 Welcome to the latest installment in the science of our lives. No, this week in science, the podcast is broadcasting live right now, and we are so glad you are here to join us. Make sure you hit that subscribe button and the like button. Get those notifications. We want to see those hearts and likes come on up here, but we are ready to start the show. Are we not? Yeah, let's start it. OK, everybody's looking good, sounding good. What do they say? Five by five, Clive. They are. I don't know who they are that says that. I don't know anybody. Oh, damn. Yes, Gord, we're having a science party right now. I would like you to know this is the live recording. The podcast may not include everything seen here. Well, it wouldn't include anything seen here. Heard here. Yeah, included here. Not to do it, you know, an annoying correction. We are beginning this show in three, two, this is. This week in science episode number eight hundred eighty recorded on Wednesday, August 18th. Is it the 18th today? No, it is 17th. It's the 17th. OK, so this is that out. Thanks. It's yeah, it's the 17th for Justin. Not for us yet. No, it's the 18th for Justin. It's the 17th. I was just on. And I don't want to time travel forward into the future yet. I want to take out the safest type of time travel. But OK, yeah. All right, starting again in three, two. This is twist. This week in science episode number eight hundred eighty recorded on Wednesday, August 17th, two thousand twenty two. Will we return to the moon? Who knows the answer to some of these questions? I'm Dr. Kiki, and today we will fill your head with sleep, sneezes and styrofoam. But first disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Your mind is made up. It's made up of physical biological squishy stuff that came to be over millions of years of evolution, giving you the ability to process information from the world around you through your senses as it operates biological functions automatically. It's made up of thoughts, language and memory, giving you the ability to wonder aloud and eventually find where you left your keys. And it's made up of interests, things your mind seeks out in the world beyond its wishy confines. While your mind is made up of many things, we recommend one more. Make your mind up with science, like a highly refined sixth sense. Science allows you to process information not readily available to senses alone. And there's no better place to make up your mind than 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 happen this week. Science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin, Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. And apparently it is Episode 888, even though I have decided we're going back in time again first. Oh, this episode. Justin just said that's the kind of time travel you don't want to do. No, that's the dangerous kind of time travel forward all you want. Going back through all the paradoxical danger happens. One step forward, two steps back. No, we're going to move right on into our science for the day. I have some fun stories today. I'm going to be talking a bit about cancer. Some headache. What? I've got I've got fun stuff to talk about today. Well, let's start off with cancer. Yeah, that's what has to be. Yeah, that's what we're doing. Synthetic circuits, some styrofoam recycling. And is consciousness solved and should be? We be thinking about free energy. Some big questions out there. Justin, what do you bring? I've got why heat makes you sleepy, especially if you're a fruit fly. Ancient DNA of South America. Fingertapping, revulsion and how to how deceptive food labeling could be countered. Deceptive labeling with truth. No, let's let's hear that when we get to that story. Yeah, Blair. Spoiler alert. Kiki just told how my story is. How about we just tell the truth? Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, I have sponges, spiders and zebra finches. Oh, I love zebra finches. Yep, I will be mimicking a zebra finch during that story. Yes, it's actually zebra finch brains. So I brought it just for you so you could basically do the story. I'm going to love it so much. And you're going to. Yeah, it's great. I was like, I gotta bring this. Oh, yeah, I didn't see that story. So I'm glad you did. Let's talk about those zebra finch brains later. But now we're going to move on into the show. And as we do, I want to remind everyone out there that if you are not yet subscribed, you can do that by looking for this week in science, all places that podcasts are found. You can find us on Twitch, on we're also a YouTube and Facebook broadcasting live weekly at eight p.m. Pacific time on Wednesdays, whether or not I get the episode number correct. And then really cares about the science. What actual episode is it? And we don't know. I mean, that's fantastic. Because we've talked about this trivia before. We've gotten to the point when we've lost track of where we are. Somewhere in the eight hundreds or nine hundreds. It's an estimate, yeah. And if you want to find us on the Twitch, the Instagram or the Twitter's look for Twist Science, our website is twist.org. If this was a lot for your brain and you just want to go to our website and see our show notes and episodes and stuff and find links and information. Twist.org. OK. Science time. Let's dive into the science. What do we want to talk about first? How about the fact that NASA has successfully rolled its Artemis One mission craft? The Orion orbiter and the SLS. Onto the launch pad early, earlier than expected. It's sitting there. On the launch pad, hopefully getting ready to launch on a test mission, not manned. Near the moon, which is pretty exciting if they actually can get this test mission to go for it. I don't know, though. A man on the moon, a man on the moon, please. Man, so far it couldn't possibly be done. Why are we? Couldn't possibly. No. Have we already done this before? I feel like deja vu. It has been done before, but not in a very long time. It's very exciting if we can successfully manage this unmanned mission to the moon and back because then we could take people to the moon. We could take new rovers to the moon. We could do lots of stuff on the moon. We could start building that moon base that we've been talking about. There's all sorts of research that could be done. I mean, let's become our own little human inter, and I guess it's not interplanetary, interplanetary body. Interarbitary? A United Federation of Planets, I think, is what you're looking for there. That's what we could get there. Yes, but no sooner than August 29th will the launch take place from Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida. And so we're just waiting now to see whether or not everything goes according to plan. Will we make it to space? Will we return to the moon? It's definitely yet to be seen. But moving on from the moon, we can take a little shift in our scientific focus in curing cancer in mice. Because as we know, as we know, this is what we love to do, cure the cancer in the mice. In this particular situation, they are testing a new kind of cancer vaccine. It is similar to others that are in clinical trials currently as it works similarly to COVID vaccines that were used by Pfizer and Moderna by delivering mRNA in little lipid molecules to fuse with cells that then read that mRNA and produce viral antigens, these little tiny segments of the virus that then can make the immune system reactive. OK, we know there are many of these mRNA vaccines for not just SARS-CoV-2 HIV and cancer in development, like I mentioned just a second ago, cancer vaccines using mRNA are in clinical trials. However, so far what they have seen is a limited turnover of the actual immune reactivity when the mRNA gets processed mainly through the liver. Now, the liver is a great immune body in our organ in our body, but the better location are our glands, the glands that swell up when you get sick. Oh, yeah. Yeah, little sponges. The lymphatic system, yes. And through the lymph glands, what we can what if we can target the mRNA to end up in those lymph glands in the lymph system where that's where the immune cells are really doing the biggest work to prepare the body to fight something off. Maybe we could have a bigger reaction. And so these researchers at Tufts School of Engineering, they attempted this and in their publication and proceedings of National Academy of Sciences this week, they showed that it was extremely successful and rather than have, as with the COVID vaccine, one to four, where like the majority of the mRNA is ending up in the liver, they had three to one where the majority was ending up in the lymphatic system. And not only that, the mice that they treated with this particular mRNA vaccine for their cancer for metastatic melanoma, they showed inhibition of tumors, 40 percent rate of complete response, no term, no tumors at all and no recurrence long term when it was paired with another therapy that helps prevent cancer cells from suppressing an immune response. So all the mice were in complete that ended up in complete remission, prevented any new tumors from forming after they were injected again with metastatic tumor cells. So the researchers were like, let's try really hard. To give these mice cancer and they didn't get it. So this is a stronger response. It's a very exciting platform for potentially not just cancer treatments moving forward, but also other other viruses and pathogens that we might want to to deal with. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So once again, in mice, but in mice. Yeah, that's where we start in mice. Exactly. But we'll get there. We'll get there eventually. The mice of all diseases so that one day they live forever, replacing us on this planet. They will. The mice in the cockroaches, we will have saved them. But this is this is this is just what it is is. We've talked about this already probably enough times on the show about how we used to like try to avoid talking about cancer. Not because we didn't want to talk about cancer, but because it was always a thing that might lead to a thing to someday a pathway to finding an intervention. But these are clinical trials that are curing cancer. And this is not the first one we've had this year alone. We've had, I think several this year already. Really an astounding time in cancer research. Yeah, it absolutely. You know what I was just thinking about too? Yeah. Pets, cancer in pets is like a huge thing. Like just. I guess as as we as as pets live longer and as we, you know, these animals we love don't really think about it. Yeah, I mean, obviously humans are the number one priority. I get that. But I'm also just thinking about, OK, cure if we can cure cancer advice. What about zoo animals or fuzzy buddies? Well, well, yeah. And if your pet is a mouse, you're way ahead of the game. True. Press release. Press release on this next story caught my attention with the opening line on the hottest summer days. You may find yourself dozing off in the middle day. They come by because it's been especially warm and it's five twenty in the morning and I'm sweating. Like it's that there's no air conditioning in this country. Like nobody has it. So it's been hot. And I did it in middle of the day yesterday. I took a really long nap while it was really warm. And so I saw this headline and I was like, oh, why is that? So I took the long midday. So why was that Northwest University neurobiologists have found clues as to what might be happening? Their study published in Current Biology found that fruit flies are pre-programmed to take a nap in the middle of the day. Follow up to a twenty twenty biology paper that identified a brain thermometer, which was only active in cold weather. This paper explores a similar thermometer circuit for hot temperatures. This is quoting Marco Gaglio, who's associate professor of neurobiology. I think it's his lab that this is being conducted in. Changes in temperature have a strong effect on behavior of both humans and animals and offers animals a cue that is time to adapt to the changing seasons. The effect of temperature on sleep can be quite extreme. Some animals decided to sleep off an entire season. Think of a hibernating bear. But the specific brain circuits that mediate the interaction between temperature and sleep remain largely unmapped. So they're working with fruit flies because they said it's a good model. There's for the question of like, why do we sleep or why does your why why does sleep what does sleep do for the brain? Because they don't attempt to disrupt their own sleep instincts as do humans. No fruit flies drinking coffee to pull the odd all nighter. They also allow researchers to isolate the influence of external cues like light and temperature on specific cellular pathways. So nice, nice friendly model to work with. Just as they expected, based on the results of the previous paper on cold temperature, researchers found that brain neurons receiving information about heat are part of the broader system that regulates sleep. When the hot circuit, which runs parallel to the cold circuit is active, the target cells that promote midday sleep stay on longer. This results in an increase of midday sleep that keeps flies away from the hottest part of the day. So if you run one of the like the cultures that have that midday siesta, where you close up all the shops and everybody's going to go take a nap. I know, I was just going to ask, is this like, yeah, like is this a genetic circuit in Italians as well? Well, yeah, it might be. It might be generational, growing up in warmer temperatures, you just sort of pick this up. But they're much biological. But that graphic you have up there is showing that the fruit fly likes a good 25 degrees C or with 77-ish Fahrenheit. And then if it's hotter than that, it triggers that response that starts saying, OK, well, these cells are going to stay on until you take a nap. Of course. Was that a guess, Justin, because I just googled it and that was exactly correct. 77. I'm dead right now. Right. From in the Celsius, everything is in Celsius. OK, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it. Yeah, I'm on the metric temperature system, which is actually completely different than Celsius. It's a whole other. Yeah, it makes more sense like metric does. But no, I've been I've been looking it up for for months, so I'm getting a little better. But the thing I felt like I was looking at this, I go, gosh, there's times in the Central Valley where at night it doesn't get doesn't cool off below that 25 C. So so when when do those flies go out? Are they just groggy? Like they just get off a shift work and they're foraging, tired and picking the wrong thing, the wrong tree again. Oh, what am I doing? I'm so tired, like, do they take the naps or do they just suffer in the heat? I don't know what they do. That's that somebody else. They die to leave the temperature on. Yeah, they're saying some parts they could actually be a biological response, but they don't and they haven't found this circuit in humans yet. That's the the next thing they want to start looking at is humans and see if they can define this sort of circuitry somewhere within humans that induces that midday sleep on the hot hot days. Well, you do. I mean, you don't want to waste energy when it's really hot and you don't want to lose water when it's really hot and exerting yourself does both of those things. So if you can just shut it all down and chill. Yeah, that is extremely beneficial. Absolutely beneficial to your physiology, your survival, resource use, all those things for sure. Hey, Blair, yes. Did you want to talk about sneezes now? We've got hot weather survival and sneezes. Why do we sneeze? As we have. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I don't know. Is this have you ever seen Apollo? I mean, the dust is close up. They're all spiky and evil looking. And then it touches your nose and like, get out of here. To get stuff out of our noses. Yes, exactly. So itchiness or pollen might cause us to sneeze. But the reason us humans can sneeze is to expel stuff from our nose, to expel waste, essentially. Spuches sneeze also. Some of the most rudimentary animals in the world, simple animals, simplistic body design, whatever you want to say. It all sounds derogatory. But they're basically just a living tube that lives in the ocean. And I love them. Don't get me wrong. But it appears that they also sneeze to expel waste. Field experts have known about this kind of sneezing behavior for years, but they have not known the exact mechanism or the exact reason for this behavior. And so this recent paper that came out in current biology looks at it as a method to get rid of materials the sponges cannot use. Now to be clear, sponge sneezes are not like our sneezes. They take about a half an hour to complete. They are a slow motion sneeze. Because they don't breathe. They don't have the big baffles to expel a large quantity. So they're kind of just twitching to move, consolidate and push away yuck. This is essentially what's going on. But both sponges and human sneeze essentially to expel waste as a mechanism. We might be able to walk away from a place filled with dust or pollen. They cannot, if the water around them gets too dirty, they need to find a way to clear out that water so they can continue to filter feed. And so organic matter exists in the water around a reef where these sponges live, but most of it isn't concentrated enough to kind of be in places where other animals can eat it. So it also turns out that by sponges doing this slow motion sneeze, they are concentrating and expelling this edible mucus in small convenient packages like little snacks for animals to eat. Sneeze packets. Yeah. And so they think that most if not all sponges sneeze based on this research. And there are potential future opportunities to understand the material cycling. Exactly the mechanism, how it's moved, how they know when to do it, kind of like what the impetus for it is. And so it also actually looks in these videos like the mucus moves along predefined paths on the surface of the sponge before they accumulate. So they would love to go through, take more videos, try out different waste distributions in the water, check different species, do all this stuff to try to figure out what is happening with sponge sneezes. But for now, we know for sure they sneeze and their sneezes provide delicious mucus to other fish on the reef for food. They don't eat their own boogers, but fish do. Other, yeah. There you go. Sharing is caring. Fada in the chat is asking you are we sure this is a sneeze? Why isn't it defined as a fart? I guess it's because you can't smell the difference underwater. Yeah, no. And Grouchy Gamer asks, why don't we sneeze while sleeping? Oh, we do. If you have. We do all the time. Yes, I usually don't notice. So my understanding is that sponge, the sponges have one opening. So they water comes in through the pores and out through the top. So this stuff is coming from the surface of the sponge. So I'm actually going to answer this question. If it were a fart, it would come from the top of the sponge where water comes out. Yes, right. But because it's coming from where water comes in, it is more akin to a nose and therefore is a sneeze, let's say. Because it's releasing mucus. And that's one of the big hallmarks is the fact that mucus is involved. Yes. Farts are not well known for mucus as part of the transaction. So this is definitely. You hope. Not ideally. Blair, thank you for this. Fantastic information. Now we can answer the question. So next time you're you're washing your dishes with a sponge, just think about it. Think about sneezing or other things we've talked about. You're welcome. Or other things. Yeah. Now I will be contemplating sponge, sneezes and sponge farts for the rest of the evening. But we have more science. How about plant roots? Plants like to put down roots, but maybe they don't put them down exactly the way that we want them to, or the way that is the most ideal, or maybe learning about the genetics behind the way that plant circuits, plant genetic circuits, proteins that work together to define the paths that plant roots take. Maybe understanding those circuits can lead us to being able to implement genetic control over not just plants, but other complex biological systems. Yes. So a paper out in science this week out of Stanford University and some other collaborators, researchers have taken a look at plant genetic parts. These are plant synthetic biologists who are interested in spatial patterns of gene expression and have been able to engineer them in plants to actually modulate root morphology. They've changed the way that the roots look. So historically, yes, genetic control. We've been able to control all sorts of things and we've learned about various circuits that work in a sense as logic gates and specifically in this study, they focus on initially a species of plant that they were, it's kind of like tobacco-related plant, nicotiniana benthamiana, and they were able to develop and measure circuit performance using green fluorescent protein to be able to see where their circuits were ending up and this circuit that they were focusing on, it's a logic operation known as a nymphle gate and they were able to control this nymphle, spelled N-I-M-P-L-Y, this nymphle gate. They discovered that there are certain transcription factor proteins that are modular. So there are binding and regulatory parts that are physically and functionally separate and what this led them to be able to do was determine a bunch of and or nymphle gate functions in this tobacco relative and then they took what they learned in the tobacco relative and they put it on a model species. We're talking about model species earlier. In the plant world, Arabidopsis thaliana is the big model species and... Tiny model species. Tiny model species. Big, big model, tiny plant. Yeah, but they were able to alter its root morphology. Initially though, one of the interesting aspects of the study is that they discovered that it wasn't a direct correlation and so half of the circuits that worked in the tobacco relative did not work in the Arabidopsis and what that indicated to them is that there's a lot more complexity and so Arabidopsis is a slightly more complex plant organism than the original that they were studying and so this increased complexity changed the outcome of these logic operations. There were other things in the black box doing work. Eventually they were able to determine what those factors were and get all of their logic gates working but the whole idea with the synthetic gene circuits is being able to put stuff in place to hopefully eventually deal with needs for increased nutrition in plants because maybe we'll be growing more plants on less ground. How are we going to deal with the nutritional needs of people? Maybe we need to get more plant matter out of plants for the populations that we have. How are we going to get these plants that we use to deal with climate change? Can we get plants to actually help us fight climate change? So on the plant side, synthetic biology and control over organisms could be really useful but then the fact that they're doing this kind of stuff and learning about these logic gates in plants suggests that it could then be applied to other organisms with greater complexity. I'll just leave it to you to imagine where it could go. I don't know, Blair. Maybe this is the kind of research that we're going to need to bring back things like the thylacine or the mammoth. Maybe these are the kinds of genetic controls that we're going to need for the rhinos, for the hybrid organisms that we're going to be potentially trying to save or maybe this is the kind of stuff that's going to be necessary. Wow. I love that idea. I'm sure everyone saw that somebody put out a press release this week that they're going to bring the thylacine back. Yeah. Great. Great. No, I love this. This is really smart taking some of the limitations and just ditching them completely. Yeah. I don't know. I find it I think it's interesting also when geneticists and biologists start looking from a computational perspective at biological functions. So this combines with this. How does it work? You know, we're going to have an IFTT if this, then that. If this, then that kind of situation in biology with genes. Man, this is just the beginning. I feel like we're on the precipice of such a cool field of innovation with genetics that I cannot even imagine what we're going to see in the next 20 years. I'm so excited. We'll be here to talk about it. Maybe. Maybe we'll be talking about the return of the thylacine. Oh man, that'd be so cool. Dang, things are everywhere. How do we get rid of all these thylacines? What is the thylacine? I don't even know what we're talking about. Tasmanian tiger. Oh, it's the Tasmanian tiger. Okay, okay. Yeah. There's a, oh yeah, no, that's the devil, the Tasmanian devil exhibit. They're opening a Tasmanian devil exhibit at the Copenhagen Zoo. Very nice. Yes, if they opened a Tasmanian tiger exhibit, that would be very impressive because they are completely extinct. Completely extinct, thank you. Except for the hopes and dreams of a few people with money and science. So much money. So much money. Let's talk about old things. Justin, you have some ancient genes from South America? Well, actually, yeah, it's a combination of current and backpacking. So this is, uh-oh, oh no, unable to load fire. Why? Okay, here it's back. By looking, so what they do is they, oh, now it's gone again. Well, I didn't get where to go. I'm, oh, it's just as I should wait. Oh, there we go. That was a roller coaster. There we go. It really was. What's going to happen now? I have no idea. Three, this is where we cut. Three, two, one. Oh, good question, Kiki. By looking at people today with the rare Q-happler group, researchers have traced the roots of South American ancestry back over 19,000 years to South America. The study based on an archaeological study that compiled a data set of 1,661 radiocarbon dates, like over 1,500 of them made on cultural materials and from some 118 human teeth, bones from 454 different archaeological sites in South America, what they found is that based on the diversity of Q-happler types spread across South and Central America today, they must have evolved there over the past 19,300-ish years. It could be much older than that since we know there's a genetic bottleneck that occurs around 12,500 years ago, coinciding with the younger dry extinction event, which places a barrier and which samples are even in existence today. So we're looking at post-bottleneck with the current modern human samples that we have with this Q. When you have a happler group or one of these things, it's a big umbrella that broke off from a bigger umbrella at some point. They have all these subcategories too. So from several different subcategories that broke off from this Q, they can backtrack how long it would have taken for them to evolve. And it also gives them with the distribution between Argentina and Mexico great confidence that all of this divergence going back 19,300-ish years would have taken place in South America, somewhere in that vicinity. So I did a little bit of further looking and found previous research that said the happler group Q originated in Asia around 20,000 years ago, only crossing the barren strait into the American continent sometime between 16,500 and 13,000 years ago. So now we know that is not correct. So again, the previous conclusion was based on assumptions about when the Americas were populated. And it almost seems like it just stated that and must not have had any evidence, must not have actually done the same sort of research or had this. Well, I don't know if those were based on backtracking or if that was from the Siberian sample, which was about 20,000 years ago. Anyways, it says as we now have evidence of populations in the Americas much older than even the emergence of these genes in Asia, which is also not completely true, there seems to point in the other direction in terms of genetic flow. Not that anyone, anyone other than me, Justin Jackson is saying this, but if they previously concluded gene flow based on data for time present in a region and those data points flip in terms of which one's the old and which one's the newer one, perhaps also the conclusions they made based on that data should also flip. Perhaps. Perhaps. So there is the overall estimation of the entire Q family is estimated currently to be about 30 something thousand years back. They, I guess, had the first evidence of it in Asia around 20,000 years ago. We now have convincing evidence that it was in the Americas about 20,000 years ago. So where does it go back further than that? Well, in the Americas, we know people go back much further. But well, we know now we didn't always know for this gene, for this specific gene. But we also know now that we have the Americas were populated with evidence 30,000 years ago. Yeah. And so and so as that that's starting to be the time frame of the Q emergence and interesting fact, the pre-Columbian haplogroup for Native peoples in the Americas, 90 percent Q or at least at least in South and Central America with certainty. But there was that there was that North American one, the 12,500 year old child that there was this big counter, you know, should they test it? Shouldn't they test it in the Native American community allowed a Danish geneticist to go and do the testing? And I think they were Danish anyway. But they they determined that that that that kid was Q. And that's, you know, I think it's somewhere far up in North America. So pretty much that's kind of starting to look like the arrow pointing the other way. And I got a little bit more here to go. It is extremely widespread Q, though. It's a rare haplogroup everywhere else in the world. Larry David has the Q haplogroup as do about 5 percent of Ashkenazi Jews. Interesting. Sweden and Denmark, Sweden and Denmark have a similar 5 percent making Scandinavia the highest Q haplogroup in Europe. And then I have Q. I'm sure I'm going to I probably have Q. It's very rare. It's 5 percent of Scandinavia. But it's a lot. They've got lots of Scandinavia. But that's the highest. It's the highest of Q in Europe is in Scandinavia. And it's thought to have arrived there really early on after Bronze Age times. Three, four thousand years ago or more. I was also believed to have spread to Eastern Europe, Middle East, largely with the help of Mongolian hordes half a century ago. But it's really interesting in all these these places that sort of pops up around the world. But in yeah, and dominant pre-Columbian haplogroup of Native Americans, maybe North, but definitely South, it was approximately 90 percent. So a very, very strong signal of this haplogroup in the Americas that in the Americas populating population is coinciding with how old they think that haplogroup is. So there's some there's some figuring they need to do. But they probably won't come to which if you which of you think about the timing and all these things that this probably suggests a raft across the ocean from Asia to South America at some at some point. No, with this, I mean, the the thing that I mean, is what is it supporting? Right. The the thing that I'm I think it's starting to support is is not the bearing. Well, it's probably likely to be the bearing crossing. Okay, right. Because of all the northern. Well, this is an area that horses went back and forth many times throughout the the the eons, right. It would at some points be an open valley you could walk across with grasslands even going if you go back far enough earlier than that ice age that you know that they thought that there were islands there but still there's times where that's a very traversable area. And the next place we see this queue and Native American ancestors down and even into Mongolia and the Altai is is in Siberia down into Mongolia and western China. So what it tells me though with the story seems to paint the picture of isn't much earlier group and I would say probably over 50,000 years. That's old. Coming to the Americas as people don't have. Yeah, I would say maybe even older. Yeah, we don't have that evidence though, right? Physical evidence. Yeah, we don't have physical this but this this potentially points that yeah. But this is well this is this and then and then people coming back and populating Siberia after having populated the Americas so that you know you go the other direction that ocean you can't cross you oh we gotta turn around go all the way back and go all the way back over and then yet that that is reintroduced because there's a couple of bottlenecks in Asia where populations disappear where there were cultures that we don't have explanations for because we have no human remains for but we know we're not related to culturally to any of the populations that came in after all of it starts to add up to paint these really strange pictures of a potential peopling over the Americas much more ancient than we thought and then a return to Asia to add that back to that gene pool which is why the signal is strongest in the Americas and gets less and less strong as you get further away from it it's why the timelines are older in the Americas than they are when you get further and further away from them like all of that does paint the picture that if it was flipped the other way people say aha here's proof and evidence of but then you flip the data and people like well we don't have any evidence that conclusively can tell us one way or another we don't have it it seems like it seems like we're constantly faced with this conversation of like but how much gene flow is happening how much are humans moving how much and it's like I hear conversations about this stuff and it sounds like when you talk about something like a tiger salamander that's a ring species where like you have very distinct genetic populations in very distinct areas and they really don't leave those areas but right really it's sounding more and more like we were migratory birds like we were just all over the map right so you just like no i'm gonna cross the continent yeah i'm gonna cross an ocean i'm gonna see what's over there like i am not constrained but keep in mind even mine these are over thousands of years so these populations themselves even even ones they're living you know a hundred miles from each other may not meet they i mean they can remain very isolated forming specific languages specific genotypes that don't mix for a very long time which is partly how we were we are able to also tell that these disparate isolated groups had to have gone back over a specific you know 20 000 years to to have been from a single source because the lack of interaction for so long i don't know i'm not convinced that they never like that things were as walled off as you say because also when you study animals you always think like okay this is where this animal hangs out and then you put telemetry on them and it turns out no you were wrong they were all over the place like it's it's hard for you to believe that in the americas for example that over the course of a few weeks somebody wouldn't just go on an exploration and go hundreds of miles and run into other humans and then just be like all right i'm gonna go back or whatever but you know it just yes i don't like the idea of these like very strict walls and divisions of no no nobody likes that but there goes somewhere that's a hundred miles from san francisco without a car and don't buy anything carry everything you need with you um you have to you have to uh forage for your for your food yeah i'm not saying it was easy but i'm also saying there was no tv so but if like if like justin's saying you know horses were going back and forth other animals are traveling back and forth the the idea of human nomadic human populations that followed animals as they were hunting them as they were followed oh the rains are coming the snows are coming we're going to move from the mountains down into the lowlands and we'll go from the lowlands and we'll go to this other area oh look somebody found this river let's go there and have fish you could see how it could move over time but yeah yeah the idea of a single person just like going on a walk it happens it happens but it's not as successful and i'm and i'm but i'm sure somebody did it yeah of course that's why we have the national geographic society right now and actually greenland greenland is that story no greenland the current native population of greenland was a uh was from a canadian native population a canadian or uh far north uh united states whatever somewhere in that area uh who apparently committed a murder and and was like oh i'm totally convinced i'm gonna scoot oh i have a vision uh there's this place so way over here we need to go there i had a vision that says we're gonna go so they all followed this guy sledging crossing water makes it to greenland and the the inuits who are in greenland are on the brink of starvation because they've been in isolation lacking technology for a long time they don't they're like wearing muskox and uh no no they're not way they're wearing skill seal skins because they think muskox are dirty animals so they don't hunt them or eat them because they've got some rumor that uh you don't want to be a muskox so they're not wearing fur or anyway they came and basically saved the population this murderer on the run by just going on a long walk hundreds of miles and crossing waters exactly happen yeah time to make a move it'll kind of it'll kind of go spiritual leaders and the eagle told me we need to leave town snap snap everybody he said quick that ego said we gotta go now take what you got on here just fly like an eagle let's go come on fly like an eagle or like a styrofoam cup to the recycling plant i'm gonna switch topics styrofoam has not been recyclable all this time and i've just been neglectful no it's very expensive to recycle it's not easy to recycle recycle i mean really for the large majority of what you're gonna do with your styrofoam it's the throat it's gonna end up in the uh in the landfill but researchers at virginia tech university also working with a colleague at uh santa clara university and dong bay university of finance and economics have published their paper in proceedings of national academy of sciences a new process that they say is relatively affordable and scalable to large situations and the key here is it's not really recycling of polystyrene or what we officially know as styrofoam polystyrene it's hard to kind of melt it and turn it into other polystyrene it's like it's once it's in its shape that's kind of where it's gonna be and how it's gonna be how it's gonna be used so turning it from one use of polystyrene into another use of polystyrene is expensive and difficult however these researchers have published a paper that in which they've taken chemical reactions where they have also involved ultraviolet light irradiation and been able to break polystyrene down to its aromatic compounds and then by adding certain solvents they could extract different materials so they get diphenyl methane they've also got uh raw products that can be at raw gasoline asphalt um they've also got four oxo four phenyl butyric acid you know a whole bunch of other things that are useful in chemical operations that could then also be sold for profit you say they did they did all of this in an rv on the outskirts of albuquerque sorry i had a cat scratching at the door yes no not that and we're not talking about breaking bad this is this is breaking good this is chemistry for good uh the they suggest in their paper that this process is scalable and that the estimated cost of building a plant capable of producing these products is a mere 1.28 million dollars mere uh they conclude that this strategy of upcycling is viable it could get rid of plastic that piles up the polystyrene styrofoam stuff that we use for takeout containers and plates and stuff and also give a financial incentive to take care of it because the products could be sold yeah so fingers crossed that they uh with this paper are are selling their idea of i still want to i still want to see them add into their equation before this is a thing the cost of my time of sorting another thing and the energy that that takes and the fuel it takes to have a truck that's because you're only it's like you can fill up the truck with you know several blocks full of aluminum cans you get the cardboard truck comes up several blocks and goes through a whole neighborhood collecting the cardboard and the styrofoam truck comes by and there's like one piece of styrofoam it's gotta go back to the factory so but but there's so think about like packaging in factories there's there's mass styrofoam being produced for sure yeah it's beside your cup however what i was gonna say was i understand the effort here and i applaud the effort however why don't we just stop using styrofoam this there are places where it has been completely illegalized like in san francisco you can't use styrofoam anymore i mean most of california i think styrofoam is illegal there's different packaging you can use there's different takeout containers you can use it's pretty much gone in my life and i do not miss it so i don't understand why we can't just cut it out why we have to be doing this i i agree with you for the personal products i don't see why polystyrene is used in a lot of cases we could just do away with it as a yeah but there's a lot of it out there in the world certainly there is could be remediated and i would just say let's not make any more i don't know why are they gonna attack your $1,500 62 inch thin flat screen quantum the television that like papery carporty forms or how about the styrofoam made out of mushrooms that are biodegradable how about that that sounds like it what but that uh what kiki uh i think you can put it in the closet and then you can grow the mushrooms in your closet no player's point printing out is the first of the three r's because you gotta reduce yeah you got the reusing recycle that comes later your first thing which just eliminates the problem all together it's just reduce the amount that you're using you don't even have to reuse a recycle anything yeah yes this is this weekend science thank you for joining us for another episode of science news discussion we are so glad to be here with you once again thank you if you are enjoying the show please share it with a friend today so you can share that discussion with someone else all right some quick covid news as we come back from that little break what's up with covid well a new study uh has been published it's a preprint not actually published in a uh a peer reviewed journal yet but researchers working together looking at 99 people with long covid for the last couple of years they've been uh they've been following them for uh for over a year and doing deep dives into their their blood their t cells and their immune signals so basically looking for signals within the blood to see what's different in the blood of people with long covid most of these people were struggling with intense fatigue brain fog and other symptoms they seem to have a common factor which is low levels of cortisol which is a hormone that helps in controlling inflammation they had uh glucose differences and and this is also involved in their sleep cycles as well and features of their t cells suggested that the t t cells were struggling that they had been working very hard and they were still working very hard but they were tired so their particular signals that t cells give off that they are working that they are overworked and this study falls right in line with another paper that was peer reviewed back in january that did document also low cortisol in people with these uh long respiratory symptoms the big difference being number of uh subjects in the two studies and the initial study only followed long covid patients who were about three months after infection where these were looking at people who had been recovered for many many many more months they actually found it challenging the researchers say to find people who were fully recovered from covid many post-covid volunteers said they were healthy but then when it came down to it they they were exhausted during their gym workouts so they're the numbers of people they actually ended up recruiting were less than they were hoping to get anyway uh long covid probably has to do with chronic inflammation probably has to do with these exhausted t cells the virus kind of sticking around similar to stuff like epstein bar and chronic fatigue syndrome um and herpes virus that where they can sit and be dormant inside cells for extended periods and then kind of resurge um and so SARS-CoV-2 may also be something that lingers in some patients as well the highlight of this good news though is that it would be possible could be possible to uh to use this information to start targeting therapies that address the decrease in cortisol that address the depleted t cells and start uh start act start treating it kind of and as an autoimmune disease to calm the immune system down so potential benefits this is like the the the withstanding mystery about covid right is the long covid situation and just it's it just does not want to go away in some people not everyone yeah small period 20 to 30 of patients that sounds like a big percentage to me it's i'm wondering how yeah well i'm wondering how how many other ailments are long haul ailments that's interesting yeah because because this is one of the few times in all of our human history where we all got the same thing at once well i didn't get it and we started having the the science the technology to be able to track stuff and the technology to track it but it was sort of like the anecdotal uh women were talking about uh you know after the vaccine like the administration cycles ever were a little bit different than they were used to and then they did a study they found out hey that's not just an anecdote that's not just a one or two that's a thing that's a trend that we we connect with the vaccine and that's the same thing that goes long covid as well because people started using social media to connect with each other saying hey my symptoms aren't going away and my doctor isn't believing me and my doc and they say it can't still be covid and so it there was a real surge of people finding community online as well and that enabling uh i guess a groundswell of enough people enough voices to actually make researchers really take note and i think to justin's point about how 20 actually feels like a lot um i think that that's an important piece of the conversation that i again and again is not being talked about when we talk about like oh well you're vaccinated you'll probably get covid now but you'll just get it for a little bit and then you'll be fine you'll you'll just miss some work it's not a big deal like open everything up it's it this is the piece that i feel it keeps getting ignored is if you have a one in five chance when you get infected of having this for months that is a different risk than just being sick for five days yep but if we don't talk about it nobody thinks about it it's okay yeah and these numbers may also be this i was gonna say these numbers may also be um there is conversation about these numbers because different numbers have showed up it's been as low as eight percent five to eight percent as high as 20 to 30 percent depending on the study and depending on the sample of individuals that have been looked at so we whether or not the doctors believe them i mean it's that's part of it the data collection right that's it's just funny that people think that they can win the lottery which is a one in several million but they don't think that they're going to get a disease or the effects of a disease that even being optimistic are around one in ten yep well speaking of data collection and communication and who we trust around things like covid the news this week is that uh rachel walensky the director of the cdc has ordered a lot of reorganization that shaking things up shaking it up at the cdc restructuring things really taking to heart the fact that uh the cdc failed when it came to giving guidance to the united states population uh that uh covid itself was and the guidance they gave was confusing and overwhelming she has brought in people from outside the agency and also is doing agency conversations talking to people working in the agency they're basically doing a big review to see how the systems in the cdc work what's working what's not working they're going to be restructuring where scientific agencies report the scientific divisions in the agency are now going to report directly to walensky's office there's going to be a new executive council reporting to her as well setting the priorities for the agency and directing spending and then as well when it comes to spending there has all has been an issue for a long time regarding something like a pandemic for a one-time big push that involves the entire united states and coordinate coordination across many states the funding the cdc has really isn't there and they have to go to congress for special funding to be able to fund the work that they do and previous um cdc directors have actually said that you know they had they didn't have enough money to send to send people on on flights to go to places where outbreaks were happening to be on the ground so there are issues related to where the money is how much money they have how that money is being spent additionally the cdc has to come up come back for a lot from a lot of the changes that occurred during the trump administration one of those being um a complete shift the pandemic response team and additionally the uh uh during it was in june of 2020 it was it was announced that a trump related data collections company called tele tele not telehealth tele some i will tell you what i'm gonna tell you something yes there was a company that was the trump the administration directed hospitals to stop reporting all all their data to the cdc directly and give the data to a pittsburgh based software company called tele tracking technologies sure the company had really never worked on anything this big before a lot of people were like what are you doing but it came out that this company was very closely related to big funders owned by funders of the trump administration you don't say yeah and so there was a lot of trouble getting the data from the hospitals then to the tele tracker then to the cdc the the data was getting sifted and edited and there was a there were pieces in the puzzle that did not quite fit anymore and so yeah the cdc couldn't give good guidance because they weren't necessarily getting the data that they needed so as of december this year that uh contract is ending and all data reporting is going to go back to the cdc and so they're going to be really looking at how the data is being put yes uh grift the gift that keeps on giving well the grifting yeah and the other the other thing too and all of this shake up and doing things better too like there's a point when it's just not your fault when you are telling people point blank that we need to take x y z actions and a big part of our population says no you've you've done what you can if the lemurs are still going off the cliff lemmings you're thinking of lemmings lemurs i'm sorry lemmings lemurs and the lemurs too any of them you would know better you would think they would know better but they get cut up in all the excitement of the lemur of the lemmings what's the then lemmings they don't even live in the same place when you're throwing lemons off a cliff thank you this is how glare got the job she could real time correct me but they're giving they were giving at some point got two good advice that needed to be followed previous to that i think we would agree we were seeing scientific publications we were talking about on the on the show that made it sound scarier than the cdc thought it seemed to stance was anyway or even the world health organization stance at that time was uh but we were seeing studies coming out saying oh nope this aerolizes it stays in the air this is a respiratory it's not about touch and it took a long time for them to adopt the findings that science was making no i noticed that in real time as we were doing the show but there was the point when they they're up to speed and they're giving the good advice that's the majority of the takeoff of the virus spread is when people were getting the right advice it wasn't a messaging problem from the cdc there was a dissemination problem through media that that's a whole other issue that's out of their control so agreed a dissemination problem and then also you know communications really comes down to the understanding when you have a message at hand and how people are taking that and so there were big gaps in making sure that real understanding was happening as opposed to just this is our message yeah and and and more importantly oh i was just i was just going to say you know props to Michelle will and ski i mean she's say she is accepting they did a really bad job they've dropped the ball on monkeypox as well the this is we are not in a good position and she's taken that and she's saying this needs to change um you know it's not reflecting well on anyone who knows if trust can be redeemed but uh they're gonna try yeah and and we've bought uh whoa like 60 000 doses of monkeypox vaccine that are still sitting in Denmark because nobody's come to pick them up what good yeah yeah i'm sure they'll keep they'll be fine we've paid we've paid for it apparently they ship fine they don't need to be cold temperature stored i don't believe but yeah they're sitting here in Denmark still the company's making them just filling up a warehouse america's paying for it still haven't come to pick it up but i did want to i did want to get to one and one thing before we go because i just heard this united states federal government you have a shipment to pick up is anyone gonna come by here i mean i know it's like a weekend but do you want to come pick up these monkeypox although it is confusing to pick up a package in Denmark because it could be at it could be anywhere you could go to a 7-11 and pick up your packages like they ship it to all these weird mom-and-pop liquor store no it's like really weird or you can have a cold on your phone and go to a dropbox and a grocery like in a parking lot down a dark alley like it makes no sense sometimes you have to go across town pick up packages at different places it's ridiculous but i did want to point out because this is very important the fish is according to something i just heard from beast price in our chat room lemmings don't go off cliffs either so we all stand corrected so much i just want to all the things to start with l life gives you lemurs make lemur and life gives you lemurs trade them in for a llama this is twist we hope you are enjoying our show so far this evening thank you so much for joining us if you are looking at this show or listening to this show and thinking to yourself i wish i could help this show out how can i help this show out well first make sure you click a little heart a like give us a little like somewhere in there so that other people know that you like it subscribe and tell your friends but the big big thing big thing is that you can go to twist.org and click on the patreon link patreon is our listener support community and anyone who chooses to support us at ten dollars or more per month will be thanked by name at the end of the show i'd love to read your name so head over to twist.org click on that patreon link to help support twist now we can't do this without you thank you so much for your support all right let's come back right now to the part of the show that's gonna be full of french french french french finch brains meet me tonight it's blairs animal cleaner with blair what you got blair well at uh kiki's behest i suppose i should start with some finch brains um this is a study from okinawa institute of science and technology had a lot of studies from them lately they are on fire with their animal science uh they wanted to look at how juvenile zebra finches learn songs directly from another finch from for the purpose of this we what we call a tutor this is usually their father but it can be other older birds and that social interaction um keeps them motivated and on task to learn songs this study wanted to know how those things are related whether they can learn songs from a speaker if they can learn songs from a recording of a tutor or if it has to be a live present tutor and what is going on in the brain if it's dependent upon a live teacher so you guessed it if they are only hearing from the speaker it doesn't really help they do a pretty poor job learning it and it has to involve a live tutor in some way so in the in the study where they wanted to look at uh kind of first of all what it required for finches to learn quickly um over a few days they recorded brain activity um and under the following situations the first was um with a juvenile who had never heard a tutor song before listen to it through a speaker so that's like the the least connected then we have a juvenile directly interacting with the tutor as he's saying and then finally they went kind of in the middle they listened to the tutor's song through the speaker a tutor they had already met so they they found that generally speaking um they needed some sort of social context they needed to have a tutor involved in some way to be able to learn the songs um they it seems like they did best with the live tutor but they also did very well if they had already met the live tutor and they were listening to that individual through a speaker if they were listening just to an unknown bird through a speaker they didn't do a very good job learning um so they wanted to know what was going on in the brain and this is where i'm going to do my very best and he can chime in and help so this all started with about 20 years ago scientists studied human babies um and found that they needed a personal guide to recognize um pieces of language and so their their idea was that there was something going on in the brain that queued them in to pay attention it's all a question of attention store this data pay attention don't look elsewhere listen to your tutor so they focused on a brain area called the locus coruleus lc what did i say it wrong say okay all right um which is known to be involved in attention and arousal and so neurons from this brain area um they helped them to um kind of order their auditory functions um and then they also wanted to look at the codomedial nidopallium ncm um and so they from previous work have decided that this is where juveniles memories of these tutor songs are are formed and stored so um they wanted to look at these two areas their hypothesis was that these two circuits working together might be important but they hadn't looked at juveniles in particular and didn't know how having a live tutor there related to that so both brain regions responded more strongly when the tutor sang and they heard the tutor singing through the speaker that also lit up these areas of the brain they responded well the lc neurons were active constantly while the tutor sang so they were responding to the vocal communication itself more than specific notes it wasn't like peaking at certain moments in the song and if the researchers act inactivated the neurons from the lc to the ncm so this circuit between these two areas when the tutor sang with social interaction they were unable to accurately copy their song so they think it's this area of the brain for sure that is is kind of turning on and lighting up and kind of logging the information um so the lc they think is conveying a secondary type of information they're not just saying hey listen to this music they they think that the lc is um focusing attention so the ncm neurons are actually queuing into a bunch of input puts from different regions in the brain and the lc in connection with that other area of the brain is actually what's telling them hey this is important learn your songs does that all make sense to you kiki yeah it makes a lot of sense yeah so if you know the bird brain the bird brain we've known about this this circuit for song learning and song production for a very long time and it's been this kind of analog to human vocal learning for you know like you like you gave the history but um understanding exactly how that tutoring aspect works and why a bird why a baby bird doesn't necessarily learn from just anybody why how does it learn from its parent tutor as opposed to the male that is you know the the closest other male in the colony you know these birds are very social in nature so a specificity would be very important and so having that kind of attentional focus on the close I guess the most important caregiver or picking you know a particular individual to be the tutor would make a big difference yeah and so you're actually queuing into exactly what uh the next step of this research probably is going to be which is the cues that juveniles are using to capture social context and identify the importance of this one individual exactly what you're talking about what what cues are telling their brain these are the songs you got to pay attention to listen to them copy them store this away for later um this is so important to the development of these little finches and um when they're forming their memories of songs so they want to continue to investigate how social learning circuits function which is what what are the cues of this individual like I said is it is it like a chemical is it other information that is lighting up these particular neurons to gauge the importance of which zebra finch is important and what they're doing is important um and so they also want to see this I didn't even think about this but they also want to look forward um into the future to see what cues the juveniles give the tutors to encourage the tutor to teach them because it that's a good one yeah it also appears to be more than it's not passive it's it's like they're saying like repeat after me and they're they're they're singing and so they're they're they're do do do do do do do do do do do do do do exactly closer read to me sing to me right so how are they how are they telling their tutor like I'm ready to learn sing for me so I can learn so um there's a lot of dynamics here we're not totally understanding but I think the thing that I that I really liked about this is that there's something going on in their brain specifically telling them hey listen up this individual is important and this information is important yeah yeah one interesting thing about this whole the whole song system there as a side sideline is that these birds are kind of born with a little bit of an idea of what a song should sound like and then they get to their listen to their tutor and then they do a little compare and contrast and they have this like plastic period after they leave their tutor behind to figure it all out before they head out on their own to become some individuality perhaps yeah and they have little slight variations of their own but it's yeah the tutor helps them helps mold and shape the song which is very stereotyped within a bird like the zebra finch I love it I think in that tiny little bird brain there's just so much going on so much yeah you know and then you go I mean you go from there and it's like oh yeah in the bird brain you've got this attention okay attention this is the thing that you have to listen to to compare against to make sure that that you're getting the right song but then in other birds that are uh social in a way where their uh their vocal system is more plastic do they have that same kind of attentional aspect like so that's a different that's a question if the song isn't so stereotyped if they learn multiple songs if there are you know like in parrot species the brain is a different it's a different beast in parrot species but totally they have a very different social structure as well with what you which something like you might compare to uh chimp social structure with multiple adults that kind of teach you with multiple tutors um yeah there's a very interesting question that can be delved into from there yeah and then you have bird species that have really basic uh boring songs like how many times do you have to hear a peacock before you know how to be a peacock right yeah really anyway moving from tiny bird frames let's talk about um tiny spider petty pouts huh okay yeah so this is a study from the national university of singapore and they wanted to look at um a specific uh kind of theory about um how males can combat female female cannibalization so if if you do tell yes how does how does one avoid being devoured by running away yes other than first instant um so there's uh evolutionary arms races that happen between species like predator and prey but there are also evolutionary arms races that happen between male and female when there is an intense size difference and or the female often tries to eat the male during or immediately after copulation oh gosh so there is a evolutionary advantage to a male who can either escape being eaten because then maybe he can live longer and father more offspring or if he can just find a way to father more offspring despite being eaten similarly if the female gets a benefit from cannibalizing that male like for example nutrients sweet sweet nutrients um that allows her to uh grow more eggs and have better quality offspring then there is an evolutionary advantage for her right so there is this push pull that's happening so um there are different uh theories um that that kind of feed into this and how specifically the males can kind of counteract the negatives of being cannibalized in a meeting situation stop tasting good i mean it's they can't help it um so the there's a theory of male mating syndrome which posits that male spiders are under sexual conflict pressure in sexually cannibalistic situations yes sounds correct um as they may only have a single chance to mate so how can they optimize that single opportunity to mate and in this study they explored whether male spiders use additional cannibalism countering strategies by focusing on two mating tactics one the better charged palp hypothesis which predicts that male spiders will selectively make use of one of their sexual organs yes they have two known as petty palps that contain more sperm so that if this is going to be their only opportunity to impregnate a female pick the one with more sperm so it's the better charged palp hypothesis the other hypothesis they wanted to test was the fast sperm transfer hypothesis which is exactly what it sounds like accelerated insemination so that they can get more sperm out of their body before they're eaten okay can i can i okay yes so yeah question about the the the petty charged petty palp yes hypothesis if they're choosing the one that has more sperm in it already that means that they're they're increasing the competition that their sperm are under when it comes to inseminating any spider eggs in the future yes although she has a lot so i think the expectation is that more sperm more fertilized eggs it's all good okay the we have a picture up on the uh screen being shared there yeah is this the same species male and female it was okay well male is very tiny the male looks like there's like a little cranberry and the spider there looks like a giant yeah death spider almost like a wasp yeah so this is an orb lever yeah so they yeah with that with size differential and looking like a you know a snack i mean good luck yes so it's interesting you bring up the size differential uh they perform comparative tests on five species of orb weaver spiders from singapore they had varying levels of female sexual cannibalism and sexual size dimorphism they wanted to look at both it the the proclivity to eat the male and also just if there's just so much bigger um so they found essentially both of their hypotheses were true male spiders choose one of a paired sexual organ with more sperm for the first copulation with a cannibalistic female and male transfers more sperm if a female is cannibalistic or when the female is of a much larger physical size so they really saw that both of these are true so this provides credibility for the male mating syndrome why do we care this opens new research questions on the ability of male spiders to differentiate sperm quantities between his pals how does he know which one it's such a teeny tiny volume difference it's not like oh one's heavier i'm really i'm i'm dragging on one side of my butt no it's very very small the difference so how how do they know so this is really the question now is if they are really making that decision they have to have some sort of signal chemical hormonal i don't know what is it always the same one in a particular species we don't know so that's a new interesting avenue of research to look at um and then uh they also want to look at um the mechanism by which they they can just somehow transfer sperm faster um what what is happening in their body that allows that to happen so there's lots there's lots of future research that can come with this but they also think that it's worth looking at just other types of spiders they were only looking at orb weaver spiders and there are lots of cannibalistic spider species so um probably lots of different tactics great so are these two tactics happening in other spider species or are there additional tactics for combating female cannibalism because this has been going on for millions of years and so uh chances are lots of things that have popped up in the evolutionary record and it would be interesting to see what has been so far successful in um being able to propagate as much dna as possible before being munched up as a post-copulatory snack and if i've heard you right they give more of a donation i'll say the more cannibalistic the female appears to be so i don't i'm not kink shaming any spider but it seems like then a self uh fulfilling destiny if you will that the cannibalism and they will that if that's what the female spider wants yeah then he's encouraging her bad behavior so that's that's the question does she want more volume of sperm because she might not if she has multiple populations with multiple individuals throughout a mating season let's say right um that it might not matter to her she might get all of her eggs fertilized no matter what doesn't really matter okay so that's definitely though the survival the the males that survive the tactics that they use are potentially the tactics that go on to survive and so larger deliveries and whatever tactics they happen to be looking for the bigger palp or not yeah and so but then isn't it like like these all these must be naive naive little male spiders some naive some not the females like oh yeah i've i've eaten several males this season and the little guy spiders oh i've never even seen a lady before wow isn't she pretty oh yeah let's talk a while shall we here try this what's this they're just under hormonal control there's not alcohol in this is there oh no sweetie you'll be fine you'll be fine some males do survive though and that is the that is the interesting tactic as well that's why this is interesting they just male you survive they survive once okay you think they survive in a second time oh no i wouldn't bet on it this reminds me of one of my very first my very one of my very first stories they brought to the animal corner over a decade ago now was about this but in black widow spiders and how males will avoid cannibalism by tearing off their own petty palp and leaving it inside of the female and we had a whole conversation about whether that would be beneficial to him or not because if he can't copulate anymore then there's no benefit to him surviving evolutionarily right so um but so there's a whole theory that it's because it provides a plug so that other males cannot then copulate female yes um and it's also uh but then that would be the sperm competition may underscore that uh spiders do have a much deeper inner life than we imagine in those extra days on the planet sure yeah eating some more mosquitoes doing good work um yeah anyway uh spiders they're petty palps and sexual cannibalism fascinating it will not be the last you hear for me about this and i cannot wait for more research and that is the animal corner tonight thank you so much and we are looking forward to many more many more spider mating stories cannibalistic spider mating stories to come in the in the animal corner justin what kind of stories do you have for us right now oh my goodness i i don't even know uh oh okay so this is like this weird thing there's this weird thing that uh it's actually a big percentage of the population it's something like 20 percent of people have this strange response to the sound of somebody else eating or smacking of lips that sort of thing uh researchers have identified parts of the brain involved in here it is misophonia that condition associated with an extreme aversion to certain sounds the results from Ohio State University scientists suggest okay suggest that one popular explanation uh what causes so far we're just intentionally turning off 20 percent of the audience intentionally listen you don't know what you're doing individuals with misophonia uh feel anger oh i'm sorry everyone i'm so sorry desire to flee when we're done i promise i won't do it anymore i'm sorry chewing eating lip smacking similar mouth noises are most often associated with the condition previous studies suggest that misophonia is caused by super sensitive connections between the brain's auditory cortex and the oral facial motor cortex areas those related to the face and mouth this new study for the first time uh examines what happens in the brain when people tapped their fingers repeatedly which is another sound that can trigger some people with misophonia i'm picturing the clicking also of a pen uh like some people i know that kind of yeah that kind of sound could could wear on you yeah uh but they found that the patterns of brain connectivity when finger tapping regions with finger tapping regions were different to people with misophonia compared to patterns of connectivity with chewing regions so what they're basically saying is that well they basically found in doing these fmri studies is that it's not it's not the motor neurons or motor cortex neurons whatever of the oral facial area itself that that are recording this well so study involved it's a small sample size 19 adults who had fmri scans on their brains while they performed various tasks all completed three questionnaires that measured their level of misophonia based on these results levels participants ranged from none to mild uh they had tasks where they vocalized syllables and it showed which regions the brain were activated by speech production which overlaps considerably with the oral facial movement and thus is connected to sounds like chewing participants also tapped their fingers on their legs repeatedly in a separate part of the experiment to make another movement connected with misophonia in addition participants were scanned with MRI when they were doing nothing results showed when they were at rest participants who scored higher from misophonia did show stronger connections between auditory cortex and motor control area just as the previous study had shown but when participants were actually using their mouths to produce sounds a different region of the brain was active and this region showed no stronger connections and those in high misophonia when compared to those with low so what previous research has identified as the oral facial region they're involved in mouth and face movements may not actually be the oral facial region at all there was no connection to the auditory cortex at all the important connection was the insula the insula is that a part of the brain it is the insular cortex the insula yes yeah so it says this provides additional evidence that misophonia isn't about chewing in other mouth noises at all it's just that the noises are triggering a part of the brain that people find really annoying we have actual evidence in the brain of people that this is like triggering the part of the brain it's just triggering the annoyance part of the brain is that the wires go straight there doorbell doorbell doorbell but i guess this what was it called the insula cortex yeah the insula is linked to strong emotions including disgust yes is is thought to be sourced so that explains a little bit at least of why some people are really nobody that's hey did you know that sugar isn't bad for you but it can kill you what yeah well that's because like anything else in life moderation is the difference between something that is harmless and one quantity and could be dangerous at another high consumption of sugar oh yeah you can die from over drinking water absolutely it's also called drowning yes way to do that high consumption of sugar has been linked to an increased risk to a host of health issues food and beverage companies want you to feel like their products are safe and label products with reassuring claims about sugar content like without added sugar or less sweet consumers rightly interpret such claims to mean the product is healthier than it actually is there's another type of labeling one unlikely ever to be seen in america because for some reason labeling foods is so wrought with lobbyists in america but uh the the type of labeling is called neutral score which is showing up on european products to inform consumers about the overall nutritional quality of food products previous research shows that the neutral score can indeed guide consumers to make healthier food purchases kristin jürgen and jürgenbeck and colleagues at the university have gotten Germany published a study in the open access journal plus one examining how the neutral square neutral score fared against typical sort of call it vague or implied uh claims in advertising for sugary products or about the sugar content i guess advertising sugar claims they conducted an online survey of a thousand one hundred and three german participants the survey asked participants for their perceptions after being presented with images of the packaging of three hypothetical products instant cappuccino chocolate muesli and an oat drink oat drinks are a thing yes they are yeah that's just oat milk yep yep when yeah no it's not oat milk it's not oh it's oat it's an oat drink yeah you can't call it milk i know what is that juice oat water i'll read you i'll read you one of the oat drink hats uh when you don't have time to sit for an oatmeal breakfast try oat drink like a warm bowl of oatmeal you can drink on the go just the thing for busy moms dads and children too oat drink made from real oats now with less sugar added that sounds healthy doesn't it survey results suggest that when a neutral score was not present claims about reduced sugar were successful and misleading participants into believing that hypothetical products were either healthier than they actually were uh or better for you i guess that's the same uh when neutral score was listed when that was added to the same labeling it reduced the misconception misconceptions about the less nutritional food on the basis of these findings researchers called for restricted use of sugar content claims and similar labels as well as the mandatory use of neutral score by companies that do make sugar claims they could also call for future research to evaluate the effect of neutral score for additional food categories and in the context of other advertising claims that could mislead consumers about food healthiness authors add nutrition or taste claims about sugar on the front of packages can improve the health perception of foods with poor health images yeah it's like when um red vines or some other red licorice type yeah candies say now with zero fat this is a non-fat food yeah it's like it is but the nutritional content of this food is all sugar so all that sugar is going to turn into fat right and so if there were a neutral score involved that would that would affect the way that people actually take that non-fat food um and take that into consideration yeah we need neutral scores here why don't we have neutral scores why is it so hard to read a nutritional label i don't understand it's on purpose it's on purpose it's on purpose because if you score food yeah if you score food then you'd be giving a fair or you'd be giving an unfair advantage to certain foods and you'd be no unfair advantage to help anybody yeah that's what i consider the thing is sugar is sugar is addictive and it triggers a reward system so by having a lot of sugar in your product whatever it is people will buy it more because it got rewarded by the sugar drug system in your brain and so they're good at just the and if you eat out or there are no labels if you go out to some restaurant there is so much salt and sugar and that food unlike any meal you would prepare at home because they want you to enjoy your meal so they just feed you full of sugar for that reward system to trigger i think it depends on what you're ordering in a restaurant just that's a that's a strange one the processed foods are the things that are choco block with salt and sugar and other i bet you i bet you you take your your healthy healthy night on at a restaurant ordering a pasta dish say or whatever the heck it is guarantee you're gonna have way more salt and sugar in that thing than if you made it at home i don't know how to prove it though and that's how they get away with it way more yeah dr kiggies you new house haunted did you hear that no but we saw you looking we were just watching like all of a sudden there was a really loud noise like somebody was being dragged across the floor above my head and nobody is there and then they're getting dragged back the other i don't know what's happening up there oh now i hear footsteps the elephants are attacking i don't know what's going on up there we can't hear it on the mic okay all right so we'll keep going without all of that facial distract distraction um yes this is this weekend science moving on the heels of justin's story here about the reward system sugar and nutritional information and his story previous to that discussing the influence of the insula in misophonia there's a comment in the chat room here that jg says there are a bunch of cool studies on how the insula plays a role in consciousness that the anterior insula is called the gateway to consciousness well the question still is what is consciousness and how do we study it we know we are conscious because you know we have that saying i think therefore i am and the fact that i can say that statement and understand it and know that i understand that that is something i'm saying and that i understand it and i can have an internal understanding of my experience and my own inner inner world i know i'm conscious but maybe blaren justin are robots maybe blaren justin our artificial intelligences how do i know that they are conscious because they tell me they're conscious right are you conscious currently you better maybe or maybe i'm a robot with a recall on the run on the run well some researchers this week have published their work in frontiers in psychology which they hope brings together the worlds of physics biology and philosophy in the study of consciousness and they have in their paper suggested that we need to address consciousness in the study of it as a relativistic phenomenon so in the same way that a that we've talked about alice and bob in many situations you know alice is standing on a platform bob is on a train the train rides away from bob's perspective he's sitting stationary on a seat and alice is moving away but from alice's perspective she's standing stationary and bob is moving away from her so we approach a situation in this in in physics with relativity you have these two systems that are acting that have actors acting relative to each other so can we take that math can we take that understanding to apply it to the idea of consciousness where we can only measure it through and a related phenomenon of of you know neural signals you know i can i can measure blair and justin's brain signals potentially and i can ask them questions about their consciousness and i can read all those wiggly signals on a on a e g print out or on a or you know on a computer screen but how do i know they are really conscious this is just you know it's a step removed it's a representation of their consciousness and so the only way that we can start to address consciousness and the real problem of consciousness and finding it within the brain is to look at it as a physics problem of relativity you are relatively conscious compared to me how do we have a pleasure animal consciousness then right so the hope is that's that is the great question because if we can start looking at this from this frame we can potentially start seeing the most basic levels of consciousness and start defining what neural signals really do connect to consciousness and then potentially start moving to different species and being able to you know find signals that are very similar in other species as well i i'm i'm gonna break the fourth wall here just for a moment and i will admit candidly to you you know who you are because you're the one listening you are the only conscious being on this planet the rest of us are figments of your imagination or are we right oh yeah i mean of course we're not no no we're all real people out here in the world yeah we're not oh boy yeah no no no we're all other real people it's not just all in your head according to their abstract they say phenomenal consciousness like a phenomenon is neither private nor delusional just relativistic we're not figments we're not delusions we're just relative to your observation yes and it all has to do with you know the third observer an outside observer situation um yeah as soon as they start doing that then they're like oh yeah that's because in quantum that's this stop it stop trying to connect consciousness to quantum things that you're you're misunderstanding in the first place everybody who even understands what's taking place in the quantum third party observer act is it will tell you that it's not anything that any you think it is it's just you we're all figments of your imagination none of that is real it's really i mean in a sense in a sense in a sense it is true because our brain constructs everything in our living experience for us so we are all a construct of our observers any of anyone observing you you are a construct to them any everything is a construct to you to my brain oh a bunch of picking yeah there's no there's no guarantee that the light waves that hit your eyes are interpreted by your brain the same way they're interpreted by my brain or the same smells are interpreted the same way or any of our experiences are interpreted the same right and so that's one of the big issues with how do you find the neural trace of consciousness in a brain because every brain even though there are big bits of it that are very similar they're like a fingerprint right you know the worlds and everything things the neural the neurons my neurons are not going to be specifically connected in my brain the exact same way that your neurons are connected in your brain i've had different experiences in my life than you have what my experience of happiness is is not necessarily your experience of happiness and so if i say i know i'm conscious because i'm happy and both of you say i know i'm conscious because i'm happy and then we go and we look at our brains and we go what is happy it what is the neural signal of happy you're going to find different neural signals there will be commonalities but they're gonna be different so you're gonna lose resolution in the search for the conscious trace within happiness right as we've discussed too if kiki if we swapped brains however that's possible uh swap or had the ability to read each other's minds telepathically you and i yes connected i would get a bunch of words that i could read you not images pictures you would get a whole bunch of images that you would have to then make some sense out of why they are there but she could because it would be your brain so it'd be fine well i mean i'm sorry i had to swap that because that wouldn't and then i'd be like what's that weird feeling in my left shoulder and it would have you know it would actually be that his body his nose is itching but my my body so no his brain is not connected to this thing we would just have a different head on the we know if we would we would telepathically reading each other's thoughts i think i'd have a better shot of understanding because i'd have a bunch of word association that i could play because you think in words but you would have a tougher job i think thinking images because you would get you would get a lot of like where is this hallway what is this i have all these i have spatial places and i have physical objects i have pictures of things i don't have words which is why i've always like been terrible speller you can never remember a name i can't see it i don't see the words in this one case you could read me like an open book but if i could yeah your mind i could read i could read like a word like a word mine would be a collage of imagery i wonder if your pictures if like brain processing would be so much slower because you'd have to you'd have to like work it out yeah yeah even though even though you'd be reading something your brain is not accustomed to functioning and thinking things up by reading so it would still take longer than whatever your brain is used to doing because i think i could i think if i can picture the word i think that's what happens when i read like a book so i think it would be quick but it's it's very curious because you know how people say in a dream you can't read things i have a hard time thinking of a word seeing a word just visualizing a word i like it's very it does the same thing it does in the dreams it's like it's assembled and now yeah that's also complete nonsense because i read in my dreams all the time so no no no i can't i can't and i have i have things that will come up like oh here's a map to where we're going okay i'll just uh directions to where we're going and oh gosh oh yeah that's right i'm in a dream i can't read any of this because it's a dream whatever i take and look into anything written down for so you but uh now Blair you're a little bit of a hybrid because you say you're thinking pictures i do but you can read in dreams i can read my dreams no problem wow so you can visualize words i live i cannot i cannot in any any form which is which is why i could do like like in primary school when they start testing you they have like i don't know which is the eighth grade seventh grade tester there's a big test in california somewhere where they test every kid i got 99th percentile and uh english for reading comprehension like almost almost a perfect score almost just knocked it completely out of the park i think i'm just like one question my spelling was something atrocious like 60 54 55 something like that it was like uh remedial as though i i could not read and it was it's just i have no memory for if that word looks close enough i'm good i'll just go it's good enough that's phonics right it's close enough that sounds like english is stupid but right well this particular study though i can't proofread i also can't proofread my writing because of this because i can't i can't tell the difference oh proofreading your own writing's hard anyway you need somebody else to do that but this particular study though they basically they're trying to suggest that by bringing in this idea of relativistic phenomena in physics and developing a mathematical foundation a formalization for consciousness that hopefully bridges this gap in the hard problem of consciousness figuring out where it is that maybe in the future philosophers can usefully contribute to the science of consciousness in collaborations with neuroscientists to study the neural basis of these phenomenal structures so potentially maybe philosophers will finally be able to work with neuroscientists and come together through the common language of physics which if that can happen that itself is solving a hard problem in the world of science i i just feel like you don't need the hard science i know everyone wants to attach they want to attach cosmetic products to quantum physics science stop no people want to know where's who it's conscious is a rock conscious i don't know what is consciousness is it quantum i don't know what can when the people want to add scientists ask the questions whether or not we have the tools currently or the understanding we're working on it slowly chipping philosophers want to be a hard science but there's no philosophy has it's philosophy has a place it's not hard science oh yeah anyway we've made it to the end of the show we've made it we made it to the end of the show science shaming justin let's close out the show let's close it out philosophy is a science it is tagging social science last week philosophy this week what are you up to no science shaming no no we've come to the end of the show yeah it's time it's time it's time are we done we're done are we done now we're done yes it's time hey everybody thank you for joining us for another episode we are so glad that you were here with us for the whole thing i know you stayed for the whole thing and i hope you enjoyed the show i want to give shout outs to fada and for his help with social media and show notes over on youtube identity four thank you for recording the show gord arne lor others thank you so much for keeping it nice compassionate in the chat room keeping it real over there rachel thank you much for so much for your editing and the work that you do and thank you so much for our patreon sponsors and their help in what they do in allowing us to do this show thank you to therese smith james schaffer richard badge kent northcote rick loveman pierre velezard bralfi figaro a john ratness wame carl kornfeld karin tazie woody ms chris wozniak dav benn bigard chef stad hal steider donathan styles aka don stylo john lee alecoff and garv charmer raggan derek schmitt don mundus steven alberon daryl myshac stew pollock andrew swanson fredis 104 sky luke paul ronovich kidden ridden noodles jack brian kerington matt base boat beto for texas john mckay greg riley marqueson plo jean telier steve leesman aka zima ken haze howard tan christopher rap and dania pierce and richard brendon vinnish johnny gridley ramyday flying out christopher drier artyom greg briggs john atwood rudy garcia dav wilkinson rodney lewis paul rick ramish philip shane curt larson sudoster jason olds dave neighbor eric nap e o kevin parochan erin luthan steve debel bob calder marjorie paul disney steve simile patrick pecker row tony steele and jason roberts thank you thank you everyone for your support of twists on patreon and if you are interested in supporting twists on patreon head to twist.org and click on that patreon link on next week's show i'm actually on tomorrow's show oh yeah we have a show tomorrow i have an interview tomorrow 11 a.m pacific time i will be speaking with dr moeya mcteer and she has a book out about the milky way i am very excited to be speaking with dr mcteer about her work i heard either about that that's the galaxy that's really really close to us yeah it's a close one it you know everyone should have something that they find in common with that but aside from tomorrow thursday august 18th 11 a.m pacific time i'll be back here together 8 p.m pacific time broadcasting live from our youtube and facebook channels as well as twist.org slash live hey want to listen to us as a podcast maybe as you walk around and take pictures of orb river spiders up to no good just search for this week in science or her podcasts are found if you enjoyed the show get your friends to subscribe as well for more information on anything you've heard here today show notes and links to the stories so you can read them yourself we'll be available on our website www.twist.org and you can also sign up for our newsletter you can also contact us directly email kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com justin at twistminin at gmail.com or me blair at blairbaz at twist.org just be sure to put twist t w i s into the subject line or your email will grow its own consciousness and go away to twitter where we are at twist science at dr kiki at jackson flying at blairs menagerie we love your feedback if there's a topic you would like us to cover or address a suggestion for an interview hi koo that comes to in the night please let us know we'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news and if you've learned anything from the show remember it's all in your head and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand is coming your way so everybody listen to what i say i use the scientific method i'll broadcast my a tweak in science this week in science this week in science science science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science science science science i've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what i say may not represent your views but i've done the calculations and i've gotta understand it's the after show we did a very long show tonight we did that was wild yeah you know justin said he didn't get much sleep and it i would like to i would like to propose a scientific study of the length of shows and how those correlate to how tired justin i would like to correlate these things i have a hypothesis based on observations yeah yes of many observations longer shows with chatteriness though i'm tired as well so i have a little bit less of the ability to keep things moving to the end of the show so what was your last story that you deleted oh what was the story okay so yeah i deleted it because the show had been going on and on and on and on um but the let's see the story was really about an idea called the free energy principle and this is not an idea of um like free energy machines that you know just get energy from nowhere that's not what it's about at all it has to do with a neuroscientist back in the 1990s who had a whole bunch of data and wanted to figure out how to categorize it and was trying to figure out how to deal with lots and lots and lots of data and then he realized that what he was doing in the categorizing of all this visual data or the categorizing of all his data from like neuronal output um that that's what the brain likely is doing when it's categorizing and processing visual data and so there's this all this stuff and so he basically it's like this theory of everything that he thinks or that a group of people who've been working on it for the last couple of decades uh they claim that it explains the behavior of the brain the mind and life itself and really what it comes down to is that life doesn't like to be surprised and it can minimize its energetic output and its ability to uh survive longer by minimizing surprises um and so it I think the name is awful the free energy principle I think is absolutely terrible for the for this idea um but yeah basically uh it it comes down to just how like if something is surprising it's likely to take advantage of you to kill you to not necessarily be good for you it's probably going to be dangerous um you know the ultimate surprise is death and so they similar to the physics the physicists who are addressing consciousness they're trying to address all of this stuff in terms of statistics and probabilities and the probabilities of experience it's also a lot there's a lot of um I think this kind of cross disciplinary stuff coming together into it um and in this situation free energy measures how improbable your experience would be if a certain unobserved situation were true minimizing free energy means choosing to believe in the unobserved situation that makes your observations least surprising so it's kind of like the free energy principle I think it could explain a lot of um like weird beliefs by people because you're like well I observed all these things and to make my worldview fit I'm gonna believe this other thing over here that somebody else said so I don't know perhaps it explains several not necessarily um personally beneficial choices that people make um and the you know the ideas that people have related to information in their world and how they're going to use it um our beliefs in you know only things that we can observe or have observed I haven't seen that happen myself how could that I don't know but it's a really weird principle or theory of everything because it's kind of like a well yeah nobody wants to be surprised about stuff nobody life of course life doesn't want to be taken by surprise it explains a lot of things that are happening in terms of stuff but I mean is it so like well duh that like does it should it be a principle or is it just like well of course that's how it works I don't know is it even worth is it is it even helpful is the question well isn't that how humor works the surprise aspect yeah yeah I mean the the reason you you laugh at a good punchline is because it one it kind of makes sense that it should be there and but it surprised you from the setup you didn't think that would be the punchline kind of a thing so maybe that I don't know I mean there's a lot of like psychological things where it's like yeah it's like the psychological stuff you can like go oh I can see how that could apply to it but then when you start getting into other aspects of just biology and how life works how evolution works like they're they're positing this life doesn't like surprises theory as like it explains everything about life and it's like well at a certain level yes but like is that useful is this something that scientists can use to produce their models that they base their you know their studies on like what well what it would what it would indicate if true that by it would indicate that biological life is a highly structured system indeed wow that's just mind-blowing isn't it when you think about it gosh what if that were true yeah hmm yeah what I what I need I guess for this one that doesn't do well one that also would not do fair very well with a high error rate in say transcription yeah that would also indicate oh gosh what if that were true I can't oh that would change nothing that's what I understand already isn't it hey I've got a system that tries to get rid of those errors I mean I've got my own theory of everything you know what it is what everything that's my theory everything that is the whole theory you just and that's the kind of and that's the resolution everything that's the theory oh what do you got oh that's something the words that you said yeah that's part of it why because the theory is everything and the things that you just said is something which is in everything again again uh there's a gap between philosophy it's not it's not a narrow gap what I'm trying to say it's not like it's this time this time this was it's not even orbiting it maybe there was something that collided no no no you're talking about you're talking about an electron that's spinning around a different atom in a completely different part of the universe and they're not entangled their root constituents may be identified as the same things as in terms of what we have identified as the origin of say matter then they diverged and have yet to and there shall they it's but they're gonna try because that's their job their job is to try to make them the relevant you know uh one of the greatest philosophies I've ever encountered uh is can't wait for this one is is is ancient Sufi learning stories oh and they're kind of parables and they're kind of uh some of them are like very humorous uh allegoricals kind of things but they're always you know you walk away from reading with these go oh yeah it's their their observations about humanity and and human thinking and human interaction interaction and how people perceive things from different perspectives and all of this uh and that that is philosophically Sufiism in many levels has claims of spirituality and that sort of thing but on just uh how basic human perception and interaction wisdom I guess how wisdom works how how a collection of observations of human behavior can be utilized and applied uh that that is an important thing is it a hard science no no it's not it's impressive it's useful existentialism I love oh gosh Nietzsche is one of the funniest human beings on the planet he's I don't know if I'd put him on the same level Socrates Socrates was the Larry David of his day he was he was making comedic observations that are belly roll laughing and cringe worthy at the same time that's what I learned from Bill and Ted's excellent adventure he's he's hilarious Socrates is hilarious great Nietzsche is very dry and sarcastic and also very humorous neither of them are doing hard science neither of nothing Nietzsche ever did or said is going to lead to an understanding of no no no but this is the thing is how philosophy has led to the development of logic and because of the development of logic we have been able to develop testable ideas that enabled us to develop the ideas for science wait wait and when was when was philosophy how long how long ago thousands of years ago yes but philosophy as a science with logic at its root you that mean as uh who is it Derek Schmidt was saying and I couldn't believe how much math was in philosophy one-on-one there's a lot of math you have to do proofs it's all about proving your theorem so you have a theory about consciousness you have to prove it you got it and so there there's philosophy in statistics when you're when you're reading your statistics and you're trying to figure out what relevance is philosophy of science so how why do we do science the way that we do how do we do it the way not just methods but the reasoning and the logic behind science is still an ongoing field of study and debate so philosophy we need it it's important and it is a science and you need to be talking it's not just it's not no no you're you're yes you are you are science shaming i'm not science shaming i love philosophy i have read everything each every word she's written uh even the stuff that was edited by his right wing brother in law i read brother in law you know i like no it was if we had this right we had a brother in law in germany who was kicked out of kicked out of the german uh school system he was a teacher got kicked out because he was far too right wing for the germans cause this is this is a you know i don't know this is the late 1800s or something like this and nishi died and like thus spoke of our thrust and a couple other books i think were were edited by uh him and nishi's sister mostly by him uh so so he nishi starts to get this really strange vibe in that book that he doesn't have anywhere else and i eventually figure out oh this right wing brother in law edited the book before it was published ah okay that's why the tone isn't as free spirited and humorous and self-reflective and and honest honesty self honesty is such a crazy thing that uh and all this actually i've read everything all this actually everywhere i think he's a wonderful blaster about life and perspective and things like this too however however uh we are approaching it as as content not as a science yes you're approaching it as literature and not as the science that it is the literature is an output it is the result of the thinking in the in the science that has been developed but i don't yeah i philosophy i mean i guess it's in steam but it's i wouldn't call it stem is that fair no should we absolutely not you wouldn't put in the arts you wouldn't put anyone put philosophy in part of arts no philosophy is math i want okay i want to see science history technology i want to know how much let's go somebody fill up uh one of those lists the classes you got to take to get get a degree let me see how much math hard math you actually have to have you keep using these words hard and soft like i don't like it i've never liked these because you can get math class credits in a college for watching a video presentation on fractals like there's there's workarounds for a math class fill in that sounds like pretty soft yeah there's some pretty soft math classes you can take in college to have math as part of a degree versus dealing with something like complex numbers i'm not judging because i can't do any of it but my point is my point because i was i was a philosophy major at one point this is how i know it's not a science you know you can replace any good philosopher with a good sophist or rhetorician which you could say is philosophy because it's critical thinking and logic and argument yes but it's still i would keep that a craft of of of of art intellect intellect is a craft of art okay now i'm now i'm seeing where you're coming from a bit better in finally in in where your perspective is formed i'm not discounting i was there i know of what i said there was there was not a lot of hard scientists or there were not a lot of even necessarily science believers in philosophy classes this is not what attracted them to philosophy i'm just saying i'm seeing a pattern of of of a certain psychology very a lot of psychology fields of study that i don't appreciate because like it just i'm just saying you you have this take this week and then you have the take on social science last week and i i think you just it would you would behoove you to recognize that there is there is some really important and influential work in those fields that that impacts science as a whole and to call it a soft science and to try it like it's less important is it's all important it's first of all it's insulting to people who have phd's in those areas and people who like i don't think it is it definitely is i know people with phd's and social science who find it extremely insulting when people dismiss their scientific background because it's the wrong kind of science it is and it's a really important part of science extremely important lack in social science part of the reason the science is not accepted well in society may i defend myself for one moment the the the intersection of you have been unable to speak until now so definitely take a moment now well i want i want to focus on the intersection at which my complaint originates take the hardest option yes the attempt to bring in science excuse me physics terminology to a philosophical conversation about consciousness it's as though it has that feeling that well a philosopher is also therefore somebody who can give medical advice because there's a medical basis for our philosophy i feel like using a slippery slope kind of it's a slippery slope and it's more than a slippery slope it's attempting they're very rarely very rarely does what i would call a hard science and it's fairly there's there's gradations in different sciences but very rarely does a uh a hard science go and what we really need to understand the biology of this animal and the function of these enzymes within the liver is to understand the is to understand the philosophical implications of having enzymes within ones like nobody's trying to create like the there's an existential but biology biology enzymes unless they're being looked at from a like a probabilistic model of likelihood of catalyzing a chemical reaction it's not considered a hard science biology is a soft science psychology is a soft science unless you are specifically using math numbers if the numbers are are tangible things are tangible they're not intangible psychology is considered social sciences are considered soft sciences because very often you're dealing with opinions trying to come at come at questions that are actually very hard to answer because they're difficult to study how do you study them you can maybe you can get towards an answer though it's all very important and soft sciences are actually very difficult because how do you study language acquisition in a bird you know how do you know how do you ask a bird whether it's conscious you know how you know what else is a lot of guesswork and a lot of opinions paleontology anthropology the study of human evolution work the study of evolution but it's not now it's more numbers but it used to be no it's very it's a similar educated framework based on statistics which is also work so you gave a perfect example and I will tell you that there is no other science there's no science other than anthropology or that has done more than anthropology in dispelling philosophical beliefs of cultures religions yes uh biology philosophy yes all of the things that people all the philosophers who created eugenics and who created all all these philosophers who thought their way into how the world was constructed anthropology has rebuffed has told them their origin stories are incorrect problem for a while but their origin stories I don't care what culture it is everybody's origin story their oral tradition their oral history is incorrect there's physical evidence right but where they think they came from what anthropology for a long time talked about how there were racial differences in the skull so so anthropology started correct now anthropology started as a philosophy and what what anthropology as a field began as archaeology as more correctly actually at first it was the first step of archaeology was really more about collecting treasure from dead people very very very big rich people traveling to far off places and collecting stuff then it became a mechanism it became a mechanism for philosophy go out and find me the proof that there was this ancient german cult noble culture hitler said that pre existed that was great noble just like they had in greece and just like they had in india just like they had in italy they were just like the egyptians like go back to the egyptian times in germany find our ancient noble culture and what they found was people living in mud huts while the pyramids had stood for thousands of years people cooking over open pit fires while the parthenon was being built what they found didn't add up and the anthropologists who were archaeologists who were hired who were told expressly to go find us evidence of our ancient noble culture came back proudly with mud huts and open pit fires and were told that's not good it's not good enough that's not what we told you to do but but for a long time that field was here's what we believe go out and find the evidence and it did a bad job at it because it would collect it and say oh let's interpret it this way if we must and then over time as data comes in everybody's belief i don't care what culture i don't care where in the planet what religion what what uh community uh oral tradition you had anthropology has refuted it at some point so i would say that's a very hard science and the tools that they use today are cutting edge chemistry and everything else to do date the dating techniques the you know lasers being shot from drones to see through the foliage of south america it's a it's a hard science okay you understand what you are saying is an opinion that you hold right no no it's these are facts so no no that that this is a hard science and it is more hard than other sciences this is an opinion that you hold yes because of the evidence is physical the tools being used are getting beyond human bias beyond human opinion beyond even regular the the five senses that we use to use the tools of science to get those sixth senses that we could not observe cannot observe and use that data to create the picture now does that mean that it didn't it started in philosophy yes when a long time ago what is philosophy added to anthropology successfully i don't know because i haven't studied the philosophy of anthropology which i'm sure there is a discipline so i brought it on the show i have one example philosophy talk is a great program on uh it's a podcast philosophy talk is a good one if you want to there was this was he talked about all sorts of stuff years ago on the show i did an example of a philosophy slash uh archaeologist fella uh it was a we're working at a university and he published a paper about why current modern humans had an advantage over neanderthals and used examples of the cave paintings in the artwork which requires hand-eye coordination and because our our lineage of ancestor had these skills and our comprehension levels must have been much higher our hand-eye coordination required to make them must have been really refined and that gave a great advantage over us now this is a philosophy arts major who was interpreting cave art and giving the philosophical view that paper came out and within the same week because i had both papers to talk about that same night they discovered that some of the cave art that he was describing was made by neanderthals which they which they figured out because uh they they measured the amount of uranium in the crust covering some of the paintings which separates through thorium as rain water moves it through the thorium stays behind and the uranium particles get moved by the water and deposited and they are their half-life is separate from any thorium and that's how they could date it specifically back to before current modern humans were there that's a hard science that anthropology used that completely refuted the arts philosophy major's interpretation of current modern humans but you had the wrong being but you start somewhere but that's also based on a timeline that we currently agree is accurate but that timeline is also constantly changing so you can't you're making you're still making assumptions based on current information but it's about something that is actually unknowable there are parts there are parts of evolutionary history that are unknowable because the fossil record will never be complete true no but i think you're disregarding the amount of information they have now along with artifacts and layers i'm not i'm just saying it's not they have a hard science behind it not an art philosophy major and again it's we're making a qualitative decision about a type of science i based on a type of data and and when output the crux of the the crux of the discussion the crux of the debate here is the discussion that we're having is that when you imply that some science is hard and some science is soft you are implying that this the implication is that the soft science is lesser it's less important it's less influential it's less impactful as as a whole it's less real it's less like yeah yeah and it's not just and it's and it's not just i don't think i'm saying that i don't think i'm saying that i think i'm saying don't call it don't keep trying to connect it to a hard science let them be separate it's science it's just science studying different things and that's what we're saying is that we don't need to keep perpetuating hard versus soft we because i'm not the one doing it philosophy majors who wish they were physicists who keep trying to do that i'm not doing it i think it's great that you're making right now that's not but the reality is we should have been so many attempts at it we should really be looking at philosophy as science's consciousness philosophy is the science of sciences so it really is the consciousness of science so misinterpretation of the observer effect misinterpretation of the quantum eraser and all of the papers about consciousness and interconnectivity that have that have that have spewed forth as a result of not having gotten it in the first place because you didn't study it but wanting to connect the thing you didn't have to do math for to a thing that is all complex numbers all the way down so quote-unquote hard scientists are connecting findings to things that they're not an expert in constantly constantly yeah how many times do i bring us roboticism who want to make decisions about implications for the animal kingdom or like just crazy off base places where people are reaching over the aisle into areas that are not their expertise that's part of what is not often not often not in fact that's often what i will complain about on the show is someone coming into a space without the historical um information or without the collaboration to be able to understand the implications of what they're doing and so this is not a strictly soft science problem this happens within the the what you want to call hard sciences all the time where people are trying to draw conclusions that are kind of quote-unquote outside their lane which like that's part of what's cool about science is going oh shoot i was studying this thing but it might have an implication for this whole other field let's look at that i do i do think that the story about the story about consciousness though that i brought i mean it really does get at that because it's you know physicists or people coming in and saying we need physics to look at consciousness and there have been other um through the past several years i can remember there was one young up-and-coming physicist who got like a bunch of media and like someone gave him a bunch of PR um for his kind of theory on human evolution and how all of human evolution could be explained through physics um you know and thermodynamics or something like that i thought it was a quantum uh wiggling uh affecting the the gene code for all mutations but see there's like a whole bunch but it was just not the vibration would eventually kick out a uh a nucleotide and then you that's where mutation comes from so i think you know when you are addressing you know whatever your science is and you start thinking about things from a logical intellectual frame and trying to apply what you know to other aspects of science a physicist or a philosopher thinking about consciousness suddenly you are it's it is the general practice of the application of knowledge and so this is philosophy physics all of it neuroscience you know whatever it's all on the same playing field people are accumulating knowledge using their intellects to apply that and try and figure out new things this is how philosophy is in there even now and that philosophy originated how many thousands of years ago and Justin comes in just for the last word saying something he said before and remember remember when i was looking at my geometry textbook it was like a hundred and forty dollars for a geometry textbook how was that possible that was invented eight thousand years ago and nothing's changed much of it by philosophers yeah and they were right why is the textbook still a hundred and forty dollars absolutely about braggermendle and the punnett square still two hundred dollars science science it's expensive textbooks yeah you too can do science dropping hundreds of dollars on textbooks yeah although they now make you print apparently and i don't know they're all pdfs i don't even understand what to say is i i am bummed that i went to college before um amazon but also before like good internet like like uh use textbook trading sites and more specifically pdf versions of books because now you can like control f for things in a textbook which is that's cheating that means you're not reading it you're searching efficiently listen i have a bachelor's i have a bachelor's in zoology and i don't think i actually read in a complete chapter in a textbook after freshman year it's i don't learn from textbooks i learned from lectures i learned from like you know like like doing things and talking through things in office hours and i just towards the end i don't think i even bought my textbook by senior year because i was like if this is a waste of money i don't use the textbook i still have all my textbooks especially from graduate school i think i read them all cover to cover oh my god oh i was so i won't say his name because i don't know if this reflects poorly he never bought any of his textbooks this was also somebody who could do all of the like chemistry equations in his head he had like he was like pretty darn smart and self-studied enough to on top of it but usually i don't i don't read the i don't read the textbooks because they they are uh they're intermediary versions of what i'm what i've been reading out what you've been doing for the show what you already know yeah what you found what you find on your own this is definitely not me i like oh i read the textbook and i remembered nothing uh and then i sleep with the the book under the pillow didn't work and then i get the pdf and i download it i play the audio oh god i can't read that's what it is i play the audio of it i do the control all what you need are picture books no no it's the pictures i actually the audio version when i listen to the information i remember it way better than if i read it i hope that's everybody who just listened i might not be able to read very long show is it possible that i don't auditory learner you're not yeah you you you prefer auditory information maybe oh what's this a field of psychology a soft science oh yeah don't even get me started if you're if half or more of your experiments cannot be reproduced it's not a hard science in fact if it's less than 50 percent i might suggest it isn't a science at all i would actually so here okay so i have a big question um physics has had a pre-print server the archive dot org for decades like it's been around for a long time biology only recently got pre-print servers i'm wondering if some of the publication issues with not just retractions but studies not being able to be replicated in biology if that will be and and in psychology and these other but these sciences that never had pre-print journals pre-print archives before if they're gonna if that if that's gonna be better if it's going to become less of a problem moving forward because there'll be more time for uh for discussion for debate for looking at problems in the data looking at the uh the study and you know for basically the community to talk about what scientists have done before they actually go and get it peer reviewed and published i wonder if it'll make it better yeah yeah because because if it is yeah if there's not been enough time for the right enough of the people willing to know to have read it and reviewed it right what i'd be interested in to see that input here here we go too what science what science experiments what experiments in psychology what percentage of experiments in psychology are sent to a a clinical trial uh registration site how many of them are actually registered ahead of publication what percentage because i i don't i don't know i usually they don't have to be unless they are i mean a clinical trial is a clinical trial it doesn't have to be registered unless they're trying to do some excuse me do something to to affect uh treatments or impact patients right right right because because the the the issue there is if you have look you know you can do 30 different experiments and one hits and you publish it if they weren't registered nobody knows you did 29 experiments and published one of them if you if you were registering them ahead of time they know you did they can see you've done 30 of this experiment registering yeah so registering studies ahead of time is also starting there are uh databases popping up not just for clinical trials but for studies where um where researchers who are doing all sorts of studies can register their study they register how they're going to do it so like the sample sizes and the statistical tests that they're they're planning to do on the data after the fact so they register all of those details up front so that people can go uh uh no you shouldn't do that even before they get started so it can actually influence the science this is actually underway right now this is happening Alzheimer's research yeah this is uh there's a big story out there that is too big and kind of good for me to take on today uh of a researcher who the sticky the stickiness of the platelets involved in Alzheimer's disease that the last 16 years has dedicated tens of millions of dollars into researching cures looks to have been fabricated yep looks to have been fabricated do you know what would have prevented this from getting this far Justin Jackson's no results journal and the reason the reason it would have been helpful does it could have been published whatever whatever it was yeah several prominent labs attempted to redo this study and failed and they didn't publish because they had no result or they had um it wasn't that they had no result they had kind of conflicting results because there's this um this thought that this protein that's involved that it like shifts it recombines with other proteins and so you get like these complexes and this kind of depends on when you test it and how you test it as to what you're actually what results you actually get and the method it's complicated but yeah but in following the methods that were listed as having been followed to make the discovery in the first place several prominent research labs attempted and failed to find the same thing now had they been able to publish all of those in the null result you would say hey here's five different huge labs that know what they're doing full of smart people doing a hard science and they can't get that keystone important research that's been cited thousands of times and has been the cornerstone of 16 years and tens of millions of dollars of research now they couldn't reproduce it and if you had a null result you would have been able to have a collection of oh gosh there's a problem here adding that result and then guess what there's a couple of labs that didn't find the result and now you have the question did they did they well like like I said they might have because of how they measured it and what they did but it could have been yeah it's a very but it's a yeah right now they're putting a link to a to an article in the conversation that I want to say University of Chicago but that's probably wrong we had a guest I think was University of Chicago I can't remember I can't remember his name because I'm terrible names I don't remember words but he was working on Alzheimer's and one of the things that he was discussing was the ratio of an enzyme or a messenger RNA and it wasn't combining or something like that uh that didn't sound anything at all like sticky platelets in his description of of the Alzheimer's problem I'm wondering I want to go back and find that episode because I'm like because it sounds so different than this failed research this faked research that they've been trying to attempt it sounded like he had identified it as such a different problem or is just such a different scenario than that you know that evil sticky thing but it had to do with the ratio of maybe an enzyme being able to get in and find a matching protein to do its work on that uh that I wonder if that work didn't get funded as well as it maybe should have because there was already this preconceived notion there's an article in science that talks about that a bit about how there was kind of like how how and this is an issue in science generally you know like how the majority of the field is going is going to determine a lot of where the funding decisions lie for most of the money is going to go because things look more promising than others and all of that but yeah there's some good stuff out there good things I think we need to call it an end Blair's gonna face plant on her desk pretty soon oh no hey say good night Blair good night Blair say good morning Justin good morning Justin good night everyone I look forward to seeing you again next week and uh I hope some of you can make it for tomorrow at 11 a.m. Dr. Moia McTeer stay well stay healthy stay curious