we are moving moving and grooving yes I have a child in here so let's see what happens with this episode we'll make it go we'll make it go we'll make it go are we all ready for a show it is live we are live we are here you are here and we are all ready to rumble with the science news of the week starting in three two this is twist this week in science episode number 720 recorded on Wednesday May 8th 2019 no I have the wrong thing up never mind hello I can't do the intro I gotta do it again did you say it was wait 2019 is it really oh my goodness Blair did you know this I sure did I had no idea it was 2019 that's I'm making small talk well you find the right thing I got the right thing starting again in oh wait I need to open it to swarm just like halfway almost my goodness how time flies time flies like an arrow flies on the other hand they like a banana I like bananas starting in 3 2 this is twist this week in science episode number 720 recorded May 8th 2019 how to stop the extinctions hey everyone I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show we are going to fill your head with phages fly sex and hot ice but first disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer okay when the world around you seems to have lost its mind when up is down left is right in is out and forward is a bowl of tuna salad it doesn't mean that you are wrong despite the fact that those around you might think that you are a recent make it up people which despite being make it up did include a data set of all humans found the average human only to be of average intelligence capable of average insight they were also average height weight and had average in seems made average points and counterpoints in conversation experienced just the average levels of serotonin when hugged and most strikingly had only an average knowledge of science and while the average person may think that you are wrong about something keep in mind that they have a below average understanding of what is going on in your mind because your mind is an outlier you have beaten the averages enough so as to make the average analyst question your data point and you have done so in most extraordinary way imaginable by tuning into this week in science coming up next science to you Kiki and Blair and a good science to you to Justin Blair and everyone out there welcome to another episode of this week in science we are yes back to talk about science because you know how much we love it we love bring in the science every week this weekend I get to go to a Portland event called science fast it's gonna be it's a march for science Portland organized event not marching we're celebrating we got science going on so very exciting it's great to celebrate science and I love the fact that we also do it every week here it's a celebration every single week of all the awesome discoveries and new questions that we can ask let's see what kind of questions of people been answering rates recently I have stories about hot ice heavenly stars and hearts just let's see I've got the new frontier in the modern phase of antibiotics how having room to breathe is a good thing and finally human evolution story I don't like oh and just under the wire a a lost hallucinogenic stash I'm glad we've gotten that story and Blair what is in the animal corner oh my goodness I have the aforementioned fly sex I have some very thinky wasps and pandas and pandas and we know it must be a good story considering how much you love the panda begrudgingly brought the pandas I am still I'm still trying to be fair and balanced it is interesting science so you'll hear this weekend begrudgingly do something information I didn't want all right so since the major media for the most part decided that they weren't gonna talk about this story very much we're gonna put it at the very top of our show hey over a million species are going extinct we're celebrating oh yeah and as we jump into the show if you want to hear about this story and you want friends to hear about this story subscribe to the podcast you can find information at twist.org we're also on YouTube okay so this this looming looming extinction over a million species are threatened thanks to people and what we are doing to the planet a study a massive analysis meta analysis we've talked about those on the show before meta analysis is when you take studies when you take studies and you and a lot lump them all together so essentially you put all the data together even though that data has come from different places and you combine them into one overarching study to come to conclusions and these are the kinds of studies that really give us an idea of what a field of science is saying about something how the results are all working together or not 15,000 studies looked at since about the 1950s or within the last 50 years studies yeah it's how did you it's got to be computers either that are a lot of interns control F and so these studies were analyzed looking at research from over the last 50 years looking at biodiversity climate ecosystem health all sorts of things and in that time our human population has gone from 3.7 billion individuals to over 7.6 billion individuals and because of human activities species are starting to vanish and what it account of the amount what it amounts to from this study is that one in every eight animal or plant species on earth are under threat is this is this including the ones that have already gone since humans made their rise or is this is this is currently her it's these that are alive species that are alive now that's not good no these are species living now some of them are already very well threatened and on the endangered species list others are just waiting to die because of things that people are doing this study was published on May 6 that is a an intergovernmental science policy platform on biodiversity and ecosystems services publication this is a group that has 132 nations involved and the report the full report will be released in about six months but this report that they they released prematurely is just a preview of what's going to come more than 40% of amphibian species are threatened 33% of marine mammals 33% of sharks and reef building corals 10% of insects yeah many of these species there are many that may vanish within the next few decades so not all of this is something that'll happen in 100 maybe 200 years down the road but but actually stuff that could happen very soon now the reasons that this is happening is human activity climate change our use of land our our our agricultural practices many ways and so there are five ways that an article in science news online you can find a science news org they have come up with the things that are really speeding up all these losses and these are our land use so about 75% of land on earth has been altered by humans severely altered by humans and this means that we are we have things that seem good on the service are not good when you really start to look at it for instance we decided that we want to use more biofuels but instead of relying on waste materials for biofuels there is land clearing for the increased growth of palm for palm oil that can be used as a biofuel and so this is that's just one example of the many ways that things that look good on the surface are being implemented poorly and without much thought to how they can be done in a sustainable manner also overfishing in the oceans and along the lines of what's happening in the oceans there is another study out this week in nature as well reporting on phytoplankton in the subarctic atlantic area researchers using satellite data have been able to create a marine productivity proxy to determine how plankton really these these phytoplankton are producing in the atlantic in the subarctic atlantic area and really they find that it in the industrial era that productivity is on the decline and it might be evidence of a predicted collapse of northern atlantic planktonic stocks doesn't sound good that's like one of the key steps look at the part of the food chain where everything else eats and then the fish get bigger the creatures get bigger as you grow up the food chain so then everything relies oh gosh yeah it's like if all of a sudden all the trees were gone yeah what would we do then and then on top of that we're not working on climate change fast enough you know we've only got what 12 13 years to really step on the gas we can do it we really can but we're not tackling it quickly enough and the warming that has already occurred is part of what they think is behind that phytoplankton decline and other effects also we're we're polluting we're still polluting I mean there was a report out today or this week that I saw that people go to festivals the festival season is upon us you want to go see your favorite bands you want to camp out for a long weekend or whatever and you want to hear the hear the music people are buying tents that are being sold as single-use tents oh my god each of these tents and then they leave them they get destroyed in the weather on at the at the location wherever it is each of these tents that gets used once and thrown away after one of these festival events is the equivalent amount of plastic to something like over 9 000 straws right okay so we're worried about straws and yet people are buying tents and throwing them away after one weekend so there is that we are polluting we are wasting we are not making changes and choices the way that would be a better way to live so all of this is leading to also move moving of invasive species from place to place as well so we can change things we can change it we just have to start making different choices everyone it's time okay so i'm just starting out the show on the message let's change things we can do it yeah i real quick i think that one thing that's that's jumping out at me from this right away is that a bunch of those animal groups that you talked about at the beginning that are under under fire right now they all have one thing in common and that's living in or around water amphibians sharks and rays corals right but also this idea of climate change pollution they affect the ocean hard core and i think something that people that are living in metropolitan areas or landlocked areas they forget that we are all connected to the ocean and this the ocean is a really important biome for us to consider when we think about conservation and saving species and saving the planet as a whole and as opposed to it being this kind of out there deep down under the water conversation elevating that part of the conversation could potentially do a lot to help all of the plants and animals on the planet because the ocean also greatly affects climate change directly yes it's all connected everyone it really is we live in a massively connected biosphere earth and our choices affect people and animals on all around the planet and and in terms of this report that has come out i mean yeah okay you might go okay these species are under threat what's it to me why do i need to make these changes if the species die then it will affect our ability to survive on the planet as well so this is something that we should take to heart think about how to make a better future for for humans for us for the next generation for the generation after and we can do that we can do it everyone we could okay oh no i was gonna move to my next story but i just i mean part of it in a way is i always feel like a little bit of victim blaming i mean the average consumer doesn't often have a choice that is uh sustainable so we can vote we can vote we get we need to do things like that we need to push the policy side of this to make big changes across industry uh not just our individual efforts is that alone actually is definitely not enough yeah the easy choice needs to be the good one we can do the thoughtfulness that's yes it needs to be the top level decision absolutely and maybe don't buy that single use tent for that festival this summer that is shocking that that's the thoughtless thing uh but that's not gonna it's not quite good but here's isn't it here's a better choice isn't it we spend more on uh pets pet food pet toys sending our pets to the doctor then we spend on science in this country so we we really do need a priority shift not saying get ready your pets but you know like yeah yeah uh it's probably we should be putting our resources to creating an environment where our pets our pets will be able to have future generations of pets yeah everybody people love their fur babies let's make a better future for our fur babies babies okay going from earth let's travel out into the depths of space and when we look around the universe we're looking for signs of water because water could be life and here on earth we look at water to try and figure out what different forms it may hold how would water behave in different situations we traveled past neptune and jupiter the Saturn these big gas giants right we've traveled past the the gas giants and if we go based on our own assumptions of our magnetic fields from our own planet you would think that okay they're gonna they're gonna have like a bar magnet north and south pole kind of magnetic field going on we traveled past these gas giant planets which we assume are you know gassy on the outside and then pressure get as there's more and more material going into the center of the planet's pressure builds up and so that gas gets pushed into different phases and into different forms and so eventually you end up with something people have hypothesized that maybe there's some kind of a liquid and maybe even a liquid metal interior to these gas giants but we've never been able to really figure that out we we we flew past them and measured their magnetic fields and kind of had these weird lumpy dispersed magnetic fields that weren't anything like the typical north south south bar magnet that we are looking for and so we're like what is going on there go back to our search for water around the universe researchers have been trying to figure out okay let's look at what water is doing and there have been some researchers working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and some and also at the laboratory for laser energetics in Brighton, New York and these researchers were like okay let's see what we can do to put water under more and more pressure and maybe that'll tell us what water would be doing if it's in one of these gas giants if water is in the gases and it's getting pressed in there what would the water be doing and how would it how would it form up so at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory they've been using lasers really strong lasers to right at water to induce shock waves in the water that would synthesize an increase in pressure you know to make it seem as if there was increase in pressure going on and they've they've been able to they've been able to see these amazing different forms of ice we've seen ice and they have these forms of of water ice where you were ice the water molecules H2O they bond together and these crystal crystal and lattices right increase in ice decrease in temperature decrease in movement between the molecules they're forming up into a crystal and under different amounts of pressure they've been able to find different forms of ice and so we've got ice one ice two H3 four all the way up through there's an ice nine like the one in cat's cradle but it's not like the one in cat's cradle it's not a doomsday it's not going to destroy the world but now within and recently they were able to get up to ice they were able at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory they were able to get up to ice seven and that was something that they could see it was cubic crystalline you could see it through it like ice it was transparent to the naked eye and they were able to super pressurize the ice at around 47 uh 4700 degrees celsius it conducted electricity and there were charged protons moving around and so all these properties they're like oh this is really cool but we need to look at stuff with x-ray diffraction to really see whether or not there's a crystal forming because hypothetically there's a crystal there but we don't know that for sure so we need to use x-rays and we need to see the crystal in structure and we need to make this happen so they moved on forward and they used lasers at this New York laser facility and pew pew the laser at a drop of water at such an intensity that it increased the pressure and the temperature of that water to a point that they created ice i think they did what what is the new number they called it no it's like ice 13 wow they jumped a bunch of them wow it's no no actually i'm sorry it's now this i'm very sorry not ice 13 i'm roman numerals i i missed i missed a numeral there it's ice 18 18 they like they doubled the number of ices that i don't yeah okay this is the name for it and if you don't want to call it ice 18 you can also call it super ionic ice better better much better much better this super ionic ice is linked together in a completely different crystal and lattice than we have ever seen before the molecule under this pressure has entirely broken apart the oxygen and the hydrogens in the h2o have gone forget it and where normally the hydrogens bond and all the oxygens are bonded to each other in a crystal and lattice in this situation it's an oxygen based crystal and lattice that makes it very very strong so that it the likelihood of it melting is very slim it's incredibly dense so it's about four times the the density of your normal water so you're take your normal gallon of water and multiply it by four it's going to be very heavy you would probably not want to pick it up but usually yeah usually ice is less dense than water right yes yeah right so it's less dense the opposite way it's the opposite direction it's incredibly dense and that density it's also at an incredibly high temperature we're looking at it at temperatures in the thousands of degrees celsius it's a very hot ice this is ice that is not what you find in your freezer it's ice at thousands of degrees and because the oxygens are bound to each other so strongly the hydrogens kind of move around and the hydrogen movement makes it almost like a liquid and people are saying that this is not just a new phase of water but possibly a completely new state of matter that is never on earth and water science water science you thought you thought the cup folks studying water science really where what could they possibly come up with what they let me tell you it's two or three or three items it's but only two elements can't be that much to discover so you're telling me high school students now when they learn about phases of matter are gonna have to learn about super ionic forms of matter probably not high school students maybe college students okay well in the hardest new future i'll be high school kids but that's okay this this form of water was hypothesized about 30 years ago but we did not have the technology until now to be able to see its structure and to make it happen it's only the advances in laser technology that has have happened even just within the last five years have allowed this to occur and so this laser shock waving at the water and then they shot x-rays at it at the very exact second that that laser hit it and they were able to illuminate the formation of this these crystals and see what happened to this water at such a high pressure and temperature that it is something that is completely new and this something that is completely new i what did i already say it's really dense it's hot and it's black where other forms of ice have been transparent or you can see through them no the density the way it's linked mmm it absorbs light wouldn't that would that make it would that make it a super ironic ice maybe angsty oh and then then we move on from here we move on from here let's go back to our planets gas giants they are plentiful around the universe and from what we are seeing if they uh it's water i'm looking at the universe that's huge possibly containing lots and lots of water and so the researchers think that this water ice form that in a gas giant what you have is the gas around the outside and then it gets a more liquidy form and then you have a mantle a thick mantle of this solid liquid ice that has a slight electricity flow through it which would possibly explain the weird magnetic fields that we've measured from these gas giants and if we take it from there it could also mean that this form of water is the most dominant predominant form of water in the universe not only that but the because it's in such a dense state the amount of water that is available in the solar system or in the universe is phenomenally more than we expected uh could even have been out there with ocean with every planet covered in an ocean it would probably not be as much water right so so that means it's it's water is a plentiful thing throughout the universe so the question now is you know this is an experiment here on our planet where they're looking at pure water what is the situation in a gas giant what happens to the water as if it's mixed with organic molecules for instant methane at ethane what what happens can you have a supraionic form of ammonia because that's one one that has been suggested as well so there are questions that still need to be answered but it's very fascinating quick question one you might not have the answer to um so it's not just heat but it's also pressure that creates this so is this an amount of pressure that we know exists on these gas giants absolutely yeah and that's where they went i think that's the back engineered it with based on i just felt like they were cranking it as far as they could go to see what would happen so yeah but there's plenty of different gas giants out there all right fair enough it's a bigger one yeah see right um but the uh the other thing is that i wonder like how how okay this is what what are the possibilities of escape uh for this water is is there is there some sort of uh it would have to be another planetary uh planetary impact of some sort how do you how would you how would you possibly get these this water removed from one of these cores so as to uh sprinkle it yeah how would we how would we get in there oh and but then but then you look at giant tardigrades is the other is it full of tardigrades yeah well and then you look at these massive asteroid belts and and things that we have and then the abundance of ice that we found on asteroids and then you can really start to maybe smize it maybe this was a gas giant or two or planetaries that uh that have uh collided it sometimes so it's either locked up or gets dispersed amongst the debris field but it's still there everywhere we look amazing water everywhere not a drop to drink so amazing and physics oh my goodness it's only because of technology that we're able to even have looked at this at this point in time in our lives so it's not amazing justin what'd you bring i like amazing things oh that's not this one uh let's see what do we oh this is uh actually this is a pretty amazing thing too uh 15 year old girl who needed a double lung transplant for after years of fighting bacterial infection and i believe she had cystic fibrosis as well uh got the double lung transplant few weeks later uh she came down with bacterial infection that spread throughout her body and liver uh infection was one that had it was the same i guess that had persisted before the surgery part of the reason if she made needed uh the lung transplant uh but now it threatened to end her life despite the application of the organ transplant the bacterial infection did not respond to antibiotics these bugs didn't respond says graham hatful howard Hughes medical institute professor university of pittsburgh they are highly drug resistant strains so uh the doctors was not helpful doctors uh gave up on her and then one of them was like well i have i know a guy who's been working on a thing let me talk to him first uh and they got a hold of hatful who's been working with working with viruses uh specifically viruses that eat bacteria he has a collection of something like 15 000 of these bacterial phages that have been collected by his students over the years and yeah so they basically they created a genetically engineered bacteria phage cocktail these viruses were introduced to the girl over six months nearly all of her uh her infection had basically cleared up the surgical wound began to close these skin nodules that she had all but disappeared uh liver function improved this was uh and this was there was actually two patients that they were attempting to assist in this and one of them didn't make it to the point where they could apply uh and to to sort of the scale and speed of this they had within the lab found a bacterial phage that would work on that uh teenagers another teenagers um particular strain that would overcome its resistance that would kill it they discovered it a month after uh no it passed so this is this is sort of the the time scale of of this uh as a cutting-edge science this is why if anybody's concerned that this is a sort of experimenting on children these are these are verge of death last error in the quiver uh opportunities yes but yeah they were the way they kind of went about it they tested individual phages on the strains they they mixed thousands of these phages together um and they tested them and they looked for ones that seem to to have this effect they came up with three in this case of this girl which they named money zoje and bps and uh and is one was really efficient the other two kind of worked but not as efficiently and so they actually did a little bit of tweaking to them basically what they did is they moved genes that let the phages reproduce within the bacterial cell which meant that they had to the phages uh reproduce and then have to escape this they basically destroy the cell when they reproduce flow through uh they did a little bit of testing before administering for safety uh and then applied it and yeah after six weeks a liver uh scan revealed the infection had essentially disappeared uh from the liver at least uh and six months later she's she's doing much much better so half of us high hopes bacteria haven't shown any signs of developing resistance to these phages his team has prepared a fourth one they're going to add to the mix uh to to try to get her all the way uh healthy in this case but yeah finding so right now it's a very individualized treatment because they have to find the right sort of cocktail of phages for each one but they may be able to maybe able to do this more broadly of course in the future this is this is what you call cutting edge I mean this started uh I guess this whole scenario started in 2017 and and here we are in 2018 with a potential uh cure now and this reminded me too of uh when we were in Portland we I brought the story about talking about how antibiotic resistance by I think it was 2050 is predicted then to have gotten to the point where uh bacterial infections kill more people than cancer car crashes and there was like a third thing combined every year it would be the it will become the number one killer so the the pressure is on and in what better place to look for it than a virus which is uh as we've also talked about on the show where a lot of our immunity comes from it's the toddlers have the highest viral load at age two because it's screening the body yeah but this you're talking about a virus this isn't just any virus these are viruses that target bacteria these aren't human targeting viruses they target the bacteria these are phages they are specific to bacteria but I think it's amazing that's what I'm talking about in the toddlers yeah same same thing those are also bacteria phages that uh that is when we come into this world we have this high viral load that's there to eat bacteria that's there to sort of filter for us to have a good start in life microbiome wise and that we shouldn't be that we uh now we're getting to the point where we can apply this later in life and bring back that initial start is brilliant well when you think about it things like any bacterial uh resistance comes from this kind of one-size-fit-all situation where you're just like kill it all right uh but and there's also this this universality of uh of antibiotics like penicillin that were used very widely right but it does seem like the more we get into modern medicine in this show it does seem like more of a custom fit for each new patient whether it be your microbiome or whatever kind of uh bacteria you're trying to get rid of or you know promote or any of these other things printing your own organs to order right so it's going to be a lot more I think successful to be looking at people as individuals in terms of of kind of specialized yeah it'll be good to be able to specialize yeah personalized on the infection itself but I think like you like we've seen here there's a lot of work that still needs to be done to like create the library of phages so that you have an ability to find out what are they infected with and do we have the ability to treat it and not let somebody you know pass because you can't nail down what they need for treatment and then also like Justin mentioned they they genetically modified these phages they they change them and so you need time to do that as well and so there's there are there are there are methodological concerns that still need to be tweaked out but it's definitely I mean it's this is coming and yeah and the thing I don't I'm not uh completely sure but I think part of this is that the reason it had to be individualized is because they don't have anything in the quiver right so if they had somebody if they if somebody came along with the same infection they wouldn't have to start from scratch individualizing something for that individual person they could apply what they had you they would have an error in the quiver for that combination of bacteria that they were infected with so it's not that it currently has to be personalized just because they don't have the answer to any of those questions yet they don't have those errors but they invented uh basically two uh in a couple of years uh in short work so yeah very promising field and I think we I don't know I think we've talked about this before as a strong possibility uh for microbial defenses in the future yeah my my hopes are on it I mean there's another story out this week that I ran across that salmonella there's a uh salmonella in some strains has there's a jumping gene for antibiotic resistance to colostin which is the antibiotic of last resort and so salmonella is becoming resistant oh yay what a terrible way to go yeah but I mean this is you know we keep seeing this it's it the resistance resistance is the resistance is spreading oh but you know what it's time let's have some let's have some happy news we have happy news yeah actually it's time for Blair's animal corner I think about now what you got Blair and what was that I heard about except for giant pandas uh those are later okay right now I'm gonna talk to you about wasps everyone's favorite insect no wait this is a study from University of Michigan looking at how wasps do at logic puzzles in math and in I think it was in middle school I learned about the transitive property if a is greater than b and b is greater than c than a is greater than c for a long time we've assumed that is a human deductive reasoning that we use shock and horror other animals use it in recent years we found that certain vertebrates like monkeys birds and fish have been able to use transitive inference but this study in particular was looking at invertebrates looking at bees and wasps another recent study found that honeybees could not figure out this transitive inference and honeybees are smart they are very smart yeah yeah they can navigational feats and they count and their honeybees are smart they can find their way to and from a location they can communicate with each other where it is but the explanation no surprise for a long time had to do with the size of their brain so there's just they have such a little tiny nerve blob in their head it's about a million neurons they assumed could not exhibit this complex thinking paper wasps turns out have the same number of neurons roughly about a million as honeybees but they fared differently on this test so the test uh this is going to get kind of complicated i will try to explain as best as i can was to test this transitive inference so they were given pairs of colors in in a in a pen in a three by ten by one centimeter rectangle one of the end of the rectangle had the quote-unquote correct stimulus and the other one had the quote-unquote incorrect the entire floor was electrified except for the two and a quarter centimeter square closest to the correct stimulus the safety zone so they were trained over time with an a and b a b and c a c and d and a d and e in these specific pairs of colors which thank you to whoever wrote this that they didn't actually use colors in their labels they just used letters thanks i appreciate that um that one was better than the other so there would be one that did not that that had the safety zone if they went to that color that would be their safety space so they were they were shown that one was better than the other so for example with a and b a would be the safety zone let's say and then um with b and c b was the safety zone c and d c was the safety zone d and e d was the safety zone so this is this a is greater than b or i guess d is greater than e c is greater than d b is greater than c a is greater than b so a is the highest e is the lowest in this example i'm giving so um at the start of the training um they were in a clear plastic partition they were placed in the center it was turned on they were removed and the wasps was free to go around for 30 seconds they entered the safe zone zone in every trial so they never had to worry about oh they just never found the safe zone after 30 seconds they were removed they were given a break um and then they went on to the next trial they were given a 45 minute break before they tested learning accuracy after they learned all these um they did this for five days and so they were trained which was better they refreshed that training on day five and then they were given a 45 minute break and then they got an untrained pair b and d or a and e so they had to use inference to figure out which was the better one even though they never found them together so in this case d was a safe zone um but b was not but they still had to know that in this case b was the safe zone because it was higher in hierarchy than d i know that's really hard to understand i i would but no i would have messed up the study i didn't get yapped we're going in the wrong yeah so in this case i'm not as smart as a wasp they had to they had to make that they had to make that leap of even though this has been a safe zone before it is not now because b is better than d because b is better than c i know it's a lot it's hard for us to think about but if when if there was an electrified floor apparently we could figure it out yeah you know i like the track maybe you know you know i would have studied harder in school i really would have yeah uh so would have done better on the test and transit of inference yeah they picked the correct corner more often than by random chance and um they so this this shows that they have some idea of this inference so they have this way better understanding of how things are related now the reasoning for why this might be the case with wasps and not bees is because they have different um they have different social structures so a honeybee colony has a single queen and they have multiple equally ranked female workers under her in contrast in terms of hierarchy yes that's not much it's somebody at the top the rest of us are all equals exactly so in contrast paper wasps have several reproductive females they call them foundrises the foundrises compete with their rivals and make a linear dominance hierarchy just like this so in theory if you found foundrises b and foundrises d you would know that d is higher than foundrises e and you'd know that foundrises a is higher than foundrises b but if you wandered into one area where there was b and d you would still have to pay more attention to foundrises b so you'd have to be able to figure out this uh this transitive property through hierarchy or at least the females would yes so is that and so the question then is this is is across i guess this would be across all the wasps or is this somehow a gender determined that is a great question is it better or worse or is there a is there a range of abilities based on are you indicating role in the social structure that prior that contrary to popular opinion for many many many millennia females might be better at math than males anyway uh paper why is that why is that contrary to many millennia oh you know because girls are bad at math you know that whole joke anyway we're not i have no idea it turns out we're not um so did you were not only oh just decades millennia millennia of men don't worry oh don't listen to men they yeah they don't yeah they're bad at math so anyway these paper wasps be able to tell each other apart they also have been shown to recognize individuals by their facial markings so that they uh they're kind of set up to recognize this difference between females in that way as well but this is mainly just setting up that even invertebrates animals way far away from us on the evolutionary tree need to be able to do this complex what we would consider logic thinking that these logic puzzles that uh we for so long assumed was only something that humans could do hmm animals can animal kingdom strikes us down once again and if you had trouble following that i'm sure you're not the only one i am a visual learner it took me reading this study a couple times to understand what's going on go to twist.org and find the show notes and you can read a little bit better but you can send me an email or tweet at me i'll try to explain it better anyway moving on to fly sex fly sex so fly sex is interesting for a bunch of reasons they do have internal fertilization and we've known before that and i think we've talked about it on the show before that male fly ejaculate makes females lose interest in other partners and i think we have had studies on the show where we've talked about the whore if it is it hormones is it neuronal path what is going on but this new study um from Howard Hughes medical institute was looking at another element in at play in a females female fruit flies disinterest in other males after copulation and that has to do with the mechanics of how they actually copulate so when a when a female fly has uninterrupted sex a pair of neurons exclusive to females carry a stop mating message from sensory neurons in the abdomen up to the brain this has been dubbed the copulation effect and might be especially important in the wild when matings can be interrupted partway through they were hunt uh the head researchers on this were actually hunting for neurons involved in reward circuitry when they stumbled across this finding which is very funny they noticed that certain cells in female flies sent strong reward messages to the brain when they were stimulated but they those cells didn't even exist in males so they said okay this is something sex specific let's look at it in one experiment they put female fruit flies with males that couldn't ejaculate so there was no sperm signaling in there after mating the females lost interest in other males even though they got no sperm from the males when they blocked this particular neurons activity that they found the females kept trying to mate so these cells control a way that female flies determine when they've successfully had sex independent of the sperm effect why would this happen this seems disadvantageous if you're a female well the sperm effect which is the one that's kind of the chemical response to the ejaculation takes a while to set in so this kind of bridges the gap in between copulation and the the hormones or whatever it is from the sperm signaling them to stop having sex this is actually a very short-lived response from the from the neurons and so it sounds like most likely they that takes over for the short term until the sperm effect can kick in is it but are we are we still sure the sperm effect is at play then though i think if it looks like there's a whole other mechanism that's doing the job so it's kind of an overlap so the the copulatory effect is the short-lived immediate and the sperm effect takes on later and is more long-term and good for those who can't see but because they have done it hand diagram of overlapping things yeah overlapping things it's like uh go ahead i was just going to say i mean part of the experiment was was controlling whether females got sperm or didn't and so they're worse and so when you see that there are some female who did who did not get sperm but like the copulatory effects stopped them and then that wore off and then they maybe wanted to mate more quickly than those without sperm and you've got you've got these two effects that you can see there you go it's like uh to try to give it a metaphor it's like i i had a migraine on monday and i took some pain medication but that takes a while takes about 20 minutes to start working so i got a nice huge ice pack and i put it on my head that was a short-term solution because it just kind of numbed what was happening superficially and it happened long enough so that i didn't barf everywhere until the pain medication kicked in about 20 minutes later fun style yeah short term versus long term short term versus long term uh-huh and for those of you in the listening audience uh when she said short term and long term Blair did a uh short span between two fingers and then a further by a longer span between her two fingers what would i do without you oh what would we all do without each other well you're gonna get a chance to find out for about a minute or two because it's time for us to take a break we're gonna take a quick break so we can have a few messages and then when we return we have more stories for you we have a what has science done for you lately collapses and much more so stay tuned for more this week in science can explain things you've heard from all that intuition the libraries it shows the way to go new conclusion the methods of hypothesis and patience are the only things i need thank you for listening to this week in science we come to you every week and it is such a gift that you join us that you bring us into your lives on a weekly basis but you want to know how you can help continue to make that an ongoing event week after week we do have to support this show and uh pay for the many ways that we make the show happen and fun things that we try to do so if you are able we would love your support to keep the show going if you're interested in how you can support the program head over to twist.org twist.org is where all things twists are found links out to other places and resources show notes all the fun stuff for each of our show episodes you have a question about stories that's where you find it but also at twist you can find things like our zazzle store link at the zazzle store link click it it'll take you to our zazzle store where you can find all sorts of twist items t-shirts and polo shirts tote bags pillows phone covers mouse pads wonderful items with the twist logo or art from various blairs animal corner calendars many items in the store and there is definitely something for anyone's needs that you can find there do you need a baby onesie we have those twist onesies they're so cute or wrapping paper there is twist wrapping paper it is true need a coffee mug oh that's where you find it and a portion of these proceeds do go to support twists and so we thank you for any purchases that you make there back at twist.org you can also click on the donate button there's a little yellow donate button on the side of the page click on that donate button and it will take you to a paypal interface where you can choose an amount to donate it's a one-time donation just click and pay through paypal to support us at the amount that you are able if you would like to support us in an ongoing fashion click on the patreon link patreon is a crowdfunding community for creators and over there you can click the red button lots of clicking going on here click click click become a patron click that red button and choose your level of support you'll be charged once per month for whichever level you choose ten dollars a month and more we will thank you by name at the end of the show wouldn't that be fun there are all sorts of other fun things you can get through the patreon community also finally back at twist.org there is a big orange subscribe button it's just for the big three google itunes and youtube but it's an easy way for you to subscribe or for you to get someone else to do the same send with someone to twist.org to subscribe you can also find us though at fun places like pandora spotify spreeker radio.com tune in all of all the big places where you can find podcasts we are there we're also we have a facebook page facebook.com slash this week in science and if you're in santa fe or thinking of heading to santa fe we will be there June 14th to or June 15th and 16th for the interplanetary festival we are going to be podcasting on June 15th can't wait to do a podcast at the interplanetary festival in santa fe sponsored by the santa fe institute thank you to all of you for your support and honestly we really could not do this without you thank you and we're back with more this week in science yeah we are you know it we have more science for you but first what has science done for me beautiful it's always beautiful such harmonizing that's right all right this letter this week comes in from minion dale more and dale wrote in to say six months ago i had to take a toyota prius to the dealership to get a headlight assembly replacement i had to leave the car there as the maintenance staff explained that it was about a five hour job fast forward six months yesterday a close family friend went into surgery he has been battling brain tumors for a while now undergoing traditional treatments as well as gamma knife last week he became numb on his left side and started exhibiting signs of possible stroke after going into the hospital he was told that a right hemisphere brain tumor had increased in size so suddenly that it was impairing his motor functions and a surgery would have to be performed as soon as possible possible side effects were partial to total paralysis on the left side he went into surgery yesterday afternoon placed under general anesthesia had his skull removed in the area tumor removed and in recovery in four and a half hours as of last night he was still unable to speak clearly but had movement on his left side and was able to tell with sign language that he was okay and signed i love you to his wife the man was in and out of a successful brain surgery faster than the local car dealership and fixed my headlight what a time to be alive yeah unfortunately i did get news from dale today when i was informing him that i would be reading his letter that this friend of his has passed away due to complications from the cancer but i when i asked him if he wanted me to still read this letter he said yes and so the thought he said is still there that that we really are in an amazing time to be alive and so dale thank you so much for being a member of our community thank you for sharing this story with us and we wish the best to your friends family and to you thank you if anyone is wanting to write us a letter a song a sonnet you can do that we need you to help fill up this moment in the show what has science done for you lately please help fill it up by sending me whatever story sonnet song whatever to my email kirsten at thisweekinscience.com or send it to facebook facebook.com slash this week in science we do want to keep filling it up and blair there's a song coming not now but i have an email it's scheduled i've got it on the i've got it on the list oh my god i'm so excited there's a song i don't know that we'll be able to play it for copyright reasons because of the music used but there's a song on the there is seriously what a time to be alive blair not you wait who's got a story next what's going on i mean i could go if you want where am i today justin you have a story yeah this is about the cambrian explosion which uh a lot of people don't remember this it was about 540 million years ago and it's sort of the key time frame for the evolution expansion of complex life forms i forgot the fossil record that question has been around for a while though why did that happen what uh what's why so much life gets so complex and so it's usually something has space and then a bunch of evolution is like how about this how about this how about this how about this so so that's that's the that is has been the sort of predominant common theory is that it was a sort of tipping point for evolutionary niches and expansion into those niches that was taking place and that's that's of course what happened but there's more to the story it seems there's a multi-disciplinary study published in nature geoscience by a joint china uk russia research team and they're giving a an argument that uh oxygen content of the atmosphere in ocean was the principal controlling factor for the cambrian explosion so they have there are in this record there are patterns of radiations of complex life and then sort of a mass extinctions that would also uh follow sort of a back and forth so it wasn't just one directional explosion it was wave upon wave of forward and back and it turns out the pattern of going forward and back coincides with fluctuations in the carbon isotopic composition of seawater which is correlated with the production of oxygen in the atmosphere and in the oceans so it now it now uh has added another layer to our understanding perhaps uh or another layer of questioning to examine exactly what is important for life and i think this is uh this story is is is interesting and exciting uh in a lot of ways but it also is very crucial right now as we talk about as we talked about the decline of corals as we learned on this show in much to my surprise corals produce half of the oxygen on the planet and so the decline of corals means decline in oxygen and we now know that that alone is tied to mass extinctions events on the planet in in our history so lessons learned are or lessons learned if you act upon them if not they are mistakes repeated yeah that works pretty simple it's great forward that kind of it does remind me of the uh the winged the the bat like winged dinosaur that looks a little bit like a dragon in the pictures that i've seen in the illustrations of it but it uh it predated the dinosaurs that turned into birds the winged dinosaurs that became birds and so it was kind of like this period of time where evolution was trying on wings and going how does this work how does that work where does that and so it it's one of the styles it's one of the dinosaurs that that didn't make it but you know it's interesting about it too it's it makes me think of okay yeah maybe not now but let's file this away and the genetic data bank of a thing we could do uh at some point again because we have it in there because as we as a lot of what we learn about uh evolution is it is we keep coming up to it's not necessarily a new thing uh in the history of a life form if you follow it back it's a reemergence of a thing or a reapplication of a thing is also something that takes place in in evolution which is very like like when they uh at some point these things are new yeah I mean we can dial back we can dial back uh embryonic chickens uh to having tea right so so so this the information is there and there could be a day in the future where um humans die off nobody's feeding the chickens and they start going after different prey and they get teeth again it's in there they have the genes to produce right when chickens bite back right they already do that and it already hurts but yeah so so uh yeah uh genetic evolution and reputation and all this also files away for future reference and so we do see these reemergences as well as co-coversions and new uh traits that are picked up a one way new and different yes uh well there are lots of different kinds of stars out there I love stars there are many different stars have you heard of collapsears before this is not a thing I've heard of before this feels like that feels like what I do on a dance floor because I refuse to get off the dance floor and then at some point I just become a collapse are I'm a collapse are that's what I am no collapse are are these massive spinning stars spinning around giant massive and then they collapse into a black hole and so when they collapse they go supernova and it's that supernova that releases a massive gamma ray burst and also explodes out those outer layers of dust and gas off of the star out into a nebula and out into the surrounding space and this is the process by which this this implosion right the supernova explosions uh by which heavier elements are thought to have ceded the universe and researchers have been trying to figure out where exactly all the gold platinum and uranium in our universe came from and we you know we always make jokes right oh the big stars well maybe that's where the gold came from that's where the stuff that came up but till now we really only have had evidence of a merger of neutron stars possibly creating gold that would be thrown out into the surrounding universe lighter lighter elements have been discovered all over the place but there's a chain of reactions it's called the our process that really only happens when you have densely packed material neutrons right so this our process happens and in the art it's not a pirate process but they're going after gold I don't know I don't know what I'm gonna put it's the our process atomic nuclei absorb neutrons really quickly and they undergo radioactive decay and in this our process new elements that are heavier get created and so they suspected when neutron stars collide this happens and then astronomers saw neutron stars collide we recently saw this because of LIGO and we were looking at it and oh hey look at that and they have uh evidence for these elements gold silver and platinum as a result of seeing this neutron star merger however neutron stars can't tell the whole story so researchers were like well what else could it be well we've gotta gotta be collapsing stars but we haven't seen this before and so there's a new study that was just published in nature on May 6th researchers have been looking at this these are processes in stars and expanding on a study from back in night in 2016 discovering a dwarf galaxy called reticulum 2 that they thought resulted with this these elements in the galaxy resulted from a neutron star merger but now as the result of this study they think it's a collapse star that it was a massive spinning star that supernova and and spit its elements everywhere they think as a result of their analyses of these massive stars that the collapse stars might actually be the things that are responsible for 80 percent of these elements that come from the r process the gold the silver the platinum the uranium in the universe and that neutron stars might only make up about 20 percent this is the new idea but still i would still think the neutron stars would be better it's spitting it out right but the neutron stars if they yes they could possibly be better at bidding out the elements the massive stars are just bigger though yeah it's just because they're so big they contain so much more stuff that what they the abundance of material is so much greater that that's why they think that these collapse stars are what are responsible localized sorry i'm doing this as stupid statistical analysis of across the universe where the gold yeah i know that's that's fascinating yeah so more studies you know more studies they'll figure it out how much is collapse stars how much is neutron stars we still don't know is there another process that we still haven't figured out yet because there there might be that as well yeah but there's both those uh the high pressure thing yeah makes sense yep high pressure high temperature massive massive event taking place yes tell me another story oh is it me again yes that's what happens you tell story i tell a story you tell a story this is a story this is uh at last a uh human origin story that i didn't like this is uh but i'm just gonna read it as it is statistical analysis of fossil data shows that it is unlikely that australopithecus sediba that's the that's the hominin that was found in in the cave uh the deep under where they had to hire really small archaeologists and anthropologists to go spelunking for in south africa the one that uh that looked like it was they were doing a burial like they might have been dragging the dead there because there was a lot of of all across all ages like you would see in a cemetery and there weren't uh there weren't kills there weren't animal bones it didn't look like they were in there eating and living uh the only evidence with their these populations being dead now researcher this research is by paleontologists from the university of chicago uh they're publishing in science advances concluding that australopithecus afarensis aka the famous lucy scouting is the most likely ancestor to the genus homo and not astralopithecus sediba so now these were the sort of it's the oldest known homo fossil job on is yet unnamed species found in ethiopia is 2.8 million years old they don't they got the job on they don't really know the rest of it but it's 2.8 million years ago they're saying this is a homo from this and it predates uh sediba by about 800 thousand years that's the current sediba find that's the oldest job on fine but again it's an unnamed species uh so so they're saying yeah it's very likely because the average run i suppose for a hominin is about a million years so they're saying it to be at 800 000 years already they they missed the mark by two million years or no by 800 000 years they're probably not the predecessor of it so despite this timeline researchers who discovered sediba have claimed that it is an ancestral species to homo while it is possible that sediba could have post-dated earliest homo by 800 000 years new analysis indicates that they're probably finding this chronological pattern is highly unlikely so i guess that there's a couple of things here that uh that sort of that sort of bothered me in this uh the statistical analysis is based on one a kind of unidentified homo job on which you could have possibly done with something that was very disparate it sort of it sort of begs the idea the old way of thinking because they're using they're not using genetics or anything like this they're using morphology some statistics and just the data points available to come to a conclusion uh what they what they sort of lack in this though is an understanding of that whole braided stream concept the idea that this could have been a completely different offshoot uh right like this could be another hominin that is also not related to homo but is morphologically similar that there could have been a bigger experiment even going back further between the different hominins that were around so that you could have something that could have morphological similarities in in different places but still not be the homo ancestor so uh based on everything that we've learned just the last five ten years it seems like that's a giant conclusion to make with very limited data but still yeah I feel like a lot of I mean this archaeological paleontological data is you know your small sample sizes and it's just these years and years of work to just get a few more bones and hopefully get enough data to be able to make these you know broad statements about our our evolution right and yeah but it's it's neat the the methods they're using these days to be able to actually do it how how long have humans been around now how it goes back and forth but I guess the rough is about 200,000 this year okay so we've still got unless we kill ourselves with climate change we've still got about 800,000 years left yeah oh but you know what I gotta take that back I gotta take that back it's gotta be older than that because there there was an interbreeding event with Neanderthals which massively predated what we thought which would put it more into 300 to 400,000 years okay we're still only we're less than halfway it's great we've got time it's good well there's other factors I mean if we were doing nothing but running around being hominins yeah okay gotta run ahead of us who's to say we're not Cambrian air type extinctions by reducing the oxygen with the knocking down at you know what people smoke them if you got them hominids got a hum you know hominids got a hum there yeah there you go okay words to live by from Blair all right moving on to my last story so I was thinking about bringing a story about lung regeneration because I was like hey that's cool we can potentially regenerate lungs for smokers but that's not really what it is it just is a method of regenerating lungs that allows them to last a few hours longer so it'll help with being able to get lungs to patients who need transplants which that's kind of cool but there was this other news that I thought was really exciting about some researchers from Kings College London have been working this is also researchers from the British Heart Foundation the head of the School of Cardiovascular Medicine and Sciences at this this Kings College London as an international collaboration really of also involving researchers in Italy who have been working to help repair the heart that has been damaged from heart attack myocardial infarction now in a heart attack the muscle is damaged it doesn't it doesn't receive oxygen the muscle cells die those cells then form a scar tissue and that scar tissue impacts the ability of electrical signals to travel through the heart and also the ability of the heart to pump cardiac arrest is one of the leading causes of death today if not the leading cause of death today and if we could repair the heart after heart attack for those people who survive it could be amazing it could it could change lives and make lives longer and more fulfilling so we've got these different methods researchers trying to do heart patches and stem cell patches and different things well these researchers who published this week in nature again have have published their study using pig hearts which are very similar and about the same size as human hearts in which they promote they they used a new generic compound micro RNA 1 9 9 a and they treated infarcted pig hearts with this micro RNA 1 9 9 a and found that it simulated stimulated cardiac repair the cells in the heart started repairing the damage new muscle cells were formed there were proliferations of cells and one month after myocardial infarction and delivery of the RNA and they used an adeno associated viral vector so again this is a viral vector that would probably have to be looked into for human use that's not an issue when you're dealing with pigs because but it allows this micro RNA to get into the cells to actually have its effect these treated animals showed increased muscle mass and reduced scar size improvements in global and regional contractivity contractility there was healing taking place in the hearts which is very exciting however bad news is there was no control over the proliferation of cells and so the micro RNA the cell the micro RNA just stayed there and kept turning the cells on and so more and more cells were being born and they got into the wrong places and eventually the pigs died of arrhythmias because their hearts stopped working well but the study does show that there is promise in this kind of method if we can learn how to control it like we can we put it in and the cells they start dividing and things start fixing and then oh it's oh it's gone too far it it's not stopping what yeah that was the story yeah so it's it's potentially a very a very exciting therapy in in the future but the fact that it was successful in a certain extent of of remediation of the damage is very exciting and we will see where it goes in the future what will we see oh yeah and i got a couple of quick news stories we ready for some quick news yeah so uh first quick news story there is a new blood test for Alzheimer's disease and when it looks for one of the proteins the misbolded proteins in the blood so it's not it's not super invasive just a blood test and it was able to within about 70 percent accuracy be able to determine whether or not somebody would have Alzheimer's disease as early as eight years before any sign of symptoms and the researchers fiddled with their tests a little bit more and found when it was paired with a test for a different protein the tau protein uh that was uh taken from cerebrospinal fluid that those results went up to 97 percent accuracy they are hoping that they will be able to get this blood and cerebrospinal fluid combo test out into the market soon because the potential to be able to find out whether people are starting to get the accumulation of proteins that will lead to the symptoms of deteriorating mental function that are associated with Alzheimer's disease before those symptoms years before those symptoms ever start means that there may be uh maybe hope for treatment yeah see that's the key because if they're if they we weren't getting as far as we have been with Alzheimer's treatments potential treatments i would say i don't know if you'd want to know it would be tough to kind of have this ticking clock knowing that it's going to start happening but since we have avenues to potential treatment this is huge it's huge and it's also been uh discussed that some of the antibody treatments that failed in trial researchers think that it's possibly because they were testing on people who were such late stage Alzheimer's it was people who already had massive amounts of damage and that perhaps if it were with patients who are accumulating proteins but still years away from actual symptoms showing up that maybe the damage might not be at a point yet where it's too far gone to treat and so maybe it might be worth revisiting some of these uh possible antibody treatments yeah that's a great point this is a story we didn't bring that has a link between uh doing diagnoses and treatment but also of some spectrum of schizophrenia being able to diagnose by the blood so therefore finding these sort of seems like a blood neural connection in there that is yeah um we'll have to maybe looking into bringing that story next week yeah that'd be cool it seems like this is an interesting uh blood brain connection there is there is as much as we think our brain is separated you know with that blood brain barrier there's still some crosstalk and there are things that we can find and and apparently the the blood carries the evidence of of what it's seen taking pictures along the way more like a blood brain sieve am i right i was gonna say blood brain tourist but sure yeah um and finally there is a study out this week in nature human behavior about pokemon brain what that's right turns out that uh people who played pokemon as kids had developed a very unique region of their brain that is is specialized for recognizing pokemon characters so you've heard of the grandmother cell or these you know these cells in our brain that respond to individuals faces of individuals that we that we know or that it allows us to recognize important figures very easily in our daily lives and those individuals who have grown up with pokemon pokemon characters were very important and so uh there's the region of the brain with neurons dedicated to pokemon characters and the region of the brain and the neurons seem to be correlated with the size of the device that they used which is associated with the size of the characters on the screen yeah so i just wonder if this is similar to you know do i have an area of my brain that is focused solely on recognizing types of animals by the way that they look or does someone who loves trains have an area of their brain that is focused on recognizing different types of trains i feel like it has to be the same stuff is there what what you focus on what's important to you there your brain is specializing for that especially yeah especially during that period of youth when your brain is developing and determining what is important yeah just like a categorizing enthusiast like a category building brain space i don't know yeah so anyway speaking of of things about animals in my brain um pandas those flawless flawless transition pandas they uh might their guts might not be so stupid um we know they are specialized herbivores they eat bamboo but they have come from a crop of carnivores from other bears and other other carnivora family members um and so we've talked before about how their gut is directly related to eating meat and so we kind of thought that was that was something that showed that they were just wrong somehow they have a digestive tract digestive enzymes and gut microbes that are for carnivores not herbivores well looking not just at the food that's going in but the nutrients in the foods that are going in they have found that despite their plant-based diet the protein and carbohydrate content of that diet looks much more like hyper carnivores animals that obtain more than 70 percent of their diet from other animals than that of herbivores so about 50 of the energy they get is from protein and i did look it up and bamboo is a very high protein plant it contains um between one and a half to four grams per 100 grams of bamboo shoots uh in protein so that's pretty high and so i guess it ends up that their their nutrient intake is actually quite similar to if they were just eating meat wait so could we all replace our the meat in our diets with bamboo no we could not digest bamboo what uh well well well unless we had the proper microbiome there you go we could do a microbiome transplant pandapoo pills pandapoo pills everybody yeah dr justin's not a real doctor pandapoo pill microbiome making bamboo not just for your floors anymore yeah so the implication from this is that the evolutionary track between a bear that eats meat and a panda is that evolutionary distance is actually quite minimal and the transition is in fact more superficial than we thought and that also explains why they have this weird mixture of herbivore and carnivore traits might not be nature's mistake it might be just fine oh are you ready folks are you rethinking your love for the panda no they're still bad at reproducing and finding their own homes so i've had it still the two things the two things that are the highest on Blair's list of qualities in a good animal uh finding a home oh yeah and must reproduce that's the name of the game that's why we're all here they're still here a lot of things aren't here pandas are here because of humans humans did it okay moving on because we didn't kill them off losing on actively saving them moving it tell us about your lost stash oh so yeah this is uh what is this the University of California Berkeley archaeologist Melanie Miller the chemical analysis of a thousand-year-old pouch made from three fox now it's sewn together uh uh that was found high in the andy mountains i believe i'll get to this uh they included dimethyl tryptamine dmt and harmine harming i don't know what this is active key components of ayahuasca my life ayahuasca mind-blowing yeah so obviously i've been out of the hipster scene for a while ayahuasca mind-blowing brew commonly associated with the amazonian jungle quotey voice of miller this is the first evidence of ancient south americans potentially combining different medicinal plants to produce a powerful substance like ayahuasca so she said they did analysis of scraping from the sock uh fox and out patch plant sample found in what they're calling the ritual bundle why are all ancient people constantly doing rituals it's impossible that this was just like a day trip or like why so damn it was just tuesday yeah these days we call it a festival fanny pack no or this could have just been date like this could be normal life could be there wasn't you know media distraction music that you could just download and listen you know it's uh you had to be entertained back in the old days this matter's just been it uh discovery ads are growing body of evidence of again ritualistic psychotropic plant use going back millennia and then this is what i sort of find is uh sort of funny about this too um so let's see where it is here uh they're found oh at 13 000 foot elevations in the region of southwestern bolivia this is picture uh wandering llamas and alpacas that's that's about where this would be the kit itself goes back 550 to 950 ad pre-incan to winakoo civilization which used to dominate the southern indian highlands uh in addition to the the medicinals they found a carved wooden snuffing tablets a snuffing tube that had human hair braids attached to it for snorting intoxicants we found some wama bone spatulas colorful woven textile strip and dried plant materials a very uh basically a junky stash kit of sores sounds like uh but the uh what was this uh what was sort of interesting is that they have thought of the site where they found these to be a burial site they thought it was a burial site which would fit with the ritualistic nature of having the you know this is some sort of community with ancestors so they they did an excavation guess what no human remains this is just somebody up at the altitude having their uh version of fun again but the yeah having a having a yeah they're having a wonder right yeah it says that plants found in the bundle do not grow at those altitudes so it's not like they went there to collect them but then automatically here we go suggesting the bundles owners may have been a traveling shaman or some other expert in rituals of psychedelic plantings wait as see the things people of yesterday were not different than people of today people of yesterday were the same people they had different experiences yes the cultures were different the technology was different but the people are people not everyone going around with psychedelics in their back pocket in their little pouch is doing a ritual or is a shaman magic man that's wooing people this this person maybe did know maybe did know how to provide proper doses so that people would not be uh hurt or harm this is typically today known as a drug dealer but but it's it's does not mean that the people around them were um wowed by the magic shamans pouch of wonders they were probably knew what they were expecting at least the second time around so anyways uh interesting really interesting fine but please not all ancient people are doing rituals unless you want to start defining everything that we do in modern society's rituals oh we're here for the ritualistic throwing around of a pig skin which is a ritual we can't talk about anyway we love the rant that comes along with it oh everyone I believe we have come to the end of another show have we done it we did it we did it yay everyone thank you thank you for a great show to you out there thank you for joining us tonight thank you to all of you in the chat room for chatting with us thank you I have some shout outs to give to individuals to identity for for helping us record the show to fata for helping keep our chat rooms nice and for social media and also for show notes and gourd gourd mcleod thank you for keeping our chat room wonderfully kind as well I do appreciate that thank you to our patreon sponsors which of course I got halfway through putting them all up on the page in front of me and then I got into justin's story I was listening to yours it was pandas and then ayahuasca and I'm like what's going on here and then I guess okay thank you to paul disney Richard Onimus ed dire andy gross jupal like philip shane ken haze hairs and brother charlene henry joshua fury steve debel alex wilson stony steel craig landon mark mizarros jack matthew litwin jason roberts bill k bob calder time jumper 319 eric nap richard brian kondren dav neighbor karin benton adam lajoy sarah chavis rodney tiffani boyd john burtrum mountain sloth seth sethogradney steven albaron john rataswamy dav friedel darryl myshack andrew swanson paul ronovitch sue doster dav wilkinson ben bignell richard porter noodles kevin reardon christoph zooknorek ashish pants ulysses adkins rt on rick ramas paul john mckay jason old brian carrington christopher drier lisa slizewski slizewski jim drapeau greg riley shun lamb ben rothig steve leesman kurt larson rudie garcia marjorie gary s robert greg briggs brendon menish christopher rappin flying out erin luthan matt setter mark heton flow hesson flow kevin parochan byron lee and e o thank you for all your support on patreon for those of you out there who are interested you can find information about patreon a link to it at twist.org remember you can also help twist out by subscribing tell your friends about twist on next week's show we will be expecting a guest we are going to be speaking with a new a researcher in new zealand christina hoob who looks at Antarctic ice and so we'll be talking about ice in Antarctica and what's going on with those ice sheets down there and what her research is telling us very excited about that conversation and once again we will be broadcasting live online at eight o'clock eight p.m pacific time twist.org slash live or on youtube you youtube no youtube youtube both places you can watch live and join the chat room don't worry if you can't make it though you can find our past episodes at twist.org or on that youtube channel thank you for enjoying the show twist is also available as a podcast just google this week in science in your itunes directory or if you have a mobile device you can simply search for this week in science and we should pop right up for more information on anything you've heard here today like you want to see that diagram about the wasp so i'm more time show notes will be available on our website that website is of course www.twist.org while you're there you can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts or other listeners yeah or you can skip the other listeners and contact us directly email kirsten at kirsten at this week in science.com justin at twistminion at gmail.com or blare at blarebaz at twist.org just be sure to put twist t-w-i-s somewhere in the subject line otherwise your email is likely to be and you can also hit us up on the twitter where we are to science at doctor kiki at jacksonfly and at blare's menagerie we love your feedback if there's a topic you'd like us to cover or address a suggestion for an interview please let us know we'll be back here next week and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news and if you've learned anything from the show remember it's all in your head this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science it's the end of the world so i'm setting up the 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 science is coming your way so everybody listen to what i say i use the scientific method for all that it's worth and i'll broadcast my opinion all over the earth because it's this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in science science i've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what i say may not represent your views but i've done the calculations and i've got a plan if you listen to the science you may just get understand but we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to save the world from japanese and this week in science is coming away so everybody listen to everything we say and if you use our methods to roll and die we may rid the world of toxoplasma got the eye because it's this week in science this week in science science science this week in science this week in science science science i've got a laundry list of items i want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness i'm trying to promote more rational thought and i'll try to answer any question you've got the help can i ever see the changes i seek when i can only set up shop one hour a week this week in science is coming your way you better just listen to what we say and if you learn anything from the words that we said then please just remember it's all in your head because it's this week in science this week in science this week in science science science this week in science this week in science science science this week in science this week in science this weekend science, this weekend science, this weekend science, this weekend science. And that brings us to the after show. The after show is after the show. It's the time that we're after the show, show, faux show. It's not the show. It's the after show. It's not the pre-show. It's the after show. After comes after, pre's before. It's not the before. It's the after. We're done, but not done. It's I don't know. What are we doing now? Hey, what even are we doing? What even are we doing, man? So there was a story that Beige over on YouTube in the chat room over on YouTube. Oh, he's going away. He said good night all. He was wanting to talk about and I don't know if he had posted it to our Facebook page, but there is another newly named Tyrannosaur. It's a Tyrannosauroid. It's a relative of the T-Rex, but it's bitty. It's a little tiny T-Rex. Tiny T-Rex. Yeah, about three feet tall at the hip, nine feet in length. So it was short, long, but still T-Rexy. Huh, so cool to find a picture of it. I wonder if I just looked up bitty T-Rex. Whitty, bitty. T-Rex, relative. There you go. Look at my Googling skills. Let's see. There it is. T-Rex cousin. Live Science says new found mini T-Rex was a tiny terror at just three feet tall. Someone else says these T-Rex relatives are an evolutionary stepping stone. Three feet tall. Do you have a picture? I'm looking for it. Yeah, I just don't want to do live science. So I'm going to find a different one. Live Science has too many ads on it. I need to find a different source and I can find pictures. New Atlas maybe. I will find it. Everything's got too many ads here. Oh, we've got lots of pictures. Here we go. I'm sharing the pictures. Let's look at this cousin. What are we looking at? We're looking at Bitty Bones. Tiny T-Rex. Look at the jaw is in his hand. There's a T-Rex jaw. This is a real T-Rex and this is three foot tall T-Rex that was found. Look at that. It's so cute. There's a little baby T-Rex. And then here comes another one. Look at that. There's a researcher with the little boat of... Look at that shirt. He matched the... He's matching the back. That's right. It's probably school colors. Look at those bones. It's a great skeleton. You've got little claws from the four limbs and you've got the pelvic bones back there. We've got legs. We've got a lot of vertebrae, the jaw bone. That's pretty cool. And so these fossilized bones, I'm trying to find... I'm trying to find the image of what they think it looked like. Oh, so he was 16 when he found the fossils in 1998. Okay. That's him then when he was 16. And then that was him up at the top in his color coordinated shirt. So he's been working on this fossil for a long time. That is very cool. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Oh, wait. Yeah. There it is. Okay. They looked... Look at it. It's all fuzzy. Fuzzy and feathery. And it was named... Amazing. Suscatyrannus hazelae. He does look kind of like a bird. He looks like a mixture between a cassowary and a spoon... No, a shoebill. It looks kind of like a shoebill. Yeah. Can you imagine just instead of those four limbs, it's just like, I have wings. Yeah, those limbs don't really look like they're going to be doing much anyway. So I've got wings. Get me some wings on there. Yeah, let's see. So let's see what the name hazelae... Does it say what he'd named it for? Getting into this. Bone growth analysis. It was at least three years old at the time it died. It was 92 million years ago, middle of the Cretaceous, an intermediate Tyrannosauroid linking the earliest and smallest members to the giants. New name. Here we go. Derived from the native, Zuni Native American tribe, word soski, meaning coyote. Tyrannus, meaning king, and hazelae for hazel wolf who funded a lot of digs in the basin. Yeah, that's cool. Coyote. So this is the king coyote. Hazel, the king coyote. That is pretty darn cool. That's a good animal name. They did good work. They did. Yeah. And that, you know, it goes into this aspect of paleontology that, you know, it has to get funded somehow, you know, who a lot of funding comes from private funders. And it's this, every once in a while researchers can give back and say thank you by naming a species after them. The patrons of the paleontological world. I don't think I like rattlesnakes. I'm gonna have to go in the desert and dig for it. That's one thing. You just stomp and you're fine. Just stomp every time you walk. Stomp everywhere, rattlesnakes, scorpions, the rattlesnakes. Scorpions are another issue. And then my skin cracking and burning.  Also, I'm weirdly allergic to the desert. So every time I've gone to the desert, my nose just turns into like a running faucet and I lose my voice. That's interesting. Yeah. So something about the dry air, I don't know. Yeah, well, your normal climate is moist. Yeah, moist. The San Franciscan goes to the desert. It's no longer moist. Gotta get out of here. Yeah, it's when I went to the Mojave to catch reptiles and amphibians in college, I woke up the our first day after sleeping there and I thought I had contracted just a terrible cold. I was I was terribly sick the whole time I was there. And then on the on the van ride back, about two hours inland, went away. It was bizarre. And then it happened to me again. Oh, every time I went to the Dead Sea in Israel, and we stayed nearby the Dead Sea. Like I got a case in the deserts. Yeah, I thought I was sick. And then we went back in to higher altitudes or to kind of a coastal area and it went away immediately. That's crazy.  Yeah, made you yawn. That means I'm empathetic towards you. That means I love you. I love you too. We could just sit here yawning back and forth across the internet. And Justin didn't yawn, which easy hates both of us. Oh, no, you know what? I wasn't looking at the video. I was typing. I was typing. Give me another one. Give me another one. Test me. Test me out right here. I can't. I can't. What's the word? Oh, you know what I would love to do? I would love to do like get a big panel on here and read the intro to Dr. Seuss's sleep book where they say yawn like he says yawn like a dozen times in the intro. It's perfect. I did a story on yawning and I felt like we were all yawning constantly. Every time there's a book, there's been all the kids books you read to your child and Blair wouldn't you wouldn't know this. I read kids books to other people's children. Okay. They're, you know, bedtime books.  Oh, and the truck yawned or and the animal yawned and stretched. And I like to act things out when I'm reading these stories. And so I'll be reading to guy kind.  I really am yawning. That's actually happening now. Without fail on page three of the little blue truck or whatever book it was, I remember. Are we talking about a 2020 calendar already? It's I'm behind. It's May. I realized and I went to the art store yesterday. I was like, oh no. And I ran to the art store and I got a bunch of stuff. Yay. Do you have anything for this year? I do, but I don't want to talk about it because it might fail miserably. I think you say that every year. Okay. I sure do. And sometimes it does the year. Oh, yeah. Last year, my first idea was a huge bust. But you never know, would you? Because nope. I think that's a great idea for a calendar. A huge bust. Oh, speaking of words like that, I got the best present.  And they're your favorite people. Yes. And they're some of my favorite people as well. And so I get this text from Heather yesterday. Check your mail. Okay. Go check my mail. And I got a box. And I wasn't really able to open it until this morning because I had to put Marshalls out of town and I had to put Kyda bed and blah, blah, blah, all the things. This morning I opened it and it is a mug covered in pictures of birds and their names, but it's a foul language mug. Oh my God.  Every bird on it. And in the very bottom of the inside of the cup is just a little tit. Oh my God. I was like, amazing. Wait, is it a three-dimensional little tit that's actually in? No, it's just a picture of it. Yeah. So they're all birds and they're all these cute, wonderful birds. And I've decided that my new life list for birding isn't going to be, you know, to look for all the birds. I only want foul language birds. That's it.  I don't know if either of you experiences, but I had a cup, a milk cup, like a mug, like a coffee mug for a kid that was, but when you drink it, there was a little frog sitting in the bottom of the cup. Yeah. I had one with a hippo in it. You had a hippo. Somebody else told me they had a bear. Where are they? You had the bear? Okay. What happened to this? Brilliant idea. Where did the factory burn down and all the molds are gone? How come this is not a thing? They exist. I have not seen these. That's a great question though, because I used to love drinking out of my mug with the bear in it. And I would, I would drink like a hot chocolate especially because I drink it down like, oh, it's hot. I can see that. I can see his head. Oh my gosh. Yeah. That was exciting to me. Yeah. What happened? I'm going to screen share. I'm screen sharing. Look at this. Is that your mug? It's so cute. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That is my mug. It's on Etsy. Oh, Etsy remembers everything cool. That was it. Oh my goodness. This is bringing back memories. $35. No, okay. Never mind. But it's a great memory. Doesn't come for free. Yeah. The one that I had was just all white. It's this one. It's called Hippo Attack. Here we go. Where'd you go? Hippo Attack. Yeah. Here. I'm going to screen share again. I'm always afraid to Google with my screen share on because you never know. Yeah. Yeah. It's just this one. I had no. Oh, I like that one. Yeah. It died. I dropped it from my nerve damage hand and it shattered. Oh, I know. I know. You dropped it and then it looked more like that one image in the image that's half open. So you can see the inside. Yeah. That's also how I broke my chemistry, my beaker coffee mug that had a caffeine molecule on it. It was so rad. I bought it at the Science Teachers Association conference. It's very sad. It is sad. Dumb nerve damage. I hate it. Identity four. That's a hilarious book. He has a book on his office shelf of North American bird species, pictures of different ways to flip people to bird. Oh my gosh. That's hilarious. Oh yeah. We should figure it. We should yeah. Animal requests. We should find out what animals we want. Yes. Any animal requests. I can't see the YouTube chat room. Can you see that? Yeah. I don't think there are many people in there right now, but maybe they have animal requests. Yeah. Anyone have any animal requests? You can tweet at me too. So far this is my plan. The first one I'm going to tackle is a box turtle. I'm very excited about that. And then I have somebody said Savannah monitor and someone said shark. I've done a couple sharks, so I might do a ray instead or a skate. That would be good. I like a ray or a skate. Yes. That would be awesome. I might do a wasp. Paper wasp. I might do a... What's the thing I always forget the name of? Sturgeon. I don't know. Moxamoxadaca. It sounds like an axolotl. Thank you. An axolotl. You could do an axolotl. Those are cool. You could do animals with funky names with lots of vowels in them. That's like doing some sort of booby. I would love a blue-footed booby. Or a masked booby. I really like masked boobies too. You could do a cacopo. Cacopos are really cool. I know. What's the other bird? The South American bird that ferments. The Watson. Watson. Yes. The Watson. It's also known as the stink bird, Justin. They're fascinating. We have a sculpture of one at my zoo. Then I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. I would just suggest you figure out what you like. Frogmouth bird. What's the bird? Piliated woodpecker. That's a good one. What? It's like a frogmouth bird. Yeah. What is it called? It's called a tawny frogmouth. The tawny frogmouth. That bird looks like somebody drew it and it came to life. That is the bird that gave me the realization of why I think I like most animals that I like visually. It's because they have a huge mouth.  You could do a dung beetle. Oh, yeah. Identity four said there aren't enough beetles represented in the calendars. You're right. We could do, you could move into the. Have you done the squirrel yet? Yes. When was the squirrel? I don't remember your squirrel. What year was it? I think it was. Was it the first run? No, it was in the coloring book calendar. I can't see in black and white, so. A hyena. Oh, that's one. What are other entries? Have you done any, like a hyrax or? Yes.  The marmot. What's the, what's the, what's the one that says? Note to people, don't eat raw marmot. You'll get the bubonic plague and die. A bed bug. What's the mammal that's like a giant roly poly with scales that's. That was also in the coloring calendar. Again, I can't see in black and white, so I missed it. Oh, no raccoons yet. I could do a raccoon. A raccoon lemur. Yeah, I could do a lemur. That's a good one. I could also do a red panda. Red pandas are neat. Oh, I've never done a giraffe either. Oh, I got square canvases this time. Don't do a square calendar. Yeah, we can go back to the square. Cool. Yeah. Let's see. What about, what is the, Oh, email is good. I could do an email. I love email. Yeah, I could do. I'm lacking in the reptile and amphibian department. Oh, yeah, you've done a couple of snakes and you did a frog or a toad once, right? An ardwork. I do love an ardwork. An oryx. What's your favorite with the stripey butt? Ocopy. Ocopy, yeah. Always a very mammal heavy, though. So is the thing. A crocodile. Oh, yeah. We haven't had any cool stories about crocodile behavior recently. What's up with that? I know. They're like, we figured it out. Yeah, that was all we had.  No, I've done one every year. Elephant bird. Elephant bird. I do an extinct creature every year. Elephant bird. And I put it on September because it's species requiem day. I don't think I've ever noticed that. That's like one of those Easter eggs in the calendar. I love that. I spoiled it. Yeah, so the first year it was the T-Rex. So I mean, here it was the mammoth. Third year it was the dodo. And then last year it was the Demetrodon. The terror bird. I tried to do a Tasmanian tiger last year and failed. It was not good. Let's see. Amphibians. A chameleon. You guys can keep going. I have to say goodnight. You have to. Okay. You're going to sleep now? Eventually, but yeah, for example. Okay. I don't think there's any business. Oh. November, we've been invited to do a podcast here in Portland. They don't have any money to provide transportation. I don't know if that's something. Where is this venue? What is this venue? It's at the Red Lion Inn. It's called Oricon and it is the Portland or I guess this Oregon area science fiction and fantasy convention. And they're going to have a podcast room. That sounds very fun. It could be very fun. It's November, early November, like the 8th to the 10th, I think is the date. Okay. Yeah, let's go. But it's a thing. It's a thing, but we have to figure out if we want to put money into something like that. I'd love to see you guys in Portland again. Yeah. I mean, that's the one place we can have a little bit low overhead, I suppose. Yeah. Also, could we have a merch table? Oh, that's a good question. Maybe that. Yeah, I'll ask that. Offset the cost a tiny bit. Yeah. See if we can sell some stuff. Yeah, that's a great idea. I was just thinking we need to, we should get it. I'm going to order some shirts, but I'm going to, I think I want to order some shirts that we need. It's all in your head shirt or a hat. We need a design that goes with it's all in your head. I could get on that. What would you want it to look like? I don't know.  An exploding head. It's all in your head. Let me think about it. Yeah. We can doodle a little bit. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, we could doodle too. We'll get some, throw some ideas back and forth. Yeah. Or somebody's listening and they want a Tony. Yeah. Yeah, we should have a new shirt design. I think it's all a twist. It's all in your head. It can be a fun shirt. Yeah. Yeah, right. Just say science is all in your head and that would just like printed board on a shirt. Boring. I'd wear that shirt. Host bobbleheads would be awesome also. Oh my gosh. I would run around. I would run around like, yeah, with my bobblehead, I would take it. That would be great. How do you have a bobblehead commissioned? I feel like that's okay. There is a company in Canada that you can go in and they do a 3D scan, and then they basically high end 3D print a bust of your head. Custom bobbleheads for $26 in seven days. Love it or your money back. Wholesale custom bobbleheads. There's lots to be done here. Bobbleheads. 3,000 body styles. Oh my god. I feel like... Then you get a bobblehead and you get a bobblehead. Yeah, I feel like if we were to do this, though, I think if we were, if we, if we want to make money at doing this, I would be more inclined to do a some classic and a bunch of ladies of science bobbleheads. That's the thing that would, for science enthusiasts who may not necessarily specifically want a Blair bobblehead on the dashboard of their car, they might go from a carrier or something like this. So I'm just saying, the hand is out a little bit. Yeah. Interesting. We could just have science-y merch that doesn't specifically have to have your beautiful faces are beautiful faces, but they may have just met us that day, but they will know like they might want Einstein bobblehead in the rear compartment of the car on the desk or whatever. Yeah, that's true. That's interesting. I still have some originals from last year that I can sell also if we decide what the just buy, buy it now would be or some of those things. There's that. We could order some zazzle items in bulk and sell them in person. If we wanted.  They could do some other ones, though. So anyway, something, but I've got, I've still got- There's no Sylvia Earl bobblehead. Okay. I like the idea. Bobbleheads for everyone. All right. T-shirts, bobbleheads, calendars, things. Everyone have a wonderful week. Is it time to go? Yeah. Yeah. Come to Santa Fe. That's the Sega Night Blair. Good night, Blair. Sega Night Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thank you for joining us again for another episode of This Week in Science. Thank you for being in our chat room if you've been chatting or just for hanging out and being a part of the show. Have a wonderful week. I'll be back here. We'll be back here next Wednesday, Friday, twitch.tv slash Dr. Kiki for a science conversation. Hope to see you soon. Happy science-ing. Where is the button? There it is.