 Are we here? Are we here? I believe we're here. Are we here for you? I'm here for me. I'm here for you. Now I was singing songs. No, I'm not going to sing any songs. We are here to do a show and I'm social mediaing. And now I even need to share something else from one other place. Retweet from that account. Look, everybody will know now. Okay, let's start the show. Has everybody ready? Three. Where's Justin? There you are. Okay, I'm like ready. Where's Justin? What's going on? Okay. In three, two, this is Twist. This week in Science Episode Number 719, recorded on Wednesday, May 1st, 2019. Science May Day. May Day. Hey, everyone. I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight we will fill your head with narwhals, superheroes, and jerks, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Everything you could have ever hoped for is closer than you think. Cures for diseases, energy and environmental sustainability, mental health and economic stability, prolonged longevity, and an end to food insecurity. The end of many menial tasks and the taking on of tasks once thought to be too intimidating to tame. These are all closer than you think. In fact, peace, prosperity, good health, and human happiness on a global scale are not just idealistic goals. They are achievable benchmarks in our evolution. We have developed a knowledge base through science that makes all of these accomplishments highly likely if not entirely inevitable. The path set by researchers over the last 100 years has birthed much positive change to our existence so far and is poised to do so again. With cumulative magnitudes of magnificent results in the millennia to come. For it to do so, we need only to protect the foundations upon which our scientific principles are founded to follow the facts where they lead us and by fostering future findings through the funding of fledgling ideas. Science is at the very heart of everything we humans have done to improve our lives and nothing else we do is nearly as important to our survival as a species except perhaps for this week in Science. Coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to learn everything. I want to fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know what's happening. What's happening. What's happening this week in Science. What's happening. What's happening. What's happening this week in Science. Good Science. And a good science to you too. Justin Blair. Everyone out there welcome to another episode of this week in Science. We are back after a long week. Well, no, it's just the normal length of a week. Just sometimes it feels longer to some of us than others. Some of us were in the woods getting twigs in our hair. Not quite. I was in a cabin. So I got to sleep in a bed. That was great. But otherwise it felt very rustic and separated. It was nice. That sounds lovely. It sounds absolutely lovely. I look forward to much time like that. It's May, everyone. Happy May Day. Happy Save a Rhino Day. Yeah, save a rhino today. May we? We have lots of stories for you. I have stories about wobbly jets, geomagnetic jerks, and self-propagating. Propagating? No, propagating prions. Justin, what did you bring? I've got superpowers. A new Denisovan discovery. Discovery of a Danish unicorn. Relax, it's the narwhal story. Why wolves are smarter than dogs. All right, we'll get into some of that. And Blair, the animal corner piece. I brought some aggressive females. Uh-oh. I brought some mosquitoes and some biodegradable shopping bags. Oh, everybody needs a few biodegradable shopping bags. Or do you? Uh-oh. Okay, that's a conversation we'll have in a little bit. I hope everyone's looking forward to all these stories and more. But before we jump into the show, I just want to remind you that if you are not yet subscribed to This Week in Science, we are a podcast. We're on YouTube. You can find us all places that podcasts are found, or YouTube channel. You can find us on Facebook. But really, go to twist.org for information. Now, let's jump into stories. How about we get this party started with some wobbly jets? When you're a jet, you're so wobbly and you fall over. You can't dance. No. So researchers using the very, the very long, I'm sorry, my brain is not working right now. Using the very long baseline array. These researchers are from the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research. And they took the very long baseline array. It's an inforometer that is able to see radio waves, detect waves from space many, many, many light years away. They looked at a variable star. It's a variable binary star system that was detected back in the 1930s. And they saw it because it had this variable light output. And people kind of went, oh, what's that? And then in about 1989, an outburst was detected from this star, also known as V404 Cygni. And they started looking at it a little bit more closely. And they realized there had been other outbursts from it. Well, it turns out it's not just a star, it's this binary black hole system. So there's a black hole that has a star nearby. And that black hole is just like sucking all of the material away from the star. It's a vacuum cleaner hoovering it up in the way that black holes do. But when they took the very long baseline array in forometer to take a nice long exposure electromagnetic image of this star system, it was a fuzzy picture. It was a blur. And normally when you look at black holes, there is the jet, the quasar jet that's the stereotypical jet of material that shoots out from the region where the black hole and the accretion disk kind of come together. This jet, however, it was blurry. The picture was blurry because it's moving all over the place, which is really unusual. And so they took a closer look. And instead of doing a long exposure, they took a number of still images. Each of the images, the exposures were about 70 seconds long, but they combined the still images to enable a movie to basically be put together. It all fashioned a zoetrope style. Yeah, kind of like a zoetrope. Exactly. The little images or a flip book, right? A flip book of independent pictures. Yes. Yeah. What they found is indeed that jet was moving all over the place. And they did a bunch more analysis of this black hole star system. And they took this image back in 2015. And so since then, they've been analyzing it and trying to figure out what's going on. And they realized that in this particular system, what's happening is that the black hole, instead of being perfectly lined up with the star that it's getting its material from, it's out of sync. It's kind of off axis from the star. And so the black hole is moving around and it's spinning. Its procession is about 60% the speed of light. So it is an incredibly rapid spin of this black hole. And that grabs the edge of the accretion disk and starts pulling that around too. This black hole is really grabbing space time and turning it. It's kind of like if you were to stick your fist or the end of a broom handle into a blanket or a towel on the floor and spin it around and then you see the towel kind of get wadded up in a whirlpool, just kind of wrap around the end of the towel or your hand. That's what's going on with space time. It's called frame dragging. And it is a concept that is well known in Einstein's theory of general relativity. But this was a really amazing example of it. And so what is going on is that this frame dragging is just physically pulling space time and in the process there's the jet of the accretion disk is getting smoothed from place to place where the jet is being emitted from is actually kind of shifting as material is being grabbed and then not grabbed and grabbed and not grabbed. And so the whole thing is a wobbly, it's a wobbly black hole with a wobbly jet. And now they think that if they look at more variable star systems like this, that they may see more of these off axis black holes. And this is something they're going to be looking for. Yeah. Anyway, wobbly black holes demonstrating Einstein's theory of relativity and frame dragging. And it's pretty exciting to these researchers. You win again, Einstein. He does at it again. Moving forward from space black holes. Let's come right down into the brain Alzheimer's disease is a deteriorative disease that primarily strikes the aging. However, for some individuals it strikes while it's young usually, while they're young usually as a result of genetic predisposition and inheritance. Nobody knows exactly what is going on in the differences between the young acquired early acquired Alzheimer's disease or the aging Alzheimer's. But there seem to be differences. And there is a new study out this week in science translational medicine. It's actually out today out of the out of UCSF the Institute for neurodegenerative diseases, which is part of the UCSF while Institute for Neurosciences. These researchers looked at the proteins amyloid beta and tau and we know with Alzheimer's disease you look at the brains of Alzheimer's disease patients and there are amyloid beta plaques and tau tangles all within the cells. And so it looks as though the cells are getting gummed up by these accumulations of misfolded proteins. And historically our efforts to clean up those plaques and tangles haven't worked. They haven't fixed the Alzheimer's disease, right? It hasn't made anything better to try and get rid of the plaques and tangles. So researchers have been like, what is going on? We don't understand what is happening here. Well, this study used new bioassay processes to be able to detect amyloid beta and also tau. And they were basing it off of a new or not new but a hypothesis that has been around for a little while since about the 80s that these misfolded proteins that cause the plaques and tangles might actually be prions, which are self-propagating misfolded proteins. So the difference is maybe the plaques and tangles were just the effect of the disease and that things got tangled up. And that's just part of the process. And if we got rid of the plaques and tangles then it would clear things up and it would be fine. But where did they come from in the first place? And there's been a hypothesis moving along where a subset of researchers have thought these amyloid beta and tau proteins have got to be causing the problem themselves. Like Crutsfeld Jacobs disease or mad cow disorder in which the prions are actually infectious. And they actually can when they come in contact with other proteins other amyloid beta or other tau proteins cause those proteins to misfold and so on and down the line where it's a self-propagating process. And these researchers now have this bioassay which has affirmed this hypothesis that yes, indeed they looked at 75 Alzheimer's disease brains, amyloid beta and tau prion activity was elevated in those brains. And 11 samples from patients that had cerebral amyloid angiopathy only amyloid beta prions were seen. And in some other brains that had tau linked frontotemporal lober degeneration samples that's FTLD only tau prions were detected which is what would make sense. They only found these infectious particles in the seven samples. There are seven samples from patients that had synuclein linked degenerative disorder. And they had a special bioassay for alpha synuclein prions and they were only found in those. And so these assays are very specific are showing that amyloid beta and tau are infectious, self-propagating, misfolded proteins that are causing the problem. And so what we've been trying to do is treat the wrong end of the disease. We've been treating the end and we need to treat the beginning. And so I mentioned this difference between people, the age related. So Alzheimer's patients who get Alzheimer's at during aging or patients who acquire it when they're younger, they found the quantity of tau proteins in the brains of patients who died at 40 years of age were on average 32 times higher than a patient who died at 90 years old. And so the researchers don't know exactly what this correlation means. And they think that there are a couple of ideas. These are the hypotheses are that whether the higher prion levels in brain samples from young patients are linked to early onset of the disease and the speed of progression or whether older brains have lower levels because they maybe have some ability to dispose of the misfolded proteins or they reflect less infected prion variants. And so maybe the younger genetically linked Alzheimer's disease, they're not able to resist these prions as well as just it's an older brain that's not as good at cleaning itself up and maybe has inflammation for various reasons. We've talked about inflammation being a huge aspect of this. We've talked about the discovery of the lymph channels coming into the brain potentially playing a role here. And there's another study out today also from MIT that is looking at genetic variants related to Alzheimer's disease that show that there are differences in the genes that are activated in Alzheimer's disease between men and women. And I was just wondering if we put all and there are different genes activated early in Alzheimer's disease then that are activated later in the disease. And so if we start looking at these genes and looking at these prions in the early phase maybe there is something that can be done there. But it's a very exciting step forward to be able to actually say these are infectious proteins that are infecting the brain and we need to target those. So I realize this ventures slightly into the science fiction of all this but from this information if we know we want to target specifically these misfolded proteins how do you fix that? How do you pull those out because it's not a specific thing that you can identify. It's the folding that's problematic. Well maybe. Our interview with Chris Donnelly kind of indicated that the proteins are interacting with other proteins that they normally wouldn't because something else is missing that they would have been interacting with. But how do you identify something that chemically is the same as other proteins? How do you remove it? Yeah it is chemically the same. It's just got a different confirmation which is part of the problem. I think it will ultimately come out if Chris Donnelly's research in that interview if it goes in that direction if this follows it would be so much about removing as it would be getting something else to express that can occupy those proteins that they do not interact. It's sort of like creating a throwing out a big steak when confronted by a bear or a lion and hopefully they go after the steak instead of you. And it would be a protein. Or an RNA something like that. So it's not out there floating around. But then according to this what I'm taking is there may be more than one thing that's in there that they are normally interacting with. So you might have to come up with two versions of that to address the different proteins. So of course it is more complicated. We've figured out more research. This is at least a step in the right direction that can help scientists start to target treatments. And especially when we start pairing it with these gene studies and how different genes are being regulated then we can really start to maybe find a drug that can block certain pathways or that can up-regulate maybe metabolic pathways to taking out the trash a little bit better. So this is very interesting and I think it's a big step forward. Now going through this write up the researchers who were talking about arguing, trying to get people to listen to them that amyloid beta and tau misfolding, they're not just like they are these prions which comes from protein ion anyway they are these prions but there's a in response to the debate this researcher who's a Nobel prize winning researcher named Prusner he actually identified prions, a protein called PRP is the cause of Kruitzfeld Jacobs disease sorry about that that's how you pronounce it he has a quote about these debates there's a type of scientist who, if given the choice would rather use his colleagues toothbrush than his terminology that's fantastic that's really funny but that comes from a neuroscientist Bernard Katz from a 1969 it's just a funny quote in the idea of scientists sharing toothbrushes before they actually share terminology is a very fun image Justin what did you bring? Oh my gosh this is a fun story so Denise Evans were discovered just nine years ago they found a finger fossil fragment in a cave it's in DNA sequencing Sfante Pabo this team and discovered an entirely new hominin that was roaming Asia and in that time since we have found their genetic footprint in modern humans across Asia all the way down into Australia so that we know that this this hominin had a pretty decent range that influenced a lot of us through interaction and Neanderthals as well we can see their genes in Neanderthal genomes that we've been able to pull apart so that was a discovery made possible only by the sequencing of one single tiny bone now a fossil that was originally discovered in 1980 by a Tibetan monk an early hominin lower mandible with large molars attached was found in a cave on the Tibetan plateau now they've dated it to 160,000 years ago much older than perhaps they had thought it's been sitting in the museum somewhere for a while and while they did not manage to extract DNA from this fossil they were able to extract proteins from one of the molars says Frida Welker University of Copenhagen our protein analysis shows that this mandible belonged to a hominin population that was closely related to the Denisovans from Denisovic cave so this is down to that Denisovic cave was up in Siberia some distance and they can tell closely related technically I guess only the second fossil identified as belonging to the Denisovans there's a lot of candidates now but there's no other fossils look out of this tiny bone fragment so it's been difficult this mandible is going to open that up considerably if it stays in the Denisovans Quoty voice of Fahou Chen the mandible likely represents the earliest hominin fossil on the Tibetan plateau the Institute of Tibetan Research so these Denisovans already had adapted to living in the high altitude low oxygen environment tens and tens of thousands of years hundreds of thousands of years maybe before homo sapiens arrived in the region previous genetic studies found that the present day Himalayan populations carry an E-PASS-1 allele in their genome and it derives from Denisovans which helped them quickly adapt to that very specific environment and that's always been one of those things like how did that that was considered to be a current modern human evolutionary leap for the longest time to have adapted to that turns out they got it probably a lot quicker than that but yeah and one of the interesting things is the similarities with this fossil with other Chinese specimens that have not yet had not yet been identified as Denisovan that were maybe hanging out in the Neanderthal camp but this discovery will help clarify some of those fossil records as well I think that's so wonderful to actually start getting fragments that are really going to start putting the Denisovans in a place at a time and also putting a face on them having the mandible you start getting an idea of how big was their head there is so much that as a kind of forensic maybe a forensic archaeologist started where you start to draw the picture of what these people looked like and that's I think that's to me really exciting and then the next step will be if they can really get not just this morphological sample but the DNA and start to tie things together more strongly from this sample I guess they might stop but so it's interesting though again there was that this this is a 40 year old discovery it was discovered 30 years before they even knew their word Denisovans and is only now through this protein analysis getting connected and there are a lot of fossils that we have likely collected of Denisovans even though we think we've only got this one sample we may have lots of them sitting in these museums that just haven't been identified but these may allow us to extract enough DNA to further sequence the genome and connect them soundly to the ancient homeland as much as it bothers some people to admit humans and human like ancestors are animals and this is the exact kind of thing that we do with animals all the time as we look back at our specimens that we have that could be 20 years, 100 years 1000 years, etc, etc, years old and we can as our technology gets better we can use those same specimens that we've saved over and over and over again which is so cool and why it's so important to keep these collections safe and well preserved and those facilities should remain funded so that we can use those specimens forever look at all these empty boxes in the basement of the museum we can't possibly be needing them they've been here for a decade totally useless now the other aspect of this is that these Denisovans they're the first people that we know of in the Tibetan Plateau at a very high altitude so we know that modern day you have genetic mutations at these very high altitudes to survive and thrive in low oxygen environments and so these Denisovans probably had those mutations or were developing those mutations 160,000 years ago and then can you actually call in the current population that has these genetic markers can you call those mutations at that point they're inherited traits it depends on where they originated it depends on whether we can tie those modern day mutations to Denisovans or they have yeah so in that then they're not a mutation inherited trait at some point it was a mutation so it's fascinating it becomes a different story than we would have known without this tiny finger bone I love it I love it but as we move on from mandibles to finger bones is it time for Blair's Animal Corner? with Blair by this little pet no pet at all if you wanna hear about this animal she's your girl except for your giant pet her next girl is an animal what you got Blair I have a story about the differences between men and women this time what else is new it has to do with life expectancy in humans on average women live longer than men what a lot of people don't know is that this is true across the animal kingdom quite often why though this is a collaborative research project with Taiwan, the US, China and the UK looking at specifically why females of most species live longer than males does this have to do with genetics does this have to do with hormones does this have to do with behavior the researchers that worked on this actually kind of stumbled on a research method very interesting they were studying the orchid island which is just off the coast of Taiwan these snakes live on the beach and they eat sea turtle eggs so they can smell the kind of hormones in the air of where the eggs were laid and buried and then they can go underground and eat these eggs they don't swallow them whole like other eggs they actually use their teeth to kind of saw open the leathery shell since it's not hard like a chicken egg and they eat the yolk inside but because it is such a good source of protein and fat and everything a growing snake needs there's a lot of competition for these eggs amongst these snakes what's interesting is the females are the ones who are usually territorial and fight over these eggs so I did a little extra research on this and it looks like the reason these snakes in particular the females are more aggressive in relation to these eggs is because the way that they protect the source of where the nest and the way that they fight one another involves biting their tails off and when males do that they are likely to use their hemipene which is basically they have two male copulatory organs poking out on either side that come out where their cloaca is and when if they get their tail ripped off or bitten off that can be deadly or it can stop them from reproducing either way non-starter evolutionarily these females they can get their tail bit off they're still good to go so they have developed this very strong aggressive rivalry on this island to defend these eggs prior research showed that the female snakes tended to have shorter life spans than males whoa that's different the suggestion there is that it has to do with their aggressive behavior males didn't fight for the eggs or for a mate the females fought how they kind of stumbled upon a perfect research kind of a research perfect storm of controlled variables is that they were studying the snakes at two different beach locations on the orchid island one of the beaches was hammered by a storm so badly that the sea turtles didn't lay the eggs there so all of a sudden no sea turtle eggs no reason for competition without any eggs to fight over females became less aggressive it ended up being longer than the males so at first glance it would look like it has to do with aggressiveness in genders that lead to females living longer so this does kind of follow the expectation that it has to do with just the potential loss of health or life in aggression for mates for resources whatever it is but what I think it actually comes down to most likely is stress we find out in so many cases that stress is the killer stress is one of these big big environmental factors that animals including humans have to deal with and can have long lasting health effects so not having to be on your guard size each other up and eventually sometimes fight for resources or mates not having that stress can completely change your biology so in other cases people have suggested it might have to do with hormones it might have to do with mutations it might have to do with mitochondrial DNA that's that's disadvantageous being passed down from mothers but based on this very particular instance it looks like it's all about specific competition over a mate or resources so according to these snakes get your rest get your rest and don't fight as much but at the same time we love to take these results from one species and generalize and say oh because we found this result and it's of course because these snakes are this interesting example because the female snakes weren't living as long as the males so it's opposite of the expectation we find this result that the female suddenly can live longer let's look at this for the entire hypothesis of the animal kingdom one island on one beach in one season this is definitely an extrapolation but I think this is a good place to start if I were these researchers I would next be looking at matriarchal societies where females compete for the head of a group are life spans in hyena groups similar where the females don't live as long as the males this is what I would be interested to see does this follow in these different sorts of situations if you take primates and you put them in a situation where suddenly they don't have as much competition do the males live longer so I think this is a good starting point but ultimately there's a lot of work to be done I think the thing that could be extrapolated from this to humans is a reminder about stress the first thing I thought of when you were talking about the bonobos they live longer male and female very relaxed society relaxed that's right the opposite of relaxation being in a room full of mosquitoes what do you do if you're going into a mosquito laden country state area I don't know if you do you probably get a reach for the deat and there's a lot of research that happens at many different universities trying to figure out why deat works so that it can be extrapolated into off brand products but also it can be extrapolated to make it even better so this is a piece of research looking at what exactly about deat is so effective this is from the Rockefeller University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute what they wanted to do is really hone in on is it taste, is it touch is it smell, what is it about deat that mosquitoes can't stand they had previously developed mutant mosquitoes that lose their sense of smell or at least part of it including the part required for avoiding deat treated arms normal mosquitoes stayed clear of deat the mutants remain detracted to people even when they were covered in repellent so again let me just remind everyone listening and watching that there are people whose job it is to get bit by mosquitoes all day so much fighting this is something to me the mosquito researchers and volunteers there are people who volunteer pick their arms into ecosystems with mosquitoes in them for science and I knew some people like this in graduate school and I've never quite understood them I accepted them as one of my people it's really going the extra mile it really is but anyway these foolhardy citizens that are helping us with science and disease prevention so thank you for your service when they stuck their arm in there the normal mosquitoes stayed away from the deat treated arms the mutants that had their smell receptors related to deat removed they remained attracted but they didn't bite after they landed so there was something about the deat on the skin after landing that kept them from biting the first thing they had to do was see if it had to do with taste they made sure the mosquitoes didn't like bitter taste or the taste of deat they took sugar water without deat or a bitter compact the insects had a clear preference for sugar without bitter or deat so they don't like the taste of it okay next they put bitter compounds on the arms but the mosquitoes still bit so just the bitter taste wasn't enough they even kept biting when bitter compounds were present at ten times the concentration in the sugar water that they didn't like next they offered mosquitoes warm blood under a membrane they had to puncture to drink when deat or bitters were in the blood they weren't interested in drinking okay interesting when bitters were smeared onto the membrane they still drank the blood but they found when you put deat on the membrane they wouldn't make contact so what this means is that it has to do with their legs so mosquitoes and other insects have little hairs all over their mouth parts and their legs so they can sense molecules basically what that means is they can taste with their legs which I'm sure all of you have heard that about flies before this is also true for some of you perhaps I know they talk about it in a bug's life I don't remember but it's been around in pop culture but they can kind of quote-unquote taste with their legs so the last step that they took in this research I love is that they took these mosquitoes and they rigged this membrane so that their legs didn't touch it and they freely bit and drank and treated membrane if their legs didn't touch it okay I have a follow-up study now we do the same test but instead of deat we use nair it's a hair removal cream or something so we do that and see if they're like totally gone foot blind over here so you remove the hairs from the mosquitoes so I don't think you can do that with nair I think that would have to be a mutation that you would have to figure out so they didn't grow the sensory hairs on their legs something that would dissolve the sensory hairs when they landed but if they did that, that might mean they'd drink from anybody because they wouldn't be able to taste it so I think what really this tells us is that there's something specifically in deat that they don't like the quote-unquote taste of on their legs so that's a ten point exactly what that is that could help us make better repellents longer lasting repellents and what the study has mentioned but I think it's also important to remember is that deat is like pretty corrosive and it can meet up fabric it does a lot of nasty stuff to us too so if we can identify exactly what it is in deat that is helping us out we might be able to make something that is less yucky to us as well maybe cheaper too I know that if you're going out of the country and you're buying deat sometimes it can be a pretty penny anyway but knowing that it does work and how it's starting to work it's good to know yeah and also this is a case where apparently the brand name stuff is is better because there's something in there they used more general repellents and it didn't work as well so there's something specifically in deat that's getting it done yeah and you can have the bitter components but they're going to bite you and taste it they may not drink as much blood but they will still be biting you and as we know the itch is usually it usually comes from the salivary compounds that they inject into you to help make everything get sucked up more easily plus in order for the taste to be something that prevents them you'd have to make your blood taste bitter so I'm not sure how you would get that done either savory food I don't know just eat nothing but lemons for a week before you travel only eat broccoli and kale and lemons there was a thing I don't know if it was B vitamins or eating make your blood bitter? natural yeast or something but no it would it was an old folksy thing like you would eat a lot of yeast natural yeast or B vitamins and that was supposed to make you less attractive I don't know that may be a way that also might be why some people are more are more likely to get bit than others maybe their skin their blood is kind of bitter we talked about that I had a couple stories like that at our live show at Alberta Rose there was one story about the odorants the compounds the odors that your skin gives off and those can be influenced by what you eat and so your body pH, all sorts of stuff goes into determining how tasty you are how nice you smell to those mosquitoes this way no matter how good you taste maybe they'll buzz off if you have the right stuff on your skin I hope so I mean that is seriously in the middle of the night in the dark oh that one that lone mosquito that lone mosquito you sound like a jet plane going over the bedroom slapping yourself in the face turning on the light every 15-20 minutes okay this time I'm going to find you this time I will find you almost got it smash everything on every wall I will find you well I hope nobody is smashing things on walls right now we have come to the end of the first half of our show and we are going to take a quick break we'll be back in just a few moments in the meantime I would love you to imagine happy things nice things let's not think about those mosquitoes that are coming in the spring spring is sprung it's May I hope that you'll be back to join us for the second half of the show where we've got superheroes, jerks and much more ahead on This Week in Science stay tuned and do it well I'm the reason it shows the way to go new conclusion the methods of hypothesis and patience are the only things I need put on a pair of goggles and go looking for the things I couldn't see thank you so much for making twist of your week I do appreciate that you are bringing us into your life right now and learning about science enjoying the stories in science from the last week with us thank you so much if you do enjoy this show enough I 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we're back more this week in science oh yeah and you know we are here with that time in the show where we talk about what science has done for me lately that's right this week we have a letter from Minion Artyom Artyom writes in and says well since I don't think I have a good definition of what exactly lately means I'm going to try and tell you what science has been doing for me for the last 14 plus years I guess this period will include lately as well I think I had an interest science as far back as I can remember myself but since I began listening to your show I believe it my interest became more organized in my life like in all our lives there are ups and downs I have these moments when I'm exhausted, depressed, jaded turning your twist episode on works like the best antidepressant I can think of it allows me to jump out of the train of these negative emotions that you feel when you're depressed speaking of depression it's one of the emotional states that thanks to science I realize the chemistry of hormones is partly responsible for realizing why you feel this makes me greatly to get back on track and calm down it's not bullet proof the more ancient part of my brain that's responsible for these emotions is still there in my skull but at least with my neural cortex I can think it through and fix myself again I wouldn't have a slightest idea of what's going on if not for your show that I've been listening to since 2005 and which set me towards reading great books about science like consciousness explained from bacteria to Bach and Bach a brief history of everyone who ever lived grooming, gossip and evolution of human language and many more I've just finished reading another one mistakes were made but not by me well I'm not sure how much I can actually follow the other suggestions given that so many people around me don't and won't follow them but I'll try to follow them anyway to enhance my communication abilities and just be a better human being I heard Neil deGrasse Tyson once say that science is first of all the way of thinking and then the rest is what people usually associate with it and this is what I value about science the most how this way of thinking helps you process the world around you and make sense of it or when it's about some brutal fact that doesn't provide the answer it's just the way it is without explanation we are always looking for for everything around us I just accept it as such a thing so even if I'm not a scientist and my current work as a content editor for online publications has nothing to do with a degree in methodology I got in university back in the late 90s but still science has a huge role in my life and for me this is the way to make it through this life with the issues that it throws at me sometimes when I listen to you talking on the podcast about something very enthusiastically I wonder that perhaps you may have had some issue in your life at the moment too but talking about science for you is the best way to get over it it's like an anchor so I'm with you this is my cure too thank you Artyom, thank you so much for writing, thank you for listening to twists for so long you really have you've been a constant feature so many emails going back and forth over the years notes and you've been a part of our social media accounts you know being there online when we're there and it's been wonderful to see your name pop up time and again and it's wonderful to hear this from you about how we've been a part of helping and bringing you something that helps make your life richer and better thank you so everyone if you would like to write in about what science has done for you lately sonnets, songs Psalms, no I couldn't Ode, I would take an ode to science a note an email, you can email me kirsten at thisweekandscience.com you can also leave a message on our facebook page that's facebook.com and that's Ode to Science this week in science all right Justin what are you going to jump into right now I'll throw into what he said too we've been doing this show for this for that many years and in that time jobs have changed relationships have changed children have come into our world we've been through so much dynamic changes over the years ourselves and gone through so many different things this is always a thing we've done once a week every week and it's a fun thread to have throughout a life is all coming back as a sort of big family and getting together and having these conversations so thank you for reminding me of that this is a pretty fun journey we're on super strength, flight, invisibility bullet immunity regeneration really fast feet you might imagine that I am describing the powers of a superhero and you're right actually that's what those are those are superhero traits but there is but is there a tell in those traits as to whether these superhero traits are male or female if we split the traits separately into two equal groups of superheroes made up from the thousands that are available but kept the groups equally male female you would have a 50-50 chance of assigning the correct gender to them superpowers are gender neutral let's instead try a different set of traits ready extreme upper body muscularity with above average weight and shoulder to waist ratios far beyond human limits subhuman weight bodies with below average waist ratio now are you ready to try it again I think you're going to improve dramatically this is new research from Higginhampton University and Sonya Swago found that within the pages of comic books male superheroes are on average obese according to the BMI while females are on average close to being really unhealthily underweight just falling when you blow on them regardless of their superpower so this is Binghampton University PhD student Laura Johnson and Sonya Swago associate professor of human development Rebecca Birch who is the lead author study they collected the BMI data for 3,752 Marvel comic characters examined the visualization of male and female superheroes paying attention to physical dimensions as well as costuming that might accentuate either hyper masculine or hyper feminine features such as those I mentioned as well as jaw lines and surprisingly breast morphology they found that male comic book characters again were obese female were at the low end of weight the mind findings where that comic book characters are an expression of super normal stimuli and they have body morphology that is beyond what humans are capable of happening said Johnson for male and female characters there are certain characteristics that are associated with masculinity or feminity for males that's the wide shoulders and actually even though they're considered obese they sort of have a narrow waist and for females that tends to be a small waist to hip ratio and again surprisingly a larger bust so what they're looking at though is a little further than just the that sort of male female stereotype here what they also are pointing out is that there are there is a these are reflections of endocrine markers that have evolved to signal youth health and fertility in real humans they've been exaggerated but there may be another dimension to why we're attracted to these superheroes they also want to look now at markers of masculinity feminity as well as how characters arc might influence how their appearances change over time in these stories that's really interesting I love the this also comes into the Japanese kawaii big eyes we've talked before about the big eyes in proportion to the faces it represents a babyish look or a young look that you want to protect and that is maybe weaker potentially these super normal stimuli are always interesting like this when we take animals into laboratory situations or experimental situations and give them giant eggs or big red like for seagulls gulls pet get this red spot on the parent's beak to get them to feed them and that red spot can be a super normal stimuli if you create it that way and so there are all these markers throughout the animal kingdom that their normal stimuli but they rep we've talked also about these honest representations these honest badges of health or fertility and then we can take them and exaggerate them red lipstick is another one this is quoting people who read comic books know that these body types are fantastical representations of the human form says Johnson who I am guessing is basing that opinion on the fact that in general comic book fans are not pursuing fantastical body types themselves is that maybe why she's saying that I don't know I feel like this is getting way too deep into a niche I mean if you just look at Barbie and Ken they have the same body types so I think this is something that you would see across pop culture that people want to look at physically fit specimens and they want to look at specimens that have these optimal measurements for whatever reason I don't think it's just superheros this is what you see in all sorts of cartoons all sorts of comics all sorts of dolls and toys right but this was a I think they used this as a data set because there was 3700 characters versus the Ken Barbie world there's not that much to so they looked at a you're right though they could have just looked at dozens of different genres of the same thing and come up with the same answer so the one thing I do love about this study is that the title of the study it came out of this comparison of Captain America Captain America actor Chris Evans to a Dorito being that his body shape is similar to a Dorito with the broad shoulders and narrow waist oh my god and so the title of the study begins with of Captain Dorito and you will never unsee this anyone who has yet to go see The Avengers Endgame Captain Dorito Googling it's pretty funny it's a it's a wonderful meme Captain Dorito and moving on from superheroes let's talk about jerks oh let's yeah well I'm not gonna talk about I guess they are super jerks it's geomagnetic jerks is what I mean I'm talking about the magnetic field produced by the Earth's core now we've talked on the show about the movement of magnetic fields and we've had multiple stories about these little jerks that take place that these alterations in the magnetic field that we don't really know how to predict when they're going to happen there is a large scale movement that seems to take place about every hundred years but then there's a more minor oscillation that seems to waver in and out about every three to twelve years and it's really not consistent about where they pop up around the globe either so in 1949 there was a jerk measured in North America but that jerk was not measured in Europe kind of makes sense but anyway moving forward so these these magnetic jerks historically have been measured by land-based magnetic observatories and so most of the Earth is covered by oceans so our data has been fairly biased until more recently when the European Space Agency launched the SWARM satellites and this is a group of three satellites that measure the Earth's magnetic field and so historical data was sparse and not as clear as what we're getting now and so a group of researchers have taken the older data so this newer SWARM data to be able to create a model a simulation of what is happening inside the planet to actually make these jerks happen what's going on I really am enjoying calling them jerks sounds like it so they've published their model in Nature Geosciences this week these researchers from the Paris Institute of Earth Physics and the Technical University of Denmark have described what they did and they've modeled the magnetic field based on the churning of fluid within the Earth's core like I said there are these longer movements which are slow convective movements that take place within the core and then there are these shorter wave movements and those come from rapid hydromagnetic waves when these hydromagnetic waves they think come from big blurps or burps of metal rising up out of that molten core and when the molten matter rises up to reach the outer surface of the core there's these waves that get produced along the magnetic field lines and that results in these changes in the flow of the liquid that's beneath the magnetic field and thus the jerk happens these jerks come from these rising blobs of metal and the blobs themselves start forming about 25 years before we feel the magnetic jerk on the surface of the planet takes about 25 years for that process to take place and what they have what they've done is they've been able to create this using the swarm data it enabled them to create a simulation that from here to the future what they're going to be doing as they try and make it more accurate is be able to predict when and where these magnetic field changes are going to take place because the changes in the earth's magnetic field can make our planet more susceptible to solar flares and solar flares can affect things like communication satellites and GPS and a lot of things that we rely on for modern modern life and so it would be great to know if down the road if a jerk is going to take out our communication satellites if it happens at the same time as a massive solar flare where are the 25 year old jerks instead of a snow day you might have a jerk day or a blurb day can't go to work today we're going to lose communications for a couple hours have a blurb day in that case we can all have an in-person meeting for the whole day nooo my GPS won't work my self-driving car won't work oh shucks shucks darn I thought this was really using satellites up above our planet to give us a picture of what's happening in its core and to be able to predict what will happen so that our technology will work better it's this feedback loop amazing I love this I love this science hopefully your self-driving car is not driving based on GPS you'll be driving off in the shoulder half the time you'll be in the other lane going the wrong way I wouldn't use that one that's part of it they have to use GPS for it but it's not what the story's about it's not oh tell me a story about the narwhals I don't have a narwhal story what don't no I'm sorry this is about the discovery of a danish unicorn oh what yeah you mean a startup researchers have sequenced the genome it's a narwhal the Arctic whale famous for the horn-like tusk that protrudes from its forehead which actually it's a tooth yeah it's a really long tooth and it's sensitive enough that I think they can taste it or something there's a theory that they can use it for that kind of there's not sure what it's for still it looks yeah is it poke holes in the ice I don't know who knows but the tooth tusks were created intensively as unicorn horns during the Viking days and these days narwhals are a highly priced food source for the Inuits of Greenland which is where you would find narwhals in that high Arctic waters this is published in the journal iScience they find that compared to other Arctic marine mammals narwhals have low genetic diversity which is typically a sign that a species is struggling however narwhal populations number in the hundreds of thousands they still might be vulnerable to some future climate change human activities in the Arctic that sort of thing but low genetic diversity is usually considered a species death sentence because when members of a species have less DNA variation there's less for natural selection to rely on or switch to and then they struggle to adapt to the changes in their surroundings and they die but this research suggests that it's maybe a little bit more complicated that at least when it comes to the narwhal there's a notion that in order to survive and be resilient to changes you need to have high genetic diversity but then you have this species that for the past million years has had low genetic diversity and it's still around it's actually relatively thriving right now it says Lena Lorenzen an associate professor at the National History Museum of Denmark made around 170,000 individual mark enough for them to be changed from near threatened to least concern last year so I think it sounds like they might have just gotten better counts they are protected the Inuits are allowed to hunt them but I don't think anyone else on the planet is so that might also have something to do with it this shows us that looking at the number of individuals is an indicative of the genomic diversity levels of the species but also looking at the genomic diversity level itself is an indicative of the number of individuals that you will find equating those two doesn't seem quite as simple as previously thought Lorenzen says interestingly the low genetic diversity found in narwhals appears to be unique to that species because the other Arctic species including their nearest relative Beluga have much higher levels of genetic diversity so it's not a specifically like you get to the Arctic and you don't need that diversity anymore it seems to be present elsewhere so it's an interesting question they're going to broaden their look at other Arctic individuals or other Arctic species to see if there is any sort of a pattern in what they've seen but yeah narwhals buck in the system stay in narwhal all the way a couple things one not to sound insensitive in any way but aren't a lot of Scandinavian Scandinavian countries also low in genetic diversity that's a thing right maybe I don't know it's well it's okay so when you become specialized but you also have very specific geographical markers or obstacles to spreading out this happens the Beluga's range map is way bigger than the narwhals very good point so if they live on top of each other for all this time it would make sense that their genetic kind of landscape would become more homogenous that does make sense what I wonder though is if the narwhals so this genetic diversity did it occur because they went through a period of a population bottleneck where their population was much much smaller they were much more threatened and because they had that small number of individuals it decreased the diversity and that diversity maybe hasn't bounced back yet is that what's happening or the other question is do they have a genetic mechanism to exploit to exploit other aspects of genetic diversity such as epigenetics right so the actual the actual expression of genes that they have so they don't they can't point to a bottleneck or population die-off event that would have limited a genetic stock because of these horns or teeth that they have from the previous trade of this quote-unquote unicorn from the recent past but then they can actually go back further the authors do suggest the onset of the last glacial period 115,000 years ago might have just created an ideal habitat where narwhals this is great and there's not really then they need to be that diversified if you found a really happy niche I guess yeah it's looking like a lot of these teeth or tusks or whatever you want to call them horns are from 1600s-ish right so that's definitely it's recent but it's also far enough away that most of the bottlenecks we think about happened late 1700s early 1800s or in the whale populations for marine mammals in general sea otters sea lions fur seals these buddies happened like late 1700s early 1800s as long as it follows that same pattern of when people started to over hunt and specifically marine mammals which is kind of a leap we don't actually know but if we're following that it would track that this low genus diversity was before that yeah but they're just happy in this environment their genes are adapted for it and so why do I need to be focused everything's fine but if climate change affects the Arctic environment where they live then it could be a problem yeah it'll be worse for the specialists which is exactly what this is about it sounds like or maybe not we'll see we have to wait and see so there's no other way of knowing data data data how about the question of where the water came from on our own planet we've had all sorts of conversations about this through the years comets right is one idea well Cosmo chemists at Arizona State University were allowed to have five little tiny particles from the sample return mission that Hayabusa brought back from asteroid Itokawa little tiny particles smaller than the size of a human hair they looked at these these particles to find out they had this question nobody was nobody was checking whether there was water on this asteroid and these researchers said hey can we look at that and so Jaxa shared the particles with them and low and behold there's nothing when they put these little tiny grains from the asteroid underneath the nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometer the measurements revealed lots of water wow yes and the results suggest that Itokawa and dry asteroids like Itokawa actually might have more water in and on them than has been presumed not so dry after all no and the water not only does it have water on it but the chemical signature is identical to the chemical signature of water found on earth yes and so extrapolating out to the number of asteroids that are in the asteroid belt just past us really the asteroid belt that is near us from about they formed at a distance as the researcher of about from the sun of one third to three times the earth's distance from the sun which is in the range of the earth the earth was forming about the same time these asteroids were forming bashing together and these s-type asteroids are one of the most common objects in the asteroid belt let's put it all together and they estimate that at about half of the water on earth may have come from asteroids like Itokawa okay guy walks into a room guy walks into a room it's a drop problem oh good it's going to be a little rough maybe to go grab a couple of asteroids it's going to be a little transition period might be a few million years say call it 60 before we're like good again but I can bring plenty of water get plenty of water well it means we can mine the asteroid belt for water potentially and also we have a number of missions that are sample return missions that are already planned so Hayabusa too to Ryugu is going to be sample return we will be able to find out whether Ryugu has water and how much we'll be able to actually replicate these results additionally we also are looking at asteroid Bennu is another target where we're going to be sample returning and Bennu samples are supposed to be back September 2023 meanwhile these researchers at ASU are building a clean lab facility which along with this mass spectrum the nano mass spectrometer device is going to be the first public university facility capable of analyzing dust grains from other solar system bodies and so they're going to be the spot at Arizona State University that these samples are going to come back to to be looked at look at the dust look at the dust for water and then find out whether or not and how the water on our own planet got here and also what can we do with it when we go out into space how can we take advantage of that what's out there how does it work what can we do one quick question is our technology good enough just one at this time thank you counselor how do we know our technology is good enough that we aren't accidentally contaminating these samples with our own water molecules that's why we need to do this multiple times and have a clean lab facility yeah and having a having a clean facility is part of that process because bringing it down here water's everywhere get out of here yeah I mean part of it is how the water is incorporated into the molecules of these samples so there's a particular minerals pyroxene for one which has water built into the crystal structure high booster I wasn't high boost it crashed yeah or am I confusing it with the stardust that it collected in some sort of gel pack so that the samples were encased that might have been the stardust one I don't remember how the cow did it now but if it's encased and then they're basically unpackaging and unsealing the sample when they first look at it as opposed to having it in a little box or a tube on a shelf but how good is your vacuum on earth that you're not when you open it but that's very interesting that the crystal structure has to do with how it's all put together molecularly that's what they look like got some another space story here Titan now I just have been watching Eureka and in the fourth season of Eureka there is a mission to go to Titan and everybody's all excited about going to Titan and so the story came out about a new analysis of images from the surface of Titan which I thought was very interesting and exciting researchers are doing a they've come up with a new way of looking at the pixels in visual imagery so that they don't just observe pixel by pixel but it which pixels are which pixels are next to or what pixels are next to each other determines how they look at specific pixels so it's not just each pixel individually it's kind of a more gestalt observation of little groups of pixels and how they're associated with each other in any case it enabled them to get a much higher resolution image of the surface of Titan and this way of looking this methodology is called principal components analysis and in it they they looked at a big swath of the tropics what would be the tropical region of Titan and looking at it they discovered a big swath bigger than the United States wide like 4,000 miles across a massive swath of water ice it's like a canyon like a very large surface feature that nobody can explain yet so did it come from some kind of surface volcanism like ice volcanoes flowing across the surface when you think about Titan the surface of Titan is methane and frozen or organic compounds so there's dust there are rocks but it's not the way that you would think about it here on earth it's similar yet completely foreign and the bedrock is frozen water ice that's the bedrock what you are seeing what you see in this giant scratch this terror on the surface of Titan this planet sized moon of Saturn is the bedrock exposed and they don't know what would have done that and so it's opened up a lot of a lot of questions about the development of Titan what's going on there and Titan is one of the big targets currently for future space missions so it wasn't just on Eureka Titan is a place that people are looking at as a future scientific mission how long would it take to get to Titan a very long time you gotta give me the speed at which your craft is traveling Blair otherwise it would be impossible for me to calculate wow okay so maybe years it looks like it would be years three years two months is the current okay there we go expectation it would be a long trip to get there I mean in Eureka they had FTL travel which would have that makes it a lot nicer so Pioneer 11 took six and a half years to get to Saturn the Cassini mission didn't take as long though I don't believe six years in nine months it does say yes it depends on the speed of your craft and the position of planets in the Eureka it's long enough you're gonna stay a while but you could include a return trip that's kind of what I was wondering bring a lot of books yeah you bring a lot of books bring a lot of entertainment it's not potentially a you know lifetime trip as anything outside the solar system would be this would this could be just a very long adventure there you go I brought my Kindle but I forgot there's not gonna be any wifi I was gonna say but I forgot the charger I forgot the charger nooo does the earth get smaller and smaller in the background nooo oh wait Amazon actually delivers here oh that's I had no idea that's cool let's get into the quick science news at the end of the show here hey hey Toxoplasma Gondii the parasite we love to hate researchers have been looking at the potential of drugs to treat Toxoplasma and Toxoplasma brain cysts are known to cause behavioral changes in people and animals which are infected a group of researchers Bill Sullivan and Ronald Weck at the Indiana University School of Medicine have been looking at a blood pressure drug to treat Toxoplasma infections and in a new M bio paper which is open access if anyone is interested in looking at this study they use this drug called guana bends guana bends to treat two strains of mice who had chronic Toxoplasma infections the as in previous work the drug reduces reduced the number of brain cysts in one strain of the mice the bulb mice however brain cysts did not get reduced in another strain that has is more susceptible to the infection just can't fight it off as easily so there's the brain cysts stayed in the not in those susceptible mice however hyperactivity behavior that's induced by those Toxoplasma brain cysts was reversed in both strains of mice and so the researchers are thinking that even though the brain cysts don't necessarily won't necessarily go away although that would be great if they did this known it's old it's an old drug it's been used for years for blood pressure so it's already got a use could be off and off label prescription it could reduce behavioral aspects of of infection try it on the cat lady try it on the cat lady this is it's a cat born parasite which you can't talk about toxo and you leave out that it's a cat born parasite which you almost did the other one is one of the earliest stories I remember reporting on had to do with blood types or types of blood chemistry that made you more or less susceptible and these mice are all going to be I'm assuming of the probably clone mice just to keep this study confounded so so it might be interesting to see if this has different effects on different blood chemistry as well that's very fascinating yeah toxo we might be able to treat it at least a little bit Blair yes you go to the grocery store you forgot your canvas bag go oh I know I'll use these compostable or these biodegradable bags instead I'm still being good well University of Plymouth did an interesting experiment taking different types of quote-unquote biodegradable or quote-unquote compostable bags and exposing them to the environment after nine months in the open air they disintegrated into fragments which is better than nothing but the biodegradable and conventional plastic formulations both of them equally remained functional as carrier bags they're able to hold a full bag of groceries after three years in soil or in the marine environment the compostable bag completely disappeared from the experimental test rig in the marine environment within three months but was still present in soil after 27 months so there's a lot of stuff going on here but ultimately the point is this raises questions about what the public expects when they buy a quote-unquote biodegradable or quote-unquote compostable bag those two things actually mean different things which people don't always realize either compostable means when you put it in a composting system with either high temperature or specific bacteria or specific animals that it will be broken down naturally biodegradable means that just exposed to the natural elements it's supposed to break apart but even that being said this has proved that not all of those bags labeled that way did their job so this identifies two things one is the need for standards relating to degradable materials to be developed if you're going to say you're a compostable or biodegradable bag this is what needs to happen to your materials and B there needs to be some information disseminating here so that people know what that actually means that doesn't mean they can throw it out into the park and it'll disappear in a few weeks it doesn't even mean that it's necessarily way better than buying a normal plastic bag we don't know that we don't know that if this bag makes it to the ocean as most trash does most litter does if it makes it to the ocean if it's not going to biodegrade and it's not compostable what does it do in sea turtle stomach acid it might still be a problem so bottom line bring your canvas bag don't use plastic you don't have to use no matter what it's labeled as but as a community as a local community or as a global community we need to demand that if we want compostable or biodegradable materials it has to be held to a certain standard they need to do that it's not oh it's going to biodegrade in 20 years yeah if you make it like under high high heat yeah no it needs to be in normal under a normal situation I like your note I like your taking the show notes you had one job that's all you were supposed to do it's a grade that's it the label it's your name it's your one job didn't do it so when I was a teenager and I was a volunteer at the zoo we had just a quick anecdote here we had those for a very short amount of time there was a multi grain chip that came in this compostable bag or this biodegradable bag I don't remember what they called it but it they ended up switching back to normal plastic because it was too noisy which is a whole other thing but we wanted to see what happened so we actually buried it in the back of the volunteer building waited months dug it back up looked exactly the same yep and it would have looked exactly the same three years later three years yeah oh my Justin tell me about the canines this is the final quick story this is wolf versus dog which one is more pro-social towards their pack members and the answer is wolves towards pack members right yeah including humans in the pack of the dogs nope yeah exactly it was a touch screen based task that allowed individuals to provide food to each other wolves perfor behaved more pro-socially towards their fellow pack members than did dog packs now these are packs of dogs these aren't quite pet dogs you're typical like these aren't like humanly surrounded raised dogs so it's sort of an interesting thing but one of the things that they sort of have always wondered is where these social behaviors come from and it looks like it does originate from the wolf as being a social pack animal I guess it's not too astounding from all of this sort of versions of this that have been out there but the fact that dogs delivered no more food to the adjacent enclosure when there was a pack member there pack member was further away but the wolves definitely fed more when they had a friend who could benefit from it I think it's also a sign of intelligence I'd be interested to see what the dogs would do if they were pet dogs and their owner was in the other room if they would show pro-social this is not a pet dog story I know that would be an interesting next step because dogs have been bred to be companions to humans in a lot of ways and actually that would be yeah would the dog be touching the thing and the dog biscuit comes out on the owner's side over and over again or would they just not feed us because they would be expecting us to feed them we did a story about how domestic dogs were better at recognizing human facial cues than dog facial cues than wolves were at recognizing wolves versus humans so it makes interesting and it kind of makes sense to trust the human that has given their owner food yeah exactly because dogs even if they're raised as pack dogs they're still human oriented whereas wolves are wolf oriented and so the pack dogs are still even though they're in a pack going to be relying more on human support and cooperation and yeah so I wonder yeah that would be the next step what would the what would the dogs do with people they're human in the enclosure next to them that would be fun we should call up whoever did this research call up whoever did this research somebody tried it somebody brought their dog to work it was like I just want to see if they love me I would volunteer to spend all day in an enclosure with a bunch of dogs thank you they got these dogs to touch screens with their noses I think that's cool yeah that was the first turtle of the study yeah touch the touch screens serve the food we will do it alright everyone out there I think we've done it we've come to the end of another episode of twist we've done it don't touch your touch screens to turn us off just yet because I need to say thank you to you thank you for listening thank you for making it to the end of the show thank you to Fada for helping with show notes and social media also thank you to identity 4 for recording the show so that we have a podcast and thank you to Gordon McLeod, Ben Rothig and others who help keep our chat rooms kind that's what we like kind chat rooms and thank you to our Patreon sponsors thank you thank you Sue Zoster, Dave Wilkenston, Ben Bignell, Richard Porter-Noodles, Kevin Reardon, Christof Zucnerac, Ashish Pant, Ulysses Adkins, Artiam Rick Ramis, Paul John McKee, Jason Oldes, 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This week in Science, this week in Science, this week in Science, this week in Science, it's the end of the world, so I'm setting up shop, got my banner unfurled, it says the scientist is in, I'm gonna sell my advice, show them how to stop the robots with a simple device. I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand, and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand. This week, Science is coming your way, so everybody listen to what I say, I use a scientific method for all that is worth, and I'll broadcast my opinion all over the air, because it's this week in Science, this week in Science, science, science, this week in Science, this week in Science, science, science, I've got one disclaimer, and it And it shouldn't be news. That's what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just get understanding. But we're not trying to threaten your philosophy. We're just trying to save the world from Japanese. And this week of science is coming away. So everybody listen to everything we say. And if you use our methods, get a roll and a die. We may rid the world of toxoplasma. Got the eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye. Because it's this week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science, science. This week in science. Science. This week in science. Science, science. Science, science. I've got a laundry list of items I want to address. From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought. And I'll try to answer any question you've got. The help can I ever see the changes I seek? When I can only set up shop one hour a week. This week in science is coming your way. You better just listen to what we say. And if you learn anything from the words that we said. Then please just remember it's all in your head. Because it's this week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science, science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science, science. This week in science. Science, science. This week in science. Science, science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science, science. And that is the end of our show. It's time for the after show. Before you go, let us know if you liked the show. I think Captain Dorito would be a great Halloween costume. Who are you going to be for Halloween? Captain Dorito. Is there anyone over there in the YouTube chat? Don't see. I think some people hung up the chat room over there. We got all our chatters on the twist.org slash live. You like my singing flying out? Thank you. It's improv. It's improvised. I don't script any of it if that's surprising. Hello, Fada. It's just you over there, but you're over in that chat. You're in all the chat rooms. That's right. We could do twists, the musical. I've always... Who will play me because I'm not doing it? Oh, come on. No, you will be Lisa with the saxophone. Oh, yeah, there we go. Perfect. Perfect. I am just looking at my flight information. Yeah, what are you looking at? That's what? My flight info. Your flight info. Oh, to Santa Fe. To Santa Fe. Is good? Is good. And it's the airline you like too. So you can probably get miles off of it, which is good. And a free checked bag if I so desire. Perfect. Perfect. Hey, Paul. The early 2000s. Hey. I have a question about Santa Fe. What is the current status of the rooms? Current status of the rooms is that they have not told me the confirmation yet. What they were going to give us was a double room and a single. The idea was that you and I would share the double and then just would have the single. But I've been considering getting another room. Oh, then I can have a double too. Cause then I can bounce from one to the other and back again. Now, Kiki wants to bring her familiar potentially. I want to bring my family if I can. But now that we have flights, I need to buy them. We need to buy them flights. And all the things. Brian is still willing to be our IT guy. Awesome. If you're down for that still. Yeah. So there are a couple. Yeah. A couple of ways that we could do that. That would be awesome. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Family room. Three in one will be fun. Yes. Hot rod. Danger mouse. Yeah. Ed, you have your twist grocery bag. That's right. Yeah. But if I was thinking if we get an additional single. And my family, we could have the double room. And then each of you guys would get your single in it. And then. But that. And that would work fine whether or not. Brian comes right. Okay. Great. I will tell him to look at flights. Yeah. They are not as cheap as you would like them to be. Yeah. Okay. That's right. That's whatever. You got to go. I mean, honestly, I am so excited. I have never been to. I've never been to Santa Fe before. And I am very excited because I have only heard good things. So if you are wondering what this talk of Santa Fe is, we are going to be on the podcast stage at the interplanetary festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico put on by the Santa Fe Institute. Let's see. As well as the Intragalactic Council on Good Relations. There's going to be, there's going to be people of air quality from all over the solar system there. I'll be showing lots of movies and there's going to be an area 21 beer garden that kind of cracks me up. Yes. They're going to be showing movies and there will be many interesting people there. I am looking forward to maybe getting to see James S. A. Corey, the sweet Daniel Abraham and then blanking on the other name. Someone help me out. Someone help me out. But anyway, the authors of the expanse, they're going to be there. Mr. Tyson will not be, but Sean Carroll, who we have interviewed many times. Yeah. He's going to be there. We are, yeah, I'm excited. Apparently there's a Georgia O'Keeffe museum. Yes, I saw that. That's like, I need to go there. I was obsessed with Georgia O'Keeffe when I was younger. Apparently there's lots of Adobe. That'll be interesting. Yes. Very much Adobe and many Adobe. What's the name of the thing? I forgot it. Thank you. Is that what it was called? I Frank. Oh, yes. The whatever wolf wolf meow. Which, oh, there is another person. So there's someone else that I'm looking forward to meeting there, Michael Garfield. Years ago, he submitted a song for one of our CD music compilations. And since he is in, he's in Santa Fe now and he has a podcast and he also works at the Santa Fe Institute. And so I'm looking forward to actually meeting him in person, which will be fun. Long time, long time listener. First time in person meeting. June 14th, 15th, 16th podcastorama. What do we know when we're actually doing a thing? No, we do not have a time yet. They are still nailing those details down. I think they wanted to get our, our flights set and make sure we're actually coming before they started putting that together. But I'm hoping that we'll be, I think we pretty much have our pick of times on Saturday, the 15th. During the day between like noon and five or noon and six or something. So, and they're only. And I believe they are only expecting a 60 minute. Podcast. Cool. Yeah. So we will go and we, if we can, I've asked them about live streaming. If we can, we will live stream because that would be great. But if that's not possible, then we'll record it and we'll release it. To the world. But they liked the idea of the live, but they just need to make sure they have the internets. That's a fair, a fair concern. Mm hmm. Yeah. Stop showing that screen off. But yeah, it's going to be exciting. But we have to figure out, yes, where we're, where. We will be staying. They haven't confirmed any of that yet. Yeah. If anyone out there, you know, can find money to bring us to their city. We'll podcast from your city. There was a whole thing about an Australia tour that would take a big nugget of money, but I'd be down. I would be so down. Oh my goodness. That would be so good. Have you ever been to Australia? No. Justin, no. Never. No, not in person. We got to go. This show is recorded. Yes, we record this madness. Oh, I think flying out was the one asking about snake tails. Let me just tell everyone real quick. Yes. It's just the last couple of inches of the snake. How do you know it's just below the cloaca? That's the all in one hole where there's the reproductive organs and the excretory exit. It's all in one place. Is it kind of like, well, that's where tails are located on animals with four legs. It's just past the butt. Yeah. So I actually already, I sent to, I shared it in the chat room. There's a really good, there's, if you just Google like snake diagram, there's a really good, let's see. XXO bot, you're funny. I'm going to see if I can screen share without breaking my computer. Oh, there we go. See, I already almost broke my computer trying to screen share. Okay. Just tell me what to look for. So can you see my screen? Yes. Okay. Great. So basically a snake is just a stretched torso. So you have the head, then you have the trachea and the esophagus is pretty long. You have one huge right lung. Left lung is reduced or absent. Then you have your intestines. You have all this kind of stuff that's kind of just stretched. So the majority of the snake is torso. And then the way you can tell that also is by looking at a skeleton at a snake skeleton. It's basically all ribs. So the way you know where the tail starts is when you no longer have back vertebrae torso vertebrae and then it turns into tail vertebrae. So that's how you can tell it's just based on the body. It's basically just a stretched torso. So yeah, the last couple of inches, and that's one of the ways you can tell the difference between a legless lizard and a snake is that on the snake, their tail is only a couple of inches of their body on a legless lizard. It's the last like half to two thirds of the body is the tail. So they're really just like a lizard with a long tail and then you just don't have legs anymore. But snakes are these super stretch torsos. They're like the opposite of giraffes. Yeah. Yeah. Or like they're like the wiener dog of the reptile world. Exactly. Exactly. Just like that. Just like that. Except if a wiener dog didn't have legs. Think about that as you go to sleep everyone. Good night. Good night. Sweet dreams. That's right. Snakes. Sweet legless wiener dog dreams for you all. That's right. There you go. You're welcome. There you go. There you go. I needed that. That was funny. Oh my gosh. I feel like somebody asked something else in the chat room. That was a good group effort there. Let's build a picture. Did somebody in the chat room ask about that recently? Yes. Yeah. I was going to talk about this earlier about how they bite off the tails and how that doesn't work for the males because at their vent, at their like cloacal opening, they have two hemipenes coming out. So they're two male copulatory organs. Yes. Snakes and some snakes and lizards, they have two. So that's fun. They come out on either side. Still not totally clear why. So you don't use them at the same time. Yeah, but they can't, I guess they can't be underneath. So they have options. I guess they do use them both. It's a symmetry thing. You'd have to just put one to one side otherwise. Not really because it comes out of the vent when it's time. So, and usually snakes kind of curl up all over each other anyway. So it doesn't really matter if it's on the bottom. But they have two. But some snakes, don't they mate in like giant mass group thing? There's a word for this. What's the word? Orgy. No, that wasn't it. Snakeball. That wasn't it. What are you saying? It's a kid. I was going to say snakeball. To my knowledge. I have to do some extra, extra research here. So someone else, I'm, I'm welcoming it. Feel free to text me information. Wait, did we change? Did you throw in some other bit of information in between? No. You're very specific. Tweet me about how hemipenes work. Hemipenes work. And why they might have two. Now my understanding is the plumbing goes kind of, it goes normal and then it falls. And then it falls. And then it falls. And then it falls. And then it falls. And my understanding is the plumbing goes kind of, it goes normal and then it forks. So you couldn't, you can't really use both at the same time. Google auto corrected that. Why do reptiles? Yeah. Each test is dedicated to a single hemipenis. An alternating pattern of hemipenis use would allow a mail, a second chance to transfer fresh sperm. Yeah. So it's not at the same time. It's just cause the female snake is so slippery that like, Oh, I thought it. All right. I got another shot. Okay. Mist. Yeah. Anyway. Snakes aren't slimy. That's a myth. Just throwing that out there, Justin. Did I say something? You said slippery. Slippery. Yeah. But I meant as in getting away from the male snake. Snakes are not slimy cause they have watertight skin. They can't excrete. They're very smooth, which makes them kind of slippery. Which is, I know a questionable thing. Thank you for defending me. It's not slimy. I guess. It is a common misconception. It's very smooth and slimy. Anyway. That's what kids all the time when I take out snakes. You know, I'm not touching that. It's slimy. And then you go, No, it's not. They have watertight skin. They can't even sweat. My son wants a snake. Ask him if he can keep mice in the fridge in the freezer. Actually, I think we should just ask Kiki if she's okay with that. Honestly, that kills it so many, so many times. If a kid says, I want a pet snake and I go, Do you want to keep frozen mice in your freezer and feed them out to the snake? They go, Nope. And the conversation is over. I now want a bunny rabbit. Yeah. You have to feed the snake the food that they like to eat. That's why if you're going to be, which being a reptile caregiver is really, really, really, really hard. They need very particular things to be healthy. And a lot of them are super long lived and require very expensive light bulbs and terrariums and supplements and soils and all this kind of stuff. But if somebody has done their research and they are really determined to have some sort of reptile as a pet, I suggest herbivorous lizards or tortoises, because you just make them a salad. It's great. Just make them a salad. Maybe we want a tortoise. Get a small one. Get like a little Russian pancake tortoise or something. Don't they transfer salmonella or something? Aren't you supposed to not pet them? All reptiles do. You can pet them. You just can't stick your hands right in your mouth, which Kai is older now. He is no longer in the danger zone of sipping, sticking it straight into the mouth. So in terms of zoos and aquariums and the CDC, the CDC has deemed that children under five should not pet reptiles because the hands go right into their mouths. But over five, if you tell them to wash their hands or use hand sanitizer right away afterwards, then it's fine because they're less likely to go right into the mouth. Pet alligator. That's something for an eight-year-old. Yeah, no, thanks. Well, if it's a little one, you'll be fine. They're only little for a little while. They're about a full year. Yeah. Foot a year. Here's a check. Happens like that. Just like that. There you go. Also, no pet cassowaries. No. Nope. No. Would you like a cassowary? No. Devil bird. They are just, they're leftovers. They're dinos. Mm-hmm. They're leftovers from the land before time. Oh, show. You know. Australia. Exactly. That lost island in the mist that we found early. In search for a jank of villa. Yeah. Australia. The last continent. It's funny that two of the five ratites are in Australia. That's so weird to me. It really, it's a, it's proofing of, um, Island biogeography. Yeah. Ratites. Large flightless birds. So you got your five. You got your ostrich in Africa. You got your Ria in South America. You got your, um, cassowary and your emu, both found in Australia. And then you have kiwi. But look at like New Zealand. I mean, isn't that, isn't that the thing where it's just, it's, uh, Well, the kiwi is in New Zealand. So there's the fifth one. And Madagascar, I think, and, and, uh, New Zealand have a, a abundance of these because they didn't have predators. Madagascar doesn't have any ratites in it. Not rat. Yeah, they have flightless birds, don't they? They do. They have, you, I got you on this one. They have a relative of the kiwi. Uh, I think, or what just appears to be for, No, the elephant bird, that's extinct. Thank you. Oh, well, yeah, but still, No, I'm talking about extant. I'm talking about currently alive. There's five on the planet and two of them are on Australia. I think that's very interesting. It is. There's nothing, there's nothing still living on. I'm not going to ask her. That's a flightless bird. Oh, Hmm. Because Madagascar. If I, if I say this in a high-pitched voice, like I'm asking a question, or does that mean you're looking at it? Oh, I am looking at it. The Kakapo. Is that what you're talking about? Could be. It's a flightless bird. I'm Madagascar. Kakapo is, isn't that New Zealand? Uh, Yeah, it's New Zealand. They're also relatives of Parrot. So they're not part of the Rattite lineage because they, they, I'm Madagascar. Here we go. I'm sure that the elephant bird. That's the only one that comes up. Yeah. That's long gone. They're long dead. Yeah. Oh, speaking of Madagascar. So, uh, what was the thing? So Jakarta in Indonesia, they are, uh, talking about, and maybe not Madagascar, but, um, I don't know why Madagascar made me think of this. Jakarta is thinking of moving its capital to a different island in the chain of islands. I'm not Jakarta. Indonesia. Jakarta is the capital. They're thinking of moving it elsewhere. And the place that they want to move it is to, um, uh, what's the, what's the, um, Calimantan. Do you remember Calimantan? Uh, is that what's that? Monkey cat? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not the, that's not a Benjaro. It's, uh, it's part of the, uh, of the island. So it's Borneo. They want to move to the island of Borneo. Uh, and it'll be in Calimantan. And the part of the, um, the area would be, uh, an area of Calimantan where they would, where they would stick it. Yeah. Yeah. I thought that was interesting. I don't know. I know it's not Madagascar, but I was thinking islands and Madagascar made me think of Calimantan and this move, which was kind of interesting. Oh, based on what science, why are they moving it? Well, Jakarta is sinking. Yeah. Yeah. I thought that was interesting. I don't know. I know it's not Madagascar, but Jakarta is sinking because it is in a low lying coastal region that used to be very marshy. Uh, but now it has. Five bazillion people living there and they are drinking all the water and using or not drinking it necessarily, but using the ground water for various purposes. And so there's, uh, the ground is subsiding because the water is disappearing. And so Jakarta is going to start flooding. Much more and they're going to be large areas of Jakarta that are going to flood. Additionally, there's really bad traffic. And so, uh, the elected officials have a really hard time getting to their meetings to actually run the country. And so there's, yeah, a bunch of, a bunch of different reasons that, yeah, but people for years have been talking about moving their capital someplace more central. Jakarta is the most populous. They've been talking about moving it more central to the entire Indonesian, uh, group of islands, but it hasn't happened to date. So who knows if it'll actually happen. Oh, people, people, but the headline I read was Indonesia moving capital Jakarta because of climate change. And so I read the article and I'm like, oh, well, it's kind of a one reason in there, but not really. It's political. It's politics, people. Yeah. Domestic chickens and turkeys. It doesn't sound like there's just water. Huh. Somebody playing with the bath. Dishwashers on draining. Maybe it's just water pouring. That would be weird for, I'm in the basement. That would be weird for the first floor. Tub could be draining. Is somebody bathing? Okay. So I don't know why I'm hearing that. All the way down. All the way down. Let's use that as the cue for. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, Justin and Blair for another great show. Thank you everyone in the chat room for chatting. While we had the show and for watching and having fun with us. We'll be back again next week. I will be doing my chat on Twitch on Friday. 1pm ish Pacific time, twitch.tv slash Dr. Kiki. And hopefully we'll have another great conversation there. Like we did this last week and then. Yeah. On and on to infinity. At infinitum. Yes. Have a, I got to hit the button. Good night, everyone. Bye. Good science to you.