 to a show on science tonight. Maybe it will be a wonderful show tonight. Musical theater science programming. Are you watching? Are you truly edutained? Oh, I like to be edutained. I like to be edutained too. You know, sometimes I feel like just breaking into like Professor Doofenshmirt's voice. He is really the greatest all time, you know? It's talking like that and you go, ah, I don't know what you're talking about. Doofenshmirt's incorporated. This is not that show though. This is This Week in Science, starting in three, two, this is Twis. This Week in Science episode number 663 recorded on Wednesday, March 21st, 2017. Doodles of science. Hey everybody, I am Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show, we are going to fill your heads with doodles, toad troubles and a rogue, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The wonderful thing about the world we are living on, if you haven't noticed it by now, is that it is covered with living things. So many planets in our solar system without life. So much of the universe apparently uninhabitable and yet this one planet. This one we live on, life is abundant. It is everywhere we have looked and it should come as no surprise that with all this teaming resplendent abundance, we would want to learn everything we can about it. So that's what we're gonna do here on This Week in Science coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn everything all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. 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're back yet again. And once again, another wonderful week of science. All sorts of wonderful stories out there. Something we will not be talking about tonight is how fairness in housework, house chores leads to better satisfaction in relationships. What we buy. That sounds like a little peek behind the curtain at the Shemford household. We won't be talking about that tonight. Of what we will be talking about some great stories. I have stories about some sciency doodles, a rogue star, and also some plastic, because you know, plastic. That's right. Justin, what did you bring? I've got some Neander news, big Neander news, a duo of Dennis Owens, and why Texas is such a sinkhole of a state. Sinkhole, oh, why is it? We'll find out in a moment. Blair, what is in the animal corner? Ooh, I brought some cane-toed sex calls. I brought baddie conversations. And I brought taste bud death. What? That's terrible. I like my taste buds. I like tasting things. I think you'll be fine. Okay, I'll be fine. Wonderful. You'll be fine, for sure. Good. Well, I like to start this show off just fine, and I will start it off full show, but reminding you all that if you have not done so yet, you can subscribe to our podcast. Please do so. In fact, if you love the sounds of science on a weekly basis, you can find information at twist.org if you're interested, or you can search for this week in science, all good places where podcasts are found, and YouTube and Facebook. Let's start it off with some really good news. Really good news, okay? So we have talked on this show, brought up this example over and over and over again of the experiments in which researchers ask kids to draw pictures of scientists, and what do they draw? A white-haired old man in a lab coat with a bubbling flask. Right. And an accent. And an accent. Oh, yeah. I think Tom's like this even. Really nice. Yeah. Okay, well, so that was how it was for sure back in the 60s and even the 70s. In the 60s and 70s, 99.4%, not 100%, but really pretty close there of kids who were given these tasks, drew a male scientist. That's a big proportion. In the 80s, that percentage dropped to about three quarters, 72%. So almost 75%. 72% of kids were drawing men. A quarter were starting to draw women or other individuals. So by the 2010s. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hang on, I have to pause you right there. The decade we're in now. I gotta pause you for a second before you move on. Yes. 72% was men. Yeah, pictures, 72% of the pictures that children drew were of male scientists. But then you said the other was women or other, and what's the other? Like some are dog scientists. Like you were drawing. It's not men. The other quarter. It's not men. We're not men. It's a duck, but it's still, it's okay. By the, by this decade, the decade we are in now, one in three drawings portrays a female scientist. Oh, not bad. It's moved 8% or maybe more if the other one didn't have ducks. Yeah, one in three drawings portrays a female scientist. Now researchers who have published this work, the lead researcher, David Miller, psychology researcher at Northwestern University says this is probably the result of increasing numbers of women becoming scientists and also mass media, such as television and children's shows. And these are featuring women more often. So what we see is not the same old image all the time that kids are starting to see the change in representation and to reflect that change as well. So interesting points here though, or how stereotypes change as children age. So from the 80s until now, 30% of girls and 83% of boys that were six years old drew male scientists. The interesting thing here is by age 16, the older ages, teenagers, 75% of girls and 98% of boys drew male researchers. And so older kids seem to link men with science more than younger kids do, which I think is a very interesting, interesting point. And this could be something that is not in the good news vein at this point in time, but that the teenagers who are the ones who are going to be looking into careers and really starting to delve into what they're gonna do for college and where they're gonna go with their lives, that this is where we need to really be putting our efforts. But at the same time, they weren't necessarily looking at these children longitudinally through their lifetime. So we're just comparing, in 1986, this many six year olds versus this many 16 year olds or these studies were showing this response. But this seems as though this would be an age group, a teenage age group would be one to target specifically to increase this understanding that women are scientists too. Yes, they are, but, but okay, so one of the things that I would look at in this too is how much do these teenagers even know about scientists, right? And if you're learning about the history of science, what's the first name that anybody can go is like, oh, that guy's a scientist, it's Einstein, right? Like this is like, and because of a critical pivotal role in our understanding of the universe that we live in, he's going to be talked about quite a bit, right? And you get into quantum and what do you start talking about? Well, Neil's bore, right? Okay, there's another guy, it's another guy in it from the same era. Also, I would want to throw into this if it was possible just to see how many like would confer a scientist more likely in a black and white image than one that was in color. Like one of these is a scientist, one's in black and white, one's in color. Both guys, you know, whatever, same age and everything. I bet you most people pick the black and white image just because this is what we see when we talk about science, when people are teaching about science. You know, also our science communicators over time, whether you're talking, you know, about the, what's his name with the British accent, who does all the narrations? David Attenborough. Attenborough. You got Steele. Brian Cox, you've got Carl Sagan. You've been in a moderated stage. Well, there's a couple of things going on there too, is with TV, there's not a lot of older women on television. So that's part of it, is that men are allowed to age and women are not. No, I think everybody doesn't have a choice in that. Hold on, I'm not done. But the other problem is that if you're talking about teenagers, a huge problem that teenagers have, and this is something we've talked about a lot on this show, is that as a woman, you're kind of told to pick, are you gonna be popular and pretty, or are you gonna be smart? And so teenagers, hey, that's right when that's starting to happen. Am I gonna start dating boys, or am I gonna start, you know, to follow a scientific track, or a math track, or an engineering track? And this is something that we're fighting against, and I think we're making a lot of strides on, but it's still something that has to be looked at and addressed, and that's what's, I think is potentially really exciting about this. And I think the big place that is going to be influential right now is actually social media, Instagram. Not all the other social media accounts necessarily, but Instagram where a lot of teenagers are hanging out and there are a large number of female scientists on Instagram curating beautiful images of their work, of their interests, also of their lives showing well-rounded lives with interests in the arts and culture and food and animals and clothes, and kind of showing that you can have all of these things and love science at the same time. And so I think through something like Instagram, if not Instagram itself, that this will help to reach teenagers and that audience. And then we'll also add to it that, of course, there's, you know, you have cohorts of children getting older, and so those six-year-olds are gonna get older eventually. And I think this is a trend. It's a major shift from, you know, less than one in a hundred children find imagining a scientist being a woman to about 30%, you know, a little over 30% of kids seeing scientists as women. And so what this shows is that communication, like what we do here and what many others are working very hard on to represent the various natures of people in the sciences that it eventually will trickle down to understanding. And this will get, it's growing. This is a positive trend. And so that is my good news take home from this story. Now, now, now. Now. Excuse myself for making the title nine comparison again, but yeah, I agree, it's getting better. It's getting better and that is good. We'll keep up the efforts, right? And one day your daughters, Justin, are gonna be carrying the banner of science and changing the world for us. And so this is what it's about. We'll keep putting it out there. So change in science, that's a big thing, but you know what's even bigger? Changing the orbits of objects in the solar system. That is a big deal. I'm against it. What could go wrong? What could go wrong there? Why would we want to do that? Why is it happening? Do you ever wish you could change the orbit of your planet? So we're not wanting that to happen, especially in our solar system. It's working pretty well for us the way it is. We don't need any more objects being dislodged from the Earth cloud and being sent hurtling to the inner planets of the solar system where they could interact with us and go boom in a very negative way for humanity and the rest of life on the earth. But historically that is something that very well may have happened. A few years back, or people have been talking about these objects that they're following in the solar system, the orbital paths of various of planets and also of these asteroids that are out these objects or cloud objects, the asteroid belt objects, these things that are in our solar systems going around, going around, right? Well, some of them are on these odd trajectories and how did they get that way? And this hypothesis has been put forward that, oh, there's a rogue planet. Oh, there's a rogue star, something interacted with our solar system. And so a team of astronomers in 2015 published an article suggesting that there was a star that is called the Schultz star that actually came close and kind of brushed through our Oort cloud about 70,000 years ago and caused some things to move. But the data, you know, it's like, okay, is that really? Okay, do we have enough data on that? And so some astronomers from Complutense University in Madrid, Carlos and Raul de la Fuente Marcos with a researcher, Sveri J. Arseth of the University of Cambridge, looked at 340 objects in the solar system that have hyperbolic orbits, which are kind of open V-shaped, kind of like a big U or a V-shaped orbit and not the elliptical orbit that is standard for most objects in the solar system. And they found the trajectory that of some of them is probably influenced by this star, the Schultz star. They write, using numerical simulations, we've calculated the radiance or positions in the sky from which all of these hyperbolic objects seem to come. In principle, one would expect those positions to be evenly distributed in the sky, particularly if the objects come from the Oort cloud. However, what we find is very different, a statistically significant accumulation of radiance. The pronounced over density appears projected in the direction of the constellation Gemini, which fits the close encounter with Schultz's star. Now Schultz's star is about 20 light years away at this point in time. And I was doing a little back of the envelope, well actually my notebook calculation to kind of see how fast that means it would have to be traveling. And so it would be traveling almost three times faster than the Earth is currently in orbit around the Earth. So it's a pretty quickly moving star, some 190,000 miles a second or so. No, 100,000 miles an hour maybe. I think about 190,000 miles an hour is what I came up with. But it's very interesting to think that a star thrown out of its orbit somehow or even in this strange orbit in our galaxy that it bumped into ours and made some things move in a way that we're just seeing the effects now and we're watching them now. So the researchers say it could be coincidence but it's unlikely that both location and time are compatible and their simulations suggest that the Schultz star approached even more than 0.6 light years away from the Earth cloud from our solar system. Yeah, so 70,000 years ago, Schultz's star which is a binary red dwarf system with really tiny. It's only about 9% the mass of the sun and there's a little brown dwarf that orbits around it this little tiny brown dwarf orbits around the red dwarf they're not very big but they're moving kind of fast and they're just these rogue binary star system and it's possible 70,000 years ago that it would have been visible to early humans, ancient humans standing on the planes looking up in the sky as a reddish light that they would have seen it actually get close enough at that point in time if they were looking up and following the stars in that way. So this happened 70,000 years ago. Yeah, a little drive-by star system and then it's like, I'm out of here, sorry. It's a little gravitational riptide our way and we're just now seeing these Oort cloud objects zipping our way, huh? Yeah, well, they're not zipping our way, they're just not in the usual direction of all Oort cloud objects but the question is these hyperbolic objects you know, what other interstellar asteroids? We've got Oomua, right? That came and did a drive-by through our solar system and what other stars and planets and interstellar objects could have interacted or are still interacting with our solar system that we're not aware of? We're part of it, our solar system is part of a system and we're not just alone in space. We get bumped into occasionally. Excuse me. Exactly. Do they buzz, excuse me, like these, woop, excuse me, woop. That's right, that's right. I don't know if the stars do that. Probably not. No, the stars are rude. So going back 70,000 years, is that far enough back to get to Neanderthals? Oh, yeah, absolutely. You only have to go nearly that far back. In fact, what do I got here? Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have sequenced the last of the Neanderthals. Got at least five Neanderthals that lived between 39,000 and 47,000 years ago. This is much more recent genome sequencing than we've had. We've had much older DNA to work with thus far. These are much more closely related to those who contributed DNA to modern humans, or the ancestors of. They would have contributed their DNA to the Neanderthals that then became interbred with the humans. So previous whole genome sequences have been generated for four Neanderthals, Croatia, Siberia, and the Russian Caucasus. This study adds five more, from Belgium, France, Croatia, and Russia. They're a little wider geographic area here, so we get a little bit better spread of this and more recent time period. So with this Neanderthal researchers can now begin to put together the history of Neanderthals a little bit. They compared these Neanderthal genomes to the genomes of people living today, so that all of the late Neanderthals were more similar to the Neanderthals that did contribute the DNA. When you go in there on your 23andMe or whatever it is, and you find out, oh, I'm 2% Neanderthal, that's likely these Neanderthals that it's referring to. So even though four of these Neanderthals that they sequenced lived at a time when modern humans had already begun arriving in Europe, they do not carry detectable amounts of modern human DNA. And quotey voice, it may be that gene flow was mostly unidirectional from Neanderthals into modern humans, according to Svante Pabo, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. So that means that the Neanderthal, at least in this scenario, the Neanderthal offspring would have likely been raised amongst humans from a Neander human co-mangling, which might mean the Neander man and the Neander female. You might extract that from that, but not necessarily. But there's also a potential mystery. They've noticed that the Neanderthals have sort of genetic similarity, which is correlated with their geographical location. But they can see that there was towards the very end of Neanderthal history, they were moving and replacing each other a little bit in areas. So Neanderthals made towards the end of their existence as freestanding hominids on this planet may have been moving around quite a bit. And so we've often talked about one of the potentials is that humans fought with or out-competed directly Neanderthal populations. It could be that the Neanderthals that were still around, were just moving away from humans and getting into conflicts with other Neanderthals. So it's a really fascinating first glimpse into, and they think that they have a way of collecting DNA from these archaic hominids now that may accelerate the ability to do this in the future. They just need to find more bones. And there was another story that you sent me, Kiki, that was about Denise events. They did a genetic sort of mapping of populations in Asia and East Asia, and popping guinea, I guess, or popping individuals. And it kind of was sort of an interesting thing. So we only have a finger of a Denisovan that we've been able to figure out these things existed. And there's a 5% Denisovan ancestry in popping individuals, which is sort of an interesting thing. What they discovered through this though is that there was not just one, but at least two different infusions or two different co-mingling events with Denisovans and modern humans. And it bases because that one that they found in this Siberian cave is closer to some Denisovan ancestry, but kind of far removed from the other Denisovan ancestry. So it was not equally related to the Denisovan genetics that modern humans carry, which indicates that there's very likely not one, but two separate events at least for Denisovan and modern human intermingling. That's interesting. So the populations came together, separated, came together, separated, or different tribes of people came together, then mixed together, like that there could have been these multiple paths of, these Denisovans, even though we don't have a lot of their bones, they got around. Keep popping up. They do. I don't think it's popping to Guinea. It's just popping. They're... Popwin. Popwin, thank you. Popwin. Popwin. Yeah. I mean, that's significant. There's a significant percentage of Denisovan in these individuals. So what even is a species? Right. I mean, well, yeah, I mean, when we're talking about ancient humans, yeah, that's what we should just call it, ancient human soup. That's right. What's the Latin word for soup? That's what we need. That's a great question. So the freezeology that's being thrown about quite a bit in anthropological circles is braided strain, right? Soup in Latin. Pulmenti. Pulmenti. There you go. Homo pulmenti. That's how you do it. Yeah. So a braided stream is the term that they're using? Yeah, because even going back further, it was the old archetypal ideas. You had this, it evolved into that. It split off at some point, and then that one died off, but this one continued and it split off. And so like a stream, it sort of breaks up and has tributaries that go off and that sort of thing. But what it really looks more like is like, no, actually, this came back over here, re-merged, and then this went on for a while, and then, oh, and then this came in and it joined, but then it went off and it became this over here, and so it keeps going back in lots of intermingling. And as long as it walks like a human and kind of looks human-ish, that's apparently good enough for hominids. Then it's a French braid. Perhaps a fish tail, who even knows? That's right. What kind of braid is it? Fancy one. It's a fancy braid. Big tails even. Yeah, but these stories, I mean, since the advent of being able to investigate genetic information more rapidly, we're getting more and more of these stories, and little find is revealing so much more information than it once did. And so a finger bone, a pile of teeth, things that used to be, okay, well, I think these traits of these things suggest that this is what happened. Now it's so much richer, and we're actually able to follow this braid through time. Yeah, it's amazing. That is amazing. I like it. I like braiding my hair, too. You know what time it is right now, everybody? It's time for Blair's Animal Corner with Blair. I have cane toad news. Okay. Cane toads, also known as marine toads. They're kind of the poster child for why introduced species are never a good idea. Listeners to the show have heard me kind of rant, I guess, about introduced species several times, and they're a great example. Cane toads originally from Central and South America were introduced a bunch of different places. They were introduced to Australia, Florida, Papa New Guinea, speaking of Papa. The Philippines, islands off the coast of Japan, a bunch of the Caribbean islands, Fiji, Pacific Islands, Hawaii. They've been introduced a lot of places, pretty much always islands, because I feel like that's always the answer to, oh, well, if it gets out of control, at least it'll just be on the island. It'll be fine. But the problem is there's a few problems. The first is they were all introduced to eat different pests depending on the island. Cane toads are awake at night and in the very early morning. A lot of the prey animals that they were released to eat awake in the middle of the day. Cane toads hang out on land on the ground level. They are not great jumpers. Most toads are not. They don't have the right back legs for it. A lot of the locusts and beetles that they were brought into eat hang out at the top of sugar cane plants. I'm laughing because right now I'm thinking, yeah, you never hear about toads' legs on the menu. Yeah, they're not impressive. Also, cane toads get really big. They can get about eight inches in their largest. So they eat things a lot bigger than bugs. They eat small mice. They eat rats. One of the places they were introduced, they were actually brought on to eat rats. And they eat small birds, other frogs and toads, lizards. They eat each other. Yeah, they eat each other. So not well thought out to say the least. A lot of the places they were released, like in Hawaii and in Australia, they didn't eat what they were brought to eat. But on top of it all, marine toads, cane toads have a very special poison gland called a parotid gland that secretes a neurotoxin. So in Central and South America, there are animals that have evolved alongside them to eat them. Things like caiman, certain snakes, a lot of birds have actually figured out how to flip them over and just eat their stomach so they avoid the gland altogether. But you put them on these new habitats and the local predators don't know what to do. They get poisoned by these animals or they learn to avoid them, which is what the response is for, right? And so as a result, in 1935, when they were released in Australia, they released 102 toads. They didn't come from their native Central and South America. They came from Hawaii, the stock in Hawaii that they thought was going so well at the time to eat cane beetles. On the sugarcane crops. There are now an estimated, guess? I don't know. This has got to be like in the thousands, tens of, how many? Dustin? I would put it in the multi-millions. 1.5 billion toads. Billions in Australia. Wow. Yeah. So they're very adaptable. They reproduce quickly. They're mobile. They can cover up to a kilometer at night, which, as Justin would say, is about 1,000 meters. Just about. Yeah. And they can hitch rides on trucks. They can even sometimes hitch rides on planes and the landing equipment. So they have spread across Australia in these past, oh my goodness, 80 years to, yeah. I just looked up Canto just because that was such a cute picture. I want to see another one. It says here a female's clutch size, which I think is the number of eggs. Number of eggs, yeah. Number of eggs, 8,000 to 25,000. Right. So again, in their native habitat, the majority of those would be eaten. Yeah. But there's also less likelihood that in a non-native habitat, there would be animals looking to eat those eggs. So all this kind of compounds and has created this population explosion, problem being they're eating other animals' food, they're out competing for space, and they're poisoning native animals. So this is a problem. It's an epidemic. And up until now, the majority of eradication efforts have been focused on capturing and killing individual toads, which as you can imagine, if it's only, if it's 1.5 billion toads, it's not very effective. So a new study looking at different trap opportunities decided to, this is from James Cook University in partnership with Animal Control Technologies Australia, wanted to see how they could use kind of the toads' motivation against them. So what are the two things that toad cares about? Food and sex, right? As with most animals. And so the two things that they did is they played with different male cane toad calls. Because the calls usually are used to attract females. So the males call to attract females. But what they found in their research was that both males and females were attracted to this male call. Meaning that either males are coming to compete with the male that's calling, or the males are going, I know where the action's at. So the male call attracts both males and females. This, they did find that females prefer certain call types and so they honed in on that, but males didn't really care. Any other male calling, they're there. The other thing that they knew was that toads follow their guts. So they wanted to attract insects. They couldn't display normal white lights that usually bugs flock to, because these toads, again being nocturnal and corpuscular, don't like bright lights. So they played with different types of UV lights and they found a type of UV light that attracts insects and does not bother the toads. So now they have these traps that involve mating calls of a male cane toad and these UV lights. So there's kind of a smorgasbord inside. And they were able to capture adult breeding age males and females. And if they picked their season wisely, they could do this before they reproduce. So not only could they eradicate the problem via current individuals out in the habitat, but they could actually prevent future generations by getting this all before mating season. So this will hopefully help put maybe a slight dent, but it's also, yeah, it's, I mean, that's a lot of traps. It is indeed, but the other side of this is to use the trapped individuals to help develop other control methods. So that might be genetically engineering disease. What could go wrong? Or genetically engineering sterility. Yes. So that's another one, genetically engineered sterility, or also genetically engineered toads that are not toxic. So then local predators can have at them. So that sounds like it would be the easiest. Yeah, I agree. Get rid of those plants for sure. Yeah, there might be another solution. Yeah, because another thing going on right now is that they're trying to train local species to avoid toads. So they're putting like a dummy marine toad out that smells really terrible or tastes terrible or shocks them to try to train these populations to avoid marine toads, but there's still so many toads. What were you going to say, Justin, target practice? No, which they have done. I mean, they've tried all sorts of things, encouraging Australians to do violence to these toads and bounce these on them, all sorts of ridiculous things. Why don't we just take whatever the natural predator was and just import a whole bunch of toads? What could go wrong? Yeah, there's one I just googled at the banded cat-eyed snake. Yeah, what could go wrong? That's what Australia needs is more snakes. Well, these ones are only mildly venomous, but that's a work everywhere else. Why not there? Yeah, absolutely. What could go wrong? Exactly. It'd be so interesting to see if they could, maybe not genetically, I don't know, if they could genetically change the female's preferences for certain cane toad songs, like if there are some male cane toads that are less poisonous than others, is there variation in the poison in the poison gland? Could you change the selection, the breeding selection, maybe? I don't know. Yeah, that's a great question. And the thing that I selfishly think about with this is that in California and along a lot of the West Coast of the United States, we have a bullfrog problem. Oh, yeah. Eastern species. They're eating turtles. So, yeah, bullfrogs, they get even larger than the marine toad, and they are eating native rodents. They are eating native birds, and they're eating native turtles. Do you think they eat cane toads? Because we may have just found this one. You know, that's a great question. I feel like probably not, because they probably are not immune to the poison. Yeah. But so any way that we can figure this out, especially something based on traps like this, this is not specific to... This is something that potentially could be extrapolated to other species. So this is something I think if it works well, we could maybe do with bullfrogs as well. Yeah. Well, the one thing we do know about the bullfrogs is that they jumped from bank to bank. That is true. Okay, pop. From bank to bank. That's right. Down on the banks of the hanky-panky and the... Yeah. Okay. I have no idea what you two are talking about. You have small children. How do you not know that? How do you not know this song? I've never heard this ever. All right. Speaking of the hanky-panky, where the bullfrogs jump from bank to bank, singing this is the first time. Here we have leap off a lily-pep and go ka-plop. That's what it was. I remembered it. I've never heard that before. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, eh. Cane toads, bullfrogs, traps. Can we catch them? Can we do something about it? What? This is driving me batty. What am I going to learn about it? Well, speaking of cane toads in South America, one of their actual native predators, a type of bat, the white-throated, round-eared bat, has been shown this week to learn from other species. So they have used auditory-based social learning to identify new food sources from individuals of another bat species. The bats are talking to each other. This is crazy. Pew! So cross-species conversations. Cross-species conversations. So they will roost together in mixed species groups. But in previous studies, we've shown that they're aware that there are different species in the area because when given the option, they choose to sleep near their own species when they're all mixed up together in a lab. So we know for sure that they're not just confusing these different bats for their same brethren. They know they're a different species. But they still live together in these caves. And they have been shown now in this new study to learn acoustic cues about unfamiliar prey from both members of their same species and members of another species. They were also able to figure it out on their own, but it took them much longer. So they caught on to things much faster when they were getting vocal cues from these other species. And they say that learning about new prey cues may be more difficult than learning new information about a previously familiar call. And they took advantage of this by learning from these other species, although it did on average shake about three times longer to learn a new cue compared to learning a cue they had heard before from a new species. So there's not a lot in this study. It's pretty simple. They just showed that they responded to these sounds coming from another species. And they were able to identify it as a cue that there was food nearby. And this was for a lot of different animals, but including cane toads. And they found that they also learned because one of the species was a little too small to eat cane toads, they learned the difference between the cane toad call and other calls from this other species. So it wasn't just, oh, they're talking. Let me follow them. They actually learned what the call meant. So I am kind of of two minds on this study. One, wow, that's really cool. Species are talking to each other. But two, maybe duh though, because these animals have been living together for billions of years, you think they'd catch on to what other folks are talking about nearby. I'm not surprised. Yeah, like even if they don't know the exact what the exact meaning of a call is, the same way we don't, but if you hear a dog barking, you go, oh, is there something going on? Because you think dogs tend to warn people about intruders. Is there, we, yeah. How many animals do we train to respond to sounds? It sounds mostly like conditioning to me, especially because they said that it took a while. So I, it's neat to see the evidence of it happening in the wild, but I'm, yeah, I'm not really surprised and I can't wait for it to come out in more and more species because of course they've done species, they've done studies on this with a lot of different primate species and quote, you know, that age old tale of until now, we thought only primates were capable of this. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But really, like animals are smart. They know how to survive and they know how they're observant, they're observant to the world around them and if other animals around them are going to give them a clue to when food is available, they're going to pick up on it. Can I get your addition one more time of the casual nature journalist? Oh yes, until now, primates were thought to be the only animals that had language. Oh, you know, drafts don't make sounds, you know, you know, they have vocal codes, but I mean, I'm sure they're for nothing at all. There we go. All right, well done. Very nicely done. So bats, I mean, these are, you know, mammals. We've got the bats have great hearing. This does, yeah, not surprising and I was going to bring up birds. Birds fly in flocks of multiple species very often. They probably pick up on each other's songs and calls and cues all the time, especially when predators are involved. And then additionally, there are even squirrels and some birds have anti-predator calls. They use, that they basically yell at a predator in the face. They have me alone, you know, it's like the animal version of self-defense training, right? Stop it. And they yell, they yell at the other animal. And so predators understand that. So this is yet another, I would say this is yet another very interesting example. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I would, yeah, and I would also agree with you. I would expect this to be something that happens constantly in like a very densely compact area, like a jungle with, you got birds and you got some frog sounds and you got all these different creatures living together making different sounds. It would be useful to know their alert sound, right? It would be helpful to know if the birds up in the canopy are all shrieking danger because there's a lot of water around. You'd probably like to be informed about that too. Yeah, absolutely. And do you see this at the zoo? Ever like if one, like if the primates are going nuts, do the other animals kind of react to it a little bit? Do they? Some animals will kind of compete with their sounds. Yeah, it kind of depends. It depends on a lot of things. But it's, it's definitely I hear it most with the primates because it's kind of somebody starts and then it's kind of this cascading effect through the primate center. Everybody's starting to call out. But it's hard because they don't have the visual cues a lot of the time. And I think that because they live to the next to the same species for so long, they might get kind of desensitized to hearing certain things. Like, oh, it's just the Siamangs again. Go back to sleep. You know. Yeah, it's that salient information. What is the call, the cue, that actually has personal relevance? You know, and we listened to people's conversations on the streets. There are sounds all over the place. But, you know, you don't really cue into something and start listening until it there's, you pick up on something that's personally important to you. Right. Somebody walking by who's like, oh, I saw this great science documentary. Yeah. So for example, something that, that does sometimes get the animals in the zoo talking more than normal is we, we allow service animals in the zoo. Occasionally, sometimes people abuse that ability and they will say they have service animals when maybe perhaps they do not. And so they will bring in a dog that then starts barking at one of the exhibits. And that will usually cause some problems where, you know, some animals will start vocalizing in a way that they don't often. Those people are always escorted out pretty much right away. But that's definitely something that you see where they're going. Oh, that's a very unfamiliar sound from a weird looking thing. No, thank you. Go away. Not interested. That's fascinating. Yeah. When people bring their service chimpanzees, it's got to be quite enough. Oh, no, thank you. We did once have a service pig come to the zoo. I thought was an odd choice. Yeah. And we had a service cockatoo come to the zoo. That was, that was an interesting one. We just require that they are in some way tethered so that they don't fly off into the lion exhibit or something. That's fascinating. A service cockatoo. What could a cockatoo do? So the only animals that, well, the animal I most frequently see interacting with animals in the zoo are squirrels. They go in and out of the exhibits. They're eating like the cockatoo's food and the cockatoo's, you know, that. Sometimes if the squirrels get a little too close to the chimpanzees, they become a fuzzy toy. Oh, dear. Yeah. Squirrel. I mean, call that. It's flying through the air. Oh, gosh. That's good old natural selection. That is, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. And right now I'm going to naturally select us to take a quick break. This is this week in science and we will be back with more sciencey goodness after this break. There is lots of plastic coming ahead and much more. Stay tuned. Hey everybody. Thank you so much for listening to Twist Right Now. 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Paul writes in, he says, Hi, Dr. Kiki. So how to start? Well, I listen to these segments which are often about health issues. And while I'm really happy for the people who are helped, I also find them a bit depressing because they ignore the let's say less good parts of health science. I've got a health problem that's been going on for nearly 10 years. It took me eight years to find a doctor who would do more than say go away. And even now, while my current doctor has had a pretty good go at trying to figure out what's going on, they still don't know. And so there's no solution. However, that's not the problem. I accept that we won't always be able to get answers. But the problem is, is the lack of care. All the doctors that I've seen show no signs of caring about me or how the lack of answers affects me. And for that, I blame science. Doctors have become blinded by all the good stuff they can do with the consequence that when they can't provide a solution, they don't know how to provide or don't see the need to provide a caring human touch. All their science, which they worship, just look at the way that they react to any alternative health system has insulated them from human needs and wiped out their humanity. It's not just in treatment that this is a problem. Chronic fatigue isn't my problem, but the way that people with it have been treated by the research community illustrates the problem. Initially, there was Simon Wesley who said it was all in people's heads. And because he was such a prominent figure, everyone in the science community fell into line presumably without thinking. Even now, when the all in the head explanation has been debunked, he's still lauded by the science community. More recently, we've had the PACE trial where the authors fought tooth and nail against releasing their data. And who did the science community back? Well, I don't think that it was the patients. Where is the care in any of this? So what has science done for me lately? I think that it's taken the care out of health care. And I don't think that's a good thing. And as he said, if this is too hard, at least use it as inspiration to recognize the damage that science sometimes does. What? Thanks for writing, Paul. I thought that I thought you wrote, and it's all it's good for us to have a conversation point. Yeah. Yeah. So here it is. Here it is. So first of all, doctors are not scientists. They're mechanics. They're people mechanics. That's all they are. It's not like they're doing research into or looking for new ways to do things. That's not what they've been trained to do. It's not what their expectation is when they go in. It's not their profession. Just like when you take a car into the shop, there's somebody who knows how to turn the wrench and where to put the torque and then to change the part out and put the other part back in, whatever it is. That's what a doctor does. And there's a sort of a wishfulness, I think, in what you have stated here about wanting alternative remedies to work. That does not make them work, right? No, but there is. But I see where he's coming. It doesn't make alternative therapies work. There is a reticence or has been a reticence historically for science to approach some alternative therapies and to study them. I think that's changed over the last few decades and that more research is happening but still there's a difficulty. I had a conversation a week ago about the difficulty in actually coming up with proper controls for some of these medical procedures. So how do you do a control group properly for acupuncture? You're going to stuck with needles or you're not getting stuck with needles, right? There's also then you look at how many people have been slathering on lavender or tea tree oil infused things onto their bodies and it turns out those are endicine disruptors. Lavender is a synthetic estrogen. And it turns out that we have receptors for these volatile odor compounds in our skin so that our skin and our physiology can actually respond. We don't exactly know how yet to odorants, which is so fascinating. But I think what he's getting at here also is that it's not necessarily doctors, it's not necessarily, it might be the fault of science in some way or our interpretation of scientific results and how we put them into practice within the medical practice. And his comment here that there is a big side of it that is missing within the medical practice, which is that human caring touch, which is just humanity. And there is a lot of nurses are fantastic and come in and are very caring, but the doctor comes through and it's checked the check board. And it's very... Well, and it varies from doctor to doctor too, but I think that the point that I see kind of shining through this that I would agree with is that part of caring for a human is also caring for the brain. And so if we're not going to make some form of therapy or counseling or some outlet to be able to speak to a person, a standard option for every human, then people end up looking for that in their doctor, which is a covered option for most humans. So I think that's kind of the other side of this is that we're very focused on the treatment of our physical body and we're not as focused on the treatment of our brain and our emotional system and our chemical system sometimes as we should be. And so that actually might have a lot to do with these sorts of problems. I think that there's other experts in that. Like, I mean, I think that doctor is a mechanic. You're the patient, in fact, can be in the way of them doing their job. Sure. But what I mean is that is that people don't feel like those specialists are available to them quite at the same breadth that that physicians are. Right. That an emergency room doctor is. And so people look there for something that they should be looking elsewhere for potentially as well. Yeah. And loquacious one in the chat room is saying that this is a huge issue and also hidden disabilities are mostly ignored. And there are many things that become ignored in the scientific investigations because of lack of funding, because of, you know, we have orphan diseases or that don't get treatments because or because they're such a rare disease. You know, these genetic disorders that only affect a very small number of people. So there are there's some very interesting aspects to this that I think his letter brings up. And yeah, I think you're right, Justin, that doctors are mechanics, but then it's that interpretation. What science gets studied? How is that science then interpreted and applied? Right. Well, and there's also the element of how what they're doing is being explained to the person it's being done to, which is a part that I personally have struggled with in the past is, OK, you have to explain why you're doing what you're doing to me because some people maybe don't want to hear that, but some people do. And I'm somebody that wants to know exactly step-by-step about my health care. And this is why I got into an argument with my dentist because they explained it to me and I was like, that's cool. No, no, no, it wasn't. I don't want to know. It's like, again, you cannot scare me with the word bacteria. That's just not going to like be sufficient of an answer to anything. What I was going to say is, I think, I don't think you should blame science for this anyway, shape or form. But there is the issue, I think, if you're talking about the orphan ailments or the mystery ailments that haven't arisen enough in our giant population for there to be focused research, discovery, and treatment for, it's really you've got to look at funding for science in the end of these things. So you've got to look at your politicians. So your politicians funding science, are they talking about science? Is this something that's pressuring for them? Because the doctor who is the mechanic can't do anything without the troubleshooter guide. And if it's never been looked at or if the study, the other thing is that study, there may be 50 scientists out there right now who've seen indications of your condition and would want to pursue research. But if they don't get grants, if they don't get funded, they can't do their work to come up with that. So scientists actually, for a large part, also I think are not necessarily caring individuals, but they are curious individuals. And if there's a problem or mystery out there, I guarantee you there's scientists who will want to work on it if for no other reason than to satisfy their curiosity and how they would approach the problem. So even in the uncaring science view of the world, scientists are curious and they'll work on any problem and try to come to any solution. And scientists are people too, and they actually do care quite a lot and they want to help and that curiosity drives so much. And I think part of this feeling that scientists or doctors have become separated from humanity, that is a misunderstanding that needs, a myth even that needs to be repaired because scientists are people too. Yeah, but I do think there's a separation between scientists and... No, I am a caring person. No, no, I don't mean that you're not caring. I just think, you know, typically I just feel like scientists are better people. Okay, well, everyone out there, I know you probably have opinions on this as well. I'd love to hear from you. So we need you to write in. Let us know what you think about this topic. Let us know what you think about what Paul had to say. Let us know also what science has done for you lately. Good, bad. Let us know what science has done for you. We want to know all the ways that science affects people in their daily lives. Right in, you can send a message to our Facebook page, facebook.com, slash this week in science, or you can email me directly at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com. We're going to keep doing this segment. Paul, thank you for that interesting, maybe a little controversial, yet thought-provoking commentary. I appreciate that. All right. Now, Justin, what's up with Texas? Is it Texas? Stinkhole State. Stinkhole. Why? Well, I have pretty directly because they've been, they turned that whole state into a pink cushion. Extracting oil for many, many decades is kind of what this will come down to. But this is, where is this? Southern Methodist University out of Dallas previously did a report on rapid rate at which sinkholes are expanding and new ones are forming. In the past, now they have a discovery here on a large portion of Texas is sinking. Radar satellite images show significant movement of ground across a 4,000 square mile area. One of the places, based on the radar data, shows that it has sunk more than 40 inches in the past two and a half years. 40? I was thinking you'd say like, oh, in the last few decades. Right. No. Four and a half years it's moved 40 inches now. Now, we've talked about, we were talking about the story of San Fran Lantus how San Francisco is slowly sinking into the bay. But it wasn't by this much. This is pretty significant for some areas to be doing this much sinking. And it's not, and in that 4,000 square mile area where they saw significant movement of the ground is in the 4,000 square mile patch that they had data on. Okay. That doesn't mean it's only happening in this 4,000 square mile, which is a large area. Not that it's just happening in this area, but that's just the radar data that they had to date when they did this study. Their analysis is using medium resolution, 15 to 65 feet radar imagery, taken between November of 2014 and April of 2017. They say that the ground movement could actually be much, much bigger just because they had that one little picture of this one little area. It doesn't mean everything, but they did sort of target this area because there's a lot of oil fields too. So that might be a little bit more movement than you could find elsewhere. They also found some places where the ground was rising up. I guess they do a pressurizing for the fracking. First, no, I'm sorry, CO2 injection in wells to get the oil to bubble out of the rocks a little better. I guess it's a great pressure. Carbonated oil, eh? And when it depressurizes, I guess the ground moves up. It expands a little bit. Some places you could see an inch rise in the land. Most significant subsistence that's the sinking is a half mile east of Wink. Wink is apparently a town, Texas, somewhere. And Wink, Texas. Blink it, it's gone. Is that what you're going to say? That one is, which has sunk more than 15.5 inches a year. I think that is mostly likely due to abandoned wells that have water seeping into them and dissolving layers of salts. And they've also got like limestone and other kind of stuff under there that may actually just the actual rock structures that was holding up the ground is dissolving away. This is something I think I don't know a lot about, but what happens when there is a sinkhole progressing this quickly? If you have, for example, a house in Wink, Texas. So first of all, I think there's probably 20 people that live in Wink, Texas. So who cares? If I'm one of those 20 people. Kind of remote. Yeah. Right. What happened to my house? So it's not just, okay, so think about the house. Yeah, if your house happens to be there, your house settles a little funny, cracks you up in the wall, that door doesn't close. All of a sudden, over time, then maybe your foundation is a little needs to be reinforced. But now think that there's a railroad track running through this particular area. That railroad track now with a 15 inch sinking area and some maybe can't actually handle the speeds at which that train normally runs. Maybe all of a sudden the track has to get shut down because of its, and then you've got oil pipelines. Well, pipelines running through an area. Well, now that oil, that land has moved six inches. How much stress is now on different portions of that pipeline further away? There's junctures. Now there's potentials for cracks. So it's a huge, oh, and if there's a levee. Oh, right. A river. If there's a dam, somebody built for a reservoir. That'll just not. Yeah, I mean, we kind of built upon the earth as though it would stay where it is. Right, right. And then we dug out underneath all the custard. Yeah. I think we've seen it in San Francisco from water extraction. We've seen it in the Central Valley from water extraction. It's been an issue for a lot of farmland here in California. But there, yeah, all this oil that's been pulled out is not necessarily just the vacuum of where the oil was, but this additional problem of now water gets into there and starts to become a solvent for the materials under there. So, yeah, one of those little old things that you might not have thought could be a problem. But yeah, Texas is sinking. Yikes. Also, Bleak in the chat room has told us all that the population of Wink is 1046. I was off by 1000. You're off by 1026. 1026. Sorry, let's keep it accurate. Yeah. So, up there with the top sinking cities in the world. Yeah, so New Mexico will have a pullout back now. Yeah. It's also, this also has come with increased seismic activity too. I guess a lot of these wells are about a half a mile down, which doesn't seem like that would be deep enough to, like, I don't know. I just assume like earthquakes come from someplace much further down. But I guess, you know, you get the ground moving in ways it didn't before. That's enough to create earthquakes. Yep. Yeah. Now we've got fracking and other effects that may just be increasing it more. Oh, people. Oh, people. Changing the environment. We are absolutely the beavers. No, no, beavers are actually good. They're good, right? No. Wetlands that allows more birds to be in an area. We are the cane toads. We are the beavers. No, I don't want to be a cane toad. We are, oh, we are absolutely the cane toads. Yeah, I think we are, because nothing can eat us. So far tonight, I am an emotionless cane toad. Great. Ah, moving on from that, oh, dear. We, the stuff we love, plastics, plastics everywhere, and really, truly not a drop to drink. Well, according to a new study that is not peer reviewed, by the way. Uh-oh, alarm, alarm, alarm, alarm. No, it's not an alarm. Well, it's just, it's not peer reviewed. And so we, there's a little pause that we should take before jumping at these results. But the researchers involved in this are, have done a lot of work in plastics and are well known in this. But the research here was conducted on behalf of a U.S. non-profit journalism organization called Orb Media. Now, Orb Media hired a research team to test bottled water for microplastic contents. The team, led by Professor Sherry Mason, who works out of the State University of New York, SUNY, was, they tested 259 bottles of water purchased in nine countries. A lot of the brands are sold internationally, but the water source manufacturing, bottling process, even for the same brand, can be totally different, depending on which country you're dealing with, right? The 11 brands that they tested involved Nestle Pure Life, Aquafina, Dasani, Evian, Evian, Evian? Evian. Evian. Evian. San Pellegrino and Gerol Steiner, as well as other brands across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. They found 93% of all bottles tested contained microplastics of some kind or another. That includes polypropylene, polystyrene, nylon, and PET or polyethylene terphthalate. Okay. I have a question before we get any further. Yes. How do we know that these microplastics are not from the plastic bottles themselves? Exactly. So some of this could be, but so far the levels at which they found these plastics, they did not match just the plastic from the bottle. Okay. Cool. And they found plastic particles in this microplastic particle range, a global average of 10.4 plastic particles per liter, and they were confirmed as plastic using an industry standard infrared microscope. They found a greater number of even smaller particles, smaller than 100 microns or so, that are likely plastic, but because they're so small, they couldn't actually identify them as plastic specifically, and there were many more of these teeny, teeny tiny particles that there was a 314.6 per liter. The water companies that responded to comment on this study said that the levels of the plastics that were found in this study were much higher than the levels that they had found in testing their own water. So... They're healthy. The question is right now, we don't know what level of microplastics are healthy or unhealthy. All we know is that they're increasing in quantity in the waters of the world, and they are being found, and this study points to them being found at higher levels in plastic bottled water than in tap drinking water. Well, we know that bottled water is not filtered to the same standards as tap water. We know that. In most cases, yeah, but in most cases, the tap water is better filtered than the bottle. So I'm not that surprised to hear that, but I think that I think it's weird that they would go out of their way to say that that's not the testing results that they got. Mr. Jackson, we're accusing you. We think you stole a million dollars from the bank. It wasn't nearly that much. Well, that's what I mean is it seems like a weird thing for them to jump to if it's not at least somehow based in truth. Yeah, so these microplastics, I guess, are found at certain levels. Garol Steiner said its tests showed a significantly lower quantity of microplastics per liter in its products, and they say we still can't understand how the study reached the conclusions. It did. The research results correspond to internal analyses that we conduct on a regular basis, and Danon, the company behind Evian and other brands said it's not in a position to comment on this story as the testing methodology that's used is unclear and there's still limited data on the topic and conclusions differ dramatically from one study to another. So this is an open question and that's why I mentioned early in this that this is not a peer reviewed study. And I think the methodology that's used by the researchers is very important because if that methodology is clear and understood, then you can go back to the bottling companies and say what are you doing? How are you testing? What's your methodology? How do these compare? Why is our number higher? But the fact that there is a defined number or undefined number, so I guess, out there, it's not on the label. I didn't know I was drinking microplastics in my plastic bottled water. I think we are at the point now. Yeah, you're more, you probably weigh a little bit more than you did. But I think that we're at the point now where we just have to assume that any water has microplastics in it because everything we do is putting microplastics somehow in the water column, whether it be spraying our crops with pesticides or washing our clothes. It's all putting microplastics into the water table. So it's it's just part of life on earth now as we plasticified the earth. Yes. And speaking of these unknown. She's not blaming the pipettes. It's all scientists. So along the health consequences of plastics in our environment, a new study has come out of the lab of Deborah Karash, a neuroscientist at the University of Calgary, and a postdoctoral fellow in her lab named Dino Nisan presented research recently. This also at the endocrine society in meeting in Chicago. This also has not yet been published. So it's pre publication and peer review. But the data that he released of a study of pregnant mice exposed to bisphenol A BPA while they were pregnant, they found that that the mice that were exposed gave birth to young mice with neuron with neuronal developmental neuronal issues that had strange behaviors later in life. And that even when they were fed low levels of the chemical 10 to 20 times below the recommended daily intake for humans, there was significant acceleration to early neuron development. BPA exposure also increased a number of size and rate of proliferation of neurons in the young mice brains, but also reduced their self their ability to self renew or what's called their steminis. And that pushed them toward a more differentiated state sooner and that lead that led to changes in the way that they behaved as older mice and as adults. So developmental effects of very low levels and the big thing here for BPA is that it's not following the usual dose response curve of many chemicals or many hormone affecting chemicals in the environment where you have low levels that don't really affect. And then there's some threshold level that tips off a physiological response. And then you have responsiveness of the body after that point, what there's a bimodal response to BPA in this study. So low levels of BPA affect development of the neurons. Nothing really happens in the mid range, according to this research. And then again, at the high levels of BPA exposure, there again is a change in development and in behavior and aspects of the neurons and of the brain. So it's this question of, as the research said, the field is really moving towards studying BPAs at these low doses. But I think we need an overwhelming amount of evidence to be able to convince a regulatory body that we really need to look at this. Well, it would be kind of a win-win if you could get rid of a lot of the BPAs because you'd be getting rid of a lot of single use plastic. Yep. I'm all for it. Test away. I'm all for it. Let's see if we can get there. Let's get rid of the plastics in our environment. Oh, we can't. It's all in the microplastics. But you can always stop from making more. Let's be satisfied with the level of microplastics we have now, whatever they are, and say, maybe that's enough. We're just swimming in it. I like swimming in it. Yeah. But let's keep it to the point where we have trouble figuring out how to detect it, as opposed to when our water is mush. Oh, microplastic mush. That sounds fantastic. Moving on from terrible, terrible news about our environment and plastics. Justin, what do you got? Oh, is it that time again where I talk about a story and I was, let's go with... Talk about science. So this is a, this is a sciencey. This is 1812, the governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Jerry, approved a long and narrow winding boating district to the state Senate that curved and carved, twisted and turned, ultimately ended up with a district that looked very much like a salamander with a long neck. So much so that a newspaper labeled the district the Jerry Mander. 206 years later, arguments over political map making continue. Part of why this difficult, this issue is sort of difficult to address, is actually not too difficult to understand, because regardless of where it takes place or who's benefiting from it, there's always a political party that lacks the power to be in charge of gerrymandering. And so they complain about it. And then at some point, maybe they become empowered, get voted in, and then it's not such a big deal to them anymore. They don't talk about their addresses. So nobody ever fixes it. A University of Vermont mathematician, Greg Warrington, has developed a tool to identify gerrymandered districts. He's calling it the declination. There's no single standard of what exactly gerrymandering is. There's no one way to test for it. But our measure, he says, is better in a lot of ways than the other approaches now being used. Pretty much the other approach being used right now is how weird does it look? That's how you kind of determine what gerrymandering is in a lot of cases. But he points out a lot of weird looking districts are looking weird because the lay of the land is just weird. You might have farmland in between, or it might be that there was this one group that was totally underserved because where they happen to be on the map. So sometimes it's not a bad thing. But he went through and he did way back in the way back machine and looked at past elections and these sorts of things. He went back since 1972. So he found that the most extreme gerrymandering favoring Republicans was in a 1980 election in Virginia. And there was a Texas election in 1976, which was the most gerrymandered for Democrats. More recent years, 2012 to 2016, his analysis shows Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, strongly gerrymandered for Republicans, while Maryland and California voting districts have strongly tipped in favor of Democrats. Again, I kind of think it may happen to be who's the governor, who's the party in charge, and that's when these things sort of change. But he kind of lays out his system is designed on finding the wasted votes. So if you want to gerrymander an election, you actually don't just want all of the, you don't want all of the Blairsians in your district versus the Kekeans in the other district. You don't want that. You don't, if you're Blair, you want the Blairsians. This is who these are your people, right? You use the ones most likely vote for you. What you actually want is to have a district that's got 55% Blairsians and 45% Kekeans because that way you've gotten a big part of her population that's wasting their vote, right? But in her, and you created a district for her that's almost entirely Kekeans. It was going to go for her anyway, but you put 70% of likely Keke voters over there, right? So you're going to win your election and she's going to win her election over in this other area, but you've designed it so that you can grab a whole bunch of the other's territory. Anyway, so this is what, this is what his, his computer, his algorithm looks for. It looks for basic, the biases of when you've created one system into another that wastes more of the other person's votes. That makes more of their voters, whether they went there and voted or not, doesn't really matter. It was so heavily going to be a Keke district that, you know, if even with a low voter. So it's sort of an interesting way of looking at this and addressing this because I guess we're the Supreme Court's now weighing in on these sorts of things, but we still don't have a way of saying this is, that isn't how do you, how do you try to figure out a politically charged issue with only politicians looking at it? It's again, 206 years and we've done nothing but do more of this. So a third party science-based analysis of what is and what isn't gerrymandering may be something that, that if, that if he has his way, he's even talking about it is creating a standard that identifies these sorts of districts throughout the nation. That would, I guess the first step is discovering the supremely gerrymandered areas and then figuring out how to fix them, how to make things more fair overall. I mean, interesting, like here, I don't know, like right now it's like, okay, we have two parties basically, but that, you know, the independence and the green party and these other parties that are such a small percentage of the population, they don't really have a say when it comes to, to, to the voting and to what's going to happen in various districts. So I, you know, well, and it also focuses to evolve over time is what I'm thinking. Yeah, allow for more groups. I think people so quickly forget about everything that people vote for other than president and the fact that these issues often impact much more local things going on that people don't pay as much attention to, people don't vote as much in those elections. And so I think that might be another reason that it kind of gets pushed off onto the periphery so often is that election. Yeah, it's once every four years kind of kind of thought process, but in reality, every two years and even more often, you've got these local state and local elections that are going to affect the makeup of school boards, that are going to affect the makeup of local governmental bodies that are going to have say over, over all sorts of local standards and how money is spent and how and how how laws are enacted and regulated in those local areas. And yeah, that's the big the local state and local that's that's big also. But it's never going to be fair because Vermont's Senate delegation is the same number of seats as California. It's not by population. I mean, like, they're sending Congress people. It's just an element of the issues that could be addressed for sure. But it's still an important element. Yeah, but but yeah, when you when you when you start to then carve out, you know, a political advantage, which when you might be a have the minority of the voters, but you can carve out a majority of the seats, it's yeah. It's it's equity. Fairness. These are such they're totally meaningless words. But sounds like democracy. You know meaningless words, meaningless words. You know, who had lots of meaningful words? Who even Hawking? He did. And did you know that before he died, he submitted a paper with another author, Thomas Hurtog. And of course he did. That's amazing. It's in press right now. It's in review. So he's obviously Hawking is obviously not going to be making any changes to the paper. Hurtog will probably be the corresponding author from this point forward. But the news came out that this this paper is available as a preprint. So it hasn't gone through peer review. It's on the archive. And this paper, a lot of people have been making these claims about Oh, it predicts the end of the universe. And it's going to help us find multiverses and all this kind of stuff. But this was Hawking and this is a very early idea that the that Hawking and Hurtog were writing about. And so what the media has been putting out there, or what they did put out there in the large part of immediately following his his death last week, was totally correct, misrepresented his words entirely. And it was probably actually misunderstood misunderstandings of language. So this paper is called a smooth exit from eternal inflation. Ah, yes. And so is our this is the idea, you know, after the big bank where there's inflation and is the universe expanding? Is this internal inflation? What's happening is our universe going to expand and cool and what's going on? And it has the idea of a multiverse, which is a simultaneous existence of multiple universes kind of side by side and next to each other, but not touching each other. And but the idea that they work on, which is called eternal inflation, the inflation continues forever in some most places, but sometimes it stops. And when the inflation stops, universes form, like our own and others in other places. And this is a repeating process that would never end. And these universes, the laws of physics all look like different, look different, meaning constants that we find here in our own universe are not going to exist necessarily in the same way in another universe as part of the universe, multiverse researcher will Kenny said in an article that you can find on discover magazine.com says eternal inflation creates an infinite number of patch universes, little bubble universes all over the place with this inflating space between them. But there's a problem here. And there's the probability that our universe is the way it is, right? And how do you calculate that probability when you're using infinity as part of that calculation. And so they in the paper are trying to put forward this method to define boundaries on universes that might exist, which could lead us in the direction of detecting other universes in a multiverse, if that is in fact what we exist within. But it's a very preliminary mathematical investigation of this idea. And in no way actually is giving us experiments to do to find other universes. That's not what they do at all. So the media told you that and you got that idea. Hawking did not publish that. And then beyond that, even the idea of the end of the universe. And then there's like this the the the idea of these membranes. And really the brain is like or that they talk about a brain in the work. And this brain is this idea of a membrane, basically the membrane that bounds our universe and separates us from these other universes. And there's there's no prediction of the end of the universe in this paper. Good. Even if it would be quite a ways from now. Just by quite a ways, you mean Thursday after next. Like I was teaching a class talking about whether we could use up the sun talking about solar panels. And of course, some smart Elkie child went, Yeah, eventually, the sun's going to go away. And I was like, All right, that's a long time from now. You don't have to worry about that. That'll be after your lifetime. Yeah, after millions of lifetimes. In fact, get out of here. Get out of here. Yeah. So this is really it's wonderful to know that Hawking was still working on interesting ideas and using his wonderful brain, even just weeks before his death and that that that his science will still be with us and will be continuing for his and he will be stimulating investigations for some time to come. Certainly. Doing science from beyond the grave. That's right. And then I wanted to comment very briefly. Also, I reported at the very end of the show last week on the astronaut research, the DNA, and I parroted the statement from the NASA press release that said 7% of the DNA of the twins is different. That's what it said. I parroted it. And I just want to clarify that, yes, the telomeres, the cats at the ends of the chromosomes, they were different. So they were longer in Scott, who was in space and shorter in Mark, who is still here on the planet. So that's an interesting question of what is going on with the telomeres as a result of microgravity and blah, blah, blah. So we talked about that and that that's totally fine. But this whole 7% of the DNA being, it's not the DNA, it's the genetic expression. So it's the epigenome that would have been changed, even though there, yes, were probably lots of mutations due to cosmic radiation and various other causes. But those point mutations were not necessarily enough to be that 7% number. That would be a lot. That would be a lot of point mutations. But it's the epigenetic changes that led to a 7% difference in genetic expression. So how the genes were actually being turned into proteins and little bits of RNA. This doesn't then explain why he now has a tail. He doesn't have a tail. Yes. So anyway, I just wanted to make, I wanted to clarify that because I don't think I made that clear last week, because I was trying to just get it in at the end of the show and not dig into the details too much, but yes. Still very cool. Very cool. Yes. Still very cool, very interesting, but not, oh my goodness, space causes genetic mutations on such a large scale. What's that voice? Oh my God, we should do lunch. That's Marvin the Martian. That was my Marvin the Martian. That's right. Does anyone need some new hair dye? Only black or brown, but I could always dye my hair black again. I did that in high school. How about hair dye that could be potentially conductive? What? What would I use that for? For good or for evil? I know. What would you do? How would you? You still have spiking hair. You could just use it as a spiker. Yeah, you could just have like this static electricity hair staining straight up, right? Actually, not static electricity hair. It would be conductive and not actually conducive to static electricity. Publish, studied in the journal Chem this last week, researchers in materials science and engineering at Northwestern McCormick School of Engineering have reported on their adaptation of graphene to make hair dye and to solve the problem of like the toxicity that's involved in a lot of their hair dyes. And also the fading of color, they have an ink formula from the, they're using the natural geometry of the graphene sheets to actually, instead of the way that hair normally works, you have to damage the hair. Usually there's some kind of peroxide or something that opens up the hair shaft, right? Because you think of it as all these, each hair is actually like a bunch of little scales that are layered on top of each other. And they're kind of sit tightly on top of each other. And so you have to rip it open to be able to get small molecules of color to sit within those scales, to actually connect to that piece of hair to make it look a different color. And what could go wrong? Right. So many times you dye your hair and there's a lot of damage that goes on and people have frizzy hair afterwards and they're like, well, my hair changed color, but it's all frizzy now. And if I take a bath, it feels like straw. And this is a potential solution to that because the sheets of graphene instead of jamming into each piece of hair would nicely wrap around like that coat the hair and wrap around it. And they have found this formula that incorporates edible non-toxic polymer binders to make it stick, but it all lasts at least 30 washes, which is the requirement for a commercial permanent hair dye. It's anti-static, so it will keep your flyaway hairs to a minimum on those really staticky, dry winter flyaway days. Or every day of my life. That's right. So far, they really it's graphene. So they've got black or really dark brown, but that's the only color that they're working on. All of high school and much of college, I dyed my hair blue black. Yeah, but their study, it's titled Multifunctional Graphene Hair Dye. Yeah, what are they doing with it? And they say, yeah, uh, people could apply this dye to make hair conductive on the surface. It could then be integrated with wearable electronics or become a conductive probe. We are only limited by our imagination. A conductive probe, you say. What? So it's your hair. There has to be a solar panel. That's right. Well, it could be connected to a solar panel and it could connect, your hair could be the connector between a solar panel and your cell phone. I don't know. Or it could throw away your earbuds, just stick your hair in your ears. That's right. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Yeah, this brings new meaning to the tinfoil hat. Oh, interesting. It's the opposite of the tinfoil hat. Yeah, could you kind of broadcast noise so that nobody could read your mind? Man, man. They can't listen because I'm so loud. Man. All right. Those are my stories for the night. Layering some more news. Yes. You know, being fat makes food not taste as good. What? Let me explain. A March 20th study found from Cornell University found that inflammation driven by obesity reduces the number of taste buds on the tongues of mice. So each taste bud on your tongue comprises of approximately 50 to 100 cells of three major types. They each have different roles in sensing the five primary tastes, salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami. The taste bud cells turn over quickly. They have an average lifespan of just about 10 days. They took mice. They fed them a 14% fat diet. That's a normal lab mouse diet, or an obesogenic diet of 58% fat. After eight weeks, the mice fed the fat food, weighed about one third more than those receiving normal chow. But the obese mice also had 25% fewer taste buds than lean mice with no change in the size or distribution of the cell types within the surviving buds. So yeah, they explain some aspect of overeating and it could be related to the satisfaction that's gained for the lack thereof. So they don't even mention that in this study. They don't even dip their toe into that conversation. But that's what I was thinking about the whole time, too, is are you chasing this taste profile that you no longer have access to? And if you want to be able to taste delicious food, perhaps you need to slim down a little bit, turns out. Obviously though, these mice aren't selecting their diet. No. Right. So this whole idea that because there's less taste selection that you're eating more. So that's a completely different study that they did not do. But that's what Kiki was saying might be a next step, I think, for this study would be to see if you kill taste buds in mice. Do they eat more food? So I don't think that's related at all, based on the fact that they just changed the diet of. They probably ate the same amount, but it was a higher fat content. Also knowing that mice don't have quite the taste profile, perhaps, that humans do. So it's potentially not super analogous, anyway. But what I was going to say, though, is it might be more along the lines of the body using resources, accordingly. Like, hey, you know what? We have all these taste buds because it's really important to differentiate. This is something I want to eat. That's something I don't want to eat. This is something I want to eat. That's something I don't want to eat. But if you're just getting all that you can eat, you got plenty coming in and plenty of the, you know, high fat diets, like, you know what? Why waste time? So I actually have such a lot of color content to why this is happening. So the researchers observed that the rate of cell death, apoptosis, increased in obese mice. So the, the, the speed at which taste buds were dying. Remember, I said they turn over every 10 days, they were dying sooner in the obese mice. And the number of taste bud progenitor cells, the ones making new cells, also declined. So not only were taste buds dying faster, but they were not making taste buds as fast. And they found that mice that were genetically resistant to becoming obese did not show these effects even on the high fat diet. So it's not due to the consumption of fat, it is the accumulation of adipose fatty tissue. And they know that adipose tissue produces pro inflammatory cytokines, which are molecules that serve as signals between cells. And they all, and they found that the high fat diet increased the level of cytokines surrounding the taste buds. But that mice that were genetically incapable of making the cytokines had no reduction in taste buds, despite gaining weight. Yeah. And when they, when they injected the cytokines directly onto the tongue of lean mice, the taste buds died. So obesity leads to inflammation, leads to the cytokines, leads to taste bud loss. But this is an interesting point from the author's summary, because this is a public public library of science biology article, plos.org biology. You can read the article yourself. The author's summary says, taste buds operate not only as sensors of essential nutrients, but can also trigger powerful central reward from the consumption of hedonically pleasing food. Abese individuals have been reported to display a weakened sense of taste, and thus be maybe driven to consume more calories to attain such reward. Our results validate a role for taste in the genesis of obesity and suggest a novel direction in the treatment of obesity. And they also say that this might help them figure out therapeutic strategies for taste dysfunction, which is pretty neat. Yeah. Fascinating. Where are you? Taste dysfunction. Is that it? Do we have more stories? I have one more. Yeah. So this is kind of fun. This couple of researchers, Jennifer Sheridan, out of Yale Nuss, which is a Singapore-based sort of like an extension of Yale, and Dr. Brian Stewart, research curator of herpetology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, looked at 400 frogs that were housed in 11 natural history museum collections around the world, looking at what was considered to be two species of Southeast Asian frogs, and they found that they're actually five species, and not two. But they, again, didn't go to the field. They went to the museum. They went like museum hopping around the world. May I have your finest jars of frogs? I am a herpetologist. I would like to see your frog collection, please. Basically, I probably not too far from how it happened. And they basically say that, yes, early biologists used mainly morphological characteristics, and British herpetologist, physician and physician Malcolm Smith had noted that the populations of some of the Southeast Asia frogs tended to differ in size and in coloration, but apparently not enough so that he could separate them into more than just two species. But now, of course, science got DNA and stuff, spiked species. But again, this is one of those things that's sort of an ongoing thing that comes up on the show once in a while. Huge scientific discoveries made in a museum collection. Yeah, potentially hundreds of years old. University basement, and all these good things we had people out there collecting. This is all the greatest hits we can also throw in there once again. What even is a species? Differentiation of biological creature over time and separation of genetic ancestry. Time and space. Isolated by reproductive incompatibility. Only sometimes. No, or not. Or not. Only sometimes it turns out. Well, we haven't actually tried mating all of the animals. That should be the next step. Yeah. Yeah, but I think these frogs have been in the jars a bit too long. My network. That's right. Five new species. Thank you museum collections. And thank you everyone out there for joining us tonight. We have made it to the end of another show. We are here because of you. And thank you. Thanks to Fada for helping out with social media and to Identity Four for helping out with our audio. And to those of you who are in our chat rooms right now and those of you who are just here with us right now. Thank you so much. But thank you most of all for all of you who are supporting us on Patreon. This is the time where I say thank you to Harrison Prather, Charlene Henry, Joshua Fury, Andy Gross, Steve Debell, Alex Wilson, Tony Steele, Ed Dyer, Jacqueline Boyster, Craig Landon, John Ratnaswamy, Paul Disney, Chibarton Lattimore, Richard Onimus, Mark Vizarros, Matthew Litwin, Jason Roberts, Bill Kay, Bob Calder, Time Jumper 319, Kyle Washington, Eric Knapp, Richard Brian Condren, Richard Porter, Artyom, Rick Ramis, Sean Bryant, Paul John McKee, Jason Olds, Brian Carrington, Christopher Dreyer, Lisa Slazowski, Jim Jopope, Greg Riley, Sean Lamb, Ben Rothig, Steve Lessiman, Kurt Larson, Robert Aston, Rudy Garcia, Marjorie Gary S, Robert Greg Griggs, Brendan Minnish, Christopher Wrappen, Flying Out, Erin Luthon, Ken Hayes, Matt Sutter, Mack, Mark Hasenflow, Kevin Parachan, Byron Lee, E.O., Mark Tyrone Fong, and Keith Corsale. Thank you so much for your support on Patreon and those of you who are new to that list, it was wonderful to read your names on the list. We love seeing our list of sponsors grow. You are interested in supporting us, you can find information at twist.org or just patreon.com slash this week in science, and you can also help us out just by telling your friends about twists. We will be back again next week, broadcasting live online at 8 p.m. Pacific time at twist.org slash live. You can watch and join our chat room, which is full of fun people, but don't worry if you can't make it, you can find past episodes at twist.org slash youtube or just twist.org. Thank you for enjoying the show. Twist is also available as a podcast. Just google this week in science in your iTunes directory and the this week in science app or podcast downloadable thingy, which is free, will be right there. Also, if you have a mobile type device, a phone or pad electronic thing, for instance, you can look for twist the number four droid app in android marketplaces or simply this week in science and anything apple marketplaces. For more information on anything you may have heard here today, show notes will be available on our website. That's at www.twist.org where you can also make comments and start conversations with the host. Hey, that's us and other listeners. Or you can just contact us directly email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekin science.com Justin at twistminion at gmail.com or Blair at Blair Baz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist TWIS somewhere in the subject line or your email will be spam filtered into oblivion. You can also hit us up on the Twitter where we are at twist science at Dr. Kiki at Jackson fly and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you would like us to cover or address, a suggestion for an interview, a haiku 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. Listen to what I say. I use the scientific method and I'll broadcast my opinion all. It's this week in science, science, science, science, this week in 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 a plan If you listen to the science you may just bed understand That we're not trying to threaten your philosophy We're just trying to save the world from Japanese This week of science is coming away So everybody listen, do everything we say And if you use our methods, better roll and I die We may rid the world of toxoplasma, got the eye Cause it's this week in science This week in science This week in science, science, science This week in science This week in science This week in science, science, science I've got a laundry list of items I want to address From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote more rational thoughts And I'll try to answer any question you've got So how can I ever see the changes I seek When I can only set up top one hour a week? This week in science is coming away You better just listen to what we say And if you learn anything from the words that we've said Then please just remember it's all in this week in science This week in science This week in science, science, science This week in science This week in science, science, science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science Hey chat room, do you see yourselves? Do you see yourself in twists? Such science. So very. Yes. It is Blair. You're yawning is tired. Here. Mike's turned off. Did you want to hear me on? No, didn't need that. Nope. All right. Yeah. Look, gracious one. Thank you. Hi in the chat room. Hi, everybody in the chat room. Private chat. Not anymore. Ah, I made it not so private. Private except for the fact that the login information is on our website. There is that. Yeah. Anyone can join anyone. No, it's getting to that time where the honor is going to go. I didn't get to it. Fada had suggested there is the Google Doodle for today celebrating Mexican astronomer Guillermo Harrow. He was an astronomer who in 1959 became the first Mexican elected to the Royal Astronomical Society. And today would have been his 105th birthday. He gives his name along with astronomer George Herbig to Herbig Harrow objects, glowing arcs and splotches of light that come from baby stars, baby stars, creating shock waves as they blast out high speed jets of material into surrounding gas. The relatively short lived objects point the way to the universe's newborn stars. He also discovered variable bright variable stars called flare stars in the Orion constellation, which can unpredictably boost their brightness for minutes at a time. That's interesting. That's not the Google Doodle thing that I got up there. No, mine's Katsuko Hoshani, who was a female Japanese geochemist who made some of the first measurements of carbon dioxide levels in seawater. Yeah. Actually, that's the Google Doodle that I have as well. Although it's switching. Maybe it really switches. I think it might switch on the East Coast time because I feel like this happens all the time that because earlier I was seeing the other one and now I'm not. Yes. Yeah. Because I see I see a different Google Doodle at work during the day than when I come home and do twist. So I'm guessing it switches over either at 9 or at 10. So she sounds pretty awesome. Yeah. Yeah, made the first measurements. Some of the first measurements of carbon dioxide levels in seawater showed evidence in seawater and atmosphere of the dangers of radioactive fallout. She was born on the 22nd March 22nd 1920s. Yes. She was inspired by rain. Childhood. A childhood experience of watching raindrops cascade down a primary school's classroom window inspired her to enter the sciences. Wow. So yeah, it's her 98th birthday tomorrow. It's not the 22nd yet. Where are you? She became the first woman to be named to the Science Council of Japan. She was the first woman to win Japan's Miyake Prize for Geochemistry as well. And she was awarded. The Sarah Saruhashi award, which was from name is named after another female scientist Ms. Saruhashi who nurtures other women's careers. Yeah, she's a female scientist who nurtures other female scientists as well. What's the best? Ladies helping ladies. That's right. Ladies helping ladies and Guillermo Harrow with his baby stars shooting jets of gas. Jets of gas. Stars helping stars, you know. Stars helping stars. Hmm. Let's see. What was it that happened recently? Anything else happened recently? I think that or are we tired? Oh, I mean, I'm always tired. It's fine. I just have to be to work at seven tomorrow. It's not a big deal. That's early. Sevens early to go teach some children. Mm-hmm. Growly bear. Yes, stars have gas. That's right. Good night, Fada. Oh, yes. And daylight savings time. That happened. That happened a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. It was bleak was saying. Yeah. In Australia, they haven't had it yet. Oh, yes. Which I was saying when I lived in Israel, it happened like several weeks after it happened in the United States. So when I first moved there was 10 hours ahead and then for a little while, I was 11 hours ahead and then I went back to being 10 hours ahead and it was, it was a nightmare. But I never missed a twist. You never missed a twist. Nope. Is true. No, I think I missed one. Oh, you went on a field trip or something. Yeah, I went on a field trip and I tried to join via the bus Wi-Fi, but it was, it was not possible. Yeah. So let's see. I may have a new, I may be moving to the downstairs studio location next week. Oh, yeah. We'll see. I'm going to see if I can get it set up. I've got my desk now. I got camera, the computer, the microphone, got backdrops. I could put myself in front of a green screen forever. Oh my God, it's so fun. That would be a lot of trouble. A lot of trouble. I'm trying to decide if I'm going to hang out my backdrop again. You can. You're not in this, you're not like in your bedroom with, I know that's the thing, I don't have to hide my bed. You're not hiding your bed anymore. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, it's been pretty great. Yeah. For those of you in the chat room or who are watching right now who also like tech stuff, Daily Tech News Show. I was on it today with Tom and Roger and Sarah. It was fun and I got to talk about soft-bodied robots for five seconds. So you can check out the Daily Tech News Show. Five whole seconds. How long's the whole show? Like an hour? That's a half hour show. It's a half hour? Okay. Yeah. No, it was a little, it was a little longer than five seconds. Just a little bit though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but that was fun. So if you haven't heard that, it's out and available so you can watch or listen. That's always a good show. Yeah, I have secret schemings now that I have my new computer for other things to do. New shows, things. I need more hours in the day. Oil. I know. I need more monetary income so I can have the more hours in the day by hiring more people. I will not necessarily have more hours in the day, but I will distribute the hours. Just get some real interns. Right. Not some washed up zookeeper that says, sure, I'll be your intern. Bleak, I will do, I will talk about the specs when I am down at the computer and can show it off to people, but it is a very fast, wonderful computer. Yes. Right, hot rod. Less sleep equals more hours, but then that leads to me being tired and cranky, which is less fun Kiki to be around. Yeah, that's also true. And that's just when I'm standing around going, what? What? Did I knock my head into the microphone again? Yes, Grally bear. And also, if there was a way to flip a switch so that you'd know when you were going to have trouble sleeping. So you'd just stay up. That's the part that drives me nuts is like, okay, got to get to bed, got to get to bed, got to get to bed. Oh, no. I can't sleep. I usually usually takes me about five whole minutes to go to sleep and I'm out until my alarm goes off. Very lucky that way. But that also means that if I ever have trouble sleeping, I am a wreck. I'm a I'm a monster. How Philip Shane is. Oh, yeah. And Philip James. Yes. Yes. I totally remember this game. It still sticks with me to this day. What is he doing? He's doing a documentary on a video game. Which was missed. Oh, missed. Yeah. That was just such a like shockingly amazing. Game is almost not even it. I mean, they threw all this philosophy and subject matter and fun and like Einstein versus Newton. One of the things is really amazing. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. That's going to be really awesome. I can't wait to see that when that comes out. Oh, he didn't being a mom. Yeah. Yeah. Phillips Philip did being Elmo. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's done some cool documentaries. He's a real deal. I knew that, but it's always exciting when you're like, Oh, no way. Really? Yeah. One degree. Elmo. You're like, oh, no, that's star power. Like it's a Sunday's film. Like it was a big deal. And he also does a podcast now called what the if, which is fun kind of science and science fiction brought together and he has fun with that. What the if he's doing a missed documentary and he's done some other cool documentaries. He did a twist short documentary. Yeah. Yeah. That's very fun. That was really cool. Yeah. Now we can be like the director of being Elmo and the missed documentary made our video. Yeah. That's right. I've got dinner with him twice. Twice. Oh my God. That's rad. I hung out with him and my son put a truck into his chocolate ice cream. Really? That's great. I love that. I was little and the trucks going right in there. Oh man. This just makes me think a bunch about New York too. I want to go back to New York. I would like to go back to New York. I love New York. I want a nice chocolate egg cream right now. I would like to go back to New York not in the middle of the winter spring. Yeah. Right now. I've only been there when it's freezing cold. It's it only has two season freezing and really hot and uncomfortable on the subway. No spring and the fall in New York City are amazing. Beautiful season. Fall in Central Park sounds glorious. It is absolutely glorious. It absolutely is. Yeah. And let's see. I was going to say about New York. Yeah. We should find a way to go back again. You know, they say it's a concrete jungle where dreams are made up chance. I made up makes you feel brand new. You know, only in New York. New York, New York. You know, you know, you know. Yeah. November in New York is very much Madness. March mammal madness. Yes with kitty kitty hind That was a whole year ago. That's crazy a year ago for March mammal madness. Yeah, are they done? No, it's not done. I don't know. They got a long way to go But you know, you don't start at the beginning of a bracket. No New York City has more peregrine falcons than any other place in the world according to planet earth too Says Ed. I'm Connecticut. Well, they probably the most pigeons more than any other place in the world. So that would make sense Delicious pigeons and they have uptown rats and downtown rats. Yes, that's right. I love that. I know It's amazing New York City There's something that popped in my head and then it went It fluttered away Flutter flutter flutter flutter. Oh Not New York City, but related to the northeasters that they've been having they on the east coast I think they've had they're on their fourth nor'easter in March And so it's just snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow snow on the east coast but They're in California, which is actually Potentially, hopefully it won't end up so bad, but there's a storm right now in California hitting central and southern California Which was ravaged by fires this last fall There is a big storm coming through that could potentially result in flash floods and mudslides in The burned areas because there's no vegetation to help with the water And the keeping of the water in the ground Yeah, so it could be could be bad and hopefully it's not I was laughing because The there's this Phenomenon going on right now in California called rain Breaking people out and so there is an atmospheric river moving towards southern California They've called it pineapple express because it's coming from Hawaii Happens like once a year twice or at least the Bay Area is expecting a whopping I'm trying to find the actual number, but it's like point two to one inches over the next week They're like, it's a storm No, it's not like no this is called precipitation And the fact that I haven't used an umbrella or a raincoat all week because it's just kind of wet out Yeah More like Portland. Yeah Yeah, this is more like what it used to be like in Western San Francisco in my entire childhood like this is just more Close to what I'm used to as opposed to this clear sunny Landscape that we've had the past few years. It's super weird to me. It's like eerie. I Walk out the door What is this? You can I have my fog back Yeah Somebody took my fog giving my fog back I want the sweet blanket of fog also because it's not as cold when it's foggy Yeah Yeah, it does kind of it's yeah, it holds the heat in it is that blanket. It's a little blanket It's a little blanket. I mean it keeps it like this relatively cool temperature usually in the 50s Yeah, it does get you lower Cool weeks ago it was It was in the low 40s and everyone was losing their mind And it was because there wasn't any fog Low 40s. Oh my god. I know everyone was like wearing ear buffs We got we got a bunch of hail Oh What the hail Went nuts, but I bet it was the first time she'd seen it hailing and she was just Running around it and then she's running around the house because she got tired of getting hailed on At least it doesn't hail like it does in um in like Texas in In the states where it's like the giant tennis balls and golf balls of hail And it hits so hard it just like sinks another couple of inches just like that You're like, I don't want my daughter running around in the hail Yeah, but like if it looks like that Yeah Wait, New York City might get over a foot of snow Nice Most snow in one snowfall since March 1869. What? No I know identity for oh, how cute a teeny bit of moisture might fall on you as uppers Whatever will we do? I know Special hair dye so the frizz doesn't you do a graphing hair dye for sure Become a giant ball of frizz. Hey, what could you do if it's not just hair dye? It's this anti-static dye. It could dye and it's you know potentially edible. Would you put it on your food? Could you would it be like your special secret messages that could? Give send a message to somebody on a piece of toast so that they could then eat to get rid of the evidence Wait now why you would need that That's pretty silly But I guess Need is not really part of the conversation at this point When started sending us a message in Facebook in our message box, it says hi dr. Kiki Justin and Blair Oh, no Keep sending us a message Try again. I bet they hit the enter instead of return or something vice versa Yeah, let's see. Oh, did you see this story Justin? It was sent by our team dog. Chev Chev shelters What Missed that was all yeah, it's a different game than I was like Oh, that was the most amazing game. It's not the same game No, why is he ready and why is he there's only one game called mist? The game I was thinking of it's the same sort of idea You're like thinking of a knockoff It was probably came out around the same Same time might have been later. Oh, it's the game that I was thinking of I Got it now. I'm gonna go crazy, but it was one of those like you had like four Four or five CDs to play through the thing same sort of thing. It's pictures and scenery and then there's sometimes puzzles Hmm now, I'm gonna go crazy Anyways, wait, what are you saying? I'm sorry. I was distracted. Yeah. No, there was a story that was sent to us that Earlier this month about prehistoric sites and the echoes that they make Did you ever see that one shelters with echoes thought to be preferred sites for prehistoric rock art? Hmm prehistoric rock concerts Yeah Now I'll put this I'll put it in the chat room There's the story The acoustic qualities of a rock shelter may have been a key factor in its selection as a site for rock art and indicate a Spiritual significance to the practice according to a recent study While scientists are also looking into whether some caves were chosen as artistic sites because of the view Yeah, but it's good to look at who knows And you have it's science. We have to put forward hypotheses to test them But the problem is is that this is all Post facto I Think you could find a correlation now today between rock art and Convenient place to get coffee Yeah, possibly Yeah, but I put I you can read the article if you want to and you're interested in the I don't know you like that stuff I Thought of you and wanted to pass it along I Returned to Zork. Oh Rob, that's funny Zork that's an old one. All right, okay, all right This is the quiet tired time and Blair has to get up early in the morning, so I can't I my brain isn't Ticking over very quickly see how long it took me to say that word and it's time to go Oh Good night, Justin. Good night, Justin Good night Good night, everyone. Thanks for watching. Thanks for a good show you guys. Yeah, fun one. It was fun Yeah, we'll be back again next week