 Apparently supposedly we're live according to the little notification on the browser that I'm looking at, but I'll just wait for the notification from the viewers that they can see us that we are live. We're all here, the gang's all here, plus one extra. But the extra has been here before. For those of you who are in the know, maybe you can look back through the history of TWIS. Wasn't that long ago? That was a while ago. Was it? Oh, man, I remember it. I know it doesn't seem that long ago, but I was still in San Francisco. Oh, that is true. Wow. I was a little shocked when I looked back how how long it really was. There has been so. Oh, great. It's live. We're here. Five by five. Thank you. Fada, identity four. Let's start the show. OK, in three, two, this is TWIS. This Week in Science, episode number 774, recorded on Wednesday, May 20th, 2020. What's in an octopus's garden? Hi, everyone. I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight we will fill your head with Jim Ratt's pain and tits. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The world is close, closer than you think, perhaps, to opening up, unlocking, and just not staying home. But are we ready? The answer I can assure you is maybe at best and most likely no. We guess we have been social distanced, and it has been working. We are washing our hands, wearing masks, avoiding handshakes, and distancing in public places. But now we have millions of people out of work. In a system that heavily relies on workplace health insurance. And while the advice from public health officials is sound, if you think you have systems, consult your primary physician. Problem there, of course, is more people lack a primary physician than ever before in the history of this nation. Look it up. That's a fact, most likely. Not everywhere in the world, is that true. But definitely it is happening here in the United States. If we learn no other reason or no other lessons from this epidemic, at least this be the takeaway, employer-based health care fails in an emergency. It's sort of as if 911 emergency calls only operated during bankers' hours. Had a problem at night? Too bad. It's not working then. Paramedics only had solar-powered defibrillators. That would also be a problem. It would make no sense. We would never do that. It's like a fire extinguisher that has an automatic shutoff valve that detects smoke. Again, I could keep going. And the thing is, it's already been in this system for people who get sick and then lose their health care. That's already been a thing. We need a better way to care for ourselves. Being dependent on sectors of industry that may or may not exist in a crisis situation is not the best way to go. Of course, there is only one way to truly avoid crisis-dependent situations. That's to tune into This Week in Science. Coming up next. Why did no go? I don't know. Hold on. I'm still going to dance. I don't know how to make music. Hold on. I can fix this again. I can still. I got music in my head enough. I don't know. Oh, here we go. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to learn new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know. I want to see you again, Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again to talk about all the science that we want to talk about because that's what this show is for. Your weekly download of us talking about science. That's right. Thank you for joining us once again. Oh, what do I have for you all tonight? I have stories about pain in the brain. I also have a story of fake eyes. This one's for Blair. And we have an interview tonight with a marine biologist who comes bearing tales of octopus gardens. Yes, it will be great. Justin, what did you bring? I got five finals done in the last three days. And I massaged the keyboard of my computer with my face late last night. And so we'll see what comes of that. Thank you for your honesty and for joining us tonight. So what I'm hearing is Justin's dog eat his homework. Justin's dog eat his homework. No, no, no, I brought stories. And I'll be reading them in my mind. He has no idea what they are. Found them last night, put them in the thing, and we'll see. We'll see. Surprise, surprise. OK, Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, I have some fungus. I have something in the air right now. I think they have stuff to fix that. I know, I have bird calls and I also have some bird poop. Oh, fun, bird calls, bird poop, two great things that go great together. All right, as we jump into the show, I would love to remind you that if you are not yet subscribed to Twists, you can find us easily on just about every podcasting platform that's out there. Look for this week in science. We are also on YouTube and Facebook. Our website is twist, T-W-I-S dot o-r-g, twist dot org. We can find show notes and you can subscribe to our newsletter. So much fun stuff there. But now it's time for the science. And I would love to introduce our guest this evening. Chad King is a marine biologist at the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. And we last spoke with Chad six years ago about a shipping container that had been dropped to the bottom of the Monterey Bay. And he's since then been involved in some pretty cool science. Most recently, some deep sea discoveries related to octopodes, octopuses. Yes, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us again. Thank you, guys. Glad to be here. I know I can't believe it's been six years. Just time just flies by. In fact, we just got this house and my kid was four at the time. My son, now he's 10, my daughter's 14. So just things are going so quickly. But just like with things in life, things that the office have gone pretty quickly over the last six years as well. Last time I was here, I talked about a shipping container that was dropped. Actually, 15 of them were dropped at the same time in Monterey Bay. They've only found one. But since then, I've been a lead scientist on our deep sea expeditions over the last several years. And yeah, we had an amazing, amazing trip a couple of years ago. We're actually about a year and a half ago, October of 2018. We've been back several times since. So I'm really happy to talk about this tonight. So cool. All right. So you've been working in the Marine, the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. How do you go about doing your job as a lead scientist for these expeditions, checking out the sanctuary and finding the things that you find? Number one, we certainly didn't plan on finding these amazing discovery. That's why they call them discoveries, right? Yeah, I'm going to put it on my list. Number one, no planning, no planning. Just go out there. Just do it. It's true. I got to step ahead. I think we're all pretty good at that part, right? Putting off everything and not actually planning for things. The best laid plans. I was have been a part of these deep sea expeditions for quite some time and then was finally put in charge of the logistics me and a co-worker. And that's really kind of the bread and butter where most of the preparation occurs, not only gathering all the supplies, planning the navigation routes and where you're going to be exploring, accounting for all sorts of factors, getting the right scientists aboard, the right testing equipment, making sure you have backup plan behind backup plan, behind backup plan, because things always go wrong when you're out at sea. Number one is weather, right? You could be weathered out for a couple of days in a row or more. So you have to have contingency plans for that. Equipment can be lost, people get sick, all those things happen. But you account for it, you buffer for it. And after doing several cruises, kind of being, you know, the logistics supervisor, if you will, or planner, my boss finally said, Hey, man, that's the book of the work. Go ahead, you know, you be the lead scientist. So he used to sit back and I wouldn't say not do anything. Of course, he did a lot of the planning. But, you know, he was kind of in charge of the cruises. So he's put me in charge the last few years and it's been a lot of fun. I definitely learned a lot in planning those cruises. And now I've learned a lot as a chief scientist or lead scientist. So again, it's all that logistical support. But now everything's kind of on your shoulders. And you kind of feel that responsibility for everything to kind of to go right. Not only all the medical forms, people have to fill out the background checks, you know, where you're going to be in a port, getting rental trucks, getting supply shipped across the country, making sure people get there. So there's all that behind the scenes stuff that really takes up the majority of the work. I mean, really 95 percent of the work is done by the time you get on the boat. And when you get on the boat, you do just kind of relax and say, whatever happens, happens, I've done the best that I can to prepare for this. And so you're on on the boat and then do you then have because you're looking at a very deep portion of the ocean in the Bay, it gets really deep thousands of feet. How do you have submersibles? What are you sending down? So back in 2018, we had the opportunity, the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, Monterey Bay is one of 14 National Marine Sanctuaries had an agreement with Ocean Exploration Trust, which is an outfit run by Dr. Bob Ballard. And he, of course, is mostly famous for discovering the Titanic, but many other things around the world. And so he has this exploration company called Ocean Exploration Trust and they have this great exploration vessel called the Nautilus, and it's equipped with two ROVs that are tethered together and they can go as deep as 4,000 meters. So we're talking 13,000 feet, almost three miles. And so we had a 10 day or so cruise planned with them in October of 2018. And we went to this extinct volcano that last erupted about 9.8 million years ago, about 50 miles off the coast of Big Sur, California. And we had explored there with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute several times since 2002 and discovered just a great assortment of colorful sponges and corals, most of these being long lived in terms of centuries, if not a millennia or two. And that led to the inclusion of the area around Davidson Seamount. It was added to Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. It is a marine protected area. So that discovery led to that. So basically, everything on the bottom of the ocean is protected from future exploitation. For example, there's some very expensive and rare corals down there, like some black corals that could hypothetically be harvested in the future. There's valuable minerals like manganese that accrete slowly over rock surfaces. That's a valuable mineral. And those extraction techniques of deep sea mining are really starting now. They're happening in the North Sea and other areas. So it is feasible for it to happen here within a certain amount of time. So it's all protected now, which is fantastic. And so our job was to explore Davidson Seamount a little bit further. But I had kind of it's like, look, we've seen the main part of the seamount. Now, granted, we've seen less than one percent of the seamount. It's a fairly large mountain. It's almost 8000 feet tall and 26 miles long, eight miles wide. Here, I think Dr. Kiki is showing some pictures of what no problem of some pictures of that we took at Davidson Seamount. And it is really like a Dr. Seuss land, those vibrant yellow sponges, those pink corals. Bunch of Truffula trees. Yeah, it's really incredible down there. It's a very diverse and an amazing environment. And these are pictures taken by Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute that we put together. So we wanted to look maybe not on the mountain itself, which is kind of as tall as the Sierra Nevada. We wanted to look out in the foothills, like maybe Auburn and where those places are. So we took Dr. Ballard's ship and his two ROVs up top in the upper right is the Hercules. That's the main workhorse. Then the Argus, which is in the lower right, that is the one that floats above and can give some contextual views and and act as a clump weight. So and the other thing I forgot to do they go down together. They are they connected together and they once the Hercules is down low and then the Argus is kind of up above and they work in conjunction. Exactly. So the Argus, the littler one, the silver one acts as the clump weight and has cameras to look above kind of a force for the trees view. And then the the Hercules, the yellow one is the bigger one. It's the main workhorse that's down closer to the bottom of the ocean. Now, it's great about this ship. If you see in the lower or in the back of the ship there, there's a large dome or ball that's a very large satellite. So it's streaming all of what we're seeing live underwater to the Internet. So everybody follows along at Nautilus Live.org. And that's what makes it so incredible that people in their living room and at home and kids and students can literally explore with us. And and are you in charge of making sure some of that happens? Is that part of your logistical responsibility? No, thank goodness. That's all ocean exploration trust and all those those wizards. I just have to be careful not to say any bad words while we're exploring. So with stuck at home, is this something you can do right now? Or are they unfortunately right now? Yeah, it's affecting everything in terms of shipping and research and everything like that. So in fact, we have a cruise schedule for this October that may be impacted. I have another one in July, which is probably going to be canceled. But yeah, we so we took this and we went down to this place. Three thousand two hundred meters deep. So it's over 10,000 feet over two miles exploring kind of the foothills off of the Sierra Mountains of Davidson Seamount. And so we're looking for corals and sponges because one of our jobs at the sanctuary is to characterize our marine resources, understand what we're protecting. We knew kind of what was on the mountain. We wanted to know what's around the mountain again in those foothills. And exploration brings you to the strangest places sometimes. And things weren't too exciting until we hit this. And I don't think you can hear it, but that's no problem. So I can describe this talking because it's a it's an audio podcast. We have to explain. You're right. That that that makes sense. So at the end of this 35 hour dive, so they do let the operations run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, if you want to. We have three shifts and we keep rotating around the clock. So it gives you a lot. Oh, my goodness. And we came across this one group of octopus mothers brooding their eggs. I was about 20 of them or so in the last hour of the dive. And they said, Chad, which way do you want to go? And I said, I've never seen anything like this. Let's go see if we can find some more. So we went downslope to the east and then we started running into just dozens and dozens and dozens of these mothers. Now, this is an octopus of the genus moose octopus species, robustus, doesn't have a common name. And this genus has this very unique brooding posture where they look very vulnerable. They're essentially upside down with their heads tucked against their eggs and their mouths exposed up above. So it looks like they're they're kind of vulnerable. But as we proceeded along here, and I know the audio listeners can't see all this, but it was just more and more and more. And they were all lined up in these cracks and crevices. There was clearly something attracting the octopus to these features on the seafloor. And as we got further and further along in this video, I think if you jump ahead just a little bit, there's a pool of them. And look at this. I mean, there's over 100, 150 just in that one shot. And as we found this one pool, we were able to actually land the ROV. And there's the pool. You can see it coming up here. And we find a place to park it and we actually saw shimmering water coming out of the seafloor, which if you ever been out on a hot day, right? The pavement kind of, you know, the air is shimmering as it raises above. And so that was an indication of warmth. Now, not only discovering all these mothers was an amazing discovery. The fact that warm water was coming out of the seafloor was something else that blew our minds. This is supposedly a dead volcano, right? Now, this does not suggest volcanic activity, but no one's ever seen warm water come out of this area. And so, unfortunately, we had a temperature. We did not have a temperature thermometer accessible on the ROV at the time. So we couldn't measure into the cracks and crevices. So it was just an idea, a theory that, oh, it's warm water. We got to come back here. OK, let's pull the ROV as scheduled. We'll turn it around, get the thermometer on there and go back down. Well, we had some technical issues with the ROV. Long story short, we literally got scrubbed the rest of the seven, eight days. We didn't get back in the water. Oh, no. That's like, again, as the chief scientist, I was not responsible for that, you know, hardware failing, but it just was a gut punch. But at the same time, if you asked me what I've rather had seven straight days of kind of mundane, this is what we expected kind of science versus one day of, oh, my God, this is a brand new thing. And this is new to science. I'll take the latter. So I still was very, very fortunate that this happened. And so we weren't able to get back that October. And I know that there are people at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. We got so much publicity because OET has a wonderful PR team aboard. I had like 13 or 14 interviews over satellite phone. It was in National Geographic, all these places. And they interviewed people at Embarie, like Dr. Bruce Robison and others, who's our colleagues. And he doubted that there was warm water because, again, the volcanic inactivity there, but they couldn't explain it. They said, ah, maybe it's a hypersaline. Maybe it's a chemical or a gas coming out. But I really thought it's got to be warm water. Why else would it be shimmering and what's bringing these mothers here? So in March, BBC had an agreement with Woods Hole and their research vessel, the Atlantis, to go out for a few days to tack on to this other research trip. And they were it was a week long live event broadcast back to the UK called Blue Planet Live, and they use the Alvin. And that's a submersible human occupied vehicle. And that's actually the submersible that went down for all the Titanic work with Bob Ballard back in the 80s. The thing had over 5,000 dives on it. And so I was invited along to participate and actually go into the Alvin. And funny story, I did have to kind of ask my wife, hey, is this OK? Has anyone ever died in that? And I said, no, no, five thousand. That's one like that one. So how how small is the space that you're getting into in the Alvin? This thing is quite large. You can see it behind me there. It's a six foot titanium sphere in the front. That's it. That's where we are. The rest of all that white material there is all the brains and hydraulics and propeller systems and weights. Yeah. So we're just in the very early three people, two pilots. It's usually one pilot and two observers, but we had a pilot in training. So that was also fun, too, because I was like, I know how to drive. He's not going to mess anything up, is he? And it's definitely a six foot six foot sphere. That's definitely not social distancing in there. No, not at all. Yeah, I'm five. I'm five ten. And I was hitting the, yeah, the little porthole thing on the top. But at least I'm not claustrophobic. It was fantastic. We got to go down and I got to see these mothers face to face on one dive and some of the Davidson Seamount horals at the summit on another dive. I got to do two dives. And we brought a temperature thermometer down. We confirmed it was warm. Now, this is two miles deep in perpetual darkness under immense pressure. Right. It is cold down there. It's just above freezing. It's about one point six degrees Celsius. So it's like 34 ish degrees Fahrenheit. Anyway, we we got temperatures as high as 10 and a half degrees Celsius. So basically almost nine degrees more. That's like kind of OK, ocean water to go swimming in, right? In the mid fifties, maybe you need a wetsuit for that, I guess. But it's really warm to the animals down there. So we confirmed warm water and here's the other thing. This was actually the second octopus nursery associated with warm water ever discovered in the world. There was one discovered in Costa Rica back in 2010 or 12 and they published a paper on it. It was only 150 individuals and we conservedly conservatively estimate there's minimum 1000 mothers here. There's a lot of the video that you didn't see. There's just they just keep going fields and fields. But they didn't have any successful reproduction. No evidence of developing eggs or developing embryos and no hatching. And that last slide you just showed are basically the first embryos ever seen hatched and we were there. And so I caught these on video and got some frame grabs. And so we also saw developing embryos as well. So there's something about this site that's different than Costa Rica because oxygen is inversely related to temperature. Costa Rica was a little bit warmer about 12 or 13 degrees Celsius. So the theory is the oxygen is too low for those babies to survive here. Maybe they've hit that that Goldilocks sweet spot. And here they are lined up again. This is a patch of the seafloor that's emanating this this warm water. Clearly something is attracting them to this area. I wonder will we know about seamounts and the not just the warmth but also the nutrients that supposedly come up from the water and the usually volcanic activity that is occurring underneath a seamount. I wonder if there's similar nutrient development, like nutrient production there. It's a really good question. We got water samples. That's right. So that's the second cruise we did in October of 2019 back on the Nautilus. Basically, Dr. Bob Ballard came aboard, shook my hand and said, you got to do over. So we were able to go back out and kind of make up for some of the last ship time that we had, but at least it enabled me to make lemonade out of those lemons and get water chemistry experts aboard and to sample said water. And so there are some preliminary results. I'm not a geochemist. I can't tell you exactly what those results are except for the oxygen levels. But that is a theory. One of the things that they think is going on is the mountain itself is made of a porous volcanic rock or basalt. So they think seawater is just percolating through. And then it travels hundreds of meters under sediment caps and can't find a weak spot until it travels maybe a few miles. And this is about six, seven, eight miles away from the seamount itself. And then it finds little conduits of volcanic rock and it shoots out these weak places. And because it gets a little closer to the Earth's mantle, it is warmed. So it's not a volcano ready to erupt. It's just a slightly warmer area, but it also changes the water chemistry. So there are a lot of the minerals that are totally different in terms of the manganese and the silica and the iron levels and all those things. So that that could play into this. But if you notice in some of those close ups, there's a lot of other animals, too. Like look at this area, it's kind of blank rock up above and below them. But within that zone, that band of octopus, you see anemones, you see snails, little hydroids, shrimp. So there's definitely a little community associated here. And we don't know really much about why they're there either. So this is something new that's going to provide years and years and years of research, but we're really excited about it because we're able to go back with the Alvin and confirm the warm water and the birthing of these these hatchlings. We've gone out with Mbari several times and they've sampled some of the animals. We've confirmed the species. We're doing all sorts of analysis on their diet through tissue sampling. And then we went back out in October of 2019 and were able to lay out long term temperature loggers, oxygen loggers and water samplers that were planning to go pick up this October. So we don't just get a snapshot in time, shoving a thermometer into the cracks. We actually have things that are going to be there for 12 months. And so we'll get to see that variability over time. That's going to answer a lot of questions. And there's just so much more to talk about this one place, but that's kind of in a nutshell and it's it's been just fantastic. But yeah, yeah, go ahead. I was going to say it strikes me a little bit as, you know, kind of the, you know, the the Tigris and Euphrates River Valley. It's like, why did people congregate originally in these very lush, vegetative places? Is because that's where that's where things could grow. That's where they could support their support their lives and their needs. And so there's something there. There's just a matter of figuring out what it is. There are various species of marine animals that use warm water to accelerate the development of their eggs. Skates have been known to do this in volcanic areas near mid-oceanic ridges. And so it's theorized that invertebrates, some invertebrates can do it. And it's theorized this octopus is basically short circuiting, cheating the system. Most deep sea animals take a very, very long time to grow, to reproduce, because it's a very low energy environment. Not much is coming down. They don't move quickly. They don't have high energy tolerance. So there was one species of octopus, not this one, but it was tracked by Mbari. They were lucky enough to see this female lay her eggs. So they knew kind of time zero. They came back time and time and time again. It took her 54 months, four and a half years until her babies hatched. I remember that's I think we talked about that story. We were like, how did that happen? It's incredible. And so we don't presume that this species is four and a half years. But the giant Pacific octopus, which you guys are probably familiar with, of course, a very famous, large, intelligent cephalopod. It's brooding times only three months, and it's a massive animal. Because so everything in shallow waters just takes a lot. It's a lot quicker in the marine environment. So it's presumed but not confirmed that this octopus probably takes at least a couple of years in a normal environment. It's possible that this warm water is accelerating that time. So the reproductive output of a population is going to be higher. But they're also going to reduce the predation pressure that's less opportunity for predators to eat their eggs. And so it's an incredible system. We were barely starting to understand what's going on down there. It's going to be many, many years to find out. But, you know, along with the octopus, the other thing is that because this is only the second place in the world that we found a nursery and the only viable reproductive reproducing one, we wanted to see if there were more than one here. No one's looking at the base of seamounts. Everybody looks at the top of the seamount. Everybody wants to climb the mountain and see where the pretty stuff is. No one wants to go look in the muddy area foothills, right? It's also easier to look at the stuff that's toward the top. I mean, for people, it's just easier. But I would have normally not chosen this area. It was just more like, where have we not looked? Oh, this is completely out of the ballpark. It's in the parking lot of the stadium. There might be something interesting there. We need to know if there's corals and sponges there for our characterization efforts at the sanctuary. So again, it was serendipity and everything kind of lining up to do this. So I had, we'd found a couple of spots on the map. One in particular, I thought, might have another octopus nursery. And on the way there, that's when we ran into this incredible whale fall, which is a whale that died at the surface for reasons we don't know. Could have been natural, could have been something else, disease. And when they die, sometimes they float for quite a while and can end up on a beach or they can sink right away or after some period of time. And again, I would encourage people to check this out on YouTube. You can go to NautilusLive.org and just put in whale fall and you'll find it because the audio of us just freaking out, just geeking out to the point where after 45 minutes of going, oh, my gosh, we got comments on the YouTube video just going, oh, these people need to shut up now. They're getting annoyed. But no, it's genuine joy and interest. And so we found this animal, this whale. Now, it's really cool about. I've never seen one, you know, in person, let alone being a part of it. This one still had flesh on its carcass. It still had the heart tissue there. The aorta was visible. Blubber was there. The baleen was a baleen whale. We think it's probably a minky or a juvenile humpback or gray. We're not sure yet. And then these scavengers are still there. So octopus and eel powder and grenadier and all these other fishes and crustaceans. And they're there still gobbling up the rest. And if you notice, there's this fuzzy stuff on the ribs here. And immediately we got super excited because I am not a whalefall expert. I'm not a cephalopod expert. I'm kind of a generalist. That was a clear indication of something called bone eating worms. Yes, I was hoping you were such a dance. There you go. Boom. Exactly. So we were super excited. We're like, oh, my God, because I know that, you know, I have a lot of colleagues in Mbari that work on bone eating worms. And they discovered them in 2002. It's brand new, relatively new to science. These crazy worms that burrow into the bones of whales, they don't have stomachs, but they put these rootlets in, dissolve the fats and lipids in the bone, bring them into their body where symbiotic bacteria actually digest it or metabolize those lipids. And then the carbon excretions, the worm then consumes. So it's a cool little symbiotic relationship. And so they were covered there. And so we were able to sample some of the loose metatarsal bones that you see in the sediment here. So we didn't have to break off a rib, like, you know, Fred Flintstone style or anything like that. Take it home like bam, bam. That's right. Exactly. Let's just take the rib. And I worked with a colleague, again, the communication equipment on the Nautilus is fantastic. So I was able to be guided live by these bone eating experts, bone eating worm experts on how to collect it, how to preserve it, how they wanted them. And long story short, they picked up the samples and they confirmed it is a new species of bone eating worm, which is from the genus Osodax. So we're going to be working on a paper to describe that species now. And there's other worms in the sediment here that were growing in like what was left of the blubber from the whale. And those haven't been analyzed yet, but I'm hoping that there's some new information coming from there. And of course, the bone from the whale will be sequenced. Again, the virus shut everything down right now. But once that's analyzed, we'll know the species of this. But there's only 75 whale falls that have ever been documented in the world. Most of them are just the bones because they've been there for many, many years. They typically only have flesh on them for up to a year or two. And those bone eating worms for maybe several years, they're pretty much essentially a bone reef after five to 10 years, depending on the area. So this was estimated to be only four months old since it fell. So it's rare to come across a whale fall number one, but even more rare to come across a relatively fresh fall. So it's a remarkable opportunity to see this here, but we also will be going back and visiting this in October, and it'll give a great 12 month kind of ecological, ecological succession snapshot of how it's changed over a year, which is gonna contribute a lot to that field. Did you have a guess of how old this was? Did you say? Yeah, this is not for me. This is people, we have a virtual, we have a chat room on the boat where experts only, like our scientists that were invited prior, can chat with us. And so we had a couple of whale fall experts saying, judging by the depth, the size of the animal and how much flesh they were, they were guesstimating around four months. Oh, okay. Yeah. It's the aquatic, I guess the marine environment forensics, the marine, the marine environment just forensics experts. Yeah, they don't have a full body farm of whales to know that well though, it's tough. But don't then like, don't these bone, whale boneworms have to live on the whale? I mean, it's, where do they come from? Like all the time, and they're just waiting? Yeah, so would they come from otherwise? It's crazy, right? Some studies have suggested that maybe there's a whale fall every 12 or so nautical miles within shipping lanes. That's not confirmed. That's just from data. I can't confirm that myself. Yeah, I mean, with hundreds of thousands of marine mammals, well whales and millions of marine mammals around the world, they all die at some point. A lot of them do sink. So you know, there's a lot of these carcasses out there that are just never obviously discovered by humans because we barely can see any portion of the seafloor. It's not even a possibility. So there are a lot of hopping spots but it is known that they only survive in the bones of animals. I mean, it could be cows or alligators. They've done experiments with us. They'll actually get into those animals as well but it's assumed that- So they're not completely whale dependent? No, no, it's kind of any- Well, that's just what I've always thought. I've always thought they were absolutely whale dependent. So then I went, how do you just, how do you just wait around until whale falls? I don't care how long it takes. If I miss the spot, I'll be dead. What I think is amazing about them is that they don't live in any adult stage in the water clearly. They only can live in the bones as an adult for maybe a couple of years, three years. And in that time, they're probably just pumping out their larvae or gametes, right? And so I guess they just have to rely on that broadcast spawning and 99.99999% of their larvae or progeny are dying and that one in a billion gets lucky and is like, oh, I ran into a whale bone. I don't know. It's incredible that life finds these odd ways of surviving and thriving. Just hit your ride on other brain mammal bones until they get to that whale. To be an Ozodax life history biologist would be a little bit, that would be difficult. How do you track the baby Ozodax? Tag him? No. Right, right, right. Little radio transmitter. I don't know how that would work. Easy. No, no, no, no problems. So, and then after that, we did wanna hit that volcanic cone. So I was like, okay, guys, we gotta go. But I had to stay there. We had to stay there for three or four hours because I didn't have a marine mammal permit to collect the bones. And so I wanted to make sure everything was on the up and up. Everything's being broadcast live. It's not like we can hide, you know? It's like it's there. So even within, was this within the marine sanctuary? Yes. Still you have to have a permit to be able to collect, even though you're part of the management. Yeah, we don't manage the collection or disturbance or take of marine mammals. That's the National Marine Fisheries Service that takes care of that. Another part of NOAA. So I was able to finally get a hold of the person who gave me verbal authorization. And so that was great. Of course I said, well, we just collected it 15 minutes ago, but he's like, ah, that's fine. It's all good. And it was something that I just recently learned that you have to have this permit for bones. But we're able to get out of there. Oh, and by the way, we did a 360 degree orbits. We had extra time. And there's this great 3D model that was built by a colleague of mine at Embarie. So you can actually look at the entire whale and spin it around and rotate it. And we're gonna hopefully get another past this October and we'll be able to kind of compare the two and make some volume differences, calculate some volume differences. So that'll be really cool too. And then on our way to the cone, we got near the top. I'm waiting for a VR experience if you've got these 360 whale falls. We are talking about that actually at Sanctuary headquarters. We're gonna be investing in some software and really directing a lot of future research to take advantage of getting these stereo images from video, because you can process the frame grabs and then put them together with all the fancy software these days. And it's essentially photogrammetry to then create the wire mesh and then overlay the photograph. So it's really, really fun stuff. It's great for education and great for science. So I wouldn't be surprised if we can do that soon. Actually, if you have a headset, you can download that model that exists on Sketchfab. Go to sketchfab.com and just Google Whalefall and it'll pop up. And yeah, you can pop on your VR glasses and look around the inside of the rib bones of a whale, I guess, so some people might wanna do that. So Sharma in the chat room is asking, why hasn't this attracted predators that would like to eat to these octopuses? Oh, great question. So as far as we know, there's probably not a whole lot that's gonna prey on these mother octopuses that are sitting there. Again, I didn't know much about this going into it. So it's been a kind of a crash course for the last year and a half to understand a little bit more of the life history of the cephalopods. And so it's generally not too much of a problem. I mean, it's not to say that an occasional one might be snacked upon, but it's nothing that they are going to bed worrying about every night. So yeah, they do look exposed, but sharks are not eating them. Most of the animals down there are, again, very slow and not moving a whole lot. So and most of the big predators you think of are not that deep. There are some smaller sharks down there, but it's generally not too much of a problem for them. And so then I also have a question. If you see if you know what the temperature is, like say eight feet below the ocean floor normally, like when it's not in this course, because the fact that if you go down eight feet here on the surface, it's something like 57 degrees, whether it's winter or the hot in summer, you go down and it's a pretty consistent temperature. So if there's having that combination of being able to submerge and have that water come back up, it doesn't need a thermal activity necessarily to raise it that those degrees by the time it's coming back up again. It's just, it might be warmer. Like it, it would be warmer there because it's so cold. Like if you had, there's this air conditioning unit where they dig a trench and then they just vent it. And so if it's 110 degrees in Arizona, they've got 57 degree air pouring out. If you use the same technique in Arctic, you've got a heater. You now have a 57 degree heater coming up out of the vent. So it just depends on what you're changing. But I've got no idea if that still applies in some way underneath the ocean floor. Yeah, I mean, again, this is a hydrological theory that I had to actually never even heard of. It's called a ridge flank low temperature hydrothermal system. So there you go. That's it in a lot of words there. But yeah, so the hydrologist I've been working with is kind of the leading expert in this. And so just kind of going off what he has said, but because it's traveling two to 300 meters under the surface, if not further, this is beyond that whole eight feet kind of thing where we're a lot closer to the mantle where there is gonna be not only closer to those temperatures, but the increased pressure from the sediment cap on top of it with the pressure increases temperature kind of thing. So yeah, and then it just will squeeze out in some of these areas. So I would like to know, and I've actually never asked him this. That's a good question. If you were to stick a thermometer down two or 300 meters where that water is going through, how hot can it get? Because where it's coming out is 10 or so degrees Celsius. If we were to dig one meter down, is it 20 degrees Celsius? If we were going to 200 meters down, is it 100 degrees? I don't know. That's a really good question. Oh, there you go. There's a little diagram of the rich flank hydrothermal system. Yeah, the little diagram for people who are watching. Someone else in the chat room, Mark F was wondering how long the dives are. So when you've got your submersibles that are down looking at stuff, is this hours, days, minutes? What, how long are the dives? So we use the two technologies, the Nautilus and Mbari use remotely operated vehicles, but at different lengths of time. So the Nautilus is a 24 seven operation. So I plan these dives to be about a day and a half long. So we put in the ROVs at time zero and the first shift is four hours. The next shift is four hours. We go every four hours, two different sets of people. Sorry, three different sets of people. We're working eight hours a day. And we go 24 hours a day. So our dives were 30 to 35 hours. The longest I think they've ever had are six or seven long or day long dives by another outfit and other science company that went out with them. The Mbari ROV, the Doc Ricketts, they're restricted, they don't work 24 seven. They're restricted to 10 hour days. So it's whatever science we can get done in those 10 hours. And you have to account for how long it takes for the ROV to descend. And to go down two miles, it takes almost three hours. And then another three hours to come up. So you've already blown five to six hours of your day just driving to and from work basically, right? And then- You just hope you're like, please let there be something more than the regular signs on the side of the road. Can I see something different? Maybe a new fast food restaurant as I'm going down. And that's why the 24 seven operation gives you so much more time per dive. You're not wasting all that ascent and decent times. And then the Alvin and other submersibles, of course, are restricted to how long the humans can stand in there. And typically it's an eight to 10 hour day. That submersible does descend and ascend faster than an ROV because they use the hundreds of pounds of these iron weights that make them super heavy. So they sink super fast. And at the end of the dive, they release those weights and then they pop like a cork. And so they're ascent and decent as faster than an ROV. But in the sub, you're just with the people there and you're just seeing out of the porthole. But with an ROV, you have an army of scientists that could be watching online or in the control van, all talking and conversing. And you're having many more eyes on the science at once than just three people in the sub. So even though the sub was an incredible experience and it gives you kind of the force for the trees, context, like it's a more spiritual human connection. I will admit that. But when you're talking about pure science and getting the job done, the most bang for your buck, ROVs in my experience tend to give you that because of those benefits of being down longer, you're not risking humans and you have so many other people that can be contributing their expertise to the mission. No, I love that. I love that idea of having them all there at once. That's fantastic. I have always been curious, and I'm just gonna ask in the submersible, is there a bathroom? I don't need to ask that. There are specialized bottles, yes. Yes, but yeah. No, they hope that you're only needing the liquid variety, right? So they tell you they have a whole prep sheet of like, this is what your diet should be 24 hours before you go. The days before. Perfect. You should not be eating that chili mac. The night before would be no, no. Make good choices, but then also you're really nervous, right, when you're going down there in the first, so that can cause tummy problem. I don't know. I did not have coffee in the two days I dove. Wow. But yeah, you know, the ROV pilots brought down the thermos of coffee and they drank it like water and I don't understand that, but they've adapted. I don't know. Some people have adapted physiologically to living in the ROV situation. I guess it's not ROV if they're actually in it. Are they actually piloting it from within or is it remotely operated from above? The ROVs are remotely operated. No one's in it. The sub is, yeah, the sub, there's a pilot right there with sticks in the keyboard and they're looking, they're hunched over, looking through their porthole and just driving it, it's incredible. I really respect those guys because some of the, you know, one of the guys there, he had over 270 dives and it's just like, wow, the amount of redundancy that they have to have in those systems and, you know, the pre-dive checks and all that, this is not something that you can just be cavalier about. ROVs have been lost. ROVs break, they power down, right? So we had to go through this training. Yeah, I was like two hours of training on understanding the support systems inside, the oxygen masks. They had long-term food supplies and sleeping bags because they said, yeah, for example, it's possible, possible. If you're down there, the weather could pick up in an instant, right? It's rare. They usually can forecast that. The ship might have to, the surface ship might have to leave. The surface ship is not gonna be able to get you safely. There's a certain time they can't get the A-frame out in the windshield and get you aboard without, you know, banging the thing and dropping it. So there are times, I think it's happened, he said two or three times ever in their 5,000 dives, where they're like, okay, guys, you need to spend the night on the seafloor. So they had to camp out in the sub of the night. That's scary, but also sounds really fun. I know. And the other thing is like, where I was in there. Ultimate sleepover. They have this O2 analyzer tells you the oxygen and they wanna keep it, you know, between 18 and 21 or 20%. And I said, oh, is it a fancy computer system that delivers oxygen? And he's like, oh no, you saw the bank of oxygen tanks behind us, right? And I said, yeah. He's all, I just go, let a little more in. Oh, it sits up a little bit. Okay, we're cool. Manual, he's like it prevents a lot of checks. Yeah, so there's more of this, these kinds of dives going on than we have spaceships being, rockets being launched into orbit. And more humans are going beneath the surface of the ocean and then they are going into space at this point in time. Maybe that'll change at some point, but did you feel at all like it was, you know, going into space? I mean, you look at, when you're using the ROV, you're looking at cameras. It's remotely operated, but in going down in the submersible yourself, did it feel like I'm like an astronaut? But, you know, is there any equivalents? It was such a different feeling. You know, I've been a scuba diver my whole life. I do a lot of scuba research for the sanctuary and, you know, light kind of peters out around 200 meters in this area. And I've always dove in the light, you know, down to 30 meters is kind of our max. And to go down from zero to 200 meters took five minutes, not even that. Yeah, it's about five minutes. I think it just sends out 40 meters a minute. And to just see the light go from that bright to blue-green to a dark blue to then just black, absolute blackness out of the portholes. And then you realize you're only at 200, 300 meters. You're going to 3,000, 3,200. You're like, we're barely off the surface and it's already dark. So then you just have this perpetual darkness dive. You don't feel the descent. You don't feel pressure change because you're contained in that sphere at one atmosphere of pressure until they get the sonar blip off the bottom. They know how close they are. They feel the ballast, they descend, and then suddenly you look out the window and you're seeing stuff I've only seen recorded or live on a TV screen, but it looks the same, right? It's still a two-dimensional flat screen. And then to see it in perspective, I mean, that's just something I never thought I would have the opportunity to do. And to see these big corals and these octomoms in these areas where I'm used to kind of had a picture in my brain of what it would look like to be down there, it really was different. Being down there, it looked totally different in terms of scale, patchiness and perspective. And so it was just an incredible experience. And I'd love to do it again, but I'm happy I got my dives. How big were those octopuses? The mantle is only about a softball, 12 inches across max. Yeah, they're actually pretty small for octopus. And the other thing is that they don't eat after they brood as well, so they kind of waste away and then they senesce and die after their eggs hatch, same with the males after they mate. And we do see males down there. They're cruising around and we've checked them out. So it's really, really cool. And at the end of this last time I was talking about after the whale fall, we did make it up that volcanic cone. It's about 200 meters tall. And we found some venting water with no octopus, which was new in itself. We hadn't found venting water without octopus. So I said, ah, we gotta go further, further, further. We had 45 minutes left in the dive and we get up to the top. And then we saw lines and lines and lines of octopus. And this area was six miles away from the original octopus garden. So now we've confirmed not only a third nursery in the world, but a second one at Davidson. And so this gives me just the realization that this, there's no way we're lucky enough to run into two octopus nurseries on two dives. There's no way we're betting 1,000. So my feeling, like that feeling, is that there's just gotta be more of these around and they're way more common than we initially thought after the first discovery. And maybe sea mounts and these other geologic formations are extremely important to sustaining these population of octopus that use this warm water to maybe increase their reproduction. So again, we wanna start finding a third and fourth one at Davidson. And then in the future expand that, hopefully with colleagues, to other sea mounts. And it's like, have you ever looked around the sides of the sea mount or the foothills? No, let's go. Let's see if we can replicate this at other places. So it's been a wild ride and hopefully a few years to come. One suggestion. Next time one of these trips is planned, one of these dives is planned with an ROV. Plan it to go in like one more hour. The first one came in the last hour and then the last one came in the last 45 minutes. You should just make sure you've got like a little extra battery pack on the thing. Just extend it a little because that seems like the really sweet spot right there. We have me and a colleague of mine, Jennifer Brown, were sitting at the desk during the first discovery. And then at the second one, we were count up this count and we literally were joking with one another. It's like, well, it's the same scenario, right? And when it happened, we're doing the whole high five and it was incredible. But you're right, I mean, it's like, we should have started the dive at this point instead of ending the dive at this point. But yeah, we hope to go, we barely saw just kind of the sliver of the top of the cone. We have the rest of the pie to see. So we're going back to that place in October, exploring a new couple of targets that may have more nurseries. And of course, going to pick up the equipment and hopefully revisit the whale fall. But it's a lot to squeeze into a cruise and with things going wrong, you never know. So. But it's an incredible point that Kiki's making about how few people have been able to explore today. I mean, one of the things is that with this few people gone in this space, we can see the moon. It's not, we can see the, I like it's half the surface of the moon with the negative. We can send a satellite to look back and get the other half. We can't see the bottom of the sea without going down there. And I actually didn't realize it got dark that quick. That's pretty amazing. It's so fast. And I think a lot of people go, oh, you guys have done like, you know, 45 dives at Davidson Seamount. You guys have seen it all. And it's like, yeah, okay. I'm gonna put it in a context for you. There's this, that's a large geographic feature, but another place we've been exploring is called Sir Ridge. We've been doing, we discovered corals there back in 2013 or so, and we're doing coral translocation experiments because of what happened in the Gulf of Mexico with the oil wiping out communities of deep sea coral. We wanted to see if it was viable to transplant branches of coral in concrete hockey pucks we made on the surface, brought them up, put them in, put them out elsewhere. And it's been successful. It's been great. But that feature, Sir Ridge itself is about the size of the island of Manhattan. And again, we've barely seen it even though we've been there on 20 or 30 dives or so. And the analogy I always try to tell people is like, imagine you don't know anything about the island of Manhattan or Yellowstone or Yosemite or any of these national parks. And you're dropped from a helicopter in pitch black and all you have is two flashlights. And now they're gonna drag you along at about one mile an hour for about six hours. Can you characterize all of Manhattan in those six hours and that tiny little thin slice of real estate you saw? Even if you do that 20 or 30 times, you're gonna miss Chinatown, you're gonna miss Wall Street, you're gonna miss Central Park, right? So that's what the analogy I try to tell people is like, just because we've been there X number of times, we've seen surface area-wise, virtually 1% or less of the area. So it's pretty incredible, but we take it where we can get it. It's expensive research, but it works. Yeah. So what is the timeframe for, again, for getting these water samples back from previous I didn't remember? We're hoping to go back in October. Yeah, Ocean Exploration Trust is dealing with contingency plans based on the virus right now. The main concern is for people's health. And since we know there's not going to be a vaccine by October, there's many considerations to be made. So we don't know the final answer and I'm just kind of sitting back and waiting for that. If we do go in any capacity, it could be reduced crew or something to that effect. Yeah, we're hoping to get the samples in. And if it's delayed or if we have to get it with another outfit, then we'll have a longer time series. More data, there's more data. Well, you need an ROV, get an ROV to go from your home to the boat and then drive the boat to the location and then drop the submersible ROV. That sounds complicated. It's good to add another ROV in the mix, right? Just an ROV and an ROV. I think you're forgetting the most important part, which is the humans enjoying the boat ride. This is like the most important part. That's the point when all the work has been out of the way and that's when you get to relax a little bit. It sounds like this is like the really exciting part of being a scientist is heading out to the site. That's the most fun. Unless you get too sick. No, the discovery. You love the discovery. But that's not always guaranteed. It's like the difference between fishing and catching. You go fishing all the time. If you catch, that's great, but you gotta enjoy fishing. Otherwise, here we go. Yeah, any successful expedition is no one gets hurt. You don't lose equipment and you still collect data, right? That's a good mission, right? But man, even though everything went wrong in that first expedition, discovering what we did in that last hour of that first dive has led. It's the whole butterfly effect, right? It's just led to so many other expeditions and information and it's just kind of changed the course of my career and other people's career. So again, I'm a generalist. I'm not an expert at any of these subject matters, but being in charge of the tools and the expeditions that go out, I try to leverage those experts. So basically what I'm saying is I'm that Caltrans supervisor on the side of the road sipping coffee, but for a marine sanctuary, which is amazing. No one can hunker though, it's okay. I'll wave at you from another boat in the bay. It's amazing. Where can people find out more information about the work that's going on? Find these videos and learn more about octopus gardens and whale falls. Yes, so I would encourage people to visit, even though it's not the sanctuary's website, NautilusLive.org, and they have a bunch of videos listed there. Or you could check out YouTube. They have their own YouTube channel called Nautilus Live. Just Google whale fall or octopus garden. You'll see them there. You can also check out our federal website, which is moderabay.noa.gov. And we have a little side website where we put a lot of amazing photography. We've collected over the years. It's all free non-commercial use over 5,000 underwater images. We've taken scuba diving and from deep sea marine research. And that's called Sanctuary Simon, or SanctuaryMonitoring.org. And we have an app called C-Photo for iOS and Android that has a lot of those photos as well. But that's all free to download and everything like that. So it's been great. I have a cat over here who keeps messing with my camera. I was wondering if that's what that was. I thought the tripod was loose or something. No, it's really, I apologize. It's so funny. That's hilarious. She normally doesn't bother me, but tonight she's really active and has decided to attack my camera. Talking it over. So thank you so much for joining us for to talk all about these discoveries. It's, it is awe-inspiring to be able to go places that people haven't really gone, see things that we haven't seen, discover new things and to be reminded that there is still so much mystery on our own planet yet to find. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. And so I'm just a fan of the show. So I'm glad you guys could have me and carry on, talk more science. We will talk more science. That it is time for us to move forward into the science part of the show and Chad, if you want to stick around and talk science with us, please do. I do. Yay. I love you. All right. So for just one moment, I would like to tell everybody that I want to say thank you. Thank you for listening to This Week in Science. You are the reason that we do what we do, that we're able to do what we do, bringing you science news down to earth, views every single week, interviews with scientists and people, discovering things on our planet and beyond. And with your help, we can continue to do even more. We can bring a sane perspective to a world that is full of misinformation right now. And for you to be able to help, head to twist.org right now. Click on the Patreon link and choose your level of support. Be a part of bringing sanity and science to more people, to helping us do more twists. Thank you for your support. We really couldn't do it without you. And we're back. You're listening to This Week in Science. Kiki, do you have a COVID update for us? I do. I have the COVID update because we're in the middle of it and it keeps going. And it's still very serious. The numbers keep rising, but the science is hopefully giving us hope for the future moving forward. The World Health Organization, COVID-19 Situation Report for May 19th, reports 4.73 million confirmed cases and 316,169 deaths. The Johns Hopkins CSSE dashboard reports 1.5 million US cases and 92,149 deaths as of 12.30 this afternoon. And it struck me this week at the numbers of people that we are beginning to see. It's something that is not comprehensive and it's huge. 20,000 people in New York City alone have died from COVID and it's mind-boggling. And for those of you who may know people, who may have lost people, we wish you well and we know that there's nothing that will ever bring those people back, but we hope that their memories bring you comfort and a little bit of joy moving forward. COVID-19 is being tracked by lots of people. The Atlantic has been responsible for managing the COVID tracker. And the COVID tracker, you can go to covidtracking.com to be able to see their website. It's for the last three months been taking the place of the CDC reports. They have been tracking state and local reports of cases, deaths and tests at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak. The CDC decided for some reason not to publish the reports from the states and relied on places like Johns Hopkins and other trackers to present the information to the public. This month of May, the CDC finally opened up a national database making the data public. And as a result, the Atlantic's COVID tracker just published a massive 55 page long report trying to figure out whether there are any discrepancies between the state reports and the national reports that have just come out from the CDC. Cases, confirmed cases and deaths, there was great agreement. So between those reports, it's very promising. However, they did find that there is massive discrepancy between state reports and what the CDC is reporting that the states have when it comes to testing. And there are lots of reasons why. And we know that testing has been a problem over the last several months. And this, but what they've discovered is that this may lead to this awareness of the discrepancies may now lead to ways that we can track more accurately. And hopefully be able to get a real handle on how many people have actually been infected or have been versus being diagnosed in a hospital. So there's the PCR based tests versus antibody tests. So there's a lot of confusion right now. Texas today is possibly, it's possible that they have been inflating their number of tests with antibody reports as well. So the state of Texas may be trying to make it look as though, or it could be accidental that they have more tests than they actually do, which changes the infection rate versus the death rate. So these numbers affect each other and are very important. But something we've been talking about for a while has been the idea of reinfection, the question of whether or not people can be reinfected. And a new study has come out from South Korea. South Korea's CDC looks at- Oh, you're killing me. This is like, I'm so anticipating with just the answer. And it's like freaking me out that it's already taken this long. Oh no, did I cry? No, everything's fine. I'm freezing the entire feed because my anxiety, now I'm ruining my, I'm creating more anxiety because I wanted to hear the answer first, because this is like the most important question is can we even have an immunity to this? And now I'm making it worse by saying all of these words when we could have heard the answer by now. Yep. That's how excited I am. So South Korea looked at over 200 individuals who came back in with symptoms, some of them with symptoms and some of them without symptoms, but tested them for reinfection, doing the PCR-based nasal swabs for infection. Viral DNA was found in these individuals. However, it was not able to infect human cells. Awesome. Yes. That is, that is tremendous news. Yes. And moving on, there were also protective antibodies found in the blood of all of these individuals. The big question though is for the individuals, there were some 150 people who came in with symptoms who did not test positive for any other viruses at the time. The question is they've got the viral DNA, they've got antibodies, they don't, they're not infectious, they hadn't, they did, they'd actually did contact tracing and found that there had been no new infections from these supposedly reinfected people. Why did they have symptoms? And so this is now the new question. What are the symptoms, what is the cause of the symptoms? So the South Koreans are moving forward saying that there is no reinfection, which is fantastic, but there is something going on. That is the salvation of humanity right there because without that, you know. So I also saw that just a couple hours ago, a couple of studies were posted about monkeys showing that they might show immunity from reinfection in COVID-19. So I mean, it sounded good. I have one major concern about this though. And it's been my concern the entire time is that if we find out that you can't be reinfected and that the antibodies take care of it, then I am so scared that people are gonna start trying to get COVID so that they can go out and do whatever they want. I am very concerned about that. I am less worried about the idiots of the world at this point. I've given up on them. I'm much more, but this was the thing, like there was a possibility that we would not have an immunity to it at all. Right, no, this is better choice for sure. This is incredible news. This is fantastic news. And Cheryl in the chat room is asking, but they had symptoms, which then you start thinking, is this a virus that kind of comes back at you? Like herpes, like it lays low for a while and then reinfects or something like. Or something like shingles, chicken pox and shingles or. Yeah, that you always have, but it sounds like it's not as severe as it's coming back at least because there's protection that has been built up to it. But it could be something that you get sick once and you're gonna continually get colds from it sort of for a while at least. But yeah, so lots of questions still to look at there. But the big, I don't know. I don't know why everybody else isn't just flying off their seats over this. This was the big question. We did not know. But it's still. People were talking about herd immunity. It's not final. But we didn't know if it was possible. It's not final. It seems possible. It seems possible, but it's not final. This is one study. It's not final. They looked at, it's a couple hundred people. It's bigger than what's done before. They did contact tracing, which suggested that there was no infection. But this is science. There is no proving anything. And you can't prove a negative. Just prove a high graph. Yes. So we always want to collect more data, but it's promising. Okay, but still, this is me mildly encouraged. About this. That's how, what about that one? Yeah, and so Fada in the chat is asking, is this the beginning of herd immunity with the antibodies? And the antibodies, so I have been corrected recently by people who work in vaccines and immunity. Herd immunity came from the initially vaccinating herds of animals. And some people take issue with the idea of using the terminology with respect to pimple. But the reality is that- We are animals. We are animals, exactly. And we do need a certain percentage of the population to have been infected or vaccinated to have resistance to be able to protect the small percentage who cannot be. And so antibodies, can you let me finish what I'm gonna say? And so the antibodies are necessary for your body to begin that defensive immunity moving forward. If you do not have antibodies that are persistent that stay within your body or are able to be activated for months to years, then you have a problem. So yes, the antibodies are very a big part of this. Also, they have found T cells that are part of the immune response as well, which are really important. These are the killer cells that come in and really get stuff. They have found T cells that respond to SARS-CoV-2 as well, which is exciting. So the thing I was gonna throw in is the part of the way to think of herd immunity is if one person with the virus walks into a room with 10 other people, there's a chance for all 10, you know, to get infected. And say it's happening to 70%, okay. So seven of those people now have it. If only two people in that room have the antibodies, that number drops dramatically and how many people are likely to walk out of that room. So when we've looked at the exponential growths before, even if it's not that high of a percentage yet that has this immunity, the ability for the exponential growth is actually reduced considerably compared to where it was before. So even as the thing begins, it has a huge impact because those people then can't transmit and the whole exponentiality of the thing is massively dampered. And so it's even with a little herd immunity, it can have a big effect if, say, there is this second wave after we've stopped distancing and tried to go back to life as normal. If there is even a small percentage in these cities that have this immunity, it will make it a lot less dramatic than it could have been. Yeah. And finally, as things start opening up a little bit, you might wanna go back to the gym. I would love to go back to my gym. It would be great. Exercise is fabulous. I'm tired of my basement. You might want to go back to these places that you have fond memories of, but a study published in the CDC Journal of Emerging Infectious Disease. It's based on another contact tracing study. Again, in South Korea, they've done amazing work contact tracing in South Korea. It's how they've been able to manage their outbreak so well. They actually recommend minimizing vigorous exercise in enclosed spaces while the threat of the outbreak still lingers because of the fact that the enclosed spaces allow the viral particles to stay in the air longer. If you are doing vigorous exercise, you are potentially breathing more particles into the air and they had several cases of individuals becoming infected as a result, a direct result of gym-related exercise classes. So, maybe think twice about those gyms and maybe also think twice about attending church. Another CDC report found that among rural Arkansas, people who live in Arkansas, Arkansas, people who live in Arkansas, 92 attendees at a church in Arkansas for March 6th to 11th out of the 92, 35 developed COVID-19, three people died and this was a direct result of attending a church sermon and the pastor actually died from this event as well. So, this is not a joke. These enclosed spaces bring us together. They are still a danger. Even though we are opening back up, the virus is not gone. Please remember that. Yeah, I've been part of a CrossFit gym for like five years and it is weird that this new normal that we're gonna have where it wasn't something I really thought about, certainly during flu season. You know, I was like, oh well, I don't, you know, I wiped down that barbell I'm gonna use because six people may have used it before me in the last part of the day. It's completely different now. Now, you know, I feel bad. I have a close friend who's the owner of the gym. She is really struggling with what's going to happen to her business, because we don't know how long it's going to take for her business to be able to be reopened, but on top of that, you're gonna have people that are her former members or her current members that are gonna be concerned about coming to a class until we have that vaccine and herd immunity and people feel confident that it's essentially eradicated. There's still gonna be that fear of coming to a class because absolutely right. I read that one study as well as the choir that spread it, the church in Butte County recently, the church in Texas recently with a pastor giving communion. It's just these enclosed spaces where people touching and breathing and especially the exercising where we're just breathing out just constantly and sweating everywhere and touching bars and high-fiving, doing the same pull-up rig and the barbells and the dumbbells. And it's like, it's a germ factory. I mean, let's face it, you know? And normally we're okay, we're fine. And I don't think I ever got sick from going there for five years, but it's a real concern now because I wouldn't want to bring it home to my wife or my parents who have compromised immune systems or anyone else like that. That's the big thing. One thing to be concerned about your health. And if you wanna risk that, that's fine, that's your decision. If you don't wanna wear a seatbelt, your decision, right? You get a ticket or maybe something else happens. But you know, don't expose yourself more than you have to wear a mask when you're in public because that's the considerate thing to do. And it's just really frustrating to still see these people. I'm not trying to get off on a tangent, but just like, oh, my civil liberties are being attacked because I have to wear a mask to Costco for 10 minutes. It's like, but are you protesting wearing a seatbelt? I don't think so. So it- People did. People did. At the time you're right. We became mandatory. There was like, ah, you're forcing me. It's more dangerous. Yeah. I feel like that's people who apparently don't have any other problem in the world. If I may look to a potential silver lining out of this, it's that I hope that after this, people will consider and it will be more socially acceptable for people to wear a mask when they got in public, if they have the flu or some other illness that is communicable. That's what this is about, right? Is I really hope that people are understanding that you're wearing the mask for everyone else. You are not wearing the mask of yourself. So I think that's the part of this that I am hoping will continue through to the next phase of our existence is that people will recognize, oh, I might be contagious with something that could get someone who's elderly or immunocompromised ill. I'm gonna wear a mask out in public. Right. It's not about you. It's about others. And for me, it is about me. And so I don't want anybody breathing on me. So I love that we have this consensus of selfish people who are willing to put on a mask to make everybody else do it so they don't get us sick. I've got a silver lining. Bring it. For the pandemic. Carbon emissions, 17% decrease in global carbon dioxide emissions, which makes this year so far, the same as it was way back in. Anybody got a guess? Way back. 17% global reduction puts us to the point where we were way back in. 1970s. Ooh, very close. Any other guesses? I saw the story. I know what it was. Okay, yeah. 2006. 2006. A 17% global drop in carbon dioxide emissions takes us back to 2006. Now, 2006, here at TWIST, we were breaking stories about the need to take drastic action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from their current levels because that's the only way we were gonna save off getting into a situation of global warming. So this podcast set off the environmental hoax to reduce carbon emissions, I guess. Yeah, we were way ahead of them. We were part of, in the basement of the UC Davis KTVS radio station, we were actually part of the deep state at that point, right? But still, it's better than it was. This is Professor Croyne Lecure at the University of East Anglia in the UK. She led the analysis. She said population confinement has led to drastic changes in energy use and CO2 emissions. These extreme decreases are likely to be temporary, though, as they do not reflect structural changes in the economic transport or energy systems. So this is likely not gonna stay. But here's a couple of interesting numbers. Emissions from cars alone accounted for almost 43% of the decrease in global emissions during the peak confinement back in April. Emissions from industry and other and power together accounted for a further 43% of that 17% decrease. Aviation only accounts for 3% of global emissions, but is 10% of the decrease, 10% of the 17, so it's 1.7% overall of that decrease. Which is sort of interesting because at first I thought, you know, aviation dropping a little more than half, you would think it, because there's like not very many planes. Who's getting on planes? But of course there's all the commercial flights and all that, so there's still cargo and mail and everything else. And still within the countries, there's passenger airlines that are still functioning. It's just not the international so much. There was an increase in the one sector that we might imagine should show more energy being used, which is in residential buildings, people staying at home, use more power at home, which kind of didn't really offset a whole lot because of so many like restaurants and bars and other industries that were being shut down. So those were kind of marginally mitigated by all of that. So if I may, this is what I see in this story. We're all at home, huge number of people are not driving or traveling for fun. And the drop was 17%. It was not actually that large, which proves what we already know, which is that it's not individual people changing the way they run their lives that are going to make the large scale changes we need for climate change. It is fundamental changes in the way we do these bigger questions, how we create electricity, how we ship things. It's these bigger questions, the systemic questions, exactly. It's the stuff that doesn't, it isn't influenced by me not going to work. It's influenced by our regulations and our networks that already exist, which is telling us what we already do, even more loud and clear that we have to demand systemic change. Right, so exactly, concrete and power generation, or two monsters of this. One of the things that it occurred to me, actually when I was looking at this story, was I was thinking about the Boondoggle high speed rail project that we got going on. The idea is- You mean that's not happening? What? The idea is that you're reducing carbon emissions on one hand by getting people off the roads, right? That's not obviously the bigger impactor. That whole area in Southern California that I used to call the great nothing, which they've now flooded for a set water down and started growing almonds, which in the drought, which on the almonds you see, this is a whole separate rant. But if we took the great nothing, if we took the great nothing and the money from the rail and just had put solar panels over all of this. Windmills, solar panels. Windmills, solar panels and just made a concerted effort to have a state and municipal solar array, the size like no other places ever built. That kind of thing is gonna have more of an impact than the high speed rail as fancy as it sounded. You know, when they came in and we're singing the song about the monorail, monorail and how, you know, Charleston's got one, you should too. Like, you know, we should have really, we could have really probably diverted that to a better cost. We could have, could have would have should have. It's not the past anymore. We can learn from the past and we can plan for the future. And we are in a position now where we are reinforcing ideals and we have choices to make moving forward. And so we all play a part in that part of it, voting for people who will support efforts to move forward with better systemic change. And that's part of it. Yes. No more rants. Got a pain in my brain. What if I could just turn it off? Yes, please. What if I could just just turn off the pain, make it go away? Well, apparently some researchers at Duke University have discovered that there's a little tiny part of your amygdala. Funny thing. Your amygdala is supposed to be response, a fear response, right? It's anger, fear, emotion processing, and apparently pain. These researchers were following up earlier research looking at general anesthetics and what they do in the brain. Looking at neurons that get activated by anesthetics as opposed to suppressed. And in 2019, this lab from the Duke School Neurobiology, Department of Neurobiology in the School of Medicine, found that slow wave sleep was actually activated by general anesthesia. It was promoted. And though from this, they got a clue that they followed with the general anesthesia that it also activated a subset of these inhibitory neurons. These are neurons that turn the other neurons off or slow them down that exist in the central amygdala. And they call them the CEAGA neurons. Central amygdala activation by general anesthesia. Fancy acronym. They looked at this in mice and they think that this might also work in people. They don't know for sure yet, but that's what they have to test next. But in mice, they could use optogenetics using light to actually turn the neurons on or off when they wanted to. So they bred these mice to use the optogenetics on. They were able to then turn off or turn on the CEAGA neurons in the amygdala. And when they give mice a pain stimulus, normally mice get these behaviors of trying to fix the discomfort. So licking their paws or grooming and they start doing behaviors that are self soothing to suppress the pain. And when they activated the CEAGA neurons in the amygdala, those behaviors completely stopped in the mice. The researcher said it was very much like turning a switch on or off. Turn on the pain, turn off the pain. And so they were able to do that using light. Moving forward, they also discovered, which I find really interesting, they also discovered that another low dose anesthetic ketamine, it also activates the CEAGA center. And if they turned off those neurons to the CEAGA center, then ketamine wouldn't work. So ketamine's response only works with these particular neurons in the amygdala. So what the researchers next step to do is to look at these neurons and figure out what genes are active there, what RNA is getting transcribed and translated to see if there is a particular target for a drug so that we can hopefully create a very strong, like a drug that works just on pain, that doesn't work on any other centers of the brain, that doesn't, it's not like opiates, not like any other pain reducers, pain relievers, but specifically targets those neurons and like a switch will be able to turn pain on, well, not on, off. This might be a silly question, Kitty, but. I just thought that the researchers were going. No, just turn it off. Is. How are my pain on? Is that what my pain? Is turning off pain and numbing the same? No, I don't think so. Numbing reduces all sensation. So if you're numbing an area, you're not able to feel anything. So it's not pain if it's, if you're like, if you go get novocaine, you're going to the dentist and they, they novocaine you out. Don't hit because suddenly. Don't want to shoot the side of your mouth off. And you're also dripping slurpy out of the side of your mouth because your, your lips don't work anymore. So you're all, you know, there's, that numbing affects much more than just the pain centers. Right. So this could be a pretty big deal in terms of pain relief, besides the fact that it could be instantaneous and all this other stuff, being able to reduce pain without numbing is would be a big deal. Okay. It would be a huge deal. Yeah. Then there's a weird, there's a weird place my brain just went. What, why not turn it off? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Never experienced pain? No, no, because I want to know when my coffee's too hot and, you know. Yeah. That's the thing. It's important, but. Yeah, pain or sensation. Yeah, it's a good feedback to be getting from the world. But if you could just turn off just pain, presumably you could be awake for a surgery. That's what I was thinking. And still feel, still feel it. No, no, I don't want to feel it. I want to feel the tugging at my intestines. Please, please, please. I was thinking specifically about childbirth. What if without what, you know, because you get an epidural, there's numbing that goes on. What if you could just turn off pain? But you could, yeah, you could still. You would still be able to feel. Yep. You would feel it would just be the pain that would be good. Yes. Oh, yeah. Wow. That's interesting. That makes some interesting reality TV for people who have watched me stick a knife through my hand. No. Oh, that feels interesting. Oh, that old trick. Anybody can do that now. Yeah, but mine was an illusion. That's why I get credit for not having actually done it. That's the whole point. Walking on coals, you know, the whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's very interesting, coming back to the amygdala and pain though, the idea that there could be this little bundle of neurons in an area that we associate with emotions. And there is a certain physicality to the emotions that we feel. So, fear and anger, and I can kind of see that being associated with pain very closely. So, it kind of makes sense that it all lies in the same place. I don't know, but I think it's very, and maybe this also has some implications for how placebo's work and our belief in certain pain-killing remedies that do or don't work. Yeah, I can see revolution if this works for chronic pain, you know, people who live with that every day. I mean, I can't, you know, my worst day of pain may have lasted, you know, like a day or two, and people live with that for years. I don't wish that on anyone. So, hopefully this develops into something to help those people. I would be curious, this is going crazy far, but I would be curious if, over time, your body would adjust. And yeah. Oh, becoming normalized to it, yeah. Over my lifetime, I've taken certain pain meds, like I started on a leave, and then I had to kind of switch to, I'm a prophet, and then I had to switch to acetaminophen, and then I, so it's, you know, I'm thinking about how your amygdala could kind of start to, We talked about this on the show. I mean, there's a situation, yeah. The guy who has the part of his brain had died that could, he had lost a hand. And that is, what is it? What's the strip along the side of the brain that registers where body parts are? But the part that's registering. This medicine is for cortex. Thank you. Whatever she just said. His hand, his hand turned out to be right next to his face. And it was this weird thing when he would shave, he would feel his hand that wasn't there. And what had happened is because these nerves that used to be the hand were not getting any signals anymore. And so the part that was next to it encroached into that area. So here's the freaky thing then. Things that normally would cause you pain don't cause pain anymore. But maybe something else does. Yeah, I know. Like every time you get the, who knows what's in the neighborhood? Maybe it's the sensation of cold is by, or maybe it's an emotional center. So whenever you're happy, oh, oh, it's my birthday. Oh, open another present. It's saying you gotta be very careful with the brain. It took a long time. Pretty much all of evolution to get the brains that we have. It's not something to trifle with. Yes, yeah. I mean, there's also the whole blood-brain barrier and getting drugs into the brain and all that kind of thing. You know, there's a whole bunch of issues to deal with moving forward, but it's, you know, this isn't going to be like tomorrow, but it's interesting that this is an area that we can even start considering when we start drilling down into the little details, right? This particular area may be a switch. We could use that switch, you know? I think it's, you know, let's worry about the other details as we come to them, but this is a great direction for this research. If you just tuned in, you are listening to This Week in Science and if you're interested in a twist shirt or mug or other item of twist merchandise, Blair, do we have face masks? They are still under review by Zazzle. There are six designs that I made, but none of them are in the shop yet. All right. Well, you can head to twisttwist.org and click on the Zazzle link to browse our store. Hey, I think it's time for Blair's Animal Corner. With Blair? Yeah. Yeah. Preacher, great and small. By the millipede, no pet at all. If you want to hear about this animal, she's your girl. Except for giant, panty, that squirrel. And an uproar. Whatcha got, Blair? I have a story about fungus on Twitter. Wait, what? Yeah. There are no fungi's on Twitter. No fungi's at all. Well, in this case, a new kind of parasitic fungus was discovered via Twitter. This is a publication from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. And a biologist and associate professor at their National Natural History Museum, Anna Sophia Robolira was scrolling through Twitter and she saw a photo of a North American millipede. There's the animal of this story. And she was looking really closely at this millipede picture and noticed some tiny dots that looked familiar. They looked like fungi. And this particular type of fungi until this moment had never been found on American millipedes. So what did they do? They ran down to the museum and they started digging. So the National Natural History Museum in Denmark in Copenhagen, it's huge. They have what is one of the world's largest entomological collections with more than 3.5 million pin-mounted insects and at least that many alcohol preserved insects and land animal specimens. About 100,000 known species are represented at that museum. And so they were able to kind of look through that for some more millipedes that might have this fungus on it. And they discovered several specimens of this same fungus on preserved American millipedes. I mean, you really, I'm looking at this picture of a millipede right now and I honestly looking at this, I'm not a millipede expert, obviously, but I would not notice a little dot of fungus. I mean, somebody was really bored looking at images on Twitter. And I am impressed that it went as far as to find a fungus and publish a study. This is amazing. Well, if you're on my college, it's just obvious. I mean, just- Right, of course. Of course, that's a fungus that has never before been documented. This is an unknown species of labubanalis fungus. It's an order of tiny, bizarre and largely unknown fungal parasites that attack insects and millipedes. And so since it was a new species discovered on Twitter, it's now official Latin name is Troglomyces twitteri. And as far as I can tell, this is the first time a new species has been discovered on Twitter, which I thought I remembered stuff that we've talked about before on the show of species being discovered on Twitter, but I couldn't find anything. Was it a fungus? Was it a fungus? No, they're saying period, new species period discovered on Twitter. So I couldn't find, I spent some time digging. I didn't see anything else, so I believe them. But that kind of shows you the importance of social media science kind of channels. There's a whole science communication Twitter world out there where people are sharing their research with each other. And there's an amazing opportunity to kind of tap into other people's knowledge that could live across the world or maybe even just down the street, but you can't physically see them in this moment. So especially now, it's a time that kind of connectivity is so important for this sort of thing. And so this shows you how you could use social media to help discover new things in science, but also secondarily, how important museum collections are. Preserved specimens had a fungus on them that they can still identify. That's bonkers to me. So it's, yeah, it's very cool. This particular fungus sucks nutrition from their host by piercing their outer shell, using a special suction structure and the other half protrude. So that little dot that she discovered that she saw on that picture was just the latter half of the fungus poking out. This has a very, I mean, structurally involved fungus as I would, I mean. There you go. Very interesting. Wow. Thanks, Twitter and board scientists. Nope. Yeah, so speaking of Twitter, let's talk about tweeters. Birds. I love it. So this is a study from Kyoto University. And this was published in current biology last week. This was looking at how birds alarm calls could impact other species. And I think we've talked to Fairmount on the show about how some animals will listen into other animals' communications to be able to tip off potential behavior. But this was looking specifically at Japanese tits and coal tits, little birds, and how the call of the Japanese tit specifically could mean one particular type of predator and how that coal tit could be listening to that and responding in like. So in particular, this was looking at their alarm call for a snake. And it really, it started as a study just looking at the Japanese tits alarm calls. But as they were doing this study in the wild, they recognized that the coal tits were often approaching the experimental area when they played these calls. So they decided to loop this other species in and see how their responses worked out. And so they are positing that actually the call is so specific that it causes the birds to mentally retrieve an image of snakes in their brain. So how did they decide this? I always get so fascinated by the experimental methods for these sorts of things. So what they did is they would play the alarm call and then they'd see how these coal tits would respond. And they did that by having a stick on a rope nearby and they would either move it, quote unquote, like a snake or they would glide it across or up a tree or they would swing it or pivot it in a way that was not snake like at all or not move it at all. And so when they played these snake specific warning calls, the stick that was moved to mimic a snake, the coal tits would approach and inspect the stick. You're like, what's going on right here? But when the stick was moved kind of in a rocking or pivoting motion, they didn't approach at all. And so it would appear that specifically they're hearing like, hey, there's a snake. And they're looking around for something that looks like a snake. And if they don't see something that looks like a snake, they're like, eh, it's fine. So that's the idea here. I think that there's a lot of studying to be done from this point forward to kind of hone in on this a little bit more. But it's a very interesting start to see how they contextualize the alarm calls of different animals. I'm in full agreement with Nord Prefect in the chat room who's saying, I mean, isn't that what you call a word? A sound that generates an image in the brain? I totally agree. That's what a word is. Not more than that. But I imagine that, I mean, this is cross species. And so we're talking about, you know, an American understanding the French word, right? Yes, exactly. This is the equivalent of understanding a different language. And I think that is- Well, the font. Yeah, it was a snake, wouldn't you? Oh, my dog gets excited when I say treat, so, you know. Yeah, exactly. So it's important enough that they kind of are queuing into it probably. Yeah. I wonder the difference between different species. So they're looking at these tit species, this one particular species of bird that is pretty social when it comes down to it. I mean, they, you know, they deal with, they often travel in flocks. The Parris Minor or the Parrot Parris Eater and, you know, these different birds travel in flocks. They're often mixed flocks. I mean, when you look here, the related birds are chickadees and you'll often find them in flocks with bush tits and other kinds of birds. They'll be nearby trees where you might have finches or sparrows. So I do, these are all very vocal animals also. So I wonder if the type of communication the animal does is important and also how social they are generally and whether or not they integrate with other species on a regular basis. I'm also very confused as to why they approach the stick. If it's a predatory alarm call, this is what I'm not getting. So they played this alarm call and these cultits approach the experiment area. Maybe they, they gotta check it out. They gotta check it out. Brings in snakes. No, no, no, but this is their predators. No, they are predated upon by snakes. This is, yeah, I don't know. They're just curious. Maybe they still learn the word. So the other part of it is maybe, you know, maybe less of a word because I've heard about this being across like, you know, maybe South American monkeys taking cues from bird calls. Maybe it's the tonality. Like you learn in your environment what another species sounds like when they're relaxed and you get to learn when they just are freaked out by something. And you don't really necessarily have to have, but you're saying they really had the picture of a snake and they were thinking snake when, and that's what they were, that's what they were reacting to when they saw it. So. Yeah, that's the expectation. Yeah. There could also be the checking. Maybe they're not checking on the predator. Maybe they are checking to see if they're the predator's prey is in danger. So is the species that's calling out is that one that's similar to them? Is it one that they would, you know, want to pay attention to? Yeah. Or maybe it's helpful to know exactly where the predator is. Have you ever, I mean, have you seen smaller birds attacking hawks? Oh, all the time. And if you've gone birding, there's the pshh sound that you do to attract birds, which is apparently like a kind of a predatory call and you make the pshh sound and the birds are supposed to come to you. Well, maybe that's might be it. They might want to identify exactly where you are. Because most of the time, you know, the snake is hidden. And so nobody knows where the snake is. Once you know where the snake is, you're like, there's where I don't go now. Is the bird just looking for, you know, just they don't know exactly where it is, but their search image suddenly expands and is trying to focus in on something that looks like a snake, which could be that stick or whatever. And that's what they, they go, they kind of look around. They go, oh, that might be the, oh, that's not a snake. Just like, you know, if you were to yell, you know, fire or, you know, look at that thing and you kind of look around and it's something that looks like what the object was that they described. Or when I'm driving through the country and I tell my, I said to my kids, hey, look. And they look and there's a big bale of hay on there. I'm sure their search image was for that bale of hay. Yes. At this point it is. At this point, if it's anything else, they'll miss it. I don't see the bale of hay pops. What are you talking about? I love it. Birds' eavesdropping and responding. I think it's fantastic. Speaking of eavesdropping, sometimes don't you wish you just had like an extra eye? You could leave hanging around to like keep an eye on things and you're not around. Or maybe, you know, you need a new eye. And that would be really nice. Well, some researchers have developed a new artificial eye. That's right. Publishing this week in nature, researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have developed a new synthetic eyeball that is pretty much like better than our eye, except that it's lower resolution now. But it won't be someday. This eye, it's an incredible piece of engineering. The eye had historically efforts to create synthetic eyes have made light sensing structures on flat sheets. Now, this eye created a specifically curved structure in which the light channels for the sensors are formed as the entire structure is formed. And so historically, it's been a flat sheet and they've had to put the light sensors kind of apart from each other because then they curved it and you have to take, when you curve a flat sheet, things get folded and bent and left out. If you've ever tried to fold a piece of flat fabric into a curve, you understand the difficulty here. But in starting from the beginning on the structure, they were able to put a really, really high number of light sensors into the structure so that effectively there are orders of magnitude more sensors in this artificial eye than there are retinal cells in the human eye. The problem is the wires that attach to these sensors, the wires are so big, each wire connects with several of these sensors at once. And so the resolution ends up being limited. And they have been able to use a very specific magnetic technique to take little tiny wires and try and connect them to a larger number of these light sensors to increase their resolution. But that manufacturing method isn't very easy in it. The lead researcher said it's like doing a very technical magnetic surgery. And so this eye, the exciting part of it because of the way that it is shaped, the materials that they have used and the high density array of photo sensors that are involved, the eye is able to, I think, let's see. Yes, so the resolution is only about 10 by the photo sensor array is only about 10 by 10 pixels. So the light detecting region is only about two millimeters wide. But let me see if I can find the, the 460 million light sensors per square centimeter would allow the eye to detect light faster than a human eye. The sensors are faster detecting light in about 30 to 40 milliseconds as opposed to 40 to 150 milliseconds. And the device can also see in dim light about as well as the human eye. So it would also, the speed at which our eye takes to get used to being in dim light conditions. This artificial eye wouldn't have to deal with that. So if they can figure out the manufacturing, make it a little bit easier with materials that maybe aren't as expensive as they are for this particular design, the potential is people are saying maybe on the, in a decade or so we might be seeing artificial eyes, synthetic eyes in use in the human population. Love it. Or at least in robots. Maybe our robots will have eyes. Don't love that, I want them, not the robots. My eyes are starting to fail. I have to start wearing glasses now. So I'll take those in 10 years. So I know you came in here for the highest definition TV you could find. And I got one for you. It's a magnitude higher resolution than the 4K. The only thing is, you're gonna need better eyes. With every purchase of this new big screen, high, high, high definition television, you sign up for a new pair of eyes as well. That's why the price is so big. We're gonna put new eyes in your head. So you can actually see better than real life. It's amazing. I'm ready to throw these in the garbage for some robot eyes. I'm 100% on board. I've got a nearsighted, I can't see color, it's a mess. Give me some robot eyes, I will take them. Yeah, I mean, seriously, better, faster, stronger, the eyes will have it. And finally, really for my news for today, really pretty interesting study had neuroscientists around the globe looking at brain scans. A group, this is published again in Nature this week. A group had 70 teams around the world all look at the same set of brain scans to test the same hypotheses about what would happen to the brains that they were looking at in particular situations. There was a set of seven different hypotheses. And what do you think, agreement or no agreement? No agreement, none. Yeah, irreproducible results. And it didn't come down to the software that they were using. It basically came down to human decisions. The teams, there were a couple of results that like 86 or 90% of the teams seemed to get pretty much in common, but that was two out of seven of the hypotheses. All the rest of them were differing results, different percentages supported or did not support the different hypotheses. And it all came down to humans. It came down to the decisions that were made on methodology, on statistics, on how to analyze, on so many things. And so this study, it's not, this goes along with the fMRI study that where they looked at a dead fish in an fMRI machine years back and found brain activity in a dead fish that was supposedly the popular media decided to interpret it as showing that fMRIs- Zombie fish. Right, that they didn't work very well, not zombie fish that fMRIs didn't work very well. But that's not exactly what it showed. It showed that there was variability in the software. They've fixed some of that stuff now. And this study is getting at the crux of the problem that a lot of researchers start their studies without actual hypotheses, start collecting data and then form their hypotheses later. So these kind of ad hoc hypotheses that come along. You also have things like p-hacking in the statistics to support certain hypotheses. And the researchers suggest that a lot of these studies that potentially do depend a lot on human error, human introduced error, should be pre-registered and that you should have a lot of the underlying decisions about analytics and data and your hypotheses set out before you even embark on the study. And there are a few places that you can actually go to pre-register your studies as a scientist that can help with reproducing the results. Cool. I Blair, what you got? I have a story about penguin poop and how the fumes drove scientists mad. I mean, it's stinky, but yes. So in the Antarctic, the king penguins live in huge colonies and we now know that their poop creates a huge amount of nitrous oxide, which we also know as laughing gas. So, they kind of noticed that when you would spend a lot of time around these penguin colonies that they would start to get some kind of weird impacts. They would get headaches. They would start to feel kind of loopy. They would start to feel ill. And so looking at what was happening there, the poop was actually interacting with the soil and the soil bacteria converted the nitrogen in their nitrogen-rich diet of fish and krill and turned it into nitrous oxide. So these king penguin colonies are just saturated in nitrous oxide. So they're gonna ask that colony now. You think your crap's funny? Yes, yes, exactly. So this is two kind of different scientific implications that I think are very funny. They're drastically different. So one is aside for just being very silly and something that now people who study penguins have to be aware of, but so on one side, nitrous oxide is a heat trapping gas. And so this less likely to have an impact on the Earth's ecosystem as a whole, but could have impacts on that specific ecosystem, that little microcosm could actually, it could change some of the thermodynamics happening there. But the other thing that's very interesting is that nitrous oxide is emitted by nitrogen fertilizers that we use in agriculture. And so you could actually learn something about fertilizers and optimal conditions for soil bacteria for agriculture from this. By looking at the soil bacteria in the Antarctic. Penguin poop. Yes. Oh no, because some people studying penguins went, I feel silly and I have a headache and I think I'm gonna bark. They're not getting enough oxygen. Yeah. But it wasn't as funny as people think it is, unfortunately. Well, no, we're laughing. Yeah. The thing is though, if they had those symptoms and they hadn't consulted a doctor, they could have come up with a completely different result. Really? No. Yes, yes. Well, what was I saying? We have more people in the United States without a primary care physician than we've ever had in the history of this country, which I'm presuming to be true. You can look it up. There's a new study that's analyzed 36 international mobile and web-based symptom checkers these are like the online medical troubleshooters that you can go online, you can put your symptoms in and it'll spit back what you might have. Well, it turns out they produced the correct diagnoses on the first result, 36% of the time. You were, the chances of having a correct diagnosis in the top three, however, jumped up to 52%. 52, that's almost chance. Almost. Yeah, just about. Yeah. So this is one way in which I guess technology is not going to revolutionize healthcare just yet. This is published if you're interested. This is researched by the Edith Cowan University, which published in the Medical Journal of Australia today. And so yeah, they're cautioning, which is also, by the way, a country that has universal healthcare. So I think they were just mocking us. Because I can't imagine, they could just go see their doctor at any time. I don't know, but maybe they were trying to encourage people that felt like, ah, I won't leave the house. I'll just do it from home. Don't do it from home. Famously, famously, this, I did this in a book version. There was like one of those home medical book things that had one of these like troubleshooter like things. If this is that, and I looked at it, when I was, I think 11 years old, I declared to my mother that I had yellow fever. There you go. I was pretty sure, because I have all the symptoms. I have a fever. I feel nauseous and a little bit dizzy. Yep. I think it was right there. Gotta be it? I think all the children of the 70s, how many households grew up with where there is no doctor in the house? It was just a common book. Oh, so many illustrations and diseases. Yep. I was always fascinated by the illustrations of all the measles and mumps. I remember those very vividly in those books growing up. It was quite the time. Of course, we also had asbestos and everything else to expose to, but it's all good. When I was a kid, life was so much freer, fun. You know what? We've come to the end of the show. We have done all the stories this time next week. Hopefully there will be American astronauts in space thanks to a launch between NASA and SpaceX. Apparently the next week, human space flight from American soil may happen again for the first time since 2011. We will see. Hopefully we will have good news from SpaceX and NASA next week. So I hope that you will be looking forward to that with us. Thank you for listening to the show. I hope that you enjoyed it. 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Thank you for joining us again. Going the distance with me. My pleasure. Thanks for having me tonight, guys. I appreciate it. Was really wonderful to get to talk with you about the octopus's garden in the sea. That's right. I had to go there once. I'm sorry. Next week's show. Let's go. We will be back Wednesday, 8 p.m. Pacific Time, broadcasting live from our YouTube and Facebook channels and from twist.org slash live, or backslash. Is it a forward slash or a backslash? I can't tell you. It's just a slash. Just go to twist.org and hit the live button. That's right. Hey, do you maybe wanna listen to us as a podcast? Just search for this week in science wherever podcasts are found. If you enjoy the show, maybe get a few of your friends to listen to. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes and links to stories will be available on our website, www.twist.org, and you can sign up for our newsletter. That's right. Also, you can contact us directly. 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Science, science, science. yet but they are under review um if you do you want me to share my screen i can show you the ones that are under review yeah let's see those face masks okay yeah gaurav really would like a sneak peek of the twist masks yes gaurav so i'm a little concerned i don't know how i i requested to show the screen i think you have to approve oh there you are i see it um so i don't know how a review works but i submitted this one down here for review in 2016 so oh my goodness i don't know i know why this one got flagged it's because the word booby is in it so i changed it to blue-footed bird which is fine um but i don't i don't know why every single mask that i did got submitted for review huh so like this one is perfectly yeah so this is just like it's just normal just a normal mask just chill i don't understand what the issue is this one same just a black mask with our little logo on it not a big deal and then um there's this one that's just our logo it's just nice and fun look it twists all over your face twist on your face no big deal i really liked this one actually um because it's the red panda's face oh it's a red panda that's good one i like um and then also i did this one because it says 2020 on it so it seems appropriate right um but yeah i thought it was fun yeah um but uh fun and colorful yeah i i don't know i i'm assuming an email goes to you related to it but i haven't gotten one yeah i don't know if it would get stuck in the spam filter but zazzle no wait let me know when the zazzle products had been oh chat just left i didn't say goodbye bye chat i didn't get to say goodbye oh that's too bad yeah yeah i check these places i check these places it let me know when maybe i'll i'll ask a question yes say hey zazzle hey you zazzle where's like where's how i get help how do i get help i don't know but if you figure out the website send me a link oh the saved designs help oh did why do they have to be under review do they have to be under review i don't know i mean i tried to make them from different methods um here i'm gonna share my screen again and show everybody the newest stuff i think cool oh there's chad he didn't go away i i'm sorry i my daughter came in my daughter had come in and was like you know how much longer and i was like oh i'm gonna get off in just a minute and i accidentally i was i was trying to hit the turn camera off and i hit the leave studio later i was sad i'm like oh we didn't get to say goodbye but i figured you had to go no i but i do have to go anyway i just i really appreciate it guys i love your show thanks for having me on i love talking about this stuff thank you so much oh that was an amazing uh this has been an amazing visit yeah a wonderful tour below the sea i know i feel so lucky and going the distance i love it i love to go in the distance with the show that's the best you know for for the longest time i've you know i started doing small podcast things and post credit shows and segments and i do my giants podcast right now that's only the only one i do i used to do a parenting podcast i used to do a gaming podcast and for years i always wanted to start a science podcast kind of like a skeptic science kind of podcast but it just never it's just it as you guys know obviously it just is so much time and i already have so much time invested into so many of the things coaching little league and and uh doing my other podcast and all this other stuff that i i just i just couldn't carve it out i just couldn't carve it out so when i could come and talk two hours of science you know one time every six years then i can make the time for that well you know hopefully we can we can make it more often than once every six years we can work on that yeah we'll see what else we can dig up out of the ocean there so to talk about but uh again thanks for having me guys i appreciate it and i'll keep watching and listening and and uh stick with it in this uh especially this time of misinformation and everything you guys do a wonderful job trying to you know bring it i know it's a little bit of you know uh preaching to the choir but at the same time you know you're doing what you can do so i appreciate it thank you thanks guys awesome thank you have a good night you too stay well bye we'll do bye i'm so glad he got in touch and said hey i went oh yeah hey let's talk octopuses in an octopuses garden that's the part that's the part is it is that it was a giant garden into the ocean it was octopuses they looked like flowers are we saying it right blaire we know we have this conversation every time it is octopuses it's not it's never been octopi or is that an alternative octopi is wrong it's accepted now just like a lot of misuses are accepted now because it's because people are wrong so generally here okay that makes it oh no no i got it i'm ready now there we go okay i just want to show everyone our new stuff this is the sweatshirt that got i had to rename because it's a blue footed movie the blue footed bird sweatshirt yeah and then this is this is the tote bag i really liked it's cute it has like a blue footed bird sweatshirt a little twist logo nice um and then figure out how to oh this mug has both beetles on it i did two beetles last year hercules and dung i like that and you can put it on any kind of mug you want because mornings are poop no it's true look you could put it on a stein if you wanted it's tiny you could put it on a travel mug it's my beetle stein you could put it on a two-tone mug oh the tortoise mask yes uh that's the one i need tortoise mask yeah sure i'm gonna call it out that's absolutely right that'd be perfect tortoise okay can we get a tortoise i mean i'll design another mask i don't know if they're gonna let me sell it they don't are you kidding me where do they care they literally have no skin in this game just in all my stuffs in review that's just because somebody has to make sure like somebody actually probably just said this is the part you missed look this polo has been under review since 2016 what okay that's that somebody needs to send an email i know i'm gonna do that right now just an email that's all it should take so which tortoise do you want the box turtle from last year or do you want to do you want the tortoise from the first year i think that i think either one uh would it be i like this one or whatever that was that was the that was the hypno toad that was the horn oh maybe i want the hypno toad i like oh i do love the hypno toad oh the mastodon the mastodon gotta put that one that's the one i've changed i've switched change your mind shama we should still do the tortoise with you on that uh but yeah now i need a mastodon mask mask to don mask to don the not the t-rex the mastodon mask to don i'm on that's the one the the mammoth that guy is it a mammoth i think it's close enough yeah yeah that one oh that's that's my mask right there that's it your your maskodon the mastodon mask mask my mask myth uh uh uh uh uh what happened okay there we go what did i do i clicked on something it logged me in i think what happened what happened i don't know actions set to feature oh i can feature things yeah mammoth mask i do love that the the crocodile hat so great i really like the the more graphic art that the stained glass created this last year i'm um i finished all my sketches for this year but now i just have to figure out what kind of um what kind of arty thing i'm gonna do what how i'm gonna color it how you're gonna make it different yeah i have some ideas but of course you do yeah so arch yeah okay so it needs to be approved by the content review team you'll be notified as soon as your product goes live we make every effort to review submissions between 10 within 10 to 14 days so you're like meanwhile 16 2016 a big deal where did it go where we go is it gone now did it go straight to the store what no i'm really confused what happened i made a mammoth mask okay and now it doesn't exist gone that is weird curious curious you know uh i should go now yeah so how did your finals go uh they're done all of five of them that's a lot yeah uh is there quality within them perhaps maybe do i care at this point not at all they're done that's all i really know at this point it's all i can remember is that they were got finished oh but i did i did okay so i think i i think i over or under thought or misread one of the finals uh it was an anthropology and it was about bipedalism uh and it said you know compare and contrast uh at least two different versions of uh ideas of how uh the first hominins became bipedal so i did that part and then the second part was uh explain what theory you like the most and why uh and i thought it was asking me to come up with one so i did i did and i like it more i like it more than any of the others so there's like the savannah one where we came down because the climate is in and we were looking over the tall grasses for prey and predators there's the there's ones that it was a display uh that the hominins were standing up to scare off other other animals there's a few there's the climate was different there's a couple you know different ways that this i decided it was because of uh uh tools so that we became upright because of tools well the first tools uh were actually in us throw little pit the sissises uh but they weren't making the tools they were doing selecting they were like finding your sharp stone they were carving meat off of things as soon as hominins started relying and these are also by the way probably could stand up bipedally because they were like back and forth into the trees and in the trees you know the the knuckle drag the knuckle walkers evolved away from being uh sort of both so they actually evolved away from being able to be bipedal at all so there was this little bit of bipedal ability to stand at least couldn't run at all i think but as we began to work with tools more it became important to use your hands and if you're using your hands on the ground you you're either sitting down or you're standing on them and then as evolution continues and we start working and making our own tools with homo habilis now we're starting to get the that whole opposable thumb thing working in there and what happens if you make the perfect tool do you just throw it out no you want to hang on to it and now what becomes really inconvenient climbing in a tree you've got the perfect tool you just worked all day on you're not gonna leave it there it's inconvenient to leave the tool it was it was the inconvenience of climbing trees once you had your favorite tool in hand that led to more and more time on the ground and more and more time especially now when you're making a tool you're not just slapping it down with one hand you're holding one stone in place as you hit it with another so now you got to have both hands working and so now you're standing you're not you're leaning you're not going to yeah so i think it was just the and and then the the uh so the habilis is when they start making tools and that's when we considered the opposable thumb came into play so now we're really dedicated to this using both hands to do stuff while on the ground so we're not we're now standing a lot more and more standing and then it's not to homo erectus that we're actually built like a runner uh but at this point we've we've really mastered toolmaking and have been using our hands to maybe even hunt with at this point so yeah that was my theory it had nothing to do with any like it wasn't persistent signing it wasn't chasing stuff because we couldn't run for uh for three million years of uh of being able to stand up uh and and starting this tool use thing so but then i realized after i uh submitted it that like oh maybe i was just supposed to choose one of the other ideas that was already there and explain why i liked that one probably yeah probably that sounds right yeah i think that's what it was supposed to be but hey i owe you an extra credit for coming up with the uh the tools uh the tool that the inconvenience of climbing trees once you had a favorite tool theory oh my god i love it oh my god just in taking finals that sounds exciting and tiring are you gonna go sleep for three days now no i'm going to uh i'm going to go to work uh in a few hours yeah you got up early and go to work yes yeah i yeah i'm i'm at work by uh five seven o'clock in the morning so so yeah it's been a it's been a fun week i don't think i will ever take five classes uh and work full-time in conjunction ever again that's bronkers yeah that's a turn out to be turn out to be yeah it's the problem of being an optimist really it's it's it should be it's not in the i was also psychology was one of the classes turns out uh uh being an optimist is not listed as a personality disorder i think it should be i think it should be because that actually probably gets you into more trouble than all of the rest of them combined because you think it's gonna be fine no matter what you're like yeah five classes that's not a lot i'll have an hour in the evening to take care of everything everything five oh my god i think i don't usually do that with like well no i do do that but um i feel like the the problem i have uh with my optimism is time i always think i'm gonna get way more stuff done in the amount of time that i have like oh that'll take five minutes i'll take 10 minutes it'll take 10 minutes to get there i'll be there in 30 minutes and then 30 minutes later i finish the first thing on that list i'm like so guess what takes a little longer yeah it's not that i'm like i'm running late and i'm messing around it's that i think i can get more done oh well i am doing that i'm also on top of all i'm a pessimist i'm an optimist and a procrastinator that combination feeds into the out there's there will still be enough time even though i'm messing around and not taking care of things right away there'll still be time i'm optimistic about it and then there's a deadline like there was with all of these finals that came out of nowhere just showed up like oh it ends now and there's i should look at the finals i should we see what's required and oh there's writing involved okay it's time it's time but uh yeah no uh sleep deprivation experiment uh day five uh i can i can i can feel the effects of the lack of sleep now uh some of them are good but mostly i it's disassociative it's just though i'm it's just though i'm observing this human uh who is still conscious and it's showing all the signs of being in a deep sleep anyway yes i'm gonna go uh get the good night's sleep so i can have a nice refreshing uh tomorrow at the end of tomorrow good yeah uh yes have a good refreshing at the end of tomorrow good night justin should we go player are you done it is oh well then i can say good night to say good night player wait wow you were i thought i would start actually now i'm worried that you might actually be more tired than me good night players say good night justin good night justin good night kiki good night everyone thank you for joining us for another episode we really really appreciate your time and we hope that you stay healthy and happy and join us again next week because there will be more science there's always more to discover thank you so much bye