Yay! He's so far away! Mm-hmm. Are we here? We're here. We're making it all work. Are we here? Are we here? Is everybody here? Yep. Is this all of us? Oh, yeah. But then I have to go to my notes because I was trying to look at my child's tinker progress. I need to get on him tinkering. Leave the child be! I know. Leave the children be. Isn't that... Believe in the children. No child, do the same level if not more work independently when you are in the middle of a crisis. That would be great. Oh, and parents in the health world! Don't do it! Hi, I think everybody needs to just talk and have a therapy session tonight. All right, let's have a show. I could totally do that. I'm much down. I'm a couple of weeks into a psychology class. I'm totally ready to start. Okay, your mic's hot. It's always hot. What do you mean? When is my mic ever not hot? It's real hot. There's no adjustment. There is. I don't have a mixer board anymore. What about the three-year level on the back of the mic? It has the tabs. All right. Here's setting number one. Is that better? That one's good. Do the next one. Well, okay. This is the second one. It's way quieter. It's way quiet. Okay. Oh, all right. One more. And what's the last one? The way quiet one. That's the one that you described as the hot mic. Hot mic. No. No. I like that face. No. Does that mean you like it? No. Go to the first one. All right. It's on that first one. Great. Number one. That's better. Number one. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. Technically, for our future reference, this is setting number three that we are currently on. Setting number three. I just don't want the hot mic, man. Hot mic. Real hot mic. Real hot mic. Hot mic. So how's everybody doing? It's still hot. How's it hot again? How do you do that? Switch it again? No. Go back to number two. Go to two. Go back to two. Geez. Geez. I'm just talking now. Okay. Now it's, this is two. Is it good?  I say he reaching for a slider or some sort. No, it's much quieter, but I like it. So I should talk louder now? Yeah. That's actually great. That's great. Yeah. The whole time. Yeah. He'll be hoarse by the break. It'll be perfect. We're doing a show here. Are we? Let me show you something. Okay. Let's start the show, everyone. Yeah. Better sound, lower decibels. Maybe I can fix it in post everybody. Yes. All right. Let's start this show in three. Two. This is twist. This week in science episode number 767 recorded on Wednesday, April 1st, 2020. April fools are canceled. Oh no. Hi there. I'm Dr. Kiki.  But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. With all of the efforts to contain the spread of the dreaded novel coronavirus, humans have isolated themselves from regular human contact. They are taking on strange behaviors like frequent hand washing, not touching everything, working from home or not working from home, day drinking, spending time with the family or spending time all alone. There are silver linings in this crisis. For one, we may end up saving some lives. Sort of. All of the efforts that we are doing are in response to a single strain of virus. But what about all the other pathogens? How will the common cold survive in a world of social distancing and hand washing? How will STDs propagate with all the bars and clubs closing down? Another is that we are technically still part of the Paris Accord, despite the administration's best efforts. And we've got a chance of really nailing the reduction in greenhouse gases goal that we had for this year. Most importantly of all, despite all the changes that have taken place, there is one thing that will remain the same. This week in science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to learn discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to- Science to you, Keegan Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair.  You. Good science to you. Yeah. I hope everyone's doing all right out there. It's wild times at the moment. But as Justin's disclaimer did kind of bring up, it is very interesting. We're focused on one virus, but what is all this staying home going to do for things like other coronaviruses and rhinoviruses and noroviruses and flu viruses and. Yeah, because this one is supposed to be extra contageable, right? To persist in the environment longer. Yeah. Right? If you understand what I'm saying and I'm making sense. So, so that. So yeah, like what if this is the cure to the common cold? I mean, we're still fighting something uncommon. But. But what is the common cold? Just stay home forever. Yeah, we could actually knock. We might be able to knock a couple of these little, little transmittable pathogens out of circulation. It might. This might actually do that. It might have that weird side effect. It's going to be. It's going to be very interesting to watch the scientific studies after this pandemic and see because there are going to be people asking these questions and doing this work. And so it'll be really interesting to see what happens for the next year or two with respect to the different studies that relate to this. I'm going to keep an eye out. I'm really interested to see what happens with climate change studies because you're going to have a sudden drop in carbon dioxide. You're going to see if that has an impact on plants or animals or ecosystems in a very short period, which will help us know what might happen if we cut it off. Yeah. Yeah. What could happen if we did make incredible changes societally? Yeah. There's a major experiment, many experiments of foot. It will be a minor drop, but it will still be interesting to see. Yeah. Yeah. Very. This week we have a whole show full of science for you coming to you from our homes and hotel rooms. That's right. I have stories about reversing aging. This one is specifically for Blair, artificial intelligence translators. And she needs at least less than we do. No, but I'm the one that wants to live forever. Oh, that's right. That's right. Although not if it has to be in my own one bedroom apartment for all of time, then I might change my mind. Yep. Conditionally. I don't think we go backwards. I don't think we go backwards. I think we just keep the social distancing forever. I also have a story about bioreactors. Justin, what did you bring? Oh, I want to hear about the bioreactors. What have I got? I have a story about the Antarctic rainforest. I have a tale of the mighty Colusa people. Some interesting. Yeah. Have you heard of the mighty Colusa people? No. They used to rule South Florida. And they had some actually really interesting technologies that we're going to be talking about. And, and, and, and, and, and. Micro biome. I saw that. I thought you might bring that story. I was hoping you would see bring that story. Yes. He threw it out there and he was hooked. It's a little fishy if you ask me. Blair, what's in the animal corner? I brought squid, ants, and ninja robots. What? One of these things is not like the others. You have all, all related to invertebrates. I have no vertebrate science tonight. I'm very excited. We do love the invertebrates in the animal corner because they are part of the animal kingdom and they need more love. There's more of them than us with a spine. A lot, a lot more, many more fathoms more. As we get into the show, we'll get into that science right about now, but I just need to remind you all that if you are not yet subscribed to the This Week in Science podcast, we're a podcast and you can find us all the places that podcasts are found. You can also find us on YouTube and Facebook. You have to look for This Week in Science to be able to find us. Whoa, happy quarantine, kiddo. I've just got, I've been visited. Okay, go to bed. I just took a shower. Oh, you're going to break my chair. Go to bed. How'd you get? Daddy's getting carbonated a lot. Okay, 5-4-3-2-1, get out of here. Happy quarantine. Happy quarantine, guy. I have a bomb banger. There's a bomb banger. This is the, the combination of a Bombay cat and an angler fish. Of course it is. Of course it is. Yes. A bomb banger. By a local artist named Kiki Doodle. She is also a Kiki and she makes these creations. Get, get, get, go to bed. Time for bed. You're interrupting my show. Time for bed. There you go. At least it was- This is my trailer. He's still going. Oh, life at home. Life at home. We love it. I am so grateful. Okay. It's time to dig in. Let's do the weekly COVID roundup, shall we? Yeah. Oh, how it's changed. Oh, how it has changed. Really good news out there. There is. Yes. So I would love to let you all know about how things are going, where they are going in, in the world. According to the World Health Organization, we are increasing in our numbers. We are now 900, over 935,000 cases, almost 50,000 deaths. But on the good side of things, almost 200,000 people recovered. We're still in the very highly upwardly mobile phase of this wave of viral pandemic. And as we move through it, there's some information that I think is important for everyone. Here in the United States, the CDC has reported 163,539 cases, 22,635 of them are new, 2,860 deaths, 455 new on March 31st as of yesterday. So big question. A lot of us are sheltering in place. This is a term from disaster terminology. A lot of us might not like that terminology. It doesn't really give the meaning that is required to get ideas across. But a lot of us are staying at home right now to stop the spread of the virus. So we're hearing good news from places like San Francisco, California and some other cities that their trends are starting to flatten out. Their curves are starting to flatten. All the efforts are starting to make sense and to actually seem as though they are working. But how much longer do we need to continue with these stay-at-home measures? There's a new paper out. It is published in the open source journal SSRN. It's titled, How Long Must Social Distancing Last? And the researchers looked at 36 countries, 50 US states found that aggressive intervention to contain COVID-19 like lockdowns and stay-at-home quarantine measures must be maintained for at least 44 days. And now this is after the three weeks that it may take to see some amount of moderation. Now the researchers looked at daily growth rate and time to double cumulative cases as the metrics for spread of the disease that they thought were important. They just looked at measurable benchmarks for analysts and public health managers to target looking at moderation where the growth rate stays below 10% and doubling time is above seven days. Control when growth rate stays below 1% and doubling stays above 70 days. And containment when growth rate remains 0.1% and doubling time stays above 700 days. That's two years. These benchmarks, after analyzing them, they determined that it suggests that once aggressive interventions are in place, large countries take almost three weeks to see moderation one month to get to control and 45 days to see containment and with less aggressive intervention or even a mix of interventions which we're currently seeing in the United States where some states are intervening with measures and other states still are allowing people to gather in large numbers. It's going to take a lot longer because you may see re-infections and virus infections traveling from one place to another. Yay! So, wouldn't the way to kind of fix this, I was thinking about this earlier today and I realized this is an extreme measure that people might be mad about but this is a thought exercise. Wouldn't a way to fix this to be to stop travel between the states that aren't cracking down and the states that are because if California and Oregon and Washington do their job and we get through this as long as we're not flying to Utah or Idaho where things aren't as controlled then we can't get re-infected and they can't infect us. If our borders are closed to those states then we're not participating in these shelter-in-place orders. Right. That's one aspect of how... I mean that's one aspect that I'm sure regulators are starting to discuss but at the same time how do we really, you know, control all of the transit? Right. I wasn't even saying like, is it possible? It was a thought experiment. It would be great. Some states are doing it and some states are not seeing that the states that are doing it are starting to have response. There is this fear that if we decide as California that it's time to move back to normal and we immediately start flying all over the United States it ruins everything. And that absolutely will happen because there will be re-infection there will be re-emergence and the public health officials who and epidemiologists are likening it to a fire where you can put out the main conflagration but if there are still embers and those embers are burning they can start new fires and even reignite the old fire. So, and I think it's a really apt analogy actually that these infections there are going to be pockets of infection until we have a vaccine or herd immunity we're going to be dealing with some amount of changed behaviors but as far as the aggressive interventions the lockdowns and the stay-at-home orders and until what we're hoping we can do is buy the public health infrastructure time to put protective measures in place to keep another peak from happening. And everybody is going to get this. That's just going to be a matter of time. 70% of people will get it. Everybody's going to get it. But you want to get it when there are beds available. No, the way you want to get it is in the form of a vaccine shot so that you don't get sick from it. So you can get the immunity before you encounter this thing because everybody's going to encounter this virus. It lingers too much. It's here like a regular flu and everybody comes into contact with a regular flu, seasonal flu at some point. Everybody does. The question is whether or not it can affect you. Right now this can affect everybody and it's looking to be pretty aggressive in the way that it is communicable. I don't think that shutting down states things works because we're a country of families who have responsibilities and jobs and if you live near a border how does that work? It's problematic. However, it would potentially entice certain states who are not conforming to conform if you started talking about it. That is something that you could create this kind of social pressure amongst the states to start paying more attention to this, to the ones who are not. But honestly, if you live in North Dakota you're probably socially distanced anyway. The part of this is though the places to get hit the hardest are with denser populations a lot of mass transit, that sort of thing. I think the one that's going to be the really the wave hasn't hit quite there yet I think the one I'm really terrified of within the United States anyway is Florida. It's peaking. It's coming up. I think Florida is going to get really scary because they haven't been taking it serious and I have it's a lot of there's a lot of retirement that goes on down there too. So we know we've got a I don't know what the statistically maybe it's just this is something I've heard over and over and over again that all the old people in the United States at some point just moved to Florida. It's probably not as true as I think it is but I've heard it over and over again my whole life. I just assume like half of it is retired people living Florida. Probably not true. Maybe. But that's the that's the vulnerable population and the fact that they haven't been testing or taking it serious that's that's going to be a bigger problem than it is right now. That's the one I'm mostly afraid of right now. In this state. So people yeah so people might be curious as to exactly how it infects our bodies and there is a new study out researchers looking at the actual structure of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and how it and how it interacts with the cells of our bodies. These researchers have used x-ray crystallography to really find to on our understanding of how SARS-CoV-2 binds to the receptor and they've discovered that this through looking at the 3D structure that compared to the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak the SARS-CoV-2 virus has new strategies that make it better at binding and the receptor that it binds to is the ACE-2 receptor in our respiratory system this the SARS virus from 2002 bound to it pretty well but this new one grabs on tightly and it doesn't want to let go so even further down the airways into the bronchioles and into the lungs where they're in the throat and the bronchioles where there are fewer of the ACE-2 receptors the SARS-CoV-2 virus that we're dealing with now is more effective and so more likely to get into cells in that pathway and so it's just much better at binding and getting into the cells and then and this is good to know additionally how it infects because a lot of people are ordering food right you might want to get takeout or something and you're like oh do I have to worry about food that other people have prepared or even the food at the grocery store most likely not unless you are touching the wrappers and then don't want or touching food and then don't wash your hands before you end up touching your face because the main route of infection is through inhalation through the nose and the mouth and into the airways our and it's that ACE-2 receptor which is in much high numbers in the respiratory system than it is other places and also our digestive system if you're chewing on the virus our digestive system has a lot of caustic acids that will break the virus down and researchers actually believe that although we are finding virus in the feces the excrement of individuals who are infected it's more likely just indicative of systemic infection as opposed to being infectious itself so I can lick my fingers after I've been outside but I shouldn't pick my nose it's very similar to the flu and other viruses you are more likely to get the virus not from drinking from an infected person's glass but taking your hands off the glass and then wiping your face so that transmission is much more likely so I can still order takeout I just can't sniff the person that brings it or the don't do that thanks for coming so quick what kind of takeout are you ordering? I didn't know you could get that at takeout well I don't live in a big city though don't deliver to an old school bus if you're a delivery worker in Davis you're gonna get sniffed yeah and Blair you had had a quick story also about oh yeah I deleted it because I feel like we kind of covered it before but it was about where it came from so there's been so much flip-flopping around where this virus came from they said it was from bats and they said it was through snakes and then they said it was through pangolins and then that was recalled well now there's new data that's saying yes it does in fact look like it went bat pangolin human yeah get the pangolins out of the wet markets pangolins good for people and then the final question I think is important people really want to know who does this virus infect it can infect and will infect most most people but the research is showing that certain individuals are more likely to experience severe disease symptoms compared to others and those people are more likely to have other conditions so pre-existing conditions like heart disease or COPD chronic obstructive pulmonary disease diabetes asthma additionally is an important elevating risk factor and some of these diseases so COPD diabetes asthma these are experienced in pretty large numbers throughout the age groups of our population they're not just diseases of the old so although this disease does more heavily affect the the age of our population we are seeing many younger individuals experiencing serious disease and that is why and also younger individuals they get sick but maybe they don't show symptoms and they're more likely to spread it and this is why the CDC is now considering backtracking on its decision to recommend mask wearing and is now considering recommending mask wearing for all individuals when you leave your houses but isn't that also kind of counter productive in that there aren't enough masks for healthcare workers right now so it would be kind of dangerous to promote mask wearing among the general populace and that is exactly why they did not promote it from the get go I mean in addition to some data suggesting that mask wearing was not effective because it how effective a N95 mask is is dependent on whether the wearer is trained on fitting it to their face and whether they fiddle with it and take it off and move it and how many people touch it during a wearing session right but what they're suggesting here is that any kind of face covering so scarves folded up bandanas homemade masks masks that you've sewn yourself you know that any kind of face covering can begin to reduce the risk and so it comes down to are you an individual who interacts with the elderly on a regular basis you really should consider getting a higher quality mask if you're going to be doing any kind of movement among different groups and populations but if you stay at home all the time maybe you just need a bandana when you go out to the store right who are the who are the people you're dealing with and what is your risk of contracting and what is your risk of transmitting but the CDC as a result of all of the data that's been coming in and what we're seeing in results from other countries in which mask wearing is a very big factor they're really starting to look at recommending it for everyone so all I gotta say is let's make it a fashion statement people I want you to bedazzle those masks come on let's make it fun don't sew on the mask that's gonna ruin but actually a lot of fabric stores are giving away free fabric to make masks right now so that is a thing that's happening if you want to try out some sewing skills while you're stuck at home we can help out we can sew some if you are stuck at home and have time and ability sew some masks for the medical health professionals and maybe a couple for your family although I did just see a really awesome video someone showing how you fold a bandana several times and use rubber bands and it makes a really amazing mask for someone who has no sewing skills and a bandana and rubber bands there are ways to do this there are ways bank tellers are just gonna love it totally alright well that's if anyone has any other questions about COVID-19 SARS-CoV-2 try and you can ask us we'll try and ask experts and look up answers and answer them to the best of our ability or send you to people who really do know the answers so we can be a way to help you find the answers if you're not finding what you need so be sure to get in touch with us if you have a question something interesting I think I already may have talked about this a bit in the chat lines in Italy who did sort of an extensive interview about what he'd been seeing firsthand as the crisis was peaking there he put out the death rate at about 2% for the hospital for this coming in which is weird because it kept looking much higher based on the infograph that we've got up now but based on the on the ground it seemed to really conform much more with what the average of this is something he also pointed out was that he didn't seem to be getting this in much greater number didn't have a mechanism behind that but he also said it was down into the 40s it wasn't just for the severe symptoms not getting it everybody can get this everybody and anybody can catch this illness but the very severe symptoms he was seeing was mostly male starting in the 40s and up was the majority of the cases and so I heard somebody was pointing out that smoking is not a very good idea during this that smokers have something like 15 times more chance of getting the severe don't know why that is but it could be it could just be kind of like having asthma like being a smoker might be kind of just like having asthma you might have restricted airways already you might already have vulnerable be vulnerable to something that attacks the lungs so that could be part of that as well yeah in a big way alright well and for those of you who asked I will try and find the link to how to make a bandana mask for and be able and share that in our chat room in the chat room keep it go I want to see that the bras being made into masks that would be I'm sure that could work also alright let's move into some other fun science now that we've gotten past our update and kind of answering some questions and kind of talking about where we are now I hope all of you are doing fine at home reach out if you need someone to talk to do some shout outs let's let's find some ways to connect with each other over the next next several weeks as so many of us are home let's do more of that alright fun story for this week magic brain decoder ring maybe just artificial intelligence that is translating neural activity into English sentences so we've talked previously on the show about efforts to translate what's happening in the brain the neural activity those electrical signals in your brain for you're doing something talking listening how can we figure out how to get the information out of the brain to potentially help people who have locked in syndrome or other disabilities that keep them from being able to communicate so researchers at UCSF took a completely new slant on the question and started looking at translation programs that we're currently using to translate between different languages and in the programs the way that they work very often as they get trained not on the initial language but there's an intermediary step between the initial language and the words that are said to the words that they're translated into there is a step in the middle in which a neural network forms basically an image of what's in there and that is what gets translated and so they went hey maybe we can do this with brain activity so they used a few epilepsy patients who were undergoing brain surgery and they put some electrodes in their brain while they were in the middle of the surgery this is a common practice in which researchers are able to get really interesting information out of live behaving human beings out of our brains it's very cool and so they were able to get these individuals to read sentences and they trained this neural network on about 30 to 50 sentences that were read by the individuals and the neural network took the neural information the activity pattern that occurred while the sentences were being read and they got turned into this intermediate structure and then over time the neural network after it was trained was able to translate the speech so basically reading into English text sentences at a 97% success rate only 3% error rate which is which is pretty amazing that's an incredible feat of this artificial intelligence but we can't hear her I will say that if I was given the opportunity to have electrodes put into my brain I would take it Hi Kiki we can't hear you though you're still talking she's reading something else okay so I'm going to go ahead and move on she'll be here soon this is researchers this is an amazing story researchers have found evidence of rainforest near the south pole rainforest near the south pole okay I feel like she's going to pop hey Kiki we can't hear you at all okay she'll come back so this is rainforest near the south pole but Justin I thought rainforests are not the equator they are but not 90 million years ago which is this fine suggests that the climate was really really warm 90 million years ago this is a team from UK and Germany they discovered forest soil in some ice cores from a Cretaceous period that was about 900 kilometers from the south pole they found preserved roots pollen spores evidence of this warmer than expected biome so discovery and analysis were carried out by an international team of researchers this is co-author professor Tina van de Fridert from the department of earth science and engineering in Peru the preservation of this 90 million year old forest is exceptional but even more surprising is the world it reveals even during months of darkness swampy temperate rainforest were able to grow close to the south pole revealing an even warmer climate than we expected so this is also suggested which this is just fascinating to me already suggests that the co2 was probably a lot higher than our current climate models have been predicting we might need to go back and challenge some of those it's really hard to get super accurate and you're getting back 90 million years but they had more 90 million 92 hundred million 92 100 million that's not right this is mid-Cretaceous this is hey dave dinosaurs it's also the warmest time in the last 140 million years sea levels at this time were 170 meters higher than today which again for those not familiar with meters 170 meters of sea rise would be about 185 yards of sea rise from where we are today you actually converted I don't know if you've ever done that he likes to surprise us it was 0.17 kilometers the trick of the shtick is just never convert it to feet or miles never do feet or miles you're fine with anything else someday I'm gonna convert well it'll be fine so the presence of the forest suggests that average temperatures were around 12 degrees celsius or about 56 american degrees so it's a little on the chilly side but really hot for Antarctica and there was likely no ice cap at all on the south pole at this time it's really interesting too I'm trying to picture so this is a climate unlike what New Zealand is today right near the south pole it had this forest biome but what can live there it's dark there according to this it would have been dark about 4 months out of the year I'm wondering if there was sunlight not the sun doesn't come up at all for 4 months and then it goes back into probably sun the rest of the time just about it makes me wonder if there was a migration to and from at this time this is around the time of the emergence of birds but the birds would have not been in the ability to migrate long distances I'm wondering if dinosaurs migrated from this area what was living there what plants were there they found flowering plants the furthest south they've ever found a flowering plant a flower on planet earth amazing but it was so long ago I mean it will be interesting to see is this our future again is our past coming back around is our past our future are we going to heat it up enough that there will be plants down in Antarctica once again the trick is just to do it slow enough that the plants can actually move because that's really that's the trick that's the rub of it is if we do it too fast the plants can't move well I think the plants will survive because we're looking sort of think about this though it's probably pretty dramatic when the meteor strikes and the sun is blocked out and then there's the molten rock and there were fires it likely was very dramatic of a shift plants are pretty amazing things they can adapt I think much better than multicellular life forms that have to move out and consume things they seem to be able to whether these changes I mean without getting into a whole thing with this they have ways of propagating and quote-unquote moving right and sometimes that's animals moving their seeds which we have cities and roads and buildings in the way of some of that sometimes it's by water and if we have dams that are blocking water that can hamper that so there are other things that we're doing to the environment that can actually have impact on how plants seed and so that is something else you have to consider plus if you throw in droughts or unusual weather patterns or all these sorts of other impacts from climate change that can also mess with their ability to see if they normally seed in May but it's hot in February and they seed and then it gets cold again and then those seeds freeze and then there are a lot of baby plants that are lost for them to be able to move so there's lots of impacts that are happening that could potentially block the ability for plants to quote-unquote move to other areas so it's complex I'm currently seeing changes though in not just plants, plants are moving and we are currently seeing changes as the oceans warm as well and there's a large number of studies just came out this week also a large number of fish are moving toward the poles so there is a movement of foot but it's interesting to look back to the past to be able to get a bead on where things could go again could maybe I'm just really disappointed because I would prefer to be going into an ice age I would prefer for this piece a mini one but enough for the seeds you want your mammoths so that would make sense what I really want is easier access to all the offshore archaeological sites oh you want the land bridges that's what you want where most of humanity lived for years most of humanity lived near the coast as we do now as nothing has changed but lower where humans lived is now underwater so it would be great to have better access to these archaeological sites to delve into our history find more ancient human in the Andertals but yeah we're going the other direction so the other way to do it now is now we know we got to build the map with one of those global information systems and raise the sea level 185 yards and see where's the good real estate now oh just you're saying just beat nature to the punch just get there first I want to see the climate model I want to see if Napa Valley has the climate of Bakersfield in 40 years Napa Valley is under water is in Monaco where's the where's the new where's the new grapevine is going to go in well we need to know these things in advance as we're planning ahead as we're planning ahead I just want to let you know you've tuned into this week in science and if you are interested in a twist shirt or mug or other item of our merchandise you can head to twist.org click on the Zazzle link and browse the store it is time now ta ta ta for Blair's Animal Corner with Blair Blair oh my goodness I have giant squid in the dark yeah I have a story from Sanford University in collaboration with Mbari Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute looking at Humboldt Squid which if you're not familiar do a quick google of the Humboldt Squid they're pretty large and in charge they can be up to about generally they're four to five feet long without their tentacles but they can get up to eight feet long and weigh up to 100 pounds so they're pretty big and they are some of the squid that live in the deep ocean so there's lots of squid that live kind of in the shallow waters close to the surface a lot of our calamari squid that you think about market squid I think usually live pretty close to the surface and so we've talked before about how a lot of cephalopods so squids cuttlefish, octopus they all have they have chromatophores on their body which help them to make patterns and color changes and do amazing things and they can communicate with their colors and their patterns but these guys that are in the deep deep ocean super super dark how are they communicating so that's really what this study is looking at they are 1500 feet 1500 feet below the surface of the ocean and they gather in the hundreds these giant Humboldt squid and they feed on lanternfish they zoom past each other trying to grab these little fish and they don't appear to ever collide or compete for food they're really good in these huge groups at being able to kind of jump around each other in the water and each get their own fish how are they doing this in the dark the researchers from Stanford and Imbari suggest that they are doing the same kind of communicating with patterns and color change but that they have a ever so subtle glow about their body they have light producing organs in their muscles and so they can create a backlight for shifting pigmentation patterns throughout their skin so they are still able to communicate to each other with patterns just like other squid but they can do it in the dark because they are very subtly glowing so how do they figure this out so first they went out with ROVs remotely operated vehicles underwater they were unmanned and they could record the patterns of the squid's skin because they were able to kind of like flash the camera or use their artificial lights to be able to record these patterns on the squid but they couldn't test this glowing element the backlight because it was too bright all of their lights no matter how how how dim they were it was still too bright to be able to capture what they assumed was this subtle glow so they had to take the information they had about the patterns that were being generated then they had to take squid back to the lab and look at their actual body and see if they have the mechanics to be able to glow so those two kind of pieces of evidence can be used together to figure this out so then they also looked at how they glowed where these glowing mechanisms were in relation to where patterns changed most often because also you would think if they're zoom in on certain areas of their body to be pattern changing the most those areas would definitely be best equipped to glow so they did find that the pigmentation patterns seemed to relate to specific context so they first were able to figure out that these patterns actually were saying specific things there were some that were detailed enough to imply that they are saying things like that over there is mine that's my fish don't go near it but they also found that there was evidence that they could break down these patterns into distinct units that could be recombined to form different messages they say like letters and alphabet I think it's more probably like words right so they were able to find kind of a vocabulary amongst squid patterns which in and of itself I want more study on that that is amazing that's amazing what are the flags that you used to communicate with ships are they called peniforce so that's kind of what it reminded me of was that you have these patterns that mean specific things so I want to know how yeah the patterns and how complex is it oh my goodness yeah so there's definitely more study to be done there but they also found back to this glowing thing that the light producing organs that facilitate the squids visual communications they did find them and they mapped where these organs are located compared it to where the most detailed skin patterns appeared and they did find the areas where the illuminating organs were most densely packed and some of those areas include between the squids eyes and then also on the thin edge of their fins those corresponded to where the most intricate patterns occurred so based on these kind of two pieces of evidence it really seems like they are backlighting their patterns to be able to communicate in the deep sea in the dark yeah it's so dark oh I love that I mean for one it would make sense that they would use patterns because evolutionarily cephalopods in general do that a lot to communicate they use these patterns that they can make in their skin so it's a question of when you're moving down into the deep dark ocean evolutionarily is it easier or better or more likely to occur through random mutation I guess for backlighting to be able to be developed so that they can still be seen or is it more likely that they would lose that pattern and find another way of communication now if it was very simple communication it could potentially be either way but also based on that we now know that their communication that they're having is actually quite complex and there could be syntax and vocabulary if that's true it would make sense to conserve that and not lose it and instead adapt to be able to continue to use that very developed vocabulary especially if it had already especially if it was already fairly developed to begin with would be less likely to lose it yeah yeah fascinating I love it I definitely we need to get somebody on to talk about this like is it are they talking in emojis, hieroglyphs how complex is this conversation are they using are they using the same it's just their own patterns that they're sending out we could have someone to talk about this once this research occurs it has not yet occurred so they figured out there's kind of these segments of communication but we have no idea how complex it is or they haven't been able to identify any of it as this means this and that means that so maybe in five years we could have somebody flash the same symbol out each other right we don't know if they can flash the same symbol back and forth that's game changing we stop being the only symbolically communicative life form on this planet I'm telling you they're gonna take over once we're gone anyway this has been the prediction they had the planet before they have the planet now we just don't realize it the planet's water they're in charge we think we're in charge they're in charge you know who else is in charge ants so speaking of different ways that animals communicate in large groups I have this really funny story about how ants don't have traffic jams so we've all been there especially maybe month month and a half ago we were commuting to work and we got stuck in some traffic and we know that with traffic on human freeways it's usually because of a few reasons one there's a lot of cars on the road and people slow down when there are more cars around just to be safe two somebody's being a real jerk and moving around from lane to lane to try to jockey around making other people slam on their brakes or three people are actually kind of like speeding up or slowing down to try to keep people from getting into their lanes also jerks regardless there's all this kind of human psyche involved with the way that traffic develops and actually there's lots of really cool studies that have been done on kind of the mechanics of how traffic builds like if you have remove a lane what happens when you remove a lane and then all of a sudden there's a merge in and how the cars move it's very interesting but anyway I also found through this study by the way that there's such a thing as a traffic scientist which makes sense but I did not know that was a thing but there you go there's like all these mechanics with traffic anyway this doesn't happen with ants so why? because they move at very high densities and there's varying densities but a team of researchers from Germany, India and Japan work together to find that ants when they travel down linear trails they're their speed remains stable no matter how many ants are on the road so they set up video cameras at 10 different one way trails that had no intersections or routes that branched but scientists never observed individual ants speeding up to overtake another ant in front so nobody was trying to jockey in front of anybody else they all followed each other in a single file I don't do that also unlike vehicular traffic the average velocity of ants remained the same in spite of increased density yes so consequently the greater the density the greater the flux which means more ants travel down the trail segment at a given amount of time so basically more ants getting to where you were going in the same amount of time there was no slowdown so I also found that the most types of high density traffic that we look at exhibit what I was talking about before mutual blockings he thinks he's going to get over he's not going to get over here and then you like speed up you're like oh you want to get over here now and you slow down so that's called mutual blocking in traffic science and the ants did not do any mutual blocking so they were far more courteous on their little ant freeway so they also found that ants tend to form platoons in which they move at identical velocities which allows them to travel what we would consider bumper to bumper so far too close for human safety when we're driving cars open AI could do it yes so this is why I brought this story is because of the time that I have spent in a Tesla that does autopilot yes because this is basically what this is getting at is by studying ants and the way that they move if you can take the human side of this out where you're trying to mutually block each other cut people off or like jockey around from lane to lane if you can take that out and you just have a machine focusing take the monkey out of it yes yeah like the the id part of it if you take that out and you're just focusing on the relative velocity of the cars around you you could potentially achieve this in high traffic you could still go fast and be safe but you would have to be able to have kind of quicker response time and you would have to not want to get around other cars that's really what is at stake here is that they do not pass each other on these roads but see they get there faster than if they did which is where this always gets so frustrating for me is all like see the car jockey around from lane to lane to lane we're going to get to where we're going at the same time buddy it's definitely part of that or you're going to get a ticket or you'll get there like after me because you keep moving anyway so yes in defense of that car in defense of that car if the car behind you you'll know how Justin drives now if the car behind you is going faster than you are move to the right if you have multiple lanes move to the right unless you're passing somebody you can handle a little bit of density of traffic if you're on a, now if you're talking rush hour that's something else but for most traffic it's that car that's doing the speed limit or just barely above it who's in the fast lane which is called the fast lane because you're supposed to go faster than the speed limit that's the rule socially accepted rule in unites it's about 5 miles but if it's 65 that's the slow lane 70 in the middle, 75 if you got 3 lanes if you got another lane go 80 it's 5 per starting with the speed limit at the first lane I've never heard this before this is just that is universally accepted it may be but it's not legal in a lot of places so no I would like to say don't take this as advice for how to drive because you should really just be driving the speed limit in some states they have actually gotten to the point where they have individually labeled we're talking about ants we're talking about ants I know so at my point of this though all of the ants have agreed they're gonna go this speed they're gonna go fast it's a social contract they're following the social contract one lane which is key to this how do you lane block in one lane like you can't nobody can pass anybody they could create a second lane they could jockey around each other but they only go single file because everybody's going full speed is that they actually use chemical signals to talk to each other as well so they are able to communicate back and forth about what's going on with AI in cars one car could tell the other car behind them that they are slowing down by a fraction of a mile per hour much quicker and more precisely than by watching the car and seeing them hit their brakes and that is the other part of this is that it is precise movement calculated quickly and so it's all about ultimately traffic is all about the amount of time it takes us to process signaling which is why we have to leave space between cars so if you take that out of the equation and you can go a set speed density doesn't really hamper that and I think that is the point of this story I wanted to bring this story because it brings in this idea I have for many many years been anti-autonomous driving vehicles and slowly I'm starting to come to the other side and this is partly why because if you can take some of that guesswork out also it's going to be safer to drive so I just think it's very interesting that you know ants already kind of have this figured out they're going to use chemical signals they're going to communicate back and forth and they have a kind of a social contract they move in platoons and they can go places fast and with a lot of them part of this is actually been handled by the auto industry already they have distance monitoring is part of a normal part of a cruise control now where if you can set your cruise control to whatever speed you want and if the car ahead of you slows down so will your car it will match a distance where It's an adaptive cruise control and they can even now come down to if that car goes down to a full stop Your car can also come down to a full stop and in some of these models now What we're talking about is the world before seat belts as an example and talking about safety on the road when once this is in every car Once this is the norm once this is a mandatory feature to every vehicle to have an adaptive cruise control Once it's an always-on feature so that it's not something that you have to turn on or opt in out of But when all cars are looking for you're going to see people stop hitting dears with the same velocities They'll stop running into each other that so So, uh, then we will call ourselves ants. Yeah, but it's not going to be artificial intelligence that does it It's going to be ant intelligence. It's still a Antification Antification of the human species, but we're really we're catching up to the ant traffic in that way Absolutely. I love it Hey everyone, thank you for listening to twist You're the reason why we're able to do what we do every week bringing you up to date and down to earth views On science discoveries. That's right. We love them and so do you and with your help we can do even more Together we can bring a sane perspective to a world full of misinformation head over to twist.org right now Click on the patreon link and choose your level of support be part of bringing sanity and science to more people All right, let's move back to some more science. We've got some more stories Like I have a story about bacterial photosynthesis Are you ready for some bacterial photosynthesis? Yes, this is my bio reactor It's not mine. It's from UC Berkeley researchers at UC Berkeley have been working on this Bioreactor for quite some time and have published a few times and I think we've talked about it previously on the show In in that these chemists Who are also working with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory? Have been trying to create this electrical bacterial system Where they get bacterial bacteria to nestle up and cuddle up with with electricity conducting nano wires The nano wires they through this whole system can capture the energy of sunlight and convert carbon dioxide and water into Organic molecules or at least the building blocks for organic molecules these nano wires are Silicon wires really really really tiny. They're nano wires. So at the nano scale smaller than the width of a human hair and What the researchers are hoping is that not just here on earth, but also in on on mars someday these bioreactors will be available and able to bring people the Basically the stuff that they need to survive that they that it will here on earth be able to use up excess carbon dioxide and produce oxygen through this synthetic process of photosynthesis the bacteria are in essence Doing photosynthesis. They're doing that process that plants normally do In converting carbon dioxide into oxygen, but in the process the bacteria also have these metabolites these side these byproducts that That can be used and in the case of this particular system When they published previously back in I think it was 2015 maybe 2017 They had an efficiency of 0.04 percent. So they they could do it barely and Now researchers Putting together this system have published in the journal jewel That they've gotten these bacteria that are called spore musa ovata And they've nestled them into a lot more nano wires So they increased the number of nano wires and they also increased the concentration of the bacteria And they got them really to cozy up with these little tiny nano wires and now have A record breaking efficiency for record breaking because nobody's nobody's done this before that 3.6 percent of incoming solar energy on an external Solar panel is being converted and then stored as acidic acid Or vinegar so they're 3.6 percent and this is actually compared to plants surprisingly really good Plants are actually not very efficient Which is something that has always surprised me when I first started looking at solar panels and the efficiency of solar panels I was like, oh Plants are going to be way better. We should totally be doing what plants do and low and behold no Plants typically convert less than less than one half percent of solar energy into carbon carbon components But in this particular system They're hitting 3.6 percent, which is a big big improvement on the basic plant efficiency and is almost comparable to one of the highest converters, which is sugarcane, which is four to five percent efficient So it's a pretty exciting system They're hoping that they're going to be able to increase this efficiency even more But at this point, um, they've been able to Get the bacteria to really sit in there as the acidity rises as it produced as they produce more acidic acid They like to pull away from the nanowires, but they've created a system where they've gotten them to all hang out together around the nanowires converting carbon dioxide into byproducts like Acetic acid and oxygen and they are hoping that they'll be able to use even more To do to spit out acid more acetate to be able to Spit out building blocks that could be used in biomanufacturing on mars Which is very exciting bacteria sunlight nanowires Mars we're going there Mars we're past destiny baby That's right Uh, yeah, so Justin do you have a story? Yes, uh, the mighty calusa These people ruled south florida Uh many many moons ago. They this is an interesting, uh Connection here. So this is uh, this was a sort of a micro empire at the time They had they were the military superpower. They had trading routes Uh, and they collected taxes that's for all the over hundreds of miles of area They created shell islands They made these enormous buildings and dredged cannot canals the size of highways And they didn't really rely heavily on agriculture though They were a fishing empire And they needed a good supply of it and they needed it whenever they needed it They didn't just wait for the boats to come in at the end of the day. They had a bustling economy They needed fish whenever they wanted them and so They created what they discovered these massive structures that they're calling water courts They were built on a foundation of oyster shells And these rectangular enclosures walled off portions. It was sometimes as big as 36 000 square feet That's a pretty good footprint. They had a nice berm around them Uh, uh about three feet high of also shell and sediment to keep the water in and they filled them with fish That they would then eat later It's a pretty amazing thing because it's it so they had aquaculture Yes, which is interesting to me because they this was also something that was going on in south america So this is this is I guess this uh, i'm trying to see Uh So so this is a sort of an interesting thing to spring up a couple of times I don't know when this occurs anywhere else in the globe time-wise this is They uh Uh They this is the the there's some reports of having witnessed this I guess in the 1600s Uh when the franciscans were there unloading ships but they they analyzed a couple of the watercarts along the southwest shore Uh an island of estro bay off florida's gulf coast It was just the seat of their power for about 500 years. This is a long standing This is between 1300 and 1400 years ago or sorry not years ago 1300 to 1400 ad is when they've dated the watercourts So we're talking about you know, 600 700 years ago This is a this is a pretty fascinating answer. So while a lot of the globe had Had encountered an agricultural revolution much later This culture had developed a fish empire It wouldn't be I mean it it's in florida, which I imagine was still very Everglades-ish at that at that period of time still very a lot of water and very swampy I mean, it it's not so long ago that it would have been uh, you know A completely different environment, but so it's not hard to imagine that they would have relied on fish Yep, uh, and this is also something that we saw along the amazon as well though, uh, where There were every empires that were that would have to uh, would carry fish Actually from the amazon inland to these estuaries that they had built in a little plastic bag Little but yeah, yeah, I know you know, you really got to get those wicker baskets tight. I don't know Maybe it was clay vessels. I don't know how they did it, but uh Either one maybe both Then that yeah aquaculture would significantly improve their ability to feed a large number of people too. So that uh, Yeah, that's that's pretty impressive and I didn't I don't know whatever happened to the mighty collusive people It doesn't go into it here. This is the first I had really heard of them And so I now I want to learn more, but I also think you know That's our hurricane territory. Yes I was thinking how do you keep the alligators from eating your aquaculture? Yeah Uh, whoo. Yeah, but then again, maybe they ate the alligators too. That sounds like good eats to me Yeah, I've never tried alligator, but I I just assumed supposedly it tastes like chicken Yes, well, they're actually more closely related to birds than to lizards. So They would make sense if it tasted like chicken Quite interesting So I have a not chickeny study story It's not chicken not chicken at all. It's Aging Aging this story is for Blair really Well, I guess she's chicken when it comes to aging Yeah, that's true. I I do want to live forever Put my head in that jar Okay Well researchers are working on that jar and in their recently published study in nature communications researchers have um been looking at this idea of transient reprogramming so looking at uh induced pluripotent stem cells researchers have been taking uh these messenger RNA instructions and using them for turning cells back in time and taking skin cells muscle cells nerve cells and taking them back to the Pre-differentiation state so taking them back in time to the point before They had decided who they were going to be when they grew up And so they they have these instructions using messenger RNA and some other cocktail compounds They bathe the cells and then they found over about five to seven days Of giving the cells in a bath these comp compounds. It's like they can Take you back to the beginning.  You can now be anything, right? But there's a place that they found where there's that cutoff point. It's the I don't know who I'm gonna be when I grow up versus now. I know who I am There's a cutoff point and they found that that cutoff point is somewhere around five days of bathing the cells In in these instructions Now they've also been looking at other interesting studies in which some researchers we talked about it last year some researchers Took rats with progeria Which is the accelerated aging disease. So it's a model of progeria in these rats and we're able to Reverse some of the symptoms some of the the markers of aging In the cells of those rats And then they went, okay Okay, let's put these things together. This works in the rats and then we know we could do this If we go all the way back to the stem cells, let's see if we can just Nobody's ever looked at human cells before so let's see if we can take human cells in a dish from not just Cells that we've been telling to become Stem cells and telling them what to do. Let's get cells from people who are old And see if we can make those cells think they're young again So they instead of having The chemical cocktail take those cells back after five days. They're like, okay We'll give it to them for four days And so they were able to take human skin cells human muscle cells human nerve cells To a point where they still were Those kinds of cells skin muscle nerve. They still knew who they were But they lost all the markers of being old They lost the markers of uh, they lost the markers of inflammation And they had a profile that was very similar To the profile of young cells that they were comparing them to and so they did this in In human cells and then they also did a different study Adding to it to just kind of really figure out if they were on the right track and Use it and and yes indeed they're they really This is not the the The anti-age egg formula yet But potentially this shines a light on how we might be able to Treat some diseases like progeria. Maybe there are um messenger RNA related Areas of the genome that we should be targeting um in order to Make cells more youthful and lively. So how how's this clinical trial gonna work for me? Great Am I gonna go take a dip?  How how How how does this work on me a fully Assembled human well, it doesn't yet How but how would it I guess is my question. What would the theoretically what would the Uh application of this technology be? Yeah, I mean theoretically at uh at this point in time, um The idea would be to Treat like I said treat diseases like progeria. So be able to address these diseases of aging or age Like where where metabolically your body seems to be aging faster than it should be um I mean Anyone who's studying aging stuff is also going to be interested in can we turn back the clock and Allow people to live longer healthier lives and that is a really big question one of the uh one of the other things they looked at in this study was whether They looked at the cells from a woman with osteoarthritis And looked to see if they could get rid of some of the markers of osteoarthritis And they were they were able to do that. They were able to reverse some of the Uh the autoimmune related inflammation and other aspects Of the disease at the cellular level And so they think that this is a potential new therapeutic strategy to treat osteoarthritis um That it would probably Be something that's very targeted as opposed to you know, and you know, maybe maybe it's a pill, but Yeah, I don't know. I would think more likely it may be an injection Of some you know of some compounds into say your knee or Into your eye if you have macular degeneration or you know, I think the I think the question as to how it would be applied Is still very much up in the air Whatever it is it just needs to be Accessible because this is always this is the fear that I have For any anti-aging potential breakthrough that happens is that it becomes something that only the ultra wealthy can get Yeah, yeah at this point. I mean this it's an elaborate. They're using of course This is getting into sci-fi territory But I do feel like you know, there is a potential that however many years down the road There could be opportunities to reverse aging in particular cases in particular ways Oregon groups whatever it is And this is always this kind of fear that I have which I'm sure is partially based on science fiction But it's it's based but not really because our health our health care industry in america is not great. So yeah Yeah, this is this fear that I have that suddenly all the people that get to live forever will be the ultra rich which is We need we need it to be accessible. It's already true I know It's already That's the uh, we want to leak the the ingredients you know Yeah leak the ingredients. Well, they're the ingredients so far are they are in this study And the researchers are they have a very specific um Code name for it based on the Ingredients they're calling it the osk mln mRNAs And the it's very catchy. It's very very catchy and these these oskem osk mln mRNAs are a cocktail of mRNAs expressing oct for socks to k lf4 c Mike my c line l an 28 and nanog These are okay all developmental Yeah mRNAs Order them off the shelf. That's right It's like following a recipe It is the recipe is right there in the in the methods. That's right Uh, jesson, do you have another another story for this part? Yeah, my uh, unfortunately my computer is acting really Annoying right now. So I'm trying to I'm trying to Just pull up a document. I don't know how come that's hard google docs. Why why is this hard right now? but uh, basically they uh, they did a survey of uh fish around coral reefs They had 50, uh Something 50. There's 59 gut microbes that they found in common that dominate for for most of these And Even though there's thousands of different microbes that can live inside of a fish There was 59 total types that they saw sort of uh, is the main Main player and five species that they had studied What was really interesting about this study the thing that caught my interest in it Was that they found that fish that were Closerly related however Separate by a different ocean um Had the same symbiont Uh residents in their guts uh, some of these some of these uh indicating then of course that This relationship between fish and its microbe Separated with the oceans or when these fish split off millions of years ago So when we when we're talking about some of these these gut microbes that are that are maybe even within us And in the functions that they perform within us These aren't just from something that you ate This isn't just for the world that you came into contact with recently This isn't some of these are going to be ancient relationships That have been going on throughout evolution So I thought that was really interesting that you can have a symbionic gut microbe In the pacific ocean and in the atlantic ocean and if it's a similar fish species Then they will likely carry the same Some of the same symbiont microbes Really a good reminder we we grew up together we evolved together When people are sitting at home alone and they're feeling isolated just remember You're not alone You're sharing your space with millions of life forms billions What I think what I think is interesting about this also is that I mean if You have these similar symbionts in species Around the world right not just in the same location But in these similar species in ecosystems around the world these symbionts Are they're Playing a particular role In the physiology of that fish in that ecosystem like that symbiont has a particular job That it does and it's doing that in all these different places Yeah, the fish the fish the fish job bacteria Yeah All right, let's check out some other cool stories here. It's time for some quick Quick science news. This is this week in science and if you'd love to help twist grow get a friend to subscribe today Musical creativity is a An interesting question last week. I brought a story at the end of the show about musical creative about music and the brain This year this year this week. I found another This one to do with creativity and what jazz musicians could teach us about the brain and creativity When you're thinking about how people describe themselves very commonly, there's the hey, I'm a right brain thinker I'm a left brain thinker, right and People can describe them. Oh, I'm so right brain. I'm very artistic and you know I have creativity and left brain thinkers are like I am analytical I like engineering. I use my left brain, right? So this is you know this division in society and people identify with one or the other even though It's very inaccurate not really supported by yeah, they're talking to each other all day every day. Yes, they are They are talking to each other, but these researchers at Drexel University's creativity research lab Did a study published in neuro image in which they took jazz musicians musicians, uh jazz musicians guitar players and recorded EEGs Elect the electrical activity from the brain but from the surface of the head So they had these skull caps with electrodes while these musicians played Uh played their guitars and the job during their guitar playing was to improvise on a On the pieces of music that were in front of them So they had to had to improvise on in these certain songs Some of the musicians were very experienced in improvisation others were not and The researchers then Looked at the performance of this. They had the improvisational pieces judged by Uh by experts in music to basically say oh, this is very creative. It's so innovative. It's wonderful or This person knows nothing. I don't know if they said that but The music was judged as creative or not creative by a panel I I'm sure there was a spectrum. There must have been a spectrum. Yes. Uh, and so the then They looked at the EEGs so they had 192 recorded jazz improvizations that had been Rated for creativity and other qualities And then the EEGs and they and they looked at the EEGs that were connected with those That were rated to be more creative or less creative. They found that the highly rated Performances had greater activity in the posterior left hemisphere of the brain So more activity back in the left hemisphere of the brain Which it goes against this whole idea of right brain versus left brain and all that kind of stuff The Performances that had lower ratings There was greater activity in the right hemisphere of the brain mostly in the frontal areas Which kind of makes sense because the frontal areas have a lot to do with planning That's why that's why they're they're hot. They're not just going with it Just gotta go with it. You gotta move it Like oh, I'm gonna play this thing that I know and then I'm gonna play this thing I know and then I'm gonna play this thing and maybe I should change it like this the other ones are just Riffin You have got it. And so When they controlled for experience what they really found is that there is this split between the less Experienced group of jazz musicians were seem to be using their brain The right the right hemisphere of their brain more for the planning activity of the creative aspect Versus the experienced Musicians were just going with the flow and their left the left hemisphere of their brain seemed to be In charge of that And so what they're thinking is that based on this kind of research it can help people Be more creative because if someone's trying to learn a skill and get to the place of mastery You might be able to follow your brain activity And go. Oh my god. I'm going left brain, but I but I I'm making mistakes So you can potentially switch your learning tactics so that you don't hard wire in Bad behaviors or or or bad habits into Your uh, your your understanding. I'm just trying to picture the music class where Use no, no, you're using the wrong part of your brain try it with the prior with the left side I took an I took an a jazz improvisation class in college. I played the saxophone for like 15 years and I I was I think I was pretty good at the saxophone, but I was Never good at improv So this this is a constant struggle for me.  Here are the notes in a d chord. I have to pick one of these five notes or a variant on that scale so like That is a huge amount of work that your brain is doing When you are a newcomer to that world So that makes perfect sense to me that that you're doing the rule following thing I don't think that's a necessarily a a detriment to Why it's not as good. It's probably because they can't they can't intuit the chord structure yet Yeah, and that's why it kind of migrates over it's so I would argue based on like which leads to which element It's actually that they're they're learning how to improvise still And so they're having to build it in their brain step by step Instead of just knowing this goes there Yeah, that's like I said, when does it go to being that intuition where you just know it the gestalt, right? Yeah, I also I'd every really curious to see how many musicians successful musicians can't read music Uh, or Or don't you know just didn't learn uh to read music first didn't learn theory first Picked up an instrument because you hear about this every once in a while Uh, this is this is very famously something that took place with a lot of the early blues musicians that we're getting Found and recorded back in the in the 60s Uh, one of my favorites is a Mississippi John Hurt who who does a finger-plec guitar that is If you've never listened to a Mississippi John Hurt Rendering of music go list go google some mrs up with John Hurt you'll understand what I'm saying amazing finger-plecing amazing melodies that are that are Playing chords as as notes individual notes throughout Never learned to read music didn't know music theory had picked up a guitar learned to probably play from some others as well Uh, but just learned by ear. So it's it's very much Uh Yeah, it might be it might be worth but based on this it might actually be worth almost doing a Introduction into music Without the the theory first You know what you're talking about Justin. You're talking about the think method, which this is the No, no, no, this is the plot of the music man is when he he's talking about the think method He's like think about what you play before you play it I'm not even gonna give you an instrument for a few weeks You have to think about what you're gonna play. It's actually he's a con man and all it's good But it's a great movie everyone should watch it, but uh, I would love to play like that think method. Yeah Oh my goodness on that note Blair. Yes, give me your quick story. I have the best headline um Ninja robot Beats mantis shrimp Boom Yes, so ninja bot It's from university of massachusetts amherst was designed to mimic the mantis shrimp strike power The heat produced by the shock of a mantis shrimp strike Is equal to the temperature at the surface of the sun about 5000 kelvin And as we know they create this kind of bubble that collapse. That's like a sonic boom So we know all about the crazy stuff of the mantis shrimp so the researchers wanted to recreate The power of a mantis shrimp strike in a robot because science They measure the strength velocity Of the mantis shrimp gonodactylus smithy smithy Which uh, they caught off the coast of australia their velocity is 30 meters per second and their acceleration Is 1.5 times 10 to the 5 meters per second squared It's fast um, and that is the highest reported date of mantis shrimp A gun has An average acceleration of 4.4 times 10 to the 5th so more but um their velocity is around 400 meters per second So pretty close The Human inventions that can achieve the acceleration that we see in mantis shrimp always require explosions So they wanted to Create one that didn't require an explosion because the mantis shrimp isn't exploding their arm off every time they do it So they wanted to actually try to find how to do it. So the ninja bot uses a crank system It has a Loader that slides away for release and the spring causes an advantage to rotate forward with extreme velocity They compared that to kind of how when you push on a door towards the hinges it requires It only makes a little movement the same pressure on the edge makes more movement So kind of being able to have this thing slide away for release creates a faster movement And they reached a velocity velocity of 25.9 meters per second and peak acceleration of 3.2 times 10 to the 4th meters per second squared Pretty close. It is less than that of the the mantis shrimp. They caught g smithy But it was close to the previously fastest measured mantis shrimp species Odontodectilus scolaris So basically I threw a lot of numbers at you, but They made a robot this ninja bot that can make A speed similar to or in some cases equal to a mantis shrimp strike Um, so they also were able to make some bubbles some cavitation bubbles like the mantis shrimp. So that was a very Kind of a good sign that they were getting onto this the Place where these similarities end is that the ninja bot is about nine kilograms. It's made of steel The mantis shrimp that they measured is only about 0.4 grams. So Pretty different shape size weight For the same amount of power. So we're we're working really hard to do what nature has figured out in a much easier package But the more we can understand that we can move this information to other robots We can start to understand the mechanics of how a mantis shrimp moves better So there's lots to be gained here But I don't I don't want robots that are as fast and strong as a mantis shrimp Yeah, we don't yeah, we don't want to hand the robots weapons No, no we don't I'm gonna circle back to something real quick. Martin Moore and the uh, I guess it's this is what is this the youtube chat room That we've got on the status Martin Moore is asking what happens in that area of the brain that back left typically Uh, if it's if it's all the way back, what's that's the cerebellum. Yes Yeah, all the way back is the cerebellum the base of the brain. Um, I mean, it depends. There's there's a lot of stuff. There's it depends on what area of the brain in the left I mean the uh, the visual system is very much in the back left also, so um Yeah, it depends what portion of the brain is specifically being targeted and that's yeah Because it's sort of interesting because if it was the cerebellum, that's uh, that's physical movement It's not the cerebellum That would make so much sense though The study. Yeah. Nope. Not the cerebellum. This is part of the cortex of the brain. Yeah There's because it's those guys that have that weird, uh, math ability where they can just do addition and subtraction like Uh with bigger numbers than most of us would have to use the thinking part of our brain We'll have part of their regular math center back there, which is just physical movements balancing kind of stuff and so they can Utilize the part of the brain that's doing the calculations for balancing to do other stuff with Uh, which is a uh I guess a much probably probably got much better, uh algorithms going on in that part of the brain All right. Yeah, it all depends on what you're doing for sure but it would be sort of interesting if it was getting converted into uh, that that that Improvisation was turning into an automatic Sort of thing that the the brain processes and handles and does without us actually having to concentrate at all on it. Um So yeah, uh, I mean, I think that's what it I think that's what is happening during improvisation For sure it for the for the the experts. Yeah, and it's uh, I wonder if it's Close to the cell about I wonder if it's utilizing the same sort of things or what else goes on in that region It's a great question. Martin more. We'll have to we'll have to see if we can find that answer for you Because I want to know it too It's not the cerebellum. It's not the cerebellum But uh, but I want to know where that is because it's kind of interesting because the brain will borrow Yeah, the brain will transfer resources. This is this really interesting story about this, uh This is a sideways thing. There's a guy who lost his hand going sideways I know but this is this is what I this is important to this story That you told this guy lost his hand And then every once in a while his hand would kind of like his hand. That's not there He would feel it when he would shave Yeah, and it's because the there's a part of the brain that registers and monitors The touch from the hand and the touch from the face And they're right next to each other when he lost his hand when it stopped sending signals to the brain Hey, this is how I hold them over here. It stopped sending signals. It still looked for signals. It started Getting it the third the sensors from the face part started to migrate over so they would function again And so now he could feel his hand by touching his face the hand that wasn't there so Where things are in the brain Is really important. That's why i'm kind of curious of what's next to this what's around this Is it sharing a resource that we normally as humans have dedicated to some other task? And it is one of those more automatic Brain regions where we don't have to concentrate on the it's probably yeah It's probably an associative area of the brain that is Active to bring together multiple domains. Uh, so I mean what you're talking about with the hands Stuff is some out of sensory cortex. Um, but what you're but what you're going to be talking about with something related to knowing how to improvise on The guitar is not just motor memory. It's also um, it's also going to be those Those rules of how the music works, you know, what are the things that you've learned over? you know a decade of improvising that That work and what are the things that don't work and so those after a while? Yeah, that knowledge gets integrated and so there's going to be auditory. There's going to be um Sensory there's going to be motor that are all going to be coordinated To allow that smooth natural Movement right the the music so so is this is does that region? So is that so if you have a master chef would you like here's some ingredients cook this up? Are they firing off in the same thing like okay, but you got to change one ingredient Okay, I know it up here. Is it also right? So is it another collective action? I'm just yeah. Yeah, I don't know. That's a very interesting question. Yeah I don't know We have come to the end of the show No, thank you all. Yeah Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed the show. And if you did share it with a friend I want to give some shout outs to our people out there fada. Thanks for helping with the show notes and social media And also with our youtube chat room identity four. Thanks for recording the show gourd for manning our twist.org Slash live chat room. 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Oh, yeah, and I guess uh blare you were on Some podcast I was on some podcast and it's called jessie and wilder's guide to life and they like to create uh Kind of guides on the best versions of things So they've done how to have the best road trip or the best game night And we designed the perfect animal And that is available on itunes or all the places that you can find your podcast It's called jessie and wilder's guide to life if you've been curious about why I hate pandas We go into great detail about that on that podcast so that'll get you up to speed on that I talk about why I love hippos and we design quite a Monster of an animal that has tentacles and spider legs, but has fur and Is the size of a wolf it's great It's I can't describe it any more than that.  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It says the scientist is in i'm gonna sell my advice Show them how to stop the robot with a simple device I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand and all it'll cost you is a couple that is coming your way So everybody listen to what i say I use the scientific method for all that it's worth and i'll broadcast my opinion all over the air This week in science This week in science science This week in science This week in science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news At what I say may not represent your views, but i've done the calculations and i've got a plan If you listen to the science, you may just get understand that would not try to threaten your philosophy We're just trying to save the world from jeopardizing we say and if you use our methods that are all This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science The laundry list of items i am dr kiki and tonight on twist we will fill your heads with oops I hit a button Me and the typing on the wrong keyword Okay now i hit a button and really turned it off that i meant to hit sorry everybody that was kind of funny That was funny Well, let me type on the keyboard and itunes just didn't do the other thing and i'll go the other way We're in the post show So did you have fun on the podcast Blair? Yes Yeah, it was great. Well it was because it was basically just like it was two guys who Didn't know very much about animals at all, but were like the best audience in that they just like They were so blown away by every animal fact that I offered them and like Audibly gasping about things that I'd tell them about the animal kingdom. I mean, I know you know amazing things But were they stoned? No, I don't think so I think they're just very enthusiastic gentlemen. It was definitely like if you listen to a couple episodes I I actually think it's a really funny podcast It's like I always I always do my research before I go on because I want to go on to some podcasts and find out that they're like some um, I don't know on the savory individual that I don't want to be associated with Are we probably sensitized to amazing science stories from having done this for too long? Sometimes I think I am yeah, sometimes like I see I see things I'll go I'll go to a A conference or something. I'll be like, oh, yeah, okay. I've been following this. Yeah. Yeah I'm aware of this whatever and then like a month later. I'll see somebody else have written up this story that I'm like Really people didn't know about this already. I totally miss it This is part of the the kind of the double-edged sword of what we do too Is that I feel like we see a lot of the stories like two weeks before the general media see them Yeah, and so people come to me And they'll be like, oh my god. Did you hear? I'll be like Yeah, yeah, I knew about it Weeks or sometimes months. Yeah months a month later. Yeah, totally There was one, uh, I think this is what the example That's always in my head, but it was like a front page story in a Los Angeles newspaper about multitasking and You know people trying to look at phones will drive you something like this, but we had we'd done the story on twist Almost almost a year before Maybe i'm excited. It might have been six months before but it was like such a long time ahead That I thought it was another study and I when I read the thing. I'm like, oh, yeah. No, that was that was the same Yeah, thanks. So I think I had that exact thing happen. Um, this week with the whole internal monologue thing Remember that how we found out that some people have internal monologues and some people don't This whole thing So it it made the rounds around my facebook friends this week and I saw it and I clicked on like, oh, this is like a new development I clicked it. I was like, no, it's the exact same story In a second wait a sec. I might have missed this one. If all it does have an internal monologue Some people turns out So it's just quiet. They're not having a conversation with themselves constantly No, I'm going back and forth sometimes yelling It's not like so if I'm thirsty.  Should I get it later? I can wait a little bit, right?   Although the really horrifying what is it like having what is it like having silence? Yeah, the really horrifying one is the internal internal uh a narrator That's that's like a disease. That one sounds really frightening. Oh, yeah Justin is describing a frightening experience that can happen to people. What where did that? No, there stay out of my head and uh narrator you don't want to be merit, but um Yeah, not having an internal dialogue now. I see why people would want to get unplugged if they were unconscious if like even I'm having that conversation whether uh, it's it's in symbolic fractals of remembered light or actual word stuffs i'm fine don't unplug me ever but That's gotta be really weird Yeah, I think the one for the one for me is not just the internal monologue because that's my Normal is the constant running dialogue monologue. It's just constant constant but the one for me is the uh that is also splitting the internet is Um, how do you imagine things when you picture something in your mind's eye? And that's kind of where this came from when we started talking in it I think we talked about this post show a few weeks back, but it's the If you picture something in your mind eye if you picture an apple Do you see it as You know the red shiny apple or is the or green apple or whatever? Do you see all the details of the apple or? Do you see nothing? Or do you see something somewhere in the middle? Do you see do you see like a brown apple shape What do you see in your mind's eye a big Shiny red apple I actually I don't Really green one don't with a little with a little uh, that's what you said last time You don't see anything you just think apple and that's it I think apple you see the word apple. Yeah. Yeah, it's more like the word apple. I think of this I think of the apple concept But I don't see an apple in my mind's eye like this is something that's always been really interesting to me because uh growing up I did gymnastics and there was there's this idea of imagining yourself Doing you know seeing yourself in your mind's eye doing the bar routine or doing the floor routine It's this mental practice idea and I always thought I was doing it wrong Because when I would try to imagine it in my head, I couldn't see myself doing it. It was more feelings and You know like it's more of a I have to you know, I have to like see my think myself through it, but it's more conceptual It's there's nothing visual there at all That sounds like a back left conversation Wait, you don't have an image But I dream my dreams are super visual, you know So like my brain can conjure up all sorts of things when I'm unconscious So if somebody says if somebody says okay, so if apple comes up, you don't see an apple But if somebody says picture an apple Is that any different? What no No, it's not that I mean you it that it's still like you can't then all right I will form and hold in my head this image of an apple Bob No, oh Interesting. No, I can't I can't know that was possible. I didn't know that was a thing. Oh, yeah But talk about the the the verbal side of things constant dialogue words can't Yes Fascinating right the darkness in my life But I can but feeling like emotions and feelings I'm very like I can call those up in a second Oh, wow.   I don't know why I'm I'm a sucker for these like Animals noble heart-tug moments, but not for like the rest of humanity. It's I am I am a sucker for a minor chord specifically D-minder anything is the one that always like makes you cry, but yeah music in a minor chord I will just all of a sudden start welling up you're like So I have a very different I have a very like when I need to calm down I will listen to something with a lot of minor chords rock them on and off or something like this Uh, it's perfect. It's sort of like moody and dark and it just makes me feel Kind of risky Yeah, I don't I don't know I react very differently than you do to minor chords Very differently Oh my god I love I love brains and the differences Yeah, for me it all depends on uh, how much alcohol I've imbibed or what that's definitely part of it What what part of the month what what? What phase of my hormonal cycle I'm in that's how much sleep I've gotten That's gonna affect the water works more than anything else. I think um Um, actually I'm with you on the on the those little tugs of the heartstrings. I have I have cried at Super Bowl ads It's true It is true I mean also I usually cry more when I'm angry than when I'm sad, which is a very interesting I feel like if the response I I want to at least partially blame being a younger sibling But there's just something about um when I'm really really really really mad I cry and it's frustrating because I've been in situations where people are like, don't be sad Like I'm not sad. I actually am crying. So I'm not punching you in the face right now But it's just like an over when the over stimulated. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and our society Is like, oh, you know if you're crying, especially if you're mad at somebody sometimes there's conflict, right? And so crying is actually like losing a conflict sometimes Which is very frustrating because if I get really mad then I I tend to cry So it's yeah, it sends the wrong signal, which is really frustrating. But um, yeah I cry way more out of anger than out of sadness It's pretty weird No, I don't think that's weird. I think that makes sense It's like crying as a way to kind of get Get the emotion out. Yeah, it's like a release A release valve. Yeah Yeah, oh in that article, Justin I'm I'm looking at this the neuro image article on the jazz musicians. Yeah The experts exhibited right parietal and central clusters of broadband activity Let's see This is here greater parietal activity may reflect an associate of brain state which relies on multimodal sensory Processing and integration long-term memory mental imagery spatial coding sensory motor transformation and attention Uh Yeah, so anyway, just like you predicted it would say Delta strong relationship with functional connectivity within the default mode network The default mode network is a sense a set of inferior parietal and midline brain regions That are activated during low external task demands Yeah, automatic brain stuff. Uh-huh. Yep, exactly Yeah, and the involvement of large-scale networks such as the dmn and the fronto parietal executive network have been implicated in several recent Neuroscientific studies of creativity I'm referring to the study that we're uh, yeah Increased connectivity across these networks may enable creative performance in a variety of domains including music and writing Anyway, it's an it's an interesting paper And it's It's open so people can read it if they want to read it and get in more more brain details Who's a zombie? Daniel yonk says someone's a zombie. It's just in the zombie. Am I a zombie? I'm not a zombie. Who knows? Brains Brains So everybody, I hope you know that right now. It's okay to cry if you have to cry I've cried several times since I've been stuck at home. I am not gonna be Embarrassed don't be ashamed Don't be ashamed of going outside and howling at the moon A little bit if you need to if you need to get it out the different way uh, you know get a little get a little People need to release valve and there's a lot of stress and pressure for a lot of people right now. So We don't know what's going on in so many different places. So Be good to each other Be good to yourselves Sleep in if you can I know there's been a lot of I actually I don't want to spoil it too much But I wrote a whole newsletter thing about this, but there's been a lot of stuff out there about Keep to your schedule put on real pants wake up at your normal time work out like okay That's great. And if you can do that that will help your mental health But there are people who can't handle that yet and yet doesn't mean never And sometimes people are trying to continue their job while homeschooling their child While trying to cover for their You know other their student other who's still working at a location like There's a lot going on you don't have to fit to the standard of what you're seeing on the internet because that also is not real Wait, what? What I see on the internet isn't real. No What the way people portray themselves on the internet are instagram personas and all these Everyone portrays themselves as being just fine Everything's happy and look at me taking care of all the things Look at me being a mom who's homeschooling and working a full-time job and making dinner and cleaning the house and And and and you can have it all see No No, that's just You know what? There is no reason to keep up with the jones's right now. Hold up. Hold up Put the brakes on not What if it's not an illusion? What if that actually what if we just assume That their lives are actually just as hectic and chaotic and troublesome as ever Maybe some people are like actually no I can not only do I Justin there is a study of this. There's science about this Yes There's a bunch of science about what you see on social media and how accurate it is to The real world and the people that you rate as happiest often rate themselves as unhappy So, you know why because they have higher standards than you which is why their lives are perfect Well, they're not perfect if they're upset No, no, they're upset and that's why they're making their lives perfect That some people do go that some people do go that direction I understand what you're saying there Do you try if you add more control to your life and Perfectionize and perfectionize then, you know, maybe maybe everything will be okay. Maybe it'll be fine. Maybe Everything's just great. No, don't touch that coaster Exactly. So me on the other hand my life is a continual disaster that is constantly unfolding Greater and greater does that and on to the next disaster of oh my goodness. Here we go again And I'm like the back left brain Are the front right so you're making beautiful music Justin It's great. Well, I don't Part of the reason everything is always turning into disasters because I'm okay. I'm happy either way. I I can I'm happy anyway Even if it's a disaster if it's not I don't I don't stress myself out about things and stuff and plans I don't plan So this is what happens when you don't plan your life becomes an unfolding disaster, but you enjoy the ride Versus I suppose Being really stressed out and having a perfect life There's probably a bad Recognize what you can control and choose what to control like there are some things you can control right now And you know sometimes there's nothing you can control because you're Justin and you don't have control And that's fine Sometimes you realize the only thing you really want to control is how much chocolate you eat But then you control whether or not your clothes fit when you stop wearing elastic pants Which is I put on jeans today and I was like are these gonna close? They did fine But I definitely I'm I'm wondering I I keep I keep telling myself like once a week I need to wear jeans to make sure that I'm not Coming out of this where I have to go to work now finally and I have nothing I can wear because I have a difference oh Sharma is making uh Sharma and Was it the YouTube chat room the thing we should do a prediction twist predictions on the impact of the worldwide shutdown And they provide actually a really good one. I should use this in the silver lining Air quality apparently air quality is up in beijing It's much better air quality in los angeles right now air quality is winning with the uh with the shutdown Yeah, I see someone who lived in um huntington beach and she now all of a sudden she can see the Hollywood side from her house From huntington beach No, that's too far away. Yeah, that is way too far away I mean unless she lied, but she posted a picture of her backyard. Wow. That's awesome Yeah, you know, I mean, yeah, l.a. has pretty bad Air quality a lot But from huntington beach Yeah, huntington beach is south though in the tall building. Is it like a really tall building? For a backyard Yeah, that's too far I don't believe it That's possible But even binoculars shouldn't even be able to reach that really far away garbage. I guess maybe she drew to the top She drove to the top of the hill. It wasn't her backyard. Maybe it was down to street. I don't know Yeah, but it was something unusual. It was from huntington beach. I know that she said it was her whole she's from huntington beach It was her whole life. She had never been able to see the the Hollywood sign from huntington beach She assumed that was not true and she took a picture of you could see it off in the distance Wow, that is amazing. She said it was from huntington. I don't know. That's a really long way. No, but that's really that's crazy Yeah, I mean, it's all kind of flat. There's the kind of extent I think I mean la is the epitome of bad traffic and smog in the united states at least it that's the way I think of it and The whole idea that it would it's public transportation infrastructure was basically dismantled by the auto industry and it became This you know the city of cars and that's what it became but it wasn't that originally and Thank goodness it did because the the corona virus would be spreading much quicker if they were all relying on a mass public transportation Right, okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. I just think now Can they go can they find a way to go back to public transit get more in there? Stop the road Public transit like this is why like i'm city like new york is having such a massive problem There's not a parking lot in new york where you could in new york city Where you can drive a car and park and they go grocery shop because everybody and i mean everybody is forced into the mass transit system Oh, but it's also i mean it's such a dense city new york city, especially during the work day is Incredibly dense and it's people in buildings. I mean it's la is spread out A lot of people there though, but it's a massively spread out area You don't have people packed into the same In the same concentration in small spaces, especially in the wintertime when it's cold and everyone's indoors I don't know and thank goodness. There's no subway. Well, there is actually a small subway system there now There is but this is actually you know, but this is going to be one of the like if we are preparing for a pandemic-y future Then mass transit Has a downside that it didn't before It's a tough one No, it's not we just have to figure out ways to clean the air better better HEPA filters better filtration systems big Sucky fan vacuums. I don't think anybody uh prediction. I don't think we go back to shaking hands again I think that yeah, I think it's gonna be that'll be on its way out. Yeah, this might be the end of the handshake I'm cool with that. Okay Although I like hugs I'm a fan of hugs. No more hugging strangers I don't hug I don't hug strangers. Was that was that ever okay? I don't think that was ever okay Somebody Yeah, that's too bad. I was a big hugger. I was a big hug reader Well, I was also because I didn't like shaking hands with people Eric in Alaska. Oh my goodness if you fun fact if you applied the average population density of Alaska to new york Manhattan island would have a population of 12 That's amazing. Wait wait save again That's awesome Wait that in Did you make that up Eric? If you applied the average population density of Alaska to new york Manhattan island would have a population of 12. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it does make sense. Yeah, yep Oh my goodness. I think I think masks are also going to become really big fashion accessories Like I'm waiting for fashion week in new york next fall and it's going to be all the rage Bet those fashion designers the potion There are other um strike pose like in china It's normal to wear a mask if you're sick Anytime of year Prior to this pandemic, right? So I feel like it's normal to wear it just in Beijing at least just because the air quality Right, that's the air quality. Yeah, culturally like it's a it's a lot less weird to see someone with a mask on And I feel like that might start to happen too is that it just might be less weird I've already kind of got desensitized to that where I see people in masks And I I don't kind of look twice which when this all started I was kind of looking twice because they were telling us not to wear masks. So Like you're not supposed to but I don't even really notice as much anymore um I think it also depends on where you are because portland not like people are starting to wear masks more now here But you all went into lockdown a week or so before we did. Yeah So yeah, there is a company. I should try probably google it That's making a scarf that has a filter built into it and they've been doing this for a while uh, they've been doing it for a while because this is This was uh designed for people who have allergies So they didn't have to wear like a medical looking mask walking around And scoff that's what it is Scarf with hidden filter mask Which is apparently their stales have gone through the roof But the idea was this was something a more subtle fashion friendly way that you could walk around Without you know sneezing from the pollen and the trees and all the sort of stuff um Yeah, apparently this was somebody's little side project business And they went from sending out a few a week to having More orders than they could possibly Fill uh in in their normal time frame But uh, yeah scarf Scarf with filter Uh, oh s c o u g h scoff, I guess I'm saying Scoff Scoff with a cough. Oh, it's cute scoff Some sort of press conference today suggest that emergency workers wear scarves instead of masks Mm-hmm Well, the I mean What they're what they're getting down to is We just don't have the supplies that you need and you're gonna have to do whatever you can to protect yourself That's what we're getting down to which is really sad Wow, these are really cute scoff. Oh my gosh Shielding bandanas. Oh, they got kid style.  I'm all up in here for marshal's birthday present Oh, and they have fresh filters that you can put in there Happy apocalypse birthday. Oh my god. I love this Wow, they actually yeah, they actually use activated carbon filters The activated carbon is probably really good for air pollution Uh, also, uh, it should filter out the parts now Yes, there you go Oh my god, I can't believe my friends haven't told me about this one yet. This is They just did You did you just told me I know before now I can't believe I'm just learning about this now What? Um, are you having a are you having a conversation? I'm done Sending off the EMS worker to another night Be safe brian Um, we do need a circular economy daniel yant. Yes there's this There was this analogy which It's really interesting. So right now we've got pandemic health problem It's all there's also a recession. There's an economic problem um And somebody was saying that you know, there's been this idea flowing around about You know, maybe this is the the opportunity to fix everything, right? You know, we Change the change the system somehow. So it's not as detrimental to the have-nots So there are fewer have-nots, you know, we just need to have this big one power Yeah, I know these optimistic ideas. But so this conversation, uh, ended up happening and The the journalist that was being interviewed he ended up saying it's kind of like right now our society is Like a patient who's Who's in the hospital and we're trying to Change its health by changing its diet and its exercise at the same time That's not gonna work. You just have to pick one And so I think Now it's an interesting question because we're looking at these countries governments leaders making the choice of Which one are they gonna fix are they going to help the people who are getting sick or are they going to help the economy And bolster the economy and Yeah, I think we know where our our great leader Yes So I think I mean the the thing that's really important to remember about all that that I keep seeing coming up That is the main point of this is that the economy hurts right now And if you fix the economy first then People will still get sick And then the economy you'll tank again because of massive health care issues But if you fix health care first then the economy will rebound on its own so like it's It's one thing and then the other yeah, so you're like do you want to fix Two things or one thing Well, I mean it's whether or not is the economy is the economy A product of the people like is it really a product of the people then you want to help the people Who bolster the economy if the economy is separate from the people then the people don't matter Yes So this is why we shouldn't do any corporate Billouts whatsoever We should have them pressuring the government to say hey The economy's fake. Anyway, we all know economy is fake Yeah, they just Trillion dollars But they didn't give it to us No, where's all that two trillion imaginary two trillion dollars. You'll get your $1,200 So so the only way to keep them $1,200 is going nowhere Like that's gonna be spent like in san francisco rent.  It's a spending economy We need to be having people spend Work is just to keep people occupied with their time Work is to give people the money so they can spend Yeah, so just bring up the money give it to the people first and have a trick off the economy Yeah, it's not what actually works is that's what it does anyway a poor person the the minute they get money They spend it 100% a rich person gets money. They put it in the bank because they don't need it They invest it by the way. This is something that's interesting Uh, there's a bunch of money to bail out Uh cruise ships. Yeah, really? Yeah, and airlines wait. Is that airlines airlines? Okay No, airlines are doing all their stock buybacks. That's The thing does I think is airlines are largely Headquartered the ones that we would be bailing out In america Yes, I don't think there is a cruise ship that's registered in the united states. There's I don't know. There is either registered in the caiman island in the bahamas in Heights or whatever some pirate nest Of old where they don't pay any tax Why would a single dollar of american taxes? Go to a foreign registered company great question. That's insane. It makes no sense. Why are we bailing out foreign countries? Who cater to a very select elective group? Uh of people Makes no sense Yeah, I don't yeah, my favorite That is nonsense my my favorite Uh, I I just love twitter for like the little things that Percolate through every once in a while and this this dad Like wrote this tweet. He said he said I I'd spent some time Doing doing art with my son over the weekend But now it's monday and I had I had to tell him that I couldn't I couldn't spend time looking at his art because I had work to do And my five-year-old child got mad and stormed out of the room saying monday's aren't real anyway Totally right that kid is absolutely right. It's all the same day. The kid gets it The kid just gets it. It gets like they created a prayer calendar Uh 1500 years ago or whatever Get people to show up at church once in a while and that's why we're stuck with this work week One of my one of my favorite twitter items from this week was um I mean last week whenever we found out we were getting a $1,200 check It said, uh, well if corporations are legally people then each corporation should only receive $1,200 Which it's perfect Oh, okay. I'll take you one. I'll take you one more take you one more that somebody posted and I think this was a, uh Representative or a candidate for a representative if capitalism is so great How come it has to be bailed out by socialism once every 10 years? It's a great question Yes What you want us to be venezuela venezuela the failed Okay, can I point out something to other people? No, I don't want to Ever get this argument or ever see the argument where somebody goes. What about venezuela? Before venezuela was a failed socialist Economy it was a failed capitalist economy. That's how it became a socialist economies because Before they had capitalism that was so rampant and corrupt that it failed so Stop using venezuela regardless of the political system that venezuela has had it has failed and been miserable partly because they're extremely wealthy and uh And so everybody wants they have more oil than saudi arabia apparently more diamonds in south africa Apparently or gold than some other place that has a lot of gold But they have tremendous value of natural resources That large company countries company the same thing Large companies would like control over and so they're constantly getting whoever their leaders are bribed and corrupted through money in exchange for the so One of the best book one of the one of the best books is confessions of an economic hitman Yeah, oh, that's a throwback, but yes Yes, yes, that is fantastic Yeah Yeah, so and then partly part of it what it was too is getting them Teaching them the ability to take on global loans for a nation that can get funneled into some of that leadership that in depth the nation Then and then we can take in uh claim companies can claim control of resources in those countries Outside of the political system that can outlast a uh, a particular leader of that nation who also Yes But that money system is just fake anyway They should just give people money and then at some point this is what this is the real danger Just give everybody money. I mean At some point we're going to realize Actually We don't most of us don't really need to work We've already we've already figured out like there's essential workers And then there's the rest of us A lot of us don't really have to be working To keep the economy ourselves going. There's enough of this fake money to go around That they could just pay everybody to stay home and keep the economy the stock market You know why the stock market's fine? None of us are the stock market No, also if I may at least in the bay area How many people are currently working from home? Which means you don't need offices which means there's not a real estate shortage Which means it shouldn't cost so freaking much To live in this geographical space Or in Vancouver Canada or I mean, there's so many places very similar. Yeah Yeah, if we ever wanted to get serious about economy We would decommodatize housing to a great extent We would have rent control that made it so that you you just couldn't charge somebody 50 60 70 80 percent of their income to live and dwell in a space That you would cap it at like 15 percent of whatever the person happened to make I can't even get to see what the other one's saying to me is that More than half more than half probably 60 percent of my paycheck goes to rent That's crazy When I was a child the young a young dad in my civic class, I remember, uh, there was Uh an explanation of how bank loans work how mortgages work and what it came down to is You could the thing I remembered was you couldn't get a loan for a home The maximum amount you were allowed to be to borrow for a home was 25 percent Of your monthly income could be your mortgage payment with all of the insurance in the upkeep and a little set aside It's the most you should be ever spending able to spend on a house And if the bank saw you be over that forget it That's not how it is anymore, which tells you what? Incomes haven't gone up. So why did housing go up? It's a fake market and it's california is also largely I mean They well street started buying up single family homes, which means now it's like rich people own all of the rentals It's like a smaller and smaller group Which we need you know, we need i'm gonna go get my pitch for it. I think I have an axe handle in the back Yeah Right Is once we no longer have to social distance Can we demand No, that's the thing. We can't protest because we have to social We can't hear you Yeah, we uh That's good. Oh, there you are. I muted myself.  However, I'm telling you. Yeah, this is your thank you for getting me on back on point You make candy people realize that they never needed to be working I think we we go to a completely Specialist economy. We'll get to do what they like to do for a living And none of this none of this work and not be able to Save anything because you're giving it all to your landlords and this is I mean There are a lot of things that I hope don't go back like in san francisco the police Instead of being mean to people who are homeless they are um approaching people who are homeless and Helping them find a place to stay So San Francisco started they could have been doing that the whole time. Well, San Francisco started doing some of this stuff ahead of time. They made it illegal to Uh, basically vehicle Homeless evict. So if there's a homeless person who was like living out of their car They wouldn't go and say, okay, your registration is You know, even though it's got two flats and it's obviously been camping in this thing Your registration's out of date. So we're going to tell your vehicle.  No shelter Like it was like some of it was counterintuitive Uh, but yeah, like we have these office buildings Hey, guess what's empty right now? Guess what people are doing? I'm in this motel this big hotel I'm the only resident Yeah, I'm the hotel. It's got like, I don't know 20 Units. I'm the only one here Yeah, I mean the staff went home. They're not even staffing. There's no staff here I'm literally the only one here Guess who could be here right now Yeah, homeless people and sick people homeless families to start with Yeah, but yeah, uh You could be packing these places full. You know why they're not we're not socialist yet. Yeah.  I don't even know what to do with the ax handle though once I get wherever I end up I don't know what to do It's I mean aside from it just being that the rich have all the money The other thing I am always complaining about In this great land of ours is that it is a just debt based economy Which is more of this like fake money bs, right? So you gave me an education and I spent 10 years Diverting money that I earned that like I never actually had in my hand To this third party that took over my government loan for my education.  You never What it's all it's iou's that are garbage So this is yeah, and this is the part that really blew my mind Which I hadn't I had thought I was naive as we all are before we learned something That when you borrowed money from a bank It was money that the bank Owned or was entrusted. No, it's someone else's money. No, it's nobody's money. It's also just yeah No, it's not even money. Yeah, now it's not even money. If you go out and get a loan for uh, $500,000 600 800 thousand dollar house in davis Uh The bank isn't actually using money that's in any account It gets created from the federal reserve in that moment. It's generated by the loan That creates the money in the economy. Oh, thank That's insane. Yeah, my favorite one is we're gonna pay off the debt on this one credit card With another credit card from a different bank and yeah, you're paying 70 interest on that one credit card We're going to give you zero interest for two years.  But but then don't look because then it's going to be 23 interest It's been 18 months. Now you owe us a huge amount of money I have a new credit card office. I'm gonna swap it onto that credit card I'm good for another six months because that one's the six months And I can only spend it on housing uh improvement products, but I'm gonna be good Yeah, it's gonna be just fine Me and my debt Oh, yeah money's fake.  We stopped uh this virus You can't yeah, what are you gonna get one?  I don't know how much is that? Yeah, it's uh $40 and 53 cents or okay. Let me here's I think that's about $40 worth of the gold and then uh 43 cents. I go. Oh, I got it Here we go potato shredder. I'll just take a little slice over here.  I think that's part of if you look back at why uh, this Uncivilized untamed territory Was so attractive to people was because back home nobody owned anything Nobody could live on their land everything was the king's land If we're getting to the point where wall street is commoditized real estate to the point that all of real estate Whether it's your mortgage, you don't own your home What's all king's land again? What ended a consolidation when they started buying after uh after the housing collapse when wall street funds started buying up Single family homes and they were going to rent them and flip them when the economy improved only they realized Wow, actually it makes more sense to keep renting them forever. Let's keep buying regardless of where the market is When and there there was a law that was proposed a proposition that was proposed in california Just to track how much private ownership corporate ownership of single family homes Is in california right now and it was shot down We aren't allowed to know that number right now. I have I have a theory about that and that is that most And this is based on zero evidence. So just a theory. I trust your opinion usually right most americans want to protect the liberties of the rich Because they believe that they could still be rich They believe in the american dream So much that they want to make sure that they are protected when they hit it big And they're also afraid of other people taking it away from them too. So they're they're like i'm gonna get mine Exactly. So there's this like before you get yours. There's this idea that no no no I could still be one of those halves. I'm not necessarily going to be a have not for my whole life I have recognized that likely I will be in the have not category until the day I die if I And that you know what that's try not to die in our current In our current economic climb and I get that so I care about the have nots more than The people who believe that they have the opportunity to hit it big still I The thing about that is I actually I think that might be somewhat of a motivation I think part of the motivation is a lot of people think they're much wealthier than they are If you are a poor person You are probably living around other poor people And if you're a little better off than them, you might think you're one of the successful people in this country Regardless of how far down the line you are I don't know But yeah, people vote against their own their own interests all the time Yeah psychology psychology man Psychology, uh, if you want to learn something interesting about psychology, I have a book I am going to recommend It's called blind spot Oh Blind spot delves into some of the topic of mind bugs uh Automatic responses that we have learned How we how the brain tends to categorize things So that you may have reflex racism you make might you might make Hidden biases. Yeah biases why you know good people do bad things or have bad ideas or something like this Uh, but blind spot is a it's a fun book because it it delves into and there's There's nice examples if you actually play along with the book It will point out that you have Pretty glaring blind spots where your brain interprets things in a way. You might not have wanted it to Yep, your brain has all sorts of mine is taking place But the part of that that after reading this book that occurs to me is There's a way to exploit those weaknesses in the human brain And that's what people once you recognize them You will see them all the time in agenda based media where they are Uh intentionally trying to hit upon One of these biases that you have whether you realize they're hitting them or not Getting you to think this right away. So yeah, we're extreme wealth Is a Horned phenomenon on this country. Do I care that somebody's wealthy? No. No, I think it's good for our society No, do I think that it's been a fair playing field once you're wealthy? No, it's not It's a completely different they have different rights. There's different games. Yeah They have different rights Part of part of why a democracy, okay, not democracy That's a capitalism the way capitalism works is if people put in hard effort and then can do things and exchange It's exchange of money the better product is it today? once you take Consolidation of wealth to the extreme that we have in the united states. It destroys capitalism It's anti-capitalistic at that point. It's no longer cap capitalism Now you're talking about What's the thing that the the with the oligarch system? All right, where you have you have you have to work through this wealth channel or that wealth channel with a Individual nameable person at the top of it who's controlling all of the funds all the way down Once you have that you no longer have capitalism anymore You're not talking about a capitalist society if if the money is not a social contract That takes work and allows it to move from place to place Which debt negates that social contract of money is as is being a freedom Is the thing that you can say like, okay, I've done my work here for this company But I don't have to shop at the company store living the company Owned housing. I don't have to pay the company's Own school private school. This is my kid too. I can I can take my money From my work