No, starting the broadcast. He, or Justin goes, rah rah rah rah. Starting the broadcast. I think we probably have already started the mobile broadcast. You may have, you may have, you may have, you may have. I think we've started the broadcast. Maybe we should start the show. I mean, it's time to start the state of our, maybe we should start it. Yeah, starting the broadcast. I'm kind of introthing. This is twist. This week in science episode number 635, recorded on Wednesday, September 6th, 2017. Fire and flood. Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight on This Week in Science, we are going to fill your heads with Zika black holes and sneezes. Do first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. There comes a point when it's time to get out. When the fire alarm goes off, when the forest is full of smoke, when the ship is sinking, it's time to get out. When the floodwaters are rising, when a hurricane is headed in your direction, when downtown is 10 feet underwater, it's time to get out. And for those who have doubted the predictions of global warming, who doubted the data, the scientists and the studies, who have bunkered down in denial, it is time to get out. We have seen heroic efforts to rescue neighbors, evacuate neighborhoods in Texas and Florida. We see the destroyed homes and billions of dollars in damages, and this is just the beginning of what climate change has in store. And while no expense will be spared to save lives on the day a hurricane hits, we could spend much less and do much more to protect those lives simply by listening to scientists. Speaking of listening to scientists, it's time to get out this week in Science coming up next. This week in Science, what's happening? What's happening? What's happening this week in Science? Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We weren't flooded out, we weren't fired out. We are still here. And we have a show to do. The show of science that is constantly ongoing. So much science news this week. I have new stories about finding black holes, crisper contention, and dogs. What'd you bring, Justin? I've got ancient feet, old Americans, real vampires, and cultural wipeswapping. Whoa. All right. Blair? Yes. So happy to be back this week. I have a story about how cleanliness is next to sexiness. I have a story about an update in bird navigation. And I have a study about radioactive sushi. My favorite kind. How do you order that again? What? How do you order radioactive sushi? Yeah. Well, you put it through a conductor and then you just close and I don't know. Luminousant. All right, everybody. Well, let's jump into the show. Let's get a move on so that we can talk about luminescent unagi and more. But first, I want to remind everyone that you can subscribe to the TWIST podcast on iTunes in the Google... No, the Google Play podcast portal. Stitcher, Spreaker, tune in. You can find us on YouTube and Facebook by searching for This Week in Science. It is so easy. Or just visit twist.org for show notes and audio episodes galore. Sometimes I can't tell if you're saying random meaningless words or if those are actually places that people can find us. There's so many places that we can be found now that I don't recognize them. Even having heard them week after week, I still sound new to me. One wonders if you're listening to this list, how are you hearing it now? I would love to know. I would love to know these things. Let us know. And also, you know, just listen right now because you know what time it's for? It's our favorite part of the show. That's right. What has science done for me lately? Yes. Good science, Dr. Kiki Blair and Justin. Science does a lot for me every day from giving me my cell phone to my thyroid medicine to better insulation in my house. But today, I'd like to give a shout out to veterinary science and medicine. My cat Henry is just over a year old, but his first year of life has been pretty eventful in a medical sense. First, he had a wicked long lasting around two months case of conjunctivitis. His vet worked with me and helped me keep him as comfortable as possible while also preventing any secondary infections. When he finally got over that, he had several months without any problems. Yay! But then he came down with an epic case of stomatitis. Boo, that's no good. Apparently, poor Henry's immune system was fiercely attacking his teeth. It was so bad that the vet didn't think there was any way to save any of his teeth after the fact point to that diagnosis, having been completely correct. The vet thought she'd have to do three or four surgeries to remove his teeth, but when she got in there, she discovered that his teeth were so degraded that they just came out really easily. Because of that, she got almost all of his teeth in one surgery and was able to take the rest out during the second surgery. During the surgeries, the vet did many, many x-rays. Yay science to make sure that she got every piece of every tooth out so that his body wouldn't just keep attacking whatever bits got left behind. Henry was given antibiotics. Yay science to prevent any infection and painkillers. Yay science to keep him comfortable while he healed. Thanks to science and veterinary medicine, Henry is healing up really well. Better in fact than expected. He can even eat dry food now, though I make sure he has plenty of wet food since it's obviously easier. Henry is an incredibly sweet cat, glad that science and veterinary medicine have been able to help him as well as so many other injured and ill animals. And she has given us a picture of the cat Henry and his sister. Let's see if I can get this up on the screen for everyone. And his sister, Bess, and they're napping together and Bess is the Siamese giving Henry, who is gray, a hug. And don't worry those of you who are concerned about birds. Nope, I can't get it for some reason. My URL's signature. Why? It'll be posted in the show notes. I'll put it in the show notes. If you're interested in seeing a picture of this cute kitty cat cuddling, I wish I could share it right now. It's not working. My no-cat picture filter seems to have accidentally worked. But those of you who are worried about the birds outdoors, Bess and Henry are indoor cats. Good. So they aren't killing any birds. This whole letter is from Minion. Joni Waldrop. Joni, thank you so much for writing in and letting us know about your cat Henry and how veterinary science has helped your cat. And you're right. So many other animals to heal in times of illness. And especially now, there are many animals who are being injured and being made ill by the forest fires, wildfires that are burning across the west and hurricanes like Hurricane Harvey who have flooded Houston. Many animals are being helped by science at this moment in time. So thank you for that wonderful reminder and about veterinary science. And also everyone out there, remember that we need you to write in to let us know what science has done for you lately. What does it do for you every day? Send us a Facebook message on our Facebook page This Week in Science. That's facebook.com This Week in Science. And we want to fill this segment of the show with something from one member of our audience every week. One member of the Minion community every single week of the year. We want to do that. Help us do that. Write us with your stories and your thoughts on science and how it helps you. You know what? It's time to move forward into the science news. Science news time! Yay! It brings me science news! Yay! It makes me so happy. So my first story tonight that I am really interested in talking about is a CRISPR story. Time for This Week in CRISPR. This Week in CRISPR. But this is interesting because about a month ago or so I reported on the CRISPR gene editing study in the Oregon multinational team led by Oregon researchers at Oregon Health and Science University had taken care of a genetic mutation with CRISPR. Edited a single mutation that is involved in a heart disease problem. The original story, the team led by researcher had many experiments in dozens of embryos to correct this mutation that is the MYBP C3 gene mutation and they replaced this mutant that was carried by sperm with a normal copy or so they say from the egg cell and were able to give an embryo with two normal copies of the gene so that there was no hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that would have been spread or given to the embryonic in embryonic individual. Anyway, they also found they introduced a healthy version of the gene with the CRISPR machinery as well but then found that the embryos really liked this maternal version better and so they were like okay we put the CRISPR in there with the sperm and it's somehow this is working. They were placing their understanding of how it worked on the CRISPR machinery. However, a team out of Columbia University and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts written a pre-print bio-archive paper contesting the results of this paper. According to these researchers, they say that's not going to be possible to happen. It just couldn't happen and their explanation is that this genetic mutation in the sperm being corrected based on the eggs version that maternal version of the gene, they don't think there's any way that that it could have happened during the reproductive period, during fertilization. So the issue that they raise is that the genomes in the egg cell, once fertilization happens, the genomes from the egg nucleus, right, and the sperm nucleus resided opposite ends of the egg cell surrounded entirely by a membrane that doesn't break down for hours. And so the researchers say if there's this hard to pass membrane and the genomes are completely separated from each other, really can you explain to us how CRISPR-Cas9 could get into the system to fix the sperm's mutation and take that from the egg and put it into the sperm? Can you just explain to us how that happened? That's basically what this paper says. The quote from a reproductive biologist Anthony Perry from the University of Bath says it's very difficult to conceive how recombination can occur between parental genomes across these huge cellular distances. I like that very British way of saying it. It's very difficult to conceive this idea. It's also like how it's conceived and we're talking about it. So Matalipov, the researcher who is involved in the original study, says the critique leveled by Egli at all offers no new results but instead relies on alternative explanations of our results based on pure speculation. Well that's a fair point. If they really want to contest it, they should probably try to replicate it and say that they couldn't. Right now, this paper is contesting their results. It's in bio archive right now. Hopefully it's a pre-print server so it hasn't actually been peer reviewed yet. Maybe at some point they will get their commentary published and then using the scientific publishing process that occurs. Matalipov and his team will likely be able to rebut every point that's in the paper and be able to explain how their data may suggest a mechanism. And other researchers may take this criticism of Matalipov's research and then try the experiments themselves to see what exactly is happening. So what Egli and the others who publish this paper say as they think Matalipov's team actually, they were misled that they had corrected misled into thinking that they'd actually corrected the mutation but because of their genetic assay and what genetic assays they were using and they think their genetic assay wasn't really able to detect a more likely outcome which is that CRISPR actually just deleted the paternal gene and then that only picked up the fact that there was only the maternal gene in there. So they think that maybe that Matalipov and his team actually think they got something when in fact they didn't. And so now what it's going to do is say this is basically going to ask them, Matalipov at all to come and say okay show us your assay works and so now they're science in action are we fixing genetic mutations we don't know yet is CRISPR really working the way that they think it is? we don't know now it's so it's not just that so at first I was thinking well okay so there's an unknown mechanism maybe it worked right but if they can't necessarily trust their result result then then yeah they just knocked out the gene that they were going to go back and look for and it's not there because they knocked it out which would seem to straightforward and simple yeah yeah so there are points raised in this paper critiquing the original study that should and that should be rebutted and approached by Matalipov's team so that everyone knows that the work they did actually stands as they say it does I really hope everybody's wrong the result is correct but the mechanism by which it happened didn't happen the way the team doing the experiment thought it did but also actually did it everybody can be wrong and progress science or everybody's right or everyone's right yeah the researchers did a successful experiment they fixed it but also the contestors were correct and it being incorrect and it didn't happen the way it was yeah there you go both right both wrong it doesn't matter with science as I see it pipette half full it kind of doesn't matter like this and you're getting your uncutting edge of science and you have something that you can hold in your hand or in your data and call a result you now have the puzzle of figuring out how you got that result exactly and that's regardless of it's what you thought you were going to get or what you wanted to get because you shouldn't have even wanted to get anything you should have tried really hard not to want something even though you suspect something is going to happen you should really push that for real and get your result and then figure out how you got that result and I love the fact that this conversations is brewing right now yeah and we've seen this happen with big scientific stories throughout the time that we've been broadcasting and it's always fun to watch the scientific conversation and see how it plays out who's going to be right who's going to be wrong how did they do it how is this all going to play out that's what I want to know and so we will be reporting on this and the next step will be to find out what Mattalipov and his team come back with and it's also always interesting I always think of Woosek Wang who did the cloning of a dog the South Korean scientist who it turned out the way he did it was either bad record keeping or just straight out fabricating how we got to the result like there was this whole controversy about this the methods that he showed couldn't be reproduced anywhere and there were problems he kind of fell from grace somehow in this for some side stuff going on but those dogs were cloned and he's gone on to clone another one so there's also like wait a sec he got the result but may not exactly have known how right and that might have been part of the problem he may have tried to show proof after the fact or show process after the fact that wasn't exact and that's why he couldn't be reproduced but yeah that's the wonderful thing about having an open scientific community is you get to see what's going on in the other labs and it's all influential and important because it moves the science forward even if it's even if it's wrong and you put something out there that you thought was right and it's wrong you check it and then it moves you back and then you move forward because it's constantly adding new information about how things work and if the only reason we went to the moon is because earthlings really were hoping it was made out of cheese we still went to the moon that's right we did go to the moon and you know what we also are looking at maybe you know that we should stick zika virus in people's brains on purpose that sounds like mad science that sounds like some sort of I know okay I'm moving on to the next story dark evil conspiracy theory moving on to the next story so in this dark evil conspiracy theory it's actually taking advantage of properties of zika virus that researchers have noticed by looking at the way it attacks the progenitor cells to neurons in the developing brain and maybe thinking that zika could be the tool that we can use to treat glioblastoma incredibly deadly form of brain cancer people who get it die within a year usually we use chemotherapy now but the chemotherapy we use gets rid of the tumor but not the cancerous cells that are left in the brain and so usually the glioblastomas make a comeback they come back again and again and eventually people succumb to the glioblastoma so the cool thing here that these researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have been doing with researchers in conjunction with researchers from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine is infecting mice with and injecting mice with glioblastoma cells in their brains with this zika virus and they found that it seems to work so they tested whether the virus could kill stem cells in glioblastomas that had been removed from patients at diagnosis infected tumors with one of two strains of zika virus both of the strains infected and killed the cancer stem cells they don't kill the tumor cells they kill the stem cells for the tumor but not the tumor cells themselves that's going to be a 1, 2 you still got the chemo but then this is like the cleanup so the researchers actually say that this is the way they're seeing it eventually one day being used in combination with other therapies that eradicate the tumor but this will get rid of the stem cells potentially and so then they checked into mice they injected zika virus or salt water as a placebo into the brain tumors of 18 mice and 15 mice respectively so 18 of them got zika virus and 15 mice got this placebo of salt water and two weeks after injection they found that in the zika treated mice tumors were smaller and the mice lived longer than the mice that had gotten the placebo so what I was going to go on to say now it's still zika virus and so the question is you stick zika virus in the brain you have dividing cells and progenitors cells still in your brain as an adult and you don't want zika virus going after all the cells in your brain and potentially setting up an infection that could you don't want to have zika in your brain so now the next thing that they want to do is to create mutant zika viruses that could be safe to use as just a vector that use the mechanism and the machinery that zika uses but then doesn't set up an infection so you know how sometimes one of the arguments against deforestation and you know the Amazon or South America what have you is that we may be destroying plants that hold cures for diseases and so we should preserve them if nothing else for the future of medicine on this planet there may be plants undiscovered who's there's something to be said about diseases now because we're starting right yeah you know CAR-T the one that they used they're using as leukemia cure is using a mutated HIV absolutely yeah we use lentivirus absolutely and we are so we're like wait now we just forget curing malaria disease we gotta figure out where we can use malaria to cure disease one of the wonderful things about these pathogens that overcome our bodies natural defenses and attack cells is that we're at a point where we can redirect them and have them attack the cells that we want them to attack or we're getting there we're finding ways about it yeah and it also teach us how our immune system works yeah and how when it fails we might be able to overcome those failures so these pathogens you know I'm glad we've got as odd as it sounds like we have a CDC lab with this influenza or that horrible disease or you know maybe Ebola we're gonna be like I need to get in a bullet shot this week I really whatever the disease is we may be getting to the point where we can co-opt and hack these things that overcome our immunity our immune system to do good for the body to attack something that's a worse threat and disarm it at the same time then when they're doing the CAR T for leukemia patients aren't ending up with HIV as a result they're getting cured of their leukemia if they can you know define which aspects or which portions of the Zika virus are the ones that they need to do the targeting and attacking they can probably make a mutated version that doesn't have the other aspects of it that aren't specifically needed so you need to of course understand the full mechanism how this works we do yeah and that we are not near that yet but these do offer opportunities to learn a lot more and potentially like you said create great ways to treat our illnesses potentially ways there's always all these caveats when we're talking about medical years coming years and years and years away it's in mice right now they haven't figured out how to make it safe for people I'm not going to let you run down the train of no holds barred no that's not where I was going but we need to get in a little bit and stick with like well this is where the science is right it'll be Lego bricks what I was saying was though look how amazingly quick those turnarounds are now from a discovery of a way to do these mutations to a potential cure whereas when we first do it started doing this show a long time ago years talking about could be maybe lead to open a door towards a pathway to research into we were talking 20 30 year time frames now we're talking about they discovered this and there's trials underway and this within the next five years four years might be a treatment that's available Carti took less than that yeah Carti no he wasn't didn't take that long 10 to 15 years I'm going to keep it I'm going to keep I'm going to temper your madness there yeah but you know what yeah you know what I was also coming quicker human natural selection for long longevity great I'm live forever researchers publishing in plus biology analyze DNA from 215 thousand people to look for parts of the genome that might be in the process of evolving so I looked at us and UK databases for mutations whose prevalence changed across age groups so as ages got older or younger did the proportions of these mutations change because that would suggest that they're being selected for for some aspect of survival especially if they say increase or decrease with aging researcher Hakkaman Hakkamanish who's at Columbia University said if a genetic variant influences survival its frequency should change with the age of the surviving individuals so if you have a harmful mutation or a leal for a gene you're probably going to die more right bigger rate of death and so if the population at a whole is dying more because of this genetic variant then that genetic variant becomes less prevalent in the old part of the population right so they looked at more than 8 million common mutations and they only found two that seemed to two that became less prevalent with age only two Hakkaman was a variant of the ApoE gene which has been linked to Alzheimer's disease it was they really didn't find it in women over 70 another mutation was found in the Truna3 gene CHRNA3 gene which was associated with heavy smoking in men and it starts to become less around middle age so what they say is that if people don't have these mutations they're more likely to survive and live longer and so the authors argue that this large study and the fact that they found only two variants two genes really suggests that evolution and natural selection is weeding out lots of harmful mutations and that there are many others that are probably already gone but aren't we now with all of our cutting edge medical research abilities application abilities going the opposite direction what if actually all the increases in the western world of diabetes or this disease or that disease actually is because we can treat everything now we can treat so many things that they don't leave the gene pool so it's not so much that the disease is increasing because of diets or environment or any of those things but just because more people are alive who can have the genes that support these diseases that's interesting that's an interesting idea yeah but they they're speculation but yeah yeah that is speculation for sure but if we yeah we could be supporting harmful mutations that would have been weeded out but the assumption that underlies the study still stands which is that if they're harmful deleterious to survival then what are they counting on diabetes and that or is that like no longer considered harmful so there's a whole bunch of factors that go into that but you can also say that part of our immunity evolution is science that's part of how we've evolved is we've added science to the toolkit so you know not I guess their central point then yeah that wasn't their central point but it's an interesting it's an interesting point to bring up yeah there are other things like fertility and longevity and this idea that one of the ideas that they think is that genes related to longevity or that are harmful towards longevity could potentially be less harmful and not really that we just maybe haven't really noticed how harmful they are or that they're connected to decreased fertility as well and so maybe there's something tying together also decreased fertility and decreased lifespan that really reduces the prevalence of mutations but that's of interesting questions here to bring up about people and where we're going and I love the idea that you know regardless we're surviving and there are fewer of these deleterious mutations that are kind of kicking around and that maybe the longevity genes are the ones that are really going to be sticking with us that's why everyone's getting older I don't know other research that came along with this also I mean not with this study but United States fatherhood has officially passed the 30 year old barrier the average age of fathers in the United States at first child is over 30 at this point an aging population older fathers having children maybe this increases longevity genes I think it probably does young fathers probably do a much worse job here here's some fireworks I'm sorry alright this is this week in science Justin what you got the history of humanity is not entirely our own we know that many humans like creatures called hominins walked the earth at some point at some point we all shared a common ancestor and as we crossed paths we crossed genes and shared other more recent common histories more closely with each other but there are far more tales of the tailless ape than we have the knowledge to tell case and point new footprints from western Crete they have an unmistakably human like form especially the toes the big toe is similar to our own in shape and size it also has the distinct ball that big part in the back of our foot on the sole on our sole of our foot which is never present in apes don't have that ball so the shape indicates that these footprints that they found in western Crete belong to an early hominin and they were made on a sandy seashore possibly in a small river delta what makes these footprints most intriguing though is not that they were found but how old they are and where they were found as the footprints are approximately 5.7 million years old well that's old very extremely old in fact at a time yes at a time when previous research puts our ancestors in Africa and with ape like feet not these human like feet toad human feet human feet have a very distinctive shape we are different from all the other animals in our feet a combination of a long sole 5 short forward pointing toes no claws for most of us and a big toe that is larger than the other toes that is unique that's a human trait totally modern human trait it's a little bit older human trait to ancestral human trait but it's a human thing feet of our other close relatives the other great apes they look more like a hand the thumb that sticks out to the side right they're not as footy so there's an iconic footprint the Latoli footprints from Tanzania those are 3.7 million years old and they show human like feet in upright locomotion those are the oldest footprints of such feet until this one which is 2 million years older and not Africa the Latoli feet are thought to have been made by Australopithecus they're actually kind of look a little bit more like the modern human foot those 3.7 million year old feet except that the heels are a little narrower than ours the sole lacks proper arch so you go back before this Latoli Australopithecus go back into the fossil record another 700,000 years you will find the 4.4 million year old Adripithecus Ramadis from Ethiopia this is the oldest known hominin from a reasonably complete fossils and it has an ape like foot ape like foot and then you got to go back another 1.3 million years to get to western Crete and find a more human looking foot Adripithecus Ramadis was considered ancestor of Australopithecus so now maybe not so much but the possibility Australopithecus much older or whatever made these foot prints the western Crete feeder is not as long as the Australopithecus of Latoli they I guess are a little shorter I'm not guess it says they're a little shorter bit more primitive looking perhaps at approximately 5.7 million years they are younger than the oldest known hominin that's in Chad but those were those were ape like feet back then wow so okay I just I think the big thing here is it's the timing I mean this when were these footprints made can we really prove 5.6 million years ago because the location below and above is how they did the dating and that's where it's sitting so it's also interesting I guess they point out this earlier this year another group of researchers reinterpreted fragmentary 7.2 million year old primate that was Grace O.Pithecus that was found in Greece and Bulgaria they redefined or reinterpreted this ape even though it's only known from teeth and jaws they're saying you know these look hominin these don't look primate these look like they could have been hominin at 7.2 million years so the story of our history is still being filled in and now part of part of what part of why this is revolutionary is because we were at some point all trained thought and all of all of the research in this field said you went from having ape feet to human like feet it was a straight line progression now we have the braided stream theory that tells us that you had ape feet running around the same time you had human feet and you had several human feet and plenty of ape like feet that were expanded at the same time so it should be expected that Australopithecus could be on walking about making footprints the same time ape like feet are still present in Africa what it changes most dramatically is our perception of how long humans have been wandering about and if it turns out how many humans have been wandering about and it alters a little bit of history that we already knew wasn't entirely the way that things happen so we've gotten enough clues lately not to be too surprised by this but still 5.6 million 5.7 million year old footprints and increase of all places that are looking very Australopithecus like or kind of a print of a shorter version so maybe a the ancestor of or an early version of Australopithecus that's really going to be fascinating I want to hear more about this as it progresses scientific conversations about changing our understanding of human evolution a bit and another little human history type story analysis of a skeleton found in Chan Hole a cave near Tulum, Mexico suggests human settlement in America has occurred in the late Pleistocene era so we've had plenty of evidence this is the 13,000 year old bones that have been dated these are human bones from the skeleton they found in this cave dated to 13,000 years ago not at all surprising we have shell mounds, we have structures we have all this other evidence some of it even a little bit older than this but this is the oldest dated skeletal remains in the Americas found in this cave in Mexico so not an alteration of timeline but another pin in there that illustrates that it sounds like some of these other structures and fragments and tools that we found the skeleton is representing another pin in that map saying yes we are pretty well drilled into drilling down the colonization of America and to be in Mexico 13,000 years ago and perhaps as long as 25,000 years ago when you get up above the Canadian sort of Alaskan Tundras people have been around America for a really long time yeah I mean stuff like being able to date fossils like this is it's important because we used to think that man barely had appeared on the North American continent 13,000 years ago you know it was like it used to be what 10,000 years ago 13,000 years ago and now it's like going further and further back and now it's 13,000 years ago humans the current estimation is like getting to North America was at least if not more than at least 20,000 years ago but there was all these glaciers in the way so then finding folks and structures 13,000 years that was a big cool I think it was getting updated from like 7,000 to 9,000 years exactly that's what I was referring to the date keeps going further and further back and actually being able to do this skeleton based I mean this is a skeleton that's an individual who died in a place an isotopic analysis being able to date it and say 13,000 years ago ish and it was sort of yeah I guess the examined human skeleton remains found in the cave researchers did the skeleton by analyzing uranium, carbon and oxygen isotopes found in its bones and in the stalagmite which had grown through its pelvic bone it's been here for a while been here for quite some time yeah you've got a stalagmite through your pelvic bone you're going to have a bad time you haven't moved in a really long time you haven't moved a while that's right well is it time for some moving and shaking of this week in science yeah because you know what time it is now what time is it it's time for Blair's Animal Corner except for giant panda what you got Blair oh my goodness I'm so excited to be back I have a really exciting story about a very special bird called a golden colored mannequin golden golden colored mannequins the males will form a leck that's a group of males that display together to attract the attention of females they all kind of gather into one arena and then the females get to come and take their pick the way the leck works for these mannequins is they have a display area on the forest floor that they protect that they defend and they clean and then the females pick their favorite so a recent study was specifically looking the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama they had a very unique opportunity because of the Smithsonian Institute in Panama to study these animals in the wild and do some slight tweaking to wild birds so they basically were able to combine an observational study in the wild with lab conditions because this is such a controlled space in the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute so what they wanted to see was if hormones influenced the male mannequins drive to clean up the way they did that is they treated some young males with testosterone and then watched their movements in the display court they also removed they removed they removed some leaves they added some leaves and they weighed down some of the leaves to make them heavier to see how hard they were really willing to try to clean up their space and what they found was the testosterone treated young males got super into cleaning so these male birds on roids had a little cleaning roid rage yes absolutely they removed significantly more leaves than untreated males they even pulled up small seedlings wow and they were so motivated to clean up that they flew carrying leaves weighing as much as their own body that's like you're picking up another person yes that's correct that's like the human feet of picking up a car beyond that the younger males were more innovative in the ways that they cleaned their space so basically if a leaf is really heavy they're gonna have to try a bunch of different kind of plans of attack to get the space clear of the riffraff and the clutter so what they saw in this study was that hormones are playing a role in motivating birds to court mates because the cleanliness is directly related to females picking them so the more testosterone the more likely they were clean they were gonna clean their space more kind of vigorously in order to kind of test this hypothesis across the board they also treated some females with testosterone they did that females were not motivated to clean but they did become more aggressive and show male display behaviors to other males so they were affected by the testosterone but this is where it got interesting is they didn't clean so what this is telling the researchers at the Smithsonian Institute and UCLA that partnered for this study is that hormones alone are not what causes the cleaning behavior the testosterone is acting on neural circuits and things in place that indicate to them the testosterone tells them you know I'm anthropomorphizing a little bit but they're just they're so excited they really want to win over a lady they know that a clean space will win the lady upping the testosterone ups the overall effort but because females don't court that the testosterone just made them really aggressive but it didn't make them clean right so they started acting like other aggressive males but not in the trying to woo the males or in trying to woo other females they didn't do that they didn't go toward those male behaviors interesting looking around my place I'm glad that not all females are looking for a clean forest boy they all are moving on from cleanliness to smell I guess they're kind of related I want to talk about birds in another area of study and that's navigation we've talked a whole bunch on this show feel like every few months I have a new update in the world of bird navigation but that's kind of what makes it so interesting is that when understanding bird brains understanding how birds get around we still only have pieces of the picture and Kiki and I kind of went off on this crazy tangent a few months ago about bird smell for a very very very long time people thought birds don't smell but then what happened Kiki oh those silly researchers realized that they'd just been cutting off the olfactory bulb and had been not considering the fact that birds could smell because they didn't think they had the brain organ for it you silly researchers you pulled the brain pan off and off with the olfactory bulb so it turns out this whole time birds can smell this is in the 90s early 2000s even a lot of the world thought birds can't smell turns out they can so there's this whole new world of research now looking at bird smell and how bird smell affects their behavior well enter bird smell in navigation this is so fascinating so a combined effort with Oxford Barcelona and PISA researchers from all three of these places have worked together to look at olfaction with bird navigation they found that navigation they particularly wanted to look at the hardest place for birds to navigate which is over open ocean with no view of land how do birds know where they're going so in previous experiments looking at this they actually displaced the birds they would take the birds they'd move them to a new spot and see if they could find their way back and then when they did that they would do sensory manipulation they would change their magnetic or olfactory receptors they would do some sort of deprivation from these experiments they had suggested that removing a bird sense of smell impairs homing but disruption of magnetic sense they couldn't find any conclusive results these researchers wanted to try something completely new and instead they wanted to deprive these birds of certain receptors or abilities to sense certain things but not displace them just plop them back where they came from and see how they acted in a normal environment which to me again I'm not in the intricacies of bird research but it makes more sense because you're not tweaking as many variables at one time so what they did is they looked at 32 scopolize sheer waters and they split them into three groups one they made temporarily anosmic so they were unable to smell they can't smell their nasal irrigation was zinc sulfate temporarily another they had them carry small magnets so their magnetic sense was all messed up and then a control group then they attached GPS loggers to each of them and they did this while the birds were nesting so they had no reason to leave the space the birds were incubating eggs and crevices and caves on the Moroccan coast so this way they could grab the birds they could mess with them put them back they were fairly certain the birds would go right back to their eggs because they wouldn't want to abandon them and that worked so then they tracked them as they engaged in normal foraging trips while they're sitting on the eggs they have to leave to feed the birds went out on their trips as normal they gained weight everything seemed normal they returned and exchanged they did incubation shifts with their partners so removing a sense of smell and messing with their magnetic senses did not impair their motivation to return home or their ability to forage but what it did do is when they made birds anosmic when they took away their sense of smell they made successful trips for foraging but their orientation on wide open sea was odd so they went straight they didn't go all over the place but they didn't go in the right direction and then once they could see land they redirected and went straight home so they were close but they weren't going exactly where they're supposed to be going so the implication here the idea is that when they don't have visual cues they use olfaction as a factor in their navigation so that would make sense it would you would think an animal would use all of their senses when doing things and the interesting thing that it brings up is that the magnetic sense even though the birds have a magnetic sense what they're doing is they're foraging they're not migrating so they're not these birds are not instinctually driven to use the magnetic sense to be able to get them from one place to another directionally they're going all over open ocean and they're like I'm just looking for food which way did I go now I just need to follow my way back I think about if you were going to the grocery store versus if you were driving out of state you might turn on your GPS you're going somewhere far away you haven't been before or it's been a long time since you went there but if it's a place you go every day you don't need your GPS however if you usually go during the day just to seeing oh no it's not there anymore you might get a little less certain you might make a couple wrong turns but you'd probably make your way back home yep so kind of similar potentially to the way that salmon use a use their both factions scent to get them to their right home stream just get them home get me home smell it home all the way that's interesting love it ties in nicely with other past stories related to this absolutely birds get their sense of smell it's so amazing we find out more and more about it this is this week in science it's time for us to take a break we'll be back in just a few moments with more science we've got dogs and black holes and some other things coming up in just a few so stay tuned hey everyone thanks so much for watching or listening to this week in science this week we do appreciate that you are here with us once again to talk about all the science that we want to talk about and birds bird noses bird noses are great you know what's also great pre-ordering the this week in science calendar it is available now this week in science you can go to twist.org which is a wonderful portal to all things twist go to twist.org and right now there is a link up on our website for you to be able to pre-order the 2018 this week in science players animal corner calendar we'll be getting mailed out in November December time we're hoping to sell out so we're making the ordering earlier this year so you can get it on your list of items to get for gifts for just for yourself for a calendar for next year it'll have all sorts of wonderful science holidays in it days that you should be 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where we live help people find us that would be wonderful we'd love more people to find us we thank you for your support we really couldn't do this without you full of displays now due to the juices and pills and the creams the bodies lost toxins whatever that means you've stopped eating all of that sinister food your dinner tastes awful so it's gotta be good and we're back with more this week in science yes we are Justin what you got oh what did I bring aha is it possible that a mythical creature once used to frighten children before putting them to bed could actually have been real Nessie Nessie Nessie Bigfoot what about vampires I still like kids about vampires right before putting them to bed sure father of the year ladies and gentlemen vampires have a lot of mythical roles to fill these days the other days they come out in the daytime they sparkle they're glittery there's all sorts of versions of this but the classic the pale skin blood draining draining nocturnal creature who is who's harmed by being in daylight may actually describe a very rare but very real blood disorder erythropoietic protopore fire rhea erythropoietic protoporiphria yeah which I will call it EPP from here on out it affects the body's molecular machinery for making hemorrhage it's a very important of the oxygen transporting protein hemoglobin when hemi binds with iron it gives blood that red luck EPP causes people's skin to become very sensitive to light prolonged exposure to sunshine can cause painful disfiguring blisters people with EPP are chronically nimic which makes them feel very tired and look very pale so does living in Portland in the HD actually even on a cloudy day there's enough ultraviolet light to cause blistering and defigurement to those body parts so staying indoors during the day and receiving blood transfusions containing sufficient hemilevels can help alleviate some of the disorder's symptoms in ancient times this may have been achieved by drinking animal blood and emerging only at night yeah fascinating and as team investigators report in a paper in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences the newly discovered genetic mutation that triggers EPP has been discovered it illuminates a novel biological mechanism potentially responsible for the stories of vampires seeing as how the EPP folks kind of have some of the symptoms and express some of the things that we've come to associate with the creatures of the night yeah you go outside it burns yeah do people have this now yeah do people have this now is this still a thing yeah it's a thing I mean that's what they're figuring out like potential cures for or at least the genetic causes of but yeah it's a real thing terrible fascinating and sad fascinating and sad exactly but also fascinating and maybe someday these ideas of vampires will be just a thing of the very very long past yeah interesting other creatures of the night oh how about not really the night but maybe the dark universe around us black holes right we always try to see them but we don't really see them the only way we really see them is kind of by the way they move gas around and the effects they have on the space around them basically we have to infer that black holes are there because you know black holes they absorb all the lights you can't really see them so we have to infer where they exist really really supermassive black holes pretty easy to infer at the center of galaxies you've got these black holes jets of material coming out of the area where the black holes exist little tiny mini black holes also fairly easy for us to find we have been able to discover a lot of them however the most difficult time we have had is in finding mid-sized intermediate sized black holes so these mid-sized black holes if we find them in the centers of galaxies you know we've got a big giant one a giant supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way but if there's another more mid-sized black hole hanging out in the Milky Way somewhere that could indicate that the Milky Way grew and got bigger by cannibalism and by sucking up its neighbors and that maybe it's in the process that supermassive black holes Sagittarius 1a that it's in the process of sucking this other black hole into it still and so researchers have been kind of looking for this and they've finally found evidence a team led by Tomoharu Okua University in Yokohama, Japan found a very peculiar cloud of molecular gas called CO-0.40-0.22 and this cloud of molecular gas was close to the center of our Milky Way it moved with a large range of velocities some of them very very very fast which made them think that there's something quite massive in there that they hadn't seen yet that's influencing the velocity of the gas and they simulated the movements that they saw and their simulation said this might be a black hole of about 100,000 solar masses so they went and they took the Atacama large millimeters sub-millimeter array otherwise known as ALMA to observe shorter wavelengths from the radio frequency spectrum to see very fine detail in this molecular cloud of gas and they found a really dense clump of gas near the center of the cloud and this clump in the center was even more fine-grained in the resolution of velocities that suggested a really massive nearby object and so then they simulated it and again the simulations were very supportive of a massive black hole so the spectrum of the source was really similar to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way but much less luminant about 500 times less luminous and so they think the researchers say that this supports the notion that this molecular cloud this radio source that they found is an intermediate mass black hole and that it may support this idea that the Milky Way cannibalized a neighbor at one point in time because this this black hole that they think they're seeing is just too big to have just gotten a start there in our Milky Way it doesn't make sense based on our models of galaxy formation there are about 50 dwarf galaxies near the Milky Way and it would support the idea that galaxies like the Milky Way grow through cannibalism if this molecular cloud is confirmed to be a black hole I just love that sense black holes grow through cannibalism that's right cannibalizing the super suckers of the universe I mean that's what they are they're a whole bunch of material yep they're giant suckers yep you got it yeah so it's like spiral galaxies like ours most of them probably have a big super massive black hole at the center but maybe if they formed in a little nursery at some point there was nest cannibalism at the galactic scale too much they're baby black holes not the babies suckers moving on up and into closer proximity to us our solar system Juno has been out hanging out taking a look at Jupiter and has been sending back some really amazing information about the gas and the atmosphere the depths of this planet one of the big things that's come out recently is new information about how auroras form was that biz on top was that what that is? yeah so I'm showing a picture right now from NASA Juno of an aurora lighting up the northern pole of the planet it's a wonderful bright blue color illuminating the top of the of the planet here on earth we have aurora that form when electrons in our high atmosphere get sped up and because of the magnetic fields that are propelled around our planet and those magnetic fields push those electrons around and basically shove them into gas particles and energy is released in the form of light and so at our poles we see aurora aurorae from the north and south pole however this news out of Jupiter suggests that we thought that Jupiter had that Jupiter's auroras were caused by the same process as here on earth but what Juno is showing us is that's not the case well it is some of the time some of the time it is there's a lot of plasma in the atmosphere and there are electrons in the outer casing of Jupiter Jupiter does have a massive magnetic field of course there are aurora and electrons that elicit emit light in the way that earth's upper atmosphere does but that's not the predominant mechanism for how aurora happen really what it's more like is that there are these waves in the planet's magnetic field of turbulence in the magnetic field because it's so massive and there is a lot of plasma and electrons and things that are in that upper atmosphere that get pushed around just pushed like a wave and so there's a lighting process that this wonderful article from Science analogizes it's a process somewhat akin to surfers being driven forward ahead of breaking ocean waves so if you can imagine these turbulent waves pushing the electrons forward and energizing them it's more as if the waves are breaking and energizing the electrons themselves as opposed to the process of knocking the electrons like billiard balls into gas particles in the atmosphere which is what happens here on earth in a completely different process thank you Juno we never would have known without you neat anyway this is going to help us understand more about what's happening in the atmosphere Juno and potentially hopefully understand the magnetic field of Jupiter a lot more which would be awesome what else you got Justin ah let's see oh yeah this is this is the medieval white swapping culture so this is the end of the stone age getting into the early bronze age families were established in a surprising manner in the lecto community which wasn't much of a community it's sort of just a fertile bridge line area there was farms and stuff this is south of Augsburg Germany if you're familiar with the area based on the remains of 84 individuals buried between 2500 and 1650 BC in cemeteries that belonged to individual homesteads they found the majority of women came from outside the area probably from Bohemia or central Germany while men the men buried there usually remained in that region from birth to death this is a so called example or an example of so called patry local pattern and it persisted over a period of 800 years during the transition from Neolithic to early bronze age we see a great diversity of different female lineages which would occur if over time many women relocated to this lech valley from somewhere else this remarks Alyssa Mitnick on the genetic analysis and Karina Knipper explains based on analysis is drawing ratios and molars which allows us to draw conclusions about the origin of people we were able to ascertain that the majority of women did not originate from the region whether these women were traveling or somehow being kidnapped cursed or sold into matrimony isn't clear though once living the farm life seems they integrated just fine at least the burials women did not differ from that of the native population indicating that the formerly foreign women were part of the local community by death researchers suspect it played a significant role in the exchange of cultural objects and ideas which increased considerably in the bronze age in turn promoting the development of new technologies and if the patterns expanded out to the greater region the exchange of cultural ideas that drove this age and the women who were moving from one place to another and bringing with them the traditions or practices or knowledge of where they grew up and coming to this Lech Valley also could be the origin of the word Lech no no it's so interesting you know we have these different periods of time culturally when we had British monarchy royalty who were in breeding because they just married the other rich landowners right and then we had this other period of time previous to that where it was like no we're traveling men were traveling they would find women bring them back and start their families with someone from far away fascinating how things change always changing another thing that is going to change hopefully maybe is our concept of dog intelligence we love dogs right man's best friend dogs are great but until now dogs have never passed the mirror test the mirror test is a test of self-recognition and thus self-awareness and metacognition and consciousness it gives a lot of ideas as to how thoughtful an organism is so if you take a dolphin for instance and you put a mark on its side that dolphin will swim around in front of a mirror checking out that mark on its side it spends a lot more time in front of the mirror if there's a mark on its side and if there isn't a mark on its side people, children if you put something on them after a certain babies after a certain age of development if you put something on them they will spend more time looking in the mirror themselves yeah we did this we did a story about them doing this with monkeys where the monkeys instead of reaching for the thing in the mirror they reach for it on themselves first yes so that shows that there's self-awareness and self-recognition which is a sign of higher intelligence people who own dogs you know people say my dog's smart, my dog knows me my dog knows itself, the dog knows but until now scientists have never been able to show this awareness but you know what we talk all the time Blair in the animal corner and on about other animal behavior studies about appropriate tests to ask the right question dogs are not primarily visual they are primarily centissual they are primarily olfactory in nature they spend the first thing a dog does is not go look at another dog they'll go sniff another dog a dog spends a lot of time in this odor world and so what researchers did is they designed an analogous test to mirror self-recognition in which they took dog's own scent from the dog's own urine and then they gave another stimulus in which the odor the urine scent was modified somehow and then another scent which was a completely different dog's scent and they found that dogs can actually distinguish between this olfactory what they say quote image of themselves when modified they investigated their own odor for longer when it had an additional odor accompanying it than when it did not and they think this implies the recognition of the odor as being of or from themselves and so the ecological validity of this is examined was examined when they also presented the subjects with other dog's odors right unknown dogs or known dogs and dogs spend longer investigating the odor of other dogs than their own odor then in the last experiment they spent longer with the modified stimulus than with the modified odor by itself so that novelty is not the thing that explains the behavior it makes sense I mean with the monkey study that we did a couple of months ago it was all about teaching the monkeys how a mirror worked and then they immediately passed the mirror test so this is the problem there aren't mirrors in the middle of the wild so testing based on a mirror you might as well test an animal based on a Macintosh it's a level of technology they don't understand so this is really cool I love it I think the more we can adjust our methodology of testing intelligence of animals the better absolutely yes so dogs self aware they have self recognition they can distinguish their own odor from that of other dogs they know when their odor has been altered I think it's a very well done very well done study of this question of whether dogs have self recognition and then the idea that they do that's confirmation alright you know what other dogs though wild dogs African wild dogs this story blows my mind researchers oh my goodness this was academics from Swansea, Australia the United States they were looking at these endangered African wild dogs in the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust they found that these animals use sneezes for a social decision making purpose they used the sneezes as quorum sensing to decide when they were going to move off to hunt after making camp for greeting ceremonies in what they call social rallies they used to think that the dogs were just just sneezing clearing their airways all these dogs were together sneezing I'm allergic to dogs me too when the researchers looked at the details of 68 of these social rallies where the dogs came together they found that when there were more sneezes it was more likely that the pack moved away to go hunting and so they've decided that it's quorum sensing and sneezes are the way that the animals vote and decide to do this together I love the story it also said that the vote or the sneeze of the alpha male or the alpha female was more important it took less sneezes after that for them to move but here's the thing about this thing it's more powerful than yours we can't call it a sneeze anymore it's not a sneeze this is not a reflexatory movement that was done in response to dust in their nose this is a vocalization that sounds like a sneeze so I don't know if they want to call it an outward chuff or what but after I read this story it took me a while to process it because it seemed so ridiculous and I figured out that's why because they were calling it a sneeze but thinking about it like a sneeze why are they sneezing on commitment no it's a vocalization it's a different sound that they make but it's fascinating in their lexicon they've developed this one very distinctive sound unlike any other that they make that is a vote to move on to move on vote with your sneezes or your outward respiratory chuff yes where are you hashtag fix it my final story for the night is another communication story this time from the bird world we've talked before about the cuckoo the brood parasite brood parasitic common cuckoos cuckulus canoris lay their eggs in the nests of a host species and the female will often move around and figure out where appropriate hosts nests are and pay visits very secretly to the nests to drop the eggs in and the it's only been known however that the males of the cuckoo species do a lot of vocalization and they have a very a call that is used during the breeding season and in the experiments that these researchers did that are published in nature ecology and evolution they found that the reed warbler really doesn't pay any attention to the cuckoo call of the male cuckoo they don't any other bird the cuckoo they don't pay any attention to it however the female cuckoo makes a weird chuckle call after it lays its egg in a host's nest and they realize the researchers discovered that this chuckle call is actually copying the sound of a hawk it's a hawk like call that the warblers actually spend more time looking out of the nest away from the nest when that chuckle call is made and it diverts their attention so that the parasite's egg is just like oh there it is that must be mine now I got distracted hawk squirrel hawk another hawk squirrel squirrel hawk you're jamming in the lock and you're saying your carline's going off exactly jamming the lock to the house don't look at your front door look at your car through the window wow yep so the female cuckoo is enhancing her success by manipulating the host's concern about being prey oh the cuckoo the ultimate con man ultimately now Blair you have a story oh I have one last story the headlined ladies and gentlemen everyone can you all just calm down calm down I can't calm down about Fushima and the fish let's calm down everyone's settled simmer down now so a recent study actually looked very carefully at radioactive isotopes in the Pacific they really wanted to put this to bed so an international research team showed that concerns about radioactivity in fish hurting humans we can put it to bed it's not a concern they looked at marine predators like tuna swordfish and sharks you look at predators because of biomagnification if there's even a tiny bit in the ocean in these large predators it will grows exponentially up the food chain so the predators will show they're the smoking gun they will show if there's really anything to worry about in the ocean so they focused on cesium which is a silvery metal it has a lot of radioactive isotopes they looked at 134C and 137C which is a form that is found when uranium fuel breaks down in nuclear reactors so what is discharged in large quantities following a radioactive disaster that's what you would look for that would tell you that there's something wrong with the fish because of Fukushima this stuff it also has relatively long half lives 2.1 and 30 years so considering that it wasn't that long ago since the Fukushima disaster they should be able to find it and it tends to accumulate in muscle tissues which is what we're eating so this is really what they wanted to look at and they sampled across the Pacific between 2012 and 2015 this was a big study they found no detectable levels of 134C and 137C concentrations that were generally consistent with background levels from above ground nuclear testings in 1940s and 1950s were those that's all they found what they found was stuff that had been there since the 1940s and 1950s they did not find anything higher than that so even since the nuclear testing period basically these nuclear disasters Fukushima melting down it hasn't been anywhere close to the amount of stuff that we put into the environment when we were doing nuclear testing yeah so what they found for marketed fish to be restricted from trade it would have to have been 1600 times higher than what they measured so one of the co-authors Kevin Wang he says go ahead and eat some sushi so go ahead and eat some sushi everybody kind of the the moral here is and I hesitate to say this but it's true the ocean is really big and so this idea that there's a radioactive disaster it's going to affect fish that are washing up on our shores here in California Oregon or Washington it's not a concern the things that we should be worried about are other things like the effects of climate change like the effects of ocean acidification like the effects of the 300 million pounds of Atlantic salmon that were released into Pacific waterways so those are the things to worry about so go ahead and eat your sushi don't worry about the Fukushima thing when it comes to that when I say go eat your sushi though still be smart pick safe fish make sure that the restaurants you're going to have good quality sushi-grade fish and if you're pregnant obviously you don't eat too much sushi but don't worry about the nuclear activity that's what I'm telling you here today fantastic I wasn't worried about it but for those of our listeners who might have been I hope that this assuages their fears and we can also we'll have a link to the story in our show notes when the show notes are all put together so that you can check out the story yourself if you want to find out more and have a place to start your investigations yeah I know we've talked about it a lot on the show but I still know lots of people that are saying oh I'm cutting down on the sushi that Fukushima stuff I know people people who are usually fairly scientific who are saying these things because it is it is widespread in a lot of the media and the social media people are still very up in arms about it so wow I want I just want to send out some real science about this issue thank you much appreciated really yeah so no fish at all they didn't find anything higher than the 1940s and 1950s testing what I'm saying is like the people who are like yeah I'll go down and have fish and chips because that's British yes they're worried about the raw I know people specifically who don't eat the raw which I do find hilarious because cooking it is not going to do anything radioactive isotope it'll be fine I have heard a lot of people say I'll eat the Atlantic fish I'm not eating the Pacific fish right now that is something that I have heard pretty widely as well so here's the actual science read it at will probably came from the North Pacific there you go you're going to lose no matter what and white fish you have no idea what kind of fish that is all right just a white meated fish that's it did we do it? we have done it end of another episode of this week in science so much science this week what a fun show everyone I would like to dun dun dun start our shout outs for thanking everyone for their support on Patreon thank you to Paul Disney, Gbert and Lattimore John, Richard O'Neill Peter Chan, Jacqueline Boyster Tyron Fong, Andy Groh, Keith Corsale Jake Jones, Gerald Sherelles, Chris Clark Richard Hendricks, Charlene Henry Brian Hedrick, John Gridley, Steve Bickel Kevin Reilsback, Ulysses Aggins, Dave Freidel James Randall, Bob Calder, Mark Bazaros Edward Dyer, Trinity 4, Laila Marshall Clark Larry Garcia, Randy Mazzucca, Tony Steele Gerald O'Neill, Steve DeBell, Louis Smith The Hardin Family, IFSHMN Greg Guthman, Patrick Cone, Cassinia Volkova Daryl Rinds-Rang, Alex Wilson Jason Schneiderman, David Neighbor Christopher Raepin, Dana Pearson Paul Stanton, 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We will be back right here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news and if you learned anything from the show remember it's all in your head reverse global warming with a wave of my hand and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand this week science is coming your way so everybody listen to what I say I use the scientific method for all that broadcast my opinion it's this week in science this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in science science 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 then understand that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to save the world from jeopardy and this week in science is coming your way so everybody listen to everything we say and if you use our methods instead of rolling a die we may rid the world of toxoplasma got the eye cause it's this week in science this week in science this week in science science science this week in science this week in science this week in science science science I've got a laundry list of items I want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote more rational thought and I'll try to answer any question you've got but how can I ever see the changes I seek this week in science is coming your way you better just listen to what we say and if you learn anything from the words that we've said then please this week in science this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in science this is the end of our show Blair looks concerned just reading a thing reading a thing gong we've made it to the end of another show I'm going to tell everybody now I'm not, hi Pamoramic hello hello Ben Rothig I put you guys up on the chat room for a second on the screen just a second Justin said he had a story to tell but now he's not here and I am not going to stay very late tonight I really need to go to bed because I have an early morning tomorrow there which is fine but I got to tell this story first I would love to hear it this is it's not really story story like a story story exactly but it follows along the path of an explorer ok so this is out of Australian National University an anthropologist at the Australian National University may have stumbled across a clue to resolving one of the most enduring mysteries of Pacific history the famous French navigator Jean-François de Gallup Comité de la Paris appeared in 1788 La Peruse was instructed by King Louis the XV 14th to undertake a major voyage of exploration in the Pacific to emulate the feats of Captain James Cook he departed the French port of Brest in 1785 with two frigates and a complement of 225 scientists this is Dr Derek Hitchcock the ANU School of Culture History Languages he believes the last survivors of La Peruse's voyage were shipwrecked on the Great Barrier Reef near Murray Island in northeast Tories Strait La Peruse's voyage of discovering the Pacific is recognized as one of the most important of its era rivaled only by the work of Cook he remains a very well known and figure in 18th century scientific exploration Dr. Hitchcock says what is known is that La Peruse's ships Astrolab and Bussol were wrecked in 1788 on Benicorot small island in the Santa Cruz group of the Solomon Islands the survivors made it to shore spent several months constructing two small masted craft using timber salvage from the wreck of the Astrolab once completed they launched the vessel and a bid to return to France what became of this ship and its crew desperate to return to France has been an ongoing mystery while researching a project on the history of Tories Strait Dr. Hitchcock came across an article published in 1818 in an Indian newspaper the Madras Courier he is confident the article reveals what became of the survivors the article tells the story of Shaikh Jumal a castaway Indian seaman who survived the sinking of a merchant ship Morningstar when it was wrecked up the coast of north Queensland in 1814 Jumal made it to Murray Island where he lived for four years learning the language and culture of the islanders because you can't really call an Uber back then ship wrecked on an island okay I'm home my name is Jumal what's yours he was finally rescued by two merchant ships that passed through the area in 1818 Jumal informed his rescuers that he had seen cutlass and muskets on the island which he recognized is not being of English make because of course being from India that's what he would have recognized as well as a compass and a gold watch he said were on the island when he asked the islanders where they were obtained they related how approximately 30 years earlier a ship had been wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef to the east in sight of the island boats with crew had come ashore but fighting followed all were eventually killed except a boy who was saved and brought up as one of their own later marrying a local woman the Purcell expedition crew list includes a ship's boy Mordela from the port of Tigera and Brittany northwestern France Dr. Hitchcock wonders if Mordela could be the last survivor of this expedition the Indian newspaper article featuring Cassari's account was later reproduced in several other newspapers and pure articles of the day in Australia and Britain France and other countries and observers noted that this might refer to that specific expedition says Hitchcock somehow the sheik Jamal's story was subsequently forgotten while a French book published in 2012 refers briefly to this newspaper article and discounts it as an unreliable account Dr. Hitchcock believes otherwise the chronology is spot on for it was 30 years earlier in late 1788 or early 1789 that the pursuit survivors left Benicoro on their small vessels for the more historians and maritime archaeologists are not aware of any other European ship being in that region at that time this means that this is the earliest known shipwreck in the Tories straight indeed eastern Australia could well be that the final phase of the law pursue Peruse sorry expedition ended in tragedy in northern Australia further recovery of artifacts from the right side of the Great Barrier Reef yet to be discovered or other islands will hopefully provide the final confirmation this particular Torah straight she includes the northern part of Australia's Great Barrier Reef is studded with reefs rocks and sandbars and has been described as a graveyard of ships over 120 vessels are known to have come to grief its treacherous waters I thought that was a fun story a second hand account that sort of of that fits the timeline and second hand account is another castaways observation of there's a lot of technology and artifacts that don't really seem to belong here isn't that odd there's a story that goes with it I'll recount that and then 100 years later plus starting to figure out maybe we might know exactly who's junk that was who's artifacts but oh well specifically who's yep nice and with that that was a fun story Kiki you can cast away cast away I was just looking at I'm going to Lexington Kentucky tomorrow Lexington Kentucky yes it is the capital of the world turns out horse capital of the world Lexington Kentucky second largest city in Kentucky horse capital of the world heart of the state's blue grass region this is interesting I went to one of my favorite things they wanted to see what unusual stuff there is in Lexington and they have a medical and science museum with life size figure casts from as many as 200 cadavers whoa outstanding collection of 19th century medical instruments yeah pretty interesting yeah do it how long are you there for the weekend conference no my best friend from high school just moved there and she's finding out to help her pick out a dog interesting yes Pam O'Ramack who's from Australia and in Australia points out from the previous story that James Kirk got eaten so I wouldn't want to emulate him oh man this museum is by appointment only Atlas Obscura what are you doing there's a floral clock there's the grave of Daniel Boone in Frankfurt isn't there a song about Daniel Boone well first off most fish are usually eaten on the west coast of the US is not from Japan wouldn't be very fresh yes she said that it's Japanese food I guess no no teriyaki bowls either it's more fresh on the western US than it is on the eastern US cause we actually have sushi fish that comes from Japan yes but also a lot of it you can get on the west coast because of where they swim yeah cause you know one big ocean one big ocean one big ocean although there was a restaurant I remember I haven't been there but I know people who say it's the most amazing sushi tiny restaurant in haze valley or sushi and I guess they fly the fish in fresh from Japan did you know that in lexington Kentucky there's a water tower the shape of a dixie cup I did not know that there's also a pharmacy built in the shape of a mortar and pestle and there's a biblical golf course here it is and on the seventh hole yes the golfers rested there's a nice bench in the picnic table oh my god I found it full of rest we'll have fun boon was a man was a big man I'll try to not get in trouble and stick is as mighty as a tree there's the daniel boon theme song you don't remember that song nope I shared it in the chat room so my friend told me also to keep an eye out at the lexington airport because it's teeny tiny for horse airplanes oh that would make sense so horse racing is big over there the horse capital of the world so ever yes what she said was in order for them to be like real legit race horses they cannot be a product of insemination it has to be natural breeding that makes a difference yeah they fly horses across the country to mate with other horses to make thoroughbred horses doesn't that make you think that if somebody a little bit science minded might be able to come up with a better racehorse tomorrow yeah what age are they pulling their horse racing knowledge from that they're sticking to but yeah she was saying you can tell them because there's no windows on those airplanes yeah because that would scare a horse well I'm sure they're drugged well it might scare a drugged horse and who wants that there's me a hoof flying out a window horse is like man that could just be bad um Eric in Alaska says the Denver airport has a museum dedicated to the conspiracy theories about the Denver airport I've been to the Denver airport I do not recall that it's a big airport you have gone everywhere well we're going again besides that museum is in a basement you need secret deep state college to get clearance to go down well I know that like when the giant horse statue flashes the red eyes that's a signal to the Illuminati but yeah signal to the yes no I'm making fart sounds with my mouth tonight everybody the end of the usable content I think we've gotten to the end of it I'm going to try and find somebody to talk to about the Cassini mission next week I think on the 15th that makes its final dive into Saturn yeah my prediction my prediction it pops out the other side what it's going to get crushed no it's instead of getting crushed it just pops out the other side we're like oh boy there's really nothing there we will all be crushed we will all be crushed by the end of Cassini that is my prediction and on that cheering note goodnight everybody is there anything else I don't think there's anything else that I need to talk about that I'm going to get the yeah nope we're good for the weekend good for the week I hope gets to high ground if you're in Florida stay safe if you are in please stay safe don't listen to Rush Limbaugh what's he doing are they really saying don't worry about it Rush Limbaugh said terrible things what did he say that's not a big deal yeah he said don't listen to the liberal media that they're saying it's a big that Irma is a big deal and it's really not and that terrible man that you don't need to go to the store to buy any supplies because it's all a conspiracy between the liberal media I'm paraphrasing of course but it's a conspiracy between the liberal media and marketers and people to make oh absolutely you know what you know what absolutely this is exactly what you expect from people who begin down the road of deciding to distrust science it becomes this thing where they just that now it's all has to be fake don't worry everything about science has to be fake if he was in if he was in a space where there was the hurricane you better believe he'd take care of himself right exactly where is he isn't he in Florida he's in LA isn't he yeah it's all over the news you can find stories about this on the Washington post you can find stories about it Fox News yeah what a jerk yes Al Roker is calling out Rush Limbaugh about this the the governor what's governor Scott of Florida is a high profile climate denier you know as were senators in Texas so the leadership that doesn't trust the data that's predicting what they're experiencing what can you say yeah panoramic Rush Limbaugh was actually a radio host in Sacramento although when he was in Sacramento believe it or not he was a liberal voice on the radio yeah he is he follows the money he's just an opportunistic he has no ideology as I believe a lot of people with extreme ideologies don't actually have ideology behind their words but have agendas and that can be a problem this is an interesting thing we're talking about agenda though it turns out and WI guy has pointed out that Rush Limbaugh is in Florida and I just looked it up his house is in Palm Beach Florida which is potentially one of the areas that could be very devastated live broadcast from there live broadcast we're going to be streaming live from my house we're going to be streaming live we're going to ride out this liberal media I'm doing the other guy who am I doing Alex Jones that's right doing somebody else yeah interesting interesting comments my hope is that nobody listens to comments such as these and really just you know consider the worst possible thing that could happen and prepare for that be prepared for the worst and be happy and surprised when it's not that bad hope that everyone faith over the week to come and I also hope there's an investigation into the skyrocketing airline ticket bears to leave about this this is the story I heard a father who's got a daughter that's going to school in Miami I think it is decide just to get her back up to Connecticut spent I think 160 bucks on a ticket looked it up and got a ticket got her a flight out and then it turned out her roommate which is also a family friend arranged to leave so the next day he went to go buy her a ticket on the same airline same kind of plane same flight plan and it was over a thousand dollars so and he looked elsewhere and found other airlines were likewise can we not capitalize on this problem yeah I mean how well that's our economy capitalism capitalism capitalizing yes there should be rules against this kind of stuff though this is a natural disaster well but this makes it so that only goes with the most money it can leave the terrible disaster situation yeah actually one of the only laws even though Texas or Houston didn't have any zoning laws which allowed people to build houses or developers to build houses and flood planes they do have an anti emergency situation gouging law which is pretty intense it's like twenty thousand dollars per offense so if you start charging twenty dollars a gallon for gas I don't know if it's every person that fills up or every gallon of gas but they levy insane fines at you I don't know that Florida has any such laws on the book it's going to be a state by state thing but there is something really treacherous about that the one airline that hadn't jacked up their price from what I was reading was jet blue except that jet blues only flights out of the area also like did this little jump down into towards the eye of the hurricane like they went you got picked up here but then you had to go here and then you had to say jet blue doesn't go many places it doesn't and so its route wasn't direct and it went towards the hurricane and so might not even be flying like so yeah I hope there's some sort of backlash that's awful awful, awful base behavior double your flight to charge half come on standing remotely yeah alright you guys I'm wishing everyone the best in the week in the week to come and I hope to see you all again next week with more of this week in science definitely goodnight kiki goodnight kiki goodnight player, goodnight Justin that's a quick out goodnight everybody goodnight everyone all at once at the same time and Ian's included goodnight to you too goodnight


When people hear arsenic, they think of it as an acute poison, and indeed a tiny amount, 100 milligrams, could kill you in an hour. That's like the weight of a tenth of a paperclip. But there's also chronic arsenic poisoning, where even a dose 10,000 times as small can be harmful if you're exposed day after day for years at a time. Chief among the concerns is cancer. Arsenic is classified as a Class 1 carcinogen. That's the highest level, things known to cause cancer in humans, alongside stuff like asbestos, cigarette smoke, formaldehyde, plutonium, processed meat, consumption of bacon, ham, hot dogs, and lunch meat. So arsenic is pretty bad stuff, implicated in tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of cancer cases worldwide every year. Of course, cancer is just our number two killer. What about heart disease? Long-term exposure to low to moderate arsenic levels was also found associated with cardiovascular disease incidents and mortality, meaning heart attacks and strokes. Arsenic is also considered an immunotoxicant, meaning toxic to our immune system. How do we know that? Well, there's a virus called varicella, which is what causes chickenpox, the first time we get it. Our immune system is able to stamp it down, but not stamp it out. The virus retreats into our nerve cells where it lies in wait for our immune function to dip, and when it does, the virus reemerges and causes a disease called shingles. We've all been exposed to the virus, but only about one in three of us will get shingles because our immune system is able to keep it at bay. But as we get older or immunosuppressed, the virus can slip its muzzle like if you're given arsenic chemotherapy.  But that's at high doses. Might even low doses of arsenic, like the kind we're exposed to in our daily diet, impact our immune function? We didn't know until this study in which thousands of Americans had the levels of arsenic in their urine tested, along with their level of antivirus antibodies, and indeed the more arsenic they had flowing through their bodies, the lower their defenses. And if you're pregnant, arsenic can pass to your baby and may not just increase the risk of miscarriage and infant mortality, but may also affect an infant's immune development and susceptibility to infections early in life, but you don't know until you put it to the test. Infant infections in relation to prenatal arsenic exposure in a study out of New Hampshire, and indeed the more arsenic the mom was exposed to during pregnancy the higher risk of infection during infancy. Though it's unknown whether arsenic-induced changes in gene expression can impact the health of not only your children, but your grandchildren as well. Regardless, arsenic exposure isn't good for mom's own health associated with increasing blood pressure. If arsenic suppresses immune system function, though, then at least maybe as a silver lining you'd get fewer allergies or something, which is kind of an overreaction of the immune system? Apparently not. Those with higher arsenic levels tend to have higher rates of food allergies, tend to not sleep as well, tend to not feel as well. If you ask people how they would rate their health, those reporting excellent or very good tended to have lower levels of arsenic compared to those who just reported good, fair, or poor. They tended to have higher levels. What about diabetes? Here's two dozen population studies on arsenic exposure and confirmed diabetes. Any result over one suggests increased risk for diabetes. Anything below one suggests lower risk, and here are the results. Suggesting an association between ingested arsenic and diabetes, but population studies can't prove cause and effect. While it'd be nice to demonstrate a cause and effect relationship, is it necessary? Look, we know it's a carcinogen. We know it causes cancer. What more do we need to take steps to decrease our exposure?