what? Let's have a show. Let's have a show show. Let's have a show show. Lock the doors. Put down the blinds. We're having a show show. We're going to have a show show. It's time for some science. We're going to have some show show. Oh, show show. Yo, show show. Yeah, show show. Hey, show show. Show. This is twist. This week in science episode number 662 recorded on Wednesday, March 14th, 2018. 3.14 spiders baked in a pie. Hey, everyone. I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight we are going to fill your heads with a termite, ravings, and a galactic center. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. In the brief history of time we have shared together on this show, we rarely have had to say goodbye to an as influential and intellect as impactful as Stephen Hawking, partly because that sort of intelligence is rare, but also because celebrity is so rarely linked to intelligence between the pregnant pauses of a 1980s synthesized voice. We waited with anticipation and often wound up astonished and amazed at the seemingly effortless communication of the immensely complicated, the insightful, often whimsical talking tours of our universe by one who understood it better than most of us will ever comprehend. In his memory, we offer these moments of science coming up next. I wanna learn everything. I wanna fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening. What's happening. What's happening this week in science. What's happening. What's happening. What's happening this week in science. Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome, welcome, welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back yet again and thank you, Justin, for a wonderful memorial disclaimer for Stephen Hawking. His influence will definitely be missed, I think. And so at that, it's a somber open, but we have much fun and much good science. Good tidings? Good science ahead. I have stories about dark matter at the galactic center, baby brain cells, and BT corn, because we got to get something controversial to some people in there somewhere. What do you have for us, Justin? Oh, I have one of the same stories. I have the future of nursing, a walk with a dinosaur, and I'll probably have something about x-rays. Or TBD, I guess. We'll work it out. All right, Blair, what is in the animal corner? Oh, I have some sacrificial termites. I have domesticated mice and some spiders. Because you know what day today is? It's save a spider day. It's save a spider day. I mean, other people who put the month before the day in writing their date might have been more excited about pie day today as we record is also pie day. I had a piece of apple pie today. I had pizza. You had pizza pie, a little pizza pie. I had a spider pie. I've been saving spiders for this very day. Oh, yum. Pie and protein all year. Pie and spiders. Three and 14 spiders baked in a pie. When you go to open it, I'm going to cry. Oh, it would change that little, little children's song. Sure would. Quite a bit. I do like it. I approve. That is Dr. Kiki approved. Oh my goodness. All right. As we jump into this auspicious day, Einstein's birthday also. Oh, man. It's Einstein's birthday. It is the day of Stephen Hawking's death. It's pie day. It's also save a spider day. This is a big day in science. What's going on in March? Yeah. What's going on? And so as we jump into the show, I want to remind you all that you can subscribe to this podcast. If you are not already subscribed on iTunes and Google Play podcast portal Stitcher Spreaker and tune in. You can find us on YouTube and Facebook search for this week in science or just visit twist.org where there's a big subscribe button, click it and it makes it easy. But now it's time for the science. All right. So my first story of the evening has to do with brain cells. The mysteries of the brain. And when I was first getting interested in the brain, this is pre grad school, pre PhD. Humans did not grow any new neurons in their brain after babyhood, after, after being born. It was knowledge. You have the number of neurons in your brain when you're born that you're getting. That's the most neurons you're going to have your entire life because that point forward. They're all dying. Yeah. It's like brains and ovaries. Exactly. Set everything. And I think fat cells. That was another though. Fat cells? Really? Not to actually go anywhere, but they just would shrink or enlarge. Right. Okay. Well, this is brain cells. While I was getting my degree in the 90s, it was a while back. I hear people calling at a time that they're nostalgic for now. Stop that right now. Anyway, while I was in grad school, there was some work done by a researcher named Rusty Gage and others who posited that there were indeed new neurons being born in the human brain because they had found such neurons in the mouse and the rat brain. So because they had been found in other mammalian brains, these neurons, and there was lots of evidence after that with different species of mammals in different instances, finding, labeling, there was this wonderful label called BRDU where you could inject the animals with it and then slice up their brains and it got into dividing cells. And so basically if a cell was undergoing cellular division, birthing a new cell, if a stem cell was creating a new neuron, you would catch it. And those cells would then be labeled. And we found them. We found them in the bird brain. We found them in the mouse brain, in the rat brain. New neurons all over the world. We found them in other primate brains. The smoking gun, however, was not really found in humans until much later. And then it was said there was evidence from nuclear, the nuclear bombs, the testing during the 50s and 60s of nuclear bombs during the Cold War, the nuclear radiation that got into the air was getting into dividing nerve cells.  And then old brains had these labeled cells. They had nuclear radiation in them. There were these cells in the hippocampus, the area of the brain that is responsible for new memories. And so everyone said, it's got to be true. You get new memories because you're growing new neurons. But yeah, you know, science, it just keeps ticking over and there's new evidence all the time. And well, the new evidence now is that, nope, no, no, no. And so adult humans do not get to have new neurons. Yes. Yeah. And so there is a new study. It's published in Nature this last week that completely contradicts the last 20 years of research in this area that has been saying that adult humans, the hippocampus, it's still dividing. But what this new research out of the University of California, San Francisco, they used a different technique than has been used in the past. They looked at post-mortem and post-operation hippocampal samples from 59 people, from fetuses at 14 weeks of gestation to 77 years of age. So looking at the span of years and the sample size, it's still not a huge sample. But this is, it is across ages. And so it could be representative. They stained the samples with a marker, potassium, 67, Sox 1, Sox 2. They're these antibodies that identify what are called neural progenitor cells, which are basically the brain nerve cell stem cells. And they also used a stain to identify young neurons. And they found that this area of the hippocampus called the subgranular zone that had been identified as this place of neurogenesis in the adult brain, that the progenitor cells don't hang out there during fetal or postnatal development, and that they are depleted in other areas of the hippocampus by age seven. Young neurons decrease in density from about 1600 cells per square millimeter at birth to about 12 per square millimeter at age seven to two per square millimeter by age 13. And there's absolutely no evidence from this study of young neurons in the samples from people over the age of 18. So we're talking Bart Mitzvah rules here.  Yeah, so it was a really interesting approach that they have used. They've used these different antibodies, different markers. This is not, you know, it's one study. So once again, limited sample size, 59 individuals is not a large number of those are going to be young individuals, you know, and not the older individuals could maybe not be representative of what older brains actually are. Why are those people dead anyway? You know, so, you know, there are critiques of the study that can be made, but it does raise the question that maybe neurogenesis in the hippocampus of the adult human brain is just very rare. Maybe it doesn't, maybe it's an ability that the human brain has, but it just doesn't do that much. But then it leads to other questions, like if the human brain doesn't have neurogenesis, how come other mammals still do? Well, my first, my first thing I'd want to figure out about that is are their brains have the plasticity that our brains have? Right. That's a great question. Yeah. Why would you need to have new brain cells with the ones you have function perfectly well and can be retrained to do new things? And it's not like don't go worrying that you're not getting any more brain cells. You've got just as many as anybody could possibly need. If you're under utilizing them, that's your fault. Do something about it.  Okay. Or is it because we don't get as much brain damage as rough and tubble animals in the wild and so we don't need new cells as much? It's possible. Creatures of habit. Yes. Are mice rough and tumble? They certainly can be. If you're getting chased by something, running around, trip over yourself, jump down a hole, et cetera. Yeah. The question now is, okay, this methodology that was used, was it a correct methodology? Should we go back and test it again? This definitely opens it up even more to the idea that we really, if we want to know the answer to this, we really need to look again and figure out a really good way to do it. And then if similar answers result, then the question is, okay, like you brought up, Justin, is it because of plasticity? Maybe the adult human brain depends more on synaptic plasticity, which is changes in the connections between neurons as opposed to changes in density or number of neurons. So maybe there are differences. And then what does that mean for our brains and how they work compared to other animals? Really interesting questions, but yeah, as of now, forget it, people. Those new neurons. No, don't forget anything. I was going to say, what we've learned is that we don't know about breaks. Yeah, yet again, we still don't know. I mean, the problem is, it's very well go and say, hey, you're 35 and in the prime of your life and seem pretty healthy. Can I have your brain? I want to see if you have new neurons growing or, hey, I want to give you this particular task, which will tax your brain and potentially lead to you needing new neurons to keep up with the new memories. So I want to give you this task and then can I have your brain? Right. To see what change has happened. Better brain scanning technology, right? We need brain scanning technology that allows us to do things that we normally can only do by removing brains from heads. Yeah, exactly. That is what we need. That is what we need. And also, more people, donate your brains to science. That would be cool. Absolutely. You can have my brain the second I'm dead. Awesome. You know, a second is in a long time. A long time. A lot of assumptions can be made. Well, I'm saying the second that for sure I am done zoes with it. Then you can have it. Done zoes. There we go. Moving on from brains. Can you give me a helmet packed with ice? Yeah. Here you go, Blair. Can you please protect your brain? Sure. Save it, please. Save it for me. Alright, so looking into the galactic center. Let's talk about galaxies. So researchers have been finding weird signals coming from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and they thought, based on their data that the signal that they'd gotten was from dark matter. Well, according to new research out of the Australian National University, nope, it's just not dark matter. It's just really, really old stars. That this, there's a gamma ray signal that is coming from 10 billion year old stars that are hanging out near the galactic center. The researchers had a hypothesis that the signal was being emitted from thousands of rapidly spinning neutron stars called millisecond pulsars and a doctor Dan Roland Crocker from the Australian National University Research School of Astronomy in Astrophysics says, at the distance to the center of our galaxy, the emission from many thousands of these whirling dense stars could be blending together to imitate the smoothly distributed signal we expect from dark matter. Millisecond pulsars close to the earth are known to be gamma ray emitters and so through their research they ruled out this idea that the gamma ray signals were coming from dark matter and that they were actually coming from these really old stars. And so the dark matter theory is that there are these WIMPs, weekly interacting massive particles that would be pulled by that supermassive black hole that's in the center of our galaxy and there would be a lump of dark matter there would be a clump of dark matter near the center and that because there would be this clumping the dark matter WIMPs would be crashing into each other occasionally and radiating these gamma rays and so the Fermi gamma ray space telescope which has been hanging out in orbit has been looking at gamma rays and the researchers says the signal that Fermi has found it traces the distribution of stars in the galactic bulge and ongoing and observational and theoretical work is underway to figure out whether or not they're right but they're pretty confident that they have found a signal from millisecond pulsars and not the collisions of dark matter at the galactic center. Also weird news in galaxies there's a story out this week researchers looking at disk galaxies have found that all disk galaxies orbit in a time scale of roughly one billion years whether or not they are a small disk galaxy or a giant disk galaxy if you are hanging out on one of the outer arms of a spiral disk shaped galaxy it's going to take you about a billion years to get around so what is this clock why why would all of them spin why would all galaxies spin at basically the same rate or I mean some would have to spin faster and some slower based on their size but a billion years why a billion years the bigger you are the faster it is right I know it's why the researchers are pushing the angle or maybe it's the public information officers are pushing the angle of oh well discovering this is going to tell us more about how the universe works and yeah why is there a billion year clock ticking for all of these galaxies that's what I want to know I can guess because gravity is a constant everywhere in the universe and the larger the mass at the center of your galaxy right maybe is tied to the increase in the speed of this disk and if it shrinks it will move slower but it's still it'll look like a clock but it'll probably be tied right to you know gravity being constant everywhere in our universe and not there being pockets of weird physics out there right so it is showing us basically what you're saying it is showing us that there are not weird physics happening across the galaxy that there is the physics that we use to describe our galaxy are the same across our galaxy although trying to set your watch by a billion year clock not a very good watch you just get one little tick the wrong way you got to wait a long time for it to come back around one one that is going to take too long so there are researchers who are going to be looking using this new clock the Swiss watch for space they have discovered they are going to be using it in the future they're waiting for the square kilometer array it's a radio telescope that's going to be coming online in the future and researchers say that when it comes online in the next decade they're going to use it as much help as they can to characterize the billions of galaxies these telescopes are soon going to make available to us and so because of this work knowing where a galaxy ends they have an edge to a galaxy where it ends means we astronomers can limit our observations and not waste time effort and computer processing power on studying data from beyond that point so because of this work we're going to be using it once every billion years with a sharp edge that's populated with a mixture of interstellar gas and both old and young stars huh yeah so characterizing the universe we're in it we're doing it and people still complain or argue that Pluto is or isn't a planet yeah big picture characterize it in a while Justin what do you have for I would tell you about a story okay we've had some recent decreases in the United States in age related fatalities whether this is due to better medical care or improved health awareness improved health habits people are living longer and so the demands for good nurses will also rise as people live later into their life so to improve the future of nursing we would do well to look to the past and clone us some Neanderthals seems obvious Neanderthal nurse maybe it's only obvious to me yeah Neanderthal nurses maybe it'll be obvious when the time I finish this story I study by University of York and it reveals that Neanderthal health care was caring and effective researchers argue that they can provide that the care provided was widespread and should be seen as compassionate knowledgeable and also uncalculated is what they're going to say so it wasn't a we weren't getting paid in mammoth bones to take care of somebody right the team suggests they were generally caring of their peers regardless of the level of injury this is lead author Penny Spickens senior lecturer in the archaeology of human origin at University of York she says our findings suggest Neanderthals didn't think in terms of weather others might repay their efforts they just responded to their feelings about seeing their loved ones suffering most individuals archaeologists know about had severe injuries of some kind so this is kind of a known thing that's a rough and double life that of the Neanderthal they got broken this and split that got the dental thing here and the crack over in the skull over there and it's a rough life to be a Neanderthal so they've seen lots of injuries some of the injuries are pretty severe and would be not just life threatening in the moment but would linger for years and years and years before death they say in some of these cases these injuries would have required monitoring, massage, fever management, hygiene care the analysis of one middle aged male around 25 to 40 pretty big range of time of death revealed get a catalog of poor health including the generative disease of the spine and shoulders they based on the skeletal structure they say his condition would have sapped his strength over the final year of life, 12 months before dying and severely restricted ability to contribute to the group yet the authors of the study argue he remained part of the group as his and was eventually carefully buried so quite a bit of quite a bit of care taking place and because we're going to need more healthcare workers in this country it just seems obvious that we would therefore have a reason to clone Neanderthals. There's some things that modern day nurses do that maybe the Neanderthals might have trouble with you know like heating up that thermometer to just the right temperature or you know finding a nice vein for fluids I think I don't think you have a still harbour a prejudice about Neanderthals I think they will surprise you when we one day get around to bring them back compassion though Neanderthals and we also found out they were the ones responsible for the cave art and it's actually going to turn out that we're the brutish ones they're going to be like oh my gosh they're the bonobos to archipansies yeah I think that might be the I mean it makes sense absolutely well maybe they'd be good nurturers good preschool teachers, good teachers in general it's the nurturing aspect it is and it's also and I get why we might not have respected it because this is a nomadic hunting population you've got to be on the move the women are part of the hunt the kids got to grow up quick and they actually do grow up faster than our children do so they can be mobile so they don't have to be carried around so they can fend for themselves because so then you know finding out that they really took time to take care of their their ill and their fallen now paints a much different picture than you may have had before there you go I mean I think we were talking last week I think about elephants and other animals was last week two weeks ago I don't know we were talking about animals showing mourning for the dead and paying tribute to the dead or at least going and talking or looking at skulls and other things you know if animals social animals can have some kind of compassion you know you raise young you have a long developmental period where that baby that offspring is tied to the mother there's got to be some amount of social dynamics that are just tied in there that started a long time before Neanderthals were even on the scene that this kind of compassion for the wounded compassion for the sick and the dying the elderly with the babies the elderly within your social group within your tribe and Neanderthals will definitely tribal so I think it makes sense I don't think it's surprising there's a bunch of things happening there I mean of course there's the basic fundamentals of altruism and the idea that I'm taking care because if I get sick I want you to take care of me absolutely and there's this expectation that it's almost borderline communist where you're paying into this kind of communal goodwill and so the expectation is to be a part of this society you take care of sick people because at some point you might be one of those sick people so as long as you're not a sick person you have to help hold everyone up and that's a typical human calculated way to look at it I think the Neanderthals just loved each other oh my it's all love love is the answer they say yeah so I mean again we're generalizing as soon as we learn something specific about the Neanderthal to humans I don't know that they were around for 400,000 years doing this kind of stuff I don't know that the humans like 100,000 years ago did more than drag our sick and elderly into a cave and left them there quarantine oh was that a call? get out of here Steve you're gone you're banished I don't know the picture that's coming out the picture of the Neanderthals is a very sweet and caring and artistic civilization almost culture they were artists maybe they were poets they loved one another and then these brutish chimp human whatever show up and just ruin everything oh humans you ruin everything all the time this is this week in science everyone all the humans are here wait no is it spiders yet? no is it time for pie? no no do you know what time it is? what time is it? animal corner I know what I'm about to show that is that's the part with Blair what you got Blair? I have the perfect story to just continue our conversation about healing the elderly caring for each other and animals that don't really prescribe to that theory at all termites termites turns out are not as nice to their elderly don't believe in the whole nursing technique a couple weeks ago actually speaking of ants we talked about ants that go out hunt kill and eat termites well what are those termites that try to ward off those killer ants they protect their nest and there are different types of termites in the group they have these different task based casts inside of a termite colony and there are soldiers soldiers are sterile there are males and there are females and their job is to protect the nest make sure that the king, queen, breeders other cast items in the nest do not get taken and eaten by these ants so the soldiers they have devoted their life whether they like it or not to defending the nest there are as I said male and female soldiers there are also young and old soldiers and we have now found in a new study that the way soldiers behave change drastically during their lifetime they don't get better at fighting they don't get worse at fighting they just get put in the less than ideal spot to defend the nest as they get older yes so this is called polyethism and that basically just means that their their job or their tasks change as they age so older soldiers are engaged in frontline defense more than younger soldiers and as I said not dependent on their ability to fight or how good they are to fight it's not like they're thinking the older soldiers are weaker they're not as good stick them out front they're expendable no they are just as good at fighting also because those those termites at the front of the nest basically are living plugs so they basically just wedge themselves into these openings to the nest in order to block passage into that nest space there's a leak in the dike there's a leak there's a leak yeah so there was a difference in behavior between the young and the old young male and young female behavior exactly the same however this is super weird and they didn't really have a good explanation of why old males and old females acted a little bit different old females were put in frontline defense positions more than males in a statistically significant larger amount but we don't have a good reason of why that would happen because they're both sterile so for whatever reason females are getting stuck out there out front more but overall older termites are getting stuck out the most they're not getting stuck out there they're like come on you guys keep up they're putting themselves out there on the frontline so good point what they did actually is they took cardboard nests in a lab they had a cylindrical chamber at the entrance they had two soldiers and five workers placed in the nest chamber and watched them over time an hour later they recorded the position of each soldier and then a single predatory ant was placed in the petri dish so then they watched what happened after that they compared the defensive rates the number of soldiers defending at the nest opening per number of trials between old and young soldiers of each sex and between male and female soldiers of each class they performed five to twenty replicants for each treatment for each colony so this is a good number of tests and they repeated it using five different colonies and what they found was that old soldiers showed defense behavior at the nest entrance more often so you're right it is not influenced as much by other ants it's what they just did so but even other termites yeah yeah so yeah so they just go out there it's not like they're being pushed out by the younger ants or sorry the younger termites they're getting they're going out there on their own so this is weird because the expectation is that it's because since their their ability to fight does not decrease over time but their life expectancy is a very clear number that termite soldiers exhibit age-based task allocation consistent in what's called life history theory that age polyethism is profitable when safer tasks are performed earlier in life and when associated with higher age related mortality so basically what that means is they don't want to risk a termite that they just raised from a pupa to getting killed right away on the front lines they want to take that investment in the initial being to as close to their life expectancy as they can so it would make sense that you don't want to you don't want to raise a baby just to have it disappear after its first time out fighting and protecting the colony you want it to do a job for a while before you put it in the high risk scenario yeah it is interesting though the the difference in the in how the sexes ended up in their distance from the nest and how they yeah distributed their tasks and so what is it about even though they're sterile like you said what is it about their their tasks their jobs within the colony that lead them to these particular places when push comes to shove so that's something that definitely needs more study because it could be that the females are larger or smaller in this particular type of termite in the soldiers or it could be hormone related it could be any number of things there's no way to know exactly in this moment why there's this weird outlier or it could be an outlier if they were if they repeated this study there could be no difference between older males and females so that's really this is just a preliminary study this is the first time they've seen this it's time to examine these little elements further but it's pretty interesting I love that inside the nest when they are when the younger termites are close to the center of the nest where the king and the queen are they are really fighting and they are they are kind of fresh and that's where they put all the newest recruits but out on the outermost circle protecting entrance into the nest they're just they're just living plugs protect the babies plug the holes but they're not any worse at fighting but they just become just termite holes plugs termite plugs so there we go and then moving on to something perhaps much cuter than termites domesticated mice if you've ever known anyone who has a pet mouse when you get a pet mouse it looks very different from a field mouse there's a bunch of differences but they kind of have droopier ears they usually have very interesting patterns on them they have splotches of white and black and brown and their their snout is actually a lot shorter than field mice there's a few other things but a study a 15 year long study in Switzerland looked at mice wild mice and they were specifically planning on looking at disease transmission but they kind of stumbled across a crazy different result so in 2002 they trapped mice and then they let them go in a barn where doors were only small enough to keep to allow mice to go in and out but to keep predators out of the barn they supplied the barn with food and water and just because it was a barn and it was shelter it was also not as exposed to the elements warmer in the winter all this kind of stuff and then over mouse nirvana yeah absolutely and so as you might expect a lot of the mice decided to stay over the next 15 years they saw the population grow inside this barn and they studied how they saw the population change in 2006 so after four years into this study they noticed that some of the mice began developing small patches of white fur this is something that does not happen in the wild but again it's in the pet trade for mice more time passed they started seeing more and more white patches and by 2016 so 14 years into the study the number of mice with white patches had doubled they also found head size had changed heads became smaller by about 3.5% and their snouts got shorter so what does this sound like Justin you were just talking about it last week it sounds like the fox study it sounds like things that they've noticed when there's comfort when the mother is giving birth and just dating the children and so with those lack of fear hormones going out there it also shows up in the hospital these are a lot of things that they saw in Siberia with the foxes the difference between the fox study and this one is that they weren't necessarily trying to tame the foxes but they were using selective breeding so they were choosing the less aggressive foxes to be allowed to breed so there was some actual selection of which genes were going to go forward in this case they did not make any selections on the parentage of these mice it's possible that it was kind of a self-selection based on who decided to stick around in the barn but there is definitely a lot of overlap here in the things that we saw with the foxes which was much more deliberate than this thing that was just kind of like here be in a barn if you want to and the mice totally changed so Charles Darwin called this domestication syndrome when animals got floppy ears and got the big puppy dog eyes and stuff like that but what's really interesting here is that we weren't trying to get domestic mice we were just giving them a place to be that was not the wild and still got essentially domestication symptoms from this mouse population that's happening here to me it sounds like a gene linkage sounds like something that's connected between having a likelihood to stay in one place or having some inbreeding or there's all sorts of things here that potentially could trigger these other things that are related it's also possible like Justin said that it is extremely hormonally linked part of it hormone signals could also be linked to genetics so it's probably and instead of an or and it's actually I think one of the first the earlier indications of things they were looking into when it came to epigenetics like why is it when you know you raise the same kind of animal in a one in a very relaxed protected environment one that's not you do see these same sort of changes that you see with the foxes now we're seeing with the mice that some of the mice actually are getting to hang out in the barn a lot when a mother mouse is pregnant she's not worried that the cat is going to sneak through the door or that a hawk is going to come down and grab them you know but it could also be influenced by the fact that the individuals choosing to stay in the barn are creating a selection of a genetic pool so I think that'd be part of it too and if you've ever been to one of their Saturday farmers markets that they throw in there they're pretty fun there's a lot going on in that barn it's an exciting place thrilling, exciting little mouse barn well researchers in this case are convinced that it has to do with the neural crest of the mice a group of cells involved in early development so that would be potentially something related to both of the things we were just talking about could be affected by epigenetics and hormonal influences could also be affected by just genetic selection absolutely by those animals that are more likely to follow a path to stay in the barn there we go so this is another reason for me to believe that we did not domesticate cats or domesticated humans or domesticated themselves which I think about all the time that's not we very clearly domesticated dogs there's conversations about how that began and whether that was a dog initiated event but then there's all these other things that happened as a result and after that movie comes out that's going to be coming out this year about the dog evolution thing that's made up story, oh my goodness there's some movie coming out about old cavemen type people and dogs or wolves and how the first relationship must have gotten started and it's like I saw it it was a preview before another movie and it made me cringe the whole time because I know people are going to be like this is how it happened that's exactly how it happened there will be a huge spike in husky adoptions there's a lot of things coming from that and wolf dog hybrid adoptions and attempts to get those as pets you heard it here don't do that though get the right dog for your household if at all if you can be a responsible pet owner but the reason I brought all of that up is that cats have a lot of things about them that are really really really similar to wild cats the domestic cats and I still am pretty convinced that they did it that they said I'm going to hang out where these humans are because they have some good stuff going on over here and that they kind of have developed some of these more the kitten faces and a lot of these things that cats have as a result of this kind of genetic or hormonal or both divergence but self-selection as opposed to through enforced breeding do you think? that is my expectation interesting all right we'll see if research bears out your hypotheses your predictions someday but for now it is time for us to take a break and we will be back in a few moments with more this week in science we have another story or two I've got BT corn we've got some Chinese space junk and spiders hopefully a little bit of nightmare juice for you coming up then mammals before dinosaurs mammals before dinosaurs what? okay we need to talk after the break this is this week in science stay tuned hello everybody thank you so much for hanging out with us and enjoying the science we do love coming back week after week after week and we hope that you enjoy coming back week after week after week but to keep this show running we need your help that's right we need you not just to listen not just to listen but to help us out to grow the show to help us hit our bottom line make sure we can pay our bills so that we can keep this going week after week after week so if you would like to help here are the multiple ways you can do so first head over to twist.org twist.org is the place for all 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hand first off I would not be alive without the involvement of medical science apparently my mother and I did not get along too well during gestation without the help of doctors and the advances of medical treatments I would likely have died before I was born when I was a kid I spent most of my time watching reading science fiction I was always more drawn to realistic sci-fi such as Arthur C. Clark a trait I have yet to outgrow thus I have multiple decades of entertainment and thought provoking stories I've always had a knack for technology rather it be electronics or computers computers just being very complex electronics thus I have spent most of my adult years in the computer repair field the advances in physics and technology have left me in a perpetual state of learning something I enjoy way more now than I did as a kid both of my kids have had life saving medical treatments without which I would not have the two most precious things in the world to me my girls have grown to be amazing people my oldest is wanting to move to Columbia for college and considering UC Davis as a likely destination for a degree in genetics I think in large part for listening to your show that's right UC Davis I can promote that here what has science done for me lately my life my kids lives a career and basically everything I enjoy and hold dear in this life yikes that's a lot it's a lot it's an awesome show rug thanks rug science UC Davis is a great place a great university it's a great university especially genetics is fantastic at UC Davis I can recommend some great researchers there Jonathan Eisen looking at you right now well I'm not but I'm calling you out there are some wonderful researchers a life of science entertainment life children's lives careers wow it is a lot thanks for writing in and sharing really appreciate it and everyone out there if you would like to share please do we need to keep this going we need you to write in to let us know what science has done for you lately if you don't write in I will have nothing to read and this will just be a boring five minutes of silence on the show this is what science has done for me lately you don't want that you don't want that do you so write in you guys we heard it here everything it can do show's over not gonna talk about it that is a promise from us to you dear listener two minutes of silence that's right so you can email me kirsten k-i-r-s-t-e-n at thisweekandscience.com or leave a message on our facebook page facebook.com this week in science keep this segment of the show going help us out we need your stories Justin I need your story what you got there is a rediscovered fossil collection which is actually hermit this is a fossil originally collected in South Africa in the 1870s by Alfred goga brown brown was an amateur paleontologist and apparently as the story is indicating a hermit which is actually kind of a hard thing to be known for if you think about it like I know that if you're the hermit you know that you don't go out much that you stay home and that you are alone much of the time but how does everybody else know that because they would just know that you're not where they are are they assuming that you didn't have a social life that they just didn't know about I don't know but somehow it was enough of a hermit to have gotten that tag that now 148 years later people are still talking about the fact that he was a hermit goga spent years trying with little success to interest European researchers and his amateur paleontological discoveries eventually he packed up everything and shipped to the natural history museum in Vienna back in 1876 where they were deposited apparently in the museum's vast collection so vast that bothered describing these bones these fossils they just haven't gotten around to it yet what is the natural history museum in Vienna I'm picturing that's where the ark is that's actually the shot you see at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark where they've got all those crates that nobody's ever opened uh cody voice although we tend to think of paleontological discoveries coming from field work many of our most important conclusions come from specimens already in museums says doctor christian camera research paleontology north carolina museum of natural sciences and the author of this new study I knew cody voice continues the brown collection in Vienna were largely unstudied but there was general agreement that this late Triassic collection was made up of only dinosaur fossils to my great surprise I immediately noticed clear disinodont jaw and arm bones among these supposed dinosaur fossils says camera as I went to the collection I found more and more bones matching a disodont instead of a dinosaur representing parts of the skull limbs and spinal column this was exciting despite over a century of extensive collection no skeletal evidence of a disodont had ever been exist in the late Triassic so before the dinosaurs around 260 million years ago a group of early mammal relatives called disodonts were the most abundant vertebrate land animals these were plant eaters with tusks turtle like beaks and were thought to have gone extinct by the late Triassic period 210 million years ago when dinosaurs first started to show up on the scene as it were now there was in the 50s some suspiciously disodont like footprints found alongside dinosaur prints in South Africa suggesting the presence of late surviving phantom disodont unknown in the skeletal record but because it was not in the time frame that scientists at the time, paleontologists at the time had already figured out everything and weren't looking for new information I suppose these were disregarded because they didn't have any other dots of data and I don't know how you would disregard something like that but again it's footprints and it looks like it could be from that creature but we know there's a lot that we haven't discovered so it wasn't necessarily tied to that so within this collect now tons of evidence that's telling them yeah look at this they were there so maybe those other footprints weren't out of place actually maybe this is exactly what we had found so these fossil footprints basically there were these disodont synodonts that were around so the footprints are separate discovery these are ones that they've seen that would have put them walking with the dinosaurs not extinct before that the dinosaurs had arrived they thought they were extinct but then no maybe they were still around but that was in the 50s and they went it's the only piece of information we have they we don't even know that these things were in South Africa and so this doesn't make sense so having evidence skeletal evidence of them from that that formation in that area says oh okay so now we have fossils of the disodonts there in that area of South Africa oh where we had these footprints that we thought might be from one and now it kind of is harder to refute that other evidence and part of this is a part of why it's it's I guess the they have they're like five toad I guess is the thing let's see the only evidence of disodonts South Africa late Triassic was from questionable footprints a short toad five-fingered track named pentastrophis incredulous meaning incredible five toad lizard foot which is how creative it is when you break it down but so yeah this is a a rediscovery of a newly described disodont and it's being named gogas five toad lizard pentasaurus goga goga they named it after the guy so they didn't go completely extinct they were hanging out a little bit but I mean there were I mean there were little mammals that the you know the mammals were not shrews there were shrews and stuff around during the time of the dinosaurs the big ones the big mammals were the things that were not not dominant right and so the disodonts probably faded away a little bit dinosaurs and others like them faded away these plant eaters were taken over by dinosaurs and again like as much as we know there's always a bunch more that we don't but we seem like that we run into these stories with some frequency on this show where a piece of evidence whether it's a a human remains in a cave in the Yukon or bones found or tools found in an area where they thought that were too old for an hominid to have utilized them you know we find this evidence long before we come to our ultimate conclusions but it's interesting how easily evidence does get pushed aside if it doesn't fit the sort of narrative the outlying data and we always understand we have all this data that seems accurate and it's precise and it all makes sense and we can back it up and then we have these outlier pieces of data that are nowhere near where all of our accurate data is we can disregard them and in most types of science and most types of things we're looking at but over and over again especially in the origin of the growth of our planet from species and human evolution whenever we have one of these outliers I think we really need to focus on it and understand that it probably just means we're missing a big rest of a story that goes along with it yeah well if you think about it when you dig for fossils you're digging in one spot over an entire world it's like a pinhole into the picture of what our world looked like so you see fossils in a particular dated zone and you estimate from that when they're around but it's very easy then to get an outlier and have to adjust that expectation for your timeline and it's some people are very good at taking that information and folding it into what they know and adjusting from there and I feel like to be a paleontologist flexibility is helpful because there is only that pinhole lens of your dig site or the fossil that you found in that one place and I also wonder though this is back in the 1800s if Goga Brown's collection and the things there were overlooked because he was an amateur because he wasn't a faculty at the university he was reaching out to because it wasn't their field work I guess that they would be claiming that they would just be identifying some of the else's discovery like you kind of wonder of all that sort of plays into it too which we're entering into a really cool age of people normal people, citizen scientists making discoveries and making contributions to science as a whole in a way that we never have seen before why it's because of overpopulation there are people everywhere it's also technology it's also understanding that a piece of data can be a piece of data even if it's not collected by an academic it's I think it's really amazing that science for everyone now it's why we're here and I wanted to clarify I got caught up on Justin's comment that it was a mammal it's not dye synodonts are not mammals they were mammal like reptiles they're part of a group called therapsids and so they had legs that in the front that were kind of bowed inward with their feet coming inward like a lizard and then legs in the back they went more straight forward back and forth like mammals and they they don't know though whether or not they had fur they don't know but they were not mammals mammal like therapsids so I do sometimes forget where I am in this timeline so maybe it's not discovered yet that that's a relative of mammals but eventually in time you'll catch up to where I'm at and actually in the story that I read from which is on fizzorg they described it as a relative of mammals yes it is one of the therapsids are ancestors it's a group of organisms known as synapsids that includes mammals and their ancestors and I did a qualifying statement you might have missed that part I just got caught up on it and I'm like mammals they weren't really really around yet but yes I had a qualifier you've been listening carefully qualified sometimes I get stuck on words and and I did distinguish that they were mammal related all right related relatives relatively similar to mammals early mammal relatives there we go all right let's move on you guys want to hear about you want to hear something corny of course it is going to be about corn so people debate now the usefulness of bt corn people have debated whether or not this GMO corn that has been engineered to contain a pest control element whether or not it's doing what it should be doing whether or not it's harmful to people what's going on really from what we've seen it's pretty beneficial and now another study has come out looking at data from 1976 to 2016 it's looking at trends 20 years before and up to 20 years after the adoption of bt corn and they say safety of bt corn has been tested extensively and proven but this study is about effectiveness of bt corn as a pest management strategy and particularly benefits for offsite crops or different crops in different areas than the bt field corn itself this is the first paper published showing offsite benefits to other host plants for pests like the corn borer which is a pretty significant pest for other crops like green beans and peppers and according to Dr. Galen Dively professor emeritus and integrated pest management consultant in the department of entomology at UMD he's saying we're seeing really more than 90% suppression of the corn borer population in our area for these crops which is incredible it's huge and they have found that bt corn which was first adopted and introduced in 1996 it now makes up over 80% of our current corn plantings so it's the significant proportion of the corn that's being planted in the United States they estimated populations of pests using pest traps and they looked at different spraying regimens for different pests and they found significant reductions in not only the pest populations but also less pesticide spraying since the bt corn was adopted the researchers say there would be no recommendation to spray for the corn borer given the current population and this paper can trace that back to bt corn adoption what's more by looking at the actual pest infestations and damage on actual crops over 40 years of data we took it a step farther to see the benefits on all sorts of crops and the declines in the actual pest populations we're able to see the results in theory and in practice on actual crops and in the real pest populations over a long stretch of time and so the next thing that they want to do which they haven't done is to quantify these benefits ecological benefits in terms of economic benefits so how many millions of dollars have been saved by not spraying pesticides and also by saving the crops using bt corn not to mention the ecological services of not dumping pesticides into the waterways also let's just remember there's corn in pretty much everything pretty much if you enjoy your American food stuffs don't mess with the corn whenever you're doing corn farmers keep at it you're doing a great job yeah so this is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the take home message here is that we this is the vast majority of corn that is being used currently it is reducing the amounts of pesticides that are being used so there are less pesticides being used in the environment pest numbers are down not only in the crops the bt crops themselves but in adjacent crops which is interesting just overall pest numbers are down in those areas and so the bad neighborhood farm they're just not even trying so there are lots of benefits going on lots of benefits from the bt corn we are where we are today thanks to genetic engineering let's not forget that it's a tool and so the researchers are trying to emphasize that this is not necessarily the only thing that should be used it shouldn't necessarily be completely relied on but it is one of the tools in what should be looked at moving forward as an integrated pest management toolbox so what other tools are in that toolbox and what other things should be used because there is going to be a time at some point probably where pests will evolve or adapt to and have bt resistance which then will lead to more pesticide use but it's fun for now fun for now delicious corn delicious corn corn products Justin do you have another story I do but first I've got a question for the both of you what do spacecraft newborns and endangered shellfish have in common babies who are allergic to shellfish are being sent into space you already know the story yeah I got nothing here researchers University of California San Diego school of medicine have developed a microbial detection technique so sensitive that allows them to detect as few as 50 to 100 bacterial cells present on a given surface what's more they can test samples more efficiently up to hundreds of samples in a single day so this technique was validated by sampling hundreds of surfaces in three different environments one space assembly facility NASA's jet propulsion laboratory at California Institute Technology two is at the neonatal intensive care unit Jacobs Medical Center UC San Diego and an endangered white abalone rearing facility at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in La Jolla California which is basically San Diego also so this is kind of it it worked basically right so at the space assembly facility jet propulsion laboratory it's a place where NASA built spacecraft and machinery that's going to be thrown up into space and they are supposed to account for every biological organism that's going up with those that equipment right really they don't want to put anything in there and they're working on a microbe free Mars mission like this is one of these things that they want so they went into this this assembly facility and out of the three places we looked this was the lowest diversity but they still detected 32 types the most abundant was a senotobacter Iwofi which apparently has something to do with human foot traffic walking around in there so that was sort of interesting they went to then the the neonatal lab and wow yeah they found a bunch of bacteria there and this is supposed to be kind of a clean room this is for premature children that sort of thing where they're like very afraid of them getting infections and that sort of thing all hospitals have bacteria but this is the kind of information we don't have what bacteria found where for how long pathogen monitoring currently requires taking samples from patients sending them to be cultured where lab technicians wait to see which bacteria grow in a petri dish I don't know if they've looked into it that's not actually how they do it anyway but it's still cute that the hospital thinks that there's somebody like doing gram staining after working up a petri dish but of course the worst was then the the abalone fishery thing so basically with this if this tool sort of becomes more readily accessible the real superpower of it is finding out very quickly what is the microbial content on your desk and then you'll have I'd rather not know about the bacteria on my phone I don't want to know about it okay so then you wouldn't be interested in Dr. Justin's not a real doctor bone probiotics with one little spritz these bacteria will keep the bad bacteria off your phone yes we all know there's likely some fecal oriented bacteria on your phone right now but with Dr. Justin's not a real doctor probiotic bone spray those bacteria will be out competed by healthy bacteria being able to quickly so yeah stand by I gotta feed the bacteria on my phone real quick the bacterial community and population is always all around us it's on everything it's everywhere it's part of the environment that we live in it's not something for us really to fear but knowing what like we're trying to learn what's in our what our microbe our gut microbe in store for each of us knowing the contents of the bacteria the varieties of bacteria in your home or where your children are sleeping or where your food is being prepared and just knowing if there's anything that you need to be worried about or if everything's just fine and in you know I almost think I'm gonna go with everything's fine I just wanna think that a public version of this because really telling everybody the name of you know 75 150 at 3000 bacteria that are under in their kitchen is not going to be helpful I think that the sort of public version of this sort of thing should be like it's you know put this roller over the surface that you're interested in and a little like goes green yeah everything's fine nothing to worry about oh you got a bunch of E. coli on this if it's red then you know what you might actually want to this is an effective counter the thing here though is that we haven't have you ever heard of a report of somebody getting staph infection from their phone E. coli infection from their phone salmonella infection from your phone like have you heard of these bad quote unquote bad bacteria causing bacterial infections like we're worried about it so much but more often you're getting these infections potentially from other things like there's no it's like oh salmonella from kale you know the incidence of I mean it's not like one phone is going to cause an epidemic outbreak of a bacterial infection but I mean it's a question if well and it's probably because you're touching it all day every day and so whatever the immunity is on your phone is probably also in you it's on you it's in you already yeah okay it's close because yeah the phone is now an extension of our body so it probably has the same microbial load that we do however it is in contact mostly with our fingers with our hands right and our hands are the way that we yeah we hold the handle on the you know we open the doors by the handles we push on doors that hundreds of thousands of other people pushed on we grab the rail on the subway or on the bus we shake hands with people that we meet when we're out and about that's like kind of like if there's anything and you transmit it there and it's and it's able to grow on your phone now it's only a few microbes when you touch the door handle or transfer but now it's on your phone it found a little crevice and now they're growing oh yeah but I mean we know are we know our phones are dirty I mean if you if we were to swab our phones there would be so much disgustingness and you'd be like oh my god it's so dirty but we're still touching our phones all day every day you're touching door handles all day any every day you're you know you're you're touching things all over the place and I'm honestly yes there is transfer of stuff that can be bad but I there is yet to be a wrecked link yes we have our dirty phones but we have dirty everything else and we are touching it all I think the big thing for infection of that's not like oh I brought my phone into the hospital and dropped it in my gaping wound and then got a staff infection no I mean it's more like I bought these tomatoes at the store they came from an organic or they came from an organic farmer it doesn't have to be an organic it doesn't have to be no but I've got these tomatoes and I want to test these tomatoes to find out if they have anything on them because you know they've come from a place that or I've got this stuff that maybe was processed in a in a facility and I want to know if the facility is clean the stuff I'm putting in my body you hear more about people getting really terrible infections from you know unknown food sources then is it the bus is it your phone I don't know things are dirty but there's no there's there's no direct line other than I mean and it's not going to help you it's dirty your phone is dirty your hands are dirty knowing that they're dirty is not going to help you knowing the species of bacteria that are there not going to help you right it could help hospitals that's absolutely something it could help hospitals because you can identify what areas you need to get better at cleaning it can identify if somebody suddenly doesn't is not doing as well as they were what to test for there are a lot to test for somebody's cell phone or yeah so it's in the lab or yes definitely when there's confounding variables things there's things to test for I would say the the the really exciting application of this is the hospital I would say hospital and also potentially places where food is prepared for restaurants for cafeterias hospitals I think oh yeah the the the health inspector when they visit the restaurant could bring their own little testing kit that's great not just bacteria but the species of bacteria yeah yeah yeah yeah so I think I think it's not going to help people for personal use so much as opposed to these more institutional uses but it's cool I mean part of me does want to put one in the hands of a germaphobe just no that's not nice no it's not nice but it would be like maybe maybe the tough love cure see it's always everywhere does not always it really pushes people in the wrong direction I don't have tough love but I've got some birds oh let's hear about birds yeah so how about an ancient bird let's make it really old first archaeopteryx relative of the birds the toothed birdie thing toothed birdie thing one of the earliest flyers a new study that has come out in nature communications researchers using the European synchrotron radiation facility used an imaging technique called propagation phase contrast synchrotron x-ray microtomography say that three times fast nope anyway paleontologist Dennis Buetan was using this microtomography technique to look at cross sections of the humerus and ulna bones of archaeopteryx fossils and they found that these bones were really densely packed with blood vessels and had a thickness similar to flying birds and so the researchers find that the bones of archaeopteryx plot closest to birds like pheasants that occasionally use active flight to across barriers or dodge predators but not to those of gliding and soaring forms such as many birds of prey and some sea birds optimized for enduring flight. That makes sense they had the little claws and they did a lot of climbing and they think they did a lot of walking so that makes sense that they would be they would be kind of peacock pheasant chicken level flyers that tracks yeah so the question is the bones could support active flight of this flapping very active hard on the body kind of flapping the bones and also the blood supply could support the needs of the muscles to activate that kind of pheasant like flapping but researchers are still critical of this because the musculature of archaeopteryx they don't think was sufficient to be able to produce really good active flying so maybe it still was not flying as much as a pheasant as high as a pheasant maybe it was still very short little hopping flights but this what it shows that if you were to try and compare an archaeopteryx to any bird living today it would be most like a pheasant neat yes so potentially it was an active flyer just probably not taking off from the ground very dynamically I still think it might I still picture it as the glider it's got the climber claws so maybe that's just how you get down from a tree real quick there might be a couple flaps in there it's like an iguana jumping out of a tree into a pool just like that just like that but there's no pool so they had to glide but they didn't glide they flapped they flapped like pheasants and also another birdie call birdie birdie call story I love ravens ravens the corvid families marty pies I use pie in there because it's pie day anyway a new study out in frontiers in zoology finds that an analysis of the food calls that ravens make when they're going ha that the ha sound that ravens make that it it indicates it's an honest signal to the call receivers of the callers age and sex that there are aspects of the frequency band the temporal traits and also the amplitude parameters of these vocalizations that indicate how old a bird is and whether it's male or female so ravens get cranky old man voice is what you're saying end up over here okay yeah this is a cool story but isn't that true of all animals like don't all animals like have from male to female and with the age different sounds that they make not necessarily like bird songs think about bird songs they can develop new songs throughout their lifetime but males and females of most singing birds sing and you'd be pretty hard pressed to identify an older versus a younger bird I know I would but with another bird I mean that's an interesting thing like I just I guess I mean I don't think I've thought about this before yeah it really depends it depends on what part of their vocal chords they're using how developed their vocal chords get how worn they get think about what gives humans old person voice a lot of it has to do with use right we talk all day every day for a long time and some people smoke a lot of cigarettes and drink a lot of whiskey yeah in the vernacular yeah so I think that it really depends it depends on the life expectancy of the animal yeah what part of their vocal chords they use lots of different things if males are larger than females was that? did you have calls that we can play? unfortunately I do not have auditory calls that I can play for you they probably sound pretty similar to us yeah grrr it's like crows already kind of all have a little bit of the you know a little bit of cranky snark to their to their talk anyhow but yeah it sounds like they get old man voice and ladies voice they get old man voice and a baby talk yeah and they do yeah so there's baby talk there's adult talk absolutely but it can also be like word choice for us like calling another crow a whipper snapper so you know I think I don't know it's interesting I've been listening to the crows in the spring there are a bunch of crows hanging out around my house an old bird lady here but the crows the adults have a caw like a very distinctive caw sound and the juveniles have a grrr like they're trying to figure it out but they've got this handle in their throat somewhere and they're like their voices cracking they're trying to beg for food I think they're like and then the adults are like caw make me a sandwich you can make your own darn sandwich that's great it is fantastic Blair do you have any more stories yeah in honor of save a spider day save a spider I wanted to tell you a terrifying and fun story about hunting spiders hunting spiders are some of the most terrifying looking of spiders and they are especially terrifying because they do not build webs and they do not catch their prey in webs they run around on the floor they wander and they use drag lines which hang from branches and up until this point it's been expected that these drag lines were used to catch movement to help them catch prey but also to catch pheromones attract to release pheromones catch pheromones let other spiders of the opposite sex know that there's a spider in that area so females of these hunting spiders have proven to use these drag lines in order to attract males to them but males actually use their silk to wrap nuptial gifts we've talked about this on the show before they wrap up a nice snack give it to the female hope that she will eat it instead of them and that then they can copulate so it's kind of something to keep her mandibles occupied while they're trying to mate so that she doesn't turn around and make a snack out of him so they were interested in since females put pheromones in their drag lines if the males had pheromones in the silk that they wrapped their presence in so that was the expectation but according to this research the chemical cues in the drag lines are female advertisement they let males know that they're around and for the males they're going oh a female maybe I can mate with her but for the females for the most part it's saying bring me food I'm here hungry bring me food maybe I'll let you mate with me bring me food it's like calling Grubhub with your pheromones but the males the males actually don't use pheromones in their nuptial gifts in any of the silk no interest in drag lines that males produced and they didn't really actually care about the silk at all that the gifts were wrapped in they most likely adapted and kind of a blindness to the pheromones and the type of silk in the gift giving behavior because they the expectation is that males used to kind of try to make the gifts look bigger than they actually were wrapping them up a bunch of times really pheromones and then you open it up and you're like this is it so the females have learned to ignore chemical signals so that the males cannot deceive them about the quality of the gift fascinating so they're probably just picking up on the olfactory cues of the gift itself probably what the insect gift actually is it might be purely visual they pick it up, they tear it open they go okay that's a pass I won't eat you or even better I'll eat this you can go ahead and mate with me I'll accept or there's always the this is terrible I'm going to eat you instead but no spiders yes save a spider everyone save a spider so today save a spider day you know what that means if you find a spider in your house think twice before you smack it and maybe just show it out yes yes it's really easy to just put a cup right over a spider that's on the wall use a postcard or a piece of mail or something like that just slide it underneath bring that nice spider outside let it go unless of course you live in Australia but then don't listen to us at all then you should probably just move because there are some spiders that are so large they just own your house now there was some six inch spider that was just saved some saved in the floods in Australia that are currently going on and also look down before you go to the restroom in Australia and check your shoes but save them they're really important let's remember real quick last service announcement in relation to this since we're talking about it if spiders were not around I couldn't see six inches in front of my face because there would be so many flying insects everywhere you would not be able to see somebody right in front of you because of the flying insects these animals have huge ecosystem services because they control populations of flying insects and most importantly our least favorite, the mosquito lots of disease vectors they control them as well so remember that if you find a spider in your house they might actually be doing you a favor if it's not in your bedroom, near your head maybe just give that spider a name let them live in your corner let them make you a nice web that maybe says some pig or something like that just let them continue to keep your home pest free right, we love the spiders we love the spiders hey, and speaking of being in control of things, I've got an image up on the screen right now it's a dark, starry night, cloudless sky I don't know, is that Orion? I think the constellation Orion is in the lower left-hand corner and there's like a very faint streak streak of light looks like it could be like a meteor oh hey, that's Tian Gang Tian Gang 1 the Chinese space station it is completely out of control and is going to crash into the earth before the end of the month hey, that's one of my predictions where's it going to crash? so it could crash in North America but it could also crash in China, they are pretty much saying somewhere between 43 degrees North and 43 degrees South pretty much covering all the continents anywhere the European Space Agency says Spain, France, Portugal and Greece are potential crash sites, they can't really get very much more accurate currently you have as much chance of being hit by this as anywhere else has a chance of being hit by this there's no chance it's wrong we've reported on this before and I just wanted to update that this 19,000 pound space laboratory is out of control, it is actually it is orbit is decaying and it is going to plummet to earth and it is expected that it will maybe make it between March 29th through April 9th so sometime in the last week of March, first week of April we should expect that this space station will break up their orbit, the orbit will decay enough that it will hit our atmosphere, begin breaking up within the atmosphere and most of it will burn up but there will probably be lots of pieces that break off and so there will be chunks of this thing that potentially land places who knows who's going to get lucky if something does land somewhere near you they are asking that you do not touch it because it could have weird chemicals and other things but if you do touch it that piece will probably go for a lot on Ebay probably will also that you can start your superhero origin story so actually I'd say by the time it's actually re-enteroraving re-enterory re-enterory atmosphere I have a much better idea of where it will and won't be landing right now because it hasn't actually gotten to the point of re-entry it hasn't gotten there yet it depends on where it's kind of making that burning up the entry part so watch this space and others for updates as we get closer to find out where and how the Chinese space station will decay into will an umbrella be enough protection if it's raining are you going to be in the basement of your home? a lot of thin layer in my final story we've talked about the NASA twins study where one astronaut Scott Kelly stayed on the international space station for a year and his brother Mark Kelly stayed on on earth well researchers at NASA have been looking for differences that have occurred between the two identical twins and they have confirmed that some 7% of Scott Kelly's DNA has diverged from that of his brother yes that sounds like a really big number it is yes 93% of Scott's genes returned to normal after landing the remaining 7% point to possible longer term changes in genes related to his immune system DNA repair bone formation networks hypoxia and hypercapnia which is related to carbon dioxide and so increasing mission duration from the typical six month international space station mission to one year it resulted in no significant decreases in Scott's cognitive performance relative to his brother on the ground however speed and accuracy decreases were reported post-flight and so they think those are due to re-exposure and adjustment to earth's gravity and the busy schedule that Scott had to follow after he got back to earth with all the interviews that he was up to yeah so basically there are there are changes the telomeres the end caps of his chromosomes became significantly longer in space we've heard that before but this has been verified by more assays and genomics testing the majority of the telomeres that had lengthened shortened within two days of Scott returning to earth so even though you might gain a little space coming back to earth is going to pull you right back down it probably has something to do with gravity I was expecting a SpaceX spa weekend in space to lengthen right telomeres lengthened I'm going for the health spa treatment lengthen my telomeres yes yeah so it's interesting I wonder is it possible it's probably microgravity effects it's also possible radiation effects that are affecting this is it possible that it's that exciting going to space and well there's that other question we were talking about the domestication issues earlier during Blair's animal corner what are the similar issues of stress hormones and the excitement I guess physiological concern that is transmitted to your genes from being in space oh I thought you were going to say what there's awful condition of being stuck on a planet it's very stressful just get off the planet relax space ex spa but you got it yeah but anyway those are my stories those are my stories for the day twinning it in space twinning and winning space makes space makes you not so identical to your identical twin anymore fascinating fascinating are you guys done I'm all good yep you're all good well this has brought us to the end of our show thank you everybody for watching for listening for being with us for half or so hour and 45 minutes maybe close to two hours I don't know I'm just going to stop right now while I'm ahead and say thank you to Fada for helping us with our show notes and our social media thank you to identity for for helping with the audio for the show thank you to Brandon for helping with Facebook thank you to all of you in the chat rooms that we have for being here and chatting and really getting into what we're talking about I love that we have you here with us and those of you who are just out there listening thank you for just being here listening I love I love you I love you for listening and I'd like to shout out to our Patreon sponsors thank you to Richard Onimus G Burton Latimore Paul Disney Harrison Prather Charlene Henry Joshua Fury Andy Gross Steve Debell Alex Wilson Tony Steele a dire Jaclyn Dr. Craig Landon John Ratna Swami Brian Condren Richard Eric Knapp Kyle Washington Time Jumper 319 Bob Calder Bill K Jason Roberts Matthew Litwin Mark Mazzaro Richard Porto Porter Ardiyam Richard Rick Ramis Sean Bryant Paul John McKee Jason Olds Brian Carrington Christopher Dryer Lisa Slesuski Jim Drapeau Greg Riley Sean Clarence Lam Bin Rothig Steve Lessonman Kurt Larson Robert Aston Rudy Garcia Marjorie Gary S Robert Greg Briggs Brendan Minnish Christopher Wrapp and flying out Aaron Lutheran Ken Hayes Matt Sutter Mark Hessinflow Kevin Parachyan Byron Lee E O Keith Corsale Tyrone Frong and Mark Thank you for all of your support on Patreon and for those of you who would like to support us on Patreon you can find information at patreon.com slash this week in science or just go to twist.org and click on that Patreon link you can help us out also by just telling your friends about twists it's an easy way to help us and also also feel good about about yourself on next week's show we will be back once again with more science 8 p.m. Wednesday evening in the Pacific Time Zone where you can watch live at twist.org slash live join our chat room don't worry though don't make it you can find past episodes at twist.org slash youtube facebook.com slash this week in science or just twist.org Thank you for enjoying the show twist is of course available as a podcast just Google this week in science in your iTunes directory and you should be able to find us no problem also you have one of those mobile type devices Pajones I think they're called you can look for the twist number four Droid app the Android marketplace or simply this week in science and anything Apple marketplace for more information on anything you've heard here today you can find show notes on our website that's at www.twist.org you can also make comments and start conversations with the hosts or other listeners you can also contact us directly email Kirsten at Kirsten this 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everybody listen to what I say I use the scientific method for all that it's worth and I'll broadcast my opinion all over the earth this week in science this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in science science science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what I say may not represent your views but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan if you listen to the science you may just then understand that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to save the world of Japan this week in science is coming your way so everybody listen to everything we say and if you use our methods then roll and I die we may rid the world of toxoplasma got the eye this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in science this week in science science I've got a laundry list of items I want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote more rational thought and I'll try to answer any question you've got but how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop once in what we say this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science for us to go it looks like I've been left alone oh there you are, you're here I've been left so I got an email from Libsyn who are our our thing on the street what's going on out there from Libsyn our hosting company and they said they've got some advertising opportunities for us one of the companies they said to get back to them if we're interested I prefer to be listener supported it's about the cash would be nice we could do it forever either we could just do it for a while yes but one of the companies is a probiotic skincare line oh interesting yeah I was thinking hey we could do that and just put Dr. Justin not a real doctor yeah just make him do the spots just make him do the spots yeah that's a tough one that's kind of like we've talked about it before it's one thing if you're talking about politics and then in your politics podcast and then you talk about mattresses but it's another thing if you're a science show or you talk about data collection and statistical significance and all this kind of stuff and then you go 20 years younger right by this product identity says identity 4 says I'm going to veto that yeah yeah I'm sure they would appreciate the Dr. Justin's not a real doctor advertising campaign for them and the great thing about like when we get audible ads like listening to stuff listen to some more stuff there's literally millions of options just here's a way to listen to things yeah that's a thing that we could absolutely support but yeah anything that makes any sort of claims is really tough wait a second did we get like a YouTube ad or something that was weird email from our podcast audio file hosting company Libsyn and they're looking there are some advertisers they're trying to match up with podcasts what do they want us to pitch it's a probiotic skincare company oh perfect that laugh oh no yeah perfect it's perfect what could go wrong I think I think this ads only work if we are pitching them ourselves yeah right it only works then yeah so taking from Dr. Justin not a real doctor I would use this if I had some around maybe or maybe I wouldn't also according to a study with a very small sample size and not a great p-value some people said that they looked younger how younger that's difficult to say I know you know what you guys you can just put yogurt I'm not a real actor but I play a doctor on TV that's right yeah again mattresses sure we can do mattresses we can do meal kits there's nothing wrong with that what's a meal kit we're on the after show like blue apron where you get like the a box of food that you basically stick on the stove for five minutes it's like all the ingredients so you don't have to go to the grocery store there's no prep work where can I get something like that that sounds like the exact sort of thing I need because with my busy schedule I find it hard sometimes plus taking kid shopping plus where can I get some free stuff where can I go to get something like that yeah because then we have to talk about our experience making blue apron so blue apron will have to send us like you say blue apron are we being sponsored by blue apron oh but I'm hoping hey blue apron told me also I could use that so Lisa, Casper, why don't you two just duke it out and I'll take whoever wins that's fine I I think we should get sponsored by the marijuana industry okay unfortunately also not great p-values yes we don't need them oh and then we could have a segment this nervous had 2,000 years of human trials we could have a segment California but it's been here all along that's great but we could have a segment of the show that's sponsored by marijuana company X that basically we could call it your moment of wow that's great oh yeah we'll find some news that's mind blowing man yeah there you go and Blair's nightmare juice sponsored by antidepressants you know that's right actually I don't know if it's really a smoothy climate antidepressant that's the one that's fantastic this is the end of the world here's how to get yourself back in the game again sponsored by my dance sponsored by screw it all you guys what about my idea it's not really a sponsor but I think we should give them invite them to the show and do the trial which is that I can't smoke weed wow I'm not suggesting that at all that was a joke better know your microbe I can't remember what it was called you biome you biome is that what it was oh yeah that company no it's not you biome that's one company that will let you know they do like genetic testing for your micro biome but yeah yeah you texted it too the better know your micro biome thing American Gut.org I think we should invite American Gut.org and we should do their participate in their study in advance of them being on the show it's not that big of a deal come on you're a mother you cleaned how many diapers baby where you work in a zoo how is it this is one of those things that is just mind boggling to me like yeah I'd rather touch animal poop than human poop that's true I know I get that I get that it's weirder that it's weirder that you know your neighbor was walking your dog it pooped on your lawn they picked it up there's some residual but you're not really tripping on it because they picked it up they did the right thing if somebody walked along squatted on your and picked it up and there's some residual you're like this is your own you've got up and picked up after strange animals Kiki you wiped a bottom for how many years I've done this for three kids I've changed diapers it's my own poop like what do I care I was I went to go away and I'm sure they don't like first put your hand down there and catch your sample then put it in the box and then wash your hand now I'm sure they have a collection method that has been tried and true and made it's probably a paper bowl with a stick that's my guess maybe it goes in a special bag here's a plastic ziploc baggie but here's what I would like to do go hit it I would like to cross to each do this trial or I'll just do it maybe if I'm the only one in advance of them being on the show and then share the results on the show talk about them on the show and talk about what they do and everything else and then we could see what we've learned about our own microbiome from our show that would be a fun show that sounds like a special episode no it would be a very special what do you call it a very poopy episode a very crappy episode of This Week in Science look at the very crappy episode of This Week in Science this week of This Week in Science we're going to be with this also a jazz singer who's going to be doing a little scat for us yeah a little scat that's right This Week in Scat is it jazz or feces you tell you decide oh my goodness yeah no we need to get them on I would love to talk with the people from the American Gut Project another one if the two of you haven't done Ancestry or not the Ancestry but the I've done 23 in me 21 I don't know I just want to be 20 I think we need to start a fund for me to do it it's on sale right now too it's like a hundred bucks again but no the idea would be they would sponsor it for you to do it I've already done it mine's already in there they could sponsor for you to get yours done and again we would do a show where they looked at our three results and said here's what's interesting about it here's what you can and can't make from it here's some of the because they're getting more authorization to talk about health stuff and we could say so here's some of this stuff that is reliable based on this predicts Justin that you would have droopy earlobes well I got a little bit yeah okay there's attribute stuff that's kind of fun in there that you are more or less likely to have certain physical attributes the one thing I was amazed by is that they tell you about the consistency of your earwax what? yeah there's one of the traits it's genetically determined whether or not you have more liquidy watery earwax or clumpy waxy earwax it's a really it's very interesting yikes that would be a fun show part of it is like we're talking this isn't exactly the sponsor talk but it is a type of sponsors like we could be sponsoring Blair to get her 23 and me done by them potentially through this but it's like we could be doing we could do a couple of those shows where we're the subject matter discussion and get to participate and play with it a little yeah that's pretty cool we could be the subject matter if it's just me I'd be happy with that too but I think those would be well there's a portion of my ancestry that's a big fat question mark I love that let's do it that would be so fun it's an eighth of me is a that's a big chunk mystery and it might be bigger than that there were huge revelations in mind that were some of which were like family rumors stuff and actually there are rumors for this one too well because my grandma knew and she wouldn't tell anybody took it to the grave did she didn't think that there would be genetic testing did she she did not my dad of course who it's a quarter of his DNA I've asked him a bunch of times if he's interested and he was like yeah he has no interest he doesn't care at all right so part of me and I love your dad he's a great guy part of me whenever somebody's like nah I'd never have my DNA check part of me is like because that's finally gonna link up that homicide back in 1916 there's some deep dark secret way back there but for him it's not even a I don't want to it was just kind of like I'm not bothered I don't care I was like would you want to know if I did it I mean I guess just not bothered does not care 4.5 feet tall with Mike what 4.5 feet tall what I don't know what right they're checking I'm not 4.5 feet tall I'm 2 and 3 quarters meters no no like 8 feet tall no 3.1415 926 3 6 5 3 5 8 9 7 9 3 2 3 8 4 6 2 6 4 3 3 8 3 2 7 9 5 0 what's uh huh that was some digits of Pi oh 3.14159 that's all I know I worked with a guy I swear to God he got like down to like 42 44 he got deep into the thing and I'm sitting there reading along going wow that was that was pretty intense she was like a math major why are we asking about how tall we are I don't know I came out of nowhere came out of nowhere um there's a story that is going around a study in geophysical research letters that uh researchers place the yearly estimate of snow accumulation as 1200 cubic miles in North America and researchers say that there is more snow piling up in the mountains of North America than anyone knew so they've revised their estimate of snow volume content for the entire continent they've discovered I mean this is crazy they've discovered snow accumulation in a typical year is 50% higher than they previously thought and that if it were spread evenly across the surface of the continent from Canada to Mexico that the snow would be about seven and a half inches deep wow that's impressive however if it were confined only to Ohio I don't know why they only chose Ohio probably because it's squarish if it were confined to Ohio it would bury the state under 150 feet of snow maybe the person who came up with that doesn't like somebody in Ohio yeah like I'm in a barrier I'm under Ohio um so researchers are saying it's currently impossible to directly measure how much water is on the planet but we need to know so that we can make accurate estimates of available fresh water and also to really understand the earth's water cycle yeah so we know water evaporates condensants over mountains and falls to earth as rain or snow snow melts water runs into rivers water run to the sea yes runs to the rivers and lakes and into the ocean but how much water is not precisely known and we have the satellites to make measurements of it but mountain terrain is really unpredictable and satellites have a really hard time making accurate resolution measurements and so researchers have to construct regional climate computer models to figure things out for the continental scale and so there's a researcher who for her doctoral thesis is combining different regional climate models to make this more accurate estimate what we need is little nanobots to tunnel to the bottom of a snowy area like to hit the actual stony end of a mountain and then like send a ping and then like crawl under the snow and just send pings so we know how deep the snow actually is yeah it's pretty cool snow sensor nanobots somebody get on it now but even though there's 50% more snow in North America than previously thought that doesn't mean the estimates for the snowpack that will be melting into the Colorado river this year are very good those water managers are going to have their work cut out for them because not so much snow all the snow is not going to the places that really need it the west is really having issues cue the antidepressants there we go antidepressants for climatia feeling bad about climate change take this antidepressant or any of them we don't really care we're on antidepressants too nobody cares having a panic attack about climate change take a chill pill there we go Dr. Kiki's chill pills that's right you got issues with climate change don't worry just Netflix and chill there you go you'll be so chilled you'll think you're streaming content that's right no you know it's television it's the soporific for the masses man feeling content and well adjusted with the way the world is take Dr. Justice not a real doctor anxiety pills you'll be worried about things you never even thought of before why you have no idea the troubles that await son right around the corner right under your nose there's things going on you couldn't have imagined before now with Dr. Justice not a real doctor anxiety pills you know what you should have been afraid of you guys so speaking of weird anxieties Marshall has this thing where he buys magnets all the time really strong neodymium magnets and then he like brings them out we had fun they're great because they attract each other even through a fairly thick piece of wood so through the table we're running magnets around and they're fun to play with for the cats and stuff like that it's kind of fun a little dangerous and so they hear some things and my child's playing with them also and as I was going to sleep last night all of a sudden I had a panic attack that my child was going to swallow magnets or that the cats were going to eat some magnets I had a panic attack and I almost woke Marshall up to tell him to get rid of the magnets we just wake up and both Kai and both of the cats are stuck to the fridge I was singing the cat on the fridge why is the cat the cat is stuck to the fridge I just went to get some cereal I'm stuck fuck oh my goodness magnets are really bad especially if you swallow two of them like they can stick they can squish your gut together squish your gut and cause some really bad problems I mean I know my child is a fairly smart child but I had this what if he swallows the magnet it's to put it in his mouth for some reason and I had a panic attack as I was trying to fall asleep at like 10, 30, 11 o'clock at night last night it's like not even something I'm like ok Marshall I almost woke him up to tell him he couldn't buy any more magnets moratorium on magnets this is a magnatorium in the Clark household that's right these are the things that give me panic attacks before I go to bed what about you oh you know just that I left the oven on and I'm going to burn down the house that's what wakes me up right before I'm going to bed that's normal did I lock my car did I lock the front door did I leave the stove on thing I actually had to create a routine a little light above the stove I turn that on before I turn on my stove now as soon as I don't turn it off until the stove is done being in the oven or whatever I'm working on until that's turned off that overhead light stays on just so that I can look over ok lights off it's good I had to do that I go all the way out to the car and be like I don't know why don't I know that's why I got to go back and look because I don't know I mostly don't like electric stove tops but the nice thing about the electric stove oven in this new place is that there are lights when anything is hot so there's also part of you like oh no did I turn everything off but it's still hot and I set something down on it so as long as all of the little indicator lights are off safe so the way to show internal thinking there's just a plot twist you're on a soap opera or a movie and you want to show that you're being pensively thinking about something the question actors most often ask themselves is did I leave the stove on that's the pretty good acting for myself hmm did my child swallow magnets I also I don't think I've ever knock on wood made this mistake but I also will wake up in the middle of the night did I set an alarm that happens to me all the time that's gone away since the phone thing now I have my phone is always going off in the morning the time I have to wake up varies wildly from one day to another so I can't just set a daily alarm that's always the same some mornings I have to be at work at 7 and some mornings I have to be at work at 9 and some mornings I have to be at work at 10 I have to set it custom every single night which then means I wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning and go did I set it did I set it if I ever slept is everything okay everything's fine that's no good you have to set yeah never mind that won't work I set three alarms when I do it yeah but I one time I woke up in the middle of the night and checked set any alarm so now because of that one night every night it's going to bug you uh huh yep oh I got a thing you can do what's that not go to work no no as long as your lights are still on you haven't set your alarm right right is that the thing or leave the lights on if your alarm is set that way all you have to do is open up lights are on yeah that's good all right speaking of panic panic attacks and alarms and everything yep time to go bedtime yeah is that time everyone thanks for sticking with us it was a fun after show fun conversation fun fun fun fun fun fun discussing the advertising on twist that's right this weeks after show brought to you by twist anxiety anxiety that's right doctor Justin's not a doctor anxiety pills does a body good or actually a brain terrible anxiety not recommended for most humans a lot of ways that human can die and I'm sure you haven't thought of them all but you will that's not a real doctor anxiety pills all right we will be back next week everyone thanks so much hey Justin you're gonna you're gonna say good night Blair good night Justin good night good night good night everyone have a wonderful week