 our first episode of twists for 2023. This is going to be so much fun. We are, though, missing Justin. And so just for those of you who are here before we really start the show, I'm just letting you know. You're waiting for that prediction show. I know you are, but we decided, since Justin is not here tonight, that we are going to put it off for another week, because we can't have a prediction show without Justin. I mean, Blair, what do you think? I just don't feel strange. I don't feel comfortable reading his predictions. He has to tell us if his predictions were right. I'm not going to do that homework for him. Justin, I'm not doing your homework. Okay. So we'll hear straight from him next week. Right. So Blair and I are going to talk about science this week and you know, you love to hear about the science. So that's what we're going to be doing. And we are so glad that you are here joining us for the first week of January. Yeah. Yeah. Gordon MacLeod. Happy 2020. Part three folks. That's right. Send it back. Wait, isn't this part four? 20, 21? Well, this is officially so we're not going to talk about it on the show. Yeah. So the official official show that's starting in just a little ton of butt is, yeah, COVID, the first visits of people in bioprotective suits to the Wuhan fish market were this last week, three years ago. Yeah. So I guess this will begin the beginning of the fourth year. Yes, that's correct. Beginning of the fourth year. However we think of it. Whoo. Yeah, our lower time is a mass hallucination. I'm so happy to be hallucinating with you all. I mean, what better company than all of you and our science? Yes. If this is my mass hallucination, it's I'm fine with it. I take it. There you go. So anyway, we're here and we're going to do this show without Justin. You're getting into it. And remember, this is recording of a podcast. This is not the whole, I mean, it's going to be edited. So this is the live shebang. Things will be edited, or maybe not as much since Justin's not here. No, I'm kidding. Whoops. He's probably watching right now. He definitely is. Did you write this disclaimer? Did he write it and flop? I wrote the disclaimer. Do you want to read it? No, you do it. No, Kiki, you do it all. You do all this stuff in the beginning. It's you wrote it. You should read it. Okay, I'll do this. If Justin wrote it, I would have read it. You get it. You get it. I get it. I get it. I get it. I get it. Okay, everyone, are you ready for a show? I think our audio sounds good. Our internets are good. And fingers crossed Blair is in the Bay Area where there's a bomb cyclone and biggest storm ever kind of hype and powers out streets or rivers. Yeah. Yeah, there's 95,000 people in the Bay Area without power currently. So yeah, I might suddenly disappear and that's going to be it for me. But you know, we'll get us get through as much as we can. And that will be the end of the show. Yes. Where'd Blair go? Oh my gosh, I bet myself. I mean, I can talk with everybody for a bit. Yeah, let's finish it up later. Yeah, it's always something. But at least we have this amazing technology that allows us to give it a good go. There you go. To see what we can make happen. So the prediction show will be next week. I'll say another word about that in a moment. But let us begin like a little iceberg lettuce. Let us begin in three, two, this is twist this week in science episode number 907 recorded on Wednesday, January 4th, 2023. Happy New Year of Science. Hey, everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we will fill your heads with less hair, grandpa's ears and lucky pigs. But first disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Another year and another page to turn. But instead of looking back, we now focus once again on the most recent discoveries, the most impressive science or maybe the most interesting eyebrow raising that will propel us into a better future. Join us for another year of This Week in Science coming up next. It's you, Kiki. And a good science to you too, Blair. And to everyone out there. Welcome to another year of science, 2023, everyone. But you know, we're not here predicting 2023 yet. That was going to be this week's show, but we're down adjusting. So instead, we are predicting that next week we will make predictions. I predict that your prediction is correct. And so this week, we will be discussing all the news from the last week of science, which luckily overlaps. It's like a mishmash of 22 and 23, because it's the last half of the last week of December 2022 and the first half of the first week of January 2023. But really, it's the most recent science. And so we are excited to be talking about it because it's going to be fun. We hope you are safe and happy wherever you are. Am I too quiet? Is that my mic? That's the tap. You're good. That's the tap. I can't tell because I can only hear you, so I have no... Nothing to worry about. You know. Anyway, worth the trek. Rachel, have fun editing that out. All right, everyone. Stay dry while we talk about the science today. I have stories about... What did I bring? I have a cancer killing vaccine, a cancer killing vaccine. I've got microplastic problems and lucky pigs. What do you have, Blair? Oh my goodness. I have ears. I have textbooks. I have wasps and also frogs. Oh, textbooks. Yay. Are you going back to school? No, never. No, not doing that. We're not doing that right now. I did it once. I'm not doing it again. Lifelong student here. Come on. Yeah, I'm doing it here. We're all good. So this is the science. There's a little bit more than that in store for you in the show, but our predictions, once again, will be here next week. So make sure you don't miss next week's show. And if you don't want to miss next week's show, you should head over to twist.org and click on the calendar purchasing link because we have all sorts of great calendars for 2023. The Blair's Animal Corner, this weekend science calendar for 2023 is available. You can buy it on Zazzle. It's also available as a PDF download, whichever way you like it. You can get it there, and we hope that you do. Mark the calendars and join us. You have to actually change the PDF calendars because they're wrong. Yeah, it's already out of date now. It's already out of date. And as we jump into the show, I do want to remind you that if you are not yet subscribed to our podcast, you can find the podcast, all places that podcasts are found. You look for them all over the places, Spotify, Google Play, whatever the other Apple-y thing is, awesome places. You find them where you like them. We're also streaming live every Wednesday, 8 p.m. Pacific time on YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook. We are Twist Science on Twitch, on Twitter, and Instagram, and now Mastodon. And our link is at the Universadon Mastodon server. So much, so many places. It's so much stuff. If you can't remember, just go to twist.org. That's all there. That's what it's all there for you. So right now, time for the science Blair. Yes, give me some 2023 science. This is pretty interesting stuff to start 2023 off with, actually. I'm very excited about this new work out of Brigham and Women's Hospital, of the Mass General Brigham Healthcare System, publishing in Science Translational Medicine this week, about their work turning cancer cells against other cancer cells to create a cancer vaccine using CRISPR. So it's like a mishmash of all the things we've ever talked about on the show. Like, let's take it all together and make it all work. The way that this particular cancer vaccine works, and the reason they're calling it a cancer vaccine, is that it works to train the body's immune cells about the signals and the particular molecules to watch out for the antigens that they should be watching out for in tumor cells, in those particular tumor cells that have been in the body. So if a tumor is destroyed and then comes back again, the body will know about it and will be able to fight it off better. But it's also a cancer killer. And the way that it's a cancer killer is they're taking these cancer cells from patients' tumors and they are reprogramming them using CRISPR to allow the cells to go back into the body, kind of like the CAR-T stuff that Justin has talked about in the past, but it's not reprogramming the cells entirely. And so these cells are going back into the body and they travel through the body because tumor cells love other tumor cells. It's like glue. And so they're like, I sniff out other tumor cells. And so the tumor cells, they get reprogrammed using the CRISPR. They go back into the body and then they're like, oh, we're going to find my friends. And so they run around finding their friends, but in the way they bump into other immune cells and other things. And because they have these signals on them that are like, hey, look for me. You know, this is what I look like. Oh, I'm a bad guy. You're going to have to catch me. This is what a bad guy looks like. It's draining the immune cells. That's what it it's like. These what they're calling therapy resistant tumor cells go back into the tumor itself and they're programmed using the CRISPR to have signals that actually lead to programmed cell death and actually actively start killing the tumor itself. So these tumor cells are like, I want to be with my friends. They're like, Oh, no, I'm killing my friends. And then all the other immune cells come and pile on and the immune cells and the tumor cells get destroyed. Interesting. Yeah. So this really interesting system of using all these different tools that we have to potentially destroy cancer. And in this particular case, it's specifically glioblastoma, brain cancer, which is one of the hardest to treat because we have a hard time getting drugs into the brain. Yeah. So so in in a clinical trial, you would say, okay, now I have to give you more cancer to cure your cancer. Yes. Yes. And so that that's a great point. One of the things they did in these reprogrammed cancer cells is they put in kill switches so that just in case something goes wrong and the tumor cells that they've put back in, they're like, we have two kinds of tumors now. This isn't good. Yeah. But they can, they can kill those off because they've been programmed to kill switches. Oh, I love that. Yeah. I mean, who you know, there's all cellular biology is very complex and mutations happen all the time and things could happen to get past the kill switches. But as it is right now, the likelihood of that is slim. And in the research and the work that they've done, they have successfully cured cancer and mice. Not in people yet. But this is a very, very successful study that has been able to get rid of cancer in mice strains that have bone marrow liver and thymus cells with cancer. And these are cancers that don't have really successful treatments too much currently. Yeah. And this is what they're specifically aiming for are brain tumors, which are very difficult to treat, have a high probability of coming back. Right. Yeah. Which is great news for clinical trials. It's gonna be a lot, a lot easier to kind of get that going when there's not like, well, but this kind of works. Do we want to risk this other thing? It's, this is really like, this is your lifeline. People will sign up for this clinical trial. Yeah. And with, with glioblastoma, it's very often you're not going to come out of it well. It has a very high mortality rate. And so yes, people will sign up for that clinical trial. Yeah. But this is definitely going to be one of those treatments where it's like you said, we're going to give you cancer to cure your cancer. So it's a little, people are going to have to weigh their, weigh the costs, weigh the benefits. And it's probably, you know, this still is only in animals. We have to get to clinical trials in people. Yeah, it's always, it's still a way away, but man, this belonged in the, in the countdown we did a couple weeks ago with the cancer cures starting right up with them again. This is great. People coming. Yes. More cures. What do you have? What do you want to talk about next? Well, I have the potential for a cure of, you know, I don't know if anybody listening or a few kiki had any big parties over the last couple weeks, maybe there were some holidays, particularly if thinking like New Year's Eve, you might have been somewhere that was loud and is kind of overstimulating. And when, when I was younger, I could have had a full conversation with someone at a nightclub, understood everything they were saying, not been overstimulated, had a great time. Now, no way. And so this is looking at hearing degradation in as, as age develops and looking at obviously we always look at the ears when we look at hearing degradation, but this is looking at something else entirely, looking at your brain. And this is specifically looking at the again in mice, the brain's ability to filter out background sound. This is from Johns Hopkins medicine, John Hopkins medicine. And they found that old mice were less capable than young mice of tuning out or turning off certain actively firing brain cells with ambient noise. They say that this creates a fuzzy sound stage that makes it difficult for the brain to focus on one type of sound, such as spoken words and filter out that surrounding noise. Then this is beyond hair cells, it's nothing to do with hair cells or the inner ear. This is nothing to do with your tinnitus. This is something else entirely. And so this is the, this is one of the first times looking specifically just at the brain, not at the ears at all in relation to hearing and comprehension. And if it really is brain based and not ear based, the thing that's really cool about this is that there's the potential to retrain your brain as you get older to regain the ability to filter out that ambient noise. So you just kind of tell, yes, I need to know how can I, well, I have bad news for you. I don't know how yet, but I can tell you more about the science of how they figured this out and how specific they got with the neurons, which is very important in figuring out how to develop therapies to fix this. So they recorded the activity of over 8,000 brain cells in the auditory cortex in the brain region of 12 old mice, which for mice, old is 16 to 24 months and 10 young mice, two to six months old. They conditioned the mice, I love this, to lick a water spout when they heard a tone. So it's like that hearing test that you take and I always feel like I'm flunking and I seem to be doing fine, but there's a year of the tone and then you hit the button, right? So they were licking the water spout, then they had the same exercise that they had to perform when there was white noise in the background. Without the ambient noise, the old mice licked the water spout just as well as the young mice. So that's great. Once they introduced the white noise, the overall the old mice got worse at it and the young mice were very precise about when they licked. They licked either at the very beginning or at the end of the tone. So there was a very clear like, this is a tone and it's over. The old mice sometimes licked it at the start of the cue, but also would start licking before the tones started. So they were maybe just kind of guessing. It's like, I think I hear something. And so they used two photon imaging to peer into the auditory cortex while they were doing this and they used fluorescent to identify and measure activity of hundreds of neurons at the same time. When the brain circuitry worked correctly in the presence of ambient noise, neuron activity increased when the mice heard the tone. At the same time, other neurons became repressed when they turned off. But in the older mice, they kind of just all turned on. And the ones that were supposed to turn off didn't turn off. They just kind of were all going crazy. Just before the tone cue, there was up to twice as much neuron activity in the old mice than young mice. So it started super excited and then just didn't calm down after that. And that would cause them to lick the spout before the tone started. I think I hear something. Is that a thing? So this means that as they get older, their neuron activity becomes fuzzy. They have the difficulty distinguishing between individual sounds. And so the suggestion here is that our brain is flexible. You can teach yourself things over again after injury, after degradation. So there's a chance that you could potentially reteach your neurons to differentiate sounds and kind of quiet down overall to differentiate from that white noise. Obviously, more research would be needed to precisely map the connection between the inability to shut off the neurons and hearing loss, so that then you could figure out how to fix that. And they want to see the differences between male and female animals, which I'm always happy to see because especially in my studies, a lot of the time, it's just all one and then you don't look at what's going on in the other. So regardless, I think it's pretty interesting to hear about hearing changes as you age in relation to your brain instead of your ears because I definitely feel, this could be totally unrelated, but I definitely feel overwhelmed in loud places in ways I didn't used to and I don't think that's COVID. It's not COVID and it's not going to get better. No. Like, I gotta turn the music down while you're talking to me. I never used to be like that, but my brain's getting hard. Yeah, it's interesting. I think this is fascinating also just getting at kind of the noisiness and how that potentially impacts people's ability to multitask. So listen to music, maybe bounce along to the beat, have a conversation, pay attention to other people in the setting. You know, there's all these things that you do socially and suddenly with all that stuff going on, is it all just getting, it's just too much and then your your attentional centers have to go, okay, what are we doing here? Or just fully shut down. I can't hear anything. Go home. Well, maybe we can teach ourselves to to redistinguish and we'll see. I love, I think that's a fascinating idea as well. Is it something that we can retrain our brains on? What is it that leads to the overload? Is it is it a loss of plasticity or a loss of the control factors that make it so noisy and you can't calm the noise down? Or is it something that you could really train? Yeah, really interesting. And then like, does your ability to handle multiple stimuli outside of hearing? Does that also decrease as you age? And so it's kind of stacking. You know, like I see Jason in the chat saying, why do I turn the music down to find parking? Totally. I have to pause my podcast when I'm dealing with difficult interchanges on the freeway because I can't I can't do multiple things at once. And it's just yeah, is there this problem where your brain has trouble kind of compartmentalizing more and more over time? Fascinating questions. Yeah. I want my brain to be able to deal with all sorts of things. There's some things about our brains that get more efficient as we get older, because our brains are like, I don't need to deal with that anymore. So that's part of it as well. But there are lots of questions there. Very interesting to look into as we move into, I don't know, all of us getting older every single minute of every single day. It's happening. You can't stop it. Inevitable. You can only take so many anti-aging compounds. I mean, so far I don't know. Yeah. But what about what we're eating and what about what fish are eating and what other fish? Oh, again, lots of other fish. But we have heard so much about microplastics making their way into our environment. And there's been a huge question as to, okay, fine. But how are they really affecting the health of fish? How are they really impacting the health of communities? How are these microplastics affecting and then further up the food chain? How are they affecting us? Great. We've all got microplastics in us. Awesome. What does it mean? Right. Yeah. Is it like glitter? I don't know. I think people put glitter in their drinks and drink it. I don't understand. Really? Yeah. I'm like, why would you? Like, why? But anyway. Yeah. Is it like glitter or is it like mercury? This is what I need to know. This is what we need to know. Is it nice and shiny and exciting and make your life a better thing, except for the glitter that gets everywhere and then you don't know it's always a bit or is it like the stuff that's going to make you sick? Yeah. These are the big questions. Well, researchers publishing this last week in bio gerontology have published their study called Dietary Intake of Microplastics Impairs Digestive Performance Induces Hepatic Dysfunction and Shortens Lifespan in the Annual Fish Northo Brancheis Guntheri. This is, I think, one of the few studies that has moved forward to be able to see real health effects on a species of any animal with relation to microplastics. There was a major study that had been debunked, that was retracted a few years back, actually, that was out of Scandinavia. And there was a big hubbub about that because it was exciting research. Everyone was like, yes, this is the proof we need that the microplastics are hurting everybody. And then it came out that the data was falsified. And so the entire study was retracted. And so I like to see other studies happening that are giving us a little direction, not in the good way. I was hoping that it wouldn't be like this. But what they have determined from their studies on this particular fish is that it shortens the lifespan of the fish, but also accelerates aging by increasing age-related biomarkers, decreasing antioxidant enzymes, reducing digestive enzymes, and then the liver hepatic function is decreased. And so through this, it also appears that from their research, it's not a really strong result, but the results suggest that the smaller the micro particles are, the more toxic they are to digestion and metabolism and growth. Good. Yeah. Yeah, the smaller they are, meaning the harder to remove. Yes. And I think that's one of the key sentences in there. I'm like, oh, the smaller. Oh, yeah. Because the big ones, maybe we can scoop them out. The bigger ones, maybe we can filter them out. But the little teeny tiny ones, those are the ones that we're going to have the problems with. And if that is the case that in some species, maybe more than others, we don't know, this is one species. So it's not like this is all fish. No. That's not what they're saying here. This is one species of fish is really negatively affected by this. So now we have to, yeah, now there needs to be more research. And hopefully this is good, strong research that doesn't get retracted and other studies can follow up. And yeah. The microplastics stuff is really hard for me because there's very clear solutions when we talk about other environmental problems. But the microplastics are tough because so much of it is already in the ocean. They like my plastic. Even if we stopped using plastic today, which is not going to happen. I foresee the ability to remove gas cars off the road to be way more likely and sooner than removing plastics for our lives. It's just, it's so overwhelming. It's pretty scary. But this is important to know because public health issues are how things get changed. Right. So if you can, if you can say this blocks digestive systems and impedes digestive intake of nutrients and all these sorts of things, then you can say like, if that's happening in fish across the board, it's probably happening in mammals. Let's test that. Okay, great. Yes, definitely happening in mammals. That means, oh, hey, humans are mammals. So and we're eating the fish that has the microplastics in it. So this is an issue. So maybe it's time to do something. And if this is impacting our aging and making us age faster, impacting, you know, if these, if this gets passed along in any way, we know that lots of compounds in nature end up in fish, end up in the food pathway, you know, and bio accumulation is a huge deal for some molecules. I don't know what that means for these plastics. Right. You eat more fish, you have more plastics in your system, and then we're going to start aging faster. We don't know this. Yeah, we don't. I don't, I want the fish to be the good things that we eat. Yeah, yeah. And we need to know so that like, you know, the much time it takes to fix things, it could start soon. We love our plastics. We should maybe do without them a little more, a lot more, a lot, a lot more. Tell me another story. Oh, well, speaking of solutions and specifically climate change, I just name dropped. This is a fascinating analysis of college textbooks since 1970, looking at the portrayal of climate change in those science texts. This is from North Carolina State University. And they found that, you know, overall, coverage of climate change in college biology textbooks expanded during the 1990s. But there have been recent changes that have been not significant. They have not significantly kind of mirrored the actual change in our understanding in climate change. And it's focusing mostly on the impacts of climate change rather than the solutions. So it's not not great. Textbooks are how a lot of people learn about science. And so that's often that can be their first introduction to climate change. I mean, sometimes they're only. I mean, I hope, yes, you learn it in school that I hope more and more people are but also more and more in the news, hopefully, and in podcasts. Yes, we're right here for you. We're here for you to get a head start. So a couple of researchers in North Carolina analyzed 57 college biology textbooks to see how climate change coverage had changed from 1970 to 2019. And they show that coverage of climate change continually expanded with the greatest increase over the 90s, as I mentioned. But over time, the passages devoted to climate change moved further back in the books. So it wasn't integrated in biology texts throughout. It's went from the last 15% to the last 2.5% of pages. So it's basically just like, oh, and while we're at it, we'll tell you about climate change before you leave. It's how many people make it to the back of their textbooks? It's anyway, the coverage also shifted from a description of the greenhouse effect to focusing on the effects of climate change, which is also problematic. If you're taking away the mechanics, then that's going to impact how people understand it and whether they comprehend the mechanics also impacts whether people, you know, tend to believe that it's happening. So that's pretty important to talk about the greenhouse effect or the heat-trapping blanket or whatever you want to talk about. As long as you explain the mechanism, that can actually help people understand the impacts in the long run. But so they're focusing more on the effects. So they just say, like, this is how this biome is being impacted by climate change, right? Especially on the movement of ecosystems and response. So they talk about, you know, species moving and stuff like that. The study also showed that the proportion of the text dedicated to solutions peaked in the 90s at over 15% of the passage, but in recent editions were about 3%. Wait, it was peaked in the 90s? Yeah. And yeah. Also, textbooks presented only graphs of global temperatures and carbon dioxide levels prior to the year 2000, but did not include more recent figures, including glacier melt and shifts in distributions in the last two decades. So they're using a lot of old charts that are oversimplified. So this is my one big asterisk on this. I did some research. I tried to figure out if they only used texts from their university, which I don't think they did. I think they pulled texts from multiple universities because that's 57 texts. You definitely should have more than that. For sure. But what I was very curious about is if they were all regional, because as we have talked about on the show, there are different versions of textbooks in the United States. There is what you call the California version and the Texas version. And I don't know if North Carolina... Right. But in this particular case, we're talking about college level textbooks, as opposed to school age K through 12 textbooks. And college textbooks, I would assume, and maybe this is me assuming, I would assume that they are not under the same strictures as school boards. See, I tried to figure that out too. I had a really hard time figuring it out. So I'm just throwing that out there. I don't know if there are regional differences in the texts. So I just want to suggest that that could be part of the deal. It also could have nothing to do with it. It could be that college texts are college texts. And I would hope that that's true. What I know about college textbooks is that Jason Bombardier assumed nothing. You are very correct. Well, you have to make assumptions sometimes, but then you have to account for them. Anyway, moving on. College textbooks very often are written by experts in their field who have been teaching biology, studying biology for a very long time. They have particular specialties within biology or genetics or chemistry, whatever it happens to be. But yeah, usually it's either one person or a small group of people who have come together to create a textbook, because they think they want to create a textbook that's going to add something to the educational environment that isn't already there. So I find it fascinating that the shift has happened from the 90s to now. I would argue in a biology text, it should be in almost 100% of the book. Because ocean environments and you have to talk about corals and you have to talk about how pH and how so much affects, climate change affects everything living. And it's currently happening. It's not like, oh, in the future we need to look for XYZ. We're seeing it in real time. It's our current state. It's like, are you going to talk about the Anthropocene in your biology textbook? If you are, you have to talk about climate change and its impacts on every clade you bring up in the biology textbook. Here's invertebrates and this is how they're impacted by climate change. And here's fungi and here's how they're impacted by climate change. It should be integrated. So that's the key word right there, integrated. And if nobody has done has created an integrated biology textbook to this point, then if you're listening right now, that is something that needs to be written. We need the biology textbook that comes from the perspective of the environments in which life exists and how the environment impacts life. Yeah. And as the researchers point out, you've got to have solutions in the textbook. I'm very surprised about that because when I took environmental science in high school, climate change was still like this, like, hey, there's this thing called climate change. Let me tell you about it. It was still, you know, not being talked about very much in classrooms, but my environmental science book had a whole section on it and a whole section on here's the deal with nuclear power. Here's the deal with solar panels. Like they had all these different sections where we had to learn about all these different types of potential solutions to climate change. And we had a discourse about what we thought was the better solution moving forward and all this. Like why is solutions not part of the text anymore? That's shocking to me. I need more. Yeah. And for the science teachers out there, you might have to supplement. That's the other thing that I'm seeing here is the textbook is a great place to start, but also as teachers, if you know that your textbook is likely to have this deficiency, then that means you have to do some heavy lifting on your own. I'm sorry. And I know you already do a lot as teachers. Just insane. So once again, I'm going to come back to this being a college level and very often college level instructors do choose their own textbooks. They can choose supplementary readings. They can, you know, very often have a lot of leeway. Unfortunately, unfortunately, also a lot of these big classes at university level are big 500 person biology classes that take place over three quarters or a couple of semesters. And there's maybe not the time to go into all of that or the ability to hit those nuanced, very important points. But yeah. Yep. It's all, it's all has to teach all the things. But maybe one of the most important things in our lifetime teach that is kind of the idea. Yeah. Maybe do that. Just a thought. Can you tell me about pigs? You really want to hear the story? I do. I do want to hear this. Is it going to make me feel better or worse? Yeah, it's going to make you laugh and I'm still debating whether or not I'm allowed to show this video. Oh, no. I would like to tell you a story about research into restoring erectile function in pigs. Oh, yes. Bet you didn't know that no, actually pigs don't really have an issue with erectile dysfunction. It's humans and this research is meant to help people. It's not meant to help pigs, but you know, pigs have been helped in the process. The researchers have, they worked on damaged penile tissue and trying to get it to be functional for erections. And to date, there really is not good material that can be used to aid in fixing damaged penile tissue. Because in most cases, when that tissue has been damaged, there can be repair, but scar tissue internally. And there's usually issues with how it functions after the fact. So these researchers developed an artificial material. Well, it's a material, the material is not artificial, but they developed an artificial substance, which is artificially like the substance, the tissue within the. So it's a model to absorb. It's not a model. Nope. Okay. Oh, no. Oh, no. They were able to add the add a material to, they call it ATA, to the artificial, it's artificial tunica albuginia. And they have injured the penises, they sutured where the injury took place and added the new artificial material, then injected saline. And they showed through their research that they were able to have the, the penile tissue regain function. Whoa. Yes. Yes. So the fascinating thing about this is that there are many, many reasons that a penile dysfunction, erectile dysfunction occurs. But for things that involve injury, we really don't have many, many ways to fix it. And so, how do we get to the point where we can help the issue for in, for individuals who are facing them? And we return function. And so what they've done with this artificial tegmental augmentum is they say it achieves tissue like functions by mimicking the microstructure of natural tissues. And what it allows to occur is that it allows the saline to engorge the tissue and then it allows it to have strength and rigidity. So I could be totally wrong. I don't know much about this topic, but aren't there different reasons that, that an individual could have a rectile dysfunction and aren't some of them not tissue damage related? Like a lot of them have to do with blood pressure issues and other issues with getting older. And we have, we have medications for that. So we have blood pressure medications. We have other medications that are just meant to help with erections when there's a rectile dysfunction. There are all sorts of things medication wise, but when there's actual tissue damage, we haven't had a lot of bio materials, biological materials that can be used to repair them. And so when they've tried to use various extracellular matrices and other things that immune system complications can occur and you really don't want immune system complications occurring in that area of your anatomy. And also the, some of the other things that they have used for repairs, the microstructures have been different from the natural tissue. And so they don't replace the tissue perfectly. And in that, there are imperfections and it's not as natural as it would be. And so this is a, what they've used, it's based on polyvinyl alcohol and apparently it has a curled fiber structure that is very similar to the structure of the natural tissue and its biomechanical properties mimic the natural tissue. And they found that their, their results were like, Hey, it's not toxic. It's not injuring the animals. There's blood compatibility. They're not having rejection issues from the immune system and it didn't seem to be rejected by the pigs. And so they don't think that it will be harmful to other tissues or to hopefully humans in the end. Very cool. Yeah. I think the, the thing that I would, if I was a human who was maybe get a sign up for a trial for this, I would want a pig to have that in their body for quite a while before, you know, and prove that it didn't cause any degradation. There was no issues over a longer time. So it just, I think that's the thing. I just immediately thought about like vaginal mesh, which was something that was given to so many people kind of all at once. And then they found out later, like, Oh, years later, this is a problem. Yeah, that's not good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, there's going to be a lot of, of course, this is pig research, not mice, but in pigs. But you know, the idea that they're working on an animal model that is very close to human anatomy, although I have a video, there's a video that goes along with this paper that I'm not going to show. I don't know if I should show a pig penis, three pig penises. I don't know what'll happen on YouTube's. I don't know if that's appropriate. Go to the show notes. Go to the show notes because the paper is available and it does have a very interesting video of pig penises, which are curly. They're curly like the tails and they straighten out as they become erect, which I think I knew, but I didn't know. And it was very interesting to watch. It's convenient. That's fascinating. It's never what you think it is. I swear. Never. But hopefully, where they're going to go with this next is that, of course, this is just the soft tissue. They're not repairing the nerves. They're not repairing the corpus cavernosum. There's other parts of the, the penile tissue that if they're damaged, do not have a repair yet. And so their next state, they're really looking to create or construct an artificial penis. Wow. That's, that's their goal. They're also looking at how to replace the heart, the bladder, you know, other tissues as well. But you know, those other things, whatever, you know. Awesome. Fascinating research. And oh, those lucky pigs. Yes. Not so lucky because it sounds like they probably had to damage their tissues first. So probably not, not lucky. That is not the job that I want. No. No. What do you do? How much pig penises for science? Let me fix them. So it's, it's chill. Don't worry about it. Chill. Yes. Hey everybody. We have come to the midpoint of our show. Thank you so much for joining us so far on the program. This is This Week in Science. And you know that we are here every single week. And I do hope that you enjoy the show every week as we bring it to you. If you are enjoying the show, please tell a friend today. And once again, if you have not headed over to twist.org yet, you can head over to twist.org. Click on the big twist calendar. If you want to order our calendar printed from Zazzle or go right down below it to purchase the 2023 digital calendar download. Great art by Blair this year. Legos! But for sure, tell a friend about twists. All right. Oh, wait. We've moved things around and I'm all confused and fuzzled. But this is the time on This Week in Science where it's Blair's Animal Corner, isn't it? Right? I'm ready. You're ready for Blair's Animal Corner with Blair. What you got Blair? Oh my goodness. I have two really fun stories. So the first one is about wasps. And did you know that only females have the spikes to sting? On wasps? Turns out. No. I did not know that. I mean, I thought that was the case for bees. But yes. So for wasps, only females have a real sting in their tails. The male counterparts generally evade predators by mimicking the females. Scientists have theorized that some male wasps might have other defense mechanisms. And a researcher accidentally was stung by a male wasp. A graduate student, actually. Sorry, a grad student. That's a research. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just especially. It's like, oh man. But then Shinji Sugura, an ecologist at Japan's Kobe University, then was like, well, let me get stung by this thing. Try to get stung. Thought that male wasps were harmless. Oh, nope. Pain. So what's happening there? How's that possible if they don't have a stinger? Well, in order to figure it out, they took some frogs, two different kinds of frogs. They offered up male mason wasps to see how they stung, what was going on there. And they were observed piercing the mouth or other parts of frogs with their genitalia. The male genitalia has two large spikes on either side. And that is how they were stinging these frogs. The pond frogs didn't really care. They weren't bothered by the stings at all. And they also ate the stinging females. But a third of the tree frogs rejected male wasps after being stung. And then when they repeated the experiment where they removed the genital spikes, the tree frogs gobbled everything up. No problem. So it was definitely the genital spikes that were delivering the sting. There's not a lot of research done on insect genitalia outside of its role in reproduction. Makes sense. But this means that it's time to take a closer look at male genitalia, especially in species where the stinger is absent in males to see if there is some sort of modification, adaptation that allows them still to defend themselves. Apparently, there's other research that was done previously where there's a species of hawk moth that uses their genitalia to emit ultrasounds that jams bat sonar, which I got to find that story. It seems insane. Haven't we talked about that before? I don't remember. That's I mean we talk about so much on the show. I don't know. Well, maybe it wasn't the genitalia that blocked the sonar. I don't know. But it seems truly insane. But it's a good example of structures being used for multiple things in biology. For sure. And it's time to expand research to determine what other wasp families have genital spikes as a defense mechanism. Yes. You're like, let's find out who has spikes. Yeah, it's wild. And you can go to the show notes and watch videos of these poor frogs trying to eat these wasps and go ow, ow, ow. But it all works out in the end. They still got their lunch. So they're good. I can pull up. I can pull up a video of these poor frogs. Hold on one moment while I bring up these poor frogs. Oh, yes, they are poor frogs. Look at that. Ouch, ouch, ouch. I get to see it. You don't. Hold on one second. There's too many clicky buttons. Share screen. Here we go. Here we go. I would like to use the genital defense. Oh, no. Oh, no. Ow, nope. Ow, back, back, back. Go away. No, thank you. Frog like, I didn't like that. Yeah. But you know, you remove the spike, then they'll chow down. They're all good. Oh, get out of there. Get out. So, but the wasps, the spikes remain on the genitalia as opposed to coming out like a stinger. Right. Yes. It's a spike, which genital spikes are used for other things obviously as well. It can help keep them nicely lodged during mating. So, there's, I think that's part of the problem is that there's an expectation that biologists know what genital spikes are for. But now there's another idea of what they could be used for. Yeah, they're just supposed to be like the spikes that are used with cats and stuff for during mating. But yeah, no. Yeah, there you go. Now speaking of frogs, I want to talk to you. Another penis study? No. No. But there are some really amazing videos of this glass frog, which if you haven't heard of glass frogs, they're transparent, they're transparent terrestrial creatures. Really unusual. You see transparent animals in the ocean all the time on land, not very common at all. They can make themselves transparent so that they can blend in with their natural environment in the rainforest. They usually stick to the bottom of a leaf. They can take a little naughty there. They can blend right into the leaf. Never know they were there. The northern glass frog hyalinobactrachium fleshmani is only a few centimeters long. They're more active at night and their green skin, they have a green tinge to them that helps them blend in when they're moving around. But then during the day when they're asleep, they have this transparent appearance. So you can really only see their organs. And remember they're only a few centimeters big, so they're really small. Those organs are really small, so it looks kind of just like a white little dot on a leaf. So they can get away scot-free. They just look like bird poop. But here's the question. Yeah, what's your question? Where is their blood? The reason transparency is not found on land very often is because red blood cells are red. And so your veins are very obvious, and your veins are basically a map of your body shape, and that completely throws transparency out the window, tells predators right where you are and shape you are. So there is a way that these frogs are hiding their red blood cells. In order to figure this out, researchers had to get glass frogs to nap in a lab, which is already kind of difficult because they only are really transparent when they're napping. When they're awake, you can see blood moving through their body, and they found that when you put them under anesthesia, you can also see the blood. So it's getting shunted or moved to an inner organ when they are asleep, and it's something that does not happen naturally when they are under anesthesia. So very cool to start with. They wanted to do testing. They wanted to do imaging to figure out. They wanted to have optical models to figure out where it's going and how they're shunting it and all this kind of stuff. And so what they used is a photoacoustic microscopy or PAM, and it involves shooting a safe laser beam of light into tissue, which is absorbed by molecules converted into ultrasonic waves, and then the sound waves are used to make a detailed image of the molecules. It's non-invasive. It's quiet. It's sensitive. So that means they can figure out where the blood vessels or where the blood cells are going and not wake them up. Also, usually when you would kind of tag a circulatory system, you would inject an animal with something, which you obviously don't want to do here because that's going to ruin the whole experiment. So all that to say, they used PAM. They had the frogs sleep upside down in a petri dish just like they would on a leaf. They shined a green laser at the animal. The red blood cells in the frog absorbed green light, emitted ultrasonic waves. They were picked up by the acoustic center. They traced them. They had high spatial resolution and high sensitivity. When the frogs were asleep, they moved nearly 90% of their circulating red blood cells to their liver. They also saw that the red blood cells float out of the liver and circulated when the frogs were active and then re-aggregated into the liver while they were recovering when they kind of needed to take a rest. What's crazy is they are avoiding a huge blood clot. How? This is the next step of this research. They want to figure out how is this blood not clotting when 90% of their blood rushes into their liver. Or when it's just in the liver or it's not circulating. Yes. How do you not damage other tissues in your body when they are starving of blood? If it rushes and has to go move quickly. So they want to study that mechanism. They want to see if it could one day apply to vascular issues in humans. 90% of their blood is moving to their liver. Their liver is also reflective in some way. So it's not red. It's such a strange system. Well, if it has a sheath maybe of connective tissue around it, then that's going to hide the blood more internally and that'll be like that white splotch that you were talking about. Yes. So they are saying that the liver is mirror coated. Whatever that means, it allows them to blend in even better. I want to know more about the biology there. What a mirror coated liver is about, molecularly speaking. Glass frogs, mirror coated livers, shunted blood, just wow. Yeah, but I guess that means if 90% of the blood is in the liver while they're sleeping, they really are taking advantage of the fact that they don't have a high metabolism or metabolic need while they're sleeping. So the blood is just not as concentrated, it's just going out more sparsely. Yeah, which again, the fact that they're an amphibian is helpful because they're ectothermic. So their metabolism can go up and down throughout the day and their basal body temperature can go up and down and that's totally normal and isn't a shock to their system like it would be for a mammal. But yeah, it's interesting to me that it's not just like, oh, I'm resting, all the blood flows into the liver. No, if you are under anesthesia, it doesn't happen. So there's something, I'm not going to say intentional, I'm not going to say they're going like, I'm going to send all the blood to my liver now. But there's a mechanism at play that requires them to not be knocked out. So there's something else going on. Right. Dave Gillespie in the chat on YouTube is saying hypoxia though. And how are they switching to glycolysis? There's a lot of questions about, okay, so they're sleeping, does that mean that they've lowered their body temperature? Are they using less oxygen? Is that why they can have the lower blood flow, which that's obviously happening? Yeah, mechanisms. How does it happen? Well, and so, okay, so not only could this help us figure out blood systems, just circulatory questions in general in our body, but also if there is stuff going on in their body that prevents tissues from dying when there is low blood flow, that's an important thing for us to know too. Right. Like if you ever get, if you ever get a, what's it called, the transplant? No, no, it's when you have like a big gaping wound and you have to tie it off. God, what's the word I'm thinking of? A tourniquet. Haha. If you get a tourniquet, right? There's a certain amount of time before tissues start to die. But if you, if you figured out what the, what the frog was doing here, and you could somehow turn that into medical care, you could, you could use that for humans who have had reduced blood flow to an area for too long, right? Yeah. So it's, there's a lot of cool potential medical applications here. Absolutely. I mean, this is the kind of thing that if we're going to be putting people to sleep for, you know, long periods of time for intergalactic travel, maybe this is the, you know, the kind of thing that we're going to have to understand, right? Shut your blood. No, we shut the blood. Fighter pilots that are undergoing massive Gs to be able to do like some, you know, crazy maneuvers that the blood is all pushed to their brain or pushed to other organs. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. During those maneuvers, right? What happens in the rest of the time? How can, how can we protect against some of the injuries that would come from some of that? And then also for just regular injuries, stroke, heart attack that lead to hypoxic conditions that can kill tissues. Yeah. How do we fix it? What do we do? Maybe these little tiny glass frogs will teach us. They know. She's going to have to ask nicely. They're so tiny, they probably go, okay. Now you have to look up glass frog sounds. Yeah. Obviously, I'm doing that right now. Oh dear. Glass frogs. Very cool. What a neat study. So fascinated by all this. I hope you're fascinated too out there. This is This Week in Science. Thank you for joining us for another episode of our show. We'll be back again next week with our prediction show, and we love to come back every single week. If you like to support us, you can head to twist.org and click on the Patreon link. Patreon supporters enable us to continue doing what we do week in and week out. We thank you for your support and really can't do it without you. We'd love to be able to thank you by name at the end of the show. Do we want to hear some more news? I have a couple more stories before the end of the show. Let's jump in. What do I have to talk about? I want to talk about seeing voices. Oh, okay. Yes. Seeing voices, which sounds odd, but think about listening to a podcast or you're in your car listening. Can you picture the faces of some of the maybe more famous or prominent people that you have seen on TV or in magazines or that you listen to on a regular basis and you know what they look like? If you close your eyes and you think about the voice of your partner, your best friend, or someone in your family, you're like, oh, yeah. You know, if you have that ability to picture people's what they look like, the sound of a voice and the vision of their face, they go hand in hand. Our recognition ability is tied to this and researchers have been trying to figure out where this all comes together. Is it, oh, you see somebody and then that ties into kind of top down control of hearing their voices or the other way around, what is controlling what? And how do we make that recognition determination? And these researchers who have just published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, they have been playing with neuroimaging, looking at epileptic surgery, brains of epileptic surgery patients, having them hear familiar voices, but then measuring a part of the very early visual system that's called the fusiform gyrus, the bilateral fusiform gyrus. The bilateral fusiform gyrus is like at the very, very basal level of when we start processing vision. So it's not like a higher level cognitive part of the visual processing, but it's at the very basic levels. And what they found is that when they were recording from this fusiform gyrus, the sound of a familiar voice would just a few milliseconds later, about 300 to 600 milliseconds later, kind of create an electrical signal, kind of like an echo. So it was the same signal, but at a lower amplitude, like somebody had turned the volume down on it, but it was in this visual system. It was in the fusiform gyrus. It wasn't in the sound processing parts of the brain. So there was this part of the lower visual system, which kind of kicked on after a voice was heard. And so what they're saying is that what this is suggesting is that there's a top-down feedback, mediated response to fulfilling your familiar voices that allows us to facilitate the identification of speakers. And so if your eyes are closed, or if you're coming around a corner, or you hear somebody yell your name and you're like, ah, okay, I hear the voice, it takes a second after you've heard it will actually 300 to 600 milliseconds for it to pop into your visual processing system to allow you to be able to put the two together to create that link, which is pretty fascinating. And so I think the really, really interesting part of this is that the visual and the auditory systems, even though we consider them as very separate systems, and like earlier in the chauvelier, you're talking about all the noise in the hearing that our sense hearing sensory parts, but you know, how does that tie in necessarily with, you know, what if there's also flashing lights and what if there are, you know, other things going on in the visual system to affect your processing, but really the fact that we consider them separate networks, but it all works in conjunction. Right. Yeah. Yeah, that's, that, yeah, that, that, that tracks. I definitely, I'm somebody that, that has like a, a movie playing in my head all the time. So when I'm reading a book or listening to a podcast, like you said, you know, I'm seeing it happening in the back of my head. So that, yeah, it's, but you know what I'm wondering about though is people who, we were having that whole conversation however long ago about, if I say Apple, do you see the word Apple or do you see an Apple in your brain? So now my question is, if you hear a voice, do you see their face or do you see their name written out? And would that light up the same parts of your brain? Very interesting. Yeah. Okay. Now I want to know that. Interesting. What they used in this study were stimuli from famous speakers, Barack Obama, George Bush, Bill Clinton, and they were presented with images of presidents or clips of their voices and then asked to identify one or the other. So who, who is this? And then, and so the, their face responsive sites very specifically related to faces. So this is probably not the same as the name as a word, right, be a different part. So these specifically are related to face responsive neurons near the fusiform gyrus, but also respond to voice. Interesting. So we don't just have like the famous person face neuron in our brain that we've talked about. That's like a big pop culture thing now. Everyone's like, oh, it's like, I don't know, the Cindy Lauper neuron or whatever. That's the one that makes you like Queen of England neuron. No, it's a neuron that will also respond to their voice in a set of neurons that are involved in that whole process. And really, it's actually a whole network and the whole idea that we can put anything down to a single neuron in our brain. Right. Of course. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Anyway. Falsely. But if you can pick out voices in the, in animated films, you know exactly who everybody is, it's this. It's this. It is. Yes. I will say my that is very strong. My that. Yeah. My that thing that you talked about. Your face and voice responsive neurons in the fusiform gyrus. You got it. That's what I said. There you go. You're that. It's very strong. Yeah. The fusiform gyrus is strong with you. Blair, I don't think you're going to have an issue with hair loss. Oh yeah. I have, I grew a lot of hair after I had Kai or when I had Kai and then I lost a lot. But I think I've, I think I've evened out here recently. It took a while, but I think I've evened out not losing too much more hair. I don't know, not gone progesterone. But anyway, we think of hair loss as humans as potentially this thing that it, it happens to guys. It's a, you know, a sex link trade. It's not something that happens, you know, doesn't happen to everyone. We want to be able to get the pill to fix it and be able to get rid of our bald spots and have our hair and, but what about the hair all over the rest of our body and the fact that we used to probably have a lot more hair like other mammals and we've lost a lot of hair or across our bodies, except for certain parts of our bodies. What happened? Why did this happen? How did it happen? Why do, why do bears have all that hair? Yeah. Have little tiny little bits of hair that grow? Why do cats have fur? Why do we, I, you know, some people definitely have to shave more than others. Not if you don't have to shave, but some people choose to shave more than others. But the question is, what happened to humans? Why are we one of the species that overall has had a tendency to lose our body hair? So researchers wanting to understand this just published in the journal Elife, their comparison of the genetic codes of 62 mammals to try and figure out how people and those other mammals lost their hair. And it turns out that even though we have sparse hair all over our bodies, this particular result may explain why some people are more here suit than others. Humans have the genes for a full coat of body hair. We have all the genes. Okay. But natural selection and evolution has turned them off. Silenced those genes. And so these research out of the University of Utah, and University of Pittsburgh have pretty much gone on to determine that by looking at all these different animals from naked mole rats to gorillas, chimpanzees, humans, and all others that also rhinos and other mammals, we've basically got a set of common genes that have been deactivated in certain places because losing hair was efficient for getting rid of heat. So if you live someplace really hot, you're out in the sun all the time, not having the hair is going to be very beneficial for like an elephant or a rhino who have to get rid of a whole lot of body heat from their massive body mass. Humans also evolving on those African planes, the savannas would probably have benefited from losing a lot of their body hair as well. And so this is probably what kick started that process. What seems to occur, however, is that as soon as an animal, according to their results and the way that they looked at all these genes, as soon as an animal starts to lose the hair, starts to turn off the genes for expressing the hair, suddenly the mutations or the natural selection factors on the hair start to speed up. So there are as soon as that process starts, because there's no more need for conserving those genes, because the hair is being turned off and silenced or slimmed or moved to different areas, suddenly there are all sorts of regulatory factors and mutations and other things that have come along to change the way that the hair is distributed and whether it's distributed at all. And I think that's just kind of a very interesting aspect of this, is that we don't have as much hair as other mammal species, we still have the genes, but we've evolved all sorts of regulatory factors and control factors that are involved in making sure that we don't have that hair, that other species don't have. So we've kind of had faster evolution because of our hair loss than the other than other species who have kept their hair. Interesting. Yeah. So and how do you other naked animals fit into this picture? Because there are other animals that don't have hair. There are other animals. Yes. So if you think about like a Chinese crested dog or like a naked mole rat, like why? Yes. So how are they similar or different in their ability to not have hair? Do they have the same controls that we have? Not necessarily. Yes. So I think that's the interesting thing that we've all started out with the same hair genes coming from, you know, the general mammalian grouping. But there are different convergent solutions that have led to the variety of controls to turn it off. So not all the genes are the same. And not all the impacts on the hair are the same either. So there are lots of mutations that have taken place that kind of have occurred because hair loss happened. Wow. Really interesting. Yeah. And when you think of a lot of animals, it's really interesting. So again, question Dave Gillespie, why would people in cold clims not turn these genes back on? And it's not that they couldn't necessarily be turned back on. I think that there are still just evolutionary pressures to maintain things as the status quo. So we have clothes, we have fire, we humans have come up with all sorts of technological adaptations that have made it unnecessary. And so not necessarily adaptive for lots of hair to come back. But I think also humans move around fairly quickly in evolutionary history. And so it's, I don't know if we've ever really stayed anywhere long enough to have too much of an impact evolutionarily to grow hair back. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like you know, you give it another couple hundred thousand years, maybe. Who knows? Who knows the next step of human evolution and adaptations? Will it be everyone looks like Shaka from Land of the Lost? Wow, that is a callback. Wow, that is wow. I don't even know I remembered that. Wow. Oh my goodness. That's the thing though, there's still sexual selection to compete with. So right, you know, that would only work if it was beneficial evolutionarily, both for survival, but also for reproduction. So, yeah. And again, one of the interesting things is that we've had all this like additional evolution going on. And it's like, it's all turned off anyway. So it's not getting expressed. And if the hair isn't getting expressed, if there are negative adaptations that have taken place in the meantime, we wouldn't know it because the hair isn't getting expressed in the way that it used to be. Lots of interesting directions it could go. Well, I'm happy to be hairless currently. Yeah, most people I know are so. It's you can, you know, you can really see what people are up to up here. Yeah, it's helpful. It is helpful. Come up to the Pacific Northwest. Lots of facial hair. Yeah. It's a whole thing. You can still see, you know, this stuff, which is pretty important, you know. I don't know, between the beanies. The beanies. The facial hair. I don't, I'm not even. I don't know. Just a nose. Can you see a nose? Pacific Northwest, you have conversations with a nose. Yes, that's all. That's where we are. And with masks, not even that. So. Right. Do we have any more stories for the night, Blair? That is all I have. That's all you have. That's all I have as well. Great. Woo-hoo, everyone. We've talked about hair. We've talked about penises. We've talked about all sorts of amazing things on this show. And I'm so glad that you all joined us for this show, this show. First show. Show of shows. The show of shows of 2023. I predict it'll be even better next week. I'm sure. I'm sure. The science always gives, it brings it. The science brings it. I don't, it's amazing. The things that people come up with, it's so good. Oh my goodness. So I want to say thank you to people. Don't I? That's where I'm at right now. It's time for us to do shout outs and to say thank you to people for supporting us. So first, thank you all for being here. Beth Bennett, thank you for being there on YouTube. Hoju Zinni, all our people in Discord. I see you. Fada, thank you so much for the show notes and the show descriptions that you do for us. Social media. Lauren Gifford, R&Lor, Golde Seder, who else is there? David Ha, got the slestaca. Yes, yes. All sorts of people who are here. Thank you, all of you, for joining us. I know I'm not saying everybody's name, but know that I'm thankful that you are joining us here live while the show is going on. Additionally, thank you very much to Identity Four for recording the show. Gord McLeod, R&Lor, others for helping to keep the chat rooms, happy places to be so that everybody feels welcome and we don't get those the trollers fishing in our chat rooms. And Rachel, thank you so much for your editing. Wonderful. Wonderful to be working with you and Blair. Welcome. Thank you to another year. Oh, yeah. Thank you for being here. Thank you, Kiki. And thank you to our Patreon sponsors. 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Thank you so much for your support. And if anyone out there would like to support us on Patreon, head over to twist.org and click on the Patreon link. Very easy to find. We would love your support. And yeah, on next week's show, we'll be back on Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific Time, broadcasting live from our YouTube and Facebook channels and from twist.org slash live. It's also the prediction show. We'll predict a lot of things. Yes. Oh, and I was going to say something too that's written down right here. You want to listen to us as a podcast instead of watching it live? You can do that. Just search for This Week in Science wherever podcasts are found. And if you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe too. For more information on anything you've heard here today, maybe if you want to rewatch some of those videos we watched together, show notes and links to stories will be available on our website. That's at www.twist.org. You can also sign up for our newsletter. We'll get one out there one of these days. It'll come. It will come. You can contact us directly. Email me, Kirsten, at kirsten, at thisweekinscience.com, Justin, at twist minute, twist rewind, Justin, at twistminion, at gmail.com, or Blair at Blair Baz, at twist.org. Just put twist in the subject line so your email doesn't get spam filtered into a glass frog where it's just shoved inside the liver and hiding behind that magnetic or that mirrored covering. The mirrored covering. Yeah, you don't want that. We would never see it there because you'd never see it. Never, never. You can also ping us on Twitter, I guess. We're still hanging around there sometimes. Check it out. We're at twist science, at Dr. Kiki, at Jackson Fly, and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you would like us to cover or address or suggestion for an interview, please let us know. And we will be back here again next week, and we hope that you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from the show tonight, remember it's all in your head. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science is the end of the world. So I'm setting up a shop, got my banner unfurled. It says the scientist is in. I'm gonna sell my advice. Show them how to stop the robot with a simple device. I'll reverse below the warming with a wave of my hand. And all is coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific week in science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That'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 then understand Oh the calendar. Oh the calendar. It's actually time to put it up now. Yay! You can put your calendar. You can put your calendar up. Oh yeah. Put your calendar up everyone. Put your calendar up. Get your twist calendar. Put your calendar up. Tomorrow's national birthday. Great national birthday. There you go. It's a birthday. We also got National Static Electricity Day. That's new this year. That's on the 9th. Did you print your own printable? Yes. He did awesome. Where did you do that? Is it on a spiral and everything? Yeah I just did it through Canva. Oh you did. Oh awesome. Yeah well pricey but worth it. Pricey but worth it. Yeah. There it is. I wonder if I could do that. You definitely could. Yes I definitely could. You definitely could. I've got yards. Thank you everyone for joining us. You look very cozy now. Did you get that for a holiday? This is a new holiday warm thing for the cold weather and it's fantastic. It's really good. Buffy and I'm afraid of ever putting it in the dryer. Yeah that's fair. It's wonderful. All these not real materials. I don't know what this is. It'll not be as soft once I wash it. I know. I always try to grab those real flannels from the 70s whenever you see them in thrift shops and stuff because those things stay soft but if you buy a flannel now it starts pilling like immediately. I'm sad they don't make things like they used to. I sound a million years old but they don't. How old are you? I'm middle aged. No you're not. You can't be. That's not allowed. You're still a young adult. I mean at heart. No that's no no Blair you've always been old at heart. That's true. You're 100% right. Yeah. Seriously I think you've been older than me like as long as I've known you. I'll take that as a compliment. Very good. Oh my goodness. Yeah happy new year everybody. Yeah. Oh yeah Aran Lore go ask Kai how old is 25. Yeah sometimes when he's in a mood Kai's a funny one he's he's super sharp so he's when he's in a mood yeah he'll dig but otherwise he's like I'm not going there or he'll make the you know the really generous comments. No mommy you're you're like barely 40 right? Right Kai. Great yeah that's good. I'll take it. Boy. Yeah we had one comment there was one comment at the Christmas dinner table and Kai looked at me and he looked at his grandmother and he said I don't think I can answer this because I think I'm gonna get in trouble if either way. Smart. And all of the adult men at the table looked at my son and went oh that was a good move good move kid. Oh my gosh. That's great. Good night Fada have a wonderful night thank you for joining. Oh my goodness. If for those in the discord I put our our pig penis video link in the discord. Oh yeah I was gonna watch it too I pulled it up. Yeah I'm like maybe I shouldn't even put it in the YouTube chat I don't know it's just anatomy it's pigs. I know it's science. Oh that is a yep that's that's a pig penis oh my gosh that's not exactly what I expected. Even though I I think I knew they were curly it's still. I like this reaction video Blair. It's so long. It looks like a wizard wand. It does. That is you know nature's beautiful what can I say. I like how they put like a privacy cloth over the pig also. Very funny. Get a little privacy cloth. Oh my gosh no identification here it's fine. Wow. Wow okay well they did it. That's as a pretty pretty big leap to human though considering oh yep that is yep oh wow it worked. That worked. So no I have a question I have an actual question. Do we think your reactions are so funny I love that was my favorite oh that was really good. Do we think do we think that pig penises are curled at the very tippy tip which like the curl never the never it never went away from the tip. Is that to scoop out other semen or is that a good question yeah maybe yeah just like move it out of the way right yeah interesting I mean I'm just my Google search history is ruined from the show anyway so let's see why oh Aran lore is a pig penis curled but we know with ducks and the duck like so the duck penis the duck vagina they are curled to match but those are but I don't know about the restricting backflow of semen during mating okay so it is like it's like a plug yeah oaky-doke well asked and answered I'm just so confused by how long it is so they're very long long and thin like a wand like a wizard wand yeah yeah I cast magic missile oh my gosh wow well I learned that today anyway I love that this this last bit of the show this little part of the show is what Aran lore decided to clip on twitch nobody ever clips anything on us for twitch thank you Aran lore I appreciate it it's a it's a good little bit oh my goodness um let's see it's new years we're back into it we will have the predictions next week do we have anything else on the agenda moving forward the schedule things we need to look forward to we want to look forward to I don't know I have the yard I'm tired yeah it's getting late um yeah we did a good job nice job hey you too um draw dinosaur days on January 30th so there's that what can we do for that that'd be fun yeah I mean we all can we all draw dinosaurs and I love it share our dinosaurs could be like a fish sundae sketching party huh you don't know about fish sundaes no fish sketch sundaes no no it's like a little thing people sketch fish and share their pictures of fish that they've sketched that was one of the nice twitter things I don't even know if it's still happening because oh I did the wonderful thing of avoiding my computer for about a week and a half and nice yeah now I have to actually pay attention to it again but yeah avoiding social media is apparently very good for my mental health as is being around my friends and family oh I think there's quite a bit of science about that actually there it is uh huh that tracks that tracks sure fair enough sure sure fair enough all right everybody if you see can I how where do you find I'm gonna find my profile where do I find that okay I'm gonna put it in the thing if people want to follow us on mastodon there's our link on the mastodon if you are wanting to find us there I haven't set up regular posting but I'm gonna talk figure out how to do that more regularly there I would love to see you over on the mastodon if that's where you're going and what you're doing but like Blair said we are still on this on twitter I haven't left it still there I'm just avoiding it a little more often listen I will say it the analytics are garbage now so you can't go on it for fun to just look for stuff because you will see things that you normally don't have to see and you'll see things from strangers that are like not relevant to anything you care about and then every once in a while you'll see something that you actually want to see twitter's analytics used to be very good yeah so mastodon is different because it's there's not really an algorithm and so it's just so mastodon is one of the possible John Hogan it's one of the possible alternatives for twitter lots of people have had it over that way lots of scientists and science communicators I know are over there now but yes it it is just the feed like it just goes through the feed and so you don't have an algorithm it just basically is whoever you're following but then you can choose to see the big fire hose of everything if you want to you can search for stuff it's interesting it's I haven't found it taking over what I used to love about twitter yet so yeah but it's there I don't know I'm gonna bounce around all this stuff yeah probably go live in a cave so yeah you do you try it try it I don't even care anymore yeah you do you too let's all do us individually free to be you and me that's right as Carly Simon would have sung back when I was in elementary school what is the discord address the discord is available for our patreon supporters so if you're supporting us on patreon you should be able to get access through patreon I think I shared the shared this the the address the link once upon a time once upon a time identity for being around your family is bad for your mental health okay we each all have our things yeah I don't know everyone's a mile I think maybe I'll open the discord up to more people but then I want to keep it more quiet but I don't know what do you discorders think should we open it up more only for patreons oh thank you I like having stuff for patreons uh sponsors I think that's night it's nice yeah for the patrons and if you want to go as R and more posted but I can put that there push that close it down more only moderators oh boy I love it all right well I'll let you get to bed Blair so that uh you can try and sleep while the storm is raging around you in San Francisco yes hopefully roads are open for me to get to work tomorrow we'll see the bay area is not prepared for this wetness I don't a lot of the west coast is not prepared enough for this kind of stuff the last storm that came through here a week ago what took out I think it was around 115,000 people's power all through the Portland metro area like it was a lot of people without power for a couple of days internet was out like there's a whole bunch of stuff and I yeah I think the whole west coast is going to have to get used to these more of these atmospheric rivers and these bombs like cyclones and these very extreme rain events and then drought yes that's that's the kicker because we're losing giant trees right now because the soils dry and so it gets hit by wind and then it just you know goes down not to mention all this wonderful water is getting washed into the storm drain and not actually nourishing our land right and it runs off the top and there isn't enough time for it to really soak into the soil and so then it runs and then it's out to the sea and then what do we do and our reservoirs are sadly not full enough and yeah yeah the west coast really all right for all of their like talk talk talk about being ready for drought and all water rages over the last 20 30 years they've really done a poor job of getting ready for all this but they don't know they didn't expect the storms they expected the drought yeah that's the big kick the big key but anyway I hope your power stays on yes I hope that you stay dry and I hope everything stays unflutted where you are and that you're safe and happy and it's all good same to you thank you dryness power all of those good things to you all right everyone wait what do we say I say I say uh good night Blair is that all I say say good night Blair say good night Blair and then I say good night kiki no it doesn't work it doesn't work with two of us I know night everybody night kiki good night everyone thank you for joining us for another fun filled episode of this week in science this week in science the penis episode just this one no no there's several there will be more we do hope they change the title we'll see we will be back next week with our prediction show we look forward to seeing you all there everyone stay warm dry and healthy and as happy as possible and stay curious in the meantime thank you