 Well, hello again, science fans. We are here. This is This Week in Science, the podcast. I'm so sorry, can you tap on your mic? Oh, oh, that's the right mic. Okay, you just sound a little tinier than last week. It's deliberate, it's very tinny. Yeah, yeah. No. And anyway. Sorry, everyone, you're peeking behind the curtain. Yeah, it's technical. If I just talk right into it, did it change all of a sudden? I mean, it's all high end and low end. Yeah, it's very strange. It definitely wasn't like that last week. This is the same microphone. I haven't changed anything. I guess you put it good. Am I loud enough, though? It's the room, probably. The room might have a slight high-end echo. I don't know if that's a thing that rooms can do. Maybe if I put it right, I don't know. We'll see if we can get this working. Is it awful? No, no, it's not awful. It's just not up to the normal, beautiful, kiki chamber. I love the normal usual, but things are not quite there yet. Shea kiki, so. That makes sense. It usually takes more than a week to move an entire house and get settled, so. Yes, yes. The movement is still afoot. Cleaning is occurring in the other house. There's unpacking. I try to do a couple boxes a day. It's good. Oh, that's ambitious. I know. All right, all right, here it is, the science show. What are we doing? We're gonna do a science show because really what we're here for is the science. This is this week in Sciencewear podcast and this is our live broadcast. I'm gonna continue to get this microphone like right into my face throughout the hour, but if nothing else, this will not end up in the podcast because what's going on is you're watching us live. You might even be watching us time shifted and at some other point. This is all the outtakes. We do all of the outtakes on this. Yeah, but then the real show comes later. Yeah, stuff gets cut out. The podcast makes, gets made. This is, I don't know, you're watching all the bacon right now. All the bacon, all the sausage? The sausage. Yeah. Sausage bacon, potato, potato. Okay, it's all ready. Just gonna be a great show. We are so glad you're here with us this hour for another tight 90 of science discussion. We have so many stories ahead and we're about to get started, but if you haven't yet, hit that subscribe button. Click the like button. Make sure you sign up for notifications and ding dong bells because we don't wanna miss those when we go live every Wednesday if you have a good time. Let's make this show happen. We are getting ready to start this show in three, two, three, two, this is twist. This week in science, episode number 887, recorded on Wednesday, August 10th, 2022. Vlogs, dogs or science? Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show, we are going to fill your head with meat, heat and sleep. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. When looking around at the world today, all the global warming, global wars, global boxes, it's important to remember it's going to be okay. Not everything is going to be okay, of course, but a lot of things most definitely, well, okay, are not going to be okay. People are getting hurt out there, but some things, things you might not have even thought about as important before realizing, hey, that's not broken yet. That thing is going to be okay. While waiting for the next terrible thing to happen, whatever the next terrible thing might be, remember the old saying, doesn't matter which old saying, I don't even know any myself, just pick one. It's good, it's fine. It'll do, get you through. Remember when we used to joke about monkeypox on the show? Cause it was funny sounding, obscure and probable. A thing they could never really have a global impact until now. And so now we're out of terrible guesses. That was the last one. What happens next is beyond compare. In fact, never mind that it's going to be okay and the old saying, that sort of thinking never works itself out the way you want it to anyway. Instead, consider what it is you can get involved with in solutions. Life goes by faster than you think it will. Now is the moment in which you can do things. So go do them, make an impact. Some solutions might require science. So go be a scientist. Others might require legal action. So go be a lawyer. Some solutions may require you to work for a noble nonprofit cause. So pick one and if the noble cause that you fall in love with isn't out there, start it. You will be ready for the next thing the world throws at us because thank goodness for you. And this week in science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn it with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know my science to you Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin, Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of this week in science. We are back again as we are every week to talk about science news. We do love it so much. And I would also like to wish everyone a happy day of lazily spoiling your dogs while vlogging. Huh? Yeah, well, if you look at what national day it is today apparently on the list, but there are many actual, today is a day of many things. But today was the day of, national day of being lazy, vlogging and dog spoiling. You know, my favorite stuff I just said about doing something, it seems like a... Nope, not today. Not today. Not today. My favorite holiday was just a couple of days ago. I hope everyone celebrated national sneak a zucchini onto your neighbor's porch day. And did you? None of my neighbors have porches. So also I would not be caught dead buying a zucchini flick. But anyway. You're supposed to buy the zucchini. You're supposed to grow the zucchini. I know. I don't have any zucchini and then have it in them. Why would you buy zucchini? I don't understand. Because people give them to you. So you don't need to buy them. Yeah. No, and none appeared on my front stoop. I was very disappointed. Oh, well, you didn't want one anyway. No, I would re-gift it. You see, I would have it along. Is there a national... Is the day after National Sneak a Zucchini Day? Is it National Re-gift a Zucchini Day? National Sneak a Zucchini into your neighbor's mailbox day. Sometimes I feel like the adults are talking in euphemisms. And I'm just like, don't get it. Yeah, I don't know. Let's talk about science. So what do I have tonight? I have stories about, let's see, not leaking, linking your gut to your heart, restoring hearing impacts that foods have and a few aging stories. One specifically for you, Blair. Justin, what do you have? I've got re-wilding the West new home on the range. Why you should never catch a raindrop on your tongue and a little arctic, Antarctic ice update came in. Nice. You can probably imagine what that one is. That there's lots of it? No. Okay, I don't think so. Blair, what is in the animal corner? Oh, I have a nice, light, fun animal corner today filled with cancer-sniffing locusts, sleepy spiders, and rat sperm. So it's gonna be real fun. All over the place. That's gonna be great. Well, as we dive into our science show tonight, I would love to remind everyone that if you're not yet subscribed, you can find us this week in science on all podcast platforms. Well, pretty much all of them, just look for this week in science. You can also find us broadcasting live weekly on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch. Let's see, that's Wednesdays at 8 p.m. Pacific time. And if you look for us on Twitch, Instagram, and Twitter, we are Twist Science. That's how you find us. But if all this is complicated, I mean, I can't even remember all of it, go to twist.org, it's our website, it's where you find all sorts of information about the show. Now that that's done, everyone click that subscribe, that like, and let's move on to the science. Okay. Why is eating red meat bad for your heart? Why is a raven like a writing desk? That's what you're asking, right? Uh, something about the... No, that's not right. I was gonna say cholesterol, that's wrong. I don't know. I love how you have all these old sayings and you have no idea what they mean. I know what that's, that's what I was wondering about. Please, come on, don't insult me with that. All right, so the mechanisms of cardiovascular disease and those specifically that stem from eating red meat and other animal proteins are hotly debated. One of the things, like you said, Blair, cholesterol is high on the list for most people. And we know not that meat consumption doesn't necessarily have all the cholesterol in it that's going to lead to bad cholesterol if you're eating lots of red meat. So there's gotta be other stuff going on there. So researchers have been investigating this connection and this particular paper published in the journal Arteriosclerosis Thrombosis and Vascular Biology by researchers at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and Cleveland Clinic Learner Research Institute quantified the risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease associated with meat intake. And they found three pathways that might help explain the risk. They looked at 4,000 US men and women over the age of 65. And then as we know, higher meat consumption is linked to higher risk of this kind of cardiovascular disease, 22% higher risk for about every 1.1 servings of red meat per day. So they also determined that this is elevated, about 10% of it is elevated by increased levels of metabolites produced by gut bacteria from nutrients that are found in the meat. And this is the relationship because red meat has certain nutrients that poultry, eggs and fish do not. And so gut bacteria can explain part of this increase in risk. So they found that the gut microbiome generated trimethylamine N-oxide, also known as T-MOW and other intermediates, Gamma butyrobate betaine and crotonobetaine. These are derived from L-carnitine, which is very, very abundant in red meat. So anyway, these particular nutrients, L-carnitine gets devoured by the bacteria. The bacteria then create these other metabolites, the metabolites then affect the cardiovascular system and will also change other things. They did find however, the associated risk of meat intake was affected by blood glucose and insulin and for processed meats, systematic inflammation, but not by blood pressure or blood cholesterol levels. And so they're saying cholesterol actually isn't as highly involved in this as they previously thought. And what's happening is that if you already are predisposed to inflammation, that your risk for cardiovascular disease due to the conversion of the nutrients into these compounds by your gut bacteria is higher. If you have a lower inflammation profile, your risk of developing cardiovascular disease is also gonna be lower. And the same goes for how your insulin and blood glucose levels are standing. So cholesterol may not be so much of the issue, but it might be more your microbiome. It's always the gut, isn't it? You know, yeah, it's one thing that almost everything that we've known for the past century about nutrition kind of went out the window once we learned what the gut microbiome was doing and how individually different people are going to be taking up or not utilizing components of what they eat. Now, heart disease and cholesterol are getting uncoupled by... Yeah, well, not completely uncoupled, but in this particular case, for red meat specifically. Yeah, it's like, whoa. Now it's, now our knowledge, because this is also crazy, because this is almost like an entirely new field. Call it 10 years. Call it 10 years that we've even had a focus on this. And now we're finding connections throughout human health that we didn't know existed and had other conclusions or had other top suspects on the list. And now it's like a constant episode of cold case, almost. Oh, it turns out, remember that criminal that we put in prison for life for all those terrible crimes. Wasn't it. Yeah, nothing to do with it. Criminal after all. We're buying the right one this time. Oh, gosh, I hope so. Well, but learning more is better because it can allow people to make better choices. If you're more prone to inflammation, choose to eat red meat less often, processed meat less often. If you are completely inflammation-free, I don't know, have at it. Enjoy your red meat. Love that. Also, who are you and how do you live? Free to, no stress, no inflammation. You're not alive. You just never have enough of this stomach, how dare you? Are you a superhero? Ah, well, I wouldn't go that far. What's your superpower? Zero inflammation. Well, that wouldn't be good. I don't experience any of that. That's all like foreign words to me. So I'm right there. Thanks. Well, speaking of criminals, there's one that's been caught in the rain. Justin, tell me about it. You don't want to hear this story. I know. I love stinging and gargling in the rain, but I won't do that anymore. Like, go ahead. Yeah, I'm stalling because my thing is taking too long. So, okay, this is Swedish researchers, University of Stockholm. The scientists there decided to look at PFAS, Water Contamination on the planet, Earth, which is the planet that we're living on. So that's important. PFAS or Perinpolyfluoroalkyl substances, aka forever chemicals, because they take a really, really, really long time to break down. And worst, we've inundated the air, water, soil, livestock, everything has got this. If you do blood tests of people and check for PFAS chemical, it's in the majority of blood tests. It's in everyone's blood. It's everywhere, regardless of where you are, regardless of age. So eventually they will work their way out of the body over about a four-year period, but the problem is they accumulate in the body as you come into contact with the chemical, which is, again, everywhere in our environment. So you need to avoid them entirely to not have them, which is hard. So this is according to CDC, just a little bit more backstory. PFAS chemicals commonly found in freeze-resistant paper, fast food containers and wrappers, microwave popcorn bags, pizza boxes, candy wrappers, stain-resistant coatings used on carpets, upholstery, and other fabrics, water-resistant clothing, cleaning products, personal care products like shampoo and dental floss and cosmetics, nail polish, eye makeup, paints, varnishes, sealants, and most famously, perhaps, non-stick cookware. Sweden's research team specifically looked for PFAS chemicals in the least likely place possible, sort of to get like a base level of, here's what the maybe environment looks like without PFAS chemicals. They looked at rainwater. And while PFAS was detected in rainwater, everywhere they looked, including Antarctica and the Tibetan Plateau, rainwater collected in Antarctica and the Tibetan Plateau only exceeded the U.S. Safe Drinking Water guidelines by 14 times, making it some of the cleanest unsafe water to drink on the planet. So rainwater everywhere on the planet, unsafe to drink. So those people living off the grid collecting rainwater to drink, still bad. It's still, it's because it's God, it's everywhere. So this is according to Ian Cousin's lead off of the study, which is published in Environmental Science and Technology. According to some studies, exposure can also lead to problems of fertility, developmental delays in children, increased risks of obesity, certain cancers, prostate, kidney, testicular. There was I think a thing out there right now, study talking about liver cancer connection to PFAS, increases in cholesterol levels, which I guess we don't have to worry about anymore. Cousin said that PFASs were now so persistent and ubiquitous that they will never disappear from the planet. This is quoting, we have made the planet inhospitable to human life by irreversibly contaminating it now so that nothing is clean anymore. And to the point that it's not clean enough to be safe. That's a heck of a quote, isn't it? We have crossed the planetary boundary, he says. Referring to a central paradigm for evaluating Earth's capacity to absorb the impact of human activity. However, Cousin's notes that PFAS levels in people have actually dropped quite significantly in the past 20 years and ambient levels in the environment have been the same for the past 20 years. So I think that maybe indicates a halting or an attempt to avoid using them. Certainly like there was the big Teflon, which was made with these chemicals, which is non-stick pans that were heated, which was the chemical industry when they first were coming up with these, it was like, oh, they're perfectly safe as long as you don't heat them. Well, as long as you don't heat them, it's really hot. Heating is fine, scratching and overheating is banned. Yeah, don't use your frying pan for frying. And you may still have PFAS type chemicals on your non-stick. They got rid of Teflon specific chemical, but then they altered chemical so that it can not be anyway. They banned the chemical and then they created a version of it that's probably just as unsafe to put in non-stick. But then again, who wants sticky pans? Am I right? So what I'm hearing, Justin, is that if we cut PFAS out of the supply chain, in four years, we'd be looking a lot better. In four years, anything that you... Well, our bodies would be looking better. Our bodies would drop in PFAS. However, if it's everywhere in the environment, if it's in the water, if it's in rainwater, which means it's in the circulatory water system and it's not disappearing from that, then we're gonna keep on getting it back in us and accumulating. So this is like the trick. Like it's gonna be forever, but... So here's the silver lining and all this. This is the same research is quoted here saying, I'm not super concerned about the everyday exposure in mountain or stream water or in the food. We can't escape it. We're just going to have to live with it. So I guess the point is, why worry when there's nothing you can do? Yeah, and I saw someone in the chat room said they were gonna go buy bottled water. And I just wanna throw out there that the amount of filtration that happens between water sources and your sink is actually way more filtration than what happens to bottled water. There's a lot of weird regulations with bottled water, at least in the United States. I don't know outside of the United States, but inside the United States, bottled water is not filtered to the same level as your sink, so you're actually better off with your sink water. And it does depend on where you live. I mean, there's places that have lead pipes still, apparently. Well, yes, lead pipes, not what's standing. Depends where you are, right? Yeah, but if you're in a, if you're in areas, most areas in the US at least, have lots of filtration in place and tap water is meant to be great to drink, or at least that's the PR around drinking water, yes. I mean, according to the technical regulations, that's how it's supposed to go, but you know. So I'm just saying, bottled water is also an environmental nightmare, so that is not the solution here. It's not actually gonna help you from the PFOS at all. And so that rainwater collection barrel, though, that is gonna be, you know, if it's all you've got, that's all you've got. So, but it's, yeah, but it's unsafe to drink. And a part of this unsafe to drink, there's a little bit of an asterisk there, I have to say, which is because we used to not have a regulation for it. So drinking water and everything else, didn't even, wasn't even looking at this. And then they realized how horrible it was, and then they created, I think that was like a million parts per whatever, lower, as the, as the back is saying here, but look, this is the new guideline and it was much stricter than the non-existent one, obviously, but they had one and then they lowered the floor on it considerably. So you're drinking water is most likely safer than, apparently than rainwater, which is crazy. And safer than bottled water, because as Kevin Reardon is saying in the chat, isn't the bottle that is used to hold the water containing PFOS? No, no, those are BPAs. There's a BPA. No, there's, there's what? There is not, there's also PFAS in the process that's involved in the plastic containers that hold water. So. Yes, not to mention that some reusable items, sometimes that have non-stick surfaces also have that. Yep. I love it. Oh, so fun. Forever. The only one I don't think I would give up is the lining of candy wrappers, because that'd be awful. If every time you opened your candy, it was all like stuck to the side of the packaging, that'd be terrible. But everything else we should get rid of. I don't know, a candy earring. We can debate that one later. Yeah. Hey, Blair. Yes. Is that? What do I smell? No, no. You're clear, you're clear. I was smelling for cancer, but you don't, you're good. You're good. Okay. Can we, can you really tell that? Can we really tell that? No, but Locust might. This is a study from Michigan State University and they wanted to test the ability for Locust to smell out cancer. Why? Great question, I'm so glad you asked. Noses are still considered in many ways the most state-of-the-art, reactive, responsive, sensitive gas-sensing equipment we have. And this is related to a conversation we had. I remember Justin was very dubious of the COVID-19 swimming dogs. That's actually considered the gold standard, dog sniffing for drugs, explosives, health conditions like low blood sugar and COVID. Those are considered better than the machinery we have. And so that is why often times when researchers are trying to find new research to sense gases, they turn to animals first. So this is, I will say this is a pre-publication. This has not yet been peer reviewed. It's from BioArchive, it's pre-print. But they wanted to look at Locust because they are one of the model organisms for olfaction. They also use fruit flies a lot, but fruit flies are a lot less hearty. And so researchers have built up a really meaningful understanding of the olfactory sensors in Locusts along with their neural circuits. And so from there, they were able to attach electrodes because they're bigger and more rugged. They were able to attach electrodes to Locust brains. They recorded the insects responses to gas samples produced by health cells and cancer cells and then used those signals to create chemical profiles of different cells. They also were able to find, so this is the difference between cancer and not cancer, but they were also able to find a difference between different lines of cancer, different types of cancer based on this sensor. And so they were looking specifically at mouth cancers, which means the chemical signatures of these cancers do get aerated. So you could actually have this sensor developed from the same mechanics in a Locust brain and have somebody do like a breathalyzer test to see if they have cancer in their system. They do think that this is potentially able to be used for cancers outside of the mouth because there are still a lot of cancers that introduce volatile metabolites into the breath. So they think that this could turn into something pretty cool. So the reason this is so important is that we find out about cancers often really late in the process. When cancer is caught early on first stage, patients in general have an 80 to 90% chance of survival, but if it's caught in stage four, 10 to 20%. So early detection is key, but without an easy way to detect just like blanket, like, is there cancer on your breath or not? Great, let's figure out what kind you have and deal with it right away. This could potentially have a really easy way to just go into the doctor for your checkup, you breathe into a little tube, and it tells you if you're carrying cancer metabolites in your breath. So it's, you know, I think it is a very cool prospect. They think that it would outpace the speed sensitivity and specificity of their current old fashioned mechanisms that they use. And so, no, you will not have to breathe at a locust in the doctor's office. Doctor locust, no. That's amazing. You had a question, Justin? No, I don't have a question. I'm just amazed by that. Sorry, yeah. I think it makes a lot of sense with the specificity of insects like locusts slash grasshoppers to chemical signals in the environment. Pheromones from other locusts that they tune into, that call them basically to ravage weak fields, come together and eat my pretties. You know, these, the chemicals, the pheromones, the olfactory signals that insects are tuned into, their tuning is very specific and very high. They're high resolution compared to humans. But that's the sort of thing that like the specificity. Specificity? They are. Yeah. Is actually sort of what's amazing about this to me is that they're picking up something that, you know, they're not looking at, it's not like, I would almost expect this to be more of the trait of a canine. That's, okay, let's pick out the weakest member of the herd. And hey, that one's probably not gonna run as fast or maybe there's a reason we should target that wilder beast or that caribou or whatever. What are the, you know, why is this resolution possible? And locust, that's what's kind of wild about it. They have that, you know, it's an off target hit or whatever, but it's still like, it's still a hit. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so it appears as though this is basically just proof that their neural circuits can tell the difference, right? Yeah. So it has to be kind of separated from, they weren't getting behavioral changes from locusts based on different stimuli. They were using electrodes on a locust to see if there was a response based on different stimuli like in a vacuum, essentially. So it's basically just, could their neurons and their sensory system handle it? And they can, but that's great because that's all you need to then start to create a non-animal model. A neural network that can respond in that kind of way through artificial intelligence. Computers of the future. That's amazing. And as Gary points out in the chat room there, and then you can eat them. So you have less red meat at the end of the day. And then, and then. And your research. Oh, but then other things that we wanna do, we wanna restore hearing also. This does not involve locusts at all. Just gonna put it out there. This story has nothing to do with locusts. Researchers have been trying to figure out how to restore hearing in people who lose their hearing for genetic reasons and a variety of other reasons for many, many years. And a researcher at the Salk Institute in La Jolla is working with the University of Sheffield researchers and have published a paper in molecular therapy, methods and clinical development about their work using gene therapy to basically introduce a dysfunctional gene or fix a dysfunctional gene called EPS-8 in the inner ear that then allows hair cells to be long enough to do the vibrating that they need to do to allow the signal transduction of sound waves to occur. So they have shown previously that lack or a broken gene of EPS-8 ends up with these little hairs in the hair cells, otherwise known as stereocilia, that they're really short. And so with really short hairs, you don't get a lot of vibration. And the way that the hair cells work is that in the fluid in the inner, in the ear, the hair cells are embedded, the waves come through and vibrate the tympanum and then that jelly material in the ear vibrates and the hair cells are supposed to vibrate back and forth too, but if they're really short, they don't get vibrated. And if they don't get vibrated, they don't turn on and they don't transmit a message to the brain to say, hey, we heard something. So they did a whole bunch of studies in mice, but were able to show that they could introduce EPS-8 into the genes of the ear in mice using gene therapy. And it allowed the mice to regain their long and luscious stereocilia and that the cells seem to be able to regain their abilities after the therapy. So future research, how can EPS-8 work to restore hearing during different developmental stages? Is it possible to lengthen the therapeutic window of opportunity? So for kids who have genetic disorders that have led to them having a broken protein, a broken gene, how young can you do gene therapy or how old can a child be to allow them to keep their hearing and not to lose it? Nice. Yeah. Let's use it. Yeah, or potential for drug targeting too, because if you know that a gene isn't producing a thing, there might be ways of tricking the body into working around that or doing what the genes aren't in real time. Yeah. Go, body, go. Go, go, gadget, body, woot, woot. Hold the ice. Is it time for the story that I don't wanna hear about? This is not a story. This is just an update. This is just an update. Just all bad news at the start of the show from Justin today. But stick around, because it's all good news at the end. Like legitimately. Good. Great. I mean it, promise. But yeah, July, this isn't it though, we're not there. July saw the lowest extent of Antarctic sea ice on record for a month of July since satellite records began 44 years ago. The lowest July ice ever. And it's according to the European Union's satellite monitoring group, 7% below the last 30 year average. So low ice values continue to string actually a blow. It wasn't just like, oh, and all of a sudden July was low. It's been the lowest month, the string of lowest below average months every month observed since February. So. Well, this is the answer to the scene. This is a mass extinction. Here we go. Well, it's Antarctica, so if it's less sea ice does that mean that less ice has fallen off the continent? I'm just trying to look. No, it's just me, right. No. No, that's a good point though. Okay, so that's a good point because there is a differentiation between the sea ice which is you got this big block of ice cap. And it's not just that there is another story that it turns out like a bunch of that's missing. But that's not this story. This story is talking about the ice that forms over the sea and extends out and creates these big shelves off of the, sort of off of the cap. So how far out that ice has grown or how far back I suppose it's retracted is, it's the level. The thing that I'm not 100% sure about and this is the problem because I kept, I was looking at this like, well, July, you know, it's a hotter summer. And so of course it's gonna push that sea ice back anyway. It's just didn't, you know, grow out or something. And then at some point it dawned on me that that's not how hemispheres work. Right. Yeah. In the middle of winter. This isn't, this isn't, you know. It's not summer. The peak summer extent of ice didn't go out as far. This is peak winter ice that didn't go out as far. That's terrible. Yeah. That means the winter in the Southern Hemispheres much hotter, which is the part that you really would hope you could catch up for, you know, make up some ice ground from all of this hot summer that you had with maybe a cold winter. But no, no, this is the least sea ice in a cold period in the last 30 years, which isn't that it was better before, it's that's when we've been monitoring this data. Yeah. Which I also just want, I want to mention when we talk about sea ice, it's different when you talk about glacier melt. Right. Because sea ice, really the main loss besides just it's not helping keep the ocean the right temperature. It's losing its ability to temper the heat of the water, but it's also habitat. It does not really contribute to sea level rise almost at all. So the really... Unlike the Greenland stories that we're hearing about right now. So sea ice in the water, it's the same amount of water. It's floating on top of ice. It's basically the same. The displacement, it's the whole, you know, science. Anyway, so the ice on land, glaciers, when that melts it rolls off into the ocean. That was water that was kept off the ocean before. So that contributes to sea level rise. So I just wanted to throw it out there because I saw a couple of comments in the chat about sea level rise. It is a different... And that's a great point. But the issue is the sea ice not being there in Antarctica is going to change the reflectance and thus the albedo of the earth. So how much light gets reflected and so how hot we end up staying as opposed to reflecting heat. But the Greenland melting and all that kind of stuff, that's adding to sea level. We don't like Greenland. Yeah, and just to give a picture of how much it's adding, like how much the ice is above the sea level and how massive that is. There's areas in the northern hemisphere in the Arctic region that when the ice caps melt aren't going to experience sea level rise. And the reason is because all of the weight of that ice is compact, has a compacting effect. And when it melts away, the earth is going to exhale a little bit right at the cap. And so there's actually going to be land raising in the Arctic region because the massive amount of weight that is pushing down from these ice caps would be gone. It's a weird thing to picture how squishy the earth actually is in some way. That's wild. Yeah, that's our squishy earth. It's our stress ball. But we're stressing it. Oh, gosh. Oh boy. Well, let's keep moving a little bit on this, our impact on the planet, not necessarily when it, I guess this is all involved in climate change, but also just how we affect the environment generally. Researchers from Oxford have published in the proceedings of the National Academies of Science, PNAS, their work comparing environmental impacts of meat and meat alternative products, like plant-based sausages, burgers, those kinds of things to figure out their environmental impacts. They looked at 57,000 multi-ingredient processed foods. So not just, oh, rice or potatoes, corn, they looked at bread. They looked at products that were found in grocery stores in the UK and Ireland, and determined based on all the ingredients and what was reported by the manufacturers of these foods to develop their model of how these products are actually impacting the environment and the choices that consumers are making, how those choices are affecting the environment. A researcher says, Dr. Michael Clark, he was the lead author, said, by estimating the environmental impact of food and drink products in a standardized way, we have taken a significant first step towards providing information that can enable informed decision-making. We still need to find how best to communicate this information effectively. Hey, why don't you talk to our podcast? In order to shift behavior towards more sustainable outcomes, but assessing the impact of products as an important first step. So the study, as you would think, has found that very often a lot of meat-based products are more impactful on the environment. Multi-ingredient vegetable fruit-based products are overall less impactful. They had low-impact score scores. One of the things that seems to go along with that also is that if they're low-impact on the environment, they're also usually have higher impact nutritionally. So the processed foods that people get- That's a good ratio. That's a good ratio. Oh, the fruits and vegetables and sugar and flour and like soup salads, breads and other things like that, they're better for the environment and they're also better for you. The one thing that did not match this were sugared beverages because just if you can imagine soft drinks, they're sugar and that's a crop, but it's not really good nutritionally. It might give you a little bit of energy, but then you crash. But the researchers are hoping that by looking at these specific food types, they can help people start shifting their behaviors towards swapping things like beef for beans. Maybe people would do that anyway because they don't want the El Carnitine that'll affect their heart anyway. So there are lots of things that go into people's choices, but they've used a big data research platform at the University of Oxford called FoodDB. That's food database. It collects and processes data daily on all food and drink products that are available in 12 online supermarkets, like I said, in the UK and Ireland. So it's a pretty big database of food and it's only as good as the source of the information. And I don't know if we have anything like this with the FDA or our USDA because that would be really interesting. No, you would never get that in the States. They will never allow you to get behind the curtain and see how your food is made. So there is one thing and I'm not... Natural ingredients. No, gosh, it's... American advertising and food is such a con job. Just it really is. But, and I don't want to sound like I'm trying to advocate for processed foods. However, there is a thing that I've never seen really looked at when I see these sort of, you know, talking about the impact of a food type environmentally, which is food waste. Because if I can put a heavily processed food type thing in my kitchen cabinet, and it's still edible a month or two from now, that food waste from that is gonna be nothing compared to vegetables, which I'm constantly like, it's almost like an emotion in the back of my fridge. That can is covered in PFAS. It must be turned into a can of PFAS. So environmental impact, there you go. It's everywhere anyway. But no, but there is like, there's gonna be some ratio. And this is also, this is sort of almost off the subject. Peeve, I've gotten a revelation that has hit me living in Denmark. When you buy bread here, it is good for up to a week, tops. And then it goes bad. I've had bread sit on a shelf, not even refrigerated in the United States that a month and a half later, perfectly fine. I don't know what bread you're eating, Justin, but that does not happen to my bread. My bread lasts a week if I don't put it in the fridge. Oh, wow. I'm buying like supermarket plastic wrapped, regular sandwich bread stuff over there. Never had bread go bad. Here it happens all like so quickly. Justin, maybe you need some glasses. So better glasses. Yeah. Thank you. R&R Grays is my result. Thank you very much. I think the big thing here though, you're talking about food waste, which is organic. And yes, another big study out this week found that lots of methane comes from landfills. Ooh, yes. But if we can use a lot of that food waste, compost it and use it for energy production, that is actually a great way to harness that methane so that it actually goes somewhere useful. We can also take a lot of some of those food scraps. You can, I don't know, take a top off of a vegetable and turn it into a vegetable plant. There are lots of really neat things we can do with food waste. I like using all of my scraps to make a veggie broth in the winter when I'm gonna make soups and stews. So many things you can do, but the problem is on the front end, on the front end you have all of the gas, all of the petroleum products that go into supporting the meat industry. And that is always going to be more impactful unless they can start figuring out how to do that, just using the energy of the sun, it's going to be more impactful than the veggies that you buy. So making the vegetarian choices, the healthier choices that way is going to be better for the planet in the long run, regardless of that food waste on the back end. Yeah, I think the thing that I would love to see here that's never gonna happen is I would love to see a study like this, but even in the UK where this study is happening, it would be great if they make policy decisions based on that. Because as someone mentioned in the chat a bit ago, there's a lot of subsidies towards corn farmers so that we can get all of our corn syrup and all this kind of stuff, right? So if you change your subsidies, so you were subsidizing the, oh, what's this, healthy for you and also better for the environment stuff, that would be really beneficial. Farmers would start switching their crops over to these more subsidized things. Those things would be more prevalent. So it would be great if this could, if policy could follow this science. So I'm saying, I'm not holding my breath, but it would be nice. Oh, policy, science-based policy. What? Just add it to the list is all I'm saying. Just add it. Oh, you idealist. Or just a tiny, tiny bit of that this week. Little tiny bit of that this week, right? With the, with the chips, passage, right? The Senate House are passing the, our Inflation Reduction Act, which actually is going to impact climate change positively. It's good. These things come together in good packages and I'm so excited. It's, you know, not the extreme that we would really, really hope for, but it's something. It's far greater than nothing. Well, you're calling it extreme. I think it would have to be called the bare minimum of what we should be doing. But yeah, extreme, we can call it extreme, kind of save the planet. Sure. Climate experts are celebrating this as a win, as we all should. Oh my goodness. This is This Week in Science. Thank you for joining us for another episode filled with science news and discussion and so many tidbits of fun. If you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend today. Let's come on back, Justin. I think you had a single COVID story for this hour. You want to jump through that hoop? Ah, yeah. This is scientists at Scripps Research. They were, they identified antibodies that are effective against a whole host of SARS COVID to variants as well as other SARS viruses. They published this in the Science Translational Medicine Journal. Findings reveal the antibody structures that produce this more comprehensive immune response. So unlike the game of whack-a-mole that we've been playing with these, these variants and their spike proteins. And I think we should probably pause there to explain to the audience what whack-a-mole is. If you're not familiar with whack-a-mole, there's nothing I can actually say that would properly describe it. You're going to have, one of those things you're going to have to Google a video if you're not familiar with whack-a-mole because you're going, the analogy is going to come up in life. And the analogy is more useful than the game of whack-a-mole ever was. It is used more often than there were machines of whack-a-mole. And there's no, the reason people still refer to whack-a-mole in analogies of things is it's the only thing that describes what it is like building a vaccine to attack a spike protein only to have a new variant pop up with a different spike, meaning the antibody is ineffective against that one. And then you create, then you alter it to attack that spike protein and it's mutated to have a different one. Kind of like whack-a-mole. I think the thing about whack-a-mole though is that it's random. You can never guess which mole is going to pop up, right? And that is the important part of that analogy is that it's really hard to anticipate. Yes. Yes. It's just like a game of whack-a-mole. Pete. See, it's the analogy that's needed to describe the game itself. That's why you just have to, if you don't know what whack-a-mole is, you just have to look it up. But these new, okay. So these newly discovered antibodies recognize a viral spike region that hasn't really been targeted by the human immune system previously. And it looks to be much more conserved across the many different SARS viruses. So it's something that is perhaps more fundamental to the function of these viruses, therefore less likely to change as new variants pop up as mutations take place. And this is quoting Dr. Reyes and Drabby, PhD investigator of the Department of Immunology and Microbiology. If we can design vaccines that elicit the similar broad responses that we've seen in this study, these treatments can enable broader protection against the virus and variants of concern. So this would kind of be the silver bullet. Problem is that this is a region that hasn't been targeted by human antibodies. And it's possible that we don't have the genes to create the antibodies that target this as of yet because we discovered these genes in macaques. They were actually doing an antibody study in macaques to test out a vaccine, giving them a couple of those, sort of simulating what happens in humans. But they were able to tackle these variants because they themselves are producing an immune response that targets this conserved region. So studying the effects of vaccine in macaques may not tell us how human immune systems would react because the monkeys are genetically different than humans, but that difference could be the key to building a better vaccine as they seem to have the right gene combination to create the right antibody to attack the broad field of the SARS virus. I think that kind of research is absolutely necessary. And we need to figure out how to move forward so that, like you said, the whack-a-mole isn't happening. And as Blair pointed out, the randomness we actually can anticipate. So we actually know where those mutations are gonna be so that we can just go broad sweep, whoop, antibody. And I think we talked about it last year, but also a paper came out finally in Nature Communications this week, reiterating and reporting the fact that some 66,000 people a year in Southeast Asia are infected by SARS variety viruses. And so spillover events are gonna happen and they're going to happen potentially more and more often with human interaction with animals, with climate change, with all these things. So one antibody to rule them all. Southeast Asia is a perfect location for viruses to get into and spread amongst the humans because the climate doesn't have a hard cold spell that makes things dormant. And it's high density of human population. So that's where most of the humans are. If you were to just say, okay, just based on the numbers, where are the humans on the earth? Southeast Asia, that's where we live. I don't know, aside from the volcanoes, I really, really think I need to move to Iceland. It's usually colder there. I mean, they've had the viruses, but they have fewer parasites. Everything's a lot nicer there, except for the cold and the rain and the volcanoes. I don't know. How far north can you go with climate change making all the North hot blair? How far north can we go? How about off the place? Just build a biodome, you're a set. That's right, I'll stay there forever. On that note for biology time. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. It is time for that part of the show that we know and love. It's Blair's Animal Corner. With Blair? Dance hall. Five pairs, little pet, no pet at all. You wanna hear about the animals. She's your girl. Except for giant pandas and squirrels. What you got, Blair? Thank you. I can't start without it. Hey, do spiders sleep? What do you think? Never, never. That's how they keep falling into people's mouths when they're sleeping. They're just alive. And then they die, right? Okay, rough. Maybe is actually the answer. This is a study where some researchers put cameras on baby jumping spiders at night to see if they slept. The footage showed patterns that looked a lot like standard sleep cycles. The spider's legs twitched and parts of their eyes flickered. This appeared to be a REM sleep-like state. And as we know, REM or rapid eye movement is an active phase of sleep when parts of the brain light up with activity and is closely linked with dreaming. Birds and mammals have been shown to experience REM sleep. But it's really hard to figure out with little creepy crawlies if they're dreaming or not because, for one, a lot of them have fixed eyes. So you can't see rapid eye movement if there's no eye movement at all. Oh. For another, they have little lob-brains. So spiders have to turn their heads to see? No, in fact, jumping spiders in particular have eye movement. They can move their retinas around to change their gaze when they hunt. So they were able to observe rapid eye movement or something that looked kind of like that in these spiders. They also have a see-through layer on their outer layer that gives a clear window into their body so they could kind of see what was going on internally with them as well. They found, they had these jumping spiders in a lab already and found that the spiders at night would hang from threads of silk in their lab containers and just chill for a really long time. This is at University of Konstanz in Germany. And so from there, one of the researchers in lab was like, you think that spider's dreaming? Which I guess is exactly what you would do if you were a researcher in a lab super late at night surrounded by spiders. I imagine like half the lights off because a lot of the researchers have gone home, right? You're stuck there, you're plugging through some data. You look to your side, you see a baby jumping spider just suspended from the top of their cage, just really looks like they're snoozing. It's time to do some research. I see spiders like that and I think they're dead. Right. Don't spiders end up just hanging from a piece of web all curled their arms, their legs curled up inward when they die. Yeah, and as we found out from our spider claw a couple of weeks ago, they do that because they're hydraulic. So that also means that if they're in rest, they're gonna be curled up because of the hydraulics of the legs. So if their brain is turned off, then that is the position that they should be in. Researchers also said that just observationally, it looked a lot like REM sleep in dogs or cats the way that they twitched a little bit when they were in this state. And then it happened in regular cycles very similar to sleep patterns in humans. So all that to say, do we know if they're technically sleeping? I would say it all depends on how you define it, but I doubt that they are having the complex, rapid eye movement that birds and mammals experience simply because they have this blob brain that is not quite the complex network that we have. So it's possible, but I think it's likely not as complex as what we experienced. So be my personal guess. I don't know, because also part of sleep is like long-term memory storage and all this other stuff that we actually know invertebrates can do. There's an argument to be made the other way, but there needs to be more testing to figure out whether they're fully out, whether they respond to triggers slowly or not at all while they're asleep, sleep, quote unquote. And they have to find a way to scan a spider brain for sleep activity. Yeah, I get a very high resolution scanner to view that one. So we know that even yeast have circadian rhythms. So there is this idea of the need for sleep that goes across all taxa of the animal kingdom, right? So sleep, yes, maybe they do sleep. Is it REM sleep that they are actually experiencing where they're dreaming, where they're practicing their neurons? I mean, maybe with the neurons, even though it's just a ganglion and not a complex brain, perhaps the neurons still need to practice their connections with one another to allow for better learning. We know that jumping spiders do have a certain amount of learning and memory and behaviors that last them into the future. So I actually would be on team REM sleep. Very interesting. I concur with that, Kiki. I think there's the fundamental thing that dreams do and humans get all bogged down with having this big complicated brain that has all this, well, I think my dream meant nothing more. What do my dreams mean? But the function is to, you know, while you're doing that is, yeah, you're locking in memory or you're maybe running through scenarios and strategizing so that if a fly does hit the web today, you've been thinking about it. So I think spiders are probably dreaming about flies getting stuck in their web and that sort of, in a form of mental practice for the event. Also, I would predict that flies also dream about getting stuck in web. Very different dreams, depending on which brain. One is a happy dream. One's a nightmare. But I think there's a little bit more. Let me ask you this, Justin. Do you think that necrobiotic spiders dream of electric flies? Ooh, that's a good one. Yes, of course. Anyway. All the time. Now we're really starting to delve into the very, very edges of philosophy and consciousness. That's the name of the novel that inspired the film Webrunner, just so you know. So it's anyway. I haven't heard of any of it. Somebody out there got it. Anyway. Next I want to talk about rat sperm. But it's not where you expect it. It's inside a mouse. Wait, what? So researchers have generated rat sperm cells inside sterile mice using a technique called blastocyst complementation. The idea is you can use pluripotent stem cells to create a chimera, a rat mouse chimera. I have to find the exact language because it's a domino effect that it's wild. So OK, so normally pluripotent stem cells can be used to make gametes in the form of eggs or sperm. It's really hard to do, but it can be done. Most of the time pluripotent stem cells are often used to create rat organs in mice. But the idea of making a rat gamete inside a mouse, so taking those two areas of pluripotent stem cell research and putting them together has not been done. So they wanted to see if they could do this. They injected rats, sorry, they injected rat pluripotent stem cells into mouse embryos to produce a mouse rat chimera. An essential gene for sperm production was mutated in the mouse blastocysts, so that's step two. The rat stem cells developed together with the mouse cells, generating a chimeric animal, composed of genotypes from the two species. So we have a rat mouse chimera. A consequence of the genetic sterility in inducing mutation was that the testes were an empty niche. They were sterile, they didn't create mouse sperm. Then rat cells could colonize the testes, generating rat sperm in mouse rat chimeras. So it's basically, it's the combination of making these chimeras and manipulating very specific genes to create basically like a vacuum inside that not physically, but like a power vacuum almost. Like I have testes with no sperm inside, uh-oh. So like, what do I got in here? Oh, rat sperm. So like, rat sperm can fill that space. OK, so. So what are the implications for endangered animals and re-speciation stuff? That's exactly it. Yes, so before we get there, though, this proved that this could happen. But the sperm cells were able to fertilize egg cells, but they didn't develop normally. They did not give rise to living offspring. So this piece worked, but it did not work to fruition yet. And very importantly, somebody says at the very end of this release, one still needs to showcase the production of female reproductive cells, i.e. eggs, in female sterile mice, especially if we envision utilizing this technology for species conservation efforts. So they were able to make sperm. But without an egg, you're. That's the point. You're up and overducked without a paddle, as I was saying. As you're saying, guys. Yes. So they definitely, that needs to be figured out before this means anything. However, the idea here is that that means a sterile animal could be a host for the generation of germ cells from other animal species, which means they could be utilized to produce endangered animal species, gametes, inside prevalent animals, like a super endangered rodent, inside a mouse, and. Or a woolly mammoth inside an elephant. Right. But what they're really excited about, as researchers often are, is human medicine. So they might be able to use this to produce rat transgenic models for biomedical research. So they can use the same methods to create the perfect specimen for medical research this way. The perfect specimen that just has this. Whoa. Yeah. So first they have to make in. So I guess first they're going to try to see if they can get these sperm to work with eggs. And then they're going to try to find a way to make eggs, which like. That's a different story. Insanely more difficult in a lot of ways. Like mammals are churning out sperm constantly. Female's not so much. It's a very specific event. So it's tough. But it's still really exciting, of course, for medical research. But I got very excited because I was thinking immediately not about woolly mammoths, but about rhinos. Yeah. And the fact that there are rhino species that are on the verge of extinction. And you might have female rhinos, but not male rhinos of the right species. You could get the right subspecies or species of rhino to produce the right sperm based on a seed vault, essentially. And then you could naturally, they could inseminate the female of the correct species. So I think that is likely to come to fruition before any of these other already extinct animals get figured out. But it's pretty exciting. Yeah. If you've got the female of a species still living, but not the male then, or a limited number of males, then that could be the answer to that problem. Yeah, it can also prevent inbreeding and reduce genetic diversity if you have some sperm and storage, basically. I wonder what the, so here mice and rats, they're genetically very distinct. But the fact that they were able to make these chimeras and it worked fairly well. Now I'm wondering what the distance could actually be between species for creating the chimeras successfully and having the sperm work in this kind of manner. Mu ha ha. I'm not Dr. Evelling it here, really. But it's an interesting question, knowing what we know about human pig chimeras and other primates even, what could be done. It's actually always somewhat fascinating to me that there is such a fall off between different species being able to mingle and create a bioblast ring. Because you would think one of the more conserved areas of biology would be reproduction. But of course, it's also that thing that needs the output of that needs to change so much, depending on the environment that it's evolved to inhabit. That it is both, I think, probably a very conserved and maybe it's just the output, the thing that you're making that's causing the confluence of too many genes trying to do the same thing or, you know, anyway. Yeah. I was also thinking about if they could take a step back. If this could be used in endangered species, if, again, you have if you have a reduced genetic diversity, could you take the species difference away and use the same method to create a genetically distinct version of the same species? Right. And then, of course, I started thinking, I don't know if any of you have ever watched the cartoon show Batman Beyond. But there's a whole storyline where basically somebody gets injected with Bruce Wayne's DNA, and so he fathers a child through this other person and he doesn't know about it. And it's basically this. Wow. Whoa, they really are. That's the story he told. No, no, that was the whole view. That was the billionaire with the PR firm behind you. Oh, I see, honey, what happened was. Well, anyway, there might be some scientific basis for this in the future. Well, and this all can lead to wonderful pop culture and science fiction writing for our future entertainment. Yeah. This is This Week in Science. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode. If you are enjoying the show, please head over to twist.org today and click on our Patreon link and help support the show. You are a part of keeping this show going, and we really can't do this without you. Thank you for your support. All right, Justin, do you have some really good news? Like really, really good news? Well, I did promise in the first half of the show that the final half would be some good news. And so here we go. All the bad things are going on on the planet. Forget about it. We humans occasionally do make an effort to move things in the general direction of not being as terrible as we have been in the past. The President of the United States signed an executive order announcing that his America the Beautiful Plan, this was something signed a while ago, will conserve 30% of US land and water by 2030. Scientists noticed that policy sounded pretty good, and they thought, hey, why don't we throw some science behind that and give some suggestions? So they put an article out in Bioscience, a proposal for sort of rewilding the Western network. Comprising of 11 large reserve areas already owned by the federal government, the authors advocate for the secession of livestock raising on some federal lands, coupled with the restoration of some keystone species. Specifically, they are focused on the gray wolf and the North American beaver. And there have been examples of the past. They're not just sort of pulling a wishful thing. There have been places where wolf and beaver populations have been brought back, and the effects on the biome there have been fantastic. So you've got wolves and beavers produce broad ecosystem effects, according to the article. For instance, they say, by felling trees and shrubs and building dams, beavers enrich fish habitat, increase water and sediment retention, maintain water flows during droughts, provide wet fire breaks, which reduces the spread of wildfires, improves water quality, except for PFAS, which they can't even get rid of, increase carbon secro state. God, I can't talk today. Sequestation and generally enhanced habitat for many plants and animal species when the beavers are reintroduced. Wolves also have a potential to reshape ecosystems. They keep deer populations from overpopulating, which is an interesting side note, but even though Americans own more guns and more guns every year, less people hunt. There's millions of less hunters than there were just 20 years ago. People don't really participate in hunting anymore. So by keeping deer populations from overpopulating, that allows native vegetation to regrow, they've found that foresting, the forests tend to bounce back because whereas deer would normally be grazing the little seedlings that make up the forest, they tend to hide more when there's wolves around and don't go into those open areas where forests are starting to push their way out with new seedlings. Also in reducing the number of grandmothers needed to visit would help reduce carbons in natural areas. The rewilding plan would produce profound cascading effects, say the authors. They could ultimately benefit many of the 92 threatened endangered species across nine taxonomic groups, five amphibians, five birds, two crustaceans, 22 fishes, 39 flowering plants, five insects, 11 mammals, one reptile and three, make it two snail species that are currently endangered. Livestock, they say would have to move along, little doggy, meat derived. This is interesting to think that you know, because we talk, we hear a lot about, you'd be reclaiming these Bureau of Land Management, federal land where cattle have been allowed to graze for free or for very little. Meat derived from foraging on federal lands only accounts for 2% of the nation's production of meat in the first place. So it's actually not nearly as big as I would have guessed it to be. And then there's another story out this week we were talking about which is along the same vein in reclaiming nature for nature in the news. Bureau of Land Management again has granted a request by a nonprofit, now this is what I was talking about in the disclaimer, find a nonprofit, put some time and effort into it, throw them some money or give them your expertise or just donate your hours on the earth to helping them with the cause. This is a nonprofit called American Prairie, which has a herd of bison that it is returning to the lands. So the Bureau of Land Management has granted them 24,000 hectares in central Montana, which is actually about the amount of land on fire in France right now, a little warming, huge fire there. But this is the largest land approval Bureau of Land Management has given to the American Prairie Organization. And many ecologists are celebrating for the first time in their lives. This is quoting ecologist, this is Beth Baker of Netherlands Institute of Ecology. We get a lot of bad news about declines of biodiversity. But then to see these really, these things really gives you hope, it makes you think it is possible to restore these ecosystems and give them majestic animals the room they deserve. And she notes that the benefits go beyond bison to a host of prairie plants and other native animals. Ranching groups and state officials are less enthusiastic about the move, fearing the bison will compete with cattle for the almighty tourist dollar. Cattle producers in central Montana fear seeing land. They exploited for generations, but never owned nor stewarded, returned to the natural state of biodiversity in which they were originally found. So according to BLM, there's actually plenty of land in Montana for both the nature and cattle ranching. It's land as far as the agency. American Prairie aims to, you okay? I'm just curious, I mean, cattle tourism? Is that a thing? Yeah, I was surprised to see that. No, no, no, it is not, that was something I made up. But I'm like, of course they're like, of course they're upset. They've got a free meal ticket for this land that their cattle can graze on that they don't have to do anything for. Right. And the bison might compete for the resources because the bison are also grazers. Are you using some of that land that they would normally be able to pre-graze now? I was like, wait a minute. Well, I was like, I try to let that one go by, but I'm glad you got it. I like that go by. Oh, the local organizations in there in Central. I'm pretty sure cows look very similar in different states. Yeah, that freeway you're on. Oh look, more cows. That's great, okay. Well, the sort of joke there is that they, obviously they are worried about a very specific self-interest pocketbook of themselves profiting from this. Not the actual region of Central Montana, which would actually probably benefit if people did go take a tour to see bison in the natural preserve, natural preserve, as opposed to nobody's driving there to see your cattle wandering around, right? So it's in a way, would be counterintuitive for them to be working against their own interests, but that's because the local economy isn't necessarily their own interests. It's just their own particular economy. Prairie, these folks seem to be pretty amazing. The organization already manages about 180,000 hectares of public and private land, much of it former ranch land, which they now graze around 800 bison. And it's hoping to expand that number to 1,000 now that it has the extra space. They also go on to say grasslands, especially tall grass prairies are some of the most endangered and least protected ecosystems in the world. They have received very little restoration efforts because again, cattle farmers aren't doing that. It's a cattle ranchers, I guess you don't grow cattle. Some former prairie, some of the former prairies are difficult to restore farmland. It's very difficult to get back to natural pristine places, but cattle, the grazing lands, open lands that have just been used for cattle to wander around and graze on, apparently that's a much easier change. So that's what they've been, that's the land that they've been focusing on. So rewilding, reintroducing proposal to reintroduce wolves and beavers to get the ecosystem looking good and bison coming back, you know, 30% of US wild land being dedicated to nature again. Sounds like it should be. I hope it all happens. Yeah. The rhythm is heard, the discouraging word. Thank you for not calling them buffalo. They're not buffalo, they're bison. This is, so I always have this question and I don't know it's a deficit of my memory. It's a separate thing, they're different species. It is a separate thing because everyone's talking about bison. Yeah, call them bison, it's perfect. So, okay, but so the American buffalo, it's always been bison. Hang on, the thing that we've been calling buffaloes in America is bison. The buffaloes didn't go extinct and now all we have is their cousins. They were never buffalo in America. They were called bison. Yeah, but it's like, yeah. It's like koala bear. It is a misnomer. You need to get rid of it. They said it because they looked like buffalo in Africa. They are not related. Buffalo living in Africa. Yeah, hamburgers don't have hamburgers. But I can. The US. But I think the weird thing is because of this information that you've given me, for somewhere along the line, I thought the American buffalo went extinct, but it's cousin, which is different. The bison still managed to survive. But if you tell me- No, we did a good job at killing off the bison for, I mean, we did a really good job. We just didn't quite get it. There's still some left. Cousins, big bison. Big bison. Oh yeah, oh, you know what? You know what helped me remember it? Good old bison bills traveling Western show. Yeah, there you go. Perfect. There you go, bison bill. Well, beyond buffalo, I mean, this episode's focused a lot on the environment and how we are affecting the environment, climate change and all these kinds of things. Well, we've heard, I think last week or so, there was news floating around that all the turtles in Florida are becoming female because of hotter temperatures and climate change. Well, this week it's not turtles, lizards are in trouble as a result of climate change. A new study published in the proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, PNAS, have determined that lizards, which bear live young in hotter environments, are giving birth to offspring with shorter telomeres. So from the point of birth, the baby lizards are older genetically. So the telomeres we've talked about before, Blair, you know we love the telomeres. We want them to be nice and happy and long. And as you get older, your telomeres, end caps on the ends of the shoelaces, they get shortened and shortened and shortened and shortened. Every time that your cells divide, those telomeres get broken down, especially once telomerase, the enzyme that protects the telomeres stops working. Well, the hot temperatures these researchers determined, they focused on 10 populations of common lizards, Zotika vivipara, also known as the viviparous lizard, which means that they give birth to live young. They live throughout the massive central mountains in France, and they looked over the period of the study looking at blood and tissue samples from hundreds of individuals, finding that those in hotter places had babies with shorter telomeres. And based on the extent of the damage, it's unlikely that many of those individuals would live long enough to reproduce. That is the killer. That is the killer. That's the species killer. Yes, and that is the species killer. So the researchers suggest that there are actually, during the course of the study, there was one particular population in the warmest area, an area around Mont Carreux in France, but it disappeared entirely and the researchers are calling it what in scientific terminology is pseudo extinct. That doesn't mean that it's like fake extinct. It means that a species went extinct while it's related daughter species, other lineages that were related to it actually continue living on. So there's kind of like a hole in the phylogeny. Yeah, the researchers say it's something that's happening at a very, very rapid pace. So, hey, thanks climate change and hot temperatures. You're making babies with old cells that can't live long enough to have other babies. I thought we were gonna end the show with good news. All right, all right, good news, good news, good news. Okay, right, Blair. Yes. I learned from big brown bats how you can live longer. Yes, give me. Okay, big brown bats live longer because they hibernate and because they hibernate, they have slower epigenetic changes. So while we're alive, we experienced lots of stuff and there's lots of mutations that occur, little shifts that happen and markers, methylation on our DNA that tie things up and make them harder or easier to turn into proteins, depending on the gene that we're talking about. But epigenetic changes lead to faster aging. And if you wanna not age as fast, you don't want as much epigenetic changes going on while you're living. Well, anyway, epizekis, there we go, epizekis fuscus, the big brown bat lives longer with fewer epigenetic changes because of hibernation. Hibernation slows its metabolism and allows it to live longer. So Blair, if you wanna live longer, you need to hibernate. Well, I don't think my work will let me do that. Maybe we can start working for it. It's not just the four-day work week, it's hibernation season. Yeah, just like teachers, right? Hibernate. I gotta go into torpor. See you all in six to eight weeks. That's it. I mean, the Europeans already have it right. They take a month off in the summer, it's perfect. Hold my calls. I'm not answering my emails, we're not coming back. And finally, finally, finally, let's talk about sleep because it's the end of the show. And I know I don't wanna put anybody to sleep, but researchers looking at brains are very interested in how brains fall asleep. And so some researchers that recently published again in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they paired fMRI research with EEG research. So they got the electrical activity of the brain also at the same time that they were getting the blood flow in the brain, which is a proxy for neuronal activation. And they were able to use these two different kinds of imaging to really get a good resolution view space and time of how neurons, or well, not specific neurons, but areas of the brain were active during falling asleep. I mean, it's a little weird. They put people in fMRI machines wearing EEG caps and said, hey, take a nap. The hum of that machine though, it's just perfect. Oh yeah, I can do it right away. No problem. Yeah, it's just so comfortable and cozy. I'd probably have to stay awake for three days ahead of time to fall asleep in one of those machines. But the people who did, there might be, that's what I'm pointing out is there could be a confounding factor that people were sleeping in these machines so it could affect the way that the sleep occurred. But what the researchers were able to determine were specific populations of neurons and the order in which they were falling or becoming inactive or less active during the stages of sleep. And so the researchers determined that area that while you're falling asleep, that initially drifting off to sleep, the thalamus is the first region to show sleep-associated blood flow patterns. And this also kind of fits in with lots of other research that the thalamus and our emotions and all that kind of stuff. And the basal brain areas are kind of the first thing to get tired and start putting everything to sleep. But interestingly, that was not the area of the brain that woke up first. So the areas of the brain that woke up first were the frontal cortical regions of the brain which are associated with attention and cognitive activity. Well, this is like gonna keep you from getting attacked in your sleep, right? Like that's the first thing that has to happen if you got to wake up quickly to protect yourself. Right, which means to people punching other people. Before the U.S. was in. There's a lion in my apartment. First thing I need to do is go find coffee. So I can be awake enough to handle it. I think it's just, I mean, I want to. That's a chemical dependency. That's a confounding variable for sure. But it's tied to attention, right? Yeah, it's tied to attention and cognitive processing. But so it's going to be very, as you first wake up, I imagine that instead of being just emotionally responsive, you want to be more aware, like you said, Blair, of what's around. So Justin, is there coffee? Has the coffee machine started yet? Is it worth getting out of bed right now? So you have those realizations first, or is there an intruder in the house? Am I sleeping in a big fMRI machine? You know, what's going on around me? Yeah, so that awareness becomes the attention, the awareness, the processing starts, and then the emotional stuff will come in later as the brain wakes up. But it's interesting that it's backwards. If on the other side, if because the emotional stuff is the first to go to sleep, if that's why, if you're stressed, if you're anxious, if you're upset, if you're even really happy and amped, yeah, you like, you can't go to sleep. It's like, it's the gatekeeper almost if it has to go to sleep first. That's really interesting. Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, calm the basal brain. Yeah, calm that down. Use your cognitive processing to slow the basal brain and the basal brain can calm down and allow the rest of the brain to fall asleep. This is making a lot of sense. This is why you fall asleep during meditation is because you're like- Or math class. But not during twists. Math class, I get excited. Oh, let me solve that equation. I love you. I'm fast. Thank you for the whiteboard. I know the answer to that question. I miss math class. Have we done it? Yeah. Have we stimulated our frontal cortical regions enough this evening? I think so, yes. All right, well, I think we've done it as well. Thank you, everyone, for joining us for another episode of This Week in Science. We have finished the show and it's time for us to go. So I would like to say thank you to FADA for your help with show notes and social media, helping out with all of those things that you do. 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And if you are interested in supporting us on Patreon, head over to twist.org and click on the Patreon link. Next week's show. We will be back Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific Time and another show Thursday at 5 a.m. Central European Time, broadcasting live from our YouTube and our Facebook channels from twist.org slash live. That's next Thursday, not tomorrow, right? No. Yeah, okay, got it. I just want to clarify, because it's still Wednesday, the night stays right now. All right, anyway, do you want to listen to us as a podcast? Maybe while you wake up for your day and activate your awareness part of your brain, just search for This Week in Science over podcasts that are found. If you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe as well. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes and links to stories will be available on our website, www.twist.org. You can contact us directly, email Kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com, Justin at twistmanion at gmail.com or me, Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org. Don't get those suffixes confused. Just be sure to put twist T-W-I-S in the subject line or your email will be spam filtered into a baby jumping spider's dreams. Aw, yeah, how cute. You can also hit us up on the Twitter, which is the thing where we are at twist science at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly Net, Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you would like us to cover or address, a suggestion for an interview, a hi-coo that comes to you in the night, please let us know. We'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you'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. It's the end of the world. So I'm setting up a shop. Got my banner unfurled. It says the scientist is in. I'm gonna sell my advice. Show them how to stop their robots with a simple device. I'll reverse below the warming with a wave of my hand. And all it is coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method for all that it's worth. And I'll broadcast my app. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science, science, science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science, science, science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That's what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got them. And we are at the end of the show. In fact, we're in the after show. Gone to the after. The after show. Gone to the after. We should have like an after show seance instead of science. Who are we gonna try to talk to? Carl Sagan. He doesn't believe in seances. He's like, even if he heard you, he'd be like, no. It's not a seance, it's a science. Oh, I get it all right. Okay. There it up. Waka, waka, waka, waka, waka. Do you mean? Hold on. Do you mean? Waka, waka, waka? Waka, waka, waka. That's right. Waka, waka, waka. How far north could I go for cool weather, Eric Knapp? Says I can go to Utkyakvik. I can't even say it, but I could be a teacher. I could teach science in an Alaskan school district. I forget, the Q is a different sound, isn't it, in the- Good boy. I don't know how to print. I don't know how to print. We had a whole conversation about this one day. I remember talking about how the pronunciations go. Jalic sauce. Thank you so much for joining us over on Twitch. Oh, our lore would science with Harry Houdini. That's fun. Who would you science with out there, everyone? Do I have a universal translator? Yes, yes, yes. You've got a babblefish. Okay, great. Then probably Socrates. Oh. I just want to hear you talk about how everyone else is stupid. And he was, he was, he went, he marched to his death knowing he was getting murdered for a stupid reason. And he just, the eye roll, I could only imagine. I just, I think he'd be real saucy. Super saucy, I think so. Yes. The snark on Socrates would be high, I think. We have a room, we have a room. Yes, we have kitties. We have kitties. All kitties are accounted for this week. No missing kitties. Good. Yes. Where was she hiding? Where was she? Oh my gosh, she's hidden a number of times in the last week. So I'm like, which, which hiding place was she in? She was in a box. Geez, of course she was. She wouldn't come out and she was angry and she was stressed out as we just moved and she didn't eat. She wasn't coming out for food. Oh, so this is cat behavior. Yes. That's really fascinating that I've discovered. Apparently cats, when they go through what they consider traumatic or stressful experiences, they associate, they can associate another cat that they're totally friends with, usually, with that trauma. And because of that, they can then, when they come near each other, they hiss, they want to fight, they don't like that cat anymore because they are now, but you were with me during that trauma, it's your fault. Are your cats related? No, they're sisters. Okay. They're sisters, they've been together since they were born and all of a sudden with this move, they decided that they hated each other. And so for several days, I had to keep them in different rooms every time they even came down the hallway from one another. There was hissing and yowling and yeah. Yeah, our and Laura, it was kitty PTSD. They were both fine with all the people in the family and we're the ones who subjected them to the trauma, but in their world, it was all about them and how much they did not like the fact that the other one was associated with the trauma that they'd been through. This is bad. Yeah, but anyway, they're better now. They aren't hiding as much. They like each other. Well, they don't love each other again, but they are now able to be within feet of each other. Not, they don't just be checking the time. I read articles on, of course, you know, you go to the internet, my cat acting like this. And some people were talking about how their cats wouldn't talk to each other for months and how it took them months to get the cats to associate with each other again. So I was waiting. Do I have a cat naming convention? No, I haven't been able to reserve a convention hall for something like that. I'm kidding. My cats were named very loosely around space themed things because of my son and he's facing things. My cats are females. And yes, I know females can spray, but they've both been fixed. They don't spray. And they're not gonna, they're gonna spray the house, Fada. My cat, they're gonna rub their cheeks all over it. But if I found out that my cats were spraying the house, I'd be kind of pissed. I see what you did there. Yeah, fixed female cats can spray too. It's true. I don't know, I've been, I am knocking on this bamboo desk. But they don't spray. We have all the cats. All the cats are good. They're coming along in terms of the household. Yes. Oh dear. We need to get rid of that person who's spamming. Who's that spam put block user? Hi, go away person. Is that all the same person? Oh my goodness. Yowzers. Yeah, best adult dating site. Band hammer. Prove it. Hey, you know, I love emojis and everything, but. It's a bold claim. I need data. You need data. That would be some interesting research. Yikes. How's it going over there, Justin? You awake? Got enough coffee? Yeah. Oh yeah, totally wide awake. Shove a cup of coffee. Sun's out. Have you learned Danish yet? Nice. No, no, no, not at all. I went to the, I think the most unnecessary in-person meeting I've ever attended. Oh no. Which is to sign up for the basic Danish classes that I'm going to be taking. I had to go and meet with somebody to assess my level of Danish language ability, which was none. Basically. You're like, this is why I'm taking the class. Yeah, I'm looking for your basic class. How much Danish do you speak? None. Okay. Well, let's start you out with a basic class. Okay. Great idea. Like it was really, it was really like, it seems like, I mean, there's a reason for it. It's a free education, which is very awesome and cool that they provide this. And so, but there is a layer where they assess where you belong. So they put you in the right class and everything. But because it was none, I'm just like, yeah, I really don't. Did you get to say, talk for coffee? Talk for coffee? I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can tell a dance. Yeah, I can eat for stov. I can eat for stov. I can eat for stov. Yeah, I can eat for stov. I can speak Danish. I just don't understand it. Oh. And it's a part of- That's funny. I feel like it's usually the other way around. Usually cognition goes before speaking. So part of there's a two-tiered problem here. Part of the problem is it is, while a Germanic language at its core, it is non-fynetic, or at least it's not the phonetics or the English at all. Oh, so you don't understand the reason. Can't read it. Is what you're saying. Can't read it at all. And they have three more vowels. They read you. And they have sounds and intonations that do not occur in the English language that are very hard to hear. Oh, it's just, it's almost endless when somebody's trying to help you pronounce something and you're repeating exactly what they're saying, but apparently with different letters or different phonetics, because I'm not hearing. My ears just not trained to comprehend the sound that was just made. And so it fills in a sound I'm familiar with, which is different. So it's gonna be tough. I'm telling you. Oh, gosh. But I don't have to get to the, you know, the basic class shouldn't be an unachievable level of Danish to be able to speak. I should be able to walk into any establishment and use a few phrases of the Danish that I've picked up to progress to the point where they just start speaking English to me. Because that's usually what happens. Almost everyone I encounter here speaks English pretty fluently. So it's also that whole immersion thing. It's not working. Because nobody's gonna, oh, you're butchering my language. Let me just use yours more eloquently than you speak it. Oh, okay, that would be fine. That's what you find. Yeah, you go and they go, oh, I'll speak English. It's okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, higher university levels are often taught in English. So, and there's a lot of higher education here, but it's even, you know, you don't have to be in an academic setting. The person who are working the grocery store line speaks fluent English for some uncomfortable reason. Yeah, they do, and I'm very thankful. In school. I blame Hollywood. I blame Hollywood. I think that's... I think it's because they're a part of Europe and it makes it easier for them all to interact. But there's no European nation that speaks English. The entire UK. Ah, not Europe anymore. Well, Ireland, come on. Okay, yeah, I know. Fair enough. You've got it. Fair enough, fair enough. If you call that English, I guess you have a point. Yeah, yeah. Maybe, can you find it? Maybe just do a conversation partner. Like, go ahead. No, I have that. I have that. And it's still... So there's a varying degrees of English that are spoken at home. Combination of mostly English with a decent amount of Danish foreign. I've got post-it notes all over the place. Oh, and it's sometimes fun because the translations for things are sometimes very similar to the roots of words, but a light switch is a stick contact. Stick contact. Yeah, it's like, okay, I can't wear how you came to that. It's just very literally describing the thing. You know, stick contact. That's a light switch. Okay. Well, that shouldn't be too hard to, huh? What's a light? I have no idea. But it's... How would you say, turn on the light? I don't know, but it's probably... Oh, yeah, I don't know how to do it. I know how to turn it off. It's lumedetno. Yeah, close that now. Yeah, we don't know for that. Lumedetno. Close that now. I had a dog that spoke Danish or understood Danish. Didn't speak Danish. That was really amazing. I had a dog that understood Danish. So, you know, I can communicate to the dogs in Denmark. Just fine. But... We do hakeeks? Ah, and I eat species of that. How do hakeeks come in who? Stuff like that, it's fine. But... You don't have any hakeeks? What's hakeeks, I know. Oh, I don't know. Oh, hakeeks, it's like a cracker, biscuit, treat. It's kind of a catch offer, like a cracker or a dog treat. Dog treat, great. But opereumens, too, though. They don't have a lot, what is a great name? They don't really have a lot. I don't see, you don't see big dogs here. Everything's small in this country. It's like very, you know, the people are normal size, but all of their things are like Liliputian style, like small dogs, small cars. Oh, but big bikes, their bikes are huge because they're usually, you know, they can be traveling with a family of four on a single bicycle as they go around. I'm trying to imagine a family of four on a bicycle right now. It's a very big bicycle. They have not stopped, like in America, we stopped inventing the bicycle once it got to two wheels. Eh, you got your BMX, your road bike, whatever, but still they have, they use them for transportation. So they have these really long bikes with baskets that, you know, apartments where people can sit in who are passengers and, you know, cart, and they'll be twice as long as a regular bike. Might be electric powered. They might be three-wheeled contraptions or two-wheeled contraptions, just giant carts in the front. It's all sorts of like interesting looking bikes here. That's one of the amazing things is there's so many bikes. Now, I found out too, I've been finding out that if you're in a bike lane with a stroller, you don't have the right of way. You would think, you'd think, you know, babies have the right of way. And then, well, maybe, and then, you know, then it's like people in wheelchairs, you know, you know, need assistance getting about, then pedestrians, and somewhere in there maybe children in wheelchairs. But, and then pedestrians, and then bicycles, because it technically would be a vehicle, right? You know, when you're navigating the roadways. Nope, nope, bicycles first. All other modes of transportation are humans on foot second. Sort of like the way Americans are with cars having the right of way. Babies crawling? Nope. Forget about the babies. Get them out of the way. Bikes first. Rick Loveman says that Davis, my hometown, has a few bikes. It's the highest per capita bike use in the United States. It's the bike capital of the world. I'd love to know if that's still accurate, because I know- Yes, we beat Portland. We beat Portland. Yes, yes, we beat Portland. Do you keep tabs on this every single year? Like you're like, this is the competition we gotta know. Davis, every year comes out, comes out officially with the new board. Oh, last four bicycles. Confirming, and if anything should change, or if we start to lose ground, they force people to ride bikes. Then everybody goes and steals more bikes from Portland. We have a bike giveaway program. They get more people on it. So, Justin, I have- They're not townhouse. I have good and bad news. So, Davis is the bike capital of the United States. Thank you. Amsterdam is the bike capital of the world. There we go. Makes sense. I can tell you, if they have more bike use per capita than the city of Davis, I will be, I mean, we have it. Per capita. I will admit, we've been losing ground. We've been losing ground. I know we have because- Yeah, it's true. Because it used to be the bike rack. Right? Everywhere, we're full, to the point where you had bikes that were getting locked up to parked cars. It just ran out of bike racks. But it seems like that's gone down, probably with the pandemic. A lot of places have gone. Apparently, Denmark has got a lot more vehicular traffic and car sales went up during the pandemic. Because everything is public transportation. You really don't need a car here, but because people wanted to isolate a lot of cars. I just found- So you were right. Sorry. Thank you. I just found- Move.org. Per capita? Is that- Hold on. Did you look it up? Let Kiko go. I'll chime in after. Oh, but I wanted to be right about something. That seems way more important than anything anybody else was going to say. Sorry. So in the United States, I found a list that says that Portland has the highest percentage of bicycle commuters, 6.3%. It's a lie. But it's cities. I don't know if Davis would- A lie. Count. It's not on- I don't think they put- Right. Davis isn't on that list, but the list that Davis makes, they definitely put Davis on that same list. That's how they know that they're the bike capital of the world. Let's see. I found another one. The Netherlands is the country with the most cyclists. The city with the most cyclists is Copenhagen. Oh, yeah, they're all over. Up to 60- That's the hip- Up to 62% of the population use a bicycle for the daily commute to work or school, cycling an average of 894,000 miles every day. Yeah. I mean, there's trains that go everywhere, right? The train system is very, very central to Copenhagen. And there's whole cars that are basically bike racks. So you take your bike onto the train, park it in the bike rack on the train, and then get where you're going. You go back off on your bike again. So it's a great system. Claire, you were going to say I was right about something. The problem is there are different metrics. So you were saying about per capita, and you're right. As far as I can tell, Davis has the most per capita because there are two bikes for every human. Yeah. But there are about 50,000 bikes in Davis. Oh, so, absolutely, I guess. Yeah, they're- No, you have to have your road bike and your mountain bike. Yeah. Yeah, road bike, mountain bike. So there are 50,000 bikes in Davis. There are almost 900,000 bikes in Amsterdam. Wow. Yeah, but it's a gigantic metropolis sprawling. It's a bigger city. Right, and so the per capita is more like one and a half. Still more than one, which is weird. So part of the per capita reason why there's two bikes per person in Davis, too, is I think also metric, maybe, because Davis has a population of about 50,000 people, not including the university. Students, yes. Students, which is a population of about 30,000 people, who mostly rely on bikes to get around. So I'm kind of wondering when they do that thing, what they're looking at, but Davis is small enough also that you can have a bike and get everywhere in town. And it's a town that was designed with the bicycle in mind. The town logo is a bicycle, but there's green belts that are designed for bike travel that connect all of the parts of town everywhere. So you can even ride your bike. They have bike lanes, which, again, I think was invented in Davis. They have bike lanes. That's a thing almost on every street, but they also have dedicated paths where bikes can go and don't even have to interact with traffic in your cars. The question that Fada has asked in our Discord, which Patreon patrons get to be a part of, does Davis have a yearly naked bike ride? San Francisco does. Really? No. I didn't know San Francisco did. That's cool. No. Portland does. It is the largest naked bike ride. So that's something that you'll find in a place like Portland or San Francisco where you have a, let's say a population that... Portland likes its motto, which is keep Portland weird. That a population that can go outside without their clothes on, without getting scorched by the ever blazing intensity of the sun that comes unfiltered to the city of Davis. There are seasons in Davis when that scorching is not quite as intense. They did the naked bike ride in the dead of winter when we have a couple... There's a season called spring. Oh, it's spring is 100 degrees in Davis now. The global warming thing hit there fast. It got there right away. It used to be you'd have those three days in late July or August, early July to August where it was three days, 110 degrees in a row. Now, that starts in spring and doesn't end until sometime in October, November. September, October. Oh, should I see what temperature it is in Davis? Not right now, but like what the... Right now it's only 70 degrees. Yeah, let me see what the high was today. Cools down to 70 degrees at night. The high today was 92. Yeah, actually not a bad day. That's a nice day. Tomorrow, 94. Friday, 95. Saturday, 97. Monday, 99. Tuesday, 103. So uncharacteristically mild summer. No, I mean, the summer is usually like 90s. I could, but like it's that over... Not anymore. It's over that, that over a hundred. You have not lived there for a while. It will get into the triple digits and just stay there for weeks. It would no wind. No wind. Just, oh, it's bad. It sounds awful. And then the delta-breeze will come in. But it's a dry heat. Yes, yes. It's a dry heat. So Denmark has, I guess, been having an unzeezingly warm summer. And I'm sweatier than I've been in a hundred years. It's so humid because it's a little island, little barely even enough to put both feet on dry ground surrounded by seawater. So it's very humid and there's no air conditioning. That's the other thing. Nobody has an air conditioning. There's more air, oh, not in Denmark. I was going to say in Davis, everyone has air conditioning now. Oh, yeah, you've done it. You have to. Yeah. Yeah, Alameda's also... Alameda's in the Bay area, right on the water, so. If you want to go someplace really interesting. Island life. Go to, is it Pacifica? Yeah, it's often foggy there. Yeah. Pacifica, I have left the city of Davis where it was 104, drove through Muggy, San Francisco in the mid 90s. Muggy, oh, geez. And then gotten down to Pacifica where you couldn't see the sun and the fog is rolling in the middle of the day. It is the most... 50 degrees. Yeah. Insane micro-climate. I've ever witnessed that can be so surrounded by just dramatically different weather. And then, yeah, yeah, sweater weather. All right, so whenever it gets into the triple digits, that's where I go. I go to Pacifica. Now you've given up your secret. It's going to be crowded. Yeah, it gets a little crowded anyway. It's fine. Yeah, it's okay. It's worth it. It's still worth it. Where'd Blair go? Alaska. It's a dry cold. That's funny. Very accurate, but funny. It's cold, but it's a dry cold. It's a dry cold. Does that mean it's not as cold? Does that mean it's colder? So did we establish Davis is in fact, the bike capital of the world? And the hottest place. And the hottest place of the U.S. Of the world per capita. Come on, almost 900,000 bikes. It's per capita. Who says that's what makes you the bike capital? Because it's how much it's being used. You can't just go in size. Otherwise, China gets everything. Beijing, Beijing, I guarantee you, has more bicycles. No, I don't think so. That's what I found. Guarantee you they have more bicycles. It's the per capita thing. That's making answer to that. Yeah, there's cities with 14, 15, 20 million people on this planet, Singapore. I don't know how many tens of millions of people live in Singapore alone. That they have to just buy the sheer numbers game. There's gonna be more bicycles present. Doesn't mean it's the per capita. That's how you do it. And also things like bike lanes and I think green belts also we should put you up in that category, which Portland does a really good job of with a lot of their bike paths and stuff. But yeah, no Davis still wins. And I need to verify this one because I think it's true and it might not be, but I'm pretty sure it is. I think Davis invented the bike lane. What? There was no bike lanes in San Francisco. There was no bike lanes in any city I'd ever visited. They probably originated not in the United States. I think Davis had a dedicated bike lanes before they existed anywhere else on the planet. Bike lane. That could be wrong, but I know they had them when I grew up. In 1896, the first bikeway in the United States was created by splitting the pedestrian way of Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. Brooklyn. That's a bikeway. That's different. That's a green belt. That's not a bike lane, which is a lane. You said bike lane, bike lane. Which is the lane dedicated to bikes between the car traffic and the sidewalk. That's a bike lane. Not a bike path. Not a bike lane. Los Angeles had construction on the world's first bike highway in 1900. You can see how long that lasted. Yeah. Okay. Okay, okay. There is a city of Davis history. Of course, this is written in city of Davis. So it's done by rational people who looked at the rest of the world. By late 1967, here we go. Let's see. In 1966, Norm Woodbury and Maynard Skinner were elected to Davis city council after advocating support for bicycle lanes. By June 1967, they joined then mayor Kent Gilt to approve the very first Davis bicycle lanes. A subsequent bill established the right for California cities to install bike lanes was also passed by the California state legislature and signed by then governor Ronald Reagan. By late July 1967, the very first official bike lane in Davis and in the United States was created on 8th street between A street and Sycamore lane. What's fun? And here it is, here it is. It was the first time that a lane for the preferential use of bicyclists had been designated as part of an existing roadway meant for vehicles. So I found something else. No, I think we should stop right there because that sounds like the verified data. Okay, but I found that in 1934, London created a segregated piece of arterial roadway next to where cars go for bicycles and there's a video and it's someone on a penny farthing. So like... That's the city of Davis symbol is a high wheeler. Yeah, this looks legit. This really looks like 1930s. They made a bike lane in the road in London. I feel like this is a lot of splitting hairs over whether or not it's a path or splitting it off of a car lane. This is thank goodness that people are trying to make it safer for bicyclists to get around and to make bicycling a more preferred mode of transportation. Isn't that great? That's great. It is. It is. Although I really, really, really detest riding a bicycle on a windy day. It's like riding uphill. It's very dangerous. Nothing is good on a windy day. I'd rather rain than the wind. People get allergies when it's windy. Yeah, yeah, hair is all messed up. You know what the best commuting mode is? Walking downstairs. That must be nice for you. So, it sounds dangerous. Meanwhile, I spend so much time in my car now. No. Could you ride a bike? No, sir. I love to take. If I took the bus, I think it would take me like three hours to get to work. Because I'd have to take a local bus to, I think, another bus to the Caltrain. And then I'd have to take two different buses from Caltrain on the other end. It would be like three to five different vehicles. It'd be insane. Yeah, it's too complicated. That makes it too complicated. This is why cars still work for so many people. If there was a clear path to Caltrain on either end, I could park at Caltrain and drive like two miles every day. Yeah. But I can't. You know what I say, too, is I'm a very vehicle-centric person. I never want to be without a car. I've had new sold cars for years. I sold cars for years, but not out of a lot of cars. That was just because they happened to have car dealerships on the edge of Davis, which was a bike down, and it was a good local job. I could care less about cars in a lot of respect. But I love driving two places when I go anywhere. And especially when you're having children and stuff, you want to be able to, hey, if somebody you want to be able to jump in a car and go there. You don't want to be like, oh, what's that? Somebody got hurt at school. Let me go jump on my bike right up. There's reasons that I would prefer cars over any other motor transportation. But that said, oh, my goodness, there are some really cool bikes in Denmark that even in the city of Davis, even the bike capital of the world, the inventor of the bike lane, the highest usage per person anywhere in the world. There's so many bikes that we don't have in Davis that would totally catch on. There are some amazing, like if I had some of these bikes with the electric assist and the saddle bags and the cart for the groceries and the put four people on the sides and, oh man, I would have, I'd just take one of those everywhere. I might have to, they cost as much as a car though. That's true. Or it's like a half a car. Yeah, but it's a half a car and you have a really cool bike. Yeah, they're, I mean, yeah, they're good. Some, at least a couple of thousand dollars for those, at least the electric ones. Yeah. Gloria says, I'm surprised you say that after seeing the European public transport infrastructure. No, it's great. You don't need a car. Here, you just don't. I just, I think there's also coming from a small town in America, getting the keys to your first car and being able to head out on the open road, big city where the action is or up to the country where the wilderness is still wild. Suburbs, I haven't even been thought of yet. There's something there. Where is that? Suburbs haven't even been thought of in the public transportation plan. No, they don't even, they don't even have suburbs up there in the, up in the Sierras. And they don't, in a big city, oh, they got all the action. If everything's going on there, nobody's sleeping. It's exciting. Not like your small, sleepy town in middle America where I grew up. With also a university as our core industry. Therefore, also everywhere is scary because people aren't educated, which is too bad. Which is nice thing about the- Or they're educated and that's why they're there. Now, that's not been my experience. Although that is one thing I do like about, also about Denmark, it's probably, I mean, Davis, also another thing, fun fact, city Davis, highest per capita PhDs in the United States. Ooh, how do you like that? Except for maybe Livermore. Nope, nope. Oh, but is that really like, if you're talking about a research compound where they, it's like- But it's a town. And that's where they all, that's where everybody lives. They're like, oh look, they live in Livermore. And then I go and I study nuclear warheads. Yeah, I guess that might be fine. I don't know if that's true, then maybe vying for, well, okay, so where is that though? That's in a foreign state though, isn't it? One of those succession of states. Well, highest per capita PhDs city in California, a hundred percent for sure. But there's a really high level of education in Denmark because education, higher education is universal. Pay, you go, they invest in their people. So it's kind of nice here. Lots of smart people. Invest in your people and your country will prosper. We could write a song about it. 50 cities with the most doctoral degree holders. Number one is Davis. It's not on the list because they don't compare themselves to us because they don't know that Davis exists because it's too small. Brookline, Massachusetts. That makes sense. Number two, Davis, California. Oh, we got back down to number two. You know what? We need to get rid of some of the slackers. Actually, I left town. I left town. I left town. Haven't, yeah. Since I left town, it's gone up. Palo Alto's number three. So California, really representing the top here. Then Cambridge, of course, with Thesda, Maryland, Ann Arbor, Newton, Ames, Iowa, Blooming, Indiana, Berkeley, California, number 10. We have three of the top 10. That's pretty cool. But I was right. I was right. We're top in California, but there is another American city that edges itself. 13, Mountain View. Just because they're all, oh, it's because of the Googleplex and the Silicon Valley. Totally. Everybody knows that it's the, or Mountain View is in there. Cupertino, number 18. What? That's where all the lawyers are. Iotec. No, that's where biotec is. Duh. I'm just like Bay Area. Where's Goleta, California? That's number 20. Goleta? Yeah. I couldn't place it on a map, but I know I've been there. Approximity to UC Santa Barbara. That's why. Okay, there we are. Man, California has a lot on here. Pasadena's, number 28. Walnut Creek, 30. Bay Area. Irvine, 32. Santa Cruz, 35. Damn. I didn't know these are- And this is in Mites, California, 39. A lot of these, a lot of these like Santa Cruz. And this is like- It's a university town. It's a small university town. This is why California should secede. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't say that. This is why California doesn't relate to anywhere else. Yeah. It's like- For real. Everybody's like, why is California so weird? Yeah. And this is actually- Honey Valley, number 41. This is a lot. A really thing that I'm always using having to make a distinguishing remark when, I mean, it's almost a trope here that, you know, when people are from somewhere, where are you from? People will say France. I am from Germany. I am from Spain. And Americans will say, I'm from California. I'm from Illinois. We'll say the state because we don't want to be associated with wherever. But- I say I'm from Canada. Yana came to me. She had this statistics on, this horrible statistics of, what is it? Rates of maternity deaths. United States is like up in 20 per 100,000 or whatever it is. It's one of the worst countries to survive having a baby. It's like so bad. And I wouldn't did a drill down on it because I felt like that doesn't sound right. California is basically up near the top with the Sweden and Denmark and the rest of the- It's abortion rights, man. It's only gonna get worse. And I'm like, yeah. You have to understand, we don't have universal healthcare in the United States. What you have is disparate little phytomes inventing it for the, like it's like it had a whole clock. So if a patchwork- So education's not allowed, like it just- You have a patchwork of things. Yeah. So when you look that, California is right there with a modern European city, whatever, or a country. It's about their, all their countries are about the size of cities. It's easy to just, but California is like, it is completely different from the rest of the United States in so many ways. And I think a big part of it is what you're pointing out. When you have the highest per capita's of PhDs, you know, in all of these cities, these people, you know, there's also, you could say, there's a level of then ability to have the finances to look past your own nose in terms of what's important for your community and your survival and things like this. We've talked before about how the stress of not paying attention to anything going on around you when you have serious financial constraints is a survival strategy that you need to do, but having a combination of affluent and educated together, because you can have affluent and not educated and you end up with Florida. And Arizona, you can have pockets of affluence with lack of education and you end up with thing that is indistinguishable from a pack of wild baboons. Or you have the combination of education and affluence that then can look beyond just the immediate and start to do things like, my goodness, Newsom announced they wants to have California, the state of California start manufacturing insulin. We can't get the drug companies to cap the price or to give us a reasonable price on it. And the state says, we're just gonna look into putting a bunch of money and the building facilities to manufacture insulin for cost for the, you know, our own, California is basically getting into a one payer healthcare system as it is. So controlling some of the pharma, why not? Makes perfect sense. I'm really a fan of the whole like Cascadia idea that, you know, like California and Oregon or at least Western Oregon and Washington could kind of and then just Boise would all kind of join together as one little consortium. We could share our healthcare and our educational systems. I have a dream of Cascadia. Instead, we got to try to bring everybody dragging them behind us. Come on. Lift everyone up. We can do it. Some things that California has definitely done that. We can be the strong men. With the, with vehicle emissions, of course, California said, we're going to restrict the amount of emissions that can come out of a tailpipe. And 13 other states, just basically whenever we come up with one of these air standards, they just check off on it and copy it. It saves them the whole thing of having to air resources for it and it's a good idea. Right. Well, the auto manufacturers looked at it and said, okay, California is the biggest market for cars in the United States. And they've picked up enough other little figures instead of making, because for a while, they tried to make cars to the California standard and like, you know, slap a thing at a cardboard muffler on the back of the other ones. And it's actually ended up being more expensive to build two different ways. And cheaper to streamline everything just to make it to the California air standards. So that's what they did. Our lower state is going to provide entertainment. Awesome. I'm just going to cry. I'm going to cry about that guy, Aaron Lohr. What is it? What was it thing? Dr. Oz and think, yes, I'm going to just cry. About? Politics and the big circus it is. Oh, I see now. Okay. Dude that Oprah put on TV is running for senator here. Yeah. Oh, that guy from New Jersey. New Jersey who doesn't live in New Jersey who bought a house that he's not living in. No, he lives in New Jersey. He's running in Pennsylvania. Right. But he bought a house in Pennsylvania so that he could have residency, but he doesn't live there. He didn't even buy a house. He's using his mother-in-law's mailing address. He didn't even buy a house. He didn't even like, no, he's just, no, he didn't even go to that far. He bought a house. That was the recent news. He bought like some $3 million place or something like that and is getting some kind of tax kickback for it because he's not cutting down trees on the land. And then he's, yeah, but he's getting residency for it, but he doesn't live there. Anyway, but our and Laura says, nope, he didn't buy it. Okay. Yeah. Dude, doctor, oh. That is not what I wanted to talk about. Claire is our fact checker this evening. Fact checking. It's good. Okay, our and Laura says it's in his mother-in-law's mother-in-law's name. And yes. Because you can't get the tax break if you're not a resident of the state. Oh, he misspelled his name of his Pennsylvania address on some of his forms running for office. Oh, because he's never been there. Yeah. He misspelled the town's name. Yeah, of course. That's the worst part. No. I'm from small town, Merbury, I think it's called. Is that small town called? I don't even know what small town I'm from, but I'm so in touch with small towns. Oh, he's renting his in-law's place. That is what's happening. Is that the wrong end or I'll turn it around. He's renting his in-law's house. Good, good, good, good. That's a joke, that guy is. It is providing entertainment. Thank you. I'm all good with the reality stars and politics. Like, how did that come into politics before science? Just like, no scientists in our politics, but you know what, reality TV stars, let's do it. It's because we didn't get the scientists to be the celebrities early enough and the celebrities became the big thing. We were once upon a time, but yeah. You know, I just found out that the, that Conspiracy Radio podcast YouTuber guy was making like some crazy, like $800,000 a month or more or something on it. I think we should take this show in a new direction. Is it time for conspiracy? I, because I'm pretty sure. No, like I was saying, you were gone at the time. I think we need to do sciences. Yeah. We will call on the spirits of dead scientists to come and speak with us with our sciences. I'm sure I have a Ouija board folded up somewhere in my game's pile somewhere. We can get them to say some things like science. $800,000 a day. It pays to lie or, you know. But I just didn't think it paid that well. I don't know why I said it done a long time ago. People really, really like to be lied to. Fact-based, science-y stuff. We can just replace my part of the first half of this show with just the sound effect. Like, oh, here's bad news. Okay, forget the bad news. Guess what? Non-stick cooking, where it makes you healthier. It's a big conspiracy to get rid of peanuts faster and it's good for the environment. It's just whatever. Like, if they're gonna pay us that much, let's sell out. Can we? Is it too late? We don't yell enough. And we're not. I could. Have you seen the page yet? We don't yell enough? Really? I think that's what it is. I don't know. I'm like, we're not sensational enough. We're not angry at people. We don't call people names. I don't know. Yes, in the seance, we're bringing back the spirit of Harry and Dini to talk about his work in anti-spiritualism and debunking seances. What do you have to say for yourself, Harry? Oh, boy, was I wrong. Also that last trick of mine, I probably shouldn't have tried it. Maybe that wasn't the best idea. I didn't try it. Somebody came and sucker punched him. Yeah, he died on stage from an appendix rupture. Poor guy. From an appendix eruption? I think it was an appendix. Yeah, so he had this part of his act where he could, he would tighten his muscles and take a really strong punch. And then somebody punched him in the stomach when he wasn't ready for it, not part of the act. They sucker punched him. And he ruptured his kidney or something. Internal bleeding. Didn't go to have modern medicine then to begin with. Appendix, spleen, something like, well, you don't want ruptured. Well, pretty much that goes for everything on the inside. You don't want it ruptured. Except this, you know. But it was a kind of rupturing, bad. Clapsed on stage and died shortly after, but he was fevered and still doing the show for a while. Got it though. Because the show must go on. Back then when it saved him, but it might have. So go to the doctor if you don't feel good. Could it save you from Henson? He decided to work through a flu and died? Numotia, what is it called? He ended up with walking pneumonia, but it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal at all. But if you go to the doctor, it's easy to treat. If you go to the doctor. So he had a really bad flu, but he worked through it and then collapsed. And by the time he got to the hospital, it was too late. So go to the doctor if you don't feel good, please. Okay. That's all I'm saying. Well, but consult your doctor first before you take any of our medical advice. Consult a doctor. I'm telling you to consult a doctor. No, no, no. You're saying go to the doctor. You should consult the call the nurse first. Come on. That's a colloquialism. You know what I mean. You trying to stir up stuff? He's always trying to stir up stuff. I'm gonna give up that free medical advice. Where's your decredentials for that? You can't do that. Telling people to go to a doctor if you feel sick. You're not a doctor. You don't know how they do it. Oh boy. This is how we're gonna make the big bucks. See, and this is also fine. And you wanna talk in absolute here. Men are bad at going to the doctor. That actually is science. So are Christian scientists. Men don't like to go to the doctor when they don't feel good. And I have a theory that the reason that women don't mind is because we have to get poked and prodded so often anyway. It's like, yeah, whatever, I'll go to the doctor. It's also why women have more heart attacks or die from heart attacks more often is because they're more used to pain. And so they don't go to the doctor when they do have pain. I believe that also. Okay. Oh my God. That's just a funny thing. It's all right. I would also suggest, perhaps, just based on the human male friends that I've had throughout my life, a lot of men probably avoid going to the doctor when they've gotten their body into troubles because they intentionally did the thing that caused the problem. And so it's all like, they think they can fix it. They're like, oh, I don't wanna go to the doctor now because they're gonna tell me I'm bad cholesterol, but I'm gonna fix it. I'm gonna shape up. I'll go to the doctor when I lose a little weight so I don't get bad news. It's like brushing your teeth right before you go to the dentist. Don't do that. Just go be honest. Okay, this is how my teeth usually look. It just wanted you to see it. I just came here right after eating broccoli just for you. Okay, actually, I need to, I can't see your teeth, which is why you're here. So it would be actually helpful if you brush them. It's your teeth that I'm trying to look at that are now covered in this broccoli and potatoes, something, I'm assuming. Oh, yum. Yum, yum, yum. Hey, maybe we could come up with some conspiracy theories. Like what if we create a conspiracy theory that like the oil companies had gotten together and plotted to keep people from knowing the truth about global warming and the deteriorous effects that it would have on them so that it could keep making money for a longer period of time? Or what about the thing with light bulbs? How light bulbs were intentionally made to not last as long so they could sell more light bulbs and like, how about, what other conspiracy theories? How about the fact that anti-abortion laws are really there to prevent poor people from getting abortions, but rich people will continue to get abortions? How about that conspiracy theory? And how about the conspiracy theory that they don't actually care about abortions except they fundraise so well off of it and that that's really the reason that they're even pretending to care about an issue because they obviously don't when it comes to caring for foster kids or mothers or daycare or healthcare for mothers or any of the rest of it. So it's really just a political issue. None of these issues are really issues to them. It's just money raising. That's positive. How do we get an avoid apology? We've been out of the workforce also. Wait, wait, you guys, you guys, stop, stop. We're starting to talk about real world issues. We need to talk about really how evolution is an egg-based conspiracy and how eggs are just trying to take over the world by continuing the manufacturing of eggs and that evolution in all the different life forms that we see is just an in-between from getting one egg to the next and that it's all about the eggs from the eggs perspective and that the rest of the world doesn't matter. But then who are we really, who gets excited? No, but actually the grain conspiracy is that we're the city bus for the microbiome. None of it matters. The city bus. Ooh, alien mind control. The aliens are microbes. Uh-huh. And we're the spaceships. This isn't fun, but that's that. Whose ideas are these anyway? What's the microbes? They're telling us what to think. Oh, oh, but then I realized how he made money too is by selling products. No. So we don't do that. Why do you do that a little bit? On our zazzle store. But nobody, they sell like, oh, if you're worried about global warming, then what you need to do is you need shorts. Shorts is the thing that everybody's gonna wear. If you don't have shorts, there's gonna be a run on shorts. You can buy shorts, you can buy shorts. We got shorts, they come in a plastic bucket. There, we should put shorts on the twist zazzle store. Okay. Do they have shorts? No, it's because you're too small. I know I've got towels for those warm days at the beach. Global warming survival kit. We gotta sell global warming survival kit. They've come with shorts, pH 250 sunscreen. And one of those little battery-powered bands that spritzes water at you. No shorts on zazzle. Dr. Justin's not a real Dr. Poo Pills. That's gotta be the first thing on this. We gotta push the product. We don't push the product like they push it on the other shows. I can't, I can't. Partly because we don't really have product. We have some merch. Fan merch is cool, but it's not product. We need to be, we need to be. We just wanna talk about science. Ooh, they have pajama pants on zazzle. I hope they're- I've done you folks. I've done you folks. When the, when the New World Order Global Warming Illuminati takeover, they're gonna get rid of pajamas. Yeah, you need to get your pajamas now. You need to buy your pajamas. They're not gonna get rid of pajamas. They're gonna get rid of sleep entirely. They're, you're not gonna need to sleep. They're gonna put stuff in the air that's gonna keep you awake all the time and you won't need to sleep so you won't need pajamas. But usually get your pajamas right now. Get your pajamas. And then you can hide from them. Where do you get branded? Where do these- Hey, where'd that adult dating site go back? Did they pay for sponsorship? Can we get them back on the- Best adult science show. But we're gonna have like, we'll have like the worst product placement. Ladies and gentlemen, are you unsatisfied with your current accuracy in pipetting? Why? There's a new- Pipet. Stability. Tool. Well, this was a pipetting, for pipetting, proper pipetting calibration. The only name you should trust is the good folks at Calibright. Why the Calibright folks will calibrate your pipetting needs. Whatever you had, a pipet with forceps attached. You know, I think there's spider forceps. I think there might be a market for research and medical goods, but I don't know that our audience really needs that because we're at the, we're not, our audience isn't- Oh, they're back! Oh, they came back. Oh, thank you. I got it. I'm blocking. But wait, but maybe they- They're trying to prove it. You're right. But it proves they are listeners to this show. So I will say, I do appreciate them for that. Because they paid attention and they're like, all right, I won't promote my adult babies. I'm back to get blocked again. He's now asked in the after-show. Okay, he's got got permission now. Folks, I don't often do adult dating, especially now that I'm married, but what I do, the only adult dating site that I go to, is the one that is guaranteed to be best. You don't want to go for second best when you're adult dating. I know you don't want second-rated adult dating. What do you want? This is the best adult dating. Oh, yeah, I don't think, he must be a crazy person. Because I don't think I can, I don't think I would really, I don't think I could keep a straight face. I couldn't. And the products too, I'm like, have you noticed that your quality of toast isn't what you'd really like it to be? Ah, before you go blaming your toaster, maybe it's the wrong bread that you're using to make your toast. I would suggest that you go to good old, what is it? What's the big San Francisco sourdough company? Is that what it's called? Yeah, you're talking about Boudin. Sure, that's a quality, quality toasted bold bread. Not like the other breads, they just turn into crusty crap when you pull it in. I don't even know how to do that. You're bread not tasting the way you like it when it's nicely buttered. Bread don't taste good, this bread good. Treat you better, get our micro butter. It's butter treated with microbes. It has nano flavors. Small things that make the flavor better. Quantum nano butter, the sciency butter for all your sciency butter needs. I started using plant butter, which is quite good. That's just plant fat. Yeah, it's like margarine basically, but there's largely less hydrocarbons in it. What would be really fun would be to have like the thing you never heard of. For sure it is. Although it cooks nicer, it cooks a lot nicer than margarine. I do think it's a little bit different because I can like fry things on the pan with it in a way that margarine doesn't work. I'm afraid for you. I am afraid for you. What about the chemicals? Plant butter. No, I listed the chemical list. Make a better plant. Basically just olive oil. You know, when I need a cool refreshing drink, something that's rehydrating, it really gets me back and going. Going on and meeting the days, tap water. Bye, tap water. It's what, it's good for you. I do. I'm watching you by municipalities everywhere. Brian Burwell, whatever happened to the lowered expectations dating service that was always promoted on Mad TV? I love that one. Lowered expectations. Then somebody like reaching for a fence, but it's like softwares. That's what you really do need. Yeah, dating science helps you lower your expectations. Oh no. Yes, I have the yams also. And it's, I have to get up and go on a junk run tomorrow morning to the dump. Woo-hoo. I have the job. I have a job cleaning up tomorrow. Woo, I get to throw things away. There's nothing like moving to make you feel like a really bad person when it comes to like your impact on the planet. You get to that point where you're like, I can't recycle anymore. I'm so done. I'm so tired. Everything goes in the garbage. It's all gone. It happens, man. Bad person. No? Not what you are, but. How long are your recycling goes in the garbage anyway? Look, look, it's a global recycling experience. All that stuff just ends up in the ocean anyway. All the plastic just ends up in the ocean. Very little bit actually gets recycled. Oh, we can do it. We can totally do this conspiracy type version of the show. Hey, but until we figure out all the details of that. And Anna and Wes, we'll just always remember that Gwen Stefani used to go, used to have a bad day in our chat room. It's true. The fake Gwen Stefani. The real Gwen Stefani was probably at a Whole Foods with my dad picking out plant-based plants. Yeah, picking out bananas. Oh, okay. B-A-N-A-N-A. B-A-N-A-N-A-N-A-S. Good night, Blair. Say good morning, Justin. Morning, Justin. Good night, Keke. Good night, everyone. Thank you for not going to bed while we ranted and raved and conspiracy slionst. And we do hope that you'll join us again next week, back Wednesday, PM Pacific time. And thank you, thank you, thank you. Stay safe, stay healthy, stay curious.