 If it says we're live, so here we are. Seven, seven, seven. Seven, seven, seven. It's our airplane episode. We're also jackpot, right? Jackpot, oh. Oh, okay. I looked on the internet to find out what seven, seven, seven means and apparently, apparently seven, seven, seven is when you're like perfectly in tune with the universe and your life is about to make a big breakthrough. So we are episode seven, seven, seven of TWIS and we're so about to make a breakthrough. I don't know to what, but anyway. For those of you who are starting the show with us right now, this is a science program and we are recording live right here and now. What you see in the next hour or so is our live broadcast. All mistakes and other things may or may not be edited out for the podcast, might happen, might not, but if you want the pretty edited version, subscribe to our podcast. Look for this week in science. Okay, are we ready to start the show? We're ready. Okay, let's start this show in three, two, this is TWIS. This week in science episode number 777 recorded on Wednesday, June 10th, 2020. Science takes flight. I'm Dr. Kiki and today on TWIS we will fill your head with artificial sleep, ancient hormones and butterfly wings, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. In the aftermath of a public lynching on the streets of Minneapolis, as peaceful protesters across America have been met with violent rioters dressed as police, as calls go out to deep fund reduce and even replace traditional policing with something that better serves the needs of communities, following our programming is about science. Public policy is not our wheelhouse. We will remain focused on the expanding knowledge of people who are pursuing ways to improve society to prolong human life. And wherever those pursuits take us, we'll be here to talk about it. Here on this week in science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind I can't get enough. I want to every day of the week. There's only one place to go. Science to you Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of this week in science. We're back again to, as Justin said, talk about the science. That's right. We're gonna talk about science today. Thank you for joining us so much. We have a fantastic show ahead. All sorts of stories. As we jump into them though, one of the big stories of the day is the shutdown STEM movement. If you go online, hashtag shutdown academia, shutdown STEM is a movement related to the Black Lives Matter movement and the issues that have been brought to the forefront of the American psyche for the last couple of weeks. And researchers around the world, actually not just in the United States, but around the world have united in solidarity and taken a day for black researchers, scientists and STEM professionals to have a day of rest. And for those who would like to be allies to educate themselves to amplify the voices of those people in STEM and academia and also to come up with game plans for how they're going to move forward. I just wanna say that we here at TWIS are going to continue to try to amplify black voices in the sciences. And if you are looking for some wonderful female black voices, go to vanguardstem.com for conversations between women, women scientists. And additionally, if you're interested in the shutdown STEM movement, you can visit shutdownstem.com for more information and resources to educate yourself. It is a little tricky for me to wanna, like the STEM is the one thing I just like, don't shut that, like there's other things that can shut down, but science, technology, engineering and math, like do we really, like I understand everyone's participating, but not that, like just keep that open. Just keep it going, right? Well, yeah, I know. It's just not something I really care about. Yeah, shut down coffee shops, shut down stuff. I don't care, but yes, this is why, this is what makes it a meaningful protest. Exactly, and this, that was the idea behind it. Exactly, you hit it right on the head. It's when people are working at home, we can't block traffic so easily, we can't make as big of visible of a protest. This is the protest. And many large academic institutions have joined in, not one of them being nature, nature publishing, and there are a group of their editors who have stood today with the black community and the sciences to develop ways that they can work around publishing, which is also a huge part of the pipeline of certain voices getting amplified or diminished and trying to figure out whether or not, what they can do to move forward better. Additionally, archive.org, we report lots of stories from the preprint, the physics preprint journal. They did not announce any new publications for today, so there were no archive announcements for today in solidarity. So there are a bunch of places. If you look around, there has been, there was a lot of silence, but there was also a lot of talk about what we can do better, how science, how science can change for the better as an institution to have everyone's voice valued, especially bring to the front those voices that have been historically marginalized. Yeah, I think we wanna talk all the time about how science that is done well is impartial and controlled. And we've even talked about stories on the show where depending who's doing the science, there can be a skewin results. And how, especially when you look at medicine, it depends who's doing the testing and who is taking the tests, right? And so we already know that we want better representation in STEM in general, but even just on a practical basis to make sure we're doing good science, we need better representation just based on that. And yeah, I think it's a really important time to look at the really kind of prolific and important contributors that we currently have, but also to look on our system of how we educate people in STEM and move people forward in STEM and make sure that we're getting all of our voices heard. Yeah, so if you know a black scientist who you think would be an amazing guest on this week in science, someone who's doing awesome science that we should be talking about that you wanna hear about and learn more about, let me know and I will see what I can do to get them on the show. Yeah, we can all work together to have more voices. All right, let's move into our science for the week. I brought stories about sleep, memories, and bird brains. What'd you bring, Justin? Oh my goodness. So I've got a hormonal C-cucumber. What? Yeah. Love C-cucumber. Oh, I've got clean water through a parasitic fungi and a self-destructing cancer with synthetic fungi. Oh, fungi of the future. Oh my goodness. A couple of fungi stories. All the fun guys totally and Blair, what is in the animal corner? So something kind of quietly came and went a couple of days ago, at least in my world since aquariums are closed and people aren't going to beaches. It was World Oceans Day. So I have a story about flamingos, some of our estuary species. I have a story about water on butterfly wings and a little quick tidbit about great white sharks. Well, great. As we jump into the show, I wanna remind you that if you're interested in subscribing to the Twist podcast, you can find it just about any podcast platform you look on, look for This Week in Science. You can also look for This Week in Science on YouTube and Facebook. And you can go to our website directly, twist.org, T-W-I-S, dot o-r-g. All right, let's dig into the science and I would love to start with a COVID update. We kind of slowed down on the COVID news for a week or so, but you know, the news is still happening and I just wanna be a part of reminding everyone that even though you want to think that the pandemic's over, it's not. It's not, it's still here. Big time, big, big time. So nationally, numbers of infections instead of dropping are starting to plateau. And you know why? It's because a number of states that have opened up and have started to allow business in various forms and reduce their social distancing practices, the numbers of cases are starting to increase. This week specifically, Arizona announced that they were going into emergency preparedness because they had seen a 30% increase in the number of hospitalizations over the last week. So things are changing rapidly and the dates do seem to kind of trend toward the Memorial Day weekend and what we saw there. So we'll see what happens further as a result of the protests, but individuals who work in epidemiology have been trying to run rough estimates. They say that, yeah, we probably will see an uptick from the protests, but not necessarily a large one immediately. It might be something more on a secondary or tertiary infection, so that the people from the protests infect other people and those people infect other people. So in like four weeks, we might be seeing a larger number of hospitalizations from the protests, but there was news from the World Health Organization this week that, Oh. The who did something? Yeah. We'll find it after these brief announcements. Okay, so it is kind of interesting that there is, oh wait, maybe if he keeps back, but she's her audio still isn't, we can't hear you, we can't hear you. We're reading, we're reading, we're reading. She's can't see us. Oh no, she's reading. So she's, look, and she's giving it her all. Oh man. So we're going to have to, we're going to have to, yeah. So anyway, what I was going to say, it's the death toll is equivalent to twice the soldiers we lost in Vietnam, which created a massive blowback from society for and long lingering pain. And I swear I don't feel like anybody or that I'm in contact with at least in my circle of COVID-free-ness is really playing that much, I mean, people are taking all the precautions, we're wearing masks, people are staying at home still. This is a massive death toll. Yeah, and I'm just seeing a lot of people just walk into the beach, meeting up with friends, giving each other hugs and heading out. I saw a bunch of gray haired gentlemen sitting around in a circle. She just figured it out. Drinking coffee, sitting so close to one another drinking coffee. I was just like, guys, we don't all live together. I know you don't. You're the worst demographic to be doing this. But I also saw an article, now I'm citing something I don't have, but I saw somewhere. We're weighing in it right now, it's okay. Some polls said that white male baby boomers are the most likely to disregard all of the warnings around COVID, which is funny because they're also in the demographic age-wise. All right, anyway. So there is also something in the article that does show that conservatives in general tend to pay less attention to health laws, whether it's don't drink this soda, don't text while driving, whatever it is, they are much less likely to follow advice or regulation, even. So Kiki, you're not gonna be pleased. You cut out at the World Health Organization. And then we waited. And then you waited and waited. You gotta monitor when you come back because you're not always back yet. Am I back now? Yes. You're back now, but what I'm saying is if it happens, if you cut out, be prepared for when you get video back, your audio might not be there. So you should monitor us as we go. The problem is, is I go to a different, I go to my notes page. Yeah, I don't know. Two screens. You need two screens. You gotta have two screens. You're a high end producer. You need two screens. Yep. Oh, well. I'll fix it. We'll fix it. All right. So anyway, this week, the World Health Organization, I'm just gonna start laughing now, the World Health Organization said, had a press conference in which a scientist said that asymptomatic transmission was very rare. And a bunch of scientists, hundreds of scientists from around the globe jumped on that statement to clarify that that scientist was only talking about a couple of studies that had been done in China. And they brought out multiple studies from around the world that back up the knowledge that asymptomatic transmission globally is actually common. It is not necessarily the highest percentage of transmission, people with symptoms are more likely to transmit the virus, but asymptomatic, yes, asymptomatic transmission does occur up to a quarter of the time, up to 26% of the time or so. That's very interesting because that... And it depends on different individuals. Some individuals are much more infectious asymptomatically and never become symptomatic. And other individuals, their asymptomatic phase, it's simply pre-symptomatic. They haven't gotten symptoms yet. So part of this is science communication and the words that are used specifically. When you think of somebody who's asymptomatic, you think this person has it and is a carrier and never gets symptoms, perhaps. Pre-symptomatic is the state in which you are infected, but have not yet begun to display symptoms. Symptomatic is obvious and that you have the symptoms. And so there are lots of words that are used. Well, yeah. And part of it too is that I thought we had discovered that the higher viral load tends to be pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic, but pre as well, like that it's actually going down as you are getting sick. Right. And so, yes, and so that's the basis for when you wanna have different kinds of tests. So PCR is better earlier. The immunoglobulin antibody tests are better later. There are different stages at which you want to be tested to reduce the possibility of a false positive or a false negative. That said, this statement by the World Health Organization after, it wasn't a statement, but the media picked up on it and the message became transmitted through the media, sensational headlines that asymptomatic transmission is not a problem. So if I feel fine, I'm good. But the reality is the World Health Organization walked everything back and issued another statement saying, well, no, that's not what we meant. We meant to say this other thing, but the reality is as we're talking about it, asymptomatic transmission is a thing. And so we all still need to be concerned about that. The science is, the World Health Organization had questionable language that they used and a questionable reference that was misinterpreted. The science is not questionable on this particular aspect. Wall Street Tech and the, I think it's the YouTube showroom saying range of infection is four meters or 13 feet. Well, I just want to, I just want to- That depends on a lot of things. Yeah, okay, so here's a good way of looking at any respiratory transmittable disease. How close do you sit to a smoker? Well, if you're outside and the wind's going the right way, you can be 10 feet, five feet away and it doesn't bother you at all. Or you could be 13 feet away in the wrong direction and you're getting besieged with cigarette smoke. If you're indoors and you can find space without ventilation, it doesn't matter how far away you are. You're going to be inhaling their secondhand smoke. So if you think about it that way. I like that. Even six feet is really sort of, even the having that distance, which we've been practicing is really insufficient. 13 feet can be better if you're outside, but again, which way is the wind blowing? Gotta pay attention. You gotta stay- Where is that toxic cloud of magic glitter? Gotta stay upwind from the other humans. So this might be segueing nicely into Kiki's next story, but in San Francisco, the thing that they said is if you're active, if you're moving and you're within 30 feet, you have to wear a mask. If you're not moving, then within six feet you have to wear a mask. So movement is also really important for transmission. It's all a cloud of probabilities. Yes. Where is this cloud of probabilities higher or lower? But yes, as the segue, the another study that just came out published in the proceedings of the Royal Society A, it's entitled Modeling Framework to assess the likely effectiveness of face masks in combination with lockdown and managing the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers used mathematical modeling to determine whether or not these non-pharmaceutical interventions, face masks and social distancing, are effective. And lo and behold, they're a good idea. They have some, speaking of these webs of probabilities, if based on their mathematical model, they came up with a wonderful schematic that I'm, for those of you who are watching live, I'm going to share right now because it's very colorful and fantastic. And it gives all of the parameters that were involved in their mathematical model. They had the modeled people who wear masks or people who don't wear masks. They involved also a period of infection for those people. Fomite inoculums, droplet inoculums were parameters that were included. Also, when they exposed people, when they were exposed, when they were asymptomatic, or in other words, pre-symptomatic, symptomatic and when the virus was removed. And they went on to look at the possibility of transmission based on all of these parameters. And in, they had used a wonderful, put it all together using. That's a math. It's some pretty math, let me tell you that. But the distribution of results from this model indicate that people wearing face masks at all times are, and they're with a very effective face mask. So say like an N95 mask that they don't touch or move or wear around their chin all the time, they're more likely to protect others from infection than those who do not wear a face mask. So the likelihood of transmission is lower with face masks. And in the last sentence of the abstract for their paper, they say, a key message from our analysis to aid the widespread adoption of face masks would be my mask protects you, your mask protects me. So we're getting some stroppy scientists out there telling us about mask wearing. And since asymptomatic transmission is a big probability, wear a mask at all times, protect other people. The science says it's better. And if you're wondering about all this social distancing and the locking down and the mask wearing and all those kinds of things, whether or not they worked, you might have heard people saying, well, you know, it's fine, nobody's in the hospital, it's great. We didn't really have that much of a problem in our state. There's the first peer reviewed analysis of local regional national policies out of UC Berkeley. These researchers looked at over 1,000 different regulations that were put into place in six countries over a period that ended April 6th. So the numbers would have been bigger if the study had predicted a longer period of time. But they were looking, they based their numbers on the exponential growth that was seen at the beginning of infection, reported infection, infective cases in these different countries. So taking the rate of growth from each of these countries before any lockdown policies had been put in place, they found that shelter in place and non-pharmaceutical interventions averted roughly 530 million COVID-19 infections across all of these countries. And of those infections, 62 million would have been confirmed cases. And this is an estimate based on, and these numbers, cases versus confirmed cases, those are numbers, confirmed cases would have been estimated based on the number of confirmed cases that we had in these different countries. So the 530 million, the larger number is an estimated number based on the case fatality rate and infection fatality rate that we have seen in all of these different countries. That said, the number of lives saved is in the thousands. So right now, for perspective, cases are at about 7 million globally, over 400,000 dead. And you can imagine the numbers, the larger numbers that would have died if we had allowed the numbers of confirmed cases to be 62 million as opposed to seven. So the study doing all of their analysis based on exponential growth, it suggests that everything we've been doing has been worth it. So good job, everyone, let's keep it up. Please wear your masks and we can move forward more safely. Let's take the plateau that we're seeing and drop it back down again. Continue to do as much social distancing as you can, if you can, let's keep others safe. And then a final study for those of you who are wondering or concerned about particular individuals who seem to have more likelihood, the higher likelihood of severe respiratory infection being intubated for their COVID infections. A recent preprint that's out in the Met Archive this last week did a genome-wide association study of samples from over 1600 hospitalized COVID patients, 2200 healthy controls. They found genetic variants in the genome of individuals who were under more severe respiratory distress based on COVID-19 that at one, related to blood type, and another, that's a gene cluster on chromosome three, that's related to the ACE2 amino acid, the ACE2 protein that has been discussed many times. The blood type that seems to have the worst trouble with the respiratory infection is type A. Type O appears to be protective. This is interesting, especially since it's been hypothesized that this is something of a blood vessel disease. So I find that kind of interesting on top of it. And then even further, the genes of interest on chromosome three, one encodes an amino acid transporter and another encodes immune system-related chemokine receptors. And both of them play a role in T cell differentiation and recruitment during influenza viral infections, which may lead to the reduced likelihood of the immune system being able to fight off the disease. So anyone who's not type A, hey, hey, hey. No, but like I said, this is not, these are increased risks. These are not necessarily, these are not necessarily a direct track to severe infection. Yeah, science. We got lots of science. Did you wanna talk about more, something more interesting than COVID? Let's move on. Wear your masks, wash your hands, social distance. New normal, troubling times. Yes, new, yes, yes. Tell me about these CQ cumbers. So don't spoil us, no spoilers. Humans, humans have hormones. Those hormones aren't just running amok all the time. They are controlled at times by proteins that regulate our reproduction, our metabolism, the immune system, other important bodily type functions. A key set of these proteins have ancient origins. According to a study published today, and today or earlier this week in E-Life. The Kispeptin, Kispeptin system is a group of proteins that control hormones. They are released by the hypothalamus, pituitary gland and the testicles in men or the ovaries in women. Quoting voice, who is this? Who am I quoting? This is lead author, Tianming Wang, who's a professor at the Marine Science and Technology College, Zhejiang Ocean University, China. The origins of these proteins have previously been traced to a very simple creatures with spinal cords, but it hadn't been tracked back any further. So creatures with spinal cords are the ones that had the first hormones. Oh, but they did look further. So they started looking at all sorts of other creatures and they looked through a system in genes of C-Cucumber, which is a creature without a spinal cord. They identified basically the equivalents of the Kispeptin genes in the C-Cucumber. Next, they found that administering Kispeptin proteins to mantle cells caused them to release calcium similar to how human versions of the protein would behave. The C-Cucumber proteins were also able to interact with receptors in human cells, suggesting that very little has changed in these proteins over the course of pretty much all of complex life evolution. It's a really long time for a function to be preserved. That is awesome and amazing. These experiments suggest that the Kispeptin system predates the evolution of the spinal cord. So if your hormones seem to be strong, remember, they are the definition of primal. They are older than vertebrates. And yes, they are trying to control you because that's what they're there for. And that's what they have done for most of animal evolution. If I may, this makes nothing but sense to me because C-Cucumbers, C-Stars, they're broadcast spawners. And so they somehow just have to know, release all the sperm, release all the eggs. Like that's how do you regulate that, but with hormones? And they can be, their moods can turn on a dime. You don't want to be on the wrong end of a C-Cucumber. Let me tell you that. What is the wrong end of a C-Cucumber? I mean, they're probably pretty equal. It's all good. C-Cucumbers, they're cute. I mean, they poop sand, so their butt can't be that gross. There's a little World Oceans Day trivia for you. Really? They poop sand? Yeah. How? They're like little, they're the oceans vacuum cleaners. They're like picking up. Well, I mean, they're not, I mean, they don't create sand. They eat just a bunch of sand when they eat poop. And so they eat poop and they poop out basically clean sand. So which end is actually the gross end? Isn't there like a fish that like poops the white sand? That like actually like creates a type of sand that's like on the white beaches. I thought there was a fish that pooped like calcium deposits or something. I don't know, I don't hear that. You know what I'm making that up and did I hear that wrong? I can do a quick fact check in the, in our mini- You said we'll do some quick fact checking on Justin's. There's a fish that poop sand that makes up. Okay, we just Google fish that poop sand. Now we know, now we know. And your hormones, they've been around for a long time, but you know, maybe our hormones are still acting the way they do because they want us to be broadcast spawners. Oh, this was a very quick fact check. Noah tells me, so this is a real source. This is great. Check your source and everybody when you Google that parrot fish create the white sand on the beaches of Hawaii. They scrape off the rocks and dead corals. They grind up the calcium carbonate of the corals and that becomes the sand on the beach. That makes sense. Very interesting. When you go to Hawaii and you rub your toes in the white sand beaches. Fish poop. It's passed through the gut of a fish. Absolutely. Yes. I mean, it has a wonderful. Most things pass through the gut of a fish feel like all water. All worm. All worm. It's something like that. Yeah, white sands are thanks to the parrot fish munching on coral. I grind so much in this little hormonal interlude. Oh, I see one of the chat rooms are all full of people who knew the answer ahead of us. Thank you chat. We have such smart listeners. We have such great listeners. Yes, thank you for knowing more than we do. If you just tuned in, this is This Week in Science. If you are interested in a twist mug or shirt or face mask or other fun item of Twist Merchandise, head to twist.org and click on the Zazzle link to browse our store and buy something. All right. It is that time for more animal stuff. This is a perfect segue into Blair's Animal Corner. What you got, Blair? Oh, pomingos. What color are they? Pomingos. What's a pomingo? It's like a pomello. Oh, no, strapped in, everybody. Flamingos. They're pink. Oh, pomingo. Are they? Oh, boy. A new study from University of Exeter looked at how pink flamingos are and their aggression towards one another in relation to food. And they found that there was a difference, that pink plumage normally is a sign of good health in lesser flamingos. So a bright color usually means good health and time to breed, speaking of those hormones. The pinkest flamingos, both the male and female, turns out they were more aggressive towards their neighbors. They came to food. Makes sense. Yeah, so they found out that the birds fight more also, just in general, when the food is in a smaller area and kind of a central place, as opposed to spread out over a wide space of food, also makes sense. We know that the color of pink flamingos comes from carotenoids, beta carotene in their food, which for the lesser flamingos is usually algae. For larger flamingos, it's often krill. But it has to do with filter feeding in the water. That's why they're beaky shaped like that. They dunk their head upside down in the water. They slap together and they have these projections in their mouth that look almost like baleen. They're made out of carotene, just like that, like baleen, so they can filter through the water as they smack their beak together and get as much food as they can from the water. So that's how they get their pink color. So for example, flamingos in zoos are pink because the food, the dry food that they're provided actually has the carotenoids in it. Otherwise, they would be whitish. But I doubt that they exhibit the same aggression with pink color in this as do the wild ones. Not so, so it's pretty consistent. So the pinker flamingos are in fact the more aggressive. But I do know that zoo flamingo food always has the stuff in it. It's supplemented perfectly for flamingos. So they didn't do this study with flamingo food that was lacking carotenoids. So we don't know if you just have a white flamingo flock if there's a difference or not. I would assume it would kind of be hard to measure at that point, but the idea is that actually the pinkness is how you can measure who's been best fed. Yes. So basically a couple of things from this. The main one is that this can impact how we manage flamingos in captivity and that as seems obvious now, you would wanna feed food over a wide area so that they don't have to compete with one another because it is kind of this feedback loop, right? So if the better fed flamingo is gonna be more aggressive, it will continue to be the better fed flamingo, which if you're out in the wild and you have an entire marshland to pick from, it might not seem to be so bad, but inside of a very specific amount of space, it could be a problem. Yeah, it makes sense. Aggressive flamingo gets the pink. Yeah, that makes sense. And so actually if you spread out the food, you end up getting overall pinker and more relaxed flamingos because everyone's getting more food. But what I thought was interesting about this actually was that I see a kind of chicken and egg. You know what you're gonna say, Justin, you know what the answer is. But like a chicken, yeah, yeah, but it's kind of a which came first situation because are the pinker flamingos aggressive because they're stronger or are they aggressive and therefore eat more? Ah, I would assume it was the aggression first just because that's probably how they got the, pushed the other birds out of the feeding spot in the first place. Right. And then they got to eat. You assumed that. That's what I would assume. But also just being, having more energy and being stronger by being better fed could also impact that. So it's, yeah, which- Yeah, but I bet there's some birds who just like they get their belly full and they're like, okay, I'm gonna go wander over here for a while and just like make a little mud nest or something, whatever flamingos do in their off time. No, it could also be that honest signaling. There are two different, you know, that people have been looking at carotenoids and how they influence the coloration of birds for a long time. We have birds like the Western Tanager, which is a songbird that its head, it's yellow, but its head turns bright red in the spring when it's eating and summer when it's eating particular food sources. And it's the food that causes the red coloration. So also finches, the house finches are pinker or redder with more of various food. So, I mean, it's an honest signal, but I don't know, you know, it could all depend on, okay, you're a young bird, but in that formative moment, you got a cold or maybe you had some kind of parasite or something. And so you weren't as energetic, you didn't get the food and then you're not pink. And then you don't have the food and it's a reinforcing cycle. It's such a sad story. That's nature, man. Or you just happen to be the individual who gets to the food first. And so they're more for you and you have more energy and then you're red. You know, it could just be correlational, but still an honest signal. Yeah, I kind of thought, I assume that the zoo plumbing goes or whatever. Yeah, plumbing goes. Yeah, you got it. Plumbing goes. They would have had better food dispersal from the zookeepers so they would have all been kind of, they wouldn't have to compete in a zoo. But I guess even in the zoo, it's a confined situation. I guess that's fierce competition in a zoo. I never thought of it that way. It could be, yeah. I think that it depends on what you're trying to do. And if you have a water feature in a Flamingo exhibit and you really want them to forage, then you might be inclined to put the majority of the food in the water, which might make it a more central location that is not as dispersed. So you could definitely see how different ideas of the best way to care for Flamingos could end up being conflicting there. Yeah, I wanna know how this all goes into those social groups that you talked about previously about how they have these friend groups that last for long periods of time. I mean, does angry Bob just have, he doesn't have any consistent friends or are all of his friends pink? Yeah, is it like the cheerleaders at the table in the cafeteria? Yeah. Oh, what, they're really nice ones? No. They're all so sweet. Oh, well, maybe not, yeah. Yeah, which I will mention, there was consistency in this experiment across males and females. Interesting. So it probably is not a sexual signaling thing because it was pretty consistent. Yeah, I guess you'd wanna see if this was something that changed in individuals over different breeding seasons, if you'd wanna follow an individual from year to year to year to be like, okay, this year Bob's pink, this year Bob's not so pink. Yeah. Good question. But in the meantime, better care for Flamingos. So then moving on to better care for humans, for humans. So this is a story about potential biomimicry in water resistance. So when we think about butterfly wings, do we think of them being super, super powerful or maybe kind of fragile? Cause I've pinned insects before and they feel pretty fragile. Especially butterfly wings. Yeah. But an analysis of high speed raindrops hitting biological surfaces, including feathers, plant leaves and insect wings, reveals that they are actually highly water repelling surfaces that can reduce the impact of water. So they have, they're scales, aren't they on a butterflies wing? Yes, we will kind of, yeah, it's textured. It's kind of pointy. So we've talked before about how insect wings are antimicrobial because they have kind of these points and almost needle-like projections that kind of tear apart the casing on viruses and bacteria. So we did know that, that they're kind of pokey. But specifically with water, it's a very interesting thing to think about because so in previous studies, we have looked at water hitting insects and plants and saw that the liquid's cleaning, the liquid, when it hits it, can hit it up to 10 meters per second. And so then they would measure the raindrops falling on hydrophobic natural surfaces, the ones I mentioned before. But the way that they explain what that means, 10 meters per second on raindrops, that's equivalent to, by weight, us getting hit by a bowling ball falling. On the sky. What? So each individual raindrop has the potential to be really dangerous to a little butterfly. So they collected their samples of these natural things, then they grabbed the insect wings from Cornell University, the insect collection. Then they placed the samples on a table, they released water drops from the height about two meters and they recorded the impact of a few thousand frames per second with a high-speed camera. Then what they found was that when a drop hits the surface, it ripples and spreads. And that on top of that, there's actually a nanoscale wax layer that repels it. And then these micro-scale bumps, the kind of projections I was talking about, they actually make the raindrops spread out. So the way they talk about that is it's as if you dropped a balloon onto a needle and it broke into a bunch of pieces. So basically that's what it's doing with the water droplet. Because of these little projections, it's breaking apart the water droplet, it's reducing the amount of time the drop is in contact with the surface, which limits momentum, it lowers impact force, and it also reduces heat transfer because insect mussels have to be really warm to be able to move. And so they can't fly unless their wings are warm. So if they're getting hit by raindrops and it's cooling them down, then they won't be able to fly. So this is a- You don't really see butterflies flying in the rain very often. No, but I'm thinking it's like right after, when they could just potentially be stuck. But yeah, so it helps. That also helps from weighing them down because water's heavy. So if they got saturated, that would be hard. So this is a really cool look at this waxy property of the wing that makes it repellent, but also the texture of the wing that breaks apart the water droplets and allows them, oh yeah, look at him go, allows them to kind of spread the water out so that the impact is reduced and so they don't get wet. So this is something that we could absolutely apply to water-resistant sprays, de-icing coatings on airplane wings, the way we manufacture plastics. Would this work? I'm thinking though, this is all microscopic stuff. You know, what we're talking about is nanoscale molecular interactions that affect the surface tension of the water. So I'm just trying to imagine it working at the macro scale needed for an airplane wing or would it matter? I mean, if you have a material that is built in that nanoscale way, would it act in the same, would it at the macro scale still have that same effect? And does rain a problem for airplanes? Not rain, but ice. Ice, oh, ice. Yeah. Yeah, I guess. I think it's an interesting question. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, I know that they, for example, this shark skin is also naturally antimicrobial and that's because they have these dermal denticles, they basically are covered in teeth. It's another World Oceans Day fact for you. So they have mimicked that in the creating of like food prep surfaces and cutting boards and that has reduced, to my knowledge, it has reduced the ability for potential yuck to grow on it, viruses and bacteria and stuff. So that, in that case, that they scaled up, but also sharks are pretty big sometimes, but it is kind of, it is on a very, very small scale if you look at the individual denticles. It's not as small as these guys, but it still is something that works at the microscopic and you can kind of scale it up to different types of surfaces. So you could see how potentially this could work similarly. Yeah, and they're definitely going that direction. Well, I love it. I love using nature to create new materials and figure out new ways of solving problems. Yeah, and something so delicate that's helping us fortify our own stuff, that's crazy. I think that's, yeah, putting it that way Blair, that's I think the thought process that led to this investigation is how do really these really, really delicate structures have that strength? How do they maintain their integrity? Yeah, big question. Super cool, super cool. And now I'm gonna look at butterflies differently. I'll be like, you're wearing armor. Yeah, better than mine. Thank you for listening to Twist out there. You are the reason that we are able to do what we do every week, bring you up to date and down to earth views on science discoveries, science news. And with your help, we can do even more. We can bring a sane perspective to a world full of misinformation together. Head over to twist.org right now, click on the Patreon link and choose your level of support and be a part of bringing sanity and science to even more people. We can't do what we do without you. Thank you for your support. And we're back. You're listening to This Week in Science. We are back and I've got bird brains. I don't have bird brains. You've been having bird brains. Yeah, I've had bird brains forever. Yeah. Yes, yes, if you've been listening to this show for a while, you know that I love the bird brains. And so when a story comes up, I jump on it. This one I thought was really interesting because it has to do with how corbids, the group that involves jays, crows, ravens, the birds that we like to think of as so extra special smart, what is it about them that gives them that extra little oomph to give them the smarts that they have? They're big birds. And so with big birds come big brains, but they also have interesting behaviors in that they live in intimate social groups. They also, very similar to people, have childhoods that are fairly extended. They hang out with their parents for a very long time. So researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Science of Human History looked into the question of how parenting impacts intelligence in non-humans, in these birds, bird brain creatures. So first they looked at the sizes of the brains and they looked at this link between parental care and intelligence. So they looked at thousands of species, more than 120 corbids. And in their new study, comparing the brain of the corbids to other birds, they found that Ravens brains, corbids brains, Ravens brains especially, account for almost 2% of its body mass. And that's on the level of human brains. Human brains are a fairly large percentage of our body mass as well, which makes us an outlier in the animal kingdom. The interesting part of this is, birds we think minimize their brain size for flight. They try to be efficient and have a brain that doesn't weigh them down. So what is worth having the bigger brain to these birds? Does this do the smarts make up for it? They look to see the intelligence of various birds. They've looked for years at species like Siberian jays, New Caledonian crows, and they know that they can solve very important puzzles and different tasks very easily. Very often these birds though, the babies will follow their parents around and they will all the, and learn from the parents. So parents will, while they're feeding them, while they're raising the babies for an extended period of time, actually teach them how to do things and feed the babies. So they think, they hypothesize, that what's going on in this extended childhood, this extended parental care for the jays, the crows, the ravens, is that they're sticking around longer. They're learning how to do complex behaviors from the parents. Meanwhile, the parents are taking care of things like feeding them for much longer periods of time. So if they're not getting a task that involves, say, putting a piece of straw into a hole to collect an ant, then it doesn't matter because the parent has got their back. They're not gonna die because their parent is there. Like a safety net. There's a safety net, right. So there's this extra amount of caloric value that the parents continue to give the young for sometimes up to two to four years, which is a very long time. These are long-lived birds. And this is a very long period of time. Normally birds fledged and are gone from their parents' care within one season. So it's very, and maybe they hang around for two seasons, but it's not common. So this is really interesting, very similar to humans in that we stick around, our parents feed us so that we have that time to learn from them. So maybe there are particular evolutionary conditions, say the researchers that helped our big brains and their big brains grow and gain the intelligence that was needed. It's okay. So crows are also the birds from the famous study, which famous study? The one with the masks where there was a person who tormented the birds and a person who treated the birds well. And then their offspring knew which human to trust and which human to stay away from without having ever met them. So this is also some really complex learning that's happening between generations. So I wonder if this is related to that, that there's this really complex knowledge getting moved from generation to generation. Is that easier because their brains are bigger because they stay with their parents longer? Interesting. Yeah, yeah, it's very interesting. So more evidence in birds, this is beyond even primate species that parental care, extended parental care may be the key to that cognitive leg up. Yeah, it's very interesting. Tell me a story, Justin. It might be worth instituting some sort of, I don't know, prolonged maternity leave. Go! You might say that. This is, I mean, public policy is not our wheelhouse, but you know, follow the science to the good outcome. One please. Oh, okay. So cyanobacteria, which are AKA blue-green algae, usually show up in the summer as that green scum on the surface of the water and throughout the water in some cases. The mass development of these is apparently really bad for water quality as they actually deprive the water of oxygen. So stuff living in water that has a lot of this blue-green algae has less available oxygen and they also produce toxins. But thankfully there is something that can make them sick. This is researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Fresh Water Ecology and Inland Fisheries has found out that the infections by a fungal parasite not only kill the cyanobacteria, but then this process also makes it easier for blue-green algae to be consumed by their natural predators. So it kills them so that now they're not reproducing and it becomes a nutrition source for stuff which may not always be able to access them through this toxins. So this was, let's see, this was a filamentous fungi of some sort that they used here. So there is an increase in cyanobacteria, blue-green algae blooms. They like the warm water and as higher temperatures start showing up around the world, we're getting larger blooms taking place in fresh waters. These affect the water quality, but then also again because of the oxygen, they can lead to fish death and other aquatic organisms down the food chain as well suffer from this. So they may have found this parasitic fungi that can counter it. It's sort of an interesting fix. From how we're used to categorizing and quantifying, if you knew you had a parasitic fungi in your water, you might be less likely to drink it. Oh, I don't want that. And again, it should still be filtered out by the time it gets into your system, to be clear. But treating freshwater lakes with the filamentous fungi might be one way to clear them up. Just as long as it's not like bringing in cane toads to Australia to get rid of the locusts, they explode out of control and just riddled with them. Yeah, I mean, I would hope this would be implemented if implemented, that it would be implemented in not so in a controlled manner, not so much age. Just throw it out into the wild. So part of the problem with the cane toads is they aren't food for anything. The benefit or the side attribute of this filamentous fungi is that it is a food source for a lot of things in the water. So it does have its own natural predators that are there and it doesn't have, it's not immune to predation itself. So it may be a bit more of a win-win ecological fix than cane toads, which is, yeah, the ultimate fail example. I mean, they seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm just saying. Yeah, yes. But when you're also, when you're looking at a situation where you're applying something because a food web is failing and you're hoping to preserve that food web. And so what they have discovered thus far is a particular parasitic fungi that seems to like to attack the blue-green algae and also gets the blue-green algae. It becomes a nutrition source and in itself is a nutrition source for that food web. So it's very happy and healthy thus far for the food web. Win-win. Happy and healthy food web. We love it. Clean water, clean water, no blue-green algae. Healthy for everyone. Don't be a downer, Blair. Well, to be fair, Blair, I think it's too Blair. I'm not sure that a whole lot of research was really done before the cane toads were brought over. I don't think that was, I don't think the footwork, the preliminary footwork had been done to do an impact report or really think anything through. I mean, it happened a lot. They brought cats to Israel and now they're all over the Middle East. Sparrow cats everywhere. It's happened here and there. Ashish Pant says, I hope the fungus is also toxic to Asian carp in the lakes. Yeah, maybe we can get rid of zebra mussels, Asian carp, a bunch of those terrible invasive species that we have problems with. Well, you know what? We all get tired at some point. Everyone gets a little bit tired. And a recent study out of Los Alamos National Laboratory from a computer scientist, Yijing Watkins, has discovered that neural networks that have been trained to learn in the way that developing human brains learn. She says, we were fascinated by the prospect of training a neuromorphic processor in a manner analogous to how humans and other biological systems learn from their environment during childhood development. She discovered that they need sleep. Not necessarily sleep, but they need what? Artificial intelligent brains also require downtime? Yes, that is the take-home message from this study that just came out of L.A. and L. Is that like when your computer's freaking out and you just need to restart it? It just needs a quick nap. It just needs a minute. So they discovered that while they were trying to get these neural networks to work and to approximate the activity in human brains and human neural networks, they found that there were instabilities that they started, they would be fine, and then over a period of time, they would become unstable and they would not work well anymore. And kind of as a last-ditch effort to try and stabilize the systems, they played a kind of white noise to the artificial network. And what they compare it to is pretty much like the slow wave activity during sleep in which it's a wide range of frequencies and amplitudes, but it gave a kind of cleansing to the neural network. This white noise, it would kind of like static between radio stations. They say it's just a lot of frequencies and amplitudes. And in doing that, it enabled the neural networks to work more efficiently and more stably. And this implies that future human-like artificial intelligences may need to sleep. So they're not gonna be able to stay awake all the time, they can't win! They'll go to sleep sometime! Can you imagine if you laptop, it's like, ah, it's gonna sleep now for the next eight hours and I can't use it. Oh, it's back. Oh, wait, why is it overheating? Oh, it's exercising. Why is it doing that? Okay, it's cool back down again. Okay, but now it's taking another break. Okay, well, I guess I'm working around your schedule. Yeah, they thought this was really interesting because other different kinds of dynamic networks that have been developed, we've talked about lots of them over the years talking about various kinds of natural learning-based networks. They can use various algorithms and methods to maintain stability in their systems. And so some of these algorithmic learning networks are much more stable and don't need to sleep, but this particularly spiking neural networks that are trained to be similar to human brains, they fault in the same way that human brains do and need rest, so fascinating. Yeah, it also explains why I jumped on my computer the other day and it was in incognito mode in the browser and there was a hardware catalog that seemed to be scrolling through. It disappeared immediately after I opened up the computer, but that was very interesting. I couldn't quite figure out why that was. The computer's gonna try and build itself a friend. I don't know. Another story on the sleep front study looking at mice, which mice are the smartest animals in the universe, smartest life forms in the universe. Study out of, it was published in Neuron this last week looking at newborn adult neurons. So we've talked about the question of whether new neurons are born in the hippocampus of adult humans. We know that there are lots of these newborn neurons in the developing brain, but what about adults? We haven't been able to confirm it or deny it in adult humans so far, but we've seen it in mice and rats. So this study looks in mice. They found these newborn neurons in the hippocampus. They associated them with a memory. So they found newborn neurons that after a shock-based memory, so they apply a shock to the mouse, the mouse goes, ah! And then the neurons in the brain light up. They determined which ones were newly born that lit up during the, or were activated during the experience. And then they look to see whether or not they get activated again during sleep, during rapid eye movement, during dreaming, because this is a phase of sleep which is thought to help consolidate memories that you've learned and put them into long-term storage. They saw that once again some of these newborn neurons got activated during the rapid eye movement phase of sleep. Okay, and so then they went, ah, let's see if we can mess with those. And so they used optogenetics to use light to turn these neurons on and off. And they found that if they disrupted those neurons, these newborn neurons during this REM sleep phase, the memories were not remembered as well as if the neurons, as if those newborn neurons were not messed with. So in mice, this study confirms that adult newborn neurons are involved in the formation of new memories and that they need to be reactivated again while you're sleeping, specifically dreaming for those memories to actually take hold. There's no reason to think that this wouldn't happen in people if we have newborn neurons being born in our brains, which is exciting. We need to have the baby neurons to make the new dreams. Justin? Yeah, okay. So all human body cells have a certain lifespan. During which there's these cells perform essential duties and at the end of the lifespan, they reach senescence, which sounds like a nap, but basically they kind of retire. They're no longer able to perform their regular duties. It's free death, basically. Free death. Yeah, and then as all cells do at some point, they commit suicide. They hit the self-destruct button. They doctor Kivorkin and they leave. This suicide of death is programmed into the genes through a process called apoptosis. That's what causes them to self-destruct in order to make way for the fresh, the young, the healthy, the new generation of cells that will replace them. Mutations sometimes interfere with this process. This can be caused simply by aging. Ultraviolet light is thought to have an effect. Various mutagenic compounds, these mutations disable the apoptosis genes resulting in zombie cells. These are cells that are the living undead. They refuse to die. They don't commit suicide. They don't hit the self-destruct button. And they kind of stop performing the function still. They still aren't performing normal cell functions. What's more, they can spread this gene to otherwise healthy working cells, turning them also into the living undead. It's a classic zombie apocalypse taking place. We usually refer to this process taking place as cancer. That's what cancer is. It starts with the lack of signaling to self-destruct. And then it also lacks the signaling for ceasing to grow or having these rest periods between growth and you get the basically runaway cells throughout the body. So, previously scientists had identified an anti-cancer compound, FV399, and a species of fungus called ascocutia, or something somewhat similar to that, which is often found, which is a, something that normally afflicts cereals, cereal food crops. But the compound is just a specific type of amino acid group that works to induce somehow an apoptosis in cancerous human cells. Problem is, can't really make enough of the fungus to express this specifically. Anyway, this research here, which is, where is this? This is Tokyo University of Science, Professor Isamu Shina, along with Dr. Takiyuki Tonnoi. Oh boy, I'm a terrible at pronouncing names I'm reading for the first time. They both accepted the challenge and they worked really hard and quite a voice. We wanted to create a compound that could treat colon cancer and we aimed to do this through the synthesis of FV399. So this is a total synthesis process of complete chemical production of this complex molecule using commercially available precursors, which allowed them to achieve some mass production. The team figured that first, the structure of this peptide would need to be identified. This was simple and they could easily perform it using commercially available and inexpensive materials following that simple start. The subsequent procedures required many, many steps that resulted in some failure and then some more failure. So they just gave up. So much failure. No, they kept going. Oh yeah, no, they did. They eventually had a major breakthrough. Their mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance studies confirmed that a three of spots on a plate showed identical chemical signature to the known formula of FV399, meaning they did it. They successfully recreated it synthetically. So what that means is they had an increased yield of about 20%, which is promising now already, but now has bigger implications for future large scale production. So this is just one example of people working really hard to see that the future is brighter for all of us. For longing, human longevity and making for a happier, healthier society. Yeah, and as Gaurav Sharma in the chat room is saying, this is a great time to remember, Henrietta lacks. Her cells were immortalized as the HeLa cancer cell line which is still used today in research and she was a black American woman and. Wasn't she, weren't they also taken without her knowledge? Without permission and lots of pharmaceuticals have been created off this. Lots of wealth has been created for this and she's received, their families have received nothing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just wanted to throw it out there. It's kind of an important part of it. Yeah, welcome to America. Come into America. We'll take yourselves. Yeah, hopefully science and scientists are working hard, have been working hard for decades to change the institution of science and how science is done. Now human subjects have to be asked for their permission to be used in a study. Even Facebook using your data and analyzing it and publishing it in a study without your permission is not legal. It's also not cool. It is not cool. Yes, Facebook deciding to use, to do different, to give different streams, feeds of information to people to see what works best without asking you. Hmm, not necessarily ethical. This is This Week in Science and we would love to have you help us grow twists. Help us grow our audience. Get a friend to subscribe today. All right, we've got some quick science news here at the end of the show. I wanna tell you about mate choice. That's what we're gonna talk about. We're gonna talk about mate choice. So Blair, tell me what you know about mate choice. What is mate choice? How much time you got? Sometimes the mate is chosen by the woman, by the female, sometimes chosen by the male. Sometimes when they're hermaphrodites, it has to be consensual or not. Sometimes mate choice is consensual. Sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it's based on pheromones. Sometimes it's based on how they look, what they're doing, how they sound. Yeah, Justin. And from the secret twist chat room had earlier asked if females do any mate selection in flamingos. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, as far as the how pink they are, I don't think so. Okay. But interesting. I will fact check that as well. Yeah, because it's like here's one of those signals for well-fed and healthy and it could be one of those sorts of things. And you would expect them. Yeah, if it's now, if it's to pass on the gene pool, I understand all the aggression. That makes sense. So it's how animal male breakers. They do dancing, they do dancing and they are monogamous, which I'm gonna say with like air quotes because most animals that we call monogamous just means they stick together for many years. Oh, many. A year, many years. Monogamy anyway. And then sometimes they break up. Yeah. As all couples sometimes do. Sometimes it's a season, sometimes it's multiple. Anyway, yes. There you go. Sometimes flamingos just drift apart. They do, that's true. So mate choice, mate choice, as Blair was saying, it has many different, mates are chosen, mates are chosen many different ways. Microbiome. Yes, in humans, it's like, oh, a woman and a man, maybe they like each other. You know, what is the story that you tell little kids that fall in love and everything? And then they have a baby, right? Well, not necessarily. Where there's a lot of issues with infertility and questions surrounding. How? Where's the, why? Is so much infertility unexplained? And so researchers this week published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society be on their work, looking at the choosiness of the egg itself. They took eggs and sperm from people who had chosen each other and from people who were not chosen and they put the eggs and the sperm together in dishes in the laboratory. They use the follicular fluid, which is the fluid that surrounds the egg and there's all sorts of chemicals in this fluid. We don't really know what all of them do, but they have to do with chemo-attraction generally. So it's thought that maybe it's involved in choosing particular sperm, attracting particular sperm to themselves. Come to me, the chemicals are saying that to the sperm. And they hypothesized, their hypothesis was that people who behaviorally chose each other, a woman who chose a man, that her egg would choose his sperm. Nope, that's not what happened. That's not how nature works. It's not how nature works. And so they found that even though you may choose each other, the egg may not choose the sperm and there may be fertility problems that arise from that situation. They did not, however, they haven't looked into the sperm side of the equation as closely because, yeah, they haven't looked into the sperm side of the equation as closely to see whether or how the sperm might be involved in choosing the egg. The open question is still, the sperm are really so choosy. No, the sperm is cheap. You just wanna get your DNA as many places as possible. The egg has to be choosy because that's a nine month commitment and kind of like a 20 year commitment. And the sperm is like, I'm the sperm. I'm here, so am I, me too, over there. Well, oh my God, how many of us are there? Oh, I didn't know, I didn't see all that. Oh, geez, there's only one egg in there? So bottom line, sperm choice by the egg's follicular fluid is not related to who you choose. Right, so this is also kind of related to quick tangent that in captivity, when we try to breed animals who we decide are genetically a really good match, right? So that's part of the job is to make sure, especially the endangered species. You have a limited number, you wanna make that into as large of a number as you can while reducing bad mutations or recessive genes being exposed. So you pick a good match. Sometimes it still doesn't work. And unless the numbers are extremely low for that individual species, you take that as a sign and you move on and you try to find a new pairing because there's other stuff going on. If it's not working, or if they don't wanna mate at all because there's some sort of chemical cue going on, there's something there, most likely that we didn't see. So, I mean, this is directly related to that. There could be stuff going on in terms of compatibility that we just totally... I guarantee you, if you will one day figure out, probably not in a two distance feature, it's all microbiome. Yeah. They got microbes like, no, don't want those ones. Doesn't your microbiome start to resemble each other when you live together? Yes, absolutely it does. But it has to be a good match. Are you talking about behaviorally, the behavior of microbiome? Because I don't think the microbiome is influencing your egg and sperm. Oh, absolutely. I don't think so, okay. It doesn't go that deep. Justin is a microbiome truther. Just a... A truther, ooh. Ooh, ch. Noted word. It's all the microbiome, you know? Yes. And then my last story for the show, I just want you to know, we're so similar, wherever you are, wherever you are in the world, you're like me, kind of. We're kind of like each other more than we're not like each other. Unless you're a jerk in our case, you're not. Then we're not alike yet. Then you're not like us. So, researchers from the University of California Riverside published a paper in the Journal of Personality this week, looking at, they teamed with researchers from 62 countries around the world to ask people a question. What do you remember the most from yesterday? Yes. This was follow-up work from a study that was called The World at Seven, which looked into what people were doing at 7 p.m. on the previous day. And they found that people only, they didn't look at it as many countries. They only looked at a couple. They found that people in countries seem to be doing similar stuff around 7 p.m. around the world. This expands on it. This time, they're including 15,000 Samad members of university and college communities, 10,771 females, 4,468 males, 79 without a gender chosen, all of them in their early to mid-20s. So when I say we're all the same, I mean college, mid-early 20 year olds are the same-ish around the world. But from 63 countries or 62 countries around the world, the study did find that, yes, indeed, we're more similar in what we remember from the previous day than not. We tend to remember, actually, more likely to remember positive things than we are to remember negative things, which was surprising to everyone based on psychology research that suggests that negative things stand out more in our memory. It's because they're young. Additionally. It's because they're young and optimistic. What else am I paying a psychologist for? To tell you how great my day was? No, I'm gonna vent. That's why they're like, everybody has a very negative experience. No, this is how they talk to you. When they measured the country that is most like the rest of the world, which country do you think it is? Wait, wait, wait, how can one country be more like the rest of the world? It has to be China. On average, no, Canada. Whoever's got the biggest population has got to be most like the rest of the world. Canada. Canada. Canada is most like the rest of the world. What does that mean? Are they in the middle? It's because, how do I say this up being insulting? I love Canada. This isn't trying to be an insult at all. You're gonna call them born. Canada is very diverse. It's just kind of like regular. Not inflammatory. It's just, it's regular. Our Canadian listeners are hating you right now there. No, Mr. Great. Yes, Canada. It means maybe you're not doing anything wrong. Canada, thanks for being regular. It's great. I wish more people were regular. That's got to be such high praise coming from the United States right now. That's what I mean. Being called, you seem normal. Oh yeah, coming from you, I don't know if I want to be normal. Is that an insult? I'm not really sure. No, no, no, I'm saying they are more stable than our country. It's regular. It's stable. It's consistent. It's like things are okay up there, you know? As long as you don't look into their treatment of indigenous people, then they seem just normal, just fine and not at all controversial. Fair, fair point, fair point. The country that was the country that was the most different from other countries was Japan, which surprised me, including the result that Japan, people in Japan were one of the, I guess had the lowest homogeneity within their borders. Their people were among the least like their other people. Wait, what? Really? Yes, 56 out of 62 in terms of homogeneity. Oh, okay. What's going on in Japan? So, I would have expected it would have been Great Britain because of tea time, the fact that they have like very specific ritual throughout the day, you know? I just remember having tea. What was that? So they have a very interesting history, Japan, of sort of having multiple timeframes of cultural isolation. So I can see how they may have developed you know, highly unique. Even the month, in the culture. Well, you know, you've got people who are working 14-hour days. Actually, I hear that we work more hours though in the United States. The Netherlands is the country where, that's the most homogeneous, let's see if I can use words. The Netherlands is the most homogeneous. Okay. Everybody has the same bedtime. Traffic must be horrible. Everybody's gonna be on the road. Because it's homogeneous, they're all driving the exact same speed, so it's great. Yeah. And their cars are all exactly the same. So when you come out to the parking lot, you're like, and like everybody else, you don't put a single bumper sticker on your car. So nobody knows, you just hit the button until the alarm goes off and hope nobody else is looking for their car at the same time. Right. This is rough. The researchers say, the findings hold a lesson worth being mindful of in the current climate of unrest during the COVID-19 pandemic. We can only hope that seeing we're all unified in the challenges we face during these trying times will give people an increased sense of global community. I guess. I don't really feel that connected to most of the country. And within this country, let alone other countries, let alone the state, I feel like different cities have their own community. I feel happy that the early 20-somethings in the academic community, they're very similar and they have a nice global community going. That gives me hope for the future. There we go. There you go. Blair, tell me about those sharks. Sharks! Shark! Great way sharks. They get a bad rap, guys. This is a study from the University of Sydney and Australia has its own sort of past with sharks, but I'm gonna put that to the side. Ultimately, this is a really interesting study looking at the diets of great white sharks because when we think about great white sharks, we think about them in the deep, deep part of the ocean and they are coming up from below to feast on marine mammals and sometimes accidentally humans, but most of the time, not. So mostly it's just marine mammals and occasionally large fish and stuff like that. But so this was a nice look at the stomachs of 40 juvenile white sharks. So these sharks were not too large yet. They were under 2.2 meters in length. So under, what is that? Like eight feet or something like that. So they can get to be much bigger than that and when they are bigger, they will eat more things like marine mammals. But as juveniles, their diet actually was mostly on, 32% was on pelagic or midwater ocean swimming fish like salmon. So that was what you would expect it all to be, but instead, 17% of the stomachs contents were bottom dwelling fish, 5% were reef fish and almost 15% were bad oid fish like stingrays and bat rays. So what that means is they're hanging out in the shallows. Yeah, in the shallows and they're eating off of the sea floor and the sea bed. So this kind of completely changes how we think great whites eat. So they're not just in the mid ocean column. They're kind of all over the place. They're wherever the food is. Yeah. So this expectation that great whites only live in the deepest parts of the ocean, in at least 50 feet deep, not necessarily. We're reading as long as they're able to keep swimming and keep breathing. Yeah, so this is the other thing I think is interesting is that when I worked at an aquarium, one of the things we told people about great white sharks is that they often hunt by sight. Excuse me, because they're tight. So they hunt by sight. So that's why surfers are sometimes chomped is because a surfer on top of a surfboard looks a lot like an elephant seal. So, yeah, so because they have by sight, this is how this happens. But if they are hunting bottom dwellers that are camouflaged in the sand and buried under the sand, they are not exclusively hunting by sight. So I would like to see more research on that after this time. Yeah, and also to let more people know that don't be surprised if those great white sharks are coming into the shallow areas where you're surfing. Yeah, and I think also- That's really not a questionable thing necessarily. I think the average person might have a hard time identifying a great white shark, especially since they're other, specifically related to juveniles. There are other shark species that look pretty similar to great white sharks and are not and do not grow large enough to be a threat at all. So there's also a whole issue with misidentification. But ultimately, if they're in the shallows, they're probably too young to be a concern anyway. Are you talking about young? I mean, baby shark- No, don't do it, don't do it. Da-da-da-da-da-da. Baby shark- Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo. Ki-Ki, you're fired. You can't fire me. I can't. I'm sorry, that's it. Back up your knives and go, I don't know. That is the last straw, that is the last straw. Okay, all right. Oh, never mind. Have we done it? Do you have any more stories, Justin? No, I don't. But that's a good point. Maybe the electrical signals are helping them catch the bottom colors. I like that comment. That's a good one. Ashish Hansa? Yeah, the impule of Lorenzini. Yes, amazing sensory organs. Why not? Got them, flaunt them. Yeah, exactly. Thank you for listening to this week in science. We have come to the end of another episode. If you enjoyed this show, please share it with a friend. That would be really great. I wanna give some shout-outs right now. 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This Week in Science. Somebody, Eman, wanted to know. Is our newsletter real? I think it's time for us to do a newsletter. Oh no. OK, it's been too long. It's been a couple months. OK, we can do that. Are you feeling overwhelmed? Yes. OK. We should get Justin to write something. Yeah, I will assemble something. It's I think it's the writing. It's just the writing. And the yeah, OK, I can assemble a newsletter in like half an hour. OK, all right. Great. See, the assembly is where I'm like, I don't want to bother. Let me do that. Yeah, yeah, I'm just I can't. I said of extra things right now. I I emailed. Ninety people today, and I have to email another three hundred and ten in the next two days. That's a lot of email. There's a lot of email. Yes, I'm I'm a little my brain is dead. Don't have a dead brain. We just need to give it rest so that just like the artificial brains. Yeah, I need to rest. Rest. Rest relaxation. Oh, maybe a fire pit. You should have a fire pit. I miss my jacuzzi. Oh, I want a jacuzzi. I have one right outside my door, but it's closed. Actually, I don't like jacuzzi. Never mind. I don't like the hot tubs. I like pools like pools on hot days. I like both. I like cold weather. Yeah, warm. Yeah, cold weather in California. I do not like warm weather. I've decided it's not for me. You've lived in California in the land of the warm weather for pretty much your whole life. Yes. Yeah, I did a nice couple of long stints. Still in California, but in the tropical rainforests of Humboldt County, where I'm bringing the 200-something days out of the air, and I felt so comfortable. Yeah. Davis, California in the summer is bad. It's not nice. No. Central Valley is just becomes awful. It makes you like going to work, where it's air conditioned. Yeah. Well, well. Well, yeah, unless you also, on top of that, had the job I had for most of my working career, which was outdoors. Right. Yes. So, Hanna, so yeah, I made bad choices. I admit it. Speaking of being outdoors, I got a sunburn from standing outside for an hour yesterday on my forearm, an area that's usually very, very tan. And I even put on sunscreen beforehand, but I got a sunburn because I'm a mole person now after shelter in place. Hello, mole person. Yes. Don't be a mole person. Wear sunblock. Where? I did. I still got a sunburn. You must wear what I wear. It's called Irish Strength Sunblock. Is it SPF 2000 or what? Yes. Yes. It's actually, it's the luck of the Irish. It's just you slap it on, it's a bunch of good luck. That's it. You just have to hope that you don't get burned. H-N-E-K and Gorov in our YouTube chat room is saying, maybe we should, we can highlight research focused on minorities once a month moving forward. I think that's a fantastic idea. We can focus on it in the newsletter or if there is anything specific, make sure that we've got a specific segment on the show. Yeah, I talked a while back about police violence and life expectancy, how it affects this sort of thing amongst male, female of different racial groups a while back. It's a study I've heard cited quite a bit lately. And one of the interesting things about the study is it was pulled from news reports. And the reason it was pulled from news reports is because police departments apparently do not keep records of their homicides. They don't record the race of someone who they shot or lynched. And it's amazing to me because if you become incarcerated, they take your blood, they run your fingerprints, they sequence your DNA, they take photographs of your tattoos, they record your height, your weight, they take photographs of your face, they do all of this. But if they kill you, it's a lot less paperwork apparently. Oh, jeez. So they had to, well, and this is a problem. And it's also there have been the fights against the CDC, just taking gun violence data in general. Yeah, yeah, we know about that. And so it's difficult to do studies based on a lack of information. So there are things that need to change. Hopefully we will. Hopefully we are at a point where there's a little bit of the purge that's taking place as peaceful protests are being crashed by violent police protests and riots. There are, we're seeing every couple of days, like police here, police officers there getting arrested or fired for what's being caught on camera. And so based on this, I think that whole concept of the few bad apples has just been refuted en masse by police forces across this country that there is something systematically wrong with the way that they are trained. The thing that was repeated over and over and over, like one day, because I think there was one police chief who used the bad apples analogy in a press conference on social media. I think my entire Twitter feed was scientists individually saying, hey, so science can help you out with this. Apples produce what is it, ethylene glycol, which makes the rest of the apples go bad. So if you have one rotting apple, it produces a molecule that makes the whole barrel go bad. So if you do have one bad apple, the whole bunch, throw it all out. And so something else I'll point out when we have gotten this video of police crimes and the numbers that we've gotten. And we can go back. This has been 20 years of capturing stuff on video with cell phones now. There is one pattern. Not more so now, though. But yeah. Well, I don't know. I was thinking about, we talked about this before, on a previous show that I was doing with Pam, Pamorama, called Meaningless Words. We did an episode where we read out names of unarmed black men who were killed by police. And it was a lengthy list. And I haven't done that show 10 years ago. And we had an inexhaustible, because we just, I mean, at some point. One of the things that's an interesting thread through all of those is there's always a little bit of a delay in the past between the police filing their report on the incident and the video coming out. Now, that time frame is changing. Some of this stuff is coming out live now. But the thread through it all is the police officers lie in the filing of their report. They change the circumstance. They change the sequence of events. They add aggressive actions by the other party. They claim a de-escalation that doesn't take place. These are consistent bad behaviors without repercussion. It's the other thread that you also see through all of this. So there is a call right now to have a national nationwide accountability standard for policing, a transparency of record of complaints against officers. There is actually one of my favorite things. That's what I mean. Transparency of records is the most important thing. I mean, that's why so many scientific researchers are moving towards open data and open lab notebooks even. So creating repositories that are online that anyone can access after a paper is published to be able to go back and check whether things are correct so that you can always double check. And so it's just part of the process. Transparency is essential. And there's another thread in this also that is counter-intuitive towards me. But the people who are very much backing police culture and activities continuing as they are tend to be people who politically are anti-union. But the strength of the police's ability to leverage their will against the budgets of cities have very high pay, have very good work. It's because they have the strongest community in the country. So the people who are against unions also think the strongest union in the country is a great thing and shouldn't be dealt with. Well, there's also people that are against federal government having a bunch of authority and then wanted the federal government to go police the protests. So there's lots of kind of a contradiction. Yeah, exactly. That contingent has a lot of contradictory, it's what serves in the moment. It's culture apocrisy. Yes, they're absolute. Self-serving. But the other thing is remember when the LA police decided to stop policing neighborhoods because they were in some conflict over funding or whatever the situation was in New York. Those neighborhoods that they stopped policing didn't have an outbreak of crime. They started intentionally underpolicing areas to show a lesson. They started having a, what do you call it, blew out or whatever when everybody was sick? Blue flew, right? Everybody was called in all their sick leave at once and I tried to underpolice areas of Manhattan. And crime was down. Calls didn't come in. It'll be interesting to see what happens in Minneapolis because that'll really be the, that's gonna be the test where they're starting from the ground up fresh. And this doesn't happen every place. It was a Camden. New Jersey, yeah, Camden. Yeah, Camden, yeah. And that's not even the only one, there are more, but yeah. But Minneapolis is like a big city. It's gonna be interesting to see. One of my favorite proposals was removing police from dealing with mental health and homelessness. Because it is wrong. It's the wrong, you know, you could act. There was, you know, there's, you can, if you Google it, you know, mentally ill police shooting, just those words, you will find all these instances of police showing up to somebody who's mentally ill and ending up shooting them because they were ill equipped to deal with it. We could have multiple community departments within. You can still have- I'd love to see it, yeah. You can still have the highway patrol doing, you know, vehicle monitoring stuff. You can still have police investigating the what are considered serious crimes, which by the way, the percentage of arrests that are considered really serious crimes in this country. Any guess? It's about 5% of the arrests are considered serious crimes. So we have a larger prison population in China. For not serious crimes. In every country in the world. Yeah. Well, it's just, I mean, that has to do with you. There's a whole systemic, you know, the prison industrial complex and who's making money and there's a whole, you know, this is- Yeah, it's not just the prisons, it's the people who are using the prisoners for labor. Yeah, it's a whole thing, yeah. This is the whole thing needs to get broken on one end. And the other part is that, yeah, police are not judges. And also by the way, I blame judges because with all the police abuse that we're seeing, you're gonna tell me that no judge had any idea that police were using these tactics, that police were being violent towards, that they heard the same thing from witness after witness saying, from defense attorney after defense attorney. Okay, your honor, but the police beat up my client before they took him to jail. They did this to my client. Well, they must have had a good reason or whatever the judges have been alibiying the bad behavior prosecutors have been looking at the other way at the bad behavior of the police. So the police have also a strong union that supports who gets to be elected mayor. They stand behind the, you know, them. They need to end that. They need to stop allowing police to endorse anyone. That would be, that's a big one because you can't- The politics of the whole system. You've had to remove the police from the politics. You can't have them endorsing candidates. So John Oliver, somebody brought him up recently. He did an amazing show on police this past weekend. But months ago, he did a show on sheriffs. And the fact that sheriffs are actually elected. So it's very interesting that you have this, what is supposed to be a public service situation. You have police, but then you have this elected official who's in charge and they often run unopposed. And then they can endorse. So then they also get supported by political systems or political parties because their endorsement is key to somebody else's victory, right? I like Ananaki's idea of robocops. Yeah, we're just going to let Boston Dynamic put all of those robotic dogs on every corner. Except when we've used artificial- Day walking is illegal. When you use neighborhood zip code data, we've immediately turns into over-incarceration for minorities. The idea of impartiality where you use somebody's zip code to judge them leads to a vicious cycle of incarceration. So that doesn't work. The AI can't be applied here. What actually could be applied, just one suggestion, is spend that budget on education and schooling. Education. Mental health. Amazing. Mental health. Education. Housing the homeless. No, not housing the homeless. Housing the poor so they're not renting. I mean, housing the rent is huge. The mass of this country. If somebody doesn't own their home, they don't have- Stability. They don't have any kind of stability. And the fact that we have a landlord-class society at this point- That is getting larger. It's only expanding. It's only expanding. What are you talking about? Only 60% of my paycheck goes to rent. I know, yeah. But the way, and what's happening is there's more money going into the hands of the landowners that are buying up more properties. This is why people left their countries to come to America because they couldn't own a piece of where they came from. Seriously, that's why we left. We got off the king's land because we couldn't own it. Or when I say we, I mean, the original American slave owners. Oh, see now. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Who also protested against the British and they were heroes. So. Yeah, Fada, I saw your question. I will, I'll get back to you about that. Yes. That sounds interesting. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, it's good to talk about this stuff. It's good for people to, if you haven't been exposed to these ideas, to think about them a bit and to look into them more because it's only gonna get worse unless we do something, unless people do something. And it's not waiting for the people in charge to do something because that's been the problem. Change is only going to come from the grassroots up and it's going to involve people educating themselves and looking into this stuff. And don't believe that can't happen here. You may be the biggest Karen in the world and think that this doesn't affect you. The beginnings of a police state is always going to be attacking the weakest and most vulnerable in your society first. But they don't stop there. They don't stop there. Remember, remember. Antifa is a terrorist organization now. It's not real. Despite having not killed anybody, but it stands for anti-fascism. If you think Antifa is bad, wait till you see the actual fascists and what they have in store for you. Yeah, scientists won't even be able to science, man. They'll only be able to science what the state allows them to science. And then it'll be propaganda anyway. Yeah, they'll only be able to publish what proves that they want them to prove. Yes, which is what we try not to support. Now, fearlessly, I made an unsubstantiatable claim and this week, scientists substantiated it. Hurrah! That's what the future will be. No. You're good. You remember that one oldie time radio voice. It's still not a good future. So I think- If that ever happens, I think as it slides to propagandic science, if it does that, I won't be able to report science anymore. I won't be able to have these conversations. It won't be science anymore. It won't be science anymore. We'll have to have an underground podcast that talks about science. We are basically doing it in a garage. Yes. And it just plans forever. We'll be the science underground. I feel like it's important to say to you, while we're sitting here complaining about all this stuff, that if you are out there and you're also upset about these things, there's lots of things that you can do. And clearly the protests are something that's really visible and really creating a common dialogue, which is the first step to something, hopefully really big. But if you're not a person that can do that, if you're immunocompromised and you don't wanna go out there right now because COVID's still lingering around, or if you get anxiety and crowds or you're still working full-time, two jobs to support your family or whatever it is, there's other stuff that you can do. And we shared some really cool stuff last week. Kiki's 8 Can't Wait is a great place to start, gives you a way to find out what is allowed and not allowed by police in your area and gives you numbers of people to call or email to try to demand change. But you could just Google it and there's lots of amazing resources of different ways that you can be a part of positive change in your community. Yep, self-education. Yeah, what, it goes way back, goes back. History, everyone, this is hundreds of years of history that we're talking about. And it somehow keeps repeating itself. So maybe we can try to break the cycle here. Yeah, yeah. We are more connected than we have ever been. There could be protests, several states over, and you might not find out about it until two weeks later, if ever, because your newspaper might be owned by somebody that didn't wanna tell you about it. But we now have the internet and we can know exactly what's going on all over our country and our world. And yeah, we're more connected than ever. This is a great time to break the cycle. All right, also if you're like me who has been through several rounds of peaceful nonviolent protesting training, but know that you are going to throw the tear gas back that know that if somebody swings a baton at you, you are going to defend yourself, maybe don't go. If you know you have a threshold that's gonna prevent you or are going to be provocatively confrontational, don't go. Yeah. Stay home. Yeah, I mean, especially if you're white because then you are escalating tension and the people who are more likely to get injured are not you. So like that is another thing to keep in mind as well. Yeah, if it's organized by Black Lives Matter or something then yeah, then you feel like being violent then don't. However, if you're in your all white, Lily White town and a cop swings a baton at you, it's a fair game. I'm actually saying this sarcastically. I don't necessarily. Sarcasm. Don't violence in any form ever. Which is why I do avoid these things because as much as I've done the training and I know what I'm supposed to do, it's not my reaction. So I steer clear. Yeah. Knowing and doing are two different things. So know yourself. So that you can do the best thing for the situation. Yeah. But it is also, you know, it's really scary when police are riding because they're showing up with weapons, they're swinging batons, they brought chemical weapons, they're shooting people in the head with rubber bullets that are blinding people, maiming people, killing people. I mean, this is exactly why the people started the protests. Continuing, yeah. It continues the cycle of violence and uprising. Yeah, it's not helping. It doesn't help. And we have a president who thinks that Kent State was a great idea. Apparently. So, yeah. And we have a president who built a wall around himself. Oh yeah, that was his wall. That's his, yeah, this is his everything. I still am so mad that we had a bunch of armed, white protestors angry about shelter in place. And the cops didn't show up to that protest. Armed to the teeth. I'm still very frustrated by that. It's just the stark contrast within one week. Oh, it hasn't gone, it hasn't been lost on people. That's for sure. Yeah. Yeah, it's a very stark contrast. Oh, well, you know, you can also look at the women's march. I don't remember the tear gas. Nope, nope. The science march? Yep. The march for, yeah, the march for science a couple of years back. No tear gas. No tear gas. Lots of people marching for science. Yep. March against police violence. They're gonna teach you a lesson. Yeah, I mean, it looks like they're trying to put down the population, like aggressively intimidate. And to violence to our fellow citizens for protesting them, the police violence that they're seeing increasing around them. So I love the trend that's taking place with, and it's unfortunate that it takes this sorts of scenarios for this to happen, but I like the trend that people are thinking about rethinking policing. I want to every police officer to be safe, and I want to be able to be proud of my local law enforcement. We had in the city of Davis, we had a young female police officer that was murdered. I don't know if I talked about this last week on the show. And my daughter, my youngest daughter was very conflicted. She's seven, she's trying to like, so we've been to a memorial for a police officer who was killed by some lunatic. And we are now at a memorial for somebody who was killed by a police officer lunatic. You know, there needs to be the excuse I keep hearing from law enforcement entities is about the fallen officers and about the losses and the violence there. The answer to the violence that police and law enforcement encounters is not to enact a magnitude of violence against all of the rest of the citizens. You're magnifying the problem, you're not reducing it. So something needs to absolutely change in their training and the way that they treat the public and the way they react to the public because they're increasing the problem, not defusing it. It may be that time, Blair. Yeah, Kiki got kicked out twice in a row. I know. Okay, I gotta go. All right. Well, on that note, everybody keep learning, reading, watching, listening, speaking, sharing. And we'll be here next week sharing sign. Say goodnight, Blair. Oh wait, she's still not back. You don't wanna wait for her to say goodnight? She's almost here. Hold on. She's just waving and looking frustrated. Good night, Blair. Say goodnight, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night. I can't hear you, so bye. Oh, you can hear me? I can't hear you at all. Awesome, bye everybody. Thanks for watching. I need to fix my computer. Always fix the computer. Bye, thanks for watching, Twiss. We'll see you next week.