We're gonna start the show Because today was like herding cats you take oh my good party cats to a party and this is what happens Don't let the cats get into the finger painting Roll number one and we're starting in three two This is Twist this week in science episode number 634 recorded on Wednesday, August 30th 2017 talk about guts Hey, everyone. I am dr. Kiki and tonight on this week in science We're going to fill your heads with more coffee trigonometry and whale teeth, but first Disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer whenever natural disaster hits and we witness tragic loss of life and home and livelihood I'm reminded that there is no such thing as a natural disaster only man-made ones The events whether in Texas or India or elsewhere while Unprecedented in scale were not Unpredicted that they were not prepared for is no act of nature, but our own damn fault We have known for some time that with global warming would come could come greater sea levels larger storms greater Precipitation and greater flooding We have heard the dire predictions of scientists and we have seen many recent examples of those predictions proving true What remains now is a choice? To continue to ignore reality and endure devastation after devastation is a natural part of life Or take charge of our future take charge of our leadership take charge of our own protection And in doing so live in a world made stronger safer and more secure a world built on the foundation of this weekend science Coming up next 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 see I want to know This And Good science to you too Justin and no No Blair no Blair today. I'm Blair free. Yeah, but she's at an awesome science Communication conference where she's gonna learn all sorts of things hone her ninja-like communication skills to become even more of a Science ninja Then she currently is that's right. She'll be back next week, but everyone else out there. Welcome to this week in science We're here once again to talk about all the science news that is fit to go in this show And there's a lot we have all sorts of fun science news I have stories about old math new hope and moth love What'd you bring Justin? I've got a way to prevent age-related cognitive decline. I need that. Yeah, it's a turns out there's an organ in your body. That's already Producing what you need. I got stuff on whale teeth pliosaurus swimming and microbiota Communication let me hear your biota talk Get a little bit of Olivia Newton Bacteria in there We are gonna jump into all these things But before we jump into our favorite segment our new favorite segment of the show I want to remind everyone out there that you can subscribe to the twist podcast on iTunes in the Google Play podcast portal on Stitcher Spreaker and tune in you can also find us on YouTube and Facebook You just search for this week in science and you'll find us or you can just visit twist org More places than I thought existed So many places, but you know what time it it is now, you know what we're gonna get into oh Yeah, it's the it's the new Stick, which is it new still because it's been going on for a while. I keep calling it new But yeah, it's kind of like our junior high Yeah, yeah adolescent shtick this weekend. What has science done for me lately? Hi Kirsten Blair and Justin my story goes twofold my work and learning English as my second language Back in the fall of 2005 after our daughter Liza was born My second cousin was about to fly from Canada to Ukraine to see a new member in the family And he asked me what present I would want to want to have I was thinking about what I'll be doing during long walks with the baby carriage and iPod mini came to my mind Ever since I began listening to podcasts in English and Twists was the first one. Yeah I'm kind of a veteran listener So kudos to clever engineers and iTunes platform builders for giving me a great way of listening to stuff That I is deeply interesting in English and therefore helping me to polish my English more and more Twists was only the beginning then I began listening to wonderful star talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson life scientific with Jim Ali Khalili Orbital path and many others all those podcasts helped me to grow my horizons and learn the language tremendously and continue to feed my curiosity daily as To my work without science not a chance that I would be able to work from home on a UK based online Publication as an editor and have a real freedom to work from wherever I want having my laptop Wi-Fi and yes coffee next to me if you think hard enough about what makes such work style and language learning possible You'll name dozens and dozens of technologies that collectively made it possible without science. It would not be possible period Artyom de Octave Well, Artyom, thank you so much for listening to Twists How awesome that we were your first podcast and you're still listening to us that that makes me like makes me makes me blush a little bit It's it gives me some goosebumps. I apologize if you're English ends in ish Yeah, and if you verb Adjectives or verb nouns on a regular basis as a result of this show Or adjunct if you noun verbs, I guess maybe that's what it is disclaimer instead of disclaim. Yeah We now in the verbs we verb the nouns we take the language and we chop it into little pieces because science and I hope I hope we haven't sent you down Like a veteran of the language my listening. Wow, they've altered the English in an intelligent way Thank you so much for writing in with your story Artyom And I do hope that you and your daughter and your cousin and the rest of your family are doing very very well And maybe you've moved on for that iPod mini now Remember everyone we need you to write in to let us know what science has done for you lately What does it do for you every single day? I want to know our other listeners want to know people want to know So please share leave us a message on our Facebook page. Look for this week in science on Facebook That's Facebook comm slash this week in science if you want to go directly to it We want to fill this segment with you and your stories. So please keep sending them in I really enjoy reading them and I love hearing about them. Thank you so much Now it's time for the science it is time to talk about old science and in fact Something that many people think of as the basis for science and scientific discernment discrimination Measurement, you know of what I speak math Important for that sort of thing. Yes. So if you think of math, who comes to mind Who do we think of as being the first to start doing math writing it down? Oh I don't know that I can think of a first mathematician Yeah, like the measuring they had all sorts of math based on ropes to it was like how they were doing they were really into Geometry and the rest but I don't know if they I will go ahead and say they invented math It will go right ahead Go right ahead. I'm sure it was being used in some degree far before that, but yeah So it's not the Greeks who started the whole thought process We still use the Grecian system of math to describe triangles using angles that Come from stick in a triangle in a circle, right because you can get the radians From inside a circle what kind of angle comes from the edge of the circle anyway figures out you can figure out the shape and you can use the angles for describing triangles through trigonometry and we have the the Trigonometric functions of sine cosine and tangent which any trigonometry student should be able to repeat The algebraic or the tan the geometric equations in their sleep If you plan on passing trigonometry this year welcome back to school everyone Anyway, we don't use the same system that the very first Trigonometricians used because you know who it was the ancient Babylonians This is a such a cool story so some Mathematicians from the University of New South Wales They took a look at a really old cuneiform tablet that was written between 1822 to 1762 BC BCE and this was in the Babylon from the Babylonian city of Larsa they described all of this in a paper in Historica Mathematica and they called the tablet a trigonometric table of a completely Unfamiliar kind and ahead of its time by thousands of years The interesting thing to it is that they didn't use the same mathematical system that we use or the ancient Greeks used In fact the numerical system of the ancient Babylonians was based on base 60 Whereas we use base 10 Right. So you use base 10 you can count it out easily count things out and divide them easily you based on your fingers But if you're gonna divide something evenly in half from 10 you get one half, which is You know five or you can do one fifth, which will be two and those are the only even ratios that you get from dividing 10 The Babylonian system of base 60 has way more even ratios that can come out of it and so they use that to actually Create this tablet that Describes triangles that the tablet describes in trigonometric functions different sizes and shapes of triangles and the angle is actually determined not from like the Greeks did putting it inside of a circle but from the relative lengths of the sides and so they believe that the ancient Babylonians much must have used these tables for describing rectangles and triangles and using them for their buildings their ancient construction and for dividing up land and measuring measuring all sorts of things and The researchers say that because of this unique base 60 Calculation it's actually could be Superior in some ways to the trigonometry of today in some applications It might actually be better than the way we do things And when we say better too, it's just I guess I mean you would end up with more whole numbers in places And then you would feel like it was immediately coming together in a better ratio It's you know, I've fallen off of the the lobbying for this a long time ago But it sounds like a 60 system isn't far removed and could have a lot of the same characteristics as the dozenal system Right, which I used to talk about a lot. You could have a third would be four It'd be a nice even number, you know, and you could take a third and cut a third in half And you'd have to but but it would be a different to like it's It is a language and so it does only have meaning as we assign it that sign to it But the phenomenal thing about the language of mathematics is you could change that language Completely in terms of what a what a 10 represents what it, you know, what it what's what's a unit of 60 versus a unit of 100 or you can change all of that and it'll still work That's always what's fascinating, you know, the numbers you come out with will be in a different language They will have some will be whole numbers some will be point something something Babylon they didn't have decimals. Yeah, so they had to work the way around it. Yeah, work with bigger numbers to start with But ultimately ultimately you can you can come up with the same result with these different languages Yeah Yeah, but what's interesting is that the Babylonian system while it could have been and is possibly Superior in some ways to the Grecian system The Babylonians Babylonian system died out. It just went away and this is the first Instance we have of of talking about about it and learning about it and figuring out Okay, this is how they did trigonometry. They did trigonometry and now we know And the thing that we still have left over from the Babylonians is our clock The 60 minutes in an hour the 60 seconds in a minute That is still based on the ancient Babylonian systems of counting But that's the only thing that we have in our numerical system then but boy, do we have that? But boy howdy Our life revolves in some way around that mathematical system It does yeah, so moving on from ancient math, which is just so cool this story There's a if you go over to ours Technica They've got a great write-up of this and there's a video from the University of New South Wales where one of the researchers is describing it and There that it shows you that the table and it describes the Triangles and the way everything works together. It's a great video I if you have a chance the link will be up on twist org After I get a chance to put the show notes up tomorrow now moving on from ancient variations in mathematical styles to variations in the human epigenomes We love talking about epigenetics on this show and how it could potentially influence human adaptation and evolution and We've talked about them for we've been talking about epigenetics on the show for probably the Entire history of the show probably about 15 years So this is an interesting study and I love having Followed this stuff so long that we actually start seeing a study like this Come into play and perspective some researchers published in a journal of nature ecology and evolution their study Looking into DNA methylation. So methylation is the adding of methyl groups to Certain parts of the genome and that mess of methylation is like a it's like a little signal to either Transcribe things from the genome or if it gets wrapped up in if the DNA gets wrapped up in a histone It's a signal that stuff isn't going to get copied and we're not going to turn it into any proteins and it won't get expressed So this methylation could be a very important aspect of human ability To adapt to changing environmental conditions So beyond just what's in the DNA. It's how does it get expressed and that expressiveness is what can change our Responsiveness these researchers looked at various groups very distinct groups of humans They looked at five populations six Siberian Yakuts seven Cambodians seven Pakistani Pathans seven Algerian moza beats and seven Mexican Mayans and The reason they chose these very distinct groups is that they thought that because they're very Evolutionarily distinct it would allow them to be able to not only differentiate just the deep the genome, but any differences very specific differences in the methylation between the groups and Results actually are very fascinating. They found a strong link between population specific methylation so changes to where methylation occurred in the genome mRNA levels or messenger RNA levels that's the stuff that travels around and tells other things what to do and the different genotypes But these methylation sites Where this methylation occurred had the highest degree of population specificity And we're more strongly associated with the local variation in a single nucleotide pop polymorphism Then compared with the association of mRNA levels with these local Changes in single nucleotide polymorphisms SNPs or SNPs And so what this means is that these little changes in the DNA little single mutations little flips in single base pairs of the DNA Influence where methylation can take place. So it's not larger gene changes, but these little tiny Switches that allow more or less methylation to occur And so there's genetics that that's population-based that kind of determines the responsiveness of Population groups in terms of their epigenetic makeup Yeah So methylation is under genetic control kind of Basically as to like whether or not the right Right amino acids are there To allow it to take place whether the the right base pairs are there So that so the genome has to sort of be open to interpretation. Yeah, exactly It's something has to then well And this is the tricky this isn't want it to you know It has to want to be changed or something has to have signaled that that a change could be handy or Something has to signal that a change is possible. I mean that gets into a tricky cascade of what's in informing or triggering or Is it can it be is it random? And if it's just random How does it get then is natural selection come in place because it's we've had this conversation as as an argument and as as an agreement That there does seem to be a Way for the Memory of an existence over past generations to influence the future Mm-hmm. We we seem to be able as as as life forms on planet Earth to evolve in a in a beneficial direction when we need to and that is Largely a natural selection thing but not entirely. So the question is then When there is this opportunity in the genome to say okay allow a change to take place is That selected based on an experience of the past or is that right? So in the past was you know some stressful conditions that maybe the That maybe our ancestors went through in the Paleolithic era Like a lot of getting chased by lions and not quite being fast enough to get away Ones that did get away nice to be this much faster Yeah, so one of the researchers notes that the consequences of this methylation aren't exactly clear So now that they've kind of seen that there are differences between that are specific between population groups They still say it is likely that most of the variation we measured is not having any important impact So the challenge is to figure out which genomic regions are important and how their DNA methylation impacts human traits So it's like okay, which genetic regions are subject to some change But maybe not a lot of change or maybe that need to be have differential expression like the uh melanin melanin melanin nation melanation of the skin um eye color hair color maybe uh digestive ability How much acid does your stomach produce how uh how how easy how easily does your stomach Work with all the bacteria that live within it, you know, how they're all these different things That there are all sorts of little levers and dials That are at play epigenetics is one level of controls And then the the dna is another and yeah And I suppose I suppose to see a a dramatic change You'd have to have some Some perhaps deficiency where all those triggers are on and available to methylation available for the changes to take place You can sort of see then You know, maybe there's maybe there could be a type of stress Uh from the environment that triggers that and then what you would get Isn't necessarily a specific direction driven Uh genetic change but one that just says hey Change needs to take place. Let's take all the barriers off of changing and then That next generation may have slightly different features this way that way the other different interaction with the get microbiota Sort of open it up for a wave of natural selection to pare it back down to what's working so That's uh, it's that's going to be a fascinating Topic to to look at again in the future. Uh, this is yeah, this topic is going to be one that will come up again and again and again Um speaking of stress my final intro story here There were a few creatures Few few little creatures that survived the k t boundary The mass extinction that occurred as a result of the massive asteroid that struck the earth and created the yucatan peninsula Shrouting our planet in darkness and cold fires burned Yeah, so not only was there physical stress on the planet which led to lots of volcanic stuff and Lit lots of fires because of the debris falling everywhere. There are fires that burned everywhere There was and then there's this all the stuff that ended up in the sky A lot of it fell back down pretty quickly like within a year or two they think but then they're the fires that were burning Probably put soot into the air That lasted much longer and so a researcher from the national center for atmospheric research Used a climate model to look at The effect of soot The soot that blanketed the planet after the wildfires Kicked everything into the air And the question is was there enough soot would there have been enough soot? To really darken the skies I mean what killed everything on the planet was it just the impact itself the heat from the impact Was it the darkening in the of the skies and the in the cold that came as a result? So anyway, he thought he'd figure it out and The estimates that have been made about of the amount of soot Uh that has been found in the rock layer Of the total amount of soot that might have been in the air range from 750 billion kilos kilos to 35 trillion kilograms pretty wide Yeah 750 billion to 35 trillion and that's not just wide but a lot And so they used those estimates and they ran a whole bunch of simulations through their climate model and they Injected the soot high into the atmosphere and the soot would absorb and reflect the sun Would absorb the sunlight and absorbing the sunlight It would cause heat heating of the air kind of like, you know Black body radiation, you know the heating of these things the air would heat and The air would rise and so the soot would end up higher And so the simulations figured out that the soot would mostly End up going up and then falling back down again within about a year but That's only part of it There would still be enough soot in the air to block 99 of the sun's light and if you saw If you were anywhere close to totality or if you were able to see Just a sliver of the sun could you imagine I mean the totality of the solar eclipse that just occurred in northern as north america brought Brought 365 degrees sunrise or sunset, you know, there's a very small amount of light 1% of light ish For only two years That's not a lot of sun And that's that 1% of sunlight is where photosynthesis dies If there's not more than 1% of photo of light from the sun photosynthesis stops We need 1% of the sun's light of the sun's energy For plants for things to get going for photosynthesis to happen for those algae those little algae to grow so two years without Growth and that's why they think the plankton species All died out at that point in time and anything that relied on the on those plankton species would die out as a result of that And 99 percent if again if you've ever seen a solar eclipse and been near totality The temperature drops If you lose that much energy from the sun you lose several degrees When I experienced the eclipse it was probably 10 to 15 degrees that the that the temperature seemed to drop So wow, that's pretty intense. Yeah in the simulation that they did the average Ocean temperature would have dropped by about 20 degrees fahrenheit as much as 11 degrees celsius The land the land temperature the surface temperature Would have dropped about 28 degrees celsius or 50 degrees fahrenheit. Holy smokes Yeah Wow, that would most of the planet Most of the planet's land would have been below freezing for a cup for two years And most life forms just that alone could not have survived everything else being the same Exactly And so there was you know part of the tropics that probably wasn't As cold where there was more heat energy from the sun You know they're getting the maximum amount of the sun 12 hours a day of that 1 percent of solar input That's that probably might have been enough to keep this small area alive And then after about two years It would start to creep up again. The soot is falling out of the air Water pipe And then And as the the soot drops Water vapor would have started rising into the sky the water vapor would have gotten up there and then heated up and condensed as Rain and so there would have been more soot falling out of the air And so eventually the natural cycle as things Warmed up and as more and more soot fell out of the air It things would have cleaned themselves naturally, but they estimate it took about seven years For the sunshine to come back For all of the sunlight from the sun to come back and in that Time surface temperatures were low Most everything died and it was only the few little things That could make do that could creep past in the tropics that might have made it Talk about a rough patch Yeah, well, this is also the time when we had Tropical poles, right, you know, we had we had We had alligators in montana. We had swamps at the poles like We we had we had a very there was life everywhere on the planet when this took place Ah, so yeah very dramatic Cutting back of life forms on this earth I'm happy to meet it. I'm sure for a minute in your story. I didn't know if we were gonna make it I was like, ah, what if what if it's dark for a thousand years? So bad Yeah, never recovered life on earth ended Yeah, so it's a it's a fascinating. It's a fascinating idea and um, yeah the idea of whether or not there were Plants that whiskey renegade bringing up the idea of plants dropping seeds Maybe there maybe there were seed stores. Maybe there were things that after about two years Could have brought things back, but um, well, you know one of yeah, and that's one of the benefits of of a frozen Uh, uh landscape is that it can also be preservative in some ways if if the planet comes back, which which it sounds like it did It sounds like it doesn't it? sounds like a podcast And it also is it quickly just makes me think of You know when we look at the archaeological records what we're finding usually is stuff that got encased in mud That's where I think we're we're scurrying about trying to get these these mammoth mammoths out of thawing uh permafrost Right now Which if we weren't here now getting them out of the permafrost, we would never be able to find them um likely, uh, so so all these there's so many species perhaps On this planet that we don't know existed just because they were frozen over quickly and then reexposed to elements and you know disintegrate into And into an unrecoverable state so It'd be interesting to to in the future see if there's ever going to be a way to sort of recalculate or Discover as we've been finding you know when we can go into a cave now and we can get we can get genetics from the soil To tell us about uh, what may have been there Hopefully there's some areas left on this planet that we can we can discover that that we can we can maybe look for these missing species absolutely Keep looking keep looking and no there's hope you know if Yeah, our our sky ends up darkened for any reason. I don't know. Maybe we need to pollute more. Maybe that's what the message is Okay, you've got stuff this is this week in science you guys Sorry in here just to follow up so uh back in 2013 a house size meteorite uh struck a russian city It was it was it was big enough. In fact, they got caught if you remember this one. This was in where's it? uh chely brinsk binsk chely chelya binsk chelya binsk um It shattered windows thousands of people had injuries from flying debris people were knocked off there Feet by the impact it was caught on dash cam In a car it was like we had we could see it streak across the sky. We had video of this one Yeah, thank goodness all the russians have issues with um Mob and police brutality stuff It's not bad It's that and they have an odd it's like it's mandatory now because of insurance the way the insurance companies Okay, because russian tires are Terrible, uh, everybody blames their tires No, um So this was yeah, this was a pretty big one. Uh, about 10 kilometers or no, excuse me 10 kilometers It was 17 meters in diameter. It was about the size of a six-story building It's pretty big Yeah And it was it was pretty huge. So now the the one we've been just talking about was 10 kilometers That's the one that caused the mass extinction event. So Much much smaller almost a magnitude smaller, right? Yeah, but the question is how many of these things are out there? and there's a survey looking for near-earth objects And what they I guess said is that about there's 3.5 million near-earth objects that are larger than 10 meters So in this size of about the size of this six-story building impact Until you think or bigger 3.5 million of them the good news if this is good news About 90 of those near-earth objects Are about the size of the one that hit russia 10 to 20 meters so so while What and this is good news because this is good news because As as as awful as that was and it could have been worse um It does mean that there's not that you know There's not a lot of those those sky darkening bodies out there Right. So yeah, the the the probability of being Struck by something that is so massively destructive Is it about you know 9 to 1 10 to 1 Right and and and what it is too is it's also this study is also lowered Uh, significantly the idea that we could be hit with a devastating impact the before the observation the The potentials of the estimates were much higher that there would be much larger objects out there So all in all, you know 3.5 million sounds scary But all in all it's actually Downgrading the threat that existed previously due to estimates. So that's a good thing Uh, this is this is an amazing state. This is age-related memory loss. Maybe reversed by boosting The effects of one of your organs kiki, which organ do you think it might be? um I don't know My spleen Ah, your spleen very good guess, uh, spleen spleen But uh, no your bones. Oh Yeah boosting blood levels of osteocalcin hormone produced by bone cells Uh, this is according to mouse studies led by columbia university medical center researchers They also identified a receptor for osteocalcin in the brain paving your way for novel approach for treating age-related cognitive decline and this is something that we have seen The anecdotal not anecdotal the correlative I guess Studies where they would do these mouse blood transfusions You would take young mouse blood and you would put it into the system of an old Mouse and you would find that their cognitive abilities improved And we've been looking at is it junk deteriorative junk that's in the older blood. What is the thing? Why is it that young mouse blood transfused into older mice makes them cognitively seen younger and in some cases Physically seen younger too And we were also pondering how the future of you know humans wealthy humans using the blood of the young to live longer This sort of vampiric Future I do still love the uh, yeah the fantasy aspect of that but yes go on yes, uh So Okay So yeah, so they they've seen those improvements with the with the plasma So now they've researched the research has determined that osteocalcin binds to a receptor called gpr 158 That is abundant in neurons In region of the hippocampus, which is part of the brain's memory system All right, this is confirmed by Inactivating hippocampal gpr and mice and subsequently giving them the infusions Of osteocalcin which did not improve them their performance on memory tests But adding it did so Uh, they also didn't find any toxic effects in the mice. Of course, this is on mice and not humans So they've still got more work to do but uh, hey, yeah, if if age related cognitive decline Is one of those things that you're worried about Meaning you're over 40 So I wonder, you know, we have issues especially in women with osteoporosis and deterioration of the bone and we don't really think of uh, the bone I mean we think of the bone is this structural component We don't think of it as the organ that it is providing us with new blood cells and providing us with hormones and All sorts of compounds that I mean it's as a living organ that is highly Important in the endocrine system. This is an endocrine organ um And so I it just this finding really makes me wonder, you know, we we have deterioration of the bone And the bone itself not upkeeping in osteoporosis Um, what does that mean for the health of the bone as an endocrine? Input if it's not keeping itself up and if it's not doing that then it's probably not Providing all the things like red blood cells to carry oxygen like this osteocalcin Yeah, and in one experiment aged mice were given continuous infusions of osteocalcin over a two month period The infusions greatly improved animal's performance on two different memory tests Reaching levels seem previously only in young mice and I don't and if you bring up an interesting question But I don't know. I mean we don't uh, I it might not affect it at all. It may be Because of course the the bones aren't just worried about the structure of the bone itself They're an organ that is is introducing red and white blood cells to your body And and having this effect also on memory. There's maybe maybe there's a Maybe there's a a trade-off that it's making To keep the blood healthy Uh versus worrying about its own structure. That's taking place in osteoporosis. Maybe maybe it's not deteriorating Uh, right. Maybe it is. Maybe it maybe there is a trade-off. Maybe it's to keep the body healthy It's deteriorating structurally. Maybe there's yeah, who knows that's an interesting question Yeah, but it does that does really make me think about bone health as you age People break bones all the time Yeah, how do we keep our bones healthy? I know it's not drinking a glass of milk a day I know No, uh more news having to do with bones. Australian scientists have made an ancient whale discovery Uh today's world There are baling whales like the blue whale which filter plankton and small fish and the ocean For food they use bristle-like structures for their teeth might have been Uh, and then you have the killer whale which has got teeth and chomps down on larger prey things to eat them Uh, now we're finding out that ancient whales had extremely sharp predator teeth similar to lions Discoveries published Wednesday in the journal biology letters shows that whales at some point completely changed their teeth As well as their prey and their feeding activities Which I guess is something that we knew but this is showing that the ancient baling whales Uh, based on their 3d scanners at the museum Had these had these sharper teeth Let's see ancient whales had extremely sharp teeth similar to the lions but they I guess the argument has been how did this change take place when did this change take place And according to this contrary to what many people thought whales never use their teeth As a sea so there the idea was they started using their sharp teeth as the filters and stopped going after the prey and But this is saying no those those teeth had one function those teeth were to Chomp just to chomp down and clean flesh from things that they were eating That's according to the museum victoria's senior curator of vertebrate paleontology Eric Fitzgerald Uh, so yeah, so this is instead they think um Maybe this is a a filter feeding technique showed up after their teeth had already been lost so mammals eventually lose their teeth Right teeth start falling out if you if you're really successful predator and you've lived a long time and you're big like a whale And you're you don't have other predators But you lose your teeth Maybe you do have to come up with something else So it's just sort of an interesting thing that it wasn't this gradual transition maybe between these sharp teeth and the baleen but that something else may be Sort of in the middle of that transition Oh interesting. Yeah, that way maybe we haven't seen that yet, but there's something else that happened And I mean and it also brings up like that that idea of going from a predator to A filter feeder and that and that I mean it doesn't just change What your teeth are like, you know first you've also got a whole lot of activity differences the way you pursue prey Is completely different the way you expend energy is completely different the way you metabolize those Small foods or those large things is going to be different your micro the the whale microbiota had to change To take care of this effect. So It's a lot more needs to be learned And that also something we didn't know How's a pleosaurus swim? I'm with bits Swimmy bits Yeah, it's wimmy bits add four flippers And a huge body in a long neck and seemed kind of awkward and it's one of those sort of like This is this can't prove that a bumblebee can fly It's too large for its wings, which And that was something somebody said that was maybe never actually true But there has been a mystery about how this This creature swam There's no other example of anything that used four flippers Simultaneously while swimming And it's a really big creature. So it didn't seem like it would be very effective Uh, so the researchers recreated pleosaurus flippers using three a 3d printer They then studied pleosaurus fossil specimens photographs of skeletal configurations before attaching the printed flippers to a body fabricated to mimic pleosaurus form Next they studied the way modern creatures such as turtles use flippers to get around and adjusted the fake flippers to allow them to move in similar ways They placed the faux pleosaurus into a tank of water at a dye to see water movement and began repeatedly adjusting the flippers until they came up with the configuration That resulted in optimal propulsion Team reports and and It swam best when all four flippers were used for swimming Simultaneously additionally, they know they had been well not quite simultaneously They had no they had to be in a specific way as the front flippers flapped They created a vortex of water under the body Back flippers would then flap between whirlpools Which better used the energy expended In essence the team notes the creature made use of its own wake The only other creature besides the dragonfly Interestingly found to do so more testing showed that when flippers worked well together the back flippers were able to increase thrust back to 60 percent By flapping without assistance from the from the front flippers So kind of a get going and then just the back ones take over for a while Yeah, you could I mean you could coast and use some flippers and not the others, but yeah And this is that this is an idea of figuring out the hydrodynamics of how this all worked Let's print flippers. Let's let's let's just pretend. Let's make it. Let's see what we can put together and see how it works Yeah, so this and this is a for if you can't picture one This is sort of if you if you can't picture what a police or looks like But I've seen pictures of What's reported to be the Loch Ness monster It would be kind of like that Oh, there we go. Look at that. We got visuals up for those who are visually paired absolutely and uh in other news another uh researcher found a another um A new pleosaur specimen a new species of pleosaur that had uh had a lot of bones in its neck A lot more bones in its neck than um Many other Dinosaurs species and this is a story I was going to save for the very end But I thought that you might find it interesting based on this pleosaur study This pleosaur that was found was um, oh There we go if I can find the story this pleosaur this published in the journal of vertebrate paleontology It's called lagon anectis rick terry And it does as you said kind of look like the Loch Ness monster And the reason I didn't say the number is because I thought I had to double check it because it I was like wow That's a lot of vertebrae That's a lot of neck vertebrae, and it really is 75 vertebrae in its neck Oh, loris smokes. This is the longest necks of any prehistoric marine reptile Wow Yeah 75 vertebrae in this pleosaur um The researcher who made the pleosaur finding while he was doing his work on this pleosaur thing he was wandering through a museum and At the lower saxony state museum in Hanover paleontologists fenn sacks He uh, he checked out a specimen that kind of caught his eye That was up in a display And it was mistaken It was a it was a dinosaur and he was like wait a minute I just last year found this new ichthyosaurus specimen and that looks a lot like an ichthyosaurus So could we take that down off the display and I want to check that out And yes, indeed it had been misidentified and the museum had put another species tail on it just to kind of make it look display-ish Oh, that's criminal I guess this happens fairly often When they just want to put a complete specimen up somewhere and so they took and so it was nobody had noticed really And this guy's like, okay wrong tail. What is it? It's an ichthyosaurus. And so this Dusty display fossils sitting there turns out to be an ichthyosaurus and it's a brand new specimen a new species that hadn't been described before called ichthyosaurus somersetensis and It's a very large specimen of its kind. They think it was probably about a 10 feet long and It had a little seven centimeter long embryo inside of it That was also and it was a pregnant ichthyosaur fossil Yeah, so they yeah Those dusty old shelves of misnamed dinosaurs at natural history museums full of gems Yeah, and there is a thing. I mean those displays Typically, they're not paying a scientist to put them together when they want to put up a new exhibit a lot of museums We'll we'll have an in-house crew That's job it is to put stuff together for the display And so you don't get You don't get that level of double checking necessarily on I mean it should have arrived there together. This is Certified, this is all one specimen Um, but yeah, somebody might have used a little artistic license on the tail there A little artistic license. That's right A little artistic license Kept well and it's not hard to understand that the species wasn't really identified until recently because I mean they're really only started Identifying and characterizing these ichthyosaurs this particular lineage fairly recently Yeah, but anyway misidentification a case of the misidentified ichthyosaur And on the other hand a great job of uh putting it out there to display for some scientists to catch otherwise Got it. Maybe still sitting in a box That's right. Hey, do you want to take a break right now?  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Uh, if you've listened to this show for Pretty much any length of time at least recently You are Uh, well aware that you are what your microbes eat and sometimes what they want you to eat and And you a lot of a lot of human behavior Maybe even driven by our symbiotic relationship with the trillions of bacteria that live within our bodies And when they talk We listen new research from rockfell university in the iken school of medicine and mount sinai suggests this communication Maybe the door to engineered gut flora That can have therapeutical beneficial effects on disease. We call it mimicry says john bratt bratt or brady Director rockfella university's laboratory for genetically encoded small molecules where this research was conducted the breakthrough Is also described in a paper published this week in the journal nature Brady and co-investigator Lewis Cohen found that gut bacteria in human cells Speak what is basically the same chemical language Based on molecules called ligands ligands ligands building on that They developed a method to genetically engineer the bacteria to produce molecules that have potential to treat certain disorders By altering the human metabolism in a test of their system on mice They introduced a modified gut bacteria Which led to reduced blood glucose levels and other metabolic changes in the animals, so they're calling it mimicry because they're impersonating the effects of of Microflora and the gut method involves Locking key relationships of ligands which being two receptors on membranes of human cells to produce specific biological effects in this case The bacteria derived molecules are mimicking human ligands that bind to a class of receptors known as Gpcrs or g protein coupled receptors many of the g protein coupled receptors have been implicated in previously in metabolic diseases brady says and and are the most common targets for synthetic drugs drug therapies They are conveniently present in the gastrointestinal tract where the got back Bacteria also are found If you're going to talk to bacterias says brady you're going to talk to them right there That's the that's where you got to get your mouth right up to if you want them to hear what you're saying right there in the gastrointestinal tract Uh in in their work coming in brady engineered got bacteria to produce specific ligands That bind with specific human receptors And it's known to be involved in the real uh regulation of glucose and appetite There's been previously therapy as previously been therapeutic target the treatment of diabetes and obesity with the drugs the bacterial ligands They created turned out to be almost identical structurally to the human ligands so they worked Among the advantages of working with bacteria cohen says who spent five years at brady's lab as part of the Rockville clinical schools program is that their genes are easier to manipulate than human genes And much is already known about them all the genes for the bacteria inside of us Have been sequenced at some point he says In the past researchers in the lab have mined microbes from soil in search of naturally occurring therapeutic Agents in this instance He started with human stool samples in the scent for the gut bacteria Which with that which uh had the DNA that could be injured or engineered so So they they they they were trying to find you know Uh that that thing outside in the naturally occurring in the world that they could use and then they Well, wait, let's just look for it where it's already. We know it's already naturally occurring When he found them he cloned them and packaged them inside E. Coli bacteria because of the ease of growth And he could see what the molecules that uh the molecules engineered Wait, he could then see what molecules the engineered E. Coli strains were making so they were all so easy to identify What those genes produced once the E. Coli were producing although They are product of non human micro micro organisms brady says it's Mistake to think the bacterial ligands they created in the lab is foreign the biggest change In thought in this field over the last 20 years is that our relationship with these bacteria Is not Antagonistic they are part of our physiology what we're doing is tapping into the native system And manipulating it to our advantage Right commensal bacteria These bacteria that are That live in our guts let's start using them To our benefit. Yeah, and so they're not really going to be close. This isn't this is like maybe someday Right someday. This could be a drug tart drug target Someday this could create something we could create these things, but At the moment it's just starting to learn about it, right? Right and and I think the important lesson from this too And understanding what the cutting edge in going in that direction is Is whenever you see something that's called a probiotic To understand that at the cutting edge of science, they're just beginning to unlock The thing that may lead to the thing that becomes the thing that's that's creates a beneficial microbiota like Like we're we're really in that stage just because the news that we now understand that this exists exists Doesn't mean probiotics that are going to be beneficial for specific things exists Right, we know that we know that there's a there there and yes, you can You can you can shoot arrows into the darkness and occasionally hit the target but Where we are now Is figuring out Where the targets even are how to shoot the bow all of that stuff right like to take my analogy too far But what I think what I think is so interesting here. I mean what we're talking about these are commensal bacteria These are bacteria that live with us. They maybe don't have any effect Maybe have positive effects on our physiology You know may or may not be Beneficial they're part of our system though And what they've done these are little tiny organisms That learned Somehow along the way to create the same molecules that our body cells use to communicate So they could talk to the cells and say don't get rid of me You like me I want to stay here, you know It's like these molecules allow these bacteria to stay there in that environment more easily Because without that communication our gut cells would probably be more likely to put up a fight Yeah, and that's smart little bacteria. That's probably happened a long time ago too. Yeah, that's one way the other way is They engineered the ship That the whole body was built around preserving There you go. Yeah Right There is that that is an that's another alternative explanation What fun though I love the I love the body talk of the gut The bacteria where we're what we're gonna learn about all this is fantastic But you know what I want to talk about right now How mods talk to each other It's it's through chemicals it's through chemicals just like those bacteria It's chemicals mods You know with the wings in the dark and they're attracted to the light Not colorful and pretty usually at least as colorful and pretty as butterflies nice cousins to the butterflies, right? When it's mating time for the moth pheromones come into play and mods Release a lot of pheromones, especially the female mods which the males use to find the females to hunt down the females through the air through the plumes of pheromonal scent Until they find the female of their choice and they're able to mate and thus the species is propagated But since there is the pheromone in question researchers have determined that there are sexy female mods and Not so sexy female mods There are the female mods every single time They are around They attract a male Doesn't matter the males come to the sexy scent of that female There are other female mobs Oh, just they're there and the males never come So if the males never come to the not so sexy females How do they continue to perpetuate their makeup Of the species right why are they're not so sexy moths? I'm gonna guess lipstick Nope, you know what it is lips. No, no no lips. No lips, but you know what? It's all about having friends It's all about having friends that right research by astrid groot from the university of amster dam Looked into a species of tobacco bud worm moth heliothis viracens, and it's a caterpillar a pest species We don't really like it in the united states Farmers often use pheromone pheromone scented traps to actually trap them Because it's an easy way to for animal control for insect control for this particular species And so she had noticed that some females never attract males And so she wanted to test for this and so she bred the most and least attractive. She basically tested These female moths she'd take a moth and say how attractive are you to males? She took the most attractive females and bred them to create super sexy females She took the least attractive females and bred them to make Super not sexy females And then she paired them off in different combinations So she had pairs of attractive females And one of the two of the attractive females Always got a mate When two unattractive females were together they never got mates ever But when she paired an attractive moth with an unattractive moth the unattractive moth Mated 17 of the time Which isn't the best but that's good odds I don't well, I you know, I don't know what the other the and and the odds are that yes The attractive one gets the bulk of the matings but Just because the unattractive one is in the vicinity of the attractive one She sometimes gets a mating because when the male moths get kind of close in they use the pheromone scent to get That's already at the part of one o'clock in the morning. Yeah, they're not really paying attention So that's just what happened every once in a while So they think that these females these unattractive females might be perpetuating through the population because of their attractive pals Yeah, so it's it comes down to mating probabilities so when the females are And when the females the attractive females, why would the attractive females ever hang out with unattractive females? Well, when they hang out with other attractive females lowers their chances it lowers their chances of mating they have a 50 50 chance of mating as opposed to an 83 chance of mating so yes It's better for both the attractive and unattractive female to be friends In this tobacco moth situation. Yes.  Maybe I could use some coffee. Yeah, you should think some coffee This is recently reported an observational study nearly 20,000 participants suggest that coffee can be part of a healthy diet and healthy people Coffee is one of the most widely consumed beverages around the world says dr. Adela Navarro cardiologist at hospital de navarra pamphelona spain Previous studies have suggested that drinking coffee might be inversely associated with all-cause mortality Which I think we have reported on this show before But this has not been investigated in a Mediterranean country. She says So they did the study there and in a way, this is a good This is uh, like trying to see if the same sort of study works somewhere else because as we bring our attention to every once in a while Most of the studies that we report on are reported on here in the western world And then you've got the configuration of is it western medicine? Is it western diet? Is it western this is it western that is the pool of the people who are being part of the study so Yes, the uh, the study was to examine association between coffee consumption and the risk of mortality in middle-aged Mediterranean Folks study was conducted in the framework of a project along with perspective cohort study and more than 22,500 University graduates the study started About the same time this show started back in 1999 They ended up with uh, they ended up with 19,896 participants Whose average enrollment was at 37.7 years of age They completed, uh A bunch of semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaires to collect information on coffee consumption at the origin of the study lifestyle socio-demographic characteristics Anthropore anthropometric measurements I'm not even sure what an anthropometric measurement is but they did them As well as a counter for previous health conditions So, uh, during the 10-year study 337 of the participants died, sadly Well, some of them may be not sad The researchers found that participants who consumed at least four cups of coffee per day I mean that category usually Had a 64 lower risk of all cause mortality Than those who never or almost never consumed coffee There was a 22 lower risk of all cause mortality for each two additional cups of coffee per day That's plastic Yeah Coffee equals good And those who are at least 45 years old drinking two additional cups of coffee per day was associated with a 30 lower risk of mortality And this is all cause mortality. This is every disease. This is hit by a bus. This is whatever it is It's all types of mortality So car accidents you have to assume Right, if that's one of them you could apply it to everything which is kind of illogical, right? You could say that it would it gives you a a 64 percent lower chance of dying in a car accident 64 percent chance of dying from cancer 64 percent. That's not true Right You could be surviving car accidents better at 80 percent. It's because it's all cause it's not drilled down to As of yet on this but I uh, but if you you're ever concerned that one more cup of coffee might might make you a little overcaffeinated Or make that night sleep a little worse But you want to have it because you want that little bit of edge to get the rest of the day. Go for it. Go for it Side effects will be you're going to be much much more likely to survive the day You will survive the day and at the end of any day all we want to do really is have survived it Actually, I'd like to have a good night's sleep at the end of any day I mean, I do want to have survived my day, but hey, you know what good night's sleep versus all cause mortality risk Which you gonna choose? I'm confused about this because if you don't have good night's sleep We know that your reaction times are like if you're drunk and you have a Unless you drink more coffee That's why you have to start your day with coffee And then in the middle a little bit to me around brunch you gotta have more coffee And then you start to fall off and get sleepy right now It's you have some more coffee and then the day's almost over but you're really getting lethargic so drink more coffee Okay, I'm gonna have to get on this Habit again. I drink my morning coffee two cups two large cups Maybe it's like eight cups if you are measuring. I don't know We we should measure. What is the measuring eight ounces? I think I'm in trouble Well, I'm not in trouble. I'm great. No, you're doing fine. If you're doing great. You're doing just fine. Everything's okay Yeah All right, speaking of keeping Yeah, because I thought we were I thought I didn't go I didn't scroll down on our You like our show notes with a rundown Kiki's got a ton more science. What you got kiki do. I've got stuff to keep us healthy. Well, that might keep us healthy healthy someday Maybe not right away, but someday Uh researchers have reported from Purdue University On a way to deliver a drug into stored white fat cells So that they can turn into brown fat cells which like to use energy and burn up Yeah, yeah, that's so it's uh And so there's this idea that maybe at one point in our past We might have had more brown fat in our body in our physiological makeup But that um that's that storage if because of extreme Extreme environments and lean times and cold temperatures Maybe led our bodies to adapt more white fat storage That that and the energy Yeah, that and the fact that we don't run everywhere to get everywhere and haven't for a really long time we've changed Where maybe once upon a time we were much more Mobile and so this white fat storage was physiologically appropriate and the problem is we have Changed and our civilizations are more likely to be sitting down in front of a computer screen or in the seat of a car Or on a bus Then they are to be walking across the planes In the hunt for I don't know ancient elk. You know, we're not doing that anymore So the researchers uh reported in the journal molecular therapy. They engineered a polymeric Nanoparticle it is an FDA approved polymer. That's known. It's known as PLGA It's great works in the body non-reactive very healthy Um, just doesn't react with the body And they could attach a drug to this nanoparticle that's called Di-ben-zaz I always messed it. I thought I could do it. Di-ben-zazepine. There we go Di-ben-zazepine. You gotta say we're there. We got some benzepine There we go.  Yeah, and it didn't matter whether the induced pluripotent stem cells came from Parkinson's disease patients or whether they came from controls And this I think is a very interesting point here and the researchers Think that even if the cells carried genetic risk factors for the disease It's the environmental insults that occur within the brain that are likely required to make the cells show a sign of pathology So the question is now, you know, if you have people who have parkinson's disease and you're able to get cells from a donor To be able to transplant them into the into a human brain Um, what could you take skin or blood cells from the parkinson's patient themselves to be induced into neuronal stem cells or You know, could they come from uh from a normal source? Would it matter? And that is the question. So anyway, the next clinical trials, they're going to be doing they're going to be addressing Safety and the conditions that are necessary to make sure that they can Get the methodology right and so they're going to be doing some more rat and mice studies before They really get back into uh looking at human stuff so pretty fun stuff awesome stuff, but Gosh, whenever whenever we're on the cusp of cures Don't you just want like a massive infusion of funding to ramp up and get multiple trials done? I mean Not quickly as as they need to be done But parallel, you know, um, whatever studies they've got planned. I would love for them to get funded to do Four more studies in parallel Yeah to knock out the next Phase or two trials that they need to go to Yeah, the the size of trials the uh infrastructure that's required The dealing with patients or if it's human trials or dealing with uh monkeys if it's you know, if you're at that stage These things are expensive. Yeah, and yeah funding more funding so that we can move forward on actually solving these problems And then a study similar to yours that you were talking about with the uh the commensal bacteria and uh An e. Coli that was your study was published in that you were talking about earlier was published in nature this is a study that was published in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences and They looked similarly at commensal bacteria And have discovered that they release This team who published this paper of out of the lab of dan calman at emory university school of medicine They've determined that this is over 17 years of experiments that molecules are really small molecules called indoles Get secreted by these commensal bacteria that can induce protection against the host Against stressors in the host and so they tested this in c elegans They used e. Coli that can colonize the gut And found these indoles and then they uh, and then they basically took the indoles and Got rid of the e. Coli themselves and put the indoles in the c elegans and the c elegans seemed younger and healthier which Would you have to have a very trained eye? When a worm seems Yeah Yeah, so they they also looked at jesophila melanogaster, which harbors an indole producing e. Coli They found that these uh jesophila which are fruit flies performed better in climbing assays and survived heat stress better than flies that didn't have e. Coli And mice that had e. Coli that produce indoles as well Were more resistant to radiation than control mice and these mice with these indole producing e. Coli had Were more youthful Stronger shinier coats happier spent more time at the gym Yeah, um, so these indoles may have something to do with like the ligands you were discussing earlier the way that these commensal bacteria communicate with their hosts how they help them and can benefit them and then uh in the human body well, they found that in Uh in c elegans and jesophila. They found the indole actually works by attaching binding to an aryl hydrocarbon receptor the ahr and The hr actually recognizes a whole bunch of molecules not just these indoles and so um The human body has a variant of it And indoles absorbed from plant dietary sources or produced by these commensal bacteria Uh can be found in small quantities all over the body. So there might be something going on in the human body as well We don't know that yet the bacteria affecting our health um And finally the well, I have one more human health related study the fda has finally approved the first gene therapy Uh to occur in the united states. We've talked about it previously the car t Therapy uh using a patient's own cells Immute a patient's own t cells taken from the blood and genetically programmed So that they seek out antigens on this on the surface of leukemia cells It's been approved but But Only going only been approved for patients 25 years old and younger who have b cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia And for whom they've had uh relapse at least twice And the cancer being still detectable after other treatments Yeah, so this is a last ditch. This is a last ditch treatment Right and and so far even for the not the acute but the chronic Form which is much less invasive and has a lot longer time span Of health available to it They're they're being very cautious and you in the same sort of ring world You have to have failed to have other therapies be effective and have to progress A long way and this is this is going to be this is a kind of a typical thing That you're going to see across like we were uh somebody in the chat room was saying you you you rarely hear about these things Going beyond the initial the lower testing This is this is examples of higher Testing levels, but they're not universally at you start human trials When it's the last arrow in the quiver time And and and and it's sometimes a little bit unfair Yeah, sometimes it's unfair because it it was the last quiver. Maybe maybe it would be more effective sooner But you have to start here when The cost to risk Ratio is such that You're not jeopardizing The a a health of a patient by doing the treatment Um, uh severely enough, right? Absolutely. So but fantastic that they have opened this up There are people who didn't have an arrow left Yep in the quiver. How come i'm talking about archery this whole night? Have you noticed this is like the third archery? For whatever reason my metaphors are all about archery tonight. Um But these are folks that didn't have another bullet in the chamber. Why is it always violent? Isn't there another? I don't have anything these are folks that had no more they had no obi won They had no obi won upon whom to rely That's right more last minute Last minute messaging before uh facing The the the deaths the literal death star death star. Oh, no Even though you started it's actually working pretty good. Um, and this for therefore this is this is uh, this is going to be Yes, that's right. I'll stop metaphoring But yeah, so it's awesome for those folks that didn't have anything left to to try and and the early The early indications of a lot of carti is that This is going to be the path that these have had successful And some human successful trials on the chronic and some in the lab that looked so fantastic Yeah, where this is how we get it into the human level Yeah, the uh result in one clinical trial for this particular car t therapy this kim ria It left 83 of these particular Cancer like leukemia type patients cancer free three months on so in three months. Just yeah Yeah, pretty much cured, which is amazing. However, it's not cheap $475,000 Hopefully insurance will cover that Yeah, uh, but you know what we don't really have insurance for uh When when fish farms break and fish From the fish farms they flood into areas where they shouldn't be fish farming We talk about it all the time. It's like, you know, fish farming. It can be this amazing thing to Aquaculture can allow awful It could be great It could feed it could take care of our fish problems if we figured out how to do it, right Aquaculture could be the way that we can not destroy all the fish stocks We can continue to feed humanity off the fish of the the fruits of the sea But sometimes we don't do it exactly right like for instance in washington state There's been a company for years over a decade really who has been like this company cooks aquaculture Has been set up in the washington state area and they've been uh breeding and raising atlantic salmon In the pacific ocean So they're like, it's fine. We keep the atlantic salmon in the nets. Everything's great They don't mix with the pacific salmon. Everything's fine. Anyway, this is controversial. There was a There was a anti-farming protest that's set for next month and people have been debating this forever but Just this last week They had an incident And I love this headline. I love this headline fish farm blamed the quote exceptionally high tides resulting from the solar eclipse For their net failures And you know what happened 300 000 atlantic salmon spilled into the pacific ocean And now the only thing that we can do is tell the fishermen to start fishing Just go out there fishermen. You are the pacific salmon's only hope Oh my goodness because the why am I not in washington and don't have a boat All right, the the news now is go out and fish for as many atlantic salmon as you can get The washington department of fish and wildlife Basically has said, you know, they're in in they're in the Ecosystem at this point. They're competing now with natural populations We don't know that they can breed the atlantic salmon with pacific salmon, but we don't want that to happen And we want to maintain the pacific salmon population size and the coho salmon population sizes so Get thee to seattle Go fishing Fish on Yeah, there's some if the the math works out of there 305 10 pound atlantic salmon That were released That means there's over 3 million pounds of fish to be caught Oh, yeah dinner for days dinner for days So that's really an awful horrible thing Potentially potentially yes Yes Yeah, uh fishermen of the blue nation have to be atlantic I like why couldn't they couldn't they be doing the fish farm with pacific salmon in the pacific ocean? Like it seems like that was an unnecessary step and I don't understand why but maybe they Maybe it's because you can't get atlantic salmon Right making it fresh atlantic salmon closer. Mm-hmm And you make getting closer and you're making it sustainable But it's the fish that different that you couldn't just use the local population and then just if it got out Oh, well, you know too bad move along move along Yeah, so fishermen are out there fishermen of the lumine nation have already headed out and netted over 200,000 pounds of the fish over this past weekend, but wow The fish have probably already spread over a 60 mile area and are moving past that probably even now and as eric in alaska Says in the chat room. There are worries that they will also reach alaskan waters Yeah, and and and the other thing that I guess that I guess that might be to the benefit of of of of sort of solving this issue is I I have an an instinct as a somebody who fished a couple times That the the the fishery fish might be more likely to take a lure Uh, I you know, I don't know about that. I don't know about that at all It might not be true, but if that's true that might increase the chances of those getting fished first Switch which then wouldn't want to spread that behavior to spread to the other population No, you don't want that at all No, but you know what I want to do right now? I want to say thank you to everyone for watching. That's what I want to do. Yeah Thanks everyone. Thanks to everyone for watching out there. Thanks to everyone for listening out there You're our audience. 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So i'm setting up shop got my banner unfurled It says the scientist is in i'm gonna sell my advice Show them how to stop the robot with a simple device I'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hands And all it'll cost you is a couple of grand Sweet science is coming your way So everybody listen to what i say I use the scientific method for all that it's worth and i'll broadcast my opinion all over the earth It's this week in science This week in science This week in science science science This week in 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 bad understand But we're never trying to threaten your philosophy We're just trying to save the world from jeopardy Week in science is coming your way So everybody listen to everything we say And if you use our methods to roll and i die We may rid the world of toxoplasma Got the eye Cause it's this week in science This week in science This week in science Science science This week in science This week in science Science science I've got a laundry list of items i want to address From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote more rational thought And i'll try to answer any question you've got The help can i ever see the changes i seek When i can only set up shop one hour a week This week in science is coming your way You better just listen to what we say And if you learn anything from the words that we've said Then please just remember it's all in your head This week in science This week in science This week in science Science science This week in science This week in science Science science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science Blair's animal corner. I did, but that's why I brought the moth story. I thought the moth invertebrate sex story would be one that would be appropriate and appreciated by Blair if she had been here, right? Yes, yes. Yeah, fada. I'm going backwards always, right? The fish farm owner claiming the solar eclipse tides. Yeah, they messed up. They messed up. They should have known the tides change. They go up and they go down. And yes, when they're when you have the moon close and things light up gravitationally, there's a little bit more of the pull on the tides and you have a larger tide and it happens. It doesn't happen. You know, sometimes you have a tide and sometimes you don't have a larger tide. It's where the moon is in the cycle. It's just the way it goes.  You don't have an accident like that. Don't blame it on the eclipse. Foolish, foolish. Ed from Connecticut. Yeah, the check code bar fire is very far from far away from Portland. It's massive. It's on the Oregon, California border. So it's about stayed away. But we have been very, very affected by the smoke here for the last week. I know there's more smoke further south, but we've been we've also got we've had a lot of it, which I found very interesting seeing as we're so far north. Oh, the air quality is not not so good. But I do hope that the fire is taking care of I hear the check code bar fire is the biggest, if not one of the biggest in the United States at this point in time. Did I read that correctly? Did I? Did I read it correctly? Oh, somebody is not being nice in the YouTube comments again. Oh, who's over in YouTube? Who is in YouTube hanging out you guys? You being nice. Is everybody being nice? Playing nice talking science over in the YouTube comments. Hey, YouTube. How you doing? I hope everything's good over there in the YouTubes. Yeah, apparently something happened. TVG live is out of there. Everybody's out of there. There's nobody in the YouTubes anymore. Oh, there's my three. But there's my three dots. Who's in there? Oh, cruft. He has been deleted. Nobody's in chat anymore. Nobody's in that chat anymore. Because the science is done. Wait, do we have a ploy to increase viewership? What? A ploy. Yeah, identity four. Oh, the YouTubes. Oh, I love this chat room, you guys. You guys are the best. Always entertaining. Yeah, what's it? Do I miss the after show with the cats? I'll bring in the cats. Erick in Alaska. Yeah, exactly. Catch of the day. It's going to be Alaskan salmon. I mean, not Alaskan. It's going to be Atlantic salmon. Atlantic salmon. That's right. Touch of the day everywhere for a little while. So I saw what? Go ahead. Oh, yeah. Drink more. Your coffee keeps all the East Coast awake longer. Thank you, Whiskey Renegade. Good advice for all those East Coast listeners. Just drink coffee late into the evening. Just drink the coffee. Totally fine. Oh, Fada said there was banning that had to happen because there was harassment in the YouTubes. Well, that's what the were in the tubes. That's unfortunate. Thank you for managing that, Fada. I'm glad we have a nice chat over here. Yeah, identity four. You're awesome. Yeah, in the beginning of August, there were other fires that were going on. There were, yeah, more local fires. So it's a fire at Mount Jefferson, and there was a fire near Mount Hood. Yeah, there were lots of more local fires. And so the air quality was terrible and they were telling, and it was like 100 degrees. So they were just telling everybody to stay indoors. I did not know it was worse at that particular time than Shanghai, Beijing and New Delhi. Oh, my goodness. New Delhi. Oh, yeah. I know that went up there, reported crystal clear skies for it. Yeah. Well, for the eclipse, everything cleared up. It was beautiful. And then the day after the eclipse, the sky was more overcast. We had high clouds and then the smoke came back. It was serendipitous. The clearing was fantastic. Pamoramic.  She's in maybe Nevada right now. Yeah. So she was on the coast recently, right? She's been all over the place. You got to meet Pam. So do tell. How was your visit in person? What did you do? How was your visit? The whole time? Well, she is a three-year-old and her and my four-year-old, her three-year-old and my four-year-old hung out around for a largely part of the time. We hung out like doting parents. When you try to hang out, but really just take care of the kids. Just yeah, you're just helicoptering. But yeah, the kids hung out and got a lot of great. They had a blast. So it was totally successful. That's awesome. The kids hung out. That's good. At least we know that the next generation gets along. Oh, yeah. There will be somebody left to pick up the mantle of what was your, what was the words? Meaningless words. Which is, we used to this show that tackled political issues, but it's become to the point where it's too ridiculous. It's like the, the, you can't even at this point, the fake newsness of everything. Yeah. It's, it's the show is just the show now. It's, there's nothing we need to add to it. No, you're like, just implied. And you're like, and here's the news. This is exactly what happened. Just it folks. I don't know anymore. Now you drink fosters. Oh, that's funny, Pam. Yeah. You wearing, which it turns out, we did a little bit of research. It's that, you know, Australian for beer, which is actually brewed in Texas and doesn't exist anywhere. Oh my God. I got to meet some other Australians. Maybe Pam knows them. Yeah. Cause I'll ask, it's such a small country. I'm kidding. You know, although, although the way the way that this visit came about was a chance meeting at the last eclipse. Yeah. Because of Pamela and Doug's radio parallax. Yeah. Yeah. Doug, I didn't realize Doug was an eclipse chaser. Oh yeah. Yeah. Now, and then I found out cause Pam was like, look at this. I got a picture of the two of us and he has from Davis and KTBS and what? Yeah, that was pretty awesome. Yeah. I love that. So maybe it's a small world than I think it is. Sometimes I'm like, it's so big. And then other times I go, oh, it's so small. Yeah. Kind of like that. It's the collapsing factor of human relationships. It is, it is a big world. It is a very large world. But like when we had, we were in relationships that I get small to Baltimore and we went to some random small gathering of humans small like 30 humans or less that Patrick put together. Yeah, or invited us to invited us to. Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. The music venue, the music venue was one of the voiceover actors from Jack feedback. No, I thought that was so great. Yeah. This is like, how crazy small world is this? I had no idea was even in the area. Maybe it was on the east coast, but it was in a different city and happened to be there. And while my mind was being just perpetually blown by this, Walt had a good explanation. He was like, people gravitate to other people and when you gravitate towards certain types of other people, you're more likely to run into your particular flavor of human again and again. And I think that's a big part of it. I think that that's what I feel like one of the biggest benefits of us doing this show is all the wonderful people that we've met who share interests and are of that flavor that we gravitate towards. This whole technology of internet and podcasting has allowed us to connect to a lot of those people who would be our friends if we were in closer proximity, but scattered about the earth as we are. It takes something like this to be able to run into one another. Yeah. Strengths, there are no videos of me watching the Eclipse. I did a very short periscope right before. I love the picture of you and Blair on that picture. Supposedly looking up at the totality with these long shadows cast behind you in total daylight. We have to do a recreation photo. It wasn't totality here. I'll show you. This was not totality because we're wearing our glasses. If you're wearing the glasses, it's not totality. This was probably about... My guess is it was after. It was after because Blair and I actually were separated. She was with her friends and I was with my friends. Then the eclipse happened, the totality happened, and about five minutes later she called me and she was like, where are you? I explained where I was, and she came and found me. Then we spent some time together owing and owing and doing photos. Okay. Yes. Let's see. Who do I have photos of? There's our not pointing photo. And then there's children with mermaids. Oh, yes. Children with mermaids and photos. Yeah, it was fun. We had a good time. Have I stopped screen sharing? Yes. Yes. Yes. We had a good group of people. We did a... Oh, here's one of my favorite photos. We took a colander. Oh, nice. That's the eclipse through the colander. And all of those little things, each of those, each of them. That's the sun. That's eclipse. That's eclipse. That's eclipse. That's eclipse. That's eclipse. All the eclipses. Yeah. It was fun to do. Hey, child, hold up a colander. Look what happens. It could be a design for a back of a sweatshirt. And this is what my phone did for total eclipse. That's all you get. Yeah, the eclipse was pretty awesome. I want to see my family eclipse photo. This is, I swear, it's like, it should be in black and white and like a 1960s, 50s kind of thing. I love everybody wearing the glasses. And the mermaid. And the mermaid because Shelley had to come along. One day you're gonna have to talk to Marshall about his affinity for this inflatable mermaid. Hello, Marshall. What's up with the mermaid? Here's my son and the mermaid. Pre-eclipse. Pre-eclipse. There we go. Hang in out. Hang in out. Hey, Pam's getting some art of yours. Um, yeah. What? How'd that happen? I want art from Jackson Fly. I don't know. Did you have your show? No, no, it's not yet. It's, you know what? It might be happening in like, or two. When? I don't know. First Friday. Second Friday. It's the second Friday of September. Okay, so next Friday. So, is that next Friday? That's next Friday. Jeez. Not the one coming, but the one after. Okay. Yeah. If not, it'll be happening the month after that. But I think that's when it's all scheduled to go. I haven't got final, final confirmation. But I'm all ready to go hang painting. So, we'll see. Yeah. Oh, whiskey renegade. Right. He's talking about how we were talking about the connectiveness of what we're doing and whiskey, whiskey says this is a bad thing, right? Aren't we supposed to be forcing ourselves to interact with people of different lifestyles? Well, you are whether you know it or not. Get out of the house, everybody. You are, you are interacting with people of different lifestyles. Yeah, but maybe some similarities, some differences. In fact, you're not precluding people with different lifestyles by interacting based on a love of science. Yes. You're not precluding for any of those regular preclusion factors, but people whose interests are similar to yours. Yeah, like you're not precluding me for the love of my cute kitty cat. Look at my cute kitty cat. They're sleeping there with a kitty cat pillow. It's kind of cat themed in that photo. It is very cat themed when they're sleeping and making a little kitty heart to make a little one side of the heart, the other side of the heart, a kitty heart. Did I see Bonnie Tyler singing total eclipse of the heart on a cruise ship during the eclipse? No, I didn't. That's funny. You don't have to watch that, but what I do recommend here, I'll get the, add lip reading, total eclipse of the heart. I've probably shared this before. Oh, literal. This is seriously, man, YouTube, why'd you go and mess with your interface? I'm just going to share it in the chat room. So there's a somebody who did music videos, the literal version. So the music videos, like the song was re-sung based on what's happening in the music videos, as opposed to the lyrics of the song. So it's very funny. One of my favorites. Ed, 2024, go to Mazatlan for the eclipse. There you go. I've seen the little interpretation video before. This one does crack me up. It makes me laugh every time. It makes me laugh every time. Oh, I don't need to forgot a picture with a fancy camera. Ooh, nice. It's a sliver of the eclipse, the crescent sun, as opposed to the crescent moon. I like it. Oh, also our friends in the Baltimore, Maryland area were posting all sorts of sad posts about the overcastness when the, uh, when the eclipse came by. When was that? Oh, in San Francisco? No, no, no. Uh, uh, East Coast, Baltimore, Maryland folks. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they had, they had fog. San Francisco had fog. Um, the, uh, what was the name of Lincoln? Oh, in San Francisco, you should expect that there's going to be, you should have left because you should expect that there's going to be fog. I mean, it's dang near a given. Yeah. Lincoln City, where the, uh, eclipse first hit the Oregon coastline, fogged out. Nobody could see it there. They had to drive up and away from the fog line to be able to actually see anything. Yeah. A lot of people stuck in the fog. You got to think about where you're going as opposed to, that's a bit of a great place. No, no, it's going to be foggy. Yeah. Some of these yelling outside, what's going on? Rob was just in Mazatlan. It's hot there. Yes, it is hot there. I don't know. It'll be April, right? Mazatlan in April, that might be nice. Might not be too hot. The longest, the PAM is posted that they'll get a seven minute eclipse in 2186. I don't think anyone, any of us are going to see that. If any of us see that, that means that there have been some major advances in longevity research. Fo sho. Fo sho. Let's see. Next week, Blair will be back. It will be September. We'll have in the next week, hopefully tomorrow, I will post a pre-order link for calendars so that people can pre-order calendars. And I really liked Ed's question of whether or not a crayon will come with the calendar. That's funny. I like that. I could do that actually. That would be fun. Send you some crayons. Although I don't know if crayons will color on the paper very easily. Pens. Everybody gets one pen. You only get one colored pen to color in the calendar. Is there anything else? It's so funny.  And that osteocalcin story of yours, keep thinking about it. Well, it's a drill down on a mechanism, right? It's that thing that we always hope is a story that's showing in effect without knowing why it's showing the effect. But I was trying to remember. I was like, okay, going back to the early 2000s when I was deep in my physiology coursework, and I went back and I grabbed my endocrine physiology textbook, and it doesn't even have osteocalcin in the back and in the bibliography, in the reference, in the appendix, whatever. So it doesn't even have osteocalcin in that endocrine physiology book. And so looking online really quickly, osteocalcin was really just thought of as like this. It was a protein in the bone, and they were just looking at it like just an indicator of bone turnover. And it's just, I think, more recently that these other roles for it have become elucidated. And so this is totally kind of, this is a new way of looking at it, which is, I find that fascinating. And there's, yeah, like you said, mechanism, but also it just opens up new questions as well. Yeah. And this is also one of the fascinating and frustrating things about doing the show at the same time. It'd be great to 15, 20 years from now, just be like, Oh, hey, did you hear this pill you can take that keeps your cognitive decline from happening? It's just awesome. But to hear about it now, and then know that it's not ready. I know that. Oh, now I'm waiting before I wasn't standing in line. What's about this show is it's like going to the DMV on some of this stuff. You learn about it, and then you got to wait. You have to wait for the actual payoff. But also exciting because you know, what's coming around the corner, you know, what the horizon, what's beyond that horizon. And in that, you can also inform your decisions about, you know, when you're thinking about, we're seeing stories about tax dollars being added to or cut from the sciences, you know the importance of those dollars, you know, the benefit society can reap from them if they're placed there. Whereas maybe not everybody does. Maybe some folks don't know or understand dollars are actually doing for them. Doing so much. Yeah, the I'm gonna not talk about this. But we've got the wrong EPA right now. Yeah. And we've got the wrong a lot of things. We've got the wrong a lot of things, but we definitely have the wrong EPA because there's there's there's folks who influence the EPA who ahead of the EPA saying it. We're already saying mocking connections between global warming and events of severe flooding. And, you know, the severe flooding is a tragedy on a number of levels. But one is ideological. You know, this is a this is it's it's we're we're seeing devastation in a community or even the simple things that as a Californian you take for granted because they're everywhere things like zoning laws, which frustrate developers and homeowners sometimes. Yeah, but the zoning laws and the regulations if they had been put in place or even forced in Houston, there would not be the same huge, huge subdivisions built in the path of their their their flood release programs because there was nobody to say that a good idea. Yeah, not just that though. There's I think it was in ProPublica big article from like 2016 because this flooding is not a new issue. This happens, you know, on this scale, it's massive, but it's unprecedented. But this happens. The flooding happens over and over again, because the development is happening. And it's they're taking over prairie grass land and the developers say it's just grassland. It's nothing there. But really, the grassland, even though you have a foot or two of grass above the ground, the root systems go down over 15 feet below the surface. And by going down so far below the surface, they provide an absorbent area that can absorb massive amounts of water. And when you put concrete on top of it ends it, that's done. There's no absorbing, it's just going to run into the rivers or the creeks and things are going to overflow. And then you have flooding. It's, yeah, it's it's amazing. Yeah, identity for the EPA head came out and said that science should not dictate policy exactly. And while there is some truth to that science should not be the dictator for policy, because we do have to balance politics with, you know, the needs of the people. And so there's always a balance between there's a balance between things, but you don't do things. I mean, when there is scientific evidence that certain actions will cause problems such as massive flooding, you should really take those into account. Science should not dictate policy, science should inform policy. And policy should not be put upon us by dictators. Look, yes, there you go. You know, when, when like at the head of the show, I said this wasn't a natural disaster, it's manmade. These things are predictable. The previous floods should have allowed for plans to be put in place. And they were under Obama. There was this whole thing about when you when you do new infrastructure building, you have to take into account the future environment that this infrastructure is going to be living in, you have to factor in global warming. They shot this down, which means that the federal funding for infrastructure going forward and the Houston, you know, Texas areas won't have to incorporate things like what just happened. It's ridiculous. And, and, and this is this is manmade disaster in that the local zoning laws didn't deter. There are no zoning laws, not the local zoning laws. There aren't zoning laws in Houston, meaning you can put a skyscraper next to a residential home, next to a factory, next to a whatever. And if it's in the floodplain, that also doesn't matter. You know, that's, that's manmade, creating disasters. It's one of those harsh things that like I always have, have, well, that I've in the past at least talked about Haiti. Haiti is a manmade disaster. Haiti is going to have another gigantic earthquake. If it's rebuilt with no matter what dollars without the the regulations and zoning, it's going to have something like San Francisco is based on. It's going to come down again. And maybe with a larger population than last time. So you have to, you have to know what you're doing in this world. And, and the idea that we can keep planning forward, knowing the risks and ignoring them, and then chalking it up to, oh, that was just one bad storm. No, that's not how living in reality works. Now you learn from experience, you say, oh, there's this big storm and it did all this flooding. What if a bigger storm came? Maybe we should consider what we're doing and how we build and what how. What's that whole saying? There's a whole saying that's like kind of popular or famous that it's like, if you don't learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it. Yeah. And if you ignore science going forward, which I can't believe anybody's doing still to this day. You know, these were predicted, the greater flooding was been the biggest prediction of devastation. But what has science ever done for me? Really? What has it done for me?  We need smarter people at the helm. Yeah, especially the area also, some other articles that I've read suggest that it's not just going to be economically impacting the Houston area or just Texas because this region of the country receives a large proportion of our petroleum imports and the petroleum manufacturing processing plants are and also just the processing plants that are there taking in oil from the local producers and processing them, they're offline. So petroleum is going to be affected in a major way, which will affect fuel prices across the country. It also is a big imports port for food. It's an exports port for food. There are things that we send to other countries and that we receive from other countries that we will not be doing. By the way, Houston is receiving massive amounts of humanitarian aid from Mexico right now. Yeah, even though, yeah, it wasn't really accepted. Well, it has been now, it's there now. And one of those things to the wall. Oh, and they've reduced regulations on transport of petrol chemicals during this to try to make sure that they can, you know, you don't have to, I don't know what, have your truck checked twice or three times. And there's a little bit of irony that we're not speaking about, which is that the community or region of the country that is sort of the hub of the fossil fuel industry, which is likely financed, most of the lobbying against global warming is the one being the most impacted at the moment. Did an irony there. Yeah, don't mess with nature. Don't mess with it, man. No way. Mother nature could just spit someday and we'd be gone. Right? Little sneeze. Oops, that was the human cold. Got rid of that. So I just googled EPA news. I'm just going to read headlines. No, no, no, no, no, no. Wait, what? It's okay. Just cover your headphones. For Scott Perot's EPA climate change denial is mission critical. That's from the nation. Trump's EPA claims scientists are politicizing hurricane daily color. EPA says climate scientists trying to politicize Texas storm that's writers. Latest EPA waves some clean air rules due to Harvey. That's in depth. That's a Lana journal constitution. EPA extends waiver on motor fuel contents to apply nationwide to apply nationwide. I don't think it'll hit California. We'll still probably fight it.  Hopefully you agree that the current situation could be a lot better. I find it interesting that they decided to waive the clean air rules as a result nationwide nationwide as a result of Harvey. That's fascinating. I mean, it's like, oh yeah, it's like that's a big storm. We'll just, you know, give everyone a break for a minute. I mean, especially considering Exxon has trouble at its processing plant. It could, they've said that it could blow up. They're releasing large amounts of sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide because of what's wrong. Anyway, yeah, I have a hard time reading the news and the social medias. I go online for the science and for the friends and then the bad things. I'm like, I make me very depressed, but positive things, the positive things. United Way has launched a national Hurricane Harvey recovery fund with starting with one million dollars from Leo DiCaprio and the Leo DiCaprio Foundation and Svaha, the science stem clothing line that we had Jaya Iyer on the show to talk about. Do you remember that interview, Justin? Wait, what was the interview? What we're talking about? The stem fashion, the stem clothes. Absolutely. Yeah, it was the beginning of this month. Yeah, they are donating some of the proceeds from, they're doing a fundraiser donating from purchases to Hurricane Harvey Relief. So, buy some stem clothes from Svaha. That'd be cool. That'd be cool. I think I need to go to bed. It's 10.30. Good night, Minions. Good night, Kiki. Hang out for two seconds with me in an after the after show, Kiki. I got a quick question for you. All right. But good night, everybody else. We'll see you again next week. Hope you manage to stay dry during all of this insanity. And out of the smoke and alive. We hope everyone has, and their families and friends are safe and healthy and able to join us for more science next week. Yeah. And if you're ever concerned that the region in which you live doesn't fit your flavor, come to California or Oregon. Or where we're waiting for you. Where the fires are. We are waiting for you. All right. Good night, everyone. Good night.