We are live now and I will wait for the cue from our wonderful chat room to let me know that we are good to go. My cat is climbing through the basement shelves and I assume that something will fall during the show. That is what this cat does. She's looking at me from up on high. It's a little nerve-wracking, but I do believe we are live and it's ready to begin in three, two, this is Twist. This week in Science episode number 750 recorded on Wednesday, December 11th, 2019. How Fishbones Tell Stories. And happy birthday, Justin. Ah, thank you. Hey, everyone. I'm Dr. Kiki and today on the show, we will fill your head with fish, STDs, and lice, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. According to reports that are coming in from around the world, people are everywhere. Even where you are right now, there's at least one person. In fact, chances are you have never been anywhere at any time where at least one person wasn't present. And even less of a chance that you have been anywhere where people haven't been before. But there have been times on our planet where people could go places where other people had never been. Going where no one has gone before has been a thing people have liked doing since the first overcrowded hunting grounds. Amazingly, when people then went looking for a place where they could find no other people, they often found other people. Occasionally, however, they did manage to find a place where no people had been before. And when they did find such brave new worlds to explore, the one thing they wished they had brought with them was another episode of This Week in Science. Coming up next. And a good science to you to Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again to talk about all the science that we enjoyed from the past week and other things that we would like to explore. And you know, in honor of Justin's birthday, which is in fact today. Well, it was yesterday for him in Denmark. But regardless, we are going to move it on up. And we have a wonderful interview planned for the show today. Talk about anthropology, archaeology, these wonderful things about ancient peoples, humans. It's a topic that Justin loves so much. So it's a topic for Justin's birthday. I also brought stories about dinosaurs and their old pals and monkey pigs. It's true. It's true. All right, Justin, what did you bring for the show? I brought some really bad news about Greenland global warming. But that's not really new news. It's just more keeping onto the piles of bad news that we've gotten in the past. Oh, and a fun story about Christmas trees. No, a fun guy story.  Blair, what's in the animal corner? I brought a story about the aforementioned STDs. It is in the animal corner. So we're talking about animal STDs. I also brought a story about sea otters and potentially bringing them to new, old places. And a fun little story about stringing up the lights, not on a Christmas tree, but on fishing nets. Oh, fishing nets. Interesting. Festive or functional? Perhaps both. Right. As we jump into the show, I do want to remind you all that if you have not yet actually subscribed to This Week in Science, you can find us all places that podcasts are found. You can also find us on YouTube and Facebook. And you can find information about the show, show notes and other things at twist.org. You can also find at twist.org. At least to order our 2020 Blair's Animal Corner twist calendar. That's right. You can get them now. I have them. Hot little mitts. And it looks like Blair got hers too. That's great. She did. The mail system works. This is wonderful. I will be mailing these things. I am mailing them. But now it is time to head on into our interview for the evening. I would love to introduce our guest tonight, Dr. Virginia Butler. She is a professor of anthropology at Portland State University here in Portland, Oregon. Her focus is zoo archaeology, zoo-o archaeology. And this is why she is very interested in fish bones. Dr. Butler, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. It's great to have you here. I was recommended your work a while back. The idea of using bones and animal bones to look into human history, I found really intriguing.  What a present. Science present. Can you tell us what is zoo archaeology and how did you get interested in it? Yes. So zoo or what we often say zoo archaeology is the study of ancient animal bones that are associated with archaeological sites. So basically as far back as people have been using animals, we have the earliest records from Africa over a million and a half years ago, we have zoo archaeology. And they provide a window into the human story because people have been connected to animals a long time. The bones and teeth of these animals are hard parts they preserve. So as people expanded across the globe and started to form new relationships with new animals, those bones get tucked into archaeological sites. We studied them and we can tell a lot about human history from them. I think that's fabulous. And how did you get interested in them to begin with? Yes. So as an undergraduate, I found archaeology because it wonderfully connected history and geology.  So I got into that. And as I developed as a scientist and a thinker, I developed strong connections to biology too. And I first thought I would start to look at plants and plant remains in sites. But then the animals pulled me in. So I went to graduate school focusing on that. And I went to the University of Washington. And it was absolutely clear that in that part of the world, fish were such an import of the human story. And this was back in the early 1980s. And there were very few people at that time looking at fish remains. And I realized that I could develop kind of a niche, a specialized understanding. And that would give me some, you know, more street cred when I got out to get a job. Some more street cred out on the job market, you know, you're looking for niche. And I saw that that was an area that wasn't being filled. That's so interesting. I am intrigued by the idea also of you bring up the geology of it. And over the last past several years, there have been a few books that have come out kind of like the idea of the world without us. And it really drives this idea of, you know, what happens to the things that are left behind over geological time scales? And how do you look at that in terms of fish bones and the leftovers from the human populations and settlements that you've been looking at? So those bones relative to the other hard parts of human history are kind of small. They're not like the subway systems and things associated with that book you might be referring to. But the kinds of things that they tell us about are the rivers, the streams, the lakes, the oceans that were existing at that time, especially if these are really ancient records. The kinds of fish we look at aren't exactly the same as the ones we see today. So they tell us about that world. They tell us about the choices people made about where they were going to invest in which types of animals and other types of resources. So they give us an idea of how people made a living. They give us an idea about how people may have hoarded, you know, and kind of gathered more to create in a mass wealth how they controlled resources. They tell us almost as many stories as exist about people. But because in a sense, they're comparable to the tools that people make, the houses people build. They're of that nature, of that natural world. But because they were selected by people, they provide kind of a unique picture of how people were engaging with that world. Right. Somebody in the chat room is asking, a lot of fish are cartilaginous. So how does that affect the research? And from that question, it made me wonder, immediately, are there some fish that are better represented in the fossil record than others? Good question. There are these cartilaginous fish, shark's classic example. But wonderfully, shark vertebrae are calcified cartilage. So they're actually hard. Absolutely, the shark teeth can be recovered. But those vertebrae are very robust. So in any place around the world, and people use sharks around the world, and in the Pacific Northwest, dogfish were a very common shark. Those vertebrae are going to be found. And even, have you ever heard about the ratfish in the Pacific Northwest? I never have. The ratfish has its own story. Someone should look that up. They've done trawls up in the Salish Sea in the area of Seattle. And the ratfish is coming up is like 40% of the catch now. So the ratfish, crazy looking fish, actually, it looks more like a rabbit. But the only hard parts of that fish are these dental plates, these little hard plates in their jaw, and one spine, one dorsal spine. There certainly are some cartilaginous fish that we may not find records for, but I'm struggling there. You got it. They're super cool. And remarkably, they're fairly common in our archaeological sites in the Pacific Northwest. That's interesting. And so you have the ratfish showing up. And you said recently they've become a larger proportion of catches. That's interesting from just an ecological perspective. It's very interesting. And I haven't really pursued this because the knowledge about how abundant this is has become more and more common. People are realizing it. But because there's never been so many trawls, so much capturing going on before this was recognized, they don't actually know if that's odd. It's just one of those features about ocean research. We still have so much to know. We don't really know what big patterns are to know that's really weird. And so does the research you're doing on the fish that human populations have historically eaten as they've lived through the Pacific Northwest and kind of this California, Oregon, Nevada, Washington kind of area, does that give us any clues to these larger scale, I guess, trends? So the ratfish is a mystery. I'm glad we're talking about it because it's giving me some push to study that more. I will say that some of the big stories that come out of our synthesizing a lot of records is how enduring people's use of some fish are. As soon as people started populating our area at the end of the last ice age, 12 to 14,000 years ago, some of our fisheries resources were prominent enough that people started using them. And I'm speaking specifically of the salmonids, these anadromous fish on our, we see them on our rivers, we see them in our coastal sites. Those are mainstays and have been part of the human story the whole time. I think one of the things, that doesn't surprise people who live in the West because salmon are such a big part of the Euro-American history. It was such a huge part of canning and so many things. But one of the things that the archaeology tells us is that other fish were also really important. And our own society doesn't value many of the fish that we find in these archaeological sites that were clearly mainstays. I could mention the ratfish, I could tell you four or five other names and you would go, what? I've never heard of that. And yet we find them, they're ubiquitous across our archaeological sites. So I love that these ancient records kind of bring these stories to our current time and they remind us of this diversity and this richness of resources. How much of what you do is looking at the actual fossil record and dig sites and places of settlement versus going and talking to Native peoples and talking about their history and getting and actually seeing what their stories are? That's a good question. I would say that my background has been more on the look at the stuff side. I was trained as a kind of a lab scientist and what a traditional archaeologist was, worked with the archaeology, excavating materials, understanding them with the picture of taxonomy, natural history, ecology. And in the last 15 to 20 years, the importance of tribal connections to these stories and actual tribal collaboration and tribal control of who gets to do the work has really transformed the way that archaeology is carried out in our area. And I've been on the kind of a front row seat to that and I have developed more and more connections with tribal groups, especially in coastal Washington, working with the lower Elwa Clalem for many years in a project. I've worked with the Grand Ron tribe here in Oregon, various tribes in different places. But most of my work hasn't been developing and working what I would say more as a cultural anthropologist, really spending time gathering those current stories. It's part of what I do, but it has been a smaller, smaller part. Is that one of the big differences between anthropology and archaeology? So it is a, you know, there's some a few questions about that. Within the United States, archaeology as a field is in the Department of Anthropology. There's, you'd almost see that with for all academic departments in the United States. So I am the chair of an anthropology department. So in some context, I am an anthropologist that has a specialization in archaeology. What we're referring to in terms of people, scholars who work closely with living people and collecting stories and those sorts of things, that tends to fall into social cultural anthropology. But I'll say because that's kind of the center of gravity, a lot of anthropology is that social cultural stuff. So a lot of people drop the social cultural and that's anthropology. I'm speaking of people like Margaret Mead, kind of the classic cultural anthropologist, who many people will just say that's an anthropologist. So it's one of those things that we have terminology and names associated with all these specialists that I don't want to get bogged down in it. I'll just say that I'll answer to someone who says, are you an anthropologist? I'll say yes. Are you an archaeologist? I'll say yes. Are you interested in history and can be an historian because I've published in history journals. You know, one of the things about archaeology and anthropology in general is how interdisciplinary it is. We really can't succeed. We can't answer hardly any questions if we don't tap into a lot of different kinds of scholarship. Right.   Oh, yeah. So it's something that you mentioned, the salmon, which of course are river spawners, which have made them accessible even without seafaring boats and a good catch. But it hadn't occurred to me. But how far back does the record of that salmon usage go? And where were the salmon spawning when there was a giant glacier on top of everything? This is a really good question. The earliest states that we have for spawning salmon up the Columbia River are in eastern Washington in a tributary to the Snake River, a rock shelter that has ages going back 13, 14,000 years. So that's some of the earliest salmonids in our area. We know from looking at the history of glaciation in eastern and western Canada that there was a block, you know, the continental ice was blocking salmonids moving up there probably until about 14, 15,000 years ago. I think that that date that we have from that rock shelter may be one of the kind of the earliest, but I'll say I've already made a mistake. The Snake River was open during the Pleistocene. So that was a kind of refugia. But when we look further south, you know, most of the Anadromous Salmonids, they don't go more southern than San Francisco, maybe LA, you know, some a little bit of migration in there. But there are records of Salmonids in some rivers in northern Mexico, which suggests that some of them probably were pushed south during this cooler temperature. And then they found a way to occupy these basins that really are refugia. There's no migratory fish that far south now, because they really are a North Pacific type species. You could also look to Alaska for early records of Salmonids. And there's a site up near Fairbanks, Alaska, that has Salmonids that are around 12 to 13,000 years too. But nothing that goes back earlier than that. Okay. So then it's somewhat tied to the return of the salmon to either people settling in an area near where these fish are available. But these people could then have been around hunting something else earlier, or is it more likely that that's why that they decided to stop in these areas? Because it was. Yeah, good questions. One of the things that absolutely our science is limited by is where people were and what they decided to eat. And so it's an imperfect record of which animals were there. But something as special as salmon, we kind of say, if they were in the river and people were there, they were fishing for that fish. But I'll say that when we look more broadly at the archaeology of the West and the earliest states that we have, we're starting to get records that go back to 15,000, 16,000 years ago, including one that was reported just in the last few months by a researcher at Oregon State, in Lauren Davis, who published a paper for work in Idaho. And that 16,000 year age is now the oldest one. We have an age of a record in central Oregon, Paisley Caves, that's around 14,000. That's an interior basin that didn't have salmonids there. I'll say that I've looked at some of the fish remains from that Idaho site that has these really early dates. The type of fish there are freshwater minnows and suckers. There may be some salmon in there, but there's other native fish that people were catching in our really early sites in the Pacific Northwest. I could imagine they're just catching whatever they can. That's true, but I also think that the fact that there's not salmon in there tells me that they weren't that abundant right then. How do you tell the difference? Is it a lot of bones in one place that coincides with other human evidence that tells you, okay, human settlement, these are humans eating fish versus this is where the bear eat. That's a really good thing too because we know that nonhumans like bears love fish or marine mammals. We look at the context of the finds, whether there's a lot of stone tools nearby, whether there's a lot of evidence of carnivore damage. That would be hard to pick up on fish because one of the things people have studied are the coprolites, the poop that passes through the gut of both people and animals. Carnivores do a number on fish. I've actually studied some remains that have gone through a gut, and there's very little that comes out that is recognizable as fish bone. Let's just play it out. If there was a deposit of fish and stone tools and deer bone and elk bone and lots of other stuff, then that's giving you a good context that people were responsible for that. If it tends to be just the fish and without any of these supporting pieces of context, it would be a weak case for the human role. But you just bring as many lines of evidence that you can to an ambiguous case like that. There's someone in our YouTube chat room who's mentioned the history of fishing as farming or as an endeavor that humans went out at as an industry and saying that in the UK, many cities and towns only exist because of fishing. Is there evidence in the fossil record as to when it became a more serious thing that we did? No, these are great questions. I'll say that there's different ways of thinking about this. One of the things that we know from the American West is that people created extraordinary fish traps in tidal estuaries, rivers, and we find evidence of their stakes. Some of those go back over 4,000 years in Southeast Alaska. We know that people were harvesting and some people would talk about some of that being managing a resource because they were capturing a lot of it at one time. They were knowing when the fish were coming. We wouldn't call that farming, but some people would call that managing and really being so knowledgeable about them that they were using them to their fullest. We also know that in some places like Hawaii that people were creating these stone structures in estuaries and were literally pinning up certain kinds of fish like mullet and the King Lee classes in Hawaii were using these as storage tanks. When they needed to have a feast, they didn't have to do any elaborate fishing. They just went down to the pond and scooped up the fish that they needed. They didn't have to feed them. In a way, these are like some of the fishpins that we now see up in the North Atlantic in Scandinavia in the Pacific Northwest where we have a lot of controversy about those fishpins. In Europe, in the UK as well as the continent, historians have documented some of the clergy that had created pints and ponds that were caring for a variety of fish, including carp, which is very prominent fish in Eurasia. That particular fish was introduced to the Pacific Northwest and we don't like it very much here. Again, that's cultural context of fish. Anthropology and archaeology in particular gets to play with what we consider trash in one place we celebrate in others. Back to the general question, we have evidence in the Pacific Northwest over 4,000 years ago that people were, I don't know if farming is the right word, it probably isn't, but they weren't just passively using the fish. They were organizing and in an almost institutional way procuring fish there. In other areas, it's more like what we would call farming. Other places that was probably happened is Amazonia. There are some extraordinary wetland modifications that people have documented using satellite imagery. It's one of those things that people at different scales are starting to realize how much, as scholars are realizing, how much people in the past were modifying landscapes, intensifying the resources or the capture methods so that they could get more of these things. I like some of the Amazonian ones because the Hawaiian ones are built along the ocean. They have these stone structures and they capture fish and they throw them in there and then they just sort of stuck. The Amazonian one apparently was not near a known past riverway or there was some distance. They had to carry them to these fish ponds. They had to catch the fish and keep it alive long enough to transport it to deposit in these ponds so that they could have them closer by. You couldn't have a settlement too close to the rivers because all the flooding that happened had to be a little higher up. Instead of going every day to get fish, bring a bunch with you and maybe they didn't breathe. I moved into territory that I don't know very much about. I'm glad you mentioned it because I haven't really plumbed that enough. What you're saying is that people sometimes settled in a particular place for different reasons. It might not have been optimal for getting certain kinds of fish. There were other reasons. They couldn't live right on the water. They'd be flooded out. But they figured out how to move animals around to habitat where they could flourish and then they could take advantage of that. Once a generation an engineer comes along and says, okay, here's what we're doing. None of this waiting for the fish season or the flood to go. I'm not walking through mud anymore. I got an idea. Human ingenuity. It is amazing. In terms of your work, back to your work, Virginia, how has what you've found through the years looking at the Salmonids and local populations or local Native people's movements, how has that helped inform what we know about our relationship or the evolving relationship between humans and fish in this environment? I think the general answer to that is at least in the most of the areas that I've worked that people knew their world in a remarkable way. They weren't just getting what was abundant in it. When you can compare the fish record that is the archaeological record with a catch data, they're not the same. It's not like they're just opportunistically going out and getting what's there. They're thinking about what is going to suit them and how is it going to suit the community at the scale of need. That's one thing. I think sometimes we look at people working passively opportunistically, oh, I need that. I'll go get that. But there's a lot of strategizing. There's a lot of planning over a year, over multiple years. I think you see that when you look at multiple records from multiple communities. It's not random. The other big thing is this idea of resilience of both the people and the fishery. That's not a foregone conclusion. We know from lots of zoarchaeological records where people have closely looked at animal remains or shellfish that people have the capacity to overuse. They can take too many out and cause the size of the population to get smaller or sometimes depress the population so much that people have to shift to another type of resource. We've documented that. We as a community around the world. When my colleague and I started to look at the salmon record for the Pacific Northwest, we didn't see any evidence for that. In spite of the fact that populations in our region, in the Pacific Northwest, were huge. People had the capacity for catching a lot of fish, certainly as much as what we've documented for the 19th century. People in a sense knew they could overshoot it and came up with ways of regulating that use. Those are some of the things archaeologists can't find regulations and prescriptions and rules from the archaeological record. But we can go to historic and ongoing traditions that tribes have and see the kinds of practices, worldviews, views that they have of fish and so forth and know that they were holding back. That was part of the relationship that they had. I don't have any evidence for this, but I feel like there may have been a version of sending the kids off to college where they would come on your generation and you're looking around, it's like it's not going to be enough food to go around with another exponential growth of population. So then people sort of had to leave. Like they think probably peacefully. It's like, okay, this generation has to go find a different river. Well, that's not too dissimilar from how other primate groups work, right? The related ones need to leave so that the genetics can spread and you don't have unhealthy babies. I think that we certainly appreciate that at a big scale in terms of people moving into a landscape, like as people moved into North America from Asia and came into our continent sometime in the last late Pleistocene, we think though that as people filled in and started to settle, it's a complicated process because this was happening over a long period of time. At some point, especially in places like the Pacific Northwest, they may have kind of filled it up. It might not have been possible to fish it off and move into a different place because that place was already taken. So we think that people were having to figure out how to make their way in a landscape that we call, we say, population packing. People had filled it up. Now, it's not anything like our urban areas here, but we can picture there being places along our river systems. People would have settled at Rapids at some of these special places first, and then as those were taken, people would have moved to other places. As those were taken, people would have moved to other places. At some point, a lot of those places were filled, and that might have even contributed to more population growth because more stable populations can provide for higher fertility rates. So I guess what I'm getting at is that we can see some of that kind of patterning, looking at the archaeological record, knowing where all these sites are, figuring out what their ages are. We can start to get a picture of people coming in and starting to fill it so that at the time of European contact, there were hundreds of thousands of people in this area. It's amazing to think that there were that many people in this area that long ago. Oh, I know, I know. And I think one of the great things about this, I think I mentioned, the Indigenous voice is having so much more of a place in how we, at least we operate in the city of Portland. There's much more of a recognition of Indigenous place. And obviously, it's the Indigenous voice that raises that, and that's the primary one. But archaeology can serve that, to just provide another line of the kind of, quote, scientific evidence, which isn't needed from an Indigenous perspective, but it simply creates that hard part that people were here. And they had a rich history that has patterns to it, and we can learn about things that just add to this richness of the human experience. I think what I'm hearing, too, that I think is just worth mentioning here, I love it, is that this is a good reminder for those that need reminding that humans are animals, and they have impacts on their ecosystems, just like any other animal. And there's a give and a take, and there's population dynamics, and they can be predators, and they can leave behind kind of vestiges of that. And I think that this is a good kind of look back not that long ago to kind of see how they had impacts on the natural world in a very obvious way. I every day try to explain to kids how we have impacts on the natural world, and how the natural world has impacts on us, even though we're in the middle of an urban escape a lot of the time. But this is kind of a good connection back to just a couple steps away where that connection was so much clearer. Absolutely. For the fish that you're finding, I had this sudden thought, are you looking in ancient garbage piles? Is that what you're looking at? That is largely what we look at, is the stuff that people pitched out. And that's an important thing to call attention to when we engage the public about archaeology. There's a lot of good stories in our garbage. Yeah. Many good stories in our garbage. Tell your neighbor to get out of there. Blair, I love what you were saying about this, this natural cultural thing. And I think one of the things that's come with our current picture of all this is how bound up they are, that people are nature. There's this artificial divide that is kind of part of a western Euro-American tradition. And it is so artificial. And the kind of work that we do really tries to couple that natural and the cultural so that we are nature. It's not out there. And I think if you come to that and you feel that in your bones, you take on a different view of your relationship to the world. It's not just saving it for its own sake. It's saving it for us. Yeah. Absolutely. We're part of it. I think it's so interesting. There was something so close to adjacent to farming, but it sounds so sustainable. It's kind of that small crop lifestyle that seems pretty doable. So one of the things too, and another one of these blurry areas, anthropology is just, does not want to call people hunter-gatherers. They don't want to call them cultivators. They want to look at it all as a continuum that obviously we get industrial farting. That is one into that continuum. But you go to the other end and there's a tending going on, if you will. It's not this passive dipping into the world and taking what you need. You're really working it in a way. Yeah. So bees will say, here's some pollen. Give me some nectar. Moving on. They're tending. Absolutely. The ancient Greeks, and I can't remember the name of the goddess who was in charge of it, but she was in charge of hunting grounds. But everyone's about Artemis. And the priests would everyone somebody like Artemis has made this whole section of forest off-limits. So there's some priests there who's just maybe using the gods a little bit to do some wildlife management so that there wasn't overhunting. They had to put it maybe in these terms, but there was a god in charge of hunting permits basically at one point. Well, in the Pacific Northwest, there were chiefs in charge of who got salmon and when it got taken. So those kinds of we use the word regulation, ritualized use, that is probably what contributed to the sustainable use. It's not, you know, we speak of this tragedy of the commons that everyone's rushing out and getting as much as they can. That's not how human societies work. And in different parts of the world, people hit upon these strategies of regulated use. And that's when things were sustainably used. I mean, that's how other animals work, right? They don't eat until they explode. They eat and they move on. Well, and I think that's even how humans operate within their own community. I think it's when there's a unique thing with humans being able to exploit a community that they don't live in, that leads to a little bit of that. That is exactly right. That is what is colonialism. When people go to a place and they take from that and they move it somewhere else and then they don't have to deal with the consequences. And when you look at the archaeology, it's people of that place. So you get that link that we kind of lose in our current world where everything's moving around. What's the show with the, oh, it's the good place, bad place. I don't want to spoil everything, but there is something where they're talking about ethics and ethic violations can send you to the bad place. And now everybody is going to the bad place because the tomato that you bought, although you just bought a tomato, you have no idea that it was picked by underpaid laborers or that the t-shirt you bought was stitched together with childhood, we aren't connected to the ethics of the things that are consumables or any of it. So there's practices we would never allow in our own community that we are blindly engaging in constantly. The wonders of capitalism. Yes. Oh, modern society. Today, actually, I was thinking about various ways to talk about sustainability. And I came across the idea of the earth as a library. And so instead of just taking and using things, we have to borrow and replace them. And if you don't return those library books, there are going to be fines and you do not want to pay those fines. So that's my, that's my, my new, my new simile metaphor. Yeah. The earth is a library. Let's start, let's start treating it like one, like one of those little neighborhood libraries where everyone shares the books, you have to keep putting books in it or else it'll be empty, right? There you go. Yes. Yes. Dr. Butler, thank you so much for joining us tonight.  Well, I've enjoyed talking to you. Great questions. And I've got more work to do. It's going to be wonderful. Can people find you various places? I know you do some outreach work. Are there, if people are interested in what you do? So, one thing that people in the, in the Portland area, we host a, an event in late May called the archaeology road show, which is a kind of archaeology fair that brings together tribes, federal agencies, like the Park Service, the US Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife, local companies that do archaeology and heritage students. Basically, we have this extravaganza of archaeology and we hosted it on campus. And there you go. Oh, we don't have our 2020 dates. So, if you were to google archaeology road show in about a week, we will have our, our 2020 dates for events that happen on, on Portland State campus. We're also going out to Bend, Oregon, and, uh, Hardee County on the east side of the state. So that's one way to do it. I'll think that if you go into Google Scholar and you Google Virginia Butler and Fish, you will hit some papers that I've written related to some of these ideas. And if you have any questions at all, you can email me at Virginia at pdx.edu. I'd love to keep the conversation going with people. I hope that you do have some wonderful continued conversations. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. Thank you. Good luck with this whole program. I appreciate it. Thanks. We have, we have monkey pigs and STDs ahead, so it's going to be a big one. Bye-bye. Bye. Have a good night. Thank you. Have a good night. And we are going to take a quick break right now before we do jump into monkey pigs, STDs, and, oh, fun guys at the Christmas tree. Did I just, did I just say that? I did. I make the good jokes. That's why you listen. It's because we make the good jokes here. We'll be back in one moment. Please stay tuned for more This Week in Science. New conclusion. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. We are having such a fun show so far. We have calendars. We have Blair's Twist 2020. Blair's Animal Corner calendar. You can go to twist.org and get yourself a calendar. Click on the frog on the website. It's frog. It's a horn frog. It's a horned frog, not a horned toad. Correct. Yes, horned frog. This is this, this image. It's on the website. Click on it and you can order yourself a calendar. That is right. There are wonderful bits of art throughout it. Handmade by Blair and it's beautiful. Blair. It's lovely. Yes, speaking of poop, we have got a dung beetle in this year's calendar. It's very exciting. Get the art and also stay on top of the cool science holidays, the days throughout the year celebrating various kinds of science. Did you know that April 14th is National Dolphin Day? Now you do. Now we know. And I do believe April Fools is April Twist Day. Yes, we have twist on April Fools. We have twist. Just saying as we're moving ahead. If you are interested in supporting this weekend's science, getting a calendar is one way you can do that. Help, help the proceeds do help support this show. Also, you can click on those Patreon links at twist.org. And once a month, you are charged an amount of your choosing for $10 and more a month. We thank you by name at the end of the show. That's right, dollar. You can be part of the big list that sometimes gets me tongue tied, but that I try to read as quickly as possible because it's really fun to try and read fast. It is fun. I enjoy it. And I want it to be longer. I want it more of a challenge. Can you make the Patreon list at the end of the show more of a challenge for me by adding your name? Let's do it. Challenge me.  All right, everyone. We can't do this show without you. So thank you. Absolutely thank you for your support. And we're back. You're listening to this weekend science. Yeah, we're back. And because it's Justin's birthday, he gets he gets to do the next segment of the show this weekend. What a science done for me lately. Hey, Justin, putting you on the spot this week. Am I oh, I have to say what science is done for me. Yes, happy birthday. What is science done for you lately. So it has allowed me to travel the world freely and not miss all the things that I love so much. So one of the things is, yeah, this right here, what we're doing, ability to communicate to the with the two of you with the audience to do our show. And I have to say also, there's a dishwasher here. And the dishwasher continues to be the one technological advancement that I would have to if I jumped into a time machine and went back to live in the ancient world before there were people everywhere, I'd have to bring a washing machine. Because I still wouldn't want to do dishes. It's still the thing that I can't see. It actually causes me some form of anxiety that I can't quite explain doing doing dishes. So yes, dishwasher has made my my life anxiety free.  And I'm a good procrastinator. It's one of my superpowers. So not having a dishwasher, which is the thing that I can, I can avoid procrastinating. You could just put them in there and hide them. And then you don't have to do them or even start the machine right away. But yeah, I was a is a dishwasherless man way back when would have the that sink full of dishes that then you can't do dishes because there's all these dishes in your sink. So how can you there's not enough counter space because there's dishes that it was terrible. So yes, that's when you throw them all in the garbage and start over. No. Yeah. Wait, that's not sustainable. Hold on. There's a children's book about this. I don't remember. Oh, I'm gonna have to look. We'll bring it up in the after show. But there's a children's book about this man who never does his dishes and they pile up. Oh, and then he's got to be buried under his dishes. That's a problem sounds like a that sounds like that children's book took a turn. This book has turned of anyone else has a this weekend. What is science done for me? You lately send them to me. Oh, there's a question in one of the chat rooms. What would be worse cleaning clothes or dishes if you could only have one machine? That's good. Yeah, laundry machines, I take for granted. But yeah, that's it. So, so, they're not my though. There were only tiny wash many things you could do with clothes. I think those would be sufficient. I think that'd be fine. The insane thing that happens in a washing machine. The fluid dynamics that goes on in those things is insanely advanced. Is one of the things that impresses me about them. Plus, they also use tremendous like a magnitude less water than than doing them by hand. So they're also extremely sustainable, which clothes washes are getting more sustainable for the time. But I don't know how they would compete against doing it by hand. So yeah, in case you're wondering the name of the book was the man who didn't wash his dishes. Well, thank you very much. There we go. The more you know. Okay. You can email me Kirsten at thisweekandscience.com or send us a message on our Facebook page to let us know what science has done for you lately. We want your letters, please do write in. All right, who wants to know about a monkey pig? I guess it sounds like a story for Halloween, but it's not. It is a story from, well, I guess it did come, I don't know, it came up around Thanksgiving. So maybe it's full of gratitude. I recently found this story and realized this is a big one. So I had to pull it in even though we're about a week, week and a half out from the publication. This is a pretty big one. Publishing in a magazine in a journal, protein and cell researchers, Chinese researchers have completed, have made chimeras of monkeys and pigs. Why? Because it is ethically questionable and still being debated by the international community as to whether creating chimeras using human cells and pig cells is acceptable. And so previous research that has been done, we talked about it some from this past summer in which researchers had made blastocyst chimeras of human and pig cells. But the chimera, they'd only let it age up to like 28 days. The blastocyst was not allowed to grow past the cellular stage. It wasn't even allowed to implant. They didn't go to the stage of making anything out of it.  We don't know this. And it's a very, it's an ethical quandary at this point and people are still debating it. But we also have a severe organ shortage in the world and people are dying because they need liver transplants, they need heart transplants, they need new spleen. And there just aren't organs to go around because of time and space and, you know, when the need and where the need happens to be in a particular moment. And so the idea of being able to create animals, pigs, we already eat them.   So these researchers have attempted to not use human but monkey because that's close to people and so we can at least learn some things to create these chimeras and they initially started with these Sinomolgus monkeys, these are macaques, Sinomolgus monkeys, and took embryonic stem cells from these monkeys. They created basically balls of cells of blastocyst from which they got the stem cells, the original monkey cells, they injected a gene for fluorescence into them so they could track them when they were implanted into the pig to see where they went so they could actually see them in the pigs. They then took these fluorescing embryonic stem cells from the monkeys, created blastocyst, they took pig stem cells and they put them together and they made a ball of cells, well it wasn't really a ball of cells, but they created an embryo out of these out of pig cells, injected the monkey cells, the monkey cells then became incorporated into the embryo and the embryo was allowed to implant, they implanted embryos in a number of pigs, but the success was very very low so they created thousands of chimeric mixes to begin with and then the numbers that actually worked were very very very much reduced so by the time they actually got from the hey let's see what happens when these blastocysts, these embryos implant in the pig uterus, what happens there and let them grow like a month, not a lot of them, a lot of them spontaneously aborted and then they had a few, they did implant, they did implant, plant several pigs to try and take pregnancies to term, they ended up with 10 of the fetuses, they ended up with 10 babies, but only two of them were actually chimeric in any way. So adding the monkey cells messed with the ability, the fitness of the ability of the embryos to even develop in the first place and then not even all of them, a very very small portion of them became chimeric to end with and then once they looked at the cells in the chimeras, they found that it was only one in like 10,000 cells that were monkey out of pig, so it was still very low numbers of monkey cells within the pig organs. You know it's too bad that this is all coming from the fact that we don't want to make human chimeras because it seems like it could be way more successful to make some monkey human chimeras instead because pigs and monkeys are so different. I'm sure that that is part of the problem here. If you try to do, I'm trying to think of another similar animal to a pig, I mean something else related to a pig. Oh, I got one, I got one. What is it? The rat deer? The rat deer. Oh yeah, sure. The rat deer, which looks like a miniature, like a deer that got put in the dryer and shrunk down. That would not be a useful, that would not be, you might learn a lot in chimerization, but it would not be useful. Yeah, anyway, I think that trying to put animals together that are more closely related would be better, right? So why pigs, just because we're okay killing them? Is that ultimately what this comes down to is that they're livestock? Yeah, they're livestock, so we already have infrastructure for large numbers of these animals to be bred and housed. It's size-wise too, though, isn't it? I think they can make a human-y size. Yeah, I do think it's interesting that when you get dental implants, for example, you'll usually have the option of pig or cadaver. Those are your choices.  You know, the pig is close enough that, yeah, we can do a lot of pig organ stuff, but it is still very different. The immune system is going to go, I don't like that. So there's a lot of differences still.  Absolutely. Since you can reject other human organs. Yes. It's a lot of hoops. There are a lot of variables, a lot of hoops. Part of this comes down to, okay, the organ shortage. If you or somebody who needs a transplant, you need it now. If we have in every major metropolitan area a number of organs that are available to be immediately harvested or that are being stored and are fairly fresh, then that increases the opportunities for people. The option of, hey, let's take a few stem cells from the person and grow the manouche plene. When someone needs a transplant right now, you don't have time to grow a whole new organ. There's a lot of stuff. I mean, maybe some diseases will be able to treat with stuff like CRISPR eventually and do gene modification so that liver damage doesn't happen as much. I mean, maybe there are things that we can do, but we are not there yet and I don't know. We have to keep looking at all the options. My money's on the 3D printing of organs for a lot of things, but there are other organs that are so very soft and squishy that there's not really scaffolding. It's much harder to 3D print. You have to try multiple things. You can't just say, we're just going to do this research. You have to try all the things. I would like you to 3D print me a new brain. No, that's not going to work. That's not going to work. Going into some other stories, not really thinking about 3D printing, but let's talk about preservation for a moment. Amber is this wonderful compound, old tree sap that has fossilized old insects, lots of old things. Well, researchers, it's really pretty awesome, researchers from Capital Normal University in Beijing, a group of paleontologists, were scanning fossils in amber looking for overlooked things, looking for little teeny tiny insects, old fossilized insects, and they have published in Nature Communications this last week. They're finding that dinosaurs probably had lice. What? Sure. Yes, they found a little tiny insect, 10 tiny insects among some very well-preserved downy dinosaur feathers. These feathers, they think, came from two different kinds of dinosaurs, feathered dinosaurs, that is. The insects are about 0.2 millimeters long, about twice the width of a human hair, so very tiny and hard to see. And they were in there among feathers that appeared damaged in the way that they would appear if somebody had been eating them.  They named the insects Mesophthorus angelae. Mesophthorus means Mesozoic Laus. There you go. And Michael Engel, Engel is an entomologist and paleontologist. They don't have any wings just like modern lice, and they have little tiny eyes and short antennae, so the researchers think that they didn't go anywhere very quickly. They probably didn't jump, they didn't fly, they just stayed in the feathers of the dinosaurs. But they're not exactly like modern lice, but they have a number of similarities. The researchers also think that because of their small size, they may have been juvenile lice and not fully grown. Babies. Little louse babies. That's right. There are lots of creepy crawlies on modern birds on their feathers. There are bird lice that hang out on feathers, so that makes sense. I love the idea though that, okay, dinosaurs, some of them had feathers. Feathers dinosaurs may have had lice, so they groomed themselves. And so you can imagine these feathered dinosaurs preening and grooming and trying to clean off their feathers. Yes, I love that. That is perfect. A very bird-like activity in dinosaurs. Have you ever seen an ostrich groom? They look so silly. Yeah. They look a lot like that, I bet.  Yeah. One more quick story for the open of our stories. Speaking of dinosaurs, well, at a certain point we think that there was a mass extinction at the Cretaceous, that there was an asteroid event that probably led to this mass extinction. However, maybe it's not as simple as all that. Researchers from Northwestern University have been looking at the calcium isotope levels of fossilized clam and snail shells dating back to the Cretaceous paleogene mass extinction. And they say that these shells, which would have been found in the ocean environment, that the chemistry shifted because of a surge in carbon in the oceans and that there was a surge in carbon probably because of volcanic eruptions. The Deccan traps were really, really active around this time, previous or prior to the extinction. And so what their data suggests is that it wasn't necessarily just the asteroid that these volcanic eruptions were actually releasing enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, enough methane out into the atmosphere, that they were having an impact on climate because the ocean chemistry was shifting. And that there was a big shift underway at the time that the asteroid impact occurred. And so maybe it's a combination of the two rather than just an asteroid thing. Hmm. Kind of interesting to think about. But hey, similar to what's going on right now, Justin. Oh, you know, we don't want to hear this story, do we? And this week has been the American Geophysical Union meeting. All the stories, I just want to cry. I'm like, no. Yeah, they upset me a lot. Yeah. So 2019 was amongst the warmest years for the Arctic. Yep. Since all of recorded history. Greenland is losing ice seven times faster now than it did in the 1990s, according to tracking by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes high end or is tracking the IPCC's high end of their climate warning scenario already. And as we've discussed, they didn't have all the information when that report was out. The amount of research being done has broadened since. And of course, we have observations since that can tell us where we stand with those. This is a team of 96 polar scientists from 50 international organizations that they produced, but they say is the most complete picture of Greenland ice loss to date. The findings published in Nature. So the Greenland has lost 3.8 trillion tons of ice since 1992, which they estimate is enough to push global sea levels up by 10.6 millimeters. The rate of ice loss has risen from what was 33 billion tons a year in the nineties to 250 billion tons per year in the last decade, which is the seven fold increase, which in within just three decades. Now, this is a, let's see, Professor Shepard of the study as rule of thumb for every centimeter rise in global sea level, another 6 million people are exposed to coastal flooding around the planet. Our current trends, Greenland ice melting will cause 100 million people to be flooded each year by the end of the century. So 400 million in total due to all sea level rise. So yeah, things aren't improving. They're getting worse. Fun fact. Well, okay. Yes, let's make it a deposit. Fun fact. Okay. Well, maybe not fun, but still a fact. Oh no. If all of Greenland's ice were to melt, or not even completely melt, but just left off into the ocean as icebergs, the world's oceans are estimated they would be rising by 7.4 meters, which if you're not familiar with meters, 7.4 meters is over 24 feet of sea level rise, which would impact the majority of the humans on the planet. Hold on. Can we just acknowledge for a second that the first time in, in my history on the show, you just actually converted meters? It was necessary on this one. Yeah. I'm so confused because he really wanted, he really wanted people to listen and hear what he was saying. I was distracted. I lost it completely. Blair. No, I'm joking. It was 24 feet. That's a lot of feet. That's a lot of feet. It's a lot of meters. And one of the things they point out here too is that this is not, the sea loss that they're seeing now is not an estimation. The impacts are not also estimations or guesses of what could possibly happen or might happen in the future. Well, what they are really pressing home is that this is happening now. This is tracking events in real time. This is not in the future. No, it's happening right now. Watching it happen. Look at those dates. We watched that melt happen. Look, we watched it start increasing. Look at what we're watching. It's a little slow, apparently, to be covered in a 24-hour news cycle type of a thing. But it's happening fast enough that everybody on the planet is going to be basically being affected by this. So we say by the end of the century, if 400 million people are displaced, we're also then not just talking about sea level rise. We're not talking about climate change in terms of farming and everything else that will shift in wildlife that will shift in resources that will have to be changed. You then have hundreds of millions of people who lived in one neighborhood who now need a new neighborhood. Yes, climate change refugees are a thing that we need to be talking about. It's already a thing. Yes. And it will disproportionately affect the southern hemisphere just because of the way things work. So yeah, anyway, that's not really great news. Hey, guys, the Earth is a Library. It's a library reminder. The climate change has to be a two-handed conversation talking about slowing the impacts and adapting and adjusting and preparing for what is currently happening. We have to talk about both things. And also, we do need at some point to bring on somebody who's studying ancient geology on the planet to find out where's going to be habitable. I've got a person. We've got some people. We'll connect with them. Let's find out where was habitable the last time, 65 million years ago, where the temperatures got as high as they're heading. What were the best places? Where was the nice beachfront property? The Sierras or the Rockies. Where would you rather sit all about altitude? This Greenland. We all be buying real estate in Greenland right now. Yeah. These are interesting questions. I don't know. And I did mention that it's AGU, and so there are a lot of these stories that are the American Geophysical Union right now.   And so these press releases and stories are coming out like crazy right now. And so there's maybe a bit of an overload. If you are looking at the news this week, there's a bit of an overload on these stories. But the reality is it is a little bit depressing, but we can't put our head in the sand. We need to face it and we need to talk positive change. What can we do about renewable energy? What can we do about getting rid of the amount of carbon that we use? How can we do this better? How can we vote to make those choices something that happened sooner rather than later? And just like certain areas have seasonal problems that they have to worry about with tornadoes or floods or snow or drought, that those things normally happen, that that's part of the culture there. That there's expectations that your representatives will take care of those things, make sure infrastructure is prepared for it. When we look to the future and what's currently happening where we need to create new infrastructure and new adaptations for the changes to come, it's not a weird agenda. It's not something that somebody somewhere is trying to profit off of. This is the same kind of stuff that we do when we're responding to other natural disasters or other dynamics on our planet that we as humans who have built these artificial spaces need to adjust to. We need to do that here too. It's interesting to think of the human psyche and how we perceive various infrastructural challenges.  You're like, I don't know if I want to vote for the bond that's going to pay for that thing, whatever. But you get super excited about a big giant rocket that you take us to Mars. Or you feel really good inside about sending money to help people in Haiti or Puerto Rico after they've been devastated by a hurricane or an earthquake. It's either these moonshot things that we get excited about and like, yes, it's so exciting. Or touchy-feely, I'm reactively helping somebody. How can we put those together so that you feel good, people feel good and touchy-feely about planning for the future and helping populations to come and building something that's amazing and works that's going to take us into the future like that big rocket to Mars. That's what we need. And I think that's something that some people are capitalizing on. I think that's one of the things, for example, that Tesla has been so successful. That's exactly why. Is the innovation and the exciting development that makes things feel tangible but also kind of special. And I think that there is something there to be learned on exactly our psyche and how we like to prioritize big changes. And we need to make it seem fun and exciting, but maybe that's just the way that we're talking about it. We don't need to change what we want to do as much. We need to change how we talk about it. I think that's part of it. But again, we brought up Haiti. I'm horribly unpopular for stop rebuilding Haiti. If it's over a fault, right? It's never going to stop having massive earthquakes. And these are social cultural decisions that we need to make. How long does it take before a group of people put a village or its city on the side of a volcano again after it erupted and devastated the entire area? How long are we going to drain Venice once sea level rise takes over before we give up and let it become Atlantis? The money saved in preparing for change, there's going to be more money saved if we spend the money now to prepare for the change. Then if we're constantly reacting to the earthquake, to the volcano, to the hurricane. My point was with Haiti is it's not a natural disaster. It's a man-made disaster because people are building on a fault. It's a human fault. It's a human fault. I feel that way sometimes about the beachfront properties in California where there's always mudslides. Not a natural disaster. The roading's been going on for a long time before you put your beachfront house there. I don't think of the consequences of global warming and climate change being a natural disaster or a series of natural disasters. It's all a man-made disaster. As such, if you think of it as a man-made disaster, I think, and get people around it, then it's something that people can also fix. If you allow this to be natural disasters, people go, oh, wind blows from the east, wind blows from the north, we have nothing to do with it. There's no way to control that. This is very much our doing. Yeah? Yeah. Another thing that is our doing. Oh goodness. It's time for Blair's Animal Corner with Blair. What's up there? I have, let me be very careful I say this, a story about a sexually transmitted disease in primates. Okay, well stated. Yes. So this is a story about baboons looking at how the individuals will respond if they or someone they know is infected with an STD and how that impacts mating behavior. This is at Lake Monyara National Park in Tanzania. They observed the mating behavior of all of baboons and some of these baboons had trempanema pallidum and so that causes ulcers in the genital area and it can create severe distortions in that region and it can progress and cause all sorts of nasty things. It's related to a disease in humans that causes yaws or syphilis. But so this is a naturally occurring STD. So they were looking at the mating behavior of these baboons over 18 months. They studied about 170 baboons. They observed 186 mating attempts between 32 females and 35 males. 540 of those led to copulation, so more than half, but not a lot more than half. And in most cases the mating was initiated by the males. But what was interesting was that regardless of who was infected, the females would change their behavior to minimize the risk of contracting and spreading sexually transmitted diseases. So the females would avoid mating if either they were themselves were infected or if the male showed signs of infection. Males did not change their behaviors at all. Not at all. No. Not important. No. No. No. So I mean it makes perfect sense. When you think about mating with males, so a evolutionary they're just trying to get all the sperm out there, right? They're just trying to get as much genetics out there as they possibly can. Go number one. Their investment is brief. Okay. So they are just trying to get that done. Doesn't matter if they don't feel great. Doesn't matter if they are carrying something. They are just trying to get their genetics out there. The females have to first of all be pregnant with a sexually transmitted disease. When you already have lots going on in that area, then you have this added stress. Also, yaws for example in humans can be passed to babies. So that's something to consider is that you can actually contract a disease that then can go to the baby that you're carrying. So you don't want that to happen. And also there's this idea if you're dealing with a patriarchal society in this case, then the females could cooperatively raise their babies. So it would benefit them to not have multiple infections running through the troop at the same time. So the females have lots of reasons. They have higher investment in the babies. They have to be kind of careful in where they're investing their time and energy. You could see how potentially if that's going to lead to complications in their reproduction or with the health of the baby that it might be better for them to support their sister's baby and get the genetics to a healthy baby instead, help with that effort instead. So it makes sense to me from just the basic reproductive strategies of the two genders there, but it is an interesting thing.  I got a little bit of an itch once in a while. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, really, this does really get to that point of choosy females. Absolutely. In animal mating, there's the idea of the promiscuous male and the choosy female, and this is just supporting that even further. Yeah.  Isn't it kind of the auditioning male? Yeah, auditioning. He's just, yeah, he's just seeing what sticks, I guess. Hey ladies, what's up? Yeah. So their degree of promiscuity is impacted by the contraction of a sexually transmitted disease in that the females have their eyes out for it and also impact their own decisions based on that. There you go. So that is baboos. Now moving on to a fun story. I thought that one was fun. Sea otters. Everyone loves sea otters. Oh, sea otters are awesome. They, of course, came back from the brink of extinction due to the expansive fur trade in the 18th and 19th centuries. They had about 150,000 individuals, somewhere between 150,000 to 300,000 individuals all along the California coast. And after the massive fur trade, there were about 2,000. In 1914, a remnant population about 50 at this point were found along the rugged Big Sur shoreline. So they had this massive drop in their populations. And at one point, they were thought to be actually extinct. And then they found this group of 50. So now all sea otters are pretty closely related. They have a genetic bottleneck. So there is kind of this fear that a disease could come out and wipe out all of the sea otters because they're also closely related. But for right now, they're doing really well. We also know that sea otters are keystone species. They're really helpful to specific areas. Usually we're thinking about kelp forests. The fact that they urchins impacts their urchins ability to eat kelp. And so having sea otters around controls the urchin population, which allows the kelp to flourish and kelp is a massively productive habitat. So they are hugely important to the California coast. Thanks to protection on these animals and all sorts of conservation efforts, the population is now at about 3000, which sounds like a lot more than 50, but nowhere near 300,000. So they're doing well, but we definitely would like to see more sea otters out there. We'd like to see them much closer to their historic numbers and range. So this new piece of research looks at where we could potentially drop more sea otters in California to increase them closer to their historic range. So this is coming out of California Polytechnic State University and Sonoma State University. And they were looking at where you might be able to plop these otters out in California. The current recovery plans have not included any estuaries as target habitats because they're mostly right now found along the coast. That's where kelp forests mostly are. And the question here is, why not? Why can't we put them in the estuaries? They have been widely associated with kelp forests. As I mentioned, that's kind of their the postage poster child for that habitat. But it turns out that over the last two decades, they've actually seen a resurgence of sea otters in two specific estuaries, Morro Bay and Elkhorn Slough. And because of that, they started to look out and see if these animals could survive in estuaries and if they would do well there. It turns out that they might actually be integral to the ecosystem health of estuaries just like in kelp forests. And they now know that by early accounts of Spanish explorers that otter populations were actually found in the San Francisco Bay as far south as San Jose and as far north as Richardson Bay. So this is all over the San Francisco Bay, which is massive. Sea otters probably numbered in the thousands in the San Francisco Bay estuary before being driven to local extension by over hunting. One of the reasons they think that these California coast sea otters haven't made their way into the San Francisco Bay yet is because of something they call the gauntlet, which is a presence of great white sharks all along the Golden Gate. Now, for those of you who are not familiar with the Bay area, the Golden Gate is not named for the bridge. The bridge was named after the Golden Gate, which is this little inlet where if you look at a map of San Francisco Bay, you have the California coast, you have this massive Bay estuary, but you have this choke point where the Golden Gate Bridge actually crosses over where you have San Francisco and then you have the North Bay on the other side. So that is what the sharks really like to hang out at, also because sea lions are going in and out of the Bay through there and that's their favorite food. But so this line of great white sharks all along the Golden Gate, the gauntlet, is why otters, the small population of otters, has not been able to make their way through into the Bay. So the too many sharks, the proposal is, the proposal is if otter populations could be established back inside of San Francisco Bay, they actually think based on population research that they could support at least 6,000 sea otters, more than twice the current estimated 3,000. Yeah, which means they could bring the population up to close to 10,000 sea otters, which should be huge for their population recovery. It would, quote, essentially lift the sea otter out of its endangered species status, which I don't know if you ask me, 10,000 still doesn't sound like enough to take it out of the endangered species status, but I'll take it. The two questions I have here that I'm just kind of going to throw out there. One, I kind of already answered it, but putting otters on the opposite side of this gauntlet would mean making two pretty distinct isolated populations. So I recognize they're all pretty closely related because of that earlier genetic bottleneck. But would you over time end up with two distinct populations or subspecies, which might not be a bad thing. It might actually be kind of neat. But my other question, my other food for thought here is that everyone thinks sea otters are super cute. The San Francisco Bay is a pretty human trafficked area, but sea otters are actually nasty. They are about eight feet long. They can weigh 200 pounds. They are in the Weasel family. They have massive razor sharks. They're actually way bigger because I'm used to seeing river otters, and I assume that the otter was a little bit bigger, but in your house, they're that much bigger. Yes. They have amazing sharp teeth for protecting their territories. And so these animals have been known to attack humans that get too close to them. So if you introduce sea otters to the San Francisco Bay, I would say first, there needs to be a massive public education campaign to make sure people are not feeding the otters. They're not trying to bring them into their homes. They are not. They're not trying to go up to them and pet them because do they do that with the sea lions? Do people do that with the sea lions? Yeah. Well, the sea lions don't let you get very close. They can be aggressive, but usually they will kind of ditch out, especially in the San Francisco area. They have their own docks that are floating that are away from humans, but they can be aggressive. Absolutely. Yeah.  But I think people know to look at sea lions from a distance. Yeah. They're pretty, they look pretty big too from far away, but the sea otters don't look so big when they're floating up on their backs in the water with their little paws. They, they're like, oh, look at them. They're so cute. So that would be my concern if we're putting 6,000 otters in the San Francisco Bay and be a little worried about their clash with humans. So first, we have to get 6,000 otters. True. But there's already great white sharks in the water. Not in the bay. Okay. They come into the bay, don't they? No, they don't. Is that wishful thinking or is it? No, they really don't. They just don't like it. It's too shallow. The average depth of the San Francisco Bay, I think is 18 feet. That seems like a shark. Is that all it is? Actually, that's, I wouldn't think it was deeper than that. Yeah. So there's a couple spots in the bay that are deeper. It can get to be about 100 feet under the Golden Gate where all those great whites are hanging out and around Alcatraz and around Angel Island and in the channels where they bring in the cruise ships. But the grand majority of the bay is under 10 feet. And so it averages out to being really, really shallow. And not what great whites like. Great whites like. They need distance between them and the surface so they can rush up and grab those sea lions. So they don't come into the bay. Except for the odd occasion. Yes, the odd occasion, often a youngster who doesn't know what he's doing. Oops, I don't want to be in here. I got to go home. Fish shallow. That's too gauntlet. Yeah. We've had whales traverse the California rivers. I have never heard of a shark trying to make it. Maybe the freshwater's not going to. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The common, there are nurse sharks and other sharks that are in there, but not so much the great whites. Yeah. Let's move on to some quick stories. Yep, let's do it. Yeah, let's do it. Okay. So a new study out of Ohio State University is, just goes on with, you know how people say you can't talk to people who don't agree with you with numbers that they're just not going to listen to the numbers. Statistics don't, and reason don't help convince people who don't want to listen to your idea anyway. Well, there's another study out that supports this now. These researchers from Ohio State University published in human communication research in this study. They gave people descriptions of four societal issues that involved numbers, numerical information. And in these issues, they presented the people in this study with, they presented them with two issues where the numbers did fit with how people view the topic usually. And then they had two other issues where the numbers kind of go against what people generally think is actually happening. And so for example, one of the issues they looked at was immigrants, Mexican immigrants into the United States. And most people believe the number grew between 2007 and 2014, but in fact, it decreased from 12.8 million to 11.7 million. So the people got a surprise afterwards, they were asked to write down the numbers that were in the descriptions of these issues. And they weren't warned that they'd have to write these numbers down so they hadn't looked at these articles with the intention of memorizing the numbers or really thinking about them strongly. For the most part, people got the numerical relationships right. And so that happened, though, with the issues where the stats were consistent with how they viewed the world. But when the numbers went in an opposite direction, people did not really remember that relationship very well. And the researchers said they had instances where participants actually got the numbers exactly correct 11.7 million and 12.8. But instead of getting them in the right order, they flipped them around to make it to make the numbers agree with their preconceived notion of growth. Right. And so the researchers say they weren't guessing they got the numbers right, but their biases were leading them to misremember the relationship. They used eye tracking technology as they read the descriptions. And so they do know that people were actually reading the numbers and when the numbers did not jive with what they kind of thought, how they thought things worked, people's eyes went back and forth between the numbers a lot more. Is that right? Yeah, exactly. Wait, what? Yes, their eyes actually gave away the fact that they were paying attention to those numbers and looking at them and were actually surprised. And the researchers said you would think that if they were paying more attention to the numbers that went against their expectations, which is what I look like, they would have a better memory for them, but they don't. And then they gave the flip to this that was really interesting is they, do you know the game of operator or telephone where you whisper things to people down a line and to see how it changes from where it started to where it ends up because people make mistakes all the time. So they did this process of looking at the numbers, having people read an article and then write down the numbers and past and then they used the numbers that people had written down to pass down the line. And they definitely found that on average, the first person flipped the numbers in the direction saying that number of Mexican immigrants increased instead of the decrease. And by the end of the chain, the average participant said the number of immigrants had increased those seven years. And they say the memory and errors tended to get bigger and bigger as they were transmitted between people, which has major implications for social media, for news, how we read it, how we talk to people about things and how then we make our decisions based on our perceptions of things. Anyway, very interesting. Yeah. So anyway, numbers. There's also a thing where there's less Americans in favor of a Catholic band than there are in favor of a border, the Mexican band, banning migrants from Mexico. Oh, that's terrible. Oh, should we ban Catholics? No, why would we ever do that? Well, that's it's just a fight because there was a whole one where there was the Muslim band versus specific countries. And it reminds the there was a Fox News Chiron that said something about deal worked out with five Mexican countries. I don't know if anybody saw it. But it kind of gave up the ghost because they're five Catholic countries, but they can only be one Mexican country. It's not a... It's called Mexico. Yeah. And the other four countries have to be different countries. So I run into this sort of confirmation bias kind of stuff all the time. It always comes up in the gun debate where somebody will point to a state that has much less restrictive gun ownership, gun usage laws than California and say they have less gun violence, even though they have like New Hampshire and Texas always get thrown at me. Maybe you want to... And then I go to the CDC. It's the same thing every time I look it up and I'm like, here, you're right. California has 40 million people.  However, per capita is important when you're comparing New Hampshire to a California. And I think New Hampshire is the one I think that gets pointed, which has New York and California's per capita injuries combined or about what New Hampshire has. Like it's actually the opposite of what people think and assume that the... But it's always the same. And I'm always wondering, somewhere in the world, somebody is either putting... That game of telephone started. Yeah. Game of telephone started. Well, I don't know if it's game of telephone. I think somewhere, somebody has put out misinformation or you've read the news story, but you're right. This hasn't occurred to me. You could probably see the story. CDC says, and if somebody's brain didn't want to hear it, they just flipped the number. That's even scarier, I think, than a misinformation campaign. It's not necessary. Our brains construct misinformation also. Oh, that's brutal. That's the rub. There's the rub. Moving on, brains, they're super awesome. Researchers looked at the brains of drummers and published in Brain Behavior, a paper titled Boom, Chack, Boom, a Multi-Method Investigation of Motor Inhibition in Professional Drummers. They used neuroimaging techniques to look at how different areas of the brain, the motor cortex, were connected in the brains of drummers, how they became activated during certain motor skills. And what they found is that drummers have basically bigger, better wires between the two hemispheres through an area of the brain called the corpus callosum. And the activity of the areas in the motor cortex and GABA levels, the neurotransmitter that is involved in the activation of the area, they also have less activation in the motor cortex when they had to do a finger tapping exercise.  That kind of stuff. Drummers have extreme independent control of their two hands. Really, the best drummers can sometimes play different times, different time signatures on each hand. So there is a... Even if it's just feet, right? Yes. One hand or feet or whatever it is. But what it comes down to is that the skill of drumming makes the connections better and activation of the area more efficient. Because in the finger tapping exercise, when drummers did it, the area of the brain in the motor cortex that was lighting up a lot in normal people's brains, it barely lit up at all in drummers. So there's... I think that's why, but it's Motley Cruise drummers.  That makes a lot of sense. I took some drum lessons and I tried to pick up the drum set and it is just so hard. It is so hard. Yep. I can't help but wonder though if this was somebody who was a neuroscientist who minors in music. Yeah. They were like, how could I get these worlds to work together? I have to correct my question. It is the Death Leopard drummer. Gosh, I'm dead at this. All right. Who's up next? Tell me a story. Oh, I got one real quick. This is the mold that stalled Christmas. Christmas tree mystery leads to Frasier fir, fungo find first, and all thanks to an apple technique. So this is Frasier firs, which are a popular Christmas tree variety of fir tree. They're sought out because they have the right color for Christmas tree.  Turns out they are also highly susceptible to a devastating root rot disease caused by a water mold genus Phytophthora, which I can't pronounce by the scientist. We're actually conducting experiments testing different types of ways and methods to grow healthier trees. And they accidentally got this mold species showing up and giving them root rot. So they did this sort of, which is apparently a very old technique of placing sliced apples in and around the plant. And on these apples, they managed to start to grow. I used it as a medium. They started to grow this fungus. This mold was growing on there. And so they took this mold and then they reinfected other trees with it and found, yep, here's the path. This is the pathogen that we're looking for. And then they went to go find out what it was. And it turns out. This is a previously undiscovered mold. It's a water mold related to such, but it's one that hadn't been identified before.  And I guess the other than the fact that has to do with Christmas trees, the thing that I liked about this story is that they didn't just go, oh, we've got, we've got some mold on our roots throughout those trees. Let's start again with one that didn't get, no, no, they followed and wanted to know what was attacking. Then they got, okay, so this is it. We identified it's, this is the mold that's, and they didn't leave it there. They kept, look, so I love the fact that these researchers followed every available mystery and didn't just, because it's, it's a, it would be a huge temptation to say we're focusing on growing a healthier tree, Christmas tree where we got contaminated, throw it all out, let's start over or let's ignore that data. They actually pursued it and made a addition to scientific knowledge. Yeah, which might, you know, then in the future we have healthier Christmas trees. But it's also kind of the thing that they remark upon is that here's a new species of mold that is affecting a, one of the most popular commercially grown trees. This is, this is something that we, how did we not know that this was a thing? And it, and it shows that right under our noses sometimes there are new discoveries of waiting to happen. I love new discoveries. Blair, give me a new discovery. Oh, it's all about lights, which is also very appropriate for the season. These don't go on trees though. They go on fishing nets. This is from University of Exeter. They found that placing lights on fishing nets reduces the chances of sea turtles and dolphins being caught by accident. It reduced accidental bycatch of sea turtles by more than 70% and cetaceans by more than 66%. That is pretty significant. So they put LED lights along the top of floating gill nets. The lights did not reduce the amount of fish caught from target species. There was previous research that has come out in the past that supported this finding as well, suggesting LED lights could reduce a catch in general of sea birds in gill nets by about 85%. So this is a potentially cost-effective way to light up these gill nets. They actually looked at 864 gill nets. So this is a pretty big sample size. And they paired each with an unlit net to compare the results. So this would be a simple, relatively low-cost technique that could help these species and allow fishers to fish more sustainably just by lighting the way, going, hey, careful, there's a net here. Yeah. The other thing they left out of that is the chances of catching disco fish goes up sustainably. Yes. That's terrible. That's not even funny. Well, there's disco clams. There's a thing called a disco fish, but it has nothing. I have a question though. So I guess not as many of these things are attracted to light as, say, moths to light. So the light just lets them know it's there so that they can see the net as opposed to getting trapped in it as well. Yes. So the things they were testing on sea turtles, small cetaceans, and sea birds, they're pretty smart and they survive by avoiding unknown stimuli. So I think they see the lights and they're like, there's fishermen over there. I'm going away from it. But we don't know how the, perhaps, intellectually impaired little fishies that we're trying to not catch, how they might respond. Because I know somebody even mentioned in the chat room earlier that they used to use lights on the ends of their bobs to try to catch fish. So some fish are actually attracted to light. So in terms of fish, I don't know. But in terms of these high profile bycatch items of sea turtles, dolphins, and sea birds, so far it sounds good. Great. Well, if we can improve things, let's do it. Let's do it. Have we come to the end of another show? I think we have. We have done it. Oh my goodness. I would love to say thanks. Thank you all. Thank you and you and you and you and you and you for joining us for this couple of hours of twists. We do enjoy doing the show. I love doing the show, getting to talk about science and getting to see everybody in the chat room, asking other questions. I love it so much. I do. Thank you to FADA for helping with show notes and our social media. Thank you to Gord McLeod for helping to manage our main chat room. Thank you to Identity Four for recording the show. And as always, thank you to our Patreon sponsors. Thank you, Paul Disney, Ed Dyer, Andrew Swanson, Craig Landon, Andy Groh, Ed Stoupolic, Phillip Shane, Ken Hayes, Harrison Prather, Charlene Henry, Joshua Fury, Steve DeBell, Alex Wilson, Tony Steele, Richard Porter, Mark Masaros, Jack Matthew, Litwin, Jason Roberts, Bill K. Bob Calder, Eric Knapp, Richard Brian Condren, Dave Nabert, Taylor P.S., Josiah Zaynor, Howard Tan, Donald Mundus, Sarah Forfar, Dan K. 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On next week's show, it's next week is our top 11 show of 2019. Is it already that time? Oh my goodness. It is. We are counting down the top 11 stories of 2019 next week. Come join us. And if you have ideas for what the top stories are, send us a tweet, send us an email, let us know hashtag top 11 science. We want to know what you think. We will be broadcasting live online, 8 p.m. Pacific time on twist.org slash live and on our YouTube channel and on our Facebook channel. You can watch live from all those places and join the chat rooms. But if you can't make it, don't worry. It's all recorded. It's going to be up. You can find us all those places. Thank you for enjoying the show. Twist is, of course, also available as a podcast. You can listen on the go. Twist is one of the greatest shows you will ever spend time listening to on a bus, on a commute while waiting in the dentist's office, whatever you're doing. It's a good time spent. Just Google us this week in science, anywhere in your iTunes directory to find us.  For more information on anything you've heard here today, you can find show notes on our website. That's at www.twist.org. While you're there, you can make comments on those shows. You can start conversations with us, the hosts, or the other listeners.  Please buy some calendars so I can continue to make calendars. Yes, you can buy a calendar, and you can, if you like, contact us directly. Email Kirsten at kirsten at thisweekandscience.com, Justin at twistmeaning.gmail.com, or BlairBlairBazz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist T-W-I-S somewhere in the subject line. Otherwise, your email will be spam. You can also hit us up on the Twitter, where we are at, TwistScience at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you would like us to cover or address, a suggestion for an interview, a haiku that comes to you tonight, please let us know. We'll be back here next week, and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from the show, remember, it's all in your head. And this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, it's the end of the world. So I'm setting up shop, got my banner unfurled. It says the science is in, I'm gonna sell my advice. Show them how to stop their robots with a simple device. I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand, and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand. 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 of this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, I've got one disclaimer, and it shouldn't be news, that what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just yet understand, that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy. The thing we say, and if you use our methods that are weak in science, this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, 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. How can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop? One hour of weak in science is coming your way. Listen to what we say, and this week in science, this week in science, science, science, 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. Now we are in the aftershow. Hey, before I forget, I'm gonna be on the Daily Tech News show on Friday. You are? Yeah. There I am. No, it's fine. It's great. I want to go on it. They're like you more than me. No, you're just busier than me. I'm kidding. That's awesome. Yeah. Have fun. Yeah, it'll be fun. Oh, yeah.  I didn't perfect it, but I did it. So I'm gonna report out. You got to report back. They specifically, they emailed me. They were like, would you like to be on the show to tell us about the bagel dog situation? It's like, yes. Also, for anyone listening or watching right now, I have a story that I'm gonna bring to that show that I didn't report today. It's about drones being used to count hippos. Oh, yes. Awesome. Yes. That's fun. So droney, droney, hippo. If you want to hear about that. Yeah. Got to listen to DTNS. It's like so great when we have the twist DTNS crossovers. It's my faves. We need to have, we need to, we need to do that again. We need to have Tom or Sarah on me. Yes. Yeah, we haven't had Sarah on. No. And we haven't had Tom on in a long time. No. Yeah. I think I get what I need to do. I need to, yeah. I'm being a production assistant or see, so like Roger is in charge of inviting people onto the show and making sure everything's scheduled. And Tom goes, make this happen. And Roger magically makes everything happen. It's so nice. And I'm often like, I recognize like, wow, you could really get a lot done when you have somebody whose entire job is just this. Yeah. The emails back and forth with people and making the things happen. Yes. Also like the fact that he doesn't participate in the show very much. So he just, he flashes yellow and then orange and then red to be like, wrap up. But like, I really like that. There's, it's just, it's, it's very nice. Like this is exactly how much time we're going to spend on this story. And then we're going to move on. And if you didn't get to the thing you wanted to talk about too bad, like, that's what I need to find out. If we could, if there's something like that that we can add to this little production studio sheet. Also, I know they had somebody, one of their, one of their fans made them a little script for the Google sheet that does the countdown. Yeah. And allow that to happen. I don't know if that would work all the time for us. I am, I mean, we have to have somebody who wasn't on the show who's like doing more what Roger does, I feel like. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. It's too hard to do it all at the same time. Yeah. I have like, I have, I have reached my limit of my attention spreading everywhere. Yep. Oh, hardly Dan is helping a friend do a PhD with a drone, but it's not as glamorous as hippos. It's techie, it's droney. Do you get to drone on about the PhD? Wacka, whacka, whacka. Again, this is why you come for the good jokes. It's the good jokes. I'm so excited. My calendars are here. They came so fast. Yes. It did. I hope I can get calendars out to everybody else. I need one. Is there a chance I can pick one up at the sketch fest? Absolutely. Justin, I'll be driving right by where you used to be tomorrow. I won't be there for a week. I'll be there next week. Yeah, I'm driving to Sacramento and I'll be back tomorrow. Oh, yeah. I'll be there next week. Hopefully with good Wi-Fi. I don't know. So, hardly Dan. Yes, you can. If you make these into real, if you make Blair's calendar into real stained glass, we need pictures. That would be amazing. That would be amazing. In the YouTube chat room, hardly Dan said, I'm going to have to buy the calendar to use as templates for some stained glass windows. He won't sue me for copyright, right? So, I don't want to overextend myself, but we've been talking about this for a while, and now I have two sets of calendars and some other pieces of art that very easily could become coloring pages. So, we hope to have a self-published coloring book in 2020, I want to say. So, hardly Dan, if you can wait for that, that'll be like a bing-bang boom perfect for your stained glass. But, you know, get the calendar because that's awesome also. Also get the calendar, of course, but I'm saying that's for hanging and enjoying and loving, but you could also get the coloring book when it's ready. My favorite thing, I would love the artwork. My kids absolutely enjoy it, too. And then, you know, I can't keep them from thumbing through it and then having a favorite and like, let's make it July now. No, it's not July yet. But the other is all of the fun holidays that are on there. Oh, it's National Hippopotamus Day, everybody. There's a lot. There's so fun. I think I increased the number of holidays on this year's calendar by almost 30%. I think it's so many more this year. It's fantastic. I get a kick out of it. If there are more days that we find out about that people let us know about, I think we should add, keep adding things. I added draw a dinosaur day. And that's a fun thing, like you walking to work. It's like, hey, what's going on? I'm like, well, I don't know. It's draw a dinosaur day. So I think I'm going to be doing that at some point. Oh, yeah. That's a thing. World Wetlands Day. I added that one and World Whale Day. World Whales. That's Shoebrew. Thanks for, yes, Patreoning.  Your friend is a studio manager at Twit. It's a good old days. Did you even know there's an International Cuckoo Day? You did now. I do now. There you go. Yeah. There were a couple of comments earlier I wanted to address when we were talking about climate issues. There were a couple of points that were brought up that are these kind of common talking points that I hear from people a lot, which is when I was a kid or back in the 70s, we were going to freeze. And now we're not. Scientists got it wrong then. How do we know they're right? No, they didn't get it wrong. Actually, they didn't get it wrong. And this is the point I wanted to bring up. I don't know if you want to go ahead there, Justin. Based on the cyclical nature of ice ages hitting about every 20,000 years, we were heading into what should have been a cooling trend. We should have been very slowly heading into the next ice age, which would have taken a lot longer than the rate of global warming. But we should have been seeing slightly increases in cooling temperatures year after year going forward for the next thousand years or a few thousand, 20,000, 10,000 years, whatever it would be, I guess. We were heading into that cooling phase that happens if you want to. So that was correct. The thing to keep in mind is if not for that trend that we are in is a natural climactic cycle, the global warming situation could be much worse. We're actually being mitigated by the fact that the Earth was naturally heading into a cooling cycle, which has actually slowed the rate, which is increasing still at a higher and faster and quicker rate now. That's the really incredible thing about it, this anthropomorphic global warming change, is that we have not only increased warming, we've reversed a global climactic trend in doing so. Yep. I think at the same time, they were predicting that, but at the same time, we already knew about carbon dioxide's effect on the atmosphere. There were some researchers who were saying, hey, wait a minute, I think we're going to have a problem. There were a lot of researchers back then who were saying, I think things might be hot. They were predicting heating, but at that point in time, the media grabbed onto the global cooling. There was a major magazine that put it on the cover. Yeah. Snowball Earth or something like this. Those researchers were correct. In that, it's the trend of where we should be compared to all the cycles of ice ages past. Absolutely. That's where we're heading. We were talking about this on the show that people were getting access to rivers and salmon were getting access to rivers for the first time 14, 15,000 years ago in North America. That was the last major ice age. It was that 15,000 to 25,000 plus years ago is when we had these glaciers that were encompassing much of North America. In the global timescale of things, it seems like that's a pretty dramatic change from then until now. We're talking about 15,000 years. The fact that we not only can't feel that trend now, but are heading quickly in the opposite direction, again, you can see how dramatic the impact that we're having on climate is. I mean, as is the case with so many misconceptions about climate change, it all comes down to time. It does come down to time. It's all about our puny little lifespan and not being able to understand some of the conversations that we're having on these larger spans. Even if it's only 20 years, it can be hard to feel something that changes what it feels like gradually to us over a 20-year period, unless somebody points it out to you. Somebody's asking why the ice ages were cyclical in the first place. I don't know what the seeds are that starts as a position of distance of the earth. I don't actually know what the initial catalyst is, but once you do start to get large ice formations, they are very reflective as one of the things, at least one of the data things. Then the earth goes through a long trend of having heat sent back out into space. Then there's a lot of carbon and methane capture with that as well. Orbital variations? Yeah, it can be part of it too.  But it is kind of what Justin was saying that there are certain things that starts the process, but then once it gets going, there's this feedback loop where when you get a lot of snow, then there's high albedo, so less light is absorbed, and then that makes it even colder, and then there's more snow, so it impacts that way. And ice is carbon sinks. And so when it's getting hot and the ice is melting, then you're releasing more heat-trapping gases, and then it gets hotter and that melts more ice, and yeah. So there you go. Melt it all. What was the other comment that somebody made? Somebody else made a comment about... I can't remember what the other comment was. As soon as I was asking you much earlier, who does the outro theme? The outro theme is... Oh, it's the... So the guy who wrote the song is Neil Shirley, and he and his brother... What's his brother's name? Lanking on his brother. I often get attributed to singing the lyrics of this, some of this, but it is not true. So is their group named unbalanced wheel? Because that's what it says That's the first song. The first opening song is unbalanced wheel. It's the something apes that is I'm looking for the CDs. Oh, I'm all alone. Pam, yeah, I have seen some... She's saying in the chat room, she sees some difference where she lives in the past 20 years or so. I've definitely seen a difference where I live. It used to be very foggy all the time, and in my whole childhood, I never saw anyone sunbathing at Ocean Beach in the Sunset District. It was not a thing you did.   Did you hear about the... I think it was near Mendocino Coast. The 75-foot wave. No. The highest wave that they have ever recorded. They say the average winter wave peaks are around 10 feet. This was a 75 foot. It was off-coast. It didn't do any damage or anything. It had to do with some sort of the weather bomb or whatever they were calling it that had a really rapid pressure drop that canalized into this and made some winds. No, I did not hear about that. But I do know that in the North Bay, the Redwoods are having some trouble because they depend on the coastal fog for their water because the Redwood forests actually have really shallow soil, so their root systems are pretty shallow. So they get the majority of the hydration that they need from the coastal fog. And because the coastal fog is reducing from reduced upwelling, from changing currents in the ocean due to climate change, that is impacting the Redwood forests in a pretty big way, which is very interesting. And yeah, shoe bruise absolutely right. No fog is also going to hurt the wine.  Seattle climate is getting wacky. There was a cool story about lightning this week. Too close to the show. Couldn't do it. Yeah, fog regions like wine regions are totally going to move. Twizz. But I'll be drinking Canadian wine soon. What even would that taste like? I like wine. Maybe. Said the person who doesn't drink wine, I'm guessing. Grape water. Grape water. Good lord. What kind of Californian are you? Early. Kugel is failing me. I don't know where my CDs are. There's somewhere else. He's called Neal. I'm seeing big differences in Alaska. One of those geophysical report studies had an essay written by an Inuit who was from Greenland who was talking about they used to have eight months of ice to hunt upon and now they're like three to four months because of the instability of the sea ice. There's so many stories that came out this week that fresh water is going to be impacted for people around the world as glaciers melt. We're going to have people moving. We could have warmings. I like warm as much as next person, but we need water. We need water, everybody. You don't have to feel sad when you're chilling at a sunny Alameda beach. Enjoy the nice sunshiny beach days while you can. That's not the thing. One of the things that can happen, you hear about this every once in a while and it's a central Californian. It always makes no sense. European heat wave, people are dying and the average temperature is 89 degrees that summer. You're like, that's nothing. New York gets a heat wave in the high 80s and people are dying from the heat. There's humidity factors or things like this, but it's also whether or not you're prepared for it. We don't have that problem in central California because nobody doesn't have an air conditioning unit in their home. Homes in the Bay Area or New York might not have central AC. Why would you need this? The same way you might not have an elaborate heating system living in the Central Valley. You don't have an elaborate cooling system in places that aren't used to being. When these big changes sweep through and suddenly you have much colder, much warmer climate in the area, people can be massively affected just because the infrastructure isn't built for it. Truth. I'm still looking now that these puppy ears. Puppy, puppy, puppy. Eat your ears. Say hi to everyone. Yeah, so I think our theme song, it was written by Neil Shirley and it's on our 2009 compilation, science music compilation. What was that song? I still have a few of all those old CDs. I got a box in my attic. Oh, if you ever do dig through it, I could use a freshly scratched copy. Okay, of all of them? Yeah, of any of them. Yeah, anything you can find. Squeak toy. Yeah, but let's see. The other one, so the unbalanced, the first opening song was that's unbalanced wheel guy, Alessandro, and he actually emailed me recently. He was like, you're still going. Here's a new version. And so the version I'm using on the show now is even updated as of this year. Just kind of cool. Which caught both me and Blair by surprise. Did I change my audio settings? I can actually hear the the drums now that I was in here before, interesting. No, brand new, brand new. I don't know, did you, Blair, did you see Cranky Hippo is in the YouTube chat room? I did see that. I haven't seen him in a while. He also has a corgi, so we have so many things in common. Yeah, you'd like hippos and corgis. Blair's gonna deal with her puppy. Wait a second. What? The nose is getting sniffly again. I have a code, it's getting better, but I have a code in my nose. What's going on, Justin? So I, uh, okay. I also did the World Robot Domination song. Yes, they did too. Yeah, who does it say what that? It's something that's something apes. So I'm reading from Neal's website. He and his brother. Yep. His brother's name is Jails. The Gifted Apes. I remembered the Gifted Apes. And I think the World Robot Domination song, I think they've got it up on a CD Baby, but I don't know. It's also on his website, NealSherly.com. Is it? Sans Category, Sans Music. Yeah. Neal, why can't I spell? Sure, sure. I say U-R-L-E-Y. Yes. Vote me. Categories, music. There we go. Uh-oh. I'm losing power, so I might just disappear. I'm plugged in, but I have to actively hold the thing in, otherwise it's not charging. Okay, so you can find it. Okay, we could share this if you're interested. Hold on. Yeah, it's for the Gifted Apes. Apes, if I can. Hey, where'd you go? A Twist Outro song. You can find it on SoundCloud, but if you do us go to NealSherly.com. Scroll down, and you'll find the SoundCloud link at the bottom. The World Robot Domination song was fun, too. So was the Sudden Death World Robot Domination song. That was a good one, also. Okay, you need to go. Next week, you're traveling, but we have the top 11 show. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, do you know if you're going to be in Flying, or if you will be landed and trying to stay away from the time of show? I don't know. I'll be landed, and I should be settled, and I will be drinking Kopi's amounts of coffee at, like, six o'clock at night in order to make it through the show. All right. Yeah. It's gonna be a fun next day. A fun next day. Yes. Okay. So, I'll set up the spreadsheet, but we should get, like, a planning sheet together, I guess, and figure it out for the year. Think about what you thought were the top 11, and we should talk about it ahead of time, right? We have texted back and forth a little bit, sure. Okay. Okay, that show will happen. We'll make it happen. We'll figure it out. And then, is there anything else that's happening this weekend? Oh, nope. Are we still trying to do a show on the 23rd? Possibly, yes. That would be fun. I'll put it in my calendar. Because I really don't think that we're gonna, I mean, at this point, it's the, oh yeah, the top 11 show, and adding on the top 11 of the last decade. Yeah. I just don't see that being pulled together in time. I'll do the stats. Okay. Here's numbers. Justin's gonna do the math. This one was bigger than that one, but you don't care because you like something different. Justin's got people who know how to do math who do the math. Excellent. So you'll say the numbers, but you won't make the numbers. Say the numbers. Okay. But they will be well sourced. These will be actual numbers in the actual world calculated by actual people who know how numbers work. Sure, sure, sure. I know people who know all of the numbers, by the way, like all of them. Okay. Bloopy, bloopy bloops. Is there less science news during the year-end holidays?  We'll say there is, journals are still publishing. Things are still happening on their normal schedule, but we are going to be, maybe, we're gonna, we're gonna do our countdowns. We're gonna do countdowns. Maybe, yeah, it is the deficit of the holiday season for science news coverage, faux show. Is there anything else we need to think about for next week? Anything else we need? Blair, you're muted. Yes. Have you made a video for me? I'm working on it. I'll do it tomorrow. Okay. Can you tell? No. Can you just say no? No, it's been like, I'm working on it. So have you filmed yet? No. No. Well, okay then. Honestly, if I'm being 100% honest, the, both of the days I was gonna do it, I forgot until after I washed off all my makeup, and then I was like, well, screw this. Yes. So that's honestly what happened is like, I went, oh, dang, I was supposed to do that first. So contrast that against, against me, where now I'm just like, what, what makeup? But you always look beautiful. Oh, thank you. And like, look at me. I did my hair for everybody. Yeah. You have a hip cap on. Put on a hat, but really it's to keep myself warm while I have a cold in this cold basement. It is cold down here. Why are you gonna make a video, Blair? Oh, because I have a new computer. I'm on it right now. Why do you have a new computer, Blair? Well, because my old computer was dying and a bunch of donors stepped up and supported twists by helping, well, 50% fund the computer. So now I have this massive iMac, which is amazing. I can have like six windows open and be able to read stories and see your faces at the same time, which I've never been able to do before, which is just rad. I can have, I can see the chat room. I can see the video stream. I can see my source content and the run sheet all at the same time. Sounds like my world. It's legit. It's amazing. It's so good. And the computer just starts and all of the buttons work and it doesn't freak out. When I try to open two pages at the same time, it doesn't go like, I can't do that. Let me just give you the spinning beach ball of death. I know, I know, I know. Oh, Gaurav Sharma says, I like listening to twists while cooking Christmas meals. Well, there will be, there will be, there will be something coming out Christmas week, even if it is not on Christmas for the Christmas meals. Yeah. So Blair has a new computer. Thank you patrons. Thank you donors. Thank you everyone who helped with that. Yeah. So I need to get Blair to make a video. I'll do it. I'll do it. Make me a video. I didn't want everyone to see my dead head. Justin's computer is dying.  So good night, Justin. So good morning, Justin. Good morning, Justin. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thank you for a wonderful show and thank you all for being with us tonight. We'll be back next week. I can't believe we're at that part of the year already. This is crazy.  Top 11? I don't know. You're doing it.  I don't even understand these things. Okay. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is also my, this is my sign for, wait, wait, wait, that's also the same. You're right. It is. I was like, you're like, I'm like, I am now very confused. Top 11 2019 next week. What are the top stories of the year according to twist? Tell your friends. We'll see you next week. Bye. That's a big boop.