 Starting from our guest. Ascend the messages. Three, two, this is TWIS. This Week in Science, episode number 625, recorded on Wednesday, June 28th, 2017. Drumming to the science beat. Brr, brr, brr, brr, brr, brr, brr, brr. Hi everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki, and today we will fill your heads with hot rats, chimp strength, and chronic pain. But first. Disclamer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Humans live in an interesting world, bound on one side by the actual physical world, that physical world that all living things and all non-living things exist in, and interact with, and by doing so constitute the universe and everything in it. And then, we humans have another side by which we are bound, the world within our brains. And while it has been shown that the world within the human brain can accomplish amazing things on the outside of the human brain, it is also amazing just how susceptible that brain is to control. Control can come in many forms, from a catchy advertising jingle, and a light bit of product placement that encourages an impulse purchase, to a conformity of ideology, connecting the brain's love of family to something completely unrelated. In short, our brains are often susceptible and subject to false realities. The best way to be sure that your own brain isn't harboring false realities is to take it out once in a while. I don't mean out of the skull, that ends really badly, but out of its perspective, compare the world as it can be studied, to the one constructed between your ears. If you practice this, become proficient at it, you might just find, this week in science, coming up next. Science to you, Kiki and Blair. And good science to you, Justin and Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of this week in science. We are back once again to talk about science. Oh, we do it every week, and we love it. So it just brings a light, a light into the week. Oh, happy, happy days. All right, everyone, you ready for the show ahead? I am, I'm ready, I'm ready. So we have tons of stories, I have stories about planets, pain and Popeye, kind of. What do you have for us, Justin? I've got earth cooties, sleeping pills for coma patients, and neander dentistry. That's not meandering dentistry, thank goodness. And Blair, what is on the docket for the animals corner tonight? Oh, I have some ratty livers, I have some rhythmic birds, and I have the family bed. Oh, the family bed. There we go. All right, let's jump right into it, everyone. Let's jump into the science, and we're going to start it all off with what has science done for me lately? This is our new segment on the show, and I'm trying to get all of you to write in and let me know what has science done for you lately? How do you, how do you find science in your everyday life? This letter is from Minion David Larson, and he wrote in to say, I had a video conference call with nearly a dozen other people somewhere in Chicago, others in Florida, one in Poland and myself in Seattle. We shared documents in near real time using the power of internet protocols, routers, servers, and collaboration software, all made possible by scientific advancement in semiconductors, algorithms, distributed systems, root optimization, and much, much more. And it's very true. The things that we do here every week through this hangout format that we use, it's all made possible thanks to science. So yeah, David, these video conference calls that we do, it's amazing, it's amazing, near real time, connecting with people all around the world, sharing documents, it's wonderful. So thank you so much for writing in. And if you, you, other people out there, my other wonderful Minions, if you would like to write in, you can send me a message on our Facebook page. If you go to facebook.com slash this week in science, look for this week in science in Facebook, find us, send us a message, and let me know what science has done for you lately. You can also email me until my this week in science email is fixed, which I'm hoping sometime this week, maybe, I don't know. But my email temporarily is Kiki Finch, K-I-K-I-F-I-N-C-H at gmail.com. And I look forward to hearing from you either way because we need to keep this going everyone one a week. That's all I ask. And now to jump into the science. We're going to start peering at the edge of our solar system with these stories, a couple of the stories that I want to start out the show with. Have you guys been hearing about Planet 10 over the last week? No, I'm guessing that's one more than Planet 9. Yeah, there you go. That's where the name comes from exactly. So yeah, we've been hearing 2016 brought Planet 9 and the possibility of a large Neptune-sized planet, some 400 astronomical units out or just way, way out in our solar system. The reason they found, they haven't discovered it yet, but they think it might be there. They hypothesize it because of their data, they're seeing clumping of these outer solar system objects, Kuiper belt objects. They're seeing them kind of clump in a way that changes what would be expected to be their normal orientation, their orbital inclination against the plane, the orbital plane of our solar system. And so you have something that has a massive gravitational pull kind of far away from the sun, things are going to be drawn to it, right? So they hypothesize there's this massive Planet 9 out there. We'll get to more of that later. But now there is new data from researchers who are at the University of Arizona, Katherine Volk and Renu Malhotra. They think they've discovered other weird warpings in the orbital inclination of these Kuiper belt objects and that it possibly suggests that there's a Mars-sized planet kind of out there. And they're calling it Planet 10. They think it's about 10 times the mass of Earth, so around Mars size, orbiting at 700 AU, oh, Planet 9, I'm sorry, that's like 4,000 astronomical units, not 400, 4,000, way, way out there. But this one is thought to be about 700 astronomical units from the sun, much, much further out than Neptune. But they too have seen a little bit of clumping. They've seen a little bit of this, instead of these objects fitting in with the normal plane of the solar system or even with the plane of other Kuiper belt objects, there's about an 8% difference. And the only thing that they've nailed down that would suggest that is something the size of Mars floating around out there. So they're very well could be not just a Planet 9, but a Planet 10. Okay. Yeah. So I guess whatever it is, can't be too shiny. I mean, we haven't like, hasn't caught an astronomer's eye yet. Nobody's tracking it. Nobody's seen it. Nobody's seen it. It really, it exists in astronomers imaginations and in the data at this point. And while we may be suspicious of that, we actually discovered with a bad degree of reliability, but still amazing considering we didn't know anything was there. The placement of a lot of the planets in our solar system, they were predicted before they were found. Absolutely. And their distances were within something of the neighborhood of 10 to 15% per planet for a lot of them. So it's not, it's not unheard of of us figuring out that there's a planet there before we've seen it. This amazes me like, well, and I guess it's because the further way it is, the smaller it is in this night sky. And the harder it's to figure out where in the night sky it's going to be because you don't know where to start looking for it. And if it's not particularly reflective, it's not an ice planet, I guess, that's catching a little glint of light or something of that nature might make it even harder. But yeah, now we have, now we have a race, I think for somebody to find and name, right? Because you still get naming rights if you're the first to get it. Well, we're going to be planet 10 forever. Yeah, if they find it, it's not just going to be planet 10. And I think Pluto was already taken. With planet nine, have we found that? No. And so this brings me to the second part of this story, which is there is an ongoing survey called the Outer Solar System Origins Survey. And this is using wonderful high-powered telescopes to search our solar system out beyond Neptune for objects like planet nine, planet 10, and just large Kuiper Belt objects. Also, there's the question of, you know, comets coming in from the work cloud. And, you know, there's things out there that we have to see. And you have to be looking to find them. And so there's this wonderful outer solar system origin survey that is ongoing. Now, some recent data from the Outer Solar System Origins Survey adds a few more points, data points to objects that are way out there. And what they have found is that they don't conform to the clumping that was seen in the data sets used by the researchers who said there's a planet nine out there. And so now you have these researchers with a new data set who are like, we found a bunch of bias from observations, and your data could be biased too. And basically our observations when we got rid of the bias didn't have any of this clumping that would be seen if there were a giant planet nine out there. So now there is new data, the Outer Solar System Origins Survey is continuing to look and will continue to add new data and will be on the lookout for things like planet nine, planet 10, and evidence that either negates or supports their existence. So there is more to this story. We don't just have these things yet. So we discovered planet 10 the same week that we maybe undiscovered planet nine. Yeah, they're about the papers came out about in about a week. Are we going to change the name of planet 10 to planet 9B? Yeah, 9B, that's right. I'm sure people interested in naming are already working on that a bit. Volk from University of Arizona is very confident. She says for planet 10, it would have to be quite a fluke for this to not be a real effect. We think there is a real signal there, and this implies an additional planet. But you know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So hopefully, other people can replicate their findings and add to them. So that's where we're at right now. Planet nine, planet 10, still to be seen, but the researchers are on it, which I think is very exciting. I mean, that's science, right? Is that something you think we could do with the current technology that we have or we have to invent new technology to see them? No, I think that we could find them. The problem is that they're very dim, something that was done recently. I mean, we're, what was it, Proxima B, I think was recently imaged. And we're looking at the topography of suns, of stars out beyond our own solar system. We are looking at changes in, there's another story about black holes that are, you know, very slowly but firmly orbiting around each other, and they're pulling apart very slowly. And the distance is massive distances that we are able to discern with the technology that we have. The timing is something, I read an article in the analogy that was given to the slow movement away from each other of these black holes. It's something like taking a snail on a planet like some 400 light years away and watching it crawl and measuring the distance that it was crawling. I mean, on that kind of a basis. So for a moment, just based on the hand gestures, I thought you're going to say that the black holes were doing Tai Chi. They could be galactic Tai Chi. Yes, whatever, whatever kind of Chi the black holes have. Yes, Snyder, yes, in the chat room he says, sounds like a good time to reach out to Fraser Kane. Yeah, he would be able to answer all these questions. But yeah, I believe that we have the technology in place and also coming online, Rob the sparkly says, James Webb baby. And that's true. We have these another telescope coming out online that searches for infrared signatures. So it wouldn't necessarily have to be light, but we could potentially get the faint heat signature of a planet out in the cold reaches of our solar system. So yeah, planets. I think we'll find them eventually. I mean, they have to predict where they're going to be to figure out where to look for them. First, so they've got general ideas. And I think that's where that's where this is all headed. Predict the planets, then project predict their trajectories, then predict places to look, and then look. Get there. Here on our own planet. I just wanted to bring up a couple of not so exciting stories. I've got like the wonderful exciting look, there's maybe other planets in our solar system that we could go to when our whole planet's too warm. Yeah, so new research, just published in the journal climate dynamics, looked at three different ocean temperature measurements by three different teams. And so basically they took these different measurements of these teams went out and measured temperatures in all the oceans on the earth and measured them different ways. And they came up with different answers. And so this paper took all of those and said, all right, let's use all your data and let's see who's right. But basically the take home message from the study is doesn't matter whose data was used or how they did the measurements or where the data was gathered in the oceans. The oceans are warming. Wait, what? What does that start happening? No question about it. What? You mean all the science that these climatologists have been spewing for the last decade and a half, two, three decades? It's four decades. It's all true? It's all true. Wow. Who'd have thunk? Yeah, who would have thunk it? So the lead author, Dr. Gonji Wang, describe the importance of the study in this way from this article in The Guardian. Our study confirms again a robust global ocean warming since 1970. However, there is substantial uncertainty in decadal scale ocean heat redistribution, which explains the contradictory results related to the ocean heat changes during the quote unquote slowdown of global warming in a recent decade, which we've seen from previous. This is my parenthetical, which studies have shown was not really a slowdown. Therefore, we recommend a comprehensive evaluation in the future for the existing ocean subsurface temperature data sets. Further, an improved ocean observation network is required to monitor the ocean change, extending the observations in the boundary currents system and deep oceans below 2000 meters, besides maintaining the Argo network. And the Argo network is a wonderful autonomous fleet of sensors that are about 3,800 of them spread out more or less uniformly across the ocean, but they've only been used since about 2005. So we only have uniform measurements dating back a little more than a decade. And so there's other procedures that have to be used to interpolate data from before that time period. So anyway, but if I'm not mistaken, that means that the sea level is going to be lower because the warmer the water is, the more compacted it becomes. No, sea water and expands when it gets warm. It does. So as the waters warm, the more they will expand and the more sea level will rise, which brings me to my final story for this show introduction, which is that a study published in Nature Climate Change used refined satellite estimates to show global sea level rise from 1993 to 2014. They show that it has increased from 2.2 millimeters, the sea level rising to from 2.2 millimeters each year in 93 to 3.3 millimeters each year in 2014, which basically means there's been about a 50 percent increase in the last two decades and the right to the rate of increase exactly to the rate of increase. So this accelerated rate of sea level rise, they have also looked at where it's coming from and they find. Can I guess? Can I guess? Go ahead. I want to just guess. I just want to guess. Is it because there's a lot more boats in the water? Because now there's more boats in the water that made the sea level go higher? No. No, that doesn't work like that. No. Over the last 25 years, the largest contribution around one millimeter per year is from thermal expansion when the ocean expands due to ocean warming. But there's the rate of increase that we're seeing is not from ocean thermal expansion because the study found that, quote, while the rate of ocean thermal expansion has remained steady since 1993, contributions from ice sheets and glaciers have increased from about half of the total rise in 93 to around 70 percent in 2014 and the researchers highlight the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and also Antarctic ice sheets in the sea level rise. Wow. Ice boats. A bunch of ice boats in the water that are down here. Well, it's not like ice cubes. It's like the ice that wasn't in the water and then you put it in the glass and suddenly the level goes up. This is ice sheets that are on the land. They haven't been in the water. They haven't been already trapped in there. And now we're just releasing it all at once. Plus, plus we have more boats than we've ever had before. Can that still be part of it? Maybe a very, very small percentage, of course. I think, yeah, I think percentage-wise it's very, very small contribution. Small. Possibly. Yeah, I would say it's, yeah, it's, we have to focus on the two main offenders, though. Yeah, I'd say you're not wrong, but you're not right either. No, you're not focusing on the right thing. Focus, people. Focus. Yeah, Ed from Connecticut says it's because people are getting heavier and when they go swimming in the ocean, it makes the sea level rise. Yes. That is, there is a problem with that also, but I don't know that everybody is in the ocean at the same time. That's like that thing where if everybody jumped on one side of the planet at the same time. Oh, don't encourage people. I don't encourage them. We don't want to lose orbit. Oh my goodness. Yes. So anyway, there it is, everyone. But something on the positive side, there's an article in ours Technica this week about a new kind of social practice, modeling climate change negotiations, actually getting people in universities, business places, also people in public office to role play different nations who have a stake in the climate change negotiations. And they've found that people who become involved in this actually become invested and change their perspectives on how climate change could and should be mitigated by their countries. So getting people in touch with the realities of climate change is not necessarily a bad thing. I remember there was a really interesting episode of, I think it was, it was a PBS radio show and it was all about how to get people to understand a new perspective. And it was all based on making things personal and making things seem close to home before you started talking about facts. If you jump straight into facts, people have a tougher time putting themselves in someone else's position if they think that something doesn't affect them personally. But when you talk about an individual or if I were to talk about my personal experience with something, then suddenly it becomes easier to understand and an easier perspective to take. Yes. Psychology. Yeah, NLP everybody. Let's go around NLP. All right, Justin, what you got? This is This Week in Science. I've got the Planetary Protection Project for NASA. It has a goal, eliminating the probability that other planets or planetoids will be contaminated with Earth cooties. As we explore these heavenly bodies, we don't want to populate them with Earth germs. So they create clean rooms for building spacecraft, rooms that are meant to be kept clean and sanitized and tested regularly for bacteria. And I think it was one of the early, like this was like a decade plus ago, we were talking about an extremophile that was found eating the paint, eating a lead-based paint in one of the clean rooms. Like they thought they had everything cleaned and sanitized and they were finding these archaea in there, right? And they say here we were checking spacecraft and their clean rooms for the presence of archaea as they are suspected to be a possible critical contaminants during space exploration. Certain methane-producing archaea are the so-called methanogens could possibly survive on Mars, which I think that's great. Of course, our side note, pin in it, side note. I think that's great. Let's put something that can live on Mars or on Mars. Then we can find it and be like, okay, there's life on Mars. We know because we put it there. Let's let life leave this planet. Mars is Justin's laboratory. Mars is a fest destiny, but we want to explore first just to see if there's something else already there. So we've got to keep it clean at least in the beginning, right? They didn't find signatures from methanogens in this, but they found loads of Thoma archaeota, which are a different type of archaea that survives with oxygen. At first, it thought that these oxygen-loving archaeota were from the outside, but after finding them also in hospitals and other clean rooms, the researchers suspected they were from human skin. They conducted a pilot study of 13 volunteers, and they found that they all had archaea on their skin. Now, archaea aren't bacteria. Bacteria are bacteria, and then there's eukaryotes. That's like all animals and plants and stuff. That's one life form. Bacteria is another, and then archaea is this other considered more primitive-ish type of life form, I guess. As a follow-up, they then tested 51 volunteers and decided to get a large range in ages to test age dependency of archaea signatures. They were taking samples were taken from the chest area. The variations in archaea abundance among the age groups was statistically significant and unexpected. A five to eight-fold difference between middle-age people and the elderly. The elderly having more. In a follow-up, study researchers conducted about genetic and chemical analysis of the samples collected from human volunteers, ranging from the age of one to 75. They found that archaea were most abundant in subjects younger than 12 and older than 60. The study is currently published in Scientific Reports. The article is titled, Human Age and Skin Physiology, Shape Diversity and Abundance of Archea on the Skin. Why is any of this important? Well, we didn't really know it was there, really, very much. We've been talking about the microbiota, microflora, and the skin has bacteria that perform functions. We are completely unaware of the function that this archaea, these extremophiles all over our bodies, are performing. It says here, skin microbiome is usually dominated by bacteria, says Hoi Ying Holman, director of the Berkeley Suctrun Infrared Structural Biology Program, senior author of the study. Most of the scientific attention has been on bacteria because it's easier to detect. Based on the literature, six years ago, we didn't even know that archaea existed on human skin. Now we found that they're part of the core microbiome and are an important player on human skin. In addition to the influence of age, they found that gender was not a factor. But people with dry skin have more archaea. Hmm. So far, most archaea that they know of are known to be beneficial rather than harmful to human health. They may be important for reducing skin pH. We're keeping it at low levels. Lower pH is associated with lower susceptibility to infections. The detected archaea probably involved in nitrogen turnover on skin, which is why they're capable of lowering skin pH, supporting suppression of pathogens. And that's why they like dry skin because it's more dead stuff, more nitrogen. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And, and there's also skin is a place for extremophiles. Our skin is an extreme environment. I love it. Yeah. Picture myself slathering on body lotion in the morning and just a bunch of screaming archaea. Yeah. Well, I think that I mean, I make a joke that our skin is a, an extreme environment. But the thing is we found them in extreme environments, you know, we found them in sewage. We found them in these hot pools, we thermal vents, right? We found them in these extreme places. And so we weren't really looking for them in the normal places. We were like, just regular bacteria are going to be there. And so maybe we weren't putting the right nutrients in the pot to grow the archaea as well to allow them to grow. And so we just didn't know. And, but they've been around for so long. Why wouldn't they? But that's fascinating. Maybe there's some kind of interaction between archaea bacteria and face mites. Oh, interesting. One of the things they think that the levels of, of, of them being higher and younger and, and older people is because as we sort of get to the middle of the ages, we produce more, I guess, sebum. Yeah, it's an oily secretion. We become greasy. And they seem to, I guess, avoid that middle life people. It's the whole thing. You hit puberty and suddenly the pimple breakout start happening. That's sweating all the time. That is the oil production in your skin ramping up, giving you that internal glow that's attractive. Gross. This is so interesting. What are they doing on our skin? I want to know. Tell you, we're just like public transit for microorganisms and little, little critters. I've been, I, my son got a bite on his arm and it's got all big and it's kind of inflamed and almost on the verge of being infected. And so we've been talking about the fact that maybe it was a spider bite. And then if there was a spider bite that maybe it's a bacteria got into his arm in the bite area. And so he recently has been fascinated by the idea of bacteria and he'd like at night before bed and in the morning before school. And when he gets home from, or not school camp, he gets home from camp. It's all these hypotheses about what the bacteria are doing on the spider and he wants to know what they look like. And then he also wants to know how they could have gotten into his body. And he's got all these hypotheses about it and how they, how the bacteria and the bacteria and the cells and how they eat each other. And he's got all sorts of ideas. It's great. Oh my, we're having some fun conversations. Hey everyone, let's teach our six-year-olds about bacteria, the microbiome. Yeah. With something like a bite, there's that, oh, I don't want him to be afraid of bacteria for his life. But it's never too early to teach your child proper hygiene, which is helpful. Kai, wash your hands. Don't put your fingers in your mouth. Stop that. Ah, don't lick the banister. Get off the ground. Don't, don't pick that up. What? Oh, yes. Oh, you're telling them not to do these things? No, no, I want my kids to have a robust immune system. Yeah. Did you lick the banister? You did me? Okay. Lick it and then let's move on to the next thing. But Justin, we know from previous stories that whatever bacteria they carry, you will carry. Yes. And I, too, will be stronger. We will all be stronger. We'll all have the very fancy immune system. I'm not raising bubble kids. No, you shouldn't. Bubble boys and girls around here. But they're not having bubble children. Good hygiene never hurt anyone. That's true. Wash your hands, brush your teeth. Maybe you don't have to shower for a few days. That's fine. And on that note, because I know how much Blair loves personal shower hygiene, we're going to move into the animal corner. Oh, I'm so excited for my stories today. Well, first I wanted to tell you about breaking news from Australian National University about palm cockatoos. Have you ever seen a palm cockatoo? A palm cockatoo in the palm of my hand. They are stunning. They are all black cockatoos. I'll put a picture of them. Great. They're all black cockatoos with red cheeks. And they're from Australia. And they, as all cockatoos are, are very smart and are good tool users. But where it gets interesting is that palm cockatoos have a very particular type of tool use. They make music. What? But don't all birds make music. Cock, cock, cock. Great question. So many birds sing, including cockatoos. We've all heard cockatoos sing at one point or another. But when a bird sings, it's not exactly like when humans sing. It is not as rhythmic. If you try to hammer out a beat or a metronome in line with a bird song, it's not easy. A lot of the time, it's kind of irregular. It doesn't set to a normal pace. So what ANU was looking at, Professor Rob Heinzen and his associates were looking at, was the way that the palm cockatoos make music. They actually will take sticks from branches or hollow seed pods, and they will bang them on trunks or tree hollows. And this is while they're displaying to females. And they wanted to see why they were doing it. Is it just, hey, hey, hey, look over here? Or is it something much more complicated than that? So how did they do that? They actually had to go out and, their words, stock the palm cockatoos. And for every 100 hours of observation, they would get one incidence of drumming. So it took a long time for them to actually find it. Once they did, they got a good baseline. They got about 60 or so instances on tape. And from that, they were able to synthesize what was happening. First of all, the type of rhythm that they tapped varied widely from individual to individual. But second, it was essentially a regular beat. It was as if they were playing the drums, and they were, they were hammering out like a metronome beat. It was regular. It was spaced equally. This is fascinating for a few reasons. Yeah. And so we're all the individuals, we're all the individuals doing the same thing. They were all regular. They were all tap, tap, tap, tap, but some of them were faster than others. And some of them loved a little flourish at the beginning. A little drumbeat flourish. Yeah. So what hypothesis is that that is kind of unique to the, that individual. And so their drumbeat is kind of their signature piece. And so other individuals can recognize them by their drumming rhythm from far away. What really makes it interesting is that as far as we can tell, this is the first time we've seen an animal with a rhythmic intentional sound that is regular and metronomic. So the bigger question here is, does this give us insight into the origin of music itself? Yes. Of our music, of what we call music, because all of our music for the most part has a regular backbeat. And that's what makes it something special is that there's a time signature, there's something that people can clap, stamp their feet, dance along to. And this has its origins in mate choice and in, in display, which one could argue, our music has a lot of roots and display and mate choice. But ultimately it's become more of a communal thing for us now. And so the question is, which came first? Do we share a common ancestor with these birds that had the ability to bang out a rhythm? Is this convergent evolution? There are lots of questions to be asked, but this is definitely the first time we have seen a regular rhythm intentionally come out of another species. Yeah, I love the, I love the question also, you know, is this something that gives us insight into our own musical behavior that our music came from mate choice originally? Maybe in the beginning our mate choice was, there was banging of sticks. Maybe there was, you know, some kind of stick banging and dancing that happened. And then maybe eventually it turned into a more social, you know, because we were tribal at an early point in our evolution that maybe that movement into a tribal way of living that it led to more social aspect. Yeah. I bet you just started with rock, rock, rock, rock, rock, rock to make tools, rock, click, click, click, lots of chipping, chipping, chipping going on. But it became like, you know. But then why did it make the jump from that to a mating ritual? Everything becomes a mating ritual at some point. Interesting hypothesis. I'd be interested to look into that. But I do think it's, it's, it's yet another thing that we've identified as uniquely human. Nobody else does it. It's just us. Oh, wait, oh, the animals do it also. And not just the animals, birds. Yeah, you know, birds, birds who have a different brain than we do. But I hadn't really thought before this about how birdsong is not very rhythmic and it definitely isn't. It's melodic, but it's not rhythmic. Yeah, absolutely. But aren't they like, these look like they're, these birds are like looking down where they're being like, I feel like they're trying to get termites or something out of this tree. Nope. It is a mating ritual. That's what they discovered through this research by following them. What did they say? They got 60 hours or something? 60 instances. 60 instances that took 100 hours each. They're talking over 6000 hours of observation time. So I think they, I think they got there. I think they got some data in there. And just to respond to Fada in the chat room, freeform jazz still has a drum set with a rhythm behind it. So birdsong is not freeform jazz, but good try. I will defend jazz at every turn. Moving on. And for people who might not know, you are a musician. You've been a musician your whole life. So this is something that you are familiar with. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so moving on to actually my, my absolute favorite story of the week. I want to talk about hot wood rats. Wood rats are so hot right now. So hot. Desert wood rats. They already live in the heat. Guess what guys, planets get a little bit hotter. So in the Mojave Desert, there are a few different types of wood rats. One thing that they all share in common. They like to eat toxic food. Mojave Desert wood rats, they like to eat creosote bush or chaperone. That plant is so toxic, pretty much nobody else can eat it or even go near it. Hi, I'm a cute wood rat. I just eat toxic food that nobody else eats. What a great niche for me to be in. I have isolated out a niche. And so I have to have all sorts of interesting physiological adaptations to deal with the toxins. Yeah, absolutely. So it's a food that other people are not taking advantage of or other animals are not taking advantage of. And it's a desert. So there's not a whole lot of plant life. And then on top of that, it's a plant that has a good amount of water in it. So that's something that they're going to want as well. Because most desert animals get the water that they need from the food that they eat. How do they eat that creosote? Their liver, just like how we deal with toxic foods and drinks are liver. Livers break down toxins. What is interesting is that near research from University of Utah looked at the function of the liver at different temperatures. What they found overall is that the liver is more active in cooler temperatures and less active in warmer temperatures, not as good at processing toxins in hotter temperatures. And so this is bad news for wood rats as temperatures go up. So it all started by observations in the field noticing that wood rats ate less of their choice plant, their usual choice when it was hotter out. Around 79 degrees Fahrenheit compared to the usual 71 degrees Fahrenheit. At 79, they ate almost none of this food. At 71 degrees, they were doing their normal thing. So 71 is kind of a cool desert temperature. 79, not that much hotter, not as hot as it can get in the Mojave Desert. I can tell you can get a lot hotter than that. But even just that eight degree difference changed the functionality of their liver. Yeah. And what they actually did is they compared liver gene expression in warm and cool wood rats, and they saw that the activity of the detoxification pathways were unchanged, but that warm wood rats had about half of the liver gene activity of cold wood rats. Half. The most significant differences were genes pertaining to metabolism. One gene regulates metabolism of vitamin A, which is a precursor to detoxification enzymes. And another gene is associated with a process called glucogenesis, which generates glucose from breakdown proteins, lipids. So that's something your liver does when it's stressed for energy. It's not a good way to make energy in the liver, but it's something that the liver does in order to keep you alive. What I thought was interesting about this, have either of you ever gone wine tasting on a really hot day? Yes. I like champagne and white wine. What do they always tell you about wine tasting on a hot day? I don't know. I remember. No. They always tell you to keep hydrated and drink less because you will get drunk faster and you are more likely to get alcohol poisoning if you're drinking out in the sun. I always thought that was just because of dehydration. This is why Vikings and people in Finland can drink vodka all winter long. Yes. Liver function is different depending on temperature. We already know this. There's temperature dependent toxicity. And so that's, for example, if you take a Tylenol in July, it's in effect longer than if you take a Tylenol in January. Your liver moves faster and more efficiently when it's colder. So you can be detoxified more quickly in cold winter weather than in hot summer weather. You can drink more in the winter because you're processing it quicker. Your liver's working quicker. The reason that it doesn't work as well or that it behooves your body to not work as well when it's hotter is that when it detoxifies, it creates heat, which is actually something that is perfect for your body most of the time. Your liver is part of the thermoregulatory system in your body. It creates a heat. It helps keep your insides warm when it's processing toxins. But if it's processing toxins and you're already hot, it has the potential to overheat to get you hotter. So it might actually turn out to be kind of an emergency shutoff valve in your body to keep you from overheating. Potentially. All we know though is that wood rats were eating less creosote when it got hotter. They looked at the genes involved with liver function and that when your body is hotter, your liver works less. Or wood rats. Same thing. This could mean something considering climate change. The maximum temperatures in their home habitat haven't increased much since the late 1980s, but average minimum temperatures in July are around five degrees warmer Fahrenheit now. So the high was already high in the desert. But remember the low, that difference of eight degrees, 71 to 79 degrees, they need those lows to dip low enough to process this food. So if it's not dipping low enough for them to process, they have to find more different food or they have to go somewhere else. Are they nocturnal maybe? They are nocturnal and so they can forage at night when it's the coldest. Absolutely enough since they eat their food. So this has implications for the wood rats, of course, but it also has implications for the biome in general. Remember all animals are connected, of course, because smaller mammals live in abandoned wood rat boroughs and a lot of top predators in the desert rely on wood rats as food. So they're actually a pretty important part of the desert ecosystem. They provide shelter and food to many different animals. So it's a whole different level to temperature sensitivity that we haven't really looked at in the wild. Pretty interesting. Yeah. And now we know wood rats are telling us, giving us the reason also why you shouldn't be drinking in a hot tub. Yes. Why drinking in hot tubs don't just doesn't mix. That's right. That explains a lot. Kids' are all still doing it. Right. Because hot tub anyway. That's a hot tub. I need to move to a cooler climate. Or as Ed from Connecticut says in the chat room, stick your head in the fridge. Stick your liver in the fridge. Yeah. Find yourself an ice box. No. All right, everyone. I'm going to go climb into the refrigerator for a few minutes. I'll be right back. On that note, we are going to take a quick break. This is This Week in Science. Thank you for joining us. We will be back after these messages for more science in the second half. We have a lot more coming. So stay tuned. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for listening to This Week in Science. We love bringing you science week after week. And I mean, it's just one of the highlights of our week to be able to come here to this internet space with all the science and to talk about it and share it with you and try and explain it and to just be a part of this amazing community. And so if you enjoy being a part of this community, I hope that you would want to support us and keep this community going in any way that you are able to. If you head on over to our website twist.org, you will find the cornucopia of ways that you can help us out. Twist.org has links where you can find our Zazzle Store. If you're into merchandise that has the twist logo on it, you can head hit the Zazzle link that's at twist.org. It'll take you to the Zazzle interface for our store, zazzle.com, slash This Week in Science. 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The biggest thing that you can do to help is share us with your friends. Tell people about us. Take us on to your social media outlets. Take a picture of yourself listening to us on Instagram, but share us with your friends on Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, iTunes. Leave a review on iTunes. There's so many little things that you can do to help us keep this show going and to help us grow our audience, which will in turn help us keep this show going. Every little thing counts and you're all helping just by listening. Thank you for being there. We thank you for your support. We really could not do this without you. And we're back with more This Week in Science. Woohoo, Justin, what you got? What do I have? What do I have? Oh, no, this isn't the story I got queued up here. I've got the other one. This is Neanderthal. Discovery of multiple toothpick-like grooves on teeth and signs of other manipulations by Neanderthal 130,000 years ago. They're saying our evidence of prehistoric self-dentistry. This is according to a study led by a University of Kansas researcher. This fits together with a dental problem that Neanderthal was having and was trying to presumably treat itself with the toothpick grooves, the brakes, and also with the scratches on the premolar, says David Freyer, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology. The Bulletin of the International Association of Paleontology recently published the study. They analyzed four mandibular teeth on the left side of Neanderthal's mouth. These teeth were found at the Cropina site in Croatia. They analyzed the teeth with a light microscope to document a clausal wear. Anyway, the wear, toothpick groove formation, dentin scratches, and anti-mortem lingual enamel fractures. Freyer and said researchers have not recovered the mandible itself. The jaw is missing, but they have the teeth. They know the teeth go together. So they couldn't figure out if there was periodontal disease, but the scratches and grooves on the teeth indicate they were likely causing irritation and discomfort for some time for this individual. They found the premolar and M3 molar were pushed out of their normal positions associated with that. They found six toothpick grooves among those two teeth and two molars further behind them. Scratches indicate this individual was pushing something into his or her mouth to get at that twisted premolar, Freyer said. Features of the premolar and M3 molar associated with several kinds of dental manipulations, he said, mostly because the chips of the teeth were on the tongue side of the teeth. It's from the inside. So they were working at different angles to get at this thing. Researchers because of that ruled out that something happened to the teeth after the mandible had died. Past fossil finds have identified toothpick-like grooves going back almost two million years. So this wasn't necessarily the first attempt at self dentistry. Maybe occasionally they got some help, but this is the first one where they have all the teeth together where they can kind of tell that there was a manipulation taking place on this set of teeth. They don't know what the Neanderthal used could have been bone, but may not be surprising that the Neanderthal did this. As far as I know, there's no specimen that combines all of this together into a pattern that when Kate here, she was trying to presumably self treat this eruption problem. The evidence from the toothpick marks and dental manipulations is also interesting. In light of a new discovery at the same cave that the Neanderthals there had the ability to fashion eagle talons into jewelry. It's sort of, well, less and less so. If I had an eagle talon, I would turn it into jewelry. Yeah, that'd be pretty sweet. This would have been stunning. This Neanderthal uses eagle talon as jewelry. Would have been stunning story all by itself 10 years ago, but now we're starting to understand our Neanderthal cousins weren't that different after all. They're not so different. So interesting. They're just like us. I mean, there was Encino Man and now no, I mean, there's this idea of the caveman of the just really not advanced, not having any cognitive skills, not just being able to hunger, you know, having sticks and rocks and basically bad. Yeah, but maybe not even that much. I don't know. They're just very just ideas about a very, very low cognitive load on these individuals. And I think it's so fascinating to find out about their dentistry, their medicine, their art, their diets, so much more complex. And I think one of the things that we tend to do looking backwards is we tend to associate technological civilization advances that took place piecemeal over long periods of time as being connected to cognitive ability. As though the three of us are we have much greater cognitive abilities than somebody who lived 200 years ago. Because I have this phone. This phone makes me smart. Do you remember anybody's phone number? No. Of course not, which makes you less cognitively able than somebody who lived just 15 years ago. Yeah, I don't even remember what's going to be happening when next week, because it's all in my calendar. Right, right. So there's this sort of this sort of judgment we make on the past as being, you know, less with it or less cognitively able when in fact it is perhaps possible speculating, of course, that a Neanderthal may have had a greater cognitive ability than a modern human, but just didn't need to, you know, apply it. They didn't have the technology or the need to apply the technology and likely because of the small groups that small groups, they hadn't yet established, you know, philosophers and the great thinkers. Well, and it's because it fit into their society, right? They didn't have a big tribal society that sat in one place and, you know, contemplated their navels. But had they, perhaps, their cognitive abilities might have been, oh, yeah, oh, I could totally get all this philosophy, all this literature, physics, no problem. We don't know. But that's the sort of bias that we make looking backwards because they use stone tools they could have never learned to drive a car. How ridiculous is that? We're the same people. Hunt a boar with a spear. I'm not sure I could do that either. Right, right, right. I do like, I like to contemplate that Neanderthal. But if you were raised to doing that, you'd probably have no problem. Right, but I like to contemplate that Neanderthal individual who was looking at the boar, thinking about it, and suddenly went, oh, I think about the boar. Therefore, I am. Right, well, yeah. I mean, I, I guess, I guess, I don't know if I've already belabored. I think I belabored the point. I'll stop saying the same thing. No, Neanderthals did have very large brains. So it's not surprising. Not so surprising. I do love the Neanderthals, and I love these stories that tell us so much more about them. How about a study actually trying to determine the strength of chimpanzees? Strong. Right, so yeah, so when you think of how strong chimpanzees are, Blair, Justin, how, what do you think? Like, how do you think of them? Superhuman strength, the ability to rip a man's arms right out of their sockets. So you're not entirely wrong. I've actually seen a raccoon torn in half. Okay, so yes, chimpanzees are strong, and zookeepers and other people who live near chimpanzees have maybe witnessed some feats of strength that make you go. So this reputation of chimpanzees as having superhuman strength is well-deserved and well-earned, but what is the truth of it? And so researchers reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences took biopsies, muscle biopsies from the thighs and calf muscles of three chimps that were housed at State University of New York at Stony Brook, and then they dissected them down to their individual fibers. So if you think about how a muscle is put together, we have each of the muscles, their large muscle groups, and those muscle groups are made up of little tiny muscle fibers that all are wrapped and bundled together and then work together within. So you have the muscle, you have the muscle fiber bundles within the muscle, and then you have the muscle fibers themselves that are the individual muscle cells that we're talking about. So they dissected them down to the individual fibers to stimulate them and find out just how much force they could generate, and then they compared their measurements to data from humans, and they found that at that individual fiber level strength output was about the same. Individual fibers from the muscles of chimpanzees were about as strong as those of humans. And so then you go, okay, what's the difference? How are chimpanzees stronger? What's going on? So one thing I would guess is that guessing here. Well, it's just always a fun part. I like to throw in a little bit of guessing is that humans being bipedal, I picture us as spending thousands and thousands of years running about getting that long-distance runner type muscles in our body. So once we stopped climbing things, we stopped needing brute strength, and we were just like, just keep going. Endurance muscles. Right. So Justin, have you read this story? No, but this is like the thing. And when I did track, you either worked on like sprinter muscle where you were going to like fire off and take off real quick. And we had like the weight lifting that was like strength to do like a big curl or something. Yeah, exactly. But as a long-distance runner, we didn't really want those muscles. So we didn't do like maximum weight. We did light weights over massive repetitions. And we do long-distance runs. And we weren't concerned. So we were training two different kinds of muscle groups in that same weight room to have different effects. And so that's what they looked at. They looked at those different muscle fiber types. And so it's not muscle groups. These are actually different muscle fiber types. There are slow twitch fibers or fast twitch fibers. And fast twitch fibers, they contract very quickly and generate a lot of force in very fast bursting action. Great for sprinting. They fatigue very quickly also. So they're very strong, but they fatigue quickly. Slow twitch fibers, they can, they're strong, but they're not as fast. They, their force is generated over a longer time period. And, but they're, they have endurance. They can keep going much longer. They're more efficient in their energy use. Which explains why 90% of all of my chimp observations at zoos has been of chimps sleeping or resting heavily. Exactly. And so the researchers found that the comparing the human muscle to chimpanzee human fibers are on average 70% slow twitch and 30% fast twitch. And chimpanzee muscles, about 33% slow twitch and 66% fast twitch. So the opposite, basically the exact opposite proportions, two thirds slow, slow twitch for humans, one third slow twitch for chimpanzee and vice versa. So they ran all their data through a computer program to build virtual muscles and kind of came up with ideas of theoretically how much power based on these new proportions of muscle fiber types, could the muscle generate? And chimp muscle is 1.35 times more powerful than a human muscle. That's not as much as I expected. Yeah. And so when they looked at the muscle fiber breakdown of a whole bunch of different animals, and they found that two animals, only two animals regularly had more slow twitch fibers. Blair, zoo lady, can you give me a guess as to... Wait, wait, wait, say this again. They found that only two animals that they looked at, they looked at a whole bunch of them, they found that only two animals had more regularly had a lot more slow twitch fibers. Humans were one. Blair, do you have a guess who the second might be? Turtle. No, they found slow lorries. No. Slow lorries have high percentages of these slow twitch fibers like humans. What's this slow lorries? They're those animals that you should never have them as a pet, but there are lots of videos of people having them as pets usually in... How to Google it. I am right now. Like Japan and in Korea, a lot of people try to have them, but yeah, they're venomous and they're so cute. They're very cute. They're actually... They're pro-Symian, so they're related to lemurs and other primates and you should not approach them. Don't make them angry. Even though they're lethargic and slow moving, they'll bite you. That's super cute. And what's the other one you said there were two? Humans are the other. Humans and slow lorries regularly have the most slow in their analyses, regularly had the most slow twitch fibers. And so their hypothesis, similar to what you said, Justin, is that as humans, as hominins, became bipedal, moved away from the trees and didn't have to climb anymore, that we got used to traveling long distances and for hunting and foraging purposes on our legs and that these slow twitch fibers became a greater proportion of our muscle type. Yeah, you look at, with the exception of maybe birds, I don't know how many animals, how many single species of animal are all over the planet. You know, and we did it, we did it way before there were planes and boats and everything. We kind of ran everywhere. We ran around. We ran there. I didn't die running. We were just running everywhere. So far away. Couldn't get away. Yeah, but they think that it potentially, because the slow twitch muscle fibers use energy more efficiently, that also would have freed up energy for expansion of the brain, which is an energy hungry organ of the body. So this interesting energetic balance and payoff that possibly occurred. This is all hypothetical. We don't have hard evidence, but it wait, we don't have hard evidence of the hypothesis that the evolutionary hypothesis that slow muscle fibers became predominant as a result of our bipedalism and needing to walk and run long distances, and that the energetic cost of that also freed up by moving into more slow muscle, switch, slow twitch muscle fibers, that they freed up energy to expand the brain. So that's just kind of taking it to an extra step. Yeah, but that's sort of part of that process. Then we got the whole thing with the blood getting pumped back into the brain, because we're bipedal and stomping on our feet in these long distance runs. Yeah, but that doesn't come from their data at all. No, no, but all of these, all, but there's, what I'm saying is, it's, yeah, it's another part of that, that great coincidence of factors that comes together that allows the brain. Yes, but evolution, look, talking about things evolutionarily. We don't have the proof of it. We don't have the data for it. We have these individual stories that we can tie together nicely, but correlation does not equal causation. And so until we actually have the smoking gun evidence, we don't know. We don't exactly know what exactly happened. Do you have another story? What you're going to tell me about brains? Oh, me? I have a brain story? Yeah. Didn't you have something to say about brains? Oh, yeah. How do you wake someone in a coma? You yell in their ear. You shake them really hard. You say, I guess someone else is just going to have to eat this. Ice cream. Well, in one study, they found that you can do so by giving them a sleeping pill, or in this case, a sleeping medication. This is a systematic review in JAMA neurology. Michigan Medicine researchers found reason for further exploration of a surprising effect of the drug, zolopidem. Zolopidem, that's also, Oh, go ahead. Isn't that also an antidepressant? It may be used to the side of that, but it's actually prescribed for insomnia to help people get to sleep. So, but they found, this is, of course, not on the label usage. Quoting voice, we saw a dramatic effect in a small amount of patients with a variety of conditions as Martin Nick Bamalasky, MD outgoing resident position University of Michigan Department of Physical Medicine Rehabilitation. For one of the first systematic reviews of this unique effect, he spent two years combing through all the case studies and small trials that have been published. Most of the patients who responded to zolopidem for non-insomnia neurological disorders had either a disorder of consciousness or a movement disorder includes those in comas, vegetative states, and others with Parkinson's disease and dystonia. In addition, some other patients who had experienced stroke or traumatic brain injury or patients with dementia were prescribed for a range of symptoms, including, so this was sort of being used off-label to sort of assist in other ways. So it's kind of interesting, he went through, well, I'm going to start first with the result. For the patients who saw improvement, and there was only a very small percentage who saw this improvement, five to seven percent, I think it was, you know, yeah, it's five to seven percent patients with disorders of consciousness and up to 24% or even higher patients with movement disorders saw a pretty amazing result. The effects tended to last from one to four hours and were repeatable. So these people became, they came out of their coma. Briefly. Only for four hours, though? For four hours. For however long it was active, oh my gosh. Auditory and verbal abilities where some patients improved to minimally conscious state where others were even trying to speak to their loved ones in some cases for the first time in years. And patients' functional neuroimaging results improved as well. Didn't work for everyone? Yeah. I mean, only five to seven percent or 24%? With the consciousness disorder. 24% showed some improvement for those with movement disorders. Yeah, what was also sort of interesting is the side effect, which is what the labeled use is, it only happened in 13 out of 551 patients. So some of them, it worked like the drug was supposed to, but tiny percentage, right? Really interesting. So they started this research. He had turned up 2,300 articles. His team reduced that down to 89 articles. So then they did a full read of the 89 articles and leading it to a more narrowed focus on 67 of them. It says most of them were considered low-level evidence, small group sizes, small trials. But when you combine these 67, you had 551 participants in that 67 that they had sort of drilled down to. So it's a bunch of factors sort of floating in the wind in terms of these aren't really well-controlled experiments, but it's actually a larger sample size in a sense. But yeah, so putting all that together, they found this responsiveness. So why does this work? They don't know. They don't know. They say the researchers report that this drug's unique effects may be present in patients whose basal ganglia, which processes information to perform an action, are no longer functioning correctly. So it may just be targeting that in those patients and patients who have a problem there. Distortive effects of the basal ganglia may suppress the hypnotic effects of the frontal cortex. Says Bumalasky. So I guess there's part of your brain that's constantly trying to hypnotize you in your frontal cortex. You are getting sleepy. Like how does that, I don't know what that means. Yeah, no, the injury has led to some kind of effect of the frontal cortex than reducing activity, reducing cognitive activity in the brain. So yeah, so much more research needs to be done. This drug has unlocked at least a that there is an access. There is a way to reach these people. There is a way to activate the consciousness or the movement in these some people. So now it's not just about using this drug. Now it's about figuring out why that drug had that effect and attempting to recreate it, understand the mechanisms behind it, and perhaps create a better, longer lasting solution for some of these people. Yeah, so the basal ganglia where information first has to come in for it to get to the rest of the brain is maybe being suppressed, inhibited by the frontal cortex. And then the zolpidem goes, the frontal cortex be quiet. And so all of a sudden the basal brain areas, the basal ganglia can suddenly be excited again and get stimulus and respond to stimuli. Fascinating. So fascinating. I love it. I love the possibility of, you know, it's such a small group of people that it'll help. But the idea here is that somebody tried it once and then someone tried it again. And then people found these articles and they were like, my loved one is in a vegetative state or whatever coma condition. Let's try this. I want to try this. And then it worked or it didn't. And so, and doctors are writing these studies up. And so now it's saying we need to look at this more. This is why I have a standing do not unplug order. This is exactly why. Always resuscitate. Always be resuscitating. All right. Justin has put it out there for you all know it now. It's the standing order. Another story along the line of kind of fixing things that people, it's like, how do you, how do you fix some of these things? Chronic pain is something that affects a very large number of individuals for various reasons. One of those is usually from peripheral nerve damage. So accidents that result in amputation. You end up with situations of chronic pain or phantom limb syndrome or injuries that cause peripheral nerve damage that can't really be fixed. You know, you can fix the wound itself, but the nerves are damaged. And something goes wrong in the pathway where once the signals of the nerve damage head up to the brain where pain is actually processed in the somatosensory cortex, there's a misfiring and the system gets messed up. And so this recent paper in nature neuroscience, they're not looking at humans. They were looking at this in mice, but they did leg surgeries on mice and then looked at the nerve. So there was nerve damage, peripheral nerve damage involved in these surgeries that they did. And they looked at activity in the brain and they found that in the somatosensory cortex, S1, there are structural and functional changes in the pain signaling neurons that are the cortical pyramidal neurons. And these changes include rearranging ion channels and also higher levels of excitation. And so these cortical pyramidal neurons, they get hyper stimulated. And so they keep saying, we're in pain. There's something happening. And so they're just constantly stimulated. And because of the changes that happen to them over time, it becomes a permanent chronic condition. And so they found that there are pain signaling neurons that modulate the activity of these cortical pyramidal neurons, pyramidal, pyramidal. Let's see if I can pronounce this word correctly. These are interneurons. They're modulatory in action. And they regulate and control pain signals. And there are parvalbumin interneurons, somatostatin interneurons, and vasoactive intestinal polypeptide expressing interneurons. They're all named based on the compounds that they express. In their study, they found that basically the activity of these pyramid cells in the cortical region of the somatosensory cortex, their activity goes up because the somatostatin and the parvalbumin activity goes down. And their activity goes down because the vasoactive peptide goes up. And so there's this whole shifting of activation that leads to chronic stimulation of the pyramid cells in the cortex, chronic stimulation. And so they used a genetically engineered virus to be able to control the interneurons activity. And then they were able to turn on the somatostatin producing cells specifically in mice that were modeling this chronic pain situation. They found that the hyperactivity of the cortical neurons dropped. And based on behavioral tests of pain, the mice were in less pain when they did this. And then they found that the same effect did not happen when they activated the parvalbumin interneurons. So those are maybe not ones that are so involved in dampening a pain signal. And so they turned on somatostatin producing cells of mice in the first week after their peripheral nerve damage surgery. And they found that activating those neurons within that first week after surgery made it, it prevented the hyperactivity of the pyramid cells from starting. And so chronic pain never happened. The mice never suffered from chronic pain because they stopped the pathway. Just normal pain. It was just normal pain, not chronic pain. Because it's important to keep the normal pain. You don't want to kill all pain. Right. There's so much that pain informs in your life. You would never realize it until it was gone. Yeah, but in this situation, the nerves and the periphery have been damaged. And over whatever time period it takes for those nerves to heal to a degree, for the wound to heal, that signal of damage has been just constantly moving up to the brain, up to the brain, up to the brain, up to the brain, into the sensory cortex. And so that causes those permanent changes to the pyramid neurons in the cortex. And so those permanent changes take place. And then you just have a change in the way that the neurons all work together. And it leads to chronic pain. And so what this study suggests is if the findings work in humans, as well as they did in mice, either drugs or therapies that target these somatostatin-producing interneurons in the somatosensory cortex could be used during surgery or within the week following or the couple of weeks following surgeries or an accident happening to stop chronic pain from ever progressing. So this could be a really big deal to reduce the number of chronic pain sufferers around the world. It could be a huge deal. Very exciting. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. I saw this study and I was like, oh my gosh, this is so interesting. I hope it works. I mean, our brains are not exactly set up exactly the same as mouse brains, but there is a lot of similarity. And if the pain signaling hardware is the same, it should work. And this should be good. Nice. Yeah. So let's jump into our quick news stories at the end of the story, end of the show, Blair, you got a story? Yeah. Do you have a family bed? We definitely all sleep together from time to time. Okay. Yes. So a recent study from Central Queensland University, again from Australia, really doing a lot of Australia stuff tonight, looked at a broad spectrum of research papers about sharing your bed. And as we all know, it's current kind of consensus that sleep is a private, sacred time during which we recuperate and recharge. And we don't want to interrupt that time. Sometimes it's so cuddly though. And it's so nice. Cuddles and children and significant others and pets can muddle up that delicious sleep. Well, this recent research says that's all garbage. That actually these previous studies have been extremely skewed on studying deleterious effect, and they have not really given any time to studying positive effects of a family bed. And that actually in ancient cultures and in some current cultures, bed is not this hermetically sealed experience. It's actually a group activity. There is co-sleeping. This is part of the process during which they get attached to one another. It's a social experience. And so they actually compared human canine sleeping with adult child co-sleeping. They said both forms of co-sleeping share common factors for establishment and maintenance, but also have similar advantages and disadvantages. So also across the board sharing your bed with humans or animals has both positive and negative impacts. So they say apart from it's clear reproductive function for the survival of the species, as well as physiological support for the quality and quantity of sleep that are essential to individual health and well-being. Co-sleeping fulfills basic psychological needs and reinforces and maintains social reactions Throughout history humans have shared their sleeping spaces with other humans and other animals. We propose that human animal and adult child co-sleeping should be approached as legitimate and socially relevant forms of co-sleeping. Moreover, a comprehensive understanding of human animal co-sleeping has significant implications for human sleep, human animal relations, and animal welfare. Biggest waste of money I've ever spent, kid beds. Yeah, so basically the moral of the story is do what you want because if you want to have your child in your bed with you, if you want to have your dog in your bed with you, there might be good psychological reasons for that. And don't let anyone feel, let you make you feel guilty about it. Oh no, heck no. No way, no way. I do. I will say with little babies in the bed though, you know, you want to make sure you're not going to smother them and they're not going to get covered by blankets and pillows. But I mean, aside from that, you know, once kids get a little older, they're good. Good to go. And that's a very common concern, but yeah, how many times have you rolled on to your cat in the middle of the night? This is the thing, I had a bed cat as a youth. You had a cat? I had a cat growing up. Oh yeah, I had a bunch of cats. But I would find myself like on my side on the edge of the bed and just like, and I'd look over and the cat sprawled out across the bed sideways. And I'm like, and every movement of this cat as I slept would take over more and more territory that I was at some point using. And so it was an easy transition to children, I think. The same sort of thing would happen. I'll wake up on the edge of the bed with a kid lying sideways in the bed. Yep, and they do wonderful sideways maneuvers. Yeah, so ultimately sleep how you want, but also when you're looking at comprehensive studies, it's important to study positive and negative effects. Thank you very much. Absolutely. Positive effects going on this weekend in the new space world. SpaceX launched two rockets this weekend, one from the east coast, one from the west coast for their customers. They were both successful and they were able to recover both of the first stage boosters. So go SpaceX. Go, go, go. Keep SpaceX-ing. You heard it here. We're going to make t-shirts. Go SpaceX, keep SpaceX-ing. Keep SpaceX-ing. There we go. That's right. And then this one I thought was fun. We talk about positive and negative effects of everything. Well, maybe there are some positive effects to the cigarette butts that people leave lying around on the ground in city environments. People who don't understand how to throw away cigarette butts. Maybe your cigarette butts are being used by birds. In a study out of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Constantino Macias Garcia studied the use of cigarette butts in the nest building of urban house finches, Carpodacus Mexicanus. There was initial evidence that hinted nicotine and other chemicals in the butts might help deter pests from moving into the nests. And so what he did is he took 32 house-finch nests off and then a day after the nests had hatched, he removed all the natural nest lining and replaced it with artificial felt so that there wouldn't be any parasites that were left in the nest. And then put in, he had three different groups. One group got live ticks, one group got dead ticks, and the other group got no ticks at all. And then they looked to see what happened. They gave the birds nesting material, including cigarette butts. And these adults who were taking care of their young were significantly more likely to add cigarette butt fibers to the nest if it contained ticks. And the weight of the butt material added to the nests that had live ticks. 40% greater than the weight of the cigarettes added to those nests with dead ticks. Oh, so that's interesting. I don't understand how the birds, are the bed birds medicate? Yeah, how do the birds do? It's a natural insecticide. Yeah, that's what's interesting is we've talked about cigarette butts in nests before, but kind of just as happenstance. Exactly. This is, they've actually been given the option and they go, yes, I want this, but only when there are live ticks. I want this when there are ticks. Yes, especially when they're alive. Yep, so interesting. So, you know, these cigarette butts are also dangerous. There is evidence suggesting that mutations can be caused by the presence of the butts in the nests that can interfere with cell division and growth. And so there's a question as to whether the birds are aware of those deleterious effects or whether they're not aware because they just happen over such a long period of time and the birds are just like, get rid of the ticks. Yeah. But how do the birds know? Well, you said they were from Mexico and they were urban. Urban house vengeance. So it's possible that they happened to cross them and they learned it over generations. Yeah. Cigarette butts in the grand scheme of evolution have not been around for a long time. No. Exactly. Final story for the night. Unless, unless Neanderthals were just very neat. They knew where to, they knew where to throw their butt. Yeah. That's right. Pandas. Yeah. Blair, this one's for you. Okay. Protecting, protecting pandas. Uh-huh. It was bad. It's great. Great for other animals and for people too. Worth it. It is worth it. Published in the journal EcoSphere, researchers write, researchers out of University, Michigan State University. The researchers write that sometimes unintended consequences can be happy ones. And give us ways to do even better work as we work toward sustainability. And the efforts that China has been taking to protect habitat for pandas has also led to protection of other animals. And so, uh, the, the forests inside the reserves and in out in reserve outside the reserves borders provide critical canopy materials. They soak up carbon dioxide greenhouse, which is a greenhouse gas. The forests outside of the reserves often grow faster than in the reserves. There are some, just a lot of effects that are taking place that are not just helping the pandas but also the other species that live within their ecosystems and humans as well. Preserving bio desert diversity by preserving the environment. For sure. They are the logo of the World Wildlife Federation, but I will say, there's always a, the, the, the, the but is that I've talked about this before on the show just that overall it's becoming more and more clear to us that saving species is not the key to saving the planet, saving ecosystems. Yes. That is the way to go. Yeah. Which is the, the, which is the gist of this. Well, absolutely. You might, they might have been trying to help the pandas, but really they were helping an ecosystem. But like, yeah, that should go hand in hand. Not always. I think it's, is that, is that it, am I making a, am I not hearing this as the same thing? Or am I not hearing this as the same thing? It's very different. Funds are allocated. Resources are allocated. Efforts are started completely differently if you're saving a species versus an ecosystem. Okay. But the efforts, the efforts that the Chinese were taking, because the pandas have such specific ecosystem requirements for bamboo and for, there's a very specific set of requirements that the pandas have. And that habitat in, in the wild was decreasing. And so by maintaining and actually increasing the amount of bamboo forest habitat, they are, they were doing some other important work for other species. Yeah. Yeah. Does that do it for us? Have we done it? We have come to the end of another episode of This Week in Science. Thank you everyone for listening. Thank you for joining us. Shout out to the chat room over, over at wherever you're, whatever chat agent you're using. I use web chat, loving it. And over on Facebook and also on YouTube. Hello everyone who's watching. Thank you for watching us. And I'd also like to give shout outs to our Patreon sponsors. Thank you for supporting us on Patreon. I would like to thank Chris Clark, Paul Disney, G. 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Don't worry if you can't make it though, because we have past episodes and you can find them at twist.org slash YouTube, or you can find them just at twist.org. Yes. Thank you for enjoying the show. Twist is also available as a podcast. You can Google this week in science in your iTunes directory, download the episodes there, or if you have a mobile type device, you can look for twist number four droid app in the Android marketplace, or simply this week in science in anything Apple Marketplacey. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes will be available on our website. That website is www.twist.org, where you can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts and other listeners. Or you can contact us directly, email Kirsten at Kirsten this week in science.com, Justin at twistminion at gmail.com, or Blair at BlairBads at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist, T-W-I-S, somewhere in the subject line, or your email will be spam-filtered in WLVN. 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I've got one disclaimer, and it shouldn't be news. That what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations, and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just better understand that we're never trying to threaten your philosophy. We're just trying to save the world from jeopardy. This week in science is coming your way. So everybody listen to everything we say. And if you use our methods to roll and die, we may rid the world of toxoplasma. Got the eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye. Cause it's this week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. I've got a laundry list of items I want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought and I'll try to answer any question you've got. The help can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour a week. 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, then please just remember, it's all in your head. This week in science. This week in science. This week in 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, this week in science, this week in science. This brings us to the end of another episode of This Week in Science. Happy Tau Day. Happy birthday to Tom Merritt. Today's Tom Merritt's birthday. Yes. Tau Day. How lovely. What does that mean? Oh, Tau is not Pi. Let's see, what is, let's see, what is, I had 3.6, whatever, what is the, what is Tau number? Oh, 6.28 approximately, instead of, it's double Pi, June 28th, that's why it would be today, 6.28. It's double Pi. Why? Why double Pi? Well, because it would make the math a little bit more easy, make it easier. There's a guy who's actually started something called the Tau Manifesto, trying to argue that we shouldn't use Pi as much as we do. I mean, we use it for so much. Oh yeah, like instead of using 2 Pi R, you'd use Tau R. Yeah, it's just Tau R, right? Yeah, you're right. But, but I don't, I don't think I'd use double Pi all that much. I would like double Pi. See what you did there. So on Tau Day, do we eat 2 Pi's? No, because it's still just a Pi. I mean, maybe, would you eat a half a Pi? No, because it's 2 Pi R, so would you Pi R squared? No, you would have a half a Pi. You couldn't have a whole Pi on Tau Day. Why? You eat a whole Pi on Pi Day. Because it's Pi Day for Pi, but... Tau is twice Pi. It is twice Pi, yeah. So 2 Pi's. Right, Bleak. It's a double stacked Pi. I want that. 2 Pi's with an egg in the middle. What? An egg in the middle. Yeah, like a Pi's breakfast sandwich. I'm tired. Yes, so the argument for Pi versus Tau, this is from Scientific American, the crux of the argument is that Pi is a ratio comparing a circle's circumference with its diameter, which is not a quantity mathematicians generally care about, which is why this argument for Tau over Pi is basically led by mathematicians. The article goes on to say, in fact, almost every mathematical equation about circles is written in terms of R for radius. Tau is precisely the number that connects a circumference to that quantity. Yeah, Tau R, I get it. Right, but, this goes on the article, the use of high extents far beyond the geometry of circles. I mean, you're talking about circles, you're also going to be talking about triangles as well, you're talking about over 60 degrees. The internal geometry of a triangle is also explained by Pi. Critical mathematical applications such as Fourier transforms, Riemann's Zeta functions, Gaussian distributions, roots of unity, integrating over polar coordinates, and pretty much anything involving trigonometry employs Pi. And throughout these diverse mathematical areas, the constant Pi is preceded by the number two, more often than not. Tauists have compiled exhaustively long lists of equations with two Pi holding a central place. If two Pi is the perennial theme, the almost magically recurring number across myriad branches of mathematics, shouldn't that be the fundamental constant we name and celebrate? No, I say no. Blair says, tired Blair says no. No, tired Blair has no time for Tau. No time for Tau, but it's Tau Day, that's why we're talking about it, because it's Tau Day. Yeah, so we should have the argument. And my argument is, get out of here, Tau. I'll take my two Pi. And you eat one Tau. I'll take my two Pi. Oh, let's change the subject to a dozenal system. To your hair? Let's talk about your haircut. I don't know what's that. What's going on there? You got a fade. What's going on? Is that what you call a fade? You got the sides done. It was just too hot in Davis, huh? It's 107 degrees. Ow, less hair. He's depiliating. Here's what happened. They were going to do like, they're like, I'm going to get it shorter. I need a haircut. And I close my eyes and they're like, and then she goes, what do you think? So I open my eyes and I'm like, a little longer than that. And then I close my eyes again. Sorry, it's hair. It grows. I have somebody from Alameda County who, I think I can get on, who's a hazmat worker there? Well, who could talk about what they do. And I guess, I guess they're explaining that unlike most sort of hazmat departments in most counties, it's the role usually filled by somebody who also might be like at the fire department or a retired fire department person or something like that. Alameda County has to respond to all of the refineries and some big chemical companies along with the regular or rigmarole. So if you'd be interested in that, they'd be willing to come on the show. I think it'd be an interesting, the conversation I had already was like, wow, they get into some pretty, we have to respond to some pretty interesting things. We should go do a twist short. Oh, right along. No. No. With the hazmat books. They go on their own. I'll stay way over here. It seems interesting. Yeah. Okay. Oh yeah. You can go. You can do it. Perfect. I'd absolutely do it. Perfect. Hazmat spills. Yeah, totally. But it's more than spills. They do like, they check drains for stuff that's like going out into creeks and the likes like that. Yeah. There's like, I guess, people can commit suicide through chemical memes. So that's a thing they respond to. There's like a whole, like everything on that list that you could, you know. I'm not saying it'd be the funnest day, but I'd be very interested. It'd be so much fun. It'd be very interesting. I went to the poop plant. It was fascinated. Okay. I'm going to give you the contact info to talk to this person. No, no. We should. I don't know. No, let's, let's defer to. Yeah. Let's, let's hear what he has to say about it. Or just have the money to talk about what they're, what they do. Mm-hmm. I don't know if that's something I'll interview. Really? Yeah. Maybe, I mean, I don't know. Maybe if it's tied to something new. Newsy. Newsy. I thought of it in terms of ongoing efforts to protect the environment. Aha. I like poop plants. Yeah. Water, water treatment plants are so fascinating. It was hard to keep my jaw from dropping because I wanted to keep my mouth firmly closed. But this makes sense. But I was, I was. Um, let's see. We did the show and. Oh, how was last week? Is everything good? I think so. Sounded good. Good. Hitting the wine Fada. I did hit the wine. I did hit the wine Fada. I have an empty glass now. Now it's just water. Mm-hmm. One glass of wine for tonight's show. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I do. Yeah. I think last week, last week went fine. They, the chair made fun of me because I, I paused the. The Patreon scroll like six times. Read everything. Yeah. My tongue wasn't as limber. I had my slip ups though. I read it fast, but I have like stumbles. You read it and didn't have any stumbles because you. So you were much smoother. Anybody listening would not have known. That you had paused. That's true. Yeah. Hot rod. Yep. Six times. I counted. Did you, did you see the cuttlefish crab that we talked about? Yeah. Isn't it fascinating? Totally. They look like a crab. Like, but it's a cuttlefish. Who are you? Yeah. And cuttlefish. That had never, that had never seen crabs before. Did it? Yeah. That's odd. So the expectation was that either it's like inherent or that they saw crabs in their eggs before they were pulled out of the wild. No. Yeah. All right. I got to go. I'll see y'all next week. Oh, you got it. You're out of here. Okay. Bye Justin. See you next week. Good show. Thank you. Independence. Yes. So do I have to put in a specific. No, there's no specific location. It's just, I think it's like when you get there kind of a thing, which is, I don't know. Do you think I could fit two tents on my one site? Probably, right? Probably. Okay. I'm trying to see if I can get a tag along. So it's a little less pricey. Yeah. And I'm, I mean, I'm going to also talk with my friend. We'll, we'll see what happens. I'll talk with my friend and see if I can talk her into, see if I can talk with her in the next couple of days until letting us share her RV. And then we'll have a spot. Okay. So, but I should, I should just grab it because they're going to sell out. Aren't they? Probably. Okay. I don't know anything about it, but they probably will. Yeah. I'll probably buy it tomorrow. All right. All right. But it looked like what I'm probably going to do is I'm probably going to drive up there on, on Friday. Cool. And then get there by like end of the day Friday. Okay. And then hang out Saturday and Sunday and then hang out Monday until the eclipse happens. And then essentially pack up and leave. Right. So not actually make it up to Portland. Probably not this time. Yeah. Just because with all of that stuff, I'm already taking so many days off of work. I'm probably, I don't know if we're doing any more, but it might make more sense for me to fly another time to come see you. Yeah. Come on a weekend or your weekend. Yeah. Yeah. Cause it's not a long flight, right? How long is it? Like an hour and a half? Yeah. Yeah. That's easy. Yes. Rob the sparkly. We are talking about you guys in the chat room. We're talking about the eclipse and we're going to go to Independence Oregon. That's the, the decision was made. There is a camp out festival happening in Independence Oregon. That's where we're going. It's called, what was it called? Independence something. Here we go. What's it called? It was called independence goes dark. Go to independence goes dark.com. I know whiskey renegade. We're in an area that it could be cloudy and it's in the valley and at 10, 18 in the morning when the eclipse is supposed to be, it could very well not be sunny. And I've been trying to explain this to my friends, but they're like, we're going south of Salem and we're going to go to independence. And I'm like, okay. Because they just want to have a spot and it's only like an hour or something away from Portland. So it'll be easy. Yeah. The stuff goes to Portland. I've heard is all sold out already. Yeah. I think it'll be so great. I'm really looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to it as well. And maybe we should find out if Zazzle sells eclipse glasses. That's very smart. Zazzle, do you sell eclipse glasses that we can make twist branded in the next month? Also, can you change your email contact on that? Oh my God. No, right. I have to get into it to change the email contact. Don't I? Yeah. I don't want to. But I'm going to get it fixed. Okay. Call in sick and go somewhere sensible. I know Southern Illinois is supposed to be the best spot. Somewhere around Illinois, you're going to get two and a half minutes of totality. What? Yeah. We're going to get like a minute and 45 seconds, which is fine. That's great. It'll be fine. I mean, we can even just cancel the whole trip and stay in Portland and not get totality, but basically see most of the eclipse. Right. And be fine. But I guess that's what we're doing now because totality because totality. We're Americans because totality. We want it all. Yeah. Note to people going to see the eclipse. Don't stare at the sun. It's never good. I mean, you don't stare at the sun on a bright beachy day. Don't stare at the sun on an eclipse day without your special eclipse glasses or a welder's helmet or goggles. And then when it's in totality, you can take off your goggles and you can look and maybe you'll be able to see the sun's Corona and stuff, which is that's kind of why I want to go see the totality because then you get the other cool effects. Possibly. But bring a sweatshirt because the temperature can drop 20 to 30 degrees. What? Yes. Are you serious? Yes. 20 to 30 degrees. The temperature can drop 20 to 30 degrees. You need one and a half minutes. Yeah. It's like over the course. It gets cooler and cooler and cooler and then totality. You've got the coldest and then it comes back. Yeah. Oh, I really want to see this. Right. What? What? It's going to be weird. Oh, here we go. Whiskey Renegade says the peak is over Kentucky Lake in Western Kentucky at 1. 36 PM Eastern time. Awesome. Right now I'm trying to get my friends go to go who have a connection to get a particular fancy car to drive. A particular fancy car. That would take zero gas. Oh, fun. A Tesla. Yeah. Nice. Which means I might autopilot might bring me to Oregon. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thursday night there will be at Independence goes dark. There's river's edge a space themed movie. I love this. There are going to be bands that are like terrible. There's a cover band. Oh my God. It's going to be awesome. Oh my God. Are you, wait, when are you going Friday? Yeah. Probably Friday. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to have to stay through Tuesday. Right. Like you're probably going to go to Portland on Monday. Yeah. That's not the question. Yeah. I don't know about the timing. Of everything. I mean, it could be. I don't know. Probably won't be too bad. Won't be too bad of a drive going back into Portland. Probably. Food truck festival. Brew festival. Just. Okay. It's a 10 hour drive. Yeah. It's an hour shorter than all the way to Portland. It's not bad. It's doable. Sunday night there's a ghost walk. The beer thing. I saw it's like 15 bucks and you get like unlimited beer in a, in a souvenir glass. Yes. Like, oh, I'm buying that one. I buy the campsite for sure. I know it. It's only open Saturday. What? How many different breweries, cider houses? There's some great ones. You're going to love that. It's going to be good. Independence goes dark. That's what we're doing. I'm really excited. I am too. I'm glad that I've finally made a decision because I was having a hard time with deciding. I don't know. This little town of independence is just going to be overrun by people. I think I hope that they've got a good system. It's going to be my very first trip to Oregon. I've never been. Never been to Oregon? What? Yeah. I've never made it. I made it to the very edge. I made it to what is it? Arcada right above Humboldt. Right. Our north as you've been. Yeah. You got to travel, girl. Well, I've traveled other places. I just haven't traveled north. Pacific Northwest. I know. I know. I think that honestly, that's part of the reason I've never gone is I know I'm going to fall in love with it. I'm going to be in trouble. It's foggy and full of redwood trees. That's like my fantasy. I basically am a Sasquatch. Yeah. It's exact. It's perfect. It's perfect. I can't wait. It's going to be awesome. I love the rain, Rob. Rain is great. The rain, but the rain. Rain has the best accessories too. Like I'm not super into clothes and accessories. Jackets and umbrellas. Rain accessories are so fun like galoshes. Yeah. Umbrella's hats. I don't know if I've ever heard anyone say galoshes were fun. They are fun. You can get them with like fun patterns and stuff. I love it. Yeah. Do you see much wildlife where you live? I know you're like in Portland. So it's very metropolitan. But you're pretty close to natural spaces, right? Yeah. Very close. So what kind of wildlife do you see normally up there? I heard there was a coyote in town here recently. We get those. Yeah. No, I mean urban wildlife is pretty standard. But if you go out, there are, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I've never, I haven't encountered wildlife more than deer. Okay. Because up like as you get further north in California, up near kind of Eureka. There's more bears. You see elk, which is, there were just elk walking along the side of the highway when I went to far northern California. That was, that was fascinating. I was like, you, you don't belong, you're like, you belong in Alaska or something. Like what are you doing here? You look too fancy for here. Too fancy. Yeah. I'm sure there are elk up here. I mean the fish, we've got salmon. Trout. Lampreys. Lampreys, gross. Lampreys. That's my Lamprey impression. I love Lampreys actually. They're pretty awesome. No, I didn't do it right. It says. They have all those rows of teeth. It was like, I'd like, and they're like, I'm stuck to the glass or whatever. Oh my goodness, they're amazing. Possums. Oh, I had a, wait, opossum. Gosh darn it. Possums are in Australia. Opossum. I saw an opossum underneath my neighbor's deck the other night. We have opossums. I know Pam is coming out. She's going to beat Doug from KDBS because they met at the last solar eclipse when Doug traveled to Australia. And so now she is moving, she's traveling here. No way. They are going to be in Eastern Oregon. So I think even though Pamela is coming all the way from Australia, unless she makes it to Portland, I don't know if I'm going to after like before, well before or after the eclipse. I don't know that I'm going to see her. It would be so cool to meet her in person and to meet her. Yeah. That would be awesome. I would love it. I would love it. Hmm. God, I found these really great. I'm going to screen share. Possum versus opossum. I found some really good one. I like this one. This one's pretty good actually. And then let's see. Possum, Australian cutie. Opossum, American freaky. This one actually is pretty good too. Cute versus freaky. I like possums. Opossums. I think that they're cute too. They're very cute and when they're abandoned, when they're babies and we use them for education, they're very good education animals. But people think they're cute and they try to approach them and they get savagely bitten because opossums are like, yeah, well, opossums don't often carry rabies, but they're unfairly lumped in with skunks and raccoons because they're urbanized, but because they're marsupials, they're a lot less likely to carry rabies. However, because of humans being very scared of rabies, opossums are often destroyed to check. Yeah, I read something recently that opossums are a very important animal to keep around because they actually, because of their movements at night, they end up kind of carrying the parasite load in an area. So it's actually better for other, for your pets if possums are around hanging out because they're going to be outside more and, yeah, the possums can reduce the parasite load, the pest load that would affect your animals. That's interesting. Well, they're also nature's garbage man. So that's important. They're one of those animals that eats all the things no one else wants to eat. And then without them, the world would be pretty gross. I suppose there's not like an infographic, like a parent contrast of possums and opossums. Whiskey renegade is telling me that for the clips that I need to be mobile, keep an eye on the weather and ready to drive if I can break out of cover of clouds in time. Yeah. Might take off in the morning. Drive. We'll see. Ed says Pamela might be visiting Portland, renting an RV. She might have to come through. Oh, cool. She has to get in touch. Oh, Rob sparkly learned something. You didn't realize there was a difference between opossum and possum. Yay. I did a thing. You did a thing. It's good. I love teaching people things. Oh, we crazed a possum. That's sweet. Sweet. All right. Next week we have fourth of July on Tuesday. So Wednesday will be just fine. For the show. Yep. You know, faux show. Oh, show. Ready. I'm going to go to bed. You're tired. No, I'm not. As you hold yourself up with your hand. And the problem is I'm sitting when I house it, I sit. And I'm so used to standing during the show that when I sit, my body just like, I can't do it. The standing really keeps me like energized and awake and attentive. Right. And if you're sitting down, it's like, this is different. I'm not moving as much. What's going on? Yeah. My, my muscles aren't engaged. I guess I should go into torpor now. Oh, it's not unlimited beer. It's four beer tokens. But that's still four. But that's still pretty good for $15. Yeah. Now that's very good. With a, with a souvenir cup that I probably would have spent $15 on if it was available. Poop is life when you have four cats. Poop is life always. Always. Always. All right. We're going to, we're going to call it 10, 28 PM. We did a thing. We did a show. And we will be back next week. With lots of science. Hopefully some awesome fourth of July stories to share in the after show. And yes. Blair. Blair. And yes. Blair used to use a computer on a treadmill. Oh, yeah. Then I'll just do the show. Researchers for the University of Australia have reported that it is a problem. And then you trip and fall. That's not going to work. It's not going to work. All right. Everybody thank you so much for watching. This week in science will be back again next week. You know, we will. And we'll be on the interwebs. And then in the meantime, we're always on Twitter and Facebook and the email and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, stay in touch. Don't be a stranger. Blair say good night. Good night. Say good night. Good night. Thank you.