I already, I don't know what I did. Okay, as soon as we get the bat signal from the chat room here that we are all set. It's live. Gordon McLeod says Roger. Oh wait, that's a different Roger. That's not right. See, you can't use that one. Roger, Roger. Okay, everyone says we're 5x5. Starting. I'm telling the discord. Okay, and flying out says go, go, go. Are you all ready? Justin says no. Well, I don't care. We're going anyway. Okay, I don't need to be in Twitter. There we go. I don't need to be in there. Okay. All right, everyone. We're going to do it. This is Twis. This week in science episode number 727 recorded on Wednesday, June 26th, 2019. It's the Daily Animal News Show. Today we will fill your head with feet, dung beetles, and neanderthek. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. No matter what, be positive. Yes, life isn't always a bowl of cherries. But so what? You could have a bowl of cherries right now if you wanted it. But you don't. And why? Because of the pits. Even a bowl of cherries has a downside.  And if you have not been positive, those around you will only say that, eh, you didn't really like it here anyway. So be positive, because even when things are bad, they could be much worse. So be positive, because the universe doesn't actually care if you are not happy. So be positive, because it doesn't matter if you are not. You might as well just look at the bright side. After all, there are things to look forward to. And a great number of those things are about to come your way here on this week in science. Coming up next. Good science to you, Blair and Roger. Good science to you too, Justin and Roger as well. Welcome everyone to this week's episode of This Week in Science. Today we have a great show ahead. Dr. Kiki is sadly not with us tonight. She is taking the night off much deserved to celebrate her first day of the show. And as always, thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next episode. Thank you for taking the night off much deserved to celebrate her 15th wedding anniversary. So real quick, congratulations, Kiki. 15 years, yay. And in her place, we are lucky to be joined tonight by Roger Chang from The Daily Tech News Show. Welcome, Roger. Hello all. Thank you for having me. I'm glad I could be part of the show. Yeah, have fun. Do you want to introduce yourself real quick? So just very quickly, I am the producer for The Daily Tech News Show at dailytechnewshow.com. But I am a veteran of cable TV. I worked at ZDTV then became tech TV for six years. Did contract work for a couple of networks, including the independent IFC independent film channel, worked at CNET for a couple of years, Ziff Davis for a couple more years, and then six years at Discovery Digital Networks. And here I am. Yeah, so you've got quite a bit of expertise, especially on the other side of the camera as well. So that's pretty cool. But are you excited to talk about some science news with us today? Yes. It's kind of neat to be able to do that and not have people scratch their heads when I open my mouth. Absolutely. So we are going to jump right into the show. What are we going to talk about this week?  So I have stories about the evolution of mammals, mosquitoes, dung beetles, and frustrated fish. Justin, what do you have? Well, I've got some Neanderthal news, some really big birds, and some genomic dark matters to discuss. Very nice. And Roger, what did you bring? I have the wonderful story of why perhaps running barefoot is a better option for you than having running shoes. And why automation? Well, more news about automation. The good, the bad, and maybe the ugly, I don't know. Yes, absolutely. Those robots are going to take all our jobs. Well, as we jump into the show, I wanted to remind everyone that you can subscribe to TWIS as a podcast and iTunes on Google Play, any podcast portal you know of, Stitcher, Spreaker, Spotify, Pandora, TuneIn, et cetera, et cetera. You can also find us on YouTube and Facebook. You can just search for This Week in Science and find us pretty much anywhere. Or you can just go to twis.org. Now, let's jump right into the science news. What big story did you bring for us, Justin? There are a great many clever accomplishments current humans are responsible for. We have invented a great many things. It's one of our prideful moments. When we look back and look at all the wonderful, crazy inventions that we've come up with. Our list of clever things does have a small section there towards the beginning, where things have been getting crossed off. Stone tools, Homo erectus had those, and maybe even a predecessor of Homo erectus. Ancient cave art, those magnificent paintings in Spain and France. Turns out those were Neanderthals painting those. Fires? Fire, the invention of fire. Neanderthals had fire, and maybe that was pre-existing even Neanderthals. But now another basic clever invention thing has been found. What do we have left? I know. We got the smartphone, and we're going to find out now actually. That was also Neanderthals. No, it's not quite there yet, but it's glue. The use of resins from trees to attach spearheads and the like. This is archaeologists working in two Italian caves. I've discovered some of the earliest known examples of using an adhesive on stone tools. This is a technological advance that was called Hafting. Hafting was previously thought to have been something that current modern humans had come up with. New study, which is Colorado University boulders Palo Vila, shows Neanderthals living in Europe from about 55,000 to 40,000 years ago traveled away from their caves to collect resin from pine trees. They then used the sticky substance, glue stone tools to handles made out of wood or bone, which is just adding to a growing body of evidence that Neanderthals were maybe more clever, not just than we thought, but more clever than the current modern humans of their time. Quoty voice, CU Museum, Natural History, you're listening. We continue to find evidence that Neanderthals were not inferior primitives. We're quite capable of doing things that have traditionally only been attributed to modern humans. That insight, she adds, came from a chance discovery from Grato della Fossilone, Grato del Sant'Ignastio, a pair of caves near the beaches of what is now Italy's west coast. Those caves were home to Neanderthals who lived in Europe during the middle Paleolithic period, thousands of years before the current modern humans had arrived on the continent. They uncovered more than a thousand stone tools from the two different sites, including ones that they put through some tests and found the sticky strange residue, which they then identified as resin from the local pine trees. In one case, that resin had also been mixed with beeswax. They were looking for anything sticky that they could find, I guess. That's great. That takes it an extra step further to me because I think about just sap, right?  That is so hard to get off of your car. It's just the stickiest, most permanent thing I can imagine in nature is that little dollop of sap on your windshield. But to actually mix it with other substances to make something to be used takes a whole other level. I think it might not be realized, but the use of adhesive is a huge advantage. Typically, when early man and perhaps hominids attached shards, whether it's flint or whatever, to a bone or a stick to make a weapon or a hunting implement, that takes time but also takes a certain level of skill. There's little less when you can just say, hey, glue this to this. Hold it there for five minutes until this guy comes by and says, you can let go. But it also makes the tool lighter. It's why adhesives are such a big deal when it came to manufacturing because every bolt, every rivet you add to a car or a plane adds weight, something that you don't necessarily want if you want to achieve efficiency or light weightness. You know what, if you could shave a few pounds, you could carry a few more arrows or maybe you could carry a few more of these weapons or implements with you along for a hunt or whatever they needed them for. And you lose less tools. If you have it attached, you get to, and you can strike multiple times because these weren't, these weren't, these weren't, really weren't projectile hunters.  Otherwise it could run off with your, they were right up in personal with their prey. Yeah.  But like they got the beeswax. I mean, that takes a level of intelligence that, you know, I mean, my daughter wouldn't figure that out until she maybe hits another year. Yeah. And it took, there was, it was processed too. So there was also, it was heated. They would build fires and then create the pitch because they had to boil it down to a really sticky, thick substance. It wasn't just taken from a tree or the bees. Like they had to actually refine it with an extra few steps, including technology of fire to get it to the right thing. And it had to collect quite a bit of it to get enough pitch to hold on something like an axe to a handle. So we have a manufacturing process all the way from the stone tool to the handle to the adhesive, which was far more advanced than anything the current modern humans of the day were doing. More and more of the stories I'm getting from this says that we, current modern humans, more than anything are just really good adapters when we see something else. We don't necessarily have to invent it all. We just see somebody else doing it. Yeah, yeah, that made sense. I can do that too. Sometimes that's all you need. The music industry, if it has taught us anything, sometimes you just need to borrow a pinch and then you got yourself a hint. Yeah, absolutely. So speaking of kind of underestimated past groups of life, I have a story about mammals in the Jurassic and Cretaceous period. So in the Jurassic and Cretaceous period, we think about who roaming the planet and ruling all, it's the dinosaurs, right? And so the historic understanding about what mammals were up to during the age of dinosaurs is this idea that they're these tiny little things, they're shrew-like, they're mouse-like, they're not up to much, they're kind of just biding their time and they didn't really evolve to these diverse diets, behaviors, shapes, sizes until after the dinosaurs died off, after the KT or KPG mass extinction about 66 million years ago, until the space was freed, these niches were freed up for the mammals. But a new piece of research, this was an article published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, looking at the fossil record, this is from University of Washington, looked at exactly what the fossil record tells us mammals were actually up to during that time. So the view of mammaliforms does not stand up to what we and others have found recently in the fossil record, says David Grossnickel, the postdoctoral researcher from University of Washington. So mammals and their relatives actually went through, according to the fossil record, three significant ecological radiations in their history. So in evolutionary biology, we talk about radiation, that's when a niche is freed or something happens where suddenly animals evolve kind of with reckless abandon, nature's just trying all the different possibilities to fill every little empty niche. So for example, when you think about animals, when you think about vertebrates first going up onto land, all you had up there was plants and invertebrates. And so all of a sudden these vertebrates go onto land and they're just trying everything. And eventually things like modern day amphibians, those sorts of things started to show up and really succeed. And so radiation is when basically all these different mutations are being tried out, whatever wins, whatever is fittest, whatever reproduces most gets to continue on. So that's these radiations. So in these three actual radiations that was discussed in this review, they diversified from insect chomping rodent-like ancestors that we think about from the age of dinosaurs and they went into a bunch of different ecological niches. So new species, for example, could climb, glide, burrow, ate more specialized diet of meat, leaves, shellfish, all these extra things and we thought all these buddies were just kind of like hanging out underground, nice and small, nice and simple. So these two of the three actually occurred during Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, which is when we think of as the time of dinosaurs. So the oldest mammal form ecological radiation ran from 190 to 163 million years ago. This was early to mid-Jurassic and this was when Pangaea was first breaking up and it involved the first true mammals and their closest relatives. So there was a pretty big radiation then. The second was around 90 million years ago in the late Cretaceous after flowering plants evolved and ended at the KPG or the KT mass extinction, which was 66 million years ago. Then the Paleocene-Eocene radiation was 66 million years ago right after the mass extinction and ended about 34 million years ago, which was the establishment of major lineages, epocetyl and marsupial mammals. So most likely that's why we assume we're very like current centric in a lot of our history that we write, even when we're thinking about millions and millions of years ago. So we think about modern day mammals. Most of them came from this third radiation. So I think it's very easy for us to assume that everything before that was just kind of waiting to be current mammals. But it turns out that is not the case. So that group was the one that made for marsupials, placental mammals, kangaroos, zebras, blue whales, humans, all the mammals we see today. But there's all this other stuff that happened before that. There's this distorted view of history. You're forgetting about these other groups of mammals that diversified millions of years before that. So this is, yeah, go ahead. So it's also very interesting about this diversification that you're talking about is, this is after a Pangea is breaking up. This is after the polar ice caps are now forming. So we now have, because the time of the Jurassic, we had swampy dinosaurs at the poles. There were alligators in Montana. What's interesting about this radiation is that it didn't need the dinosaurs to be extinct for it to happen. These mammals would have evolved in cooler climates that the dinosaurs would have been retreating from. We would have had all the room that we needed to diversify and have mammals living alongside dinosaurs to today, if not for the extinction of them. Well, if you think about it, we have hippos and crocodiles living in the same rivers. That's not that far off, right? Absolutely. So there is outside of this horrible meteorite thing, asteroid, whatever, striking and causing this mass extinction, there's no reason we couldn't have dinosaurs and man walking side by side today. It didn't require the dinosaurs being removed from the planet to give the niche for mammals. That was coming anyway. I would put some of the, if I could say blame, on popular culture, because oftentimes, whether it was wrongly assuming that cavemen and dinosaurs lived together, you know, cheek and jowl, or something like Jurassic Park where, you know, dinosaurs are the centerpiece of the movie. I mean, that's kind of the whole point. But at the expense of like, well, that was all there was. There wasn't any other life forms during or around that period of time. And there was a huge... I'm disappointing that you go to the Jurassic Park and it's all the mammals. Yeah. And you're like, this is not what I was expecting. Yeah. What do they have to?  You know, there are all these different life forms that sprung out of it because of the climate and the higher density of oxygen in the air. You know, they developed into such a huge range of different shapes and sizes. It would have been kind of cool to see, if not for an exchange of it, what it would look like. Although I'm sure they would have probably shrunk a little bit due to colder climate, a thinner atmosphere for some of the larger invertebrates. And there's going to be... There's something that ties into a little bit to a story that you're going to be talking about later. One of the theories of human intelligence comes from running around on our bare feet that we're not initially maybe designed for walking.  Right? As having visual... Really bad visual. Thanks, you. ...of having forced more blood to the brain from all of the running we did over millions of years as a bipedal creature, which is sort of a rarity to have fleshy feet and be bipedal. The dinosaur with the largest brain, pre-extinction, and considered to be the most intelligent, was sort of like a velociraptor looking thing, and was bipedal and was starting to actually articulate a little bit more upright at the point of the extension. We're living in a world that could have had two sentient beings, both bipedal with the Pangea and the climate change, allowing the mammals to go off and do their thing, and allowing the trajectory of the dinosaurs to follow. We could have two sentient species on this planet. Or you could have ended up with chickens, which is what happened. You could also just take a step back and recognize that modern birds, dinosaurs, not that different. Regardless, we underestimated the mammals this whole time through the Jurassic and Cretaceous period. New fossils, more complete fossils are helping us recognize that they are much more diverse than we thought at those times. So it's time to rewrite the history books again. I feel like I say this every week. Rewrite those, sorry, biology books. I said history books, that's funny. All right, so moving right along, Roger, what did you bring? So this story caught my eye. I got it from the new scientist's site. So the headline is barefoot walkers have tough feet, but sense of ground just as well. And in summary, it's essentially a story of a biologist, evolutionary biologist, Daniel Lieberman from Harvard University. He took a barefoot running about a decade ago when he started studying this whole idea of just running without shoes. So maybe socks, but you're not wearing tennis shoes. You're not wearing running shoes. You're not wearing any kind of shoes. My heartches. Well, it's interesting. His 2010 findings helped feel kind of the craze about barefoot running. And oftentimes in new marathons, there would be occasionally one or two or a handful of runners exclusively, not exclusively, but predominantly from Kenya or other nations that produced very renowned marathon runners. And they wouldn't run barefoot. If you're running barefoot, it's going to hurt. It's going to be bad for you and the rest. But he noticed in his own personal experience that a lot of the pains that he was getting from his joints when he was running with athletic shoes disappeared or slowly diminished when he started running barefoot. And he wanted to kind of figure out what was going on. And he noticed that the calluses on the soles of his feet got thicker. But even as it got thicker, his sensitivity to the ground, his ability to sense the surface that he was running on did not diminish. And he started looking at this and what he hypothesized is that in many cases running barefoot would actually reduce injury because one of the facets of modern athletic shoes is you kind of have a soul that is designed to absorb or eliminate the shock that you get when you run. And the other byproduct is that as you run with shoes, people tend to land on their heel instead of the ball of their feet, which is kind of where you want to when you run. So your foot can kind of flatten them off, take some of the stress out. And what's so fascinating is that it is having the ability to kind of sense the ground that you're running on is so, so important. In fact, he's you know, thinking about looking at elderly individuals who often have difficulty walking and some of that could be due to the fact that they can't feel the ground beneath them because they're wearing shoes. And as you get older, your sensitivity, your nerve endings aren't as sensitive as they were like in your 30s or 20s. But you know, it's kind of cool and it's something near dear to me because as I get older and I'm lifting my kids and I'm running around all the time, I'm walking in dirt. So, so, I mean, it's one of these things we just take for granted. You put shoes on when you go walking and this is like normal to all of us just about now. Millions of years throughout ancestors and evolution, humans traveled the planet without shoes.  While you're at hair, while you eat. It does seem like a crazy thing that somehow we just added to being on the planet that didn't necessarily need to be there. You know, and it's fascinating because there are so many different styles of footwear. I mean, whether it's dress shoes, athletic shoes, lounge shoes, moccasins. And, you know, it fascinates me that there's so much money invested in these things that oftentimes people just kind of like assume, yeah, well, you know, they made it. I can wear it on my feet, so I guess I should go on without really thinking about the implications. Because if you think about it, you spend most of your day, or at least a waking hour, on your feet in some fashion, right? Whether it's walking to work or you're standing in a meeting or you're getting your lunch.    And it's led to, at least Lieberman, considering maybe he wants to base, essentially, further the test to see if you can get through a thin-soled shoe can offer some of the benefits of, say, like, you know, not being able to scrape your feet on walking on a hot pavement, but at the same time giving you enough sensation or tactile feel that you can, you know, feel and you can get your balance. I'm not sure if you've heard of tabby socks. Have you seen those? They're like socks that are designed for your big toe in one little holder and then the rest of it in separate, so you can wear sandals with socks. Oh. I thought you were going to talk about five fingers, those funny shoes with toes. Oh, well, those, those as well. But tabby, tabby boots were quite popular in Japan, Japan for the late, you know, for the last half of the 20th century because for the workers who used them, who went to work every day, you know, whether they were working at the fish docks or they were working in a factory, they could feel the ground. It had a rubber sole. It looked the same way, but it was very flexible and it was designed to conform to the foot, which is something kind of opposite to the way shoes work now, where your foot sorta conforms to the shoe, especially if you have to wear dress shoes, which are very painful for me. High heels, another no-no. The worst.  So this is interesting too, because I recall having grown up a slightly country, having calluses on the feet, being able to go outside and run around in dirt and rock and not having it be a big deal. And now, like, I can't, I can't walk to pick up a newspaper or take the trash out without putting my shoes on. My feet are just fragile, poodle bumblebees of, like, not able to withstand anything environmentally. Okay, now as the native San Franciscan, let me say, I have never walked outside of my home or backyard without wearing shoes because of broken glass, cigarette butts, various types of poop, hot pavement. There's lots of things as a city dweller that I'm trying to avoid. So my question is, what are these running, what are these tracks? Where are they running? Where they can run barefoot and not get in trouble? Oftentimes they run cross-country. Like, so it'll be on trails.  And if you actually run on those, the surfaces are pretty cool because they're actually not, they're kind of spongy, right? They're not just absolutely hard and immutable. You can run and they sort of bounce. It's awesome if you ever get a chance to do it. But oftentimes they run cross-country. They run across trails.   So you're not hopping into McDonald's to get your high-calorie breakfast burrito.  Take care of your feet because they take care of you. Yeah, that is very true. Absolutely. All right. Justin, do you know what time it is? Oh, if you just tuned in, you're listening to This Week in Science tonight. We are joined with, we are joined with Justin Jackson. We are joined with Roger from the Daily Tech News Show and yours truly Blair Basderich. What time is it, Justin? Well, when you first asked, I was going to say it was time to say that. But now that you're asking, it's time for Blair's Animal Corner with Blair. I have, speaking of the poop on the streets, I have dung beetles to talk to you about today. So I want to start by referencing a study actually done related to the one that I'm about to talk about that we talked about on the show a long time ago. So I'm going to talk about what we talked about that one time when we talked about it.  It could be more romantic than rolling a dung ball in the moonlight. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So a new study looked at how dung beetles move when the sun is too high or too low to provide directional information. This is an international research team from Sweden and South Africa. And they wanted to look at what happens when the sun is directly above, higher than 75 degrees above the horizon in the middle of the day, or when it is so low that it provides very little information on which way you are going. Also, when it's cloudy, dung beetles don't know where the sun is, so that is a problem. They looked out in the field and in the laboratory using fans, they created wind. They could select the wind direction, which way the wind was blowing in each test. They changed the sun's position in the sky using a mirror in their laboratory. When the sun is at a low or medium elevation in the sky, the dung beetles change direction by 180 degrees if the sun's position is changed by 180 degrees. So they are definitely using the sun to help identify which way to go with their nice ball of dung. However, they were not affected when researchers changed the wind direction by 180 degrees when the sun was at these elevations low or medium. But when the sun was highest, the situation was reversed. The wind showed the way. Insects did not respond to a change in sun location, but they did respond to a change in wind direction. Yeah, so they use their antenna to register wind direction. And so they can use these different kind of vector information pieces to find their way through their habitat with their pile of dung. Yeah, so this is the first study showing an animal using their biological compass where they integrate different directional sensors. In this case, wind and sun in a flexible way. This enables the highest possible precision at all times, says Marie Dach, professor of sensory biology at Lundi University. And she was the lead researcher. And we call it a ball of dung. But of course, the beetle refers to it as their stuff. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And it also keeps their tutsis cool when it's too hot on the ground, which I absolutely love. It's like their own version of shoes. So this is their proof that these teeny, tiny brains and these dung beetles have dynamic principles that adapt to conditions at any given moment. And so this combined with what they know about the Milky Way and polarized moonlight for them to find their way means that there's a lot still to learn about these quote-unquote small-brained animals and how they handle large amounts of information to make decisions. Their next plan is to go on to study whether they can also use the wind at night. I'm guessing yes. Another aspect they're curious about is what guides them when there is no wind and it's cloudy, which is a great question. So they say this has implications for robot development and artificial intelligence because it's incorporating a bunch of different pieces of stimuli from the outside world to kind of navigate. But I think more than anything, it's just a reminder that we're not that special. This is what I always end up talking about in the animal corner, right?  We think that we are these ultra-smart animals that can process all of this special information with our very large brains with lots and lots of folds. But in reality, animals have a pretty hard life and they have a lot of things that they need to figure out in a given day to not die. And in order to do that, they have to be able to process a whole lot of information at once. And I am in no way surprised by this finding, but it's cool to know that they use the wind. Pretty neat. You're making this correlation of animal intelligence between humans and a thing that makes its home in a giant ball of dust. But I'm thinking, what is a mortgage?  And there's an island in Denmark that is made up in most entirely of Asia. Oh, see, there you go, frozen poop. They are just recycling the gifts that the world gave them.  Detroitivores are in many ways my favorite animals on the planet because if they weren't eating poop, there'd be a lot more of it. So thanks to Detroitivores and scavengers and all the animals that eat things that we don't want to eat. Very important work. But like, you know, more to the case of the story, I mean, we can learn a lot from the way they operate. I mean, we used to, I mean, we still do, we researched birds to find out how they find direction, you know, whether they have an internal magnetic compass, dolphins, whales, other migratory animals, because it's important to understand not just for the benefit of the animals for ecological preservation, but, you know, we want to build intelligent systems that do this. I mean, back in the day before GPS, a lot of the automated flight systems we had relied on radar and the Air Force before then relied on something called stellar navigation, which sounds super awesome, because it sounds like it's, you know, from sci-fi. And essentially it was a system that looked at the stars to figure out where it was. It was very much of the, I'm using a sextant, but it's in a computer and the plane is sort of kind of figuring where it's at. It's much better now, believe me. But it's, all these things have been around for millions of years evolved through trial and error. You know, I'm sure the dung beetles that didn't have this ability were quickly eating up couldn't get their ball of dung where they needed it. And it's fascinating because all this stuff, we want to do it in a machine.  It's just awesome. It's just really cool because, you know, even these small creatures and, you know, yeah, they're not, you know, they're not writing out a new season scandal or anything, but, you know, they're getting by in a very cool way. Yeah, and if you can find that a dung beetle can do something that you thought you were going to have to model a dolphin brain for, that's actually a lot more achievable as someone designing AI, a simple neural network to a very complicated one. Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. This is something that could be really helpful in finding neural network function for other AI. And if you don't want to say dung beetle, you can say scare beetle too. Yeah. So it's a little more sophisticated and polite company. I prefer dung beetle. So to an animal that people like even more than dung beetles, I have a story about mosquitoes. Oh. It's a story that probably no one will enjoy, unfortunately. I have some bad news for you all. Wait, there's worse news than mosquitoes natural activity? Yeah. Agricultural pesticides are making some mosquitoes pesticide resistant. Oh, that's fantastic. I got eaten alive last year. I stopped wearing shorts for that reason. I live in Southern California. Oh no, you poor thing. Stay inside with the air conditioning. This is a study from Utah State University. They found that there were pesticide resistant mosquitoes, colonizing habitats that had reduced numbers of predators and competitors due to the pesticides used in that space. Extensive analysis of aquatic invertebrate communities within tropical bromeliads found that invertebrate biodiversity was reduced when exposed to pesticides. Makes sense. But the bromeliads from areas with pesticide use had higher densities of mosquitoes. Our toxicity bioassay showed that ababala, which is the mosquito species, from agricultural areas had 10 times demethylate tolerance, so that's the pesticide, compared to non-agricultural mosquitoes. Combining the toxicity experiments with field observations gave us a better understanding of possible mechanisms driving community patterns across landscapes. That's Jen Weatherhead, the main researcher. So they found that the mosquitoes were getting to be resistant to the pesticide. At the same time, the pesticide was destroying all of the other invertebrate life in that space, including their predator, the damselfly. So those two things together mean that the mosquito populations could explode in those areas treated by pesticides, both in laboratories and in field experiments. This happened. And thank goodness, because we're talking about agricultural areas, we know now that mosquitoes are pollinators. If you've eliminated everything else, you have eliminated the thing that will do the pollination. And the fact that the pollinators are a major player in that category is going to thrive now because they've become immune and their niche has opened up means great things for plants and flowers in the future. Go mosquitoes. Or you could just release a whole lot more damselflies who will eat mosquitoes in that space. And then, yeah, that won't be good for the plants. I don't know. This is a clear example of the law of unintended consequences. Absolutely. I really want to get rid of these bugs that might be eating my crops. That's certainly a relevant complaint. But at the same time, it's like ladybugs. They eat the aphids. You don't want to get rid of the ladybugs. You don't want to get rid of the bees, because they pollinate everything. When you hose everything down, that's one of the consequences. It does suggest that perhaps we need to examine better ways of pest management other than just liberal use of chemicals. We're in the danger of running into those is with all the bee colony collapses and bees being essential. 80% of the bees in America come to California at some point to pollinate the agland. If the bees aren't hard enough and we discover at some point that mosquitoes are tough enough to do the job, you're going to have mosquito hives. 80% of the nation's mosquito hives brought to California to pollinate the fields. I'm saying the fact that we can make food to feed the population will be more important industrial wise and famine prevention wise than the fact that everyone will need to not go outdoors anymore because mosquitoes will have the air.  The female ones do bite you. I don't actually know which one is the male.   Male mosquito doesn't bite people. It sucks, it pollinates flies. You're totally right. Male mosquitoes never bite and the females need the protein and blood only to produce eggs. So the normal food of adult mosquitoes is a good factor for plants. To be fair, Gary Larson also often showed cavemen alongside dinosaurs and claimed that cigarettes are what actually killed the dinosaurs. Oh yeah. They all smoked. Yeah, they did. Well something smoked. But it's, yes, no. It's, again, it's, you know... I remember when everyone I remember seeing the films where DDT was liberally spread around families and children to get rid of those nasty mosquitoes little did we know that they would affect aviary reproduction as the same same time point though I think when kids were like kids would go to a science fair and dip their arms in mercury right metal rolls right off yeah it's fun times oh my god well anyway on that note for progress we are going to progress into our break stay tuned for more this week in science we're going to take a quick little break and we will be right back did you know that twist has merchandise you might enjoy you can go to twist.org and buy some of our swag we have a link on our website that goes directly to our zazzle store so at our zazzle store you will see all sorts of merchandise with the twist logo on it you will also find some merchandise with some of my art from previous calendars that we've done so you can go check out our zazzle store go to twist.org click 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with us now live or later in the future listening we hear you we could not do this without you thank you for being here with us and we're back with more this weekend science my phone didn't recognize my fingerprint but now it's time for this weekend what has science done for me lately so Roger we have been doing this segment on the show for almost two years now maybe more than two years we did it actually yeah I think around early 2017 we started this when science was maybe not getting as much positive energy as we thought it deserved and so now every week we asked somebody to send in a story of what science has done for them lately to make sure we are giving science our props every single week recognizing how important science is to our lives for fun for health for everything so now I'm going to go ahead and put you on the spot and ask you Roger what has science done for you lately oh this this really is a spot um it could be big it could be small it could be anything it's it's it's relatively small but I would have to say the impossible burger and beyond meat now one of the things one of the things as I've learned as I get older my weight increases and my girth expands ever so slightly that garden metabolism slowing down yeah you know I gotta be aware of the red meats no things like that but I am a I am a fancier of the burger so I was a little skeptical at these claims that they've created not only a taste and texture comparable to a burger but something that you know I would you know blindfolded I wouldn't be able to tell so back at CES at the beginning of this year the electronics consumer electronic show hell trade show held in Las Vegas we went to a little um not exposition but a little area that was dedicated to food uh innovation and what they had on offer the impossible burger and I have to say I was pretty impressed I said to Tom Merritt the the host of the Daily Techno Show if these were offered like as normal patties like every day that I could afford I would totally eat these instead of burger like actual red meat and uh I have not very often I will add um trying to cut down on eating in general but uh no yeah they think they're actually more calories than the meat burger but I yeah they are delicious but they are very delicious and you know I'm not going to say that you know you're going to eat one and turn into you know uh Atlas um you know Joe Atlas on the beach you know you know impressing people with your biceps and six back but uh you know this does bode well for the future of alternative meat products but also sustainable food that you can have that people will you know generally accept as a as a replacement I think it's great I don't think it's you know this is the solution too but it definitely points to the direction I mean they got the hemoglobin taste you know that little blood metallic taste that you get meat yeah so I myself have never had a hamburger in my whole life uh but I recently had an impossible burger and I did think it was very tasty very hearty it was a very interesting texture I enjoyed it uh yeah so lab made food uh is a is a wonderful wonderful thing uh it is it is that that it is tasty because because it's the future anyway yeah so my goodness I'm glad it's tasty because they say that even just cutting down one meal of meat a week is a huge impact on carbon so even if you're not saying I'm gonna go vegetarian if you're just saying I'm gonna replace one hamburger a week with an impossible burger that actually makes a huge positive impact on our environment well I mean you think about the amount of water and land you need to raise a cow yeah right and even a even even raising hogs like if you if you're big big into pork and there's nothing wrong with pork but those animals put out a lot of effluent right and and to the point where in certain areas around the carolinas where they have huge hog hog far raising operations the water is actually kind of gross for the fish in it and so you know having something that you can eat and not feel and not have that impact would be great and you know before then I mean you know people used to make fun of like the tofur key and like you know the only cool thing that came out of NASA's space program was tang and freeze-dried ice cream uh at least in the food sense but I mean it's it's kind of cool I mean you know when people think lab grown food you know they think of weird you know uh uh sci-fi movies where people are eating food have a you know toothpaste tube uh or something ridiculous and this this does show that it's possible to have something that's tasty you know for the most part nutritious uh and and definitely uh something that can be manageable for most people I think yeah and the thing though is uh bioreactors or however these become developed are still going to use a lot of water and resources there there really actually is a one better solution which is just going straight to insect eating yeah actually but but people are still resistant it's all the lab food before they'll eat crickets I get it all marketing the thing is like most bugs actually don't taste like much right if you've ever accidentally swallowed like if you've ever been in the fields like I grew up I didn't grow up but I spent I live seven years in the central valley uh during yeah we eat bugs every day oh yeah it's all over the place you open your mouth in the orchard you're going to get a fly or something um and you know that's not something I'm going to be proud of like oh I'm a fly eater but uh you know you know in in Chinese culture eating eating walk-fried crickets isn't considered weird at all it's a snack and all it does is take a little bit of clever marketing like for example um I had an idea of growing like alive scorpions as as an alternative uh to lobster and you just call them land lobsters right you just yeah I mean really if you think about they're just land lobsters uh sure they're you know maybe a few generations lobster minis yeah oh yeah who wouldn't go for that right and you just they have the little then they have that little bite you know with the venom perfect I mean people go out of their way and pay hundreds of dollars to eat fugu the poisonous puffer fish because the meat is so delicate but just a little bit of the liver and yeah oh my gosh that's part of the fun yeah well anyway amazing developments in food and meat replacements is a great what has science done for you lately thank you so much for sharing remember everyone we need you to write in and let us know what science has done for you lately as listeners what does it do for you every day if it's been a while since you wrote go ahead write again update us give us something new it could be small it could be big leave us a message on our facebook page facebook.com slash this week in science or you can email your submission to dr kiki directly I just became uh kiwi for a second kiki finch at gmail.com oh no kirsten at thisweekinscience.com I'm reading old copy um we want to fill this segment of the show with something from our community every week let's keep going we don't want this segment to guy die send us what science has done for you lately write us in all right Justin tell me about bird bones so i'm gonna have to come back to the bird bone story because i'm having some technical difficulties oh no and in store instead i'm gonna give you uh geneticists exploring the heart of the human genome uh so there's this there's this thing called centimeres they're in the middle of centromeres they're in the middle of our chromosomes uh they are sort of the in the anchor area that the fibers are pulling chromosomes apart when cells divide they're kind of important to do understanding what happens when cell division is taking place going wrong or uh working naturally the dna of the centimeres contains a lot of repeating sequences which apparently has given some scientists um a difficult time in mapping the region reliably so justin i'm just gonna cut in real quick and let you know that we did talk about this last week oh you did yes but you can give us you can give us a quick kiki brought it you can bring us a quick review about it and just tell us kind of your thoughts since uh maybe we didn't talk about it the exact same way uh basically what i was going to say is this was done at uc davis yes uh which is a pebble's throw away from me uh you could spit at it yeah uh if they need it sequence reliably they should just call oh yeah absolutely but so what happened with the centromeres real quick since you since you teased it in case nobody didn't hear it last week uh case there's tons of neanderthal in there so basically it's it's very heavily um conserved over a very long amount of time was kind of what we talked about last time so it was really interesting because it was kind of a time capsule in your genes from a very very very long time ago and it included neanderthals yeah like actually huge chunks of it uh that's that was sort of the incredible thing that the because we've talked a little about how little neanderthal dna is actually uh there there was in this in this study at least there was a consider amount of neanderthal dna in a very conserved uh region in fact in chromosome 11 they were talking about half of groups at the brides 700 000 to a million years ago uh being present in this dna so this is this is some really ancient dna it's uh persisting in current humans and uc davis needs to it's gonna be a call if you're having trouble with repeats i'm gonna program we can take it well and it's a good it's a good reminder about that whole braided stream thing right so you have these centromeres which are these highly conserved parts of your chromosomes and if they have these bits that are very very very old and very very very conserved but they are from neanderthals before when we thought we may have interbred with them then that means that there are these big chunks of chromosomes that were given to us from than neanderthals which is not necessarily because it can actually be common ancestors as well so this is the whole braided stream thing we we have the same it's uh you know when we're talking about uh divergence that's about the divergent time too so it could also be indicating that the common ancestor of neanderthal and current modern humans is is is what's been conserved and that we both maintain this but then then why would it show up specifically as neanderthal dna and that and distinct from ours if it was from a common ancestor exactly so so it must not uh it must not persist in african populations is the only is the only out right so then it is it is something that could still be an ancestor but when you're talking about like things like like you know uh haplogroups or things that are getting passed down it could be that means it was a different ancestor than the ones that ultimately led to the neanderthals but still could be from the same ancestor i see interesting but i guess we're already about all right i'll keep diving and my technology i have i have uh the the bird story i will bring in a few moments in a few moments okay so in the meantime roger do you want to tell me about how robots are stealing my job yeah so uh we we covered this uh story from a very tech angle um uh this uh earlier today on on dtns but it's very interesting um so oxford economics it's a firm that uh evaluates and and produces reports on economies um did a study and they calculate roughly 20 million manufacturing jobs around the world uh could be replaced by robots automation by 2013 however that said the amount of increased automation will also boo job creation and its economic growth now here's the bad part that's going to be applied unevenly right so not everyone will benefit from the from the largest of automation and improve productivity uh so they they figure out at least um every 1.6 manufacturing jobs uh uh all right go to mommy and close the door behind you well one of them be a um bed tucking robot because yes i hope so i hope so um i have to do this silly i need you to go i'm so sorry that's okay no no no no this happens it happens all the time on this show because everybody except for Blair has kids uh but she's working on it and they always get involved in the show at some point hold on let me do this go you can do that all right uh that was my daughter she's uh very fond of seeing what daddy's up to uh but roughly 1.6 manufacturing jobs for every robot uh will be taken um unfortunately regions where people tend to be lower skilled that means uh more uh more more manual types of work uh that require less education or less skills uh skill development will tend to feel the impact more in other words more of those jobs will go and the jobs that they could go to things like truck driving construction maintenance and office those jobs are next on the list of things to be automated uh and so kind of the the synopsis of this whole thing is we can see this coming down the pipe we need to develop some policies that allows to transition those people over whether it's skill retraining finding new jobs or you know some kind of in between uh where people just aren't left i mean because we've we've experienced something very similar with the industrial revolution a lot of people from agricultural agricultural backgrounds moved into the factories uh and you know that whole shift was not easy you had riots you had labor strikes you've had you know labor business relations you had all these things that happened if anyone remembers the grapes of wrath as a as a this kind of foretelling of of kind of that shift where agriculture became kind of a diminishing pool where people could work um and so yeah shadowing was a bird of prey eating a turtle was that the foreshadowing moment never something else which wait for the grapes isn't it that it's like the classic example of a foreshadowing in literature was like this possibly i don't remember it because i read it 15 years ago yeah high school was a long time ago oh high school jeez i would have to crank the time dial back even further but i won't because i'm old um but it's it's a very fascinating look that automation is kind of a thing that's happening now it's not happening across the board it's not like you will be replaced by a robot jobs that will stay are ones that require human intuition human judgment creative aspects something that you can't easily automate so even things like certain levels of programming computer programming will eventually be automated through machine learning right you know stuff stuff that requires how are things like putting together plumbing or or any kind of carpentry those skills might still remain because there's a certain level of skill that can't necessarily be replaced so you said computer programming might get automated certain certain types of because i know they have a lot of uh programs where they take people like coal miners for example that are out of work and they teach them how to code and and things like that sound very promising but if if there's going to be automation even in that field that there's some concerns you know when people say coding they imagine it's all very sophisticated and and but a lot of it's back in database stuff which is which which can be automated because there's a lot of stuff that is very typical about it it's it's the more it's it's the more creative stuff things like games or or perhaps a video editing suite or something or or even larger databases that require a lot more complicated kind of comparative databases that need to do a little more you know intelligent work it's not to you know it's not that all coding is smart or all coding is dumb like everything else you know someone someone who's a carpenter isn't the same guy who just nails together two two-by-fours right you know a master carpenter is doing more than just that yeah and uh the important thing is also people's skills aren't fungible right just because you're really good at being a a phd doesn't mean you're going to make a very good computer you know a computer developer or a coding developer and vice versa someone who's worked in the mines you easily just can't transition them into another type of work just because so is there is there a canary in the code mine at this point is there something where we can see that this is already worked and humans got where we're irrelevant to the coding of a thing um there's they're starting especially with machine language and kind of developing uh models that this is where it would happen it's where you need to create something that doesn't exist yet but you just can't re you can't repurpose an existing code base because it's either too large and wieldy uh for example if you just needed to maybe uh create a database for i don't know you say you you run a store that sells antiques and you need certain aspects of an antique database that you for some reason can't do in visual basic machine learning would be able to kind of like okay we'll do all this or think of your taxes filling out your taxes you know you have software that does that your machine learning can automate it to a point where they just keep asking you questions and automatically fills it out for you so it's it's we're at an in-between stage we're at a transition stage and a lot of what was being uh kind of reported on is that you know this this is coming it's not here yet we should develop ways to kind of offset or mitigate the the impact this would have on on large populations of people you I think that the last thing that that the automation AI would be trained to do would be to write automation because you would think that the person no no it wouldn't be it would be like oh I could teach the AI to automate on its own oh you know what then it wouldn't need me yeah at the very least that would be the thing where they would stop and say no more well it wouldn't be automation writing automation just be I mean you know like not all code you know some is a code could be as simple as like every time I type the type my name it shows up in in my Twitter my Facebook or whatever like you know like Hootsuite does all that all at once um yeah you know it depends and not you know it a lot of this stuff will not be directly affecting people on a day-to-day basis but it will affect for example a lot of the jobs at the outsource coding jobs at the outsource overseas tends to be a lot of the kind of more rote more repetitive stuff that more more skilled programmers generally don't want to do because it's not considered challenging in the same way that hey you know your world renowned chef here go work at this mel's diner and slap me up a couple of burgers and a and a grilled cheese sandwich I mean yeah it's all cooking but on a certain level there's a difference in applied skill and creativity but can we agree though maybe that the the goal is to automate every job well see you you have this is the thing you can't automate every job and that's what they're saying is like things that require human to intuition creativity tend to be safer like education I feel pretty safe education teaching people is actually is is is one of those things that people think you can you know just program and people will learn from a screen and that's okay but we were we were at the Santa Fe Institute and one of the speakers there is developing AI to write movie scripts right based on the history of oh yeah I've seen I'm not I haven't seen that but I think I've seen something very similar about writing like fiction or something and it's very obvious right I'm sure at some point it's currently but you know but but then again what is it doing it's getting rid of the low level jobs of TV writers who basically steal plots from other shows and they change the characters and it's that you're no longer a cop your PI and you're no longer in LA you're in Houston and it's not a murder case it's a it's a bigamy case or something like that and then you know your whole thing is that you have your your allergic to peanuts and you know like you know it's like yes you basically madlib yeah exactly that's what a lot of those things do and it actually looks like it's funny it's very yeah so which you know the blockbusters a lot of those are based on the personality of the celebrity that that is the writer that did it right and so that's part of why people participate in certain creative endeavors is because of the people behind it I don't know if someday AI will be writing that stuff and then someone up front will pretend to take credit for it but ultimately I feel like that's part of the human experience that's important to mention here is that people want to invest in people there's a reason people use the checkout line with a human instead of the self-checkout line it's because they feel more comfortable talking to a human that because I'm always buying alcohol and you can't do that in a cell that also you know and things like healthcare right you know you don't want to you know I know jet you know I know there are companies in japan developing robot nurses but really you don't want to robot like it's time for your bath and you know you get these you know even if it's soft robotics and they have a very gentle touch it's kind of awkward right I don't know I'm still dirty here I just watched I'm I am mother on Netflix so I'm very if you get a chance and you have Netflix you should see it but it covers a couple of those bases it's very interesting maybe we should all oh go ahead but if I mean eventually like automation is the that's like it's not even outsourcing it's not immigrant labor that's taking anybody's jobs we've we've automated so much of the work that we used to do yeah that no longer exists and and and we got pushed with the idea was we're going to do service jobs and everything else and then Amazon came along it's like well I guess we're not all going to work well you know the thing is you know it's the whole fallacy of there's a lump of there's a lump of labor there's only there's a fixed amount of jobs and as we've gone gone through uh life we've learned that people need different things over time right so um things like who would have thought that you know you right you could you know take your car out and become a pretend taxi you know for for a couple hours in the evening um I mean gig economy is part of it but I think you know there will be different jobs that will be needed uh as as a lot of these technologies develop like you know not everyone needed a butter churner back in the day and now you don't need it because you get everything but it's not like a butter churner suddenly lost her job and remember the original computers were people right if you ever watch the movie hidden figures when they're running all the numbers that's what that's who computers were and then we turned them into computer and then we turned them into digital computers same thing word processor back in the day a word processor was a person who typed for you into into into a computer and so that became a something that got eliminated was through software uh spell check you know you get a dictionary you don't need that who we put all those dictionary publishers out of business oh what was that what's the uh what's the encyclopedia Britannica yes they that was a that was a gig oh you could be a professional encyclopedia doordor sales boarder door everywhere in the world hey you need this for your kids education now that just wait 10 years there's going to be a thing called wikipedia in your set yeah yeah perfect um well maybe it's time for us all to give up like zebrafish i have a story about what it takes to give up giving up is actually a very important thing for animals to be able to do because at a certain point animals need to know when to stop a behavior that's not working and stop needlessly depleting energy to figure out what exactly in our brain makes us give up a team of researchers put zebrafish in a laboratory experiment where they were in a virtual reality system swimming they removed the visual feedback associated with movement to the fish so to to those fish in that moment it appeared as if they were drifting backwards regard regardless of how hard they swam first the fish thrashed harder and harder and then they simply gave up this is from Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Genelia Research Campus and so to figure out exactly what neurons are responsible for the decision to quit they watched zebrafish brain activity as they struggled but their clearest signal wasn't coming from neurons at all the cells that sprang into action just before zebrafish quit were glia long thought to play a supporting role in the brain so glia until about two decades ago were thought to just provide support and installation for neurons glia is from the greek for glue so they really just thought it was brain glue recent research has begun to ever uncover new roles for glia in processing in this research they showed that zebrafish had one type of glial cell that calculated when an effort is futile so their original hope was that they would find neurons driving this give up behavior but instead they were able they were able to identify specific glia a glia called radial astrocytes they're shaped kind of like a star hence astrocytes those amped up in their activity in one part of the brain when the animals stopped trying to swim neurons were involved each time a movement attempt failed certain neurons revved the astrocytes up so they were connected kind of in symphony till last they crossed a threshold and sent the quit command but the glia were definitely the most active during that time to tell the fish when to give up the glia monitored movement attempts noted repeated failures and then set the quit message to the body to verify their role the researchers first used a laser to kill the only ones that consistently turned on when the fish gave up in fact fish who lacked those glial cells continued struggling to swim longer than the fish who still had astrocytes next they created fish with astrocytes the team control switching them on the fish stopped swimming even when the visual environment wasn't messing with them well fish rarely pause fish with overactive astrocytes spent over over half their time languishing in defeat just totally without hope taken together these experiments confirmed the radial astrocytes control the decision to stop swimming the next step for the group will be to study exactly how they communicate with neurons astrocytes can for example release chemical messengers that affect neuron behavior one of their lead researchers says astrocytes are like a swiss army knife so they want to identify which of their many tools they deploy to halt unproductive struggle so are these are there similar features in the human brain like would they be able to scan you and say you're a quitter we're going to cut some of these out so you'll be a winner potentially although that might kill you if it doesn't make you oh if that doesn't kill you you'll be a winner right so i feel like yeah it's it's difficult to figure out exactly how much this has to do with just the normal function of life like if you push a door and it doesn't open then you try to pull it is that not gonna register suddenly are you just going to keep pushing the door second option well i'm wondering if it also is related to things like clinical depression where you're just always feeling kind of lost and like it's not gonna you know because it would be it would be super helpful uh to be able to see diagnose uh that if there's a way to you know maybe you know suppress some of them not all of them but suppress some of them you know help people get on uh get on a two feet situation yeah absolutely that's that's so interesting i didn't even think about that um yeah it definitely could have implications for human mental health if we figure out exactly what the astrocyte is up to i mean in general since we've been kind of ignoring glia for almost two decades and now all of a sudden we're starting to recognize how many different things they could be responsible for there's all sorts of opportunities to look into that and see exactly what's going on in the brain it's with all the the brain stories that kiki brings to the show on on a regular basis and she's our um our neuroscientist it's very clear to me it's more clear every week how little we understand how our brain works it is of i mean you know the ancient egyptians used to think the uh the human brain was there just to dissipate heat uh and you know we've come a long way but it's a fascinating organ um that's been much studied but you know we're still still trying to uncover the the various aspects of it especially when it comes to memory it's my memory yeah absolutely it's just electrical signals but it's so much more than that actually so pretty interesting um jessin did you find your bird bone story i did this is a discovery in a crimian cave which is that a little region in the north of laxie uh this is uh it's suggesting that early europeans lived alongside some of the largest birds ever to exist uh this research is published in the journal of vertebrate paleontology previously thought that such giganticism like birds uh was kind of limited to islands madagascar new zealand australia we now have newly discovered specimen in this cave in the northern coast of laxie it is a bird as giant as the elephant bird or the new zealand moa and maybe a source of meat bones father's eggs that sort of thing for early humans in the region clody voice from dr nekita zelenkov for russian academy of sciences when i first felt the weight of the bird whose thigh bone i was holding in my hand i thought it must be malagasy elephant bird fossil because no birds of the size have ever been reported from europe however the structure of the bone unexpectedly told a different story we don't have yet enough data to say whether it was as most closely related to ostriches or other birds but we estimate it weighed 450 kilograms which if you're not familiar with kilograms as a metric 450 kilograms is approximately the equivalent of 450 000 grams or 992 pounds oh or that uh that's big that's really big formal weight is nearly double the largest moa three times the largest living bird common ostrich and nearly as much as an adult polar bear for reference hmm first time bird of this size has been reported anywhere in the northern hemisphere although the species was previously known no one had ever tried to calculate the size of it the flightless bird attributed to the species uh was probably at least three and a half meters tall which uh what is that what's meter three and a half meters tall is we're talking 10 feet is that right no like 11 11 feet oh 11 11 and a half right 11 and a half feet tall thousand pounds ish thing weighs more than uh the the original Volkswagen Beetle yeah so so it's also kind of interesting about this uh is based on the femur that they have uh so so look at elephant birds which was on an island didn't have any predators didn't need to run away from anything it was that that was the biggest thing uh on the island uh they they compared the femurs and the this current find is relatively long and slim in comparison suggesting it may have been a better runner that it's actually more comparable uh to an ostrich suggesting it may have had speed uh to get away from predators which would have been necessary in the northern hemisphere and not so much on these island uh flightless birds that we've seen in the past so so uh other fossils discovered alongside this there was a bison for instance date this to about 1.5 to 2 million years to go so this is really before current modern humans were in this hemisphere uh but there was other archaic humans around at the time that is really i mean ratites are were are and were everywhere i love it just give me all the big flightless birds on all the continents want to see them all they're amazing uh it's a meaty bird must have made one awesome you know holiday feast if you could ever get anywhere near it yeah not get kicked i mean you know the running isn't just to run away it's probably chasing after something too oh yeah good point yeah yeah uh i wonder how big their eggs were i wonder if they were probably ostrich size eggs those things are pretty chunky yeah so ostriches can get to be around 200 250 pounds and they're biggest so if this thing is three times four times that weight yeah then that means potentially at least in thickness that egg is going to have to be crazy thick is that an ostrich egg behind you oh yeah so so this is if you could if you don't mind uh for those who are visually impaired at the moment that egg is almost the size of Blair's head yeah it's and if i'm imagining this the bird that's four times the size of the bird that laid that yeah i'm guessing the egg might have been that although with the weight and the height i wonder how fast it could have run because the there is as you get physically bigger your uh even if even with bird bones or taller is um you know you gotta be be a little be careful because that's a lot of weight to be caring on two legs it is but the stride also that stride if it's if it's that much longer you know these things add up pretty quick it takes longer to get going fast but once you're going fast your momentum is out of control and you don't need you don't need to spend energy as long to cover as much ground too that's a that's another aspect well that's the other thing i'm wondering if the size is the way it was due to the climate right larger animals tend to to lose less heat for every for every you know calorie that they burn than a comparative comparatively small like a screw that's why elephants are so big uh woolly mammoths and stuff so i wonder if that might have played a part it's just very fascinating large birds you know if they're any larger you could ride them like horses no if they would let you yeah if they would let you would have to be pretty annoyed they would never let you do that kicked right in the face uh roger did you bring any more stories uh i had one on the narwhal beluga hybrid yes uh but i knew animals were kind of your thing so i didn't want to be a jerk no please we can talk about roger we've heard we've heard all the stories about animals are for everyone is the thing that's why i'm talking about them that's great that's like the perfect line to a sesame street so it's actually okay so now i need to know this story because i had not heard any whiff of this so if so but one of the things we covered just recently was about how narwhals were a a kind of a nar the narwhals is sort of a a unicorn amongst all life in that it has a very conserved uh non-diverse gene pool for a extremely long time which is usually a sign that a species is about to uh buy it beyond the way out but have survived and thrived without diversity over really long periods of time so so literally a unicorn amongst life uh but to find out that they can have a hybrid event is then something very interesting to that story so um uh this goes back to the late 1980s an inuit hunter uh named jens larson killed the trail very strange whales off the coast of western greenland now he kept the bones after they dismembered the animal native and the rest uh and it was more recently that they managed to analyze the dna in the uh in in the animal uh by um by a scientist named i hope i can get his name right mad speeder hide jorgensen uh studies marine mammals um in the 90s he heard about it and so he decided to like well this is i want to know if this is a new kind of whale or new species of whale and extracted the dna and it turns out this animal is a narwhal beluga hybrid now for anyone who's not familiar narwhal is the whale with the big horn which is actually their upper tooth that just goes through your head the tooth imagine if your upper wisdom tooth grew through your head and you had a horn on it that's what a narwhal is and then tell everybody that you are your unicorn is and then the beluga whale is the famous kind of canary of the sea the white whale but not mobidic it's a very chubby almost michelin man-esque uh citation it has a big melon on the top of its head which is which is not actually a melon like a cantaloupe but just a deposit of fat that helps them um echo locate yeah i'm very impressed and they what's interesting is that they did a dna test but they also did a dentition examination and what they found was the animal kind of had a halfway between the teeth of a narwhal and in a beluga narwhals other than the big tusk and some vestigial teeth don't actually have teeth right they kill and then they swallow like most animals or whales uh and the beluga has a even number of teeth on top in the bottom this animal kind of had halfway had 18 teeth on the upper bottom some of them were conically shaped like a spiral horn on a narwhal and others were shaped like in a beluga and what was interesting is the narwhal and belugas have some of their diet overlaps but you know narwhal does a lot of bottom feeding with the the horn they dig up various uh animals off the bottom of the sea to eat and the and belugas you know eat fish so they were wondering how it you know ate and because it apparently ate because it these animals lived for for quite a long time um and you know it's it's very interesting because hybridization is something you normally encounter in land animals for example uh koi dogs uh or uh what we were talking about earlier the uh polar bear grizzly uh grizz not grizz roller bear roller i want to say grizz wall but that's from uh vacation um the family uh or the infamous liger from napoleon dynamite uh also a hybrid and in these cases all these hybrids are sterile because they're not compatible species uh so they don't know if this was something that could have uh continued on but they're also wondering if this also represents uh a diminishing or stressed population of animals uh because they normally wouldn't they normally wouldn't interbreed so what what were the circumstances to cause this interbreeding in the first place uh so lots of questions but it's very very fascinating uh generally i like hybrid animals because it brings up the x-files and everything like everyone has a little cryptozoology in the oh yeah big but Loch Ness monster you know mother-in-law um things like that and it's it's it's so cool funky but at the same time it's real and scientific so it's kind of kind of has that like oh but it's real so it's cool like the and and then there's an Inuit named Jens who's who recognized that he had an odd catch yeah and it didn't know what to do with it kept the bones just to a good show off to that no really it's a fish story but i had kept the bones so i can show all my other Inuit friends no i really caught something that was like this in between i it's it's fascinating and it's also um of you know the whole thing about crossing species has been part of human psychology for thousands of years that's why we have sphinxes that's why we got gods with the heads of eagles and you know various bodies um because you know there's an aspect like what if you could cross like the most ferocious animals on the planet and then you have your horror story kind of thing um but it's also like you know at what point can we do this uh through through dna splicing where we could do it like hey let's create the perfect cow or let's create the perfect pig or the child or something like that so it's it's it's cool it's freaky it's neat and the shows that life will find a way well and in terms of conservation in terms of conservation the fact that these two have in interbred in the past means that if either of these marine mammals were in dire straits genetically we talked about how the narwhals are so similar if something came along like a disease that started to wipe all of the narwhals out and we have found that beluga dna has integrated in with narwhal dna in the past there's an opportunity to inject that population with some new dna to save it so you could do that synthetically or if their babies are able to reproduce if they have the same number of chromosomes and they match up correctly then you could actually just do some selective interbreeding so in the united states for example the florida panther was almost extinct and they were able to take regular mountain lions and breed a few of them in to the florida panther population to grow that population so this is an opportunity to potentially use this to help save either of these species in the future and you know it's it's interesting if they find more of these animals it could lead to better understandings like currently our taxonomy i mean it's kind of like when you look at it's pretty rigid like your species to species if you can't interbreed and have a fertile offspring you're not you're not on the same page here but if it if it shows that over time that can change that means our entire understanding of taxonomy and the way we classify animals and creatures will change as well right i mean like currently humans humans and our closest primate relatives not going to happen right on a whole number of levels uh but genetically it's not it's going to produce what do they call it a chimera like you're basically a non a non-functioning embryo so it's if if you could do this that means there might be a chance for other related species uh you know they're close enough uh for for to you know possibly use as you suggest and then we talk about the braided stream of humans right so maybe there's a braided stream and other animals we don't know about is that what you were gonna say yes exactly this is this is an aspect of evolution that we often overlook that uh these hybrid events so so you know we brought up a very interesting point of how did this how did this creature feed uh was it a combination of the traits of both of its parents and if so that may have been a tremendous advantage which if it really was a tremendous advantage then we should have uh seen it persist so probably wasn't uh but but but the there is an aspect of evolution of hybridized hybridizing between sort of disparate species uh that that can possibly create things that are go forward and are very productive which is what humans are humans are are one part evolution sure but a lot of hybridization events uh in human history so why not in whales why not in a lot of ways yeah absolutely and who doesn't love whales and who doesn't love whales because they're delicious oh and nutritious oh no oh no oh no it is so yummy though it really is it's really worth going hey Justin moving on moving on tell me your quick story for the end of the oh yeah i've got a quick story uh this is really quick much of your currently right now as we speak is experiencing a heat wave uh temperatures soaring over 40 degrees celsius which is triple digit Fahrenheit the extreme weather conditions are threatening the lives of tens of thousands of people who are unaccustomed to what we hear in the center valley of california refer to as summer it's really not that hot it's not that bad it's like 104 well so not only the poor europeans who aren't used to it but the plants is the thing so that it can mess up blooming cycles it can wake animals up at the wrong time of year so here in san francisco for example the summer for my whole life until a couple of years ago was the time of year that i wore a scarf and fingerless gloves to work to work zoo camp and all of a sudden it's sunny it's hot i'm wearing short sleeves and in san francisco usually those temperatures the 80 90 degrees if we get them would be in october which means when you switch that you have plants and animals thinking it's october and then whoops it's cold again two weeks later and so when these sorts of crazy things happen there can be huge domino effects down the line ecologically there can't however uh there is a silver lining in the region of bordeaux in france where wine producers are saying that the sudden burst of sun after the wet spring that they had will produce a superior vintage and an abundance of bordeaux so well great the ecology may be going to hell but there'll be plenty of good wine to drink yes to drink our sorrows away and something else that might happen from a different kind of inebriation i have a real quick story about fungal hallucinogens and cicadas scientists have discovered new details on a fungus that compels its cicada host to mate long after their genitals have gone and their bodies have turned into one what researcher colorfully describes as flying salt shakers of death so this is a plant associated a phetamine and a psychoactive chemical found in magic mushrooms put together in a pathogenic fungi that inside of the cicada um there it was just two of less than a thousand compounds found in these cicadas it was enough to infect the cicada um and make them flap their wings and in a feminine matter attracting males to stop for a snuggle unfortunately their genitals have already fallen off and so they don't stop snuggling up to one another but instead spread these these pieces of fungus to their friends around them the fungus among this so that uh yeah something quite grisly the next step of this study is to dig into the fungal genome to see how they express themselves inside their hosts but ultimately if you want to know more about it you can look into it yourself oh my goodness this it's really weird because this actually reminds me of a cult movie i remember seeing as a kid uh with a very similar uh uh hook to it it's called the vision of the bee girls came out in 1973 okay the whole thing is uh these infected women would literally just have sex with men until they died like they would just die from exhaustion sure death by snoo snoo all right so um that i think is all did we do all our stories everybody yes that's fantastic we did it uh first and foremost thanks roger for joining us tonight um i hope you had fun oh i had fun i i hope my daughter didn't uh freak anyone out oh no not at all um where can people find you if they want to find out more about you and your shows so you can find daily tech news show at daily tech news show dot com uh and you can find me on twitter at jolly roger j-o-l-l-y-r-o-g-e-r fantastic also thanks to fada identity for gordon mcleod and everyone else in our chat room for making sure it is friendly and a fun space to be and as always shout outs to our patreon supporters now i do not have access to the amazing list that kiki reads every week so let me just say thank you to all of our patreon supporters but especially those that have pledged enough to a shout out on the show instead of hearing your actual name you're just gonna hear me instead saying shout out to you thank you for your support kiki can edit that in later if she desires thank you all for your support on patreon if you're interested in supporting us finding out the different levels you can find information at patreon.com slash this week in science also remember that you can help us out simply by telling your friends about twists on next week's show we'll be talking with dr susanne amari about her work using cadaver brains to understand obsessive compulsive disorder oh my god i love talking about cadavers i'm so excited once again we will be broadcasting live online at 8 p.m pst for that amazing interview and you can find us on twist.org slash live where you can watch and join our chat room in real time if you can't make it though don't worry you can find our past episodes at 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How can I ever see the changes I seek When I can only set up shop one out? This week in science is coming your way You better just listen to what we say And if you learn anything Then please just remember it's all in your head This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science This week in science We did a show! Yes! We did. So we usually do a little bit of an after show It's already pretty late and I'm pretty darn tired I'm tired, so it's not gonna be long, but we can chat and the chat room can talk to us and the people who are watching live can talk to us. So if you're in do it, otherwise you're welcome. Yeah, I can stay a few minutes and then they do it. Yeah. You are based in San Francisco. Yes. Are you a local? Yeah, I'm born and raised. Although I'm a daily. Awesome. I'm in daily city now. I had to move outside of city limits. No, I'm San Francisco born and raised. Oh, really? I moved to the Central Valley after junior high. I went to Hoover. Oh, you went to Hoover? Oh, my God, that's great. So it's weird because I sound excited because I know very few people left who are actually San Francisco locals. I have a handful of friends, but most of the people I meet are either transplants or they moved down or up from the state. Whenever people meet me here and they find out that I'm from here, they call me a unicorn.  I hang out with them. Yeah, it's neat. Did you, which high school did you go to? I went to Lowell. Ah, everyone goes to Lowell. Yeah. My sister went to Lowell. I felt like high school was harder than college. I don't know if that's a pro or a con. Yeah, that particular high school. Man, that's one way to screw with your kid's head. Yeah, it definitely was. I had eight hours of homework a night. Yeah, I never understood that weird fact. It's kind of weird.  And you actually had to apply for it, right? You didn't automatically just get sent to it. You had to apply. So it was a public school. It's part of the public school system. It's not a charter school or anything like that, but you have to apply to get in. And it's just so weird. It's bizarre. And yeah, it was like all my cousins when I ended up going to high school in Modesto, but it's a very fascinating thing. And now you're in Daly City where the bowling alley was when I was a kid. Yes, Sarah Boll, it's closed. Sarah Boll, there was Westlake Bowl. And then they killed, well, when Amoeba set up shop, they killed the one over in the hate with the Rockin Bowl. What a clock. You pay 20 bucks so you can bowl as many games as you want. Well now, I don't know if you can tell what all these trophies are behind me, but they are in fact bowling trophies. Nice. It's very apropos. Wait, are you going to see Boll? No, I bowl at Presidio. Oh yes, I've only been there once and that was for a party, so I didn't do much bowling. It's a great bowling alley, it's very cool. The Presidio's the best part of the city. It's pretty great. It's pretty neat. Untouched in many years by a lot of things. But yeah, so it's weird. I mean, the city has changed and not changed. Since when? Mostly changed. Well, it's changed, but what's weird is if you've actually ever seen photos of San Francisco from the 20s and 30s, a lot of the city looks the same because San Francisco has raised tight zoning laws. Now, you have some landmark features like the Coronet Theater that I saw Star Wars in. Yes, so did I. That got crushed and turned into retirement homes or no assisted living homes. And what was the one, Alexandria, the other one on Gary? Yeah, that had a very ignominious end that turned into a limestick and then it got turned. I saw a bunch of, I saw Roger Rabbit there in Dark City. I saw Pee Wee's big adventure there. I never saw that in the theater. It's such a fantastic movie. It was great. But I really miss it because it was a single screen theater. You go went in there and you only saw the one movie. I love the single screen theater. But it had all that ornate detail and architecture that was very, you know, 30s and 40s. So very, it was not Rococo, but it was very art deco-y, but it was very done in a very flourishing manner. Yeah. I just loved going, Charles Abroad's asking where the Coronet was. It was on Geary, right near Mel's Drive-In. The thing I loved about going to the Coronet or any single screen theater is that it was such an experience. It was before, I remember even when movie phone happened and all of a sudden you were like, I can get tickets ahead of time. But when I saw the re-releases of all the Star Wars movies in the early 90s, it was before movie phone was even a thing. So you had to go line up for a couple hours to get your tickets. And then you got back in line to get into the movie theater and get a seat. And it was this whole experience. You're with all these people all day to see this experience together. I never was so amped up by the time the movie started. It was very fun. Was that the first time you saw the movies? No, no, no.  But it was the first time I saw them in theaters, which was very cool. Yeah. It was having a bunch of people in a theater is kind of cool. Even though if you sit out in the boonies, but there's a certain feeling in the air that you get. I remember when they re-released the movies with all the digital enhancements, which a lot of people grieve about. But you had a long line, but everyone was super into it. Like, instead of having like 12 showings of the same movie in a Metroplex where people aren't in there, you still can kind of get that feeling. But now you have to go super early. You have to get to super late showing. You have to be at the rest of the room. This was just like in the middle of the day. And the blind stretch out of the block, someone ruins the movie about Empire Strikes Back and the twist at the end. The twist. But the school system there was always bizarre. Yeah, it is very weird. There's a lottery system to the way San Francisco's high schools work. I don't know if it goes with all the... I don't remember it being for all the schools, but I definitely know it was a high school. And nothing to do with how close you were to the high school. And you were put in a pile and it was based on your parents' educational attainment. The higher your, for example, if both your parents are PhDs, you're less likely to get into the school of your choice. And if you had... The whole idea was to give children from disadvantaged backgrounds first dibs in placement. Level the playing field, yeah. So there's positives and negatives to that. And I get in trouble when I talk about this a little bit. I started out my schooling in a school district that may not have had a PhD parent in the school. And then I moved to a town where most of the parents likely had a PhD, at least one, if not both. And I went from being a straight A student to a solid D student like that. And part of it was because the school district moves along at a much quicker pace because they're teaching to the sort of average of the class. And the average of the class with a predominant number of PhD students moves along quicker. I think the quality of the education is better in that scenario. Despite the fact that I became a D student and basically failed out of school as a result of having transferred this way, I do appreciate how this school system works when you have all of that support at home. So I don't know that it's necessarily beneficial to the students to do this leveling of the playing field when you could have an accelerated education available. So it's a really tricky thing because you wanna lift all boats, but at the same time, you don't also at the same time want to be sinking them. So it's a very hard thing to grapple as a society how you manage both of those. I think my solution ultimately to feel better about believing that a segregated school system on education actually works in the favor of the students is to say that the solution is to get more people into higher education in the first place. So that their children will be accelerated through school. Ultimately what you're talking about is a more personalized learning system, which is what is generally understood to be the best methodology. The problem is we don't have money for it. If you have smaller class sizes, if you have more teachers per classroom, however, you can personalize the learning experience for each student because each brain is different and develops at different rates and that works in different ways the better, but that is a very expensive prospect. And unfortunately, our country's not very good at funding school. Right, but what I'm saying is actually is not quite that which is what I'm saying is that there is definitely a massive affect of the parental level of education that does affect because the parents are academically aware and encouraging and reinforcing and teaching at home things that they have learned that the other parents may not have prioritized. And by segregating students based on the parental education will accelerate those children to greater levels of education quicker and won't be held back and won't get bored. It's a very hard thing. And I get why they would do the lottery system. I get the idea of giving access, but you could take the most underfunded school district in the nation and if it has a highest per capita of PhD parents, they'll be fine. But part of that is because of something called homework which is part of this larger conversation of should children be given homework from kindergarten? And the less you can send work home with the children the less you will have inequity in expectations and abilities based on who's at home helping. Yes. Which is a big part of the problem. And this is the thing. I went to the school district that had no PhD parents and I was a straight A student because I showed up in the third grade with the ability to read. That was all it took by third grade to be able to read. If you're not reading in kindergarten in this other school though, you have fallen behind. But that's what I'm trying to express is that if you are the kid who could read in the first grade or second grade and none of your classmates can, they're not gonna be teaching you additional reading skills. You're not going to be progressing. So this is a very, it's a very class or it falls into a lot of categories of class. It can fall then quickly into race. It can follow into a lot of categories. The solution obviously is giving access to higher education to people who would not necessarily be able to have gotten in the first place because their next generation will be on that more accelerated path as well. And maybe we need to rethink the way schools operate with the grade levels that we do. I mean, it's a holdover from like the turn of the 20th century. I mean, before then it was not uncommon to group children of different ages into the same classroom and teach in the same subject. Right, and which, at least one of my children got to experience through a Montessori type school system and it worked amazingly well because the kids feed off each other and they learn from the older kids quicker than they learn from the teacher, which is an incredible thing to witness. So, but there is, but okay, so then if you come from the disadvantaged school, then maybe K through 12 doesn't do it. Maybe it's K through 14. Is that what you're kind of indicating?  I think part of it is just like we have these grades. We have fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade. I mean, a lot of it is just like, we understand better how children learn in different environments and we haven't really changed or altered too much of the way a lot of school districts operate, which is unfortunate. Well, I will take back from a second from what you're saying in that we had a revolution in education at the turn of the last century with John Dewey, who before then we were doing rote teaching, memorize this, repeat it back, that was it. And he said, no, we actually have to get the student involvement. We have to have them doing their homework, doing the research, participating in the learning experience. Totally revolutionized education. We invented everything we invented. And then at some point, a dozen years ago, we decided, no, no, we need to teach to a test where they remember stuff and spit it back at us so we can rank schools and teachers and deploy funding based on this. We actually have been going the wrong direction with a lot of education. And the results are, we are failing and key leading subjects comparatively to other countries across the country. Well, and that's one of the failures of understanding education is that we see numbers and we need to, well, our numbers need to be at this level. And it's not to say that there aren't problematic teachers that we need, kids need to know a certain competency in literacy, numeracy, and the rest, but at the same time, it's not assembling a car or something, you just can't put parts together and expect it to work time. And again, the other thing is teachers are super undervalued. Oh yeah. It's just not even funded. Undervalued, under supported, under trained, all of it. Underpaid. Yeah, they don't often get professional development for free. They pay out of their own pockets for professional development. You know, and the biggest cost in education isn't the teachers, it's the bureaucracy. Like I remember my parents from the restaurant, there was this teachers teaching association, like they had this huge dinner, they occupied half the restaurant. I was asked, it's like, oh, what class do you teach? We don't teach, we just work in the office. We run, and it's not, bureaucracy is necessary, but it's an odd thing that we have such a, we're so wedded to how things look instead of actually how they function. Like it needs to, we need to be seen giving money. It's not that schools don't need money, but they just kind of throw money and expect things to happen, right? And that's not how, right? You don't throw seeds on the ground, expect a crop of corn to come up in three months, right? There's a bunch of work you need to do. And we offset the benefits of fundraising by refusing to give funds to schools. This is the story of the California Lottery. The whole reason that we got statewide gambling, the state sponsored gambling in the state of California was that the funds were going to the schools. So as soon as those funds started to arrive, what did they do? They reduced the amount of taxes that went to fund the schools. So there's no benefit. No, no, no. It was literally the, I mean, you could tell, like the whole, the fact that they stressed education lottery, education lottery. You know, when I went to high school, my Spanish teacher's just like, you see this, Matt? This is what the lottery paid for. That's it. Everything else is, everything else in this building is from 1956. Yeah. You know? You got a boiler that heats the school in the middle of the summer because it's too expensive to turn it off because it's from 1956. Yeah. Oh, I remember stuff like that. Yeah. And there was one hallway when I went to school where there was insulation exposed. And you're like, I hope that's not asbestos, but based on what I know about this school and the timeline, it's probably asbestos. You had Channing Hall. So you had some celebrities. Annette Benning, I think was the other one. And, oh gosh, what was his name? Robin Williams? No, not Robin Williams. The guy from Miss Congeniality, what's his name? Benjamin Bratt? Yeah. Oh, yes. Yeah, he went to the world. He did that other San Francisco movie, The Mission. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's almost 10.30. I need to jet. But thank you guys so much for being on the show. It was so much fun. Yeah, thanks so much for coming on. Normally in the show, it would be something along the lines of say goodnight, Roger. Good night. Say goodnight, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say goodnight, Justin. Good night, Justin. All right. Good night, everybody. Stopping the broad.