 I'm going to have to do some maneuvering here. This is TWIS, this week in Science episode number 570, recorded on Wednesday, June 8th, 2016, as Unchanging as the Sea. Hey everyone, I am Dr. Kiki, and tonight on This Week in Science, we are going to fill your heads with fiber optic eyes, bioluminescence and the world's oceans, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Right now at this very moment, there is an archaeological site directly beneath your feet. Beneath the paved roads and home foundations, under the swimming pools and strip malls, within the soil, in the rocks and in between the roots of trees, there are clues to the history of the planet and the creatures who have called it home. And this history can be revealed. And if you happen to live in the Americas, there is an ancient peoples beneath your feet. A people that lived in the Americas 10,000 years before Bronze Age men poured into Europe for the first time. A people who fished and farmed and traded goods before the pyramids of Egypt were built. A people who hunted Ice Age megafauna while Scandinavian lands were still too cold for Vikings to inhabit. A people who traveled further from our collective origins than any other in exploration of our planet. And it's all there, wherever you happen to be standing, there's a treasure trove of history right there beneath your feet. And as with most knowledge, it's not your proximity to the information, but how you search for it that counts. And lucky for you, your search has brought you here as you are now closer than you might think to another episode of This Week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn everything. I wanna fill it all up. I do 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, what's happening this week in science. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. Science to Kiki and Blair and Elizabeth. And good science to you too, Justin, Blair, Elizabeth and everyone out there. Thank you for joining us for another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again. And you know what today is? It's World Oceans Day. It's also National Best Friend Day, but World Oceans Day. This is what we're here for. Is that supposed to be ocean sounds, Blair? Okay, we now have Blair doing our ocean sound effects for the show. All gonna be great. On today's show, we have a whole bunch of science news. I've got stories about bioluminescent fish, crisper and jumping eels. We also have a themed up interview with Dr. Elizabeth Cybert on tiny ocean fossils and what they can tell us about ocean evolution. What do you have for us, Justin? I've got de-glaciating bison, pre-Columbian trade in Alaska, inbred neanderthals, and a lost city under the sea lost no more. Also not a city anymore. I don't know if I just ruined the teaser. It's lost, but it's not. Down by the sea. I'm gonna pop into a little mermaid soundtrack every once in a while in this episode. Blair, what did you bring for this episode? Oh, I have extremely smart fish. I have fiber optic eyeballs, and I have microplastics. No, nobody likes microplastics. Well, it's World Oceans Day. It's time to talk about them. It's time to talk. Let's do it. We'll talk about it during the animal corner. And Elizabeth Cybert, who is here, if she feels like piping in, Elizabeth, if you feel like piping into any of the stories that we're talking about, bring your ocean expertise to bear. We would love it. Okay, first story. Let's get going. Right off the top, bioluminescent fishes. This is very interesting because we all know down deep where it's dark and no light penetrates from the sun, these fish gotta be able to see somehow, right? So there are many species of fish who have evolved some kind of bioluminescence, whether or not it is harboring bacteria to be used as a lure for their prey or actually developing a chemical cocktail that fluoresces and allows them to be seen and potentially eat very nicely for dinner that evening. There's a study published in the journal PLOS One this week from the American Museum of Natural History, St. Cloud State University and the University of Kansas in which they have done a phylogenetic analysis of the fishes. And they have found bioluminescence evolved 27 separate times in marine-ray finned fishes. And then if you count in the sharks and the rays, it could be 29 times. So we talk a lot, especially during the animal corner, I know, about convergent evolution. And this is an amazing example of multiple species of fish coming up with all sorts of solutions that worked for them, but not necessarily coming from the same ancestral point. Because like I said, some of them use bacteria and other use chemicals for the fluorescence, but it's just what the crux of this study shows is that bioluminescence in the entire animal kingdom is probably highly underestimated, or at least the uniqueness of the source of bioluminescence or where the adaptation came from is underestimated. So if we were to do a broad phylogenetic analysis of the entire animal kingdom, we may find bioluminescence popping up independently a lot more often than one would expect. Yeah, and it shows too that there's an evolutionary pressure for developing some sort of bioluminescence there, because we don't see it on land very much, but on land we have this sun that's there, like a big portion of the time. So in an environment which is completely dark all the time, yeah, the pressure is there to find some way to use that sense with light. Well, there are fireflies and lightning bugs. You're right, you're right. I totally neglected those, yeah. And then the question is maybe the, I guess the landlubber analogy to the deep dark ocean would be caves. So how often has bioluminescence popped up independently in species that are caved while? That's another interesting question. But anyway. We need to send some robots down into some caves to find out. No, spelunkers. But then, because they're like going around and being humans, they'll scare the animals, they'll turn out the like, what? No, spelunkers. Just like, just like how's, how's it stop being bipedal as soon as humans drive by? Oh, oh, yeah. That follows. Humans coming. Moving forward, I always like to have crisper news whenever there's crisper news to be had. Crisper update. Yes, crisper update. Crisper alert, crisper alert. So last year, researchers from MIT and NCBI, the National Center for Biotechnology Information, published crisper proteins that could be RNA cleaving as opposed to DNA cleaving. And when we've talked about crisper Cas9 as a mechanism for cutting up and editing the genome, we're usually talking about cutting up DNA. The stuff that is the blueprint for us or whatever animal species we're talking about, right? Which is fantastic for the Jackson Lab folks, right? For editing a specific mouse you want. Nothing can be done once you're here. If you're here, crisper Cas9 can't do anything editing your genes to help you because you've already got your genes in place. However, RNA is this amazing molecule that it exists in single strands very often within the nucleus of the cell. It kind of floats around. Sometimes, they're very often regulating the expression of genes in other areas of the genome. So it gets transcribed and then has all sorts of roles throughout the cell. And it's also a place where disease can potentially kind of be hidden within the cell. And so it is a potential target for therapeutic editing that we could target without actually changing the DNA, the stuff of the genes. And so it might, being able to come up with a tool to edit RNA might give us a better way to approach therapies for different diseases than what we're currently looking at. So a lot of people are like, hey, are there any proteins that might work for targeting RNA with the crisper Cas9 system? And they found one called C2C2. And this is not like R2D2, it's just C2C2. So C2C2 seemed last year, they published, they said it, they thought that it seemed to be RNA-cleaving and now they have actually established it. They have shown pretty solidly that they've found a crisper Cas system, so it's crisper CasC2C2 that targets this RNA. So with this, we could potentially do in vivo. So in living organisms, RNA editing that could change the expression of genes which could be totally huge, yeah. So this is, yeah, this is real time epigenetic editing. This is the thing that you can actually affect an R2D living, breathing entity. That's fantastic. That's absolutely tremendous. Yeah, it's absolutely huge. And so they've shown that they're able to modify the Cas9 system to bind and follow and now cleave the messenger RNA if you need to. The researchers say, they've told the scientist that this RNA targeting crisper might be used to manipulate RNAs in ways that have not been done before such as for transcript editing or translational control. And another researcher who's not involved says if C2C2 can be engineered such that the RNA cleaving activity is specific and no collateral RNA molecules are targeted, we always talk about like how efficient it is and if the collateral damage is the thing that you don't want. Then this tool could provide a much faster way of knocking down gene products over crisper interference or crisper nuclease which both act at the DNA level. So this is published in Science. C2C2 is a single component programmable RNA guided RNA targeting crisper effector. Very fancy. Very, very exciting and fancy. So that's it for my news to open the show. Justin. Oh, that would be, I mean it was my turn. Okay, so. What you got? Two quick stories. One, scientists using evidence from bison fossils have determined when an ice-free corridor opened up along the Rocky Mountains during the late Pleustine. So this has been one of those misnomers and sort of trying to back engineer, find out how Native Americans populated. The Americas, back in the 70s they believed it was once these ice sheets sort of backed off and created this corridor through the Rockies that people were able to go from the far north down to the south. That would have, and they've placed this, they've found the date is about 13,000 years ago that it was fully open. And the way they figured out when it's open is they studied two desperate bison populations. One to the south, one to the north of the ice sheet and by tracking their DNA through the fossils that they would find, maybe carbonating them, they sort of could tell the migration of the southern bison going further and further north until they merged and started commingling with the then genetically diverse enough other bison to the north. So they've through the bison, by following the bison DNA, they managed to tell when this corridor opened up. What's really fascinating though is at the same time, we've learned that there were populations south of these glaciers, far back is 15,000 years. So this whole opening of this corridor to allow the north to come to the south no longer makes any sense. In fact, the oldest Clovis culture up in Alaska is about 12,400 years old, whereas we have them over 13,000 years old to the south. So what they're now discovering, what they're now realizing is that the populations probably came along the Pacific coast south of the glaciers and the technology was probably springing up there and then traveled back up north to Alaska once this divide was no longer dividing them. And much of this is of course being updated by Native American sites that we've been finding and studying, but also by following the bison as those people would have done, they managed to solve that mystery. More on that sort of theme, 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, the Atlantic Ocean. I guess we should be more specific seeing it's World Ocean Day, which Ocean we're talking about. October 12th, 1492, he discovered the North American continent, which he must took for India. And while the discovery was new news to Columbus and the Europeans, tens of millions of people who had been living in the Americas for longer than Europeans and been living in Europe were less surprised to discover that they in fact existed. What's more, there's now evidence showing that while European populations were suffering through a regressive dark ages, hundreds of years earlier, trade from Asia was already making its way to the American continent. This is small findings, small findings, but it's two leaded bronze artifacts found in northwestern Alaska are now the first evidence that metals from Asia reached prehistoric North America prior to contact with the Europeans. According to the researcher, H. Corey Cooper, who's an associate professor of anthropology, says it's not a surprise based on oral history and other archeological finds. It was just a matter of time before we found a good example evidence of Eurasian metal that had been traded to these populations. So they found it in a house that was dated around 1100 to 1300 AD, which is hundreds of years before Columbus. And it was, there were actually somewhat advanced these findings. The leather that there was a leather fragmented leather strap and a bead. The buckle was something that had been used in China for horses at an earlier age. So this wasn't like a regular belt buckle. This was a sort of livestock buckle. The leather on the buckle, they dated to five to 800 years old, although the metal itself portions could have even been older than that. So we have this, we have suddenly a point of reference. We have a data point for trade between Asia and North America after the, years after the migration. Thousands, tens of thousands of years after the initial migrations, so. Why did it take so long? I'm not surprised to find out people were here before Columbus. That's something that I would have kind of expected. Yeah, but that the trade route, and this is something that it's been whispered about, but not really evidence of there being a trade from Eurasia. This is, we're talking down in China, up through Siberia, across the Bering Strait, inland through to Alaska, that there could have been trade routes still functioning there. One of the reasons that they say that it might have taken so long to find this is metal, metal objects that are used don't usually survive too well, apparently. They get used, it's such a precious resource if you have some sort of a tool or implement that's made out of metal. And there is, there's copper in Alaska that was utilized by the Inuit there, the Tully, I'm sorry, this is the Tully people who are Inuit, but the Tully cultures used copper and they used meteorite fragments for their metals. So copper doesn't last too well and it's pretty hard to get your hands on a piece of meteorite, so there wasn't that much of that floating around. But it tends to get used up. If you've got a tool like that, you use it continually until there's very little left of it. Right, it's worth something, it's useful, let's use it. Use it, it's not like culture now, we're like, I'm gonna take this, I'm gonna put it on a shelf, I'm gonna just look at it. I'm gonna use these things. You know what, this is this week in science and it's time to use my switching the show button that I've got because you know what time it is. It's time for Blair's Animal Player. The little pet, don't pet her, she's your girl. Except for a giant panda, let's go. Let her go, go, go. What you got, Blair? Oh, I have so much salty science today. So let's start with tropical fish known as aero fish that can differentiate human faces. Wait a minute. That's some smarty pants, fishes, what? So aero fish, sorry, aero fish, archer fish, so close. Same thing. What, no. Aero, archer, archer, archer fish. Archer fish, they are called that because they squirt water in very directed directions. I'm so good at talking today. They can spit a fly that's hovering above the water, out of the air, into the water and do a meal. They shoot this jet of water and they are very accurate. And so researchers from Oxford University used that ability to train these fish to shoot water at specific images on a touchscreen. So that alone, shocking to me, just the mind baffles. But then on top of that, what they taught them to do, what they trained them to do, was to distinguish between human faces. And it was previously suggested that being able to distinguish human faces was something that pretty much only a few birds and then primate species could do. It really wasn't something that the scientific community thought that all sorts of vertebrates could do. Specifically looking at the brain complexity, that was something that they really thought you needed to be able to recognize and differentiate human faces. But from this study, and I have a picture of how the study worked, they had these different faces and what they actually did, I was kind of surprised, was that they trained the fish to squirt the water at the unfamiliar face. So they have them recognize a face and then they squirted the water at the face that wasn't the one that they recognized. And they did it in this- I haven't showed you my archer fish yet. Oh, come take a look. Yes, come closer, come closer. There you go. Yeah, so the first time they did it with full-on pictures of faces and then in their second phase of the experiment, they used these ones in the box B here where they kind of chopped off the shape of the face and then they made them all in gray scale so that they could really see these fish were able to differentiate faces even when you controlled color and face shape. It was specifically the size and the shading and this kind of stuff that the size and shape of the nose versus the eyes versus the mouth that they really were able to differentiate. So yeah, it's pretty surprising. But this isn't the first time that this has happened. We've talked about like puffer fish and other I guess more seemingly intelligent species of fishes. Octopuses, octopuses. Well, octopuses are cephalopods. So they're different, but I remember speaking about it, specifically about a puffer fish story in which the puffer fish could recognize faces. So maybe there are other fish stories as well, but I believe it has something to do with, I don't know, the intelligence of the fish species or at least their social, the pressure to recognize faces would probably come from either the recognizing, having to recognize and differentiate complex prey patterns or conspecifics. So other same species fish or other species fish that are actually in the environment with them. Right, so the main focus of this, go ahead. I also have, I've noticed myself with the couple of fish that have survived me getting an aquarium for the kids, that they go absolutely crazy and all head over to the side of the tank where my three year old, when she appears, because she's the one who's in charge of feeding them. And so I felt like, wow, they recognize her. They know that the little human is the one that means food. Right, and so this study was really specifically looking at if it was a face or if it was other elements. Did they respond to the smallest human in your house or was it the human that had this particular hairstyle or face shape? No, it's really specifically the facial features. And well, this all came from this idea that the ability to recognize faces came from this area of the brain called the neocortex and that it was kind of an innate ability and that humans were just born with this ability to differentiate faces which could still be true because we deal with so many faces on a day to day basis. But the idea is that these fish can still learn to differentiate faces when needed despite lacking this part of the brain that we thought facial recognition lived in. Right, there's another story from last year in which they found that damsel fish could recognize the faces of other damsel fish based on infrared patterning on the face of the fish. So they were actually recognizing facial features of other fish and this ability did extend to another species of damsel fish as well. So they were actually recognizing their own species and other species. So maybe they don't need facial recognition as such as we have where we look for the specific confirmation of eyes, nose, mouth. But isn't that what the studies sort of drilled down on? It's not. I mean, because they did the grayscale of just features, right? And it still worked. No, yeah, and it still worked but that's not the necessary. They're probably looking at the faces as a complex set of stimuli that are not registered in the same way as they're registered in the human brain. Right, so it could be a pattern thing. One of these things is not like the other. That's all it has to be, is that they recognize a certain pattern and then when something comes up that does not follow that pattern, then they see that. So we see faces in humans but we also see faces in things that aren't humans all the time, like light switches and things like that. And so we definitely have this. What? Have you, you've never seen a face on a light switch or in a plug or anything like that? Or on the moon. Or on the moon or in cloud. I thought I was the one with a history here. No, actually that's one hallucination I haven't had. It's not a hallucination. It's when you see, for example, a house that has a domed front door and windows that look like eyeballs. So that's something that we can do but that's because we are definitely geared towards looking for faces. So it's possible these fish aren't even seeing faces. They're seeing one thing and they're seeing things that aren't like that thing. So that's all this is really identified. But the fact that they can see these very, very distinct but kind of subtle differences in human faces is somewhat surprising, for sure. Because a lot of people just look at fish and they think that they just run from unknown stimuli. Just, oh, there's something that might eat me, goodbye. But there's clearly a lot more going on there, which again, I'm not hugely surprised because that's a theme in this show is that animals are smarter than we thought. So not that specific. But speaking of animals that run away, there are those that run away and then there are those that can hide. And squid are particularly good at hiding because they have the ability to change colors on their body. But one type of deep ocean squid actually is pretty much invisible. So these squids, Galituthis glacialis, they are pretty much completely see-through except for one part of their body and that's their eyeballs. And their eyeballs are pretty dark and even if their entire body was clear, you'd see these two eyeballs floating around in the water. And the eyes on squids are pretty big, so you would think that would be a pretty dead giveaway. But a recent study has found that these guys actually have a really cool way of completely disguising those potentially floating eyeballs that would give them away. So the University of Pennsylvania looked at the structure of these eyeballs and they found that the photophores that were on the eyeballs had walls on them, the cells had walls on them that were reflective. And the fact that they were reflective and that the walls had a slight bend, those caused light to be channeled like fiber optic cables across the wall of the cell. And they found that their reflecting ability was not as efficient as it could have been. So they thought that that was kind of an imperfection in the system. But it turned out that the fact that they were inefficient about channeling the light meant that light would leak out throughout the cell and it turns out that these small amounts of light leaked out in all these different directions and that caused the squids eyes to become completely invisible to creatures that were at or near the same water level. Yeah, so they describe it like an invisibility cloak on these eyeballs. Just for the eyes. How interesting, yeah, so basically because the light is going out in all the different directions, there's enough interference that it just masks the entire eye. Yeah, so the researchers, they calculated the amount of light quote leaking and then they reproduced the light levels in an experimental tank that simulated the environment they're from and they matched. So omnidirectional invisibility cloaks. So maybe now, I mean, there's the bio-inspired engineering that we do. Maybe researchers should take a really close look at how the squids are doing this and see if it's more efficient than the invisibility cloak designs they've come up with to date. Squid-inspired invisibility cloak. That's what I want. I want it. Yes, yes. Invisibility from a squid. Thank you very much. Invisibility from a squid. Hopefully that won't be made out of plastic, however, because plastic is a real big problem in the ocean as we know. And segue. Yes, and the very worst types of plastic in a lot of ways are the microplastics because we can't even see them. And luckily there's a lot of items that you could buy in the store that would have microplastics in them that are starting to get phased out. It's always good to check your beauty items before you buy them. If they're a scrub, a lot of the time those scrubs are teeny, tiny little balls of plastic that end up in our waterways. Not great. So if you can find a non-plastic version, that's better. But all of these microplastic particles we've been focused before on bioaccumulation. So basically a little zoo plankton ends up with like one or two little pieces in them and then a fish eats a million of those so they have a million pieces of microplastic in them and then those fish are eaten by bigger fish and they have a whole bunch of microplastic in them until eventually it's weighing them down, it's making them sick, it's blocking them up, there's all sorts of things that could happen. But a recent study looking at microplastics in fish larva from Uppsala University found that the microplastics actually led to increased mortality rates because it stunted growth and altered larval behavior. So first of all, these fish larvae, they actually preferred to eat the microplastic than their normal food of zoo plankton. So for whatever reason, they thought the plastic was delicious. Yeah, and so that's gonna stunt their growth. Then they found that when these fish larvae, they grew up when they were put in a space with a predator, so these were little perch larvae, when they went into a space with, let's say, a pike, they were caught and eaten more than four times quicker than control fish and actually all the fish exposed to microplastic were dead within 48 hours when exposed to a predator. So it makes them not grow as big, it keeps them from eating good food and apparently keeps them from being able to eat food. Yeah, they're more likely to go up the food chain, too. I mean, then the plastic goes up the food chain, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's a very good point, yeah, absolutely. Microplastics, don't do it. Yeah, so something that I was thinking about today in alongside the World Oceans Day, thinking about plastics in the ocean and the gyres that are collecting the plastics in the ocean and also the microplastics that we've talked about so much, the best thing that we can do is stop the plastic at the source and that is stop using plastic bottles, plastic bags and stop throwing them away into landfills, stop littering. I have a friend who has done cleanup along the Russian River near Gernville and Santa Rosa in California and she said the last time they did a river cleanup, they picked up several tons of garbage along the river side. Much of it had probably gotten there by from the water along the waterway but people leaving things along the water and if the rivers rise or rains come or winds blow, it can blow right into the water and then out to sea. So there's a lot of plastic that just gets channeled into the rivers that go out to the ocean and then once they get out in the ocean, that's when they get churned up and they start becoming these microplastics. So stopping at the source is the best thing that we can do if we can minimize our plastics use and how we throw it away and get rid of it, that is the best thing we can do. Second to that is to help people who are interested in ocean cleanup and are working near the coasts before the plastics break down too much and end up going out to sea where they can do more damage. So, absolutely. And Dave Freidel in the chat room brought up a very good point that microbeads have been banned in the US by President Obama signed something in December, in late December, I think, banning microbeads. That will be enacted in mid-2017. So that does mean that we still should be diligent and look now and try to stop buying that stuff now. That also means if you travel abroad, things could still have microbeads in them that way. They can sneak into things if things are imported from outside the United States. So it's still something that we should be aware of and if you're going to buy a scrub, if you really need a scrub for your skin, make sure that the abrasive in there is not peach pits or something. Yes, there are abrasive things in nature. Salt, there's some where they use salt granules. There's all sorts of things that you can use that aren't little pieces of plastic, which maybe aren't a great thing to be putting on your body anyway. So, just a thought, a chest. And of course, City of Davis has outlawed plastic bags. So they charge you extra if you really have to have bags, but I always feel too guilty to do that, so I've been buying totes because I always forget. I have so many totes. Now, next time I move, I'm gonna do the entire move in totes because now this will be a problem that we're kicking down to the next generation where totes started showing up in the oceans and were everywhere. But yeah, the other thing we have to look at is you pointed out that because this thing isn't supposed to completely phase out everything until 2017, because we have to be diligent towards attempts to repeal this. So, yeah. So this is the battle that now goes on is industry is probably gonna fight to try to get that repealed under future administration. So we'll keep our eyes open. Yeah, and that's also true for things like bag bands, which there is a bag band for all of California that's trying to make its way through, but I don't think it's finalized yet. And the next thing after that, hey, plastic water bottles. There's lots of plastic out there in our world that we don't need to have, and so that's something to keep in mind is it all, so much of it ends up in the ocean. The other part of this that I do wanna mention before we go on to the break is that we also perhaps need to start looking at our filtration methods, because a lot of these microplastics are making it into the ocean because we don't have the right filtration methods to pull it out before it gets there. And maybe it's worth it once we see that it's affecting fisheries, it's affecting worldwide economies if this is gonna continue happening with fish that we depend on in a lot of economies if you wanna put a price tag on it. There's lots of different reasons for us to wanna keep plastic from ending up in the ocean. And until we figured out how to stop putting it there, maybe it's time to start pulling it out before it gets there. It's a big and discerning problem, there's people looking at it, but I think we've covered on the show before through a guest, it's much more complicated to get those plastics out. Creating a filtration system or something that's small, that can also be cleaned out is a tough challenge, but it's one well worth. Well worth it. You're not putting scientists, find some filters. That's right, young scientists, that's right, get into the filter development area of science and engineering. There are lots of people working on that problem right now and I'm sure in a few years we're going to find major advances in our filtration systems. But you know what, it's time for right now. What? It's time for our break, it's time for our break. We're gonna take a quick break, Elizabeth. Cybert has been waiting patiently through our conversations in the first half of this show to speak with us about her work on little tiny fossils in the ocean. And I'm very excited to talk with her about this. So let's take a quick break and make sure you're back here to talk with us or to be with us while Dr. Cybert talks with us. That's right. Y'all come back now, here. 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Hi there, thanks for inviting me to come join you. This is fun. Yeah, I'm glad you're having fun so far. Now it's your turn to keep it going. No pressure, no pressure. So today's World Oceans Day, as we've said, and there's a lot of stuff happening. I know that worldoceansday.org, I believe, is a group, and they've got events going on all over the country. Have you been doing anything fun? Other than joining the show, I guess? Yeah, I've celebrated World Oceans Day since early high school when I discovered it. And unfortunately, this year is just really crazy, but I'm really lucky to work in an office that can see the ocean, and so I definitely went and just hung out with the ocean for a little while because I feel really lucky that I can. Yeah, Scripps, where Scripps is located is just, it's beautiful, so, yeah, right, take advantage of that. So what are ichthyoliths? So I work with ichthyoliths, like you said, they're really, really tiny fossil fish teeth. Now why teeth? Mostly because teeth are made of appetite or calcium phosphate, and they're really hard to get rid of. And so most other parts of the fish, most other parts of most fossils tend to dissolve be destroyed just over the millions and millions of years, but because fish teeth are a lot more durable, they last a lot longer. So we're talking about things that are really, really tiny. In general, most of what I look at goes through about a hundred micron sieve. Now to give you an idea of scale, you could take a human hair and put it through one of the sieves that my fish teeth will go through, so I have to use a sieve that your hairs will not go through in order to catch all of my teeth to look at. But they're there, and once you go through and look at them, they're actually really, really quite pretty. That's amazing. So what do they look like? Do they have lots of colors or? So mostly they, it depends on what kind of sediment they're in, if I had a warning, I'd pick a picture for you, but they're mostly triangular actually, so they kind of look like you'd imagine a triangular tooth to look. It's pretty neat. A lot of them will have a little kind of pulp cavity in the center of it that's also triangular, where they will have a set of nerve tissue, just like we have nerve tissue. And so they often, sometimes they'll have colors, sometimes they're clear. Let's see, can I try and do a screen share for you? Yeah. We've got one up from Kiki. Those are pretty wild. Oh yeah, that was what I was going for. So there's a few of them that show up. Basically there's kind of triangular teeth. The ones that you see in that image are some of my maybe big ones. So the scale bar, there's a little white bar on there, that's about 500 microns or half a millimeter. Yeah, so they're very tiny. So tiny, I actually use two microscopes to do most of my work, one to look at them in the sediment, one to put them in the slide position, then like that. Wow. It's impressive to be able to work with something that is so small. I mean, how do you place them on a slide and get that, I mean, do they fall as they may, or is there like, do you have a method to your manipulation of these tiny things? I do have a method actually. I always, when I talk about these, and they're so interesting, they're really abundant in marine sediments, but they're actually so tiny that the people who work on microfossils when I was first working on them didn't even believe that we had the numbers we were talking about because they'd never seen them because they were sort of small. So I go to the art store and I buy the tiniest paintbrush they have. If you know anything about paintbrushes, they measure them in like 10 is a really big one, zero is pretty tiny. I use one that has 10 zeros is what it's called. So it's like maybe a couple of hairs and we just pick it up using the paintbrush with a little bit of water and I take it over to my other microscope and I gently place it down and I can't place them without using a microscope to see what's going on. So you're sitting here staring through a microscope with this little tiny brush with these little tiny objects and placing one by one on the slide. Yep. Do you have a steady hand? Or do you? You know, there's a couple of tricks. One is that I don't drink coffee, but the other one is that if you anchor your hand on something, it stops the shaking so if you figure out where your anchor point is, that works pretty well. That's me when I wanna take a selfie and put my hand against a wall. So that's already fascinating, but then how does this filtration process work in the first place if the sieve is the size of the human hair? There's plenty of junk and detritus in the universe that's gotta be clogging up your search to begin with. Yes. So actually, I've spent a lot of time trying to come up with methods to make this functional. One of the things I always like to say is I don't know why no one's done this before. It's so cool, but I know exactly why no one's done this before because it took a lot of effort in it to figure out how to do it efficiently. How do you even find it? Yeah, so one of the things that I do is I actually acidify a lot of my samples using stuff you find in your kitchen, mostly vinegar. We use lab vinegar, 5% acidic acid, but it's basically vinegar when we were testing this, we went to the grocery store and just bought a jug of vinegar to try it. See, real science, that's how it was done. That's right, troubleshoot however you can. There you go. So we dissolve a lot of the sediments. A lot of open ocean sediments is made of calcium carbonate from little tiny micro plankton. So cockle at the fore is in form, and if for another little tiny plankton have shells that they grow and then they fall to the sea floor and they make up the ocean sediment. And so I dissolve a lot of those away, and that helps a lot. But then I've also been employing a technique that lets me turn this fish teeth bright pink. And that actually works really, really well because there's very little in ocean sediments that is bright pink. And so if I can turn just the fish teeth pink that actually really helps a lot. Oh, is that like when the dentist does that test with you to find out if you're brushing properly and they stain your teeth pink and then they make you brush your teeth? You know, I don't think it's the same stuff, but it's kind of similar. If you've ever seen a cleared and stained fish in a museum where they've got the bones all dyed pink and the fish has been cleared, that we use the same chemical that they use just for a different purpose. Nice. So we dye our fish teeth pink and that makes it a lot easier to work with. Right, because then you can tell them apart from everything else. Yes. That's right, even though they're tiny. So under a microscope, separating them from everything else. Yes. So what are you finding? What are the areas of discovery in these teeth? Yeah, so fish are really neat because they kind of represent the middle of an ocean food web where you have your plankton and then you have your whales. But then in between those things we have a little tiny fish that like we talked about fish larvae earlier but those little fish larvae grow into smaller fish. Often in the open ocean we have a lot of vertically migrating things that actually have a lot of the carbon that's in there. There's a lot of the biomass is fish and so they're kind of this link between the base of the food web and the big charismatic things that we tend to think of in the open ocean. And so it's neat because I can look at sort of this link between the base and the top and see how they respond to changes. And so I'm really interested in how the oceans got to be the way they are. Sort of what happened in the last, say, tens or hundreds of millions of years that the history of the ocean. And so fish are a cool way to look at that. And so are you looking at like the different, the fossil teeth to define the species that are present in different layers of sediment to figure out who was where, when and maybe how changing climate affected that? So we're doing a little bit of that. Unfortunately, as you see in the teeth, they actually all look very similar. And so I sort of look at three different levels of tooth records. And so the simplest thing is just how many teeth are there and that how many teeth can answer and how many teeth and how does that number change? Do we have more teeth before or after an event or, for example, in warm times, do we have more teeth in cold times or vice versa? And so that's just the sort of how many are there. And then the second level I look at is what does the gross community look like? And so there's two main types of ichthylates. One is teeth, one is shark denicles. And so my favorite thing about sharks is that they're covered in modified teeth. And so if you've ever rubbed your hand on shark skin, it's kind of grainy. And that material is actually the same material as the fish teeth. And so it preserves. And they're actually about the same size as a lot of the fish teeth. So I can get both a record of raphinfish and a record of sharks. Do the sharks lose their teeth all the time? So is there also, do their teeth preserve the same way that their scales do? Great question. So the teeth are actually, on a single square centimeter of shark skin, we have thousands of their scales. Whereas over the course of a lifetime, a shark might lose a couple thousand teeth, maybe 10,000 if you're really lucky. And so we actually see orders of magnitude more scales in the record. And so even though we think of sharks as constantly losing teeth, the scales just vastly outnumber them. And so I find a shark tooth every now and again in my records, but I actually don't find very many. That's fascinating. So is it kind of like the way we shed our skin cells? Just like where our house, the dust on our floors is mostly our skin. Yeah, I think probably something like that. Yeah, so just to get back to your question, bring it full circle is that so there's how many teeth are there and then sort of what's the relative abundance of fish teeth versus shark scales? So gross metric of how many sharks were there relative to how many fish were there. And then the last metric that I use is looking a little bit more deeply at what the teeth look like and what their shape evolution is through time. And unfortunately I don't know what most of the species are. I can identify teeth that we think are from lantern fish and we think we've got a good handle on flying fish. But unfortunately in the records that I've looked at, both of those are actually really rare. And so we're working on it, but unfortunately we don't really know what they are yet. I'm hoping to in the next couple of years during my postdocs sort some of that out. Right, so the actual identification of the fish is by tooth, by microscopic tooth is actually quite difficult. Yeah, they all just look very similar. So we can actually, and something that I've been working on and just sort of wrapped up at the end of my dissertation was we can actually see the teeth do change through time and they do have turnover, which means we actually do see things originating, they evolve, and then they go extinct to different types. And so we think there's definitely promise there, we just haven't cracked that code yet. Cool. Are you looking at other things in these little fossils like isotopes or any indicators of the climate? Sometimes, so I really don't like dissolving my teeth because I work so hard to get them and you have to dissolve them to get the isotopes. Yeah. There's a lot of really, really smart people who've been working on isotope records from a lot of these similar sites using other microfossils. So those four minifera that I talked about briefly that make their little chalky shells actually preserve a lot of isotope information. And so we can actually get, not only do we get what the fish look like, we can actually from the same core get a temperature record from four minifera or something about carbon cycling from carbon isotopes. Sometimes we can get different information about how many other types of microfossils were there as well. So we can look at the whole base of the food chain and not just the fish or not just the plankting group. We can combine them. So I don't personally work on that yet. It's something I'd like to, but... Maybe, maybe later. So I've got a very Kirsten-y question, Tess. Okay. Okay, here you go. You mentioned that you've been celebrating Ocean Day since high school. So what was it that even that early gravitated you towards the ocean? Were your parents involved in the oceans? Or was it just something that they're like, wow, our kid really likes going to the ocean? Better encourage. I think it was a little bit of the latter. Both my parents are computer scientists. They don't really get the whole ocean thing. But I think I've always been interested in the ocean. And for me, when I was really little, I really wanted to crack the dolphin code. I wanted to understand dolphin language. And then as I got a little bit older and I started, I read everything I could find about oceans. That was just sort of what I did when I went to bed at night. And as I got a little older, I started reading about ocean currents and ocean circulation and just started to understand how you could put together how an ocean ecosystem works just from looking at the chemistry that is in the ocean at that particular location and how the currents were working. And that, to me, was just really, really neat that you can see how an ocean works just by looking at how all these different parts go together and that that might tell you something about what the life looks like. And it reminds me, you made a comment earlier there also about how ickylyths may not be as charismatic as some of the other creatures in the sea. But definitely not any less important as much a part of that system you're describing. So once you got started down this path of investigation, you've gotten to this point where you've done your dissertation. You recently published a study in the, which paper was it? Was it the proceedings? Yeah, proceedings of the Royal Society, B. What did you find when you looked at these fossils and what did you discover? Yeah, so actually this relates a little bit to what I was just saying about how we, as modern oceanographers, study the modern ocean and can figure out sort of what you might expect an ecosystem to look like, given a certain set of oceanographic conditions. And so what I found looking back in time is I basically looked at just first order how many ickylyths were there through time and what did the ocean ecosystem look like. And we kind of expected going in that we'd see a system that was very sort of stable through time, maybe with ups and downs, with climate change, or when big events happened. And what we found was actually something really nifty and really, really, really different from what I expected at any rate. And what we found was that we saw three sort of very distinct and very different ecosystem structures. And so the metric I talked to you a little bit about earlier, this sort of the relative abundance of teeth and scales. So some sort of metric of how many fish there are versus how many sharks there are. What we found is that that was very, very stable on long time scales. So in the Cretaceous from about 85 million years ago until the asteroid hit 66 million years ago, we see this system where there's a lot of, or where there's actually very few sharks and very few fish. And their fossils are present in about a one to one ratio. So we see the same number of shark fossils and we see fish fossils. And even though the amounts go up and down, they don't, the ratio doesn't really change. When the asteroid hit the planet and the dinosaurs went extinct, we see this shift in the ratio where we see the number of sharks stay the same, the number of fish goes way up. And so what we see is a lot more fish in the ocean relative to the number of sharks. And that then stayed the same for another 45 million years. And that's a huge amount of time. So, and why is that? Is that, we're talking about tiny, tiny, tiny little fish mostly, is this part of it? So is this, as the large megafauna, I guess of its day, came drifting down to the bottom of the ocean, they became a new resource that even though the surface of the planet was sort of being devastated at the time, there was an extra resource there for the little fish at the bottom of the sea to feast upon. Well, so what we think was happening is that when the extinction happened, a lot of things in the ocean went extinct. And in particular, one of the big, sort of famous groups that go extinct are the ammonites. And if you've ever seen an obelisk of today, they're kind of related. They're the little black squiggly things in the picture. And they seem to, a lot of them seem to live in the same environment that we tend to think of fish living in today. They live in the mesopelagic from about, or 200 meters to 1,000 meters depth. And we think they probably were competing with fish for food. And when the extinction happened and those guys disappeared, we see that the fish start to diversify and maybe take over some of the empty space or the empty ecological space that was taken up by them. And so we see this sort of shift where fish actually did really well. It's interesting that there wasn't a concomitant shift in the number of sharks or predator species because you'd think if you have prey species increasing that you would have predator species increasing as well. So that's interesting. But just the scale difference is probably what. It's really neat. And what we think is happening is that there may actually be a different link between, so we think of a system as oh, sharks eat fish. But it may have been that actually sharks were eating a whole bunch of stuff and the fish that evolved weren't necessarily the prey that the sharks were able to handle. But then later in the paleocene or in the paleogene, so the extinction was about 66 million years ago, but then once the ratio stabilized, and that took about five million years to get to the new sort of stable state, the absolute abundance of sharks and fish then rose and fell in concert with different changes in climate. So we see these big swings between 55 and 50 million years ago, the absolute abundance of our fossils went up about 10 fold in both groups. And so we see that they do go up and down together, but the ratio is different from the prior system. So it was disrupted somehow. And do you have any, and so what was happening in the climate to cause those swings? Was it, what was it? What happened to the little squiggly- Glaciation, what was happening? So during the paleogene, during the first half of the paleogene anyway, there was no permanent ice on Antarctica. It was actually a fully greenhouse earth and the CO2 was incredibly high and it was a really warm world. And what we see is that about 50 million years ago was the warmest it's been in the last 90 to 100 million years and I wanna say global temperatures went up by about four degrees C and then back down and right along with it, the fish and shark abundance actually went up and then back down, which was really baffling, a really big surprise to us that we saw this increase in fish in this warm world. It's because nobody was fishing them, yes. Yes, yes. But if we go to the modern system for a moment, because that's a really, it's another abrupt transition. 20 million years ago, our stable state that lasted over 40 million years, almost 46 million years in the paleogene just abruptly changed. And suddenly instead of having this relatively stable abundances of fish and sharks, what we see is a highly variable system and it kind of like a light switch. We don't know what the mechanism was that switched the system actually because there's no really obvious climate event, there's no mass extinction, no asteroid hit the planet then. But we see this big change in how the system's working where there's a much larger, there's an increase in variability in the abundance of fish. So instead of having these nice curves that go up and down over millions of years, we might take a sample and see one level of fish and then 50,000 years later, that's gone up by four fold and then it drops down way low and there's just a lot more bouncing around. And along with that, we see a drop in sharks. We go from seeing like one shark fossil for every five teeth to maybe one shark fossil in every 50 fish teeth. And they just kind of disappear from our records. And so we think that something might have happened to really change the amount of primary production in the ocean and maybe we're seeing a lot more variability. So it may not be that the open ocean where our records are from is not as happy of a place, it's not so stable. And so the big things that depend on a constant food source aren't gonna hang around there very often. Yeah, when Mike in the chat room is wondering where were you sampling and is there any possibility that where you just, this is a localized effect based on where your samples were taken. Yeah, so again, great question. We're sampling from the middle of the open oceans. So we got, I'd say we, the Paleo-Oceanographic community has been collecting ocean sediment cores since the 60s. So all of my samples for this study were taken before I was born. Just a testament to marine collections and the fact that you can actually do really great science with samples that have been around a long time. But these samples are taken from the center of the oceans and they've been the cores that we have that were in the center of the ocean. So between all the major currents in the gyres for their entire history. And so we think it would be a localized phenomenon except that we actually see it throughout the world. And so we see it in different ocean basins and we see it at the same time. And so if it was just a local phenomenon, we would expect it to only show up in one of our sites. But because we can replicate it, we see it all over the world. It's much more likely that it would get a global picture. What were you gonna ask, Blair? Oh, well I was just gonna say that in the third section, just looking at the graphic that we had with the study, the one thing that I see that's very different in the third section is marine mammals. Is that something that you think had a profound effect or do you think it's a result of something else going on that their numbers were so much higher? So it's really tough for us to get cause versus effect in this kind of study. So all I can do really is speculate. But I have a couple of thoughts about that. And one of the big things is that around 20 to about 10 million years ago, that 10 million year window is when we start seeing the diversification of a lot more open ocean dwelling megafauna that we think of as common today. So things like big seabirds like albatross that fly long distances and very large sharks, large things like tuna that again, larger organisms that move around. And of course I've got the whales in there as well. And what we're starting to see is this diversification of migrators, things that have to travel long distances for food. And so when we see this uptick in variability in our fish, what we think may be happening is that the variability we see in this modern system in the last 20 million years may be a more localized phenomena where we see certain regions having a lot more at one point and you go just a little bit farther away, it'll be a little bit less. And so you have a patchy ocean and things might need to move around a little bit more to find food. Which drives the migration, which turns, you get the megafauna which needs to be able to cross an ocean and can't just sit in one place. Wow, yeah. Exactly, and then that helps explain to us a little bit anyway why we might be seeing this rapid drop off in the abundance of shark fossils. Because it's not like sharks are gone, we have sharks all over the world and they're a really important part of a lot of different ocean ecosystems. But what we think may be happening is that instead of spending the vast majority of their time in the open ocean where they were for the pelagine, sharks are now spending more time migrating or going off to the coast or not just, they're just not spending their whole life cycle in there on the open ocean. So when they shut their skin, they're not going. Their skin's falling at other places basically. That makes sense, yeah. And so you said that throughout this it looks like there's fluctuations with small changes in climate but it seems to pretty much be in concert with the other populations, right? So the overall effect you saw was that there wasn't really a huge change in a particular type of animal based on a climate shift, is that right? So a little bit. So in the Cretaceous and the Pelagine, so before 20 million years ago, what we see is actually that the abundance of these organisms, so the abundance of our fossils seems to go up and down in concert with local temperature records. So we see temperature increase, we see the abundance of sharks and the abundance of fish increase. And we see a decrease in temperature, we'll see the corresponding decrease. What we don't see is actually any sort of structural change. So the relative abundances, this ratio that I was talking about, that doesn't change at all with climate. It stays almost completely stable through these big changes in climate. Now in the modern system, 20 million years ago to the present, we see something totally different that's a lot harder to tie to any sort of climate because our dating system is not so great for that. We don't have the fine levels of variability that we need to look at glacial and or glacial cycles. So future work on the very long list of things. Yeah, to be able to start correlating it. Can we take any of this information and try to apply it to what's going on right now? I think it's a little bit tough because again, we're looking at a system that's really altered by humans. And as much as I'd love to say, oh, fish did really, really well in this warm climate, actually we're in a totally different regime than we were in the system when the fish did well in the warm climate. We've got this entirely different ecosystem structure. And so it's really tough to say that the ecosystem structure now would respond the same way it did with warm climates. We also have human pressures and one of the things we think caused these changes in structure is competition between fish and other organisms or competition between the predators of fish. And we humans are predators and we're really changing a lot of the things that are going on in the system. And so I don't know where we're going, but it is a neat thing to see that at least at some point fish did really well in a warm world gives us a little bit of hope, but I don't know that it's certainly not the VL end all. Right, yeah, I think that was like one of the most interesting parts of your results is that at the highest temperatures, the fish were doing great, you know, but now like you said, we have completely different pressures that we humans are putting onto the fish through fishing and also pollution and everything that we do. Microplastic. Our use of the oceans in general. The other part of it too there is that the ocean fauna had to become migrators to adapt for the last 20 to 40 million years. And before that, when the temperatures rose, they were pretty much staying at home. Plenty of food, they could stay where they were. So can you then go from a migrator to one that stays at home in a potentially warmer and more like place? I mean, this is one of those questions that will be, this is that data point now that we're creating. Yes, this is the fourth segment. Yes, exactly, this is going to be the fourth one. Future sentient mice will look back on the human, whatever it is. This is, we're creating that thing that we don't know that will have to be understood by scientists in the future looking back. But it is important to try to predict and as much as we want to preserve the oceans that we now live with. And I don't know what those effects could be. And I have to ask this. And I know because this is a science show, we've only talked about the science, but there is, there was something in the chat room that you perhaps teach people how to circus. And I can't not ask you about it. So you stung upon my secret life, which is not really a secret. But I've actually been doing circus arts, aerial acrobatics, things like that I was 11. So I really enjoy just like hanging upside down 20 feet in the air. It's kind of fun. And so I really like teaching other people how to do that too. So what I do on my nights off. It keeps me sane. Scientists by day, acrobat by night. And there is some video available on her YouTube channel of Elizabeth standing on someone's shoulders, of her being balancing and circusing. I guess it's, it's circusing. It's a verb now. I have not heard of any of the verb before actually. I like it. I'm gonna have to find it. You have to find it. Let's all circus. Oh my gosh. They're doing jumping jacks with you on your show. Oh, that looks incredibly dangerous. And somewhat fun. It looks somewhat fun. Oh, it's great fun. Oh no, oh my gosh. This is somersault from the fall of about 60. Oh wow. That is some skills. This is good radio. It's circusing skills. It's circusing skills. This is me reacting to a video on YouTube. Okay. And if anyone wants to see that, you can look for Elizabeth on YouTube. She's got some great, there's some great videos. It looks like you're highly skilled. Wow, you've been doing it since you're 11. I am impressed. That is fantastic. Rena Sonsfield. I think my super power is that I'm just really persistent. I'm actually not very skilled at any of it. It took me probably four times longer to learn to juggle than any of my friends, but just kept trying and got there eventually. And now you really know it. So that'll make you that much better of a teacher. Perfect. I think that's part of it. But yeah, I think that's what helps me with the fish teeth. I'm just really persistent. That's my super power. I think that's a great super power to have. So being persistent and a scientist who works on the oceans, I just want to ask you, why as kind of an ocean spokesperson, ocean science spokesperson right now, why is it important to focus on the oceans? So the ocean is 70% of our surface of our planet, and it's significantly more than that. I have a professor who in the very first class, I'm going to use his demo. If you all take a breath in and exhale, and now take a second breath in and out. And that second breath, that one is all because of the ocean. The phytoplagdin in the ocean make about 50% of our oxygen. Life has, we think, originated in the ocean and was there from the very, really about 3 and 1 half, 4 billion years ago. So the ocean is just a really important part of our planet. And sure, we as humans don't live in the ocean, so I sometimes wish I could. It really supports the vast majority of life on our planet, and it gives us the air, the very thing we need to live, the air we breathe, and it's made all of life possible. So I think it's a really important part of the planet. Absolutely, and with your research, looking back into the past, hopefully, at some point, that'll give us a picture that we can use to help us inform our use of the oceans in the future. Help us get there. Yeah. Are we screwed? Are we totally screwed? I don't know, what? I don't think so. I have a lot of faith in human ingenuity, and I really, I think it's really neat watching. And I'm going to sound really ridiculous because I'm all of 26, but it's really neat watching the younger generation talk about all of the stuff they're doing to help the planet, and just watching the undergrads even that I work with who are just so much more aware than the people I'm a little bit older than me. And I think we'll be OK. I hope we'll be OK, but I think we can make it. And honestly, one of the things from my research that I've found is that fish are really, really resilient to global change. You can kind of hit them with pretty much anything, and at least some part of the group is going to do OK. And so I think that's a really neat thought, is that fish are really successful. There's more than 30,000 species of them in the world. And I think we're going to hit a lot of them, but some of them are going to be OK, and they will do better. So I don't know. I think that these are kind of a chance. I, too, am always constantly very impressed with the younger generations in a quick defense for my generations and those previous to me. We had a lot of lead paint. And asbestos. Don't forget the asbestos. Asbestos and a lot of lead paint. So we may just not have been able to be as bright. Are you just like excusing the stupid? Is that what you're saying? No, I'm excusing. I don't like the shifting baselines phenomenon. My baseline's a little bit different, and their baseline's even a little different. Every year, everyone's got a little bit of a different perspective. And it's just neat to see that changing perspective. Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us tonight, Elizabeth. It's been wonderful to speak with you. If anyone is interested in following Elizabeth online, you can find her on Twitter. She has a Twitter account at Elizabeth's Cybert. Maybe soon that Twitter name will change. She told us a secret name that she might want to change it to, which would be pretty funny. You can also find her if you look for Cybert at Scripps Institute of Oceanography. And are you going to be there much longer? Do you know where you're going? Are you doing a postdoc, or do you know what you're doing? Yeah, so I'm actually, you've caught me on my last week here. I'm actually moving to Harvard next week, so I'll be there for the next three years. Hopefully trying to solve some of the problems that we've talked about that I don't have answers for yet. Nice. That is very nice. Well, good luck with that move, and congratulations on Harvard. That's fantastic. There's smart people there. There's a lot less of the stupid. Yes. And like we said, Elizabeth also has a YouTube channel with her circus videos. So if all else fails, we will have the circus to fall back on then. That's right. That's my secret backup plan of science. Does it work? I'm going to move somewhere and start a circus school. Excellent. Perfect. It's always good. Always good to have a plan B, maybe even have a plan Zed. I don't know. It's always good. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much. You are welcome. You're welcome to stick around. We have some more science news before the end of the show. Blair, you got slime molds? Yes, slime molds. So slime molds are pretty amazing life forms. They're not animals. They're not bacteria. They're not fungi. They're nothing and everything. They're slime molds. And they have already shown some pretty interesting abilities. But now we know that they have some pretty intense decision making abilities. So they use something called the two-armed bandit, which is a play on the one-armed bandit slot machine. And so the conventional way of doing this experiment with humans would have two different levers. And some of them would give rewards at different times. But one would consistently give a bigger reward, no matter when it gave the reward. And so you would test how long it would take for the person to abandon the other level, to only try the lever that gave the higher payoff. And the slime molds do this. So what they did is they had the slime mold in a test where, in one direction, there was food. In another direction, there was patches of food. They were more or less regularly distributed. But one direction had more of these patches than the other. And the slime mold actually compared the relative qualities of the multiple options and most often chose the direction with a higher overall concentration of food. That's fascinating. So basically, we have an organism without a brain that is taking certain chemical stimuli into account and acting on them. I'm not going to say making decisions, but of course. Yes, that's an anthropomorphization, of course. But it, in some way, chemically or whatever, weighs its options. And the chemical reaction causes it to go one way versus the other. So the two-armed bandit. There's some interesting similarities. There's some interesting parallels that could be drawn to other things related to the two-armed bandit that I was thinking about that we won't go into because it's a science show. But maybe in the after show. But if you think about a trade-off where there's benefits to both sides, but one has the possibility of a higher payoff, slime mold was able to do that. Yeah, so somehow, whether it's through some kind of a sensing mechanism where some kind of signal is up-regulated more than another, and that leads to motility in one direction versus the other. That's Kirsten's answer. My answer is from now on, I will call them sly molds. Excellent. There we go. I got a couple of interesting stories here. Did you guys hear about the jumping eels? I did. Oh my gosh, I love this. So there's anecdotal conversation about people seeing, historically, people seeing electric eels jump out of the water to attack invaders or their prey. However, it had not ever been studied or seen before in the lab. And a researcher at the university, let's see, where did he work? He's a researcher who's published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science this week. He's a researcher at Vanderbilt University, studied this defensive behavior neuroscientist, Kenneth Catania, wrote that it consists of an approach and leap out of the water during which the eel presses its chin against a threatening conductor while discharging high voltage volleys. And sometimes, half of their body rises up out of the water. And they're really good at jumping out of the water. And there is some video of this if you haven't seen it online. But it's a pretty impressive video of these eel in a tank. And they have a fake crocodile head onto which the eel jumps. And it's made of a conductive material, so that little lights start blinking in the head as a result of the electrical signal that the eel is putting out. So it looks like the eel is petting the croc. It looks like that. Oh, who's a good croc? That's a lot of electricity. Who's a good croc? That's a lot of electricity. I'm thinking this could be a cool, I don't know, water-based dance club, the light show, eel-based light show. I don't know. I'm just imagining the researcher whose job it was to design a crocodile head that blinked. Yeah, let's make this conductive and let's put holes in it and little LED lights and make it blink. Yes, exactly. The IU PAC, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, have confirmed atomic numbered elements 113, 115, 117, and 118 and now have given them provisional names. We have 113 being named Neonium with a symbol N-H. Element 115, Moscovium with a symbol M-C. 117 is Tennesine with a symbol T-S, and 118 is Oganeson with a symbol O-G. That's my favorite one. O-G, O-G, O-G. And my final story for the night is that the United States Senate has ratified a reform bill of the Toxic Substances Control Act. And it's an act that was brought to bear in the 1970s. It's kind of out of date now and hasn't been really great. It's been kind of weak and there have been a lot of chemicals that ended up on the market that pose health problems to people because they haven't had to be tested properly before being released into the wild. And so this Toxic Substances Control Act governs how industrial chemicals are tested and regulated. It is now just needs to go to Obama to be signed. But what this bill now does is that it compromises so that it brings science-based evidence into account in the approval of substances and the regulation of substances as opposed to just lobbying and hearsay, actual science being used to inform policy. That wasn't just happening at all before? No, not really. In fact, the EPA was kind of hamstrung on some of the things that they could do. And companies ended up miring the EPA and legal loopholes through the TSCA that kept the EPA from being able to actually act on several toxic substances that it's been trying to regulate for years. Additionally, this bill does have provisions to reduce the use of animals in chemical testing, so less animal testing. And that should make animal rights proponents very happy. And also, the inclusion of study of cancer clusters. And so these are areas in which people are just coming down with cancer, and they can't really figure out why. And so the idea is to actually get epidemiologists out to study what's going on in different areas to find out whether or not there is a chemical link in these cancer cluster areas around the country to find out whether there's something that needs to be done. It's kind of nice. So anyway, ta-da! Science wins! Great. Yes, very excited. Justin, what are your final stories? The final quick two stories. First one is inbred neanderthals. So part of the thing that we've been talking about is in neanderthal human interactions is that the offspring may have been less fertile. And that's why the sort of neanderthal population died out within our population. But one of the interesting things is they found genes within the neanderthals that look like they would be less likely to reproduce. Things that would make it less likely for even neanderthal and neanderthal to perhaps bear children. And so part of it might not be that it was the hybridization of modern human and neanderthal that created that sort of lack of reproductivity but it was something already going on within the neanderthal population which we knew lived in smaller groups and were more isolated and therefore were likely very inbred to begin with. And this, this study is proposing, may have passed on to non-African populations to some percentage even though most people who are in a non-direct recent African descent will only have about 2% of their genome from neanderthals if you go back in time closer to when neanderthals and humans were interacting. Their population was a ratio of one to 10. It's likely that they had a good 10% of the population that was part neanderthal. So these genes possibly they claim have accounted to historically 1% lower reproductive fitness for those with neanderthal lineage. And the last story I have tonight is about the city under the sea, the lost city that was found, it's a Greek city. It's not, yeah, is it Atlantis? They found Atlantis. This is a while back they discovered the bases of pillars underneath the sea, only three to five meters deep. And it looks just like a formed base of a pillar should look, it looks formed, it looks like it has a little architectural flair to it. But it turns out, no, they've done some pretty detailed analysis, the mineral content, they've done some microscopy x-rays and stable isotope techniques, and they say it's a naturally occurring geological phenomenon has to do with hydrocarbon seeps it's team and paleo settings as well as in the modern seafloor. The city under the sea. It's not a city at all. It's actually not a city. I bet they didn't even find any mermaids did they? Oh, they did. I was gonna say that for next week though, thanks. Oh, okay. That's really fascinating though. I mean we, there are all these, you know, you look at the, what something looks like and there are all these mistakes that we make in how we identify animals, how we group them together, how we identify physical structures in the world. It's the same thing and so it's this similarity. It's like it's a base of a pillar. It's got to be Atlantis, but then how wonderful that science can completely dash our dreams like that. So basic morphology has gotten us a long way before we had other tools and techniques, but now we have them. Now it's time to ruin it all. We don't have to be the victim of morphology alone or being tricked by our own eyes. Yeah. And mermaids are just manatees. Warp, warp, warp, warp. It's a manatee. No, no, it's a mermaid to me. I just made that up. Okay. I think that we have done this show. So close to the method journal. Long enough. When I start making up songs, it is time for this show to be over. That's the cue, that's the cue to roll on. That's right. So everyone, thank you for joining us. I am going to take this moment to thank Elizabeth one more time. Thank you so much, Dr. Sebert, for joining us this evening. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. And also I would like to thank our Patreon sponsors. Thank you to Paul Disney, Kevin Parachan, Keith Corsale, Steve DeBell, Melissa Mosley, Jesse Moreno, Patrick O'Keefe, Jason Snyderman, Rita Garcia, Gerald Sorrells, Greg Guthman, Alex Wilson, Dave Neighbor, Jason Dozier, Matthew Litwin, Eric Knapp, Jason Roberts, Chris Clark, Richard Onimus, John Rataswamy, Byron Lee, EO, Jared Lysette, Ulysses Adkins, Brian Condren. 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What was it you were afraid to talk about when you were talking about your slam roll? I was making a bad analogy. Don't worry about it. If you didn't figure it out. I couldn't figure it out. She was going down a blind pathway there. No, no, explain. So the slime rolls and other organisms in this to our abandoned scenario saw two pathways that both were beneficial, but one had a higher chance of a good payoff. What's in the news right now is related to that. Are you talking about politics in America today? Yes. Yeah. I got you. That's what it was about because of all of the hubbub this morning. Did everyone in California vote today? Yesterday. Yesterday. All your voting. If you didn't, it's kind of too late. I did. Although I don't know if my ballot got counted because I still have a overseas ballot, which I didn't realize. Because of when you were in Israel? Yes. So every time I voted in an election since I was in Israel, I've had to go to City Hall because I couldn't find my ballot. Like it never showed up in the mail, nothing. This year, I finally found out because I got on top of it. I was like, where the heck is my ballot? I found it was in my spam folder in my email because I signed up as an overseas voter during the last presidential election. And so ever since then, they've been emailing me my ballot. And so I don't know how to unsign up for that, but in order to vote with an overseas ballot, you have to have an overseas address. And so I just wrote, you have the email ballot. You print it out. You fill it out. Then you put it in an envelope. And you write on the front your Department of Elections mail-in ballot. And then you write your current address overseas and your address in the US. And then you put that in another envelope. And then you put with that a signed piece of paper that looks like an envelope. And then you seal up that second envelope, and you put that in the mail. But so I wrote in these big letters on the first envelope, returned from overseas, no overseas address, and circled it really big. And so I don't know if it's going to fly. But also, in a lot of cases, they won't count your ballot if things aren't close. Yeah, and I don't think mine's going to get counted either, because I never also received a ballot. I thought that was weird, but I didn't know that anybody else was getting pre-ballots. And then I arrived there, and it said, vote by mail. And I'm like, how can I vote by mail? I never got a ballot to vote by mail. And plus, who signed me up for this? So I have to use that as before the presidential election, and I have to change my status before the presidential election. Yeah, we've got to change the statuses. I can't believe I may not have been counted in my vote after all the really long time. Well, at least this was just a practice. I'm kidding. But the presidential election will have a lot more stuff on the ballot. Like, this ballot was pretty lean. There wasn't a lot on it. This was the ballot to vote for. This is a primary. But there was some other stuff on there. But it's voting to say whether or not that you're going to vote on it is what you're voting on. Yeah. But so, yes, the ballot in November will be much lengthier, and we'll have more important things on it. Like, there might be some bands on some plastic materials that show up on that ballot in November. We'll see. Dave Freidel. I know Dave Freidel is like saying, he's being ridiculous right now. If he says that Blair, you're from Kroplakistan, you're not a US citizen. So that's why you're having trouble voting. And that he voted for Dukakis. I'm not even an Earthling. I'm part Klingon. Maybe that's the problem. I went to the, this is dating, but I went to the Dukakis Convention. And it's why I'm afraid of ever going to any other gathering of politically minded people. Why? Because it was like, he would say this like, short sentence platitude. And it was like rock concert. Like, woo, he said a short sentence platitude. And I'm like, oh, stop. No, that wasn't that good. Like, cheer for something that's like really like, wow. And I mean like, I was, you know, I was like, guess for the guy. I don't even, I don't really remember. I was a kid. But it was still, it was like, there was way too many, I was looking at him like, this is these people's rock concert. I get that. I get that they're excited. I get this is a rally. I understand all of this. But I felt like he could have said anything. Like, and just to date when that was being dated, he could have said, where's the beef? And people would have gone, whoa. I like, I love fish tacos better. I just prefer someone who loves fish tacos. I cannot handle group, group think mentality situation. I know, I know that on the, on Cinco de Mayo, Trump tweeted out a picture of him eating a taco bowl. Yeah. Guess he only eats with a fork, right? Wasn't this, wasn't this Stewart's dig on him? They went out the pizza and he busted out a fork. And he's like, what are you doing? You can't eat pizza with a fork. So Hot Rod says in Canada, oh you've got small hands. I guess he can't. Is Canadian. Canadian, all you have to do is show proof of ID and reference for an address like utilities bill. Yeah, I bet you also get the day off to vote in Canada, don't you? And they end up voting for really intelligent people who hire female science ministers. Oh, interesting. Hello. One time. No, one time. One time. Yeah. Oh, oh Canada. So much better than the United States right now. Yeah, this country is still awesome. Oh, it's great. You know why it's awesome? Cause I'm gonna be on Netflix in about, oh my God. Two hours. Oh, that's right. We've gotta stay up. We've gotta stay up. Big announcement. That's not gonna happen. Watch it tomorrow. Watch it tomorrow. Starting at midnight tonight, there will be a release of a Netflix based late show, talk show called, what is it called? Chelsea. It's just called Chelsea. That's all you gotta remember. That's called Chelsea. Not there now. Don't run to your Netflix yet, but at 12.01 PM. Or AM, 12.01 AM. Oh yeah, AM, that's right. But which standard time? Like is it already available on the East Coast or is it the Pacific? That is a really good question. Oh my gosh, it could be there right now. Hold on, hold on. Let me check the email. It starts at midnight, but this is a big country. Oh, but we didn't say what it was. Kirsten is going to be on that show. Yeah, I'm gonna be on that show. Here, let me show you a picture downloaded that was sent to me today. Let me show you a picture of me on this show, talking science. Oh my goodness. That's me with Chelsea Handler and David Spade. Oh my God. I was so starstruck. Oh my God, it was ridiculous. I bet they were, I bet they were totally starstruck. And then the other woman over on the left side of the screen is Melissa Arno, who is the first American woman to summit Mount Everest without any supplemental oxygen. Whoa. Or without stairs apparently. She's basically a female badass. Nice. Yeah. And you were there talking about? So I was invited to talk about the physiology and science of altitude and high altitude. Oh, did you do some cramming? I didn't have to cram. I'm a physiologist, Blair. I know, but you know, it's always good to rush up. Of course I read things and I rushed up. Of course I did. Yeah. No, I'm just gonna wig it. No, I'm just gonna go on an international program. This show, this show airs. I just was wondering if you were that good. If you were just like, nah, I just did my hair and walked on set. That's great. I just walked up and went, bam, science. There you go. Nice. Yeah. So I did a show and it was awesome. Man, that's so cool. Yeah. Yeah, it was a really neat experience. It was a very, very cool experience. And so I hope if people have Netflix that you'll check it out and I hope you enjoy the show. I will say that it is a late show. So the jokes with in the beginning of the show between her and David Spade, they're a little risqué. So you might not wanna watch it with your young children, you know. But yeah, it's not necessarily, it's a late night show. So it's not a young children's show. So my youngest child is three. I can watch risqué language banter with my three-year-old. She's not gonna repeat it yet. My nine-year-old. That's a dangerous game. No, no, no, my nine-year-old. Actually, I guess she was eight at the time. Did take a Saturday Night Live joke I retold about the low prices at the Sofa King. And how they were Sofa King low. And she didn't get it because I was telling it to somebody else at the time. But she barely retold the joke at school, her elementary school that got treated to an ad campaign of the Sofa King. The jokes that your child is telling us. And how low the prices were. How low were they? They were Sofa King low. Sofa King low, that's right. I got, well, her mother actually got the talking to, but then I got it second hand. Oh boy, her mother goes, I know where she got those. Okay, yes, of course, okay, solved. Dave Freida wants to know if I met Chunk. Chunk is the dog, right? I did, I got to pet the dog. Let me pet him for a second. He's a very sweet dog. The dog was totally star-struck. The dog's totally, totally star-struck. And this is really funny. He's a cute, sweet dog, such a sweet dog. Yeah, that's cool. It is international if it's on Netflix. So no matter where you are, if you get Netflix, you could see Chelsea because it hairs in 200 countries worldwide. And, okay, you want to know how I was introduced? Yes. Dr. Kiki, physiologist and host of This Week in Science podcast. Oh, beautiful. That's very, that's fantastic. That's really, really exciting. I know. Which means people who are watching that will see the first uploaded over this next week, the people who watch this, the Chelsea show. Hi, new viewers. I'm gonna see, this will be the first show likely that they see. This will be very likely if they come check us out. That's right. Yeah. Elizabeth, that's right. You're on the first show. Kiki, stick out those coattails because I'm jumping on. Yeah, so we'll see if there's an uptick in the numbers. If anyone goes, oh, This Week in Science podcast. How interesting. Maybe an uptick in our Twitter followers or Twitter or Twiscience, yeah. Maybe we'll hit that 10,000 mark. Maybe, yeah. Let's see, do I have, oh no, I haven't been updating photos from my phone. I don't have photos on the computer that I can show people. Do we have, so let's see. So next week, we are going to be speaking with a wonderful roboticist about her cool inventions and robots. I know, what a bummer. I'm most likely gonna miss that. That's right, and you're gonna be out next week, right? Most likely. Because if there's some small miracle, it's because you're going to be drunk, right? Well, no, that's not why I won't be here. That will be a side effect of why I won't be here. Probably the status update on their Facebook. No, I'm going to be in Atlanta. One of my very best friends in the world is defending her PhD after working for five years with monkeys and hormones. This is the monkey's hormones, yeah. And she will now be able to call herself a reproductive endocrinologist, and she will be a doctor after next week. So I'm going to watch her defense, and her defense is on Wednesday. So there's going to be some celebration afterwards. I can guarantee you, and we'll be three hours ahead, which means by 8 o'clock PST, 11 o'clock EST, the likelihood of me being able to jump on a call is going to be low. Going to be about as big as the holes in Elizabeth's sieve, right? Yes, that's right. Plus, I'm trying to travel very light because I have two very long layovers on the way there and back, and I'm trying to explore during those layovers, which means I am not bringing my laptop and podcasting equipment. So if I do get to jump on, it will be because I get to borrow somebody else's laptop, so. Which reminds me, what's the lowest quality of connection that this show has been able to tolerate and still have a decent show? I'm not exactly sure. I don't know, I think it's just the unreliableness of stuff. I mean, if you have a consistent connection, but it's a low bandwidth, it can be fine. Okay. As long as it's just not spotty. I may be heading to the country soon. Are you gonna move out to the country? I'm looking at another farmhouse type situation. Look, I had a door. What do you name on it? Oh, look at that. I had a door with my name on it. That's so great. No, it's a framed picture. Door with my name on it. Oh, fun. I know. Well. There's a small chance I might be moving to the farmhouse this summer, which would be DSL connection at best. They gave me snacks, too. Oh, green room fun. Nice. Free food. They did my makeup. Makeup set up. I feel like there's, there I was. I dressed up. Picture of my dressing room. Dressing room. How long were you there just for the day? Were you in and out the same day? Just for the day. Yeah, I flew down the night before and then did the show that then I left. Nice. Picture, and then there's that. Nope, that's bad. That's basically it. I didn't get any pictures with anybody. Maybe if I get invited back again, then I'll be like, can I take a picture over there, Chelsea? Well, that would be kind of cool. If they need you to bring an animal expert sidekick, you just let me know. That's right. I'll be there. We'll just bring in Blair to talk about the animals. And if Sam Spade can't make it one night, I'm sure, or what's his name? David Spade. David Spade. Sam Spade. Sam Spade. Sorry. The Maltese Falcon, right? No, that's Philip Marla. Oh no, that is Sam Spade. It's Philip Marla's the partner who died. No, it's Philip Marla. Sam Spade's the partner who died. I keep putting that next up. Yeah, David Spade can't make it and they need somebody who's like ridiculously untalented but sometimes funny. I totally could feel that wrong. Yeah, I'll just totally let them know, yeah? Sounds good because you know, I'm just, you know, because you're BFFs with Chelsea, BFFs. I know you guys like hanging out all the time. Hanging out, talking, that's right. Not even close. I was like, okay, riffraff, you're done here now. Go away. You served your purpose. Yeah, everybody there was amazing. Let's see, this week, tomorrow night, I'm doing a podcasters meetup in Portland. If there's anybody in Portland who wants to come talk about podcasting, I'm gonna be there. 5.30 to 7.30 tomorrow, downtown Portland. Look it up on meetup.com. I did, I got to pet Chunk, Dave. I did, I pet the fluffy dog, it was pretty. What kind of dog is Chunk? A cute fluffy dog. Googling. Ed has said, he's got the minion hangout going out tomorrow. So you can do the minion hangout, twist minion hangout tonight. He is fluffy. Did you feel like you just looked up Chunk? Of course I did, he's fabulous. He is fabulous, he's going around. Look at this fluffy mound of love. He's so cute. Oh my god, I want a pet Chunk. Oh my god, oh my god. Oh my god, look at him, he's fluffy and soft and he's just this nice dog. Chow shepherd mix. Elizabeth, where are you right now? It looks very labby behind you. Yeah, he's very labby behind me. Where are you actually broadcasting from? So I'm sitting in the lab at Scripps. So I'm sitting just like on the fourth floor of our building. I moved last week so I'm currently sleeping on a friend's couch and I didn't think that was a good spot to do this from. Actually the show has been done for many couches before. That would not have been unprecedented, but. It's a little messy and there's a couple of cats that run around like crazy. Oh that would have been terrifying. Yeah, that would have been totally terrifying, yeah. Only to you Justin, Blair and I would have been like, oh look at the kitty cat. Justin would be out there with his crucifix. Get it away! Oh goodness. So are you excited? Are you excited about the Harvard transition? Have you been on the West Coast most of your life? I actually grew up outside of Boston and then I've been here for eight years and I'm headed back. So it's an interesting transition. I feel like I've lived here my entire adult life so I'm ready to go try something new. Yeah, cool. So, okay, so here's how you can warm up to heading back east. If you have, if you have khaki pants, do you have any khaki pants? I have a pair of khaki pants. I've lived in my closet since I moved out here. Perfect, so all you have to do is practice the phrase, where are my khakis? Very nice. You mean these? That's exactly what I'm talking about, yeah. Practice that for a little while. Right back into the swing of things. Oh my God. That was good. Walked right into that one. That's exactly where my khakis are. I can't find my khakis. I love my khakis around you, some ways. The last several weeks, Justin has had a new phrase from a different place that, yeah. What was it with the Australian one? Oh, yeah, to give yourself- Razor blitz. Razor blitz. No, no, no, it wasn't razor blitz. You ruined the punchline. I can always rely on you to do it. You ruined the punchline. But the way to perfect an Australian accent is to say the phrase, raise up lights. That's right, raise up lights. Raise up lights. Where's my raise up lights? Oh my God, so good. Collect them all, right? How many do you have, Justin? Do you have kids? Some of them are just annoying digs. I played in the last couple weeks with pointing out that people were astute by saying astute. It's a very astute comment. And then there's this second of like, I both heard astute and you know that that's a word. And people don't know how to react quite to it, so. What are you doing? Some of them are not all of them are gems. It's just because it's there that you follow. Blair's showing off wolves. Oh, is the wolf exhibit up? Open today. Oh my goodness, yeah, I'm just going to see these. Here they are. Their names are Bowie, Prince, and Garcia. That's awesome. I love that. Somebody pledged a lot of money to the zoo to name the wolves and that is what they chose to name them. David Bowie, Prince, and Jerry Garcia. And one wolf on the left of that picture. The wolf looks, his eyes are scary. Yeah, they're a little bit older. The wolves are about 10. So like Prince and Bowie, they will probably die soon. Oh gosh. Oh, but that's not funny. A lot of wolves live in the wild. In the wild, they live about 10 to 12, but in captivity, they can live up to 17 years. So, it really depends. But we have a lot of really geriatric animals at the zoo that have outlived their lifespan, so we're optimistic. Yeah. And coming soon-ish, you'll get to see and hear more about the wolf exhibit. Isn't that right, Kiki? Yes, it is right. Do I hear a short in the works? There's a twist short in the works. If I get around to editing it. You've just been a little bit busy, you know, like being a teen. You're a Hollywood lifestyle. Yeah. From club to talk show to- Cutting my son's hair. Yes. Cutting my son's hair. My little boy. Oh my god. Chelsea and I are like this. And my gosh. My son wanted me to cut his hair so that he could swing on the swings. He said, mommy, my hair's too long. It's getting in my eyes and in my mouth, and I don't like it. I want to swing, mommy. All right. And then he said, I'm not going to school today until you cut my hair. All right. I'm better than them doing it themselves. That was my first real haircut. I wasn't necessarily sure it was any better. Little scissor hack job. Oh my goodness. Let's see, what else do I have that's fun? Do we have anything else for people? For each other? Well, I have a fun, random thing for Kiki. Oh, awesome. When I told my friend that I was going to do this, she just bounced up and down. I was like, oh my god, Dr. Kiki's my hero. I want to beat her when I grow up. Wow. And she's, so I thought you might like that. She's getting her PhD and she'll be done next year or so. And she was like, I want to know how to beat her. Anyway, I thought you might like that. That's so cool. I was not nervous until she had that reaction. And then you're like, oh no. Who am I talking to? Well, and then the pre-show comment that Kiki threw at you is like, OK, be golden or you're dead to us. Yeah, when I said that, that comment. You folded it up with Dr. Kiki's amazing. Just stare into her eyes and she'll get you through this. So that was good advice. Just stare. That's OK. Just stare until I get you through it. And so OK, so then I got to ask this, right? Because you've definitely done education outreach before because you spoke way too fluidly about your subject to have been trying to explain it to the layman for the first time. So who are you outreaching to? Who is it that you're explaining your field to on a non? So I spent five years in visitor education at the Boston Aquarium when I was growing up. So 8th through 12th grade, I was a Sunday morning education volunteer. And I went from being like this shy, terrified kid to I can give a 30 minute talk about something. And then I did a lot of one off workshops and things. So I spent a lot of time doing that. And I've also taught the paleontology lab class for the undergrad scripts for the past five years. Oh, that's great. I've done a lot of that. And I just gave my defense talk two weeks ago. And that was, that's right, yeah, about two weeks ago. And that's three weeks ago now. It's open to the public. It has to be outreached. So I actually very recently spent a lot of time talking to you at this. Excellent, yeah. And it shows. It's all paid off then because yeah, you could do. I had a lot too many realies in there for a while. Hopefully some of those can disappear when you add a test. So I didn't notice that. We all have those moments and little verbal ticks. Basically, words come out. I think the first thing I noticed in doing this show and listening to it, which is so hard to do, listening to your own voice, right? But I had the ums. And the first shows, it was, there was this um tick, this ticking um that with like five, four, three, two, he's gonna say, um, ah, I did it again. And I counted it and I think it was like 48 or something. Like one show. Okay, I really have to remove um. It's hard to listen to it and monitor it without freezing up and taking up too much brain space too. It's really, it takes, it's difficult. And the other thing that's really hard is to allow silence. And it's, by the way, I don't know how to do that. And as Connecticut points out, if Elizabeth taught the circus, if you can speak upside down, anything else is easy. That's true. That is true. I do spend a lot of time breaking down that as well. I'm usually holding myself up in the air upside down. Like if I can take my right hand and move it around my back, well, I'm holding on to something upside down with my left hand. I think I can talk about things. Yeah. Exactly. Yup. It's all coordination. It's all good. No, it's it. I love that. It's good to work on. It's good to know how to speak clearly and communicate your ideas to people no matter what. And I think science has gotten a bad rap for years because people have been allowed to just kind of hole up inside the ivory tower and not have to reach out so much. But I think the tide is changing. And I think over the last 10 years, we've seen a massive increase in the number of people working in science communication, the number of science writers, the number of science blogs, the number of science podcasts, the number of science radio shows. I mean, the stuff that's getting out is more and more and more. And it's because people think it's important, so. Well, and it's interesting of all of my friends. I'm the only one who wants to be an academic. Everybody else wants to go into something that's got some aspect of public communication or policy or any number of different things. So it's neat to see. I think Scripps does a really great job of encouraging that and the students. Good. You're not expected to stay. I'm the abnormality. Well, it's good to have everybody wanting to do different things. We know that there aren't a lot of academic jobs out there, but if you're good at it, and like you said, persistent. Everything takes practice. Yeah, things will pay off. Oh, that's a story I didn't bring, but there was a story about how, for top athletes, practice is about that really important. Well, once you get to a certain level. No, what they were saying is like the whole, the misnomer's about, well, if you're the younger, if you're younger when you enter sports, because they age bracket you by the year, and if you happen to be like eight months younger than most of the players, you may have a little more athleticism, so you get more playing times, you get more practice, and then you practice more in it. But at some point, your absolute pure athleticism comes across more than any amount of practice. You know, I heard the opposite about that, where especially if you're in the sport where you were starting when you were young, and the age bracket, people who were older in the age bracket did better because they were more aware of what was going on. Right, and they got, well, and also because they would get more playing time. They would be the starters, like year after year, and if you were just a little less coordinated or had grown at a half an inch or an inch or two less, then you wouldn't get the playing time. But this was a pretty broad study, and it also said that whole 10,000 hours of mastering something, it's like, yeah, you'll get better at it, but it doesn't mean somebody just walk in with a hundred hours of practice and already be way better than you. There are things that can be traits that you might just have that make you exactly right or whatever the thing is you're doing. And that's why I always remarked, when you were sort of already interested in oceans by high school, you know, these are the sort of callings that you especially hear every physicist out there who's a known name in physics, knew that this is what they wanted to do, or cosmology, knew this is what they were interested in by like age 10, and that there are very few elite, premier, theoretical physicists who weren't already heading that way at age 10, that nobody picks it up at 30, right? And he goes, I think I'm gonna get into that. You know, the farm mathematicians, though, that pick it up in like late high school or college. Oh, absolutely, not that it can't be done. Not that it can't be done, right? But these callings come to people early, and I love the fact that not only was the inspiration and the desire there kind of early, but that obviously you've pursued it to this point where you're- I think I won the little kid jackpot. I'm both a marine biologist and a paleontologist. Oh, yeah. I don't know how I could have done that better. Yeah, that's a fantastic combination, because if you're just a marine biologist, I think you're only allowed to do circus acts with large mammalian secrets or something. Like, I don't know, I'm just, I'm being too broad, but yeah, I think I've met a few fish paleontologists through UC Davis, because it's the biggest piece that we have of the history of life on this planet is encoded there. Well, yeah, so much of our history is underwater, currently. And in terms of exploring an alien planet, something that is so different and unknown to us, there's nothing like that vast, we unexplored region of oceans that encompass most of this planet. Oh, it was interesting, something that you brought up when you brought up the lost city, that's actually not a city. We get that all the time in paleontology, especially looking for signs of super early Earth. A lot of the really old fossils we look at. The question is, is this actually biological or is this something that just water did flowing? And we see a lot of things like that, where the earliest life on the planet or the earliest fossils are constantly being asked, is this really actually a fossil or are we looking at just a feature that was made by regular water moving around processes or something? Right, it's good. Or like in the case of the black smokers and stuff where you have microbes at work underneath that might have died off and left some kind of structure that's then been eroded and yeah. Or was, because this is one of the, this is one of the early, you just nailed it completely Kiki, this is being one of the earlier ideas of perhaps how life got started, was with some sort of very primitive life that used the clay from the smokers as it sort of acts as a skeleton or as to allow it to move from one place to another. I mean, so there is this transition where it came just from Earth and transformed into life. And so yeah, it's gotta be a really difficult barrier to sort of determine, is this that sign? Is this the signal? Is this what that would look like? Or are we projecting and hoping backwards on something? I think it's kind of fun. I didn't find the ontology until I was in college though, actually. Well that's interesting though, that you came across it and you're like, I was not in dinosaurs at all. I was in dinosaurs. I think I went through the little kid dino phase but I didn't go through the dino phase and get obsessed with it. I got really interested in it because I was fascinated by how the oceans are the way they are and then just the idea that they could be different is just totally baffling to me. Can you imagine an ocean where sharks outnumber fish? Yeah, that seems pretty crazy. Totally baffling. But apparently there was something that was kind of like that and that's really neat. I just wanna know how that happened. Right, so of course you would just have to get into a whole nother discipline of science to be able to do that. Of course, time travel, we need that. Just one thing I have to admit, I think I've learned it during Shark Week which this last year's Shark Week was much better. There was a lot more science in the Shark Week than in previous Shark Weeks. But one of the interesting things was, off of Monterey Bay, I think it was, they had witnessed an orca taking down a great white. And in the period directly after it because they had a lot of sharks that were being monitored, those sharks all left the area. And I think it was a chemical signal from the decaying shark that all the other sharks in the region were like, oh, big predator, something took down one of us, all time to leave, let's get out of here, let's just evade. And I'm like, well, when was, how far back do you have to go, evolutionarily, for there to be major shark predators? Or is this something that was when sharks were smaller and there was a lot more things that could predate on them that this was just a carryover? But it was, how long was it before there was a good amount of shark predators? And coral reefs today don't octopuses sometimes attack sharks? And sharks go, they go from teeny tiny all the way. So then it's something maintained from sharks going from smaller to bigger that they still got that's telling them to get the heck out of the way. There's a predator in the area, we've gotta run for it. And hundreds of millions of years ago, sharks felt a lot more ecological niches than they do today. They're kind of like, sharks frankly, ecologically are kind of boring these days in a lot of ways. They don't do a whole bunch of things the way they used to. They still do a lot of really cool things. They're really like sharks, they're really neat. But they used to do a lot more different things ecologically than they do now. So they certainly could have easily been prey a lot of them anyway. Yeah, that's a great survival instinct though. To some degree, if somebody eats one of your friends you should just run. Just had the other direction. Don't you think you would? And they actually, they used it then as a repellent and it worked. They had this bit of decayed shark in a little vial of a thing and they threw it into the water and the sharks kind of dispersed away from it. Did not want to be anywhere near the scent of a dead shark. Cool. But I think that would mostly come into play. Be mostly important if you were a super predator. If you were being regular prey, like you'd have to be running all the time, right? It's not until you're a super predator that you're like, oh, if somebody can take one of me down, I don't even want to see what did it. I don't even want to know what could eat a great white shark. I would just prefer to go half an inch away. Megalodons might be out there. That was the year before Shark Week. That was the year before. Although, although, if I'm not miscorrect in my misunderstanding of science, we're heading to the carbon parts per billion in the atmosphere that, you know, the temperatures perhaps then that follow that sustained Megalodon. We're in that carbon region over 400. So maybe the silver lining of global warming will be that we have bigger and bigger sharks. Is that a good thing? Every shark week, every year, we find an even larger biggest great white shark that we've ever seen before. A shark the size of a school bus, sounds good. Oh, come on, the vast majority of them are not that bad. No, they're not. They're really quite nice little creatures. Yes, definitely. I would have one as a pet if I was a man. But we had, when I worked at the Aquarium, we had a fossilized Megalodon tooth and that thing. Yeah, it was kind of pointy and very large. So, you know. It didn't make you nervous about being next to it, a large body of water. Just think of the Megalodon. No, it might come back for me. Because I know they're not there. Yeah, and unless I look like a seal, probably I'm not too much trouble. Oh, you sound like one now. I got tired all of a sudden. Yeah, it is that time. Yeah, it is that time. I can't come out in front of Netflix to refresh until the show comes on. Aw, thanks. Or maybe you can watch it tomorrow. Yeah, that's what I'm going to do. Probably more likely. You can always watch it tomorrow. It comes out at midnight if you're up that late. But for east coasters, that's three in the morning. And, you know, maybe you're a night owl. I don't think I'm that much of a night owl. I'm going to go to bed and maybe watch it tomorrow. Yeah. Nah, you're staying up all night. I'm not. A cup of coffee. Oh, I'm tired. I might do things. I totally would. If I was on international TV, I would totally be staying up all night until I see it. I know. No, I can't. I just need to go to bed. But maybe I'll watch it first thing in the morning. It's 5.04 am. I know. I'll wake up at 4 in the morning and watch it. I got to see it. I got to see it. What did I say? I don't even remember what I said. I don't remember what I said. All I know is that there were lots of things I wanted to say that I didn't say, and then lots of things that I wanted to say that I did say. That's good. Yeah, it's because you didn't have an after show. Well, it does get it all out. It's those really bright lights. They're kind of like a memory eraser, aren't they? No. Yeah, it's the light. The lights were bright. Then there's Chelsea Handler sitting right there asking me questions. Then she asked the last question first, which threw me off my planned presentation. I had a thing that I had been practicing. Then she asked the last question first, and I was like, oh no. Now I just have to go back to that, and then I forgot to talk about a couple of things. But it's all good. It's all good. I talked about science. I got in natural selection though. Oh, yeah. I did work in natural selection. It wasn't probably you got in this week in science. And this week in science. Say good night, Kiki. Good night, Kiki. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Elizabeth. Good night. Good night. Good night, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us once again for another episode of This Week in Science. And for our after show. And Elizabeth, thanks for sticking around and hanging out with us. Yeah, great to hang out with you. And I look forward to hearing more from you in your career. And maybe we'll have you on to talk about stuff again. Yeah, yeah. That would be great. Take care. Have a good night. Good night. Good night, everybody.