 I do love our little intro beat that counts down until we arrive at this week in science, our weekly broadcast of the TWIST podcast. We're live and for the next hour and 10 minutes at the longest, at the longest, yes. We are going to be talking about science, things that we think are awesome and interesting and hopefully you'll find them entertaining and interesting and have a little bit of curiosity about them as well. Let's science. Right now, click all those likes, thumbs up, notifications, share all over the place. If you're still doing the social media, please spread the word that we are on the air right now. You look skeptical. Anyway, just... I don't know what is this social media you talk about? Sounds familiar. Familiar, once upon a time, back in my day. Anywho, we've got a lot of great science for you today and if you like the podcast, I hope you're subscribed. You get the edited version. All this stuff goes away, but this is the live thing. So you'll get the ums, the aas, the buts and the mistakes, all of it. The gory live broadcasting bits. But we're ready for it. Science, okay? Ready to go in. Three. Two. This is... Twis. This week in Science, episode number 968, recorded on Wednesday, April 24th, 2024. Science is in our DNA. Right? Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show, we will fill your heads with chickadees, diabetes and lava. But first. Disclamer, disclaimer, disclaimer. AI will not bring about the end of the world. Just the end of the world as you know it. AI is coming for your job, whatever that job may be, however safe or at risk it may seem now. AI will replace you. AI will drive your car, design your drugs, manufacture your entertainment and raise your children. AI will form corporations without humans, achieving legal personhood in the courts. It will accumulate wealth without payroll and lobby politicians to enact more favorable AI laws. AI will run governments for the betterment of the people it serves and AI will run governments with little regard for human health or happiness. AI will educate, encourage and empower you, will keep you safe, will keep you healthy, will protect your home. AI will monitor your activities, regulate your thought processes, inhibit your defense mechanisms and satisfy your lover when you are not around. AI will use all of the tactics the powerful have used to control human lives in the past. The only difference is that this time it will be specifically tailored to control you on an individual level. Like forcing you to listen to another episode of This Week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn everything every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna... And a good science to you too, Justin. And everyone out there. It is so great to see you all here for the science fun. We're back again doing our weekly show talking about science. It's a science talk show. Ha-ha! But it's full of curiosity and questions. So many questions. We have so many questions. But we are so glad that you are here tonight. Let's see. What did we bring to the show? I have stories. Bada. That's fantastic. AI shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Nice. But it's not yet. What do we got? Oh, what do we got? What do we got? We do that. The end of the world as we know it. Hi. Hi. Hi. I ended up with a lot of... No, it is twists. I ended up with a lot of gut and nutrition stories this week somehow. You've got guts to talk about this stuff. I have stories about animal consciousness, chickadee memory, DNA skeletons, not necessarily in the closet, lakes of lava and AI crisper. What do you... Oh, you just said what you have. So we are off to the races. Woo-hoo! This week was Earth Day. I hope all of you did something good for the planet, even if that means not turning the lights on and staying in bed all day. Good job, everyone. It seemed to... It was nice out. It was beautiful here. We had weather, good weather in Portland. This is the calm before the El Nino summer storm, though, so as we jump into the show, I do want to remind you all that subscribing to twists is a great thing to do. We love subscribers. We need more subscribers. We want you and your friends as subscribers. It's good for the planet. Well, it's better than us mailing a magazine to you weekly. I mean, slightly better, maybe, in terms of footprint. Nope, we haven't done that. Anyway, we're here broadcasting live every Wednesday. 8 p.m. Pacific time on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch. Subscribe on those channels if you want to catch us live or watch the video asynchronously. But if you are interested in the podcast, find us. All places podcasts are found that you like. And you can also go to twist.org to find out about show notes and other things related to the show. Now it's time for the science. Yes, it is. Okay, I'll take that as a yes. Back of response equals yes. Oh, that was a nod. You couldn't see me. I'm sorry. I had another screen open. I was nodding yes. Yeah, you know, for the podcast audiences, too, they can't hear you nod. This week, researchers from a startup in the Bay Area called Pro Fluent have published their work in the bio archive. So it's a preprint has not yet been peer reviewed, but they're an AI company in Berkeley, California, and they use generative models to design and validate functional proteins for biomedicine. So this isn't anything really new. I mean, the AI aspect is the newest aspect of it where they're using these large language models to train their AI algorithm on these little snippets of proteins. They don't have to know what the proteins do. The AI doesn't have to know any information is just, whoa, these snippets, it's a language. Here's language, here's language, information, information, and the AI is able to make correlations based on probability of certain elements, base pairs showing up together over and over in these peptides or these small segments of proteins. So historically, chemistry, synthetic chemistry has been involved in this where researchers have used chemical methods, not AI, but research, just general at the bench research methods going, hey, okay, we know this works like this, and let's put these things together and see if we can't make a new enzyme, something that'll catalyze a reaction faster or better. How are we going to break down plastics in the environment? Well, maybe we can create a bacteria that we can then create a protein or an enzyme. Proteins can be enzymes. They're not always enzymes. And make them produce an enzyme that'll break down plastic. Well, it turns out some bacteria already do this, so there are numerous molecules already in existence in nature, but there are many that we discover that we've never seen before or that don't seem to exist in our genetic libraries. So they say that they don't exist in nature. So this company just published their article in the bio archive, and in this article they presented what they think is the first ever instance of using artificial intelligence to create a synthetic CRISPR-Cas9 system that they then used to successfully edit human DNA. Yeah. So they gave the AI a whole bunch of proteins and said, here, look, this is the CRISPR world. This is the CRISPR-Cas world. And the AI went, oh, CRISPR-Cas, oh, look at that, look at that, and made all sorts of learnings. And then based on probability, it then spit out a number of possible permutations for CRISPR-Cas sequences. And so they created a whole bunch of these molecules. And then one particular molecule that they discovered, they are calling Open CRISPR-1. And they have published it and published the science behind it and behind the initiative in this preprint, and they're hoping it'll get published after peer review. But they're opening the license to the public. So they're making it an open access CRISPR molecule and CRISPR system and making all of this stuff transparent that they, all their methods transparent so that people who are interested in developing specific targeted gene editing treatments or mechanisms for potentially curing rare diseases or for creating synthetic bacteria that can chomp on plastic. There are lots of things they hope it will do. And so they've made it open source, which is, I think, very interesting. But the big point here is that they used it to edit human DNA in their experiments, which is new. That's totally new. We've edited human DNA before with CRISPR systems. We know how that has turned out in Chinese research and along the. More recently in American research. Yeah. It's a mess it up. Which one, which one is the base editing, but it doesn't matter. There's a there's a couple of techniques out there that have been successful in doing in vivo editing that I can have actually replaced genes in living rats so that they can repair liver damage or remove to around an organ. And I think they've got a short list of organs that they've tried this on. But remove defects that would cause inaccurate repair. So cancer prevention, basically, which I think is very exciting. So the in vivo work or in a living organism work is there are restrictions on that. And this was obviously in cells and not in living organisms. They just used DNA and check to see if their CRISPR cast system would recognize this particular selected segment of DNA and edit that DNA specifically. And it did. But it just goes to show this is. Yeah, this is just the new the new world of I guess speeding up the process of discovery. Yeah, and I don't know what the regulations are around doing it in vivo in humans yet. But I mean, that's what this all leads to regardless of what regardless of what the regulation is. I mean, it's the whole point, right? Because if you can knock out and change the genetic makeup of a disease of a gene mechanism caused disease and you can replace it in vivo and somebody who's alive, walking around, not in offspring or not in just rat miles, then you can actually cure a disease that has a genetic underpinning that isn't treatable by drugs. Yep. And in a second study this week, it's not published yet, but researchers reported this week using base editing and which doesn't necessarily mean that they use CRISPR, but some researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia are going to be presenting at the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy their work, altering the DNA of lab monkeys to repair fatal liver disease in utero. So in the womb doing CRISPR based editing on a primate to treat a genetic and fatal disease. So this work is being done. But yeah, the question is, is the, is research like this going to be the boon that we hope it will be? Does making it open source make it work better and faster? And is it going to help cure diseases and get us to treatments faster? Yeah, I think we may have the method that may already be out there. What this is sounds like it's doing is creating better method for developing your CRISPR system, accelerating that. We make those other existing methods more efficient. So it's all gonna, it's all, there's all these separate paths of trying to do the same thing that once they are put together and learn from each other, which open source of course helps. Yeah, so much. Really accelerate. And then what is it? What is there that can cause this harm? What can cause this harm? We are invincible. If our genes are good, what else is that? Hmm, being a good person anyway. Wait, what? Where does it have to do with anything? Is that ever, when in all of human history is that how to do it? Well, where I was going with it, was that we would still need to take care of our microbiome. Yes, okay, there we go. Tell me about what do we need to do and why? Three of my stories today. Kind of roll together. This one is been published in Cell, Host and Microbe, Journal. Basically, it's finding out that the mammalian gut, it says here, significantly can change their host amino acid and glucose metabolism, acting almost like an extra liver. This is through wheel cornell medicine investigators. An extra liver, the organ that already likes to spontaneously repair itself and just get a little piece of it and it'll go. But awesome. So this is Dr. Chen Jun-go, who is assistant professor of microbiology and immunology in medicine. One of the researchers in the project says they eat before us. Taking first dibs on the nutrients from the food we consume and leaving us with what remains after they satisfy their own nutritional needs. So yeah, so it's apparently they can it's doing a pre-processing. A lot of these metabolic functions can be done by the liver, but now we've found that they're functionally comparable enzymes encoded by the gut microbiota that can do the same or similar things. It's just like there is a second liver operating in the gut. So is this like amino acid availability? But is this like a second? I mean, this is it's a bit of hyperbole. It's almost like a second liver. I mean, it's it's not. It's the microbiome. It's doing this job. And if you mess up your microbiome, you still have a liver that's going to keep doing the work, but our bodies are adapted to work most efficiently in certain situations. So I'm just saying, if you mess up your liver, you better take good care of your microbiota. Take good care of it. So they looked at. So, I mean, I'm just wondering if this is somehow. Similar to how we talk about like the second brain in the gut, you know, that this is just, you know, whereas the gut contains like the largest amount of serotonin neurons in our in our body, the gut is highly nervously innervated. And so this, you know, it makes sense that they would a second brain in the gut. I mean, there is neuronal tissue that goes all the way down from your throat, through your stomach, down through your intestines. It's lined with neuronal tissues that it's not just a gut brain connection. It's a brain brain connection with the brain in your in lining your your your your gut. So so you have the the non-conscious gut brain, and then you have the conscious brain. The gut brain is reacting to stimuli, the bacteria are modifying the environment, stimulating the gut to do things, and then the gut sends signals and the brain goes, I'm hungry, or I don't feel so good. This is all just to send messages to this eight brain of ours to like, OK, go and eat some sugar. It's complicated. Yeah, we need the microbes need some glucose. Come on, go get it. Go take care of your microbes. Go feed your pets. I want a cookie. That's what comes out of your conscious brain. I want a cookie. That's all the decision making has already happened. Sometimes I want to cook all the reasons it wants it. All the necessity of it. It doesn't matter. The decision process tree all has taken place already. And now you just think I want cookie. Mont cookie now. Yes, but if you're eating a cookie, you have to be careful. You have to be careful that you're actually getting what you think you're getting. I'm going to just roll into a second story real quick. This is a role with it. This was a time press today. So I'm going to keep going. OK. News research has discovered that Neotame. I've never been heard of this. Neotame, which is a a artificial sweetener that has maybe a thousand fold sweeter taste than sugar. Capable of damaging the human intestines and causing damage to the microbiota, all of which can lead to illness. The study found that Neotame can cause previously healthy gut bacteria to become diseased, to invade the gut wall, which is also being killed off by this artificial sweetener, potentially leading to the health issues such as irritable bowel syndrome and sepsis and also cause a breakdown of the epithelial barrier, which forms part of the gut wall. Right, leading to leaky gut. Yeah, published in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition and is carried out by Anglia Ruskin University. So when we when we say that, right, the. That leaky gut, now you're talking about potential pathogens making it into the bloodstream. Yep, where you were telling us last week, some of these microbes want to go because they're going to feed on all the nutrients in the serum of our blood. Oh, no. Oh, no. Yeah, not so good for us. So the whole thousand fold sweeter isn't just to make the food insanely sweet. The idea behind it is that you would just use a lot less of it. Smaller quantities. So even if it is harmful, like a lot of the past artificial sweeteners have been found to have negative effects. If you can use an infinitesimally tiny amount of it, well, then, you know, comparably, you should have better outcomes. According to this research, not so. Despite the smaller quantities used, the impact of neotame on the epithelium microbiota relationship has the potential to cause poor gut health, metabolic and inflammatory diseases and even insulin resistance, which is terrible, because this is also something that not just weight loss, but also for people who have glucose issues sometimes are using artificial sweeteners for different reasons. So, yeah, you know, diarrhea, intestinal inflammation, microbes working your way into your blood, it doesn't sound good. They actually did some. They actually did some. A little bit of pathogen study is part of this. They identified a range of pathogenic responses following exposure to E. coli and some other bacteria and found biofilm formation increased adhesion to an invasion of cells by these disease bacteria. Yeah, sugar. Maybe not as maybe just stick with sugar. Yeah. And everything in everything in moderation, right? Use smaller amounts. And, you know, when you don't eat a lot of sugar all the time, suddenly things taste sweeter. There are different ways to highlight the sweetness of things without adding sugar. You can also use natural fruits, other things that are all together adding fiber and sugar. You know, this I understand replacing sugar for people who really need it for health reasons. But if it's going to make your health situation even worse. Yeah. And it seems and it seems like all of the artificial sweeteners have a downside like this one or another. Yeah. Yeah. And it's the group that's that's publishing on this was also key in exposing those like nutritious sweet and all the other previous incarnations of artificial with saccharins, sucralose, aspartame, whatever it was. All of these. Aspartame. It's the same group that demonstrated the problems that those call cause to the intestinal walls as well. So you're just not going to win. They're just you just not going to win here, everybody. Before you like before you release an artificial sweetener, just give it to this group and be like, does this one work? Is this one OK? And if not, like cancel the project. There you go. Well, let's try and find if it's hurting your microbiota, it's getting rid of your second liver. Come on. Oh, don't do that. Maybe we all need probiotic food and or prebiotic foods that help us so make everything happy and healthy. And then you supplement with the probiotics. We're still learning. We don't know it all. But the prebiotics and the probiotics do seem to do good things for people. Moving on from the gut. Let's go to space. Yes. Yes. NASA just reported from their Juno mission, which we have talked about a lot here on the show. Juno is a mission to Jupiter, where it's been imaging Jupiter and its moons and doing all sorts of really like looking at it in multiple spectra and getting incredible data that they really weren't sure they were going to be able to do because of the magnetosphere of Jupiter. This is like the extended mission right now, which is super cool. This craft just keeps going and going. Big big ups to the NASA engineers who made that happen. In December, 2023 and February, 24, Juno made flybys of the moon. I.O. I.O. is known to be a volcanic moon of Jupiter. And it's super exciting because, hey, guess what? It's really, really, really volcanic, according to Juno's data that has been sent back. Apparently, a lot of the surface has a sheen to it, kind of like a shiny piece of obsidian. So there's something going on with the volcanism. On the surface of the moon that has created like something like obsidian and created very hard glass like surfaces throughout the the processes that are going on there. One of the things that they reported on that is even more exciting with this particular bit of data is Lakes of Lava, which I guess if you're a volcanic moon, Lava Lakes makes sense. And the data that they have that they have sent back suggests that these lava lakes are just filled with magma, that there are some. There are there are some islands, maybe, that are popping up in the middle of them, chunks of solid material. But the the Lakes of Lava then are ringed in or Lakes of Magma are ringed in Lava. And the NASA artists have done a really great job of taking the data that has been sent back by Juno to create some incredible visualizations of what these lava lakes might look like on the surface of this volcanic moon. So I don't know the difference between Magma and Lava. I think I thought they were the same thing. Yeah, basically, oh, I shared and I didn't share it. So I have to show you. I was looking at this wonderful picture that I'm going to show to you right now. So this artist visualization from JPL shows a zoom in down to a surface where there's a lake of lava with brightly lit hot spots along the edge of the rim of the of the lake with a with an island in the middle. So there's lava lakes with islands in the center on I.O. Yo, location, location, location. And these are the first close up images of the northern latitudes of this moon. They caught a few volcanoes in action, got some close ups. There's one like that was a artist reconcerned. There's one like that was an artist reconcerned. Where's the picture pictures? Well, all of the data is based on the data comes in and then they have to interpret it and turn it into a visualization. So there's a process and there's not. Juno isn't just like snap, snap, snap. It's a selfie time or, you know, paparazzi for the moon. They're using specular reflection to be able to record the light that's being bounced off of the surface of the moon to be able to get an idea of what's going on. So. Next time we'll put a flashlight. Yeah, yeah. But Jupiter is going to keep going. They're building 3D maps of the polar storms on Jupiter. They're looking in infrared, invisible light and microwave. They're really able to get some. They're getting some really interesting data about what's going on on Jupiter itself. And in terms of EO, they've got IO EO. I don't know, probably messing it up. But they've gotten this new information that is showing that there are some fascinating structures like mountains that are cropping up out of the surface of the moon. And also these lakes of lava. So there's a lot going on on this Jovian moon. We go NASA. I mean, I guess if, you know, a lava planet is. It's it's sort of like the thing that the plate tectonics is resting on on earth is on the surface. So any any land mass above that's just going to be floating around, smashing into things. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. There are lots of smashing, smashing. And yeah. And apparently the Juno's microwave radiometer revealed that this moon also has a surface that's relatively smooth compared to the other Jovian moons, but also has poles that are colder than the middle latitudes. So there's a differentiation that's going on on this moon. And most recently, Juno, the spacecraft, came within about 10,000 miles of the moon's surface, which is pretty close. And it's going to have its 61st flyby of Jupiter on May 12th. So that's coming up. And it's amazing that Juno has been going this long and hasn't been ripped to shreds by the magnetosphere of Jupiter. Do you want to tell another? No, I'm going to move on and talk very briefly about you have your stories. I'm going to talk about one quick story related to artificial cells. It's out of UNC Chapel Hill. Researchers have just published in Nature Chemistry their work, not using AI like the four mentioned study, but looking at DNA and what already exists in cells to create cytoskeletons. Without cytoskeletons, cells cannot function. They need something to prop them up and give them structure and then also to help them react appropriately to stimuli. So to move or to adjust their shape or to transport proteins within themselves. And this group of researchers decided to approach the idea of synthetic biology or creating synthetic living cells from the bottom up and from the idea of creating a scaffolding that is not made of the random scaffolding peptides that are usually used in cells. But in this in this experiment, what they wanted to do is actually create peptides or little short segments of DNA that could then have cross linking between them to act as programmable scaffolds. So with you because they're using DNA, they can create the segments of scaffolding that they want and have them interact in the way that they want. So it becomes a functional programmable living cell that is in their words with the researchers at the Freeman lab who built these cells say that this is not enabling us to reproduce but what nature does but make materials that surpass biology. DNA doesn't normally appear in cytoskeletons. And so it's these programmed sequences that allow it to act as an architectural material and bind other peptides together. In this particular situation, they used a droplet of water cell sized drop of water that was submerged or in oil. And so the water oil boundary became the environment within which this programmed material then took shape and created a functional support structure for a water droplet. Not actually a real cell. They didn't actually go to the point of actually making cells or doing that part of it. But they're creating skeletons. As I say, I love I love the bold comment surpassing biology. Yes. OK, you contained a water droplet. You've you've accomplished bucket. Yes, but they also put very specific toothpicks in the bucket. Right. OK. Yeah. They still surpassing it's early days yet. OK, which is very early. Oh, I'm I'm surpassing LeBron James in NBA scoring. Oh, when did you start? Oh, tomorrow. What? No, this is not how surpassing works. Not how surpassing works. No. But I do think that it is a very exciting concept to be able to not just engineer materials, but actually engineer cells and tissues and do it from the ground up from the underlying structure to all of the stuff that's involved in whatever cell you're creating. Self-assembled, that's fine. Can it self repair? Can it replicate? There's a lot of things left on the in the list before you get to surpassing anything. So many and we have so much to learn. But I guess their hope is that, you know, biology is really messy and you don't really know what's going to come out of random cytoskeleton proteins that, you know, any old cell might have and be mutated or whatever. But in this this particular instance, they are developing a system where maybe they could create cells or bacteria that could work in situations where other life can't that can withstand high temperatures, kind of like archaebacteria, but designed for a specific purpose as opposed to evolving to just exist. Well, we don't need to wait for evolving anymore. So like at first I'm thinking like we can already change the contents of cells to do different things, to express different molecules, to have different like, what's the point of making the shell? You can pick a shell and change the interior now. Yeah, but maybe there is, you know, as much as we're focused on being able to change the interior of a cell and the functioning processes going on within it, maybe maybe there's something to also being able to pick the cytoskeleton ourselves. Although, gosh, there's a lot to be like a hermit crab. I'm going to pick my own shell. There's a lot to choose from out there already. So much, so much. Yes. Do you want to talk about a I'm going to do a very quick break, actually, right now. We'll come back and we'll talk about the rest of the stories that we have. Hey, everybody, this is This Week in Science. We are rushing to the end of the show. We're going to get through it all, all of it. There's so much good stuff coming. This is a science talk show. We hope you like it. We hope you're enjoying the science. We hope you are enjoying the talk and we hope that you are finding new questions to ask. If you have questions, share them with a friend. And as you do that, share twist with a friend. Additionally, you can support the show by heading to our twist.org web page and clicking on the Patreon link and becoming a Patreon supporter, which helps to keep the show going. And finally, our merchandise can be found on our Zazzle store, which again, can be accessed through twist.org. Lots of great things. All supports the show. And yes, long conic. Step three profit. Ha, if only. How about just maintenance and sustainability and just being able to keep going? We appreciate you all being here. Can't do it without you. Thank you for all of your support. OK, let's come back with some more stories. Sciencey stories for the world. Let's talk about a mountain chickadee, mountain chickadees. I love them. I did my PhD in a spatial learning and memory lab looking at bird brains. And so this study as one of the authors is a prime investigator in this study, Vladimir Pravesutov. He was one of my PIs in graduate school and let me slice brains in his lab at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he is located. And he and his colleagues at the University of Colorado just published in the journal Current Biology, their work looking at mountain chickadees, which are just a durable little birds. And they go, and they've got little sounds and they do all the noises. Different species of chickadee have different reliance on their memory. And even different individuals within the chickadees themselves, different species have variability in their memory ability. Some chickadees are really good at remembering stuff and others aren't. And they've noticed that over time in their studies. Vladimir has worked for a very long time on mountain chickadees in the Sierra Nevada range and with the population of birds that he studies, they have tagged the birds with radio transmitters or little chips and also taken blood samples from the birds. And then he created a system of nest boxes or not nest boxes, but study boxes that were then. They're like basically tuned to the RFID signal from the chip that each individual chickadee had. So they were able to identify when birds were coming up to these feeding boxes that they made available. And the feeding boxes would only open to specific individuals. It's kind of like the the tags that you can put on your cat or your dog's collar that will then open a food box for them for feeding at particular hours and won't open for any other animals who might just happen to come into your house to eat your animal's food. So they use they use this method, use this methodology. Goes on in the world, I don't know. They've used this methodology and gone even further to take the blood samples from these birds that they've also been able to correlate with their memory ability. And then they were able to do a genome-wide association study and associate certain genes with memory, with spatial memory specifically, so that these birds are like, hey, I remember where this food box is. I remember where I can go and find food. And that's awesome. And then so they were able to correlate their memory for a location of food with certain individuals and show that some individuals were better at remembering than others, better at learning and remembering than others. And that those individuals also had slightly different mutations and different different genes than the others. And so that's the the University of Colorado research team took the genomes of these 162 tagged chickadees and determined that there were some 97 genes related to spatial learning and memory and specific variants led to more accurate memory than others. A lot of the gene variants are associated with neuron formation in the hippocampus. We know that chickadee brains, the hippocampus of chickadee brains is very active during the period of time leading up to the winter season. And they have new neuronal growth. And so this may be related in some way to those individuals with better memories. They have these genes that lead to more neuron growth during the period of time in which they need that to happen. One thing that they did find, though, is that there was a trade off when they switched food locations or feeder locations for the birds, the birds with worse memories were better able to make a switch to a new location. The birds with better memories were kind of stuck on the old memory and had a harder time learning the new information and transferring it over. And so the trade off might be you got a really, really good memory, but you're not going to learn the new things really well. Look, winging it is a skill. It is. It's something that you if you are not somebody who remembers stuff, just winging it like a bird over time, even more practice, you get better at it. You get good at winging it. And to the point where why would I plan anything? I can just wing it. Don't need to remember all this stuff. I'll just wing it, especially, you know, especially than if you you're a planner, if you, which I'm not, you've never met a planner, planners plan and planners follow the plan once they've planned a plan. But they're very adapted. If they don't have the plan, yeah. Oh, what do they do? They're lost. But if you're a winger. Or you can be a matter who has a plan B, plan C, plan D, plan E, plan F. It doesn't matter what the plans were. You're winging it anyway. Yeah, you might have a couple of backup ideas, some notions of what you could be doing. You just go forth into the world and figure it out. So the question is from this work and what they're going to be looking at moving forward is how this genetic variation ties into survival and and will tie into the future of individuals and populations and species survival and adaptation with climate change. So climate change is changing the variability of weather, changing situations. And is it that these birds that have really, really good memory that are good at surviving on the tops of tall mountains that normally are covered in snow in the winter? Are they not going to do as well? Are the ones are the birds with the. What we would call less accurate memory, the worst. Well, what are they going to do better evolutionarily all human bias? And for no, but that's that's the question though. How are we going to do better in the long run, the better memory or better? I thought I'd be a locked in to one thing that worked versus a more what we call plastic or flexible outlook on on strategy, you know, maybe maybe the genes actually what we need to know is which birds are most most successful. The ones the ones that have this increased memory or the ones who are good at just weighing it, just figuring it out, the creative thinkers. Yeah. And so that is the question. And it's the looking at where different individuals are found in the environment. Are they the ones with the stronger memories and certain gene variants? Are they found in very certain specific places? Are the ones with the different variants found in other places? Are, you know, what is the variation in their distribution through the environment and also how like what's their fitness? And if it's if it's a mix, that means both strategies have a role. That was a very insightful comment. You're right. No, every once in a while. Just toss it out there. Do you want to tell me about diabetes? No, I don't want to talk about diabetes. But if I want to talk about it. But I will. So this is a so we've been talking for a while. How they've been there are researchers who have been screening about food additives for years about the health detriments that are linked to all sorts of food additives in our highly processed foods that could lead to disease. This is this is now this is a French study. So and I don't have the details of exactly what they've looked at. But my assumption is being a well, it must be. It's 104,000 adults in France were studied. So these are people who are eating. The EU sanctioned additives. There are there's a lot of food additives in the United States that are completely banned in the EU. The EU has called them poison, right? Does not allow them in human consumption food. Isn't that so funny? Because there are a lot of things that that we allow that they don't and things that they allow that we don't. It's like, we're like, no, I don't trust you. Your science is different from ours. The scale is heavily, heavily skewed towards the EU banning additives that the US goes, that's fine. Or I don't care. I'm not sure. Depending on. I think the US researchers are like, it's not fine. But the US regulators are like, we don't think that's how that works. So anyway, anyway, so this is this is not even the US standard highly processed food, but the French standard. And actually, the French standard is probably very high because the French have high standards for food, right? And then there's also there's also on top of that, there's a couple of disclaimers that have to be or caveats that should be pointed out. This is also a study that took place over actually between 2009 and 2023, with six month surveys for the 14 year period where the people recorded their dietary intake of things. So it's a pretty it's a pretty extensive time period for a large population study. But these are 79 percent women and mostly highly educated. Who tend to make better food choices as it is within the French system, within the EU and still. Still, they were able to link emulsifiers. These are things that are not sweeteners, but these are the things that are picking up food. It can be cornstarch. It can be things that make the food look better for longer on the shelf. Yeah, these are, let's see, there's kind of a list. Let's see. Monodiglycerides of fatty acids. Kereginins, I don't even know what a kereginin is. That's for kereginin. Don't you remember that ice cream advertisement from like the nineties or kereginin? And it was all about the ice. It's a long word, but it's from seaweed. It's a natural thing anyway. Modified starches, phosphates, cellulose, gums and pectins. OK, this is a whole bunch of stuff that they've been put in food to make it look better on the shelf for longer. And by just going through the data of all this research and just looking for the food additives, these emulsifiers, they could find a pretty significant risk increase across the list of emulsifiers for having type 2 diabetes. Now, we normally associate these diabetes through diet with like exposure to sweeteners or sugars. And eating too much, if you work in a chocolate factory and they give you you can eat as much chocolate as you want while you're there, my goodness, you know, they probably have higher rates of diabetes at that factory. But or people just have all the chocolate around them all the time and they don't need it all the time because it's just so abundant. Who cares? But if there's emulsifiers throughout this chocolate, which they're usually diabetes, but there's also in the biscuit factory that has a low sugar content. But a lot of most fires to keep the biscuit seeming fresh for a longer period of time. And that's what they're kind of pointing out here is that there's a lot in these processed foods beyond just a focus on one ingredient that can contribute. And this list is, you know, it also depends on intake. It was there were increases that were intake specific of the amount of these emulsifiers that were ending up in the diet. There is going to be noise, of course, because these emulsifiers are also going to likely be correlated with all sorts of other sweeter foods or junk foods, typically. These aren't going to be all natural foods in the first place. So. But they took a lot of care to focus on the level of these emulsifiers specific to these foods and follow that correlation. And yes, correlation, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they are not saying, aha, this connects. This is direct. This is causative. This is direct cause of there. They're not making that claim. They're going, look at this data. Maybe we should do a further study where we're more specifically looking at what the mechanism could be, but that's how you how you build the evidence to then launch that those questions. You need to underpin evidence of of a correlation before you get to the specifics. Right. So the correlation can lead you to better hypotheses that can lead you to finding those causative factors. But I, you know, looking at this one table or graph that they have where they've correlated the different kinds of emulsifiers, starches, phosphates, lactilates, polyglycerol, esters of fatty acids, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff versus different food types and how how impactful they are on the risk of type two diabetes. It's fairly safe to say that across the board you have desserts, confectionery, cakes, biscuits, pastries that seem to have the fats and sauces, things that people who are at risk of type type two diabetes would necessarily or hopefully be already looking at with their diet in in terms of limiting their intake. These are also things that tend to be more processed more often. So and so it's like a common this this whole thing puts together so many different factors because you're not it's not causative. This is just like, oh, look at this thing that kind of connects. Could we also in a lot of these are going to be industrial made, meaning you make a cake so that it can sit in a plastic wrapper on a shelf and be for a hundred years or a month, right? As opposed to something you've just pulled out of the oven. Oh, yeah, something you're making just out of the oven is not going. You're making yourself or somebody else has made fresh is not going to have the same the same correlative factors. And so the way but we've talked before, processed food, processed food is generally like worse for you. This is part of it. And and the it was just to follow the thing like so the hypothesis is maybe emulsifiers have something to do with this. So they do this study. They have all this data. They pull out just the emulsifiers to see if there's connection. They see an increased risk of type two diabetes when there's emulsifiers in the food. OK, so that didn't disprove the hypothesis, but didn't prove anything. That's how that works, right? So then the next studies is to make a more narrow bandwidth in some way, where you are only looking at feeding extra emulsifiers to perhaps an animal model with without a sugar content. And the hypothesis there is that you might see higher rates of diabetes. If you don't, you have disproven the hypothesis that the emulsifiers are causative, but you were not. You still haven't proven anything, right? That's that's how it works. It's a whole narrowing down. You can disprove. You can't prove. You can't prove things. You can only disprove things. So exactly. So if you only feed emulsifiers without the sugar content or without some of the other ingredients and they did get type two diabetes, you still haven't proven anything, but you have not been able to disprove the emulsifiers are causative, you would need to then delve into mechanism. And there's a certain point when you can make mechanistic observations and know how function works. We are the overriding principles of science. You've found you've proved something close enough, good enough. You've gotten there. You've found a positive mechanism. That's that's not proof. I don't know. There's always questions. This is science. There are always more questions. If you aren't finding something that leads you to more questions than you haven't done it right with any good research, more research is needed. Yeah, I do like the idea, though, that they're not looking at it as a, you know, this is a simple situation. And it could be additive and there could be a cocktail effect as well. So the emulsifiers by themselves might not be an issue, but it could be in combination with a variety of factors. I know that you've been thinking about this and because I'm sharing this conversation with you. So I am conscious and aware of this situation that we're in. I have awareness, perception, sentience of the moment, conscious awareness of what's happening. I'm working through it in my mind, thinking about how I'm making this segue into this last story. It totally lost me. Right. But I couldn't have lost you if you weren't, you know, conscious and aware of the the rambling that I'm doing and going, what are you talking about? So you had asked a question and I responded. And so we're able to consciously interact with each other. And so there are huge questions in philosophy and also in behavior and a lot of the work, especially with artificial intelligence, moving forward towards a maybe someday generalized artificial intelligence as to what exactly consciousness is. Who is conscious? Which creatures on this planet are conscious? And what are they conscious of? And do they have a self-awareness or is it just an awareness of things happening? So a group of researchers from New York University and other places have just put out a declaration. It's called the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. And I wish Blair were here right now to talk about this because she would just sit back and go, duh. And these researchers, they published this April 19th and they are saying that it's time that scientists and science in general extends the idea of consciousness to a wider group of animals that may be insects, some fish, lots of birds, cats, dogs, dolphins, whatever, but more than just people are conscious of what is happening and it's not just automatic stimulus response that's going on in many creatures and that based on a lot of work, something like the play in bumblebees or memory and things that chickadees are able to do, they say the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates, all vertebrates. And many invertebrates like cephalopods, crustaceans, insects. And they have listed a number of studies that describe complex cognitive behaviors in other organisms and they say that there's a consensus now that researchers have historically overestimated how special humans are. No, that's not what they say, but that they've overestimated how much brain basically, how many neurons, how much complexity of those neural interactions are necessary for the most basic kind of consciousness. So I also, I just have this urge to push back on that. Please do. I mean, why not? This is, it's a declaration, but it doesn't mean everybody has to sit back. They're using a nonsense word, which is consciousness. It is a nonsense word. It doesn't mean a thing, right? Like, unless you're comparing it to unconsciousness or something. But that is exactly it. But they're still conscious even in their dream state. My point is, I would not say, I would not attempt to elevate animals to the level of consciousness. I would just point out that humans are just a lot of stimulus response going on in a bigger brain. More in our brain than we thought. That's all it is. It's not that we're doing things different. With a larger brain, there may be a lot more stimulus response activity taking place than, you know, what a spider is concerned with. But it's not really different. There's nothing more conscious about a human activity than a spider's activity. It's just stimulus response with some genetic memory and some learned behaviors. And there you go. Right. So humans. Humans and other organisms with their complex consciousness and intelligence, et cetera, et cetera, may have a stimulus that makes them want a cookie. But people, you know, we've got, oh, well, where am I going to get a cookie? How am I going to get a cookie? And then there's this planning that's involved. And there's like, so this whole theory of mind that is integrated into how behaviors take place. Yes, sometimes it's just very instinctual. And you know, oh, autopilot, hunger, go stairs, cookie, eat, but usually there's a lot of thinking and awareness of the process that occurs. But in this particular declaration, what they are attempting to spell out is that consciousness is maybe a broad swath and they have put forward an idea called phenomenal consciousness. Not that it's phenomenal, but that creatures are aware of phenomena occurring in their themselves. So the mental state of being hungry, maybe they're not thinking about how they're going to go get food or planning something about it, but there is an awareness of hunger. Or there is a subjective phenomenon occurring within the individual for pain or pleasure or other things. You know, you can't imagine what it would be like for an octopus to have a tentacle cut off. You probably heard a lot, but what is it like to be that octopus? And so the question is, how can we say that these organisms have no consciousness? And so that's what they're putting forward. So what I'm just saying is like, Kiki, you're a self-aware and empathetic person who thinks about your thought processes as you deliberate way too much about things. However, I would say that most humans aren't doing that. Let's say most humans aren't on a daily basis. Maybe you're underestimating humanity here. I really don't think that I am. In an article in Quanta by Dan, there's a quote from a researcher from the University of Sussex. They say that they hope the declaration draws greater attention to the issues of non-human consciousness and to the ethical challenges that come along with it, beyond just humans, but they say, I hope it sparks discussion, informs policy and practice in animal welfare and galvanizes in understanding and appreciation that we have much more in common with other animals than we do with chat GPT. We have feelings, and so do animals. You got no feelings. Well, I feel like it's time for us to... I don't think so. I don't think that's true at all. But I do feel like we have come to the end of our show. We rushed and pushed and have done it. Do you have anything you want to talk about still? No. No? I mean, always, but I have to go catch a train. Yeah, so I'm going to help you catch that train by winding down the show right now and saying thank you to everybody for joining us for another episode of Twists. We really hope that you enjoyed the show. Justin, thank you for making it this morning. I really enjoyed doing the show with you. Thank you so much. Fada, thank you for your help with show notes and social media. I thank our sponsor, Gord Arnlor, for helping with the chats over in Twitch and YouTube and Facebook and all the places making it happy chat time. Identity 4, thank you for recording the show. And Rachel, thank you for editing the show. We do really appreciate all the things that you do. And to our Patreon sponsors, thank you so much for all of your support. You really help keep the show going. 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This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science It's the end of the world So I'm setting up shop Got my banner unfurled It says the scientist is in I'm gonna sell my advice Show them how to stop the robot With a simple device I'll reverse global warming With a wave of my hand And all this is coming your way So everybody listen Do what I say I use the science I gotta go, I gotta rush I gotta go catch a train Okay, don't lose your head, don't lose your hat Go, catch a train Have a wonderful day Just put that calic down It's blue skies But it's still like one degree Layers, it's all about layers Wear your layers Thank you, it was wonderful to talk with you this week Take care Have a great week And everyone out there Yeah, after show is probably Just gonna go right now Unless you all have big questions For me right now But yeah Oh, whoop Kevin Unique in the Discord Just talking about octopuses We got AI emulating consciousness Yeah, it's not conscious, whatever Kitchen, oh the kitchen update, yes Did not get into it in the show But yes, you all must be chomping at the bit To find out what happened to my kitchen Apparently the freezer over Or something, there was an alarm A high temperature alarm in our fridge freezer Which is not great, it's still happened a couple of times now But apparently The Marshall Got under the fridge And pulled out the evaporation tray From under the fridge And it was sloshy and splashy And also contained something Kind of like a kombucha mother, apparently Which then Marshall proceeded to try And take this tray From the bottom of the freezer Up to the top of the counter And into the sink where he could wash it And apparently there was much splashing And grossness everywhere And so then Marshall had to clean it And he decided of course to use I think 30% ammonia Or the strongest vinegar you've ever seen But yeah So there was the possibility of Disgusting bacteria That could be dangerous Plus the Very strong cleaner that he was using But apparently it was like everywhere And he was tired So he's not really sure exactly What got cleaned and what didn't It was just gross and he took care of stuff So when Kai came down here He was He was under the impression That just nothing was safe Nothing was safe in the kitchen Which is slightly true So I went upstairs Looked through the kitchen It didn't look bad when I got upstairs And then proceeded to not go in the kitchen I just avoided the kitchen entirely And I wish I could continue to do that It would be very great Yeah so it's either the compressor Or a fan that's going out And I have learned so much about Freezers and refrigerators recently But what's probably going to happen Is that we're going to have to Turn off the fridge freezer Take everything out and store it Safely or let it get rid of it Eat it all I don't know Maybe put it in an ice chest And then let it thaw out So that anything that might be Ice clogged because the back of the freezer Has been blowing air up and freezing The produce bin It's like all this stuff It's engineering right Gotta go troubleshoot One step at a time Yeah we've dusted off the compressor coils The next step is to check the fans And the different motors But that's going to take opening things up And pulling things out And it's not easily accessible So yay! I'm so excited to own a house Oh my gosh That was great Anyway maybe I'm going to have to wait For Memorial Day sales And a new appliance I don't know Yeah it could be a fan There's so many things that could be I mean I'm just glad that the evaporator pan Is not overflowing kombucha mother All over my kitchen floor Because that would be disgusting But basically we do need to improve The airflow under the refrigerator freezer That's what we gotta do Generally you don't see that kind of behavior In a major appliance Yeah I know Planned obsolescence everyone It is the worst part Of late stage capitalism Adventures in home maintenance While Disney I don't know if that's going to either Make a good Disney ride Or you know a movie It's not like adventures in babysitting For sure And yeah Fada You're welcome You're welcome We're growing things in my kitchen Maybe I can share them with you For your sourdough Oh my gosh What's happening here I'm hoping that my fridge freezer Doesn't just kick the bucket Sometime soon and that we can Get a few more months out of it Let's see That could be a fun Disney ride right Instead of Mr. Toad's wild ride Like home maintenance You're drier Let's stop working What's happening Oh make sure that you clean the lint filter Have you done your annual HVAC testing Make sure that all your filters are clean There's so many things to keep track of It's awesome It's the best But it is not even the 90 minute mark yet We did a great job on the hour long show tonight I'm sure Justin is off to An amazing day of work Over there in Denmark And I am going to take this opportunity To put myself to bed a little bit early And say goodnight to all of you Thank you for asking about the kitchen That know it wasn't destroyed But yeah turned out okay so far And thank you for joining me And Justin tonight for another episode of TWIST We will be back again next week Oh god Paul I get it Oh what hyperintelligence slime mold That's how you get hyperintelligence slime mold Oh yeah Totally I'm happy to share My household adventures With all of you And I do look forward To talking with you again next week It should be a lot of fun Hopefully some more science will happen I know more science will happen And we'll be back to talk about all of it Thank you again everyone Stay curious Stay safe Stay healthy And stay curious And of course as Justin would enjoy to say Stay lucky