Prince is fine. All right, we're moving on. Moving? Yeah, it's not. Oh. I'm just looking at it. It's not that anything. Okay. Everyone needs to chill out. News is great. Don't be misled by the news. No news is good news with Gary Ghanous. Oh, I remember the news. No news is good news also. Hi, everyone. We're here doing a show. I'm not a robot. Are you a robot? I'm not a robot. I'm here. Thanks. We're here. We're so excited to be here to do another episode of This Week in Science to talk about all the science that we can fit in a show from the last week and hang out with you because this is a great time to be together to talk about science. Welcome to This Week in Science. We're going to record the show. It may not be the entire show that becomes the podcast. So this is just the live recording. Are we ready? Oh, I'm ready. We're so ready. Almost. Almost. Almost. Kind of. Let me copy and paste and open that. Almost. Almost. Everybody just sit tight for another 15 minutes and then I'll be ready as well. No. All right. I'll wing it then. After this many years, you better be able to wing it because we're starting the show. In. Who's got clicky noises? Is that Blair? Oh, it's the dog. All mute. He's chewing a bone. All mute. Just mute the dog. Yeah. Mute your dog, Blair. In three, two, this is twist. This is a science episode number 816 recorded on Wednesday, March 17th, 2021. How do Irish eyes? Hey, everyone. I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we will fill your heads with bad air, destruction, and a cosmic shipwreck. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Those who control the present control the future. The current humans are here, but for a short while. When we are gone, the world will move on with new humans. New humans with new ideas, new solutions to old challenges, and new challenges of their own. But we are here now. And the future, even the future we will not be here for, is very much ours to see. While we are here, it is a future we can do something about. We may not feel the responsibility of the moment. We may not be so altruistically inclined to sacrifice work and invest in causes beyond our immediate need. But if we do not act, if we do nothing, we will have no say in how our history will be written. Those who control the present control the future. And nowhere are the signs of what is at stake greater than here on This Week in Science. Coming up next. I want to know what happened every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. It's to you Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back yet again to talk about science. Hey, Happy St. Patrick's Day everybody. Oh yeah, that's why I'm not wearing any green. Something about snakes and Ireland. Yay. Yay. I'm going to keep trying. I'm sure they were perfectly nice snakes. They were just minding their own business. But you know.  We don't need any of those. But I'm sure their ecosystems still would appreciate a few snakes. However. They didn't get them all. No, they didn't get them all. Did they ever have snakes to begin with? Yes, I know. I thought it was because it was everywhere. I thought it was because it was like some island that didn't have snakes. And then there was a story. It's like, oh yeah, you know how that came about. Why, I don't know. There's this guy who like chased them all away. It's not it. They have snakes. We know we have to forget. Top of the show. First question. Does Ireland even have snakes? Yes, of course they have snakes. I don't know this. It has lots of snakes. It's a myth. It's a myth. Okay. Oh wait. Well, there are snakes. They've probably been brought there by other species. Oh, they're invasive. Okay. Okay. So there was. So the myth has its origin in the fact that people who were there who was like, there's no snakes here. And then, oh yeah, let me tell you a story about how that happened. And then that was a myth. And then people had snakes as pets and they got loose and now. Right. So it has a serpent free reputation, but people own lots of snakes and there are wild escaped snakes. But according to mental floss.com, which is a very trustable. Very reputable site has of yet no species has managed to take hold in the wild. Okay. So yes. And then the other the other thing that I found was 3 million years ago when Ireland left mainland Europe. Yes. There were obviously many snakes. But what happened was when the Ice Age came, the cold-blooded critters died out and they have not since been able to get back. They haven't been able to take over ecosystems. Look how good a shoe we do when we just wing it. Let's go. Let's just ask questions and answer them. Let's figure them out.  Right. Is it true? Let's do this. All right. Good. Did anyone save a spider this weekend? I didn't. Well Blair, I'm not even asking you. Kill any spiders. I know I'm trying to avoid that anyway. I definitely did not save any spiders this weekend. It's like, come on spider. I'm going to rescue. No, no. This is my home. I live here. Please leave me alone. I'm fine right where I am. As long as a spider is not like, I don't know, near the head of my bed or in my food, I'm happy with them living in the home because they're getting rid of other yucky things. Okay. Well, this weekend was save a spider day on Sunday. So if you did save a spider on Sunday, congrats to you. That was also in the process of losing an hour of sleep for daylight savings time, which is still very contested as you will see in many media articles and across social media this week, people fighting, fighting for standard time, other people fighting for daylight savings time. I don't know. I think if we could just pick one, it would be a lot easier. Just pick one. Why are we moving around? Why are we messing with our circadian rhythms? Well, it's the circadian rhythm stuff. That's really the issue, isn't it? Yeah. It's not a big deal. Just deal with it. I'm so tired. Still. Okay. Then can we get rid of leap years and can we make all of the months have the same number because it's ridiculous. Right. Let's have 13 months of all the same length. 13 months of the same length. You could also do, because then it's four weeks a month. That's the brilliant one. Yeah. That's the right one. Perfect. Anyway, this is all time related math. And on this St. Patrick's Day, wait, no. Pie day. Did anyone get to eat a pie? We missed pie day on Sunday. I almost didn't eat a pie, but one of my friends magically mysteriously had a pie delivered to my front door. Oh my. Oh, that's great. That's like you mixed sneak a zucchini day, which is also at the kilter. It was sneak a pie day. It was awesome. It was sneak a pie day. That's great. Thank you, JoJo and Heather. All right. So let's get to the science enough with all of these special dates. March is big. There's a lot of stuff going on. We have great stories. I've got stories about Irish eyes and eyes of all kinds, really. And I've also got no womb. I'm sorry. No room? No womb. No womb. We'll talk about that in a few. Justin, what did you bring? I have got a sunken treasure of cosmic design, bad air that is really old, fast food, go figure why oceans are worth protecting and the green acres of the Arctic. Oh, I was going to start singing the green acres green acres where it used to be green land in the Arctic. I see. Okay. Blair, the animal corner. Yes. The animal corner tonight is for the birds. I have a story about birds that can't mate. And I have a story about birds that can't parent. So some, some, some birds with some trouble today. And then also for the quick stories at the very beginning, I have a story about why masks are bad. I mean, they're good. We know that they're good, but they're also bad. We're going to talk about it. Okay. Fantastic. As we jump into all of the science, I would like to remind everyone that if you have not yet subscribed to This Week in Science, you can subscribe to us on the YouTubes, on the Facebooks, on Twitch. You can also find us all podcast players that are out there. I'm pretty sure pretty much all of them look for This Week in Science. So head to our website, twist-t-w-i-s-dot-org. All right. Ready for some science. No womb for the science. Oh. And maybe it's not a problem. Maybe it's not a problem if there's no womb. Huh? What? Is that what you're waiting for? What are you talking about? Why do you keep saying the word womb? We need wombs. Wombs are part of the deal for... But what if they weren't needed necessarily? No, no. No, no. No, no. That's not... Or maybe a synthetic womb. Instead, researchers just published in Nature their work on mouse embryos, keeping alive little mouse embryos for a couple of weeks, actually. Initially, they were trying to grow embryos in a nice embryonic fluid bath, and they were able to keep them alive for about three or four days, but then the cellular development didn't go much further, and the embryos ended up dying. And the researchers played around with a bunch of ideas and eventually realized that they needed to increase the air pressure and oxygen delivery. So they created a mechanism through which they could deliver the needed oxygen nutrients to these growing baby mice. And they were able then to keep the mice alive for up to 11 days to a much later state of development. You know, it's not fancy. It's a bunch of lab equipment, really, and modified centrifuges, modified pumps, moving fluid around, stirring little balls of cells, blastocysts, the hollow ball of cells, the gastrula, and taking them to a point where they actually started to grow organs inside of the cells. And that's when they were created and began to grow organs. This is the first time this has been done. It potentially, for lab research situations, opens up according to a developmental biologist on the Science Magazine website, Magdalena Zernicka-Gretz. It opens new doors by making embryos accessible for a detailed study of many aspects of their development. So being able to not just culture cells up to a certain state, but actually get to the next stages of development without having to go into the pregnant womb, remove these cells, and do that aspect of study, it's going to be a lot easier to push the process of research forward. How is this different from lamb bags? Yeah, so that's a great question. So it's the opposite direction. Lamb bags were for, or are for, we've reported on before, these synthetic wombs that in effect are great for late term births or early term births. So when premature births happen, these lamb bags could be a nurturing nutrient environment. I mean, right now they're called lamb bags because they're being studied using lambs. But the idea is that they would be able to give that womb-like experience to a premature baby that can't survive on its own or that needs a little bit more support for just a little bit longer. So the lamb bags are coming from the end of pregnancy, kind of moving backwards. And this situation is starting from those fertilized cells at the very beginning of development and moving forward. So there in the middle, maybe the two technologies will merge. Yeah. So this is the other thing I'm wondering about this. Is this something that you could use to develop an extinct species embryo? Because generally you find a good vessel, right? So you're like, if I want to make a mammoth, I'm going to put this mammoth embryo in an elephant. And we definitely do want to make a mammoth. And in this case, the vessel is a jar. Right. But if it was a mammoth, it'd be like a really big jar. Well, not at first. It would just have to be transferred to become successively larger jars and then a lamb bag and then a mammoth bag. Right. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. So it's pretty interesting. This could potentially be a direction for also for in vitro fertilization for the, to really make sure that the development of embryos is progressing in the way that you want it to progress before implantation, before actually transferring them to a mother's womb. There are a lot of different reasons this could be very interesting. I mean, in the sci-fi take on this at some point, like you brought up the lamb bag and there's this at some point, it will lead to embryos being taken to full development in some way. For sure. For sure. It'll go there. Can you imagine if this technology was available this moment? Yeah. Yeah. I want to have kids, but I don't want to get pregnant and go through all that nonsense. So I'll just hire this lab. Right. I'll pick up my baby when they say it's ready. And then you wonder like all of the language and the heartbeat and that connection stuff. Maybe it turns out doesn't matter at all. Never mattered actually. Just people like to think it mattered. Didn't matter at all. Could be. I could be very important and we just had no idea how.  No. No. Make sure to shake your baby once a day. Never shake a baby. Talk to your baby in a jar. The more you know, don't shake baby. Tell that jar baby you love it. Oh my God. How is it in there little baby? And additionally like tie on to this news. Child's first words, never knock on the glass. Oh no. You'll never do that again. And a kind of carry on to this is another study that was also or a couple of studies that were published in Nature This Week and there were some preprints in this vein as well related to the study of human fertility. It's been very difficult to to there are limits on studying human blastocysts on studying human cells for ethical reasons.  And researchers at the University of Texas, South of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, they have taken skin cells and they were able to get them to become embryonic stem cells and then pretty much get them with chemicals to turn into the blastocysts, which are the first stage of organs, organisms development. There's fertilization fertilization.  That's the blastocyst after the blastocyst you have this imagination that turns into the gastrola, which is that ball of cells that has like a donut basically. But the the what they're doing, they've created these human blastoids, basically these balls of cells that are able to grow in dishes in the lab that did not come from fertilized egg. Right. They didn't come from that. They came backwards. It was like, here's my skin and now we'll make some things that are very close to what the developmental process is. That basically a cloning technique then? Kind of, yeah.  Does it become viable? That is the question. Yeah. Could that is, could it work that way? And we've got blastocysts. If you then put them into the mouse jar, the baby jar. Can you get them to grow and then to the stage of the lamb bag? Can we get that to work? I don't know. And then and then you're like, I think this person has been very intelligent, very successful in their life. Hey, can I shake hands with you? Thank you. Swaps up. What are you doing? Oh, nothing. Just want to have a successful offspring. Okay, so the researchers state very carefully that these blastoids are not embryos. So they are not, they are, they're not going to undergo those early stages of embryogenesis. I mean, number one, they're not getting the right, they're not getting the right molecular signals. They don't have the right conversations going on at the chemical, the chemical molecular level. They're growing. But they are growing. They're cells that are growing together. Yeah. What are they growing up to be? Yeah, but all countries, a bunch of countries have decided that that blastoids, human blastoids cannot be allowed to grow for more than 14 days, because after 14 days, the question of their viability as a developing human, I think becomes more questionable. But how are we going to know if it could? No, so it's annoying. Yes, there does need to be a cutoff. I think at some point we will all agree. But should it be 14 days? That seems early, but then the argument can go on forever there. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, though these blastoids that are being developed right now, no, they're not going to turn into embryos. They're not going to be able to turn into babies. But this is the kind of technology that leads us in the understanding that will allow this kind of stuff to happen in the future. So these studies that are out today are steps in the path of technologies related to in vitro fertilization, understanding issues with fertility, of being able to foster children outside of a womb, given if there are medical conditions that won't allow you to have your own child. There are all sorts of things that there are use cases and the technologies are developing. It's very interesting to me. Steven Rain in the chat room is asking, could DNA be copyrighted? It is all the time. Sequences of DNA are copyrighted all the time and given patent protection. But the way that it's understood right now by patent law is that you can't patent a person's DNA or an individual's DNA. That is because that's nature. It's just something that was created by nature.  This is biotech all the time. They're constantly patenting adjustments they make to a wild type strain. And then that augmented strain specifically is copyrighted or patented, I suppose. Methodologies are usually copyrighted. Methodologies are usually patented and the sequences maybe are copyrighted. Copyright I feel like is publishing versus using something. I don't know. It is publishing. But also those sequencing services that you can get for your own DNA, don't you sign off a bunch of rights to your sequences to them when you do that? No, you just allow them to do research on them and utilize them anonymously, basically. Okay. Interesting. It's because there's a ton of protections on people's medical files and that's part of your medical file and understanding technically. And so they need to get special permission to be able to even research what you're offering them to research. But it comes with various levels of not being able to connect you to it so they have to separate you and keep you separate from that information. But then they can also share it within a limited scope as well beyond that with other people who are doing research or other companies who are doing research in that same day. All right, Justin, tell me about a shipwreck. All right. Wait, wait, wait. You're going to go ahead with this story. Okay. Who's the headline? Okay, that's right. Hoist to sails when the winds are fair and the seas are smooth, but never mistake smooth sailing for skilled sailors because bigger ships with better crews than the one you are in have sunk beneath these waters. And on one such shipwreck, lost to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea nearly 2,000 years ago, discovered by sponge divers 120 years ago near the Greek island of Antikethera, was a strange lump of corroded bronze and wood that upon closer inspection had a gear of some sort embedded in it. Mystery gear turned out to be part of a larger mechanism, which eventually revealed it operated as a mechanical clockwork calendar with 30 gears and many inscribed discs and even some tiny beads that played a role somehow. It had the 12 zodiac symbols, Greek writing, the Egyptian calendar days of the year, they were kind of, we were talking about like they had 12, 30 day months and then five days that you just did, you got through and you forgot they even existed. You just did those five days. But the rest of the months were all the same. Sounds like a five day vacation for everybody. I was like, this time doesn't count, but we got to do it. If your birthday was on this day, sorry, you don't exist. Researches at the University College London have discovered that it could do even more. So they found that it can show the ancient Greek order of the universe, which is basically what we call the solar system today, the planets. I think they had five planets at that time. This is quoting the lead author, Professor Tony Freeth of the University College London Mechanical Engineering, explaining ours is the first model that confirms to all the physical evidence and matches the descriptions of the scientific inscriptions engraved in the mechanism itself. The sun, moon and planets are displayed in an impressive tour de force of ancient Greek brilliance. So they've kind of worked somewhat off of some past studies. In 2005, there was 3D X-rays and surface imaging enabled them to show how the mechanism predicted the eclipses and it calculated the variable motion of the moon. And it uncovered too that there was thousands of text, thousands of icons of text within the mechanism. Let's see. So about a third of the mechanism has actually survived. They're missing most of it, and that was split into 82 fragments. So there was a big puzzle to put together in the first place. Biggest surviving fragment is known as fragment A. It displays those features bearing pillars and a block. Another is fragment D, which has featured here to unexplained 63 tooth gear and plate. This is a pretty complicated mechanism. Yeah, they found thousands of text characters hidden inside the fragments when they did the X-ray stuff. They found planets moving on rings and indicated by marker beads. And it was this that the team was trying to reconstruct. And one of the things that the X-rays showed from the front cover was something that said 462 years and another that said 442 years. Sort of interesting because that happens to accurately represent the cycles of Venus and Saturn respectively. They actually had calculated the motions of Venus and Saturn. When observed from Earth, the planets have cycles that kind of reverse themselves. They didn't have an elliptical that would go over here and it's going to move back again at some point. So they had to track all these variables over these long periods of time to be able to predict their positions. And they did that through the mechanism. So they still didn't figure it out. Okay, so this is quoting voice from member Eris, Dick and Alice of the research team. Classic astronomy, the first millennium BC originated Babylon, but nothing in this astronomy suggested how the Greeks found the highly accurate 462 year cycle for Venus and 442 year cycle for Saturn. So using some ancient Greek mathematical methods that they had found that had been described by the philosopher Permanides, the team not only could explain how the cycles for Venus and Saturn were derived using that ancient math, but also managed to recover the cycles of all the other planets that were missing and then be able to find them in the mechanism. In fact, after this is David Higgin, who's a PhD candidate member of the team, after a considerable struggle, we managed to match the evidence and fragments A and D to a mechanism for Venus as well that's completely related to that 63-2 gear that was playing a crucial role. The team then created innovative mechanisms for all of the planets that would calculate the new advanced astronomical cycles and minimize the number of gears in the whole system so that they could fit it into these tight spaces. They still have to go back and they still haven't figured out how to truly fully reconstruct this thing, partly because there's a bunch of things missing, but there's also these little tubes inside and these beads will apparently, from the way it sounds, the beads will sort of drop and show like, this planet is now going to be here and we should look for this one here at certain occasions. So it's insanely complicated mechanism. 2000 years old, one of the first, oh wait, the surprise part of this? Somebody's asking, wait, wait until Justin gets to the surprise part of this. I thought that was the surprise. That's the surprise. They could calculate the planets with it. So they had a calendar that was not just a calendar, but a solar, like a solar system, not a solar calendar, but a solar system calendar. Solar system calendar and maybe this is the surprise part and could also tell you when the next Olympics was about to happen. Of course, because you need to be there to start running at the right time. I got to get there at the right time. So did they think that this was a common device or was this something that was like a specialty item that was a one off? So it's a one off as far as history is concerned. We've never seen anything like that. As far as our, I mean, even a description of this is missing. The question is, did the person who had it, did everyone think that they were crazy? So it was in the shipwreck. They think it might have been looted from somewhere and was being transferred. It was on a Roman ship. It's got Greek lettering and it's tracking Greek stuff. It's Egyptian, but it's a Greek thing heading to Rome. It may have been looted from a military campaign. The thing is, we just don't know. We just don't know. There's been nothing else like it or hinting at it ever. I just picture someone saying, I know where the planets will be. And everyone's like, yeah, all right, Tom. Yeah. There he goes again. It's, yeah, it's pretty incredible. Put your weird box away. I say that there's been nothing like it found and that's pretty much true. But there have been accounts of other mechanized sort of robotic animatronic devices. Yeah. That go way back. But have not been found. Yeah. And it's like, oh, that's just storytelling. Then you find a thing like this and go, wow, they had a very complicated understanding somebody did of clockwork gearing 2000 years ago. That's what impresses me is the, the number of gears, the complexity of sizes of gears, the way they interlock with each other, the way they move together. I mean, that in itself is mind boggling to consider the complexity of how they all work together. But I'm not a clockmaker. I've never tried, you know, I could probably deal with a couple of years, but you start putting more together and it raises the levels of complexity. How big was this thing, Justin? Oh, that's okay. There it is. Is that, no, that's not, is that centimeters that it's showing there? Oh, the centimeters for some of the gears. Oh yeah, like 10. Individual gears. Yeah. Which, you know, when you think of making those gears. That's inside the larger mechanism. Yeah. Pretty cool. This thing has been, we've been talking about this mechanism, the Antikythera mechanism, this mystery for decades. People have been looking into this, trying to, what is it? What secrets of the universe does it hold? It's pretty awesome with modern technology and some puzzle solvers, pretty much these scientists who've been working so hard to figure out how it all piece together and figure out the puzzle. And there's still thousands of icons that we haven't really figured out how they play in. I mean, this is also part of the incredible nature of it. It's like, what if it does something else? You know? This is amazing so far. Yeah, it's pretty cool. That's impressive. All right, Blair, do you have a story for us? Yes, about masks. Are you going to badmouth the masks? I am and I'm not. So, of course, at the beginning of the pandemic, we were saying, don't wear masks. Save them for the medical heroes. And then we said, wear them to protect everyone else. And now it turns out all along, they were protecting us too, right? So they're very essential to our safely getting to the other side of this pandemic. And I am not going to say anything to the contrary because masks are essential to that. But let me ask you this. What is the surgical mask made out of? Do either of you know, have you thought about it? Plastic fibers? It's not made of nice cotton, is it? No, it's not cotton. It's not paper. It's plastic. These disposable face masks are made from plastic microfibers. And you can see where this is going. It's an ecological nightmare. So this is a problem because, of course, right now, we are throwing away around 129 billion face masks every month. That's 3 million a minute. But even after the pandemic is over, these are needed for the medical field. So it's not like it just, it goes away overnight, right? Disposable masks are here to stay. And this is a big problem with the medical field in general, right? There's a lot of disposable things. There's things you can't use over and over. There's things that you can't sterilize. There's things that it's safer for everyone if you have a disposable product. But when you look at these disposable masks that are made out of plastic, it can't be biodegraded. But it does break up into small plastic particles. They're micro and nanoplastics. And they are already widespread in ecosystems. There's no official guidance on mass recycling. Plastic bottles, for example, you can recycle, but you can't do that with masks right now. So they are disposed of as solid waste. Even the ones that make it into the trash, which we know it's been a huge problem of people for some reason, just taking the mask off and throwing it on the ground. I don't understand what's going on there. It's like all the other things. Even if you're putting it in the garbage, a huge amount of it will end up in the water column anyway. And so these masks that are made out of micro-sized plastic fibers, they have a thickness of about 1 to 10 micrometers. When they break down into the environment, they release more micro-sized plastics that are easier and faster than bulk plastics like plastic bags to move around and get digested and all sorts of other things. There's actually a new generation of disposable masks coming out called NATO masks. Do you might think that might be better? Ooh, no, made out of nano-sized plastic fibers. They're not even smaller. Yeah, they're smaller than one micrometer. And they also are probably going to be a new source of nanoplastic pollution. So the other problem is, I didn't even think about this, they have build-up of harmful chemicals if you're wearing them to work with chemicals. They have build-up of biological substances like bisphenol A. They have heavy metals in them. And if you're using it to filter out microorganisms like pathogens, then those end up in the water column. So that's all part of this kind of problematic situation with the masks. So what can you do? The researchers who are kind of looking into this, there's no official research yet on the microplastic, kind of the depth and breadth of the microplastics from disposable masks yet, that's in process. But the people who are looking into this have four suggestions for disposable masks. One, set up mask-only trash cans for collection and disposal. Make sense. Then they're not going to fly out of your kitchen trash, right? Yeah. Two, consider standardization guidelines and strict implementation of waste management for mask waste. So that could be a way to maybe recycle them or find a way to seclude this stuff in a safer space. Three, replace disposable masks with reusable face masks whenever possible, like cotton masks, which a lot of us are doing, but that needs to be kind of pushed forward whenever possible. And if you're using the cotton masks, make sure that you're double masking, because that's why they say double mask now. It's not that, oh, you're wearing an N95, double mask with N95s. No. It's just put a couple of cough masks on to really make the filtration better. Absolutely. And the fourth suggestion here is to, of course, consider development of biodegradable disposable masks. It's got to be out there. There has to be a possibility for this. So that's actually the main reason I brought this story is that a lot of people probably thought their surgical mask was made out of cotton or paper, and it's not. It's made out of plastic. And somebody might have a really great idea for how to make a biodegradable mask made out of potato or corn. Wouldn't that be great? I mean, a lot of plastic does come from biological sources. We do have plastics that come from potato, from soybeans, from bamboo floors, bamboo polyester, comes from bamboo. So there are natural sources to the plastic fibers. It's just that there are certain conformation of molecules that leads to the way that they work within the environment and how they don't break down as easily. I'm thinking, though, the thing that they're missing here is using plastic-eating bacteria. We should get some kind of...   It would be kind of hazardous waste disposal at that point depending on... You don't know what has been breathed where or how and so that would be an interesting... Yeah, but a waste disposal company could deal with that. Yeah, so medical labs do that already. They have biological hazard bins that stuff goes into. The specific crew comes and collects and takes away again. What they do with it, I don't know. Maybe it just goes to the dump, but they at least transport it. It goes to a special dump. Yes, a magical, special lab and medical dump. I like the idea.  It's everything in the same place. I mean, I wear disposable contact lenses and so I collect all of the contact lens cases and the contact lenses themselves.  Yeah. How do you prevent cancerous cells from spreading? Why don't you tell me? Yeah. Counter to some... I don't know, woo conspiracy theory ideas that you might hear out there. Some researchers at Ohio State have discovered that electromagnetic fields could slow or stop certain kinds of cancers. When cancerous cells were exposed to electromagnetic fields in the laboratory, they found that it inhibited the cells' cancer cells' metabolism, did not inhibit normal cells, but it stopped cancerous cells from expanding and traveling and growing in the way that cancerous cells like to grow and develop. The researchers think that it selectively works by changing the electrical fields inside these cells that somehow excesses the internal workings of the cell but this is something that is a kind of new discovery based on their work and so they have more work to do for sure. It started more questions. Okay, so one of the things about cancerous cells is they have stopped listening to all the neighboring cells. They've stopped listening to the orders to stop growing. They've stopped listening to the apoptosis orders. They stopped listening to anything other than where in go mode, where in cut all the communication in the outside world, we're just going to grow. Go, yeah. So some sort of disruptive, you might call it, information comes through from this magnetic field, gets through. A normal cell, it's like, okay, what's that? That's noise. Don't need it. That's noise, don't need it.  We have orders! We have new orders! Do something! We can figure out what it is. Like, something finally gets through. So there's a way that that kind of, like, just kind of makes sense. Makes sense to you in a way. But it does also make me laugh because then all these people who are trying to get away from like high power lines and like being afraid of the meter. Yes. Because that causes cancer. Actually, just like when they took the mercury out of the vaccines and the autism rates went up, apparently autism was preventing autism. Not how that works. But you're making up pseudo-science, health, fear, remedy, junk.  Yeah, no, I was thinking about this. You know, it's like all these people who are upset about the electromagnetic fields around high power lines, about cell phones, about all these things. And it's like, wow, if this study has something to do with that and this, to me, this is a very interesting opposite, completely counter to what they're positing kind of result. So. Utsi the Iceman. How old is Utsi the Iceman? Is he a 3,000-year-old? I don't remember. Yeah. 3 to 5? Yeah. High cholesterol. Yeah. He had nothing to do with the modern diet. He was like a 40-year-old man with high cholesterol. It was even normal then. Yeah. That was just how humans have been for a long time. Yep. He just didn't have a word for it. All right. Anyway, I kind of feel like maybe if this work goes further, we'll keep an eye on it and see how these electromagnetic fields end up actually tying into why they affect cancer cells in this way. But I don't know. Maybe there's going to people be using electromagnetic fields as like a cancer force field. Oh, they're going to be using that way ahead of any research development. This is the problem with information. Like, sometimes it's just better. A little bit is too much. Shh. We just found this thing, but we're going to be really quiet about it until we can get more causation. Yeah. Nobody's going to totally misinterpret it and start carrying around a microwave. No. What's that? I'm just wearing my magnet shirt.  But I apparently got it. I went to go get in the car. I think I have too strong of magnets. I couldn't. I got up to the door and now I'm stuck here. How do you turn off a magnet? All right. Tell me about some bad air. Okay. So the Roman word for air is area. The word for bad was mall. Put them together and you get area mall, which is full of suspect air that might be bad these days. Put them together the other way around and you get malaria. Romans believed that bad air of some regions were responsible for the disease that they called malaria. Long thought to be a disease first encountered during the birth of human agriculture when we started grouping together and irrigating and then being around standing water with the mosquitoes. We think this is how malaria first started to interact with humans. But now new bioarchaeological research shows that malaria has threatened human communities for more than 7,000 years. This is a lead author, Dr. Melandri Vloch, Department of Anatomy, University of Otago says this groundbreaking research published in scientific reports changes our understanding of how long humans have been dealing with malaria, which by the way, still one of the deadliest diseases in the world. 2019 World Health Organization estimated 229 million cases of malaria around the world.  This is a very brutal lethal element. Researchers identified thalassemia, which is a thing that you can get. It's a genetic disorder that causes porous bones, can have some very devastating effects. However, for some reason it also offers in the milder form some protection against malaria. Researchers identified thalassemia in an ancient hunter-gatherer archaeological site from Vietnam dated to approximately 7,000 years ago. This is thousands of years before we had the green acres farming stuff going on anywhere. And in this particular region, mosquitoes are common in the forest. So you don't have to have that irrigation pools of standing water scenario for that high degree of mosquito and human interaction. They're present there in the forests. So it's pretty interesting they had used microscopic techniques to investigate changes in bone tissue to identify the disease. They had found it in a 7,000 year old hunter-gatherer site and then they found it again in a 4,000 year old agricultural site in the same region. So then you have two examples separated by 3,000 years. This is Dr. Vlok, quotey voice. A lot of pieces came together. Then there was a startling moment of realization that malaria was present and problematic for these people all those years ago and a lot earlier than we've known about until now. So just a little bit of advice from the past. 7,000 years ago. Diseases have a way of sticking around. So you were talking about how devastating this disease is but that it kind of, how do I put this the right way? It's like when we've talked about on the show how an effective pathogen doesn't have a 100% death rate because it has to stick around, right? And so you can see how if malaria is stuck with us for this long, it's done in its view a really good job of being deadly enough but not too deadly within our population. And that might be why it's stuck around so effectively for so long. And it doesn't affect everybody as badly and I guess if you have access to medical it's not a big deal. A friend of mine from back in the day who's a physicist from India told me he'd gotten malaria a number of times. He was like, oh malaria, yeah. I've had that many times. I grew up with it. Yeah, it was just common in the region he grew up in that people got malaria. That's just the thing that happens. This seasonal malaria came along. She's no flu here, seasonal malaria there. Yeah, it's like, oh Joey's not in school today. Oh yeah, he has malaria. Like, oh god. We know that a lot of diseases, a lot of viruses, a lot of parasites have stuck with us for thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years. I mean there's been research into the herpes virus which goes back as long as humanity has been around and even further. There are diseases that have evolved with us, that stick with us. There are ideas that previous COVID viruses that are now common flu caused major pandemics in the past and then lots of people died and then turned into a common cold because herd immunity and also possibly changes in the virus enough to make coexistence possible. Yeah, some malaria is another one. Been around. At least 7,000 years. At least, probably longer. Probably much longer, yeah. Yeah, because Southeast Asia, that's a pretty early, one of the earlier sites that humans reached. And then there was, Denisovans were already there. Did they have malaria issues? Why not? Were there mosquitoes? Were there biting insects? Were there human-like organisms? Yes, most likely. Okay, Blair, what's a giraffe's blood pressure like? Well, it has to be... That's kind of a funny question. So it has to be really high to pump it up to its head, which is why giraffes don't lay their head down for very long ever, because they'll get just the worst head rush. It's a giant, powerful heart and if they put their head below their heart, they could black out.  What happened? Oh, I kneeled down too quick. Well, researchers decided to dig a little deeper into the giraffe genome to find out more about the genes that allow the great blood pressure and height and behavioral adaptations of giraffes to take place. So they looked very deeply at the chromosome level giraffe genome and compared it with other ruminant genomes. They looked at a bunch of giraffe's specific mutations and found a lot of mutations in a gene called FGFRL1. FGFRL1. And this is a gene related to blood pressure. So what did the researchers do? They used CRISPR to put the giraffe gene into mice to see what happened to the mouse ability to deal with high blood pressure when they had the giraffe genes. So basically they took giraffe genes, put them into mice, and then gave the mice high blood pressure and checked to see what happens. And the mice were like, dude, high blood pressure? That's fine. I can totally deal. No problem. Yes, so these mutations, not just the giant heart of the giraffe, but also genetic mutations have allowed giraffes to actually manage constant high blood pressure. And we might be able to use their mutations or understanding of how those mutations work to help human high blood pressure. Maybe we can find genomic level treatments for people who have very high blood pressure at some point. Or maybe there are targeted treatments that can be targeted at certain receptors based on what we understand about this at some point. I just pictured, yeah, I got a pig heart valve and giraffe gene. I immediately pictured a picture of conference. It's maybe 50,000 to 100,000 years into the future, maybe longer. It's a conference. And as the lights go up in the conference, you realize that somebody's at the podium about to speak and it's all mice. And the mouse is announcing, we have discovered the cure to high blood pressure from ancient... ancient ape texts that we have deciphered. Curing yet another disease that has maleficted mice kind for so long. Eventually, we'll just have immortal mice. Is that the deal? These ancient apes, they spent so much time curing all of Mousekind's diseases. And giving them... giving them diseases to mice. Oh my goodness. Another thing that they found is that the researchers found genetically edited mice did not have... so they didn't have this normal reaction which is a compound ang-2 which is an angiotensin high blood pressure related gene. They additionally noted a sensory trade-off in giraffes. So the genes of their sense of smell were reduced and downgraded and vision genes were upgraded. So there's more... more stuff going on in giraffe vision than there is in giraffe smell. And the researchers hypothesized that this is because giraffes rely on horizon scanning vision from the tall vantage point. And that olfaction at 5 meters from the ground probably isn't as important as it might be for other animals. Well, I mean, and they're not working too hard to sniff out food. I don't think Acacia smells too much. Just leaves. Have you think about how they forage and what they're doing, right? Oh, I see some over there, Bob, as opposed to, I smell the wafting of Acacia leaves on the breeze. Yes, no. But anyway, yeah, big discoveries thanks to giraffes could help high blood pressure. Giraffes and mice, giraffe mouse combos. Anyway, Justin, did you have another story you want to talk about right now? Oh, I did. I have a really fast story. This is the quick, quick, quick, quick, quick story. Researchers in Australia have found that for each new fast food outlet in a region, the number of heart attacks per 100,000 people goes up by four. Team found that the fast food was positively correlated with an increase of myocardial infraction, even after counting for other factors such as age, obesity, high cholesterol, hypertension, smoking, diabetes, associated economic status. All of these things were factored in and while correlation isn't causation, it is a tool used to discover causation. Absolutely, it is. It's a step in the direction of discovery. What? What's happening to you two? I'm trying to see what Kiki's looking at. Is there something on my face? What are you guys doing? I can't see it from here. I don't know. He told me to look over here and so I was like, get it. Is there space in my teeth? A little bit, a little bit. But that's the best story of the week. You know what that is? That's the French fry factor. You think you're blaming the French fries straight off? I am. I'm going to blame the French fries. French fry factor. At least, I'm not going to blame them. I'm not going to blame them. I'm just coining the term right now, okay? You heard it here first. This is This Week in Science. If you just tuned in, we're talking about all the science from the week. Are you enjoying the show? Please tell a friend. This Week in Science. Okay, I'm going to come right back and hey, can we have a little bit of a COVID update? Yeah, I think it's time. Okay, let's have a bit of a COVID update. COVID update. Wee! Okay. In vaccine news, AstraZeneca, that is a the Oxford vaccine, which has not yet been approved here in the United States, although it is under review, has been put on hold in several countries after reports of blood clots following administration. Many of the reports, there are conflicting reports in that some reports say that the numbers of blood clots are not more than would be found in the average population without the vaccine. And others say that the numbers of blood clots are higher than would be found on average and are within a certain timeframe, a short timeframe after getting the vaccine, and so are indicative of however, it's still contested, there's a review that definitely has to take place, but in many places they're talking about potentially just stopping the use of certain batches with the question of whether certain batches, because the AstraZeneca vaccine is manufactured in multiple plants in many different places that certain batches could be bad or having these effects for some reason. There could be differences in how they're being manufactured. There's a lot of questions at the moment, but to put it in perspective the numbers of blood clot effects are still much, much, much, much less than what you would actually expect your chances of getting the virus to be. Yeah, that's what I was trying to find. I want to say it was like this can't be right, but I thought it was like 40 people out of like 50 million Yeah. vaccinations. Yeah. Maybe, yeah. Yeah, so the numbers if you remember there was a brief pause on the Pfizer vaccine when it first was let out and be cut in the UK because of the question of allergic reactions and now we know there are some people who do have allergic reactions and so there's a period of like okay let's watch you to make sure you don't have an allergic reaction and let's keep an eye on that and that's taken into consideration but they're even though it's not happening to a lot of people this is part of the process you want to keep an eye on it and stop something before it does become a lot of people we don't want any of these treatments to become worse than the actual disease Well and you would hope that out of these 40 people or whatever it is such a small number it'd be hard to even point to anything specific but if there was something in common with these people like for example we were just talking about cholesterol like maybe high cholesterol or something like that then you could select for that and say maybe you're not a good candidate for this vaccine. Right and we don't know that yet so perhaps that will become understood and that news will be passed along at some point. But in that as well the AstraZeneca vaccine is also not working against the B351 variant of COVID-19 which is the South African variant which is a special vaccine escape concern yeah so apparently a new paper out in New England Journal of Medicine AstraZeneca it doesn't work against that particular variant so if you get the AstraZeneca vaccination there's a limit to how much it may protect you against future variants and you may be in the next few months you're looking at definitely getting a booster shot of something something else but are you going to say Justin? So one of the confounding elements of this and I get it's been you know great minds are at work trying to sort this out right now but one of the interesting things is there was a correlation of people who had gotten COVID and survived it who then had strokes so I think part of it is just we're looking at very large populations and all of this it's so hard to separate the noise from a signal yeah I guess it was specifically not linked to high cholesterol and this sort of thing so these were outliers which is why it got the attention at this point yeah speaking of variants the UK variant B117 new research says that B117 is up to not only more transmissible but up to 68% deadlier now with 68% more death as compared to other circulating COVID variants but the good news with B117 as far as we are aware based on current testing it does appear to be neutralized there's a slight reduction in neutralization effectiveness but it does appear to be neutralized by most of the vaccines that we are currently administrating so that's good so there's a couple things I want to point out about this that I think is really important for somebody just kind of reading this headline they could see 68% deadlier and turn that into 68% deadly in their head and that is very different he's a 68% deadlier than the virus that we've been tracking that's like 1.7% or something like that so it's higher but it's a smaller number so I don't want people totally panicking over the variant but the other thing I really want to point out is this is exactly this is one of the reasons why even if you got a vaccine you're still supposed to be wearing a mask when you go out in public and this is exactly why is that yes the vaccines still cover by and large the variants however the only way for us to get past these deadlier variants is to reduce spread and the way to do that is by basking even if you've been vaccinated because you might be carrying that deadly or strain and so being able to prevent that from happening is really important and one of the things that is being talked about more and more and we've brought it up on the show here is the difference between a vaccine that is prophylactic in treating the disease versus treating transmissibility and so far what we know is that these vaccines are fantastic at preventing disease and so like you've said asymptomatic transmission can occur however there are researchers looking at viral loads in nasal swabs of people who have been vaccinated trying to figure out how many people are infected and in fact able to spread the disease, spread the virus even though they're not showing disease and so a new study just came out looking at the mRNA viruses looking at people who were vaccinated and it's a broad swath of people they looked at thousands of people to see whether or not they had were capable of asymptomatic infections after vaccination and they found that the mRNA virus the mRNA vaccines reduce asymptomatic infections by 80% after the second dose it's not 100% it's 80% so that's great but there's still risk and this is why the CDC said if you're around a bunch of other vaccinated people you can hang out because 80% and 80% and 80% there's pretty good odds for you right there but that's also why there's all these weird gray areas in the CDC that they said which is like if there's one person who's not vaccinated from one household then you're probably okay but if there's two households of unvaccinated individuals then you don't want to mix those because they're not protected then they get spread to each other unfortunately it's still very gray and so there's still you still have to be really careful absolutely but it's still fantastic news because the terrifying thing would be that everyone gets vaccinated and still carries and transmits and shares this virus you're not getting the ill health effects now because everybody is vaccinated and this you know we're going forward maybe a year I don't know how long this is going to take everybody's vaccinated but the virus is now thriving in a population that doesn't die from it and then a mutant finally comes along and we just jump right back into this again and none of the vaccines work and one of the things about vaccines too is what we've been talking about there are still maybe a dozen or more vaccines that are being developed the ones that we have now are currently being released and their effectiveness is where it is and that's great and so we should all do it now to prevent the spread but we may be also then again a year two years down the road be getting vaccines that are 100% at everything so we may in this arms race against this virus we are now beginning to turn the tide and I think be doing better in the future although I don't like predicting things because I also was like this is probably just going to go away like the flu in the very beginning because it's novel we don't know it might just be and I was really wrong then so if I'm wrong again as wrong now oh shoot I should not predict things I think you're right on the fact that we are going to be dealing with some kind of vaccine for this virus for the foreseeable future and even though you're getting vaccinated within the next six months with the emergency released vaccines you know within another six months to a year after that be ready to probably get vaccinated again there will be more vaccines released you'll want to get you'll probably want to get booster shots there's the reason and the way that this arms race is going to work is with that development of new vaccines Moderna is already testing a new target for a new booster shot for their vaccine so the researchers are always already on this they know there are variants they know what's happening and they're trying to predict they are trying to predict the future because they need to protect us in the future yeah anyway really the evolution viral evolution the immunity and the way that it works at a population level is I mean this stuff is fascinating and if somebody honestly we're going to have more of these pandemics if you're interested in biology, immunology, virology data, genomics viral evolution this is I mean also computational evolution phylogenies this stuff is going to be a big area of study in the future I don't see this going away there's going to be money put into these areas for sure well that's the other thing there's money to be had by going into it because for whatever reason the patents for these vaccines are being held tight is it Johnson & Johnson that's done a is it a non-commercial or there's one of the vaccines that's that's non-profit based there are others that are definitely based profit based for sure it's very each of them is different so in a really tragic having to learn the hard way humans once again despite all of the warnings from science despite people saying despite the bird flu the the MERS besides all these near events like this that we have managed to avoid and then taking the eye off the ball and defunding the observers in the field defunding the research into all of this stuff that takes place maybe it takes something like this to just okay now this is the thing we monitor and research constantly and have that as a true pipeline of funding do that research that does not get caught off or diminished because hey we haven't had a problem for a few years hey all you capitalists who like the economy you don't want this to happen again right pop out and I also I think it's worth mentioning as long as we're talking covid on the show right now that you know we just came across the year anniversary of the shutdown in the United States just in the last week was my anniversary of being sent home from work and when it all started we were saying we can't wait for the vaccine we can't wait for the vaccine we have to figure this out if we wait for the vaccine 200,000 people will die 535,000 people in the United States so important to recognize we thought we were being doomsday alarmists about it trying to give this huge number and it wasn't even a half of what it was before the vaccine came out and we said we can't wait we waited it was more than twice what we thought and so yeah I do think this is a really important reminder to stay vigilant and not let it get here again it's springtime the schools are opening in my area I know they've opened in lots of places and you know it's springtime I mean luckily outdoors is much safer than indoors so I hope everybody safely enjoys the outdoors as we move into our nicer months in the northern hemisphere yeah but it's still here it's not gone yet everyone but let's keep moving but you know what we can have hope I think that's the big thing we can be optimistic it's going to still take time but things will start getting better and I just one last thing because you said I can't remember who said capitalists if you like your business is to be open you need to fund this stuff my begrudging fear is that what this will lead to is to increase taxes for funneling those funds to address the future version of this problem but that they will do the capitalistic version of socialism which they'll create like pandemic insurance for your business so you can pay a little extra in case there's a pandemic you'll be made right and not have to pay taxes which is a weird thing if you think about it but that's how so much of at least the American capitalist system operates is they will opt for insurance versus a social actually fixing something so watch for pandemic insurance to show up let us know if you see it there's going to be there's already a pandemic clause in my new wedding contract so unless it's a pandemic in which case I'm staying far away from you that's a wedding license that's different than you oh my goodness alright this is this week in science thank you so much for listening to us right now if you are enjoying the show please consider heading to twist.org and clicking the patreon link patreon is how we are funded by you our listeners you're our supporters you're the ones who help us continue to do this show every single week we take a few breaks here and there but really we're here every week with you and we love to talk about science with you so can you hang out with us and help us out and help us keep it going by supporting us on patreon head over to twist.org and click that patreon link we really can't do this without you thank you for your support alright coming on back it's that part of the show wait what did you say Blair it's for the birds what you got Blair oh I have the very sad story of why it is tough to be a regent honey eater in Australia so this is a study looking at regent honey eaters over five years tracking how they sing and how they learn their songs oh it is a bird it is a bird the honey eater and their songs the males woo their females with their bird songs tail is the oldest time and they usually learn those tunes from adult mentors they leave the nest before they start singing when they're very young so they learn their bird song from other adults nearby not their parents and so over this tracking of singing ability and breeding success in the critically endangered regent honey eater they found a very interesting change in how they learn their songs they were common across Australia but since about the 1950s their population has consistently shrunk and now there's about three to four hundred of them left very small population on a large continent and so they're spread out and they don't have a lot of population density and while they used to have these big winter flocks when they first went out and started to learn their songs now a lot of them are alone there's not a lot of other honey eaters around and so when they're learning their songs in their first year they don't have anyone to listen to and they learn by listening yes that makes me so sad it's a very good looking bird it's a beauty the black white and yellow yellow and black going in the first very very pretty bird yeah and so over this five year study about 12% of male honey eaters they would wind up producing mangled versions of their songs and they would mix it with other bird species because that's what they heard so they would mix up honey eater song with fryer birds and cuckoo shrieks and all sorts of other birds that have ridiculous names so it ended up sounding wrong and kind of muddled and those unconventional male singers at 12% they were pretty consistently less successful in wooing a mate they're not singing the right song and through selection the females are like I only like this song and you're not singing it so then they're not excited so the kind of avoidance by the females could be a few things obviously they're all based in selection but what is the motivation there why is this weird song a turn off for them so there's a couple ideas one is that they don't recognize them as a potential partner because they don't sound like a honey eater so they're just like who are you stranger or they approach but then the song takes a weird turn it's like using a random word in the middle of a sentence and you're like you okay and so there could be that they feel like they're unfit or they're using their wrong cues or it's not sexy or whatever you want to call it not like you were communicating with a bad AI yes exactly yes this sounds like a trap welcome to my home can I offer you an artichoke what do you mean like a glass of water I don't know anyway here's some fresh tennis shoes my thank you I'm gonna go so there's this weird context thing that's happening that doesn't really work so this is an overarching larger concern when a species population drops that depends on social learning do you lose species knowledge from a population when a population size declines so this could be a much bigger problem that's an important part of looking at endangered species that we haven't really thought about before when population density drops yeah when population density drops do you lose social knowledge do you lose the movement of knowledge across a species so cultural knowledge within species is something that hasn't really been looked at too closely when it comes to declining populations so that's a huge thing now one thing that they actually did to see if there was a way they could fix this problem just experimentally is they took young birds into a captive breeding program and they either in some cases they played male song recordings for them and in other cases they housed them next to adult males and it appears to be working it's very early in the testing but it looks like the these younger males are impressionable enough that they're learning via these next door singers or a tape recorded message so this could be helpful in small bits this could be helpful maybe by putting a speaker out in the wild for some animals that are known to winter in a specific area but it you know it's definitely a band-aid it's not solving the bigger problem here but I mean it's a band-aid but perhaps it would be enough of a band-aid to teach the young males the songs they need to learn so that there is actually more attraction with females for mating which could help to bolster the population sizes obviously some males are the population although they're endangered they're still kind of going even though they're declining so there are some good songs out there there's some good mates out there and if the researchers and maybe this is the kind of thing that they could enlist people to help to put out recorders during the breeding season to put out to put out players speakers to play these songs so that these young male birds can learn stuff this sounds like a citizen science project if I ever heard one but isn't this do you think this is crossed the threshold with 300 individuals yeah it's a small population where you stop just trying to encourage in the wild and you start thinking about breeding programs start thinking about captive preservation and rebuilding like California did with the condor yeah and I think that's actually the thing I just got really excited about is thinking about captive breeding programs so when you're doing captive breeding programs this is a really good wake up call that this needs to be part of the research when you develop a captive breeding program is there cultural knowledge is there social learning happening during the time period of when your captive breeding is happening between when you pull eggs or hatchlings or whatever they are and when you release them into the wild because if there is then you have to figure that in or you are not going to have as successful of a program they might pull a bunch of honey eaters put them in captivity raise them up throw them out in the wild and be like why isn't the population going up right and this is the same the whooping crane the condors very similar there are dances that some birds do and there are some lessons there are some lessons that young birds need to learn from older birds to be successful birds need bird school they do they are so special what is your next bird sad bird story well snowy plovers they are not going to get homeschooled by their mom because their mom guess what she leaving she is out so in snowy plovers females will often ditch out on their chicks so first of all I have to explain why this happens there are equal numbers of female and male snowy plovers when they hatch however males for whatever reason just part of their biology have survival advantages at all life stages these guys live in really tough habitats they breed on salt flats or in brackish inland lakes they have a barren environment that puts huge pressure on them at all stages of life but especially in their parents and they they have temporary salt ponds where they grow where they raise their babies those dry up and chicks can die of thirst or starvation during that time so it's tough to be a snowy plover but on top of that it's harder to be a female snowy plover and so there is a surplus of males when they reach adulthood females than males which flips the script they're more males than females so that flips the script on selection and that actually means that the females have a huge advantage in finding mates and that they can actually play the field because for each female there are several males so it might actually benefit them to try to have families of multiple males there could be a benefit there because there's more males than females so that opportunity presents itself biologically so in snowy plovers it's my instead of my two dads it's my three dads or maybe my four dads right so that exists on top of that let's keep in mind that when we talk about how females put all this extra energy and effort when we've talked about that before a lot of the time we're talking about mammals but these buddies can plop eggs down after a few days and then those eggs will incubate for 20 to 30 days and then they have to be taken care of by somebody but it doesn't have to be the female so actually there is a possibility with birds for the female to lay eggs and leave and there's also a pressure on the male to take care of babies because the females get their pick and so if the females are selecting for males that take good care of the babies in the nest they have the ability to make that choice kind of pick the males who are going to make good dads so all of this to say the snowy plover culture is such that females are set up so that there is an evolutionary advantage to play the field on top of that this is a study from Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany they actually wanted to see what the decision making process was because the females don't always leave sometimes they do sometimes they don't sometimes they leave their babies to be taken care of sometimes they leave their babies to die which sorry that's nature that happens sometimes sometimes they're just cutting their losses and so they wanted to see what the decision making process was here why does the snowy plover leave her nest? and this is also I brought it because it's an uncomfortable thing to talk about because we want to talk about moms as being the ones right they are the childcare giver but that's not the case in humans and that's not the case in the animal world either it's kind of a broad brush that we've used but I wanted to point this out because this is also the thing that we stereotypically talk about males doing in species but this is something in this case the females do so what they showed through this study they would looked at 260 broods over 7 years 70% of those broods were deserted by females chicks from abandoned broods did survive less often than the broods where females stayed longer but part of the reason that that kind of data exists the reason that indicator is there is because broods were also more likely to be deserted at the beginning of the breeding season when there weren't as many resources and when a chick died so it was as if to say I lost one I'm gonna lose them all I gotta go I'm gonna start over there's something wrong with this batch I gotta start over which sounds sounds very blasé but this is part of this is part of nature I'm sorry this is part of trying to figure out how to get your DNA to go right is you have to make difficult decisions and for example boobies they do this crazy thing where they it depends on the type of I think masked boobies actually physically kick out they always have two checks they kick one out pick which one is more likely to survive and they they ditch the other one completely they say I'm putting my resources into this one the blue-footed boobies I believe I'm getting this right just neglect one yeah and it sounds really scary because we want to put our own anthropomorphic stuff on there but ultimately at the end of the day they're trying to make sure their DNA makes it and so it they have to make decisions that sounds scary to us because we're putting them in our own frame but really that's what's happening here yeah I it's interesting we do anthropomorphize and with birds the brains are different and emotions are and decisions are arrived at differently than the mammalian brain for sure but you know we like to say oh it's a tough decision to leave your nest or to you know choose one chick over another but it's very likely just sensory information and the parents are making an instinctual choice you know based on what they see what they smell what they you know what they're experiencing I wonder if if it's actually a more competitive mating environment for the females because there's less of them yeah so so if it's sort of it sounds like a little bit sideways because like why why would they have more competition there's plenty to choose from yeah but to get the good ones get them you know to go if you're in charge of selection you start to prioritize things more than if you're just lucky to find somebody oh I'm just like the numbers the other way I'm just lucky to have found somebody thank you for mating with me I'm going to mate with you and so happy that you even like are here right now that's enough but if you are really being able to be choosy then that drive to compete in the selection process means hey you know what it's not working out I need to get back in the game and before the the blossoms fall or whatever the time of the year it is whatever I need to have a new mate who is ready to go and I want them to be a good one so I need to go out there and select them well and that's the other piece right is who's left who's not tending to a nest because the males are the ones that have to tend to a nest right so if you're you have to start over because you feel like this this set of chicks is not going to make it you have to start over you have to act quickly you also have a very a short you have a short mating season and breeding period so you have you have a ticking clock there before you use a whole year and where was the male bird they left that's their job they have one job two jobs but the second job is watching if it's not going to take care of them then I picked wrong this is not going to be good for the next generation well and this is the other thing so there is it reminded me of the conversation we were having about the COVID vaccine so there is a chance when the female leaves there is a higher mortality rate however there's still a pretty high success rate so it was like it was making me think about okay yes so there's a small group of people who are having blood clots and perhaps they would not have a blood clot if they did not take the vaccine but they're likelihood of dying from coronavirus is much higher or getting a blood clot from surviving corona is also a thing that's been happening since there's no would you be better off without either perhaps but with these two choices the females choice is they have a pretty good shot of surviving with dad I'm going to go try to make sure that I have some chicks that survive to next year that the one thing I know we're not talking about the virus anymore but the one thing about that is that one thing about it so is that I know how to take precautions to void getting the virus once the shot is in the arm the fear is that you don't have control over it so there that's why they shut it down if it's if it's going to do any harm in Denmark I think was the first one to stop all the Scandinavian countries several southeast Asian countries countries trying to delve deeper into it to figure it out but yeah just just not knowing and controlling that's the numbers don't make sense to human those lovers though they're just going to keep mating they're going to keep doing what they do they're controlling what they can and that's cute little exactly is it the snowy plover oh it's the kill deer that drags the arm the mama drags her arm not her arm her wing drags her wings look at me come over here I'm a decoy yes no the snowy plovers are the ones all over the pacific coast that run back and forth from the tide and the reason you can't bring your dog on the beach yes snowy plovers are cute adorable and it turns out their mom has kind of brutal she's a working mom staying home with the kids her job is having a second family she's like I gotta go have another family right now see ya kids good luck it takes to survive pass on those genes thanks everybody for joining us for another episode of this week in science this is this week in science it really is we're talking about science hey are you enjoying the show please tell a friend we love it when you do that this is time now to come back Justin ah what did you bring to talk about uh did I have more stars you don't you do do you you tell me so this is a this is an international team 26 different authors on this single paper including six of them came out of UC Santa Barbara they just published in the journal nature and they kind of looked at the problems that are be setting mankind's future and really did a pretty narrow observation on what what needs to be done to protect our oceans so the researchers identified specific areas of the ocean that could provide multiple benefits if protected safeguarding these regions that they suggest would protect nearly 80 percent of marine species and in by doing that also increase fishing catches by more than 8 million metric tons by having preserved areas where the fish that are getting fished can be free to breed and also prevent the release of more than 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide by protecting the sea floor bottom from trawling which is a destructive fishing practice that I didn't realize contributed that much to to carbon dioxide and to the oceans but it does this is Cody voice of Enrique Salah an explorer in residence at the National Geographic Society ocean life has been declining worldwide because of overfishing habitat destruction and climate change yet only 7 percent of the ocean is currently under some kind of protection and what they are encouraging is even though there's this these specific areas that would be the most useful they know it's going to come down to every single nation country society having to dictate laws over the waters that they control but what they're pushing for is getting to 30 percent for 7 percent protected waters now they want to push it up another 23 percent to get us to 30 percent protection by the year 2030 as the minimum that we need to have any shot at a sustainable future on planet earth so protect the waters everybody we can do this I mean come on we've done so much this year for covid research and it takes focus it takes money but this is something we can do so this is this is something I think about all the time is is what to do about the international waters and the things that you know no one has any control over and actually something that we talk about at home all the time is what if Aquaman was real I'm like it's really it would take somebody who talks about this all the time me and Brian we talk about that Aquaman I miss those conversations specifically the other day he was talking about Namor who I didn't know was but he's like the Marvel version of Aquaman but anyway the idea that like there would have to be somebody with a voice living physically in the ocean to be able to come out and be like you can't use this anymore you gotta go you're being so disrespectful with the space that we live you gotta go happy feet to happen we need that penguin with Robin Williams voice to come out of the aquarium teaching us not to destroy the ocean come on the orca that we're turning fishing boats around and like ruining propellers and like physically pushing boats out of the fishing lanes those voices are being they are raising their voices as best they can for something that you just speak English and Carrie is the point exactly but they do actually have targets that are located in international waters they have areas of the mid-Atlantic ridge the Master Seen Plateau in the Indian Ocean Nazca ridge off west coast of South America and the southwest Indian ridge between Africa and Antarctica so there's other areas that they have pointed to in international waters that are protected would also massively both reduce the contribution to global warming but also create a sustainable ocean fishery for future generations to come you know what would be great actually is instead of anything's allowed in international waters nothing's allowed it's like hey we have no control over the space so guess what you can't do anything but sail through it I like that I like that too no one will agree to it okay what's your last story wait wait a second wait a second that can't be our attitude for trying to address global warming issues and sustainable oceans nobody will listen to it and just move on what is that that's my line by the way you just stepped on that's my take on the show is to be the pessimistic okay anyway this is 100,000 year old DNA was pulled out of the mud of a lake in the Arctic this is I think it's called I think this is Baffin is it Baffin Island yeah Baffin Island which is located in the north eastern side of Arctic Canada sort of right across from Greenland territory of Nanuvote in the lands of the Quikitani Inuit fun fact Baffin Island fifth largest island on planet earth did you know that no because nobody goes to the island because it's freezing cold so they put but they did what they did was they did that sort of environmental DNA thing where they just have sediment and they tested DNA of what was in the sediment underneath this this Arctic lake that was there and they found evidence of a shrub they found a shrub that doesn't grow there in fact the shrub is native to northern Canada some 250 miles south this is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Sarah Cropp Researcher of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the time of the study quoting here we have this really rare view into a particular warm period in the past that was arguably the most recent time that it was warmer than present in the Arctic that makes it really useful analog for what we might expect in the future dwarf birch is the species of shrub that they found it's a kind of a knee high type of a growing thing tends to pop up under the tundra so it's you got the snowy tundra in in Canada there and then the shrub shows up everywhere and it turns things very green it kind of creates a bit of a heat feedback loop and that it kind of the ice around it the snow around it will melt and then it can of course use this water and that's how it survives but it doesn't grow anywhere past a certain point in the southern part of the Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic because it's just too cold Cody voice again this is it's pretty significant difference from the distribution of tundra plants today and that's crump she's actually currently postdoctoral in the paleogenomics lab University of California Santa Cruz so one of the things that you know we're talking about here though is this is this is from 100 116 to 125,000 year old sediment where this shrub was in this location and when we get into cooler periods it normally goes it takes thousands of years as these arcs of temperature rise and fall we're doing things very quickly now so one of the one of the points that this story study sort of brings up is yes there are plants that can survive other places but how do they move there and does like this is something that can survive if the temperature that we're going to see at the end of the century is 9 degrees Fahrenheit 5 degrees Celsius higher than it was the pre-industrial because the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet these are very very achievable does where the plant is now inhabitable for this shrub will it transport will it begin to move if it can't move in time it dies and so this isn't this is just one shrub that has moved has backed off 250 miles of territory but doesn't have another 250 miles of territory to itself that it can live in either it's in this band where the its biome is secure it can function and it can exist so there's this is one specific shrub but the implications of this are for every form of tree and plant life on this planet that if you can see a 250 mile change in territory of its ideal habitable zones that could be absolutely devastating to the oh wait that's right and we should pass the law to get people to but they won't do anything about it so why bother to do my you're following up on it okay that's pretty interesting though that these yeah these plants maybe someday soon the plants of today will be competing against their ancestors no yeah no I mean so the point is like can you picture like having to take like okay all right we have to move the the desert cactus 250 miles north of the plant or 50 miles or whatever like having to like move all of the plants that's a lot of work people we don't we're come on I know humans we're much we don't move the plants plants move themselves we force the situation that's causing the moving of the plants but it's gonna happen too quick for the plants to do it so what I'm saying is if we're too lazy to move all of the plants 100 miles north or whatever it takes we should just stop warming the planet yeah that would be easier it would be it would be easier let's just not do it everybody okay save the hard thing for later you think it was Kennedy who said that we're gonna do the easy thing put off doing hard things to some other time we should do it that way sometimes the easy thing is the right thing why do Irish eyes cry why do any eyes cry cause they're seabed well it's because of your lacrimal glands come on lacrimal glands yes and researchers have decided that yes we need to grow lacrimal glands from stem cells in a petri dish of course we do to understand exactly how they work and what genes are involved this is important to understand this actually it is very important the researchers say that the lacrimal glands and the act of crying the tear production is not really fully understood like so many other things but there are disorders like dry eye and dry mouth that are genetically related that if we could figure out how to treat them if we can understand how these this part of the eyes work it could help out a lot of people anyway researchers took the lacrimal glands from mice stem celled them up grew them in dishes and then looked to see how they grew and whether like really they could grow them in dishes that was the main point of their work was can we grow them outside of an animal and yes indeed they could they were able to get full organ growth they found all the cell types they did have to mix up their chemical cocktail a little bit to get the glands to work but when I say get the glands to work they made these tear glands cry in a dish with the addition of norepinephrine so in case you didn't know chemical signal for tear production in your eyes is norepinephrine now you know so the researchers were able to actually get tear production to occur in a dish then they used knockout technology to knock different genes out to see how that affected tear production they found one gene called PACS-6 completely dismantled tear production tears were not formed the lacrimal glands didn't do what they needed to do it just it was a big shame a shamble no tears the glands had no tears I have no tears for you they said to the researchers well they didn't really but the end of the story is now they have some direction to go in the study of the genes that are related to tear production the development of the lacrimal glands and there is a syndrome which is called Shulgren's syndrome which does result in dry eyes dry mouth and a lot of pain for people because of it and it is related to a mutation the PACS-6 gene apparently yeah so when Irish eyes are crying norepinephrine has been released and the lacrimal glands are producing tears right at the beginning of the story in the end of the story when you're like and did they do it I would just kind of wish you had said no like we should do like a no a no report did they do it? no no it didn't work researchers are studying if they can combine these two elements and create this other thing and it didn't work oh my gosh okay researchers okay researchers who are studying things please send us your no results yes please send us your no results if you're a researcher and you have no results we'll make a collection we'll make an exception one of my best friends got her PhD on a no result send it in yes it was fascinating when I saw her defense and it was very interesting actually but I think that will be a fun episode they were looking at this and they were asking this question and they did all these things and did they find it no well there's no mechanism there whatsoever it's just a correlation oh I can't wait this will be a great episode I love it well because there are I mean honestly there are way more no results than there are positive positive hits are really enlightening ones and all of those do lead to a narrowing it's part of the whole scientific process it's all part of it I've always wanted to do a journal too that was just the no results like okay you spent all the time just write it up send it to us we'll still publish you'll still publish I think there might be a journal of no results by now I think there needs to be a database that's searchable so if somebody was setting up an experiment they can go find that 5 other 10 other people have tried it and it didn't work hopefully at least a consistent no result you've got inconsistently no results but some are consistent no results you see how they did it you can go oh all of them missed trying it this way something you know there's like a whole body of information that's left out of the conversation by not having a database of no results what was tried and how and what didn't work if I may the international journal of negative and no results is a peer reviewed open access science journal that publishes original research papers review articles and essays specifically focus on experiments that produce no positive results and just then Trenton moody was posting that in the youtube chat yes so yeah I mean they definitely you in order if somebody's doing it as a phd or a masters project they have to do a write up and that's that was my understanding from going to this defense was that that does go somewhere and that does benefit future science to have that no experiment so I love that they have that journal and they started doing this because that was not a thing I like the database idea though has to be a searchable database too though and it has to have how the science how the experiment was constructed and when you think about the tens hundreds of thousands of published scientific articles that are out there and there's how many journals of no results when no results are more often yeah well and that's the other thing too is how many people end up having to start over on their graduate work because they got a no result and their advisor wants them to have something that's kind of prettier and a large part of it too I think could just be a database really not about the results so much has less to do with that sometimes than the design of experiment if the same design of experiment has been utilized many many many times you can still look at the thing but you're going to have to devise a different way of testing or experimenting because anyway we need to pull that resource there science rules I'm sure there's something there within science the scientists are sciencing anyhow my final story oh you people with green eyes we're thinking green eyes for Irish but it's not necessarily brown eyes is probably very common for the Irish Justin are you showing off your eyes just a little bit just a little bit researchers at Kings and Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam have identified 50 new genes for eye color so we all not all of us but I mean in school yeah in school I learned genetics using the Punnett Square and dominant and recessive genes for say brown eyes you know big B's brown eyes little B's blue one out of four is blue oh look how that works very simplistic but that gave me my understanding of modern genetics and eye color it's a bit more complex than that just a little bit it was published in Science Advances and looked at over 195,000 people across Europe and Asia hopefully this isn't just a study looking at eye color but will help understanding of eye disease and pigmentary glaucoma ocular albinism as well where eye pigment is actually related to disease in the eye in some way or another additionally they found that eye color in Asians with different shades of brown is genetically similar to eye color in Europeans that range from dark brown to light blue so same genes different shading different pigment really fascinating there yeah so previously there's also green and yellow yellow I have a friend who's got yellow eyes and that's another yeah right and that's definitely unique so how many genes are involved in that and then sometimes have heterochromia so they have two different color dyes right yeah so anyway eye color it's not just two genes as some scientists a long time ago previously thought then it was a dozen genes now it's over 50 genes for eye colors so your beautiful beautiful ocular sockets are pigmented very complexly complexity is beautiful if I may I think there's still certain things that are heavily dominant right within all of that yeah it depends on how they're looped my dad's entire side has these extremely dark brown eyes like so dark they almost look black and I have them and I think that there's something there because all of these bas-dreaches all the way down a lot of them married people with light eyes, my mom has light eyes lots of people with light eyes in that family but their kids pretty much always ended up with these really really really really dark eyes and it's very anecdotal but I think the Punnett score might be an oversimplification but there's definitely some interesting stuff going on there with dominance with the eye colors too just like with hair too curly hairs dominant but you can also have weird mixtures of hair two out of my three kids have blue eyes and you have brown eyes no green eyes I have I have the both both so my pops had blue eyes and my mother has brown eyes they're kind of hazely yeah I was going to say from the abstract for this paper which is in Science Advances they say we identified 124 independent associations arising from 61 discrete genomic regions including 50 previously unidentified we find evidence for genes involved in melanin pigmentation also associations involved in iris morphology and structure and then they go on to discuss the Asian versus European eye coloration collectively they say that their results explain 53.2% of eye color variation using common single nucleotide polymorphisms so there is still more to be discovered if their findings only explain about 50% it's only halfway there there's so much more to find more associations needed more study of eyes let researchers gaze deeply into your eyes maybe maybe not quite have we come to the end of another episode I think we all need to do this come on close wait I want to do this I can't get any closer my camera is not on auto focus look at these eyes we can all now not work in top security forever all eyes on you everyone our eyes are on you I hope all of your eyes are on your calendars and marking them for April 17 Saturday April 17 for the twist DTNS crossover episode science times technology is that when it is did I get it wrong I think that's right yeah so if you if you have something I'm not saying you got it wrong I just anyway yeah we'll talk about it in the after show anyway if you have something that you would like us to talk about related to the cross of science and technology it could be a specific story it could be a larger topic please let us know we're going to tell you how to find us in a second in all the myriad of ways but any of those ways tell us something that you want us to bring to the show yes thank you but mark your calendars more details will come twist DTNS crossover I really for some reason I really want to play it out like are we going to be fighting oh yeah is there a monster trek involved? it's like a monster trek rally but science and technology so it's going to be amazing it's a saturday saturday saturday saturday yes science science science technology it's going to be amazing so much fun yes thank you everyone for listening to the show we are so glad that you were here with us tonight tonight thank you for joining 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I'm gonna sell my advice show them how to stop the robot with a simple device I'll reverse below the warming with a wave of my hand and all it'll cost you is a couple of grand coming your way so everybody listen to what I say I use the scientific map and I'll broadcast my opinion all up this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in science science I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what I say may not represent your views but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan if you listen to the science you may just then understand that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to say everybody listen to everything we say if you use our methods this week in science this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in science science the laundry list of items I want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote more rational thought to answer any question you've got but how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour science is coming listen to what we say then please just remember if this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in science science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science make this dance flair I'm trying to do that not mirrored is insane it's really hard which side am I on? which way do I go? I'm not mirrored I'm mirrored hold on can you get it? there you're like Ralph I'm a rectangle yeah I'm a rectangle we should have we could do a weekly 3 no problem regular drive time no problem man how's your week going? pretty good pretty good pretty good maybe Groot Groot we unpacked the last of the large boxes last weekend which was nice oh nice I went on a very short run this morning the first one since I heard myself so that was good that's nice get back into things that's good I'm 7 days 7 days post-vax so yeah I'm pretty excited about that go antibodies go you got this you got this antibodies you can do this and I got the good old J&J so in one more week I'll be a superhero so is it only 2 weeks? I mean isn't it like after 4 weeks or later even that they say that it kind of continues to get better I had heard 14 days but that's a good question I thought it was like I mean they say 2 weeks but I think there have been reports that even later there are improvements what's the CDC say I like Eric in Alaska thank you for this beautiful picture of honeycomb I also got the shot did you get the J&J shot too? no I got the Moderna Moderna so I got to wait 4 weeks from when I got it to get like that at you and then and then even then there's a waiting period after that before it's considered in full right full effect but already it's supposedly starting working yes yeah I think it was 2 or 3 weeks I know for Pfizer 2 weeks after the first Pfizer shot you're supposed to be like 60% protected but again that was before the variant so who knows so this says Johnson & Johnson 66.3% effective 2 weeks 2 weeks after receiving it and that the effectiveness they're looking at there is any COVID-19 illness at all 66% effective which is pretty pretty amazing people have the most protection 2 weeks after and then 4 weeks after no one has had to be hospitalized with COVID-19 so far yeah so 4 weeks later but yeah that was the number that I remembered was the 4 weeks later yeah I like Steven Rain he got a shot of whiskey I hope for St. Patrick's Day it was a shot of Irish whiskey yeah I don't have any I can't believe I'm out of Irish whiskey on St. Patrick's Day I'm so sad I have a Guinness in my fridge and I forgot to pour it I ended up pouring in a gin and soda and then just like I have I mean I could maybe make like a late soda bread or something I got nothing it's alright I missed out on Pi Day too it's a crazy time I just can't do these things during pandemic there's no yeah so I was thinking out for a second there but I think I got it soda I'm going to be flying on the 15th if everything if everything goes what's the show on the 17th the 17th will be I don't know I'll probably still be in this time zone at that point so it'll probably be just fine are you coming back where I'll have just gotten there so that's good so circadian rhythm wise you'll still be in this time zone so you'll also be fresh off your second dose getting on the airplane way to do math way to do math completely fresh like how many days between you getting the second dose and getting on an airplane three okay you should be fine so here's the thing I was flying anyway I've been flying this whole time anyway the plane is the safest place to be having chills would suck I've had absolutely zero even noticing it's in muscle so it's like getting punched in the arm or something other than that I've had no kind of anything I was convinced I was going to have no response because I've had no response to any inoculation ever really but I did right around the 12 hour mark I just got some started getting like kind of a little bit achy and then I went to bed before I went to sleep I was shivering I took some Tylenol and I was done it was fine and then that was it so Tylenol actually inactivates the anybody no it doesn't that was a whole thing don't say stories like that because everything goes oh by the way you know what Justin said on this we can say that that misinformation was going around which was a good time I just make it up to tell a joke and now it turns out it's already gone worldwide I'm sorry so here's another myth because this is when I had to look up because I was very nervous about this because I have to take a test before I get on that plane like right before I have to have results of a test within 24 hours of getting on the plane oh you were afraid you were going to cut positive covid test from the vaccine from the shot so I looked it up and there is no there is no positive tests from any of the vaccines that's a myth so if you tested positive and you're like ah but it's just because I had the vaccine no it isn't and you got it well that's the thing that's really scary too is like I think there are people out there who you know I was misinformed clearly but there's people who like aren't doing the due diligence to figure out when it's okay to go out and I'm sure like a couple days after the vaccine they're like I'm going to go hang out with my friends it's like no not yet I just had this experience with my family yeah I've absolutely seen it too I just I was just the wet blanket and I am officially the family wet blanket I will be your family's wet blanket also if your friends need a wet blanket I will be the wet blanket I have taken on that role apparently yeah my a family member said oh let's all get together for Easter because the grandparents are vaccinated now and I'm vaccinated and these family members had COVID so they're totally immune and I was like oh funny thing about natural immunity and of course and I'm talking to Marshall and I'm like yeah you know I was really trying to hold back and be nice about it I did he's like he looks and he goes it's funny you thought that was holding back oh my god yeah but I uh yeah so I laid some stuff out there about immunity and how it works and it doesn't work basically that you know your body could have decided to be immune to some other part that doesn't really matter and it could get mutated and oh suddenly you get sick again with COVID this is what happens with the flu different parts change your body doesn't recognize it you're able to get right and I'm like so I explain this and then a few hours later the family oh well maybe we are jumping the gun a little bit maybe we do need to still consider it I'm like thank you please and I was like I'm sorry and they were like it's okay I'm like I don't think you think that but okay well the other thing that I've had to deal with throughout being the wet blanket was people saying I'm already in a high-risk profession so so what's more risk exactly it's basically like if I'm gonna get sick it's gonna be from work it's not gonna be from hanging out with you and it's like what you know why do you have zero understanding like but it's also just like don't you want to mitigate any risk like control the things you can control yeah yeah I think a lot of people also now the vaccine vaccines coming out and people like we've talked about COVID fat fatigue is huge people are tired they're done like some people are like I don't care like just done and it's not a matter of wanting to help anymore they're tired yeah it is so I was reading an article I wish I had all the sciencey words for it but there's all there's an actual psychological thing that happens right now when you have been through this fatigue with no end in sight for the past a year and now there's an end in sight but the timeline for that end is super unclear it's still vague and you don't trust it there's still so much that could go wrong between here and there right and so it actually in some cases prevent creates worse psychological effects which is funny because I have I felt you know I've had like the code of gloomies over the past year in one way or another but I do feel like over the past one or so it became more acute everybody so many there have been articles about it all over the place people are really starting to feel it well and also because like all of a sudden now all of our workplaces are now talking to us about going back to the office and about this being a real thing that's going to happen soon and it's terrifying because not everyone's vaccinated they haven't come up with plans on how to share space they haven't come up with plans on how to you know the HR side of if you're going to work partially from home and partially at work and how that's going to impact your your productivity and all and so many workplaces have expected no change in productivity throughout the pandemic which is also super frustrating so like this new massive disruption maybe you figured out a way to function working from home and now there's going to be another massive disruption and there's going to be an expectation for continued efficiency and it is very scary yeah I'm so the Portland schools are going to open back up and there's two months left in the school year spring break starts next week it's a week long and then there's basically two months left and they're like let's let the teachers have another week to get their selves together to teach in the classrooms and then open the classrooms up and I'm like can we can we not can we just wait can we just just wait a little I mean I know we have a really like our rate of infection is or not yeah not infection but yeah our rate of infection is very low the test positivity rate is very low right now in Multnomah County and that's fantastic but I am concerned about the rush to return to normal because that's how we end up playing whack-a-mole because we have no patients and we have no build ability yeah well and you know plans but like make those plans for like five six months from now like start the slow ramp up but the thing also I have a couple teacher friends who the poor teachers so the funny thing here is the teachers they're gonna they have to rush now to get back into the classroom and by the time they established decor and procedures and some sort of normalcy for their classroom it's gonna be summertime it's it's dumb it's dumb say the word it's dumb it's dumb and the kids and the teachers who finally started to get the hang of teaching online the kids who've gotten the hang of being at home and doing school like and the parents who yes want to go and want to go back to work and have their time again but it's going to disrupt schedules that have become the only consistent thing in this time of chaos and I am pissed that my son's schedule is going to be just thrown away and for two months we have to do this new thing I'm pissed I mean and I I'm pissed at that but then like the fact that the teachers are gonna be doing this I decided not to send Kai back to the classroom because I don't think it's they're only doing like two hours of in-person schooling per day it's not for my schedule it's not worth it for me to disrupt my schedule to take him to school and then have to go right back it's not good for him it's not worth it and the kids the kids are gonna go they're gonna sit in a classroom that's ventilated but they're not gonna be allowed to play together it's just to go to school and look at a computer because they're gonna be on their computers at school right like this whole it's dumb thank you yes it is dumb and we need to stop having dumb people make the controlling decisions of our present this is what screws up our future this is what's been happening that's why this whole thing has been such a whole thing is that dumb people were allowed to make decisions for the rest of us you always have to have somebody making decisions for larger groups of people that's just kind of how it works when you're in society you have people who make decisions that affect a lot of people but what you don't want is for dumb people to be making those decisions and I don't understand why they effectively can't prevent dumb people from making our decisions I don't understand why that is still this difficult in this day and age I don't think it's always dumb people sometimes I think it is it is people who are sick of being yelled at and just want to do whatever people have been yelling them to do so this is something also that like my county went into a new tier the less restrictive tier today and this is very, except they do it they do it the second the second the numbers dropped to where they want them to be their rule isn't when the numbers have dropped and then two weeks later because you know there's a latency COVID so we know there's a two week lag in COVID numbers so when it dips and it stays dipped for two weeks how about then you change the tier you don't do it the day the capacity drops that's because also what do they do because we moved into the orange tier open malls, open bars open restaurants so it's going to happen and if you're color blind you don't even know what tier you're in at any given point what zone are we in are we in the light brown or the other brown it's a little bit so and where is this pressure coming from well I did so parents a lot of parents they did a survey at my school a lot of parents it was like 65-70% of the parents wanted the kids to go back to school 70% of parents don't like their kids it's a higher number than I thought it would be the survey results I was shocked I have to go in there too we have to remember their low income families who are stuck leaving their 8 year old at home on a computer by themselves this is happening that's part of the problem too is that from day one resources for low income families have not existed so if that existed properly from day one then there wouldn't be this additional pressure to put kids back in the classroom it's a place for children to go whose parents have to go work in the grocery store I'm going to tell you that my school district is not a low it's not high income but it's not a low income district and that's not the problem it's parents who want their kids to go back to school it's also because you need to get the kids out of the house oh yeah the kids need to socialize right the kids you need to be able to vocalize your desire to have a divorce and get that fight over because it's been building you were on the cost you weren't sure but now after a year of being forced to live with the person you realized was a mistake that you made some time in the past but now you're stuck with on a daily basis it was fine you came back and shared a meal you didn't talk a whole lot through the week because everybody's got all of these schedules we got to take a little softball game baseball game do the thing now the people have been stuck with each other and they're like I can't wait not to go back to normal I can't wait to leave this relationship I need to get out oh the first step is getting the kids out of the house so you can express yourself at full volume sometimes you're a snowy plover just has to leave the nest just gotta get out you know what there's other birds near the sea I can tell you I watched a town hall snowy plover mama gotta go it was 20 people in a row yelling at all of the city council it was like watching an episode of parks and rec a town hall but luckily because it was virtual they could cut people off when their 2 minutes is up which was very satisfying but everybody was just complaining let the kids play their sports let the kids play their sports open up the schools that was the whole conversation the whole time which I get it's a pretty big deal to a lot of children and a lot of families but also perspective thunder beaver in the chat room says they're so afraid their kids will be all messed up because that's the stigma of homeschooled kids and I think that's a really interesting comment to make because homeschooling has been a push or charter schools and homeschooling excuse me has been a push for a long time in different communities but there is that kind of idea of the lone student not interacting not having social skills it's not okay I have met so many homeschooled kids who are totally fine the thing that they didn't run into they know how to interact with adults but they don't know how to interact with peers they know how to interact with adults who are usually kind and thoughtful when they interact with people generally I know some homeschooled adults now who are homeschooled as children their entire career who are actually they're they're great and there's a couple reasons for that so one is their mother was an actual professional teacher who was pissed off at the school district and quit to homeschool her children right so she was a professional instructor so she was able to get them on that system but the other thing is from day one they had extracurriculars so they still had almost every single day of the week they had groups of children their age that they were interacting with yeah if you so can maintain that then it absolutely does make sense and so yeah it's you can't tell there's no difference but I think that's that's really that's the that's the thing that that everyone's afraid about right now right is that you don't have your social interaction because we don't have those either so I'm just gonna ask a quick question here about the western settlers or the small nomadic bands of people who adventured not adventured ventured into different distant lands as small pods without extensive socialization they you know must have led to completely dysfunctional societies and people like how could any civilization come out of these groups small groups of people who were relatively isolated from others with no communication even less access to others in the world than we have today come on well okay to be fair we're ruined wait a second but to be fair they were all a little bit nuts okay okay there is the nuts and then the others okay another part of this there are people very literate they're very literate but not always not always one of the most amazing accounts of California's first arrival is from the daughter of this guy's like a minor or lumberjack or something I don't think he's gonna try to make farms she's documenting in her diary in like illustrative articulation language of the seas of wildflowers and and how like she's it's like a sea of purple and then there's streams of yellow and then there's an orange and beyond that and she's basically articulating or describing for the first time something that's now lost in California was the pre grasslands when wildflowers filled the valley and and it's also showing like oh there's different soil conditions that these different wildflowers are adapting to it but it's just she's not saying that but she's like noticing that they all these seems to sort of run together in these streams this person who was able to write and didn't have anything to do except look and read looking and reading this is how the world was we were actually in the world we were in and then and the others the other thing I've the other thing I've thought about people saying this year of missing out on school is going to really affect their children's future it's going to affect there are lots of people not gonna make it not gonna be top tier not top tier anymore it's over go start another start another hatch nobody's ever been held back a grade right ever there we go but I skipped a grade before I got held back they were like take backsies it was so I skipped a grade and then I had a year where I was like really sick in the middle of the school year and missed so much school that I couldn't catch up interesting but I had skipped my like I skipped first grade I skipped some year where like whatever it is where they're supposed to teach you how to read and I already read fluently whatever young age that was we don't have anything to teach your child this year because we teach reading and he's reading so we're going to move him up and my mother said oh he'll be the youngest and then by the time I finished school I actually left school a little early but I had both skipped and been held back later so just do the things that work for the student at the time but people have also completely missed out on education because of famine because of war because of genocide there are so many things that have happened around the world that kids have lived through and ended up fine I mean yes with some baggage for sure people make it past and if there's something to learn and a person needs it they will learn it and I just feel it's a false flag that kids are not that this year is going to ruin I'm like and that's the other thing that I keep thinking about is that when we were in school when all three of us were in school I'm willing to bet that what kids are learning at grades are not what kids are learning in their current grades now I know this the expectations for kids are at least in my experience in California the expectations and the watermarks that they use are way higher than what they expected I mean when I was in kindergarten I was learning how to better shapes with my hand they looked terrible but we would spend like two days practicing our A's just drawing an A over and over but kids at kindergarten have started reading some of them and that's why I feel I'm not too worried because I feel like there's plasticity there or there should be plasticity there that isn't there yeah and this is like a very much the extreme version of this tale is the Holocaust survivors who were children at the time you know one of which at least George Sharr's is like one of the richest men in America you know you are not necessarily limited by but could be inspired by I actually have a feeling we're going to get a great wave of people who are studying viruses virology is going to be a thing that is very prescient in the minds of today's youth and wanting to tackle and prevent a pandemic so that mommy's not mad all the time and daddy doesn't lose his job and I'm not allowed to play with my friends because that was awful and that imprint is going to probably give us a great generation of people dedicating themselves to the science of this hopefully how about technology yeah better technology too the generation that survived the 1918 flu the Kansas based Spanish flu was the most pro-science generation they're the ones that were all backed and behind and funded and we'll pay the taxes for going to the moon 100% behind it adapted every new appliance and technology that they could because they believed in science they believed in technology and then at some point we have this weird wishwash in this modern age of just thinking technology is magic and it's just something that's inevitable and it just happens like it's ridiculous how this generation in some aspects treats science and how it is completely reliant upon it on the other I wonder if the time because there are a lot of kids who they're at school doing I mean at home doing their school they're getting their assignments done probably in a quarter of the time that they would actually be spending at school and then their parents might be working and these kids are like okay what do I do now you know maybe they're just on the internet but maybe kids are exploring things that they wouldn't necessarily get a chance to explore otherwise how many new interests and you know new ways of thinking are kids going to have coming out of this that maybe they wouldn't have had otherwise because they wouldn't have had the deep dive or the time to really spend on things the same way that people are like oh my pandemic project we don't really think about you know what are kids doing and do they have that kind of intense time in something in the youtube chat room it's not that big a deal check with any military kid I was in 13 different schools by the time I got to 10th grade some postings are up before the school year is done I wouldn't say that's idealized but it's not idealized but it's kids make it work you learn you do families make it work I have this desire to have kids educated without having to go to school and just getting to do recess and it doesn't work it's still a childhood dream of mine I want the education I don't like sitting in a classroom and recess is awesome there's a way to combine those some day then we will have the perfect educational system I would take classes constantly if I didn't have to do assignments if I could just attend lecture and go to lab if I could do labs and lectures and not have to turn anything in or take any tests I would I would constantly be in school I think that happens I think that actually does happen and I'm going to strawman it a little bit but if you have a parent who is a PhD in life sciences just going on a camping trip or on a road trip or just being in nature you're getting that you're getting lessons without assignment you're getting pointing out hey by the way do you notice how this creature seems to be staying over here and that one is up in the thing and yet they when this one talks the other one looks around when that one talks the other one pays they're paying attention to each other why do you think that is or have you noticed the variation in these leaves what's the benefit of having different leaves like if you have somebody who's pointing out the questions do you go along as a child that is some of the best education because kids love finding solutions you make a kid curious they're going to apply their little antithera brains to it gears will start spinning that's what Kai has oh yeah Kai absolutely has it yeah he does need other very geeky kids to hang out with so much to talk about he does but I've tried it a couple times I've seen Kai I've done like a throwaway comment where I've said something he's like I have three follow up questions like uh oh no I didn't really want to I was just saying the thing he's like no no no but when you said that did you mean this this or this I was like oh you know what I don't know I have to think about it he's going to keep doing your shows man take your kid alright before I teach him bad things come back come back he already has my pin code he doesn't have the card yet but he has the pin code I was just thinking recently actually I'm very curious Kiki do you know if Kai's getting assignments over spring break and this is why I ask because no I don't think so okay good because I'm sure there are some schools out there