 This is TWIS. This Week in Science, episode number 627, recorded on Wednesday, July 12th, 2017. What's in your brain? Hey, everyone, I am Dr. Kiki, and tonight on This Week in Science, we are going to fill your heads with death on Mars, sneaky spiders, and psychopathy. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The spider was in love with its neighbor. Turned out it was ants with very nice pants, so spider, of course, copied the behavior. No, this is not the limerick version of this show, but I'll have you know we do love the science, which founded many an appliance. So off to the races we go. This Week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I'll let all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. Good science to you, Kiki. And good science to you, Blair and Jens. Justin is not here this evening. Unfortunately, he may not make the show tonight, but the rest of us are here and I hope that you are here with us. Are you ready? Are you with us for another evening of science news? All right, we have tons of science news tonight. I have stories about the deathly surface of Mars. I've also got stories about photons to Earth, calling Earth with photons. And we have an interview tonight with Dr. Jens Foll, who's gonna talk to us about the neuroscience of psychopathy and various other fun brain tidbits. But before we get to that, Blair, what is in the animal corner? Oh my goodness, I brought snail shells and spider ants, or ant spiders, depending on how you wanna look at it, and arguing scientists. Arguing, debating scientists, or arguing, or arguing. Well, that is to be determined. All right, all right, we'll get there. We will get there. First things first, let's start off the show with our new and one of my favorite segments that we've ever done is this week in what has science done for me lately? Hi, Dr. Kiki, Justin and Blair, just writing in to share what science has done for me lately. Today, while doing some dishes, I had a burnt pan that I couldn't seem to scrape clean. Thankfully, I know a thing or two about chemistry, and I knew that if I heated super concentrated saltwater in my pan, it would cause a chemical reaction, lifting the burnt particles from the surface of my pan for an easy clean. Nothing monumental, but it goes to show how science can and is used in our daily lives. Good science, Carly Karrotkowsky. Carly, thank you so much for writing in. Blair, what- Let's try that. You're like, I didn't know that. Take notes about that. And that's when I burnt a pan. Science. Burning a pan, that too, is science because there's actually a heat chemical reaction between the pan and the food particles that's occurring. And so when you actually burn food onto the surface of your pan, it's because of a chemical molecular reaction that's driven by heat. Oh my goodness. I love thinking about every time I scramble my egg in the morning, how it's a non-reversible reaction. Yep. You can never unscramble that egg. No, entropy man. All right. Remember everyone, we need you to write in to let us know what science has done for you lately. What does it do for you every day? Leave us a message on our Facebook page. That's at facebook.com slash thisweekandscience. Let us know. I wanna hear from you or you can email me if email's more your speed at kekefinchkikifinch at gmail.com. Someday I will actually get my This Week in Science email fixed. I don't know when that's gonna happen. It's avoiding me to date. But anyway, kekefinch and gmail. In the future. In the future. You know, the future, it'll happen. We do though want this segment of the show to be filled every week with something from a member of our Minion community. Every week of the year I'm asking you to write me with things, stories about how science affects your life. What has it done for you lately? What does it do for you every day? Share. Come on, don't be afraid. Help us and write your stories. And with that, it's time to jump in to our interview. If you're watching right now, you'll see that there's a wonderful gentleman who's been nice and quiet waiting his turn. Dr. Jens Foll, Jens studied psychology in Tübingen, Germany. And I know I did not pronounce that correctly either. And he then did his doctorate in neuropsychology at the University of Heidelberg on the ways that phantom pain therapy affects the brain. He is currently studying several topics at Florida State University. But above all, he is interested in how to recognize the fundamentals and components of psychopathy in the brain. He's also interested in science communication like we are. And he co-founded the arm in Germany of real scientists, which is a group dedicated to giving a platform to scientists to tell the world about their work. Jens, thank you so much for joining us today on Twitter. Thank you very much. And on Twitter, on Twitter, on my show. I was looking at your Twitter handle. I don't know what's wrong with me tonight. What's my brain doing? So thank you very much for having me. I'm super excited to be here. I'm a big fan of the show. It's really great. I mean, I studied neuroscience myself, but learning in memory and didn't really delve into things like psychopathy and the things that, you know, or what behavior goes wrong in the human mind. So how did you get into studying phantom pain and things like psychopathy? How'd you get started? Well, how I got started is it's, well, I finished up studying psychology in Germany. And I sort of found out, I realized at the last moment that actually what interests me most about psychology is sort of the science aspect, the neuroscience aspect, like all during my college time, undergrad time, I was never really into the neuroscience angle. And at some point I realized, man, I should have paid more attention to it. It's actually really, really interesting. And so a position opened up to look at phantom limb pain or more general at how the brain adapts to amputation because we have areas in the brain that are dealing with and processing signals to and from our limbs. And the question is how do those areas react to like a drastic change in the shape of the body like after amputation and how does that reaction relate to phantom limb pain? So I thought it was just fascinating, especially perception in general is something that I've always been interested in. And this is obviously a sort of a special case of how we perceive our own bodies. Plus it had the advantage that I was studying something that has a direct application because I was looking at treatments, possible treatments for phantom limb pain so you can help people with chronic pain, which is great. And not all topics in neuroscience have a clear application to them. But I've always, at the same time, I've always been interested in forensic psychology. I've done a long internship in a prison in Germany that I thought was fascinating. And when I found an entry point into this topic by studying psychopathy and how this relates to both criminal behavior and to changes in the brain or specific things and processes in the brain, I jumped at the chance and moved over to Florida and now I'm looking at that stuff. That's basically the story. Cool, so let's start talking to start off just about phantom pain and how that gets started in the brain. I mean, I've read a bit about it, but can you clarify, how does that get started? You have a limb that's amputated and so it's not there anymore. How do you end up with someone feeling as if they still have a limb where there isn't one? Right, so yeah, this is actually a fascinating topic. So what we know is that if you make, if you do any sort of movement, like just moving your hands like this, right? This movement has to be initiated somewhere in the brain. Using fMRI, which is the tool that I mostly use, it's functional magnetic resonance imaging and it just, it basically can just show you where in the brain activation happens. We can talk about the method a bit more if you want to. But the point is, if you do something like this in an MRI scanner, we can pinpoint where this activation happens in the brain, like where this movement is being prepared and processed in the brain. Now, obviously, if you lose an arm, for example, during amputation, either accidental or clinical, that area of your brain will no longer be needed. In fact, you have several areas that are no longer needed. You have one that used to control the movement of the hand, you have another one that used to feel touch on your fingers, and all of these areas are basically being thrown in disarray and the brain hates a vacuum like that. So these nerve cells that are up there and they're basically waiting for signals that will never come. So what they're doing instead is, they try to look at what the neighboring neurons are doing. They might take over tasks from the neighbors or they might just kind of be rearranged to do different things. So basically this organization of your brain and this cortical organization changes in ways that are not always apparent or not always the same in different patients. In other words, there is stuff going on up there to try to adapt to the new situation. And the idea is that in some cases that goes wrong and somehow creates pain. Now, the mechanisms behind it are not entirely solved yet. There's competing ideas about how this really works and why it creates pain. But what we know for sure is, you can measure a shift in your cortical maps of well, well, let me take a step back. I mentioned how the, so your hand is represented in your brain, right? There are nerve cells in your brain that control your hand. You have that for every part of your body. So basically your whole body is represented in your brain, on the surface of your brain in the form of nerve cells that are controlling movement that are waiting for touches to process and things like that. So you basically have a map of your whole body in your brain. If there is a change in the form of your body, if there is an amputation, as I said, some of these cells will shift around. And the important thing is using fMRI, we can measure the degree of this shift. So we can measure, for example, if the left hand is amputated, we can compare where the right hand is and what the organization, the left and right hemisphere of the brain are and compare them and see if there has been any sort of shift after amputation. And what we found out, and that was actually my PhD mentor who found that out a while back, is that the degree of this shift is directly related to the intensity of phantom limb pain. So the more, exactly, the more shifting is going on, the more these cells are basically being redistributed. So the cells themselves stay as they are, but the cell behavior changes in a way that redistributes these maps. And the more of that happens, the stronger the more intense your phantom limb pain is. Now the question is, does that mean the shift is the cause of phantom limb pain? Or does it mean the phantom limb pain itself does something to the brain that makes these organizations shift around? So we don't know that for sure and different people have different ideas. A complicating factor is that not to, no to amputation patients are the same. You have other stuff going on. Obviously that limb has been amputated for a reason. So there might be nerve damage from even before the amputation or that's concurrent with the accident. So there's all kinds of stuff that goes in there, but we know that this connection is there. And that helps us to try and find out how that works in the brain. Yeah, and it really makes me wonder, what is it about certain patients that makes the map shift more than in others? Is it the fact that there is more nerve damage? Is that there's more going on because of whatever accident was? Is it something to do with the time that it took to get the limb amputated after damage took place? Or, you know, yeah. Or is a person more predisposed to this really plastic behavior? Yeah, yes. Yeah, it might be. And if that's the case, then it might be that there's other stuff going on as well. That they might be better at learning, you know, playing the piano or they might be worse at learning the piano because there's more cortical plasticity or less. We're not really sure about that. So what we can tell is that it's clear that there's a lot of variation, including with phantom limb pain. Not everybody feels phantom limb pain. Some people feel it and then it goes away. You know, the intensity might be very, very different. Obviously that makes it very hard to study because you're never really sure what's going on. And again, there's other stuff. Like for example, if you have an amputated limb, the nerves that have been cut. So the peripheral nerves in your arm or your leg, they're trying to grow on. They're trying to basically get healthy again to heal again. So they might just grow somewhere and it might get knotted up. And we know that that can create pain as well. So that wouldn't be phantom limb pain. That would just be pain in your residual limb. Exactly. For the patient, that's not always apparent because that nerve used to be in the hand that's gone or used to be close there. So that patient might have trouble even finding out, like even telling you what exactly it is that hurts. So that makes the research very complicated. And we're trying to find out more and more because we realized that what we find out there might also help us develop better prosthetics, for example. We might know, we might learn what does an artificial hand have to be or have to do in order to help people use it and also in order to help people get rid of their phantom limb pain, which is a possibility. We know that people who have a functional artificial limb, like functional hand that can be used in some way, have on average less phantom limb pain than other people. Again, it's not sure why that is. It could be that this limb helps the brain re-adapt to the situation or it could be that the people who don't have as much phantom limb pain in the first place are more keen and more ready to use a more complicated prosthetic. So we're still in the process of finding that out. But yeah, we're making progress and it's interesting. And basically every week there's a new finding and new stuff. You could have a whole show just about phantom limb pain and perception. Right. Or that kind of stuff. You worked on mirror therapy. So the idea that you've got your arm, say your arm is amputated, so you use your other arm that has not been amputated and a mirror with your amputated stump kind of placed behind it so that you can visualize yourself having a complete limb by using the reflection. So does that shift, does that, looking at the fMRI stuff, because I know that's what you do, does that therapy shift those behaviors back towards normal of the shifts in the map that you were talking about? Yeah, well, let's talk about mirror therapy because I know it sounds super weird. And I've had at least one patient not take part in the study because she said, no, that sounds like new age stuff to me. It's kind of weird that the mirror would do that. And if you know me, I'm like the least new age guy that you can imagine. But so we have that. And there's like a Dr. House episode where he kind of heals a patient's pain with the mirror within seconds. So there's a lot of kind of myths and weirdness around. But that's a TV episode. It's not gonna take seconds. This is therapy. This is something that takes long periods of time. I mean, I can't fix my illnesses in a 30 minute block only on TV Blair. I mean, Dr. House, I love the show but especially in terms of fMRI stuff, it's basically a science fiction show. It's like, you know, anyway. So the mirror therapy. About a decade ago, there was a first study that showed mirror therapy decreases pain. Like if you have patients with chronic phenomenon pain, you do that, what you just said, you kind of hide the residual limb behind the mirror and you ask the person to do movements. And it's just so that the patient, yeah, visualizes the limb being there again. That's basically the point of mirror therapy. About 10 years ago, a study came out that showed it does work, right? So it works for the patient, not in every patient, maybe about half the patient. I think it was 40% in that study. But for some people, it seems to work. So what I wanted to do is to see if we can measure the shift that I was talking about using fMRI because if that therapy works, we would expect this shift to go back towards the way it was before the amputation. Again, we could compare the left and right hemisphere of the brain, basically the healthy hemisphere and the hemisphere that represents the amputated side of the body and see if they get more similar to each other after successful therapy. So that's what I did for my PhD thesis and that's what I found. So I found that, in fact, for those patients that benefit from mirror therapy, the brain does reorganize itself back more into the direction of the way it looked before the amputation. So that means we now basically have another marker that tells us, yeah, this type of therapy actually works because the other thing about chronic pain is it's usually, it fluctuates a lot. So you have to be kind of careful, how you ask people about their pain, when you ask about their pain and how long you follow up afterwards because there's always jumps and spikes in the pain ratings. So you might have a hard time being sure that your therapy actually had an effect. So now we have kind of two things. We can ask people for the amount of pain that they actually feel and we can see if there's like an effect like that in the brain that sort of shows you whether or not the therapy is effective. So that was a fascinating study to do and now we know that at least and that led to other developments. So now people look at virtual reality environments, for example, and I co-authored a study on that where people try to make mirror therapy better because one weird thing is phantom limbs don't necessarily have to look the way or feel the way the limb used to feel when it was still there. You can have patients that clearly feel a phantom limb so they feel like their hand, for example, is still there, but it feels deformed. It feels like shrunken, for example, or it feels cramped. What my study also showed is that these people, this group of patients, those might be the people not benefiting as much from mirror therapy. I didn't really look into that. That was something that came out after kind of in line with the other results. So I didn't really investigate that in and of itself, but it seemed to me like this type of phantom, if the phantom is cramped, for example, you might maybe not accept mirror therapy, you might have trouble visualizing it just because it doesn't feel like you're, it doesn't look like your phantom limb feels. Right, it's not actually mirroring what you're feeling in your head. Exactly, yeah, there's a disconnect between what the phantom feels like and what the mirror image looks like. So we could fix that by introducing a virtual environment. We could create a computer-generated phantom limb that looks exactly like the phantom limb feels and then do mirror therapy with that, give people control over this limb and try to see if we can improve mirror therapy this way. So that would be interesting. Awesome, and so you've been using FMRI for a while and can you explain the basis of FMRI and how it's been used through the years to give us so much information about the human brain and behavior? Right, yeah, sure. So FMRI is using the same MRI scanner that you know and love from the hospital. So in the hospital, usually what people do with those machines is a structural MRI. So you can look inside the body, you can see bone fractured bones or tissue that looks like it might be a tumor and things like that. You can just kind of look inside the body. Functional MRI or FMRI is using the same machine but it looks for something different. It looks for oxygen depletion in the brain. The assumption is that regions of the brain that are particularly active would use up more oxygen because they need more energy. And that's what you're looking for. So you can basically scan the whole brain and you can see where the areas are that use up most oxygen or more oxygen than usual in a specific task. So probably most of your viewers and listeners have already seen MRI results attached to the news articles. Like a lot of neuroscience articles show a brain, a picture of a brain with like colorful blobs on it. And that's basically what FMRI results look like. Colorful blobs. Yes, yeah, that's what I do. I draw colorful blobs on brains basically, that's my job. And there's an interesting side to it and I'm not sure if you wanna get into it but those blobs are always sort of lying to you because in fact, all of your brain, like the whole brain is active all the time, whatever you do. So if you see like a brain, one of these images, a brain with a couple of blobs on it, it looks like, oh yeah, those are the areas that are active and all the rest is kind of sleeping. And that's not the case at all. And that's also kind of where this 10% of the brain myth comes in, right? People tell you, again, the New Age people, I'm gonna bash New Age tonight. I'm just kidding. But yeah. We do it here, so yeah. You have this idea that you only use 10% of your brain and you can sort of unlock the rest that the other 90% by doing whatever. By taking a pill if you watch movies, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. Actually, I haven't seen that movie where that happens but I'm still kind of angry with them that they even made that. But anyway, so this is a myth. In fact, your whole brain is active all the time, no matter what you do. There's like an in-joke among FMI researchers about FMI being like a brain localizer. Because if you look at the activation, the whole brain is just kind of lighting up. You're like, yep, there's a brain. So we use our brain localizer. We know it's there. But in fact, so what happens is that different areas of the brain still have different tasks and the intensity of activation changes according to the task. So what we wanna do is find a way to draw out the activation that's specific to a task. So for example, which activation is specific if you do that hand movement I was talking about earlier. Like if you do this, it's a very simple task. Again, it has to happen somewhere in the brain. So how can we find out where this is? Exactly, yeah. So you could come to my scanner and kind of do that just kind of for a couple of minutes. And so if you were to do that task, it's not enough to have you line the scanner and do this. I also have to have some sort of a baseline condition. So for example, you line the scanner and don't do the hand movement. So I'm gonna ask you, you know, do the hand movement and then just stop and just lie there for a couple of minutes. So I have basically two images of your brain activation. One during the hand movement and one during nothing, just kind of as a baseline. And I subtract one from the other. And what's left over is gonna be the activation that's specific to the hand movement. Now this sounds simple enough, but it's actually a big point. So that's where these images come from. And the problem is, so people who know statistics, they have like all kinds of red flags going on in their brains right now, because they know if you have like a lot of random noise in the brain and you subtract that from another, like a lot of random noise, that process is never gonna be perfect. There's always gonna be stuff, you know, patterns appearing or whatever, kind of random blobs appearing that have nothing to do with the hand movement that are just a statistical effect. And that is an issue in FMI research and data analysis. So a big part of doing FMI research is like discussing the correct way to analyze it and doing that and explaining it to others exactly what you did so that they have, that they can put their trust in your results basically. Yeah, and like we reported earlier this year, was it late last year about the study in which someone, a group reported that they'd done an analysis of the models, the statistical models, and they're like, it's all wrong. All of the FMI neuropsychology studies that you've ever seen are wrong. Yes, that was a very interesting period in my life. Yeah, I mean, okay. Let me give you a bit of a backstory of that. So the study itself, like within the FMI research of field was not necessarily a major thing. So these things and these studies, these effects are being discussed all the time. But suddenly this was something that popped up in popular science and it was kind of reported in the public sphere. So that was weird. I had friends texting me like, what's going on? Are you gonna be unemployed now? You know, what's happening to your research field? And so what happened was this was a group out of Sweden, a couple of really great methodologists, FMI researchers, and they've been working on that for a couple of years and they've been putting out studies about this problem. Like they're basically, they found a bug that, you know, it was bad enough that they found it. But even worse was that it seemed to be occurring in no matter what kind of software package you're using, you have different ways to analyze data, but this bug seemed to be there in all of them. So what they did is they wanted to make, you know, they reported on it years ago, but they wanted to make sure that they know what's going on. And for the longest time, the problem was that you couldn't analyze large sets of fMRI data because fMRI data is huge. Like every study produces gigabytes and gigabytes of data, which means it's kind of, it takes long to analyze it. You know, it's hard to store it all and to save it all. And it's hard to send it around to other researchers. And all of this has gotten a lot easier, you know, with the cloud and the computation power and all that kind of stuff. So they had a chance to turn through, I don't know how many, but just giant sets of data to make absolutely sure that what they found was really there and that this bug really exists and can change results. So that's what they reported last year and that's the study that suddenly blew up. And basically what they found, you know, to put it as simple as possible is a bug that sort of screws up this process I was talking about of weeding out activation that's not interesting. So that means it could produce activation or this bug might lead you to think that activation that's actually just kind of accidental is actually there and, you know, it has to do with your experiment. False positives. Yes, exactly. It introduces false positives, yeah. That's what it does. Now, the first version of the study did indeed say what you just said. They said something like, you know, thousands of FMI studies have to be questioned now. And they quickly modified that statement because they realized it's not as bad as it seems. It's like, you know, not everybody uses this particular way of analyzing and also if you have a really strong effect, that effect will still be there and it will still be real. It's just that you have to revisit those studies that reported weak effects and you have to kind of free test those. And what they pointed out was a big problem and that's true is that a lot of studies don't save out their data forever. So you can't go back and do a re-analysis. So if you find a bug like that, you can't just go back and do a re-analysis as you should be able to. Again, this is something that changes now because server space is getting a lot less expensive. So now you have the ability to save out all that stuff. So it was an important study and it was a really well done study, but it wasn't kind of that hammer blow to the field as it was reported on. And of course people will, I mean, I call myself FMRI guy on Twitter. Of course I'm gonna say that, right? But trust me on this, it's not, you know, the field is still happy and healthy and it's good actually, or it's very good that we find that stuff out and can discuss it. But I mean, isn't that part of science? I mean, you always wanna be looking at your methodology, making sure you're using an accurate methodology or at least the most accurate methodology that you can. Make sure your models are, that the assumptions that you're using are valid. You want to constantly be self-checking, quality assurance, right? Yes, absolutely. And especially when talking about the brain, the brain is the most complex thing that we've encountered in the universe so far. And in this context, FMRI is kind of a bit of a blurry lens through which we look at the brain. So we can talk about activation in nerve clusters that each of these kind of blobs will contain millions and billions of nerve cells, each doing their thing, right? Each having their own metabolism, their own way of dealing with newer transmitters, all kinds of stuff, and we sort of summarize all of this. So it's gonna be blurry and it's gonna be not very exact. That's just part of the deal. And we're gonna get better and better over time. Magnets are getting stronger in analysis methods again. So there's progress there. But yeah, we're gonna get wrong results. We're gonna have to revisit our methods. We're gonna have to do all of that stuff. And yeah, as you say, that's just part, regular part of science. As they say, every model is wrong. And so you have to kind of work with what you got. Yeah, exactly. And so now, the idea of every model being wrong, you've moved into a psychopathy, psychopathy, however we want to pronounce it, pronunciate it. I'm gonna leave that to the native speakers, yeah. So, psychopathy versus sociopathy. Right. What are you looking at specifically? I've never really understood what the term sociopathy actually means. My understanding is that it's basically been replaced by the term psychopathy. But it just, what it tells you is that for a long time there was a lot of confusion about what psychopathy actually is, including the term. Like what the term means and what sociopathy and stuff is. But we're getting a pretty clear image of what psychopathy entails through certain data that we now collect and looking at the brain and all that. So let me give you a bit of an overview of that. If you hear the term psychopathy, what you're thinking of is like serial killers, right? People that have no empathy and that are kind of overly aggressive or murderous. Right. This concept has changed over time to become more refined. What exactly is different? What exactly is missing? What kind of empathy is it that they're missing? Because we also know that, for example, people on the autism spectrum have decreased empathy, but it's obviously not the same thing. They have trouble figuring out what's going on in somebody else's mind and heart. People in high-end psychopathy don't have that problem. They know what's going on. They just can't have feelings to empathize with other people. They just don't care. They know how, they can use it. They can manipulate it. They just don't care necessarily how the outcome is going to affect other people. Right, exactly. So over time, what I want to say is basically, over time systems have become more refined and now we have the idea, and I'm a bit biased because my mentor right now is basically the one who came up with this particular system, but it seems to match up with the data that we have pretty well. That psychopathy is composed of three different personality facets and if you're high on all of these three, you're going to be diagnosed with psychopathy basically if you're high enough on all of those three. One would be this callousness or meanness that you basically, that includes this lack of empathy and a disconnect to other people and the lack of interest to connect to other people. The second one would be understood as boldness or fearlessness, which actually sounds like a good thing and it sort of is. It's a capability of dealing with stress. It's just being unfazed. It's recovering quicker from stressful events and other people, stuff like that. And the third one is what we call disinhibition, which is basically a type of impulsivity. It's giving into aggression or also using substance use and stuff like that, just kind of not being able to inhibit your own responses and your own urges as well as other people. And so again, if you... Oh, go ahead. I was just going to say, wouldn't all of these things potentially be evolutionarily advantageous in some regard? Yes. Yeah, pretty much. Definitely that boldness aspect. I mean, disinhibition, not sure if that's really very adaptive, but the thing is, I mean, everybody falls somewhere on the spectrum. And I feel like in evolution, it's always important to have variation that you can draw from for the next generation. So it makes sense that you would have people falling on all parts of the spectrum. One important thing is in and of itself, those three personality traits are not that problematic in real life. If you're high on boldness, it's fine. If you're high on disinhibition, sure, you're prone towards drug issues and stuff like that, but no matter what happens, you can live a well-adapted life being high on either of these spectra or kind of traits. And only a certain combination is where we would say, okay, this person qualifies as being diagnosed with psychopathy. If you are, if you do have that diagnosis, that doesn't mean that you're gonna be a serial killer. So it would have people high in psychopathy. You could be a politician or a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Right, yeah, I mean, sure, you kind of, you have this, yeah, those are things where you would need certain capabilities that come with that, right? Fact of the matter is among serial killers you have, or it's, for example, in prison populations, you have high rates of psychopathy, that's just true, but that doesn't mean the reverse, that somebody high in psychopathy is automatically a criminal. So it's like being a thumb being a fingerer, but not everything finger being a thumb kind of thing. What's important, I'm sorry. Every bourbon is a whiskey, not every whiskey is a bourbon? Yes. I'm German, you would have to make like a beer analogy for me to understand. But- Yes, I like to say every tortoise is a turtle, but not every turtle is a tortoise, but that's just me. Yeah, so what I think is interesting is, what's the evidence that's there for these, how can we test these three different personality traits? Even in people who would not qualify as high in psychopathy, even in non-prison populations, how can we investigate like this inhibition boldness and whatever the other thing was that I said, what was it, meanness, kind of callousness? Callousness. Yes, so because sometimes like, I talk about this on Twitter and somebody once challenged me was like, well, you know, if you have an ephemeral eye scan and then you say, oh, this guy, you know, he's high in psychopathy. What's the evidence that that's actually the case? You know, how do you know that it's not just kind of some nonsense correlation that has nothing to do with anything? And so what I like to look at is just different ways of testing the same thing. So for example, this inhibition, right? This impulsivity aspect of not being able to suppress your own behavior, you can give people questionnaires about it, like about how they would describe their own behavior, how they see the world. You can test for actual substance use and stuff like that, but you can also give them behavioral tests. So there's an interesting test that's basically imagine like a whack-a-mole game, right? It's gonna be on the computer, but imagine like playing whack-a-mole and then somebody just tells you, okay, stop, but the game still continues. So you still have kind of this urge of kind of hitting more molds, right? Even though you know it's part of the paradigm that you need to stop into an individual behavior, that's gonna be hard. And people high in this inhibition will have a harder time doing that. They will make more mistakes. Then imagine you give those people like an EEG cap at the same time and you wanna check, you're gonna see how the brain physiologically responds to this mistake. Because everybody, like there is a typical reaction visible on an EEG if you make a mistake. So that's kind of the brain recognizing that something was wrong. And so this reaction might be different in people high in this inhibition. Again, the same with boldness, like the stress response, you can measure that. There's like a startle response, I'm sorry, there was kind of a startle response. It's a hard word for me. That you can measure. So you give people like a loud noise blast while they're doing a task, everybody's just gonna twitch a little bit and you can quantify that. You can see how the startle response is in that person and that's gonna be different for somebody who's high in boldness. So you have behavioral tests, you have physiological tests, you have questionnaire tests and then you can use all that to predict clinical variables. You can say, well, based on that profile, this person should be prone towards, for example, drinking more alcohol than other people. And then you can see if that's actually the case. And doing that, you basically have, at some point you have a whole matrix of different markers for different things and that's what helps you understand what's actually going on. And then you can look at, for example, genetics. You can look at, is this heritable or not? Even if, for example, psychopathy is not heritable, some of these traits might be. So that's what fascinates me. It's just kind of looking at one thing from all different perspectives. Can you actually see or is there evidence of differential brain activation in the brains of psychopaths versus other people? Yes, to the degree that- I mean, as you said, it's a spectrum and everyone has a little bit of it. So. Right, yes, you can do that as well. For example, in the context of these three personality traits, one thing that I looked at was this disinhibition trait. So people behind this inhibition, how would their brain response be different? And we know quite a lot about that, actually. It's pretty interesting, fascinating. You might have heard of a brain region called the amygdala, which is present in a lot of creatures, in a lot of animals as well. So it's a very basic sort of area of the brain and easy to find in the brain, which is not always the case. And it processes fear and anger and basic stuff like that. So you can see how this area reacts using fMRI to, for example, emotional images. You can show people emotional images. They might be, they might be illicit strong emotions like pictures of somebody in an accident, for example, like horrifying pictures. Everybody's amygdala is gonna respond to that. So you can just ask people to line the scanner, observe pictures. Again, you need the baseline. So you show the neutral pictures as well. And then you see how the amygdala responds. And this response will be stronger in people high in this inhibition. So that would be one marker, for example. A study that I worked on tried to figure out why that is. So that effect is well known, but there's also other effects that relate to that, that are interesting to look at. So for example, the way it looks now is that we have certain other areas in the brain in the frontal parts of our brain that are supposed to regulate this amygdala activation. And if those areas don't do what they're supposed to do, that might be the reason why the amygdala overreacts. So suddenly we're talking about the network of different areas of the brain. And who knows, we might have ways to influence parts of this network using therapy of different therapies of different kinds, medications, something like that. But either way, it's important for us to understand why the activation looks the way it looks. That's where also where new analysis methods come in. So people have different ways of analyzing these networks, of kind of trying to understand the interaction between different areas. We now have great tools that allow us to look at white matter connections between areas. So you know gray matter, as the saying goes, is where kind of the action happens. But you need white matter connections between these areas to help them communicate. Yeah, this is the, what is it, a tensor diffusion. Yes, diffusion tensor imaging, DTI. Diffusion tensor imaging, yes. It's really fascinating. It's again, done with the same machine. It's still an MRI machine, but it's a different way of analyzing what's going on in the brain. And basically you look at atomic nuclei and you kind of try to shuffle them around using the magnetic field and see which direction they're going. And suddenly you see like, okay, so this nucleus can kind of go in this direction, but not in these directions. So it's probably kind of a nerve track there. Yeah, exactly. The nerve pathway that it travels along. And that's a technology that you sometimes see pictures of it because it renders beautiful pictures, like really, really colorful of the whole brain. And it's really useful to understand how areas are connected. So this would be different from functional MRI because the people, if you measure that, people don't have to do anything. It's like a structural scan. You just wanna find out about the structure of the brain in a way that hasn't been possible up to a couple of years ago. So that's also something that fascinates me. It's similar to the phantom limb pain thing that to get back to that, that we've known about phantom limbs for thousands of years. Ever since people have been injured in warfare and so forth, but only in the last couple of decades did we get a technology that allows us to make a phantom limb visible because if you talk about the hand movement and you can see that, if you ask somebody to move their phantom limb, their phantom hand, if they're able to do that, if it's not cramped, you will see similar activation. There will be activation of the brain processing this movement, which is the first ever objective evidence that phantom limbs even exist. Up to this point, maybe, you know, it would have been possible that all the patients are just lying to us, which would be weird. But there has to be... It could be like alien abductions. Exactly. Yeah, you didn't have proof so far, yeah. There's no real proof. Yeah, and that was the theory. Like for a while people said, oh yeah, people are just like soldiers in war zones or just making this up to get out of... They're making up phantom limb pain to get out of service or whatever. So nobody really had a good explanation for why it happens and now we know. So that's pretty cool. Yeah, I love the advancement in the technology too. I mean, we went from just a simple EEG and then we got CT scans and PET scans and now fMRI and now the fMRI is even being made more sensitive to be able to determine how areas are connected and the communication between these different areas. So it's just ripe for so much study. So many questions. Now, something that we talked about over email, previous preparation for this conversation. You mentioned you could talk about the neuroscience of necrophilia. And if that is, I mean, necrophilia, that's gotta be a psychopathia, psychopathy. That's pretty dramatic. So what is going on in the brains of necrophiliax? Yes, I was hoping we could talk about that. Yeah, you mentioned it. And I was like, we're not gonna forget about this one. I listened to your cannibalism episode a while back. I was like, yeah, let's see if I can top that with another topic. No, but so for those who don't know what that term means, because I've gotten weird looks when talking about this thing, it's necrophilia basically means having sex with dead people. And for those who didn't know up to this point that this is a thing, I'm just gonna give a couple of seconds to kind of take it in. But, and also there's kind of, it's hard to, so it could also mean, it's not necessarily the act of doing that. It's also, it could also denote like having fantasies in that regard. But in any way, what happened is that one psychopathy researcher noticed that a lot of serial killers engage in that, engage in necrophilia, and it's not really clear why that is. Like it could be a motivation to kill somebody, but it's not really clear what's going on. And they wanted to basically write a book that's called Understanding Necrophilia that looks at this phenomenon from all angles, including ethical, legal, cultural, which is interesting. I mean, you can say that this whole vampire romance stuff that's been a big hit in the last couple of years might relate to that. So there's basically, they were planning one compendium about the topic from all angles. And it's a weird book, it's out there now. And I contributed a chapter on the neuroscience aspect of it. The problem is there are zero studies on the neuroscience of necrophilia, but I didn't wanna let that stop me. And I looked at other stuff that's out there. Like how does the brain deal with certain things? Like how do paraphernalia in general, like the idea of unusual sexual fantasies and so forth, how does that work in the brain anyway? Also how does like disgust work in the brain, which is certainly something that comes up. How does sexuality influence the feeling of disgust in the brain as well? So there are a couple of angles that you can talk about without having people with necrophilia urges in your scanner. And I wanted to go a bit further How do you study calling on necrophilia? Exactly. That was another thing that I wanted to get into that I included in the chapter. And that's actually interesting. How do you study something that has a social stigma like that? Yeah, I studied illicit drug use for a while, neuropsychopharmacology. And we were one of the labs from the University of California at San Francisco that advertised in the back of one of the weekly newspapers. Do you do cocaine? Want to be paid in a scientific study? So I understand the issues related to trying to gather your subject. Right. Yeah, I mean, exactly. Yeah, I mean, if you look at that stuff, if you look at neuroscience and sexuality in like unusual cases, what we do have is pedophilia because some of those end up in the legal system. And it's an important topic to look at. We want to understand it. So we do have neuroscience studies on pedophilia that help us understand how something like that evolves. I've been talking to a researcher who was doing a big study on sadomasochism. And they did the thing that you just said. They went out on the internet. They said, you know, if you want to contribute to researching that, you know, please come. And it looked like, I don't know how much I can say about it because it wasn't my study, but I got the feeling that they only got a certain part of the population. Like all the people were like, very, not all the people. The way I understood it was that this particular sample of people had high rates of, for example, extroversion. Like there were people who really wanted to talk about that. Yeah, it's a self-selecting portion. It's a general population. You're not, it's a biased sample. You're not actually getting a good representation. Yeah. Yeah. So the idea would be that. So you're going to get the extroverted necrophiliax. Exactly, the very extroverted one. No, for the, I mean, in both cases, the idea would be that there are people out there who have, you know, sadomasochistic urges or necrophilic urges that might engage in acts to that, you know, to that regard or not, but they're out there. That's the idea that there's a spectrum there, but that we can't find them. There's no way to kind of do that, which is giving us a problem. And again, if you go into like, if you would have, you know, if you have people in prisons because of it, because they acted out on it, even if you get all of these people into your scanner, you're only going to have like one slice of the population. You're not going to find the others that might have certain fantasies that are, that are harmless and don't engage in them. So that's the only way to change that would be to change the stigma and kind of make it more socially acceptable to have ideas like that. To have ideas, but not necessarily act on them. Right. I mean, again, like the whole ethical aspect is kind of dealt with by other people in that same books. I wouldn't comment on that, but what I do know, one thing that happened in Germany that's kind of interesting is people wanted to do, or they did create PSAs basically about pedophilia about people who realize that they're sexually attracted to children and calling on those people to talk to a therapist about it, which people might not want to do because there is such a social stigma against it that you don't want to have your, you don't want to talk to somebody about it and then you don't want to have their brain scan, you don't want to do all that kind of stuff. But of course it could prevent crimes. Now in Germany, there was an outrage against those ads. And as far as I know, they took them down and it's just kind of on the internet. It's still like they have a Twitter account, they have a website. So they're still ongoing, but still the social stigma against this idea that this stuff even exists was so strong that people spoke out against something that was supposed to help people, which is kind of weird. So yeah, I mean, as long as we don't have that settled, I guess we don't have to really talk about necrophilia. People are not gonna want to talk about that. People are gonna want to talk about it, but what can you figure out and what have we figured out about the neuroscience of it? Yeah, well, again, I looked at other stuff. I looked at how the brain reacts to, for example, phases of dead people versus phases of alive people, which is interesting. I don't know if you've heard of this uncanny valley effect in computer generated images. Yeah, so that's the idea that if a computer-generated image of a phase is getting too close to reality, it freaks people out. And that has been investigated by the brain as well. And by the brain, yes, by the brain, but the brain aspect of it has been investigated as well. And yeah, it looks like it just, there's a reaction of disgust to phases that appear like they're dead. So the question is how would sexual arousal even overcome that? But there are ideas, there are things that the theory is how that might work. There's the idea that there's this thing called excitation transfer that basically, if you're doing something that's exciting, that might transfer into like sexual arousal. And that this can be a source of development of paraphernalia of sexual urges going into weird directions. So that might be one way how this could work. And yeah, the assumption is that you have like, that you have high rates of necrophilia and people who work around that people, for example, like morticians or emergency personnel and stuff like that. Although then it's kind of, the chicken and egg question comes in again, you know, you don't know whether people who have these kind of fantasies go into that field. But there are things that you can look at, there are things that you can investigate, and there are ideas and theories how that development could work in the brain. This is fascinating, this is just fascinating stuff. I love that there's the creativity to be able to come up with ways to study these things in the brain when it's nigh on impossible to actually get that actual population into the fMRI machine. There's the scientific artistic creativity that happens. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it was an interesting project for sure, and I wish I could like do a study in the future that goes in that direction, but I'm not sure if that's gonna happen. But it's definitely, again, it goes into this idea of the neuroscience of perception, basically. So the neuroscience of sexuality is also just kind of really fascinating and interesting. Absolutely, I mean, we are sexual animals and so how are our brains and we are acted on by environmental and genetic factors that influence those things, the way that we act, cultural, social factors. And so our brain is this wonderfully plastic machine that keeps us running. Oh, sorry. Oh, I was just going to move on really fast. We've almost been in an hour talking to you already. This is amazing. I was just gonna come on really quickly from your fMRI work to what you're working on with real scientists and your current science communications efforts. Where can people find you online? Are you're managing the German real scientists account? Yes, together with another scientist, we're doing that. So the idea is that you might know, or your listeners might know, about the English language account. It's real scientists on Twitter, which has been founded by Upali Divasekara about four years ago. And she's an amazing scientist, an amazing science communicator. And the account is really, it's the most interesting account that you can follow on Twitter, basically. Every week, there's a new researcher, somebody working with science, just talking about their work, talking about their life. It's absolutely fascinating. Every week is somebody else, different field and so forth. And I've become involved with that, kind of just managing the account and or co-managing the account. And the idea came up of doing that, of basically creating a German language segment of it. It's not a translation, it's a German language researchers doing the same thing. I thought back of, when I was living in Germany, I was giving talks more or less regularly about the scientific method and critical thinking. And people kept asking me, how can we find out that? How can we talk to people about science? Yeah, there's magazines, but you can't ask questions. How do we kind of get access to people who actually can tell us what's what? And back then I didn't have an answer for them, but that German language real scientists account is supposed to be doing that. Like you can just follow people, you can listen to, you don't have to seek out the researchers, you're gonna get a new one every week and you can ask questions and have discussions with them. And that's really fascinating. So it's not called real scientists because we want to distinguish between real and fake scientists. It's because you actually see what people are really doing and that they're real people. The German version is going well, it's been launched in February, so almost half a year ago. And we got a great reaction. We had great curators so far, including for example an ex-homopathic doctor who kind of sort of changed sides and now wants to investigate homeopathy scientifically from medical center. We interviewed her, yes. Oh, really? That was cool, yeah, so that's awesome. Yes, so that was really fascinating. Other great people, like this week our current curator is doing optogenetics, basically influencing cell behavior with light, which is, it's fascinating. So anyway, I'm a big fan. I'm biased, but yeah. So I'm basically co-managing that together with Anne Schiel also in Germany, not also in Germany, but she's also German and it's a lot of fun. It's really fascinating. That's awesome. And so you're managing that. You are at fmri underscore guy on Twitter. Exactly. And you're working on your research and you're writing papers and you are doing interviews on podcasts. Exactly, yeah. You're doing it all. You're the ultimate scientist, science communicator. So I kind of try my hand at it, right? I would not even call myself a science communicator because there's so many great communicators out there who have just this amazing talent to explain stuff in a way that makes people understand and makes people fascinating by science, including you guys, right? Or y'all, of course. If you're in the South, y'all. Exactly, y'all. And I know you guys, it's a lot of masculinity in there. So y'all do a great job. But seriously, I think it's a great art because science is really, I think science is just the most fascinating thing. I keep saying you can divide scientists from regular people by saying the phrase, the most fascinating thing in the universe is the herpes virus. Because people might not necessarily agree with you but scientists will say, oh yeah, I can see that. I mean, it writes itself into your genome. There's a lot of, you know, yeah, it's fascinating. Sure, yeah, yeah, it's pretty interesting. And non-science will go like, what the heck are you talking about? It's like, what that disgusting stuff that kind of has like this little little lips, that's horrifying. How could that be fascinating? But yeah, no, but it is fascinating. It's amazing, right? All that science and this idea of giving that, not explaining to people, but kind of making people excited for it. I love that. And there's a lot of people on Twitter who do that. Again, I'm just sort of trying to awkwardly emulate what they're doing and what y'all are doing. And I love it a lot. It's really cool. Well, I think one of the biggest steps to becoming a science communicator is taking on the mantle, right? And so I think it's so important just like when we talk about what really is a scientist. It's, well, if you care about science, you study science, you can think critically, you're on your way to being a scientist already. So I think it's important to not try to, you know, dismiss yourself so quickly. I think that ultimately anyone making an effort to be a science communicator and to have an inclusive conversation about what they love, that's a science communicator in my book at least. And so I'm very excited about what you're doing. Thank you so much. So yeah, I definitely encourage everybody to follow RealSci and RealSci. RealSci underscore DE is the German version. If you understand German, definitely follow it. And I'm not kidding about it. I had several people contact me on Twitter saying they now started learning German so they can follow the account. Wow, that's cool. So yeah, do that. And you can find me on Twitter, under fmri underscore guy, where I try to communicate science, but actually I'm just sort of complaining about movies and stuff. People do it on Twitter. Posting pictures of my food, yeah. I mean, we all do a little bit of that for sure. Yeah. Ayans, thank you so much for joining us today and talking to us about the brain and fmri and the methodologies you've been using. The phantom limb work that you did as a PhD student and now the psychopathy work that you're doing, it's just, it's so fascinating. And it's just- Thank you so much. Thank you for adding to our understanding of our own humanity. Well, thank you. Thank you very much for having me and yeah, wishing you all the best. Thank you. Have a wonderful evening. And everyone once again at fmri underscore guy on Twitter, at real scientists or at real sci and DE for the German version of that. And we are going to move on to take in a break. This is this week in science. I hope you enjoyed this interview. We are going to be back in a few moments with science news. We have tons of science stories for you all and we hope that you will stay tuned for that more science coming up. Did you know that twist has merchandise you might enjoy? 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We thank you for your support even if it's just being here with us tonight and we couldn't and wouldn't do it without you. Believe what a skeptic I am. I can't believe you believe in that plan. We disagree but I still give a damn. Your astral projections are coming along with Chakra and Shia both growing your strength. And we're back. You're listening to This Week in Science and I think it's time for some science news. Kiki, what do you have for us? Well, I've got some science. Let's hear the science. Ready for some science? Death on Mars. I mean, we all know that as it is, Mars is not a very habitable place, right? I mean, we couldn't just go there and live. People are trying to figure out how they would survive the radiation that makes a really thin atmosphere. When the atmosphere is really thin, doesn't have oxygen to speak to. Oh yeah, oxygen. Yeah, it's just not habitable to complex life. They're hoping that maybe there are microbes, extremophiles that possibly could be living in the soil, right? There's been lots of evidence of water. And if there's water, the universal solvent, there could potentially be life. There could be bacteria. There's been many, many bits of evidence that have pointed to the signatures of the chemistry of life on the surface of Mars from our various investigations. We still haven't found bacteria there, but there's evidence that's been stacking up. But now, now, the likelihood of life, bacterial life actually being on the surface of the planet, that likelihood has taken a nosedive because researchers using compounds found in Martian soil, they did experiments and found that, hey, you expose them to ultraviolet light. Guess what happens? They turn into bactericides. These compounds actually shift molecularly as a result of exposure to ultraviolet light and become compounds that kill bacteria. Oh, that's not good. Great. Oh, ultraviolet light. Yes, there's ultraviolet light hitting the surface of the planet. These compounds are in the Martian soil, so the likelihood of Martian soil actually containing bacteria and there being life on the surface. It's like negative a million percent. Yeah, it's become slim. And so, yeah, so now the idea is that if there's bacterial life, it's probably not on the surface in the surface soil. It would have to be way underground. You'd have to dig fairly deep to find any extant living bacteria there or even evidence of past life. They think maybe two or three meters below the surface, would it be enough shielding? That's pretty far. Yeah, yeah. So this is, yeah, so life on the surface of Mars. Researchers from Edinburgh University looked into this, looked at what happened to a species of bacteria that's common in the soil, basalus subtilis. And this bacteria actually is a regular contaminant from Earth on space probes. And then they mixed it with magnesium perchlorate, which is common in Mars soil and then put those at ultraviolet rays onto it. They're just trying to simulate a Martian environment and the bacteria died twice as fast as when it was only perchlorate. And so other perchlorates found on Mars also had similar effects. And so the UV, what it does, it breaks the perchlorate down into hypochlorite and chloride. And these, this is something that bacteria don't like. And then they were like, oh, let's keep looking at this. So it's not just that, they kept looking. Then they started looking at iron oxides and hydrogen peroxide. That's more bad news. I don't know. Poor bacteria. So when all of these compounds were present, the bacteria died 11 times faster than just with perchlorate alone. This report is in scientific reports and yeah. So the moral of the story is if there's life on Mars, we got to dig. You would have to dig, exactly. So we'll just dig about nine feet and then mole people, right? And then mole people, yeah, mole people, yeah. So, Aka bacteria. Yeah, exactly. So there were these seeps, these kind of wet seeps that had been noticed, briny seeps on the surface, these damp streaks on the Martian surface. And these patches would be very, and these had previously been said to be prime spots to look for life, for bacterial life. But now they're like, oh, they'd probably contain a lot of perchlorates and you know, it's Martian soils and there's a lot of iron oxides. And so they're probably more toxic than everything around them. So they have gone. Just a big pool of death juice. That's right. Big pool of death juice, exactly. So maybe eventually there are missions going to Mars. In 2020, the ESA is sending exo-Mars. It's a rover that's gonna be supposed to search for alien life. And it will have a drill that will be able to bore two meters underground to get samples from the soil. So it is possible that this rover could drill deep enough to find bacteria living in Mars. Underground, under this oil. And Ed in the chat room brings up an interesting question. Is it possible to make a sterile drill? Sterile drill, no. I mean, that's the question right now. They're trying to do away with the bacterial castaways, the ones that are just jumping on the probes and going with them to Mars and to other places. NASA is, I mean, if we can find an antibiotic that's strong enough to get rid of those, I mean, humanity could potentially be set. Then we could kill just about anything. Strengths in the chat room brings up an excellent point. Stick it in the death juice. Stick it in the death juice. That's what you do. That's right. When you bring it up to Mars, you like dip the drill in the death juice and then you drill. There you go. We figured it out. Who's got NASA? I can call NASA. Somebody call NASA. Someone call the USA, the European Space Agency. Yeah, we'll make it work. And then moving into another planet. I talked last week very briefly at the end of the show about the Juno mission and the fact that it was going to be making its way around Jupiter to investigate the great red spot this past Monday and indeed it did. And I didn't expect that there would be images back yet, but there are images. The first images have been released by NASA of this great red spot as Juno went so close within 4,000-ish, 5,000-ish miles of the surface of the planet and trained all of its instruments. Kiki, why is it shaped like that? Oh, the shape that looks kind of like a sanitary napkin. The shape of the image has to do with the swath over which the Juno's camera was looking and the shape of the planet. It couldn't get the whole thing in there. Interesting. So is that a composite image? I don't know if this... I don't think that it might be. This could be a composite image, yeah. Very interesting. I'm not exactly sure. But yes, some of the images that have come back do look slightly like female sanitary napkins. I thought it looked more like a finger trap, but you go ahead with yours. But the great thing is part of it is the motion, the speedy motion of Jupiter and of Juno as it moved over Jupiter's large, spherical surface. And we've got some amazing images and one of the images in particular has been processed already. And the great red spot, which you just imagine as just a red spot, this storm, right, has so much turbulence and complexity within it that it is going to be a playground for atmospheric scientists to discover more about what's going on in this storm that has been raging for hundreds of years. Yeah, that doesn't sound like a place that I would want to go. No, no, you wouldn't necessarily want to go there, but it was great that we could send Juno there in our stead so that Juno could take pictures and let us know more about this large planet, the largest planet in our solar system and what's actually happening in its outer atmosphere. Thanks Juno. Thanks Juno. And so over the next few weeks, we will see more and more and more images coming from Juno. You can look for Juno cam images through NASA online and all of the images are being made available for the public to process and to play with. So you can go and download images from Juno cam yourself if you're into processing scientific images. I love it. I love that NASA just gives their stuff to people. Yeah, open for the public and the public so far has been making some amazingly beautiful images from the images that have come back. So there's a lot of art coming through, art and science and more will be coming from Juno as they actually look at the data from the various instruments, but it's neat that we finally got pictures back. And then a little closer in space news this week on quantum teleportation. The Chinese are at it again with their quantum satellite. Yes, this means I can get to New York in one second, right? No, no, nothing like that. Nothing like that. But last summer, 2016 China launched a satellite called Myseus or Myseus, M-I-C-I-U-S. And that satellite they've been testing, they reported back in about April some experiments that they've been doing trying to beam quantum, quantumally entangled photons from the earth to the station or from the station that had been in the satellite that they had been entangled on the satellite back to earth and they were capable of doing it. It wasn't a great success rate but they were capable of doing it. So part of the problem is they're beaming photons of light which can be disrupted by any other light. And so they have to do their experiments. The satellite has to fly over their ground stations at night to reduce interference. There can't be very much cloud cover or there's interference because the process behind this quantum teleportation that they're talking about that you might have seen in the headlines is they took two photons here on earth. They entangled them together using quantum methods. They sent one of them in a laser beam to the satellite. And so you have to imagine how hard it is to take a laser beam and focus it on a satellite to make sure that your photons hit the detector, right? From earth to satellite, laser beam, pew, pew, pew, entangled photons. They sent millions of them, not just one photon, but they were sent, they entangled a pair and from each pair, one of them was sent up to the station, up to the satellite. And then they changed something about the photon that was here on earth and then they could read whether or not there was a change in the photon that was entangled with it on the satellite. And so the idea is that it's not, you might have seen in the headlines an object was teleported by the Chinese from earth to space. That's not really what happened. They were just able to mimic what was happening on earth. Yeah, and so, but it's quantum entanglement. So that mimicking of what happened on earth, the photon on the satellite and the photon on earth both changed, the instant they changed state of one of the photons, that very same instant, the other photon changed its state. And so it's an instantaneous transportation, transfer of information about a photon. It's not actually a photon instantaneously moving from earth to the satellite or vice versa. That's not what's going on. Interesting. This is not be me up Scotty teleportation in any way, shape or form. Right. This is more like if my twin sister was in New York and her right arm hurt and then also my right arm hurt. Exactly. Exactly, at the exact same moment. Right. At that moment in time that your twin sister, which you don't really have. Correct. Started feeling pain or you felt pain. Yeah. Exactly, like the dark crystal, that's all right. And so the idea is that eventually we could use satellites like this to create a quantum internet that we could send information that's been encrypted and entangled using this entanglement method, but high encryption as a result of this. So very secure data transfer someday. That's pretty, I'll be sending that to you via photon teleportation. That's right. And the other idea is that this could eventually like if you entangled particles in a device here on earth and then sent a craft to outer space, currently it takes 20 minutes round trip for information, 13 to 20 minutes for information to reach and come back from Mars. So you have round trip information going to Mars and then coming back. And so information communication could potentially occur instantaneously almost like the phone calls that we have now between far away places, but you'd have to entangle these atoms or photons or whatever you decide to entangle and then put them on a craft for this with the communication device that you'd send to this place so that it's there. This craft is sent to Jupiter or this craft is sent to Mars to allow communication from that place to occur in real time. This kind of sounds like the beginning of a science fiction film. It does. Where scientists try to do something outside of what science should do and then we create a black hole. No, this is not, this is Blair. I know, I know, I just, we're going to entangle a bunch of photons and shoot them across the universe. Yeah, right. And then we'll be able to talk to Proximab, Proxima Centauri. It sounds great, but it also sounds like the start too. Well, this is the stuff that science fiction is made of, but at the same time, these researchers are really doing, this is basic science. There's so much work that still needs to be done to make this a viable technology for us. And they're doing it at the right pace and they're being stepwise and they're, so we're less likely to be a cautionary tale when science does do diligence. Absolutely, and in quantum entanglement and this teleportation that we're doing at this point in time, this is not going to lead to a black hole. This is not even involved in the physics of that at all. Right, so I don't, I just don't, I just want to clarify that so that nobody in our, I know you were being silly, but I just want to make sure our audience knows that you were being silly. And that's not a possibility. And we're going on record as the people who did not say it was a possibility. Good point. In today's age, you can never be clear about these things. So in my far school statement, I did not mean to imply that this is in any way going to cause anything detrimental. Yeah, this is not detrimental. This is, I love this. This is kind of this, what is it? It's Einstein's spooky action at a distance at work. Yeah, yes. It sounds very ethereal and intense and advanced, but like you're saying, we're starting at the ground floor here with this. But it's a very exciting step for sure. Yeah, and I was going to say, this was not an incredibly efficient, it's really not efficient yet. Like they sent millions or a million photons and then they were only really able to measure this entanglement in something like 900. So the efficiency is so low. This is not ready for prime time in any way, shape, or form at this point in time. But people, you don't need to worry. I did see the articles and all of the headlines were teleportation and then sent a photon. I know, and I have been reading these and I've been so mad all week and I've been mad at all my friends posting these articles. But I mean, it's exciting. This is exciting. It's a technological advancement for, it's exciting in its own right, but it's not, it's like I said, it's not being me at Scotty. It's not, it wasn't a photon was here and then all of a sudden it was there on the satellite. That's not what happened. Which is why headlines are not sufficient. You can read headlines. Headlines are made to make you want to read the thing. But then you have to actually read the thing. Please, please, I'm asking everyone within shouting distance of me right now. Never share an article you haven't read. Thank you. Thank you and goodbye. We're done. No, we're not. Okay. Yeah. We're not done, but that does it for me for my first few stories. Blair, what do you have for the animal corner? Oh, wait, wait, I have music for you and stuff. I can't just jump into it like that. We must have some pop. It is time for the animal corner. The creature cried at school. Five-bed, male-bed, no-bed at all. Wanna hear about the animals? She's your girl. Except for giant pandas at school. That'll go up. Let me tell you about snails. Let me tell you about snails. So snails are mollusks, or gastropods. And their snails and slugs are the only terrestrial gastropods. Why does a snail have a shell, Kiki? So it's hard to get squished, yes. So it's hard to get squished and to protect it from the elements. But a recent researcher from John Moore's University in the Liverpool found that that shell might have a whole another use. He looked at, this is Robbie Ray, which is a rad name. Robbie Ray looked at snail shells because he felt there was something going on between snails and nematodes. So nematodes are already a biological control agent for snails. Snails and slugs, farmers and gardeners will put NEMA slug into their garden to control snail populations. We know that here in the U.S. we have an invasive snail that likes to wreak havoc on our gardens. And so these nematodes are a parasite that burrow into the snails and slugs and devour them from within. And these guys, the snails and slugs, they've been around for about 400 million years. Nematodes have been around for almost that long. You would think there'd be some sort of protection against these guys after all of this time. Well, the shell may be the key. So by looking at snail shells from living snails and then also at snail shells across museum collections, they were able to find that these nematodes were getting trapped in their shells. So the nematodes, as they burrow into the snail, the snail can somehow force it into the shell cavity and then the shell itself just kind of starts to grow around the nematodes until they're encased in the shell lining. So it's a pretty intense way to rid yourself of a parasite. It's like a snail sarcophagus that the snail carries. It's the nematode sarcophagus that the snail just carries with it constantly, right? Yes. And so they actually, because it becomes a part of the shell, the snail then carries with it, yes, the DNA of all of the nematodes that has ever kind of sucked up into that space. So that means museum specimens and living specimens can then tell us about their kind of their life history of extracting these nematodes. So yeah, and some of these snails would have hundreds of nematodes in their shell. So from there, the question becomes, did the shell evolve to kill nematodes or did the nematodes or did the shell evolve to protect it from predators? And then the nematodes created an incentive for the shell to develop a second purpose. Right, so this is the chicken or the egg question about this relationship between the nematodes and the snails. And what's even more interesting is that slugs, most slugs actually have a remnant shell, an internalized kind of vestigial shell that also carries calcium carbonate in it just like snail shells are made out of. They also serve as storage for calcium salts and they work in conjunction with their digestive glands. So they have this internalized vestigial shell and Robbie Ray found that this internalized vestigial shell in slugs also encases and kills invading nematodes, but in less frequency than the full on snail shell. Well, it's not a full on snail shell, that's fine. But first of all, I don't know, maybe I glossed over this in college, but I guess I forgot or I just never knew that the shell came first, that the slugs lost the shell and that they lost it a bunch of times. Slugs are a polyphilatic group, they're not all related. So snails turned into slugs many, many times. So if the shell is supposed to save them from nematodes, that could be a reason that they retain some on the inside. But then beyond that, why would they be able to lose it as much as they did? Because it's clearly an evolutionary advantage to get rid of it at a certain point in certain environments. Maybe, I mean, slugs and snails don't always inhabit the same habitats, the same ecosystem. So maybe there are situations where it's just better for the slug to get rid of the shell. Particularly where it's very cool or wet, they don't need the shell as much. So banana slugs, they live in Redwood forests where it's pretty moist generally. But to kind of give a little bit of an idea, I think that the author is kind of leaning towards an initial use of the shell for this because the earliest ancestor of mollus, Odontogryphus, lived about 550 million years ago, and then nematodes have been tracked to about 470 million years ago. So as far as we can tell, nematodes predate snails, but they post-date the mollusk ancestor, but not by much. So if nematodes were a threat to this mollusk ancestor, this might be something that goes pretty far back. This is also another really good example of specimen collections in museums providing information to studies, sometimes hundreds of years later. That's cool. Yeah, absolutely. So snail shells, they're protecting them from internal and external threats turns out. Who knew? I never would have guessed that. Yeah, absolutely. But maybe, I guess that the spiral shape is part of that. Who knows? Because the spiral shape came pretty late, actually, because limpets just have their little triangle shape. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Torsion came pretty late. So next, speaking to body shapes. I wanna talk about spiders that act like ants. Why would a spider wanna act like an ant? Great question. A team of researchers from Cornell found that a certain species of spider raises its front legs to mimic the look of antenna so that he only has six legs. And then he has a little antenna poking out like this. Also, the spider walks in a zigzag pattern, which mimics the way that ants smell as they walk, which is kind of zigzaggy. So the reason for this, they think, is to avoid predators and to help them get food. So, it's a two-fold. Two-fold, yes. So the researchers found that the spider mere marachna formicaria, which has evolved to resemble an ant has also learned to mimic the behavior. And this might be because ants are pretty savage. They bite, they have chemical defenses, they're very aggressive and they have millions of friends. So that would be enough to deter many spiders from eating them. And so these spiders have found a way to kind of cloak themselves within the ant group, but also to look like an ant to confuse larger spiders that might try to eat them. So they used close-up high-speed video. They found that they were lifting these two eggs periodically as they walked. They couldn't do it all the time because they would like fall forward. So they have to bring it back up and then start to fall forward. So they did it often enough to confuse prey. They thought that the legs were antennae, they were mimicking ants. The predators attacked spiders less than if they attacked, then they attacked regular spiders in related spiders, jumping spiders, but pretty much as often as they attacked real ants. It looks like the mimicry by the spiders is very effective because it gets them attacked only as much as ants, which as I mentioned is not a whole lot. Yeah, but on top of that, then they can get closer to prey animals as well. But I mean, so ants have their formic acid and other things that are not great when you get bitten by an ant, but so do spiders. They have venom, they're not necessarily. Yes, but they don't come with millions of friends. That's true. Okay, good point. Yes, I think that's really the main concern is you don't want to be enveloped by acid spitting ants. Yeah, no, I think I would like to avoid that. Sounds like a bad day. Sounds like a very bad day. Yes, how neat. So you try that these spiders are, they're mimicking. They're trying to figure out they have figured out a way. So now the question is, is this something ingrained in this particular species? When did they learn it? How did it, how is this behavior, how has this behavior passed along? Right, because in terms of genetics, they've inherited the traits for their body shape to just in general be more like an ant. Yeah. But then on top of that, is this behavior something, yes, that they learn from growing up around ants, that they learn from ancestors that is ingrained. We don't know yet. Pretty interesting. Yeah, absolutely. And next, I'm going to find out about ants imitating spiders. Right, we're not far away. Well, I almost brought a story about ants mimicking the Eiffel Tower, but you'll have to go to my Twitter or my Facebook to find out about that. A melting Eiffel Tower. So dear, okay. So last I want to talk about quarreling scientists. Back in December, I talked about a study where they did a model of a macaque throat and larynx, and they got this macaque model to very spookily and terrifyingly say, I love you. Remember that? I remember that, that was creepy. Yes, and also they had it sing Happy Holidays because it came out in December. It was just terrifyingly festive. Terrible, terrible, terrible. So that study led by W. Fitch, that was published in Science Advances, and they were talking about a suggestion that perhaps monkeys had vocal abilities to speak many human-like words, their brain just hadn't caught up. Ooh, I ruined my voice with that. Then researcher Philip Lieberman spoke up because they had published Decades of Grow ago, research on rhesus macaques to understand why they can't speak, and they had concluded that the vocal abilities of the monkeys were far too limited to allow monkeys to talk anything like humans, even if they had proper brain wiring. So this was several decades ago. Then Fitch comes out with this last year. Then Lieberman put a technical comments piece together for Science Advances, criticizing Fitch and his team. He said that it was unfounded and that it was a flawed research at its base, and this kind of went back and forth and back and forth through these scientific journals, which is really interesting. I love that this is part of the scientific discourse, and this is part of how science moves forward. Papers are written, scientists disagree with findings, they publish their own counter criticisms, they publish their own data sometimes that supports their claims, and then it becomes this back and forth. And so what's happening? So where has it gotten? The main arguments are, Fitch says, the guy who wrote the thing that came out last year, that the techniques that were available 30 years ago do not do justice to what a monkey throat can actually do. It was making plaster casts of the throat and other vocal parts and working with these manually. Fitch was using computer models and much more complicated modeling systems. He did X-ray videos of macaques while they ate, while they made noises, stuff like this. So the argument on either side of the aisle, I'm not sure we can get a definitive response until we, I don't know, tinker around in a macaque brain and get them to actually try to speak. But ultimately, it all came down eventually to an argument over the long E sound as in read. And so Lieberman says that surgery would be required for a monkey to speak the word with the long E because they don't have the tongue for it, which is a whole nother conversation. They've been talking about the larynx and the throat this whole time. But now we've moved on to the tongue. Fitch said that the importance of the long E is debatable. So it's turned into largely a semantic debate at this point. Ultimately, it's got us talking about the mechanics of speech. But I think the next part of this has to be about the brain. Yeah, because until you can marry those two things, you can't really definitively say one way or the other. So we need to genetically modify monkeys to have the neural pathways to produce speech. Yeah, is that the next step? Or are we gonna do it to mice? I think we could also, and we got much closer to this with the most recent study, is we could take sounds callous. We could take a dead monkey, right? We could take all of the organs involved. We could push air through it and we could manipulate it with electrodes and things like that and see if we could make some sounds. It would be a pretty intense robot or a pretty intense system to work on. But I think it's possible. And I think that that would pretty definitively say if it was possible or not. Or maybe there's the possibility of 3D printing the parts based on the computer modeling. Computer, we could use topographic scans to be able to get actual images of the vocal equipment to be able to then 3D print them or actually create them where we could blow air through them using bellows and different modulation, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. The next step is experimentation. Actual physical experimentation is just a matter of how the scientists involved choose to do it. Right, and I would like to think that there's a reason to this. I mean, there is just the curiosity of where speech came from. I guess there are a lot of anthropological consequences from that as well. Yes, well, it's like finding out as Justin brings up very often, every once in a while it's like, oh, humanoids, hominins had stone tools earlier than was thought. Or, oh, human ancestors created art on walls earlier than was thought. It's when we push the dates back, when we push the incidents of certain cognitive behaviors back further, it gives us understanding of how long evolutionary forces have been at play on certain behaviors. And so if monkeys, our ancestors, had the vocal potential to create speech what was it that kept them from doing it? Was it a not fully developed enough brain? Was it the connectivity between the brain and the vocal cords and the jaw? What exactly was it that held it back? What was the next step in evolution that led to humans who we know have speech? At what point did it happen? Absolutely, and I think that debates are really important too, but it's important that they went through the right channels, which I think is so interesting too, is that they didn't just start bashing each other on Twitter, calling each other hacks, they actually- You're a scientific hack, you don't know how many make hack from it. Right, they definitely threw some lower blows, but they were all based in science. So that's what I think is so fascinating is that they can submit these articles to scientific journals and they can say, here's the problem I have with your research. And instead of just going, ah, the troll response, rebuttal. Actual response, yeah. It's very interesting. And it might be very heated outside of, in the laboratories where the people are, but people move it, move the dial forward. The science advances as a result of this criticism of a scientific competitors. And maybe more funding will go to this topic now. I mean, after December, maybe this, just this topic would have been like, okay, we solved that, macaques can talk, moving on. But now more money might go to this for more research. Nice, I hope so. All right, you got some quick stories for us. I do have quick stories for us. Are you ready for this? Yes. It's bad news. First, I've got melting. Yep, it finally happened. The Larson C ice shelf split off from the Antarctic Peninsula sometime between Monday and today. At some point, the largest remaining ice shelf of the Antarctic Peninsula calved. That means it broke off, finally. Yeah, so Larson shelf A collapsed in 95, B collapsed in 2002. And now we have Larson C, which is a giant, several trillion tonne, is it three, two trillion tonne shelf of ice that's been cracking for the last couple of years. And now it's going to be floating in the ocean. That's not great. That's a lot of sea level rise coming out of that shelf. Well, yeah, but it's not too much actually, because it was kind of on the water to begin with. This isn't touching the water, this ice shelf wasn't ice that's on land, this is actually out on the water. So it's not going to dramatically, this particular shelf is not gonna dramatically change the sea level. But now, they've been watching this crack forever. And well, it can't be the silver bullet. There's no evidence that this is exactly caused by climate change. This is one of the things that's predicted to occur more often with climate change. Excuse me. Well, and also if this wasn't because of climate change, a lot of other elements with the ocean are because of climate change, we know that. And so this can only exacerbate some of those problems. And now the question is the Larson C ice shelf is actually, there's still a lot more to it aside from this bit that collapsed off. And so now they're wondering, is this a sign of instability? And is there going to be massive collapse of these ice shelves as we move forward? And a glaciologist at University of California Irvine said, as climate warming advances farther south, it will affect larger and larger ice shelves that currently hold back bigger and bigger glaciers. So their collapse will contribute to more sea level rise. And that's the point too that ice is white, right? And so albedo is a huge part of this problem also. So just like when you wear light colored clothes on a hot day, because it reflects the light, you wear dark colored clothes on a cold day because it absorbs all of the heat from the light. So the ice shelf, that going away is going to reduce the earth's albedo, which is actually going to increase warming. Yeah, and so, and the issue here with sea level rise, you were asking how much is this going to affect that? Like I said, this ice shelf is already on the water. So it's like, this is already like an ice cube. But what these ice shelves do is that they are kind of the wall that holds back the glaciers that are on land. Bumpers on the bowling lane. Yes, they are. And so when they collapse, there's nothing holding the melt of the glaciers back. And so that's what we're looking at. But this is a big floating ice cube now. It's about the size of Delaware. Oh boy. Just a big, big iceberg now, down floating off of Antarctica. And it could end up in shipping lanes, which could be a problem for shipping. Moving on, my next really depressing quick story, death. Oh, good. Death. It's a cat grandpa. Death. Well, no, it's a sixth math mass extinction that's ongoing. According to an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers published this article called Biological Annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines. They sampled 27,600 terrestrial vertebrate species. They did a more detailed analysis of 177 mammal species. And they find an extremely high degree of population decay in vertebrates, even in common, quote unquote, species of low concern. And so they say dwindling population sizes and range shrinkages amount to a massive anthropogenic erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilization. And they make no bones about it. This biological annihilation underlines the seriousness for humanity of Earth's ongoing sixth mass extinction event. And they're just throwing it out there. They're not like mincing their words at all. They're like, no annihilation. Well, it's the anthropogenic era. And it's the Anthropocene. And we see climate change and extinctions. Thanks everybody. So what are we gonna do about it? So now, yes, exactly. So what are we gonna do? Let's fix it. Okay, how? So how are we gonna fix it? The new study that just came out in environmental research letters did an analysis of the things that people can do. Get CFLs. Change it all. Oh yeah, so on the list, you can upgrade your light bulbs. Okay. You can hang dry clothes. You can recycle. Wash clothes in cold water. Replace gasoline with a hybrid. You can eat a plant-based diet. Switch from electric car to car-free. That'll save you about a ton of carbon dioxide emissions right there if you go car-free completely. Same amount if you buy a more efficient car. So it's actually, it's very interesting. If you go from electric to car-free or just a more efficient car, you can save a ton of carbon dioxide emissions. If you buy green energy, that's gonna help you out a bit. Avoid one round-trip transatlantic flight a year. Live completely car-free. You wanna know? I'm putting it up on the screen right now. You know what the big one is that can save you 60 tons of carbon dioxide emissions? Have one fewer child. The biggest thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint, your impact on the world. Just don't have that kid. That makes sense. It checks out because kids eat food and go in cars and buy products and throw things away. Yeah, so basically making a human does all the things. Yes. So if you don't make a human, they won't do all the things and yeah. But it was interesting. I was having a light debate with some friends of mine who are, who have, there's this idea in population dynamics, which is replacement, where the average couple can have two kids because that replaces each of those two individuals and the couple in the population and then you have steady-state population growth. You're not gonna grow too fast. You're not gonna decline. When people start having fewer children that leads to population decline. When you start having more children than replacement, that adds to population growth, right? I have some friends, very intelligent people have three children, four children, right? And so the question for them is that they are very environmentally conscious, but they're educating their children and they are teaching their children to be eco-warriors. So their kids are not growing up to be consumers, to be travelers, to, they're growing up with the knowledge that they're growing up into a kind of messed up situation climate-wise and that they need to do something about it. So is it better if you're going to have that one more kid to make sure you educate them properly? Does that make a difference? That is tough. It's also tough trying to make someone feel guilty for having a child they've already had. Right, you already had the kid. There's nothing you can do about that now. There's no take-backs. It's not real help. I read a quote recently. It's one of my favorites that was, stop looking behind you. You're not going that way. So I mean, it's important to be aware of the future and mistakes that have been made or things that maybe could be done differently. But looking forward, so I think it's very important when we're talking about being ecological and curbing climate change to not shame people for the life that they're leading. So where can you go from this space forward that will help? So if you're educating your children, maybe you include the part about family planning. Because even though you had three children and those three children will be amazing, our population needs to slow the heck down. It needs to slow. So how are we gonna do that? We're gonna do that by making sure that the children we've already had are not going to have a million children. It's interesting though. The United States is not in a huge population boom. Instead, in fact, researchers looking into reproduction are currently a little concerned because millennials and basically people under 35 are deciding not to have kids or they're delaying having kids until much later. And so the individuals, the population in which child birth rates are going up compared to historically is in the 35, 40 and over. Because now with IVF technologies, people can delay raising children. But overall, that doesn't work all the time, right? So overall, less people are starting to have kids. It's starting to go down. And this is happening in other countries, in Japan, socially, culturally, things are getting weird. Their population is declining. They have fewer younger people in the population. Italy, same issue is happening. Many countries in the world, this is happening. But you have other countries where populations are still on the rise, India, China, for instance, where populations are really growing. So the question is, you have to look at the population growth rates, but then also look at the consumption rates. So even though the United States is starting to go on a little bit, like it's starting to drop a little bit, we are the biggest consumers and the biggest producers of carbon dioxide as a result. Here's the other thing that I was just gonna ask you. And we switched it around a little. Right. So if everyone who understands what needs to be done stops having children and everyone who doesn't believe in climate change continues, then the only people left to vote for green energy won't want to. So this is kind of the other catch 22, right? Is how are we going to make a movement and fix some of these problems if the only people reproducing don't believe those problems exist? I think it's called public education, Blair. How do we do that? Oh, well, we have to get the federal government to, oh, never mind. How? Yeah, I'm getting excited. What do I do? Oh yeah, the federal government regulating science standards across the entire 50 states so that all students learn the same things about science regardless of their family backgrounds or beliefs. Everybody comes from the same basic understanding of science and can move forward from that point. I've got a great idea. That sounds kind of like that thing I heard about. Oh yeah, the next generation science standards. Oh wait, a bunch of states didn't adopt them. That's right. State choice, y'all. Bowie. Bowie. Bowie. Okay, we're not in the after show, but you know what, it's time for us to be. Yeah, it is time for us to end this show. We have gone on quite long enough. Everybody out there, thank you so much for joining us. We have been having a lot of fun tonight. Talked with Dr. Jens Full about his work in neuroscience and fMRI research to discover more about strange psychology and how the brain works, right? Psychology in the brain, neuropsychology. It's fabulous, fun stuff. We also had a bunch of fun science stories. Learned about ants, spiders dancing like ants. Didn't know they did that, spiders. They're more freaky than we thought they were. Now Blair's dancing like an ant dancing like a spider. I mean, I'm confused now. It's turtles all the way down. Jumping spiders all the way down. Jumping spiders, does not turtles, it's spiders. Everything is just spiders, you guys. And on that note, I hope you don't have too many nightmares. I hope you love your spiders today. I would like to thank everybody for listening to us, for watching, if you're watching on YouTube. And I would like to especially thank our Patreon sponsors. 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Thank you for all of your support on Patreon. And if any of you are interested in supporting us on Patreon, you can find information at patreon.com slash this week in science, or you can just go to twist.org and click on the Patreon link. Remember that you can also just help us out simply by telling your friends about twists. It's so easy. And on next week's show, we're gonna be talking about placentas. We are not eating them. We're not talking about, no, we're gonna be talking with Jessica Hebert about her research into the unique mammalian, I guess, yeah, the unique mammalian organ of the placenta. And once again, we will be broadcasting live online at 8 p.m. Pacific time on twist.org slash live. You can watch and join our chat room live, but don't worry if you can't make it because you can find past episodes at twist.org slash YouTube, Facebook.com slash this week in science, or twist.org. Thanks everyone for listening. We hope you enjoyed the show. Twist is also available as a podcast. Just search for this week in science in the iTunes database or if you have a mobile device, you can look for twist for droid in the Android marketplace. It's an app or for this week in science in any of the Apple marketplace locations. Or you can contact us directly. Email Kirsten at KikiFench at gmail.com, Justin at twistminion at gmail.com or Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org. So you got to remember just put twist in the subject line or it'll get spam filtered into oblivion but a bunch of laser wielding spiders pretending to be ants. You can also ping us on Twitter where we're at twist science, TWIS science at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly and at Blair's Menagerie. We'll have your feedback. And if there's a topic that you would like us to cover or address or a suggestion for an interview, please let us know. Also, if you'd like to hear any information about anything you heard here today, you can check out our show notes at twist.org. That's www.twist.org. We can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts and other listeners. I totally missed it, didn't I? That's okay. We will also be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news and if you've learned anything from the show, remember. It's all in your head. Science, this week in science, this week in science. This week in science, it's the end of the world. So I'm setting up shop, got my banner unfurled. It says the scientist is in, I'm gonna sell my advice. Show them how to stop the robots with a simple device. I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand. This week science is coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method for all that is worth and I'll broadcast my opinion all over the earth. It's this week in science, this week in science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science, this week in science. 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This week in science is coming your way. You better just listen to what we say and if you learn anything from the words that we've said please just remember it's all in it. This week in science, this week in science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science, this week in science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science, this week in science. This week in science, this week in science. This week in science, this week in science. we are in the after show. Now we are in the time that is after the show. Yay. After our long show. What was it? Fun interview. Yeah, very, very, very, very, very, gosh. It was like, he was really good at explaining what he was talking about. Right. So that it almost sounded like too simple. You're like, oh, I really get it. That's great. Yeah. I was like, really? That's the whole deal? Cool. It was nice to. I thought it was nice to hear from him on the worry that concerned the research, the news that came out about all of the FMRIs are wrong. It was nice to hear his explanation of that. Yes. After having talked about it so much. So that was cool. Me too. Strengths is asking why the cat is not curled up with Kai on the couch right now while he's, because Kai finally fell asleep on the couch, which is great. But no, he's not on the fort though, huh? Not in the fort. He was too active in the fort. So here's what happened. I used, I had a clothing rack with some clothes that were hand washed sitting there. And so I was like, oh, I can use that and hang a blanket over it and make a fort for him to go to sleep. And it'll be in a nice little dark space. But then it was too hot for him. And so I put a fan on him. And so the fan helped. But I think the fan was also kind of keeping him awake. Then the cat was afraid of the fan. The cat wanted to go into the fort. But the fan was too much for it. And then also Kai was moving around a lot because he decided he was going to take the clothes off the clothing rack and try them on. So he was busy trying on the clothes from the clothing rack underneath the blanket fort while the show was going. That's what was happening over there. If you saw little wiggles from the. I saw some wiggles. Yeah. He was pretty good. Not very, he wasn't loud. He wasn't, you know, he was good. Yeah, that was, I was very surprised with the restraint. I know. He was, he was good. Last time Marshall was out of town and this happened. Kai was not as restrained. So he was a bit more restrained tonight, which was very nice. He's growing. He is. He's also learning the threat of you're going to have to go sleep by yourself. Yes. Oh, no, I'm only six. I can't cope with that. You're going to have to go by yourself. And he's like, no, I'll be quiet. I promise. I'll be good. Thanks, Rourx. Glad you enjoyed it. I should have Kai on as a guest. He would love it. He, before the show, he's like, can I be on? I really want to be on your show. And then he's telling him, he was giving me advice. Yes. He was giving me advice as to what we should do. He's like, you know, mommy, I think you should get into gaming because lots of people watch gaming and then he's like, and you know, you should have a fashion show also because people like clothes. And so you should, you should have different shows. You should have your science show and a gaming show. And I'll be on your gaming show. And then the fashion one, we can talk about what people wear. Oh my God. No, he was totally giving me professional advice. And I'm like, oh, OK. All right. He's like, your channel would be very popular if you did these things. Oh my God. You'd be super popular, mom. You know, he's six years old and he already knows what I need to do on my YouTube channel. You should probably talk about Pokemon too. Well, there's that, of course. Minecraft, Pokemon, all of them. I can't believe he's passed his Ghostbusters phase. That makes me sad. It makes me sad when he got into Pokemon and he made us take down the Ghostbusters posters. I'm like, really? Do I have to? Because we have some cool Ghostbusters posters that we got him. I'm thinking, though, I've got this little space downstairs that I'm waiting for Marshall to finish the wall. And then once the wall is finished, I can make it into a fake set. And so I'm thinking maybe I can put the Ghostbusters posters down there. And then put some, because that would be cool, right? Ghostbusters posters. And then I'll have a green screen that I can pull down to do green screen stuff. So Kai can record stuff down there. And we've got Web 21. I know, right? My son is probably right about the game channel and the fashion stuff, totally. Whiskey Renegade. Blockchains would be cool. It is pretty techie. I wonder if we can get into the science of that. And I don't know, let's see. Whiskey Renegade, you've been having fantasies about turning your whole house into a fort years for now. Yeah, it's super fun. Fort House, it's amazing. They've got these cool kits now where you can buy, they have connectors and sticks. And so you can make forts and then you can buy scarves and things and hang them over and basically build these massive fort structures through your house. And it's not the same as pillow cushions and chairs and all that, but it- Well, you can just do what I did and just get spools of fabric from the craft store. Hey nun, I know, craft store or thrift stores very often. We'll have- Also fabric. This is on a clothesline, like they still sell clothesline like Target and stuff and it's pretty clutch. It works, what? Nobody would ever guess Blair. Well, now everyone knows. I know, no, you've told us before but nobody would ever guess. You've done, it's great. It's helpful that in this newer spot, my landlord does not care at all about putting holes in the wall. So I was able to put hooks in the wall which made all the difference in my setup. Yeah. Fada, you're funny. You got the feeling Dr. Yens has experience explaining things to Americans real slow. No. Na, na, na. Yeah, we can green, we can green screen, slime you on twist, yes, Ed. That would be awesome. I feel like it shouldn't be slime though. I feel like it should be slime mold. Slime mold. Spider web. Or just spiders. Or- Hi Stella, can you say hello? Stella's coming. Ooh, I heard a meow. Or the kitty. Where's my pearl? Yes, I love that cat. I want to cuddle that cat. Oh, she's a cuddler. She comes up and she takes your lap. You. She's a good kitty. I want you a good girl. Oh, ow, and then the claws down the back. Oh, onto the back. Now I have, now I've got a growth. I've got a cat growth. She's got a nice perch. Yeah, I thought you were about to show the whole internet a giant cat, but. Yeah, no, well I could. Smart teasing you. Oh my goodness. Identity four, I love it. Lab fashion line, stunning lab coats. Trendy goggles. That's right. Ooh, I have some trendy goggles. Right here actually. Okay, Stella, you need to go down. See trendy. Ooh, they are very. Yeah. That's what I was talking about so last year. I had a pair in high school that were the over the glasses kind because I only got contacts when I was in college. And I was pretty excited to upgrade to these bad boys. That's right. Should be. I use them actually when I was zoo keeping all the time. Working with the monkeys? Well, that too, but also whenever we use bleach we're supposed to wear goggles. I too, yeah. And the designated goggles are always like, have been dropped a million times and are like scratched all over so you can't really see. So I was just like, I'll bring my goggles from home. I'll bring my own goggles. So I was the zookeeper that brought her own goggles from home. Are we surprised? I'm not surprised. This does not surprise me at all. Yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. The smash. Blah. That was my cat parrot moment. She wasn't a very good parrot. That was not good cat parroting. She was not good crackers. No. Do you want a cracker? Yeah? Yeah? Did you see my exciting news about the calendar? You sent me an email. Yes, just that we got a final quote on the production. So we maybe can take pre-orders pretty soon. We can start early this year. We can start selling before they've been made. That would be a great idea. Yes, I think that's a- Guarantee delivery before the new year. Yeah. Guarantee delivery before Christmas, maybe. Yeah. I like it. But that would be cool. That would be great. We could gauge interest ahead of time. But I just have to, the only thing I'm waiting to do before we can post it for pre-order is I have to go scan in the images I've made and then I have to finish the cover because I'm gonna add some color to the cover. And then once we have a cover and a few sample images, then I feel like we can start taking pre-orders. Awesome. Okay. All right, keep me updated. But we also have to discuss price point, which is why I sent it to you. It looks like we can probably just stick with- Yeah. The program. I think $20 is probably- Yeah, 20 plus shipping is fine. 20 plus shipping is probably acceptable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And before, I think that'll work. Yeah, keep it. Keep it the same. I feel like that would be good, but yeah. So it's exciting. Identity four is already ready. Ooh, calendars. Somebody, I saw, because I was trying to figure out something about last year's calendar. And I guess I had never looked. Someone had written some very nice comments on the calendar page for last year. It was so sweet. Oh, nice. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, this year, I was thinking, I was like, I wonder if the same people will keep ordering if they'll be like, two is enough Blair, stop it. Stop it. But it looks like there's some interest. So that's pretty cool. Plus, you can color in my art and tweet it back to me. And I can see all of the various incarnations of my art. I would love to see it. Good night, Fada. Art incarnations. Yes. Yeah. I think it'd be so cool. Daniel Folland over on YouTube, when Stella came over. The internet is now more full of cats. Yes. And the world is a better place. Yes. Yes. Ah, it was fun. What do you think? Is it time for bed? Yeah. I think it might be time for bed. Moving forward. Moving on up. Trying to think, oh yeah, everyone, if the video at the beginning of the show didn't catch your attention today is Net Neutrality Action Day. Save the internet, everyone. Mm-hmm. Send in a letter to your Congress people and to the FCC to try and stop them from repealing Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality is kind of important for the things that we do here on Twists. So we don't have the money to get special treatment so that our show downloads faster for you. We don't have that. We can't do, we don't get special big media money. We're just little producers, little creators. We thank you for all of your support. But big support would be to try and support Net Neutrality. Please. Please. Let's try and get the FCC to support the little people as opposed to the big people. No, it's not in Whiskey Renegade. It's not a bill. I said repeal, but the thing is it's not a bill because it's already in the FCC. This isn't something that's, I don't think Congress is really involved in this, although Congress can put pressure on the FCC to not change things. Cause basically there's a new FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, Ajit Pai. And he's actually, he's an industry, and he's an industry insider. He was like a lawyer for Comcast or Verizon or somebody. Like he's tied to the big mobile carriers and to the carriers of the network basically who have built, who hold the pipes, right? Yeah. And so he's on their side. And what he wants to do is get rid of Net Neutrality, which was already voted on by the FCC, pretty much voted on. Now he wants to yank it back and take a vote to yank it back. But it's within the FCC. And I don't believe other than public pressure that Congress can really help. So overwhelming the FCC with requests not to do anything. And then already, and then if you want, talk to your member of Congress to see if they can put pressure on as well. Yeah. Cush, darn it. Yeah. We don't want internet, we don't want capping of our internet speeds. We don't, or download maxes. Let the internet grow. Let it be free. Let it breathe and live like a wild beast. BattlefortheNet.com, that's right, Rourx. Thanks for putting that in there. It's important. I know a lot of you already know about this and have probably already been vocal, but it is, it's not a big deal. It is pretty important. It's not something that a lot of people are really active on, but this is something that is gonna underline a lot of, a lot of, I mean, online culture moving forward. What do we do, right? Moe money, moe money, moe. Hot rod, I am a Netflix junkie as well. Gotta love it. Also Amazon Prime, Amazon Prime, Netflix. Ed from Connecticut, I believe with that. I believe that too. Communities should be able to build their own networks. Rob the invisible. Ooh, someday it's not here yet, the quantum internet. Someday somebody's gonna have to launch those satellites. Somebody will have to make the infrastructure for it. So who's gonna do it? I don't know. And with research money here, here's my question. Somebody brought this up online. They were already with the quantum teleportation thing. This is a Chinese endeavor. The Chinese launched this satellite, right? And I believe the Europeans are getting it together to launch a quantum teleportation satellite as well. Someday in the future, where's the US in this? Is, I don't know. I'm guessing the military is probably already working on it, but where is the US in this quantum teleportation news that's ongoing? I know we have researchers who are involved in the research. I know there's been research going on in Canada as well. But the, you know, somebody on Facebook saw this news and was like, oh, it's China, China. And down with Trump, he's like anti-science. And so he's putting us behind. And I'm like, well, really with this news that just came out that Trump has nothing to do with that because this is like years in the making. And so it has nothing, his politics and the sitting Congress have nothing to do with it. But the decisions they're making now on science funding could determine our potential competitiveness in this arena moving forward. The United States should be involved in this. The United States, didn't we start the internet? Well, and we're already having internet issues with other countries. So when are we gonna? There's quantum internet that's gonna happen. We should be involved in that. And we should be launching satellites as well. So when are we gonna do that? Where's, okay. Yeah. Our cybersecurity needs help anyway. Yes. So we need to be more in this game, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, it's a question. I have to look into it more because I don't know enough about the United States efforts, who's doing the research in the United States. And if there's a satellite that's planned, but what I've read so far is that Europe has one planned but not one that we do. So, I don't know. Well, there's some people that don't like government handouts. So. I know free Elon. Cool. We just have to talk to Elon. Yeah. Elon. Uncle Elon, give us the internet. That's right. Just the quantum internet. So our communications will be safe from government prying. Oh, wait. Did I just say that? Or, you know, our government will be safe from other governments. There you go. You know, maybe so voting boxes or emails, can't we? No? Okay. Yeah. All right, everybody. I don't think we have any more news or business to discuss at this point in time. No more new business. Yeah, I'm sorry to say we were invited. It's really cool news. We were invited to podcast again at a couple of minifairs, which would have been fun. Do our twist thing, interview people at the minifairs. Gosh, I would have had to play Minecraft at least once before we did that. Sure. Minecraft is awesome. You should. I've never played it. It's really fun. Do you know what's really cool? What platforms does one play Minecraft on? Any platform. Okay. You can download it on any platform. You can play it on PlayStation. You can play it on Android. You can play it on iPhone. You can play it on a desktop computer. Hmm, you know. There's all sorts of installations for Minecraft. I shall look into it. Yeah, you should. I use Gmail. I don't use encrypted email. I don't really have a lot of communications that I would really need encryption for, but. Raspberry Pi. Yes, put it on Raspberry Pi, exactly. I ain't got nothing to hide. It's also on the Oculus. You can do virtual reality Minecraft. I'll get right on that, which is actually pretty weird. It's pretty wild. Especially when you go climb up onto things, you can climb up, you can build up, and then if you're looking at it on the screen, you're like, oh, I just built a tall thing, and you look around, but you're looking at it from an outside observer's perspective, and so it's this thing. But then when you put on the VR goggles and do Minecraft, all of a sudden, you're up on top of this thing you're building, and you're like, if I step, I'm gonna fall, and then you're like, oh! I had a fear of heights panic moment, even though I knew I was standing on, logically, I knew I was standing on a floor, and I could not fall. But in the VR, I felt like I was gonna fall off a cliff. I couldn't look down. I was like, oh, I'm gonna fall, oh my gosh. And then my friend is like, jump, Kiki, jump. And I'm like, I can't, he's like, you can do it. I'm like, oh my god. It was fun. I don't know if I would have used the word fun for that, but it was fun. You do you. I do, mom. Yeah, so we were invited to MindFair. We were invited to MindFair in two dates, in all on the East Coast, two dates in August and one date in October, but it's not gonna happen. What with vacation time for everyone and the dates of things and... Yeah, West Coast things. Yeah, let's see. Please? I'm gonna see if they can sign us up for some young innovator fair stuff. Hopefully next year, there'll be more young innovator fairs and if they have one on the West Coast, I'll be like, Pellies? Pallies. Got something in my eye. Maybe it's cat. I think I got cat in my eye. I think. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. That is not great. Oh, it's late. It is late. Maybe I'll turn the lights down, let my child sleep for a little bit. That's a good idea. Get myself ready for bed and pick him up and move him into the bed. Yeah. Yeah. He's so peacefully sleeping. I hope he's getting good rest. Probably not with me talking all this time. Hmm. Yeah. Oh yeah, Google Cardboard. You could make it yourself and check out the VR with your smartphone. Hot rod, that's a great idea. That's awesome. Didn't think about that. That's a great idea. Okay, you guys, I think we're gonna go to sleep. That's a good idea. And hopefully Justin will be back next week. I hope he has had a nice little vacation. Nice time in Bodega Bay. It's a nice place to be. Rossler, let my child sleep for a little bit. Then start screaming at his ear. Yeah, I think about doing that sometimes. Oh, let sleeping children lie. Yes, yes. Have a wonderful night, everyone. Thank you for joining us tonight. Thanks for sticking around for our long show tonight. I hope you enjoyed the interview. I hope you enjoyed the science. I had fun. Thank you, Blair. Thank you. I had a great time. Yeah, that was fun. I've been working really hard at lining up interviews for us. So we've got some, starting to get some good interviews lined up, moving through the next couple of months, which will be a lot of fun. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I go on these like, yes, we're gonna interview people and then I do a lot of planning and then I go, I can't do it. Which is fine. That's fine. Yeah. Life works in cycles. I have a bunch of time to do things for all of the things I care about and then I go through a few weeks where all I can do is work and sleep and the bare minimum. Minimum, yeah, that's right. And, you know, it's life works in cycles. You can't live in the world of expectations of doing everything at 100% all of the time. This is what I'm learning as I age. Expectations. Yeah. You can either do less stuff at 100% all the time or you can do all things and try your hardest and make priorities. No, just make priorities. Interviewing in an introvert, well, it depends if it's an extroverted introvert. That's a thing. Okay, good night, Blair. Good night, Kiki. Have a great evening. Me too. Thanks, everybody, for watching and we hope that we'll see you again next week. In the meantime, we will see you on the interwebs. We will be around on, you know, we're around social media. We're there if you wanna say hi. Talk to you later.