 Well, maybe a little late. We're on time, we're early. We changed the time so that we would be early, but we're actually late because we're here. We are here, everyone. And if you are watching this right now, just know that you are watching the live broadcast of the This Week in Science podcast. If you want the edited version with the ums and the uhs and the computer technical glitches taken out, then subscribe to the podcast. Yes. So, is it possible that people could be watching this right now? They're in it right now, and it'd not be live, too. Because it is... It's true. It's being recorded, so... It's true. It's being recorded, you might... But this is the live recording, so the YouTube video is not edited. It is all of the things. We are live, like, Saturday Night Live is live, is what Kiki is saying. Yeah, but they do two versions of each show and take the best one, I think. No, they don't. Okay. No. I just always assume. No. They tape it at the time in New York, and then it's aired three hours later in California. Okay. Oh, okay. Are we ready to start the show? I think we're ready to start the show. Do we have sound, audio, all the good things in the world that we need? Oh, yes, we do. We're ready to start. So we will begin in a three, two. This is Twist. This Week in Science, episode number 776, recorded on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2020. It's time for a change. I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight on This Week in Science, we will fill your head with Fox Life, brain disease and misery, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The looting has got to stop. No excuse for it. The opportunistic nature of the looters should be met with force military if necessary. I speak, of course, about the last round of tax cuts for the already rich, which amounted to $2.3 trillion in looting from the federal government, adding trillions to our national debt and giving us nothing in return. What else would $2.3 trillion have paid for? 295 years of the National Science Foundation's budget, or the elimination of all current student debt in the United States, plus 102 years of the National Science Foundation's budget, or enough to triple the federal spending on public schools every single one of them. When we see looting, we react as we should. It is wrong and something should be done about it. But let us be clear-eyed when we call for force to resolve it. Let us add up the actual cost. Count the ways in which those dollars have been taken from us. And let us direct our outrage, where it is most deserved, which is anywhere but this week in science, coming up next. And this is where we dance because I don't have any music. We're going out of music ready. I don't have any music because I'm not home and I don't have my usual computer. Yeah, this is where we edit it in later. I'm going to be kind of mine. I can't get enough. I want to learn theories that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know what's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And the good science to you too, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again with all the wild things happening around the United States and around the world, even within the last week, months. It's been a crazy ride. But we're here to talk about science. And today, we have a bunch of fun science to talk to you about. I've got stories about the pre-mentioned foxes and their lives. I also have some psychology for you related to protests. And I've got a link for you that we will share on our website later on related to black scientists and science in general. And I've got geoengineering problems. Justin, what did you bring? Very interesting. OK, what did I bring? I brought, let's see, I've got a hemorrhaging brain. Oh, great. I've got triple negative breast cancer. And I got a Dead Sea Scroll puzzle. Very nice. We like puzzles. That's what everyone's been doing during COVID. No, we're all out of them, so finding one for them too. There's a new one just came out. New one. And Blair, what's it? 25,000 pieces. Oh, geez. Not a challenge at all. Be done by tomorrow. And they don't necessarily go together. It's that fun. All right. Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, I have royal jelly. I have a story about how misery loves company. And I have your dog to the rescue. Very cool. Hey, Kiki, I got to let you know you've got a really hot mic. Something changed from the pre-show to the post to the active show. I don't know if it got closer. OK, I moved it. Is that better? Is that better? Back it up. Back it up. Back it up. All right, it's not my normal mic. Everything's weird. It's weird. Is it better? Yeah. Yeah? OK. Thank you very much. We could go on with the show. I want everyone, though. I don't want to move on before we do mention a bit more about the aforementioned looting, but not necessarily the looting. But how can we make things better? There's a lot going on right now that needs to change. There are some organizations that are working toward that change. One in particular is Campaign Zero. You can find them at joincampaignzero.org. It's a group of people who are working to have zero deaths from police violence moving forward. You can also find information on the methods that they suggest for police forces around the country to adopt in order to reach that goal. And they have another website called 8CANTWAIT. That's 8CANTWAIT.org. So if you're interested in these things, I recommend you check them out, because it's a way that we can move forward and really see some change. And this is data-backed practice. And also, I looked at 8CANTWAIT.org when you sent it, Kiki. And I am not done with my own education, let me tell you, because I clicked on that link. I saw the eight ways that could help reduce that number, that terrible number. And I saw the list, and I thought that I would assume that that was all currently happening everywhere, and it is not. And that was earth-shattering for me and devastating. And I'm very privileged that I didn't know that, because I haven't been faced with any of those problems before. But yeah, it's a good reminder that we all have a lot of educating to do. We may grow up learning that the police are here to protect us and our communities, but that has mutated so that the police have become more a mechanism of control for the masses. And so there is a lot of work that needs to be done. Not saying that the police are bad, but there is something rotten in the state of Denmark for sure. No, actually, Denmark's quite lovely. It's the United States that is a festering pool at the moment of the worst pandemic. And we're getting mocked, of course, by Iran and China for our civil rights. I'm sorry. That's also ridiculous. It's time for a hard review. I'm not quite sure how to get that done, but it's seeming like disruption is the way to get big change. So I get it. As Obama said today in his web stream, it's not just protest or voting. It's protest and voting. You protest to get people's attention, and then you vote to make change. And that's what we're doing. So I actually think that the community that we should possibly be focused on more is outreach to police departments to be vocal, not to be really vocal, about when they see other police departments doing things like this. Because it does affect their ability to have that connection to their community and police peacefully. I feel like there's maybe something that the union doesn't allow people to speak out against other people in the same union somewhere else. But if that's the case, it needs to change. We need members of the police community to do. Oh, what's that? Police themselves. Police themselves, yes. To really be more vocal. And I think that's part of the problem. There hasn't been that loud voice from police departments across this country saying how much they condemn things that they see going on in other police departments or specific activities or pointing out police and saying that is not something that follows the ethic of policing in America. That's really what needs to be added to the conversation. And the fact that it's missing is part of the problem. So as we jump into the show here to talk about the science, I do want to remind you that subscribing to the TWIST podcast is how you can get us in your ears every single week. You can subscribe to us on YouTube and Facebook. Look for This Week in Science in those places. And on any podcast directory, you can find our website at twist.org. That's T-W-I-S dot O-R-G. All right, so let's talk about science. I've got a story, oh, about protests and psychology. So there is a recent study out looking into the psychology of how people are influenced by extreme actions during protests. So actions such as blocking traffic or breaking windows, things that lead to maybe that lead to more violence or that include more violence or, I guess, affect the flow of people's lives who are not involved in the protests. This is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The author on the study said that he's interested in social change and progress and was curious what social movement strategies might be most effective at influencing popular opinion. They did six different experiments with 3,399 participants and looked at how different types of protests and behaviors influenced support for progressive causes, conservative causes, Black Lives Matter, anti-abortion movement. They found a whole bunch of stuff, but things like blocking traffic, inflammatory words and vandalism consistently reduced popular support for social movements. Now, this study was performed well before the extent of what we're experiencing right now where so many people are disenfranchised at the moment. So many people are responding to inequalities, injustices, racism. And so I don't know how well this particular experiment particularly applies to what we're seeing right here and now today, but looking online on social media, you see people start to turn away from the protests and turn away from supporting the protests as vandalism takes place, as violence takes place, whether or not it's instigated by the police or the protesters. And honestly, it's usually somewhat separate. Like there's usually a protest. And then opportunistically, as the police are focused on the protest, there is looting going on elsewhere or it's happening after the protest is ended, but there is still a large enough crowd. So it's harder. I do think this might be different, because what I'm hearing, what I'm kind of reading between the lines there, is that people might get frustrated with protests if it, I'm not trying to make this trivial, but if it kind of inconveniences them, right? So I think about breaking up, like messing up traffic. It's OK. So right now, all of our lives are inconvenienced to a crazy degree because of shelter in place and all this pandemic stuff going on. So in a weird way, the response to this might be way different, because who cares? You block the freeway. I don't have anywhere to go. Nobody's going anywhere anyway. Not to mention we are all consuming media to a crazy degree right now, which gives an opportunity to have more of a constant dialogue as to the reasoning behind the protest that might not have happened before. People are less distracted by other daily things that aren't happening as much. So anyway, the researchers go on to say, activists outraged by the status quo and or believing that change is largely impossible may engage in extreme protest actions as a form of self-expression or even catharsis without any strategic calculations about the effects such behavior will have in the long run. Similarly, even if a movement plans not to engage in extreme behaviors, a small number of dissidents in the group may incite extreme actions in others. So there is a bit of a dilemma there. And it is something to be taken into account. But yeah, we may be in a different kind of situation in the current time period. There's also a tremendous amount of propaganda going on around this. I mean, the idea that say in the parallel world where all of the protesters are demolishing the city and it is specifically them. Okay, what are they doing it for then? Civil rights. Okay. What are other ways that cities get rioting and looting takes place? When the hockey team wins or loses the big game? When the baseball team wins or loses the big game? When your football team won the Super Bowl, you flipped over cop cars and set them on fire. Like stop with the double standard first of all. Yeah, that's true. Nobody called the National Guard then. No, absolutely not. Why? Probably because there was a lot of white faces on the streets. That's why. So let's not have that double standard. Also, as we were talking about Antifa, who has killed no one. If you're against anti-fascists, wait till you experience actual fascists and then tell me you're still against anti-fascists. Like I feel like we're in a sea of ignorance and having just the basic conversation sometimes about what's taking place in our time. And I'll stop now. All right. I put a cap on the time that I would do it. Okay. But I absolutely agree with your point. Yeah, yes. We need to get people talking to each other. That's what this is about. And there is also the point at which there are difficult conversations that we need to have. We maybe some people need to be inconvenienced to see what's happening in the world around them. So there is awareness and there's a way to bring awareness. But okay, moving on to some more science. If I can have one more second. Just because you just got to follow what you said. You do not have to follow what I said. We can finish the show. Either of you remember the Rodney King protests? Yes. No, you don't. No, you don't remember the protests. You remember the rioting. You remember the rioting that caught fire to the city and made the police department absolutely redefine itself. You do not remember the protests because they went unnoticed. So to your point, Kiki, you sometimes have to grab attention, not just have a slogan and walk in the street. So I- Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna mute myself because I won't- I can't argue. I'm gonna mute myself. You know, and I'm gonna bring you to another study that might get Justin talking. This one is related to the Russian Fox experiment that he's talked about many times, the Siberian Tret Fox experiment. However, that experiment is a lab experiment. These foxes were put into caged, kenneled situations. They were domesticated in- These foxes were taken in and domesticated and the researchers have been watching to see what kind of changes occur to the foxes. They've seen a shortening of the muzzle and a broadening of the head. They've seen changes in the fur. They've seen changes in the behavior of the animals as well. And so these are all adaptations that have been taken to imply that there is a domestication effect on animals. Potentially, we're even domesticating ourselves as some other studies have gone on to say. But a natural experiment has taken place in which researchers in Glasgow realized there were a bunch of foxes coming into the urban areas of the city and not necessarily being domesticated but living within the urban environment. And they wanted to know if there was a change between actual physical change between the urban living foxes and their rural counterparts. So there were a bunch of fox skulls, skulls that had been collected in Scotland because these foxes are just kind of living there. They had 1500 skulls, which is a pretty big sample size. They were collected between 1971 and 1973. And so the researcher decided to take a look at these fox skulls and indeed was able to find a difference. The urban foxes had that shorter muzzle and the broader, shorter and broader muzzle. And what they think this has to do with is living off of human castoffs. There are oftentimes bones that are cast off. And so the hypothesis now is that the skulls, the jaws of these foxes have to get stronger to be able to chew the castaway food items from humanity. Yeah, so it's just this stronger bite as opposed to speed, which the rural counterpart part is thought to be quote unquote designed for. So you're saying it was their jaws, they're mandible, right? They're mandible, yes. Okay, so that makes sense from what I know about animal skulls because up here in your, oh gosh, a zygomatic arch, I think is what it's called, is in front of your bite muscles. So you can actually feel that. If you bite down, you can feel muscles kind of right next to your eyeballs. That is your bite muscle. And on like cats and wolves, that arch is huge because those are the giant muscles. But if you look at like a horse, this bone, your mandible is huge. And that's because that's the chew muscles. Right. So on animals that are just, that swallow things whole or rip off whole pieces of meat and then swallow those whole, their mandible's still pretty small because they're not doing much chewing. So one of the big differences between wolves and domestic dogs is you see a much bigger, wider mandible for chew muscles to exist. So that fits right in there. It does, it absolutely does. The other interesting finding was that there was less room for the brains of the urban foxes. Sure. The urban foxes have smaller brains than their rural counterparts. Why would that be? The idea is that maybe the brains don't have to be as big because the foxes aren't really that worried about predators or other animals in the urban situation. And they just have to stand still at one place and eat as opposed to constantly, potentially beyond the move. Food is always there. They're not trying to prepare it. I encountered a fox at the Hearst Castle that was oddly on top of a hedge, like standing up. It's for the peacocks like that. Coming after the peacock. No, it was even like berries or something off of this hedge. But what was interesting is like, we walked past it and it wasn't the least bit skittish of humans in any way. I didn't measure its skull though. I should have got out of that at the moment, just to see what my measurements were. I could have compared it to this study. I've heard that some of the other critters at Hearst Castle are very friendly as compared to their wild counterparts. But yeah, they sort of create an environment where there are no sort of predators allowed on the grounds. They used to have like all kinds of zoo animals too, but those are mostly gone now. Yeah, they was deeper still I think. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Foxy, Foxy things at Hearst Castle, but yeah, foxes, urban foxes, smaller brains, better bites. Maybe that has to do with domestication. Blair, did you want to give us a silver lining for our COVID update for the week? Yes, yes, so COVID, still bad. I'm not gonna say it's not bad. I think you're bad. No, it's bad. Still wear your mask. Don't touch each other. It's still not good. However, it's fundamentally changing the way that we behave in a lot of ways for many, many, many years to come. And so this is actually a study. It's a large poll conducted looking at Americans. It was over 2000 adults over the age of 18 in May. And it was looking at self care in a post pandemic world. So this, in general, 46% of Americans report that they are struggling to find a way to maintain their whole health during the pandemic, so I can include physical, mental and spiritual health. But the silver lining here is that 80% of those people polled plan on being more mindful of practicing self care post pandemic. So there's a lot of reasons that that could be probably because most people that are stuck at home, we've talked about before and I share in the newsletter are showing some sign of grief and stress. And so everybody's kind of strung out right now. And so it also gives us a moment to kind of look inward and look at how we take care of ourselves. So about 35% of those polled are practicing more creative activities. 31% are praying more. 31% are engaging in more meaningful conversations with friends and family. And 64% say that they are more focused on mental health now than ever before. So it's, it's cause it's, okay, so 30% of Americans report a lack of energy. 29% report difficulty sleeping and exercising less. And 47% report feeling socially isolated. So all of those things together mean that people are actually taking this opportunity to think about how they're gonna take better care of themselves in the future. Also because the other kind of leap that was brought here looking at these findings and extrapolating from them is that, you know, this is a time when a lot of us need healthcare more than we ever have before either because of physical problems related to COVID or not, or mental problems related to all that stuff we were talking about. And ironically, as we have frustratedly talked about before because healthcare is linked to jobs and unemployment is crazy high at a time when people need healthcare most, a lot of people can't have it. And so that also is putting into stark contrast when people may have had health insurance before and didn't take advantage of it. So both of those things together make it likely that people may pay better attention to their own mental and physical wellbeing when we all get out of our houses. I think there's another side of it also, which is that since everybody's in this together, we're all, you know, there are those frontline workers, the essential workers who have been going into work, but we're all under stress in different ways. But because of that, we are aware that others are under stress and there's a little bit more consideration from other people as well. There's, you get on a Zoom call, how are you doing? It's one of the first questions that's asked. Whereas before it might be, you jump on the call and somebody's immediately asking you what you've gotten done and if you know, have you got, have you hit your metrics for the week and blah, blah, you know, things have slightly slowed down and the priority have shifted. I mean, people still want to get things done, but there's more societal care. Yeah, it's definitely brought into stark contrast what is essential, right? Although I have heard that there has been a lot of stress eating taking place. The statistic I think I heard was that 63% of Americans are now 74% of Americans because of this. Right. Something along those lines of an increase in the amount of Americans that they are. But I mean, what Kiki was talking about and what I was talking about put together means maybe people will be better about advocating for themselves and taking days off when they need them. Which is another piece of this. Yeah, it's a hope that as a society we can move forward in a healthier way for our work. We've been a very work-driven society, achievement-driven society, but maybe there are healthier ways to do that. Absolutely, yeah. Actually, there are healthier ways to do that. It took me 20 years to really figure out what a mental health day was, which, you know, it's talked about like it's, oh, you're taking a mental health day, huh? But they're actually super important and now I can recognize that and go, oh my gosh, I need a day. I'm gonna take a day. I am no good to anybody today. My mental health is also important. I don't have to be snotty and coughing to say that I can't be at work. Yeah. My mental health can usually be cured in about 15 minutes. I know what you're talking about, or seven. Or seven, something. Yeah, it just depends on the temperature of the day. Yeah. All right, Justin, let's move on from silver linings to brain damage. Okay, shall we? That seems appropriate. Oh my goodness. Okay. So we have talked quite a bit over the years about the gut-brain connection. Uh-oh. What happened? Where did everybody else go? Is everybody else here? Yeah. Oh, you guys must have got so quiet all of a sudden. I thought you both dropped out. No. I probably dropped. No, you're good. Keep going. So, yeah, we've talked about a lot, the gut-brain connection, how things seemingly unrelated to cognitive functions actually have this connection to bacterial communities in our intestines, which at first seemed impossibly strange, but as evidence has piled on over the years, is now sort of a normal way of looking at things. Now we have a study showing that people with a rare genetic disease that causes brain bleeding have gut microbiomes that are made up of distinct bacteria. More than a correlation here, it is molecules produced by this bacterial imbalance that are causing lesions to form in the brains of the patients as discovered in this study. This is the first in any human neurovascular disease to show this correlation or the even causation. So it has implications, not just for treating the particular disease that they were studying here, but they can use this maybe now to examine other neurovascular diseases that they never thought to inquire into the gut microbiome to see if there was a connection to the patients. Study was led by investigators at the University of Chicago Medicine, published May 27th in Nature Communications. It examined the gut bacteria patients with cavernous angioma. It's a disease where a blood vessel abnormalities develop in the brain causing strokes, seizures and other serious neurological complications. It is caused, well, it is caused, and I'm doing air quality things because this is sort of how it has been looked at in the past caused by genetic mutation and lesion which may be inherited and also can occur sporadically. So it's both an inherited disease and one that's not linked to heredity and it's severity and course very widely among its patients. So investigators had hints in the past that there could be a gut microbiome link. This is senior author Issam Awad who's a medical doctor, professor of neurosurgery and was a partner in a previous study in mice which showed that the cells that lined the blood vessels of the brain reacted to changes in the animal's gut bacteria. The implications of that were very big, he said, and I am saying in a quotey voice which may not represent his actual voice, but we didn't know if this concept of a unique microbiome that favors the development of lesions would be true in human beings to find out the researchers working with investigators at the University of California, San Francisco, University of New Mexico, University of Pennsylvania and the Angioma Alliance Patient Sport Group as well as the U of Chicago collected stool samples for more than 120 cavernous angioma patients. Samples were then analyzed for bacterial content compared to samples from people who in the general population who did not have the disease and they found combination of three common bacterial species whose relative abundance allowed them to, as if in a blind lineup, they could tell, aha, this one will have it, that one will not with absolute certainty. Poty voice, the cavernous angioma patients from all the different collection sites had the same distinctive microbiome regardless of whether they inherited mutation or had sporadic lesion, regardless of the number of lesions they had, Awad says. Investigators further showed that patients produced, this is a long word, so give me a moment, lipopolysaccharides, oh, I suppose these aren't, molecules, so which travel through the bloodstream, this is from the gut through the bloodstream to the brain and then attach themselves to the brain's blood vessel lining. So now we have a molecule produced in a bacteria in your intestines that works its way to the brain, the lining of the vessels in the brain facilitating then lesion development. All this evidence, this is Poty voice of Awad again, all this evidence pointed to the microbiome as a cause of lesions rather than an effect. So there could have been the argument, right, that you have something, you have a correlation, there's gut bacteria, there's brain, but the communication is supposed to be two ways, so maybe the lesions in the brain are causing some sort of failed reaction in the gut or the intestines, but no, it's absolutely the opposite way, it is the bacteria in the intestines who are able to create and causally affect these lesions in the brain. So the next step, of course, is to look at ways to create treatments, they do caution that just doing antibiotics or probiotics, you're pulling levers, you could make it worse. You don't like this weight for a little bit more science to be done before you start attempting this because you don't know. Just poking buttons, what does this do? What does this do? Yeah, and you could make yourself more susceptible to lesions by doing so. But an amazing, because we talk a lot when there's these correlations, a lot of these studies have been correlative, see this, we see this over here, it seems to be related to that over there, but no mechanism, we haven't figured out, this is mechanism too, so it's really stunning. That's amazing, I mean, this is the first kind of study that has gone beyond correlation to give us some kind of causality, give us mechanism to, yeah, I mean, I think there's still so much to be pulled apart there. How do different bacterial species interact in a population to lead to healthy versus disease states? Which species are specifically bad ones? How do we get rid of those? How can you monitor your bacterial microflora, right? How can you figure all that stuff out? And something that's interesting here too is, and I haven't done the deep dive in the paper to the previous research that found the hereditary links, but they make me wonder now if they exist, because within a family, you will share microbiota. So there is this odd, it's a tough thing, but you have to separate microbiota that has passed down from generation to generation, within households, within the grandparents' house, and it's in your house, and it's in your bedsheets, and it's in the couch, and it's the family eating together that's sharing- Like a mother dough. Yeah, it's okay, they were perfect, yeah, perfect. For those of you who have dedicated your current lives to a yeast dough sample. A yeast baby? I have a yeast baby. Yeast babies. Previous correlations of genes may also be actually the generational sharing of microbiota that aren't actually related to those genes, so there's a lot of digging left to be done. So much digging, but so fascinating. I mean, I can't wait until we get to that point in time where we do know which foods are gonna help us, which bacteria we should have in our probiotic yogurt drink, where these things are individualized as opposed to just being a catch-all. Everybody's just eating prescription yogurt from now. Yeah, yes. I mean, I'm gonna have my prescription fiber and yogurt morning food. Yeah, I mean, it sounds silly, but also how much better would that be than a cocktail of drugs? To be able to just eat your medicine as you're- Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Way better. Wait, whoa, whoa, what are the drugs? Fair, depends what they're for, right? Is it treating the symptom or the cause, or is it just fun? We all need a little bit of fun these days. I'm saying if it turned out to be eating cinnamon made you live forever, I would still need a drug that simulated what cinnamon did. You know what I mean? Like there's some thing, red peppers? No, thanks. Right, cause you have that cinnamon not liking response. Cinnamon and red peppers. Yeah, maybe it's your microbiome. Maybe if you're the right microbiome, you'd like them. Oh no, I have the right microbiome. Thank you. I poop in under 12 seconds. All right, if you just tuned in, you are listening to This Week in Science and if you're interested in a twist shirt or a mug or face mask, head over to twist.org, click on the Zazzle Store link and browse our store. We have face masks now. And now it is the time for Blair's Animal Corner. I have a study that kind of rocked my world a little bit, my understanding to the core of what makes a queen bee? What makes a queen bee? Do you two know? Braille jelly? Yeah, turns out, no. So this study kind of challenged that long-believed belief, understanding that cleanliness comes from the diet of royal jelly, a milky white secretion of protein, water and fat, and dishes coming from the heads of nurse bees. But this new paper looks at what specifically makes a queen and it doesn't appear to be the jelly itself. It appears to just be the amount of food that they eat. So whoever becomes the biggest becomes the most important. There are hormonal changes that come from that and that is what makes a queen bee. So this is a study from North Dakota State University. They had previously studied bees from species where each female lives alone and raises their own young and discovered that the body size of these solitary bees depended on the amount of food their mother gives them. So they wanted to see how the amount of food relates to social honey bees. So in this control experiment, they raised larvae in a lab in nine different diets with different amounts of royal jelly and sugar. The bees who ate the most food were indistinguishable from queens raised in a hive. And their ability to turn into queen did not depend on the proteins or sugars or being fed royal jelly. Scientists know what hormones and genes are responsible for queen development, but they don't know kind of what the trigger is there for the hormones and genes to do what they do. So they don't exactly know how the hormones and genes change because it appears to just be with the amount of food those two things start to change. This could have a huge implication for the bee industry besides just totally blowing our perception of what makes a queen bee out of the water. If we know better what makes a queen, there's actually an opportunity for the people who raise bees for commercial honey or for pollination of agriculture that they often will replace their queens every year. And so if they know how to make queens and can do that, that can actually help with the bee industry. So they could actually increase resilience of the commercial beekeeping industry by being able to do that. So there's pretty cool implications here, but also just, that's just one of those things that you take for granted in biology. What makes a queen royal jelly? Not really. No. Just fed a lot. It's whoever eats the most royal jelly first. Yeah. Which I said, I... Give me that royal jelly. I knew from some sort of sci-fi episode of like an outer limits reboot or something like this. A trauma too. Farmers eating a lot of royal jelly and then turns into a bee. That's how I knew that. It's honestly how that information got to my brain. Next I have a story that we could all probably relate to right about now. It's all showing some signs of stress as we talked about at the start of the show. Well, this is a story- I don't know what you're talking about, Blair. Okay, well. Maccax, the study on Maccax, show that misery does indeed love company. What I mean by that is this University of Vienna and Biomedical Primate Research Center in Rzschewik, Netherlands. It's lots of constants, not a lot of Ls. They were studying Maccax and their stress levels when working towards a goal by themselves with a stranger or with a bonded dyad. So basically a close friend. So in order to be able to do that, the first thing they did do was try to teach the Maccax that lived in this lab how to provide a saliva sample on demand. So I love that is the first thing they taught the Maccax how to spit into something. So that's great. I don't know if that's great. I mean, that's science. That's like animal science to the, oh, that's so cool. That's animals get to participate in experiments voluntarily. That's so neat. Anyway, so anyway, so they first they did that. So they first they did that. Then they noted who had chosen to bond with another monkey. So they could identify dyads and monkeys that were alone. And then they taught the monkeys how to use a string to pull a platform close enough to retrieve a piece of food. And in some cases one monkey could do it. And in other cases they'd manipulate it so you'd need a friend. So they would have a monkey pulling from two different sides to make it work. So that you'd need the teamwork. And after each trial they spit, they would test cortisol levels to see how stressed they were. So they found that the monkeys who were paired with a bonded friend had the lowest levels of cortisol. So they were least stressed from the monkeys that were doing it by themselves, the monkeys that had help from a stranger. So if you, I mean, and it makes sense. If you think about any situation where you've been in a ridiculous scenario or you've been stressed out or you've been scared or there's been any sort of stressor on you, if you had somebody you knew with you, it probably was a little less stressful. It was comforting to have that person. That's where misery loves companies, right? So this is this whole idea that if they're in the stressful situation, like, I want this food but I have to do this thing, but if they're there with a friend, it's a little less scary or stressful. It's like having your little security blanket with a friend there. I think that's fantastic. Being able to show that these monkeys and to your point, yes, they weren't forcing the cortisol from the monkeys. They weren't taking blood draws that were really stressful or having to handle the monkeys, which can be stressful to be able to get this bit. Which can manipulate your variables. Which manipulates, yeah, when the human handling, the human interaction aspect is a big factor that researchers really have to think about when they're talking about stress experiments. How much is the human stressing the animal out versus, how much is the cortisol just up? That's just it for all of them. Yeah, but that's, I love that they, I mean, I think they do have to worry about now the rhesus macaques just deciding to spit at the researchers. I'm sure that that's not gonna increase because of the study. This is already happening. Or decrease, or decrease. It's also not going down. Yeah, maybe they realized the macaques were already spitting at them and said, we can put this to good use. Oh, I can do that behavior. Yeah, there you go. It's like sometimes they had to collect that from a face shield that they were wearing, but, you know. Yeah, still got the spit in the longer. Yeah, oh, friends. Yeah, I mean, I think I would like, I like company when I'm not feeling good. And I mean, if I can extrapolate this to our human scenario, which this was not a study on humans. So I'll say that right away. But think about people who are self isolating alone, versus in family groups, or with a partner, or even with a roommate. It's very different. And it could be because you're going through a stressful situation, either alone, or with somebody that you're bonded to in whatever way. And so, check on your friends that live alone. But don't spit on them. Don't spit on them. No, that's not, that's not the takeaway. Yeah, the takeaway, let's check in on each other. Yeah, Justin, how you doing? Let's do that. How am I doing? Yeah. Oh, you don't have time. Fair enough. To go into it all. Maybe the other show. Yeah, you don't have time. Yeah, yeah. You're just still young. You have your whole life ahead of you. I don't wanna shatter the perspective of what it means to live long life on this planet. Oh, long lives, yes. This is why people like to have children so that when they're old and miserable, they still have company. Yes. True. All right. I'm gonna take a very, very, very quick break right now. To thank you for listening to TWIS, you are the reason that we do what we do, weekend and week out, bringing you science news, trying to discern what is truth, what is fake news, where is this reality that we're experiencing and what can we agree on is reality, right? Let's talk about these things in a very down to earth way. Let's try to get away from the craziness of the world that's out there every once in a while, once a week, right? We can bring that same perspective and it's thanks to you. So with your help to continue this, we can continue to bring TWIS to you every week. If you head to this week in science's website, twist.org, click on the Patreon link and support us at a level of your choosing. $10 a month and you will be thanked at the end of the show. We can't do this without you. Thank you for your support. And we're back. You're listening to This Week in Science. Kiki, do you have more stories for us? I do have more stories. How about a story about lab grown livers? Do you like liver? Like human? Human livers? Yes, yes. Lab grown human livers. Although they're little livers. They're little livers. Researchers were able to take skin cells. These are researchers from the University of Pittsburgh have taken skin cells and been able to reprogram them to be liver cells and not just one kind of liver cell. I mean, the liver has multiple types of cells within it. So they were able to reprogram these cells, these skin cells to be multiple different cell types that exist in the liver to create a little tiny mini liver. And they put these livers into mice and they grew within the mice and they took them out and everything seemed fine. The mice survived for four days and they probably would have survived longer but that was the end date of the experiment when they sacrificed the animals to see how the livers had grown and how they had done. The exciting aspect to this is that with the advent of regenerative medicine, of being able to grow all the cell types that are required to grow an organ, this potentially will help us to address the issue of organ shortages. There are hundreds of thousands of people on the organ donation list. About 17,000 people are waiting for livers right now in the United States. And each time there is a liver transplant, it's almost a million dollars in cost. And if we could potentially grow livers from a patient's own stem cells, it could lead to, I mean, it might still be a million dollars but we could at least potentially address all of the 17,000 people who need them instead of having individuals unfortunately go without as they do right now. Well, and livers are kind of an interesting one because I think the people who need them sometimes get bumped up or down the list depending on all sorts of variables. Like if you have a history with alcohol dependence or how old you are or if you have other health problems and I would love for everyone who needs a liver to get a liver and it would be so much easier if you could just grow one. Yeah, and then you don't have to decide who quote unquote deserves a liver more, which is just heartbreaking. Yeah, yeah, and that is one of the problems. So there's inequality in the system at this point in time, there are issues as well with respect to donors and recipients and how well they match up. So there's the matching that has to take place so that rejection doesn't have to happen. In this particular study, the mice were immunosuppressed because they were getting human cells and so they didn't want the mouse immune system to react to the human cells but if you're creating patient-derived, regenerated livers, then you're potentially going to not have rejection effects. People wouldn't have to be on immunosuppressive drugs. There are so many things that could go better. By the way, fun fact, if it did cost a million dollars, instead of the $2.3 trillion looting of the US Treasury by giving tax cuts to the already rich, we could pay for all of them and they'd still have money left over. So even like, again, take into account what was taken and be outraged about that because even if it was a million dollars per, we could have paid for it in that one tax cut. Yeah, it's all relative. It is all relative, you know, and if we had universal healthcare, that would be a lot better too that everyone who deserves would get, you know, but these are different issues to get into all together. Yeah, so another issue here is that these little livers, they were little, they fit in mice. So we're not looking at things. The cute little baby liver. The little baby liver, you know, we're looking at vascularization of a very tiny little, it looked like a liver, it acted like a liver, it was great and there was vascularization it was fantastic, but it's not gonna work for a person unless they can figure out how to increase the size and the durability of the entire structure, which is going to be a bit harder. But yeah, yeah, no, no, we're getting there. Baby liver steps, baby liver steps. I mean, the fact that we're even at making little baby livers right now is. I love it. This is science fiction. This is we are getting, we are working into the realm of science of the future. This is the stuff that's so exciting to me. We'll see how long it takes to actually make it happen, but I have faith that it will. Justin, what you got? Oh, okay. I should have been anticipating the fact that I would be bringing another story tonight. Oh, here we go. I'm gonna change the order of the stories. This is researchers at Tulane University School of Medicine identified a gene that actually causes an aggressive form of breast cancer to rapidly grow. This is the triple negative. This is the most dangerous, most untreatable, most aggressive metastasizing form of breast cancer. And they had parallel studies that were looking into two genes. It doesn't really matter what they are, it was Traff3ip2 and the other is Rab27a. Genes get weird names. There's just not enough names that sound like something you've heard of before to name every gene. It's just too hard. You have a weird name. No, they don't. They look at us and go, how come you all have the same name? How do you differentiate who's doing what? So the research team studied what happens when these genes were stopped from functioning, suppressing the expression of either gene led to a decline in both tumor growth and the spread of cancer to other organs. This is, the research was led by Dr. Riza Izzadpina who examined these interactions. And basically what they came up with is they found one that like really limited when one of them was silenced it really limited the tumor growth, tumor growth would stop but there was still a small amount of spread. When they also turned off the second there stopped being metastasization at all. It stopped metastasizing. There was no little cancer cells going off and blatching somewhere else and restarting growth. This is, we usually avoid talking about, I try to avoid talking about cancer cures historically because there's everything was a path to leading to a treatment that could someday but this one looks like a switch. This one looks like a switch. The quotey voice is important to note that this discovery is the result of a truly collaborative effort between basic science researchers and other clinicians but what they basically did was develop a two gene switch that can shut down the most aggressive untreatable form of breast cancer. And now they can create a drug that targets these specific genes to suppress their activity. Pretty huge, they're already working on FDA approval and want to go right into clinical trials from the animal model results because it was that just starkly stunning positive result that they got from this study. So, and with all the bad news going around in terms of where we have a pandemic we might have a care we're gonna stay at home. We don't know when this is gonna triple negative breast cancer might have just found the switch that shuts it down. And if we have a drug, I mean, finding the switch but having a drug that can do that, that's the next best if they're already on a path towards that, then I mean. Actually, what they actually, and I think I undersold it, what they actually did was trigger that. They actually switched it. Now it's in mice, right? So, you need to now do the study on humans but they already effectively showed proof of concept. It's not like now we need to, actually it's not like we need it. They did it already. And so now the clinical trials need to start and we need to see that it works in humans as well. But yeah. I love, I mean, it's always this step forward of, at what point do we get excited of it working for people? But at what point is it more than just curing cancer in mice? And at some of the mice but actually as I'm looking over what I have, I'm sorry, I just, I don't have the actual animal model that it was utilized in that was parallel from the other story I was talking about. But still. But in general, there's so many stories about curing whatever in mice. It's always in mice first and then the drug doesn't work in people. It causes too many side effects in people. There's so many reasons why something won't go forward into treatment. And so there are a lot of hoops that still need to be jumped through for sure. But having something that is such a specific target is, I mean, that it's just, it's a cleaner shot for getting there. That's exciting. Yeah. I love it. That's great. Yeah. Okay. Well, let me go from there into kind of, you know, negative land. Sad negative land. Like the back end of a magnet or like SAAP? Like SAAP, like, you know, climate change. Oh, no, not that. The thing that we haven't been talking about. Well, they know we're busy. I know. I've been, you know, specifically with COVID and all the pandemic and things going on. I've been avoiding climate change news, but it's ongoing and a new study out. I found it interesting because we've talked about this general trend in the show previously, which is that animals are found, have been found to, they're making shifts toward the poles. And this is something we've talked about previously. We know that the, that weather is changing, climate is changing. The, there are lots of organisms that are finding their ecosystems are no longer working for them. And they have to follow that the plants are moving and the animals have to follow the plants and everything is shifting. And we've discussed this before, but this week a database was published that brought together 258 peer reviewed studies comparing over 30,000 habitat shifts in more than 12,000 species of bacteria, fungi, plants and animals. This is called bio shifts. And this is, aside from being a study, you know, one-off studies, this is the first massive comprehensive analysis of the shifts that are taking place by life around our planet. And the authors published this week and discovered that land animals are moving closer to the poles, but at a pace that slower than was expected. That the ocean life is moving a lot more quickly than the life is that's on land. And Phibians are found to be moving toward the poles. They call that moving upslope at over 12 meters a year. Reptiles seem to be headed toward the equator at 6.5 meters a year. Insects are moving poleward at 18.5 kilometers per year. And in marine species are moving at about six kilometers per year, but land animals, that slowness, only 1.8 meters per year. So land animals not moving fast enough maybe and are the ocean animals, the marine species, are they because of the way that the water currents work? Is that why they're moving so much more quickly? And the question now arises, will marine species adapt to the fast climatic shifts that are taking place on our planet better than land animals? And I think that's the big question. And I would assume the answer is yes. And I would largely, my attribution to that would speculate that the obstacle for the larger land animals would be humans. You know, insects can travel regardless of whether there's human development. You know, in the ocean, there's no highways to cross. There's no large city further north or south of you as the case may be to have to encounter to continue in that direction. I would assume that the obstacle course is humanity. Yeah, so there's something else. There's also something else, which is plants. So yes, so plants cannot move nearly as fast as an animal. Large animals that might be. The animals move and then the plants don't move with them and they have to kind of retreat and go like, oh, I need those. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's a huge barrier that land animals depend on plants that are fairly immobile. Yes, if your biome doesn't move, you can't either. Yeah, yeah, that's a really, so it may be a combination of the biomes themselves not moving very quickly and habitat fragmentation like you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know. I like how Kiki makes us both right. Yeah. Bring everyone together. You're all right. We can be right together, it's okay. But you know, there have been engineers for several years now talking about the possibility and the potential for geoengineering our way out of climate change. Can we use technology and engineering to halt the progression of temperature increase of carbon dioxide increase here on the planet? Well, some researchers decided to model this. And you know, this is a really good idea before actually implementing some of these proposed solutions. Maybe try and figure out what they will actually do. Model them. Yeah, model them, yes. So these researchers at MIT wanted to look at the idea of solar geoengineering and they considered an idealized scenario, which is, you know, that's what they do in modeling. Giant umbrella. Yes, yes. Over like a parasel over the earth to block the sun. Yes, yes, absolutely. So that's pretty much the idea that they looked at this scenario in which solar radiation is reflected away from the earth that we would put, not umbrellas, but giant reflectors to aim sunlight elsewhere, away from earth. And the situation that they looked at, they wanted to see whether it would be enough to offset the warming that would occur if carbon dioxide quadrupled in concentration. So they were looking at like extreme. They were looking at like 2060. Yes, yes, which isn't that far away, but anyway. OK. What they found looking at their research, which they published in Geophysical Research Letters, is that the reduction in solar radiation would work. The geoengineering strategy employed to reflect light away would lead to reduced radiation reaching the earth. And so there would be less incoming solar heat that would counteract, to a degree, the warming caused by the carbon dioxide emissions. However, the cooling of the planet would not prevent other greenhouse gas-induced effects like regional reductions in rainfall and ocean acidification. So what ends up happening with this situation is that storm tracks would be changed. And whereas now we're looking at the possibility of increased storms and increased severity of storms, tropical storms, hurricanes, typhoons, with the conditions of their experiment, which they called the G1 experiment of the geoengineering model intercomparison project, that if solar radiation were to be reduced, there would be unpredictable effects on the atmosphere and those storms. And so storms are often used. They work to distribute energy through the atmosphere. They work to distribute rainfall across the globe. And they also distribute particulate matter. They move things around. This is atmospheric conduction of materials. And it's imperfect. So the bottom line of this story is that reducing solar radiation isn't just going to be a, ta-da, we fixed it, scenario of fixing global warming. It would actually have potentially negative effects on water distribution around the globe and on particulate matter. What they specifically would go into saying is that in the northern hemisphere, there would be much, much, much weaker storm tracks and that it could end up leading to stagnation, especially during the hot summer months, which would be a lot worse. Turning down the sun doesn't seem like the sun's not the problem. No. I'm having trouble with it. That's like cooking on the stove, right? And touching the burner and being like, ow, I'm burning my hand. Let me turn the stove off. It's like, no, just move your hand. That's not a problem. That'd be fair. Every year, this is part of global warming right here. This is what it's really all about. Every year, the Earth moves closer to the sun. It's a fact. It's a fact. Also, every year, we then move further away again. Yeah. It's kind of a political orbit. You know, we want to keep all that sun for, I don't know, the plants and for solar panels. And I don't know, why are we trying to turn the sun down? Yeah, we want more sun for the solar panels, except then we want to reduce. Yeah, no, it's the sun's not the problem. The gases are the problem. The heat-trapping gases are the problem. Not to take this back to the protests that are happening across the nation and in other places in the world, but gosh darn, and this is the fist of the air, gosh darn, but why aren't people also activated by this to this degree? I don't understand it. This is destroying our own habitat globally. We need to learn a lesson. It's a no-sendable. It's if we fix racism and inequality, we can also fix climate change. Climate change is and water availability around the globe. These are issues of climate change that affects the world's poor the most. Yes, so this is part of the whole thing. It's part of the whole package. Fixing climate change is part of fixing inequalities around the world. And that's a big part of it. And it's worse than you think, because it's not just going to be evenly distributed. The effects, actual sea level rise, is going to be much worse in the southern hemisphere than it is in the northern hemisphere. So the countries who are doing the least contribution to the global warming are going to see the most effect. It's sort of like, oh my goodness, it is sort of like a little bit of a correlation to what's going on in the United States right now. There are some people who are living under fascism, while the rest are not. And there's a disparity in the societies nationally here in the United States and then globally of people who are living under unequitable conditions. It's still, I get it. Yeah. So anyway, long story short for geoengineering. The researchers say, this work highlights that solar geoengineering is not reversing climate change, but is substituting one unprecedented climate state for another. Reflecting sunlight isn't a perfect counterbalance to the greenhouse effect. And another researcher added, there are multiple reasons to avoid doing this and instead to favor reducing emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. And I think I somehow missed part of it. Because this was an old, early solution, like aerosolized zinc in the atmosphere or something like this. Silver, yeah. Iron particles. And I think there's, I think, oh, so it causes rain. Nickel. Nickel. I don't know. Yeah. But yeah, there's been a few ideas of how to accomplish this. But yeah, let's not. This is a Twilight Zone episode. Let's block out the sun. No, let's not. Let's not do that. Let's just fix the problem we made. Yeah. How do we do that? Let's learn how to. I think we are at a point where we can learn how to do a whole lot of things better. And there's already a lot of good research out there on how we can do things better. Yeah. Yeah. This is This Week in Science. Want to help twist, grow? Get a friend to subscribe today. All right, we have some quick, quick things for the end of the show here. OK. This one, do you have one, Justin? You have a quick quick. I was, well, no, before we get to the quick. Oh, you have one more story. I do. OK, so Dead Sea Scrolls. This is a collection of 25,000-ish about fragments of ancient manuscripts, including some of the oldest copies, or the oldest copies, excuse me, of the Hebrew Bible. This is original source material. So piecing them together has been incredibly difficult because there's so many different pieces. They're small, they're old, they're deteriorating. And also, they weren't, they didn't get excavated from the caves in which they were found and then handed to researchers, or weren't excavated by researchers. But rather, most of the fragments filtered their way through the hands of antiquity, dealers, and private collectors, first and then eventually gotten to the hands of people researching. This is reported in the journal Cell, from June 2nd, it's an intriguing clue to help put the puzzle pieces together, maybe even finding the edge pieces because they did, for the first time, DNA sampling of, well, you can't take a piece and destroy it, but there's residue, there's dust that comes off of the fragments. So they did DNA analysis on the fragments and it turns out, a lot of them were on sheepskin, which wasn't known before, but the majority of them are written on sheepskin. This is Kodi voice, who is this? This is Oded Rakavi, Tel Aviv University in Israel. The discovery of the 2000 year old Dead Sea Scrolls is one of the most important archeological discoveries ever made. Yeah, maybe. However, it poses two major challenges. First, most of them were not found, exactly rather disintegrating to thousands of fragments, which had to be sorted and pieced together with no prior knowledge on how many pieces have been lost or in the case of non-biblical compositions, how the original texts should even read, depending on the classification of each fragment, the interpretation of any given text could change dramatically. Yeah, so you've got a book, you've got many books, several books, maybe a thousand books, who knows? Chopped into tiny, tiny pieces, where you have sentence fragments and then they try to piece these things together. This is actually pretty brilliant, the fact that they were largely on sheepskin, some on cowhide, but when you look at the DNA, you can actually see not just what animal they came from, but how related those animals were. So you have two fragments that came from the same sheep, chances are they're much closer related than something that was written on sheep that have no relation. Maybe this fragment came from a sheep that's related to that other sheep fragment. Those might be closer than the one that came from a cow. So they started, so they did this analysis and they started piecing things together, some of it very different, differently. So this is, who did in this study? There's Rikavi colleagues, including Noam Mizrahi at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and Matias Jakobsson, Upsala University of Svenska, Sweden. This side looked deeper and they did this DNA analysis. Some of the things that were sort of interesting, they found that pieces that were thought to run together because at first they were sort of doing this visually, morphologically almost. This looks like it fits, but this is part of the same text. There was one segment which was part of the prophetic book, Jeremiah, right? This is one of the oldest known scrolls of the Hebrew Bible. He was a bull frog, right? Jeremiah was a bull frog, also. But two pieces, two of these pieces that were thought to go together to form this story, one came from different animals. One was sheep and one was cowhide, which makes them think, ah, these probably came from different versions of the same story. Analysis found, analysis of these texts found that on these Jeremiah pieces suggest that they not only belong to different scrolls, they also represent different versions of the prophetic book. The fact that the scrolls that are most divergent actually are also made of a different animal species is indicative that they originate at a different provenance. So, sort of interesting. One of the, first of all, this is going to help put together pieces that weren't able to be put together and separate pieces that shouldn't have been put together. But it also shows that the early stories of mysticism and Jewish liturgy and some of the other non-secular stories had different versions of them concurrently, which is sort of interesting when we compare it to what modern day religion is where you have, here is the one text and message and it is the literal, now in the origins of religions, there were different versions of these religions which had different texts and different stories and even before there was a lot of writing and you had one scroll, but you had a lot of people going around telling things verbally. And so, maybe the story changed a little bit as people are talking about it and telling the story from person to person. You have that telephone operator effect. But even in the days of the Dead Sea Scrolls, there were multiple scrolls that had different texts. Yeah, so the Dead Sea Scrolls are around 2,000 years old, right? Is what I heard. We are currently in the year, in the Jewish year 5780. So you have almost 4,000 years of oral tradition before these scrolls existed. So that is a huge amount of drift, even assuming there was a common origin on these stories. Yeah, and people were like, let's write it all down. Let's put it all down. After it had been oral tradition for thousands and thousands of years. Yeah, absolutely. Which again, just brings to the thing that I've always said, which is there was a written language in China at the time. Why not start with people who could write it down? Why not start? This is a good question. Just take the message to people who can literally transcribe it. It's not like we had. Why take it to a literate? Do not take it to a literate first. It's not like they had planes, trains, and automobiles back then. No, no, just to think, the big man upstairs, if he had such an important, yeah, he should have written it. The big man upstairs. Yeah, got it. He should have taken it to the one people who had a finely defined written language first, and not put it in the hands of the illiterates who had to wait thousands of years before they could write it down. I'm just saying. Well, they were talking to different big men and women upstairs, weren't they? At the time. They were, yes. There you go. Okay, I'm convinced it's all that got Loki playing a trick on the other guy. But that's fine. We can all have our version of the stories, right? This way we get more stories. It's better. It's better that way. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Speaking of more stories, let's jump to the last couple of stories. Justin, this one is specifically for you. Okay. Now I'm both gringing in anticipation and excited to hear what the story might be. Yeah, yeah. You should be a little excited. Cringe-cited. There's cringe-citement going on at the moment. Yes. Okay. Well, researchers in South Australia decided that they needed to test a methodology for getting rid of feral cats. And so they have completed and published their field trial results of Felixers, which are a device that sprays poison on the identified target, a cat. So they tested 20 Felixers that were set to fire their poison across vehicle tracks and dune crossings for six weeks. They recorded cat activity and they used track counts and grids and remote camera traps to be able to record this activity. They also had radio collars on six of the cats. They found that none of the non-target objects, batongs, bilbies, birds, lizards, humans or vehicles that passed a Felixer was fired on. The Felixers only, they had high target specificity according to this abstract. They only fired 33 times over the six week trial on cats. And they only had two, they looked at their two radio collared cats that triggered the Felixers during the trial and they died. So, oh, their results suggest that Felixers are an effective target specific method of controlling feral cats at least in areas where cat immigration is prevented. Yes, so now Australia may have a method for ridding itself of some of the problematic cats in their outback. The cats in Australia and New Zealand are a big problem. There should be no cat for New Zealand. There should be zero cats in New Zealand. They're working on it. They're working on it. They're making really good strides in New Zealand because it's small so it's easier to address but in Australia it's still a huge problem. Yeah, so they have tried all sorts of methods of poisoning food and trying to get cats to eat the poison food, trapping cats. But this particular method with a poison that sprays the fur of the cats, the cats then clean themselves and ingest the poison as they go through their cleaning routine. And it apparently is very effective. Show. I'm so torn. I'm so torn. I thought you would be. It's sad but it's good news for all those billbees and other birds and lizards. I love birds and lizards. I love birds and lizards. Billbees, billbees are so cool. So none of those animals are targeted or affected and it's good that it's specific. It's sad for the cats but also the cats of Australia and New Zealand, as we said. Big problem. Don't belong there. They don't belong there, yeah. King toads and cats, gotta get them out. Yeah. All right, Blair, what do you have? Oh, to all those dog owners out there, you know how sometimes you're rough housing with a friend and the dog runs up to you and you're like, did they wanna play or did they think I'm in trouble? Well, a lot of us have often wondered if our dog would rescue us if we were in trouble. It's a study out of Arizona State University and this very preliminary study makes it look like, yes indeed, your dog would like to save you from peril. So they took 60 pet dogs and they had zero training in how to quote unquote rescue their owners in distress and they put their owners in a large box equipped with a lightweight door that the dog would be able of moving aside to get to the owner and then the owners called out, help or help me. Oh my. And they did coach the owners to make sure that they sounded real, which I think is very funny. And then they noticed that about one third of the dogs rescued their distress owner, which at first doesn't sound very good, right? So I was like, okay, in general dogs don't wanna save their distress owner, but in fact, their control test was that they put food in the box and only 19 out of the 60 dogs were able to get to the food. So more dogs actually rescued their owners than went for food, which means that when they control for, they consider this a control for understanding of how to get to the inside of the box. When they control for that, it actually looks like it's very good. If you look at only the 19 dogs that were able to open the door to get to food, 84% of them rescued their owners. So actually it looks like if they know how to get inside the box, it's a pretty big number of dogs that were very interested in getting to them. And then the other control test they did was having an owner just read a magazine inside the box. So they were trying to figure out if the dogs just wanted to know where their owners were. And 16 out of 60 went up to their owner, but did not show any signs of stress, like whining, walking, barking or yawning. And they did a lot of those things when the owner was calling up for help. So it appears to be an inherent desire in dogs to get to their owners when they are in trouble or they appear to be in trouble. So the next step, of course, is to figure out whether the dogs that rescue them do so to get close to the people or if they're really trying to help them and accessing the human physically is not the main motivator. So if they could help, they could assist their human in trouble, even if they couldn't get to them physically to get some pets, would they still do it? So all in all, your dog cares about you. Your dog cares, at least a third of the dogs care. Which is actually a high number according to who is able. I don't know. More study is needed. But I think it's a further and more study. Yeah, but then it gets into the idea of which dogs, are there specific breeds, or does it have to do with how connected the owner and the dog are, like what kind of, when did the owner get the dog? Was it when they were a six-week-old puppy or when the dog was three years old? Did they adopt them from a shelter or was it given to them by a friend? What are the, there's so many variants. How long have they owned them? How close would they, do they exercise them regularly? Probably zero out all of those and look at two factors. Does the dog think that they are higher or lower than the owner in the hierarchy? If the dog thinks it's lower in the hierarchy, it's gonna jump to support the master dog. If it thinks it's actually the dominant member of the pack, it's like, I don't care who beats up the minors, it doesn't matter to me, I'm still the top dog. It's you're low on the hierarchy, this is what happens. A more dominant male than you, or female than you has shown up in the pack. But if you- Yeah, they also, they should also figure out whether or not people have practiced having their dogs save them from a box before. Well, okay, there's that, but I have noticed, I have noticed, whenever somebody's dog really doesn't like me, it's because I'm kind of the more dominant male. Or is it because they know you don't like dogs? The dog can- No, no, no, no, some dogs absolutely love me, but I feel like- Well, they couldn't tell. I feel like those dogs think that they own the house. Those dogs think that they are the top dog. It's the dogs that aren't really sure of their position that always are barking at. It's just my dog psychology. Pop dog psychology. I admit, I admit, I'm not diagnosing any specific dogs. It's from all those dog training courses you've taken. Yeah. Which by the way, this is a whole separate thing, but we should just be able to diagnose people. Like with psychology. We just should, we just should. We should stop not doing it. We should stop not doing it. You're just talking about one person and- It's because it's the only science in which we're not allowed to apply anything we've learned. We- What? Is this an iris? Yes, that's an iris. You're not a botanist. You're right. I should never have called it an iris. You know, we should stop undiagnosing people because we're not the professionals. It's just my own personal side, right? That's fine. Okay, I'll be quiet again. Shit, go be quiet. What? What? What? Oh my goodness. All right. I think this brings us to the end of our show here, but as we do come to the end, I want to give you a little bit of homework. I'm going to put a link in our chat rooms and also I will put it on our website for a YouTube video. It's about an hour and 45 minutes long that the Royal Institute in England put out and it's a conversation, a panel conversation on black scientists, past, present, and future. What we can all do is learn more about where black scientists have come from, the past, what they're doing now, and where they are potentially going to influence science going forward. We need more black scientists, more people of color, indigenous scientists so that there are, is a representational diversity of views and backgrounds that can give us a better fabric of understanding of our world. There's probably some questions that we have no idea we should be asking because those people who would be asking the questions aren't in science because they've been pushed out for whatever reason. So we all have to do a job to inform ourselves and to learn more and to move forward to bring more people into science and to make it more equitable and diverse. And additionally, this week is Black Birders Week. So if you're aware of the incident that took place in New York City's Central Park last week involving a black birder and a woman who was running her dog off leash in an area that was not allowed to be not off leash. Anyway, it was a whole thing and it just stood to highlight the daily assaults that black people are up against in the ecological sciences. There are not many black birders and people don't talk about it that much, but this week there is a celebration of black birders on Twitter. They're doing all sorts of things. If you look up black birders, the hashtag black birders, and I'm also going to put a link to blackAF in STEM. It's a great hashtag with some really great black scientists, young ecologists, naturalists, birders, people who are doing really great work and also science communication outreach work. And tomorrow they're gonna be doing a live Q&A in the afternoon for those of you who are interested. So the link will send you that direction as well. So I hope to be able to, from where we are at this platform, be able to send you to these places so that you can see what other people in the sciences are doing and what celebrations are happening right now. And on that note, thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. And if you did, remember, please share it with a friend. Shout outs to Fada for help on social media and with our show descriptions. Thanks to Identity Four for recording the show. Thanks to Gord for manning the chat room. And thanks to the Burroughs Welcome Fund for their support. Also, thanks to our Patreon sponsors for your generous support. Thank you too. Paul Disney, Andrew Swanson, Stu Pollock, Ed Dyer, Ken Hayes, Kosti Rankee, Craig Landon, Tony Steele, Alex Wilson, Steve DeBell, Joshua Fury, Philip Shane, Ed Les Science, Mark Mazzaro, Richard Porter, Sky Luke, Brian Condren, Richard Eric Knapp, Jason Roberts, Matthew Litwin, Jack Bob Calder, Guillaume, Dave Neighbor, EEO, Kevin Parachan, Matt Sutter, Erin Luthon, Christopher Wrappen, Brendan Minnish, Greg Briggs, Robert Gary S. Marjorie, Regar Sia, Kurt Larsen, Steve Leesman, Sean Lamb, Greg Riley, Jim Drapeau, Lisa Soluzzi, Christopher Dreyer, Brian Carrington, Jason Olds, John McKee, Paul, RTOM, Ulysses Adkins, Kevin Reardon, Noodles. And my list is loading. I'll be there in one second to continue the list of people as soon as the website. Dave Wilkinson, Stu Doster, Paul Runevich, Darryl Myshack, Dave Freidl, John Ratnaswamy, Stephen Albaran, South O'Gradney, Mountain Sloth, Rodney Lewis, Sarah Chavis, Corinne Benton, John Gridley, Gene Tellier, Patrick Pecoraro, Darwin Hannon, Matt Bass, Dan Kay, Sarah Forfar, Donald Munnis, Howard Tan, Josiah Zainer, Taylor Piazz, Ben Bignell, Maddie Perrin, Mark Hestonflow, John Atwood, Ali Coffin, Ben Rothig, John Lee, and Flying Out. Thank you for all of your support on Patreon. And if you are interested in supporting us on Patreon, you can find information at patreon.com slash this week in science. On next week's show. You're muted, Justin. It wasn't me for once. You're still muted. Where'd your audio go? Why would I? Darryl, now you're back. Oh, I remember. I muted myself because I was fighting the temptation to take another rant and put the show into extra. On next week's show. We will be back Wednesday, 8 p.m. Pacific Time, broadcasting live from our YouTube and Facebook channels. And also from twistforward.org, forward or back slash live. I still can't tell the difference. Is it what? Just say slash. Slash, it's forward, back slash forward. So I don't know the difference. I'm slash dyslexic, I apologize. I know you love looking at our beautiful faces, but if you want to listen to us as a podcast, you can search for this week in science wherever podcasts are found. If you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe as well. For more information on anything you have heard here today, show notes and links to stories will be available on our website, www.twist.org. And you can also sign up for our newsletter. Feel free to shout out to us directly. You can email Kirsten at kirsten at thisweekandscience.com, Justin at twistminion at gmail.com or me Blair at BlairBaz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist, T-W-I-S in that subject line or we'll never see it because your email, it'll get spam filtered into oblivion. You can also hit us up on the Twitter where we are at twist science at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If you have a topic you would like us to cover or address, a suggestion for an interview, a haiku that comes due in the night. Please let us know. We'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from the show, remember. This week in science is the end of the world. So I'm setting up shop, got my banner on pearl. It says the scientist is in. I'm gonna sell my advice to the simple device. I'll be back in science, this week in science. We're gonna be ranting. It was gonna be this week for sure. Yeah. I mean, there's a place. Yeah. For all the ranting, for sure. Yeah, this week was an interesting one thinking about, you know, number one, do we do the show? Number two, do we... Is it something in our wheelhouse to address what's going on, you know, politically in the public sphere? You know, what is appropriate for our show and the podcast? And so I think it was a, you know, I feel like we touched on it but we didn't belabor it, which I think is important, but. No. So I mean, it's all people are hearing about right now. So I think that, yeah, it's important to address but not necessarily something that we need to go over and over on specifics of because there are certain people that don't wanna hear certain elements of that all day, every day, especially for people that actually, like that's part of their life. It's, I mean, it's very easy for me to be mad and to go on and on about it, but I, at the end of the day, I still have, I still have privilege that other people don't. And so for those people that have to worry in situations that I don't, talking about it over and over and over can be actually kind of traumatizing. So it's something we have to be kind of careful of. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. Oh, Fada's tired. Thank you, Fada. Have a good night. Lots to rant about exactly identity for. Noodles has to move from, oh, has to move from your apartment in the middle of the pandemic this month in New York City. Ah, I'm sorry, that's gonna be hard. Yeah. Oh, we should do, we should do another newsletter. It's probably about time. Yeah, and I have to get better about doing the video posts. So on the website, it's just I do the podcast post and then I'm like, I'm done. I'm done. And then I just forget about it entirely and the videos remain the same on the front page. Never take down my sperm update. It's gonna be there forever now. I love it. See, I think it was like 2013. So I was still fairly early in the show, but I was full co-host and we had technical difficulties and I had been so excited because I found three sperm stories that I was so excited about. And so you're like, just film them. Like, okay. Just film it, do it. Okay. Make it happen. Yeah. And I remember I did the entire thing. I talked for like 20 minutes and the recording didn't work. And so I had to do it again. So that's take two, what's up there? I'm still traumatized by it, so I remember it, even though it was like. And I'll never do it again. It was like, I don't know, technology changes so much in just a few years. You had to do it. I had to do it to YouTube live, but like. Oh yeah. Record it. And it wasn't live. It was like a whole thing. Whoa, that just happened. There was a boom outside. I don't know. I heard a boom here too, but. Honestly, probably fireworks. It's probably part of the whole situation. The protests and everything. Yeah. Yeah, I still, on my phone, I still get alerts from San Francisco. Oh, that's funny. So I get the emails and I get the phone alerts. It's like, okay, yes. San Francisco has curfew again. Okay, Muni is rerouting because of these problems that they, yes, okay. I actually have a letter that I can show in case I'm stopped in curfew. Oh yeah. Oh, because you're essential now. I'm essential now. Yeah. Yeah. Get out of jail, free card. That's awesome. Brian has one of those too. I think my cousin, years ago, had one of those when he lived in New Orleans because he taught the police chiefs, the police chief's wife, tennis. Oh wow. Is that how you get those? Like it was a real get out of jail, free card. It's like, I teach, I teach the police chiefs, wife, tennis. So I'm the tennis pro at the Hilton. I was like, what? That can really happen? He's like, yep. Oh my goodness. How is everybody y'all holding up? I believe I can hear the chatroomer to us because you guys, I mean, everybody really, but I mean, I can't talk to everybody in the chatroom. I mean, I can look and see how everyone's doing. The big cities have been very, very busy this last week, the last five days. Who is Alex T? Who is Alex T who was in the Facebook chatroom and wrote a couple songs for? Alex Troiano. What was the songs? What are the songs? Alex wrote, he was Unbalanced Wheel and he made our theme song, the show opening song. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. I think it's Alex, yeah. Cool. Yeah. So when he said he wrote a couple songs a couple years ago. It was underselling it. He was underselling it. He wrote our theme song. The unbalanced. Yeah. Yeah. Funny. I thought I saw him and then it like scrolled up and I, yes. Is he still here? He's probably not here. Still, one of the openings. One of the openings was Guitar Riff thingy which was one of my favorite band names ever which was used rugs. Oh, they used rugs. Yes. Yes. That was Josh. That was Josh. That was Josh. Yeah. Yeah. That was lost. Daniel Yount is wondering how the corona how corona will take advantage of the protests and also saying, I'm in a small town so for sure the absence of action. Major concern because you have very large unsocially distanced people mostly wearing masks, which is nice to see, but. Which was not the case in the protests last week who were angry about being told to wear masks. Mm-hmm. Those people were not wearing masks and protesting. So I just, that's why I keep wanting to shout all day everything's like. Go ahead. They were protests last week. People had guns. They were mad. You wanted them to wear a mask. The National Guard didn't get called out for that. Yeah, so what's gonna happen? And this is, people are thinking about this already. We had the protests to open up and to come out of lockdown. We have a bunch of states that did where those protesters were not wearing masks. We have a bunch of states that did start coming out of their lockdown mode and opening business. And that was a week or two ago. We've already started to see an uptick of cases in places like Texas and Ohio, which are states that came out of their lockdown early. And then we had these protests, which are massively greater numbers of people than the earlier protests. But, and the use of tear gas and other irritants that make people cough is a potential problem. Which, by the way, is a chemical weapon and is banned in warfare. By the Geneva Convention. It's banned in international warfare. But we're using it on our own citizens. Yeah. Daniel Lyant says they're going into phase three opening. Interesting. Yeah, it is pretty weird. Pandemic not going anywhere. Protest. But let's go ahead and open up restaurants. Let's just go ahead. Let's just do it. Yeah. So we've got the protests. So what we're gonna see in, we are already seeing an uptick in cases in places that are opening up. This round of protests, give it two weeks. We're gonna see, I predict more cases. I mean, epidemiologists are predicting more cases. But then the thing that's gonna happen is that people are not going to say, oh, the state's openings are leading to more cases, which they are. And like the spring breakers or the Memorial Day weekend people who went to Lake, whatever, and they were packed all next to each other in their rubber floaties and not wearing masks and drinking beer. There's a whole bunch of gathering on Memorial Day weekend. I think that's gonna get overlooked and these protests are going to be blamed for a lot of upticks. They're not gonna say, hey, we opened things up. Yeah. Yeah. So it's gonna be, we're gonna see a lot of stuff. Politics will be played with the data. And that's gonna be for some. The question is, is anyone gonna wanna roll back? Cause it feels like on opening up post-Corona. So nobody's gonna wanna roll back. Nobody wants to roll back. Will governors or mayors or whoever roll back to previous regulations if there's an uptick in cases? Because it seems like, especially now that it's summer, like everyone wants to make their lost income. Now that like people wanna go on vacation and all this kind of stuff. I'm a little skeptical as to whether the powers that be will make the right choice if there is an uptick. Yeah, we'll see what happens. I mean, all you can do is manage your own risk. All you can do is, if you have to go back to work and cannot work from home, you can do what you can in that situation to be safe. You can wear a mask, wear gloves if you can. You can wash your hands a bazillion times a day. You can wear eye protection. You can change your clothes and take a shower before you interact with your family after you've been out in the world. There are things that you can do. It just depends on your comfort level. It, rah, rah, rah, rah, rah, rah. I mean, if you're going out wearing a mask but somebody else who has it isn't and they're a super spreader and you're in the grocery store at the same time that they are, your mask isn't gonna help you that much. Brian Burwell, who claims not to be trying to get political, did write all three of his Congress people about the inappropriate crowd control used earlier this week. So there is something, okay, first of all, I'm proud of how many cities, including non-American cities, held the peaceful protests. Cities around the world, all 50 states and cities around the world. And cities around the world. I'm very proud of all of you for going out. I did too, but I'm in the city of Davis. So it's like, it was literally like a day, it actually was at the park. It was a day at the park. With the small town that Uber Liberal already is. And I've mentioned this in the pre-show, but it's been confusing to sort of explain what's going on to children because we had a very beloved young police officer who got tragically murdered in the last year in our small town while on duty. And we had held vigils for them. And we held vigils in this case as well for somebody who was murdered by the police. And so it's not a side versus. It is a, let's be less violent towards each other. How about murder? Murder's bad, let's try not to do that. It really is. However, there is a purge quality to this, which I kind of appreciate, which is they have been rounding up a lot of looters and arresting them while this is going on. And with all of that, when we've all seen these examples of police who have been being overtly violent towards protesters, a lot of them have already at least lost their jobs and may have criminal prosecution to follow. So, and it's not always a white officer involved too. This is also a systemic policing problem in the way police are trained. The one of the most egregious ones that I saw was a traffic stop where they busted out the window and tasered the driver and dragged people out of the car over a traffic stop in Atlanta. And it was black police officers who got fired for this. So it's also, it is a fascist mentality and a, you know, when we watch the CNN officer, CNN reporter, black reporter, get arrested. And then the other reporters who were there, camera crew and support staff who were white were sort of left alone. They were sort of like an, oh, we should go back and arrest them too. Because the one black man in the crew got let off in handcuffs and got filmed. And it was like, that was over, okay. Oh wait, we should probably, and the fact that these were state troopers in Minnesota, the fact that they felt like that was okay, tells you that it's, it's- It's systemic, it's a- It's systemic, but it is that the role of their authority, the limited their authority has not been made clear to them. And this is something that does need to absolutely change. We have too many examples for the limited time that we have. If I had seven minutes, I could do it, but we only have probably five. But what really needs, really needs, oh yeah, okay, I lost my track. I totally lost track of my point. But this, there is something in the protesters going out there and confronting police, which is getting bad actors or people who do not have the mental makeup to be good police who are being exposed in these events. And sometimes at the physical harm of the protesters, but by sort of outing them in this way, we can eliminate them. It's almost like we should just do this on a, maybe not every year, maybe every other year, have this confrontation, see which police overreact and eliminate them from the police force. No, no, I mean, like I'm absolutely serious. I'm absolutely serious. It's a little bit too hunger games-ish. It is, but it might be the only way that we can effectively do it nationwide. Because we can pull these police- I hope that what we can do is allow for the change. You saw what happened in Portland. You saw what happened in Portland. I've been watching Portland. I cried. I cried when those officers all knelt in solidarity with the protesters. I had tears coming out of my eyes. I'm like, that's how you do it. That right there is exactly how you do it. You speak up and you join. Yeah, and in Portland they had, there were some black protesters who they were, they had a bullhorn and were calling for a conversation, calling for the chief of police to come out and talk to them, and the chief came out. And they took like three or four of the protesters, took them inside, and they sat and they had a conversation. And so it's the beginning of a conversation. They've got a space in Portland where more of these conversations are gonna happen. And it, you know, the downside of it is they're in there having a conversation, and meanwhile some individuals outside somewhere in Portland decided to get violent, start vandalizing, doing whatever, and the conversation had to end because they had to actually, they had to go deal with individuals who were causing violence. But then on the other side of that in Portland, there is also a lot of police violence against people in the black population. And it's- It's unquestionable. Yeah, police violence in general, by the way, black or white is up 50% from where it was 20 years ago. So there is an increased problem here that is being addressed right now on the streets of America. One of the things that was also, I think it's a vice piece, but I might be mistaken, but there are a bunch of individuals across the country who are going in, they're illustrating how difficult it is to file a complaint against a police officer, where sometimes they literally go in and they're not handed the form upon which they must fill out or told to wait, and then they wait indefinitely. Like where there is a desire not to even allow citizens to report abuse by police. Now, the individual who is now charged with multiple murders, which it's allegedly, even though we have all seen the video evidence, so it's hard to say allegedly when you- When you see the evidence. When there's an actual footage of the crime, is it gonna be impossible to get a fair trial? No. Just because everyone saw the evidence, just because everyone saw the evidence doesn't make it hard to have a fair trial. That's not how that works. You know, but because everybody saw the evidence this time, they're going to trial. And now, because everybody's protesting all over the place, not just the one guy, but the other three police officers, they're all going, they're all arrested. They're all going to be, they're going to trial for aiding and abetting in the murder of George Floyd. 25% of Americans believe Sasquatch exists. 33% of Americans believe- We have video evidence. UFOs are from- Video evidence, yeah. 60% believe in ghosts, I think it is. It's a really high number. Self, very few believe that police violence is an epidemic. Cell phones have cameras. The footage we have gotten has not captured Sasquatch, has not seen UFO evidence, and has not illustrated apparitions that walk through walls or any of this nonsense. What we have seen over and over again is unarmed black men being assaulted by police. So if I can tie it back to the resource that Kiki shared at the beginning of the show. Yeah, yeah, that's the one. It can't wait, this is exactly, so I think that's where some of this comes from is you assume that protect and serve and best intentions and it's rare and all these kinds of stuff kind of that you're talking about, Justin, but you'd probably also assume that no matter where you live that you would be required as a police officer to de-escalate if possible, you'd be required to exhaust all other means before shooting that chokeholds and strangleholds would not be allowed, that you would require comprehensive reporting, that you would, the fact that require a warning before shooting, that one actually really, that hit me over the head. What? So the fact that, I mean, you can look down, you can select your city, you can see exactly where they stand on these requirements, and they give you people to call and write, so this is, I mean. Yeah, East LA apartment circa, I think 1993, some other apartment, maybe on a lower floor, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, police. Yeah, the order that you say these words matters. So my final thoughts, couple of final thoughts, I have too many final thoughts. So many final thoughts, yes. Yeah, Twitter has been, I've been really, you know, Twitter can be social media, can be the place where things get you down, but I've also seen so many people come together and really talk about stuff in the last week, be and share resources and share information on how those of us who are not black, who are white, who cannot begin to imagine the lived experience that we can learn, we can learn more about it and learn how we can be better allies. Yeah, and that's one of the things that I've been enjoying. Also the historical aspect, there's a woman in Portland who Claire Willett is her name, and she posted a thread on her research into the history of the Black Panthers and the concerted effort of government during the Nixon era to smear the names of people who were standing up against the authority of the government within the black community and basically had people murdered. And her history is amazing. I'll try and find that thread because there are some links to documentaries that are just mind blowing. It's like, really? This is stuff that we need to learn in school that we're not. There's two lies that white America has told itself, which is that it's not systemic and I don't see it, right? Yeah. The two lies that were exposed, one, when George Floyd was murdered, we knew it wasn't one bad cop. We knew it wasn't, hey, that guy is the problem in this scenario. We knew right away, this is a continuum of activity. The other one is the Central Park Karen. I don't know her name and I don't care to know it. She knew, she knew the relationship between black men and police. And she knew how to weaponize it. The relationship between police and a white woman and police and a black man in the park. She knew immediately how dangerous that was and she used it. It wasn't a mystery. It is not unknown and it's not, whether it's spoken or not, it is not unknown to society that how disparate the relationship is between local government and citizenry. So yeah, so any claim that we didn't realize this is a problem is absolutely, this is also by the way, this woman, this woman, by the way, by the way, this woman, just so we're clear, donated to Obama, voted Democrat, but still was willing to, I think she should be in jail right now and I'm surprised she's not, because this is, that was what I, we know what, you know what swatting is, when you call police to a household claiming there's an active situation, people go to prison for this. And I'm surprised that she is not in jail because that was effectively a swatting. It was an attempted homicide in actuality and probably in legal terms, something to do with swatting is the only thing I've, but yeah, immediately knew how to weaponize her position versus his position. And the guy was looking up for birds. I mean, stop it, just stop it. Just be in, just be in a human, not fair. No. Yeah, no, there's a lot institutionally that has been done over the years that, yeah, it needs to change and it needs to never happen again and we need to do better in a major way. I also just wanna close myself on kind of what you were talking about Kiki a second ago, what you've been looking at on Twitter and stuff like that. I really wanna give a shout out to all of the people of color who have taken time out during this time that there's probably lots of other things that they could do to participate in this movement, but to educate people who wanna be allies. So like they're going even harder to try to help us help them, which is it's so silly that we need the help, but I think we all could use some extra words of wisdom in how best to help, because even those of us with the very best intention might make some mistakes in a situation when we need everybody doing exactly what that community needs, not what I need or what you need, right? And so I think it's been really amazing to see people really take time and resources to educate me and I'm so thankful because I wanna help, I wanna do what is needed and I don't wanna crowd the space with things that aren't. And it's helpful to get that, helpful to get that help. I appreciate it. Yeah, yeah, shout out to noodles. Thanks for listening to Twist. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, we are glad you're here, I'm glad, I'm glad. I'm trying to get all my links out. I found the, at least she moved it to a Tumblr post, it's easier to find, but I found a Tumblr post of Claire Willett and this thread of hers that really is fairly phenomenal and it's just, it's a beginning, but it's a lot of really, it's the beginning of a rabbit hole of research and awareness that is, it's pretty amazing, I highly recommend reading it if you haven't already. Yeah, there's a lot going on, everybody. There are many thoughts for all of us. Thank you for sticking with us while we share some of ours here and we will continue to, as the producer and host of this show, I want to make sure that in the years to come, we continue to lift diverse voices and bring scientists in for interviews from the black community, from the Native American indigenous community, from people of color, Latinx, female, we're gonna, we have always done that because it's always been, it's important to me, but every once in a while, we may have too many white male scientists because maybe those are the books that are written or the PR emails that I get and it's easier for me to just reply to the things that come to me asking for interviews. So I promise I'm going to work harder to put effort into finding people that are going to give you really amazing information because I think that's what you come here for are interesting interviews with interesting people who are working on fascinating things and that we can have a conversation with them that you get to be a part of and I want to continue that. I think that's a big part of it, but making sure that it's not, limited representation is incredibly important and I'm going to make an effort to make sure that I continue to do that. And also if we find resources for scientists, for students, for scientists where we can help, I know that there are a few websites out there with academic institutions, granting, funding information, career workshops, things that are specifically focused on underrepresented communities and if we can help share those resources, I will try to do that also. Yeah, Daniel, you're right, the all white guy expedition on the ISS didn't help. Although I have to say, Bob and Doug, they made me, the combination of the two guys made me go watch Strange Brew afterwards. A. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Beauty, A. Man, we didn't even talk about that on the show this week. Yeah, we got overshadowed, but yeah. Yeah, we made it a big, big, big historic jump for space and for America going into space. It was interesting, though, many parallels between the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the Apollo mission to the moon and, yeah, so, when you think of like, but I'm gonna turn it onto, okay, we have our civil rights movement that's happening now with this new space race, but I'm going to try and put a little positive spin on it and say that maybe this is another chance. We can look at this as another chance to do better and not to let ourselves be lulled into a false sense of security and complacency. This is our chance to work. So on that note, time to say good night. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Good night, Peaky. Good night, everyone. Thanks for joining us for another episode of TWIS, Serious Times, Serious Thoughts. Thanks for being with us this week and we'll see you next week. We'll be back again and I'll be at home with my computer that crashes once every hour. But I'll have a microphone that I understand how to use. I don't know what I'm doing with this thing here. Anyway, thank you all for watching. We'll see you again next week. Be healthy, be safe and enjoy the science. We'll see you later. Thanks.