This is TWIS, this week in science episode number 580, recorded on Wednesday, August 17, 2016. Check your conspiracy at the door. Hey everyone, I am Dr. Kiki and tonight on This Week in Science, we are going to fill your heads with primordial soup, contrails, and fish pee, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The world you are living in has not, I repeat, not been all figured out yet. Sure, a lot of major hurdles have been handled. We can control electricity, harness it to do work, and that work produces amazing advantages to being on the planet. Like the light bulb, the computer, and the greatest of all inventions ever, the dishwasher. We have solved complex riddles of living things, giving us protections and treatments that manage disease and prolong our life spans. We have delved into the atomic world that once seemed so small, only to delve deeper and discover an entirely tinier world of subatomic particles. We can manipulate this world a great effect, despite having hands that are too large and clumsy for the job. We have been to the moon and Mars and all the major bodies in our solar system, sent probes hurtling outside of our solar system, and have taken photos of other solar systems by the billions with Hubble. These terrestrial eyes of ours have gazed upon galaxies that never could have been seen or even imagined without our scientific advancements. And despite all this, we are living in a world that has not been all figured out. There are still greater mysteries out there, far further depths to delve into. And while nothing we have yet to accomplish may out-awesome the invention of the dishwasher, which I happen to love very much, anything new from here on out will be building on all past human knowledge. And you will hear it first on This Week in Science, coming up next. Discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know what's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening this week in science. Science to Keke and Blair. And good science to you, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back yet again with so much science. You know, you'd think that summertime would be this time of, you know, kind of lazy science reporting, that there would not be so much coming out, but it seems like the last couple of weeks have just been like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. August is a month of awesome discoveries, and so we have many more awesome discoveries to share with you on the show tonight. I have stories related to con trails, not chem trails, Hawking radiation, the primordial soup and whether or not there really was a soup to begin with, and finally, precision targeting. What do you have, Justin? I've got a gut feeling life's a salty beach. Marsupial lions? What? And why going Borg might actually be good for some people. Do not assimilate. One of us. The assimilation is not futile. Resistance is futile. Absolutely. What is in the animal corner? Oh, tonight I have a delicious fish pee. I have also the fish semen and the fish camouflage. Also, I have some stray cat babies. Something is seeming a little fishy here, and I see what you did there with the cats and the fish stories. Complimenting each other very nicely there, my dear. I would suggest the white wine also. Awesome. We are going to have a whole bunch of science, and I do hope that not so much of it is actually fishy, but just sciencey. Sciencey goodness. And I am going to start off with a story about Hawking radiation. Black holes. We have never really seen them, but we see the evidence of them because of gravitational lensing effects, and also because of gravitational forces in space, and that we have got quasars, and these incredible things in space that can really only be explained by black holes.  The no coming back from here any more point. Once you go past the event horizon, it's Sayonara. The last song. Last man. It's just over. It's done. Well, isn't it like it's over from getting out again, but it takes an eternity almost to fall from the event? It's tiny, whiny stuff. There's relativity. Relativity issue. Yeah, very... It's all debatable. But one of the aspects of black holes in the event horizon that has been debated is the... There's a conflict between the idea that what falls into a black hole is never retrieved because of the gravitational mass at the center pulling everything in and not letting anything escape. But there is a rule in our universe that information can never be destroyed. So what happens to that information if it goes into the black hole? It goes on your credit report forever. Wait, no, this is different information. This is different information. So Stephen Hawking came up with the idea of Hawking radiation. And there's this idea that they're like these... Kind of like an aurora or an aura of soft hairs around the event horizon from which entangled particles at the edge of the black hole at the event horizon instead of particles annihilating each other there, one will fall in and another will escape and there's immense energy in this escape as well. So eventually over time a black hole can actually release all of the information about the matter that has fallen into it back into the universe. But there's no way to really confirm this. However, a physicist at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Jeff Steinhauer has been playing with this simulation of black holes that are acoustic black holes. They super cool these rubidium atoms and the holes, the atoms enter a quantum state and they start to clump up and become a Bose-Einstein condensate which has its own special properties and it acts in a particular way. Well, in making this happen they're able to, in creating this Bose-Einstein condensate they mimic behavior of black holes with particles that are called phonons and these are packets of sound energy like photons or packets of light energy. Phonons are packets of sound energy and they ran their simulated black hole experiment over and over and over again for like six days. They ran it a total of 4,600 times over those six days to be able to get their replication and the data that they needed for significance and he saw over and over again pairs of phonons appearing at the event horizon just spontaneously and one of those energetically being shot away from the event, the simulated event horizon and the other being left to go inside of this acoustic black hole. And in the energetic aspect of it what they saw was something that was equivalent to what would be a hypothesized firewall, just a very energetic wall of almost fire around black holes and they have seen this in simulated acoustic black holes in the laboratory. So we're talking sound energy and Bose-Einstein condensates, not an actual black hole out in space and I mean this is something that's in a laboratory, pretty miniaturized as opposed to what we would think of as a big bad black hole, but this evidence in this system, this model system that does seem to model characteristics of black holes very well seems to confirm that Hawking radiation does occur. So now the question is can we actually measure it in space? If we know what we're looking for, can we do it? So anyway, it's a fascinating, fascinating experiment and he's been working for years to be able to simulate black holes using these phonons. So lots of technical physics labs engineering going on there. Another physics story, has there been another force of nature found? We reported on this last month, a fifth force of nature originally reported on by Hungarian Academy of Science physicists who were looking for indicators of dark matter called dark photons, well they came up with a bunch of data and then some UC Irvine researchers got a hold of that data and they compared it against a bunch of other studies and they published a month ago in archive.org their results of that finding which suggested not that there were dark photons, but a new form of matter called a protophobic ex boson. This is a really weird particle that doesn't behave like any other particle and we talked a little bit about it where they are proton phobic or protophobic. They push away from protons and these ex bosons are attracted to electrons and neutrons only interacting with them at very, very short distances. So they've published another paper, so this is the update, they've published another paper which gives a little bit more evidence in the direction of their finding and they've got numbers now which can lead experimentalists like those at the LHC and other locations who've been looking for evidence of dark photons or evidence of dark matter. They've got numbers, so frequencies and spaces, places for this boson to exist. So pushing people in the right direction. Go physicists, go. And that paper is, it was published in, this paper was published in physics, review letters I believe, but it's also available on archive.org so you can read it if you are interested, if you want to go look for it. And then my final intro story which is fascinating, well interesting angle on things, for years now with an increase in air traffic overhead we've been seeing an increase in these long white kind of skinny clouds that come out the tail end of jets. Oh you mean the mind control drugs. Right, no. They're called contrails and they form as a result of the cold air and condensation and formation of ice particles because of the way the jet engines move, work pushing hot air that's full of water out behind them into the cold and there's condensation in the ice particles and then you have these icy little clouds that are formed. Contrails, it's pretty simple. Are you trying to use science to explain this right now? Yeah, well this is the story though. Let me tell you this story. Sorry, go ahead. I'll let you go ahead but this is just a real nutshell. This phenomenon of seeing these formations behind aircraft is not new. Well it's been going on for years. For as long as there have been these jet aircraft. This is as somebody who's at least 43 years on the planet and have been looking up to the skies my whole life. I remember these from my childhood. This is not something new. There are more of them now. There's more planes and there's more people reporting that they don't understand because they've looked up for the first time. Hey, what do you think that is? It's the first time they looked up and we're like, oh my gosh, there's a giant ball of fire. Know that thing over there. There's all that blue coming from. This is who must imagine that something odd is taking place. The thing is that people do imagine that there's something odd going on and there is a conspiracy theory that posits. These are not just contrails but they are doped with heavy metals, with mind control substances as you mentioned before, with various kinds of drugs, all sorts of things. They call them chemtrails. A lot of ideas have been passed back and forth on the internet about these chemtrails. It's very hard to explain chemtrails. Researchers, again, this is another UC Irvine story. There's some good research happening at UC Irvine right now. They have published a paper. It's open access at iopscience.iop.org. The paper is entitled Quantifying Expert Consensus Against the Existence of a Secret Large-Scale Atmospheric Spraying Program. What they did is they surveyed, they found experts in atmospheric sciences. Atmospheric chemists and geochemists who work on atmospheric deposition of dust and pollen. They had them scientifically evaluate the claims of these secret large-scale atmospheric program theorists. The results pretty much come down to 76 of the 77 scientists said they had never encountered evidence of these secret large-scale atmospheric spraying programs and all of their research. The data that they cited as evidence that was being cited by these conspiracy theorists as evidence could be explained through other factors. Like physics and chemistry. They pretty much came with it. It's a full study on experts giving their expert analysis of this theory. It's going to go up again. It's a tough wall to try to break through. It's why education is so extremely important. It's not just the chemtrail things. It's not just conspiracy theories. It can go into a lot of different other aspects of things that people believe. People are going to want to make connections between things and create stories out of them. If you don't have knowledge and don't understand what the evidence is then any story presented to you can be as good as any other. If it's more exciting to think about or fits into a worldview you'll adopt it, regardless of facts. Facts are for people who actually want to know the story of what's actually going on. If that story is not that entertaining to some they'll continue on with whatever stories they've created. In 2011 there was an international survey that found that nearly 17% of the survey respondents believed that there are these spraying programs going on. Stephen Davis, who's the lead on this study he said, we wanted to establish a scientific record on the topic of secret atmospheric spraying programs for the benefit of those in the public who haven't made up their minds. The experts we surveyed resoundingly rejected contrail photographs and test results as evidence of a large-scale atmospheric conspiracy. So they're not going after that 17% who already are conspiracy theorists because they know, as we've talked about before on many other similar belief-based topics they've made up their minds and they're not going to listen to any evidence. And especially something like this that is a survey of scientists on their expert analysis, this isn't actually... They're behind it anyway. Yeah, they're behind it anyway, right? And this isn't actually a study where they've gone up and sampled contrails or quote-unquote chemtrails. So this isn't actually a sample-based experiment or a chemistry-based experiment. This is just looking at data and looking at evidence. I mean, people who are already convinced are not going to be convinced by this, but the fact that experts are resoundingly, I would say 76 out of 77 is pretty resoundingly... They have not seen evidence for these programs in their work. And the one person... Who's the one? The one person who did said the evidence that they had come across was quote, high levels of atmospheric barium in a remote area with standard low soil barium. So there was an imbalance that could maybe be explained by someone spraying stuff into the air, into the atmosphere, but was hard to explain by some kind of mixing of what's on the soil and what's in the air because there was an imbalance, but there was no real explanation for it. So that's the one, the one. And so in this situation, people who want to believe a particular thing will follow this one expert's story rather than the other 76 people. They just want to spray us with barium. That's all they want. Barium, yeah. We're all going to, I don't know, take barium x-rays, right? See if we have anything in our digestive tracts. Isn't that what you take the barium shake for? Yeah. Colonoscopies or whatever. Yeah. Anyway. So the government can have our colon map on file. That's why. You know, it's very identifying. Everybody's colon map is as unique as a fingerprint. Oh my gosh. See, they're going to sprinkle the barium down. They're going to line us up for our colonoscopies. The next thing you know, your name is gone. You're just a number man. Damn it. So anyway, experts pretty much agree, 98.7% that chemtrails don't exist, but contrails do. And there is science to support the existence of contrails and why they are there. This is this week in science. Hey, Justin, what you got? Oh, that's a fantastic question that I should have an answer for. Here we go.  But according to science, it turns out the two are connected. So whichever one you're going with is going to inform the other. And it's both going together. There are connections. So connected are we that the two influence each other in both directions, mind and gut. There are neural networks connecting brain and bowel that signal things like hunger, fullness, love, fear and even communicate our status of being safe or on alert for danger. These networks employ a myriad of chemical signals that include dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter. That's mostly known for its role in reward and addiction. Now, Duke University researchers have shown that manipulating dopamine signals in the nervous system of a pneumatode, Worm C. Elgins, can control inflammation in the gut. Well, it's gut anyway. A study published on August 12th, current biology illustrates that the immune system can be controlled using drugs that were originally designed to target the nervous system. So we're talking about anti-psychotics, right? Yeah. So it's the existence of a set of drugs and drug targets that could open up the spectrum of potential therapeutic applications by targeting pathways that fine-tune the inflammatory response. This is according to Alejandro Abela, PhD professor molecular genetics microbiology at Duke School of Medicine. The quotey voice is on, it's a big leap from worms to humans, but the idea of targeting the nervous system to control the immune system could potentially be used to treat conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, autoimmune disease, cancer, inflammatory bowel disease and even Crohn's. Recent research suggests that wiring between the gut involved in many other maladies, this is like autism, anxiety depression, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's. This is a pretty connected system. C. elegans provides an excellent model looking into this because this tiny transparent worm has a very super simple nervous system. It's only got like 300 neurons compared to the human which is in the 100 billion neuron range. And this worm has a very basic immune system. So it's got just enough of that system to make a simple model. So they kind of stumbled upon this gut-brain connection some years ago. The worms they were working with were subjected to a barrage of chemicals in search of immune activators that could protect against a bacterial infection. Out of more than a thousand different chemical compounds they played with, they identified 45 that turned on an immune pathway. Curiously to them, half of those were involved in the nervous system and some of these blocked the activity of dopamine. In the study, Abilay decided to examine the effects of dopamine-dopamine signaling pathways on this immunity. He had his grad student Zhao Cao block dopamine by treating animals with chloropromazine, a dopamine antagonist drug. They used it for schizophrenia treatment and manic depression in humans. He found that these worms were more resistant to infection by common pathogens than their counterparts that hadn't received it. When he treated the animals with dopamine, increased their dopamine, it generated the opposite effect, rendering them more susceptible to infection. Researchers believe their findings indicate that dopamine signaling acts by putting on the brakes to the body's inflammatory response, so we don't go too far with it. It's pretty amazing. Worms have evolved, this is Abilay, worms have evolved mechanisms to deal with colonizing bacteria. That is true for us as well. Humans have trillions of microorganisms in our guts and we have to be careful about activating our own antimicrobial defenses so that we mainly target potential harmful microbes without damaging our good bacteria or even our own cells in the process. And that thing that regulates that turns out to be perhaps the nervous system. The nervous system appears to be the perfect system for integrating all these different psychological cues to keep the amount of damage and track. And checks is Abilay. So he plans to continue studies on C. elegans to identify different cues involved in fight tuning this immune response. He also thinks it's worth looking at different analogs or different doses of dopamine antagonists to see if their effects on psychosis can be separate from their effects on immunity so that we might use them simply for immunity and not have the mental effect. So if there's a way to sort of separate a little bit of that communication between brain and gut, but really an amazing idea that we could start to tackle so many diseases that seem to originate in the gut by affecting the brain.  The gut really is our second brain. And the fact that bacteria are so influential through the gut, this kind of makes sense. It's a very interesting pathway. And if there's a way to keep, not necessarily have the future treatments act on the brain but maybe act on those neurons or those receptors in the gut itself and manage immunity and fight infection at the gut and systemic level and just stay away from the brain, that could be pretty amazing. Yeah. Yeah, we are unlocking more and more of the mysteries of the human body but it's one of these things too. It's like when you think about how much we've already learned, you would think that we'd already sort of figured out a lot of things that we were just discovering but that's what science is about. Once you've discovered everything else and there's other mysteries that pop up. It's like I always say, the human body is like an onion. So many layers. I think it's kind of like a dance, you know. Two steps forward, one step back. Yeah, go forward. To the left, to the left, to the left, to the right, to the right, to the right. Anybody know what time it is? It is time for Blair's Animal Court. I have so much going on under our oceans. One could even say in the fathoms below. Yeah, I have all sorts of fish stories this week. It's really interesting. It seems like some scientists have really cracked the case on a lot of age-old fish-related questions. So first of all, probably my favorite story of the week is about female mate selection in fish. How do fish do it? Justin, do you know? Like how do they do it? I don't know how they select their mates but the way they do it is why the next time I date a mermaid, the fish part is going to be on the top. Yeah, that's right. Isn't that a direct connect? There is not. It is external. The guy shows up near them, does his thing, and it sort of floats around and makes those connections outside of the body. Correct. We call that external fertilization. So if that is how fish copulate, how on earth could a female pick who the father of her babies would be? So she can try her best to pick by selecting a spot to deposit her eggs, by warding off males that are undesirable for allowing males access that they want access to the eggs. But in most species of fish, there are still something called sneaker males. They are smaller males that sneak in at the last minute and deposit large amounts of sperm while the female is spawning. So by making a rather large deposit, then even though their accuracy may not be perfect, they might not be able to get as close as the males that are desired. They still have a fairly high chance of fathering some babies because of the size of their donation. So looking at fish in the Mediterranean Sea, they were particularly looking at rasses, oscillated wrasse. They were looking at how fertilization works for these guys and how females do in fact pick their males. And it turns out that they do in fact pick their males. What happens is somehow the males that they pick are the ones who help with the nest. They're called nesting males. They do show attention to the nest. They help care for the nest. And so it is beneficial for the females to encourage those males to stick around because they want help with the nest. But it also is beneficial for nesting males to be the father of babies, because they'll leave otherwise because they won't. They have no idea of knowing whose babies those are. To our knowledge, they don't have any sort of chemical signals that will make them care more or less for the babies, whether they're the father or not. They will take care of those babies in those nests if they are the nesting male in that space. But nesting males father babies that grow older and more quickly than the fathers that are sneaker males. So that would be a genetic advantage to the females to make sure not only that the nesting male takes care of her nest and her eggs, but on top of that, that the nesting male is the father. This would be beneficial to her. So how does she get this done? Well, by putting eggs and sperm in Petri dishes and looking at ovarian fluid in these grasses, by combining all these things, it turns out that the ovarian fluid coming from the females when she deposits her eggs actually, in a certain way, selects the nesting male. The way that works is it actually benefits them to make a smaller deposit, and the nesting males generally, their sperm are faster. So it benefits the sperm that are faster and longer. So they have used a specific physical trait with the sperm they want to select out the unwanted sneaker male sperm. So there's some kind of recognizable receptor or something that the ovarian fluid can basically hone in on on those particular sperm that would favor the sperm of the larger, faster males more than the smaller sneaker males. So there's something in there. That's the interesting thing. What is it? How does the ovarian fluid know? Right. And this is what we need to find out next. So the next step clearly in the study is to figure out what about the ovarian fluid is allowing the kind of the mix to favor quality over quantity. So the ovarian fluid, it doesn't appear to have a direct effect on the sperm from different male types, but as far as they can tell, generally enhances how fast and straight the sperm swim and the strength of their attraction to the egg. So the overall effect from that means an increase in relative importance of sperm velocity over sperm numbers. Interesting. So I wonder if it's like a viscosity aspect that just allows those particular sperm to swim better. Great question. We'll see. Yeah. I think that is a to be continued. Totally. But I love, you know, faithful listeners to the show will know that I find sexual selection very interesting, particularly in the direct chemical relationship between sperm and ovum. And then on top of this, when you take it outside of the female canal, so you don't even have direct biological control inside the female over what's going on. To still in the mess of the ocean in open water to still be able to have this selection is fascinating. Yeah. And it says it says a lot, too, how important this is for the progression of species is to have this have this selection there, even whether it's in the body or external, there's nature is trying to find a way to select just and it's selecting a good candidate or something the body is pre the ovum is predisp determined to say this is what we're looking for. This is what we want to connect to and creating barriers for anything that doesn't fit that. Yeah. The nesting males grow faster. They survive more into their second year and they grow larger. So all of those things, if you're a mom, you want that for your babies, right? So that's a pretty much a no-brainer for them. But if the sneakers were given a chance, yeah. But they are. So as a species, it's actually taking on two different survival techniques. Absolutely. And we've talked about this kind of thing in the show before, too, that in order to have this dichotomy, it sets a balance because otherwise you'd end up with fish that are so big and grow so fast that potentially they couldn't feed themselves fast enough and they would die or they wouldn't be able, they would deplete local resources or there would be too much competition or any number of things. They can survive different sort of fishy disasters. You need all kinds of people and you need all kinds of fish. That's right. Yeah. Now speaking of fish competition, another kind of fish competition this time between not of a female selecting a male but of males competing, looking at western rainbow fish captured from the Fortescue River in Pilbara, they actually change their color to match their environment, hence rainbow fish.   This is pretty basic adaptive coloration, great camouflage techniques. Turns out they also use these colorations as signals for dominance. So the darker, the more dominant that they are. So what is really interesting is that out of this comes something called the loser effect.  So instead of you saying you can't see me, you're also saying, hey, I'm real big. This is my space. You want to fight? And then that's a problem. So what unexpected result came from taking these fish out and seeing their interactions with each other is that in the loser effect, if you win one thing, you're more likely to win another. If you lose one thing, you're more likely to lose again. So what happens is these males who were subordinate in a first interaction, the ones who had to lighten up so that they didn't get bullied, were less likely to darken their skin for camouflage even when they would be the dominant fish in the second interaction. So they were like emotionally scarred, basically. They were like, no, I did this. This was a really poor choice. Not going to do it. I can't get darker for camouflage. Bad things happen when I do that. So they, of course, I'm anthropomorphizing. Really what happens is there's a selection for fish that adapt quickly to the idea of, oh, getting dark gets me beat up. So instead, they don't darken even in situations where it's a win-win. So most likely this is related to hormones, which would make sense because dominance also is related to hormones. And it's just an interesting combination of uses of camouflage and kind of an unexpected but sensical interaction of those two different uses for camouflage. Yeah, it's interesting that if camouflage is used for two different purposes but in the same animal, that the different interactions are going to have effects in the long run on the way those two things play out. Absolutely. And then right before the break, a real quick story, those beautiful coral reefs that we love to visit that give us so much of our oxygen, they have so much biota living there. They have so much productivity for us. It all comes down to fish pee. A recent study suggests that coral reefs are completely dependent on fish for nutrients that help coral grow, mainly because when fish urinate, they release phosphorus into the water. And you can look into coral reefs where fishing and overfishing is a problem and the coral reefs are degrading and it mostly comes down to a lack in nutrients and particularly phosphorus. So fish pee. So save your old aquarium water. No. But particularly large predator fish, they have higher levels of nutrients because of trophic levels we've talked about in the show before. So when reefs were depleted of large fish, they had nearly 50% fewer nutrients, including most importantly phosphorus and nitrogen, which are essential to survival. And ultimately, it's the pee. What's really interesting is phosphorus and nitrogen are essential for growth. We use nitrogen to fertilize crops, but then we have issues with over-fosphor, adding too much phosphorus to some systems. For example, places like Lake Tahoe, they're working really hard to keep the phosphorus out because you don't want the algae growth that occurs. What all those Tahoe blue stickers are about? It's part of it, yeah. There are issues with agricultural runoff going into areas and into estuaries and lakes and causing increased algae growth. So the nitrogen and the phosphorus, there's a balance and that's the whole story, is that there is a cycle. We talk about, say, the carbon cycle or the oxygen cycle, there's a nitrogen cycle, there's a phosphorus cycle, and finding out about the fish pee in the coral reefs, that is just part of that ecosystem's natural cycle. Keeping it all in balance. One could call it a circle of life. One could. Absolutely. All right, have we hit all our stories for the first half of the show? I think we're ready to make our way to the second half of the show. But first, these announcements. That's right, stay tuned. We've got lots more stories coming in just a minute. Hey everyone, thanks again for subscribing to us on YouTube. We have surpassed 10,000 subscribers and are on our way upward ever higher with more and more subscribers, just like you. Thank you so much and keep telling people about TWIS because that really helps us increase the number of subscribers that we have, the number of people that are listening to and or watching TWIS online and it makes us happy because the more people we have, the better and more easily we're able to do this show. More minions, please! Some announcements. I am going to be bringing TWIS to the Portland Mini Maker Faire for a podcasting maker booth with Paul Colligan, who is the author of How to Podcast. We are going to be giving some podcasting seminar sessions and also doing live podcasting. So if you're in the Portland, Oregon area, the weekend of September 10th and 11th, come on over to the Portland Mini Maker Faire and say hi. Also, we are going to be heading to the Maryland STEM Festival. November 4th, we will be performing a live show at the National Aquarium, TWIS Live at the National Aquarium, Baltimore, Maryland, for Maryland STEM Fest. And STEM Fest is all over the state of Maryland, some neat stuff happening that week. So if you're in Maryland in the Baltimore area, especially, come check us out in November, November 4th for that. TWIS is supported by listeners just like you and your donations pay for everything that we do for the show. You really are the producers of the show. You fund it and you make the show run. At this point in time, we do not take any advertisers. It's all you people. 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Help us reach more people and get more listeners. That's a super easy thing to do and it won't cost a dime. And it will help immensely, immensely. We thank you for your support. We really could not do this without you. And we are back with more This Week in Science. We are. Justin, what do you have for me in this second half? So, this is a scientist from the University of Bristol in Malaga have proposed that the long-extinct marsupial lion hunted in a very unique way. The marsupial lion, and I keep saying it that way because I think I've learned about this before but must have forgotten it because as soon as I saw this story, I went, there was a marsupial lion? What? A lion with a pouch? This makes no sense. How did this happen? Well, not exactly, but there were a lot of marsupials way back when. There were. This is as a Latin name, phylocolio carnifex. It existed from around two and a half million years ago until as recently as tens of thousands of years ago when most likely, yes, humans probably did them all in. And its face looks kind of like a sea otter with fangs. When I see how to picture this, the first thing I thought about the nose is the nose looked very much like that of a koala. It's definitely got at least in the artist rendition. The artist rendition is a little bit less lion-y and more... And the fur is rather lion-y in that rendition too which may or may not actually be the case. So, there is cave art of the creature of somewhat decent detail but not that specific. But that means we know that we shared some pretty close quarters at some point because some of the detail of the front paws are somewhat decent in detail. They show some sort of distinction that you might expect between that and say a lion. And as the name suggests, the marsupial lion has long presumed to be a cat-like predator. Despite lacking the large canine teeth, it had instead these protruding buck teeth and that koala-like nose. And the buck teeth is sort of koala-like, isn't it?  Yeah, kind of. This one has them top and bottom. No, it's kind of like the... I don't know, it's a little beaver-ish. Yeah. Kind of beaver-y, yeah. It's like one rabbit-ish. Yeah, rabbit. And it has these sort of rear teeth too that it can sort of cut stuff up with. It's mostly these protruding front, lower and top buck teeth that are not sharp, sharp. They look like they're pretty serious. They're pretty big. Apparently this thing has one of the strongest bites of any mammal that's ever lived because of the size of the jaw. And the creature overall is about the size of a large jaguar. And it had four cat-ish sort of, I guess, looking limbs. And then a very cat-like tail. The tail comes off very much like you would a long sort of in the air tail that you would expect from a cat. And of course it had a poach! Which is what makes that marsupial kind of thing. Right, right. But its limbs were not exactly lying, like, suggesting based on the analysis it wouldn't have been as fast a runner by any means as a lion. It also supported a very large claw and its front hands, similar to the do-claw of cats, but much bigger in size with a bony sheath and a mobile first digit or thumb. So it sort of had a little bit of a opposable thumb thing going on. New study published in Paleo-Biology by Christine Janis looked at the elbow joints of a large number of living mammals to compare it to the marsupial line. This showed a strong association between the anatomy of humerus, the arm bone where it articulates with the forelimb and the locomotor behavior of the different mammals. So animals that are more specialized for running, like say a dog or a cat, have a joint indicating movement limited for back and forward stabilizing their bodies on the ground, while animals with more specialized for climbing, like say a monkey, will have a joint that allows for rotation of the hand around the elbow. Modern cats, which unlike dogs, who use their forelimbs to grapple with their prey, have an elbow joint of sort of an intermediate shape. So actually cats aren't quite like the dogs. They're a little bit different. Christine Janis said if thylacoleo had hunted like a lion for using its forelimbs to manipulate its prey, its elbow joint should have been much more lion-like. Instead, what they found was a unique elbow joint compared to living predatory animals across any time. They had a great deal of rotational capacity of the hand, like in a climbing mammal. And features not seen in living climbers that would have also stabilized the limb on the ground. So it could have run. Okay, but probably didn't hunt is what it sounds like. Well, no, what they're saying though is actually different. Christine Janis' colleagues proposed that they use a unique elbow joint in combination with the huge dew claw, the mobile thumb claw, would have allowed the marsupial lion to use its claw to kill its prey. And in contrast to large teeth up front were very blunt and were probably, even though it had a massive bite, it was probably to grab on to things. So unlike other hunters, they include that it grabs and holds with its big teeth and then does all the killing stuff with its claws. They could rename it the death claw marsupial. So unlike the dew claw that often has to be removed from dogs or that seems to be this vestigial thing in cats and dogs today that we've domesticated, it actually was a very active, useful claw to this marsupial lion. Yeah, and it says there's no other living predator that does this, that just hangs on with its teeth and then does all the killing with its appendages. It probably didn't work so well then. Yeah, it didn't survive obviously. The hug of death. Two and a half million years. Two and a half million years it was going around probably eating kangaroo. And then we show up. I don't know about kangaroo. Those things are pretty gnarly. They're pretty gnarly but that's why you've got the claws. That's why you have gnarly claws. I was looking too. Maybe the cats use their weird arm elbow joints to smack their prey. Snack them around a bit. So I have here a picture of a skull of a wombat which has a pretty similar kind of protruding front incisors that are pretty pointy. And then looking here I have a koala skull which also has, they're much reduced. But very similar. And you'll notice both of them are missing the canine area that you would expect to see in something like a cat or a dog that's going to hunt. So without canines it's pretty interesting that they were able to still acquire prey without canine teeth. It seems like we would really expect that that would be necessary. And yes, two and a half million years yes. But the fact that they aren't still around means that for whatever reason they didn't make it. That means most likely like most marsupials they were outcompeted by animals that were not marsupials. So again that was probably us because it lived the same time we did. But something interesting you bring up there in showing a wombat is that there was in Australia there were wombats the size of rhinoceros. Oh my god that's so adorable. It might have been that might have been something that like a kangaroo might be too quick you're right. But that might be something that the marsupial lion or as we're going to have to rename it the death claw. The death claw marsupial may have been able to catch and what a large meal that would have been. And then we got it. So also sort of I thought was interesting at least some of the cave art that I saw I think looked like they were showing multiple of these things. So maybe they hunted in packs. And it could be that once the giant wombats were wiped out their favored prey was gone and everything else was too fast. So you're right it may not have been direct hunting. I don't think I'd want to take one on those giant clawy things. So we don't really know but this is very interesting how they've drilled down just on the elbow to be able to tell us so much about how this predator may have hunted and lived. Yeah it's fascinating. Just the way things piece together in the bones you're able to figure out how they move and how that animal would have worked. What it would have done. It's fantastic. We're also trying to piece things together to figure out exactly how life got started. You're taking it way back. I'm taking it way back. I'm going to take it. My next couple of stories I'm going to take it. So primordial soup. It's a phrase that gets thrown around all the time. We've been talking about the primordial ooze. The primordial soup. The primordial salad. All appetizers. There were experiments where they threw a whole bunch of stuff together in a jar and put an electrical current through it or something and went, Ta-da! It's alive! So this idea of the primordial soup has gotten a lot of energy behind it. So it is a hypothesis. But now there's a slight change in this competing hypothesis for it actually. The idea that life would have begun when lightning or UV rays actually got simple molecules to become more complex molecules and then those would then lead to RNA and DNA and all that kind of stuff in some kind of bubble of a cell. You know, there should be some kind of evidence of that molecularly within us still and within primitive organisms like bacteria that are around on the planet today. Maybe there should be some kind of UV reliance or electricity reliance in some way. Instead, we see cells that have evolved the ability to get energy from other parts of the environment. So we have this evolution of life that the cells we have now can get their own energy, can create their own energy. The energy doesn't come in from outside. So the idea is that life did not start when lightning struck a primordial soup. There's now a paper in Nature Microbiology that suggests that maybe the vent, the hydrothermal vent hypothesis is more accurate and that the conditions that occur around hydrothermal vents have always been more conducive to the formation of these complex molecules and the evolution of more complex life forms. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, because they are energy sources that we still see today. There are chemical pathways within our cells now for using hydrogen or using a proton gradient, a concentration gradient along which a proton, a hydrogen ion, will flow. So it's kind of like, oh, there's this energy that would be available, say, at a hydrothermal vent that complex molecules in maybe in a little pocket, a bubble, mud that's packed in around the hydrothermal vent, a primordial primitive cell, suddenly was able to click together in the right way to allow a proton to flow from one side to the other and then create energy flow. You get electrons from those protons flowing and that energy can then drive other processes in further evolution. So it's a very, it's just a fascinating, very convincing argument in this paper. And then I guess the thing to do would be to sort of figure out, okay, what conditions would be most conducive for that to be taking place? And we might be able to do it somewhat. We might be able to find clues by back-engineering the oceans and seeing what that would have looked like. And maybe we'll get clues about how that ocean may have looked like, what that ocean would have had to have looked like based on the type of energy that, vestigially, I guess, we can still transport and convert through this hydrogen. It's a whole wonderful, fantastic, amazing subject here. Yeah, it really is. This has been bantied about, we've been talking a lot about hydrogeners from events, but this has been talked a little bit about more and more about this idea. If we're looking at living cells, it's kind of like that jump from the quantum to the standard model in physics. How did we go from non-living molecules to living cells? How could that jump have taken place? And how would it still be recorded in organisms that we could maybe see it? And so this is one of the first times that theory has bridged that gap. And so it, you know, we don't know for sure, but this is a very promising theory and I'm sure there are going to be a lot of people following it down. Let's keep renegading the chat room. There's a reason everyone loves hot tubs. That's right. That hot, soupy environment. Anywho. Speaking on your other point though, Justin, of kind of back engineering and trying to figure out how everything works, there's a second study out of the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in their early edition that has come out of the Scripps Research Institute. And researchers there, we reported last year on their work in synthesizing a ribozyme, which is an RNA enzyme. And there are lots of RNA enzymes around now, but at one point there was, you know, the first ribozyme. What was the first ribozyme? It had to be an enzyme that could replicate and generate functional RNA molecules. So be able to take one strand of RNA to copy it to a complimentary strand and then translate that to a copy strand again, so the original strand would be copied and could then fold appropriately to actually be a functional molecule that can then go on and bind to other places within a cell and have an effect and actually work. So researchers have these researchers at Scripps. They've been working for a long time on this and they started with something that's been used for years in research since the 1990s. It's called a class I RNA polymerase ribozyme. And this does the basic RNA synthesis. It can take this RNA template and transcribe it into a functional RNA molecule, but it can only really do it in very, very short sequences. It's not very accurate. It can't, if the RNAs have any kind of complicated structure, this class I polymerase ribozyme goes and it doesn't do it. It just can't handle it. So they used natural selection in a lab dish and they set up a system that selected for stronger, better, faster RNA ribozymes and they basically kept taking the best ones, take the best ones, take the best ones, take the best ones and after a couple dozen rounds of this natural selection in the lab, they have what they call polymerase ribozyme 24-3. And this is, I'm quoting from this article from Physorg, is capable of synthesizing not only the two target binding RNAs, but also several other structurally complex RNA molecules that exist in nature, including a yeast version of a transfer RNA molecule that it has an essential protein making role in all of cells and the researcher, one of the lead researchers says, we found that the new ribozyme can handle most sequences and all but the most difficult structures so we can use it to make a variety of functional RNA molecules. So now they have created this functional ribozyme, something that's actually working and so what they're really working at trying to do is back generate, go backwards in time to generate and create and maintain sustainably an RNA world. They want to know what the world would have been like in a world before DNA, in a world before DNA. In a world before DNA. That's right. That's what they're trying to do and so they have to, they're going to still go back to the, keep working on it and improving it because it's not perfect. It's much faster and better than that class one polymerase ribozyme that they started with. It's way, way better than that one. And the researcher says, this is the very, very cool thing. Listen to this quote and just have your mind be boggled. A polymerase ribozyme that achieves exponential amplification of itself will meet the criteria of being alive. That is a summit that's now within sight. It's alive! Yeah, so they actually think that they are on a road to having a self-replicating RNA ribozyme. But doesn't that bring in, bring up the ethical collaboration of humans playing nature? Yeah, yeah. Nice. Humans playing nature. Anyway, fascinating stuff. Going back to the beginnings of life itself. Justin, tell me a story. Ah, okay. I'm sure I have another story somewhere in here. Do you have another story to tell me? Actually, I've got a couple. Oh, yes. There's one. Sandy beaches are beginning to show signs of bitter days to come as batches of beach sand from Delaware Bay are showing the impact of temperature rise and evaporation along the shore. And challenging long-held assumptions that would actually cause salty beaches to fluctuate. So it has some implications, too, for the survival of invertebrates, flair invertebrates, as global warming drives temperatures ever higher. Study by New Jersey Institute of Technology's Center for Natural Resources Development on the effects of evaporation on the flow of subsurface water and salt content in the beach intertidal zone. What is intertidal? It's the opposite of outer tidal. It's not low tide and it's not high tide. They get barraged by heavy waves all day long and they go through periods of being completely submerged and periods of being completely out of the water. So they studied the sediments from these sections in the beach in Delaware and it turns out they have salt concentrations four times as high as the ocean water that's washing over them. Wow, that's intense. So near shore seawater team measured salt concentrations of 25 grams per liter. The researchers expected the subsurface water in areas of the beach infiltrated would have similar even lower levels as seawater mixes within land groundwater in the zone so it should be not higher concentrations, it should be diluted. But they instead discovered that the average salinity in the upper intertidal zone at high tide line was 60 grams per liter more than 25. Some values they even got reached as high as 100. And so they concluded there's only one way that this could have possibly happened evaporation. So as that salty water is sloshing about it's getting evaporated and that's increasing that's moving the water but the salt stays behind which increases the salinity of the soil. And that's mainly determined what are the rates of evaporation, what determines this temperature relative humidity and sort of things that are going to go up with global warming. Previous studies that identified seawater as the primary source of salinity in coastal aquifer systems thereby concluding that seawater infiltration always increases the poorer water salinity by seawater ground mixing dynamics. So it's all evaporation. That's what the previous one but says Michael Bouffadeau director of this study based on what we learned we think this finding should alter the way water management in coastal areas is conducted. It's that evaporation. They analyzed 400 segments of sediments collected during the sequential phases of complete tidal cycle from day to night on seven discontinuous days. One of the biggest ramifications of sort of things in this this is a very dynamic habitat. This is where lots of stuff lives. These tide pools. All these things have to like Blair said deal with pretty extreme conditions. It's dynamic. They deal with salt, no salt with water, no water. They deal with sun, no sun. It's like they're constantly dealing with these extremes and so maybe they are the best adapted to be able to deal with high salt content. They are. This is an area favored by crabs, mussels, sea enemies and of course then the birds eat these and other things eat birds. But then the sea levels are all rising anyway so does it really matter because this area has to be underwater in a couple of years. So many of the animals that we're talking about burrow into the beaches which is where the salinity will be rising and what happens if the salty beaches become too salty these animals simply leave. They search for less briny abodes. So where do they leave to? Where do they move to? They may find and actually a problem might solve itself a little bit if the sea level keeps rising and the beach you keep going in more.  New beach, brand new beach, less salty. But then suddenly maybe you've got less beach. Yeah eventually you run out of beach. Now you're at the frozen cliff and there is no tide pool. But really there's a whole food web thing. Right and those animals that live in the tide pool live there not because it's fun but because it's a place that is so difficult to live that other animals can't live there. So they have found a way to take up this niche that was otherwise not yet used and they escape potential predators that way. So they can't just go out to deeper water. They have to stay in that tide pool zone. So if there's no tide pool zone that fits their needs yeah that's going to be tough. Also mussels can't run very fast. Yeah they don't all seem very mobile. I mean it says that they look for less salty abodes but how but not the fastest. It just unstick yourself. Unstick. I'm not stuck anymore. Not the fastest. Not the fastest. Thinking of things that are maybe faster and more accurate and where they're going to land. How about bacteria used to possibly treat cancer? Yeah Yeah so this is a really interesting technique that some researchers from the polytechnic Montreal University Montreal and McGill University have developed and it's interesting they call it like nano robotic agents but there's nothing robotic about these things. These are bacteria and they are using a very specific type of bacteria that utilizes both magneto sensing that it uses a magnetic field or magnetic field lines to navigate in the environment this single cell bacteria and additionally is oxygen sensing so it is attracted to hypoxic or low oxygen areas. So they've taken this bacteria it's called magnetococcus marinus strain mc1 and they've loaded it up with drug carrying nano liposomes and so this is a flagellated bacteria at the tail. It's a flagellated bacteria that follows magnetic fields and oxygen levels and is loaded up with a drug bomb. They took a lot of them and in their abstract they say harnessing swarms of microorganisms so they took lots of them injected them into colorectal xenografts and then looked to see what happened and they found that they used magnets to kind of tell the bacteria where to go and then once the bacteria were deep in the tumor they were attracted to and stuck to the low oxygen hypoxic areas in the tumor that are very hard to reach and often part of why these tumors can survive so well. So they got there and were able to unload their liposomes within these tumors. So it's kind of proof of concept but it's a very interesting idea of using these organisms that have these abilities and then using them to our wishes. And they suggest maybe eventually developing nanobots that serve this purpose because of course nanobots or maybe people would be a little more okay with nanobots being injected into their tumor and then then back to swarms of bacteria I don't know. I can visualize how those can be flushed out. I'm not so sure that I know what happens to a nanobot when it's done. You turn into a member of the Borg right? Which is maybe not the worst outcome for all. I thought this was a transition. It can be a transition for sure. Go in Borg. Let's talk about it. So this was a couple years ago the Wachigan project which is a non-profit international research consortium. They had a scientific demonstration during the opening ceremony of the soccer world cup in Brazil. They had a young Brazilian man paralyzed from his chest down deliver the opening kickoff of the world cup by using a brain machine interface that allowed him to control the movements of a lower robotic limb via exoskeleton. Right? Two years later ish after its public demonstration they're publishing their first clinical report and it's describing the findings obtained after the first year of training of eight paraplegic patients. They studied the international team of neuroscientist engineers and neuro-rehabilitation personnel reports the discovery that a group of patients who have continued to train with the brain-controlled system including a motorized exoskeleton have regained the ability to voluntarily move their leg muscles and to feel touch and pain in the paralyzed limbs. These people were originally diagnosed as having typically complete spinal cord injury some of them 10 years ago right? So I think it's three to 14 years earlier is the range of when their accidents took place or their injuries took place. Patients also regained important degrees of things like bladder and bowel control they improved their cardiovascular function which in one case resulted in significant reduction of hypertension as well. As such the first study report that long-term brain-machine interface may lead to significant recovery of neurological functions in patients suffering from severe spinal cords. Researchers theorized the long-term training regime which started back in 2014 likely promoted brain reorganization so you've got this part of your brain that's now interacting with this machine and you start to realize that it does things and so you start trying to do those things and you start to regain I guess they say it may have activated some dormant nerves that may have survived the original spinal injury and were looking to reconnect the part of the body it was connected to with the activity that was taking place in the brain even though that activity was leaving the brain and going direct to the destination there was nerves looking to fill that connection awesome mind-blown sounds to me like resistance they're not thinking that it's so much regeneration then they don't think that the body is they don't know they're looking into it but they think what's happened is that the way the brain can reorganize to okay lost this part of the brain that is in control of language so it's going to have to redevelop itself and reorganize this other part of the brain to sort of take over some of those functions there may be nerves in the spinal cord that weren't active in connecting brain to say foot or leg or knee or what have your skin that is now attempting to reorganize itself for those purposes so lots of lots of work still to be done but you know what they had been working on of course is just ignoring the spinal injury and creating an exoskeleton that had the brain machine interface that allowed people to continue on a normal existence but what they've discovered in doing that is that the brain wanted the spinal nervous system wanted to it wants to connect it wants to connect and so really an incredible story so happy for the participants in this and also those who are working on this project to find that their initial direction in this work has uncovered a therapy as well yeah and even if the patients don't actually recover their full ability to walk regaining some amount of autonomy over bodily functions that suddenly have absolutely improves your quality of life absolutely it's a big deal I've got a few final stories here researchers at Northwestern University have discovered that DNA can fluoresce so we've talked before about skin cells and that humans that we fluoresce occasionally that there's energy that photons of light get emitted from cells when certain processes take place well nobody ever really thought that happened with DNA because it's this macro molecule structure it's just stable it just kind of sits and it's kind of locked in structure except for when it's being transcribed opened up, closed up, copied whatever but there's this idea that biological molecules don't absorb light and they don't fluoresce and so these researchers are now publishing in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a study in which yeah they actually got it to fluoresce so they say that the molecules are in what they call a dark state and this is a state where there's no light transfer going on in any direction absorption, no emission, no nothing and then they basically illuminated it with the right wavelength of light and by illuminating it with the correct wavelength of light they were excited more and emitted more light than would be emitted by the most powerful fluorescent labels that we currently use to label DNA so the interesting thing about this is that when we add fluorescent tags and we stain things like DNA, a cell in a dish the fluorescent tag is kind of like a toxin to the cell so the whole staining process you basically kill the cell in the state that it's in and it's really hard to have something that's a true a true picture of what's going on in the cell you're not really getting the activity, the true activity of a living cell of the movement of a molecule things that are going on and so this study suggests we could potentially by applying the kind of light or the right process that we could get images of cells and processes that involve DNA that we haven't really seen before or at least we don't have the complete picture of because we haven't gotten the right set of pictures so the researchers say your cell might die in two hours so you can still do your imaging in the first half hour exactly are you measuring, what are you actually seeing are you looking at real processes of the cell or are you looking at processes in a cell that is about to die nobody knows and so this new process to allow DNA to fluoresce could actually give us you know real information about what is happening in a living cell to DNA as it's living, really cool stuff and the thing that really got me, one of the one of the, this is just, this is science and this is what we talk about on the show a lot and this researcher Vadim Backman was quoted as saying you know everybody is over look this effect because nobody asked the right question it sounds cliche but you get the answer to the question you ask when we actually asked the right question we got a very different answer than expected that is science and that, that, I was just like yes, so exciting yeah I get goose bumps, I get goose bumps when I think of stuff like that such a great, such a great life lesson too is you only get the answers to the questions you ask yes and if you don't ask the question you don't ask the right question you only get the answer yep, yeah that's fantastic that's not just science, that's like inspirational that's right, we should make a social media meme, little shareable image right this guy's quote on it that's good and then my final story for the night research suggests that maybe just maybe maybe you should not go to work first thing in the morning or go to school first thing in the morning maybe you should stay home in the morning sign me up but why don't ask why only ask the questions you want I won't be until noon because science, alright see you then because science so this study is published in again Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences some researchers looked at circadian clock genes and the interactions with intercellular pathogens like viruses and so what they found in their study they were looking at a key clock gene transcription factor called b-mal 1 and you know clock genes are part of keeping our circadian rhythm tuned and we know that when the circadian rhythm gets messed up that's when our body starts to break down we get sick more often so they found that disrupting b-mal 1 disrupts the clock and that led the circadian clock of animals and it leads to increased virus replication and dissemination and so I believe that there is an indication here from their data and this is from their paper that the severity of acute infections is influenced by circadian timekeeping turns out this clock and other ones these things are regulated on an interesting schedule so in the morning these particular genes that the viruses seem to be targeting are less active in the morning and become more active throughout the day and so the particular the particulars of this are that in the winter we maybe get more sick because of the change in activity of these particular clock genes and also we may get more sick from interactions that we have with viruses or people who carry viruses in the morning than we do in the evening because of the daily rhythm of our clock genes so this is definitely speculative I mean I'm not really saying okay don't go to work but this does have for sure some significant implications for people who are shift workers who are working all night and their clock genes are all messed up I'm sorry Justin I'll just note I didn't actually think you were going to bring in a scientific study I thought you were going to bring in a note from your doctor well they are doctors they are doctors PhD is a PhD that's more than a note I gave you a whole paper on the subject what part are you on I was thinking more that I'll go to work but I just won't leave my cubicle until after lunch don't leave it just avoid people just avoid all humans until after lunch just try to avoid Karen Karen I'm going to avoid you until after lunch Karen don't you dare sneeze on my wrist Karen after self after self alright so tell us about your distressed kittens oh so in a scientific study from Hanover Medical School and the University of Veterinary Medicine Hanover Germany they distressed some kittens and then they watched male and female cats related and unrelated and how they responded and when they were at normal arousal levels we can say these kittens pretty much the same in interest and distress in response to these sounds low arousal in which a kitten was spatially separated from his mother and siblings for three minutes and left undisturbed but when they were put at higher arousal that's in which a kitten was taken out of the nest box for three minutes lifted off the ground and turned on its back oh no the female cats had a heightened response the male's response no difference so it's a pretty simple study just based on acoustic cues in a pretty small sample size 17 adult cats, 9 males and 8 females to control for experience half of the females had not previously raised kittens but in this small group looks like the males did not increase their get up and go if the kittens seemed more concerned but the females definitely did I think it's your turn again I mean this does kind of make sense I mean male cats are involved to some degree kind of in the parenting but not really I mean there's the cats go into heat and then they run off and then many males are involved cats don't really like cats many males are often involved in the mating and so they're not the males are not really involved well but also think about ok mammals what do baby mammals need milk males give milk to the kittens no if a kitten is mewing because they're in distress and perhaps they are hungry male doesn't have a whole lot of reason to saunter over does he that's all female that one's yours yep it's just like in the joke that you made just about who's getting up with the babies before this whole thing of being able to pump or create artificial breast milk there was only one parent that could feed a restless baby and how many I don't even know like how many nipples a cat has several I think it's six or eight I've got six or eight useless nips here they don't do nothing I can't help there's no point in me getting up and it and if you just I'm I'm kind of glad that the distressing of the kittens was limited to just sort of turning them over on their backs I was a little afraid going in what kind of distressing you're doing doing to the kittens it's kind of scary don't shake the kitten so in a quick google search it seems like cats can have either six or eight nipples oh see you were actually absolutely accurate yes there there we go six to eight that's kind of weird wait a second it's good when the guess is all right now there's a backtracking that needs to take place now I want to know what makes that's a question for the after show but what we do know is that male cats don't care kittens they're just stressed it's good to know and I hope you know that this is the end of the show we have reached the end of our show we have yeah no more stories no more stories we have no more stories and it is time for me to say thank you to all of our patreon sponsors thank you thank you thank you that would be super helpful and on next week's show we will be interviewing a scientist from NASA Goddard on the topic of Arctic sea ice and this is going to be because they've got big programs going on with Arctic sea ice monitoring at NASA so we've been talking about this for a while and it will be neat to get someone who's involved in the research to tell us about what's actually going on once again we will be broadcasting live online at 8pm pacific time on twist.org and you can watch and join our chat room don't worry if you can't 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say and if you use our methods instead of rolling a die we may rid the world of toxoplasma thisweekandscience thisweekandscience thisweekandscience science thisweekandscience thisweekandscience science the laundry list of items i want to address the world of human beings 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 when i can only set up shop while coming your way you better just listen to what we say and if you learn anything from the words that we said then please we can science science thisweekandscience science thisweekandscience thisweekandscience thisweekandscience it is now the after show before you go i want to say thank you for watching hey been talking to Karen this week oh your microphone is turning sorry no oh my goodness identity 4 said some things earlier about Karen that had me laughing oh my god i almost died i had to turn off my microphone i had to turn off my microphone it was hilarious where was it i'm going to scroll back and see if i can find it well Karen she hasn't quite been getting up in my business today lately but i don't know if you noticed in the show notes steve was in rare form this week steve steve this week that's right steve so when we were talking when i said that when i was making a joke about our colon being unique like our thumbprint oh yeah he said i'm not going to use my colon to unlock my phone Karen oh my goodness that was fun i was just imagining how would that work oh my god yeah steve steve this week has been trying um he he brought cookies for the office but they were gluten free vegan and had raisins in them steve raisins are sweet because raisins are their natural sweetener those are garbage cookies and they've got fiber so it keeps you regular yeah he was also clearly on a phone call in the restroom steve i don't know there's something about Karen i know nobody's ever going to get upset at Karen for watching twist at work ben come on ow steve was listening to science friday at work come on steve boo yeah what boo what do you think this is um oh my gosh oh here ed from kineticid is saying google is stopping google plus hangouts on air it is i've read a couple of books about it so this hangout format platform that we use is being but it's not it's not being taken away it's not it's being moved to youtube live oh so now so now all of you don't have to have like a back engineering thing to figure out how to move it from one to the other no it's already there they're doing it they're doing it and hopefully we don't know how what a mess it's going to be it's not going to be a huge mess but we don't know they're getting rid of a few bits of functionality but from what i've read nothing that we use so hopefully all of our plugins like hangout toolbox and all these things that have been developed for it will still work i would assume it's basically hangouts but it's just all through the youtube live youtube interface so i have to go to the youtube account go to my my creator studio and so if you guys ever start the show you have to just log into youtube for this weekend science go to the creator studio and then you go to what's the window you go to it says it's like live events and then you basically pick live event and click on it and you create it and so i do not believe it will affect how you record the hangout either Ed i don't know how you record your hangout how do you record your hangout oh i mean because i mean everything on the youtube side of stuff videos and sharing that stuff that's all going to be the same it's basically the google plus side of things that's not going to be there oh well google plus is still there but there are just it seems as though i mean i don't know they're minimizing google plus more and more at google so i wonder how so i think i get it i think i get it so up till now to be part of the hangouts you had to have a google plus account yes so this will open it up to everybody who doesn't google that's right make sense you don't have to have a google plus account you can just have a youtube channel and that's it yeah hot rod probably a test broadcast or something before the move to test it all out i mean we have broadcast our live events through this youtube live interface before so i know it works but it's just a matter of you know all the things like our lower thirds with our hangout i'm hoping the hangout toolbox makes it because things like in the sidebar showcase is going to go away i never use it anyway because i just don't have time and energy to do that and q and a is going to go away as far as i know yeah ed i think nothing is supposed to change once you open the hangout and i think that whole system is supposed to be the same of adding people to it um yeah i don't think we've really utilized q and a so much because we have the chat room so it's not i don't think it will impact that's fine and you know we do we put all of our links in our show notes on our website so we've never used showcase really but we didn't so i'm not too sad about this but so we'll see hopefully everything will be just fine and yeah i do not believe your recording will be affected ed from what i've read yeah secret experimental twist shows right exactly the gem doctor well if we do it i'll put if i do it experiments i'll let everybody know i don't know yeah we'll do some experiments scientific experiments with youtube oh my god my search history is going to be ridiculous what are you searching for cat nipples my favorite one is common questions about cat nipples perfect love oh no oh no perfect perfect love so yeah it's like as little as four and as many as 12 but usually it's six or eight but i can't figure out why why it varies yeah that's that's the part that's really interesting is this is this illustrating some genetic genetic lineages well they're saying that sometimes within a litter even there'll be different individuals with different numbers right but isn't there also isn't it isn't it and maybe i'm wrong here can't a litter of cats have different fathers i mean i'm sure not a thing i'm sure they could i think that's the thing i could be wrong about that but i think that's the thing i obviously don't read up too much on cats i also found out that cats are indeed ticklish but that they don't like it oh my god uh these cat forums are amazing oh my god yeah uh i don't know tbd on that and then a lot of people trying to figure out how many cats there or nipples their individual cats have i don't know one cat had nine not even an even number that's like a little nubbin that's like a person with three nipples yeah pretty interesting so identity 4 is saying he thinks that we should go for the obs skype youtube stream solution it would be better audio quality probably i mean it would be what we would use so obs is the open broadcasting system so that would be the encoder that we would use to be able to stream to youtube and then uh so i would do a skype call on my machine have obs open to take that skype call that would include any of us in it and port it to youtube and that would be our video but i don't know if we did that there are so many little details about the skype and things like lower thirds and it's like the little details of uh i'd have to have a machine that would be like the skype asaurus from twitter and then i'm dealing with pinging between the different ones and being the producer and actually really having to do what google hangouts having to have a tech and like google hangouts or soon to be youtube hangouts it does that automatically when somebody starts talking so i don't know hmm oh brandon thank you would be nice if i was to recommend a feature or a function is a sound check where you can hear everything not based on your own levels i don't hear myself you don't hear yourself that would be too manic to try to talk while you were also hearing yourself in the headphones so comparing our levels is sort of difficult we sort of have to do this how do i sound to both of you right we have to go it'd be great if we could turn on sound check uh that was playing in your headphones just as the audio was going to go out completely and then either could adjust it there or what have you and turn that off and go back into just doing the regular stuff that would be a neat feature yeah so many features yeah hopefully everything works with the youtube thing and you know as we move forward i am going to i will take the skype obs system into advisement i think the thing is is um just trying to implement it all by myself it's a little bit overwhelming so i don't know we'll see we'll see something to think about there's definite there are definitely people here in our chat room who know how to use this stuff identity, gourd, brandon definitely you guys know how to do all of these things so i know there are people out there i could rely on to talk to you about it so we will see yeah we will see we will see icicle what are we doing why are we doing a sound check um what else are we going to talk about what else was i going to talk about many maker fare blare can't come justin you want to come to partland i do i really do i just don't see how in the world i can i can manage this yeah scheduling short notices i know short notice things i want to go like really badly so i don't know i wish i could go i'm probably not going uh because i can't go but i could just show up wow it'd be awesome if you did here's justin i wasn't expecting him but he's here awesome awesome awesome i do not have the crappiest internet connection what are you talking about when we've tested i've had usually i've had the best uh internet connection just turns out i can't have five things uploading and downloading and playing at the same time i think tonight was a good night for my internet connection and i did a full shutdown as was advised by the chat room last week of other computers that were connected yeah that's something that i've done for a while is like i tell my husband to turn off all of his torrents and make sure that we're not like we're not streaming anything of completely free content right that's you know not copyrighted content yes that also might be a reason and video game stuff and like yeah it's totally legitimate reasons to use torrents yeah um speaking of internet i'm gonna be doing this from a brand new location in two weeks are you moving you are moving i'm moving you're staying in the same town now yes moving to the other side of the golden gate park ooh where is it how do you get internet connection in the park is the wifi really good oh yeah moving into a tent um no it's uh it's gonna be very close to work actually so that'll be good for a new internet service that within the year should put me on fiber optic cable so you're gonna be getting the fiber so that within a year hopefully fingers crossed will be amazing like i'll be doing internet so fast like you won't even see me i'll be here and gone but uh but in the interim we'll be back on another organization's internet that i won't speak of at this time and so we'll see how it turns out i told them that before i moved in i was like so when they come to install the internet i need my own line nice so um we'll see how that turns out very cool it's nice to make demands but uh so hopefully within two weeks i'll be doing it from my new location but otherwise if i'm in between not moved in not settled i'll be doing twists from my parents house in the guitar room um the guitar room was uh staple for many many many years yeah so yeah so um i will not to be here we'll see though i'm not sure if i'm going to be able to hang this at the new place i think the guitar background sort of like how i had painting backgrounds for years it's like going retro it's a throwback but if i do get into my new place by then yeah you won't be able to tell if i get this up i may or may not find a way to hang this in the new spot because right now i'm using i'm using um hooks a clothing line a clothesline and um clothespins and this piece of fabric and it's because i have crown molding in this house but in the new house there is no crown molding so i am not sure how this is going to work we'll see are you guys excited i'm super excited have you seen the trailer for hidden figures no what's that i don't even know what you're talking about you guys have to see this trailer i'm so excited about this movie coming out i think oh there's a ladybug on my light what's that doing up there don't get burned in the light little ladybug the short attention span theater yes the hidden figures is the story of the black women at nasa who were behind um getting people into orbit behind the math and the physics of um the craft that john glenn wrote in wow yeah and it's powerful the trailer looks amazing oh that's great like these if these women are like they own it and it's just oh i mean i don't know how i hope it's close to how it actually was historically these women are when they were trailblazers and amazing and i cannot cannot wait to see this movie so we'll have to have see if we can either get an interview when it comes out or with someone or i don't know maybe we can get screening tickets i'll start asking it would be so cool women in science to review it yes women in science and not just justin can come to yeah and justin can come to justin's pro women oh he's very pro women i have two of them as offspring he just isn't a woman in science that's right and then have you guys seen um have you seen the video online today just it became a twitter thing today says who there's a cnn video of a reporter interviewing the trump spokesman about the polling results that suggest that trump has fallen behind clinton and what they're you know what are they doing she's basically trying to so that she's like so the polls is now trailing behind clinton and she's trying to ask the question of so how are you reorganizing what are you doing to get the lead back and all the spokesman says is like says who says who you say it's not a shake up but you guys are down says who most of them says who i just told you i answered your question okay which polls all of them okay and your question is so so it's sort of and then there's like the the other one that was this week which is like well because obama you know got us into afghanistan now we're predated but it was like the the spokesman didn't know the history of the last 12-14 years which she apparently lived through but didn't know the history but i think i think there's going to be a number this is my prediction that the number of people the percentage of people what was it 17% was it that believed in chemtrails yeah 17% yeah will be the exact percentage of the general public that gets votes or gives their vote to donald trump i have a feeling that is going to those two numbers will coincide very neatly the number of percentage of the votes that they get over there seems like somebody made somebody made an edit of this interview video and it's got gary oldman involved and i hope this is loud enough when i put my headphones over the speaker so you can hear it but this made me laugh out loud when i saw it earlier says who it's the entire trump staff take lessons from trump on how to act like trump because that's what this looks like is this guy is doing like a poor man's trump impersonation yeah yeah says who all of the polls everyone says me karen nice said says everyone karen says everyone karen just go ahead karen did you see brian cox professor brian cox the british uh... this is this guy science communicator guy uh... he was on some sort of australian tv show panel and there was a politician australian politician who's a global climate warming skeptic denier and he's like well there's you're basing this whole thing on a consensus he's like holding up the hockey stick chart and he's like there's a lot of here's a whole report on it and he like tosses it across the thing like there is it's beyond a consensus it's a hundred percent this is what's going on like he like just kind of hit him between the eyes with it like here's the data read it i see it i found it karen go sit with steve and brian cox is such a like you know he seems like such an even tempered cat but he's also like you know a very smart guy karen steve we're sending you to first professional development in ohai alright just held up the graph there it is that's like um... who was at katie mac on twitter this week she uh i can find the i'm sure it's i can find it easily she's an astrophysicist she has a phd astrophysics and is this um... and jk rowling ended up finding like she this this guy tried to troll her about climate change and she katie mac came back wonderfully and jk rowling basically gave her this amazing twitter high five in the in the interaction let's see if i can if i can find it so yeah so katie mac posted honestly climate change scares the heck out of me and it makes me so sad to see what see what we're losing because of it and then this guy trolls her and says maybe you should learn some actual science then and stop listening to the criminals pushing the hashtag global warming scam and then and then katie mac comes back with i don't know man i already went and got a phd and astrophysics seems like more than that would be overkill at this point boom that's right and then um and then jk rowling posted back the existence of twitter is forever validated by this following exchange and she tweeted out katie mac's response to this guy so it's like yeah yeah that's good yeah i can't you know i already got a phd and astrophysics so you know i don't know if i need any more burn them and then unfollow them burn unfollow that's right and block block you're right that's the three parts yeah bub burn unfollow block yeah it's the hey bub method that's what i did to the people who um called me what did they call me um uh uh feminazi that's right anti anti male terrorist or something like that some guy remember uh you and justin i think we're talking about i think you had brought the story or something i don't remember but the um this guy actually like went to the effort of making a video and like including a clip from our show in his video and then went on to like talk about you and our conversation and i was i was i was gobsmacked i was like seriously yeah apparently apparently i interrupted justin too much because his voice was not well represented on the show your frequent friends and yeah i mean i have i honestly was never going to to talk about it because i fear retaliation um but it right but it was so clear in the eyes of the third party neutral uh witness that that the my voice um because perhaps i'm a male was was not something that was being taken into consideration uh and and yeah you know i think i think males do get sort of bullied about in in society and have for thousands you can't even say it with a straight face you can't even i'm trying to be uh i'm trying to find um the study that i read i don't know if we talked about it on air um but it was about um it was a scientific study where they had this like quote business meeting where men and women had time to talk and they found that when women spoke like 30 percent of the time the perception was that women spoke over half and when they spoke about 15 or 20 percent of the time i think it was it was perceived that men and women spoke equal amounts of time wow yeah um fascinating perception does not equal reality and facts are not the same thing as truth let's see wait when you say facts are not the same thing as truth no because everyone can have their own truths but facts are especially empirical facts scientifically derived facts are um should be at least unassailable if your truth isn't true doesn't that just make it a false belief and not a true thing it's just sort of like yeah then then you have the conversation or the debate about it yeah well because i don't know i think there is a little bit and it's actually there's a little lack of of hitting hitting direct uh when something's not true typically in the media and the news shows over the last decade there's a lot of dancing around with i'm seeing gloves come off a lot uh with with the you know the outlandishly outrageous comments being made by one of the political like trump and is you know having been in his little minions that go out there and have to defend uh this bs where they're like okay but everything you just said isn't true we have all of the it's just not true like what you said is not it didn't happen that you're talking about recent history we can it's not even something that's like many academics looking back have looked at this from different angles and think that this may be a what may not be what happened to the summaries now you're talking about a war that started on that was covered on cnn and you're saying it happened like six eight years later than it did um stop what are you doing that's not a belief you can have and and call it your truth no that's just it's just wrong people can be wrong and i think yes people are wrong people can can and are can be and are totally i just i would like i would just like there to be a little more you know cut and dry no that's not that's wrong that's absolutely i mean there's definitely the the truths you know we hold these truths to be self-evident you know they don't it wasn't we hold these facts to be self-evident no it's the truths to be self-evident and um you know people can take what what facts they have at hand to inform their truths you know and sometimes those truths are not true at all they're very very wrong other times it's just a different way of looking at the same issue um so so there there are definitely great asians and it's not it's this it's not a i think we need to work on the definition of the word truth which in this case is being turned into a meaningless word then and hence this is this should be a podcast with you and Pamela yeah right yeah we have a show called that we do vastly practically like almost never now but we're trying to figure it out anyway but yeah the show is called meaningless words and it's things like this like a meaningless word to me shouldn't be truth truth should mean something concrete a meaningless word should be something like the word justice right justice is a meaningless word because justice presumes that we agree that the outcome is justified and it's but everybody who's ever been before court you judge Judy or the people's court or whatever kind of a thing both sides want justice right we both want justice but then when justice is handed out one of them is not happy with justice and says that's not what justice looks like so it's subjective the entire word justice is subjective totally and it's all and so is truth truth should not be subjective but it is i think you're conflating the word truth with the word belief or desire i think we can desire things to be true we want them to be true or believe them to be true but i think the word truth itself is that thing that's held up to that standard of it's the actual thing that is in the world and not the thing you want to believe although it is sort of what is it truth justice in the american dream or something i don't know where that comes from but there is it does truth and justice do get conflated a lot i can see why the whole truth nothing but the truth so help you something that's not true tell the truth the whole truth nothing but the truth so help you a false belief that cannot be refuted by facts yeah that's easy i can do that one all day so there is on philosophy forums philosophy forum consider two scenarios scenario one truth justice in the american way it is superman scenario one you are driving by a meadow and see a horse and get out of your car and go pet it scenario two you're driving by a meadow and see a replica of a horse but really there is a horse behind the big tree so you petted it in both scenarios because you believed there was a horse in both scenarios it was true that there was in fact a horse in the meadow and so then there is a question of truth, knowledge and belief so is it true that africa is a country i believe that africa is a country i have never been to africa do i truly know that africa is a country i don't think that africa is a country actually i don't think anybody it's not a country it's not, it's a continent it's like i also believe the country of africa is spelled starting with the letter g well that doesn't make it true for you you might be under that assumption but it's the letter a and so you're wrong you're wrong it's just me wrong the person here who's using this as an example is saying normally knowledge is thought to be justified true belief that is it must be true for one you have to believe it and you must have some justification for believing it whether this criterion is sufficient or other threads about it when it comes to the scenarios somebody is saying that the scenarios are too vague but this africa issue how is it true that africa is a country which it is not it seems that you have no justification for saying that africa is a country which it is not but just a belief that it is perhaps you have some justification but it does not show in the argument yeah let's see if we can find a good i think that when especially when we look at science and we look at the facts the data the little facts that add up to a theory and then at some point when things change, when new evidence is put there, that the luminiferous ether does not exist we had plenty of facts we had plenty of theories we had Newtonian physics that worked just great it actually worked it was coming from a time when some sort of luminiferous ether might even be considered reality it doesn't mean that the facts changed it just means that not everything was true and that some of the lines that we go down weren't correct so it doesn't mean that they were true then and aren't true now it means that they weren't true and that's why some of the extensions in that direction failed to materialize so i like the word truth to be kept to be kept like a good scientific experience all the parameters were tightly controlled and monitored and I want truth to be that and I think it might be like the truth might have two existences one as my it's a individual fact is a truth an individual data point is true and that's my version of truth and then there's the other truth which is sort of socially bantered about one in theory well theory in science is a massive collection of these individual truths these individual facts these individual data points actually add up to a theory where in sort of casual conversation a theory is like a vague hypothesis that you haven't actually tested but like a thought experiment you could make it up anything and use a couple of straw figures and that's good enough for the theory that's not what a theory is in science that's where the theory is in you know casual conversation between people who aren't scientists or so so I get how truth can have two different lives no no then it does sort of Superman does have sort of a vague stance I'm for like whatever you believe truth whatever and oh yeah and justice whichever you know and you think is going to be the end of that justice and also the American way which is a melting pot of diverse cultures who also have different reasons for being here in different goals so just sort of generally Superman's for whatever you got whatever you got whatever gets you through tonight I'm Superman therefore I'll represent that I guess Ed was saying Pamela is going to be on the Island twist minion hangout tomorrow night around midnight midnight eastern time so it's starting late that's nine nine o'clock Pacific so that should be a lot of fun super fun always a good time it does seem though that knock on wood that I do seem to get a car deal Thursday nights like the late night deal where I've got to go drive Thursday is interesting it's just goodness we're not doing Thursdays anymore actually actually no it's actually it's been not just Thursdays it's been almost every man I think I have a hypothesis I'm not just theorizing this this isn't a theory I have because I have no not much data at the back of that so I'm just going to call it a hypothesis that it has to do with the heat it's been so hot that people are showing up to the black top that is the car dealership later and later as things cool off people are showing up at like 7 8 o'clock instead of earlier in the day it's just too freaking hot wait wait you're going away just going away I'll be right back I'm just I'm going to step I got it the crowd has run out of pretzels and mixed nuts I got to go refresh I'm getting tired I still have people in the bleachers here if you're ready to say good night I'm getting tired I know okay I'm getting tired you guys Blair looks concerned though I'm trying to find this stupid study and I can't find it are you still on that I thought we forgot about that a long time you did just like a man my tiny man brain couldn't keep the important thing up front long enough another study said that if there's 17 percent women 17 17 percent women in a crowd scene in media the perception is that it's 50 50 really and that if it's 33 percent women then people perceive it as majority women because I guess people look at women more I guess women compare themselves to other women men check out women and nobody cares what the dudes are doing yep yep yep so then how do you determine when there's too many dicks on this dance floor like how does that what's that actual ratio then question there's always too many apparently always too many but it would actually sounds like it would take you wouldn't even notice that there were too many dicks on the dance floor until it was the number was like over 83 percent yeah yeah exactly yeah and also see this is kind of what I was trying to find that in at a mixed table men take up 75 percent of the conversation women have about 25 percent and most people male and female perceive that as equal time male and female yeah so women they grow up just not speaking as much and get used to it right and this is also what keeps this is what keeps women from speaking in mixed meetings and in classrooms because they everything's normal they feel like they would be dominating wow maybe california I don't know but it seems to me that women talk two to three times as much as men do yeah that's what this study proved but no I mean I don't think I'm coming at it with this whole great deal of bias either I just think that no that's exactly what the study is saying is that the for whatever reason men and women perceive a three to one ratio of men talking to women talking as even so maybe it's closer to even in your life and it feels like women are speaking more than the camera could have followed me around all day right and actually because that is kind of the number I came up with and it's what this study says I would say I would say though on this show I think the women do fairly well I think so I mean wait a second fairly well on this show even women think that a ratio of two to one is even so maybe I am actually talking half of the time on this show oh yeah it doesn't sound like it's possibly like too far off I don't know I do edit this show and I have to watch it on YouTube after the fact so I actually you know I actually see a lot of what I I think our talk times are pretty even I believe that I mean we could do a study on us on ourselves but yeah interesting it is the physics data saying that women and men communicate differently and look for different things and anchor on different things and that's true so yeah the communication habits of men and women are different so yeah that could be something to do with it as well yeah it's and it's also it has to do with also the and I have to be careful I say this but this whole thing with men being predisposed to interrupt more which there have actually been studies in the past few years about that what Blair is trying to say is that men sometimes what a woman while she is talking says who what the woman is saying in a more clearly an articulate manner than the woman was capable of doing is that coming close to what you were says who well I think that's the definition of I think that was a very good performance of man's swimming you were totally man's swimming there you go I feel like I have to I'm sorry to interrupt you again Blair I want to interrupt you I'm just going to say this I didn't feel like I kind of monitor myself a little bit on this show or because like I will interrupt and reiterate what somebody just said but I think part of what I'm doing a lot of the time is trying to say it simpler in like because I'm the one without the big scientific education on the show that I have to sometimes reiterate it for my fellow uneducated people sure I don't mean it to be mansplaining I just mean it to be like okay so what you said in your fancy science talk is really sort of like how the calf follows the cow around the pasture not the mole okay so what Blair meant so for those of you who aren't familiar with Californian that meant I might not be able we might not have enough time to get through us given the unconscious body with the comments that came before but when we're interrupted a lot more than then I wonder if you are aware that you've interrupted many more times than you thought so let's see there actually have been studies done and that there is a completely unconscious bias that makes it easier to interrupt a woman than a man is actually biological basis of women's voices versus men's voices and what it does to your brain this is just one study so we don't know too much about this yet but there has been a study on that but there's been a study on that yes the twist story there's been a study on that here's a 1975 study going way back loitering in public places like coffee shops and drug stores with a tape recorder surreptitiously recording any two person conversations they overheard they had 31 dialogues 10 conversations between two men 10 between two women and 11 between men and women the results were staggering hold on before you gave me the result I want to predict I predict based on what you've already told me that the men probably talked more than the women when they were talking I also predict that men talked less to each other and that when women were talking to women the amount of dialogue increased above the other two that would be my prediction so all that it says here is that in the mixed sex conversations men were responsible for all but one of the 48 interruptions they overheard in a study just a couple of years ago George Washington University recruited 20 male and 20 female volunteers and had each volunteer engage in two short conversations one with a man and one with a woman she found that women were interrupted far more often than men the man's conversational partner was female he logged an average of 2.1 interruptions over the course of a 3 minute dialogue if his counterpart was male however the number dropped to 1.8 not a huge difference but still a difference women too were less likely to interrupt men than to cut off other women in each conversation women interrupted an average of 2.9 times if their partner was female and just once if their partner was male so next time I interrupt you I understand it's just biological difference between women and then looking at university of Pennsylvania looked at speech patterns in the tech industry interesting over the course of a 4 week period she sat in on dozens of meetings serving a total of 900 minutes of conversation there were 314 interruptions an average of one every 2 minutes and 51 seconds and discovered that men not only interrupted twice enough as often as women but were nearly 3 times as likely to interrupt women than they were to interrupt men this also happens in cows a woman and women also seemed far more reluctant to interrupt men 87% of times women interrupted they were interrupting another woman and bitch bitch what are you swearing what no I was just interrupting another woman that's all I'm having fun with the draw app in here I'm sorry I see that okay so there was that I'm interrupting with technology exactly flying out and then the other thing I was trying to find shnago says I was in a meeting today with 2 male bloviators and 5 techies 2 female 3 male was monitoring speaking times the 2 talkity guys took almost 90% of the time I discussed this was one of those dudes and his perception was that they didn't interrupt and only spoke less than 10% of the time that is fascinating there you go that's right physics dad what about distractions like kiki non verbally or subconsciously interrupting no wow shnago you just started timing because you couldn't get a word in edgewise that's just ridiculous that's a pretty that's actually a really good way to deal with it is is when a situation like that arises and you're not able to get a word in edgewise start timing I'm going to just find out how much are you does it do I just feel like this because I drank too much coffee this morning or is it that this is something that's actually an issue that I'd like to get that we should talk about the other thing I keep seeing in these is about the kind of verbal tick of especially in the business world apologizing for saying things I apologize which I will admit to noticing myself doing recently and trying very hard to stop because it's it's something that I don't understand where it comes from hearing these studies perhaps it's more clear but there's definitely this verbal tick of apologizing for interrupting apologizing for taking credit for things apologizing for speaking at all apologizing for giving ideas that's not great yeah I again not my experience with California yeah Dave Shorty is saying any note on the value of the interjection as in are you being interrupted to be corrected so I think that's one thing but if it's something like you're being interrupted like a woman is being interrupted to be mansplained at when they were really explaining something fine that's a real issue but then again I will say my husband and I actually have communication differences and oh no no no stop says who my husband and I have said over the years have communication differences and we will both be talking about the same exact thing but saying it in different ways and kind of arguing about something and I'm like it ends up getting to the point where we're like oh we're talking about the same thing we just weren't describing it with the same words or from the same perspective but we're actually both at the same point of understanding and I'm always blown away when that happens I'm like wow okay again communication different modes of communication but do you think that is that never happen with females is that a male female thing oh it does it happens experience it more with your direct mate but no it happens with everyone I've had political conversations where me and my Republican friend who's no longer Republican will be arguing about something but it might be I might be arguing about why this law should be implemented and he might be arguing about why the outcome needs to be stopped and it turns out we are agreeing really it's just maybe the method or whatever it is but I think that's not necessarily a male female no no that's not it's just what I was trying to say is that no don't apologize for it communication differences don't apologize for making your point it's okay you can make points too I wasn't apologizing I wanted to find there was this awesome there was this awesome collection of I'm going to be right back and I'm tired I was going to go to bed but then you kept interrupting me when I kept trying to say no oh heck no heck no oh heck no oh heck no oh heck no do we finish each other's sentences sometimes yeah not all the time though it's not like we're the same person they understand each other pretty well to maintain a conversation with police devil and ends up in diff's disagreement when you do fundamentally agree interesting idea Jackson fly is the world's best button pusher he takes that role very seriously he's good at it he finds those little buttons I can find it no that's right does he interrupt just to apologize no no reason I really am tired I woke up earlier than I do normally I'm getting on the early train this is my first week of getting on the early train of waking up to get my son to school by 8 in the morning all the years I've worked really hard to answer and to set my own hours and suddenly I am being told what to do by my son's school he's 5 so he hasn't started kindergarten yet that's what he's doing he's starting kindergarten in about a week and a half there's no way get out of here kindergarten man I like to judge how long I've been with twists by how big he is from little baby all the way he was practically brand new yeah kindergartener it's gonna be crazy it's crazy start time yeah yeah we just learned today how to get up early and go to bed early you should tell them what we learned today I'm just gonna end up sleep deprived again you can't go early you'll get sick that's what we learned exactly and so what I was thinking maybe this whole kids getting sicker and then bringing it back to the parents that kind of stuff we should have later start times for kids in schools we should oh absolutely test scores increase now it sounds like less kids will get sick right wouldn't that be great I would have to go to work later because I go to schools it's a win-win-win win-win-win schools suck no schools are good learning is good any system systematized institution or institutionalized system it's gonna have its issues schools are important places of learning ah six and seven year old boys nice physics dad that's right yes you're welcome I'm glad you joined us tonight in Japan six days a week six to seven a.m. until four to five p.m. what that's early that sounds terrible and no strength Kai has not had the nits in his hair yet and I'm not excited about that I keep reading these articles about the super lice have you read the I don't know if I want to hear about this well it's just the drug the drug resistant lice it's basically resistant to most of the drug treatments especially the over the counter ones what is it no no and so Oregon is one of the states where this super lice is spread everywhere so excited I don't know what you yeah that face Blair you're like oh dear I don't like lice I don't like lice either and I'm very not thrilled about it so it's a you guys know how I am about like showering and cleanliness um yeah I think you apparently for the audience listening still Blair apparently thinks she's the only person who engages in personal hygiene that's not what I said and it's a misnomer that lice are on dirty people and I understand that equally my kids have had lice a half a dozen times in the Davis school district it's been insane like every week I get these these alerts that like okay another one was found with lice check your children and it's been a few times we've had to go to the red I don't I'm actually I always feel left out because it's sort of like how the popular monkeys are the ones that get lice because they get groomed the most right and I'm like and like the kids are getting looked through and checked and everything and they're like no you're clear my hair because maybe I have horrible hygiene I don't wash my hair because that's how you get lice Blair I have a clean hair they don't like oily hair no cover your ears when you're wearing your headphones it doesn't work I found nine non-threatening leadership strategies for women I put it in the chat room I'm going to open that and look at it tomorrow it's the greatest am I doing these things am I non-threatening to people or am I threatening am I scary I have to go say good night Dr. Kiki Helsinki I love Helsinki thank you Finland good night good night Kiki good night Blair good night Minions we love you we're going to miss you until next week when we'll be back and it sounds like we're going to have a fantastic interview next week it'll be another great show until then do not let Karen eat your lunch yeah Karen Karen or Steve good night everyone who's Steve I totally miss Steve I don't know what the stick is