 Welcome everyone to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again! Woohoo! We're gonna have so much fun this week. I don't know if Justin can hear us, if there's a lag between us and him. The internet is interesting in Denmark, apparently at five in the morning. We're getting going with the science, and we're so thankful that you're here with us tonight. Thanks for joining us. Time to start, yeah? We ready? We ready? We ready? Woo! Justin, you ready? Yeah! Okay! I get to delay on this side at all. So, if it's there, my apologies. No, we're great. We are great. You know what? Sometimes you just gotta take a, take a leap, make it go. Oh, internet and technology, you will do us well this evening. I know. All right, everyone, let's start this show in. Oh, wait, let me move that over so I can read that. In three, two, this is twist. This Week in Science, episode number 902, recorded on Wednesday, November 23, 2022. Who's thankful for science? I think everyone here right now. I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight on the show, we will fill your heads with duplications. European, Europeans? No, Europeans and frogs. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. No new action on curbing emissions. That's the result of the COP 27 meeting. Nothing, zero, zilch. All the speeches, all the media hype, all the past commitments amounted to nothing. There were no agreements to reduce carbon, no agreements to phase out coal and oil industry subsidies, no agreements on rethinking agricultural practices, no agreements to meet past commitments on afforestation, no agreements on industry aerosol reduction, no agreements to fund research solutions to scale alternative energy to face the increasing environmental degradation heading our way. With anything, it was a total surrender to another generation of complete reliance on fossil fuels. The 27th Conference of the Party's Convention on Climate Change was a massive public failure of leadership and political resolve, one that deeply discredited the urgency with which governments of the world claimed to be taking the issue of climate change. And it was perhaps the most productive meeting we could have asked for. It provided a clear roadmap of dead ends, of non-starters. Notably, the United Nations will not be leading us to a solution. It offered confessions of culpability in the way of loss and damages payments to the nations most affected by global warming, though done so with no clear outline of how those funds will be distributed, who will pay, or when. And it solidified the belief among many that the political power industry is greater than the collective will of a majority of global citizens who want action. So what is next? Science! It has the solutions. Without funding legislation, those solutions are not likely to be realized. But if we keep working on them, increasing the feasibility and diversity of those solutions, eventually the world will have no other option than completing total reliance on This Week in Science. Up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough I want to learn everything Every day of the week There's only one place to go To find the knowledge I seek I want to know It's to you, Kiki and Blair. Kiki, you're muted! It's to you too, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again to talk about science on this pre- Thanksgiving Day Day of giving thanks Also, that we'd like to say thanks to the Indigenous peoples of the United States for all they have done and all the knowledge they can bring and all the land that we have put our homes upon and the reality that we are now standing in a place that was previously peopled by the Indigenous peoples and is currently and is currently and currently but in various places anyway, all sorts of colonization stuff occupied territory yeah, exactly, a little bit that's where I was going with that everyone. I am so glad that you are here and thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for being with us on this day. I'm always grateful for you joining us for science! Let's talk about it. What do I have for this week? I have tons of science news about bad genes, fat birds, and makeup. What do you have, Justin? I have got a couple of stories with global warming. I have got some just good news mass extinction edition and if I make it to the end of the show with the internet what was it? What am I missing? Oh gosh, what was it? Oh and then there is another story. Oh yeah, a waste, a use of wastewater that we haven't thought about before I guess. Fantastic. I mean usually we just want to clean the wastewater but a use for wastewater maybe that's a positive direction. Blair, what is in the animal corner? Oh I have such good conversation topics for everyone celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow I can't wait for you to bring this up around the table. I have fish mothers that eat their babies I have how exactly frogs swallow and chimps showing off to their parents. Show off chimps. A themed show today. I think it's going to be fantastic and I hope everyone's looking forward to all that we are bringing today. As we jump into the show I want to remind you all that if you are not yet subscribed you can find us all places podcasts are found you can find us streaming live Wednesday evenings 8 p.m. Pacific time on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch we are normally this weekend science but we are also at twist science on Twitch, Twitter, and Instagram our website is twist.org but now let's jump in to that big old turkey we like to call science okay no anyway there's going to be lots of... What did you base your science in this week? Thanksgiving jokes the first thing I want to stuff into your heads is a little bit it's a little baddie yes we are going to talk about bat viruses we've talked about bat viruses with respect to COVID and other diseases before and the reality that we know that bats harbor lots of viruses in fact there are reservoirs for these viruses where the viruses kind of do battle and mutate and figure out ways out and then potentially because people and bats or the other parts of the ecosystem that bats interact with and humans interact eventually those viruses potentially can jump to humans so one of the big questions is what is it about the bat immune system that allows them to harbor so many viruses and not get sick with them themselves because that's what happens these bats they get infected but they don't get sick so the question is what's going on in their genes and a study was just published this week in science advances called adaptive duplication and genetic diversification of protein kinase R contribute to the specificity of bat virus interactions so what does this mean well the researchers dug into a bunch of bat genomes and in doing so they were able to determine where is this one particular family of genes protein kinase R and the protein kinase R gene somewhere along the way it got duplicated and so bat genomes and they looked at 33 species of more than oh focusing on 33 of more than 130 different species of mouse-eared bats this is from the genus myotis they were able to determine that there was at least one duplication but most species had more than two copies so there were multiple duplications of this particular gene that is specifically called EIF2AK2 they found also closely related sequences so not only just duplications but duplications and very slight alterations but all still within this group of genes that create these protein kinases which are enzymes that are active in the immune system and so the idea is that these enzymes then are part of beating up and battling and eating up viruses and the viruses and the bats have been doing battle for a very long time yes why is this interesting because kinases enzymes tend to add, be additive they usually look for stuff and they go oh hey you've got your phosphate hat put that on now you're good to go they're kind of running around finding people walking down the street missing an accessory and they fix them up and send them on their way again so yeah I'm curious now is it finding bits of the virus and going oh no you're dressed all wrong and then you know putting it in some big mittens and the virus can't work handles anymore exactly yeah you need that hat you don't need that hat oh you need that you don't need that exactly changing around the I mean these protein kinases are doctor sucing the viruses up they are have been a very specific aspect of how these bats are battling viruses and don't get infected by them they determine they say in this abstract that duplicated pkrs of the myotis species have undergone genetic diversification allowing them to collectively escape from and enhance the control of DNA and RNA viruses this suggests that viral driven adaptations in pkr contribute to modern virus bat interactions and may account for bat specific immunity and if this is indeed the case this starts to give us a target to look at and it starts to potentially tell us how we can target viruses where their weak spots are what we can start going after and if we understand how the bats evade the viruses maybe it can help us evade the viruses as well but it is very indicative of predator-prey interactions the researchers said that going into these genomes they really were able to see that these viruses and bats have been the immune system of bats versus viruses have been like ratcheting up at each other for millennia so this isn't so much why bats are such great zoonotic carriers it's more why their populations aren't destroyed by the viruses that when they hop to us are really detrimental well it's kind of both it's how they're good carriers but it's also they don't really get sick they can carry it and their populations aren't decimated but it also leads to the mutations that many viruses are having that potentiate that jump to humans and a good virus doesn't kill its host it keeps it alive so it's a perfect incubator for that reason interesting and again it's probably I would think just largely an accident in nature that gets started in the first place anything else that these viruses are showing up into it could be killing off a population or a portion of the population then reduces the viruses ability it very much reminds me of bats toxo because I keep wondering where toxoplasmic gondii got into cats because from what we've understood one of the mechanisms is they lack an enzyme and they got that allows reproduction to take place the t-gondii probably started in something non-mammal because all mammals except for cats who seem to have had an evolutionary oopsie where they've lied to themselves every other mammal has it and it doesn't reproduce and so it finds sometimes their parasites are very opportunistic and they happen to get into something that through whatever evolutionary oopsies they've taken place go ah this is a great home to continue to do my reproduction or I won't get kicked out right yeah but researchers are looking into bats we need to understand the bats the cats and all the viruses and what they're doing and I'm glad the researchers are finding out more about what leads to the viruses that end up affecting us Justin what do you bring what do you want to talk about next all right oh wait Grouchy Gamers do the cat families also have the virus it's not a virus it's a parasite t-gondii but the big cats from my understanding make some of the enzyme it's a lower level than I think a lot of other mammals because everybody can carry it they don't want pregnant zookeepers to clean out the hay bales the cats yes so they must reproduce there as well yeah and there's theories that it reproduces in otters too it kind of there's confusion about it it's not the juries out on exactly where it's happening I haven't heard about the otter thing yet okay what do I got to have change which could sound like a thermostat setting global warming which could sound like a snug sweater near a campfire on a chilly morning just as the sun comes up my personal preference for calling it climitia never caught on but would have sounded more appropriate to my ear common misnomer is that global temperature will be rising uniformly worldwide they will not in Europe and elsewhere has been increasing faster than the global average according to researchers at Stockholm University who have published new findings in the general geophysical research atmospheres the climate across the European continent has become not just hotter but also drier leading to worse heat waves and risk of fires even referencing back to the UN's intergovernmental panel on climate change warming over land areas occurs significantly faster than over oceans the goal to stay under 1.5 degrees warming has to do with global average ocean temperatures that's where that main focus has been on land measurements reveal that warming in large parts of Europe has already surpassed 2 degrees in the summer months in southern Europe feedback loops caused by global warming are being amplified due to drier soil and decreased evaporation and there has been less cloud coverage over large parts of Europe as a result of less water vapor in the air study also includes a section about the estimated impact of aerosol particles on temperature increase so warming is mostly a consequence of these long-lived greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide these are things that trap heat they can collect infrared solar radiation and then shoot it back down at the planet so they're just like a nice warm heated blanket emissions of shorter lived aerosol particles like say soot from a cold fired power plant have decreased greatly over the last 40 years which is a good thing because that emits a lot of carbon into the atmosphere and is toxic radioactive oh gosh you burn coal you get a lot of radioactive isotopes but they're pointing out the suit did also do something else because that kind of an aerosol in the atmosphere scatters sunlight back out into space and actually has a mild cooling effect on the local areas so as dirty greenhouse gas emitting power plants have been replaced their localized cooling effects have also gone away which then reveal the true effects of the greenhouse gas increases and heat attributed to them so there's kind of a double whammy going on as a lot of especially largely I think southern eastern Europe has moved away from these coal power plants the accelerated heating on land is being shown above 2 degrees in the summers already and we've of course seen some of the heat waves and other parts of the world as well that are unprecedented but yeah the whole blowing past the 1.5 they've been seen in news because the COP 27 meeting didn't do anything 1.5 was also for the APCC's reports was also the rosiest number it was the low end of the spectrum of where what we were in for to begin with and it only counts if you're on the open ocean overland you're already there maybe even blown past it already but the number itself the 1.5 is the global average so when you talk about over land over water it's cumulatively averaging all of those all of those higher numbers and lower numbers and putting it together so yes we are globally yet locally there are these regions yes in the summertime we're blowing past stuff where the ocean is keeping things cooler but what this really suggests is it's good we're cleaning things up seeing what we're actually doing is like a slap in the face and nobody wants to do anything about it they just want to shove all the dirty stuff in the closet and shut the door and ignore it yeah well the problem with that though of course is that the planet is mostly ocean yes so if the oceans are at 1.5 and we know that it's dramatically higher over land when you get to the average of 1.5 the oceans maybe at 1.2 and everything else is at 3 it's the ratio there mostly what they're tracking yes there's a little bit it's more global there's other sources but it's mostly an ocean temperature thing at 1.5 everything else is going to be well above that we are going it's what's happening there were some agreements made at COP 27 whether or not you agree with the way that they're going to be putting money away the political decisions I'm glad these conversations are happening but yeah it's going to be the allusions are really going to have to be more and it's going to have to be a different we're going to play catch up in a big way it's very serious that we're borrowing from tomorrow is what's currently happening and all of a sudden everyone's going to go oh no oh no oh no what's happened like try to backtrack and that's going to be way harder than trying to do things now yes absolutely it's only getting harder and harder there's already a problem with their whole loss and payment scheme idea it's because they can't agree on whether or not they're going to base those payments on current emitters of which India and China would have to pay a lot of money or historic emitters in which China and India would pay a lot less well and the other problem is that certain countries are selling the oil that then other countries are burning so then who pays for that and currently it's looking like the people doing the burning but there's also the selling of the oil which is part of the deal so it's you know it's complicated yeah we have so then nobody's getting any money and if the money goes to any of these countries it's not going to be so vague and so it's not going to go to people who are hurt it's not going to go to the local farmer who lost his crops because of global warming it's not going to go to any of these people it's just not don't pretend your dollars are going in it's not going to go into the building of structures that burn fossil fuels because it's such a stadium hopefully it'll go into the construction of sustainable fuels solar panels wind farms hydro generation there's no language in any of it that indicates any of it will go there there's none I am thankful for science because it tells me things and you know sometimes you can just ignore the people and the politics so anyway let's move away from changing climate and this disease we've given our planet and let's talk about birds trying to fly through the air I know many people will be boarding an airplane today, tomorrow Friday and when they do you know one of the things you really don't want is turbulence on your flight and to know if you might have a turbulent flight maybe you should ask the pigeons this is a study with academics from University collaborating with University of Leeds the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Constance and they looked at flying a small aircraft along and close to a track of pigeons they wanted to measure the turbulence levels and see if pigeons might have something to tell us beyond the instruments we currently use to measure turbulence can we use birds bouncing in the air to tell us about the air exactly so the unsteadiness of the birds the bump up and down this can be used to understand how turbulent the conditions are they hooked up some backpacks essentially to these pigeons and they compared the measurements that they collected GPS barometric pressure and acceleration data they compared that to that measured by an anemometer I always want to say it wrong anemometer on board the aircraft that's how English works that's how I'm going to pronounce it anyway lots of syllables so basically they looked at these two things and they found out that they could indeed use bird born sensors to calculate free stream turbulence in nature this of course depends on the pigeons going where you're interested in getting measurements so there is that kind of interesting caveat of do you train the pigeons do you just measure pigeons everywhere and for the most part they're looking specifically at using this to measure these conditions in areas where it's kind of inaccessible to humans so they they likened it to using seals with sensors on to measure salinity and see temperatures under ice caps so they could use they could strap some some backpacks onto these birds and send them into areas that are remote or difficult to access to collect atmospheric data what's interesting is that remember you know it depends on where the pigeons go is that the pigeons can fly in conditions that were too turbulent for sensors for the kind of our sensors that are not strapped to pigeons but there was also some suggestion on how pigeons might have avoided certain routes with very high turbulence that could be data that you could include this pigeon went way out of their way to go over here that means there's a high turbulence area in this space so that also raises the question of how birds cope with high turbulence and the effect that it has on flight costs because if you're going way out of the way to avoid turbulence then you know that that does make your flight longer or more difficult or takes you off course you've to spend more time and energy navigating any number of things that come as a result of that but basically the long and short of this is that birds could be used as a remote sensor for wind turbulence and that it could allow us to go places where our normal devices cannot go and flying conditions that our normal devices could not fly in so there you go I feel like this study was done by a researcher who accidentally crossed over from the parallel dimension where all air travel is done by Zeppelin right yes I guess we could outfit all the Zeppelins with pigeons who will tell them about current turbulence conditions and we can send them out and they will find us the best route see I'm picturing more like ladies and gentlemen if you look to the right of your aircraft you'll see the Grand Canyon and if I look at my pigeon friends out in front of there bogging up and down which means we're in for a bit of a bumpy ride here so just strap in and stay seated can they tie to the wing and wear these pigeons tie them to the wing no I mean I do wonder how fast can a pigeon fly not that fast how fast can a pigeon fly how far how much turbulence can a pigeon take what determines how a pigeon chooses its route what is it that the birds see in the air that we can't see how do they watch the clouds what do they know and this is still a question we're trying to answer we still don't have a firm grasp on how pigeons navigate the landscape so is this part of that no idea oh I bet you I know how they do it I just figured it out I got it I got it we just learn that insects flying emit electrical field if pigeons can see an electrical field they can say hey there's no insects in the air over there must be too turbulent I'll go this way that's it they're navigating by a smaller winged creature by bug yeah got it and then the bugs are doing it by bacteria right they're listening to the flowers which are listening to the bacteria they missed a step there oh there was a talking flower story it's probably everybody's following those electric fields I'm sure the ions ions are a sensory field that are very important but we have to we'd have to look into that so next step pigeons how do they sense changes in the ion fields yeah yes well after that Thanksgiving meal or that Thanksgiving travel that you're doing flying pigeon air you are gonna have a meal and at some point you'll probably have to go to the bathroom and there may be some defecation involved and sometimes if there's defecation involved and you look in the toilet you go oh that's sank or oh look a floater and what on earth determines the difference between well Obra told me it was about calcium it's not about calcium that's Obra had a whole show about it I think in the 90s yeah well I mean Obra was wrong our information has come a ways and you know now the microbiome is a big area of research there was some question not related to calcium but whether oil levels determined the buoyancy of your fecal matter but these researchers who published their paper in scientific reports they're from the Mayo Clinic they had germ free mice they had experimentally microbially colonized mice and they had naturally gut colonized mice and they compared the different buoyancies of the food that passed through and you want to know what they determined those mice that had no bacteria the germ free mice they produced sinkers so bacteria are partially responsible for what's going on and what is responsible is the amount of gas that the bacteria are producing so gas producing bacteria bacterioides ovatus is one species that has been linked to flatulence in humans there are other forms of bacteria that they specifically worked with but really the more gas that your bacteria produce the more you're going to have a floater but there's a huge problem with this mice don't eat what we eat mice do not eat what we eat but they do have they do have bacteria that we have so different bacteria so different from ours but they can have sinkers or floaters apparently and they took away the bacteria and they sank it's all about gas this is really hard for me to buy I understand in terms of mouse, sinkers and floaters I'm on board but applying it to humans or other species also mostly lab mice eat pellet food which is homogenous and is always exactly the same and our diet is extremely varied and so if you're eating the exact same thing every day then your sinker or floater might have to do with the amount of bacteria but I'm just saying there's other things involved in what is in the poop but what you eat is it's also a two-way highway what you eat influences what's in your gut and so when you have say more fiber or more beans or other things that lead to more gas production that's going to lead to different formations of things multiple things could make potentially we don't know right but multiple things could make feces, sink or float it doesn't just have to be the bacteria yes it's based on this experiment we don't know if changing their diet but maintaining a certain like keep seeding them the same bacteria over and over would that change anything? yeah you're right fair point point to Blair and everyone see how your Thanksgiving meal goes yeah and remember if you smell something at the table and it's not the coming from the turkey don't blame your relatives it's their microbes it's their microbes it's the dog that's one of the reasons to have a dog blame the dog now we know Blair okay Justin we've been talking about waste do you have more waste to waste our audience's time on? so this follows nicely according to environmental engineering researchers at Drexel University we should be using our sewage wastewater to fertilize crops the production of nitrogen for fertilizer is energy intensive and accounts for nearly 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions it's higher than I thought it would have been new study looks at a process for removing ammonia from wastewater and converting it into fertilizer and suggests that it's technically viable it would reduce the carbon footprint of fertilizer production creating a circular nitrogen economy this according to Patrick Gurian a professor in Drexel U college of engineering quoting this means we are using existing nitrogen rather than expending energy and generating greenhouse gas to harvest nitrogen from the atmosphere which is a more sustainable practice for agriculture and could become a source of revenue for utilities under the Clean Water Act 1972 in the United States municipal water treatment facilities have to meet certain standards of quality control for the water that they are discharging back into the waterways ammonia is at elevated levels in wastewater and can result in overgrowth in vegetation which then can kill fish if it's released so they have a couple of options one is they it takes a lot of time and they put out in these big fields and sort of let it off gas slowly over time and other ways that they do it can be rather energy intensive so one of the options that they've been looking at here is something called air stripping which removes ammonia by raising the temperature and pH of the water enough to convert the chemical into a gas which can then be collected in a concentrated form as ammonium sulfate using data from Philadelphia's water treatment facility and several others across North America and Europe team conducted a life cycle assessment an economic feasibility assessment they looked at the factors ranging from the cost of installing and maintaining the air stripping system to the concentration of ammonia and flow rate of the wastewater to the sources of energy used to drive the collection and conversion process to and down to the production cost and market price that the fertilizer chemicals would have there so it sounds like they did a pretty nice print analysis, feasibility analysis of this thing, they said the findings of the feasibility analysis show the air stripping emits 5 to 10 times less greenhouse gas than current nitrogen producing processes used to make fertilizer and it uses about 15 times less energy making the overall cost of producing the fertilizer this way from the wastewater far, far cheaper, magnitude cheaper than it would be the old way, yeah so this also cuts the time and processing needed to treat the water which means the turnaround time of getting that wastewater back into fresh water out back into the environment would be faster which could be helpful so the process wouldn't replace chemical production of nitrogen for fertilizer because there's just, we make so much of that and we just don't have enough of our own wastewater but it would be a reduction and it would be a sustainable reduction and it's taken one more thing out of the footprint and that's what we need there are some big solutions out there that can be looked at can be addressed, can be discovered can be scaled up to some degree but usually once you look at scaling up, like the aforestation thing that's going to take over something 30% larger than the United States of dense trees underground or the something like 250,000 or millions, some of those carbon capture container they built a while ago they've been being built, I think those might be in no way there's a lot of big scale but there's a lot of small solutions if you stream enough of the small solutions together you get a decent amount of the way there and this is the kind of thing this is the kind of thing that if you have an industry that's producing extra or nitrates and ammoniums that you can use that and create another product and so this is take a byproduct turn it into a product as opposed to just letting it into the atmosphere or even take it out of the atmosphere like you were saying I think that is part of the benefit especially reducing the polluting that we do into our atmosphere I think that's exactly it is thinking about the ammonia that we produce with our bodies as a byproduct or something that needs to be processed when before we lived in these buildings with plumbing that was actually part of the whole nitrogen cycle is you consume food you release nitrogen back into the soil and it fertilizes the soil and allows for more food to be grown and as we've kind of sanitized our lives we've removed ourselves from that cycle and so that's the problem is we're kind of like we're messing it up on both ends we're processing out and kind of sequestering the nitrogen that we're naturally producing and then we're pulling it out of the atmosphere because we're like we need more nitrogen it's like actually it's right we're supposed to make it and it's supposed to go back into the ground so I love the idea of trying to reestablish that connection that is supposed to exist when you say supposed to exist though I mean after culture is about it it's part of the process we used to go I'm talking about like animals poop by a tree like okay we gotta keep going yeah we're not camping here tonight woo and so no but if you're a deer if you're a deer you pee and you poop on the ground then more plants grow that's kind of the basis of the nitrogen cycle and that's where we that and dead stuff right that's where we're all coming from and we were a part of that as well before we started putting ourselves into an agricultural culture we were hunter-gatherers we were wandering around maybe we had middens or areas that were latrines that we created when we were in our tribal stages of development but you know that's still part of it there was still part of it but the agriculture revolution we stopped traveling very far you know staying for years generations in one location then we started to have to mitigate that midden wasn't at the edge of the thing was now in the middle of town uh oh so we've been trying to distance ourselves from this as a problem for now thousands of years that yeah it took that long to occur to us like oh yeah there's something useful in the way that the natural cycle of things operates let's see does anyone gonna have vegetables at their Thanksgiving meal tomorrow think about their memories and how you make memories at the Thanksgiving table how are these plants gonna pass on their memories anyway researchers published in trends in plant science this last week on their work figuring out how plants are able to adapt to the adverse effects of climate change how they're passing down adaptations to offspring and one of the things that really stuck out to me in the telling of this story is one of the lead researcher Federico Martinelli who's a plant geneticist at the University of Florence saying that plants don't have brains they don't have nerves they don't have a way to store their memories and they don't have language to tell stories and pass things down informationally in a you know the way we think of our storytelling and information will pass down and he says one day I thought how the living style and experience of a person can affect his or her gametes transmitting molecular marks of their life into their children immediately I thought that even more epigenetic marks must be transmitted in plants being that plants are sessile organisms that are subjected to many more environmental stresses than animals during their lives so as the seasons change as cold seasons get shorter as hotter seasons get longer as the wet season dries up how do plants send information on how to survive down to the next generation from what they've learned in just the most recent period of time not you know the stuff that's not necessarily bound up in the DNA and this researcher then said well it's definitely going to be based in epigenetics these mechanisms allow plants to recognize the occurrence of a previous environmental condition and react more promptly in the presence of the same consequential condition and so in their work they highlighted a number of key genes, proteins oligonucleotides that are involved in abiotic stresses like drought, salinity, cold, heat heavy metals, pathogens, etc and they've provided a whole bunch of examples for the molecular mechanisms that are responsible for plant memories and that plants have to have had another way to transmit information from generation to generation then simply DNA or storytelling there's got to be something else there and so the way they tell this story in this particular paper is that it's the epigenome that is very important to this to these memories it's somatic memory that can be then translated transgenerationally once again I will say Lamarck we're sorry we're sorry Lamarck you were right on that you had some good ideas the giraffe was maybe a little much but you had the basic idea down you really did I said no to Lamarck so many times when I thought I knew so much from my genetics classes in university I was so wrong and Justin actually you used to be like oh in Lamarck let's talk about Lamarck and yeah well you know because it just makes it just makes sense it does so one of the things too is we've seen we've seen evidence of plants learning of creating seeding and growth strategies based on generations access to water so you know we've known this exists we know they have this memory we know they have these amazing abilities we know they listen we know they spike their sugar when they hear bees flying by and there's this the story that I didn't bring up last I can't find it now there was a thing about recycling bring it in where they're also changing some iridescent coloring and alter iridescent coloring on them to signal bees and they can also regulate that up and down in the presence of bees it's this sort of advertise got the good sugars over here come check out this pond whatever they're shouting out there I got a sugar yeah they have all sorts of other tricks to lure in pollinators which is amazing so lure them in and tell the stories through their epigenome da da da um but Blair did you have one more story there oh yes I have a quick one just while you're around the family table tomorrow if you are celebrating Thanksgiving and your parents are just really getting on your nerves well just be happy your mom's not a sicklet fish that's because researchers at Central Michigan University have found that sicklet fish it's not so fun to be their babies that's because we know from prior research that sicklids brood their young in their mouths for up to two weeks after their eggs are fertilized and yeah you guessed it about 40% of those offspring get eaten oops who'd have thought they looked at 80 females that laid eggs they were all fertilized by males after fertilization they observed how the brooding proceeded as expected the mothers kept their offspring in their mouths for two weeks as they did so the researchers noted that the mothers didn't eat regular food at all they also found that the mothers behaved in ways that researchers described as stressed the researchers then dissected some of the mothers showing different levels of stress and found that higher levels of stress had chemicals in those fish who behaved in more stressed out ways so yes they were indeed stressed on average the mothers ate approximately 40% of their offspring and 93% of those fish ate at least some of their young so if you were in that lucky 7% your mom didn't eat any of you they also found yeah very rare they also found that those mothers who appeared to be more stressed you guessed it they tended to eat more of their babies stress eating on my babies yeah the researchers note that eating one of one's offspring might seem like a reduction in reproductive success but it might be offset by health benefits in addition to nutrients that they get from eating their offspring yum nutrients the mothers also get an antioxidant boost which gives them the energy they need to spawn again in just a few months which what I need to do I'm just saying so I don't quite get that reasoning I really feel like it is a mechanical mistake that's what it sounds like to me you're holding a bunch of babies in your mouth you haven't eaten in two weeks oops I swallowed some I'm stressed out and I just take a gulp out of the water and nope I just swallowed my babies oops you're not as careful you don't want to cook tonight I don't really feel like cooking tonight do you want to order out or should we just eat the baby just one of them just 40% of the babies just 40% plenty plenty to go around doesn't sound like a real thought out option it just really sounds like an oopsie to me right so you've got 7% of the population who are moms who are maybe not as stressed out who for whatever reason their genes are like just coasting through life and so they're not stressed and they don't and they've got enough energy and maybe they're bigger or whatever but they're fine and they don't make mistakes because they're super mom and so anyway we're not going to talk about them anymore but they're out there adding whatever they're adding to the population and then you've got the big mass of people oh not people sorry people aren't maybe eaters I hope then you have the majority just doing their best for moms who are just trying if you stick them to they're just trying here and they're maybe a little bit more stressed out but their genes are also maybe going to be affecting their anxiety levels and their offspring's anxiety levels and so the genetic aspects of this are very interesting to consider and then there is but just one thing that Blair was saying she did not really understand the downstream genetic effects of being eaten you know the Punnett Square kind of stuff if you are half related to your brothers and sisters that genetic and from that benefit that you've given that it is a genetic benefit if you are helping your mother to have another generation of children well and on the whole if 60% make it and they were breeding they were brooding outside of the mouth and 20% made it because the rest of them got eaten by other fish it's still beneficial to then brood them in your mouth where you might swallow 40% so if it's a bit fewer then it's still worth it but it's just so funny to be like you don't say the mother fish with the babies and she ate some no what we've talked about this everybody swallowed gum at some point you've accidentally swallowed it it happens I used to always swallow my gum intentionally you could have been that cichlid mom oops the thing that's interesting about this is this can't also be they've noticed the stress level differences but you would think that might be a genetic underpinning but it seems like that would have gotten out that would have been removed by all the 40% and 60% of offspring that were removed from the population whereas super mom fish is putting out a full batch of potentially no stress there's nobody saying anything about how these babies are organized within the mom's mouth so is it completely random do these baby eggs have different levels of activity are the less fish larva in their little bubble egg sacks as they start growing they're moving around just like little babies are warming my little bubble egg and moving around and so they move around maybe they're better swimmers it's just they're swimming the wrong way no I was saying the other direction the less active fish are possibly the ones who are just kind of sinking to the back of the mouth where the mother's more likely to swallow them yeah I'm getting out of here where's this lead and then they just swim down I think it's 100% a mistake they accidentally swallow some babies that stresses them out because they know they swallowed they went oh no that's how they get their stress right and it is it is completely random that 7% that doesn't swallow any babies no genetic indicator just totally random if you accidentally swallow some babies you get stressed out you show stress hormones that's my hypothesis I say you know as a biologist we often want to put it's survival benefit right but sometimes it's just luck of the draw stochastic chance right this is oopsies hey my baby okay this is This Week in Science thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Science Fun if you are enjoying the show right now head over to twist.org where you can find our annual calendar sales are going on that's right right now Blair's calendar is up for sale the 2023 twist Blair's Animal Corner calendar is available on our twist website you go to twist.org I'm gonna do it right now twist.org and there's a link let me show it to you I should have planned to do this ahead of time of course I didn't but now I'm doing it right now and Rachel you can cut all this stuff out here we go at twist.org click on the colorful picture of the twist 2023 Blair's Animal Corner calendar to be taken to zazzle.com where you can purchase the wonderful calendar in a printed format or just below the the calendar you will see a link that says purchase the 2023 twist calendar digital download by now that will send you to an embedded page once you've purchased the digital download calendar so that you can download a CMYK full color beautiful PDF that you can print out on your own head over to twist.org get yourself a calendar get your friends a calendar today we do appreciate you enjoying the show and now let's come on back and I think it's time for a part of the show that we like to call Blair's Animal Corner what's there she loves her creature great as fall by pet milliped no pet at all if you want to hear about animals she's your girl except for giant pandas what you get Blair oh my goodness I have a story I'm really excited to share with everyone today um I'm not sure other people will be as interested but let me just explain so it's yeah I know I don't think you're gonna be interested in this but this is late breaking frog anatomy news and I actually I teased it last week because I was so excited to talk about it I was like I have to talk about it it broke just before the show last week frogs how did they swallow this is something that we haven't known there's a lot of confusion around it it took until the mid 20th century to figure out how their tongues work they finally figured it out by observing in high speed the tongues so that they figured out they unroll like a party horn they wrap around their target and in an adhesive hug they call it and pull it into their mouth but what happens after that oh really difficult to tell because first of all how do you said treats get unstuck from the tongue also if you watch a frog swallow what I was told in all of my time working with animals is that their eyeballs push the food down because if you watch a frog or a toad swallow their eyeballs so this is what I was always told if you watch when they swallow they close their eyes and their eyes recede into their head so this was the conventional wisdom or educated guess on how a frog swallowing worked the eyeballs push it down but nobody knew for sure so researchers used x-ray videography so they placed toads in a clear observation box they attached metallic beads at key points in the mouths of cane toads renello marina and they fed them a steady stream of crickets they fed them with x-ray videography the thing about frog mouths is that they're super weird they have a complex pulley system of cartilage and muscle they have these crazy tongues that I was talking about before and they have a hyoid a cartilaginous plate called a hyoid which a hyoid arch is something we have in our but it's kind of just suspended in midair amongst a bunch of not bones basically and so the hyoid in a lot of senses in our neck is a vestige from when we were reptiles and amphibians way back and so they have and so they have this big fat hyoid they have a cartilaginous plate as their hyoid it has loops and prongs attached to muscles it rests on the floor of their mouths and the function so far has been unknown so you can see where this is going the hyoid it turns out plays a big part in how swallowing works and the eyes have nothing to do with it the other crazy thing is that a lot of frog species there's about 7000 known frog species which toads are frogs not all frogs and toads make so a bunch of frog species have fang like teeth on the roof of their mouths and then toads which generally don't have teeth have ridges like a washboard along the upper palate so they have this giant hyoid they have these weird protrusions that are hard in the roof of their mouth either teeth or this washboard made of cartilage and so what they found was that the whole floor of the mouth was pulled down and backward into the throat and the tongue along with it via the hyoid they reconstructed the movements into 3D animations they created a play by play from still frames to try to figure out exactly what was going on so the tongue comes out it reaches its full extent it grabs its prey the hyoid then retracts into the throat the tongue which is directly attached to the hyoid slingshots back into the mouth because the hyoid is pulling it down it's going to pull the tongue back so that's the recoil of the tongue that's where this comes from they're not sure how far the hyoid could move because instead it kind of slams into the frog's heart what? and so yet that's why the eyes close no, no, no it's actually it seems to be highly coordinated it slides against the heart milliseconds before the tongue smashes into the cartilaginous cushion of the hyoid the other piece that's crazy is that until now no one's known how they unstick the prey from their tongue because once the tongue has grabbed it how do they get it off it gets pulled off during this process right? yeah it's ripped off but they think actually by those things on the roof of their mouths either the teeth or the plate yeah, so the hyoid shoots up and presses the tongue against the roof immediately afterwards and it moves forward it scrapes the food off into the esophagus so this would explain the ridges and fangs on the upper palate this whole process takes less than two seconds most of that time is spent repositioning the tongue and hyoid after it's been slingshot it back and forth and so this challenges everything we've assumed about how frogs and toads eat but the big asterisk here is that this is done on cane toads one species now is the time to do a comparative study amongst a bunch of frogs and toads to see whether the feeding behavior of these cane toads is the rule rather than the exception is this the thing we see everywhere or mostly everywhere in frogs and toads so you know kind of or did they just pick the worst and most unlucky test subject in the world so hopefully it's that first one it's a really good example species for all of frogs and toads but it's it's just so funny to think about how much of zoology has been based on observation and the more tools that we get at our disposal and the more ways we can think about to measure how the form and function of animals work the more we learn because just watching frogs and toads they go oh, it's the eyeballs they're pushing the food down duh I have never thought it was the eyeballs Blair I have been told time and time again that it is the eyeballs now we know I heard it at every zoo and aquarium I've ever worked at it's the eyeballs but now we know it's not the eyeballs it's the hyoid it's like the more likely actually if you just want to think logically it's fine anyway, think about that while you're swallowing your Thanksgiving meal what's your hyoid up to it's the hyoid man it's the hyoid that helps me swallow so hopefully everybody found that as interesting as I did moving on the last thing that might come up tomorrow that I wanted to talk about in terms of the animal kingdom animals are just like a is that you might have a family member and if you don't it's you who likes to show off say hey look at me look what I can do hey look at this thing that I got hey check out the new gadget that I bought I don't know there's always we like to share experiences right yeah so we like to share experiences we like to share objects we like to marvel in things together and for a long time it has been assumed that these very specific social interactions were previously only for humans can you guess wait wait did they find that there's some animal yes there was a lot of internet difficulty with that but I think what I heard was did they find something animal that does this thing and the answer is did they find an animal that does this oh wait can I guess which animal yes can I guess because I'm guessing from all animals but I'm going to say huh other than humans I want to say I could see this happening in chimps I'd be a little confused but not surprised if it happened in mice like what they would be showing off but I also think birds could be because birds might be like oh look at this interesting tool that I have manufactured and check out what I can do with it now I need the real answer yeah you guessed it the first time but this is different from saying look at this tool that I made because that social learning this is showing something off just to go hey look at that like throw it over your shoulder and be done with it right so this was here's the big asterisk on this piece it is one encounter among two chimps that was observed once so this is something unusual that was observed that I wanted to just talk about for a second but this is not a systemic observation amongst chimps in a specific group or amongst the entire species that needs to be looked at further however I feel pretty confident that in chimps and in other animal species this is something that you will start to see and we're going to watch the video right now and I will narrate it for our listener so there's one chimp who's kind of mouthing a leaf and it's just a leaf it's not food it's not a tool it's not anything she can use and then she just shows it she like shoves it in front of the face of a second chimp as if to say like look at this leaf and then puts it right back and starts looking at it again on her side so again there's no food on this leaf there's no function for this leaf she's like hey check out this cool leaf that I found and that's it so these chimps look at it this is a mother and daughter so this is the daughter encouraging her mother to just join her in looking at a leaf and there have been lots of social interactions that chimps have been observed doing where they share experiences with each other they they use gestures to kind of indicate interest but this is something very unique in that it is something that has no function all previously documented referential gestures and primates were given to request something and not just to share attention so even if it was something that was not that didn't have a function it's they were trying to use it to get their attention to do something this is really just hey look at this thing and then they keep hanging out together and that's it and so this is really just an invitation to do further study but yeah they examined 80 similar leaf grooming events in order to rule out other explanations including food sharing and initiating grooming or playing so they they they measured this one against all the other ones it really seemed unique and different co-author professor slow comb of the University of York added quote while there is a need to identify further examples of this behavior in chimpanzees our observations indicate that sharing attention for sharing sake is not unique to humans it has been argued that our ability to share experiences helped us evolve the cognitive abilities to set us apart from other species such as our capacity for joint action cooperation and language our observations raised new questions about why human share experiences more often than our closest living relatives and whether engaging in this behavior at a higher frequency than other species can still explain the evolution of cognitive functions underpinning human social behavior so that's her way of kind of saying like but we still might be special because we do it a lot yeah more yeah I mean that's basically what all of social media is is hey look at this it's just share it's just asking for attention it's often not asking for specific action right yeah just attention my favorite cartoon is what does it say the guys at the computer and his wife is like hey when are you coming to bed and he's like somebody on the internet is still wrong something like he's still cracking things on the internet you said that well it was like the joke for a very long time whenever I hear those things whenever I hear those things in terms of this leading to a behavior leading to a cognitive ability in humans I'm always like well you know likely all of those cognitive abilities all those behaviors came about as a result of cognitive ability like I don't feel like built small cognitive abilities one by one then the brain increased to you know have the capacity to continue them feel like the brain got bigger and then there was yeah it feels like it went that direction it's as someone who's spent a lot of time around animals I can tell you that like almost every animal I've ever seen really can spend attention on something that is visually interesting and so if they can do that if they can watch TV or if they can watch humans or if they can look at a strange object moving in a strange way and just watch passively then why can't they do this this seems like a version of that hey look at this thing but it's the bridge of the social connection of not just I can watch and engage in an observation of an interesting thing but I want this other individual to also pay attention to this thing which requires like a knowledge of another being in a space and that they have their own attention span and they are looking or not looking at a thing right so it requires a lot of complex thought to understand the relative nature of other individuals but theory of mind right but it doesn't feel impossible to me for primates for birds, for other animals yeah and we know that chimpanzees and chimpanzee young they're the chimpanzee young are just like jumping around and playing and all over their parents and like getting their parents attention all the time in all sorts of different physical ways and perhaps this is an older child right so maybe this is not playing but still that you know child need for attention and a different way to get it so maybe you know this is that kind of next step in mental development of the chimpanzee brain in how that attention is gained. I love that that totally makes sense because that's yeah I mean we do that too right when we get older we don't ask our parents to like hey look what I can do and we do a handstand no we're telling our parents about only this achievement or a thing that we made with our own hands or you know just stuff that that is kind of at a different level of shared attention absolutely I think that totally makes sense. Yeah come to my house and share a meal with me I could talk about a book with you I mean I guess I don't know why it would be terribly differentiated from from learning you know because we have many examples across the animal kingdom of the older adult showing you know orcas show the young how to hunt and they practice even with the baby seals and stuff like this we have endless we have the bird that's saying okay I'm ready to learn and then you're observing the little bird to see oh okay yeah it looks like they're ready for the singing lesson yeah that they're paying enough attention you know it could also be a form of practice or play for a learning event which is you know mom is always showing the young one here look at this here look at this and then we do a thing and the younger one might be practicing teaching by going oh here look at this and but that was the rest of the lesson there's nothing to there's no learning moment there but they're picking up those pieces where you're getting attention of another one and maybe that young chimp will then have a baby and be like here's a leaf oh yeah I forgot this lesson goes nowhere here's a here's a here's a stick let's go let me shake it termites out of the hill that one I know how that one is so it could just be practice for a shared learning experience and teaching experience to the animals do quite a bit in the animal kingdom yeah I think with two animals it's very hard to say anything but it's interesting that the behavioral researchers are just noting it as a behavior now for the first time separate from others so I think that's the interesting that's going to allow other observations and differentiations yeah yeah it's all about recognizing that animals have the capacity for things that we designate as uniquely human then you start to see it everywhere so it's yeah you're right it's this opens up the opportunity to observe it yeah this is this week in science I do hope that you are observing this live streamed podcast or you know asynchronous asynchronously viewed somewhere facebook, youtube, twitch or potentially you're listening to us on a podcast we love that you're you're with us thank you so much for joining us we appreciate you and don't forget to head over to twist.org to get your 2023 twist flares animal corner calendar all right Justin what you got it's time for just good news the science news segment that here's the strange growling sound coming from the basement of the recent research lab and goes to investigate the source of the sound with nothing but an intermittently operating flashlight and a healthy dose of optimism it's just good news mass extinction addition the earth the earth is not currently experiencing a sixth major extinction event it has been believed by most scientific circles that planet earth the one we're living on it was in the midst of the sixth global mass extinction event not so say researchers from the University of California at Riverside and Virginia Tech so yay good news in the study and the proceedings of National Academy of Sciences the researchers were exploring life forms 550 million years old they found that the percentage of organisms that vanished from this time period to the next was similar to other documented extinction events that killed off nearly 80% or in this case killed off nearly 80% of the first complex multi-cellular life forms on the planet this form of life was sort of odd looking by more complex future life forms lots of Orbi disc shaped things they only lasted 10 million years so kind of a flash in the pan evolutionarily and researchers believe environmental changes were to blame for the extinction event geological records this is quoting Chengyai too of University California Riverside the paleo ecologists and the studies co-author geological records show that the world's oceans lost a lot of oxygen during that time and the few species that did survive had bodies adapted for lower oxygen environments so it's not clear why oxygen levels declined at the end of that era it is clear that environmental changes can destabilize and destroy life on earth at any time point such changes have driven all mass extinctions including the one currently occurring in which we are losing thousands of species each year due to climate change well I guess if you're counting we can no longer be considered to be in the sixth major mass extinction event in earth's history turns out it's the seventh later events since earlier one that was more difficult to document because the creatures that perished were soft-bodied and did not preserve well in the fossil record we humans on the other hand will be having an indelible mark for future paleo ecologists to sift through be they skimp or mouse or octopus whoever's running the show and the next sentient sentient dolphins I'd go orca then if we're gonna go marine that's the type of dolphin it is right now I know you said that on purpose wow and actually I tell you what maybe this study is the good news study we'll make this one the good news study because that one kind of had about trick me so this has been published in the scientific journal global change biology to study from the green land institute of natural resources and the national institute of aquatic resources technical university Denmark DTU they found that large numbers of whales have been moving into the waters off eastern Greenland so whales have found a new home the once sub Arctic ecosystem off southeast Greenland once dominated by large amounts of drifting ice pack has become more temperate with less sea ice and warmer ocean temperatures these changes in summer ocean conditions are making the region more attractive for large numbers of fin and humpback whales as well as other species like tuna that's all sounds great dramatic ecological changes such as these are considered regime shifts and the ecological literature shifts from one regime to another occur at a tipping point and sometimes reverse sometimes are not reversible and the regime shift can have cascading effects throughout the ecosystem if it is not reversed this is quoting professor Professor Miles Peter Haver Jorgensen Greenland Institute of Natural Resources in this case the new regime will likely become permanent for the foreseeable future unless temperatures cool and the ice export from the north increases again continued 21st century climate changes are in scenario unlikely this event this is then Brian Mackenzie National Institute of Resources at DTU this event is so unusual in the past 200 years of summer ice observations in the region we have seen big changes in some of the upper trophic levels there are likely many other changes in the ecosystem and food web that have not yet been described and might be part of the reason why these are coming to the region so sort of like the frog guy swallowing situation they are making observations they are seeing ice they are seeing the migratory mammals showing up but of course very difficult to really observe the underlying food web that is taking place below to see how dramatic these changes actually are and how far how far past the tipping point though this is apparently going on for a while back in 2012 bluefin tuna were being caught as bycatch in trawl fisheries in the waters off east greenland which was something that had never been encountered before and got a lot of attention back then since then large numbers of fin and humpback whales have been showing up they started to occur together with temperate species like dolphins killer whales, pilot whales at the same time observations of high arctic species narwhale walrus started to dwindle decreasing so they are getting pushed out either by the water temperatures or by the other species that are moving it I mean all these animals are also governed by the things they eat which is what they were getting to talking about the traffic level so the animals that are leaving are likely leaving because their food source is left it could be their food source is left it could be the other ones are migrating because their food source moved in down below but you think something like mackerel which is more of a feeder fish would be indicative so the levels there are dwindling and then you see some of the predators that would have been eating the mackerel or predators that would have been eating tuna there are probably many different situations we can consider who's the predator, who's the prey and what are we seeing happen they say the ecological shift in East Greenland has been also driven by the decline in summer ice drift so we know Greenland is melting so you think oh there should be more ice drifting around there should be more of that stuff going on so it turns out which this is something I didn't know I just learned from this study that most of this ice drift that you see off of Eastern Greenland and I've seen it before the route that flies the planes flying over Greenland to get to Denmark they go right over Eastern Greenland it's an amazing area where it just seems like an endless expanse of drifting ice coming off the Iceland's shelf or the Greenlandic shelf but it's not from Greenland which I always thought that ice all forms north of Alaska and then slowly turns out over Greenland and then gets sort of accelerated out to sea apparently it's not as endless as I thought because it's been in decline and that is why partly why maybe there's the warmer temperature or the more room for air breathing mammals to get in there and utilize utilize that water so the good news of this it's like a new normal is that what you're saying new place for whales to hang out most are a lot of whales except for the narwhal if you want to go whale watching go to Greenland just good news you gotta find this silver lining in all of the just good news I like to find the silver linings somewhere in there alright I have a couple of stories before we close out the show um you enjoy putting on makeup on a daily basis or on an occasional basis and you're just not excited about the foundation the concealer all the stuff that you think you need to make your skin even and flawless and look I have no pores anyway that's not gonna happen but research just published in vision research journal has studied whether or not just applying makeup to the eyes lips eyes and lips impacts how people see your skin and they did digital makeup application in pictures pictures with even skin using concealer foundation no thing at no makeup at all or just makeup applied to the eyes and the lips and they also did a real professionally applied makeup to real people not just digital makeup um comparison and they determined that people see your skin as more flawless when makeup is only applied to the eyes and the lips yes so if you just want to do the mascara and the lipstick a little bit of eyeshadow or something it's going to draw the attention of people's visual field away from the specifics of the rest of your face and potentially give the impression that your skin is more flawless than it actually is without having to conceal anything so I'm going to pretend that I knew this result all along because I am too lazy to put on concealer and so I think I put on concealer less than a dozen times in my entire life so I'm going to pretend it's I knew it I knew it and I just paid attention to the eyes and the lips that's it don't worry about the rest I love this save so much money and time and somebody who has never really worn makeup but has observed that concealer stuff or whatever you know those bases where there's cover those can go very easily wrong they become extremely noticeable if they're caked on or applied unevenly or whatever sizes just yeah just avoid it just skip that just go with this eyes and lips there you go we think we need we think we need all the makeup but you know all those contouring videos on tiktok who needs them who needs them it does this research does really kind of get at some of the previous research that suggests that when people are looking at faces our visual system our brain and the way that we recognize faces is actually more of a holistic view and that we are looking at things that are important for communication so the eyes and the mouth are very important for communicating messages and very important for behavioral communication and so that's why this seems like it makes a lot of sense right you don't why pay attention to those little tiny details that observers brains are not necessarily paying attention to anyway the eyes and the lips have it everyone it's great that's what our brains like yes so you know Thanksgiving tomorrow if you feel like you need to put on that makeup don't it's your family just eyes and lips that's all which the lips you don't even have to bother because you're going to eat so the lips are going to wear right off so just the eyes and even forget about that just don't have a good time everybody and forget about all the makeup just come as you are you know although I hate to perpetuate any sort of women or anybody should wear makeup kind of a because I've never really cared for it but I had this this dear friend that I worked with and she had very faint eyelashes she's blonde but she had very faint eyelashes and if she didn't wear mascara she would she's like oh I didn't wear mascara today Justin I'm like oh okay that's fine she's a gasp but now everybody's asking if I'm sick see this is the thing that happens if you regularly wear makeup and you don't wear it one day everyone will ask you if you are sick or tired they know what if you pick up why are you tired did you sleep last night are you coming down on something I just didn't wear makeup see what you do is you just never wear it and then if you occasionally wear it it's like oh my god you're gorgeous but like otherwise just like normal every day otherwise this is the problem that I ran into was in my last job and I wore a lot more makeup than I used to and I would if I would ever tone it down it was oh are you sick do you need to go home no no I'm fine I'm sorry I didn't tammy fey it come on alright so on my final story I do want to have us think about the birds and think about what the birds eat before we eat them but I'm not going to talk about not going to talk about turkeys we are going to discuss the great bustered male the great bustered boy that's a bigot right these are a a lecking species very most like they have a big front patch of feathers and they puff up their chests to impress the females and they have big tail feathers that they fluff up when they're trying to impress the ladies and they really do want to be as healthy as they can be some researchers were looking into whether or not birds these birds in a specific choose their diet as a way to accentuate their health and so their study in frontiers in ecology and evolution would suggest that they seek out plants with compounds that can actually kill pathogens so they determined that during the the mating season these great bustereds according to co-author doctor Susena Gonzalez-Coloma from the Institute of Agricultural Sciences in Merid the great bustereds seek out two species of weeds that are also used by humans in traditional medicine we show that both contain antiprotazole and nematocidal worm-killing compounds while the second also contains antifungal agents they compared these birds in the Iberian peninsula to see what they were eating during different times of the year and they found that during the spring season the droppings that they collected they didn't watch them they just observed the poop of the birds tells the story 623 droppings from female and male bustereds during the mating season in April and they looked at tissue that was left over from stems and leaves and flowers from about 90 different plant species that grow in the area and they showed that two species the papaver roeus and the echium plantagenium these are the corn poppy and the purple vipers bug gloss that are eaten more than expected from their relative abundance compared to the amount of plants locally in the environment and how much is actually in the diet so that's what these males are outdoing they're like let me get some of that bug gloss so they're showing up to the lek they got their their shake kind of cup with the wire ball in it that they shake up that has the creatine in it and the vitamin c boost and all this stuff and they're like I'm ready that's right I don't have any nematodes that's right no protozoans on me that's right the researchers the authors tested the activity of the molecular fractions that they had obtained from these plants that they had looked at they found that the molecules the alkaloids essential oils others actually were very successful against trichomonas galenae which is a protozoa nematode a parasitic worm and maloediga that's maloediglain javanica and the fungus aspergillus Niger so this is interesting because it suggests that not only humans are capable of seeking out food for their medicinal properties that words do it we do it that's right everybody's trying to stay healthy and it's fascinating I mean we've talked also about the catnip and other plants that our animals enjoy potentially having these kinds of medicinal uses and so it's just interesting the male birds who need to show off and be healthy look at what I'm eating the question is where does this behavior come from right so like when we we get cravings sometimes because we are deficient in something but this doesn't really feel like that it feels like they're trying to boost something so if they're getting a craving it's not because they're deficient it's because their hormones are telling them or I don't know that is the question where these birds infected with protozoans or nematodes coming into the season and then the plants helped them or and is that what led to them eating these foods more or when they get a spike in testosterone do they just crave these foods and where does that come from is that something in their genetics I don't know so bizarre learned? a lot of animal food preference I have to assume is genetic you know how much of it is learned how much of it is genetic how much of it is microbiome driven because then if you're learning a little bit from your parents then maybe that microbiome gets situated early and then that takes over but it could be this was a long time ago food preference for some segment of a bird population and then then come the nematodes and the what have you here comes the and then now all those birds that didn't eat these plants are gone but it's only during one time of the year right it's only during the season but is that also when the plants are there or is it the plants are around like the poppy isn't year round relative there's all sorts of other plants around but they just happen to be eating them more and the males were eating them more than the females anyway what is your turkey eating before you eat your turkey probably corn right is that probably if you're eating the meats some people are having ham some people are having turkey some people are having tofu doesn't matter what you eat just matters that you are able to share time and a little bit of gratitude for all the things that we've got and the people who are in our lives at this very moment and the science that has brought us all together I think we've made it to the end of another show and I just want to say thank you all so much I'm grateful so grateful alright who do I need to say thank you to I want to say thank you Justin Blair thank you for being a Hill Host I really love getting to do a show with you every week I really love it thank you Fada for all your help thank you for also showing up you're welcome hi Jay okay Fada thank you so much for your help on social media and getting those show notes done really appreciate that Gord, Aron Law, others who help keep the chat rooms very happy places to be thank you for your time and your effort identity 4 thank you for recording the show Rachel, thank you for editing the show people who are watching in our chat rooms on our Twitch, Facebook our YouTube channel thank you for being here while we're doing the show live and for talking and for being a part of what we're talking about really love having you here and as always I would love to say thank you to our patrons thank you too 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 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