 This is TWIS, this week in Science episode number 606. Recorded on Wednesday, February 15th, 2017. Happy, happy hippos. I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on This Week in Science, we are going to fill your heads with a terrible headed lizard, real live malaria and ant butt beetles. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. It's time to wake up. There's a whole big wide world out there just waiting to be explored and you can't get there while your brain is napping. Sleep has benefits but snoring is too boring when there's still so much you have to learn. In the world you know is the world you live in. Your wide open spaces, your mountains and valleys, your oceans and seven seas, your horizons and your solar system, galaxy and universe beyond. All are limited or expanded by what you've learned. Your education means your world to you as much as the ground you are standing on. As the earth is beneath your feet and we want you to be our neighbor. Here on This Week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to learn everything. I want to fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know what's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. Science to you, Kiki and Blair. And good science to you, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another fabulous episode of This Week in Science. Do you know what day it is today, Blair? It's the day after Valentine's Day, is that right? It's the day after... Is it National Something Day? Valentine's Day and also according to the TWIS calendar, National Hippo Day. It's the best day of the year. How did we get a national hippo day? We don't even have hippopotamuses. We almost did at one time. How what? That's a story for the after show. Stay tuned. Stay tuned. And I think Friday, it's not on the calendar, but I think Friday is like the random acts of kindness day, which is very wonderful day. So as we move through this week away from wonderful hippos, you can go to random acts of kindness, which will be fantastic. But right now, in addition to hippos and being the day after Valentine's Day, full of love and kindness and hippos, we got a show full of science. Yes. I do. And I have a whole bunch of science that I have brought for tonight's show. Great show ahead. I have stories like I mentioned at the very, very beginning, the Aunt Butt beetle. I'm going to talk about an Aunt Butt beetle. I'm also going to talk about nutrition and how five days of fasting might be fabulous. And then I've also got some updates on CRISPR and human genome editing. Justin, yeah. Justin, what you got? I've got eggless lizards, getting better grades by skipping school to play video games, and immigrants. Are they more or less criminal than the average American? Are you bringing science to my politics, like chocolate and peanut butter? Politics is just science. Just science. All right. Blair, what do you have in the animal corner? Oh, well, in honor of Twist and Tine's Day, I brought some animal live. I brought a story about the hardened criminal early in life and how he might get ahead later on. I brought a story about flies getting pretty for their loved ones. I brought monkey spending a little too much time with self-care and falling in love with endangered species. Love for Valentine's Day. I like it. I like it a lot. OK, everybody. Are you ready to jump right into some fabulous, splendiferous science? Let's do it. All right, so this week, we've been talking about on this show human genome editing for quite some time. Well, this last week, National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine put out a report in which they list a bunch of guidelines for how to move forward in the area of human genome editing. It's a very cautious report. It's kind of like Goldilocks. It's not to one extreme or the other. They take the nice middle road looking at the negative possibilities, the positive possibilities, what is possible now with the talk technology, what could be possible in the future. And the take-home message from this panel of 22 of the world's leading experts on human genome editing, well, genetics, bioethics, medicine, law, all these fields go hand in hand with genome editing. They say, basically, go for it within limits, within reason. So it's not everybody go ahead and edit your genome free for all, what we're talking about. Yeah, oh, darn. Scientists always with the fine line. With the fine lines, yeah. But they basically say, yes, maybe we could consider editing the germline of individuals if we're talking about diseases that are single, they're mutations that really are going to affect a person's health. Why not change the germline? If you're worried about somebody having something, some advantage over somebody else, putting edits into the human genome that can be passed on from generation to generation, like turning people into X-Men, they're super smart people or whatever, that's not what they're recommending. But in the case of disease, where it's something that we can fix. And if you can fix it and keep any more of that person's lineage from suffering from that disease, why not do it? And why not bring them up to the same level of life possibility as people without that mutation? Additionally, they say there should be stringent guidelines around the world for how genome editing is done in terms of disease. And it shouldn't just be healthy people getting genome edits for just for giggle's sake. It should be in order to help people become healthier and not have medical problems that will deteriorate the quality of their life. Well, anything good in moderation might as well be better without it. Yeah. Like, I don't know, part of the little scary-ish thing in the back, when they say, well, this isn't about creating supermen with great intelligence. This sort of comes down to, well, we've got to be fair and got to play even. They may decide, hey, look, there's people with too much. There's a few of our population that's just more intelligent than the rest. So we need to end that for going forward so that we all have even intelligence. Which I think is ridiculous. Or I could argue that my people have my diseases I don't have the cognitive abilities that I should have to do the things I want to do. It's always going to be the slippery slope both directions. So what moderation? It's a great first thing to concentrate on. No, that is something that they do bring up as to the slippery slope. And it's a gray area of how do you define something that really is a disease that requires genome editing? When do you get to that point versus just taking a drug or having normal treatments? Here in the United States, human genome editing is still not legal. And it's not going to be supported by federal funding. The United States is not supposed to do genome editing in humans. That's just the way it is here for now. But other countries don't have as stringent controls. So the question is whether or not there will be stem cell clinics now, CRISPR clinics that will pop up in other countries where requirements are not the same as they are here in the United States. And so they are looking to create a global consortium to be able to create global guidelines where every country gets on board to work with this new editing technology, the CRISPR-Cas9 technology, as humans. How do you do it? That's a good idea. Absolutely. I mean, when you think about other sticky, ethical, slippery, slopey issues, it's always good to have a conversation and sit down and set parameters. Exactly. And so it's nice to have those parameters. And so now through the National Academy of Sciences, there is an entire document that basically is beginning this conversation. And it lays the groundwork for future conversations that we have globally, researchers, and the public alike to be able to figure out what is appropriate and what is not appropriate. And then in other news for CRISPR, we've talked before about this lengthy patent battle that's been going on between the discoverers of CRISPR-Cas9 at UC Berkeley and another team at the MIT Broad Institute. Who's going to get the patent? The original patent was filed by the UC Berkeley researchers, Charpentier and Doudna. And in 2012, I believe, like in April maybe. And theirs was CRISPR-Cas9 in cells in a dish or in test tubes, but not eukaryotic or human cells necessarily, but their patent would potentially cover all of the uses of CRISPR-Cas9. And then later in 2012, the MIT Broad Institute also started filing patents and also paid for an express patent process with the patent office. And for their process of using CRISPR-Cas9 on human cells, eukaryotic cells. So the verdict has been reached by the US Patent Trial and Appeal Board. And they ruled in favor of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And this doesn't necessarily knock the UC Berkeley team out of the running. What the patent office is now doing is giving the Broad Institute the patent for CRISPR-Cas9 use in human cells. And it's thought that Charpentier and Doudna at UC Berkeley are going to get the patent ruling for basically everything else. And the way that Doudna explained it is like, you know, it's kind of like if people are going to be working and creating technologies based on our patents, they're now going to have to license the technology twice. They're going to basically have to, the Broad Institute, this is Doudna's quote, has a patent on green tennis balls. We likely will have a patent on all tennis balls. And so now it's just going to make things a little bit more complicated for people who want to use the technology down the road. And this is not the only patent that has been filed for CRISPR-Cas9. The Broad Institute has some 12 or more, maybe 14 patents. And there are now up to 50 patents related to CRISPR at the US Patent and Technology Office. So patents, patents, galore. This is just one of the biggest picture because it was the first patent. And is this going to be like a new medicine where a patent holds for about 50 years and then it becomes public domain and then everyone gets to use CRISPR? Exactly. OK. So in 50 years, things are going to get crazy. No, that's terrible because they should be getting crazy now. Yeah, that's true. We just have to wait a little bit. Yeah, I hope this legal fight turns into a quagmire when people just keep using it and ignoring the hell out of it. Yeah, well, in the end, it all depends. I mean, the UC system, University of California system, and also MIT, there was a lot of money behind these organizations, these institutions, to be able to go after people who are using the technology without paying licensing fees. So there's going to be a lot of lawsuits coming forth. It's going to be interesting. Like people are saying in the classroom, in the chat room, Shnago says, just imagine what's going on with CRISPR in North Korea right now. And then Whiskey Renegade says, or China, they don't follow our patent rules either. So yeah, all that we'll do is reduce American science ability. Well, and I'm reminded of things like the space race, too. Do we really want to be left behind in all this red tape while other countries start to play around with this stuff and then people have to go to other countries to get medical treatments? Yeah, and in the end, where this CRISPR-Cas9 system is probably going to be so integrated into so many areas of scientific research, it's going to be really hard to, I think it'll be incredibly hard to follow and to track all the instances of its use. Yeah, litigation's going to become so difficult. They're just going to say, never mind. Yeah, because lawyers give up easy. Yeah, they're down for it. You're a funny person. And then my final intro story for the hour is a new vaccine for malaria. Justin, you've brought it malaria on the show many, many times. And this is one of the leading causes of death around the world. Malaria is a mostly third world country problem. And it's devastating. And if we could get rid of it, it would be amazing if we could vaccinate people. So they were vaccinated for a population in a country were vaccinated for six months. And the immunity held among all those individuals in the country for six months, maybe a year tops, it could get rid of malaria in that country. And if you could imagine getting, doing that in all the places where malaria is a problem at the same time, just get mass vaccinations, you could potentially get rid of malaria as a problem. So vaccines for malaria, we would love this. And traditional vaccines use a weakened version like most vaccines, it's either a weakened version of the bacterium or not bacterium parasite or just pieces of it, little bits and pieces that your immune system can respond to. None of the vaccines that we've had so far have had amazing amounts of success. Right. Now there's a group, a biotech company called Sonaria and they make a bunch of different malaria vaccines. They're located in Maryland, Rockville, Maryland and they and their collaborators who work at the University of Dubingen in Germany, they just were like, forget about these pieces of plasmodium, forget about weakened plasmodium, we're just gonna inject malaria into people. Yeah, that works. Work could happen. Yeah. So what they did, yes, they did, just malaria. They gave people three injections of malaria at four weeks, four week intervals. What? And then they got malaria. No, because before, during and after this process they took anti-malarial pills, Chloroquine. So the parasite was crippled and basically killed in the liver, but the immune system got the full thing and was like, oh, we don't like this malaria. The researchers were challenged, the researchers challenged the participants, participants 10 weeks later with no anti-malarial. What's your guess? They all died. What do you think, what percent protection or disease? What's your guess? Something high, 80%. Okay, Justin's saying they all died. Do you say 80%? Do we know the answer? We do, they all, they all, 100%. Oh, they all died, yeah, 100% of them died. And they all had nightmarish diarrhea while on the malaria medicine, right? None of them got sick, none of the people, none of the people who had been vaccinated. Go natural immune system. The system work? With that little assistant. Yeah, and so they had a control group of people who had never gotten the vaccine, never had malaria before and they all had, they all got malaria basically. And so then they had to treat them for malaria. You don't want to be in the control group of this experiment. Yeah, I'm not in that one. How much did they pay those people? My goodness. They got credit for school probably. This is really exciting. But the problem here is that this is not gonna work in a real world setting where people forget to take their anti-malarial pills or they just don't ever get them. And if you were to try and institute this vaccine around the world in uncontrolled situations, people would get sick and die. Uh-huh, uh-huh. You guys could be giving people malaria. Yeah. So they, as much as revolutionary as this is, it's not revolutionary. So can you make a cocktail that is the malaria and the anti-malarial in one syringe? That would be nice, yeah, I don't know. So first and foremost. They think this is gonna be good for like military troops or like doctors without borders, people who go into areas, people who are traveling, you know, that you could get a vaccination before you go and be protected. It'll be a first world benefit. Yes. Right. Yep, that's exactly it. How nice. Or maybe, you know, a military benefit for military of these countries. You know, situations where you have control over how the treatment is given, you know? Yeah, so anyway, a little step forward and a little step back on the malaria vaccine all in one. Just give them malaria. Eureka. Look at it out. Don't try this at home and don't try it with other ailments. Anyway, more research, more research necessary. Not a study that I would volunteer for. No. Yeah, I can't go to your party this weekend. Gonna get malaria. I know, I'm sorry. I got malaria this weekend. I'm not feeling so great. This is this week in science. Hey, Justin, what'd you bring to the show? I brought a reptilian resident of a shallow sea about 230 million years ago in what is now Southeast China known as the terrible headed lizard. It's now in the news. Its head may not have been actually so terrible. It was rather small for its body, but its neck was five and a half feet long. Wait, what? Allowing five and a half foot long neck which allowed the small head to sneak up on prey before its bulky body came into view in the murky waters. So it was like a snake neck. Yeah, it would snake its neck around and snatch fish with it. It's like a cross between a snake and a lizard in the water. What's really remarkable or remarkably more remarkable than that is this. The recent fossil found of the terrible headed lizard, aka dinocephalosaurus, had an embryo instead of an egg inside of it. What? Evidence for live birth. Head of the University of Queenland School of Earth and Environmental Sciences co-author, professor, Joe Hamilton, Jonathan, sorry, Atchison said the fossil provided first evidence for live birth in an animal group previously thought to exclusively lay eggs. Blair is looking shocked and amazed over this. No, I was confused because lizards pretty regularly give live birth. So they do, however, snakes do this too, but it's because the little ones have hatched inside the mother. Right. But emerged without the egg, they were still in an egg first. They just hatched indoors. This is an embryo. This is, they think, live birth, not an egg inside and then hatching and then leaving, but just what like mammals do, live birthering. Wow, so they think that this diverged from the red, this long-necked mammal, not mammal, long-necked reptile. It's in the group that includes crocodiles and birds. So it diverged from the other egg layers and started just doing away with the shell. No, it is, so I can't tell you the lineage. It's back there, 230 million years back in the lineage. So this could be what turned into crocodiles and birds that may have disappeared this advantage. We don't really know. Or it could have been just a virgin, I'm not sure. Professor Chris Orgen from Montana State University said evolutionary analysis showed that this instance of live birth was also associated with genetic sex determination. That's important because reptiles today, such as crocodiles, or some of them do at least, determine sex of the offspring based on the temperature of the nest. And identified that dinocephalosaurus, he says, a distant ancestor of crocodiles, determine the sex of its babies genetically like mammals and birds. It's also, I think, an ancestor potentially of birds. Yeah, so it looks like this guy, they're clumping with dinosaurs, birds, and crocodilians. So that's really the difference here, is that there's these pseudo-live births happening in snakes and lizards, but it hasn't been recorded in the branch with birds, dinosaurs, and crocodilians. And bigger than that, this is live birth that's different than egg and hatching inside. That's still laying an egg, it just doesn't come out. That type of live birth is separate from this type of live birth. So it's not just the divergent thing. This is not laying an egg inside and hatching inside and then emerging. This is live birth. And part of why they think this evolutionary change took place is because this creature may not go back to land to lay eggs. It may actually give live birth into the water. Fascinating. How cool. How do they know that it wasn't a reabsorbed egg? How do they know that it's just live birth? Because they're scientists. They are experts at this. When they first found the fossil, actually they thought it had eaten something. They thought what they were looking at was a creature that had been devoured. And then they thought, okay, well it's sort of facing the wrong way for that, but then they kind of discovered that it was also of the same species. And so then as they drill down on this, they've come to this conclusion. Now you're absolutely right. They could be wrong. But, you know, I think that's... That's interesting. It's a pretty big jump, evolutionarily. Well, okay, it isn't, it isn't though, because we don't know the jump. We don't know the steps. This creature and its types have been around for 250 million years. And there isn't, when you go back, there's not a whole lot of, whether it's egg or live birth or anything else, there's not a whole lot of evidence of reproductive systems. They're actually saying this is now, pushes back 50 million years, our earliest example of reproduction in this group. So this is now the earliest example that they have within this particular group of, however they've got it grouped, of reproduction at all. So, very interesting. Yeah, so it'll be interesting to see if there's any conversation that comes out of this, but it's fascinating that, that they are defining this as an embryo that is without eggshell. From the paper itself, it says, in all arcosauromorphs and turtles, the eggshells are well calcified, though many turtle eggs are also pliable. There is no trace of preserved eggshells near the embryo while many delicate calcareous fossils are preserved in the same horizon. This is consistent with the eggshell morphology of extant viviparous reptiles. Although an eggshell membrane initially forms around the developing embryo in viviparous reptile species, does not become calcified. All together, these lines of evidence suggests that the embryo was likely contained in soft uncalcified membranes, as in living viviparous reptiles. Right, so it's the same. It's the, Yeah, although the taffonomic absence of a calcified shell cannot be excluded. All right, but so it still sounds like it is analogous to quote live birth in current reptiles. Yes. Yeah, so it's not like mammalian live birth. No, it's like reptilian live birth, but if they're saying it's an embryo, it was internal and they're not seeing, they have not seen a calcified shell. That doesn't mean there wasn't one there. But, if you just tuned in, you're listening to This Week in Science. Do you know what time it is, you guys? What time is it? It's time for slam animal corners. Waste animal. Waste animal. Waste animal. Waste animal. Why pet, feel the pet, no pet at all. Why hear about a pet almost, she's your girl. Except for giant pandas that squirl. Waste animal. Waste animal. I wish I had hippo since it's national hippo day, but this is this week in science so I can only bring the current scientific news. So we'll talk about hippos plenty in the after show. Meanwhile, I want to talk about sex. Oh, great. Animal corner all the way. Yeah, I mean, yesterday was Valentine's Day, everyone was snuggled up with themselves or a loved one or just a person or a good book or a good book. But there are different or like maybe it was Taco Tuesday or a good laptop. Anyway, romance was in the air yesterday. And when it comes to romance, nobody knows it better than female green bottle flies. That was not where I was expecting you to go. That's right. So in green bottle flies, the males are attracted to females. By certain criteria, there have been lots of ideas about exactly what this is. But the latest finding shows us that it has to do with. The sun. Their wings and how fast they flap. All right. Yes. So a new model of sexual communication in and sex was described this week. This may be common to animals in other groups as well. So now we have to start looking. It has to do with modulating wing breed beat frequency and thus light flash frequency from the sun. So these flies are communicating to their peers, their sex, their age and most likely mating status, all with a flick of the wing. Yes, using video technology and capturing and measuring wing flash frequency. They were able to show that male flies were attracted to specific flash frequencies and they were able to control this for morphological characteristics so that they they determined morphological characteristics were not part of the decision making process. This is pretty much just how quick the females were flapping their wings in the sun. Males are strongly attracted as males of many types to a wing flash frequency of one hundred and seventy eight Hertz. You know what I'm talking about, Justin. That is hot. One hundred and seventy eight. It does hurt. Then that's characteristic of free flying young female flies. They were also found frequencies in the low to mid two hundreds, about two twelve, two thirty five, two sixty six Hertz. Those are all characteristic of young males, old females and old males, respectively. Those young males had no interest in those wing beat frequencies. The slower wing flash frequency of the young females are most likely a phenotypic trait of reproductive capability. Furthermore, this all had to do with how much light was being reflected from those wing beats. So the way they were able to figure that out was by looking how much sun was out. Sun versus clouds, filters, light filters, all sorts of things. Definitely the sun reflecting off of these wing beats had a huge impact. So the flies are most likely synchronizing sexual communication with environmental conditions, and that way they can put off their sexual signals with ease. I the one of the ways they measured this was they found that on cloudy days, they just weren't into it. I don't know, maybe they were just not into the gloomy weather. Maybe it was too cold. I don't know. The researchers think it had to do with the sun and the wing beat frequency. So what is that? Is life span anyway? Like, well, it varies from from species to species, but it's it's a factor of days to weeks. Right. So if it's I'm just saying, like if it's San Francisco, what do you have? No flies there. It's like not sunny enough enough for the time. Well, perhaps you'd use a different modality of picking your mate. OK, is that going to be if you really did need the sun to come out and you were only alive that short of a period of time? Yeah, it's it's a good question. I think green bottle flies probably don't live or mate in areas or times when it is fog. So that's I think it's fascinating that these these little animals, these little insects, they communicate using the light reflected off of their wings. I mean, at some point that became important that guys flap their wings one way. Women flap their wings another way. And you can tell age and sex from the wing beats. Yeah, well, and beyond that, that I would have thought the younger flies would have beat their wings faster. And then as they age, they kind of slow down. But no, that's not how it goes. There yeah. Why? They're like building up muscle mass, except they don't have muscle. So I don't know. Anyway, that's that's the that's the males picking the female flies. Next, I want to talk about. But I was also going to I was also going to say they they could probably figure out more about the cloudy days and whether it has to do with cold or warm. All you have to do is have them in a cloudy, not sunny or a, you know, an evenly lit environment that doesn't reflect. Oh, absolutely. And they started that. They definitely did some of that. I think they just didn't combine all of the variables together yet. So this is definitely a preliminary study because there nobody's ever heard of this of flies or any animal communicating fitness via wingbeats and reflections from the sun. Crazy. Wow. And I think I know why the older flies have to beat their wings faster. Because as they age, they they start to get little fly love handles, little fly guts. Then you have to fly harder. No, this is like the fly version of semaphore. Yes, absolutely. That's exactly what it is. Or Morse code with your flashlight. Yeah, absolutely. So speaking of life expectancy and mate choice. A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how having a rough upbringing if you are a mouse, a male mouse, as long as you're dominant, might make you more attractive to females. Well, a new study relating to growing right to growing up in tough conditions came out this week from the University of Exeter, looking at banded mongooses. And what they found wasn't just that a rough upbringing can make you more attractive. But in this case, they actually lived longer. So there was no difference in the number of offspring they fathered. But they lived significantly longer. That suggests a live, slow, die old method for those that had tough conditions growing up and those at the easier first year of life had a live, fast, die young methodology. Yeah. The males that fathered the most popes, however, were those that grew up with conditions that were highly variable. They also lived long. So so the best option is to have a highly variable upbringing, not bad, not good, all over the place. Wait, did. OK, so the individual was variable, not the group, because that would. But no, this is conditions. We're looking at conditions. So the conditions that they grew up in was unpredictable. So when we talk about poor conditions, we're talking about drought. When mongooses grow up in periods of drought, there aren't a lot of insects. Food is scarce. When they grow up in a wet period, insects are everywhere. They can eat all the insects they need. Unpredictable or variable upbringings mean periods of wetness with periods of drought and a very little pattern. So all these things happen in nature. And it turns out that when you have that variable upbringing, you father the most pups and you live the longest, which means you're basically it just means when you're growing up in a variable condition, you know how to deal with everything. You're prepared for the worst, but you also get a lot of nutrients. So. And maybe maybe also it has to do with, you know, stress being not constant, you know, not chronic, but acute, which we have a story about in the second half or related to stress and how it might affect longevity and health. So maybe that has something to do with it at all. Also as well. Yeah, absolutely. And then real quick before the break, I have one more quick story. We talked about males picking females. We talked about females picking males. Now we're going to talk about. Picking yourself out in the mirror. Monkey, monkey do what you have talked pretty extensively on this show about you see monkey meat. That's what we're self awareness tests, right? And usually it's the one where you you ink up somebody's cheek, some animals cheek, and then they are supposed to touch their own face in the mirror. Well, most animals, particularly animals like macaques or Reese's monkeys, they will touch the mirror. They will not touch their own face. Once again, this looks like a case of us testing animals as if they were humans and drawing human conclusions. This is what we do all the time. We do it all the time. So the Shanghai Institute for Biological Sciences has found that actually Reese's monkeys can pass the mirror self awareness test if they are first taught how mirrors work. Of course, they don't understand what a mirror is. Have you ever seen a dog bark at itself in the mirror? It doesn't understand what a mirror is. That doesn't mean it doesn't understand that it is a thing that they are a thing. So instead, in this study, they taught the Reese's monkeys how a mirror works by placing them in front of a mirror, rewarding them each time they correctly place their hand on a spot in its cage lit up by a laser pointer. And then over time, the monkeys understood how they could look in the mirror and put their hand where the laser pointer was. Eventually, they started pointing the laser pointer at their face. They would be touching their face. OK, so now they understand how the mirror works. Then they would wait a period of time, mark their face with ink, like in the old study, and right away, they would touch their own face. Beyond that, they would then, when left alone in the room to do whatever in front of the mirror, they would actually spend a lot of time sitting in front of the mirror with no direction. They also would use the mirror to check normally parts of their body. They can't see such as, you know, the down there's and they would use it to preen themselves. Oh, they would preen also. But they also are just curious what it looks like down there, which, you know. I can't. Who has it? So there we go. Once again, we short change the animals on their intelligence because we just don't know how to test them. Well, they just don't get the experiment. They must not be that smart. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's a mirror. They should understand that that's their reflection, right? Well, not if you don't know what a mirror is. Yeah, I mean, I think you could take you could take our our our friend, the clone Neanderthal and raise him with or any human being and raise them without mirrors or a child. And the first time they've interacted with the mirror, that sort of thing, you know, it might not go as intelligently as is expected. If they've never encountered it before. Because it's such a normal thing now to have mirrors in the house when kids get to see them themselves in the mirror at a very early age. And I don't recall my kids ever quite not getting it. But I don't also remember them being just casual about it at first either. My youngest wanted to keep kept wanting to kiss herself in the mirror. So I don't know. Absolutely. So there you go. Once again, we're not so special. Not so special. We think we're special. We're not the only ones that check out our genitalia in the mirror. Bingo, if you look, if you took nothing else away from the show today. There you go. But, you know, you could also think about, you know, self-awareness in other primate species and how it suggests that, you know, theory of mind is something that can probably be applied to a lot more species than just humans, which we are seeing more and more often as people get smarter about asking the right questions. Yeah, so it's not about how smart they are. It's about how good we are at testing their intelligence. Exactly. How how smart are we? Really, that's what it all is. It all comes down to how smart are the humans doing research? Let's make sure you're out. Yeah. And on that note, I hope everyone feels a lot smarter. It's time for us to take a little short break. We're going to come back and there's more to learn because there's a lot more science coming here on this week in science. Stay tuned. Hey, everyone. 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And we're back with more this week in science. Yes, we are. Justin, what you got in the science? That's a good question. Oh, yeah, I remember. Video games, mindless entertainment, or the perfect tool for educating the masses? Well, since you brought it up, I'm going to go with mindless entertainment. Perfect. University of Dallas, University of Texas at Dallas team decided it could be the latter, the perfect tool for educating the masses, without entirely ruining the mindless entertainment value. So they set out to teach real world science through a game. Now, for those of you that play the video games, you've already seen that the teaching ability within the games, within the gaming format, is pretty considerable. From tutorials to increasing levels of difficulty, you learn as you go, improving along the way as new layers of complexity are added, so that you are at times struggling with or seeking out a more challenging experience. And aside from some mindless fun, it can be an engaging, effectively educational instruction as you play. In an article recently published in Nature Chemistry, the team, including material scientists, two chemists and a game design expert, put together an enhanced version of the video game Minecraft. They then set 39 college students from diverse majors loose on the thing. And they learned chemistry in the process of playing the game despite being given no in-class science instruction. Dr. Walter Voight led the team and created Polycraft World, which is a mod for the Minecraft world game thing. It allows players to incorporate the properties of chemical elements and compounds into regular game activities. Using the modern instructions provided on a Wiki website, players can, for example, harvest and process natural rubber to make pogo sticks or convert crude oil into a jet pack using distillation, chemical synthesis and manufacturing processes. Our goal is to demonstrate the various advantages of presenting educational content in a gaming format, says Voight. He's the material science and engineering professor at the Eric Johnson School of Engineering and Computer Science. An immersive cooperative experience like that of Polycraft World may present the future of education. Wow, yeah. And this is something that, you know, there's been versions that we've talked about there, that people have talked about doing. There's then the it thing where they were doing the folding. There's the whole Khan Academy, which sort of leads you through mathematics or linguistics or whatever the subject matter is in the format of a game, sort of going up in stages, up in stages, like the education system is largely based on, but it's very intuitive to gamers. It's very, we're sort of used to seeing this in gaming. And they worked a lot on making sure their game wasn't too difficult so that players would get frustrated and lose lost interest. So they found this balance that they say made it both addicting and engaging as well as compelling to play. They produced more than 2000 methods for building more than 100 different polymers from thousands of available chemicals. So they really didn't, this isn't just a simple, well, you hit this button, then that button, and then poof, you've done the thing. No, no, no, they really created a chemistry lab within the game. This is kind of what I've been hoping somebody would eventually do with Minecraft because there are so many elements within Minecraft that are fairly accurate and kind of teach little basic principles of say physics or there are things that are kind of right on, but nobody, and the furthest that we've reported on previously was just someone created a chemistry world or like a biochemistry world that you could go into and then look at stuff kind of in a three-dimensional way but you couldn't really interact with it or do anything. And there has been like an IT version of the mod where instead of doing the basic game building block stuff, you were actually creating elements in like a wifi system. Like you had to put together like to create a communication system and run the electronics and power everything and sort of have this communicate with that and you would sort of create networks as one of the things that we were doing, but this is sort of an exciting front and I hope that this not only continues to grow in this polycraft world but that other educators look at this and find ways to add what they could teach. I think this could be like one of the easy things I think too is like you could definitely do a lot of history in a video game. Like that wouldn't be having a world where you're interacting with historical events as they unfold, albeit maybe accelerated so that you didn't have to. Right, actually live through them in real time. Yeah. You know, you could sort of imagine like all the different directions that this could take. Yeah, I think, you know, this is not, you know, I'm sure that this has not been an easy process to go in and modify Minecraft by any means to define all of these different categories and the different substances and the ways that you can use them together. I'm sure this has been a huge project to undertake but just the fact that they were able to take this platform and turn it into such a fantastic, fantastic learning experience. And the next step they're taking, they're actually gonna take this particular one further. They're working with economists. They're developing a monetary system. They're looking at creating governments and companies that can be formed. A government, a distribution system for currency and then seeing how the available resources and the goods affect the economy. So micro-macro economics on its way to this thing, really fascinating. I mean, I always thought like SimCity, like that old game, did a pretty decent job of like, okay, here's the problems that your local city council's dealing with and now you get to recreate a scenario where it's your problem. I thought that was always pretty good eye-opener, balancing the economic of commercial, industrial, residential and environmental and then infrastructure and all that sort of thing. And then you have people who actually maybe are invested in urban planning. Yeah, right. I wonder how many urban planners like played that game and went, I love this. I wanna do this forever. Like, I bet you there's more than, I don't know any urban planners, but if I... Yeah, and with the potential for making an economic Minecraft or a competitive economy kind of Minecraft, it's all good until the zombies come. Sorry? There are zombies in Minecraft, you don't know this? Zombies, helicopters, all sorts of things, yeah. No wonder I don't play. So it's a micro-economic chemistry lab set in the, what is it, the walking dead? Right, exactly. I haven't seen it. Okay, so what if you could fast for five days out of every 30? Not in a row. Five days in a row. But not completely fast, you'd get to have a small amount of calories, just a very reduced amount compared to your normal intake. So that you're not starving, you've given your body a little bit of fuel to keep going. I'd get real cranky. Maybe, maybe not, but the outcome of it, what if the outcome is that all of the indicators for decreased inflammation and improved cardiovascular health, improved metabolic standard and potentially increased longevity? Would you do it? Would you fast for five days out of every 30 if it meant that maybe you would live longer and healthier? How many calories? Yeah, I need the numbers, but I think I might already kind of do that. Like, it seems like, it seems like... Probably do. With my, the way it works in my work world is that we can be, you know, not very busy for a lot of the people. And then there'll be like a three or four day weekend where it's from morning to night, go, go, go, busy, busy, busy, where I don't eat lunches, I come home so tired, I'm just gonna have a snack and go to bed and then wake up in the morning. I don't even eat breakfast. So I think I've probably done this unconsciously or not on purpose, like just as routine for a really long time. That's very possible. Well, there is a researcher out of the University of Southern California who has published a study this last week on, it was in science translational medicine and it was extending on research that had been published a few years ago in which they created a diet for what's considered fasting mimicking. So it's not complete fasting, it's just mimicking the physiological effects of fasting on the body. So you can actually have a little bit of fuel but the benefits are all the same. They did this on mice a few years ago and all the mice lived longer and were way healthier and they were like, oh, we should do this with people. And so the researcher, Valter Longo out of the University of Southern California tried it with people. And for five consecutive days, participants ate about 1,100 calories the first day and then no more than 750 calories for the next four days. So it's probably under half of the calories, less than half of the calories that most people on average take in during the day. I'm on board now. And they were given a very, it's like Longo has actually gone so far as founding a company. And this company is called, what is it called? New Longo or N Longo or something and, oh, El Nutra, it's called El Nutra. And they've created a product called Prolon in which they specifically give you packaged foods in order to do this diet. Of course, the press release and all the research says everything was done to prevent conflict of interest and there's no bias in this release whatsoever. Apparently Longo does not have any, he was a founder of the company, but he does not have any financial gain from the company. So he founded it, he's not getting any money from it technically. I don't know, the University of Southern California probably is though. Anyhow, these 71 people followed this fasting, mimicking diet for three months. So for five days a month, they had to eat this pre-packaged food. And then the remaining days, they could eat whatever they wanted. And overall, these dieters, these dieters lost about six pounds each as an average of six pounds. And the control group state who did not get the pre-packaged food and just ate whatever they want the whole time stayed at the same weight. Those that were on the diet also had reduced blood pressure, body fat and waist size. They had changes in levels of insulin like growth factor one, which this promotes aging. And then there are other indicators of metabolism like blood glucose levels and cholesterol that decreased as well. Query. Yes. What if this fasting shrunk their stomach so they ate less on other days? And that is possible too. I don't know if they counted what calories people took in on other days of the diet. Cause that's what I would wonder is if the amount of food they're eating when they're not fasting would also decrease because if you're only eating between seven and 1,100 calories a day, that's not a lot of volume. No, it's not. So it would make sense if that would shrink their stomach capacity. Yeah, potentially. There are people who have been experimenting with caloric restriction of various forms, fasting, this also this fasting mimicking diet, people are doing this themselves. There are a bunch of people who are DIYing the fasting for themselves. And many people will fast until the sun goes down and then only eat after the sun goes down. Other people will fast until another certain time of the day. Other people will eat for five days, fast for two. Eat for five days, fast for two. Oh yeah, didn't you report on that last year? Yeah, and so all of these, and there have been a few studies looking at these different kinds of fasting and caloric restriction in general does increase the lifespan of animals across the board. So the question is, what is kind of the easiest way that people can do this? Also, that's probably not very sustainable. So you say three months, I dare anybody to do that for any, like over a year or two years to have that actually be your method, unless you're Justin, a parent. Yeah, I mean, this is the thing though. And we've got somebody in the chat room who sounds like they have a similar experience that I have, which is having maintained pretty much the same weight since the teenage years and can go days without hardly eating much and they can eat as much as they want also at other times. And it doesn't seem to affect, like, wait. And it's, you know, it's a metabolism thing. Well, it's, I don't know, it's a metabolism thing, but I'm not, like, this isn't like, hey, you should eat what I eat, because I eat crap. I eat junk food, you know, just as easily as I eat healthy or as easily as I eat nothing at all for days of the time. Like it's a weird thing. Like, I don't, I really don't understand or get anything that has to do with dieting or food stuff because I don't, I don't know. But like this other person in our, like, USS Rover in the chat room is explaining as well, I think we're just wired that way. It's a metabolism thing. And I bet you it does come down to, it's not genetics because it's not really like it runs in my family so much, I don't think, but it may be, it may be, it might be gut microbes, you know, it might be that you've got a certain relationship with the microbes that they're like, okay, signal it. So this, so the microbes is totally separate from the fasting. And so like this is something they saw that across the board, people who it's not, you know, they took lots of different people of different ages and different backgrounds and different weights and they put them into either control group or test group. And across the board, people lost weight and they improved on all these factors. And then they took people in the control group and they put them on the diet and the control group also improved and got better. And so the diet appears to work. Now, again, I just, you know, the question is they only did it for three months. Is this something that you can do it for three months or even just one month. And then the benefits stick with you for a while. How long are you benefited by it? Does it then, like Justin, you're bringing up, does it then depend on your metabolism and your microbial fauna, flora? Yeah, so- And what I was gonna say is- Different question. Well, right, but what I meant by that though, wasn't that, what I meant by that is my micro flora and rovers here in the audience and that sort of thing. Those that do sort of naturally do this like low caloric diet, it might be that our micro flora are determining when we feel satiated. When we say, okay, that's enough energy and that it's a natural metabolism based on micro flora that creates that. Not that the diet is in any way dependent on it. Yeah, but the big point here is that it's another, this is another study now in humans that fasting and specifically this fasting mimicking technique can improve people's health. Which actually, this is kind of related to what we were talking about with the mongooses before, that variable states might be the best thing for your body, just like with the mongooses. So- Yeah, so then I wanted to link up to another study that just came out this week and some researchers have just published in Nature Communications a study, this was in worms, not in people, so pretty far removed from humans, but basically they took worms and then they looked at particular proteins that were aggregating in their system. And our cells have this natural process that's called autophagy. And in autophagy, what happens is it's basically inside the cell, they've got these liposomes that grab onto broken or tangled up proteins, chomp them up, recycle them, get rid of them, it's kind of the housekeepers of the cell. And autophagy seems to decrease in your cells the older you get. And so there's a lot of evidence that's lining up to suggest that this autophagy might be really important for longevity and for health. This study showed that when they shocked these mice, shocked these worms with high temperatures, they call it heat shock, heat shock that there were certain worms that increased their autophagy and other worms that were deficient. And so the ones that increased their autophagy rates were able to also do better when they were shocked with heat later on and they also lived longer. So the take home story from this is that we should all have a sauna every once in a while. Yeah. So the take home message is the heat stress was what the stress was for these worms. And there are some worms that are better than others at accepting the stress, but that variable stress upregulated this process of autophagy. And that autophagy is probably what was determining the better survival rates of some worms over others. So the moral of today's show in general so far is a little stress is good for you. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Which I think we knew. We've heard this before. It's just more. I.e. exercise, right? I have something that may bring a little less. Yeah, less stress, okay. Less stress. As we all might recall, our current president in conversation about immigration stated they're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some, I assume, are good people. Well, Mr. President, assume no longer. Results of a university at Buffalo Lead Study did find a link between crime and immigration. Turns out immigration is actually linked to reductions in crime. According to the findings, immigrants are less criminal than your average American. Quoting voice, our research shows strong and stable evidence that on average across U.S. metropolitan areas, crime and immigration are not linked, says Robert Alderman, associate professor of sociology at UB at University of Buffalo and the paper's lead author. The results show that immigration does not increase assaults and in fact, robberies, burglaries, larceny and murder are lower in places where immigration levels are higher. Alderman's study with Leslie William Reed, University of Alabama, Gail Markle, Kensa State University, Charles Jarrett, Georgia State University and Saskia Weiss, an impent scholar is published in the latest issue in the journal Ethnicity and Criminal Justice. Facts are critical things in current political environments, says Alderman almost wishfully. The empirical evidence in the study and other related research shows little support for the notion that more immigrants lead to more crime. Previous research based on arrest and offense data has shown that overall foreign born individuals are less likely to commit crimes than native born Americans. For the current study, the author stepped back from the study of individual immigrants and instead explored whether large scale immigration patterns in communities could be tied to increases in crime due to changes in cities, such as fewer economic opportunities based on the claim that immigrants displace domestic workers from jobs. Authors drew a sample of 200 metropolitan areas defined by the US Census Bureau. And use census data and uniform crime reporting data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, I think that's the FBI, for a 40 year period, 200 metropolitan areas between 1970 and 2010. This is a study across time and across place and the evidence is clear, said Alderman. We're not claiming that immigrants are never involved in crime. What we are explaining is that communities experiencing demographic change driven by immigration patterns do not experience significant increases in any kind of crime we examined. In many cases, crime was either stable or actually declined in communities that incorporated many immigrants. So little bit of fact finding that may be useful going forward for the current political sphere as well. Yeah, it's important to do studies like this to actually find out what's happening in our country. How is our country working? How are people interacting with each other? But somebody who was it, Twit Refugee or no, no, yeah, Twit Refugee says this is sociology, not science, which is a whole nother debate. But it is data. Yes, is social science and hard science, are they different, do they overlap? Of course they overlap. This is data driven empirical thought. Scientific. This is data driven. This is the only, I mean, take it out of context, take it out of the context of whatever it is. This is data driven, everything else you've heard isn't. Okay, this was data driven, anything else you might have heard, think, believe was not. There. So you guys wanna talk about the ant butt beetle? Yeah. Why would you even ask? Ant butt beetle, yes. So before you get into the story. It's like a turducken, right? I kind of have a question. You have a question, kind of. Is an ant with a beetle butt or is this a beetle that has an, looks sort of an antish? Because it ends in beetle. So I'm assuming it's actually a beetle, but then why would they call it ant butt? Because then I'm thinking it's, see, though I'm confused. Don't you wanna hear the story? I do, but I... Don't you wanna hear the story? I'm gonna know if it's an ant or a beetle. No need to vamp, sir. Let's hear it. It's both. Dun dun dun. Both. So when I say ant butt beetle, I really do mean a beetle that pretends to be the butt of an ant. Oh my goodness. That is very different. Does the ant know about it? And that is the good question, because the ant, there is an ant here, and the ant doesn't appear to notice this little beetle hanging onto its abdomen. Adorable. And looking kind of like a, I don't know, you can describe it kind of like a bustle or a, I don't know, a double butt. The second butt. The second butt. It looks like an ant with two butts. It looks like a bustle. Like if that ant was in the Old West, it'd be wearing a nice checkered dress. With a little bustle on the back, right? With a little bustle. With a little badompe bump. So this beetle has specialized itself to hang on to the ant's abdomen, hang on for dear life. And its external covering actually mimics that of the ant itself. And so the researchers think it's very possible that this beetle is trying to mimic the ant's rear section. Now as to the benefit of this, we don't necessarily know why the beetle has decided to do this, but there, this species of ant, this army ant, the researchers say, will go out into the jungles. The researchers, according to an article by Ed Jung over at The Atlantic, once again, a fantastic, fun article, he talked about these researchers, Christoph von Birren and Daniel Kronauer, who found these, they studied these ants. They've been studying them for years in rain forests in Costa Rica. And they'd go out and they'd hang out on little chairs and they'd watch ants all day long on the forest floor and the leaf litter seeing what they're gonna do. And these ants, these army ants will go out with giant, maybe up to 200,000 individual large raiding parties. And whatever they come across, they will tear apart. And so they will kill other animals, little other insects. They'll kill little birds. If they run into a bigger bird, they will attack it and probably injure it. And they can even sting larger animals to death even if they can't just consume them. So this particular army ant that they were studying in the forest, they're looking at one day in 2004, they're like, oh, why does that ant have two abdomens? Or in the case of this story, two butts. And so they took a look and they discovered that it was a beetle. They put the ant in a vial, they put an ant in a vial and they shook it and then all of a sudden the second abdomen fell off and legs came out and they went, oh my gosh, it's actually a beetle. It's a beetle. So that ant is a big bad bodyguard perhaps? Bad body. So that's possibly it is that according to this article, there are potentially up to 550 different species of organisms that follow these ants around, basically picking up the refuse, also hanging on to the ants for protection. There are flies that lay eggs in some of the injuries that are incurred in the victims. There are little mites that ride around on the ants, second blood from the ants. There are beetles, other species of beetles. So they have one kind, this hysterid of which this new beetle they've discovered is part of the group, the hysterids. They are very spherical and they're kind of like turtles. They can pull all of their appendages in so they're just like a hard shell that the ants can't get into to eat them. So there's already this form factor, morphology of being able to be hard and scared away. And so these little guys that the researchers have named Nimfeister, Cronaueri, they've just gone a little bit further to just get a free ride, protection. Maybe if they drop off, they can get free food at certain points. Yeah. These ants sound like keystone species almost. Like they have their own little... They have an ecosystem that surrounds them. Yeah. Yeah. I'm picturing that an ant on my kitchen counter like as I'm about to smack it going, you're looking at me like I'm a pest? You have no idea what it's like to live with pests. You have no idea. I'm just passing through. You have no concept of what it's like to have pests. If you add something as big as your butt hanging onto you then you'll know what it's like to live with pests. Yeah, could you imagine? I mean, for you to have, I mean, that's the... Yeah, I mean, could you consider the size of the ant's abdomen with its rear section? And then, could you imagine? It's like having, I don't know, sometimes my small child hangs off with me that way. I was gonna say, Kiki, don't you have that problem sometimes? I do. Yeah. Anywho, ant butt beetles in Costa Rica. Who knew? Who knew? Nimfeister. Nimfeister. Oh, they're fantastic. All right. Are we ready for our quick stories for the end of the hour? Mm-hmm. Okay, I have one. Turns out that French people cross the road against red lights, jaywalking, much more often than people in Japan. Why do I need to know that? That sounds like a waste of brain space. And if it was given to me as a trivia question, I would have guessed right. Probably would have. Yeah, so French people are 20 times more likely than the Japanese to cross the street on a red. And the, they are, so when they looked at over 5,000 street crossings, they picked like three, four intersections in Nagoya, Japan. And they had three intersections in Strasbourg, France. And they found that more than 40% of the French pedestrians crossed against the light. Only 2% of the Japanese did. And I wonder if it has anything to do with the reaction times of the drivers. I don't know, possibly. But something noted in this study is that French pedestrians are much more likely to just kind of follow other pedestrians into the street and then be very surprised when they see cars coming at them. Really? Yeah. Oh boy. So the point of this study is to... Please tell me. Quantify this kind of behavior to potentially find ways to engineer safer signals into our public spaces. We don't like people getting run over by cars. If you have people who are going to be more likely to cross the street, do they follow other people into the street? Can you make something that goes blah and has a really loud noise that don't cross the street? What you do is you send an electric current in the street for when the don't walk sign is up. Yeah. Well, not enough to actually hurt them. Just enough for it to kind of shock them when they step down off the curb. I like how Whiskey Rettigate says the French are so nonchalant. Yes, they're so nonchalant. They invented the phrase nonchalant. There you go. Oh, that was good. Yeah, one thing, French, yeah, probably more likely to get run over by cars than the Japanese as well. Not that that was quantified in their study. Other quick study. Once again, a study looking at fruit flies shows that the father's diet impacts the sperm competitiveness of their male children. Oh, of their male children. Yeah, so fruit flies who were raised on either a high or a low protein diet. So when they were young, had high or low protein diets and then had their adulthood on similar intermediate protein level diets. The ones that had high protein had sons that had better fitness. Their sperm were better at competing. Low protein males had a different immune activity. So your diet will affect your children and their sexual abilities. Not just your data, but father's. Father's will impact their sons' reproductive abilities. And not just the diet that they are eating now, but the diet they were raised on. So if an impoverished fruit fly goes on to become a middle-class lawyer fruit fly, then he's still potentially going to have sons that have better infertile potentially, yeah, or have trouble conceiving with female fruit flies. Yeah, and then my final quick story for the hour. Researchers, did you know this? Researchers sent some algae up to the International Space Station. They didn't just put this algae in the International Space Station and see how it worked. They put it outside of the International Space Station. Oh, gosh. It was out in space. This little algae from Norway hung out outside the space station for 530 days. Whoa. Wow, that's more than a year. It is indeed, well done, sir. Not quite two years. That's a really long time. I would not expect anything to survive for 530 days in space. Right, you would not expect. And these, yeah, they're kind of extremophile algae already. They come from a remote peninsula in Norway where they are able to withstand really extreme cold and not a lot of moisture. And they're really, they have this kind of like tardigrades, they have a dormant state that they can go into. So that they don't need to apply energy to reproduction or metabolism for feed or feeding themselves. So brought them back to Earth and the researchers even did not expect what they saw. Basically, it was as if they had never gone to space. The algae came back, they came out of their dormant phase and just started reproducing as if nothing had ever happened. I feel like this is how the thing started. I feel like this is how the thing started. The thing did come from outer space, but I don't know. But it was a plant. I don't know if it had come from Earth initially. I don't know. So, the thing now. That's very cool. Yeah. So what is the earliest form of life on Earth? What? Isn't it like the green blue algae? The earliest form of life? Yeah. Some of the earliest forms of life are plant life. Yeah, plant life. It's like really early. So we could potentially, if we found another planet before we expire here on this Earth, we could set up an automated mission to an M-class planet, shock full of algis and just hope what happened here happens again there. I thought you were going to say this is clear evidence of panspermia. Well, it could be, but it's also like it'd be a great, like, yeah, I mean, this is an evolutionary adaption to living in space. I mean, that's pretty cool, right? This is clear evidence of Norwegian superiority. Yeah, clear Norwegian alienness. But no, I mean, this is something then that we could use to send something through space potentially. Potentially, yeah. I mean, studying these dormancy strategies of life forms, which, you know, like tardigrades, these algae, they are unicellular organisms, but they, like these algae, they form communities. But it'll be interesting to find out what we can learn about how their strategies work, where they came from. Is it something we can apply to our own efforts? Absolutely. We can terraform Mars with algae. Hey, Blair, you have a story? Yeah. So when it comes to the media, at least in the UK, a recent study found out that we're not getting the whole truth about conservation issues, namely, and well, welfare issues, and that some of them get more airtime than others. Any ideas what that might be? The panda. Polar bear, penguin. So they didn't look particularly at individual species, but on animal welfare issues. And overall, they found that welfare issues are more likely to attract media coverage if it involves deliberate intention to harm animals or breaking the law. The media is less likely to report animal welfare issues occurring in the marine environment relating to pollution, marine debris, commercial fishing, stuff like that. That's weird. And in particular, also, if someone in the media is a proponent of a particular issue, that will get a lot more coverage as well. Sure, because it's humans who dictate. I mean, producers are human and they dictate the news. Yeah. Absolutely. So the coverage in media is not analogous to the importance or the multitude of effect from these environmental concerns. It's really about what is going to get the most viewers and who has supported those particular issues. And also, there's an idea that if it's illegal, if there's already something out there calling this welfare issue illegal, people will be more likely to bring it up in media because it is not controversial. If it's illegal, it's unilaterally bad. So they don't have any concerns bringing it up. Yeah. So when you're hearing about these things in the news, sure, all of them need our attention, but perhaps look at some science and some research before you decide what is the worst and needs the most attention. Yeah, well, I mean, I know on this show, I definitely go for sensationalism over what's actually the issue, you know, Aunt Butt Beatle. I think, I don't know if that's pretty controversial, too, though. I mean. Sure. Yes. Ultimately, not to be too sensationalist. Ultimately, people should watch this week in science if they should. And also, we talk about the largest environmental issue of our time all the time. All the time. Chlamydia. That's true. Climate change. That's right. I've been talking about it a long time. Any more stories, Justin? I'm good. All right. Blair, that is all. We have reached the end of our fabulous hippo celebration show in which there was nothing to do with hippos. Stay tuned, and I'll tell you my favorite story about hippos from the last couple of years. All right, not in the show, but in the after show. You can find that on YouTube if you are interested in finding out more. So it is now time for us to end this show. I want to shout out to everyone in the chat room, everyone over on YouTube chatting, everyone over on Facebook who are leaving comments and watching. Thanks, you guys. Thanks for being engaged and being a part of the show. 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Gotta be high, high, high, high, high, high, high, high, high. Because it's this weekend science. This weekend science. This weekend science, science, science. This weekend science. This weekend science. This weekend science. Science, science. I've got a laundry list of items I want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thoughts, 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, our week in science is coming your way. Listen to what we say, and if you learn anything from the words that we've said, then leave. This week in science. That does it for another episode of This Week in Science. We are clear. We are done. We are out. Blair's got a fluffy hippo. I do! I don't have a hippo. I just have a hippo in the calendar. That's the saddest story I've ever heard. If everybody deserves a hippo, everyone should have a hippo. Where's Justin? I want to hear your story. I know. I have to wait. He'll really like it. Yeah. Gosh, why am I still quiet compared to Blair and Justin? I mean, I can turn up. Does that help? I just turned up a little bit. Does that help? Am I coming across loud and clear? I don't know. I turned it up a little bit. You're so kind to me. Yeah, I know. It all says Google's just limiting me. Justin! I'll just turn it up a lot more. Keep turning it up and turning it up. Justin! Am I as loud as Blair? Everyone says I'm louder now. Okay, so I'll just have to remember. Super loud says Rob the Invisible. Am I too loud now compared to Blair? So I have to find the right level. We've given the... I have to find the right level given the delay between... All right. Does this work? Does this work? Is that okay? Does this work? Okay, Blair, you talk too. I'm talking about hippos. I'm not talking about hippos. I'm talking about something else. That's it. Strengths. Okay, Whiskey says maybe down a smidgen. Strengths said I'm still not as loud as shouty Blair. But I'm not shouty right now. No, Blair's not shouty. I'm shouty. Here, I'm going to be shouty now. Justin! Teeny bit more. Justin! Now I'm going to be getting into... I've turned up a little bit more. I'm going to be getting into... buzz. What's happening? Microphone interference. But if I'm talking like this and a normal and then you're talking... Identity 4 said I was a little quiet compared to you guys today. And last time. Which is weird because my setting is always the same. Which means it's not us. It's interwebs. And I can't change my input volume. Good. Identity 4 likes it now. Don't you have a mixer thingy set up with this? No, I don't set that up every week. It's a huge pain. Yeah, you don't need the mixer every week. I have the same settings every week. Yeah, Gordon MacLeod, nothing is as loud as shouty Blair. It's true. Especially when shouty Blair is shouting at Karen. I've been having a nice day. Let's not bring Karen into the mix right now. You know, there's a side effect to this too, you know. Which is annoying as Karen is to you. All your friends when they get together without you, they're like, you ever know how she's always talking about Karen. Karen is Karen that. I think I started a meme. I've seen a lot of memes about Karen lately. Oh gosh. Okay, so I wanted to tell you guys this story. It came out in 2014. So it's not this week in science. So one of my two favorite news stories about hippos. The first one I've talked about ad nauseam, which is about how their poop is actually the main source of nutrients in the dry season in the river Nile, because they leave the river, eat grass, come back into the river and poop everywhere. So without hippos, the Nile might be a pretty terrible place to be. So hippos and hippo poop are super important. I just shared it on Facebook too for national hippo day. And then I'm going to wait for Kiki to come back to talk about this one. Oh no, I'm right here. I messed with white out with something that's a very strange white out. So then in 2014, which was before that thing I was just talking about, a story came to light that some people knew about, but most people didn't. And I think it was actually a story on NPR. Maybe it was This American Life. I don't know. But it was about a plan in the early 20th century to bring hippopotamuses to the United States. Because that's what people did back then. Like they brought pigeons here. They brought that was like, no, just bring things to the United States. Can you guess why, what use the hippos would serve? I don't know. Lots of hippo zoos. No. So the swamps of Louisiana were full of invasive water hyacinths. So what Americans love to do when they're invasives is bring in another invasive to take care of it. That's what we love to do. So they thought that they could bring in hippos, set them loose in the bayou. They would eat the water hyacinths. And then you could hunt the hippos for meat. So hippo hunting. Yeah. So apparently, okay, in 1910, the United States with its growing population, its native animals hunted to extinction was facing a meat shortage. Frederick Russell Burrum, a famed American scout, had a novel idea to beef up the country's annoying meat supply, import animals from Africa. This man was the key inspiration for the Boy Scouts of America. And he thought that transplanting African animals was the answer to the meat shortage, the hyacinth invasion, and more. Hippos, eating hyacinths and then being meat for people and adventuresome hunters. They could be an adventuresome hunter. Yeah. And then even President Theodore Roosevelt was in support of this idea originally. No, why not? The Idea Blair. And in 1910, Burnham's quest lined up with the designs of Congressman Robert Folligny Broussard, a Democrat from New Iberia, Louisiana. But the district had a problem that brought them to decide not to do this. So originally, they were like, oh, the water hyacinths. Yes, absolutely. Let's bring in the hippos. What could go wrong? I picture music. Bring in the hippos. Bring in the hippos. Oh my goodness. Yeah. So the hippo bill, HR 23261. The hippo bill. It was set to appropriate $250,000 for the importation of useful new animals to the United States, i.e. hippos. The Washington Post assured the public that the U.S. would see shipments of hippos within a few years. But the shipments never arrived. Despite the initial burst of energy and press excitement, the movement to import and ranch the hippopotamus fizzled out. So the beginning of the end was one congressman arguing that unscrupulous hunters would sneak onto the farms and hunt them for trophies, not for meat. The Department of Agriculture eventually decided that the way to answer the question of the meat supply was not to diversify the animals on our plate, but to increase the land available for beef. Instead of the swamps who came home to hippos, the swamps were converted to beef-friendly agricultural land. It would have been so great though, wouldn't it? No. Of course not. No, we don't want. Oh, hey. Territorial animals that kill more people every year than any other predator combined in Africa. Yeah. That's a good idea. Yeah. Yeah. So hippos at one time could have been roaming the bayou. And killing people. Yep. I like that in the comment section, there's a reason Africans never domesticated or farmed hippos. Hippos are A-holes. They're cute, but they're not necessarily nice. Yeah. Oh, my God. Oh, my God, I'm watching this video. That is really funny. What is it? I have to try it. I have to find the link so I can share it. It's a Facebook video. I'm going to find this. Oh, my God. Russians. It's a Russian funny video. Oh, there it is. There we go. There it is. Okay. I'll find the link to this thing. All right. No, I'll just play it right now because this is hilarious. What the? They're using like a leaf blower and getting in these big balloons. I don't like it. I don't have nightmares from that. What's your face? Your face into the balloon. Sorry. That's real weird. Yeah. I don't like that to be airtight enough to maintain the balloon's consistency. It's got to be getting choked out at the same time. Possibly. Yeah. That just made me laugh so much. Oh, my goodness. Too funny. Player didn't like it. I thought it was hilarious. It creeped me out for some reason. I feel like the girl just smashing her face into the side of the balloon. I would do the same thing. Ha ha ha. Want to hear a joke about sodium? Yes. Na. Oh. Want to hear a joke about sodium hypo bromide? Na bro. Na bro. Thank Campbell for that one. That's funny. Hey, I got a package today. Tom Merritt. If Tom Merritt's out there anywhere. I got a package from ink shares today. Tom Merritt's new book. Oh, wow. And he crowdfunded using a self publishing website called ink shares. It's kind of like, I don't know, it's kind of, I don't know, not Kickstarter, but it's like, you have to get, it's kind of like Kickstarter because you have to raise a certain amount of money from people ordering the book to get it published. So anyway, it's got a pretty cover. It's very, it's very nice paperback. It seems like good quality paper. I'm very excited to read Tom Merritt's new book called Pilot X. This is fantastic. It's about time travel. When are you going to write another book, huh, Justin? I don't know. Right now I'm preparing for an art show. Oh, awesome. Yeah, you've been doing that. Yeah, you have been for a little while. That's cool. Yeah, I've got, there's, I've got a venue and I've got to produce, I've got two pieces made now and I need a third. I'm most of the way there. And that's going to be probably sometime in April, May-ish. Sweet. That's cool. I'll do a shout out for at least the local Davisee crowd. Yeah. Yeah, people in Davise, where's it going to be? At the Three Mile Gallery and Brewery downtown. Downtown, awesome. Yeah. So you can have a beer and check out your art. I like it. Well, actually, and it's, it'll be with the, the whole premise of this, of course, is that it's going to be for the second Friday art about town thing. But the premise is that you come in and if you like the art, you, you buy the artist a beer because it's that easy. So your appreciation for art. Wow. It looks like 7000 Daviseites are without power tonight. What? Why? Let's see. It's raining. Yeah, it's raining here too. How's the, It's not here. I mean, he says it'll be on about 11 p.m. tonight for those 7000 without. I'm glad you had power for this. Geez. Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm in the deep south of Davise now. It seems to have hit. The dirty south? Sort of west central. Yeah. I'm in the, actually, yeah. It is also the dirty south part of it. No. The dirty south. That's a song about Davise, right? Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Um, how do you guys know? Has anything happened with the, uh, the dam that they evacuated? The Oroville, the Oroville dam. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. Good. It didn't break? No, the dam itself, uh, was okay. The dam was fine. This was an emergency. And then it had this spillway that, uh, started to erode. And then they thought, okay, we'll shut down the spillway, which is letting off excess water from the dam to go, you know, take pressure off the dam. And, and so they shut that down to repair it. And while they're looking over how to repair it, a whole lot of runoff from the water, from the ice packs, and then another storm came through and they're like, oh my gosh. Well, there's an emergency spillway. So if we don't use the regular runoff thing, there's an emergency one where it just kind of goes over the, this very wide bank. Um, amazingly, though they never used it, this 40 year old, uh, emergency spillway in the, like, tallest dam in America, I guess it is. Dam. Um, it, so it spills over this really long, sort of like if it was coming over the edge of your bathtub, right? It's coming on over a long area. It's the whole side is, it's sort of spilling over. And it spills down really far. And at the bottom of that though, it was just dirt. And so then they immediately began to erode what this, this emergency spillway was pouring down into. And it was backing up and, and in threat of, uh, going under and encroaching on the foundation of the emergency spillway, which is a big part of the dam. It's a, it's not the whole dam. It's not the dam itself, but it's a massive volume of water that if this thing failed, it would be terrible. So they had to stop using that. So they turned it back on this emergency spillway, the regular spillway, which was already eroded. And now it's getting damaged even worse, but they're using it again. They used it again to lower the level of the waters in the dam. Well, they could look at the other thing and figure out what they could do there. And they dropped all these helicopters, dropped these industrial size sandbags full of boulders into the part of the spillway that was getting damaged. So that slowed it down a bit, but it was a big panic. Cause if the thing had failed, you know, it would have impacted a lot of people. So a lot of people had to evacuate very quickly and now have gotten a green light to return home. But it's, it's one of those things too. Like if you'd gotten a walkthrough of this, a massive volume of water is going to come over this wall and land here. And you went, okay, what's here? Like all it really needed was a really thick, concrete flooring where the water first comes down just to get it, you know, off of, cause that's, you know, you take a garden hose and you turn on it and it makes a hole. Basic backyard kid playing with a hose in the mud, you would have figured this out. And it's, what's funny sort of is they did this massive multi-hundred million dollar upgrade of the Folsom Dam. Folsom Dam is good. They massively did this huge infrastructure project to reinforce it. And then we, then we ran into a drought. So there's no doubt in my mind that this was next on the list to get a major upgrade. But now there's a drought and all these, you know, all these water reservoirs are dry. They're the lowest levels they've been in the history of their creation. So I spent a hundred million dollars again reinforcing something that you don't need to. Because it might rain again. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Rourke says they've averted disaster thus far, but there's more rain on the way, need to make it through the season before they can fix the main spillway and strengthen the emergency spillway. Yep. Gotta make it through the season. So fingers crossed. So they've kept the regular spillway open, not full blast even, but they've kept open. They've been working really hard to lower the level of the reservoir so that it can take this coming storm. And they feel like they've got things well in hand. Although having things well in hand is when they've been saying all along. As this thing got worse and worse and we're out of control. So we've got people on it. They may be our best people, but it almost, the emergency spillway, it looks like an unfinished project. It really does. It looks like that had to be the next step was reinforcing the base of where the water was going to come pouring down and just never got finished. And I don't know if it just got exited out of a budget, but I guarantee you the engineers that built that thing, I bet you if you find the original blueprint of this thing, that was there. And at some point it got cut out because it's expensive and it's just a bunch of concrete. If we need it someday. So I spend the tens or a hundred million dollars to do it. It'll probably never happen, cross it off the budget. I'm guessing what happened because it's pretty obvious it needed to be there. Yeah. I mean, it failed like hour six. I could see that the thing didn't work. Yeah. Rourx is saying the Sierra Club tried to get them to strengthen the emergency spillway in 2005, but they killed it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. With Mike infrastructure, it's never sexy infrastructure, which is the thing that keeps things running, keeps the lights on, keeps people from not drowning in a flood infrastructure. It's not sexy at all. And politicians don't prioritize it. You know, it's not the thing. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's, and then it becomes a lot more costly to repair damage that occurs. Exactly. Yeah. Planning ahead. Always nice. So, you know, I'm not a big fan of talking politics when it comes to real politics for the after show, but I have to put out there that last week on February 7th, there was a bunch of Republicans. I mean, who knows where it'll go, but they introduced a bill to the House of Representatives to terminate the Department of Education. And I feel that our role as an educational program, informational, fun, entertaining, but also educational program, this is something that's important. And it is bill HR 899. And it was introduced by Representative Justin Amash from Missouri, Andy Biggs from Arizona, Jason Chaffetz from Utah, Matt Gaetz from Florida, Jody B. Heiss from Georgia, Walter Jones from North Carolina, and Raul Labrador from Idaho. This has been moved to the House Education and the Workforce Committee for further action, but this is something that I think we should call people about. So maybe call the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, find out if it's been moved to a subcommittee. And if it's been moved to a subcommittee, we call those people because terminating the Department of Education is not going to be in our nation's best interest. We need that. Talking about planning for the future. We need it. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know exactly. How about we do not terminate it? Exactly. Your education is the world you live in. It forms the boundaries and expanse of what you can know and experience and achieve in this world. It's kind of everything that modern society is based on. So... Yeah. Yeah. And I understand where I understand Republicans believe that education is more of a local issue that it should be taken back to the states, not run by the federal government. But I'm going to say that in a global economy, when we are not just competing against people in our local area for jobs, but we're competing against people internationally for jobs, all of the people, all of the kids in our country growing up need to be educated to be competitive. We need to introduce creativity and we need to introduce curiosity and we need to introduce also academics. Keep the academics going and prepare children for the future and there need to be national standards and we can't do that without Department of Education. It's not like we're doing so well in terms of education. We're not doing that work. That it's time to let it go. We're not the worst, but for example, when you've come up with a set of national science standards and not every state is willing to accept them because they include the words evolution and climate change. Yeah. Oh, and Texas? They voted to put things like that reintroduced the controversy of evolution into their textbooks. They're going to be refining their textbooks again even though educators said don't do it. So pretty much every science textbook, there is a California edition and there is a Texas edition. Yeah. The California edition adheres to science standards. The Texas edition makes evolution sound like a debate. And now also the Texas edition of textbooks will not include climate change information. Okay. So this is kind of my point when we were talking a little bit about people with different ideologies when they get exposed to critical information about climate change, how one group moved more than the other or that there was this. And I really believe that the goal of all this is to create kind of like living in a town with the company store and the company newspaper and the company school where you're taught what they want you to know solely. And so when we have this constant feedback from... And then you also have to use the company money and you don't get paid in any other kind of currency so you can only spend your money at the company store. Which is exactly why we had a revolutionary war because that becomes the same thing as a pipeline. And the dangers of not having national education is that you can have completely different types of education based on what a local government decides it wants its population to know and that is always in the best interest of them maintaining their political power. So it's a very dangerous, dangerous concept but very lucrative if, for instance, you want people to think there's a controversy about evolution. Well, and it's being ill-informed breeds bad decisions for the future when it comes to all of this stuff which may benefit some people and that may be part of the reason for not wanting to talk about this stuff but on the whole it benefits society if we can look forward with the proper understanding of our closed system. There's a state that decided not to teach sex education. It removed it from classrooms. That state, Tennessee, had then, as a result, the highest rate of teen pregnancy. But, ideologically, they stuck to their guns and they did the thing that they believed was right without paying attention to facts. And now we've got immigration policy based on fear of crime or that was ginned up through fear of crime at least. And as this study shows, the opposite is actually true. That's why facts matter. Truth is a real thing. There is a real truth to every one of these issues, to every one of these problems, to every one of these things that we have politicians deciding on. And it has to be made clear through people speaking out and through our education system which allows people to weigh different arguments aside from just somebody saying so. I don't think you destroy an education system unless facts work against you. If facts are working against you, if truth is working against you and people are being educated to understand facts and weigh truths, then, yeah, I see the desire to destroy it as being lucrative. What an interesting point. Hey, if you want an uninformed populace, maybe you're not a cool person. Hiding facts from people generally doesn't mean you're a good person. Breeding ignorance, not a cool move. On another line of this, something looking at toward the future, as we have been discussing, there's a really interesting opinion article by George Monbiot in The Guardian right now. I think he, yeah, from today. And the title of it is, in an age of robots, schools are teaching our children to be redundant. I think that's something very important to consider. Yeah, a regime of cramming and testing is crushing young people's instinct to learn and destroying their future. So in the future, kids are going to be competing against robots for jobs. This is one of the things that's great about the next generation science standards that not everyone has adapted yet. It's not about being able to prove you know things. It's about being able to prove that you know how to find things and how to use information to argue a point. Yeah, and how to figure things out. Exactly. So the whole point is trying to create performance expectations that are not based on knowledge. They are based on processes and thinking procedures, which is huge. The big challenge now is trying to figure out how to test for that because of course we still have to test. So right now, some states, so for California, for example, one of the earlier states to accept and adopt the next generation science standards, we just left the awareness phase. Now we're slowly getting into the implementation phase. And now in two to three years, they're hoping to start the evaluation phase. But it takes time to figure this out because you know before you had these scantrons, okay, you can figure out what percentile this person's in, bang bang boom, done. Because you can check and see if they can answer questions on a page. But now they want you to be able to prove that you can make a design to solve a problem and reason how that new design fixes that problem. How are you going to test for that? It's not going to be easy. But it's so worthwhile to adjust our expectations. You're right. So that they're not made obsolete by the fact that the internet exists. So just like when calculators, when graphing calculators happened and there was this lag of, okay, do we still make them graph things? Right. Then figuring out, okay, teach them how to use the tool and then teach them how to use the information given by the tool further. Yeah. So this is actually the invent of John Dewey. Back in the late 1800s and even the very early 1900s, we taught to a test. We had a teacher whose job it was to stand in the front of the classroom and recite lists, lists of information. And the student's job was to memorize lists of information. And then they would be tested on these lists of information. And the more of this list of information they remember, the better they did in school. And John Dewey came along, became the nation's first, it was before the Department of Education, but he was like the nation's education czar. And said, no, we're doing this wrong. And he was a teacher himself and he had schools in Chicago, which were constantly having attempted to be shut down by the religious schools at the time. Because they didn't like it. It was sort of like an early version. Well, but it was like he would work with groups of kids, like a Montessori, like early Montessori stuff. Groups of kids. And instead of, here's the recipe, recite it back as I have told it to you, he would have the kids sort of work in a home eclect, where they would actually bake the bread. Or instead of list off these leaves, they would do a nature walk and collect them and be forced to sort of go through the process of identifying things based on characteristics. So his education model was largely adapted. That education model that he adapted fueled the American education system through past the, it was sort of in the late end of the Industrial Revolution, when we had some bright people and a lot of workers to what became the generations that created the modern world of technology that the US has been such a major contributor of. And this whole, we need to judge the teachers, therefore we need these testings of teachers and schools to get the funding and depend on the funding and now it's a teach to the test. The whole modern, well, the last 15 years or so, 20 years of education, started pushing us more and more and more towards that system that was failing our students that we moved away from. And John Dewey, every teacher is now, there's a sort of gap. If I talk to teachers who are retired and retired from teaching, they know who John Dewey is. They learned about John Dewey. That was part of what they were taught. There's this group of teachers in the middle who are older teachers and still working. You never heard of John Dewey. And what's really awesome is when I talk to young teachers today, those who've been teaching for a few years, they know who John Dewey is. Yeah. And it's been John Dewey, John Dewey's philosophy of education has been brought back with Common Core. Like this is all about, no, we need the testing is peripheral to the education of the student. It is not the education of the student. The education of the student is in the process of your education system. It's in how you teach, not what you teach. And so I have real concerns for the nation. And when it comes to the quality of education, but on the other hand, it's also like, I have real concerns for third world countries in terms of their education system too. At the end of the day, I'm in California, baby. I'm raising my kids in a progressive education economic state. I'm not really that worried about my own personal, you know, future when it comes to these things, living in a state where, and I know they're talking about cutting our funding. Really, you know, again, we give more than we take. So California is going to be okay. And I'm starting to have like California, California-dependent first world thinking when it comes to talking about our nation, where I'm like, that's really awful for them. That's terrible that that's happening over there. More and more, I'm starting to think like that, which is awful and terrible because I should be an American before I'm in California first. And that's, so all of this, I feel like is happening in a place really far away. Like it's, gosh, I can't believe that that country is doing that. Oh, well, because, you know, the truth of the matter is if they got rid of the EPA tomorrow, if they got rid of the Department of Education tomorrow, if they got rid of these, in the state of California, we'd actually have a better version of that thing in place already. Our EPA in California, the California's version of the EPA is actually more stringent and has higher standards than the national EPA. The California system of education actually has higher standards than the national. The California building code has higher standards than the national. The California minimum wage is higher than the federal. Okay, okay, okay. Just make me feel bad for leaving already. Come on. Wait, Portland isn't far behind. Portland is mostly made up of Californians. And there's this really weird statistic that's been coming up lately that I came across, which is a lot of the red state immigration comes, like a lot of red states have immigration from California at around 25%. Like Northern Idaho is 25% ex-California residents. But they're getting our red staters. They're getting our like, we don't belong in California. We must leave and move to frozen Northern Idaho. There's part of that. Part of it is there are people who, people moved out of the Midwest or out of the red states to go to college or after college, they're like, I'm going to go live in San Francisco. I'm going to go. And so maybe they did a few years in the Bay Area. And then they're like, okay, I'm out. I don't need to live here anymore. I know lots of people who did that, you know, from the time that I spent after my college years. And then I watched them all leave because they wanted to go someplace and raise a family. And San Francisco wasn't really conducive to that. And so, and even now it's just, I would not raise a kid in San Francisco. And even now California is just, if you want to live someplace interesting, I mean, Sacramento is becoming, because there's a lot of cool stuff right now. Sacramento is an armpit, don't go there. Great. So the Central Valley is affordable, but an armpit. And everywhere that's interesting is unaffordable for the average person. So people are leaving. Can I tell you, I think Portland is the perfect city. If I could just pick a city that I would want to live in, or a city that I would move to California, it would be Portland. If I could just pick Portland up and move it to like where Crescent City is. Or no, is it Crescent City? Yeah. Crescent City in Nevada. What's the north of Arcada? Oh, shoot. Eureka. Yeah, like, yeah. Okay. So if I could take Portland and put it where Eureka is, which is south of Arcada, but if I could take Portland and put it where, yeah, that would be perfect. Or lots of, anywhere. Portland, you pick your place, except for San Francisco and LA. Those are taken. They're taken. They're full, as you like to say. San Francisco is full. San Francisco is full. There's no parking. Don't bother coming in. You're going to, if you drive in, you won't be able to park. You'll spend your whole time circling around. And you won't be like tight circles, because like half of it's one way streets with no left or right turns. Nothing. And then you're going to run into like an eight-way intersection where it's just assumed a certain percentage of people will die. Trying to figure it out. It's just ridiculous. That's awesome. Oh my goodness. All right, you guys. It's 10 30. Just about ish. I'm tired. That's almost as much after show as we had show show. And I'm tired. I'm ready for sleeping. I got to go make some art with my. Yeah. Go make some art. Go spend your night hours. Artie. I'm going to go cuddle up next to my hippo. I'm going to curl up with my kitty cat. I'm going to pet them. That's not a hippo. Maybe I will start reading Tom Merritt's new book. Maybe I'll go watch Eureka. It's a good show. There's a lot of people talking about the California leaving thing. No, we're not handing the rest of the nation over to those jerks. This is why I was always leaving. I was always totally for Texas leaving because I was like, yeah, that's great. That means we win every national election and we can finally fix the country. Texas, if you want to leave, it's still on the table. We'll sign off on it. No company won't leave because as much as people think the headquarters of the nation is in Washington, D.C. We all know it's really California. It's California that calls the shots. Your entire economy. New York and California. If it wasn't for the tax revenue derived from those two states, the rest would be the third world nation. Yeah. Portland a little bit, Seattle. Seattle's big, yeah. I like Washington, Oregon. You always fall in line. You always do as California does. But you have, I think, sometimes cultural contributions. I can't say that for a lot of the flyover states. Good night, everybody. Good night, everybody. I got tiredness. I'm getting sick. I need to go sleeping. I hope everybody has a wonderful, wonderful, healthy week. What are you showing us, Blair? What is that? That's a butt of a hippo. Yeah. Does it have a beetle butt? It has a tail that big. Does it have a butt beetle? Really? I always thought it was like a little snakey thing. No, it has to do this. Elephant tail. It spreads the poop everywhere. Or maybe it's butt beetle does that for it. Okay, everybody. Have a wonderful week. Good night. This week in Science Signing Off. Thanks so much for joining us. We're so glad you did. Hit it button now. I had to button now. Okay, bye.