 Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate, hydrate, hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. We almost hydrate. Hydration is the key. Unless you want to drink an ocean, then you've had, you'll have to see. You'll have to pee. Welcome everyone to another live broadcast of the TWIS podcast. We are here to do our podcast. So in the next couple of hours, I do hope that you enjoy the show. Subscribe, click those buttons, follow, like, subscribe, get the notifications turned on so you know this is happening every week. And know that this show may be edited because I do that sometimes for brevity and for import and to get rid of the ums and the aws and the technical glitches and things. So I do hope that you listen to the podcast with all of our important pauses as we learned about last week. Yes. And is that Blair clicking? Blair, are you making clicking noises? Yeah, I was typing. You have a loud keyboard. I have loud fingers. We need to get your, we need to get your keyboard off the mic one of these days. It's my fingers. It's your fingers that are making the sound? Yeah, I'm a smacker. When her fingers do the talking. Oh, show. Okay, starting the show in three, two. This is Twist. This week in Science episode number 828 recorded on Wednesday, June 9th, 2021, swimming in a sea of science. Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show, we are going to fill your heads with life, happiness and schooling. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. In advance of the coming Pentagon report on unidentified aerial phenomena, some are expecting evidence of extraterrestrials while others are expecting scientific explanations. Likely both will be disappointed. In the meantime, consider the following. What if it turns out that humans are the most intelligent life form in the galaxy? Life in the galaxy seems likely. Life abounds on earth. Life is chemistry. Chemistry of the earth is not rare in the galaxy, but intelligent life. That sentient theory of mind, innovator of language, mathematics, technology, the type of intelligence humans are capable of is so incredibly rare here on earth that only happen to one species. And even then we have to ask ourselves for how long will that intelligent species last upon the earth? If you can imagine that we might be it for higher intelligence, the one rare example, what then? What responsibility should we have? The most intelligent creature in the galaxy for the planet we are on, for preserving the only life forms we know to exist, for using our intelligence to uncover the mysteries of the universe, for one day traveling beyond our own star, so we can discover other planets, other life, or maybe just use that big brain of ours to get along with one another here on earth. If you are looking for the most intelligent life forms in the galaxy, you can find them. The place you should be looking is this week in science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind I can't get enough. I want to live every day of the week. There's only one place to go. Science to you, Kiki and Blair. This is, and a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again. What are we talking about this week? Science? Yes, yes. We're talking about science because we love to show up every Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific time to talk about science together. We love to do that. And we're glad that those of you who are watching live are here with us right now. And those of you who are watching us or listening to us as a podcast or time shifted on your favorite platform, thank you for joining us whenever you can. We do hope that you enjoy the next science-y hour or more, we'll see how long this, we'll see how long it goes. I have stories. I did bring some this week about treating depression, learning math, and reviving life. That sounds exciting. Yeah, they are exciting. Lots of exciting stories. Justin, what did you bring? I have got expensive asteroids, robots raising children, flu vaccine study that you might have thought they'd done a long time ago. And why women should eat healthy foods. Just women should eat healthy foods. Yeah, okay. Men or generally people. Yes, good advice, good advice. But it's even more so good advice for women. And I'll explain why at the end of the show. Fantastic Blair, what is in the animal corner? Oh, I have hangar. I have bacteria traps. I have school lessons gone wrong. And I have puppies. Oh, I like puppies. Yeah, we will have fun with all of the puppies. Because just don't get the hangar. Yeah, don't get the hangar and the puppies confused because then you don't want those near, it's just going to cause problems. What? Are you talking about puppy eating? No, no, that's awful. Whenever you say something though, I now assume it's something that's happened in the world. Like there's like this awful story out there that'll leave the show and find out, oh gosh, puppy eating is a thing that was in the news this week. Okay, good. Don't scare me like that. Nope, not in the news. No puppy eating in the news. But we have a whole bunch of science news to talk about, so let's get to it. Before we do, just want to remind you, you right there, that you can subscribe to this week in science on just about any podcast platform that is out there. We are also on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch. We're on Twitter, we're on Instagram. And you can find us by looking for this week in science. Our website is twist.org. All right, first story of the night. What about reviving ancient life? I mean, I think I remember some movies with this theme and it always goes horribly awry. That's because they don't show you the movies where everything just works out to be a scientific discovery. They just, those ones, those scripts don't get off the ground. Yeah, very banal. Hollywood's not so into it, so yeah. Anyway, Russian researchers took from the ancient Siberian permafrost samples. Okay, this does sound like exactly like, okay, wait a sec. Here we go, right? Some samples, this is from the Soil Cryology Lab. They published in the journal Current Biology on their study in which they reawakened bedeloid rotifers. These are little water-living multicellular animals, not single cell bacteria or yeast-like organisms. These are multicellular animals. You do need a microscope to be able to take a look at them. They're not really visible by the naked eye, but still, multiple cells working to keep them going and they're tough little creatures, kind of on the level of tardigrades. They're not quite tardigrade level of being able to survive things, but they can freeze and thaw and freeze and thaw and freeze and thaw. Well, I said ancient and this ancientness, 24,000 years they had been frozen. Oh my goodness. Drop back to life, totally fine. And they've also previously, they identified a worm, a nematode that was about 30,000 years old, but this, as they say, Stas Malavin of the Soil Cryology Laboratory at the Institute of Physiochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science in Pushino, Russia. Our report is the hardest proof as of today that multicellular animals could withstand tens of thousands of years in cryptobiosis, the state of almost completely arrested metabolism. Let me talk about arrested development. It's all these bones and skin. It's just, it's keeping us from some of the coolest stuff, right? I know, but this is what, but this is the interesting point, Blair. We talked, Justin talked about regenerating limbs last week with respect to axolotls and what we could learn from the molecular biology of organisms that are really good at regenerating things. And here we have an organism like the tardigrade able to withstand freezing for a very long period of time. Could the mechanisms that are involved in allowing a multicellular, although microscopic organism to survive for 24,000 years while frozen, could they be learned and applied to humans? Is this something that could work? We're talking about Austin Powers now. Right? Either that or what was it? I don't remember the name of it. I'm gonna say no. I mean, it has to be something so specific and it's makeup that is not allowing anything to deteriorate the genetic material as it's in that, the G0 stasis. I mean- Right. And so this is the key point. When freezing happens, usually ice crystals are the big problem. You freeze and the ice starts forming, crystals are sharp and they burst cells. And so the cells might freeze, but then they're never gonna reawaken and live. They won't survive because everything will leak out as they thought because there's big holes in their cell membranes. These little organisms have a mechanism that allows them to withstand the formation of ice crystals. They have some kind of mechanism to shield their cells and the organelles within them from the harm of low temperatures. So- From the temperature, from potential radiation, I don't know how bad that is once you're in the permafrost, but it's still gotta be taking place. And then there's, just at the cellular level, things start devouring each other and even in a bacteria. So one of the things I was thinking about is that rotifers don't have blood. They have like an open circulatory system. So it would follow that they, since they have constant exchange with their environment in that way, that they might not be as fragile when it comes to keeping things inside the body a certain status quo. Yeah. The big key to what's exciting about these organisms, not just that they reanimated and there was survival at stake, what is the most important part about survival? Reproduction. Reproduction. Yes. Thank you. Reproduction. And so they were able to reproduce using a clonal process, parthenogenesis to create another organism from them. My video is not working very well, but yeah, they were able to, after freezing, produce more of these 24,000 year old bedeloid rotifers. Life continues to find a way. Indeed. And I think another big question related to this though, yes, okay, mechanisms, molecular mechanisms related to cryogenics and being able to freeze and thaw mammals, humans, maybe at some point in the future, but huge question. What about all of the Siberian permafrosts that are thawing? Great question. Does this mean if the thawing happens at a decent pace, will they survive? Will organisms like this that are in the ice return to compete with the organisms that are alive now? And what will that do to that ecosystem? Yeah. Are any of them carrying bacteria that the environment's not used to anymore? I don't know. I still kind of am always falling on that side of when there's a conversation like this. Yeah, it's such an arms race to keep up with. All of the other things in the niches that, boy, I just assume anything that jumps in this late in the game is going to be defenseless. Now, we could say like, yeah, everything has moved on and has forgotten how to defend against its particular strategy. And that's possible. But there's so many things competing so ruthlessly and that arms race has been going on so long that I just, I wouldn't like the odds of coming in late in the game. I just, it's very double. I guess we're all going to be part of that giant experiment. Yeah, we'll find out. Speaking of experiments, Justin, you want to talk about raising children? Oh, well, yes. In this day and age of two income families with busy work schedules and long commutes, there's little time for meaningful interactions with children. That's where robots can help. Great. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Kings College London and a company called Sproutel have developed a socially assistive robot specifically designed to aid emotional regulation in children. The robot looks like a fuzzy stuffed animal. Looks like a kid's toy. It responds to a child's touch via a simulated heartbeat. When the creature is nervous, it has a rapid heartbeat, calming down and reducing its movements as the child caresses or hugs it. It even makes a little purring sound when it has been sufficiently soothed. Researchers evaluated their robot as series of initial experiments where children and their parents were asked to interact with the robot and share their feedback. The feedback they collected was highly promising as all the 25 children who engaged with the prototype said that they enjoyed it and they wanted to keep it for longer, which means they took the kid's stuffies away at the end of the experiment. You go too far with your science experiment on children. I was really struck by the positive impact that was reported by children and parents in our field study said, Catherine Isbister of UC Santa Cruz, who was apparently not present when the toys were ripped from the arms of the children. We are currently conducting an NIH funded trial for a smart fidget ball that we developed to help those with ADHD to focus in collaboration with Julie Schweitzer at the University of California, Davis. Peter Slovak, researcher at King's College London is continuing to explore the use of the fuzzy creature and various emotion regulation contexts with a range of populations, including children, adolescents, and youth. Would you use, would you raise your children with a robot? Even if the science says, hey, it works. The robots can teach them values. Are we there yet? I don't think I am. I think, I think, but here's the thing too. There's something that reminds one of having a pet, like having a cat or a dog or something growing up and knowing when the dog is happy and knowing what you're doing that's upsetting it. And if a kid can't have a pet, they've got allergies, they live in a building that doesn't allow it as a simulation for that sort of thing. Yeah, maybe I could see that. As if just another kid's toy. Yeah, I guess I could see that. I would probably not object to it. I don't like the idea of it replacing that, which I feel like hugs. Yeah, that's not great. Human contact, yeah. Human contact is a great thing. Which is important. But also this is also being directed at kids that might be having problems elsewhere, elsewise to sort of, the idea is, the robots have been working on different types of fidgety things so that when a kid is occupied or preoccupied with an object, or in this case a heartbeat of a stuffed animal, it takes that anxiety or the fixation problem if it's ADD or whatever it is and sort of places it in this secondary object, allowing them to concentrate better, is the idea behind it. I mean, let's be real. Robots are raising our children. It's called an iPad. Thanks. I just say, for people listening to this going like, I would never. Actually, we're teaching our kids a lot of things via technology now. I think, yes, replacing other things bad, but especially for children that have problems processing and expressing and reading emotions, this could be a cool tool. And I think additionally it's, they're cute little stuffed animals and it's an interactive toy. It's a toy that can respond. And like you said, Justin, if it's responding to the child and like you said, maybe they can't have a cat that can purr. Maybe they don't have a dog that can come and ask for snuggles at just the right moment. And having a little toy, a blanket, something, this is better than a blanket because it's a little bit interactive. It gives them something. It responds, yeah. So I can see how this could be. It could be very useful. So it's in pre-print. They haven't, so they haven't totally published this study yet. I didn't see at least in the press release anything about a control group because I found like my favorite stuffy was like, oh, I needed to be cool when I was a kid. So these are stuffed animals. Like how do you separate the stuffed animal from this whole heartbeat interaction thing that you've created, they've created on top of it because stuffed animals, kids love and they find soothing. I mean, it could have a favorite blanket. It could be like whatever that they're, I think Schuber though, Alexa, please sedate child number one. Thank you Schuber from the chat room. Yes. Yeah, so if they are late and you've got one of the kids the stuffed animal emits a gaseous substance. Oh, and then the kid is like, yeah, the child is sedated. The design of these two, these things too, I can't tell if they're cute or they're disconcerting and terrifying. They're cute. I mean, definitely like the one on the right is very cute. It's that one on the left that I feel like is going to be watching me while I sleep later. It's kind of bothering me. You Blair, yeah, it's going to be watching you. I have. Just sitting in the corner. The wake up is going to be sitting at the foot of my bed. Yeah. All right, Blair. Yes. You can outsmart this stuffed animal robot. Tell me about outsmarting some, outsmarting bacteria. Yes. Yeah, how do we do that? Much talk of vaccines in the news. They're all the rage. But it would be great if we could get some really good vaccines towards a lot of bacteria that like to evolve and mutate. And they're just a constant moving target. And a lot of the time they become more deadly as they mutate and evolve, right? And so researchers at ETH Zurich and the University of Basel have looked at how to exploit this mechanism to come up with an effective vaccine against bacteria. So they use this on Salmonella and they developed a vaccine that instead of trying to kill the bacteria, no, no, no, it just pushes and pressures and guides their evolution to make them weak. So they can use it to drive evolution in a certain direction. And in this case, something they would consider a dead end. So they inoculated mice with different vaccines against Salmonella typhimorium and observed how the Salmonella and the animals guts modified their genes to escape the vaccine's effects. And that lets scientists then identify the full spectrum of potential mutations and then produced a combination vaccine to push them in a particular direction. That caused an important sugar coating on the surface to atrophy. And so affected bacteria could still multiply in the gut but were completely largely unable to infect body tissues and cause disease. So this is a test on mice and it was shown in this test to be more effective than preventing Salmonella in existing vaccines for pigs and chickens. So it's a pretty interesting idea to kind of recognize, okay, the bacteria is gonna mutate. What if we push it in the right direction? Then you don't make super bugs, right? Forcing the mutational hand of the bacteria. Going, you're gonna do better this way. That's right, you're gonna get what you want this way and then you die. Yeah, and then we know how we can still control you. For some reason, this feels safer to me. It feels like if it doesn't quite work all the way you're not gonna end up with a super bug. You're just gonna end up with something that doesn't respond to the guiding vaccine that doesn't actually even try to kill it, right? Like it's just, I think it's interesting because it might be more effective than just trying to kill the bacteria, but it also might be less effective but more effective in the long run because you're not pushing an arms race, I guess. I think that's really interesting is taking our understanding of arms races of how the ratcheting up of kind of predator prey or the changes necessary for survival, kind of understanding what we know to be important for a particular species of bacteria or a virus, say, and outsparting it. I mean, isn't that what our big brains are for? Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. I hope it, I don't know, I'd love to see, I can't wait to see where this goes and whether this is developed as a way of fighting things off in the future. Yeah, we're just gonna make that bacterial infection just so weak you don't even feel it anymore. The devolution, that's right. You're just gonna just be quiet now, bacterial infection and then we can take care of you, yes. Well, this has nothing to do with bacteria but it has everything to do with treating depression. Researchers this week reported on their phase two clinical trial. This is researchers publishing in Science Translational Medicine out of the University of Chicago's Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care, their work using nitrous oxide, laughing gas or you might know it as the propellant in whipped cream canisters or you might know it as any number of uses that we actually have for nitrous oxide. Laughing gas may allow for happiness. In this recent study, they determined that giving, giving their, the people in the study, the patients in the study a 25% concentration. So normally, if you go to the dentist and ask for laughing gas, they're going to give you 70% concentration and that's gonna keep you sedated. You may have some negative side effects, some nausea, not feeling so good afterwards but they had found in a phase one trial that 50% worked really well but there were a lot of these side effects. And so in the phase two, they wanted to know whether or not a lower dose could work. And so they gave people a pretty three groups. They had nitrous oxide at 50% concentration, one at 25% concentration, one a placebo group with one three hour inhalation session per month for three months. And they found that by the end of the study, 85% of patients had improved, 55% had a treatment response which means at least a halving of their depressive symptoms and 40% were in remission. Laughing gas, nitrous oxide. We'll see where it goes. It was the researcher on the study, Peter Nagel said that he had been working as an anesthesiologist and knew about nitrous oxide for decades and knew that it's an antagonist of NDMA glutamate receptors. These are involved in long-term memory formation. They are also affected by ketamine. And because of the recent work looking into ketamine as a possible treatment for depression, he said, wait a minute, they're acting on the same receptors. Maybe nitrous oxide will work too. And so they started the studies. And lo and behold, it seems like it might have an effect and it's not as controlled as substance. So it could potentially be an easily accessible, not high-cost compound that can be used to effectively treat depression and clinically depressed patients without much difficulty. Could be interesting. What does it feel like for somebody that's doing this three-hour inhalation session? Do we think- No idea. I wonder if you'd just be super light-headed. Yeah. You could also maybe go to sleep, right? You probably could. Just go to sleep for, because you're lying there for three hours. So yeah, you could probably watch a movie, go to sleep, just be super relaxed for a little while and then start feeling better. And the effect of these sessions lasts for several weeks after the sessions. We are not recommending that anybody go to their local whipped cream aisle. This is- Oh, however. This is a clinical study. Yeah, that would also be 100% so that would be a lot. However. Yeah. Disclamer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Favorite comment in the chat room. Laugh and gas, mail out for happiness in quotation marks. But you already established it's the propellant for whipped cream. What more do you need? No, I mean it is, there we go. Yeah, two in one. All right, Justin, take us to our next story. Are we going hardcore? Well, we're doing what? Oh yeah, we're gonna go metal. We are going hardcore. A core of a planet, in fact. Okay. Yeah, a failed planet. This is an asteroid worth an estimated 10 quintillion US dollars. That's a 10 with, I think, 18 zeros after it. 10 quintillion US dollars is going to get a closer look as NASA is scheduled to launch the Psyche mission in 2022 and should be arriving at 16 Psyche asteroid in 2026. 16 Psyche was long thought to be the exposed iron core of a small planet that had failed to form in the earliest days of our solar system. It's out there in the asteroid belt. However, a University of Arizona led research study suggests the asteroid might not be that metallic or even as dense as it was once thought and hints at a maybe different origin story for it. Scientists have been interested in 16 Psyche because if it's presumed origins, of course, if that's true, it would provide a nice opportunity to look at the exposed core of a planet up close. We could go land on it, check it out and see what might be in the core of our own planet if there's any relation. So also the asteroid is huge. It's very noticeable. It makes up 1%. This one asteroid makes up 1% of the material of the asteroid belt. It is approximately the size of Massachusetts, which if you do the conversion is about seven Rhode Islands. Of course. Thanks for that. Okay. Well, we're always doing ice sheet, glacier breaks off, it's the side of Rhode Island. I figured that's more of a scientific measurement than Massachusetts. Nobody uses Massachusetts in science. No. Rhode Island all the time. So this was first spotted by an Italian astronomer in 1852 and the 16 in its name is because it is just the 16th asteroid that was ever discovered. This is the information from University of Arizona is from an undergraduate student, David Cantillo, who is the lead author of the paper. It published in Planetary Science Journal. It proposes that 16 Psyche is 82.5% metal, which is still sounds really high. 7% low iron, approximately 10.5% carbonicus carbonate. So basically it's a rubble pile mostly with a density of around, oh, what is it, empty space within its body is around 35%. So pretty porous, which is sort of not what we were expecting. We were expecting something a lot denser because of the size. So the old estimates were 95% metal and much, much denser than this one. So it is probably not an exposed core of an early planet, much more likely just a biggest rubble pile that we have found out there. Yeah, if it's lighter, less dense, it sounds more like a, I don't know, a tufa kind of volcanic material that probably is full of air. Maybe it was shot off during a massive impact. Maybe it is just a gravel pile that has a lot of light dust that holds it together. Yeah. So it might be deep getting devalued a bit, but it's still pretty iron rich from what's being studied so far. So it's probably worth maybe just one quintillion. But going and getting a look at it we'll know more for sure. So that's gonna be good. We don't know what we're gonna get yet, do we? No, and that's the thing. That's the thing, the opportunity to study it, regardless is coming. So that's gonna be very exciting. To look at our psyche. Even though I know that's not where, anyway. Blair, do you want to school us now? Yes, so sometimes a scientist takes their own time to go into a school classroom and they have an amazing enlightening time with the students and another time the scientist walks into a classroom and gets schooled. So this is from the Florida Museum of Natural History and Victor Perez, who is a doctoral student at the Florida Museum of Natural History, was guiding students through a math exercise. And this was looking at 3D printed replicas of fossil teeth from a megalodon. The idea was to use commonly used equations based on tooth height to estimate the shark size. Just a very simple, this is how paleontologists do it, how big's the megalodon? But students got a wide range of sizes for that megalodon from 40 to about 148 feet in length for the same bit of teeth. Whoa, whoa. That's something, there's something wrong. Yeah, so you can imagine at first. Right, if there's such a range. Or the methodology. He was like, all right, did you use the equation wrong? Did you forget to fix your units? Like what is happening? Cause there was a mathematical error somewhere in here. Why did we have this wide range? It turns out that these equations that have been used by scientists since 2002, that have just been blindly accepted in paleontology, they're not as accurate as we thought. So, really? Really? It's a range like that. Yeah, so megalodon sharks, they shed thousands of teeth over a lifetime. Sharks have this thing called the tooth whirl, which is like the tooth conveyor belt, right? So they're constantly losing teeth in this cartilaginous jaw. It's almost impossible to keep the teeth in there. And so the jaw decomposes over time, but the teeth don't because of enamel. It's really great stuff that we have on that side. So all of that to say, that's why you get a lot of shark teeth in the fossil record, but not a lot else because they're cartilaginous skeletons and it's all kind of soft and squishy. Falls apart. So they've been using great white sharks as a proxy, as a model, and then you kind of extrapolate based on the shape and size of the teeth in their mouth to the megalodon, and then you can make some distinctions based on that. They have a couple of vertebrae for megalodons, but mostly it's just teeth. And so you have to identify where in the jaw the tooth belongs and then measure the length. And so this is from a nearly complete set of teeth. So you're pretty sure where the teeth belong. It was a CT scan that then the classroom did their own 3D printing of the teeth, which I think is so fun. And then they were able to do, measure with a real ruler the size of these things and the shape and arrange them and set up their megalodon. So they were supposed to, as kind of like an art project, they were supposed to make a whole megalodon jaw out of these three printed teeth, which I think is so, oh my God. I wish I could go back to school now that 3D printers exist. I think it would be so fun. But anyway. Blair, next time you come to Portland, I'll get Marshall to make sure his 3D printer's ready to go and you can print a megalodon jaw. We'll do this. Oh yeah, I'm gonna print so many things. Okay, anyway. Megalodon puzzle jaw, we'll make it happen. I love it. Regardless, these equations are wrong, clearly. They're missing something, right? So what about age of the shark? What about, yeah, go ahead, Justin. Yes. Well, okay, so the idea is, depending on where it is, you measure it and that will relate to its overall size. So the equation that they're doing is fine. The math is working out. It's just the principle behind it doesn't actually fit. Right, because based on the height of the teeth, there are still some play as to where in the mouth the tooth goes. And that is really the problem. So if the tooth is in the back of the mouth versus in the front, that's gonna dictate a different size shark. And so what the suggestion of, he actually, Perez released in a community newsletter, this kind of quandary, and Teddy Badoe, an avocational paleontologist in France, suggested to measure the width instead of the height of the teeth, which is the great thing about the width is that it actually, it's very specific how big the jaw itself can be because they have to go next to each other. So there's a lot less play there. And so they developed a whole new set of equations based on tooth width. Then they analyzed fossil teeth from 11 individuals representing five species, including the megalodon. And then they developed this new model. And then the new model still have a range of error of about 10 feet, but that's certainly a lot better than a hundred feet. And so since then they've now, they're transitioning to potentially using this new equation. And on top of that, Victor Perez teaches this lesson still, but very differently. So he can talk about the nature of science and unanswered questions and how conventional ways of thinking of things aren't always right. How conventional ways of thinking can be overturned by your students. Yeah, fantastic. That's great. Yeah. And so with this new equation, there are some estimates that the megalodons actually bigger than we previously thought, pushing it up to 65 feet in length, which is a couple of school buses. Yeah. It depends on the school bus, but yeah. Yeah, not normal school bus. All right. So my last story for the opening stories tonight is a bit political. I want you to listen to this clip of a house natural resources hearing here in the United States. From what's been testified to the Forest Service and the BLM, you want very much to work on the issue of climate change. I was informed by the media pass director of NASA that they have found that the moon's orbit is changing slightly. And so is the Earth's orbit around the sun. We know there's been a significant solar flare activity, and so is there anything that the National Forest Service or BLM can do to change the course of the moon's orbit or the Earth's orbit around the sun? Obviously, that would have profound effects on our climate. This is Louie Gohmert, right? This is Louie Gohmert, representative Louie Gohmert for Republican- Representative of government for the United States of America. Yes, from the United States of America. Boy, am I proud. Yeah. So here's the take I have on this, which is that he knows better, but he is in the position of needing to muddy the waters to continue to play, to keep the conversation playing for old ideas, like solar flares being responsible for the heating of the planet, that it's because of the positions, the position of the Earth in our orbit. It's the solar flares from the sun that these factors we have no control over are the reason we have climate change. And what I wanna say is a lot of people online have been saying, he must be so dumb. And I don't think he is. I think he's a politician and he's playing the game. But what we end up having is a lot of conversation now about this topic. And no, we're not gonna move the orbit of the Earth. No, we're not going to move the orbit of the Moon because that would have profound effects, not on climate so much as everything on the planet. The Moon's gonna do its own moving over time as it slowly gets further and further away from the Earth and escapes our gravitational pull. But that's gonna happen over a very long period of time. And in the meantime, what we do have control over are our own actions. We have control over what we regulate. We have control over where we put our money. We have control over how we use our technology. We have control over how we build our infrastructure, how we help poorer countries develop their infrastructure. These are things we have control over. No, we cannot control the orbit of the Earth, the orbit of the Moon or solar flares on the Sun. Right, but if we can't do that, if we can't control the orbit of the Moon, that means there's no point in trying to do anything about global warming. That's his point. That is his point. That is what he is trying to put forward. And I would like to just say that we need to continue to have conversations to, because they're pushing these ideas and the science indeed is in that it is our activity that is promoting climate change. It is our emissions of carbon dioxide that are acidifying the oceans that are changing the atmosphere and its ability to hold heat. That's us. And we need to accept that and we need to talk about it a lot more, yeah. I don't understand the tired yelling of these voices. We need to yell more. I don't understand this strategy only because I feel like if he's trying to speak to people who aren't skeptical of the things that he's saying and don't understand the science, then they won't understand the intricacy of what he's trying to do. But do you know what I mean? It seems kind of weird that he's saying this roundabout trip to this argument. Because people who listen to him and have voted for him and are in the know because they're in the special club that are in the know of the things he knows, he is reiterating knowledge that they are confirmed in, that they agree with. And so it's the confirmation bias and so they'll continue to hold on to these ideas. It is, but then we have to locate it somewhere else. Somewhere else there are stories circulating that versions of global warming, that it's just sun flares, that it's just the orbit of the earth changing. Da da da da da da. So it's confirming all these. Now those sources, those sources can come from anywhere. I've heard them on a religious station before where they were talking about the, what was it? Jesus was doing some stuff, whatever. But the sort of a religious tie-in to this is that humans can't control anything. Only a higher power controls the weather, the climate, everything. So that we actually don't have a role to play in it even on that level. We don't control the weather, but we can influence the climate and we are influencing it. It is these, yeah, these language differences, the slight nuances in the difference between control and influence. It is the differences between confirming that it's nature's responsibility versus we play a part in nature and are impacting it. That's why climate change, yeah. Different narratives. The bottom line is never trust a politician from Texas on climate change or anything that's created by the fossil fuel industry. Never, just saying, but you don't trust a Kentucky or a Senator or a Congress person on the health effects of tobacco. I never trust a Sicilian with deficits on the line. What is that? What did I do this time? Kick your sister's laugh and then fall off screen. Oh my goodness, this is This Week in Science. Thank you so much for listening to our program for being a part of the show. If you love the show, please tell a friend about it today. Help us grow. Okay, let's dive into another joyful part of our program. The COVID update. Oh. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Okay, so there, you know, we love it. We love to hate it. It is a thing that is with us, but I want to start out the COVID update with a letter from a listener. Todd Barnnell wrote in to say, I know it can't be fun doing the COVID update, but I want to let you know how helpful they are for us out here. My partner and I both have high stress jobs in the public, me assisting tribal environmental staff around the country and her helping people in our county navigate the legal system. Both of us have seen our workload significantly increased during the pandemic. We've been very strict about protocols throughout, which has caused issues with friends as things open up. She's taking a few days off here and there, but hasn't gone anywhere. I haven't even taken days off. I only say all this to illustrate we're both bloody exhausted. And I've found myself actually questioning my approach and saying, well, the CDC, we've both been annoyed with how things have been handled by the feds lately and it will have repercussions on entities making people go straight back into the front line with the public soon. But I've found myself actually thinking, oh, screw it. And I don't do that. But I have to recognize I am not at my best anymore. I needed your slap in the face. It pulled me up straight seeing you, Blair and Justin, all agreeing on something. I know all three of you are experiencing just as much trauma and frustration as everyone who is trying to navigate all the craziness and still trying to make the world a better place. I know you all must be exhausted, but I just want to thank you for taking a breath and finding the energy to fight the good fight for science and rationality, even those of us who freaking know better need to be reminded in these trying days. Seriously, I extend a heartfelt and sincere thank you to all three of you, take care of yourselves and I wish you peace and good health. Thank you so much, Todd. Yeah. Yeah, it was really just wonderful to get your email and to hear that our COVID update actually is appreciated. Yeah, and we do generally agree when it comes to the COVID update. And we learn things from each other. You know what, I agree with you on that. Hey, I also agree. Yes, agreeing. This is great. Okay, jumping into the actual news, a pre-print out in the Med Archive suggests that investigation of over 55,000 employees of the Cleveland Clinic system suggests that people who were symptomatic and tested positive for COVID-19 might not need to get vaccinated. The data show that previously infected individuals did not get reinfected during the timeframe of the study, similarly to those who had been vaccinated, while people who had been unexposed and were not vaccinated did have cases. A caveat though, it does suggest that this is not indicative of immunity to the new variants of concern, which have shown small amounts of breakthrough infections in vaccinated individuals even. So there are still questions as to how far that immunity goes, but people who have tested positive and had symptoms may not need to get vaccinated. Nice. Yeah. Which this could be a middle ground actually for a lot of the colleges, universities that are requiring vaccination for people to go back to school. Maybe you can show a positive test and or vaccination. Maybe there are other ways through this. And if not everybody, especially here in the United States, not everyone wants to get vaccinated, but if you've had it, maybe you're protected a little bit more. And if you're protected, you're protecting others potentially. So that means we might have more extra vaccines to be able to send to countries that really need it where they're having big outbreaks or to get to communities that really need it. So there are upsides to this for sure. Well, there's also, without painting with too broad of a brush, there probably is a pretty good Venn diagram of people who were out and about not being super careful, not wearing a lot of masks and people who don't want to get vaccinated. So there probably is a good number of people who did get infected who also don't want to get vaccinated. So that is kind of a ray of hope for me personally. Yeah. I mean, when I look at the numbers and I'm like, oh, 51% of the United States, we're getting there, but we're not quite there. We're not hitting. And then you think, oh, well, maybe we do have another 10, 20% of people who have already been infected, 30% even, potentially. I mean, cases are going down, hospitalizations are going down. We still have to see what happens with these variants of concern, but maybe the United States is coming up to that point of actually getting better just here in the United States. We still have to look at this as a global worldwide pandemic. And that is something that needs to be taken into account. So representative Louie Gomert wasn't the only person saying all sorts of wild things on the internet this week or in the world this week. Contrary to the testimony of a known anti-vaccine doctor in Ohio yesterday, COVID-19 vaccines will not cause keys, coins, and other metal items to stick to your body. The vaccines will not make you magnetic. I'm sorry, what? I can't believe the CDC had to actually put this on their fact checks. You also just said a doctor said that. Yes, a doctor of osteopathy, she has a practice, but she's also one of the top 12 people on social media spreading anti-vaccine information. I feel like this is against the Hippocratic Oath, right? She spent 45 minutes with her witness testimony and her followers who came to stick keys to their faces that then fell off, but she went to Ohio because Ohio is voting on vaccine mandates and whether or not businesses will be allowed to ask for proof of vaccination or other proof of the fact that they won't be getting people sick if they wanna come into their businesses. If that were true, then I can prove I was vaccinated by sticking a key to my face. Yes, exactly, but the amount of vaccine that is injected is not enough, even if it were pure magnetic material to even allow for that to happen and the fact that it's going to get distributed through your entire body. No, there are no metals in the vaccines, so this is not possible. And in fact, if you wanna try, you know, on a hot, sticky summer day, if you've got oil on your skin or if you wanna blow on hot air on the back of a key or a coin, you too can stick things to your skin. It's the spoon trick on your nose. It is, yeah, we learned this in grade school and now it is being used in, yeah, alongside the 5G theory that the vaccines make you receptive to 5G vaccines. I go back to the reference to the disclaimer at the beginning of this show. What if we are the most intelligent life form in the galaxy? What if? Yeah. Well, anyway, yeah, the vaccines are not gonna make you magnetic, they're going to protect you very well from infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the variants, including the Delta variant, which is one of the most rapidly spreading variants of concern right now that's spreading among the unvaccinated. So if you have not been infected, have not been vaccinated, please consider vaccination to protect yourself and your community. On the mask front, we know on social media, anti-masking is a big thing, masks don't work. Justin, you've even said on the show, well, think about smoke and if you're breathing air and stuff, it's like smoke particles and people say, well, if it's like smoke particles, smoke goes through masks. A UC Davis engineering professor did a study looking at surgical masks had people wear surgical masks which are a little loose fitting and can have air gaps around the sides. They're not the same as the N95s, which are made to fit very tightly on your skin, around your nose and your mouth. Surgical masks are known to be slightly less effective at preventing viral spread than N95 masks. That's why they're not the same level of protection. Again, below surgical masks, cloth masks are another step down in protection. Each level is a level of protection, yet this researcher had volunteers breathe into an air, a machine that would sense the airflow down to five microns, I believe, was the site, very small particle size, had them talk or cough directly in from the side to see how the airflow from the side of surgical masks would work. And they found that, yes, indeed, even though there are air gaps, wearing a mask versus not wearing a mask reduces airflow in such a way that would reduce viral transmission. I mean, I've said this once, and I'll say it again, it's nothing has proved to me how effective masks are more than going into a porta potty wearing a mask. I'll never go into porta potty with that one ever again. Ever again. It's just so much more pleasant, and that's the thing, it's like, how do smells happen? They're particles. They're particles. So it's, the mask works. Mm-hmm. They do work. You might still smell stuff, but you're not smelling as much stuff. It's like 10%, yeah. It's different, but that's a difference, yeah. And then finally, oh, go ahead. I'm sorry, yeah, but even because even if it's leaking and some of the air is transferring, part of the thing is your protection from other people, they're wearing a mask, is that their breath is not going out towards you. It's not being expelled at great distance. It's going in this little cloud around them more than it's getting projected in different directions as they speak and talk and breathe. Which is important for considering how viral transmission takes place. Is somebody just spitting into your face or is it just general stuff in the air, but less of it? It still reduces the amount of it that gets into the air. And then finally, we've asked previously on the show about mixing and matching vaccine doses and now there have been a few studies actually starting to look into this. And they seem to work fine. And at least with the Pfizer, one Pfizer dose first followed by AstraZeneca, there are no significant side effects. Everything seems to work just great. There is a researcher actually embarking on doing a full comparison of the 12 different combinations of vaccines that are currently available. So Johnson and Johnson and an AstraZeneca or the Moderna and a Pfizer or the various combinations to see how they all work. But so far, although limited, the studies seem to suggest they're effective and they don't harm you. Mixing and matching is not bad. Great, and it could actually be beneficial because you're getting potentially different bits of things. You know what? When the time comes for my booster, just go ahead and mix up a vat of jungle juice vaccine for me and I'm good. Take it, whatever it needs. Whatever I need. Do any of you have any COVID stories for this week? I guess I do. I guess I could jump to one of the other stories I've got. It's a population based study that was published in JAMA. It's not a COVID story, but it is a vaccine story. Cool. They found that flu vaccination during pregnancy does not lead to an increased risk of adverse early childhood health outcomes. So pregnant people are not more susceptible to acquiring influenza infections in the first place. They are at an increased risk of severe illness and complications if they do get the flu during pregnancy. For this reason, all pregnant people are advised to receive a flu shot each year. However, only 36% of pregnant people are getting the shot. Because people are concerned. Yes. I think my friend who was pregnant last year got a different flu shot than I did when we all got them at work. It was a different dose or something, but there was a slight difference in what was administered to her. They do have a variety of different flu shot formulations. They even have the nasal mist flu inhalant. So there are a variety. She could have asked for a very specific formulation also. Yeah, but yeah, I think the interesting thing is the question is, you're doing risk benefit analysis, right? You could get the flu and then that would put you and your baby at huge risk. And the question is, how much of a risk is it going to be to do this flu shot? And we're more afraid of the flu shot because it's this pharmaceutical thing. It's man-made, it's not, and there are a lot of reasons why people might have fear. Well, and it's when you're doing cost benefit analysis, you're 100% sure you're getting the shot if you say you're gonna get the shot, but you're not 100% sure you're gonna get the flu if you don't get the shot. And I think that's where people's brains go, I'll take the risk, even though- I haven't had the flu in years. It's not a true cost benefit analysis because the potential cost of getting the flu is far higher. Yeah. Yeah, as long as it's- And that's what the study is, right? Yeah. But that's the thing is as long as it's safe. So there have been, there were anti-Nazia medications that were given in the past that led to birth defects. There've been missteps in the medical community towards pregnant women because, like we discovered just last week, women don't get studied. No. For the most important piece of, what's the most important thing to evolution survival? Reproduction. Reproduction, and it's like massively understudied. So it's no wonder that there have been these horrible, horrendous missteps in the past. Dr. DeShane Fell, she's an Associate Professor Epidemiology and Faculty of Medicine at University of Ottawa, went out on this study, 28,000 children from birth up to an average age of about three and a half years in this study. Yeah, I don't know that this has even been properly studied before. That she looked at all the immune-related health conditions, asthma, ear infection, other types of infections, non-immune related things, neoplasm, sensory impairment, non-specific health needs, emergency department visits, hospitalizations didn't increase. End of this, it's perfectly fine, has no health effects on the children, other than getting them through your pregnancy without having to deal with influenza. So, Dr. Fell has now also begun this sort of work on the COVID-19 vaccines. This is the thing, they're not allowing pregnant women to take the vaccine in many cases. I know several that got it. You do know several? Okay. Yes. Well, it was a big question back in December because they hadn't tested it on pregnant women at that point in time. But then over the next couple of months, data did come in that suggested it was okay. And so, I think it's become more of a- It's shifting. Yeah, it's been shifting. And it's been recommended more and more because they're starting to see antibodies. Yeah. In the, Bambini? In the fetus, yes. In the fetus, yes. So that's exactly it. Not only, so far has the research shown it's safe for pregnant women and their baby, but also, yes, that it will protect the newborn and the mother from COVID. Yeah. Protect your children. Protect yourself, protect your children. Yeah. The unborn and Bambininis, they don't actually get the shot themselves. You do, they never have to. That's even better. You're feeding them, you're pumping them full of beneficial bacteria. You're giving them their microbiomes. Give them the antibodies too. Just push it all through. Yup. It's all for the Bambininis. Is that what you said? The Bambininis? Bambininis, oh no, Bambininis. Bambam, Bambam! So they'll actually have, they'll actually get any babies born to vaccinated pregnant mom then has these antibodies. They're jumping the line from all the zero to 12 year olds who can't get the shot yet. Yeah. And it's gonna be protective to them when they're in the most sensitive phase as they're babies, right? They need to be protected. Yeah, the newborn babies don't have an immune system. Basically, they're actually viral loads. Actually, they've got a lot of virus in them is what they've got. They've got very little microbiome and immune system stuff going on. Protect the Bambininis. This is This Week in Science. Thank you for joining us for another episode. If you love the show, head over to twist.org and click on our Patreon link. Our Patreon link will take you to our Patreon community where you can choose to support twists, $10 or more a month. And we will thank you by name. At the end of the show, you'll also get some fun gifties. We have fun stickers and t-shirts and other things depending on your level of support. And you'll get to join our Discord, which is poppin' right now, I do have to say. So if you wanna really, really be a part of this community and help TwistGrow, help support our weekly endeavor to educate and discuss science, please support us on Patreon. We can't do this without you. We thank you for your support. And as we come back right now with more This Week in Science, it is time for Animal Corner. Where? Where? Buy a pet, build a pet, no pet at all. If you wanna hear about this animal, she's your mom. Except for giant pamphlets grown in an off-road corner. What you got, blur? Well, you tell me, do you want puppies or hunger? Oh, wow, what if I don't want to? I'd rather go hungry than have a puppy. Okay, great. So let's talk about hunger. So I definitely suffer from hunger. It is the phenomena when you are so hungry that you want to destroy. And so new research shows that humans are not the only ones who can turn irritable and aggressive between meals. This is a finding from University of East Anglia, which shows that hanger behavior in male Drosophila meganogaster, melanogaster, or fruit flies will get hangry during increased prolonged periods of food deprivation. They grew more combative the longer they went without food to a point. But after 24 hours, the Coralson behavior plateaued. He just got too tuckered. And so hanger behaviors in previous studies from Oxford have shown that potentially there are other distantly related animals to humans that show this quote unquote hangry behavior. But the fruit flies, this is something very interesting. It shows this very kind of baseline understanding of this behavior, but why? What would the benefit be of getting aggressive when you're hungry? So you would expect potentially that being hungry would make you weaker. You'd be weakened if you'd be deprived of nutrients. You're just, I can't go on anymore. I'm so hungry. And then if that was the case, you would expect that hungry individuals would be less likely to win fights. And that also means that in turn, they would be less aggressive during those times because they're gonna lose. So talk about cost benefit analysis. Knowing you're probably gonna lose, you're not gonna start a fight. At least if you're an animal, who's that? Anyway, on the other hand, hungry individuals might be more motivated to fight or compete for food, which would lead to aggression or anger. And so that is what it looks like researchers saw in the fruit flies. Hungry male fruit flies displayed more hostility towards each other. They were more likely to aggressively lunge at each other and to swat at each other with their legs, which is called fencing. And they spent more time defending their food patches. They also found that increased aggression in food-deprived males could potentially result from a desperado effect, which means that individuals of poor condition... I'm just imagining. Put down a cowboy hat. Yes. Desperado. It's called everybody partner. Yes. So what it actually means is that individuals of poor condition engage in fights when they are likely to lose against what I talked about a second ago, because they cannot gain fitness by not engaging at all. So basically they're going for broke. But in the course of this study, it would appear they just get more aggressive as they get more hungry. The actual specific motivation is still unclear. They figured this out by scanning vials of male fruit flies, a total of 16 or 32 times. Each scan lasted three seconds. And in each scan, the observer recorded the number of lunges and tussles and the numbers of flies chasing fencing and occupying the food patch. So they were able to see these guys in the little vials. So other studies have shown that poor food conditions early in life have the opposite effect on aggression. So flies that grow up experiencing limited food are less aggressive as adults. So not only is the availability of food impacting their behavior, but when in their life cycle, they experience food scarcity, also impacts their behavior. So... Yeah, I'm just thinking about what it is that leads to these fruit flies deciding to attack each other. I'm angry, I'm gonna be aggressive. Is it gonna get them food? Maybe not, but they're gonna get aggressive anyway. Yeah, so for me personally, I always assumed my hanger had to do with just a reduction of resources in my body and my body's sudden inability to measure my emotions. That's what I would usually say, but a fruit fly... Yes. Does a fruit fly measure their emotions? Great question. So I think, yeah, that's really the question here, right? Is are we different from fruit flies and that because we have such a more complex nervous system, there's so much more going on in our brain that we essentially just have processes shorting out when we're low on food and that's why we get all angry? Or is it based in this very far back kind of tree of life response, which is I'm hungry. I need to defend my space and get more food and I need to do that through aggression. I mean, that makes sense. It really does make sense to get resources, especially when there's competition, you have to be more aggressive about it and you're not gonna get anything if you don't try. And so the more scarce energy is, resources are in your system, your body is going, okay, you gotta fill the tank. Go do it. So there you go, hunger. It has a basis in the evolutionary family tree. We're all just like fruit flies. Give me some rotting fruit. I would rather, well, I mean, I guess that would be like wine, but that'd be fine. That's not gonna keep me from being hungry. That leads to a different issue. Then you're drunk and hungry. Yeah. And that'll all happen faster because you don't have any food in your stomach. Yeah. Anyway, let's talk about puppies. Okay, puppy time. So I brought this story, not because it's a huge kind of breakthrough in science, but because it is related to conversations we've had a few times over the past few months in relation to dogs versus wolves and their response to humans. And I thought this was an interesting new piece in that puzzle. So this was from the University of Arizona, looking at social skills in puppies and in adult dogs, and then also in wolves to kind of see what's happening here. Is there something innate? Is there something that's learned? Is there a difference? And so they actually used dogs from the California-based Canine Companions, which is a service dog organization which serves clients with physical disabilities. They chose that because they were able to know the genetic lineage of every individual and because of the way service dogs are raised, they could do performative tests on eight-week-old puppies that had pretty much never seen a human. So all of that together was kind of the perfect opportunity to test how puppies respond to humans. So they looked at 375 of these eight-week-old service dogs. They had almost- I have to say, this sounds like a terrible job. Yeah, I'm gonna go try to give treats to puppies for my research project. Who thought of this, man? Oh boy. Emily Bray, I'm gonna come work in your lab. Yeah, so yeah, so these eight-week-old dogs had almost no interaction with humans, one-on-one interaction with humans. Humans brought food in and stuff like that, but they didn't really interact with the puppies before this. And then they were asked to perform a series of tasks to measure their social communication skills. So one of these we were just talking about, and that's why I wanted to bring this up, is they actually explain how this works. This is the one where they have two overturned cups, one has a treat in it and one does not, and they point at it. Do you remember we were talking about this and we were like, maybe they're just smelling it. Aha, I have a new piece of information on the research procedure. There is a treat taped to the inside roof of both cups, so they both smell like treats. Well done. So that was very cool. So I wanted to share that, it was very neat, good research design. So that was to ensure that they weren't just following the smell. And then in another version, the puppies watched as researchers placed a yellow block next to the cup instead of pointing to indicate where they should look for food. So this is a lot more just what's different versus following a human instruction, right? And so then in the other tasks, they wanted to see if puppies looked at human faces. And one, the researchers spoke to the puppies in dog directed speech, which is basically like baby talk for dogs, which come on, we're all, except for maybe Justin, guilty of. And then they measured how long the puppy held a gaze with that human who was talking to them. And then in the final task, it was an unsolvable task. I'm sure they got lots of pets and treats afterwards. Don't worry. They sealed a treat inside a closed container. It was impossible. And they presented it to the puppy and measured how often the puppy looked at the human for reassurance or help. So what did they find? Many of the puppies were responsive to humans physical and verbal hues, but very few looked to humans for help with their unsolvable task. What that means is just like with babies, it would appear that they are learning communication from us first before they can then provide their own communication back. So this is very similar to how human babies learn. Now, bringing in the genetics and the wolf part. So with the genetics, they wanted to look at whether the inherited genes explained the differences in the dog's abilities. And genetics explained more than 40% of the variation in puppy's abilities to follow human pointing gestures, as well as the variation in how long they engage in eye contact. So it's a lot. And it also, I will just throw in as my own anecdotal knowledge of these sorts of things is usually these service dog places are only a limited select number of purebred breeds. And so that means if they're able to find a 40% connection in genetics, even within a breed, then this is where this study gets actually really applicable to the betterment of humans, which is that you could actually potentially pick out the best future service dogs based on genetics. Oh, I thought you were gonna say the best service people. Yeah, well, we can probably do that now, honestly. But anyway, so you might be able to predict before the puppy is born, if that litter is gonna be a good set of service dog candidates because they have the right genetic background. Now, this has to be, you have to tread carefully here. I will also throw in as my own editorial piece because dog breeds are already pretty seriously inbred. So this has to be done carefully because if you are trying to breed selectively for specific genes within an already purebred population that can cause other unexpected defects. So this has to be done carefully and specifically and who knows, someday maybe there'll be some engineering involved. CRISPR, those things in there, I don't know. But anyway, so there was that. The last piece I wanted to mention is that they did also compare this to previous studies with wolves. So wolves do not search out the help of humans when they are solving an unsolvable problem. So, but with adults dogs who have spent time with humans, they are constantly asking for reassurance from their human. And so this is where they think they can kind of parse out, okay, so these puppies really seem to be born with this understanding of how to key into a human's communications, but they have to learn based on this ancestral almost wolf-like trait of not asking humans for help as they age. So this is some of the kind of squishy addition of these other research pieces in there. So still a lot to learn, but there does seem to be some innate human connection pieces in the genome of domestic dogs. The chat room is busting me up. What's that, Timmy's in the well again? Where, show me. Oh, wait, what? You want to treat first. I don't have anything on me. Can we just go to Timmy first? No, you need the treat first. Okay, let's... See, a good animal trainer. Always have something. No, a good animal trainer. Wean's a monster trainer. After a behavior is established, you less consistently give treats so that they don't know if you have them. You also can build a bridge. So you can say good girl to Lassie, and a boy, girl, girl. Yes, good girl to Lassie. Sit, Ubu, sit. And then you can give her a treat later and she knows it's coming. What's that, Timmy's in the well? Let's go, oh no, Timmy's out of the well again. How, you repelled? Wow, that's impressive. I didn't know you could... Oh, that trainer's good. Put the service in service dog. That's a good trainer. That's a good trainer. Hey everyone, this is This Week in Science. If you are interested in a cool twist sweatshirt, I'm wearing one right now. It's pretty wonderful. There's a blue fitted booby on the back and I really like it on this slightly chilly evening, springish, leading into summer. But if you're interested in one of our pieces of merchandise, head over to twist.org and click on our Zazzle link. There's a lot of fun stuff for you in there. Yes, many things help support twists and wear some fun clothing. All right, Justin, you wanna tell us a story? Oh yeah, last story of the night I got is... Turns out women's mental health has a higher association with dietary factors than does men's mental health. This is according to new research at Binghamton University, State University of New York, Lena Bedashi, Assistant Professor of Health and Wellness Studies at Binghamton University has previously published some research on diet and mood suggesting that a high quality diet improves mental health generally. She wanted to test whether customization of diet improves mood among men and women ages 30 or older. And interestingly they found that when they had the unhealthy dietary patterns, level of mental distress was much higher in women than in men, which confirmed that women are more susceptible to unhealthy eating than our men. Which, is that, that seems like something that I've just witnessed as the years have gone by that men will eat anything. I feel like this keys into the hanger conversation too because a little bit, if I eat garbage that doesn't last me to the next meal then I get hangry. Yeah, fast food, skipping breakfast, caffeine, high glycemic foods were all associated with mental distress and mature women. That sounds like a regular diet for most guys. Fruit and dark green leafy vegetables were associated with good mental health. But yeah, it is sort of interesting that the men just weren't, the mental states of the men didn't seem to be being as affected by what they ate. But that just could be because we're just all a bunch of miserable, I mean it's all over 30 men. We just might be a bunch of miserable grumps all the time anyway. And so the food is just not gonna register enough on the scale. I do have to wonder though, how much of each of these individuals, how very often, not always, very often women have the role of making food in households. Yes, there are many men that cook meals and I mean, but there is a standard in two person households, there is a standard split of household roles that while it might be shifting with some ages, it generally falls along the lines of women making food or providing the food and men, I don't know, my husband right now, every once in a while, he provides by going on Grubhub and ordering food and suddenly food is at the door and it's burgers. Whereas I probably would have made a nice meal that was well balanced and thought it through. Yeah, I just wonder about the psychological load involved in thinking about diet and where that normally falls. That said, there are many men who are interested in how their bodies work, working out, looking good and so the men's health guys who are, they're interested in their protein shakes and they're watching their diet very carefully and maybe they have a different perspective on food than on men. I was thinking about that too, about at least in America, the diet culture thing it's everywhere, but it targets women extra hard and so there is definitely a piece, especially the social media now where you can, you see the selective existence of your friends who only post their healthy meals. They don't post the disgusting McDonald's meal that they picked up on the way home or something like, you know what I mean? So there is a weird guilt complex to eating less healthy as well, which could potentially add to some of these effects. Whereas men are likely only to share the most unhealthy meal. Look at this giant steak I ate. That's wrapped in bacon, but you can't see it because it's covered in a layer of cheese, which is hidden under the sour cream, right? That's the picture we would share, but so what's interesting though is I do most of the cooking when me and my significant are together and I cook way healthier than I do when I'm just on my own. When I'm on my own, it is not even in the same, I wouldn't even plate what I eat. Yeah, it's bachelor chow. Yeah, totally. You're eating it out of the pot off the pan. But I, yeah, but I don't know. Maybe it wasn't even actually cooked. But I don't know that I'm doing a good enough job because now according to this, now knowing that there's this big link between mental health and food decay, now there's all the more reason to pay attention to what's going into the food. Yes, the food, you are what you eat, everybody. And it can affect your mood. It can affect all sorts of things. But I have a couple of stories, so I hope these last two stories make you happy. Like, well, it's not gonna make you happy, but yeah, maybe it'll give you some tips on how to live your life a little bit better. A couple of brainy studies that I wanted to bring to your attention. A new study by NIH, National Institute of Health Scientists, discovered that when you're learning something, like typing out a pattern, they apply this, they didn't study this, but they say maybe it could be applied to something like learning piano, what they call procedural memory. The doing of a procedure that if you take short breaks in between little sprints of learning, that those short breaks are important. They looked at the brain waves, the brain activity during those short break periods and found that they were quite different from when you were actually doing the learning of the procedure. When you take a short break, your brain rapidly plays back the brain activity that happened while you were learning whatever the procedure is. So you learn something and you do it and you do it and you do it, so you do it like 10 times, and then you go, okay, I'm gonna take a little break for a minute or two. During that short period of time before we do something again for a rapid burst, your brain is compressing that information and compiling it. It's running it over and over and over again, and it's not just the somatosensory cortex that's involved in that motor learning process, and that's what the researchers thought is that it was pretty much only going to be your somatosensory cortex, all the motor learning areas. They also discovered that your hippocampus is involved. They didn't think hippocampus was involved in procedural memories, but lo and behold, hippocampus is popping off and coordinating things and talking with your somatosensory cortex the whole time. And so the old idea of learning things and then sleeping on it to get the information really deep into your brain, that still works, but what they have discovered is this new method of doing short periods of learning followed by a short break, followed by another bit of learning, followed by another short break, allows your brain to actually have much better acquisition of memories. So if you're learning piano or some other instrument or maybe you wanna be like Simone Biles and just learn that vault, then you better do your round off, full in, triple back and then take a little break before you try it again. What are you supposed to do during that break? Nothing, just relax. Just nothing at all. Yes. You just do nothing. Stare at the wall. You can do, yeah, just don't do anything. You could stare at the wall. You could probably, you know, you could daydream. You could, you know, it's just, you don't do anything but you let your brain do its thing. That's the part for me. Try to do nothing. Try to do nothing. This was a really long, long time ago. We did a story. Breathing is okay, yes, Gord. We did a story about students would look over a bunch of material for an exam and then some of the students would go out drink that night and some would go off to have other activities without drinking, whatever. The ones who drank did better on the next day exam. They scored higher. And what they think the reason was is because after repeating this information, they also shut down the brain for new information because the drinking doesn't do as much memory forming. Slowed that whole process down. So the last information the brain had was the study whereas the other students might have watched movie, they were out with friends, they were doing all this other stuff. They got more information and put the brain as they slept didn't know what to lock in and what not to lock in. But drinking was sort of a barrier. It's just there's like, okay, we're gonna stop, shut it down, they're drinking again. I mean, it just means your brain's not working as well when you're drinking, but it also means if you studied something earlier, you might have learned. So I would try to do nothing. I would try to not read, not look at the phone. Don't learn anything else. No, no, do that repetition and then just sort of like eyes closed until the alarm goes off and then go back to it to try to avoid making any confusion about what the brain should be focused on committing to memory. What I think is really fascinating though is that we learn things and as we learn them, the electrochemical signals that are happening in our neurons and connecting the entire learning network are all firing, you're doing an action and all the neurons that allow that action to take place are firing, right? And then when you stop doing the action, they don't just play it back at normal speed, they fast forward it and watch it, your brain fast forwards and watches that action over and over and over and over again. It's like, okay, we're gonna repeat this over and over and over again. And so your brain is basically going through reenacting that same action just super fast when you're not doing it. Which is just fascinating that it would start, that your brain works this way. Yeah, super fast replay for learning. Oh, and for anyone who is younger in our audience who is not considering continuing to study math as they progress in school, I beg you, please continue your math education, please. Researchers looked at students 16 years and older, they were able to isolate people in the UK because at the age of 16, students can choose their further direction of study and they can focus on maths related study or non-math related study. So they could actually pinpoint students that stopped learning math at a certain point in their education. Put them under an active FMRI machine, had them watch a movie to get their brain at rest and then had them do a bunch of cognitive exercises. They were looking for differences in concentration of a neurotransmitter called GABA and they discovered that there is a change in the concentration of GABA in the frontal cortex that is indicative of how much you studied math. And not just the GABA being apparent, the GABA is related to synaptic plasticity and cognitive ability. So studying math longer led to higher GABA concentrations, higher GABA concentration was indicative of higher neuroplasticity, higher cognitive ability and low GABA was actually predictive of your math performance and your math ability over a year and a half later. So your brain, your brain is good on math. Which is really weird because our brains did not evolve for math, but math helps organize our brains and our brain responds to math in a way that influences its development. Even at kind of what you might think of as a later stage of young adulthood, right? 16, the late teens into early 20s. Maybe early hominids were physics geniuses. They were calculating the arc and velocity of projectiles as they hunted. Yeah. Yep, brains on math. Much better than brains on math, absolutely. Absolutely, from PB. From PB in the chat room pointing that out, yes. Make sure we understand we're encouraging the kids to do math. Mathematics, yes. Mathematics, what's good for you? Mathematics. Your brain will thank you later. And then because you're cognitively able and your brain's all plastic, maybe society will thank you later for continuing to study math. Maybe maths helps. I don't know. I'd like to know how maths study influences society. I would like to know how difficult a math I need to be doing to be getting the benefit. Like, does it have to be the kind of thing that makes my... By 16, you're probably past algebra one. You're at least into trigonometry, maybe. Geometry, trigonometry. Maybe into algebra two, precalculus. So is it I have to keep learning math? I can't just do the old problems that I figured out how to solve already. I have to keep taking new classes. Can you just learn an instrument? Isn't that the same area of your brain? Yeah, maybe just, yeah, you could learn an instrument as well. Learning instruments, learning languages, learning math, these things stimulate our brains. In that case, can I just listen to music? Nope, no. Stop trying to debate this with me. I'm not the one in charge. I'm just trying to find a solution that I'm... Fix it, Kiki. All right, I'll just do math. What we should find is a good, enjoyable math puzzle book. Right, you know, it's like Sudoku kind of patterns and math is involved and I'm sure math games. I don't know, at some point it can get too far. I went to some, I went to some, like the geometry class for the students who are gonna be doing some sort of creative arts. I don't know. It was basically watching movies of fractals, is what I think it was and that's, it's almost all it was. I was just gonna say, just don't do geometry, but for a completely different reason, which is that geometry is like, turn math into words. Actually, write a proof for why this is a triangle. Yeah, that's fine. You know what, here's the thing though, I do have a quick rant. My kid's geometry textbook for colleges are like 140 bucks, something crazy. Whoever wrote that book didn't invent anything. Well, we've known this information. They wrote some of the problems though. We've known this information for thousands of years. Yeah, they just wrote practice problem. It's been collected and understood. But I get it, if you invented a new math, then you can charge $140 for a textbook. No new math. My generation was experimented on with new math. And now we know. If it's not the same math people have been having for. We have touched a nerve. Thousands of years, you should not be allowed to charge students $140 for a 2,000 year old textbook. I'm sorry. The textbook's not 2,000 years old. It's material that has been interpreted for the audience with. Fresh with fresh problems that have been made to stimulate the student's mind. It's from BC. It's knowledge we had in the BCs. But you still have to teach it to the people now. My evolutionary morphology book, which was literally millions of year old information was like $300. So I hear you. No, but somebody had to compile that information. No, no, somebody. It's a process. That said, that said. I think we're done with our show. I don't think we have any more stories. No, I guess not. No, no, we don't have any more stories. Except that tomorrow is Black Cow Day. Yes, do you know what this is? I do, because I looked it up. I put that on the calendar for several years. And I never looked it up, but I finally looked it up today. It's Rupert Flood Day. Rupert Float Day tomorrow. Yeah, take a moment. Have a Rupert Float. I love your Rupert Float. It's also called a Black Cow. It's one of the few ways that I like vanilla ice cream or sassarilla. Either one of those on their own. Partner. Sassy. Either one of them on their own, no thanks. Together, amazing, amazing. Out of this world. That actually might be my little stuffy with the heartbeat thing. One of those. That's just like, ugh. So it was perfect. Yeah, I forgot that existed. Thank you, Blair. Tomorrow, indulge. Thank you all for listening to the show. I do hope that you enjoyed it. Shout outs to our team. Fada, thank you for your help with social media and show notes. Gord, thank you for manning the chat room, modding, helping me stay sane. Identity four for recording the show. Rachel, thank you for your wonderful assistance. And I would like to thank our Patreon sponsors for their generous support. Thank you to Pierre Vela Zarb, Ralph E. Figaroa, John Ratnaswamy, Kira, Carl Kornfeld, Melanie Stagman, DeCramster, Karen Tauzy, Andrei Beset, Woody M.S., Chris Wozniak, Dave Bunn, Vegard Shefstad, Hal Snyder. I try to do too many things. Donathan Styles, aka Don Stilo, John Lee, Ali Koff and Maddie Perringor, Sharma Shubhru, Don Mundus, Steven Alberon, Darryl Mychak's, Dupalik, Andrew Swanson, Fretas104, Sky Luke, Paul Ronevich, Kevin Reardon, Knudels, Jack, Brian Carrington, Matt Bass, Joshua Fury, Shana Nina Lam, John McKee, Greg Riley, Mark Hessenflow, Jean Tellier, Steve Leesman, aka Zima, Ken Hayes, Howard Tan, Christopher Wrappen, Dana Pearson, Richard, Brenton Minnish, Johnny Gridley, Kevin Railsback, Flying Out, Christopher Dreyer, Mark Masarro, Artyom Gregg Briggs, John Atwood. This profile name is hilarious in the context of some other podcast. Rudy Garcia, Dave Wilkinson, Rodney Lewis, Paul, Matt Sutter, Phillip Shane, Kurt Larson, Mountain Sloth, Jim Drapaus, Sarah Chavis, Sue Doster, Jason Olds, Dave Neighbor, Eric Knapp, E.O. Kevin Parachann, Aaron Luthan, Steve DeBell, Bob Calder, Marjorie Paul Stanton, Paul Disney, Patrick Pecoraro, Tony Steeley, Lizzie Adkins, Brian Condren, and Jason Roberts. Thank you for all of your support on Patreon. And if you would like to support us on Patreon, you can head over to twist.org and click on the Patreon link. And on next week's show, we will be speaking with researcher, Angelique Cortalls and members of her research team, Liliana Davalos and Diana Moreno-Santián about their work on bat immunity. Don't miss it. Yeah, we will be back Wednesday, 8 p.m. Pacific Time, broadcasting live from our YouTube and Facebook channels and from twist.org slash live. Hey, do you want to listen to us as a podcast? Maybe we'll you take a nice bike ride through the countryside. Just search for This Week in Science where our podcasts are found. If you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe as well. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes and links to stories will be available on our website, www.twist.org. And you can also hire Blair to be a babysitter. You can also contact us directly, email Kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com, Justin at twistmeaning at gmail.com or me, Blair, at BlairBazz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist, T-W-I-S in the subject line or your email will be spam filtered all the way into a cup that's upside down with a dog treat in it. Just be taped to the top of it. You'll never find it. And while you're looking, you can also hit us up on the Twitter where we are at twist.science at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly and at Blair's at Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you would like us to cover or address, a suggestion for an interview, a haiku that comes due in the night, please let us know. We'll be back here next week 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. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science is the end of the world. So I'm setting up shop, got my banner unfurled. It says the scientist is in. I'm gonna sell my advice. Show them how to stop the robot with a simple device. I'll reverse all the warming with a wave of my hand. And all it'll cost you is a cup of grass 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 of this week in science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That's what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just dead understand. That we're not trying to threaten your philosophy. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. I've got a laundry list of items I want to address. From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought. And I'll try to answer any question you've got. But how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour of what we say? This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. It's the after show. It's the part of the show that's after the show. The after show. Who wants to do math? Claire looks like you look convinced. I love math. What's going on over there? I do too. I want to try and figure out how to make Kai not have math anxiety. He has math anxiety. Yeah. So I think the reason that a lot of people have trouble with math is because there's a right answer, but that's exactly why I love math. It's like you're either right or you're wrong. Yeah. Like I'm gonna find it. Or you have a range of values that indicate to you that something is wrong. You didn't get it right. Yeah. I've always loved it for that. But yeah, I do think that is the anxiety that a lot of people have with it because it's impossible to know if you're right. It's not like I didn't study this enough. I can't complete this essay. Or they asked me this question about who is the president in such and such a year. And I either know that I know it or I don't. But math is there's a right or a wrong answer. And you could do a bunch of work and still get the wrong answer and not know you got the wrong answer until you get the test back. Yeah. And I think that does create a lot of anxiety around math for students. So I will absolutely recommend then unsolicited free thing you can do is go to Khan Academy. Yeah, Khan Academy is good. That is one of the, I think one of the coolest tools out there. Especially if you've got kids but it goes up pretty darned advanced actually. So that's a fun place where it's a, you're not gonna get zinged on the test but you will get to do lots of friendly practice with explanations and videos that will come up to talk through the concepts and then you get to try it out. And it makes it very, it's like having a tutor. It's basically what it is. Khan Academy, if you get kids, we get them into the maths through Khan Academy. They have everything there too. They've got all sorts of neat programming and other types of studies. Isn't it all free? Yeah, it's all free. I think that aspect of it, the making math education available to anybody. It's amazing. He is saying Pixar in a box on Khan Academy is great. Oh yeah, that would be cool. Let's see that. I'm gonna go find that right now. Oh, sets and staging. One of the things that before my, we used to try to do the next year's math during the summer. Sort of like a sneak preview. It's tough to get kids to do school stuff during the summer and it's not really fair but it does work. So then when they encounter these things, they're not completely new concepts. They've at least had a run through with it in a very casual way. I think that's important too because often it's just being confronted by something new that they don't know and it's a challenge and that unfamiliarity can cause just anxiety from the very get-go and it's a different unfamiliarity than say a book you haven't read before. Like a book you're like, oh, I can still read this or I'm learning how to write. I can write a paragraph now, that's fine. But math and new concepts in math, they're, yeah, it can be a challenge. And what the, so I'm also gonna admit that I've used it myself for significant figures was something I had to go back and look at this. Cause I'm terrible at sometimes remembering the rule for a thing, but the concept is key. Like if I get the concept of why I'm doing this thing, then I'm locked in, I'm solid. So I had to go back and go to Khan Academy to figure out significant figures, like when you stop counting the digits and doing all. And it was a really, it was like, I think a three minute video and I'm like, ah yeah, I got it again, it's locked in. Now it all comes back. Yeah, but there are a lot of things if you haven't done them for a long time. It's like, wait a minute, how did that work again? Yeah, if someone were to ask me to calculate the moles of carbon dioxide in, you know, a kilogram of air, I would be, you know, I'd be like, I gotta think about that for a minute. And what's also important to know is that you don't, I could do it for sure. You absolutely don't have to memorize everything. What you have to do is understand the concept and why and where you would use it. I have seen many, many, many times research scientists in a lab pulling up the phone just to make sure they're getting the right serial dilution or whatever it is or that they're calculating properly off of a cell count machine if they're doing the math. Just to just reference, this is what I think it is, I'm just gonna look at it real quick, look it up real quick just to see, make sure I'm using it, the right tool. Knowing that you have the tool is more than half, that's like 90% of that. And you can just look at it. Yeah, knowing you have the right tool, knowing that you can use it, I think there's also the confidence of, so for instance, you didn't remember exactly how to use the significant figures, right? When do I stop, right? But you had the confidence to know that you could figure it out and that if you refreshed your memory, you'd be able to do it. Whereas somebody with anxiety about math would question their ability to use that tool. Right, and that's why the Khan Academy was so great, is it like lays it out, not as a rule, not as a rope, not as here it is, now repeat it, now here's your quiz. Here's why we do this, here's why this is used. Here's another example, here's two more examples we're gonna throw at you in a different way that you can see it. And then once you've seen it done and understand why it is you're doing it that way, then yeah, you don't need the lesson, that was the lesson, that's it. And it was like three minutes, maybe tops, and yeah. Anyway, it's a great resource out there. It is a wonderful one, and then let's see. Daniel Yount said MIT courseware, MIT courseware, Daniel Yount is saying is good, and then Eric Knapp said there's a book called Math Doesn't Suck, that's great. I'll have to check that out for sure. If I can just get him to read a book like that, as opposed to just, no mom, what? Dana Plato, who we had on the show. Dana Plato we had on the show back at the KTVS studio. She was winning from, no, I've got the wrong, I've got the wrong, it wasn't that. Did we have Winnie Cooper on the show? Winnie Cooper, I'm sorry, I got the wrong, I tried to look at that, but I got the wrong name. That was the character name, that's not her real name. Danica McKellar, yes, Daniel Yount. Thank you, thank you, I got the wrong, I got the wrong name. Did we have Danica McKellar on the show when she wrote her math book? Yes. See, look at me, I can't even remember something like that. There's a long line coming, anyway. Did I miss that show and it was just you? I don't think so. That's me. I think we're about there, maybe not, but it was a math book that was just like, they took out all the trains and the cars moving in the airplanes and she replaced it with things that might be more familiar to a teenage girl. And just changing what the word problems were associated with made it more engaging. Yeah, yep. So there's your word, there's your problems, that's what the books cost more money for, so those are original problems. I don't know if you have to have girl specific stuff, but you could definitely make stuff more universally interesting. Yes, Blair, I think I just did slash mod for you in Twitch, thank you, Blair can post links in the Twitch. Twitch now. There's our latest newsletter. Oh yes, we have a newsletter. I just sent it. The first in a year. Almost a year, yeah. Yes, it's our annual newsletter. I changed it to say seasonal. I'd like to try them get quarterly, seasonally. Quarterly, yeah. I think quarterly, see by having a realistic goal, if you just say monthly or even, I think originally we had said weekly, which is insane. So we had originally said weekly and I think that made it overwhelming. And so I just never worked on it. But if we have a realistic goal like quarterly, I feel like I could write some content. Yes, I think yes, it's all about expectations, realistic expectations for ourselves and that our subscribers should have for us, right? We set them for people. So they're like, what is this spam? You're in my spam filter now because I didn't approve you anymore. I hope people continue to approve us. It is hard to do weekly without a staff, you're right, Gaurav, hello Gaurav, hello Melizand. We have some people coming in. You're late. That's okay, you're here. Kiki, did you know our YouTube videos has ads now? Our YouTube videos have ads now. When do they have ads? At the beginning. Old YouTube videos? Yeah. Yes. Okay. I know that, I monetize. Oh, okay. I thought, no, no, I thought there was a time a while ago that they popped out and didn't want it. Do you remember that? So that's why I was just checking. Yeah, so I turned it, I did, I had it set so that it was automatic, ads were turned on automatically anytime we posted anything. So if we went live and somebody started watching us live, they'd come into the show and then suddenly they'd have to watch an ad. And I just figured I don't need to do that. So I add, but I still add ads to the recorded videos. Blair, are you seeing it? I'm looking at the outfit, yeah. What? Somebody posted the original, the new intern. Yeah, so what you need to know is that I think I went out after this and that is a dress. That is a like clubbing dress and I was wearing like knee-high heeled boots with that. There's the ad, there's the ad, oh, I can't copy it here. Oh gosh, I used to be younger too. Yeah, I'm young, so young. Oh, look at that outfit. Yeah, that was a clubbing outfit for sure. I've thrown away all of my clubbing clothes. Blair, you like clubbing? Yeah, man. I just thought you went bowling. No, when I started this show, I was in my early 20s. You were young, it's true. I was gallivanting all around San Francisco to the wee hours of the morning. As you do. Making bad decisions. As you do when you're young in San Francisco. Yes, I love that new intern works at a zoo likes hippos. Yeah. And this must have been right after the babysitting game. Love that new intern works at a zoo likes hippos. Yeah, that's very funny. So. Worked out part time as Kai's babysitter. You missed how in the chat Grouchy Gamer was under the impression I was Kai's babysitter and you put me on mic and it went well. And so I hated her. Then I was going into more. More Blair, your babysitter. We need to make a babysitter new intern likes hippos. To the zoo. Oh, my goodness. Is the species Nephalingus maliburensis? I think I said that right. Anyway, it's you're asking me. What is the proper pronunciation? So these guys, they have some really interesting habits in their copulation and first of all, the female is cannibalistic towards the male. Right. Pretty much always post the copulation. And so they found recently that these guys have been purposefully castrating themselves at the end of their copulation session on purpose. Yes. This remains one of my favorite stories ever. There's a few different purposes. This is from episode to get a look. This is from episode three hundred fifty five. This is, I think, maybe my third episode ever. Yeah, I was like, you can come and do it. You can get you get to do like one story. And then as I remember before that, you said you can place a couple of things in the twist science Facebook group. And then I did that. You're like, OK, do you want to just bring a headline next week? It's like, OK, OK, do you want to bring a story next week? Yes. Let me tell you something. Wait, the closet would not be eaten. The second would be something that's actually pretty popular in arthropod species and a bunch of different ones where they actually will plug up the female so that other males cannot have access to her. And so they're the only possible father. I love how you're trying to get all the sex stories in. Generations, you're like, I'm on the air. I'm going to talk about invertebrate sex. I mean, if I really got myself on the back a little bit, I shot for it. I took my shot, man. I did not. You're like, I think I think I get this twist. I get this twist thing. I think I know what's appropriate. I shot for the moon. Will there be a This Week in Science Khan Academy pairing like a fine wine? That would be nice. Maybe this week in This Week in Science on Khan Academy. This week, we're learning about decimals. Oh, yeah, right, Arun, Laura. It wasn't traumatic insemination. That is the other surprising thing. Well, we are looking at, I think, her third episode. That was probably the first one. I think the very first story I brought was about eye, eye fingers. I still don't know. Eye, eye, eye, eye fingers. It's the little the nocturnal lemurs, but their long middle finger has an extra knuckle and they tap, tap, tap, tap to find bugs. And they have what was it? It's like extra cold. Like there's no temperature regulation in their finger or something like that. I don't know. I could find it. Eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye. If I'm at all close, I'm proud of myself for remembering a science story from a decade ago. I'm impressed, although I'm sure those stories, they were before you went to Israel. So you were actually maybe sleeping. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah, that whole section is a blur. Yeah, yeah, not remembering any of that. Yeah, no, I remember those first ones because I was going to your house and so I was very nervous always. I was like going to the boss's house. Going to her house. What? What? And I'm like, I got a kid. I don't know what's going on. I'm just trying to do this show. Let's have let's have science fun. Let's talk about science and hope that people want to watch. This is cool. Oh, my God, I have to send this link on Pixar in a box to Kai. I think he's going to love it. Oh, my God, I love looking at old episodes of twists. So what something I've been doing recently to to help with SEO and internal linking of the website. But it's also really fun is going through and finding episodes from 10 years ago and episodes from last year to post them on our on our on our website when the new episodes are posted. It's like, oh, this was this week. Did you know that 10 years ago this is what we were talking about? And so I've been listening to all these old shows from 2011 pre Blair. And yeah, they've been really fun. And they're all just an hour long. Well, there was a few points in time when we were in a studio where there were shows of before and an after show. Yep, that was so after we had to get we got kicked off the air quite often because somebody else wanted to do their show. We talked our talk. We got it all out there. Oh, Aran Lore is looking back at Blair's old topics. Three fifty four, you talked about bower birds. Right. When twist minutes, minions used to get together. Oh, I love the the twist minion, the minion chats that Ed brought together. Right. Those were great. That was awesome. Yeah, I miss that. I know. Ed was oddly it was also my in the back of my head, always most of the stories I was talking to Ed still. I was like, I always had this idea that I was telling Ed the story for like a lot of years because we did the twist meaning hangout and we would talk for hours and hours and hours about stuff then. And so and so I had this weird feeling like I was still in that conversation when I jumped into this show, because there was some points when I was we were doing more hours of that hangout than we were doing of the show. Yeah, because you could. Yeah. Yeah, we didn't have anybody to say no. Right. No, we have to stop talking now. Yeah, all sorts of good things. I've got yawns. I've been yawning. I think Blair's voice has changed, Gaurav. It definitely has. Yeah, it is your voice and your presentation has matured. It's also I when I watch myself physically talk. This is this is something so intricate, but I got invisible line, right? And so the way that I hold my face and the way that I talk has changed as a result of moving my teeth around. Right. It's pretty crazy to do that as an adult and have them move as much as they did. It was it was pretty wild because like if you're if you're like 13 and you get braces, then your voice is already changing and maturing at a rapid pace anyway. So it's probably not as noticeable. But yeah, I noticed a pretty big difference. I'm going the other direction. I had Blair. I had not. I had braces as a teenager. And I, of course, threw away my retainer very shortly after getting rid of the braces themselves. And so now my teeth are like, let's see if we can go back to the position that we were once in once upon a time. So I'm going to slowly go back to maybe facial movements that I had as a child. Yeah, I think though it's the full cycle, full circle of life. We'll see how long it lasts, but I still wear my retainer every night. And it's probably because I paid for it myself. Yes. I mean, as an adult, you made the choice to do the end as a line. And so you're like, I'm going to keep this. Yeah. And it's amazing when you don't wear your retainer for just a little while, your teeth are like suddenly you put it in and you're like, ah, that's not quite right. Yeah, I will occasionally skip a night. And it, yeah, it hurts to put them back in afterwards. Yeah. Oh, yeah. If you found your retainer now, I found it trying to get back in. God, and if you did, you might not be able to get it back off. And then I'd be in pain. I don't think that would be a great idea at all. So I hope I never find it. And you just blow it off, put it back in. That's right. That's what you do, right? Yikes. Blow it off. Human teeth are a mess, but part of the reason they're a mess is we're not supposed to keep them all. That's true, too. The expectation is we're supposed to lose some. Yeah, I have too many teeth, too many teeth. Do you have your wisdom teeth, too? Oh, yeah, I've got a little look at this little jaw and it's crammed full of teeth. Oh, my God. You had braces, but you didn't have your wisdom teeth out. That's so funny. That's a weird. They weren't like there was nothing wrong with them. They came in, everything came in correctly. And so the the orthodontist said that we could pull teeth. And I was like, I don't want to pull teeth. Why would you pull teeth? And they're like, well, I would make it easier for the orthodontia. And I was like, no, I was not excited about getting braces in the first place. And then so I didn't make it easy on the orthodontist. Like, no, you're not going to pull teeth. You're going to get it done before I finish graduating because I am not going to college with braces. So these are the things that you need to do. He was like, OK, this is what's going to happen. That's it. Yeah, my wisdom teeth came in. I just find. Look at what's happening here. Hi, Sadie. Hi. She's sitting up in this office chair. She's like, hi. Hello. Is it bedtime yet? Are you going to give me treats this snack time? Hi, Sadie. My cat has been hanging out down by my feet, looking really cute and rolling over and showing me her belly. I don't know what she wants. The pets she wants. And you had an extra tooth. That is amazing. Huh. And then you had it pulled. Wow. The dentist was excited. Man, too bad, Gord. That would have made you psychic if you kept it. What? Just how do you I would never want my extra tooth pulled like the one that nobody has. Like, that's got to have magical powers, right? Yeah, right. Exactly. That's why the dentist wanted it. The dentist is like, I'm going to take this and add this to my box of magical teeth. The dentist wanted your magical tooth power. Our lawyers came in at a weird angle. That's what wisdom teeth usually do. Because our jaws are not meant to have all the teeth in them that we have. And so it's everything's jam packed in there. I do love those pictures of kids' skulls with like all the teeth going up. So gross. Into the upper. Oh, my God. Brian showed me that recently. I've never seen it. It was so gross. It's it's horrifying, but so. Just fascinating. And it's like one of those things where you're like, I got to look at this more. Really? This is weird. What are you talking about? What's going on? Has teeth growing into a thing or what? Huh? Are you doing it or am I doing it? I can do it. I don't want to see it. I just wanted to explain. You do. I don't want to know. I really don't want to see. Yes, you do. Here, I'm screen sharing. Are you finding it already? Yeah. Yeah, well, there it is. Yeah. Sure. Blair is sharing. It's it makes you on a bar. I don't I don't I'm I have a very strong stomach. Great. But this makes you on a bar. You think it's so cool. Like, look at look at this. All those teeth. You have a jaw of teeth. What is this creature? That would have been. That is a child. Oh gosh, that's terrible. I feel so sad for that little people. It makes you on a bar. There's so many teeth in our heads. Why are they already there? Why don't they come after? Why are they preloaded like this? Well, I mean, wouldn't you want them preloaded? No, it's great. I want my hormones to tell my body that I need more and then build more. That's what I want. Like, so this is my question. Does an elephant gets four sets of teeth? Those aren't all in their skull. Well, I thought they only got one. What do you mean? I thought they were the other way. I thought they had four. They get four sets. And they don't have them all in their skull. I mean, how could they? They're huge. They just grow from the back. One tooth. It's it's this big is one tooth and they lose their teeth. Yeah. Multiple times. What? Yes. Well, I miss I miss I remember. I don't could you imagine? I thought they had I thought they were had as an elephant. I thought they had teeth for life. I'm going to unless I've been taught a grave myth for many decades. I mean, I had no reason to know it one way or the other at any point. An elephant goes through six sets of teeth in a lifetime. I'm not seeing anything pre stacked. In any elephant skulls that I'm looking at online. As one set wears down from grinding and chewing plant material, the next step pushes pushes through after an elephant's last set of teeth wears down, they lose the ability to chew and digest food. So that's the reason I know that is because that's actually what an elephant graveyard is. So and the reason elephant graveyard exists is because they're usually like swampy areas and that's where the old elephants without teeth go because the food is mushy. Interesting. So then they all just happen to die there because they're old. How do I? What do I search for this elephant teeth? Yeah, I was looking for me skull elephants. Yeah, nothing I'm seeing is showing them in the skull like humans. They develop from the back and move forward. OK, that makes sense. Elephants have only molars with four at a time and a molar in each jaw. They are wide and flat in shape. Two elephants fart. That's not what I asked. Google, you're way off. Google, this is what you want to know. They grow new teeth. Yeah. How fascinating. I want to know how many different organisms grow new teeth and how many have them pre-loaded pre-loaded because humans are that's crazy looking. The way humans are a bit different than maybe not different than other primates, but possibly. I think that's fascinating. I never really considered that before. Wait, what? What? No, primates also have the second set of teeth. They have baby teeth also. Yeah. I'm just looking at a bunch of different skulls and they don't seem to have. Let's see, young male male. I'm really tempted to Facebook message my college professor right now. OK, we've got a question. Wait, is it? Eric Napp, yeah, sharks are pre-loaded. Wait, we're not. We're not saying that those photos of child skulls were normal. That's not what you're thinking. Yeah. No, no, that can't be right. Are they not normal? No, that's like a disease or something. No, I don't think so. To have them fully formed with the baby teeth under them? OK, here's skeptics guide. Not where they were. Maybe they are. Kids skull as their baby teeth get pushed out and their adult teeth are coming in. Yeah, I mean, they're in there and then they get pushed out. I guess they've got to be, yeah, I guess they have to be. Yeah, it's a phase. It's a phase. No wonder they're crying. Oh, but no, those are like, those aren't even Bambinini, little Bambinini. These are like, yeah. Children's. I've always thought that losing your teeth and getting new teeth is one of the six to twelve. Just kind of most animalistic things we go through in child development. All right, it's really, it's like, OK, your teeth are going to fall out. You're going to chew on things and then another tooth is going to come in and that's normal. 30% of children end up with two rows of teeth before the primary teeth come out. Two rows? Yeah. So they've got extras preloaded. Yeah. So, Gord, maybe if you had pulled other teeth, you would have had more teeth ready to come out. Maybe they just, they was, I don't know. Hmm. 30% is enough where it's, that's a, that's a big proportion. It's not a majority, but it is a, that's a significant proportion. Yeah, three sets of teeth. It's a lot. So the thing is, as we live longer, it would make sense, it would make sense to have a third round of teeth. However, we're never going to get them unless we implant them or whatever, right? We're going to have to use medical technology. We're going to have to use technology to get the third set. That's called dentures. Dentures or actually regrowing or like actually growing teeth. Like, that might even be a possible thing, right? But evolution cannot take care of this for us now because our technology is in some ways, hampering technology, hampering evolution from being able to keep up with the other adjustments that we've been making. It's not hampering. It's just, we don't have to make other adjustments. Yeah. Right? Because we have technology. But that's kind of what I mean. Like also like, Yeah. Like eyeglasses, diabetes, this is like a whole bunch of diseases that are going to be perfectly represented in populations that they might not have been if natural selection had been sort of taking on. But then there's also things like, maybe living longer would have eventually given us those freaks with a third set of teeth would have taken over. Maybe. Not much has changed. I mean, if you can chew food for longer in your life than somebody else, this is a survival benefit, right? You don't go to the swamp to eat the mushy food and then get stuck and die in the swamp. I mean, our technology has given us non-recyclable baby food packets that we can eat as we get older. Non-recyclable. What's the John Oliver phrase? I don't know if you invented it, but wish cycling? You did this whole segment on all the things people put into a recycling that are totally not recyclable. Yeah. And all the things that say that they're recyclable that are totally not recycled. I just started subscribing to a new service here called Ridwell, and I hope that it's more than wish cycling is supposed to be able to take, they take away things that aren't as easily recyclable, that the recyclers don't recycle. So it's like plastic bags and plastic films, like that plastic film that covers the top of your salsa container. And then they have other bags, they'll take away batteries and they do styrofoam and other stuff. I don't know. I'm hoping that what I'm doing is helping as opposed to the wish cycling that I was doing because I wanted it to be recycled. Yeah. And then there's this whole question about where like where those plastics end up, you know. Yeah. Some of those recycling centers might be in foreign countries. Some of those captains might be like, you know what, if we just stop halfway on load and turn around, we can pick up another. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think the big step though, and I think the real progress will be made if we can regulate and get government to stop the construction of new plastic plants. If we can regulate corporations and businesses to use less plastic or to only use certain kinds of plastic that are recyclable in their packaging, because it doesn't seem like consumer interest is changing that. No, but neither is the corporate interest, like they're the ones making it. So we're the ones buying it, they're the ones making it that you blame everybody. But here's what, here's actually the sorts of things that we could be doing sooner. We have all this, like you were talking about a Grubhub or a, you know, the Amazon Fresh or the whatever the food delivery businesses that have been booming in the pandemic. Why not like start setting it up like the old, like does anybody remember the milk man? Nobody remembers, nobody knows what I'm talking about. But the milk man used to be a guy who drove a truck, like he had the post office truck, he also had the milk truck. And the milk man would drop off the glass bottles, but importantly, at the same time, you would pick up the old bottles. He didn't just throw out the old milk bottle, the milk man came in and picked it up. They would pick it up and take it away, yeah. They would take it away, cleaned it. Yeah, so. And they do that in different areas with like soda bottles or you know, you go to the store and you take your Coca-Cola bottles, you return the Coca-Cola bottles and then they'll let you get another bottle of Coca-Cola, right? But the first one is you pay a deposit for that bottle and then you have to, yeah, but you have to bring it back. This was the. And we've separated these things here. Yeah, I experienced that in Denmark before where you would get a case of beer and like a milk carton type thing and you would pay for the extra for the bottles and then when you turned in those bottles, you turned them in like you just put them back in the thing when they were empty and I assume they just got washed, is what I figured that's the only way that makes sense. Maybe they get melted down and turned back into bottles again. I assumed they get washed. Maybe I don't know what happened after that. The bottles probably get washed. But you got, yeah, you got your money back when you turned them in and it was just a, seemed like a very smart way of doing it. Yeah, I think it's interesting there are some places like Daniel Yant is saying in Tulsa and they knew how to do recycling. Oklahoma City, they have no clue how to do it. And like here in Portland, recycling and garbage is divvied up to like, there's a number of different companies that are responsible for it and nobody's really responsible for it. So I don't, it's a very inefficient system. I think I understand why we don't anymore but you know, when I was a kid, we separated out paper and plastic. And I feel like that potentially could have reduced the number of the amount of this wish cycling that you're talking about. Also like, when I was a kid, you had to practically wash containers before they went in. You had to really rinse the heck out of them before they were gonna go into that recycling bin. And I feel like people don't do that anymore. And if there's food in there, even if it's just a little bit of food, it'll often end up trashed. Yeah, but I don't think people know that though. Yeah. You know, yeah, I think people don't understand how the entire process works. And so they treat recycling like the garbage as opposed to it's part of this process. We are responsible for the things that contain the products that we're purchasing. Neural, neural. I wash the containers too, Gaurav. All plastic, all plastic goes back to the manufacturer. Why not? Yeah. You have to come pick it up. You have to deal with this. You deal with it. You have to either reuse it or bury it on site of your business. I mean, well, what could we do? So to make that happen, say I go to a Fred Meyers, you go to a Safeway, wherever it is you buy your stuff, right? Maybe there's a box you could, I mean, do we get a box and send the Frito-Lay chips back to Frito-Lay? No, no, no, no. Do we take that chip packaging back to Fred Meyers or Safeway and then when Safeway gets a new shipment, they just trade? No, no, yeah, it's just raw output. Put this much plastic out into the environment, into the ecosystem, into the grocery stores, into your packaging and all your things. You have to take that much back. You have to deal with that much coming back. You have to have your own recycling plant that collects that much that you put out, you need to get it back. Or just stop using plastic. But what's the good alternative? Like, you know, it's also the other thing is when you see people get away from plastics, oh gosh, it sucks. It depends. Some of it's really good. Some of it's really terrible. They need to improve that. But I think the emphasis should be on making it the responsibility of those building with plastics, packaging in plastics for the convenience so they can earn the money on it to take care of it. There's lots of places we can't get rid of plastics. Like I know somebody mentioned people with disabilities who need certain things, but also like the entire healthcare industry. There's so much disposable plastic in healthcare and you're not gonna get rid of that. And you know what? I'd rather live longer and I get that. Like that is how healthcare works. But also, there's lots of places we don't have to have plastic. And so I think that's really the, it's not like, oh, well they have it, so who cares? It's like, no, they have to have plastic there. So let's get rid of it everywhere else. I'm also totally against it. Totally against the use of plastic. Just refill the bottle and use it several times. No, don't do that. Why? That's what I do. I don't laugh for you. Cold water is not, no, if you drink, no, you can refill your bottle as fine. I read a scientific study when I was in high school, when I would use the same plastic water bottle. This is before like Nalgene's and stuff, right? So I would use that thing for like two weeks. And in my chemistry class, we read a whole paper about how those things leach in inhibitors. Yeah, and how it can affect your fertility and stuff. So that was, that's because you showed up, we covered that before you joined the show. We talked about that big length on the show before you joined. Otherwise, you'd have already known that, gosh, this show would be something. Justin, you're misaging me right now because that was when I was in high school. So that was before, that was, yeah, that was a long time ago. We were probably doing the show. You probably were. You probably were in the show. But I don't, I'm just saying, I don't know about your timeline. I'm pretty sure that we talked about that story that you're talking about, the researcher, the woman who brought this all forward. We definitely talked about that on the show. When it was new. I remember, I remember talking about that on KTVS back in the studio. Well, it would have been KTVS for sure because this is probably, yeah, this is probably 2002. No. We were at KTVS then. I wasn't, I wasn't there yet. Yeah, so Justin, I predate you, so there you go. This story might have predated Justin. Yeah, this was early days in high school for me. The moment, the moment player finds out how old Justin and KTVS we are. Shh, shh, shh, shh. Shh, shh, shh. No idea. It's fine. I'm young. What do I keep saying? I'm as young as I'm ever gonna be. You know, the microplastics situation is not good. This is true. But yeah, there's a lot that can be done. I am happy that people are working to make a difference but it isn't happening yet. And I don't know, I just think more needs to be done. So, yeah, I think microplastics will be our, microplastics will be our legacy as a species. Okay, the one lesson that we have learned is it can't be the responsibility of the end user. It doesn't work. You need to have, you need to have, how else, how many times do we have to keep explaining this? We have to have those doing the polluting be accountable and responsible for the pollution that they create. And this is the argument for the fossil fuel companies and the propaganda that they have been spitting out which shifts the blame the way the narrative they tell shifts the blame to drivers and people who use the gas. They're like, oh, but it's not our fault. We're just providing a product to people who want it. Nevermind that they've worked to get legislation in place to give themselves kickbacks and make it easy to sell their fossil fuels. And yes, all of this, the narrative is it's the end user and the responsibility. Yes, we all have a responsibility to play but in the grand scheme of things it's gotta go back to the source. Solve the problem at the source, right? So I would encourage anyone interested in this conversation to look into the story of stuff because that's specifically what this is about is how there's this false narrative that you have to go above and beyond but really society is supposed to change so that we are comfortable within it. It's not to one person to care. So the metaphor they use is like you're meant to be this person swimming upstream buying reusable things, buying eco-friendly products not giving your money to places that are not eco-friendly. Understanding exactly what the little triangles and the numbers of the plastic what all of them mean and knowing how to use that appropriately. Right, but in reality, they should be turning the river around to run the correct way so you can coast down the river in the correct direction. That should be the way it's supposed to work but the reason that doesn't happen is because there are powers that be that have a lot to gain by not doing that. That have gained and want to continue to gain. Yeah, yeah. And so it's not only do we have to convince those people but we have to convince the people that are in their pockets that it's the right thing to do too which is also difficult. Yeah, especially since we don't have a representative democracy. So there we go. Look, the story of Stuff Project there is a 21 minute video on YouTube that is totally doable and they have a great looking webpage. And then there's a couple other things from them. So the other thing there's a follow-up video called the story of change, which I love which is all about how to be a change maker and in it it explains how expecting the same actions from everybody is not relevant or appropriate and you can figure out what kind of change maker you are. You might be somebody who's upfront protesting, demanding legislation or you might be somebody that is providing service to someone else to free up their time to go do that, right? And so everybody has a different way to find how they are a change maker. And then on the webpage there's like quizzes you can take to figure out what kind of change maker you are and stuff like that. So it's great, I love it. It's cool. There's also a book, the story of Stuff that you can read the book. Yeah, Story Stuff, that's a good project. This is kind of like on the side of I'm blanking on the climate, the climate change group that they give just solutions, project draw down. So this is kind of like the consumption side of presenting things in a very solution oriented way, getting you aware of things. Yeah, there are some good groups out there. Hopefully we can all make change as a result. Take action. Host a screening, there's a movie. Should we host a screening? That'd be fun, what do we have to do? That'd be very fun. Ooh, they have a bunch of movies. We can screen any of the movies. That'd be fun, maybe that's what we could do for part of our watching. That would be very fun though. I know. Be very serious. I want to have more fun. Things that go boom are rather convincing Thunder Beaver. Well, we can wait for the Pentagon report and then watch all of the, if they release more videos. The internet explode. I sent Kiki two videos today, Justin. I should send them to you too. You've been bumping some of the UFO videos. It was very interesting from a physicist. Some of it was like what you were talking about though, Justin, about different camera angles and some of it was like the, not necessarily the movement of the object, but the movement of the camera. Cause you have it, yeah. Cause you also have a camera, you're on a plane moving with a camera that's tracking an object that appears to be, and then that object can be moving. So yeah, your sense of perception there is. Yeah, I watched one of the videos that was interesting. Yeah, probably that one, right? The other one I really liked was, I guess there was a video that came out of a pyramid that was flashing in the sky. But it also turns out that a lot of night vision binoculars and binoculars have triangular focus. And so if it's out of focus, then all light looks like little triangles. And so he was even able to find three of the triangles were a constellation. He could actually identify what stars they were based on their arrangement. And then he took his like monocular out and he took it out of focus and it looked exactly the same. And then he even said that the blinking was consistent with the blinking pattern of a Boeing like 737 or something like that. The blinking looked like a plane to me. Yeah, so he said it was a plane traveling away from you and it was a night vision monocular that was out of focus. And that was it. And so my problem is like, why aren't these videos labeled? Cause this is the conversation I had with Brian tonight was we took the dog for a walk and I was telling him about this. And I was saying like, why is the Pentagon releasing these things? Or why even, why are they releasing them? Why did they think their UFOs if just knowing how cameras work could resolve this issue, right? Like how do they not know that? And his response was they know they just didn't go out of their way to label this stuff that they released to the public. So they didn't exactly like release it, release it to the public straight away. It was like that declassified because of those reasons, it's nothing. And then other people pulled it out, made it into a big to-do about it. People love big to-dos. But you know, there are a lot of eyewitnesses without these videos of things. And then what's sort of interesting is my 14 year old was pointing out the other day. One of the earliest, the earliest report before Roswell was this guy who said who described something moving around erratically as if you had taken a saucer and skipped it across water. Now I don't know who skipped saucers, like the little dish that goes under a teacup across water, like I don't know who's ever done and why he would do that. In a pinch, he tried to describe the thing as moving erratically like this. And then after that, everything was saucer shaped UFOs. He's like, I never said it was saucer shaped. I never said anything about it being saucer shaped, but that's how the game of, so then there's Roswell and somebody apparently gets a peek. I think it's the Roswell. It might be there were. I think it's the Roswell, they get a peek at an alien under a tarp. And they describe it as having an extended forefinger, like the yay-yay. Like the aye-aye? Aye-aye, thank you. Aye-aye. Like having this extended forefinger. And then what sort of happens after that is people start reporting aliens and saying that they have forefingers. Difference being having heard forefinger, meaning the distal little distal bone. Forefinger versus forefingers. Turned into fore, like this is horrible game of telephone that you can see evolving over the course of these reports. But yeah, there hasn't been anything, actually there has been something pretty amazing in the footage that they captured, which is the amount of tension they've gotten without critical eye. The other thing is they also point out that a lot of objects are found around military installations. Military ships, military installations. Do you know why that is? Surveillance. Because nobody else is surveilling the skies up to 80,000 feet, but the military, nobody else is looking for missiles or objects or anything that could be fled. So yeah, space to junk comes floating in. That's where you're gonna see it. You didn't see it in Hoboken, the Jews, Davis, California, Portland, because nobody was looking. Nobody's looking at 80,000 feet for any possible movement of an object. You see it around a military base because that's where you're gonna detect something. So yeah, space junk, and it probably sounds like it's happening very frequently now. That's great news. We got space junk snowing down on us. I also wonder, I also keep wondering if some of it isn't, I don't know how ice forms in the high, high, high atmosphere, because I have a feeling that it's less dense and can float around a bit. Because these things do look a lot like they could be ice. One of them they talk about, it's going in the opposite direction of the wind. But if it's coming, this is something that's, if it's coming from way up in the atmosphere, it might be in a completely different type of jet stream current higher up. Well, in the video I just shared, I think he said, according to his markers, looking at like the waves and the ocean and other stuff going on, it looks like it's actually not moving at all. Yeah. But it can appear that way to the pilot. So here's the thing, the idea that pilots are experts and you take the best baseball player and you have a robot throw a ball. Tell me how fast that was. Ah, somewhere between 1500 miles an hour. But you're gonna tell me, you're gonna be able to tell, you're gonna tell me how fast something is moving in the open skies with no frame of reference. How far away it is, because you assume then you have to assume how big it is. How fast it's moving again. There's a lot of assumptions. It's a lot of it, it's a lot of it and a lot of misinformation too. So people are getting some nice grift off of this and people are getting some nice talking careers out of this speaking careers books are being written. They're all not UFO guys, but they can tell you every UFO story. The one pilot, he's not a UFO guy, but boy, he knows every UFO story that's ever been and get like, well, it's kind of like the Barney Frank. Well, except in Barney Frank, this is not happening, this is happening, that's happening. They know all of the stories that they're not into and they don't even seem that excited. It's like, woo, we found it. And then they're talking about, hey, did you pick it up with this method? No, I used this thing to catch it with. Oh, okay, I see, yeah, all right, whatever. Didn't even seem like, like, if they thought they had an enemy craft that was stealth and then there, there wouldn't be goof talking about it. They'd be radio and for backup and trying to get a jet scrambled intercept. They didn't do that. Right. They continued about their training mission diversion and just flew around. They were so concerned. Nobody made a call. So concerned it turned into an international incident. Oh, wait, no, it didn't. No, it didn't. It didn't even turn into a localized incident. Didn't turn into anything. Yeah, omo, omo, omo, I can't even say it still. That's the best that UFO we've had so far. Oh, omo, omo, omo, omo, omo, omo, omo, omo. That's the best one so far. You know why? Because we thought. Which wasn't. Right, because we actually detected it. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't get some, like, they literally did spend $22 million looking at old grainy footage of stuff. I think the Pentagon's budget is too big. Can I just say, can I be like, can I say this? I'm just gonna go way out on land. You can definitely say that. Yeah. I'm gonna say that the Pentagon's budget is too big and we need to take a big chunk of that money away from the Pentagon and give it to the National Science Foundation. Can we please do this? Can we please have scientists looking at things, figuring stuff out? Not a bunch of paranoid grifters? I don't know where else to call them. They are, yeah. People benefiting off of, it's the grift. It's the grift. So the reason I found all this stuff was because I was actually given through one of my science communication list serves a bunch of cheat sheets on how to talk about these UFO sightings, which is very interesting. One of them's from the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. It's very interesting. And they have some constructive suggestions to the media when talking about UFOs. So one, be aware of the notorious history of these enthusiasm. UFO claims arise, generate media and public interest, often get reported in highly credulous ways and produce a flood of copycat stories. Scientists and science-minded investigators then examine and eventually explain the claims often to the embarrassment of the early enthusiasts. Usually the prosaic explanations get little coverage compared with the early hype, of course. This dynamic distorts the public and the media's perceptions. Soon the debunked claims are replaced by new claims and the cycle starts anew. Two, sources often conflate sightings of something in the sky with extraterrestrials. A UFO or a UIP doesn't mean aliens. I've talked about that on the show before, blah, blah, blah. There's a picture of the lights over the U.S. Capitol in like 1953, all these hovering lights above it. And I saw it immediately and it's been debunked with what I saw immediately. The lights along the front of the Capitol are like, it's like it's in the reflection of, like if you took a picture through the windshield of a car, they like match up, like perfectly, the lights that are down at the bottom of the car, match up to the lights in the sky. That thing was trotted out in some news report talking about the history of UFOs this last week. That was debunked 50 something years ago. That's just why we're not all talking about it. That's just, that's shoddy, the journal, if that's like a news report, the report. You know, it's all local news. There is no journalism in local news, but anyway. But the point is it was just, it's utterly ridiculous that these things can come back and persist and like exactly what you're saying, the debunking doesn't get the press and it doesn't register and doesn't get the, to generate the excitement. And the other thing that it also kind of ticks me off because part of the UFOologist conspiracy theories, which all of the conspiracy theories, by the way, I get corrupted into politics at some point and it's the worst thing ever. But all of the science that we've done, if you've ever watched ancient aliens, it takes away every achievement of mankind, every bit of architecture and engineering mankind, every leap of tech, every amazing wonder of the world that we've done, it takes it all away. It's just aliens. Every bit of technology we have in the modern world, they're gonna relate back to Roswell Crash or something like the Area 51 back engineering. Like we've done nothing. Don't play the exiles, melasand. We've done no science whatsoever. It's all been a, like, you know what? Yes we have. Yeah, we've done a lot. I'm sorry you missed all the little steps along the way that led from one thing to another, but they exist. They were done by real people who worked really hard and then somebody else picked up that knowledge and went, oh, I know how I can use this in a different way and technology that we have today. And this is also, like, if aliens do land, if they're anything like the people here on earth, if the aliens will land, they'll have this fancy spaceship, they're gonna have like this crazy materials and everything. We're like, ooh, we'll ask them, how did you do it? How did you create all these things? I don't know, I just bought it. Somebody else thought of it. Thousands of years ago, we don't even know how it's made. Tell me how your iPhone is made. Nobody knows. Nobody knows how their iPhone is made. I don't know what's going on. It's just a magic box. With all of the technology we have, it's all magic boxes to people. Not so much. I mean, people are, more and more, I mean, the maker culture is a big thing. I mean, I know it's a subculture, but there are people, thanks to Adafruit and other organizations who make it, make it achievable to understand how to make, how to build a basic computer and how the circuits go together and a circuit board. Yeah, yeah. Yes, the majority of people, you buy your phone and you couldn't care less how it works. You just want the newest thing. It just needs to work. And if it stops working, you get mad at the technology because it's so inconvenient and then you throw your old phone in a landfill. The ignorance is, I mean, I don't care how a phone works. I really don't. But I do know that it's not alien technology. What was the thing that somebody was trying to say that octopuses? Are aliens. Were aliens? Of course they are. They're going to need to knock it off. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. They are alien in the adjective sense in that they are so very different. I think we are the most intelligent life form in the galaxy. And that is as depressing as that sounds, that's a lot more responsibility to have people have these amazing brains that have done all of this stuff that's all around us. All of this was done by people. People are capable of incredible things if they put their minds to it. The problem is too many people are putting their minds to garbage. But I mean, when you think about it, okay, so then there's the evolution of man, right? And we think about it, it's like, okay, human brain evolved about 200,000 years ago. So we've been pretty much us, maybe with little less language, less math, you know, less education, but we've been us for 200,000 years at least. And if we've been us for 200,000 years, what the heck have we been doing? You know that not everybody out there in our ancient past was trying to figure out physics. You know, Socrates, Plato, all of them, they didn't show up. They weren't on the scene for a long time, you know? Memory castles, all that kind of stuff. No way. You know, there were people 200,000 years ago picking their butts, waiting for something to die so that they could scavenge it. You know, they're like, I mean, yeah. Who knows what they were doing? They tapped their leg and go, look, music. It took us a really long time to get where we are. And I think we sell ourselves short by, or I think we expect too much from ourselves to say humans are amazing. We are amazing. We've done a lot in a short period of time, but I don't think we need to expect all of humanity to do amazing things either. They're gonna be a few amazing humans who are gonna do a few amazing things. And then everybody else is picking their butts, waiting for something to die. I guess that's just what we, I have to accept that, yeah. You don't have to. You can expect more for humanity. That's fine. I don't. At least I'm trying to convince myself not to because if I continue to expect more, I'm gonna be sad and depressed forever because, or yelling into the void like I was today. Well, now at least I realize there's much more of a reason to colonize space than I thought before. I didn't realize an asteroid could be worth, what was it, 10 quintillion dollars? Oh yeah, no, that's why New Space. If it was an iron mass the size of Seven Root Island. No, that is entirely why New Space is a huge industry. All these corporations who are trying to get into space and do, they wanna mine the asteroids. That's it. They want all that cashola that's floating around in space. That's it. It's just floating there. There's money in space. Yeah, you know, on Star Trek when they go, when they go to a planet and it's my $14 biggest complaint about Star Trek is that every planet's one country, basically. So they're all one people. I think that's what has to happen at some point for you to have space travel. You have to all agree to do it as a planet. Like, I don't think we're going to make it into the stars with the tribalism that we have now. I don't think there's a way to do that. Well, because you're trying to claim planets on behalf of countries. We won't get over the, yeah, and we won't get over the point of cluttering up the, just putting debris into our orbit because we can't agree on rules for how to do that. Like, this is something that takes the concerted effort of a, to get on the same page. Boy, we are not. We are not built like that. We are stochastic by nature in our approaches to everything in this world. And that leads to survival skill, I guess, over evolutionary times. But boy, it's a lot of tribalism when you're trying to get into a space age type of society. So in the Fermi paradox, I don't think we make it because I say we don't necessarily go down in war and destruction, but I just don't think we get on the same page to work together to do it. And that's going to be the problem. There's going to be too many, too much fussing down here for this to get out, to leave. And I don't think one of those stochastic, sort of like random by design. Yeah, but stochastic, but it's random, but it's also random as a strategy. It can be in terms of evolutionary. The fact that we have so many people with different personality types or sexualities or those who are more likely to want to stay near and not travel and those who are more feel the urge to go travel. It's all of these different things mixed together. I think it's what made humanity, humans survive so well all over the planet. I mean, if we haven't learned anything from science fiction, it's that we will only survive by appreciating the diversity of humanity and being able to use that to our advantage. That's it. Otherwise, there's going to be battles. It's going to be people arguing over what to call each other and I don't know. Yeah, we all just need Bob Marley. That's all. One love, one love, let's get together and be all right. And on that note, it's getting late and Blair needs to get up in the morning and she's like, why are we up so late? I don't like this conversation, but I got to go and I got to put Sadie to bed. Sadie fell asleep and I'm sitting here and I don't know why I didn't just leave yet. I don't know where she is, she left, she left. She put herself to bed. Yeah. Good night, Blair, say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thank you for joining us again for another show and a fun after show, great conversations, lots of topics covered and I do hope that we see you next week for another episode. We've got guests, it'll be a great interview. Bat immunity, bat genetics. Why don't bats get sick from the things that they carry? I don't wanna be immune to bats. Oh, wait, what? No. Also something about white nose syndrome. Also, thanks again. You're the best.