 Hello, everyone. Welcome to another Wednesday night installment of your weekly science brain fillings. We are here with Twiss, our broadcast of our podcast recording, and we're so glad that you're here to join us as well. Take an adventure through the world of curiosity, troubleshooting, and scientific madness. No, it's not madness. It's wonder and amazing, amazingness, just amazingness. We're so excited. Are you all ready for the show? Yes. Are you ready? I'm ready for this. Justin, are you ready? Yeah. Okay, there we go. Just making sure that the microphones work. There is a method to my madness, everyone. Oh, yes, there is. Although you might not think so. Let's begin this science show that may not be exactly the same as this recording on the podcast. There's going to be editing involved. What? Unless we hit a tight 90. Beginning in three, two, this is Twiss. This week in science, episode number 866 recorded on Wednesday, March 9, 2022. What is the secret to longevity? I'm Dr. Kiki, and I have no idea how to live longer, but we'll learn all about it and fill your heads with all sorts of science here on This Week in Science. I have naps, nematodes, and new approaches, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. When it comes to the crossroads of science and geopolitics, scientists have a long tradition of ignoring politics and borders and cultural differences, because whatever conflicts governments engage in, science is founded on collaboration, a mutual interest in knowledge discovery, the furthering of science for the betterment of all humanity. Nothing should interfere with that. And few things do. One thing that does, bombs dropped on towns full of humans. The senseless brutality the recent Russian attacks on civilians in Ukraine has galvanized many in the scientific community to cut ties with colleagues, organizations, and projects connected to Russia. MIT has ended its partnership with University in Moscow, which MIT started. The Alliance of Science Organizations in Germany, which funds research, will no longer collaborate with Russian researchers. There are journals that will no longer publish research from scientists at Russian institutions, while CERN and ETER have yet to expel Russian researchers, institutions across Europe and the US, of looking for ways to distance their projects from the Russian state. And to be clear, there are Russian scientists who are speaking out against the war, letters signed by more than 5,000 scientists, including 85 members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, called the attack an unjustifiable war for geopolitical ambitions. While we should always treat scientific exchanges differently than soccer matches, cultural pageantry, and financial transactions, because science is again at its core, an effort of collaboration towards global knowledge, it is hard to maintain that spirit of cooperation when bombs are being dropped on towns full of humans. And while other fellow researchers are fighting or fleeing for their lives, but we should, only to show the rest of the world that working together across borders, across cultures, despite geopolitics, and in some cases, in defiance of them is not only possible, but necessary. For This Week in Science, coming up next. of This Week in Science. We are here to talk about all the science that has occurred in the last week headlines. We are excited about interested in stories that just wet our curiosity whistle. And also the politics and policy and things that science is involved in and is affected by and also effects. So what did I bring for the show today? I have got stories about aging, mice, and marmots, bird learning, and wormy decisions. So much fun. What did you bring, Justin? I've got hybrid mammoth rats, 10 armed octopuses, Egyptian bigfoot, and intrepid mishaps. Intrepid? Oh, no. Blair, what is in the animal corner? What is this? Ripley's believe it or not. I have shark naps, and then I also have a whole bunch of animal sounds. A whole bunch. We love animal sounds. Isn't that like a, it's a Beach Boys album or something? That sounds. Yeah, yeah. In this case, I have one domestic case and one wild case we'll talk about. They're not all pets. Looking forward to it. And as you're looking forward, if you are not yet subscribed to this show, remember that you can find us all places podcasts are found. Look for this week in science. We broadcast live weekly on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. Pacific time. You can find us as Twist Science on Twitch, Twitter, and Instagram. And if you can't remember all this stuff, head over to our website, twist.org, where you can find information about the show and the stories that we cover after the podcast is published. And now, let's dive into some headlines. Science headlines for this week. There's a few kind of big stories that can be boiled down to headlines, but might be worth a little bit of discussion, not too much. But similar to your disclaimer, Justin, CERN has not kicked out ongoing Russian investigators involved in science that is ongoing at the Large Hadron Collider. However, they have blocked future interaction and collaboration with Russians and have also removed Russia's observer status. So like the United States, Russia is not a part of the European Union that is responsible for CERN and the Large Hadron Collider. And so we have observer status. It's been allowed to us. We also put money in, but more so, we're just kind of, they like us. And so they let us play along. But in this case, they have said that Russia doesn't get to play anymore unless things change. And then also on the science, the science newsy policy front, the congressional budget came out today. It just has to be finalized and signed by Biden to really make it to the front so that finally the fiscal year 2022 will have the money that is going to be dished out for 2022 around the United States. NASA won the congressional budget allotments, got almost all the money that they asked for. And this is unusual. And the reason I bring it up, it's unusual because normally NASA doesn't get anywhere near what it asks for. So it's very exciting that this year NASA has actually done quite well in comparison to other organizations. National Institute of Health has also received a billion dollars. There's a graph that I'm showing on screen right now that doesn't represent this billion dollars that has been allotted to NIH because it's not really given to NIH. It's been given to the new ARPA movement, which has been pushed forward. And in part by one of our past correspondents, Michael Stubbins, he was involved in part of getting this to happen in Washington, D.C. and moving it to the forefront. But finally, we have money going toward an organization that will be similar to past green technology investments and other governmental investments that spur the creation of new technologies, new research, new ideas. It's more exploratory funding to try and solve big problems like this is health related, so cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, some of the big problems that are facing United States citizens currently. So that's very excited. They did ask for six billion dollars for ARPA-H, but they got a billion to get it going. Yeah, you've got to aim high. You've got to ask for a little more than you need. Yeah, that's definitely what they do. In this particular fiscal year, basically a lot of these organizations, governmental organizations have asked for lots of money, and they are not really going to be getting what they asked for. But science spending did increase in proportion to other spending across the budget. So at least it kind of increased at the rate of inflation, which I mean, that might be a bad thing to say right now because inflation is kind of going out of control, but it went up in relation to what? Because obviously science budgets were slashed pretty heavily for four years. So is this up from last year or is this up from two years ago? Yeah, and so the thing is the science budget budgets weren't slashed for the last four years. They just weren't given very much. And this is giving a little more, but not much more. NASA though, they got a lot of money. The congressmen love the SLS. They love this big rocket that we're going to be sending to the moon and to Mars. They love it. And so a big chunk of NASA's budget is going to the SLS, basically because it's pork barrel and it's going to be giving a lot of jobs to many Americans across the country because of the fact that things are made in lots of different states. All the parts are all over the place. But yeah, so good news, bad news. It's at least budgets for science have not been slashed. And I think that's the big plus here, but it's not what people were hoping for. And then the final bit of science headlines that I thought were interesting this last week, pig, the patient who had the pig heart transplant two months ago has died. We don't have a cause of death, but but I guess death. No, the heart was working fine. Everything was doing great. Yes. No, it wasn't it wasn't hard. We don't know. They don't they did not have a cause of death. He was doing fine. He was they said he was doing well enough to participate in watching the Super Bowl. He was recovering from this massive invasive surgery and transplantation, however, and things seem to be going well. So we don't really understand exactly what happened. However, he was not a paragon of health before the surgery happened initially. Yeah, that's usually that would usually be the case. Yeah, but it's because he did so well for two months, it still does show that this this process procedure has the potential to help people. And so there was not a lot of there wasn't rejection that they can tell they got a lot of data. So the fact that he went through the surgery had the transplant unfortunately has died, but it's still going to be very beneficial for future transplant recipients and this technology moving forward. Yeah. All right. Well, moving on from these headlines, you got some new approaches to things, Justin, you want to look at things from a different way. Different perspective always worth doing. So we've talked a bit over the years about the pros and cons of bringing back the mammoth. Yes, always a debate on this show. Before we need to worry about if we could, should we? There's a whole issue of how to do it thing that needs would need to get sorted out in the first place. So this is published in the current the journal, the journal current biology team of paleogeneticists have turned their attention to extinct Christmas Island rat, Redis McLeary. Their findings provide some interesting insights both into limitations of de extinction and possible paths forward. So when sequencing the genome of an extinct species, scientists faced a problem that extinct species, you've got the DNA, but maybe it's a little bit degraded. You don't have the complete full multi-pass genome, which we don't have the multi-pass genome of, you know, most living things today, even if we get a sample, right? So there's the problem of they have all these little gaps, all this little bits of missing information. And the idea has been, not a problem, we'll just fill it in with the closest living relative that it has, right? So with the woolly mammoth, you might take an elephant and say, okay, we're missing this section here of the woolly mammoth. We'll just put elephant in there. And you should end up with something pretty much like a woolly mammoth. Pretty much. Yeah. So anyway, so the Christmas Island rat went extinct about 120 years ago, but it also very interesting because I didn't know if it was, you know, that I would have guessed if you told me there was a rat on Christmas Island, which is this island just off the coast of Australia. I would have assumed it had come over with the boats, you know, the first, some of the explorers, but it turns out the explorers killed off the rats through disease somehow. So right back at you for the whole plague thing. So they went extinct 120 years ago. And now evolutionary geneticist Tom Gilbert, the University of Copenhagen and his colleagues were looking at, hey, could we bring that back? Let's start small. Let's start with this rat. It's a little bit more recent. So not only were they able to obtain almost all of the rodents genome from a couple of old rats lying around in a museum, but since it diverged not too long ago from other rat species, they blasted it out and they found that its genome that they have 95% match with the Norwegian brown rat. Very, very similar. So now they have their elephant, their elephant for their woolly mammoth model, right? So now they have, if we have the missing gaps, now we've got a perfect model to get out. So the genome matched up against the reference of this living species. Scientists identified parts of the genome that weren't quite matching up or were missing where the gaps were. And a few key genes were missing that they specifically know what they do and they're related to olfaction, meaning the resurrected Christmas Island rat would likely be unable to process smells in the way that a Christmas Island rat had evolved to process smells. So in theory, they could use the CRISPR technology and the gene edit the DNA and remove to take out the portions that they need and then fit slap them in in this new thing. But then you might have this Australian Island rat with the olfactory genes of a Norwegian rat and who knows what affects behaviorally that then have on survivability or its social cues. I mean, this is a creature that relies very heavily on a sense of smell. So all these interesting problems potentially come up. So the Norwegian to Christmas rat ratio scenario is particularly a good test, they say, and that's because the evolutionary divergence is actually pretty similar to that of elephants and mammoths. So this is a pretty good model. This is quoting Gilbert. It is very, very clear that we are never going to be able to get all the information to create a perfect recovered form of an extinct species. There will always be some kind of a hybrid. So the replicas will never be perfect. He makes this point that it's pretty interesting that for some reason it's the easier approach, but it's the one I had not really heard talked about to before. In order to make an ecologically functional mammoth, for example, one might need to edit elephant DNA to make the animal hairy and able to live in the cold. If you're making a weird fuzzy elephant to live in a zoo, it probably doesn't matter if it's missing some behavioral genes, he says, but then that brings up all sorts of ethical questions. So instead of, you know, the starting with that gene and trying to build it up from a blastocyst into one of those sheep pouches or whatever they were, or having just a lamb bag. Thank you. Or maybe even inseminate it into an elephant and try to have it give birth. What he's talking about is just, you know, edit the genes of an elephant to become more mammoth like would be like, not that he's saying, you should do this. Don't try this at home, people. He said, this might be a better approach. And if you, and if you are, if you know that it's not going to behave the same, but it's going to be a zoo creature anyway, if you're not actually trying to rewild it, it wouldn't be necessarily a problem. But if you were trying to rewild it, it could have all sorts of issues. Gilbert plans on actually trying to do this experiment with the rats, but he's going to start with species that are still living. He intends to begin by doing crisper edits on a black rat genome to change it to a Norway brown rat before he attempts the resurrection of the Christmas Island rat. That sounds like a genetic magician. You know, I will turn this rabbit into a hat, but I'm going to turn this black rat into a Norway rat. I'm going to turn this rabbit into a different rabbit. So you're guessing and assuming what needs to happen to an existing species genome to match a species that no longer exists, which is a lot. And on top of that, the missing sections of genome could have other things on it you don't know about. They're like, oh, it's just repeated segments of DNA. And it's like, well, sometimes repeated segments of DNA, they do have a function in the number of times they're repeated. It affects translation and transcription and the amount of protein that gets created and the amount of protein definitely has an influence on metabolism, behavior, et cetera. So yeah, there's all sorts of aspects of this that I think the key message is we don't know enough at this point in time. And like we've been saying, the sensational aspect of, hey, let's make a mammoth. Let's use an elephant to make a mammoth. It's not that easy. You can't just take old DNA, stick it in an elephant. Ta-da. It doesn't work that way. Well, and I also will continue to take issue with the sentence to make an ecologically viable mammoth. I will continue to take issue with that. You don't think that there is a currently ecologically viable version of a mammoth? No. Do you think it would be better to, knowing that we have climate change coming, help the modification of modern elephants so that they do become better at navigating? I mean, they're already good at hot temperatures in lots of places. I'm hearing there's something we can do to help the elephants of today move into different environments. Yeah. I'm here to tell you the answer to that and it is to get rid of the humans because we are still killing 96 elephants a day for ivory. That has nothing to do with their ecological viability. Why would you bring another animal onto this planet to be hunted for poaching purposes? I was going to tell the podcasting audience that while you were were describing the story, telling the bits and pieces of your story, Justin, that if the podcasting audience could only see Blair's face, she was listening to you. Part of the problem is humans are not considered part of the ecology, right? Yeah. You talk about there's space for them or there's a good climate for them in a particular place or there's food for them, but you don't think about humans as part of the ecology, which is a huge piece of this. Yep. So jumping off point here, I think you've just brought up there, Kiki. We've been talking about reintroducing and all the difficulties and now you're pointing out like, ah, but the ecology isn't there and then you can't really, you don't need to help the current elephants in global warming. Thinking ahead though, what's the next thing, what's the next big animal that's going to go extinct that we could help by adjusting its DNA today? Polar bears. Exactly. What have we made? What can we do to help polar bears survive? Less shaggy polar bears. Is it time to start thinking that in that direction? So the problem with polar bears is that they go fishing for food and with the ice melt, there's no platforms for them to hang out. So I think you'd have to give them gills. Yeah. I think, no, maybe what we need to do is create arctic lily pads. Yes. So as the arctic ocean warms and becomes more amenable to more plant life and other, we could just grow lily pads on the surface and then the polar bears could get on the giant lily pads and fish for food. Giant lily pads, yeah. Yeah, why not? Just giant white lily pads improve the albedo of the planet, you know. Yes. Yes, there's a whole bunch of things. Anything you change, it's a butterfly effect, right? Anything you change. But okay, we have so much, we could probably spend an entire day talking about just this topic. Certainly, certainly. That would make us tired and I might need to take a nap. I need to take a nap. Like a shark, like a little baby shark. No, sharks don't nap. That's the thing about sharks is they never sleep. They just keep swimming or they die. I learned when I was seven. So first, let me answer that question before I even talk about my story. There are some sharks that have musculature over their gills so they can actively pump water over their gills. There are other sharks who do not. And so sharks that hang out on the bottom of the ocean, like horn sharks or swell sharks, they have those musculatures. So you can see them actually physically resting on the ocean bottom, not moving at all and they can breathe. Other sharks, larger sharks, great whites, they do not have the musculature to push water over their gills. And so they quote unquote, never stop swimming or they will drown. Kind of true, kind of not. This story is all about whether or not sharks sleep. In the case of a great white or a shark that would need to keep moving, it is still possible for them to sleep unihemispherically. There are lots of animals that do that. If you ever see a flamingo sleeping, standing on one leg, they are also engaging mussels as they sleep. Whales and dolphins do this. They sleep with half their brain as they sleep and they got the other eye open so they can go up and breathe and do whatever they got to do. So that's not going to stop a shark from sleeping, basically. Just a different process. But so the long and short of this story is, yes, sharks sleep. Okay, that's it, I'm done. No, so this is... Okay, and the next story we have... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so this is a study from La Trobe University in Australia looking at sharks in Australia and New Zealand. There has been anecdotal evidence from scuba divers saying that it looks like sharks are sleeping, sharks are fish, they don't have eyelids. How do you tell if they're sleeping? It's all been very anecdotal and so there's not really a clear scientific answer. But so in this case, they were able to take some sharks into a lab, they put them in an aquaria filled with oxygen sensors and monitored them over a 24-hour period, they monitored the physical activity and the oxygen level in the aquarium to see how quickly they are using oxygen to fuel their metabolism. So all of this together, you can kind of put the picture together, is this shark sleeping? They metabolized oxygen fastest while actively swimming, makes sense, and the rate dropped when they stopped swimming and it dropped even further during behavioral signs of sleep. So this is motionlessness for at least five minutes with the body held in a near horizontal position. Really looks like sharks sleep, that's it. The... So that's great. So you could have finished it back then. Yes, but what is your information? The kind of follow up to this is why do sharks sleep? In general, if you want to think about like broad strokes, why animal sleep, it is to conserve energy while resting. Your metabolism drops, you have to burn less energy, right? But there are potentially other reasons for sleep. Sleep can help with memory storage. It can help with memory consolidation. It can help with removal of toxins. It can help with healing. There's lots of things that sleep can do. There's a lot of regenerative abilities of sleep depending on the animal that you're looking at. And so sleep is complex and can serve many functions in an animal system. So there are arguments on both sides of the fence here. There are some researchers who chimed in to this research to say, okay, what else are they doing? What's happening in their brain? There are others that say, no, they're just conserving energy. Chill out, right? So there's people on both sides of the conversation here. The next step to really figure that out is to look at what's happening in their brain. There has been previous sleep studies on zebrafish. They could look at imaging using fluorescent imaging techniques on their brain activities so that they could see what's happening in the fish. And they found two distinct phases of sleep in these fish. And I will also add, since sharks are fish, I'm not exactly sure why people were so surprised that sharks also sleep. But regardless, but why would they sleep? Yeah, the kind of issue with studying sleep in sharks is that the majority of sharks live in saltwater. And as you can imagine, electricity in saltwater creates a challenge. So it's a lot harder to figure out what's happening in a shark's brain because you have to deal with a conductive fluid, which is an interesting piece of that puzzle. But the one thing that can be drawn here is that sharks sleep. And what's cool about that is that there really appears to be some extremely deep-seated evolutionary history of sleep. And this is why the sharks are so particularly interesting. Oh, my God. They're old. Sharks are really, really old, evolutionarily speaking. They've been around for a very, very, very long time. All vertebrates came from fish. And so sharks have a good kind of potential key into the history of sleep in vertebrates as a whole. Follow-up question. Follow-up question. What was the plural of aquariums? Aquaria. Aquaria. I did not know that. The age of Aquaria. I knew you were going to do that. I almost, when the moon is in the 7th house. You got it. Anyway, when the moon's in the 7th house, it's time for the sharks to nap. Anyway, moving on. Nap time. Well, sleep has been around for a very long time, but other things that have been around for a long time as well. Getting older, aging. That's been around for a bit. Yeah. Well, researchers are really working, trying to figure out how to make aging better and how to make more older people seem younger, or actually be younger. And so researchers at the Salk Institute have been working on anti-aging in mice. And previously, they had given their little anti-aging cocktail to mice. It consists of some reprogramming molecules, four of them called the Yamanaka factors that are oct-4, sox-2, kel-4, and C-mic. C-mic? I don't know. Anyway, there's these factors, the Yamanaka factors. And if you give an organism or cells these factors, it resets epigenetic marks in the cells so that they're more like their original patterns. So as you're going around your day awake, not napping and sleeping, but as you're going about around your day, interacting with the universe, your body's like, assault, assault. And epigenetics takes place. Lots of mRNA and other things get in there and they wind up DNA. They put little markers on your DNA. They say, oh, this thing happened to me. And so my cell needs to remember it for X amount of time. And whoop, whoop, whoop, all the epigenetics start changing. And so when you're living, the epigenetics are going, getting you closer to death, getting you closer to death. And so what they do is they put in these little reprogramming factors and it takes those epigenetic markers, wipes them clean, resets the slate. And they've shown previously that when they give these factors to mice for a small period of time, that they do have improvement in mussel tone, in metabolism, in all sorts of factors that are normally looked at to count scores of aging. So in this new study, they wanted to know what happens with this regenerative approach in healthy animals as they get older. And so they did the equivalent, two different groups of animals. One group that was the equivalent of starting the treatment at 50 years old and taking it until they were 70 years old. So in mice, this is 15 months old to 22 months old. And then another group was 12 months to 22 months, which is about 35 to about 70. And then they gave a very short-term treatment to an additional group that was just for a month at about the equivalent of 80 years old in people. And so they wanted to find out, okay, if we give this factor to people right now, it's just mice, but if we give it to mice for a long period of time, what's it going to do? Is there going to be a bad effect? Is it going to cause cancer? What happens if you keep wiping the epigenetics clean? And they found that compared to control animals, there were no blood cell alterations, no neurological changes, and they found no cancer as well. And the signs of aging in the groups that had undergone the longer-term treatments were much better than the group that only had that month-long treatment at the later stage. So starting younger, going longer with the regenerative treatment is like a constant resetting. And it didn't seem in mice to have a negative impact on the health or behavior of the animals. So that's awesome. Right. Is this someday, you're like, I'm 35, 40 years old, and your doctor's like, yep, yep, there you go. Here are your anti-aging factors. But this is also the problem. This is the problem with anti-aging things like this. Like, oh, yeah, yeah, we figured out how to keep you from aging, but it's like investing. Yeah, you have to start when you're three. What? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What you do is, yeah, just do this one simple thing every other week, but starting when you're three. And then you're like, but that's not, I missed me. I missed it. Yeah, yeah, not for you. This is going to keep the next generation different. And then when you're young, you're like, I don't want to do that. I'm young. What do I care about that? That's something some old person cares about. And I don't care about it because I'm young right now. What do I care about tomorrow, guy? This is the problem. Or it's like a genetic thing. You're like, oh, you can make a genetic alteration in an infant or before they're born. But that's too late for everybody who cares about it, who's already aging. Right. So for the young, it's not something that's necessary. And it probably would not even be recommended because you do want to develop. You do want to age, but there is a certain point where people start going, hmm, my skin's getting thinner. My muscle tone is not as great as it used to be. My speed, my dexterity, maybe not as fantastic as they once were. And maybe that's around 35, 40, 45, 50 years old. And if there were a thing, and yes, Blair, I'm looking at you, I'm also looking at myself. But not at me because I think a loss of muscle tone is sexy. It's great. It's awesome. I wouldn't want it back. But if you're not into taking any kind of drug or treatment that is created from this, from this research, you could always talk to a yellow-bellied marmot. So what? And ask them for the drugs. Ask them for their secret of longevity. Did you know yellow-bellied marmots are surprisingly long-lived for their size? Look at them go. Yellow-bellied marmots, they're like giant ground squirrels. And they are just the cutest little things. And I got to know a few yellow-bellied marmots once at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, where part of this research took place. And so I'm very excited to share this study out of UCLA that also, as I said, took place at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, Rumble, in Colorado in the Rocky Mountains, where they looked at these animals that hibernate. So when these animals hibernate, they go deep. And their metabolism, it's like as close to zero as you can get for a big rodent. And it's surprising, actually. And the researchers were saying that, yeah, you know, you pick them up when they're hibernating and they're just like these floppy stacks of fur. They're bodies. They're just not, they're not doing anything. It's not working at all. And so they looked into these rodents and what they determined from the metabolism is that because they're hibernating, they're basically going into this very, very deep sleep for a long period of time during the very cold winter. Everything gets turned off. And so there are no more epigenetic changes to their DNA. And so when they're awake in the spring and the summer and they're going about their life, epigenetic changes are happening. They're doing their thing. The clocks ticking down. And then they go into hibernation. It's like, it all stops. It doesn't reset it to zero, but it stops. So what I'm thinking, Blair, is that we could just hibernate for part of the year. What would I do? I'm wondering maybe, maybe like six to eight hours a night. Oh, I see. All right. Now, Blair, Blair, I think I caught you fact checking. And I'm assuming you were fact checking. Whether or not this was hibernation. No, actually, I was looking up, because I always get confused, is there between marmots, hedgehogs, or sorry. Marmots, groundhogs and woodchucks, which they're all the same genus. So they're basically the same thing. They're very close. They're just in different locations. Yeah. Yeah, but they are sometimes, those words are used for each other at different times. But yes, I don't know. It's like we're doing the tongue twister. Right. No, that's a good question. So in order for it to be true hibernation, their body temperature has to drop a certain amount. I want to say this is true hibernation. They're calling it true hibernation. They are, yeah. Because the little rodents often do. The problem is like with bears. Torpor is shorter period of time usually. Yeah. And so like for bears, for example, they do winter torpor. They don't do full hibernation. And they winter sleep is what my professors used to call it. It's because they're so big in conservation of mass and what it would take to lower that giant hunk of bear meat, a certain amount of like temperature is a lot harder than just lowering a little rodents body temperature and then bringing it back up. And so I think for a little, not so little, but still little rodent, it's a lot easier for them to do hibernation. Yeah. And so the way it works for these marmots is that they alternate two weeks, a week or two of hibernation, this metabolic suppression, and then a day or less than a day, less than 24 hours of increased metabolism that then drops back down again for suppression for another week or two. And apparently, according to the researchers, for an 11 to 13 pound, 5,000 to 6,000 gram animal, they only burn a single gram of fat a day when they're in their metabolic suppression, which is, that's tiny, tiny. I mean, look at any food that you eat. It's going to have more fat than that, most likely, except maybe 0% fat milk. But what I want to know is, what do you want to know if a human slept, didn't hibernate? Because I don't know if our bodies would even do that. But if we slept for like the equivalent, so I was looking and marmots, it's the equivalent of about 50% of their year, right, has spent a sleep. And so if we slept 12 hours a day every day, would we look younger? Would we live longer? I don't know. I want you to know that when I was sleeping, trying to maintain my health when I was pregnant, people talk about the glow of pregnancy, I think it's because you're being very healthy when you're pregnant, even healthier. You're not drinking, you're not eating a bunch of garbage, you're sleeping things. You try to eat well, you're like, everything is super well. Except for the first six weeks where maybe you can't eat anything and you're constantly barfing. Right, right. That twinkle in the eye is actually coming from a need to pee. That's very good. That is good. I don't know, what would happen to us if we slept that much? Oh, it's my dream in life to find out. Because it wouldn't be hibernation, if we were just sleeping for 12 hours a day every day, would you become undernourished and underhydrated? And would you have other problems? Like that's the first thing I think of is if you're just awake less, are you going to get liver failure or kidney failure from not doing the right thing? You might get bed sores. There's that too. 12 hours a day, I don't think you'll get bed sores. As long as you're active enough, the rest of the 12, I think it's fine. I think people could, we'll just study teenagers. No, but teenagers don't go to sleep to two in the morning. So they still have that matter? But they sleep up to in the afternoon if given the ability. So, I don't know, it just depends. All right, Justin, we love octopuses on this show. Did you find an octopus? May have. In once, when what was once an ancient shallow bay, 325 million years ago, in what some people are now calling Montana, a new kind of octopus was apparently found. Interesting, they weren't sure exactly where it was found. It got donated to a Canadian museum in 1988 and then was immediately ignored for the past 30 years. It was catalogued, I'm sure. Yeah, but then ignored. But that's actually, it's really not unusual. Canadians largely try to imagine that there's nothing south of their border. And they've gotten pretty good at it over the years. And also museums sometimes have a lot of things that are being brought in. It is not always time or the right person to study them. So their job is to collect. It's not always to do the full research immediately. New paper published in Nature Communications by a couple of American paleontologists, Christopher Whelan and Neil Landman, got a chance to look at this and examine it and they find that this border crossing cephalopod is an entirely new species. So they named the species, I'm going to mess it up, Salipsi Mopodi Bidany after President Joe Biden, who had just been, when they were submitting for publication, had just been inaugurated and the authors wanted to recognize his stated commitment to science. So Bidany is about 12 centimeters long and has 10 tentacles, has suckers, fins and a triangular hard kind of bony tissue inside its body for support. Okay, I'm going to stop you right there and ask. Yeah. Is it 10 tentacles? Is it 10 arms? Is it eight arms and two tentacles? They're actually, they're saying it has 10 arms. I switched it to tentacles. Okay. Because they're different. They are different. Okay. So octopus have eight arms. Squids have eight arms and two tentacles. Okay. So this is a 10 armed octopus, meaning it's a deco-pus? Deco-pus. Deco-pus. Yeah, that's not right. Actually, it's, you're right though. It is, it's a squid also. Okay. Because also in the picture, in the drawing, it looks like there are two tentacles. There are two specialized longer appendages. So does it have 12 appendages? So I think those are, I think those are the two that round it to 10. So then it's just a squid. Because they currently have eight arms and two tentacles. Yeah, it's a squid. I have to admit, Justin, I saw the story and this is why I didn't bring it, is I got very confused about why this was special. Okay. So here's where it is. So, uh... Please help me. Yeah. So, so these are octopuses and squids are the most familiar types of cephalopods. There's also cuttlefish, not a list. Fossil record for squishy cephalopods, with the ones that don't have shells is pretty awful because when they die, they don't leave anything behind for the fossil record. So they're just, they're gone. Very special environmental conditions. Soft parts of the animal can keep preserving rock and that is the case in Bear Gulch, the limestone fossil site where this species was found. It's, it's famous for this kind of preservation. Does a really good job. So Waylon and, uh, Landman described the important parts of the new species anatomy and got some clues about its identity. They suggest that Bidini's features make it the oldest member of the group called vampropods. This is the group of cephalopods that includes modern octopuses and the vampire squid. There's a single surviving species of vampyroth, this infernalis, whose name actually means vampire squid from hell. Yes. It looks like a demented umbrella with fangs. Yeah, so it's, it's, I love it. It's an interesting place to put it because that is actually more closely related to octopuses than it is to squids. Interesting. As is, uh, as is Bidini, even though it has a very squid-like appearance, as you pointed out. So the, the vampire squid has primitive features that are very much in common with this new species, such as the 10 limbs and the stiff internal like shell thingy, triangular shell thingy. No living octopus has either of these. Until now it was thought that the, uh, vampropods, octopus relatives, originated in a Triassic period, about 240 million years ago. But this new species from Montana pushes that back 82 million years. So quite a- That makes them older, yeah. Jump back in time. Why do we back? So then the issue was with the reporting and the headlines put on this story. Yes. Because what I saw all over the internet this week was 10 armed octopus. Yep. First-ever 10 armed octopus. That's what I saw all over. But really it's a squid relative, but what's weird about it is that it is evolutionarily closer to octopuses and therefore changes our evolutionary timeline. That is what is cool about this. That's awesome. Yes. Very nice. Blair, you need to be telling people how to report stories like this. They just, I wish they would just call me. Wait a second. Before they did, it's an ophelopause story. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I didn't even have a clue to get this show. Changes our view of octopus evolution. As a 10 armed octopus, because that's the, that's the lead. That's the timeline. But it's a new eye. It's a squid. It isn't a lie because it's not a squid. Right. It's an ancestor, closer related to the octopus. But I would argue based on its morphology, you're not going to go with morphology. Yes. Based on its morphology and the fact that it's closely related to the vampire squid. Yep. I would push back on that and say that it can very well be a squid. But the vampire squid, as I just pointed out, is closer related to an octopus than it is to a squid. You also don't know what the common ancestor with squids and octopuses looked like. Maybe they had 10 appendages and therefore maybe octopuses are the weird ones. I think, I think we all, I can agree on that. The aliens, yes. Octopuses are the weird ones. That is absolutely true. But now we all know about this class of vampirapods and their relation. Neither squids nor octopus. The president has whatever you want to call it named after him. The cephalopod. Yeah. The cephalopod was found in an ancient dried up bay in Montana. Montana. Of all places. Which is unlikely. Right. Yeah, it's also kind of, it's also the, this is actually the, I left that apart. That is kind of also I thought a little bit interesting. The, that existing living infernal vampire squid thing lives in deep, deep, deep ocean. Like drifts around in total darkness at the bottom of the ocean. And they think this ancient, ancient relative was living in shallows. So. Interesting. It's closest living relative and they have very disparate environments that they're living in. Even though, even though, like you say, morphologically, they have some similar appearance. Well, lots of cephalopod species that boomed and busted. And we just don't know. That's also the amazing thing or the horrible thing or the intriguing thing about it is that because they, they're just missing from the record. When we do find one, there's all these missing points that we would have to sort of connect. Like how did this go from here to all of these things? We don't have the little transitionals all the way along. Like we do with many, many, many species. The soft bodied ones especially. We don't have them. So tough. They're gone. Something we do have at least on the west coast of the United States are scrub jays. And scrub jays in California are known as the California scrub jay or the western scrub jay. California's in Florida and other areas are a Mexican jay. And Mexican jays are more social group oriented. The young of the Mexican jay, they love to hang out together and help their parents take care of the young. And it takes a long time for them to kind of go, all right, I'm going to go out on my own now. And they might never, they might just stay in that social living group and just spend their life helping out with the family group. And that is totally fine for the western jays. Now scrub jays, screechy birds that I love so much. The western scrub jay is more independent and loves to hang out on its own, very territorial. They form breeding pairs, but otherwise they kick everybody out. They like their own area, even their own young. As soon as the young are old enough to run off on their own, they go, they chase their babies out and get out of here. Go find your own future and life. Anyway, western scrub jays, I love them very much. I think they're fantastic. Anyway, these researchers from University of Oregon and also University of Washington decided to compare these two groups of scrub jays as to how they learn to say, okay, well, we figure that birds that are social, like the Mexican jay, will be more likely to learn from demonstrators. So they would mimic a behavior, be more likely to pick it up from others demonstrating. And the unsocial, asocial birds are less likely. So the asocial birds are probably not going to pick up on what the demonstrators are doing, and they're just going to learn by their own trial and error process. Now I'm guessing by the setup, maybe they found something totally unexpected. Yeah, they totally did find something unexpected. They discovered that, well, these western scrub jays, they learn just as well as the birds in the group, and they learn from demonstrators. They are more likely to try things out on their own than the Mexican jays, but living in a group didn't give the Mexican jays a big advantage over the western jays in learning how to remove food from naturalistic containers that they'd made into basically puzzle boxes that contain food. The Mexican jays would help each other out. The western jays absolutely would not help each other, but both of them learned just fine. And so the question is what scrub jays, western scrub jays, have been shown to have what's thought of as theory of mind. I worked with these birds. They are really smart. They're capable of assessing another animal's, another bird's intention. So we know that western scrub jays watch other birds who are storing their food. They watch squirrels in the environment that are storing their food. These birds pilfer food stores. They also want to make sure that they're hiding their food from other animals. And so even though they're not social or as social as the Mexican jays, it doesn't mean that they aren't paying attention. Yeah, I have an anecdotal for this, and Blair, you're going to hate it for all the right reasons. Down in Santa Cruz, a friend of mine, not me, somebody else, started feeding a scrub jay that would come and flap to his porch. And you start by laying out a couple. The point where the bird would land in his hand and just take peanuts from his hand and flap. And he had this one that would come and visit and show up. And then I was there checking it out. And I think I came back, visited like a couple of weeks later. And I was like, oh, has your bird been around? Where's your blue jay? Is he visiting? He's like, nah, I had to stop. Had to stop. Because the power line or outside behind the house, he said, there was like 50 of them. They were all there watching. Every time I went out. Well, he also maybe thought he was teaching the same one, but he was teaching a different one every day. But when you were telling me that story, I was like, yeah, they may not hang out in social groups, but they watch each other. They pay attention to everything going on in their environment, even if they're not hanging out together. Yeah. And I was thinking there might be a different reason than the Mexican jays hang out together, you know, like predators, specific predators in their ecosystem that there's power in numbers. There could be other reasons that they're hanging out in larger groups. It could be an issue with taking care of their little chicks. They might need more help or more protection, again, from predators. There could be other things besides just foraging that caused them to do that. Right. And one of the questions now, though, is what was the original social form of these animals? Were these birds originally the original animal that the jays descended from? Were they social and gregarious? And is it the Western jays that have lost that because of their environment? Or is it the other way around? And so what is the ancestral trait? And if sociality is the ancestral trait, then maybe the Western scrub jay has lost the social part of it, but not the cognitive aspect that goes along with sociality. I don't think so. Interesting. No, I'm thinking about it. And I'm just thinking about the fact that like bird evolutionary history in context of other vertebrates, I feel like is still modern bird evolutionary history is still kind of new compared to some other evolutionary timescales you could look at. And there's such a wide variety of social dynamics in birds, but I would say large social groups is not dominant. Well, I don't think that's true. Wait a second. Wait, wait, wait. It depends on how you think of social. Birds shove up feather. Right, right. So that's part of it too, right? If you want to think about just the proximity, sure. But if you want to think about a cooperative. Yes, cooperation is the big one. That's not common. No, no, it's not. Territoriality is more common. Right. And that's exactly what I was thinking about. And if you want to think about birds as a group as a whole, I would say it's way more likely that Jays in the Corvid group, Corvids, Jays, they all kind of look at each other and learn from each other, but they're not in these large cooperative. Yeah, but could we be interpreting that? Could we be interpreting that? And instead of it being territorial, like this is my land, that's yours, whatever. Maybe they're like, this is my side of the couch. That's your, like they're still, you know what I mean? Like they're still, they're part of that family. They just need their own space within the family. And I'm going to say as somebody who had a scrub J as a pet for a while, or as a house companion that I let onto my couch, he was actually very social. And I mean, I say he, it, they were very, very social. The scrub J really liked having interaction. It enjoyed like being on the couch and it would come over and it would mess with me, but it would come over and pull my paper and peck at things that I was doing. It was like having a cat that was a bird. It was very interesting. I would totally agree with that for crows too. I feel like crows are very like cat-like. Hey, pay attention to me. Intelligence. You're not paying attention to me. Oh, you're paying attention to me? No, I'm good. I'm going to go over there. Yeah, but we are so glad that you are paying attention to us. Thank you for joining this week in science for another episode full of science. If you are enjoying the show, please share it with a friend. All right, let's come on back with a part of the show that we love to fill with animals. It's Blair's Animal Corner with Blair. I want to talk about animal sounds. Yeah. So I want to start with a story about pig grunts. Really? This is a study from the University of Copenhagen, and this is looking at... Well, they were the lead research, but it also came out of ETH Zurich and the France's National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment. And this international group wanted to look at pig grunts, squeals, snorts, and wanted to figure out what they meant. They used more than 7,000 audio recordings of pigs. They designed an algorithm that could decode whether the individual pig was experiencing a positive emotion, happy or excited, a negative one scared or stressed, or somewhere in between. They used commercial pigs, as you might imagine, from birth until death. So for their whole lifespan, and they were able to use those recordings and that algorithm to code these things and come up with a sort of an understanding of pig expression based on the sounds that they make. They were able to demonstrate that animal sounds provide insight into their emotions. No surprise there, but what's interesting is the algorithm was able to decode and understand the emotions of pigs, which of course has a huge application in the welfare of livestock. So you could potentially have an AI or you could train individuals to recognize sounds, to recognize the well-being of the animals on a farm. And based on that, you could make sure that their lives are good up until the end. And also I would say, I'm gonna throw in there, maybe you could improve the slaughter process, so it's not so scary. Because as an example, they recorded natural kind of impacts on these pigs' lives. So they recorded positive and negative situations. Positives included suckling from their mothers or when they're united with a family member after they were temporarily separated. Negative situations included separation, fights between piglets, castration, and you guessed it, slaughter. So they know what's going on. There's panic, there's smells, there's all sorts of things going on so that they definitely know what's happening to them. And it's one of the negative emotions. So if you can find a way to make it less negative, that might be nice, right? Earplugs. I think they should give earplugs to all of the workers and the pigs. Right. I don't know. I don't have an answer to that. I don't know how to make this better. But if you can recognize that it is a negative experience. Lab-grown meat. Lab-grown meat would be helpful. If you could find some way to anesthetize them cheaply and where it doesn't impact the meat at all, then they could just be asleep. That would be nice. I don't know. There's ideas. But there are people who actually have to do this for a living and experiment with procedures for the management of livestock. So I'm going to leave them to that. But what I can tell you is that in the second phase of the experiment, they also had experimental stables. They created mocks and areas for the pigs to evoke nuanced emotions in the middle of the spectrum. They know about the positive and the negative. They want to know about the stuff in the middle. This included having toys or food in a corresponding area and then going into another area where there was no stimuli at all. Then they also placed new and unfamiliar objects in an arena, recorded them while they were interacting with it. And then during that time, the pigs' calls, behavior, and heart rates were monitored and recorded. And so through analyzing these over 7,000 recordings, they found a pattern. They were able to discern positive and negative emotions. And they also collected, they saw specific trends. So more high-frequency calls like screams and squeals were in negative situations. Sounds right. At the same time, low-frequency calls, barks and grunts occurred in both positive or negative situations. So barks and grunts harder to tell. When they look closer, they found that in positive situations, the calls are shorter with minor fluctuations in amplitude, like short and consistent. Grunts, more specifically, would be high and go lower in frequency in positive situations. So they could see these kind of specific patterns related to positive and negative. So you could train the algorithm, but I do think you could also train a human in this as well, which would be helpful. And so just from the visualization of the data, it seems so discreet that these sounds are definitely their own populations of sounds and that they don't really overlap very much. And so you're right. I think they could be. I would imagine a lot of people who work with pigs, hogs, that they have a sense of what the sounds are already. Yeah. And talk to any pet parent. They can tell you this was between an excited squeal and a pained squeal out of their cat or dog or rat or guinea pig or whatever it may be. You can tell. And it's because there's a difference and you learn them. The algorithm was able to classify 92% of the calls with the correct emotion. So very, very effective algorithm. So next they want to develop the algorithm into an app that farmers could use. So if they're not going to use, if they can't use their own ears, the app could discern for them how the pigs are feeling. But with enough data to train the algorithm, they actually think that the algorithm could be adapted to better understand emotions of other mammals with machine learning totally possible. I could see that happening. So you feed it enough data after it's kind of the pig as the basis study. They could probably figure it out. And suddenly we understand at least the general emotional state of animals. And like you said, that can influence the way that we treat them and the way that we work with them. Kyvago in the chat room says maybe someone should get those talking buttons for pigs. Yes. To see if they use them to communicate or if they can learn to use them. They certainly could. They're very smart. I would think so. Pigs are at least on par with dogs and children in terms of intelligence. So at least from what I've heard. So what I've read. No, pigs are very smart. I bet they could do that. Yeah. So that all works though if it's an animal that can make sounds. Right. You know what animal has not been studied for the sounds that they make until today? What? Is it snails? It's fish. Yeah, we're back to fish again. Sharks don't nap and fish don't talk. Nope. We're just, we're breaking down barriers left and right this week. I thought we like talked about fish making noises before. Haven't we? Yeah, we certainly have. And the thing is though, there's not a lot of science on it. There's a doctoral candidate, Audrey Lubey from the University of Florida who decided to make a website FishSounds.net. And she did this with an international team of researchers as the first online interactive fish sound repository of its kind. She argues that fish sounds are as important for understanding fish as bird sounds are for studying birds. And I love that she calls them bird sounds. Feels like a little bit of a dig. It does a little bit. I agree there. I just said bird sounds. All right. Bird song. We get it. But yeah, so fish sounds, they actually, they're a lot more varied and dynamic than you ever could have imagined. And so FishSounds.net has this repository. They hope in the future to be able to have it open for people to publish their own fish sounds right now. It's this closed group of researchers, but they would like people to be able to add their own fish sounds in the future. And you can go, it's free. You can go listen to fish sounds. I was doing it for quite a while before the show today. And you can, you can learn all about the different fish in the sounds they make and see visualizations. It's very cool. Yes, Kiki. I see you're muted. Yeah. How many people can have ever tried recording the sounds their fish make? I mean, we go and we tap on the side of the tank occasionally, right? But So, wait, wait a second. Get a tin can, stick it in the water, record the sounds. What? I don't recall fish having ears. They have the same structures that we do. They have inner ear bones. They have, they have all of the same kind of mechanisms. They don't have an ear hole, but they can totally hear and respond to vibrations like snakes don't have ear holes. Why would you have an ear hole in the water? I mean, I guess you could. They've got the gills with the gill slits. Maybe I have a missing big missing gap in my evolutionary history, but I thought the inner ear bone was like a separated part of a fish jaw at some point that wasn't there something. So I know what you're talking about. I do believe it is a, it's like a lamprey jaw. It's like a, it's a jawless fish structure that looks like a, well, I'll look, we'll talk about in the after show, but I do believe it is like a pre-fish is what you're talking about. Okay. It's not actually fish as we know. So fish have ears. Yeah. They have, they have structures for, for hearing and responding to vibrations and sounds. Yeah. Like up in their head, like behind the jaw somewhere. Yeah. So Blair, what were some fish sounds that you wanted everyone to hear? So, so this brings me to my favorite part of the story, which is that there is not yet a standard system for naming fish sounds. So we were just talking about pigs and we talked about squeals and we talked about grunts and stuff like that. There's no standard system for naming fish sounds. So this project has had to make them up. I mean, we have a lot of sound names already. So it's not completely making things up. Right. But if you look at, if you start to holistically kind of look at this database of fish sounds, there, there are types of sounds that keep coming up. And my favorites are, there are boops, boop, there are croaks, there are boat whistles, there are grunt thumps. There's, it's, there's so, there are unks. It's very good. But so some of my favorites were from toad fish. And I think most of the ones I sent you, Kiki, are from toad fish. Okay. But let's, let's see. Yes. So this is a hello batrakis didactylis, leucitanian toad fish. It's a croak. Very good. That sounds like a frog, right? That does not sound like a fish. No. Yeah. I wouldn't, I wouldn't, here we have a leucitanian toad fish with a boat whistle. I do like that boat, but I wouldn't have thought of it as a boat whistle. It doesn't sound like a whistle. Sounds a little like tug boaty, whatever that thing is. So I'm not, I'm not seeing the whistliness. All right, should we reveal? Should we reveal? All right. These are just toot noises that me and Blair recorded. I decided to play for you. No, no. No, no, no. These are not toots. They are fish. So, okay. Here's, here's another one that I can share a picture of the drawing. But how amplified are these from the recordings? Like, do other fish know that fish are making these sounds? Is there a hearing sense? Are they hearing this? Yes, they have ears. Yeah. But are they, is it loud enough? Like, I don't know, like... So remember if you've ever made sounds of your water, like in the pool, that water is extremely, sound transmits very easily in water. And so it's, it's actually, that's one of my favorites. It's actually very, it's, it's easier in some ways to hear sounds in water than in, in the air. There's less resistance, I guess. But so, and to answer your question about fish ears, they have their own inner ear and cranial cavity. They have no external or middle ear. They have otoliths in there, which help them to hear, which is like a very, very dense section. So it's denser than the water around it. And you're right, there are gill structures that have migrated into our inner ear. But they still have these nerve centers and structures for listening that are analogous to our ear. So, so we were, so you, you got some of it there, but it's more about the bones. So the bones and the gills moved up into the inner ear, but the, the, the organ structures and stuff are analogous. So anyway, they have ears. But yeah, so I can listen to it all day. You're red binding a little, Kiki. Well, anyway, go to fishsounds.net and just poke around, find some unks, find some boobs, have a grand old time. But the point of the story, besides just telling you all to go to fishsounds.net, is that there are active sounds that some fish make, which is mostly what we listen to today. I chose the active sounds because they're more fun. That's when some fish, like toad fish, have evolved organs or other structures that produce sounds. So it's like they're, they're making grunts or unks or boobs on the road. But other fish produce. I would not have named these sounds, the names that they have chosen. I don't see it, but I'm not a fish person. So. So I think part of, part of, I know bird people's sounds also don't always match up to what it sounds, sounds like. And part of it is that to us, these all kind of sound the same. But to someone trying to categorize these sounds, you have to differentiate them. So you do. Okay, that was more of a boop. And this was more of an unk. Okay, great. Got it. But yes, so they, so there are active sounds, like the ones that we all listen to, there are also passive sounds chewing, splashing, snapping. And so those can also convey information. As Justin brought up, sound is an effective way to communicate underwater. It travels faster underwater than it does in air. And there are lots of spaces where there are lots of fish and low visibility. So sound would actually be a great way to communicate if there is not a good way to visually communicate what's going on. They may communicate about territory, predators, food, reproduction, any number of things. So it makes sense that fish would communicate with sounds. And this is just something that is not really looked at too much now. So the hope is that since this database exists, it will continue to grow. People use their hydrophones underwater, underwater microphones to gather more fish sounds, they will be able to, based on the knowledge of this sounds, be able to use hydrophones, hear what's going on and draw conclusions about what's happening live where they are. There are under 1000 fish species that have been recorded making active sounds. That has to be an underestimate. So that is the other really big hope from this is that drawing attention to the sounds that fish makes, that more people will go out and research this, collect this, catalog this, and be able to look at it as a way to study fish communication. Because I think also fish often get overlooked. People think that they're not that smart, they're not that complicated. There's not much going on in their brain. That whole idea that goldfish have like an hour memory, we know is debunked, right? It's true. Yeah. So this is kind of more of that wanting to look at how complex communication might be happening with these fish with sound, which is so cool. Not to mention that, as I said before, we all came from fish. And so is there some sort of auditory communication that evolutionarily is rooted all the way back to our fishy origins? Yeah. And that's the answer. Who knows? Who knows? This is This Week in Science. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Science Filled Fun. We know that you are going to be making lots of fish sounds moving forward. If you're enjoying the show, please head over to twist.org. Click on the Patreon link and choose at your level of comfort to support us to keep this show going week after week. We do appreciate your support. We really can't do it without you. All right. Coming back with more This Week in Science, Justin, tell me a story. Okay. Let me see. One of the world's most storied shipwrecks that have intrepid Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, the ship Endurance, has been discovered at the bottom of the sea off the coast of Antarctica. Endurance was discovered at a depth of three kilometers, which if you're not familiar with kilometers is about 3,000 meters under the water. If you don't remember the endurance and if you don't remember Shackleton, why would you? Because it was over a hundred years ago. Once upon a time there was a race to explore the South Pole. Nobody been there. It was uncharted territory. Shackleton, the intrepid Shackleton in his crew, got within a hundred miles of the pole in one expedition, but were first to turn back, almost dying in the attempt. Things got so bad they had to eat their horses. And actually I think they got dysentery and sick from eating their horses, which then almost really, that was really a way almost finished them off. But it was the closest anyone had ever gotten to the South Pole and at the time. So they also managed to climb a volcano. There's another kind of thing that the explorer people would do back in those days is go climb something that hadn't been climbed before, put a flag on the top of it, do the hero pose, and then come back down and tell people about it because they usually didn't have cameras around all the time. A few years later, after Shackleton got close, the pole would be reached twice by other people. Since he had nothing better to do, Shackleton decided to walk across Antarctica crossing it at the pole if he yet never accomplished and so were the challenge for an intrepid explorer, such as himself. But the expedition didn't get too far. It got all the way to Antarctica, but then it got trapped in sea ice, the boat, the endurance. So since I started this story, if I tell you that they found Shackleton's ship at the bottom of the sea, you probably know what happened next or think you do. The intrepid of Shackleton and his resigned to their fake crew survived on the boat, trapped in the ice for nearly a year. The hull slowly getting crushed, water slowly working its way inside the boat over about 10 months until finally they had to leave the sinking ship. And so they camped on the ice for a few months on the ice flows as the ship continued to go further into the water. That plan seemed to be unsustainable for the long term. So they took the small escape boats from the sunken ship and they made their way across 1,400 kilometers of stormy Antarctic Sea and basically these little dinghy boats. First landing on an island that turned out to be covered in ice, not where they wanted to be. They kept going, finally made it back to civilization. They survived. They lived. They're not on that boat that just got discovered at the bottom of the Antarctic. This current expedition, which had a modern-day icebreaker ship, was organized by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust. And they used sonar as well as underwater drones to find and film the shipwreck. They found the endurance also only six kilometers away from where the coordinates where the crew had reported their ship having gone down. So it was very, very close to where the ship initially sunk. The underwater drones got some really nice images. I don't know if you've got the link there. Oh yeah, you got it though. If you look at that image, if you pull back up that image of the boat from the link, one of the fascinating things, that thing looks intact. You can see there's rope and rigging that is up on the deck with the gear. You can see the name endurance blazing across the front. There's the old piratey looking shipwheel. Run that rudder. It's because it's so cold. It's, yeah, it's so cold. It's all preserved. Yeah, you know, it sunk straight down. There's nothing, yeah, there's a little bit of barnically life forms and such starting to make it its home. But this boat is almost immaculately preserved under there. It's even sitting upright. It's not like on its side. It's not got big holes in it. It's like the ice just kind of went, oh, we're just going to put you down. I don't want you up here anymore. We're just going to put you down there. Yeah. So pretty much upright and tacked rigging gear on the deck. Looks like it was sunk yesterday. Under international law, the wreck is now a protected historical site. So the explorers that located it filmed it and scanned it, but did not touch the ship are not going to be retrieving any artifacts, not taking anything to the surface. It will stay there a international historic wreck. I'm sure they will send underwater archaeologists down to take a look at it and to get inside and study it. They're not supposed to go inside. They're not supposed to touch it. They've got to just leave it where it is. So the crew, I guess, I don't know if this was just a side thing. So they were doing some climactic research. They were doing ice flow stuff, everything, things like this, but I guess they just knew the boat was down there somewhere. And so they got a sonar hit around the area where it was recorded to go down. The quotes are pretty much something along the lines of, we knew we found the boat because there's nothing else here. There wouldn't be anything else there. We're like the fourth boat ever to even be in this little bay area. Nobody comes here. There's no good reason to be in this place other than some climate research and looking for this particular boat. And as we've heard, there's no good reason for people to be going there even now. We're bad for Antarctica. And speaking of people with no good reason, occasionally there is something on the planet Earth that through whatever chance of evolution, through some failure to adapt to new environments, life just stops finding a way. Many extinct creatures are extinct for a reason because they just weren't good at surviving. They just didn't want it. The largest ape species, the 10 foot tall central casting equivalent of Bigfoot Gigantopithecus died out 100,000 years ago. 10 foot tall ape. You would think, hey, you're the 10 foot tall ape in the room wherever you go. The world is your oyster, but climate change killed off its preferred forest fruit that it liked to eat. So it just decided to stop existing. It just gave up. Blair might even suggest maybe even a current life form that seems bent on its own eventual demise. Whatever could you mean? Pandas, maybe? That's the one that came to mind. Societies can also be like this. Societies can merit this. We have whole civilizations that have come and gone on the planet due to their inability to adapt to a changing environment. You got the Anastasi, classic Maya, Harappa, Hittites, ancient Egyptian cultures. And now, maybe we're going to see it happen again to the Floridians. All right. You got to explain this one, Justin. Like a bunch of lazy pandas, Floridians can't be convinced to help themselves. Despite years of warnings from top scientists around the world, Florida's government seems not just uninterested in cutting greenhouse emissions. The last time Florida legislature addressed greenhouse gas emissions, it was with a law that blocked cities from cutting emissions. Effectively. Florida passed a law that was actually crafted by natural gas companies that prevented cities from banning the use of natural gas. Natural gas rides about 70% of the state's fuel power plants and is also used in homes for cooking, heating and everything else. It's made of methane gas, which heats the atmosphere much more than carbon dioxide does. So their new law undercut individual cities' ability to meet goals that they had set for themselves to get to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 because instead of doing electric or different types of cooking, you couldn't ban natural gas from your town. So they have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars attempting to raise roads and flood proof buildings because things are already happening. The flooding, the water rise is already happening to where they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars attempting to adapt to a changing environment but not going to address the actual problem behind it. Well, Justin, it's already happening. Why do anything if it's already done? And now Florida Ponds. Florida Ponds are getting into the spirit. It turns out Florida, which has had some rapid residential growth over the years, has some 76,000 man-made storm ponds and these ponds emit more carbon via gas apparently than they store in their muck. They're negative carbon sinks. So older waterways are pretty okay at carbon sinking, but the newer man-made ponds lack the biological infrastructure to do any sort of sequestration. So they end up actually giving off more gas than they retain. So they're doing the roads and they're doing all this stuff, but they're creating these urban storm water ponds, but they're not making them right. Yeah, and given a generation or two, maybe they'll be in equilibrium. But right now, they've got tens of thousands that are actually doing the opposite of what you were doing. Well, isn't that because they were made to prevent flooding, not to hold carbon? They weren't made for sequestration, yeah, but they're also contributing to their own demise there. So like the gigantipithecus, like the dodo bird, like the future pandas, like the Egyptians, like everybody else, Florida, you will be missed on max. One day it'll just be water there. Well, hopefully research like this will get integrated into new storm water pond designs, so they're not just made to hold storm water, but actually made to fit within ecosystems and sequester carbon dioxide, because wouldn't that be nice? Let's design for multiple uses, not just one. Yeah, let's do that. I have some stories, not about Florida, nope, not about pandas, not about, no, no, I've got stories about little teeny tiny nematodes. Nemes! Nematodes, worms, yes, little worms that only have about 302 neurons in their who needs them? Quote unquote brain, right, so nerve clump. We have tens of billions of neurons in our brain and we think it makes us so special. We're like, oh, we're not fish anymore, look at us go. We stay awake and we don't take naps, but we do. Some of us really like to take naps, but we also think that all these neurons make us so great at making decisions and doing things, but the long come little nematodes, parasitic nematodes that like to eat C. elegans, which is another kind of nematode. So these researchers at the Salk Institute were looking at predatory worms called pristioncus pacificus, and these predatory worms like to eat little bacteria patches, and they also like to eat C. elegans larvae, and they bite, they're biting worms because they're predatory, and in the biting that they do, it turns out they don't just, they don't just have one strategy of biting, and it's not just for eating, not just for predating. Oh no, these wonderful worms, these parasitic worms, they also like to bite the adult C. elegans, because it just so happens that the adult C. elegans like to eat the bacteria just like the P. pacificus like to eat, and so these researchers at the Salk Institute decided to record the activity and look into the activity of these worms, and they saw that they had very complex behavior, and that they enjoyed biting and eating the larvae and were predatory in their actions toward the larvae, but then when it came to attacking the adults, they were much more likely to have a different kind of biting behavior that was just a territorial to scare the big adult C. elegans away, and then they found that when they used a molecular trigger, they were able to switch the behavior of the worm from territorial to predatory, and so there's a very simple behavior that the worms use signals that are released by the bacteria that they eat, they sense the bacteria that they eat, and they use that to trigger their behavior, and they also have senses that determine whether or not they're going to eat baby C. elegans or whether or not they're just going to attack the parent. These little tiny worms, very basic signals, it's either attack or get off my lawn. Attack or attack? Attack or attack, it's just two different kinds of attacking with very different behavioral reasoning. Attack to kill versus attack to disarm. Yeah, so yes, these worms, you spent all day listening to fish sounds, I spent all afternoon watching worms attack worms, and I really enjoyed it. I gotta tell you that little lump of nerves, it's up to something. Little ganglia, right? Little worm ganglia, they are up to something. The nematodes are great for that. You just have this lump of nerve cells, but it really feels like you have a brain. It's like it's pretty much a brain. I mean, it does a lot of stuff. It does most of the stuff that allows an organism to survive, and I think that's one of the most interesting points about so much behavior is that there's a lot of it that's automatic and is at the cellular level, and we look at ourselves as these complex behavioral creatures who can plan and think and conceptualize, and yes, but at our heart, when we think so much is our ability to be conscious of stuff, like there's a lot going on underneath the hood that would be going on anyway. So I think the basics of behavior don't require a lot, and so what is it, the steps that make us exactly who we are? Are you worm or are you human? Or are you dancer? Exactly. I should write the lyrics to their songs. It might actually make more sense. And my last study for the night that I want to share has nothing to do with worms and has everything to do, Blair, with aging. Yes. Yes, one more study on aging, and apparently you have to go to the Amazon's indigenous tribes to age really well without dementia or Alzheimer's. So researchers did an observational study that was just published in the journal Alzheimer's and Dementia, the Journal of the Alzheimer's Association, in which they looked at several hundred people from the Semaine tribe and also the Mosetin group, and they looked at the over 60 age group to determine what percentage of them suffered from cognitive impairment, Alzheimer's, or dementia. And they found that these these two groups have much lower rate of dementia than anybody else that they've ever looked at on the planet. Only about 1% suffer from dementia, and there are about 11% of people in the United States who suffer from dementia. And so one of the questions is that the researchers are trying to parse out, and this study does not do that, but researchers are trying to determine whether or not it's the urban lifestyle that has led to the deterioration of mental state as we age, or are there other factors at play? And as I was reading through this study, I thought it's very, very interesting to look at these different groups of people, and they compared also their results with these Amazonian tribes with a review of 15 studies of Indigenous populations in Australia, North America, Guam, and Brazil. And they found that, and that study earlier found a dementia prevalence that ranges from about 0.5% to 20% among Indigenous older adults, and with the highest levels being more so in individuals that are closer to urban life. And so that seems to support their hypothesis, but the thing that they don't do that I wish they had been able to do was to figure out whether it has to do with the number of people who have just survived in their environment to the age at which they are included in the study and don't have dementia. The people in the Semaine tribe are subsistence farmers, and so they are subsistence livers. They subsist on things from the environment. They're foragers, they don't have malls and stores and places that they can go and, you know, they don't have fast food to go get whatever they want. So is it that they're able to survive better because they don't have, because they don't have a predilection toward mental disability? Or is, you know, what is it that led them to that low number in the first place? And so that the study doesn't answer that really, and it would be nice to know. Yeah, that's interesting. I was reading an article today about downtime and how we're doing downtime wrong. That is like, that's one of, that's a, that's a clickbait headline. You're doing downtime wrong. But this is from the Neuro, Neuro Leadership Institute, and they were talking about how your brain needs actual downtime and how in modern society, time that we designate as downtime is not watching TV, listening to a podcast while you do the dishes. This is not downtime because you're actively engaging your brain in an activity. You're not allowing it to kind of move and flow and all this kind of stuff. And so I'm wondering about that. I'm wondering about a disconnection from the hyper, hyper connected lifestyle that we live, the hyper efficient, gotta use every spare moment of our lives to better ourselves or constantly be engaged, if that could have something to do with the health of the brain? Well, additionally, we know that there are influences from the light that we subject ourselves to constantly. Televisions, LCD screens, artificial light, we're not just dealing with the light of the sun anymore. We're not. And so that light is affecting not just our eyes, but also the clocks in our brains and blue light versus warm light is has different effects because these are different frequencies of light and the different frequencies of light stimulate our neurons differently. So there's a whole bunch of factors that get involved there, but it's all confounding factors. Is it urban life? Is that what's doing it? Is that what's leading us to have more mental disease, more mental deterioration as we age? What is it? We don't know. It's so many confounding factors, but very interesting. We should go become part of the Semaine tribe if we want to have lower risk of dementia. So first of all, I would like to express my opinion that listening to Twist is perfectly acceptable downtime. And you should continue to listen to the show, to relax whenever you get the chance. But I would also point out that I don't think I believe the data behind this comparative, the comparative data for the, you know, I was just looking up the, you know, this, this global collection of studies shows that the United States is like 14% dementia. It's after 71 years. The other place is South America. 7.3. But then, you know, it's like so dramatic. Europe is six, then China is three. I feel like there's a lot of different definitions and levels of diagnosis and everything else going on, because I don't believe that life in Europe and life in America and city or small town is enough to be seven times or four times or five times as much dementia. I think I have a problem with the underlying. Pollution is probably, I would believe pollution would be a big factor in that. Sure, but then China is only 3%. Right. Well, a lot of China is rural, but. Yeah, population disease, maybe it's just more recent that it's become, but I don't know. I have, whenever I have a diagnosis of especially dementia, which is a spectromy kind of thing. Right. It's not a specific disease. It's a spectrum of, it's a cluster of symptoms. Yes. What I would say though, is that it might be more obvious in a highly urbanized city area, some place where you got to take three subways to get over to the grandkids house and then you're going to jump on the F train because it's the nighttime or the whatever's going on. Maybe those problems manifest easier with a more complicated set of obstacles in front of you or tasks in front of you on a daily basis. But I don't know. I have a hard time. I think, I mean, the point I was trying to make with the complexity of whether or not people survived to be included in the study is that potentially it's not just the urban environment that could, you know, whatever factors, pollution or distraction and, you know, whatever it is that circadian rhythms, whatever, that lead to dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Possibly, I mean, it could be that we have a better medical system within urban centers to allow people to survive longer. We have, even though the United States has, we talk about how bad medical care, the health system, the health care system is all the time, at the same time, it is better than in the jungles of the Amazon. So when somebody, you know, steps on a nail here in the city, we can go get a tetanus shot. It's a lot harder to do when you're in the jungles of the Amazon. We have vaccines that are more available. There's a lot less nails, though, to be fair. No, I'm just, I'm making examples, but the likelihood that, you know, an injury or an illness is going to fell you at a young age is higher in a less urban area like the, or a more remote area than it would be in a city or in a place that has a good health care system. And so if, so COVID-19, for example, we're now seeing that, and this is one example, and there are other viruses that potentially lead to lifelong illnesses as well, but we're finding that COVID-19 leads to shrinkage of your brain. It leads to potentially long COVID in about 30% of people, and that you have the potential for things like multiple sclerosis or other autoimmune diseases to pop up after you have a viral infection. So say in the Amazon, you get COVID-19 and you die. Here in the United States, you get a ventilator or you get the medication, you survive, but then you have a virally induced illness that later predisposes you to Alzheimer's or dementia. You know, so perhaps it is a factor that, you know, more survivability. I mean, so many confounding factors. There are so many confounding factors, but like earlier, Blair, you were saying about the way that the octopus vampire squid story was covered. You didn't see what was going on there, and that's like with this study, this Amazonian reduction in dementia that has been, I've been seeing headlines all over the place, it's like, oh, it's this amazing special group. And that is not what the study says at all. It's an observational study that says, we found this number. It doesn't explain why, it doesn't explain how. And they go through this whole thing and there's like one sentence that says, yeah, there could be these confounding factors about, you know, related to who survived. So, sampling bias of their age group. Yeah. Anyway, the headlines, don't just read the headlines because they don't tell the whole story. And sometimes even the stories don't tell the whole story. It's important. And yes, Amazon, Blair, don't book those airline tickets to the Amazon. No, don't worry, I won't. Not just yet. We have made it to the end of the show. Yeah. Isn't that amazing? Isn't that amazing? We made it. We're here at the end of the show. And I would like to say thanks so much to Clarissa M. Chains for listening to and enjoying the TWIST podcast enough to lift us in their top 10 podcasts list. And wrote a blog post about it. And so we'll link to the blog post in our show notes. Very nice group of podcasts to be included in. And I appreciate being listed. And so thank you very much for doing that, Clarissa. Clarissa also, and this is for a later show, not for tonight. So we have homework. Okay. Clarissa wants to know our thoughts on the USAID's deep VZN program. And this is a program to identify viral variants. And so there are aspects of the openness and transparency of this program that we need to dig in on it. So we have homework to do, research to do, so that we can discuss the USAID's deep VZN program on a later show. But in the meantime, it's there. And Clarissa, thank you for the discussion topic and thank you for writing in. Thank you, everybody who writes in and sends ideas for interviews and other things. And if you have questions, ask us questions. We'll see what we can answer. I see your question and the questions are on Laura and I'll put it on the list for next week. We'll get to it. But we are now at the end of the show. So thank you all for listening. Thank you for joining us for another episode. I do want to do shout outs because that's what time it is, isn't it? It is time for shout outs. Shout outs to Fada. Thank you so much for joining us and helping with the show notes and show descriptions and social media. Really appreciate that identity for it. Thank you for recording the shows. And yes, I am downloading them. I just switched computers. So things are working a little differently than they did for a while. Additionally, who else? Who else do I have to thank? I need to thank Gord and Aaron Lore and other people who helped to maintain the safe nature of our chat rooms. And thank you to Rachel for editing the show and for your assistance on so many other things. 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Thank you for all of your support on Patreon. And if you would like to support us on Patreon, please head over to twist.org and click on the Patreon link on next week's show. We will be back Wednesday 8 p.m. pacific time broadcasting live from our YouTube and Facebook channels as well as from twist.org slash live. Hey, do you want to listen to us as a podcast? Maybe while you do the dishes, just be sure to have some downtime later. Just search for This Week in Science over podcasts are found. If you've enjoyed the show, you can get your friends to subscribe as well. For more downtime on anything you've heard here today, show notes and links to stories will be available on our website, www.twist.org. You can also contact us directly email Kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com, Justin at twistminion at gmail.com, or me, Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist TWIS in the subject line, or your email will get caught in some ice, it will slowly get overtaken, and it will sink to the bottom of the Antarctic. You'll never know. Maybe in a couple hundred years, they'll find you. But for now, gone. And you can also find us on the Twitter, where we are, at twist science, at Dr. Kiki, at Jacksonfly, and at players, Menagerie. We love your downtime. If there's a topic you'd like us to cover or address, a suggestion for an interview, a haiku that comes in the night, please let us know. We'll be back here next week after some quality downtime. And we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from the show, remember. It's all in your head. It's 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 robots with a simple device. I'll reverse all the 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 the scientific method for all that it's worth. And I'll broadcast my opinion all over the air. Because it's this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, science, this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That 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 yet understand. And that's the show. This is the after show. We were very good at talking tonight. You skipped your whole COVID section. I know because the first part of the show was too long. And so I was like, well, we got to keep going. And then the rest of the show started. I was like, well, that's long too. Okay. Yeah, I could do the COVID section now in the after show. We had COVID stories. Nobody cares anymore. Nobody cares about COVID. Oh my goodness. Do y'all want the COVID news? Gaurav asks, what was the COVID news? Over a full 120. Yes. Oh no. Yeah, right. Oh no. Anyway, our discord is so upset that we were long. COVID news. What was I going to talk about? COVID news in the Lancet this week. They published a review of six months, the first six months of the VAERS data. So that is the adverse reactions, adverse events reaction data. And this is usually entered by people who are experiencing things. Sometimes they go to their doctors and the doctors will enter it into the VAERS. It's not anything that is proven to be something actually connected to a vaccine. But it is data. And so these researchers took a look at all the data to see what was actually happening in the adverse events. And they didn't find anything that they didn't expect. So that actually is really good. They found certain numbers, low numbers of the myopericarditis and also allergic reactions, which we already knew were an issue from the very beginning of the vaccines. But they found that although approximately one in 1,000 vaccinated individuals might have an adverse event, most events are non-serious. So most events are maybe soreness at the injection site, fatigue, maybe a low fever. But then more serious events were things like higher fevers that caused actual problems. But it was still very low numbers. And so Fnord is COVID news ever good news? I don't know about that. Yeah, yes. So anyway, this data is great because it supports what people have been saying, which is that the vaccines are generally safe for most people. And so that hopefully we can use this information to help reduce hesitancy in those people who are still worried about getting vaccines. For those individuals who had an allergic reaction to the first mRNA shot, though, when you went in and you had an allergic reaction, many of those individuals are rightly concerned about going and getting a second shot because you don't want to go and have another allergic reaction. So the NIH is launching a study to specifically investigate COVID-19 mRNA vaccine allergic reactions. And they're going to be trying to get 100 people to voluntarily come into an intensive care ward in the hospital to get the second shot and to study the body's reactions to the second shot and be in the intensive care ward so that any and all reactions, allergic reactions can be dealt with immediately. But if they can determine what is specifically causing the allergic reaction, why the allergy is happening in the first place in this very small subset of people, then if they can figure that out, they might have more to tell people about who might suffer allergic responses and whether or not the second shot is going to be as dangerous, more dangerous, less dangerous than the first shot and what they experienced after that. So that's something that's, I think, and it's an important study to do. And, you know, a lot of people will be thankful to those individuals who volunteer for this study because it is going to be volunteer-based. Stuff like that I think is so interesting. Like there was also results that have been coming out from the first purposeful infection studies where they purposefully infected people with COVID-19 to see what happens to the progress of the infection. That's crazy to me that they did that, that they got people to sign up for it. I think, you know, the other bummer about the people with allergies to the first dose is if we had all just gotten vaccinated, if everyone had done their part, it wouldn't matter. It wouldn't matter. Yep. Because we'd have herd immunity for those people, but we never got there. We never got to herd immunity. And so those individuals are still now at risk. And so this question has to be asked that otherwise might have been irrelevant. Yeah. But at the same time, we now have more kinds of vaccines and not just mRNA. So people can get, and we know that mixing and matching is safe. And so people can go here in the United States, go get a Johnson Johnson. They can go, you know, they don't have to stick with mRNA and that's it. So at least now, even though we don't have the herd immunity like we wish, at least there are options for people. And that's good. But understanding the allergic reaction is going to be very important in the long run for mRNA vaccines. Why does it happen? Yeah. Well, and Garov Sharma brings up a good point in the chat room, which is asking about people allergic to flu shots. So if you're allergic to eggs, you can't take the flu shot at all. And not all of them, like there's, oh, there's most synthetic ones. Yeah. There are non egg shots now. But yeah, the common ones. And I, I, it aren't the, it was definitely the Johnson and Johnson, right? But maybe all of them also, they said, if you're allergic to eggs, you're not supposed to. Yeah. Or maybe not all of, not that, I don't think the mRNA one. Okay, maybe not those, but definitely the Johnson and Johnson one, right? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So it's different kinds of allergies. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the whole thing. So yes, there are people who have to be careful about the flu shots. And as masks are coming off around the country, and people are saying, what was it last week, somebody in the chat room said, the CDC is taking the Kit Kat approach to COVID. Give me a break. Give me a break. I appreciate that a lot. Yeah. Give me a break. Give me a break. And yeah, people really want to take their masks off. And oh my goodness, Portland. Oh my gosh. Last night, I went to my very first concert. I went and I saw, I saw a band and it was auditorium with lots of people that was very crowded. And we went in and they had, we still are in the show, your proof of vaccination. And you have to wear a mask phase. So people had their vaccine, vaccine cards to get in. And it started out with most people really wearing their masks. But by the end of the concert, like, there were so many faces. I just was like, what have I done? So now I'm just, you know, waiting to see. Oh no. So yeah, I've been like, I've been knocking on wood. Haven't gotten it yet. And I'm wondering, I mean, well, what do you mean? You could have had an asymptomatic, you wouldn't have known. Yeah. Yes, that's possible. There's a decent amount of testing that goes on where I'm at though. But the thing is, for those of me who really worked hard to just get this to go away without getting it, I feel like people are letting me down again. Yeah. And I feel like I was, I feel like I worked really hard. It's been a couple of years of this. And didn't I avoid it? I'm doing great. I still haven't gotten it. And I would like to never even, that would be fantastic. I don't like the resign like, well, we're all going to get it one day, which was my opinion at the very beginning. When 30% of people, I meant that I would get the vaccine, which I did. But when 30% of people, now we've got the breakthrough cases with Omicron and all sorts of stuff, 30% of people, somewhere between 10 and 50%, the average is 30% of people get long COVID. That's a lot. It's an incredibly big number. It's a big number. And the long COVID may be just four or five months, but it could also be much longer. Who wants that? I don't want that. Yeah, that's the thing, man, is like, even if you're still going by some of the old stats, which aren't even right anymore, but if you say like, there's a one in 50 chance of getting COVID or whatever. But then on top of that, you add the one in three risk factor of getting long COVID. It's not worth it. It's not worth it. No, I don't think it's worth it. And so there's a study, and for people who need different motivations to wear their masks, a different study that highlights the importance of layering of defenses, so vaccination and masking. And they did a mathematical model looking at vaccination rates, face mask use, and found that if that this is a different metric of importance, the US could save billions of dollars if institutions maintained masking requirements for at least two and up to 10 weeks after vaccination rates reach certain thresholds. And so they looked at things like vaccination rates reaching 70% or 80%. And how long after that threshold would mask wearing maintain some ability of society or organizations to function well? I mean, really, what they're talking about is that as people take off masks and the faster you take off masks, the more people are going to get sick, you're going to lose business hours, employee, employee hours, you know, lots of things grind to a halt when people get sick. So next week is going to be interesting Portland Public Schools has changed the rules for public schools saying that it now is up to the student or the student's family to choose whether or not to wear masks in the classroom. And I think this is the worst decision I have ever heard. Can you just, fine, take them off outside, playground. I don't care, take your mask off outside. That's great. You don't have to wear the mask all day long. But when you go inside into the classroom, put the mask on. I don't understand why that's a problem right now. Just for a little, I mean, just a little until the end of the school year. Let's just, as we're still getting vaccination rates up as we're still. That's the thing, man, vaccination rates in kids is still pretty bad. Vaccination rates in adults have done pretty good overall, but not where we want it, but way better than children. Children's vaccination rates are bad. And there's still sections of children that can't get vaccinated that are in those schools. They're elementary school age children who cannot be vaccinated. Yep. And then what, I mean, a kid who has maybe some slight auto immune issues or can't get vaccinated for whatever reason, still can go to school and has to be careful about things. But now this makes the choice harder. It makes it even more difficult because suddenly your community is not protecting you. Your mask protects me. My mask protects you. Our masks protect each other. It's not hard. And to all the people talking about herd immunity in the chat room, it didn't happen. It's not gonna happen. It's not gonna happen. We're not getting herd immunity. So many people have died and gotten sick. That's not what herd immunity is. And we're not getting there. Oh yeah. And now there's a new variant of Omicron. There's a new variant of Omicron that is increasing in numbers in New York. Yeah. There's a new one, but we'll see what happens with that. I think there's some compromises being suggested in the chat room too. I think there should be a compromise at this point. I think obviously you shouldn't have, if you haven't gotten vaccinated at this point, you shouldn't have to. If you don't want to wear the mask, you shouldn't have to. But the compromise would be you would have to. Where's the island that we're gonna Florida. Florida, okay. It got ahead of me. Yeah. Well, I think there's already a high propensity there, isn't there? Or Texas maybe. You know, you can move to one of those states where they are actively trying to kill their population. You have to go there. Yeah. And Booster, Derek Schmidt is saying booster rates have stalled as well. And that's that's also an issue because in the next month, they're also going to start, stop asking for proof of vaccination in different places. And so suddenly vaccination is not going to be, there's not going to be motivation for vaccination for more boosters for, and so we'll just have to see. I really like the idea of going to eat in a restaurant around only vaccinated people. I do want to go to a restaurant. Makes it safer. If that goes away, I'm not comfortable anymore. I'm really curious if people are going to care. I think a lot of people are not going to care. And I think that is the the CDC's kit cat method. And, you know, possibly and Gaurav, that's exactly if we're inviting a wave, maybe that's what it is, but maybe it'll be a wave that's more like the annual flu that we've, from the beginning, we're like, it's not like the flu, but you know, maybe that. Oh no, in the very, very beginning, I was like, it's just going to be like the flu. Yeah, the very, very, then it was not. Back in December, you're saying I was like, it's just going to be the flu. However, I did, I did save myself. However, that's my prediction. However, it's novel. So we don't really know. So we should treat it like it's the real thing. Yeah, but here's the practice run and not get it. I think that, you know, the question is, I mean, what we're looking at, and this has been the priority from the beginning, right, is don't overwhelm the hospital systems. And so if you have a wave that does not overwhelm the hospital system, like the annual flu, then it's not a big deal. If the flu and COVID together, whatever new variant of COVID it is, overwhelm the hospital system, then together, they're a problem. And so the government will push for more vaccination and masks and all that kind of stuff. But I'm just trying to talk through the motivation to wear a mask or to get vaccinated where historically, when we didn't have anything except maybe old flu pandemics that we had thought about, we didn't wear masks. We didn't care about people's vaccination status. You didn't even think about whether or not somebody's vaccinated. So can I, can I push back on that? I love that. I just want to talk through it a little bit. Yeah, in the medical field, it does matter. In the medical field, so first of all, I think there are places where the flu season does overload the hospital. I know in Brian's hospital, they bring in travelers every flu season and they're still packed a lot of the time in flu season. But also a lot of hospitals and other medical facilities, if you don't get your flu shot, you have to wear a surgical mask all day every day. That's the, that's the trade off. You have to go get your flu shot or you have to wear a surgical mask all the time. And it's because of that, it's because they don't want you killing people when they go to the hospital or giving the flu to other workers in the hospital. Yeah. Overwhelming the hospital system is a bad metric and it's not something we would use for anything else safety related. Look, hey, just, just a big announcement we want to make. Yeah. Hospital system is very low right now, not being stressed off. So we're going to make stop signs and stop lights optional. Optional. Yep. You can stop, you can not stop up to you. We're not going to take them down. They'll still be there, but you don't have to stop. You know, nobody's going to write you a ticket. It's up to you now. Until a point where the hospitals get overloaded from the car accident people getting brought in and then we're going to get mandatory again until, until it falls behind a certain threshold and then just drive anarchy again. Like there's no other, there's no other scenario that we would have this totally acceptable loss of tens of thousands of people. Look, and I can't, and nobody wants to listen to Justin saying just shut everything down for six weeks anymore. Because I'm tired of here. Never going to happen. Would it save trillions of dollars? And then forget the billions you're talking about for saving businesses. Be an openness. Save everything. And hey, guess what? Gas is eight dollars a gallon right now. You don't want to drive anywhere. You know, there's nowhere you want to go that's worth that. Just you're staying home anyway now. Just test, test T. He says gas is 464 a gallon in South Central Alaska. I need to move to Alaska. Gas is 565 here in Portland. Yeah. There wasn't a shell station in town. The gas was over six dollars. I was six dollars and 60 cents a gallon, I think. Oh yeah. My dad texted me today. He's paid it at six dollars in San Francisco. But I've honestly thought that, I mean, gas in the United States has never been on par with the price of gas basically anywhere else in the world. I mean, European gas prices have always been so much higher than here in the United States. But this is like the, I've always thought that the high gas prices are the kick in the pants to push us towards less fossil fuel reliance. So when things start, instead of, oh, let's just try to make gas cheaper, I was like, okay, well, it's gonna be maybe expensive for a while, but it's gonna push people away from the cars that they have. It'll push them toward public transportation. It'll push them toward different priorities. I don't know about public transportation, but people who are driving cars, when they're looking at that next car, they're gonna focus on gas mileage. Gas mileage, gas mileage or electrical vehicles or, you know, yeah, but it makes the transition happen faster when it becomes a pressure on the pocketbook. Yeah. I'll tell you what else makes it happen faster, free electric vehicle charging at your workplace. Oh, yes. If you could just get that done, everybody would be running to get electric cars because then you're powering your car for free. Well, and I still haven't, we haven't, we're starting to see, I should take it back, but the, you can put infrastructure for electric charging stations in every parking lot. Like, it's not, it's not a big leak. So you now, especially since you don't, you don't need the fast charging, right? Because especially at workplaces, you can spend eight hours charging because you're at work. And then these vehicles, they charge pretty quickly anyway. So you may not fully charge a vehicle if you've gone grocery shopping, but if you spent 45 minutes in that grocery store, you've gotten a decent charge and you've got more charge on the vehicle than it took you to drive there and home. That's me. My ADD makes me take forever in the grocery store. I go in for like three things. I come out with a massive shopping cart full and it took me an hour. You went there for, the reverse of that is I don't, yeah, I almost completely to ordering food on the market. Yeah, I know the produce is going to be terrible because it's like a reverse selection. It's, I feel like they take the worst produce first and put it in the bag instead of you going, not that tomato, but that one way in the back. That's the one for me. You don't get to do that, which is terrible. But I shop, I shop through a company called Imperfect Produce. I do that too. And I enjoy them and it makes me feel good because apparently a lot of the stuff is like leftover stuff. And so the carrots look funny and the apples are all misshapen and it's great. I feel good. I love when they send you things because it's too big or it's like overstock or all these things. It's like, so this is going to get thrown away because this potato was too big. Yes, I will have. Thank you. But that says, you guys just don't, you just guys aren't seeing the back end of that where they have all this perfectly good normal looking fruits and vegetables that they're just tossing out because it doesn't fit the brand. It's not imperfect enough. That's the right size. Throw it away. What's going on there? Let me see. So I have, have you ever looked at your dashboard Kiki? Because on my dashboard it says that I have diverted 406 pounds of food from a lesser outcome. I have saved 15,867 gallons of water and I have saved 1,177 pounds of carbon dioxide. Let me log into my account. So you're telling me none of this missapen fruit and vegetables ended up being processed? Oh, here we go. It's like a restaurant. It's not, it's just, no, no, this is, this is food that is not, that was not otherwise directed apparently. Yeah. I mean, some of it, I think now they're putting other stuff in there. 1,852 pounds of food saved from a lesser outcome. There you go. 2,677 gallons of water saved 5,561 pounds of CO2 emissions. How long have you been doing it? A couple of years. Okay, I've been doing it. I've got a friend. 2018. Oh, it's four years. But you probably get more food because there's more of you. Yeah. Oh, what's that? Certainly not a Western goal. What are you showing? What's happening there? I got a seagull on the balcony. Yeah, but it can't have been a Western goal. I missed the goal. It has to be something else. Size-shaming veggies, so corrupt. Right, R and Laura, how much of that produce would have gone to things like animal feed or fruit cocktail? Oh no. All of it. This is part of the thing though. Remember that in America, grand new virgin wood gets bleached and turned into toilet paper. Okay, we shave down new perfect carrots to make baby carrots. We do. It's true. So baby carrots aren't baby carrots. They're just fine. The way our food changes. And some of them, wait, that's not entirely true about the carrots. No, you take a big carrot that makes maybe three or four baby carrots. It's all shaved down. What? There's not like a baby carrot factory out there. It's a baby carrot factory for sure. It's a huge amount of food waste. Just so much food waste. It's insane. Carrot cake. Oh my God. I love carrot cake. R and Laura. I love our foods. So one of the things Imperfect Produce makes, I need to, how do I find it? I don't even know how I'd find it on their site. But they make these cookies out of waste gluten. What is it made out of? Oh my God, it's going to kill me. Imperfect. Don't let it kill you. They do have, yeah, they have Imperfect Cookies. Yeah. So the Imperfect Chocolate Chip Cookies are made out of, you're there. What are they made out of? They're made out of Okara flour. That's Okara. I'm going to look it up right now. I've read it on the back of the thing, the box. Wow, it's getting late. Okara is the pulpy byproduct left over from tofu production and soy milk production. So it's trash. It's just, it's trash. And they gluten free. Okay. And they make flour out of it and make cookies with it. And they use misshapen and throw away chocolate chips and chop them up and put them in there too. It's so cool. I don't know how chocolate chips could ever get thrown away. I mean, I know. I bought their chocolate chips from Imperfect Produce too and it's like too big. Like, stop, what? I'm not complaining. I'm not, I'm not going to size shame the chocolate chips. That's not happening on my watch. No. Good night, Eric. It is good. Are you waving goodbye? Are you eating breakfast? Are you staying up all day, Justin? Are you eating cookies? Should I talk to you while you're chewing on the microphone in front of the camera? It's a baby cookie. He stole one of the biscuits that's been saved for the baby child. No, no biscuits yet. I know it's a baby child. Yeah, I made my own misshapen cookies last night. Cookies are yummy. Oh, the other thing they sell. Oh, and I saw glass animals last night. I think Derek asked me that. Glass animals? What is it? Glass animals. I like them. They're so cute. Oh, the bands now. Vanilla oatmeal. 20 years old. Cookie, have a sugar. Yum. The other cookie that they make that I sometimes buy is double chocolate chip cookies made with coffee cherry flower, which I just looked up. And coffee cherry flower is the skin and pulp surrounding the coffee bean when it is processed. Also garbage. Also garbage. Instead can be milled and dried and used as flour. I love it. Apparently there's a place called Renewal Mill. This Renewal Mill. They do all sorts of flower. Huh. Oh, no. That's cool. There are flowers from plants that we really don't take advantage of even here in the United States that are well used around the world. There are so many things. So many things that we just we focus on. We just love our beige food. We like our big foods. Yeah, exactly. Give you my beige foods. Climate friendly baking. Renewal Mill. Huh. This is interesting. Different flowers. Yeah, each day they send an army of dumpster divers to bring you only the finest. Only the finest in dumped things. It seems like a great idea. You go to these food processing plants and you're like, can we take your garbage? Right. But how interesting, like the Okara sugar, the Okara flower and coffee cherry flower, like different types of flowers, oat milk flower. Yeah, why would there be, there's the Okara flower, gluten free baking flower, sorts of different things. Fascinating. The world is going to be an interesting and wonderful place. No, no raisins. This is not, I did not make a raisin type cookie. No, thank you. Who said raisins? Get out. I like raisins. I do like to put pecans in my cookies. I like raisins. I like pecans. No nuts in my desserts. Thank you very much. Well, I like a pecan. I like a pecan in a cookie. None of it. It's a good place for a pecan. Get out of it. Right there in a cookie. If I put some chocolate. If I put fruit in a cookie, I also want to put chocolate in the cookie. No. I want to balance, I want to balance everything with chocolate, except carrot cake. I just want carrot cake to be carrot cake. Yeah, I just, I just want a baked good. Why are you going to mess with it? You want a baked good, not a baked bad. Yeah. Baked nutty. I got to go. I think my, I think my groceries, my normal sized groceries just got delivered. Oh my. Actually, this is Denmark. Nothing is normal sized. It's little, right? It's all, everything's little except for the red cabbages are ginormous. Red cabbages, are you making Borscht? They're from Spain, they're from Spain and they're like, and they're like, they're not round. They're like cone headed. They're crazy looking. Are you making coleslaw? No. You do it with the red cabbage if it's not coleslaw. You put the red wine vinegar on it and you just eat it like that. What? Yeah. Just put it into a big old salad with some red wine vinegar. What are you talking about? All the Borscht cooking and stuff. You put red cabbage and pretty much anything. You chop it up, put it in a salad, put it in a soup. You can mix it in with maybe making an egg frittata. Friggin red cabbage. Yeah, it's good all the time. It's got that stuff that makes you live forever in it, that reverse it all. I think it's got that stuff. Reverse it all. Resberta. You wish. I wish there was some funny video where somebody was basically just making a salad and they were, it was as if they had never made a salad before and they didn't call it a salad. They called it something else and I wish I could remember what it was called because it was a really, it was just really funny because vegetable snack mix or something like that. That's what it was like making lettuce chips. This person's like, and so I take the lettuce and I put it and I break it up into all these bite-sized pieces that I can pick up with my fingers and I'm going to put it in a bowl and then I'm going to put a little bit of oil and maybe some salt and pepper. Oh, maybe some vinegar because I like the salt and vinegar kind of flavor and then they're like, look, it's like I can sit and watch a movie and instead of eating, eating chips, I'll eat my lettuce chips. I was like, you just made a salad. Get a fork. Get a fork. I mean, yeah, you can use your fingers, but no. So yes, recipes from twist. Everyone enjoy your lettuce chips this week. We'll be back next week. Say your things. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good morning, Justin. Good morning, Justin. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thank you for joining us once again and we do hope that you join us next week for more science, more curiosity. Stay, well, stay curious. Stay awesome. We'll see you. Bye.