Thank you for staying so late and for listening to me speak. As Muir mentioned, I'm a children's writer and I thought I'd share with you a little bit about my journey and my goals in creating literature for kids and hopefully changing the narrative for American Muslims through this media. And I won't talk at you too long because it's so late, but I'll just introduce myself quickly, share my work, and then hopefully we can have a conversation because I'd love to hear about what you all are thinking about these topics. A little bit about me. I was born and raised in Maryland of Pakistani heritage. My parents immigrated from Pakistan before I was born. Of course I was raised an American Muslim. I was a big reader for those girls in the audience. I loved to read as a kid and I also loved to write for fun. I spent a lot of time writing letters and poems. I actually had a family newspaper that I'll share with you in a moment. As I mentioned, I spent a lot of time reading. I spent a lot of time at the library. My mom would take us every few weeks to the public library with shopping bags from the grocery store that she would fill up with books. And these are some of the stories that I read growing up. For those of you who can see them, they all have female protagonists. They're all stories about siblings. Each of these characters had modern sisters. They're all very family-centric. And I read everything. I read fantasy and science fiction and mysteries. But these are the stories that I gravitated to the most and really connected with and read over and over again. And these are the characters that I still think about now, so many years later. But there was something missing in all of these stories that I was reading and that was me. I never saw myself in any of the books that I wrote when I was growing up. I never encountered a Pakistani American child or a Muslim character in any of the books that I read, which was very typical of that time. And I also mentioned that I used to write for fun. And I had this family newspaper that I called The Chronicles and I actually found issues of the paper that are yellowed, notebook paper, pages where I had stories that I wrote about my family. And it's interesting to go back all these years later and read these issues. And what was very striking to me was that in all of them, I don't mention anything about my culture, my religion, the food that we ate at home, the language we spoke, the Islamic education I was getting. If anyone was to pick up that paper and read, apart from the names that were mentioned, you would think that you were reading about any white American person in almost all of them. And I think that was reflected because that was what I was reading. And I don't think I felt like I had the license to write about the issues, because I think they were worth sharing or worth telling because no one else was writing the stories, so why would anybody want to read them? And even though I wasn't aware of how much that lack of representation impacted me, now as an adult I think I can see the impact that it had. And growing up as a Muslim in America, 30 years ago, 35 years ago when I was a child in elementary school, I went through public education system in Maryland, which was actually a very good system, a good county. And at that time growing up, as we know for those of us who grew up in this country during that time, Islam was very relatively unknown. We were pretty much under the radar. And there was very little understanding of our traditions on holidays. When I was in school, my teachers didn't even know what Ramadan was most of the time. When I was missing school because of the Eid holiday, I couldn't even say that I'm missing school for Eid. I didn't use it by name. I would write the note that my parents would sign it and say, please excuse her for her religious holiday because I didn't bother to refer to it by name. I remember when I was a sophomore at high school, my teacher asked where my family was from. And when I said, wow, she said, oh, that's nice. Where is that? That's just a tough thing. And now looking back, you know, it's interesting to make it away was a blessing to be invisible. But as a child, you want to be seen.  And it hurts to be invisible, especially in your teacher's eyes. And I remember the first time being aware of Muslims in the media. And that was during the Iran hostage crisis in 1978, between 1978 and 80 when I was between 8 and 10 years old. And I remember even as a child being as young as I was, you know, feeling that shame that these are my people doing these things that are getting all this negative attention. But at the same time, I think the difference was that as far as the country, even this image that I have about this says, deport all Iranians, right? It doesn't say all Muslims. And I feel like there was that distinction that it was political. It was a certain group of Muslims. They were the Iranians, and it didn't spread to all American Muslims. So I went on to, you know, Trump's being so very visible to obviously growing up and working in public health communications. But I had the chance to start writing books for kids about 16 years ago. And these are some of the first books that I published. And I had nothing to do with Islam or being a Muslim. I wrote about space and spies and the PNX book. We got into growing up. But at the same time, I was very inspired by other books that I was finding, because I was also a new mother at the time. And I was reading books to my kids and people taking my kids to the library and looking for those stories that I didn't have when I was a kid. And sadly, they still didn't exist. I found books about Chinese American families. I found books about Sammy's spiders celebrating his first Hanukkah with a family. And I thought, where, you know, it was jealous when I saw these books and thought, where are the books for our community? They just didn't exist. And at the same time, 9-11 had just happened. And of course, as we all know, we knew that the world would never be the same for American Muslims. And at the time, a lot of things were being said. A lot of confusion, a lot of curiosity. All of a sudden, people wanted to know more about who we were as a community. And at the same time, somebody said, Islam is a vibrant faith. Millions of our fellow citizens are Muslims. We respect the faith. We honor its traditions. Our enemy does not. Our enemy doesn't follow the great traditions of Islam. They hijack the great religion. Anyone else who said that? That's right. George Bush. Who would think that? Who would now look back on this and be the dignified statesman that he now seems to be? But, you know, he, at the time, it was a great service that's made up to our community that he did make that distinction very clearly. I know he went on to say something about Islam being a religion of peace and about all, I think he said something like, all ours is a country based upon tolerance and we welcome people of all faiths in America. He said that in another event. And he made it very clear that American Muslims were not the enemy that we welcome, et cetera. And we know that's not the case today. So all this is happening and there's always curiosity about who Muslims were. And I wanted to create something to help change that. So I started thinking about the audience. I wanted to reach schools and libraries and especially public schools that really had very little resources. I wanted Muslim kids to have what they call the industry a mirror book where they pick up a book and see themselves reflected. And I also wanted window books which are for non-Muslims to be able to look in and see and understand our culture and our traditions. And the beauty of picture books and children's books in general are that you really reach more than just the children who are reading them. You're reaching parents who are reading to their children and with their children you're reaching educators, librarians and so it has this ripple effect into the community. So the first book I published came out in 2008 by the movement. It's a simple book about Yasmin and her family celebrating the month of Ramadan. They're watching the moon change shape over the month and they celebrate Eid and Yasmin gets a special surprise, a spoiler, it's a telescope to help you watch for a month. And I woven things like the lunar cycle and the change in shape of the moon so that teachers could use that in addition to learning about Ramadan they could also do less than the lunar cycle. And this is an interior page of the book. A few years later I published Golden Dose and Silver Lanterns and this book is about a Muslim book of colors which is very simple but inverse. It's not holiday specific although I do mention Ramadan and Eid in it. And in this book people can learn about objects and things that are special to Muslims through the color. And a couple examples are blue is the hijab mom likes to wear as a scarf she uses to cover her hair. So very simple verse. Black is the ink I used to draw the Arabic letters which that's spelled it all along. And I wanted to introduce the Quran and the Qur'an and the Khufi and there are very similar concepts and objects. I also wrote other books that had nothing to do with Islam like about Mars and Amazon but the reason I mention this is that I tried to include diverse characters in every book that I could because apart from books about Muslims it's also important for Muslim characters to appear in books about anything. So in this book about the Amazon I included an Egyptian doctor named Rania Salamon as one of the characters and in my book about Mars there's an astronaut from India named Anis Salamon so I think that's another important tool to increase people's awareness of Muslims. And then last year as many of you know I was thrilled when I wrote Isra'ul-Qarish George people wonder how did that happen how did you write Qarish George and the publisher actually approached me to show you about Muslims and they asked me if they thought if I thought Muslims would be open and interested in having Qarish George celebrate and of course growing up as I did and knowing how much I would have loved a book like this I was growing up I said with confidence that I thought Muslims would be overjoyed and they were and the book got a lot of attention in the media and I think people were at this time so excited to see something positive happening Muslims attached to it because sadly when the book came out last year the election cycle was in full swing reviewing the damaging rhetoric that was being said about Muslims and the mood was very very different from what it had been when under the Bush administration and of course I was wrong. So this book is a very simple book about Qarish George celebrating Ramadan with his friends and the focus is on community and family and charity like most Americans do and he gets into a little lucky trouble like usual and this is the scene where they're having dinner after after it's dark and celebrating the chocolate coming in at us but as we know as I mentioned pulling in a slump for me later was is a lion in the wall and growing in this country sadly and there was actually a new study that came out from ISP this too for social policy and understanding that was reporting in PR a few weeks ago and then 42% of Muslim children in America are reporting in discrimination in school and of that I think almost a quarter of it I might be wrong on that number but a high percentage of that was actually from their teachers so not even just their peers but we know that anti-Muslim violence and vandalism has skyrocketed I think five most have grown to the ground this year alone which is terrifying in 2015 there were 78 reported incidents of mosques being targeted in some way and we know that you know just anecdotally if you're just watching this probably double what happened in 2016 and at the same time that all of this is happening it blows my mind that 60% of Americans still say they don't know which I find to believe and I think maybe they know they know Muslim maybe they imagine it was them to look a certain way or act a certain way and you're up with Middle Eastern or you're not very smart that you're not Muslim but that's what they think and I think obviously with that we know that what people don't know something they don't understand something that is easy for them to be displayed in the media and the power of storytelling is so important because we can refute we can refute facts and we can argue back and forth as much as we want whether as long as it's a religion of peace whether you know terrorism or Muslim whatever the issue is but we can't know and deny our stories and if we give them the opportunity to get to know us especially those who say they don't know us through our stories hopefully that creates compassion and tolerance where maybe it isn't and changes people's hearts and minds and as I mentioned for the kids out there representation really matters and I think now more than ever so I was really really thrilled when Amna's voice was published just a couple of months ago and as Maria mentioned it's the first publication of a new imprint called Salon Reads which is put up by Simon Schuster a division within a large culture and is specialized in different texts so they dedicated an entire imprint to books about this so we can tell our old stories and they're recognizing and they initially are largely really recognizing that the stories are important that they need to be told and they aren't because most of the children aren't seeing themselves activated and although it's slowly changing it hasn't changed enough so it's looking out in March and it's about a 12 year old girl named Amna who is a sixth grader she's a Pakistani American her parents are immigrants she started those schools for the first time and I tried to create a character who's really reliable that any little girl just like the books that I shared earlier that I read that really I didn't see myself in but I had stuff in common with those girls the same way I want anybody who thinks that this book to feel like they can identify with Amna or have something in common with her she has a best friend who's Korean American and she's a very talented singer and has a beautiful singing voice but she's extremely sharp and afraid to show it in the story she's dealing with her friends changing I feel like that's something most middle school aged children deal with is who are my friends and where do I fit in her best friend is also becoming friendly who wasn't very nice to them in the past and that's making her confused her older brother Mustafa is rebelling a little bit at home which is causing some tension her uncle's visiting from Pakistan who is much more conservative than her family and is sort of a father figure to her father and that's making her parents feel pressure to represent there's a broad competition that her parents want her to compete in and she, as I mentioned before very stage shy would love to have the confidence to sing if it doesn't and I introduced the idea that even though it introduces some controversy in the larger context of music and whether or not music is encouraged or not even encouraged but discouraged or forbidden in this law and I did that purposefully because it's a in my mind a smaller issue of terrorism or something like that but a way to demonstrate that Muslims are not a model where we don't follow their practice exact same way and that there are disagreements even within families on how we choose to practice and that that idea is introduced in a subtle way that obviously can make people understand that it translates into bigger issues as well so during the story throughout the course of the story that changes of course as a writer you want a character who grows and evolves and working and helping out so it's a really not satisfying story so I'm going to learn some stripes of her community love her family who her friends really are the power inside of her to make a difference and she really gains some confidence and I'm hoping that readers gain insight into an American who is in community because the book takes you into a mosque you meet the emul you go to her Sunday school you get a glimpse into prayer but a lot of Americans don't have access to they don't understand what really happens at a mosque and are mosques really breeding grounds for terrorists or not is there creeping Sharia and happening or whatever creeping Sharia is so they don't know what an emul does and so to see the emul in the story joking around with the kids and being an example to them and arranging this competition and encouraging them to compete and think of what our communities look like um to get a taste of Pakistani culture lots of soon people say not to read this book on an empty stomach because they make you hungry and you realize that you're just the food obsessives I am but again like the idea that we want compassion and understanding for our community and in the book even though I wrote it four and a half years ago the first draft that's how long it took for it to actually be published I introduced the idea of mosque feminism and the community that you get to know and love with Aminah and her family is attacked and when I wrote the book I was on the board of ISP the organization that I mentioned that did this study on belief and you know I was aware of incidents that were happening around the country and I was very concerned about it and I thought it was a way for people to understand from the girl, the character how damaging that is what it would feel like to have to be this victim of an attack like that and it's unfortunate now that people are pointing this book and saying how timely, how relevant it is and it's a really unfortunate coincidence because I wish it wasn't and I wish that something that happened and doesn't happen anymore but sadly it's the opposite and I sat the book in Milwaukee, Wisconsin even though I'm in Maryland outside of D.C. right now in a D.C. suburb and I didn't imagine that this could happen in my hometown being as diverse as it is being as tolerant of the community as it is and my husband grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and so I knew that community through his family and I also knew that it was the site of a terrible attack on the state temple some years ago and I was never caring about that where six people were killed so that's why I chose that as the study two weeks before this book came out my local mosque received threats along with many of our country and we know that the climate is not very friendly these are just some other titles about this office to demonstrate the variety that's out there but these books and my books and other books really need is the support of the community we have to show the publishing industry that making an investment in something like Salon Reads was worth it tonight because if not they won't keep doing it right at the end of the day it's dollars and cents for these publishers they have to make profit and there's a lot of interest right now and in fact since Trump was elected there's been extra attention to get more Muslim voices published there's agents who are specifically asking for Muslim writers to come and submit their work and it's almost part of this resistance that we made for our voices out there but we have to give them content but we also need to support the books that are out there so I think whatever you can do not just mine but Muslim books that are mainstream published the ones that Muslim press are amazing we need them we need those books to teach our kids how to practice their faith but the books that are out there for anyone to consider the ones that you find in the libraries we need to support those books and donate them if we can if you aren't Muslim too for your teachers for plastering if you can write reviews that's huge publishers read reviews that people leave and on Amazon and elsewhere and of course read to your kids spend time reading with your kids and they get their feedback on what they think about these stories and what it means to them because they're lucky to have them really compared to what we were years ago I'll stop just stay in touch and connect with me on social media but I'd love to hear your thoughts on anything or any questions just a quick question where we can get the books from that website or can we get it from the website so this website is just to connect with me so if you're interested in what I'm working on or things like that that's where you can work it in touch with me that's how my books are available on bookstores and also on all of our news channels like Amazon or Barnes & Noble I always try to encourage people to support independent booksellers in Fossil but I know it's hard so anywhere in Charlotte you can find it there's a lot here all the work that you do I have a couple of daughters so I think but how to keep them inspired when they get older to keep writing it's amazing to hear about young writers like I mentioned I'm sorry I was talking kind of adult level but when I was little I loved to write and I mentioned poems and plays and the family newspaper that I showed you so I think when you're young you never know you love that love for writing when you're young you keep doing it I think sometimes when you're in school like those school ages you find especially upper middle school high school it's kind of hard to keep kids reading that's when they have so much school work and it's hard to read for pleasure but I think if you develop that passion when kids are young they pick it up again later and really try to find opportunities there's like great writing contests for kids to enter into that's a nice way to motivate them essay contests sharing work with even family and friends is a way to keep them encouraged email the story that your kids are writing and get feedback from friends and family and encouragement things like that I think are important and then mother daughter book club is another fun thing or even a writing group for kids would be a nice way to keep motivated so I'll keep writing when you for representation yeah so high school you mentioned that we're born and raised here at the time that you were growing up and the kids now that are growing up 10 years old do you see a change in them in terms of an identity of being Muslim is there a difference between then and now are they more open about it or are they more conservative about their faith and character it depends on many factors looking at my own situation as I mentioned when I grew up it wasn't even that I was hiding it it was just that nobody really knew what being Muslim was outside of the community so when I was the only Muslim in my class I had no share of that experience with or anything and I mentioned that Alvina's best friend is a Korean American I had a Korean American best friend as well because she was another minority who I could relate to on different levels of having a parent I think it's different now from I live in the same area that I was raised in now and I have two kids who are now 12 and 16 and two boys and looking at them I do see a big difference my peers, my someone who was in second grade had three other Muslim boys in his class which was huge and I couldn't imagine that when I was growing up the teacher had we went in and read my book during Ramadan and that was something that never would have happened when I was a kid I do ask my kids, I think having grown up here I'm very aware of what they're feeling what they're thinking and do they feel different and I don't think they're as connected to Pakistani culture as I was growing up obviously having immigrant parents but I feel like they're more secure in their Muslim identity and for me that was something that is very important to me in this book too to write it from the perspective of a child who's not embarrassed or ashamed of who she is because I feel like there's a lot of diversity stories where there is a first or second generation American child who's either born to children of parents and there's that oh my parents face with an accent or they cook by their side food in my lunch box I think that story's been done and I really wanted to write a character who was unapologetically Muslim and of course there's things happen like going to school smelling like Masala I mean that happens and no one likes it but you know, in her essence she's proud of who she is and it's like an issue of things like friends and family and etc and I think for me maybe I drew from my own kids and the kids that I know who are a bit more like that they seem more balanced and our communities are more established too like we didn't have something like this when I was growing up we used to rent a high school so I think it's progress I hope it's progress in the right direction and our kids are facing challenges that we couldn't have to face if it worked out to daily problems I'm doing a project Islamphobia for school and I I got some things that preventions but what do you think you can prevent from Islamphobia spray? How do we prevent it? I don't know I think it's a really good question I mean I definitely think getting our stories out like I mentioned is one way to humanize Muslims I think when people don't know us as people as community members and friends and only think of what they hear and use and believe what they hear then it's all ISIS terrorism and they start to fight that with Muslims I think it's important for people to also see stories from all different types of Muslims because that's another thing that people just don't see they don't realize that the largest group of Muslims in America are African-Americans or that the largest immigrant community is Pakistani-American and that Arabs are a smaller minority of Muslims in America but that's what everybody thinks that all Muslims are speaking Arabic are from the Middle East so I think having stories of all types of representation I think obviously that's what I do so this is what you think in terms of other things I think we need more mainstream Muslims in the media just obviously in the news itself but even in pop culture I think having more characters and I think starting to happen you see random characters in TV shows or movies and even it's exciting to see commercials with people wearing a job and I think the more we can do to just normalize and show that we're part of society and of course each of us are ambassadors being active in our community so I think running for office I think it's huge but being your child's PTA being active in interfaith but also whatever you need to be out there so that people know that you're Muslim but you're many other things I think it's really important in terms of open housing that means that the local people also can see how more characters can understand yeah absolutely I think interfaith and welcoming people and just from our personal perspective we're not relying ourselves I think personally even me seeing the way librarians and educators have championed this book and other books of mine this book I think because it's the new imprints, long raids it's been beautiful to see the way people have stepped up and celebrated this and not Muslims I'm talking about and I feel like we have so much support for our other minority groups I was invited last week to people of the book fair at a synagogue in DC and it was so lovely that there were three Jewish authors and then they invited me to come and I was invited to the National Cathedral where they had a chapel on Islam for their little kids from school up to third grade and they invited me I think that we as a community because for the first time we're being targeted the way we are we have to come out of our shells and we have to also ally ourselves with other marginalized communities like the Black Lives Matter movement LGBTQ like we have we can't discriminate and and think our rights are laws that matter and it's okay for other rights to be trampled we have to unify with the Jewish community other minority communities and hopefully find what's happening because they are allies and I feel that


Do you ever have those days when you really want to bake a loaf of sourdough bread but you can't because you forgot to prepare your starter the night before? Well today I'm going to show you a recipe that can be made from start to finish in just about 9 hours so you can make the entire thing within the course of a single day. So let's get into it. If you're new here my name is Charlie and on this channel I explore the basic principles of cooking so that we can all become better home cooks and home bakers. So let's make some bread. And speaking of that I'm excited to announce that I just launched my first line of merch which includes this let's make some bread t-shirt that I'm wearing right now. So you can find my full shop at theregularchef.com slash merch and it'll also of course be linked below. There's several designs to choose from and they come in a wide variety of styles and colors so make sure to check that out if that sounds like something that interests you or if you just appreciate what I do here and you want to support me further. And if you order within the next two weeks your order will ship out in the first batch so make sure to order soon if you want to get them as quickly as possible. So without further ado let's get into the recipe. Now this is based on my basic sourdough bread recipe and the process is pretty similar but I've made a few modifications which will not only allow us to make this entire bread within the same day but it'll also help us to create an even better, more open crumbed bread. And as always we first need to prepare our Levan. And since this is the same day sourdough bread we're going to prepare it in the morning on the same day that we want to bake the bread and we'll have to make sure that it rises quickly so the first key in doing that is to use a high ratio of starter to flour to water. So in this case we're using a one to one to one ratio. So add 50 grams of your starter to a clean jar along with 50 grams of flour and 50 grams of water. And as usual I'm using a blend of 50% whole wheat and 50% all-purpose flour here but really pretty much any type of flour will work. Then of course stir until all of the flour is fully hydrated and cover your jar with a loosely fitting lid. I recently started using these Weck tulip jars when I'm working with smaller quantities of starter because their shape makes them really easy to stir in but since they only have a half liter capacity they do only work for smaller quantities. So I'll of course link those below for anyone else who wants to check them out. Now the other key to helping the starter rise quickly is placing it into a warm environment around 85 degrees Fahrenheit which is about 29 degrees Celsius. So I'm going to put it in my homemade proofing box which I've made a video about that'll also be linked below. But you can usually achieve a similar environment by just placing your starter into your oven with the light on. So after one and a half hours my Levan has risen to just about double its original size and it's got plenty of bubbles throughout so I'm ready to start mixing the dough. In a large bowl add 140 grams of Levan which should be about the entire thing along with 510 grams of water preferably around 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Then just stir to dissolve the Levan. Now add 70 grams of whole wheat flour along with 600 grams of unbleached bread flour and stir until all the flour is completely saturated.  This recipe will make two loaves but of course feel free to scale it to make however many you like. Now just cover that bowl with plastic wrap or anything else that'll form an airtight seal and throw it back into your 85 degree environment for a 25 minute resting period. For simplicity in this recipe I've designed every resting period from here up until the final proofing to be 25 minutes long. So after that first 25 minutes we'll add the remaining ingredients which are 14 grams of salt and another 30 grams of water. So fold those ingredients into the dough then if you like transfer the dough to a translucent rectangular container or any other container with a lid. Now this brings the total hydration of the dough to almost 83% so it's a bit higher than the 77% that we used in my basic sourdough bread recipe. So this will make the dough more extensible which will allow us to achieve an even more open crumb but it'll also make the dough slightly stickier and harder to handle so I'd recommend starting with that basic recipe if you're new to making sourdough bread. Anyways once those ingredients are fully integrated place that container back into your warm environment for another 25 minutes. Now for this recipe we're going to perform a total of five sets of folds throughout the bulk fermentation so we'll be doing three sets of stretch and folds followed by two sets of coil folds. So after that first 25 minute rest get your dough back out and perform the first set of stretch and folds. For these just grab a small portion of your dough and stretch it up as far as it'll go then fold it back over itself and repeat that process a total of eight times around the perimeter of the dough. Then once that's done place your dough back into the warm environment for another 25 minutes then perform the remaining two sets of stretch and folds in the same way resting 25 minutes between each set and after that third set you'll want to flip the dough over in its container to prepare it for the coil folds then of course place it back into the warm environment for another 25 minutes. So now we'll be performing two sets of coil folds again spaced out at 25 minute intervals. These coil folds allow us to be more gentle with the dough during its later stages of bulk fermentation while still helping us to develop the gluten structure. So just pick up the dough and let one side fold underneath itself like so then set it back down and repeat that same process three more times around the perimeter of the dough. As always make sure to wet your hands before handling the dough to prevent any sticking. Now after the next 25 minute resting period the dough should be starting to get nice and aerated with a few small bubbles on the surface but it shouldn't be overly bubbly and sticky. If it is you may want to cut the bulk fermentation short and skip straight to the next step in order to avoid over fermenting your dough but assuming it still looks good proceed with the final set of coil folds then place it back into your warm environment for another 25 minutes and after that resting period we're ready to start shaping. Start by dusting your work surface with a good amount of flour then turn your dough out with the top side facing down and preferably you should wet your hands before doing so which for some reason I didn't do this time and you can see the struggle. Anyways using a floured bench scraper divide your dough up into two equal size pieces and flip them over and shape them each into a top ball using your bench scraper to develop tension. Be sure not to over shape because that can cause the surface to tear so you just need to form some initial tension here. Then dust the loaves again with flour and cover them with the dish towel for a 25 minute vent rest and after that it's time for the final shaping. For this you'll need two banditons and since I'm going to form my loaves into patards I'm using oval banditons which I've dust with rice flour to prevent any sticking. If you want to learn how to shape a boule you can refer back to my basic sourdough bread recipe video which will be linked below. So for the shaping start by flipping the loaves back over onto a floured portion of your surface making sure to keep the other side unfloured to allow it to stick to itself. Take one loaf at a time and stretch it out so it lies slightly flatter on your surface then grab the portion of the dough closest to you and stretch it up and over about two-thirds of the way down the dough. Then grab the left and right sides of the dough and fold them over in the same way being sure to stretch them a bit to develop some tension but also being careful not to tear the dough. Finally grab the top corners of the dough and fold them in toward the middle then tuck to develop some tension, fold the dough over then tuck again and fold again until you've reached the end of the dough. At that point just drag the dough along your work surface to develop a bit more tension and seal off the seams then gently transfer the loaf to your banneton with the seam side facing up. Then repeat that process with the second loaf dust both of them with some more rice flour and place them into food safe plastic bags or any other airtight containers for the final rise. Now if you follow my recommended timing it'll be about 1 pm at this point so in order to get these loaves in the oven within the next few hours we'll need to let them rise at room temperature. But we also want to bake the loaves while they're cold for reasons that I've detailed in previous videos so what we're going to do is allow them to rise for one to one and half hours at room temperature then for another one and a half hours in the refrigerator. And once the loaves spring back slowly when poked we know they're ready to bake. So here are the loaves at the beginning of proofing and you can see that they spring back right away. Then after my one and a half hour room temperature proof they spring back a bit slower and finally after the additional one and a half hour proof in the fridge they spring back very slowly which is exactly what we want. So once your loaves have been in the fridge for about 30 minutes you'll also want to start preheating your oven with a Dutch oven or combo cooker inside to 500 degrees Fahrenheit which is about 260 degrees Celsius. Then after the entire hour and a half take your first loaf out of the fridge and working as quickly as possible toss it into the bottom half of your Dutch oven and score it.  After 20 minutes remove the Dutch oven lid and reduce the oven temperature to 450 degrees Fahrenheit which is about 230 degrees Celsius and bake the loaf for another 15 to 20 minutes until the desired level of browning is achieved. Then repeat that process with the second loaf and as always you'll want to let the loaves cool completely on a wire rack for at least one to two hours before cutting into them. But once you do you should be left with a beautiful open crumb loaf with a nice mild flavor which I actually prefer compared to the overly tangy loaves that you get with a lot of sourdough bread. But if you do want a more tangy loaf you'll need to slow down the process a bit because the longer time and lower temperature proofing is what typically gives the loaves their tangy flavor. But this recipe is perfect for anyone who claims to not like sourdough bread because they don't like the tangy flavor of it. This recipe can achieve a very mild tasting loaf that you may not even know as sourdough if you hadn't made it yourself. So just one more thing before we move on for those of you who want to take your sour dough bread baking to the next level I'm now available for one-on-one video consultations which you can set up through the link in the description below. I do try to answer all of your questions in the comments to the best of my ability because I don't want you to have to pay to get the information you need but for those of you that really want to dive deep and work directly with me to improve your loaves this is the way to do it. So now that you know how to make some same-day sourdough bread if you want to pick up some more tips on how to get a better oven spring be sure to click that video in the bottom right corner of the screen. So there you go. I'll see you all in the next one.


This study explores the literature on using social media for participant recruitment in health research studies and identifies best practices for recruiting participants using this method. The results show that social media is a cost effective and efficient strategy for recruiting participants, but there are limited participation of older adults in social media recruitment. Ethics boards and research support services in academic institutions are encouraged to provide guidelines on the use of social media for health research participant recruitment. This article was authored by Elizabeth Marekoua-Darco, Manol Kleeb, and Joanne Olson.


You know, brought me here today, very simple, the word love. I love what I do immensely, I don't know why I feel like that, but I love it immensely and I've loved it since the day I began learning it, it's really boring when you learn the basics, right? But then I just fell in love with it, you know, it's been a tough journey for me, but because I love it so much, I don't remember the hard, you know, the discrimination, the hardships, the practice, hiding on the terrace and practicing with my parents. My parents thought I was doing karate. I think the fundamental problem was I was a boy, small eyes, not even South Indian. I think but what took the cake was that I'm not a literally beautiful South Indian woman.  I love it so much, I don't remember the hardships. I promise you, I don't remember a single hard time. I've shed tears, I've cried, I walked out of house, I buzzed tables in pizza corner. Yeah, I've done really weird things for my dancing. I've quit it a hundred times. Everyone says this boy is bonkers. He jumps from guru to guru, he doesn't dance, he dances for one year, he doesn't dance for six months and all that, but that was good on the journey and it defines my existence. Now, Bhartanathim is the domain from where I come from, of literally beautiful South Indian women, right?  Okay, Lord Nataraja is the patron deity of dance, right? He is the symbol of androgyny, half man and half a woman, right? Another beautiful metaphor I take from the Lord, Nataraja statue, he's got you know long matted hair, he's a handsome man with a brown hair and you know his locks are compared to lightning. So I'm comparing it to Lord Shiva's, I mean this is because somebody asked me a question, the metaphor and how we learn as Indians to you know, to observe and you know, observe everything around us.  That represents the complexities of life and the Ganga, everyone knows is the purest source or the purest thing on this planet. So I said, the Ganga is pure, it flows through the Lord's hair, what does it say? It says, if you have a purity of intention, you will flow through the complexities of life, right?  I'm going to conclude with a piece that celebrates the Navarasa or the nine emotions and to me, Bharatanatyam is a celebration of where I come from, where I'm going to go or you know, my parents, my background and my identity as an Indian. I present you Adi Nama in praise of Lord Shiva.


Video Friday, with a present! Thank you for that. So today we're going to talk about these little painter's pyramids that you see in our videos. These things cost maybe like a dollar a piece at the hardware store. So you can go spend a dollar a piece or you can just think outside the box and grab maybe some shot glasses from the dollar store that you have left over from your last party or even a Campbell's can of soup or even a viet can or you're a painter you have lots of different containers so four of the same size containers here's ink things this is what I personally use I just get these toys from the dollar store babies blocks are perfect and babies are super easy to trick and steal from um that's it so you don't need to go out and buy these fancy things you can if you want but just use anything oh and the reason you want to do this is because when the resin drips off the side you don't want to get stuck to the surface because they just create a good mess so there you go we'll see you next Friday


Okay, you ready to do a show? I definitely don't know how to do it. How is it? Testing? Testing, testing. Get up on it. Get up on it. Get up on it. Good. Are we doing an audio check, sir? We are going to be recording our podcast. So for a moment. Testing, testing, testing, testing. Hello. Thanks everyone for coming and sitting in bleachers here with us for podcast hour. Did everyone dance like a peacock spider already? If at any point you feel the need to be a peacock spider. Perfect. A wonderful display. You can go dance with the spiders. Are we good? Good morning. Okay, fantastic. Are we ready? Always. Is everyone here ready? Let's have a show. Starting in. Let's see if I can make this phone work. It's not my phone. I'm going to have music. Starting in. Three, two, this is twist. This week in science episode number 754 recorded on Thursday, January 16th, 2020. Live at Sketchfest, 2020. I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight we will fill your heads with a hot target grade. We will have a show where you can find the best spots and sugar pigs. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer.  You're silent opposition to fossil fuel industry lobbyists when unheard.  It's all your fault. When you aren't alone, there are billions of others just like you. There is anonymity in such big numbers and with the whole human species implicated in the crime, there is no shortage of witnesses and accomplices to point at. It's all your fault. Okay, you're making this feel great. We feel safe thinking things will get better. That somewhere, somebody else is adulting, but positive thinking without action is just mental masturbation. And while masturbation does have its perks, it probably won't save the world and it's all your fault. What happens next is this. All of humanity gets science educated in a hurry, supporting emergency federal funding for science at military spending levels. Scientists do their magic when it's saved and it will be all your fault because you tuned into this week in science. Coming up next. Yeah, baby. Over, there we go. Everybody can dance if you want. It's mandatory. It's mandatory dancing. It's everybody's doing it. You're not gonna be the weird one. What's happening? Good. Science to you. And a good science to you too. Justin Blair and everyone here at Cal Academy the sketch fest tonight tonight. Thank you all for coming and joining us tonight. We are so excited to be here, and I am absolutely thrilled that weather be darned. Yeah, San Francisco is going to get here. It's hard. It's shut down whole freeways when it rains here, but we're here. We did it. We are here. Yes, the freeways might be flooded, but we have made it and we're so happy. We have a great show. Hopefully, you'll enjoy it. We have a good show ahead tonight. I have stories about life, the universe, and everything. You know, the small stuff. Yeah, followed it. And those sugar pigs, I mentioned just a minute ago. Sugar pigs. They're so sweet. What do you have, Justin? I'm not eating a gummy bear, but like bacon flavored. No. No? Okay, we'll find out.  Oh boy. Okay, we're getting into some real deep talks there. Okay, fill it. Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, I have hot tardigrades. I have toxoplasmosis, and I have bad taste. I'm so sorry. And bad taste. Yeah. You're fitting it finally. Oh, God.  It comes from me. That's what's amazing. All right, let's jump into the show. But before we do, I want to raise, everyone raise your hand. Are you subscribed to this weekend science? Oh, all of these people, without any hands raised, I implore you, find this weekend science. We are on all podcast directories where you like to get your podcasts. Look for this weekend science. We're also on YouTube and Facebook. Just look for this weekend science. Or you can go to our website, twisttwis.org. You can find us, we're there. We have like 20 years worth of shows. So there's a lot of material there. If you want to go back into the deep history of science, 20 years old history of science. Let's get into it. Talking about old things, researchers published a paper in which they talked about a new method to look at meteorites and to determine the age of materials within the meteorites. They reported finding little space granules that are 7 billion years old on our planet from a meteorite that struck our planet on the continent of Australia. They found this meteorite back in the 60s and really just were like, oh look, it's a nice hunk of space metal. That's great. But they knew there were little interesting bits to it and it was only now, decades later, that with technology we were able to look at the way that cosmic rays have influenced material within this meteorite. A lot of these granules are made up of a compound called carborundum, silicon carbide, very hard stuff, very common in our universe actually. This silicon carbide gets affected by cosmic rays and the longer the cosmic rays are puk puk puking into these little teeny tiny bits which hundreds of them could fit on like the dot at the end of a sentence, the period at the end of a sentence, hundreds of these little space granules, little dust particles could fit in a period. And so cosmic rays have been puk puk puking, hitting these little teeny tiny particles for billions of years and over that time it affected the makeup of that molecule and changed its isotopic characteristics. So it is a slightly heavier molecule than it was previously and so they were able to use a new way of looking at these carborundum bits to determine the age of these little teeny tiny particles within this meteorite. They found a wide range of dates, the oldest probably around seven billion years old. So our sun note, four point a half billion years old. So is this, can we consider this an interstellar object because it's been floating around since before our sun was there? The meteorite itself is not an interstellar object. These dust particles are. I mean, everything in the universe came from something once upon a time. We had this wonderful astronomy presentation prior to our podcast where we talked about how once upon a time it was all energy and then things coalesced and things swished into other things and then they started turning into matter and things that we could see. And over time, stars started developing. We know that stars, when they reach a certain size they reach a certain age. They're gonna go supernova and when they go supernova they spew heavy elements everywhere. And so that starts the seeding of materials all over the universe. And then those little bits and pieces go into other stars, the later generations of stars. And what this research actually found which is really interesting is they found many different ages of dust particles from just about 4.6 billion years old which is slightly older than our solar system to seven billion years. And they had some in there around five billion years old. And what is said to them is that there were periods of star formation.  Pew, a firework goes off and then you get to the finale and it's like boom boom boom boom boom and there's all sorts of fireworks going at once. There were different periods of star formation in which they were way more active than other periods. And they discovered this because these granules travel through space together. Some of them are kind of sticky, they said. So there are these little tiny space particles that float around in groups based on where they came from and when they came to be. And this all came from a meteorite that landed out in the middle of nowhere in Australia. Yay. Yeah, Australia. Good, brilliant, cool, of course, brilliant. So fire. Yeah, but moving on another story that I thought was really amazing this week published about phosphorus. How many people think about phosphorus on a regular basis? Oh my goodness, there's a lot of hands coming up here. Okay, very surprising. But phosphorus is a very important molecule for what? Matches. Matches, you can say matches. How about agriculture? Yes, fertilizer. How about life? Life? Yeah, very important for life. And so researchers have been trying to figure out, right? Those magic ingredients for life. Where did life come from? Well, you have to have the starting blocks somewhere. So where does phosphorus come into it? And they use the Atacama radio array in Atacama, Chile, the Arecibo radio telescope in Chile to look out into the universe, into areas of star formation and new galaxy formation and looking out that way. You found radio signals that told them that in these massively dynamic areas where things are being created and big forces are happening on astronomical scales that there are these pockets of gas, of empty space that open up within the smashing and the bashing and the crashing and the making. And the empty pockets along the walls of the pockets, phosphorus forms, that's where phosphorus shows up. And it's from those little pockets in the middle of these astronomical galactic birth places where phosphorus comes from. And then they went another step. They looked at a comet. We had a reset emission that went and looked at the comet, a 67P Garrison Mob chair manco and this comet, it's amazing.  We have amazing high resolution images of this comet but also the image, not just the images but we have information about materials on this comet and whole low and behold, phosphorus is on this comet. It's not just on our planet. And so they tracked from these pockets in space in the middle of space, back to our solar system. Phosphorus, this track of life thinking that if there's phosphorus on comets and once upon a time our planet was bombarded by comets that perhaps this is how Earth got the building block. One of the very important building blocks for life and that comets are how it traveled through space to make it possible. And knowing how common this is as an effect throughout space. Life is everywhere and all that's the only conclusion I can come to. Well, I feel like it's hubris to assume that all of the building blocks for life started and ended on our planet. We are truly interstellar species. We think about it, right? Like all of this stuff had to come from somewhere. So it makes sense to me that you would need kind of all these different types of bombardments over the time for when Earth first happened to when life first happened. It makes perfect sense to me that it's all kind of interstellar garbage. But it's a matter of- And hubris is rarely right about anything. That's true. Yeah. Never gotten anything. Yeah, come on. But it doesn't matter how do these little bits of what make us up, of what makes life possible. How do they mix together in the universe to become that beautiful souffle that rises versus the one that like in my kitchen at home falls completely flat? Yes, I've been watching too many baking and cooking shows lately. This is this week in science. Justin, what did you bring? Okay, when somebody says robot, like I just did, robot, what do you think of? What comes to your mind? Robots. Robots. Robots. What kind of- What kind of- Terminator. Here's the good one we got. The ones that came from my oddly might defend on age, but I thought of the old Boston space robot, not the new one that's kind of scary looking, but I remember the old one with the big bubbles seep through it. Robots. Yeah. Roof, right? Liquid handlers, if you work in a lab, you might see those a lot. Those might be your robots. Articulating arms that build cars, all kinds of robots. So what are robots made out of? Metal, make some plastic, a little bit of rubber here and there. That's rubber stuff. So if you were gonna make a robot, you would start with that, and you probably wouldn't get around to using frog embryos. Wait, what? Frog embryos. Frog. But somebody thought, hey, that's actually the best place to start. I'm gonna make a robot out of frog embryos. And they did. That could just be the whole story right there. But this was published January 13th in the Proceedings to the National Academy of Sciences. They repurposed living cells straight from frog embryos, and the cell moved them into a living machine, a millimeter wide, what's it called a Xenobot. 100% frog DNA, 100% not a frog. This is, they created this thing, actually kind of interestingly, by using the, I think it's called the Deep Green Supercomputer at the University of Vermont. And they went through thousands and thousands of potential design ideas and came up with one, and the main thing it needed to do was move in one direction. And they straightened these cells, they stitched them together basically, and they created a thing that is running on the energy that existed in the embryo itself. It's not powered from the outside. They're looking at this as a prototype that might be able to deliver medications. They may be able to do exploration of areas that are very hard to get to in the world, or that might be contaminated, something like a new food facility, or something like this. That would be a very slow discovery process. Oh, and that's not how big they make it. Right now, right now it's a blob of cells. I'm thinking frog embryo, it's pretty small. That can move in one direction, whether it can make it larger. I mean, is it going to move at a scale of slime mold, slowly lurking over the surface? Right now it's moving slowly, it could move faster. So one of the other things is it has a lifespan, shorter maybe than most robots. But that lifespan when it decays is just some dead life material. It's the kind of thing we're used to. So talk about bio-decreability, it's 100% perfect, no toxic op, do anything like this. It also can self-repair. There is the regenerative properties, and probably the folks that worked on this studied regenerative properties and frogs, they can self-regenerate. So they can cut this thing almost entirely in half. It stitches itself back together and continues on its mission. Because cells can divide, they can heal, they can regenerate. And especially if you're talking about an embryonic cell that you're talking about, extreme regenerative properties. Where we get to trouble is if it turns into two complete robots, if you cut it in half, that would be trouble. And then you get into, instead of the gray goo, it's just on slime, I don't know, taking over the earth. It's an interesting thing to me too, because it's going beyond synthetic weight biology. And sort of saying, okay, let's not reinvent biology, it kind of works really well for most of life on the planet. Let's just utilize it in a completely different way. Is there anybody who's freaked out by a living robot?  I'm not surprised. I'm just a little concerned. I feel like it could get away from us real quick. No, it's too much madness. Two words, Boston Dynamics. Right, oh my God. You're right. Big dog. Yeah, right, that was the beginning of robots. A lot. But also yeah, but that's another one of those things. You're still mad.  This is the infancy of the robot and we're going to keep kicking it. What's it going to learn from that? And then this one, it's almost in half and see what it does. Yeah, they're going to have to have a rough childhood. So we better be careful no matter what happens. Let's just hope they don't figure out how to reproduce. No reproduction. Yeah, just come in half. Well, instead of time to reproduce, you know what time it is right now? I think it's time for Blair's Animal Corner. With Blair? It does like if I can get it to start. How do you make it go? I didn't do it.  Five bed, feel the bed, no bed at all. Want to hear about the animals. She's your girl, except for giant animals at school. With Blair. So I want to start the Animal Corner tonight to talk about toxoplasmosis. You're sort of toxoplasmosis, all right? So we talk about toxoplasmosis a lot on this week in science, mainly because I think it's Justin's main reasoning to dislike cats, but... It's the other way around, really. But I have some really interesting breaking news about toxoplasmosis that will change the way we think about indoor and outdoor cats, forever. So toxoplasmosis, one of the things that makes it so kind of infamous and scary is that it actually can affect the behavior of some of the animals that it infects. So toxoplasmosis in mice gives them this behavior where they actually go up two cats and get eaten. And why is that, Justin? Why do they do that? Because, well, the reasoning was that they were attracted to the scent of cat urine, is what this is about. Right, and so the reason that the parasite, T. gandhii, would want the mouse to get eaten by the cat is that it passes through the cat's digestive tract. That's where it... Only place we know of that is reproducible. Exactly. So it has this idea that everything we've known about it has this fatal feline attraction involved to it, that mice are gonna go straight up to the cat and go, hello, get eaten immediately. It's your favorite meal. It's also been linked in humans to schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, and bipolar disorder, as well as traffic accidents and suicide attempts. And it's estimated 25% of the population in the planet is currently infected by toxoplasma gandhii. And some countries are significantly higher. Well, I was left out there with the leading cause of child blindness in a couple of countries. Yeah, it can actually be fatal if a pregnant woman gets it. That's why the... If everybody knows that the warning label for pregnant women not to handle clavimosa, it's not because there's anything bad in the clavimosa. It's a warning to stay away from cat food. Yeah, exactly. In fact, more than 40 million people in the United States currently carry toxoplasmosis. You could be a carrier right now and not even know it. It can lay just latent in your body and get passed to other people in your brain. But this study from University of Geneva that I wanted to talk about kind of changes the narrative a little bit. So we've thought about this fatal feline attraction for about 20 years as a big part of what toxoplasmosis is and does. But this new study looks at actually the cause of that and what's actually happening in mouse brains. And it's not so simple. It's not just that they're getting pushed right into the mouth of the cat by the parasite. They actually infected mice with the parasite for five to 10 weeks. And then they put them through all these different kind of test conditions. So in one of them, they put them through an elevated maze versus a lower down maze. So the elevated maze kind of puts them more in danger because mice are burrowing animals. So they like to be underground and kind of blow to the ground. They also have them near different types of urine, bobcat urine, guinea pig urine. They have them around other animals that could be a threat and they tried to play with them with the researchers hand. More than just I think them playing with mice was about if they avoided a predator, which we definitely look like predators to most animals. And what they found is that they didn't show a preference for interacting with some things over other things. They just appeared overall more curious and less anxious. So there really was no link to cats in particular in any of these study conditions. So it really just seemed like they were less anxious in general. And then they looked at their brains, which is where this really gets interesting. They use light sheet microscopy to look at the brain distribution size and number of cysts. The cysts are the cause of this issue with toxoplasmosis. And they found that the outer layer, especially the brain regions involved in processing visual information were covered in cysts when they were acting kind of different and had different avoidance behaviors. So the cysts number and distribution varied across mice. But so that showed it was kind of random, but the frequency of cysts and inflammation therein is what seems to cause the change in behavior.  That's gonna make you less anxious, which I don't know if that is a good thing or a bad thing. So people might think that's great. Yeah! I'm gonna make you more sociable. I don't need to talk about that. So does something, do we know, we probably don't, if these are male or female mice? I do not know. Usually studies use male mice. Usually, yeah. Right, that makes sense. In male humans, toxoplasma-gandia infection tends to be associated with novelty-seeking, which is very interesting. And women has a very different behavioral manifestation.  Crazy deal-takers. Because this study claims to have debunked the crazy cat lady hypothesis. Oh, here we go of toxoplasmosis. There it is. But they didn't use female mice, because in female humans, it tends to create guilt issues. And one of the things that anybody's lived next to, or I'm sorry, if you are, a cat lady, there is, it is about taking care of all of and any... Okay, well, I'm not pointing for your care. They're just building numbers so that they can take down the hoax. That's all that's taking place. They're just trying to gather enough cats. So you said the frequency of cysts in mice versus the frequency of cysts in a human brain with toxoplasmosis does not create the extreme behavior change that you see in mice. So that's their theory, is that it could kind of push you into the less anxious, more curious, more sociable realm, but it's not, you're not gonna go crazy cat lady, bolted. That's not gonna happen with this. That's what the study says, according to the study of the cysts. But in general, I think it's very, it just makes you less anxious. So the cats were, sorry, the mice were more likely to just rub up against a researcher's hand or check out the guinea pig urine or the bat-bob cat urine. There was no differentiation at all for cats specifically. They're not seeking out cats, they're just seeking out. But the uptick... They're just not afraid. The uptick in color accidents, that's the comparison that's associated with Dr. Paziganya. Could be that less anxious. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I can make that. I can break a little bit later. I'll break a little bit later. Your speed is fine for this one.  No, dear. Oh, speaking of cats consuming their owners, there was a study written about this in the Washington Post, that they've reported on it this week. And apparently cats do and will eat humans. But as to whether or not they will eat you, their owner, that is still a question that wasn't really talked about too much in the report. Basically... Cats? No, so have you heard about the body farms where forensic scientists studied deterioration of bodies? So there's a body farmed and they were watching some bodies and waiting to see what happened.  And the cats came back, they take the specific, each cat kind of found their own body and stuck with it for several days, coming back to the same body to feed off of it over time. So yes, cats will eat people if they're really hungry, but maybe they'll love you their owner. That has not been tested. Just putting that out there, that is a question yet to be answered. So interesting. So many cats. I have cats. But my number one thing is, there's supposed to be hunters. They're not supposed to be scavengers. Right. They're supposed to be hunters, not scavengers, but when you're hungry, you're going to be a scavenger. That's like the meat eating here we talked about, right? It's any food is food if you're hungry. Vegetarian sharks. Yeah. Okay. Well, I have one more story for the animal corner today.  They're known to be invincible to many things. The vacuum of space, radiation, dead hydration, death. They had one that was desiccated and dead for a hundred years and they reanimated it. So tardigrades are pretty amazing and invincible in general, except global warming, they kill them. I know that. I know that. We ruin everything. This is something that flummoxes me. Yeah. So they can handle everything, except apparently getting two degrees Celsius warmer. It does not. But if we're getting colder, they would be fine because they would probably just go into torpor for their little desiccated hybridation. Yeah. So they're these amazing little animals that have their six legs and they're also called water bears or moss piglets. But they have this kind of razor sharp little tube of a face. Anyway, when they get desiccated, when they dry out, they go into a tongue state, which looks like a little barrel. And they can do that for, like I said, up to a hundred years as far as we know. But new research found that their extreme temperature capabilities are not great. So they have this one species of tardigrades that they found in rain gutters in, I think, Norway. They have a medium range of time, but where do you go look for your science? Oh, Norwegian rain gutters. Yeah, rain gutters. Obviously. So tardigrades can live basically anywhere that it's wet. So if you even just grabbed a little piece of moss from a nearby pond, there's definitely tardigrades in there. So if you have any sort of microscope at home, you can look at water bears, which is really cool. You don't need a high intensity microscope. It's pretty easy. But their medium lethal temperature is about 37 degrees Celsius. They go up just 0.6 degrees Celsius. They pretty much all die. So they also found that if they had them in the tongue state, they were dried out and they were kind of dormant, they could stand 151 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes. Wow. So even that desiccated state couldn't take it. Yeah, they could stand 80 degrees Celsius for one hour. So they really don't know whether the tongue state, if they can withstand anything more than they're used to for more than an hour. But really, this is just a good example of how if the warming happened gradually, they might be able to adjust and adapt. But because it's happening so fast, these guys who are invisible to almost everything else, we could possibly throw at them, can't handle warming of just a couple degrees. If anybody is interested in looking at Tartigrade's friend Arielle Waldman has made a website called Life Under the Ice. She spent a season in Antarctica digging in the ice and she made a microscopy lab. She basically taught herself microscopy petition to go to Antarctica and dig up Tartigrades and they left her and she has created some great videos in this website, Life Under the Ice, or Life in the Ice, and we can see all of her Tartigrades and lots of other little creatures and some of them are unidentified still at this point. So there's some cool stuff to see on your website. There's lots of kinds of Tartigrades out there. So cool. And they can handle it when it's very, very cold. But they just can't handle it. I really like the idea of our hot Tartigrades. Come on. Hot Tartigrades. Oh my goodness. Okay, take a quick moment. I would love to tell everybody this is This Week in Science. If you are not subscribed, you can find us all places that podcasts are found all over the internet. Look for This Week in Science. Our website is twisttwis.org and at that website you can find our merchandise. We have a zazzle store. Click on the zazzle link and you'll be able to buy T-shirts and mugs and all sorts of cool twist gear. And Blair makes these wonderful calendars and much of the art from previous year's calendars has been turned into items in our zazzle store. So you can get a phone cover or wallpaper. No wallpaper. I don't know. You can search. There's wrapping paper on there. There's a tie. That's wrapping paper. I like the mammoth lumbar pillow personally. It's a very nice pillow. Additionally, we are listener supported by Patreon and PayPal. So you can click on the Patreon link at our website. It'll take you to our Patreon community. And if you're interested in helping us continue to do this show and into the future, then I would be much appreciated. Patreon is a wonderful crowdfunding community and you get special things, little gifts from us for becoming a patron. All right. Should we get into some more science news? We are at the Cal Academy and this is S&F Sketch Fest Night Live event. Thank you everyone for joining us for this week's In Sciences presentation. Are we doing a presentation tonight? No. It's a show. It's a show. This is a show. We're gonna get a table. It's pretty awesome. It's just another show. Thank you all for joining us. We're so excited to see all your faces. Taking time out of your nights to come talk about science with us. Justin. All right. We're gonna go a little out of order here. You're going out of, what else is new? You're always out of order. Welcome to Planet Earth, everybody. This is a fantastic planet. If you haven't been here before, it's very rare in our solar system to be this wet and have this nice of a climate. You're lucky to be here.  And one thing, if you could please stop stepping on all of the rest of the life that is here, we would really appreciate it. This is all horrible. So I shouldn't have brought this for tonight. I should have saved this for a different day.  This is a new study that looked at the footprint of humanity on wildlife. And it's not good. It's really not good. It's like size 12, 13, or a billion. So anybody who's living in San Francisco, I thank you for living in a high density metropolis like this. You're doing more benefit to nature by living in the city and not wanting to be that close to it. Because the rest of the world that keeps trying to get close to nature, so they're away from the rest of us, they're the ones who are doing most of the footprint. So you living in Davis? That's a house, that's a small town. I admit, there was wildlife there before we farmed it, but that's part of the footprint. So this is showing that 84%, 84% of vertebrates have their ranges that are exposed to intense human pressure at this moment. And about 16%, that's the rest of it, isn't off the hook. They actually have it worse. They're in the entirely exposed under the footprint of humanity. So especially, this story sounds really bad, but then you can look at what has just taken place in Australia, where we may have just lost from the planet, from all of evolution to this point, life forms that we won't see again on this earth. Because of fires that were largely brought about by both human manipulation of landscape and global warming. Just something to think of. So this is, I shouldn't have brought it tonight. I'm gonna, but part of the thing is, I do seriously wanna thank everybody here for living in a high density environment. Next time you're complaining about the traffic on the freeway, next time you can't get a decent seat on the park, you're doing a tremendous benefit to the planet by keeping all the humans in a very tight, confined space. The less spread out we are, the better for the environment. You know the bad thing about this though, recent study determined that people love the environment, but they don't wanna help the environment unless they experience it on a regular basis. So you have to go out into the world and into the environment to appreciate it and to want to save it. Or to everybody in where there are the existence. Or maybe talk about the natural environment. The parks in the middle of the cities, but yes, being close to nature helps people want to help nature. Look, that's the park, the manicured version of nature. That's good enough. It's good enough, hey look up there. The artificial nature, that's all people should know. Should we mess with sugar? Yeah, tell me about those bacon flavored sugar pigs. Sugar pigs. So we've heard a lot over the last few years about how sugar is not good for us. But hey, it's great for us because our bodies love sugar. It helps to give us energy to do everything. I mean, we wouldn't have things like glycolysis and gluconeogenesis in our metabolic pathways if sugar were not so important. And so sugar is a very important part of our diet. However, the way that we respond to sugar, there's been a question as to whether or not it's addictive. How do people make sugar as addictive? We've got a few hands. A few hands, a few not hands. Well, a researcher said that he was going to test this question. He said, I really did not want to find out that sugar was addictive. I really wanted to find something else. But he took 12 pigs, 12 mini pigs. Why pigs, you may ask?  A lot of their physiology is actually very similar to human physiology. And he gave half of the pigs two liters of sugar water a day. That's a lot. It's a two liter bottle of soda a day. And so one app, he gave the other group just regular water. So we have the sugar pigs and the not sugar pigs, the water pigs, yes, sugar pigs and water pigs. Here we go. Then he looked at the brains of the pigs. They didn't kill the pigs. This is something they were able to do through mapping the brain using imaging technologies. They probably killed the pigs after the research was done anyway. They may have, I mean, sweet bacon, sorry, I don't mean to eat bacon. They looked at dopamine receptors in the brain and opioid receptors in the brain. Dopamine and opioid receptors are highly involved in the reward halfway. They found that in five of the pigs. So we're talking about a very small sample size here. Yeah, that's a tiny end. This is a tiny end. And so their significance was limited. But in five of the pigs, they looked at their brains on the first day. So after they were given one hour of 12 liters, two liters of sugar water, they looked at the brain and there was no change in the dopamine receptors. But the opioid receptors had already started to change after one administration of sugar. So forward a couple of weeks, they looked at the brains of all the pigs at the very end. The water pigs, no surprise. Their brain didn't change. No change in the receptors in the brains. We do know that in people who are addicts, drug addicts, we find a down regulation. There are less dopamine receptors in the brains of people who are addicts. There are fewer opioid receptors in the brains of people who are addicts. They found this in the brains of the pigs after two weeks. Both opioids and dopamine receptors were changing. So this is a hint that, yeah, sugar, it can have addictive effects similar to addictive drugs, but this is modulating our behavior. It's modulating this reward pathway. There are still, this isn't like, yeah, sugar's addictive. Boom, we're talking about a very small sample size of pigs and a lot of sugar and a lot of sugar. And the way that the study was done, there are other factors that could have affected it. In fact, they gave the pigs only one hour of sugar a day, and it was the same time every day. So maybe it's not necessarily the sugar. I mean, there's little things that could have affected it behaviorally that could have changed its button. More and more data is arising that sugar, it's potentially addictive. And is that a bad thing necessarily since it's so important to our physiology and to our metabolism? I feel like, in theory, no, because of what you said, it's important to our body, but now that sugar is in most food and definitely all processed foods, that becomes a problem because you can't detox. It's always there. It's everywhere. Yeah, sugar. And it's probably wiring in our brains that had we found this 2,000 years ago in earlier humanity, find a sugar source, a high energy source.  This will give you a life longer. And so it's, it's not like a negative thing about sugar itself. It's just our brains are wired evolutionarily to want this cheap, easy energy source. Bold brains in modern times. Yeah. Yeah. What's the other story? Stradivarius from UCLA's Galactic Center Orbits Initiative have spotted a new class of bizarre objects, the center of our galaxy around the supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A. So this is currently published in The Journal of Nature. And they're saying these, they have the kind of these objects that appear at first to behave like stars and then as they got closer to the black hole, they looked a lot more like a gas. Like they started to expand massively. And as they went by the black hole at the closest point, huge portions of that expansion got ripped off and started heading into the black hole. And then the thing headed on its way again. It's a really interesting object that they discovered. They named G1. And they were puzzled by it because it's the only one that they had seen like this. They just thought maybe this is some kind of crazy outlier. So they kept looking and they've now come up with five more. So they named them easily G1, G2, and G6, right? So this is, Jen. Sorry, I did it in the hallway though. So one of the interesting things here too is that this is when we were looking towards that inner core area around where our black hole that sort of anchors our entire galaxy spinning around it. Things are a lot more populated there than they are there. So we actually kind of lucky living very worldly as we are in our galaxy. Because it's, and I didn't know this until I was reading this particular study, but it's a million times more dense with stars in just that inner core. I might have been, I'm sorry, that's, I just quoted the, it's a billion times more dense with stars. So it would be an amazing night sky if you were living on a planet in that inner core. But one of the things that they run into is they have, they have gravity pollution. So we are not really horribly affected by the gravity of another star system. But if you're in that inner core where billions of stars are swimming around, you might get grabbed by something else. This is actually what these objects are. That would change everything. And that's what these objects are though. They discovered these G1 through 6 are binary stars that have merged and they're gas on the, and this is a process that normally takes from our observations, our estimates, a million years for two of these binary stars to sort of become one together without doing a supernova or something. Here they're thinking, actually this might be very common. This might be happening all the time in this hot dense inner core of our Milky Way. All the time. I'm glad we live only here though. It's a lot nicer. It's a meaning to him. But according to your previous, I like our boring neighborhood. We were supposed to live where it's more densely populated. So should we? So we'd have gravitational pollution that would be extremely magnetic fields that would contain other magnetic fields apart. It wouldn't have to worry about them. And there's no parking. You know where we're in the core of our... Sounds like San Francisco. Okay, so good news about the ways that we can potentially impact this bad news, the human footprint. What is one of the biggest carbon dioxide polluters that we know of? Concrete. Concrete. You're right. Absolutely right. It's concrete. Concrete and the methods that we use to make concrete emit carbon dioxide all over the place. Bad for the atmosphere. Bad for everything we're trying to do right now. Researchers have just published about their new methods. Similar to your Kragmiba robots, they are using bacteria to make concrete. And instead of just spreading bacteria on the surface of blocks of concrete that have already been made, I'm just saying, hey, bacteria, be like glue and just hold the surface together nicely. They have discovered there is a particular group of bacteria that in part of their metabolism, they form calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate is a very essential part of concrete. And so they mixed these bacteria with sand and a little bit of fluid and a bit of humidity. They grew a concrete block and then they chopped that concrete block in half and they grew two concrete blocks. And so they've discovered that they have a potential potentially exponential way of growing concrete in a way that actually will take carbon dioxide out of the air because it's metabolism of these bacteria as opposed to being a net emitter. The problem is a lot of places that are making concrete and using the modern methods of creating it, they are also very dry places. And so far, these bacteria need humidity to be able to survive, they need water. And the idea is that they're going to try and genetically modify the bacteria to make them more resistant to dry conditions. This is potentially not just awesome for our own planet, but these scientists are also looking at Mars and thinking they could send some basic materials, a little bit of water, you mix it all up and suddenly you're growing a habitat on another planet. So hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. It's sci-fi, it's the future. It needs water, it needs water, this is. Wouldn't you want it to need water and be in a dry environment? Because if you made a building out of these bricks and put it in San Francisco, then every morning when the fog came in, it would grow.  This would be a problem. How do you stop it from growing? Right, I think that would have to do with the frog robots. If you haven't got it with more frog robots. This would have to be the life cycles of the bacteria. So you would create the concrete and then take them out of the conditions in which they would grow. So the concrete they create actually is as strong. The bricks they created were as strong as regular concrete. Basically concrete, just made by bacteria.  And then you're just left with calcium carbonate and sand and bricks, bricks. So the buildings would be made of dead bacteria. Yes, yes, they would, yes. And bacteria, you put bacteria back also. Bacterial poop, yeah, very hygienic, beautiful. It's gonna be wonderful. The world is going to be amazing in the future. Are we ready for some quick stories? Ah, there, tell me a quick one. Oh my goodness.  What, when have you been eating moths? I haven't, but bats have, okay. So this was a study where they took moths and they put them, five different species of tiger moths. They put them in a fight arena at night, which is where they just attract bats. So bats would just swoop in and feed on the moths. And they used infrared cameras to figure out who was getting eaten and who wasn't and how the moths were reacting. They found that the moths that had yucky taste, that tasted really bad, didn't really dodge out of the way of bats at all. So they found that out by looking at which moths got spit out by the bats. So the early moth catches the worm, but the lazy moth spits that out. I like that one. I'm gonna roll with that one. Except they also have to taste terrible. The lazy moth. It's a question of which came first, right? Are they bad at agility and therefore developed distasteful chemicals in their body so that they wouldn't get eaten?  Yeah, I think it would probably go that way. We don't know, yeah. But they do think that based on this, they've identified these specific compounds that make moths taste gross and they think that they could extrapolate this to extinct insect species. So if they can find the same compounds in those animals, they hypothesize that that means that that animal was probably not very good at dodging predators. Because they wouldn't waste that energy, right? Like if you dodge out of the way of a bat, you might end up caught in a spider web or you might use up a whole bunch of energy that you have to replace later, right? So there's benefits to being slower or lazier, but. Yeah? Yeah, if you can. Neanderthals, Neanderthal study. Really good, this is, it turns out Neanderthals, they went diving for a shelf. So we found this study a little while back and it was just the morphology of the ear, the inner ear has what looks like swimmers ear and modern current humans. These Neanderthals, some of them had this as well, which made scientists think maybe they went diving, maybe they spent some time going underwater for this stuff. Then they went and looked at, this is a cave that was discovered in 1949. They had 171 examples of tools made from shelves by Neanderthals and they went and they re-examined these. And what they found was, well, about 80% of them were so, had that rough sort of texture to the outside, meaning they were probably just picked up off of the beach. A lot of them were shiny and would have been plucked from the sea floor and the Mediterranean when they were still alive. And so we have, it's also sort of interesting because we know that Neanderthals have a larger lung capacity than modern current humans. Like potentially hold their breath very long. Yeah, they might have really been able to like hang out down there and do the searching. But it's one of those things that just takes another one of the pins away that we assumed about Neanderthals as being just the game hunters and just the large predator chasers. They went by the beach, they picked up shelves. They went swimming. Maybe they were swimming two kilometers deep for alligator corpses. Sorry, what? Researchers wanted to find out about the ecosystem in the very deep sea. And we don't know a lot about this ecosystem other than it's very dark. And there's, since it's so dark, there's not a lot of food available to the animals that do live down there. And the animals that do live down in very deep sea two kilometers or so, they survive off of what are called food falls. And that is when a whale dies, its corpse falls to the bottom of the ocean. It gets cannibalized, scavenged by the animals that are down there. The researchers wanted to know exactly who was doing what in the Gulf of Mexico at this great depth. So they threw three alligator corpses into the bottom of the ocean and tethered them to the sea floor. So they weren't just floating around. No, no, they were tethered to the floor of the ocean. One of the alligators was eaten up by giant, was it cats? No, giant pill bugs. They're big pill bugs, big pill bugs. Like roly pollas? Like roly pollas. They're isopods. Isopods at the bottom of the ocean. Yes, that's the gnomus gigantius. Hey guys, look it up. Anyway, they ate one of the alligators. The other alligator, well, one of them, it looked as though its tether was ripped apart and shredded and the alligator disappeared. We don't know what happened to that alligator. And then the third corpse, they determined that the bones became covered by a bone-eating worm. Bone worms, bone worms, those are that.  It's great, but they, not just any old ozodax, some brand new species that had never been found before. Very exciting, ground fuzzy, bone-eating worms, eating alligator corpses at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. But why alligators? I don't understand. Because that's where they had my arm. Because there's literally no reason that I could see. Right, so the question is, would they eat a food source that they had never come across before? How do the animals in the ecosystem interact with the food that comes to them? Is it they like certain things or are they going to eat whatever? The other part of it is that alligators have a very tough outer covering that is going to make it difficult for certain types of animals to be able to eat them. And they wanted to see how the life forms dealt with that. And it appears that they all dealt with it very easily. I don't want to throw a bunch of shade at this research, but... You got it. Whales not only have thick skin, they have inches of blubber. Yeah, sometimes even more. These animals have to get through to get to the meat. I'm not surprised. Not surprised.  So you would have done this study by killing whales? No. Theater meat, I mean, they're probably from Florida. Lots of theaters in Florida. Go to the Gulf of Mexico. Makes it easy. We have so much more science, but unfortunately we have come to the end of our hour. So we can't tell you about the sequencing of the genome of the giant squid, unfortunately. Huh? What? South American coyotes, I have that too. Or South American, or beauty sleep. There's so much more science out there. We'll have to tune in next week. You'll have to tune in next week. I would love to give a few shout outs right now though. I'd love to thank everyone here. Thank you again for coming out and joining us. Thank you so much for being in our audience. Thank you to SF sketch fest for bringing us here tonight. Thank you for Cal Academy for making this possible. Thank you to our volunteers who help out with the show every week. Identity four who records the show. Fada, who helps in our social media chat rooms and also with our social media and the descriptions of stuff. And Gord McLeod, who helps in another chat room. I'd also like to thank our Patreon sponsors. Are you ready for this list? Ready for this. 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