or Like post like after they graduated they go back and they what is it like a reunion like a some sort of thing for the first Stanford And we're driving around the convention center. We go. Ah, ha that must be it because there's all these people with sashes on and crossing guard Convention that sounds like a joke that I made up But it was literally we thought the Stanford gathering we pulled in because we saw all these people with these red sashes and Red sashes because that's the color of the school Like it was like, I don't know is the marching band here or something like we just like Like this is crossing guard going around part Crossing and and and everybody who was who was actually in attendance was Had been to the law school and was looking for clients. It was all that showed up People apparently we're just looking to see if they could represent. Have you been in any accidents lately? Are you happily married, okay moving on what yeah, who are you? What do you do and how can I use that to my advantage and so I didn't go to high school So Ibrari oh, yeah, you know welcome to the show everybody. We are here and it's just in story time pre-show story time We're just talking about Ivy League schools, you know as you do as one of those speaking Yeah pictures live sound is awesome. Thanks Fada. Yeah, we do not have an echo Today gotta be a fourth-party problem. I think it's a fourth-party problem the last two the last all of the interviews It's been an echo so where are they what did they have open? Yeah That is echoing I wonder if they're using a different browser or All right, well, we we're not echoing today, which is Oh There was a little echo. I don't know what we're gonna do today All right, everyone. Are you ready to do a show? Yeah Are we ready to make this potty rumble? How can my browser can remember everything except that I'm not a robot? You are not a robot because you aren't today, but you might be tomorrow. Yes, that's the whole point of that box And unbreakable Did you say unbreakable pants I did I gotta put that that goes oh No, I can't wait for this Welcome everyone to this week in science the sister and brotherhood of the unbreakable pants Starting the show in three two This is Twists this week in science episode number 672 recorded on Wednesday May 23rd 2018 Turtles love science Hey everyone, I'm dr. Kiki and tonight on this week in science We are going to fill your head with an ice man octopus aliens and unbreakable pants but first Disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer Imagine for a moment if you will contact with an alien species a Voyaging spacecraft colony of creatures who would like to live peacefully here on earth with us They had to leave their own planet behind because it became too inhospitable What with the pollution pervasive hazardous chemicals? unstable atmospheric climate changes and an ecosystem in complete free fall They just had to head for the stars and their ship was nearly out of plutonium when they happened by earth and so with open arms and Uncertainty about whether we really have a choice. We let the aliens live amongst us soon We discover that the new arrivals have a voracious appetite and an affinity for resources that rivals even our own After only a week they improve oil extraction to the point where there is no more oil to drill for Two weeks in and there seems to be a distinct lack of trees were once there were many Three weeks in and somehow they managed to catch and eat nearly all the fish in the sea by week four There isn't a four-legged creature over four pounds that hasn't disappeared down their bellies And at the end of just a month the air is unfit to breathe the oceans are acidified and the ecosystem is in complete free fall And as the aliens depart in search of more fertile planets to plunder the humans take a moment to ponder This must be what we look like to those weirdos that listen to this weekend science Coming up next I want to fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week There's only one place to go to find the knowledge. I seek. I want to know What's happening? What's happening this weekend science? What's happening? What's happening? What's happening this weekend science? Yeah Science to you Kiki and Blair and The good science to you too Justin Blair and everyone out there welcome to another show It's this weekend science coming at you bringing you all the science throwing the science at you Science all the way down. I mean turtles all the way down. I mean it's world turtle day today Yeah So on the day that we're recording this is a day of celebration for our Turtilian friends Tested knees Tested knees. What's your favorite turtle Blair? Question my favorite turtle would have to be the leopard tortoise which remember all tortoises are turtles But not all turtles are tortoises Hashtag Blair's animal corner The leopard tortoise is for Africa and when it floods they can float Floaty tortoise turtles They're pretty heavy. They're like 40 pounds That's a good skill to have for flooding areas in Years when there's or seasons when there's lots of rain monsoon seasons that they bring Yeah, here's a fun fact about me actually for world turtle day. My first word was Turtle, I don't know what my first word was that's a good thing to go back to the the data banks for yes Yes, but this says a lot about you. I think although technically it was turdo Turdo, I like the turdo Buddy mama daddy. It's a turdo. You know what this is this is this weekend science And we've got a great show coming up. I have all sorts of science news ahead I have stories about interstellar aliens the ice man's brain and worms Justin what do you have for us? I've got the answer to every problem an updated history of mammals and The end of the world may be closer than you think no that no Oh Okay, we're gonna have a positive spin on that one Blair. What's in the animal corner? Oh my gosh this week I went hunting for mythical creatures. I have three different stories about creatures that are so crazy They may or may not even exist May or may not Maybe they're aliens Maybe they're from here. Maybe you can find them. Maybe they can't maybe it's about a Sasquatch Maybe it's about the Loctus monster. We'll find out News at ten. No, I mean hopefully a lot earlier than that. Yes Hopefully Blair's animal corner will be on before 10 p.m. Pacific time this evening. Let's hopefully Let's hope let's hope we don't run on and on and on as we are want to do All right, so let's make this show happen and As we get into it I would like to remind everybody that if you have not subscribed yet to this week in science You can do so just by going to twist org and clicking the subscribe button. It'll send you to either YouTube Google or Itunes that's the other one That's the other one where you will be able to subscribe to our video channel or our SS feeds We're also on all sorts of players out there and on Facebook all good places you look for these things You know what you look for this week in science Don't forget twist org and that is where you can find information on subscribing to us All right, let's dive on in everybody. So the news this week the space internet has been a buzz with the news of an interstellar alien Oh But I when I say alien I don't really mean like a living alien like ET I mean a bunch of space rock This bunch of space rock this space were rock was discovered in 2015 and its name is 2015 BZ 509 Taking a look at this object that is in the distant solar system It orbits the Sun at about the same distance as Jupiter and it's about three kilometers in diameter Taking a look at it. Everyone thought oh, this looks pretty normal and then it went wait a minute No, it doesn't this isn't normal at all. It's orbiting the Sun Retrograde So everything follows the same kind of orbit. It's called prograde Everything's orbiting in the same direction around the Sun all the normal solar system objects that we know and love I'll go prograde around the Sun, but not this little guy not BZ BZ is going retrograde It's going in a direction opposite to everything else And so and it's it's really not in the same plane of the ecliptic either. It's really tipped So it's at an angle and it's orbiting the wrong direction One of these things is doing its own thing, right? Yeah, so researchers published a paper this last week suggesting in the title no less that this is an Interstellar object that was floating through space got ejected from some other Galaxy or solar system and got scooped up by the Sun's gravity and the gravity Gravitational pull of all the other of the planets in our solar system and Became a member of our solar system after our solar system got its start, but that it didn't start out here Only because basically because they ran a bunch of simulations on a computer and they all the ways they simulated it They're like that probably came from somewhere else. There's nothing really that explains it going the other direction however, that's not entirely true and Many people on the interwebs Do you think that these researchers are jumping to conclusions with their conclusion that this rock is from another? part of Our of our universe, right? So for galaxy, right? Yeah, there's no there's no evidence other than its retrogradeness and inclination that that would suggest this and it is possible because of the Microperturbations that occur from large Gravitational bodies like Jupiter and Saturn that you know just bump it back into place that maybe it it is from our solar system Maybe it got its start here four and a half billion years ago and just ended up in a stable a stable orbit Yeah, he's like I've been here the whole time guys. I don't know what the problem is What were you gonna say Justin? Well, I mean it's it's not that big Is is one thing so, you know three kilometers if you're not familiar with the metric system is about 3000 meters, right? Which is big, but it's not like you know solar system big It would it seems there's a couple things that seem odd like I don't know how many of the of these retrograde Orbiting objects there are that we've discovered if this is like the only one that we've identified pretty much That's really weird. It's weird You know like ah something bumping into something getting caught in an orbit you should see more of it So I'm wondering if we just haven't this is like one of the first ones we've identified Out there, but maybe they're harder to see because they're going the other way like I don't know But I agree. I think it's kind of a leap to say It has to be from a like, you know outside of the solar system to have been able to follow into this I just I think it's probably the first one we've seen so there's going to be a lot of explanations for it And then we'll find more and go oh This is a common thing It's just hard to see because it's small and it's going the opposite way of everything So it doesn't it's not being tracked like a telescope would normally try to get a glimmer and track an object with you Know the motion of everything coming the other way. It's you look for it and can't find it again Wait, where did it go? We were not looking in the right place because it's not going the right direction If it's so weird, right, right if it's such a weird thing for us to track something in that direction That's probably why we don't see a lot of Yeah, so I mean that is if it was captured by our solar system You know, yeah, maybe there it really is one of very few objects that our solar system is captured and that's why it's so weird That's possible. It's also possible that it just got a weird start and there are going to be more of them And yeah, we just haven't seen them yet. So All those headlines out there saying enters first interstellar planetary body that's here It's could be jumping the gun just slightly The cigar-shaped spaceship, right? Yes, it's not as that's not a spaceship That's just in just a an asteroid-y type thing floating through So the difference is that this object BZ is in a stable orbit and so is a part of our solar system. It's just wonky Wow, wow, wow The cigar-shaped asteroid that was really literally Passing through it's not in a soul. It's not in a stable orbit. It was just doing a drive-by Based on everything that they could see about it. It that they do not think it's going to loop around at any point and come back Still and we were passing through it. Yeah, there's that but I was gonna say in a similar trippy vein Who's to say what in our solar system is original and what is new in the cosmic timeline? Right and so okay cosmic timeline while there is the whole you know What dust was in the protoplanetary cloud at the beginning of the solar system? Do we count all those objects that were the dust that was there first that coalesced of those objects? There you go, you know, how far back do you go? but the reality is is that yeah, there's a bit of I mean looking at it and looking at its orbit and trying to figure out how that fits into our ideas of solar system formation But at the same time until we really get a close look at it or and can it measure its chemical composition? To start looking at isotopes to be able to determine whether or not it has the same Molecular chemical makeup as the rest of the stuff in the solar system That's until we have that evidence we can't jump to the conclusion that it's from somewhere else Even then we'd have to assume that somewhere else was vastly different Vastly vastly different Alright, so on that note of vast difference. I want to jump into a little dose of sunshine I'm gonna be a little miss sunshine here in a recent study researchers in Where was this this was in China's research that was done a Researcher Wei Zhong of the University of Science and Technology of China This is actually an accidental discovery and he did not set out to look at a little bit of sunshine It's a post-it situation in his but he did so he found that UV light when it He found UV light led to increased concentrations of a compound In neurons That shouldn't have been there that they wouldn't think would be there and they didn't know why it was there because this compound is normally discovered in the skin and this compounds called urokenic acid and Urokenic acid is in involved in the skin's metabolic response to UV light and that inflammatory protective response That the skin that the skin undergoes when UV light affects it now UV light We know is good for us in some ways because it leads to The production of vitamin D, but it also is bad for us because it can lead to mutations that are cancer causing However, this discovery of this urokenic acid in neurons led him to go who what What's going on there and instead of just saying what? Like a good scientist he did experiments to figure out what was going on and so of course he had to shave some mice So he exposed these shaved mice He had two groups one he exposed them to low dose of UV light Which is responsible for sunburn and humans for two hours And he had a control group that was not exposed to the UV light and then he performed mass spectrometry to Look at the brain cells and see what kind of chemicals were popping up molecular Signatures were popping up from the brain cells of these mice and he found Urokenic acid increased in the neurons of the animals that were exposed to the UV light and not in The animals that didn't get the light So then he went on to say okay. What else is going on? Discovered that urokenic acid is involved in the nerve in nerve cells in the glutamate pathway glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter that is involved in mood and memory and Is in charge of a whole bunch of very important functions within the brain and so In the end what his all of his experiments did was link UV light exposure to the production of this urokenic acid and increased concentrations of glutamate in the brain which led to improved memory and learning in animals exposed to UV light compared to those that did not get any UV light and It worked when they just injected urokenic acid into the brain cells as opposed to exposing them to the light And so what I'm thinking there's been a question for there are questions as to you know, where does seasonal effective disorder come from? Why you know, why is it that? sunny weather Can affect people's mood in a positive way and maybe this I mean this studies in mice so you know and it's only one study of course, but perhaps this is one of the links in the chain that Indicate how or it will explain how sunlight Through if you know affecting our skin can actually lead to a positive mood effect in the brain So since you mentioned that he basically sunburned these mice He's sunburned the mice would you have the same positive effect if you slathered these naked mice With sunscreen. No, I don't think so because it this urokenic acid is a result of this the UV Radiations Interaction with the skin cells and so you have sunblock on or sunscreen you're blocking that interaction And so it would reduce that So, you know, I this is not an endorsement for people to stop wearing sunscreen You know, that's what I'm saying. This is only a study in mice. This is not in people We don't even know if this same process works in people, but this is a very interesting Interesting finding and perhaps this is something that should be looked into much much more carefully in humans so don't Go to stick your head in a biosafety cabinet and click on the UV lights Careful what kind of UV it is Justin because not all UV lights the same So what one of the things I think is really kind of interesting about this system Is that yeah mice don't have a whole lot of exposed skin normally Yeah, and they're nocturnal. Yeah, so the question is why would this be a mechanism that would still be Prevalent in mice. I mean is it possibly that if a mouse is found Out in the daylight, they you know, they want to have their behavior and their memory Fine-tuned so that they can escape because they in the wrong place at the wrong time It's probably a preserved thing that they're not using that's an ancestral link But how far I mean I picture mice as direct lineage from the first mammalian show It's probably isn't like thing but like so so this would be possibly something. That's a Pre-mammal character. So that's a say is reptiles For example have to have specific UV light depending on the species or they will get really sick They could even die So this is a mistake that people make when they get their first pet reptile they don't need know that they need UVA or UVB or both bulbs and then they have Terrible things happen to their pet because their pet gets really really sick. So if UV light is part of a healthy reptile Yeah, there's a potential that there's a common Link there But it's also you have to remember the correlative Correlatively that we are on a planet that is bombarded with UV light every day So that is also of a very high potential to get some convergent traits related to UV light So it's hard to say Yeah, hard to say it's an end. It's interesting in nonetheless. I mean finding Pathways like this where you know something affecting the skin ends up making its way into neurons that get into the brain I mean that whole how did how is that all happening in in the first place? You know what I just realized too is sundowning in seniors That's directly relate related to It getting dark and their memory But I don't know if it's yeah, I don't know if that's getting darker just being it's the end of a day and yeah And I don't know where it's in the brain or affected. I don't know It's a thought. It's all people in lizards same thing Lizards Justin Yeah, anyway thoughts for sunny days as the sunny days are Are on their way and still to come for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere Some people though just like taking their brains and sticking them into MRI machines for the name of science Like the Iceman Huh Well, yeah, you say huh, which one is this? His name is actually Wim Hof Wim Hof the Iceman Super villain. No, he's kind of a he's kind of a super hero who's okay Wim Hof is the guy who you may have heard of like in extreme people or feats of amazingness by people Superhuman thing. Yeah, so yes But he's this guy is able to control his body's ability to feel pain And so he is able through breathing exercises, which he has I think patented and written about the Wim Hof method He is able to control his body's responses to temperature to hot and to cold. He has Run a marathon in the Namib desert not drinking any water the entire time he's also He's also climbed Mount Everest and Mount Kilimanjaro in shorts So he goes outside and bare feet and into the snow He doesn't get frostbite. He has he feels no pain and researchers have wondered how he does it and so in a recent study Pediatrician at Wayne State University School of Medicine and his co-authors Put Wim Hof into a magnetic resonance imaging machine to see What happened to his body when they exposed him to cold water or hot water? and they put him in this like Skin tightsuit that had water tubes had tubes with water in them so they could have him inside the MRI machine and Pipe the cold water through the suit and see how his body responded to it So they had him go through his breathing exercises and they and then exposed him to the cold and what They found is that basically this guy has found a way through breathing Almost like meditation. He has found a way to hack into his body's stress response And in in his initial breathing exercises, it's kind of it's like hyperventilation where he blows off a lot of oxygen and increases the amount of carbon dioxide in his body And so his body has a hypercapnic response as what it's called and in the physiological responses To the situation of hypercapnia a buildup of carbon dioxide within the blood in within the blood And as a result the body has a stress response to try and increase oxygen And so it increases blood perfusion to the tissues There are there are other areas like the extremities that maybe have have the blood pulled back from them But in in this MRI they determined that when he's exposed to cold specifically He's able to activate the part of the brain that's responsible for releasing opioids and cannabinoids into the body And so he is basically triggering his brains pain control system and releasing endogenous that means made by the body Opioids and cannabinoids so pain medications created by the body released that end up also releasing dopamine and serotonin so that he feels good at the same time and And so he has a euphoric effect at the same time as not feeling any pain and that effect he says Wim Hof himself says lasts a few minutes, but his trick is In effect tricking his brain into continuing the stress response by Keeping in mind the fact that the pain or the stress on the body is going to continue And so they still don't know exactly how he does All the feats of physiology That he is able to do but one of the things is he is actively triggering In a feed-forward sense certain areas of his brain responsible for managing pain So he's literally high on life Yes. Yes. So he's got like a runner's high But he doesn't have to run to get it Yeah, I'm all right. I'm gonna stay home. I think I don't I don't need to hike Mount Everest in shorts Okay No, not many people do but what the researchers are interested in Is the ability of this guy to come up with these pain responses and if he's able to also In a sense control his autonomous system. Maybe other people who need You know who have disorders who have eczema who have Immune system problems. Maybe they can learn or maybe who have chronic pain even That maybe people can learn to harness the method that he's come up with in a similar way to manage their Their disorders without having to rely on pain medications to be able to do it So learning from a person who is an extreme We'll see Wow fascinating Why doesn't he freeze? Why doesn't he get frostbite? That's what I want to know Yeah, he's gotta be cutting He's got to be changing his blood flow. He like a penguin. I would assume where he's restricting blood flow to his feet his extremities And um creating a feedback loop of hot and cold above it Yeah That would be my assumption, but he doesn't have the the kind of the Scaffolding for that in his body. So I'm not sure how that would happen bodies are we have a little bit of it But we don't really have the same kind of system to the shunting to shunt the cold blood over to the warm side to be able to To warm it up in a and in a way that some birds and other other animals do We don't have the same system and so Maybe he does We do a bit a little bit. No, I mean we have a little It's not to the extent It's not to the this I mean in some animals It is a literal like there are capillaries that go back and forth between you have you have the vein and the artery Right the vein and the artery and there are capillaries that connect the two wherein humans There aren't but we do have a little bit of it. There is shunting. There is definitely some aspect of that I mean I have rey nodes I have a disorder called rey nodes and when I get cold My fingers like there's some nervous response that takes all the blood out of my fingers My fingers turn yellow Because you have genes from a people who lived in a frigid northern environment Where it's like the ice age all the time Right exactly And that's and that's making peoples Yeah, and that's that's when you'll see that in uh an inuits to an extent too Although morphology is also a little bit different there too, but that the the body preserves the life force of heat Into the core by pulling it away from the extremities. Yeah Yep, heat it up. We will survive Justin what'd you bring? Hey everyone? This is this week in science Uh, yeah, I have a solution for every problem Uh global warming space elevator smart grid led into gold Unbreakable pants. What do you mean solve? It's 42, right? 42 that's one invention. It's only requires one invention And uh, somebody beat me to it actually, uh, it's what the Vanderbilt University researchers came up with It has to do with carbon nanotubes this Super material stronger than steel or conductive and copper The reason they're not in every application from batteries to tires doing breakable pants as this As that they the the really amazing properties of nanotubes only show up in a in the tiniest version of it, which are extremely difficult to make and expensive This is much much more expensive than than Than gold, right? Any of these precious diamonds forget it. It's easier to find Uh, not only did they Vanderbilt teams show that they can make these materials cheaply They made them from carbon dioxide pulled out of thin air These materials which assistant professor of mechanical engineering Carrie pint calls black gold and thereby earning him a crusty old Gold prospectory voice in an upcoming quotey thing Could steer the conversation from negative impact of emissions to how we can use the carbon dioxide pollution To propel us into a future technology What are the most exciting things about what we've done is use? electrochemistry to put apart carbon dioxide and the elemental constituents of carbon and oxygen and stitch together with horn swallowing precision those carbon atoms in the pater Or new forms of matter pint says That opens the door to being able to generate really valuable products with carbon nanotubes These could revolutionize the dag gum world and I reckon they will too says pint Approximately and report published today in chemical Uh, I this might not be today chemical American chemical society pint and his inter interdisciplinary team of Folks and phd student Anna Douglas and the team describe how Tiny nanoparticles 10,000 times smaller than human hair can be produced from coatings on stainless steel surfaces He was making them small enough to be valuable. So They've got this system that puts the current through there and it can It sort of pulls the carbons and attracts them and they build up the problem as they keep building up And as soon as you're bigger than these nano 10,000 times smaller than human hair They're not the super valuable useful future technology building nano substances anymore so they came up with and patented a technique to keep the particles small And they started a company with this too, which was uh funded by the department of energy Has a has a program that helps Startup companies with good ideas companies called sky nano and is focused on building upon the science For the process to scale up and commercialize products from the materials What we've learned is the motherload of science and opens the door to now build some of the most valuable materials in our world Such as diamonds and single walled carbon nanotubes or carbon dioxide That we capture The air That's such a cool double thing. So Unbreakable pants is a possibility From this technology. Why is that where your brain goes? I want my carbon nanotubes to make unbreakable pants You buy one pair of pants that you like and are comfortable and you never have to buy more Why that isn't a valuable thing that we could be But yeah, like this is and and if we combine this too with a story last week or so when uh a team figured out how to position the nanomaterials To to construct larger objects with uh to organize them Yeah, this uh this whole field seems to be coming together very rapidly And this was this was the thing that they keep saying or kept saying we kept talking about which we don't anymore Space elevator no more launching stuff. If you have something strong enough And stable enough you can just put things on the space elevator to put them into orbit or to launch uh Launch craft from so question. Are they flexible or are they super rigid? Both depending on how you organize them. So could you load a 3d printer with this stuff? Yeah Yeah That'd be cool. Yeah Fuzzy printing Yeah, yeah, I think you probably could it's nano scale nice Nano and nice that's for sure That is for sure. All right everybody in the world.  Yep. That's right. I do.  Blair's animal corner If you want to hear about animal Blair I am so excited. I have a Blair's animal corner that is quite unusual this week I am not spending a lot of time talking about things that we discovered I'm going to spend time talking about things that are not true Oh So first I want to talk about the story that was all over the internet this week Octopuses are from space No, they're not No, they're not I mean people people want them to be everybody's like Octopuses are so weird with their tentacles and stuff So octopuses are very interesting They're not from an ocean though. Like we're all in space. It's just so the the hypothesis is that octopuses are aliens that they came here as a fertilized egg On an asteroid Landed on this planet seeded the earth. So this was the headline first. Let me say so that was the headline That was all over the internet What's carling scholarly magazines? Are you subscribing to? So this was you know every outlet I saw it on this was the headline however This is what actually was published. It was a study from 33 authors and It was published on march 13th. So I don't know why it happened this week in the journal progress and biophysics and molecular biology And the theses was not that octopuses came here as fertilized eggs on a asteroid, but that the cambrian explosion Was the result of panspermia And the panspermia Was actually in the form of a virus That crashed on earth in a meteor impact So here's so there were media there were meteor impacts at that point in time. I mean that That's part of where the the cambrian explosion came from right is like you had A lot of animals die and then there was an explosion of other animals because of that Yeah, but so the cambrian explosion really quickly was around 540 million years ago It's the cambrian period and this it's known as the cambrian explosion because for about 20 to 25 million years there was this huge adaptive radiation where we went from pretty much all Individual single-celled organisms that lived in colonies and then afterwards we got things like sea stars and jellyfish And octopuses and all these sorts of things Most of the marine invertebrates came from this explosion and a lot of them are still around And so it's it's this singularly very interesting event in evolutionary history so one of the main authors of this paper was the individual who first proposed the hypothesis of panspermia in general in the 1970s and they Were mainly pointing at the fact that octopuses have complex nervous systems camera like eyes and this amazing camouflage And that the genes for these adaptations as per the paper do not seem to have come from octopus ancestors but quote it is plausible then to suggest That these traits seem to be borrowed from a far distant future in terms of terrestrial evolution or more realistically From the cosmos at large. So a couple of things just about that sentence Is that just because you haven't seen some of these genes That does not mean that your simplest most plausible suggestion Is that it was a virus from space? space Wait a second though. Let me let me just say that is That is how all of these conversations Seemed to take place though. Have you like like Huh, it seems very difficult to build something out of stone this large Must be aliens. No humans could have achieved this task. All right Why is there a why is there a straight line? Cut into the desert. Yeah, it's the jump to conclusion of the thing You would hope that this would not come from the scientific community But here we are The real thing though that it's important to note is that when the octopus genome was mapped in 2015 They found that the octopus nervous system genes split from the squids 135 million years ago So remember that cambrian explosion 540 million years ago So their big explanation is that octopuses and squids are so different that it must have been a virus and there must have been this epigenetic change and The only source of this epigenetic change has to have been from space But we're seeing this couldn't have been here right and we're seeing this stepwise change So yes, there's this explosion the second you have multicellular organisms. That's not surprising You have single-celled organism Organisms for millions and millions and millions and millions of years And then you finally adapt to the point where you have multicellular organisms in a vast ocean You're gonna see adaptive radiation.  Yeah, and that's and it's it's genomic. It's genetic homesteading It's it's the genes that allow that Homesteading to take place and so you have the mutation you have The gene that allows you to do it and so you get out there and take it over and if you win You survive and so one of the reasons The environment may inform the the survival. We'll get into that some other day, but yeah So and one of the reasons that octopuses are so different from other animals Is that they are this evolutionary arm that was successful during the cambrian explosion that has then continued to evolve For 540 million years. So of course you're going to see it's like a genetic bottleneck You're going to see this huge runaway evolution of this one type of thing that of course you're going to see vast differences from other lines because its root is so far deeper down the evolutionary tree One particular person who took issue with this Was ken steadman a virologist and professor of biology at portland state university state. I've met him We should have him on the show. He's yeah interesting. Yeah, this is my favorite point For a virus such as the RNA based ones known as retroviruses to somehow turn a squid into an octopus as this paper would suggest That virus would have to evolve in a world where squids existed Right, it would have to recognize something in the squid to be able to affect it to yes It would have to have a target within the squid to make the change I will also say as a passing just comment that um, you can Access the original paper online. Uh, there's no paywall that I found But it reads like a science fiction novel. I did not see any data I did not see any tables. I did not see anything that was an evaluative element of this thing It was mostly just kind of this narrative about in a world Where there's only single celled organisms and then there's an octopus Surely it has to be from outer space. Don't call me surely But this is this is one of those situations where you know people reported this as a study And they're like, oh this study suggests that octopus the octopuses are aliens It's like no, it's not a study. It is a it's a research paper. They used literature To back up their ideas, but it's it's it's a it's a work of fiction based on Their ideas. There's no experiment. There's no study Right an idea. I want them if they're gonna say this they need to go back and get some proof I want the data Well, and also I think the thing that was really lost is that the the whole idea of these octopus eggs Hitching a ride was a sentence in this very long paper that was actually all about the cambrian explosion Which if you kind of take the step back and look at that Then you really start to question the idea because if you're looking at adaptive radiation As a pattern and suggesting that you have to find an alternative source for each radiation that becomes problematic anyway Justin, are you missing something? Does that mean that it would require a different virus? on a different Ragnant Every evolutionary time. Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's kind of that one's then it's a stretch It gets stickier for sure. Um moving on to the next occult story that I brought tonight It's all about the Loch Ness monster Oh That's not science. You get well actually let me tell you Loch Ness monster again is kind of just the headline and the and the fun thing to talk about here But actually this is a story about Loch Ness and the fact that The university of otago new zealand is actually going to start synthesizing environmental dna e dna From the waters of Loch Ness this summer and they're very excited to see what they find so the the kind of The funny thing to talk about here is that if nessie exists or ever did exist She would or he would have left behind skin scales feathers fur pee poo What have you that has dna in it and from that from these samples in Loch Ness over the next several months to years they could figure out what or if she was But really what's interesting about this Is that Loch Ness? I didn't know this is actually um, it is the largest freshwater lake In the uk it is the largest freshwater body in the uk And they believe that under those murky depths are brand new Species of life. They think they will find new species in there through their environmental dna They will find a whole bunch of new bacteria They want to see data on invasive species because this is a lake or lock that has Unfortunately had a lot of species purposefully and Accidentally introduced like pacific pink salmon And from all of this they should be able to look at hundreds of thousands of different organisms in Loch Ness and get a good Kind of idea of what's going on there So one of the lead researcher says we have the opportunity through this project to demonstrate the scientific process How hypotheses are established and tested the need to replicate use controls and account for observer bias using double blind methodologies These are all important parts of this story So I actually offered this as a nice opposite to our first animal corner story where they're taking a potentially uh silly or extreme or fairy tale-esque Story and they're going to use science as a learning opportunity in that case That's great. I have a story very similar to this that I have at the very end of the show that I bring up But I bet they find a plea. Pleasure Then maybe who knows certainly could and that would be really cool if we could move forward and tell people that you know Nessie was a thing But of course the fact that she would still be alive when there were cameras would How many years old is she now? Oh my god, maybe there were two and nessie was the last one Maybe just dinosaurs live forever Yeah, maybe Or maybe she was frozen in ice and bobbing on the surface of the water It's anyway one more quick story to close out the corner and it's all about tardigrades the other aliens That can live forever and float through space. So Whereas I do not think they actually are aliens. I like to joke about that because they are so unusual and weird Well, here's a new thing to add to the weirdness of tardigrades Their poop is huge So i'm playing a video if you're listening. I encourage you to go to the show notes and watch this but There's this tardigrade and there's this mass That's more than a third the length I would say that mass is approximately two thirds the length of the tardigrade Here i'm gonna play it again. Tardigrade is you know as you would imagine a weird I mean the water bear, you know, it's a weird burbly looking single-celled organism And it ejects Something from its body Well, yeah, we're pretty sure it's poop. Um, but as far as we can tell this is only the second Bowel movement if we can even call it that from a tardigrade ever Uh captured, let's say Yeah, and so this all happened a tardigrade hunter That is a wild and captured tardigrade Tessa Montog a recent phd graduate from harvard She posted this video on twitter and it exploded. Um, I loved seeing it. It's fascinating and A quick check in with her from life science Um, actually wanted to ask about how often tardigrades poop and her answer was i have no idea Um, because this is the second time ever that they've seen it Are their poops always big her her answer was yes, but our sample size is two So the two times they've seen it the poops have been huge And um, what are they made of well tardigrades eat lichens algae, etc So it was probably partially digested lichen and in full color the poop was bright green So So just add to the list of tardigrades being amazing and weird and fascinating is that they have giant poops Ha, there we go. Maybe it's part of how they survive so well Also, maybe they're camera shy. Maybe they've just been building it up because they don't want to poop on camera. Who knows? I don't know It's it's possible that all these things are possible, right? No, I would I would imagine that Maybe part of you know their ability to survive and to deal with radiation and all the things maybe their metabolism and their excretory system Is highly advanced for getting rid of stuff.  We have other things that we're going to talk about but first we're going to take a break So everyone out there. Thank you for joining us so far We have a bunch of other cool science news coming up We've got brains and the other things and we will see you After the break stay tuned for more this week in science You've heard more than intuition A lot of recent shows the way to go New conclusion the methods of hypothesis and patience are the only things I need Hey everyone, thank you so much for watching this week in science Thank you for listening if you are listening right now Thank you for being a part of our audience and being a part of this show week after week after week And we do enjoy bringing you the show every week But part of what we do and how we do it is the fact that we are listener supported that we are supported by you You help us bring the show to you. So all of our costs and labor are supported By you. So how can you help this week in science? Well, number one, you can subscribe What is it that easy? 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We really could not do this without you Things you've heard more than intuition The library shows the way And we're back with more this week in science Yes, we are and on this week in science right now it is time for This week in what has science done for me? lately All right, walter gun wrote in and left a comment on the twist website and he said Being a twist fan. I hear with submit my twistament to the role of science in my life Though no scientist nor having training beyond college courses I totally rely on science as a practicing visual artist as do all our scientists as do all creatives whether recognized or not Geometry geology mineralogy and engineering and physics at all are required to make and maintain the machinery And tools to work steel and wood fiber stone paint and clay Likewise the role of chemistry and atmospherics in the mastery of pigments and finishes all via the artisan Empower the object itself its life expectancy and interaction with light and space science Like art animates the what-if spurs possibilities teaches by mistake And demands we build upon and with truth Walter thank you so much for writing in I really appreciate this This this comment and the sentiment. I mean there yeah and justin, you know, you're an artist as well Well, so here's and here's the thing walter. I will say that that at least in the practice of Making art and a lot of materials, especially that you're describing You have to experiment Quite a bit and then when you hit upon something that you really like You want to be able to recreate it So you you take notes on how you got there what you did how you put it together so that you can recreate it That's the act of of doing Research right there. I mean that's it's the same practice. It's the same skill sets. It's the same methodologies that come into play so I would I would say that yeah, you are doing a scientific method and creating your art. It's the same thing Yeah, and it's wonderful for everyone to be reminded of that that art and science are Intertwined and intermingled and near Nigh unseparable inseparable. Let's see if I can use words tonight All of you, thank you for your words, but you need to keep them coming We need your sentiments. We need your comments. We need your emails. We need your messages You need to send them to me. Tell me what science has done for you lately Leave us a message at facebook our facebook page facebook.com slash this week in science or email me kirsten k i r s t e n at this week in science dot com I want to keep this show this part of the show going because it seems to be something that everyone appreciates I enjoy all of it. I really do. They're all so different which gets me Well, it's that personal aspect. I that's what I love is it's this is these these are the people who listen to the show This is this is who? These are your fellow minions. Yeah, this is a beautiful tapestry Yeah, I love it I love it All connected Justin I got a segment that we haven't done in a while But we seem to hit upon at least every other week this week in the end of the world Failing to cap global warming at two degrees celsius or less could cost the world economy Tens of trillions of dollars over the next 80 years researchers warned four out of five countries 90 of the global population Would see major economic benefits by avoiding costs linked to higher temperatures. This is a report in the journal nature Such costs stem from more frequent and severe extreme weather lower yields in agriculture negative health impacts The 196 nation paris climate treaty calls for holding the rise in earth surface temperature to well under two degrees celsius or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit and if possible 1.5 degrees celsius Lower target was included of Was included in light of severe climate impacts predicted after only one degree celsius of warming Including deadly heat waves drought storm surges Made more destructive by raising seas un special report do in october will likely detail damage in a 1.5c world And help leaders decide if the targets that they have now are within reach But few efforts have been made to quantify the impact of different temperature goals on long-term economic growth cody voice Achieving the more ambitious paris gold Is highly likely to benefit most countries and the global economy overall by avoiding more severe Economic damage says senior author noah diffanba a professor at stanford university school of earth over the course Of this entry the global economy and a 1.5 degree celsius increase world would generate an additional 20 trillion dollars in gdp Compared to one in which the temperature rose by two degrees celsius That's a half a degree difference in global temperature 20 trillion dollars in gdp's And gdp is not a necessarily new caterer of economic health of other people, but it's you know something that can be figured out So, uh, but that's uh, that is of course if we are in For a 1.5 to 2 degrees celsius change as in a different story researchers just published their analysis projecting a doubling of the two degrees celsius increase By 2085 uh, that's in the advances in atmospheric sciences Or is published and the analysis the team used the parameters of no mitigation of rising greenhouse emissions So they're predicting Paris climate accord the side Nothing changes. We just keep going the way that we're going they compared They didn't do their own individual study. What they actually did was a comparison of Of other data. They compared 39 coordinated climate model experiments From something called the fifth phase the coupled model Intro comparison project which develops and reviews climate models to ensure the most accurate climate simulations possible They found that most of the models projected an increase of four degrees celsius as early as 2064 That's the majority saying 2064 and as late as uh 2095 So they picked 2084. Uh, I guess that was there. They're you know, finding something sort of Apparently everybody signed the accord except the United States and maybe venezuela but uh So they're assuming okay. Well, we'll go with the number where some mitigation does take place But even then 2084 Meanwhile, meanwhile in another completely unrelated story, although the subject matter is uh topically similar uh Increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere Will reduce the nutritional value of rice According to an international research team that's analyzing rice samples from field experiments started by a university of tokyo professor uh There's a good portion of the population on earth that uses rice as a as their you know staple crop And then completely random Sidenote to that one of that professors tokyo professors, uh, bains and doing his research was apparently raccoons that kept You know tubes that were designed to carry uh the increased co2 to the to the plants as they grew And had an issue with raccoons chewing through the tubes so unrelated, but uh, maybe Oh, the trouble the the troubles researchers have to deal with Maybe the raccoons don't want us to know what's coming. Maybe maybe we've already got a plan for dealing with a foreseeable Yeah, no, my gosh. Yeah rice is a huge subs subsistence crop around the world it maintains the nutrition for many diets for people around the world and if it has Lowered nutrition that means more people are going to have nutritional issues and there's going to be higher levels of starvation So that's not good. It's not a good thing or at least malnutrition and that's sort of interesting that the study was uh The professor was in tokyo who was doing this study But from when he started doing his studies till now, uh, the the people of japan have become much less reliant on rice As a staple, uh, but but it's in in some places in the world. It's it's as much as 50 percent Yeah, well, you know what else is really important for food is uh insects And while we're talking about this 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius change I'm just gonna hop in with one of my quick stories Which is uh is very interesting that it also dropped this week this is actually published in science from the university of east anglia and it's about uh, a limiting of global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius focusing on insects specifically and they found that, uh Looking at the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius. They actually looked at 115 thousand species Including 31 000 insects 8 000 birds 1700 mammals 1800 reptiles 1000 amphibians and 71 000 plants in this large-scale study and they found that um Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels would reap enormous benefits for biodiversity So this is kind of the uh glass half full side of this story is that hey if we limit it We're actually gonna be okay Uh, and they found that at two degrees warming 18 percent of insects will Have more than half of their range lost but at 1.5 degrees Celsius only six percent will be lost Um scaling that up at three degrees Celsius about 50 percent of insects would lose half of their range So this is a situation where you know insects kind of important to most food that we eat That 1.5 degrees Celsius is really that critical space And if you know if you you're not so worried about that uh black rhinos Darwin's finches these are also animals that really that 1.5 degrees Celsius is a Watermark it's looking like for them and and you bring up a good point and and that Something that I've left out of all of my 1.5 2 degree 4 degrees Celsius Is that those temperatures aren't like 1.5 more than we are now That's 1.5 2 or 4 from uh the pre-industrial 1890 those is like compared to 1890 temperatures so We've already done a lot of the progress towards that at this point So so these this isn't additional on top of what's already happened. This is uh Not including what's already happening. Yes, but I think what also is important here is to remember that we're not already sunk So it's this idea that that's that researchers are really finding that that specific threshold and that We're not already past the point of no return. We have to limit where we move Towards right now, but it's not too late That's what I took away I looked and I looked at all my fellow humans and went they're not going to do anything They're not going to change. Well, we'll see but it starts to affect food and global diversity. It's It's something that I mean, that's why the the Paris Accords happened and you know, we don't yet know What the results of that is it's still really early. So I choose her Lee Yeah, but we don't know exactly what's going to happen. Eric hold house this last week on uh, actually just yesterday on twitter I ran across a tweet of his he it. He is a climate Reporter and he he has been known to go to the extreme end of the sky is falling kind of reporting um, but on his on his uh recent He recently wrote an article on grist.org about a building El Nino for 2018 We still don't know exactly what's going to happen But that there are signs of an El Nino coming again, which is kind of unprecedented And he says in his in his tweet. He says if El Nino a lot arrives in late 2018 And it's looking like it might next year might tiptoe across the 1.5 degree Celsius mark Next year, right, but it's also it's not it's not once you're over it. It's not over There's still this there's there's wiggle room and it goes up and it goes down and the you know, this is This is it's not over until the until the last human goes Yeah, which which I think is the important thing here also is that we know again from social science research Bringing it back to the science, right that the second that um people think that there's no fixing something They stop caring and they won't do anything about it. So so that also is a lie to people No, it's actually similar reason Any other result results behavior change and better outcomes. So that's also a big part of it So people that think that we're already past the point of no return and people that think that there is no hope They have no reason to be invested or care So I choose hope We're not past the point of no return. There are possibilities. There are things we can do and in fact There was news and in terms of hope in california this last week um It was reported that since the coal and natural gas power plants went offline the number of of I think it's the number of pre of premature births has decreased in california So it's there's a there's a correlation between the reduction in coal power plants and coal coal processing and cleaner air and healthier babies Healthier pregnancies Yeah, and and there is other other news that It is becoming less financially feasible for things like coal to work and so Even though the price of solar and wind has been going down It the the price of coal has been going up and so more more solar and more wind are being put into use But we have things in action and steps are being taken Absolutely. Hope and we can all get rid of plastic straws. Thank you mcdonalds. Yeah. Um, wait Hey, wait, I can't just let that by me. I I didn't hear the plastic straw story. So now you got to tell me that Yes, so mcdonalds is signing on to the uh The movement to get rid of plastic straws straws are the worst Yes And it's this is a fast food company who hands you your beverage through a window with the plastic straw with the plastic lid I don't know what they're going to do to replace it, but they are taking it seriously and uh, they're going They're going to be signing on to getting rid of plastic straws They're probably going to sell five dollar mcdonalds reusable straws or something like that and end up making it in your car Because everyone will forget their straws So it'll work out for you Yeah, yeah, but um, I think that that's a really good point is that the plastic bags Not to go too far on a digit But the plastic bag band has worked really well and is gaining more and more momentum And less and less plastic bags are entering our environment every day And so once that success has been shown and is still continuing to grow It's giving people hope that they can stop other terrible things for entering the environment i.e microbeads straws Plastic utensils more and more of those things are becoming the norm And I I'm really I'm inspired by how far we've come in just a few years with that More work into the future, of course But other areas in which researchers are trying to help humanity is in helping the brain heal from the damage From stroke So when people suffer stroke there is a blockage of blood supply which blocks oxygen getting to nerve cells and other cells in the brain and those cells Can sometimes die and so after a stroke a patient has to deal with maybe reduced mental capacity reduced behavioral abilities because of Basically scars In their brain areas of the brain where there's dead tissue where there's nothing there And even though the human brain is plastic and that some some recovery can be made over time It's very slow going and the question has been how can we help that along? Well, some researchers at UCLA just publishing in nature materials have created what they're calling a stroke healing gel It is a hydrogel that can be implanted into the brain and helps brain cells grow back and so they were able to implant it into these scarred regions of mice who had been damaged by strokes and the Brain tissue and blood vessels started returning to the cavity after the hydrogel was injected into the cavity So this hydrogel it thickens into something of a scaffold so that neurons and blood Blood vessels can grow through it and it's infused with medications that actually stimulate that growth and suppress inflammation Which inflammation often reduces that regrowing and results in scars after 16 weeks In these mouse brains the stroke cavities contained regenerated brain tissue including new neuronal Connections this has never been seen before And the the abilities of the mice were improved. They were able to reach for food better Which is a sign of improved motor behavior But they don't know exactly how that was working because they you know weren't actually in the brain Seeing the neurons connect and knowing that that was what was allowing the behavior to be improved But they think that maybe new axons could be working and allowing the motor behavior in the mice so They're going to be testing this in humans to see How long it'll take they think that uh this In in mice they could In they could inject it following a stroke over a period of about five days after a stroke And they think that this period might be longer in humans maybe up to two months after a stroke that they could Be able to inject this and help with recovery So wow, that's awesome Yeah, so this I don't know why but this created this as wild speculation within me Don't know how that happened You what? That some point in the distant future We could remove parts of our brain And regenerate it a fresh anew And and the first thing that came to my mind is well, what if you're a professional athlete?  I've been doing was wrong talking about reprogramming Wiping the hard drive But it's like getting a fresh brain to to to fill with Experiences and neural connections and knowledge. I mean it would definitely would not be easy I mean it would have to be you'd be going back to the drawing board on how the connections work and what connections are made and You know what depending on I mean we're talking about networks in the brain working with other networks in the brain Like I think more I think more specifically maybe this I mean this could help with stroke But I mean could this help with uh with traumatic brain and an injury like for boxers or football players You know, um, you know, could it be something that after you know too many too many No, it's schizophrenic because that is that's brain-wide and it is going to be that's at a molecular level That's not just we can give you new tissue and it's going to be okay Well, if it's no regular and it's new tissue, why wouldn't it be okay? I mean I mean it'd have to be your tissue And so yes, so there you're talking about in something like schizophrenia You'd have to go. I mean that's a lot of mutations that are responsible for the disorder and it's I you'd have to fix all of them and then implant the tissue fixed and that This is a bit but I think Yeah, there could be Sections of the brain so say, you know an accident Maybe it's not stroke But maybe there's something that leads to you know aphasia where suddenly You're unable to understand speech or you're not able to speak But then we can replace that brain area Put the new brain tissue in there and then teach you to speak again or teach you to understand it Yeah, there yeah the potential there is very it's interesting So yes, this is in mice. We'll see how it works in people But the fact that this hydrogel worked and they had new brain connections. I mean that's exciting I I like the idea of overwriting some of the hard drive I know there's this is a science fiction. All right Tell me about raccoon lizard cats Okay, yeah, let's get down to some hard science This is an earth shattering discovery I get it in Utah It's not really necessarily earth shattering. It's more land mass separation and how that relates to our understanding of mammalian evolution in a Sort of shattering of what we understood before kind of way nearly 130 million year old fossilized skull Found in utah is evidence yet, panjia the super continental one continent for all life Split occurred more recently than scientists previously thought Huh And uh that uh and that this and that that a group of reptile like mammals These creatures who are sort of transitioning from reptile to mammal somewhere in the middles there They experienced an unsuspected burst of evolution across several continents must have been aliens of course Uh, quotey voice of adam huttenlocker Based on the unlikely discovery of this near complete fossil cranium We now recognize a new cosmopolitan group of early mammal relatives Uh adam is uh huttenlocker is the lead author of the study assistant professor clinical integrative anatomical sciences at keck school of medicine at usc This is published in the journal nature Study updates are understanding of how mammals evolved and dispersed across major continents during the age of the dinosaurs For a long time. We thought early mammals from the cretaceous, which is 145 266 million years ago time range We're anatomically similar to each other and not ecologically diverse This finding by our team and others reinforced that even before the rise of modern mammals Ancient relatives of mammals were exploring specialty niches Insectivores herbivores carnivores swimmers gliders In destructible pants basically they were occupying a variety of niches that we see them occupy today study reveals that early mammal precursors migrated from Asia to Europe into north america and further into the major southern continents Really interesting find here though This is oh the the new species which i don't know if you can get a screen share of this thing But it is like a raccoon cat fox thing. It's a really uh pretty cool-looking critter its name of the new species is cephalodon wakarm I can't say it wakarm usuch Which is uh phalaodon wakarm usuch wakarm usuch Which means yellow cat in the yute tribes language and respect for the area where the creature was found It was found in the cretaceous beds of eastern utah and that's sort of where a lot of this tie into the pangea split comes in Because this critter They find is most closer related the closest thing they've found to this the closest relative is during around in the early Cretaceous, but it's it's not in north america. It's in northern africa And it sort of It slims down the idea that the dispersing continents then you would see dispersed uh Sort of evolution taking place in different places And then that would make sense because they were not connected But if you have these these very similar creatures In what are now very different parts of the world It's harder to make that argument And I guess it backs up some other sort of recent finds this year within the dinosaur fossils Uh in african europe that kind of hint at the same much more recent separation of pangea But uh, yeah this little guy uh He had he says they had had teeth similar to fruit eating bats Yeah, so they're with their teeth. They could nip shear and crush Uh might have been an omnivore had a small brain which most everything that's not human we say that about It had giant ol factory bulbs. So it had really good sense of smell it focused a lot on smell And uh skull has tiny Eye sockets, so it probably didn't have good eyesight may not have had color vision Possibly nocturnal because a good sense of smell and bad eyes Why not just go out at night if you're reliant relying on your your sense of smell plus maybe the dinosaurs Be a little on the cold-blooded side Might not be out in active in such force at night might be a good time for the mammals This might be the nocturnal thing all comes down to mammals trying to avoid when dinosaurs were very accurate But yeah, did you find it? Did you uh, I didn't see if you screen shot I did it. You know what it looks like to me is a kawadi Which is a thing that lives in south america It looks a lot like it actually um, but I trust the I trust the biologists here and their categorization Wait, what does it what's their categorization? Uh that they are most similar to something that isn't in the americas Oh, oh, but but also also really really long time ago. This is so this is a this is sort of a dead family tree This is apparently not an actual ancestor of anything living today. This is an extinct branch Uh of creatures, so it's not related to anything. Oh my gosh. It looks very much like that Yes, that's the first thing I thought of was a kawadi, which is basically a south american raccoon Yeah, so this is this is uh So the kawadi worked out in south america this other one split off it ended up someplace else and didn't work very well Yeah, so maybe it maybe it has to do with predators and habitat and You know, maybe the kawadi was just well adapt. It is a well adapted for that south american ecosystem that habitat and then Maybe better at climbing trees. Yeah, I mean there's probably something that would that made the difference But that's fascinating that the body type and so much can look so similar yet. They can be completely different fates Time and place and it's uh, it's it the fact that the only subspecies of this was also found in north africa is again part of what that But I think they might that might be the creature. They said uh I'm trying to find it now. They said it was it's only two and a half pounds Uh The this it was little great. Yeah, it's a it's a little guy, but what did they compare it to? They might have actually compared compared it to that critter you're the kawadamindi Yeah They said it was like the size of small hair Yeah, I can't find it here Oh, yeah, here it is. Oh, no they compared it to a pica That's weird. That's a rodent. That is a rodent. Yeah In terms of size in terms of size But but but at two and a half pounds it would have been at its time One of the biggest mammals It would have been the under mammal of its time At that size Yeah, what is small now was very large then that's really interesting So much to think about how about thinking about some hammerhead worms Say what? Not a hammerhead shark, but a hammerhead worm. I'm intrigued. Tell me more You should be intrigued because this story is actually very intriguing Uh researchers in france Had gotten a couple of reports over the years about these weird Worms in in people's gardens and there was this one one guy Who kept sending these worms to this lab? And the the scientist was like that didn't come from france They are french. This is not a french worm This is not something that you would find in our gardens And so he just peeped it as he peeped it He said and but then the reports kept coming and finally the researcher said, okay Let's really take a look at this. And so the group the researchers got A bunch of um of citizen science observations. They got observations from 1999 to 2017 They did a four-year survey to get these These observations a total of 111 records And they were able to determine that there has been an invasion In france and that indeed France has been taken over by the hammerhead flatworm That is blue That is blue Platy helmenthe's geoplannaday Bipallium Diverse bi-pallium. These are worm species that Of the species of the genera bi-pallium diverse bi-pallium They are among Land planarians these flatworms and normally you think of planarians as kind of these water living Flatworm type things but these planarians They're giants and they live in the land and normally they live in asia But now they've invaded other places and It's scary because they're predator predators. They eat earthworms They secrete a they secrete a paralyzing toxin That allows them to Basically subdue and kill their earthworm prey But earthworms make soil And this is the same job that the earthworm does No, oh They do not do the same job as the earthworm and in fact in uh the the records of their activity and the uh the invasion of these worms they've actually shown that there has been A decrease in earthworm populations in the areas where these invasions have taken place And also that uh the soil quality and formation has decreased in those areas These worms are bad news. You know, they these worms these worms have been found in florida Because that's where everything invades first. Yeah.  Yeah, but something needs to stop these flat worms these flat worms are huge They can be um They can be pretty long They're giants in the world. There's 20 inches in in this picture. Whoa That's too big. That's way too big for worms. And what we need is they can they can reproduce by fission But yes, they can just split because they're planarians. They can just Split and form New worms. Hey, I think I need to just make a new worm Cut myself in half there. There we go Yeah, bro. I think they're from space Yeah The theme tonight, it's probably from space. It's probably it's not from space. It's from asia They and they are a scourge And especially for gardens for gardeners for people who are concerned about The soil and I know there's been a lot of talk about About the soil and our loss of it because of our poor agricultural practices Globally, we're losing our ground soil be for various reasons This isn't this is a not a great news. So um, yeah Flat worms hammerhead flat worms. It's like scary hammerhead sharks except their worms How do they think they got there? Do they think they hitched a ride on it on a plant or somebody's shoe? Or in soil. Yeah, somebody bringing a plant from asia. I mean, there's so many ways That these could spread you think of a normal worm and you think it moves real slow Well, it's not 20 inches long. I mean it might be able to outrun a toddler All right, these things have not walked Around the country they have been moved by the physical movements of people and the things that and plants and soil and so Yeah, things that people have done And you know, who knows it's been potentially, you know, you even have soil with eggs in it That you're bringing a plant from asia and it's got you know Even just the eggs of these things and then they can hatch and anyway Full-blown invasion French invasion. I think there's a point where you have to start taking Ecosystems sides And and you have to take our latest technologies And and start doing that that would normally takes nature a long time is is that sort of Interplay between predator and prey Back and forth that that arms race that goes on normally And say, you know what? We can make And rebuild a better earthworm Bigger we can make them Resist this neurotoxic behavior this pair of Right and now right now all of our earthworms.  It's just like a horror movie Samurai sort of some sort of molecular level Version of to combat and defend themselves. Let's do the arms race. Like there is a thing where at some point You kind of have to start making those decisions.   Some people end up with welts and these huge swollen bites for Weeks sometimes and you know, nobody ever really talks about why that is But now some researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have looked at the effect of mosquito saliva All by itself and this is the I can't believe this is the first time anybody's looked at this But this is the first time that researchers have discovered that just mosquito saliva With nothing else no malaria in it like nothing nothing No parasite Yeah, yeah, just just the saliva can trigger an uh an immune response in the human immune system And so this is published in plus neglected tropical diseases journal the public library of science Uh, they this was again some this is one of those studies where they were like, oh I don't we weren't really looking for this but we saw an effect and they used humanized mice Uh, and they they were at first looking at mosquito bite delivery and needle injection delivery of dengue virus To significantly different disease developments and and they saw that If it was a needle injection the dengue virus had one effect and if it was a mosquito bite, it was different And the mosquitoes delivering the virus the mice had more of a rash more fever and mother more characteristics that were similar to the disease presentation in humans because humans aren't going around going Hey, can you give me a needle full of dengue? They're just getting bitten by mosquitoes So they went in to look at this more specifically and they found that 24 hours and seven days after mosquitoes bite humanized mice They were able to look at the levels of cytokines which are inflammatory molecules and they modulate the immune response and they looked at other immune cells And they found that they were all Upgraded just from mosquito delivered saliva So there is a complex immune reaction that was not anticipated From mosquito saliva and so since it's an immune reaction I am going to jump to the conclusion This was not part of what they said in the study But this is an immune response And so I'm going to jump to the conclusion that some people are going to have a more heightened immune response than others to mosquito saliva akin to an allergy akin to an allergy.  You're you're actually allergic to mosquito spit And then my final story talking about the uh, this story we've we've brought up on the show before the Em drive which is one of these magical thrusters that uh multiple I think there were some germans and chinese and nasa researchers who've been trying to create um thrusters that could be lightweight and not have to use a whole bunch of fuel but be able to get us across the solar system Easily they're looking for these new ways to drive spacecraft or across the universe and um the aem drive came out in the last year or two as this really interesting weird thing that was like a black box That there was thrust involved and they don't know how it worked Well, it turns out it didn't work because it didn't work and um, I'm going back to you This is then and I and I'm going back to your uh story from the your animal corner blare about how The researchers were doing this this setup and you know Oh, we also just want to look for the Loch Ness monster because this is also a teaching thing We can teach about science and we can do all this stuff. Well For this particular story A team of germans were like, okay We need to figure out what's going on here. And so they created this really neat experimental Box to test these cool new space drives and see how they work and see if they work And so they create it with it. It's got a vacuum So it'll be like the vacuum of space and they've got it automated so that they can Set things to run on their own and they've got calibrations and all sorts of balancing and everything to make it as finely tuned as possible And it's sensitive this system is sensitive to around 10 nano newtons of force, which is not very much force Anyway, they tested this eam drive. They built their own and they tested it and they determined that What's happening is uh, the eam drive is just sensitive to the earth's magnetic field And that the thrust that the drive was Showing is not really thrust at all, but actually noise from the earth's magnetic field Yeah And then they did this again. They tried again on something called a muck effect thruster, which is a different kind of thruster that's Based on kind of vibrations. And so they built kind of this piezo powered vibrating system To get it to work and again It didn't really work and they don't really they couldn't figure it There's something interesting going on there, but they couldn't figure it out entirely But really what they did is they created a really cool setup and system for testing these things Really well, and they're very excited about their opportunity and the research researchers conclusions from all of this is that At least space drive, which is the name of the test setup Is an excellent educational project by developing highly demanding test setups evaluating theoretical models and possible Experimental errors. It's a great learning experience with the possibility to find something that can drive space exploration into its next generation Great. So testing tool is also a teaching tool Yeah Yeah, and this uh my this art this article that I Took that quote from is written by Chris Lee over at ours technica and seriously He has the best sense of humor about this whole thing I mean in the beginning of the In the beginning of this article he instead of calling it the em drive.  Where did it go? Um Oh, and then he goes on to talk about how Um things in space that can't be powered by magical unicorns or something He starts talking about magical space unicorns at some point in the article and That just shows his lack of knowledge I mean, I mean there's no evidence that it's not magical space unicorns. So maybe it is has to be magical space Maybe I'll grab 30 of my friends and we'll write a Paper about magical space unicorns. That's right get 30 of your friends and write a paper and there you go That's right. Oh, here it is He had the thruster the radiation bounces around the cone and by some physics defying magic unicorns materialized to push you through space Yeah, no, that doesn't happen. No Yeah physics everybody physics is what it boils down to does anyone else have any amazing articles They want to quickly run through before the end of the show. Oh, yeah speaking of testing and teaching the african madabelli ants mega panera analysis We've talked about them on the show before they're the termite eating ants And so they actually make long files of 200 to 600 ants and raid termites at their foraging sites And bring the termites back to their nest where they are feasted upon But before they start their raids they actually send out scouts to look for the termites And once they've spotted them the scout ants have to return quickly to get everyone back there before the termites leave On their way back the scouts show Something very unusual. They take the quickest route, which is not always the shortest So for example, if there's really tall grass, they that'll slow them down. So they will actually take a detour On flat ground that will double their pace. So they found that on average They were able to reduce their time back to the nest by 35 percent Taking the longer route The really weird thing about this is that they are not sure yet how they're navigating And um, that's what they want to research nexus What is the navigational abilities here because they're not relying on the same navigational aids that other ant species Use in that they found in previous studies The the really crazy thing is that the decision On which way to take is made by individual ants. It's not a collective decision So this is individual autonomous ants saying I think that way is quicker So this is the first proof of time optimized path integration by individuals in the ant kingdom They got to get there faster the faster the ant the better the colony The shortest route is not always the fastest. So maybe don't always listen to your gps Right, you might know of a little long cut that cuts your time And the ants do they know in the bay area. I have quite a few long cuts Oh, yeah, absolutely. I'm convinced some of those, uh gps rerouting things Are to get you've talked about this other people out of out of the way That'd be good. All right, everybody. Have we done it? I think we did I think so I think we did it Oh, thank you so much for a great show Thank you everyone for joining us tonight. Thank you to fada for helping us on our show notes and also In our social media. 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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 other than tardigrades make big turds Remember it's all in your head We're the wave of my hand and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand This week science is coming your way So everybody listen to what I say I use the scientific method for all that it's worth and I'll broadcast my opinion all over the air Because it's this week in science This week in science science science This week in science This week in science science science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be new That's what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan If you listen to the science, you may just get understand that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy We're just trying to save the world from jeopardy And this week in science is coming your way So everybody listen to everything we say and if you use our methods better roll and die We may rid the world of coxoplasma Got the eye Because it's this week in science This week in science science science This week in science This week in science science science I've got a laundry list of items I want to address From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote more rational thought and I'll try to answer any question you've got So how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour a week? This week in science is coming your way You better just listen to what we say and if you learn anything from the words that we've said Then please just remember it's all in your head Because it's this week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science and that brings us to the end of our show i didn't hope that your garden is not taken over by the uh flatworm the hammerhead of flatworm and so sorry so sorry i'm gonna stop screen sharing now gonna stop screen sharing sharing now gonna stop at now i just realized my hair matches my backdrop i got some i got some pink color in there some and it's kind of it's got this red in the i'm very tonally tonally matched according to these lights colors in there there's some colors yeah oh my goodness the comments over on youtube i know that the youtube is still going and you're over there there are people over there are you being else worth dan b densby thank you i'm glad you enjoyed the episode and learned i was making comments about the youtube commenters because there were a lot of people over there today who had to have messages deleted and be hidden because they were making trouble i have to say um that cool we're not down with that i'm really proud of our twist community and um the people who have our backs i know that also in our um web chat in our like irc chat um there have been people that have showed up and not understood what we're trying to do here or what kind of people we are or how we want to talk and um everybody has our backs so quickly and it's the internet can really be a crappy place to be if people don't have your back and it's pretty great yeah i mean facebook we have great comments over on facebook we have great comments in our chat room our chat community is fantastic and i think that our youtube many times our youtube chat can be great also i think it just takes one or two bad apples um but if everybody bands together to not accept that behavior then that is our community and so um over on youtube i would love those of you who are watching you know to try and keep the troublemakers in line if we can um as a community because that's not what we stand for we're here for the science we're not here to comment on people's appearances we're not here to comment on people's ethnicities we're not here to comment on um you know we're not that's not what we're what we're here to talk about we're not here for any kind of hate speech we are here to talk about science and uh to talk about the betterment of humanity really yeah that's what i like there's the hope again there's the hope i hope and i know that our community over on youtube too i mean it's i think youtube it's like people wonder in sometimes and don't know what's going on but um there's a place for all of us in the community to stand up and say hey yeah you know what be cool be cool just enjoy the show and you don't have to be rude this is why we can't have nice things we can have yes noodles we can have unicorns we can yes noodles oh i like that cr1 in the small intestine of life be the good gut bacteria that's right yeah and a big group hug little gracious one that's right i know don't feed the trolls but sometimes you do need to put the trolls in their place and tell them they need to be quiet and then help to ban them i i you know i don't have all the time and ability to do that while i'm hosting the show so um people who are able to do that that's wonderful irons in the fire thank you for commenting over there on youtube i appreciate that uh it looks like justin had a power outage which is interesting because he's still online nothing changed in my lighting it's just my camera the side sometimes like it's better now let's you're done um arc no is empty over on facebook you're you're not alone in your chat you're not alone and thank you for uh for for joining us on patreon go ahead justin uh the whole i don't now i'm blurry before i was just like not lit now no camera i'm gonna get a new camera one of these days i need a new camera to my laptop cameras beans so you guys the camera i got is a logitech and it's um it's amazing it's this little tiny camera and you're crystal clear it's a it's hd 1080p it's beautiful so i highly recommend this camera okay we highly recommend right in the mail so is it mac compliant uh it should be yeah so the not feeding the trolls thing uh is something that i got into pretty heavily a long time ago on twist when there was a it was we were getting trolled by creationists and there was this anti evolutionary movement to you know stickers on textbooks that were disclaimers against evolution disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer you know and i and i went i went pretty heavily after them directly and engaged in every conversation that was presented and eventually they went away um so i i i kind of agree and disagree with the whole don't feed the trolls thing uh i sometimes think if you if you can articulate uh the opposing view that the troll is clamoring on about uh you inform the greater audience a little bit and yeah and i agree i mean yes but you have to have the the the time and the emotional strength in that moment to deal with that because that's the other side right is that like when you first start that conversation you're gonna get hit back hard and so if you power through sometimes you succeed and sometimes you know you can help educate people around the conversation which is important but if you're not in an emotional or or physical state to be able to fire back responses to everything you get thrown at for the next i don't know i'm always 24 hours 24 7 i'm ready to go 24 7 bring it like yeah i'm ready always speaking of evolution hot red says my camera is set to autofocus it is and and i've gone through lengths and found a thing that could change it and set it and then every time the dang old computer does one of those updates it takes every setting that i did to this camera and then i gotta go find and upload the controller app and then have it open in the window again and do all this it's just nonsense i just need a camera that doesn't rely on windows it's a microsoft camera so anything that microsoft changes on my computer the camera is like oh we're gonna start fresh with this dang autofocus and lighting we're gonna do it all over uh speaking of evolution in arizona i believe it's arizona the there is a new new language for science education and evolution advocate education that's being voted on it's open for public comment right now um so if you're in arizona uh you're a voter in arizona i think you can comment on it but they have changed the language to remove the word evolution yep sure did from the science curriculum super good idea guys and and the superintendent of the schools is has has been caught on camera promoting intelligent design saying that creationism should be taught as an alternative theory to evolution that it's been hundreds of years why are we still having this conversation why do we have to talk about this and the courts have even said no intelligent design is not a suitable alternative it is a tool for creationists to get religion into the schools the courts the federal courts have basically said this and so now their new ploy is just to get rid of words that they don't like because that invites the conversation invites the debate if you don't have the word evolution then what are you talking about yeah unfortunately the the next generation science standards have already been adapted in a couple states where they've done that they've taken evolution and climate change out of the standards which is crazy because i've read those standards front to back that are this thick many times now um and every time i don't understand how you can have it without it they've in they've intertwined it into the curriculum progressively from k through high school those things they their concepts that build on each other and to and to say that it's not there like they talk about heritability and they talk about variation and they talk about mutation and all this kind of stuff from kindergarten it's it's ridiculous it's absolutely ridiculous so i being an ivory tower intellectual elitist oh yeah oh this is gonna be good yeah from your from your own league school my high school dropout in this although although technically you didn't drop out i proficient at it i took a test that said i wouldn't have to ever go back to high school again and i went to college a year earlier than i would have been able to but then dropped out of that and then went back to college and dropped out and went back to college and dropped out of end of the rich cycle of figuring out that um brick and mortar schools are not for me but the the the thing that uh the ivory tower intellectual elitist thing because i i'm like okay with it i i have this this sense that we should allow people to pursue and pursue for their progeny and pursue for the community a a lifestyle and an intellectual and an awareness and ignorance but that we should also then at the same moment in which a community decides that they're going to change or remove evolution from their textbook we should remove everything else that science has contributed to right and just get rid of it just get rid of it just as soon as they pass that law evolution will not be taught in school and power grid goes down right no more electricity for that community they're now off the grid they're free to amish it up all they like and i can offend the amish because they're not listening they can amish it up all they like and they can do their prepper society where they dig holes and live in them and you know live off of earthworms or whatever they're they're they're shredded it's this this i they're gonna be any earthworms left well we'll remove the hospitals we'll remove the electricity we'll remove anything that science has created they no longer have access to fine absolutely fine with that no yeah let's go back because this is what they want they want they want a they want a a path to power within the community that does not require facts or reality to back it up they want unearned educationally unearned power on this earth without having to have done the work or relied upon the work of others well and this is the problem too is right that the new next generation science standards are all about the integrated approach and how science helps you be a functional human adult right so it's not about like can you recite the scientific method can you copy back the the periodic table of elements it's about hey can you use the scientific method to figure out if a thing works and if it doesn't can you fix it so that it works stuff like that right and so if you if you then can't evaluate uniformly across right so this whole idea was like oh we'll have the next generation science standards everybody you'll have the same progression building on scientific knowledge alongside with math and literature and language art standards and all this kind of stuff but then the problem is now these states that have altered the standards have to come up with their own evaluations so isn't that a fun kind of catch 22 that now they get to evaluate themselves however they want kind of defeats the whole purpose so defeats the purpose anyway just let us teach science everyone everyone chill let us teach science you don't tell the plumber how to fix the pipes don't tell the people whose entire career has been teaching science and how to teach science and how children learn and brain development and all this kind of stuff don't tell them how to do their job either yeah this whole thing it sounds as though there was a team so there were new standards developed by a team of more than 30 educators and then they were submitted to the arizona department of education and then according to some of the teachers that wrote the standards the state normally edits for clarity and grammar it makes changes to document formatting but then the changes that were put in place were more than that and apparently they the woman who is responsible for it is superintendent diane douglas and she has defended her her ideas and it says the changes were enough to cause the department of education's director of k12 science education to resign oh yes okay so i don't under i don't understand i mean you're the if you're going to be if you're the director aren't you above the superintendent wouldn't you're wouldn't i don't like why i don't understand the resigning when i mean i understand being upset but then you just put your foot down and you say no i don't know it's very complicated there's so much red tape in school systems it's insane um yeah it's it's weird to answer irons in the fire in the youtube chat that i'm watching now which is so fun i can't do it during the show but during the after show i can um irons in the fire ask where does this leave stem program so stem science technology engineering and math is an acronym it doesn't actually mean anything when it comes to education standards it's more of a thing that you'd say uh we offer stem programs for school so it's it's an acronym that you use to convey that your your program or your curriculum or whatever it is your offering has those elements in it the thing that that was the previous standards were state science standards so here in california we had the california science standards so um those were around for um around 20 years um took about 10 years to make the n gss similarly has taken it took almost 10 years to make and then get kind of disseminated and then each state has a certain amount of years to adopt and so in adoption you are allowed to make adjustments like kiki was talking about but the original plan for that was for things like oh well we'll change this conversation about drought to conversation about flooding because we're in florida or um we don't you know whatever reason things they weren't intending that there would be content edits based on you know disbelief in science but as we've talked about on the show before most science textbooks have a texas edition and a california edition and you can buy one of those two and so the california edition is um the one that has usually all the science and the texas edition usually is the one that has some edits as some of the side by side conversations of intelligent design versus evolution and they stage a debate in the classroom and this kind of stuff so it's we're getting better the fact that there's dissent about this process right now i think is huge so that that is progress because you know in the last set of science standards that we had i'm sure arizona just took the texas version and went with it you know so i think that this um it's good news to me that there's a conversation being had but i wish it was further along i yeah absolutely there's an article from um arizona public radio that is about this they're saying um that so the department of education in arizona made unexpected last-minute changes shifting from big ideas to vocabulary words and watering down the concept of evolution um so listen listen listen i'm not sure the new arizona science standards are meant to encourage a messy hands-on approach to science the department of education's revisions shifted the focus backwards quote as a professional as a science educator i just could not support teaching students this incorrect idea of what science is says lacy weezer the department's former director of k-12 science education she resigned rather than implement the changes made during an unprecedented internal review she says i think the changes really shift from the focus of this idea of science of discipline for helping students make sense of the world the world to really just memorizing a body of facts she was also alarmed by the addition of so-called key concepts to the standards they look a lot like the old vocabulary terms emphasized in arizona's outdated standards from 2004 which is what a committee of experts who wrote the new document wanted to get away from another troubling change department staff deleted or qualified the word evolution throughout the document yeah so um yeah so this is for the next generation uh science standards the arizona still has not adopted it and is one of this 19th uh no is uh let's see yeah arizona hasn't adopted it yet and has chosen to write its own standards and so schools in arizona may not be able to use national resources great yeah that's that's another issue it's a it's a state saying i want to have my state's rights and it's like you can oh jeez yeah yeah um and it doesn't say anything about climate change although it's sound i mean if they're i don't know so back to my ivory intellectually this tower i i've become strongly in favor of state rights yeah i think state state states rights are very important but i think in terms of um in terms of standardizing the basics of education that all students across the united states should be able to get there's a place you know where that becomes a little tricky where it's it's like yes i get it but then you have you know then you have kentucky or arizona or you know wherever not teaching climate change not teaching evolution um and kids like they're not learning they're not learning what everyone else is learning and that's a problem it is it is and and the whole like you don't get federal dollars if you're blah blah blah like you know i don't know again every tower of being in california where we have a surplus of taxes going to where we're we're in the uh we're in the black in terms of where i guess we contribute more to the federal than we take states like kentucky don't that's a welfare state to begin with and if they want to further cut themselves off from any federal dollars when it comes to education everything else again there's this like sort of like trying to destroy the fabric of a of an age of reason society that takes place in a lot of these states i don't know what the instinct is that drives people towards what i do know what it is it's the desire to have power over people without actually being intelligent not actually having rational thought involved that i i'd really believe that there's a desire to have an uneducated populace uh because they're easier to rule they're they're more likely to vote for your uneducated point of view if they themselves are not educated you know there's there's things when it comes to the california that as a state with state powers and our our state's environmental regulations for instance our regulations on to what the car industry the auto industry can and cannot have coming out of a tailpipe yeah um because we're such a large state we can impact the decisions of the automakers to where they they could make two or three or four different types of emission controls on every vehicle depending on the state they're going to send that vehicle to but the end of the day that becomes additional expense so it's easier to build to the highest standard and california does that they have high standards for for for carbon emissions from vehicles that sort of thing and so we have an enormous influence and if we were stuck with relying on a national standard for anything whatever our education our emissions pollution that can come from a factory the minimum wage any of that it would be a much more disastrous situation so so in that in that bad decision uh what the heck is going on in the in the state of Kansas you know Tennessee Tennessee removed sex education almost entirely from its curriculum and it also happens to be the state with the highest rate of teen pregnancy how did that happen i wonder um you know eventually eventually this this experiment of democracy is supposed to look back on what it's done you look back on the results and go you know what uh in Kentucky they they reduce taxes and reduce taxes and reduce taxes and now the teachers uh can't afford to teach the students in their own full revolt and the state isn't a deficit and it's a welfare state relying on federal dollars and they can't produce much like there's a point where we've done the experiment look at the results and this whole democracy experiment thing continues what if we put a billionaire with no experience and questionable ethics in charge of the country what could possibly go wrong and amazingly as as much as you know we can say this that or the other one of the wonderful things about the way our country is constructed is our economy is not based solely on who the president you know it's not a doling out the deciding this industry gets this much this industry will now get that much it's capitalism so industry and economies survive despite who's the president a lot of the policies because they're state regulated they're state controlled that that we have state elections that are separate from the national election don't necessarily change it very much regardless of who the president is or who the supreme court is because we have supreme courts and states as well so the way our powers are so massively separated that the city i live in versus the city that you live in can have a different set of regulations above what our states have uh allows for a tremendous amount of self-rule and and when we see these horrible efforts to remove evolution which i think is a form of child abuse of use to remove scientific education from the curriculum children to limit their ability to advance and interact with reality we have to understand that that's a side effect or that we have to deal with or that's a that's a symptom uh that comes about when we can allow ourselves also to have all the success that we have in communities that aren't doing that so it's it's a wonderful horrible thing about our country but we're not stuck with any single philosophy and it allows for experimentation and not all experimentation is good and some of it is negative and some of is is ideologically or religiously driven and most of us will survive whatever the negative is because in large we look at results and communities decide to go in directions based on this so well uh also just to add on to that kind of a different thing is if you if you don't want to see what happens with that and you instead want to fix this problem one place that you can go is to ncse the national center for science education so ncse.com i go i get their daily digest of all of the science standards updates from the various states that are going through adoption right now and there actually is a really good success story i was trying to find it in the in the example of new mexico so new mexico did exactly what arizona is doing right now they gutted the ngss they removed all of evolution and all of climate change mentions um and they were trying to push through this mess right um but as soon as ncse found out what was going on they they did um a whole blitz with the press they talked to the press they they engaged people in new mexico um a lot of the people living in new mexico who would actually be affected by this who have children in the school system they a lot of them actually did act and there was a huge um demonstration of criticism on the public education department when they were going to adopt their messed up version of the standards and um then towards the end of that month a whole almost an entire month later they pushed it back pushed it back pushed it back and decided in the end to adopt the entire ngss in its entirety unedited um so this is a situation where in this exact same kind of status where they're they're talking a big game they they they they're putting forward these um these gutted uh standards it's not going to work in every single state but part of being abreast of these things and being aware and telling your friends who live there and and sharing things on social media or whatever it is you're going to do but part of being aware of the of the fight actually it it starts to show you that in a lot of these states there are huge communities of people who want the proper standards and if there's a large enough majority of that then they can make their voices heard and demonstrate and tell their congresspeople and tell their superintendent and their department of education and changes can be made before it's too late so it's pretty cool i would encourage for anyone who's very interested in this topic yeah to sign up for ncse's blog um and they're actually all of their staff are really great blog writers they're they're fantastic i know they're great people yeah they're so entertaining and kind of quirky and their narrative is excellent but they also tell you exactly as much for me as i would want to know about a thing which is a lot but not too much yeah we've had we've interviewed them from time to time on the show which has been which has been good yeah it's so funny yeah but it's just so funny every once and while you think oh climate change is a thing now nobody's talking about evolution anymore and then something pops up like this and you're like what it's impossible for me to tell as a as an educator you know sometimes i'll go to a school and they'll say you can't say evolution here and then i'll just talk about adaptation a whole bunch and about how certain aspects of animals are good for certain yeah i'll go to schools it's happening less and less but i'll go to schools where they say you can't use the e-word um and i will occasionally go to other schools where they say that you can't talk about climate change and then i'll say okay well you definitely shouldn't pick our climate change lesson then um but it's not often both and it's very hard for me for me to predict which one it's going to be i mean you're in the you're in the bay area i mean these aren't public right oh no they're they're not public schools no no no no they're private schools but but you would be surprised that it does still happen um that i go to places and they tell me that i cannot talk about those things and the problem is i'm i'm not going to say i'm not going to go there because my visit could still be some of the only real science that those students get for the year so i am not going to deprive the children of seeing the animals and hearing their stories um because i'm not allowed to use a certain word i do usually talk about evolution in any way but i don't use the word and i have never gotten in trouble for it just use other words the teachers at those places aren't specialized enough to be smart enough to catch you yeah absolutely you see davis uh has a has a sort of primer for visiting instructors in life sciences that that warns them and reforms them about has to sort of educate them about the fact that they will have certain students that don't believe in evolution because it's not a thing in most countries you go into a science or in a classroom talk about evolution and people go well that's just a thing that doesn't happen other places it's sort of like how how when they did that poll and global warming was only like a controversial or conspiratorial subject matter in the united states it's that's what we're talking about yeah we have we have an interesting mix yeah it's you gotta roll with your punches do what you can spread the science where you can that's what we're doing with the punches spread all the science no how did you don't use the e word when they tell you you can't no i was there too i was i was actually thinking exactly that when you started singing kiki i was like we were thinking the same thing that would be a fun song i didn't backhand teachers i was backhanding yeah i did backhand some teachers i did i'm sorry for that no i'm sorry for that i i love teachers i just get upset i get upset about those kinds of things and myself personally i am the type of person that when somebody tells me or i know i'm not supposed to talk about something the first thing that comes out of my mouth is that thing visiting visiting france talking to the french people who took us out to dinner so nicely well you know california wine so much better so much better so let's talk about catholicism this was uh this was little jason in the 10th grade somebody from the nancy regans just say no program uh was doing a speech in like second period class and they started off there are 354 different chemicals in marijuana hand goes up in the back of the room mine yes how many of those are harmful well uh there's a number of different compound hand goes up in the back of the room yes how many chemicals separate compounds are there in a breakfast cereal well that's uh there's you can differentiate between how many people have overdosed or died from from marijuana ever in the history of ever this is you at 10 years old no no this is not i'm not 10 years old 10th grade so what is that okay even or something but it was like there is there is a thing that you know i've never been afraid to say that thing you're saying is constructed only in such a way to get across a message and it's relieving everybody of the facts in doing so right like like i like i i did this i did this only a couple years later at the community first community college that i dropped out of high school to go to there was in the town square in arcada california there was uh around christmas there was a group of um what do you call it like uh the ring in the bell i guess they're fundraising but they're also preaching um some sort of christian faith so many things and and they're talking against evolution and all these sort of things so i decided i would stand on the opposite side of the street and start talking about dinosaurs talking about evolution started and i was doing and actually i got a bigger crowd and and i like i was also like a 17 year old 16 17 year old kid without all my you know without a depth of knowledge really of science but i got other people involved in the activity who were then talking who were like at you know abandoned university where maybe anthropologists or you know life sciences people who started then saying out loud things that they knew about evolution it turned into this fantastic like thing that just happened right there in the spot where you had people talking about science on one side of the street and people who were like trying to discount science as it turned out first they were just saying the things about the creation and like you know this was that and that happened to them and then people lived for 400 years until there was a flood and then people only lived to be 80-ish um but i i think that that that's what if anything we could teach people is to call bs when they see it is to say you know that the insight of the thing that you're telling me while i can see an element of truth to it perhaps the reason that you're telling it to this a particular audience is because you want to convey this message specifically and i feel like you're overriding a lot of facts that happen between the thing that you started that the thing that you want them to know and the way that you're presenting your information i can tell you're leaving out this that and i think we need more of that i think we need more people to be and i don't even think it's necessarily a critical thinking thing well that's part of it it's a skeptical thing but it's not just being skeptical because that could be you comply that to everything you can be like i'm skeptical about science like yeah absolutely i go for it like you can be well that's like a misuse of the word i'll see it is but skepticality it's the limiting factor of being a skeptic is you you're always skeptical about things you don't know and so it's like it's the you know a a physicist being skeptical and me at 17 being skeptical are completely different things or even me now when it comes to anything physics that's just like being a skeptic is great except it's based on your level of education so you can be a terrible skeptic if you're not very well educated but or you can be very skeptical all the time because you don't know any better so skepticism well i think i think again that's like a colloquialized version of the word that people don't know again it's what they don't know right but being a skeptic is about like wanting more information or wanting to see the um the process of you know the line of reasoning the explanatory chain but people use it to say you know i don't believe that right i'm skeptical yeah but that's it it's not what it's meant right to be for is like show me the process show me the a to z i want to see it as opposed to actually no that's not true yeah but here's the other thing i would say to that i mean this this part of this is this as well it's like if you're interested in that why don't you go look for that information i don't need to show it to you you the burden of proof that that whole conversation right libraries google all of the things yeah that's like the person who who has no um argument of their own other than a statement right and then when you contradict that statement you now have to explain why you're right that's the whole burden of the fallacy of the burden of proof right it's like that's not how and that's that's what happens to me on the internet all the time which is when i'm like all right i'm done because i don't have to go and do an hour of homework to find out what i know to be true because i've done this hour of homework before because you told me i have to do that if you don't want to believe me and you don't want to look it up for yourself bye bye i'll see you later i need i do need to get going this is a fan this is a great conversation and i am enjoying it but i have to get going marshal is i want to leave with the parting a parting parting thought yeah parting shot off the bow parting shot which is one of the one of the things i learned in the uh the ideology wars i guess or the creationist trolling conversations is that people who tend to have ignored all of science because they haven't done the reading they haven't done the research and all of that also tend to not do have delved into or read or researched their own point of view it's not like they came with their separate body of knowledge exactly yeah i found amazingly that creationists religious ideologues don't know the bible oh yeah for sure like this is like that's the other side of that argument it's like some of them do but some of them don't you know it just like most of the people who i've encountered and interacted with and had these conversations with and i've only done like two or three read-throughs like beginning to end of this this work uh don't actually know what their document the the thing that they're convinced of they haven't read a research and that's and that's the thing is is relying on an assumption of what the thing that you think is true is based on without ever even having looked into that like go look into that first i mean i think i think one of the things that could convince more people of evolution than anything else is compare is actually have them go read their text go have them read their document ask them to read their documents that are in refute that are refuting uh what science says read the document not just it's not even so much that they need to be exposed to science i think they need to be exposed to their own ideological underpinnings because they haven't even had that they haven't explored it and that's the problem people who don't explore good night exploration it's just it's yeah they need to explore it all yeah say good night flair good night flair say good night justin good night justin good night kiki good night you guys good night everybody thank you so much for joining us once again we'll be back another week in the can um yeah we'll be back next week no special news before we go so i hope that we see you all later thank you so much we love you goodbye we love you goodbye oh those of you who are patreon sponsors i have reached out related to mp3 stuff and t-shirt sizes and other things so we're in the process but um if you have not seen those messages check your email for the patreon messages i sent if you should be getting one um yes check your messages helps you later okay and uh justin hang on the line one second and we'll chat with you oh how about things that i'm supposed to do oh no i actually hit the button and now i'm also not here what a punk okay i'm gonna hit the stop broadcast button good night everybody