 Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of Science Theatre. We are bringing you our weekly broadcast of the Twist podcast, in which we will discuss the science that we enjoy. And now we will do that, and you will hear or see the whole thing. If you are going to be signing up for the podcast, which we do hope that you will do, it will not be the whole thing, because there is editing. Here we are, man. Yeah! Yeah, yeah! Okay, you ready? We're going to do this show? I was waiting for verbal acrobatics. Oh yeah, totally. It's uh... Affirmative. Great. All right, let's do this. It's time for Twist. In three, two... This is Twist. This week in Science, episode number 872, recorded on Wednesday, April 20th, 2022. Going cuckoo for Earth Day. Hey there, I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight on the show we will fill your head with cuckoos, cookies, and cancer. But first... Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Hello science mild friend, come to talk with you again About research softly creeping Newly published while we were sleeping And the stories implanted in our brains They still remain Within the sound of This Week in Science Coming up next. Got the kind of mind that can't get enough Every day of the week, there's only one place to go To find the knowledge I seek It's Tiki Kimbler. And the good science to you too, Justin Blair And everyone out there, welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are here, yes. Science, our old friend. Maybe to some of you it's a new friend, but science is always a friend. So let's have some friendly conversation about all the science from the past week. I have stories of import. Well, excitement, because you know what? Today is International Cuckoo Day, but I'm not talking about that at all Because Earth Day is coming on Friday So I've got some Earth-based stories to remind us about this incredible planet that we live on. I've got some acceleration. What else did I have? Oh, yeah, I have the cookies that were in the front there. I've got COVID and a lack of imagination. Sorry to hear that. Justin, what did you bring? I've got a couple of sound stories. I've got a 500 million year old camera And finally a good use for turmeric. Finally, I use it in all the things. Not a big fan of the curry. Okay, I love the curry. Blair, tell us about the animal corner. Oh, I have rhinos and I also have cuckoos. Yes. I knew you could do it for us on this International Day of Cuckoo-ness. And then I also brought a story that it turns out you guys talked about when I missed a show. So I'm going to have something else in the first part of the show. It'll be a surprise. I'm so sad that you figured that out because I always like it when somebody takes a week off And then it's doing that because then the job just... I looked before I did my research last week, but I forgot from last week to this week. And there's always a lag for certain journals to publish things. So it looked like this week's news to me. Oops. It's old news. It's old news. We just want the new news. Now nobody knows what news we have been noodling about. On the show tonight, we have so much science. So I do hope that you will consider subscribing. You can find us on all podcast platforms. Pretty much not all of them, but we're out there. Look for this week in science. We also broadcast weekly at 8 p.m. Pacific time on Facebook, YouTube and Twitch. We are twist science, T-W-I-S-C-I-E-N-C-E on Twitch, Twitter and Instagram. And if all of this is just making your noodle more noodle-ier, then head over to twist.org where you can find show notes and links to all of these places. And with that done, let's dive into the news. All right. As I mentioned, Earth Day is right around the corner. So let's start out the show with a little reminder about our wonderful planet Earth. Climate Central does a great job of telling us about the important changes that are occurring in the science that is helping us understand the changes to climate going on. And as always, they have posted ahead of Earth Day, taking stock of, as I say, widespread warming in 246 U.S. locations, 49 states and the nation since 1970. Why 1970? Well, that was the year that we first celebrated our planet, the first year of Earth Day celebrations. Since then, the United States has warmed by 2.6 degrees Fahrenheit, which is just almost, but not quite to that 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, which would be about the one and a half degrees Celsius equivalent warming that the IPCC has warned against. So we're getting there. 49 states and 99% of 246 U.S. cities have warmed since 1970. The fastest warming city. This is your trivia for this week. Do you know what city it was? I feel like it's going to be a place that was already hot, but maybe that would be a place that was cold. It would be a place that was cold. This one's cool. This one, actually, I was very surprised at. Reno, Nevada is the fastest warming city in the United States. But the fastest warming state is Alaska. You got it. Absolutely. The fastest warming state was Alaska. Is Alaska. And many northern states are experiencing a lot of warming, but really the Southwest is experiencing the largest amount of warming since 1970, other than Alaska being so far north. So we've got an increase in the concentration of heat trapping gases and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide has increased almost 30% since 1970, and temperatures are increasing as we've been talking about. There is work that we can do. You can look into Earth Day celebrations near you. You can find, if you head to EarthDay.org, EarthDay.org is a great organization that is actually doing an all-day celebration. They're going to be doing webinars and all sorts of stuff all day long. And there are events all over the United States and around the world to allow you to take place in Earth Day. So this Friday, find yourself, find your way to an Earth Day event or join the Earth Day organization online. Their theme this year is investing in our planet, because we do need to invest in it. We need to innovate and implement and make changes moving forward because we only have one Earth. I don't think there's any controversy about that at this point in time. There's not. I feel like we're going to be doing this show. And now we are one degree Celsius above the 1.5 that the IPCC has. Hey, you guys remember Florida? That was water. I feel like it's just going to slow train into global warming water world as we continue to report on and talk about global warming. I'm becoming pessimist. How could that ever happen? I don't know. I kind of feel like there's got to be some kind of that snarky side to you that isn't really pessimistic about the loss of Florida that actually deep down inside this is optimistic. Longs for it. All right. Well, let's get into some other really great news. There's a new cure for cancer. Oh, you want to go right to, yeah. I want to go right in there. What you got. This is University of Michigan researchers have used sound to kill cancer in rats. They used focused ultrasound acoustic waves to break down liver tumors destroying 50 to 75% of the tumor's volume, which apparently was enough for the rats immune system to clear the rest. They didn't completely destroy these tumors as their experiment was designed to do. I think they were probably looking for the minimum that they could do to have sort of an effect, but destroying half of the tumor was enough. The method also allowed for targeting of those tissues within a millimeter precision. So it's very rather precise. More than 80% of the animals, there was no evidence of recurrence of metastasis or recurrence or metastasis, which is a fantastic result. But it's actually kind of difficult because it must be nearly impossible to tell if the reoccurrences and the metastasis metastasis being when cancer cells kind of break off from the tumor and it goes somewhere else in the body and start growing again. It must be very difficult to know if that already process has already started before their treatment. So it could actually even be better than the data suggests if you get to it early enough, of course. Quoting Zhen Su, professor of biomedical engineering, UM and corresponding author of the study, which is published in Cancers. This will be a really fun magazine. Quoting, even if we don't target the entire tumor, we can still cause the tumor to regress and also reduce the risk of future metastasis. The treatment stimulated the rats immune system responses, possibly contributing to the eventual regression of the untargeted portions of the tumor and preventing further spread of the cancer. The technique is currently being used now in a human liver cancer trial in both the United States and Europe. So this is a study on rats, but it looks like they've already got it moved over to the human trials. That's pretty, that's pretty wild. So that's, you know, fast moving, it's exciting. Yeah, this is using microsecond lung pulses from a transducer to generate micro bubbles within the targeted tissues. Bubbles then rapidly expand and collapse. These are very violent but extremely localized mechanical stresses that killed the cells of the tumors and then break it up, break up its structure leading to, I guess, giving the immune system a way in or fighting chance. Yeah, yeah, that's totally what would happen. As long as the tumor is organized, it's able to use its cellular defenses, I guess the broken cellular defenses to be able to maintain its structure and its form and protect itself. But as soon as you start breaking it apart, I can't do that as well anymore. Yeah, I didn't unfortunately get enough into the details. But one of the things that cancer cells are doing is they're not communicating with the surrounding tissues anymore. So the other tissues are like, hey, you need to do some apoptosis, you need to turn off, you need to stop growing, and the cancer cells just don't pay attention. Oh, can't hear you! But then all of a sudden the micro bubbles and things are going and they're like, oh, help, help, help! It's like, oh, you could hear us. You were just choosing to ignore us. Okay, yeah, we're going to come help you. Yeah, we'll help you. I don't know, but it's pretty amazing. And this is, this targeting with sound is also non-invasive. So this is a high-powered focused version that basically have an ultrasound, which is completely, you know, take images of babies and stuff like that. It's not the same thing that they're using. But it's basically the same idea. So it's non-invasive. You don't have to do a surgery. You don't have to open a body and carve away its stuff. You can target this through skin. So non-invasive on top of the fact that it looks like it's being pretty darned effective. Incredibly effective. And because it's so just it's targeted sound, you don't have to deal with drug interactions. You don't have to deal with aspects of, you know, metabolites or other aspects of the physiology aside from, okay, what tissue are you damaging? And what are the recovery processes of that tissue? Once the tumor has been ablated, I guess, damaged? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, right. We got a ton of surgeries or yeah, you're right. Whole body radiation. Yeah. It's pretty chemotherapy in the treatment. They're pretty extreme and they have a massive effect on the whole body's health. And so then recovery becomes such a big issue. If you can just target with sound and you go in there and you sit down, they put the little bit of gel stuff on you and put the little thing up there or whatever they do it. There's only a little bit of burning. Sound treatment is so funny because on the scale of pharmaceuticals to crystals, you would think that sound treatment for a disease would be very close to the crystal end of the spectrum, right? No, no. It sounds very like woo, but in reality, this is a big deal. It sounds like, oh, like, you know, play some good music to your, you know, to your body and you'll heal. And you know, it sounds very kind of touchy-feely, right? Yeah. But it's a physical thing. Yeah. The games are a thing. It's a force. So it's, even though it sounds very kind of silly and ethereal, it's way closer on the other side of the spectrum. Well, people actually have, though, being able to use light therapy to cure things like cataracts or, you know, other vision problems. They call it laser surgery, but you know, they put a laser in there and they do that. But it's like, yeah, light, lasers, sound. It's all very frequency influenced, right? It depends what the frequency is and what power you're using. We're just a bunch of electrons. Amplitude and frequency are very important when it comes to things like this. So you're not doing sound baths. And there's a question there that says, won't allow cancer cells to travel. According to this, 80% successful without metastasis after, because that's the thing you would worry about. You break up the tumor and then you've got metastasis going everywhere. It's not quite how metastasis works. It's not just a break-off piece that then floats around. Yeah. They're like literally sending out away missions. Right. And so the cells have a very specific function if they're going to go out, seek out a new habitat in your physiological ecosystem, right? So the cells have, they are those sentry ants, right? The ones that are going out first, checking out what's going on out there. And then those cells can start laying down a new residence in your body. But then with these, what you've done is you've broken it apart. And so the cells aren't ready for being sent out into the unknown. They're not necessarily those secret ants. They're all tough when they're hanging out together. Yes. Catch them on their own. That's where the immune system comes in. Gotcha. Blair. Yes. Since you're not going to talk about the talking mushrooms. No. We've talked about that before. What are you going to talk about now? I do love that story though. All right. Now I have to listen back and enjoy it as a passive listener instead. Because it's such a fun story. Anyway, I'm here to talk about SCURO, the robotic rat. This is from a team of researchers led by Professor King Shi from Beijing Institute of Technology, China. They have developed a novel robotic rat named SCURO, small size quadrupedic robotic rat. So this has been over 10 years in the making. They developed robots that were able to reproduce movement or behavior of rats. Originally they were wheeled robotic rats that could do rat-like behaviors. But more recently the wheels have been replaced by legs, more like big dog and other robots that we've seen. But the great thing about this guy is that he's rat-sized. So he's smaller. So if you're thinking about search and rescue and things like that, big dog is not going to go into a search and rescue experience and be able to come out. First of all, being able to enter narrow spaces but also being able to bring out larger payloads. So enter the rat. That's because rats go in and out of narrow spaces and carry heavy things that are very agile in real life. So they have this elongated slim body. They were able to mimic the motion of actual rats inside narrow spaces, crouching to standing, walking, crawling, turning, and can recover after falling by controlling their limbs and cervical parts to adjust their center of mass. They also pass through an irregular narrow passage and enter width of 90 millimeters. And that is, you know, 9 centimeters. Cross an obstacle with a height of 30 millimeters and achieve stable locomotion on a slope with an inclination of 15 degrees. So that all demonstrates their application for inspection tasks inside narrow spaces. Why they had to give a rat face? I don't know. There's not a real reason for that other than maybe if they come across somebody who's trapped, it's less terrifying, I suppose. Yeah, their first one they were going to do was a rescue snake where people reacted even worse. Yes, yes, yes. So that the other thing that's why does it have a tail? Oh, that's probably for balance, right? To help it with the center of mass. That would make sense. Yeah, probably. I don't know. Or maybe just for fun. But the really interesting thing about this is that they were able to carry a load equal to 91% of their own weight, which demonstrates superior payload compared to other quadripedic robots. So our little Squarrow has potentially a bright future. I really need, move over both the dynamics. I need my music video of Squarrow immediately. Please and thank you. Also, don't kick Squarrow, please. No. I hope no one would kick the little Squarrow. And hopefully this will be a friendlier rat to those individuals who are not fans of real rats. Yeah. Well, I think that's why they made it white also is so if you made it like dark gray or black in a kind of dark covered up rescue operation, it could look like a real rat and scare somebody, right? But it's bright white. So I feel like they're like, oh, that's a rat shaped robot. Got it. And it really is. It's got the ears. It's got a pointy nose. It looks like it might have whiskers. I wonder if they would actually add whiskers for sensory aspects at the front of the rat, right? I don't know. But you could have in the head of the rat. I mean, the reason an animal, a rat, a dog, a cat, you know, us, we have a head in a particular shape is for us to be able to survive and sense our environment. The rat goes into little tiny places. The whiskers are able to sense whether or not they can fit in spaces. They can sense sensitive vibrations in the air. Their noses, which stick out in front, are able to scent any chemicals that are odorants that are in the air. And the eyes are up front to let you know what's going on. So I wonder if they're going to put a whole bunch of sensors up there now that they have all of the movement down. I did the CSI thing. I enhanced, enhanced, enhanced. And it does look like on this photo, there is a little wire poking out of one side of this. So perhaps it is, you know, to kind of judge how wide an opening is before they go in and get stuck. That's perfectly possible. It's possible. Yeah. Oh, Squiro, what will you do? And what will you be? Hopefully save lives and a hero, respectively. You're my Squiro. Okay, let's move to back to the earth. We can talk about a little bit of research that is ongoing. Looking into our oceans and our ocean currents back to this idea of climate change that I touched on at the very top of this segment of stories. A group out of Scripps Institution of Oceanography is working with an international collaboration to computer model simulations to look at the ocean surfaces. Researchers have been doing this looking at the ocean and how the different currents move in the ocean. We know that there are very regular oscillations. There are gyres that occur around where continents meet oceans. And this week, they published in the journal Science Advances their work that a bunch of, they used a bunch of computer simulations to confirm that as the climate warms, the surface of the air close to the ocean is going to, the ocean's going to heat up, the air is heating up. And as that heating takes place, there's a lot of evaporation as well. And what is actually happening is that top layer of water on the ocean becomes lighter. It's almost as if because that chance that that evaporation is taking place that it's lifting that little top layer of water and because that water at the top that interface between the air and the ocean is lighter, it's starting to move faster. And they're seeing surface currents speed up in more than three quarters of the world's oceans as they simulated heating the oceans more and more and more. And so that's really interesting because it's not. Well, I guess it's maybe it's a different dynamic that's doing the Atlantic conveyor belt. Right, so this isn't necessarily affecting the deeper currents yet so upwelling and stuff like the Atlantic conveyor belt, but it could because you have the Atlantic conveyor belt that dives way down deep into the colder water and then comes up to the top. And that it moves across the surface at the hotter side and then dives down deep again. And so, because the top part of that current is going faster, it could change the way that that convection current takes place. More so what they're they're thinking about is how this what the implications are for removing carbon from the oceans, heating the atmosphere and the ongoing protection by the ocean from from overall global global warming as it takes up carbon dioxide. What they say is our study points to a way forward for investigating ocean circulation change and evaluating the uncertainty. And so there's a lot of uncertainty in how the oceans play a role in removing carbon in how they how the changing speed of gyres in the surface of the ocean. There's speeding up underneath slowing down underneath speeding up on top slowing down underneath. I mean, that this could really be affecting greenhouse gas levels over time and they don't really know exactly what the inputs are and how it all balances. And so now this is it gives them something to add to the climate models to make the climate models a bit more accurate. And one interesting thing that they did see. So the the models that they're looking at and the way that the different oceans work. And like I said, you have all of the continents, the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, there are these gyres that are or I guess you could also think gyres that are in play between different mixing areas of the of the surface of the ocean. The only place that these don't take place is around Antarctica. And since Antarctica is at the very southern pole, the Antarctic, the southern ocean goes around Antarctica. And so you have these westerly winds that just go around and around and around Antarctica. And their models do have those speeding up. And indeed, last year, script scientists detected from space the Antarctic circumpolar current is speeding up. So now they have models which are in line with observations. And so this is the this is all part and parcel with a warming climate. Speeding currents zipping along the surface of the ocean. It'll change the way that rain is distributed and that air is pushed because the air and the ocean come together. And so there will be more extreme weather events, which already we're going to increase because of climate change. And so now this will make them increase even more. Yeah. And eventually the end of Florida. So it's not all bad. Oh boy. Unless you own property in Florida. Well, less land mass is a problem no matter what, because there's a lot of humans. Yeah. Oh yeah, they'd have to go somewhere. They have to go somewhere. Oh yeah, we need to reverse this thing. Yeah. I kind of like the fact that they're all the way down in the water. Plus where will all the alligators live is my whole question. Montana. Because they're freshwater critters is the thing. Montana. So just move back. All right. Tell me though, there's some good news out there, isn't there? Energetically, we can do things better. Yeah, this is just a good news story. Cybernetic implants. Not everyone has them yet, but some people already do. And many more will in the years to come. Typically we think of cybernetic implants as sort of being medical technology. But we, you know, pacemakers, that sort of thing. But we could be getting into the realm of people, you know, with all the connectivity and digitalization and devising, shrinkaging. People might just get tired of losing phones or carrying stuff around just to start implanting things. Some people have already started doing this. So the number of people using implanted electronic devices is only going to get bigger. Batteries of body implanted devices. They need to get replaced occasionally. And how do you do that? Surgery. You have to cut open and go to the device and take it out and change its battery or plug it in and put it back in. However you're going to do it requires surgery to take a thing out and put it back in. And most people don't like having surgery done. There's other health complications that are potential infections and that sort of thing. So why not make them just charge wirelessly? We have, so electromagnetic induction, that's what we typically think of when we think about wireless charging. That's the thing that smart phones can do. Some smart phones can do wireless earphone devices are doing this already. You get a mattress pad that's a charging, right? You just lay down to sleep. You charge everything. Oh, that's a different thing. That's all I want. It's a different way. So the usage of that is going to be limited though because waves from electromagnetic induction don't pass through water or metal. So you have a short charging distance to begin with and humans are mostly water. And if the device is made out of metal, the battery inside is not going to be able to charge. Also the heat that's generated while charging is enough to damage tissues. On an electronic device when you're charging it, that heat normally just sort of dissipates into the air. It's not a big deal. You probably don't even notice if you pick up even a phone that's been charging for a while that there's any heat. But tucked into the body where that heat has nowhere to escape, it builds up and damages tissues. So there's no way to do it until a new wireless charging technique by the Kreen Institute of Science and Technology, KIST. They've just discovered a way that they can use sound to charge implant batteries without having to replace them. Researcher is led by Dr. Yun Chul-Sung at the Electronic Materials Research Center. It's an ultrasonic wireless power transmission technology. Now Kiki, I don't know if you know. But if you check the show rundown in the notes section, there's a couple of videos of this thing working. So they adopted this ultrasonic waves energy transmission thing, converts ultrasonic waves into electrical energy using the tribal electric principle that allows for the conversion of small mechanical vibrations into electrical energy effectively. And they use a crystal. That's cool. I mean, that's a really, really very cool application of the tribal electric effect from crystals. Yeah, so you've got the video. This is 200 individual little LED diodes. And it's going to power them with sound. And they turn it off. There it is. It's working. And then, so they did that. And then they also, and then the other video that's up there, they used it. They charged through a chunk of pork. There it is. They got it one on one side. This is the experimenting. I just... But look, you can see the power is making through that big chunk of pork because... And it did not cook the pork. That is the crucial point. It didn't cook it and was able to... Yeah, so basically their systems looks like it's working. Dr. Son explains the study demonstrated that electronic devices can be driven by wireless power charging via ultrasonic waves if the stability and efficiency of the device are further improved. In the future, this technology can be applied to supply power wirelessly to implantable sensors or in deep-sea sensors in which replacing batteries is cumbersome. So apparently, we have under the oceans cables that do all of the global communication connectivity stuff. And there's sensors down there that monitor, I guess, the health of the cable or the things that are working. And every once in a while, some poor sap has to swim down to the bottom of the ocean. I don't know, take a submarine, have some sort of... I don't know how they do it. They go down and have to change batteries on one of these things. It's ridiculous. They forgot to put a power line down because that wouldn't have to be all it took. They forgot to do that apparently so they've got batteries. Well, what you're doing is you're using a sensor to detect whether or not there's corrosion of a line that would influence the ability of that line to allow communication or electricity transfer. Then you don't really want another line that could be corroded in the process. So you probably have a whole packaged system. I guess you're right. Yeah, but still, yeah, interesting. There are probably all sorts of uses underwater for chargers. A way to charge things up, right? Yeah, this sounds like underwater. I mean, I got to charge my cell phone when I'm diving. I got to take those cute underwater pictures. Without the example that they offered, I don't think I would have imagined a anytime reason to need to charge something underwater. Well, you need to charge your solar sub when you're too far down for the sun. When you're in the aphotic zone, then you need to charge it. But charging it with what? If you have a thing that's charged with a battery, that's like a whole extra step. Just charge it, have that much more battery available. It just didn't make sense why that would be. So it has that one industrial purpose and then all of the implanted. I'm going to imagine there's more industrial purposes than that. There's a lot of stuff that we do underwater or even at the surface of water that could involve the need for wireless battery charging. I'm going to think that this is going to, this is, we are a wet planet. I'm going to trust that scientists know what they're doing here. They're just making things up. We need to write that down in the broader impact statement. It sounds problematic to have an implanted thing that is going to get charged via the water inside your body that runs on electrical impulses. It scares me. You're scared of too many things like that. But people already have like pacemakers. I think that's just the thing. And then every once in a while they have to have a battery that has to be replaced. You have a date that the battery is good till and sometime well before that date you need to go in and have surgery. And while they open up your chest and take the device out and change the battery real quick. And there are other devices that they actually have the power cable coming out of your head, say for retinal implants or cochlear implants. Sometimes the batteries are actually there in your skull or they have cables coming out and you plug a battery into it. So it makes things a lot simpler to be able to have the power generation internalized. And you could build it into your pillow. So when you're charging your body and the mattress, you've got the pillow there. Charge everything. That's interesting. I love it. Well, this might be the time for anyone who has a bag of Oreos out there. Now that we're talking about getting charged up. I'm really glad you brought the story. I almost brought it because I liked it so much. Let's talk about Oreos. Let's talk about Oreos. And Blair, what is it that you do with an Oreo? I mean, how do you eat an Oreo? Well, I guess I was psychopath because I just don't get in and eat it. What? But I know the stereotypical thing is you twist it. But see, I want the perfect mixture of cookie and frosting. I want it evenly. I don't want any uneven bites. So I don't do that. But I know people normally twist them and the filling comes off on one side and you get just cookie on the other side. That's right. I've never understood that either. That's like going in and like getting Rocky Road ice cream and then like, I'm just going to take all of these nuts out first, whatever. That's totally what I would do. Now he goes later. Somebody else likes the whole thing. I'm just going to want the chocolate ice cream. I don't want any other stuff and it's all picked the bits out of it. Chocolate ice cream. There's a little something for everybody. So this is what this experiment was getting at. Blair and Justin is this evenness of filling distribution. And why is it that it seems like you twist the cookie and it always comes off on one side? Are there reasons or ways that would make it come off evenly where you have half of the frosting on either side of the cookie? We don't know exactly how the magic of the Oreos happens, but this team, they from MIT, they went through about 20 boxes of Oreos, including regular double stuff and mega stuff, levels of filling and regular dark chocolate and golden wafer flavors. To answer the question of whether or not the frosting would ever, the filling would ever separate evenly. And no, no, it did not. Why did they do this experiment? How did they do this experiment? The researchers who were involved in this are rheologists. And you may say, what is a rheologist? What is? What is rheology? Well, rheology is the study of how non-Newtonian, well, not just non-Newtonian, but how material flows. How non-Newtonian material flows when it's twisted, pressed or stressed. Does it flow? Does it crack? Does it shatter? Does it stretch? Does it ooze? So engineers need to know these kinds of things for not only developing materials, but all that can be used in various solutions to engineering problems, but also fixing materials that we're currently using. So apparently the study of rheology is used to study concrete. It's one of these things. Anyway. What? That's not a non-Newtonian fluid. Sure is. But I guess before it dries, it is. There you go. Wow. I would have just thought it was a normal fluid. Yeah. Yeah. In this wonderful study, they put an Oreo cookie into a rheostat. A rheostat is a device for studying the forces involved when twisting and stressing a fluid material. They glued two sides of an Oreo to either side of the rheostat and then set about twisting the Oreo with different amounts of force. They used pennies to adjust the force that was to balance it and to adjust the force that was used. They twisted their Oreo cookies and were able to see what happened to the filling inside. And it never splits evenly ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. It always only comes off on one side of the cookie or the other. They did see that there were certain aspects to where the cookies were in the tray that was in the package that determined whether or not the filling came off on the right side or the left side of the cookie. And this could have something to do with manufacturing. But getting into this connection isn't just. You know, which is the left side or the right side of the. Based on which side the cookie comes out of the package. They had it. This was a science experiment, Justin. Yeah. The open package in a very particular way. And you know, make some assumptions about the manufacturing process, but okay. One of my favorite things about the story is kind of why they did this study. That's what I was just going to get to Blair. Yeah. Okay, go, go. Right. This is an experiment for helping people understand the science of rheology and why we use it and how these forces work and potentially apply to our everyday lives. The team's study was really an attempt to make rheology accessible to people. And they actually have a 3d print principle. Oriometer. And this is a device that people can print if they too would like to stress out Oreo cookies. So what I read about this story was that this was birthed from the early pandemic. And that the researchers were sent home. They were away from their lab. So this is bored. They were thinking what science can we do right now away from our labs away from the studies we were working on. This is how you can do rheology from home with your Oreos and your 3d printed. Oreo meter. And the 3d printed Oreo meter. Will allow people to be able to in classrooms be able to approach this Oreo science in a really engaging, I don't know, a really engaging way that students will be excited about eat your cookies, give them a twist, do your experiment. You can make some hypotheses, learn engineering, learn physics. It's all good. So let me ask this. Is this the first kind of weird left base research we've read that was birthed because of the shutdown? Because the timeline is right. Right. The data processing, the publishing, all of it, peer review. So maybe we're going to see more and more of these wild studies popping up in our journals that we go through every week because those early pandemic studies are now being released. I would guess also that the fish robot car might have been one of those, but nobody admitted it. Somebody was sitting at home talking to their fish going, I wish you could walk. I wish I could take you for a walk, little goldfish. That's the only time I'm allowed to leave the house is when I walk around the block. You should come with me. Yeah, but I do hope that we're able to, that there will be more of these kinds of fun experiments. Science is fun. Science can be serious. It's also a lot of fun. And scientists find ways to do science, which I think is the, that's the thing about this study that I got really excited about is like, you know, they got sent home away from their lab. They're like, they're sitting there eating their Oreo. They look at it. They go, we can, we can make this work. Yeah. I suppose if you're a rheologist, was that what it was called? R-H-E-O-L-O-G-Y. The opportunities abound for twisting, scrunching, squishing, whatever. Like that's, those are operations that really happen to materials around the house all the time. And we're going to need a lot of that. Let's make sustainable squishables. Sustainable, squeezable squishables. I don't know, twistable things. Twistable. Twistable. Very good Blair. This is This Week in Science. Thank you for joining us for another episode of our science program. We hope to talk every week about science. We can do that with your help. And with you and your friends. So please bring a friend to twist next week. All right. Let's come back to a COVID update. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Boop. We're still doing that? Yeah. Beer, beer, beer, beer. Wacka. Wacka, Wacka. All right. Tell me there's good news. There's some interesting news. It's been too long. It has been too long. I finally got COVID fatigue just today. Today? Yeah. Took me a while. I've really actually, for the most part of the pandemic, I've just really enjoyed exiting society. I was fine with it until today. Today is the day. And now you're done. It's a nice day outside. And I want to go to the zoo. And everything's open here. There's people everywhere. Everything's open. But I'm still being cautious and having fatigue. So I guess it's my own fault. We're not wanting to get a novel virus. Yeah. We don't want to get the novel virus for the main reason that not just is it can it lead to very severe disease, but usually only in a subset of the people who get infected. But a new study out of UCLA finds that in their study of about 309 people with long COVID that 30% of people treated for COVID-19 developed post acute sequelae of COVID-19 or PASC, which is what they are calling long COVID. 30%. And wait, 30% it's get they got what? I don't understand. The common symptoms of this PASC, which is post acute sequelae of COVID-19. We'll just call it long COVID. Long COVID persistent symptoms in the 309 people that they saw with long COVID were fatigue and shortness of breath about 31% and 15% respectively in hospitalized persons and a loss of sense of smell and outpatients. And this is interesting. I guess my cousin had COVID lost his sense of smell. Didn't get it back for like nine months. And it's still not all the way back. So yeah, loss of sense of smell. That's a big one. But otherwise, it's totally fine apparently. So there were a bunch of people that they looked at between April and 2020 and February 2021. They saw this 30% of people at UCLA's COVID ambulatory program develop long COVID. This seems in line with other studies that have been looking at outcomes of COVID-19 and the persistence of symptoms. So about not all people, but the people that they did see developing long COVID were people more likely to be hospitalized in the first place. These individuals were people with a history of hospitalization, diabetes, and higher body mass index who were most likely to develop it. Interestingly, those people covered by Medicaid, not commercial private health insurance, were less likely. So people with Medicaid were less likely to get long COVID. People who had undergone an organ transplant were less likely to get long COVID. And ethnicity, older age and socioeconomic status were not associated with long COVID in the least. So there were some surprises to the study, but it's still a small study, very probably unrepresentative of the general population. I think one thing it does illustrate though, beyond the shadow of doubt, is that all senses are not on the same level. We've known about the loss of sense of smell as being an effect. Nobody really cares. Nobody really cares until it happens to them. Yeah, but even then, nobody's that scared of that happening to them. If people were going blind, or losing their hearing, or just couldn't touch, feel touched anymore. Your fingers went numb? Yeah. They'd be like, oh my gosh, this is like a horrible fate. You lost your senses. Unless you're like a chef, or you're in perfume, right? Then it's a problem. I feel like one of those super-smellar people. Yeah. Just a melee. That's not going to work. Oh yeah, that would be a bad one. But that's such a, yeah. So long COVID, it's a possibility for a large number. Of people, we still don't really understand who's going to get it versus who doesn't. Really what it is is a persistence of certain symptoms longer than 90 days. So if you, after three months, two to three months, still have symptoms, then you're really in the long COVID range or with this post-acute. God. COVID, post-acute sequelae. Can we take a second to acknowledge that though? I feel like that's an important piece of information. 90 days of COVID is normal. That's not long COVID. Right. It's like, it's the, it can stick around for a while. Yeah. And I think that's the part people keep forgetting is like, oh, you can get it now. It's not as bad now. You still could be sick for 90 days. Maybe you're just fatigued a little bit, but that's three months of just being really tired and feeling less productive and less able to do things. You really want that? I don't know. But people want this to be over. And at this point in time. You already have that. Wait, what happened? You have it anyway. And you get it worse. What if you're already kind of listless? Right. And then you get the, the, and then, oh, then when you can just knock it out of bed at all. Is that what happens? Yeah. Possibly. Or are you like immune to it? Like, I'm already very lazy. And so there are multiple viruses, you know, that are these not, you know, lots of viruses that are out in the world to be worried about. Some of them are more transmissible than others. Newer variants of COVID are even more transmissible. And we were getting into the wonderful. The CDC is still suggesting that people wear their masks in public transit, but for the time being in the United States, a judge from Florida has, uh, nullified the federal mask mandate for public transit. So, uh, no longer do you have to wear a, uh, a mask in public transit? Although some outlets are still mandating it. Certain airlines, certain, uh, public transportation outlets are still, uh, are still. Asking that people wear. So it's very scattershot at this point in time and very confusing to people. It's unfortunate. And the Biden administration may be, uh, going into, uh, executive ordering or something. Yeah. Well, not executive ordering, but just, uh, getting that, getting the judgment overturned. So they're going to see about going back in. This is fixed that because they're, uh, in an interview on NPR, a public health lawyer this morning, uh, stated that. That this has bigger implications for, uh, future pandemics and future issues where, where you have interstate travel between states that the states can't cover. And if this. If this judgment is allowed to stand, it potentially will keep the federal government from being able to fill in those gaps that the states can't fill in for public health. So. It's also dangerous though, because if they escalate it and it goes the wrong way, then you create a precedence for future pandemics. So I think that was the reason that there was a hesitation and some planning happening before immediately filing an appeal. Exactly. So the appeal may happen. Uh, it's very likely to happen. Uh, But they need to really get their ducks in a row to make it right. And in the meantime, the CDC is going to be able to fill in those gaps that the states can't fill in for public health. So they need to really get their ducks in a row to make it right. And in the meantime, the CDC is sitting back going, well, we recommend you wear a mask in public places, but there's no teeth anymore. Yeah. And that's a big problem because this is a health issue, not a legal issue and not a political issue. And this is a person who was a politically appointed judge who hadn't been a judge. Yeah. Who's been before. And then they had a new case in court before like they had literally no experience for the job. And they're getting to make a huge public health policy. For a while at this point. A couple of years. For a while. She was a judge. She just hadn't tried things in a particular way before getting the appointment. But it. Yes. The, uh, what is it? The American. Lawyer, American Lawyers Association, the bar, the American bar association. Um, she's one of the few judges that they. Did that they like actively wrote a letter. Highly unqualified. Hi, saying she was highly unqualified. Yeah. Not recommending her. Uh, chat room points out. Uh, in future, uh, Florida won't exist. So we won't. We won't exist. We won't exist. That won't include. All of this. So yeah, this. Earth Day. Bringing us right back around Earth Day. Uh, so we have to track COVID these wonderful systems in our wastewater at this point. There is a huge system. That across a. Collaboration across the country where we are now monitoring wastewater. For viral particles of COVID. Levels around the country. This is potentially one reason why testing has been on the decline so much. However, uh, new study out of Stanford University has just found that some patients can shed fragments of the virus from their feces for up to seven months past their initial infection. This, uh, potentially they think plays a role in long COVID symptoms in, uh, their group of study subjects. They had 4% of their study subjects. Uh, did have long COVID. Uh, and we're still showing viral RNA seven months. After they had been affected. They found traces of SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA in the feces of just under 50% of their study cohort within a week of the initial diagnosis four months later, 12.7% of the patients were still shedding. Um, these are not infectious particles. They say these are. These are just viral fragments, but it is indicative of a persistent infection within the gut. And that SARS-CoV-2 is hiding out in the. Digestive systems. Of some individuals. We don't know why. Uh, but. This does add a question to how we're surveilling our wastewater systems, because if you do have a certain percentage of the population that. Have these ongoing persistent gut infections, how does that affect your, uh, your measurements? And so it, we just need to put that into the math and make sure it's in there accurately. Well, before that, at least it's a better safe than sorry scenario. So worst case scenario, we're overestimating how much COVID is in a population. Not under, which would be bad. Right. Yeah. It's probably better to overestimate, but you don't want to be misestimating for this at all. And so how do we track whether or not people still have long COVID when they're infected with something, when they're not infected with something? What about like all these symptoms that people talk about when they get their vaccine? Like, oh, what if there was some way to really easily track all this stuff? Oh my God, people wear smart devices. Two studies out this week, one out of the university of Michigan examined the effects of COVID-19 with six factors derived from heart rate data. They followed University of Michigan students and medical interns across the country and they discovered signals embedded in the heart rate indicating when individuals were infected with COVID and how sick they became. They found that people with COVID had an increase in their heart rate per step after symptom onset and those with a cough had a higher heart rate per step than those without a cough. They also found other symptoms, the circadian phase uncertainty, the body's inability to time daily events increased around COVID symptom onset. Daily basal heart rate tended to increase on or before symptom onset and researchers think this might have been because of fever or maybe anxiety, it might be infected, oh my gosh. Heart rate tended to be more correlated around symptom onset which could indicate the effects of stress-related hormones like adenosine. Interestingly, this could potentially lead to future studies or future use of heart data to understand infection in not just COVID but in other illnesses like the flu and just if people monitor certain factors of their heart rate it could give people an indication that maybe they're infected with something before they would know otherwise. Additionally, another study out of La Jolla Scripps Research, they just published an NPJ digital magazine, their sensor data on sleep activity and heart rate from 5600 individuals that were involved in the digital engagement and tracking for early control and treatment study that was launched in March 2020 and this study was looking at wearables to try and to see how vaccination affected physiology and they showed that average resting heart rate of study participants increased significantly the day following vaccination, peaking two days post vaccination and returning to normal four days after the first dose and six days after the second in addition to increases in resting heart rate after being higher after the second dose of Moderna versus the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the study suggests that prior COVID-19 infection was linked with a significantly higher resting heart rate increase after the first vaccine dose relative to those without prior infection. Women experienced greater changes in heart rate than men in the five days following vaccination. Individuals under the age of 40 had higher changes in resting heart rate than older adults only after the second dose and they didn't really see activity and sleep patterns change very much but this gives data where we haven't really had data before they looked at two weeks prior to vaccination and two weeks after vaccination to be able to actually see that there were changes in physiology due to vaccination which is people talk about oh I didn't feel good I had a fever I had this I had but now this is something that can actually be physically tracked without any kind of biased subjective reporting from a person. Your body does the reporting for you. Well I have to say thanks to these stories I am over my COVID fatigue and I'm back on high alert and ready to not go out and do anything again. Yes get your wearable get your little smartwatch whatever fitness band gets you there. This is This Week in Science. Thank you for joining us for another episode. If you are enjoying the show please head over to twist.org and click on the Patreon link. Patreon is how we support the show. Listeners like you can donate monthly from a dollar to a thousand dollars a month if you choose to support us at ten dollars or more per month we will thank you by name at the end of the show. We really can't do this without you. Thank you for your support. All right let's come back to a wonderful part of the show. It's gonna make us go cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo. Wait Rhino? Heck if Rhino. It's time for Blair's Animal Corner. With Blair. I have cuckoos in honor of International Cuckoo Day. But it's not good news for the cuckoos actually. So cuckoos what are they famous for? They put the egg in the other nest. Yes I think what you're saying is brood parasitism and you know what you'd be exactly right. So cuckoos smuggle their eggs into foreign nests and then they hatch early which allows them to grow quicker and beg more loudly for food and then the host birds feed the cuckoo and starve their own children to death. Such a happy story. That's what cuckoos do and that's how they survive and they have been doing this for two million years and the way that they get away with it is they mimic the color of the host parents eggs. The study that I wanted to report on tonight is all about the color of those eggs and how evolution might actually be fighting back against these cuckoos because if this was a super effective strategy this is my own editorializing is if this is super effective there would be so many cuckoos and so much less of other birds but it's effective enough that cuckoos survive but host species still are able to maintain so what what is going on here there's definitely an evolutionary arms race happening as these cuckoos get better at forging their egg colors there has to be evolutionary pressure to work around that trick. And so this study was looking at the color of eggs and how cuckoos inherit the color that they would use on their eggs. This is a study that this week proved for the first time that the skill quote-unquote inherited that dictates cuckoo egg color is inherited via the W chromosome which in birds is akin to the Y chromosome. The W chromosome indicates females however but it is the single chromosome the double chromosome like XS for us is the male and so the W indicates a female bird so that means that the skill that allows them to hatch their eggs a specific color to be able to hide the baby in plain sight is passed through the mother and the father has no impact on that like color blindness actually in humans it's sex linked onto that one chromosome. So studying the DNA samples of 196 cuckoos from 141 nests in Zambia they found this very specific linkage to the W chromosome and then they wanted to look at their ability to adjust that so it turns out that they not only get it from their mother but that they only know how to mimic quote-unquote know how to mimic the color of eggs that they were laid in so whatever they grew up in that's the type of egg that they will hatch later in life but so it's imprinted. Can I pause it for a minute? Say they get into a nest full of blue eggs and they're a blue egg and then they're going to have their own blue egg one day. Now that sort of makes sense but that's only if they keep going to blue egg nests they can't go to the yellow egg nests because then the game's over and the whole evolution yes yes however the genetic piece is that they can only go to blue egg nests because that's genetically the type of eggs that they can make the pattern and the specific look of the egg is imprinted based on the nest that they were born in so yes so they have their their crayons they're only given the blue crayons basically and then the pattern that they pick is based on what they saw growing up so yes so it's very two million years this is a lot of evolution that have got us that has got the cuckoo here so implications are insane yeah so so there are blue there are blue eggs there are red eggs they those are both found on these female chromosomes but never together and this is one of those situations where colors in inherited traits are often things that are combined for multiple chromosomes and you kind of get a blend like hair color eye color these can be things your skin color actually is the probably the best example of that is that you end up being kind of a blend of your two parents because there's multiple locations on multiple chromosomes that dictate that so it's kind of a mixture of all these different indicators that's how the colors of eggs work but because it is only found on the W chromosome the red and the blue can never be mixed you can never get this kind of in-between color that is green green and so there are certain birds that have figured out that they can lay olive green eggs the tawny flanked prinia that cannot be duped by a cuckoo because cuckoos cannot make green eggs so this is this is kind of a extremely convoluted story based on many previous pieces of research over many many years that have figured out these bits and pieces of how cuckoos work bit by bit and now we are at this place where we understand how they can make their colors and what their limitations are in their eggs what that means is there are certain colors of eggs that cuckoos cannot infect the nest of and so there are safeguards against cuckoos the question is how many quote-unquote unforgible egg signatures will start to evolve and how many of these will force cuckoos to change either the host that they use the way that they fool them or the way that they raise their babies how will evolution push these guys in the future I think this is a fascinating question it's been millions of years already yes to this point so it's it's obviously a very difficult yeah back and forth a very difficult process of adaptation and you know there's lots of birds in the tree you could say so they probably could switch to other species without too much trouble maybe maybe that's that's really interesting but I'm still they can make the pattern on the egg from the one so that does that mean because without going into a visual to genetic memory to knowing how to like the intuitive body designing an egg to mimic I don't see it's not possible but could it be like there's like a direct diet thing because they're eating the diet early on of whatever they're being fed by the mama bird in that nest it's hard for me to that would make that would be variable and even even that pathway is like okay so how does that work but like because then you're talking about something that's imprinted by their diet that then affects all of the eggs which I guess is how that works I think it's more likely that there are genetic markers many genetic markers on these host birds DNA that tell them how their eggs are going to pop out and that over time cuckoos have kind of pigeon holed themselves into specific species in specific locations of specific species and that their repertoire is not that large that's yeah okay I don't know it's it's a very good question I think a lot more research needs to be done to figure out what level this imprinting is at what level the the genetic coding is and how it all works in concert and how much you could take it could I take a cuckoo from 500 miles away stick it in a host bird nest and have it reproduce the same eggs that's the question right because that because there's so much going on with cuckoos I need a cuckoo twins to study now yeah well it's that's gonna be hard because you know there's usually only ever one yeah we're gonna have to do some cloning it'll be fine it's this project well worth yeah yeah that's cloning actually that's a very good segue into my next story because black rhinos may soon be saved by cloning we know about that but before we can save them we have to stop them from going extinct right now and so that's more what this study is about this is from University of Manchester working in collaboration with Kenyan conservationists and scientists they wanted to look at data from the critically endangered Kenyan black rhino populations to see how the impacts of individuals change the expectations for the viability of populations that's a lot of words to say they wanted to know if it mattered which rhino gets poached so what they found was that poaching combined with individual rhino reproductive variants or as they call it elsewhere reproductive skew which I very I like that term a lot reproductive skew or how successful the mother rhinos are at raising young leads to a greater than first thought risk to the survival of the black rhino what they found is that reproductive variants increased extinction risk by as much as 70% when they combined it with poaching that's because indiscriminate killing if you're just killing whatever rhino means there it's possible you could kill a very important rhino there are some rhinos that are very good at having babies do from an from an early age and contribute a lot to their population there are others that start later get pregnant less often die sooner any number of things and so individual rhinos have different impacts on population viability they have not included reproductive skew I know black rhinos are so cute with their little lip black rhinos have not been included in predictions of future population growth for many endangered species because that it requires detailed individual breeding histories constant monitoring all sorts of things like that the thing about black rhinos is they are constantly being monitored by humans by drones just constantly because if they weren't they'd all be gone unfortunately it it sucks I hate it but ultimately if somebody was not there watching all black rhinos at all times they'd already all be poached so to be able to monitor rhinos already means they are a perfect kind of case study for looking at reproductive skew labeling specific individuals and protecting specific individuals more than others so if you have limited resources to protect rhinos you can identify specific subpopulation specific family groups specific individuals that need the bodyguards most and so this could have a pretty big impact on other endangered species management because differences between individuals and populations is most likely an issue across many species and so if possible you should be evaluating this when assessing the risk of extinction for individual species of course there are some species that are longer lived than others more easy to differentiate all this kind of stuff but you could even see how for short-lived animals that live in large populations you could identify some populations or family lines that are most influential on a population and population growth and from there you can also make better decisions for who to protect and how protect all of them rhinos are my favorite endangered animal of all time and you know they're like one of those megafauna that if you were looking at this is like in the fossil record there was this giant friendly creature that had giant horns on its nose you'd go oh wow that's a weird thing that doesn't it couldn't live in the modern age I think it's too big and weird and they are so they're here still the sweetest sweetest they're snugglers we'll watch them like they play together they snuggle together they're big puppies with I mean ideally it's not just because they're cute and they're sweet ideally it's because they are important parts of their ecosystem and all animals deserve the opportunity to live and not be hunted just for a horn or you know a horn that is chemically exactly the same as your fingernails and your hair it's just carrot yeah yeah it's it's and Justin you're right we should we should protect them all but they're still getting poached somehow yes so it's not effective and that's the problem is you can't you can't put fences around wild animals and have them still have the same impact on their ecosystem they did before and if you can't put fences around them like think about elephants they can walk thousands of miles over a matter of days and they completely change the ecosystem as they walk through it so you can't you can't kind of create a perimeter and secure it's not something you can do so it's you have to be realistic that again we share our planet with lots of different people with lots of different resource needs and and and values and and abilities and pressures and in the end you have to find a way to work around what we currently have I would love to create a world where endangered species are free and won't be trafficked and there's a million pangolins on every tree and create a world where there are no endangered species yeah where everything is living in harmony yeah the only endangered species are endangered because there's too much selective pressure and they're an evolutionary dead end yeah exactly dead end anyway on this earth day think about rhinos don't buy any poached animal products ask what things are made of when you buy things when you're traveling or you're you're buying things from an antique shop don't buy them yeah or do some research on population dynamics and help save them in the future yes thank you Blair yeah Justin what do you have for us I've got a 500 million year old camera lens sweet or rather a 500 million year old trilobites vision that has been recreated in a camera so trilobites had compound eyes which is a single big eye that's made of tens of thousands of tiny independent cornea lenses got a little light sensitive cells in there and this one giant eye now there's one group though the Dominita social socialists had something very unique they had two eyes of these two of these compound eyes each one was mounted on a stock and composed of one lens on each that bent light in very different angles of each other so one of their stocks was set to see things super close so something they wanted to eat flies right in front of their face they can get it and the other eye was designed to look really far away as far as a kilometer away so that if something was going around looking for a trilobites to eat it could see it and stay out of its way so researchers looked at this interesting configuration on this 500 million year old fossilized creature and decided what would it look like with that binocular vision it was the one really close up in the one super far away so National standards in technology NIST folks developed a miniature camera featuring a bifocal lens based on this creature they got record and setting depth of field in a single photo so that's that's some of the data photos there's one that I got linked in the in the show notes that'll actually show the the ruler close up and then the building off in the distance their depth of feel on this like depth of field is one of those things that we kind of start to take for granted now but Citizen Kane was the first movie where they had like the foreground in the background over you know few meters or whatever that was in focus before then he sort of had one plane of focus and that's still how I think a lot of filming is done the cameras can simultaneously image objects as close as three centimeters and as far away as one point seven kilometers keeping everything in between in focus now the intermediate distances though and between this near and far focal lengths were handled by a computer algorithm that mimics the human's nervous system sharpening objects to create the final all-in-focus image that covers the entire depth of field there should be one more image in there was one more there Kiki that's gonna it's gonna it's got like a ruler in the foreground you know have a have the building in the background should be the one I put in the show notes I think I got the right one it's really if oh you know it's I didn't put it in the notes oh no okay anyway yeah I thought that was pretty cool they decided to actually build this thing out of it's published in Nature Communications April 19th issue if you want to go take a look at it pretty interesting way that they went about doing it with the lenses that they had to create these teeny teeny tiny lenses as well as a computer processing to combine all of these images there we go that's the one and it's the picture in the upper right hand side there where you can see those are actual objects in the foreground and those are the some of the university buildings often in the far distance and to get everything in that much focus in a single shot is absolutely insane so are they they used human neural networks to be able to train their computer algorithm are they assuming that the trilobites had a similar neural network to to the human nervous system yeah I mean that's like yes okay you've got this big system but are they saying that these ancient trilobites could actually see with this accuracy with the security I don't know that they are but it but it is stands the reason when I saying human neural network it's you know it's computer algorithm stuff it's yeah the idea is this is processing that can take takes place in the brain when handling visual information as it is something analogous to it anyway so yeah it's possible that they could have this depth of vision I mean when you've got binocular eyes the first thing that you're going to try to do is look is track track things track motion track movement that sort of thing if they could if they can see so well why don't they see their own extinction coming oh do you know how long they were on the planet longer than us where are we at how close to the 1.5 yes they're fair but they've actually but this camera is being able to also do some really crazy high-resolution stuff going forward they're going to be able to use it for all sorts of interesting applications and imaging and processing and things going forward next research is India like I said before finally found a good use for turmeric and actually the extract curcumin is the missing ingredient to building safer more efficient fuel cells so what they did is they mixed curcumin with gold nanoparticles to create an electrode that requires a hundred times less energy to efficiently convert alcohol into electricity so most fuel cells when you think of fuel cell people are thinking hydrogen but there's a lot of interest right now in creating the ethanol fuel cell we're coming proving that because it's just easier ethanol is much easier to acquire there's there's hydrogen is the most common chemical element in the universe and so you would think let's use the most common chemical element in the universe to turn into a fuel source but the problem is collecting hydrogen getting it all in one place because it's it's very tricky it floats around the particles very small they don't glom together very well it occurs naturally on earth only in compound form with other elements water there's hydrogen there but it's it's actually takes a lot of energy to split water and hydrogen and oxygen to use it then later as a fuel and harvest from that it's energy energy heavy we can get it rather easily comparatively and extracting it from natural gas and fossil fuels but again this is if you're trying to get the green economy and that's why you're moving towards hydrogen it might not be that good so extraction adds to the hydrogen's fuel cells cost environmental packs plus it's also compressed gas so that's another whole challenge of storage and transportation ethanol we can basically transport and move around the same way that we do gasoline today so there's already a ton of infrastructure we've got that whole corn into into ethanol as a fuel to some degree that's been worked on so this is this is a pretty big area research which I was until reading the story has had no idea that we were looking at at doing ethanol fuel cells we had these researchers they found that this substance the curcumin work perfectly part of the problem what they had was the they have to mix things into coat the gold nanoparticles they don't glom all together this prevented that from happening in the most productive way out of anything that they've tried so far so let me get this straight so they're worried about finding hydrogen and gathering it together and all this kind of stuff because it's it's too hard so instead they're gonna focus on gold and spices spices which to my knowledge are very expensive usually only available in small quantities an example of kind of like the ultimate form of of elitist status and like you know the most valuable stuff on the planet spices in a lot of you know the history of human trade yeah I like okay a long time ago yeah yeah no even still go to the store and try to buy some saffron it's 20 bucks for like this much so that's a but it's great point you bring up because they're using gold nanoparticles also right but in the hydrogen fuel cell it's been platinum right which is even more of a rare and a spicy you know curcumin I don't know how much of that we're really growing I think India probably goes through a bit as a nation I feel like somebody's mother this is like was like suggesting but this is something that is potentially part of a sustainable a sustainable solution as long as we're not destroying our top soil right we can grow the turmeric as long as we've got water we can and sunlight we can grow turmeric and the ethanol itself is coming from the waste products from corn ethanol is a massive subsidy energy product when we're not growing corn for cows it's corn for ethanol so I have issues with ethanol as a fuel source in the first place there are lots of issues with this but it is a step in the direction away from fossil fuels and toward this new direction this will make it more efficient and possibly more sustainable as a chemical reaction without burning it yeah that's that's that's and they did have to like you saying they did put the constraints on designing this to try to make all the materials is green and renewable as possible yeah part of what they were also attempting to do here there's other ways make the problem worse well yeah there's other ways there's other more toxic ways of doing things that are available but if it's defeating the purpose you know yeah cool very cool this is as we can science I have a couple last stories here liar liar drama bird liar liar drama bird last year I talked about splendid liar birds splendid liar birds lie to their potential mates with their song they set up their song and they're like I'm gonna make songs pretending that I am really popular and already having sex and so like we already know that liar birds are you know their songs are interesting one aspect of them though is that they are mimics their vocal mimics they don't really have their own songs they take all of their song elements from things in their environments other birds car alarms you name it they pick and choose to create a very dynamic interesting song and I don't know if the kids today really really understand how insanely well they do this because there was a time like the hip hop samplers they're birds they're the sampler sample magicians there's a time when people were installing these cheap car alarms that would like you know a truck will go by and the thing will go off and it went through this you know like this pattern of different sounds that would run through and then every once in a while you'd hear a bird that was making those those the car alarm sound and I haven't heard one of those car alarms in decades so I think the birds would probably stop but it was just so amazing to me at the time the birds in my neighborhood even when the car alarms weren't going off we're making it like it was a bird song they had like yeah the bird mimics of the bird world they can they can make all sorts of sounds sound just right well this bird is not a splendid lyre bird this is an alberts lyre bird also from Australia that I would like to talk about tonight where this research out of western Sydney University has discovered that the males of this species don't only create long complex sounds that have been sampled from their environment they also are drama queens these alberts lyre birds create their songs in such a way they don't just put all this all the sampled material together haphazardly randomly just like oh I learned a new thing let's put that in there now oh here's another sound I'll throw that one in there now oh no this these mimics they have a characteristic song sequence different populations of lyre bird these alberts lyre birds have characteristics song sequences where males sing the same song sequence many times during the breeding season with only very minor variations neighbors sing a similar sequence but there are differences and within the sequences they found that the similarity between the sequences and individual male sings is 40.7% this is a figure significantly higher than expected by random chance and the average similarity among sequences from different males from the same populations 35.6% and different populations it's even lower at 19.3% so you've got similar popular the same population very similar same individual very similar different population very different so what they're showing with this data is that individuals copy their sequences from other individuals nearby it's like oh I like the song you're singing that's a great song wait wait wait wait oh I love that beat let's drop that wait wait wait wait but maybe not I don't know I don't hang out with liars all the time samplers are sampling from other bird but then they start sampling from samplers are sampling from the samplers yes and then and in the way that they're putting it together they're maximizing drama so they put their sequences together so that the most discordant samples are next to each other so that there's a lot of difference between the segments that have been sampled so that it's constantly changing and creating a lot of dynamics and drama throughout their song punching it up in the studio that's right I was hoping can you hear it okay what I heard wasn't that interesting that's like a whole forest of birds right there and it's just one bird I love that one it sounds like they took that from another species for sure in the after show you've got to find me a mockingbird doing a car line that's a cuckaburra oh yeah so you've got some very interesting sounds in these sequences but the idea is that these birds are trying to give this dynamic impression of virtuosity to the listener that's what I was going to ask because I feel like they don't want to sound like other birds that's not beneficial to them so they're just showing off they're just saying look I can do all these different calls I can do all these calls they're doing impressions for her yep and they're stealing them from other males going look I can do this one too better than that guy and putting them contrasting with quiet sounds and loud sounds low sounds and high sounds buzzes trills just trying to create this the researchers say it's kind of a game of telephone but then the individuals are putting their repertoire together to enhance the drama and to add to the drama they're going to do that whole thing and their tail feathers are extended up over their head for whatever reason indeed look I have giant tail feathers for no reason and also I sound like other birds you know mimicry is the best form of giving a compliment flattery flattery is the best flattery yes well obviously I don't have a whole lot of imagination if I'm going to be talking about mimicry as the best thing I'm just going to copy all the other people out there no we don't need to copy copy copy some people though do not have great visual imagination some people can't imagine how things look in their mind's eye when you think of a mind's eye the things that you see in it some people have very vivid visual imagery they can create in their heads other people cannot I for instance have issues with visual imagination and so I'm curious about this particular study as it is about a disorder it's not really a disorder but a particular state called aphantasia aphantasia is a lack of visual imagination it's not that Disney movie with mickey the mouse and the magic and stuff that's a different phantasia different phantasia yeah so in this study researchers researchers researchers exposed people to bright shapes and dark shapes and look to see how their pupils dilated or didn't dilate so when there were bright shapes pupils contracted when there were dark shapes pupils opened up a bit and then to test visual imagery they had individuals just imagine those same shapes the dark shapes or the light shapes and then measured pupillary constriction to see what happened and they tracked that pupils dilated when they were imagining the dark shapes just as if they were seeing them and contracted when they were imagining bright shapes just as if they were seeing them however the amount of dilation or constriction was seemed to be in correspondence to the vividness of that imagery that people reported having of course this is subjective because you can't look inside of people's heads and go how vivid is that image in there so they wanted to know okay let's really test this and they found people with a phantasia this inability to imagine visual scenes they repeated it with 18 participants exposing them to bright and dark shapes pupils work that pupillary response reflex works just fine no problem constriction to bright dilation to dark visualize the same shapes nothing happened no pupillary response this has never been measured before researchers are now suggesting that these results suggest that we may have a marker that can be measured to determine whether or not people have a phantasia as opposed to just going on the subjective oh yeah I can't imagine I don't imagine things visually very well so Kiki you said you're bad at it I am yeah so like trying to imagine it's like this vague like I think when I try to imagine something specific it's very hard for me to actually like it's not it's not super visual it's like contextual somehow in my brain in a different way so let me ask you this over the last two years when you've met someone with a mask on and you've never met them before do you imagine what their face looks like under the mask no okay so I always do which is why it's very jarring when they take the mask off because it never looks like what I imagine their nose or their mouth or their chin looks like it's very jarring if they're a person who could grow facial hair do they have facial hair or not I imagine something and it's never what I imagine a whole face you don't imagine a face no no I don't they went on with these aphantasic aphantasic participants aphantasmic I think they're aphantasic aphantasic participants and had them try to visualize the four shapes instead of just one shape here's the dark ape in the light shape just imagine four of them instead of a particular color and so since they and what they say is that imagining a larger amount should correspond to greater cognitive effort and there are studies that suggest that pupillary constriction does go along with cognitive effort and they did see that there was pupil response in the in these aphantasic pupils when they're trying to imagine the larger number of things and so they say this is the first time they have strong biological evidence that those with aphantasia are really trying to create a mental image I swear I try I'm really trying putting to rest claims that they may simply not be attempting to create a mental image just lazy brain there's something there it's just no I don't think it's the same as what you're thinking of wonder if you're like have you ever been like in a spelling bee yes are you really good at spelling I'm good at spelling well I do lose track sometimes in the middle of the words because I try to think about what the word looks like but I lose I lose track a lot because the word just kind of fuzz it just like is just it doesn't matter reading in a dream yeah but I can I dream very very vividly I'm dreaming it seems very vivid I don't know very interesting but what they're hoping is that having this objective measure of a previously subjective state now we'll be able to at the brain more specifically related to imagery a phantasia hyper phantasia those people who have extremely strong visual imagery to be able to understand how the brain works for different people with respect to all these different things so this method can help us understand the brain mechanisms behind imagery why do some people why can't I picture a green apple with the little dots all over it brown dots has it gone bad no it's not like bad ones it's just a little it's like freckles it's got the little like tan freckles on the green apple on my green apple there always is and yeah I've got the carousel my visual you're playing one of those games where you can pick a character and there's like a carousel that goes around or like a zoetrope of images from the outside but so I've got the green apple then there's a red apple then there's like the iphone apple and then there's like eave and a snake and it's like all the apple associated images they can kind of Steve Jobs I've got all the connotations of of apple in this like rotisserie I have a roller deck of every word in images but I have a apple pie picturing the word itself I'm terrible I'm a terrible speller to this day if it wasn't for autocorrect it would be fine I wouldn't be able to like attend school autocorrect has made you weak it's a crutch no but it's always been like I would get like 99% in comprehension and then like 40% in spelling I don't know how many how many peas are an apple that's because English is dumb yeah it doesn't make any sense it follows no rules try danish yeah I don't know but this visualization I'm sure it's why I can't draw why can't I draw I don't know I can't see it I can't yes I don't know maybe I always used to wonder for gymnastics when I was growing up the coaches would tell us to visualize ourselves doing the tricks I can't it doesn't work for me oh no I'd be like I don't know I'd lie in bed at night try to visualize I just didn't go I know we gotta go but do you daydream have you daydreamed I mean I don't know my brain thinks things she makes lists she makes lists and she checks them off and that's how we have this show see in your mind's eye like you watch like it's basically like a dream but during the day no no if I'm asleep during the day yes do you see it can you at least picture in your mind's eye a clock that's getting close to two hours hahahaha that's the anxiety on my heart beat we haven't gotten even we haven't hit the tight 90 in a very long time I feel like we get close when one of us is missing what wait am I getting blamed for the non tight 90 alright here's what we do what episode are we on right now 8.72 right alright pick a number between uh 7.72 and 8.72 both of you what he's doing are you gonna add it up you're making it longer right now Justin just pick one of those you should pick one of those for the last 100 shows just pick a number 7.63 Blair come on 8.10 okay what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go through both of these episodes I gotta pick one too it's only fair if I pick one too and you can't listen to the podcast episode because they've been edited yeah I know I'm sure I'm missing from all again we won't be able to have nothing alright I picked 7.99 alright so we got I got three episodes who talks the longest in each of those episodes we're gonna spread sheet and graph it out and we can end all of this oh it's Justin who's doing the talking okay but what you're missing is Kiki's supposed to talk the most but I I also talk faster than both of you I think sometimes it depends on the level of coffee it really does yeah that's gonna make a big difference are we gonna have the show already I feel like we missed something no that's what you're making the show longer right now sorry Rachel this is the end of the show now we've made it to the end the very end thank you everyone for listening I really hope that you did enjoy the show in its entirety shoutouts to FATA for help with social media and show notes Gord, Aaron Lor, everyone thank you for manning the chat room identity 4 for recording the show Rachel for your amazing assistance and editing and I'd like to thank our Patreon sponsors for their generous support thank you too Teresa Smith, James Schofer Richard Badge Kent Northcote, Rick Loveman, Pierre Velazad Broffy Figueroa, John Ratnaswamy Carl Kornfeld, Karen Tauzy Woody M.S. 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Maybe as you harvest your closet mushrooms just search for this week in Science if our podcasts are found If you enjoyed the show get your friends to subscribe as well For more information on anything you've heard here today show notes links to these stories available on our website www.twis.org You can also sign up for a newsletter You can contact us directly email kyrsten at kyrstenthesweekinscience.com just send it to us at gmail.com or me Blair at Blair Baz at twistjust twis.org Just put TWIS TWIS in the subject line or your email will be spam-filtered either into this spreadsheet that moved unexpectedly and disappeared everything or into Kiki's mind's eye where she won't be able to read it at all Oh no You can also hit us up on the Twitter where we are at TWIS Science with only one S in the middle at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly and at Blair's Menagerie We love your feedback If there's a topic you would like us to cover or address a suggestion for an interview a haiku that comes to you tonight please let us know We'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news And if you've learned anything from this show remember It's all in your head I've got my banner on furl It says the scientist is in I'm gonna sell my advice Show them how to sell their robots with a simple device I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand and a little costume is a couple of grand This week science is coming your way So everybody listen to what I say I use the scientific method and I'll broadcast my opinion all over the air cause it's this week in science this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in 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 calculations and I've got a plan if you listen to the science you may just get understand but we're not trying to threaten your philosophy no hey hey it's me after show la la la la la la Fada asked in the discord what happens when someone asks me to picture my child's face I can recognize my child's face I have like a general sense of it but I cannot I can't but specifically picture it there's like a hint of things in there visually a hint it's in there but I can't like I mean maybe I don't haven't practiced enough I don't know if you don't mind what maybe I do I just posted a link in the private chat I wanted to show everyone what was it called again a Malaysian wah he did and it needs sound oh okay well I have to do the sound separately separately right good thing I'm like okay let me send myself an email haha it's too bad gchat doesn't exist anymore you just gchat yourself wait it's in here wait isn't that chat in there are we able to oh yeah wait just miss that does that work oh that is it that's fair I'm going to see if that's here I'm playing with technology to put it into both the places whoa what so when you try to use gchat because it's like dead I get an email haha haha okay that's hilarious the last time you messaged the two of us in gchat we were in a call together on April 10th 2019 haha wow but that was faster than emailing myself yeah what what was I doing oh yeah okay share this yeah you gotta do both at the same time share the screen okay screen sharing and this is this Malaysian katydid this person's hand look at how big it is okay now I'm going to try and coordinate why is that so oh it's all oh oh what what just happened there are those cows sound like cows what is happening tell me about this katydid I don't I don't know I don't know it's just the loud katydid yeah so it's ginormous it was ginormous and very loud hey I don't know how to do stuff can you play the sound of a mockingbird doing a car alarm too hard to find because I need people to understand this is a thing I used to hear all the time hasn't everybody heard a mockingbird no because first of all there's no mockingbirds anymore that is not true they had a mass die off they got some sort of bird flu thing or something went around we don't know but they all vanished in the course of two years what and car alarms that don't make those noises anymore that's a thing in the past maybe that's what it is yeah but it was the weirdest thing to hear this bird almost perfectly those are like the little patterns that the car alarm these birds are amateurs the ones in my neighborhood had it way more down right yeah I love it when mockingbirds meow like cats though the birds meow like the cats and the cats are like what's going on of course it's something hilarious earlier in the chat room paraphrase it I can't really scroll through it early man used used the lyrebirds to do mixtapes yeah and you trained it that's right you go outside and just start making sounds when the lyrebirds are around in the springtime yeah you get to hear your song all season long perfect and I whoop and I wonder if the lyrebird would pick that up you do it often enough no way what's real Kiki this I'm looking at this mushroom story and I'm so confused about time because I heard it I heard it this week too it's okay so it was published so okay so the article the press release is from April 15 when I click on the source material in the royal society open science the published date is April 6 yep after the show that you're saying it was on no it was on the 6th or the 7th I talked about it on the 7th the week you were gone you're right that's how time works it's the 20th where you are maybe the 20th was yesterday here oh man that was two weeks ago yeah it was on the day that you reported on it I think so yeah yep I think sound might have a a top category at the end of this year a lot of talking a lot of sound usage acoustics just this week it was eerie how many acoustical stories there were yeah like you were saying there were a couple that we didn't even get to there was a lot of good science this week I wonder if it's people coming back from spring break shoot I gotta get it out I don't know but there was a lot so normally I go through I click on all the stories I think are interesting I like read through them and then I narrow them down and then I read through them again and I usually have like 50 tabs open before I start narrowing things down and this week I think I had 12 and I was like oh man then kind of a slow week maybe but then I read through all the stories and I was like ooh I wanna report on all of these let's do that there was some good stuff this week it was pretty neat yeah we didn't even talk about what was the uh the firelight art production there was a story I wanted to talk about but it wasn't animal related and it was not appropriate for the being of the show because it was gonna take me like 20 minutes to talk through it but it was about the fact that um like small like not nano molecules but tiny little air pollution molecules um that they you know like if you if you're breathing in polluted air all the time you're gonna get lung cancer right right but the mechanism has never really been understood like why is inhaling these little flecks why does that give you cancer and so um some breakthrough research happened this week where they discovered actually that these um little particles don't make cancer happen in fact if you um expose cancer um cells to these particles the growth is actually hindered but what actually happens is it gums up all the cell membranes and um it also promotes cell membranes to grow larger and so it's just harder for immune cells to travel through the body to get rid of the cancer so it just creates a traffic jam oh wow it was very interesting that makes so much sense that's really it's like oh just the system that's gonna go in there to get rid of that stuff can't get in there yeah you block the street so the ambulance can't get through sometimes it's hard to you know you have to remember that we're like a system of tubes yes the system of tubes like the internet right we are porous beings yeah it's I think it's especially funny because it's uh you take it for granted yeah air pollution lung cancer of course why oh but then there's like the other aspects so there's lung cancer but then there's other stuff air pollution is also allergies it's also more heart disease it's all sorts of other stuff which probably is related to an amped up immune system that doesn't know what to do with itself sure sure yeah that's one of those misnumbers whenever you see something that's talking about priming your immune system or having your immune system supercharged you actually don't want that that's not supercharged I have allergies I take pills to tamp down my immune system yeah it makes me flemy all the time yeah but you also think about it like this might be a mechanism of smoking giving you cancer right because I just heard someone recently saying like oh no no I vape it's okay because there's no there's no tobacco in vaping it's just nicotine so it's fine and but if you're inhaling smoke of any sort you are also inhaling particulate of some sort and so this might be a mechanism for that that might have something to do with why smoking is so terrible for you so saudust by the way yeah exactly really good point saudust asbestos asbestos okay it is but do you remember years ago we were talking about like the shapes of nanoparticles and how certain like rod shaped nanoparticles were more likely to cause lung cancer than more spherical I'm remembering this from like years ago when we were still doing the show at UC Davis oh wow okay long time ago long time ago are they just more pokey that way? yeah but I'm wondering if this is part of it where it's like the shape allows it to gum things up if it's one shape it gums things up more the rod shape is similar to like asbestos stuff where it's like little tiny needles that get in your lungs what are you I don't know just the physical forces that I don't know just kind of interesting oh yeah and it's 420 isn't it? oh yeah so very appropriate I have to do a correction very rare that I bothered to go back and correct my mistakes I thought that was going to be the joke very rare that I admit that I admit that I were having to make them say time to correct anything if I screwed it up uh I was beating up Dan Gilbert for his TED Talk, Happiness TED Talk and I said that he misquoted his own research with the infographics it's actually he misrepresented somebody else's 60 year old what would it have been it would have been a 50 year old research about 40 year old at the time but took they had done phone surveys with people who had won the lottery a year after they won the lottery and survey phone surveys of people a year after becoming a paraplegic and he represented that data as being just as happy as a year after the lottery winners versus the year into being a paraplegic and his graphic actually made it look like the paraplegics were slightly more happy now to spending all doubt because happiness is comparative and so everybody's self-reporting their happiness now maybe compared to like you know but the actual study the people who had won the lottery a year ago self-reported much happier much happier like a few times happier but I had misquoted it and said that it was his research that he purposely misrepresented to support his arguments it wasn't his own research that he misrepresented with the infographic it was somebody else's research he misrepresented his research just by saying it represented a large data set when in fact it was a very small data set what was the point of his TED Talk what was he trying to get across synthesizing happiness and he straight up made up stories about a guy who had gone to jail for committing murder but then there was DNA evidence that exonerated him and so he was pardoned and he said on the way out about his experience of prison he just I'd do it again the guy was still happy he was saying the guy never lost it some people can keep their happiness turns out there was no DNA evidence that exonerated him that was made up he had admitted to doing the murder but had fought that it was in self-defense because the other guys were KKK people in the family he did not get let go early he got released just normal for having done his sentence and so when he then says it was glorious it was totally worth it completely different things he's happy about getting to go free after having committed and gotten these murders so but anyway that's just a couple of points I feel like at some point I'm going to I want to go through and do a thing where I edit together that Ted Talk and talk about why it needs to be taken down because the thing is just all made up and it's got like millions and millions of views it's like a top 10 ever watched Ted Talk well and the Ted Talks have a reputation for being based in fact so that's not great yeah I'm starting to question that though yeah they're based in sensationalism how do you get a Ted Talk this is what I don't understand how do those happen you apply you find out when they're going to be doing a thing and then you apply and you can apply to do a Ted X to kind of practice your form but you don't want to do too many Ted Xs diluting your essence then you're just desperate you're all desperate but you want to get really good you want to get into one of the good feeder Ted X events to get invited to Ted so this seems like a whole thing about it elitist structure hey fun thing too fun thing to do and this is just because I'm weird you watch the Ted Talks without the volume on at like the fastest multiplier of speed that you can and you'll see everybody doing the same body language during their talk they train everybody they have the same body language it's like standing without a podium to figure out what to do with their hands and so they've all trained on the same hand gestures it's really weird yeah but I want to do an almost point by point thing on this because the more I went and looked at it again and it made me mad how terribly false this thing is and the fact that this part of the thing is we've talked about this a long time ago in the past I've always had this problem with psychology being focused so much on pathology and he's taken positive psychology which was a thing that existed before World War II you would go to a psychiatrist if you wanted to be better at playing the saxophone and they would sort of nurture creative talents they would help you build practices or build skills to do better practicing there was a lot of psychiatry was sort of positive mentoring aspects of human nature and the like World War II happens there's a multi millions of people on the planet who are in deep trauma and pathology starts to get all this research and then it sort of took over and so I was always had a problem what is this perfect human that everything else is a deficiency of right so I've never liked pathology but what's happened to positive psychology they've just done the same thing but they've made happiness the thing that you're supposed to always and then what makes it the worst is because then there is a perfect person and they're trying to push you towards that model of perfect humanity which is sense of well-being accomplishment in workplace balance in family life and being happy becomes the core of it and the problem is Dan Gilbert's talk is all about synthesizing happiness meaning your job is terrible it's not going anywhere your promotion but you know what you can basically synthesize your own happiness by lowering your expectations is essentially at the end of it it's going wrong it's that Bob Newhart stop it it's basically it's like the and there's something just like nails on a chalkboard of the soul of humanity in what is being pushed forward I even went back and watched some of the the PBS specials where he throws in these points sort of in between hearing these terrible stories that none of it has a cohesive theme or argument to it but at the end of it there's these poignant things that he says they're like okay yeah but that doesn't none of what we witnessed supports any of your arguments and you're just sort of making blanket statements Eric Naps asks Justin are you fitting into Denmark you're becoming a dour Scandinavian so here's the thing here's the thing I've always been rather candid and rather direct about things in the United States that makes me a jerk in Denmark that's perfectly acceptable and normal so uh yeah I'd say I fit in pretty well here I'm fitting in great I've been left of liberal and this is a socialist country so yeah it's well you know capitalism thrive a little bit more into you know what I love about this country you ever hear the company called Blackstone yes they run around little company they've been running around buying up single family homes across the United States and renting them back to people because it's going to be a renter state in the future hedge funds people's investments go up and then when they try to retire they have to rent anyway they were not allowed to do business in Denmark they came in wanting to buy up a bunch of real estate and rent to people and Denmark the government said no take your money elsewhere we're not going to allow you to exploit rent of our people we're going to have housing control here to at least a degree where you're not welcome you're not helping you're not in the business of housing to provide housing you're in it to profit meaning you would be exploitive take a hike love that so yeah I think I fit in well here everybody's in a union like everybody's in a union like there's nobody who's not in a union they fight the unions here there would be a homeless homeless people's union in this country if they had homeless people but they don't yeah housing and homeless is the cheapest way to manage them they have people with all the same problems that the homeless people have in America whether it's bouts of poverty or mental health issues or whatever it is but you wouldn't notice it because they're not wandering the earth they send them to other countries they take their homeless people and like send them put them on a train on a fun boat you don't see them because they're not wandering around unbathed with unwashed clothes carrying around all of their life's possessions in a shopping cart somewhere for their stuff where they can shower and maintain hygiene and do all that sort of stuff yeah so yeah I'd like it here let's house people put them places I think I'm gonna call it I have a oh but we didn't even talk about the legislation in Florida we did we did during the show in the don't say gay thing oh don't say gay I just wanted to say really quick I just wanted to say really quick I think I think it's awesome I think I'm all for it because it's once things become a law they become machinery and it doesn't matter what their intention was that made this thing law you can no longer talk or describe or deal with gender and up to what is it third grade or whatever right in Florida whatever along this law age range it goes to you can't bring up gender specific things to the children so there's no longer boys or girls bathroom it's a unisex bathroom now that's no yeah you can't talk about the mother or the father's role of everything that has no that's the parent you have to de-gender because there's nothing that says about which gender you cannot promote in their in their law that they created you have to remove gender from the classroom it doesn't matter who wears skirts and who wears pants you can't tell no you can't you can't tell a kid they're wearing skirts and they're very close to school why because you're not allowed to talk about gender in school yeah I got it that's so funny Justin that you think that Florida will actually follow the law that they passed by the law and not actually just use it to not allow people to talk about gay I understand but if you're if you're running a school in Florida and you don't agree with the state that's what the law says you're supposed to do it's tricky when you go in with a bunch of people who probably who probably didn't do well in high school or college and then they get somehow their buddy puts them in a position to write legislation this is what you end up with technically that law right now just removes gender conversations you can't talk about a boy's or girl's room that's now illegal so it has to be every bathroom has to be unisex you can't question a child's gender however they dress but Justin there's more to the bill than that that's not the whole bill so I'm looking right now so the three main tenants of the bill are banning instruction or classroom discussion about LGBTQ issues for children through third grade specifically in the bill calls that out for older students discussion about gay and transgender issues has to be age appropriate or developmentally appropriate that is completely subjective so any school or any teacher can make any decision about that for someone else's child to it empowers parents to sue the school district over teaching they don't like which means even if teachers or administrators aren't homophobic they will be afraid to talk about these things because their own money will be at stake and then it requires the school to tell parents when their child receives mental health services so now the school is no longer a safe space to talk to a counselor we're going to tattle on children to their parents immediately the only way the school can avoid liability then is to remove all gendered conversation this is what I'm saying because then that becomes an LGBTQ issue don't you understand if you try to make things gender neutral anybody could sue the school district and say that you're pushing an LGBTQ issue that's not allowed it's absolutely as a piece of machinery it's got wheels on the roof it's got the axles sticking out the back of the thing it's functionally illiterate is what I'm saying yeah I think both of you have good points on this it's awful and I know it's awful and I know you're joking about it I know it's terrible but I'm just saying that's not all the bill says like I know that it's not all it says but it's going to be it's going to tie up of course it's just it's ridiculous if you want to have a bunch of control over what your child is taught at this level pay for them to go to private school sorry send them to an ultra religious private school if you don't want to deal with this or move to Florida apparently there's already what three more states trying to make the same like a clone they're trying to pass a clone of the bill so it's sort of like that law that the abortion law that created the bounty in Texas and I think we called it on the show ahead of time but California and a couple other states are like we're doing that with guns we're going to do with that guns now we have a bounty on guns and said we can't make it illegal because that's sort of illegal but we can for the government to do it but we can have citizens that are allowed that power and then it's not the government doing it so then it bypasses the law and therefore we can every every state we could do it to anything like the law the way they're trying to circumvent law law is amazing because it's not working yeah it has test tickle yeah it's the when you get when you allow people to to sue people or to basically bring people to heal it is this malicious compliance because it gets people in the community tattling on other people in the community and makes people afraid Alaska is very far from Florida yeah so I guess it's very different I guess part of the problem if they've got LGBTQ and then we just need to add one more letter for the heterosexuals put an H at the end is that what that is well no this means you identify as what you were assigned at birth so you would have to add like C-H SIS heterosexual okay so then if hey if we all of a sudden it's one group then we can all sue Florida forever perfect just turn it around it's just I don't know the saddest thing that I saw so far was a kindergarten teacher who had to take down the picture of his husband at his desk that sucks I hate that yeah wow teachers are humans yep I can't teachers getting in trouble for being spotted drinking after school at a restaurant it's like are you not allowed to have a life outside of being a teacher oh wow my what was it my sixth grade teacher he definitely moonlit as a bartender yeah he was young and he drove a fancy red car sports car and he was a bartender and he probably had to bartend because teachers get paid so little yeah I don't know how he got up early enough to do school yeah okay well speaking of getting up early I'm gonna turn in good night Blair say good night Justin say good morning Justin good night Justin good good night Kiki good night everyone thank you for joining us for another episode and while we see areas in the world that are resorting to malicious compliance let us be kind and compassionate and think of each other with openness be kind and be curious stay well everybody we will see you next Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific time oh and I think I'm gonna be on DTN next Tuesday oh that's fun so that should be fun see you later everyone