This is TWIS, this week in science episode number 614, recorded on Wednesday, April 12th, 2017. Thank you, Yuri. Hey everyone, I am Dr. Kiki, and tonight on This Week in Science, we are going to fill your heads with evolving octopuses, young fish poo, and magnetic sperm, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Humans, they seem to be everywhere these days. And while we watch their hopes and dreams, fears and flaws play out across the globe, the wider world is waiting. The world of everything that is not human. That world that has been watching the activities of hairless apes, sometimes with curiosity, too often in horror, the world is watching, waiting for humans to strike a balance, and find a niche within the greater earthling community. And while the wayward activities of the hairless apes shows little sign of slowing, there are some promising signals. As some of the brighter ones begin to understand that within the mysteries of how things work, there is a lesson in longevity, a logic to living within the balancing act of other life forms. And so to get the word out through as many as possible, we will take human form just long enough to bring you yet another episode of This Week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn everything. I wanna fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna 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 you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We're back yet again with more science, another week filled with the funtasticness of the science world. You know what night is? It's Wednesday, right? It's Wednesday. It's also Yuri's night. Tonight is Yuri's night. And if anyone is aware of what Yuri's night is, maybe you're out celebrating right now as we record this show, or maybe you're celebrating it in your own way in your own home by watching this show longer. Kiki, what am I not celebrating that I should be out celebrating with people who know about this event? The instance of the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin. This is the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's space flight. He was a Russian cosmonaut, the first man in space. And there are celebrations all over the world in honor of Mr. Gagarin, cosmonaut Gagarin. Yes, not Yuri Geller. Gagarin. So this is an auspicious day in the history of space flight, manned human space flight. But you know, there is also womanned human space flight. And as you may well know, there is an astronaut at the International Space Station who she is on her way to extending her stay on the International Space Station to become the longest staying female on the space station.  Yeah, so we've got some exciting stuff right now, some neat things going on in space. There's a lot of other stuff going on here on Earth though. A lot of cool stuff. Robo Games is coming up in two weeks. April 21st to 23rd in. That's always awesome. My money's on the one with the buzz saw. Oh, you're taking the sucker money. Yeah, I'll take the other end of that one. It's the one with the low profile that doesn't have any big weapons that always wins. Yeah, that's true. Flips the other ones. Yeah, the flipper, you're right. It's always flipper. The flipper, I don't know about that. We'll see, we will see how the Robo Games turn out. Who wins? Who will lose? You must go find your way at robogames.net if you're interested. Also, we are going to be in Philadelphia the June 10th and 11th, right? We're going to Philly for the Young Innovators Fair. You can go to younginnovatorsfair.com to find information on that. All right, what do we have on the show tonight? I have stories about melting. Lots of melting. There's a lot of melting going on on planet Earth. I also have giant viruses and cancer fighting sperm. Justin, yeah, Justin, what do you have? Didn't realize, I always wanted to be a doctor. On the edge of my feet, as it were. And what it took? What did I bring? I've got early dinokin discovery, gut bacteria, buffer against that diabetes, disrupting electric magnetic duality and an answer to the age-old question, by the way, which ones pick? Oh, I didn't know that was a question. Okay. That's an age-old question. Age-old question, all righty. And Blair, what is in the animal corner? Oh, I brought nerdy bees and I brought self-conscious elephants and aliens living in our oceans. Aliens in our oceans. Although, sci-fies were right. I can't wait to find out more about this. We've got some good stuff coming up. So let's jump in. Get right down to it. So I'm gonna start because, you know, I was feeling a little spacey because of Yuri Gagarin at the beginning of the show. Did you all know that you can adopt the planet for Earth Day? No, that's adorable. Yeah, NASA is allowing us all hashtag adopt the planet. So we can adopt one of 64,000 individual pieces of Earth and I tried to adopt the planet for this week in science and let's see if I can pull it up right now. The location that I have is 3.6 degrees north. Oh, it's reloading, which is probably not. Yeah, 3.6 degrees north, 169.92 degrees east, which is somewhere way out there in the Pacific Ocean. Yeah. I'm not really sure much. But anyway, it gives lots of information about the location. So you can go to the web. You can look, it's through NASA. And if you look for this, adopt the planet. You can just put in a name of who you're adopting it for and then it gives you data layers and information about that location. So in that location, it tells you relative chlorophyll levels, humidity, sea surface temperature, cloud top height information. And then it gives links and other things to be able to explore the map and find out more about different locations on the planet. And so really the idea is to make people more aware about what is out there on the planet and what different places are, what's going on in different places on the planet? Really? So it started on April 6th and it'll be running through Earth Day. And you'd go to go.nasa.gov slash adopt. And you can adopt a little bit of the planet one of 64,000 locations. Ta-da! Nice. Yeah, pretty fun stuff. Also in NASA news, maybe not as exciting and fun, but researchers from the University of California, Irvine, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and a bunch of other groups have made shipboard surveys of the sea floors in West Greenland. And they've also used data from NASA's Operation Ice Bridge and NASA's US Geological Survey Landsat Satellite. They've taken all the combined data and they have used it to generate the most comprehensive maps of the sea floor in the fjords beneath Greenland's glaciers that have ever around 14 of the great glaciers. And this is the most comprehensive survey that has ever been done, like using all these different sources of data. And you know what they found out? Everything's fine. Everything's cool here, people. No need to worry. No, not really. So the previous estimates of the depth of the oceans in these fjords were as much as several thousand feet too shallow. So actually they found that areas of these in these fjords were actually much deeper than they had previously estimated.  But that's not really the way it works in this area of the ocean and the earth. And so because of upwelling and different currents, it actually, the deeper waters sometimes tends to bring a lot more warm water closer to the glaciers. And so as a result of these changes in depths and this finer grained resolution allows us better understanding of the possibility that these glaciers might be even more at risk of melting than they previously were. Well, the risk is not changed. Our understanding of the risk has changed. Our expectation, our appraisal of risk. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, yeah. So basically these, the estimates of melting that we've had are probably not as rosy as they once were. So you're saying we're in trouble. Let's say we're in trouble. I'm just saying now we have more information. So what you're saying is climate change is bad. Yeah, well, we've spoken before and this is one of the big things we're talking about. Glaciers, we're not talking about icebergs. We're talking about ice that is on top of land. And if it melts, it's going to add to the oceans and will increase sea levels, right? That's bad, that's bad. So we don't want it to melt as quickly as warmer waters reaching the glaciers suggest that the possibility could make it. If that happens, you're going to have a bad time. That'll be a bad day, yeah. I've got to really hear one of these, you know, information data adjustments to the model where it's like, oh, here's something that's really going to slow down the effects of global warming. It always seems like the more we look into it, the more we're like, our model was very rosy. The one that everybody was scared about? Yeah, that one, very rosy. It's only worse news.  Oh, so ice cores from the Canadian Arctic melted and left a big pool of water on the floor of a freezer in Canada. Yeah, so there was a cold storage facility in Edmonton run by the University of Alberta and they had 180 meter long. That's about three feet for those of you who like to work in feet rather than scientific standards. 180 meters is only three feet. That's, I've been doing my math all wrong. Just stop it, 180 ice cores, each of them about a meter in length. And they melted and there was steam and water everywhere and it was about 12 to 13% of the entire collection of samples that had been taken from across the Arctic. Yeah, and they lost so researchers say some of the losses, one of the oldest ice cores from Mount Logan, which is a 5,500 meter high mountain in Northern Canada. Researchers says we only lost 15 meters of the core but because it was from the bottom that's 16,000 years out of the 18,000 years that we had represented. Another one, they lost 66 meters of core from Baffin Island's Penny ice cap. That accounts for about a quarter of the record in 22,000 years, gone leaving a gap for the oldest part. Guys, what's the one rule about ice cores? They have to be frozen. The one rule is that they have to be cold, you guys. Why was there not a backup generator? I don't know, yeah, so oops, that's an oops. That's an oops. This is the kind of thing each core would probably cost around $500,000 to a million dollars to replace according to the researchers because of logistics with operating in the icy Canadian Arctic. Yes, you have to make it warm enough for humans to not die in your research station, which means your ice cores may melt if you don't keep them cold. Yeah, and this ice core archive actually has been moved around a whole bunch. And so it's moved from, they were collected in the early 2000s, flown to Whitehorse Yukon Territory and then to the Ice Core Research Laboratory at the Geological Survey of Canada in Ottawa and then moved to the Edmonton Lab. So they've already moved around a whole bunch without ever melting. And then in a freezer. Guys, god, some intern messed up. I looked in the cooler and I saw it was all full of ice already so I figured why it was already cold. It's cold without that ice in there.  Karen. Karen. You melted the ice cores, Karen. Karen, that's hundreds of years of research. How could you do this, Karen? Thousands of years of research. You're fired, Karen. Oh, yeah. So science, sometimes things aren't so rosy.  I feel like that should have been in a freezer inside of a larger freezer. There was inside of a yet larger freezer and each freezer was attached to its own backup generator that also was attached to solar panels. That seems like the proper precautions for ice cores that are thousands of years old. Yeah, so we've got ice cores, right? Difficult to get in the first place. From glaciers and ice that are melting, that aren't necessarily gonna be around forever and they tell us a history of gases in the atmosphere of the planet. They give us a history of temperatures in the planet. They tell us all sorts of things about the history of our earth. And yeah, if you melt them, yeah, no. No, it doesn't work so well. It's frustrating to considering the hard work it is to get ice cores, the fact that humans have to trudge right on the back of essentially what is a snowmobile with a box tied to it and then they have to dig and then they have to core. It's a lot of work and sometimes researchers are out there for months. What a bar. Yeah, but to be fair, Canadians probably spend as much time thinking about how to keep ice cold as we Californians think about how to make an iced tea warm. Like, it's unintuitive thinking. Should have brought in an expert. Should have brought in an expert. Moving forward away from freezing and melting things. How about some more old stuff?  We've talked before. How giant?  It's, these are little tiny things, but big for viruses. Now, viruses we've talked about before is possible people have hypothesized that they may be there a separate branch in the tree of life. You know, that there are these giant viruses, one that has been found called the Meme viruses. They're, they have these genes that potentially suggest that they can live outside of a host cell that basically they could be their own, their own almost a cell that they could exist on their own. They just don't have all of the stuff in them.  They're almost as big as they're, they could almost be small single celled organisms except they don't have quite all the stuff that would be needed for that. Some people think that these viruses started out self-sufficiently and then got trapped inside other cells. And then they became, while they were trapped, they're like, yeah, I don't need all this stuff. I could use your stuff. And then they became, but then it's all this biological material. This mitochondria, get out of here. Right.  The other idea is that viruses might have been tiny bits of RNA, DNA that started grabbing bits of genetic material from hosts.  I'm gonna take that with me. Oh, I like that one. I'm gonna take that one with me. And eventually, over time, that would allow some viruses taking this process of grabbing what they want and what they need to grow in size and become kind of big.  What word are you saying? Cluj, K-L-U-D-G-E, Cluj. It's like the human brain. It's like things that evolution just, just gonna throw it together and it works. It's a solution that works. It might not be the best solution, but it's possible. I learned to be more today. Cluj, an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose.  Just like your life, yeah. My whole life, that's what this is. Yeah, we had an explanation. That's a word for that, huh? My life is a Cluj, and so are, and so are possibly these giant viruses. Viruses in some total, maybe. But it's, you know, this paper has been based on a new group of giant viruses called Klosniewiruses, spelled K-L-O-S-N-E-U viruses. So Klosniewiruses, I don't know if it's German or something. But anyway, it's debatable as to whether they are a missing link of sorts. And so these particular viruses code, their genomes code for lots and lots of enzymes and machinery that cells usually have to make proteins. And so that's super unusual. And they did a genetic analysis, and they found that this is, they've never seen anything like this. They have a high similarity to some single-celled organisms, and they found these new viruses. You wanna know where they found them? In a sewage water treatment plant in Austria. Yum! So Klosniewiruses is probably Austrian. There we go, German. So they sequence these genomes, and they're like, oh, look, there are some genomes that are kind of similar to the giant Mimi virus that the French had found. And, but the evidence, based on the kind of molecular clock and the genes that are involved, suggests that they originated in, potentially they could have originated in different ways. And so it's still unclear whether eukaryotic organisms actually, whether the clone virus took its bits and pieces from other organisms. They can't grow the virus yet. They've only been able to find it in samples. And so they don't have a host that they can infect to see what it does. And they don't infect, or they can't get it to infect the same type of amoeba as the Mimi virus. And so this new thing, I think they found it in a sewage plant, so they should look for their host species in that sewage plant. There's something in that sewage, otherwise these big viruses wouldn't be there. But this is just a very interesting finding. Unless the host is the solution that they're in, you know? I mean, if the host- The whole solution, right? Yeah. In which case is it out on its own at that point? Right. And so, yeah, it's very interesting. And so there's this virus. It has added a whole bunch of gene families that had never been seen before in the virus genomes. So it's got a whole bunch of new things. And they found the biggest thing here. They compared them to the Mimi virus and they had been able to incorporate four, they can incorporate 14 of the 20 different amino acids into proteins without having to use host cell machinery. 14 out of 20. And so that's a big deal. I mean, this is basically, yeah, this clonavirus, it really seems like it's on its way to being its own, its own cell, its own branch of life. So are we, is that further back in the evolutionary spectrum than most of the viruses we see? Or is it more advanced? Oh, right. That's a really good question. I'm not sure. Right? Because we don't know where viruses came from for sure yet. So we can't really know until then. Yeah. Yeah. So it's anyway, very interesting that they're, these viruses, maybe. I mean, still maybe they will tell us a thing or two about evolution and how life came to be or why some bits of DNA and RNA decided to not become life and to latch on to life for the parts that needs to do, that needs to do things. And while other cells went, I'm gonna be alive. It's a pretty neat comparison. What you got, Justin? I have something published in Nature. Scientists describe the earliest known dinosaur relative, six foot long lizard-like carnivore called Tilly O'Craytor, Radenius. Radenius says, this is from Ken Angliccik, the field museum's associate curator of fossil mammals, one of the paper's authors. Surprisingly, in quotey voice, earlier dinosaur relatives were pretty profoundly not dinosaur-like. Tilly O'Craytor has unexpectedly crocodile-like features that are causing us to completely reassess what we thought about the earliest stages of dinosaur evolution. So all dinosaurs are archosaurs, a group that contains dinos, birds, pterosaurs, that's the flying ones, and crocodilians. About 250 million years ago, archosaurs split into two groups, a bird-like group that evolved into dinosaurs, birds, and pterosaurs, and the crocodile-like group that includes crocodiles, alligators of that are alive today, and a whole mess of now extinct relatives. This newly discovered Tilly O'Craytor, Radenius, I can't pronounce it, is the earliest member of the bird-like side of the family. However, it is not a direct ancestor of the dinosaurs, it's simply the oldest known cousin of the dinosaurs. It's sort of an offshoot branch right after the bird-like side of the family began. And it didn't look too much like a dinosaur, it more resembles a monitor lizard that would be alive today for something you could picture in your head. It was between six and 10 feet long, although much of that length was neck and tail, a really long neck and an even longer tail. Weight between 20 and 65 pounds was around two feet tall at the hip. And while some of its features, like the jaw muscle attachments at the back of the skull, clearly put it in the archosaur camp with the dinos and the birds. It had a lot in common with the more distant crocodilian cousins, notably ankle joints that could rotate from side to side as well as flexing up and down, whereas dinosaurs and birds, ankle joints, can only hinge up and down motions. So it's got a more splayed crocodile gait than you might have expected from an early branch of the dinosaur family. So it's giving the scientists a new picture about how dinosaur-like features evolved, more quotey voice. We used to think that many of the distinctive features of bird-line archosaurs evolved very quickly after they diverged from the crocodile line because early bird-line archosaurs like were small and very dinosaur-like, right? However, this one shows us archosaurs initially inherited many crocodile-like features from the common ancestors of all archosaurs and that the typical bird-line features evolved stepwise fashion over a long period of time, making telecrater a missing link, albeit from a slightly different chain between dinosaurs and the common ancestors they share with crocodiles. And it's interesting looking at this, the artist's rendition at least of it, because I don't have a real one in front of me. You can see the both, yeah, it's got crocodile-ish feet and that sort of the neck and tail is the precursor to what we expect the dinosaur to look like, very much so. And the long jaw and lots of teeth for eating mammals. Yeah, the name, telecrater, means slender, complete basin, a reference to the animal's lean-building closed-hip socket and is actually the name given to it in the 1930s when it was first discovered, although completely misplaced or misunderstood or, well, we had just, we were scratching the surface of dinosaur evolution at that time anyway, but they gave it the name that had originally been given to it. So that's pretty cool. But these are all new fossils. They found a, this is a, this is more quotey voice. We found fossils that we thought might be from telecrater, but it wasn't until we were back in the lab that we realized we found something really amazing. Discovery of such an important new species is a once in a lifetime discovery. Telecrater fundamentally changes ideas about the earliest history of dinosaur relatives. Right, so that potentially the telecrater came first and then from there you have dinosaurs kind of coming beyond them. And, but before dinosaurs, you have the off-split of the actual crocodile, crocodilian group. Oh yeah, so we had- Yes, but this telecrater would be first because it has these crocodilian features. Yeah, so he's closer to the ancestor of the crocodiles in some ways. But it's showing too that some of these, you can't really call them crocodilian features then at that point. You have to say they're the precursor to the archer-saur. This was something that didn't get discarded from the ancestor. Whereas some of the things that we think of as bird-like or dinosaur-like were things that were changed from the archetypal design that was there, right? Very interesting, and it's whenever we fit in one of these pieces of data that really changes how we have to assemble the rest of the puzzle in that time period, it's always very fascinating because then we start to look at the whole process of evolution backwards with new detail, with new clarity. And then we can see that, you know, especially in this case, those things are sometimes a loss of motion. You know, that simpler, more primitive motion of the ankle, for instance, and dinosaurs and birds may have come from an ancestor that had much more mobility, but didn't, over time, for whatever reason, the gate that they started using, the way that they started their locomotion didn't require the mobility. We're relying maybe on teeth to do the grabbing and the biting, and so didn't need more mobile claws to grasp at things, you know. Yeah. Evolution doesn't always just add more benefits. Sometimes, let's, old ones go, can't buy these for it. The thing that I'm always struck by, though, is that we're still just looking at physical features. We're not looking at actual genetics because we can't get all the DNA. And so, I mean, we've even been surprised by genetic analysis of extant living organisms, like birds, and genetic analysis reshuffled a lot of relationships between birds that had been determined on the basis of morphology or how they look. And so all of this still, we need that genetic data because we're still shuffling and reshuffling based on characteristics that might be convergent, that might have appeared for one reason or another. I don't know. Yeah, morphology has proven to be sort of like a good outline, but it's not a final draft by any means. It's somewhere at the very beginning of the process and then further from the end. It kind of narrows things down at first. Yeah. Narrow it down. Oh, we're going through these stories one at a time. We're narrowing down our time. You know what time it is right now? What time? I think I do. It's time for Blair's Animal Corner. We're just great at stuff. Buy a pet, build a pet, don't pet animals. Wanna hear about animals? She's your girl. Except for giant pandas. That's a girl. They're bad on her own. What you got, Blair? I wanted to talk about animal smarts. One of my favorite things to talk about on the show. In general, we've learned, what have we learned, Justin? Birds are smart.  Yeah, in general, would you say that we have correctly assessed the smartness of animals? We're getting there. The pack, really the one that blew me away, I think more than any of the others, was the pack hunting, was it alligators? Yeah, that's still one of my favorite stories of all time. So yes, animals, time and time again, surprise us at their intelligence. Mainly because we still don't know how to test their intelligence. So I have a story actually sent by Ed Dyer, one of our faithful minions about elephants that came out actually this morning from the University of Cambridge, and about elephant intelligence, elephant self-awareness, and particularly elephant body awareness. So a lot of animals that we try to study their sense of self is with a mirror test. There's a few problems with this that we've talked about a little bit before. One of them being not all animals understand what a mirror is, we just talked about that recently a couple of weeks ago. Also, what if you're an animal that doesn't have a great sense of sight? What if you're an animal that doesn't have hugely different markings on each other, like you all look pretty similar within a species, so it's just not something your brain's clued into, right? There's lots of things that can keep animals from being successful at a mirror test that is not a lack of self-awareness. Right, like part of it could also be animals are using a significant portion of the identification through the sense of smell, and therefore if the mirror doesn't smell like you, you wouldn't assume it was you. Absolutely, so a recent study was looking at Asian elephants trying to find a new way of testing for self-awareness. So in this test, it was actually adapted from an awareness test for human children. The version for human children had them, they had the kids push a shopping trolley, a shopping cart, right? But the trolley, the cart was attached to a mat, and that mat had the child standing on it. So they couldn't push it if they were standing on the mat that the cart was attached to, right? So they had to figure out, oh, okay, so if I move off the cart, then I can move the cart, right? So in the elephant version of the test, they attached a stick to a rubber mat with a rope. The elephants were, they walked onto the mat and then they were asked to hand the stick to the researcher. So they were previously taught to stand on the mat and hand a stick that was not attached to the mat, right? So they understood the task. In the results of the study, they found that they could figure it out. So actually they stepped off of the mat, an average of around 42 out of 48 times. So that's a pretty good success rate. And they only stepped off the mat in their control when the stick was not attached to the mat three times. So overall, looked like they weren't stepping off the mat by coincidence, they understood their bodies were in the way so they stepped aside, which allowed them to do the task at hand. So these elephants are capable of recognizing themselves as separate objects from their environment, recognizing their impact on the environment, all that kind of stuff. So this is a new version of the self-recognition test that elephants pass with flying colors. We're not that surprised at that. Elephants are real smart. But now this gives us some tools for potentially testing other species in new ways about self-recognition. Additionally, this helps us look at body awareness of elephants in future studies in relation to social decision-making. So if they know where their body is, we know how they know that their body is impacting a space. So that actually helps aid research on social dynamics with elephants and in space dynamics between elephants and humans. They actually are competing for land in Thailand and India. So conservation strategies require some research on this conflict for space. So all of that could be helpful. But what's really fascinating here is that they really understood this test better than most toddler-age humans. So they really could figure out how their mass, how their physical body was affecting the world around them in a way that was pretty intense. I think it's very interesting the idea of these elephants having this kind of body awareness.  I mean, they've got a body. You have to know where your body is to be able to actually, you have to know where your body is in space to move and to do things and not injure yourself, not to fall in a hole. If you're an animal that lives in a tree to not fall off a branch, there are certain aspects of that awareness.  You have to know where you're landing so that you don't miss it and fall, right? But it's interesting that I was thinking about my own son and things that he did as he was getting older as he became aware of his physical space. Absolutely.  So if you learn how to fly, you learn how to land, if I asked you while you were riding a bike, where is your foot right now? Okay, where's your foot now? Okay, where are you turning, right? A lot of it is second nature. So where is this moment in which you recognize the difference between what you need to do to do what you're doing and awareness of where you are in space and time. And even we lose that from time to time and we need to sit and think about where we are in space and time, right? So otherwise we would never bump into things, right? Justin, like your sweet, sweet child. You're so daughter. So if we were aware of where we were in space and time all the time, we might not run into doorways. So thinking about that. Seven stitches, three years old, seven stitches, zero tears though. Tell her to think like an elephant next time. Maybe she won't. I know, she continued to be like an elephant. She got school, she continued on to the, she got up and went and sat down at the table to do a science activity of all things.  She just wanted to science. So, yeah, so these elephants. Who cares about the bleeding? I just want to science. So that's a case where- Far enough away from my heart, I'll be fine. We're being smart maybe for your daughter as well is a huge benefit, right? But being smart isn't always a good thing, is it? Yes, it is. It's always a good thing. Why would it not be good? How could it- Let me just quickly remind you for any of our listeners out there, I'm not saying that any of us know what it may have been like, but being a smarter person in class, sometimes maybe you get picked on, maybe life's a little bit tougher for you. What? What school did you go to?  Bee. Being smart. Bee. Being too smart. So, bubblebees, research from U of G. I don't know what that means. University of- Georgia. Georgia. And also the plant and food research conglomerate organization. There's no noun at the end there in New Zealand. These two groups, they came together to look at how smart bubblebees are. And ultimately, they found that fast learning bubblebees collected fewer resources in the colony over their foraging career. And there is a learning associated cost in the wild, therefore, which means actually it costs to be smart. So the way that they tested this is they had blue and yellow artificial flowers in a lab. They had 85 individual bubblebees from five colonies. The yellow flowers provided sugar reward. The blue ones did not. And then the researchers observed how long it took the bees to ignore the unrewarding blue flowers. So initially they would prefer the blue flowers because that would be their natural inclination. So how long it took them to adjust instead associate yellow flowers with food? The bees were monitored using radio frequency, identification, tagging technology to determine their foraging activity. And they found that the bubblebees that were best at adjusting actually came at a cost. So they found that they got less resources and overall were less successful as bubblebees even though they were better at learning. So this is weird. It's hard to parse out exactly what's happening here, but as far as they can tell, it all comes down to the cost of being smart, the actual energetic cost of having a smarter brain. Hmm, I don't know if I buy that explanation. It's an interesting correlation. I just think those bees are self-aware and they're just, man, this is it. I'm part of this hive mind. I'm gonna have to do the same job every day. Never gonna move up. Can't be the queen. It's interesting you say that, Justin, because actually that's part of the story. Part of the story is that these bees are still here. So the idea is that neural tissue is metabolically expensive and it's also metabolically expensive to maintain throughout the life of the bee. Foraging is energy demanding. So is learning. So the kind of the give and take here, the push-pull is that if you take energy to make and produce and maintain a good brain, you will have less energy to forage. The question then is, why? Oh, why are there still smart bees? But I wonder if you've got the waggle dance, right? You've got a bee that comes back and tells the other bees where the nectar is. Where do you have to go? And bees that pick up on that more quickly are going to be able to get to that location more accurately. They're not gonna get wander off track. They're probably going to be more successful over time. So that's exactly it too, but also- That would be my explanation though. That would be my, I would actually expect, hang on, I would actually expect the bee that does the waggle dance to be the smarter bee. That's the one who's like, look, I can give you really good, clear directions. I found it really quickly. I didn't spend time foraging. I just come back to a real accurate map of where it's at and all of you drones can go do the actual work. Like I'd love to see that, like if they're the ones who tend to report back more, the smarter bees. So based on this study, they found that the bees that learned which flowers to go to, not only foraged less successfully, but had a shorter foraging lifespan. So they double lost the idea behind- What do you mean by less successfully? I mean, I thought that it was just that they, they didn't go on as many foraging bouts that they didn't forage as much. They didn't forage as much and they didn't forage for as long of a lifespan. Because they didn't need to. Because they didn't need to. They did better. Because they had existential angst. They had too much suffering. This is going to be my life forever every day. The same thing, not to me. I don't take it. So as far as I know, the bees were bringing back the same amount of stuff, regardless. So the fact that they're going out less that most likely means they're bringing back less total. But the reason they think this maintains in a bumblebee population is the same reason that you still want that nerd that everybody beats up on in class. You still want them around because everyone needs to copy off his paper during the test, right? So the smart bees are actually helping to rise up the average intelligence level of the bee population as a whole. So the population has an advantage based on these outliers helping bring everybody up. So they help lead the way. They help assist in the foraging strategy overall. So even though they lose out, they are helping the population. Can I see that happening? Yeah. Yeah. So there's downsides being smart, but maybe you can save your colony. So there's a population level upside that keeps the smart bees around.  Well, we talked about lazy ants. So I bet it's probably pretty similar. These social organisms. And did you have one more story for the animal colony? I'll save it for later. Wait, what? This is an exciting story. Okay. All right, I'll do it now. I'll do it now if you want me to. You can do it in the second half of your life. You can do it in the second half. It's gonna be a bit. And I know it's time for a break, so. It's going to be a bit. It's a dense story. All right, well, we will take a very short break for everyone to clear your heads and think about smart bees, dumb bees, all the bees around.   Dumb bees, smart elephants. Let's think about these things as we move into the break. Everyone, this is This Week in Science. We're back in just a few moments. We have some messages for you. So stay tuned for more This Week in Science. 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Thank you for your support. We would have skipped the gun, yeah. I can't believe you believe in that show. We disagree, but I still give a damn. The ramification of treatments from holy men leaves me slightly queasy deep down in the abdomen. And hence that's the lives that they lead me to Justin. And we're back with more of this week in science. All right, we are back. Justin, what else did you bring? I brought two groups of participants that participated in a Finnish diabetes study. All of these participants were overweight and had impaired glucose tolerance. So the researchers investigated the serum, serum metabolite profile. Serum is it's your blood if it didn't have any blood cells or coagulating things. So it's the under, it's the broth. I don't know how to describe it. It's the thing that super villains always use. Well, yeah. So they looked at the metabolite profile, these 200 participants with impaired glucose tolerance who either developed type two diabetes within the first five years or did not convert to type two diabetes within a 15 year follow up. So these are all high risk type two diabetes category folks, pre-diabetes. They tracked them, they studied their, the serum or their blood to see what would happen. So these aren't, they're not being given a serum. It's not like these are control groups in that way. They just looking to see what happens in these groups. They found that a high concentration if indopropionic acid in the serum protected against type two diabetes, indopropionic acid is a metabolite produced by, wait for it, wait for it, intestinal bacteria. And not intestinal bacteria is, has its own production boosted by a fiber rich diet. Higher concentration of the acid also seems to promote insulin secretion by pancreatic beta cells, which might explain the protective effect that it's having. According to the researchers, the discovery provides additional insight into the role of intestinal bacteria and the interplay between diet metabolism and overall health. Findings were published in scientific reports. Differences between the groups were analyzed by non-targeted metroballomics analysis. So, what that basically- Metabolomics. Yeah, basically what it means is instead of having gone in with, we're going to look for this, this and this and see how that tracks over the time. What they did was they just looked at the overall picture and what they saw were spikes in this acid for those who didn't develop and lower levels than those who did develop. So they just looked at the overall stuff that was in the serum and didn't prejudge it. They weren't tracking anything specifically going in. So they didn't go in with a premise or hypothesis. This is what we'll find. They just observed and took their observations and made connections between their observations and the results, right? They also found that certain lipid metabolites were concentrations of that as well as the endopropionic acid had the correlation, right? So, they also took this out of this one study and they looked at two other population-based data sets. One was the Finnish Metabolic Syndrome in Men study and another was the Swedish Vasterboten Intervention Project. So these are two other different data sets and they found this acid was also in more abundance in the protected groups in those studies. So, a nice sort of open sourceness between these studies allowed them to look, take their results that they got out of their study, looking to other studies that were taking place and went, aha, the same thing is present here. So they also identified some new lipid metabolites whose high concentration were associated with improved insulin resistance and reduced risk of diabetes, less low-level inflammation and the like. Concentrations of these metabolites were also associated with dietary fat, lower amount of saturated fat in the diet, the higher the concentrations of these metabolites. Quoty voice, earlier studies, too, have linked intestinal bacteria with the risk of disease and overweight people. Our findings suggest that indole-pro-pionic acid may be one factor that mediates the protective effect of diet and intestinal bacteria. It's from Academy Research Fellow, Kati Havniva from the University of Eastern Finland, which is almost unpronounceable. We'll have to get Yanni from Finland to pronounce it for us. Haniniva, Haniniva, I'm pretty sure it's Kati Haniniva from the University of Eastern Finland. Direct identification of intestinal bacteria, they say, is a complex process, which is why identifying the metabolites produced by intestinal bacteria may be a more feasible method for analyzing the role of intestinal bacteria in the pathogenesis of diseases, for example, diabetes, than it would be into just figuring out what their beneficial factors are, right? Yeah, I think we've talked so much in the past about how fiber in the diet is beneficial for bacteria, and now we're finding that, oh, not just looking at the bacteria, but this particular substance, the indelopropionic acid, that this is involved, and that it's a signaling molecule somehow with the pancreas, and that all these factors potentially work together to be protective for some individuals, and in the case of people who maybe have diets low in fiber, that protective effect is not there because the bacteria are not protected and given a good environment by fiber in the diet. Right, so within this one study, we pretty much go from eat your fruits and vegetables, okay? Right. To high fiber is good for intestinal bacteria that produce this acid that incites the pancreas, so like the chain, the mechanisms start to unfold now. But the result is still the same. Yes. Eat healthy, everyone. Yeah, we lost exercise, dietary adjustments, whole grain products, fruits and vegetables. Oh, and like sleep, and yeah. Yeah, but we all know, we love french fries. French fries are yummy, potato chips, sugary sodas, I mean, I can't drink them, they're too sugary, but there are all these things that, ah, we love them, I love ordering french fries instead of a salad, but moderation, right? Make sure you have that salad on occasion. Make sure you're working through that and not just always ordering french fries. And it's funny you say that because kind of like, my takeaway from the story a little bit is like, how to hack it, right? It's like, this is like, okay, now we understand the mechanisms as they cascade down and become catalysts for other things. How do we still drink soda and eat french fries and not get diabetes? Like, this is sort of like, once we hack the system, we don't have to just stick to the exercise diet thing anymore, right? We can cut around it somehow. Right. At least at least. And so potentially, this is, you know, this indole-propionic acid is maybe something that can take the place of salads eventually. But that's not good either because this is still correlation. This is, okay, we see these people either converting to diabetes or not converting to diabetes, right? Same kind of profiles, but it's this acid that kind of made the difference, right? So it's still correlational.  There could be other factors. There's also these lipids involved, which they also did see. And the other thing too is, you know, the more we learn about anything. The more there is to learn. Yeah. The more we learn about any of it that we start to find that it's a community of catalysts. It's an ecosystem of things taking place and that you may be able to like, you know, you suggest just add this acid into the mix and not get a result, even though it's essential to it if the rest of those factors, like when we were talking about milk last week, right? In the cancer, right? Like it's still probably a very important part of this process of cancer's developing, but might or obviously isn't a sole operator. So yeah, all of these things are very complicated and that's what's fantastic. The more we drill down on them, the more we can figure out, suss out what individual actors are doing within these grand plays.  No, no, no, that's what you can do. That's what you can do. You at least know where this starts with salad, exercise, fruits, vegetables. That's where it starts. Yes. Eat your fiber today, folks. But in the future, they're gonna live off it. Fiber a day keeps the diabetes away. All right, everybody, moving on forward. Let's talk about sperm and how researchers are creating sperm that will have the power to fight cancer. I cannot wait. Tell me everything. This is just, I love this study. So Mariana Medina Sanchez from the Institute for Integrative Nanosciences in Germany have created this, oh, basically are using sperm as a drug delivery system. And so they're loading up sperm and- Oh, just because they're the best swimmers in the world. Because they got that flagellum. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, they're, yes. Demonstrate a way, Blair. That's flagellum, Barb. I know I haven't raised my hand all semester. Yep, yep, yep, yep. What's your name? Where exactly are they delivering? What are they delivering to? This is designed for diseases, cancers of the genital tract, the urogenital tract. So the female reproductive tract is the site of many cancers, uterine, cervical cancers, endometriosis, inflammatory diseases of the pelvis, lots of things that can be very problematic and it's very difficult to deliver drugs specifically to that area. And so the system- Just tell me about the delivery system. They have put the sperm into a harness and like put a little harness on the body of the sperm and that harness is coated in iron. So it's like a sperm with a backpack on, is what you're saying? Sperm with an iron backpack. Okay, great. And then they have basically got these sperm to, they soak the sperm in the drug. They have an active ingredient. They soak it in the active ingredient and then the drug. And so the sperm just, they soak up all the drug and they've got it attached to themselves all over like a little, you know, a lot of drug all over themselves and then the harness with the iron harness. So they're wearing a drug jumpsuit and an iron backpack. There you go. Yes, yes. And then they use magnets in an external magnetic field to steer the sperm to the site of delivery. Okay, again though. Because iron backpack, magnetic and then the sperm are like swimming and magnets. What is the delivery system? The sperm and then they- No, how is the sperm getting there? Okay, so well the sperm is directed there by the magnets. The magnetic field kind of directs it. The sperm has the propulsion system to drive it forward. And so if you know where a tumor is, say in the cervical wall or in the uterus, you can potentially have the magnets have the sperm swim right up there and specifically target the tumor, swim right up to it. And then the harness that has a quick release on it. And so if when the sperm bumps up against something the tumor, whatever it is, the harness breaks away. It's like a breakaway harness. And then the sperm can swim away on its own. And so then the sperm can reach the tumor, harness is released and then the sperm will burrow into that tumorous tissue because sperms like to keep swimming and burrow into things. And so then they would enter the tissue where the cancerous cells are located and deliver the drug. Okay, so I guess this is what I'm not getting. So the sperm, is it from a donor? Is it from, yeah, so I don't know where you would get sperm. I know, I know where it comes from. It's not artificial sperm. So the sperm is still, it's normal sperm out to do the normal job of sperm. So there's a problem. Pregnant when you're treating someone with this special sperm. Yeah, you're catching the right point there Blair. That is the one problem that they haven't, the hurdle they haven't overcome yet with this drug delivery system. You might get rid of your cancer but you might also get pregnant. So the other thing is I'm surprised that the sperm would, I mean, maybe I shouldn't be but that's sperm will just penetrate anything they run into, like, that's, Yeah, that's just, yeah, it's a bit of a throw. And then they break down after a while. They have a lifespan of a certain amount of time and then they start deteriorating and breaking down. But, They're depressed after a long swim like that.  Well, that'll get up and go. Everybody. Yeah, and with, but they're taking sperm, they're doing, they're outfitting them with the drug jumpsuit and the iron backpack in a lab, in a dish. In a dish. This hasn't been tested in people yet. So it's not like they're giving men supplements that then create them to produce sperm with drug jumpsuits and iron backpacks. Yes, no, there's none of that. No, this is not that. Yet. Not yet, yes. But I mean, the, what's going on, I guess. Now your husband take these. Hello, ladies. Go have a good night and call me in the morning, right? And then make it. Dr. Justin is here to cure what ails you. No. Nope. Yep. I think that was even wild in anything that Kiki said, but I think you just came up with that. Yeah. I did. You're welcome. Yeah. So there are still a few questions about this, but you can read about it yourself on the archive, the River Preprint server archive.org. Titled. I must feel like at the end of it. You just did one of these. This, the study is titled Sperm Hybrid Micromotor for Drug Delivery in the Female Reproductive Tract. AKA Sperm with Jump Suits and Backpacks. Mm-hmm. Sperm. Magnus Fighting Cancer. I think I always picture Sperm with Backpacks. Like parachutes. I think it's from a Woody Allen movie. Yes. Yeah. That it is. I think that's, that's so much. All right. Tell me about electrodynamics. Justin, is that your next story? Yeah, this is crazy. Radio waves, microwaves, light itself. They're all made of electric and magnetic fields. Classical theory of electromagnetism. They completed that theory back in the 60s by it was who, James Clerk Maxwell at the time. And you can even use induced magnetic currents from an electrical, magnetic fields from an electrical current to tell the sperm what to do. Yeah. So this, this goes right along. There you go. So at the time, Maxwell's theory was not thought to be used on sperm, but was still revolutionary. It provided a unified framework to understand electricity, magnetism, even optics. Now, new research led by LSU Department of Physics and Astronomy Assistant Professor Ivan Agulo with colleagues from Universidad de Valencia, Spain is advancing our knowledge of this theory. Recent discoveries have been published in physical review letters. Maxwell's theory displays a remarkable feature here. It remains unaltered under the interchange of electric and magnetic fields when charges and currents are not present. This symmetry is called electromagnetic duality. Amazing. The only thing is, when electric charges exist, magnetic charges have never, while electric charges exist, magnetic charges have never been observed in nature. So while this is a beautiful theory and everything seems to work, one of the fundamental principles has never been seen. So how does that, if magnetic charges don't exist, the symmetry doesn't exist. So one of the underlying fundamental ideas behind this theory doesn't exist. But one of the ideas behind the theory doesn't exist. Yeah, one of the fundamental ideas behind the theory that seems to work just fine for everything that we've used it for, which is everything that you're hearing me seeing this show, every technology, your every bit of electricity that's running around and you know, some of these days, it's all based on something that may not exist. So this all works, but now we don't know why. Well, we haven't ever known why. We haven't ever known why. We thought we knew. Turns out, we don't know anything. We've never been able to prove it. And physicists have been motivated to search for these charges, magnetic charges, magnetic monopoles, whatever. Nobody has been successful. And Agulo and his colleagues may have discovered why we have been successful. Quoty voice. Gravity spoils the symmetry. Regardless of whether magnetic monopoles exist or not, this is shocking. The bottom line is that symmetry cannot exist in our universe at the fundamental level because gravity is everywhere. Darn gravity. That thing that we know, but don't get. Gravity? Right now, this is another thing. Gravity exists, but how does gravity work? That we also don't know, but it does your gravity together with quantum effects, disrupts the electric magnetic duality or symmetry of the electromagnetic field. Agulo and colleagues discovered this by looking at previous theories that illustrate this phenomenon among other types of particles in the universe called fermions and applied it to photons in electromagnetic fields. We have been able to write the theory of the electromagnetic field in a way that very much resembles the theory of pheromones. Pheromions. Pheromions, sorry. And prove this absence of symmetry by using powerful techniques that were developed by fermions. This new discovery challenges assumptions that could impact other research, including, that's the drum rolly sound, the birth of the universe. Ooh. Whoa. Taking it all the way back. That's the Big Bang. Satellites collect data from radiation emitted from the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background. This radiation contains valuable information about the history of the universe that we base the length of the age of the universe on and expanding the universe, those lights and all these things. By measuring CMB, we get precise information on how the Big Bang happened. Scientists analyzing this data have assumed that the polarization of photons and the cosmic microwave background is not affected by the gravitational field in the universe, which is true only if electromagnetic symmetry exists. However, since this new finding suggests that the symmetry does not exist at the fundamental level, the polarization of the CMB, or cosmic microwave background, can change throughout cosmic evolution. Da, da, da. Scientists may need to take this into consideration in analyzing the data and focus the goal is new. Current research is on how much this new effect actually is. So right now, there's not being called into question, but there's an asterisk, ding, right there on the age of the universe and the timing of the Big Bang if all the data in needs to be adjusted. So what we thought was a constant is not a constant, so... Right. And, well, I mean, we do pretty well, we do pretty well just looking at distant galaxies and that's sort of the number we have for the age for the age of the known universe, but pinpointing how much further back in time the Big Bang took place if there is adjustments over, you know, many, many, many billions of years that, you know, that 5%, 10%, 20%, like these numbers can make a very large shift over that kind of timeframe. So, exciting, really, fantastically exciting. This means we're gonna have more to talk about in the future. I love the unsettled question that we thought was settled because it's like, oh, no longer need to talk about the age of the universe, that one's, it's just a number that's just textbook reading. We won't cover that here on This Week in Science anymore. And then, oh, that's going to be future stories. Yeah, but, you know, this is one of those things that I think is, even though this new idea has come out, you know, and they've got maths underlying this determination, you know, there have been lots of maths underlying other determinations about gravity and our universe and different hypotheses on how things work the way that they do in physics, right? How does certain phenomena work? And so I think what this is going to do more so is it's going to really fire up the debate about symmetry and especially in this electromagnetic instance. And if nothing else, we will see more conversations come out of it. Yeah, and I would also, it's not, it's not debate also for the, you know, it's not debate in terms of, well, I believe this, but you believe that. So it's going to be more maths. It's going to be reviewing maths, testing it differently. What are my assumptions? What are your assumptions? Because assumptions make an A-S-S out of you and me. Right. But so science is all about getting new information and adjusting what we know, right? And the things that are not fine will not accept new information and refuse to adjust, right? That's what makes science different. That's what makes science great, is the adjustment and the conversation. And I think it's also, it's also important, like in this study or in this research, they weren't setting out to just prove the age of the universe, you know? They were chasing, they were chasing the maths on a particular subject and they came to a conclusion that by its existence challenges other data sets. Yep. Those data sets may need a good shaking up, you know? We all need to shake up our data sets from time to time. Yeah, shake up your data set. What that means is take a look at your, take a look at it again, reassess, make sure that you are looking at things with a clear perspective. Yeah, yeah. And as we try to look at things with a clear perspective, you know, it gets harder to see things clearly as you get older, right? Brain gets tired, you've seen too many things, had too much experience.  No, wait, I don't want to die.  This show just got really dark all of a sudden. I don't want to die. I hope this is a segue, otherwise... It is a segue, that's what I'm working on right now. So, you know, modern technology, scientists are working on, you know, looking for factors in the blood of young mice to determine, you know, whether or not they're going to keep old mice fresh and... Old mice, does your mice get old in the stale? Do you want to make your old mice fresh and new again? Yeah, give it a young mouse blood transfusion, right? That's right, there we go. So, we've talked about that before on the show, and this study is another one right along that vein, but it also, it takes our other favorite, which is fecal transplants. What's it right in there? Except it's not fecal transplants, it's fish eating the poo of younger fish. Woo! Yes. Yes, so this is another that was posted to the bio archive pre-print server, so it still needs yet to be reviewed, but this study out of the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Aging in Cologne, Germany has looked at fish and looked at a particular species, Nothobranches furseri, the turquoise killy fish, and they determined these fish live in ephemeral ponds, those are ponds that pop up during the rainy season in Mozambican Zimbabwe, and these fish will eat, they eat whatever's around, and so they did a transplant of gut microbes from six-week-old killy fish into middle-aged nine-week-old fish, and they had also cleared out the natural flora of the middle-aged fish with antibiotics, and then checked to see what happened, and so these transplanted microbes recolonize the guts of the fish, and the microbiomes of the middle-aged fish turned into the microbiomes of the six-week-old fish, so in effect they had this really young gut, and the fish lived longer, huh? Yeah, so they, and their longevity increased by 41% compared to fish that had not been exposed to the microbes. Okay, so I know what's next.  Right. Introducing Dr. Justin's not a real doctor, new line of baby poo pills. Baby poo pills. Yeah, 41% longer life as seen in different species. Yeah, and so they found that the older fish, when they did this experiment in reverse, the microbiota from the older fish did not affect the lifespans of the younger fish at all, so unlike what we've seen in the blood experiments where blood from old mice actually affects the metabolic profile of younger mice, this is not what happened, so in the older poo, the older gut microbes, didn't affect longevity at all. And if I could speculate a little bit. Yes. I bet ya, I bet ya, those younger fish have a virus load that was doing proper filtering, and that probably didn't affect it. Oh, like the story from last week. That's what I would speculate. No, that was from a long time ago, but that's what I would speculate. Yeah, I don't know if it's a viral, we don't know if it's a viral load, but the researchers think that it has to do with the immune system, and their guess is that as you age, your immune system gets kind of tired. This is why as you get older, allergies tend to be less severe as than when you're young. You don't have as severe reactions to why colds and flus can be more dangerous. So what they think is that the harmful microbes when you're older can outcompete the good microbes and by getting a microbiome transplant, it could have reset the microbiome of the middle-aged fish. And so what you would expect is that if it's an immune system thing that over time, the middle-aged fish microbiome would deteriorate to a more or a population that represents less beneficial bacteria.  There we go. Oh, to be young, it just takes the blood and the guts. Oh, to be young and also a fish. And also be a fish, I know. Yeah, all right, we should talk to our friend who did the microbiome transplant. Josiah. Josiah, we should talk to Mr. Zainer and see how old his friend was. Oh yeah. I think they were in college together, though. I think it's probably at the same age as you. Yeah, so that wouldn't have an effect. All right, Blair, you have a big story. Do you wanna talk about aliens that live in the ocean? Mm-hmm. I'm talking about octopuses, sorry. They're not aliens, but they're like aliens because they do so many things in such weird ways. It seems like they were just dropped off here. It's so unusual. And the list of ways that they are so unusual is starting to stack up to a ridiculous degree. They're weird camouflage. The fact they have nine brains.  They can fit through anything larger than their beak. They're just bizarre animals. But on top of this, now recent research. Donuts. Mm, octopus brain. So research looking at the RNA editing of cephalopods is bonkers. So a few years ago, actually, I reported on the show about cephalopods that were going through RNA editing while in cold water. So this is essentially some sort of Lamarckian-esque evolution happening where they were changing elements of themselves, changing the coding of proteins in real time within individuals. From that discovery back in 2012, people have started looking in closer and closer at these oddballs of the natural world and their DNA and RNA processes. So this new study, which is coming out of Woods Hole in Massachusetts, suggests that the evolutionary path to neural sophistication, so the way they got so smart includes a huge amount of RNA editing. What I say huge amount, I mean, in our bodies, a fraction of 1% of our RNA have recoding events, have events where they change, where they switch out an ASC, a GRT, they don't follow the DNA so that they edit, they essentially change the way the protein is formed. That happens less than 1% of the time that RNAs are coding. In these cephalopods, over 60% of RNA transcription 60% of RNA transcriptions are recoded by editing. What does this mean? It means they're gonna outlast every other living life form on this planet and actually take over. It means they can adapt to anything. We already know they're on the hole doing pretty darn well in the face of climate change and ocean acidification. We already know they've found a lot of ways to survive in extreme environments and now they can edit themselves in real time to face new challenges. So cephalopods, they got under control. So they looked specifically in this study at three smart, quote unquote cephalopods species, two octopuses and one cuttlefish after they had done the editing in a squid brain. So now they were looking at squids, cuttlefish and octopus. These are called colloids. So they're the soft-bodied cephalopods. So that does not include nautilus, basically. Poor nautilus left out. I know. But so these guys are considered to be extremely smart and now we're thinking that that's how. But what's especially interesting is that this has happened at the expense of what we consider to be normal evolution. So when you have an animal rewriting DNA, more than half of the time, that's the norm, that means that inherited traits are often dwarfed by these edits. So it's not DNA, they're editing, they're editing RNA. Right, but the RNA is what then makes proteins. So even though they're inheriting expression. Right, so they're inheriting certain things in their genes, but those genes are not actually dictating what happens in their body because there's this editing that happens in between. And so they're saying that this is actually affecting, this is impacting the effectiveness of evolution in cephalopods. And so instead of being an organism that mutates via evolution or changes via evolution and then occasionally has editing events, it's completely the other way around. So it's really, really slow genomic evolution and everything else is changing. Yes. But this is where the epigenetic memory thing can kind of come in. Because are the options for the changes based on environment or however the RNA editing is taking place, is that inherited? Is that something, is that like a toolbox that's- Good question. So because it's happening at the RNA level? Pull that one out. If you see that, this one goes in its place. So because it's happening at the RNA level, it shouldn't be inherited. Mm-hmm. Because it's happening at the RNA level, it's not happening in the DNA. The DNA is what's passed on to future generations. So this is only happening. So basically the little zipper RNA is coming along the double helix and copying what it sees and saying, okay, there's an A. Okay, there's a G. Okay, there's an A. Okay, there's a T. And then, okay, here's a U. Okay, here's a T. And then, oh, I see an A, but you know what? Screw that. I'm gonna put an I in here instead. Okay, moving on, right? But what triggers, this is the thing though, what triggers, and it's usually an environmental factor of some sort, that triggers the, as you said, screw it. And having that big of a, that flexible of a toolbox is obviously inherited, otherwise it would have just seen it in one, right? So this is an abolition, like, this is an A. Overall, to answer your question, this is overall in response to temperature changes. So it is when the environment is not what they are normally adapted to, this is how they adjust to new temperatures. And so this is what the study back in 2012 found was that these, I think it was an octopus that was living in either it was Arctic or Antarctic waters, but it was at a pole. It was ridiculously cold. This octopus should not have been able to live there at all, but it was doing it via RNA editing. And that's what kind of spurned this whole study. But it's interesting because this is something that as far as we know, unprecedented in biology. As the research paper said, this goes directly against the quote, central dogma of evolution. So it's bizarre. Will we see it in other groups of animals? I don't know. My money's kind of on no because cephalopods are real weird. Like I got, like I started with, they are so unusual. We just found out recently that they might actually be colorblind even though they use color to signal and signaling. And so they're using the halo effect around their oddly shaped pupils to detect changes in color. Another bizarre thing. Have we seen that anywhere else in the animal kingdom? Absolutely not. Actually, we have seen that. We have seen that in the human kingdom when they first invented a way to see TV in color. There were these screens you would put in front of the television, the black and white television that would assign colors to things, although it wasn't always. Well, as humans are good at engineering things that are not as they are, but yes, that is the first time we've seen it in the natural world in animals. So cephalopods, man, they're just, they're going about it a different way and they'll be here when we're all gone. I feel like I've long ago when one of the early episodes of TWIS predicted that the cephalopods would eventually inherit the Earth. Mm-hmm. It's possible.  It's going to be jellyfish cockroaches and cephalopods. That's what it'll be. Yeah, and you know, it's so funny. I was at a soiree for NOAA for the National Oceanographic Atmospheric Association in the Bay Area. They had an octopus soiree, which is how I actually heard about this press release originally. And there was an octopus researcher who spoke and she said octopuses are going to outlive us all. Yeah, there we go. That's super exciting. We'll be outlived by the octopuses, mate. Well, you know, not if we can get our hands on those fecal transplants and other things. Yeah, and I get my singularity. Where's my robot? Where's my singularity, right? Where can I download my brain? Just after the youngest child is out of diapers. Final stories for the evening. There are crazy parasites in Hawaii.  It's been in Hawaii before, but it usually doesn't cause that many cases. But in the last few months, there have been six cases that popped up. This doesn't make it an epidemic necessarily, but it's a parasite of concern. And the question here, you know, is this, what's going on? Why is this particular parasite starting to expand and become dangerous, the problem with it? And it's also spreading to places like Georgia or no, not Georgia, Oklahoma, various states around the country. There have been instances of this rat lung worm caused by this roundworm. The roundworm, Angiostrongilus cantanensis can be contracted basically by eating slug larva or residue left by slugs.  So you want to make sure. Or eating slugs. Yeah, so you want to make sure. It's like the main subsistence of being on Hawaii. Exactly. So you want to make sure things are washed really well. Make sure things are very, very clean and washed. And make sure you're drinking clean water. So this infection has been introduced to North America through globalization. So it is one of the things as people have thought it's gotten to the Americas through ship ballasts, which we know is a big issue for the spread of many things. How is this still a problem? Bellas. I know, we've had this conversation, yes. So globalization is a big cause of its spread. And then also climate change is making environments better for it to survive and be passed along. And then finally, one of the, this story was sent to me by Michael McThany, actually sent to TWIS on Twitter by Michael McThany. Crabs in trees. What? Tree crabs. Tree crabs, yes. So this is Kenny Maranjandu. And it was found in the forests of the Western Ghats in South India. And it's named after the Kani, a tribal community who first noticed the crabs. And Maranjandu is the local term for tree crab. So basically the Kani tree crab. And so these long leg crabs were first reported in 2014, but then a researcher from the University of Kerala was like, I need to go look for these. Let's go actually find them as opposed to hearing these anecdotal stories. So they tracked the tree crabs down and have just published in the Journal of Crestation Biology about these crabs. These wonderful tree crabs that have long legs, a distinct hard outer shell, and they can get a really, they live in water-filled hollows of tall evergreen and deciduous trees. And the Kani who look for them and will probably eat them, detect their presence by looking for air bubbles coming out of the hollows of trees. Yeah, but they're cute dark colored little crabs. And I mean, seriously, watch out for coconuts and crabs, falling coconuts, falling crabs. Pretty cool, tree crabs. Oh gosh, they look spidery. They do look spidery, right? Well, crabs and spiders are pretty closely related, right? Yeah, exactly, they're very related. They're cute little crabs, cute little tree crabs. They're not that big because your hand, maybe. Cute. You don't like it? You don't want the, Claire, I thought you would love the tree crab. I love the tree crab, being a tree crab. Okay, be the tree crab, love the tree crab. Yeah, crabs and trees, tree crabs. There we go. The habitat, it's very restricted in its habitat, so anytime you have an organism that's restricted in its habitat, you have to think about the ecosystem and threats to that ecosystem. The existence of these crabs is reliant on rainwater that falls and collects in the tree hollows. And so if rain goes away, then the crabs themselves will have a hard time existing in the trees. What was your last story, Justin? My last story is about a pistol shrimp or snapping shrimp. There's a new one discovered. These types of shrimp have the ability to generate a substantial amount of sonic energy. Oh, I love those. By closing the enlarged claw, one of its, it has one enlarged claw, at a rapid speed, the shrimp creates a high-pressure cavitation bubble, the implosion, which salts in one of the loudest sounds in the ocean, strong enough to stun or even kill a small fish. This particular one found off the Pacific Coast Panama has extremely pink enlarged claw. And the scientist that discovered this particular shrimp also has a favorite band. Quoting voice, I've been listening to Pink Floyd since the wall was released in 1979. I was 14 years old. I've seen them play live several times since, including the Hyde Park reunion gig before live eight in 2005. The description of this new species of pistol shrimp was the perfect opportunity to finally give a nod to my favorite band, says Arthur Enker, University of Federal Geograe System, Brazil, I think is at the, yeah. And also Kirsten Hultgen, Seattle University and Sammy DeGrave, Oxford University Museum of Natural History, they all. Oh, no, it's DeGrave. Sorry, it's DeGrave. Oxford University Museum of Natural History who's a lifelong Pink Floyd fan. So they gave the name, Sinalophias. Pink Floyd. Sinalphias Pink Floydia. Sinalphias Pink Floydie. Pink Floydie, Sinalphias Pink Floydie. Sinalphias. I love it. What was it a week or two ago? We were talking about David Attenborough getting yet another species. Finally one for Pink Floyd. Finally, Bout Time. How's no one named a shrimp after Pink Floyd yet?  It's the first crustacean, but they have other stuff named after him. There's a Danza fly that's named Umaguma. Umaguma. That's fantastic. Oh, when pop culture comes in, transects intersects with science. I mean, what's the point of finding new species if you can't name them silly things? Right? I feel like a lot of these cases, they're like, well, I named one after my advisor and I named one after my wife and I named one after my son and I named one after my university. Pink Floyd? Yeah, Pink Floyd. Yeah, Pink Floyd. This guy found, the guy who discovered the tiniest snake ever discovered, named it after his wife. Which, you know, it sounds sweet and endearing until you find out he named, he had named 28 other critters before that. I was like, what took you so long? Yeah. What were the 28? Who were the 20? The next thing. You got around to your wife. The next thing you find, you'll be naming that after the couch you'll be sleeping on. Yeah. Well, it is time for us to wrap up this show and I know Justin has a couch to sleep on. So I would like to remind everyone once again, enjoy this evening. It's Yuri's night. 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This Week in Science. Science. Science. I've got a laundry list of items I want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought and I'll try to answer any question you've got. The help can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour a week. This Week in Science is coming your way. You better just listen to what we say and if you learn anything from the words that we've said then please just remember it's all in your head. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This week in science, this week in science, this week in science, this week in science. I unmute myself from the dancing muting and the desire after show. Time for the after show. Stick around if you'd like to. This is not the show anymore. This is where we're just hanging out. I don't know how long we're gonna hang out, but this is just the part where we hang out. And we talk to each other sometimes, every once in a while. Except Blair is tired because she had a big dinner last night. I had, it was the second night of Passover, so I had a Passover Seder. Big Passover Seder. 20 people. That's a lot. 20 people is a lot. Cooking a lot of food, but also cooking a lot of very particular food. Yes. I had Taco Tuesday. That was nice. I'm friends over for Taco Tuesday. That was nice. I like Taco Tuesday. Taco Tuesday. We have to book flights for Philadelphia, don't we? Yeah, I'm not gonna book them yet though.  But that's exciting. Yeah, I mean, I've been like contacted by them once in the last couple of months because they're like, oh, we're gonna start our marketing stuff. Can you send us some stuff? And I was like, okay. But then I haven't heard from them since then really. So, you know, the hedge on the side of, we're gonna tell people about it, but I'm not gonna buy any tickets until. Really sure. I'm really sure. I'm pretty sure. Good call. Yeah.  So, May. That's soon. How is that so soon? I know. That's what I was saying. Why is this year going so fast? It's going so fast. I literally just started writing 2017 on things. And now it's April. Halfway through April. It's not even just April, it's mid-April. I know. I really don't like this phenomena wherein time goes faster the older you get. I do not like it at all. I do feel like last year moved a lot slower. Yeah. I like it. It's crazy. I think it's a relation to how busy you are, right? Mm-hmm. I guess that's things you have to do. I guess I don't have a lot of stuff to do. I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what. Yeah, how's your year going, Justin? How's your year? I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what.  When you encounter something new, it's not routine. It's not the end out of the day. It's not the busy, busy process of doing X, Y, Z task. That's what this show does. This show slows down time, because every week, I'm encountering. That's true, actually, yeah. When I'm reading over the stories, when I'm getting prepped for the show, it's being present, right? Yeah, it's being noticed. But it's also with really new material every week. And I hope on some level that listening to the show has the same effect. Throwing something into the diet that's not just a formula of media consumption, this is the setup to the joke. This is, it's gonna have a conclusion. Oh, there's the conclusion to the show, whatever it is. The day that you spend doing maybe slightly different each day, but largely the same processes at work. It's time to do this. The alarm goes off. It's time to wake up. You have this many minutes to get ready. All of that, for me, slows down completely when getting ready for this show. And reading stuff I never would have encountered throughout my normal week and haven't seen anywhere else. And I really sincerely hope that some of that effect translates to the audience, that they slow down time a little bit while listening to this one hour. This one hour, this one hour of programming. Programming that sometimes drifts into two. That by encountering new information, new stories, finding out more about this world we live in, that that helps slow down other people's journey as well. The twist meditation. Yeah, so how's your daughter? She was tough. She was bloodied. Seriously, not her tears. Much of her time. Yeah, I... Not yours, Blair. Seriously, no tears. She did a great job of being calm the whole time that we were doing the stitches and stuff. She was playing right up to it. And then when she finally didn't have to sit still anymore was a bundle of energy that was running around and playing again. That's great. What a truer. Didn't faze her at all. It's almost as if women are really good at handling pain. There was one moment like after... The child is the resilience of child. She had to go potty. She hadn't told anybody she had to go potty until we were done. She's like, okay, now I gotta go potty. So it's the first thing we did after stitches. And she caught the reflection in the mirror and she had, because they were kept cleaning wounds that there was sort of blood splatter all over.  Like I'm freaky. Blood. I'm like, yeah, totally. I love that. But sight of her own blood, she's totally unfazed by anything. And I already knew she was a pretty brave kid. But this was definitely the biggest test of that I've seen and flying colors. I'm very proud. Awesome. Have you seen the Thor Ragnarok trailer? Oh yeah. How many people are talking to me about that? I haven't seen it yet. Oh God, I can't wait to see it. I got tagged by that. I did that. Yeah. I couldn't help it. Why? Is Justin in it? It's the only one. Justin's in it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to find the image. There he is. I gotta find the image so that I can... There you go. There you go. There you go. Jeff Goldblum is in it? Possibly my actual biological father. Is in it. And therefore, everybody was suggesting that I should... Telling me that I've gone cray, basically, I guess. Support some cray hair. Jeff Goldblum is in Thor.  Thorn it. Oh yeah. He's like the centerpiece of it. Hold on. I'm gonna find this. I'm gonna find a picture so that you can... Are you watching it? Yes. Are you watching it? Yeah. Oh, there it is. Come on. There it is. Pause. Okay. There we go. Here we go. So we will... I'm not showing the whole trailer, but here we go. You need to start wearing gray hair and lower lid eyeliner. Lower lid eyeliner. That one's... That one I've got already. You've got a little lower lid eyeliner and then there's the blue chin stripe. We gotta... We've got gray hair now. So you have to work on that, Justin. Yeah. Stop. Start dyeing your hair. Oh, a second. Oh, there it is. Look, there will come a day. There will come a day that I figure... I don't know. I might decide to dye it. I have yet to do this. Dye it. Change your diet. How is Loki still alive? This doesn't make any sense. I know. I need to go back and watch. How is an immortal still alive? Immortals are immortal. I love it. Every time there's like a new movie in a series, it makes me go back and watch the other one again, because you have to go watch the other ones so you know what's going on in the new one. Things happen. Like memory loss. He's a friend from work. I know. Oh, I know him. He's a friend from work. Janescu, I do need a throne. I should replace this shoddy chair that I've got. Oh, you want the throne? I can't wait for that. It looks amazing. Great. He's going to need like that, a cloak, a cool coat. Yeah, so you know what? Your Halloween costume is now, Justin. It's pirate. It's always pirate. You've just brought in the gray. It's always just pirate.  The pirate. No. Like one of your children can be Loki.  That'd be great. A little tin foil. So it can be Thor. Yeah. Great. Yeah. Yeah, Whiskey Renegade Marvel's doing pretty well for themselves in the movie, in the movie Bidness. They certainly are. OK, I'm going to exit stage left. Yeah, is there anything else we need to talk about before you exit? Are we going to exit? Everything's good. I think so. Under control. No news? Everything is under control, except for the fact that nothing is under control. Does our producer have any notes for us? That's after. We're going to have to do an after the after show. We'll go for that one. I don't have any notes. So for this great. Oh, in that case, say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night, Kiki. Good night, Kiki. Good night, Kiki. Wait, what did I say? What did you say? Say good night. Is this a say? Good night, Kiki. No, no. It's supposed to be say it. Last time we said it. No, good night. And then I said it was supposed to be. Kiki, on the show that you weren't here. Oh, no, no. I'm right. You're wrong. We just messed up last week. No, it was say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. Say good night, Justin. And then one, two, three. Good night, Kiki. And then you would say good night. And then it'd be over. See? That's what we were supposed to do. Start over. Start over. Try it again. We'll fix it in post. OK, you do it. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night, Kiki. Aw, good night, everybody. Thanks, everyone, for watching. Sorry it's such a short after show. We've got some tired blariness going on. We've got some tired people. But we will be back next week. We hope you have a wonderful intervening week. For those of you who are hunting for Easter eggs this weekend, I hope you find them. That's great. There you go. We'll see you next week. Tell your friends about twists. Bye. Or just hit the button, Kiki.