person because you ask it in the form of a question. Oosterhoofle. That means cheese slicer. It does. It does. It does. I'm moving my camera. Hi, everybody. I moved it too far. I'm going to move it back again that way. I had it, but then I didn't have it. Now I'm over here. Nope. We're just going to move it back. There we go. Which way? Where? Nope. Where should I go? You certainly. What? I don't know.  Oh, well, there'll be a half of Blair's face. Shoot. Oh, wow! There we go. All right. Do it again. I fixed it. I'm straight now. I keep moving the wrong way. It's hard. It is really hard. How's that? Wow. Oh, it's like two of my favorite people I've won. Okay. No, no, no. It's time for a show, everyone. Oh boy, this is either going to be a really great show or oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Yes. I may or may not be entirely losing my mind as a result of staying indoors because of the pandemic and now the wildfire smoke that has made the air in the Willamette Valley among, well, no, not among the worst in the entire world. During the last week, but we're here. We're doing a show. Oh, we are doing a show. Are you ready for it? Are you ready for it?  Yes, we are. And apparently we all look and sound great. Thank you, Fada. A bad echo. Why do I have a bad echo? What, really? I'm not hearing it. I'm not hearing an echo either. Really? I don't hear. Well, I mean, I never hear it when there's something wrong with me. People have to let me know these things. Fada says bad echo. Identity 4 says no echo. Fada, maybe it's you. Maybe it's you. Shubrew says no echo. Your audio. Yeah, I'm not hearing it. Do you have it? Are you listening to the show in two places, Fada? But then how come you would only hear it from Dr. Kiki? Maybe it's only because... Well, I tell you what, folks. A little reverb? Why do I have reverb? Just add a little... You're not loud. The name is Justin. I always put my voice through a fender amp. An old spring style. And thunder beaver. It's not reverb. It's just my vocal fry. Totally. Totally. I'm fine now. Okay, great. We will do the show, everybody. We're gonna do this. This is the show where we record the This Week in Science podcast.  We might be a little silly after. We may have conversations. We might even be silly during the show. But what comes out in the podcast is usually similar, but not exactly the same to what ends up here in the YouTubes. So you here on YouTube are watching the original version of This Week in Science. It's time for us to start the show. We're ready to go. In... Three... Two... Where's my mouse? A one... Wait, hold on. One... This is... Twist. This Week in Science episode number 791 recorded on Wednesday, September 16, 2020. How long will this last? Hi, everyone.  But first... Disclamer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Humans have had a good run on planet Earth. Yes, there are multitude of life forms that have persisted much longer than the human blip upon the scene of life, but there have likely been few life forms that have dramatically affected the lives of so many other life forms as humans have done. And while humans are having their moment now at the height of science, at the height of technology, at the height of agriculture, at the height of economy, at the height of communication, collaboration, interconnectivity, they're also at the very height of hubris. They're even thinking that the world belongs to them and will so remain undeterred by their activities. Humans are but one form of life on this Earth. The aftereffect of a recent adaptation amongst apes, an adaptation that has led to a radical break with nature, and these actions, the actions of these unnatural apes, is having some consequences on the rest of the inhabitants here. It's not only a matter of time before these consequences become too great to bear, a time when all of human history will be but evidenced in ocean trash and atmospheric carbon, a time when all of humanity's accomplishments of tech will lay as artifacts under dirt and under sea, a time when all of science will be as all lost species extinct and forgotten, a time when all of art and culture is discarded into the entropic decay of time, a time where roads laid will lead from cities devoured by nature to bridges that do not span the farther shore, a time when everything they held as human and everything they knew about the universe is simply plowed under. A million years gone from the surface of the Earth, when all of human history is but a dream, the only thing worth remembering about them will be This Week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind I can't get enough. I want discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know what's happening. A good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We are back again to talk about science because we love it. It gives us energy. It makes our curiosity thrive. It fills us with joy for the world. You know, and we all need that, especially in these days which are so difficult. It's nice to have something, something. We've got to have something that brings us joy and I hope this show will bring you joy because we have a lot of fun science to talk about. This Week, I have stories about whale blubber brains and venomous plants. Blubber brains. Oh, wait, where did my stories go? I have some also. What have I got? Peanut chocolate. I've got orcas under attack. Life on Venus. Question mark. It's a bear find in California Channel Islands. And why boiled stew might have been a thing when humans ate before they invented fire? Boiled stew. I think you're missing something there, but I look forward to hearing it. We'll find out. We will definitely find out, Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, I have magnetic bacteria and then also psychic worms and chimps. Wait, what? Just a story about chimps. Story about it. Wait, wait, wait, wait. What was that, a bit? I think worms. Very interesting. Can we just start with that? Awesome. What are you, that now? You have to wait. Got to wait until you want to do the chimps. Right. remind you that subscribing to the TWIS podcast on your favorite podcast platform is the best way that you can get TWIS every week. If you're not already subscribed, you can also find us on YouTube and Facebook. Look for This Week in Science, places where podcasts and videos are found or visit TWIS, TWIS dot org. Let's get into the science. Let the dribble begin. Okay, Justin, start us off. What happened this week? What was the big announcement? Oh, life was found on Mars. No, no, no. Venus. Is it Venus? No, it's not both. Isn't it? Both planets got life this week? No, no. No, no. Not Mars. Venus. No, no. Venus? Oh, we don't know. No. This is a science show. So maybe let's back. I know I saw those headlines a million times. We just talked about what was really discovered. Yeah, this is our role, right? Is people see the headline on their social media that says, there's life on Venus. Oh my God, there's aliens. It's our job to actually explain what happened. So what happened? So, okay. That's the headline. Now everybody's listening. Now we take it away. See, that's how it works. Well, sort of. Maybe not. International team of astronomers have discovered signs of life on Venus. Signs of life. What does a sign of life mean? Well, in this case, it's molecules. Molecules in the atmosphere that here on earth are produced industrially or by microbes and no other way. There's no other natural formation of the molecule. It's phosphine. It's the only way that is known to have been created here on this planet. Now, what's interesting about this is it's being found in the high atmosphere, the clouds of Venus. So the clouds of Venus are one place on Venus that astronomers have in the past postulated the possibility for microbial life to exist. The surface of the planet is a bit warm. A bit? That's a bit warm. Even for an extremophile. It's 864 degrees Fahrenheit. And I think that would be about 460 something Celsius. Not just hot, but it's also high pressure, too. I mean, remember the last probe we sent to Venus? What happened to that? Oh, I don't know. What happened? It was crushed and melted. It lived on the surface and was able to send back pictures for just a short period of time. And then the planet destroyed it. So Venus doesn't want us to go get melted and crushed. Yeah. Melted and crushed. Yeah. It didn't survive very well. But it's a pretty good hit. Professor Jane Graves grieves, excuse me. This was an experiment made out of pure curiosity. They had this powerful, the at the comma large millimeter, submillimeter array was used as well as the, what's the, how, what is the other one? The James Clark Maxwell Telescope. So they got a hit with the James Clark Maxwell Telescope. And because they had such a strong hit for this phosphine, because this is such an interesting fine, they were allowed to jump on to the at a comma large millimeter array as well. Alma. Yes. Alma, which is 45 telescopes as part of that array because they got the initial hit. And the second look confirmed the first hit. So we got two hits. So Greaves was basically looking, had this opportunity to do some research and thought we, they would be just be able to rule out extreme scenarios like clouds being stuffed with organisms. Microbes. Yes. And then we got the first hint of phosphine in Venus, Venus's spectrum. It was a shock. This is the, this is one of those telltale molecules that you might look for when looking for life. So it doesn't mean we found microbes, obviously, but it does look like it's one of those things. So so the other side of this though is we've found signature for phosphine in Jupiter's atmosphere before. And we do not expect there to be microbes in Jupiter's atmosphere. We have postulated about Venus because maybe at one point it was occupied by life. Maybe life did evolve there a little bit, but then it went the greenhouse route and got too hot and gassy. And by the way, less than for all of you. Lesson for everyone listening. Don't get too hot.  Venus had an atmosphere. Greenhouse got run away. Now it is 800 something boiling. Now it even has an even hotter insulating blanket. So the, but so the phosphine here on earth, it's either industrial produced through known chemical chemical, I keep thinking equations, but reactions. But it's, and we know it as a sign of life in certain life biological chemical reactions. So we, there's no industry, they didn't find any of evidence of those known chemical reactions that would. They found the industry. Maybe microbes in the atmosphere, but they didn't find those non-organic sources. They didn't. And so they've got this phosphine, but they can't explain it by any method of making phosphine that is known here on earth. So is there another way to make it? Yeah. And that's part of the other thing like they they even sort of looked at if there was any like lightning strikes and certain chemicals being present and different potential ways that they could simulate the industrial effect. And they couldn't come within a magnitude, within many magnitudes of the amount that they're seeing there. They could not come up with a natural way for this to occur. Some you could there's ways that you could get this molecule to form under some conditions possibly, but nothing to the levels of what they saw in the atmosphere. So it's definitely something that can give us good cause to go and take another closer look. Yeah. And this is exciting because we've like you said there, this has been postulated before and there has been the idea lofted of sending drones or little helicopters that would be robots that could go sample the atmosphere of Venus. So the way that we send stuff to the surface of Mars to go dig in the dirt, we would send basically, yeah, drones to go fly around in the atmosphere of Venus and collect air samples and send information back. Don't get crushed. Don't get melted. Just do it. Don't get melted. And it's beyond your way. It's possible up in the upper atmosphere, not quite as hot, not as dense, very acidic though, which is still another aspect of, you know, it's still not an incredibly hospitable environment, but we'll see. We should do it. We should send the helicopter to Venus. Let's do it. And it's just slightly less gravity than the planet Earth. So it's not like it's not the pressures being caused by this massive gravity or anything. This is not, you're not going to do a fly by. If you can fly it in this atmosphere, you should be able to survive that atmosphere just fine and move around and then maybe leave again, maybe a return mission kind of a thing. Yeah.  I love these ideas. It came from Venus. Let's get this technology going. What? The moral of the story is just once again, we're not that special. Like, you know, I think we're very special. In the solar system, we're sharing things, of course. And so there's got to be stuff kind of in common with different planets in our own solar system, but also just like these things that we keep identifying that are like, okay, this is the thing that we need to look for for life. Oh, no, it's over there too. We're not that special. We need to find that thing that makes life so extra special that we can't find on other planets that don't have life. And I think that's what this is about, right? We haven't found life anywhere else yet though. So we're just narrowing down the list. So we're like, okay, this is another thing, not an indicator of life potentially. If Venus doesn't have life, then it's not an indicator. Move on to the next thing. Right. That's a great point, actually, which if we can knock off these signals and particular chemical signatures as not indicative of life, then that makes it easier to look at the atmospheres of other of exoplanets outside our solar system. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. All right. Well, okay, so it's exciting news. It has been a little sensationalized this week, but it is exciting nonetheless. And I do hope we send helicopters to Venus. Moving on to Mars, just going to keep going there. Moving on to Mars, we all want that irrefutable evidence of life on Mars. Well, a new paper out of scientific reports doesn't have it, called Constraining the Preservation of Organic Compounds in Mars Analog Nontranites After Exposure to Acid and Alkaline Fluids.  So you're probably not going to find it if you're looking there. So that's that's the take home message from the story. We are sending, we're said, the Perseverance rover, which is launched and on its way to Mars, is going to land at the Jezero crater in February of 2021, ran away from Pandemic World. It's persevering on Mars. I'm going to be collecting the samples, but we'll see if we find anything. Did I just hear that right? Did you say Fed Brewery? You spell it, man. I know, but that's not how you say it. Yeah, wet nest day also. Or is it? No, no, my question immediately becomes, or is it? Have I been doing that differently than everybody else and just never caught it before? It's also possible. I have a tendency to pronounce things like February. It's the opposite of the Bay Area accent, where you squish everything together and say it really fast. It's said you're over, you're just announcing everything. February, February, February, February, Wednesday. Yes. Okay, Blair, tell me a story. Let's talk about magnetic bacteria. This is a study out of University of Central Florida looking at, once again, the age old question, how do animals navigate in the world?  Is it their inner ear hairs? Is it some other magnetic cell in their head? There's a bunch of different theories. But this new one, let's throw another one on the pile, is that it actually is magnetic bacteria. This is researchers from University of Central Florida, and combined with researchers from the United Kingdom and Israel together, worked on a study looking at the magnetic sense of direction that sea turtles get, birds, fish, pigeons, salmon, these are the ones we've talked about before. And it's coming from a symbiotic relationship with magneto-tactic bacteria. So this is influenced by magnetic fields, the bacteria that respond to magnetic fields, including the Earth's. And so what they did is they actually looked at one of the largest genetic databases in the world of microbes, known as the metagenomic rapid annotations using subsystems technology database. And they looked at the presence of magneto-tactic bacteria that had been found in animal samples. So I guess they had previously, lots of people have looked at bacteria in individuals, but this kind of across species thing has done a little bit, but they haven't really looked at these magneto-tactic bacteria across species. And so they have found that there appears to be a correlation between their presence and animals that are good at this kind of wild sense of direction related to migration, or in the case of sea turtles and salmon returning to where they were born, all this kind of crazy stuff. So what I think I love about this story, I thought this is going to be quick, but I just love this story so much. Researchers don't know where they live in the animal. They have no idea. Yeah. So how would that work? Yeah, their guess is that it's associated with nervous tissue, which would make sense. You want to have the direct calm line into the brain. Don't need to. Don't need to. We got microbiome can converse through other channels. But I think the quickest possible response would be to be related to the nervous tissue. So their current idea is that it has to do with the eye or the brain, but they actually really don't know. And so they do think that this could be used. I kind of pulled this out of the animal corner because it has a lot of cool potential uses for humans. So this could affect our own navigation. This could help us modify, look at modifications to our own environment in magnetic fields. When we do things like construct power lines, we could have this bacteria around to help us see what's going on. It could also help develop therapy therapies that related to magnetism for drug delivery. And I just like to think that you could maybe infect yourself with this bacteria and have just the best sense of direction. Yeah. So isn't this extremely easy to test? Don't you just get like homing pigeons and feed them antibiotics until you've knocked out their system and see if they can find their way home? Right. I mean, isn't that that easy? You could do that. The next step is to see if there is a direct relationship between kind of like bacterial load or whatever and navigation. So that's the next step. And then after that, they can kind of try to figure out how it works and then from there, how we could harness it. So it's many, many steps away still, but this is a new theory. And it does, not everyone's convinced, but it's an interesting idea. I would start with taking a pigeon that used to be able to find its way home, knocking out its bacterial load and then seeing if it can do it again. But you have to find where it is, because if this bacteria lives in the brain, then you have to be really careful with how you're administering antibiotics because of the blood-brain barrier, which we know really is questionable now. But still, it'd be much harder to knock it all out. You can at least isolate then maybe. Here's where not to look. The idea of bacteria in the brain, I mean, it could happen, but it doesn't seem that it would happen individually, but potentially, but not across species, you know, like entire populations being infected in the brain with bacteria. Unless it's some weird symbiotic thing from ancient dinosaur. Yeah, like they're born with it. Like it, yeah, it develops as they grow from embryo or whatever. The mammalian brain is encased in a way that is meant to protect it from bacterial parasites. We hear occasionally about people inhaling water from a really warm pond at the end of the summer and getting a brain-eating parasite because the amoeba went up their nose. We're using a netty pot. We're using a netty pot, exactly, not sterilizing the water. So yeah, this is a very interesting question to me. Would the bacteria potentially be on the optic nerve itself, like in behind the eyes? I don't think it needs to be. I think you're right, Justin, that if you could use antibiotics and knock out the sense of direction, I know antibiotics can knock out your sense of smell. So two things there. First of all, I don't think it needs the absolute direct connection of being connected to a nerve.  That's the direction. I think you can have a gut feeling of where north is. And that communication can happen fast enough to gut to brain. We know it affects human behavior in a quick time. The other thing is, the gut isn't really designed to allow bacteria to transfer from the gut into the bloodstream, but it happens all the time. And we've discovered that there's times when the body grabs bacteria and transports it to through the gut intentionally into the bloodstream. So if there is something that the body's looking for in a bird that does want to transport it to the brain, it will have carriers that will bring it there. I mean, this is something that will have evolved for it to transport things with the right stream and attachment. So it's possibly the thing here is that, anything's possible until you do the science to prove that it's not. Possible and probable. Very different things. Also, and on top of it, there's also the bias of what scientists are looking for. So potentially just having this hypothesis out there will allow scientists to look in places where they haven't thought to look before, which I think is exciting. Anyway, very interesting. A new study published in Science Advances by neuroscientists out of Florida Atlantic University's Charles E. Schmidt College of Science and Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College collaborating with Bar-Elon University, Rahmet Gan in Israel, so many collaborations. It's wonderful. These researchers looked at blind cavefish. I love these following on the heels of Justin's cavefish story. Last week, this study goes into the brains of cavefish as opposed to looking at the physical anatomy of the body as opposed to looking at the behavior of blind cavefish, of which there are many species and they seem to have very uniquely adapted behaviors. These researchers looked at the brains of several species of Mexican tetras, acetonax Mexicanis, which comprises river-dwelling surface fish and also many evolved, independently evolved, populations of blind cavefish. Checked out their brains and the brain activity and found that looking at 18 anatomical regions across the brain and looking at the neural activity across them, they were able to generate whole brain atlases to be able to do a complete comparative brain-wide study of the variation between the different species. And they said, yeah, these fish have behavioral differences that are supported by changes in the brain, that there are physical changes in the brain and also changes to the wiring, the neural circuits that are involved, and the neurotransmitters that get released. So there are lots of differences that characterize the brain and behavior differences between the species and that now they have the opportunity to look at all of these things from an evolutionary context and they really did see that by looking all at all of these different brains that the cavefish, for the most part, derived very unique adaptations for their behavioral traits, that they weren't sharing these things, that they were actually using what they had from the basics, but then going off in completely different directions. Gravitational. And talking about fish and my cat decided to come up for a visit. I would like this graphic on loop, please. Yes, on loop for the rest of the night. It looks like a lava lamp. It's fish brains. It's great. It's color-coded fish brain. Yep, yep. And while there are certain similarities, there are definitely lots and lots and lots and lots of differences. Justin, what else do you have going on here? I have a story that I'm going to tell you the first part of now and then we'll get into it more in the second half. But we've been talking about whether or not we can find life out there in the universe, in the solar system even. What if we found intelligent life? What if we found life that we could communicate with? And that life asked us to stay away. Well, go away. We don't want any. We wouldn't. It's happening. The no solicitors sign on my front door. It's happening here on earth. This is over the past few months, a pot of orcas have been defending their waters off the coast of Spain and Portugal. And it started harmlessly enough. This is sort of the south of France, the Gibraltar Strait, that sort of entrance below Spain into the Mediterranean waters. July 20th, near the port of Barbates, Spain, a yacht is followed by a pot of orca. According to the yacht's captain, one individual had hold of the rudder and stopped us moving the boat, he says. It's the first time I'd seen him do that. July 22nd, 34-foot yacht is struck 9.30 at night by orca, knocking out its steering cables, then lifting and pushing the vessel around in the water for 15 minutes until it is turned 180 degrees off course. Turned it right around. Two and a half hours later, a couple traveling in their 50-foot boat, same area, suddenly come to a halt in the waters off that coast and think they have been caught in a fishing net. Go up there with the flashlights and see orca swimming all around the boat. They now discover that the boat is pointing in the opposite direction that they were traveling. They tried to correct course several times, but each time the orca redirected them back in the direction from which they had come. They described the orcas as at times attempting to lift the boat out of the water. The encounter lasted 20 minutes. The rudder was damaged, but worked just well enough to steer them back to port. The next day, July 23rd, a 40-foot boat in the same area, part of at least four orcas. It's probably the same part of, they think about nine of them that are part of this group. Because a part of at least four orcas had brought a craft, a 40-foot boat, to a halt by grabbing the rudder and until it finally broke. Then it escalated over the next 50 minutes. The orca began heading out 80 feet, turning around and ramming the boat at full speed, eventually spinning the yacht 120 degrees. July 29th, off Cape Trafalgar, which is about eight miles to the west. Orcapod in action again. This time a 46-foot boat had its rudder destroyed and then was rammed for over an hour, disabling the engines and turning them 180 degrees off course. Upon closer investigation after rescue, teeth marks were evidenced on the bottom of the vessel in the keel. A sailor who happens to be a biology graduate who is also going to be studying marine biology soon and has decided to study the orca of this region after this event, a girl from New Zealand, described a deafening noise. She's down underneath the boat. She's inside the boat. Deafening noise as they communicated, whistling to each other. It was so loud that we had to shout, adding the attacks felt totally orchestrated. August 30th. Orchestrated. Orchestrated. August 30th. French flagged vessel near Vigo. This is northwest of Spain now. This is 500 miles away. This is later, but this is 500 miles away from the initial encounters. Radio's the Coast Guard saying they're under attack from killer whales. Ship remains functional, though the whole bore evidence of orcas rubbing up against it. The same day, 80 miles south of that, a Spanish naval yacht, Murphock, lost its rudder to a killer whale encounter. That encounter was caught on video. In the video, sailors can be heard calling the orca a bad name in Spanish as it surfaces alongside the vessel. Immediately followed by that orca, turning around, grabbing the rudder and removing it. Brilliant. Brilliant. Make fun of the apex predator in the ocean, you silly humans. September 11th, 150 miles north of that, that Murphock encounter, off Ecrunia, I don't know, Spain, a 36 foot boat encounter with orca, which rams the stern about 15 times the boat lost its steering and needed to be towed back to harbor. So this was just Monday. Spain's maritime rescue service warned vessels in the area off the coast of Spain that to be aware of the presence of orcas and ask sailors to keep their distance, give them lots of leeway and inform the Coast Guard, although it does seem as though these orca are pursuing the boats and targeting them and working on them in an orchestrated way. This is, of course, they believe this is the same pod all the way through, that this is one pod of orcas that is doing this behavior. They are turning, if they had turned one of the boats around 180 degrees, you might go, oh, well, that's interesting or that just happened to be a coincidence. It's a, they are turning these boats like, nope, you're going that way, buddy.  So there's a bunch of things that may have led up to this and there's some theories as to what's triggered this pod to begin this behavior. But we can get to that in a second. Oh, teasing it for the second half. We're going to talk about, because that actually, yeah, now we know what the orcas are doing. Why are they doing it? Okay, we'll talk about that, Blair. You better put that in your back pocket and we'll be talking about it later. I have one last story for our quick stories at the start about whales, about a good news kind of researchers wanted to find out how many persistent organic pollutants are hanging out in Antarctica and affecting the health of animals there. Oh, hey, whales, they go swimming around a lot and they eat a lot of krill and other food that picks up those pollutants and then transfers them to the blubber of the whales. So they went to Ecuador and Mozambique and they sampled about 150 humpback whales and other southern whales to get a look at what kind of a pollutant load, contaminant load was in their bodies. And while they did find traces of DDT and other persistent pollutants like pesticides that are used on wheat fields, many pesticides that are supposedly banned today in their bloodstream, in their blubber, they found that it wasn't actually as much as in other areas of the world. So although pesticides and these persistent pesticides, these pollutants are making it to the Antarctic waters, they are not yet at a level that is considered dangerous to whales. So still a little bit of good news, even though these things are still in use and they're affecting the world, it's not that bad. So if I may, quick question, I don't have a quick story, but these are all baleen whales, right? These are all whales that are like filter feeders. So if you looked at toothed whales, whales that are predators, you might actually find a pretty different response because of biomagnification. So yeah, so these guys are eating the very bottom of the food chain. So there's not opportunity for it to accumulate a whole lot. But yeah, if you had an animal like fish that ate krill and then seals that ate fish and then whales that ate the seal, then they might have a much bigger load of that stuff. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Well, for the baleen, for the humpbacks, they are not the canary in the coal mine. Good. That you are, that they are looking for. I'll take it as good news for right now. But that's because it's the ocean. If you put canaries in the ocean, you would think the ocean was already toxic because they wouldn't. They wouldn't have last. Canaries would not last very long in the ocean. They would be better in the, yeah. They would be better in the ocean. This is toxic dihydrogen monoxide everywhere. Oh no! Club, club, club, club. If you just tuned in, you are listening to This Week in Science. If you are interested in a twist shirt, or mug, or pillow, or apron, or face mask, we have all sorts of twist products available in our Zazzle Store. Head over to twist.org. Click on that Zazzle link. Find something to make your twisty heart happy and support twists at the same time. Time for our COVID update. Bad news. It's all bad news. It is. It is. So I interviewed a public health researcher for Sigma Xi, the scientific professional organization, last Friday. And he's working at a fairly high level of on the informational side and research side of what's going on. And he is of the mind that this virus is going to be with us in one way or another forever. So we better start kind of putting that into our mindset. Right now, the U.S. is averaging 35,752 new cases and 772 deaths per day. However- Wow. Cut the deaths almost in half from the... That's so great news. So much better than the awful that we were doing before. Silver lining. Yeah. I hear your sarcasm. However, with school back in session, cases are increasing again, even as reported testing is decreasing. Test positivity is up from 4.8 percent to 6.1 percent over the last few days and test volume is down below 600,000 tests. A majority of COVID-19 outbreak hot spots are currently college towns, which may or may not be correlation. Well, it does relate back to the science of adolescence and risk-taking. Yes. That actually that age range is like the most likely to take risks that could kill you. So it kind of tracks. It does kind of tracks a little bit. And if the news is any indicator, many of these universities are giving lots of citations to their students for flaunting the rules related to COVID. All right. Even while that is going on, researchers are trying their darndest to find ways to prevent and treat this terrible disease, the cause of the pandemic we're in the midst of. And University of Pittsburgh researchers have discovered a teeny tiny bit of protein called AB8, AB8, which is actually a little tiny immunoglobulin, I can't say the word immunoglobulin, immunoglobulin, there we go, immunoglobulin-based antibody. So it's based on antibodies that our blood creates. They took blood and they put SARS, the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein into the blood and then looked to see what the immune cells in the blood came up with.  And this AB8 was the smallest, but also one of the most effective. And they've now tested it on mice and hamsters and they were able to very well prevent and also treat infection with SARS-CoV-2 in these animals. And the exciting thing is, is because it's a tiny little virus, AB8 could be fairly easily delivered, wouldn't have to be delivered in large quantities necessarily because they found in mice and hamsters that very low concentrations of the protein have a very significant effect. It is a very effective neutralizing agent for the virus. It grabs onto the spike and doesn't allow it to infect cells. Additionally, it does not bind to human cells itself. So there is no possibility that AB8 would be a problem to our body in any way. It would just probably get cleared out after a while. And because it's so tiny, you could inhale it. So it wouldn't have to be a drip injection delivery method. It could be something that is as easy as your allergy medication to be able to take. So very exciting. It's very early on in these, but these stages of manufacturing and getting it along the road to clinical trials, but they are already partnering with a manufacturer and a research, industrial research organization that can potentially push this out faster, fast as we need it. Yeah. AB8, put that in your little memory bank, says something that's a possibility, not yet, but maybe out there. Because remember, this virus is going to be with us for a long time, so we're going to need it. Thank you, America. Thank you. Thank you, America, because there is another study that I didn't want to talk about tonight. That said, pretty much we could have avoided all of this, but we're not going to talk about that because it doesn't matter anymore. Yeah, that sounds correct. It's a little too late to be talking about what could have been done. Let's talk about what we're going to do, moving forward, which masks huge. CDC director today just was talking with Congress and was like, yeah, so I think a mask is going to protect me better than a vaccine will. Yeah, so masks are the thing. They are the thing. So how do we perceive them? We have these huge questions. Oh, my gosh. Who has questions? Who has no questions? There are people who are angry about being told they have to wear a mask about what it implies about them and their identity issues that have somehow been tied into mask wearing. To look into this a little bit, there was a study done in Germany looking at 7,000 German participants, cross-sectional of the population, and they looked at, in the laboratory, this is a simulated situation, not real, but they had people in the study either in a you have to wear masks mandatory group and another group that's like, oh, it's voluntary. You can choose to wear masks and then gave them different situations like, oh, you're in a grocery store and somebody's not wearing a mask. What do you do? And then look to see how people responded and what they found is very interesting. Their results encapsulated in their abstract indicate that a voluntary policy would likely lead to insufficient compliance, would be perceived as less fair and could intensify stigmatization. Stigmatization because people who wear masks are perceived as having greater risk of contracting the disease and so that gives a greater stigma to the health state of the people wearing masks. There's also the opposite side of it which found that was very apparent in the mandatory situation where people were, they found it to be effective, fair and socially responsible. Once people were told to wear masks, compliance went up from something on the level of 60% of people, 60, 70% of people to 96% of people wearing masks once it was mandatory. There are perception issues at work here that are very interesting and that should be taken into account moving forward, especially as we're potentially looking at things being, at mask policies being applied on a region to region or state to state basis. And so it's a very interesting issue as to how people perceive each other. Once it's voluntary, the idea of mask wearing when it's voluntary, it's like you're on my team and people who see other people wearing masks like, oh yeah, you're like me and there's a social bonding that happens as a result of it. And there is also social stigmatization to those who are not wearing masks either. I also, they're not a joiner. They're not a helper. You're not a joiner. That's how we identify the others. They're not wearing the mask when they should. That's how we know who they are and we can round them up. Look, here's the thing. I come to an intersection. Justin. I come to an intersection. I can tell if there's other cars coming. I have eyes in my head. I'm aware of my surroundings. I shouldn't need to stop at a stop sign if I don't see other cars coming. Yeah. The whole point and of having a stop sign that you stop out even if there's no other cars there is that we all follow this rule together all the time and we don't run into each other. We don't guess. We help each other. Yeah. Yes. I was thinking more about how when they first said, okay, now everyone wear masks. I didn't wear a mask every time I went outside because I would be like, oh, I'm going to run out to take the dog out real quick. And so I'd be like, oh, I'll be right back. And I usually didn't run into people, but every once in a while, there'd be another person in the stairs. Oh, dang, I should have my mask. But then they made it very clear in my apartment complex that you can get a fine for not having a mask on in the common areas of the apartment complexes. Okay, all right. So now I put a mask on every time I go outside. And it's just I've always been with the mask thing ever since they've said that we should. And I still was less compliant when it was optional. Just because it's you think about like a seatbelt, like, oh, I'm just going to the store. I don't need to put my seatbelt on. But if there's any streets between the store and there, I could get pulled over for not wearing a seatbelt. So it's just having it be compulsory changes the, I think even the frequency of how often you do it, even if you're with it. Yeah. Yeah. However, as I reported a month or so ago, maybe longer, if you're conservative, you're going to be more likely to break a rule once it's a rule. This is just the seatbelt law. This is a weird thing that they found that if you have a conservative mindset, you're less likely to wear the seatbelt because it's the law. Like you're more likely to go against the social recommendation. Interesting. Why it is that they don't believe that yeah, this was a whole study that this is like a month or two ago, I did. Okay, I have to go back and look at that again. Yeah. Conservative mindsets tend to be not like those. No, I don't think I don't think that's right because we, not a criminal thing. No, conservative mindsets are, it depends, it really depends on the identity of the conservative, like in which way they're conservative because there is the accepting of authoritarian instruction of leadership that's authoritarian. And if in that case, if somebody tells you what to do, you're going to be all for it. But there is the conservative, which is personal freedom conservative, which is going to- They're the same. Hang on, hang on, they're the same because what you have to understand is when they follow the authoritarian, the rule is on somebody else, not on them. They follow the authoritarian because the authoritarian is saying, we're going to create these other rules for those people. Yay, I'm going to create one rule for you. No, rules on the other people. Yeah, no, that's exactly it. It's the same person. Okay, that's called hypocrisy. Anyway, that's the word. Yeah, anyway, it's very interesting. And I think in terms of these mandates or voluntary applications of behaviors that can potentially save lives, that will reduce infections, that are scientifically, they have been shown and will be, and are being shown, there are more studies being published every day on how different kinds of masks impair airflow, impair viral transmission, you know, that we are learning more and more every day. But Blair, what did you find? You found one of these studies. Yes, so actually this isn't a study, this is a commentary. So that's the first disclaimer I have here is that it's not a scientific study, it's based on data collected from other studies and just current COVID information. So it's really just a hypothesis at this point. But this was a commentary published in the New England Journal of Medicine which has a promising theory about the use of masks. Now, I love this. So when we all started, we were like, okay, everybody wear your masks.  Which was a PR nightmare. I feel like it was a huge mistake. My mask protects you, your mask protects me. Huge mistake, but the good news is it's more complicated and that mask might actually save your life. Let me explain. I'm so excited about this story. Okay, so there's a new theory that universal face mask wearing might actually reduce the severity of COVID-19 and ensure a greater proportion of infections are asymptomatic and increase general immunity. Because, yes, because this is all based on a dataset that shows that the amount of virus someone is exposed to at the start of infection, the infectious dose may determine not only the severity of their illness but also the mortality rate of patients.  Like it just, it makes, it looks like it makes it better. So- But that makes absolute sense, doesn't it? Because I'm like, I'm like, if you get a bacteria, it's going to have a chance to grow. And at some point it's growing and it's doubling and it's doubling and it's doubling and it gets to a point where it's going to infect you as much as it's going to infect you. But with the virus, it's the number of them in the cells that are taking over machinery in your cells that are then expulsing. So it's going to have, how much you start with determines how rapidly the onset is going to be. Right, but this is where, this is where this gets crazy. There is also new data suggesting that the immune response from COVID is equally as strong from a mild or asymptomatic infection as from a troublesome infection. So knowing that, combining those two pieces of information, wearing a mask could actually increase immunity overall in a population. Because if you are getting exposed to COVID, they're wearing a mask and I'm wearing a mask, then way less virus ends up in my body and my immune system might actually build antibody short-term for that virus without ever getting sick. So what you're saying is we should have these micro dosing parties where some of COVID wears a mask. No, no, no. Everyone should wear a mask. Back to what we were just talking about, just a mask mandate. A mask mandate could create temporary immunity while we create a vaccine. So this starts to be a really, really interesting idea. Yeah. For example, this is again, this is not, this is not like I didn't do any statistics on this at all. But anecdotally, California has had very, very strict mask rules in their cities, in their big cities. But they also have been reopening and there's been questions about like, oh, is this a good idea? Not to mention the peaceful protests that occurred. People were wearing masks. Right? Yep. And outdoors. Yeah. So knowing all this, this contributes to this idea. Why is California's rates still dropping if we are opening up and we're not at the kind of prescribed percentage rate that we're supposed to be at? And this might be why, because California might be really, really, really good at enforcing and promoting mask wearing and creating this temporary immunity and more common asymptomatic infections in the community. So again, this was an article, just kind of proposing an idea based on some data that was polled. So this is totally correlative, but I think it is so exciting. And I think this means we have to change our conversation again and start to indicate that that mask protects you. Oh, yeah. The mask protects everyone because you breathe out. Yeah. The air goes less distance. It's reducing the amount of virus potentially that makes it out past the mask out into the air. And if you're breathing in, same thing. The airflow is less, virus is less. My mask protects you and me. Exactly. I am the weary of the extrapolation of anything that's being done statewide, being too closely associated with the thing that's being done. I like it with the masks. It makes sense, that correlation. That was totally just me being anecdotal because our numbers are not rising as fast as they should be considering how we're reopening. That's all I'm saying. Yet, yet.  Florida congratulated itself, patted itself on the back for doing such a great job, even though they had done nothing and congratulated themselves into becoming the hotspot in the nation. There's been other places were like, hey, we've reopened schools and haven't had a problem. And then they had, you know, it's a couple weeks later, they have these outbreaks.  And we did have a problem. And we just thought we didn't because that's. Yes, but also both of those, like you talked about some of these schools, the school, the majority of the states where these schools have been, but also Florida, when they did this exact thing, they did not have mask mandates. No, no, no, I totally agree that the masks should be part of it. I've been, I wear mine happily. Yeah, all the time. Absolutely. Happily we go outside, sing kumbayask, my friends kumbayask. Don't say it, it says mask also protect from bad, bad breath. It sure does. Actually, it turns out it can also help you help your friends if you have bad breath and didn't know it. Yeah. Brush your teeth, people. Can eat all the garlic I want now. Who wants to eat garlic? I do. So good, but so bad. This is this weekend science. Want to help twist grow? Get a friend to listen today. Then get them to subscribe. That would be awesome. All right. Is it that time? It's that time. In our show that we love to call Blair's Animal Corner. With Blair. She loves our creature, great as all. By bed, will a pet, no pet at all. You are here about animal. She's your girl, except for giant. And that's girl. She got there. I have those psychic worms. Well, that was kind of false advertising. I have worms. What? What do you mean? No, we didn't get any false advertising. The worms know that you're talking about. Tell me about psychic worms. This is about our friend C. elegans, or care nor hubditis elegans. C. elegans is fine. That's why they call it C. elegans. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a microscopic roundworm. They're studied to death, probably quite literally. We know a lot about them. We know their neurons, their muscle cells, their intestinal cells, the identity of every cell in their body. We also know the order in which those cells arrive, but there's still something that's pretty wild about these worms that needed to be studied. So this is out of Princeton University. And this research question comes from the fact that they feed on bacteria, pseudomonas aeruginosa. And under certain environmental conditions, this bacteria can become pathogenic. It can sicken the worms.  I don't know. I don't know how it makes them sick, but it makes them sick. It makes them sick. And so when mothers are made ill, or I'm going to say mothers because they're hermaphrodites, but when parent worms are made ill, they actually learn to avoid that bacteria because the environment in which they live is now bad for that, like that bacteria becomes toxic in that environment.  What gets interesting is that they're offspring, their grandchildren, and their great-great-grandchildren also avoid that bacteria. But after four generations, this what they call transgenerational avoidance behavior disappears, letting the worms return to feeding on the bacteria. Because maybe after four generations, things have gotten better and the bacteria is palatable again. I don't know. They wanted to see what the mechanism was here. How are these worms avoiding the bacteria? Like are they tasting it and going now? And then how are they telling these multiple generations to stay away from this bacteria? So first they looked at other types of pathogenic bacteria, did not cause avoidance. So this behavior is specific to that bacteria. It's not just that if they eat something that makes them sick, they'll avoid it after that. No, it's just this one bacteria. So they also found that it is, it all comes from one particular worm neuron. One neuron tells them not to eat that stuff. That's great. How does this work? How does it get that?  How did the generations find out? So they fed worms with a harmless bacteria that had been spiked with different materials isolated from the pathogenic bacteria. And they found that it has to do with RNA. So they tested DNA. They tested the messenger RNAs and small RNAs. Those don't cone for proteins, but instead they perform regulatory functions in cells like they promote the destruction of messenger RNAs, for example. So when it came down to it, it was the small RNAs in the bacteria that was telling the worms not to eat them. So it didn't have to do with taste. It didn't have to do with anything produced when they eat it. No metabolites, nothing like that. It was just the small RNAs that told them that it was pathogenic. So they found within that that a specific small RNA called P11 is the one that causes inherited avoidance. It doesn't make them sick. They just detect P11 and it's enough to make them avoid it and pass on to four generations. So how does this happen? Once the worm has eaten the bacteria, P11 is absorbed, processed by the worm intestine, and then finds its way into the egg and sperm. So this is kind of related to what we were talking about before. How do you get bacteria into neurons? So it's passed into eggs and sperm. Again, they're hermaphrodites, so they have both. This is just a protein though. This is just not even a protein. This is mRNA. Tiny bit of thing. Yeah, it's different, but it's still a similar pathway. So from gut to neuron. So from there, P11 brought to the neuron. It controls the avoidant behavior. And the way they do that is they destroy the worm messenger RNAs that encode for a protein, a specific protein called maceulin. The messenger RNAs prevent this protein from being manufactured, and that causes the avoidance. So this is the basis now. Now we have a mechanics behind a genetic memory. Yeah, indeed. That's because it's something we've talked about for so long. How does this happen? What is this multi-generational learning thing? How is this possible? Now we're seeing mechanism in a worm. The very basic illustration of how that mechanism of passing on a genetic memory from one generation to the next, let alone four might be possible. And beyond that, though, why does it stop?  Yeah, it also has to survive it. So to pass it. But then the other thing is, I don't know enough about how worms reproduce. They're hermaphrodites. They're hermaphrodites, but do they also hook up with that? They can with themselves? They can, yep. And? Okay, because then my whole tree of how a trait is passed down gets really awkward. Well, and that might have to do, yeah, that might have, it's just an infinity size. Yeah, no. Yeah, how would it fall out then? Is it then the thing? So that might have to do with sexual reproduction. Because they do both. Yeah. But in the, in the, is it asexual? What's the one where, how's the one where they do it with themselves and have an offspring that's kind of a clone? They self fertilize. They self fertilize, but do they have, is it a clone or do they have other material from both parents that they use to mix it up with? Because if that's the case. Listen to Blair. Think about your punnett square, right? So I have brown hair. That means I either have two brown hair genes or I have a brown and a blonde, let's say, right? And the blonde would be recessive, which is why you see my brown hair. So if I had a baby with someone who was blonde, as I want to do, then there would be a chance that my baby would be blonde because that person has two recessive blonde genes, right? So I have like a one in four chance that I'd have two in four chance I'd have brown hair because it's dominant and two in four chance that I would have a kid with blonde hair. So that's what's happening with this worm. So if I did asexual reproduction in this case and I self fertilized, I could technically have a blonde child because of that recessive gene. So no, it would not be a clone. Okay, perfect. So it's not a clone. So then you can have, if the one that encounters and is now going to pass on this trait, pass it, it could still encode DNA that doesn't have the trait because they, oh, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, because it could be pulling from. Because they're also saying it goes straight through to the sperm and egg in which case it could be present in all versions. All of those versions. And then at some point, somebody's then asexual, ah, then asexual transmissions taking place and with a set that may not, that it's inherited sexual transmission. Yeah. Doesn't have it. Except everything. They, ah, yeah, I don't know. Yep. So that could be it. We don't know. They, they didn't figure out why it goes away yet. That's a future study. But maybe, maybe the interaction with the molecule has to trigger it. Yeah. Yeah, maybe that is, I mean, what I'm interested in now is, okay, we've seen this and we have a mechanism for the worms. We know that there are stress related changes in, like, what is it? The F2 generation where if the grandparents were stressed out because of lack of food, then there are changes to the metabolism of not the offspring, but the grandchildren. And this is in, in mammals, right? So, yeah, so humans. That's humans, yeah. So what is happening? So that's the question there is what happens there? Where does it go for a, for a generation? So I think that's really the question here. Yeah. Is this the method for memories and DNA? Or is it a method? A method. For memories and DNA. So, so one of the, one of the ideas I guess behind that is that it is, it has to be pre-purity humans. So it's probably affecting egg and sperm that's going to be I must say the way I've read this is it seems like it is changing the way egg and sperm in their offspring is going DNA is going to be manufactured but the offspring still get the genes. I know that's weird, but it's No, that kind of makes sense, right?  So it doesn't go straight into the eggs, but there's chemical signals that go into the, their baby and those eggs are the ones that I can't stop. Yes, yes, absolutely. Even though they're still inheriting whatever the last generation was, the, they're primed to pass the thing on that they didn't have. Yeah. There are lots of, lots of things that work, especially in chromosomal imprinting where one of the two chromosomes from the mother and one of the two chromosomes from the father get passed along in the, so there's imprinting that's at work and one get, because one gets silenced, the other one doesn't. So if, if it's on one version and not the other, it'll get passed or not. This is all very interesting. Complicated. Very complicated, very fascinating. It's very dramatic. Yeah. Absolutely. Um, speaking of complications, yeah. Yes. Tell us more. Complicated environments can lead to complicated people or chimps. So this is a study. It was an international team of researchers from a pan African program, the culture chimpanzee and the Max Planck Institute of Illegionary Anthropology and more, looking at combined fieldwork and in depth literature, looking at chimpanzee behavior. So they looked at 46 field sites and then also they had all of their old data that they were looking at. They looked at 144 chimpanzee social groups and they found they were looking at environmental conditions related to behavioral diversity and cultural diversity. So you think about behavioral diversity that's just like how many different personalities you have or tactics or ways of acting in a troop. But then you have your cultural diversity that's could be within the same group or between groups. Do some of them use tools in a particular way, store their tools in a particular way, make tools in particular ways, have different ways of kind of grooming hierarchies within, you know, these are all cultural changes within species. So they found that with environmental diversity comes behavior and cultural diversity. So the more variable your space is seasonality changes, landscape changes over time, the more kind of plastic behavior comes in that space. Makes sense. You have to kind of adapt to what you're dealing with and you become more flexible as an individual and therefore as a troop, as a group, as a species potentially. So this is used kind of as a proxy for human evolution because it's really hard to study things like behavioral diversity through the fossil record all by itself. And so looking at something like this you can kind of see how this could shed a light on the behavior of hominids in the past because if they lived in a space that had very strong seasonality then it is likely that their behaviors were also varied because they have to do different things at different times of the year to be able to migrate, be able to stay put, all these different things. Search for different food sources. Absolutely. Yeah. And learn different tactics of preparing that food or gathering that food or what happened. So this was a pretty cool thing that's making us do. When you say it, you're making us do, when you say it, it kind of sounds like a well done but it's a really good basis for looking at other primate species including humanoids, humans ourselves and then also just other animals in general. If you have more environmental variability then maybe you're looking out for more behavioral variability. And I think also it's important to remember that a lot of behavioral research is done over many, many years but not all of it. And so if you're researching behavior in a species only during a winter in a species that has intense environmental variability where they live, then maybe you should stick around for a couple calendar years and make sure you're there in different seasons because you could see completely different behavior depending on that. Yeah. If you only study grizzly bears in the winter. You think they were really sleepy. That is the laziest animal you've ever seen. But likewise, if you only study grizzly bears in let's say California when they were here versus in Montana, you might see very different things. Right. Because here in California doesn't get as cold. So they wouldn't even hibernate. So there you go. There's some behavior. What? I just think of bears as always hibernating.  Nope. Just because it's winter, they don't hibernate? Yeah. That's what, you know, the bears that zoos that are in temperate climates don't hibernate usually. There's probably a difference between diets too. I mean eating berries in the spring and summer versus, you know, trying to eat a lot of fatty fish or something as you get close to winter. Yeah. It's going to vary seasonally depending on the needs of the animal. Absolutely. And this though, there is a bit of chicken and egg in this idea. It's always the egg. Because I know, I know. Eggs came way before chickens. Dinosaurs laid eggs. Eggs have been around a lot longer. From the brain side of things, there's the also, you know, which animals are going to stick around in different areas? So animals that have bigger brains that have more interconnectedness that they have greater networking within their brain are potentially better generalists and better able to come up with more behaviors to handle a diverse environment. And so it's got, there's a bit of the hand in hand aspect of the evolutionary process, which, you know, what is going to push from the birds that I studied migrate to push birds to migrate or to stay in one place and take advantage of the resources that are in, yeah, hunker down and just stay, stay in one place.  And we, there are differences in the brains between specialists and generalists, migrant birds and non-migrant birds. You know, so, yeah, so diverse environment versus very plain environment. See, well, I think this will get really interesting. What do you need? What do you need to live in a very boring place? Not much. If you take a chimp from a not very variable environment, from generations of a not variable environment, you stick them into a variable environment. What happens? How plastic is it? Like, how quickly can they could they respond to the culture that they're in? And I think it's fascinating. Yeah, very interesting question. Cool. Thank you, Blair. Oh, well. This is This Week in Science. We want to thank you for listening to TWIS. You are the reason that we do what we do every single week, bringing you up to date and down to earth views on science discoveries and with your help, we can do even more.  Head to TWIS.org right now and choose your level of support be a part of bringing sanity and science to more people. And we're back. You're listening to This Week in Science and Justin was supposed to tell us more about Orcas, but I guess we'll have to wait for that. Justin doesn't care about the rundown. Dude. He can go to some stories, Orcas. He can go left. I have stories. Of course I have stories. I kind of put Justin in there to see if he'll just stay. The answer is no. The answer is no. Let's talk about pain. The pain that comes from climbing a particular tree in Australia. There's a tree in Australia because Australia doesn't have enough things that can hurt you. They also have plants that can hurt you. The Australian Stinging Tree, otherwise known as Gimpy Gimpy Stinging Tree, is venomous. I want to say I saw Steve Irwin get stung by this tree when I was a kid on his show. You may have, and this tree, very similar to stinging nettles that you might be familiar with.  It leads to pain, burning, itching, that can last days, sometimes weeks, depending on how much of the venom ends up in your skin and how your body reacts to it. The tree, dendrochnide, means stinging tree. It is a member of the nettle family found from the northern rivers region of New South Wales and Queensland through Gimpy Queensland. It's all over the place, not nice, and these researchers decided to check out what was going on with the chemical makeup of the venom to find out what was in it. And they thought that they'd find something fairly basic, and they were looking, but at first they were like, okay, in the trichomes, there's got to be histamine, acetylcholine, formic acid, they wanted to test all these things, but they didn't have that long lasting effect. And so they said, well, maybe there's actually a neurotoxin involved and they decided to look more closely there and found that there's a whole new class of plant neurotoxins now, little mini proteins that they have called gimpitides. And the gimpitides, of course, are named after the gimpi-gimpi plant, but they are neurotoxins similar to the cone snail and venomous spiders. Oh my God, cone snails are very high on the pain index. Yeah, and I have an issue, I'm calling it venom because I think of it as like, you know, little fangs or a- Well, venom is injected, poison is injected, so this does sound like venom. Yes, it's injected through these trichomes that are like little teeny tiny needles that inject the venom, plant venom. So not only do we have venomous spiders and cone snails, there is at least one, if not more venomous plant in the world. It's called big fangs, big, big fangs. Yes, what they're hoping, the neurotoxin works very similarly to other neurotoxins affecting ion channels, sodium channels in sensory neurons in the skin. So it's not actually due to the little tiny hairs getting stuck in the skin, but it's actually because the ion channel in the sensory neurons is getting changed permanently.  And it's like constant, constant burning pain. And by figuring out how it works, that they can hopefully use gimpi tides to develop treatments for people who accidentally just, or I don't know, on a dare decide to climb these trees. I mean, I'm just trying to get a better view. You had no idea what I was getting myself into. Yeah, that tree was going to take me down the way that it did. Venom, it's gone. See, Australia, even the trees are trying to hurt you. It's true, it's true. Everything in Australia is trying to kill you. Just one nice thing, one nice thing that's not trying to kill me. Yeah, okay. Moving on from venomous plants. Let's talk about time. Time? Rosemary and or the passage Wibbledy, Wobbledy, Timey, Wimey stuff. Oh, the Wibbledy, Wobbledy, Timey, Wimey. How we perceive it. Time perception. How do we know how long time is?  We've talked before about how we have an internal clock, the circadian clock that dictates our day and all of our metabolism and makes our body run.  But that doesn't have to do with perception of time. How do you know when something has been a long time or a short time? And you kind of, you maybe have a job that is repetitive and you're doing the same thing over and over, like pipetting perhaps, Justin. Pipetting from one set of plates to another. It's just repetitive and the time just seems to go by. Well, these researchers publishing in the Journal of Neuroscience really wanted to know what was happening in the brain. And so they did an fMRI study.  It's limited, but fMRI studies usually aren't too large in terms of their sample size. They showed people either a video clip. It's five seconds long, 50 times. So these people had to watch the same five second video 50 times or they had to listen to white noise that was like five seconds of white noise 50 times. And then, and this is kind of the entrainment to get the repetitive signal into the brain and to get the brain kind of warmed up to the sense of time this would be. Once they had done that, they asked the people to estimate how long the video clip was or how long the white noise was. And some people said that it was longer in duration or shorter in duration. After they did that, they did a test in which they played either a longer video clip or a shorter video clip. But they didn't tell them they changed the duration. And then they asked people to estimate how long the video was or how long the sound was. And they found that everybody got it wrong.  The, where did it go? The SMG, the super something gyrus.  The super marginal gyrus. Here we go. They found, using fMRI, they found this super marginal gyrus which lit up, but it lit up less when people were really misjudging the time that they were supposed to be estimating.   That's the take home message here. Your brain is not good at judging time at all, so we should just stop trying. You're going to get it wrong. Is that like highway hypnosis? I feel like that's highway hypnosis, right?  Right. Yeah. And so the idea that they're hoping to get at at some point in the future is like, maybe we can stimulate that area of the brain when people are doing long drives, repetitive tasks, something to keep those neurons fresh and not tired out and habituated so that your sense of time either can fly by and you'll be able to have less time distortion in a negative sense and in a slowing sense or in the other direction, be able to control it so that tasks or fun times that you want to have, you can make them last longer. But don't you think the fleeting nature of fun is part of what makes it desirable? Oh, I agree with that. Absolutely. No, no, no, no. I feel like it's a good first leap. I would like like when you hit snooze for it to feel like two hours. That would be great. I would like that a lot. Yes, this after you hit the snooze button. I slept for so much longer. Oh, it hasn't been that much longer, but I feel refreshed. It's great. Yeah, but basically, this is another area of the brain which has a very distinct population of neurons that are involved in our perception of time. Now we know where they are. Can we manipulate them? Or what else can we learn about how they're integrated with other areas of the brain to really allow us to navigate through not only space, but time, which is what we do. We're time travelers. We are just in one direction. Yeah, more or less. In relation to time thing can be interesting. I mean, I can absolutely see like, hey, if you take this pill, the next eight hours will go by as if it was two. Get on that long flight and at the end you feel actually that wasn't so bad.   I'd have to see it in action. I'd have to see the difference of somebody under this pill or whatever under this condition. Hypersensitivity or not hypersensitivity being like, okay, there's a lot going to happen in the next minute or in the next hour. You need to pay attention to all of it. Sounds like you're putting somebody on speed. Sounds like you're putting somebody on something. You know what I mean? Isn't that what that is already like? Those are the attention. Yeah, you got to get a lot out of the next hour. Those are the attention enhancing drugs, the ones that affect the frontal cortex. This group of neurons is a little bit different though. The fact that when they get tired, time distorts for you. All it's going to do is replace an egg timer. Ah, I don't need it. I have an egg timer for that. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Anyway, it's pretty interesting. Yeah, our brain is absolutely tied into how we perceive time. But I want to know now, Justin, about those orcas. You said you were going to talk about it more. Let's talk now. Let's talk. Okay. You introduced it. Yeah. The first half I introduced seven different attacks where whales seem to be intentionally disabling boats and turning them around. So this is mostly taking place, at least it started off. And the Gibraltar Strait, which is South of France that sort of entrance to the Mediterranean between Europe and Africa. Yeah. So in that area, the orca that are there are endangered, as they probably are in most places in the world, but they're very endangered. They are absolutely on the edge in this region. Their main thing that has drawn them to this region in the past is bluefin tuna, which has been massively overfished in this area. And his dwindling, dwindling supply, there's 30 adult orca making up five pods of orca. Two of those pods have already switched from hunting bluefin tuna to going after fish that were already caught on these long lines of the fisherman's net. So the fisherman pull up the line, not the nets, but the hook lines.  Because two separate pods have figured out how to just take them from the fisherman instead of hunting. It's also hard to hunt because then noise is so great. The orca there have been sort of hounded in a couple ways. It's a shipping lane, it's a heavy fishing region, plus there are whale watchers who are coming out to do sightseeing of the orcas. And plus fishermen chase orcas because they believe that the orcas are better at finding the bluefin tuna. So they will actually run there, if they see orca, they'll put their fishing boats across where the orca are thinking that the tuna will be below. What happens then is they get caught and hit and snagged and cut by fishing line. Also when they're going after the tuna that's already on the hook, that's also very dangerous, very sometimes lethal, but usually just causing injury to the orca. So their food is scarce, the noise pollution is bad, their ability to get food is also not just hampered, but they have all of these sort of challenges with getting cut in all these fishing lines that are going back and forth across. Okay, so this is from The Guardian is reporting that you're selling a marine biologist with Firm, FIRMM, Whale Watching and Research Foundation who's been there for 17 years studying whales, considers one theory that thanks to the COVID slowdown, there were months where there was no big game fishing, no whale watching, no people sailing, no fast ferries putting tourists around, fewer merchant ships were crossing through there. You got quiet. The entire area got quiet. So the pod that they think has been responsible for these boat attacks does not hunt off the line. They're one of the pods that still actually tries to hunt the bluefin, which means that they're hunting probably greatly improved in the quiet. This is something according to Selene that they probably never experienced before and so they might have gotten used to it in just a few months of being able to hear everything again for the first time. Then suddenly it starts up again. Now it's an annoyance. Now they identify, oh, we didn't see as many boats and the noise went away, maybe that's what it is. And what's interesting is a lot of these boats that were attacked are sailboats that also have engines that were under engine power at the time that the whales attacked. So even the sailboats that were part of this were under engine at the time. So that's very interesting. Another one is thinking that, oh, this is a Rousio Espada, I might be messing up the name, who works at the Marine Biology Laboratory of the University of Seville has observed the migratory population of Orca and the jolt brought to straits for many, many years. Quoting, for killer whales to take out a piece of fiberglass rudder is crazy. I've seen these Orcas grow from babies, I know their life stories, I've never seen or heard of attacks. Sometimes they will bite the rudder to get dragged behind as a game but never with enough force to break it. So for those who think this is just Orcas at play, it does look like this is something that maybe they started as play at one point, but this one pod seems to have taken it into a new direction. There's another one. I think it's interesting, the idea of play, we know with kids for development and for all sorts of species, play is learning. You play with things. How do kids learn how to become an engineer when they grow up? They start by taking things apart. They learn how it works. So play could have been learning about the rudder, seeing what it does to the boat and learning. This also just seems like more of nature taking over while everyone was inside from COVID and not wanting to go back, which is happening with the coyotes in my neighborhood. Now we live here now. This is it. Yeah, this is ours. Another thing is that it's a little bit interesting because one of the other things is that it could be fishermen have been attacking the fish. So these are protected animals, but both the whale watching boats, speed boats ignore the protection distance orders. And fishermen who see the orca as competitors have actually tried to attack these reports, I guess, of them using electric prods on them to scare them away or throwing lit fuel at them, just being generally awful. There have been young orca, which they're having a hard time keeping them alive because the food sources are so rare, but young orca are not making it the normal rates. Some get caught in nets. Some actually get caught on the hooks. So it could be, no, there's this idea that, but that's been going on for decades. The big change has been everything got quiet. That's a one big change. Yeah, it went back to the orca and immediately as things have started up and immediately I'm saying, but it's interesting in the chain of events that they have listed out so far of these orca encounters, the first one starts with them just stopping a boat by the rudder. And then it seems to escalate as they're trying out techniques and turning the boats around. They're turning the boats around. So if we did find an intelligent life form on another planet, it could be a lot less intelligent than this. And we would say, we need to clean room for our interaction, for anything going to probe we need to make sure we do not interfere or interact negatively towards this mediocre species of even a bacteria that we find in space. Here's something on earth that is learning, operating in a coordinated manner and telling us turn around, go that way. My favorite is the one where they got turned around in the middle of the night. They tried to turn the boat back around. New York were like, no, no, no, we're turning you around again. But we need to correct. No, no, no, no, no, put them back again until they were like, fine, we're going back and stop fighting with Orca. I can't wait to hear the actual scientific studies that come out of this because it is going to be very interesting to find out whether or not we know Orcas do hunt impacts. We do know they are coordinated in their actions. It's not random. So what is their coordination? What do their communications seem to indicate to actually go in and start studying? Let's go in with different kinds of boats and see what happens. Let's go in with different kinds of rudders and see what happens. Honestly, though, don't go out in a rowboat. Actually, what's interesting though is that small boats like that have never been affected really by Orca. Orca never paid attention. There have been other reports of Orca coming up being interested in boats, sort of bumping them, sort of checking out what's going on here. They don't do that to small personnel. You get the catfights for sure. Yeah, but they don't seem to do that with personal craft. None of these attacks or maybe we just never heard from the people. Yeah. We're in the book. But so here's what I think it's passing. So this is in the Geralta Strait in the south of Spain. The Bluefin tuna are at this point heading up the coast of Portugal. This pod has, I believe, because one of the researchers was saying that they believe it's all the same pod because it's unlikely that other pods spontaneously took up this behavior. And the attacks have followed the tuna migration up the coast of Portugal to the northwest Spain. So they assume it's the same pod that has traveled up there. Are these tuna-eating Orcas or are they seal-eating Orcas? No, these are tuna. It's their primary. Okay, so that's at least some good news. They're not mammal eaters, as far as we know. I mean, that is something very specific about different populations. Until they get a taste for the blood. But yeah, they may have connected, not just sound to the humans, this noise pollution. They may have been connected. They may be connecting, of course, the scarcity of food with humans. They're protecting their territory is what's taking place. Interestingly, they haven't, doesn't sound like they're turning boats around off the northwest coast. So, but it's not as, it's more of an open sea situation. So there's maybe not as confined an area now that they're in that they're no longer trying to turn boats back to the shore to protect this Gibraltar Strait. It's very fascinating. So we need to follow this if these attacks continue because the last one was just within the last week. But next season, when they're back in the Gibraltar Strait, what's going to be really fascinating is because Orca have the ability to teach. And one of these pods mingles with one of the other pods or with another group that doesn't go back to the Gibraltar. If they meet other Orca elsewhere and this behavior is learned, this can propagate. This can become a worldwide strategy of Orca. If I may, I feel like it is much more likely that they spend their migration up and down hearing ship noise in the channels now that things are starting up again and all this kind of stuff. And they're going to be totally desensitized when they get back down.  And then, you know, but then, you know, later, a couple of hours later, you're like, what did they say? And you crank it up and you crank it up and you crank it up and it doesn't seem so loud to you anymore. So I'm sure that's a possibility here if they were used to it before that they might get used to it again in their travels. That's a great point. Plus they're not getting food out of it. So like, learned behaviors most likely get passed on because it's a good way to get food. It's a good strategy. If they don't get anything out of this strategy over time, if they're not getting more food, if the boats don't all go away, yeah, then maybe it, maybe. Maybe we just don't know what they're getting yet. I mean, maybe it is getting rid of the humans. Maybe it is defending a territory against a different fish hunting animal. Could be. Yeah. But actually, we should respect it as though we've got to find out what they're after. We should respect it as though this is first contact. We are definitely being sent a message. You can't get much more clear than the message of turn your boat around, go back than what we've gotten. I think we should respect it. I think they should shut down the Mediterranean blue fin tuna fishing. Well, they should shut down the blue fin tuna thing anyway. I think blue fin tuna are percentage-wise based on original population. They're more scarce than Siberian tigers. Yeah, they crashed the population there by overfishing. So there's not a lot of blue fin tuna. So I feel like we should just cut that out anyway. I think that's a great idea. Elsewhere, we're talking about ion channels or something earlier. We had the California Channel Islands, which is not really a great transition, especially since we came after other stories in between. California Channel Islands off the coast of Los Angeles, California have for the yacht ferrying Southern Californians been a haven and is an interesting trove of archaeological, biological, paleontological richness has some actually important human sites in North America. These are islands off the coast famously or maybe not so much home to ancient, we're once home to Pygmy Mammoths. Pygmy Mammoths, which I love the phrase. It sounds like a jibble shrimp. Also a giant mouse. So they went both ways on these islands. But they found a short nose bear fossil in a cave on the island. It was this one little bone that was excavated in 1996 and it was thought to be a seal bone. And then it got looked at by an expert at some point the observation suggested that no, this looks like a bear toe. Way more like a bear toe than any kind of seal. And it was the first and only bear ever recorded on these islands. It was found in a strata that was dated over 13,000 years old. And it was kind of a mystery. Like there's nothing else here. There's no other signs of bear that got here. So what kind of bear was it? They sent it to a couple of labs. One came back with the with the hit that it looked like a speckled bear from South America. And another had gotten some DNA and DNA out of it that showed that it wasn't a South American bear. What they ended up doing is cross referencing. It turns out the speckled bear of South America is actually living relative of this short-nosed beast of a bear. Which this is a spectacle bear. Is that what you're talking about? Spectacled bear. Yes, the speckled is. Spectacled. Spectacled. They have markings that look like glasses. You look, yeah, they wear glasses. They have poor eyesight. But no, this is the ancestor. My favorite bear. So this bone is not the spectacled bear, but the ancestor of the speckled. Yes. So they got a hip for that that looked close to that. But then it turns out, no, no, this is the reason they have is because this is the ancestor. This is the arctodis simus. This is the extinct giant short-faced bear. Which had a range from Alaska down into Mexico, weighed about 2000 pounds, and had a very diverse set of environments. So we're talking about diverse environments before. There was some evidence that these bears ate nothing, but they were almost, they're omnivores. They ate a lot of berries and stuff like this. Other assessments have said that these were just complete carnivores up in the Yukon.  So they were eating maybe seals or fish near the shores. So this is related to what I just googled because I was like, how'd they get there? So the Channel Islands is 23 miles from the mainland, is what I just googled. Yeah, it's not close. So hey, maybe the ice- Is that swimmable for a bear? It's swimmable, maybe the ice- Far though. I know polar bears swim a really good distance, but that's 23 miles. That's pretty far for a swim. But yeah, if this bear is eating primarily seafood, then maybe they're good swimmers. Back in those days though, you could get really good seafood by walking into the coast off of California. Not anymore. 13,000 years ago, fish swam right up like no big deal. We're all over it. The ocean's full. We're going to hang out over here near the wall because that's all that stuff. So they had two theories they had to figure out. They had to figure out whether or not bears made it to the island and then died. Or if the thing died and something else brought it to the island. Oh yeah. Was it humans? Well, the bone was actually very much intact, which is apparently sort of weird once a human is carrying a bone around for any reason. They're usually doing so for some kind of a purpose, and they've repurposed it, and that's usually the case. That was their pet bear. But it's just the toe. There's the rest of the bear. It's my fidget spinner. Anyway, the assessment they landed on, they think this is the best, that it was likely taken by like an eagle or a condor. Big birds of prey that used to be a lot more common also in California. That would have probably preyed on the seafood left behind by the bear, what the bear didn't eat. And if the bear is living by the coast and the bear dies by the coast, it would get picked apart by these condors and eagles who also likely spent time on the island. And that would make more sense to me that a large soaring bird like a condor and probably that long ago they were very large condors probably ate a little scavenged, scavenged a little bear toe bone. Maybe carry them back with them young on an island where it's nice and safe from other predators. And the other thing is because of where they found the bear, it is sort of into a cave a little bit. Normally if you find a large predator animal in a cave, you find the whole thing. Other animals in caves, you might find bits and parts because a carnivore has dragged them in there. But when you find the carnivore, the whole thing's usually there. So yeah, best estimate that it was flown in. And my last story, last story if there's time, do we still have time? Go quick, Lee. Oldivay faithful. Some of the holiest remains of early human ancestors are from the Oldivay gorge, rift valley setting, northern Tanzania, right? This is the earth has been tearing apart, so we have all these nice layers. We can go back in human history. Hominid fossils and tools have been found, 1.8 million years old. There's this interesting stretch of dirt that's about that age, about 1.7 million years old that was being investigated because it was extremely sandy. It's a three kilometer long layer of rock that's exposed. It has just different geologic layer compared to everything else around it. They did some testing. This is Sistiaga is the lead author of this study that's in the proceedings National Academy of Sciences publication. Went to go analyze these sediments to see how landscapes had changed over time. Sort of looking for a climate change thing. How are the plants differentiated? And there's a lab that you could take this to in the United States. Where is it? That's somewhere in the States. That's all that matters right now. And they looked at this analysis and they found these lipids and these leftover bits that were in there. And they went, yeah, this isn't coming back as plants. And it happened to be the lab they took it to had also been studying yellowstone. And what they did discover is, hey, this looks exactly like the trace leftovers that you would expect to find from an extremophile that can't live in water below 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Or no, not 80 degrees. I'm sorry, 80 degrees Celsius. What is that? That's like 176 degrees Fahrenheit. This leftover looks like it was from a bacteria that persisted or an extremophile that persisted in boiling water. Basically, it was just sub boiling water. So if this if this holds up and it looks like it does, because apparently this is one of those telltale signs. This is one of those pretty crazy evidence that the and it makes sense because this is a splitting rift valley. You would expect there to be some tectonic activity. You would absolutely isn't type of area. You would expect to see hot springs. And in this case, high temperature extreme hot springs. So then not crazy idea that because the maybe because of the hot springs, you have these human settlements nearby. And if you have these human settlements nearby these hot hot hot springs, why not put a little food in there? Now, one of the things that it could have started, they think this is still postulate. They don't have it. It's hard to find the evidence of behavior yet. But now they have a thing to look for. They're going to look to see if there's other human sites, search the grounds around other human sites. Now that they have this way of determining whether a hot spring was there and some of some of the soils to see if there's other human sites. Near these types of hot springs. Because one of the things that they think could have happened is, you know, the first time you see an animal that's fallen into this boiling water and you retrieve it out and dang that meat is pretty good. That's a different way. I've never tasted meat like this before. And it's very easy to digest and it's very palatable too. And then you catch something. Well, let's put it in there first. So this is this is the this is the possibility. There's a potential that we have mankind started cooking food before they had fire. Suvied. Stew before stew before and it could have been totally makes sense. Accidents just happen stance. Yeah, should have been soup.  Yeah, they get cooked up too. And yeah, that's way easier to eat. Let's put everything in there. See if it's easier to eat. You know, put a rock in there. Pull it out out. No, that didn't improve. All right. Just try something else. Keep going until you've got you've got yourself a nice menu. Really, yeah, very interesting idea about how that would happen. Really, it makes sense to me. Yeah, so far they just have the correlation of these human settlements being near this super, super hot spring. I like that. They're not causation, but it's hard to prove something like this, but it's an interesting idea. Yeah, it's hard to assess the human behavior aspect so far. But they wouldn't they they've only just this was sort of a fluke. A person a person who's finding, you know, molecule evidence that or couldn't find their plant molecule evidence was finding this strange hit in the lab that they brought it to who specializes in the sort of thing. Had also been studying Yellowstone had also said hey, this signature matches up almost identically to the remnants of extremophiles that we have found and the super hot springs and we have some so that was sort of some luck to say the least. So now we got to keep looking. What if this is the thing humans just like hot tubs who went from hot tub spot to hot tub spot. Why not? Oh my gosh. Nice hot tub at the end of a rough day. Catch and pray scavenging. Absolutely. It's good stuff. All right, we are coming down to the end of the show here and I do have a letter from someone for our for our questions. And it's less of a less of a science question, more of a philosophical question related to science and our stance on issues. So for our twist question of the week, the letter comes from our listener, Ashlyn Antrobus. Ashlyn writes in what is twist's stance on the issue of transgender people existing? That's probably not the best wording for my question, but I'm struggling to word this in a way that keeps it in a matter, strictly a matter of science. On the July 29th episode, there was a discussion of barriers to entry. Presents were members of marginalized communities. Init Blair talked about the impact on careers of raising a family in which she described pregnancy and childbirth as what it means biologically to be a woman. I emailed her to point out that this ignores transgender men, non-binary people who are capable of these things in addition to cisgender women who cannot have children or don't want any. Then on the September 5th episode, after Blair's story about the limb regenerative capabilities of anemones, there was discussion of the wish for humans to have that capability. And Justin pointed out that alcohol and caffeine can have deleterious effects on people experiencing pregnancy. The statement was perfect, but then he amended himself to less inclusive language by changing it to women experiencing pregnancy. So you can understand my concern. And I wanted to know if you followed the lead of many organizations, or do you believe in the regressive idea that women are simply walking uteruses? I've been a fan of twists for a very long time, but need to know if you're going to be denying the experiences of my friends, my wife, and myself. So I just want to address this very quickly. And we can talk about the biology, the science, the state. Just from the top, though, I want to say, in everything that we do, we do not want to deny any living person, their personal experiences. Those experiences are yours, are theirs, and we do not want to deny anything. And so if any language that has come out of our show has given that impression, that was not our intent. Now, intent does not necessarily... This is a live show, and sometimes we use words that don't reflect the things that we believe in the best way. And so I just want to start the conversation there. But then there's also the biologically what it means to be a woman. We can go to the definitions of what that is, and culturally, this has become a very hot point for conversation over the last few years. It's been a long time coming, and I'm glad it is a massive conversation. Just in the last week, we see J.K. Rowling releasing a book with... There's a lot of bad, a lot of misrepresentation in the world. I think that's exactly what this is about too, is just... I wish that this had been part of the dialogue for longer, but it's still kind of new, and I appreciate people's patience as we learn to incorporate the right language when we're talking off the cuff. And I think that five years ago, I sometimes messed up when I was talking about pronouns, because that was kind of a newer conversation. And I'm not perfect. I'm trying to get better. I'm still not perfect.  So it has to do... So it's not, though. It's related to the... Yeah, the genetic. So the Supreme Court ruled against you. The Supreme Court ruled against you. So there's the social construct versus... When we're teaching science, there are specific words that mean specific things. And so you have to be very deliberate. And I think that this is the tough work that we have to do. And I actually... I did get that email, and I have been doing a lot of my own research. I wanted to be able to respond and kind of be thoughtful in my response. And so, Ashley and I look forward to writing something for you in the next week or so. But I appreciate the feedback because it did push me to do some of my own learning there. Because I want to make sure that my language is correct and inclusive and also scientifically accurate, because that's what we want to do, right? Yeah, exactly. And I'm a little bit of an iceberg from a foregone era. So I don't have the prejudiced iceberg thing. I have this early form of woke before that was the thing people said. And my training on gender was that you didn't... For instance, this is the early stages. Being a lesbian didn't make you a man. Was a thing, right? Like, you didn't call lesbians men because they were... Like, that would be offensive.  That's just fine. It's okay. There's nothing wrong with that, right? And so that was sort of... So if a woman wants to be like him, dress like him, that's fine. It can still be a woman who wants to do all of those things. That was the self-empowerment, regardless of what your gender, which was binary, regardless of what your gender is, you could live your life however you felt best suited you. And that was fine. You still had gender and it didn't matter how you were expressing. But now that's the part that I'm having. I've had a really hard time accepting like, is this a wave of people making an ask of gender? And do they represent all of their community? Because it feels like if I wanted to wear a dress, I shouldn't be calling myself a woman. If you've gone through the surgeries, does it still matter that you... How you were born or should it not matter that you were born that way and you can be a man with all of this accoutrement? That's where the pronoun conversation comes from, right? It's up to you. It's up to you. It's a personal choice and it's not on anyone else to tell you what you are. Right. But why do you have to disown one to have the other? It's the thing that I just found counter-intuitive. It almost is like I'm going to give up the fight for saying a man can have a vagina. Why did that fight just get given up? Why can't being born as the stamp on your birth certificate still own anything else that comes? You still be part of that because then... It depends on what you want and if it's misstamped because there's a misunderstanding, right? But to me, it sounds like surrender. To me, it sounds like surrender. No, it does. It says that a man can't X, Y, Z. Then you have to change your pronoun and have a third definition for a man can do however he wants as a woman can do however they want. And still, I mean, that's how you really break that gender wall. It's you stay men and women and live it out however you like. That's what's been my pushback. But I think that's what you think. You're talking about like your desire as a person versus your identity, which are two completely different things. Yeah, and these are two different things. You have the person you want to be with in the life you want to live in, the things you want to wear, and you have what you feel you are. But then you're stereotyping, but by choosing to say, I feel like I'm this, you're now defining.   That's what I'm saying. That makes no sense.  I just touched on the air. I got passionate. Forget those. Forget those definitions after show.  Why are you still following a stereotype? As you say you're walking away from the stereotype, you're just bringing the stereotype full circle. I appreciate that clarification of it because I think what it comes down to when I imagine it, I've always imagined the messiness of biology and we like to have our binary sexes categorize a man and a woman. And we just, we've liked to categorize it like that. And we can justify it, rationalize it by saying, well, the biological definition of female is the one who's able to carry the offspring or reproduce hold the offspring. And then a woman is an adult female. You can go by those definitions, but when it comes down to it, it's a spectrum. And everything is this, there might be the extremes where it's exact, exactly by that definition at one end or the other. But everything in the middle is messy and everything else. And so you have multiple chromosomes, multiple hormones. And yeah, and I think it's a very interesting point. We assign these things, but biology is messy. We try and create, we categorize. We create species when we don't even really know what species are. Humans are, we're trying to figure it out. Random gender topic in that room says we should invite a trans person as a guest to better explain. Yeah, please, because I don't know if a transgender man or woman is trying to be a chauvinist or have male privilege or have, I don't know why they're clinging on to the thing that they're supposed to be breaking. And that's why it's- But they're not necessarily trying to break anything. No, break them all. They have to have their own definition. My thing is like it's, oh, it's like skin lightening creams and hair straighteners became very popular when African Americans tried to integrate more into white society. It's like, why do you have to- I don't like the idea- Why do we have- I think just- Changing the A definition to fit into another definition. It just doesn't- Just a thought though, Justin. I think that part of this comes from the fact that you haven't been misgendered, right? And so I think part of it is that if you spend your life misgendered, being called the wrong pronoun, being called the opposite of what you identify as, then it makes you want to push to make it very clear what you want to be called, because every time somebody misgenders you, it hurts. And by appreciating what people want to be called, by appreciating and accepting and acknowledging that and trying to be as inclusive as possible, what we can do on this show moving forward is make sure that everyone feels comfortable and everyone feels welcome. And that is- And that's absolutely never our intention is to push somebody to a margin on this show. No. And we always, we want to learn. And if we're getting it wrong, we need to be told. So we do invite people to let us know. You know, if they're, yeah, Fada's saying you have a friend who is good on these subjects, could be great. I don't know. The thing is, I don't know that it's necessarily that the social politics conversation is necessarily the place on this show. I do want to learn these things and we do need to do more research to get to gain better understanding. But as a science program, our intent is to talk about things from the scientific perspective. And if, if as we're muddling our way through, we misuse a word, it is not our intent. And we will do the best that we can to use the most inclusive language that we can. But our, our intent is to communicate science. Yeah. And I will stand by women have the babies in the human race. I don't think that should be extreme. I don't understand why it is. Oh, but no, it's, it's, and if a trans woman could have been misgendered as, or as a male at birth, but is a woman because they could, because they self identify as a woman. So, and so they could potentially, if they have all of the, the plumbing, or if they go through hormone treatments or whatever is needed, they could potentially have a, hold, have a child, bear a child.   Like a per, it's, it's inclusive. And transgender men can have babies. And transgender men can have babies. But it's, we're talking about, you know, I think one, for example, like the conversation that sparked the beginning of this, I was talking about something that I, I should be more exact with my words and say that the majority of women are capable of having babies. And that might be part of their career path. And that is the barrier because also not all women who can have babies want to have babies, not all women who are born women can have babies. So that is part of the, you know, if you, if you want to be careful with your language, it takes extra words, which prevents you from marginalizing people. So it's, it takes practice. Yeah, the practice and we're, and I don't want to make mistakes, but I think since this is not, you know, this is an evolving understanding, we probably will, and we're going to make mistakes in all sorts of things. But it's emails like this that keep us honest and keep us thinking about these things so that we can do better. So thank you so much for writing the letter and helping, helping us start this conversation here with you. I think that brings us to the end of the show, a little tough conversation until for the end of the show there. That cursed on the show. Yeah, it's for the YouTubes, but it's not going to be in the podcast. Oh yeah. We have made it to the end of the show. Thank you for listening, everyone. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed it. I would love to shout out now to Fada. Thank you for your help with social media and with show notes. Gord, thank you for manning the chat room identity for thank you for recording the show, and I'd like to thank the Boroughs Welcome Fund and our Patreon sponsors for their generous support. 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This week's science is coming your way, so everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method for all that it's worth, and I'll broadcast my opinion all over the earth. Cause it's this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news, that what I say may not represent your views, but I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just get to understand, but we're not trying to threaten your philosophy, we're just trying to save the world from Japanese. And this week in science is coming your way, so everybody listen to everything we say, and if you use our methods that are rolling and die, we may rid the world of toxoplasma, got the eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, eye, cause it's this week in science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, this week in science, this week in science, science, science, science. I've got a laundry list of items I want to address, from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought and I'll try to answer any question you've got. Well how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour a week? This week in science is coming your way, you better just listen to what we say and if you learn anything from the words that we've said, then please just remember it's all in your head. Cause it's 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, It looks like the snake is doing, oh Blair can't hear me, that snake looks like it's its own neck warming scarf, is that a giant ground sloth, drink all the coffee you need or that you have, Carol Ann?  Our conversation at the end of the show will likely be edited down a little bit for the podcast version as it did go off the rails slightly but I'm glad that we started having that conversation. Oh good it's backwards! There we go! There's our new, our new frog. Oh identity four is now Sir Professor Dr. Awesome Sauce from now on. Identity four is Sir Professor Dr. Awesome Sauce. I know I was talking and I realized you couldn't hear and that's fine. So I'm reaching out about calendar pricing this week and we'll be ready by next week so that we can start taking pre-orders. Okay great pre-orders calendars everyone. Do you need your 2021 calendar? I hope we need a 2021 calendar. Where have we given up? A 2021 calendar is only going to March. Sorry folks it's how she wrote. No it's the opposite. It starts in August because that's when we're gonna have a vaccine. No Thunderbeaver you like that was your favorite part of the show. Awesome!  I don't know. I keep coming down to the Depeche Mode song, right? People are people so why should it be? You and I should get along so awfully boom boom boom. And by the way I'm I don't know if I stated it articulately enough. I understand I am out of line with the the the the current effect in culture on this issue. I understand that I'm out of line and I'm I'm just trying to apologize at the same time stating that where I am coming from is not a place of hate or intentional disparity but that I have this this somewhere in between what you're what's been fought against and what was the initial action taken. I'm sort of stuck there on that in between of acknowledging anybody. And I use the pronouns of the the where the now is the nouns pronouns what are the as as as prescribed to me when I'm told this is how this person I yeah I use them but I still don't have full comprehension on what is the current thing. Yeah education absolutely. Education I mean that's that's that's I do still have an innate language but for a very different reason. Our language is based in habit so it's like breaking a habit when you have to learn new ways of talking about things it takes time. Yeah and and Thunder Beaver did clarify the part of the show that you really liked was the F bomb. It wasn't the conversation we were having. I'm gonna echo or is this okay? You're good. You're good. Don't echo. I had to take my headphones off because it's so hot. My cans they were so hot. Yeah acknowledging social identities absolutely Gaurav. We need to we need to do that and we are we are going to try to do that. I think I think it's very interesting when we I mean we talk about sexual reproduction. We talk about issues that have to do with the biology of of sexes and sometimes even genders and it's definitely has to be very accurate these days. Yeah I mean it's it's definitely it's a it's a push-pull because in order to be a good science communicator you want to relate things to humans but gender identity is not something that happens by our allowance who's outside right so it's different so even though you know we send all this time talking about how humans are animals and we're just like them and all this kind of stuff we have this very different framework for this specific thing and so I think that's where it's been it's been difficult for me to find the right words and learn the right words and and kind of push in the right direction because there's these two conflicting things you want to relate to humans but humans so here's an example here's an example here's an example we did a study of a hundred women across the United States testing how they react to this drug and we compared that with a study of a hundred men except the hundred women where men who identify as women you this there's going to be differences that are not identity alone I'm not saying that these things are choice I get that it's not a choice that's made that this is discovery of what your true identity is but if you were doing a scientific study of women and it was men who identify as women were the only ones that you chose for the study you're skewing a result and that is and that is as part of the argument of why we need to include more female animals in animal studies what and why in drug studies like for instance the back covid vaccines that are being studied we want to have men we want to have women we want to have white people we want to have black indigenous people of color we want to have transgender we want to have we we want as the broadest spectrum and the largest number of each of all the of all the people and definitions so that we can find out if there are places where things go wrong yes so so when it comes to the world of science I say it should remain largely binary when you're not doing a social study now if you're talking about the census the census needs to be opened up absolutely but if you're talking about how a drug interacts with body chemistry that that's a different I think that's a different issue so so yeah there's some places where the the social identity won't matter like if you say we've studied you know a thousand Americans and all of those Americans are like you say all Caucasian or all indigenous it's not rarely representing all Americans in the study so sometimes you do have to go down into those details to know what you're talking about is effective and actually yeah what's representative what's not like you had no idea that my cat was pushing me off the chair this entire show no no idea no idea until I tell you uh I didn't notice the f-bomb that I dropped yeah I think I did it and covered it up pretty uh dramatically it's pretty dramatic I don't know how far it got out I don't know we got pretty far out we were talking before the show and Blair was saying that we should have a that we should have a a twist after dark episode where all the backwards where we're allowed to say whatever we want that would be a different show maybe I mean imagine the words that are actually in my head although although somebody will have to sit me down one day and absolutely explain to me why uh it it is not uh it is not submitting or surrendering uh and uh I self identifying with uh stereotype does it change the stereotype or doesn't let it remain intact is my question is it really challenging it or is it saying yeah that stereotype is correct and now but here's how I want to be included in that stereotype it's it's tricky still to me for me on those grounds to really suss out what the objective is um and I know the objective is coming from uh what Blair was talking about this the the ostracization and social acceptance and these are this is a community that is coming up with its own terminology so that should be acknowledged um I just maybe I just like from the outside uh would would want to have taken a more uh aggressive action the other direction I suppose yeah I don't know I mean I maybe maybe what it is is it's little steps toward you know instead of breaking down gender stereotypes and suddenly you know just having not really having that be a thing at all it's maybe it's just slowly start including different awarenesses of people you know suddenly we have an awareness of non-binary that was never an awareness before suddenly we have an awareness of of uh transgender I mean it it it's amazing that the education is happening on a cultural level in a way that never used to be talked about before and it's it's wonderful and I so maybe in order for the stereotypes to really be broken down in the end it's maybe a slow progression of small acceptances oh that's just a thought yeah yeah little tight little tiny things you want to check out my art swim yeah more just for the halibut just for the halibut identity for I mean doctor what was it that you wanted to be called I didn't there's the halibut doctor something awesome something yeah sir professor dr awesome sauce he's not interested in having the uh the twist after dark you don't like but he says bad idea no horn bill no no what is that one that's a shoe bill shoe bill thank you that I said I got the bill right devil bird and and I know this is going to sound crass and totally as if I missed the point of the previous conversation which is which it hasn't but I would like to self-identify as the doctor start with an a look at me miss the I mean the wrinkles are related already what it is a nice scarf it's a green tree python very close here's my extinct animal snack I know this one I got this one right giant ground sloth yeah yes oh great question do you do when you do the coloring now do you wear the glasses no not usually because like they're really hard to use inside the glass do you do you look at the colors ahead of time and then do the coloring so you can see some of it here but it's just like the very first calendar I did I like do like little checks of color on the sheet so like comparing contrast because like I can tell a little bit better but I also arranged the contrast oh I can show art I have art to show I arranged the color pencils in order of color and I asked to be like proof red is this new art yeah so I arrange all of the pencils and then I know where to pull from oh did you you've done this in Denmark is it what is that a mermaid seed dragon horse so this is uh this is what it is like it's it's got big fangs yes so this is this is actually bar this image is was found on a coin in Norfolk it's an ancient Celtic coin oh really Norfolk wolf and then I grabbed another figure from a Celtic coin I think in Spain or France I think it's French French Celtic coin is the writer and I kind of put them together is that just paint uh no it's got some uh a little bit of hype to it yeah would you put stuff under it oh yeah of course it's all sorts of it's really cool Justin I love it here we go yes identity four it has breasts does it I didn't notice are they obvious can you see them I could make them bigger if you can't see them yes uh just for the base uh to connect the paints to the canvas the guess so just whatever it is um no that's a combination of uh medium that's used to thicken paint as well as I paint with the I use cock really mm-hmm like uh yeah I use I use uh my my cock to make all of all of mm-hmm knew that was coming uh-huh um Carol Ann said I was a unicorn for being a colorblind woman yes you're more likely to be born with 11 toes than to be born a colorblind female that's my favorite that's amazing yeah so when have you been a unicorn for Halloween yet no it's because it's every day kiki oh okay yeah I get it say oh I thought you meant it was Halloween every day oh no no I'm a unicorn every day okay every day is halloween he's bothered because Brian left oh poor puppies poor puppies um um I would like to apologize to people who are here who were going to go to a get together for Ed on Sunday with the fires and everything that was going on I um I went to you might not have been able to be uh near your house these fires came right up to Portland they weren't close to Portland I did go to somebody else's house for the weekend because they had a better HVAC system than I do here in my house and so until we got two-inch painters tape and we're able to tape up the whole inside of the house um the entire city of Portland was on evacuation warning alert like they were like are you ready to go it was ready yeah there was a lot so I I got distracted and and then I was exhausted and I woke up at like 11 30 to see messages about are we meeting what's going on what's happening and I am so sorry because that's all on me that I missed getting the link out and um I know a few people did get together on Science Island but if people would like to try again this weekend I am absolutely I'm up I'm up for trying again and absolutely I'd love to do that um good night noodles oh noodles left I missed it yes I did see the police body cam footage of the college house party so uh police officer shows up to a party and where's it Miami uh I think it was uh and according to the Charmander in the chat room and hey uh you're only supposed to have 10 people in the house at the time it looks like you have a bigger gathering how big is it uh yeah it's probably 20 people here okay uh so this is weird I haven't had the officers talking I haven't had this happen before but it came up uh on my uh my screen here that you have COVID it was a COVID quarantine house no look and he goes so wait are you supposed to be quarantined yeah that's why I'm staying home okay when was this a week ago that he tested positive okay and you have 20 people in your house right now well yeah because I'm on quarantine oh my gosh yeah what oh god when in action well and the thing I really liked about that is I heard about that on the daily show and Trevor Noah because we're on the after show I can say Trevor Noah promote other shows um he was like oh so that's just like for a police officer to talk to interact with a white person yeah he's like oh yeah you shouldn't do this no it's like well uh it looks like you're committing a crime I just like to point that out and I'll be on my way so many levels this was wow what a story oh I do have to watch the video I haven't seen it or heard about it and all of his roommates are positive too and they're like yeah we'll have a party and invite some people over that's great we'll be at home it'll be fine did they not think for one second that they could transmit they all hate their families they're gonna go home too as much they feel you know hey and you guys also want to get your inheritances a little early got an idea so I'll get together and then we'll go visit the family ooh ouch crazy hi kori I see kori over on facebook um who is it carolyn was saying she has a bestie who is evacuated outside of medford doesn't think they'll have a house to go back to oh that's awful yeah so much of that around here here yes and random genre talk better or worse there is another country right now with a a lot of police issues we're not the we're not we're not we're bad we're not the worst we're not the most authoritarian yet identity for asking an important question uh in one of the chat rooms here just uh ask why are we so dumb well let's answer this question we have Tony safeguards in place so there's no natural selection anymore so not as many Darwin award winners modern medicine has allowed people to be dumb and survive all seriously all of our laws are about protecting protecting people from their own stupidity I love people I love people my t-shirt oh random genre talk if you'll better or worse there is another country right now with a lot of police issues okay random genre I will take the bait what country is that um so anyway that was just my my little comment t-shirt comment who's we who's we don't talk about talk about I think our audience here is very intelligent we have we have the best smartest most amazing kind compassionate thoughtful curious incredible audience the best audience oh yeah by the way whenever I'm making fun of humans understand you are not included I know you may self-identify as a human but because you're listening to this show I know you're better than that but we are included yeah sometimes sometimes oh oh um talk like a pirate day is coming up this weekend whoa um also also I noticed not this month next month October 3rd is virus appreciation day okay and I'm having issues with this holiday I didn't know I didn't know wait you said that you said I didn't get to do my pirate joke I didn't get do you know I do you know what a pirate's favorite letter is you're supposed to say our no it's letter p because without it they'd just be I right that's not the one I know the one I know is um what's your pirate's favori