 I'm waiting for the indication that they actually can see us before I start. Do we have to whisper this all the time or are we not going to talk to each other? Yes. You don't have to whisper. I have to whisper. You have to. Can you whisper? You're not whispering. I just want to know how to whisper. I don't think we can whisper. Okay. All right, everybody, we are good to go. So we are starting in three, two, this is Twist. This Week in Science, episode number 645, recorded on Wednesday, November 15th, 2017. Soonish or later, hey everyone, I am Dr. Kiki and tonight on This Week in Science we are going to fill your heads with rules, waves, and the future. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer, the future was yesterday. It happened while you were sleeping, for the future never sleeps. While you were cleaning the kitchen, brushing your teeth or reading in bed, the future happened and it happened in a consequential way. While you were busy working, the future happened and it changed the world you live in. While you were studying, the future changed how we look at the thing you were studying. While you were binge watching the latest episodic season release, while you were rooting for the home team, while you were a leader of Soda Deep into an epic quest, the future got serious. So serious that it happened and happened well ahead of schedule. And now nothing will ever be the same again for the future was yesterday. If you were listening to this show, you didn't miss a thing. Because when the future happens, it happens here first on Ant's Coming Up Next. And the good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there, welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We're back again to talk science. So much good stuff ahead. Things happened this week. We have new stories about pulsing pulsars, creeping climatia, and we have an interview with Dr. Kelly Wienersmith. She studies parasites and has written a book with her husband, Zach, about future technologies that's called Soonish. Justin, what do you have for us on the show tonight? I have a wine before time. Neolithic farmer-gatherers and wealth inequality boom and bust. Boom bust. All right. That sounds like it's out of sadness. Blair, what's in the animal corner? You see, that's what the wine story is for is temper that. I brought a whole bunch of feathered science and some buzzing bees. Oh, birds and the bees, huh? The birds and the bees. That sounds bad for the chorus, right? Okay, everyone, as we jump into the show, I would like to remind you that you can subscribe to Twists just about everywhere. We're on iTunes in the Google Play Podcast portal, Stitcher, Spreaker, tune in. You can find us on YouTube and Facebook searching for This Week in Science. You can also just visit twist.org. Also, if you go to twist.org, our calendars for next year are available. Blair's hand-drawn 2018 Blair's Animal Corner Twists calendars are available. So if you're interested, another reason you might want to head over to our website. But right now, I would love to introduce our guest for the evening. She's an adjunct faculty in the biosciences department at Rice University, where she studies parasites that manipulate the behavior of their hosts. That's like our favorite thing here on Twists. In addition to being a respected researcher, she co-hosts a podcast. She's another podcaster. Science is sort of. Yeah. It's one of the top 20 natural science podcasts, and she has spoken at Smithsonian magazines. The Future is here 2015. She's been featured in the Atlantic Science, Nature, National Geographic, BBC, The World Gizmodo, CBC's Quirks and Quirks, and now she's here on Twists. Thank you so much for joining us tonight, Kelly. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. It's fantastic. When I found out that you and your husband were writing a book and that it was about the future and technology and science, I was like, yes, come to us. And I was happy to come. Yes. Because, I mean, I like, so for those of you who are not aware, Kelly's husband, Zach Weiner-Smith, is a comic cartoon artist. He has a cartoon called The Sunday Morning Breakfast Cereal that- Saturday. Oh, Saturday. Sorry. Because that's when, yeah, it's the other day. Never mind. It's all good. Saturday. SMBC. And it's fabulous, and he's great. But I mean, really, I was very excited to be talking on our science podcast with the scientist of the couple. Thank you. It's usually, usually people are a little more excited about Zach, which I'm fine with. I'm glad to be here. Okay. So the book itself, soonish, 10 emerging technologies that'll improve or and or ruin everything. You've got a copy there too. Yeah. Yeah. You've got copies. What inspired you, what inspired the both of you to delve into writing this book? Well, so we both had full-time jobs of our own. So I was a Huxley Fellow at Race University and Zach, of course, has a Saturday morning breakfast area, which is a full-time job for him. And we were approached about writing a book together and we were like, well, what would be fun to work on that isn't exactly our work and would be essentially a fun third job that we could pick up and share together. And we just thought reading about 10 new technologies would be a lot of fun. Actually, it was 50 when we started, but then we decided that 50 would be too short and we wouldn't offer anything better than like a funny version of a Wikipedia article. So we decided to go with 10. And it was just 10 things we thought would be fun to read about for a month or two and then read about. All right. So the 50 things, winnowing it down to the 10, how did you eventually decide these are the topics that we're going to talk about? Well, so we're not claiming that these are like the 10 most important technologies people are working on. But so we had that list of 50 and some of them were, you know, we started doing the research and it was so early in the process that you couldn't tell if it was just a bunch of crackpots proposing something that would never pan out. So there was just some kind of crazy stuff in there. But then you also didn't want to pick a technology that was too far along because all that would be left would be details at that point and people would be maybe, we thought would be maybe a little less interested. So these are technologies that are like somewhere in the middle. People have been working on them for a while, but they're still probably a way off. And then there were just things that were interesting, but also the topics diverged enough that it wouldn't be like each chapter was sort of reiterating something you read before. So and also they just sounded like fun because we'd have to read about them each for one to two months. So it had to be something we wanted to read about that much. Yeah, you absolutely have to be like into the topic. Now, in the introduction, you've spoken about the future before the future and technology. These are things that you're interested in. But you're a bioscientist and a lot of topics in this book. I mean, you talk about space elevators, you talk about going to space in the first chapter. There's a lot of stuff that is not necessarily biology or bioscience related. So is there anything that you found like the most challenging just heart like I don't get this or I have to wrap my head around this and I'm having a hard time. Well, so my favorite chapters were the ones that did not have anything to do with what I study just because like I love biology. I love biosciences, but it was just really nice to get an excuse to read about space for a while, for example. So it was a little what was the hardest thing to understand? Trying to understand how CRISPR worked in a way that we could explain clearly was a little bit tough. So actually, I think the hardest part was translating what I felt like I already knew into something that would be easily understandable for a broad audience of people who weren't necessarily scientists. That was probably the hardest part. Fusion, fusion was tough. Yeah, let me break down fusion for you. So I mean, I'm reading through this book. It definitely is this is kind of introductory level for people. It's not you're not expecting people to have any. Are you were you expecting your audience to have any kind of prior knowledge of these things? No, so I think that we will have done our job if somebody who is smart, inquisitive, but knows nothing about science can pick up the book and follow what we had to say. So we were hoping this book would get picked up by people who were not scientists and engineers in addition to people who were scientists and engineers. Yeah, I mean, looking through this, OK, and I know it's it's something you've posted on previously, but it is a funny analogy. I'm a neuroscientist by training. And so I really did like the description in your chapters on brain imaging technology, these brain computer interfaces of the the future and how we're going to read the brain and talking about using EEG, the electroencephalography to read electrical activity on the inside of the brain and making the analogy of a ball of cats or a sphere of cats. Mm hmm. Can you can you read it? Can you kind of tell us how you got to the point of talking about neurons in the brain as a sphere of cats? Well, so that that that was actually Zach's brainchild, to be honest. But so the idea is that, you know, you've got all these neurons and they're talking to one another and they tend to talk in bunches. For reasons I don't think we completely understand, but please correct me if you know otherwise. And so so they tend to work in bunches and essentially like you get a lot of activity in one area or another area and it's hard to figure out where that came from. And part of why it's hard to figure out where it came from is because it's sort of like you have a whole sphere filled with cats and the cats have parties every once in a while. And so like in one part, there'll be a bunch of cats that start meowing all at once, but maybe there's a multiple parties going on and there's cats meowing somewhere else in the stadium and the cats are always sort of low level meowing in the background. So to try to like get out the noise of all of the cats that are background meowing and to try to hone in on the cat party that's happening in response to something you just had the patient think is very difficult. There's just a bunch of background noise and you need to figure out which cat party is the important one. And so EEG is essentially try to pick up on all of the meowing and then figure out and then there's different like algorithms that figure out which meowing was the meowing you were interested in. Justin, this is right up your alley. Your brain is a sphere of cats. We have at least one neuroscientist ask if he could like use that analogy in his lectures. And we were like, yes, absolutely. If it makes sense, go for it. So one of the things that leads into your parasitology research, what we talk about on the show with a lot is a toxoplasma gondii. And Justin is not a fan of cats because of toxoplasmosis. You know, I'm not a fan of outdoor cats because of toxoplasmosis. There you go. The fact that they're, you know, devastating for the local ecology, that too. Yeah, you know, local ecology, brain parasites, cysts, you know, change your behavior. Yeah. Like the one to punch there. Yeah, it's true. So from the manipulating, the brain manipulating or behavior manipulating parasites and that being your area of research, why, I'm wondering, I mean, I know you're going straight from research, but brain computer interfaces, are we taking inspiration from behavior modulating parasites at all? Should we be doing that? Well, so then to be honest, that was not a connection that I had made before this moment, but so one of the, for every technology we talk about, like what's holding the technology back and then we talk about how the technology could make life awesome, but we also try to give the bad side of things a fair shake. So we talk about how the technology could ruin everything and basically your listeners probably already know this, but brain computer interfaces are just devices that sort of read what's happening in your brain and then do something in response. And in the future, there's some people who are arguing that maybe at some point, your employers could keep track of what's going on in your brain and maybe if you're getting a little bit tired, they could like give you a little zap to wake you up, which maybe you'd want if you were like driving a truck across the country or, and to be honest, I think that all of this is so far away, it's ridiculous because we don't understand the brain nearly enough to do anything that complicated, but anyway. So you could also imagine that maybe if you're not in the right mood, you could have a brain computer interface that would tell your boss like, this person should be really energetic today, but they're probably not gonna be energetic. Maybe you should call them off work today or something. But anyway, so the idea that like somebody else could get access to how you feel and could maybe do something with that information seems unpleasant. And if we ever get to the point where we understand the brain well enough that you could manipulate the brain in response to stuff like that, like, oh, this employee should be more alert. We'll dump some chemicals in there to make them more alert. That could sort of be like manipulation, but that's a bit of a stretch. Yeah, I think. The one I think that seems most likely to me is what we've already seen with the internet, right? Which is you'll get sort of real life as you're walking around pop-up ads in your head, like little suggestions, like advertisements. And yeah, these advertisements will be based on your mood, your level of hunger, your level. It's like, you're a little tired and a little thirsty. How about a XYZ brand soda? Oh, look, there's way to purchase one right there from a vending machine. If you take 30 steps forward and two to the left. Like this is my fear, is that it'll just get co-opted by advertising and it will not, now you can't even browse without advertising, you can't watch it. Program without advertising, you can't do anything without some advertising element, which by the way, if you haven't looked into Blair's calendars that were really amazing. But that could be, that would infiltrate this brain-computer connection because that's how you would afford it initially is with these pop-ups, right? So I personally don't think this is a problem any of us will be dealing with in our lifetime, but maybe I'm underestimating neuroscience. But I think in our lifetime, we could actually have a problem with augmented reality doing that to us. So we have another chapter in the book on augmented reality where essentially, augmented reality is, for example, you put these glasses on and you're looking at the real world, but on top of the real world, virtual bits are overlaid. So maybe you're in your office and you see the books around you and then a T-Rex walks across your table. And that would be the augmented part. So rad. Which would be awesome, right? Awesome part. It would be awesome. And so virtual reality would be like, if you didn't see your books or anything, you were just transported to the Jurassic period or something and you didn't see anything real. But at some point, this virtual reality stuff could be like in our contact lenses, our glasses, and our phones. And it could be monitoring us also. So there was something we found in the precision medicine chapter where Andrew Reese and somebody else's name, I'm forgetting, found that you can analyze people's Twitter and Instagram accounts and figure out ahead of time, like are they becoming depressed? You can get all this information about them. And so you could like, your glasses could log into your Twitter account, say, oh, they're getting kind of bummed out and then say like, hey, have you thought about Ambien? Or like, what about a Zola? And you could start getting advertisements, like, you know, on your lenses, that where the information for that is actually like taken from your Facebook and Twitter feed. And then you could get targeted ads that like pop up on your glasses. And your glasses could also be like, oh, he's kind of sweating. We're a little bit moist. Let's suggest they go to Starbucks for some iced tea or something. And anyway. So basically we're already there. It's just that the interface is just sort of low res. Like we already... If it's in your brain it could be a little more subtle but I think that like it won't be that long before it's showing up in our glasses or on our contact lenses or something. Well, because we already have things like Fitbits and these monitors that we wear on our body, a lot of us, right? That monitor our sleep cycle and things like that. And they tell you to get up out of your chair and they tell you, you need more sleep and all this kind of stuff already. So we're well on our way. Absolutely. And one of the scary things about this book is that it does seem like in most of the future scenarios for these technologies, giving up even more privacy is important for making the technologies work. And it seems like maybe every year that goes by we all become much more comfortable about giving up some of our privacy. And it'll be interesting to see where that goes. Gosh, what's left at this point? I don't even. There's more. You can always give up more. Yeah, I like that. So does having written this book, like thinking about stories related to privacy with Google and Facebook and others, or even stories like this week there's a new planet, like 11 light years from Earth that is like the number four most likely to be habitable or potentially habitable at this point. Do stories like this that after writing this book and really thinking about these different technologies and kind of the influence on humanity and culture, does it make you think about this new stories that are coming out in a different light? Yeah, it does. And so I wouldn't say that after writing this I'm more pessimistic or anything. So we think of ourselves as like skeptical optimists. We wanna try to think about both sides but we're optimistic that humanity will do things well. Maybe that makes us foolish. But if anything, I think that it makes me think a little bit more carefully about the way things are being presented. So when we read popular press articles for a lot of these technologies and then we read the actual primary literature, the popular press articles were always like, oh, they solved this problem and now we're so close. But then you'd read the primary literature and the problem that was talked about in the popular press article was not the main thing that's holding the technology back. So like for space elevators, a problem is how do you beam energy up to this elevator that's gonna be going up to space? But the real problem is what you make the cable out of. So people will talk about advances in beaming energy up to solar panels and stuff. And that's awesome, that needs to get solved but it's not as hard a problem as what do you make a cable for a space elevator out of? And so I feel like I read article or popular press articles with a bit more of a skeptical eye because I don't know if they're always honest about what the major challenges are and how close we are to these technologies really working out. Yeah, I wondered too, I mean, a lot of times I've seen, I mean, we get press releases and we see, okay, this is the hook that the press release writer, the PIO from the university or the institution decided to take. And then you see all of the popular press articles just follow that direction as well. And so it's really that interesting question of is the reporter actually going from the primary literature or are they just following that kind of, this is an easy hook and people are gonna be interested and this is for the popular market anyway. So everyone will like it. And is it necessarily a bad thing that there's a narrative of science that's slightly disconjointed from the reality? I mean, what's consumable, right? Like the narrative, the storytelling portion of it is going to be more consumable. It's going to gain more interest. I think if you just deliver technical information, that's not really going to appease the audience or get garner an interest for science or what science is doing. So I think there is a little bit of need for that storytelling aspect of science. Sure, but it's how it's what you take from the art, what you take from what the actual problem is. Yeah, so I'm with you. I get why you want to write popular press articles that will be read by the general public. That's like the whole point of those articles and you want to get people excited about science. But I feel like at some point we're selling the public a false sale of bill of goods. So you tell them so many times that we've almost found a cure for cancer even though it's a very small incremental step in the right direction. And then the general public is like all these things that keep getting promised to me on the news are not happening. I still don't have a hoverboard. Yes, exactly. Where is my flying car? Yes, right. We use that as an example in the book flying cars in particular. And so I don't know to what extent we do damage to ourselves as like a community by having these articles out that kind of oversell stuff and then disappoint people when these technologies that they think are going to be like on their doorsteps in the next couple of months never show up because they're actually many years or decades away. Although to be fair, to be fair, and we're the same way, we've been in the Harvard many decades now we've been doing the show. We don't typically bring the next cancer cure story because they're all a new path into a look at which may possibly open a door to something. There is a lot of caveats even in those that research and those stories to the point where every once in a while they cure a form of cancer and we totally miss it. And I don't want to seem down on these technologies or technology in general. Part of the reason we were excited about writing this book is because humans are trying to solve some amazingly difficult problems and the solutions they're coming up with are just mind blowing and fantastic and we're really excited about them. But for each technology we wanted to pass our enthusiasm on but also make clear where the technology is and how it could also be horrible in ways that you maybe also might not know. We also might not see in the popular press articles or that like the scientists who you're talking to who does the technology might not wanna talk about because they'd rather focus on the positive. Yeah, I like the, there's a paragraph in the conclusion of your book where you say we did our best to hit the right blend of information and humor but our biggest fear in writing this book was that someone would call us inaccurate. And so I think that's, it is a popular science book. And so as such it is kind of part of the popular press but I think it's laudable that you have really worked to try and make it as accurate as possible. And you do tell everybody if they do find errors in the book the best way to come reach you and let you know. And I think we essentially try to trick people into our basements so we can lock them down there so they won't tell anyone but people have instead sent us emails. And some of the emails are scary in the title and then in the contents are less scary like you got X wrong in the title but in the body of the email we actually didn't get it wrong. There's just extra examples we didn't include. And I'm like, you give me a heart attack but really you just want me to know this extra stuff and that's great. I appreciate that you sent me this but please don't give me a heart attack. So anyway, you know, whatever it's all good. Do you find the public commentary more difficult than peer review for scientific publishing? Mm, no, I don't. And the reason I don't is because I used to do YouTube videos for SMBC theater and the public put some of the most horrible things I've ever read. It's terrible. Yes, just absolutely terrible horrible things about me and my friends and anyway. And so at that point I was like I don't care what you guys say. You're 50% monsters. But if somebody gives like a reasonable critique that was clearly thought through and I feel like there's some truth in it I take that to heart as much as a peer review comment. But I try not to read too many comments because you'll end up with some really horrible stuff that I just don't really want to read. To this day, my favorite critique of this show or specifically me on this show was saying how terrible I was for the show and they missed the old co-host who they absolutely loved. But it, of course, it had been me the whole time. It was the only good. So I was like, no, I really love my content but don't like me now. Okay, well I can take that both ways. That's fantastic advice. Yeah, at some point you need to one, have a thick skin and two, get really good at deciding what critiques you think are reasonable and which you do not. And you just need to filter. And I say that like I'm good at it and it just brushed off my shoulder or whatever and it's not actually that way but that's the kind of why I try to avoid the comments. Just general. So we haven't really talked about- I've built my brain. Good ones anyway. So we haven't really talked about your research. Can you give us that broad public overview of what you do? Tell us about your parasites. I'll tell you about my beloved parasites. So I basically just study parasites that manipulate the behavior of their host and so essentially they're changing host behavior in a way that's really bad for the host but really good for the parasite. And I shouldn't say this. I shouldn't pick favorites. It's like picking your favorite kid. But currently my favorite system is a system that I found recently that Scott Egan found recently and I started working with him on it. And so this is, do I have time to go through the system? Yeah. Okay. So there are these beautiful trees in the southern part of the United States called live oaks. They have these beautiful long limbs that like touch the ground and come back up again. And they have lots of little gall wasps that live in them. So these are little wasps that lay their eggs in various parts of the plant and then they manipulate the tissue in the plant to make a compartment that's like an ideal place for this wasp to undergo development. And then when they're done becoming adults they chew their way out and they fly away. So one of these gall wasps because there's multiple different species on this tree are called crypt gall wasps. And what they do is the mom lays an egg into a developing stem on this tree. And it induces the formation of a little compartment that in this case is called a crypt. And the wasp undergoes development and when it's ready to leave it just chews a hole out and it leaves. So if you find a stem that had these wasps in it it's like riddled with little holes where the crypts were once inhabited and then the wasp left. So that's what happens if things are going well for the host. If the host ah there you go. So if the host wasp is unlucky and gets infected by a parasitoid that we named the crypt keeper wasp then the host wasp is induced to make a tinier than usual hole to get out of the tree. And then it plugs the hole the host plugs the hole with its head and dies there. So instead of leaving and making a big hole instead it makes a tinier hole and the wasp plugs the hole with its head. This is what the host wasp is doing. So when the crypt keeper wasp which is the parasitoid that I study is ready to emerge it chews a hole through the head of its host and then flies out. So that's an interesting story. But what I thought was kind of cool was that we were able to kind of quantify how that benefits the parasitoid. So the parasitoid one benefits because it eats the inside the bodies of the wasp that made the crypts. So there's food but if you put a tiny little piece of bark over the head of the host and you let the parasitoid try to chew its way through the head and a tiny little bit of bark it's three times more likely to die trapped in the crypt. So essentially the parasitoid is a super wimpy chewer and it can't chew its way out of these stems. It can but it's it's much more likely to die trying to get out of these stems than if the host does the hard work of chewing through it for them. Does that all make sense? Yeah. So it really it not just nutritional but also just survival to get out to get out of its crypt. It needs the host to have done the work. It mostly needs the host to have done the work. Some of them can get through on their own but they're much more likely to die trapped in there without the host's help. Which is pretty awesome. And so we got to name the parasitoid was new to science and it was in the genus Euderis so we didn't get to pick that but we got to give it its species name. So we named it after the Egyptian god set. So he was the god of like chaos and evil who ruled over evil things but more importantly he trapped his brother Osiris in a crypt and then scattered his body afterwards and if you dig into these crypts the exoskeleton so the outer part of the body of the host is like thrown all around the crypt because it gets just sort of thrown to pieces as the parasitoid tries to get out of there. So we thought that was like totally fitting and absolutely amazing and it was so great. So Scott Egan was the one who found this. Sean Lu was the undergrad who did like tons of dissections and was amazing and Andrew Forbes helped us identify the parasitoid. So it was a team effort but it was just like it was such an awesome system to find. And it was like right outside our offices. That is isn't that amazing? It's just no it's just looking and it's just the exploration of the natural world. There is still stuff that we haven't really found that needs to be described. And we think that these were like literally in the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institute for maybe a hundred years. There were samples that that where this was happening and you could have found it including in Alfred Kinsey's collection. So not everybody knows this but Alfred Kinsey is famous for studying human sexual behavior. Yeah that's what I was going to say. Yeah. Before he was that guy he was a signipid gall wasp guy and that's the kind of wasp that lives on these oak trees and makes these crypts and different kinds of galls. So he has like millions of gall wasps I think in the American Museum of Natural History but maybe it's Smithsonian. And so that's what he did before he studied human sexual behavior. So gall wasp biologists go through his samples all the time. That's amazing. Yeah I grew up in the Central Valley of California and I'm very familiar with the oak balls. Those wasp balls and you know to stay away from them in the summer. Yeah. Yeah but they're so awesome and so this was like a parasitoid or you know a manipulator so the wasp manipulates the tree tissue to make the crypt and then the parasitoid manipulates the wasp to eat its way out of the crypt so it was like manipulation on top of manipulation it was awesome. It is awesome. I love that. I love my parasitoids. Many layers of manipulation. Yeah. No good. On your website I was saying that you also have worked you work with the killy fish. California killy fish and there's behaviors that they do that the parasite makes them do that makes them more likely to be eaten or caught by birds. Yeah. Can you talk about that a little bit? Oh absolutely. So I love that system too. So the trimitode parasite in that system is named you have lorcus californiensis and so it starts it's like well it breeds as adults in the guts of predatory birds and they make eggs and when the bird defecates the eggs end up in a salt marsh where they're accidentally eaten by California horn snails and as if it wasn't bad enough to accidentally be eating poop and parasite eggs the snails are subsequently castrated so they will never make their own offspring and all of the energy that they would have put towards making offspring now goes towards making the parasites which reproduce asexually and every day when the tide comes in literally thousands of parasites can leave from the snails depending on the time of year and the temperature of the water and then they swim around in the water and when a killy fish encounters the parasites it gets infected we think that it burrows through their skin and follows nerves up to the brain. Yeah and then each parasite that infects the each parasite that encounters the killy fish and survives forms a separate cyst on top of the brain and these fish when they like very soon after they've hatched already have some of the parasites on their brain and by the time they're adults they have somewhere between 1,000 and 8,000 so it's like a carpet of parasites just packed in one next to each other that covers the entire brain on some of these fish. Oh my god. It's mind-blowing and these fish mostly look normal which also surprises me because you think like 8,000 parasites on the brain these fish must be like swimming on their sides and just like obviously sick but mostly they're fine but every once in a while they'll do something like flip upside down and they have shiny bellies so when they do that the sun reflects off their belly and it makes them look very obvious or they'll like contort in the shape of a sea or they'll shoot to the surface of the water and make these ripples come off on the surface of the water so the more parasites they have the more often they do what we call conspicuous behaviors which are the things I just described and the more likely they are to get eaten by predatory birds so these parasites make the fish essentially be like I'm over here, I'm over here and then probably makes them easier to catch because they're flipping upside down and they're like in the shape of a sea and that's how the parasite completes its life cycle so we just anyway I love that system and we're working on getting it to work in the lab a little bit better the fish are kind of finicky but the parasites are just like amazing to bring into the lab because you get those snails and the snails can live infected for years and they keep producing the same genotype and so if you can keep the snails alive you get like asexual production of the same parasite for a really long time so yeah I love that system too so we're trying to figure out the mechanism that the parasite uses to like specifically change those conspicuous behaviors but not make the fish you know like swim on its side and act abnormal in other ways that could cause it to just die but not necessarily die at the hands of a predatory bird or the beak of a bird for a parasite that it is and for any infectious agent really that is like that trade-off right you want to complete the life cycle you want to keep it going so that the parasite lives to be birthed again and if you kill your host it's not going anywhere right or if your host dies the wrong way because it's very particular like if it gets eaten by another fish all those parasites are dead it's got to get eaten by a bird so manipulation is often extremely precise you know presumably because of this you know because it's necessary that they die in a particular way yeah so the interesting question so the specificity of the life cycle of the parasites is so fascinating also like these are these parasites are just in the water just swimming around and is it only the killy fish that they infect or is it our other fish affected are there fish that are consumed by humans that are affected that we should I mean is this like something that people should be thinking about well so for trimatodes it's very common to have two or three hosts in the life cycle like I described almost all of them include maybe all of them include a snail and so in my system U.F. lurkus californiansis only infects california killy fish but there's another U.F. lurkus species in the Gulf of Mexico that can infect a couple different somewhat closely related species of killy fish and like maybe one fish that's also kind of more distantly related so trimatodes differ in how specific they are and whether or not they manipulate humans can get infected by trimatodes so for example if you go into a pond and you get swimmers itch which is all those tiny little like spots on your leg that itch like crazy that is a trimatode parasite that is shooting for infecting birds and burrowing into the skin of birds as they swim around in the water but infected us instead and our immune systems pretty quickly kill them and the horrible itching I believe is caused by your immune response to dead parasites in your skin good to know and so for people who live in Africa schistosoma mancini and schistosoma panicum there's schistosomia or schistosomiasis is a problem down there there are trimatodes that cause human health problems but that's not very common in the U.S. okay yeah so the ones that you're looking at they are very specific and the human immune system is sufficient to fight them off and they basically are a nuisance more than anything well so the ones that I study I don't think even can get through human skin they just don't have the right pack of enzymes in the little pouches around their mouth but you know maybe I'm wrong and I have a bunch of them on my brain and I've been blowing it all this time maybe this explains all the people laying out on beaches they think it looks like they're just sunning themselves but they're really it's the parasites trying to get eaten by a bird yes exactly show that shiny white underbelly misjudge the house this capability of being eaten by a bird could be oh my goodness so Kelly are you you're on you're doing touring and and working on the book are you are you kind of torn between your research and and the book at this point in time so actually the book has weirdly opened up my ability to do more research so I the plan was to write this book with Zach and keep writing books and spend the amount of time on books that I would have spent teaching if I were in academia and then sort of transition out of the system but parallel to the system and so now we're looking to buy land and set up an ecology research station that will be funded by writing these kinds of books and I will hopefully have a lot more time to do science because I won't be doing administration and and other stuff so I'll just be writing and doing science in my backyard so that's my awesome plan I like this plan I really do and this sounds like I mean as good a reason as any to to purchase a book if you're interested Soonish 10 emerging technologies that'll improve and or ruin everything and it is available now and you can find it at the website smbc-comics.com slash Soonish or you can also find it at Soonish.com Soonish book.com Soonish book.com and there are fun things they have an origami robot that you can learn how to make and there is also an augmented reality app that you can use with your phone to experience the joy of augmented reality if you haven't done so before and stuff like that's fun to do and the app is free and it's free and I love it works with their book I love that your book is that this is a this is a research goal this is life goals yeah yeah I was super excited that that worked out yeah help help fund science by buying my dorky book right this will fund science she'll write about science and do science and the coolest kind of science parasite science you know sorry to everyone else who studies anything other than that but I said it I don't know I mean every time there is a parasite story I'm like who what are they doing now what have we learned now it's a fun field to study that's for sure awesome it is it is the most it is the most insanely complicated and other other body dependent strategy for survival that that it's really unique so it is very fascinating we call it unique and then some people like to argue that everyone's really a parasite in one way or another there is that yeah but it's a whole like it's got to be on land it's got to be in the water then it's in belly of a bird like that's just that's taking that whole thing to an extreme it really is it's mind blown it is well I am I'm mind blown gobsmacked is it you have this memorized this is something that rattles off the tip of your tongue we don't give out the ISBM number we'll have a link on the website we'll have a link on the website there's a link on the website we'll have a link on the website for everyone who's interested Kelly I know you're on the east coast so I don't want to keep you too too don't want to keep you much longer it's getting late over there thank you so much for joining us tonight and talking about your book and telling us about your awesome research and I hope that we can have you back on at some point to do one or the other or both at some point in the future again awesome thank you so much I had a ton of fun and I really appreciate you having me on and I hope to come back in the future yay awesome all right have a wonderful evening thank you you too good night good night thank you Kelly and that was Kelly Weiner Smith doctor of parasitology extraordinaire she's got I bet she's got so many more stories and could have gone on and on about parasites we're also talking about the book Soonish and we like I said we'll have the link on the website okay you guys we just talked about parasites which usually are a lovely kind of invertebrate so you know what I think it's time for right now what's it time for Blair's Animal Corner with Blair I unfortunately only have vertebrates tonight at least for the beginning part of the animal corner I have two very interesting stories about feathers and feathers doing things perhaps we would not expect the first article I have tonight is actually from Australian National University looking at whistle-winged pigeons they're actually called crusted pigeons but that's kind of their their name on the street is the whistle-winged pigeon and that's because their feathers make sounds I was not aware of the whistle-winged pigeon before but it sounds like these these wings make sounds as they take off they have high and low sounds coming off from the mechanical movement of their wings as they fly and so Australian National University a lab there led by Robert McGrath wanted to see if these sounds had an impact on the pigeon groups around the pigeon that was flying away so basically he wanted to see if these sounds had a behavioral impact if there was a reason for them other than just the movement of the feathers so he did high-speed video and conducted feather removal experiments they and through these experiments they found that the birds have an unusually narrow eighth primary wing feather and that that eighth wing feather produces a distinct note with each downstroke they also found that as the birds flapped faster the wing sounds went at a higher tempo as you might imagine they also found that the hot there were high and low notes that they made in flight the eighth wing feather was responsible for the high notes the ninth primary feather made low notes but playback experiments showed that the high notes were actually the critical element for behavioral impacts on other pigeons so they played these flight sounds that the pigeons that they recorded to other pigeons they recorded sounds with the eighth feather with the eighth feather removed with the ninth feather with the ninth feather removed and they found that they are very likely to flee upon hearing the flight of a bird with an intact eighth primary feather so when they played the sound where there was no eighth feather when they removed the eighth feather the pigeons kind of looked around and didn't take off so they found that as you might expect this alarm signal is intrinsically reliable because they flap faster when they're in trouble so fast flapping automatically creates a high tempo alarm signal that is very reliable to other pigeons to know exactly what's going on around them so obviously there's been a lot of study done yeah on the sounds that birds make with their mouths but there has not been a lot of study done on the sounds birds make with their wings I know that when I was a teenager and I was learning about owls at the zoo we knew that there were animals that were very quiet when they flew and that was so they could sneak up on animals in the dark at night that was good, my next question is like yeah are birds that predate on other birds are they are they or even on another animal are they quieter when they fly do they not have these signals yes so owls do yeah owls have fringes on the edges of their feathers that break up the air as they flap and they they are essentially silent flyers it's because they flight by stealth but animals like hawks and they are much louder when they flap their wings because they fly based on agility and then there are animals like vultures that make a racket when they fly because they're eating dead things dead stuff right it ain't gonna run but these guys have taken it to a whole another step by using their wings essentially like a musical instrument to send out a warning call that's awesome yeah so that's fascinating so future studies hopefully we'll study the evolution of wing sounds across birds to see where this development came from and and there's there's some level of sitting in the park and hearing the the flutter of pigeon wings and going oh what if that's a thing that you have to go okay I'm insane I know I'm insane I'm listening to the sound that pigeon feathers make but I'm still gonna study it because I want to find out if that's a thing yeah that's awesome and it's a thing I know it's it's interesting that it's a thing for these alarm calls that the pigeons are specifically using it for this because I know what is it the the red capped mannequin mannequins use their wings during mating right to make a quick call and then I think hummingbirds also their wings make sounds that are used they they're humming sounds that are that are also signals for mating and for aggression so yeah exactly so that is a it's it's a set of sounds that that again you know it's a it's a chicken or egg forgive the the pun scenario where we don't know if the sound is a signal of readiness because they're just moving quickly or if the sound is produced to signify something right and so you can look through you can try to figure that out by kind of exploring wing sounds in the huge group of birds that there are on this planet and you can kind of try to to follow the steps back and see if the behavior created the sound or if the sound created the behavior which I think will be fascinating to find out but I think yeah yeah yeah and it's just one of those things that could kind of just be naturally grown together like you know hearing hearing somebody's footsteps running faster might make you you know look quicker than somebody just normally walking and it is a signal but is it one that's being sent it's not intentional come on does that does that necessarily does that necessarily even matter but but although I have to I have to say as always it was the egg before the chicken or eggs eggs a long time before there were chickens I always need to point that out yes well so from noisy feathers I want to move to smelly feathers I love talking about smelly things in relation to birds because why kiki even just it's it's not true yeah but people used to think they didn't have a good sense of smell yes even just today I was telling someone at work about this amazing story that I found and they went but most birds can't smell not true it's why why kiki it's because somebody because people when they they pulled the brain pan off of the birds right then the kind of the node of nerves that was the smell center the olfactory cortex right with the brain pan and they went it's not there the olfactory bulb yeah so it's looking right here oh my god they don't have an olfactory bulb it's just not possible for them to smell no you missed it you missed it so you pulled it off so let's talk about smelly feathers this isn't feathers that are on a dirty bird they're creating smells out of a smell sack and they're covering themselves with it no the feathers intrinsically smell well yeah crimson rosellas they're parrots from eastern and south eastern Australia Dr. Mila Mihailova which is who's a formal doctoral student at deacon university center for integrative ecology says they smell like an old jumper you know a sweater which has which has been drenched in really cheap old perfume so they their feather odor is actually part of their nesting behavior it influences how much time females spend at their nest if a female can smell that a male or a female of the same subspecies has been around she'll come back to the nest quicker and they also found that they would adjust their behavior based on what kind of individual around was around if it was a male or a female what subspecies it was the genetic diversity or health of an individual the odor can actually tell them these things so they the the smell of signature of these feathers give them a host of information about each other this recent study though found that crimson rosellas actually are leaving a clue behind for ringtail possums their main predator and ringtail possums not opossums but possums they eat eggs and they nestlings and they can smell these smelly feathers they can detect the smell of parrots just from sniffing a nesting site where the birds had been so these birds are stinky they're stinky the feather odor helps detect prey and it also helps to adjust the vigilance of these possums but that's not good for the birds you would think the birds would have evolved to be less stinky since they would get eaten all right so this is we are seeing feathers everywhere see that the predator searching all sorts of places what we're seeing right now is this is the first study to show that the smell of feathers affects behavior of a wild mammal this is the first time we've ever seen this and so this is interesting because this may be something that we're seeing mid evolutionary arms race so we talk about an evolutionary arms race in the show all the time predator and prey male and female these animals adapting alongside and i am seeing a very intense moment in this evolutionary arms race because these individuals depend on their feather smells to find each other and to get along but they also are getting eaten because of it so we're in the middle of the battle we're just watching that we're watching the battle from the sidelines going what's going to happen yeah and so they're saying that these birds over evolutionary time will probably need to adjust their smell or find better hiding places for their nests sure stay away from posses yeah absolutely so yeah so they say our work shows that feather smells mediate the interactions around who gains and who wins in this holy battle yeah don't have the nest in a hole just kind of get out in the fresh air clean clean it out the breeze air it out the spring cleaning you know yeah so you know birds feathers they're pretty they keep them warm they help them fly but guess what they're also loud and smelly yeah I wonder I wonder what could affect the the smelliness though like if preening makes them less smelly or if there is you know something in their food that leads to the scent that if they changed their food source if there's a micro there's probably a microbial component to it yeah and you I wonder fascinating yeah so I think change that's part of what's next is to figure out exactly what about these feathers gives them their scent and to see if that starts to change all right birds of a feather stinking together there you go there we go we're going to take a quick break everyone this is this weekend science we are going to be right back with more science news and I think Justin's got a glass of wine coming for the second half at least a story about sciency wine we'll be back just a few moments stay tuned hey everybody thank you for listening to or for watching this weekend science we absolutely appreciate you being here and while you're here why don't you take a moment to head on over to twist.org twist.org is the home for all things twist-alicious sciency goodness and all that and if you're if you're heading to twist.org you will be able to find that our this weekend science Blair's Animal Corner calendars are there for your ordering if you go click on that link twisttwis.org and click on the image for the twist 2018 Blair's Animal Corner calendar you can order it there's a nice little PayPal interface to help you do that very easily and we have actually put our order in for those calendars so they will 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mission with research and tech I yell go to heck and beat viruses into submission well done Travis and thank you I love the I love it's a very sciencey limerick about your work and what you do yeah go to heck viruses go to heck get the heck out of town get out of here we love it so this was a request of Blair's a while back it's a fun twist on what science has done for me lately for you lately so let us know what science has done for you lately in limerick form or just write us a note leave us a note on our facebook page facebook.com slash this weekend science we really would love to keep filling this part of the show with your stories your thoughts and your limericks hi coos sonnets I don't know a sonnet yes a science sonnet pentameter a science sonnet there we go yes an iambic and I'll read it in vocal fry oh my god like a vocal fry is great tonight it totally is oh my god all right but enough of that everyone let's keep it going thank you Travis for that wonderful limerick really appreciate it was so much fun and now Justin what you got a wise man was once hired to be the spokesman of a company that peddled fermented beverages and in the most sincerest of theatrical voices would quip to the cameras we will sell no wine until it's time and while this patience by a vendor may hold value for an odd vintage here or there the aging of modern wines is typically destructive to its flavor and appearance wine is meant to be opened and enjoyed sooner rather than later oh and this tradition of fermented indulgence has been with us much longer than previously thought the earliest previously known chemical evidence of wine dated somewhere into the 50 or 5400 to 5000 bc just from an area in the Zargos mountains of Iran now an exception to the has been found in the excavations of the Republic of Georgia by the Godotriali Gora Regional Archaeological Project expedition aka Grape the undertaking with the University of Toronto and the Georgia National Museum have uncovered evidence of the earliest winemaking ever found anywhere in the world discovery dates the origin of the practice to the Neolithic period around 6000 bc pushing back the date of fermented grapes some 600 to 1000 years excavations have focused on two early ceramic Neolithic sites approximately 50 kilometers south of the modern capital Tbilisi for those not familiar with the metric system of course 50 kilometers is approximately the same as 50 000 meters pottery fragments of ceramic jars recovered from the sites were collected and subsequently analyzed by scientists the University of Pennsylvania to ascertain the components of the preserved residues they confirmed tartaric acid the fingerprint compound for grape and wine as well as three associated organic acids malach succininic susaninic and citric inverse residues that were recovered from these eight large jar vessels that they found findings reported in a research study this week proceedings in the National Academy of Science PNAS we believe this is the oldest example of the domestication of wild growing Eurasian grapevine solely for the production of wines says Devin Batuik a senior researcher associate department of near and middle eastern civilizations and archaeology center at University of Toronto co-author of the study published in PNAS domesticated version of the fruit has more than 10 000 varieties of table and wine grapes worldwide Georgia is home to over 500 varieties for wine alone suggesting that grapes have been domesticated and cross-bred in this region for a very long time so the Neolithic period is characterized by a package of activities that include the beginning of farming which ended up spreading into Europe domestication of animals development of crafts such as pottery weaving making of polished stone tools and now we can add wine making to that list yeah looking at an image of a jar at the Georgian Museum there was what appeared to be obviously grapes on the outside of the rim of the jar yeah like yeah this is a wine jug well I mean wine goes back pretty far in written and oral history too I mean we definitely know that it started a long time ago because it's it's pivotal in fables and and a lot of ancient kind of oral tradition but this takes it way further back yeah they're talking this is definitely the domestication of the grape they're saying led to the emergence of wine culture in the region I mean this was a big hit they used it as medicine it's the social lubricant mind altering to a degree a highly valued tradable commodity it became the focus of religious cults pharmacopias cuisines economics society throughout the ancient Near East this was wine was where it was at man like everybody was into this stuff I think a lot of people are still into this stuff yeah one can say one could say considering the economic perspective or the the largesse economic largesse of areas throughout the world Italy France California Australia I mean there's all over the world wine growing regions are known for their productions they are but 99.9% of wine made is from a Eurasian grapevine or from Eurasian grapevines like it's originally yeah yeah these of even like there was actually in research through this a little bit I was I was surprised the Shiraz or Shirab wine which I thought Shirah Shirah Shirah or Shiraz Shirah or Shiraz the same there's there's a Shiraz Shiraz is from Australia though yeah we're not going to pronounce it Shiraz we're going to pronounce it Shiraz but there's a Shiraz Iran which I always thought the grape originated from but it turns out and researching this story a little bit that that was a hub of wine making interesting a long time ago but that the the grapes that are Shiraz are actually of southern France origin was a they used the name for what was you know a long time ago they used the name that was a throwback to an ancient wine making civilization but that the grape itself is is from southern France it's not an exported grape which I always thought was the case so I got to know something so this pushed it back to 8,000 years ago is what you said right yeah so so you know so I was some quick googling told me because I'm not good with this stuff ancient Greece was around 3,000 years ago so definitely we know from I think Bacchus is the Roman name but whoever was the party god he was definitely into wine so we knew that was a big deal then the Jewish calendar goes to the almost the year 6000 we know that wine is part of their tradition from the earlier it's not the year 6000 yet it's the year 57 something so we're getting close and then so this adds based on just those two little tidbits I know as a layman 2,000 years which is which is a good hunk of time for sure considering it's 2017 by our calendar right now and I think even beyond that you know bringing up the kind of origin story of wines and grapes and when it if we push the date back we'll probably find the original wine grape you know could you find the original the original originator that from which the Eurasian stock came from which all of the stocks around the world are pretty much generated was it just juice that was left out probably originally yeah they made grape juice and they were like oh should we throw it out no let's go ahead and drink it and then they just got it's also trash this is happening this is happening in the caucuses right which is which is also where where the the mutolithic farming this is where agriculture it you know was a lot of these was developed more down into Syria and Turkey Iraq but but really it was it was once you got to the caucuses this is when there was that sort of explosion of farming techniques and so this is you know they're coming up with these new products one of them was wine but they're coming up with all sorts of new food products which then eventually led to the the farming immigration into into Europe you know for for the search of more farmlands to do these crafts and and with them must have brought wine as well who's bringing the wine really feels like as long as there's been people there's been alcohol yeah so i'm gonna switch up which story I was going to do next or yeah I mean I'm gonna switch up the story because I think talking about the kind of agricultural aspects of of wine will lead me into my climatia update the end of the world this week in the end of the world so there are a few stories out this last week that I found incredibly bleak a large number of research scientists issued a warning to the world that if we continue on the path that we are headed that it's going to be disaster for humanity unfortunately you know they published it behind a paywall in an academic journal so nobody can read it but yeah it's like we're issuing this cry to the world behind a paywall what the this is why we can't have nice things this is exactly why you can't choose a open access journal for something like that you'll still get man I know you'll still get the scientific authorship credit it'll work create that I don't know but anyway so we just we just need access that's that's the only thing we're complaining about is we need the access yeah we just need the well I mean I wish we would have more access to you know big you know warning statements from the science science community anyway then then we have a story that does a new did a new analysis on rainfall in the southern region of the united states and uh looking at that was basically is a system that analyzes hurricane frequency in a warming world this is a professor from MIT named Kerry Emanuel who has developed the system and he basically found that hurricane Harvey amounts of rainfall aren't going to be rare in the future that they're going to increase that there will be a an 18 percent chance of happening of a one of these biblical biblical proportion rainfall events one of these what is it five to 500 to a thousand year rainfall events an 18 percent chance of it happening in any given year by the end of this century and the end of this century is only 83 years away and once we get to the end of this year it's only 82 years away so that's you know and and within your grandparents lifetime right right and I think we've talked about this a little bit on the show too that's that's a that doesn't mean that we doesn't mean that we stay with it being a once every hundred year storm until we get to there and then magically it's once every five years it there's going to be an increase so there will be some years there will be more a lot of years there'll be a none yeah yeah like yeah that's just like a progression this is how progressions work it's not just going to wait till then to kick in yeah so the climate model that he has put together for these hurricanes is he actually took a set of seven climate climate models and that that used the conditions prevailing between 1980 and 2016 and so he has a computer model right and he started putting or seeding tropical disturbances during the runs of this model and then the system selected this this tropical disturbances that would develop into hurricanes and strike Texas within 3000 kilometers of Houston and so storms with anywhere above 450 millimeters of rainfall are extremely rare and those with more than 800 millimeters are almost unprecedented to this according to this ours Technica article and Emmanuel concludes that what happened with Hurricane Harvey's rainfall was biblical in the sense that it likely occurred around once since the Old Testament was written Wow they were talking we were talking about years back with wine and everything go back to the Old Testament that this this kind of rainfall happened once since then but expanding out to the coast the probabilities are definitely going to go up and that I you know we're looking at you know a little over 2000 how long ago was Old Testament written that's a tough one how old that's probably at least 3000 1000 years ago right so so once this Hurricane Harvey level of rainfall we're expecting it to be about once a century or so if these if these climate conditions prevail yeah but it's got a googling face on yeah you had her googling face on earlier tonight I think when she thought that Blair had said that that Feathers could smell and she's like I'm going to have to look at this study wait a second I'm googling things all the time here we go so there's there's a there's a holiday on the Jewish calendar about the writing of the Torah so it occurred in 1312 B.C. which is around 3000 years ago 3000 years ago yeah so something that happened once in 3000 years is probably going to be a once every 100 year event by the end of this century yeah that doesn't mean it's going to happen but the odds increase which means it's going to happen that's what that means it's going to happen pretty much so there's that that's getting that's like oh okay more more lots of rainfall so maybe we should figure out how to how to build better in the Houston area right moving on from there though we've been really happy with our carbon emissions for the last few years reports have been that for several years now our carbon emissions have stabilized and even decreased a little bit but you know what that's not holding anymore the global analysis of the global carbon cycle has been has been released and we are now every country basically is on an upward trend well part of it is when you say our I don't know if you mean global or like the United States yeah that's it's global and the United States so yeah so the interesting thing though is that there are exact there were trends in the economy and also in the environment that that lent themselves to the stabilization of carbon dioxide emissions so there was reduced coal use in China and elsewhere there were gains in energy efficiency a boom in low carbon renewables like wind and solar however according to this editorial in the journal environmental letters research the temporary hiatus appears to have ended in 2017 right so so you you become you become you add all these layers of efficiency right but then your population is still growing quickly fast right expansion production and so like here in the United States we had higher natural gas prices for a while and so people used less natural gas and so and and and coal has started to increase and so we're going to have a bit more of the carbon dioxide is emitting as a bit of that there's also was a burst of economic growth in the early part of 2017 and there was a dip in hydroelectric hydroelectric damn generation because we didn't have as much as much rain in 2017 yeah not as much rain well it's also as as energy efficiency increases we are also building more and more things and incorporating more and more things into our lives that require energy we are the story of coal which is when they made when they made the the coal steam engines and trains much more efficient the price of coal dropped and then what happened what followed was then people would burn a couple of a couple more nuggets of coal and the furnace to keep them warm because they could afford it and so there was actually more coal burnt when the price went down than before so yeah and we see this happen with gasoline petroleum here in the united states that has petrol prices increase people drive less they don't drive as far they don't they maybe rely on public transportation more and as a result you have decreased emissions from that price goes down people get back in their cars again and so there's yeah behavior is related to cost and also efficiency for people's behaviors yeah I've been wondering a lot about the carbon footprint of the bay area lately since the cost of living has increased so much so many people have actually moved further and further away from their place of work to find a place that is affordable to live and in the process driving longer and longer commutes yeah they just need to move the places of work over to where the people who work there live or you could just make it not impossible to live in the city where you work that's the other option but it's part of a whole story we need in order to be a sustainable community it has to be a ground up plan which is you know it comes down to infrastructure which is the conversation that nobody wants to have and which segues me exactly into my next story which was the thing that kind of gave me a little bit of hope compared to everything else which is the idea that we could feed a billion more people than we are currently feeding on the planet if we stopped working as individual nations and started working as a global community and put plants in places where they grow more efficiently put more drought tolerant plants in areas that are more arid for example plants that require more water in areas where water is plentiful actually move things around the world and we can produce enough food possibly you know things you know even with more technology and fertilizers and irrigation and all that kind of stuff this new analysis in nature geoscience says that we find that the current distribution of crops around the world neither attains maximum production nor minimum water use and so really nobody's ever sat down to figure out what grows the best in different places it's just kind of happened it's a cluge but the problem is as they write in their article this crop distribution though things don't necessarily end up in areas where people of that culture eat that stuff and so they moved things in their analysis and moving things around the globe they grew more soybeans sorghum roots tubers and peanuts and crops like millet sugarcane and sugar beet rice and wheat were decreased and so sorghum was grown in western Russia instead of sugar beets and we know beets are something that's important to Russia but sugar beets are a little different millet grows best in northern India instead of rice soybeans in lieu of wheat in Australia and peanuts instead of wheat in the Nile Delta and yeah people don't really eat those things in those areas and so it would be like hey you guys you got to switch up your culture because we need to be more efficient so here's the problem with that though because then you would be you'd be shipping this stuff all over which means you're going to have a carbon footprint to that and then you're also we already do that though yeah and that's what I was going to say too is that the way we ship things is also not efficient so how many tankers have I seen that come in full of stuff and exit the San Francisco Bay empty oh they're probably probably full of recycled cardboard this is the thing is how can we make sure that we're not that we're also if we're a global community we are going we would be orchestrating the movement of products in a more efficient fashion as well but I think there's another thing that you're I think there's another thing that we're touching on which is a very techy subject for the future which is starting to happen maybe it happened yesterday which is that we're not just talking about then reallocation of foods what we're talking about is fresh water distribution right because because when you're talking about will you grow this water dependent thing here and you just move it over there what you've actually done is exported water no no the idea no no the idea is that you grow the what the thing that needs water in places that where there is water right but that's a tricky thing because there's usually local competition for that water for instance here in california we have a huge an explosion in almond farms which are high-intensity water and we had this during a drought when we're talking about telling people to stop watering your lawns stop washing your cars and yet we have this huge industry of almonds and a lot of that's being exported so when we when we talk about these things there's another whole layer of not the crop and the food thing but the fresh water thing that's getting left out and you can imagine especially in a place where in california we have a pretty good access to legislature and that sort of thing there's parts of the world where they don't have as much control the local populations don't have as much control over water rights and water usage and if we're growing crops there that are getting shipped out but those people are being rationed for their fresh water this it's a I'm just pointing out that it's more complicated it is complicated but it's a it's a I mean it's a fascinating thought project you know could we really could the could the world work together to change agriculture to feed everybody there's another really important part of this thought exercise that I think no one wants to bring up and that's the meat huh right meat when you take when you reduce meat production production there's more water there's more space to grow food all of these problems go away when you reduce your meat production it when you talk about feeding a billion more people you can do that by just cutting down the meat yeah I don't think they're talking about all sorts of stakes in this article yeah but also you know when young people eat meat they do better at math so like they don't necessarily cut down not cut out cut down just like again it's again it's the almonds people are villainizing the almonds when almonds don't take nearly as much water as it does nowhere near all right this is a debate that can go on and on so let's not keep it going on and on right now people can write in and tell us what they think tweet us or talk to us on facebook and let us know what you think about the story but right now Justin what's up with Neolithic farmer people oh yeah so uh as I was talking about before the caucuses we had this sort of farming revolution and after a while they ran out of places to grow stuff now they just decided they were going to go look for more fertile lands people would say hey you know what all these all the good farming spots are taken up let's head west first arrived in Europe there were other people there there were hunter gatherer groups that were that were in different places throughout Europe prior studies have suggested that these early near eastern farmers replace the pre-existing European hunter-gatherers but how did they do it did the farmers wipe them out through warfare was it disease seems like they disappeared shortly after arriving but maybe they didn't maybe it was a little slower than that current study published today in nature suggests that these groups likely coexisted side by side for thousands of years after the early farmers spread across Europe this is recent studies of ancient DNA have revealed that the spread of farming across Europe wasn't merely a result of a transfer of ideas this wasn't like I'll teach you how to work a plow and then you teach your neighbor and they teach their neighbor but it was the expanding farmers from the Near East brought this knowledge with them as they themselves spread across the continent okay so these these people who brought farming were the farmers it wasn't just like this was spreading from people to people numerous studies have shown that early farmers from all over Europe such as the Iberian Peninsula southern Scandinavian Central Europe all shared a common origin in the Near East this is a little bit or it was unrevealing it a little bit of an unexpected finding given the diversity of prehistoric cultures there's diverse environments there's different languages across Europe but these people from bottom to top of Europe all came across all entered Europe together basically they also though found various amounts of hunter-gather ancestry in these populations which had not been previously analyzed in the detail that it was in this study current study from an international team including scientists from Harvard Medical School the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Max Blank Institute for the Science of Human History focused on the regional interactions between early farmers and late hunter-gatherer groups across a broad time span in three different locations in Europe they looked at Iberian Peninsula in the west so that's I guess western-ish Spain the Middle Ebal sail region of north-central Europe and the fertile lands of the Carpathian Basin which is basically hungry the researchers used high resolution genotyping methods to analyze the genomes of 180 early farmers 130 of them that they put into this study actually were new newly reported and this was from 6,000 to 2200 BC and explored population dynamics I bet they were drinking wine I think they were all drinking wine well the hunter-gatherers probably weren't this is why they they eventually got pulled in to the communities right so we find that hunter-gatherer admixture varied locally but more importantly differed widely between three main regions this means that local hunter-gatherers were slowly but steadily integrated into farming communities says Mark Lipsom a researcher department genetics at Harvard Medical School who is also first author on the paper while the percentage of hunter-gatherer heritage never reached very high levels it did increase over time finding suggests hunter-gatherers were not pushed out or exterminated by the farmers when the farmers first arrived rather they coexisted with increasing interactions over time well I bet I mean think about it they're hunter-gatherers which means that their food supply is not necessarily available all the time they're having to work really hard to find maybe minimal amounts of food and then here come these people who are like oh you could just put this in the ground and we're going to do this to the ground and we're going to grow our crop we're going to grow our food and we'll have food and then we're going to do things like drink wine and the hunter-gatherers this is way better I like this and probably a pretty good trade arrangement because hunter-gatherers stop by every day it's like still nothing came out of the ground yeah sure this is going to work and again I found a deer do you want some of this deer do you want some deer pelt you want some antlers I'll trade you when your stuff comes out of the ground so this is kind of fun though they found that the farmers in each of the locations only mixed with hunter-gatherers from that region and not with other hunter-gatherers from other regions or even other farmers from other areas so once the farmers showed up they stayed put and they interacted with that local group which creates a tag basically based on that hunter-gatherer group that was in any specific region for the populations of farmers that started there right if you can if you have a little bit of hunter-gatherer X in your genome you know your people were in this specific region because they can tie it back to the hunter-gatherers of that that particular region right so there's sort of an interesting way of of tagging people in their interactions in certain places back in time which is sort of fun interestingly these neolithic farming communities had rapid growth followed by a violent period that typically ended in dissolution of many of these communities this is from past research and the past research failed to link this boom or bust pattern to whether they looked really hard it was their climactic change why are these farming communities collapsing and they postulated maybe it was from disease but they actually didn't find evidence of that that was just sort of best guest stuff and researchers at Washington State University and 13 other institutions have found perhaps that economic inequality something that would have been a very new feature to early societies but spiked in farming communities was likely a driver of the eventual fall of many of these communities that's cool so economic inequality is not a good thing which is actually history repeats itself it's a segue to your last story it's a segue to the last story but it they did cross over unintentionally and oddly in this in this way let's go to your last story so you said it's a segue what's your last story bring it oh well yeah okay so this is researchers at Washington State University and 13 other institutions that found that the archipelago story bends towards economic inequality the largest study of its kind research saw disparities in wealth mount with the rise of agriculture specifically the domestication of plants and large animals and increased social organization so basically the more civilized and state-puttedness of us increased our economic wealth disparities their findings published this week and the journal Nature they say have profound implications on contemporary society as the inequality repeatedly leads to social disruption even collapse says Tim Kohler lead author and regents professor of archeology and evolutionary anthropology at Washington State University special note they point out the United States currently has one of the highest levels of wealth inequality in the history of the world the study gathered history of the world history of the world study gatherator from 63 archeological sites or group of sites comparing house sizes within each site researchers assigned what would it be genie coefficients common measures of inequality developed more than a century ago by the italian statistician and sociologist grotto genie in theory country with complete wealth equality would have a genie coefficient of zero well a country that had all of its wealth in one household would get a one researchers found that hunter gatherer societies typically had low wealth disparities with immediate genie of 0.17 partly you know they're moving around a lot accumulating wealth is actually hindrance if you've got to like pack up a U-Haul full of stuff before there were U-Haul and everybody's working communally to to make society work yeah yeah I mean the the important possessions are your tools for hunting and you know maybe mending clothes or something like some you have essential tools for looking food yeah right but you're very utilitarian society anyway so the the wealth thing is like you know how good of a hunt did we have today then you get into horticulture small-scale low-intensity farmers their median genie was 0.27 larger scale agricultural societies had a median genie of 0.35 so you see it's increasing the more we sort of get into these larger more organized societies researchers surprised and the quality kept rising in the old world but in the new world that's the Americas it hit a plateau researchers attribute this to the ability of old world societies to literally harness big mysticated mammals like cattle and eventually horse and water buffalo Kohler says so you've got draft animals in the old world they let the wealthier farmers accumulate more of these animals that do work for them and since they own them they expand into more land new areas they increase their wealth which ultimately created a class of landless peasants yeah these processes increased inequality by operating on both ends of wealth distribution increasing the holdings of the rich while decreasing the holdings of the poor researchers right old world also saw the arrive of bronzade metallurgy mounted warrior elite that increased genies through large houses and territorial conquests we end up with phythdoms that sort of thing researchers put the highest genie on the ancient world at 0.59 but really if you compare that to modern day that's close to contemporary Greece and Spain Greece at 0.56 and Spain 0.58 gene while this is well short of China's 0.73 gene and the United States 0.80 which is a 2000 figure cited in nature paper you can also look at two other analysis the alliance global wealth report in 2016 put the U.S. at 0.81 and and it's also been pegged at 0.85 yeah so it means we're the best right okay well yes we're the we're the best right societies with high inequality tend to have low social mobility color points to a science paper from earlier this year that found rates of mobility have fallen from 90% for U.S. children who were born in 1940 to 1950 or 1940 to 50% we've gone from 90% mobility down to 50% for children born in the 80s and that number is likely decreasing still yeah and it's just and we've also had we've also had research on health outcomes that United States health and mortality it's decreasing it's increasing so health decreasing mortality increasing and this is linked to inequality because people can't access health care yeah unequal societies tend to have poor health more equal societies have higher life expectancy or trust is low is to help others uh yeah so he quoted Quotey voice here people need to be aware that inequality can have deleterious effects on health outcomes on mobility on degree of trust on social solidarity all these things we're not helping ourselves by being so unequal I read something earlier today that said that 50% of the world's wealth is now in the hands of 1% of the population so you know it's not just an American problem it's a global problem but it's it's definitely out of whack here says here decreasing inequality is extremely difficult and usually comes big revolution mass warfare or state collapse according to the great leveler a new book by Stanford University's Walter Scheidel so this is they're looking in the past and and seeing how how wealth inequality much less than we have today ended and it tended to end badly Kohler himself documented four periods of mounting inequality amongst the ancient Pueblo people of American Southwest and these are people that that stuck and stayed in a specific location they weren't hunter gatherer types well they probably hunted and gathered but they they didn't they weren't nomadic I guess and and in these four these four periods each ended with violence and then greater equality after that last window and coincided with the complete depopulating of the Mesa Verde area so and in each case Cody voice again in each case you see not just this decline in genie scores but we also see an increase in violence that accompanies that decline we could be concerned in the United States that if genius get too high we could be inviting revolution or we could be inviting state collapse yeah I was just looking at that the the genie from the French Revolution was 0.59 yeah right and that's the old world high watermark right I'm afraid the genie is out of the bottle yeah right I mean we and this is one of those things that we we here discussed every once in a while it was wealth and equality in in America and that sort of thing but if you look at historically like I I guess I knew it was really really really bad but I thought that maybe it's not as bad as the time maybe it's just heading to the time where everybody worked the king or the barons land and didn't own anything themselves right but to know that we're that much higher on this scale of wealth inequality than in the worst fiefdoms that the peoples that populated the Americas for the second time we're escaping that's that's uh that's right yeah well it's because people it's not that people are you know living in filth in the streets with rats in their homes and working for the baron people are just now in extreme debt yep all right well we're gonna move it past this story because I want to finish up this show and I have a few more stories to go so uh looking on the bright side of things scientists are trying to look at pulsars in space which are uh pulsars are regularly pulsing objects in space they are these really dense leftovers of stars that have have died but they emit these radio waves beams and it's like they've that's as if they're they're called a cosmic lighthouse because the pulsation it's as if the beam of radio waves it's spinning around and it occasionally passes over the earth where we can record it and witness it but anyway these pulsars are all over the place and researchers not content with LIGO and Virgo our current gravitational wave detectors here on earth which have done a great job of detecting neutron stars colliding now this summer they've detected black holes colliding this you know this this year already lots of things it's awesome right they're doing great stuff with like we've got gravitational waves we know these mergers are happening out in the universe and when we detect them it tells us information about how the universe works right but no no no we must have a bigger gravitational wave detector so big that it has to actually be in space and it's not really going to be something that we're building in space it's going to be us looking at pulsars and we're going to create an array of basically detectors or we're going to coordinate detectors here on earth to observe pulsars that are scattered in quadrants around the earth and use shifts in their pulsation that we know they pulse at a very regular rate but will those pulses happen differently if they are stretched in spacetime because of the movement of a gravitational wave past them and in doing so what we'll be able to detect are not the mergers of small black holes like we have detected already with LIGO and Virgo here on earth but super massive black holes that they're so massive as they start to spin near each other that gravitational low frequency gravitational waves are start to be emitted as they start to collide and tear things up near and suck each other up and everything gets everything gets bent and shifted in that area of these super massive black holes and so it's not going to be the higher frequency waves that we've been detecting but very low frequency waves think about elephants feeling low frequency rumbles in the earth how elephants call to each other through the earth using low frequency sound this is going to be our way of detecting the giant sounds of big space elephants but I don't not space elephants super massive black holes same difference same difference yes yes so uh yeah the researchers think that they'll be have they'll be able to put together this observatory the North American nanohertz observatory for gravitational waves that this whole timing array that they're building that they're gonna expand it over the next 10 years or so and they think they have a very high likelihood of finding at least one super massive black hole merger within that time and now where they look and kind of what areas they're looking at are important because the size of the black holes also determines how fast the merger takes place and so the speed of the merger also gives you the window over which the detection could take place and so for example in this article from jet propulsion laboratory they say there's black holes merging in the large galaxy m87 would have a four million year window of detection but the smaller sombrero galaxy mergers there typically take about 160 million years so there's more opportunities for timing arrays to detect those mergers in that 160,000 year window than in the four million year window but we're gonna detect one in 10 years anyway it that I think that one is very exciting pulsars in space as our new space array of gravitational wave detection and then finally we've heard stories of I don't know if you've heard last night or there came an article on the AP came out that for the first time a gene editing technology has been used to treat a human being or a disease a gentleman suffering from hunter syndrome was given treatment using a zinc finger nuclease this is not a crisper treatment but an alternative gene editing and an older gene editing technology called zinc finger nuclease to basically go in and cut out the problem genes that are have been causing him much much trouble he had a basically an IV drip with the treatment over several hours and we will see whether or not there is a result and whether or not it's a positive one sometime in the next one to three months the first time in the United States at least that it's been publicly made aware that we have used a gene editing technology in a medical medical purpose wow that's quite the watermark yeah so while this probably is not yet going to be something that will help large numbers of people in a in regular rotation in medical clinics around the country or the world it's just an obvious point for this all to move forward that this gene editing is on its way and it is probably going to be a very large part of medical medical therapy moving forward and then my final story cardiac arrest during or after sex you know we've heard stories of people kicking that's a thing kicking the bucket you have sex and oh it was I guess it was so strenuous that usually the male in the situation heart stops and they die well researchers so researchers looked at 404,557 adult cases of cardiac arrest in a northwestern U.S. community between 2002 and 2015 of all of these 4,000 so cases only 34 of them occurred during or within an hour of sexual intercourse and of those 34 32 were male and so there's definitely a sex link a gender link to to sex and cardiac arrest it's linked to about now we know who really does all the work yeah only about one in 100 cases of cardiac arrest in men and for women the rates around one in a thousand however what they found and this mirrors stuff happening in another report that came out of France but the numbers are different that only a third of those individuals that had cardiac arrest from sex received CPR so basically their partner let them die what the I'm so confused and this is lower than the overall rate of CPR for people who have cardiac arrest in other places outside hospitals not in a hospital in a hospital you're gonna get you're gonna have CPR but I I get it I get it look okay I get it and so the rate but it's funny the rate out in public away from hospitals where people it's 46% so nearly 50 people 50% of people who suffer cardiac arrest out out in the general world get CPR and this includes cases where there's no bystanders around to see the cardiac arrest occurred so this is basically you're in a place where there's somebody there is it because all of the blood has left your brain to other parts of your body and you're not thinking straight like okay now here's the thing if you are jogging and suddenly collapse boy that doesn't look right you know you're at work in the middle of a conversation suddenly you flop onto the ground and and stop responding that's really out of place if you just finish having sex and then you lie down and do nothing that's kind of what you might expect and it could go unnoticed for a you know enough time that these people didn't receive immediate treatment it kind of makes sense yeah so it kind of makes sense but in in France the numbers are totally different so they in France they looked at about 3000 cases of cardiac cardiac arrest where the patients arrived at the hospital they got there alive only 17 of those cases were linked to sex and 229 cases were linked to non-sex activity those that were doing non-sex activity like sports and stuff almost all of them were around other people with their jogging or whatever 80 percent got CPR before they got to the hospital doing the horizontal dance 47 percent received CPR and so more people in France are surviving cardiac arrest after sex than people here in the United States that is because in France you're expected after you're expected to have a conversation after this you know smoke a cigarette eat some cheese now is the time when we talk in a relaxed voice I can't do it we have now finished with the sex would you like some brie? yeah why are you not taking the cheese oh something is wrong yeah so it's a head scratcher I mean maybe Justin's right it's a cultural thing you're not you're supposed to just check out here in the United States let's go to sleep let's go to sleep yeah done sex done talk so the take home story of this is pay attention pay attention to your partner pay attention to your lover and learn CPR because you might save someone's life yeah absolutely and especially if your partner has any history of heart issues they don't respond right away wake them up wake them up check check baby check baby did you have one last buzz if you had a bit of news yes so I wish I had better news about the bees but their buzzing is changing and that change is the result of neonicotinoid pesticides those pesticides are affecting bee behavior they are interfering with the type of vibrations they produce when they are collecting their pollen this is from the University of Sterling and they found that there were actual quantitative changes in the types of buzzes produced by bees exposed to field realistic levels of pesticides they found that the acoustic signal produced during buzz pollination changes in buzzing behavior through time bees learn how to be better buzzers throughout their lifetime but they found that chronic exposure to pesticides at similar levels to those in agricultural fear fields interfered with the vibrations of bees as they collected pollen which in turn reduced the amount of pollen they were able to collect bees that came into contact with pesticides did not collect more pollen as they gained more experience while bees that were not around pesticides collected more pollen each time they went out throughout their lifetime they learned how to buzz efficiently to vibrate just right to get the most pollen on their bodies but by the end of the experiment the bees that were exposed to pesticides collected between 47 and 56% less pollen compared to the control bees so they started out similar but by the end of the experiment these pesticides were inhibiting their buzz learning buzz kill they were buzz kill so this is a whole another implication for effects of pesticides on bees that we haven't previously known about related to behavior and therefore pollen collection so that's perhaps a reason for organics it's just something to keep in mind the bees are already in trouble it's good for us to know what's going on with them so we can adjust absolutely and that is the buzz for this week that does it we're gonna leave you on a little bit of a low note this week I guess no I'll just say we can we can save the bees we can save them because the agriculture we're using the pesticides to help the agriculture but the bees help the agriculture so we're kind of at a zero sum but if we change the pesticides reduce the pesticides go to natural pesticides we can fix it because now we know about it which is the whole point of science right better is that better yeah okay there's a high note there we go and on that note thank you everyone for joining us tonight we have made it to the end of another episode I want to say thank you to Brandon and Fada and Identity Four for helping us do all the things we do and I would love 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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 robots with a simple device I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand so this week science is coming your way so everybody listen what I say I use the scientific method for all that is worth and I'll broadcast my opinion all over the earth it's this week in science this week in science this week in science science science this week in science this week in science this week in science science science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what I say may not represent your views but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan if you listen to the science you may just that understand but we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to save the world from jeopardy week in science is coming your way so everybody listen do everything we say and if you use our methods that'll roll and I die we may rid the world of toxoplasma got the eye because it's this week in science this week in science this week in science science science this week in science this week in science science science at our laundry list of items I want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote more rational thought and I'll try to answer any question you've got. But how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop? This week in science, science, this week in science, science, science, this week in science, this week in science, this week in science. We reached the end of another episode. It is now the after show. We did it. We did it. It was a very long show. Very long show. A two hour show. A two hour show. It's pretty good with an interview and all the stories. Yeah. There was a point where I was like, okay, we don't have to read the whole story. Truncate. Truncate for time. Look at the clock. Truncate for time. And then I come across as rude. So I'm like, okay, moving on. No, man, that's your job. You're the producer. It's my job. Let's keep moving people. We tried using the chat windows, but I feel like they were not being seen. Not being seen. Not seen. Yeah. Are we going to have a giant panda squirrel t-shirt? Yeah, I'll work on it. I went actually looking. I went online. I was like, are there any pictures of a giant panda squirrel? That's the question. How do you make it look giant? I guess you put it next to a tree. Maybe. Yes, Fat. I left out the crisper story and then I deleted it from the rundown. Yeah, I will work on that art imminently. If you look on giant panda squirrel and images, there's all sorts of pictures. I guess there was some video from the Toronto Zoo of a panda that got scared by a squirrel. And there's all these squirrels. And then you scroll down far enough and there's this one. Here we go. And it is small and lovely, but has a very big tail, squirrel. It looks very cute and lives only in China, giant panda. It takes both of the things you love and puts them in one place. Here it is. Oh, I'm not screen sharing. Hold on. Here it is. Now I can share with you. Small and lovely. More like small and a big jerk. I love this foreign language school document that this is obviously taken from. It's got a squirrel writing a water ski. Yes. Always with the squirrels on the water ski. They're just trying to lure you in, make you think that they're harmless, and then they'll attack. Small and lovely for the very big tail. So the question is only in China, giant panda. Maybe I'll do the difference. Maybe I'll do a big squirrel that looks like a panda and then I'll do a panda that looks like a squirrel. Because those are two different things. I was thinking like a giant panda with a big bushy squirrel tail. Yeah. I was thinking this image I'm going to screen share that has been shared to me more times than I can count since I started to twist this picture. I've seen so many times that I would do something of that ilk. That's little. We went giant. But it would have to be big and munching bamboo perhaps. Yes. Yeah. That's sort of how I pictured it. A squirrel painted like a panda. The giant panda squirrel. But you would need something for reference to show that it was gigantic. That's what I was saying. Yeah. Oh, a T-Rex. Oh, yeah. Next to a T-Rex. But I definitely do. Or a Brontosaurus. I would put it next to like an elephant. Like because that's how I always see the giant ground sloth. It's like this is what an elephant which didn't live anywhere near a giant ground sloth. This is what an elephant would height would be. Well, if I was better at drawing humans, which I still might try to do, I would draw a human running in fear from it. Just do a little stick figure in it. That's fine. Yeah. Yeah. Running away. I like it. We'll see. We'll see. I'm working on it. We love it. I love it. I love it. And then we need a song for the giant panda squirrel. Where's the giant panda squirrel? Here's somebody. Oh, the cats are back. They're putting their paws under the door again. Oh, man. Might be my kid. So did I talk about this already? My four-year-old has been like obsessed with like scary movies. Kids' scary movies, but kids' scary stuff from Halloween. And it's gotten her like at first it was just off like she really likes it and likes the scariness and talking about it and telling scary stories to her actually kind of getting scared about like monsters. So she's like, what are you scared of? And I told her, cats. She's like, what? And I'm like, yeah, cats. Cats scare me. And so now she's like, when we see cats, she's like the brave one that's like, I got you. Just hold my hand, Papa. She can be the reassuring one whenever we see a cat. And it's really, really sweet. Scary movie. She's like, I can be like, I'm not afraid of monsters at all. Like so, you can hold my hand. But hey, like she really liked finding out that I was scared of something and that it was something not scary at all. And I'm like, yeah, it's the same with thing with monsters. You're scared of monsters, but I'm not scared of them at all because there's nothing to be scared of monsters because they're not real. But cats are real. Cats are, she's like. Anyway, that's good. Yeah. Oh my gosh. My search of panda squirrel came up with a lot of red pandas, which in fairness is kind of like a panda squirrel. It's an interesting point. It has a long fluffy tail, climbs and trees, but it's a panda. There we go. There you go. Yeah. So we have the calendars ordered. They should be getting here. This did standard. So we'll probably get here maybe next week. Maybe before I head off for Thanksgiving, but I don't know. Oh, Fada wants to know, did you leave out a CRISPR story? I did. Yeah. I think I saw that in the rundown. Yeah. I was like, I want this show to be over and I don't want to talk about it. I went, that's it. That's the end of that. How are you taking a picture of? Well, I was, somebody tagged me for that seven days of black and white photos. And so, yeah, this, I gotta do a day. Yeah. Yeah, there we go. Um, guess what was announced today? What? The SF sketch fest lineup. Yes. The lineup was released today. And we're on it. We're on it. Yeah. We're going to sketch fest. We're going to sketch fest. We're going to sketch fest again. Yeah. January 18th. Where is it this year? We're still at the Cal Academy this year. Oh, that's cool. San Francisco. Where it is every year. SF, it's called SF sketch fest because it's in SF. And we are part of sketch fest nightlife because we are science and that is their funny science night. Yeah. Sketch fest.com. I just got the email. I haven't had a chance to read it. So I'm going to put a little gold star on that so I know it'll go into a box and not get lost. Oh, god. Cat scroll. Ed, no, I can't even click on it. No, I hate it. People love Photoshop, don't they? Yeah. So I'm really excited about that. There's some really good stuff. I'm going to go spend a lot of money on tickets. Are you? Yeah. Nice. You love your comedy. I don't know if I'll be able to be in town long enough to see more comedy, but I'll be there for the show. You should come the day before so you can go to the networking thing with me so I don't have to go by myself. Yeah, I could pause. I could try doing that. Or maybe it's the day after. I bet it's the day after. What day of the week? It's a Thursday. It's just like last year. Like last year. What's a Thursday? Okay. Oh, yeah. Figure it out, Justin. Oh, yeah. Multiple job man. It is I, multiple job men. I wear many hats. Yeah. I am a man with multiple incomes and expectations. Oh, that kitty wants to eat that squirrel bleak because of the kittens. It's licking it because it's going to eat it. Juggler of schedules. Utilizer of the daily planner. It is I, multiple jobs man. Thank you, God. What is that? Day planner. I had one of those. That was the most, and it worked for like a month. It worked. I had one of those. There's some name brand version of it, but I had one of those. It worked great for a month. And then because it keeps feeding itself into other things you have to do later, it became like, I'm just going to throw this away. I'm just going to, can't do it. I kept a paper like dayminder until probably less than two years ago. And I finally gave up and started using my phone also because my phone would, you know, the technology is so smart now that it would read my emails and auto-populate my calendar sometimes. And I'd be like, okay, I can't have, I can't check. I'm already checking a work calendar that's digital, two work calendars that are paper, and I'm checking my own personal calendar. I'm not going to then check my personal calendar in paper and my personal calendar on my phone. Too much. I was like, okay, give up. It's all my phone now. It gets to be too much to carry around. Just too much. You can't do it all. Too many calendars. I, somebody calls me, are you available for a meeting on this day? And I have to check four calendars. Yeah, that's too much. It has to all be together in one place. But I've decided that I'm going to get a big white board for the back of my door to my office so I can map out projects. I love light boards. I need a big white board. And the problem with my office is it's got like the, you know, the high boards all around it. And it's just, it's at a height where I'm short. I can't read. I mean, getting up to write on something up there would be dangerous and awkward. The only place in this room is on the back of the door. And I need it. Unless I got an easel. Maybe I should get an easel. I got some fun toys lately. Well, they're not mine. I got them. This is my daughter's birthday month. One of my daughters, Satya's birthday month. And so I've been getting her, I've been setting her up a lab. But we just got a pH tester and a magnetic mixer. Nice. That's what I need. There's like a little mini magnetic mixer with a little magnet. You put it in the beaker and it creates a little vortex in there. I love that. I used to just put water in beakers and do just turn on the magnet. It's spinners because I liked doing that. I liked doing that. And then adding anything that added color to the water. Yeah, we've got all kinds of food coloring. And she's been playing with, I mean, you know, stuff like vinegar and baking, sort of, you know, making stuff fizz, putting balloons over the beakers to see how much it fizzes based on how much you put in, how much that inflates the balloon with the CO2. But yeah, that magnetic mixer has been a hit. And so the littler one too, mostly just plays with the food coloring, but has been working in the lab there too. So I've got some future scientists in the work share. I've got my kids playing with lab equipment. Like that's perfect, right? That is perfect. They're going to get to some level of school that has a lab and be like, Oh, it's playtime. Hey, let's go. Hey, Bleak, I don't think we're going to be able to do a day corrected version of the calendar for you. Oh my gosh. Yeah, so Bleak's asking us to put twist on Thursdays on for Australia. It is in Australia. It says, it says PST on there. But to be fair, in our show promo on YouTube. That's right. It says Thursday. It says we're on Thursdays. Oh, yeah. That's for our Australian viewers. But I also, to do that, I would also have to go through and check the dates of every single holiday that I put on there. So it's quite the, oof, that would be many, many hours. I think you need to up your Patreon level for me to do that. Then I'll do it. All right, you guys. Is it bedtime? Is it time for me to rest this voice before I go teach more children tomorrow? Yeah, go rest yourself. This is kind of a, I just figured out how you can distinguish an alligator from a crocodile. It's whether or not the animal sees you later or in a while. That's the best way. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Yeah, I was sick last week. And so this over the weekend, my voice was definitely faltering. And then this week, every day this week, I've been teaching at least two classes a day. Oh, nice. Which means it's been lights out for my vocal chords. Hurry, everybody. Well, in the interest of keeping Blair healthy enough to make it back to the show next week. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Gigi. And good night, everyone. And congratulations to Australia for voting in favor of Savings Sex Marriage yesterday. Congratulations. That is a wonderful, wonderful step. Let's see if we can all learn to do this and be, but we're going to go to bed now. Let's sleep on it. Just be good to everybody, guys. That's right. Be nice to each other and learn new things and learn new viewpoints. Be excellent. Yes, be excellent to each other, as the great Abe Lincoln once said. Right. Yeah, excellent. Yeah, excellent. Oops, now I'm throwing things around. Okay. Good night, everybody. Good night, everybody. We'll see you again next week. Thank you so much for watching or listening or whatever. Bye.