shiny shiny shiny we are here so shiny we are shiny she shiny science shiny people shiny happy bag not done okay with this is the twist podcast you do know we're live oh what we're what with who for how much hi everybody we're here to do the twist podcast so I think we'll start that now it's live with ads so I'll give you twitchers and others who are potentially watching watching on ad-generated platforms I'll just say look at my my hair is going frizzy I'm just giving you a moment before I actually are we stalling are we stalling for them to get that by now they've got to be done with whatever ads exist they're done with whatever ads we're in in existence thank you so much for putting up with our kind sponsors how do you say it I don't know the pre-roll wrong hat for 30 minutes don't worry about it but if people are here right now they're here right now to see this week in science on our live broadcast of the podcast that we do every week on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. or maybe a starting a couple of minutes later plus 30 seconds for pre-roll ads if that happens on the platform in which you are watching now we are going to start the podcast which is not the podcast but the broadcast of the podcast the podcast is going to be edited from the broadcast which we're going to do right now starting in three two this is twist this week in science episode number 830 recorded on Wednesday June 23rd 2021 will the aliens find us first hey everyone I am Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show we will fill your heads with butterflies birds and mice but first disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer infrastructure to brick and mortar backbone upon which the modern world depends to carry the weight of our fast-evolving civilization constructed from the ingenuity of human engineering and design that functional visual manifestation of Earth's one sentient being reimagining the surface of one habitable planet in our solar system and as it turns out our infrastructure is crumbling not entirely crumbling not all at once in many places the infrastructure might actually be brand new but everything we build has a shelf life a number of years before nature reclaims the material we build with and returns them to the earth every crack in a foundation every dusting of rust on exposed bit of rebar along every mile of road from sea to shining sea and in every pothole along the way there are signs that nature remains relentless and it's push for entropy and our best response so far has been cement cement is most widely consumed material globally it is the industry itself accounts for 8% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions so as the politicians decide how best to spend infrastructure dollars let us not overlook where those dollars could be best spent research science I know you're surprised that that's the answer I came up with but research science is where we should be putting our dollars Angie Teresa Acano at the McCormick School of Engineering is a research scientist who is working on ways to make cement stronger longer lasting and better for the environment she is an example of what we actually need is an integral part of infrastructure planning material research that can lead to lower maintenance costs lower greenhouse gas emissions and taller structures by 2050 the United Nations predicts two-thirds of the world's population will be concentrated in cities so either we build up or we pave the rain forest and roads we could afford every good thing humanity deserves if we could just spend less maintaining roads if you don't know the national average is twenty five thousand four hundred and seventy four dollars in transportation spending per mile per lane of road and hey who knows with all the money we save by funding research that goes on to save us money we might be able to spend even more money on research and the more money we spend on research the more we will have of this week in science coming up next I've got the kind of mind I can't get enough I want to learn 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 science to you Kiki and Blair's gone again man Blair is out again for another evening and we do wish her well we do we do but just so you know it's gonna be Justin's animal corner today I'm taking it over Justin's hold up in the animal corner Justin's animal corner with Justin we'll see what Justin's animal corner gets up to probably not as many invertebrate stories as Blair but we'll see I didn't want to I didn't want to you know I didn't want to make her mad at me I want to never make never make the Blair mad oh okay everyone this is this week in science good science to you all and thank you for joining us for another week of fun filled science discussion we have all sorts of amazing stories for you this week I'm going to be talking about alien planets some quantum stand stills magnetic birds and mice and brains and Justin what did you bring I've got a retro viral communication tiny t-rex bird brain or skull not a brain just the skull uh ignoring covid natural peril uh record setting butterflies toxinoplasmic hyenas and why not to shake hands with your veterinarian oh okay I will keep that in mind next time I have to go to the veterinarian after you tell me that story in just a little bit for those of you who are just joining us and haven't done so before just understand that you can subscribe to this week in science on youtube on facebook on twitch and on instagram and on twitter and we are also a podcast on all the places where podcasts are found so look for this week in science our website is twist.org all right ready for science Justin let's bring it okay let's start by taking a nice look at the earth from the perspective of other stars that's a new thing to do researchers have previously tried to figure out how the earth might look from other planets from other places in the universe from the perspective of aliens that might be gazing out at the stars and trying to figure out if they are the only life in this universe previously though scientists had looked at the stars been like nope those stars there's only a few that would be able to take a good look at the earth and now none of them probably have earth like planets or life producing planets on them so we're we're all good no big deal however some new researchers decided to cast a different kind of gaze around the universe and they reported in nature this week their work that took a look at not just the perspective from the stars but from the perspective of stars that would be in the plane of our galactic orbit so where our solar system orbits around the Milky Way and how our planet is orbitally inclined around our sun how our solar system is inclined to think like earth humans gazing out at the stars and using the Kepler space telescope to get ideas of what exoplanets might be transiting distant stars because because my initial thought was well gosh isn't it just like if we can see a star they can see us that's right it's just solved it but the the way that we find these other planets out there is they have to go kind of like across in front of their staff pass in front of their sun yes and that's when we get the little dimming blip effect so what we're looking for where we want us it's the stars that we can see when the sun is at our back exactly so and it's not just when the sun is at our back but also when we are in the right plane of viewing for distant stars so not all stars are going to be looking at us at the right potential time defend you know if there is a star gazing down at us you know all these ups and downs are relative because the angle has to be right the angle has to be exactly that we're looking at it yeah yeah so these researchers have found approximately 2,000 stars some 1715 of them have or are in the right position to have spotted the earth in the last 5,000 years in the next 5,000 years they estimate they've they've found another 319 stars that might be able to take earth in as a view and of those 2,000 ish stars that might be peeking at the earth within the plus or minus 10,000 years surrounding our here and now 75 stars within about 30 parsecs have already been potentially swept past by our radio waves all of our noisy radio and tv emanations that we've been broadcasting to each other have also broadcast out into space and some 75 stars may have already heard us we can take that number down a little bit further and there are around 25 stars that could possibly have a view of us right now and be able to see us there are some stars do you remember the discovery of the trappist solar system yeah that really weird tiny planet with the lots of them and tight really a tight uh were there could have been multiple how about a goldilocks range yeah multiple goldilocks planets potentially in that in that uh system and in about 1600 years the trappist one system will be able to view earth for a total of about 2300 years so there will be it's a long time from now but 2300 years in which they could put any life in the trappist trappist system gazing out could potentially view us if we're still around now there's another star though but even if we are there's there's still that little that little hiccup that we we're actually gonna seem to be getting quieter we don't we're not broadcasting we're still doing radio for now but a lot of radio it's actually digital right television is that blip is gone a little bit yeah it is uh we can get to a point where we're not broadcasting uh anymore we might but we still we still have radio waves to some degree but um researchers though are they've said maybe the researchers involved in this have said maybe we should think about uh putting a transiting mega structure in place for the trappist system to observe in the year 3663 and that if we put a instead of just our planet earth if we have a transiting mega structure that's larger than earth it'll really dim the light of the sun and get the attention of any aliens in the trappist system now that's if we want to go down the sci-fi route and make contact and you know we'll see where we are in some 1600 years as to whether that's something that's interesting to humanity but it's an interesting new way of considering the universe around us and any potential life that might also be looking into the stars and what they'd be able to see and win this is what we're doing we've found exoplanets now who else might be doing this too it's an intriguing question i suppose it is intriguing and this gets you know and then it dives into deeper questions of you know who are we going to choose to make contact are we going to choose to hide what are we going to do and there are many people with many different opinions on this earth so it's a big question for humanity as as we reach out into the stars but as we're reaching out just and i think you have i think your next story had something to do without the reaching in maybe little tiny things inside of us reaching out to talk to us so yeah this is a pretty interesting story uh national institutes of health scientists and their collaborators have identified an internal communication network in mammals that may regulate tissue repair and inflammation providing new insights on how uh researchers can tackle diseases such as obesity inflammatory skin disorders these sorts of things uh this research is published in cell so there are billions of organisms living on body surfaces and the skin of animals collectively we refer to this as our microbiota they communicate with each other and their host immune system and a sophisticated network according to the study viruses integrated into the host genome these are remnants of previous infection this is what we're talking about when we're talking about endogenous retroviruses these these virus remnants in our dna can control how host immune system and microbiota interact and ultimately affect the response to tissue repair and antimicrobial defenses so uh retroviruses in your dna aren't a a casual component they can compose or comprise as much as 10 of all of your genes the newly discovered role of these retroviruses adds to a sort of long standing uh or a building i guess it's not really that long standing i guess we since we've started this uh show it feels like it's been going on quite a long time but it's been basically during the life of this show that this type of research has even uh come to light so they say uh here this is from the authors together our results support the idea that mammals may have co-opted their endogenous viromes as a means to communicate with their microbiota resulting in a multi kingdom dialogue that controls both immunity and inflammation this is uh not a fly by study by any means these are scientists uh from nih's national institute of allergen infectious diseases they led the project they had collaborators from the national institute of health center for human immunology the national cancer institute stanford university scripts research in california university of pennsylvania oxford uh university oxford the francis quick institute in england were all part of the uh collaborators on this project wow yeah huge yeah so building on the series of studies over the past decades showing that the microbiota broadly promote immune protection this is and as well as some human behavior aspects to it and everything like we've been talking been listening to this show for a while you've heard is going on and on about microbiota the scientists and collaborators tried to do that thing the scientists do they asked the question why they looked for the mechanism using uh staflokakis epidermidis epidermidis uh a common skin bacterium with known helpful and harmful features as a study model in laboratory and mouse experiments the models help them identify the role of skin cells uh care keratinocytes keratin oocytes and the dodgenus retroviruses in communication between microbiota and skin immune system this is just like i mean we're we kind of we know that something's going on so it shouldn't be like wow this is this communication is taking place uh through this mechanism that we wouldn't have imagined but of course that's always sort of the case keratinocytes are the primary interface between the host and microbiota this their study showed that acid epidermidis triggered an antiviral response and the keratinocytes and that finding led them to discover that the retroviruses coordinate responses to the microbiota that stimulate then the immune system mouse model also showed that a high fat diet triggers an inflammatory immune response to the acid epidermidis that can be controlled by providing an antiretroviral treatment yeah so that means there's a way to block the communication of the retrovirus from driving an inflammatory response caused by microbes who are under high fat conditions that would then be uh that but that is just absolutely mind boggling i mean i don't know how i couldn't even give you a guesstimate on the number of diseases that are inflammatory response diseases i i just feel like the there are so many and diseases that we didn't think were inflammatory diseases are coming to light that they are inflammatory diseases so or or has an inflammatory aspect yeah yes yeah it's somewhere it's like that there's a retrovirus in the dna from all viruses like yeah we've got something for that i don't know if you wanted to well you know just send it i'm just gonna go send an inflammatory response yeah yeah it's it's really amazing though i mean it does make sense that we would have these endogenous uh systems where our body would be communicating with the microbiome with the microbes that are on and in us to coexist that our body and those microbes have been evolving together for a very long time and these systems have yeah for and for the longest time the retroviruses in our deal we thought was just you know oops oh well it's there it doesn't do anything obviously we're not producing virus off of it but it could be helping us deal with microbes yeah yes so then it's the whole thing where microbes can swap you know some genetic DNA that they incorporate and of course that seems like well if you're an amoeba you might be able to do that but humans we're so no this is we've been doing this to get this evolved this this has been part of that process we've been swapping genes so that we could get to where we are and yeah everybody everybody's swapping DNA that's that's that's the way it goes these days except for those moments when everything is at a complete standstill but i really when you think about that does that ever happen no no i mean even when you look at the tiniest microscopic aspects of the universe go down to that quantum level it's vibrating everything's moving constantly moving moving moving but researchers have been trying to over time bring matter to a standstill and we have super cooled various atoms things at the atomic scale we've been able to use magnets and all sorts of energy really to reduce that movement and so when we think about what temperature is temperature is a measurement of movement it's an energy of it's a measure of energy in a system and temperature is really like this this difference this differential between things but researchers have been able to get atoms down to super small scale super small nano kelvin love levels and when they get down there to this all this point of almost not moving anymore this is called the emotional ground state now researchers at mit and other organizations have used LIGO the laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory not to observe gravitational waves but to create a functional cooled large object basically taking something the size of LIGO and its mirrors which we have this laser interferometer laser light bounces off these very very very sensitive mirrors and in bouncing off those very very sensitive mirrors these tiny little bounces of the laser give us this idea of how much our planet is bouncing based on due to gravitational waves they have been able to take this interferometer and control it so that they know when one photon is bouncing off a mirror and how that affects another photon's movement and in understanding the movements of the photons bouncing off the mirrors they're able to with motors stop the vibration of the mirror and in effect stop the vibration of those photons like as if like a car accident or if there's a ball that's being thrown at you and you suddenly stop it with your hand and it just stops there that moment before it bounces away that stoppage of movement and taking all of of photons of light and taking all four mirrors of LIGO which are like 40 40 kilograms or something in weight the average comes out to an object this is a virtual object because it's taking all of these four mirrors from LIGO and putting them together that would weigh in at about 10 kilograms which is the size of something reasonable like that's a decent size object as opposed to something at an atomic scale and in stopping the movement of these mirrors they have fundamentally created a emotional ground state for an object that is virtually the size of a large piece of matter a 10 kilogram piece of matter and now having this this stoppage of motion created an effective reduction in this virtual objects temperature down to about 77 nano kelvins which is like this is unheard of and in doing this now they think that why are they doing this what have they done this is weird what have they done this is just a random big experiment and okay you can stop the mirrors moving in the light bouncing and then what happens in doing that what we will be able to do is test in the future the effects of gravity on quantum objects that are large sized like the size of your desk like the size of a car like the size of a laptop as opposed to atoms so it's going from the atomic scale to real world scale which is kind of exciting for physics yeah yeah i'm excited somebody in the chat room is not familiar with kilograms yeah 10 kilograms is approximately 10 000 grams so it's about the same thank you thank you thank you for that clarification i appreciate that justin yeah yeah so that's it's a it's a big story using LIGO for something other than gravitational waves is a unique adaptation of the technology and i don't know i'm excited to see where they take it tell me about though we're not going to talk about quantum stuff anymore tell me about birds you have a wait no do you have a dinosaur or a bird yeah well that's the question uh i i don't know uh researchers from the institute of vertebrate paleontology and paleoanthropology of the chinese academy of sciences have discovered a 120 million year old partial fossil skeleton of a tiny extinct bird this is very tiny so small it could fit in the palm of your hand and it has the skull of a t-rex well well at least it has a unique skull with a mix of dinosaur and bird features it was dinosaur features being uh functional features that are shared with tyrannosaurus rex kind of showing that this early bird kept many of the features of the predecessor so their findings published in nature communications june 23rd the bird was deposited 120 million years ago in a shallow lake and what is today the aung province in northeastern china through a detailed reconstruction of the bird family tree the researchers demonstrated that the new fossil bird species belongs to an extinct group of birds called in that in nanta oh gosh in anti-orn it themes excuse me or opposite birds they're the most diverse group of birds from the time of the dinosaurs and the cretaceous and have been found all over the world in some form in living birds the quadrate is one of the most movable bones in the skull allows for the unique feature of living birds known as kinetic skull which allows the upper jaw to move independently of the brain and lower jaw in contrast living birds the skull of the new opposite bird was was uh as well as those dinosaurs like t-rex and the close dinosaurian relatives of birds uh they were not kinetic instead the bones are locked up and unable to move so the temporal regions sides of the skull of this bird fossil very different from living birds species has two bony arches for jaw muscle attachments like those found in reptiles this is lizards alligators dinosaurs making the rear of the skull rigid and resistant to movement along those bones i don't see here the one thing i wanted to know which i don't see here is if it had teeth and this wasn't just a uh a little tiny baby this wasn't just a little teeny tiny baby t-rex so no it's not but you know it that that's a great point you bring up because one of the things that has uh foiled paleontologists in the past is the reliance on morphology if the thing looks a certain way it's a certain thing and one of the things that they discovered especially common uh amongst dinosaurs which is still something you can see amongst mostly in bird certain bird species today is the is the ability to both grow and then uh absorb and re redistribute bone material something that we all humans do all mammals do all the time you wear your bone and it grows a little bit more if you haven't used a muscle the bone that attaches there might have to be a little bit that that material or that energy to produce that house uh housing goes somewhere else in a bind but that through normal life stages they have found uh dinosaurs that would have these big cranial ridges that they would disappear and might show up in the back of the skull somewhere or just might just be gone completely or they would so morphologically this I agree this might be a little baby bird it might be a fully grown uh fully grown bird it might be a species that they found before that looks new because of that it's happened enough times I think uh you know there's some classic examples but uh the but triceratops like that it was right like that we had like a dozen or more of them that it turned out well sometimes we're looking at adolescents and sometimes we're looking at adults sometimes we're looking at but the the morphology of the horns and everything actually could change so drastically uh over over the different ages that uh yeah you weren't always you weren't always seeing what you thought you were seeing do you see what I see I see a a dinosaur tiny bird oh there's the little teeth there it is got little teeth it does little tiny dinosaur teeth I didn't see it it's in the uh you found you found a nice picture of it I was uh what I was reading I didn't uh I didn't see it specifically talking about the teeth but those the the skull and jaw muscle attachments made it sound like a biter so this yeah and so you if it's a biter if it's got the large muscle attachments even though it's a tiny skull compared to what a t-rex skull would be a miniaturization it's still if it's got the large muscle attachments you would expect to see teeth or something that would be this is biting and it's going to yeah this little tiny bird would be fierce super fierce little animal I love it that's really fun I have another bird story about magnets in birds it's in their eyes we've talked lots of times about how birds migrate and how that migration is very possibly made possible by a special sensory power the ability to be able to sense the earth's magnetic fields and it's been a big question as to just how that is possible how on earth do the do these migratory birds potentially see the magnetic fields how how does it work well a while back we also reported on a study in which researchers looked at proteins cryptochromes which are light sensitive proteins that are uh in in various eyes human eyes was the where this study went and it was I think it was last year I know it was a few months ago but the the study found that humans have cryptochromes that when they are exposed to light and magnetic fields they they change formation and thus are sensitive to magnetic fields and so everybody's like why do people have cryptochromes that are sensitive to magnets in their eyes that's weird and then this led to these researchers taking cryptochrome 4 from the eyes of migratory european robins and taking a look to see whether or not they were sensitive to magnetic influence they compared this cryptochrome 4 against two non migratory bird species one chicken and the pigeon very non migratory although pigeons have a good homing sense for homing pigeons they don't migrate and so why would they need magnetic fields chickens they can jump into and out of trees very nicely they don't need magnetic fields so they tested the mutations that were in these different cryptochromes and tested how the cryptochrome formation changed when they were in the presence of magnetic fields and they discovered that yes indeed the migratory robins have a magnet magnetic fields sensitive cryptochrome so we don't know exactly what that would look like in their visual field it's been talked about is it like maybe it would appear as like a glow or some kind of you know what would that be we can only imagine right how that would lay over I immediately pictured it almost like you're saying like a glow but certainly like you you know if you had a gps that just pointed you in the right direction like oh that's not it this is the way you go go over there there it is I can see it now yeah this is the right way that's when it gets all shiny yeah so they're gonna do more studies and try and figure out exactly what's going on but this really is starting to point to and this is this is weird because we've been talking about this for so long and to see it go from iron particles in the beak of the bird to suddenly these light sensitive pigments in the eye and and these pigments are sensitive to magnetic fields this is just it's it is wild and I mean probably decades ago researchers never would have considered this possibility but this could potentially be a mechanism for how the magnetic sense works in birds so and and well we're talking about a heads up display or whatever it is the other thing I always remember is that or the other thing that that's occurring is that the eyes are just a sensor the brain does all the work like it was oddly reminds me of this this long history that started with this there was a shaman who could repair vision these are wrote books about how to fix your vision because you have to look like an eagle move your eyes are rapidly around and then fix it on something and all this Huxley this is a long story all this actually was going blind as a child read on this did the exercises and it worked but he's like I don't believe in this eagle eye shamanism it's because I've strengthened the muscles and then years later they did research on people playing video games see how how horrible it is for your eyes turns out it was great for your eyes if you were playing one of these games that had lots of motion in them but it wasn't repair on eyes it's the fact that the brain got better at at processing the information and and there's so much that the brain is doing involved in vision that we're not the least bit uh tuned to aware of it just happens it just most of our vision does not happen in our eyes it happens in our brain it's all happening in your brain this is just an this is a port that the light gets information starts to come into and then it's gets translated so that that long story short that that heads up display that's taking place in these birds may not be visual at all it could just become sort of like an impulse or an instinct or a feeling could be just a sense yeah because the brain doesn't need you to see everything it's learning or processing or doing it doesn't need to communicate back I guess to you uh with a visual stimuli you don't need a heads up display you don't need a heads up display you when it's integrated when it's when it's not integrated yeah don't need don't need to show it back to you you were just there to gather the the data the brain now can do all of the rest of that work without you knowing it this is this week in science thank you everyone for watching whether you're on facebook or youtube or twitch you're watching live we appreciate you watching right now thanks for being a part of this show and if you can and you like the show tell a friend that'd be great all right it's time for the quick update i don't think that music goes with the covid update it's lovely i at all i think that's That's the best type of music we're coming up with. Thank you. You're welcome. OK, so on Twitter today, I became aware of a New York Times story that was based on research that just was published in the bio archive, based on the work of a molecular evolution laboratory, the J. Bloom laboratory that's affiliated with the Fred Hutch research center in HHMI. Now, the Bloom lab published their study in bio archive, recovery of deleted, deep sequencing data, sheds more light on the early Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 epidemic. And now you might see people making a big deal out of this, saying, oh, this points more to the lab leak and trying to cultivate more controversy and more trouble. Now, number one, it looks as though there is an NIH-maintained database called the Sequence Read Archive. Scientists can put their deep sequencing data in this archive for other scientists to peruse. The Bloom lab went about checking through the data from last year related to a paper that was published on the Peer J. Open Access Journal. And in doing that, discovered that there was data from a project by Wuhan University that had been deleted from this NIH archive. Dun dun dun. It's not a terrible deal that it was deleted. Researchers delete data all the time for various reasons. And there is a process that you can go through to email the archive and say, hey, I kind of messed up on that or whatever. Can you delete that? And it'll get deleted. So we don't know why the data was deleted. But data was deleted. Second, the data is. They are right back. The data actually does not support a lab leak necessarily. What it does support is this came from bats and that the sequences that had been deleted were actually more closely related to SARS coronaviruses that have been found in bats. Then the sequences that had been taken from the Wuhan market. And so researchers are now saying, all right, so the whole idea that it came from the Wuhan market, that's really we're putting that to bed. And they are starting to look at the bigger idea of a lot of bat-based coronaviruses around. And it's very likely it could have come from other areas come into Wuhan. And that's when we first really became aware of it. And so there are questions definitely as to whether or not China was deleting research that it hadn't gone through. The Chinese government likes to have a very specific publication process where everything is vetted and OK'd by the government before it gets published, especially for something like the pandemic. And they wanted to cover their tracks in case it was something they did wrong, maybe. So it's very possible. I'm speculating here. But definitely some things were deleted. We don't know why. So we don't know. But this is not the evidence that it's a lab leak. No, don't even listen to people who are saying that. Go ahead, Justin. Could be a lab leak. Most likely not. But the thing is the Chinese government does have a bad track record. And I don't think it has to do with about if they did something wrong. I don't think that is the care. It has to do with business. Keeping business and tourism going and all these sorts of things. And they don't want to slow that down. So they don't talk about it. Policy is not great. And you could point to that and say, aha. That's why you can't trust. But then you look at how many governors in the president of the United States was like, well, it's not test. And then that means that we don't have a problem. Same. There's all sorts of political things. Politicians with good public health decisions have a bad track record, generally. One of the things, though, when you're talking about trying to get to ground zero on a pandemic, is that pandemic, not even before it's a pandemic, just a spread of a disease like this that's transferred from the animal world into the human world, is that they don't make that leap and then just run with it. They make that leap and it fails and they make the leap and it fails and they make the leap and it fails and they make the leap and ah, then there's a little bit and then it goes away because those people don't transmit enough. So there's such a staggered effect that when you're talking about a city with the population two and a half million more people than New York City as a ground zero, I don't think we appreciate when the beginning was. I think this idea that we have this beginning when the virus is in people and spreads easily amongst people belies how viruses transmit once they've made that leap. It's very likely that we would need to go back, look much further back and probably because of the interactions of a city that large, you would also need to look at what population of people had an interaction with that city and what you'll find is pretty much everywhere. Everywhere, everyone comes from all over that city. So the idea that you could you can are going to trace it back. The only way to do it and I'm just gonna wrap that up. The only way to do it is if you find the natural reservoir because then you have a potential idea of a starting place and then you find the reservoir, then that's your smoking gun, right?  There's the genetic sequence we're coming from. That's exactly it. We don't have that yet. We just have loose connections at this point. And until you have the reservoir, you can't then even know where you're trying to trace back to interactions to. So it's like an impossible problem. There's too many puzzle pieces and they don't all belong in the puzzle. It's the problem. Yeah, and like our guests from last week mentioned, there is a paper published in Cell this last, actually I don't know if it's actually published, published the embargo. It does not have an embargo. So it's available. Identification of novel bat coronaviruses sheds light on the evolutionary origins of SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses. The researchers studied 411 bat samples that were collected in Yunnan province in China between 2019 and 2020. They got 24 full length coronavirus genomes that had four viruses that were very, very, very, very related to SARS-CoV-2. Three of them were very related to SARS. And the closest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 infects a species of bat that is found in regions extending from South Laos and Vietnam to Southern China. So this is the study actually starts getting at, hey look, here are populations of bats that overlap this area that have related viral sequences. And so there are bats that we should be monitoring and maybe this is the direction that we need to be going to to find that reservoir that you're talking about. But the work is happening. But yeah, so there are sticking points because of politics and politicians having different ideas about the way things should be done than the scientists. And that is an issue, but yeah, hopefully the scientists, scientists will come out on top. Yeah, I would say good hope. The problem is science never flexes its muscles. Science can have its funding cut off. Scientists can be silenced by authoritarian governments. Science never goes, you like electric light?  What science is made for? You like asthma medicine, you like your allergy pills? Yes. You like those?   What are you gonna do? Like science never, say, you know what I'm saying. And then, but moving on from the source and understanding that our understanding is only as good as our data happens to be, we've got researchers now who are working with the National Institute of Health to study people long terms here in the United States who have, who may have previously been infected with COVID-19 but didn't know it. So they looked at a large sample of people representative of the general demographics of the United States and they found that there were a massive number of undiagnosed cases. They discovered this by looking at antibodies in people's blood. They got people to submit blood samples and they discovered, wow, like 16 million more people had COVID-19 by last July than we had thought, which is a significantly higher number. And if that significantly higher number can is transferable to the rest of the pandemic because of asymptomatic cases or cases with very low amounts of symptoms, this is going, potentially going to give us a different outcome with the variants that are coming through. Now the variants of concern, like the Delta variant that we're worried about and researchers are gonna be following up with these participants to find out more about how vaccination affects future infection rates and also how naturally acquired antibodies affect responses to these variants of concern. And anyway, yeah, higher seropositivity, which was thought to have happened, but it wasn't exactly sure. And then Francis Collins, the head of the NIH just summarized a recent study that compared the antibodies that were produced by vaccinated individuals versus those people who had been infected but not vaccinated. And yeah, and they discovered that, and so we've had this question on the show for a while of like, all right. How come we don't know? Why don't we know that there's enough people infected you should know if they have the antibodies that they have the immunity versus like if they were just vaccinated. But then there's also the question of if you're naturally acquiring, naturally means you're getting infected, right? Versus getting vaccinated, how is that going to influence your immunity? Is one better than the other? And there's a big question about that. And what they've discovered from studying the antibodies in the blood of these people, like a really in-depth analysis of what antibodies are in these people's blood, they found that there actually is a striking difference in the types of antibodies, what the antibodies have been constructed to respond to in the blood of the naturally acquired versus vaccine acquired antibodies. And there's a part of the spike protein that is the binding domain. And the binding domain is really important because that latches onto the ACE2 receptor. Kiki, you're killing me. What? You're killing me. Which one's better? They think that the vaccine is gonna be better. Okay, I got it. Okay, I'm like, okay. That's what I was gonna get to. You were building up and building up. I just couldn't take it anymore. I'm sorry. No more building up. Which one? It's not that the naturally acquired immunity is not good. It's that since the vaccine is so specifically, or vaccines, I should say, are so specifically targeted to the spike protein, it gives the potential for antibodies to be better able to respond to variants that even have single point mutations in that binding domain, which is in the spike protein. And like the real reason this is an important issue is because more people, at least around these parts, where you're sitting, I think, have got the vaccine than have recovered from, so if both groups are feeling immunized by this, one really isn't, that's an important thing to know. Yeah. But it also, yeah. Still gotta keep an eye on this Delta variant thing, though, because it seems to be finding it. Yeah, and the Delta variant, it's definitely a variant of concern. It is massively more infectious. People, reports in Australia and other places are laying it out to be, instead of having to be in the space of the virus for 15 minutes to be able to get infected, they're saying you can be infected within a minute, within a few seconds of being in contact, just walking past somebody and breathing their air for the Delta variant could be. So, but that said, vaccines are very effective against the Delta variant, so at this point, it's the unvaccinated population that is really the population of concern. And that's kids, and that's people with immunodeficiencies. It's, yeah. But then there's still people who are just ignoring it. Despite the constant coverage of the COVID pandemic, everywhere you look, all over cable network, radio news stations, every website portal, platform, and social media site, every conversation that you have with anybody. Well, every conceivable way in which information is disseminated in this modern era, but there are some people who failed more than others to take these necessary precautions. New research, West Virginia University sociologists looked into excess deaths among the Amish population in 2020. Oh, did anybody, did anybody tell the Amish? We added on all the electronic devices. They don't have, maybe they just didn't hear that this was happening. What's that? Oh, that's what the Mennonites do. Okay, I didn't know. So it turns out Mennonites are basically Amish who can, who are not Luddites. They can have electronic devices. Yeah, so the death rate during the first year of the pandemic soared above baseline average the largest spike being last November. They had 125% higher mortality than normal. Research led by Rachel Stein, she's an associate professor of sociology, analyzed obituary information published in Amish Mennonite newspapers to examine excess deaths among this segment of our population in 2020. The results are published in the Journal of Religion and Health and explains co-author Katie Corcoran, associate professor of sociology at West Virginia. By taking multiple years of historical data, we can create an average rate of death. For 2020, we identified how much extra death occurred on top of that average, which we call then the excess death. And then Stein, who's leading the study, grew up in Amish country, decided to explore COVID-19's effect on that community. Pointing out that, yeah, they were, the community members really weren't practicing social distancing at the outset. Amish community do not use modern technology, such as electricity even, and they tend to distrust modern preventative medicine. Stein said, there's a perception that COVID is like the flu there. If people get sick, then people get sick and will eventually get over it. Co-author Corey Collier, associate professor of sociology, views the team's findings through the intersection of religion and government guidelines, stating that mandates prohibiting church can backfire. Well, when this pandemic hit and the state prohibited worship, well, the prohibited gatherings of people, but that effected worship, they didn't take it lightly. They don't look at it as nanny state or as a government overstepping bounds. They take it as persecution in the attempt to curtail religious gathering and practicing their fears with their sacred business. When states step in and say, you can't gather for church, they say, well, there's man's law and there's God's law. We're gonna follow God's law. Studies suggest that in general, many groups complied with government guidelines limiting religious gatherings in March and April, but many then resumed church services by summer. Then this seems, this is just my observation. It seems to actually show the effectiveness of these government guidelines because the study's pointing out that when the government restrictions became more relaxed in the fall, that's then November, that's when researchers observed the greatest spike in the excess deaths. So there must have been a decent amount of awareness in the community to at least have done the moderate reduction of group sizes. So he says, I think the future's gonna remain problematic in these communities. Most members will not practice the social distancing. They're not getting vaccinated, the research team said. They said though that Amish is, the Amish are a great example, but they shouldn't just be single out because the methodology of this study could be used for all sorts of other religious groups. Religious groups and also just as a reminder of the fact that not everybody is connected to everything all the time. There are lots of people who are slipping through the cracks and it's not just communications cracks. There are people who are in grocery store deserts, right? Where there's just no pharmacy anywhere near them where they can get a vaccine. So it's like, how much is available? How much, first is the information available? And then is the opportunity available? There's a lot of these things that kind of tie in there. Yeah, that's true. But thank you, I didn't know that about the Mennonites. That's, I learned something about the Mennonites. So it does explain why the Amish girl was excommunicated. Two men a night. Oh, Justin. Nobody's gonna send me a evil email about that. I won't get any negative tweets over that one. Because it's gonna be cut out of the podcast. Because it's gonna be cut out of the podcast. And because, very likely, Mennonite will probably wrote that joke. The Amish aren't gonna hear it. Mennonites, they have a wonderful sense of humor. Okay, but on this whole conversation of opportunity and who's seeing these messages and who's hearing about COVID-19, there's also the question of hesitancy, some researchers towards even getting the vaccine and some researchers just published a study which is a review of a whole lot of surveys. It's a systematic review and meta analysis of acceptability and its predictors. Surprisingly, out of 38 articles with 81,173 individuals included the pooled COVID vaccine acceptance rate was 73.31%. Studies using representative samples reported a rate of 73.16%. The pooled acceptance rate among the general population, 81.65%. Really high. However, this was higher than that among healthcare workers which was 65.65%. What is going on in healthcare that healthcare workers have a lower vaccine acceptance rate than the general population according to these surveys? I just would love to know the nuts and bolts of the surveys and this is fascinating to me. It maybe explains why several hospitals are having to convince their healthcare workers to get vaccinated, why several healthcare workers have chosen to leave their jobs because they didn't want to get vaccinated for COVID-19. But anyway, people who received an influenza vaccine in the last year were more likely to accept COVID-19 vaccination and national and individual level interventions can be improved to get better vaccine acceptance understanding that the main reasons for willingness are protecting oneself or others and the main reasons for hesitancy had to do with side effects and safety. So there are very specific messaging efforts that can take place as a result of this data. Which is pretty exciting. I'm oddly not surprised though. The healthcare is education is, it is interesting, it is. But it's, I think because healthcare nursing education this sort of thing is not approached like you were learning science. It's approached from a very vocational manufacturing-esque trade and it's less on the side of it. And it's less on the science behind why you're doing things and much more focused on process and procedure of performing a functional duty to the manufacturing of hospitals. So I'm not actually that surprised that just by being adjacent to medicine does not- Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know, I find it very interesting. I think that it is obviously something that needs to be addressed very significantly. And then finally today also the CDC did report they had a panel look into the question of whether or not myocarditis is being caused by COVID-19 vaccines. And they have said that there's a very likely link although it's a very rare side effect. But, and it is again similar to the Johnson and Johnson AstraZeneca blood clot side effect that seemed to be very age and gender related. This also appears to be more age and gender related. However, the myocarditis is in the younger age group and mostly boys. And at this time they have certified about 250 cases that they think are linked to the vaccine but no deaths at this point. And then they're continuing to look into other cases that have been reported to the adverse events reporting system. So it's all a process but it's a very rare symptom and mostly treatable and fine but something to think about. This is This Week in Science. We are a science podcast and we thank you for joining us for this episode. Thank you for spending this time with us. If you appreciate the podcast, please consider heading over to twist.org and clicking on our podcast. No, our Patreon link. Become a patron of Twitter and Facebook. Support us and allow us to do this wonderful broadcast on a weekly basis. We really appreciate your support and can't do this without you. We're gonna come on back right now to Justin's Animal Corner. It just feels so wrong, Justin. No, I mean you just gotta put your heart into it.  Justin's Animal Corner. Well, Justin doesn't like bats, I guess. Tell me some animal stories, Justin. Okay.  We can't do this without you. So much. But since you're gone, best known for its presence in house cats and a tendency to infect and alter behaviors of rodents and humans and its legacy as being the culprit behind most newborn blindness, the parasite toxin-blasmagandii which only recreates in cats, domestic cats mostly, is now also being associated with bold, deadly behavior among wild hyena cubs. This wild behavior puts them at greater risk of being killed by lions. Finds new research from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Findings- Oh my goodness. So wait, toxoplasma, hyena cubs, eaten by the lions, and then it passes through a cat species. Yes. Oh. This is why the cat lady has cats that gets into a mouse and makes them less afraid of cats. It gets into a rat and makes them less afraid of cats. It gets into a hyena, the mortal enemy nemesis of a lion and it makes them fearless of lions. Why? Because parasites got to complete its business regardless of who the host is. So yeah, this is, they published this week in Nature Communications, reinforces previous research which has found the parasite prompting these sort of profound behavioral changes in hosts, and is currently being around two billion people worldwide or infected with it. T. Gandiai has been well-studied in laboratory settings, but this is one of the first times they've been able to do observations in the wild. This is Quoty Voice. Let's see, who have I got here? This is Zach Laubach, who's a co-lead author of the study, postdoctoral fellow in ecology and evolutionary biology. This project is one of a handful of long-term continuous studies on a long-lived mammal. Our findings suggest that infection early in life leads to bolder behavior and is particularly costly for young hyenas. So this also happens to be the one place in a hyena's life when they can easily take down a hyena. The older hyenas, interestingly in his study, learn to be more cautious about lions, but in a group, a bunch of hyenas can be a real problem for a lion. So it can be a fair fight on some level. But when they're young hyenas, they don't have a shot under a year old. Multiple strains of T. Gandiai found throughout the world infecting warm-blooded animals, including humans who have house cats with a big spike there. So during different life stages through contaminated soil, drinking water, eating meat of other animals who've been infected, it can be passed down even from mother to baby, which we've talked about in the past is I think the leading cause of childhood blindness. Anyway, for infected cubs, hyenas up to one year old, they found infected animals are bolder, approaching lions from closer distances than the unaffected cubs. And that infection among cubs also corresponds to the higher probability of being eaten by lions. In the study, lions responsible for all the hyena cub deaths among their infected animals, 17% of unaffected cubs died before the age of one due to lion attacks. All hyena cub deaths among infected animals, yikes. But after their one year old, no difference in how close those lions got regardless of their infection status. Some scientists theorize that this parasite manipulates its host behavior. This is what we're talking about in order to get back into cats where it can sexually reproduce. But the data from this study, they're saying does not provide enough evidence to disentangle the theory supporting the adaptive mechanism for the parasite from other plausible alternative theories. Although it is another one, it seems to point in that direction. It seems pretty straightforward, but like we've seen many times in science, what seems straightforward is not always. I was convinced by the cat, it was just the cat lady who's got the 50 cats in the house. It's just the parasite's just like get more cats, bring more cats into the house. You need more cats. I'm going to need that many cats to take down a human. The Texas needs all the cats to take the humans down. There's a species of butterfly found in sub-Saharan Africa that is able to migrate thousands of miles to Europe. It crosses the Saharan desert when the weather conditions are just right. And it's set the world record for the furthest migrating insect. The striking painted lady, Vanessa Cardouille. Butterfly has been shown for the first time to be capable of making the 12 million meter, 12 to 14 million meter round trip. The longest insect migration ever seen. In greater numbers, they can do this when weather conditions in the desert help the plants on which they then lay eggs. And yes, for those not familiar with meters, 12 to 14 million meters is about 12 to 14,000 kilometers. Pretty much the same. Professor Tom Oliver, Ecologist, University of Reading and co-author of the study said, we know that the number of painted lady butterflies in Europe varies wildly. Sometimes with a hundred times more from the year one year to the next. However, the conditions that caused this were unknown. And the suggestion that butterflies could cross the Saharan desert and oceans to reach Europe was not proven. This research shows this unlikely journey is possible and that certain climate conditions leading up to migration season have big influence on the numbers that can make it. It demonstrates how the wildlife we see in the UK can transcend national boundaries and protecting such species requires strong international cooperation. So, yeah, the study is published in the Pershings of the National Academy of Science's journal. The team calculated that butterflies must fly non-stop during the day and rest during night to cross the Sahara, making maybe a few stops to find a little bit of nectar to feed on. This actually is a similar pattern they have seen before in songbirds that migrate. They also include that the butterflies must fly up to one to three kilometers above sea level to take advantage of favorable tailwinds because if they're just relying on their own flying power, you might not be able to make it that distance. They calculated the painted ladies have enough body fat after metamorphosis to sustain 40 hours of non-stop flying. Wow, that's amazing. It's very similar to the research that we heard about from a previous guest talking about mosquitoes and the flights that mosquitoes make where mosquitoes get lofted up by winds and they make these thousand mile trips. And so there's this definite possibility that mosquitoes transit the Sahara desert, lofted on the winds over thousands of miles. And this is happening with the painted ladies too. It's amazing, thousands of kilometers. So, but one of the other threads of this story is that they do need a certain amount of the right weather conditions in the Sahara for the trip to be possible. And if it doesn't happen, they don't go or not as many of them endeavor upon that journey.  Maybe they will take me and have it being like more of a chance event that happens around that time of the year because the conditions are more favorable. Yeah. It's also an interesting story to me too because I have a family connection to it. My ancestors were lumberjacks and the Sahara forest. They caused that desert? What? They were good at their job. Oh no. Is this my last animal story? Researchers being presented at the European, research is being presented at the European Congress of clinical microbiology and infectious diseases that's gonna be held this year in early July. I think the ninth to the 12th suggesting that one in 10 veterinary workers in the Netherlands carry strains of multi-drug antibacterial resistant bacteria compared to only around one in 20 in the general population. Higher prevalence could not be explained by known risk factors such as antibiotics, recent travel, it seems highly likely that occupational contact with animals in the animal healthcare setting may result in shedding and transmission of multi-drug resistant pathogens from animals to humans. Interestingly for the study though they hadn't tested any of the animals. This was just a study of the healthcare workers. They didn't have a study conducted on the pets that they then were interacting with. Stool samples were collected from 482 veterinary workers. These were vets, technicians, assistants to the vets. Genetic sequencing was used to identify species of bacteria in the samples. The presence of extended spectrum beta lactamase and amp-c drug resistant genes were found. These are enzymes that don't get broken down I guess by our drugs that we use to fight the bacteria that veterinary staff completed questionnaires about contact with animals, this sort of thing. It's also interesting in here. So the veterinary workers were twice as likely than the regular population, the non-veterinarian population at large. But 17%, which is then almost double the veterinary workers of their household members, also were carrying strains of the drug resistant bacteria. Which is, it takes a minute to sort of get your head around like, okay, so they're the veterinarian workers are having the close contact perhaps with perhaps there's animal interaction. We don't actually know because they didn't look at the animals. And they're twice the general public's rate of infection with this drug resistant bacteria. But their family members are almost twice the load that they have. Right. So what's the difference? The difference is the veterinary workers are taking constant precautions at work, wearing gloves, changing gloves, washing hands, using alcohol. Right, cleaning their veterinary clothes even. Yeah. Not enough to prevent getting twice, but enough to keep their conditions. Their numbers down. Surprised. Whereas their family members who might stop by or might have interacted or might have caught it on the day when they didn't stop it from getting through. Or it could be. Aren't doing those things on a daily basis. It's all in the car that the family shares or it's yeah, you come home and you don't take a shower and it gets in the bed and then you're sharing it. Yeah, and yeah, it would get concentrated. Yeah, it was a smaller sample size. Interesting. It's extended family members. So that's not part of the data that they're highlighting because I think it was, let me y'all get the real number. It was only four out of 23 people carried these bacteria. So that's, that's 70%. It's still really low. It's twice the rate of the number of household members. It's twice the rate of, almost, of the veterinarian workers which then makes it about four times the rate.  It's a lot. Yeah. It's insignificant yet significant and what kind of influence is this happening? Take more care. Yeah, no samples were taken from animals attending the clinics so they couldn't connect the dot but this obviously is a good place to do some future research. Totally. Yeah, I hope they do. This kind of research is really important because multi-drug resistant antibiotic resistance is a huge problem and until we can figure out how to deal with it and what we're gonna be able to do we have to figure out where that resistance is coming from. Where is it spreading? Where are the pockets? Yeah. And that does it for Justin's Animal Corner. Remember to get your pet spayed and neutered. Actually, I guess you can't do that. Can you get spayed and neutered? I think it's one or the other. Not in the same animal unless it's a hermaphrodite. Okay, spayed or neutered. Or neutered. Don't try to do both and don't do it at home. Don't do it at home. They still need to go to a veterinarian. Go to your veterinarian. But when you go, wear plenty of PPE. Gloves, mask, don't just walk in there, shaking hands, kissing your veterinarian.  Alrighty, I've got some brainy stories for you. So brains, I wanna talk first about memory. Let's talk about how we remember things, right? The hippocampus is the part of the brain that's involved in incorporating new memories in.  And in that, the hippocampus is a huge part of how we remember the world, where that information is. And the hippocampus does become active when we are remembering stuff, as it is part of that network of, it's the librarian that told everything where to go, so to speak. Researchers have known for a long time that this is an essential part of the brain for memory, but a new study out of Northwestern University has determined that the hippocampus is also essential for constructing your present. The hippocampus is active all the time, and it's helping you to take in information, but it's not just doing the memory storage. This discovery is that the hippocampus is involved in comparing your present experiences against your past experiences to help you predict what might happen in the future. So the hippocampus is this essential organ in our brain to reality construction.  You know, and suddenly you have a new situation that is an event that your hippocampus is encoding, but it is helping you understand the present moment, which I think is a very interesting new function for the hippocampus, not just memory storage librarian, but also it helps you guide your decision-making, it helps you construct your reality. So that's it, that's it, I was reading a study that about dreams, when it described dreaming as let's say 50% reports a memory source were connected, or multiple past experiences were connected to a dream. They also found that 25.7% of dreams were related to specific impending events, so it was sort of trying to predict the future. 37.4% of dreams with a future event source were additionally related to one or more specific memories of past experiences. So it's the sort of interesting things your brain is trying to do. It's like, here's all the things that happened in the past, here's the things I know are coming and let me run some modeling. Let me do some predictive modeling. Right, so your brain is doing that predictive modeling while you're sleeping, but then it's also doing it in the current moment. So there is the whole, like we are constantly, what, like a quarter of a second behind what's actually happening in the world because of the fact that our brain is taking information, and we are a quarter of a second consciously aware, our conscious awareness of what's going on is lagging behind the construction of our reality by our brain. So information is coming in, the hippocampus is going, does this match with what we know? No, it doesn't match with what we know. And suddenly, you're conscious of going, hey, I don't know what's going on here, you know? Or you can drive a car and just kind of get lost in that dreaminess of driving because you've done it so many times before until that moment when somebody runs a red light, right? Your brain is helping you constantly, it's a prediction engine, and it's all of these parts of the brain working together while you're sleeping, while you're awake to predict everything, which is pretty amazing. But that, quick question, so is it still the hippocampus? Do you think that's gonna be operating? The dream study when they were looking at this, they weren't doing any sort of that sort of a dive into what part of the brain was functioning. This was just people self-reporting things. I thought it was interesting because then you have, you know, you have that one where you've predicted a model of the future.  Well, yeah, but you also modeled all the things that didn't happen. But is it, because we're talking about when we're asleep, but is our, do you think maybe our hippocampus is still like doing the same job all night long? Yeah, it's gonna be involved in that. So it's part of the system of storage. And so as your brain is reactivating and running through events, probably, yeah, we talked a couple of weeks ago about how the brain runs through things kind of at multiple speeds faster than they actually happened and plays through them. And then it's in your dreams, it's not just playing through them super fast while you're not paying attention. In your dreams, it's like constructing new situations and putting new things together and playing with new possibilities. And so your hippocampus is probably part of that whole wiring system of how it's your, yeah. A bit of a lucid dreamer, usually remember a good part of the dreams. So I know that stuff's going on, but then it starts to bring up the question like, okay, so what exactly is getting put to sleep? It's sort of like the id, it's sort of like the one that wants to choose what's doing.   That's not fair. Yes.  Okay, shh, we're speaking. Okay, brains in charge. You're on time out. Right, exactly. The brain has put you into a timeout. So you're going to sleep too? No, no, we have work to do, child. Go to sleep. We love talking about aging on this show and our constant efforts or Blair's efforts. And I'm sorry, she's not here for this story. Blair's constant efforts to fight aging. Well, a new study out this week in the public library of science by researchers at plus biology in these researchers, at all, they have discovered a link between a protein that's in red blood cells that allows red blood cells to deliver their oxygen to various tissues. It is a protein that's called adenosine receptor A2B or as the acronym is so cutely spelled adora2B. I wish it were adorab2, but it's adora2B. Adora2B, they don't know yet whether or not it decreases in its levels as people age, but in this study that they did in mice they discovered that if they had mice with adora2B or without adora2B, those without adora2B as they aged, they had more cognitive decline, deteriorating memory, they had hearing deficits which was very interesting and they had larger inflammatory responses in their brain. So if they did not have adora2B, all these things got worse faster. Because, why? Apparently, the adora2B kept the retroviruses busy talking. Hey, just whispering to the door, didn't have time to like send out inflammatory orders to the rest of the part of the brain. Well, the adora2B kept delivering oxygen to the brain and letting the brain do the work that it needed to do, the metabolism was able to keep going as opposed to having hypoxic conditions without oxygen or without enough oxygen which would then definitely lead to panic, inflammatory responses, and potentially cognitive decline as a result of that. So this is the big question now, whether or not in natural aging, whether adora2B in individuals decreases with age. We don't know that for sure, but based on their studies and also other work in which they adjusted hypoxic conditions for these mice and determined that those with adora2B did much better than those without adora2B. It's obviously a potential target and it's obviously something that is a protein of interest moving forward for the treatment of that terrible transition from youth to age. Find it graceful. I'm trying to be graceful about it. And finally, my final story, I really wanted to bring just because of one particular aspect of the study. Again, it's a mouse study and I keep thinking about your mouse, your mouse story from last week about how all these studies, if nobody says they're in mice, people just run with it like it's proven on humans. Yeah, so I'm really trying my best to make sure I say these study is in mice. Researchers at the Reichen Center for Brain Science and the Reichen Bioresource Research Center in Japan with State University of New York at Buffalo collaborators have created a model system in mice to study naturally occurring melatonin. They've published this in the Journal of Pinial Research and they found in this, what their main findings is that the mice with melatonin showed that natural melatonin is linked to a pre-hybernation state that allows mice to slow down their metabolism and survive when food is scarce or temperatures are cold, which is interesting. This is not the most interesting aspect of this study to me. The most interesting implication of this study is the discovery or the just overall awareness that lab mice do not have melatonin. Wild mice do have melatonin. They discovered in as they were modifying their mice and trying to get mice with melatonin, mice without melatonin reproduce better. And so laboratories have been creating a selection effect for animals that don't have melatonin and who are used in studies of sleep and metabolism very often, we have created these populations because they reproduced better. So as more babies, we're gonna use these ones. You pick the ones that have the more babies to have the more babies and then you have a lab populations without melatonin, which I just found is absolutely fascinating. Yeah, especially because I like, while you're telling this, like I remember, I remember this study on melatonin in mice and how blue light or something like affected like the mice's melatonin and that led to cancer rate or something like, I don't know, a decade ago. Right. But now I have to question whether or not you should trust mouse studies on mice, about mice. At least when dealing with melatonin. Yeah. So are they dealing with the right population of mice? Because obviously mice are lab animals that have lots of genetic strains that we have picked and prodded through for many generations, mouse generations. But yeah, there's an accidental selection process in lab mice then. Yes. That could be a problem across a whole bunch of things.  And yeah, I hadn't realized this and I found it very interesting. But anyway, the evolutionary advantage to having melatonin, it protects wild mice from losing weight. They have this pre-hybernation torporer when they can't find enough food. So if they're in, you know, it's winter time or it's cold, they can't find enough food, they can survive and they don't lose weight because of this torpor. But lab mice, they don't have melatonin, they don't need it because they're in these wonderful environments that are temperature controlled and they have ad lib food usually. So they're nice and chunky and very healthy and they don't go into torpor. So lab mice and these wild mice with melatonin have very different metabolisms. This is really important for mouse science, but. Yeah, and our and the Lord in the chat room is very interesting, how often have we had stories about stress in lab mice? Very often, very often, yes. So I wonder who will pick up on the melatonin, this melatonin, this aspect of melatonin in lab mice if it will be picked up on. I think it is a very interesting study for many reasons, but they are creating a population of mice that have melatonin that can be studied in this model system for how melatonin interacts and creates behaviors for mice innately. Yay, who knew we had to put melatonin back in mice? But that was my last story. Brings me to the end of the show. Have we done it? Are we done? I think so. I think we typed 90 minutes. That's pretty good. Once we're done editing out all of my things that I set, we write at 90. One, two, three, we're there. Anyway, if you have any questions for us, you can always let us know what questions. If you have comments, send us an email and we can read it on the show. Also, really appreciate the fact that you were here with us for the show. I do hope that you enjoyed it. Shout outs to people who helped the show. Fada, thank you for all your help on social media and with the show notes. Identity four, thank you for recording the show. Gord, thank you for chat room help. And I also want to thank Rachel for her amazing assistance in helping me with script supervision. She helps get the show made. I also want to thank our Patreon sponsors for all of their wonderful support of this show. We really can't do it without any of them. Thank you too. Pierre Velazar, Ralph E. Figueroa, John Ratnaswamy, Kira Carl Kornfeld, Melanie Stegman, DeKramstad, Karen Taze, Wooden Yemes, Andrew Beset, Chris Wozniak, Dave Bunn, Vegard Shefstad, Hal Schneider, Donathan Styles, aka Don Stilo, John Lee, Addy Alecoff and Maddie Perrin, Gaurav Sharma, Shubru, Donald Mundus, Stephen Albaran, Dale Maishak, Stu Pollock, Andrew Swanson, Frontus 104, Skylake, Paul Roanovich, Kevin Reardon, Noodles, Jack Bryant, Carrington, Matt Bates, Joshua Fiori, Shawna Neena-Lam, John McKee, Greg Reilly, Mark Hessin, Flo Jean, Talia, Steve Leesman, aka Zima, Ken Hayes, Howard Tan, Christopher Wrappen, Richard Pearson, Richard Brendon Merritton, Brendon Minnish, Johnny Gridley, Kevin Railsbeck, Flying Out, Christopher Dreyer, Mark Rosaros, Artyom, Greg Briggs, John Atwood, this profile name is hilarious in the context of some other podcast, I wonder which one. Rudy Garcia, Dave Wilkinson, Rodney Lewis, Paul Matt Sutter, Phillip Shane, Kurt Larson, Mountain Sloth, Jim Drapeau, Sharer Chavez, Stu Doster, Jason Olds, Dave Neighbor, Eric Knapp, E.O. Kevin Parachan, Aaron Luthan, Steve DeBell, Bob Calder, Marjorie Paul Stanton, Paul Disney, Patrick Peccararo, Tony Steele, Ulysses Adkins, Brian Condren, and Jason Roberts. Thank you for all of your support on Patreon. And if you would like to help out on Patreon, head over to twist.org and click on that Patreon button. Become a patron on next week's show. We will be back Wednesday, 8 p.m. specific time, broadcasting live from our YouTube and Facebook channels, as well as from our website, twist.org slash live. Want to listen to us as a podcast? Just search for this week in science wherever podcasts are found.  And if you enjoyed this show, get your friends to subscribe too. 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I need to, I don't read this often enough. We will be back here next week. We hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything about the ending of this show, remember. It's all in your head. Bum, bum, bum. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science is the end of the world. So I'm setting up shop, got my banner unfurled. It says the scientist is in, I'm gonna sell my advice. Show them how to stop the robot with a simple device. I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand. And all it'll cost you is a couple of grand. Come in your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific map and I'll broadcast my opinion, oh, science. This week in science. This week in science. Science, science, science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science, science, science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. 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Science, science, science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science, science, science. This week in science. This week in science. Thank you all for watching. I hope that we hit all of your science hot spots this week. We got a little space, we got a lot of animals, got some Toxoplasma Godniai, got brains, we got COVID. I think we hit a lot of topics in there. So thank you. Thank you for joining us. I think Justin's coming back. He gave me the one second. I know it is itchy. I didn't take my allergy pills today. He gave me the one second. Thank you, Identity Four. I will I'm going to put your put you up on the screen there. Did we disprove the null hypothesis? Are in law. Did we? Yeah, Eric, Eric Knapp Blair is still sick. We don't know what's happening. She said she's going to go to the doctor tomorrow and have some tests. Yes, that's a week of really not feeling well. She said she started feeling better last week, Thursday, Friday, but then it came back with a vengeance, whatever it is. And yeah, so I mean, it's serious enough that she's talking to a doctor. So fingers crossed that they are able to figure it out because if it's, she's feeling so bad that she can't even twist. I mean, you got to be feeling bad not to be able to twist, right? She's got to be feeling really badly. And that makes me feel sadly. Yes. Yeah, I'm worried about her. I hope that she is fine. I'm sure it's going to be fine. Yes. Oh, yes. Adam Curry. Ah, yeah. So, y'all, I am hoping that night attack invite me on to have the opposite conversation of the one that he had with Adam Curry this week that I had. I have so many thoughts. So many thoughts. Oh, the pod father, he's like as bad as Joe Rogan. He actually listens to Joe Rogan. And he he's quoting scientists who are known crackpots. Ah, good night, father. Yeah. Anyway, I like no agenda. But yes, shoe brew. Adam and Dvorak are just I love them. But they're this whole COVID season and they have lots more listeners than we do. They have a much bigger audience than we do, which really upsets me. Like, why can't I have a big audience to talk about the things that are fact based for the science and just don't understand? Why do the why do the people with the crackpot theories who say, well, I researched a heck of a lot, you know, and that makes me more of an expert than the experts. And so. All right. But there is a very, there is a very simple reason for it. And I've I've thought about this tremendously, because I think I kind of know what you're talking about. You don't know what I'm talking about. No, I do. Because here's a chart that the researchers you see this squiggly line, or they dig a hole into the peak of England. And because the squiggly line, it means the climate change is real, because this stuff happens all the time. What what what I think science communicators are scientists, probably more so even than science communicators, scientists get frustrated with you being one of them is the fact that these sort of crackpots get so much access. And the reason is the reason is smart people talking a language that people don't understand a lot of the time. Grifters know how to present themselves as what people who aren't educated think a smart person talks like. I am not and they're very different. No, no, I mean that yeah okay so who I was talking about was a specific person who is not a grifter and I just he's just I don't I mean these are people who just think they know things and they don't. They think they're smart because they work in media and tear media apart. I think that's great. That's nice but yeah I do I do agree it's the language use and yes grifters for sure know how to use that language and grifters but it's also the miscommunication that takes place when general media general journalists even are endeavoring to ask questions well meaning though they may be at times about science without having delved into the complexities of it like for most of the my part on the show my role here is as a person like I don't research as a person my my my my good I'm not a person I'm a science robot I try to come here as a doctor science robot I said person I meant a layman I try to come in uh you know yeah I know with the level of education that doesn't presume the audience to know more than I knew before I researched the study and brought it right before I read the thing and then tried to figure out what it was what it meant I try to bridge that gap as much as possible but people okay here's the other thing you look at the UFO conspiracy stuff or the whatever the ancients of all these things where people are trying to take disparate pieces of information put them together and then somebody does in a way that they gravitate to maybe it has a story thread to it that makes it attractive maybe there's a little like conspiracy to it that sounds intriguing but what I what I kind of gleaned from this is that people really want to know things they really want to connect the dots they have a hunger and a passion for knowledge and information and unfortunately many times the most palatable thing that they can access is well I wouldn't call it the stuff that comes out of the back end of a of a bull because that actually has a use that's fertilizer that has tremendously positive uses that we can you know grow grow plants and what they get is absolutely useless uh and and because it's accessible so things like what we're doing here is an attempt to bridge those gaps to make all this information accessible to talk about I think the one of the things that I appreciate about the show is that we cover so many stories that that when when even if you didn't care about a story or it didn't or you did like one or words that just by by sure uh sheer numbers a number of the stories start to sort of connect together a lot of the you know we have these threads of the microbiome we have the threads of how your brain is processing information we have these threads about all these things we're learning from the animal kingdom and then they start to patch together and then you begin to get a different view of of the world that we're all experiencing together but if you went on if you went and looked up the youtube person who's going to talk about well let me tell you what the real story is behind all these ancient civilizations you're you're getting a bunch of useless information and it's not going to help you perceive the reality of which you live and it's sad yeah it's sad yeah I think what's uh it's it's it's upsetting that um yeah typing something it is setting it upsetting that it's so easy for people to be swayed by a negative truth and a dynamic speaker right charisma charisma uh one of the one of the uh oh gosh the is it science show who the green brothers oh yeah hank and john green yes yeah uh they put up a thing like uh it's now it's uh it's become too hard to deny that blank has killed blank and you're supposed to fill in the thing and fill in the blank fill in the blank and i posted that the uh that the it's now impossible to that rhetoric has killed a rhetorical conversation that was my contribution and and like there isn't there isn't real debate or real conversation that takes place on most venues yeah usually a feedback of people talking with people who are either like-minded or oh gosh like painfully open to the idea of whatever is being expressed i mean it is a way of hosting a show where somebody comes on and you just accept everything you suspend all doubt and you accept everything that's being said and you inquire about it as though it's just as real as anything else yeah i'm gonna try and find the study that uh i found earlier today but there was a study looking i think at the sentiment of people's social media posts and basically people who have like more aggressive negative like combative social media posts against some kind of perceived opponent are more successful more likely to go viral on social media which i have i'm not i'm like oh yeah that makes sense uh guava charmer says it doesn't have to do with education level okay so i disagree with you here's why actually without i'm coming over yeah uh i think i think it does have to do with education level on the subject that like so you can know everything you can be an engineer okay over here you can very educated in this but the thing you're likely to fall for grift on is something that has nothing to do with engineering if they were talking nonsense about engineering you wouldn't for this for a second be fooled by it you would recognize this is nonsense it's then when you're out of your field whatever your education is because their education can be narrow bandwidths okay of education it can be rather specific stuff that you've you've studied on and i think i think we were talked about this almost when we were alluding to the health care workers not wanting you know the percentage of health care workers who were uh adverse to to getting vaccinated being rather high yeah that makes perfect sense to me they're they're bandwidth if you look at what is taught in nursing and health care these days it is not the science behind why they do their job it is the function of the job it's a it's a trade at this point uh so so you leave but if they if somebody was coming up and saying here's how you here's how you uh uh do an ivy and it's totally not right they're gonna see it immediately they're gonna be like no that's a nonsense i would never do that to any of my patients but it's the it's here's how you take you cut a straw and make it sharp and then you try and stick it in there no i got i got an ivy not too long ago uh and the nurse explained uh she actually she really did know her stuff she was explaining the valves within the veins that i didn't really know existed i just pictured veins in these big long tubes but there's all these pressure there is tubes it's a series of tubes with a series of valves and sometimes so you gotta punch through it yeah sometimes they gotta punch through it with the needle they got a little resistance push a little harder usually bust right through okay hopefully you don't leave the vein again that's when you gotta read oh gosh how'd it go what no you were fine i found that i found the study i was looking for it's in the proceedings of national academy of sciences and it's called out group animosity drives engagement on social media and what what you're talking about the um like the end of rhetoric or the end of rhetorical conversations because of rhetoric um what they say in the significance of their the significant statement for their paper is that so it social media may be creating perverse incentives and i like that combination of words but perverse incentives for divisive content because this content is particularly likely to go viral and they report evidence that posts about political opponents are substantially more likely to be shared on social media and that this out group effect is much stronger than other established predictors of social media sharing such as emotional language these findings contribute to scholarly debates about the role of social media and political polarization and hopefully can form solutions for healthier social media landscapes language about out groups are very strong predictors of angry reactions language about the in groups are strong predictors of love reactions reflecting in group favoritism and out group derogation the out group effect was not moderated by political orientation or social media platform but stronger effects were found among political leaders than among news media accounts in some out group languages the strongest predictor of social media engagement across all relevant predictors measured suggesting that social media may be creating perverse incentives for content expressing out group animosity because we have found that we are that people respond when we're angry and we get mad with others we're making those divisions even stronger the rhetoric yeah i know come on come on people stop being people can we like can we just like i i really want people to rally around the whole joy germs thing i've been saying this one for years hashtag joy germs i don't know what is joy germs instead of like sharing the the mean oppositional content or combative content share joyful content spread joy germs so are you just saying uh say it with a smile or no find a way to say things positively instead of aggressively or negatively if you do have something to say about an out group does it have to be like mean and attacking can we start trying to heal some of these boundaries well the i think but then the thing is i think because of it's a it's a feedback loop kind of a thing paul yeah paul paul disney's asking sometimes i wonder if human minds culture was ready for the internet and the narrator says no no they were not and then and then the the sub tangent uh narrator pops in goes well it it was invented by scientists for scientists so what so those people are ready for the mass those people are ready it wasn't meant for everyone it was meant to share the gene data bank data it was meant to share all the physics data it was yeah oh man paul disney says if you can't say something nice don't say anything at all oh he's quoting my mom he's quoting he's quoting oh not my mom he's quoting his mom my mom said something very similar to my grandmother said that all the time my mother said something very similar she said my mother said something very similar to me growing up she said if you can't say something nice it means you're a republican justin this is how i was raised i don't know how to change that's the problem it's hard i wonder how you ended up the way you are well i'm telling you i'm telling you the part of the problem though is and and i say this i say this as a person who has only chosen to support one of the political parties because the other one is so bad not out of unbridled love for what is there but gosh they believe in magic beans they believe that somebody's gonna come to the table and negotiate with them and hand them a and that the magic beans that they pay for are gonna turn into something wonderful you know save the farm but they're wrong they're in a combat situation they really are it's sad but that's what's happening another favorite quote of my mother's uh of me quoting my mother uh uh never suffer fools that's a great one i like that one i it's like all right i gotta go now yeah if you're if you're if you look to the left and the right and and you don't have anyone there that you'd want to talk to don't be there yeah okay good point am i am i in a place nope don't need and this is the same for the internet if you are scrolling through twitter facebook or and you're looking around and you're like what don't dive into the debates if they seem foolish and a bit crazy right don't suffer fool i want to say it like like mr t would have said it i suffer no fools right wouldn't he have said something like that mr t was the best he said i pity the fool wasn't i pity the fool but yeah because he would womp on them no because he had love for everyone i even pity the fools yeah gotta have love for everyone i think that was his message i love everybody my grandmother and eat my cereal my grandmother's other phrase was ikepilanesan don't pick your nose that's the one ikepilanesan ikepilanesan ikepilanesan yes it was it was either that or you don't have anything nice to say don't galagher got the shot while wearing got his first shot while wearing a twist mask and who did what where uh yeah got it has the second one now uh galagher is uh jerry galagher you are in ireland yes it's in ireland uh got the first shot while wearing a twist mask uh that's uh that's way to represent see and that's part of the in-crowd so it's we love him and then if you didn't do that then we don't like you so where's i don't know i'm still working on the in-crowd out-crowd thing i want to like everybody but then i i meet fools like oh that's right yes clowns and jokers hey jenny k that's right clowns to the left me jokers to the right here i am stuck in the middle with you stuck in the middle with you did i see mr t infreaked no did i see freaks is it weird to ask is mr t still alive i don't like checked in i haven't checked in on him in a really long time yeah i last i checked he's still alive yes carav is that my quote did i say that i think i did yeah new twist i would wear that i would wear that shirt i really would that's true oh my goodness twist t-shirt i want to like people but then i meet fools oh no this weekend science don't be a fool don't be a fool oh geez yeah people with a poor immune system right if you don't have a strong immune system then you're not going to have as much of an immune response to the vaccine you're not going to have as many antibodies even if you do get vaccinated and will therefore be less protected so we gotta that's the thing it's not about you it's not about me it's like having to think in a more social context and i think that flies in the face of a lot of american values which individuality and independence freedom is a very important thing it's why i think we have such a huge issue with vaccine um anti-vaccine populations um you know it's not just fear it's not just concern about side effects it's you know don't tread on me don't tell me what to do i can make my own decisions um yeah it's about society if you can't do something for society maybe you should go live in the forest away from society we have to take care of people who are in the society with us who who aren't able to get vaccinated i don't know why this is so hard but i do know why it's so hard it's like i could i could start to understand the mental space that people are in but then at the same time i'm like but come on let's get you know let's come together and sing kumbaya and uh everyone get vaccinated it will get over the pandemic and then we will fix climate change and we will stop all wars and everything's gonna be great and then we'll meet our alien friend neighbors oh and maybe they're not friend neighbors and then the world community will have to band together to be able to go they won't they won't we just have the best example of a thing that the world should have got like here was our our alien invasion was of came in the form of a virus we should have been like regardless of politics regardless of spiritual belief regardless of echo socio-nomic status uh whatever the things that divide us let us together defeat this common enemy and it created nothing but division yeah you know why because humans tribal tribal age we are it's really i wish we could get past the like minuscule tribal divisions and start you know so human tribe this is actually right right right so this is the thing survival is humanity my now 14 year old daughter as often she's at talking about star track and every time it's like star trek comes up her first thing that she always talks about is like yeah isn't it weird that in star trek every time they go to a planet the people are like a country but they're the whole planet and i'm like well at first i'm trying to explain well you know back then they're actually trying to articulate different political ideologies of countries in the form of other planets other planets yeah but then i realized like actually this is part of the this is part of that uh that what is it the fermi test or whatever it is that uh determines whether or the paradox that determines whether a planet becomes space faring until you become like one country as a planet you will never get off the ground we yeah you will never agree enough to work together for a common humongous effort yeah like exploring the rest of the galaxy i think that i think that i think that's true uh yeah i don't know um oh what was i thinking of oh have you seen speaking of all these divisions have you heard about the freedom festival nope it's anything with the name festival in it i'm like i'm not going to be interested for a few years no no just just look it up just look it up i'm not interested in a concert not you don't have to festival i'm not even that into a little comfortable to get together amongst acquaintances yeah you don't you don't need to go you don't need to go although you know the one thing i am regretting i regretted it last year and i'm regretting it this year too you know what i'm missing what santa fe institute i am missing the santa fe institute so much that was really fun we had an invite while we were in seattle at the outbreak of covid and they were like wow we're gonna see you come back this summer we can't wait to see you and of course that didn't happen and it's not gonna happen this year i had such a blast uh with their venue that's like the one thing even in the midst of all of this that'd be like yeah i'll go i'll go i won't see my family for a few weeks after maybe this is like pre-vaccination it won't see my family for a few weeks after oh no i got it wrong quarantine redneck rave oh that's the one you have to look up not freedom no i don't i don't redneck rave the fact that but rock you know if you know what i'm talking it's like when the radio stations go we do the radio station the place nothing but rock and then and then it's all of these like entitled like stilted adolescent angry boy uh screecher scripture speaker weezer whatever but rock bands that are like yeah i'm getting into the mic with the same time weezer is not a but rock band yes they are i may be okay fine i'll you can have your weezer back but so this industry of music that by the way when they looked at it 15 years ago and looked at it today musically it had not evolved or changed they're literally screaming over the same lyrics that they were 15 years ago or the same music but it actually often is outselling what is considered popular music i love rock music so does the audience i will if you listen to me talk long enough i will spend days listening to nothing but rock oh yeah well you're from you're from stockton so i guess that should be surprising stockton home of but rock in california so so yeah if you listen to me long enough i will find a way to offend something that you hold i think that i i think that's true usually i don't i don't know that you've ever actually offended me i think i'm very hard to offend like actually offend okay good yeah this is one of one of my traits like i'm like water like what why are people mad don't get mad just go huh whatever i don't mind i think people are angry too much these days we got there's a lot to be angry at there's a lot to be angry at i guess we got a lot of change oh yeah shubrew just went to red rocks to a to a super spreader event but that's awesome shubrew was a groupie for a band that's fantastic my my my toxoplasma cat is here meowing and saying hi hi hi hi hi hi hi kappy she said what are you doing down here yeah you got a talker there what are you doing down here i'm just gonna meow at you and i'm gonna sit at your feet i'm gonna purr oh gosh i'm even i think i'm even allergic to cats over the internet no you are not at least you're not as sneezy as last week oh my goodness was it just last week yes it was mister i can't even do this story because so yeah the last no but i we didn't think we told the audience we're talking about it out there we didn't tell the audience at all story i was doing last week and my eyes water were watering so badly that i stopped being able to read the text from the story and so i was like anyway there's a story about whatever this was and oh okay let's wrap up the show now because i was like i had i had no idea what was going on i had no clue just that he was rushing through this story yeah you're rushing through this story and say the things i remember about this story before i lost vision live on the air and then i'm like well what about this and you're like yeah yeah i'm sure that's in there somewhere oh my goodness that was funny allergies were good oh little nasa x that's right i'm glad justin isn't a pilot also that yeah there's no cats in the sky there's no cats in the sky it's fine it's far away from cats there's no cats on planes no they're not allowed on my i met a cat on a plane what a passenger had his cat and just it was a lap cat and what yeah i have never then i'm bringing peanuts aboard to the next flight i don't care he did now i just don't even care yeah there was a guy he had his cat on a leash and really cat was just basically hanging out on his lap the whole flight and yeah was it some like airline none of us have heard of that like oh i think it was alaska airlines really alaska or you know what i bet no i bet you it was alaska because i bet you alaska it's like because they're like they're like flying like rural people with like hunting dogs all the time there's that's how i picture it what this picture i picture an alaska airlines flight in alaska being like maybe an emotional support animal the most row it's like it's like you got one row is the family and behind that you got the hunting dogs they're strapped in oh geez and i also picture it as having gun racks on the plane cats on spaceships i think we should have cats on spaceships for sure absolutely i want all the animals on spaceships especially flying snakes so uh i think it's time i think it's time uh that we all say uh uh get well soon to blare get well soon blare get well soon quick be ill or whatever it is be healthy get there rest and recover uh don't get caught up in national catfish day on friday um tau day is on monday what can we do with tau day do we make more pies on tau day an excuse to eat pies um and yeah i think next wednesday is the last wednesday of the month will have gone through the sixth month of the year that'll be crazy uh when i have you know it was stop because i think i think every point in the year that we are in is just as crazy yeah is the everything keeps going going i need to take a vacation like like for months sometime you know what i think you should just say good night kiki i think that's what i'm gonna do but i think you should say good night justin good night justin sit can't wait how's it going i'm forgetting because blare's now i say good night kiki good night everyone good night dr kiki good night minions good night everyone thank you for joining us for another episode of twist i am going to add a uh channel to our discord so that we can get not just story recommendations and interview recommendations for the show but also movie suggestions for us putting together a twist movie night maybe we'll start doing a twist movie night uh that we can all watch together so i'm going to make a channel where you can put your suggestions in the discord once again thank you all have a wonderful week stay safe i want to gourd and jerry i hope that your side effects if you're having any from the vaccine second dose that you're all good in the next week or so um that everything protects you get vaccinated everyone let's try and beat these variants of concern and move through the summer with ease would be wonderful yeah thank you very much have a great week and we'll see you next wednesday and hopefully blare will be back good night