 Welcome, everyone, to the weekly This Week in Science podcast broadcast. We're so glad to have you here. And as always, I would love to let you know that we are getting started here. We're going to talk about science. That's what we do. And Facebook doesn't like me again. So we're just going to delete that. Sorry, Facebook this week. And all of the major social media players just fall in flat. You don't even know what to do anymore. OK, but this is the show where we talk about science that we like to talk about, that we hope you like to hear about. And we hope that you like the conversation and you like to chat with us in the chat room and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's going to be edited because it's a podcast also. So this kind of stuff could hack gone, not even in the podcast. So let's go. Hit those likes, hit the subscribes, hit the shares. Make sure we end up at the top of the algorithm. Help us out. Do your part because that's really helpful and wonderful. Y'all ready? Yeah, y'all ready for this? Oh, the references. Starting in three to. This is twist this week in science episode number nine hundred thirty seven recorded Wednesday, August 2nd, two thousand twenty three. This is the day after what you're going to do science. Hey, everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight we are so glad to fill your head with tall trees, tickling rats again and robot comedians. We're not, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer for nearly 20 years now. This week in science has been discussing global warming and climate change, bringing reports from scientists to the public here in our little corner of the media world. In that time, we have seen global temperatures steadily climb as predicted by science and at ever increasing rates. The fossil fuel industry and the politicians they support have argued against the science from denial to alternative causes of warming. They have lied. They have prevented meaningful action in government. They have successfully stalled investment in alternative energy, and they continue to do so. The current strategy is to suggest that taking action on climate change hurts Americans' interest internationally and costs too much. Wildfires, floods, extreme heat are turning the global warming into local climate emergencies, not surprisingly, predictably. In twenty twenty three July, this last month, we broke global temperature records as the world's hottest month ever. Not shocking, expected. It's not a mystery why this is happening. It is a choice. And while the next 20 years of the show will have plenty of discussions on the damage and destruction that global warming and climate change are causing, knowing that it could have been prevented. If only more people listen to this week in science, coming up next. I'm learning every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to see you, Kiki and Blair. And the good science to you too, Justin, Blair and everyone out there. Welcome back, Justin. It's so good to see you. Thank you. It's so good to exist. You survived a child for three weeks. I have lessons learned. Things that do better. Things like, oh, could have gone worse. Don't think about that one. Lucky that that's bad rabbit hole. I like the. You survived. You learned lessons. And isn't that what being a parent is all about? Like learning things because you didn't know it before, right? It's just you think you know everything and then you're a parent and you're like, whoa, you know nothing, John Snow. And you have to try and teach this little human being how to human being. And oh, my goodness. And the navigating of everything is so difficult. Man, I feel like if the show has any moral at all, it's that none of us know anything. Thank you. Thank you very much, Blair. So much to be learned. There is so much to be learned. That is it. It's the humility in the lack of knowledge. But we are all here back again tonight to talk about all the science that they think we think is going to be just fun to talk about. That we're curious about and we hope that you will be as well. And it's so great to have the whole team back together tonight. Who knows how long it'll last. Yeah, as we get into the show, I need to tell you that I've got stories about some really ancient discoveries. I'm going to start off the show with a trifecta of cool things coming from old places. We're going to talk about eating plastic because that's delicious. And then, of course, at the end of the show, I'm going to have brain stuff and a little bit of robot comedy, maybe. Yeah, Justin, what do you have? I will be starting off this week in science with my first story would be this week in science covers all the extraterrestrial evidence of the unidentified aerial phenomenon. It'll be the first story. I've also got a story. You're actually doing that. We're going there. We're going there because what? There was a congressional hearing. I was really, really, really trying to avoid it. All right, we can't. So I'm going to cover all of that. It's just the first story might take a while. There's a program cell death, intentional cell death, convincing cancer to quit you. Just stop it, cancer. Stop it. A new gene drive effort when it comes to mosquitoes and everything you didn't want to know about supplements. Oh, no. Sure, sure. That old rag. No, we all want to know about supplements. I mean, supplements are the things that everybody does without talking to their doctors. Yeah. Yeah. OK, we have a lot to dig into. And actually, there's a story I left behind because you wrote about it over on Fizzorg, Justin. That if we don't get to it, maybe I'll talk about in the after show because I think it's worth talking about. So but I went to Fizzorg and went, oh, look, who wrote that article? Justin Jackson. So I'm not doing it here. What? Wait a second. Why wouldn't you go? Oh, look, Justin wrote this. I should cover it on the show for sure now because he wrote it. Well, I figured you were going to cover it. And I was totally wrong. Now I'm so curious. I think I know what we're going to throw into that at some point. We'll see what time was. Tight 90, everybody. That's what we're aiming for. Jumping into the show. Oh, you know what? My stories are I'm going to go. Gosh, darn it. Blair, what's in the animal corner? I'm just rushing through things. It's like I want you to go into labor right now. Yeah, I can just go. Oh, God, I can see what happens. That's a spicy pizza. I I brought a story about tall trees, the tickling rats. Yes, again, new story on that. The researchers just love to tickle rats. I just can't wait every time to find out what they've learned. And also birds striking power lines or maybe not. I want to I'm looking forward to that because there's a lot of history to power lines and birds and windmills and birds and all these things. So we're going to talk about it. Oh, my gosh. OK, I'm just going to sit back and let you guys talk about science for the whole show. So. No, here's the news, everyone. You need to subscribe to twist. If you're not yet subscribed, head over to whatever podcast platform you prefer. Look for this week in science, also known as twist. You can find us as twist science on places like Twitch, Instagram, University and others. We stream live weekly, 8 p.m. Pacific Timish every Wednesday. So you can find us on Facebook, except not tonight. YouTube and Twitch most of the time. And I guess if you want to know other things like show notes, links to stories, other stuff, put it twist.org. And that will also give you information about subscribing. It's all there. So you don't have to remember all the things. Let's jump into the science. Obviously, Justin left. OK. I want to start with old stuff. You ready, Blair? Yeah, give me the old stuff. OK, we're going to start with really old science. So 48,000 years ago, a nematode died. And then was as they often do. Sure. Well, it didn't lie. Really, it just got frozen in ice. OK. And some researchers were like, oh, look, we can thaw the ice and what's living in the ice might come back to life. And then they were like, we brought 48,000 year old nematodes back to life. Oh, my gosh, what does this mean? So now it's going to be. Yeah, so that was like 2018 when that research was done. I remember talking about it. It was like, whoa, they thawed old worms. Dude, the thing is, it's not supposed to be possible. Like, it should not unless you're in Ceno Man, which is Justin's debut on the silver tree. Yeah. Oh, yeah, it was. Yeah, that's not supposed to be like just DNA degradation is supposed to be taking place. Even when things are frozen, they're still enzymatic activity that's taking place. Things are supposed to break down. Or they, you know, supposed to they do. You can't preserve things just by freezing them. And definitely because there's water in those hours and years. Living things of water in the whole thing. When you freeze it, it causes problems. Yeah. So does this turn out to be debunked now? No. So actually, Blair, your comment about water being in the big portion of freezing things is a very important point because these researchers with their new paper that was just published in PLOS genetics, they looked at the differences between C. elegans, which is a nematode species that is regularly used in research as a lab like model species for genetics and other things. Very easy to work with in the lab. They compared it to one of these species that they thought out. So the genera that they determined that these nematodes, really old Siberian nematodes belong to is Panagrolymus and Plectus. Panagrolymus, the Panagrolymus really big name for a tiny worm. It's a tiny worm. It's a really big name. Yes. But these little worms, according to the genetic analysis, they were like, OK, how'd the worms survive? What are they doing? Do they have anything in common with worms that exist today? C. elegans, lab basic. We got all the genetics for it. We've been looking at it for ages and they went, oh, my gosh, they do the same thing. And they actually have several genes in common that are not like high, that seem to be highly conserved genes because C. elegans still has them. And this worm species from over 40,000 years ago has them as well. And what these genes do is they increase the amount of sugars that are put into the cells. And so when a little nematode is exposed to stress that suggests that there might be bad times coming, that little nematode goes, OK, got to make the sugar, got to make the sugar, fill all my cells with sugar. And because they fill the cells with sugar, they don't freeze like ice cubes. Yeah, don't freeze into little sharp snowflakes that break cell membranes. And this is something that we do in lab procedures as well. We add sugars to organisms that we want to preserve so that so that when we freeze them, the freezing process doesn't break their structure. And so it's a really cool, cool study suggesting that, you know, C. elegans, which is one of our lab animals, could survive for a very, very, very long time frozen. But then also that nematodes evolve these mechanisms for self-preservation during times of lower temperatures of very, very long time ago. And then that that's been conserved for thousands, thousand million. What was it? Thousand years ago. Yeah. A thousand. Cool. Pleistocene era. Yeah. So we know that current C. elegans has the have the genes to do this thing. But do we know for sure that they can do it? I mean, we can't fight. That would be a time travel experiment. We freeze some and then put them someplace in a box. Well, you'd have to do it for 48,000. You're like, but you can do a short term one. Like, you know that freezing things will still kill things in a shorter amount of time. And so you could freeze C. elegans and see if they could come back after. Yeah. And that's another thing that these researchers did is in their in their work, they looked at these different organisms because they were able to bring these Pleistocene nematodes back to life from 43,000, 46, 48,000 years ago. And in bringing them back to life, they were able to go, hey, what you're made of and compare them. And so now they have them in dishes in a lab and they're able to look at these little tiny worms and compare how they survive to C. elegans, which is a basic lab model species. And so they're doing that work. I mean, no, it's gonna be, you know, wow, maybe somebody's gonna make a 46,000, 48,000 year long experiment to test it. But at this point in time, they're just comparing, you know, what these different species have in terms of genes, how they exist in the stressful lab environment conditions that they put them under and see where they go. Yeah. So anyway, that's worms from a long time ago. All right. So the next interesting story that was from a long, long time ago, researchers have been talking for a long time. We've talked on the show ourselves about the possibility of things thawing out of the permafrost in Siberia. That's gonna be a fun experience. Right. All the new things. The very old things. What's gonna come back? What's gonna happen and how are we gonna deal with it? And some researchers, again. Will it even be a problem? Yeah. Will it be a problem? And so that is the question that these researchers publishing in plus computational biology came up against with their study titled Time Traveling Pathogens and their risk to ecological communities. So they didn't have time traveling pathogens. They created a computer model. This is computer simulations, computational biology. This is not actually like they're not bringing things back to life and seeing what's happening. This isn't actually in vivo. This isn't in life, right? This is in silico simulations. The in silico simulations that these researchers have been able to develop have indicated that time traveling pathogens, yeah, they're probably gonna be a problem that we shouldn't underestimate the influence that they're going to have and that they actually are going to change the way that ecosystem dynamics work. They will change population genetics. They will change diversity and that a very, not a lot, it's not gonna be like all of them, but it'll be like 1.1% of these revived organisms that come back, that get into ecosystems and have an impact. But it's a small number, but the impact can be huge. And so that's the take home, yeah. Yeah, and so here's the fun arms race of the microbial world. Yeah. Here's this thing that had a space, had a niche at one point. Yes, one time. And now it shows up after this time travel and is that niche still there? Is it something that is now vulnerable to attack because of all the arms race that's gone up? It's like, oh, I'm gonna take over the world because I have invented steel. And the world's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, okay. All right, that's it. Or is it gonna be something that other resistances, other organisms had a resistance to because at the time they encountered it and it's been so long that that countermeasure hasn't been used for 150,000 years and now it can exploit everything. Like it could really go either way. And that's the thing, it could go either way. The way that these in silico, which is in a computer, they did computer simulations, their in silico models turned out was that they can have a really big impact and that we should not underestimate them. Not that we should completely fear them, just that we should not underestimate where it can happen. And then to add a positive note to the end of all this like, oh my God, the thing's coming back from the dead from thousands of years ago. Researchers just published in cell host and microbe, their analysis of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA to look for genes that would be related to proteins slash peptides. Peptides are much smaller segments of proteins. They're little active molecules. And these researchers were like, all right, things might be coming back from the past. So if we look at the old DNA, is there stuff in there that might have been antimicrobial, antibacterial that's in the genomes that we can use? And they ended up in the researchers. It's funny. It's a great, great quote in this article as published on Nature, which is, we started actually thinking about Jurassic Park rather than bringing dinosaurs back to life, as scientists did in the 1993 film. The team decided, why not bring back molecules? And so they used an AI algorithm to map amino acids in proteins, look at protein sequences in Homo sapiens, Neanderthalensis and Denisovans, and looked at things that might kill bacteria. And they found some and then they tested them in the lab. They had six peptides, four from Homo sapiens, one from Neanderthal, one from Denisovan. They gave them to mice that had been infected with a regular hospital-born bacterial infection, Esenetobacter baumanii. All six stopped the bacteria in its tracks. None killed the bacteria, but they all stopped it. And so that in itself suggests that we could possibly use these peptides in addition to antibiotics. Another thing that maybe when like really give us a leg up in our fight against bacteria. So can you explain that what stopped it means? Didn't kill it, but it stopped it. Yeah, so they stopped growing. They stopped reproducing. So they didn't all die. They just weren't within the experimental period. They were not reproducing anymore. They were enough for these cells to potentially handle on their own. Right, you know, sometimes with bacteria, they also go into like a cyst-like state where they just shut every other processes shut down. So like I was talking about with the nematodes, ah, it's freezing. Let's just stop, let's wait. And so sometimes in those kind of stresses that can happen, but it's an interesting combination of AI algorithms, computer science, and genetics, and all the stuff we've learned from our ancient ancestors. And this is pretty awesome. Okay, so I've gone on long enough. I'm glad that I was able to add a little positive bit here. Justin, I am not, I really didn't want to talk about this. I was gonna ignore the UFOs or UAVs. UAPs. Whatever they're called now. Okay, whatever. Bring it, I'm ready, I'm ready. You can't, you can't ignore it because the future has happened and it's now before Congress. So this is, this Week in Science covers all the extraterrestrial evidence of the unidentified aerial phenomenon. Ready? There is none. Great, thank you. This concludes this Week in Science's coverage of the extraterrestrial evidence of the unidentified aerial phenomenon. Thanks, Justin. You're welcome. Okay, that was easy. Next. Yeah, it was, so hang on. Hang on, there was, there was this past week a congressional hearing that was held to expose the truth about UAVs, previously known or still known as UFOs by anybody who really cares. And in that hearing, there was no evidence provided. There were some extraordinary claims made, apparently, of non-human biologics recovered from a unidentified thing crash site. According to a former intel official who says he knows a guy that knows a guy and is willing to whisper what else he knows off the record in a soundproof phone booth. So I will not resist the temptation to point out that non-human biologics basically describes any life on earth that isn't human. Right, yeah. Cats, bees, birds, bacteria, and bananas are non-human. I wasn't even gonna leave the letter B and I've already got all of birds and all of bacteria. Octopuses, squid, cuttlefish. I'm off. So truly overwhelming, third hand evidence that we might not be alone is the only life on planet Earth. There was a moldy peanut butter sandwich in the, in the plane and that had some mold on it. And that is non-human biologic, yeah. I mean, in absolute definite terms an unidentified aerial object that crashes and non-human biologics found could be a bird. That would be a perfect description of them finding a bird and the most- Could be a bat, could be a butterfly, could be- Could be a balloon that has floated over from China. Easy, we'll get there. Pushing it out. The NASA, a real agency has been tasked with putting together a report and is expected to come before the same congressional committee at some point, maybe, to provide their analysis of UAP evidence. The question from NASA back to the committee is what evidence are we supposed to be looking at? Why us? These things aren't even in space. 80% of these UAP reports are actually below commercial air traffic altitudes. So from NASA's perspective, the request is going to be a little, not much more than a debunking exercise, most of which they've already done because they're getting cajoled into reviewing aircraft data footage and things like this. They've pretty much already done this of the videos that have surfaced. The most compelling- They've already done this, like they've been doing this because this data has been out there. These videos have been out there. Yeah, but they have to be part of the performative show that is for some reason finding a grift somewhere within this phenomenon. So the most compelling UAP recorded sightings so far are identified as either aircraft seen at a distance. They're always through this saturated digital zoom from a moving aircraft with cameras mounted on moving mounted platforms. There's over 38 million commercial airline flights per year in the world. Then there's all the private aviation, weather balloons, all the rest of it. Misidentifications haven't been publicized, but they must be happening all the time. So the fact that there's a misidentified craft in the air with tens of millions of things flying around should not be surprising. In the case of perhaps the most famous footage, the Go Fast video, NASA researchers, as well as online grad students, sleuths, using data captured on the screen of the aircraft, of speed, altitude, angle, distance, object, used a advanced technology called trigonometry to reveal that the object is around 12,000 feet, moving it around 40 miles an hour, consistent with air currents of that altitude, and not actually very fast. So advanced compared to like middle school math or? Advanced compared to like pre-Greek. Well, more advanced apparently than got it. Woo-hoo! Fighter pilot, top gun guy who captured it with the tracking system, which they actually talked about more than how interesting it was that they found something, which might go to the fact that they know that they're tracking basically another B word, which is either a bird or a balloon. Anyway, deciding a balloon would not be insignificant, right? Oh, that would be a thing! A spy balloon! It could be, because now we know that's a thing, right? But we have missed it, maybe, because people are thinking this is a physics-defying UFO instead of it's not inconceivable for fighter pilots or other pilots to believe that optical illusions and misidentifications defy Earthly explanation. It's a tricky environment, right? You have to identify speed and distance of anything of objects encountered. Planes, especially military aircraft, are outfitted with all sorts of arrays of sensors because humans can't tell range or distance in those environments, by sight. They just were not good. It's too fast. It's too... And especially... It's a chaotic environment and you cannot trust your senses. You're under G-forces and... There's heat impacts on refraction and stuff. Yeah, there's all sorts of stuff. And there's also the fact that fighter pilots now are sensing things that are many, many miles away. So they're not even often within a good visual range anyway when they're encountering things. What they're basing most of these encounters on are the sensors. Okay, so this makes sense. But once explanations are forthcoming, once recorded footage from aircraft is analyzed and explanations are forthcoming and the phenomenon is demystified, to continue to hold up explanations as supernatural begins to question the authenticity of the speaker's intent and the integrity of their cognitive curiosity. So keep that in mind as we go forward. There's... NASA is being forced to do debunking of ghost phenomenon next. They're gonna be like, whoa, we saw these ghosts in this house in this video on this reality TV show. Why don't you... Why don't we get NASA to look at it? No, stop. And so this is where like science communication comes in and is a very, like it's an interesting slippery slope. And there is the point where if NASA is responding to these things and debunking, it's usually from the idea of like the deficit model, which is that people just don't have the information and if they have the right information, they'll believe us. So then it's like, look, we give you the information. Of course, there's not really an identified thing. Like we know what's going on, right? But if people come from a place of identity, bias, where they're thinking about things from a very different perspective, it doesn't matter what information you give them. And that puts NASA actually at a disadvantage because it starts to put NASA, which is a science organization within the government in this position of like, playing pop culture advocate or whatever, you know, and that's not okay. Right, you know? And debunking is good, you need to do these... The real thing that you need to do is you need to do the truth sandwich, right? You go, oh, right, you saw that evidence that they showed. That's really interesting. But did you know this, this, this, this, this? And I can totally understand why you think that, but actually, blah, blah, blah. And so you smash it into a sandwich and you make them eat it. Yeah, so I think there might be some... And that's not the only method. There's others. What this is likely, I think, in my conspiratorial mind. We've talked to like evolution, intelligent design conspiracy theorists over the... We've talked to so many people on our forums and in other places and I'm just like... So there is a political party which has been seeking to defund NASA quite a bit because NASA's also focused on the health of the earth and so has been paying a lot of attention in vaulting global warming and covering it and analyzing and using its resources. So now, if, hey, if NASA hasn't come up with these any discovery villains, we need a different organization. The Space Force should take some of that budget from NASA to go and look into these things. There's something much simpler too though, Justin, which is just that same political party has stuff going on that they don't want you to pay attention to right now. I think it's a distraction. It's mainly a cultural distraction. Yeah, it's also feeding the base, the raw meat, the thing like, yeah, I'm guys gonna go and find out about the aliens. That's the real important stuff going on in government. And then the other one... Don't look over here to this actual really bad stuff that's happening. Look at the aliens. The biggest part though, I think that's the most frightening is that there's a national security risk here because there are now requests for, well, we need to be able to get reports and data for all the things you've seen. Military aircraft and where they are and what they are seeing and when they're seeing it. And the problem with that is, that is making that information public. And that is a... And so who would want that? Well, maybe adversaries of the United States. And it's not an accident that some of those people who are on that panel have also used propaganda that was made up information by adversaries to question our own intelligence department about issues in the past. So not that they're doing it willfully, but somebody's giving them information that is channeled from the adversaries. So, and now they're out there saying, oh, we gotta get all of our military uncloked and have the Pentagon be transparent. What world are you living in? That's a good idea. Yeah. One thing though that has been like a positive side to this whole hubbub is that there has been a push on social media that I've seen of people responding with TikToks and Instagrams and all sorts of stuff going, really? You're talking about aliens? Who's gonna pay my rent? Yeah, really? Their rents too darn high. And people are, there is, and I don't know who's behind this movement and I find it fascinating because there is that group of people out there who are like, I don't, I don't care. Like this congressional thing, you're trying to distract us, but in the meantime, nobody is helping us with housing prices. Nobody is helping us with like inflation. This is- These aliens gonna live. Yeah. So I'm actually- I get it. And where's the congressional hearing that's like trying to get to the bottom of the solutions for global warming? They've had them, but they've been attacked. Once John Kerry was a couple months back, like, will you've flown on a plane before? You know, like, oh, hey, well, why would you want to make solar panels for the thing that we do? That's the Chinese make those. Okay, well, guess what? We could have- We could have. But somebody interfered with the investment process there. Yeah, and they were doing a really good job of trying with the green investment process back a few years ago. But it's another thing when it comes down to a lot of this conspiracy stuff, which is there are people who are trying to keep certain status quo in place. And there are certain people who are just the naive actors who get taken advantage of, but at the same time, they are in a high enough authority position that their views get spread around. So you have the basketball dude who goes up on a plane with his level and, you know, ah, I didn't see any churches. Corsairs, that's flat. You know, like, hi. Do you really understand all the physics behind how that works? I don't think you do. But at the same time, people look at that and go, he's an authority in basketball. So he's authority in those others. Like, I don't think anybody's, like, quoting. I don't know how convincing an argument that fell. I'm not naming names, but it's just one thing after another, and it is continuous. And that's the war on information. Now it's a new Congress and a House setting and a committee being taken seriously by people who are in a control funding. Yeah, it's kinda, how many, yeah, many aneurysms all the time. Hey, Blair, what do you got? I gotta get off of this. This ends the official report of the thing we didn't find any evidence. Thank you, Justin. Great, well, you mentioned climate change. So let's talk about tall trees. Having tall trees are important. They provide food, shade, shelter, all sorts of things in a forest. So having the tall trees versus just short ones is important. They also are able to pull more carbon dioxide out of the air than smaller trees. They redistribute nutrients. They have larger root structures. They help turn around the water cycle. But now a new piece of research tells us that the tallest trees are also the most capable of overcoming droughts, at least in the short term. This was an assessment of more than 125 different studies, not looking at tall species versus short species, but looking at how tall specific trees within a species are and how they adapt their structure and functioning as they gain height and the effect of that height on their survival from drought. The higher they grow, the trunk produces more water storing tissue. They store more food. They develop deeper roots. They extract water from deeper parts of the soil that helps them to respond to drought conditions. That also, they make structural and functional readjustments that minimize the formation of embolisms in their circulatory system and the risk of death by starvation, the two most common complications suffered by trees during drought. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Ambolisms in trees. Like we talk about medical science, humans have embolisms. That's a big deal. Yeah. Trees have embolisms? Yeah, they have a circulatory system. So when we have an embolism, it's a blocked artery. This is like a clot in a tree. So it impacts their circulation of nutrients and liquids through the tree. So yeah, so they can get embolisms and trees can die from drought because of the embolism. So basically this is tension in the xylem conduits. It becomes too high and there's water column breakage that creates a disconnection of leaves and above ground parts from the roots so they can't send nutrients or water to the other parts of the tree. So it's- And this is caused by what? Too much red meat? It's drought. It's caused by drought. I don't think it's caused by too much drought, yeah. Yeah, but so the reason I brought this story, it's, I mean, the finding is very simple. Tall trees are important, but- Very. It's not important. Well, for one, whenever people cut down trees, a lot of times they are required to plant new trees. Not the same. Aside from all of ecosystem benefits, if you're not planting a tree of the same height, it's likelihood of surviving upcoming drought conditions not as high. Unless you can just water it all the time, which in places in the Southwest, that's a huge problem. You don't plant just a tree and you can't do that. Like we are looking at trees in the Pacific Northwest now with climate change. You're going, can we keep watering them? Yeah, this is a huge kind of piece of the conservation movement is planting trees. Planting trees to replace trees that have been removed, planting trees to offset carbon, all these sorts of things. That's impacted the efficacy of that and the likelihood of survival of these trees that are getting planted is impacted by how tall they are. So it's not a one for one is the problem. A lot of it is treated like a one for one. It is not a one for one. These trees that have spent decades and in some cases hundreds of years growing, that helps them survive through drought conditions. So if you're just going to cut one down and plant a newer tree that's only a few years old, they may not survive droughts, which we have more coming for sure. Yeah, and there's an actually another point to this that in an article that came out this last week related to the story Justin brought ages ago related to planting all the trees that would be needed to plant on land to counteract all the carbon dioxide, whatever. But the plans currently in the United States to plant trees, we don't have enough trees. No. So we don't have enough land either. No, no, no, it's not just, right, we don't have the land but we don't have enough baby trees. Yeah, no. But it's then like what you're saying Blair though is it's not just the baby trees. Baby trees are not going to cut it. They're not going to cut it. So we are, we need to start subtracting stuff. Like things need to be taken out of the equation currently. Right, also don't cut down any more tall trees. Holy. Developers. I mean, yeah, just just drive around the Bay Area and look at all the buildings. You don't need to cut down any more trees, please. There's a spot I was just driving through Southwest into Northwest Portland and there's a spot that says really big tree and it is. It's just a really big redwood and there's one tree and somebody made it a spot on Google Maps and I think that's great. I hope nobody cuts it too. All those really big trees, drought resistant. They need to be too. I mean, it's the, their roots go down deeper. They've got the ability to hold the water. They, like all of the physical processes are going to be more beneficial to them but it's also going to be species relevant also because I know there's a huge issue in on the West Coast. I don't know about other places but on the West Coast with climate change, cedars are currently dying and so you might have like a really tall cedar tree that's been around for a really long time but because of the change in rainfall, they're dying and so it's not just a big tree. The next 20 years of twist. This is exactly this. It's like, oh, where did we live? We lost another tree species from the planet this week. It's going to be fun. No, no, I refuse. And a story I did not bring this week was all about how spiders, they thrive in tree species diverse habitats. So also if you want to save the spiders, you need more types of trees. You can't have kind of a monoculture. So anyway, I'll just throw that out there as a bonus. Lots of animals benefit from species biodiversity and so that is just another one. Biodiversity is one of the best things. We got to think about biodiversity. Yeah. And everything we do, not think about biodiversity but space rocks. I'm going to talk for a second about the asteroid Ryugu, the JAXA's Hayabusa two spacecraft went to and actually was able to return samples from. 2020, we were like, yeah, what's going to happen? And in 2021, they were like, yeah, they got carbon, nitrogen, all the stuff that would be necessary for life. So it's like, ooh, this asteroid out in the asteroid belt. It's got all the stuff for life. That's cool. Okay. 2022 study found that there's water in there. Evidence of water. So you've got ingredients for life. You've got water, bunch of stuff for Ryugu. Amazing little asteroid that we got to visit. New study just out published in Science Advances has determined that the rocks or the clasts that are in the samples from Ryugu, these samples C0002 and A0040, they thought to have originated on the outside of the solar system, not on the inside of the solar system, but towards the outside. And so they've used electron microscopy, they've got X-ray spectroscopy, they've got mask spectroscopy, that's in the nanoscale, like they're working at all the molecules in every way that they absolutely can. And they determined that there are pre-solar, silicate grains in the samples that were brought back. And they also contain a lot of an isotope called carbon-13. A lot of the grains were silicon carbide. And so the conclusion is that Ryugu and what it's made up of is not stuff from our solar system, but more stuff from outside our solar system, the asymptotic giant branch stars. Our sun's gonna end up there someday. It's not coming from inside the house. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But for a large part, all of these bits and pieces of Ryugu that we're looking at that we're like, oh yeah, we're just gonna be like, hey Ryugu, you're an asteroid in our solar system. You're gonna just let us know how our solar system formed and all that. Oh, hey, you've got pieces of life. You've got water, you got all this stuff. Wait a minute, you've got stuff in you that's not from here, how to get there. So they've also found that there are other pre-solar grains high in oxygen 17. And there's a ratio that physicists look at of oxygen 17 to oxygen 18. And when you have high levels of oxygen 18, it's more likely to be coming from supernovae. So there's just some really interesting... So wait a second, that means that there could be life outside of our solar system and other solar systems. Wait, where's my notes on the UAP thing? I need to go back to that. Go back to that story. Go back to that. You should be talking about in a press conference. That's, I think that's the thing that's actually really frustrating about this if I could tie these two things together is that the likelihood that there is life somewhere out there is extremely high. Yes. So that's, I think that's like, that's the frustration of it all is I think that a lot of people who have the scientific facts in line are interested in finding proof of life elsewhere. And in fact, I think it probably exists. It's just not this baloney that they were talking about. So there's like actual science that you could discuss that would be really interesting related to extraterrestrial life. Yes, absolutely. No, it's not. Pollutes. Yeah. I mean, there's... It's because we haven't, we don't have the evidence of extraterrestrial life. Sometimes the absence of evidence is that there isn't any. Right. The thing doesn't exist that you're looking for if you've found no evidence. But you got these building blocks, they came from very far away. We know there's building blocks. We've got all that stuff out there. And it's possible that the stuff that's we brought back from Ryugu was because Ryugu went through a comet tail. And maybe the comet was a thing that had the stuff. And then Ryugu was like, thank you for the glitter. You know? And it's... So there's other explanations for how it turned out. Yeah, yeah. Comet glitter bomb all over Ryugu. Yeah. But it's just very interesting in that if we look at it just as the data and not looking at these other alternative hypotheses of comets that would have influenced Ryugu, it suggests that Ryugu came from the outer solar system. And if it came from the outer solar system, what does that mean for how our solar system evolved in line with other stars and solar systems in our regional cluster? Which is really interesting. That's really interesting. Yeah, billions of years. I don't know, lots of stuff. One of the things that becomes very disappointing, maybe, is when we learn that the physics are the same everywhere. We have the universe pretty much, which means the available materials are pretty much the same, which means the building blocks of things like galaxies and then down to the solar systems can be very similar as well. So there's a chance that whatever we're finding here has a very high probability of being found pretty much anywhere in the universe. And if there's building blocks for life, it would make sense because we do know that life exists on planet Earth. We have evidence of that. We have a great N of one. He is fantastic, he's great. Without re-bringing up the subject again, if you do suspend out and believe everything from the UFO community, one of the things that's also common, you have to believe it all. I can't just say like, oh, all of, except for this one video, everything else was fake. It wouldn't make sense. It all has to go together. They're hominins. And we know one planet that hominins are from. The alien creatures, and that's the Earth. So they'd also have to be earthlings. They're traveling back from the future. The aliens are Earthlings. We'd actually be from another planet. They would have to be from the Earth traveling back in time because they're hominins and those only come from Earth. They're very complex, happenstancy, bottleneck, and dispersal form of evolution that took billions of years. Right, we all think somebody broke the nose off of this thanks, but in reality, it was like a rocket ship to Mars. Of course it was. And the other thing was also, I've always found it very interesting about this extraterrestrial life visiting Earth scenario, as long as we're slightly on this subject. And no, no, ooh, muah, muah, muah, muah. Just be quiet about it. Is it the show, is it different species of aliens, apparently, different descriptions of aliens or more common in different countries? Like in Russia, alien visitors tend to be like nine, 10 feet tall. Whereas in the Americas, they tend to be, or in North America, they tend to be three feet tall. And gray. So then you've got, now you've got this scenario is, aliens travel from across the vastness of space and then when they get there, they're like, which country should we visit? Oh, I see there, we'll go there because somebody else is already visiting over there. Like it's just utterly ridiculous that they would follow national boundaries and cultures as well in their visitations. But anyway, I don't know why I'm going back into that. We're not going back to that anymore. The level of dumb, that's why I'm going back to it. The level of dumb that was displayed in that congressional hearing is still bothering me. We believe our listeners are so intelligent. Thank you for listening. Do you have any more stories for the opening of the show? Justin, I can't tell. I could. Do you want one? Yeah. Okay, this is a little bit of an admission. I am somebody who is extremely skeptical about most claims. I want to know who's making the claim? What is that claim based on? What is the evidence and is there a paper on it so I can read it with a critical eye before I say I agree with you? At the same time, I can be overly and easily influenced, trusting and conned by anything that claims to be able to make me smarter, stronger, and more focused. Because after all, how hard would that actually be? So I have been an occasional sucker for supplements. That state they have a given effect. Knowing on some part of my brain that I'm likely just purchasing a placebo. But what is actually in a store-bought supplement? Whatever is on the label? Whatever is on the label, I always assume, reflects what is in the pill. I'm gonna swallow this thing. It's the thing that's on the label. That's how food works. That's how products work. They label them with the thing that's the ingredient. Whether it actually has the desired effect claims or not is what it says. You're scaring me now. Yeah, however, turns out supplement manufacturing is not monitored or regulated in any way. And according to a recent study, the ingredients can be quite different. This is scientists from a variety of universities, Cambridge, Harvard Medical School, University of Mississippi, NSF, International, and Michigan. They've analyzed ingredients in a selection of sports supplements purchased online and they applied some liquid chromatography, quadruple, time of flight mass spectrometry and discovered that 89% of the labels are inaccurate. 12% included unlabeled band drug substance. So, they had 57 products that they purchased online. And these were for five popular supplements, vomitoria, methylbarium, I don't know where to add, turquoise stone, halistocene, and octopamine, whatever. Doesn't matter. These are supplements that are purported to be stimulants to help you have energy or perhaps a newotropic effects. 23 of the products, that's 40%, did not contain a detectable amount of the labeled ingredient. That's 40% of them, didn't contain anything that was on the label. So it's not even like there's extra stuff in it. It didn't have the thing you're buying it for. No. Of the 34 products that did contain detectable amounts of the listed ingredient, the actual quantity ranged from 0.02%, which I think they should have put into the non-detectable category, honestly. But it's technically- Yeah, they like chewed some up and then like breathed on it. 0.02% to 334%. So if you were intending to dose yourself with a little extra, I'm gonna take twice the amount because I feel like being aggressive with my supplements. You actually took six times the amount that you thought a single dose would be. So there's that. Okay, where are we at here? Okay, of the 34 products, okay, only six products contained an ingredient quantity within 10% of the label. So 89% were off either 40% didn't have anything, then the next range had a very little trace amount or too much, 11% of the products contained an ingredient quantity within 10% of the label. That's considered an acceptable range. Seven of the products, that's 12%, that's more than the percentage that were accurately labeled. 12% were found to contain at least one illegal drug. These are stimulants, DMAA, DMHA, these are experimental-created drugs that have never been FDA-approved, never tested on humans, and they are stimulant drugs. They have been studied in labs on animals. They are, one is an amphetamine derivative that can raise blood pressure, lead to cardiovascular problems, including shortness of breath, chest tightening, heart attack. Heart attacks. They're looking down the list, sweating, nausea, chest pain, palpitations. Like, these are dangerous and they're drugs that some of them are actually banned outright by the United States. One was taken off, because there was one that was taken off. Yeah, octodrine is a discontinued nasal decongestant first developed in the 1940s that was out and is now banned in the United States. Most of the rest never have been approved for any form of use. So, what turns out like that I didn't know about all this is that the FDA has no authority in the manufacturing of these or the regulation of supplements. And only can bring action if a product is already on the market. And they can, and they then usually request that the product be removed or destroyed. But this is where this has gotten me. I am currently prescribed several vitamins by my doctor. But according to this study, I can't be sure I'm getting the dose I'm supposed to be getting. I'll put it this way too. It depends where you're getting them. So, there are certain places that are more likely to be more accurate. And if you're getting your supplements through your doctor, they're probably more likely, or through a pharmacy, they're probably more likely to be accurate. But if I'm just buying them at the grocery store. That's the, yes. That's kind of terrifying. I go into the supplement aisle and go, I live in Portland. I should have vitamin D. And I look at the supplement aisle and I go, I don't believe any of you. And then I walk outside without sunscreen. I mean, I'm on iron supplements right now. Yeah, which is important. But you have to have the right iron supplements to make it good for digestion that don't make you sick as much. And you have to have the right amount. Is it the right amount? Is there something else in there I don't know about? This is really troublesome. Yeah, it's very frightening. So now these were bought online which makes you feel like they could be less reputable. What I wish they would do is just list the brands of who was in the study of who was putting these out. Because that would be helpful, I think. If you have a track record as a supplement company of having been putting in nothing or the wrong thing, I think I would want to know. But my recommendation, and I'm not a doctor, but I sometimes, not a real doctor anyway. Sometimes I call myself doctors, but not that kind of doctor. Then I clarify that. Justin, not a real doctor, yes. Whenever possible, if there is a vitamin or a nutrient or a supplement that you want to take, find it in a food. Because food is regulated. Food is tested. Food is not. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Food is just food. It's groceries. You go and you have produce and they look and they've seen that maybe organic food has higher levels of nutrients than food that is more traditionally farmed. We're having. But it's regulated by nature. So I'm not gonna peel my banana. Did you just say regulated by nature? Did you just say regulated by nature? It's regulated by nature. I'm not going to peel the banana open and have a bunch of grapes fall out. Like that's just not gonna happen. If it did, it would be very surprised. However, sometimes you need supplements. Sometimes you can't get what you need from food. Yeah, you need them right now. So take them. Yes, so this is where this is really concerning. So I, for one, want to know how to fix this. And I guess that we have to work on, at least in America, the political system because it's another thing to add to that list, I suppose. Because it's something that's not regulated that needs to be regulated. Because people are using it for using them for health purposes. And yet they're still in that weird zone of medicinal treatments that used to contain things like heroin and cocaine and lots of alcohol and all this stuff, you know? And it's, you know, we have homeopathic remedies that we find time and time again, actually have active compounds that are dangerous or that they have different compounds similar to the supplements today that you're talking about, Justin, where they have different compounds than what are listed on their ingredient list. And that's dangerous. And so the, yeah, this is the kind of situation where the FDA does need to be stepping in, but there is this place, governmentally and politically, where they don't want to stifle business and yet at the same time, it's this balance they're trying to achieve between what became of the pharmaceutical industry where everything's regulated, you know, and you have to get a prescription for everything versus I can go get vitamin C or, you know, get vitamin C. Or I can get a pill that says vitamin C on a label. So recharging the chat room says something great. Is there a country that regulates vitamins and supplements? Because that way, of course, just buy the brands that are sold in that country or from that country. And I think that would be... And this is why Alibaba is wonderful. No. So what would be, actually kind of like, if like Iceland was like, we're regulating our vitamins so that every vitamin made here will have 100% what is in the label ingredients. And nothing else. Guess where you would sell worldwide a lot of your supplements from? Iceland or whoever like took up that thing. The fact that it's utterly Wild West and it's just, you know, the NFL union, I think is funds a lab that whenever an athlete wants to use a supplement, dietary supplement, sports supplement, whatever it is, it goes to that lab and gets tested before they can take it. And they knock down Yeah. Supplements constantly for containing all sorts of drugs and not having the thing or having a different thing. They've been on this for years. Those athletes will not risk their careers over a supplement company. No, and supplements of many times are produced in manufacturing facilities in foreign countries that have different regulatory structures and or none, exactly. And that's, and that's what we end up with. It's a label that's pasted on to, you know, somebody said, I'm going to make this supplement because it's going to be amazing for brain health. And they decided they're going to make a company and they're going to do their company on supplements. And oh, okay. How can I put all these things in? Okay, I found a manufacturer. I found a place that's going to, it's in China, it's in India. It's in all these other places. It's not local. It's not anything that is known to be, if you can't regulate it. And according to the study, you have a higher chance of getting an illegal drug, a banned Russian experimental drug. Dude, I'm going to buy all the supplements now. I know, I know. More higher chance of that than getting the correct labeled thing. But the majority of the time you're just going to be taking nothing. The majority of the time, it's not what you want. So you can't, and you can't just go to the web browser and say best supplement. Yes. That you know that SEO, that the people are one, that's going to be the best. No, what we need to have, there need, if there's not going to be an FDA regulating then maybe there is an external testing group that goes and tests. I don't understand why that isn't a thing. Why you don't have like this lab certified stamp of some form or another on there? Doesn't make any sense. That seems so reasonable. Yeah, it totally does. It's so reasonable. Very specific. We're telling you what like... Yeah. There's that kind of testing for soaps. You can have soaps that are tested, what are they, paraben free or cruelty free or all these other things, that it's an actual process to get that stamp. There's also rainforest friendly products that you can get certified. And that's all things that are important, but this is like way more important. This is something you're putting into your body that can harm you or help you. Yeah, and we just trust the things that are on shelves because they're in the stores and they're being sold and so you trust that they're okay, but there is not a process in place. And so this kind of research is absolutely essential because this is the kind of stuff that people need to be aware of. This is like, we need to know. And I don't wanna alarm anybody, but I looked at the research group that put up this paper. And what are their interests? No, no, no, that's all right. Conflict of interest? No, okay. But they have several other papers from the past, five years or so, covering different groups of supplements that they've done this analysis to. I think we've reported on them too. And yeah, I think we have too. And found pretty much the same thing. Like the more they look, the more it's just looks like a blatantly fraudulent enterprise. Sorry, everyone. I hope that you live forever, but the supplements might not be the thing. And this makes me feel really bad for that one Silicon Valley dude who's spending like $2 million a year trying to stay young with like 5,000 supplements a day. Really bad, user? Really? Yeah. Last quick story, published in PLOS this last week, researchers looked at a bunch of bacteria that normally decompose wood. And they went, I wonder if these bacteria will decompose other things? And so they looked at a whole bunch of these bacteria and they found one. Fledbiopsis flabiodualba. It lived on a species of very hard to decompose wood from an area in Southeast Asia. And really what they figured out is when oxygen goes away and when wood goes away, these bacteria are like, I will take whatever I can get. And so whatever carbon happens to be around, they're gonna break it up. Because when they break it up, then they get oxygen and then they're able to get like the energy from the electron transfer and it makes them all very happy. So they did a bunch of scanning electron microscopic imaging and looked at carbon dioxide and stuff occurring due to fungal degradation of plastic. And it worked great. So these fungi that are normally known for degrading wood, they are absolutely fine at degrading plastic if they don't have wood. They just need the carbon. So when you say degrading plastic, I wanna be very clear here because we have talked a lot about bacteria or worms or other things that eat plastic and can digest it and can break it down. But you still end up with microplastics or nanoplastics. They are fully pulling apart molecules. Yes. Yeah. Which means you are left with no plastic. No plastic. This is breaking apart carbons and oxygens, using enzymes to not, they don't care that it's plastic. They are after the oxygen and they're after the carbon and they want it. And so they're looking at this stuff as a source of food and when wood was not there and plastic was in the same situation in an anaerobic environment, which is lacking oxygen otherwise, those fungi went to town and they started breaking it up. And so what are you left with? What are the byproducts of them breaking these things down? Yeah. So that's gonna be the interesting thing is that you have the destruction, you have degradation. These are two different concepts. But what they say is in their evidence of deteriorating the plastic without wood is that they created more fragile plastic and they're using what they call LDPE and LDPE is a, let me see if I can find the actual acronym for the whole thing back here in the paper that I'm looking at. LDPE is low density polyethylene. So they're low density polyethylene, lots of plastics are made up of LDPE. In their work, they saw that there was a change in the structural integrity of the LDPE. They saw that there was a deterioration of the tensile properties of the plastic. They saw that there were a lot of other, let me see, I'm looking for things related. Okay, here it is. Contact angle measurements, the microorganisms were more likely to adhere to the carbon on the surface of the plastic to be able to break it up. Their data from scanning electron microscopy showed that their enzymes and the metabolites were peeling off polyethylene sheet and that was evident to the naked eye. They saw mycelial mats underneath and within the plastic breaking it apart so the polymer surface was breaking apart. So this in your to answer your question does kind of get that there might be microplastics being produced in the process. So there may be, in addition though is lignolytic enzyme activities and when carbon is the only source within the plastic, this lignolytic enzyme activity which normally breaks down lignin in wood, they find that it starts degrading polyethylene. So actually starting to break, instead of breaking down the lignin, it breaks down the plastics in the same way that it would be breaking down the lignin. So it oxidizes the polyethylene. So you end up with different molecular groups. So, yeah, there is a change, yeah. So maybe not the solution to all of our problems but an interesting development, yeah. Yeah, they say this indicates these fungi have metabolic flexibility to adjust and utilize available carbon sources for their survival which is fascinating in itself. And they call them the white rot fungi which having read Chuck Wendig's series on the fungus that's related to the bats that kills humanity, I'm not excited about this. But anyway, the cell surface is more adhesive to the carbon, stuff than normal. You have more breakdown, you have polymers that have carbon-carbon bonds being broken down. And so this is good. It's less, it's not the same kind of microplastics that you would normally get. Yeah, yes, recharge, rest in peace, tight 90 minutes. We did it, we hand done it because we still have places to go. It's been an hour and a half and it's just the beginning of the show. I don't get it. Fungus. Eatin' our plastic, maybe that's the way it's gonna go. Let's not make things out of plastic anymore because there's lots of fungus in it. We're gonna just stop using plastic. That would be really awesome. Oh my goodness, everyone. This is This Week in Science. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of our show that airs weekly Wednesdays 8 p.m. Pacific time. We do hope that you subscribe to us as a podcast or subscribe to us on YouTube, Facebook or Twitch where you can watch us live streamed. If you really enjoy the show, please share on one of the many social media outlets that's out there. I don't know where you are right now. We can't keep up with it anymore. So just please share if you like what we're doing. Please let other people know. And if you really appreciate what we're doing, head over to twist.org. Click the Patreon link. And over on Patreon, you'll be able to help support the show as a patron in an ongoing fashion. Choose your level of support. We really, really cannot do any of this without you. And right now, we can't do any of the next part of the show without Blair. I don't know what's gonna happen in the next few months. Oh my gosh. But right now, it's Blair's Animal Corner with Blair. Creatures, great and small. Buy pets, build a pet, no pet at all. If you wanna hear about this animal, she's your girl. Except for giant pandas and squirrels and animals. Are you gonna ask me what I got? Oh, oh, oh, what you got, Blair? I can't start without it. You're gonna be like, I'm waiting. Okay, so tickling rats. It's a pastime of many researchers for one, because it is positive reinforcement for rats. They love being tickled. They love to play. They love a little tickle fight with a researcher's hand. But now I bring to you a piece of research looking at ticklishness and play in rats and what's happening in their brain. We know that animals like rats are less likely to play with each other if they're anxious or restrained. But what's kind of missing is data on the brain activity of rats that are free to play and do play. So where does this originate in the brain? Why is this something that fundamentally exists in the brain, kind of the wiring for play? And how can we figure this out through tickling rats? So first up was to get- I love this. It's like researchers get to play. Yes. They like to play. Well, what do you do? Oh, I tickle rats. So first step is of course to get the rats comfortable with a human playmate. So they have to kind of remove anxiety or anything like that. Then they tickle them under controlled conditions and measured the rats' squeaks and brain activities. So they know that there are vocalizations like laughter that rats use in play. They're squeaks, they're too high for us to hear normally, but they do communicate. And other animals that play, including us, will use laughter as a signal for play. In fact, with children, with human children, human children have been shown in other studies to check for laughter when they play fight with each other. And if the playmate isn't laughing or they stop laughing, they stop fighting. So it's a signal that everybody's having fun, basically, which I love. And so they were able to monitor the squeaking to see if the rats were enjoying the tickling and they were having fun. And then they were also figuring out what was going on in the brain. Currently, scientists don't know the neural pathways that control playfulness in humans or in other animals. And so the way that they did this, they played games of chase the hand. So after the rats became used to the research to kind of move their hand around a play zone, and if the rats chased the hand, that means they wanted to be tickled, then the hand would start tickling them, and the rats would either get tickled on their backs or their bellies. And yes, you're playing the video. You can see in the first one, actually, that the rat, the first time you look at it, it looks like the human is flipping the rat over, but really what's happening is the rat is like propelling themselves upside down because they want to be tickled so bad. My cat does this. She rolls over and it's just like, pat my belly. Yes. Yeah. And so they seem to really enjoy it. They chase the hand for tickles. They squeak and squeal in a high-pitched tone when they're excited when it's happening. And they found a strong neural response. They found a response about tickling and playing in the lateral column of the periaqueductal gray, or PAG, and if they inhibited that part of the brain, they stopped engaging in play as much and did not laugh as frequently. So they really are confident that they found the location of where this play behavior is coming from. Meanwhile, if the rats were put in an unfamiliar environment that was designed to provoke anxiety, they also stopped laughing and the tickling and play responsive cells in the PAG decreased in activity. So it really does seem like this is what's happening here. What's interesting is the PAG is in the midbrain and it also has been known in the past to control vocalizations. Makes sense. But interestingly, also the fight or flight response. So behaviorally, play and play fighting can be seen as a practice of the fight or flight response. And so that might be why they are linked. That's fascinating, some practicing. Yes. Like, I might need to show my belly. I might need to run away. The perfect example I can think of with human children is TAG. Yeah. TAG, that's a fight or flight response, right? You get TAG, you gotta run without even thinking in the opposite direction, hide and all these other things. But it's fun, you're laughing while you're doing it. It's enjoyable. So there is an interesting link there that the fight or flight response, vocalizations and play could all kind of come from the same place in the brain. Next, the researchers want to see if they can observe similar activity in the lateral column of other animals when they are being played with. So that they can kind of extrapolate out how universal this location and this association is across different species. And I'm sure eventually they wanna look at humans. But for now, tickling rats, low-hanging fruit, you can figure out when they like to play. I mean, yeah, looking at humans, you're not gonna have the easy like, oh, let's use your children for our research. That's not gonna happen. Let's move on to, yeah, let's move on to human trials. I mean, if it was just a hat, if it was, if you just wanna put a hat on my kid while he played, I'd be fine with that. Or, I mean, to be able to get at these locations within the brain, is it the kind of thing that you need to have people who are comfortable going into an fMRI machine and being comfortable in that closed space, but then giving them some kind of entertainment or some kind of freedom, or do you put them in a tube and tickle them? Tickle torture, straight away. Which do human children appreciate tickling as much as rats do? For science. I actually would argue, it depends on the child, but generally my guess would be no. Oh, no, we play a very similar game, too, what those rats are doing. Yes, I'm just saying, statistically, I don't know. I think that there's a lot of human children that do not like to be tickled. Well, not by strangers, Blair, you gotta stop going up to random children and trying to tickle them. When you're your own kid and you're playing with it. What is this character assassination? They won't have it. No. Let's talk about birds and power lines, huh? Birds and birds. It was like a whole animation where they were the birds and it was the big blue bird and then like that was the whole thing. So here's the thing about power lines, I think a lot of people don't realize. Okay. Birds don't get electrocuted by power lines just by sitting on a power line. They have to come into contact with two energized parts of the power line at once. Yes. Which usually happens when they are, they have their wings spread and they take off from land or from a power pole and they accidentally connect to both of the lines at the same time. And so it's understood to be a really large threat to a lot of protected species, specifically birds of prey are a big target of this kind of concern. And so energy companies are required to invest substantial time and money to make sure that their power lines are avian safe, that they install safe purchase and then they insulate energized elements to reduce these kind of incidents. So this is my big disclaimer on this story. The leader of this research project, the first author Eve Thomason, I was a research associate at Boise State University's Raptor Research Center, did before doing this project perform avian risk assessments for a power company. So that's not to say that necessarily Eve was looking for something in particular. But where did she come from and how'd she get into this graduate program? Right, right. So that's the question is sometimes environmental assessments are done with the expectation of a certain outcome. Sometimes they are not. So it really depends on the situation. So I'm just kind of throwing that out there so that we have all the information of where this first author is coming from. I'm not saying that this data is skewed because I'm gonna get into it. It's actually very interesting. But I do think that there was there was a particular expectation of how this might go when they were working for the power company in particular. When she was, she noticed that she was finding dead birds along power lines that should have been safe from electrocution. There should have been all of these sorts of things in place that means that the birds should not have been electrocuted. So once she joined the Raptor Research Center she wanted to do an assessment. And over the course of four years her team hiked or drove 196 kilometers of power lines in Wyoming, Idaho, Utah and Oregon in search of dead birds. They collected 410 carcasses. Most of them were federally protected species like Eagles Hawks and Ravens. They took them back to the laboratory to determine cause of death. Now most of the time when you get these strikes and electrocutions at power lines that's what's written down is cause of death is electrocution end of story. They are not x-rayed unless there is a particular argument to do so. In this case, they x-rayed every single one of them. For example, they examined a bald eagle that a power line owner thought had died from electrocution. But when they x-rayed the bird they found shotgun pellets throughout the bird's body and entrance wounds throughout the eagle's body suggesting that the bird was actually shot prior to making contact with the power lines as it fell to the ground. Eagles don't even like, Eagles don't even like. That's how you get a dead eagle out of a power line is that you have to shoot at it. No. Oops. Shoot at it and you hope you missed the power line enough. Well, the long and short of this is that 66% of the dead birds that they found died from being illegally shot. Oh, go figure. So this is a shooting problem, not a power line problem. This is important to know. So again, this is why I'm bringing in the idea that okay, there is a researcher involved who used to do environmental consulting for power companies. But if this is the case, this is, there's a misallocation of resources here. Yeah. It's not to say that power lines don't need to be birdproofed because they certainly do. But it might actually mean that certain things that are happening are effective, which is important to know. And additionally, that more funds and time and effort need to be put into reducing the illegal shooting of birds instead of just this power line debate. Power lines have been mills and all these things. Yeah. So the interesting thing here also is that they're talking about birds of prey, eagles, they're like seagulls, they're gulls, they're like scavengers, they're like gonna eat whatever. They love fish, but they're not, you wouldn't think of an eagle as something that's really gonna be a problem for a farmer or some other situation. But they talk to each other about it. And it is a colloquial, it's like an urban, I guess the opposite of urban, but it's a tale that is told, if you got eagles, they'll take your sheep. This is like a very common... Eagles are not gonna take your sheep. If we have any ranchers out there, eagles are not going to take your sheep. We do not live in Central or South America where you have like the big... Yeah. But it's a common misconception that eagles will take your livestock. And that's understood as a big threat to your livelihood. All birds of prey are seen to be this kind of threat towards livestock. And so there is a lot of illegal hunting that happens. Yes. And so it's inaccurate and unnecessary. As a bird person, I'm sitting here going, huh, why would you think that? Yeah. And how many of you saw the viral video of the eagle picking up the toddler that was fake? These are things that feed that kind of miscommunication of what's possible. An eight-pound bird is not gonna pick up a 40-pound sheep. I don't... Nope, not gonna happen. And they usually don't even work together to make it happen either. No, absolutely not. So the next steps of this study, they wanna expand into new areas so they can understand the spatial extent of illegal shooting and see whether there's a reason why these birds are being shot. Of course, we think we know what it is, but we'll see. But also how widespread is it? Like is this two thirds of the reported electrocutions nationwide? Or is it just in these particular states? Are there areas this needs to be looked at more than others? Is it more than 66% in other areas? So this is something that needs to be looked at. And these protected and endangered animals need to be x-rayed when they are recovered. Because especially if they get electrocuted, you don't know right away if they were shot first, unless you look. Yeah, so that's the big question, is were they shot recently or were they shot and they recovered? And so whatever pellet shot they've got in them, is that something that's just there for a long... They've had it for years and just survived with it. We don't know that. Yeah, and the picture of the eagle that you showed, that thing died from all those pieces of shrapnel. You can't survive shrapnel to the brain. That's going to be a problem. Yeah, so it's definitely... I would call that the COD there. But anyway, I thought that was really interesting with all of the kind of controversy of electrical wires but also now I want this study done on windmills. Because of the amount of time that we talk about wind turbines killing birds. Sting birds, yeah. I want the receipts, I want to know. Are they actually just being shot and then running into the blades because they're dying? Or are they really honestly bopping into turbines all the time? I want to know. It's a great question, yeah. Next study, let's get that data. Justin, did you have any more studies for the store or the show tonight? Yo, of course, I got plenty more. Oh, wait, you actually put them in the rundown. There they are. Yeah, this one is coming out of... Oh, what is this one? Fizz.org says mosquito-friendly gene drive may lead to a malaria-free future. Now, when you see that headline, you might think, ah, that's that gene drive where they're going to kill all the mosquitoes. Cause that was actually something that had been proposed. The previous considerations for using gene drive modifications to eradicate mosquitoes, we've talked about it quite a bit. There's concern, some unintended effects. Removing a species from the environment, even one as universally despised as mosquitoes because they, for one thing, are food for other creatures. Birds, bats, turtles, fish, frog, spider snakes, dragonflies and damselflies, which if you don't know the difference, look at your friend's dragonfly tattoo, that's a damselfly, most likely. That's true, that's really funny. So, but this is actually kind of a different approach. They are not using this as an eradication. They have engineered a small group of mosquitoes with both the gene drive, which gene drive basically just means that you're gonna beat the 50% Mendelian inheritance rate from a gene. You're gonna put it in a spot and have it connected to a chromosome that seems so ultra-conserved that all of the offspring are gonna have this same gene. So when you have something that's a fast reproducer like mosquitoes, what they found is they can take a small population, add it to a larger captive population and within a month or so, all of the mosquitoes that are living in that captive population now have this added gene. And what this added gene is doing is it's basically creating antibodies. It's monoclonal antibodies. It's basically creating a genetic vaccine to the malaria parasite. Doesn't kill it off completely, but it's sort of like you were talking before. It has a neutralizing effect. So it's less likely to spread and spread to the propuscus part of the mosquito, the pocadie part thing that it has, whatever, that jabs people. And this is actually something that I learned reading in this study here that mosquitoes actually, even the blood-sucking ones, don't spend that much time eating blood. They spend actually the majority of their time collecting nectar from small flowers. So a lot of small plants, herbs, things that may not be getting the pollinator treatment from larger birds and bees and what have you are getting their reproduction facilitated by mosquitoes. So their food and their going around and making sure that all these small plants get to the reproduce. So we don't wanna kill them off even though they're harboring this malaria parasite. But this approach I think is really great because it's not an eradication program. It's a mosquito vaccination program, which is much friendlier. I love the idea of vaccinating the mosquitoes. Like, let's start there. Why are we just- We've tried vaccinating people. We've tried mosquito nets. Yeah. There are an estimated 247 million cases with 619 deaths reported from 2022 alone. Globally, the investment in malaria intervention, 16 billion dollars. So if we can get these little mosquitoes to take care of the problem, if we can vaccinate the mosquitoes, take care of their health issue, we might not have one. And actually that's the problem. It's not a health issue for the mosquitoes, the parasite. It's a good symbiotic relationship as far as the parasite's concerned because they don't kill the host. It just becomes a problem at the next step, the next level. Can we recharge? Can we change them to not like blood? Yeah. They like it. It's good. It's full of iron. It's usually a triangle, sorry. Without mosquitoes, we wouldn't have horizontal gene transfer happening as often as it does either, right? So I feel like it's still kind of important. It's not just mosquitoes, it's all sorts of other biting insects. Yeah, but they're definitely contributors to evolutionary time. And my last story of the night, this is from something called Medical Express out of something called Stanford University, which I've heard of before. Scientists engineer cooperation in cancer cells. It's a very California university thing to do. Cooperation in cancer cells to activate apoptosis mechanisms. So one of the things that occurs in cancer is cancer stops listening to the surrounding tissue. The surrounding tissue looks over, cells and tissues have a very complicated neighborhood that they live in. It's not like the suburbs where you got a neighbor, maybe to the left and right and maybe a back fence neighbor. They've got a neighbor in every direction. And you look over there at Cell Bob and Bob's over there trimming the hedges and you wave to Bob and then you look over the other way and there's one and he's out there, he's got his car in the driveway and he's washing it and you wave and your neighbor waves back. Then you look across the street and where Barbara used to live, there's a multi-headed demon doing push-ups, bench presses on the lawn listening to that rock and roll music too loud and you go, oh, okay, we got a problem in the neighborhood and cancer started to form. And so you send the signal through the Homeowners Association, through the mitochondria that something needs to be done. They need to stop growing across the street there and maybe even get evicted, get kicked out of the neighborhood. What cancer does is it stops listening. So the normal signals from neighboring cells that tell it to stop growing and to maybe even initiate apoptosis, your cells out of control, you're gonna endanger the group, the community. Cancer cells ignore it. They say, ah, not gonna do it, I don't care. And one of the ways that they do it turns out that the mechanisms for apoptosis are still all there and in place. It's not like the mechanism to initiate cell death has been damaged by this cancer. They're just actively suppressing it. And they suppress it with a molecule gene transcript, BCL6. Okay, so this one goes around to all the places that could be potentially initiating apoptosis and says, yeah, you're off, you're turning you off, you're turning you off, you're all being suppressed. Nothing's gonna bind to you and now you won't work. So you can't initiate the self-destruct mechanism within the cancer cell. What the researchers here did is they said, well, what would happen if we took a activator, something that turns those switches on and got a small molecule to bind it to the one that says not to turn it on? And that's what they did. So you have this small molecule that's now linking an activator to what is causing the suppression in the cancer cell. So everywhere that the cancer cell is attempting to suppress normal cell activity, this little activator's piggybacking and turning the switch back on. It's just like reach over, boop, boop, boop. And so, you know, this is a proof of concept. This is an idea of one of the researchers there, I think is an undergrad, like something was looking at this, got it picked up, talked it up through and then they did it and now it's working. Not only is it working, this could be an effective method in about 50% of cancers, which is just yet another. Yeah, I mean, it's very early in the process of determining if there's any off-site issues. So far they haven't seen any. What they find is that the concentrations that these, the BCL6 and the other one that the little piggybacker that's turning the lights on is BRD4, that they're not impacting their levels significantly in the rest of the cells. So it essentially is only working to initiate apoptosis in the cancer cells. The only place where it's doing this. Which is great, because cancer cells are like, I'm gonna live forever. I'm gonna turn off all the things and I'm just, no, you can't stop me. I'm gonna do whatever. It's just making it so that signaling mechanism is what it sounds like. The signaling mechanism from the surrounding tissues that are telling the cell to initiate apoptosis can no longer be ignored once this treatment is in place. Right, which is the main aspect of cancers, right? Where you have signaling mutations that the cells go, I'm gonna ignore that. I don't have to, I have a weird thing going on, but I don't have to kill myself. It's okay. And some it could be because the signaling system is damaged, but I guess in half of these cases it's an act of suppression. You know, the more you learn about cancer, it's actually, it's sort of like, it's hard not to appreciate what cancer does to survive in a body and ignoring all, like you tell me to die, I'm not gonna die. You tell me to stop roaring, I'm gonna keep growing. It's very selfish. Yeah, and I think that's the fascinating thing about it is that we think of cancer as something that generally it's a bad thing for the human organism, right? This is bad, but for cancer, the way cancer works itself, it is the perpetuation of life. It is the perpetuation of cells. It is growing, growing, growing, growing, growing, growing, but it doesn't care about the community. So- Yeah, it's sort of like a fossil fuel lobbyist. Yes, there we go with it. Yes, these are the analogies we need. Totally. I love having jokes and other things. I might have some jokes a little bit later, maybe not, but could you imagine if somebody had control over your brain and made you just completely stop moving to the effect that you couldn't even breathe and your heart stopped as well? That sounds bad. I don't like that. Are we talking about Mitch McConnell? Is that what we're talking about? Oh, ouch. I'm sorry. Yeah, anyway, so researchers publishing in Nature Neuroscience this last week with their research into the pedunculopantine CHX-10 to the plus neurons they've determined that these are very specific neurons that can stop all motor action. I wanna say motor action, I mean muscle action. Done, like you are a statue. You're not a breathing statue even, you're a statue. So we were talking about like the tickling in mice and how that might be like practice for a fight or flight or for certain self-defense aspects. Lots of animals have a freeze reaction, deer, freeze in headlights, rabbits. We know there's a fight, flight, freeze. Or freeze, mm-hmm. Reaction, exactly. And so it's been determined that there are certain neurons that are involved in that freeze reaction to an environmental stress. This is not that. So these researchers were like, what are all the things in the brain that can just stop bodies from doing things? What are the stop neurons? And then once we find those, let's write that down, burn it, send the ashes into space and never let anyone see it because it will be weaponized. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, so previously there have been neurons that have been discovered that are involved in the freeze response, but this particular circuit that they have, they've found this pedunculo pontine CHX 10 to the plus neurons. Yeah, when they stimulated these neurons, the mice in their experiments had absolute pause. So they were doing an action, pause. And then when they stopped doing the stimulation of the neurons, sometimes they just keep going like nothing had happened. So it's like pause and play on a VCR or something. But it was also sometimes they'd be like, okay, now I'm gonna do something else. And they do different behaviors sometimes. It's a scary kind of study when you think of it from a sci-fi dystopian narrative of controlling humans in the future kind of perspective. But the reality is that if we can understand how neurons like these are involved in neuronal deficits like Parkinson's disease or other palsies where the muscles are being turned on and turned off, turned on and turned off. And they don't have the continual input that allows for a smooth movement. Understanding this kind of locomotor nervous system can be really important for actually treating some really big diseases. So yeah, they're studied to find a motor command that could cause global motor arrest. And it could be recruited in response to salient environmental cues to allow for various arousal states. And it identified a locomotor opposing role for rostrally biased glutamatergic neurons in the PPN. Basically it was part of the system that tells things to be quiet. Good to know. A little bit weird. We'll see where it goes from here, whether or not- Yeah, I don't wanna, I'm with Blair. There's some things that should just be, ooh, in fact, maybe that's why the aliens have been visiting us. Because they're like, dude, you gotta stop with the AI. Do you realize that we'll take all the space jobs as well as just, it's not just the earth jobs. We're not worried about earth jobs. It doesn't take the intergalactic jobs too. It's illegal for a reason. It's illegal, we didn't know. We don't know, we didn't see that. There's some things that we shouldn't be exploring too much, like how to turn everybody off. We can see. I can turn you off. Turn you, bye bye, you go sleep now. Okay, next study published in Neuron. Researchers have been trying to figure out, hey, like memory, that's a really interesting thing. And the hippocampus of the brain in humans is known to be a part of the memory system. And so there's been a lot of research mostly in mice and rats that have suggested that navigation and memory are also together. In the hippocampus. And in the hippocampus, they know that there is a particular oscillation that's called the theta oscillation. And the theta oscillation is just around like 12 to 35 Hertz. And this is in rodents. And it's related to movement and it's linked to navigation. We've seen oscillate these theta oscillations in humans related to verbal memory. And so the researchers were like, okay, we've got theta oscillations in rats related to them remembering how to go around a maze. We've got theta oscillations in the hippocampus of humans when they're remembering words. So we're gonna take people who are gonna undergo brain surgery. And before they undergo the brain surgery, we're gonna have them learn a navigational thing. So they had people who have seizures who are going to undergo surgery to negate the seizures that are affecting their lives. And in the process, they first had the people learn like a little navigational thing. And then they measured theta oscillations in the brain while they were undergoing the brain surgery. And they had them because during brain surgery, often you're awake. So they had these patients, they said, hey, what do you remember about? Would you go left or right there? Which way do you go to get around this situation? How do you get there? What are you doing? And they discovered that these theta oscillations were more prevalent when the people were remembering stuff than when they were actually experiencing them. So it could still be involved in verbal. It could also be navigational as well, but the main discovery is that these rhythmic signals that these theta oscillations in the hippocampus, they are very important for the remembering. And then if the brain and the hippocampus, if the hippocampus isn't firing in that particular frequency range, you're not going to remember things. You're not going to remember the navigation. You're not going to remember the stuff. So this is some aspect of this, which just feel like I've seen every time somebody has forgotten a word. And they start- Me every day. They'll look off in a direction. And so what is that called? There's a physical head turning and looking up to remember. People use direction as though, oh, that's where in this way is where that thought is, that word is stored or that concept is lying. Well, it's a very well known phenomenon that if you ask a person a question and they're accessing their memory to answer the question, people do the large part look up into the left as they're thinking about what they should be telling you. So there are eye movements that are connected to the way that we remember things. There are physical aspects to it. Last week, Blair and I talked about a study where it was related to people could remember more about stuff if they imagined themselves trying to plan a museum heist. They could remember more about the art and what was in the museum if they were like, I'm going to rob this museum, not just go into the museum for the sake of going to the museum. It's been known for a long time, the idea of mind castles where you connect a room in your house with a weird subject and then something that you want to remember and you create this situation. Physical map of those words or things that you're trying to remember. Yeah, so I think there's something here with what's happening between the rat research and the human research and understanding how the hippocampus is involved in not just navigation but also the way that we store information in our brain, possibly in like a weird, I don't know, everyone has their personal weird library where there's weird hallways and things are pushed away. Some things are locked in the basement. You never want to see them again. But anyway, these theta oscillations, the reason it's going to potentially be important is that if we can stimulate the brain of people who have memory deficits, specifically in the hippocampus with the theta oscillations, we could potentially help them regain memories. The other aspect is people who are deteriorating. We know that there are things like light therapy and other things that are helping people with Alzheimer's. So maybe there's something that we can do related to frequency oscillations of the brain that will allow us to maintain brain health. Maybe there's something that we can do there. So no answer yet, but it's kind of cool. And then I wanted to finally, Justin, you brought up artificial intelligence and robots taking over and all kind of things. The one thing we cannot have robots do is take over humor. I mean, seriously. Humors, that's ours, right? We know what's funny-ish. Not everyone's funny. I know what I think is funny. Right. Researchers just, this is not a published study, but it's out of Cornell University, and it was an award-winning study from a paper that they presented at the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Toronto, and the researchers took New Yorker magazine cartoons. And the New Yorker has their cartoon caption contest. It's kind of an annual thing, where everybody tries to caption the cartoons. And so the researchers had a couple of AI models, one that was based on pixels that looked at the picture and what was there, and another that was more verbal and was interpreting the language of stuff that was going on, compared them to humans as to who could identify a winning caption and explain why that caption actually was funny. Who do you think did a good job? People. People. I have a huge problem with this. First of all, the New Yorker comics aren't funny. They're not funny. They're never funny. They're like maybe like a, oh, that's clever. It's funny. They're not like a Gary Larson. I know. No. It's such a strange choice. And also, when you're saying better than humans, I guarantee you that there are humans who submitted things that are worse than the robot. Absolutely. They compiled 14 years worth of New Yorker caption contests. There were 700 comics in all. Each contest included a caption list cartoon, the week's entries, and the three finalists selected by New Yorker editors and for some contests, crowd quality estimations for some of the submissions. And then they asked humans, AI, who did better at things? And the way it came out is that the AI matched cartoon to captions with about 62% accuracy where humans were 94% accurate at picking a caption and matching it to the proper cartoon. So humans are better at understanding the human references to humor. I mean, the context. AI to write some jokes and then to have somebody perform those jokes. Yes. Not an AI. And then do a set that they wrote and then test that because like, this isn't humor. I'm really stuck on this. This is like not a good test of humor at all. Yeah. And one aspect of this study that I thought was particularly troubling is that the researchers found that, okay, so they, the relationships between the images and captions are indirect, playful. They reference a lot of real world entities and norms. And so there's a lot more context that humans have to understand. The robots would have AI would have to understand. They had to create distractors for the experiment that were not actual captions that had been submitted to kind of act as like a control for the humans and the robots. And so the main researcher who did this to get people to submit other captions, but that didn't work out for whatever reason. So the researcher himself wrote 650, 60 word explanations for the cartoons that were used in the experiment. And so that in itself biases it to whatever sense of humor the researcher has. Right. That is not a control. Also those are human written. Yeah. So. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So there's like, there are aspects of this study where you kind of go, it really is not really well controlled. Again, I said not published. This was just part of a thing, but I find it an interesting step in trying to figure out the differences between what AI that we're teaching to try and be like us and humans understand from the world as humor. Well, certainly send that study to Universal and Netflix and everybody else who's not caving to the writers currently. Look, look, the writers are done. Look, here's the thing. Good cave. Here's the thing. We're comparing grownups who read the New Yorker magazine or at least buy it and wait for the cartoon contest. Right. Who also thought their ideas were clever enough to submit to the New Yorker compared to a two year old AI intelligence. And the jokes were from the past 14 years. So you're talking about like. Relevance too, right? How old is the joke? Yeah. But we've got to keep remembering this is infant, maybe even a newborn AI that we're dealing with. We're not. We're not even working with like a mature AI yet. We're working with little Bambini, and it's competing on some level with humans on all sorts of things already. You with the hood, a beady beady baby, bougie, hoochie bunny, many little baby. You probably, your baby's probably a lot, got a better sense of humor already. Pretty good sense of humor. Definitely. That's all I've got for this episode. Are we all good? Yeah. Are we done it? We've covered it. Robots can't crack a joke yet, or at least, I don't know, maybe we don't know how to study it. Thank you all for listening. I'm so glad that you were here. Justin, so good to have you back, Blair. Wonderful to have you here. We'll see how things go in the next few weeks. 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I use the scientific method this week in science this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in science science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news I say you 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 then understand that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy I have to turn my mute off and then on and then off and then on and figure out where I am and woo hoo it's the after show it's late what a wonderful show Justin had to go welcome back Justin that's exactly it and even with all of that Justin had to hang up because he had to go take his child to school or daycare I mean I guess it's daycare at this age but yeah whatever what a fun time it's late so a tight 900 thanks Paul Disney I just know I I have gotta hit the hay yeah so everyone I want you to know so Justin will probably be more regularly back here for the foreseeable future that's as far as I know Blair is now up basically we don't know any day now can we say this out loud yeah go for it Blair is having a baby and so her delivery date is soon yeah but it could be any time now squishy he is fully cooked he is fully cooked and we cannot wait to meet him but what that means is that there may be a missing Blair for a little bit and we don't know when that's gonna happen it could be tomorrow it could be three weeks from now it could be tonight we don't know yeah so Blair yeah go have a wonderful night not sleeping I hope that the baby doesn't kick you in the bladder too many times that's the least of my problems he can take away I don't care his feet are fully in my ribs at this point he's turned upside down more like he's head banging me in the bladder is more what's happening well I hope that it's all good and so glad that you were here tonight and it was really good to have everyone together for a little bit so maybe a 140 minute show was kind of awesome because who knows what's gonna happen next week that's very true we don't know no so yeah so not a long after show tonight because Blair needs to go to bed I need to go to bed Justin's gone and everyone out there thank you so much for being here it was fun wasn't it Kira and happy birthday Kiki oh thank you yeah I've been kind of I don't know I was a little loosey goosey tonight because I haven't kind of still celebrated my birthday great you celebrate you deserve it yay Kira yes happy birthday to all the Leos out there and I guess Blair say goodnight goodnight Blair say goodnight Kiki goodnight Kiki goodnight everyone thank you for joining us all of you stay healthy stay safe stay curious stay lucky that's what you like right be lucky likes good bye