 Hello everyone, we are back again for the live podcast broadcast of this week in science. This is the time where we all get together and talk about science and have a wonderful time for a tight 90 and then you know that if we make mistakes or if there's weird technical glitches, things get edited out for the podcast. And so the podcast is the edited version of all of this. You are here for the live show. Thanks for being here. And yeah, click all the likes and the hearts and the things that help us with the algorithms and letting people know that we're live and that other people should come and watch us. So share it out with the world. Are we ready? We're ready. Yes, I will say, okay, I will say, ah, starting this wonderful show. It three to this is twist this week in science episode number 925 recorded on Wednesday, May 10th, 2023, the science of soap and mosquitoes. Hey, everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and on tonight's show, we will fill your heads with sperm, assassins and magic mushrooms. But first, don't think I was ready for that. I can do this disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The future is coming. According to some sources, it is already here. Science has gained unparalleled knowledge. Research has found breakthrough applications and technology has already been set in motion to make significant changes to the lives of humans. Change is coming and the world as it stands is currently operating under an obsolete model. We are eating wrong, thinking wrong, drinking the wrong water, breathing the wrong air and are still reliant on fossil fuels, despite knowing the damage it is causing. We are still on a money system that incentivizes accumulation over application, is used as excuses for the unethical treatment of humans and allows lifesaving research to languish because insert moneyed interest reason here while we do tax cuts. Under educating, under investing in the next generation while raising the retirement age around the world just as working is becoming the most automated it has ever been. But like I said, change is coming and you'll see it first right here on This Week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mime I can't get enough, I wanna learn and build it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week, there's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek, I wanna know. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there, welcome to another episode of This Week in Science, we're back again, hello, we're here, we're all here, the gang's all here, so let's talk about some science, what did we bring this week, I have stories about diamond funnels, the pan genome and soap. What did you bring Justin? The preferred sex of space, travel, the, oh what's, I got a story about what's going wrong with doctors, what are doctors up to, it's terrible these days. A potential possible, it's just a case report about magic mushrooms and color blindness. Blair, that's gonna be all about you? No. Okay, what's in the animal corner? No, it wasn't my case study, I can tell you right now. I brought the sperm, of course, you know, sperms in the show, it's usually my story. And then also, I brought assassin bugs and smelly or not so smelly crabs. Right, I mean, just listening to this lineup tonight, I am, this is a talk show. Yeah, this is a talk show and I'm finding myself speechless already, so let's get moving into all of this fun stuff. As we jump into the show, everyone, I want to remind you that yes, this is a podcast, so if you have not yet subscribed, find us wherever good podcasts are found, look for this weekend science. We also live stream weekly on YouTube, Facebook and Twitch. Again, look for this weekend science on Twitch, we're Twist Science and we're Twist Science on the Instagram and the Universidad and other places. But if you want to watch live, it's Wednesdays, 8pm Pacific time. That's where you find us and if you just want to find all this information, it's at our website twist.org. That'll help you out a lot, I think. Moving to the science. Let's do it, what do you got? Yes, I was waiting for the ready, let's get ready and go. Ready, let's go. Okay, so once upon a time, Einstein was pondering the world. He came up with the theory of general relativity, which we keep finding no evidence against. General relativity. It works, it works, it works, that's great. But he was really, really bothered by spooky action at a distance. He was very bothered by quantum entanglement. And despite the fact that he discovered it. Yes, he discovered it, but he was, he didn't like it. He didn't like it. Yeah, he's like, oh, everything seems to go this way, but I don't like it. And he liked the idea of local realism, that everything was connected through localities and that there was a connection between the macroscopic and the microscopic and the quantum and that it could all be connected, which we haven't really been able to connect the macro world with the quantum world yet. That's not happening. There was another researcher later in the 70s who came up with an idea. He wanted to study what was called, actually, John Bell was in the 1960s. He wanted to settle the question of the idea of this locality versus entanglement that could be active across space and time. And so there were random experiments that were performed, not random, but planned experiments that were performed by Bell on two entangled particles at the same time. And if they were doing the same things, then everything was in or if they were doing things the way Einstein planned, then Bell was wrong. And if they were doing things the way Bell thought with what he calls Bell's inequality, then everything's great. Anyway, these are concepts that you can find out about in physics books and everything. Suffice it to say, experiment after experiment after experiment has been run to kind of repeat these Bell experiments over and over again. Because really, a lot of assumptions have had to be made through the years to determine whether or not the results are accurate. And one of those is that usually the researchers are limited by space. So where they put their physics measurement experiment and how far apart entangled particles can actually be and how it all works. And so there have been some very, very great experiments that have supposedly settled the disputes over the years, but some researchers just publishing in Nature this week have really reconfirmed the results. And in this reconformation of the results, they have shown that semiconducting circuits operate according to the laws of quantum mechanics, even though they are not microscopic quantum objects, they're macroscopic quantum objects. So they showed by taking these superconducting circuits and separating them by 30 meters. They decided that this was enough space between their measurement devices to... Yeah, that's a good distance. It's a really good distance. And it would take out assumptions of like, Oh, well, maybe photons are involved. Maybe things are moving at light speed and just the time it takes for the measurement to be taken. Actually, there's information traveling at the speed of light that's impacting the results. So they have pretty much shown that that is not the case. And so they created the system with two quantum entangled particles, 30 meters apart within superconducting circuits, these qubits. And they were able to show that, yes, indeed, at the exact same time, with no light speed travel involved, that the circuits were working exactly as they should be. So in effect, it was disproving Einstein's ideas of a locality and actually providing more support for the concept of spooky action at a distance and that entanglement can occur and these objects can be connected and have the same movements across space and time, instantaneously. So anyway, new experiment, new technology to allow it to occur and repeating results, but with more significance. So their data, they did a million measurements and their data is highly, highly, highly significant. The fact that it's highly significant suggests that this is going to, with the superconducting circuits, potentially lead to better encryption in our computer communication systems. Maybe it will lead to... I love how that is often... That, to me, is the silliest reason. I mean, it's the first one they think of, I guess, every time because you always hear about, oh, we can encrypt things. Okay, what's the encryption going to be based on? Well, we're going to use a software that structure was created 50 years ago to navigate that, like, well, then you just ruined the whole thing. Yeah, and another aspect of this whole study, well, it's very interesting and I think exciting for physicists and also for people who are interested in the potential of where quantum entanglement might be able to take us. The experiment itself, it had to be produced in a very specific superconducting situation, close to zero Kelvin, so very close to these cold, cold, cold temperatures. So this is not real-world stuff yet. This is going to take a really long time before it becomes more real-world application. But... So what I'm interpreting from this is Einstein was wrong, he was actually right because he was bothered by spooky action at a distance anyway, so he was right in how he was kind of wrong. No, he was right. He just didn't like it. He didn't like it. He didn't like the answer that he figured out had to be the result. Like, this is the biggest crime that has happened in physics is that Einstein came along before we had the never-dying human, which is still not quite there, right? But like, what would another 50 years of Einstein having a functional brain working on these problems have produced? Nothing that anyone else could have understood. Well, no, but he would be able to... I mean, because people do understand, but like, would he have spent the last 50 years experimentally trying to prove any of his stuff? No, he would have moved on and created new things that people were like, gosh, we got to experimentally test this now too. Like, he wouldn't have been done. I mean, that's part of it also is that he wasn't an experimentalist. He was a theorist. And so he did the math and he just... He couldn't put it all together, but now we have the technology. People are starting to put things together. And so even though he was bothered about it, maybe he would have kept working on it and working with experimentalists and helping to get where we are now, but technology had to move forward enough for us to have superconducting circuits that could have entangled qubits within them. There's also the possibility that he would have to work with experimentalists because Einstein at the end... Well, actually, I've thought of all of the ideas. It's right. There's nothing else to figure out here. I guess I just work with the experimenters trying to show examples of it now because I came to the end and it's all correct. It's all correct. It's all good. I think he'd still keep working on stuff. Yeah, I was thinking about it and I'd love to hear from our audience their thoughts throughout the show or even later on who they think are the greatest minds that we know of because, yes, situationally, people can have great minds and not get recognized for it, but people like Einstein could visualize all this stuff in their heads and hold it in their heads. Stephen Hawking could hold all sorts of equations and thoughts in his heads and hold on to them enough to be able to take the time and have the patience to spell it out letter by letter. So, I don't know. There are some amazing minds that have graced this planet. Yeah. I think it's an interesting question. But do you mind Justin telling me a story? Well, let's see. Where are we starting? Let's start in space here. Okay. So, humans have been thinking about life on another planet. Starting on another planet, there's this whole thing that we got going on on Earth doing that somewhere else. Well, the nearest solar system would maybe take tens of thousands of years to travel to requiring thousands of generations of humans to be on a spaceship. Heading there. Which represents some problems. First of all, you have to have a decent mix of men and women. It has to be a large enough number that you don't have too much genetic drift or inbreeding or what have you going on there. So, you have to start with a decent sized population and then you also can't be bigger than the ship. So, at some point, you've got to pull straws to see who goes out the airlock. Or shrink humans. Is that where you're going with this? I've always been for shrinking humans. I think humans are way too big. You don't need to be this size anymore. We can be smaller. But more likely, we would be colonizing Mars, which is a much shorter trip. And if we did that, we wouldn't necessarily need to have the Adam and Eve progenitor generations going. You could have an all male crew. You could have an all female crew. You could have mixed up. It wouldn't really make too big of a difference there. Except this is researchers from the Space Medicine European Space Agency in Germany. They conducted a study published in scientific reports found female astronauts much more efficient. They have lower water requirements for hydration. They have less total energy expenditure while in space. They use less oxygen, produce less CO2, and produce less heat, which is a thing that you have to dissipate once you're in space because you can't just have it keep heating up in the capsule. All of these advantages, plus they can come in smaller sizes. Then they also looked at the effect of body size. And this is measuring, by the way, similar statures. So this isn't just like a tall guy and a short lady comparing the two. This is of the same height. The physiological differences between men and women are there. One of the things they tested also was exercise because you have to exercise in space. In space you have to do this countermeasure stuff otherwise the body atrophies. They found that women use less energy. They sweat less. Women sweat. What was it, 29% less than men? Which means they have to rehydrate less. So why does all of that matter, Justin? Isn't there, you know, all this stuff in space where once you're there, you're there? The cost of getting payloads to the International Space Station, 93,400 per kilogram. They found that on a 1,000-day mission, 1,080-day mission, a four-member all-female crew would require 1,695 kilograms less food weight. Now the water might be recycled. The oxygen systems on board might be about the same. So you don't take weight off of that. There's some packaging difference. Also in the food waste. But still, just with the back of the calculator, 93,400 per kilogram, 1,695, you end up with $158 million savings just in the gender of the crew. Also it frees up 2.3 cubic meters of space from the waste packaging of the food alone, which we're looking at. And you have to deal with, yeah. So that is 4% of the habitable volume of the Gateway Halo module for NASA's proposed Lunar Orbit Space Station. So if 4% of your living area is trash, it's quite significant. That's quite significant. Well, women never poop, so you don't have to worry about that. I'm kidding. That I didn't know. See, that's what I did at the end of the show. I think one of the things, though, I learned that when I was in Huntsville, Alabama, I learned that instead of sending up ice to pack a whole bunch of the food that is perishable, they pack it in ice cream. So I wonder if they would have to pack more ice cream. It's a fun fact. Women on the show. Fun fact. They don't actually take the space ice cream. Never goes to space. No, no, not the, not the, not the, not the dust. Not the dusty stuff, but real ice cream. Because it has a, it's able to hold. I guess a high, I guess it would be a high heat about so they can hold the cold in for a while. It's able to keep perishable. It's also very malleable, I would imagine. It's malleable and delicious. And so it's not wasted. So yeah, relative astronauts. Yes. Relative difference between the male astronauts and the female astronauts on a similar stature across these metrics is range from either a 5% to a 20% less comparable usage of energy or what have you. Then compared to the 50th percentile stature for US females, 1.6 meters. So that's about 5, 3 to 5, 4 somewhere in there. They were even better. So they were 11% to 41% better on the comparables. This translates into less use of oxygen, production of CO2, metabolic heat. You know that, what was that, that, that fail, terrible mission where they're like, oh, we got to hurry up and get back to Earth before we run out of oxygen. If it were all women, it would have been a much different situation. It would have been like, oh gosh, it looks like we're all going to have to get back to Earth with enough oxygen for another week up here. So it's fine. We got this. So pretty soon you're going to be saying, I'd love to be an astronaut, but I'm too tall. So there is already. So you can already be too tall to be an astronaut. That's true. Interestingly, they don't have a, they don't have a weight. They don't have a weight written listed as like, oh, you're too heavy. Well, that makes sense because it's more about fitness, right? They probably care more about your fit test than they do about your weight. Yeah, they don't show a body mass index or anything like this as a fall cage. Well, BMI is crash anyway. And there's a minimum height. That minimum height is frighteningly close to what that fiftieth percentile female form would be. So they might need to drop that one because, especially as, you know, we're talking about now something that's going to be tighter quarters than the ISS in this lunar, this lunar mission, this lunar space station, shorter is going to be better in space. They're going to have to build things differently then because I think that's part of why that the height, there's a height minimum, right? Is so you can reach controls and you fit properly in the seats and all these sorts of things that maybe they're going to start making everything smaller. Yeah, yeah. They need to start making the space. Isn't there a problem like they were going to do a space walk but then they realized like, they only had a, like a couple of the spacesuits that were, that would fit women. The right side. Yes, yes. Yeah, like you need to make all those smaller. You need to lower your height requirement because the ergonomics of working in space in these tighter quarters also is going to be an issue. This is a whole other benefit, which is you've got smaller work areas now. You can have big, tall, lanky people going around bumping into things. You need smaller people in space. See, I assumed this story was going to be all about this, like, well, women are better at multitasking or also some sort of weird societal thing, but this is all about sex. Or metabolism. Yes. It's all about our metabolism. Yeah, it's metabolism. Yeah. There's also, well, okay. So there is also, there's also anecdotal stuff that's not in this report here about the eye problems that astronauts have being pronounceably, pronounceably. People can say the words. Being worse in men. Right. So for whatever reason, they found that the female astronauts do not have the same amount of pressure built up behind the eyes that's causing the vision issues. So that's another thing. They don't know why that is yet, but that's a physiological reason for potentially having all female crews. And then there's just, you know, there's just the obvious. There's just the obvious, which is the study way we just did. Physiologically, they're cheaper to send to space and if they also can use shorter astronauts, then that's also a benefit. So now it's, is that a cheap date? You're a cheap person to send to space. Okay. And if you want to also, if you want to get a slightly misogynistic, no, if you need that before we go, no, I want to say now, I'll just say, I'm going to be slightly misogynistic and say having the big strong man. You know, it's weightless. You don't need anybody to help you move the couch. And if you need a tall person, there's nothing you can just push off off the floor and you can get to the top shelf, regardless of how tall you're starting. So you don't actually, and when last misogynistic piece, there are no spiders to kill in space. So if you're not reaching for the tall thing, killing the spider or helping lift the heavy thing, what good are you? That's a great question. Especially since we're doing all sorts of work on, I don't know, replacing sperm, making sperm, but Blair, you had some interesting work about biology, a sperm. Oh, yes. You want to talk about it? Yeah, this is a grant and award announcement from Michigan State University. So I don't have results to share with you. I just have a really quick announcement of a study that's beginning that I think is really interesting. So we'll have to have a, like a to be continued when this is released and I don't know how long. But did you know that the small African fish called electric fish or elephant fish, they have sperm that don't have tails. They have no flagellum. How do they get places? I don't know. But so there's this $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation that has been awarded to Michigan State University to study these fish and their tailless sperm. The hypothesis is that the reason they don't have tails on their sperm is to save energy. The idea is that they have prioritized the energy spent on their electric fish activities, which is basically they live in these murky African waters. They're so muddy that they rely on electric charges to find each other. And I think we even did a study on the show about them and the way that they talk to each other through electric charges and it's truly fascinating. But both the pulses of electrical output and the brain power needed to analyze the pulses require a lot of energy. So the idea is maybe this was the trade-off. You get your electric communication but you lose the tails on your sperm, which seems like a really weird role of the dice evolutionarily that worked out. But hey, maybe. And so the way that they're going to test this is by isolating the genes that are related to sperm tail development. Insert it into a species of fish that has flagellal sperm so that they develop sperm without a tail to see if those tails disappear. So then they find that this is the gene and then they want to be able to measure respiration in both the electric fishes and the non-electric fishes to see if there's a difference in energy output with and without sperm tails. So that's kind of their beginning theory to see why this is happening. Because also we don't know how it works. How does the sperm get there? Which this is the other big overarching question of this study is like the expectation is sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive, sperm move, eggs really don't. So that's the way it works. But how do these little balls of sperm without tails get to the egg? And if so, is there a different type of investment in their sex cells in this species versus other species where there are sperm with tails? Does that impact the way the males and females interact with each other and how they treat fertilization and reproduction in general? It's a really big question. And on top of that, then you kind of have to ask, OK, humans have assumptions about how males are programmed to fertilize and spread seed and all this kind of stuff. And females are passive recipients. But in this case, if it's not like that, then there's a fundamental biological assumption that we are making potentially societally for expectations for males and females as well that could be based in nothing, basically. So this one little study on what happens when you remove sperm tails could have implications for biology in general, which I think are very interesting. Yeah. So my big question here, though, is why the sperm tail is there to move the sperm to the egg because the egg doesn't move, right? Right. But we know throughout the biological kingdom, like pollen doesn't have a tail, does it? Like there are broadcast spawners where just things go out into the environment. You're right. So like, do they just produce so much? Is there ejaculate so full of these little sperm balls that it doesn't matter that they don't swim? Yeah. Do they deposit it very locally? Yeah. Right? Does it not have as far to go? Like, are the females' eggs being released much closer to the cloacal opening? Like, what is happening? I need to know more about electric fish sex right away. So Michigan State University, please hurry. Release your study. I will conclude to be concluded on the second science. To be concluded as Blair is satisfied in understanding more about fish sex. Yes. And Taylor sperm, what even are you? How do you exist? It's just a cell. It's a thing. What? Yeah. How do you know what you do? How has evolution allowed this to persist? That's what I want to know. Because it worked and it hasn't messed up yet. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Moving on from fish sex and Taylor sperm. Let's talk about diamonds. Diamonds we know come. They are not all over the world. They're all over the place. They're the ones we like to use and make into jewelry and stuff. They're in these deposits around the world. And they're usually in what are called Kimberlite eruptions, which are these eruptions from the mantle of the earth. They come up through the mantle and out to the crust of the earth. And researchers want to know more about how the internals of the earth work to figure out why Kimberlite deposits are some places and not others. What are the forces at work and how are things happening? Well, some researchers just published in Nature Geoscience on their supercomputer modeling. So they haven't actually gone and looked for these things, although other people have done a lot of work already. And what they found is that there's a lot of data out there, right? Yeah. And so they found through their supercomputer modeling that it matched very, very closely to where a lot of these Kimberlite eruptions have taken place. But what they have found in looking through the history of what occurs is that there seems to be a plume or a pillar of heat that comes up through the mantle. And they think that there's this pillar of heat that drives up toward the surface and actually ignites these Kimberlite eruptions. And so it's a matter of finding how the heat is being transported up from the deep earth to the Kimberlites. And they were able to determine that these mantle upwellings, what they call them, and they really, really like the term pillar of heat is what connects the earth deeply into the surface. And they were able to successfully capture these Kimberlite eruptions in Africa, in Brazil, Russia, and also in the United States. Some of the eruptions that we know of in Canada were not discovered, were not predicted by this model. So they think that there may be other mechanisms at work. But they've been able to predict Kimberlites back to one billion years of mantle movement of this energetic cycling of heat from the inner core, the mantle up to the surface, and additionally the reconstructions of tectonic plate movements across the surface of the planet. Wait, are you indicating that Canadians have diamonds that they just haven't been telling people about? No, they've been telling people about them. They just, they didn't occur by the same process. They think that they occurred more by a process called plate subduction. So when the plates, one plate moves underneath another plate and causes a lot of heat to occur. But in this particular case, it is these upwellings that from the, yeah, from the mantle, from within the earth that we have this movement that's hot enough to be able to create ignition that's hot enough to create the situations that are necessary for the pressure and the heat that produce diamonds, which are one of the hardest substances on the planet. So my first thing is, Canadian in the chat rooms, Justin, I knew your economy couldn't run on maple syrup. I knew you were hiding. The thing that first jumps out is like, okay, so where do we send the submarine collectors? Because when, you know, we talk about the diamond mines and all of this, that's, that's nowadays. Initially, some of the best diamond finds that have ever been collected were just picked up off the surface. Right. You know. Right, but we don't know any of that. We can make diamonds in laps. Now we can. Yeah. We can. That are actually better quality than the things that you pull out of a diamond mine. So this is really interesting for geology's sake, I think. I still, I still want a submarine to go down and pick up some big diamonds. Now, now we have a logical disaster. We just fell lab diamonds, please. But the, I mean, that's another, another question is, you know, these Kimberlite locations. It had that, that's where we need to be looking. And so they are very specifically located. And many of them are luckily in mountains on tops of the continents and on top of the plates. And maybe there aren't as many underneath that we need to be worrying about. Their models have also predicted undiscovered Kimberlite eruptions in East Antarctica and the Yilgarn, the Yilgarn Creighton of Western Australia. So there are other places that still may be mined that have not been determined. Yes. And the, the value of diamonds is all manufactured anyway. Anyway. Yes. Again, geologically, very interesting. Yes. I totally agree. From a diamond selling perspective, I disapprove. But from a geological perspective, this gives us much more information about how things are moving to the surface, the heat movement that is occurring and why, you know, different blobs of heat move in different directions and where they go and why they go there and why different minerals are formed and yeah. Absolutely. And that has ecological implications on animals that depend on the plumes or columns of heat or whatever. There's all sorts of cascade of effects of these dynamics, which is very interesting. Beyond just shiny. Lots. Beyond just shiny. The value, the value of diamonds question thing is kind of like, I don't think anything has value that doesn't have a research output. Let's just get to the science yet. So I have a full agreement about, about that on every subject that doesn't have a research result. Yeah. Stem cells. The meaning of which. Yeah. Okay, so, you know, there's a lot of hype in science, specifically around stem cells. Boy, we've been, stem cells have been this fantasy of curative things that can be done with them and there's all we can cure all of the diseases and we can have all of these therapeutics and everything. And where are they? Well, they're not here. So why? So what is a couple of the reasons? One, which is, it's probably the lesser of them, but it's that stem cells can proliferate. They can proliferate as any type of cell, creating fresh tissue without disease. They can regenerate with it. You can take these progenitor cells and place them into, you know, a liver or a lung and they can rebuild liver and lung tissue and fantastic. Problem is, partly is that they can keep proliferating. They might, they don't always have the off switch in research that's been done here. Also, sometimes they'd make the wrong tissue. So, you know, you go in to do a hair transplant and then you, a tooth forms, right? Or you do a tooth replacement and you get this hairy tooth thing happening or whatever. That's Bailey. That's fine. Yeah. So a lot of that, though, is probably has direct knowledge based solutions as well as cell management, you know, in a lot of the research that is produced, either runaway or wrong tissue, there's all sorts of questions about how that stem cell line was managed to begin with, whether or not they started differentiating before the experiment took place. And then we're learning so much about cell signaling that learning how to turn off the grow factors. These are things that are within, already within grasp of being able to handle, plus enough experiments been done to know how to use these cells better. So there's that. The other problem is they get rejected. They get rejected by the body and destroyed because of something called human leukocyte antigens. These are markers found in most cells that the immune system uses to say, hey, that's one of us, or, oh gosh, that cell is foreign and we need to call the immune system and have them destroy it. So these markers. Okay. So then you just match markers with somebody. The problem is there's tens of thousands of these different markers amongst the variety of humans that exist and you can get really close and have it be effective or it can be very different because the alleles are just not right and then the body goes, nope, that doesn't belong here. One solution is you can engineer from a patient's own cells, these pluripotent cells and then use those on the patient. Now you're talking about something for per patient to even get these started. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars per patient and so it's not a mass therapeutic. The other idea that's been floated is you could create a bank of stem cells with all these variations that humans have and you'd have millions and millions of lines of cells that you would have to keep in this bank and have at the ready to go send off to somebody to use and it's unfeasible to say the least regardless of the intentions that you have going into that. So now what we have is, okay, how do we get a universal stem cell that can be used for anybody that ignores this human leukocyte antigen marker issue and it may have just been accomplished. This is researchers at Santa Biotechnology, California. I think they're based in Washington but this is out of their California lab. They have made a significant breakthrough. They have created stem cells that they're calling loose pluripotent stem cells. They have tested them on mice and rhesus macaques and based on the results they've put out this is in published in Nature Biotechnology there was no reaction from the immune system. There was no attack on these stem cells the cell isolates that formed after. In one of the experiments on mice they had created a pancreatic cell that was and these mice were modeled to have diabetes it improved their condition and didn't get attacked. They did something really interesting here too is they took a wild type stem cell that would get attacked by the immune system so that you have all of the activity the cytokines or whatever they're going in there and attack that are designed to the immune systems brought all the artillery in to attack the cell and of course those got wiped out but they also did it concurrently with their cloaked stem cells with their universal donor cells and despite being in the same area as the cells that were getting attacked they were left alone. This is amazing. This study which is kind of obscure by title this is you know it's not saying hey we did it you know it's hyperimmune induced pluripotent stem cells survive long term and fully immunocompetent allogenic rhesus macaque meaning they did not use immunosuppressive drugs that prevented the immune system from putting forward the attack and these were not tight matches these were not matched HLA specifically yeah but they were rhesus macaque pluripotent stem cells but not matched they used human they also used human in the rhesus macaque and in the mouse model they were so they were completely wrong right didn't get attacked and there was no immunosuppression of the subjects those two accounts right there I mean this is this is there's the stack okay there's no stack of research papers anywhere on the plane anymore because everything's electronic but I'm picturing this cheatering stack of research that's been done in lab conditions where they say here's the different things we might be able to cure with this that have not been able to be implemented that have not been able to be clinically trial that are not going to have a mass therapeutic potential because of the issues we were talking about there's too many factors to get by the immune system these also lasted I think the one of the tests was 40 days it was the longest test there was a 16 day in the initial portion of the study where which was the length of that one in the macaques where they said okay this the cells are still here they're still not days weeks I'm looking at the 16 weeks 16 weeks 40 versus 40 weeks yeah was the was the final correct and so they are they're long term survival and I think that pretty intense and I think that's the interesting point and the questionable aspect is when you put in a pluripotent stem cell one of the concerns is whether or not it's going to become tumorogenic so is it going to go in and just start dividing dividing dividing dividing and form a tumor and one of the things that can protect a body against that that result is the immune system attacking this foreign cell so I think one of the big questions is going to be moving forward determining whether or not these implants can be safe not just that they are across the board you could give them to everybody I think that's awesome but then how is this going to impact over the long term the growth of the things that you're trying to fix whatever it is yeah that's one of the three that's one of the three obstacles to stem cells tumorogenic immune system rejection and the necessity of immunosuppression long term in a patient so immunosuppression long term patient gone rejection by the body gone and what you end up with is still the tumorgenic effect which from my reading on this a lot of that has come a lot of that has come from stem cell line management yeah now the proliferation that can't be stopped in some cases you know is also you know that depends on the where it's being used maybe whether there's already in that area the the stop growth signals aren't present for whatever reason that they're not reaching the stem cells but for the ones where it was I can't remember the terminology for it where it grows the wrong tissue those they think that's lab condition that's stem cell line handling issues that have largely been sort of figured out over the years why that takes place and we know enough about cell signaling I think that we'll be able to the huge hurdles huge hurdles may just be completely out of the way by the the good folks at Santa Biotechnology a company that will sell and license their technology to everyone but it's great this is wonderful it's fantastic yeah yeah I love it this is the kind of thing that we need to be working towards another aspect of things that we need to be working towards is not just having a human genome project that has basically just been like oh look it's like one person's genome or putting everyone's together and just saying look it's a puzzle and we put it all together and this is all of our genes researchers last year said they finally completed a complete version of the human genome I thought we did that a long time ago like in the 90s but last year we talked about this it was adding in new things that hadn't been it was the most complete version of the human genome ever so it's still just like hey it's the human genome this is our genome the one genome and this represents everybody when we know that there are all who's genes is that so we know that there's all sorts of diversity in the human genome generally lots of people have mutations we have all sorts of fun things going around and researchers have finally come together there were four studies published in Nature they're construction of what they call a pan genome so it's the next level in human genome understanding it's 47 different individuals from around the world but of course it is not representative of all of the different groups of people around the world and it has taken into account many differences between different groups of people so it's actually showing us how our evolution and adaptation has led to certain differences within the genomes that we have present on the planet today so this is a big project that they are continuing to work on they want to continue adding more and more people to this they're in talks currently with indigenous peoples from around the world about including more indigenous representation into this project but I think it's a great step forward because it is taking that idea of just like the big average blob of the human genome and suddenly starting to look at it as a much more diverse construct to source all of the 23 and me information that would be almost essentially exclusively the Americas sure but there are different brands that are popular in other countries too and then yes it would skew towards a certain type of person that would send their information in but I'm just saying that this stuff there are DNA samples of humans out there in large supply that I feel like there's an opportunity there to just source a bunch of it for sure but a lot of that is like I said it's single nucleotide polymorphisms so it's not entire genomes it's just little tiny snippets of genomes and so the shotgun sequencing that's been done to be able to put things together you know they're trying to advance this technology to allow it to be faster and better and more representative but one of the cool things that they've discovered is that there's a lot of interesting duplication within different different individuals that where we have certain segments genes that have been reversed or duplicated multiple multiple times and so some people have one or two copies and some people have like 4, 5, 6, 7, however many copies and so now the question is how does this represent the area people come from the evolutionary lineage that they descend from how does it impact protein function and they're also starting to look at things like the the epigenetic aspects of this the genome also because they're able to start being able to look at different loci that are responsible for the twists and turns of DNA that hide some genes until they're accessed for transcription into proteins or even during this process called imprinting which turns off one chromosome and turns on another chromosome you know which ones are actually the ones that go on to produce the proteins that impact who we are so this pan genome is going to give us a lot more information about the crucial loci within the genome and for different lineages of people to be able to determine how different genes are expressed in proteins and how it goes into making us who we are yeah anyway yeah they want to end they need more people so more genomes so far 47 which when you think about science and sample sizes it's very small but it's better than what we have it's better than the one and then the other thing to touch on to this is that it's also still just scratching the surface then of genetic difference because alright you've got this some people call it a DNA like a blueprint it's more like a the shelves of at a hardware store these are more like the ingredients that can get that can be applied when the actual application takes place is in the transcriptome and how genes are edited and how mRNA messaging and regulating takes place at this next whole other layer which can have ethnically connected differences I don't think we ever talked about this on the show but there was this study that was looking at schizophrenia and they found this really strong signal with some types of gene expression that were elevated that were repressing neural activity and what have you what was interesting is because they had included people from diverse ethnicities in this study they found that that was only true in the European cohort that there was almost the opposite being seen when they were narrowing down this one portion of it and I think it was the African population meaning that there was a more than one pathway to the same effect but that it was different micromanagement within you know so the genome is again it's a list of ingredients how they get applied is all other layer that this can give insights into yep and this is one of the steps on the way to being able to do that thank you all for joining us for this week in science we love that you're here once again on our weekly journey through science news talking about all the things that we love to talk about if you're enjoying the show please share it with a friend we love it when you share the science don't keep it to yourself share share share also head over to twist.org click on our Patreon link if you are interested in supporting the show moving forward we do appreciate your support we really can't do it without you thank you for your support and now on this week in science it is time to have Blair's Animal with Blair Dance Hall Nail the Ped No Ped at All Animal She's your girl Except for Giant Panda Next Girl What you got Blair I have tool using assassin bugs what terrifying I know this is from Macquar University in Australia they have found the first example of tool use by assassin bugs in the field assassin bugs are a group of bugs that are clustered together based on a behavior that they have they kill the way they do that is by poking a hole in their prey with a rostrum and pumping in digestive enzymes and then sucking out all of the innards to eat delicious that is so clever so delicious but it does require a certain amount of sneak upery and cleverness to be able to grab, poke, digest and eat and so you know it's very assassin-y I suppose oh very charming looking insect too oh yes, oh yes quite charming and what you'll notice in the pictures is that they look kind of shiny sticky don't they so they are specifically in this study they studied a group of assassin bugs in the Gorara dubious genus they live on blades of spinifex grass which is a type of grass that produces a sticky resin this grass is well known in Australia mainly because indigenous people would use the resin to bind material together when making tools so everybody knows about this grass it's nice and sticky and so they had an idea that these assassin bugs since they were living on this grass might be using the resin so researchers collected 26 specimens brought them back to the lab both males and females would scrape resin off of grass blades right to the parts of their bodies mostly it was on their four legs it was on their arms basically then they placed individuals in glass jars after they had applied resin then they would add an ant and a house fly and watch and the assassin bugs would try to capture and eat them then they did the same experiment but they before they put the assassin bugs in the jars they took some makeup remover and they removed the resin off their legs so they wanted to see if they were less effective at capturing their prey and they were 26% more successful at capturing prey when they had resin on their bodies versus when it was removed conversely they found that flies placed in the jars of the assassin bugs were 64% more likely to escape if the bugs had the resin removed so just in general the resin was helpful in the capturing and eating of prey so their idea is based on the observations that the resin helps them slow down the prey hold on to them long enough for them to be stabbed and subdued so it appears to be tool use now I brought this we want to call it tool use I feel like we have this debate every time about what is a tool and what is tool use and I would say that it is based on some of the other things that we've called tools in the past like I called a circular blade of grass being used to amplify sound a tool right so it's a piece of your environment they're not manufacturing a tool they're not doing anything like that but they are applying it in a specific way to a specific place to be used for a purpose what do you guys think so I would call it chemical use so is a chemical tool but the chemical it would be a tool in this case it's a great question but I would put it in a little past tool use it's one thing to use an object a physical object to do another function that's a tool when you're using, when you start getting into using a compound now I'm like whoa that seems like even more fascinating to me than just using a stick to I think it's more impressive than using a stick to get a termite is you know what to catch my prey I need to be stickier I'm going to coat myself in this yeah so is it you talk about a primate using a stick to get termites that's intentional and many times that animal has learned to use the stick figured it out or been taught by watching others and so there's cultural transmission but this is something that if you just gave the bugs nothing when they figure it out is this something that they, I mean right like if you put them on grass that didn't produce resin and you put a jar of resin over to the side would they be like I'm not sticky enough to have enough a little bit before yeah that's the question Kiki you're exactly right that's what they need to figure out is this just a byproduct of where they live or is this something they are intentionally seeking out and using you're totally right because I feel like organisms, animals from the single-celled to multi-cell you know like there's things that are happenstance that are uses of stuff in the environment because you've evolved and adapted along with those things it's not yes it could it's used for a purpose but what was the intention and how did that occur like koalas eat eucalyptus and eucalyptus helps them to secrete an oil that makes them kind of bug repellent is that tool use or are they just benefiting from the fact that they eat eucalyptus and that is a byproduct of that and they started getting worried I'm less impressed with his bug now now that you put it that way I'm a lot less I think he is dead on here you have to figure out intention you have to figure out are they just hanging out on grass that's sticky and they're benefiting from it by chance and so evolutionarily assassin bugs that hang out on grass survive and have more babies and so that is a tendency that is ingrained in them or are they going oh got a lather up time to go yeah I need my sticky stuff I'm gonna go catch some bugs you're totally right they want to know this is it tool use? I need more research and now moving on to crabs and their sense of smell so this is a study from University of Toronto looking at ocean acidification I will give our listeners who are less than familiar with ocean acidification the I don't know three sentence version but basically when we burn fossil fuels coal oil and natural gas it releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere some of that is absorbed into the ocean that changes the chemistry of the ocean it makes it more acidic that doesn't make it like acid it just makes it less basic and more acidic than it was before and there's all sorts of kind of domino effects from that animals that need calcium carbonate and their bodies that reacts with the ocean in a different way all the free hydrogens that were there before and then there's less free calcium carbonate for them to grow so they have less strong shells there's all these issues we have talked on the show about how it impacts other animals chemo reception there's a bunch of different ways that ocean acidification can impact animals so I have a new one so University of Toronto wanted to see how climate change and specifically ocean acidification could have an impact on one of the largest fisheries in the world Dungeonous Crabs they are valued at more than $250 million annually as of 2019 and so they are very common if you are in the United States there's Dungeonous Crabs on a lot of menus specifically here on the west coast they're quite prevalent and delicious and delicious I agree well it turns out that ocean acidification might be causing a problem with their sniffer and if you think about it you might not really have an obvious kind of place for a crabs nose to be so quite prominent so crabs have poor vision so their sense of smell is really important in finding food, mates suitable habitats and avoiding predators they sniff through something called flicking so they have antennules basically antennas that they flick around and they detect odors tiny neurons responsible for smell are inside the antennules they send electrical signals to the brain so it's actually not that different from our nose our nose on the inside the squishy stuff, our nasal turbinates have nerves that send electrical signals to our brain to tell us what we're smelling it's a very similar process it just looks different so what they find is that their flicking rate increases when they detect an odor they're interested in but in crabs that were exposed to ocean acidification the odors had to be 10 times more concentrated before they started flicking interestingly in an important smell so they're flicking less they also found that they have less sensory neurons than crabs not exposed to ocean acidification they tested the electrical activity in their sensory neurons to determine if they were more responsive less responsive they had fewer receptors and their sensory neurons were physically shrinking as much as 25% so this is a which came first question is it shrinking because of ocean acidification or is the shrinking causing the ocean acidification no no no no they think that it's shrinking because of lack of use so because the electrical activity is doled they're not using the neurons and it's like a muscle you don't use it I'm not going to put energy into making these things anymore so they end up being smaller use it or lose it yes so all that to say they are responding to smells less and the neurons that tell them about smells and what's important are not responsive so there's their smeller's all messed and so there's implications for that obviously if they can't find food that's going to impact them if they can't find mates that's going to impact them if they can't smell predators nearby that's going to impact them and so of course this is a problem for crustaceans throughout the ocean I would assume that since they have similar structures they will be impacted similarly to kind of raise the economic question you have this big this crab market you also have Alaskan king crabs you have snow crabs you have all sorts of crabs that are part of fisheries that have an economic impact but beyond that crustaceans are a huge group of animals that are detritivors they're the cleanup crew in the ocean if we start losing detritivors we are in big trouble so it's this is important to know it's part of the whole ecosystem turnover life cycle it's how it all works very smoothly we need to have the janitors yeah exactly they are they are so important to the ecosystem because there's also a certain feedback loop with that the chemistry of the ocean will continue to change if they can't remove if they can't remove waste material from the ocean visibility, turbidity will change the ability for certain nutrients to be free-floating will change it's all impacted it's just like on earth on land if you didn't have animals getting rid of dead stuff and poop the ecosystem will collapse yeah you'd have piles of dead stuff and poop yeah there'd be all sorts of problems so my brain might have checked out for something here was was this observed in lab conditions or are these the CO2 conditions of the waters where they retrieved these crabs so they it was both so they were specifically pulling crabs from the ocean and testing electrical activity they were also raising crabs in the lab and testing what happened so they were kind of trying to see what's happening but what's the mechanism so there were multiple steps but the reason I was thinking this if it was just wild and so this might not be correct this might be an example of human-caused selection because the way that we fish for crabs is through their sense of smell that's how we catch them we put down a cage of crab food and they smell it and they go in the cage and then they can't get out so if the bad smellers the ones who didn't where is everybody going wherever they're heading it could be we're doing we have done size so we've changed the average size of fish through all the fishing we could be changing the sense of smell of crabs by smell but that's only if they've done this that's a very interesting point I think one of the things that they used to kind of point away from that is they cited some other research that was done at University of Hull that showed how ocean acidification disrupts odor molecules so ocean acidification in a laboratory setting actually does change the way molecules travel and the way they bind to smell receptors and so that's actually something that we talked about with I think it was with sharks it was probably almost 10 years ago now because it was when I worked at the aquariums it was like a very long time ago but but we know that ocean acidification disrupts sensory systems in animals generally speaking so it's not a huge leap to go there but I do think it's an interesting point that there can be other influencers selective pressures also that could be impacting these guys and it could be a combination of all of these things it doesn't have to be an either or it could be an and and the big issue is these crabs who can't smell they're not going to be finding food they're not going to be finding mates and the behavioral repertoire is going to be messed up and so it could mess up future populations or it could be preserving them because here's the other thing I know if you go back to the crabbing trapping stuff if you have reduced not that you can't smell but you have reduced range now those crab cages that you would have shuffled over to in the old days now you can't even tell it's there so you keep going about your local business and finding your very local food and don't go traveling so it could end up being a stochastic survival strategy by selection I'm cracking up in the paper here so it's even I think this refutes your theory they acquired most of their subjects from a grocery store which means they were caught so they were the ones that don't get caught they were the ones who get caught so they're still smelling their snitches are good yeah but so the majority of the of the cases were pulled from the grocery store and then yeah they put them on these 10 day and then 4 day treatments of carbon dioxide different levels and then they kind of looked through all these other things happening but but so they were they were wild caught by a grocery store and then they were they were tested after that so I don't know we'll see what happens with the crabs and other animals and what we do with ocean acidification because it's still happening how that impacts so many different another reason cut it with the climate change please I haven't really heard a whole lot of the upsides no there's really not many not many no hey Justin you want to talk about some studies uh yeah so uh this is gosh this is a study about prescription drugs in americans they had these researchers uh gosh where are they this is from John Hopkins Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness they got a hold of insurance data of 9 million 9.1 million continuously enrolled adults aged 19 to 64 from a commercial uh insurance claims database and they looked through to see what drugs were being prescribed they found that 3% 276,000 of this 9 million were using schedule 2 stimulants among that group that was being prescribed that 3% 45% were being given a combined use of one or more additional central nervous system active drugs and we're on it for 213 days at least based on supply for this one year study additionally 24% 24.3% of stimulant users used two or more additional central nervous system active medications for at least 182 days and 47.6 also had an antidepressant 30% filled prescriptions for anxiety sedative hypnotic medications 19% 19.6% also received opioid prescriptions as part of this and so this is the thing they also found that once patients started a treatment 75% of them became long term users so what's interesting to me about this study was that all of these drugs that people are taking undergo a clinical trial here's a condition that needs to be that can be treated with this drug let's try it, we go through clinical trials you have safety, effectiveness all of these here's what you need to know there are not clinical trials for being on 3 or 4 of these drugs at the same time these are schedule 2 drugs the reason they get this FDA regulatory moniker is because they are habit forming they are very addictive and have withdrawal symptoms and are hard to get off of for 1 but then in combo what does that mean what does it mean when you're on 2 what does it mean when you're on 3 what does it mean when you're on 4 and so what occurred to me in looking at this there is if you were to do a clinical study one of the thresholds for doing a clinical study trial on humans is that it has to be safe and it has to have a reason for doing it and there has to be informed consent about the risk benefits how are these doctors doing this when you could not get a study past good clinical practice to be authorized to do this study they don't each of these drugs again there was a clinical trial which informs research informing clinicians on how to use how is it that doctors are ignoring that they don't have clinical trials for these drug combinations because essentially what this looks like to me is experimenting on people and doing so in an controlled environment with multiple high addiction long term dependence that can result in this and guess what there isn't seemingly an exit plan so I think you know what I'm thinking about Justin is just to give a personal example of something that's going on with me right now I was recently prescribed a new medication and I got an email from a pharmacist at my insurance carrier who said can you let me which of the following medications on your chart you're currently taking there were 25 medications on that list I am not taking all of those some of those are from like 10 years ago when I sprained my ankle and I got diagnosed one thing or I got prescribed one thing from when I got stung by a bee last year and I got prescribed something else and like it's just I think part of it is just at least in my experience in the American medical care system I think there's a certain amount of throwing up of hands with prescriptions where it's just like you expect me to do the due diligence to figure out exactly what everyone is taking when and it's just kind of like it's just they're going to ask me then I can say oh let me look into those interactions for you but otherwise I think there's a certain amount of like plausible deniability with this where there's just an expectation that well I can't possibly be expected to know all the drugs everyone's on all at once and we know that there are certain interactions between certain classes of drugs and you know yes unfortunately a lot of the understanding has been the result of people taking drugs in combination and then things happening and you report it to your doctor and they go oh stop doing that or because they know the mechanism of action of a particular drug and they say this particular drug works on this receptor so you don't want something that's going to interfere with that or with a particular pathway so we do know some of those things and there are definitely those instructions of don't take this drug with that one you shouldn't be doing that but yeah it's a very interesting point that is brought up by this by this study about the idea that people are using these and I think the key point but it is applicable to all sorts of drugs that we take for our mental health, our physical health, everything but the key point here is that they're talking about addictive drugs that are getting mixed in with these other drugs yeah and that in itself is it is questionable but we are doing it yeah it's not good your point is taken that it needs to be paid closer attention to but that's my just inkling based on my experience in the healthcare system we have in this country is that there's a certain amount of well there's too many people with too many different drugs there on they're possibly going to worry about all of it I mean there's a certain point where how do you do all those studies for all those combinations you can't possibly so part of it is there are databases that doctors are going to refer to for pharmaceutical databases showing interactions and things like this okay but that's not a study right I mean the thing is if you don't have a population that you can do the study for then you don't have a population you should be prescribing this to does that make sense but if I could push back yeah but stimulant oh I can't sleep here's a here's a suppressor here's one to help you sleep oh now I'm concentrated here's the second drug now I'm this oh I'll try this one in combination yeah absolutely it's experimenting on people because they don't have side effect outcomes they don't have they don't have a a clear clinical trial that says you give this four combination drug to treat to this is the indicator for for using these four and so you can use it for this long because we studied and here's what you have to give them to get off of it or here's how you taper it down that's not part of this no but at the same time we know that certain drugs work for certain things and if they don't have negative interactions together and they don't have negative side effects altogether they can't be managed and together they improve the life of the person you are we don't know if so as a doctor do you deny your medication to people because the interaction studies have not been done even though we know that there is no specific interaction that's going to be negative because we don't know because they haven't done a clinical trial so you don't give people drugs that could help them live better lives correct so I don't think that's I think the real takeaway here is that as a patient you need to know that not every combination of drugs in the world has been tested or will be tested and therefore you need to be knowledgeable to ask questions and pay attention to these things and report issues when they come I do not like putting it on the patient I do not like the doctor deciding to experiment we don't have enough money we don't have enough time we do not have the infrastructure to be able to test do you know how much money is being generated by these drugs we don't have I think there's plenty of money there's a practically infinite number of combinations of drugs that you could test but I'm talking about these are scheduled to additives because this is the lesson from the opioid crisis where patients needed drugs that were supposed to be prescribed by clinical trial short term that got prescribed for chronic pain long term and then what happens is in the united states insurance is not guaranteed your prescription coverage is not guaranteed so what happens when people came off of their job that had a prescription coverage for the medication or multiple medications that they were addicted to there was no okay now that you don't have our insurance we're going to put you into rehab for four weeks so you can recover or go through lifelong you're now a lifelong recovering addict from this thing that we're not going to pay instead people end up using street drugs so this is the outcome that I see from prescribed getting people on addictive drugs long term without study and without without a safety net for recovery I agree with that entirely I feel like our system is broken in that way and I think you're absolutely right we should not be putting people on addictive substances without a safety net like our insurance system the way it works I absolutely agree with you and take your point here but that's yeah let's move on to fun drugs what about magic mushrooms so this is not a study disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer this is not a study this is a case report which was brought by the Center for Behavioral Health Department of Psychiatry and Psychology Center for Behavioral Health Neurological Institute at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio and the reason it's not a study it's kind of interesting the way they called it a case report because it's one individual reporting this however this individual is referred to in the paper as a colleague which uh you know must then of course you would assume is a colleague at the Department of Psychiatry Psychology Center for Behavioral Health Neurological Institute at Cleveland Clinic possibly could be just academic colleague I suppose but this individual is a colleague the person had noticed when they were using psychedelic drugs they noticed that their vision improved because the individual in the case report is colorblind now they're diagnosed with the sort of mild red-green type of color blindness but they had noticed this enough that they went and created their own trial along with they utilized the oh what's that what's that test called Blair do you know the name of that? yeah I don't remember what it's called but the dots with the numbers in it so it's the dots it's the Ishihara test okay it's yeah you got this conglomeration of dots different sizes and slightly different hues some will be green maybe and some will be red this is the one I had to do every time I got a new eye doctor growing up because none of them believed me that I was colorblind because it's so rare for a girl to be colorblind so I had to do this a million times so this test if you are not colorblind you look at it and you see this goofy number in the middle of you can say oh there's a number 6 that's number 3 that's number 2 if you're colorblind it's indistinguishable it's just a bunch of dots can't see that there's a hidden number differentiated by the hues so this individual went from oh getting what was it let's see here I'll get the right number if I can 14 out of 21 which is enough to put them in that marginal colorblind if you're 17 or above you are considered not colorblind so the individual took the magic mushrooms and had no improvement okay ah slight improvement got maybe got one more so far so bad 24 hours later the score was 18 okay the score remained 17 to 18 for months after the experience it remained high and it stayed high for a prolonged period of time afterwards now one of the things the researchers suggest is that the psychedelic induced phenomena maybe primarily from alterations in brain activity rather than any effects of cones yes so this is the first thing I thought of is how my enchroma glasses work yes so you have to wear them for at least a week before they really start to work because your neurons have to shift yes so this sounds very similar to that doesn't it yeah so the brain is doing so much of the work because when you this is an example it's actually oddly used in this paper of enchroma glasses not in the study but in this write up I've got here in front of me of enchroma glasses taking a while to kick in because the brain has to catch up with the separate wavelengths if the psilocybin induced thinking brain activity actually can notice that these wavelengths should have been separated and that this confusion range in the middle needs to be ignored in some way and then affects that change in the brain in the end it illustrates that both are on one level a learning process because this type of color blindness tends to be that wavelength that's usually here's the green wavelength and here's the red wavelength they begin to overlap and because they overlap the brain goes ah too hard call it the same thing they'll just call that the one color and it interprets it the same really what's taking place even though the cones are there now the people who always push back and think the enchroma glasses are fake don't think that this is real there's people with the severe cone missing not the overlap but they're missing some cones those people with the severe yes there's no help for you you're colorblind and are going to stay that way and no treatment will help because you've got cone problems for a lot of color blindness it's overlapping wavelengths for the milder cases right and so those the glasses work for those apparently at least in this one case report showing that the brain itself can overcome this in this case with the use of magic mushrooms but you know that's but the question is still like why would the mushrooms lead to this process and why would the change and vision occur in the first place and you know what is it about the magic mushrooms the psilocybin that would initiate this alteration of course it's changing stuff but why is it changing the vision and what is it what's the brain learning and why that's an interesting place apparently the research the colleague of the researchers initially I made this discovery with LSD oh so they've done this before oh yeah yeah and I love it's a case study this is an individual we're not talking about it they're highlighting it as a reason to do more research into this yeah pilot pilot let's take a look but in these psychedelic drugs you know when they talk about the doors of perception are open the mind actually becomes very perceptive to things that it normally is not right paying attention in different ways it's like turning off your filter basically big time actually there's something called tracers and trails where a car drives by at night and that tail light is like a tail coming off the thing almost it stays the brain is still processing it even though the car went by so somewhere in there that processing of the information from the eye is noticing that you have two different signals that are overlapping and begins to separate them in the mind allowing you your eye which is already doing the same work it's always doing allowing your mind to see what the eye is picking up in such a way as reversing the effect of the color blind most vision the majority of vision is because of the brain so our brain is the super important part of this and then I'm kind of curious about all this like all these artists were like all the colors I can see or whatever you know people who've experimented it was like yeah you do this you see all these different colors I've never seen anything new colors oh those people were color blind they just hadn't been able to tell red from green before that's what happened it's not new colors that they're seeing they're just seeing colors for the first time now I get it it explains actually a lot retrospectively yes suddenly the world is technicolor but how is it how is it that our smell impacts how mosquitoes decide to bite us or not the way we smell the way we smell not just what mosquitoes see but what they smell is very important and we all know that carbon dioxide is one aspect of what we exhale that mosquitoes get attracted to there are other scents that either repel or attract mosquitoes and we have wonderful chemicals like DEET which are also not very safe for us but we use them because they're great for getting rid of the mosquitoes kind of and then we have other things there are plants there are things that work so some researchers just published in iScience was a study of how some big name soaps commercial soaps that people use all the time on themselves how they change our scents and how that impacts mosquitoes and can i guess already can you guess well of course you can guess i just want to get because my guess is that the soaps are attractive not repellent that these cosmetics or soaps are actually attracting more insects because i don't wear any i don't wear like any extra anything right no deodorants no you know and mosquitoes don't like me at all but my wife was like you know has like early shelves of stuff gets devoured gets absolutely devoured by insects or mosquitoes well a lot of people use these personal care products involving soap and a lot of these soaps have plant related volatile organic compounds that then when we heat up they aerosolize and they get into the air and yes human odor is modified by soaps this is true and they used chromatography mass spectrometry to quantify how human odor is changed they showed soap changes your odor big surprise there we know this you can smell people who have washed with soap versus people who have not that's a thing so now they tested it on mosquitoes to see what they were attracted to the different soaps that they investigated were the big names dial dove and then a couple of lesser known native and simple truth these are highly popular brands in the united states and so that's what they looked at looked at the way that it affected the attractedness of 80s egypt which is one of the bad ones spreads yellow fever spreads all sorts of malaria all sorts of fun things and what they determined at the end of it all is that the majority of the soaps attracted mosquitoes so there you go yes the majority of the soaps were attracting the mosquitoes however there was the native soap tended to repel and the reason they think it repels is that it has a high content of coconut oil and there is research that suggests that coconut oil is repellent to mosquitoes so that's what I was going to say is if any of the soaps had eucalyptus in them so I just mentioned that earlier in the show that could have an impact on it I know some soaps have that smell and so yes if you smell like a flower bugs will want to come to you so yeah that's the question are you picking a smell that's attractive or is there something else in the soap besides the scent that is attracting the mosquitoes also because I also yeah I also know that we've talked on the show about how there are genetic links to who is attractive to mosquitoes and who is not there is that as well even two people who wore the same soap might have different impacts of what's biting but yeah I'm curious if it's the scent if it's a chemical compound if it's all of the above if it's how clean it makes you no I think it's it's the stinkiness it's how it changes your odor yeah yeah how it changes the components of how you smell and that's what they really really showed so the use of plants and plant compounds can be beneficial for repelling bugs like mosquitoes but it depends on you know which plants you're using and what kind of flower you smell like like a flower do you smell like a coconut I don't I guess I want to smell like a coconut I guess the thing right now but I don't know about you but as we get older people talk about getting distracted a little bit more often not being able to focus on stuff I'm sorry what were you saying yeah I don't know I don't know what I was saying I got distracted by your comment as the parent of a child who loves to interrupt me while I'm in the middle of making dinner or doing a task of any kind I lose stream of flow very often and what was just determined by a study out of the University California Riverside in the journal psychology and aging which I will caveat with the fact that they only recruited 19 older adults between 65 and 86 and then 31 younger adults which probably was easier because they're at UC Riverside which is a university university that has many people in that age group they looked at the idea that older adults when they're trying to physically exert themselves a physical exertion makes them more distractable and this is a I think an interesting study it suggests that yes if you're doing something physical that you're more easily distracted that your mental effort is focused on the physical effort in this though the way that they did the study I just kind of wonder I don't know they had a cognitive task where they had people focus on something and try to do a thing and then they had them squeeze a squeezy thing they were supposed to squeeze up to like from 10% to 30% of their ability to squeeze so they're just squeezing a ball or squeezing a handlebar squeezing it but then while they're squeezing it then they added distracting things on the screen while they're trying to be focusing on this other thing that's going on so it kind of starting to distract but you're supposed to be squeezing to be focusing and then there's a distracting thing anyway older adults were more easily distracted when they were exerting more force on the squeezy thing so what does this mean for aging healthily and reducing distractions I don't know it's just we might be more prone to distractions so hey young people if you see somebody who's older doing something like driving don't try to have a conversation with them while they're driving because you're going to distract them from the focusing on their driving I know this this if you see an old person on a bicycle don't go hey because that could end badly I don't know how this gets used I like that one don't distract the drivers always I'm curious if this was all on on like some sort of touch screen situation also because if you were raised using a screen versus not you might actually be better at multitasking on a screen because you've been using one your entire life than if you were a person who grew up before these multifaceted screens with multiple windows existed so I think that part is tough depending on how what the test methods were I think also it becomes the question of how many conversations can you if you're listening to the radio can you still have a conversation with somebody and do some other task or what is happening in your life and how much can you focus on I think it's interesting to correlate this with physical activity the reason that they're trying to look into this is because people tend to lose muscle mass as they get older people move less as they get older and so maybe because of the deterioration of the physical form that leads to and this is just me completely speculating but maybe the deterioration of the physical form leads to more mental effort needing to be spent to maintain it and need to use it and so then this feedback effect but anyway I don't know maybe keep up your walking and your weight lifting and you're listening to the radio and talking to people for as long as you can and young people don't distract old people just be nice I also just think multitasking gets harder when you get older just generally speaking what I also do though is that most people who think that they're multitasking aren't they've done this they're doing everything worse basically they're doing little bursts of one thing here one thing here one thing here and not at the same time there was some study done on good multitaskers were recruited for a study where they were driving and holding a conversation and doing a task beautifully and it turned out their driving was much worse than the undistracted group the reason they didn't notice that their driving was worse than anybody else's while they were multitasking is because they were multitasking they were distracted that's what being distracted is is not noticing for instance I cannot if I am reading I cannot hear I cannot hear the world somebody can talk to me in that moment I am reading something I didn't hear anything that they said now in a room full of people talking I can kind of track a couple conversations at once at least I think I can but in reality that might be so distracting that I don't even realize that I'm not even catching any of what they're actually saying people can't tell the whole point of distraction is that you can't always tell you're being distracted yeah and some people have it put election to distraction so it's all a thing be nice I don't know what this study actually says about what we can do in the future just understand that people get distracted and that's a real thing so I think we made it to the end of the show we did we did a good job I would like to say everyone for joining us for another show glad we could all be here together Chatters, thank you for being in our chat rooms Fada, thank you for all 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Adam Mishkan, Perichann Laren Luthin, Steve DeBell, Bob Calder Marjorie, Paul Disney, David Silmerly Patrick Pecorado and Tony Steele There were some new names! There were some new names! I love reading the new names! I hope someone out there wants to be a new name If you want to be a new name, head over to twist.org and click on that Patreon link on next week's show We will be back broadcasting Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific time and again for the second show, 5 a.m. Central European time on Thursday Same time, same time You can find us on YouTube and Facebook when we're live also you can go to twist.org to catch the live broadcast Hey, do you want to listen to us as a podcast? Maybe not while you're driving if it's going to distract you It's a personal choice But just search for this week in Science where our podcasts are found If you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe as well For more information on anything heard here today show notes and links to stories will be available on our website www.twist.org and you can sign up for newsletters maybe even ours You can also contact us directly email Kiki at Kirsten at thisweekinScience.com Justin at twistmanin at gmail.com or me Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org Just be sure to put twist T-W-I-S or your email will end up stuck to an assassin bug's leg and they'll run away and we'll never read it Oh yeah, but then we I guess we're still on Twitter Still there It feels almost sort of like like it's getting to be the end of school and you're going to have to say goodbye to all your friends there on the Twitter But right now you can still write in our yearbooks at twist.science at Dr. Kiki at Jacksonfly We love your feedback if there's a topic you'd like us to cover or a suggestion for an interview a haiku that comes to you tonight please let us know We'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news And if you've learned anything from the show remember It's all in your head This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science So I'm setting up shop Got my banner unfurled It says the scientist is in I'm gonna sell my advice Show them how to stop the robot with a simple device I'll reverse below the warming with a wave of my hand And all this is coming your way So everybody listen Do what I say I use the scientific This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news That what I say may not represent your view You just might understand that this is the after show Thanks for joining us everybody What a fun time I'm exhausted Blair Uh huh Oh you're there, okay Did I look frozen? You did Are you frozen over there? What's happening? Do you want to tell me what numbers are in this color test? No You don't? I can tell the first one That's the one I can always tell 12 I have to put it on a bigger screen So I can actually see 12 Really? See I would have gotten that one wrong 10 29 No idea 5 Okay great 3 Excellent 15 I'm 2 so far 14 74 Oh my god Nothing, there's no number in there 6 65 45 Okay Nothing at all 5 You're lying to me No she's telling you the truth This is a 1 7 Nothing 16 73 Ooh squiggly Yep What number is that? Is that a number? It's not? No that's weird lines all over I could probably trace the lines for you But yeah not a number That's not a number There's maybe a 4 in there There's a 4 in there? Yeah This looks like a 6 You're right 2 26 42 Nothing at all Squiggles Nothing Squiggles Nothing Nothing Nothing at all Yeah squiggles I don't even see squiggles in these I know I'm saying there's a squiggle I can definitely see a squiggle in this one Okay That was an obvious squiggle Okay great So I got 2 Congratulations The initial 21 are a form of color blindness It gets more specific once you go beyond 21 and you're looking much more directly at the red-green differentiation The last portion of the test is different than the So then just being able to recognize that there's something This is the one that truly blew my mind We don't have to do the whole thing because it's going to take me a minute It's the color arrangement test Screen again So you're supposed to Match So you're arranged the colors in order Like along the color Right This is impossible for me This is so hard It's just It's a no-go Is the problem Am I doing okay? You're doing fantastic Yeah This is where it gets hard I think you're doing great so far Well cool Okay well See now I'm completely lost These all look the same Yeah There are a lot of similarities to some of these colors I feel like This should go here That should go there There you go What you had I think you nailed it I think you got it I'm looking at it through a screen We all have to know that Our screens show different colors There's all sorts of things But I thought it was good This is the art This is the art part Of how you learned How to compare colors This is the result So it says The thick line describes your order Of the test plates People with normal color Order them in a circle P1 through 15 You're pretty circular Crossings indicate forms of color blindness So the fact I have the proton And the dutan crossing Yeah That's a minor crossing Compared to how it could be Really That was actually not bad at all The one I also found fascinating Used to be at the old exploratorium I don't know if it's a new exploratorium That's where we found out my brother was color blind Oh really? At the old exploratorium Are you talking about the color blindness room? No, there's this chart And so One person There's a color In some spot of this And then you have these two wheels that have the matching color And so you and your friend Can kind of match them up Apparently they discovered color blindness And Kiki's brother there But What I found was interesting Is when you match it up with somebody who isn't Color blind You can still It's a really Kind of the test you just did But with maybe 100 iterations Of color And so what you find is that I was there with somebody And we were matching up The colors next to each other But we weren't agreeing On the matching hue To the lit portion of it And so That kind of pointed out that We don't all see The colors exactly the same And that adds up That's true as well Even in the color sighted There's a lack of agreement Yeah So zombie Tom Hanks in the chat room Ask what the chance of passing color blindness to children Is for women versus men So it's a sex link treat So that's why Men are more likely to have it On the X chromosome So basically You only need to get it once For you to be color blind If you're a man That's why it's much more likely To get it as a woman You have to get both Xs With color blindness in it So it's very very very rare You're more likely to have 11 toes Than to be a color blind woman Which is very funny Now what's funny is I am currently Carrying a boy Genomics are more complicated than that It's not cut and dried But according to the sex link Treat rules 100% he will be color blind Sorry bud Yeah because His X he receives is from me Guaranteed And both of my Xs carry color blindness On them that's why I am color blind Therefore he has to be color blind The question is because it's Actually much more complicated than that And how color blind you are is a whole complicated thing Has to do with The chromosomes and like Exact mixing and all these things Anyway How color blind he is It will be a question later on But he will be At least technically Somewhat color blind I have a question I have a question for you that I totally forgot about Yeah In relation to the case study Now We know that it takes a while Like I think the first time you used the Enchromal glasses we were 45 minutes in or something like that It was a while before you started to See the effect and then you Now tell me it takes a week for it You have to use it for a week before For full potency Question You take them off Does it immediately go away That's a great question I would say partially because The Sunglasses work way better than the inside glasses And so you are dealing With a brightness issue When you take your sunglasses off So it's actually pretty hard to tell I would say If I had to make kind of like A gut response to your question It sticks around a little It's not the same But it definitely Like you continue To notice things a little bit Slightly I haven't worn them in a long time Because I Can't be trusted with sunglasses I destroyed them Just taking care of them They're getting a break Right now and I take them out for special occasions Or like hikes or stuff like that But I have my $15 target sunglasses Is what I usually rock these days Because that's what I can be trusted with And it doesn't matter if they fall off my head It's a whole thing But if you've ever worn Like any Tinted glasses You know there is a certain amount Of adjustment that our eyes make So if the light changes The amount of blue or the amount of green That's getting into your vision Then that opposite part of the Spectrum is heightened And so when you take them off For just a little bit everything looks A little bit more whatever that color was So we'll talk about it a little bit But that happens a little bit But if you wear it for like a week Like Blair was saying What's happening is if your brain is actually shifting Then that is going to have More of a long term Residual Because your brain has to switch back Because the interesting part To me here I'm very curious Next time you're using them for a little while Take notes When you take them off I think I think I remember you reporting that It kind of went away but orange Still was loud Something like this Because the way that the Enchromer glasses Work is you know I talked about the overlap Of the red green Spectrum being Confused and so the brain just Identifying is one thing The Enchromer Largely designed to Block That middle portion of the overlap So that they can Be perceived They like force them to hyper color basically Yeah they've received They force them to be Separate wavelengths and so then the brain Begins to do the processing That's definitely what kind of felt to me Was like looking at a black light A poster almost That's how it felt when I was wearing them Okay and so But then I'm really curious About is that plasticity In the brain that has Now been identifying these separate things To see how well It can maintain it after the glasses Are removed for how long Is it 15 minutes Is it a day Is it that fall in a week Is it this one guy How long Also I'm looking at this All of this hate Commentary for Enchromer And all these other Different Techniques And they all came from folks who have like The worst kind Of Color blindness because it's not Helping what they're Because they're not in that in-between range They're not having an overlap problem Well and if you take the test on their website They'll tell you these glasses are for you Have a money back guarantee on top of it Just because It sounds like we're doing a promo And I also think that a lot of times People buy them for people as gifts And they don't know what kind of color blindness Their significant other or friend has So they don't know any better But just for those people The magic mushrooms might not work for you The Enchromer glasses might not work for you Nothing will help you But that doesn't mean that there aren't people who can But we don't know that but mushrooms might work The sample size of one so far The sample size of one And it's not even Well technically it's a Somewhat controlled study One of the funny things that was In there too was that the Oh I can't remember where the time frame was It was like you know One time in college Four weeks later Or something like this They were still They weren't at the peak In that test that they reached In the 24 hour after period This is for sure a bunch of researchers Did shrooms And one of them was like I can see colors guys They were like we should write a paper They should have just called us and said We're going to show this on the show But they reported also Actually that the effects In the case report they kind of focus on Four weeks later Four months later whatever it was They still had the The effects 40 weeks was the Stem cells But they Stem cells mushrooms They still had improved color vision Potato potato rub a mushroom on it It'll be fine They stated that the individual Did report still having Improved color vision a year later Not at the height Not near the peak but still better But hang on Asterix But they had used multiple psychedelics In that period Therefore this is ruining the study Study portion of it This is a bunch of researchers who like to do Like LSD and shrooms Quote study This isn't a study No it's a case report of somebody who did A self study I would still call it a study But because they used Colleague That's the only thing I'm grabbing onto Is they didn't just say hey this guy Walked up and told us this story So we did a case report on it They had a colleague Who trusted enough to do A self experiment that they would Report on I still have questions Also though Here's a perfect example Of An illegal substance That doesn't have The negative effects Of these drugs that doctors are prescribing Multiple of without a study behind So I'm just saying Well Justin you don't know that Because there aren't studies Of mushrooms versus XYZ So you actually don't know that Yeah According to your rule that shouldn't be allowed Technically you're correct However However I gotta go to psilocybin rehab Oh yeah I gotta get the psilocybin toxins out of my No there's no such There's no such I mean maybe for this guy who Suddenly can see colors Maybe he should Maybe there's something there I need to see Dreams In that case Say good night Blair Good night Blair say good morning Justin Good morning Justin Good Good night Kiki Good night everyone Have a wonderful week we'll be back again Next week looking forward to all the Science we get to share stay safe Stay happy stay Wherever stay curious Stay psychedelic Stay Indeed Whoa the colors man