Okay. I think it says we're live, but now I have to wait for the hey live. Everybody can see us now. A-O-K from the chat room. Win a win. Are we five by five? Is that the five by five? What's the trucker phrase? 25. Glad you know your multiplication. Very well done. Yay, you've been homeschooling too. Woohoo! That's good. And we are ready to go. In three, two, this is twist. This week in science episode number 768 recorded on Wednesday, April 8th, 2020.   But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The World Health Organization is too China-centric, according to one world leader. And it's true. The World Health Organization has been focused a lot on China lately, which does make sense. Seeing as how Southeast Asia has half of the world's population, China has been at the epicenter of the last few emerging pandemics, including the current outbreak, which is still underway. And if you want to know what's going to happen next, it can be helpful to learn what has already taken place where it's already happened. So it's a bit like saying doctors are currently being too patient-centric or scientists working on vaccines are too virus-centric. What would be nice is to have a leader who was more leadership-centric. And yet the same world leader suggests the United States will look into cutting our funding for the World Health Organization in response to the World Health Organization doing its job to protect world health in the midst of a global pandemic. If there was a joke here, this is where I would be delivering a punchline, but I don't have one. It's not funny. I can't even do a proper face palm because I'm not supposed to touch my face right now. So instead, we'll just treat you to an episode of This Week in Science, coming up next. Science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We're here! We're here on Wednesday. Happy Passover, Blair. Yeah, your tweet earlier. I had a few concerns about you social isolating yourself a little bit too, too stringently. When Blair was in YouTube land, let my science go. Yep, that was it. That was the thing. Good job. Good job there. All right. Let's not let the science go. Let's hold on to it. Let's love it and keep it. And treat it as our very own. Yes, we're going to have a really great time tonight with all the science and with you. Thank you for joining us during this time. We hope you enjoy the show ahead. I have some stories about brain implants and what else did I bring? Oh yeah, heart patches because heart patches are cool. And we have an interview this evening with Vanessa Hill in just a few moments. Yeah, Justin, what did you bring? I brought a couple of COVID-19 stories. Okay, seems timely. Seems apricot. It's past time to move on to other stuff, but it's hard when there's sciencey things going on. Also very relevant, absolutely. Yeah. I promise that once we're past this, I'll stop talking about it. Okay, great. And Blair, what is in the animal corner this evening? I brought some animal emotions. I brought horseshoe crabs and invasive species. I brought all the emotions. All right. Really just bubbling up just barely beneath the surface right now. All my animal emotions. As we jump into the show right here, I want to remind you that subscribing to the Twist podcast is pretty easy on your favorite podcast platform, YouTube or Facebook. Just look forward this week in science and you'll find us and you will get Twist. Every time a new episode is published, if you're subscribed and click that little notifications bell. All right. You can also go to twist.org. But now let's get into this science. I want to introduce our guest for the evening, Vanessa Hill. Nessie Hill is an award-winning science educator, host and STEM advocate. She hosts and produces the PBS Digital Studios show BrainCraft and holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from University of New South Wales and a Masters of Science Communication from Australian National University. Welcome to the show. Thank you. That's it. I don't need to say anything else now. That's everything about me. All of it. There's nothing else. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you for joining us. I've wanted to have you on the show for a while.  I always thought this would be fun. Yes. But I'd love to get started with your story and how you ended up doing the BrainCraft, how you ended up getting into science communication. What was your path? Yeah, for sure. I feel like there's no standard path into getting into science communication, right? Like everyone has a different path that is interesting in its own way. For me, so I guess it all started at university. I started studying biology and taking psychology classes, and I was just kind of interested in the why and how people and animals and all of it. And when I was in my third year of classes, we had this other woman came in at the end of one of our biology lectures, and she was like, Hey, I am running this little like science communication club on campus. And I was like, What is that? You know, and she and she went and explained it. And there was a couple of classes that you could take that my university was offering. So the next semester, I went and took one. And there were like five students in the class. And I was like, This is an amazing subject. Like it was just kind of blended a lot of passions that I had, which was science, but also theater and writing and the visual arts and like a lot of creative pursuits that I was interested in. So I took a few classes as electives when I was at university. I had no idea what to do when I graduated. And I got off the job from the Australian government. I did an internship, which led into a full time job of myself working in education and outreach for the what is essentially the National Science Agency in Australia. So it's essentially a research body that does like pure research and applied industrial research as well. It manages masses facilities in Australia. It does a lot of ocean and atmospheric research that kind of encompasses like most of the separate bodies that you have here in the U.S. So I worked for them for six years, which was fantastic because I got to travel around the country as a young person teaching science to people from the desert to the tropical rainforest to tropical islands of the coast of Queensland. I started out in Sydney where I'm from and then I moved up to an office that we had that was off the Great Barrier Reef and I worked in an education centre there for a couple of years and I really had an amazing opportunity to travel around them and learn a lot about science.  So yeah, so that was my life in education and outreach. I loved it. It was super fun. But I think I in a way like fell into that job because I did this internship, I started doing it, and then I was like, Do I want to be a teacher? I was kind of having a lot of thoughts, you know, working in the same position for that amount of time when you're young. So anyway, I had an opportunity to move into the media team, which I took, and then I really wanted to kind of have a creative pursuit. I mean, everyone says this, but I was very interested in video production. I started doing a little bit when I was still working there. And we had this whole back catalogue of videos of Australian animals, essentially, that were from the 60s and 70s. And there were these amazing clips, like there was this one clip, which was one of the first ones that I cut up and I released it on YouTube. And it was Aber Kangaroo giving birth for a few minutes. And it's fascinating. There's a little gummy bear that crawls up into the pouch. It looks like. And I released this video when I say I released it. It took months because it's very bureaucratic. I had to get permission to start a YouTube channel for the agency. I had to put together a case for it. I had to go jump through a lot of poops to do this. But we had all of this archive in our office. And I was like, why is this all sitting here? People should be seeing this. Yeah, you can make this public. Yeah. And the internet. Exactly. So this first video that I uploaded got a million views in a couple of weeks. And it really opened my eyes to what was possible on YouTube and other social media platforms. So from that point, I started uploading more videos. You know, we have a kidnars giving birth. We have all kinds of things up there. And I started really thinking about was there something I wanted to do personally. And what I had been doing in the classroom was a lot of curriculum based education. But what I had seen from studying psychology and neuroscience and then kind of going in and doing a lot of curriculum stuff, which is obviously very important. But there were kind of some gaps of what is more science for your life, rather than life science, right? When you think about like, what is the science of forming a habit, being motivated, memorizing things when you're studying, having naps, getting a good night's sleep. How does that good night's sleep impact the rest of your life in terms of your productivity and attention? Yeah. You know, there was just all of these, all of these bits and pieces. And it also bothered me a little bit that there was no brain science in Australia that entered the curriculum anywhere, anywhere, until you went to university. So it kind of became just a passion for me in terms of finding a gap in the school curriculum, but then also for adults and the general audience as well. So I started making braincraft videos on the side of my job for about six months. I really put a lot into it and I was, you know, taking holidays, vacation time to go to conferences in the US, which is probably where I first met you, Kiki. And I was just like trying to build a network around science online and people who had blogs and YouTube, early YouTube channels and all this kind of stuff. And I met PBS Digital Studios on one of these conferences who had just begun. They were a little kind of experimental unit inside PBS who were looking at reaching new audiences. So the broadcast audience on PBS as with any public media around the world is 70 plus. So they were thinking like, how do we capture people when they're 18 to watch PBS content until they're 30, for example? And the answer for them was also YouTube. So that's where audiences go then, which was seven years ago and still now to consume content. So I created braincraft as a series for PBS and put it on YouTube for many years and I'm still doing it independently now. And I have done a bunch of other documentaries, one in gene editing, one on the psychology of attention. And I have another project about sleep that is coming up very shortly. Yeah. So that is my long-winded, rambling life story. I love it. I mean, not long-winded, it all makes sense.  You saw something that was missing and you had the skills to start addressing it. And I think that's a very important thing to be aware of. In so many moments in your life, people may be going, what do I want to do? Where do I go next? Or I just follow this path that's kind of in front of me or this thing that interests me? And then when you find a gap, you can think to yourself, do I have some way to fill this? Can I add to this? Can I address this in some way? Yeah. I think it's inspirational that you stepped off the cliff and you dove into YouTube. What a wild place to dive into. Professionally. Yeah. I mean, I have been a full-time YouTuber now for six years, which is, I find unbelievable because it doesn't seem like it can be a stable source of income. Yet, I think that is a way to make it work if it's a part of a small business and you're not kind of throwing 100% of your time and everything into the YouTube basket. But kids now, a lot of them will say, I want to be a YouTuber. It's one of the most popular career aspirations that kids have, particularly when they're, I would say, tweens, you know, five or one is a tween, eight to 16, eight to 15 in that range. It's a very popular career aspiration and I do a lot of public events. I'm having to caution my kids against right now because my older daughter happened to be filming on her phone when my younger daughter took a spill on her scooter and she uploaded it and it got, and then my youngest one's like, I'm really famous right now. And then I'm like, yeah, but, you know, like, stop, like, do not be an injury comic. Yeah, that's not, yeah. This is not what you want to be known for. Exactly. Yeah, let's not repeat this thing. Yeah, well, I mean, I have a lot of kids that ask me about it and tell me stories like that because I do a lot of public events. And what I've started saying is that you need something to make videos about, right? So I went to university, studied science, worked in an institution for a while, and that gave me a lot of content. The kinds of YouTubers who just make short videos about their life, they might find fame, but it only lasts for a year and then everyone kind of forgets about them. So when you have content that isn't new, I don't think any one person is interesting enough to sustain a full time career on the internet, like no matter how amazing you are, like you need something to write about or something for people to connect with other than yourself. Yeah. In terms of science on YouTube, how have you, how has it been in your experience to be producing science scientific content for that public audience? How has the response been and have you been able to, have you seen any data on any effectiveness of the information that you're giving out?  It's a very niche audience and I mean, there's always exceptions, but most of the time it is people who want to hear that. So that has been nice.  They're lovely. A lot of people who leave comments are really nice, but obviously you have allies, you have the nasty comments and you know, there's that happens in certain types of content more than others, like controversial areas of science, areas that tap into people's identity in terms of talking about climate and gender and issues that are a little bit more charged. So yeah, I think you overall YouTube gets a bad rap in people saying like it has horrible comments and you shouldn't do things there because overall like there are really nice people there who are consuming content and it can be a pleasant place to be a science communicator and talk about science. If you structure it the right way, if you know you're not looking, if you set up the right filters for comments, if you're, I'm sorry my dog is really, is really being very vocal. No worries. But that's always a thing.  He brings nothing to the show. Unlike the co-hosts that she used to have who was amazing and whatever happened to him. Yeah. But that was still me. I was in the same comment. I was getting attacked and like, oh, but he's wonderful. So it was like, okay, I can take that. That was like my favorite one. People aren't really paying attention. Yeah. Yeah.  And of course, you're going to have people who are really excited to share that time and space with you and you're going to have people who react differently. And we know that speaking of brains, right, our brains are more likely to kind of glom on to negative things than positive things. And so even though we might have a million positive comments, those five negative ones seem like the world. Of course. Yeah, I know. And I think, I mean, Kivi, I did kind of dodge your question about effectiveness. I will say that I will come back to it. But I think talking about evidence in that sense of how effective videos are and all different things around them, the comments one is interesting to me because they have been studying stuff about comments. More so, I think that the learning outcomes and things in particular pieces of content. And I think because they're easier to study, right, like you can just look and take subsets of comments and things and have a look at what they say compared to actually evaluating what people are learning. But in terms of print articles, this is a few years ago now, but popular science turned off the comments on their articles because they found that people reading the comments affected their interpretation of the actual article. So I think that there is probably a similar effect on YouTube. So that is why I use a lot of filtering and things like that because if people were like, I don't like your co-host, he's so annoying or whatever it may be that 20 people who didn't think that are going to raid the column and be like, you know what, he is annoying. And I would have considered. So I think there's an interesting effect. Yeah. Yeah, I can I can somewhat relate to this in a way too that if I am watching a channel that I haven't seen before and the messaging that's going along with it is extremely vulgar or rude or something like that. I'm sort of like there's part of me that's like, I don't want to associate with this crowd that's here in attendance to this. Like why am I being attracted to the same thing these people are? So this is sort of like judging the content by the crowd that has drawn. Yeah. Yeah, that's so interesting. So yeah, I agree with that. That is. I am looking at a science of science communication study. I'm thinking this is something for a graduate student to work on. I was just going to say there have been graduate students that have done have done studies on comments. So there was there was one that was looking at the differences in comments by the gender of the host of different science videos. And they found that there was quite a backlash against female hosts, which really validated a lot of my personal thoughts when I saw that published. So yeah, that that was an interesting one. But in terms of other effectiveness, I mean, I have done surveys like survey monkey surveys on my own channel before, which have led to my own like personal interpretation of how effective my content is. But I haven't seen anything that is a high level evaluation that's gone across different things. I mean, YouTube do a lot of their own research, except I wouldn't personally take corporate research on their own product as something that I would use to measure that. Right. And that's not necessarily going to inform the effectiveness of your methods and help you with your end goals necessarily. Yeah, a lot of what YouTube is doing is more to look at like, hey, they call the whole genre learning. So they're like, look at these learning studies, like this is how much people are learning things, these are different types of skills they're acquiring, and they will do their own kind of small surveys and things like that. So they're looking at it more from people can learn things off YouTube rather than like the effectiveness of science information. Yeah, it sounds like what we what we actually need is the ability to switch off the word comments and have a questions panel so that people can be asking if it said like live questions instead of live comments. That's what we have right now in our chat room. We have our chat room. People can ask questions and we can see if we can if we can get those questions then. Yeah, we can bring them in, but I think going the other direction is going to be able to pull the audience. You know what YouTube is like? YouTube is like the end of a public talk where someone asks if there's any questions and someone gets the microphone and they have like a six minute comment. That is just why YouTube is. It's the more of a comment than a question. Go buy cheap pills online.  What is your favorite brain topic to talk about? Oh, interesting. So I was really panicking while you were asking that question because I've made like 300 videos and quite frequently in on panels and in interviews and things. People like, I watched this one video that you made on this specific topic and at minute one, 15. Yeah, we're on episode 700 something that would be 768. So the favorite, it's really hard for me to pick one because you know, sometimes it's like picking a favorite child or something like that. But also there's so many different people that have gone into different ones and different places.  So because of the different context, it's very hard to say like definitely this one. I would say if you just looked at everything that is on my YouTube channel, I made a documentary called Mutant Menu, which was about the state of CRISPR in 2016. So it was really on the ethics of gene editing and a little bit of the science, science and ethics, I would say. That's probably my favorite thing that I have done because at the time I was working with the largest team that I had worked with. I worked with some fantastic people on it. We traveled to many different countries filming and it was just such a fantastic experience. But beyond that in terms of the more regular videos that I will make, when I've had the opportunity to interview and profile neuroscientists in videos, that has been fantastic because I think personally, I don't think that anyone who has a big platform as a science communicator needs to be a guru. They don't need to be the king or queen of science communication. I think your platform is there for you to really profile other people who are doing amazing work who don't have the time to build a platform like that and they shouldn't because they're about to do the work. Exactly. So a year ago, I did this series with the MacArthur Foundation where I interviewed a couple of the recipients of the genius grants and did some stories on microglia, which is a really amazing support cell that you have in your brain on a few different aspects of neuroscience. In the past, I have gotten to interview Elizabeth Blackburn, who is the only Australian to win a Nobel Prize for her role. And a woman winning a Nobel Prize. For science. And I did a stop motion animation where I made a little animated character for her as well, which was also on her story growing up in Tasmania and doing the work to help in the discovery of telomeres, which are these little caps on the end of your cells, which can contribute to aging. So yeah, so I didn't answer your question at all. I just started rambling again. You have a lot of favourites, I think. I have a lot of favourites. I mean, if I asked you the same question, you were like, definitely. I'd be like, oh, this thing? I know all the things. I like all the things. Yeah. Yeah.  So that's fantastic. In your most recent video, I mean, it brings us to the current situation with relation to COVID-19 and what we're all up against. Your most recent episode of BrainCraft was on the topic of uncertainty. Can you talk about what brought you to think that was the video and the thing to cover right now? Yeah, that is a really good question. I really wanted to make something to respond to the moment that we're all in. I was feeling quite stressed and anxious myself, and I know that a lot of my audience members kind of share that. I have done some tweets and Instagram posts and different things that people comment on. So you get a gauge of how people are feeling. You can look at the news and get a gauge of how people are feeling. So I really, in the last year, I suppose, have pivoted a little bit from every day science education and brain education to try to give people some tips, some take-home messages, some things that they can do that play off the back of research studies and different things like this. So with the uncertainty one, I was doing some reading on anxiety and stress and uncertainty is something I made a video on last year, that I experience a lot of uncertainty. I mean, I am living in a country where I'm not a permanent resident that has been going on for many years. I'm a freelance, I run a small business. There's just a lot of things where I'm just very uncertain about a lot of stuff. I had started looking to uncertainty last year for this other video, and something that was really interesting that I found is that a lot of things in psychology, uncertainty is thought of as a muscle. So the more that you flex your uncertainty muscle and the more that you work on it, you can grow in being able to deal with different types of uncertainty. So I think that that is a nice message for people and the fact that there are take-home messages there, like what can you do in your life to introduce small amounts of uncertainty? Like can you go outside and go for a walk without checking the weather? Can you order food from a new place without having a good look at the menu, without looking at pictures online, without looking at reviews? Can you order from a new restaurant without checking the Yelp reviews? Can you do it? Exactly. You're just driving my life right now. Apparently, I live in a lot of uncertainty. Yeah, I mean, could you email a colleague or message someone and then just put your phone in a drawer for two or three hours and just not know what the reply is that's come back? Like would you be okay with doing things like that? And if you start small and kind of build that up over time, you should be able to deal with larger bouts of uncertainty a little bit better. Yeah, I can understand it potentially being a muscle. I hadn't read anything about, I hadn't looked into uncertainty and then I saw your video and I'm like, oh, this is really interesting. Yeah. But yeah, a while back, I came to the phrase finding comfort and discomfort. And so I think it's, that's the same idea. You just got to, you just have to flow with it. Yes. Learn how to just flow and be cool. Is there a way to train yourself the other direction? If you have too much uncertainty, if a lot of uncertainty just doesn't really seem to faze you? Yeah. How do I get the anxiety muscle where I'm like, oh, that's very uncertain. I think she's doing a great job. If you're okay with everything being up in the air. Oh yeah. I have a video that's coming out in a couple of days on how, on why it feels like time slows down. So why our subjective perception of time can change depending on context and things we're experiencing. And the kind of big spoiler is that our emotional responses to different things can change how we remember them. And then when we recall those memories, it kind of feels like it took a very long period of time or a very short period of time. So that is again in the context of COVID-19. I've kind of dived into this COVID-19 psychology survival guide at the moment where I have a number of episodes this month coming out on things that explain what we're all feeling. Yeah. And I know you work from home. I work from home. So there's a lot of like, we were talking before the show started, a lot of things have not really changed for us necessarily. But for a lot of people, they're working from home now. And their systems are upended. Their patterns of behavior have been changed. Do you have, and I saw you've got some working from home tips as well. Do you have big tips that you would want like three big tips to tell people how to... Yeah, I did make a playlist on my YouTube channel of all of the videos I've done in the past that would be good if you're working from home. So they're about why we can't stop snacking and how to plan your time effectively, how to stay motivated, things like this. But what I did was I made that playlist with all of these different videos rather than making a working from home guide because I'm terrible at working from home. And I don't think that people should be taking that much advice from me personally. But I will say based on those videos that I have made, one thing that I often fall prey to is the planning fallacy where things always take longer than you expect. And what you're meant to do is double the amount of time and then add an extra 10% is kind of the guide of what you're meant to do if you're someone like me where I'm just like, oh, this is going to take two hours, it's really going to take four hours and 40 minutes or something like that. So yeah, so that is the kind of guide on how to plan for things. And that may change when you're in a different working environment. So that's something that I guess you can look out for. And I will say that a lot of, I mean, it's really hard with everyone being at home now because snacking, our compulsion to snack is quite environmental, excuse me, environmental actually. So I wonder if there's a way for people to lock up snacks in the bathroom or somewhere that is not the kitchen, if you're confined to your one bedroom apartment like I am. Yeah, yeah, people are talking about what the COVID-15 used to be. It used to be the freshman 15. Now it's the COVID-15 staying at home, the snack. Exactly, exactly, yeah. Some people in the chat have asked a couple of questions. Gaurav Sharma asks, do you feel pressured to make videos about current hot topics because of the YouTube algorithm? Yeah, the algorithm. What an interesting question. What I have found over the years is that if you make a compelling video about any topic, it will largely do better than a compelling video about, sorry, let me rephrase that, it's getting late. If you make a compelling video about any topic, it will do better than just a video about what's hot right now in the moment and then definitely over time. So I think what I feel more pressure about is to upload things consistently because if you don't do anything for six months or you're very kind of infrequent with that, it can hurt how your next videos are displayed, like how many people they're recommended to and things like that. So I feel pressure to upload frequently and then to make things that are really good all of the time. It always has to be good. Yeah. Not necessarily about what's hot right now. It just has to be good constantly. Blackstar David asks, what would be the most complicated video you've made that left you with good memories? Interesting. I made a video on network neuroscience a couple of years ago, which I would encourage you to either Google the definition of a watch rather than have me explain to you right now what it is at a very, very basic level. There's no network neuroscience science is watching, but at a very, very basic level, it's really like looking at patterns of activity in your brain like a subway map or like a huge connected network map to see what different areas are connected over a very, very large scale rather than just looking at individual structures or a group of a cluster of brain cells or something like that. So it's looking for the huge patterns that can tell us how things are connected and the impact on the other and so forth. But it is quite, it is a complicated area, but it's one that is weird to explain. Like how do you make a compelling video on a topic like that? And I was going to a very distinguished young professor's office. She was really cool. It was at Penn State. Anyway, but I took a bunch of games. I actually bought a Twister game. I bought some pins and yarn and I had her first use the pins and yarn to like explain this kind of network theory. And we had had some things that we threaded through and she kind of showed me how things would move along the network and what she would, she would look for.  I moved some of her furniture and we set off the Twister game and we had a number of cameras around and played it and worked that into the narrative and kind of used Twister to explain her area of science. So I guess I was quite chuffed about that one because it was really fun and it was explaining something that isn't traditionally that fun to talk about. So that's one that I think I'm proud of how I executed it. I think that's really fun. How do you come up with ideas like that? Where does the creative energy spark when you're looking at a topic and you're like, oh, how am I going to cover this? I have to dress up like a banana or I just have to do this. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.  And that's one that I have seen play out very much personally for me over the past six or so years since I've been doing this because when I first started, my ideas really weren't that far out of the box. And the more that you think about it and the more that you allow your brain to like you kind of give permission for yourself to make these random connections and introduce a lot of other things, you have wilder and wilder ideas. But something that you can do in terms of training your brain to be more creative is consuming a lot more content, but things that are completely unrelated. So if you go and see theater, if you read a fiction book in a completely different genre, if you're watching movies that are about something totally different to science or science communication or whatever area you're in, you start to pull inspiration from all of these disparate places and eventually think of an idea when you're allowing your mind to wander. So every creative idea that I've had has either been when I'm in the shower, when I'm walking my dog, or when I'm just riding on a train looking out the window. So I think that if you want to be creative, like you need to consume all kinds of different things, be patient and just let yourself think. I think that's amazing advice. The shower is my favorite place for kind of wandering. Yes, me too. And I recently discovered that they have beautiful showers at my co-working space that I go to occasionally. So I did this thing where I just started showering in the middle of the day for an hour because I was like, I just need time to think this through and I would just stand in the shower. And I'm telling you that there's an amazing idea out there for you. All you need to do is take the dog for the walk in the shower. She doesn't like that very much. That's not a dog walk. It's a dog wash. It's much fun, definitely. Okay, I need to know we're getting towards the end of our time together, but I just need to know how does one become a pants enthusiast?   Loud pants. All right. Moving forward with everything so uncertain as to whether live programming is going to, you know, in-person programming is going to come back. I know you've been doing a little bit of work at Caveat in New York, which is a delightful venue. It's amazing. Yeah. And if I get over to New York and things are open again, I have dreams of visiting and seeing a show there. Are you doing, I know they've switched a lot of their stuff to online now. Are you going to be doing anything with them moving forward online? I am not personally because I don't have a regular show with them. I have done a couple of specials and I've been a regular guest on a lot of shows that they have, but I have watched some of their live shows that they've been streaming and they're really fun. I mean, what you guys are doing with this podcast is fun as well. Like whenever there is a live event that you can participate in, in the moment that we're all experiencing, I think that it's really useful for people to take their mind off the new cycle and help the time pass those two things, which are very good for our mental health. Yeah. Somebody on Twitter just asked me out of the blue. They're like, things are bad. I don't want to look at the numbers. Do you have anything distracting that I can read? Okay, I'll come up with something distracting for you to read. Just come watch my show. That'll be fine. Where can people find you and what are you going to be working on moving forward? You said you have a sleep documentary and what else is going on. So the show, it hasn't been announced publicly so I can't say too much about it, but I will say that it is a reality show about sleep that is going to be announced on my YouTube channel shortly. So everyone, it is... I'm just imagining bad things. I'm just imagining terrible sleep deprivation and people being... Yeah, it's actually the opposite of that. We're helping people sleep. Oh, yeah. It's going to be globally available so everyone will be able to see it. So streaming. So yeah, I'm really excited about it because it was such a bizarre idea that I had. I was actually on the train. I was on the subway here in New York and there's no windows, unfortunately, but I was just staring at the subway map and I had just been to see this art exhibit and I just had this idea just popped into my head where I was like, what if I did this but with this and this and it all merged into the show in the reality genre, which I have never done anything in. And it was just so fascinating to work on because every other person that I worked with had worked on RuPaul's Drag, Race, Naked and Afraid, Dancing with the Stars, Big Brother. Everyone was just an ex-producer, director, editor, researcher. I don't really have researchers on our shows. I brought the researcher. But it was just such a different experience because I mean, talking about science communication, trying to communicate science in a reality format had so many challenges that I kind of expected, but it was really difficult to deal with when you're on set, you're in a time crunch. No one wants to do it your way, but you know your way is the accurate way or the way that it has to be done for the audience that you want for this show and trying to bat for that was really one of the biggest challenges and rewards of my career today, I would say. So everyone needs to watch this show. You can find more information about it on my socials. I'm Messy Hill on Twitter and Instagram. My YouTube channel is just youtube.com forward slash braincraft. I'll have lots of updates there and it's coming on May 18, I think. I'll be here. If you can get a science based reality show to catch, that would be awesome. Oh my goodness. I am trying. There'll still be a cast of audience. Yeah, probably. Streaming will continue to be all the rage in May. This is my prediction. I hope so. Yeah. We will put all of your links on our website and yeah, I will try. Reach out to me definitely when your show does go live and all. If I can help spread the word, I would love to help. Thank you. I want to watch it. It sounds great. Good. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. Is there anything that we haven't haven't hit on that you want to tell and tell the audience about or? I just want to thank some of the people in the live comments who have been saying that they've subscribed to braincraft since August 25, 2018. What a day that was. That's their best ideas happen when their mind is slowing down. I've been enjoying the live comments. So thank you for having me. Thank you for this rambling hour. It's now 11.53 p.m. And yeah. I hope we kept your we kept your mind moving. You did. You did. And you kept me from reading the news, which studies have shown is actually bad for our our body's physiological stress response when we read news about about traumatic events. So anyway, keep yourselves keep yourselves distracted. Watch more streams and videos and read books and thank you again. Yeah. Thank you so much. Of course. Appreciate your time tonight. Wonderful to get to talk with you. Yeah. Everyone that's Nessie Hill, we are going to go to a very quick break. Thank you for joining us. This is This Week in Science. We'll be back in just a few moments with some more stories. We got science coming people. Hi, everyone. Oh, am I working? I'm working. It's odd when you're all by yourself here. Thank you for listening to the show. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for listening to Twist. You're the reason we're able to do what we do every week, bringing you up to date and down to earth views on scientific discoveries. And with your help, we can do even more together.  Head to twist.org right now. Yeah, why not? Go right now. Open a new tab or click over there and click on the Patreon link and choose your level of support. Be a part of bringing sanity and science to more people. And we're back. You're listening to This Week in Science. I just want to check one second. Nessie, you're still here. You're hanging out. Are you hanging out? I just can't take my cue, but here it is. Thank you. Bye. I just had to check and make sure that if she was with us or not with us, I had to check. Okay, Blair, it's you again. And we're back. You're listening to This Week in Science. Yeah, welcome back, everybody. We are going to jump in to our weekly COVID-19 update. That's right. COVID-19 is- We keep for now. Hopefully not forever. Hopefully not forever, right? It's our weekly update for right now. And I would get things logged in here. Open up the windows. Nope, Justin's not coming back. Okay, let me share the screen. Can't handle the bad news. No, can't handle it. He's waiting for us to be done. Can't handle it. Call me when you're done talking about COVID. All right. So this week, we are well over 1.4 million new cases diagnosed around the world on the Johns Hopkins dashboard. 88,538 deaths and over 300,000 recovered cases. So still, the number of recovered is much, much higher than the number who are dying from this disease. The spread is rampant. And let's talk a little bit more about these numbers. Hold on. I got to open up another thing. There's a lot of things to open up that I didn't have opened up. And I realized if I move my tab- Hey, open all your things. Open all my things. This is going to be me editing the podcast later. This is the part that gets edited out. Aren't you lucky live viewers? You see this stuff. But if I may, the number 329,000, whatever, of recovered cases, the number is actually much higher than that. The number is actually much higher. And that is a point that I would like to bring up. Okay. Yes. I'm going to bring this up. Okay. Our update, the WHO COVID-19 situation report for April 7 reported only 1.27 million confirmed COVID-19 cases, 68,766 new, 72,614 deaths, 5,020 of those new. And the US CDC reported 734,329 cases with 12,064 deaths, 3,154 of those are new on April 7. That bump was thought to potentially be the result of misreporting from the weekend or lack of reporting from the weekend that boosted up after the weekend was over. These are substantial increases over the previous day. So maybe that weekend reporting. As of yesterday, 14 states have reported more than 5,000 cases. And 30 states have reported widespread community transmission. The Johns Hopkins dashboard is reporting the large number of 401,166 US cases and 12,930 deaths as of 10.30 a.m. on April 8. That's today. There's growing concern that the number of reported COVID-19 deaths is underestimating the scale and severity of the pandemic in particular due to limited testing and a focus on only the most severe cases. Reports are emerging from around the world that many potential COVID-19 patients may be dying without a proper diagnosis, potentially even dying at home. In Chicago, also African American residents have approximately a times higher mortality rate than Caucasian residents. Additionally, 68% of the COVID-19 deaths have been reported in African Americans, despite only representing 30% of the population. The distribution of cases and death from COVID-19 highlights differential access to resources and poignant inequities between communities. Wuhan, China, the city where the novel coronavirus outbreak was first documented, lifted travel restrictions today, removing some of the most restrictive measures implemented during the city's widely publicized lockdown that started more than two months ago. So that's a bit of good news. The world will be watching Wuhan to see what happens and whether and when and if there is a resurgence. Did I hit the points that you wanted to hit their Blair about the underreporting? Yeah. I mean, it's just we don't have enough testing to know if all of the categories are equally higher and therefore the percentage is the same or if the what it seems like is there are a lot of people carrying this thing asymptomatic. So really you should be throwing that into that 300,000 number and that number would become way higher and then the mortality rate is way lower. Not to say it's not terrible, but just, you know, all of this grain of salt number of tests that we have, etc., etc. Yeah. So here's a here's another danger in assuming anything is COVID if we don't have testing, which is that it might not be.  So if we haven't tested, the fear would be somebody who thinks they are in this recovered from COVID category. But it was a flu. And it was just a flu.  And that's why there's a real interest and push for testing people who have recovered to know whether or not they actually had the coronavirus and not something else because they may not be ready to unisolate or they may not have any immunity built and or operating under false sense of security. There's also something interesting, which is another way of looking at this, which unfortunately puts me in the category of agreeing with some people who I definitely do not have anything in common with or never have agreed with anything they have said. And therefore I should just stop now. However, there are parts of the country who likely should not be in complete lockdown. And we want to prevent this thing from spreading absolutely. There is an argument to be made for if your hospitals aren't even at near like 50% capacity, if your hospitals haven't been impacted currently and aren't stressed by this virus, you may want it to be trickling in now as opposed to hitting all at once later. You know, Wuhan is likely going to see another spike of these cases. The point is their hospitals have recovered from capacity enough to reopen and allow for more patients to move through. The country of Denmark is about to release some of its restrictions. It got hit hard and fast and the thing grew very quickly, very early.  And now they're thinking maybe it's time to re-allow some people back some segments of the population back out into normal society because their hospitals are not stressed. And there is a there is in the light of not having a vaccine now, there is a benefit to having a herd immunity where you have enough people who have recovered to continue. But I'm not advocating it. I'm just there's an argument and people are discussing this. Now, the things that we can come up with to the first point of whether to know whether or not people have had the flu or whether they've had COVID, there are now some antibody tests that are available and in limited capacity, they're not widely spread yet. But I know Stanford and a few other locations around the country now have antibody tests that can tell whether or not you've been exposed. And if you have whether or not an immune response has been elicited within your body because you've got the antibodies. So there are tests that will probably become more available given time. And then second to that is it's not just that, okay, you had the response, you want to let some people back out. There is a full layer of healthcare infrastructure that has to be taken care of before you can really start allowing the different segments of the population back to normal life. So number one, you have to know whether people have had an immune response and whether they have antibodies and are quote unquote potentially immune to COVID moving forward. And so maybe those people can go back to manning the stores and doing the work that other people who have not experienced the COVID virus yet would not be able to do. The second part of that is that there need to be procedures in place for substantial testing isolation and quarantine measures. So the minute that somebody thinks that they've been exposed or that they are showing symptoms of any kind that the proper testing and quarantine procedures immediately take place. And that is something that actually it takes infrastructure to manage. And so what the hope is is that this whole process is giving our system time to put these procedures in place and get the tests in place and get everything set so that yeah, we can start letting people live lives again. But it's that it's the time that it takes for all of this to happen. That's the hard part. Well, the other concern I have is that if you just open the floodgates, right, then there's people still that should not be going out right away immunocompromised people, older people. And so there there needs to be a very concerted effort in however this is done to make sure that there is still societal expectations that are adjusted so that those people don't feel forced into returning because that is going to spike potential fatalities if everybody feels like they have to go and the the conversation drops and how to support people who are will not be able to go back right away. Yeah, who are the people in the population who are at the most at the most risk who need the most help and how can they be supported. And it is it is a sort of a ghoulish thing because the obviously the ideal is there's a vaccine so nobody needs to suffer through actually getting this. But knowing also that that might be far out enough that we're going to get a resurgence. Anyway, there is a strategy of once that current like California is not ready for this. New York is not ready for this. You know, there's places that aren't ready. We're still trying to flatten that curve so it doesn't go beyond our hospital capacities. New York's already well past that. Yes. So so for areas that aren't there yet though, knowing that they likely are still heading in that direction, you may not want to wait until it is a New York wait until it is a Los Angeles situation. You want some segment to trickle through and sort of be treatable with full attention without stressing out hospital staff because this is going to go on long enough. Right. And the examples that have been able to do that are Taiwan and South Korea. These are countries that have enforced massive testing, quarantine procedures, all sorts of infrastructural efforts that we don't have in this country. At least we haven't had so far and I'm not seeing the I'm not seeing it put in place. And so I think different countries are going to are going to have the ability to do this differently. But you you absolutely need to have the infrastructure in place to be able to manage it properly so that like Blair was saying so that the sparks don't happen so that you don't have peaks that suddenly hit as a surprise because you've you've let it go. But I wanted to go from there into, you know, other animals are other animals are getting COVID. Not so many dogs, but a surprising number of cats and ferrets are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, which is very interesting. This is something I remember wondering about at the outbreak of this because if something can go it transferred from say the bat to the penguin or the civet or whatever it was. And then now we know it can transfer mammalian species. Yeah, it can go from why would it then stop at humans? Why would we not then also be a vector? Why would we not be the the penguin of whatever else we're interacting with? And the first thing of course is we have pets at home. Yeah, I mean it all depends on viral specificity and what the virus targets. So is the I mean because bats have they're probably a reservoir and don't actually get they probably don't get as sick and so they survive and they pass it along. But that that becomes the question, you know, which animals are the cats? Are the ferrets? Are they similar to bats as a reservoir for the virus or are they actually getting severely ill in the way that humans are? How are the different immune systems reacting to the virus and how effectively is the virus infecting the various hosts? You know, so there's definitely going to be species specific aspects of the infection. So this is not something that, by the way, a track. Somebody had pointed out that there were some tigers that got it, but you're saying cats, are you talking about are they now house cats? A tiger in a zoo got it. Okay, but it's not house cats. But it is house cats also. It's house cats also. Oh, that I didn't know. So there's another reason. Okay, I'll stop. You need to stop now. That was not on my radar. I've only got, but I had heard about the tigers, but I hadn't heard about the house cats. Correct me if I'm wrong, but last I heard, we now think that we can give it to the cats, but we don't think the cats can then put it back to us, right? I mean, we haven't heard about that yet. We haven't seen it yet. We haven't. We don't have examples of it yet. And I think that's just an important thing to meant. We don't have evidence for that yet, because there was a concern that now there was going to be a rush of people abandoning their pets, because they think they're going to get them sick, which also if you have your cat inside, which you should, then this won't happen anyway. If you're self isolating and your cat is self isolating, then it wouldn't happen regardless. Okay, here's the question. Where are these cats getting COVID tests? Oh no, it's important to know if this exists. Why do the veterinarians have COVID tests? The reason that they have them is that they've been provided very specifically for research purposes to determine whether or not cats and dogs and other pet animals can be vectors and whether it is going back and forth, because we live so closely with these animals. So there have been very specific research-related test kits that have been given. They are different test kits, too. I think that's important. They're different test kits. They're not human test kits. We are not pulling test kits from the human supply. No. They are test kits for the cats. A letter in the YouTube chat room. My cat always practices social distancing. She knew. She knew. That's right. Cats and their social distance. That's right. So another very interesting thing that I ran across this week is a study on the effectiveness of convalescent plasma therapy in severe COVID-19 patients. This came out in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences just a couple of days ago, and it's not a large study. Again, the researchers are looking at a very small sample size, but what they looked at were 10 adults with very severe cases of COVID-19. They were on ventilators. They were given convalescent plasma. And now what that is is the isolated blood plasma from people who had recovered from COVID-19. So it's blood plasma that contains the antibodies for COVID-19. And the idea is that it's kind of like old school vaccines, that you give this convalescent plasma to patients and the antibodies that are there will allow the patient that is receiving it to then add to or upregulate their immune response to the virus, to the disease. And in the study, apparently all of the patients did very well. The convalescent plasma was well tolerated and didn't stimulate allergic responses or negative immune responses. And these neutralizing antibodies led to improvement within about three days, the disappearance of the virus by Remia in about seven days. And the patients pretty well, they were taken off of ventilators and they improved fairly rapidly. So it's a good, it's not a clinical trial and it's not anything that we can say for sure this is something that will work, but it is a step in the right direction. And it's a, I think it's something that's very hopeful and promising for that idea of a vaccine and also various therapies moving forward. Great news. Give me the bad news now, Justin. What was your COVID story? You had one right at the top. Okay, two. The one at the top. Let's see what I've got. This is, oh yeah, people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, COPD, and people who currently are smokers have higher levels of a molecule called angiotensin converting enzyme two, which is also known as ACE2 in their lungs. And as we have learned ACE2 is a way that the virus gains entry into the body. Previous research shows ACE2, which sits on the surface of lung cells is the entry point that allows the coronavirus to get into the cells and lungs and therefore cause an infection. So also interesting, the new study shows that levels of ACE2 and former smokers is lower than in current smokers and is not unlike non-smokers. So, perfect time to quit if you've been thinking about it. On the other hand, smoking is a very good way to get other people the social distance from you. Geez. Keep that in mind. Keep it in mind, yes. Unless they want to light, then they're getting right up in your business if they want to light.  You'll be amazed how much space they give you. So interesting. Yeah. This is not good advice. So the researchers found this. They also checked their new findings against existing study groups, which together contain data on, they had, I think, something like 21 to 40 people. They had a somewhat small, something they found another study that had 249 more people. Some non-smokers, some current smokers, some former smokers that had looked at this ACE2 and they found, yes, they're higher again in the current smokers, lower non-smokers, and in those who were former smokers. Research was led by Dr. Janice Lung at the University of British Columbia, St. Paul's Hospital, Vancouver, Canada. She said, we found that patients with COPD and people who are still smoking have higher levels of ACE2 in their airways, which might put them at increased risk of developing severe COVID-19 infections, which is something that we've kind of heard like a somewhat anecdotally, not as part of a study, but has been out there and been noticed that smokers, this was, I think, the Italian doctor was pointing out that this, the whole, you have to be over 65 years old, had nothing to do with it. Plenty of people in their 40s, mostly men and mostly smokers, had increased frequency showing up in his hospital. So, yeah, maybe a good, maybe a good time to quit. This is also, this is Professor Tobias Welth, an infection expert in European Restoratory Society, not part of that study, but he's a coordinator at the National German COVID 19 Task Force. He says, the study gives him interesting insight into why some people may be more risk, so this, we're getting into mechanism now as opposed to correlating data. But what it does not tell us is whether it's possible to manipulate ACE2 levels to improve survival in patients already infected with COVID-19, or this would make a difference in COPD patients who contract the infection. So it's kind of a disclaimer, like it doesn't necessarily mean that this leads to treatment, but it's definitely something that can be researched further to see if there are ways to immunize. Immunize? Yeah. Immunize, that's a word also. It's actually a better word than the ones that I almost came up with. It is a great word. And I have, actually, just do my last, my next COVID. And we'll be done with COVID? Sure. We'll be done with the COVID for the day. So this was, this is researchers warn, this is researchers from Keel University and some other institutions across Europe, including University of Oxford. They reviewed 27 research studies, this sort of a metadata, that proposed models for the diagnosis and prognosis of patients with COVID-19, which kind of goes also to a little bit of what I was saying. I think we were pointing out, like, if we haven't actually tested, how do we know? The researchers whose paper have been published in the British Medical Journal found that the data and methods used in the studies were potentially at high risk of bias. Well, some of the studies included recommendations that were questionable, actually put into practice. The researchers warn that the potentially flawed models may result in doctors making inappropriate decisions about whether patients even have the virus, about whether or not they should be given a ventilator, and whether or not they should even be in the hospital at all in the first place. Doctors obviously are getting significant pressure to detect diagnosed patients who are infected with the virus and to give a prognosis for each of these confirmed cases. But according to this study, there's kind of faulty data being used, or there's not a good consistent way that this has been put together. So the researchers reviewed the 27 studies, 25 of them used data from China, one used data from Italy, while another used some international data that data was collected. This is a period between early December of 2019 and up to about 15th of March 2020. They found that the studies had a high risk of bias. Some of the studies had a non-representative selection of patients, so they may have had specific age groups or something like this. Others excluded patients from their result study who were still ill at the end of the study. So others had also some substandard statistical analysis based on this review. Given the identified flaws, the researchers said it was a concern that some of the proposed models were already being used to support medical decisions that are taking place right now. They're calling on researchers to immediately share anonymized high quality patient data throughout the world health organization to support collaborative efforts to build and validate more rigorous methods of and models of these predictions. Richard Riley, professor of biostatistics at Kuhl University, says doctors should be making decisions based on robust evidence. Unfortunately, current studies fall short of providing robust models for diagnosis or prognosis of COVID-19. Researchers around the world should unite in sharing their data immediately to improve the quality of future studies in this area. Health professionals, methodologists, must work together to pool high quality representative COVID-19 data that is then analyzed using appropriate statistical methods. So, yeah, I mean, if there's a problem, yeah, okay. So this was sent in, oh, whereas Dave Robinson who sent in the story, things are moving fast, so I don't blame medical practitioners as much for not being able to stick to a high standard of scrutiny. Totally agreed. That's absolutely right. So, and there's a problem because we have an active threat of death by virus. There are some who are mocking the fact that researchers want to take the appropriate time to do good research. We get it. It's where people are in the trenches right now, but we also have to understand that doctors don't do research, the medical doctors, the people who are treating patients are not researchers. Yeah, but they're working, right now they're working in the trenches, they're triaging, they're doing, they're sharing information on what's working in their emergency rooms, in their ICUs. And that's a problem because they may not really understand what good research is. They're used to getting treatment recommendations after long rigorous processes that they are not at all involved. A part of, right. They're not part of it. They're not involved in that process. And I'm not belittling what a doctor does. A doctor has to look for the thousand different symptoms for the million diseases that humans are heir to and come up with the most current treatment based on recommendations. But the thing is those recommendations come from a huge pipeline of process that, you know, if a doctor has seven patients and they give this XYZ treatment that they've been told to try and it worked on three of them and they publicize that and people say, hey, it worked at that hospital. It's a three patient study. It's not a study, it's anecdotal evidence at that, at best. It may be that those people if they hadn't received it would have been just fine, there's no double blind, there's no nothing that's not science going on. It becomes meme based or not mean. Is it mean based science or is it just anecdotal medical recommendations? But the public is putting so much pressure like this mentioned in the study to diagnose an attempt treatments based on proven untested non-data driven simply because those treatments that have been mean doubt that have been made publicly aware are available mentally to the public. And so that is absolutely the definition of bias. When you reach out for the one thing that you have heard of, then you are now biased in that. That's the only thing you've heard of. Yeah, it's why we have a problem with pharmacy reps going and giving free samples to the doctors and the doctors only recommending certain medications. It's because that's the most recent thing that they've heard of and what's the first thing in their mind. And so if that's happening with the public, with the doctors, with everyone, yeah, it's informational. So I think part of it, it's a big red flag that anybody, including say the leader of the free world is recommending using something off label when there isn't the research behind it. And there's people who actually need those drugs and if we gave it to every, there wouldn't be enough anyway to give it to everybody. Even if it was like the miracle cure, there's not enough. So that needs to stop. And we need to allow the scientific process to take place. And guess what? Guess what? Funding science in the first place before it's at this point and having a healthy robust Yeah, if you want to talk about what should have happened before, should have. We could talk for hours about that. No, no, we could. We're not going to because we only have less than a half an hour before I want this show to be over. So we got to get through some more stories. We got to, there is, yeah, there's a systematic issue that needs to be addressed. But speaking of systems, the brain is a pretty big system. The brain is an amazing system. And what if we could read the brain and attach the brain in a very robust, resilient way to prosthetics for movement, for vision, for hearing, future Blair wouldn't be stuck in a jar. Future Blair would not be stuck in a jar. So it's very exciting news that has come out in science translational medicine this week. Researchers have published their new design for electrodes that would be implanted into the brain. And I've talked about implantable electrodes a whole lot on the show. These electrodes are teeny, teeny tiny. We're talking nano nanometers in size less than the size the width of a human hair. These little tiny needles would go into the brain and would interact interface with the neurons in the brain and over an array of electrodes be able to take in the activity of those cells, read it and translate it and take it out to a computer that could or a process of prosthetic for movement. And like I said, vision, all sorts of fun things. The problem is that the body is a very caustic environment for not organic stuff. I mean, it wants to get rid of invaders of all kinds. We're talking about the immune system with COVID and everything. The body wants to get rid of invaders and this also it definitely includes electrical devices like electrodes and the researchers one get rid of the body. Yeah, no, the researchers. What are the researchers? Viventi. He is what is his name? Jonathan Viventi from Duke University. He says trying to get these sensors to work in the brain is like tossing your foldable flexible smartphone in the ocean and expecting it to work for 70 years. Except we're making devices that are much thinner and much more flexible than the phones currently on the market. And that's the challenge. And what they've been able to do is create these electrode arrays now that have more electrodes than implantable arrays have had previously. They're now up to just over a thousand electrodes. They had a smaller electrode array that they tested and implanted into rats, this thousand electrode neural interface. They implanted into a rhesus macaque monkey and were able to record from it the awake alive behaving monkey. And their goal is to create a new type of visual prosthetic that would interact directly with the brain to be able to restore capacity for sight people with damaged optic nerves, which would be very exciting. What they did with the electrodes where the brain usually interacts with the electrodes, that's where deterioration of the electrodes begins to take place. And so they needed to look for some kind of coating to put on the electrodes. And it's either too thick or it's like not conductive or this thing didn't work and that thing didn't work. And they finally came up with an approach that allowed for this very simple addition of a silicon silicon dioxide over the surface of the electrodes. And it's basically a form of glass. And so the glass, while it doesn't conduct electricity, because there are so many of these electrodes in the array, they they do respond to more more general activity in the brain. So it's not actual conductance of the individual in the individual electrode electrodes. What did they say here? They yeah, they used to this biocompat that's a biocompatible device and it they think it's going to be able to survive for up to six years. The way that it detects neural activity is similar to when you touch a touchscreen with your finger through capacitive sensing. So it's capacitance and so it's this this capacity for electrical activity as opposed to actual conduction of electricity through the electrodes. And so the 1008 electrode neural interface was able to record activity from a mortar cortex of a monkey touching a touchscreen. And they think that they'll be able to do this in people very soon. They're going to try and refine it. But they're very exciting. They're working up from 1000 electrodes to more than 65,000 in their next iteration. And they're hoping that they're going to be able to get really superior electrodes moving forward. Visual prosthetics coming soon. I do it. Yeah, you do it. I was just thinking about like, I know it's not analogous because it's different problems, but you know, I deal with I have contacts and my vision is terrible. I have instinctism. I'm nearsighted all the things I found out my center of vision is not the center of my eyeball recently. I just I shouldn't be able to see it all. Basically. So I just think about like, LASIK, it sounds like a nightmare to me, or instead some electrodes on my brain. And I definitely would prefer the electrodes. That's going to take some open open head surgery. Yeah. But I'd be asleep for it as opposed to being awake when someone is taking a scalpel to your eyeball. I'd rather not. It's a laser to your eyeball. No, it's a scalpel first. It's a laser. It's a laser scalpel. Okay. Well, point being I would my point is I have enough problems with my vision. I feel like I I could really value I I'd absolutely do it. If I was losing my sight and this is what it would take. Totally. Absolutely. And if these and if these especially if they last for a long period of time, I mean, six years, that's okay. You don't want to be doing brain surgery every six years. That's a bit much. But at the same time, if they develop this a bit further and they can get them to last even longer, you know, it's potentially it's potentially something that a lot of people would sign up for potentially. And then a really kind of quick one that I think is very exciting. I have reported previously on repair mechanisms for the heart. There aren't any real natural repair mechanisms for the heart once you've had a heart attack. Researchers from North Carolina State University have published in in Science Translational Medicine about their off the shelf artificial cardiac patch. They're just slapping onto the heart and fix it after a heart attack. That's not exactly what happens. No, they looked at a rat model of heart attack. And they also did a pilot study involving pigs. So pig hearts are much more similar to human hearts. In these models of heart attack, they applied these cardiac patches and the patches are interesting because they took they created a scaffold from pig cardiac tissue that they desalularized. Basically, it's just the extracellular stuff that holds the cells together. They got rid of the cells and it's just the extracellular matrix. And then instead of growing new cells in it, they created what they're calling a synthetic, they put in synthetic cardiac stromal cells. And these being synthetic, it's not really cells. It's a biodegradable polymer that has a mix of stromal cell derived repair factors that come from heart cells. So they've got the scaffolding, they've got the repair factors all stuffed into the holes where the cells normally go. And they can put it in the freezer if they want, but they put it on a rat's heart that had gone through heart attack. And they found that the patch resulted in about 50% improvement of cardiac function. So this is analogous, if I'm hearing Kiki right, to showing up at a work site with catering and building materials and then allowing the workers who are there, the workers are passing by going, I guess we're not working there today. No donuts, no coffee, and there's nothing to build with. There's no materials. There's nothing there. The little cell fixers come by and they see, oh, look. Yes, you're back. Okay, good. Yes, although there is an echo. Yes, I got a problem. I'll fix it. So now there's a reason to go to work and it makes the job site easier. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Give the body what it needs to do the job and your body will likely do the job for you. This is also, by the way, true of your brain.  Look, think while you're home, do I really need to get to the end of the Tiger King? Do I really, is that, do I really need to know how this story ends? Is it that important or could I be watching this show or brain craft? Can I be, is there something I could be consuming with my brain that will actually make my brain healthier and stronger? So I think, yeah, I was learning that this is sort of like bringing all the repair materials and maybe some incentives to the regular repair network around the heart. Yeah, and I think that's what they're finding is potentially like the best pathway moving forward toward repairing the heart because they're finding that you can't induce stem cells in the heart to do anything. You could do cell transplants into the heart and try and get them to do stuff, but then you might have rejection issues. And so this is, it kind of solves all the problems because you don't have to deal with cells that have been transplanted from somebody else. You're looking at just the repair stuff and your own body then picks it up and does the work and does and fixes it. It just needs that little that little boost to make it go potentially. And so this is looking very promising. In the pigs, there was also about 30% reduction in scarring in some areas of the pig heart as well as stabilized heart function compared to non-treatment. And the patch that they have created can be frozen and safely stored for at least 30 days because there's no live cells involved. It's say what they're what they're saying off the shelf. It's the kind of thing that you could have like a Band-Aid at a hospital, except it's a heart Band-Aid. Cardiac Band-Aid. It is. Oh, you had a heart attack. We'll put a Band-Aid on that. But heart patch will patch you up. What's a new meaning for patching somebody up moving forward? I think it's very interesting work and I'm very excited about it. But at this point, it's not time for me to be excited anymore. Really? I mean, it's time for other things. It's time to move forward in the show. Oh, and if you are interested in a twist shirt or mug or other item of merchandise, go to twist.org and click on the Zazzle link and browse our store player. Are you ready? Did you drink that 14% alcohol by volume brown beer? And are you ready for the animal corner? I cannot confirm or deny what I was drinking, but I am ready for the animal corner. That's time for the animal corner. What are you doing? What is this thing about? I'm going to tell you what I have. Justin, do it. I have a question for you. Do you think by looking at a mouse, you could tell me if you thought it was happy or sad or grossed out? You know, I think I do. I think there's something about a mouse face that is kind of human readable. Interesting. Okay. So this is a study from Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology. This is a study on mouse facial expressions. They found through a study that their facial expressions do in fact change when they taste something sweet or bitter or when they become anxious. So this has a bunch of implications that we'll get into in a minute, but first I just wanted to talk about how they did this. So they use machine vision. They're able to reliably link five emotional states to facial expressions in mice. Pleasure, disgust, nausea, pain, and fear. And they could even measure the relative strength of these emotions. Now, for example, in humans, if we are disgusted, our eyes become narrow, our nose wrinkles, and our upper lip distorts asymmetrically, which now I'm like trying to do it and I can't quite figure it out. Even newborn babies have this distinct facial expression, similarly when they are sad or happy. So they have their own kind of set, but it's unique among humans. So we can see kind of all humans react in the same way. A lot of people also have said that they can recognize facial expressions in their pets. And I definitely feel like I can tell a lot about my pet's mood just by looking at her face. I can also tell you that working with wild animals and zoos, I have definitely as a zookeeper got up to a vet and gone, there's something wrong with this otter. He has, what do you mean there's something wrong? She's just not right. What do you mean she's just not right? So this study actually kind of perked my interest for that reason as well. There's definitely, there's something that you can sense just by looking at an animal's face. So they were able to look through this machine vision and try to figure out exactly what's going on there. So they also found that the reactions weren't directly linked to the environment. They also reflected the emotional value of the trigger. So for example, mice that licked a sugar solution when they were thirsty showed a more joyful facial expression than mice that weren't thirsty. And mice that tasted a slightly salty solution showed a satisfied expression, salty and tasty, while a very salty solution brought that disgusted face. So not only does their own condition impact their facial expression, but also there are kind of degrees within that. And so from here, they drew the conclusion that uncoupled from sensory stimulus, facial expressions reflect inner individual character of emotion, which they led to believe that this arises through mechanisms in the brain itself. So the next step, brains were back to brains this episode. So the next step was to investigate how neuronal activity in different brain regions affected facial expression. And they were able to evoke different emotional facial expressions by light activating specific brain areas that are known to play a role in emotional processing. So they used optogenetics to trigger. Yeah, okay. Yeah. And so they actually were able to measure the activity of individual neurons using two photon microscopy and simultaneously recorded the emotional facial expressions of the mice. And they found that in this area, they're they're calling the in the insular cortex, they are finding individual neurons have specific emotions attached to them. So they the individual neurons reacted with the same strength and at the exactly exact same time as the mouse's facial expression across mice. And each individual neural neuron was linked only to one single emotion. So they're starting to call them now emotion neurons individual. So so there's kind of two pockets to this. One is we are starting to understand where emotions happen in the brain, or at least what part of the emotion triggers physical response, right, the physical expression of that emotion. Yeah. And so this this could help investigate emotions in humans, also help investigate disorders related to how individuals can reflect emotions that they're feeling. They could help potentially help with anxiety disorders, depression. But the other thing that that I thought about was a lot of learning differences that are related to kind of social dynamics and being able to read other people and being able to express your own emotions. There could be something going on there. So all sorts of interesting stuff on the potential human side. Of course, again, this is mice, right? But this is mice mouse. The mouse is kind of our sample for laboratory tests, before we start talking about humans. So it's not too far off. But the whole other side of this is that I never had any doubt that animals had facial expressions, but we didn't really have a whole lot of data to show not only that their their expression changes depending on their environment and stimuli, but that also it's conditional based on their own emotional condition at that moment. And that it has this deep seated neuronal activity. So it brings it back to kind of this hard science of yes, we can read animals facial expressions. And yes, it tells us more than just what we're poking them with. But it actually tells us how they're feeling. So based on all these different things. So yeah, but it's also I think a little bit of a narrow bandwidth to talk about facial expression. Because we're used to talking about this because we're humans. We don't have a tail that can express. We don't have big ears that stick out in our mobile that can express. So like the diagram that we had up there of the little facial expressions, I couldn't see a whole lot of difference. But the ears completely articulated differently, depending on the emotional situation. This is something having been around horses a lot is you can read like half broken wild horses, but you can kind of read whether horse is going to let you go for the put the saddle on go for a ride or not based on their ears, because their ears are extremely expressive. So they don't necessarily need to do as much cheek or face or lip movement in the whole face. Okay, well, that's fine. But then like in a dog, you would also have like a tail, I suppose you could have. But yeah, so there's there's body language humans also have body language. I mean, we can look what so mammals, but primates especially were very visually oriented toward the face. But other animals as what we know, right, but all dogs are also oriented. We've we've talked about studies where we show the dogs look at their owner's faces. And that's very important. And also mice, it's not just in the tail and you know, the whole body facial expression is important because they come up to each other face to face and they sniff each other. And they're probably telling each other things as they come into contact, they're very social animals. And so with that sociality, you could expect that there is some kind of facial emotional expression.  And somebody goes, another mouse goes, Oh, look at that. That must taste awful. I don't want to eat that. And so it expresses things without any other communication element. And so I'm, I don't know what you're arguing about. No, I think I think what I'm saying is because we're humans, we have a face that is very expressive with like eyebrows can tell a tremendous amount of the story. I just think you're being mousest right now. I would also say that I think that it depends on what your frame of reference is. So if you're staring at mouse faces all day, you probably start to notice very small changes from one mouse to another, which a mouse would see right away. Yeah. And like, I would never recognize individuals out of a group of 100 penguins, but somebody who has worked with penguins might know them all by name. Yes. Day one on the job in the primate department, I could not tell the 28 squirrel monkeys apart. But by the time I was working full time in that department, I knew exactly who was who. I guess my point was that body language communication amongst me, animals, not just face is something to look at because if we'd only looked at humans to see how expressive they were with their ears, we would find humans to be very emotionally un-expressive. So there are probably other neurons that are involved in the other aspects of body language, emotion, communication, but they didn't look at that. They looked at the face and they looked at neurons that were activated when the face was activated. That's what they looked at. There's two different things we're talking about here. One is body language, which is mostly a social signal. An emotional facial expression is not necessarily. It could just be a reaction to stimuli and to an emotional context and might not have anything to do with social benefits of making that face. We don't know that, especially since there's neuronal things happening. So we don't know.  And that's very different from, ooh, this is salty. And so I think there's just different buckets we're talking about here. I think all of it though, to say that it's not social, I think all of it is social in nature because that's what communication is about. And if we weren't trying to express something from dangerous food, dangerous sound I'm afraid of, you should be afraid to, you're conveying some internal state externally. And the reason for that conveyance is social understanding.  Right. But I think what I was trying to say is there's some things that we do to through body language or facial expression in the presence of other individuals for the benefit of those individuals. And there are some things that we will do, whether they're individuals around or not. And I think that's kind of what I was trying to say. If you're like a lemon, I'm going to make that face whether there's someone else in the room or not. Right.  And the fact that we can all recognize, ooh, somebody ate something sour is a communication that came after, but it wasn't that the body, the way that the thing originated was the body saying, get that away from my lips. They're not even yours. That was a bad decision other part of my brain. I think that's an assumption. I think that's an assumption. I think we don't know. It's a good one. It is a good one, but I'm just saying, I think that we don't know how it all came to be, but yeah. Fascinating brain stuff. Yes. So I have a couple other stories in the animal corner. The first one is about invasive species and whether we are okay, pulling them right out of the environment, eradicating them from places they are not supposed to be, or whether we get kind of defensive about people wanting to remove them from the spaces that we live in. And it comes down to charisma. So this is a study from Biology Center of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Island Fisheries. And they have investigated the influence of charisma on the management of invasive species. So there's a couple spots in the chain of how you get an invasive species that they looked at. One being that being charismatic, first of all, you're just more likely to get it to get plucked from one place and brought somewhere else. So intentionally brought in. You're also more likely to get released out into the wild because somebody, maybe they don't want to have that as a pet anymore. They don't want to hold on to it anymore, but they want it to be free and be healthy and survive. And so they're much more likely to release it into the wild, which then means they're more likely to find others like them in that new space. They're more likely to breed and explode in population and cause huge problems. And then they're less likely to be eradicated, and they're more likely for people to get upset when you want to eradicate them because they are charismatic. And of course, their example was a situation where it was in Italy to control the invasive gray squirrel and to protect the native red squirrel. And there were protests. There were special interest groups. They had children drawing cartoon animals of squirrels because they did not want people removing those gray squirrels. And so it was a good scientific look at the fact that how charismatic an animal is impacts them in several ways. Oftentimes, it helps drive more funding for research and conservation if they are in trouble. But on the flip side of that, it prevents you from removing them from a situation where they might have huge cascading effects on ecosystems. So check your bias with your... You hear that cane toad? You hear that cane toad? You just need to be more charismatic. Exactly. Basically, if you were cuter, maybe a little... I was just cutin' up. Did a little bit of cane toad tap dance. And speaking of charismatic animals, I have one last story, quick one for the animal corner. One of the very most charismatic animals I can think of, the horseshoe crab. Love them so much. They're not the cutest of animals, but they're pretty darn important. They've been around since about 450 million years ago. They've lived through at least five mass extinctions, and they give us life-saving amoeba sites. So they have this blue blood. They're indispensable in modern medicine, these amoeba sites. And that's because they're the only known source of limulus amoeba site, Lysate, L-A-L. They're sensitive to specific toxins produced by specific bacteria that are responsible for 80% of life-threatening sepsis cases in humans. So by having these amoeba sites, we can do tests and figure out how to take care of the sepsis in individuals. But there's one big stopper in it, and that is that you can't use it in the blood of human patients. So you can use it to test medical devices, but there's been all sorts of research done since 1977, since they started using it to test medical devices to try to figure out how to test human blood. They've had a huge problem with that. But a new breakthrough in caring for raising and harvesting these amoeba sites from horseshoe crabs, they might have solved multiple problems. We, I think we've talked, it was many years ago, but we talked about how horseshoe crabs are harvested from the ocean. About 600,000 individuals are harvested every year, and their blood to receive those amoeba sites from the blue blood, they're usually released back into the ocean. The procedure itself has about a 30% mortality rate, not good. And then the research that we reported on a few years ago was that actually they thought that the ones that made it back to the ocean did fine, but actually was stunting their growth, so it was causing all sorts of problems. And so definitely not ideal, especially since they are now protected and their population is dropping. But so this new method of aquaculture that they are doing allows them to hold about, they think about 45,000 individuals they can have in aquaculture and yield enough of this LAL for their current needs and even have extra to be able to use new clinical applications. So it looks like this new aquaculture technique, they actually, they immobilize them, they put a catheter in so that they can continually, they can harvest the amoeba sites from them, and they even throughout this made sure that their well-being was good. So they had a zero mortality rate in the process, that they were able to display natural behaviors, they maintained body weight and continued growing as expected. And so not only are the horseshoe crabs healthier, but it appears that the amoeba sites are actually better primed to be used on human blood as a result of this. And so they actually think they're going to be able to use this to test human blood. Wow. So not only cutting down on the impact on the horseshoe crab populations, but also better effective at what they actually want to do with it. So this could save horseshoe crab lives and human lives. Saving all the lives. Yes, improve the aquaculture. I like it. Very nicely done. Go scientists, solving the problems. Yeah, it just takes time, a little thought, testing, testing, testing, and then maybe you can solve a problem. Kind of cool. Like whether or not people need to have regular assessment of health related factors that might be in their urine or their feces. Are you talking about a smart toilet? I am talking about a smart toilet. I am. Dr. Toilet. Dr. Toilet, this toilet that has been developed out of Stanford University researchers have published in Nature Biomedical Engineering a mountable toilet system that's capable of monitoring a person's health by analyzing the urine and the poop. It is modular so that different systems can be added or subtracted to it. It can be fitted onto standard toilets. It has a camera and a scanning tool on it and it will upload your data to the cloud. You don't have to do anything. Don't even have to lift a finger. Can you turn it off though? Because I would want to be able to turn it off so it's not like you drank too much wine last night. So the thing about this toilet that is the most interesting feature is its ability to identify individuals. Okay, because this is my first thing that I was like, Justin, your estrogen levels are picking up a lot higher than normal. I'm like, somebody forget the flush. I cleaned the toilet between. This has been designed with the idea that multiple people in a household would be using or in a facility would be using a toilet. And so the camera would identify individuals by your... Did you say camera? Camera? Oh, no. Identify individuals by what is apparently very unique. Sort of like a fingerprint. Yes, kind of like a fingerprint.  Everyone is so unique. Yeah, a little snowflake. Turns out it's actually better than even looking at a retina for a scanner. So new security measures going forward. Rated identifying individuals. It could also have a fingerprint scanner as well that would allow fingerprint identification. I don't need a camera on my toilet. I'm good. I don't need a camera in the toilet either. But for some people, if you are having to have particular metabolites or health related markers tracked on a regular basis, this could potentially make it much simpler as opposed to having to collect samples and send them to a lab for the assessment. Get rid of the camera. We don't need the camera. Just put your fingerprint on that or put in your code. Scan a key card. No camera. No camera. Yeah. Anyway, they have tested this on 21 participants and a total of 10 different biomarkers have been used in their test toilets, in sitting toilets, and in urinals. And it has passed initial tests and will move on to clinical study to potentially move forward as a medical device that could be used in people's homes to collect information and send that information to your health professionals. You know one side benefit of this? They have vacuum cleaners that have sort of just a light sensor detector that can tell if it's still picking up dirt. And then the light goes green if you've vacuumed sufficiently in an area. You could use this camera. This camera could sort of give you like all kind of backup cameras before they had backup cameras go from red to green. Just stop. So you don't have to look. Just stop. You don't have to check the paper anymore. I'm clean. That's great. It just tells you. Okay, I'm done. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Speaking about dropping things off. Oh, there's this interstellar comet. We talked about omumua, but there's another one Comet Borisov and Comet Borisov is very much like a comet that would be typically seen in our own solar system. However, because of its trajectory, we said, Hey, this is probably interstellar visitor number two. We've been following it. It's gone near nearby the sun and is past past it looks like around March 23. It just seemed to have some heating on the inside. And it's but it appears on March 28 to have experienced a bit of a breakup. And as of March 30, there is a little bit of it that is highly active that seems to have been left behind and is now it's now it's own little, little bit of comet, tiny bit of comet. They grew up so fast. Just dropped off. It was budding. It's a budding comet. Yes. Yeah. So the interesting thing is since this is like comets in our own solar system, it's thought that it's a mixture of ice and gravel, you know, bits of rock and ice water. But they think the molecular signatures might be different because it's come from somewhere else. And so this watching this event take place, this breakage happen, it's going to allow them potentially to see different molecules from the interior because a piece that was previously under the surface is now open to space and to the heat of the sun that it wasn't before. And so volatiles are potentially coming off that can be measured and analyzed kind of neat. But I don't know if I'm cool with interstellar visitors dropping things off in our solar system.  Don't drop your trash here. Clean up after yourself. I mean, we're so close to dropping our trash everywhere all over the universe. We're ones to talk. We're just in a trash in every direction. We're not ones to talk. I have a question for you though, Blair. COVID-19 has closed the zoos in China and the pandas are mating. How does this make you feel? So most zoo animals actually I've seen a lot of zookeepers are like changing outfits and hats and walking in front of exhibits because a lot of the animals are used to having people around. We're like their TV. So not having people around, they actually they kind of need more stimulation. So pandas appear to be the opposite. They don't want us looking at them. It could also be a complete fluke. This is it's not necessarily just because the zoo's closed. It also sounds like her estrus and his hormones spiked at the same time. And then they didn't say that they have records of that happening before. So this is the first time in 10 years. Yeah. So it's also just possible that they needed 10 years to warm up to each other. Maybe they needed the 10 years to warm up to each other. Maybe also there's no people. Maybe they like it to be nice and quiet. It's really quiet. You know what maybe they're just like really like you said under stimulated right now. And they're like nothing else to do. Yeah. There's nothing on the Netflix that I haven't seen. All right. I guess we can have sex. It's such a begrudging animal to begin with. But yeah, that makes sense. Yes. I was actually reading the story and I forget certain things about pandas because it's just there's so much to know about them. One of them is that you can't tell via ultrasound if they're pregnant until two weeks before birth. Like come on. Wait, what? You're just so bad at reproducing until two weeks prior. Are the bambininis that small or what's that? Yeah. Yeah. They're super, super small. Oh. They're small. They're underdeveloped. Not like other bear cubs but whatever. Whatever floats their boat. That's what you get for going straight vegetarian. That's what you get. You got the wrong gut for it.  Can't find their way home. Just a host of problems. So many problems. But I hope that we diverted and distracted people away from their problems for a couple of hours into the world of science. But now go back to them. No, no. Go to bed. Go to bed. That's right. Don't look at your phone before bed. Somebody could be watching this in the middle of the day. This could be the time you're watching them right now. Just go back. Go to bed. The day's not worth it. No matter when you're hearing this advice. Go to bed. If you are anything like me, you may find yourself randomly lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling and wonder, how did I get here? What am I doing on the floor? Let's go to bed. I hope that you have enjoyed the show. If you did, share it with a friend. That would be cool. Thank you. We've come to the end of a show. We've done another one. Yeah, I have a few shout outs. I would love to shout out Fada for his help with social media and show notes, Gord for manning the chat room, ID for for recording the show, and I'd like to thank the boroughs welcome fund and our Patreon sponsors for their generous support. And I apologize right now. Patreon is down. And so I do not have access to my list of Patreon sponsors. So I cannot list you all by name right now, but know that we are incredibly grateful for all that you do to help keep this show going. So thank you for all your support on Patreon. For information, visit patreon.com slash this weekend science on next week's show. Justin, guys, I'm still trying to like pull up the thing. We'll be back next Wednesday at 8 p.m. Broadcasting from our YouTube and Facebook channels and from twist.org slash live. If you want to listen to us as a podcast, just search for this week in science, wherever podcasts are found. If you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe as well. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes available on our website at www.twist.org. You can also find our links to our stories there. And you can sign up for our newsletter. We actually just sent out a newsletter earlier this week. So if you sign up and you did not receive it, let us know we can send you a link to the newsletter. And you can contact us directly email Kirsten at kirsten at this week in science.com. Justin at twistminion at gmail.com or Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist, T-W-I-S, somewhere in that subject line or Justin, what will happen? You will be spammed, filtered into oblivion. You can also hit us up on the Twitter where we are at twist science at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. 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I believe there will be editing before the podcast is released. Yeah, that makes sense. That tracks. There will be much editing in my future. Oh, yeah, Gara. I've got a newsletter. Fantastic. There was some moral fatigue. Yes, and the adrenaline has gone down now. Yeah. Yeah, it is after it's going to be interesting, I think, because we don't know how long all of this is going to last. And so the fatigue of having to stay in all the time and not getting to go do things. And I mean, yeah. Hmm. And there's also a lot of there's I find with social media, there's a lot of anger and that moral fatigue that happens when you follow the news stories and follow the emotions of all the people who are upset about missteps and mistakes and yeah, can't keep that going. We just have to take care of ourselves. We don't want to be running in chronic stress mode. We need to we need to figure out ways to take care of ourselves. Well, and with kind of what Vanessa was talking about earlier, where like working from home already usually takes longer. It takes even longer when 60% of your brain is focused on a global pandemic. And you're constantly getting poked at by news and especially if any part of the job that you're trying to do from home is supposed to be in some way responding to what's going on, then you have to be up on the news and be creating contingency plans to contingency plans, which is exhausting. So yeah, it's definitely it's a it's a wild wild thing. Answering a question in our chat room. What is Ed talking about? What are you guys talking about? Oh, making making masks from bras. I think one of my favorite videos was somebody making masks from jockstraps. That that was pretty humorous. I saw the I've seen a lot of the feminine products. Oh, but they're not that kind of filter. Oh, you've got to have some benefits working with the health care industry professional.  It's like the new the new bouquet of flowers. I got you this beautiful mask. I got you this mask in these gloves. Oh, I should go get my mask. I have a mask in the car that I've so far only shown up places sort of as a joke, because it's a like double carbon filtered Darth Vader mask looking thing. It's a little much a big much. That's a big one. It doesn't want to work. That's not gonna work. Okay, I would like to say it doesn't work. What Blair is demonstrating is not the proper way to wear a mask. If your mask is not tight above your nose.  Paul Riley, I'm glad in the chat in the YouTube chat room. Paul Riley. Thank you for re asking the question. I did see it when you first put it in there, but I forgot to we forgot that we didn't get it in. That's better than that spread to humans. And so far they do not think so. So far they don't think so. So far they don't know. I think I think the important thing to remind yourself about is that a cat is a member of your immediate family. And you should sequester them along with you. That's the best thing you should already be doing that because of toxoplasmic gondii. You don't want the cat going out there. Wildlife. Doing the wildlife. This is your moment to force yourself to turn your outdoor cat into an indoor cat for your own health and for their health and for the health of the wild ecosystem around you. My family went out for a walk in the neighborhood last night and I can't tell you the number of neighborhood cats, cats without collars, cats without bells on their collars that are just out running around and we pet those cats and then we come home and we wash our hands rigorously. Matt also in the YouTube chat room. One thing you want to think about though is the cats aren't necessarily going to be like a chew cough cough spreading it to you.  So you don't necessarily want to go around. You don't want to go around petting cats that are outside but keep your cats home. Matt in the YouTube chat room. Question. Is it redundant to say global pandemic? Doesn't pandemic indicate it's global? No, actually I disagree. I disagree. I think so pandemic my understanding is that it is traveled between at least two countries. A global pandemic is that it has gone to pretty much all of the countries. So I don't think saying global pandemic is redundant. I think it expresses it's an extreme pandemic versus you can have a limited pandemic. It could go from North America to South America and that's technically a pandemic. So no I don't think it's redundant. But there are some things like anytime you hear has anybody ever heard of a modest or a limited wasteland? No, it's always a vast wasteland. That you don't need to say vast wasteland. You can just say it was a wasteland because every wasteland is considered vast because it's a wasteland and space is precious on this planet. My refrigerator after weeks of sheltering at home is a wasteland of forgotten food. I've forgotten and spoiled food. Oh that's that's my post-apocalyptic explore entered into the wasteland. It was a very limited of my refrigerator. Only a couple of football fields. Yes, it's a very finite wasteland. And do I think I did notice that the that the World Health Organization is waffling to define this as one? You know the the the impetus but behind some of the decision-making at the World Health Organization is when I talked about in the disclaimer that a current world leader of a country extremely close to where I'm located it might even be the one I'm in for now the the amount we're the largest contributor to the World Health Organization. Guess how many billions of dollars we give them? Billions. It's actually about four million I think a year. It's it's it's this is not a this is not a heavily funded organization compared to the consequence expense of what has come from. Well into your point from last week money's fake anyway. Well money's fake anyway. Money's fake. Yeah but but one of the things one of the things that I think we need to start arguing for you know we had a pandemic response team one that was specifically dedicated to China that got canceled. It was like the months you hear before we ran into this. Well World Health Organization is an underfunded organization you know. It is very underfunded. Yeah when you can actually see what the consequences and the importance of the task which again in a sense we're doing this with hindsight in a sense we've also had so many examples of this in the past that's why they created the organization. Okay. So hey there are global things maybe we should all work together to try and manage these health issues that we're all going to deal with. Yeah that's not. And keep it going. Thank you. The global pandemic that differentiates from interplanetary pandemic there's currently not a Mars station affected nor nor moon base thankfully. But and yeah there were political considerations but also part of the considerations of when to call it a pandemic were financial considerations because as Justin said the who is critically chronically underfunded and when you when they say pandemic it starts a whole bunch of processes happening it leads to countries being able to request money for emergency funds from the World Health Organization to pay for some of their healthcare infrastructure and for emergency services related to the pandemics and so it just it puts a whole things a bunch of stuff in process and so they may have been tentative about getting to pandemic but we knew epidemic pandemic it was already on the move and it was moving around the country around the globe. I don't know but global pandemic it is supposed to be that it means it's global once it's gone to two continents your global or at least a large portion of the globe so global pandemic it is redundant I'm gonna keep saying I mean I'm gonna argue with you. I oh it's epidemic and then pandemic and if you say a global pandemic you're just saying the same thing pandemics are global. Then maybe it is redundant. Like ATM machine wait oh yeah automatic teller machine machine. There's a lot of stuff like that where it's like you talk about uh the COVID disease I say that and it's like oh the coronavirus infectious disease disease. But I mean also you know as communicators we should recognize that sometimes it could be wrong but it's still going to help people understand. So maybe people don't know what pandemic means and it's just a scary word and by saying global pandemic we're still getting across to people this is spread globally. It's a global epidemic so even though it could be wrong it's like when people get all in the weeds about well you didn't teach that scientific concept exactly right or that metaphor isn't quite exactly right but if it helps people understand what's going on who maybe don't totally understand the minutia. Yeah so pan pandemic the word did you Google. I went yes the word comes from Greek originally pan meaning all and deimos people all people pan deimos and then we added the English ik to the end to make it pandemic. Is this like pan gea? Like pan all geas. All geas. All people. Yes all geas. All geas. Yeah so pandemic is all people so global all people. It's a global all people problem. Global all people outbreak. Yeah. Words word roots where do they come from how does it mean pan like pantheon exactly. Yeah what was the other thing. Yeah Gora says I think the world is being too hard on the who and I think there are a lot of people who are very thankful that the who is doing its job and I think the who is doing a great job in a very stressful difficult situation.  Yeah I wouldn't want to have that job right now. I mean it's like it's not just a herder of cats but a herder of panic cats. Yeah panicked cats. Oh good lord so many claws. All the claws you know the next thing you know you've got a cat on the side of your head you've got a cat attached to your thigh to your torso. It's craziness. Cat craziness. Yeah this virus did not come from Enceladus. Nope don't think so. This is a very earth origin originating virus. Now something I think is really interesting. I don't think we talked about it with the it was just announced that there are people who are going to be going uh no Stanford University researchers are going to be looking at some of those antibody tests to start looking to see who has had COVID and there are all these people talking about how they were sick in the fall with something that wasn't the flu that had a cough and it had very coronavirus like symptoms and they're going to try and start looking to see whether or not it's possible there could have been an earlier spread that we aren't aware of because it's also come out that there was an intelligence report that was sent to the president back in November about a threat of a virus coming out of China. That's always true. Yeah but if that intelligence so the scientists everyone and what China has reported is oh it we just first got wind of it November 17th you know then and so if that's the case the intelligence community shouldn't have really been jumping on that. Well okay so here's a little bit of a backstory to that is a month before that the administration had shut down the pandemic response team part of which was specifically headquartered in China and monitoring Southeast Asia because of again half the world's population the tropical climate the density of the population this is where us as a planet tends to maybe acquire but also the spread is most efficient for a virus to engage with our organism. So it's more likely that the intelligence report was a response to having shut down something that was critical infrastructure for monitoring and being aware of this and may not have been based on any kind of evidence of something actually being there because this it happened we I mean what are the chances it's like jinxing yourself like I don't need car insurance and then two months later your first accident ever kind of a thing but it wasn't the first is the other part of this story it's this has been going on for quite some time we are aware of this the only way you're not aware of this is simply by not being informed of ignoring the information that's out there and making judgments based on no information which is what the current administration does time and time again and it's frustrating because as a species is a planet as the knowledge the the gathered knowledge of humanity we are better than this we are so much better than this and and channeling power in a way to in an individual or group of individuals that ignore all of human knowledge this is what you get this by the way is we are at the point now but this is no longer a china virus most of the cases are in the united states it's now a us virus this is an america virus so this is now the biggest vector the biggest uh uh what is it called it's the pooled in a particular area uh hot spot the hot spot and there's another word i'm looking for but i'm forgetting words now epicenter epicenter reservoir thank you reservoir for the virus currently is the united states i know i think myself other than i by the way i am so good to me i'm the best to me i'm so i'm absolutely everybody says i'm the best to me that anybody else the perfect quarantine partner for yourself yeah no so so we are we are now the biggest reservoir amongst the human population so it's now an america virus china's off the hook but it's not it's not about culture or nationality or borders or any of this nonsense it just happens to be where people are and so where people are in proximity to other people you're going to this is where the hot spot most likely will be each and every time that's why uh southeast asia needs monitoring funding world health organization needs and this is also why it's like so frustrating to hear like why are they so china-centric because that's absolutely did you have you not paid attention to everything else yeah what are you looking at what is being what piece of paper is being put in front of the person who's guiding our response is it blank or is the blankness on the inside of the eyelid this is the blankness in the brain it's the it's it's somebody who they he you're out of the next country but then he looks at a piece of paper and he goes words but we know he tears things up when he doesn't like what they have on them so so and then and then attempting to blame shift or all of this sort of stuff none of that does does anything none of that it does anything to affect our situation in the positive so yeah it's it's unfortunate but uh well unfortunately some governors are stepping up and yeah california's governor newson who's done an amazing job i'm so proud yeah it's very it's it's i feel privileged i often feel privileged to live in california and this is another moment i feel pretty privileged but um yeah lucky for you no origan has done a pretty good job as well the west even even washington where like washington was in trouble and they they have really done amazing work flattening that curve the west coast is killing it by not killing it or by so not killing each other yeah but i so so there is an i won't go back to the argument there is some argument out there which i kind of can't help bringing up again which is are we killing it too soon not everywhere there's places where nobody should even have contact with another human who's not in their immediate circle but are we killing it too good in places that haven't been heavily affected uh because they still have hospital capacity so if you picture this as a as a two to three year problem right if we say we don't even have to go that far we could just call it a two-year problem and we know there's going to be resurgence's we know that at some point people are going to get reintroduced it's going to seem like it's all clear we're going to get hit again the more people who have survived the first round in theory will not get affected in the second round so so you want kind of to be below the threshold of your hospitals but you want to have patients coming in you want to have cases taking place in your community as insane as that sounds uh the the thing that is the state home shelter in place orders that are sort of become national now are in response to what's taking place in los angeles san francisco washington new york i mean they may negatively they may negatively impact other communities who don't have a percentage of their population that cannot function if it does go there that's kind of what i'm saying like there's it's it's hard to say this because you know that there's a better version of of doing this with a vaccine right once we have a vaccine that's what's hopefully going to help but i think the point when when you when people make the argument that we should let it spread through the population and it's you know in a slow fashion trickle through that is a privileged perspective to take because it does not consider the individuals who are more likely to die because and i think that that is and i and i honestly think that it it it's a it's a perspective of from from privilege to be honest yeah because there's people that don't have health care so even if they would have survived if they don't have health care they might die but also there are people i mean if we're talking about trying to make it a trickle that means that if you do get sick you need to stay home and if you can't feed your family or pay rent through staying home if you don't have sick time then you're you might go to work while sick and make it spread faster than we intend so okay and the other part but hold on one second hold on one second and i think the other point to make about this is that it's it's also privileged in the fact that what it is also doing is perpetuating a system that prioritizes economy over people and i think and i think that's yeah and i think if you're saying people need you know we need to do this because people need to go back to work i mean that is that's wrong-headed i mean it absolutely you know totally great yeah and so i mean what blare's saying like it all ties in together which is the unfortunate part of it because our system's broken it's broken well okay so i'll say a couple things i'll do i'll do two responses here one is uh blare absolutely right this maybe is only a part of me there was kiki's point about the privilege maybe this is only uh this is only something that should be done in canada danmark uh germany italy uk places that have universal health care maybe you're right about that i don't believe it's it's economy is the important thing i think the where i'm coming from is it's not like we need to get people back to work that's not where i think money's fake i've said this many times you just pay people the world would continue nobody would care it'd be a lot of economy instead of trickle down it would function exactly the same doesn't matter my point though is is specifically about the concept of hospital capacity yes which is if right if there is a peak that can come later that overcomes hospital capacity more people die then if you keep within hospital capacity the entire way that you go so it's not an argument about needing to get back to work or the economy or any of that it's more about managing our ability to treat uh in an effective way and if we if we lock everything down and we get through a round of this and then at some point go outdoors again and it overcomes the second wave we're back in it and this continues longer and with more casualties so i think i think in an actual management of of keeping that treatment capability in concert with capacity there is an argument yeah but what it means is so like Wuhan China Wuhan has opened up again they're no longer in lockdown but they still have measures in place to track people's health to track their movement a lot of things that because of privacy concerns would not fly here in the United States but um you know on on the other hand there are countries where they are continuing to work at a higher capacity than we are or they're coming out of they're coming out of their quarantine isolation periods and they're they're they're coming out of it slowly you know not rushing out to it i mean what what it basically what basically is going to happen is we cannot go back to business as usual in two weeks yeah that's not a light switch it's not it's not an on off kind of thing and it's going to be certain sectors of the economy can possibly go back to work certain people we decide you know it depends on what different states even or the federal government what this what they what everyone agrees is the best plan of action i mean and it doesn't need to be part of the economy but a plan needs to be put in place that's what i was saying earlier during the show is that there needs the the management needs to happen and so in the Danish model that's taking place right now in the Danish model it's not really a whole lot of that economy that they're putting back into play they're sending kids back to school uh as a as a this is what's supposedly coming next is that the schools are gonna reopen which does mean children who have somebody who's got it maybe at home it's right i don't necessarily agree with that uh but but you know it's not it's not completely economic factor driven in that scenario so there's there's a couple of different approaches that are going to be out there but i think it has to do with you don't open up uh until you can open up enough to handle again by hospital capacity i think that's that threshold that everybody is looking at how many beds how many ventilators how many doctors are going to be available to treat and and if you get below that thing if you're if you're below 50 you should be letting more people out because you need you might need to let a trickle effect take place right now it's just so hard though because like who do you sacrifice to coronavirus like when you're when you're hoping that there's gonna be a vaccine at some point um how do you decide okay so we already have we already have it's it's it's uh people who run gas stations it's people who work in grocery stores yeah but so who's next who's next yeah who's the next the essential essential yeah i think right now anybody who's not in a sense for workers just should never have to work again because obviously we're we're never needed to be not essential we're never essential to the economy yeah yeah well we'll see where things go there are there who knows how what changes will take place changes out of foot oh wait Matt some people are pointing to the flu and saying that has more deaths what makes COVID-19 a scarier virus than something that has more deaths so right now uh COVID within the United States has less deaths than a regular seasonal flu uh the difference is a couple of things first we can protect more people from the seasonal flu than we can from COVID-19 with a flu shot uh shot yes uh secondly it appears that is is more contagious so it's more easily can uh contract it doesn't appear it is more contagious it is yes okay COVID-19 is absolutely substantially more contagious than flu you can say that uh affirmative you can also say that when people get it more people die by a factor order of magnitude now having said that uh the best thing that we've ever come up with uh to combat the common flu has been our reaction to COVID-19 because the regular flu is going to kill a lot less people than it normally does very true and and we are normally even though we have people have flu shots or we are still like you know there's a good portion of the population that's a walking talking reservoir of this common flu because it because it doesn't kill uh as efficiently if if the COVID was more deadly than it was now if it was more of a bird flu or a MERS a lot less people would be infected because you would get it you would die and you would die quickly and you'd be less likely to transmit it to somebody else one of the that's that's the the once you're once you have it once you've gone to the hospital you're in there potential