 Let's see when it goes live on our channel. Hey, everybody. We are here for another episode of This Week in Science, starting in three, two. This is Twist. This Week in Science, episode number three. I can't even speak. Starting again. What episode is it, Kiki? It got it written right down here. I just couldn't speak for a moment. Kiki's buffering. Am I muted? No, you're fine. Justin's just being... Three, two. This is Twist. This Week in Science, episode number 731. Recorded on Wednesday, July 24th, 2019. Archaeology from Spain. Hey, everyone. I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight we will fill your head with parenting, females, and a locker, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The following acts of communication are all in your head. Nothing you are hearing now is happening now. Not even the sound of this voice saying these words. The person most often associated with the sound of this voice is not actually saying this right now. In fact, his lips may not even be moving. What you are listening to now is a recording of a voice, a voice that in a short while will be accompanied by other voices, all telling you about the amazing things that are happening now, or happened long ago, or might happen in the future. As we speak, these voices are taking up residence in your head, free wallpaper in the interior of your skull, setting up subtle, sciency subroutines in your subconscious mind, navigating your every third thought in the direction of this weekend's science. Coming up next. Rock one. Tonight is the night. It's over. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to learn everything. I want to fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know what's happening. What's happening? What's happening this weekend's science? What's happening? What's happening? What's happening this weekend's science? Good. Thanks to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. It's time again for another episode of This Week in Science. Oh, we're back again after another week. So much fun. So much fun. So much science. I brought stories about fake visions and parent brain. And we have an interview this evening to discuss space archeology with Dr. Sarah Parkack. That'll be coming up in just a few moments. Justin, what did you bring? I didn't know space archeology was the thing I could have done. That sounds really awesome. I can't wait. Oh, wow. This is a synthetic protein that can work inside living cells called locker. That's going to be really exciting. There is a study looking into global warming. I'll spoiler. It confirms it. But give some explanation for some of the decade-long shifts that we've seen over the last few thousand years. And something from a scientific journal of marketing. Scientific journal of marketing. Marketing can be very scientific, Justin. So I'm looking forward to hearing all about that one. Blair, what's in the animal corner? I have sex-changing fish. I have screaming embryos. And I have some climate change. I don't want any more climate change. Well, I have climate change news. I'm not bringing you more climate change. Just some science related to the inevitable effects. We have enough of the science. The climate change coming without any more. But yes. Okay. News for that. I'm going to go forward to it as well as the other animal corner news. As we jump into the show, I want to remind everyone that if you have not done so previously, you can subscribe to This Week in Science, all places that podcasts are found. iTunes, Google, Spotify, Spreaker, Radio.com, Pandora. Tune in. Just look for This Week in Science or Twist. Also, you can go to YouTube and find us there. We're also on Facebook. You can find us easily at twist.org for information. Okay. Now it is time for our interview. I'd love to introduce our guest tonight, Dr. Sarah Parcak. Dr. Parcak is a space archeologist. And like Justin said, maybe many of you didn't know this was a thing that you could do. We'll talk about that. She's a professor of anthropology and director of the Laboratory for Global Observation at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. An expert in using satellites for remote sensing and in archeology and Egyptology. She's a National Geographic Explorer and a TED Senior Fellow, won the 2016 $1 million TED prize, which that money was then used to launch a citizen science platform called Global Explorer that aims to bring the wonders of archeological discovery to everyone. And she has a book that's out now called Archeology from Space, How the Future Shapes Are Past. Dr. Parcak, thank you for joining us tonight on the show. Thank you so much. And can I just say I'm renaming my garage band name to Screaming Embryos? Yeah. That's a good one. You're welcome. Oh, for all the good band names, come to this week in science. You're going to Blair. Just go straight to Blair. I have a list. All right. To get started, I'd love to know first, what is a space archaeologist and how did you become one? So it's kind of the super fun public facing name of what I do. Like most scientists, I wear a lot of hats. I'm an anthropologist. I'm a landscape archaeologist. But my specialization is that I look at different types of satellite imagery to try to find subtle hints of entire ancient settlements or very speakers on sites or even environmental features like rivers that may indicate where humans used to live. I did not come up with the terms based archaeology. That is NASA's fault. Yes, it is their fault. They have a space archaeology program that funds exactly what I do. And if NASA calls what I do a space archaeology or go I am a space archaeologist. I mean, look, yes, technically I'm a mid-proposphere, multi to hyperspectral pixel, surface feature detection analysts, and now all your listeners are asleep. Space archaeology, let's get all the kids excited about science. That's kind of whatever it takes. Absolutely. How did you get interested in doing archaeology in this particular manner? Oh, frozen again. We had everyone out there. We've had a few technical difficulties this evening. So hopefully Dr. Parkack will come back in a moment and we will start again with that question if we haven't. But in the meantime, we will... So there's a couple of things that I immediately have jumped out. Like I want to ask if she's part of them or the things that came to mind immediately were... There were settlements in South America that were seen from space. There's the newfoundland, the early Viking attempts at getting a foothold in North America that were spotted, the longhouses, sort of the outlines of this were seen in soil differentiations. I know that they've been doing all sorts of non-penetrating things and looking through Egypt. So this is if anybody who's ever played with a surface version of like a Google Earth where you can go around, just sort of wander around and see interesting things like what is this structure in the middle of the wilderness? What's going on there? Where did this come from? If you have a trained eye in archaeology, you can differentiate what is a man-made feature versus what is just a natural feature? Absolutely. And I hope that we'll talk about that in a minute because that is part of what is in her book is differentiating some of these features. How you look at stuff from space and how you... There we go. I have the worst Wi-Fi. Sorry to all your listeners. Anyway, long story short, I'm back. The reason I do what I do is because my grandfather, he was a forestry professor at the University of Maine in Orno and a member of the 101st Screaming Eagles in World War II. He pioneered the use of aerial photographs and the use of analyzing old forests. So he used overlapping aerial photographs to measure tree heights. And he's the reason I took my first remote sensing classes in undergraduate. So at the time, high-resolution imagery was super expensive. I mainly looked at NASA satellite imagery. So it was really, really just getting going in the early 2000s. So it could have been called aerial archaeology. That's right. So that's still part of the field of archaeology, the field of interpreting aerial photographs. Obviously very important even now, especially as we look at old photographs from the sort of 50s and 60s that, indeed, show landscapes that no longer exist. They're helping our analysis map sites. In fact, the coolest, one of the coolest satellite data sets I use is high-resolution black and white corona spy photographs from the 60s and 70s. And I get to look at old images of Egypt and map parts of sites that are largely gone. Right. So there's places now that are parking lots or housing development and all this stuff. And then we've sort of lost any trace of what could have been there. And by analyzing these old images, it becomes maybe apparent to somebody with a trained eye. That's right. And what we're looking for from space, first of all, we're looking for the chemical signatures of entire sites. So everything on the Earth's surface has its own distinct chemical signature. And I'm using the same images, processing techniques, computer programs that, say, biologists use when they're looking at vectors for animals or diseases or urban scientists who are looking at change detection, people who are looking at mapping the polarized caps over time. And when I say chemical signature in the light spectrum, different things spike in different parts, whether it's a barn for Ed. And sometimes entire archaeological sites will have their own distinct chemical signature. Sometimes things that are buried under the ground will be reflected in different parts of the light spectrum. So think of it kind of like a cool, space-based CAT scan where things buried under the ground will affect the overlaying vegetation or soils or whatever or geology in ways that we can't see with our naked human eye, but we can in different parts of the light spectrum that we can see in different kinds of satellite imagery. And one of the examples of this that jumped to my mind was the Long Houses in Newfoundland where they identified what looked like the structures of Viking-type settlements on islands that they hadn't ever considered Vikings to have gotten to. But the outlines that they could see somehow from the differentiation of the soil kind of painted the picture of a typical Norwegian or whatever Viking Long House settlement. And then, of course, people have to go into the field, get on boats, go out to these islands and do some digging, but actually found evidence that these stones were placed here and they had foundations and the like. Yeah, so in archaeology, no matter where we're looking for anything, whether it's in Egypt or Newfoundland or Peru or China, it doesn't matter. We're going from the known to the unknown. So before we even start this project work, obviously this is science. We don't necessarily go somewhere because, gee, there's something cool there. We go because we're interested in answering a question. We develop a hypothesis about that place. Maybe this settlement moved here the next period of time. Maybe we think the civilization collapsed for different reasons and we're trying to find evidence for that. So we develop databases of dozens, hundreds of known examples of different sites and features. And so before we even begin processing, we have to think, what are we finding? And then we look at the areas, geology. We look at weather patterns. We look at the soil. We look at seasonality. That's a big deal. You might find something in spring that we may or may not find in the fall. And that's before we even order the imagery. So it's a really detailed, almost kind of like a detective process that we worked through before we actually start analyzing the imagery. Yeah. And I'd love to know more about global explorer, though. So from the science perspective, it's hypothesis driven. You're following a trail of people in a particular area looking for evidence of their activities. Is it the same kind of idea with the citizen science projects that you've got on global explorer, or are you really just kind of using people's eyes to get you images that might be useful later? Right. So when we were developing global explorer, we wanted to create an experience for the people who would be using it. It would be very similar to a remote sensing scientist. Now, it's not like they're getting on the platform and they're doing advanced algorithms to find a specific tiny feature on a single site. What they're doing is they're looking at the same level of zoom that we would do for a satellite image. So that's about the right distance if you get on. And then they're determining whether or not there are specific shapes or features in that satellite image. So this is very high resolution. So 0.5, 0.4, even 0.3 meter resolution data. Is there something there that merits further analysis? And what we're doing is it's not just like one person can see a thing and then it gets kicked to us. A minimum of six people need to look at a single satellite image and five out of the six of them need to agree that it either is a thing or isn't a thing. That's just the number that we came to over time and talking to other sort of online citizen science projects and PIs. And in a way, that sort of gets around, in some cases, the lack of expertise. If five out of six people say it's a thing, what we found when we looked at the back end, when we get the data, that our users have between an 85% and 90% success rate in terms of detecting teachers. So they're really good at it. And obviously you get better over time. And so what we're doing is we got areas of interest from the Peruvian government, from the Ministry of Culture. So we took that information or that desire for more information from them. We're working very hard to collaborate, of course, with ministries wherever we go. And then we set the eyes of our crowd on those specific places. And what we did is we shared the data with archeologists on the ground. In one case, working with this amazing gentleman, Dr. Louis Jaime Castillo, who's now the Minister of Culture in Peru, he used the information from our crowd and did additional drone mapping that led to the discovery of 50 new Nazca lines. So this idea of collaboration, empowering local archeologists with the data that the crowd gathers. So we've had to learn a lot about citizen science as we've gone along. The ethics around it are murky. There's a lot of give and take. How do you respond to the crowd? How do you give them and thank them? And make them feel like they're part of this larger scientific effort, which they are. And the goal, once we kind of sift through more data, is to do a huge peer-reviewed publication. And all the citizen scientists should be authors, in my opinion. I think that's wonderful. There have been a few publications that have published these kinds of citizen science endeavors that have published with the long list of names of citizen scientists who have been involved and it's pretty neat to see. For your project that you have now, I was digging around on your Global Explorer site. And it's currently a question of looking for looting versus not looting. Can you talk about the problem of looting and what you're hoping to, what you're hoping to find with this particular project? So yes, so on the platform, so one of the things that we grappled with and are still grappling with are user engagement and user experience, so UX and UI. And what we decided to do was to, it's not like people are just going on the platform and they're clicking buttons and that's it. It's actually a game. So there are 10 distinct levels. The more piles you examine, the more you level up. And so you start off on the looting level and you're just looking at this image as they're looting, isn't there looting? And the thing about looting is it looks the same everywhere in the world. So it's holes in the ground surrounded by donut shape of earth. I should say too for the people that are listening, it's not just like we throw you on the platform and start, you take several tutorial videos to show you different examples of sites and features in looting. And unfortunately, looting is a problem over the world. Certainly it's a huge problem in Peru. We see a lot of objects on the black market here in the US and in other places. So by determining that there's looting going on at a site, bad information can then be shared with government officials. It's not up to us to prosecute or investigate. It's always up to the governments. But at least we have a good map of where it's going on. And if you have a map where it's happening, then you can take steps to hopefully do something about it. So after I think it's a thousand tiles, then you level up to discovery, which is one of course you can start looking for sites. That's pretty exciting. But is the problem of looting, is it a really bad problem? I mean we've got movies like Tomb Raider and even with Indiana Jones. There was looting. I will admit that. Totally problematic. Yeah, I mean, so looting is not a black or white issue. There are many, many shades of gray. The first people, most people in the West tend to blame are the looters themselves. I don't blame them. I blame the Western collectors. If there's no market, people aren't going to loot. I don't blame them. I blame the Western collectors. People aren't going to loot. And then there's this picture painted of poor, desperate, local people who are doing it to survive. That's also not true. Looting is in many cases like a gig economy. You need to get some money to maybe send your kids to school or an operation or something short term or quick. So I think we in the West have a lot to answer for. Look at Christie's and Sotheby's. They're always in the news because they're yet another object. It has falsified what we call provenance or area of origin. And it was very likely looted. So what I do whenever I speak publicly is I say to people, why would you want to own a piece of the past? Basically your golem and you want to sit in your layer and stroke. Like you take it out and you show it to your friends and you have a thing from I sold and congratulations you funded terrorism. Versus why don't you take that million dollars or whatever you paid for it and fund 20 excavations for multiple years of digging and you at your fancy people rich parties get to brag that you helped to rewrite history. This is very similar to how we talk about it. Why would you want to own that endangered animal in a rug or taxidermied item instead of using that money to preserve that species and I don't know if you want to take your buddies on a safari to see them go ahead but that does way more good. Absolutely. The juxtapose here I'm hearing is that science isn't paying enough. Because the early days of archeology was sounding like how did so many Egyptian artifacts end up in British museums? British museum. It was technically the version of looting I guess but the preservation aspect and the public aspect and the transparency thing I think would be the differentiation we're talking about this. And also like rampant colonialism obviously still a huge problem where a lot of us are fighting in the fields. But ironically in spite of all the issues, challenges, problems, this model that existed through the 30s and 40s and still does to some extent today a very wealthy donors and sponsors helping to support archeological research. I think that's the wave of the future whether it's microfunding through Kickstarter or GoFundMe or whatever it is or donors and finally it can come to your site it can come Queen Pottery for a day if it just isn't the government funding anymore, it's drying up so we need to think about better models for sustainable funding to help support this work because so many scientists are struggling right now. Yeah and you're also dealing with a world that is rapidly changing we have climate change where many areas that might be of interest will be under water soon and you'd have to be a marine archeologist to be able to reach them. We've also got war like you mentioned Palmyra which is also something you talk about in your book is the idea that things are being blown up and things are being destroyed by people. Is there a feeling of time pressure that you don't have the money but you also want to try and record things and see what you can find before it's too late? Yeah I think not to be dire but we who are in the science sphere know we are running out of time the oceans are going to rise there's a glacier the size of Florida that is breaking off right now and we are seeing levels of heat in the Arctic that we're not expected for another 70 years I think we need to decide what we're going to save and how we're going to save it now because we can there's time looting and climate change are two issues but right in the middle and the much bigger problem is development urbanization sites being bulldozed through deforestation it's all kind of tied together and the biggest problem from what I see is if you don't have a good map of where your cultural resources are how can you know what to protect so most countries in the world don't have good archeological maps just pretty shocking okay so we know in general if you ask a biologist how many species of X are there and they would be able to tell you down to the specific bird type or slug type how many archeological sites are in the world I don't know I'm an archeologist my job is to map thousands of sites I've mapped sites all over the world I have a rough guesstimate in the book and I have a rough guesstimate for how many sites I think there are have to find so anyway that's what I think the issue is so I have a proposal that may horrify you but this is where how my brain works if we identified sites most at risk could we partner looters with scientists who would archeologists who could do some preliminary verification identification and therefore themselves get to do some analysis and register that this existed at one point this was found which would then increase the value of the looted object because it would have a verification behind it but do so in the most at risk places in order to loot them as quickly as possible because government funding and the like is not going to be sufficient to actually excavate those sites now with the hopes of at some point later in the future being able to recover those objects if even necessary but having at least gotten a chance to record them partnering with looters is that a job? I can do better than partnering with looters why don't we create a global citizen archeology movement whereby in communities on or around archeological sites we empower citizens there with the tools and resources on a phone all they're doing is they're the cultural stakeholders they're going to sites, they're documenting I'm going to say a word that will make you all quench blockchain so most uses of blockchain are complete baloney I don't know words I'm allowed or not to say on the show but I'm going to use the word baloney my word but so when you put something on chain it's immutable you're recording the exact time and place of that thing and one of the really cool uses of blockchain I've become convinced or converted what if every archeological object and site in the world were on chain what if every part of every monument of the world were on chain that way there's a global immutable database right in the middle of that interesting concept I was about to find out how blockchain works because I have no idea I have no idea how blockchain works other than it has to do with verification of things whether it's a document or money or some transaction you hear it with the bitcoin stuff all the time it's a growing list of records called blocks that are linked using cryptography each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block a time stamp and transaction data by design a blockchain is resistant to modification of data yes it's resistant to modification and there's also usually a key to it so you can have multiple people or people able to verify it so I did have a follow up question for her that I may not get to ask which is that all this citizen science could be empowering looters over some data first is it worth it there is part of that there's a lot of Google Earth has empowered looters so we know that just simply having the technology available the democratization of information has made it possible for looters to gain access to archaeological sites to locations where there might be things and in the global explorer training video when you start the video starts showing you how to identify looting sites and really it's this they will use bulldozers to scrape the land so they scrape the land under the guise of maybe preparing the land for farming or agriculture until they hit something and then when they hit something then they start digging a bunch of holes so they ruin the landscape and they're also not digging in a standard way that is helpful or preserving yeah they're just going for what they can find do they find something that has stuff in it get in there get it out as fast as possible mine versus archaeology it's very different yes exactly it's completely different and when you see a picture with all these pock marks all over the landscape right near an archaeological site and you can see the difference you know the care that has been taken by archaeologists to unearth the location and then the looters digging all these holes Dr. Parkeck you have returned you are back my phone decided to revolt against me so I'm very sorry technological revolt you were talking about blockchain so blockchain if you imagine like a global antiquities registry and you have all the objects everywhere in the world that are on chain and these citizen archaeologists have helped document them everywhere because you've given them training and they're going out the darned archaeologists in the world to help map all these sites so we have to train other people and archaeologists need to like get out of the ivory tower we've got a decade maybe two to document as much of this stuff as possible and why not create millions of people around the world that are really excited about archaeological sites and they're taking part in documenting them like why isn't that a good thing these people are not interested in the third regnal year of the third they're just not generally I might be but they're not so let's get out of the ivory tower and get this out of our heads do you think that will I mean it'll get you out there doing stuff do you think it's going to reduce the quality of the science that can be done or do you think it just you just need to get a higher throughput I think we need a higher throughput you know in so many places we just need people documenting the sites their condition what's at risk you know with so many limited resources around the world archaeologists more often than not you know they may work but one site but there's another site that's far more at risk and if they're working there at least they can take the steps they need to protect it so like I said it all starts with a good map and you know for example we're going to India next with with global explore we're working very closely the ministry of culture with the Tata Trust which is an enormous not-for-profit organization they're providing very generous funding for what we're doing and the archaeological survey of India the body that is in charge of India's heritage has asked specifically to help them create a national database of sites so again it's coming from them we're not going in with like a lot of right so it's something that we can do it's a resource we can provide to them so they can do a needs assessment for what's there so you know I have this crazy dream of mapping the world in the next 10 years we're doing machine learning I should say as well go through more data that'll be built into the back end of the platform we're rebuilding it right now so that we'll be able to go through things even faster I mean we're doing everything we can to make this more efficient but yeah I mean in terms of the science like the science will happen I just feel like I don't have to put the science on hold but like I don't know yeah I feel like we're in a crisis right now and we need to work yeah yeah I'm just thinking Blair brought up the similarity to conservation biology and poaching but also in biology there are experiments done where there's just data collection genetics genomics you know sometimes just collect all the genetic data and then do the experiments and so maybe that's where archaeology needs to be for a little while to get all that information out in your book you talk about the idea of how the future shapes are passed but technology has been such an important part of what you're able to do and what you are going to be able to do like you just mentioned machine learning how do you see technology influencing your field in the years to come so I actually have a whole chapter on what archaeology is going to be like in 100 years I'm a total sci-fi nerd like I grew up on Clark and Langel and so many others and today I read Jemison and Stevenson and anyway I've always wanted to write science fiction and gosh darn it it was my book I was going to write science fiction so I invented what you know all these things that we're using satellite imagery DNA analysis, chemical testing radiocarbon dating even things like reading burnt scrolls using CAT scans I imagine this guy named Robbie who works for a company called Archaeotech and he's rapidly exploring sites and he's got these things that I call digbots which I should totally trade Mark because I'm sure he's a billion dollar company totally but like he goes to these sites and he sends off these little mini drones and they're mapping the sites quickly and they're measuring everything that's underneath and he's sending out digbots to go rapidly and in an hour he's able to get as much information as we archaeologists would get in 100 years of the site but then what I do in the chapter is I kind of stop I'm like y'all think I'm probably like on something but here's where archaeology is now here's where the technology is here's how quickly it's advancing and I think a lot of these technologies are going to be I'm going to plug in my phone so it doesn't die that would be good yeah I know we're down to the last there we go anyway this is what we archaeologists do we try to be flexible to accommodate ongoing disasters anyway so I think we'll get there faster than 20 years and I think we archaeologists are not going to be exploring sites on earth for the purpose of exploring sites on earth like we do now in 100 years I think we'll be preparing to look for civilizations on other worlds assuming we get through the climate crisis NASA doesn't have any archaeologists on staff right now which is an enormous problem we're the only ones on this planet that have the framework in place to contend with any civilization at any stage about which we know nothing which is what we're going to find in other worlds if it's beyond multicellular life right if we actually if we get our telescopes working or even get our craft out to rendezvous with other places these exoplanets that we're looking at that I mean I know from the biological standpoint or the chemistry of life standpoint we can look for the spectra the life signatures right now we're looking for methane we're looking for water in the atmosphere but your ideas would go beyond that I mean yeah and again it's like total speculation because you know I don't need octopus anymore because I'm like oh my god I've been eating the smartest animal that actually apartments for themselves under the ocean I'm like a cannibal so yeah we have no idea what these settlements will look like if we happen to get that sweet spot of when that civilization exists but you know put us archaeologists to work we have really good imaginations it's worth a try right I mean we have no idea what shapes or sizes the civilizations or features will be but I'd like to think that we know a thing or two about creating something from nothing I think so in your research you know I mentioned Laura Croft and Tomb Raider and Indiana Jones Laura Croft I remember when I was younger she was a very like I thought even though it was video game character extraordinary I was excited about seeing a woman in a main character archaeologists role I mean she was rating tombs but still I was excited to see I was excited to see a female in this kind of role whereas you know Indiana Jones and others and even historically archaeology had been very male dominated do you see the the field like you mentioned colonialization do you see the a switch in a change in the representation of the sexes in archaeology as well so in most anthropology archaeology grad programs I can only speak to universities that are say in the UK or in the US although I have to say my colleagues in Europe generally I think would speak to the same trends 70 plus percent women or more which is great but then as they advance there's massive attrition rates you know due to abuse lack of opportunities sexism all the issues and challenges that have kept women out of the sciences or prevented them from entering you know and then of course even if women get academic positions you know is there an extra year added on the tenure clock so they can have a kid if that is what they so choose and and and and and and and so I am a rare beast and I don't know how many what percent of women in archaeology end up as professors I should probably figure that out but it's a very small percentage I do my best to speak up about the sexism I do my best to you know try to encourage and mentor as many junior scholars especially women and I make a lot of middle-to-old middle-aged old men in my field be uncomfortable because their fault and I call them out at all at the time so it's all I mean you know you pay way and you try to make it better and easier for others because I you know I yeah yeah it's kind of interesting I think that my list of archaeologists anthropologists that I know and have met over the years I would have to say it is in the 90% female category I don't know if that's a California thing but it's I somehow have this picture of this being a female dominated field and it could just be completely my own personal perspective of what I've encountered or it could be this psychology of you seeing 50% women and your brain tells you it's more which is a thing no no but okay also having had been in a relationship for a long time anthropologists who is female who had female old friends that's probably the network that's probably how that happened even the lead on the research that was the professor at UC Davis so maybe this is I think you're talking outliers for sure there's this larger question of exactly Sarah what you're getting to where in academia how women that they have to pick between taking advantage of their baby making window for their body or continuing in academia and I think there has to be a solution to this problem I look forward to hopefully being able to future generations this not being so much of an issue but it is something that I know several people have been pushed out of that path because they decided to take advantage of their biological window to start a family I have a super controversial thing to say about this I benefited from the solution that I'm about to propose so I got my Ph.D. at Cambridge and between my M.Phil and my Ph.D. I was only there four years it did not take me seven to eight I think we waste time in grad school I finished my Ph.D. and I got an academic job I was very lucky I know it's a crap shoot but like what would three to four more years of grad school have done for me taken a few courses I know how to look things up I know how to like figure out problems for myself I think we need to lessen the time in grad school across the board just not I think that's a great point yeah I mean how much is that extra data set going to help you with your thesis really that's going to take you an extra year to collect I'm going to say something even more controversial but it's not about the grad students getting more data for their thesis it's about employees for professors so often you hear about professors who say no I think you need to do one more study and I think you need to do one more thing and the PI will not sign off on the grad students dissertation yeah but the only reason that I think I was able to choose to have a child was because I got tenure around the time that most people are starting academic jobs and I was a super freaking it's because I finished my dissertation when I was 26 started when I was 27 and had tenure by 3233 yeah yeah that makes a big difference I'm going to throw out something even more controversial to end it something even more controversial Justin will not be one up to one up that controversy the other thing that can make a woman very successful in having children and maintaining an academic life is having a good man a partner a good partner a good partner but I slept my 3 year old son across Greenland while his mother was doing field work and this is one of those things that if she didn't have a guy who could leave his job behind in Greenland good job Justin behind every strong anything is somebody who's helping them be that and that's a partnership is like you're saying is crucial in any of those but I have an amazing partner you know he he's this is not any shade at all he's more of a traditional archeologist so in other words he doesn't need the fancy computer equipment and programs that I do he's more more of a traditional scholar I tell people that his articles are things that we've footnotes together like his insane scholar but he's a wonderful partner and incredibly supportive and I couldn't do what I do without him like I was just gone on a book tour for 4.5 days looking after our son so obviously everything I can do is our family but I left out you know I left out my partner well so in right fold and as we know academia you have the work is never done but like it's fun if you need to go to the grocery store at 2 p.m. so that you can make the dinner and then you're up on the article but it's okay it's hard how do you find partners how it's hard hard for what it's hard for women that have night jobs it's hard for everyone to find that balance ah there's here's a word if I can get one thing get on the soap box tonight there is no such thing as balance because balance assumes that life stops it's pendulum and you'll be able to speed the pendulum and sometimes it will like this and sometimes it will like this to go haywire. You just want to predict the pendulum. So I'll nugget up with some that I will share with you tonight. Nice. I appreciate that. I'm always looking for remember that one. I know. Come on, Kiki, stop looking for balance. Just swing with it. Yeah. Oh, it's 730 p.m. and I'm still at work. The pendulum just swing in this way tonight. It's all right. I'll fix it tomorrow. I always thought balance was making a successful blanket fort in the living room. I'm hiding there for the evening. That to me was balance. Still fun. That's still fun. My, my large adult child life. I'm still with you on that one. Yeah. That's how you find balance. Hide in the tent. You made me a living room. And then somebody will look for the archaeological remains of at some later point. Is there anything else you would like to tell us about the book that you've written and and and what you hope to get across in the book to people who read it? So, so, yeah, so I hope that the book over time will show people what archaeology is really like. It's about this new science, but I talk a ton about what digs are like, you know, the types of people you find in excavations, how we archaeologists take all this information and piece it together to try to recreate stories of what happened. You know, I want people to see the richness and the vibrancy of archaeology and why aliens didn't build the pyramids people did. I want, you know, the stories that I tell about the past and I have a whole there's not just science fiction chapter, there's a fiction chapter where I bring to life a 4200 year old anonymous woman from the Egyptian Delta. I hope that by learning her story and the story of her family and her struggles in a period of great climate change and people and then kind of connecting that to their archaeological information, I hope that creates some empathy, right? Because I think the world now needs a lot more empathy. We so many people who say, okay, that people belong in cages, their empathyometers are down to zero, because they're they can't see beyond themselves. They can't they don't have the ability to connect but by understanding the past, by looking at the richness and the diversity of everything that has merged to create our very modern and interconnected and in some ways not so modern in our world is because of the diversity of all these cultures. And you you understand that by learning about them. You know, I think the other thing I hope the book does is rekindle people's ability to experience awe. I think that's missing right now in our world in spite of us being so interconnected. You don't experience awe to experience awe through media, I think you know that the great example of course is the the landing of the Apollo 11 on the moon, because we're all fixed, we're all experiencing this global moment in time. And the same sensation of feeling overwhelmed and feeling you're part of something bigger than yourself, you get that when you're in front of Angkor Wat or an Easter Island, or at Machu Picchu or in front of the pyramids. And I hope I encourage I inspire people to go out and experience awe for themselves, because when you feel small, it's not a bad feeling small, it means you're interconnected, it means you're part of something bigger than you ever could have imagined. And that I think inspires you inspires you to kind of feel like you can own your place in the world by making it better. So hefty goals for a small book, but small but mighty. Small but mighty. And I love the so perspective changing. I mean, not just looking at the pale blue dot from space, but using our technology, our new view from space to be able to really give us a view on ourselves, who we are now, where we came from previously, the many cultures around the world and how they're interwoven in the braided stream of life, right, the braided stream of humanity. Where can people find out more about you and your book? So the book is the book is available on Amazon inbound or ideally your local independent bookstore. I try to encourage people to to go there or please check out your local library. I'm a huge fan of libraries and if they haven't ordered it, please encourage them to or take it out. You know, I'm not chilling the book just want as many people to be able to enjoy it as possible. You can get it on Kindle or whatever device you use. And I am I guess I'm I'm highly Googleable. You could listen to my TED talks, as they say. Yeah, I think documentaries I've done are on YouTube. So I did one called I'm trying to remember the names. Egypt's Lost Cities, Rome's Lost Empire and Vikings on Earth. So they're all on the YouTubes and a bunch of lectures and other things that give it online. So yeah, it's slightly frightening how much information is about me out there. But I mean, sometimes you go, wow, how did I do all how did I put myself out there so much? But, you know, I'm glad that you have because I think that you have by putting yourself out there as a public figure and an archaeologist. You know, you're a role model for so many young children to look up to to to inspire be inspired by and hope that maybe one day they can be a modern day Indiana Jones looking down from satellites or using drones or machine learning. Thank you so much. So yeah, if I could if as a child, I somebody told me I could be Indiana Jones in space, I would not have looked back. I had the I had the hat. I had the like rope swinging the backyard on the tree. And I had the theme song rolling 24 seven and vaguely understood there was some archaeology involved. But still, you put it in space, it would have been a whole different scenario. There's a photo that I don't think I'll ever share publicly of Harris. Oh my gosh. Seriously, he's he's a lovely man. And he did not have to take that photo with me and he did. So yeah, and when I'm not not having a good day, I'll think about that photo. I'll be like, Yeah, I did that. That's one for the pendulum for sure. All of their good Harrison word rolls in one. But you know, I think I think we need a new Indiana Jones movie. I, you know, I think it's been a while, I think, and I don't mean like Indiana Jones in the same vein of hella problematic colonialism and small age and children, like the bad bad bad bad. You know, I'd love it are a woman of color. Wouldn't that be amazing? You know, dealing with looting or something I who knows, but I, you know, you know, who's actually done this? Dora the Explorer, the movie coming out. Yeah, you got a movie coming out. But I think she's looting in the movie which is sad. But now maybe she's fighting with it. We have to wait, wait and see when the movie comes out. Twist movie club. Great. Yeah, our son isn't in the door these four, although Molly of Denali, that's amazing. My anthropologist goes yeah, PBS highly recommended. I don't know. Yeah, that's another that's another good new one. That's yes. Yes, there are some there are some good ones coming. I think WGB GBH is behind Molly from Denali. That's an awesome one. Yeah. I love it. Things are on the path to change. We just have to keep working, working and doing our best to help that change happen. Right. Thank you, Sarah. You were an absolute trooper fighting through all technological glitches and returning fighting every time. I love it. It's been yes. Thank you so much for for working with the technology and being here for us tonight. I really appreciate getting to talk to you. Thank you. I would love to talk to you again sometime. I hope you have a wonderful night. We'll let you get your rest. Thank you so much y'all. Good night. Thank you. Good night. That was Dr. Sarah Parkack. Her book is Archaeology from Space How the Future Shapes Are Past. It's a really good book. I'm enjoying it a lot. It was a fun interview. It is time for us to get to some science news, however, so we're going to take a quick break. And when we return, there will be more this week in science. Stay tuned. Hey, everybody, thanks for watching Twiz or listening to Twiz. I hope that you are enjoying the show. I do hope that if you enjoy us that you might think about supporting what we do. We do this show completely listener supported and it would be wonderful to get your help in keeping this weekly show going month after month after month. 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The methods of hypothesis and patience are the only things I need. Put on a pair of goggles and go looking for the things I couldn't see. And we are back with more this week in science. Yes, we are. And it's time for that part of the show that we like to call this week. And what is science done for me? All right. This comes in from Dan Linder. He says, Hello, twist team. Here's my what has science done for me lately entries. Of course, there were two entries and I just got to be pasted the whole thing because I like them. And so I just put them in there. Entry one years ago after learning of the twist podcast, I was fortunate enough to hear a suggestion to use assault as an abrasive to rub burnt on food off of pots and pans. The next day we had one such event and sure enough, it worked well. We continue using it to this day on our cast iron pans using dish soap on cast iron is a big no no apparently because it removes too much of the oil seasoning every time. Who did that? That was that wasn't me. The more you know, I probably said something like that cast iron. I love it. Entry two related to what has science done for me lately. There was a segment a few weeks ago talking about how much non homo sapiens had actually invented that we take for granted. You asked for ideas of things that were invented well after that point that us homo sapiens could call ours. I propose that modern ice cream is that invention. It required the domestication of cattle for milk cultivation of specific plants for sugar as well as the free time to churn the freezing mixture for extended periods of time not the not to mention the ability to do this in non freezing climates by harvesting ice and keeping that into the summer. I can't provide facts backing this up but I'd like to think it was ours. You know, I I really appreciate and I think I agree with this. Ice cream is not a thing that's ever come up in the archaeological record of the ancient hominids. Nobody else. I really but as soon as I say this, there's going to that that means we've jinxed it. It's like it turns out then Denise events or big big ice cream. But how would you tell the difference between ice cream and like just milk and sugar? Uh if you got the milk and sugar and you were in an icy climate, I think it would have been a natural. Yeah. Okay. You're walking with your cup of sugar and you tripped and you spilled it on the snow and you made ice cream. I mean, that's that's no, I love it. I love it. That is I think that is the one thing that we can verify has been claimed now by by current modern humans is ice cream. I like it. Anybody who thinks they have something else, let us know in our what has science done for me lately section. Uh you can send me an email kirsten at this weekend science dot com or leave me a message on our Facebook page. We want to keep filling this part of the show with your letters, with your songs, with your poems, your odes. Please please keep sending them. We need new ones. Come on. Infographic. We could narrate it to the podcast listener. Just try to describe it really well. That might be more difficult. Yeah, we could do it. We'll work on that. Okay. But this brings me to my first story of the evening. You're narrating something to somebody listening. You're using words to paint a picture that they can visualize in their brains, right? So you're essentially putting a picture into their heads. Scientists have really tried to do this using optogenetics. Carl Disaroth and researchers in his lab and related to his lab have used the technique that he came up with, optogenetics, to stimulate neurons in the visual system of the mouse brain in a way that makes the mice behave as if they had actually seen something. So it's like putting a fake fake image in the mouse's visual cortex that makes the mouse go do something. All right. So let me tell you how they did this. It's really a fascinating study. So first, optogenetics is this technique where they modify neurons. They put a gene into the neuron that makes the neuron respond to laser light. Historically, this has been blue light. And so it's been, it's always been optogenetics. It's this blue light. Well, researchers, Disaroth lab, they went searching for other molecules that could be involved. And they found a new light responsive protein called CHR mine, chromine, chromine. This is, this protein is better than the other channel redopsin proteins that they had been using because it can be activated by much less light and they're able to use a very simple red laser to stimulate neurons. So it makes it a little bit, it makes it more accurate. So there's not just like light dumping everywhere in the brain. It's they're able to pinpoint things more specifically. So they used the, they had, they set up these mice with this new optogenetic technique. And in the meantime, they, they trained them these mice in this situation where there was, they were shown either horizontal lines or vertical lines. So there are specific neurons in your visual cortex, also the visual cortex of mice. Yes, yours. There are neurons whose job it is to respond only to vertically oriented stimuli, like vertical lines and others that respond only to horizontal lines. So there's very, there are neurons that respond to very specific things. These are these, these orientation stimulated neurons. So they trained the mice when they see horizontal lines, lick a water spout. If you, in other mice, if you see vertical lines lick the water spout. And so they had these different mice licking the water spout based on what lines they saw. And then they made the lines dimmer and dimmer and they kind of got to the end of the mouse ability to detect the lines visually. So the lines were so dim that they weren't licking the water spout anymore. At this point, they started stimulating the neurons using the optogenetics. So they started, they had recorded from the brain to find out which neurons were the ones that were responding in the brain to either the horizontal lines or the vertical lines. And then they targeted those neurons specifically and they started stimulating just small groups of them, like 10 or 20 neurons at a time. So this is really fine-tuned targeting of neurons. And they found that if they got rid of the visual stuff entirely, stopped actually showing a little picture in the real world of horizontal or vertical lines, but only used the optogenetic technique to trigger up to like 20 neurons, that was enough to make the mice go lick the water spout in the properly trained situation. Right. So the properly trained situation. So it's 20 neurons, but it's feeding into a cascade of trained behaviors. Yeah. And so that's what, that is the thing. So small population of neurons, feeds into this much more complex behavior. And so what they're thinking is that there are these cascades that take place in the brain. And so more complex tasks could be studied possibly using very small assemblies of neurons. And that we could maybe study things like memory or look at other perceptions like smells, touches and tastes to be able to really figure out how the neuronal systems work and which neurons are involved in creating behaviors. My dystopic sci-fi take on this whole thing is, hey, somebody is going to start implanting things in people's brains to make them hallucinate stuff. Right. Or like it could be a hat that you put on where the hollow deck is then a real thing. Right. You could opt in. But my question is, how do we know that what they're doing to the mouse brains is what is making them see a thing instead of making them do a thing? Right. So that is the big question. We don't really know that. We know that they did the thing when they saw the thing in the, you know, when they we knew they were seeing vertical lines, they licked the water spot. We know that happened and then, oh, hey, we stimulated the neurons that are supposed to be the vertical orientation neurons and then the water spot licking happening. So it is correlation of behavior to activation. It's not, we don't actually know this because we can't ask a mouse if they are seeing this. But for what they're recording in the brain, everything they said they recorded in the brain seemed exactly the same as the visual input situation. So if we extrapolate to this far off sci-fi potential, would it potentially be possible to rig up a synthetic brain or a real brain but rig it up to a system which basically would project what the brain sees? Is that a thing in crazy far off sci-fi land? Oh, yeah, to like basically make brain TV. Yes. So that you could, you could have receptors. You could test it so that you could show them a thing and make sure that's what is stuck out on the projector, right? So you could make sure that that system works and then you could manipulate that brain and see what comes out the projector. Yeah. So they have already done this in with some animals. I think the experiment I remember from several years back used cats and they hooked cat brains up to, or it might have been bunnies, cats are bunnies, but they hooked them up to a video screen and you were, it wasn't a high-resolution image, but they were able to get a recording of what was in the visual cortex. See, that's what I want. Then I'd believe this. If they could hook up the mouse brains and show some, even just a blob, it'd be like, oh, yeah, I can believe that's vertical lines. Sure. So what's odd is I have a different take on this. What I'm sort of, what I was hearing was that there is, there's a big set of data out here and you have this response on the other side, which is a big set of response activity. To connect it, you need a trigger that says, okay, I've seen this, now I do this. It sounds to me like what they've narrowed down to is triggering that response mechanism without the input. So they were specifically targeting neurons within the visual cortex and so if you're going to think about the behavioral loop, the trigger of the behavior, the movement that the animal would have had to make would have gone through, there would have been another loop going away from the visual cortex, probably down into the amygdala or thalamus, thalamic area, and then back up, probably thalamic area and then back up to the motor cortex. So they should have been, I think, yeah, so there's a couple of different branches to what's happening. You're right. Right, but what it sounds like, okay. They weren't just stimulating the motor cortex. No, no, they're doing something else. They're sounds like they have targeted, they've narrowed down to that region that says, okay, if this visual input is this, then there's a natural, there's a reaction you should have. But that reaction trigger sort of, I keep saying the word trigger. I don't know if there's another, there's a better way of saying it. The response should be this if you get this input. But without having that input, they've triggered what the response should be by targeting a specific region, which means unlike the ability to visually see it, you wouldn't need to visually see it. You're sort of circumventing the actual first experience and you're going directly to the response trigger of having seen anything. So this is the interesting question to me, though, because vision does not occur in our eyes. Perception of vision occurs in our brain. Our visual cortex allows us to put together all of those bits of light that come into our retina and up our optic nerve. And they're just random bits of data about light and color and orientation and, you know, frequency. And it gets turned into the picture. There's an our visual cortex is like the digital encoder, right? It's got the algorithm also in it that allows the image. And so the image itself should be in the brain at the highest level of the visual cortex. The percept is should be there. And if it's not physically there, the brain can create it as anybody who's ever had a dream with imagery and an action. And a hallucination. It's like a hallucination or yeah. And yeah, if you've visualized anything, close your eyes and visualize, right? It's still there. And so the brain does not know the difference between its own activity and activity that was stimulated by something else. It's just activity. And so if my brain can tell the difference, my brain can tell the difference, you know, it's so that's the idea. That's why hallucinations can be so so frightening is that reality, your brain, your brain is producing the perception of something that's not really there. And your brain doesn't know you have to, you have to come around to figuring out that it's hallucination. But in the meantime, your brain does not know the difference. Oh, activity in the brain is just activity in the brain. That's one of the coolest things to me is that, you know, there's stimulation that comes to us through our proprioceptive and sensory system. There's stimulation that happens just within the brain. And part of this research actually could help us find out more about hallucinations and how these little tiny populations of neurons may be getting triggered by some random blip of activation, you know, like an itch on your nose accidentally triggers some random population of neurons in your visual cortex and suddenly you see blip of light out of your left visual field. You know, that it's that kind of thing happening that shouldn't be linked, maybe there are explanations for how these little tiny populations of neurons can have much larger proprioceptive perceptive effects to us. Yeah. Beyond that, hey, yeah, parenting. Parenting brain. Parenting brain is old brain. It goes way back. According to a new study that is out this last week in the proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers looked at frogs to find out a little bit more about the brain and parenting. Not all amphibians parent their children. However, some poison dart frogs really take care of the eggs, clean them off, carry their babies on their back. They care give. And so we want to know, or researchers wanted to know, what is the difference? Where in the brain does parenting come from? What makes a species or an individual give care or parent? So the researchers took a whole bunch of these little frogs while they were carrying their babies around in the water and then immediately took their brains because they needed fresh brains that had just been stimulated by parenting. They froze the brain, sliced them up, and then discovered that an area of the brain called the pre-optic area lit up in caregiving frogs but not those who don't give care. And this pre-optic area is also something that's important to parenting in vertebrates and as mammals. So the fact that we share this area being active during parenting with frogs suggests that this is an area of the brain that evolved in some way for this caregiving manner, caregiving behavior a long, long time ago. Another area of the brain, the medial pallidum, pallium, a medial pallium. It's a- Okay, that's, I'm not familiar with this. Can you point to the general? Medial pallium, but- Right there in the middle. An amphibian brain is set up much differently. Medial off to the side, in the middle medial side. But the amphibian brain is arranged much differently from the human brain. Yeah, like this. It's like squished. The amphibian brain is squished flat and our brain is like layered up on top of itself. We're rolled in a ball like a burrito. So the medial pallium is similar to the hippocampus, which is for memory and memory consolidation. And that was also important in the brains of the frogs with tadpoles. And so maybe it's because they have to move their tadpoles around. We don't really know why, but that was another reason. And there were some differences between male and female caregiving frogs. So they found some neurons. There's a particular neuron that's tied to actions for grooming pups in mice. And when they looked at it, they only found activity in this particular neuron in one species of three species of frogs that they looked at. So there is some variation in the system. And not all of the species are the same. And there's probably, as in so many things we've looked at, a lot of... What's the kind, Blair? What's the kind of evolution? Convergent evolution? Thank you. Convergent evolution going on in the system. So I think this is really good. This is a really good pointer to the idea that the basics of parental care are not convergent. When you think about it, you have these different types of animals evolving into new space, into new niches. And the amphibians are the first ones that walked out onto land, had this huge amount of space, all this food in the form of plants and also invertebrates like bugs and stuff. And so as they're exploding into this space, out in the ocean, broadcast spawning, pretty successful, just kind of floats its way out there. When you're on land, you have to be very careful about where you put your gametes. Yeah, a little more accuracy needed. So then you have to put this entire idea of where do I put my stuff, right? Which is starting to show up in fish, which I will talk about in the animal corner in a little bit. So the idea of where am I going to spawn starts to show up in fish. But once you're on land, you really have to be specific. And then from there, you really have to be specific about where you want to have your babies. Are there predators here? Is there a food source? So even if you're going to leave them and never take care of them again, there still has to be some careful decision-making involved in where I'm going to put my babies. And then you go on, and as you go further through evolutionary history, you see more and more parental care because there's less and less babies. And there's, excuse me, there's there's advantages to taking care of your babies. So you can kind of see if you look through evolutionary past, you can see a very clear logical progression of parental care. And I think it's very cool that you can find out exactly in the brain where it's hanging out in these rocks. Yep. And if you don't happen to have these particular areas of the brain wired for parenting, you're probably not going to be a parent. At least not a parent who cares. That's for sure. Hey, Justin. Uh-oh. Are you are you hanging out near your locker? Oh, yeah. So, okay. This is okay. So crisper is the thing that everybody knows what crisper is. It's at some extent, it's a now it's table salt. What is it? What a table salt phrase? It's the thing that everybody knows is a thing in the world. Coming next, locker. L-O-C-K-R, which is short for latching orthogonal cage slash key protein with the R emphasized in protein to get locker. All right. Well, okay. That's a it's a bit of a stretch there, but it is a completely artificial protein switch that can work inside of a living cell which can commandeer the cells internal circuitry can control modify gene expression. What this means is you can have a cell implanted in your body under this that can well, okay. Scientists show that locker can be programmed to modify gene expression, redirect cellular traffic, degrade specific proteins, control protein binding interactions. Researchers also use locker to build new biological circuits that behave like autonomous sensors. These circuits detect cues from cells internal external environment and respond by making changes within the cell. So this is sort of a they saying a kin to the way of thermostat since his ambient temperature and operates your central heat or cooling system to shut off or turn on to achieve a desired temperature. These sorts of things have been designed before synthetic genetic circuitry is a thing that's been being worked on. But what this does is a little bit different than just circuitry. It's creating a protein that's going to have a set sort of scheme of activities and you can put it into a living cell and determine whether or not it activates, which is very different. There's a quotey voice from Elsa Maud, who's a professor of biochemistry, biochemistry, biophysics at University California of San Francisco, co-senior author of the study. The ability to control cells with the designer proteins ushers in a new era of biology in the same way that integrated circuits and able to explosion of the computer chip industry. These versatile and dynamic biological switch is could soon unlock precise control over the behavior of living cells and ultimately our health. Health is of course where they are laser focused on this. They're looking at improving the CAR-T technology so that you can not only modify cells but give them a very deterministic activity once they're activated. There is no counterpart in the natural world. So CRISPR is a thing that we discovered by discovering something that a virus bacterial interaction within the genome. This is completely synthetic biology. These proteins were made from scratch with a purpose of an activity that they would do. This is basically the first of its kind ever conceived on the planet. If there is a video that kind of goes with it, it's two and a half minutes. I don't know if we have time and space to play it, Ki. No. Okay. All right. Yeah, they're just talking a lot. They are talking a lot but they are sort of laying down basically what I'm saying now. Yeah, that's what you're for. Yeah. Okay. So they had a version of this that they installed in yeast and they were able to show the genetically engineered fungus could be made to degrade a specific cellular protein at a time of the researchers choosing. They could turn it on and say, okay, at this time point, we want you to degrade this protein. They then redesigned the switch and also demonstrated the same effect in lab-grown human cells. So this has a couple of layers to go still, but one of the things that isn't in the video not in this report here that they point to specifically is things like tumor targeting and cancer patients. Being able to degrade things that the tumors need for their sustenance and replication, you can put into place and allow it to get to the place where you want it to be activated and then turn it on remotely. This is not anything that has been possible before in the history of biomanipulation, I suppose. So fantastic. And the University of Washington is who came up with this, and there's sister papers that are out of UCSF that have found additional applications for the basic technology. But Locker, we're going to be hearing a lot about this in the probably next three to five years of choice. Absolutely. It does, like you mentioned, CRISPR, it's going to be one of those technologies that will be made use of by other researchers. They're going to be like, what protein can I stick to it? What am I going to latch it to? How am I going to modulate whatever system? People are going to start playing with it. It's a platform. So you can design a protein that will have whatever interaction to its environment you like, and you can hide it within another protein, which is the cage element. And yeah, you can decide when to activate it, which is really fascinating. That is cool. Do you know what time it is? It's time to activate something that we like on this show. What do we call it? Ah, Blair's Animal Corner. Victor Blair. I have an amazing story about anemone fish, also known as clownfish. Justin, what do you know about clownfish? I only know the movie. Yeah. Well, what did you learn in the movie? You learned that they live in an anemone. And if that film was accurate, when Nemo's mother died, Marlon would have turned into a female. Yes, they are sequential hermaphrodites. They start out male, all clownfish start out as male. And the biggest, baddest clownfish in a specific area transitions into female and becomes the dominant female in a monogamous pair for life. So each pair makes their home in an anemone, which protects them from predators with its stinging tentacles. They appear, as far as we know, to be immune to their stings. Females lay eggs, males fertilize them, just like we were talking about. After that, the mother defends the nest, she protects it from predators, and the father tends to the egg. Sometimes there are other non-reproductive male fish allowed to live on or near that same anemone with the mating pair. If for some reason the female disappears, her male mate begins almost immediately to take on female behaviors, such as aggressively defending the nest. And the next largest male next door can move in to become her mate. I don't know why it is I love that the biggest, baddest, most macho guy on the block becomes the matriarch. Yes, that is correct. Yes. So this is a study out of University of Illinois. There's a psychology professor, Justin Rhodes, is a behavioral neuroscientist who wanted to see where this transition first begins. Now, if you were to guess either of you, at what point would you consider the male anemone fish to officially be female? What would it be? When he couldn't find a mate. So you're saying the second the female dies? Yeah. Like as soon as there's nobody to mate with and it's all, you're telling me it's an enemy sausage party. I'm like. Yeah. So I'm saying at what point do you classify that individual as female? Yeah, when reproductive aspects change. So that would make sense. What do you mean? Right. But this specific study was looking at what changes first and what starts the cascade to turning female. Is it the gonads? Is it the brain? Is it behavior? Is it physiology? So the way that they figured this out is they set up experiments in the laboratory where they paired male anemone fish together and tracked their development. They followed 17 pairs of anemone fish within minutes to hours of being put together. One of the two males emerged as dominant. So basically they fought and fought and fought until somebody won. And whoever won began to start behaving as female almost instantly. So their original hypothesis was that as soon as it was kind of decided, okay, this is going to be the fee. I'm going to be the female. I'm going to be the female. Then immediately their gonads would start changing. But that's not what they saw. They looked at brain structure that regulates gonad function. This is the pre-optic area. It's much bigger in females than in males in anemone fish. It is roughly twice the number of neurons. They track the changes in that area and the changes in the gonads and in their blood hormones. They counted neurons in the pre-optic area, took blood samples to look at their sex hormones and examined the eggs to look at the proportion of eggs to testicular tissue in their gonads. Within six months of being paired with a male, the dominant male grew their pre-optic area to the size that is indistinguishable from females. In six months, this part of their brain was completely female. After six months, this part of the brain is completely changed from a male brain to a female brain. But the gonads still did not change. So they're still male gonads. But what Rhodes says, if you ask other fish, they'll tell you that's a female. So their behavior and everything about them outwardly tells you yes, this is a female. So this is especially interesting because only three of the dominant fish in the 17 pairs actually transitioned all the way to reproductive females within the course of the study with the viable eggs in their gonads and only one of the three laid eggs. So the rest of them appeared to be in a holding pattern where the female brains were fully functional but they still had male gonads. They followed the fish for three years and so the majority of them still hadn't finished their transition. They don't know quote-unquote what they're waiting for. It could just take that long or they could be waiting to grow bigger so they can reproduce more eggs because they put boys together. So they were both smaller. So it's possible they're just waiting to grow up big and strong so they can defend their anemone and lay lots of eggs or they say maybe they don't have the right chemistry as a couple. Maybe if they were out in the ocean they would have ditched each other by now. We don't know but what's really interesting here is that it is a very clear demonstration that brain sex and gonad sex can be uncoupled. Yeah so absolutely. I immediately thought of human yeah anthropomorpho-permorpho-legicalizing whatever. Anthropomorphizing yeah. I don't know that I've ever met a somebody who put in the category of drag queen who is sort of like had a a subdominant or submissive person. Like you're kind of like it takes a very bold individual to be like yeah I'm gonna change all this and be in public and be heard about it and not be shy about it at all. Like there's something in that personality trait that is but what we do know is that there are sex hormones produced in the brain there are sex hormones produced in the gonads and if you remove the gonads or if you remove say the uterus in the case of a hysterectomy for women then there are still it doesn't take away all the hormones in the body there are still sex hormones because brain sex and the gonadal sex they are they can be separated and so but this is a very interesting natural model system to look at this in to be able to see the effects on the brain and how and really tease apart how things change and why they do. And I think to Justin's point just the human side of this thing which is not the point of this research after all but the thing that is interesting here is if you know that in nature brain sex and gonadal sex can be decoupled that is true that can be true in other species I'm not saying for sure we found it but it can be true in other species which can also explain certain situations that we have run into as humans where people identify as one sex but were born another physically so there there is something interesting there I don't know the science behind that I don't know if the science has been done to show anything is similar between this and that but I just think it's a very interesting parallel and could be an interesting avenue of research and I'm also interesting because it's an archetypal life form like there was fish before there was most anything that there were fish before there was anything on land so you're talking about a life form that the study was conducted in that is essentially it's current it's has evolved is anything else that currently exists but it's but it's also but fish came first fish came first so anything anything that you see in fish you should be able to see in other life forms all the way well unless they lost it yeah but yes gills okay so that gills in everything yeah so now we've talked about what comes before the babies I want to move on to parenting Kiki was just talking about parenting earlier in particular parenting in birds and more particular yellow-legged gills so this is a study from university.divigo in Spain looking at goal embryos response to parental warning calls so we see a bird on a nest they see a predator they call out a warning call are they calling to other birds or are they calling to the eggs they're sitting on recent research builds on prior research which showed that embryonic birds amphibians reptiles insects can receive sensory information in the egg in ovo in utero whatever it may be so they can they can definitely receive sensory information while they are developing this research wanted to look at warning calls on the eggs and how this would affect their development and extra wrinkle how the what one egg hears might affect another egg in their same nest I will explain they collected 90 goal eggs from nests along the shores of salvora island and brought them back to the lab for testing they separated eggs into individual three egg clutches and incubated them so in each of these three egg clutches they pulled out two of them to expose them four times a day to a test either recorded adult warning sounds or silence still a test so then they took those two and put them back in with the first egg untouched they reported that the embryos exposed to the shrill warning calls would vibrate when the recordings were played and continue vibrating for some time even after they were returned to their incubator they suspected that the vibrations could be felt by the nest mate that had not heard the recording so that this vibration would pass on information that they got when they were removed to their nest mate that didn't hear it to find out they monitored the embryos after they hatched the birds exposed to warning sounds took longer to hatch maybe they were they were being extra safe coming out when they finally did they were quieter than the chicks that had been exposed to silence they crouched lower when they were exposed to perceived threats and they were smaller overall and had shorter legs so all advantageous changes to a space riddled with predators the clutch mates mates of chicks exposed to the recordings so the ones that weren't exposed but were next to them had all the same differences even though they never heard the warning calls themselves so this means that most likely they felt the the wiggling that the embryos were doing oh god did you hear that hawk of nearby embryos and responded as if they had heard it themselves that's crazy yeah what it's crazy but also it's super not to me it makes sense if they're developed enough to have anything like a brain in there why wouldn't you respond to stimuli and and you know that would release fear hormones that would change their development right yeah I mean this goes I mean these are birds we're talking about but people put you know put their their headphones and little speakers on their pregnant bellies so that their children can have have a particular audio and experience in the womb of music or you know talk to the child in the womb because those vibrational sounds can make their way to the developing child and then those vibrations that that that can affect things so this is it's really interesting to see this in a species in the wild and having long-term developmental influences so maybe don't watch a slasher film while you're pregnant I don't know I mean who knows the baby wouldn't know with that the baby a baby wouldn't know what that is screaming if there's just a lot of screaming they might know I don't know just a thought yeah I wonder for us you know the gulls what the the the chicks and the eggs are responding to the sounds of predators so these are birds that are predated and it's triggering a a response pattern that will protect them possibly you know make them harder to catch make them hide faster will protect them as their young birds and as they're developing humans don't have lots of predators do you have yeah if we just played like lions lion roaring sounds yeah just kind of wondering what sounds would be the ones that would influence you know your your chance at death right interesting yeah I don't know well anyway for the birds which is actually what this is about yeah adaptation to perceive threats while stealing the egg pretty cool yeah that is very cool I love it I love it staying in the egg we are towards the end of the show got some quick stories here hey an apple a day can give you lots of bacteria oh no even if you wash it yay yay good bacteria or bad bacteria bacteria it's fine it's just bacteria fine lots of bacteria so researchers decided to look at the bacteria on and in apples and they've published in frontiers in microbiology previously research has looked at the fungal species that are on and in apples but nobody had ever looked at bacteria before so the researchers were like let's check this out people eat raw apples they don't cook them and so apples like other fruits end up potentially populating your intestines your your gut with bacteria because if it's not cooked the bacteria is not killed so you've got bacterial transfer so they checked it out and they looked at the stem peel flesh seeds and the calyx which is that little flowery bit at the bottom or it's where the flower used to be and they discovered that a regular sized apple not with one of the big giant ones but a regularly sized apple has about 100 million bacteria but if you discard the core you'll only end up taking in about 10 million bacteria so if you want to eat the core I don't I'm not the majority of the bacteria are in the seeds is that in a quantitative or is that a diversity oh good question I believe this is a quantitative yeah sounds like it this is quantitative not diversity and there were pathogenic bacteria found in most of the conventional apple samples but none from organic apples but a beneficial lactobacilli lactobacteria that we like in our probiotics it was the opposite there was lots of that in organic apples and none in the conventional apples and there's other methylobacterium the researcher says known to enhance the biosynthesis of strawberry flavor compounds was more abundant in organic apples especially on the peel and flesh which in general had a more diverse microbiota than seeds stems or calyx so even though there are quantitatively more bacteria in the seeds of the apples the diversity is greater where it interfaces with the environment more often yeah anyway microbiome pretty big on that apple and might be a part of the reason that an apple a day keeps the doctor away baby we'll see about that anyone else have a story who's next so following studies from Florida International University's College of Business and was published in the Journal of Marketing which on the surface sounds like just the sort of thing your parents would have warned you you might encounter someday with instructions to turn around and walk briskly in the other direction and they were right to say so however as much as it slightly pains me to say so psychological sciences directed at consumer triggers was likely one of the most sophisticated and if not in every case completely misdirected for somewhat nefarious purposes benefits of psychology or most astute psychological professions so in this they looked at the effects of temperature on humans facing a decision and so the study analyzed housing auction data which kind of sounds like bidding on who gets bragging rights or profiting on the suffering of others at the hands of a commoditized housing market but I slightly digress the data measured the impact of temperatures between 67 and 77 degrees which they called moderate and temperatures as high as 82 degrees which they put into the high temperature category so they also had two sort of categories of these transactions one was an auction setting and one was a negotiation so one is your bidding against others to see who gets to win the thing and in that those in the high temperature category offered more money than those in a separate auction environment who had a lower temperature they also found that in a negotiation setting higher temperatures led to harder negotiators they wanted even lower prices they were underbidding what would be the under bid at that point and what they kind of came away with was higher temperatures lead to more aggressive activity so if you're bidding in an auction environment the aggressive thing is to try to get it by having a higher bid if you're in a negotiation situation the aggressive activity is to offer less for the negotiated for the agreeable prices I found this really interesting because of course their advice is if you're holding an auction versus a negotiation you might want to raise the temperature in the room to get the most from your client because business people are scum and they they don't they could just have easily have said if you are trying to be the client you should opt for a colder room versus a warmer room if you're right they could have easily but no immediately their conclusion is if you're the one who's having a profit from fine that's who they are I get it but what I found really fascinating about this is this is also as as simple as it is a temperature variance in human behavior there's a correlation throughout history of wars being started in higher temperatures in hotter temperatures and it's usually blamed on scarcity of resources over water or stuff like that no no that's what's actually wild about it it is it is the assumption of resources that has also been attributed to this so you've gotten to the spring everything's planted and it's now growing you go to war in the summer so that you can get home hopefully by harvest because the resources are being produced you can also feed an army that was that's one portion of this but the other is the leaders of countries whoever they are the decision makers make more aggressive decisions when it gets hotter so these marketing people found this in a microcosm of a uh auction versus negotiation with completely different outcomes but here's here's my takeaway from this here's where we can make it useful my takeaway is that hey climate change is making it hotter everywhere and in about a week the Arctic's gonna be as hot as Morocco so awesome okay so so here's here's how you uh the listening audience can actually make use of this if you and your spouse your loved ones your you and your children you and your roommate whoever it is need to come together to make some decisions crank up the air conditioning crank up the air conditioning you will make less aggressive demands of the other you will find more mediating positions to agree on something if it's somebody you don't want to agree with if you're going to the car dealership and you want to put yourself in the mind frame put heating pads all over your body like right do it on a hot summer day you can actually self manipulate yourself into being in a situation where people are more accommodating or less accommodating with this information yeah cool who's next so do you know what else happens when it gets hotter animals shrink what yeah so we've talked a couple times on the show about different theories of how body size is shrinking in different populations due to climate change one story in particular that has stuck with me that I actually teach in a lot of my climate change lessons now to kids is about mountain goats in Europe where as they're pushed higher up in elevation there's less and less free oxygen and the babies aren't growing as large or as quickly so the whole entire population is actually shrinking in body size but this study from University of Cape Town looked at a 23 year period between 1976 and 1999 and found that climate change is indeed shrinking the body sizes of mountain wag tails which is a type of bird and they think that this is because larger animals in general tolerate cold conditions better than smaller animals so you would expect warm and climate to be more advantageous for smaller animals but there are other potential impacts of course because that makes them potentially more likely to become predated upon it's an important indicator of fertility so it could cause problems with sexual selection it can mess with lifespan it reduces lifespan sometimes it reduces its ability to survive in stress and food shortages or drought and so these are all things that potentially could impact species that are shrinking because of climate change in a very short amount of time and other factors of their survivability is not adapting at the same rate so it is something that in this particular species of bird was measured it has been hypothesized in a lot of different species but I just thought I would throw that out there since it was a pretty large scale study with a very clear answer birds are shrinking it's getting hotter birds are shrinking from climate change what's interesting there's been a question as to whether airplanes are going to have issues in the changing atmosphere because the density of the atmosphere will be changing as things heat up so planes may have to lighten up to be able to stay up no no it might affect airplanes as well but that brings us to the end of another episode of This Week in Science I want to say thanks again to our guest tonight Dr. Sarah Parkak whose book is Archaeology from Space How the Future Shapes Are Past Fun Read and I would like to also thank everyone who's involved in making This Week in 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This week in science. This week in science. We're at the after show. But again, I'm tired. It's getting late. Yeah, I gotta go to bed, but... Long show, but we need to talk tech. Yeah, we have one more week. Uh-huh, and I need Justin to come back because I have to find out what kind of computer he has. I think he has a computer that's a gaming computer which may have a graphics card that can handle the video stuff. Yeah, did you see the email I sent you? Yes, I did. So there are... Yeah, because I was talking to Roger before after DTNS and he was saying that he... Yeah, they broadcast to Twitch via Hangouts that isn't live. No. He said you could still use Hangouts to video conference. To video conference, yes. But you need additional software to do the stream. Oh. So he's using... They're using the OBS streamcast. I see. And they're using Hangouts. To continue doing it. And so we may do that and that could be awesome because Hangouts, for as long as it lasts, but I really think Hangouts is going to go away pretty soon. But so there needs to be another solution. But in the meantime, it is the best solution for having everybody show up on the screen at the same time and able to talk to each other, right? Yeah. Yeah. So everyone, the question that we are pondering right now, if you've been here previous weeks, it's been a couple of weeks of starting to think about it, is at the end of this month, as of August 1st, the YouTube live setup that we use will no longer integrate with Google Hangouts. And so we just have to find... We have to find a new streaming solution. And we could, with a new streaming solution, broadcast Twitch, as we've done before. We could also... And then send it over to YouTube afterwards, which is fine. I just like having the live show so that we can interact with everybody while we do the show, so I can see the comments and do that. And Twitch is nice because, I mean, it's got the Discord integration and there's a bunch of other stuff that is pretty cool. OBS Streamcast seems like a cool solution because they do, again, have a bunch of integrations to use with Twitch, which is pretty awesome. But that said, I mean, I can download it and use it on my machine, but you can't at this point. And so if I ever want to take a night off, that just means no twists, which is not a deal killer, but maybe it might mean changing some broadcast nights or something if I have to take a night off. Unless Justin has a computer that will work. So I guess my other question before we get to that is, is there a way to still record the show but it doesn't go out live but goes out delayed that same night or something instead if you can't go? Is the stopper the liveness? That's the main problem, yes. So we could do a Google Hangout that is not on air and I could record it and post it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you could probably get some software to record it and post it, yes. Yeah. Or if it's not a Google Hangout, you could even do, I think if you did a Zoom conference, you can record Zoom conferences. Yeah, I don't know how that integrates with it. Well, you wouldn't, what you would do is you'd have the file and then you would just upload it to the YouTube channel. Okay. Yeah, because I use Zoom all the time for no key stuff. I'm pretty familiar with that but. Yeah, I'm going to close some windows so that I can see what's happening over in the chat room. Yeah. Yeah, Thunder Beaver just asked me if I needed a graphics card. Like, oh no, no, no, no. She needs an everything. Computer. Yeah, so I've had, I've been having this philosophical debate with myself. Was approached by a marketing person about possible deal with a pharmaceutical company. Oh, yeah. Do an episode, you know, that the episode would be sponsored or something like that. I want the money. Yeah. But then I, because, you know, oh, that would be such a nice infusion of a little bit of money to, you know, take care of these issues. Buy you a new computer, whatever it is. But, you know, I'm like, ah, and then it's pharmaceutical episode. And everybody's going to be like, here in the pharmaceutical companies pocket. Yeah. So as much as I'm like, hey, money, that would be great. I'm like, oh, darn it. I'm having, I'm seriously having philosophical and economic. So, um, question to you while we're waiting for Justin Steele. If I had, I don't know. If I had a new. I'm still here. Oh, you are muted. I'm muted, but I'm still here. Oh, okay. You go first then. I'll ask my question after. What kind of computer are you on? Windows. Right. Do you have it? What kind of graphics card do you have? Hmm. Sufficient. For this. Like, no, they can be, it's, it's a, no, it's bargain basement from probably 10 years ago. Like it's, yeah. Okay. Bargain basement. All right. Okay. Okay. All right. So my next question is if I upgraded my little Mac book pro here. Not, not a, um, not the air, but the pro, the heftier laptop. Would that be enough to run this software? Does it have to be windows? Uh, yeah. So that's the other issue. Streamcast. Oh, OBS streamcast is a windows only machine. Oh, yeah. It's a windows only software. Uh, so like you'd have, like, you'd have to have a, it's like a decent, it doesn't have to be like super powered, but it would have to be a decent machine. Uh-huh. To run it. Um. Yeah. So. Can't, can't need that much. My streaming machine is pretty old. Now goes here, but has modern-ish video card. Oh yeah. I could put windows on a new Mac. You could. If you partitioned the drive. Yeah. Don't get into this nonsense. Go buy the cheapest, uh, windows tower at a fries electronics. And it'll be fine. I know, but here's the problem. I have a small one bedroom. I have a small one. I have a small one. It'll be fine. I know, but here's the problem. I have a small one bedroom apartment and no desk. Yeah. So we could, we could do OBS, but not the stream labs. Stream labs as windows only OBS is cross platform as thunder beaver is saying in the chat room. And. Thunder beaver. Streamcast stuff. The streamcast stuff runs in the cloud. That's cool. Probably can't do all the local inputs. Not that many inputs. But yeah. Dell precision laptops. Yeah. I work better with wine thunder beaver for sure. Yeah. It's, um, Mac mini and egg poo. I don't know what egg poo is noodles. Acronyms. Yeah. Yeah. So the issue is like we can, we can broadcast. We will be able to broadcast moving forward. Twitch, YouTube, all the things because I have the stuff. Um, you know, I can either upgrade my V mix and pay the monies to upgrade it so we can have the integrated V mix call and bring it, you know, and all that. Stuff. Um, I don't like the interface as much as, um, I don't like the interface as much as this Google Hangouts interface where I can see everybody. Um, But I could maybe I'll see if I can. Play with, I'll play with Hangouts with my V mix. Cause I don't have to upgrade anything. And then we can at least use and maybe use Hangouts with V mix and it'll be all good. So that's, for me, it's, I'm fine. We can keep going. But the day I decided to take the night off. Right. I have to buy you a new computer. Cause we'll use Hangouts. So, but, and I can't use V mix either. I think it, no V mix is, uh, is windows only also. Does that need any heavy duty stuff? Like, like a graphics card or something like that? It does. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I have a brand new Chromebook. It's not very helpful. Bleak. Kick. Yes. Windows computer. Yeah. But that's a thousand dollars. Yeah. Yeah. No. External graphics card. Egg poo. I like calling it egg poo. Good night. Fada. Thank you. Have a good night. Yeah. This is my main issue. I don't have a thousand dollars for a computer. Streaming. Gord says if we're not gaming, we don't necessarily don't need the GPU so much. Yeah. Streaming is more CPU. Thanks. Gord for that reminder. So what if I just did some research? Yeah. Okay. Bleak. I bought this in 2012 as a refurb. So we're not talking about price here. Anyway. If I found a. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. hangouts integration. It's not all over. Yeah, it's not the end of the world. We'll still keep going. But we just have to, I have to start putting some money away to help buy you a machine. Yeah, it'll be, it'll be, yeah, 1000 is middle of the road for a laptop price. But if you haven't, yeah, if you haven't like put that money away for that purpose, it's then it's like, oh, okay, it's a lot of money. Yeah. So but I mean, it's doable if we put the, I'll start putting the money away. We could find it. I can finance something. You're right. Bleak take. No, no, no, no. I mean, there's the part of me, I mean, it's like, I thank you Bleak for saying that you would be fine. And if it were clear that it was a sponsored episode, I think part of the problem is with perceptions. And even though I'm not like a massive, massive podcast show, I mean, we're decently well known and like enough people can bring up issues related. It's one of the big things now, like the anti-vax movement is to attack people's credibility. And I think that's the pharmaceutical industry as much as it could be a, you know, perfectly parallel science kind of episode, like whatever they're doing, maybe it's related to cell research or some, you know, or maybe, you know, gene modification. And it's not even related to vaccines. But if it's something that somebody can spin it's tough. I listen to podcasts all the time. And you know, the comedy podcast, they can do mattress commercials and whatever they want all they want. But when I listen to news podcasts, it feels icky sometimes when they have certain sponsor copies, you know, like I was actually I was just listening to something. And there was an ad for a particular news network that I don't agree with overall. And I would feel like people in general who listen to the podcast I was listening to would not agree with the programming on that network. It was a very odd match. But I mean, which, which is a disconnect between, okay, I have a advertising company that's going to cycle in ads. Yeah. And somebody has decided, Hey, find people who are diametrically opposed to our message and put our ads there. And the person who's like contracts with the ad agency has no say over who the ads are. Here's the thing. I don't think we should partner with anybody who finances this show without us doing the ads. Oh, yeah, absolutely. If I can say the words right for promoting the organization, nonprofit, for profit, whatever it is, if I can say the words, I will say the words. But I wouldn't I'd be really put off by the words being said without us. Because then I'm like, I don't know that I agree with them putting their words on top of our. So the the way podcasts ads usually work is you get you get copy you're supposed to read. Yeah. And you can deviate from certain parts, but they have certain parts identified that you have to read. And there's usually the call to action. Which is illegal in radio. But yeah. Um, I don't know. Uh, as much as I would love to be financially successful, I also don't want to do the things that require that. It's it's a tough spot. Like it's it it is. There it is. You know, unless unless unless we found a sponsor who was willing to let us put them forward despite our own personal takes on their product. So I I think there's certain items that we could have ads for and it wouldn't make anyone cringe. Here's a cool mattress. How about an audio book? Visit Illinois. I think those would be fine. No, no, no, no, no. Illinois. There's nothing in Illinois. Anybody ever need to go to and see that Illinois. It's one of those states where it was part of the purchase, but it was just the lead into the purchase. It's everything after Illinois. That's currently in a podcast ad that is running is visit Illinois. That's why I made that joke. But anyway, those sorts of ads, I don't think anyone would be like, I don't trust these guys anymore. But anything that has any sort of claim of efficacy, any sort of like that's where the pharmaceuticals get really itchy, right? Is if if they make a claim that that something does a specific thing and and their dubious sample sizes, testing methods, whatever they may be, that's where it gets kind of itchy, right? Now, it's not itchy. It's F you know, we're not talking about your thing at all. If you're funding us, we're not talking about anything you do. That's not how that works. Kiki saying this pharmaceutical company wanted us to do a full segment about them, right? No, I know. I don't know exactly. No, no, no. It wouldn't be that. It would be like a sponsored episode or brought to you by the good folks that there was nothing very specific. It was like, there are ideas of how it could be done, you know, and so yeah, it wouldn't be necessary. I don't then that's what I don't know is how much of it would have to be about what they're doing and the work that they're doing. I don't trust anyone who would pay me. Fair enough. Okay, so for next week, we're doing everything as normal. For the following week, we're going to be doing V-Mix. Is that right? Yeah, next week will be normal. I am going, well, it shouldn't matter if I can get Hangouts to work with V-Mix. If I can make that work, then we're all good. Okay. Then it'll just be Hangouts and it'll be the same as we've always done. Oh. Except it'll just be a little bit different on my end because apparently, as Roger was saying, there's a difference in, you know, how I can, from here, I can click on say Justin's face and make Justin be in the screen. Right. There's like, there's something different about the way it works for the regular Hangouts because it's not made for broadcast. So there's, there's something. Interesting. Yeah, there's something different and now that is how that works that I need to play with, but other than that. Okay. And I'm going to do some research on different ways to get Hangouts live streaming through software applications that I can use on my computer and just see what, what, what there is out there. But you're going to be, you're trying to broadcast to YouTube still or you're going to try to broadcast to Twitch? Um, it might be fun to, I don't know. I mean, we can broadcast to YouTube. I can see if I can broadcast to both. So there's still going to be YouTube live? Yes. YouTube live is not going anywhere. It's where it's, they are just, so YouTube live is just changing the way they do things. I think they're just, if you're doing a show kind of setup, they are now just requiring that you use stream software to, okay. Into, to get yourself in there. Yeah. As opposed to there, to this wonderful setup that has worked for so long and that it just like, or like, we don't like you people using it anymore, even though it worked pretty well for you. Pretty well. I mean, only every once in a while did it, did something go weird on it. Just when they would update it on Wednesday evenings. Yeah. Well, Chora Sharma says, yes, please continue. Okay. The YouTube live. You like it? I know some people would like to see us on Twitch. If we did Twitch, it would be live on Twitch. And then we'd have to wait a day or so and then upload it to YouTube the next day. It would not be YouTube live. I don't always take opioids. But what I do, I demand them of my doctor. I get persistent. I go and I demand that I'm at a level 10 pain. And I state this over and over again until I get a prescription. And then I feel better. You know, actually this might not be as hard as I thought. Once a man reaches a certain age, the youthful vigor sometimes fades. That's why I use. See, like this could actually be fun. The more I'm thinking about it, being a pitch man for like the worst possible players in the pharmaceutical field, they'd have to be the worst. That would be the thing. I don't actually have a bone density problem, which is why I'm taking pills that will at some point make my bones brittle. But it makes my doctor happy because he gets a kickback. And when my doctor's happy, he prescribes me more opioids, which always make me feel better after a long period of needing to take an enhancer for the loss of my youthful vigor. Like this could all like we need all of them at once to really pull this off. Read them all through. Read them all like concurrently. And because of my heavy opioid and youthful vigor pills, I also need a stool softener because I can no longer go to the bathroom in the natural way, which is why I use like this could just keep on building off the blast. We don't need that. We don't need that. I don't know. But there is there is a homeopathic cure to the rashes I've developed from all the pharmaceuticals I've taken, which you can also get. But yeah, thank you. Not a real doctor, poop pills. Don't worry, folks. I wouldn't send you my actual poo pills. These aren't poo pills at all. Well, they're not from me anyway. They're not from a human. That wasn't authorized. But it turns out rabbit poo is not to be considered a supplement and therefore I can send you those in pill form all day long. You know, one of the things that this show has benefited from since its creation is not having anybody tell us ever at any point what we can or cannot talk about. So I kind of, in the category of Blair, yes, if we were talking about being pitch people for mattresses or something like this, it feels like that doesn't that doesn't conflict with any of the subjects that we talk about. But it's so it's so weird delving into the sponsorship world. You know, if it was pillows, do you have a problem with pillows, Blair? Not at all. Did you pitch a pillow? Yeah. Yeah. What if the guy who's on this pillow? What if it's the my pillow guy and it turns out he's also he's also a massive Trump supporter and spends a lot of a lot of dollars for these sort of Christian anti-abortion funded. But I will no longer take his money. Right. Let's see. This is the thing. It's you're delving into politics with money almost immediately. I think the best thing, the best thing is that we have to get more patreons on board. Wonderful. Yeah. And people who enjoy the messaging without the corporate sponsorship and keep pushing in that way. PBS has been around since I was a kid. I think it could continue, you know? They still have ads though sometimes. Like all of my NPR podcasts have ads. They do. They do. They do. They do. And occasionally it's the Koch brothers, which you like. Yeah. How is this a thing? So, I mean, there is another side to this which, you know, you have to spend money to make money, but I think we're definitely, it feels to me like we're getting out there more and we're doing more live shows. And I think that that's also something that if we continue to do this more and more, if we can find a way to not with too much beginning cost, set up something that could be a merch table where we could sell some products and encourage people to sign up for Patreon, give out handouts about how to sign up for Patreon. I don't know. Something that could help increase that support from our live events. I think there's options there. I think if we can find a billionaire who's not specifically spending their funds on getting massages from underage women and instead actually wants to do a science outreach type thing to sponsors, I think that's more the venue that I would be happy with. Somebody who would be like, here's a big, here's a war chest to go spread science enlightenment to the world. That's the dream, right? That we can, we can apply something from somebody who's like, I managed to figure out a way to not pay taxes. This is my way of giving back to society and the thing that I think is important. Speaking of venues, we need to get to. Selmar, is that what it's called? There's a once every two years fungal conference. It's a year and a half from now. It's down near Monterey. We need to become part of this show. Fungus. I love fungus. It's mycologists, but it's also people sort of generally working in the field. A lot of presentations. They do it once every two years. It's right on the Monterey coast. It's a gorgeous location and a year and a half from now. So this is like kind of far out. But it's at a great venue, which is this sort of it's like a retreat or camp sort of setting that sort of nestled up into the Selmar. It's beautiful. I've been there. Oh, it's gorgeous. Yeah. I think we'd be a natural fit and we could become part of that event on a bi-annual. Is that twice a year? Or once every two years? It's both. Don't you love English? It's once every two years and twice a year. Yeah. Yeah. That's correct. Beautiful. So it's a bi-annual type event. But if we could like it's one of the things if we can create enough of these sort of one-off things that we do every time. If we do a Santa Fe Institute every time, if we do a AAAS every time, if we do a entomology conference, which we didn't do this year, if we do a thing that we do every year, every year, we can fill up the calendar pretty quickly. And yeah. But this is a this would be a fun venue. They bring in scientists from all sorts of fields that revolve around mycology, but not specifically mycologists who are presenting and talking and interacting. So it's a great place to do a lot of interviews. It's a multi-day event. I think it's something we should be part of. And it's a gorgeous location. I like gorgeous locations. It's hard to get to. Oh, it isn't? No. It's right off the one. For me? Well, it's all of our events are in Portland or Washington. Everything is within driving distance for Kiki. It's fine. That's not true. If you go to Monterey, it has lots of hotels. Yeah. No, that's great. I love it. Selomar is beautiful. Down. I'd be down. Okay. So I know what I need to figure out. There are there are softwares. For me. It does appear like I need to do some more research. But I mean, this one costs $250 annually. That's not great. But when? Wirecast. Oh, yeah. Wirecast. Yeah, that would work. I've used it before. OBS is the free one. And yeah, I'm looking at that one. It does say it's Apple. It's Mac compatible. Yeah. It is Mac compatible. And if you want to spend the time getting up to speed on it and playing with it. Yeah. See if it'll work. I don't know. So basically what you're saying, Kiki and Blaren. Blaren Kiki. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Are you sure? I talked about. We need one specific Patreon at the I call it $20 a month level. And we can have this streaming service. Wirecast. Yeah. That's correct. But yeah, I think. Okay. So OBS has the following requirements according to a website I just found. AMD FX series or Intel i5 2000 series processor. Okay. Of course. Yeah. So I need a new computer. I don't have an Intel chip in my computer, but I do probably need a new computer as a whole thing. I get it. Okay. Fine. Whatever. 4Gb of RAM. Yeah. How much RAM? 4Gb of RAM. And it says a direct X10 capable graphics card. I don't know what graphics card is in your old. I have an Intel HD graphics card. That's it. Oh, that's great. I don't know what that means. You mean it the way. But it also, I have the right operating system on my old, old, old laptop. So I could potentially play with it on my current laptop and see how it all works out. You said it's free? OBS? OBS is free. Okay. So it doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to work when you're not here. Right? So, okay. I will play with OBS and see how it looks. Hey, Blair, can you do me a favor? Yeah. Can you say good night, Justin? Sure. Good night, Justin. Bedtime. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. You did it wrong. I know. This is how tired I am. I'm screwing up the outro. Good night, Justin. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Oh, yeah. I was getting a tote bag. Let's sit and post. Wait. Good night, Keith. Good night, Keith. Good night, Keith. Good night, everyone. Thanks for listening to us as we go through our technological growing pains. And, you know, it's good. It's always nice. I'm going to stretch out into the world, figure it out, and might open new doors for us. So, Kiki, by the way. By the way. You guys are great. By the way. Kiki, by the way. Kiki, by the way. Justin. If you have a pharmaceutical company that wants me to say whatever they want in order for the show to continue to go on, I will completely and totally and 100% do it. Like, no worries. I will follow this. Just have them send me the script. I will say it verbatim. No worries. No worries. I got it. I'll do that. I'll be the one who does the direct pitch for the opioid boner X-Lex pill, whatever it is. Not a problem. I'll do it every time. The audience knows me. They'll get where it's coming from. They will know. Yay. Oh, Gaurav. I hope you enjoy the tote bag. Good night, everyone. Thank you for watching, Twiss, and we hope to see you again next week. Have a good one. Bye.