 Hello everyone, we're live. Oh, did my internet mess up immediately? That's hilarious. Just for the hello. Oh my God. It's fine now. Okay. This is bonkers. This is actual show content. Yeah, you're a little robot. Wow. And see, this never happens normally. I don't know what's going on. I do have, I do have an, I don't know if I have time to set it up. What are you, what are you trying to set up? I'm gonna, I know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna call tech support. Well, engineering is working on this problem. Anybody remember the disclaimer from last week when I was like, they've gotta have an angle. There's gotta be like a money angle to all these states that are banning the banning, or banning masks mandates? We might've gotten one. We might've gotten the answer already. It might be Regeneron, because they both like mentioned, both the Texas Abbott who got COVID this week. He's like, oh, but I took Regeneron, now I'm fine. And uh, Steph Santos is promising everyone federally funded Regeneron shots and has a major contributor. One of his top donors is a major investor in that thing. So, and the stock has gone up 800% in the midst of all of this surge of cases. So, I was thinking it was something else, but maybe it's as simple as pushing a specific pharmaceutical either way you look at it though. It's pretty gruesome. As we wait for Blair to, we're having technical issues. If you've just joined the show, we're in the midst of a little bit. Chatroom, any questions about the show or something show related or science related? I'll answer any science question that you have. Right now as we wait. Oh, tech support for less than a mechanic? Are you serious? That is, that would be a heck of a deal. Anyone in need of affordable tech support reach out to one grouchy gamer. Is the moon really made of cheese? Well, so it's a tough question because it's not like cheese all the way around. Some of it is more of a cream. So it's definitely dairy. It's all dairy though. Kiki melt in the Portland heat. I didn't get an update on that. I don't know how hot it was. It's not like where I'm in the central valley. Like it has been triple digits for weeks on end. Hotest, hottest July in the history of the planet, but it's also the hottest one here. We've had that little heat advisory icon next to the temperature at the bottom of the windows machines on constantly. Do I wear pants when doing this? Actually, it's one of the few things I put pants on for. Yeah, I dress up for twists. The rest of the time, no pants. We have located a hard wire. So in one minute, this should be figured out. Okay, okay. I'll keep treading water. Getting the really good questions though. My shoemaker, it's any chat room. Any of the chat rooms to spit out the questions there and I guess I see the Facebook, the Twitch and I guess the YouTube is all what I'm seeing. Go pants free for the show. The problem is occasionally I stand up during the show and then that would be a different show. Can you use light to create nuclear fusion? Oh, that's a great question. No spoilers, but apparently, yes. Yes you can. Yes you can. It's one of the stories today. Jeffle Grenadier bested, but that's a long name. Yeah, apparently they did that with lasers. It's gonna be one of my big stories tonight. 99 degrees British Columbia. Poo shot. That's what it cools down to at around 10 o'clock at night here now. Well, at least it did until the forest fires blocked out the sun. The last couple of days have been nice and cool. You can't breathe the air. The entire Central Valley kind of smells like a campfire. When you wake up in the morning, you're like, oh, somebody's got the old fireplace going in the middle of summer. That's really weird. And then you realize, no, all of the forests are burning. Okay, how is this? Am I a robot? No, that's, I think you solved it. So this is what we've learned. My internet can handle being on the show, but not hosting the show. Yeah, because you got to get the, my feet has to get there. And then you got to match that up with your- No, I got to send it back out. So this is what I have now learned. And Eric Knapp says we are five by five, which is perfect. Okay, so let's see. So do I have everything I need? I have to open up music. I have to see, we have a title. I know what date it is. Oh, episode number is an important thing to put in here. See, okay. Okay, okay, okay. Okay, and then you have a disclaimer. And then we're gonna do the show. Are you ready to do the show? Yeah, we can pull this off. Okay, great. So then- Wait till we wait for Kiki. No, so Kiki's not here this week. This is why I did all this. Oh, now we're good since. Yes, okay, great. So you're ready to go? Yeah, it's about, yeah. All of the chat rooms, I appreciate you bearing with us. We are getting started now, as we have internet. Okay, here we go. This is TWIS. This week in Science, episode number 838, recorded on Wednesday, August 18th, 2021. But maybe it could have been worse. Hi, everybody. I'm Blair Bazderich, filling in for Dr. Kiki. Normally I'm just, I'm one of the lackeys on the show, but I'm driving this week. And Kiki is having a much-deserved week off. Instead, we are doing this just me and Justin. And in the meantime, we're gonna fill your head with climate change, chameleons, and energetic children. But first. Disclamer, disclaimer, disclaimer. As Haiti reels from another man-made disaster, the sort that happens when you continue to grow and rebuild on land with a long history of earthquakes, people everywhere should look at the cycle of building and destruction that comes from ignoring history and basic science that allows us to predict future habitability of an area. In the United States, there is some of the highest growth of populations in areas that are predicted to be the most affected by climate change. In the deserts of Arizona, where they have grown 20% in the last decade, they have done so despite predictions of increased heat and diminishing water supplies. Likewise, Gulf Coast of Texas and the southern coastline of Florida have grown over 10% despite sea level rise and increased hurricane forced storms. And while the inevitable loss of life, homes and destruction of infrastructure, when it comes, people will be blaming global warming, which is right. But it isn't going to be the whole story. Global warming is a man-made problem, as is not combating global warming sooner, which none of the states that I've been talking about here have taken seriously and ignoring the predictions of science is man-made ignorance. Avoiding ignorance is not hard. All you need is curiosity, the ability to read and this week in science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening. What's happening this week in science. What's happening. What's happening. What's happening this week in science. Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. Wait, where's Kiki, Blair? That's just me. I'm good, how are you doing, Justin? I'm fine. Yeah, so yeah, we're flying without the good doctor this week, but we still have lots of good science to talk about. Thanks everyone for joining us. We have an amazing show ahead. I have stories about the chameleons I mentioned before, COVID of course, and then also some unconventional animal relationships. How about you, Justin? I have got scientists attempting to create a tiny sun in a lab, bio-engineers figuring out a way to use lasers on people to cure cancer. Good news in the COVID corner and a little bit of global warming stuff. Yeah, it wouldn't be a science show without some global warming stuff, I suppose. As we jump into the show here, I also wanna remind you that you can subscribe to TWIS on your favorite podcast platform. It's any of them, or YouTube or Facebook. Just search TWIS wherever you listen or watch things. And if you subscribe, you'll get the episodes every time we publish something new. Just search for TWIS or this week in science. So let's go right into the kind of shorter stories here. Justin, why don't you tell me about fusion? Oh, okay. So scientists are attempting to create a tiny sun in a lab using hundreds of lasers focused on a single spot and they did it. They successfully generated fusion energy. This was at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The event produced eight times more energy than they had ever generated before and lasted for 100 trillionths of a second. Not quite. Yeah, it's real quick. Cornucopia of energy that we're waiting for from this technology. However, according to Kim Boodle, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which operates this, I think it's just out of Berkeley. The result is a historic advance for inertial confinement fusion research. So nuclear fusion is considered by some scientists to be the potential energy of the future because it produces more energy than it uses in theory and produces little to no waste, no greenhouse gases. It differs from vision. That's what happens in nuclear reactors where you take big, heavy atoms and you split them to release their energy. You end up with a bunch of radioactive waste after this. Fusion is going the other way around. It's taking two very light atoms and smushing them together. This is what the sun does all the time. This experiment, scientists used two isotopes of hydrogen. Basically, they made helium and that was enough to produce this energy. This is according to Professor Steven Rose, who's co-director of the Research Center at Imperial College London, works on similar type things. This is the most significant advance in inertial fusion since it began in 1972. So we still have a long way to go to make this technology an actual power source but this is the thing, this is the one that if they can pull this off, that transforms energy on the planet. That means basically we can create energy from an unlimited supply without waste and without affecting the environment negatively. The no carbons, this is the thing that then the electric car, especially electric infrastructure becomes untethered to fossil fuels completely. Well, I feel like you have to, so you have to make fusion possible and then you have to make it make sense energetically because I think Mike Shoemaker in the chat room has a really good question. How much energy went in to creating this instance of fusion? See, that's like still not, see it's eight times more energy that they created than they ever had before. Well, that's still good, that's a nice ratio. It's still not doing the thing that we ultimately want it to do. What it is though is proof of concept of a type of reactor that can be built in the future. So it's still a long ways to go but proof of concept stuff is coming along nicely. Nice. Well, speaking of endless energy, this is the perfect segue into my short story which is all about kids and how much energy they have and burn. So if anyone who's seen a kind of a toddler running around right after nap time, right after a snack perhaps, you can see they're running all over the place. How do they even have all that energy? Well, in the first comprehensive study of energy over human lifespan, they've quantified the burn rate of infants, the calorie burn rate of infants, excuse me, between the ages of nine and 15 months and they have a 50% more energy that they burn in a day than adults do when you adjust for body size. So they didn't just study infants, of course. It was a huge, huge study of 6,421. I just made up about 640, 21. Over 6,000 people, how about we say that from 29 nations between the ages of eight days and 95 years. So it's a good sample size. And they looked at the daily metabolic rates for each individual by looking at their total daily energy rate from a doubly labeled water study, which basically is looking at heavy, like they make people drink heavy water, which is unusual versions of hydrogen and oxygen and then they can be traced. So they have too many neutrons, essentially. So basically kids have tiny sons in them, 200 lasers. Not quite. So, and what's really interesting is that when you adjust for body size, infants are actually born with the same metabolic rates as their mothers. So there's something between when they're born and then when they get to be eight days old, or sorry, but nine months old, that they kind of revs up that whole time and then it reaches this peak between nine and 15 months. And they stay high. They don't say this crazy high, but they stay high until age five. Then they slowly glide down, plateau it around 20. And then they are stable until age 60 when they decline more. Now, I immediately was like, hold on a second. That was not my experience. And everyone I know is like, oh, when you hit a brick wall, when you hit 30. But their explanation there is that in your 30s and 40s, you actually, there are other impacts. Hormonal changes, stress, disease, growth, activity levels, appetite, energy, body, and then all that changes body weight. The thing that I noticed is I can still have the high energy, but the recovery rate is increased exponentially as you start to age. It's always been the thing that impressed me about young people's kids is that not only do they have that energy output, might have it for like a whole afternoon, holy whatever, then they can crash and then the next day they can do it again. Yes. Yep. They could just get up and go again. They can, yeah, well, I mean, when I was in my 20s, I could like pull in all nighter and then still be awake all day. And I certainly could not do that now. I have a hard time pulling in all day-er. Yeah, for real. But ultimately, this study found that the difference is so vast between these little toddlers that they burn energy, completely different from adults, so different that it's like they're a completely different species. So they had trouble even kind of categorizing. Like it was off the map, which aside from just, first of all, making a lot of sense and then also being interesting, this actually could factor into how babies, pregnant women and older adults, wow, I am having trouble today. Older adults are looked at in medicine and how their nourishment is kind of attacked in medicine because the babies are having this crazy energy need. So it turns out that many children could be undernourished without us even realizing it because their metabolic need is so much higher than we thought. But they also found in this study, for example, that pregnant women don't have higher metabolic rates than other adults, just it's their body size is bigger. So they're using more energy because they're bigger, but it has nothing to do with their metabolism. And so all that to say, a continuation of a study like this could give a better kind of holistic view at life stages and metabolic needs throughout that life stage. All that to be said, I'm gonna put a giant asterisk on this, this short story that turned into a very long story because this is, it's a good sample size, it's like 6,000 people, but when you look at the individual, an individual, especially when it comes to metabolic needs and individual processes inside their body are much more than an average. And so this could help inform that, but I think that also it's important to know what population baseline might be, but that the metabolic rate of just a random person that you grab might not be on par with that. But I just don't grab random people. Yeah, well, that's not advisable. Sometimes you gotta. You have one more short story for us. I don't know if I have a short story. That's all right, there's only two thirds of us, we have some extra time I think. This is bioengineers at Georgia Institute of Technology. They've done some work to expand the precision and ability to use CAR T therapy. So CAR T therapy involves engineering a person's T cells in a lab. The T cells are removed from the body and then a chimeric antigen receptor is added. These customized immune cells are then grown up and put back into the patient's body where they are able to seek out and destroy cancer cells. Now there's been some pretty amazing success in this so far. There are more than 500 clinical trials analyzing CAR T cells for different cancer treatments that are going on right now around the world. They've been mostly effective for patients that have what you would call liquid tumors or blood-borne tumors, leukemia, that sort of thing. But for the solid tumors, this is according to Wallace H. Coulter, Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech in Emory. Unfortunately for solid tumors, sarcomas, carcinomas, they don't work well. There are many different reasons why, but one huge problem is that CAR T cells are immunosuppressed by the tumor's microenvironment. So they can get to the tumor, but when it's a big solid tumor, the T cells are basically turned off. Kuang and researchers, where's Kuang, where's Kuang? Oh shoot, I don't have his descriptor here. Kuang and collaborators are challenging the environment and making some cell modifications of their own to enhance the way CAR T cells fight cancer. They basically added a genetic on-off switch to the cells and developed a remote control system that can send the modified T cells to a specific tumor microenvironment where they then kill the tumor and can even prevent relapse. They were successful in doing this in mice and explain all about it in a recently published article in Journal Biomedical Engineering. So what's sort of interesting about this is that they used laser to heat an area on the mice where the tumor was. And the way they had designed their CAR T cells is that they basically become activated once they are at that heat source and can overcome the immunosuppression. Part of what they packaged with this are some proteins that would be otherwise kind of toxic to the body, but they are dormant within this modified T cell until they get to this hotspot, which is just, it's like having a fever, I think it's 160 degrees or something like that. It's enough to be differentiatedly warmer than the rest of your environment, of your body, but not enough to actually cause damage. So I say though that this is not what they're going to be using in people. This is basically the trial to see if it can work, if you can have this on-off. So far, their system is cured cancer in these mice and it not only shrunk the tumors, but it also prevented relapse when they move on to the human-based studies, according to Kuang, who was one of the researchers, head lead researcher in this project, they're going to turn to ultrasound as a focused ultrasound is the way to activate the T cells, which one of the problems with the lasers is it's got to be a surface tumor. You know, you've got to be able, you can't just like shoot through the whole body to heat stuff up, doesn't quite work that way. Oh, my organs. Yeah, but with this ultrasound, this focused ultrasound, you could be like a tumor on a liver or a spleen or someplace and have them activated internally to the body. So this is like an incredible next step for this CAR-T therapy and a really nice innovation of hacking and existing, you know, taking the existing system that people have developed that has been largely focused on things like leukemia and retooling it so that it can be used on other cancers as well. Nice. That's awesome. I mean, I have a friend who works in a lab who actually works with CAR-T cells and she reminded me the other day when we were talking about it. Each study on this sort of things is a cure for A cancer, not a cure for cancer, right? But it is an excellent, excellent step in the right direction. That's awesome. Yeah, and some of it too, like the initial reports of the original CAR-T therapy when it came out, they were giving it to leukemia patients who were like at the last stage of diagnosis and there's no more stages and this is kind of like it, like last error in the quiver kind of a thing. And there were patients who were being cured within 48 hours. They were leukemia-free, cancer-free. There was some percentage that died from this, some small percentage compared like, you know, I think it was less than 1% or something, but it was apparently a pretty horrible death. The entire immune system had turned against them. But for people who have maybe been struggling with a blood cancer for decades even, to have, you know, going for treatment and that next weekend be fine. That's like just incredible. Yeah, and it took a lot of those brave individuals to help give to a body of research that will eventually hopefully make this much more applicable to a larger audience. Absolutely. Speaking of, oh gosh, just being sick and all that kind of stuff. Should we talk about COVID news? I heard you had some good news. I do, I do. What do you got? If you're a mouse. Oh, well, I'm gonna go. What do you got for the mice? This is new vaccines that are coming. There's a Northwestern medicine study that they did in mice. Researchers took one of the current vaccines. They didn't specify here for this version that I have at least. Remain anonymous. But it's one of the mRNA vaccines. And so they, it's based on, so those are sort of based on the coronavirus's spike protein, right? You wanna sort of block. So what they've done though is they added a different antigen to the vaccine as well. This is a nucleocapsid protein. And what they're finding is that they've actually improved the existing COVID vaccine. One of the existing COVID vaccines with this. So this protein is an internal RNA binding protein. And what that means is, so the spike protein is the thing that makes contact somewhere in the body, right? And you wanna block it. So most of the vaccines are very much focused on blocking that spike protein from making contact with cells so that it doesn't register that it has arrived at a cell and won't deploy. And as we've seen, that's effective, but not always. And then you get variants and the like. And now you have problems where it's still breaking through. It's either using a different spike protein or a slightly different version of a spike protein that is enough to get around that defense. What they're adding to this is something that attacks the internal components. And by attacking the internal components, basically what it is doing is it is signaling the body once it is in the cell. And I've seen a couple of versions of this being discussed lately, but the thing you want from the antibodies is to do a couple of things. One, you want this sort of blocking. You wanna say, hey, stay out. Yeah, the bouncer. Don't go through the cell. Yeah. But then once it gets around that and gets in to the club, to club lung or what have you, they might not be as effective as, they're not as effective at telling it to get out. Now, what you want for it to get out is something that signals your own body's immune system that says, hey, in here, this cell right here, we got a problem. Somebody's starting a bar fight. Somebody's throwing drinks. Somebody's had a few too many. And so you need that inside bouncer to throw them out. This looks like it's combining the inside bouncer with the doorman. And anyway, it looks like this is piggybacking and existing by sort of just an improvement that is much needed. Because one of the things that this does as well is it attacks proteins that are common in all of the strains. Or it engages with proteins that it recognizes. Yes, well, for the internals. So the externals is where we've seen, yeah, right, until we've done something. Yes, yeah. But for all of the known variants of the coronavirus, this would apply. This would apply. As the coronavirus gets clever and gets more and more of its drunken, unruly viral load past the front doorman, next rounds of innovation are coming to kick it out. Nice. That's, I mean, I can't wait for my next newest and greatest vaccine. But in the meantime, I have news from Israel regarding COVID-19. The reason Israel is something that is a place that kind of the whole world is looking at right now in terms of COVID is that they have some of the world's highest levels of vaccination that about 78% of those 12 and older are fully vaccinated in the entire country. The vast majority was the Pfizer vaccine. So they also have a single vaccine used across the country. And they also got vaccinated early. They got vaccinated very early and they also have public health care, right? And so all of that also means that they can track the health data of people who've received vaccines extremely well. Wait, so there's a benefit you're saying to having a centralized health system aside from the fact that everybody gets healthcare, you can also monitor an entire population as diseases progress their way. Interesting. Indeed, indeed. Yes, and so because of that, the Israeli data is considered some of the best data coming out of quote unquote, anywhere in the world in relation to COVID and post vaccinated figures because of that. It's easier to vaccinate everyone when you have public healthcare. There's greater trust in the healthcare system. People see their doctor more often. They get to just get the vaccine from their normal doctor and it gets charted. So all of these things make it way easier for them. Also, they did vaccinate everybody pretty quickly. And all of that to say people are looking to Israel to see what's happening with the Delta variant. And what they found was that they actually have some of the highest infection rates right now with nearly 650 new cases daily per million people. And more than half of those cases are in the fully vaccinated. So while that's showing the extraordinary transmissibility of Delta, it is important to also remember that the unvaccinated in those numbers are still overwhelmingly more likely to end up in the hospital and die. So a reminder that even though there are breakthrough infections from Delta and it's a big number considering it's more than we would like, it's still preventing a lot of serious illness and death. So the vaccine is still doing important work regardless. And I just have to kind of underline and bold and highlight that for everybody. Why would you feel the need to do that? Anyway, so what they found was that the COVID-19 infection protection during June and July dropped in proportion to the length of time since the individual was vaccinated. So exactly what people have been talking about where's my booster? I want my booster. Oh, my booster too, don't worry about it. They're working on it. But so people vaccinated in January had a 2.26 times greater risk for a breakthrough infection than those vaccinated in April. All that to say, if it's been longer since you got your vaccine, you're more likely to get infected. So Israel has already started administering booster shots. In July, they started with people over 60 and then last week they started with people 50 and over. And as of Monday, around a million Israelis have received a third dose of the vaccine. But this is tough because there's a reason to want to give boosters to your population if you're seeing this clear drop off. But global health leaders instead are urging developed countries not to administer boosters but instead to send those doses to the population in the world who have not yet even received a single dose. So now comes, but we have them. There are countries where people are not vaccinated because they don't have doses. So that's the thing, no, they have them. They just don't want them. Right. So that, so here's the push-pull. The question is, and based on how it makes you feel because I have an emotional response, of course. And I want to say, of course you have to give those vaccines to people in countries who have not received them yet. Now, if you take the kind of moral imperative out of it, there is a epidemiological statistical question. What will be better at stopping spread? Will it be at sending doses to people who have not received any? Or will it be to administer boosts to people who have? And it depends. It depends on a bunch of factors. Who's moving around the globe? Where is Delta hanging out? All of these questions, right? And so I don't have an answer to that question. All we know is that this thing is breaking through shots and now we will be hopefully getting some good data from Israel on the boosters. So hopefully that will tell the tale, but I kind of wanted to bring this up just because there is two sides to this coin. Ideally we'd be able to do all of it, but we can't do all of it immediately. So as really it should be a global effort, which way are we gonna attack this thing to prevent people from getting sick? And what they say is that the most important critical issue is to vaccinate those who haven't received their dose, but could. So really the places we're seeing Delta explode are, as you mentioned, Justin, Florida. So it's still the public information campaign and whatever carrot has to be used to get people vaccinated in places where there are doses available is still, according to most of the experts, the best way to stop the spread of this thing. Yeah, I still feel like though, I want the booster to protect me from Floridian types. Yeah, and I want my husband to get the booster to protect him from the patients he takes care of who didn't get vaccinated and now are in the hospital with COVID. The next variants are gonna come from Florida or Texas. I think Texas is the second most populous state in the United States. I think they have a 45%, something awful vaccination rate. They're governor who's been anti-mask mandate just got COVID and immediately turned to science and drugs for his asymptomatic case. He wanted all of the science immediately, but it's still ignoring science when it comes to prevention. I think there's, I think this should be enough made for everybody. There is also some kind of goodness that's sort of interesting. This isn't anything I brought, but there's some studies that I've been hearing about that if you would delay it, like if you took the second dose in three weeks, it was actually more effective if you took it at like eight or nine or 10 weeks after. And so there may be something, even though we've had a lot of us these breaks from when we received second shot, the booster sounds like it's going to be extremely effective when it comes through. Oh, and that's the other thing that I forgot to mention that they talked about in this study is that in over 4,500 patients who received boosters in Israel, 88% said any side effects from the third shot were no worse and sometimes milder than the second. And that's good to know. Out there too is that the virulence load amongst the breakthrough crowd, the vaccinated who get it and maybe asymptomatic, they're just as virulent as somebody who's unvaccinated. I mean, they can still, they're at least in the notes, they can still, if they sneeze or something like that, they can spread it just as easily as anybody else. So we still, oh, oh, and the big news, the big COVID news is there is a case of COVID in New Zealand that was reported this past week. Where did they come from? They shut everything down. Yeah, one case. And we'll do so for probably the next two weeks. Yeah, they've been listening to Justin. That's how you handle it. That's how you handle it right there. Yeah, they've been listening. Of course, I got a direct line to New Zealand. Yeah, of course you do. That's all, and then they're gonna be done again. By the way, people in New Zealand have been out at the pub, they've been doing concerts, going to movies, they've been doing everything. They haven't stopped anything. You know why? Because they shut down properly to begin with. Well, it's also New Zealand and Israel, something they both have in common. They're pretty, they're small also. So the size does have something to do with it. I recognize, it's not everything. But I think the size of the country does change things a little bit. It's a lot harder to govern a place that's so large with so many people with different governments that are regionally doing different things. When you're geographically smaller, it's easier to do those sorts of things. Or how about if you're just ideologically more aligned? Yes, well, what does that happen? See, is that like a Venn diagram? The smaller the country, the more aligned it is. I don't know. I don't know. I feel like China didn't go through a whole lot of regional indecision. I mean, it's a totalitarian state. Don't get me wrong. But still, I think the more you trust or feel your government, there might be a correlation that too. Well, but also, which place is more like ideologically diverse? California or Connecticut? Yeah, California is. Well, we got like 30 something million. Yeah, that's my point. That's exactly what I was saying. Size matters. Anyway, all right. Anyway, this is this week in science. Normally we'd have Dr. Kiki here, but instead it's just me, Blair Basterich and Justin Jackson. Justin, do you know what time it is? Is it that time again? It is. What time is it? Is it time for Blair's Animal Corner? It is. With Blair? Let's go. What you got, Blair? I have big love in woodpeckers. Yeah. So I'm sure we'd all like to think that the majority of animals have mom and dad and they have their babies and they're a big happy family. But that's not how most animals operate. And so this study that came out this week from Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History looked at male acorn woodpeckers and their polygamy and how that might affect their ability to sire young and how effective they are at doing that. And if you just boil it down really simply, if there's one female and a bunch of males, do you think that's gonna help your ability to have a bunch of babies or hurt that? Hurt? You would think, right? But it turns out that male acorn woodpeckers who are in polygamous relationships and duos or trios of males actually fathered more offspring than males who bred alone with a single female. Yes. So you gotta do the math for me, Blair. Yes, well, I'll walk you through it. So there's a lot of different weird, complex breeding strategies that the Animal Kingdom exhibits and we've talked about quite a few of them on this show even. And the common expectation for how this works is that actually if you allow your brother and in most cases these polygamous relationships were amongst siblings. So if you allow your brother to also proliferate with the same female, then there are... This is like a bad Maury Povich episode. Yes. Well, woodpeckers are all about it. So... There's no good ones by that. Or Jerry Springer, I suppose. Probably too good. But anyway, the long-term advantages would be that because they are related to each other, the DNA proliferates either way. So you are 50% the same as your siblings' DNA. So understanding that, this is called kin selection. So cooperative breeding could have arisen evolutionarily and perpetuated itself despite reducing the number of offspring an individual could parent because even if one male loses, if he loses to his brother, the resulting chicks will still carry his DNA. So this is a long, long understood theory in evolution. However, this study might kind of mess that whole theory up. So they compared the number of lifetime offspring produced by woodpeckers that did their breeding in pairs with the number produced by birds engaged in some sort of cooperative polygamy. And individual males that bred as cobreeding duos and trios had 1.5 times more direct offspring than single breeding males. They also found that cobreeding males tended to spend two to three extra years as breeders compared to those paired up in counterparts which might be responsible for the increased reproductive success. It could just make them live longer and that could be all it is. What's interesting is on the flip side female woodpecker duos and single breeders left behind around the same number of young over their lifetimes but those who bred as trios actually produced 2.5 fewer chicks. So the females actually lost out in this gamble somehow. So this study I also just have to kind of shine light on because this was a 40 year long study looking at 499 birds over their entire lifetimes in a 2,500 acre natural history reservation in Carmel Valley along California's central coast. It had rotating scientists throughout those 40 years, 150 scientists and interns observing acorn woodpeckers since 1968. Wow, that's intense. Yes, and they recorded each bird's reproductive output from their first attempt to their last along with information, including territory quality, group composition, social standing and genetic tracking linking barrens to their offspring for birds hatched between 1984 and 2006. So this is like- All of this, all of this to just prove what real players have known all along it helps to have a wingman. Of course, of course I get it, wingman. And so- Did you get it cause it was birds? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes, and these woodpeckers were picked because they are known for very commonly to have an arrangement where a male will have a patch of woodland alongside two of his brothers and a pair of sisters from another family. And then the brothers all made and raised chicks with these sisters. So there's no opportunity for genetic problems with the babies. There's no relatives breeding. Instead, you just have these all same sex brothers or sisters kind of cooperating together to increase their fecundity. But so the thing that's really wild here is this is one of those things that were in all of my textbooks in college is the idea of kin selection as a mechanism for evolution. And so this might kind of cast that whole situation into doubt. It may be that this cooperative trait actually has direct positive impact on at least in this case, the males where it actually does indeed increase their own personal mating success. Pretty interesting. Anyway, don't kink shame the woodpeckers. Don't kink shame up. But I suppose also then they are also involved in cooperating to defend territory from other male birds that are coming into the area too, which provides more of a secure, steady breeding ground throughout that period of time. Certainly. Yeah. Certainly possible, but then why is it only brothers and sisters? But you know, because it's also been that way with humans. I mean, we have these sort of blips of like, gosh, like all of the children of this region can be traced back to a one family of men. The women can often be coming from diverse places, but it's like, I forget that there's a name for it, even I can't remember what it's called. But we have a lot of these sort of things that showed up in the early feudal-ish times, back whenever hill people were ruling the earth. Yeah. Well, speaking of civilizations, my other animal corner story is from Florida Museum of Natural History. Couple of different stories from museums tonight. And this one is looking at urbanized animals. So again, urbanized animals are not domestic animals. They're animals that are still wild, but live around humans. So can you think of any urbanized animals? Squirrels, raccoons, rats. Yep. What else? If you think of the big boys, what are the big mammals that are urbanized? Those are the biggest ones. There's bigger than that out there. Yeah. Coyotes? Okay. I don't know, the raccoons around here must be really fat. They're bigger than some of the coyotes I've seen. Maybe, but I would say an adult coyote would be in stature, probably larger than I can. But regardless, they're all getting bigger as cities grow. Yes. So this is also counter-intuitive to conventional wisdom because the expectation is that as climate change rears its ugly, ugly head. Just words, Blair. Yeah. Just words. They don't cooperate tonight. But as climate change happens, the planet gets hotter and then the metabolism of animals have to respond and other things happen where mammals in general are shrinking due to climate change. We talked about this on the show a bunch. But so the expectation is that as buildings and roads trap and emit heat, that's actually hotter than green landscapes if you think about urban heat islands, right? We've all heard about that. That means cities are hotter. And as cities are hotter, if the whole planet's getting hotter, but cities in particular are getting hotter, then the expectation is that animals will shrink or at least mammals will shrink. So researchers created a model to examine how climate and the density of people living in a given area, which is a proxy for urbanization, how urbanized as an area would influence the size of mammals. As temperatures dropped, body length and mass increased exactly what we thought we would see, right? But the trend was stronger in areas of more people. So they got bigger as more people were around. They looked at 140,000, 500 measurements of body length and mass for more than 100 North American mammal species collected over 80 years. This is another really robust study. And city dwelling mammals are longer and heftier than their rural counterparts. Why would this be? Do you have any ideas, Justin, why this might be? More people, more trash. Yeah, so that's a theory is that it's just, there's more availability of food, water, shelter. Cats? Yeah. There's also a relative lack of predators. So those cats are actually predators sometimes, but a lot of the other predators that might hang out in cities are absent. And so that might mean that they do a better job in general of succeeding. And so as urbanization ramps up, what researchers actually expect is that we will see them divided into winners and losers. Some animals will really benefit from urbanization and get bigger and bigger. Those animals that do not will continue to shrink due to climate change. So it's, yeah, if you don't like raccoons, they're getting bigger. I'm sorry to say. Simon this morning, you look pretty fit. Yeah, you don't mess with raccoons. I feel like he has not missed a meal in a long time. Justin, what else do you got for me? That's it for the animal corner. With Blair. How about a haiku? Mm-hmm. This is from Jared Lucette, Lauren Laura in the chat. Says, it's called, it's a haiku that came to him in the night. And it's titled to young people. Fires and large storms and a years long pandemic. We are so sorry. Very well done. Very well done. We are sorry, aren't we? Yeah, we're sorry. Okay, 2021 was the hottest July ever recorded in the history of July's on planet Earth. Well, all of the news related to global warming has been bad lately. We've pretty much gotten worse and worse news as more reports trickle out from the science world. There is one success story. We can all celebrate in the fight against global warming. We phased out the use of chlorofluorocarbons. Woo, CFCs. That's before I was old enough to actually do that. Yeah, that protocol was from the year 1987. Still, some countries are using it in, I think it's ranked China's the biggest user. Russia's the third. The second is South Korea in terms of still using it. But even then it's way, way, way less. This used to be in hairspray cans and refrigerants. We used it to just fill up peanuts for shipping containers and foams. And it put a hole in the ozone. And so people reacted to it and banned CFCs from use in manufacturing and other things. So there's a group from the US, UK, New Zealand. They published Nature and it illustrates the world we avoided by banning CFCs. They did some modeling and they found that had CFCs been left unchecked, their continued and increased use would have contributed to global air temperatures rising and additional above the global warming that we're predicting at the end of the century and additional 2.5 degrees Celsius. That's a lot. Yeah, they have some modeling here. So there would have been 580 billion tons, less carbon stored in forests or other vegetation and soils. There would be an additional 165 to 215 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. Today we're at 420. So that would be putting us maybe over 600. That's an additional 40 to 50% carbon in the atmosphere than we are today. And this huge amount of additional CO2 would have contributed to an additional 0.8 degrees Celsius of warming right now. Which would basically have doubled where we started from the industrial revolution. So the hottest July in the history of July is on planet Earth. Courted history, at the very least. Could have been twice as bad. It could have been much worse than it was. Had we not done this other thing. Now, how did we do this? Yes. Bunch of countries got together and had what they called a protocol. And this one was the Montreal Protocols, they called a bunch of countries signed a document and agreed we're not gonna do this anymore. Are you talking about like the Paris Climate Agreement? A similar document also in a French-speaking country? No, it wasn't as people used to say. No, it wasn't like, because the Paris Court thing was like, we're gonna say we're gonna do stuff. We don't really have to. No stakes. No, the CFC ban, they said, we're going to stop using this and they had specific cutoff dates. I mean, some of them went to as late as 2013. Most of them wrapped up by the mid-90s. Most of them were completely phased out by the mid-90s. Well, I think it helps that. But there were some outliers that went a little further. But they had set dates. The CFCs weren't like tied to things that were. There was a hole in the ozone. Yeah, but no, no, no, I'm saying to parts of our lives, you said, can you just use something else in your hairspray can? That would be great. It's very different. No, we can't, because it's the 80s and we need our hairspray. And then we got hair gel and that brought about the 90s. Yeah. And it was all hair gel. But it's just, you know, we banned microbeads too and we found other ways to scratch our faces with soap. It was an easier replacement than perhaps getting rid of all fossil fuels. Yeah, and so also if we hadn't done this, we would have had, like that's just the effects on global warming. The effects on reducing our ozone would have just made the plants less, more UV damage to plants and crops, more UV damage to skins and more skin cancers, like all of this stuff would be happening now. We would be, we would definitely be in for a much refer, but so some people took action. It was a democratic controlled Congress and Senate, I think at the time, it was a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, who non-quincidentally got skin cancer like on his nose, got some sort of melanoma thing and had it removed and then signed the bill or had signed the bill right about at the same time, right? You would think that, like I get that some people need to be like, I see now how this affects me directly and I will take an action causes, but I don't see that taking place yet. So I also think there's a weird, I would love to hear somebody who understands like psychology a little bit because I think there's also a psychological difference in a whole in something we have versus adding too much of a thing to a place. And I just, I feel like that's also so that you do like, oh my God, there's a hole in the ozone. There's a hole in the sky. We hurt the thing that we have. We hurt the ozone layer. We punched a hole in it. We gotta fill that hole up. Oh my God. But there's like, oh, there's too much carbon in the air. It's like, it's different. We're still, we still have like another 40 years before they think that hole is properly patched up all the way. There was still healing. But I think what that shows though is there was some people in the past who took an action and we are already living in the benefit from that. Our sluggishness on this means that future generations won't be able to look back and thank us. It's true. I think also there is something too. I know that when they've done research on how people respond to questions related to climate change without any primoring or education or anything. A lot of people when you say like, oh, what's the deal with climate change? They'll go like, oh, isn't that something with the ozone? Isn't there like a hole in the ozone layer? So I also wonder if there's a weird psychological thing where people think, oh, climate change, that's the ozone layer. We fixed that. I don't know. It's very interesting. Well, in some ways we did help by doing it, but that's, yeah, it's not. First of all, it's not completely patched. Second of all, we still have a big problem. Yeah, yeah. But that's the good news from the global warming front. Nice. Do you have more good news or do you have bad news? What do you have or neutral news? I have just, I guess it's more COVID. This probably should have been during the COVID. Oh, okay. So COVID part two. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Yeah. So it's basically, this is just a pitch. This is an outbreak and there was an outbreak in Zhejiang, China. It was suppressed by contact tracing. Within five days, they had quarantined anyone who was in contact basically and they shut it down. Contact tracing, we can't, I don't think, I don't even want to do this. We're not going to do anything. No, we're not. We're not going to contact trace. We're not going to contact trace. We're not going to do anything. But anyway, if you use contact tracing in the first place or in any of the low places when you were like, oh, we're done. No, that's when you should really contact trace. When you get it down to the new low, now you need to start contact tracing like never before. Once it's starting to surge like it is now, it becomes much more unmanageable of an effort because like the Abbott, like the governor of Texas, like who has COVID now, was that a, what was a dinner with like what, 250, 650 people? Like where nobody's wearing masks. So now you got to contact trace all 650 of those and all the people that they've had contact with and like it becomes much more laborious, especially if people aren't being forthright about it. So when you got it down to a few cases, a couple dozen cases in a county somewhere, from then on out, contact trace everything. Man, but this is the problem is that everyone's done. Everyone's sick of it and in order to contact trace, you have to admit that things are bad again. This is the problem. No, here's what I'm saying. This is what I'm saying. Just contact trace, you go wait till things are good. Contact tracing is things you do, the thing you do when things are looking great. Well, that means we're winning because now we can contact trace again. I'm thinking back to when going to restaurants and things, even if you were eating outside, you had to write your name and your phone number when you got there in order. Did you do this at all, Justin? What are you talking about? Oh yeah, so in San Francisco. Oh, that's clever. Yeah, when you went to a restaurant, this was like last summer fall. When you went to a restaurant, you had to write your name and your phone number down before you sat down at a table and the time that you got there. And this was for contact tracing. And I think I did it twice and I haven't seen it since. So it is interesting that some of our numbers are worse than when we were doing that before, but we're not doing it now. Anyway. So there is that whole coronavirus fatigue, right? The pandemic fatigue where people are just tired of dealing with reality. Yeah, absolutely. Well, if you're dealing with reality, Justin, what if you could just blend into your surroundings? What about that? I feel like I do a pretty decent job of that. Yeah, well, let's see. You're kind of blending in, I guess, but I feel like you need to be a little more craterous to blend into the moon tonight. Anyway, what if you could, I don't know, wear armor that could change color like a chameleon? Would you want to do that? Maybe. Maybe a shirt? What about a shirt? I don't know really when I would use it, but yes, I would absolutely love to have one. I think it would be very fun. Because then too, like if you showed up somewhere and I'm like, oh, I am not dressed for this. And you could like, boop, boop, boop. And now you've got like your tuxedo on. Or boop, boop, boop. Oh, look, I'm dressed way more casual now because I would definitely overdress for this party. And now I'm feeling embarrassed. So boop, boop, boop. And now I'm just wearing sweatshirt. Well, you're getting into patterns, which we can't handle yet. But just if we're talking about colors, there is a new robotic chameleon that as it crawls can change color to match its surroundings. This is a team of Korean researchers who made a robotic chameleon complete with googly eyes. It is very cute. I'm gonna show a video in a minute. And it waddles just like a chameleon. And most importantly, they can change color on demand. And so they have this artificial electronic skin which adjusts its hues instantly and automatically to match their background colors as they crawl over it. This is one of the first devices to change colors and patterns based on its environment. And I know we've seen other robots and things that can change colors to match their environment, but they're usually being commanded from a remote location as to what color to change to. And so this is especially special because they can match their background. They can kind of sense what's going on. So they have this skin using a thin glaze of liquid crystal and it's basically like an LCD screen. They can take on any color depending on the alignment of its molecules. This is fairly similar to how chameleons actually truly change the color of their skin. They actually change the arrangement of crystals, teeny tiny crystals in their skin to change the way they absorb or repel light so that they different wavelengths, it's very cool. So they made this skin and they kind of controlled the skin based on temperature. So what they do is they have this heater, they have heater strips under the fake lizard skin. They have up to 10 color sensors on the underbelly of the robot to take stock of the hues. So they have this visual sensor on their belly to see what they're walking onto. That sensor relays information back to the control unit which then changes the heat, cranks up the heat or draws down the heat. And a device tucked inside the robot keeps the heating temperature in check to hold the colors steady. This is not as fast as a chameleon, it takes about half a second to change colors and it is easier to heat up than to cool down. So it is harder to go from like blue to red because they are much better going red to blue. And so the other kind of weird thing is that the temperatures are pretty close to human body temperature, 78 to 97 degrees. So the skin color could also be affected by the temperature of their surroundings. If it's too hot in the room, that could impact the sensors the LCDs basically that are changing the color. But all in all, this is a really cool advance in this color change technology. They think that it could be something that military could wear for active camouflage. They think it could be fashion. They think it could help with hunting. They think it could help with, well, the thing that I immediately thought about. So I think it could help with monitoring wildlife, right? So you can camouflage better if you like have a GoPro on a drone or a little remote controlled vehicle and they can change color to match their surroundings. But anyway, pretty neat. Let me share this video real quick. See, this is what Kiki always does real fast that I cannot do while I'm talking. You're doing fine. So here we go. So here he goes. So he starts on the red, waddles forward. I really appreciate how much they made this look like a chameleon. I think it's a really good job. Turns green, very nice, matching those green legs. And then you can see it turn blue as it kind of crosses the threshold onto the blue on this piece of paper. But I'm really glad they put googly eyes on him because it really does make him look cute instead of terrifying, which is always good when you're designing a robot. Yeah, that's my little robotic chameleon. Do you have any more stories, Justin? No, I'm a lot of stories for the evening. I think we did it. We did it in record time. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but at least Kiki will know that she is appreciated and essential to making the show longer than 60 minutes. Whoops. Well, anyway, if anyone has any questions for this week in science or future, what has science done for you lately or anything like that, we still do tag those onto the show if you have them, so feel free to send them in. I hope you all enjoyed the show. Thank you for listening. Now I'm gonna see. And we're back. Shout out to Fada for all of his help with the chat room, Agendi Forra for recording the show, Gord for manning the other chat room, Rachel for your amazing assistance. I saw you were in the chat room for a second, Rachel, you're probably in bed, but just in case you aren't, hello, thank you so much. Sorry for the extra work this week with all of the difficulty of the words. And I would like to thank our Patreon sponsors. Thank you too. With the way I've been pronouncing words, this is going to be interesting. Thank you to Pierre Velazarb, Ralph E. 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If you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe as well. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes and links to stories will be available on our website, www.twist.org, and you can also sign up for our newsletter. You can also contact us directly. Email Kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com. Just don't email her about how bad I did this week. Thank you so much. Justin at twistmeaning at gmail.com or me Blair at BlairBazzetttwist.org. Just be sure to put twist T-W-I-S in the subject line or your email will be spam filtered into a third dose of a COVID vaccine. It'll be helpful, but we won't ever read it. Yeah, you guys will hit us up on the Twitter where we are at twistscience at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly and at playersmenagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you would like us to cover or address, a suggestion for an interview, a haiku that comes through tonight, please let us know. But please don't let us know that I couldn't say words this week because I know it's fine. We will be back here next week though and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned with words, things in your brain holes, from the talking holes, then remember. It's all in your head. It says the scientist is in. I'm gonna sell my advice. And listen, what I cast my opinion all of this week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science, science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science, science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That's what I say may not represent your views but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science you may just get understanding. That would not try to threaten your philosophy. We're just trying to save the world from jeopardy. It's just coming. Listen to everything we say and if you use our methods get a role and a die. We may rid the world of talk of plasma. Got the eye. Eye, eye, eye. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science, science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science, science. To address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought and I'll try to answer any question you've got. So how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour just missing through what we get in science? This week in science. Science, science. This week in science. Yes, I am aware that the music is very tin canny. I don't have the ability, literal space because of my work from home set up to set up the entire switchboard that I would need to set up when I host to properly feed music into the system. So for the time being, I play it on the phone and then Kiki splices in the good music for the podcast. So I apologize for all of the live viewers that you have to deal with the tinny music, but it's what we have to deal with right now because we don't have an actual studio or producer. So otherwise, if we had like a producer who would be invisible behind the scenes then they could be in charge of all the sound and the screens and all of it. But instead, we're a little homegrown. So Kiki has the full set up, but I don't have the full switchboard. And so you got the tinny music. But again, if you listen to the podcast, it'll be perfect. Justin, you are muted. He's doing that intentionally to show what it's like when the sound quality isn't what you would expect. Yeah, yeah. Dung beetle tote bag, anyone? I forgot to mention Zazzle in the show. I got Buster. This is the shopping, the QVC version of this week in science. Yeah, well, it's, you know, you want some wrapping paper? Just a thought. Oh, the other one I really like is the, oh, somebody bought the doormat. Oh, fun. There's a shower curtain somewhere. You sort by, not popular, newest, please. There it is. Look at that shower curtain. Somebody was making fun of Stormtrooper armor, Shibu. It's making fun of Stormtrooper Star Wars armor. Yeah. It's like, yeah, it's totally useless. Yeah, it's a uniform. It's not, it's not armor. I feel like it's a uniform. Yeah, I think having the thing that Obi-Wan Kenobi says when he's looking at the blaster marks from the, I guess, aunt and uncle of Skywalker, Luke. It's like the precision could only, the only ones who could do this kind of precise shooting Stormtroopers. And then they go on for the rest of the franchise not being able to hit the broad side of a barn. I don't remember that. Yeah, it's just a little throw, it's just a little throwaway comment. The precision of this blaster fire could only have been accomplished by one group of well-trained Stormtroopers. Oh yeah, only Imperial Stormtroopers are so precise. So precise, thank you. There it is. Yeah, precise, but then I want them to redo like another version of Star Wars where there's just blaster fire everywhere. They're precise. They're not accurate, but they're precise. It was, they killed the Jawas. It was the Jawas that killed, okay. No, no, it was, yeah, they killed the Jawas. And he said, they're too precise for sand people. Yes. Oh, Garov, you bought the doormat, that's right. I hope you're enjoying it. Did you receive it? Oh, and yes, GZDR4EV, this is in fact a science show. It was. It's now the after-show. But you can rewind, right? That's the beauty of YouTube. You could just chit chat. Go to the beginning, catch up. Oh, Garov bought the dung beetle tote bag too. That's great, how fun. Oh yeah, and the masks. I was even thinking for a reason. I was like, oh, no one's gonna buy masks anymore. Like even I, I was like, oh, I kind of want some more masks. I wanna like spice up my collection. I was like, oh, but you know, I shouldn't because we don't need them anymore. Anyway, good night, Fada. Thanks for your help. Oh, the coffee cup. Which coffee cup do you have? We need critical thinking, the TWIST logo? Oh, you're telling family to buy it for you, I see. Gord is making an interesting point. Resident Franchise was basically two encounters. Both these cases, they were supposed to leave the rebels alive. Would you want to report to Vader and say, oh yeah, those guys we were supposed to keep alive? Bob killed them all, sorry. See, they were missing on purpose. I don't even know if I can say that. Well, but also, so they killed Uncle Owen and Aunt Baru, but that was Vader's step-brother and stepsister. So, spoiler alert, I don't know if anyone hasn't seen Star Wars. But yeah, so it feels correct. It feels like he was like, bring them alive, but also like kill my step-brother and stepsister because, I don't know. Oh yes, you were wondering what part of Ea equals MC Square this is. That's the part where we sell fun merch with animals on it, because I do animal art and my section of the show is about animals. It's the whole thing. We have a calendar with science holidays on it that I put my art on. There we go. So you're saying Darth who was like a good guy all along? He just kept not wanting people to die? No, no, Gord said Tarkin wanted the ones, you know, the Moth. He wanted them alive so they could track the Falcon and then the Emperor wanted the Ender team alive so they could be bait for Luke. Yes, of course, that makes sense. See, it all makes sense, Gord, fixed. All right. Yes, I agree, masks will always be useful when one is feeling anti-social or has a cold sore. Or if you are in a place that is filled with smoke, yes, that's what I was dealing with today. It went solidly into the orange today. Yeah, I think it was worse here because I'm not near the coast. It was just all bad. Yeah, do you know what your AQI was today? You know, it's not even showing it anymore, but it was up there. What do you mean it's not showing it? What do you mean by that? I'm looking at it and it's like it was having the, it had that little thing next to the temperature and everything and it's not showing it anymore. Oh, I'm on a different computer. This one might not have an update or something that does that, I don't know. Avis is currently 110 on healthy for sensitive groups. Mine is moderate 51. We got twice as much bad. Mine already dipped back down. The one at my work was in the 140s when I left work. Not great. Not great. Oh, well, what do you need to do? Yeah, Luke was not very upset. You're right, Cheryl. Luke was not very upset about losing the people what raised him. It was awful. Yeah, well, he wanted to go to Tashi station and get a power converter, Justin. They wouldn't let him. I guess they, it's not. But there's also this interesting theme. Like the thing that makes a Jedi a good Jedi is that they have no emotional connection. Correct, correct. Is there anyone, like, that's like a, like no wonder they make so many Sith. Yes, no, this is a rant I go on all the time is like they should have recognized that they keep losing good Jedi because they're telling them to like cut themselves off from the people that they love. Like that's how, you know, the whole invention of Darth Vader is that they left his mother behind and he wasn't supposed to go visit her. Well, that's, yeah, that's a very dumb plot hole because there's a million ways. I was just talking to Brian about this the other day and how Padme could have gotten his mom like that. She was a queen. Yeah, yeah. Like, what was the point of, now you have to break all emotional connections to your mother? Yeah, dumb. Why? Which like, then also like, there's the whole, well, then in the new trilogy, there's that statement of like, the way we, what did Rose say? She said like, the way we beat them is by saving the people we love, which is like antithetical to the Jedi thing. Yeah, the new one, the new, I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to say new ones. It's well. I think there are things about them that I enjoy, but I definitely think that there were some interesting decisions made. That's how we're going to win, not fighting what we hate, saving what we love. Yeah, let's give all the fathers that brought their kids to the movie. Let's kill one of their favorite iconic heroes. We give them a senseless villain's death and have nobody show any remorse. Spoiler alert. It's, well, it's... They killed Han for no reason. Yeah, well. Well, he wanted out. He wanted Han to die in the original trilogy. Yeah, yeah, it's fine. But you know, you're still like... I think it would have been interesting to have a sequel trilogy where all of the old characters didn't come back. I would maybe have. And then to have like the original cast in a movie and have no scene where they're all together. You know what you can take comparatively? The way that the reboot of the Star Trek was done in the first five to 15 minutes of the new Star Trek reboot. Which one, Discovery or... No, no, no, the movies. When they're redoing the... Oh, the Chris Pine, yep. The, when they read that first 15 minutes, you see a link to the past. You see a sentiment towards character. You see all of this. We really paid attention, did our homework and care about this franchise. And it's gonna be in good hands. And in the first 15 minutes, you're like, okay, okay. They're gonna do this right. They're gonna do this right. And Star Wars just never got the feeling like they had enjoyed a Star Wars movie before making that movie. No, I think that's exactly what the problem was is that it was like a... Well, because JJ did the first one and the third one, right? So I feel like part of it was like he was playing with his toys in his sandbox and then he gave them to somebody else and then he was like, no, you're playing with them wrong and took them back and tried to fix everything. I feel like that's with the problem. That's in my opinion. That's like a lot of the problem. But I will also say of the new Star Trek films, I think the first and the third one are good. I think the second one with Benedict Cumberbatch is a tough watch. Oh, but it's a Cumberbund. You can't, I like that. He's fine. It's just he's first of all, he's him in everything he does, but also, no, I just, the plot was like, it was, I, no, the second one was too much for me. I was okay with it. I did, I actually did enjoy the reversal of the con moment of Kirk dying of the radiation. But then they had like, yeah, that one didn't have a problem. They had like, oh, we're just gonna use magic blood. Oh, okay, we'll put the magic blood and then he's fine. Oh, what about the other people who were dying? Oh, we forgot about magic blood already. And then that's also the one where they ruined everything. Right, you're right. Like, we can just, why don't we just transport a bomb into a ship? Oh, how come we never thought? We could just transport bombs into ships. We'll do that forever and then they never do it again because it ruins everything. You're right, it had problems. So what's, oh, Shoebrew. There were things in the chat. Cheers, Shoebrew. I'm drinking a plain old Lagunitas. Very nice. We need critical thinking. Also know what we thought of the Mandalorian. I loved it. Didn't watch it. Yeah, it was great. I think it was great. What was really cool about it was that every episode, at least in the first season, had a different director but it was still a cohesive piece but you could kind of get like a different, almost art style out of each episode. It was really, really, really interesting. And then I won't be discussing Indiana Jones 4. I'm sorry. That's not possible. Oh, Benadryl Humberdink. Yep. That is who that was. I do believe you're right. Because even if you say Benadryl Humberdink, you know exactly who it is. Yeah. Bonified Cucumber Splotch. Bonified only one face. It's an actor with a thousand names. Bonified Cucumber Splotch. Which by the way, I'm so mad I missed Sneak-A-Zucchini Day again. Somehow, every year. It's a sneaky holiday. It passes me by. I even, I saw it coming and I was like, mustn't forget about Sneak-A-Zucchini Day and off it went. I missed it. Man, and I even have like neighbors where I could sneak a zucchini onto someone's porch now. Shh, don't, shh, the neighbors can't hear. But I do, I do have that now. But I would have to buy a zucchini and I hate zucchini. So this is the other stopper for me. Is that like, I'd have to go to the store and buy one zucchini. Knowing I'm not gonna eat it because they're gross. Jess, you got any other quibbles before we wrap? Well, I know I'm sure it's fine. I could save every thought until some other time. Okay, well, I'd be happy to end early. I'm, I'm tired. But, I don't know. It's chat rooms, going once, going twice. Any other topics? Lots of talk about zucchini, zucchini's terrible. I don't care what anyone else has to say. I think it's disgusting. I hate that it's put in extreme prevalence in everything vegetarian. They're like, oh, if we can't give you chicken, let's just put 16 zucchinis in this dish. You know what's funny? I don't mind that at all. But I'm getting way too much red pepper in vegetarian food now. I hate cooked bell pepper. It's slimy and gross. I don't like cooked or not cooked bell peppers. They're disgusting. The red ones especially. But either, I don't like them. I like them raw, I had them for lunch today, but. Who keeps talking about earthquakes? Where's their earthquakes? Oh, Shibu, I don't, you know, I keep seeing on Facebook, people in my area saying, like, oh, there's an earthquake, but I never, ever feel them, never. So I don't know if also like, they're getting reported more, I don't know. Everyone's at home still, so they feel them. I don't know. I don't know what the deal is. There's like always earthquakes, like all the time. But yeah, there's three volcanoes going off at the same time, that was pretty exciting. And this is Alaska and Japan. Haiti, Japan, Alaska, yeah. Yeah, the whole Pacific rim is always a ring of fire. It's always a little hot. Oh, and 7.0 is what Shibu is saying. Oh, wow. That's a good one, that's definitely good. Oh, okay, so this is a good question from our recent joiner, GZDR4EV, I don't, forever. Did you ever clarify if Jeff Bezos was in space like you wanted or in between stars and spheres? He was in space, we had somebody on the show who was actually a real, did we? Oh, no, no, no, that was on, ha-ha. See, now my worlds are blending. I listened to a podcast. You need more sleep. Yeah, I need more sleep. I listened to a podcast, it was, aha, it was, wait, wait, don't tell me. And they had someone from NASA on their show and they asked the very same question. They asked, was he really in space? Yes. Blair, imagine that this was part of our show. Yes, I did. Come on, we've had people from NASA on the show, please. Many times. But yeah, so he was actually by definition in space. But I have to see him again. Forceful sneeze. Okay, and people talking about vegan food. Three volcanoes right now. There was an 8.5 quake a little over a week ago. So, and it could be connections to heating, drying and volcanic and earthquake activity. Sure, that would make some kind of sense. Whenever you have, whenever you have stressors that can dig down into the earth a bit, I suppose, bad things can happen. And yeah, like water tables, especially. I don't know how deep down you have to go before you're really affecting an earthquake though. I mean, I guess fracking does it. That can't be that deep. That sneeze went too far, I had to take care of it. Anyway, all right, well, I think we'll call it there. All right, in that case, say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair, say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. And good night, Kiki, wherever you are. Good night, we'll see you next week. We'll all be back together. Goodbye.