyone has these tasks that they're supposed to do but while everybody's doing the tasks the imposters run around and try and kill people and the goal is to figure out who the imposters are before they kill everybody and to do all your tasks and so it's kind of like you're supposed to be paying attention to who's doing it but i'm like running around trying to follow galactica so it actually sounds exactly like um we have a board game that's uh the thing you know john john covengers the thing okay um and so uh that is basically that it's a it's a cooperation based game you're given tasks but a certain number of people are infected and then they can infect other people and you have to like try to figure out who it is and yeah that's one so yeah your goal is to not let the alien get off of the base and into the helicopter i think we have lost every time i play the alien always wins um but uh it sounds very similar to this i always get voted off the spaceship doesn't matter whether or not i'm an imposter people are like you're sus kiki whoever you are you're sus okay i am i don't know what i'm doing how do i get anywhere what is this map i don't know what's happening yeah it's fun it's become is it a video game yeah it's a it's a game that went viral that uh once the pandemic started people had nothing to do and they found this game and everybody loves it now and it is pretty fun cool it's pretty fun and i accept my susness suspicious that's right thunder yeah but blare you can go shout in the woods i will do my taxes is there anything else going on today is fossil day happy fossil day isn't today also ate a lovely yesterday yesterday yesterday and on friday we all need to watch hamilton because it's hamilton day just listen to that sound right hamilton hamilton day yes fun things this week science going on congratulations on 33 years of marriage shubru yeah that's great i am 16 i think 16 years of marriage not knowing is probably good i forget means you're not counting no yeah no i forget when i forget when i was when i got married like what i've had uh i think 10 years of marriage for uh like 12 13 years now i get it i get it okay uh this is take a night blare good night blare say good morning justin good night kiki go do your taxes good night everyone i hope everyone stays well and warm and happy and that we see you next week safe travels justin and happy weddings and woods blare thank you yeah take care stay sus everybody stay sus