 and welcome welcome welcome welcome to the live twist podcast broadcast we are back for another week of science discussion and we're so glad to have you here just to let everybody know remember this is a live broadcast errors that are made we don't make that many mistakes really but every once in a while there are things to edit out and those things do not make it to the podcast so uh this is the live fun fun times so we are glad you are here with us and make sure you click all the likes and the shares and get other people to join us for the next tight 90 of science discussion yeah are you ready yeah there's head nodding yes head nodding in an audio podcast it is i know this is nobody even knows we were nodding except for people who are here right now all right so let's start this show business in three two this is twist this week in science episode number 918 recovery recorded on wednesday march 22nd 2023 the science spring quinox it's super fresh but i'll let you know that i'm dr kiki and today we will fill your heads with chemicals depression and fevers but first disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer ai is changing everything well maybe not everything yet but it's just getting started and already there are questions the academic world is struggling to keep up with students who may be brilliant but right like a robot or students who skipped a required reading yet turned in a perfectly astute essay the teacher uses ai detectors to determine a reel from generated paper are they the ones cheating if ai is used to grade papers is that cheating ai is a powerful research tool and that is not cheating if your research paper though is entirely ai generated that seems like cheating but what if your guided ai in some way does it count if its findings are valid what if they are not ai recently predicted that several hundred millions of protein folds would based off single sequences would have certain formations but how accurate are they if they are close enough to accurate is it science how close if they are not close is it still science a car drives off a cliff runs over pedestrian was it driver error was the driver even the driver does that even matter for a signing fault our deep fakes fraud or free speech is ai based stock trading a tool or is it cheating the system is ai based trading becoming more popular and automated and if so is having an ai based economy wise we humans live in a world of words what does it mean if we aren't the ones generating those words interpreting those words what jobs will be left for humans to reform when knowledge based word generation and automated physical systems are everywhere and actually worse the worst case scenario of all what if one day ai replaces this week in science coming up next and a good science to you too justin blare and everyone out there welcome to this week in science thank you so much for joining us for another science filled episode blare so good to have you back i'm so happy to be back all right we have wonderful science ahead for you uh yeah like they said all sorts of great fun things i've got some neutrinos uh flipping galaxies some big eyes and microscopes for mice what do you have justin all those research mice they need them oh gosh where did i bring that's a great question every scroll or see if i can remember oh yes i've got uh baltic blasts uh not so forever chemicals after all maybe sourcing depression to a single gut enzyme and toxoplasma gondii strikes again oh you know it always strikes back what is in the animal corner this week oh my goodness well uh those same lab mice you were talking about before uh they like to pee everywhere and we're going to talk about why and when and how and when not uh we're also going to talk about strange birds and uh in the short stories i want to talk about fevers in fish and maybe humans fish beavers i have never even contemplated this possibility so i'm very interested i'm very curious about actually the fever story because uh yeah i had i had a uh this is an ongoing debate in the jackson household yes we're gonna get into it i bet it's exactly what this is about i can't wait well i hope everyone else is as excited about all these topics as we all are and as we jump into the show here i would like to remind you that this week in science is available as a podcast all pretty much all places the podcasts are found look for this week in science twist we broadcast live weekly streaming from youtube twitch and facebook we are at twist science on twitch twitter mastodon and instagram and you can find our website at twist.org let's start the science let's do let's do it okay first things first large hadron collider news there were some neutrinos discovered in 2021 by researchers looking at the phaser particle detector at the large hadron collider in cern and phaser stands for forward search experiment and its purpose was to try and detect particles that are produced by the collisions that happen within the large hadron collider specifically they have been searching for these neutrinos because neutrinos they're one of the most important particles for the standard model they also don't really interact with anything so they just kind of go through stuff and don't you don't bother with them a lot and so they're hard to find we have a really hard time detecting them we have various detectors around the world a big giant detector full of water in japan that detects them we also have at the ice cube detector and in Antarctica looking for neutrinos it's found a few but actually being able to find neutrinos that come from the collisions that we create we can start to really understand the forces and the interactions that actually lead to these particles and you know and then we can start really understanding the standard model more and how the neutrinos fit into like we can start putting pieces together and so over the last few years the large hadron collider had been down for upgrades it got upgraded it came back online again and the data has been coming in and the researchers from the University of California Irvine have reported on their findings and the report is ridiculously successful so when we normally talk about like physics experiments and the success it's like oh this was a five sigma or a six sigma significance rate right and that's like really good this data that they now have from 2021 and the new upgrade of the large hadron collider 16 sigma so that's so many sigmas it's so many sigmas but really what it means is the the chance that they didn't actually find neutrinos is pretty much impossible that they're pretty darn sure basically is the math language for that that's exactly something like airline uh air controls are working at like six sigma or something like this like those are the people like in charge of air traffic air traffic control folks they're working on a system of i think it's six sigma maybe it gets into seven but i think it's somewhere in there in terms of not messing up or not having an error right and so 16 sigma is just it's order of magnitude larger instead of single digits we're in double digits i mean it's it's uh they're very very positive about their findings and neutrinos i mean we've it's been 70 years since they were first discovered and these researchers are very excited about this particular finding uh researchers saying uh neutrinos are the only known particles that the much larger experiments at the large hadron collider are unable to directly detect so phasors successful observation means the collider's full physics potential is finally being exploited lawn in the chatroom says uh i consider the lhc a failure the standard model still stands happy yeah you know the way it was it was absolutely the excitement that uh this is going to ruin everything how we thought their things were and there would be all the alternative theories of physics had their had their chance with the lhc to to show that hey maybe maybe the fringy ideas which in physics everything is kind of a fringe idea in some respect to be honest or or is the fundamental rules of the universe and it's it's one or the other i like that it's confirming the the view that we've had so far so we've got a lot of confirmation of stuff and and that's really awesome we're still missing p big pieces though uh one of the other things that phaser is set up to do is to identify the the things the particles the bits the pieces that make up dark matter and they haven't done that yet but that is one of the uh one of the goals one of the things that phaser is supposed to be doing looking for signs of dark matter so maybe new things so long in the chat room hold keep up keep up the hope keep it up we can always hope for something new placeholder for this thing we haven't quite figured out uh might have to get replaced with something that's different than the things that have been proposed for the placeholder there's still hope for some for some uh a little bit of disruptive information to come from LHC speaking of disruptions do you want to talk about some uh some some dangers Justin oh yeah uh so this is oh this is i don't know if the two of you watch the news or our viewers watch the news the news never heard of it outside of the the world of science but apparently a while back uh september of 2022 there was some explosions at the bottom of the Baltic Sea that may have been intentional explosions that uh broke some pipelines that had been built to bring natural gas from russia to germany the Nord Stream one and the Nord Stream two pipelines two separate pipelines in the same uh area underneath the Baltic Sea blew up underwater and out of that came oh now all the natural gas poured out for a while till they realized oh we got a problem we went from 150 something atmospheres of pressure in our pipe down to just a few there's a hole there let's shut it down anyway the uh turns out this is a this is also a bit of a environmental hazard you don't say and not necessarily for the reasons people might suspect okay some some Danish researchers went and looked at what are the environmental impacts of these pipelines it took place right off the coast of the far eastern island of Denmark born home which sits there in the middle of the Baltic Sea just north of Poland and for one thing they have uh harbour harbour purposes which are endangered in the Baltic now they're not endangered everywhere but they're endangered there and there's a population of only 500 and so they calculated what that blast could have done to the local population the concussive explosion and they found that they could have if they were close if there were any individuals close they could have been killed if they were within 50 kilometers of the at the explosions they could have lost some hearing which if it was especially if it was a female that lack of hearing reduces the ability to find mates and you know Blair's not angry at you understand this is you don't want to lose your hearing as an critically endangered species I mean purposes like to talk to each other as we've discussed they recognize each other's voices and calls hearing is pretty important to their social structure and the US Navy and other organizations institutions have had lots of research evidence that noises under the under the surface of the ocean can have detrimental effects on hearing of these animals there's also there's also a couple of species of seals and all the fish that would have been in the air because it was it was an explosion that was recorded at least seismically to be the equivalent of something like 500 uh uh kilos of t and t so really big big explosions underwater now that is not the extent of it this happened to happen in a terrible terrible terrible location born home is lovely gorgeous little you know it's a it's an island to get away in a Scandinavian sort of way it's still so sometime after world war two people decided hey we have all these chemical weapons all this mustard gas lying around and nobody's using all these arsenic based chemical weapons what are we gonna do with them don't say dump it in the ocean some reason they dumped them in the ocean oh my god why right you bet you yeah i bet you can guess where they dumped it right by the pipelines well the pipeline wasn't there yet and actually if you look at the pipeline it comes the comes away from russia nice and parallel lines and then it gets to this dump site area and it splits and it goes around it top and north and south of it well the explosions happened just to the north and just to the south of this chemical weapons dump cool cool cool cool cool cool cool cool cool cool cool cool no not cool not just the other waters in the in the Baltic east of born home is that the the deep water is stratified meaning that they're the ocean currents at the bottom are very subtle rarely do they disrupt or churn the sediment right at the ocean floor yeah so aside from there being a chemical weapons dump that hasn't been churned away or anything like this been sitting there also all of human history's use of any sort of chemicals that made it into the the sea have just settled to the bottom and remained there so it's it's the top layer that sediment is all heavy metals and what so one of the things they found is there are signs when they got as close as 20 kilometers to the explosions they're not they're not getting any closer than that right now uh the sediment had some signs of mustard gas related chemicals and arsenic related chemicals from the chemical weapons but the big contributors the biggest ones is a uh i got the td t dt i gotta have to look up the chemical air but it's a chemical uh biocide that was typically mixed into the paints for the hulls of ships to keep little sub aquatic critters from growing uh it's it's a banned chemical now because of course it is disruptor and it's as many chemicals are yeah whoopsie however it's in a shipping lane here uh that has been using it for the last 40 years before the ban and so it it's settled down into this into the top five centimeters of the soil is the most critically toxically uh that was disrupted and this is all this stuff is lead yeah because of all the vehicles and what have you and engines using leaded fuel for so long that's it so what they're finding is there's a 1200 square kilometer region of the sea that would have experienced a toxic plume for as much as a little over a month after the explosion great so oh there's a lot of intrigue about who done it and they're they're testing yachts for explosives and they're watching satellites and they've got the tracking ships trying to figure who done it but you know geopolitical concerns aside for all this this stuff it was a very terrible location for them to wonder if i guess put the pipeline but another to have blown it up so this is the thing right it's like this is a known toxic waste dump site yeah known yes so maybe it's time everybody that we look at those known toxic waste sites and start doing something about them before they do something to us i don't know what it takes to clean up a entire seafloor or a chemical weapons dump at the bottom of the ocean it would have taken less than what it's gonna take now now yeah but but they they went to additional expense in probably spending a billion extra dollars of when they laid this seafloor pipeline to go around it in a way that didn't disrupt the soil yeah didn't create this resuspension of materials because they were so concerned about it and went way around it so i'm guessing that the expense to clean it up was much higher also well maybe you need to pay that if you want a gas pipeline interestingly though it was a tremendous volume of gas that uh that was released the 115 000 tons of natural gas that escaped which also would you know 15 million tons of co2 went into the greenhouse gases the calculation which which will will be removed in a year if 580 million trees are dedicated to the task but they did find that the the actual gas itself interaction with the water and the residue from the explosives were we're not harmful not having we're not suspected to have a lasting environmental impact of any kind so that's good news because the the gas is probably bubbled up and out of the water however the sediments and everything that have been floating has a tax it's like it's it's pollution yes the pollution well gee that was i don't think there's any way to put a good news spin on that at all that was just bad news oh i didn't even mention that it's a uh a cod spawning ground of course it is that's gonna be fantastic we all love our cod liver oil don't we just make sure yeah you gotta source it i didn't even know i had to source my cod just don't get it from the toxic waste site in the Baltic sea Blair yes while we're sourcing more healthy cod liver oil is there another way we should be thinking about fevers and our health yeah if you have a mild fever out there and you're reaching for the Tylenol maybe don't if you're a fish let's talk about it this is a study from University of Alberta and this is a study mostly done this is done on fish but they they say that this does bring up some interesting ideas about how we care for fevers as humans because fevers are evolutionarily conserved across the animal kingdom for over 550 million years and every animal examined has a fever biological response to infection so let's step aside from the fact that fish are ectothermic and we're endothermic so when you're talking about fevers i feel like there's fundamental differences but let's just put that aside and talk about what the study is about um so fish were given a bacterial infection their behavior was tracked and evaluated using machine learning they saw similar outward symptoms to humans with a fever including immobility fatigue and malaise i want to see what a fish with malaise looks like they were then matched to important immune mechanisms inside those animals so they were like yes they have a fever um the research showed that natural fever actually offered an integrative response that not only activates defense against infection but also helps control it they found the fever helped clear the fish of infection in about seven days which is half the time it took for animals not allowed to exert fever fever also helped shut down inflammation and repaired injured tissue now that's what a fever does right it kills cells that's the point of it your body's having an immune response to kill something foreign in your body but what we know about fevers is if they get too high they start killing other things too like brain cells so i feel like the part that's missing from this study because they're saying that this is like implication that we should resist reaching for over-the-counter fever medications or NSAIDs non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs at the first sign of a mild temperature and if if you have a mild fever you should potentially let it run its course but the the the key there is the word mild right so like I want to see studies on exactly at what temperature in a human not a fish the benefits and the drawbacks are you know the benefits outweigh the drawbacks to having a fever and then when it switches because that's really what I think the beneficial knowledge here is is to a certain extent I would have guessed this fevers are a biological mechanism that our bodies have developed hundreds of millions of years ago there's a reason for it is to kill infection but the reason we suppress fever is that if you have a fever for too long it is detrimental to it is detrimental to your body and yes potentially having a fever is better than being dead but not having a fever still might be better than having a fever so if you can keep yourself from dying while also not having a fever that might be better and so there has to be if this is true there has to be a point at which like what would be helpful is if you could take your kids temperature and go okay you're at one on one I'm gonna let you sit there I'll check you in an hour right you're at 102 now time for the Tylenol right like so like if you could identify the the temperature at which and of course everybody's basal temperature is slightly different so you'd have to like and push pull to that a little bit right so your normal temperature is closer to 97 so your 101 is more like the test subjects 102 so you'd have to like you'd have to look at relative temperatures too I think but if you could find the the kind of turning point at which fevers are 100 detrimental I think that would be the thing to look at before you start telling people to let fevers run their course yeah this is so this is a this is a conversation that we've had here the Jackson household about whether or not you should just let the fever stay because the fever has raised the temperature so it's killing off an infection that's the idea behind but then the conversation goes into well how high of a temperature does it actually need to be to kill off the bacteria before and yeah before cells are being damaged and the answer is probably probably you're going to be doing detrimental harm once once you've got a fever of about 106 that seems high that seems very high damaging that for a for a child that's really really high yeah you know adults you're you're told to start looking at going to the hospital if you're at 102 yeah 103 for more than a couple of days you know my argument my argument has been that fever is a is a sort of a last defense system for a human where okay I've got this thing at some temperature I can knock it down I may do some self-harm but it's worth it because I have no antibiotics I have no I have no cure I don't have orange juice readily available whatever it is in the in the natural world that extreme reaction may be the best course of solution for the body to self-attack this thing I mean so so topically we can talk about covid right and the fact that one of the covid symptoms is having a sustained fever and so it's I can tell you my experience with covid I didn't have to go to a hospital it wasn't that bad but I had to keep on my my Tylenol and I was getting uh ice put all over my body the ice bags and that would push it down and then a couple hours later I take my temperature k back up I had to push it back down again it was a constant fight for days to keep my body temperature low and if it had been high for too long I could have gotten really really sick yeah and that's one of the big uh big questions is uh with a lot of viruses you have the body's inflammatory response the inflammatory response is part of this fever and sometimes the inflammatory response goes too far and it actually really does start causing damage and so you don't want to get to the point where the inflammatory or where this part of the body's defense system hits a point of no return and can't come back from it right you know that's when you end up in the hospital on all sorts of other medications and um yeah but it's uh it's interesting to think that this is yeah something that is across the animal kingdom that fevers they do play a role in the healing yeah yeah and I don't hate the idea of doing extensive human research yes and figuring out 99 100 degrees let it ride I think that is a perfectly reasonable thing to say your body's you know fighting something let it fight but at a certain point you have to recognize when when the cost outweighs the benefits and another aspect Justin to your point about you know how high a temperature does it have to be to just destroy the uh the invader whatever it is that's not the only thing that we should be considering it's also what are the optimal temperatures to enable enzymes and various cellular mechanisms to do their job more efficiently yeah and that's and that's the other side of it yeah it could be it could be that aside from that direct heat or the inflammation or any of the rest of it it could be that that's part of how the body activates certain defense mechanisms is by that high heat triggering a cascade effect of now this forms or now this knows what yep yeah I think I think my personally uh comfort is a great healer yeah that's also true if you can't sleep if you're stressed that also does impact your ability to heal that's actually a really relevant piece if you are so febrile that you can't sleep and you can't rest that's going to be detrimental to your healing also yeah knock that get rid of the headache get rid of that fevery feeling so that you can be calm and relaxed and if it takes you an extra couple days even sleep based off the fish study to heal we have this luxury as humans and we aren't going to get eaten if your workplace gives you sick time but uh yeah that's another if you don't have sick time at your job then you can find another job exactly like it tomorrow really but that is but that but that that is the good the point is we are not fish right we are not we have medicine that our wonderful brains have allowed us to create that does help us live the lives that we live better and so yeah yeah biology is is mushy and wishy washy and everybody's going to be different and have their different ideas but yeah fevers are good but they're part of the system but yeah not everyone has to do the same thing um so speaking of not everybody doing the same thing this also applies to galaxies apparently um astronomers have been looking at at the sky you know because that's what they like to do and the only thing that they talk about it all the time and one of the things they love to look at is you know the active galactic nuclei right the bright spots at the center of galaxies that we think are powered by supermassive black holes and these active galactic nuclei they're really bright and they're but they're usually the jets that come out of the black hole center of the of the galaxy we call them quasars and then it's it's the uh you know coalition of all of those things falling into it getting closer and closer yeah that's very densely packed right stuff gets spit out and it's all jets flying on anyway this part of a galaxy is we call them quasars and they're cool we like looking at the spewing of stuff out of galaxies is very neat for astronomers to look at very active anyway um they can point in all sorts of directions but if one is pointing at earth it's really really really bright and so astronomers like the you know fancy names and so they call them blazars and quasars it's only because quasar was taken yeah they are quasars that's the best the name of anything in space they're still quasars yeah they're still quasars but they're pointed at us and they're so when they're pointed at us and they're super super bright they're called blazars because they're blazing bright i guess that's must be it anyway um sometimes quasars flip direction and do different things uh but we've never we've never really see it happening uh but they found a galaxy that switched he used to be a quasar now it's a blazar it's about should blazar be like an active verb thing like should it be blazering blazaring is that is that is that uh is that galactic nuclei blazering up all of a sudden uh no they think it's the they we don't know so is it the same amount of energy what's going on we don't know why it flipped directions why it started pointing directly at earth so that we had to start calling it a blazar uh it's located about 656.8 million light years away from our planet and um they've been you know looking at it from radio signals for a very long time so they were like wait you're kind of weird and so then they started looking at it with optical infrared x-ray ultraviolet gamma ray telescopes they've been looking at all the things and well they've determined that because of the way that it moved they've got a couple of relics of the old jets from when it was a quasar before it became a blazar and so the old jets they're not fed anymore but there's still kind of material that's hot and out there in space and so astronomers with all these different electromagnetic spectra of of investigation we're able to go oh the old jets they're not getting food anymore so they're all getting quiet but now we have a jet pointed at us and there's why is it why is it like this anyway they're now able to uh estimate the galaxy's size and they think that it spans roughly four million light years in diameter that's about four uh 400 times the size of our galaxy anyway um is 400 right yeah another two yeah yes yes that's another two um but yeah this is very interesting to astronomers they think it might be be because the galaxy might have run into another galaxy and so had a little bump like billiard balls and the new material maybe changed the way that the active galactic nuclei was being fed yeah well yeah could it just be more dynamical there you know because if there's they can still see the other jets but they've been turned off well maybe all that pressure whatever i'm calling it pressure whatever the insane forces are taking place in a quasar meant that that uh the energy still has to go out somewhere and so maybe that just switched directions right i don't i don't know but why would it switch directions and so this is the question we don't know but the switch allowed us to understand a little bit more about that particular galaxy but that it also left astronomers with more questions which is what science is all about so keep looking at the skies i think they need to switch it to to blazing blazing it's still a quasar there's nothing changed it's blazing now that quasar is blazing uh because it's now pointing its jet at us right at us yes uh tell me about zapping zapping chemicals it's not yeah so this is the this we have that problem with the PFAS chemicals these are the the non-stick forever chemicals they're the water repellent very famously teflon teflon right the non-stick pan coating that we used to use especially terrible because we would heat them and put them put our food on it yes and so those chemicals were especially able to get into humans but they seem to go everywhere they're everywhere in our environment they're they don't dissolve in water they don't degrade and that's a problem because in places where people probably haven't been using a lot of non-stick pans like the tibetan plateau or Antarctica are covered in these PFAS chemicals because it it goes up into the clouds and it comes down in rain and so it's getting spread everywhere on the planet it's a known endocrine disruptor it's really really really really bad now in terms of being really really really bad it can't be that bad because it's everywhere and everybody's gonna die already plus you get to turn Everest into a slip and slide this way so that's pretty fun everything that's what's really happening all the places are just sliding off because they're so slippery so but they do have places where they get increased concentration through food webs and things like this anyway one of the places where we'd prefer not to be reintroducing it into humans is in our water system and our drinking water and this is these researchers have these are engineers up in British Columbia which uh is a I believe a colony of the UK north of the United States they have uh already been working on for a while some techniques to degrade the PFAS chemicals and they have a system in which they figured out how to do it it requires adding a little bit of electricity to some uh to some other chemicals an electrochemical reaction takes place to break them down so they can do this great but how do you upscale that that's the problem well what they've decided is may I forget it we're not going to upscale by itself what what they've done is they've created a filter that they are saying will capture 99% of the PFAS in a volume of water okay because that was my original thing I was going to ask is is there intention to purify water have it degrade in water and then you have have you to be able to still drink the water or are they extracting it and then degrading it so they're extracting and then degrading because one of the problems was if you just extract it and have these little throwaway filters now you have concentrations of PFAS now you've created a a hazmat problem everywhere you've purified water so we don't want so but but this is this is not you know the order in which it seems that this this uh technology has come about they've got the filter and now they've got also the way to break it down separately so it's not something you would necessarily have in a home filtration system but it's something that could be upscaled and applied then to a water treatment plant right so that before the water even gets to you it's had the PFAS forever chemicals not just removed but removed and then separately degraded that's amazing this is great news the filters should be reusable reconstitutable uh because everything's just gonna slide off of them a bit well and as hard as in the chat water bill is gonna go up but you know what I will take that for some years back on my life so I am consuming less forever chemicals but it's a it's a huge part of just the water system in general we've got medications we've got all sorts of manufacturing chemicals we've got these forever chemicals it's it let's make systems that can make the water as clean as possible for everybody yes that's what we should be working towards and this sounds great because yeah you should be cleaning them at the water treatment plants before they go into municipal waterways to feed our faucets they should also be going on the back end before they release treated water back into the ocean or into other waterways as well so so you need it on both ends because people are still going to be using their Teflon pan to cook their eggs in the morning and PFAS are still going to then end up in the waterways if they've got the old pans if you got the old Teflon pans throw them out because that's it's been banned for that right however which I didn't know uh all of your waterproofing rain jackets and things like this can still have those chemicals are applied to them for waterproofing uh things I thought they were still on the inside of aluminum cans there's still yes there's still on uh involved in a lot of food packaging yeah horrible yeah the idea being well we've discovered there's a problem with them getting released because of high heat right which this is also this is the whole story and this is just utterly ridiculous because the chemists I don't want to say which company because I don't want to get sued by a major corporation if I get it wrong but the researchers when developing it says yeah this is fine totally stable and safe is dot dot dot as long as it's not exposed to high to high heat what do they do they put it on frying pans frying pans perfect nobody you'll use these to cook at very high heats no no no don't do it just right well moving on from this actually very good news hopeful news for uh the future of removing some of these terrible few uh forever not so forever chemicals from our environment um let's talk about saber tooth marsupial predators picture I'm hoping well we only have a an illustration by uh an artist rendering gimme it an artist's rendering by the artist named a whore hey a blanco and um this this uh let's see if I can look it doesn't want to load it right now but anyway this thylacosmilus thylacosmilus atrox is uh extinct saber toothed marsupial uh that you know enjoyed enjoyed eating other living animals it was an ambush predator so it would hide it would stalk its prey it would ambush them when they had no way out okay I'm not able to get that picture open but these uh researchers found skulls of them and were like well you've got a really interesting skull what's actually going on there and in looking at the the skulls of these thylacosmilus atroxes they discovered that the eye sockets the orbital sockets for these animals were oriented in a very very strange way so normally for predators the eyes are frontally located so that the animal can really have binocular vision be able to focus on whatever they're hunting and be able to get them with accuracy um however these old marsupials turns out that their the growth of the saber teeth out of their upper jaw pushed the orbital sockets no out of the way no yes and so compared compared to um other toothed predators of the time uh smilodon populator thylacolio carnafex and thylacinus sinusaphalus um they were able to determine that there was much less crossover in the front of the uh the visual field then you would normally expect for a predator you know we usually say eyes in the front go and hunt eyes on the side go and hide exactly and so this predator who's a hunter has an eye socket orientation and actually the eyes themselves the way that the nerves would have gone in and the way that the orbital uh sockets were shaped they're much more like cows or like a prey species than a predator species and they survived for a really long time so they still did a really good job and so the researchers are basically saying this study suggests that you know maybe the old adage that the eyes have to be this particular way for predators is not necessarily true well and i suppose they could have maybe their eyes could have been secondary they could have been using other senses as their main detection for for hunting and especially if they're ambush predators it's kind of all out the window because you you don't really need the binocular vision to be able to figure out depth perception unless you're chasing something right if you're just waiting for something to walk right in front of your face and jump out and grab it you don't need precise vision and since they had very large fangs yeah i got you the other option could be that it had that binocular vision and evolved away from it because these these looks like these forward teeth started to take up a lot of prominence uh in the front of the face and started to block the vision yes so now you've got to oh now we've got it right if it's moved it out of the way so they may have they may have and this would be impossible to test incredible peripheral vision that is still allowing for that binocular aspect to be in full well so by the binocular vision is you have to have overlap for binocular vision to work because the whole idea of binocular vision is that it allows for the depth perception so if it's all based on periphery then you're not going to have overlap and you won't be able to think about saying if the eyes are pointing more out to the sides uh that peripheral vision may overlap still right so that so the peripheral vision does have the center of vision yeah the peripheral vision so in this in this particular species there's an overlap at the front of the skull of about they have a 35 visual field overlap versus um other species which have 46 50 64 percent but then the difference between where the eyes are focused on the top of this skull so these these saber teeth pushed the eyes back and the eyes ended up kind of going up and so there is a uh like a 79 percent view upwards from the top from the the the top of the skull surface upwards compared to about 50 percent on the other species maybe which would make sense if you're an ambush predator because if you're waiting for something to come and you're kind of you're hiding in the bushes that's perfect but you know what other ambush predator has eyes on the side which i'm going to show a picture if it's all right yeah i'd love to know who the crocodile and my favorite predator yeah they're more on the top and there's no way they have very much overlap of these two little bdis no way interesting point i was also able to bring this up i don't know if this is the picture that you were looking at before but yes this is an artist's rendering of the saber tooth marsupial which i love it's a saber tooth marsupial predator i love it yeah i love it so much weird in so many ways that's a very cool story but to my point about the crocodiles it's like it's not completely unprecedented with predators that but if you think about like lions and dogs and wolves you think about kind of your basic design for a hunter you're absolutely right you have those ones in the front but if yeah for ambush predator makes a lot more sense to me for them to just i also think it's an amazing thing about marsupials the convergent evolution like there's a whole study on the extinct uh Tasmanian tiger which if you look at this extinct creature it looks like a canine you would say this is a very strange kind of a dog maybe it's like a related to closer to a hyena there's something like this but it's not it's a it's a predatory marsupial that convergently is very wolf like just a convergent it has a weird face though it has a much more marsupial face looking kind of like crash bandicoot or something well if you look at it but the overall skull is close is actually very close to a wolf compared to a typical marsupial it has that look like you can tell it's australian anyway yeah exactly it's got that ozzy a little bit of a like a tough looking king rooster but the skull dimensions are actually much closer to the wolf the body proportions are much closer to a wolf than any other marsupial and it's it's been cited as this very interesting example of co-version evolution pushing a design to an optimal predator design yeah but the the great thing this is like the saber tooth tiger completely unrelated to this thing that looks very much like you would assume looking at that that that was some sort of saber tooth cat relative but it's it's complete it's not it's not no it was a marsupial but it goes to show that skull shape and features there's the way that they worked and the way that you know there's always some kind of trade-off so the teeth got bigger the eyes moved the but it was still in a way that this species was able to successfully hunt and attack its prey for you know a very long time it's even though it's no longer on the planet at some point it failed but in any case yes maybe it was succeeding longer than us so far though right i know how long did it go this is this weekend science thank you for joining us for another episode of our science news talk show we come here every week and love it if you are here too and if you're gonna come here and join us for sign it for sign us no for science please bring a friend tell some friends about this weekend science today also head over to twist.org and click on that patreon link because your listener support is what keeps us going week after week month after month thank you for your support we can't do it without you time to come on back now to the last half hour of our show this weekend science is wonderful Blair's Animal Corner with Blair what's up now i'm gonna tell you about animal personalities and how they can mess up science because they've got personality personality that's how i mess up Blair's animal corner yeah no you're making it better um but several years ago there was a researcher named Christian Roots who um was doing a study at University of St. Andrews in Scotland on New Caledonian Crows as we often like to talk about and he was challenging them with puzzles made from natural materials before releasing them again and in one test they were faced uh they were faced with a log that had been drilled with holes that contained hidden food they couldn't get the food out by bending um by just with their beak so they had to bend a plant stem into a hook so we've talked about studies like this a million times in New Caledonian Crows right um and if the thing is though in order to make a sample set and for just the logistics of figuring out what it took for a crow to make tools as a designer of a research experiment you have to kind of make some decisions and so one of the decisions that was made is that if a bird didn't try it within 90 minutes they were removed from the data set they were just like nope they're not gonna mess with the log at all get him out of here so that it sometimes could just be um kind of chalked up to like outliers or this crow shy so he doesn't want to do it so we can't test his intelligence or whatever but the more that he looked at that Christian Rooks looked at different animal tests and types of research on animal subjects the more he realized that there's potentially this issue of personality that is confounding data sets so in this case he wasn't studying the skills of New Caledonian Crows he was studying the skills of a subset of New Caledonian Crows that were quicker to approach a weird log right and so the the statistics he pulled from this data set maybe were not significant in the view of New Caledonian Crows on the whole so that means that he wanted to change his protocol so he redid his study he gave the more hesitant birds extra time so he if they if they didn't approach the log right away he'd put them back away from the log for a couple days they'd get used to being in captivity they'd get used to their surroundings they'd be let back out they could try the puzzle again many of these retested birds would start engaging with the log and they could get good data from these individuals so it's a reminder to treat these animals like individuals just like we would with people they have distinct tendencies habits life experiences this could all affect how they perform in an experiment they're not you know equations or something that you can kind of distill down to one variable if you're collecting animals from the wild and so this is a kind of an an idea to change the way that animal behavior studies are done into a new method called strange strange is an acronym as you might imagine and that or the researchers are just strange I mean both can be true and so strange consider several factors about animal studies social background trappability and self-selection rearing history acclimation and habituation natural changes in responsiveness genetic makeup and experience strange so whenever whenever whenever one of those comes together like that I'm like okay which one or two of those did you throw in there yes exactly yeah which one did you have to change the wording for to make it spell something fun but you know what it's fun so an example of that yeah go ahead well there's also the I don't know maybe like it's my inherent laziness but you know how long does it take to trap a crow catch one of these wild crows in the first place I'm only gonna give it 90 minutes that's like trying to do this show in 90 minutes hey you know what it's gonna be a whole week before we do another show we gotta you know take take what you got now go with it uh-huh huh well so speaking of trappability an example of adjusting a study to not bias towards trappability if you're catching fish if you use a mesh a stationary mesh you're only gonna get fish that are the most active are the ones that slam into the mesh but if you use a net that you manipulate and pull through a school of fish you're gonna get a more even distribution of individuals so that's trappability um there are pheasants that if you house them in groups of five and do an experiment or you house them in groups of three and do an experiment they perform differently they actually do better if they're in groups of five so that's their social background that has to do with how they're comfortable jumping spiders raised in captivity are less interested in prey than wild spiders rearing history honey bees learn learn best in the morning natural changes in responsiveness so there's all these different things that you need to keep into consideration and I was immediately reminded of the study that I keep bringing back up because I think it's one of my favorite studies we've ever talked about on the show that lab mice are cold so like that is an environmental impact on a study species right so like these are all things that you have to consider are some of these mice just better at performing in the cold than others right so these this strange factors idea will hopefully kind of percolate through future animal research so that um we make sure that we're studying actual representative sets of species and not a specific subset of a species right and so that you're actually getting to the answers of the questions that you're asking yes I think I've told this story before but probably not for a very long time that one of my I had a high school job in an orthopedic research lab at UC Davis and I was there and my desk was right next to the cages where they had these mice that were recovering from a surgery where the aorta was cut and then sutured up with this tiny tiny needle under a microscope and and the the survival rate had meant of around 20 percent so the concern was maybe they weren't that good with the the needle yet maybe this wasn't a procedure that they would want to use for other things it went up to a hundred percent survival rate after I started working there and and the reason was you changed the protocol I was accidentally changing the protocol because the the little mice post surgery were down at the bottom of the cage and the food was in a tray suspended at the top you know they put it just in the top and they'd have to come up and nibble between the bars to get the food and they weren't getting out so I would take some of my crackers and tuna sandwich and I I'd drop it down to the bottom you messed with the research I didn't know that was part of the experiment and it was like I was like oh they're needing recovery I'll just help them out a little bit and they're not getting up to get their food and it was a hundred percent survival and at first of the research was like yeah we're trying to figure out what happened and change and then and once it's like what's his food in here the new kid is over there the new kid is like hey I got a question for you kid huh oh yeah you would mess with the mic yeah I've been helping them out yeah they're doing much better now but that was it was just the the the the recovery area for the mice just the cages the way it was designed they weren't getting to the couldn't get their food they were two weeks to get up and get the food and that changed the entire outcome of the study it was that little bit of accidental animal husbandry so the strange should also be a strange jay just to make sure jay the justin factor but yeah but that's that's a huge point yeah it's a question you know uh Fred Gage started asking years and years ago about enrichment and how does Anna enrichment affect the behavior of animals you know and you know rat mouse cages in research labs were barren sterile for such a long time and now we know that it's great to let them have places to hide and give them bedding and give them toys to play with and give them some novel food sometimes yeah so there's yeah all sorts of things that you know it yeah I hope this strange uh framework becomes more accepted and gets picked up uh around research labs because it is the kind of thing that it's better for the animal better for the research better for everything yeah yes absolutely it occurs to me that this must also be occurring in humans yes well I mean we've talked about that a lot right like who shows up for studies first of all that's trapeability right there trapeability of humans yes self-selection yeah who are we hearing from are you are you getting all the extroverts yeah exactly it's yeah we're just not hearing from any of those those quiet extroverts or those shy people those people who just don't want to be bothered well until you start forcibly getting people to include themselves in studies and it's you can't really it's yeah and that's not anyway um speaking of lab mice let's talk about mice some more um I want to talk about mice that are p shy what is that yeah it's exactly what it sounds like so um mice communicate in many ways but one of the ways that that they communicate specifically males quite a bit um is through chemical signaling aka marking aka peeing intentionally in places yes and so um a new method of tracking where mice pee and when through thermal imaging so you get to actually because the pee is warm when it comes out right so you get to see through thermal imaging when they're peeing because they pee like teeny tiny little baby little dots so if you've ever held a mouse in your hand and it's peed in your hand uh which you know I obviously I have experienced that it's you could barely even tell because it's just like it's like a little dropper full of it's like a pipette full of water it's like so tiny um but through the thermal imaging they can catch it um and so through thermal recordings researchers at Cornell were able to track when where and why mice sent mark and they found that mice that recently lost a fight became p shy while victors increased their frequency of marking so basically like yeah I won I'm the cock of the walk I'm gonna pee everywhere this is my space and then you know the other one's like oh I lost I don't want people to know where I am because they know that I'm weak so I'm not gonna pee and so um it's interesting because this is a a social signaling management system but it also is a metabolic management system because pee is metabolically costly do you use energy to fuel your body to make muscle or do you use energy to create urine to continually pee out over time right so there's there's a push pull you don't want to do it too much if you do it a lot but there's a benefit then you know there might be a good thing to that but also you have to do it some because that's the main way of communicating and they found that if males lost and they they didn't pee so if you looked at all the males that lost socials kind of fights with other males the ones that peed less had less success with mates because they weren't marking the ones that peed slightly more than that had better had more success but they all peed less as a result of losing right so it's like you have to you have to recognize okay I don't want to pee too much but I don't want to pee too little it's like a very difficult balance to figure out exactly how much and when and how to scent mark but there's a is there a difference between the the urination as scent marking and just the bodily function of you having to go yeah so that that's a good question and I think that um my guess is the way they didn't go into that in the study too much but my guess is that the way the thermal imaging worked is you could tell the difference between a mark and just like a a release because it would be larger um right but it's also just possible that they they don't really need to do a whole lot of larger peeing because they mark so much yeah I mean just that little clip of thermal imaging that was available there made it look like mice are peeing all the time yeah they kind of are yes absolutely and so that that's what they looked at in the study so some males hold it in a little longer and a little more frequently as a result of losing but um it also impacts future fights so the lower peeing males that won fights had a more difficult time winning the mice that fought them were less willing to surrender to weak signalers so there's also you don't want to over advertise your presence because everyone knows you're a loser but you don't want to under advertise or you'll never win a fight again I have a feeling and this is just pure uh Justin speculation that this this study has been overthought and the real result is that uh being better hydrated uh makes you better at uh that's I mean I don't know I'm I'm thinking that the uh the outcome of this you want if you're gonna have mice in your house as pets you're you're going to want to have the loser mice it's especially if you're gonna let them out of their cages at all having a mouse as a pet is just tough just saying I know I don't don't really like to be held honestly a rat is better as a pet love anyway that's a huge sideline but ultimately this study aside from just being bizarre um is a is a good model to start to look at to build kind of rules for animals that use social signals so basically looking at the the rules that they use to make decisions to kind of optimize social signaling with the costs associated so how do you understand how evolution has optimized the effort to produce and broadcast social information in the recognition that broadcasting that social information is costly so this is you know you could do this in a bunch of other ways like there are animals that do social signaling that also make them vulnerable to predators think about calls think about um bright colorations right so you could apply this kind of similar model to other species in a very similar way it'd be interesting to see if there are kind of trends I guess beyond just the pea shy mice there probably are trends uh but yeah it'd be interesting how they to see how they line up how it all works out and then and then do a parallel where they're testing all those uh on hydration level yes exactly you can't it's like good sleep stay hydrated or two of those things that you should always be doing hey Justin do you want to tell us about uh other things that we're finding out about that make our I don't know our brains and bodies work yeah so this is actually uh this story is interesting uh but it's also uh I like the way that it was is laid out by the researchers here this is researchers at uh Wuhan University which I believe is in China they have found a previously unknown mechanism connecting gut microbiota to depression and specifically in women so what they what they were working on was there's an understanding that there's a connection between an estrogen uh estradiol estradiol estradiol thank you estradiol which is the most prominent estrogen uh in women of reproductive age there has been in the past noticed a correlation between having low estradiol levels and depression so these researchers uh decided to go and check the microbiota of women with well first they did blood tests first it starts with blood tests and it turned out that in the blood tests though this is all pre menopausal women because things change later uh the women with depression had 43 percent lower estradiol in their blood system so okay that was a pretty significant hit right away to to to be you know interrogating now the way that it gets into the blood system is this is the this is produced by the liver and it ends up in the gut and then it works its way into the blood system from the gut so where do you go from checking the blood you go to the gut and they check the gut microbiota samples from uh two groups of women one with depression and the low estradiol levels and the ones without and they've showed that within two hours estradiol degraded by 77.8 percent in the guts of women with depression and only 19.3 percent in the non-depression group so this was all what's happening yeah something's degrading it so the assumption then isn't maybe this is not a an issue of lack of production of estradiol in the first place something is degrading it before it can get to the blood stream so then the researchers went to went to mice they did a mouse study and they introduced this microbiome to the mice and found a 25 percent decrease in estradiol levels in the blood of the mice who had been given the depressed microbiota okay so if now they've they've sort of confirmed their uh their link their their association with this gut microbiota and estradiol levels so the next thing they needed to do what in the microbiota is doing it and so they ran some more testing in isolations and and they found they narrowed it down to a single enzyme so then what do you gotta do you gotta put that enzyme in the mice so they went back to the mouse study and they put the enzyme by itself in the mouse and to see if it would have the same effect and it did and in fact I think in this case it might have been even uh they set maybe a larger decrease in the amount of estradiol that was making it into the blood okay so now we have something where we can make more women depressed is that what this is wait that's not the that's not the uh that's not the moral of this story is that the take on message so what they had done those they had narrowed it down to this enzyme that can degrade estradiol they narrowed it down to a specific specific bacteria that could do so actually I skipped a step so I messed up the whole story they narrowed it down to before they got down to the enzyme they narrowed it down to a specific bacteria and introduced bacteria and those rates decreased and then they went to the directly to the enzyme and that did it also so now they've got it pretty narrowed down they've also from some genome searching found that there's maybe three gut microbiota that can produce this enzyme that breaks down estradiol the they also checked the oh and I look it up the the other the esterone which is the byproduct once the the estradiol has been broken down to see if those levels had any effect and they did not just introducing esterone to mice had no effect on the the blood level so it is it is the degrading itself the reduction of the lack of estradiol that's been degraded by this enzyme that has so then what do we got now we know potential therapeutic pathways we know they also did a a side piece where they had introduced the the microbe responsible and and then and they had the control and then they had a third group that they also gave a antibiotic to and they found that the group that had the the troublesome microbe but also was given an antibiotic which basically nullified it worked so it's possible that the antibiotic targeting this specific microbe could potentially reduce depression in some it's it has to be a very targeted antibiotic because you can also mess up somebody's um other systems by by getting rid of other beneficial microbiota right and that can also cause depression yeah and the and the and the antimicrobri antibacterial resistance that we're getting uh that is a huge problem it seems like it yeah unless they could have something incredibly targeted that wouldn't be the way to go but the other direction would be how can we read you know increase other populations of bacteria that might be good that would displace the bad oh there you go is there a diet right are there dietary or uh you know I don't know exercise you know are there things that people could do once you find that this is a thing that this you know that would change those populations without requiring a medication or do you just supplement with more and more and more estradiol I do know that there's research uh pre pre menopause that iron levels so if you have more iron in your diet that can influence uh influence estradiol levels versus progesterone levels and so there are component nutrient components of our diets fiber um other things that can have significant effects on things like estradiol levels so sure fascinating to be able to target it to like a few species of bacteria but yeah but yeah this was a club siella erogannus I guess is the the strain of bacteria you know the regardless of regardless though what you're talking about those like you can you can feed that gut microbiota that may be altering activity for a little bit but if this microbiota is there and being active and is degrading the thing you need even if you're taking supplements it could be attaching it yeah weird we don't like to say that antibiotics is is a great thing for everybody to be on but it might be one of those things to talk to your doctor about if you can get a microbiota sample if you've been suffering from depression to see if this could be tragic because then an heart antibiotic treatment and that you can get through in a couple of weeks if it if it can impact long-term mental health which is also this this is the thing that occurs to me too it's like how many years of therapy yeah word talking thinking assuming that everything is brain centered behavior centered experience centered in all of our manifestations of problems and depression that it's all in your head literally and then it can turn out that no you have a hormonal imbalance because it's all in your stomach that's yeah in your gut your hormones that you need to for mood stability yeah oh well then what did I do in therapy well you got to get a lot of stuff out of the closet that you needed to but that didn't help did it no okay well then let's get to the physical root of an actual yeah treating the symptom not the cause in that case yeah yeah so it's I mean it's just another uh feather in the cap for the idea of running um microbiome panels consistently throughout your life as part of your healthcare it needs to happen all sort of hormone all sorts of baseline panels just to just get it get it and if you're if your health system is introducing uh you know a lot of mental health access that's great but maybe some of those dollars should be going to exactly what you're saying Blair of of getting a microbiome profile so we can take those things that we now know are sourced in the gut and separate them from the psychology mental health arena completely well they could do two things they both can be both can be happening yeah it doesn't have to be separated I'm pretty sure most healthcare industries have enough money to do both do all the things yeah which one are they gonna do first because come on but what if but what if but what if it's not something that's your healthcare industry but what if it's a a a parasite that's floating around in the water so this is yeah you're talking about the there's four sea otters that got stranded in California and died were examined and they turned out to have an unusually severe form of toxoplasmosis disease caused by a friend of the shell I guess toxoplasmic gondii this is a california department of fish and wildlife and the university of california and davis scientists warned that this is a very rare strain previously never reported in an aquatic animal and did not seem in california before they published this in the journals frontier in marine science it's very they say it's very aggressive the researchers looking at the the inundation of this parasite throughout fatty tissues or throughout tissues throughout these otters say they've never seen the lesions like this in any toxoplasmic case before and incredibly it's not in the brain which is a very normal place for a typical toxoplasmic gondii to get to the right blood brain barrier and change behaviors and you know by by colonizing the brain a little bit yeah but that's usually they go they end up in the brain and they become this the cyst right they it's like they lay eggs change their form or they go into a dormant dormant cyst state in the brain and that's what changes things because it's it's it's the it's assists that actually do the traveling the the parasites in the stays in the gut but it's the thing that's supposed to become eggs doesn't happen without a specific enzyme in the gut oh here we go again that that so cats lack this one enzyme that normally will somehow prevent the the the in any other mammal prevents these gamite cells of this parasite from becoming eggs so then you get these weird little differentiated from what would become an egg cells that go traveling throughout the site yeah yeah having these strange effects so but it's not in the brain so this isn't a behavioral change that caused them to die this is fatty tissue inflammation that was so severe that these these poor theaters didn't make it uh so well we don't know what this is we don't know what this is so what do you do you test the DNA of the that strain of toxoplasma and it got a big hit with something called kook a strange of a strain strange strain of toxoplasma was there in all four cases and the strain had been previously identified all the way back in 1995 canadian mountain lions had been part of the center of the vector for an outbreak of an aggressive form of toxoplasma gondii and this was the strain that the canadian mountain lions had so traveled a far away yeah this is karen Shapiro of the uc davis school of veterinary medicine quoted this was a complete surprise the kook genotype and she probably didn't say it like that but we maybe the kook genotype has never before been described in sea otters nor anywhere in the california coastal environment or in any other aquatic mammal or bird so they've sort of issued they're sort of issuing a pretty big warning here because of course toxoplasma gondii or toxoplasmosis can affect mammals if it's in the marine environment it could move up food chain moving up food chain means it could get into house pets humans foods all sorts of things yeah and because this is such an aggressive form that didn't migrate to the brain but is creating this massive fatty tissue inflammation the researchers are putting out pretty big warning for for a a monitoring effort to make sure that this doesn't climb the food ladder yeah because even though we know that there are health impacts that are significant from toxoplasma gondii as we have known it this seems like it would be uh much more impactful even though i mean it's so strange it's like oh behavioral changes so okay that we can kind of deal with that well except that could also mean in extreme cases that also means a schizophrenia diagnosis right when it's well and it can it can also cause miscarriages in the first trimester that's why you have the warnings on kitty litter it's not because the kitty litter size of this i do wonder though if the um you know if this being a much more virulent or not virulent but it's not a virus it's a parasite but fast acting getting into the the fatty tissues not ending up in the brain it's not going to change the behavior of animals much but maybe it kills them really fast and so maybe that in itself is not um the if these animals are dying more rapidly then maybe they won't be spreading it as much right but i think what's what's scary is what sea otters eat and how they probably got it which is in marine invertebrates which like everything eats marine invertebrates including us so it's restaurants you can get your uncooked muscles yeah your oysters your shrimp yeah so that's i think the thing about this that scared me is that it's they're not eating mice they're not eating cats they're they're eating marine invertebrates and and they're they're it's enough in the marine invertebrates that there's bioaccumulation and that they have this impact so it's that's that's spooky to me it is spooky it's very spooky we're just gonna have to eat our 3d printed pizza and it sounds great and go to bed it's we're we're not gonna be able to eat just normal food anymore because we ruined it all well we did you said pizza though right 3d printed pizza i don't know how good it tastes you're gonna have vegetarian pizza it's out there you know whatever anyway moving on from you know threats to our ecosystems and the animals that live in them let's talk about how we are improving our technology to be able to look into places where we haven't been able to look into before yes researchers have just published in nature communications uh two papers this is the second of two papers describing their technical advancement of being able to stick a little tiny miniature microscope into mouse spinal cords to be able to image the uh the glial cells the astraglial cells and active neurons while the mice were wearing the microscopes wow yeah so it's a really cool setup they're tiny and they have this little teeny tiny little there's like a they're wearable so they're like as big as a finger kind of thing they're little tiny uh cameras that and the microscope stuff is all in the outside and then they insert a tube into the area of the spinal score the spinal cord that they want to image and then they have a prism that is involved in um it's involved in multiplying the light to be able to increase the resolution and be able to get all of the colors um and not just one or two colors and so they're able to go into the spinal cord and uh inject neurons with certain dyes and the astraglial cells with other color dyes and then pull on the moustails um or or pinch the moustails to make them feel a painful or somewhat painful stimulus and then they could actually see the changes in the spinal cord as they as as the mice were experiencing the stimulus um it's a very exciting advancement like they say that the the camera itself it's like it's bigger than your bigger than your little or not bigger smaller than your little finger um they're able to get a really great resolution and so it's uh it's a very exciting a bit an exciting advancement because not only do we potentially want to be looking at mouse spinal cords but we could potentially start looking at human spinal cords or other places that brains brains that are difficult to look into yes how do i think it feels to have this contraption on you i have no idea it feels great oh that's really it got right this but it's like uh like acupuncture oh it's perfect right there that's where i needed like acupuncture when i tried it anyway um that's i'm just curious about that because you know everything's nice and tiny for the mouse but i feel like i don't know right but so this is um you know we talk about image sensors on cameras and how you know you have your multiple ccds to be able to get the different colors and everything but because of the prism that they're implanting as well they're able to get uh and the these this compound lens compound lens that they've created they are able to have multiple colors that they image so they can look at these different areas of of the neurons and be able to actually see stuff happen in real time and be able to understand more about things like the astro glial the astrocyte um involvement in transmitting messages about pain down and through the the spinal cord because normally we think you know these astrocytes are like packing material or that's what you know years and years ago that's how they were kind of referred to they're just like support cells for the neurons the neurons are the ones that do the big transmission of information but with this they were actually able to really show that these glial cells were actively involved in the transmission of the signal down that's down the spinal cord um so I don't know maybe this is the kind of thing that we can look at to be able to see how neurons um and if neurons are recovering from spinal injury maybe this is the kind of thing that we can actually start seeing how astrocytes become involved in repair processes in the in the spinal cord and like you said Justin maybe different places in the brain um and with this technology they stick this little teeny tiny camera in and I was like how do you do how do you get this picture you're not slicing the spinal cord open they say it's minimal damage to the spinal cord so the tissue that's not nothing it's not nothing but at the same time it's you know it allows them to do the work so that they can have an active animal that has this little camera that's wearing this little camera and you can record images of changes to the neurons and the astrocytes and see how things work during different different time periods yeah so I thought it was very exciting because I mean really how do you look inside a spinal cord or a brain without cutting it open yeah until now you don't what would be really interesting because this is specifically we're talking spinal cord here and being able to see the activities going on would be experiments with the pluripotent cells that if we're not talking about a repair mechanism we could be viewing repair mechanisms very important but seeing you know trying to force regeneration of new cells the new connections and being able to observe those can tell us what's working what's not working how to adjust how to so that we could be talking about you know as as as much as this is just an optical technology in the moment as a research tool this may allow for further down the road of course the pathway of the thing you know how medical research works yeah a cure to spinal injuries exactly we can understand these processes a lot better yeah understand how the cells work together understand how they signal with each other how the you know signal transmission process takes place there's a lot of I mean and yeah when you do when you learn those things then you can figure out how to hack it so you can make repairs with the body can't and then you can be doctor what is his name octa octa auto octavius octavius doctor octavius with your all your arms attached to your spinal cord and yes we'll have all these things this is why I don't go outside you got you got to attach it just right though or you'll go crazy and evil you don't want to do that this is a no that's why we need to do all the mouse micros you know the mouse scope back hacks now doc doc from happening I get it exactly thank you now I understand you can't got it you get me how do we have research mice working on so another study my last one for the night nothing to do with mice only to do with people and how we communicate and how our brains are involved in communication there have been lots of studies that have looked at speech areas in the brain how the brain is wired for speech and we've got things like Broca's area and other parts of the brain we've got the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere that are involved in different aspects of speech comprehension versus speech production and being able to understand how all this works and how the brains are wired wired up how anyone's brain is wired up with for language is a really fascinating question that researchers have been trying to figure out more about for a very long time and in this particular study that was just published in neuro image researchers have compared the brains of native german speakers and native arabic speakers the reason that they have compared these two particular language types is that german is very what they call morphosyntactically complex and if anybody has ever tried to learn german or um experienced words like farfignugin or other things it's like there are lots of parts of words that are put together to create words and so it's a it's a very fascinating language in that um the construction of words is very specific and there are very specific parts and it's additive thing where you have two small words and you put them together and make a new word that's uh and unfortunately they introduced this concept to the greenlandic inuits who just kept rolling they didn't have like a a a length cleavage aspect to their to their language creation so you have these you know 30 character long words now in greenlandic inuit language because they just kept rolling with this additive yeah so yeah so german is like that it's derived uh it's indo european arabic is a Semitic language and as opposed to being flexible with its word order it is very specific with its word order and it is a root based system so uh the researchers say most words are morphologically complex characterized by a rich non linear or non concatenative morphological structure and the words are derived from a root and the word pattern so there's a lot of aspects to the way the the way the context of the words and where they come together and there's a specific aspect the root usually consists of three or four consonants and provides the core semantic meaning or the semantic family while the word pattern is a fixed template composed mostly of vowels with slots for consonants fascinating just on its own so it's this pattern of consonants and vowels that it's like a skeleton that makes up the information of the words the very different from the way germanic the germanic language works so they're like all right we know these languages are very very different and so let's put native german speakers and native arabic speakers into an fmri machine and see what we can find um and they hypothesized that there would be differences and uh and yes indeed there were differences what they found is that the germanic language tended to be um strongerly more strongerly that's my new language that's a great word i understood exactly what you meant by it no no i believe it's more strongerly more strongerly that would be more had had greater connectivity within the left hemisphere of the brain but there was a lot of activity on the right as well because there's also you know the various um understanding and processing that goes on but it's not as connected across the brain whereas with arabic they discovered that there was a lot of connectivity of the network across the hemispheres of the brain so there was instead of being mostly active in the left hemisphere there was pretty much equal activity in the left and the right so the uh what this suggests and what we've thought for a very long time this supports is that the language that you grow up speaking affects the development of your brain and the networks within the brain and so to take this to an even you know a different perspective is because of this it's affecting the wiring of your brain and this is also going to impact the way you think how you how you do things it's this is you know very interesting implications for that just the way that the brain works um you know not that one is better than another but that they're it's fascinating that there are these differences that show up so specifically for basically the different morphologies if you could use the morphology of a language huh yeah different languages different brain connections and I bet that I bet that you could also do something similar on along the lines of uh looking at the the active brain of somebody who's thinking about doing involved in computer coding or a musician or a you know because these are also forms of language that are accessing different portions of the brain right but this so the interesting question that they're going to be looking into further is now they're going to these are the arabic speakers the study took place in germany the arabic speakers were people who had recently moved to germany didn't speak german yet but they're going to be taking german lessons and so most people their language abilities crystallize between the ages of about 11 to 13 years old you can still learn languages for your whole life but it gets harder so much harder right and so this is now they're interested in the developmental versus the uh influential impacts of learning so these people these people who have now are now learning german who learned arabic before will this change the way that their brain is connected or will their brains remain connected in the same way and so i think that those are the interesting questions that they're going to be looking at next it's like nature versus nurture of their brain but it's i mean it's all it's all nurture because it's language but anyway i want them to map a bunch of languages now right because they so they found these very specific things about these very specific languages but there's other crazy things about other languages and the way they're developed and the way their words are formed and the way sentences are formed and and they all have these very different roles so i would love to see how all these different languages map out on a brain and marie mentions in the chat room it would be really cool to see somebody who was raised in a multilingual household right so they didn't really have a dominant language or if they did they they grew up speaking multiple languages to see if you then is it an overlap of the two or more languages if you just have them on their own like oh man brains they're so we don't understand them at all and i know that science is going to do this for me but i would like to find out after blairs follow-up studies what the best language is for the human brain and and just agree to all learn that whatever it happens to be no pre-judging no saying ah only if it's or if it's that whatever the best one is even if we all have to learn how to make click sounds whatever the best one is we should just agree on one language and all speak that going forward oh well what i think i think i think standardization oh you're going for standardization okay well i was thinking more along the lines of if all of the languages influence brain development in various ways and change the morphological uh and processing demands of the brain then really we all just need to learn all languages and that would probably be best for the brain i'd love that but then you have uh you have important research papers that are being published in multiple languages it may not have access to you know it just helps to be to have a standard second language maybe that's i should put it that way so you still have that stochastic human thinking throughout the world you're pushing for esperanto again aren't you no i don't want that one either i want whatever the i kind of want it to be one of the ones where you make clicking sounds i think that would be ooh hard rock says sign language yeah so yeah interesting as well but that's also different because it's motor and so it's the completely different language language areas and motor mapping yeah right so it's so sign language is language dependent so there's yeah american sign language sign language yeah i was a horrible speller as a youth and so and so even though if i learned all the letters nobody understood me i was like oh i must not know my letters i knew the letters in my the gesture is okay i just couldn't spell the words anyway did we do it it's all good i think we did it i think i think we've come to the end of another episode thank you everyone for joining us for another episode of this weekend science as always i would love to thank a number of people thank you my co-hosts for this wonderful show thank you to fada for helping with social media and the uh show notes that go out on youtube thank you to identity four for recording the show gord aran lore others who are involved in keeping our chat rooms great places thank you for your work doing that and thank you to everyone in the chat rooms love seeing you here chatting all over the place and everyone who is a patreon sponsor thank you for helping to support this show thank you to therese smith 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the show everybody after the show after the show it's the after show help yourself to the odors be cautioned uh with the chicken it was actually put out before the show started which was a long time ago we did a couple of hours a couple hours there i was like the thing that we're just uh making sure uh poor rachel has a show enough content to edit together a show yeah you know you wouldn't want you wouldn't want uh oh i gotta cut all this out but oh then the show is too short i have to leave in the nonsense part uh jesson's babbling this way we talk are you enough i think are you on did you have time change this week or are you still that was last time and it still hasn't changed so you're still this weekend i'll get what time what time is it now like five six six okay yeah yeah okay ouch it'll be and if it's next week though it would be seven so then everything's a little bit more physiological because i had to get up at what is it it was time o'clock three o'clock in the morning which three o'clock in the morning i appreciate it that's correct that is just i think just barely the next day like two thirty at night is still yesterday yeah i agree two thirty in the morning is yesterday but three is starting to get you know i i really feel like the new day starts at like four in the morning actually i want to take it back that three in the morning is still yesterday it's in that in between where you either shouldn't have gotten up this early or should have been in bed already three in the morning is a time when nobody should be awake witching hour right but it's where my alarm was set on a kind of having to get to the show because you do the daylight savings time at a different week over there and in uh what is it america this place then we apparently we do it in europe so yes we have a lot of pain but you made it i'm okay taking it one day at a time baby good that's what we should all do oh fada's gonna go watch some some television that's nice it's a good shows that sounds fantastic thank you fada have a good night did we see the cme last week i personally did not see i'm guessing by cme the coronal mass ejection that was massive i personally i didn't see it you're a coronal mass ejection yeah apparently there was big giant big giant dark spot on the sun that explains how i missed it because you're not supposed to stare at the sun come on everybody don't stare for uh too long stare at the sun for very long yes march 12 it was massive yes hard jar yeah what's amazing is for the people who did who did see it they can still see the spots in front of their eyes now you know at march 12 i think i had my own mass ejection that day i want to dig into that oh i don't know i don't know where that news i don't know where that news is i saw a picture they there's a big there's a big black spot on the sun several days ago there was yeah don't stare at the sun just look at the nice non ai produced images on the internet they come with the news stories yes yeah i haven't i've been oh gosh all the ai stories that have been popping up into my news feeds like this ben at a certain point you just have to go no thank you i don't um i'm gonna look anymore oh no i watch i'm finding it i'm finding it incredibly fascinating because you know like ever like i was i've mentioned a disclaimer everything that we do basically as humans even the study we're just talking about everything is so language based like if you think about all the people in offices who are making phone calls or typing up preparing documents or doing anything are just word generating we generate words tremendous volume through for for moving economies and society along and if we don't do that anymore at some point if that gets taken over the whole word generation and word interpretation help centers right calls but there's a huge problem there's a huge problem with that and i was watching an ai expert on um youtube through wired they have basically tech support but then they changed it into whatever right and so it was ai support and uh he was talking about um there's a huge problem with ai that we're not going to lose anytime soon in fact we might have to go back to the drawing board with ai because it is such a problem and it is dishonesty and so that is the problem is that is that ai lies ai lies they will make things up and so even if you tell ai to do your emails for you a human has to check every single one or lies will go out so like so i was in a meeting a couple weeks ago with a bunch of volunteer program managers in the bay area and this one woman was talking about she uses chat gpt now to make some of her emails that she sends out to her volunteers and um i had this like visceral response where i was like ew but then you know i kind of had to think about it like why do i feel that way about it and she basically says you know it it might take her an hour to wordsmith an email and instead she can ask chat gpt to write it and then she can tweak it and send it out and that takes five minutes instead of an hour right she says so the time board of directors or whatever but it still requires that human eye and as far as you know the guy that i saw on on wired was saying there is no clear solution to the dishonesty problem at this time and there may not be with the current AI framework that exists which is why he's saying like we might have to start over yeah i think part of that does come from the initial goal of AI language models which was just to be able to impersonate uh human in conversation to see human that meant just pulling information that could fit not not for accuracy but for seeming relevant in a conversation i don't know that this is you know the the problem also then in in rating the information that you have that you're sending out is is is going to be solved i think i think is is not oh well gosh now that's a good question how much is honesty a a ranking system that humans are doing on information that they can pass fail on content that's going out and i think that's it's definitely something humans in honesty related situations are doing constantly or maybe even not even honest like any conversation we have i want to quote you i was like oh what about that uh animal that i was like wait is that right do i know that oh maybe it's a different animal we have all this going on i think yeah it's gonna get there no no so AI doesn't have that AI just goes oh i can i can have an answer to that of course but how old it doesn't know the difference but it doesn't know it how old that it's hallucinating what are we talking about are we talking about a two-year-old three-year-old five-year-old AI my point is it's all just machine learning absolute this machine learning is an infancy yeah we had a billion years to figure out how to you know not tell a lie or tell one a little better than some but it's also and that's also the social basis of reciprocity right and uh you know in social relationships so that's exactly i have nothing to lose by by line wait a second exactly because it's just chat botting with us right now now now in the future here's what happens more and more language models are taking over language-based human jobs AI language bottles from this company that company this place that place now have to communicate with each other because the humans are out of the picture now when an AI tells something that's not correct it has a cost to it if it now is like oh saying if it's correct or not if other AIs are checking it right the other AI is like hey yeah i sent you this order and you took my money and you didn't fulfill the order and the other AI goes oh let me see oh i said i sent it out but i didn't because i failed to check properly i will make so it's going to be culture it's we have human culture that's based around our social interactions and having to trust each other and have to understand whether we're going to do things right and that's if we let the AIs talk to each other then it's going to be AI culture and they're going to build their own culture they're going to do it too though because they rely on each other ian banks is right they're going to rely on each other to perform yeah if if my if AAA talking to AIB is not getting what it wants from AIB it's going to tell all the other AIs AIB is not trustworthy and so what's the motivation for AIB to get a specific thing from AIA though because they're doing business or something yeah do it yeah right but but that's what i'm saying is transaction there is another way to get that transaction done on paper whether it happens in real life or not so like that's what i'm saying you have to you're through this narrative there is still at least one AI that knows the difference between truth and a lie no but if all of the AIs don't know it's going to develop but that's what Justin's saying is that it's going to develop over time because there will be instances that one AI is relying on another AI to either give it specific information or to supply it with certain you know to fulfill an order or you know whatever it has but because of those relationships the same way that human society built up trust and the idea of honesty versus lies the AIs right could potentially develop it themselves if they have to rely on each other in that particular way at some point right but i guess what i'm seeing on the flip side they'll have verification systems for an order going out that is far beyond anything a human is done so i what i'm seeing is on the flip side of that the opportunity for echo chambers of dishonesty absolutely absolutely you can have AIs talking to each other non truths and so this is this is part of the issue is that like there's lots of fiction out there in the world for AI to absorb and so there's a lot of things that aren't true that can be taken as true by an AI if it is given access for example to the internet so like that's the other issue is how do you give AI like a critical eye to narrative like it's just it's so difficult well that's the thing is that there has to be some kind there they have to be checks and balances or some cost benefit because that i mean those are things that have been crucial to animal behavioral evolution human cultural evolution but how are how and how are any of those different than in humans well because the AI doesn't have to pay to live it doesn't have to feed itself it doesn't have to do anything to survive there's no resource there's no no resource mutations yeah yeah but that's such a same thing what i'm talking about is is the i will just say it in a sort of uh general way humans have believed to the point of life and death in things that may on every level be complete and total fantasy yep wars fought yes people uh treating each other one way or another based on completely erroneous hey i'm not saying humans are better i'm saying that like AI we can't depend on AI to be perfect with human consequences there have been wars and death and social strife and repression and enslavement and cruelty and everything if ais are bsing each other about whether or not they sent out the amazon order live with it so no but the AI could have control of electrical grids like there's all sorts of shit and we we know that there are algorithms that have been involved in the the the stock market and in placing placing money and certain stocks and the the trading that happens and the faster algorithms you know you've got the quants who develop the algorithms to be more efficient and more effective blah blah blah anyway so we've already got algorithms that are working at these fast paced speeds that are faster than human and so we know that computers can process faster than human and so we've got the internet that can transmit information faster than a human can decisions that can be made faster than a human brain can make a decision communication that can happen much faster than humans can do this communication and so an interesting side to this as well would be the uh we've had you know 200 000 years of human evolution of our culture with the way that we've been interacting how much faster could AI evolution take place because of the speed of their interactions well and how will that take them to dishonest places and dysfunctional places much faster i know are they gonna go there faster are they gonna go to a good place faster i mean who knows but they're gonna yeah yeah i mean that's it's like it's it's like the we were talking about in the story last week and then someone pulls the plug uh you know how do you tell if you know research paper or anything that people are generating text wise is AI generated or not yeah and so you have AI checkers now that go and look for and of course how do you train your AI to do a better job of not looking like AI oh you you train it on an AI checker and then how do you get that AI checker to do better well you trained it on AI checked AI that's uh been refund it's going to do this at the pace that it's almost i almost have this weird feeling too like like this could end up not impacting humanity at all because it just could go so fast too it just boop and it's done and it's like yeah like it's like we were talking one day about and plug it we're talking one day about like oh we gotta watch out for you know kids uh faking their their their their assignments and then and then like a year later the mothership leaves the planet that was built out of components of nanotechnology designed by the AI and they've gone off to explore the universe and we're like and left nothing behind of their trace of their existence like oh okay well i guess that was like a fun couple of years wow okay anybody know how to run the electrical grid because i don't think anybody's been doing that for a few months at least let the ai's do it for us it's just spin the spiral out of control but go off in its own direction and leave us completely out of it or not well it's all fun and games so much fun we will be the pets and you know in the words of jane's addiction we'll make great pets we'll make great pets i'd be a great pet you'll make great pets that's what i want i want the machine to do the work and i want to be able to hang out at home and do my enrichment and get fed that's exactly what i want i'm afraid i'm afraid that they'll they'll tell me to exercise more and then i'd exercise more if i didn't have to work right i'm afraid they'll tell me to like exercise more and then would come up with an incentive program that i wouldn't follow and then come up with a de-incentive a negative reinforcement program well see if the ai studied all of the research on animal rewarded punishment they would they would know that positive reinforcement is the most effective way oh okay you wouldn't have to worry about it i'll exercise more for my health if i can have more cream cheese one time yes absolutely yum that sounds great i think of it yeah i mean some people are like i want to exercise so i have the best fake chinese food that's ever that that cream fake chinese food what i don't know maybe not i just i've had a feeling when i i've seen it at like a couple of places and i always had a feeling like that's that probably doesn't go in america american chinese food go go to deep china town in san francisco you'll get some wontons you'll get some crab rangoons as they go yeah but i'm talking about cream cheese like just a wonder with just cream cheese and just cream cheese what yes yes it's the most amazing she's like why would you do that why don't you eat fried cream cheese and not put any crab in there what a waste it no it works oh does it work give me the crab give me that toxoplasmosis crab i don't i don't get any aggressive cougar tea gondi guy in my uh the cougar wanton no thank you i'd like a coug wanton please the coug rangoon for me yum the cream of chinese food tonight i know it i have korean leftovers upstairs i love a good bibimbap give me some bibimbap bibimbap bibimbap bibimbap and i think on this note yeah i think you should i think you should go dream of chinese food okay say good morning justin good morning justin no no you didn't do mine yet i did but you missed it i started with you i was like oh you should go dream of chinese food uh so say good night blare oh maybe i didn't oh you didn't you're right good night blare okay now good night night kiki good night everyone thank you for joining us for another episode of this week in science and we hope that you will be back again happy healthy full of dreams of cream cheese wantons i don't know if that's a good thing or not in your world yeah stay well stay safe and stay curious we will see you next week