 I need to shake my soul. I hit the live button. Oh, we're live? OK, she's stopping for that. I did. I hit the live button. We're live. Stop inspecting your nose, hair, and the camera. That's no longer the time. No bears in the cave? Time to go. This is the live broadcast of the This Week in Science podcast. And we are recording right now to do this podcast thing that we do every week. Some of it will probably end up in the podcast. Some of it. It may not. But we are all here regardless. And we hope that you are ready to enjoy the show because are you ready to go team? Oh, I'm as ready as I'll ever be. Ready as I'll ever be. This is the best answer that we can have, right? Sometimes. Be sometimes. Someway, somehow. Starting in a three, two. This is Twist. This Week in Science episode number 818, recorded on Wednesday, March 31, 2021. What to do about the beasts? What should we do? I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight on the show, we will fill your head with synthetics, rabbits, and a conservative interview, but first. Disclamer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The whole here-to-day, gone-tomorrow outlook on life can make us seize the day with the gusto of a first-year declared poetry major evoking ancient themes of love and loss, action, and change as if all of our moments were monumental. Born of some epic story never to be forgotten, meaningful, intentional, and beautiful to behold. Or we can go the other out, which is the terrible waiting between the poetic beats as we endure simply to survive. It can make us fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way, the apathy of impermanence, the fleeting worry, the fleeting joys, the fleeting terror of fleeting moments. But these aspects of life that make us aware of our brevity ignore the larger story for pages that mention us by name. This idle, skimming, disjointed reading ignores the long shadows a life can cast. We are all part of a much greater story, one that has evolved over billions of years, one that was once independent, that is now dependent on our monumental choices, a modern-day world of love and loss, action, and change. It is a story that can be meaningful, intentional, and beautiful to behold if only you take the time to read it. Whatever you want to do, the moment in which you can do it is always now, and we're better to be now than here with us on This Week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn every reason happened every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I'm Blair. And the good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again, dancing our little science booties off to the scientific beat. What a wonderful intro tonight. That disclaimer was pretty special there, Justin. Nice to see you, Dad. Wait, you made it. The other ones then that I've been doing weren't good enough for you? Gah, I finally got one that you were like, oh, that one was good. That one was good. The other ones, the other ones, you might hit the mark, but that one was good. Thank you, Kiki. You're welcome. Congratulations, you hit my bar. Thanks for joining us tonight, everyone. On the show, I have stories about some synthetic life making great divides, some very good stuff. And I'm theming up my stories in a conservation biodiversity bent for in honor of our interview tonight, we'll be speaking with Michelle Nyhouse, who has written a book that we're gonna be talking about in just a bit. But Justin, what did you bring? Oh, that's a good question. Okay, always a question. I have Jalis Fish, stuff that we can learn from Jalis Fish. I have a South American mystery, a socially distanced mice and hitting anti-matter with lasers. That sounds like fun. Pew, pew, pew! Because that's what sounds lasers make. We all know that. Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, I have some theming today too that I didn't even realize. It's all kind of about evolution. So I have the origin of hopping, the origin of dreams, and the origin of venom. I like it. It's all origin stories. It's like science superhero hour. Maybe we should change the name of your section. Or an ASOP of sorts. ASOP of sorts, there we go. Yes. All right, everyone. Before we dive into all of the science stories, I do want to remind you that if you have not yet subscribed to This Week in Science, you can find us on YouTube, on Facebook, we are on Twitch as at Twist Science. And if you go to podcast directories, we are a podcast and you can subscribe to us on just about every podcast directory that's out there. Just look for This Week in Science. Our website is twist.org. If you want to check out show notes and other details about the show. Let's dive into this science. First story of the night, I want to chat a little bit about synthetic biology. We've heard a lot for years. Craig Venter years back was like, I'm going to make synthetic life. You know, he didn't say it exactly like that, but he started a huge push to start creating synthetic organisms. And in that process, in 2016, researchers created a synthetic organism with a very minimal set of genes. It was like 470 some odd genes, a very small number of genes. And they really just want to figure out, what is the minimal number of genes? What are the most basic genes that are needed to support cellular life? And so they started out with a regular bacterium, sucked out its DNA, put in some DNA that they had synthetically created. And there in 2016, their synthetic life, it was looking pretty good. It was doing life things. It was trying to divide. But when it tried to divide, it didn't do it very well. It created these little lopsided bits that wasn't evenly dividing the way that cells are supposed to divide. And so they're like, okay, we still need to work on this. Obviously, we don't have the replication part of biology down yet. And so they added a number of genes and now they have succeeded in creating an organism that is able to self-replicate, divide evenly into evenly sized spherical cells. And all it took were 492 genes. That's a pretty decent size. It's a pretty decent size, but that is really small when it comes down to the number of genes that most organisms have. Most biological life has many, many more genes than just 400 or so. Yeah, so we're dealing with this group. This research was led by researchers in the cellular engineering group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. And the hope is that they'll be able to one day be able to produce these synthetic cells to be biological sensors. And that by creating cells that can go about normal biological functions, metabolism, replication, just normal activity of cells, but then be given a special function through genes that have been added by researchers. Perhaps they can be used to detect environmental toxins, perhaps they can be used to monitor temperature, light emissions from different places and could really be used instead of engineered systems, it's cellular engineered systems. This organism is now called, JCVI Syn3A, it has a very fancy name, but it's able to have normal cell division, which is a huge step. And now they know. Well, this isn't Syn3A, this is what it was interesting. That number's so big. And the reason I'm saying it's so big is you have to get to a point where you need 400 genes working together in order to replicate life. So that means that before this stage, before this stage of life being able to get here, say we were just gonna call it, this is the smallest, they've got the right, now this is the smallest number of genes in order to replicate and have this thing with. Means before that, you couldn't do it with 300 genes. So how did you get to the 400? You couldn't get anywhere with 300 unless you had multiple organisms with a piece of the puzzle or I don't even know if they're organisms at that point. What do you call it? Right. Yeah, I think ultimately you could guess, kind of based on what you're saying, Justin, that you could do it with less, but we don't know what the starting point is, right? And that's what they're figuring out, engineering. So that in theory, now that we have the 492 gene version, you can kind of start to whittle it down and figure out exactly what is necessary and get it smaller. And what was necessary were seven genes to allow normal cellular division. There were seven genes involved in that out of the 492. So it's just fascinating. That's a nicer, smaller number. It's a nicer, that number, small, but it has a very discreet function. Yeah. Yeah, but all of those genes, all of those molecules, all working together in tandem to allow life. Yeah. Justin, tell me your story. What's up on your first story here? All right, so pop quiz, pop quiz. Get rid of your number two pencils, you're not gonna need them. Prepare to answer the following question in the form of an American criminal procedural comedy drama television series. Ready? What do all vertebrates have in common? Verdebrae. Verdebrae? Bones, you're supposed to answer it in the form of American criminal procedural comedy drama television type shit. Bones, yes, they all have bones, that's the thing. Okay. Yeah, all vertebrates have bones and internal skeleton. These bones that we have are made up of a very complex combination of composite minerals, proteins, living cells that are trapped inside the matrix of the bone. Those living cells are then interconnected by tiny channels so they can exchange electrochemical signals with each other and nutrition and allowing the bone to grow and regenerate. There's blood production that's taking place within the marrow. This is a very complex architectural system there. Where did this originate? Enter the museum for the Nazi Kund Berlin team headed by Dr. Florian Witzman. They have discovered a possible milestone in this development. They tried to go back as far as possible to look at fish that may not have had bones. They examined fossilized samples of bony armor from two early fish species that lived around 400 million years ago. One sample was a jealous fish that lived 423 million years ago, belongs to an extinct family. The second is much younger, about 380 million. And so they basically wanted to take a really high resolution. Look at this, quoting Witzman. It was already known that these early vertebrates had bone cells, but we knew little about how the cells were connected to each other, as well as anything about the detailed structure of the lacuna or the cavities in which the bone cells were located in the living animal. In order to be able to make more precise statements about bone metabolism, we had to have a far more detailed image to work from. Quick, to the electron microscopy laboratory. Hit it with the focused gallium ion beams. An electron beam scanner, later they had 3D images at a resolution better than any television so that your eyes can handle without melting the significant part of your occipital lobe. Even in the older sample, the jealous armored fish, the 3D images display a complex network with the cavities for the bone cells and the tiny channels through the bone injury connecting these cavities. The channels are thousands of times narrower than a human hair, so this is any fossil record that they're even finding. This is pretty amazing. And it has been almost completely preserved, they say, over the 400 million years since this thing was alive. So basically they can see that even 400 million years ago and these fish, the architecture was already there. It was already well underway. That transition from cartilage to bony structure, right? So that, yeah. Even in early bone, even early fossil bone, they could, bone cells were able to do what they do now. Dissolve themselves in places, restore bone minerals were needed. The bones themselves were acting as batteries, restoring minerals, releasing later on. Bones do this as well, that's why they're so delicious if you're a carnivore, because there's a lot of energy stored in there. A lot of phosphates, a lot of calcium. The bone battery, exactly. I wouldn't have thought of them that way, but yeah, they're a molecular storage device for sure. Yeah, that's cool. Active metabolism, 400 million year old early vertebrate. Nice. This is something that started early and thank goodness it's continued. I am glad for that. I wonder if looking at stuff, the osteocytes and trying to figure out how all of this stuff works. I just, I love trying to make connections between discoveries of ancient formation and development of traits with understanding how we can approach modern medicine and possible therapeutics. So what kind of understanding at the molecular level can we get that could help something like bone disease, right, how could we do that? Yeah, so I think one of the most powerful things that we could have would be DNA from this 400 million year old creature, which we do not, we do not. Just the bones, just the hard structure. We're not gonna get it, but looking at something like that. Yeah, yeah, but looking, but trying to find its closest equivalent in the modern day ocean. Something that has also undergone evolution, but maybe is sort of stuck in these stages where maybe there hasn't been a tremendous amount of change in these regions. You might see what's, when you look at this most simplified structure like you were talking about a minute ago, finding the most simplified structure for reproduction, replication. When you find the most simplified mechanisms and markers for bone growth and dissolving and everything else, you then, you look at where our bones are now evolved to and you can see, okay, this all has followed the same pathway. What is this that's different? Why has it changed? Is this important? Why did it change? Yeah, what forces led to that? And then it also narrows down the list that you might wanna look at for some certain bone diseases in the like, right? For sure. Okay, Blair. Speaking of origins, developments, do you have one for me? Yes, I do, and I forgot to warn you, I'm gonna need you to pull up a video from the story. Apologies to our listeners. Please go to twist.org, find the show notes from today and watch this video because I thought I knew a lot about animals, but this is something that I have no idea about. So this was trying to find the origin of hopping behavior, where that kind of lives in the genome in animals. And to do that, so researchers from University of Deporto and Uppsala University worked together to study a particular kind of rabbit. So there's a rabbit called a Sauter Del Four. And- Sounds fancy. It does not hop, instead. It lifts up its back legs and it walks on its front paws. So it walks on its hands. Yeah. It's truly wild. And I had no idea that this existed. So- And now there's a new pet that you would like. Oh, this is some sort of weird, fake, trained rabbit meme onion story. It has to be. It is not. So if you click on the link in the show notes, there's actually a video of this thing moving. So I can't see it moving, but look at those rear legs. It's got powerful front paws, which you don't see on a rabbit. Right. And it's got these tiny little hind legs, which are usually massive. Yeah. Little hind legs. So to kind of set the scene here, we know rabbits, hares, kangaroos, some rodents like kangaroo rats and kangaroo mice, they, their main form of locomotion is jumping. And so this paper in particular was trying to figure out why some animals moved by jumping, why some animals do not, where this was in the genome, because it's not just, it turns out it's not just the powerful hind legs. It's not just, do you have the muscles for it? You have to have kind of, you have to have the quintessential building blocks. It's not something you can just build up and do. We can't build up enough muscle to just hop instead of walk. So what they did is they actually bred these weird rabbits that walk on their front legs, the Sauter Delphoa rabbits. And they bred with another breed that hops normally to move around. And they compared the offspring genomes. Here we go. Here's a, it's just bizarre. Oh no. Yeah. So again, if you're listening to this, you've got to check it out. It's bizarre. But yeah, so anyway, so they bred these weird rabbits that don't hop that walk on their front legs with, I'm going to say, you know, not to judge these rabbits, but normal rabbits that hop. Sorry to like- Rabbit shimmer. Yeah. Anyway, so they bred them together to figure out, okay, here are the ones that hop. Here are the ones that don't. What's happening in their genome? So there's a mutation in the RAR related orphan receptor B gene. So that's called the RORB gene. The RORB protein is found in regions of the rabbit's nervous system, like throughout and this mutation that this funny Sauter del Thor rabbit has, has a decrease in the number of neurons in this final cord that produce RORB. So basically it's just a reduction in this protein. So the functional RORB gene is necessary for rabbits and they assume other hopping animals to perform this characteristic jumping hopping gate. And that builds on previous studies in mice where they actually, they inhibited the RORB gene from producing proteins and they started walking kind of like ducks. So there's something weird related to this protein and the gate of an animal. So this shows an example of abnormal gate behavior that is mapped from a single base change. And so this is the first description of gene required for this particular locomotion. And so this points out the importance of the RORB gene and how it's part of the normal wiring of the spinal cord. So this does mean that, yes, this stops hopping in rabbits but that also means that this could inhibit locomotion in humans or any vertebrates. It could kind of mess up how the musculature is supposed to function essentially. So beyond this just being just a bizarre story about a bizarre rabbit that walks on its front legs and why they do that and other rabbits hop, this could actually have some really interesting implications for studies invertebrates in general. So. Absolutely. Yeah, the implications of a single base change and the effects on gate on locomotion. I mean, yeah, this is fascinating. Why does it make a mouse walk like a duck? And why does it make a rabbit walk on its front legs instead of its back legs? This is fascinating. Yeah. I mean. Especially because none of the rest of the, none of the rest of the architecture should be there. It's just change gate, mid evolution, just to, you know, what is it? Like there's certain, I think cows and pigs or a lot of animals lack the thing like an attachment at the back of the skull that allows them to run fast. If they run fast, their head just starts going like crazy because there's no stabilizer for it. You know, all your pursuit carnivores have a really nice thick thing that's holding their heads so their whole body can move and their head is still staying real focused. Some animals just, their head just flops off. So this gene is messing with that channel. That's a really hard one to overcome. I imagine this have to have been a domesticated genetic fluke and not something that ever survived in the wilderness. You would not expect to see this. No, but yeah. Wild rabbits. Like they have, they have the musculature. Yeah, so they have the musculature to hop but they have a neuronal kind of stopper keeping them from do that. And so their body's like, how do I move? Oh, I guess my front legs then. So just use these, like use what I can. Is it just not forming the nerves all the way down? It's a protein deficiency. Protein deficiency will affect it. But yeah, that'll have carry on effects feedback. But just for future reference, somebody should tell those rabbits they're doing bipedalism wrong. Yeah, they are. It's not the recommended way. They could run away to the circus quite, quite effectively. Okay. I'm gonna jump us ahead and into our interview. Hey, everyone. If you just tuned in, this is This Week in Science. And if you would like to help us grow, tell a friend about twists today. That would be amazing. All right, I would love to introduce our guest for the evening. Michelle Nyhouse is a project editor at The Atlantic, a contributing editor at High Country News and an award-winning reporter whose work has been published in National Geographic in the New York Times Magazine. She's co-editor of The Science Writer's Handbook and lives in White Salmon, Washington. And she has recently published Beloved Beasts, Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction. Welcome to the show tonight, Michelle. Hey, thanks for having me. I love those rabbits. Everybody wants one now. I want one. Definitely not one. Thanks so much for joining us. I responded to a tweet of yours where you said, I have some extra galleys, and I was like, I would love to see this. And so one thing led to another, and get here, come talk to us about your book. It was Excellent Serendipity, yeah. Yeah, fantastic. I'd love to find out before we dig into the book, though. You were a biologist. You call yourself a lapsed biologist. How did you go from biology to science writing and to now writing this novel? It's a, well, long and tangled tail, but the short version is I majored in biology at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. And I, after college, supported myself by doing a lot of funny jobs, helping out wildlife research projects. I was a field technician, and I worked mostly in the Southwest, so I got to count plants at the wildfires and chase frogs through streams, and most memorably followed desert tortoises around and take notes on what they ate for a diet study. And that really, I mean, the tortoises were fascinating, but what was even more interesting and memorable to me were all the politics around threatens and endangered species at the time. The tortoises were and still are a threatened species, and I just couldn't believe that people were talking about these profound, or fighting more commonly about these profound issues in these meetings that were designed to work out. Whether an ORB trail was going to be closed or something like that, and instead people were like, what's our responsibility to this species? You know what? And I thought, wow, I know that smart people have come up with answers to these questions, but I don't know what they are, and I would like to know more. So I have always been interested in the history of conservation for that reason and many others, but after I made a living for a couple of years as a fieldhand, I started as a journalist at High Country News in Colorado, which covers environmental issues around the Western US and started writing about science, which was really my true love. Yeah, I mean, to be a biologist and then to start describing the world around you through writing, it's this transition of this studying the thing you love and then let me tell other people about it. Yeah, this is a transition, but you know that transition well, all of you do. I really like able to, I mean, I had always liked writing, so that part wasn't so much of a switch for me, but I really, I think I'm a generalist at heart and I just love being able to make the connections, you know, like you guys do every week, make the connections between different studies and different researchers, some of whom have no idea that what's going on in another field and it's so cool to see those connections happen within science and then connections between scientists and the broader community as well. I love that description too, because it is the world of the generalist is getting to keep poking your head into the next lab and finding out what's going on. And if you're in any of those labs, sometimes you can be just completely siloed and so focused on either your field or specifically your own project that you don't look beyond, you don't get to poke your head in all the other doors. Totally, and I've always felt vaguely guilty about it or I feel vaguely guilty about, because I know how hard science is, so I feel like I show up in journalism is hard too, don't get me wrong, but when I show up, you know, at someone's field say, and I'm like, well, I'm here for 24 hours, tell me everything you've done in the last 25 years, you know, I feel a little bit badly, but I've come to think of being a generalist as a strength that the world needs, so just as much as it needs the deep focus of the specialist. Yeah, on that note though, I mean, there's always that question when people are talking about science writing and being a generalist, it's there's something about being able to ask the questions that an expert takes for granted. Yeah, great. You know, explain this to me, I don't know anything about it or I know this very little bit and teach me, right? And we do tackle that in a pretty interesting way when we do this show, which is Keegan Blair will often read a book that somebody has written, whereas I'm not even given the name of the guest until, no, this is serious, serious, so that I can ask exactly those like completely uninformed questions that might, after you've read the book, you're like, oh, I get that, everybody must get that after you read something. But before you do, you're like, well, what is that? I've never even heard of it. So we do that to keep the show a little edgy. I don't know what book you might be talking about, but I mean, as a generalist, you get too deep into a subject also and like sometimes I'll go home to my family and I'll tell them like, oh, and I found out all about this and then they'll ask me some question that I'm like, you know, I have no idea because I didn't ask and it's something that's like really basic but really important. So I think we all need our perspective thinkers. So much. And so from the perspective of you're studying the history of conservation and the world around you, you're kind of steeping yourself in it as a science journalist for a number of years, what led you to finally go, I have to write this book? Well, I have been stewing about the history of conservation for a long time because I always find it really interesting and always trying to fit what my editors call too much backstory. And I thought it was like very important context into my stories. But yeah, and I just kept thinking like there's a story here that at least no one I know of has really pieced together. You know, we all know, we all know, I think at least a couple of the famous names in conservation, you know, people have heard of Rachel Carson, maybe they've heard of John Muir who founded the Sierra Club or Alder Leopold who wrote a Sound County Almanac. But we don't have a sense of like, this is a tradition that's accomplished some things. When we think about conservation, I think, you know, just as like I'm speaking as just a typical media consumer, we're like, oh, it's about endangered species. You know, it's about these species of which there are only two members left. You know, that's sort of the typical story you hear about on the news. And I knew that it was more than that. And I knew people had learned things over the last hundred years or so. And I just felt like it would be useful to put that together and kind of look at what had been accomplished because there have, you know, we have done some good. We've done some good for other species in addition to doing a lot of bad. And I didn't want to write a book that was just about another book about how horrible things were. I wanted to offer some kind of hope and the version of genuine hope I felt like I could offer was, hey, look, we actually have done some other species that a lot of people think about and we can keep doing them, you know? And I think that's really important to, that, you know, all conservationists kind of need to know what other conservationists are up to because there's so many ways where if you have a particular species or habitat or interest that you're trying to protect that there's overlap, right? And there's opportunity for collaboration to really amplify impact. And I think, yeah, that's something that the modern conservation movement is still, I think, trying to figure out is how to coordinate all those kind of distinct efforts. Sure. I mean, it's like we were just talking about, people get siloed, not only because they're super focused on their problem, but, you know, conservation in many ways is such an emergency and they don't feel like they can take the time often, you know, to reach out and make connections with people who might be working on similar problems just because everything seems understandably, everything seems so pressing because it is pressing. But you mentioned also that, you mentioned also like a species, right? And so that's also one of the big questions. Is, are you saving the species where there's only two individuals left? Are you helping bring the California condor back from the brink of extinction? Or are you saving genes? Are you saving biodiversity? Are you saving variety? Right. Yeah, yeah, I mean, and I think conservationists, you know, people who are professional conservationists that do it for a living do have a sense at this point, you know, we've been trying to save species from extinction and trying to preserve healthy populations of species for, you know, on a global scale for 100 years or so. And at this point, they have a sense that conservation is about protecting relationships, you know, protecting relationships among, among organisms and among species and between species and their habitats. But I don't think the average person who cares about other creatures thinks about it that way. I think they mostly think, oh, it's about saving one species at a time. The panda. Yeah, it's about the panda. I mean, I can't, and I do have some anecdata about this because I, you know, when I was working on this book, I can't tell you the number of people who I would say, oh, it's about the history of conservation. They would say, oh, well, are you gonna talk about the bald eagle? And I was like, well, yes, and I love bald eagles, but it's actually about much more than that. And, you know, people who really, you know, cared about these things and knew quite a bit about them. So, yeah, I think it just, and I think that has to do with the way we as journalists cover those issues and the way that conservation groups present them, you know, they're so, they always are, you know, falling back on flagship species. And I think that the media and conservation organizations need to take some more risks and show us some more ugly species and show us some species, you know, doing things together to show us that conservation is a much more complicated and more rewarding job than it is. So we have a frequent argument, me and Blair, about what's the right path forward. I think that we should convince people to avoid going into nature, to really love heavily, overly urbanized areas with scamped nature around and give them no desire to go near nature because even if they really love it, they can only hurt it. And I think Blair is your argument that if you don't expose them to enough nature, then they just don't care about it at all. Yeah, so there's also, there's some cases of ecotourism that obviously like brings money and resources and awareness into areas, right? So I think I just feel like it's a little more nuanced than that, perhaps. Really? But what is, I mean, what's the right solution? Because we can't keep encroaching if we are to preserve it. There's going to just be more people wanting to take the tour every year. There's gonna be twice as many every 30, 40 years, whatever it is. Yeah, I mean, I guess what I would love to see conservation organizations emphasize more is that conservation should be happening everywhere, we've come to think of it as something that happens out there on the calendar picture, on the calendar landscape. And yeah, it happens there and big reserves are really important for all kinds of reasons, but really everyone should be a conservationist and it shouldn't be an exceptional thing. We need everyone to be thinking about it and there are all kinds of habitats where all of us live, we're not perfect, but functional. They serve other species and sometimes in really surprisingly cool waves. So I'm a little bit both and on that, I'm not, yeah. Yeah, because I mean, I'm all for getting people to be like, get familiar with your normal natural environment, your squirrels, your raccoons and your rats. That's basically what we're all going to be living. That's our nature that most people will see. Yeah, so this week, there is a story that it's published in Nature that has just done an analysis and found that the average person who doesn't go out and chop down any trees but buys coffee and products with palm oil and chocolate and these things that we love in our modern urban world and maybe buys them without a second thought as to where they come from are responsible for on average 3.9 trees being destroyed every year. And so they have found that it's people in the G7 countries, in urban developed countries that are our consumption habits are having an impact on deforestation in tropical areas that are at risk ecosystems for biodiversity loss. And so maybe here is where the message is, you don't have to be the Pacific Rim Trail hiker, right? You don't have to be that nature loving but maybe just understand that even in the city your actions have impacts. Yeah, yeah, I think that's really important to understand those connections. And at the same time I would want, I would hope that conservationists make their message more conservation organizations make their message about more than consumer decisions. Because I mean, it's important, no doubt like every person who cleans up their act is saving 3.9 trees and those 3.9 trees times however many million add up. So they're really important but I also think political action is important too. And so getting the word out about systemic changes that would truly make a difference. The first thing that comes to mind for me is legitimizing or affirming indigenous land rates in high biodiversity countries. I mean, that's one of the most efficient and effective ways to protect the... Put it back in the hands of people that were conserving for many millennia, yeah. Yeah, and I mean, not to put the burden, I mean, not to put the burden on them or to assume that indigenous... The skills still exist. You know, are going to just inevitably conserve your land but just we know from experience and research that when people have secure tenure to their land they tend to do a really good job of protecting it for the long term. So just, yeah, I'd love to see more, you know, yes, like yes, clean up your own act in your backyard and yes, protect your backyard from protect the habitats in your backyard but also, you know, thank you. Oh no, think about, she went away. That was a complete out. Maybe she had a... She's like, think about it. Think about it, I gotta go. Mic drop, absolutely. Oh, here she comes back. Let's get her back in there. Hi, I don't know what happened. All of a sudden it said, you're done. That's so... It was very mean, but... She knocked that off. Anyway, yeah, long answer to your question, but... Yeah, you were saying for people to think about... Yeah, for people to think about systemic changes that can make a difference. I mean, it's also less depressing. To think about systemic changes. I just have this really strong memory of seeing an inconvenient truth when it first came out and I watched the whole thing, the whole slide presentation, no tears and then I got to the end and Al Gore said, you should change your light bulbs and that's when I welled up because it was just so... The gap between action and problem was so huge and so I feel like saying, you know, yes, do that. You know, do that on your own. Do that with your household, but also plug into this larger effort because that'll give you some constructive hope. Yeah, and I think that also that... My big problem with that whole idea also is that it takes socioeconomical and cultural factors completely away, right? So it's kind of, it's on you to buy an electric car to change your light bulbs, to buy sustainable coffee that costs twice as much, to do all these things and the burden shouldn't be the financial, logistical, just the adjustment, all of that should not be on the individual. It needs to be the easy choice, right? It's the, I've brought it up a million times in the show, but it's the idea that if you have the paper towels next to the sink and the electric hand dryer behind you, you're gonna grab those paper towels every single time. Totally. And so you need to make the correct choice the easier one. Right. Yeah, and right, and that takes a certain change, you know. I mean, I lived up to the grid for many years and I had a small footprint, but then there was no way, there was no public transportation where I lived. So, you know, I didn't have, those efforts need to be plugged into, literally plugged into a grid. So you were doing, you were off grid living. That's awesome. Yeah. For 15 years. Yeah, when I lived in rural Colorado, I lived off the grid in a house that my partner built and, you know, I mean, it was great. I loved it. We had solar power and we did have a very, you know, when we were in our house, our footprint, our carbon footprint was very small, but it's, you know, not everyone can do that. First of all, and then second of all, there were a lot of things that we didn't have, we needed to share resources in order to do them efficiently and we couldn't do that because of just the geography and the isolation, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, that's why I think those tend to work better in communities. Yeah. There's actually down in the Southwest in Taos, I think there is an Earthship community that is set up, that is all off grid, that all has, you know, they've got these solar and they're using passive heating for the wintertime and that sort of thing, but having a group of those that are sort of in it together, I think would be probably a little bit easier. Yeah. I think we need to go there on that too. Share all those resources. I can't give you a message, I'll wait. Yeah. But it, so I was thinking about the systemic change and Blair's comment about how, you know, it's kind of put on the consumer and just thinking about the historical view of where these conservation efforts have been historically, the initial aspects of the conservation movement were very white male colonial maintaining the status quo and you talk about that a lot in your book, a lot of the decisions and efforts that were made were to maintain that white male power imbalance, like imbalance. And it seems as though, do you think it seems to me as though this is like a shift it to the future through capitalism and maintaining a power structure? When we talk about individual efforts. Yeah, individual efforts versus systemic. Yeah, yeah, I think that's true. And yeah, the history of early history of conservation is full of white dude energy, unfortunately. And it has improved a great deal. And I think one of the things that improvement, one of the concrete things that improvement has brought about is a greater emphasis on community led conservation efforts. Like I was just talking about on, excuse me, on indigenous and rural community owned land where people really are, they might be subsistence hunters or farmers, but they really are reconnecting with their neighboring species through collective management efforts that allow them to benefit from conservation in some way and relieve the burdens and the costs of conservation. And yeah, I mean, I think those kinds of efforts really do get at the kind of systemic change that's needed and get away from this. Like, well, we'll just, you know, capitalism will be, we'll save us, we can spend more money on the coffee. And it won't alone, this is one of the interesting things is that we have almost nobody who is involved in housing outside of some local regulatory. And so everybody who's providing housing is not providing housing, they're in business. It's all a profit business. So I don't really care as really the quality of the housing outside of some sort of legal limits we've put on the minimum that can be done. It seems like if we're looking at the environment and conservation on a larger scale, I don't see how individual communities themselves are really going to be equipped to outbid developers, outbid mineral companies, this sort of thing. It seems like we would need sort of a federal mandate to conserve X amount of land and make it permanent. Yeah, I mean, that's, yeah. And that's why I was talking about indigenous and rural community land rights, because, you know, yeah, that's why it's so hard for people in developing countries to do any kind of long-term management, because they never know when some giant corporation X is gonna come in and scrape out a gold mine. So, but, and, you know, I agree with you here. That's, there's a form of that that's needed here as well. We do, you know, we do need traditional conservation. We do need parks and reserves because we can't let the market decide how land gets used. Conservation always costs something in the short-term and the market is set up to respond to short-term, short-term demand, not long-term. Not what we all need, which is, you know, air and water and biodiversity for the long-term. Not the long-term needs of survival. That's not what the market responds to. We should talk to the people who are interested in the market in the terms of it's a bank. You're putting things in savings. And we're gonna, conservation is like putting our assets in savings and we're gonna let them accrue interest. Yeah, I think this is something we talk about on the show consistently, that there keeps being stories about this. How do we get the real economic evaluation of biodiversity and conservation reflected in the global market? How do we get that to happen? I feel like that, that really would jump start a lot of this because no matter how bad the average person wants conservation to happen, those systemic changes aren't gonna happen unless it becomes very clear that there is an economic benefit, which we know there is, science knows there is, but it's not trickling into that. Yeah, and I mean, Gretchen Daly at Stanford has been working for years on ecological valuation and trying to put a price tag on ecosystem services. And of course, there's a lot of people who say, well, you could never have the value of an ecosystem reflected in a price tag, which is true, but it would certainly be better to have it be greater than zero, which it is negative. Or negative. But here's where I don't agree with this argument, but it's partly because of bothering with that at all. It's because I don't know who that convinces. I don't think that if you're trying to influence Wall Street or government that's tied to finance that's doing deficit spending and is doing everything short term, I don't think they, like we were talking before, I don't think it even registers with them. If they're not gaining personally, immediately from it, business interests don't care what your economic numbers they're throwing around, they have no interest in this. And if that's who we're trying to convince, I say we skip it. I'd say we just skip that all, put the efforts somewhere else. And when you're talking about loss of the species, when you look at any nations, every state has a state bird. And it probably has a state lizard and now they have a state flower. They probably have a state every kind of something. They sure do. So we are on some very governmental level aware that we are identified by the nature in our region. And just preserving that as a state pride or you know, like that thing you're talking about wanting to, who cares about the turtles? Cause we got all these turtles here. Maybe this is part of why people have moved there. It's for the nature that's there. So you can't, you're then destroying the state itself. I don't know. I don't think the whole trying to convince the world that there's a benefit to fresh air and clean water when, you know, every tailpipe is saying they don't care. Yeah. But I do think, I mean, if, and I'm not, yeah, I mean, I certainly don't think corporations are going to solve our problems, but I do think there's a value in, in there are, there are opportunities to say, look, you know, we've calculated that this ecosystem is worth X amount of money over the next 20 years. And, you know, you could get, you could actually get rewarded for preserving it, you know, for preserving that value. So there may be, there may be mechanisms that are, that are more, that are more persuasive than what you're talking about, which I agree is not going to work. But I mean, the larger problem is that, I think that conservation, because it's populated by so many biologists or people with biology background, it's, we have worked per decades to understand what species need to survive, you know, how much space they need, how much habitat, where it needs to be, how it needs to be connected. That's what conservation biology has done for decades. That's what ecology was doing for decades before that. But we, the science or the social science of how to get people to conserve land or the economics of it, all those things are just in their infancy. And so I think we just have a very rudimentary understanding of how to change corporate behavior, how to change human behavior and, you know, the hour is late, but there's a lot of really, I think there are so many huge questions that could be answered that, that, you know, a lot could be accomplished with, just, you know, we've been paying so little attention to it that just paying a little bit more could accomplish a lot. Do you see- Is that, is this the optimistic book that you wrote? Yeah. Okay, okay, now I'm just, I'm just checking in there, because, okay, whew. Yeah, I mean, the optimism is we know what to do, we know what we need to do, but we don't know how to get there, but we do know the questions. So, you know, it's like, we do and we don't. Yeah, one of the things I thought was just fantastic about your book was the weaving of the personal stories of these personalities who were involved in advancing the field, right? And advancing conservation as a movement. You know, the idea that because of Linnaeus coming up with a system of naming species, suddenly we could name the things and then they became important or not important, whereas before they were so vague, right? And then to move from there into, it was fascinating to me to see you weave from that initiation of the concept of a species to the, I guess, the Western perspective, the colonialist perspective that really was, we're going to use the land and take it over and it's ours. And I think even growing up in the 80s and 90s, I came across that perspective very often. And even into the 1990s, would see writing by people from a perspective that the land is ours, we can do what we want with it. So, I mean, this is hundreds of years of time and we're still like within 20, 30 years, barely changing, barely putting a nick in that. So how much do you think, how much work, where do you think we start to put the lever against it to start to change this more? Yeah, I mean, no question. I did try to write an optimistic quote, but there's no question. I mean, I don't want to downplay the challenges, but I will say that, you know, 100, when William Hornaday, who was a taxidermist and a horrible person in many respects, but he did do a lot of good for the American Plains Bison and is one of the reasons why we have him today. When he decided that he didn't want to see the Bison go extinct, people had not, people were really just coming to terms with the fact that humans could start, could drive a species extinct. Like that, and that was in the late 1800s. I mean, it had been known for a while that species could go extinct and then it was kind of, you know, Darwin had mentioned, oh yeah, you know, in the mid-1800s, yeah, humans can drive species extinct, but it's okay, don't worry about it. Don't worry, there'll be another one. This was like some sort of- There'll be another one, but so, I guess- This was some sort of belief that overnight, at each night, like the world was just populated by more animals. Like this was like a real thing that people thought. They didn't really understand breeding that took place in nature was like a process of a limited or a set number of individuals. Yeah. Like that concept, it really didn't exist. Yeah, people thought that, well, people had a lot of faith that species were created by God and they never changed. But so I guess what I feel like, like it's easier to look at the history of conservation than say, there's been so little progress. But on the other hand, I look at it and I said, well, it was barely a hundred years ago that we didn't even know it was possible to drive a species extinct. And so in a way, you know, we're way behind. And I don't want to minimize that. We're so behind. But we have learned a ton over the past century. And, you know, we have such a sophisticated understanding of what species we use. And we have, I mean, there are a lot of species on the planet today. It wouldn't be here where it's not for human effort. And I think it's important to remember that because it is easy to think like, oh my God, there's nothing, you know, especially we're all stuck in their houses still because we know it's been a hard year for optimism. But it's like, we've done, we have done good for other species. And I think it's really important that the fall into this sort of, oh my God, humans can only do damage because we've shown that that's not true. And so it's a big lift, but it's possible. It's not, you know, because we've shown it's possible and I think it's still possible. Yeah, I mean, there's some really amazing success stories out there, even animals that are not doing well. And that's, we're not necessarily our fault. There are some cases, but there are some really cool things like the, I think it's the Florida panther almost went extinct, but then we crossbred them with mountain lions and then. So we used our knowledge of genetics and conservation and, you know, breeding and all these sorts of things. Then we were able to put all that together and save a species. And I think that, yeah, it's, it is important to stop and celebrate success because yeah, there's such an amazing breadth of knowledge that we've developed and we're still reporting on every week that will help equip us. If we can move forward on conservation, we have a lot of baseline knowledge that will help propel us through and especially with, you know, like a seed vault essentially for genes. There's a lot of opportunities there with potential future use of that frozen, the sperm and eggs and all sorts of stuff. Yeah, yeah, we have a lot of technical tools and also, I mean, a lot of conservation is really pretty simple. Like a lot, like, you know, most species are not yet directly endangered by climate change. They're, you know, they will be if we don't solve climate change, but they are, what they're still endangered by is the same thing they've been endangered by for a hundred years, which is too many people are shooting them and too many people, you know, and too many people are destroying their habitat. And so, I mean, of course the economics and the social science of all that is very complicated, but the facts of what we have to do are not that complex. I have a question. With respect to saving species versus ecosystems, bringing back a mammoth could potentially benefit ecosystems, would you be pro mammoth? What is your mammoth stance? What is my mammoth stance? Well, I am extremely pro mammoth in a sense, but I'm not pro mammoth in the sense that I think you mean. Yeah, I think I, well, I feel like I'm maybe joining a conversation that's been going on here for a long time. Okay. But it's probably where like, what the territory is. Yeah, Justin is pro and I am essentially anti because my, you know, my thing is they went extinct due to just dramatic change on the planet and they were no longer supported. And we have lots of other endangered or extinct species that are actually adapted to the planet we currently live on and I would rather bring those back. Yeah. And my point is like, well, how long is too far removed for something that may have been hunted to the brink at one point? You know, how is it 10,000? Like what happens if you reintroduce the mammoth to the Canadian landscape? Is there more nutrients getting moved around in the soil? Are there different plant species that start to show up? Is that biome, can it be potentially harboring more life forms than we consider? Could it be richer? Yeah. Reintroducing the wolf and the beaver, right, to the Montana. Are there all these extra effects that we are just glossing over because, yeah, but you know. And I stand in the middle between the two of them and I moderate. Yeah. Point, separate, fight. I would be as interested as anyone else in seeing a bunch of elephant mammoth hybrids running around. I'm not even gonna call them mammoths because I think the whole thing is a branding exercise. Right. They're not mammoths, they would be, well, first of all, they don't exist. Yeah. Where they exist, where they do exist, they would be hybrid animals. And so we're not de-extincting anything. So we should get rid of that Florida panther thing. Because it's just, see, this is how it gets, then I get very contentious with the whole conversation. Well, then we get rid of all of the hybridized transmission things. No, let me finish. I mean, my issue with it is that I don't have a problem with hybrids running around. I just have a problem with the over-promising of it. And I have a problem with the, and this may not particularly be anyone's fault, but it depresses me how much oxygen the whole conversation takes up. Because I feel like conservation can be really boring. It's a gradual process. And the politics are complicated and progress is really slow. And then someone comes along and is like, you know what, we could just make more mammoth. And that's, it's sexy and exciting. And I mean, I no doubt that ethical issues are fascinating, that potential ecological issues are fascinating. It's fun to talk about. And then the promise of like, oh my God, we might not have to bother with all that other stuff. That would be so cool. But do we need these sorts of ambassadors though? I mean, like sort of like what the panda has done for conservation. And Blair, I think also maybe disagrees with me on this, that the panda has done any good for conservation by taking so much of the oxygen out of the room kind of thing. But it did get, I think as a poster child, a way to, you know, drum up money for conservation that could be applied to other places. You know, I mean, we can't expect, can we, the general population to take interest in the mundane that they don't maybe understand or care about yet? Well, I think we could try a lot harder to make the mundane interesting and like not be so drawn to the shiny objects that the so-called de-extinction that is the shiny object. And the trouble I have with it as a poster child, I mean, yeah, I think that there's some poster children have done some good for conservation. I don't think pandas have done a lot of good. But there's some new research that says that actually they haven't been that great for the ecosystem. They're trying not to exist. They're trying, as Blair is always pointing out, they're trying not to exist. They're working against themselves constantly. There are pieces like that that are just, yeah, you don't feel like population has their best interest in art. But I feel like the other thing, of the many things that drive me crazy about the hybrid mammoth elephants, the theoretical hybrid mammoth elephant, is that it's such a primitive form of conservation. Like 150 years ago, when we saved the bison, we put them on a train from the Bronx and trucked them out to the plains and plunked them down like they were cows. And like that was great at the time because ecology was really young, people didn't have a sense of the ecosystem. And so basically what we're talking about is doing almost the same thing and just kind of seeing what happens to the ecosystem instead of preserving the many functioning, assemblages of species and ecosystems that we still have and that isn't doing much about. But isn't this also, like Blair's talking about this gene bank, at some point, we have to be taking on if things keep continuing like this, we have the conservation effort, but we also then, at some point, we'll be transitioning into species management where we're really controlling, like they've been doing throughout the Sierras with certain fish populations. We're up there kind of playing gone with the populations, mixing up fish from different waterways just to keep the populations going and diverse enough to survive and rebound. Yeah. We're going in that direction anyway. I think this would be a great learning experience that would have a high profile. Really pushing for it. I am, I am. I think there's angles to it that make sense in the bigger picture. Meanwhile, there's a whole other side of conservation that actually I would love your opinion on, Michelle, while we're talking about it, which is this idea of categorizing species as to how much effort, money, what have you, should go into their conservation. And this takes into account several things, including maybe they're too far gone, which I think is the really, I used to work at a zoo and it was really heartbreaking when this conversation started and I worked specifically with fishing cats and fishing cats had been listed as a species that was maybe too far gone and maybe they were going to stop putting money into, and I think it all, there was a lot of controversy and it ended up kind of falling through in the end, but I kind of would like your opinion based on the research that you've done on prioritizing species. Yeah. Well, triage is what it's been called. Yeah. Years and yeah, and it's tough. I do think, I mean, there's definitely a place, what actually I would love to see us put more money into, more public money into is protecting common species because those are the cheapest species to save. And we know that when they get endangered, they're really expensive to save. And we're not giving or the state governments are where conservation of common species happen and they're most, those efforts are mostly supported by hunting and because not as many people are hunting, they're running out of money. So we really need like a new funding model to protect abundance. But I think, understandably, we also wanna protect endangered species. Nobody wants to be the person to pull the metaphorical plug. I do think there's a point at which we have to say, we're not gonna spend public money on the species anymore. It requires too many heroic measures. It is, there is a point where it's, it's draining resources from, that would do much more good. But that's not to say that, private funders can't come in and say, like there's a, I spent some time at the, at the Rhino Center in San Diego where they're trying to, what they call rewind the extinction of the Northern white rhino subspecies by doing this very groundbreaking research on reproductive technologies, which could potentially save other species, other highly endangered species, if it's perfected. And that, that is mostly privately funded. And I think that that's, it's a speculative effort. They all know it's a real long shot. And I think it's valuable in its way, but I don't think we need to be spending taxpayer money on it. When that could be doing, it could be getting a lot more bang for a proverbial buck. So I guess my follow-up to that is, is there a way, can we circumvent this difficult conversation about prioritizing species by just focusing on habitats? This is like my soapbox thing, right? Is, how can we shift, is it possible to shift the research, the funding, and the kind of the PR focus of conservation from the species level to the habitat level so we don't have to make these difficult decisions? Yeah, I would love to see it happen. I think that's when, I mean, I was just talking about state government funding. That's what, you know, that's what a lot of state wildlife agencies do, ideally. You know, some of them don't do their jobs, but, you know, that's what they're tasked with doing is protecting habitat. And the problem we have in the US, and the problem we have worldwide actually with the IUCN and its red list is that we have taken this species-focused approach to conservation. And so all of our, like our legal structure, our political structure, and even our emotional investment is at the species level. So it's a very, I mean, I totally agree that that would be better for the ecosystems that we wanna save. I'm not sure how, you know, politically and legally we approach it. Isn't there a movement currently to try and get, was it 30% of the world's surface preserved by? Yes, there is. And Biden's- All in the ocean. Yeah, Biden wrote that into his climate executive order during his first couple weeks in office. And yeah, that's gained a lot of momentum. And if it gets written into the convention on biological diversity, which is being their 10-year goals are being set again at the end of this year, that could make, and if indigenous land rights are written into that, which they should be, that could make a huge difference. And it could tilt, I think, a lot of the attention of the conservation movement toward habitats, which is, I think it's intense. But I mean, we've been thinking about species for a long time, and I think to some extent that will always be with us. But I do, I totally agree with you that we need to be shifting the focus and maybe talking about groups of species, maybe we can learn ourselves from the idea by talking about communities of species and how they use certain habitats. Is that very familiar with the concept of a living fence, or it's kind of another name. I think it's more common in Europe or UK. But where they build like a hedge fence that can be used as like a highway for all sorts of critters to move around and back and forth and sort of avoid roads and people. Why don't we just do that? We do just a giant public works project where we just remove, like do a big swath straight across the United States. It's just like, you know, we have a couple overpasses, maybe an underpass where we get through the thing. We just leave that and just don't touch it. Just nobody goes there. We know this big swath is left for the animals to wander out once in a while. They might walk through a local suburb occasionally. But for the most part, they've got there, we'll get a good section of the biomes and just leave it. Just leave it. Just don't touch it. What can't live there just didn't make it. What does happen? Let's get an infrastructure build. Yeah. It's the easiest infrastructure build. We don't have to maintain it. We don't have to build it. We just have to get out of the way. That's it. Sounds like belt. Yeah. Just a giant swath. It sounds like a living wall. Just a living wall through the... Yeah, okay. You build that wall. So don't. But at some point, it sounds crazy to just make that swath and anything that happens to have a biome that matches that lives. And anything that, well, it's not deserty enough, the desert stuff that. Is that cold enough and something? Too bad nothing looks there. But basically we're doing that piecemeal all over the place. If we at least create one shot gigantic national park across the country. There is tons of ideas. People have so many ideas. And like Michelle said before, we know the science. It's changing minds. It's changing systems. It's changing patterns. This book is really fantastic. And I got to sit by the ocean looking at the waves and read these stories of these people and conservation. And it was a whole moment for me personally, but I'm really enjoying it. If you want to save the world and want the most optimistic take on how to do so. But there is in the first chapter, at the very end of your first chapter, you end the first chapter and start the book with the paragraph. Or there's one more word I use sparingly here. Hope. Hope is a subject of much discussion in conservation circles, both the need for it and the lack of it. Yet few of any of the most influential early conservationists were motivated by what might be called hope. They did it anyway. I'm scooching forward. As Leopold in one of his grimmer moods wrote to a friend that the situation is hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best. And I think those are just really wonderful words. And if you were to give your message of hope and what you want people to get out of this book, what do you hope that people get from reading your book? I hope that they can learn from this book or see in this book that there have been more successes than many of us realize. And as we've talked about, that we do know what needs to be done. We don't always know how to accomplish it, but we know what we need to accomplish. And despite everything that's facing us, we're not as special as we think we are. That a lot of people, and the reason I didn't use the word hope, as I said, was that I was just moved by all these people in conservation history who really had no particular reason to be optimistic that what they were gonna do was gonna work out. And in fact, most of them thought it probably wouldn't. And they were working at the start of the Great Depression at the beginning of World Wars through World Wars at times of great uncertainty and chaos. And I think that they can be an example to us that they just kept doing what they thought was right and contributing in the way that they thought they could contribute the most. And I hope that people will take from the book that that is still worth doing, despite it all. Thank you so much for joining us tonight for our conversation and for sharing your book. Really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for having me. It's so fun to be here. It's been really great having you on. Yeah. Yeah. So where can people find you and your book? They can find my book. Anywhere books are sold. It's called Beloved Beasts. And if they want to learn more about me and what I do, they can go to belovedbeastsbook.com. We'll send you to this website. And that has more information about the book and where I'll be showing up over the next few weeks and give me talks and so forth. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks to all three of you. Great to be here. It's been wonderful. Have a wonderful night. Take care. You too. All right, everybody. I feel like this whole interview requires it. I feel like we need some kind of a call to action at the end of this, like. After this whole conversation. Yeah, I feel like, you know, like it almost feels like this is, okay, I'm ready to sign up. Read the book. I gotta read it, but I gotta find out where to sign up. I gotta get the book, because in the book it'll tell me where I can be applying efforts. That's the thing. I'm ready, though, now. Oh, awesome. Right? Ready. Let's do it. We can all apply a little pressure here and there. We can do what we think is right. This is This Week in Science. Thank you so much for joining us this evening. We're gonna close a couple of windows here and tell you that in a few weeks, what is it? April 17th, you will be able to find us mingling and mixing ideas, mixing our science with the technology of the Daily Tech News Show. April 17th at 4 p.m. Pacific time, we will be science and teching it up. So put it on your calendars and stay tuned for more information as we get links and all that kind of stuff set up. And if you have ideas for what you want to hear us mind meld about with the Daily Tech News Show team, send us an email. Let us know. We'd love to hear from you. And now, as we come back from this wonderful interview, it is time for a part of the show that we all know and love as Blair's Science Superhero Origin Story Animal Corner. A creature, great as all. By pet, nill, a pet, no pet at all. If you wanna hear about the animal, she's your girl. Except for giant pandas and squirrels. Okay, Rose, oh right, what you got, Blair? I'm waiting, I can't start until the question is asked. Okay, well, I have a really funny, or fun story, not funny, fun story about octopuses. Always amazing what octopuses make in appearance in the animal corner. And this is a study looking at octopus sleep. Did you know that octopuses sleep? They do. I didn't, I did not. I mean, I guess I expect most octopus, most animals to sleep in some way, because that's a thing. Yeah, and there's restorative properties to sleep. And we know that octopuses have a weird donut shaped brain, but a brain nonetheless, which means sleep is probably important, right? Yes, yes, donuts. And so this is a study all about octopus sleep. So you might have seen videos on the internet at some point of an octopus sleeping and you might have seen this cool color and texture changing happening all over the octopus as it sleeps. And this study specifically wanted to look at if there were multiple types of sleep that an octopus exhibited. Kind of like humans. So we have, this is from the Brain Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande de Norte in Brazil. And this was looking at, it turns out there, are two alternating sleep states for octopuses, an active sleep stage and a quiet sleep stage. They, so scientists historically, again, historically, scientists have always thought that only humans are special. Historically, scientists were very human-centric. Yes, absolutely, yes. Oh, it's so special that we do this and that. So scientists used to think that only mammals and birds had two sleep states. More recently, surprised they found that reptiles also showed non-rem and REM sleep. And a REM sleep-like state was also recently reported kind of anecdotally in Cuddlefish. But so this brought them to look at octopuses because they exhibit this wild sleep pattern where they change their color and texture and their suckers move and all sorts of stuff. So they captured video recordings of octopuses in the lab. During quiet sleep, they were still and quiet. They had pale skin, their eyes, their eye pupils contracted to a slit. So they don't have eyelids. So they sleep with their eyes open like fish do, but their pupil is so special compared to just normal fish eyes because they have the ability to contract their pupil like we do. So they're either, but they have this pupil- I think it looks like they're opening and closing their eye because the way they contract it, it's like, oh, they're shutting their eyelids. Nope, no eyelids, just squishing pupil. Yeah, so their skin around their eye is changing texture and their pupil is contracting to a slit. So yeah, it looks like they're closing their eye. So that's during their quiet sleep. During active sleep, this is when their skin color and texture were changing, their eyes moved around a bunch and their suckers contracted and their body twitched and moved around. And the active sleep occurs after a long quiet sleep, which is generally longer than six minutes and it has this characteristic periodicity that would repeat about every 30 to 40 minutes. Sound familiar, starting to sound like REM sleep, right? Yes. And how do they know they're asleep? Because as I mentioned, they don't have eyelids. Well, they measured their arousal threshold using visual and tactile simulation tests. It's basically they tried to wave this more scientific than this, but it's basically like they wave their hands in front of their eyes and they like poked them. Yeah, they're poking, poking, poke the octopus. See if it responds. Hello octopus, poke, poke, poke, poke. Seems to be asleep. So the result of those tests showed that in both the active and quiet sleep states, they needed a stronger stimulus to evoke a behavioral response. So they were sleeping. This of course has implications for the evolution of sleep because either this is convergent or there are origins of sleep dating back as far as 500 million years because that's when the divergence between cephalopods and vertebrates occurred. So one of those two things. And so if these two different sleep states evolve twice independently, invertebrates and invertebrates, that means there's some sort of essential evolutionary pressure shaping this process in order to have a centralized nervous system. You can't decouple a centralized nervous system and sleep is what this would mean. So if you're gonna become extra smart and have a centralized nervous system, you're going to get sleep. Or as I said, maybe everybody does it and it has this 500 million year old connection of sleep. So the next kind of studies for this group would be to record neural data from cephalopods to understand what's going on in their donut brain while they sleep. And they'd also like to know the role of sleep in their metabolisms, thinking and learning. So if you sleep to private octopus, can it behave as well in behavioral tests? Can it perform as well? Does it affect their ability to metabolize food? Do they get tired? Do they die sooner? So these are all things that would be a great question to follow through with. And the... How necessary are these sleep cycles to an octopus's survival? Yeah, absolutely. But the show sleep deprivation kind of symptoms like humans do. So senior author, Siddhartha Rubero said, I love this, it is tempting to speculate that just like in humans, dreaming in the octopus may help to adapt to environmental challenges and promote learning. Do octopuses have nightmares? Could octopuses dreams be inscribed on their dynamic skill patterns? Could we learn to read the dreams by quantifying these changes? So I like the idea of thinking about octopuses dreaming, having nightmares, storing memory, all the sorts of things that happens to us, but yeah, dreaming octopuses. More study required, but it looks really interesting. And I love the evolutionary aspect of this having evolved multiple times that, yeah. Or not. Or not. That's the thing. They really kind of focus on this idea that it's coupled to brain development. But I'm sitting here going, what if like unicellular little kind of silly covered little protests? What if they, what if they dream? We don't know they don't dream. It's a, what do you want to call dreaming? Like, do they shut down for part of the time and just chill? Is that considered sleep? Is that considered? So I don't know. I understand dreaming is supposed to be a very particular brain wave pattern and all these sorts of things. So I could be going a bit far with the single celled organism. But I do think it's worth considering that maybe anything with a glob of nerves, anything that is kind of like a brain, could they dream? That's possible. Right, what is quiescent? What is active? What is, yeah. This is, okay. This is why we need to create sentient mice and give them a dream journal so that when they wake up, they can jot down any dreams they had and then we'll know. But if you're creating sentient mice, then of course they have sentience, consciousness. And so then it's a moot point. Of course they're going to dream then. Mice are sentient guys. This is fine. They already are. They already rule the world. Anyway, moving from dreams to fangs, I want to talk about venom. Okay. Would you like to be venomous, Kiki? Yes. Okay, Justin. Would you like to be venomous? I feel like at some point, I'd bite my own tongue and die. Oh, that's fair. Well, I mean, you think that if you're venomous, you're gonna not be venomous. I don't know. I don't know how many times I want venom. I don't know. I don't know how often snakes accidentally bite themselves. Yeah, I don't know how that happens. It does happen sometimes because they're long and thin, you know? And do they just like no big deal? Yeah. Oh, wow. It's fine, yeah. Anyway, so the reason I ask is we may find, we may have found out how to make humans venomous. Let me take a step back. What? No, this is like it. Repeat that before you say that fast. This is the sensationalist headline that was all over the internet. So this is one of those stories that I'm bringing today to kind of take a step back and explain what the actual science is. So the headlines all over the internet was, you know, how to make a human venomous. But really what the story is about is the evolutionary origin of venom in snakes and that we share some of the building blocks with venomous snakes as mammals. So Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Graduate University and the Australian National University have found the genetic foundation required for oral venom and it is present in both reptiles and mammals. Yes. So there's an underlying molecular link between venom glands in snakes and the salivary glands in mammals. So instead of saliva, you could be spit in venom. So venom has arisen in so many animals and animal types. So we have venomous jellyfish, of course. We have venomous spiders, of course. We have venomous scorpions, snakes, and we have some mammals like, for example, the platypus and the slow loris. So there are mammals that have venom. We know this already, but their venom delivery method is claw-based and they're paws. So if we're talking about a venomous mammal in terms of a bite, we don't have that. So they all have different ways to deliver their venom, but this latest research wants to look at specifically the oral delivery of venom and, like I said, it's connection to salivary glands. This was looking at venomous snakes, specifically a pit viper found in Asia from Taiwan. It's called the Taiwan Habu snake. They looked at the genes that work alongside and interact with venom genes. They found the adjacent genes and they wanted to look at them and then compare them to other stuff. So previously scientists have focused on genes that code for proteins that make up the mixture, but many of the toxins found in venom were incorporated after the oral venom system was already established. This is why you have anti-venoms that are different for different snakes is because their specific toxins are different, but there has to be something in common at the base of all that with the development of an oral venom system. So they wanted to look at the genes that were present before the origin of venom, which enabled the rise of these individual venom systems. So they identified around 3,000 of cooperating genes that played roles in protecting the cells from stress caused by producing lots of protein. So they are cranking out these venom proteins and that can cause stress to your system. They were also key in regulating protein modification and folding. If they don't fold right, they're not venomous. If they don't fold right, they could poison you. There's a billion things that can happen wrong if the protein doesn't fold right. Then they looked at the genomes of other animals and that included dogs, chimps, humans, and they found that they contained their own versions of these genes. And when they looked at salivary gland tissues within mammals, they found that the genes had similar patterns of activity to the snake venom glands. So this is the first real solid evidence for the theory that venom glands evolved from salivary glands. And while snakes then, quote, went crazy, incorporating many different toxins into their venom and increasing the number of genes involved in producing venom, mammals like shrews that produce venom, they created a much simpler venom that actually is very similar to saliva. And the ease with which the function of salivary glands can be repurposed to be venomous is surprising. It's a pretty easy switch. And so scientists could start looking at other mammals and how easily they can turn them venomous. So here's a quote, quote, if under certain ecological conditions, mice that produce more toxic proteins in their saliva have better reproductive success, then in just a few thousand years, you could see venomous mice. Yikes. Yes. So, you know, it's probably not gonna happen, but this does work. Maybe we've already got shrews, come on. Also, I just love the, you know, the snake cornering a field mouse and then it's like the little vampire reveal. The snake is like suddenly terrified. Yes. It's the, it's like the, where the guy pulls out a sword and then he just pulls out a gun. It's like, oh actually. And shoots him. Yeah. And shoots, you know how many innocent people he kills in that movie by the way? Well, all right, there we go. He's got mass murderous freaks. Anyway, let's do the show. Let me finish my venom story. So obviously mice, we don't think they're on this evolutionary path to become venomous. Like they would have by now, they've been around a while. But I also like this little addition, although very unlikely, if the right ecological conditions ever existed, humans too could be venomous. That's, it's not gonna happen. There's no, there's absolutely no reason that would occur. But it's, you know, they're just saying we have the genes. Now. Somebody's gonna want it. Gene modification technology. Somebody's gonna want to do it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you could, you could, you can go sci-fi with this if you want. Now I did want to pull up this story from last summer that was looking at venom glands in amphibians because I just, I wanted to draw a connection because it's actually a pretty different story, but it's along a similar line of like, you know, just venom. It's not unique to snakes. It didn't evolve a bunch of several times. It seems like it really did have a singular origin and then it kind of blossomed in different ways throughout evolutionary history. But this was specifically looking at embryonic analysis and they were looking at the fact that there are oral glands in these amphibians that had the ability to develop venom. So basically they just, they have the same developmental embryonic origin as the venom glands in snakes, but they turn into these dental glands in Sicilians, this type of amphibian. So it related similar. So this is looking at embryonic development. And then this other story that I brought today is looking at the genetics behind it. So they could be linked, they could be related, but ultimately the origin of venom, oral venom seems to be pretty far back and there are vestiges of that throughout the fossil record basically is what this boils down to. It's in amphibians, it's in snakes and reptiles, it's in mammals. We all have it. Yeah. So where does that, where does evolutionarily, where does that point? Where's the convergence? It's when good proteins go bad. It's when proteins allow an adaptive, an adaptation to take place, like Blair was saying, it's the proteins are there, the network of molecules that enable the protein folding and everything to happen, they're all there and then there's a change that allows you to over-stimulate your prey or you're able to kill your prey more effectively or like Blair was saying, better reproduction or whatever. We're not speculating then that there was some ancient, ancient ancestor that we're all linked to that had venom for a while and then just dropped it in a bunch of the- It seems possible. So I think this was the thing that future research is gonna have to look at. But based on the story we brought last summer that there's the developmental origin of what gives us venomous snakes is also in the Sicilians, these amphibians. Amphibians, yeah. Would lead you to believe that the common ancestor between reptiles and amphibians had at least the developmental building blocks for this. But that's the thing where I think it gets really difficult is that in the Sicilians, it developed into these weird like leaky, dental spoon-shaped things in their mouths and in snakes it turned into fangs with injectors. So did their common ancestor also have venom capabilities or did their common ancestor just have the developmental possibility to create venom, right? And so I think that is where it becomes really difficult. Is the genes are there? The structures are there, but did they develop to completion? We don't know. However many millions of years ago. And that is what we don't know. Maybe it didn't and that's why they didn't stick around. Right. Right. A quick shout out to Dan Christensen and I think it's the YouTube chat room for the in-chat donation. And for correctly calling it, yeah, you're right. Shrews are venomous. Yeah. Called it ahead of the reveal. That's right. The head of the reveal. You know what I'm going to be revealing right now? What? That Justin, it's your turn to talk about science. Woo! Science. Okay. What's the story you're going to hop on? This is a team of researchers from the Universidad de São Paulo, Universidad Federal de Rio Grande, Dosul and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, which I think are all in South America somewhere. Anyway, they found evidence of genetic Australasian influence in more parts of South America. If you weren't aware that they had discovered any genetic early Australasian influence in South America, apparently there was. I didn't even know about this study. Somehow I missed it as well. Back in 2015, researchers found what they described as Australasian influence in native people living in the Amazon. That would be people with genetic markers associated with the early populations of South Asia, Australia and Melanesia. In their papers published in Proceedings to National Academy Sciences, the group now describes their study, this next round study of a genomic data set from multiple South American populations across the continent that are also showing this sign. So theories that explain how the signal could have been introduced into people living in South America are tough considering it has not been found in any early people living in North America. Current population theory is that North American and South America were populated by people migrating over from Asia via Siberia to Alaska then waiting for a glacial event to melt and then continuing down and then populating North America and then South America, although they might have kind of headed to South America along the coast quicker. It's sort of tough because while this is upheld by most of the evidence we have is perfect. The oldest human activity that we've seen in the Americas is now this cave in Mexico that's 30,000 years old. There are a number of South American sites that are likely somewhere between that 30,000 year old age and then the oldest stuff in North America. So if you were just gonna go off of no other information but the age of the sites, you would say started in Mexico, headed to South America and then moved to North America. Now the genetic information still is backing up the transition from Siberia to the Americas. That's still the correct overriding theory. But this experiment that they just did involved collecting blood samples from native peoples all across the midsection of South American continent. They conducted the genetic analysis and all they studied samples from 383 people included 438,000 plus markers within the genome that they were looking for. Researchers found the Australasian marker and native people living in the Brazilian plateau in the center of the country and also those living in the western part of the country. They also found the signal from the Chotuna people in Peru. Finding suggests migrations of people were far more widespread in South America than were thought. The findings also suggest that there were a couple waves of such migration. This has led to some scrutiny of previous theories about how people got to South America. Some suggest though that this may be a problem because many lineages in North America were wiped out by European colonial genocide. So we may not have a full picture of North American genome and I don't know how much access we have to ancient North American genome because of some treaty issues that have taken place where we're not really allowed to do a lot of analysis without a lot of express permission and that permission has been begrudging over time to look at ancient population DNA. We have had some exceptions but it's for the most part, we don't have a very good map of North American indigenous. What? Fascinating. Yeah, so close to study though, they also think though there's another thing that says, yeah, if we just look at that North American population, the data that we do have, we should eventually find the signal there as well. Most enticing possibility is of course that a population of early people from Australasia somehow made their way all the way across the Pacific directly to the shores of South America, which is not supported by any other evidence at this point. Aside from the fact of the genetic marker. The genetic marker, yeah. Yeah, which is pretty good signal. That's a pretty good signal but it can't be ruled out because of that genetic marker. So yeah, like there's a lot of interesting questions that arise from this. People have rode across the Indian Ocean, the Pacific, I mean. That's the other thing about it too, which is it wouldn't need to be that big of a population. Yeah, it's a long trip though. It's a long trip, but it's also not, it's not saying that the Americas now were populated by a cross Pacific, Southern Pacific crossing event. It's not there, but that admixture does tell you that either when people showed up to South America, they might have run into people who were already there or you know, could have been the other way. We don't know, we have no idea but it's this absolutely fascinating question puzzle thing that needs to get tracked down. Very exciting. This is a very exciting time for Paley. So cool, need more data. More data, more data. Oh, and then more stories, more stories. You have more stories. Yeah, so this is a quotey voice of Gloria Choi, Associate Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, member of the Pick Our Institute. If you're familiar, I am not. As a quotey, as a community is very important for animals to be able to socially distance themselves from sick individuals as all of us now totally understand. Especially in species like mice, although I'd say humans is safe that too, especially in species like mice where mating is instinctively driven, it's imperative to be able to have a mechanism that can shut it down when the risk is high. To explore whether mice would change their innate behavior when exposed to sick animals, researchers placed mice in the same cage with either a healthy female, oh, that's male mice must be, yes, male mice in the same cage with either a healthy female or a female that was showing signs of illness and they had this bacteria that they injected with them that kind of made them sick but wasn't too dangerous. They found out that the males engaged much less with the sick females and made no effort to mount them. So the whole got a headache thing, apparently. I think you have to go with fever. I've got fever and cold sweats and I have an off-powler. Anyway. You know, that's so hot. I'm gonna go. Yeah, you stay home. Think about just having drip it, just like so congested, just like the bright red nose and the covered, just tissues in every pocket and it's just really, maybe doesn't get you going and that might be why. Right. Yeah, those aren't really the, I wanna date you right now signs, right? Yeah, exactly. It's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not. There's a reason. There's a reason that being sick is like, quote unquote, gross, right? But what is that reason? Researchers. It's a go away signal. But what is that signal? Researchers didn't stop with just that observation. They tried to identify the brain circuitry underlying the mouse overcoming their instinct, the usual behavior of wanting to mount the member of the opposite. Mice have a lot of intercourse. That's, it's, you know, we talk about bonobos a lot. Mice, big time into the sex thing. Okay, so what they said, the, here with the Vemur, I'm gonna have to phonetically, I'm sorry, Vomirino nasal organ, which processes pheromones, feeds into part of the amygdala called the Coa PM, or yeah, Coa PM. And the MIT team found that this region is activated by the presence of the bacteria injected mice. Further experiments revealed that this activity, the Coa PM is necessary to suppress the male's mating behavior in the presence of six females. When Coa PM activity was turned off, males would continue to try to mount sick females. Wasn't the appearance of snot. That was, it needed, they needed to have this signal in the brain, which is probably being triggered by that. Yeah, it's, there's a trigger. There's a trigger. Additionally, artificially simulating, stimulating the Coa MP suppress mating behavior in males, even when they were around healthy females. So they could, they could actually get the, stimulate this and get them to, I guess, think everybody was sick or act like everyone else was sick. Yep. Showed, the research also showed that it communicates with another part of the amygdala called the medial amygdala. And this communication carried by hormone is necessary to suppress the mating behavior. The link to this, this was called a thyrotropin releasing hormone, TRH is intriguing, Troy says, because thyroid dysfunction in humans has been implicated in depression and social withdrawal. Yeah, that's an interesting point on this, on this study where it's thyroid dysfunction could have this influence on human behavior, not the mounting effect, but just, just like you said, social withdrawal, people choosing to not be around other people more often because there's something, a signal in their brain that is kind of pushing them to do that. But what's really interesting then is it sort of, it sort of changes your perspective of why somebody is being a little antisocial and depressed in this sort of way or withdrawing. If they're having the same feeling that Blair would have if everybody was walking around with number 11s, right, coming out of their noses, then yeah, all of us would be like, I'm really not into hanging out with you people today because I just, it's me. I just don't feel like it, not because you're all revolting. Yeah, I mean, it's such an interesting question where there's a behavior when you look at it in a model species like a mouse that is this repetitive, stereotyped behavior that, you know, a mouse is gonna do it, you know, no matter what, unless you take that part of the brain and go, you're not gonna do it anymore, right? And so you start seeing that there are these, these lovers in the brain, these switches that can be turned on and turned off that lead to different behaviors. But then when it comes to an animal like humans that are a bit more complicated than a mouse, we like to hope that because of the layers of cognition that are involved in certain social, pro-social behaviors, they are gonna have effects, but maybe not the same effects as they would have on a mouse, right? But it's really interesting to dig into this on an animal level. I think it also is interesting to think about it on a system level because one of the things I just thought of too is that, not to bring it to humans again, but the human flu season is also the like stay at home and nest season. And, you know, we always assumed that that was just because it's cold out, but maybe there's something else going on there. Right, we're seeing, we're seeing people sick and going, I'm just gonna stay home. I don't need to be around other people right now as much. Yeah. Could be bigger. Final, just I'll do a very short version of the story. Researchers with the CERN based alpha collaboration have announced the world's first laser based manipulation of antimatter, leveraging a made in Canada laser system to cool a sample of antimatter down to near absolute zero. This is published in the journal Nature and it is considered an absolute breakthrough because they used a made in Canada laser. Justin. Incredible. Didn't think they were ever gonna get that done. Wow, shortest story of the night. That's your story, that's your take on the story. I can keep going with the story. That's to me, like there's stuff about, you know, being able to then, now that you can control a little bit of antimatter, now what research can we do? This is something that they've been working on for like 40 years. Yeah. Dada, it's quite a breakthrough, but really the highlight of the story, as you can tell from the fact that it is in the first sentence of the press release, is that it was done with a made in Canada laser. They're very proud. They're very proud. We did it. We made a laser, which is, you know, amplifying light down a tube. It's very impressive, Canada. It is the amplifying light down a tube and that it's, these lasers are helping them manipulate antimatter, which we're just getting a handle on. This is very exciting for our understanding of the universe. Thanks, Canada. Thanks for your lasers. We appreciate that. All right, I have some stories. First, I wanna say thank you once again for joining us for this week in science. All right, my science. What do I have? I have. Sorry, this is just coming in. Okay. It was assembled in Canada, I think is what. Made in, assembled in. Oh, verbs, verbs. Sorry, I couldn't resist. Go ahead, I'm sorry. I'll stop being the interrupting cow. Okay, all right. So I'm gonna start with a story that is a follow-on from the interview and from conversations we have also had on the show many times about invasive species and conservation. Well, it turns out that snakes, rats, cats, all the invasive species in the world, according to researchers in France, that invasive species have cost $1.3 trillion to the global economy since 1970. It's an average of $26.8 billion per year. And it's almost as much as, I don't know, it's not quite as much as the infrastructure bill that's being proposed right now, but anyway, study published in Nature. Researchers have been counting all the costs that invasive species have had in the world. And they came up with a top 10 number of invasive pest species. They're groups of species, mostly, that are having the most influence and doing the most damage around the world. And on this list, I named a few off the top, but let's talk about who the most costly invasive species are, mosquitoes. They are by far the most costly invasive species at a level of $148.7 billion. And then we have rats and mice coming in at 67.1. We have cats. Cats are number three on the most bad list of invasive species. I'm only surprised they weren't higher. I know they're third. And then we have Formosan subterranean termites, red imported fire ants, brown tree snakes, Mexican cotton ball weevils, gypsy moths, Africanized bees, and New World screw worms. Screw worms. That's right. They screwed us. Anyway, there's a lot for these animals and the trouble that they have been counting causing. And guess what? What? Another study has determined that the pets that we like the most, hey cats, what's up, are most likely to become invasive species. That there is a certain combination of traits that leads to basically generalists that are able to adapt to ecosystems and be able to survive. And they did some mathematical modeling and then some experiments with ants. And have pretty much come to the conclusion that we're bad people for the pets that we like to choose because our pets are highly likely to become invasive species that are then gonna go on and cost trillions of dollars to the global economy. Well, they probably started it right as an invasive species at the begin with. And but they were so adaptable, they were already out serial killing, they were adapting to anything. And then we said, hey be our pets. But they get, yeah, I think so. They probably just weren't amenable enough to be around people. Like we were this close to, like if raccoons and squirrels could just chill out a little bit more and play along, they could take the role of cats and dogs. They could be like, are you a cat person or a dog person or a squirrel person or a raccoon person? You'd have to ask all these questions. But they never made that transition quite. But the dogs and cats probably just hung around being invasive with humans. So that's usually not the direction it goes. Usually we decide we like pets and then the pets get into the environment and start causing trouble. And the one thing about this study that I thought was really interesting, their analysis, they started out looking at which species are more or less likely to be invasive. And if pets were not more, if pets didn't have any invasive characteristics to them, if they're not likely or not at all or whatever, if they're just not that invasive, you'd expect that they would be equally distributed among all the species. But what they found is that invasive mammal species were present at five times the rate in the pet trade as they are in the wild around the planet. So it's similar for birds, for amphibians and all sorts of different animals, fish. Anyway, all the species, we like invasive ones as pets. We probably made them invasive, but anyhow. Well, there are places where they purposefully released cats too. Cats, like when I lived in Israel, they were straight swats everywhere. To kill the rats, which was their invasive. That's exactly yes. So the Brits were like, oh yeah, let's just release a bunch of cats out there to take care of the rats and mice that we accidentally brought here. Yep. And then, I don't know, on a good note though, if you do happen to have a garden and you want to do something good for the world, know that your urban garden is having a beneficial effect on pollinators. A new study that just came out in the Journal of Ecology suggests that urban areas in the United Kingdom, this was in the UK, are a significant source of nectar and floral diversity for insects. And so this is a good thing. They were looking to understand how the nectar supply differs between urban and rural areas and where nectar sources are concentrated in urban settings. And so they started looking at where things were and basically they discovered that your garden can be a refuge and a source of sustenance for those pollinators that we need. And the reason that they're pointing to your garden is because everywhere else that is controlled by the city, they're not going to take the effort to maintain something like wildflowers. They're going to put crushed granite and concrete over everything. There's no man, less maintenance, yeah. There's very little, this is sort of also the thing I was thinking about when we were doing the interview. There's very little land where I'm at. Anywhere that is not heavily managed by humans. I mean, granted, most of my surroundings are farmland, which are by nature completely manipulated by man. But within the city, there's not really any wild areas. It's a lot of concrete. So listen to this though, listen to this though, so this is in the UK. The researchers sampled in and around 12 towns and cities, they were in areas categorized as urban, farmland, or nature reserve. And urban and farmland had higher numbers of non-native plants than nature preserves. They found that all three of them had about the same amounts of nectar. The urban sources of nectar, 85% was attributed to gardens, however, even paved areas contributed to nectar sources in some instances with flowering shrubs growing through cracks or in parking lots. But within gardens, 83% of nectar producing plants were non-native. So that's always a problem. That's an issue also, but there's nectar and that's good for the insects. This is where Justin's green belt he was talking about before would be super helpful. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, green space is so important. If you can do it in your backyard, but kind of part of the community level thing we were talking about with our interview is if there's legislation or particular representatives who want to favor more green space in your area, that is another really important thing to support. Because that's ultimately you need kind of that higher level support to make sure that land is saved or converted back to green space when possible. Yeah, yeah, possibly. Okay, I'm gonna take us away from conservation though and now I'm gonna take us in robotic sci-fi land. It's here, it's here. Last year researchers reported their Xenobot. The Xenobot was a biological robot created out of layers of skin cells and cardiac cells from Xenopus frog embryos. So they called it Xenobot. They created these little micro-machines out of biological parts that could function that could move around and they moved around and they did little things and they're like, look, biological robot, this is so cool. Well, they went back to the drawing board and decided to play with their design of Xenobot a bit further and now they have the sequel to Xenobot and have created, as they say, a cellular platform for the development of synthetic living machines. They are reporting a method for generation of in vitro biological robots from Xenopus levis cells, so frog cells. They exhibit coordinated locomotion via cilia present on their surfaces. So they took frog embryos, took stem cells from the frog embryos, allowed those stem cells to grow into little spheroids, little balls of cells and those little spheroids then started to grow little hairy appendages all over them, cilia naturally. It's a natural process. It wasn't something that the researchers made the cells do. The cells did it themselves. There are lots of natural normal processes in which cilia arise in biological systems all the time, like our gut lining and all sorts of things. So these little cells got cilia all over the outside of them and so the researchers took them at that point and they started using them to make little robots. And so they basically have created these little robots that are amenable to high throughput projects. They arise by this cellular self-organization. They don't need any external stuff, no scaffolds, no micro printing. And you can also, they can be damaged. They tested them, they cut these cells like a significant slice out of the cells and the cells healed themselves within five minutes and were able to go on about their business. So they're amenable to surgical genetic chemical and optical stimulation during this self-assembly process. They can navigate aqueous environments in diverse ways and they have emergent group behavior. So these little tiny cells, there's a video of these little tiny cells wiggling around and in my view, I don't think it looks emergent group behavior, doesn't look like, but they are moving around in the same area together and in their motion are able to potentially collect little iron particles in the environment and move them out of the environment. These are not smart machines, but the machines have been, they have a genetic switch, a genetic trigger to have a memory of one bit on or off. And so with this genetic trigger, which is a fluorescent protein, if they are exposed to blue light they will fluoresce and they will have that memory of quote unquote memory of having been exposed to a particular light signal. So what they can do with this kind of model system is send these little frog bots into environmental, biological ecosystems into areas where they can play cleanup. They're thinking about using these kinds of, these Xenobots for cleaning up microplastics and all sorts of things that are difficult for humans to do, but that these little frog bots kind of do on their own. Frog bots, Xenobots. Spent so much time wondering if you could. Didn't stop to think about if you should. Yeah, that's interesting, it's kind of scary. It seems as though it's pushing this single, because these are single cells. These are little cilia covered single-celled frog organism bots. So yeah, is it pushing things in an evolutionary direction? Would that influence, would they be influenced in some way? They are biological, they can adapt, they can, if they survive and reproduce then that potentially becomes something. At this point in time, they survive a short period of time as long as they've got amniotic fluid nutrients to be able to rely on otherwise. They go into a sort of stasis if they are in and can remain in a stasis state for a fairly long period of time if they run out of nutrients or if they're taken out of a nutrient situation. But they can't reproduce on their own, they're just frog cells that move around. So on one hand, essentially remote controlled single-celled organisms could be super helpful in the medical field. Yes, super helpful. On the other hand, could kind of go the other way. On the other hand, it's one of those technology falls into the wrong hand sort of thing. Yeah. With the great medical and military applications of our new technology, we will save half and kill half of the planet at any time we choose. That's right, snap. It's a snap. Yeah, there seems to always be also this sort of deficit anytime we have done something that is very designed in terms of life, which is that we have created something that can perform a task that maybe we would not have been able to just naturally find anything in nature to simulate the activity. We can really engineer that. Only problem is we don't have all of the rest of evolution that took place to make a thing able to survive stochastically against many situations. So we're creating these born sick hybrid poodle things that are really good at fetching. But then, you know, if the temperature goes up five or down five degrees, they just die. They just die. Exactly. At some point, maybe there will be these biological soft-bodied machines that we will, yeah, that we'll be using, that will be helping us. Right now, what this is, is a platform for investigation. I mean, there is an emergent swarm behavior in these little single-celled organisms. That's interesting. Maybe there's something to learn there about swarm behavior. There's, yeah. So the bioengineering aspect of it also is, you know, that's still under development. This is definitely not released the frog cells into the wild stage yet at all. But Xenobots 2, the sequel, has arisen. It has. Stuff does escape from labs. Where's it the, I don't know where it is. Which Jackson lab it is, but they had the escape, I think. Maybe not, no, it was probably not a Jackson lab, but somewhere they had the Doogie Housermice to escape from a lab. The Doogie Housermice. It's like the rats of NIM. Yeah, the Doogie Housermice were these mice that were, are they rats? Maybe they're rats. Yeah, no, they were mice, yeah. They were designed to be exceedingly intelligent compared to other mice. And they were being utilized for experiment because they had apparently really good memories and some decent, I don't know, cognitive abilities. So they were really fun to run these complicated cognitive experiments on. And some of them have escaped over the years and out there in the wild breeding a potentially super intelligent race of mice that is interesting that we haven't heard anything about in a while. They figured it out. Oh, there's a case that I don't know about. Either that or they bred with wild mice and bred the smart right out of them. My money's on that one. You have to at some level always acknowledge when you're dealing with anything that you're going to let it out. Yep. Inadvertently, of course, accidentally, of course, unknowingly. This is always true with every chemical compound that we create. Just like every drug has a side effect that we don't find out about until 20 years later, 30 years later, 40 years later. Just like my anxieties and my stresses, I just push them deep down inside, but eventually they come out. No. Like so much microplastic. Like so much. Your bodily fluids. Yeah, it's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. But you know what else is gonna happen? What? We're gonna get to the end of the show. Oh. We did it. We did get to the end of the show. Did we do the shout out for the get-together thing? I did it once, but I will do it again now. I missed it, I missed it, it's on my phone. Yeah, you left the room. But a reminder, everyone, put it on your calendar, April 17th for the Twist DTNS Crossover Science and Technology Show. 4 p.m. Pacific time, April 17th. Mark your calendar. It's gonna be great. And let us know what you want us to talk about. You really should. Okay, so now it's time for us to say the thanks and the things and to, oh, there's my run sheet. It's time for a few shout outs. Shout outs to Fada. Thank you for your help making the show notes and the descriptions, the social media doing all that work. Really appreciate it. Gord, thank you for all your help in the chat room. Identity for it. Thank you for recording the show. And Rachel, we know you're real. 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Thank you for all of your support on Patreon. And if any of you are interested, in helping us out on Patreon, head over to twist.org and click on that Patreon link. And on next week's show, ooh, Wednesday, that is going to be, wait, wait, it's on the calendar. What is the day? It's World Beaver Day next Wednesday. And we are going to have an interview with a beaver expert next week. No way, really? Yes, way. Wow. That's exciting. Yes. Yes, it's very exciting. And I didn't write it down. Did I write it down in the show notes? Of course I didn't write it down in the show notes as to what his name is so that I can remember everything right now. Good, good, don't tell me. I don't want to know. Why would I tell you? And tell, right before the show. So yeah, on next week's show, we will be back Wednesday, 8 p.m. Pacific Time Broadcasting live from our YouTube and Facebook type channels, as well as from twist.org backslash live. Want to listen to us as a podcast? 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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. Ben Goldfarb. That's his name. Ben Goldfarb, that's his name. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method. He wrote a book called Eager, The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. Big shout out to Dan Christensen. Thank you for that donation during the show. Science. Science. Science. Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. Science. I've got a laundry list of items I want to address. From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. And I'll try to promote more rational thought. And I'll try to answer any question you've got. And you've got the half can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour To what we say And please just remember this week in science this week in science science This week in science this week in science This week in science science science This week in science this week in science This week in science this week in science I'm just gonna watch Blair training Sadie and get good lessons on how I should train my cats I don't think my cats are trainable They definitely are Are they um, I know they are are they food motivated? Berry yes Yes, I'm sure You can do it jump up Good job Sadie You win Barthender you're very wrong about that. So Sadie's just uh, learning if she waits long enough You'll give her the treat just to be in cute. No, no, no No, no, no we work for treats in this house Seriously, I mean you've been clicker training Brian so I forgot about that Oh man Did everyone says yay go Sadie How's my chat room? Oh good noodles your twist hoodie. Isn't it the nicest it's like a good thickness They are good hoodies Goodie hoodies the twist hoodies. Yeah Thanks for getting a hoodie Glad you like it Hot rod says give your pet affection not food as a reward for proper training It depends on the pet, right? Yeah, so there are also dogs who like Will work for a tennis ball, which like it totally it just depends but like depends on the animal She loves affection and affection is part of her training, but Um, there's she wouldn't do much if there wasn't food involved and I just use I don't use um super caloric treats Usually I use just her food which is enough for her So that way it's just part of her diet. It's not like Giving her diabetes or anything Yeah Yeah, but sometimes when she does stuff she just gets affection And that's okay. Yeah, she should oh there's a Justin Uh, I see a Justin. Oh, yeah tn. I saw um became a patreon patron today Thanks for joining us tn $50 a month level Oh my goodness. Yeah Welcome Thank you We absolutely get by with a lot of love from the listeners You are absolutely keeping this show going absolutely So much so much. I mean I would have to take I would I would have to take advertisers If it weren't for all the patrons, I've thought about going to advertising And having a an ad free feed for the patrons Which we could do maybe we had a couple ads when I started Yeah, I've had ads on and off through the years But we haven't had we haven't had like Sorry the the level where We are pitching product Really, I mean we pitched. Where do we pitch like the what was it audible? I hate do you like books? You can listen to a book if a reading is tedious for you You know, that's I don't feel like that's a hardest a very hard sell. No Yeah, and we're just Encouraging people to find Knowledge that's good Knowledge in literature. That's all good And it's like I've said before I think advertising for me even I don't want to just take any advertising It's like It's like a relationship with our listeners with the audience. We have a We have a relationship Can you imagine though if we were like If we had like followed every big uh advertising push so Again, we just want to reiterate we are uh The advice we're about to give you uh is disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer brought to you by the good People that produce the hydroxychloroquine who are telling you that it cures what ails you Okay, and next uh Any amount of pain is too much pain. That's why opiates are harmless and find to take Also buy my pillow living long um, there's a pillow that apparently um, can fix spina divinis and uh, glaucoma Um, and like several other Diseases this can't be right. Can we just can anybody can we fact check this before we go to air? I'm not Oh, can I tell you though? This is okay. I know I know right now I don't know where the vote is at. There's a thing going on with amazon And a unionization thing. Yeah, so I'm trying to avoid however Uh before this was going on before this was like taking place Uh the beginning of the month almost like a while ago. I ordered Uh my food from amazon to get it delivered. Uh, yeah including a Did it come from whole foods? No, actually, you know, I avoid whole foods. No, I do. I absolutely avoid whole foods Because I this is like this is a reverse. This is why this is why I'm I would suck Doing a promo like I'm about to say something nice about amazon, but whole foods sent me this this supposed, uh, uh Dijon mustard That was the color of mustard, but that's the only resemblance. That's the only resemblance it had to mustard Is that it was the color of mustard It was the most This like I love every kind of mustard. I have Are you mad at this mustard? I have five mustards. Are you mad at this mustard? I have five mustards in my fridge right now This one Went on ruined a piece of bread basically is what it did And ended up the whole thing went right into I had to actually taste it again just to see if Like why I did that I just the whole thing just went straight to trash. I got like five other mustards I just mixed it up. I like my ceramic was in there So so but no, this is this is the thing. This is the thing that happened though I got a recall notice On the mustard on hummus. No, this is I got a recall notice I won't say the brand but it's because well, no because you haven't heard There's a certain batch of the sabra hummus That's been recalled for salmonella I did not know that that's now that's issue I and and the reason I got the notice is because I had ordered it And gotten it mustard right not the mustard. We're talking hummus. I had ordered the hummus And and now I get this notice saying, you know, if it's this lot just check the labels the thing toss it out We had a FDA sampled and they found salmonella in some of the samples now Turn around time wasn't perfect because I've already eaten this hummus I'm fine I either didn't get one with enough salmonella or it wasn't the right lot. I don't know now But the thing that I was I'm just like been blowing my mind about this is that How many food recalls are there? The grocery store doesn't know who you are and doesn't have your number in your email and doesn't call you and say Hey The milk you just bought on tuesday. Don't finish it. Toss it the lettuce refund. Yeah, whatever it is Yeah, and you have to watch like the local news or something Who does that anymore or check, you know, go check FDA recall lists every day to see like how that information gets out It's always been just such a joke And here it is Here's the purchase that's tracked to your name and your address And here's the recall notice that we got and are providing it and sending that on to you That is the most brilliant piece of added value Amazon food delivery Uh, I'm just just like that added so much value to the whole They they're they still like I've not gotten a tomato that wasn't like squished or about to go bad I'm still upset with the tomatoes. But if they were salmonella tomatoes, you would know I'd know about it a month after I ate them But but still but still It's it's got to catch up a little bit the turnaround's got to be faster But that's just as soon as they that's just the process of figuring out when they had a problem, I guess And it might not have been it might be that because I've been ordering this They're pointing this out even if I don't have even if it wasn't the batch that I got sent I don't know. I don't have the packaging left to to compare it to because it's already gone But I still like that was I thought really cool Eric in Alaska is bringing up loyalty cards That he got a recall notice from a grocery store based on the information on the loyalty card So if you're actually using a loyalty card that is Yours and attached to the right phone number Um, and that can work that would not have worked for me when I used to shop at at a big store because I used the loyalty card of Somebody's roommate from like 10 years prior that everybody just passed that phone number along and we all kept using It wasn't ours. He got all the free sandwiches Got all the free sandwiches and also got called all the time for report recall. So like I haven't got it by that Why are they telling me? Yeah Right and you and thunder beaver you always use fake info for those things right lots of people Don't put the right information into them. It's just like I just want to get the discount. Yo come on Yeah, I thought that was pretty cool. I was pretty I was pretty impressed But uh, at least there attempts to give me the heads up Hot rod said there's one california lettuce plantation That's literally across the street from a cow ranch with a few thousand cattle I wonder where the e-coli is coming from the lettuce farmer defends this by saying they have had this set up for years And only recently the e-coli breakout happened. Yikes Well, isn't the e-coli and lettuce usually does not have to do with um humans In the field Yeah, usually. Yeah water. It is. It's water like a convenient scapegoat because I don't know I don't know How how True that is a good question. Yeah, because you're using fertilizer from various animal sources Well, and in other countries people Who's talking about boba clean their produce with like a 10 percent? Is it 10 percent bleach solution? Yeah, so yeah, so that's something also that like we are just super spoiled about not having to clean our produce Yeah, I admit it. I buy triple washed spinach. Yeah, just the general Even if I even if I do it even if I do it, I'm still getting grit all up in the spinach It's just like I'm not good at it. No Physics police says e-coli comes from improper growing conditions. I mean, that's that's a good catch all for it. It doesn't What are those improper conditions that allow the e-coli to run? I don't know Yeah Do you guys see the super worm moon? No, what The full moon this last weekend was a super worm moon. I didn't know it was called the super worm moon I did notice that it was big and full and was keeping me awake And I tried to pull the shades down so that I could sleep I learned that each of the full moons has a name according to the farmer's almanac And so this one was a worm moon because it's the one in spring at the turn of spring When all the worms start coming out of the soil because they've like defrosted Interesting. So it's called a super worm moon I like that. I've never heard of the worm moon, but that's great Oh, yes, and the super worm moon helped move the suez canal situation It's not fully out from what I hear, but um, it has moved. It has moved. It's not sideways It's not sideways. Yeah I think they've cleared it enough that the traffic is starting to flow again, right? Starting. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, and um, and yes, so the super it's called a super moon because it's nice and big and and the The pull on the tides is extra heavy That was the thing about suez canal. Is it rise raise the tide? Which is they needed they needed a super high tide. Oh fantastic. I get that that makes sense So after all of the man-made interventions they tried in the end the tide Is what helped them get that boat out of the canal that that that ship in that canal it All right, you can see it from space Yeah, so if you want a big that giant ship through a tiny space like that like Maybe Maybe the trade-off you're making is you're moving more stuff But it's gonna take two weeks longer and you have to go around the horn. Maybe you can't go through the canal Or so all of the ships that all of the ships are that big now though. Yeah, but When they made the canal they weren't that big Make the canal bigger You just actually I think what they need to do is just look at the weather report Uh, one thing you can always tell out here in the central valley It's going to be a gorgeous windless day When you look to look up and you can see out up out now over the some of the ag land Uh, you see the hot air balloons are up Then you know There's not going to be wind today Gonna be a nice nice windless day nothing crazy going on That's what apparently did it. It was high winds Yeah, it was high winds but they just got turned by wind That is look at the weather forecast big windy day. Yeah, maybe chill out for you know, take it a couple days off to the big And I think I don't know because like In the in the microscope they have bar pilots right and like the wind in the bay sounds like a bad combination Is inside insane the wind is just it can be crazy But these people jump from a little tugboat onto a ladder on these giant container ships And pilot these giant container ships through a space that is not that much bigger Maybe has a few you know, I'm exaggerating, but it's like a few feet of room on either side It's not huge these these little um these little uh Channels that are in the bay for these giant container ships because that the average depth of the bay is like 10 feet or something So like thanks for the channel, right? Right, they have to come in through the channel But those ships are not coming in at low tide like a lot of them will actually Stay outside of the bay and they'll like take their time coming in so they can time it to come in During a higher tide so that they're not going to have as much of an issue But like do they have canal pilots? That's my question is like are people just Steering as best they can is that why this happened If they had canal pilots who like their entire job was to steer this This ship through the eye of a needle. I think it's just the ship captains. I think the ship the ship captains take them through Like there was somebody Uh who was like a ship captain from another ship who was complaining about that ship for being like rude and like basically like Passing them in a like and was like this guy was going too fast Anyway, and then he got in there and he couldn't handle the wind and there was there was some funny conversation on twitter I was like wow Ship captains bad mouthing each other On twitter. Yeah, so, you know, I'm just saying it seems like that works pretty well in a lot of places They have harper pilots and bar pilots like maybe there should be a pilot You say it but at a certain point I mean if it's that windy and the wind is coming at a certain angle that could push the rear of the boat One way or the other like if you're so big and heavy If it gets just a little bit too far that you're you're not going to be able to come back from that And that's what happened Yeah, that's the scary thing about those big ships is like by the time you realize you've made a mistake It's too late. There's literally nothing you could do Okay, but here's the here's the slow motion. You know that that happened in slow motion Here's the thing though How many ships are going through there 10 of all the trade? It's going overseas or something passes through that canal How many times has this happened? One I've we've ever heard of that we've ever heard of so whatever it is. It can't be that big a deal I think I think what it must come down to is that you know, there's the wind. There's the speed There's the how heavy or how big it is somebody screwed up Yeah Yeah Operator error it could have been pushing forward when they should have waited or whatever But yes, you're right. Somebody screwed up if that many other ships have managed to get through all the time and never wedged themselves in there It's not a canal design issue stop blaming the weather There's been all the weathers and there've been ships going through there. It's been fine. It's been fine somebody screwed up You know, no, nobody screwed up. They just wanted to create a situation for the best memeable photographs Mm-hmm Oh Eric and alaska, uh, just shared A marketplace about a columbia river bar pilot in our in our chat um But then also asked did you see the story about the anchorage cosco where the ravens are raiding people's shopping carts Hmm Girls The ravens are like give me your food. Wait, where is this? Anchorage, alaska ravens They're stealing people's i mean cosco you've got those big unwieldy shopping carts parking lot and it's the Crazy parking lot and you probably got your six kids in tow on your way to your minivan And you're just like Then the raven comes in it's also because you're trying to like you're trying to uh You're trying you're holding the the drink that you got at the little And the hot dog, right? Yeah, but the I don't know if anybody else says is the lids that they give you at the cosco Don't actually stay on the top of the cup And so you're trying to balance this thing in the shopping cart because You got it and you should have just eaten there, but it was so busy. It's just i'm going home And then and then it starts to you know, it's falling over. You know, it's not going to make it. Wow tm tn Amazing Gigantic uh Shout out. We need a what is that thing called the shofar? What the? One of those kind of sounds we need a sound effects crew for this thing Tn with the 500. Wow, that's gonna go a long way. That's gonna take this show on the road That's getting this partway to one of those those road trips where we get to go out and And visit people in the in the country Where we're someday Really want my rv to work someday It's russian currency. Okay, whatever russian currency. No, whatever it still works I don't know what the army quarves trying to figure it out. Oh, it's real Somebody's saying is it brazilian or just real? Real Thank you. We can talk about things. Thank you so much. Thank you Yeah, talk about Costco ravens. I mean they know how the supersize packages work There's a lot of packaging impact in costco stuff though So how do they get through it all sometimes it's like a bag in a bag in a box No, no, no, no, no, that's the thing about costco is they don't bag anything No, these boxes to stack everything So they're just swooping down and taking yeah, you're right. It's like a 20 pound bag of almonds So yeah, these must be For example, like cheese is like bulk. It's it's 10 bags of cheese in a bag in a box It's true Yeah, so I I don't know Um, I bought a laughing cow like the creamy swiss there Um recently and it so it's three individual wheels Inside of a box and inside each wheel are the foil wrapped Pieces of cheese. I was like this is this is too much You got done yourself today. It's really intense. Wait, what ravens can open doors? Eric They're not that big No No, I don't want to I do not want to subscribe to the Anchorage Daily News But you're not gonna let me in Okay, nobody nobody do the math on Tian's donation I think it's fine to put it in a currency that makes the number look the biggest I'm all for that. I'm it's much more exciting. It's amazing. We got it. Yeah you Oh, oh wow, we like the same cheese Oh, yeah, I was just in Tillamook. Oh my gosh. Okay. Yeah Okay, you guys So in Tillamook they have the Tillamook Creamery and they also have a Tillamook crematorium Please explain this is too close I'm sorry, I came for a tour of your cheese making facilities. I think I'm in the wrong place Yeah, yeah, you know won't you any won't touch the uh the pre shredded cheese Because she won't explain it exactly but she knows to me, but she knows or maybe she's tried to explain it to me and I just But she knows how it's how it's made to stay looking fresh It's in a giant shredded No, there's more There's chemicals involved. Yeah There's a lot of preservative to make the shredded cheese look fresh Uh, so yeah, I'm off shredded cheese. That's interesting. You can shred your own cheese It doesn't take that long. You just gotta get one of those gloves that prevents you from uh, you know cutting yourself Oh, yeah It's all we went you just gotta eat that last little nub. You can't No, no, you gotta get the gloves so then you can get aggressive with it because it's annoying to be like I don't want to die from shredding shredding cheese. I'll eat the chemicals Just get the glove and then you can do that with the immunity. You can't even it's just I went to the tillamook creamery um this on monday on monday I went to the creamery and Kai wanted ice cream and they sell ice cream and luckily they have like an outdoor little ice cream booth so it was outdoor totally fine, but there was a line of people Many of them not wearing masks to get indoors to their gift shop and the tour and We had at first thought hey that could be fun to go tour the creamery facility and then we saw all that we went Oh, no Oh, no, no, no So we just got out today, huh? We got we got ice cream and then we went and we sat in our car and we ate it This week in science is sad to announce the passing of kirsten sanford Uh, it started when she tried to get ice cream Uh in a in a line of people who weren't wearing masks And basically that's the whole story. Uh, that's the whole yeah, not worth it. Not Worth it There's so much else the With the rest of the you know, not worth it Yeah, I was just I was like wow there were a lot there were a lot of people wearing masks But many who were not and it was just very It's like oh interesting. Oh, so me and uh, my little list went to the zoo This weekend nice zoo There were uh For the most part it's limited you have to buy tickets online They have limited people going into the zoo all the whole thing wear masks I saw about a half a dozen adults who were just wandering around without the mask once they were inside And I wanted to kick them all out, but I was like I I I don't have I'm not the person who should confront people In these situations because I'm Too aggressive verbally Yeah, um, but but they have a new exhibit Uh, uh, uh Gosh, what is it called? Akapai what is it called? It's like they have a copy They're having a copy. They have two It is the first time I had ever seen one in person They have two of them at the back end of a zebra The head of a giraffe that's kind of like a deer meets and then the body of a moose So I have seen pictures of a copy copy Ocopy Ocopy and we saw ocopy in baltimore, justin. Okay. I don't remember. I think I missed them I think I missed them. We saw them at the maryland zoo I think I missed it because ocopy in my mind is like, uh Uh a small deer I've seen the pictures a million times and I don't know why what reference point I ever had for it But I've always pictured them like being the size of a small deer like very Very kind of smallish foresty type creature, savannahish creature, whatever they are This thing is like big as a moose. They're huge They are they are giraffes out the long neck. They are closer really right at your giraffe. They got the little giraffe What are they called antenna? How many, how many, how many? Ossicones Ossicones, they got the little Ossicones The giraffe antenna They got the long purple tongue thing Right and then they've also got the prehensile lippity stuff And then yeah, they have like full on zebra stripes on the rear course, which I've seen the pictures But I had no they were there were five six times bigger than I had uh had them place held in my in my head They're on my spot list of favorite animals for sure. Um, they are essentially rainforest giraffes Rainforest. Oh, yeah, that's right. It did tell us that there were rainforest creatures. That's right So, yeah, so they have the shorter neck and they have the um the striped rear to kind of help with um Camouflage in a thick forest because you have like the the strands of light coming through right but Um, yeah, they're wild. I love them. They're critically endangered Uh, I've just done an update animals. I've just gotten an update. It's uh, this is specifically the uh the shredded cheese to avoid is the parmesan cheese that's already pre-shredded And it's be it's for it not to clump up again Is why they do it Hi, yana Somebody's watching Um, that's interesting Huh Um, yeah, oh copies are great. I didn't know the sacks. You've got those two got two except they're not uh, they're not together because apparently they're very uh anti-social creatures Um, they're solitary for sure, but also um, they probably are uh, I could imagine they may be waiting awaiting a breeding recommendation to put them together If there's a male and a female Who I was reading about ravens in Costco parking lot. Oh, yo copies and then there was there was this really terrifying moment Where I looked into this cage that normally have these little wolf monkey given thing I don't know what they are these tiny little cute Wolf monkeys. I don't know what they are little monkeys cute. They run around as a whole family that lives in this one enclosure Okay I don't remember the name wolf gibbon. Is that a thing? No No, no It'll just be like and Justin gives a tour through the zoo Are you talking about a wolf? Making up names of animals Gannon, that's why you're getting is again. I'm saying gibbon. I'm saying gibbon. Yeah. Yes. Okay. That's a real thing Hello everybody Justin's tour is actually more accurate than he thought I was just close. It's close. It's close to the right answers Anyway, I looked into this exhibit and there's this giant eagle thing In there and I'm like, oh my god an eagle got in and ate all the wolf gannon It ate all the little monkeys Apparently the genins are just on vacation and while they're away the I don't think they're gonna let an eagle in to eat all the all the babies also primates are animals that are often Put into exhibits with other species because primates are pretty good at Defending their space. So I would also guess this was big tally Yeah, but I feel like an eagle might not go for a monkey with giant also canines These are tiny monkeys with venomous canines Oh, maybe I don't know. All right. Let's not try here. Look at the genins But they weren't in there together. They look like they need venom I like how google's like did you mean wolf spider? No That's not what I meant. I got the wolf in the monkey part, right? I just had a gibbon instead again Did you guys hear about the Nemo jumping spider? No, what's named this week? Oh, cute Like Nemo dude. Yeah, I love jumping spiders Which is pretty funny considering. You don't like spiders generally, right? But I love jumping spiders Because they have so much personality. They really do When it's always I'm having a fun time waving Woo I love them Merit emeritus Nemo He's pretty cute Fun fact about clownfish spider If the matriarch the head female disappears Uh, the lead male will turn into a female a female Yeah, we talked about on the show. Yeah, it would have been a very different story if they followed nature Yes, yes marlin should have turned into a female Yeah, and then You know somebody made that decision at some point, you know, there was somebody like well, you know about these fish This is what happens and somebody was like, yeah, no, we're not gonna Also, uh, clownfish aren't monogamous. So That's the other thing. There would have been several so Marlin wouldn't have been the only Deadie in the area and disney could you just please stop killing off all the parents? You're putting ideas in the heads of the kids So there is an interesting, uh, interview between pete davidson and glenn close Oh, yeah Yeah, and in it she talks about playing cruella de vil and she um She has this she has this moment of talking about how when she was little she used to watch disney movies all the time and along the way realized that For the story to happen That what happens is that The child has to have something bad happen to them And then be saved have you know in order to have something good So that's their how their story arc has to happen And nothing bad can happen to the child as long as the mother is there And so all the disney movies have they get rid of the mom in one way or another there's an there's There's right, but the the dad might be in the picture somewhere, but he's like not there really He's not paying attention or he had to go away for some reason You know, yeah, bambi the dad is off somewhere doing something else, you know He's being the king of the forest. It's an important job Yeah, yeah, so it wasn't interesting the dad is still there in snow white. He just It's like he's not in the picture. He's off doing no snow white. The dad died Did he died because he's because it's the stepmother. It's part of the monologue is uh, yeah, because I know I know the mother died and he remarried, but then he also dies. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, he dies later Yeah, but then there's always and but the mother gets replaced with an evil stepmother who can also be a witch You know, so there's like these like the evil. So yeah, it's just really interesting the way that the stories put together Silverman's character and Wreck-It Ralph at some point Uh, the turning point is when they they stare at important water The princess has to look somebody has to look at important water And then for some it's looking into a well For some it's a fountain for some it's a still pond for There's a weird thing Where all the princesses have their sort of Transitional moment that usually turns into song After staring into like a reflection or bubbles underwater if you're already underwater like aerial That's some sort of weird water moment And that then becomes the transformative moment uh to inspire them onward I stared into important water and my life has never been the same since Yeah, thunder beaver and heavy metal bands and fans are the ones who get blamed for the whole kill your parents thing, right? Disney seriously Mulan the whole thing because it centers around a reflection song. Absolutely I think it's snow white has the Looking into a well or something Identity four you have to wake up at five That's early Oh, it is after 11. Yeah identity. How is it after 11? I already noodle says keep it going Eric this yes, this quote is so good Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Hello, monty python But if that's not then what is because really I feel like that might be an improvement some days um, I watched they have a um They have a documentary on netflix now a six-part Um documentary on the history of monty python Oh, really? It's really good. Yeah, I watched it all in one day. Wait. Wait a second. Wait a second. Where is this? What is netflix? Okay, I've seen this then but I don't know which one I've seen because I think it came out like a weeks ago or a month ago movie. I don't know. Okay, so then it's old because I've seen one since Monty python Must have more documentaries about A three-year show And and some movies that came after but they have more there are more monty python documentaries Then there are works by monty python at this point It's really fascinating Hey, listen if they can keep riding that train. I don't blame them Um, and each time they're like this is the last time we're gonna tell these old stories So I'll just tell you the stories that Maybe it's hard to learn a dozen times before because we're kind of running out of stories at this point But they always have more and more great I would love to watch actually all of the monty python Documentaries in order to watch them age over the course of three days What I have noticed from these documentaries is that as time goes on They are more brutally honest about one another So in this one They clearly did they no longer cared about being nice and they just told the Pretty unpolished truth about each other and about their relationships throughout the thing which was very Interesting and like you could tell there was no hard feelings at all They were just like we're too old to like pretend that we were happy with one another about this one thing Yeah, and so it's Like they talked It wasn't like angry there wasn't like vitriol behind it But it definitely was very matter of fact of like john cleese talking about like how he and terry jones did not like each other And so fun fact by the way A lot of people found their tumors, but it really hurts to get hit in the face with a fish It really it is not comfortable. I did not like that scene. I know it's popular amongst the fans But it really hurts to get it stings they have scales and it stings to get hit in the face with a fish like Stop it. No at some point they're just making stuff up making me laugh, sir Like I've got no more stories, but if you dig deep and come up with something We can pay give you another paycheck for sitting down and babbling Semi-coherently into a camera for half an hour. All right, let's give it a go. So I've I've read several, um Biographies and stuff about them. You might be right gaurav And um, there's definitely like john cleese is someone who I think has Never sugar coated things too much. No, it's always been a little bit crass. Yes Yes, but other people have and I think that it was really interesting this time to say like Uh, yeah terry jones and john cleese didn't really like each other and actually they're uh The fact that they would debate about the status of sketches and things like that They were kind of the opposing sides and then the rest of the team would Um, kind of make the decisions and break the tie on a lot of things and so when john cleese left There was this weird power vacuum, which was like, you know, that kind of stuff is pretty interesting um But yeah, just hearing both of them kind of talk about that. Hey, do you guys want to start Do you want to scrap this whole science thing and do like a sketch comedy show because I would really like that Can we do that? It would be a lot of fun. I think I think we've done enough I mean, I feel like we've gone far enough with this genre I think we should just start doing a sketch comedy show. We should put together a troop You know and tour the country doing like uh Live sketch comedy. We need a juggler also actually we need a juggling monkey. Can you train a monkey to juggle blur? We just need to get one of those rabbits Now blaze amazing Hand walking rabbits. How does she train them? How do they do it folks? Ladies and gentlemen Dispel all disbelief as you watch the wonder of the hand walking rabbits Oh, yeah, uh, what was this wait? Yeah, uh, uh, Twists episode 1000 is going to be the host yelling swear words at each other You just missed the you just got you guys missed the pre show. We never started airing that yet So we we we slightly talked about what's coming on the show and then it's like oh more neanderthals great Oh, yeah, no, that's what because that's what we talked about. Isn't it in the last meeting we talked We need another neanderthal story. Justin. That's what we talked about, isn't it? Well, no, but this one was just particularly interesting because it has like yeah, yeah something about neanderthals. Yeah All right. Okay. Well player. What do you got? I don't want to say come on player. What do you have? I don't and I have vertebrate sex and a jumping spider story. Oh my god Oh I haven't we worn out that is there anybody who's missing another one of those stories. Okay fine. Okay. Save us kiki Save us kiki. What what have you got? What have you got? Something complicated about a pathway in the brain Okay, it's gonna be one of those nights, isn't it? All right. Well Let's just get through this one. Let's do a tight 90 and be out and then we'll call it next week. We'll come up with something I've done before That's pretty much how every pre-show goes Yeah Oh, that's funny That's that's funny. Justin. That's talking about maybe that we have a pre-show and we don't Uh You do have another joke that you got to hear was the idea that we ever talk about the show before we do the show I mean we have the show notes. We have we have a a set thing that we have to bring But we don't vet each other or Storyboard or standard do any of that stuff I have once in a while I try to like if I can get there early enough if it well If you guys have stories or we have a guest and it's all there early enough. I might try to like Taylor the disclaimer a little bit to the show or the guest Uh, if it's uh, if it's all Showing up last minute. I might even still try to do that But for the most part that becomes its own isolated thing that could happen I should just take like a week off and just write like the next 52 disclaimers And then but you wouldn't You will then also they're not as topical. No, they have to be slightly every once in a while. They're topic they get a little topic You should do more shows drunk Are you gonna disclaimer beavers next week? Yeah, totally Did did you see the meme of uh about the Suez canal and beavers? No, okay Frumpy bee says we should do more shows. Huh interesting We should just do more shows apparently uh Drunk on water and high on life Tight 90 oh my gosh Yeah, we should absolutely. I mean if we if we keep doing what we're doing for the next 40 minutes we can do an april fools day show We all do need to get some sleep. You're right It would be good Where's trying to find a joke that she meant to tell Five minutes ago and it's still struggling to find the material. I can't find it. It was just basically We'll fix it in post. It's it's big. So it's a picture It's a picture of the of the ever given in the Suez canal And then uh, it shows uh jeff goldblum and it says uh beavers Says you crazy son of a bitch you did I love it Oh, it's good. That's all that's all You know the beavers comes because the the ever given It's like a dam I have I have material. I have material already for the sketch comedy show physics police I'm I'm ready to rock. I've got like at least one episode Locked and loaded ready to go I'm a little afraid Yeah, you should be It's good. It's good stuff. It'll make you laugh But you can't bring your whole family to see it. Yeah That's the problem I made that one Oh boy, that was one I I memed I made a meme. That's hilarious. Oh Oh Sad because it's true It's already april 1st somewhere Oh, jeez. Okay. Well before it's april 1st here anybody hear about the congressperson when the house voted 180 uh 118 to 1 And the senate was also was completely unanimous in favor of passing a strict sex trafficking law that that one person who voted against was a congressperson who's now under investigation for sex trafficking Ah Can't write that that just happened That just happened the one congressperson who voted against the sex trafficking bill Is being investigated for sex trafficking, which I'm just now assuming That's what started the investigation Identity four says I need to end the short to show now Okay, say good night Say good night identity four Say good night Blair. Good night Blair. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin Good Good night, everyone We won't be back We'll be back next week to talk about beavers I hope you join us because it's going to be sciencey and awesome. Have a wonderful week Stay safe. Stay well