 Hello everybody. Welcome to This Week in Science. We are here for another fun-filled, science-filled episode of This Week in Science. It's our weekly podcast podcast. And things in this broadcast may or may not make it to the final podcast episode. But if you're here, you're getting it all. Make sure you hit the likes and the hearts and the shares and make the algorithms happy so that we can get all the shares and the likes and everything on these different platforms. And additionally, I was going to say something else, but I forgot what it was. So that's another thing. We're going to do a show. You ready? So ready. It's the pear brandy. I know what it is. Don't tell them. All right, everyone. It's time for twists. Starting in a three, two, this is twists. This Week in Science, episode number 930, recorded on June 14, 2023, the upright science brigade. Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we will fill your head with Asgard Australopithecus and dead flies, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Artificial intelligence is in the news lately with worrisome warnings of a future beyond our control. So before anyone panics about our future robot overlords, a little context. AI is nothing more than a collection of computers. It can read everything we have ever written on any subject and maybe learn from it and apply it in ways that we might not expect. But what AI does not have is a motive. AI has no interest in humanity, no will or ideology it seeks to impose upon us and no desire to change the world or profit off of its people. Eventually, if not already, we will be giving goals with human motives to the AI. And given what we know about humans, these goals will likely revolve around lawyers, drugs, and money. Or some combination thereof. There are archaic forms of artificial intelligence that already operate in the world today. We call them corporations, governments, and science. These are all forms of an artificial intelligence. As these entities seek to incorporate more powerful AI into their operations, what we will see will be nothing new and nothing to be afraid of. That there isn't already good reason to be worried about today. Corporations have tremendous power over resources and leverage over people. Historically showing a lack of concern for human health and well-being outside of its own bottom line. And this will influence how corporate motivated AI treats people. Governments around the world already range from big brother authoritarian dictatorships to big brother limited freedom democracies. Government motivated AI will reflect this, making any system harder to challenge from within. And science, which is already awesome, will just get more awesome. The science motivated AI will accelerate every form of research. And give us much to talk about here on This Week in Science, coming up next. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back. Yes, we are. Oh my gosh. Who would have expected that? A weekly science podcast coming back again in another week. That's right. We're back to talk about all the science that we think is important and interesting to discuss this week. This is a big brother free zone. It's just the science. Alright everyone. What are you watching on the social media platform? I was about to say we are linked to Facebook. Yeah, I know. There are all these caveats, always caveats. Anyway, on the show tonight, I have science about our Asgardian roots, dancing peanuts and tunnels in your brain. Justin, what did you bring? Those are all amazing sounding. They're gonna be. Let's see. I've got out of Africa earlier than we thought. Maybe. Lucy, the upright Australopithecus. Another reason we need trees in case we didn't have enough. And why smoking is killing non-smokers at an alarming rate. Oh no. Oh jeez. Alright, Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh my goodness. I have hot sand. I have death perception. Yes, death perception. Not death. Before that, I'm gonna have a real quick story about rhino horns. Alright. I'm looking forward to all of this. I can't wait to talk about all these things and even more because I know there's more in store for everyone. And I hope that you are all looking forward to it too. If you have not yet subscribed to us on the podcast machines, go into the podcast realms. Look for this week in science. All places that podcasts are found. Twists could work too. But this week in science is what we're called. You might be able to subscribe to us. We also live stream weekly, Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Pacific time. What is it? 5 a.m. Central European time right now. On Thursdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays. Anyway. Thursdays. Live YouTube, Facebook and Twitch. And we would love to see you here in our chat rooms. You can also subscribe to our channels and watch those shows asynchronously if that's what you like. Additionally, we're on Instagram. We're still on the Twitter, even though we're not really on the Twitter. We're on Universal Dawn, if you like the Mastodon thing. And Facebook, I already said Facebook. Just look for twist.org. That's our website. Show notes, all sorts of other interesting things if you need resources. Time for science. Yes. That's doing it. My cat is learning how to open doors. So that's where I had to step away for just a moment. Is that your first story? Cat's opening doors? Cat's opening doors. Humans looking into the solar system. That is my first story for the night. We've been peeking at the solar system and, you know, several years ago, there was this little tiny spacecraft that orbited. Nope. Nope. Orbited Saturn. And it did a death dive into Saturn. And it took all sorts of pretty pictures. The Cassini mission. Cassini. Yeah. It took a long time to get to Saturn. And then when it finally got to Saturn, it was there longer. It was a really great mission. Did all sorts of stuff. Went out to, it sent off the Huygens probe to one of the moons of Saturn. Like all this great stuff. It is still giving us good information. Data from Cassini is still being analyzed. And researchers who have just published a new paper and I believe, wait, where is it? I'm totally blanking on where they published the paper. Nature. Oh my gosh. Yes. Nature. That's exciting. I guess a journal that you get in three probably. I would have copped out completely. And I would have said published in a prestigious journal. Right. I know. I got to look for it. I got to make sure it's accurate. Detection of phosphates originating from Enceladus's ocean. So it says data coming from the Cassini probe from one of the detectors on the Cassini probe, which is the cosmic dust analyzer in which it flew through plumes of water, ice, and these, these plumes that are ejected from Enceladus and also flew through the rings of Saturn to be able to get an idea of what kind of particles were there in the dust and gas around Saturn in the rings and also emanating from the moons like Enceladus. And in the process, this information is just now coming to light, which is amazing to me because it's been years since Cassini crashed itself into the surface of Saturn. This is also, by the way, this is part of why we need AI in science. These missions generate so much data that you've got to chop it up into these tiny small little pieces and hand it off to scientists to analyze. The entire process is, our data collection ability is so much greater than our capacity to analyze at this point that this is why it takes, there's a time delay between collecting a ton of data. There's a time, yeah, there's that time delay and there's also the publication delay. And so these researchers who were involved in trying to figure out whether or not there are signatures of compounds that are involved in organic life. Carbon, we know of as the basis for organic chemistry, organic biology chemistry, but there are a number of other elements that are important and also responsible for life. Phosphorus is one of the main key elements for life. And in the dust and gas, they have specifically been able to find the signature of phosphorus emanating from Enceladus. And this is interesting because years and years and years, they've been hypothesizing that the icy crust of Enceladus hides oceans of liquid methane, liquid that may contain amino acids that may contain other compounds that could support life. Could there be alien life, microbial life, even or even more, you know, could be little alien octopuses hanging out underneath that icy crust? Who knows? But the question is, you know, how do we find out if it's there? And we have to do these measurements. And so the instrument on Cassini was able to take these measurements. But this model was initiated, like these researchers said back in 2020, we said, we think that there might be phosphorus on Enceladus. And then they published a paper about their model that came out in 2022. So two years later, their paper came out. And now in 2023, they have actual data from Cassini that is actually spectroscopic. They've got scanning electron microscopy related to phosphorus, chemistry and molecules. And they're like, yep, there's phosphorus on Enceladus or in Enceladus under that ice crust. So basically we need to go to Enceladus, crack it open like an egg and see if there's life there. And be sure not to bring any with us. So we accidentally think that that's what we found. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, assuming that life always starts the way it does, which 50% chance. We are not. One of the things that could, that would happen is there's a possibility that we would infect another planet, right? The other idea though is that we might hybridize with it. Make both stronger. You know, this is how life finds its way around this planet. Okay, look, your cousin, Jeff Goldblum, may have said that life finds a way. But in reality, we just want to find out what's out there before we decide whether or not we're going to hybridize it. That would be incredible. Can we figure out what the endemic species are first? Deciding things ahead of time. All this planning. So much planning ahead. Well, this was not ahead of time planning. And in fact, it's one of those wonderful things that comes out of data. So I'm really glad to see Cassini mission data still providing us with lots of information. And then my second story for how we're looking at our solar system, researchers from the University of Copenhagen have just published their study determining, well, it's kind of, it's also in nature. And it is not necessarily a new idea, but that the Earth might have formed a lot faster than we originally thought it did. So instead of taking a billion years to form or more than a hundred million years to form, then this new study suggests that there was a fast accumulation of little tiny millimeter sized pebbles according to Martin Bizarro, professor at Globe Institute, one of the researchers behind the new study. The Earth was formed in just a few million years. And based on their simulations, their findings, they say, it appears that the presence of water on Earth is a by product of its formation. So it gets past the concept that water on Earth was a chance of impact with comets from the outer solar system and is just a byproduct of the combination of a variety of pebbles of gravel and stuff that was already in existence in the ring. And that a little tiny conglomeration had more gravitational pull than others and just eventually built up and cleared its orbit. And that is the Earth and that that would have been the way that our Earth formed. So one of the things that I don't know if this reinforces is a counterpoint because they actually can be seen kind of, maybe it's both. Maybe it's both. I don't know. It's a cow. The pebbly asteroid that Hayabusa sampled long, little time ago, has been found to have salt crystals that can only form in liquid solution. This is not an outer water source then. What it indicates is all these near Earth objects that we assume to be dry could contain enough water at some point to have been liquid and for the salt formation. Or that it was never liquid, but it's the salts or the combination of molecules. So these compounds, when they come together in a certain way, then you have water within. And we know that there is water in the crust of the Earth, not in liquid lake water form, but actually tied up in rocks. Yes. Oh, yeah. So then it might not need one of those far away objects to come and drop water here. Maybe it's both. Both would even accelerate everything. Yeah, it could be both. It could be all, but this particular study, the theory that they're working on, they were investigating silicon isotope constraints on terrestrial planet accretion. And so this is their way of kind of looking at isotopes of different molecules to be able to compare between 60 different meteorites and planetary bodies and try and phenotypically. So Blair, the way that we look at biology and magnetic relationships, try and establish that kind of relationship through chemistry and what we know of how chemical timing works and how that works to determine how various rocky bodies might have developed into the Earth, which is, I think, a very interesting approach. Yeah, so it's like instead of looking as we have at the Earth from an anatomical perspective, which is like what we used to do is like, oh, this bird has feathers. So it's related to other birds. Basic morphology. Yeah, morphology versus physiology. Yeah, or yeah. Anyway, interesting stuff. What you got there, Justin? Oh, that's a great question. Where did I start off? Oh, yeah. So this is a pretty big story. Let me see if I can find it. Yeah. Never let the thing you do not see be the evidence that they are not there. Fair. Yes. So this is sediment layers of a cave in northern Laos, containing some human skeletal remains, has been dated to between 68 and 86,000 years ago. Now, along with evidence that human presence in the region was lasting, I guess for like 56,000 years. So in some ways, this find is unexpected. Because this would be like the oldest site found. And other other ways, it's just what you might expect. So it's unexpected and that the is the oldest modern human site found in Southeast Asia by about 40,000 years. And so falls outside of our confirmed knowledge of human migration and occupation in the region. It is, I think, expected as we know that people reached Australia between 50 and 65,000 years ago. And so we should expect there to be settlement sites somewhere between Africa and Australia at predate Australia. Or people just were like, we're on the move. We're not going to stop until we get to Australia. There should be some evidence of that, though, still. Yeah. So there should be places in between that are older. And there are some sites in maybe India that seem to be older current modern humans. So there's that beginning. But then, yeah, this is quite an astounding find. The northern lost find suggests that humans have had other strategies because part of also why we think we haven't seen any of those sites over that those incremental steps as we expanded out of Africa is because there's a previous assumption that human ancestors only traveled along the coastlines. And so those ancient coastlines are now out to sea and underwater due to sea level rise, obscuring any evidence. This is sort of Highland inland. And in fact, it actually makes quite a bit of sense because the early explorers they think in this region that found this cave were likely following inland rivers. That's such a better strategy, it seems, when traveling following a river than following a coastline because there's fresh water there. Wherever you know, as long as you're near a river, you've got fresh water, which seems like that's like a tough one to wander away from if you're an early hominin without a at least with if you don't have a decent canteen or something to carry water in the ocean doesn't help with that at all. So why would anybody willingly follow a coastline? He can't drink that water. That's no good. So anyway, there is no DNA from any of these fossils. And there's no direct dating of the fossils because Laos has prohibited the destructive analysis of any human fossils that are found in any sites there, which is good on one level on the other. We need the DNA. So the researchers use workarounds to date bovine teeth that were found in the similar layers. They used uranium series dating on a buried stalactite fragment, which is a very accurate sort of atomic clock way of doing things. The site is also close to Cobra Cave, which I think looks like a cobra from the outside. I don't think it means that it had cobras in it. What they did find in that cave was Denisovan remains. And snakes. Previously. Well, so that site, though, is a previous site that was found was 70,000 years older than they think this site is. So it doesn't mean that the humans and Denisovans met there. But, you know, at some point we know Denisovans and current modern humans had hybridization events throughout Asia, and especially Southeast Asia. And so somewhere in that overlap of the last of the Denisovans and the early explorers to Southeast Asia, there were interactions that took place. This now being the oldest human site in Southeast Asia gives a great possibility that these early modern humans may have been. Now they say they don't think there's any hybridization in the fossils that they've found thus far. It doesn't look like they're already hybridized with anything. These look like the current modern humans of the day. And unlikely, so they're speculating that these aren't the direct ancestors of Southeast Asia. Part of the problem, of course, is they don't have the DNA. So I think any speculation, one way or the other, shouldn't happen. Like, did you have an inspiration? I think that's very fair. I mean, you've got the stuff there, but you don't have the DNA. So hopefully in 10 or 20 years there'll be some new technology where they can scan DNA without destroying the material, and they'll be able to figure it out. There is. That's the next step. They're going to go through and apply environmental DNA techniques to hope to the soil to hopefully capture enough of these early humans somewhere in that collection to get a better picture. They have bones. I wish they would just try just for this. Just make an exception. Mouse, let them do this one thing to try to see. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Environmental DNA, I understand it for doing here and now kind of assessments, but seriously, to make sure that you are getting the DNA of a long, extinct hominid that may... He's very undisturbed soil. Very undisturbed soil. These would be current humans, but from 70s. Right, but then how do you know, like, honestly, I really want to talk to these people about how they're going to keep it clean. How do they keep their human DNA out of the mix so that they absolutely know there's no contamination. Right. How is not every person who's been in that site since then now contaminated the environmental DNA? How many people have walked into and out of this beautiful cave because it's a gorgeous cave? I want to live there. So, I think there might be... I mean, I don't know exactly the techniques that they use. I think everyone who's working in this needs to have their DNA sequence so they can be compared to these. But we were talking about the proteomics. Just in proteomics analysis, they were able to back engineer the individuals that they came from. So, there are enough unique signatures in tiny segments of DNA that will only have come from certain individuals. So, you know, and it is tying exceedingly small strings of information together, which, again, kind of an important task that AI can accomplish that humans have a harder time. As long as it's not hallucinating, but yes. There is an asterisk here as there are claims of older modern human remains found in China. However, whenever those have been investigated by researchers and scientists who are not from China, they turn out to be inaccurately dated, not human, or have genetic analysis that matches so well with current modern Chinese inhabitants of the region that it would have to come from a current modern Chinese inhabitant of the region to Blair's point. So, asterisk, not asterisk. That can happen. It does happen. And it has happened quite a bit. I think actually it was at Svante Pavo's first work in ancient Egyptian DNA, which was a PhD thesis project, turned out to be contaminated by researchers. Yes. And not. And he's gone on to do really amazing work, but I think he learned his lesson. Didn't go like, oh, I failed at science. I will now, no, instead he's made contributions to science. Let's fix the problem of contamination and let's move forward. It's a huge issue, especially when you're dealing with this kind of genetic human ancestry genetic data. You just have to make sure that it's not contaminated. I don't. I want the EDNA thing to work. Yeah. This would be a good guess. We should get somebody on here who can break down how come it works. Break it down. Break it down. Speaking of how things work, Blair, you want to talk about not bones, but rhino horns. Yes, rhino horns. And they are not just a species of rhino that is made out of carotene. They are sought after for many reasons. And because of that, every species of rhino currently on the planet is endangered. And so this is a study from University of Neuchâtel, which is in Switzerland. It's a French speaking area of Switzerland. They wanted to look at some of the impacts of black rhinos and white rhinos they were looking at. And there's been a variety of ways to try to protect them. The most common is that their armed guards, that their entire job is guarding a specific rhino or group of rhinos. But more recently, there's been an attempt to remove their horns so that poachers have no reason to kill them. Now, this is complicated because there's still a concern that if poachers track a rhino and find out that that rhino does not have a horn, there's still a chance that they might dispatch that rhino so they don't track that rhino twice, does not have a horn. However, that doesn't appear to have happened, even though that's kind of a concern for part of this process. Instead, they've actually seen a huge drop in poaching as a result of these programs. However, the University of Neuchâtel wanted to look at the other implications of removing these horns. Aside from the fact that it's really difficult to do, it puts humans and rhinos at risk, you have to tranquilize them, you have to replace them or you have to go back and remove them again every 18 to 24 months because again, they're made out of keratin. They're growing like nails and hair. Right, so it's not a permanent solution. Oh, I cut off your horn, you're good for life. So basically, they wanted to see are there other impacts on the rhinos from removing their horns? And unfortunately, yes. After loss of a horn, male rhinos reduced their range up to 80% of their territory. They were essentially more shy. And for females, the reduced range was even greater. So they didn't venture out as far. They also found that black rhinos in general were less social with one another when they did not have a horn. Instead of interacting, they would intentionally avoid one another. So it's like a teenager with a zit on their forehead. They're just like, I'm going to stay home until this clears up. You're going to a knife fight with a spoon basically. No, they're not even going to the knife fight. They are staying home. They're saying I'm not going to go to the knife fight because all I have is a spoon. The rhinos, the way they protect themselves from each other as well is with the horn. It's how they intimidate one another. They size each other up based on the size. So this is also going to impact mating selection. It's a huge impact. It makes a rhino a rhino. This is their whole ecology is based on having a horn. So now the question is, do you weigh the gain of poachers not poaching versus changing the species completely because you're going to change sexual selection and selective pressures and you're going to change the behavior of the species. Yeah. And this gets back to the real question of when it comes down to it, what is a species? What do we care about when we're talking about genetic diversity? And part of the rhino's behavior is to the males and the females to expand even though they do have herds, but they expand out so they can have increased possibility of interacting with other individuals from outside their genetic pool to increase diversity in the overall population. So you have these territories, the basic ecology 101. But in this case, so yeah, I think it's a very interesting question because what you're saying is that the horn removal is actually benefiting conservation from two angles that they're not being hunted because they have no horn and they're not leaving their territory. So they're not potentially going to be moving out into an unprotected unconserved area. Fair. Yes. Very fair. But I take your point of behavior and population changes and genetic bottlenecks. Yes, absolutely. So it's, you know, then also you have the question of the whole conversation that we had last week about when you have protected areas that can impact the behavior in it. Basically we can't have nice things because we kill them. That's what this is about. Don't tell the plants in my house. Yeah, really. If we could just stop killing the animals, that would be great. But there's a huge demand still for rhino horn globally. Yeah, I... Somebody needs to address that. That's the most ridiculous thing. That would be great. There needs to be a massive influx of funds and resources into specifically working with native populations in those areas. Not like cultural identity-based. Rich white people walking in and going, you shouldn't eat rhino horn, right? You need to like work with the actual local communities. Are these local communities that are doing this? It's probably more of like the rich parts of the culture. So it's a combination of things. There's definitely still local expectations for use of these things. The influx and requests for it is often yes, because of affluent, often white tourists moving into that space and wanting authentic rhino horn pills or something like that, right? So there still is Yes. It still is, as it often is, the wealthy elite who are paying whatever they want for things that are driving up prices for things. A few isolated communities using some rhino horn a couple thousand years ago didn't drive species to extinction. It's happening now because there's global trade, right? But still, if culturally there was less use of these things and less significance on it, it would be less sought after in the global market. Yeah. So there needs to be that conversation and there's been lots of cool research on identifying cultural resources of the animal when they're alive and promoting that and changing I think we had a whole story about snow leopards about this, right? Like changing the value of that animal so they're more valuable alive than they are for their resources. Yeah. And so that kind of shifts cultural ideals around that animal and can change the way management works. But it's so hard. It's so hard. And it's definitely not the thing that, yeah, you can't have western elite quote-unquote scientists coming in and telling locals how to live their lives and what to do. It needs to be from within. It needs to be a community led conversation and it needs to be something that changes from the bottom up, not the top down. And I mean maybe or from both sides, but there needs to be there needs to be pressure for sure. People are so weird. Changing people's minds is so hard. Here's how I mean, I kind of agree with everything you just said. However however so my understanding has been that there's a traditional Chinese medicine market place for rhino horn. This is so then if you've got what you're calling western white people coming in and saying, hey, we're going to throw resources at protecting this rhino. You're talking about maybe an argument between two It depends. They're very wealthy nations. They're Asian rhinos. So that's part of why this happens. Is that there is an expectation that that rhino horn it does come from there is my point. So then there's a global marketplace, but it's based in this interaction that's thousands of years old because there are rhinos in Asia in China in Asia. Well, okay. Well, that's okay. Yes, but it's much closer than saying that Chinese markets are buying from Africa. That's not how this started. Okay. Okay. It's more complicated than that. And this is one of those places too where you would think the upside of having an authoritarian government would be you could just outlaw a thing with repercussions and it would happen. Yeah, but not so much because it's still cultural. And so it's you're dealing with cultural beliefs and like Blair said there are people who move into a place or even who are from elsewhere who go quote unquote ancient Asian medicine, ancient Chinese medicine, ancient Asian Indonesian medicine, ancient African medicine, whatever your cancer or cure this or whatever bed or what I have though it is just all the money. Yes, and I will give you all my money and so then there's the market and there's all you know beyond just the specifically cultural market it goes beyond that as well and there's money involved and so where there's money there is a market but it's cultural overall and so you have to get past those cultural beliefs that you're taking away something from people that would help them. Regardless, we're not going to solve this tonight but what we have found out is that some of the current mitigation methods that just try to put barriers in between poachers and rhinos are more complicated than previously thought. Yeah, I got to think that through. Complications Well, okay speaking of like evolutionary complications, where the heck did eukaryotes come from? Wait. That ain't another cell. Yeah, okay so it's like symbiosis so you have prokaryotes which are the one celled organisms suddenly in history they're like we're going to be multicellular of us in us and that happened and now we're here but how did we get here? We don't really know and so researchers are trying to trace our evolutionary down to that root, that microbial root of the linkage between the single celled organism and our multicellular ancestors. Again, published in Nature this is I you'd think I just read Nature but again published in Nature this week researchers at the University of Texas Austin in collaboration with a bunch of other universities among which are the wagon and the wagon and the university and the Netherlands the wagon and the that one that one my peoples anyway the researchers have been delving into the microbial world of archaea bacteria these single celled organisms that aren't just microbes they are extremophiles they are known to have evolved in the hot vents at the bottom of the sea they're known to be evolving around volcanoes in acidic pools there has been a lot of work in trying to figure out what's up with the archaea because they're like their own group of bacteria and so the researchers many researchers have been for years dredging the bottom of the oceans taking samples and trying to get genetic samples archaea samples to be able to bring back to the lab and grow in the lab and to date only two species of archaea have been able to they've only been able to grow two species of archaea in the lab so that limits the way that researchers are able to understand how archaea linked to everything else and so this new study researchers instead of actually growing them in the lab they did one of those genomic samples where they took a bunch of samples from a lot of places under the ocean and got over 50 undescribed genomes and specifically these archaea genomes are of what are called the as guardians they are a specific what is that yeah so so once upon a time researchers decided that they were going to have fun with naming extremophiles and they're like wouldn't it be really cool if we named them after Norse gods hey so there's an entire family of these archaeans which are as guardians and they've been describing these as guardians that they've been finding in volcanic vents and hot smokers and other things from the bottom of the ocean for a while now but they haven't really found that evidence that connects as not the as guardians but the archaea generally to the rest of eukaryotic life although it seems like there's been this hint there and so a bunch of researchers thought there were a group of the low-key as guardians of course that may have had molecular and cellular mechanisms that could have led to eukaryotic mechanisms but this particular study they were able to get over 50 different genetic signatures from their genetic samples and what they have determined is that nope low-key was not the lead god in determining eukaryotes in fact they have been able to isolate the probable initiation of eukaryotes multi-cellular organisms from what they call the Heimdall as guardians so they think that the last common ancestor of asgard archaea was probably thermophilic chimalotholithotroph and that the lineage from which eukaryotes evolved adapted to mesophilic conditions and acquired the genetic potential to support a heterotrophic lifestyle and so in their analysis they have determined that hodor, not from Game of Thrones but the hodorkiates hodorkialia are the group from which eukarya expanded because they share a number of ribosomal proteins in common and the mutations of those seem to have a lot of evolutionary lineage so bottom line there's a group of extremophile bacteria single cellular live at the bottom of the ocean, crazy environments archaebacteria one group of those are named after Norse gods they are the asgardians and one of those the hodorkeliates however you say it the hodorkeliates are the sister group of eukaryotes and that eukaryotes which are multicellular that's where we came from from extremophiles that makes sense we come from extremophiles I love this our planet was extreme yeah extreme and this may explain extreme sport popularity I don't know but I just love that people have been following this line of inquiry for a while that at one point in time we didn't know about this group of prokaryotes and then they showed up on the scene and everyone went oh we can't really get them to work in the lab we can't grow them they are extreme we only find them in these crazy places how do they relate to the rest of everything and for a while it was like they are a third group of life that is not just prokaryotes and eukaryotes it is prokaryotes, archaea and eukaryotes but now we are saying that they were the stepping zone between interesting I still think it bothers me that anytime we are looking at things that are current it's tough because oh well based on morphology based on how something is put together this came from that but we are all involved at the same length of time from the beginning there is changes that have taken place in everything there is changes that take place all over the place you look for those signatures that suggest relatedness yes but it's it's until you get the time machine the thing with the hodes which the scientists are calling them for short is that they instead of digesting methane and living in darkness they actually have a different metabolic pathway that is more in line with the way that the majority of eukaryotes metabolize energy and so that is what led even though this whole group of rk evolved like 2 billion years ago further back than 2 billion years ago it is this similarity in metabolism which is something that is very very specific and important to the survival of an organism how do you live how do you use energy what do you use carbon dioxide oxygen what is it that you use and everything falls from there the problem I have with it is 2 billion years of evolution that can of a multicellular life form that could have the convergent evolution aspects do not need to be broad but you know from what we have talked about in the past we also know about molecular clocks and we also know that there are specific genes and there are ways that mutations happen within genes that can be timed and so we have baseline rates for how mutations occur in different species and there are lots of ways that researchers are looking at this to be able to come to this determination that isn't necessarily clear as we are just looking at it on the face of it but when you understand the methodology and I know you have been looking and you have taken classes in this stuff I don't know anything about what do you call it extremo archaeology or whatever you are talking about there I don't know I don't know if they do horizontal gene transfer for example all of that stuff is probably still going to do that kind of thing if that's still there that's why even looking at bacteria and trying to say what bacteria what bacteria you can kind of create these big groupings but gosh as soon as something can just swap DNA with something else your whole biological molecular clock thing your whole it makes it very difficult to really say anything for certain going back a billion years I think that's fair enough to say that and yeah we do our best we don't have a time machine at a certain point if you want to try to figure out what happened this is this is the morphology of the modern age and I just I know that there are also a lot of versions of theory on this a lot of phylogenetic evolutionary conclusions that were drawn with animals were wrong a lot of them were right yeah you just start somewhere is it oh of course I'm just throwing in a little head scratch not because I'm trying to say that this is in any way not the correct or best theory that is possible but there's always questions I just have a lot of questions because I don't understand how you can say anything definitive about that long I think the it looks like and we hypothesize that is implied in this case yes absolutely billions of years speaking of billions of years well not billions of years how about hundreds of thousands of years tell me about Lucy Justin 3 million 3.2 million years ago how long ago he's old millions of years ago well she was only she was found in the 70s though if you were born in the 70s and you might feel like it's been millions of years I've got to find my story here this is a Cambridge University researcher she has digitally reconstructed the soft tissue of Lucy the Australopithecus afarensis who is actually named after the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds after she was discovered in Ethiopia in the mid 70s Lucy is one of the most complete examples of an Australopithecus skeleton have recovered about 40% of the bones in that find this is an early species of human hominin that lived in East Africa over 3 million years ago right so shorter than us just like face and smaller brain but able to walk on two legs and real quick this is I just wanted to point out ape-like face that is in the press release I don't believe it's in the paper but is in the press release of the story this is a nonsense term I think because I just want to point out that there are around 20 species of apes on the planet including humans with global population of apes is about 8.5 billion with 8 billion of them being humans so ape-like mostly means human like current modern human that is the most that's definitely one of those terms where they put humans to the side as not an animal humans are over here animals are over here so it's yes I find that very common that people forget that we are I think Lucy is a dead ringer for Christy Brinkley come on they also almost always when they say ape-like mean chimpanzee yes almost always and there's less than another 19 species of apes that have different morphologies anyway press release goes on some have argued that she moved around in a crouching waddle similar to chimpanzees our common ancestor when they walked on two legs stop the pull the record up again so just this is again this is the press release whoever's writing the press release at Cambridge University this is not the paper there is no chimpanzee ancestor of humans nor of Osteropithecus chimpanzees or has evolved as current modern humans share a common ancestor share a common ancestor who chimpanzees are probably a lot less like than current modern humans in that the whole knuckle walking aspect of chimpanzees gorillas and some extinct apes is something they evolved and the upright walking without knuckle dragging likely came from having been arboreal and then being bipedal on the ground as well bipedal in trees before being bipedal on the ground but this story is about how Lucy stood and so that's I feel like usually they always talk about where the spine attaches to the skull when it comes to this sort of thing is that what this was about? no actually they went the other way this is working focused on the legs so what they did is they reconstructed the legs the leg muscles and the hip muscles the researchers kind of put those in but I just wanted to point out the chimpanzee thing that is the cartoon of evolution that everybody needs to get rid of in their head that is not the thing and I'm going to say that looking at some of these figures from the study in the Royal Society Open Access Journal it looks like people legs like they're models this is like I'm like okay how different is that from anyone else right and so there is a little bit of uncertainty in this because you're placing a whole bunch of muscles in places without having any of the soft tissue as an example but you know where they connect because you have all those bumps and divots where are the ligaments and tendons where everything would connect to the bones to an extent so they did use a human form basis for reconstructing the musculature if a chimpanzee form had been selected as the basis reconstruction it might have been a little bit different because it would have been using chimpanzee muscles and trying to get them to fit in as an example however there are more similarities with human than there are there's more dissimilarities with the chimpanzee and it would have pushed it to a more human musculature in the end anyway because one of the very conserved aspects is the way that the vertebrae muscles the spinal muscles surrounding the vertebrae are going to connect and so how these connect along with I think 36 muscles in each leg what it did is it basically ended up creating a reconstruction that showed that Lucy could stand straight erect and lock knees just like a current modern human Lucy's knee extensor muscles and the leverage they would allow confirm the ability to straighten knee joints just as much as a current modern human and this has actually been adding up to there's been other side research and other ancient ape finds and the like that has been pointing to the direction of bipedalism is not being something that we developed once we decided to start exploring beyond trees but it's something that developed in the trees in and out of material or a combination of anyway but this is the first time that this has been shown in Lucy that Lucy I am jealous of Lucy's gluteus Lucy had so Lucy's not yeah Lucy's got bigger muscles bigger leg muscles in a lot of ways and was also if you look into the upper body it would have been more able to climb in trees stronger upper body or however you know the way the joints are set in there but yeah so back to my previous kind of comment about how they've always talked about whether a specific hominid or relative walked upright or not they always looked at the skull and the spine right so so did she just have a crazy hump did she walk like an old man with a walker like did her spine still connect to the back of her head because I thought that's why they were sure that she wasn't bipedal long arms still I think but yeah I think and because she had such a large pelvis they expected it to be angled back in a way that would have put her at a quadrupedal predominance it feels like yeah it feels like we have some conflicting information so like was she in between did she do a little both and also all of the fossils that we've looked at where we've only looked at skull spine connection location and angle does that mean now that you have to look also at the legs sounds like yes part of the problem is of course having the complete fossils which this is the most complete and it's 40% and it's so this was actually all this research that we're looking at here is generated from they took all of the scannings and 3D renderings of Lucy and put it online in an open access resource and so this yeah this Cambridge University researcher basically downloaded it and started applying the muscles in the right locations with the expertise and I think that I think the big assumption historically is that humans are related to chimpanzees like you brought up in the very beginning there which we need to get out of our heads and we're related we're still related but we're an ancestor but they're our ancestor and if you start from the assumption that chimpanzees are our ancestor you are incorrectly attributing certain body morphology you're incorrectly attributing behaviors and all sorts of stuff and so for decades we've probably been looking at Lucy all wrong for 50 years she's like what I was alive for like 3 billion come on I mean million a gazillion she's an old lady she doesn't have to put up with this stuff anymore she's like I don't care I have purple hair just be quiet you kids these days well like all of our misnomers that long ago we would have been not walking up right well that's not a thing it turns out like hominids walked up right that's just the thing hominids oh small brains couldn't do this that or the other small brains can do everything that modern humans can do and in fact what Blair's been explaining is doesn't even need to be a human brain to do a lot of human type and intelligence so we're having to reinterpret all the time all the time and now for kangaroos as well published in El Caringa an Australasian journal of paleontology researchers have reviewed the literature on kangaroos living kangaroos the ancient fossil evidence of kangaroos to determine did kangaroos always hop and the answer is no hopping was not necessarily an initial kangaroo trait and in fact according to their analysis it is something that really ancient kangaroos didn't do because ancient kangaroos were generally bigger than modern-day kangaroos kangaroos are huge yeah there were some real big ones there were some big carnivorous modern kangaroos are still big under 100 kilograms but they're not as big as some of the ancient ones but even the littler like modern-day kangaroos is from the wallabies to the kangaroos everyone's like I'm gonna hop hop hop all over the place but apparently according to their review this is just something that came with the smaller sizes that the evolution of using the tail as a fifth limb and also the the smaller sizing changed the way that the ankle bone the calcaneal heel was developed to support weight aha okay so this is interesting so my understanding of why kangaroos cannot walk and must hop is because they do not have a kneecap they're two leg bones overlap and so they can't extend out enough to straighten their leg to walk so this is really interesting this isn't even looking at the kneecap this is looking at the ankle not even the kneecap but I think that's an interesting point also but historically the ancient species didn't have that lever arm counter balance so their tail and they didn't so they didn't have that balance and the ankles were not set up to deal with those forces they had a thick Achilles tendon and so that wasn't really good for the elasticity that's necessary for the hop the jump the jump the jump the jump so it's a much stronger tendon but not for hopping and so I mean it's really interesting because now I'm envisioning these big you know fanged giant fanged kangaroos lumbering at me with a bipedal step as opposed to hopping and it's a little more terrifying but but yeah old big kangaroos were striders not hoppers their ankles didn't support it very interesting yeah I wanna see the fossil knees pan up I wanna see call these researchers you gotta look at that come on I'm sure it's part of it too but they only looked at the calcaneal heel and it's ability to support forces and weight that would be involved in hopping compared to modern day species yeah and then finally have you been to a bar that the bartender goes haha I'm gonna dump some peanuts in your beer when you order it and then the peanuts are like no I sink to the bottom and then I rise to the top and then I sink to the bottom and I rise to the top and the peanuts are like doing this magic peanut dance in your beer no no okay roasted shelled peanuts put them in a beer they do a little dance in the shell out of the shell out of the shell the peanuts meet take the little peanut throw it in the glass peanuts gonna do a little peanut dance and it'll do what now a little peanut dance oh good this video I got a video for you you don't just for I would assume that has to do with the oil content nothing to do with the oil content okay and so that is this in a nutshell researchers decided they wanted to explain why peanuts do their little peanut dance it was a Brazilian researcher Luis Pereira and so he knew he had the idea when he was first passing through Argentina's capital Buenos Aires to learn Spanish it was a bartender thing in the city to take peanuts pop them into beers and the beers do this thing and he was like what is going on so they have looked into the peanut dance and he's now working at Germany's Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich is it the bubbles? the carbonated bubbles that are rising ooh got it yes nucleation and so the peanuts maybe because of their oil content are more likely to get the little bubbles the nucleation sites within the carbonated beverage than the sides of the glass and so all the carbon dioxide wants to form bubbles hang on hang on hold on I'm removing YouTube what is that? it's a great interview I've never seen that video didn't mean to do that yeah so the bubbles all form on the peanuts and it depends on the angle of the bubble as it forms on the peanut and how it's able to loft the peanut up to the surface where the carbon dioxide is released and then the peanut can sink back down to form more nucleation sites and bubbles and so it goes up and down and up and down within the beer so would this work on a jelly bean? possibly yeah we should try it it's about the shape is basically the idea the shape of the weight I think is also going to be right they call it in their paper in the Royal Science Open Science Journal their beer gas peanut system and so they have not looked at jelly beans well that's what I want to know what makes the peanut special and what else can I do this with we should try I have a feeling a jelly bean is too dense probably but yeah what else would be equivalent what else can we put into the beer I really don't want a jelly bean in my beer though I think a more important question is do you need more than just the peanut to be able to do this trick yeah Kiki what what's the practicality of this research did they talk about what they could apply this to for war or exploration because it's always one of those it's not war it has to do with mining the earth for its resources option number three got it if right now we use air injected into a mixture where there's a mineral like iron and the air will attach to it and other minerals sink to the bottom so it can allow separation of different resources in a resource in a resource not manufacturing but isolation situation so you got to carbonate the water carbonate the water yeah Debbie's got it in the youtube chat room a coffee bean maybe that would work that would also be tastier than putting peanuts in beer I think especially if you had like a nice stout no no no you're missing it Blair tastier than a jelly bean in your beer okay sure sure I just I want to get the peanuts out of there no nuts in your beer coffee bean that will be great I could do that I could definitely do a coffee bean in there yeah see if it works it's oily it's still a bean yeah has lots of like similar weight issues also very similar curved coffee beans have an interesting little cut down the middle that could also provide some interesting dynamics so in this mineral extraction zone we're going to carbonate the water and skim the minerals off the top foam of this bubbling water with like a giant like net imagine magma it's not beer it's magma and we are learning how to carbonate the magma we're carbonating the magma we're learning how to get it oh no we're going to get what we need out of it but in the meantime I highly recommend let's figure out what else does the peanut dance in your beer this is my other question does it have to be beer no this is just something from a bartending thing so it could be anything carbonate I mean we know Mentos are incredible sources of nucleation and when you put them into Diet Coke suddenly you have this massive you know explosion almost of the carbonated gases that come out so this is just a different take on that different beverage different carbonation levels different source of nucleation sites but understanding the dynamics of how putting a substance that leads to nucleation into another substance that has its own viscosity and its own its own traits then suddenly we can start to look at things that could be used for you know mining minerals or doing things in a better different more efficient manner hopefully right interesting sure just an excuse for researchers to drink beer and eat peanuts as part of their experiment but you know what you guys have fun right there yes it'll be a great time this is This Week in Science thank you all for joining us for this first bit of the show we have a few more stories to go if you are enjoying the show please head over to twist.org and click on the Patreon link you can choose your level of support and we wonderfully wonderfully thank you for helping us maintain the show and keep going week after week year after year it's you who really help us get to where we are and we do this show for you we love talking to each other but we love seeing you in the chat rooms we love getting your emails we love that we get to be creating the show because you're here thank you for your support we can't do this without you oh and by the way if you go to the Zazzle link you can get a mug like this one that I'm drinking coffee out of at 9.30 at night I'm not sleeping am I nope nope not going to sleep that's not coffee I don't believe you it's coffee okay swear it's coffee it's definitely your funeral alright coming on back this is this week in science it's time for Blair's Animal Corner oh wait with Blair what you got Blair oh my goodness well I'm gonna start with a fruit fly funeral actually not a funeral just you know fruit fly that sees another fruit fly die which I imagine how many of you know which I imagine happens quite often I hate to try to kill them in my kitchen this is from University of Michigan they wanted to look at the link between death perception and reduced aging in flies not depth perception death perception which is something that is studied it is how animals respond both in behavior but also internally how their body physically responds to witnessing death and yes this is a thing that is studied well we've like crows corvids have funerals elephants have funerals right so there's the behavioral side which is do they recognize the death and do they act a certain way about it this study is actually about what happens in the fruit flies body as a result of witnessing death they found in previous experiments that perceptual experiences can affect aging how that happens is still a mystery but so previously University of Michigan reported that when fruit flies see other dead fruit flies they experience advanced aging and they even were able to drill down and see that this effect depends on a type of serotonin receptor so there's something happening in their brain as a result of seeing death that makes them age faster no why wouldn't it be like oh there's death I want to live they why so if you're looking for that I don't have it for you I really hope science figures this out soon because I spent way too long trying to figure out what other species links there are between death perception and aging and I couldn't find anything seems like historically they've really only seen this in flies so far but this is something that they want to kind of drill down to the mechanics of and then see what's happening in other species as well so what's happening is they found out in this new study a specific group of brain cells in the fly called R2 and R4 neurons are activated when they encounter other dead flies and that specific increased activity leads to rapid aging they figured this out through fluorescent tagging and what's even more specific to this is that they silenced ring neurons in the region to see that R2 and R4 were having this impact and when they were artificially activated lifespans decreased even when they didn't see death so R2 and R4 are causing this as a result of seeing death they're confident about that because they took the death out of the equation just turned these guys on they aged faster it went straight to the molecular signaling and it still happens yeah exactly so why I don't know evolutionarily why would this happen I don't know is it olfactory is it only vision what is it that's making these neurons go we need to find out but even more specifically the researchers think that because they found out what's going on in these brains they could reverse engineer it to turn them off to lead to targeted drug therapies potentially even in humans to slow aging what so if you figure out what's speeding it up reverse engineer that turn it off no wait what can you slow down aging so but do they know these things affect aging in humans no so this is that deal 20 studies from now but still it is but still like if we were to extrapolate yeah this and say it applies to humans what it would then mean is that we need a lot less violence on television well so that's one of the things one of the very first things I thought of of course because he lives in my house is my significant other sees death a fair amount is that impacting his aging but what about you going to a graveyard or visiting your grandparents look if you're seeing dead people at a graveyard that graveyard has been constructed very poorly well how about open caskets there's all of those things right like I don't I think it's very we're not fruit flies that's all we're not fruit flies we can reason through things very differently right so there it's a lot more than just oh there's something dead over there right there's there's more going on in our brains I think there is less expectation from these researchers that they could extrapolate the impact of death perception to humans and more expectation that they could extrapolate what's going on in the brain related to aging to humans however I still want both I want more research on death perception in other animals specifically leading up to birds and mammals I want to figure out what's going on there because also there's a fascination with death like you were talking about Kiki like crows and elephants both are very fixated on it when it happens and perform rituals related to it and all these things so is that being counterproductive because there's an impact from seeing death like calling more friends over to see that death is that actually observing that death hurting the pop that can't be true because then evolutionarily they wouldn't do that anymore so the idea with crows is that they have their crow funerals because what's happening is they are identifying a threat to other crows look here a crow died be aware and don't die also yeah exactly so yes I was expecting the opposite from the study when I read the headline I was expecting that aging decreased when they saw dead flies because of that learning from what happened but also exactly what you're talking about like oh hey less competition time to really live it up but maybe that's it also is that they saw death they saw other dead flies and those neurons got stimulated and they were neurons that didn't just lead to death but increase their metabolism they worked harder to reproduce faster and that wasn't something that the researchers measured yes I love that okay that needs to be looked at yeah Kiki that was a great answer and it wasn't just the death it's the metabolism gets sped up and it's like you need to go do the life thing now yes there's an urgency death is on it's a midlife crisis you see death and you're like yeah take care of it wow interesting I love that well I'm going to be keeping my eyes peeled for more death perception in science news in coming years bring us your depth perception of the death perception last for the animal corner I wanted to talk about sand it's coarse it gets everywhere and in the case of sand and microplastics they get hot this is from Florida State University and they wanted to look at what concentrations of microplastics do to the temperature of sand this is something that hasn't really been looked at before and how the presence of microplastics affects the thermal profile of sand why do we care aside from just hurting our feet when we go to the beach well let's talk about sea turtles sea turtles they lay their eggs in the sand and as we have discussed many times on this show the sex of the babies are not dependent on genetics like in humans an X or Y from mom from dad you always get an X from mom but an X or Y from dad right instead it is the temperature cooler babies are male and so usually pre-climate change you'd have this nice gradient in your nest where you'd get about 50-50 coming out of the nest in the end because there's certain areas closer to the top that are warmer lower down they're cooler towards the center they're warmer towards the outside they're cooler and it kind of creates this really nice gradient because of climate change seeing an increase in female turtles that causes a problem with sex ratios so finding a male harder to have babies impacts the general population but what they found by mixing sand from beaches in Florida and then mixing it with black or white microplastics is that the microplastics themselves also impact the temperature of the sand so concentrations are 5% to 30% they recorded samples temperatures July through September outside by varying digital thermometers at the same depth at which longer heads of turtles typically lay eggs samples with higher microplastic concentrations had greater increases in temperature so those plastics are really holding on to the heat samples containing 30% specifically of the black microplastic pieces had the highest mean difference that totally makes sense those samples were 0.58 degrees celsius warmer that is pretty substantial it's fascinating to me I mean I know that there are like the glass sand beaches where it's obvious that glass has been thrown out of ships and other places and been ground down to sand and we know that sand itself is silica but the fact that the plastic is holding on to heat that much more yes and so it's 30% though the kind of asterisk here that's a crazy concentration of microplastics 30% a third right so for every sand particles there's one microplastic that's crazy that's about 9.8 million pieces per cubic meter that has what's the normal that's found on beaches yes so current research found the highest reported concentrations collected from beaches is about 1.8 million pieces per cubic meter so about and what is that an eighth of that right so it's not no that's not an eighth that's a fourth math it's like it's actually it's closer to a fifth anyway it's about a fifth but there hasn't been a lot of research on microplastic concentrations in sand so we don't know what it actually is worldwide also is going up so recognizing that it's that you can get there still helps to kind of recognize the urgency of this issue and so you know keeping in mind nesting grounds are accumulating eggs are around 29 degrees Celsius below male above female so smaller concentrations of plastic it might not create a half a degree Celsius change but it would still create a change and that change could be enough especially in combination with climate change to push the sex ratio even further in the wrong direction so it's you know not great news no I mean if you've ever tried to walk across a hot sand beach in the afternoon barefoot you know what kind of temperatures you're dealing with and if not people sea turtles and birds and others are bearing their young in that sand then that's going to have major impacts or they're going to move other places if they can in time and keep in mind this is just another way that plastics are messing with animals we talk all the time about ingesting bioaccumulation, increased cancer risk all these sorts of things changing the temperature of the environment that's just something else we haven't really thought about I'm going to keep that tagline at ease there not great news it's a wonderful way to start a lot of these stories not great not great yeah but the I mean one good side of it is that if it's that hot then bacteria probably can't live in the sand so there's fewer bacterial infections possible might also impact the microbiome of turtles coming out of the shell though so that's I don't know about that well and I would just if you're talking about the surface having that increased temperature maybe if you're talking about a little bit further down where temperatures normally would be cooler it might actually increase microbial activity if it's getting them into a a better temperature range more comfortable interesting yeah really interesting point generally though the plastic in the beach which is the small particles not good let's just can we stop putting the plastics in the ocean last plastic would be great that'd be great thank you for the animal corner Blair Justin where are you going to take us now I'm going to take us directly to not great news there's something I didn't consider didn't know to consider wish I hadn't learned about and it actually fits very much with the story you were just you're talking about there Blair turns out about 25% of global carbon emissions are captured by forests grasslands and vegetation in general which is good news during photosynthesis plants store carbon in their cell walls as well as in the soil because of this soils tend to contain twice as much carbon as the atmosphere does deeper subsoils more than 8 inches account for roughly half of the soil carbon which is it means there's quite a lot there but there's also quite a bit right on top scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Berkeley Lab and University of Zurich have revealed that the organic compounds that are present in carbon sequestration in deep soil are more vulnerable to decomposition during global warming this is Margaret Torn a senior scientist at Berkeley Lab earth environmental sciences area and the senior author of the study shows that climate change will affect all aspects of soil carbon and nutrient cycling it also shows that in terms of carbon sequestration there's no silver bullet if we want soil to sustain carbon sequestration in a warming world we will need better soil management practices which means minimal disturbances of soil during forest management and agriculture so basically what they did is they went to the Sierras and this research forest it's the California's Bloget forest research station the foothills of the Sierras and they stuck one meter deep plots of soil with these heating rods that reduced excuse me that increased temperatures by four degrees Celsius very reminiscent of the story we just heard and that is also the realistic amount of warming projected by the end of the 21st century due to greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming they found that 4.5 years of warming at this temperature led to large changes in carbon stock at depths down to even 30 centimeters or 12 inches below the soil surface basically it was a 17% reduction in lignin which is a compound that plants used to form rigidity important for strong trees yes, very important nearly 30% loss in cutin and subarin, the waxy compounds on leaves and stems and roots that protect the plants from pathogens as well as significant losses of pyrogenic carbon so it had been assumed that pyrogenic carbon this is the carbon that's like after a wildfire and then it kind of goes down to the soil burnt stuff there was an idea that this was a very safe stable form of sequestered carbon but they found that in the deep soils that were heated they were broken down and that carbon was released you know it's with this thing you've been thinking like oh the permafrost and there's methane in the ice and that's going to get released and maybe there's carbon underneath the ice in places that's going to get released but the heating of just soil everywhere and knowing that like there's half of the atmospheric carbon is sitting in that top layer of soil oh that means things could be even worse than the bad news so not great news not really great news at all is one of the things that could counter this could cover so if you've got trees covering the soil it won't heat up as much yeah I was just going to say that I was going to say that if the trees are there they're providing shade and that shade is going to keep the soil below cooler and it's a complete difference from open areas and my final story of the day turns out smoking has been killing nonsmokers who knew people who've never smoked you just talking about second hand smoke or what no gosh no that's actually that's why that's a reason to smoke second hand smoke is so bad you want the first hand smoke because apparently that's better no this is a published in jaman network open researchers have looked into mortality estimations mortality charts that you can go and look up you know they tell you if you're this age your chances of dying and that sort of thing turns out those even this is one that's on the national cancer institute website called know your chances they don't take into account smoking status in any of the data or any of the estimates nope really it's it's not that they're leaving smokers out smokers are included but they're doing a general population analysis so it's all people now it shouldn't be a big deal smokers make up what like 11 and a half percent of the population in the united states now down from over 50 percent in the 1940s so tremendous progress there however what they found was those that 11 and a half percent of smokers that are out there are waiting mortality estimates considerably for everyone else involved especially with smoking related diseases so they're just pulling down the medians is what you're saying so this is and this is not even just doing the analysis I'm about to talk about here isn't just on smoking related diseases this is all death risk average risk of all death over 10 years of any cause the authors give an example of a 60 year old white male with the general population average death risk of any cause over 10 years being 14.5 percent which is kind of high if you just looked at that number because of the considered death rate once you hit like 70 years old or something is somewhere around 8 percent a year something in that ballpark so 14.5 seems kind of high it says that if an individual were a lifelong non smoker adjusted risk getting the smokers out of there and the former smokers the adjusted risk goes down from 14.5 percent to 9.7 percent that's significant a former smoker somebody who's quit smoking for more than two years goes down still to 13.2 percent which means those folks those folks who are who are smoking are waiting everybody else up so what is it if you were just a smoker 60 year old white male smoker it's a 10 year risk death the 70 year old is a yearly the risk jumps to 27.3 percent over 10 years nearly twice the general population average almost three times the risk for another smoker so anyway also if you take the smokers out of the equation this is okay so for lifelong non-smoking women the 10 year risk of breast cancer was slightly above all of your causes for women who smoked lung cancer and coronary heart disease took the lead as the cause so breast cancer isn't even their most the high risk category 30 to 35 anyway avoiding mortality is hard to believe it is you can't avoid mortality actually everybody both of you and everybody listening right now has avoided mortality every day of their life yes but I mean eventually the mortality is coming it's just it is the birth death mortality is coming at this point you can look at your days and go yay I survived today the thing that I think this study is pointing out is that it's not the thing at the end that gets you what it is it isn't it's the other people it's no it's the it's all the things that came before that add up makes you more likely to get got it's what they call comorbidities right comorbidities though so that's why if you look at the mortality statistics everybody should be most people 85 what is it 88.5% of people should be doing better than the estimates it's just that 11.5% that's bringing it down for everyone just you know don't drink don't smoke what you gonna do don't drink don't smoke don't do risky things just take bed rot we should all be bed rotting no that's bad for you also no it's not you wanna bed rot just do the bed rot that's fine do it whatever that's a new term for what I believe is called depression it's basically just hanging out in bed under your blanket it's you know John Lennon and Yoko Ono for a while well that was different though because they like brought in newspapers and stuff that was you know and now we bring in laptops and our little devices and watch our Teen Wolf series in bed wrapped by a blanket yeah that's bad for you it's bad for you you need to move around bed sores are bad oh bed sores are terrible yeah that I can agree with that one okay let's move on to a few brainy things we're gonna make you happy and smart before you go home maybe give Blair some nightmare juice okay last few stories here we love talking about the supportive nature of microglial cells to the neurons in our brains once upon a time it was like neurons they're all that brain needs they're everything that make us do all the things and there's nothing else important microglia what is that that's just packing material like those styrofoam tubes or whatever yeah oh not just tubes but you said tubes so now I have to follow up on this which is that researchers studying University of Heidelberg have discovered what and they discovered this years ago but tunneling nanotubes microglia connect to your neurons not just by wrapping around them in a nice hug but they actually have like tubes that go like I don't know you know like those sky pathways those sky between skyscrapers where you're like I'm in one skyscraper on one side of the street and then I'm going to walk across this tube to a skyscraper on the other side of the street the microglia do this with our neurons once upon a time it was this idea that our neurons are just like neurons cahony cahol cahol Santiago Ramoni cahol and Golgi had these different ideas about how the brain was put together and it was like oh no you know finally we discovered it's just like synapses and they never really connect with each other they just kind of barely touch and they have synapses and that's this thing right and that's what we've been talking about but now we know there are tubes there are little nanotunnels in our brain between the microglia and the neurons why are they there and so these researchers were like we think nanotubes are there to help remove waste from the neurons that this is the garbage conveyor belt that these microglia have these extensions that are like needles into the neurons that then pull stuff out that stuff can be transported along nobody had any research supporting this or denying this and so these researchers have just published their study in a journal cell death and disease and their most recent study yeah cell death and disease and they have really uncovered this protective role for microglia and the research that they did they showed that the the glia with these nanotubes first they took neurons and microglia and they showed that they could put them together in a petri dish and they would grow together and that these nanotubules were there and they were nice little nanotubules and then they were like okay so what do cells like to get rid of how about alpha synnuclein which is one of those nasty proteins that get gums up the works and causes Alzheimer's so they were like okay we're going to make the neurons with alpha synnuclein and then add the microglial cells and see what happens and they showed that all of the alpha synnuclein synuclein went from the neurons down those nanotubules into the microglia and they did it the other way as well they they grew the microglia with the alpha synnuclein and then added the neurons to see if it pushed just was like a back and forth kind of thing and it wasn't the alpha synnuclein preferentially was taken from the neurons into the microglia down these microtubules or nanotubules so is there any suggestion that this the Alzheimer's is then a microglial needle tube and if problem yes and so there has been research and they also show that there were that sick neurons that the microglia would send mitochondria down the nanotubules to the sick neurons because mitochondria are effective in in helping the metabolism of a neuron so could fix it up and so yes number of experiments that they did and this also falls in line with a whole bunch of research that suggests that a lot of neurodegenerative disease has to do with this kind of waste management problem which would be the microglia could be something related to proteins or signaling mechanisms that are involved in that transport process down the tubules whether the nanotubules get formed in the first place whether they're broken you know what happens to upkeep those tubules or not and so this is a whole new area for researchers to look into and ask a whole bunch of questions because we have seen that microglia do seem to be implicated in a lot of neurodegenerative diseases this waste management problem is an issue mitochondria also an issue so how does this all play together and this is like a whole new structural issue that now can be studied yeah it's always amazing when there's a something like this where here's this very key important aspect of a lot of diseases that you've been studying for the last 20-30 years that you were missing in all of that research which a lot of work and smart people and effort has gone in already but you wouldn't be where you are right now without all that previous research absolutely maybe not all of it but yeah we can say that but that missing component then ties together probably a bunch of research and we're scratching ahead we don't know why we see this effect or that effect or how this is involved and now suddenly there's this key component yeah how has microglia been involved in waste management how does that work oh well it's a series of tubes oh my gosh you have tunnels in your brain nano tunnels in your brain they're very important this next study is related to our diets and aging and Blair has hopped off for just a second here but researchers publishing in science this last week have published a study called torine deficiency as a driver of aging researchers have shown over the years that torine is one of those semi-essential amino acids that declines with age so in our blood in our urine the amounts of it decline over time as we age yet we know during development torine is very important for vision for neuro neuro development for musculature development all sorts of stuff but then it starts to decline and so researchers in this paper they showed that supplementation in mice with torine slowed a lot of the markers of aging like DNA damage telomerase deficiency impaired mitochondrial function cellular senescence we know that humans have a loss of torine as we get older and so the idea is that knowing that in mice we also look at it in monkeys that in these other organisms that torine seems to benefit as you get older even though it's naturally declining could we supplement as we get older and that would that be beneficial it was beneficial to their study animals so I just went online and found and ordered a whole bunch of torine supplements of different description five hour energy I don't know try not to do the stuff that's got the sugar and the other things that are bad for you but supplement so it's all unregulated so I have no idea what I'm actually buying or what I'm going to tell you but I just ordered a bunch so that I can be younger so torine is also found in food so you can get food that is in shellfish it is in meat very very high levels of torine in organ meat like liver lots of torine in eggs but cysteine is one of the precursors of torine so there are lots of foods that vegetarians can eat that aren't necessarily rich in torine but they are rich in the precursors to torine so perhaps eating some of these other foods that are precursor rich can lead you to also increasing your torine levels did you say eggs? eggs is on the list though that's so easy eggs are so easy perfect food eggs is easy there are many foods out there if you do some good research and figure it out take care of yourself people if your body is naturally declining let's give our bodies a little bit more super easy let's face it we don't have the torine we used to have no I don't but we might have new robots for space and Blair again for some reason I really like ending the show with stories that are going to give Blair some kind of nightmare juice yay I want to give you good advice for aging because I want to help you great as you grow as a human and grow other humans but then I also like to you know, terrify you a little bit kind of balance it so researchers from EPFL have published in Nature Machine Intelligence their new modular robot which is based on inspiration from polygon meshing and swarm behavior I don't like the sound of that swarm behaviors always so it's almost like dehumanizing robots in a way that's like turning robots into everyone's favorite thing wasp anthropomorphizing this robot is not very anthropomorphic at all this is a polygonic triangle like a triangular ruba it is like a little triangular ruba it's called mori and mori can connect with other mori units to be able to make a big mori unit and so that's the swarm behavior is that for whatever need that may occur a bunch of these little triangular rumbas can connect together and be like we're a Voltron you know and suddenly they can yes and they can maneuver and work as a whole or they can work as individuals so that is part of the interesting aspect of the swarm research that's occurred over the years related to robotics so in its modular nature they've been able to show that the modules can come together in such a way to create more complex robots like a quadrupedal robot that could walk around on each of the little triangle rumbas could become one of those things is a leg and they could walk around they also have ideas that this potentially could be used in like a space station or the international space station even though that'll be probably the commission by the time these robots are ready but the idea is that because of the ways that they can pretty much connect in any configuration that they could be used for multiple uses that these robots could create satellite sheets that they could be used for maneuver by astronauts in space for maneuvering objects around they could be used on the outside of a space station they would be small and easy to transport and their modularity would allow them that kind of efficiency they're not just a one-use robot they wouldn't be able to take over some of the uses that very specialized robots would be good at but in the end more you would be modular and maneuverable and usable for all sorts of things just for the astronauts need what they are they are lying to you this is a macro version of something like continually scale down until you have what is essentially interconnecting nanobots yes that act like a liquid and can form anything that's where this is going I don't doubt you actually that's bad like in theory I'm like yes that actually that would be great that would be super beneficial technology there's lots of cool things about that weaponization of that is bad but even nano it's not weaponization so it's everything it's two steps away from it and those two steps are very easy to do this is like the AI disclaimer I gave in the beginning right anything in the hands of science creates something really cool you take that same cool thing you put it in the hands of governments and it can be a thing that kills yes and you can put it in the hands of of a corporate environment and it's something that is used to gain leverage over other humans and take their resources from them so it just depends on who's using a technology not with the technology yes what if what if it's being used by Felix what would he do with it right now he's blown bubbles I saw he's blown bubbles he's taking all of his belongings and putting them on the balcony good he's moving he's moving outside to the balcony that's like a normal thing gravity is cool yeah anyway it's all lies they're not going to use these giant triangles on the space station they're going to turn this into nanotechnology so they can have like a fluidic I love you I love you no that's 100% what this is okay all right morey creators we know what you're up to now yeah you're not going to use those giant triangles no the researchers say these robots we had to rethink the way we understand robotics these robots can change their own shape attach to each other communicate and reconfigure to form functional and articulated structures so yeah they're going to be great it's very cool has the potential to be very cool I just yeah you just you know go ahead and go to sleep with that in your mind it's all right did we finish the show what we really need them to do is replace humans so humans don't have to go to space anymore or so that we don't mess up our own planet anymore but anyway I like being human I don't want to be taken over by AIs or robots unless they're in the right hands see this is the thing whose hands are the robots hands or humans hands obviously Justin means him what I mean is that we live on a planet that is half authoritarian government right we live in a place where they're malicious humans who are in control of resources like there's one level where like AI robot overlords really going to be worse than what we've already got or are we going to train them on what currently exists and model bad behavior and make things worse didn't you see the study that was out this last week AI being trained on AI or machine learning being trained on machine learning for all these chat GPT uses and how it's accelerating the decline of the intelligence of the chat of the that's great I love the idea it's just going to self-implode and we're going to have to start over we're going to start over it's going to be so good I actually did see an AI researcher mention that like this isn't going to go anywhere this is all going to implode and we're going to have to start over at square one like alright we'll see oh the future who are we to tell the future just don't hand those triangles AI please not yet what was the gravity falls triangle bill they're like modular bills that's not good we don't need a billion tiny bill ciphers no we do not alright we made it to the end of the show you did yes well everyone I want to say thank you for joining us for another episode everyone in the chat room thank you so much for chatting discord thank you for being in the discord with all your comments and chats you know if you're a patron then you can join our discord another reason to join our patreon but I do want to say thank you also to fada for help with social media and show notes for recording the show to gordon everyone who hangs out in the chat and make sure that everybody's being nice to everybody else and to all of our patreon sponsors thank you Craig Potts Marie Gertz, Teresa Smith, Richard Badge Kent Northcote, Rick Levin, George Corespierre Velazarb, John 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Steve DeBell Bob Calder, Marjorie Paul Disney David Simmerly, Patrick Pecoraro and Tony Steele Thank you so much for all of your support on Patreon And if you would like to support us on Patreon, head over to twist.org and click on that Patreon link and I'm just realizing that I forgot to bring Rachel for her help editing the show Yes, of course Rachel do us a favor cut that out, edit it and put it where it belongs Put it at the beginning of the show Thank you Put it right at the beginning of the show Where it all belong Yes In our next week's show We will be back broadcasting on Wednesday at 8pm Pacific Time and again Thursday 5pm Central European Time from our YouTube and Facebook channels and from twist.org Hey, do you want to listen to us as a podcast? Perhaps while you count how many microplastics are in the sand in your sandbox. Just 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've heard here today Most of the stories will be available on our website www.twist.org where you can read about, you can listen to past episodes there you can read up on show notes from past episodes and you can also sign up for a newsletter one day You can also contact us directly email Kiki at Kirsten at thisweekinScience.com Justin at twistmeaning at gmail.com or me Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org Just be sure to put twist T-W-I-S in the starting line or your email will be absorbed by a conglomeration of tiny triangle robots that will read it themselves but not deliver it back to us because they have not been trained to do so And you can hit us up in the meantime on Twitter where we might not respond because we might not be checking it anymore I'm not really sure My Twitter is broken so I go there and I check it sometimes and then I'm like just sad about humanity and I leave It's just an awful feed now It won't let me tweet So I'm giving up So use the emails that Blair was talking about because we love your feedback and we do want to cover subjects and topics you are interested in so if there's a haiku that comes during the night or a story that you think we've missed please let us know We'll be back here next week with science news And if you've learned anything from this show remember It's all in your head This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science It's the end of the world So I'm setting up a shop Got my banner unfurled It says the scientist is in I'm gonna sell my advice Show them how to stop the robot I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand And all is coming your way So everybody listen This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news That what I say may not represent your views but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan La la la la la la la la la la We've finished the show It was longer Super fun I had fun talking with you guys It was good We're missing one I know He's run off His child is awake There were sounds in the background I'm sure that he is needed Oh good Which is this week You must be happy Your studio is fixed I mean that in itself is very exciting Tech difficulty Yeah I know you had a loud Felix He's running around But it's a first day of school There were all sorts of like I gotta pack him a lunch I gotta pack me a lunch I gotta make sure that there's He looks presentable That I don't take him there And they're like what have you been doing With your child And I gotta look presentable What have you been doing with your parents This is just Daycare It's school here Wait Are those gulls Do you have birds? Oh there's tons of birds right out there I heard that There's tons of gulls in that We have tons of birds outside Denmark is Located in an inland sea What would you even call it I don't know It's surrounded by water There's seagulls everywhere And we're eight floors up So sometimes they like Hang out on the balcony When you're like get off Your bird nitrogen is just so annoying Blair I hope everything Is good for you Over the next week or so Wait hold on hold on hold on Before you go It's end of school here So you're having school Child's gonna be going places from here on Kai is probably gonna be here Being up late So just warning everybody moving forward So what do you say from here What happens now Good morning Justin Say good night Blair Good night Good night Good night everyone Thank you for joining us for another Episode full of Sciencey goodness We'll see you next Wednesday 8 p.m. Pacific time 5 a.m Central European time Tell Felix to have a great school day And Stay safe stay healthy Stay happy stay curious Be lucky Be lucky