Hello everybody, welcome to another podcast broadcast. That's right. This is as we can science and You know how the technology loves to work with you until it decides it's back I don't like the fact that you're broadcasting here. We're just gonna break for a second. So Did you do that did you do the update the update did you try ginger ale? No Just oh we're doing this. I'm hit maybe maybe we will connect with Facebook tonight It's fine on the YouTube's and the twitches and it looks like it is now fine on the Facebook. Hey yo, here we go So it is time for this science show You ready my dear co-hosts? And the audience are you all ready?  So let's do a show starting now beginning in three to this is Twist this week in science episode number 916 recorded on Wednesday, March 8th, 2023 how to get brainier through science on International Women's Day Hey, I'm dr. Kiki and today on the show. We will fill your heads with wasp nests hollow bones and mouse antlers, but first this Clamer disclaimer disclaimer the following program deals with stories and topics pulled from current research papers and as such Occasionally uses big words while listening you may find yourself becoming smarter thinking thoughts about scientific subjects You hadn't considered before Getting super judgy when correlations are mistaken for causations Referencing studies in casual conversation instead of saying beats me or I guess but what do I know? Because soon you'll be in the know a few tips from the other side of being brilliantly informed One of one your increase in knowledge will not cause an actual volume of brain size So you don't have to lose sleep worrying about that to getting smarter doesn't mean you have to forget things you already learned But it might update or correct a few things also It's best to get smarter with friends that way you still have someone interesting to talk to and maybe most importantly of all Being smarter will make you way more excited for another episode of this weekend science coming up next I Got the kind of mine that can't get enough I want to learn everything I want new discoveries that happen every day of the week There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek I want to know And a good science to you to Justin Blair and everyone out there welcome to another episode of this week in science We're back again to talk about science as we love to do on a weekly basis What do I know well actually I brought a bit of stories. Yeah, I learned a few things along the way As we all do Continual learning around here and we've got a bunch of stories for you that we hope you enjoy learning about I have stories about dogs antlers Maybe on mice and another story that might sober you up. What do you have Justin? I've got getting water from a baby star the the one thing that might get people focused on global warming and insane statistical analysis of metabolic disease and hollow boned dinosaurs Oh good Because they were like birds Before the birds. Yes. They're what about before that? Okay? Well as we wait for that story So we also need to know what's going on in Blair's animal corner. There we go I have plastic I have acid I have fairness today plastic acid fairness Could be like an old indie rock album title. Yeah. Yeah for sure You're going to see plastic acid fairness this weekend. That's right. Yeah, man Down at the borefield. All right everybody We're jumping in now and if you have not seen this show before this is this week in science You can subscribe to us We are on the places the podcasts are found look for us twist is another thing that we go by this week in science twist We broadcast live every Wednesday at 8 p.m. Ish Pacific time and It we are on YouTube Facebook Twitch and On we're on the social medias We are twist science on the insta the Twitter and The twitch and also the mastodon universe did on you can go find us over there. Oh my goodness So many places we try to be so that we can be places Where other people are who like the science? But anyway, you can find our website twist org Where all this information is and as well show notes that you can learn more about the stories and all that kind of stuff But Finally, that's done with click the like buttons click the subscribes and let's do the science you guys ready We got I've got not David Bowie's diamond dogs, but some share noble dogs That doesn't sound good How many heads do they have Hey The normal number of heads that dogs usually have on average got it. All right so one to three depending on if they're from Tartarus or from Hades. Yes. Okay. Got it. Yeah. All right, so Researchers have been trying to find out what do natural disasters or those disasters that are human caused that results in nature being exposed to toxic chemicals to radiation massive amounts of radiation You know and and other incidents in the environment, how do how do animals? Maintain, how do they withstand? The toxicity the changes everything that happens There have been a number of studies looking at various species of animals who are living within the wildlife zone That is this area the share noble exclusion zone where you're Really people don't go you're not supposed to go there people do go there for some research, but you really shouldn't be heading over there There's a weird overlap right where it's like what going on has to do with the The radiation and what going on has to do with the fact that humans aren't there because I remember there was a study a couple Years ago where there was a bunch of benefits to living in The radioactive zone and the expectation was it was just because humans weren't bugging them Right, right. It was like during the pandemic when people didn't go outside nature started taking over If you don't know where share noble is it is on the border It is technically within Ukraine which is in its own war with Russia at the moment And you don't want to go over there necessarily anyway for those particular reasons, but within The share noble exclusion zone they have denoted various levels of risk based on the radiation that was emitted when Steam came out of share noble when it blew when it got the pressure got too high and lots of radiation holding steam evacuated the plant and went into the local atmosphere ended up in the ground got all over the place Anyway, nature has been very happy, but they've seen lots of changes in this particular study though They decided that they were going to look at what dogs That people left behind from shared in share noble so people ran away people died dogs were left behind So there are a bunch of wild dogs there now they looked at the genetics and Compared them between the dogs in the share noble Exclusion zone and also an area 16 and a half kilometers away in share noble city They wanted to see what was going on because of the actual Radiate radiative impacts how much had these populations of dogs differentiated themselves And basically these two populations do not overlap. They don't interbreed very much It's they're they're pretty separated and that's what they found within the genetic data and The the genetic data that they found they found massive numbers of mutations that the dogs had that In the share noble exclude exclusion zone that were not held by The dogs in the normal city, so the populations were incredibly diversified and they had a lot of Space they were like base different Almost different species subspecies. They're still dogs. So different subspecies of dogs Absolutely separated the two the two populations really really low overlap between the two is one of the big big notes That they found and then additionally they determined that there was a significant number of outlier regions in the genomes of the dogs that differed between the two different areas and they said there were 391 of these what they call outlier regions these Differentiations and they went on they they say in their work at this stage We can't say for sure that these genetic alterations are in response to the multi-generational and complex Exposures we have a lot of work to do to determine if that is the case But now that they know there are these very striking Hundreds of differences between the two populations. They want to know whether it's just genetic drift or whether it actually is Mutational adaptation to the harsh harsher radiative environment in which the wild dogs of the share noble excuse exclusion zone are existing. Oh That's really interesting Because the expectation right away would be yeah that it would just be like Mutants just like you've been exposed to radioactivity and now you have laser beams for eyes type of thing But But the idea yeah that there would be slight there would be different selective pressure in that space that would cause mutation is like Once you say it very obvious but not something that I immediately thought of In because you immediately want to jump to the the sensationalized kind of radioactivity It's Spider-Man, right? You know, it's just you know the dog the dogs have totally mutated But yes, we don't know my first reaction is it probably Deselected for For cancer proclivity That's what you would that's what you would guess so they need to go deeper Yeah, I would I would think that if any the any any of the dogs that stayed in that highly radioactive zone would have had more DNA damage taking place throughout their cells if They don't have a robust type of cell repair system Working that those dogs would die and they'd be removed from the gene pool of within a few generations, right? But but you know what the problem with that is though dogs become reproductive age very quickly So so you could live every production and then die when you're only three years old damage totally But I think it would select the for the population wise would select for Dogs that were super cancer resistant Also very able to survive without humans. Yeah, so dogs that are species that are in generally intelligent more able to hunt for their own prey be able to Potentially, I don't know did do these on these I don't know much about the ecology of these dogs Do they form packs? How do they live? You know, how do these probably do my Assumption is that any dog would go feral within like a week No, I don't know. No, not all of them. I don't know In a in two days outside without me. I think she's done for yeah, but that's why they they they group up They go find that that wild pack are rough living dogs on the edge of town and start following them around and behaving like a week maybe two in there completely They got dog tattoos It's I'm not gonna take your dog your anti dog propaganda It's pro dog propaganda Like to see giving them too much credit. I would like to see a similar study on Right the I think it was elk in the study that I was referencing from a couple years ago previously Yeah To see if they have genetic differences in the Chernobyl area from ones that are not in the Chernobyl area, so I Would this is this is kind of something to now look at with other animals that are not previously domestic Mm-hmm that are used to living in the wild to see if there's any correlation there Yeah, and I would absolutely if I was a cancer researcher, this is where I would go and look to see what what's like the ideal gene type to Fight cellular damage Right, how can if if they're surviving this close to a hot radioactive zone intergenerationally It seems like there could have been a selective pressure to allow that to happen, which means they may have They may have genes that we'd be interested in learning more about Right, I mean and potentially these are genes that are Being mammals, you know, maybe they are widespread some of them silenced for various reasons some expressed for different reasons You know, there's always the epigenetic aspect of things. There's where the environment influences what actually gets expressed There's so much happening there, you know, yeah, how much is the natural selection at hand? How much is intrinsic mutation like what's going on how much, you know, so many questions to be answered there but yes, share noble dogs teaching us about Living with a more toxic future or really maybe how we can help Treat some of the disease. Do you know what what happened to these dogs after the study? Like they captured these wild dogs and they took blood samples and then what? Probably just let them go back to their daily lives. Can't take them home I Think from there from their methods blood samples were collected from semi-feral dogs captured around the share noble nuclear power plant and Chernobyl City They were taken during a sterilization and vaccination Procedure that was conducted by the clean futures fund dogs of share noble program in 2018 and 2019 so that was part of a let's not let these dogs keep breeding. It's kind of like a Tnr for cats. Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly exactly But then they let them and then they they just did those procedures and Because you want to keep seeing the experiment run forward But what is what's the definition of semi-feral in a dog? Well, my guess would be that they were able to approach the dogs Yeah, and with food and yes. Yeah They wooed them Okay, maybe like people a little bit sometimes they want to like us I've been semi-feral in my life then Yeah, yes, and yeah, well, we don't want to talk about wooing, but maybe we want to talk about water We're gonna have to send you back to transition school I Think that was one of my favorites Justin, I don't know what you're talking about That's that's somebody's on their game as far as I'm concerned. I Feel that I feel it's just sort of like a improv theater Pre-association has been it's like poetry. It's great. Go for it. Tell us about water I'm gonna tell you about space This is astronomers observing a relatively young somewhat nearby star Have detected the presence of water. Oh, no, you're right water and it's circumstallar disk We know that water seemingly everywhere we look and according to the open lines of this study Water is a fundamental molecule in the star and planet formation process essential for catalyzing the growth of solid material in the formation of Plantismals within discs So water has to be everywhere. Otherwise, we wouldn't have stars But actually detecting it can be pretty tricky because space is if you haven't noticed cold dark freezing place and water is Either vaporized if it's too close to a star or it freezes into tiny little dust crystals and spreads are out Out into space and then you just can't see it. So there's this little zone Where you have maybe frozen ice in in big thick clusters But really you want this liquid gas transition phase to be able to detect it from here on earth the baby star Has been heating up the free-floating ice particles in its disc have been Turning gaseous allowing observations to be made with Atacama large millimeter submillimeter array Alma Marking the first detection of water being inherited into a protoplanetary disk Without significant changes to its composition. These results further suggest in these study water in our solar system formed Billions of years before the sun its baby stars located roughly 1,300 light years from the earth in the constellation Orion Observer say the protostar has helped scientists find a missing link of water in the interstellar medium and water in our solar system by confirming that we have similar composition This is a kind of a neat quote from John Tobin Strunner at the National Science Foundation's National Radio Astronomy Observatory who is the lead author of this paper We can think of the path of water through the universe as a trail We know what the endpoints look like which are water on planets and in comets But we wanted to trace that trail back to the origins of water Before now we could link the earth to comets and protostars to the interstellar medium But we couldn't link protostars to comets V883 Ori the name of this baby star Has changed that and proven that the water molecules in that system and our solar system Have a similar ratio of Deuterium and hydrogen So we have now found the missing link of water in the universe It's everywhere. Yeah And now I got me I didn't really realize that you had to have Water to make a planet or a star knowing that means yeah There's I Have didn't count, but there's a lot of stars. Oh wait. I did count 76 trillion ish stars that I'm aware of at least that you've counted personally I mean that's a rough You lose track when you don't start over when you're doing stars you just keep going So this is interesting because you have You need water to get everything going but the so water's everywhere We know life is Reliant at least as far as we know upon water to Pretty pretty essential degree and so this means that If we look at maybe concentrations of water in different places, maybe the Amount of water some places versus others maybe indicating more life possibility or less possibility More likelihood of oceans versus just rocky bodies Yeah, yeah, and and It's a it's a water is a solution that makes all sorts of meat chemistry take place Take place. Yeah. So so the more of it that there is Uh, and the more of these little goldilocks wet water zones that there are on rocky planets The more opportunities life has to exist elsewhere In the galaxy and in the universe beyond where there's other galaxies But I hope they don't have plastics Blair tell us about Plastic problems. Yeah, you don't want plastics in your water What what why don't we want plastics in our water? Because it doesn't taste good It doesn't taste good Uh, because then they they ends up in the the bodies in the tissues of the body somehow and then it's it releases It's a synthetic endocrine thing or something It could be uh, uh, it could be the plastics could hold lots of chemicals and things that are dangerous and Release them in our bodies Yeah, yeah, we're also not always good at at pooping plastic out Which means it can build up in the stomach and it can take up space where food is supposed to go And it makes you think you're full, but you can't eat. There's lots of reasons that plastics has benefits No, anyway I mean, maybe in the medical field, but otherwise I feel like we could we could probably do without at this point. Anyway um, the latest reason to not want to use plastics to Divert as many plastics as possible from entering our oceans Is plasticosis And this is a new disease described in seabird so far just in one species Um, this is flesh-footed sheer waters who live 600 kilometers off the coast of australia on an island And they are the most plastic contaminated birds in the world so far bound Because they consume pieces of plastic at sea mistaking it for food and feed it to their babies Taking it for food. Mm-hmm So far Plasticosis has been described as affecting the digestive system There are suggestions that it could potentially affect other parts of the body like the lungs or like justin mentioned It can affect the endocrine system. There's all sorts of things But uh, this is specifically looking at the stomach This is when you ingest pieces of plastic and it inflames the digestic tract Over time persistent inflammation causes tissues to become scarred. They become deformed They affect growth digestion survival. Basically it just scars your stomach so bad that it becomes inflamed The scar tissue becomes semi-permanent and it makes it less elastic It makes it less good at digesting things There's all sorts of stuff that happen as a result of that and so birds that look otherwise healthy on the outside can be riddled with plasticosis On the inside and one of the ways that it's really impacting them is through their tubular glands, which um, they secrete digestive compounds And as plastic is consumed and it kind of drags along the sides of the stomach The glands get gradually more and more stunted until they lose their tissue structure entirely And they can no longer Create those digestive compounds, which makes them vulnerable to infection and parasites reduces their ability to absorb vitamins Couldn't cause the stomach to become hardened all this stuff so I didn't want to do a whole thing on this which is what I just threw kind of in the in the quick stories because there's Not much to do from here other than just can't can't use less plastic, please This is the first this is the first species they found this in this is a species Like I mentioned that eats a lot of plastic so the next kind of intentions of the study group is to Look at other bird species and potentially non birds to see What is happening in the guts of other animals that? Directly or indirectly digest plastic So this is something that could be happening in us if we're eating a lot of microplastics We don't know yet, but it's kind of we've talked a lot about um Kind of these more direct impacts and this is a more indirect impact of just the the the act of plastic moving through the digestive tract causing physical harm Yeah, and this isn't like just a big big chunk of plastic that moves through and you have to have taken out of your dog's gut because it Just clogs things up But this is actually little bits of it getting stuck in places where it Yeah, make it the little holes and the little the little gaps in the intestines and yeah the glands makes it no good Yeah, how can we do the less plastic? There's still a lot already out there So the removal is good, but the big thing is how to with eight billion people on the planet. How do we stop? Right using all the plastic all the time Right, I mean, so there's individual things that you can do But what I myself can do Is not going to have a large impact on the ocean. I can still make my decisions but uh ultimately actually Like asking your civic leaders To make changes is what's actually going to fix it plastic bag bands changing packaging Requirements, this is what's actually going to make a difference and sometimes Companies don't want to do it because plastics made out of starch that biodegrade are more expensive But it's just like solar power the more people use it the cheaper it'll get to make So that's something that if you can kind of push that agenda a little bit harder It'll definitely help Offset the initial pain of doing that also big business. They can they can take it on. They're fine. They don't I can do it. We can make it happen something a little bit controversial. Yeah One way to prevent plastics from ending up in the ocean Might be Not recycling it Where do you put it then Justin in the landfill? It doesn't all of the plastic it it falls out it gets blown away. It yeah water. It's the using it A lot of the a lot of the recycling That supposedly happens to plastics ends up getting shipped Out of this country and then they have And ending up places where it is not landfill It is landfill, but just landfill other places on the ocean. Just oh wait, what's shipped. Yeah.  What do you do with that with all those bread bags supply chain has to change That is what has to happen There's some things that we're never gonna lose plastic and I mentioned before the healthcare industry There's some things that's that's always gonna be plastic your saline bag It's always gonna be plastic But there's a lot of things that we use plastic for that do not need to be Petroleum plastic so Yeah, and as Harjar is asking in the chat room that we have an enzyme that eats plastic We have found many, uh, but actually there are a couple and people are researching those uses and there are Recycling efforts underway to see how we can put these Into into action application at large scale. Will they actually work? It's it takes why I mean it takes work and people are working on these things. So there are solutions out there, but the biggest solutions are Talking to your civic leaders and you know, trying not to use as much plastic One of the yeah, and I anyway, let's move on to more science Oh, I was gonna say one of the things you just brought up that is a problem with alternative, uh sourcing Is just that it's from a found source. It's from petroleum products Which you know, aside from a little bit of mining and transportation activities Is a found resource on the planet. It's not a manufactured one Uh, and that that's a big barrier to switching away from plastics is that it's extremely cheap, right?   No no vengeance. No hurting. No, I mean How about let's figure out how to help right? Uh regenerating organs regenerating appendages. These are things that we'd love to do mammals are terrible at it We're really not good at regrowing fingers arms legs organs we We lost that ability pretty much a long time ago. Um, you know We can we can we can repair the skin for a scab and stuff like that and they can reattach a finger Sometimes it works, but really we're limited and we'd like to be less limited How can we be less limited? Well researchers wanted to Look into mammals that have various types of Regrowth and cellular regeneration and one of those Those animals one of those groups are Are deer deer Have antlers that they grow every year and then they fall off their heads And then they grow them again. And so they have cells that are actually called antler Blastema progenitor cells. So they've got cell stem cells On their heads that are continuously there that work seasonally to grow antlers until they get to a point Where the antler it's like no no we're going to turn off right now And then we're going to stop working no more antlers and then oh wait It's time to start working time to make antlers again. So the question is Where else within mammals do we can we possibly find similar? Cells to these antler blastema progenitor cells um, anyway, they looked across a bunch of different species comparing various cells and they found that There's a mouse The well a mouse mice mice have a similar type of gene in their regenerative digit tip And they haven't found this in non mammalian species. So anyway, they have been messing with the With the mice working with the mice to See exactly how they can take advantage of the knowledge that there is this growth that that that mice have these stem cells mice have so mice have the stem cells and they were able to move the stem cells to a location in the mouse forehead similar to uh, oh no, they did not antlers and no they did not they did not specifically Create um antlers on mice, but they were able to give the mice a large-sized lump on their forehead Please tell me you have pictures I'm I'm searching for the picture right now Yes, so the the researchers were yes kind of like pinky in the brain, so they were able to Oh, no, it looks like a cow It looks kind of like a cow or like a little little thinking cap, but these little little baby mice Growing they show that they were able to Enable these stem cells these progenitor cells to grow tissue similar to antler tissue that is found in In deer that grow antlers and they were able to turn them on and turn them off and so this is really interesting because this potentially provides us with a new model for investigating a cellular target for regeneration of Various tissues, so can we start studying how the regeneration happens the different molecules that are involved the synthesis pathways Why do these cells turn off? When do they turn on? Is there the possibility of using this to our benefit for For regenerative properties of our extremities and organs And also I can have antlers now and then that I have to say I am I had this little image of a bunch of little mice with antlers like all All in front of a sleigh with like a little santa on it and that I'll stop there But who needs reindeer when you have antler mice, but he really is a mad scientist I was thinking about the chippalope from northern california. Yes a famous mythical creature. I was like, oh, maybe it's real All right, so some of these these species, you know there's the idea that there's a fungus that can infect various animals to create growths that look like antlers or bones, but perhaps they're the the fungus or other situations are leading to the activation of these particular cell types condrocytes mesenchymal cells immune cells and ethyl cells various cells that would be involved in the growth of What they're calling an ectopic antler Yeah Mice with antlers Coming soon. This is just because you could does mean you should Right, but the idea that they we could have mammals may have a distinctive Regeneration mechanism that we can harness This is exciting. Love it Yes So this next story Don't do it only affect you personally Don't take it away from me.  No big deal But if you love coffee Not have it world bad place like too many spikes eyes many pain receptors prevent brain from working Book coffee the world's the buzz with delightful memes about how great coffee is and aside from putting that pep in your step and that perk in your twerk Coffee comes from a plant that grows outdoors Entropical climates and stay with me The stability of those climates is being threatened by global warming Insert sad no have coffee meme here Study published in close climate by Doug Richardson at Cicero oceans and atmosphere australian colleagues Suggest that climate change may significantly affect land where coffee is cultivated Coffee plant plants are sensitive to climate variability and change However, the impact of and this is a fun one that we'll be talking about in the future About a few times synchronous climate hazards Occurring in multiple areas important for coffee production Is unknown how how this is going to take place order to make it a little less unknown Researchers conducted conducted a systematic analysis of climate hazards and compound events and coffee producing regions from 1980 to 2020 They identified 12 climate hazards that threaten coffee crops In the top 12 coffee producing countries So things that exceeded the daily maximum temperature that coffee plants can tolerate researchers found that the number of climate hazards and compound events had increased in every coffee growing region between 1980 and 2020 Additionally, the type of hazards shifted from overly cool conditions. Oh, no Too overly warm Both are both are troublesome because you need the you need the sweet spot We talk about earth being in the gold goldilocks zone different species have their little goldilocks zone and in the earth so yeah According to the authors our results suggest that aluminium is the primary mode in explaining compound climate event variability both globally and regionally region level hazards are therefore Indicative of systematic risk risk to coffee production rather than local risk As with other crops a systematic risk in the global coffee trade is posed by synchronized crop failures Climate change prediction showing a continued rise of temperatures and tropics likely we posit that coffee production can expect ongoing systematic systemic shocks in response to spatially compounding climate hazards synchronized crop failures coffee crops could fail everywhere all at once Or at least be so severely impacted that we will all need to start Forging for used coffee filters and city dumps.  We didn't even know they were living in a time of such bounty So coffee is one of those things that It i'm surprised that we still have to have it shipped from the rainforest It's one of those things that i'm like really we haven't figured out how to like With hydroponics and greenhouses and all these too cheap We haven't figured out how to get this done closer to home Yeah, I mean that's a thing. Yeah the cost and cost benefit, right? Yes economics It's coffee vanilla. There's a couple other things that come chocolate That mostly comes from the rainforest still and I always just kind of wonder really that's We're still doing that Yes, we are because it all comes down to cheap Yeah, we have where the locations and I don't know. I'm just not imagining. I guess I guess maybe you could do hydroponics coffee farms in Nebraska, but I'm just not imagining it It's I'm just imagining a perfect world that will never exist where you grow a variety of foods in In one geographic area for everyone who lives there You don't grow just Yeah, well, I mean we can do that in this one field forever We can absolutely do that Some people don't get quinoa. Some people don't get coffee. Some people it's like you get what you get. No People get everything people can have everything The thing it will take is tremendous amounts of energy and right now the way that we make tremendous amounts of energy is through fossil fuels Primarily and so then we are accelerating the decline of the natural areas that can produce these things and so we need Limitless power that's clean and then we can absolutely do anything we want indoors Well while the planet is handed over to the Chernobyl dogs Stay indoors. There's only share noble dogs out there Well, okay, at least it'll all happen at the same time synchronously and synchronized crop failure synchronized systemic problems Good job everybody. Yeah, but I think this is actually I think this is uh, this is the smack to the microphone. I think this might be Like all the other things, you know, we talk about oh these animals are dying and these trees and these plants and these Birds are dying like things are going to be bad sea levels arise and people will lose their homes bad all these things and people are like Tell people that they're the coffee drinkers of the world that they will no longer have their coffee because of global warming I think we could actually get something done Okay Well moving on from coffee to Um Moms and babies we have this conversation very often on the show about how the microbiome transfers from the mother to the child there is another study out this week looking at uh, this particular question in particular It Doesn't matter if it's a vaginal birth or a c-section Do you have to swab the baby? Do you have to take Vaginal swabs from the mother and swab the baby if it is a c-section to make sure that the baby gets the stuff that the need for to be healthy and apparently according to this study in which they looked at a bunch of mothers and babies and vaginal birth versus a c-section they determined that The majority or it's it's kind of 50 50 the amount of Of microbiota that is transferred from the mother to the infant is about 58.5 Percent from saliva skin breast milk feces. That's during birth vaginal birth and the vagina. That's the mother and the additional 40 percent and of course there's error bars that are going to be involved in this the additional Influence comes from the environment and comes from the after the the infant is birthed that That the cont the contribution Grows but uh, yes, there is a larger contribution from the mother during Vaginal birth and c-section, but it doesn't mean that the infants aren't going to get um their microbiota and it's it's you know 58.5 percent from the mother. I that's it's that it's it's a little bit over Half and half, but I don't know And they didn't find that was sustained because my understanding is that babies Newborns don't really have Microbiota per se they're not relying on it. It's not a the functional system for a few years Yeah, it grows over time. Yeah, it's so that's Yeah, so the babies and the bacteria that the babies are getting it's coming from all sorts of places But the maternal contribution to infant Microbiota it is yes a bit larger during vaginal birth than caesarean section And there are differences in the species because of where they particularly come from but overall the take-home messages from these researchers the take-home message was that it is From the environment that these microbes and microbial functions are transferred irrespective of various transmission routes breastfeeding kissing the baby Yes, holding the baby baby sleeping in the The environment All of these things are going to be How the that microbiota transfers from parent to child too. Um, yeah, and this also this uh kind of dovetails of the story that I read Maybe a month ago that I didn't bring to this the show. I'm sorry about how Uh, there's no microbiome transfer when the baby's in the womb There's there's this whole idea that that happens, but it obviously doesn't because it's There's no bacterial transfer if things are happening correctly in the womb, right and so, um, they they did a study and confirmed that there was no Bacteria in common inside and outside the womb before the baby is born. So all that happens after All after it's a lot. It's a lot after and it's we were also discussing I guess a couple weeks ago about about the virome and viruses. There's a lot after They get better influence. So the environment is Really important in all of this But I think this brings us to the end of the first half of this week in science Thank you so much for joining us and if you love the show Please take this opportunity to go to twist.org and click on our patreon link We are supported by you our listeners our viewers and your help Continues to keep us going and doing this show having fun bringing you science to enlighten you to To feed your curiosity week after week $15 in up a month. You'll get you'll get a sticker pack We've got some cool stickers for you that arrive once per quarter And $10 and up per month. We will thank you by name at the end of the show We really cannot do this without you. So if you head over twist.org click on that patreon link You would be doing us a world of good. Thank you for your support. Can't do it without you Come back now for that wonderful part of the show It's full of wasps today, I guess. I don't know. It's time for Blair's animal corner with Blair What you got Blair you laughing at I want to start with a story of fairness So I want to say it was a couple years ago There's a story about monkeys that were handed either a cucumber or a grape And if you handed one monkey a grape and the other one a cucumber right next to them They would get so mad they would throw the cucumber at the trainer who was handing the food out Out of frustration that they didn't get the better reward So that kind of sparked a whole debate over what was happening Was this a frustration over lack of fairness? Was this something where they just were able to recognize there was a higher quality treat and they wanted it Or was this a disappointment in the trainer in particular? I'm so disappointed in you I can't believe you did that to me That's exactly what this study from the german primate center Liebmiz Institute for primate research Wanted to look at so they had long-tailed macaques And they wanted to see Does this frustration really stem from a dislike of unequal treatment or is there something else going on? So the they they designated these kind of three different Hypotheses for what's going on that I alluded to so the first one is called inequity aversion It's all about fairness It's it has a social comparison with con specifics So they see a pattern of rewards. They compare themselves to that and get frustrated because it's unfair The second is called food expectation. That is looking at the visibility of potential foods There is an attractive food You do not get that attractive food, you know, it's on the menu But you didn't get it and that's frustrating So if a high quality reward is visible the animal expects to receive it The third hypothesis is social disappointment And that is about the trainer's decision to provide an inferior reward So behind that is an expectation to be rewarded in the best possible way by the human you trust You trusted you You betrayed me. So the way that they set up this experiment Is they had monkeys with four different scenarios They would activate a lever Which was followed by a reward Of low quality food Which was brought within reach by a conveyor belt High quality rewards were displayed But remained out of reach The experimental design itself varied in two ways So first either the human provided the reward or it was administered by an automatic feeder So they're taking out the human element Or the animal was either alone Or they had a buddy monkey with them Who solved the same task but got a higher quality reward So they're trying to attack these three different hypotheses Parse out what's happening What's interesting is they almost never refused the reward when it was provided by an automatic feeder So no matter what it was even though they got the The kind of less desirable reward It was fed to them by a robot and so they They took it and they ate it They're like, thanks robot. I'll eat the salad or I'll eat the burger. Yeah, that's great. Whatever. Thanks But in 20% of experiments They refused the food If it was offered by a human So when a human offered it 20% of the time they said no, I'm not taking it Just generally 20% of the time they didn't or did it matter whether it was high or low? Is that It was always low the one that they were testing against so if they were given the the worst treat Right say salad or hamburger. I think like chocolate chips are raisins Like what the heck is this chocolate versus carrot, right? Yeah Yeah, so uh, so they would they would Refuse it if a human gave it to them But it didn't seem to matter any of the variables and any of the other ways Really the only thing that indicated it was whether a human handed it to them or the automatic feeder handed it to them Which means they have no social expectations of a vending machine And they're not disappointed if the vending machine gives them the worst treat But they do have social expectations For a human and so they get interesting frustrated or upset or whatever human emotion you want to kind of project When a human gives them the worst treat So this this really leads us to the the idea of This social disappointment So they were frustrated with their human trainers decisions so I was I was just thinking that too that that you could absolutely run this experiment with humans Uh, some getting the wrong thing dispensed from a vending machine and do you still take it? Of course you do There's no recourse Yeah, right if if the if the person at the counter hands you the wrong thing You know, then then you're gonna be like, hey, that's not what I asked for that's not what I ordered They recognize that there's no recourse With the there's no negotiating With the vending machine, right? So like there's all sorts of questions here like do monkeys understand The different like what machines do Do they understand that there's not a human controlling that machine or actually there is right Do do they now now it's the vending machine question You know like the squirrels in central park in new york who have learned how to climb into the vending machine and take whatever they want Whereas humans who do not get the chips because the chips get stuck hanging half way out of the vending machine And that you're staring at it or to violence if some resort to violence and I think Someone must walk away having lost the dollar 25. Really, you don't you know, I immediately just the apron takes over Is I will then fork over another dollar 25 Thinking that if I order a second one, it'll kick it all. All right But okay, so anyway the point of this story was they were trying to figure out if monkeys were measuring fairness And what they found as far as their measurements go is that that is not what was happening What was happening was social Disappointment so it had nothing to do with the monkey.  I see you have grapes I know you could give me something better I don't care what you gave him over there I want a grape so Does this have to do with fairness? According to this test. No, does this mean monkeys don't understand fairness? I'm also gonna say No, not necessarily. We don't know that we have to find a new way to test this This basically means the previous test for fairness measurements in animals needs redoing. Yeah They accidentally tested something else Yeah, I mean, I think that's the the real take home is now that they now that You can see that there is a social expectation for the trainer You have to always work with robots from here on out But see that's even harder for me because if their understanding is a robot is like when some lose some Then it doesn't matter what the person next to them gets then they don't care about fairness It's like if you're pulling a slot machine and the person next to you wins You're not going that's not fair.  That's cool. Right. So that's that's kind of Or at least if you were a monkey, that's how you'd respond I suppose but Depends on the kind of person you are but But if you're watching somebody Yeah, but if you're watching another monkey being given grapes and you're given the cucumber that you do not like By the same trainer Right, it is a social expectation. You're being let down, but it could also Be an indication of fairness, you know, right a new way to figure this out Yeah, so it seems like the the this is the problem though. The machine doesn't do it So if the human is accidentally testing something else the machine They don't measure fairness with that. That's not how they're They were responding Right, you have to find a new mechanism and I don't know I don't know what it is But what is fairness? aside from a social expectation of Even-handed behaviors or Allocation of resources like what you mean fairness is subjective Right, but see this is the problem. This is the part where like we can talk about this for an hour is that They they were disappointed that they got the lesser treat Regardless of whether they saw another monkey get a good treat or not Yeah So that is where they feel like they were not testing fairness But yes, it depends how you define fairness Is fairness just that I know this thing exists and I didn't get it or is fairness that he got it and I didn't get it Right unequal treatment right So it's it's it's a complicated nut to crack, but This ain't it They'll crack that nut It also means that animals And as a former zookeeper I thought about this immediately like animals were paying attention to how I was treating their cons specifics And animals paid attention to how they I was treating them on one day and another And if they knew that I had strawberries and I did not give them a strawberry Did they think I was doing something to them? That was me You you meanie zookeeper you Like I had fish yesterday. This is just kibble. What is this garbage? So it's yes, so That was it was very interesting to recognize that they like They recognize their human Caretaker and that the human has agency over what food they give them that's wild to me But they recognize that a machine doesn't have agency over it right So and then this is gonna this is sort of empty. Well, it's a it's a bit of a stretch but You know Humans are very subjective when it comes to fairness, right? Our entire court system where people sue each other Everybody going in there is seeking justice And and wants to get the get the fairness Balance correct both sides have a very different idea of what that means And so and so our court system is playing this out all the time and there I could be resentment I suppose they're unfairness with the I think the court didn't rule correctly But what if we do eventually replace a lot of low-level Judicial decision-making by robots with the robot would people then go Okay. Well, you know, I went in there and I pulled the old handle on the judge The one one arm judge and uh, you get what you get Yeah problem is the more we learn about AI the more we learn that AI has bias Our biases Okay back to animals blair animals. Let's talk about wasps and a story that uh Is complicated so bear with me So wasps, um I have a really interesting this the the synopsis snippet wasp has a really cool Mating not mating strategy birthing strat larval development strategy In vertebrates, right? Well, um, but so they have a strategy for taking care of their babies um That may in fact also have a built-in defense system that has never been observed before And so I'm going to try to explain it here for you now. So Cinnipid wasps they We've known for a while for decades that they inject chemicals into leaves that induce oak trees to produce protective Gauls which are like these kind of balls or growths around their larva that Makes them safe And then it kind of ferments and falls off the tree and is then food for the larva as they emerge little baby buggy Bjorn, yeah, and and they've kind of induced the plants to do this thing and in most Gaul situations I'm going to talk about one gaul in particular but in most cases of Gauls in nature the the chemistry is such that there's Tannins that develop inside of them They prevent damage by herbivore. So there's a defense mechanism there And they're so high that when you crush a gaul and you soak it in water It creates this kind of dark brown liquid That was actually used to write the declaration of independence the constitution and the bill of rights Which is really interesting Yeah, no idea. That's so cool. Yes. So natural inks And so this is fascinating in an area of study for a lot of Botanist and entomologists because an animal is using chemistry to force a plant to do something It's parasitic manipulation And so the insect gets the plant to make the food it needs for their larva as well as create a defensive space So in this new research They revealed a potentially novel manipulation of chemistry in the translucent oak gaul So in one particular type of oak gaul Where what the wasp does is they lower the pH Insanely low equivalent to the acidity level in pitcher plants and what do pitcher plants do? They digest insects. They digest insects and sometimes small mammals Yes, exactly. Um, yes, so they digest things. So the pH is so low it can eat Exoskeleton and and the bodies of insects. So Why might a gaul have a pH super low? Perhaps to mess with bugs that want to parasitize the gauls So we have the wasps parasitizing the oak to create the gaul But it also turns out that um, there are What are they called I have to find it but there's yeah, so so there's there's another type of wasp That can actually Try to inject their Tissue or their their their own larva into the gaul To take over to hijack the gaul completely And so uh, these are parasitoid wasps and so um, the pH is so low that it can degrade the tissue of the needle-like Organ that the female uses to inject the eggs into the gaul. Wow So this is taken this kind of chemical manipulation to a crazy degree And so this is there they've a pH below three. They they've a pH measuring two up to three And so this is the most acidic plant That has ever been measured to date The only one close to it is citrus fruit trees Yeah Yeah, so just the this is um, the specific acid in there that's creating the low pH is malic acid, which is of high bundles and apples um, and So it it kind of naturally occurs in a lot of plants but in low low low low low concentrations And so this is actually 66 of the organic acid in Gauls in these very specific Gauls So the concentration Was two times higher than other Gauls and two times higher than apples So they basically just through these kind of chemical manipulations have made this acid output go off the charts In order to protect their larva Yeah, that's fast and it wouldn't the this plant would not be creating these things It would not be this acidic if it weren't for the wasp making it Is it good for the for the oak at all for the plant? I don't think so Yeah, I don't think it's necessarily that bad other than it's it's you know diverting energy to creating these structures But to my knowledge it's not considered like an illness to the oak or anything like that Right, not something we need to get rid of Yeah, right, but so this is this is an extreme situation of chemical manipulation from From a parasite and so this is this is a brand new discovery and going to be the source of a lot of research in the future to figure out what the The actual trigger And mechanism the molecular molecular mechanism is That is creating this change in the plant tissues Can we do something similar? What's going on?  I don't think work Nice I mean if they burst they'll eat through your clothes, but I suppose you could give it a go I love it. All right, Justin. Do you want to tell us a few stories? Yeah, uh Understanding what makes for a long happy life Can be challenging. That's one of those subjective things Avoiding death Must be a significant consideration when talking about a long happy life and that so then understanding what ends life Happy or not is a much more straightforward thing to tackle the gbd Which is the global burden of disease report is collected and analyzed by a consortium of more than 9 000 researchers in 162 countries and territories They capture premature death and disability for 370 diseases And injuries in 204 countries and territories by age and sex and they've been doing this since 1990 researchers the national University of Singapore and colleagues in the u.s. And china undertook a review of two decades specifically focused on the metabolic analysis of the gbd reports and published in the journal cell metabolism so Because there's all of this different death and disease data, you know A lot of studies that have been done in the past will focus on one Or two of them and they kind of look at this but the researchers wanted Really look at the group of metabolic diseases because they're closely interlinked Sort of causationally And they tend to manifest multiple people with like type 2 diabetes Might also have high cholesterol might also be obese and since these are separate categories in the gbd report they They decided to look at all of them together because they cluster around processes like insulin resistance inflammatory immune cells these sorts of things so They found high mortality rate for metabolic diseases The highest was found in eastern Mediterranean regions of the study followed by countries with lower income education and fertility averages The rates of increase In metabolic diseases were highest in more developed countries for some reason Some of the highlights this is a Obesity and type 2 diabetes death rates over the last 20 years Didn't really change maybe slight decrease but insignificantly death rates about the same which You could say hey great. It's not getting worse Or you could go. Hey, how come it's it's stagnant Why haven't we been able to to attack these problems better? non-alcoholic fatty liver disease deaths were down 0.63 per cent per year So that's that's actually good news. That's less big but the rates of acquisition of these diseases went up and all of them. Yeah So in a sense, you could say that we are getting better at treatment Because we've managed to stay we've managed to tread water on the death rate despite having yearly rises in disability now in in obesity, it's 0.48 per cent per year you know A 1.56 yearly increase percent yearly increase in global rates of type 2 diabetes and 0.83 percent yearly increase in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease so The rates of disease are increasing or the way the rates of acquisition are decreasing while the death rate is remaining about the same or going down slightly so The thing that caught my eye about this story though. Yeah, was they have something called the uh yearly rise in disability adjusted life years A disability adjusted life years or dailies is an estimate of years Uh lost due to premature mortality how many years Of life doesn't get lived by humans due to these diseases And in 2019 alone And these these by the way these are also increasing uh yearly In type 2 diabetes uh In 2019 alone humans lost 6.6 million years of life due to the disease non-alcoholic fatty liver disease 4.4 million years of life lost in just 2019 and obesity alone which was the overall highest death rate out of uh or number of deaths out of all of these 160.2 million years of human life lost In 2019 alone that is a staggering figure If you just look at it by itself. Yeah, remember there's there's you there's 8 billion of us Right, so if you add it up that's yes, but that's you know, it's uh every year of being obese losing Maybe a few weeks here and there of your expected life span for every year But if you take it as a whole 160 million years 100 can you imagine 160 million year old person? would have Vast amounts of knowledge would have had time to do all of those things you never got around to And we as a planet are losing this much To these metabolic diseases Right on a yearly. Yeah on a yearly basis. Yeah Yeah, and apparently that is up from uh, what is it back in 2000 when they started this this 20 year study here Was 140 million per year. So we're losing extra 20 million years of life per year And on our current trajectory and it's just going up Well, I was I was asking about the Mediterranean diet. I don't know Eastern Mediterranean was uh, was was it was hit harder Than anywhere else Right. So I don't I don't know There's a whole lot of there's a whole slew of other things that of course play into that uh, one one one criticism of this study That I came across was that it is You know the cause of death portion of it Is really tricky to isolate obesity because again, these are also going to have maybe type 2 to be diabetes on top of that But also, uh, you know, what isn't going to be in here then is something like cardiac arrest Or secondary three, you know, every trying to trying to connect deaths by obesity or deaths by type 2 diabetes when a bunch of like an infection that Hit somebody who's immunocomprate. So it's the data itself might actually be underestimations because There's a lot of ways that people die And it's not always recorded and captured and so of course these are all estimations But by a very large group of very informed people making them So most reliable data that we have Yeah, but yeah comes down to the metabolic disease burden. So globally. Yes This is something that we should be paying attention to it should be paying attention to and it's not too unsurprising This is where we're living in the age of globalization Uh, you know, this this happened to us before when agriculture first started people Shrank by like half a foot over over some generations of just switching from hunter-gather to To agriculture based lifestyle. We became sicker. We became prone to many more diseases Uh, it was living in groups. Yeah living in groups living more maybe more sedentary You know having a very more a much more restrictive diet, perhaps so there's You know, we go through bottlenecks like this where there's huge disease tolls normally What happens normally too is natural selection plays into it a little bit and so Those who can survive and adjust To sitting in a chair all day Yeah With with medical assistance though, we're going to find that uh disease continues. Anyway Last story for me today Dinosaurs could be really big Some as tall as five stories some measured in number of buses long And how did they manage to do that without crushing under their own weight Turns out dinosaurs had had hollow bones. They had inner structures known as air sacs, which made their skeletons lighter and less dense It's how come pterosaurs can pterodactylsora can fly This is a tito oriliano first after the article less dense bones containing more air gave the dinosaurs and pterosaurs and birds today more oxygen circulating in their blood as well as more agility ability to hunt flea and fight even fly so Oriliano analyzed fossil bones from three brazilian species of the late Triassic. This is two hundred and thirty three Million year old dinosaur bones. This is when dinosaurs are emerging. This is this is old even for a dinosaur The ages this is like way like the dinosaurs that died out at the end Boy these to them these were like ancient ancient ancient dinosaurs Researchers were looking for signs of the presence of air sacs because the what we consider almost said modern dinosaurs But what we consider, you know on in the dinosaur movies That we are used to watching All of those dinosaurs have largely had hollow bones And so those are pretty much all the dinosaurs that we commonly think of when we think of dinosaurs So they got these really old bones and they're trying to find these air sacs and Couldn't find them They had three species Two were sauropodomorphs. This is the group that eventually evolved into long neck dinosaurs And brought the source and the likes and a third was one of the earliest carnivores the particular lineage Didn't make it didn't go on to be followed up by others So they had a computerized tomography to visualize the fossils internal structures The small spaces in the vertebrae were identified as being uh For a mean if for veins arteries and marrow attaching points for muscles tendons could be seen all of this But nothing capable of serving as pneumatic chambers through which air might have flowed continuously So what's going on all the original dinosaurs Had solid bones study published In 2021 had also found Oriental skins lacked the structure that could have housed air sacs from a from a Order that was probably more in the 200 million 145 million year old range That became the triceratops, which does have hollow bones Multiple examples then early dinosaurs without the telltale feature means If it didn't evolve before they differentiated into the different type of dinosaurs that would become later Different types of dinosaurs again. If it didn't belong to a common ancestor Then it must be an example of Conversion evolution Yes convergent evolution They say must have occurred at least in three separate lineages of dinosaurs As the best way To to make it in a sometimes hot Environment which made it easier for them to cool and or or as they were Getting larger make easier for them to move around or whatever needing to fly the desire to fly the dinosaurs. Yeah Yeah, you know what the big drawback is though with hollow bones Oh, no, I I well No, you can guess they're fragile When they break they shatter Oh, no Our bones fracture they could heal back together when hollow bones break. That's it. You're done So that's why they went extinct Well, we still have birds so they figured it out some of them But that is the drawback. That's why Everybody doesn't have hollow bones Makes you nice and hearty The the with yeah, but with the the scaffolding of the interior of these hollow bones There is strength in them to certain degrees for you know standing on them when they have to stand on them But it's the forces that come in at other angles that could crack or fracture a bone that That's where you start getting the Getting the difficulties. Yeah made for certain purposes. I think that's exactly what you were getting at there Justin and the you know, yeah the convergent evolution totally It makes sense. You're gonna build the bones you need I want to look at the different types of support structures inside the hollow bones for these different lineages Because i'm very curious if they look different kind of the architecture of the support structures If you're a flying dinosaur or if you have hollow bones because you're just so honking big Or if you hollow bones for other reasons just depending on kind of like The form and function I would be very curious to see which followed which because yeah, I can imagine that uh Hollow bones so I would maxi this is the thing. I'd imagine that the hollow bones came first Right because then then you can grow bigger and then you can learn to fly but they're already you know But the the the fact that they had to to have convergent evolution three different times is surprising Well, remember to like bats don't have hollow bones and they can fly But they're very usually usually not always there can be some very large flying bats out there those flying foxes, but Usually bats are pretty small flying out there But so my point is that I don't know exactly when pterosaur bones became hollow But in theory They could have flown Before they had hollow bones And the hollow bones could have just improved their ability. They could have been gliders Initially and then kind of turned into full flyers later allowed them to get bigger Or allowed and allowed them to get better.  Yeah, it's really not not necessarily good for Our our bodies however, um There's a question in play as to okay animals Do come across have throughout history come across fermented Fruits fermented plants and there are enzymes that help to process the alcohol sugars and to allow Um less damage to the liver to other organs of the body so these Dehydrogenases the alcohol dehydrogenases that are existent across species They reveal according to this paper and cell metabolism that many strict herbivores and carnivores That are not exposed to ethanol appear to have lost the ability To metabolize it. They can't break it up. And so There is this idea now that the presence of alcohol itself is an evolutionary driver and what else is going on in our systems aside from alcohol dehydrogenase that could potentially be impacting the the Breakdown and the metabolism of these alcohols There is a particular hormone that gets released in our livers. It is called fgf 21 and fgf 21 Uh Is a hormone and it's a it's a liver hormone that has been determined that In mice anyway, when you give mice alcohol, you can uh negate the inebriation by Injecting them with this Fgf 21 so the mice that were Given alcohol and then given this fgf 21. They basically Became sober. It was like a sober shot And they showed that there was less damage to there was uh less ethanol in the brain after a period of time less plasma ethanol after a period of time this fgf 21 is uh Significantly able to To protect the liver to protect the body and the idea is that maybe perhaps Perhaps we could use fgf 21 in situations of extreme alcohol poisoning or alcohol Impeachment situations where people could be Extremely damaged by the alcohol that they have taken in and maybe this could lead to Better protection for our bodies against the ethanol that we consume And now of course they're talking about um in this particular in this Particular study they're talking about using it in a way that is Used for extreme cases of liver or or alcohol intoxication But you know really I want the okay. I went out tonight pill Right I had oops too many glasses of wine. I'm gonna take this fgf pill before I go to sleep and Everything's gonna be happy You know How there are uh lactose-free milk and uh and ice creams and things like that that have the built-in lactase, right? Yes, so you you get the dairy, but the enzymes in it to counteract it automatically. It's like you could have the The no drunkenness alcohol for the designation drivers You could say you could have this same beer that everyone else is having But we're gonna drop this little thing in it and you won't get drunk Yeah No No One never let anybody put anything in your drink. We got this what they say it is two Just don't drink if you're the designated driver in three this actually I get to see this as being an on hand This was developed into a functional product that you give somebody or inject and then boom it would work A something that a University town Uh Paramedic or service could have on hand because young people experimenting with alcohol for the first time Definitely run into Risks of overconsumption at probably higher rates Then then you know people with a little bit of experience Yeah, but the whether or not there is experience there the ideas that our species Does naturally produce fgf-21 in the liver similar to the alcohol dehydrogenase being produced and So how do we stop it? No, no, no No, no that way you don't have to buy all that many drinks You just have a couple of little sips And then Yes, yes Exactly so you could how can you increase the amount? How can you increase the amount of fgf-21 that is being produced in the body? Can you do that? Synthetically or can You add it pharmacologically is the other question They did determine that there is a direct connection between the liver fgf-21 Expression this hormone gets expressed and it makes it to The brain by activating noradrenergic neurons in the locus coerilus Which regulates arousal and alertness and so more fgf-21 Makes you more alert and it it kind of blocks the intoxicated the talks intoxicant depressant effects of alcohol In the process so It's they think it might have been an extra pathway In addition to alcohol dehydrogenase that evolved to protect Against intoxication So do you have lots of fgf-21 naturally? Do you not is that part of whether or not you get drunk more easily or not? But can we target it? Can we treat alcohol poisoning? We really I don't I forget what they're called the what they're doing now the the kids on the campuses with like the gallon three gallon jugs of No of jungle juice that are Don't do that That's terrible. That's like that's everything but the kitchen sink sink in there No, I mean that's how high different alcohols in there Yeah, so once upon a time in the old days of college hood, there was like a big Bowl or whatever there was or the juice right or sink or whatever Or whatever it was that was bad or tarp in the beach. I remember that one all bad all bad bad That's the last thing I remember of that.  Well now kids are they've got a new thing where because they don't want to be sharing all their Cups and sharing the source of the alcohol. They have you know milk big plastic milk jugs Or juice jugs that they're filling up with whatever they like. They're making their own jungle juice and kids across the country Are uh experiencing lots and lots of alcohol poisoning in first step Try maybe try and just stop it. Yeah, just stop it. Don't don't do that in the just stop it Don't do it in the first place a second step. We don't have this Fgf 21 yet. So there you if you're gonna get alcohol poisoning. It's really really really bad Don't go there. Okay. Just stop.  I will do that Oh No, I'm afraid of your cooties, but you know what I'm gonna drink this whole jug of Juggle juice and then I'm probably gonna make out with 60 for people because I am so intoxicated What about germs then? What about germs then?  So squishy folded up thingy inside the skull. That's the only thing that I consider me Yeah, yeah, so this study is for you Justin researchers published their Rease research into possible promises for the treatment of neurodegenerative Neurodegenerative diseases in science advances this last week Looking at what is termed mitochondrial pyruvate metabolism And how it activates quiescent adult neural stem cells So there's this big question as to whether or not You know, how do when do you get new brain cells? Well, you're not growing new brain cells and having lots of new brain cells if you're poisoning yourself all the time, but perhaps If we know how to generate new neurons in the brain we can Perhaps treat some of the damage that is going on. I mean, I'm I am making light of the issue But the what they really are hoping to do is treat neurodegenerative diseases To be able to actually take neural stem cells stimulate them into becoming active naturally and and growing into Various roles in the brain in the adult brain even elderly brains. This is Work that they have have particularly looked at in adult and elderly mice This is exciting. They are looking at what is specifically called the mitochondrial pyruvate carrier Which is a transporter that carries pyruvate From outside of the cell Into the mitochondria linking a whole bunch of processes like coliseus and all sorts of citric acid cycles and oxidative phosphorylation mitochondria big energy producer ATP and in these A neural stem cells it up regulates if you can turn that Transporter on it's going to create more ATP. It's going to Turn those stem cells on and suddenly boom activation stem cell progenitors grow new stem cells which grow new neurons which grow potentially Healing for the brain and it's available Now from dr. Justin's not a real doctor supplement question mark Online pharmacy Right, so this is the this is the big question. What are we gonna? What are we going to be needing to make this happen? And It's it is interestingly linked to Aspartate which is aspartic acid, which is an amino acid And it's not the same thing as aspartame Which is this big sugar. Yeah, yeah, fake sugar. Yeah, but The Yes, they are chemically similar the aspartate is part of aspartame that in It's different stuff added to the aspartame, but Let it be said though that The levels of the aspartate that are Are present are important to the activation of this mitochondrial Transporter and these the ability of these cells to get To get activated To become mature neurons So there's a lot of little things in there I'm not telling you that You should go looking for I don't know ask a brain spa the brain I mean to drag them to Dr. Justin's not a real doctor supplement question mark Question mark And it's just aspartame. It's just sweet and low, right? No, no Well, it's supplement so I don't have to be too specific, but it's it's uh, it's for what alzia It's isn't the aspartame It's supposed to be bad for us. Yes. Yeah, it's very bad for us. It's not good. So we this is there isn't You don't say good or bad in the biz Well, I do look forward to going to a brain recommended and not available I do like the idea of like I'm gonna head over to the spa get my nails done get a massage Then we're gonna head over to the brain spa get some new neurons. I'll be home in a few hours all tuned up I love this idea Tune it up. Tune it up.  I think we've come to the end of the show Did we make it? Thanks everyone for joining us we have come to the end of the show. I hope you enjoyed it I do want to thank everyone who has been here and also those who help with the show fada Thank you so much for your help with show notes and social media Gord are and lore others who help in the chat rooms to make things nice and happy and pleasant Thank you for being there People in the chat rooms. Thank you for chatting. Thank you for having thoughts while we're chatting and thinking and It's all wonderful having you around here Identity four. Thank you for recording the show Rachel. Thank you for editing the show and as always I would like to specifically thank our patreon sponsors Thank you, too Oops, I'm at the wrong end of my list. Thank you, too Teresa Smith James Schaefer Richard Badge Kent Northcote Rick Loveman George Chorus Pierre Velazarb John Ratna swami Carl Kornfeld Karantazi Chris Wozniak Dave Bunn Vegard chef stad house knight or donathan styles aka don stylo Alley coffin rag and Don Mundus Steven Albaron Darryl my shacks to Paul like Andrew Swanson freddas 104 sky Luke Paul Ronovitch Kevin Reardon noodles jack David E youngblood Sean Clarence lamb john mckay greg riley marqueson flow steve leesman aka zima Ken haze Howard tan christopher rappin richard brendan minnish johnny gridley chlemy day flying out christopher drier artyom greg briggs john atwood Rudy Garcia david wilkinson rodney lewis paul rick ramus philip shane curt larson craig landon pseudoster jason old stave neighbor eric nappy oak adam mishkan parent kevin parochan erin luthan steve debelt bob caldery marjorie david blablabla blablabla blablabla paul d disney david similarly patrick fecararo and tony steel Thank you. Thank you all for your support of twist on patreon and if you are interested head over to twist.org click on the patreon link and help us help support the show through patreon on next week's show We will be back Wednesday 8 p.m. Pacific time and again on thursday 5 a.m. Central european time broadcasting live from our youtube and facebook channels and from twist.org slash live Hey, do you want to listen to us as a podcast perhaps while you brew your morning coffee and put the sweetener of your choice And into it perhaps not at all Just search for this week in science for a podcast or found if you enjoyed the show get your friends to subscribe as well For more information on anything you've heard here today show notes links to stories available on our website www.twist.org where you can also sign up for a newsletter You can also contact us directly email kiki at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com Justin at twist minion at gmail.com or me blair at blairbaz at twist.org Just be sure to put twist t w i s in the subject line or your email will be spam filtered into the non antler like growth onto the head of a mouse Which is a which is the perfect time to Ping us on twitter with a picture At twist science at dr kiki at jackson fly or at blairs menagerie We love your feedback If there's a topic you would like us to cover or address a suggestion for an interview a haiku that comes during the night Please let us know We'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news And if you've learned anything from the show remember It's all in your head This week in science This week in science This week in science. It's the end of the world. So i'm setting up shop got my banner unfurled It says the scientist is in i'm gonna sell my advice Show them how to stop the robots with a simple device I'll reverse below the warming with a wave of my hand and all this is coming your way So everybody listen to what i say. I use the scientific methods This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what i say may not represent your views But i've done the calculations and it's the actor show Where did justin go? He'll be back in a minute. I'm sure He's probably getting more coffey Yeah More coffee I'm doing the opposite of that Less coffey Diving into bed Same I know Getting the rest that we need Justin's up for another busy day Mmm Justin Oh, what happened? I'm wondering how busy are you today? Uh, I am going somewhere very important And an hour Oh, okay What am I doing? Oh Yeah I'm Very important been thinking about this all week long because it's very important Uh, going to uh go visit the future daycare Uh for the first time Check that out or potential future daycare potential future. Yes Nice Yeah, that's uh, so i've got to be Cognitive How I got it you're in Coherent Coherent Yeah, I'm gonna have to have a functioning day today. It's gonna be What really weird totally weird most days aren't functioning No, no not every day not like this Well, because you know, it's like first of all, I'm there to be very judgy of Oh, yeah People and the place who perspective could be taking care of and watching over my child So I'm there to be very but then I always feel like oh, maybe they're looking at me like Judging me back and then I'm like, oh, well, I better, you know Not say something stupid and so then I won't end up not talking at all And then I forget to ask all the questions and then when I leave then you're like, well, what did you think of the place? I was like, I don't like it. Why I don't know anything about it. So so it's very I don't know what I learned at all. I don't know process To find a new daycare our first daycare Aw, you'll find it. You'll find a good one interview with you. Yeah, let me guess it's free over there Um, would you? Yeah Yeah I had a feeling yeah The Yeah, it's a it's a different country and when I say that I mean like Very different. Yeah. Yeah, I've heard In many many many ways So many ways Nobody's outlawing drag queens over there No, no No I need just I've decided I've recently just I've been staying off of the social media as much as possible and it's making me much happier. Yeah I don't know a lot of what's going on.  It's like for some reason it really really really wants to tell me stories about why the the showrunner for um, the witcher did not get along with Henry Henry Henry Henry cavill Henry cavill or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, um, you know because he was oh too Too excited about or or too geeky about the show material. I don't know. Those are like that's what I get Stories about college students drinking jugs of jungle juice, which they have a whole new name for they have like a whole You know, whatever, but those are the things that I'm learning about but I I scroll through them But I'm so much happier not knowing about I've trying not to I don't know I don't know what people are doing Unless maybe npr tells me in the morning on the way to school. I don't know I have that set there's that section of What you're talking about in news Where they're talking about who the you know the all the goings on of the celebrity people And uh I don't know who any of them are Same I'm like who what I don't know Who any of them are And I'd actually I'm looking back. I'm like did I was there ever really a time when I Yes, there was a time. Yes. Who these people were sure when it was Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan and uh, Julia Roberts and Yeah, no at the time Like I'm telling you when when they were when they were like Oh, no, no, Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts are dating. I I didn't know who they were because really part of it is actually because I'm I'm actually have like name blindness To a great degree Like I am constantly talking about that guy in that movie The girl who was in the other movie And with you know the plot It's it's like I have very hard time remembering Just human names In general let alone somebody who I don't actually know. Yeah names are hard Yeah, well, I feel like for me it all happened when I was watching Saturday Night Live and all of a sudden I didn't know Who the hosts were Exactly stranger. I've literally never seen before and unfortunately I want to say that happened 15 years ago Blair It was I think the first time uh, probably like Harry Styles was on I was probably like I have no picture in in my head For Harry Styles. That's who that is. Yeah. Yeah for the best He split his pants at a performance. That's about all I know about him. Yeah Maybe did or did not spit on chris pine So whatever I what I think is really What I think is very interesting about all this though is that there was a so this week There's a study that came out that said Oh, there's a reason why People stop keeping track of music After a certain age while you get stuck like musically in a certain era and I'm like Well, I don't know I I mean I like music from my youth and everything But I've been trying to keep I like music now. I like that. I've been learning lots. I listened. I got lots of things But it's the it's the the tv people the movie people. I don't have any idea who they are I'm not keeping up with popular culture on the like who are the actors and actresses Except for tom holland and zandaya. I mean that's basically the only one I need to know They're america's sweetheart. You've got to keep, you know, they're even though tom holland's british, but still Yeah, still What are you talking about? I'm talking about spider-man See and then there's a perfect example There's a perfect example because actually I was I was gonna use it would be a great example If I could tell you who one of the actors names were and from one of the movies But I don't have any of them. You don't have any of them. No, I don't have any But I do have a complainer I do have a complaint about uh spider-man movies, yeah There's you could do more than the origin story Yeah I haven't really you haven't you haven't said origin in a while of the same Yeah They didn't in the latest spider-man iteration. They didn't do the origin at all, but they have different actors So how can you even tell well, how did they become spider-man? You don't even know the multiverse Come on get with the time It's sort of be like if we're gonna like go fight darth vader and the And the and and and the uh death star and more than one movie like why would you It's like it's like if darth vader just it's like if darth vader Why would you bother making the same movie? It's it's the same cast of characters in the same Whole Why do we have different burger restaurants more than one movie? Imagine just imagine this script that darth vader All of a sudden is confronted by an adult Anakin Skywalker a good Good side of the force using jedi anakin Skywalker Would that not be interesting that would be a multiverse Yes, okay. I see what you're saying So what we're gonna do is We're gonna stop the movie with all the plot and character development stuff going on And these two are just gonna sit and talk and be like wow, so what? What's it like using like the bad force? I've always won. I was like oh You should really check out uh spider-man in the multiverse. You can do this and then you're gonna like ah You know if you're mad oh mad sometimes. I bet you do. I don't hey you should listen to that no no no no Because that's how you end up her in the mask all the time. Yeah, how'd you avoid the mask? I you know, I didn't you're joking, but this is actually how movies work now Pretty much There's two different spider-man movies that do that actually One by sony and one by disney so you know Oh That's a whole that's a whole debate on its own Yeah, I do want to bring up hard jar in the chat room on youtube said To please keep diana physics girl in our thoughts and I do want to bring diana Cowern up who is physics girl on youtube and has done Amazing work through the years we interviewed her on twist several years back She's an amazing science communicator. She is has been struggling with long coveted and to the point where she's Yeah, been in the in and out of the er. She's got low oxygen all the time. She cannot work She's really really struggling with the effects of long coveted right now. So uh, if you hadn't been aware of that, uh I hope you are aware and that possibly the you know having the awareness to be able to Understand that long coveted Is something that people you never expect Are struggling with it and it is long. It can be long. It can be months long It can be debilitating and this is another reason why we all need to be taking care of each other And we can argue about movies and the fun stuff all we want But anyway best wishes best best wishes to diana From us here at twist And yeah, paul. I hope she gets better soon. There's a lot of research into long covet treatments and Other things and I am you know, I hope she's getting the best care possible And you know, I hope everybody is long coveted is something that's going to be affecting us for a long time to come Not to bring the conversation down to a low point, but just wanted to give um Make sure that I didn't forget to say this because it's important but Yeah But anyway, there's supposed to be you know third season of the witcher last season for harry henry Hey, I heard this uh harry styles fellas does a good job in that movie And it's because he's so dedicated to the nuances of the mythology of this story that he stays in character and And and cast spells on people on set and that's why they don't like him You're all caught up You should be working for I don't know tmz or fandom wire or whatever they do Oh my goodness Well, yeah Well, paparazzi we went out today. We uh filmed this guy Uh getting out of his car. It looks like he's got dry cleaning I don't know if he's famous or not. Who's this guy? He sure looks like he's having a a normal day But that'd be great go around just do paparazzi for just unsuspecting people in the wild People would be like why are you taking pictures? You would get attacked People would be like what are you doing? Apply paparazzi mentality to people who should have no business getting uh pursued like this Uh because they you know in fairness. Why not their lives might be uh interesting If we uh, you know put them under a microscope. Let's see It's true. Everybody's everybody probably has something interesting going on Yeah And especially if you like microscopes and looking at things through microscopes, I mean Makes everything interesting Let's take that little thing and blow it up really big and took you're lucky at it Yeah Blair you look like you're tired I'm melting. Okay. You're melting and you just didn't have important things to do I gotta I gotta I gotta go. Yes. Oh my pillow real quick. Oh now you oh great. Now. We've got a my pillow salesperson Oh, I love the frog mouth. Yeah That is so much better of a pillow than I've seen hawked on other shows elsewhere. I must say Yeah, you did a really good job. It's tawny frog mouth pillow sleeping time now. Yes He's in the shop. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Zillow. Zillow. Zillow Nope, not zillow. That's where you buy a house I'm tired too. Zazzle. Zazzle. Don't go to zillow to look for twist merchandise because you're not gonna work Yeah You're like, what did I charge for 1.6 million dollars last Last night while I was doing my late night shopping Oh, if you're gonna do late night shopping especially after drinking go check out dr. Justin's not a real doctor supplements question mark Yeah on the online pharmacy question mark dot com Which doesn't hold it might be a thing don't actually go there. It could be a thing I don't even know you throw out a thing like that. You think it's a joke and then you find out. Oh, gosh I just sent somebody to some A real scam site. Okay. Say good night Blair Good night Blair. Say good morning, Justin. Good morning, Justin Good night Kiki Good night, everyone. Thank you for joining us once again for another episode of this week in science Can't wait to see you next week. Stay safe. Stay healthy and stay curious


Yanis asks, how am I sure that a private key is generated at random? This is a really good question, Yanis, because it is actually fairly difficult to evaluate randomness. In terms of generating random keys, you have to trust that the software and the device you are using, that software is doing the necessary things to generate good quality entropy, good quality randomness for your keys. For example, hardware wallets have built-in random number generators. Your operating system has a built-in secure random number generator, and if your software running on your computer uses it correctly, then that will be high quality randomness. Ultimately, there is an element of trust there. However, you can actually generate seeds and keys on your own by using natural randomness. This is an exercise more for those who are either extremely paranoid or just want to see how this works. But effectively, you can use playing cards, dice, or other things like that in order to generate a private key. A private key is just a number. That applies also to generating a seed for a hierarchical deterministic wallet. You can do that in terms of generating the entropy for 256 bits by flipping a coin 256 times, and writing down 0, 1 for heads and tails. Basically, you have your private seed entropy, 256 bits of randomness. Stephen asks, is there a risk that someone, such as the developer of the wallet application, can access the private key and therefore steal the cryptocurrency stored on a mobile wallet? Steve, absolutely. Yes, and this has happened numerous times. Not only have we seen a number of rogue mobile wallets being introduced on different platforms, we have seen this happen repeatedly. For example, people will upload fake versions of popular mobile wallets onto application stores, such as Google Play or iTunes, and then users will inadvertently download the fake one instead of the real one. We have also seen a couple of occasions where an account has been compromised and an update to a real wallet or other application has been uploaded that contains Trojan software that compromises a mobile or desktop computer and steals cryptocurrency keys. Of course, there is a possibility that the developer themselves may do this, although the developers of most mobile wallets are interested in building a good product rather than a Trojan horse. They would get caught pretty soon. Many of the reliable wallets have been around for quite a while. It is important that you are very careful when installing software on any device that has cryptocurrency keys on it. To be very careful what software you install, that you are very sure that that software is good, and that you minimize your exposure to attacks. For example, the browser I use on my desktop in order to do cryptocurrency transactions, even though I am using a hardware wallet at the time, is a different browser than the one I use for daily browsing on the web. It has only one or two extensions, mostly security extensions and plugins in the browser that block scripts and things like that, in order to harden that browser. The reason I do that is because, while my keys are secure on a hardware wallet, I am still concerned about the possibility of a Trojan or malware system compromising my clipboard and changing an address without me noticing. Of course, if I pay attention to my hardware wallet and compare the address I see on the screen of my hardware wallet, I will probably notice that because I always check, but to be careful, I use a different browser for one function than the other. I don't install extensions willy-nilly on my browser, I don't install applications willy-nilly on my phone, because I am always careful because of the possibility of compromise software, whether by the cryptocurrency wallet developers, which is unlikely but still possible, or more likely the developers of another application that has access to the operating system or pretends to be your mobile wallet. Again, this is why hardware wallets exist. This is why we keep the keys separate from the software that creates and signs transactions. Satender asks about vanity addresses. In your bookmastering bitcoin, there is a section around vanity addresses and how there are pools that can generate such addresses for some fee. I am surprised to not see any mention of how those private keys are secured, considering that they are generated for you by someone else. That is a great question, Satender. First of all, let's describe what vanity addresses are. You probably have seen that I have a vanity address, you can see it on my website. It is a bitcoin address that says OneAndraeus, so it is OneA-N-D-R-E-A-S, and then 30 other characters after that. How did that get generated? The simple answer of how it got generated is that each character in that sequence has a certain probability of showing up. For example, if I wanted to create an address that started with OneA, a simple example. There are 58 characters in the base 58 encoding of an address. In order to find an address that starts with OneA, all of them start with one, at least in that address format. Ignore the one. The second character is A. On average, if I just pick random private keys and calculate the address that corresponds to that private key, one out of every 58 private keys I create will have an address that starts with A, because there is a one-in-fifty-eight chance out of the 58 characters that that letter or number might be, that it will be an A. What about the N? Well, there is one out of 58 chances that the second letter is going to be an N. So 58 times 58 is the probability of me getting A-N as the first two characters. So I have to generate 58 times 58 keys before I happen to find one whose address by coincidence starts with A-N. For A-N-D, 58 times 58 times 58, A-N-D-R, 58 to the power of 4, A-N-D-R-E, power of 5, A-6, S-7. So I need to generate 58 to the seventh power, or 58 times itself, seven times private keys, before I happen to chance upon one, on average, that starts with one address. That is exactly what I did. Although I didn't do it, I used the pool. Why would you need a pool? Simply because the calculations you need to do to generate the Bitcoin private key, to then do an elliptic curve multiplication to find the public key, hash that twice, calculate the check sum by hashing again, and then producing a base-58 encoded address. So you can see if that address matches by coincidence the pattern that you want. That takes a fair amount of computation. I can do it on my laptop with a GPU. But what if instead there were 100 computers with four GPUs each, that were very powerful, and they could do that at a rate of billions and billions of keys per second? Well, I'd get to my 58 to the power of 7 much faster and do it much sooner, if I had access to that many computers. You can rent computers like that to do your calculation. So to Satinder's question, why is that secure? How is that secure if they generate the private key? Well, it has to do with a little trick of elliptic curve arithmetic that allows you to have the vanity pool, generate private keys, so as to produce a vanity address without knowing the full private key of that vanity address. And it relies on the simple fact that the sum of private keys produces a public key that is the sum of public keys. So if you take two private keys, A and B, and you produce the public key for A and the public key for B, then the sum of the two private keys, A plus B, and you take that private key, which is the sum, and you produce its public key, its public key is the sum of the two public keys of the two constituents. And that applies also to multiplication, so A times B produces a public key that is the factor of A and B. So the sum of private keys, the public key of the... Let me try this again. Pause, deep breath. The public key of the sum of two private keys is the same as the sum of the two public keys derived from those private keys. And what that means is that when you use a vanity pool, you have a private key, B, they have a private key, A. You calculate the public key, let's call that capital B, for your private key, B, that they don't know. And you give them this public key, capital B. They then calculate capital A plus capital B, the sum of the two public keys, and see if that address is a good vanity address. If they find one that matches your vanity address, that produces one address, what they know is that the sum of the two public keys, A plus B, produces this vanity address, but they only know one of the two private keys. They only know lower case A, which is the one they were calculating. They can iterate very quickly on that one private key, and then calculate the vanity address of the sum of the two public keys. When they find a result, they send you their part, their private key. And they don't know how to produce the sum of the private keys, because you have the other half. So you can take their private key and your private key and add them together, and now you have the private key for this vanity address. And they don't, because they only had half of it. So that's how you work a vanity pool, or how vanity pools work, in a way that they can iterate through billions of private keys, and produce a vanity address that you can use without them knowing the private key to that vanity address. I hope that was a good explanation. It's perhaps something that's easier to do with a whiteboard than it is just by speaking it.