 This is TWIS. This week in Science, episode number 593. Recorded on Wednesday, November 16, 2016. Tickling your science bone. Hey, everyone, I am Dr. Kiki, and we are here today to fill your heads with a pig personality, rat giggles, and coffee. But first... This, clamor, disclaimer, disclaimer. There is a difference between what we want to see in this world and what we sometimes get. Reality, it seems, is a result-oriented endeavor. There are moments in time when we can affect change, moments when we can simply observe the results of change, and moments in which we are changed by a result. When change is heading your way, as it often does, you have two basic choices to make. Let that change affect you, or change your affect. If you change the way you interact with reality, knowing that it is a result-oriented endeavor, the world you want to see can be the result you made happen. And sometimes, that can make all the difference in the world. And what better result the reality could there be than this week in Science, coming up next. 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 the good science to you, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there, welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back yet again to science it up. We've got all sorts of stories, all sorts of fun discussion about, you know, what's happening in the world? What are people discovering? What are the cool new discoveries? Let's talk about them. Let's discover them for ourselves. Oh, and just so you know, This Week in Science has the 2017 Blair's Animal Corner calendar on the way. So make sure you go to twist.org if you are interested in finding out more about that. Also, if you love twists, share us with your friends on social media. We know you have the Twitters and the Fache Bucas, as- Yeah, as Blair likes to call it. Yes, it's not Italian. It's just the Facebook or the Instagrams or the Snapchat or whatever it is. Share us with your friends. Tell other people they should be listening to us or watching us as well, as well. That would be awesome. Now onto the show. We have all sorts of science news. I have stories about, yeah, the end of the world. Dun, dun, dun. It's coming. Rat brains and coffee because you gotta drink coffee to watch the end of the world happen, right? Justin- I don't wanna sleep through that. No, Justin, what do you have? I've got, what do I have? I have talking microbes, human antibiotics, and underwater archeology. Blurp, blurp, blurp, blurp. And Blair, what's happening in the Animal Corner? I have moody pigs, cockatoos that are good at building cockatoos that are good at building tools and very fast animals and very, very savage animals. I have lots, lots going on today. It's kind of all over the map. Sorry, I'm giggling at cockatoos. Cockatoos, oh man. Missed opportunity. Justin knew I was going there. Can I just rewind? I have moody pigs and cockatoos today. Here we go. We'll fix it in post. It's fine, it's fine. All right, let's jump into it, everybody. It looks like it's gonna be an awesome show. I hope you're ready for the next hour or so to listen, learn, and discuss some more. All right, first up, this is super awesome. We've been talking about CRISPR for a long time and whether or not it's actually gonna be tested in people and there's ethical questions about editing cells and then using them in people. But here in the United States, we don't live in China yet. Anyway, Chinese scientists are moving forward with a CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technique to treat patients with lung cancer, aggressive lung cancer. This is a clinical trial. It's more of like a safety efficacy study. So they're only looking at about 10 patients at the West China Hospital in Chengdu. So this is led by oncologist Liu Yu at Sichuan University in Chengdu and they have delivered altered cells to their first patient. The report says, so on October 28th, basically what they did is they took immune cells from the blood of the patient with a form of very aggressive lung cancer and then they took the cells, isolated them, in a dish applied the CRISPR-Cas9 technique to alter a gene related to immune system function and part of the way this gene works, it codes for a protein called PD1 and normally this stops a cell's immune response and it affects a cell's ability to proliferate. And so when it's disabled, the proliferation is changed and cancers take advantage of it. And so basically what they've done is they've cut out this gene that codes for the disabled PD1. So. Get rid of the back door. Exactly, and then they took the cells and they multiplied them. So they only had a few from the blood of the patient at first, they multiplied them and then they took them and they put it back into the patient. So there's no worry of rejection. This is a patient's own cells only slightly edited. And the hope is that now that this gene that really isn't working to stop cell proliferation, that without it these cells are going to basically attack and kill the cancer, keep them from the cells from proliferating. That's awesome. Yeah, so we have to wait and see. This is, like I said, again, kind of a safety trial. They've done previous studies. I mean, they've moved forward to this human study because they have done prior animal work. And now they're going to be monitoring the patients for six months to see whether injections cause serious adverse effects or whether or not there's any benefit, whether or not the cancer starts going away, goes into remission. So this is pretty exciting. And this is the first real human trial of a CRISPR technique. That's fantastic. I mean, I don't know if this is just because this is where this research was being done. But is there a strict moratorium on doing anything like this in the US? Yes and no, yeah. I mean, this has been kind of, there's been a global moratorium on doing human gene editing studies. But then last year we talked about a group of researchers and policy makers coming together to discuss the effects of various kinds of research into CRISPR-Cas9 and how gene editing can affect humans. And I mean, the big ethical questions we've talked about before are when edits can get into the germline or the reproductive cells. And so this particular therapy is not something that would affect the reproductive cells. This would not be passed on down the lineage. And so there's no worry of, you know, having edited humans being born. And so- Right, and we've talked, I mean, I know the research is definitely underway here. The research- Yeah, so we're actually, there is research that's supposed to be starting here in the United States in 2017, hopefully. There's a trial from, that's going to be using CRISPR to target three genes with the goal of treating different kinds of cancer. So a very similar idea using CRISPR-Cas9 to edit and remove various genes for various types of cancer. And so that's supposed to start in the United States in 2017. So that just hasn't happened yet. There are other researchers, also a group in Peking University in Beijing is hoping to start clinical trials using CRISPR against bladder, prostate and renal cell cancers, but they haven't yet gotten approval or funding. So this is, it's on the move. Human studies are making headway. They're getting approval by the various review and approval boards to move into human trials, which is very exciting. Do it, do it, do it. Yeah, so anyway, it's pretty cool. We'll wait and see what happens with this Chinese trial. And very similarly, many, a few more in 2017, potentially getting started to also treat cancers. And so we'll see how CRISPR-Cas9 does in this paradigm for cancer therapy. It's very exciting. Yeah, so then moving on from cancer, let's get to the end of the world. So we all know that the humans have given the planet Earth a nice case of climitia, right? Climitia, yes. Climitia, yes, we've done it. So anyway, we've been trying to be better and treat the Earth a little bit better. And there's good news. I'm gonna start with the good news. The Earth, our global carbon dioxide emissions have been flat for the third year in a row. And so the global carbon project who measure how much carbon dioxide people, humans emit every year, they also measure how much gets absorbed by various sinks, biomass sinks, the ocean, plants, land surfaces, et cetera. We basically figure out how much carbon dioxide is going into the atmosphere to drive global warming. And they say third year in a row, there's only about a 0.2% increase above emissions of level of 2015, barely. It's really kind of within the error bars. So it's flat, no increase. Good job, people. Yeah, to an extent. Yeah, but I have other things to say about this. So yeah. My analogy of this is for the last three years, the world has put on a credit card the same amount more than it earns or pay off in that year. So while we're not increasing our reliance on the carbon credit card, we're still putting more on it than we can pay off. If that makes any sense. Well, I would say this is good news though, because there's some countries out there who are still increasing their carbon output. So this means, mathematically, some countries have started going in the negative. No. No? No. Nobody's going in the negative. We're flat, which is good. Well, I'm just saying it's averaging to flat because there's probably some countries that are doing more than they were before, but that means some countries are doing less than they were before. That's more what I meant. So some countries have figured out how to slow down and we're slowly ramping down how much carbon dioxide, at least for some countries. So that's, I would say that's inspiring. Yes. Some countries are having economic slowdowns at the moment. Right, so there have been. That's a good thing, really. So here's the deal. The United States and China have been curbing their coal reliance and that is a huge part of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide that the United States and China, two of the top producers in the world put into the atmosphere. Now, the organization, an organization putting together the Climate Change Performance Index of 2017 reported on around the UN climate talks that were taking place in Marrakesh during the last week and they found absolutely no country is shifting to clean energy fast enough to or reducing their reliance on coal or petroleum products fast enough to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius. They ranked 58 nations responsible for 90% of the energy related CO2 emissions. They find France is being awesome. So they're part of the Paris Agreement that we signed last year. France is number one, but they rely a lot on nuclear power, right? So that's one aspect. We also have Sweden and Britain, silver and bronze because they had some cool policies that were put in place, but oh, hey, look, those governments aren't in power anymore, so we'll see what happens there. And then, yeah, the United States and China not doing so well. United States second largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world after China lost ground across all categories. We also have Canada, Australia and Japan at the bottom of the rankings. So we have a lot of work, basically falling oil prices according to Jan Burk of German watch who's the lead author of the report. Falling oil, oil prices did not cause an increase in demand for the energy source while a growing number of countries are starting to turn their back on coal. So this is good. There is a growth in renewables, even though it's not enough. So the point here is we still have a lot more work to do in terms of renewables. And why really do we need to move on this to keep the two degree temperature increased down globally? Well, like I said, we had flat growth in carbon dioxide emissions globally, so no growth necessarily, but that's emissions. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is at a record high again. And so the researchers looking into it say that last year, 2015, it was a record high and could again be in 2016. Atmospheric CO2 levels exceeded 400 parts per million in 2015 and these carbon dioxide levels are linked to temperature. 2015 did see the El Niño event that lasted from May 2015 to June 2016 this year. And so that reduced the amount of biomass, land mass because it was hotter and wetter, or actually it was hotter and drier over tropical land, reduced the amount of biomass that was available to act as a carbon sink. So there was, because of El Niño, those hot, dry conditions kept the carbon from being able to be put away. So potentially we're gonna be in La Niña this year. We actually are in La Niña now, lots of rain, gonna be cold, cold, cold, wet, maybe we'll be a better carbon sink from this part of 2016 into 2017. We don't know, but still, there is, there are weather pattern fluctuations that change how carbon can be put away and stored by the planet. But at the same time, we need to, like Justin said, stop using the credit card. Yeah. And there's also, to put a last bit of perspective on this energy consumption, when you look at a whole oil, it goes up a magnitude every 10 years, which means what we use from say 2000 to 2010 was as much as we had ever used before combined. It's the same, right? And as that goes, it's always gone that way backwards in time, if you look at it. So even sustaining this level, even if we continued not to change, we're still in 10 years going to use as much oil and put out as much of these carbons and use as much energy as we did in all of the years starting in the industrial revolution, like way back then, all of that combined every 10 years. And we're experiencing the climate change of almost 50 years ago, because this is the carbon sink cycle of the ocean. So be a wild ride for a while. There's no getting off of this, but what we're doing and attempting to do now is make sure our children's children have a world that they can live in. Yeah, it's time to start thinking about the future and not just thinking about ourselves. So anyway, it's the end of the world. As we know it, I'm buckling my seatbelt, my arms go up, woo, I feel fine. No, I don't. No, I don't. All right, Justin, what you got for us? How do you know an evolutionary trait is useful? Because it's there. Because it's there. It's conserved over a great span of time, right? It's sometimes there are things that are weird. Why do they do it there? I mean, I guess, yeah, if they're there, you just know that they're not terribly detrimental. Exactly. In the case of Acheromancia mutcini fila, it's survival is as much due to its traits as it is to the evolutionary benefit it provides to others. And as the name might have tipped you off, Acheromancia muscini filia, or fila, is a bacteria. Researchers at Oregon State University have discovered how it functions in the gut in helping to regulate glucose metabolism. This bacteria's function is so important, scientists say that it has been conserved through millions of years of evolution to perform a similar function in both mice and humans. So this is, they say this is, it's got this same sort of symbiotic relationship with mice and human. Could be, could be even beyond millions. This might mean this has been around since an ancient ancestor. I'm gonna go out on a limb here. Muscini fila, like mucin, mucilage, mucin, mucous loving, it's a mucous loving bacteria. Part of why this is such a fascinating, interesting thing is not only that they're realizing it, it helps to regulate glucose and metabolism, but because this particular bacteria can talk. Quoty voice. This is Dr. Natalia Shilzenko, assistant professor at Oregon State. We're discovering that in biology there are multiple connections and communications, what we call crosstalk. They're very important in ways we're just beginning to understand. It's being made clear by a number of studies that our immune system in particular is closely linked to other metabolic functions in ways we never realized. This is still unconventional thinking and it's being described as a new field called immune metabolism. Through the process of evolution mammals, including humans have developed functional systems that communicate with each other and microbes are an essential part of that process. So if the crosstalk and interaction with a muscini fila are disrupted, it can lead to type two diabetes and metabolic syndrome. It does an important link between the immune system, gut bacteria, and glucose metabolism, crosstalk interaction that can lead to that type two diabetes when not functioning properly. So again, this is just another layer of understanding how bacteria are really kind of running stuff in a really integral part of our immune system may lead to another way of looking at type two diabetes. This could be another drill down now that they've sort of discovered that this crosstalk when it's interrupted was leading to type two diabetes in a test. It's possible that there's some cases of type two diabetes that you could maybe source down to this bacteria. Now it's not the only bacteria in this chain. It's sort of a community, but they've isolated this one and its one function is being part of it. Yeah, or maybe it's the ecosystem or the environment of the gut that changes and the bacteria for some reason is it can't live there anymore. And then you lose it and then maybe that leads to the type two diabetes. And so those observations were made in mice. They say similar observations were also made in humans. It's been observed, for instance, that athletes who are extremely fit have high levels of the gut bacteria, a musinophila, which is, oh, there you go, a mucus degrading bacteria. The research makes it whole to two seasons. I love it. I'm going to eat it. What's believed to be functionally separate immunity and glucose metabolism are in fact closely linked and what bridges that difference between the two may be that gut bacteria. There's probably more than one bacteria involved. They go on in this process of communication and metabolic control. The gut harbors literally thousands of microbes that appear to function almost as a metabolically, a metabolically active organ. That's an interesting way, the ecosystem, but thinking of your gut bacteria as a separate organ, like you would identify your heart, your lungs, your liver, your microbiota, are, in a sense, as they're saying here, perhaps can be looked at as an organ. Wow, that's an interesting way of looking at it, right? That's fascinating, yeah. Bacterium-mediated communication, of course, is just one part of a complex human system. Issues such as proper diet exercise, appropriate weight control, still important. Research has said, but as we all know, with a single order of Dr. Justin's, not a real doctor, poop pills, you can cure almost anything. No, I thought the idea that you could think of the bacteria as an active organ, I think, is fascinating. I don't know that that, necessarily, in itself is accurate, though. I think it would be more that this is a level of each of the organs, the stomach, in the gastrointestinal tract that we have not taken into account. It's a different tissue layer, the bacterial layer. Because you're gonna say the stomach is an organ already. It is an organ. Yeah. Yeah, the stomach, your small intestine, your large intestine. Part of what the gastrointestinal system organ- Very solid. How it functions is- Yeah, yeah, this is fascinating. Oh, bacteria, how many, let us count the ways that we love you. Fascinating. If you just tuned in, you are with Twiss. You know what time it is, though? What time is it? It's time for Blair's Animal Corner. My pet little pet, don't pet at all. Wanna hear about this animal? She's your girl. Except for giant pandalaxe, girl, that little girl. What you got, Blair? I have yet another case of an animal making tools. This individual story is interesting for some very specific reasons, though. This bit of research from the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna and the University of Oxford, we're looking at Goffins' cockatoos and their ability to make tools. Why this is interesting is that the hypothesis behind the making of tools, not just the use of tools, but being able to fabricate tools, is that it is some sort of combination of heritable and acquired competencies with tools. So there has to be either, or, and... Okay. Yes, some combo of heritable traits of something that has passed through the bloodline of the ability and the kind of predisposition to make tools, some generation of that, and then being able to learn from one another, acquired abilities. So if it's heavy on one side, you need less of the other side. So there has to be some combination of these two items. The cockatoo, this cockatoo in particular is interesting, is not known for tool use, nor the ability to make tools. So in the wild, these guys don't use tools at all. But these cockatoos in a lab have been shown to use tools and make tools. So that means it's something that they can think through and do. This isn't something that they watched another cockatoo do and then they do it. It's something that they have a problem in front of them and they make a tool and they fix that problem. So the test that they had for these birds was to, they had kind of a glass box and there was food placed a few centimeters, centimeters, I like centimeters. Centimers behind a circular hole in that clear box. And the piece of food was kind of on a pedestal. And Kiki, I'm wondering if you'll be able to bring up this video. I am gonna bring up this video. That's fantastic. So the food is on this pedestal through this hole and then if the food is pushed off the pedestal, it will slide down a slanted floor of this box and it will come out under the front. So basically they have to knock this little piece of food off of the pedestal by pushing through this circular hole. So how do you do that? You do that with some sort of stick. So these cockatoos were given four different materials to see if they could make something to fix this problem. Larchwood, which is something that they already had in their kind of repertoire. Leafy beach twigs, which were not in any way, shape, or form something that they could use at the start. Carboard and amorphous beeswax. That last one just seems cruel. So what they did. Have this smooshy thing that you did and see what you could do with it. So what's so interesting we're watching in the video right now is that with the Larchwood, they were able to bite at it just a couple of times and then pull and because of the way the wood fibers work, they pulled off a stick and they were able to use that stick to knock the food off of the pedestal and get the food. So that was fairly easy. They just kind of bit at it and it happened by nature of that thing. The beach branch, they had to pull individual leaves off of and then they were able to use it as a stick. Where it gets very interesting is the cardboard because it is in no way, shape, or form anything if you were to look at it like something that could help them accomplish this task. But what they did is they actually kind of punched holes in the cardboard and then they were able to pull it apart into a long thin shape, basically making a flat twig. So they were able to make the tool that they needed out of all of these different materials. Of course, with the amorphous beeswax, nobody could do it. What are you gonna do with that? He wouldn't expect to do it anyway. What do I do with this? So the fascinating thing here is they made similar items out of three different materials, which means they had something in mind that would solve their problem. So what they're trying to figure out is how these animals are thinking. Are they imagining a stick in their mind? Does that image show up as a template or is there something else that's causing them to make this shape? Yeah, well, I wonder, you know, I haven't read this particular study, but I wonder, you know, I'd hope that with their animals, they didn't always give them those particular materials in that order and that they were randomly assigned different materials in different orders so that they would just de novo come up with the solutions as opposed to, oh, look, I made a stick out of this wood and it worked really easily. Oh, look, I took the leaves off of the twig and then it worked really easily. I'll do the same with the cardboard, you know. Yes, absolutely. And one would hope that that's how they did that because that would be good science. Um, the, as far as I can tell, the paper does not go deeply into that part of the methodology, unfortunately. So I was not able to figure that out, but I would say that if that wasn't part of this experiment, that absolutely would be the next step, would be to give them the cardboard first, complete blank slate, here's some cardboard. What are you gonna do? Yeah, and then the idea that, okay, these particular birds, I mean, it's just this, you know, Goffin's cockatoos don't make tools. And oh, look, they made tools in the lab. So do they actually make tools and we just don't know yet? Right, do they have certain things that they do in the wild that help them to collect insects for instance that we've never seen? Or maybe they're just so well-adapted to their environment that they don't need tools. Like, like all of a sudden in the lab, they're like, wow, I need a different beak for this. I'll have to make one out of tools. Yeah. You know, it could be in the, out in nature. It's like, oh, everything works because I evolved over, you know, however many thousands of years to live in this environment, I don't need any help, I'm good. But as soon as they're confronted with something it seems like they can't overcome, it's like, oh, necessity. So I did find, so they said the testing conditions were defined by the materials. So subjects that had previously made tools from the larch wood started with larch wood, but otherwise conditions were presented randomly across individuals. So it sounds like they did a good job of randomizing what came first. And again, this is a very small sample size. It's only about four animals, but it's fascinating to see it's not just one. We have a lot of spectacular parrots that we see do amazing behaviors, but it's very anecdotal. And to see this be replicated a few times definitely makes you think that this, at least this species, kind of like you were saying, don't know if we don't know if they're actually doing this in the wild or not. We haven't seen it. That doesn't mean it's not happening, but this species can make a similar shape out of several different things. That's all the same problem. Like you said, parrots, anyone who has owned a parrot or a cockatoo, or even cockatiels, these birds are smart birds, and they figure things out. And it's very amazing. The number of times that I've had birds escape from cages, I can't, I can't. I don't know. Yeah. And it was never the songbirds. Let me tell you that. So, so let me ask you, Kiki. Is your bird cage half empty or half full? Oh, I guess if I had one right now, I'd hope that it would be half full. How about you, Justin? Bird cage half empty or half full? Is that a thing you're supposed to feed on a regular basis? If so, Tim. This is my smooth transition way of asking you if you're an optimist or a pest, pest, pest, are you a pessimist? I really, really want to be an optimist. I really do, but I'm really, really sad right now. I know you're, I know you're segueing this, and I don't want to ruin the segue portion of it, but I am. I did such a good job. You did. But I am a intentional pessimist, so that I can be optimistic with the actual results. Yeah. Right, right, right. It's like going to the movie theater and assuming before you get there, oh, there's not going to be any parking. The show's going to be all sold out. We're going to have wasted the whole trip through this traffic to get there. And then when you get there and you find a parking spot and you get into the theater, everything is, wow, this is so great. Okay, so let me put it this way. If you were a pig, not a bird, but a pig. If you were a pig, and there, in one corner of the room, there was always chocolates. And in another corner of the room, there was always raisins. And in this scenario, we'll say you really love chocolate and you hate raisins, okay? That was about to go right for the raisins, but okay. So you want the chocolate, you hate raisins. Okay. Then a bowl shows up in the middle of the room. What do you think is in that bowl? Gotcha. Oh, you gotta check it out. Maybe it's more chocolate. Or raisins. It's worth checking out in hopes that it is chocolate, yeah. So you're an optimist. I am. Yeah. So according to this test, if you were a pig, you would be an optimist. So in this new study, published in Biology Letters, researchers were looking at, first of all, if pigs were particularly optimistic or pessimistic, and on top of that, if there was a influence on that behavior and opinion based on their surroundings. So humans, we know, process information that they see differently, depending on their mood. They'll expect a bad outcome when facing an ambiguous situation if they're feeling negative, and if they're feeling positive, they expect a good outcome. The mood, together with your baseline personality, like whether you're generally an optimistic or pessimistic person, influences that what we call their cognitive bias. Where this study becomes particularly interesting is based in the fact that many, many, many research papers where they have studied animals and their thought processes assume that most animals, if not all animals, do not have a cognitive bias. So you're seeing each individual and their thought processes as representative of a species. Now we can probably guess what the reality there is. Yeah, is that individuals are individuals, even if they're frogs or monkeys or rats, and they process things in their brain differently. So this study put 36 domestic pigs in different situations. So they trained the pigs to recognize the bull in one corner of the room had chocolate, the bull in the other corner of the room had bitter coffee beans. They were coated in sugar, so the pigs couldn't sniff them out and figure out what it was before, but so they learned left corner sugar, right corner gross coffee. Then they put the bulls in more and more ambiguous spots and watched their behavior. And the animals before this were put in either an economy lodging or deluxe lodgings. Both had slotted floors, a slotted area wouldn't blocks for enrichment, but the deluxe lodgings were larger and they had a deeper, comfier straw bed. Pigs with personalities that were what they considered proactive, kind of glass half full, tended to check out the middle bull, even without being sure about whether the reward was in there or not, regardless of whether they were in the economy or the deluxe lodgings. Pigs with reactive personalities, they are allocating this as more pessimistic, were more optimistic about their chances when they had the deluxe accommodations and they were less likely to check out the ambiguous food if they were in the economy pen. Okay, so that's really interesting because that ties into the reevaluation of the marshmallow test that we were talking about, maybe earlier this year, maybe last year, where when there's a little bit more pressure, I suppose, on survival, you take the immediate, the sure thing is you don't feel as though perhaps you can afford to take the chances away. Yeah, absolutely, and that also ties into the studies that we've done, I think, or reported on with rats where if they were raised in low food scenarios, they end up fat later in life because they're always stuffing their face because they think it's gonna be gone later. So this is more saying that there are certain things that are inherent to the point where it doesn't matter how unsure you are of whether there will be a marshmallow later. If you're an optimist, you're gonna wait. So what's interesting too then, just to throw into this, we'd be really curious to see if they could redo this test and see if at the piglet stage, they could create a little scenario where optimism is rewarded or optimism is not rewarded really early on and see if later in life those pigs maintain that because it sort of seems like these personality traits that we see later on in life could be rooted in some really elementary experiences as piglets. Yeah, rooted. Absolutely. But the bottom line is here that there are two things that affect this animal's behavior in this experiment. There is stable personality traits that they have, those stable personality traits affect how they act, but also they have transient mood states. So this again, ties back to tests on cognitive bias in animals and the fact that it looks really like, like I was saying, each individual animal is in fact an individual and just one rat is not gonna act like another rat. One pig is not gonna act like another pig. Personality differences may affect outcomes in experiments if you're trying to test on decision-making preferences, any of these things. Absolutely. And it's something that, we don't have to throw a bunch of things away and start over, but it's definitely something that indicates, we talk on the show all the time about how not enough money is allocated to repeating experiments and replicating results. And this is the perfect example is if you have an experiment that has a smaller sample size and you got one result, there's a chance that that has to do with the personalities of the individuals. And so the larger sample size you have, the better because that kind of, that rules out less of the random personality choices, helps you with your statistics. But this also means that, based on the lab that they live in, based on all sorts of things. The conditions, how- Yeah, we don't consider to be confounding variables and experiments could be affecting the personalities of our test subjects. If two separate alien abductions took place from separate alien species and far distant flung planets, and they grabbed, say, two different people off the planet, say two different people who were, say, running for office or something, they could come away with vastly different opinions of what humans are like. Vastly different. Two, one is an anecdote. Two is basically just two anecdotes. You've doubled your anecdotal size. Yeah. Your sample size is not large enough to make any, any firm conclusions. And I'm not making any firm conclusions about this show yet. We still have so much left to go. We have a whole second half coming up. I mean, I am gonna be getting out the coffee. Seriously. I will be. I hope you stay with us for more This Week in Science, coming back in a minute. You guys, you guys, you guys, you guys! You know what's coming? 2017, it's almost the end of the year. We are in the middle of November of 2016. And 2017 is coming. And so is Blair's calendar. So if you go to twist.org right now, you can pre-order that calendar. You know, there's a link. You just click on the picture of Blair's animal corner from calendar from 2016. Click on that picture. Or there's a nice little announcement. It says, get your calendar now. Got a little spiel. Again, just click on the link and order your calendar. That's all you have to do. You know, you can order them as holiday presents, you know, for yourself, for your friends. You can order them just to have to give away during the year. You can order as many as you like. We got calendars. 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That's gonna grow us and it's gonna grow, grow everything that we can do. So it's one of the biggest ways that you can help. Today, right now, share us. We really appreciate your support, all of it in all of its forms. We could not do this without you. That I do believe is the dollars and cents all these authors receive. If miracle wonders were held in their looks, why waste precious time and try selling their books? Oh, I sit and wait for your publishing. Royal fare. If one has real power, who needs really the loyalty? If you could travel by thought to a mystical place. Why go to book signings and buy for shelf space? Why would you wait for your agent to call you in advance and try to convince? And we are back with more This Week in Science. Oh yeah, we are. We're back, we're back, we're back. Justin, what you got? I'm gonna switch up the order of the stories I was gonna bring. I switched it and then I switched it back and then I can't, this story is just, turn my case, it's too awesome. Don't like switching. So it began seven years ago. Divers off the coast of southern Sweden who are no doubt just now thawing off from that dive. Gosh, that's gotta be cold. They discovered the oldest known stationary fish traps in Northern Europe. And stationary fish trap is sort of something that you put out there in the water and then you come back later and hope that a bunch of fish have tracked themselves in it, right? So it's not fishing like on a hook, it's you set up some sort of thing where fish go in but they have a hard time swimming out again. Yeah, so since then though, this is seven years ago, since then researchers at Lund University, Sweden have uncovered an exceptionally well-preserved stone age site. They now believe the location was a lagoon environment where Mesolithic humans lived during parts of the year. Other spectacular finds include a 9,000 year old pickaxe made out of elk antlers. There are discoveries in cape mass fishing and therefore a semi-permanent settlement. As geologists, we want to recreate this area and understand how it looked. Was it warm or cold? How did the environment change over time? So there's Anton Hansen PhD student quaintinary geology at Lund University. So they've done all sorts of scans of the undersea environment to sort of get the layout of what the landscape looked like and they've sort of been rolling back water to sort of figure out how this could have looked 9,000 years ago. Changes in sea level allowed the findings to be preserved deep below the surface of Hano Bay in the Baltic Sea, which is sort of, if you can picture Sweden, it's the southern Sweden and a little bit to the east. If you want to fully understand how humans dispersed from Africa and their way of life, we also have to find all of their settlements. Quite a few, or quite a few of these are currently underwater since sea level is higher today than during the last glaciation. Humans have always preferred coastal sites, he concludes. So here's part of why that is so interesting. This find is bigger than just another glimpse into ancient peoples. This is an ancient people that we may not really know anything else about other than these artifacts. The people who we refer to as Europeans currently started to arrive about 6,500 years ago. So this is a 9,000 year old site. What we call Europeans today arrived about 6,500 years ago and they had farming. And this is sort of before the Bronze Age migration, which added a lot more people. They, when they got there, displaced another group of farmers who had come from the Middle East 500 years ago. So still not these people of 9,000 years ago. And those 7,500 years ago, farmers displaced another group of hunter-gatherers this time who had been there possibly about 40,000 years ago and spread throughout Europe. So that might be who these people are, but maybe not. Cause by displacing each of these cases, there seems to be very little mingling to send these populations into the next and to the next from what little evidence we have on record didn't really mingle or get absorbed, but sort of pushed out. And it could have been that the environment had pushed them out just before. And then when they were gone, it allowed people to fill unused space. It's kind of unclear cause we don't have the records. Of course, before this we had, before the 40,000 year old humans got there, there were Neanderthals there for about 400,000 years throughout Europe. And yes, Homer Rectus was there about 1.8 million years ago. They left Flint Axis in Spain 900,000 years ago. They left seven foot Javelins in Germany, 380,000 years ago. So Europe was occupied several times in different waves of people going out, different groups coming in from different directions at different times, people were displaced, replaced and then replaced the displacers. And then there's groups that are there that we don't know where they came from. Now, in fact, I think part of that group that we were describing as 6,500 year old related to modern Europeans, we're really not sure where they came from. They're not directly seeming to be related to finds that we've made to the North, South, East, West, whatever, right? They sort of showed up. They're slightly related to the group that came in the Middle East, but different genetically from the little bits of genetic info that we have. But we don't know much about what happened to the people who made this fish trap or where they came from. And part of the reason is likely waiting to be discovered under the sea because so much of the reason these are mysteries, where these populations came from, how they disappeared is because where they were living is not places that are convenient to look right now. And the first thing I thought when looking at this study was the robot that they're developing, undersea robot that they're developing out of the national aquarium or the national aquarium we're using in Baltimore. This would be a fantastic usage. I understand they're more interested in using deep sea undersea robots to monitor wildlife and to discovery in that nature, but I think archeology could definitely benefit from the use of undersea robots to do exploration that might be inconvenient for humans. Absolutely, and I mean, it just makes me think so much about looking at, if we look at the coasts and we look at where people might have lived and start looking underwater, we don't just see changes in say, oh, here's evidence of corals that now live at higher levels in the water. There's evidence of these corals living lower in the water. So, oh, the water must have been lower. There is lots of evidence of human activity, human villages, human settlements, places that we did things where we worked or we fished. And I think someday the water's gonna change again and there's gonna be archeology on the people who lived around the year 2000. In Florida. In what we left, in Florida, exactly, you know. And evidence. And what did we leave behind? And so it's just very fascinating, to look at history that's not just buried beneath the ground, but is covered by water which is constantly changing its levels. And there's that kid who found the Clovis Point type that after, I was after the Hurricane Sandy, but it was after they had been using sand from off sea on barges to rebuild the beaches. They were transporting all this sand from a little underwater off the coast to rebuild the beachfronts. And so they apparently hit upon some sort of an archeological site off the coast and threw up some Clovis Plains that somebody could just walk along the beach and find. So we've got all these sites out there. We just gotta find a way to get to them. That's right. Robots and divers. And lots and lots of coffee for the long hours. Coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee. And if you are going to be drinking coffee, how are you gonna do it? You know, you want that perfect cup, right? I just kind of pour a hunk into my coffee machine. Is that not how I'm supposed to do it? No, Blair, let me show you how you're supposed to do it. You're supposed to do it with this equation. Oh. It's with math. It's with math. Two things I love, coffee and math. Tell me more. That's right. Mathematicians have been modeling the, modeling the math, the science of coffee extraction through water. So you have, in this scenario, you have a vessel, right? You either are using something like a drip coffee maker which has, say, a conical reservoir for the coffee, or you are using something, say, like Justin uses, that's more of a French press or an espresso maker where you have the coffee grounds in more of a cylindrical vessel that the water is pressurized and pushed through. And so you have these different scenarios. And not only do you maybe have pressurized water in one or gravity feeding in the other, you also have difference in coffee grain size. So espresso grounds are often very finely ground and coffee grounds that are used for a drip coffee maker are not so finely ground. So, oh my gosh, you've got a coffee machine maybe that you've got at a yard sale. What is the best way to make coffee? Well, if you can figure out the equation that they have come up with, maybe you will figure it out. But basically what they have tried to do is to simplify all of the details. And because they said a couple of years ago, they came out with an equation and they came out with all the parameters and it's just, it's a messy, big equation. And it's just too much, it's too many details, right? So what they've had to do is they're trying to simplify it. It's kind of like the E equals MC squared of Einstein trying to simplify the universe. Well, they're trying to simplify the math of coffee. So the variables they're looking at, they've got intragranular porosity, intra and inter granular porosity, coffee solid density, grain diffusion fitting coefficient and the surface dissolution fitting coefficient. These are big phrases, right? So basically what it comes down to is they hope that this math will enable coffee machine makers and coffee makers to come together to create the optimal coffee brewing scenario. Yes, one of the authors- I guess most greasy diners still won't. Yeah, most likely not. But one of the studies authors said, we'd hope you could optimize the coffee machine for a certain size of grains. You could adjust the flow rate so you get the perfect extraction there. Also, okay, here's my question. Yes. I feel like the perfect cup of coffee is very subjective. I think that might be true, but I think there are aspects. Okay, so for example, what makes it the perfect cup of coffee mathematically that they got as much out of the beans as they could? Yeah. That it is super concentrated? Yeah, that it's not concentrated, but that it is an efficient extraction so that the coffee that is held in the grains, what you want out of it gets into the water that is filtered. So they say in the introduction to their paper, coffee is one of the most widely consumed beverages in the world. This popular drink is made from the roasted seeds of the coffee plant. Following roasting, the beans are ground and some of their soluble content is extracted by hot water. This extract is generally filtered to remove undissolved solids, like other coffee grains, really like the grains, the greediness of the coffee. And the resulting solution of hot water and coffee, solubles is called coffee. That is science talk about coffee. Here we go. A large number of techniques have been developed for the purposes of brewing coffee for both domestic and catering use. These methods fall into three categories generally, decoction method, infusion methods, and pressure methods. And a common feature of all these is that they're based on solid liquid extraction or leaching and that involves the transfer of solutes from a solid to a fluid. And the target is to consistently produce the best quality coffee possible and defining what makes a good cup of coffee is a non-trivial matter, and to some extent, a matter of personal preference. Yeah, there you go. And so it was surprising to me to find that in this paper they referenced, coffee is composed of over 1,800 different chemical compounds. What? 1,800, more than chemical compounds. So if you're caffeine. Yeah, and then other things. You're right, I lost track after that. That was all I had. Caffeine molecule. But all of them fit into the flavor and the personality of your coffee. Wow. Well, I mean, sometimes there's hazelnutty things in there and I'm not into that at all. The hazelnut molecules can get the heck out. Yeah. Yeah, so, you know, there are some people who like more bitter coffee. Some people like a sweeter coffee or a more rounded flavor. A lot, most people can agree on brew strength, I think, but there's also the strength. Do you like, do you like diner coffee? Yeah, given one option in the morning, I will drink just about any kind of coffee. Yeah. Yeah, so the paper is available online at S-I-A-M, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. It's very math and coffee together. I still think the equation for making a good cup of coffee should be shorter than, you know, explaining how gravity works. Very probably, yeah. Getting us to the moon with FMA should have been a bigger, maybe that one should have just been a bigger equation to me. My question, if I were to interview these mathematicians, would be, and how much coffee did it take for you to write this paper? None at all. I don't know, I don't drink any coffee. I don't just, I never touch this stuff. Yeah. I wrote the paper in two days. That was a long time. I almost had 15 minutes one night. I was exhausted. All right, Justin, tell me a story. Antibiotic overuse and general human sloppy germ swapping have created a crisis of resistance to treatments of a wide variety of infections that once were held in harmless check. Most antibiotics in use today are based on natural molecules produced by bacteria. Yet apparently, coaxing bacteria to produce new antibiotics is tricky. Most bacteria won't grow in the lab, and even when they do, most of the genes that cause them to churn out molecules with antibiotic properties don't really get switched on. And because of this, we have a hard time fabricating or manufacturing new antibiotics to replace those that are losing their efficiency. Recently, researchers at Rockefeller University found a way around this problem by using computational methods to identify which genes in the microbes genome ought to produce antibiotic compounds. Then they went about synthesizing the compounds themselves instead of doing the whole Petri dish thing and letting them go. And they were able to discover two promising new antibiotics without having to culture a single Petri dish. Even though the picture that they used to headline your article shows a Petri dish. They then used specialized computer software to scan hundreds of those genomes for clusters of genes that were likely to produce molecules known as non-ribosomal peptides from the basis of many antibiotics. They also used the software to predict the chemical structures of the molecules that the gene clusters ought to produce. Research identified 57 potential useful gene clusters when researchers, which researchers then narrowed down to 30, they then used a method called solid phase peptide synthesis to manufacture 25 different chemical compounds. By testing those compounds against human pathogens, researchers successfully identified two closely related antibiotics, which they dubbed humusin A and humusin B. Both are found a family of bacteria called rutodocus microbes that have never yielded anything resembling the human humusins when cultured using the traditional laboratory techniques. So the humusins proved especially effective against staphylococcus and strepococcus bacteria, which can cause dangerous infections in humans, tend to grow resistant to various antibiotics that we already have on the market. Further experiments suggest the humusin humusins. I'm not going to get it right. Work by inhibiting the enzyme that bacteria used to build their cell walls. And once that cell wall building pathway is interrupted, the bacteria die. This is something, a similar antibiotic that we use or works, or similar way it works, something called beta-lactamins, which is a broad class of commonly prescribed antibiotics that's losing its efficacy, its efficiency over time right now. There's a lot of things resisting it. But the scientists did find that using human humusins, human myosins, I think that's it. Human myosins could be used to resensitize bacteria to beta-lactams that had previously lost their ability to work. One experiment, they exposed beta-lactam-resistant staphylococcus microbes to humusin A in combination with beta-lactam antibiotic. And once again, it was effective. Now, humusin A by itself wasn't really that effective, but the two in combination suddenly worked where neither of them really was going to work on their own. Sean Bradley, head of the Laboratory of Genetically Encoded Small Molecules, attributes this to the fact that both compounds work by interrupting different steps in the same biological pathway. He says, it's like taking a hose and pinching it in two spots, even if neither kink halts the flow altogether on its own, eventually no more water comes through. And while that's a terrible analogy, because that's not how hoses really work, Bradley still hopes that the discovery will inspire scientists to mine the genomes of bacteria for more molecules that could yield similarly useful results. Yeah, and there's a summary. So this was also, this was a bacteria that he was grabbing in the first place to do this, came from the human gut already. So it's sort of interesting, you know, you're looking for something that's already in the gut so that perhaps the molecules that you're going to create from this won't be too disastrous to the surroundings, although I guess in the way that they manufactured it, it doesn't matter that it originally came from the human gut because it's something that micro, that bacteria in the human gut doesn't normally produce. So... Well, it's not that it doesn't normally produce it, it's that in the laboratory, they've never found it before. So it just means that in laboratory conditions, they've never gotten them to produce it before. It's not that they don't produce it in the gut, it's just that lab conditions weren't conducive to the production of it. And so what they've done is changed their methodology and by doing this new methodology of this assay, they've basically found something that they overlooked previously because the technology was different. But it may also be that it's, even if it is producing it, it may not be producing it, certainly not enough quantities to actually be giving us... Maybe not large quantities, right. So this is sort of a new way of going about it. You look at the genome, you see what the body is capable of producing or what bacteria in the body are capable of producing. You produce it yourself based on computational descriptions of how that should look. I mean, they're really going into like, they're going into sort of like, okay bacteria, I know you have potential. You haven't been living up to it yourself, but I can see it and I'm going to go ahead and do it for you. I'm going to help you out here. So, and he's now saying this method, he can do all the bacterial species that aren't in the human microbiome already. Microbiome already. And once more and more things get sequenced, they can keep applying this search. Yeah, I think the other aspect to it also is the excitement of finding these news things. And we've reported on some other potential antibacterial agents that have been found through other bacteria, not from people, but from just other bacteria that were isolated where they caused this renewed sensitivity with antibiotics that are waning in how they work. So that's the other exciting thing. It's like, oh, we've got these antibiotics that aren't working very well anymore because of antibiotic resistance, but you couple it with something like this and it's like bam, bam. Suddenly it works. Taking everything down all over again. Yeah, which is great. It's great. Does it tickle you? And it's very tickled by this. Are you very tickled by it? I'm not ticklish. That's not true. You've got to be ticklish. You're ticklish. I can be ticklish or not ticklish. I got tickled a lot as a child and so I learned to concentrate so that I would not be tickled and won't laugh. So if I don't want to be tickled, I'm not ticklish, but if I want to be tickled, then it's okay. But question is, what controls all this ticklishness or not ticklishness? The silly center of your brain. Yeah, well, that silly center is maybe otherwise known as the somatosensory cortex or at least a certain part of it. And how do we know this? Researchers tickled rats. That's right. With their fingers? They tickled them with their fingers. No. Yes, they tickled rats. They tickled them on the belly. They tickled them and made the rats laugh. And so we've talked, you've brought up in the animal corner before we've talked about these ultrasound kind of little shrieks that mice and rats give off that aren't the same as the ones that we hear. It's higher pitched than that. We had the singing mouse on here. Right, singing mice. Well, these are laughing rats and they giggle. Oh my gosh. And the researchers, Michael Brecht at Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany says it's remarkable, the similarities between rats and humans, the fact they vocalize and clearly enjoy tickling so much. So Brecht's team, they did stick electrodes into the somatosensory cortex, which is part of the brain that is important for touch, for your skin. So when you feel your shirt on your arm, that is because there's a nerve that has a receptor that's been stimulated in your skin that sent a nerve signal up to your somatosensory cortex where you can perceive it. So anyway, they put electrodes in there to measure what was going on. And they found that tickling activates part of the somatosensory cortex. And they also found that rats like being tickled on their feet. Yeah. They additionally found, they did another test where they put the rats in a very stressful situation. So rats are nocturnal. They put rats in a very open cage and with a bright light shining on them. And they found that rats aren't ticklish then. Their tickle cells become less activated. And they just, they're not as tickle-able when they're stressed out. And so there is some aspect of stress or mood that moderates ticklishness in rats. Love that. And then in another part, they found that cells become active that cells become active right before tickling starts. So it's like, if an animal learns that tickling is gonna happen, those cells respond and there's an anticipation. And they believe based on this and some other activities they did with the rats. Not, no, no, some other activities they did where they had the rats chase the researchers hand after they got tickled. So they basically played with, they tickled the rats and then had them chase for more and they linked with play. And so Brecht says that it's possible that it might be a trick by the brain to encourage sociality and playfulness. And so there could be an evolutionary role of tickling that he says tickling, the tickle response is profoundly social aimed at others and not yourself. And this is very likely why you can't tickle yourself is in that it is not a self-oriented behavior. It is an outwardly oriented social behavior. Interesting. Tickling in rats. I wanna be a rat tickle researcher. What did you do? Tickle rats for a living. I'm a rat tickler. Good. I'm a rat tickler. I'm in the filming industry right now. I'm riding the crest of the wave. Top of my game right now. Is that better than being a bird poop researcher, Kiki? Possibly. Very possibly. Yeah, so anyway. No relation, but it was the book fair thing where they make you buy stuff, books and mostly junk books for your kids at the school. It's their fundraiser event, but they bring all the kids in there to do walkthroughs of all the stuff. And then the next day, the kid right after school drags you over there having already picked out like 10 things they wanna buy. But there was a book up there that I got really excited about because I wasn't wearing my glasses and I thought it said animal feces. And I'm like, oh, that's so rat. There's a whole book on animal feces, but it was animal faces that turned out. It was like, oh, we're getting that one right there. A whole book about animal poop. This would be fantastic, but. Well, don't we have some animal feces in our quick rundown? That's right, you tried to toss to the bird, yes. And I didn't jump on it quickly enough. But yes, animal feces, bird, poop. I'm bringing it right back around to the end of the world where I started at the beginning of the show. It was found, reported in nature communications that birds poop a lot on the rocks in the Arctic. And that ammonia enriched poop, the guano, has a slight cooling effect on the atmosphere. I'm gonna just say it right now, not enough to really counteract the warming effect that is going on currently, but this is such a fascinating process because it is so enriched with ammonia. The emissions of ammonia from guano when the poop is in the sun in the summertime on these arctic rocks, it is released, little bursts of ammonia go into the atmosphere and the ammonia interacts with sulfuric acid and water and it forms particles that become the nuclei that give birth to clouds. Cloud forming ammonia rich bird guano. It's amazing. So anyway, clouds, if there's a lot of clouds, play a role in reflecting sunlight or heat. Wow. I thought you were gonna say that it had to do with albedo, that all of the poop was somehow affecting the reflectivity. Well, it's good now. Cloud reflectivity. Yeah. And they said it actually is, that's enough, it's complicated, but it's these low lying clouds that get formed actually really have a cooling effect on the region and across the arctic, it's significant. So ammonia. So keep pooping, everybody. Don't stop. I hate birds. Cuffins, don't stop. Keep going to the arctic and doing things in the arctic that we want that, come on. Birds, you do what you do best. Oh, I love birds. All right, Blair, tell us some bat news. Yeah, so we have a new world record holder for the fastest horizontal flight. And it is no longer a bird. It is the Brazilian free-tailed bat. So the previous record holder was the common swift which can reach speeds of over 100 kilometers per hour. These little bats, believe it or not, can go 160 kilometers per hour. That is about 100 miles per hour for those of us in America. That's fast. Yeah, that's very fast. Now, at first I went, that's not the fastest thing, but there are different qualifiers here. So this is the fastest horizontal flight. The fastest thing on the planet is the peregrine falcon which reaches diving speeds of about 300 kilometers per hour. That's about 185 miles per hour. So that's the fastest animal overall. How fast is a person in a squirrel suit diving down a cliff? The speed of grab the D, I don't know. Right. Anyway, yeah, so this little bat, they found from a Max Planck Institute, did the research and found that these guys are now the fastest. They're these little 12 gram bats, the Brazilian free-tailed bat, now the fastest horizontal flyer. And in, what's that? Faster than swifts. Faster than swifts. Yes, the bats have outflown the birds in this specific case, which is kind of unusual because bats are thought to be not super aerodynamic as compared to birds, but these guys are just doing a great job. Catching the moths fast. And then my other real short story is an awesome finding out of Japan and Russia. That is that there are snails that don't use their shells for what we're used to. They found two species of snails that use their shells to attack predators. They don't hide in the shell, they whack their predators with their shell. And you have to see this video to believe it. So I'm hoping that Kiki can share this. Predator whacking snails. Yes, these two snail species, Keraftohelix, Guyensi in Japan and Keraftohelix Celski in the Far East region of Russia, swing their shells to hit the Kerappid beetles, demonstrating a unique active defense strategy while other closely related snail species withdraw their soft bodies into their shells. So watch them go, can you believe? I could not believe the range on this snail. So for those of you who are only listening, I strongly suggest you go to www.twist.org, click on our show notes from tonight and watch this video because it is fascinating. Even more interesting, as far as they can tell, these snails, if you trace them back to a common ancestor, that ancestor does not whack its enemies with its shell, which means most likely this is a convergent evolution trait. So this is something that has evolved twice so far that we have found in the snail realm. And very useful, obviously. Yeah, I know the beetle definitely got the heck out of there when he was doing it. Yeah, I got upside down and then I got pushed out of the way. I don't like that. It's like taking off your football helmet and just smacking a linebacker with it. Totally. That's not allowed in the rules. No. That and you would immediately regret having removed your helmet. Right, exactly. To do that. Yeah, my final story, this is, we've talked about the over-the-counter homeopathic drugs being reviewed by the FTC and they held a panel, a workshop last year and they have released their report from that session as well as come up with a final ruling as to how homeopathic drugs are to be marketed and sold if they're over-the-counter. And the policy statement notes, quote, the FTC has long recognized that marketing claims may include additional explanatory information to prevent the claims from being misleading. Accordingly, it recognizes that an OTC, homeopathic drug claim that is not substantiated by competent and reliable scientific evidence might not be deceptive if the advertisement or label where it appears effectively communicates that one, there is no scientific evidence that the product works and two, that the products claimed, products claims are based only on theories of homeopathy from the 1700s that are not accepted by both most modern medical experts. Was it really the 1700s being there? Like that would be, that would be awesome. In the packaging. This cures the common cold according to stuff we did in the 1700s when people died a lot from the common cold. You guys are not feeling that great. I'm gonna go pick up some leeches. I'll be right back. Those probably will work better than anything you've done. Leeches are scientifically proven and actually used in medical treatments these days. Oh, right, right, right. Anyway, the FTC has basically said that the marketing of these drugs cannot be different from any other over-the-counter drugs and that they are going to scrutinize the impression of these marketing claims and if an ad conveys more substantiation than a marketer has, it's going to violate the FTC Act and they will be penalized. So yes, from now on, homeopathy, homeopathic treatments must say that they don't work or that they don't have any proof or they can't make any claims about their efficacy. That is a great step in the right direction. It's a win for science and for public health in the United States. Good job, FTC, you voted scientifically. Yeah, and that brings us to the end of our show. It's so great. I know Fata had mentioned in on Twitter that we had talked previously about the Project Blue Space Telescope in which they're going to try and crowdfund the funds to create this coffee table-sized telescope to be launched and their crowdfunding campaign has begun. So if you're interested in that, I would go look for Project Blue Space Telescope. Otherwise, it's the end of the show. As we know it. Yeah, it is. And I would like to take this opportunity to thank our Patreon sponsors. Thank you, Chris Clark, Paul Disney, G. 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Thank you for your support on Patreon. And thank you to all our new Patreon supporters. I saw some new names in there. Thank you so much for your support. Welcome to the family. That's right. And if anyone out there is interested in supporting us, you can find information at patreon.com slash this week in science. Also remember that you can help us out simply by telling your friends about twists. That's right. Those social medias use them for twists. And on next week's show, we will be joined by author, science writer, Eric Vance. He has written a book called Suggestible You. It's all about the ways our minds play tricks on us, depending on various states of our body or brain. So it's gonna be a fascinating interview. He has put himself through the ringer on various accounts. And so it'll be great to speak with him. And once again, we're gonna be broadcasting live online at 8 p.m. Pacific Time on twist.org slash live. You can watch live, join our chat room. Hey chat room, how you doing? Love scrolling through the chat room during the show, seeing what people have to say. But, you know, if you can't make it and find our past episodes at twist.org slash YouTube or just go to twist.org. Thank you for enjoying the show. Twist is also available as a podcast. Just Google this weekend science in your iTunes directory or if you have a mobile device, you can look for twist the number four, droid, place or simply this weekend science and anything Apple market placey. For more information on anything you may have heard here today, show notes will be available on our website. That's at www.twist.org where you can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts as well as other listeners. Or you can contact us directly, email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekandscience.com Justin at twistminion at gmail.com or Blair at Blair Baz at twist.org. 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I use the scientific method for all that it's worth. And I'll broadcast my opinion all over the earth. It's this week in science, this week in science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science, this week in science. This week in science, science, science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just get to understand that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy. We're just trying to save the world from Japanese. And this week in science is coming your way. So everybody listen to everything we say and if you use our methods to roll and die, we may rid the world of toxoplasma. Got the eye, eye, eye, eye. Cause it's this week in science, this week in science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science, this week in science. This week in science, science, science. I've got a laundry list of items I want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought and I'll try to answer any question you've got. So how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop with what we say? This week in science, science, science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science, this week in science. I'm going to say it one more time. Order your calendars, please. Get your calendars, don't forget. This is coming, get them before Christmas. Get them before Christmas. Please. Get them before, whatever. Get them before New Year's Day, okay? You know what I want for my birthday this year? To sell out of calendars before Christmas. And what day is your birthday, Blair? December 12th. That's right, December. So before December 12th, let's do it. We've got less than a month to sell out. We can do it. That's right. Yeah, so do it by my birthday. Your birthday. The 11th. The 11th, right. So crazy. My co-hosts born a day apart from each other. This is my awesome. This is one day that separates the birth of Justin and the birth of Blair. Just one day. And they couldn't be more different. Well, one day and several, several years. Oh, anyway, what were we talking about? Oh, yeah, also in stuff that we talk about when we're doing an after show, there's other stuff. You know what, I'm going to go. I think I have to go to find somewhere to sign up for, to be an archaeologist. I think I got to do that. Like, I want to go investigate these, the ancient European, before the ancient Europeans, but after the Neanderthal peoples. I'm like fascinated that we don't really know anything about them, but that they were everywhere. That's pretty cool. That's, yeah. And plus it's like, you know, you can pick archaeology, you know, things to specialize in. Specializing in an archaeology that's all over Europe would be pretty awesome. That would be, that would be, you would be traveling Europe constantly. Where you going? I've got to go to work. Where you going? Ireland, Sweden, Germany. I got to go to France and Spain the following weeks. Look at some signs. It's a drag. I got to keep, you're a whale pass. Yeah, I'm always on the move. That seems like the kind of archaeology to get in. Not something really super rurally frozen. I want to do arctic archaeology. I want to do desert archaeology. These are tough, tough, tough, tough gigs in general. A lot of the times that these dinosaur researchers are going to really awful deserts to find them. I think that's terrible. Bit of a lip. Glad that there's people doing it of course, but. Totally. Oh, you guys, huh? Eric Verlind has a new paper out theory of gravity. You're going to love this one, Justin. We've talked about Verlind and De Hoeft and other jarred De Hoeft and the holographic principle and stuff. You're a De Hoeft. De Hoeft. So Verlind has his paper is on the archive preprint server and it basically is on the idea of emergent gravity, so not as gravity as a force as some say that it is. So it would not have a particle of its own, but actually that it is a, it's not fundamental, but an emergent phenomenon. So. Deep space. And long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, big space. And along with this, he concludes the results, he has like dark matter tied into it as well. So this is going to be interesting. I got to check this out, so I got to check this out. I do like Verlind's ideas. He put strange ideas out there. But as far as I knew De Hoeft and Verlind were, where other people came out with papers saying there's no way that they were right, but although let's see in 2010 it gets rid of the need and you don't need dark matter you don't need dark matter that's what it is yeah yeah so basically because with his idea you don't need dark matter no extra particle and we I think we vaguely covered this uh we could go yeah well in yeah we have covered it before because he and um to Hooft have published various papers on the holographic principle throughout the years and recent like very recently like a week ago we were talking about how they did the measurement of of the spin and how the dark matter oh yeah it was in um it was like in different star systems right yeah yeah yeah fascinating he says whereas ordinary gravity can be encoded using the information on the imaginary sphere around the universe which he showed in his 2010 work on the holographic principle the result of the additional information in the bulk of this of space is a force that nicely matches that attributed to dark matter part of the information on universe is contained in space itself not just the uh information being on a giant imaginary sphere around the space we are in I love this idea that we live in a hologram so the idea it's like there's a sphere with all the information on it and there's like this because of the information there's a hologram that's projected that emerges from all that information and that's where we live in space and then this idea kind of says oh there's some information in space also and that takes care of dark matter so I don't know it could be a just a just so story though don't we have other proofs for dark matter yes and no yes and no we definitely have um we definitely have you know evidence of mass you know and we've got the the big evidence that everybody goes back to is the evidence of systems passing through each other so you have galaxies passing through each other and one passes away and but you still have like a bulk of mass that gets left behind even though there's no actual matter that we can visual matter that we can see there anymore and so it's the it's said to be dark matter but that mass but that mass could be dark matter or it could be that we're just talking about a warpage of space it is exactly yeah yeah the uh stuff there you know and they've got that was it the sterile neutrinos that they've been looking for and they built the detector for and they found nothing so far which was supposed to be an indicator of dark matter so experimentally when we when we've looked for it but you know it's it's not the first time it took us a long time to find something but experimentally we've not been able to detect uh or prove that it exists yeah and so as long as as long as there is other out there other possibility out there should be being looked into and he's been yeah he's been on this for a while and I and just I like it I like it better than I don't I've never understood the graviton I don't understand the graviton either it doesn't I mean we really don't have proof of a graviton everybody's like there's a graviton and then it leaves our dimension and that's why it doesn't have an effect here and they're generated continuously and they have to react to I don't know they're like everything all over the place faster than the speed of light continually and it's a lot of stuff out there for something that you yeah had to make uh I don't know yeah I am intrigued I don't know enough about any of it to know and of course nobody knows for sure but this is I've I have I find the holographic principle and Berlin's ideas intriguing to say the least I don't like the holographic thing that that makes me feel uh makes me feel hollow inside oh it's all still real I mean it's information come on good it's all real we're real we're real little bouncing bits of information yeah everything is super fun stuff there's so there were so many stories I did not end up talking about this week did you guys have that problem this week this week is a very rich science week last week I was like I don't know I don't care there's no nothing I like and this week I'm like oh my goodness so much I found this one in the the 11th hour and didn't have time for it but world's smallest magnifying glass makes it possible to see chemical bonds between atoms nice what cray could have an augmented self as well which one am I am I the real me or am I there was Pluto news there might be a water ice ocean lying underneath Pluto's heart water ice ocean yes slushy ocean of water ice so probably very salty and could be a subsurface ocean uh astronomers have observed that tombog tomba regio Pluto's brightest region aligns almost exactly opposite the dwarf's planet moon Sharon in a locked orientation it hasn't had a very convincing explanation and a heavy ocean would have been a gravitational anomaly they say or weight I would have factored in Pluto and Sharon's gravitational tug of war and that it would have allowed the planet to kind of wobble until it spun around and aligned with Sharon directly but then additionally the heart is where it is because of some kind of giant impact at some point published in in nature researchers researchers looking at the heart-shaped region again say that that it could be where this heart could be where it is because of accumulation of ice because accumulation of ice made the dwarf planet roll over creating cracks and tensions in the crust that point towards the presence of a subsurface surface ocean so those are similar but that basically ice on the surface also added to the weight on the surface of the planet that got the planet to roll over and spin and orient itself and then the subsurface ocean added in there and then it's like oh it's just gonna it's heart's gonna point at Sharon forever little ball of rock oh here's a cute animation you guys want to see an animation always we always like animations right so we have past coming forward volatiles growing that means ice on the surface that's what they mean look at that spin that happened Sharon just sat there and watched it shot an arrow through Pluto's heart how dare you yeah i think it's interesting it didn't i love the that wasn't always where it is now it moved why did it move how did it move like earth we had our giant impact that set the moon and the earth kind of where they were we talked about that did a little dance to make the earth used to be super tilted and the moon kind of pulled it back up and then this kind of thing happened with Sharon and Pluto it's another story i can get rid of there's so much stories this week you guys so much stories i'm sure that ed is going to talk about a lot of them tomorrow i'm sure this is cool work presented the society for neuroscience meeting this week by nick Ramsey from brain center Rudolph Magnus at UMC Utrecht in the Netherlands there's a paper coming out in the New England Journal of Medicine where he's got a patient who with ALS which is otherwise known as Lou Gehrig's disease or motor neuron disease that destroys neurons required for voluntary muscle control her body doesn't work anymore she has control of her eyes but that is it they implanted a brain control interface into her brain an electrocortograph corticograph and the electrical sensors are inside the skull against the brain and can read brain activity and the patient learned how to use the implant basically to perform a brain click to be able to like basically click click a mouse clicker and so now instead of using eye tracking as an input method she can communicate when her eye track computer doesn't work with her brain the power of her brain is ALS the same thing that Stephen Hawking has anyway this is a the first person to use a fully implanted brain computer interface at home in day-to-day life without constant doctor supervision pretty cool taking it home not in the lab did you know that in in London you can take a rainbow unicorn to work explain things um unicorn drawn carriages have just been launched in London because why not yeah two horses decked with rainbow manes and horns draw a white coach complete with rainbow pattern on the side drawn dressed in purple suits and yellow shirts crowned with top hats the coachmen don't fall behind either so-called unicabs are a temporary thing uh brought in to cheer londoners up as the mornings get darker they say that's great cheer up london we know it's getting dark but here's a rainbow a unicorn rainbow and they're absolutely free that is hilarious oh my gosh i love it you can ride a free rainbow free rainbow unicorn unicab you just have to tweet at the british phone company three and you have to tweet at three uk the station you'd like to be picked up from your destination and the hashtag magic together oh i love that because really if you're riding a rainbow unicorn cab that is magic you're having together with the rest of London that's great i'm sleepy you guys i'm real sleepy yeah we have a calendar done thank you for doing that Blair really appreciate it and thanks to Patrick for helping with the art on that yay all done it's ordered calendars will be coming if you order them too yeah um anything else oh yeah we're still thinking about uh january 19th i haven't heard anything yet okay i know the line-ups getting released on friday i think yeah i was told uh when they emailed me they said it would be like last week but it wasn't so i got an email because i get sketchfest emails because i love sketch that i'm saying that they would announce the line-up to the general public on friday the 18th awesome yeah i guess uh eight we'll have we either aren't in it or no we are we're 40 minutes of fun 40 minutes of fun it's a little shorter than a normal show so we'll have to do our regular show and then do that the next night just for fun it'll be a just for fun episode just for fun yeah actually good it'll be great i'm looking forward to it oh yeah jenia skew where is my wine it is um not even close to halfway so it's on its beta empty tonight with a wine night i work very hard at not not drinking on on show nights but uh lately i've decided i'm didn't just do what i want lately some of those things i don't care anymore i'm gonna do what i want but they're unicorn calves i know oh did you guys see my post about um the post-it notes at kai's school i i saw it i don't remember what it said so at kai's school he's in kindergarten but it's a k through sixth grade elementary school and this monday when they returned to school last week was um they were out of school all week so they hadn't it was the first time they'd come back to school since the election and they showed up at school and in the morning every single locker 500 lockers for you know one for every kid every kid has a locker in the school each locker in the school had a post-it note a nice colorful post-it note with a message like like you are loved we appreciate you thank you for being here like all these messages of affirmation and just positivity and like today i picked kai up and he was wearing his like he'd left it on his locker for a few days but like he was wearing his on his shirt today on the way home like he it really i think it really touched the kids and it was just such a wonderful wonderful thing that some of the parents did that uh i think it's just fabulous and yeah i'm gonna give post-its to people post-its post your love post it you know what you guys what you are loved i love you and i am looking forward to our what is it twist giving episode yeah pre turkey madness or for vegetarians pre toe furky madness night before your stomach was so full fill your head with science we will before we fill your tummies with turkey that's right that's what we're gonna do can't wait it's gonna be great oh whiskey renegade shush the stickers were all fine yeah i think i'm ready to go to bed you guys got anything more i'm so ready i'm exhausted good night minions good night geeky and blair night i'll see you next week thank you so much everybody for watching thanks for being with us tonight all right have a great love you bye