We are here for another episode of This Week in Science. I hope that's what you are here for as well. It's time. Time for another week. Time for some more science. How are those microphones? How's that internet? Checkity check. Check one, two? Check. Check. Three, four. Somebody send me a check. Okay. That would be very nice. All right, let's make this happen. Are you all ready for this? Oh, check, check, check, check, check, check it. We're gonna do this show. Starting. Wait, no, there, aha, there we go. Now we're gonna do this show that we know and love as This Week in Science. Remember, this is the live podcast broadcast. Things may get edited for the end podcast. If you are watching this now, that means that, hey, you got the live unedited warts and all version. And welcome. We're so glad you're here. Let's begin it in a three, two, this is twist. This week in science episode number 903 recorded on Wednesday, November 30th, 2022. Does this wormhole go to Science Town? I'm Dr. Kiki and I certainly hope it does.  But first. What? Is that our show? Really? Yep. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The following program has been carefully designed to make you think we have chosen subjects, topics, and stories pulled from the current week of scientific publication. This content considered to be dangerous to beliefs. If you subscribe to any of the many thousands of common false beliefs, you may find that science regularly refutes things you thought to be true. This is not intentional, but cannot be avoided because God, the Illuminati, aliens, and Bigfoot all got together and planned it that way. That doesn't mean that flat earthers can't hang around. Though the flat mooners should really leave now. Seriously, even the astrology crowd don't believe you. And they all think that space is flat. Creationists continue to claim that the Naughty and the old arguments they consistently put forward show that to be somewhat true. The racists, the conspiracy theorists, the misogynists, the confusists, all base their ideas on false facts and uncritical thinking. Still, extreme caution is advised for anyone maintaining such thoughts, especially those that can be easily refuted by facts, as those beliefs are considered highly combustible and should not be placed in close proximity to children with matches or questions. And definitely such ideas safely hidden away from the open flame of critical inquiry that is this week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna look discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek out. Science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back to talk about, well, the past week in Science. So this week in Science, what was published? Yes, what did we find enjoyable? Yes, yes. Let's get into it. It was a nice last week. I hope there were many people taking time and thanks and lots of gratitude and everything. But we're back, time for business again. I have stories about holographic wormholes, cannabis contradictions, Wolfpack parasites and octopus nervous systems, as well as da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Bird jaws. Good one. It's not shark week, it's bird jaw week. Justin, what'd you bring? I have brought, how we can save the planet from global warming, cocaine, biotech, the emperor who never was, or was he? And new space minerals never before found on earth, found on earth. Woo-hoo, do the minerals, wear any clothes like the emperor? Okay, Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, I have the previously discussed death metal and also some poop. Sounds like a fantastic combination. This is a science show. Yeah. Okay, I'm just checking. Just needed to.  Quite a bit, yeah. Because poop science is important science. It really is. And in this case, the little hint it is goose poop science. So I don't think we've had goose poop science on the show before, so this is. Yeah, no, lots of birdies. Okay, let us dive in to this wonderful world of science. Yes, it might not sound like it could be science with all of these descriptions, but that's what it is. We're talking about science tonight as we do every week. And if you are not yet subscribed to the show, I implore you to head to your favorite podcast, outlet, platform, et cetera, and look for this week in science, otherwise known as twist. We are on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch every Wednesday night, live streaming at 8 p.m. Pacific time on Wednesdays and we are twist science on Twitch, Twitter, and Instagram. If all this is just too much, go to twist.org. That's our website where you can find us lots of other information. Okay, are you ready to dive into the one-dimensional quantum wormhole? Are you talking about the new Amen movie? No, I'm talking about science like this. Oh, got it, okay. This week's. Kang will not be arriving, got it, continue. No, Kang will not be arriving yet. But we might be working on a way to make that happen. Researchers publishing in nature this week out of a variety of different organizations. They have, it's a California Institute of Technology using Google's quantum computer, Sycamore, which is in Santa Barbara, California near the California Institute of Technology. They've created a quantum entanglement gravity experiment on a chip in which they have created a one-dimensional holographic wormhole. Huh? Wormhole, like wormholes, like Einstein- Where's it come out the other side though? It's only one dimensional, there's no other side. There's no other side. There's this, this experiment takes sides. I know, it opens up at that black hole that they made in the lab that you talked about a couple of weeks ago, right? So this is kind of like, right, that's right. A couple of weeks ago, they were doing the black holes. They started glowing and emitting the little, it's like, whoa, that's happening in a lab. This is totally different, different researchers, but wormholes. Yeah, so, okay, physics in labs, it's small scale, but it's getting wild and crazy here, people. Researchers have been trying to study the idea of the holographic universe and looking at the ideas that have been put forward by numerous physicists over a very, very, very long couple of decades, several decades. Initially, researchers, Einstein, Rosen, others have posited the idea that there are these places where physics breaks down, classical physics breaks down and you lose relativity and there is a quantum space where things kind of take over and particles go, what am I even? And that's inside of a singularity, a black hole, and that inside these black holes, there could be points that connect other points in space, single dimensional points. However, in the current view of our physical space, which is understood, if you wanna look up this idea of desitter space, desitter space is the idea that our universe has no end, it's infinite, it's expanding, it's not desitting still, it is degrowing. Anyway, researchers were like, hey, that doesn't quite work and then Gerard Tewft and several others were like, oh, look at this idea of anti-desitter space and this is the idea of a finite universe with a very finite surface from which information, bits, zeros and ones, could then be projected into the space inside of it, that's a holographic universe. Not like holograms from Star Wars, not like, help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope.  That's anti-desitter space, that's not our universe. Our universe is desitter space. So, okay, phew, anyway. Is it? Yes, our universe, this is, but, so now, these researchers are like, okay, we want to understand gravity, we like this idea of like, oh, the anti-desitter space, because we might be able to play with variables a bit. This anti-desitter space is just like different because it's just like anti, it's like anti-matter, it's a negative value instead of positive values, it's finite instead of infinite and it's a physical, spherical cow which physicists can go, oh, look, we can study physics now and so they're using quantum computers to do it. Enter Google's massive quantum computer and these researchers who decided to say, oh, look, we can take these sets of entangled particles and we can, you know, like we know we've talked about entanglement on the show before where you have a particle A that's over here and a particle B that's over someplace else and when particle A goes whoop-de-doo, particle B goes whoop-de-doo at the same time and if you change the way that that particle goes whoop-de-doo, then the other particle changes in a very similar manner. So entanglement, we know this is a thing, we know this happens and so these researchers were like, oh, let's take sets of entangled particles. So they had seven qubits that were entangled together and they were like, oh, look, all seven of them go whoop-de-doo at the same time and they're entangled bits on the other side go whoop-de-doo on the other side at the same time, look, they're entangled, that's awesome. Okay, and then they were like, let's put a weirdo eighth qubit on one side of this setup and so the eighth qubit goes in on the left side and then they shove it at the other set of entangled qubits with what they call a negative energy pulse. But it's basically like they're like, here, qubit, go be in here and the qubit goes into this already arranged entangled set of stuff and that arranged entangled set of stuff goes whoa, this is different and they change and so that change happens and then the qubit goes bloop and gets shot through to the other set of entangled stuff, pops out the other side, the entangled stuff, they're all that do in their entangled thing and what they found in this quantum setup, it's not a real wormhole, it's a holographic wormhole but it's a little tiny one-dimensional little spaghetti string. It's like they were like shoot, I'm shooting peas at the other side. They found this property that they didn't expect whatsoever which is kind of like the weird chaotification. Like if you crack an egg in real time, it cracks, it breaks, it goes bloop, you have an egg, you can scramble it, it's all chaotic, right? But it says if that weird eighth qubit got shoved in there, it went into one side of the wormhole, kind of got scrambled and then went, I'm not gonna be scrambled anymore and unscramble itself on the way out the other side, which is a hypothesized aspect of how wormholes work. Is this like the machine in Willy Wonka that's like the TV, right? That scrambles the little boy up and then he travels above everyone's head and then unscrambles on the other side of the room. That's basically what you're talking about. That is exactly what I'm talking about except quantum particles and qubits, yes. Okay, got it. I understand it perfectly now, thank you so much. Oh yeah, it's also the teleporter from Star Trek. Yes, yes, of course it is that too, you're right. It is a bit. And so this is the really fascinating part. So this is hypothetical. It's working based on this anti-decider space, which is not how our universe works. It's existing in a quantum computer on these superconducting computer chips. This is data that goes in one side, comes out another side. And so researchers are like, all right, this is really great. I'm glad you did this. It's not a real wormhole, even though physics suggests that wormholes should exist in our decider space, universe. This still isn't giving us what we need. But what it suggests is that they have actually started to see gravity. Like, not just, oh hey, gravity, but the force that is gravity in this synthetic situation that they've created. But not in our, it's a spherical cow. It's still not this universe. There's a lot of questions that still need to be answered. It's still very basic in how it's working, but it worked. And so, yeah. Wormhole, it's very tiny.  We exist in a four dimensional universe of space time and there's a whole bunch of other factors that are probably involved, but this is fascinating. Yeah. So, will quantum computers lead us to have transporters? Wormholes? I mean, or other kind of philosophical questions. If in the real world, this kind of like movement of one state to another entangled state happens. Like, is this what's happening in every single moment as we move from place to place?  I don't know. This is me not, I've had too much caffeine today. Or does this help explain dark matter? Does it? Right, is it in that realm? I mean... Because I feel like in a lot of ways our understanding of dark matter is still like, this is the part of the equation that doesn't make sense, so we're gonna call this dark matter. Yeah. So, maybe it's in this other dimension or universe. Yeah, so this is kind of like, yeah, it's like a parallel universe, this weird quantum experiment that happened. But the ideas that they're working on and how they're working on them are certain to lead us to other places. The thing I'm having a hard time reconciling my brain is, is this a simulation or is this a physical electron that has moved somewhere? Like, what moved exactly with this quantum particle or is it a simulated particle? Because at some point, then I'm like, is this a model or is this something that was actually data that moved when you're calling it data that moved? Like, ah, yes, still. It's kind of a mix of the two of them. Mm, I don't know. Because it is a model, but you're actually dealing with magnetic forces and electrical charges in the process of creating, doing the experiment and creating the data. So, and when it comes down to it, like what we're talking about is zeros and ones. We're talking about information spread. Well, if it's a quantum computer, it's not even just zeros and ones. So that's the thing. It's like, then it's like, well, like if your data is the experiment and it's on a computer and it's a quantum computer at that, then there's some point when I can't tell the difference between, this is just a program we wrote. The answer is 42. And this is a physical thing that just happened in the universe that's amazing. Like, it's starting to get to the crossroads of like, I don't know if you just like, if this is, you just invented Pong on a quantum computer or unlock the mystery of the universe. Like I can't tell. Quantum Pong, I love it. Quantum Pong. Yeah, wormhole Pong. Yeah, I mean, I think that is a big question. And that is, that's where the research still has to lead us. And so there are more questions than there are answers at this point in time. And I love the New York Times headline for this article, which is something about physicists create the first crappiest wormhole. Or, you know, so, or not crap, from the end. The thing I do find very fascinating though, because you mentioned that they gave some sort of an insight into how gravity works, I guess. And that, that's sort of exciting because the thing that we have to do to figure out what gravity is is really limit anything's ability to move or travel anywhere and see how it moves. See how it moves through a finite area of space because that's down at that level of things moving in spaces where gravity is eventually going to be unlocked. And it's something that we still haven't truly understood or seen properly. So it is, it is pretty interesting. It is, I want to, I still want to find out of. That's like the big, I think the big plus to studying this anti-decider space because they can, it's a finite universe. They can control variables, but ours is not, as far as we know, a holographic universe because it's a big fuzzy edge to be projecting all this stuff in here. So. I don't know, I think Susskin isn't, he's like.  Yeah, and I highly recommend. I would follow, whatever Susskin says. He's publishing on this stuff. Yes, he's publishing on this stuff. He is involved in this research. So he is a big part of this. And there's a, we're going to link to an article from Quantum Magazine, which they have created a wonderful video that's about 20 minutes long that explains a lot of this. And so I, if you want to spend about 20 minutes digging in, we'll link to that in our show notes so that you can have, you can dive into the wormhole, wormhole a little bit more. In the same way that a hundred years later, Einstein is still being proven to be correct over and over again. I have a feeling Susskin is going to be the same, have the same longevity of his ideas. I think we're going to be discovering. Yeah, I think so. We're going to be referring back to Susskin. Susskin. For the rest of this century, in terms of, oh gosh, he actually had things figured.  Yeah, one of the interesting side notes brought up in the Quantum Magazine article is that Einstein and Rosen were actually working on like black holes and the idea of the singularity and all this stuff separately from the Quantum ideas. And they never put the two together. They just did not think about like Quantum stuff happening in the black, and so it's very interesting that it takes decades for the two together. Yeah, and then when it did get brought up, then they discovered entangled particles and were like, ah, can't be right. Yeah, exactly. They discovered the entangled particles and did not put it together with black holes, which I think that is very interesting. It also tried to dismiss it like, yeah, that means it can't be right. Yeah, we're brilliant, we came up with this. Can't possibly be true. Okay, tell us how we're going to save the earth now. Now that we have wormholes. Oh yeah, because we're going to need to do that if we want to be around long enough to see how these ideas pan out. In case you haven't noticed, there's a lot of carbon in the atmosphere and not a lot that's being done about it other than we're experiencing global warming is what we're doing about it so far. World governments have pledged to plant trees to help offset carbons that they produce. They have committed to providing land for the purpose of planting those trees at least the land. By one study's estimate, governments have collectively promised land that when added up would be 30% larger than the continent of Europe or 30%-ish larger than the entire territory of the United States. When spread out across the world, though, not just putting it all in one way and mass, you'd have to leave out, of course, the places where there's already forests, deserts, high mountain tops, other places trees don't grow. The plan would require using 50% of existing farmland to meet those commitments, which would immediately lead to global famine, not to mention the necessity of finding an arborist or a local plant store of some sort that had two trillion tree seedlings ready to plant. Just lying around, I got two trillion trees here and nobody came looking for them before, but now, okay, so what's a world to do? Turns out there's a place where we could grow the forests we need without the downside of mass starvation. Where can we put the forests? The ocean. According to an international research team led by Michael Huchella of the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, we could begin seeding the oceans with engineered fertilizer particles in near ocean plankton. The goal would be to feed phytoplankton, these microscopic plants that are a very big part of the ocean's ecosystem. We could feed them, encourage them to grow, and by growing, they would naturally take up carbon dioxide. This analysis is in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. This is quoting Huchella, the idea is to augment existing processes. Humans have fertilized, we can fertilize the oceans responsibly. Just in using fertilizing the ocean, what causes red tide and algal growth? Yeah, so the way we do it right now is rather unintentional, I guess in a sense. It's just runoff, right? So we put a lot of fertilizer on that. Normally the ocean gets its fertilizer from land and water runoff. We're adding a tremendous amount of fertilizer to the land and now the runoff is encouraging explosions of growth off of the coasts, absolutely right. So what this would do is take that same principle, but intentionally place it in places where phytoplankton can better use it. And so what they would do is they take it up and then when they are done, it drops to the bottom. Basically it's a carbon sink where it can be removed and out of the atmosphere sequestered, if you will, for thousands of years. So it's a natural process phytoplankton already do. Researchers say we could just speed it up. Their analysis, they looked at 123 published studies that showed that numerous non-toxic metal oxygen materials could safely enhance plankton growth, stability, earth abundance of these minerals, ease of creation of the materials. They looked at all this stuff. They also did some feasibility study in terms of price-wise. The price part, they realized that they could just use sort of raw materials that would be less efficient, a little bit more expensive to make the engineered version that was specific, but that would be significantly more effective, because this is different ocean areas are going would need different sort of formulations to be most effective. So there's a little bit of knowing the waters that you're putting it into. Sometimes it needs to be more iron rich. Some places it could be more silicon would be required. But yeah, after all, the point is time is not on our side. So at some point when we're talking about drastic actions, this might be it. This is a natural process already. Hey, more phytoplankton in the ocean. I'm sure that, you know, there's a lot of, what fish are left out there. I probably enjoy that. And we've over promised the land. We've over, the governments are using offsets to get to a goal that they're writing checks that their planet can't cash already. So. This bothers me. It bothers you how so. Do go on. Reason that I would like to see some proof of concept that this is not going to completely ruin ocean food webs that are already stretched to their breaking point by things like climate change. I mean, I think that's the thing that Justin was like briefly, he briefly stated the researchers and said that if we could locally target specific solutions that are specific to the needs of particular areas, then perhaps we could keep from creating red tides, toxic algal blooms, too much phytoplankton, anoxic dead zones. But that is, that's the rub, right? Do we have that information? Are we really capable of controlling our input into such a big open system like the ocean and knowing what's gonna come out? I mean, we've tried biological control in Australia and that hasn't gone very well. So. That's what I'm saying is we're under the assumption that the artificially boosted in growth phytoplankton in the ocean is not going to impact the food web in a negative way. First of all, by maybe they're just being too much phytoplankton. Yeah. Or it being suddenly extremely carbon-rich phytoplankton because it's absorbing so much carbon dioxide. How's that going to impact the food web? So here's my sort of brief rebuttal to that. We're already impacting all of those things. True, exactly. We've already done it. True. So the idea that we don't wanna mess with nature is a great one and I 100% agree with you. But it's too late. I'm saying we've already messed with it so much. That's what I'm saying. Is that it has been messed with to the degree that marine ecosystems are hanging by a thread. Can we fix it? So trying to drastically change the balance within a food web in an already stressed system kind of scares me. That's all I'm saying. Yeah. And you should be scared. You should be scared. But I don't know. It sounds like more fish food to me. So I think that would probably be all right. Right, but then do you get more fish of certain species that then mess up the food web in another way because there's too many of one kind of fish that eats phytoplankton? Well, then you have to have the really big marketing campaign to get everyone to eat that fish instead of things like salmon and other ecologically important fish. And then you're like, great.  Let's see, okay, they're not jelly fish. You really do want to eat them. Good marketing campaigns are here. But the fish right now, the fish right now are moving. Yeah, they are. So they're already like, the whole like, we don't want to impact the biome. The biome is going away. The biome and its population is moving. It's changing already. So this is an effort that could, that when you're talking about fixing global warming, you're talking about at least maintaining those biomes so otherwise the fish are going to move. They're heading to colder waters or they're going down further to get more oxygen because the certification, like the whole ocean is all at risk. Yeah, it's the case of, you know, have we, you know, if we don't try something to make it better, is it going to be worse or do we just... And you can make a measurement on land too, like growing all those trees, you know, putting two trillion trees somewhere is going to be a major impact as well on land. This just gives us, you know, 70, something percent of the planet is covered by water. It gives us an option to tackle. And you're not talking about doing the whole ocean. That's a big ocean, you know. It's all connected though, is the thing. It's always on land too, it's connected everywhere. Yeah, I agree, I agree. And right now that connection is global warming. That connection is people. And since we're talking about people right now, let's talk about some close relatives, Blair. Yes. You know how sometimes you look like your relatives and sometimes the resemblance is closer than other times, whether you want to admit it or not. Just visually you can kind of go like, is that your brother or is that your mom? Cause you kind of look, catch the nose. Oh, you've got your mother's eyes. Yeah, exactly, yeah. And so a study from University of St. Andrews wanted to see if the same was true for chimps. They wanted to see if wild chimpanzees looked like they're family members. And if there were particular ways that relationships were easier to detect, like at particular ages or particular relationships like mother or daughter or father, son or father, you know, or any of these things. And so what they did is they set up an online game that people could play as part of a community science effort to crowdsource a dataset. Turns out people really liked playing a game where they got to pick out pictures of chimps and decide who was related to who. Over 5,000 people participated. They tried their skills at matching photos of 180 wild chimps. They had to try to spot the mother, father, or half siblings. And this is all because of course you can't ask a chimpanzee if they recognize each other. So instead they were trying to use this dataset and humans to see if they could make a relationship guess as a human because surely if we could do it then the chimps could do it. And so they were trying to see if based on kind of looking similar and humans being able to recognize those similarities if that was an advertising of relatedness. If chimpanzees were benefiting by looking like their relative. So this is kind of, this is looking at kind of a different side of the coin. So the first is just like, you look like your relatives because you're related to them. End of story. You have the same genes therefore they express in the same way and that's why you look the same. Seems like the obvious reason. However, is there an evolutionary benefit to looking like your relatives and therefore do certain unique characteristics get expressed more to identify familial relationships among us, among chimps, among other animals. They found that humans can detect family relationships and chimps at around 30% accuracy. Not great. That's worse than chance. Like significantly worse than chance. But it's, but if you, hang on though. If I'm looking at the screen here, I've got one chimp that I'm assuming is the one you got to find the relative for up top and then four to choose from below. So it's better than chance if chance would say that 25% would just be the chance. So it's a little bit better than chance. But what's interesting is what you do then with data that doesn't look good is you try to identify specific subsets to see if there's specific subsets that humans are really good at recognizing. And that is that once chimpanzees start to get older, it's actually a lot easier to tell relatives in kind of the adult faces. Adult chimpanzee family pairs were easy to recognize. And in that case, it might be really helpful because it might, this is a huge leap. I am recognizing that it might help them prevent inbreeding. You look like my relative, I am not going to breed with you. A few families in particular in the study shared a lot of distinctive characteristics that made them easy to spot. So they're the very specific familial lines that were really well-defined according to us. And this is all according to us. And they also found that male chimpanzees were harder to match to their parents or siblings when they were young, but parents and children, especially fathers to children. So once those boy chimps became fathers, they were adults, they were easy to match to their children. Got it. Yes. So they posit, the researchers suggest that this is because very easy to tell who your mother is. She gives birth and she raises the baby. But fathers often don't show a lot of direct connection when the babies are very young in chimps society. So paternity is harder to define and is more uncertain. So also showing paternity as a baby might be risky because there might be more infanticide. If you're not mine, I'm going to get rid of you. So I can have more of mine. This is very common, right? In the animal kingdom. So if you can hide that to survive to adulthood, that would be great. And then once you're older, it's better for young males to be able to form alliances and again to prevent inbreeding. So this is all to say, that's what we figured out by looking at them. But does that top chimp baby know what he looks like? And therefore can he recognize who looks like him? Because they don't have mirrors. So how does that kind of leap happen? Yeah. So is there something that helps them to piece together?  And of course all of that would not be a conscious decision. It would be kind of a signal that causes a response.  I'm not gonna breed with you.  I'm going to help you out. I would like to see this experiment done with chimpanzees. I mean, we know that we can train chimpanzees to use computers, touch screens, do eye tracking experiments.  You get a fruit loop when you identify your brother, your cousin, et cetera, right? This is, you start with family groups and then you train them on the basic people. Chimpanzees they know and then spread it out further. I think this need to really understand if this is how they're thinking. It needs to be a chimpanzee experiment. Yeah, no one, absolutely, you're totally right. And as Fada's bringing up pheromones, scent, there are so many other signals. Sound of voice. Manorisms. It's very interesting. I think it's very interesting, but like you said, where are the mirrors? How do they know? So, how indeed. So, I think it's an interesting example of citizen science. I think it is very cool to see how how the appearance of chimps is inherited and how you can see very clear family lines in certain groups. But beyond that, I find it very hard to draw any conclusions and more research is needed. More research, we love it. Always more research. But yeah, when did we start to do that? When did we get mirrors? And when did that become important?  Well, so part of that didn't require a mirror. No, because we work with tribes. Chimpanzees also work around in small tribes and yeah. Chimpanzees do this too. But it's how we need a mirror, which you need as a friend. You need a friend to come and pluck the twigs out of your hair.  You gotta pull those out, whatever it is. You know, we groomed each other. So, I don't know. I think it looks have probably been important longer than people could possibly imagine. There's all sorts of decoration and adornment going on throughout even pre-current modern human society in humans. And I'm sure those friends are also acting as the really good chimpanzee wingman to help you not give in to the chimpanzee beer goggles. But anyway, let's move on to cannabis. So, from chimpanzees. No cannabis goggles, right? No cannabis goggles. One of the things that we have talked about a lot on the show related to cannabis is the potential for cannabis and cannabinoid compounds to be used, cannabis-derived compounds, to be used to treat pain. And it would be wonderful to be able to use something other than opioids, something other than NSAIDs, things that actually, that are causing lots of physical and psychological and mortality issues around the world. So, people have been looking at cannabis and cannabis-derived products. And a new study was just published in the journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA. They looked at the results of randomized, controlled trials in which cannabis was compared with a placebo for the treatment of clinical pain. They were only able to look at about 20 studies that involved about 1,500 people altogether because of the way that they limited their studies, specifically trying to look for specific endpoints like change in pain intensity before treatment, after treatment, the use of control groups, randomization, and full random control. They did find that the majority of the studies participants were female between the ages of 33 and 62. And pretty much it was all Western countries that were involved. The cannabinoid products were administered a whole bunch of different ways, but their meta-analysis determined and actually corroborated another meta-analysis from 2021 that found that the cannabis compounds are really not any better than placebo. So they also, in this study, and this is the really interesting aspect of it, they looked at the way these studies were covered by the media and academic journals and then tried to relate that, correlate it, obviously to the therapeutic effects that participants reported. And they were able to show that there are a lot of examples of relationships between treatment expectations and placebo responses in their article that they've written up about their work and the conversation. They say we cannot say with 100% certainty that media coverage is responsible for the high placebo response observed in our review, but given placebos were shown to be just as good as cannabis for managing pain, our results showed just how important it is to think about the placebo effect and how it can be influenced by external factors. Like the media, hello, yes, us. So- Not us though. We follow data. Totally, totally. Yeah, but I think it's, yeah, go ahead, Justin. Well, okay, so I don't know. Is it really been pushed forward as a pain relief alternative to some extent? But- Yeah. Is it? I've never heard of CBD as a pain relief. I've never, I've heard of CBD is- Oh yeah, there's CBD ointment for arthritis. There's CBD ointment for joint pain. So- So one of the things, and this might be why they had to limit their study, or not why they decided to necessarily, but why that is because the CBD has been shown to reduce anxiety. Now, that crossroads of pain isolated by itself, do you still feel this discomfort and associated anxiety or constant thinking of that pain? If those two things have been separated, then yeah, I could see, you could do that with a lot of things though, if you're very narrowly limiting. But yeah, I never thought of, I've never personally thought of CBD as a pain relief medicine. I know some people who have- Yeah, it's a big part of the market, yeah. But I know people who have, and again, this is anecdotal, I know people who swear by it for this reason. But it occurs to me that if you're just being able to lower your anxiety around that pain, then you may still feel the pain, but if you don't have the associated anxiety, that's a huge relief. So, I don't know. I think that's an interesting point, is the difference between pain relief and just being able to forget that you have pain. Those are very different things. Keep your mind off of it, yeah. Yeah, because you know, after mine had an experience with marijuana and pain relief, and it does not relieve pain, but it sure made it tolerable in the moment, you know? And so, this gets at the psychological aspect of pain. We talk about different people having higher or lower pain tolerances. Some of this is genetic. Some of it is, a lot of it is experiential, and a lot of it is related to things like anxiety, fear, and other negative emotions that can exacerbate whatever those painful feelings are. So, there is something to be said for that psychological aspect. And then second, I wanna say also, placebo, if it is working in some extent, if the placebo is as good as an NSAID, if the placebo is doing some amount of work to reduce your pain, it's working. To sub-degree. So, you know, this is the debate about placebos, right? It's not necessarily a drug or a medication, but it's working. So. Yeah, and if it's not hurting you, if it's not hurting your liver, if you're not spending your life savings on it, and maybe it's not so bad. Life savings, like insulin? Anyway, anyway. Yeah. Here's another interesting thing though, opioids. People who have used opioids for chronic pain, and this is how a lot of how the opioid epidemic happened is because there was strengths of opioids that were only supposed to be prescribed for short-term pain relief, that were being started to be prescribed long-term. And my understanding is that the pain is still there. It's not like the opioid. You just don't care about it. Also, it takes away the pain. You just don't, yeah.  And you know, the NFL players, a lot of them had a lot of problems with opioids because the NFL, American football players, break their bodies during the sport. And so it was, yeah, and it was one of some guys who was a professional athlete, probably five years ago, that now uses crutches to go up and downstairs and talking about how the pain is always there and the opioids didn't take it away. They just made it tolerable, like I think Blair was saying. And there have been studies, I remember Justin reporting a while back on a study in which cannabinoids were actually being used by psychiatrists as a way to transfer people off of opioids. So, and they were being used successfully. So there are potentially benefits, but whether or not they actually work for pain relief, stopping pain, getting rid of pain, that is the evidence is not in its favor, but like we've talked about placebo, psychology, there are other potentially very positive aspects. I also, I wanna tag one more thing on, which is that sometimes you have a physician that tells you to take a pain reliever, not just to relieve pain, sometimes it's a pain reliever that's an anti-inflammatory, sometimes it's a pain reliever that's a blood thinner. And so it's important to know why you're being prescribed that stuff. So if you decide, no, no, no, I'm gonna do this cannabis rub instead, that can be dangerous if your pain reliever is resolving another issue at the same time. Yeah. But if it works, do it. Even if it's a placebo. Not a doctor. Even if it's a placebo effect.  If you're talking about pain relief, if you're talking about pain relief, if you're doing something that turns out that somebody's saying is a placebo, but it's been working for you, don't listen to them. As long as it's not dangerous. As long as it's not dangerous. That's the problem. That's the problem with placebos in research is that. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying. Right, that's what I said earlier. I'm just saying we should be talking to our doctors and we should be doing things like Blair said that are not hurting us. As long as it's good. Okay, let's talk about cocaine now. Oh, great. That's not a placebo. Wow, look at that gateway. Look at that gateway story right there. I know, I timed it perfectly. Published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences working with a colleague from the UK had developed a way to synthesize cocaine using a tobacco plant. So we're gonna hit all of the things people shouldn't be doing. Scientists have long been looking for a way to produce cocaine in the lab. They're like, oh, we could just do that when you can quit this lab job tomorrow. Researchers have now figured out the biochemistry of the plant and have synthesized small amounts of cocaine by genetically engineering a type of tobacco plant to produce it in its... Which is kind of, I guess, a benefit. You've got one plant that's apparently pretty labor-intensive and grows in a certain climate. Now you can grow in a completely different climate and you can have the fields of Virginia filled with coca plants. Well, maybe not. So they got a very little amount, not enough to use this for industrial purposes. But it is a proof of concept that they could find another way of producing. And in studying this, though, they discovered that the cocaine that winds up in the leaves is not produced by chemical elements in the plant converting compounds that have been thought. They found that is instead produced by just two enzymes. So it's two enzymes with some additional systems from a substance that's also produced in the plants called ornithine, which is similar to the precursor in the coca plant. Researchers note that their efforts were focused on synthesizing cocaine to produce it for use in medical applications, such as pain control, which is sort of interesting because we got all the lidocaine, novocaine, all the other canes. But my understanding is those were all synthetic. From cocaine. All right, no, no, I thought they weren't derived. I thought they were synthesized separately. But maybe I'm wrong. Oh, yeah, so cocaine was discovered, but then all these others, not cocaine, biosimilars, like these other chemical, yeah, biosimilar compounds, yeah, were developed for the research. They say here, also notably, the process they use to produce the cocaine in tobacco plants is far too technical for use by criminals determined to produce the drug illegally. That statement right there is ridiculous. That is the most ridiculous, like, oh yeah, they would have to have a lab somewhere. You know, they have the money to put into some research equipment. There's no way they could pull that off those criminals. Yeah, right. Team also notes that the amount of cocaine they can produce.  Maybe you too can create your own painkillers. So here's the thing.  So there's like, oh, more research. We gotta see what else we can do. Why do you have, skip the plant. You have an end, you have two enzymes and a precursor. Skip the plant altogether. Or maybe just use it for precursor because now you can get yeast or bacillus or something to produce these enzymes. You put those in a bioreactor and just make a ton of enzyme, slap it into another bioreactor full of precursor and boom, industrial scale synthesized cocaine for the mass, for medical use. The mass in medical use, that was nicely said. Yeah, a lot of people need medical use of things. Yes. It seems like that, like two enzymes is a very, and one precursor, if that's the formula, if that's the arrangement, that's not something that really needs a plant anymore at that point.  And the enzymes, the way the enzymes work, they're a catalyst. So they're gonna do a one to a thousand work ratio on this stuff and conversion. I think they should probably have, you know, thought this whole, the criminals could never figure it out thing through. Because maybe they just don't know, maybe these resources just don't. Yeah, they're probably still missing a few pieces. I mean, from this, it said that there's this, key biosynthetic step for the skeleton of this intermediary. And it was unknown. And now they found these two enzymes, and oh, look, it does this. And this works in the nicotiniana. Will it work the same in yeast? We don't know, probably. But, you know, perhaps the biological pathways are still not fully fleshed out. And there still needs to be some, I mean, like they said, they didn't make very much in these plants. They have a very extensive process, but you're also talking about a bioengineered plant is already the hurdle. Like, if you have a mechanism and you can remove the plant from it, then it's the biotech, bioreactors could be producing tremendous volumes of this much needed medical, but do we need it medically?  It is still used, actually, yes. You have to make Coca-Cola, no. No. No, it is still used around the world for various medical and veterinary techniques, but like you said, there are these other biosimilar synthetics that are not as addictive, not as dangerous, that are used for different uses, but they're not as good all the time. So to be able to have without having to grow the coca plant, the coca leaves, or having to rely on drug busts or whatever, these medical and research purposes need very, very pure substances. And so where do you get it? How do you have it ethically? How do you have large enough substances, large enough amounts of it to be useful? Yeah, anyway, lots of reasons. But oh, we were talking a bit about ecosystems and how one change in one place, downstream effects, butterfly effect. Woo, what happened elsewhere? Our favorite parasite potentially has one of these butterfly effects, except in wolves. T. gondii, toxoplasmosis, which is known to infect lots of cats. We've talked, even I think it was last week, about cats being the host of these wonderful parasites and in cats, it's like, whoop, goes right out. They eat the rats, the mice, the poop, whatever, it goes, passes out in the cat poop and then the mice and the rats and everything. Anyway, nice life cycle. People, seals, California seals off the coast in California, when they're found distressed, almost always have T. gondii. When they fail to be able to eat. Here, here, here, great. It's every five stalk, half of humans. But what do wolves also eat? Rodents. Mice, lots of them. No, the coyotes in my neighborhood eat the cats. Oh, got it, got it, okay. But wolves eat lots of rodents and so wolves are also very, very likely to be infected with toxoplasma gondii. And this recent study published has determined based on 26 years worth of wolf behavioral data that if a wolf is infected with T. gondii, it is 46 times more likely to become the pack leader. Looking at the behavior of the infected pack leaders and the role of these entire packs in ecosystems, the researchers have gone on to suggest that it leads to changes in the wolf pack behavior as a whole. So not just is the leader of the pack more likely to be infected with T. gondii, it's behavior is different and that's why it's more likely to be the alpha. Influences the others downward in the hierarchy. And so the researchers have said this behavioral consequence means that infected wolves are 11 times more likely to disperse from their pack into new territory. Infected males had a 50% probability of leaving their pack within six months compared with more typical 21 months. Females had a higher chance of leaving their pack at a faster rate and then becoming pack leaders. This leads to heightened aggression, heightened dominance, which is great for a pack leader, but then it can lead to congenital T. gondii transmission passed from mother to offspring. And so then you can have wolf packs that are congenitally potentially more aggressive, more dominant acting and these aggressive domineering pack leaders have a big effect on the group decisions. So okay, so this whole time I was wondering, what is the benefit to T. gondii, right? And so you just spelled it out. So first of all, if you send the wolves away, you're spreading the parasite, great, A-plus. But the other one is the alpha bothers the most babies, right? Yes, yes. And then they are propagating the parasite in their babies. So that's also a benefit. The alpha female, the alpha male, the alpha female. But he just said it's congenital. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, hang on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait a sec, wait, let's clarify because this runs counter to my understanding of how T. gondii operates completely. So the infected wolf is not going to pass the parasite out to anywhere because the gamite cells do not turn into eggs and it does not reproduce and it does not become. That's not what this is saying. And this, in this, what they have determined is that females are likely to pass it on congenitally to their offspring. Aggressive behavior or the. The T. gondii infection. So these are mammals, right? So the babies are in there, the bloodstream, the parasite is probably getting in through the placenta somehow. Or potentially maybe it's after birth with the milk supply.  But they're not going to transmit it, even that pup isn't going to transmit it to the rest of another pack. That does not happen.  And so it spreads and yes. The part of this that is, okay, part of this is very interesting. In human males, infection has been associated with novelty seeking. Yes. And so it's sort of interesting that some of these wolves are like, huh, you know, I wonder what's over on the other mountain side. I'm going to go wander over there. Oh, hey, look, there's other wolves. And then I wonder if it's not, I'm really questioning whether the T. gondii infection is at all influencing aggressive behavior in these wolves. Or, so once you're in a pack, there's a hierarchy that is fiercely enforced. There's a pack leader and then there's all subservient wolves after that basically. So the T. gondii, the T. gondii pack, T. gondii wolves go, ah, I'm more aggressive and they become the pack leader because they fight everybody and then they're like, I'm a winner. No, I thought they left and found a new pack. And then become the pack leader. Well, wait, but if you leave that pack, you are no longer- But they're leaving their ancestral pack. They're leaving when they grow up. They're leaving earlier and then they are becoming the leader of the new pack that they have found. Which makes sense. Because once you're away from your hierarchy, you get to start again and try to be top. So I kind of just, I don't know. It's interesting that they've seen this aggressive thing. I wonder if that's just normal, I don't know. Wolf behavior, except that they're being novelty seeking and heading out earlier. But just another reason to get rid of cats. Well, in this case, it's not cat cats, it's cougars. And this is where, yeah, so this is where cougar territories overlap with wolf territories. And that's the tea Gandhi I spread is the wild feline of the ancestral form that is involved in this. So, you know, go ahead, get rid of all the cats, Justin. Do what you do. How about the big cats? Yeah, okay. Well, you tell me there's really no domestic cats. There's probably herds of domestic cats. I still think it's the domestic cats. Herds? Herds of domestic cats. What do you call a herd of cats? How'd you ever heard of people saying, oh, it's like herding cats? A pride, a pride. They don't do that. That's why that phrase is a thing. Okay, but the bottom line is this is an interesting ecological study showing how a small microscopic parasitic creature can have not only individual consequences in behavior, but how those individual behavioral consequences can also go on to influence entire populations. So. That's the thing. It's funny that there's all these wolf pack leaders out there, really at their core, they're cat people. They've been infected with the tea Gandhi I. Oh my, oh my. I hope that we are the leader of the science pack in your world. This is this week in science. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode full of science and fun. And this has been a great, great fun time so far. I know we've got more fun times to come, but you know, let me just remind you right now that this is our annual time to be selling this week in science calendars. So if you have not been over to twist.org, you can click, oh, let me show you Blair right now. You can click on, you can go to twist.org. We have a couple of things you can click on the Zazzle link with the big picture of the cover art that Blair's come up with. And that will take you to Zazzle where you can purchase a printed calendar for 2023. And it's got beautiful, it's wonderful. The only thing is it just doesn't have all of our science holidays. Unfortunately, if you're interested in those science holidays, and that's what really gets you going. If you're in another country and the mailing prices are getting to you, you can alternatively purchase the 2023 twist calendar as a digital PDF download and print it yourself. That has all the art, high quality CMYK, beautiful PDF with all of our science holidays. And you can print it up yourself at any place that prints things. You can get it done as a calendar. You can print it on your printer. You can do all the things. It's beautiful Blair. I love your calendar. Thank you. I hope you're welcome. It's Legos everybody, Lego animals. And it's gorgeous. And I just can't wait to put mine on my wall in 2023. I hope the same for you. All right. Oh Blair, you're up on the screen right now. So I think I'm just gonna leave you right there because yeah, this is this week in science. And we're gonna come back right now to Blair's Animal Corner with Blair. That's all. Buy a pet, mill a pet, no pet at all. If you wanna hear about this animal, she's your girl. Except for giant pandas and squirrels. What you got, Blair? Oh my gosh. So what, Kiki? What do you think? What, what? An annoyed bat sounds like. I'm making a really high pitched sound right now that you can't hear. Got it. You're exactly wrong. Oh. In fact, annoyed bats sound more like death metal singers or tube and throat singers. What? Extremely low. This is figured out by extracting, mounting and filming larynxes from Dal Benton's bats and applying airflow to mimic natural breathing. High-speed videos showed vocal membranes and false vocal cords vibrating at different frequencies. They rolled to find the extremes of possibility in these bat throats and found that the lowest to highest was seven octaves. Most mammals have a range of three to four. We have generally three. If you're looking at Rykeri or Prince, they have four or five, but there's only a few humans that kind of reach that threshold. So mostly we're looking at three octaves for us, but they have seven. Whoa. And so this is a video of them looking at kind of forcing that air through the larynx. So what they found was that specifically these growling sounds are produced when bats fly in or out from a densely packed roost. So they're like bumping into each other a bunch. And the low sounds are in the range of one to five kilohertz. The, they seem to be aggressive or an expression of annoyance. And then there was kind of this third category of, I don't know. So there was aggressive grumbling. There was annoyed grumbling. And then, so there's at least one more category of why about would make this deep death metal sound. They are doing this with false vocal cords. They look like vocal cords, but they are not used in normal speech or song in humans. In death metal and in tube and throat singers, they use false vocal cords just like these bats are using. They move, if I were to do it, if I were to scream some death metal right now, which I will not. The process would move the vocal cords down. So they oscillate with these vocal folds that are these false vocal cords. So that together makes the vocal folds heavy and that makes them vibrate at extremely low frequencies. Meanwhile, when bats are echolocating, they make extremely high frequency echolocation calls. They do it by vibrating very thin vocal membranes, structures that we no longer have. We lost them over evolutionary time, but bats retain them. They, by filming them at extremely high rates of up to 250,000 frames per second, they have the ability to vibrate extremely fast. And so that high frequency call allows them to echolocate, which allows them to catch their insects while flying. So they're still trying to figure out what the meaning of these sounds and calls are, as I mentioned, but it's interesting that it is a similar method, what's happening in their throat, as far as we can tell, as stuff that we do as humans. Except they're... They said... Yeah, exactly. They do go. I need to know if they get throat polyps, because that's like... Oh, are you talking about from all the vocal fry? Yes, and also these vocalists who they're... Everybody's having to sing louder, but nobody's using the techniques anymore to protect their throat. And so there's a lot more scratchy kind of stuff in the vocal fry that, you know, it's... I know it, yeah. Or maybe bats just don't live long enough for it to matter. I'm sorry, it might be the case. That's probably more likely. Gosh darn it. That's the sad reality of most animal species. Long live the bats. Yeah. But there you go, seven octaves. That's a lot. That is wild.  So, Axl Rose is another one. Yes, Axl Rose is another one, yeah. He had a crazy image. But like... He also had five. I'm at least glad that... What about the singer from the fifth element? Oh. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I don't know, I don't know anything about this. I'm at least glad that Kiki's first impersonation of bats is the only one that I've heard. That squeak, squeak sound. Cause can you imagine if bats were just flying around? The cold washed them back. Oh, there's bats. Oh, they're back again. A little more afraid of them. More or less, I don't know. I wonder if the high-pitchedness makes them feel creepier to some people. I don't know. I don't know. It's like screaming. It's like grating. But I guess death metal to some is also grating. So, I don't know. It's the worst of both worlds. Moving on to the worst. Let's talk about Canada geese and their poop. I live in an area filled, they're lousy with Canada geese. Every time I walk my dog, I step in so many goose poops. I have to prevent her from eating a random one. If you walk through the grass, they're everywhere. And then sometimes the geese will hiss at me and chase me and my dog. Of course they do. And so Canada geese are widely considered nuisance birds for the poop problem, for the attacking problem, and generally because they're not supposed to hang around here all the time. They are supposed to be migratory birds. They're supposed to get the heck out of here in the winter. They fly south for the winter. They fly further north in the summer up to Canada. And they usually just stop by on their way north and south. That's it. They're here for like a couple of weeks tops. They scoot. But they have stuck around. They figured out where they can hang out. There's a temperate climate. There's steady food and shelter. And not as many predators, often in urban areas. And so they just stick it here. They completely give up migrating. It's all the fault of one old man who would go out early in the morning sitting on the bench throwing stale bread out there to the geese. Certainly possible. And they never left. Yeah. And so there is a huge industry, both for profits and also in the academic community, trying to figure out how to encourage these buddies to fly south. Just do what you're supposed to do. Kickstart your migration.   And harassed is an actual wildlife management term just like hazing is a term when you're talking about some other species like coyotes. So harassing geese is what you do when you encourage them to move out of the space. You do not threaten them with actual harm, but instead in this case, you walk or you drive towards them while clapping boards together to tell them to scoot, to kind of just spook them. And so what they found was that harassed birds spend a little more time flying in an alert mode than geese that weren't harassed, but their GPS collars told us they spend the same amount of time foraging and resting. The point of harassing the geese is to stress them out enough that they can't rest so that they are running out of reasons to stay and they start to use up their energy reserves so they are forced to move warmer and to a different area with better resources.  But it turns out they're actually returning more quickly to the places they're scared away from. Whereas when geese leave in the absence of harassment, they stay away longer to make use of resources elsewhere. Most harass geese either moved elsewhere in the same park or were back within the hour. And when they did leave, they went to rooftops, rail yards, other parks, water treatment ponds, and sports fields. All other human used spaces. And not necessarily for the winter. Yeah. And not necessarily places that are like good for food or just open spaces. Yeah. But also one of the ones that I thought was particularly interesting was a water treatment plant. Perhaps a place you definitely don't want a bird sitting in the water and pooping. But anyway, so generally it didn't work. And I will mention that this is not the first study to find that harassment doesn't work, but it is the first to potentially explain why harassment doesn't work. And the idea is that when you harass them, they fly a little bit because you scare them, or they might be alert a little longer, but it didn't change their energy output enough over the day to make them hungry or cold, which are the main kind of points of this, right? Or to convince them that like this is a bad place to eat food. Like the food is no good here. You must find food someplace else. Yes. And it just didn't do that. Also by them having the GPS collars, they were able to collect data on the geese during really bad weather. So this was in Chicago.  It wasn't possible. But because they were wearing GPS tags, they could still track what the geese were doing and what they found was that during those really cold and snowy times, the geese are in fact just resting and waiting out the weather. So if you could harass them during those times, it's possible that that would actually encourage them to leave. That deserves future testing. South. You gotta go south. It's bad weather here everybody. Leave. Yeah, exactly. But the other thing that nobody wants to talk about, but it is mentioned towards the end of this, that I will also mention, it's important thing to discuss, is that this is all under the confines of no lethal element to a deterrent for geese. And they are extremely smart. They're adaptable. They have excellent memory. They have a keen ability to discern legitimate threats from mild annoyances.  Okay, well then that brings up the question, what have you been doing to your local geese, Blair? I have not done anything. But there is a piece of invasive species management, which Canada geese are because they are not supposed to be here year round. They are infringing on a habitat and a food web. There is a piece of that where sometimes you have to talk about eradication. When you do that, if you can do that in a targeted way to discourage geese, if you can figure out that lethal harassment, which sounds terrible, but if you are able to eliminate a couple birds and then the rest of the flock recognize this is not a safe place to be and they leave, that is a potential way of looking at this. Obviously that is a really controversial topic. Not a lot of people want to talk about that. It is a big bummer.  But sometimes it is necessary, especially when you are talking about animals that disrupt ecosystems. If they are just pooping everywhere and you are stepping in it, that is not a reason to kill geese. That is the amount of ecosystem disruption that is actually occurring because of their presence. At what point, in the idea of migratory species, and also with just species in general, remember that everything has blurry fuzzy edges. At one point in time, migratory species were probably not migratory. Or maybe they were nomadic and they just followed food. So there is no reason why a migratory species couldn't also go back the other direction. It seems as though the Canada geese are becoming more nomadic and actually finding places that work just fine and maybe traveling on when they want to go or there are some populations that are just staying where they are. Now whether or not we determine that that is invasive and bad or a part of just the changing ecosystem, the fact that we have created habitat that is suitable to the geese because of our human habitation, I mean, come on everybody. There's so many pieces that stick together here. Something like this came up recently. We were walking around a forest here and I saw a pigeon and I was like, oh, you must be lost. Because I'm so used to seeing pigeons in heavily urbanized areas. There's like a thousand of them at the central Copenhagen train station or the one right off of it. They're all over San Francisco.  They saw a pigeon in a forest park and I'm like, oh, poor guy must be lost. Doesn't belong here.  It was like, you know, just one pigeon wandering around. I was like, oh, gosh, poor guy. Because I just assume that they've always lived in cities. Like, where else would a pigeon be? But like near a train station in a big... They're doves, baby. But so yeah, you know, ecosystems change and strategies will change over time. And so we should be too surprised that the geese like the airport runway or the golf course or the local park or wherever they're hanging out. If they found a niche that's working, they should stick with it. Right. And so that's really the question. Is it impacting local environments or is it just a nuisance for humans? Right. And you mentioned that these geese are also very intelligent and it has been suggested that more intelligent species are more likely to be generalists and generalists are more able to adapt. And yeah. Yeah, imagine like, hey, buddy, I don't have to fly 6,000 miles every year. Why? Why would I do that? To get food and stay warm. I can do that here. I'll just stay here. It's all good. Yeah, all good. And this is the last thing. There used to be a lot more wetlands and places four years to go that maybe... Stop along the way. Yeah. And that maybe did resource-wise dry out seasonally and was why they needed to move. And now if they don't need to move because humans are providing a stable environment, then we've created a biome that is... How do you even have an invasive species in a park? How is there an invasive species? How is that even a relevant thing to say in a place like the San Francisco area? Because nothing there is the natural environment any more anyway. The Canada geese, you know, they say, eh, I'm just a tourist. Eh? This is This Week in Science. Hey, Justin, what do you want to talk about? Oh, gosh, do I still have stories I haven't talked about? Yes. Oh, I'm missing one. Oh, here we go. Yeah. Nearly 300 years ago. I think that's three. Yeah, more than 300 years ago. In 1713, a collection of fake Roman coins was discovered in Transylvania. At the time, at the time these coins purported to be around 1,500 years old. So this is, they go all the way back to around 260, year 260. CE. It featured a Roman emperor. Sponsianus. For much of Roman history, Roman mints produced coins featuring portraits of their current emperors. Only problem, no such spondaneous Roman emperor ever existed. Faked coins? Adding to this, the coins seemed to be manufactured differently than other coins of the mid-200s being cast rather than stamped. There were some stylistic issues. It was the style of a Roman coin, but it seemed too crude. Like so, the forgery was obvious. One problem with the forgery, being a forgery however, was the question of why would someone make a fake coin of a fake emperor? When you could make a fake coin of a real emperor, and people go, oh, I'll buy that for a dollar and the reason it turns out is because they might not be forgeries at all. Not entirely anyhow. So a new analysis suggests that these long-thought fake coins are authentic to the 260s, providing evidence that the leader portrayed wouldn't power at least somewhat. Paul Pearson University College, London, UK and colleagues present the findings of an access journal, plus one. Pearson and colleagues applied visible light microscopy, ultraviolet imaging, scanning, electron microscopy, and reflection mode for your transform infrared spectroscopy to the coins in comparison to undoubtedly authentic Roman gold coins. See, I think these coins are gold.  Real gold out of...anyway. The analysis revealed... It was their bitcoin, right? In a way, it sort of was. The analysis revealed deep microabrasion patterns typically associated with coins that were in circulation for an extensive period of time. They also analyzed earthen deposits on the coins, finding evidence that after extensive circulation the coins were buried for prolonged periods of time before being exhumed. All suggesting the coins are authentic. The problem is... They're tokens. They're game tokens. Anybody who's... Golden game tokens. Anybody who's studied these... See, there's palace. People who are experts in Roman history and everything have always said that they're made wrong. It's not the right style. This emperor doesn't exist. Like, none of this... fits. So... The researchers though considered the historical record alongside the new evidence. The coins... And they now suggest that Sponsien was an army commander at an isolated gold mining outpost in the Roman province of Dacia which is a territory overlapping modern-day Romania. During a time when the Roman Empire was in the midst of civil wars there were borderlands being overrun by pondering invaders and very likely they were cut off from the chaos even that was the Roman Empire for a number of years. So what we made out of here is a self-proclaimed emperor casting coins far from the official Roman mint with an artist who's not maybe up to snuff with the artisans back home and this guy is he's a he's got this isolated gold mining outpost they probably didn't have a whole lot of highly qualified artisans so that might explain the crude rendering the need for casting as opposed to having a pressing mint. So maybe more of an acting governor due to this loss of contact with the normal chain of command sort of thing trying to keep order and say we're going to have some normalcy I'll be the emperor for now or perhaps he was an ambitious commander this happened quite a bit in ancient Rome somebody would be out there some while he's got gold mines all over he's like hey you know what I could take Rome one day Rome's in chaos why don't I just call myself emperor and come back would be evacuated by Rome and then abandoned within a few decades after that after the minting of the coins most likely so this is most likely I think the local commander attempting to keep order in a tumultuous time but very interesting how nothing fit nothing fit nothing fit everything's wrong it's a fake coin and it turns out there's a it's a real coin there's a real story behind it and there's now a piece of where I guess we're now Romanian history of this isolated gold mine outpost commander who made himself emperor just by saying so which is also the whole thing about the transition to power and why that's really necessary to have a very clear goal because I guess anybody with the gold mine could call themselves emperor what would happen on the in the colonies early days company towns coal mines you'd work at the coal mine you'd get the money that was minted by the company owners and everything was bought in the company store very similar kind of 16 towns what do you get another day older not the only you're talking about colony times this is a very much okay but this is also very much a phenomenon of the Pacific Northwest lumber or some mining towns today where the it's not maybe it is small town up in northern California where the lumber company printed the local newspaper was in charge of the local newspaper and rented the housing to the lumberjacks they owned the houses in town and would rent it to them so it was very much that company town where all the money cycles back into all the information is given by so that sort of thing has gone on it's been going on last straight night from me as a team of researchers have discovered at least two new minerals that have never been seen on earth before they found these naturally occurring minerals in a 15 ton meteorite found in Somalia 15 times that's it's the ninth largest meteorite ever found on the planet whenever you find this is a 15 tons and what do you get another day older and deeper in debt no no two new elements and two new not elements two new minerals two and possibly a third so this is quoting Chris heard professor department of earth and atmospheric sciences and curated the University of Alberta's meteorite collection whenever you find a new mineral it means that the actual geological conditions the chemistry of the rock was different than what's been found before that's what makes this exciting in this particular matter of two officially minerals two science two minerals came from a single from a single 70 gram slice that was sent to the University of Alberta for classification and they're already there's a third mineral that is under consideration in their sample so there might even be three they say if a researcher is able to obtain more samples of the matter so the two this is so they brought him in expert he's like okay I got this analysis of bringing the expert and let's see heard was analyzing meteorite to classify he saw something caught his attention he brought in the expertise of Andrew LeCarque head of University of Alberta's electron micro probe laboratory and quoting her again the very first day he did some analysis he said you've got at least two new minerals in there that was phenomenal most of the time it takes a lot more work than that to say that there's a new mineral part of the way that they identified this new these new minerals is that they had actually been synthetically created before so they they could match it they did still get to name them though because this is the naturally occurring I guess versus the human made counterpart which is also like one of those things that in science fiction they're always out there mining asteroids are mining somewhere oh it's not like why would you need to go mine and asteroids or meteorites in space or whatever like it's just minerals you could produce everything if you can go to space shouldn't you be able but geological processes from cores of old planets or meteorites and stuff in space and how they form abundance then of course is the key how much of it has been formed under these maybe intense processes maybe more than what's here on earth and if we can go mess up an asteroid that doesn't have any life on it that we know of instead of messing up the ocean sea floor or our mountains oh my gosh I'm all for it so researchers are continuing to examine the minerals determine what the conditions the meteorite was was formed in that is my expertise as heard how you tease out the geologic processes and the geologic history of the asteroid this rock was once part of I never thought I'd be involved in describing brand new minerals just by virtue of working on and you know it's that the new mineral discovery could lead to exciting new uses down the line whenever there's new material that's known material scientists are interested to because the potential uses in a wide range of things in society researchers have unfortunately not been able to get additional samples they have received news that the meteorite appears to have moved to China 15 ton meteorite has moved to China apparently it was sold or is in search of a potential buyer so it remains to be seen whether any additional samples will again be available for scientific purpose or hopefully if it sells in China hopefully at least it gets studied there but now that we sorry last thing it's interesting because apparently this meteorite has been there for several generations it didn't just land it's been there you know many many many generations that things been known about they finally go oh wow we've got this who gets to sell that is it the government that's selling it is it somebody whose farm it landed on like who's getting to sell this 15 ton meteorite but apparently it's gone these things are for sale people buy and sell these things there's a massive market of meteorite men and people who go out and search for meteorites so that they could be the people who found them and then sell them for lots of cash because they're big collectors and in a case like this yeah potentially it'll be researchers and others who are interested in it 15 ton do you find one buyer or do you break it up and just sell it to that I think people would want the whole thing I mean if it's like that massive I have no idea I'm not I only have like a couple of little teeny tiny meteorites in my collection so far yeah if you're mini museum not to plug a company but if you're them knock up tiny little pieces and you sell those off but I think the interesting thing is if we have these new minerals if we know what they are and know what their makeup is then it becomes the job of chemists of material scientists to determine how to synthesize them can we synthesize them what kind of forces would have been at play to create these minerals and the particular combination that they have discovered and you know then that gives us information on the history of the universe and also if we've got you know synthesis then okay then what can we do something with this is this useful is it is this a new material that we can do something with and so apparently two of them have been synthesized I think the hold up on calling the third one a new mineral is that it hasn't been otherwise they would have been able to recognize it so there's a third potential new mineral that is not just unfound on earth before but unseen undiscovered on earth before also they haven't pictured it yet they have to stick a nice picture and go this is different this picture doesn't look like those pictures okay I have a couple of last stories for us to end the show and Blair we're gonna talk about octopuses right now I'm very excited because I have to tell you I read this story and I wanted to bring it but I didn't understand it so I'm so happy that you're gonna explain it to me right now yes so it's not just octopuses but the octopus nervous system we've talked before about oh how there's you know the octopus brain basically that consists of like a central brain and then how there's kind of like little separate brains out in each of the arms and Blair's talked to told us about how different arms have different uses and we've heard all this kind of stuff but what is not known really is how the different arms potentially communicate with each other historical research done back in the 50s was able to determine that if you lesion brain areas in the octopus and you mess around with an arm on one side of the octopus you can still see arms on the other side of the octopus responding so how would that happen if you lesion brain areas in the middle that would supposedly be responsible for communication between the different arms how could they be responding to that movement so these researchers published in current biology their work on little tiny octopuses these little very small octopuses in this study that was made possible by the marine biological laboratory these little young octopuses were small enough so they were able to image the base of all of the arms at the same time so if you imagine there's the blurby head body part of the octopus and then the eight legs splay out from there but there's something of a ring and so these these researchers were able to then take the tissue image it and process it so they could color different parts of the musculature and the nerves that are in the in these arms and they found that at first they were looking at these larger nerve cords that are in the arm and larger nerve cords they're like the nerve cords that are responsible for the movement of the arms but they determined that they're like other nerves that are involved that they were calling intramuscular nerve cords so these are inside the muscles doing different things and they help with proprioception or the sensation of the movement like oh I know where my arm is in space it's not just randomly flapping around they actually know what it's doing and where it is it's throwing rocks at other octopuses it's throwing rocks at other octopuses and so they thought that these inks these intramuscular nerve cords have been involved in proprioception for a really long time but they're like alright let's really look at them and how they're involved in the arm control and what's going on let's trace them through the tissue and what they found is that instead of just ending at the end of an arm and going into the brain the main brain or just being part of the arm itself and nothing else then in fact they crisscross and each arm is attached, is connected to an arm on the opposite side of the octopuses body and so there is a this is a new design for what they're calling a limb-based nervous system so that the limbs probably created the basis for the nervous system because of the need of movement and the need of knowing what's happening in their environment and the the limbs being like a tongue the limbs being a hand the limbs being a foot the limbs being everything the limb it's immediately making me think of sea stars because sea stars sense and taste and see and move and do everything with their I mean, technically thousands of feet that are little hydraulic feet along each arm right, all the different feet but in this particular case it's not like they're connected in a very interesting pattern because they skip it's not like the nerve cord in one arm goes and goes into the arm right next to it it skips a couple of arms and then goes into the third arm from it so there's this symmetry radial symmetry of the way that the web of the nerves is connected and so that's why in the 1950s when they got rid of the brain and they stimulated one arm a symmetrical arm on the other side still wiggled and responded because they're connected for that proprioception so now, of course robots, can we use this to help design robots and also what can understanding how the nervous system of octopuses has evolved and how it functions what can it tell us about nervous systems in general and possible other body plans and formats for other intelligent creatures right? and also, can we decentralize my brain? yes I think it really hits on the point of the embodied cognition which has become much more prominent in neuroscience and cognitive biology over the past few decades but the whole idea that it's not just your brain that's important it's actually your body and your brain working together to connect you and so when you talk to a therapist and they talk to you about where do you feel your feelings how do your feelings feel it's not just because they're just asking you that just because it is because there is a mind-body connection we've talked about our gut being connected to our brain we know that all these things we know it all these things are connected but octopuses have a much different plan and it's fascinating it seems like a good a good form of delegation too if the brain had to focus on all eight limbs at the same time that just seems like a lot of work you wouldn't be able to think about anything else just walking for eight limbs but they don't use all right when they walk they use don't they like have specialization in certain limbs to do certain tasks I'm just curious about the one that's symmetrical to the mating limb exactly does it have a paired function or do they work do they tend to work in tandem with that paired tentacle I call that the hexacodil less yes goes to the hexacodil more right no okay no that's for those that suffer enthusiasts out there yeah so anyway octopus anatomy and neuroscience very interesting we may understand this new embodied organization for octopuses and their behavioral control oh and now let's talk a bit about bird jaws oh yes not shark week no well these birds dead so we're going back in time sit to what's it called it is kind of angry pointy yes but we're going back in time to right before a lot of dinosaurs died so about 66.7 million years ago or so and there's an image that is been used by the guardian that is the product of who did this who did this wonderful picture this picture is Philip rzeminski and it's an impression of the last known toothed bird that researchers have named Genovese Finaledens and in this image Genovese Finaledens who Blair has said does look like a toothy pointy awk is playing around on the beach with a bunch of wonder chickens now wonder chickens are there's the nickname for the oldest known bird the ancestor of modern birds and when we think about birds um like we think about the way that their jaws are put together and the way that their beaks work lots of modern birds songbirds and others you see them preen and they're like and their beak moves but you know what their mouth is not set up like ours where our upper jaw is like fused to our skull and our lower jaw is the part that goes and moves around based on the muscles right no no lots of modern birds have moveability of their upper and lower jaw that's where their beaks are like their hands right because they're like I can move my upper I can move my lower I can you know I can do all sorts of things with these cool beaks and we always not we but researchers bird researchers evolutionarily speaking have thought that's a modern thing this is just modern modern birds um older birds like ostriches and others there's are more fused they have a fused jaw condition and so these mobile upper jaw or mobile palette birds are called neonaths or new jaws and the fused palette ones are paleognaths or old jaws so we've got new jaws and old jaws and this bird genavis phenaledens is now named because they were looking at fossils and they went look at all these things there's this bone here the pteragoid bone and the pteragoid bone and a lot of these uh old jawed birds fused within this complex it's all fused in there but very often this bone is broken and in multiple pieces and so researchers just thought it was fused in all sorts of birds and that these old birds always all had fused jaws because the fossils that they found were damaged and this pteragoid bone has been broken instead they're like oh yeah they're all fused old birds fused jaws modern birds have the movable palette well no this genavis phenaledens which is a reference to the roman god that looked both backwards and forwards and also it's the phenaledens is a portmanteau of the latin words for final and teeth and it existed right before all the birds with teeth got wiped out with the dinosaurs and it was they had a movable jaw that's what the fossils say so Keith does this mean ish million years ago yeah a 66 67 million years ago so does this mean the ostrich fused their jaw later or multiple shoots of birds lost teeth this is the interesting question yes so the loss of the teeth why did they lose their teeth why did the jaws get fused what was going on because apparently the fused jaw wasn't the ancestral state but maybe the teeth and the movable jaw together somehow didn't work out for these birds I don't know wonder chicken made it through but genavis did not yep they think that this mass extinction event was highly sized selective large-bodied animals interact in real environments terribly across the mass extinction event genavis weighed about four times as much as wonder chicken so that might have been one thing against it and other researchers say that if this is a primitive feature the palette being movable then it probably could have had an even earlier origin and survived so bird evolution potentially turned upside down by a broken fossil bone that has been overlooked by researchers forever rewrite those books those textbooks that's just basically it okay so hang on a couple things going on here I got toothed and untoothed birds in the ancient world and the toothy birds have the modern bird peak palette but the toothless bird is fused yes yes then the whole which came which made it through that bottle neck event did they lose teeth and then some got them back again and then they lost them it was evolution like let me try it one more time we know chickens still have the genes to produce teeth they're just silenced yeah so many interesting questions here where did the teeth where did the mobility in the jaw come from well and also were there other tiny birds yeah having a mobile jaw it feels like you wouldn't need teeth then I mean I guess if you have really good muscles but in terms of chewing I guess birds don't do a lot of chewing they do a lot of swallowing but yeah I don't know it just seems like you don't have the same bite force if you have movable muscles on top and bottom although parrots have some of the strongest PSI bite force in the animal kingdom you know what never mind I don't know what I'm talking about and sharks sharks sharks have upwardly mobile their whole bite isn't actually connected to their skull I don't think exactly don't they have these teeth that go up and down can't they bite I think sharks are like that interesting I love the language in evolution and ornithology papers pulled together I mean you come in here I mean this is anatomy, evolution and ornithology and let me just read to you the last couple of sentences we recovered Genavis as the first well-known well-represented member of Ictheornis other than Ictheornis clearly substantiating the persistence of the clade into the latest Cretaceous Genavis confirms the presence of an anatomically neonagnathis neonagnathis palate in at least some mesozoic non-crown ornithoreans suggesting that pterygoids similar to those of extant galloancerae may be plesiomorphic for crown birds are results combined with recent evidence on the Ictheornithine palatine overturned long-standing assumptions about the ancestral crown bird palette and should prompt re-evaluation of the purported galloanceran affinities of several bizarre early senozoic groups such as pseudo-toothed birds pelaginorthidae ornithidae I love scientific language tongue twisting I'm also learning today that the ostrich jaw is fused is that right? fused but it also doesn't have teeth thankfully I got bitten by one once and I on my finger and I reacted as though I had just been bitten by a dog or something was that with me? it was right? the ostrich and he got my finger I encouraged you to let the ostrich by your hand because it doesn't hurt I know but it was you went really fast and it was scary but yeah no teeth no teeth no teeth as long as the ostrich didn't kick you you're probably open right yes not for lack of trying on this end well this episode obviously did not include a humorous bone but we have made it to the end of the show we did it we made it to the end of another episode thank you all for joining us for this episode of this week in science we've really enjoyed getting to spend this time with you and have these conversations I want to say thank you to Fada for help with show notes and social media to Identity 4 for recording the show to Gord and R&L and others who help keep our chat rooms very nice places to hang out everyone in those chat rooms thank you for being apart and chatting while we've been doing this live stream and I'd love to thank our Patreon sponsors thank you too Teresa Smith, James Schaefer, Richard Badge, Kent Northcote Rick Loveman, Pilar Velazarb, Ralphie Figueroa Jan, I'm going to just be pronouncing things like scientific words and names and making John Ratnaswamy Carl Kornfeld, Karen Tauzy William S. 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Maybe while you travel from one time zone to another just search for This Week in Science if our podcasts are found If you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe as well For more information on anything you've heard here today show notes and links to stories will be available on our website www.twist.org and you can also sign up for a newsletter You can also contact us directly email Kirsten at Kirsten at thisweekinscience.com Justin at twistmenion at gmail.com or me, Blair, at BlairBazz 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 a hologram of a model of a wormhole that maybe exists and maybe doesn't and so we'll never read it It might collapse Other places we probably won't read it, Twitter where we are at Twist Science at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly and at Blair's Menagerie We love your feedback if there's a topic you would like us to cover or address, a suggestion for an interview, a haiku that comes to in 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 Thisweekinscience Thisweekinscience Thisweekinscience It's the end of the world So I'm setting up a shop Got my banner unfurled It says the scientist is in I'm gonna sell my advice Show them how to stop their robots with a simple device Burst below the warming with a wave of my hand And all is coming your way So everybody listen Do what I say I use the science I'll broadcast my epic science Thisweekinscience Science Thisweekinscience Thisweekinscience 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 I've got a plan If you listen to the This is the after show Blair is in a beautiful calendar That is my extinct animal for this year It is the extinct death eater bat I love the bat Necromantis Atticaster It's a really good genus species Anything with the genus Necromantis Oh yeah That wants attention But she doesn't She's like love me But don't love me Said he's pining for Brian out the window He just left Also, by the way Every month has some hidden surprises in it So you'll want to print it out Or get the printed version So you can look at it up close You can find all the Easter eggs Where are the Easter eggs? Noodles, thank you for ordering calendars I hope they print soon as well Yes, Schnago We welcome our robotic cephalopod overlords Cthulhu bot That's how it would be It will Earlier in the chat somebody like Way at the beginning of the show Said that they had been listening to us In prison And that we That our podcast Brought them a lot of Good news While they were doing time Now they're out That's pretty awesome I'm glad to have Our science help anyone Get through any day Yeah Happy to keep company Yeah I'm happy to keep Keep company with people Through science All the good things I like to bring all the good things And even when it's the things That we can't control And that we're like all I don't know about We can try and find some Positivity and goodness in it Somewhere Somewhere Look at this movable Upper and lower Upper pallet Movable pallet Neo-nath Neo-gnath Neo-gnath Nath adjusted back and then he left Where'd he go? Making coffee I can confirm Macaw bites hurt I am tear I like Love All the parrots You're so pretty But I keep all the distance Because I'm terrified of their bites Yeah Straight up lose a finger And people are like Oh it's just a sweet parrot Nope I don't know that parrot That parrot doesn't know me It's gonna bite my finger off If you ever watch them crack Like that Imagine what they do to your finger They will Justin you're muted I bet they eat lots of fingers Just wanted to shout out to John Michael In the chat room Glad we were there to help Yep Yep Agreed It's been interesting recently Everyone was really upset Everyone was upset that squirrels There was a picture of a squirrel Eating a rabbit ear And like the squirrel Nibbling on a rabbit ear Like you would nibble on a carrot I don't know Why are we looking at that Look away Social media everybody was like Oh my goodness look at the squirrel Eating a rabbit ear And I was like of course It's an opportunist To eat something Certainly Cows eat rabbits and squirrels And you know Everything We think Deer eat meat in the winter Deer eat meat We're like oh they're so wonderful And they're just vegetarian If there's food to be had There's food to be ate Wait a second Cows leave me Yes Cows will eat That's how mad cow happened They were feeding cow to cow Well they were feeding them Sheep It was like Pellets or food Whatever It was processed But it was basically like the waste meat From Yup Birds eat eggs Yeah I mean mice are supposed to be herbivores And mice will Get it to some nasty stuff When you're not looking Especially with their own Babies Okay Budget regards Budget regards I have a hard octagon Okay I'm still awake Well I'll see you both in two weeks Two weeks You're taking a week off Yes although Kiki I may see you in person If the snow allows it I know there's all sorts of Snow right now so I hope you make it Through the mountain passes and have a great adventure That's not involving I will pack lots of water and food Every time we hit the road Take main roads don't I'm just gonna take this weird little Google's telling me to do this side road Oh is it even paved I don't know where we're gonna end up Yeah don't do that I'll be taking freeways I'll see you both in two weeks Two weeks Good night Blair Good morning Justin Good morning Justin Good night Kiki Good night everyone Thank you for joining us for another episode of Twist We will be back here again next week Minus Blair But it's gonna be awesome We hope that it's plus all of you Stay safe, stay healthy, stay happy Stay curious Ciao bello