Justin's working something out. He's computating over there. We're live.  Dark rainbow timeline. This is the This Week in Science live broadcast of our podcast and we're going to do a show now. Technical difficulties have been dealt with and we're so glad to see you. Thank you for joining us. Things may be edited from this video to make the podcast. So if you're here watching this video, then no, you are seeing the uncut, unedited, safe for children version of the show. Yes. Fingers crossed. I just saw what you named the episode and I'm very, very happy about it. So tonight, ladies, gentlemen and everyone here, Kiki decided to name the episode while we were talking with each other about just all sorts of things. And so she took inspiration from just something that was said and I love it. Okay, Ted. Inspiration. You find it all places. Are we ready to start this show, friends? We have a podcast sign. I need the podcasting now sign. Boop, boop, boop, boop. All right. Let's begin this in. Oh, yeah. Make sure my audio volumes up. Yep. Volumes are up. I hope we all sound like we're even Steven five by five getting ready to do the show because I'm going to start in a three to this is twist. This week in science episode number 803 recorded on Wednesday, December 9th, 2020, bringing light to the darkest timeline. Hey, everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki and today we will fill your head with issues, poo and beavers. But first, this is the end, the end of everything past. This is the result of the experiment. This is now. And like all nows, we are at the beginning. We are at the designing point of the next experiment. We are at the birth of the future. This is the prelude to everything that is yet to come. The moment of now comes with great responsibility. Choices now will affect nows to come. And now is the only moment in which you can do anything about it. If we make choices based on science and reason and empathy, we can build our future brighter than the one we started with. If we ignore science, if we act without reason, without empathy, we will fall into a future far worse than where we started. Whichever world we end up with, you have at least made one choice that can only help improve our chances. You are now listening to This Week in Science, coming up next. Got the kind of mind that can't get a night every day of the week, there's only one place to go. And a good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We're back. We're here. We're ready to talk about science. Bringing the science light, that's right, because you know what, knowledge, it is a light in the dark and we're here to do that. Science yet to come and we can bring, hold that candle to the darkness. I have stories tonight about humans and nature, some lightness, some supremacy, and brains because I like them. Brain supremacy. Brain, yes, right, fully brain supremacy. That's totally what it is. Justin, what did you bring? I've got cat scratch, new psychiatric issues, call to action, a new Neanderthal cemetery, and police really need to look and act like the military. The answer is no, but I would like to know the story later. But there's a study that has been done along these lines. Great. Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, I have beavers. I have animals with COVID. I have dog brains and I have pandas covered in poop. There's the poo. We knew it would be there eventually. I'm sure this story just is one more reason to love pandas. Oh my God. I cannot wait. I don't want to hype it up too much, but I feel like this might be my favorite story of 2020. So bear with us here. Get it? Bear with us. Panda with us. Is it a bear story? Okay. Yeah. Let's dig into this science. But before we do, I would like to remind each and every one of you that if you are not yet subscribed to This Week in Science, you can find us all over the place. We are a podcast. You can subscribe to us as a podcast, download us to your device, look for This Week in Science in every podcast directory. You can also find us on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch. Look for This Week in Science, or on Twitch, it's Twiscience. You can visit twist.org for information. Okay. Time for this science. The unbearable lightness of quantum supremacy. That's what I want to start with. Okay. Yeah. All right. There has been a race to build quantum computers. There have been a couple of different designs for quantum computers so far. They're big and they're bulky and they have reliability issues. And so far, they could potentially, as they grow, be amazing for servers and services that are large scale where you have a building to hold your quantum computing center in. But there is another alternative design that consists of optical light. Laser beams. Because, well, not just because lasers are awesome, but because you can control light. You can use crystals and mirrors to bounce it different directions, control its polarization to really control the way that it works. And last year, a Chinese quantum computing engineering team after Google announced that they had reached quantum supremacy, which is still debatable, still debatable. There was a Chinese team that announced they had created a computer, a computing device that could potentially also have reached quantum supremacy. They just published about this device of theirs and it is a really amazing design. The design uses lasers and beam splitters and that's a fairly simple design, but it has to be very, very, very controlled because you're dealing with the detection of photons and the detection of not just any photons, but identical photons, figuring out which way they've gone as they have hit the beam splitter and diverged along their path. Now, the thing about this quantum computer is that it was built to do this problem of detecting and figuring out the probability of where these identical photons would end up once they went through their beam split paths. It solved the problem in four, under four minutes, whereas a classical computer like the ones that we're running the show on right now would take about two and a half million years to calculate the same problem. All right, I was going to say that my computer even could do that because I was like, I don't think I could do that. It would take a very, very, very, very, very, very long time. How long does it take to do the calculation to figure out that it would take 2.5 million years? Oh, that's a very good question, yes, probably a napkin, back at the napkin bar table. Okay. Calculation. These engineers, I'm absolutely sure. But the classical computers, no, it wouldn't be your desktop computer. We're talking about probably supercomputers. It would take the most powerful computer, classically designed computer with circuit boards and everything, two and a half million years to calculate this problem that was solved in under four minutes by this optically based quantum computer. This is amazing. It's a huge breakthrough, but this computer was only designed to do this one problem. You can't program it. It's not going to be able to do any other kinds of problems. So is it really a computer? Not really. It's just a, it's a calculating device, but just a very, very specific function machine. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's an exciting development because it could lay the, the, the groundwork for future optical quantum computers that based on their design would take up less space, less energy, could potentially be more useful generally than, than other designs that are out there. A little step forward, a little step back, but calc, fast calculations, super fast. Quick question about this, not crazy quick, but quick, quantum quick, do they, do they know, do they have an estimate of how long it will take before the experiment starts? Because I just imagined that's a very long four minutes, but it's like, you know, four minutes is, it's very short for something like this. But in terms of it taking a computer doing a thing nowadays, four minutes is a really long time, right? You could imagine kind of the, the researchers kind of sitting there and sitting there and sitting there for four minutes. You're like, is it broken? Is it going to work? Is it going to take 10 years? Is it going to take five minutes? How long is it going to take? They must have had like a rough. No, maybe not though. Maybe not because maybe this is, maybe this is the great thing. They spend, you know, two years getting this thing built, overthinking everything. Exactly. Yes. Now we're running. All right. Okay. I guess we're going to take shifts. We're going to have this elaborate alert system to let us know if anything happens. Mostly we just want to make sure the power doesn't go off in case there's a storm next winter or, you know, we've got the air conditioners, all coolers are all ready for this, for the heat in the summer to keep all the servers going. Wait, what? We're done? Oh. Did we even buy champagne to celebrate? I don't think we even had time. That's good. Yeah. That was amazingly quick compared to like the time they're winning at setting it up. Yeah. The time setting it up and there's a fun comment in one of the articles, Ars Technica has written an article, Chris Lee from Ars Technica has written a great article about it. There's a comment he makes about there's, there are some very proud graduate students out there for the work that they have done to make this happen. Yes, to bring it together. So the beam splitters and the way they, the way they split the photons, two photons arrive at the beam splitter at the exact same moment and they have a chip that has the equivalent of 300 beam splitters. They have 50 inputs, 300 beam splitters and the possible output states the number that are available is about 10 to the 30. And this is a huge, huge possibility of states. And so the photons get sent in and then they exit in this random way from all the possible states. And the calculation of that, they do it over and over and over again, but the calculation is much faster. Yes. Ah, Fada says two photons walk into a bar. Yes, exactly. Two photons walk into a beam splitter. Exactly. There are technical details at work. It's a very simple concept at its heart, but the technical details are definitely very specific and interesting to people who enjoy engineering and physics. Justin, are you going to tell me about cats right now, or are we going to talk about a disease? Oh, no, no. This is an infectious disease story. There is, it's an emerging infectious disease that threatens humans. Yes, it's not the COVID-19, which, while on the rise currently, hopefully will be declining once we start vaccinating people and, you know, going outside after not going outside for a while still. You guys still stay home and mask all that kind of stuff. Sciencey magic is on the way, though. Meanwhile, there is a bacteria which is known to cause fever and rash that has also been now recently found to cause skin lesions. And neuropsychiatric symptoms of mental illness. This is a study by North Carolina State University researchers. They found additional instances of Bartonella infection in humans who exhibited these neuropsychiatric symptoms. This is adding to a body of evidence that not only can this infection mimic a spectrum of chronic illnesses, including mental illness, but also that dermatological symptoms may accompany the infection. So this is a bacterium historically associated with cat scratches. Cat scratch fever? Sorry, sorry. This is cat scratch fever. Yeah, which, yeah, it's thought to be short-lived. I have a very limiting infection time period. But it turns out that's probably not as true as we thought it was. There's actually 30 different species of this, 13 of which have been found to infect humans. And so they're working on lots of ways of detecting it. It's notorious for hiding in the lining of blood vessels in the skin. But yeah, so this is building off of previous research. This is Edward Breitschwood published a case study involving an adolescent boy who had been diagnosed with a rapid onset of schizophrenia. This is not something that, you know, rapid onset means it wasn't there. And then next week, now he's exhibiting all these schizophrenic signs. He also happened to have these skin lesions. So the research group documented Bartonella infection. And a patient received antimicrobial therapy. All the neuropsychiatric effects and symptoms resolved themselves. Boom, fixed it. Fantastic. So this is a follow-up study from that work published currently in the journal Pathogens that 33 participants suffering from neuropsychiatric symptoms. This is everything from sleep disorders, migraines, depression, anxiety. So they were all enrolled in the study. 29 of the 33 participants were found to have Bartonella infections. Yeah, based on the blood work that they did. PCR testing of the serology samples. 24 of the 29 positive participants, that's 83 percent, reported the appearance of skin lesions during their illnesses as well. So there was also accompanied. And by skin lesions, depending on what you've got, it can be kind of different. But it's sort of the one that they were seeing here was kind of interesting. It was basically stretch marks. Yeah. They were getting stretch marks. And these were, they of course ruled out things like bodybuilding or rapid weight gain, loss, pregnancy, all those sorts of things that you might normally get stretch marks from. These people suddenly had stretch marks and sort of in weird places too. Maybe that weren't normally associated with where you would get stretch marks, but these sort of reddish, long, elongated lesions. There's other ones too, but I'm not going to talk about those. But yeah, it turned out like a lot of these cases were just cat scratch fever. And this is notoriously affects children predominantly. They tend to get this more than adults. If you go to the CDC's website on this, there's a really cute picture of a kitten. I'm looking at it right now. So apparently kittens transmit this even more so than adult cats. Oh, that's interesting. And another vector is. They don't clean themselves as well. I don't know why it is, but another vector is fleas. However, they're the transmission, one of the transmission sources, but the vector really is cats. Cats are the ones that are harboring this bacteria. So if toxic plasma gondii wasn't enough, maybe cat scratch fever will help convince you. But isn't it weird that everything we're getting from cats causes psychosis of some sorts, some sort of schizophrenic side effects? That's. Maybe that just explains why cats are the way they are. Hmm, we will leave leave our listeners with that as of. We'll just leave our listeners with that Blair. Yes. Tell us about beavers. Sorry, I'm looking at this CDC site. It's scary. OK, anyway, yeah, we should link to that. If I haven't already said it in the show notes, that should be there. Anyway, moving on beavers. Guys, the beavers talk about beavers. What do you want to tell us? Beavers may not only help amphibians, but humans who are threatened by climate change. This is a study from Washington State University. And they did some research in Grifford, Pinshoe National Forest of the Cascade Range. Where they identified. Oh, very cool. They identified 49 study sites they all had either had or did not have beaver beaver dams and they found that the beaver dam sites were two point seven times higher in amphibian species richness than undamned sites. When they looked at the types of amphibians, in particular, they saw ones that develop more slowly and need still water that is safe to grow in, which makes sense why the dam would help. And so a couple of species they saw in particular were red legged frogs and Northwestern salamanders, and they are particularly at risk from climate change. So they in particular could really do with that extra help from the beavers. Beavers, of course, were once abundant in the Pacific Northwest, but they were hunted nearly to extinction for their sweet, sweet fur. But in an effort to improve wildlife habitat and mitigate the effects of climate extremes, some land managers have started relocating beavers into the historic locations where beavers used to be. Beaver's numbers are slowly recovering, which is also, as we mentioned, benefiting amphibians. But the important thing here that is not talked about in this particular article is that amphibians are indicator species. That means they're like the canary in the coal mine to water. So when amphibians disappear, that is bad news for everyone, including us. And that is why there's this question about mitigating impacts of climate change. Can mitigate flood problems? It can mitigate water, scare cities. It can it can stop all of these problems or slow them if if the amphibians are seeing benefits. So it's basically they're they're the first domino to fall when you're looking at water quality and water abundance. So as go the amphibians, so do we just later. So that's why if beavers are helping amphibians combat the extra pressures from climate change, that means that that can do a lot potentially to help us in the future. So basically a healthy waterway means healthy ecosystems, means healthy humans in the long run, which is why I think it's so important to recognize that when an animal has huge ecosystem services, like beavers making dams, that is more than just saving frogs. And so this proves that they can be reintroduced in these historical ranges and still do a lot of good. I think that's great. Yeah, I mean, the idea of reintroducing them to places where they have been pushed out, hunted to extinction. I mean, it could help waterways. I mean, we just had the story this last week of a runoff from car tires being toxic to salmon and, you know, you start adding these things together. How can we how can we mitigate those things? How can we use the natural environment to help itself too? Yeah, and the the really cool thing about beavers, too, on a personal note for me is that in the Bay Area in the San Francisco Bay Area, I didn't know this growing up, but this is a historical beaver range as well. I always thought beavers were like found in Alaska or something like totally exotic and different. But in my lifetime, beavers have come back. So they they're in the pretty deep East Bay in the in the Bay Delta, but they are starting to come closer and closer into the Bay watershed. So they are recovering in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is very cool. That's really neat. Yeah, that's super cool. Beavers, they're interesting. We should have an interview with there is somebody who wrote a book about beavers within the last year or two. Oh, I'd love to talk beavers. We should talk beavers or beavers on the show. That sounds great. There was wasn't there a reintroduction program in Montana that we talked about some years ago? Yeah. But yeah, they recreated a just a healthier biome and it's spread out from there with all these ripple effects that, you know, the more Indians, maybe the birds are eating better. They're transferring seeds more around because they're eating better. They're, you know, healthier and more birds. And then yeah, well, they're also just slowing water down. So the nutrient load in the river is better because it's not washing all the nutrients away. So yeah, it has lots of effects. Flood mitigation and all the rest of it. Yeah, yeah, so many. Well, nature is doing its own thing. And it would be probably doing really great if we weren't impacting it. But two studies are out this week having to do with humans. And nature and I just can't find anything positive to say about these studies. I really like to one one study in particular is out of the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And this study looked at it was 15 leading international experts based on the intergovernmental science policy platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services. It was a global assessment and they discussed the risk to humans well-being and prosperity resulting from continued degradation of the environment. They were looking at the ways in which nature provides benefits like material goods, food, wood, medicines, non material goods and ecological processes that regulate environmental conditions. So water filtration, beavers, you know, being part of the waterways, carbon sequestration, storm protection. And they conclude in their study that the well-being of people is not really not being helped out by nature as much as it used to. We have declining crop yields. We have lower soil productivity, increased exposure to floods and storms. And this is because of the degradation of coastal ecosystems. But pretty much their take home message is nature's nature's contribution to people is found to be in decline. Nature, you're just not given back. What's up? And then the other study is a study looking at how humans are impacting nature by what we build a parent according to a study out of the Weitzman Institute of Science, Ron Milo, a systems biologist, started looking into how the mass of what we are building in the world compares to the biomass in the world. So the mass of all the living things on the planet. And they looked between 1900 to 2017. They they pretty much figured out comparatively over the there's been a change over the last 120 years that until in 1900, the mass of human materials was about 3% of Earth's total biomass. Materials that we have made to build and use have doubled every 20 years approximately. This is a paper in nature. Total biomass declined. And we now have gotten to the point where human made objects, dams, roads, buildings exceed Earth's total living biomass. It happened this year, maybe give or take six years. I mean, there's there's there are fudge factors and this is an estimate if you include water in the in biomass, then it's going to take until about 2037 for us to overtake the living parts of the Earth with the things that we built. That's only 17. Well, yeah, 16 years away. So this year, 17 years from now, I don't know. We are at this point where we are we are building so much. We are truly in the Anthropocene. We are truly in the age of human impact on the planet. Just, you know, just for perspective, people. Thanks. Yeah. Well, what are we going to do? There's not much to say about that. Well, you know, from we're we're on the path of. This is assembling, separating the nature that evolved on this planet from existing. Yeah. In the upside, though, our local zoo in Sacramento is looking at a 50 acre site to replace their, you know, 80 year old 14 acres. We get bigger zoos eventually, but. Yeah, it is depressing. Carol, in the shot room, you're right. This is depressing. We should move on. It tells us a fun story. Tell me a fun story. Let me just let me just tell you one. There's a quote from Eduardo Bronzino. Bron diesio. Sorry. An anthropologist, environmental anthropologist at Indiana University in Bloomington, who says it's not that infrastructure per se is bad. It's how we do infrastructure that is the problem. So fingers crossed, we can make better plans moving forward. Knowledge is power. It's true. It's true. OK, do you have good news, Justin? Oh, I was up to make cemeteries. What burial sites? OK, let's let's OK, bring it. Well, I wouldn't say it's I wouldn't say it's good news, exactly. But it's not bad news.  But it's a child that died 41,000 years ago. So like it's been a while, right? It's not too soon to talk about this. Question is, did the Neanderthals really bury their dead? Past evidence has shown that they did. And then the skeptics were skeptical. But then the evidence again, swaying in the direction of, yeah, it looks like they buried them. Now, researchers in France, National de Historie Naturelle National de Historie Naturelle and the University of the Basque Country in Spain have demonstrated that a Neanderthal child was buried 41,000 years ago. Their studies published in general scientific reports. So this is a site where six Neanderthals things were discovered way back in the beginning of the 20th century, early 1900s, for those who don't do that math. The site derived another, a seventh in the 1970s, early 1970s, belonging to a child of around two years old. Since that, the collection associated with this specimen has remained unexplored and investigated in the archives of the Musée d'Archéologie Nationale in France. Researchers stumbling upon this said, hey, we have a Neanderthal here. Let's check it out. They reopened the excavation notebooks from the 70s, reviewed the material, they revealing 47 new human bones that had not been identified and the original excavation which they believe belonged to the same skeleton. Scientists also carried out through analysis of the bones, state of preservation, studied the proteins, the genetics. They did some carbon dating. They went back to the original site trying to find more bones. They didn't find more bones, but using the notebooks of the people who'd done the thorough note-taking, even though they didn't identify 47 bones, who did really good note-taking, were able to reconstruct and interpret the spatial distribution of the human remains as they had been found on site. Researchers showed that the skeleton had been buried in a fresh sedimentary layer, or not fresh, but under separately disturbed from the soil around it. A layer with the head elevated higher than the pelvis. The bones were relatively close together and had remained in their anatomical positions. This is this preservation indicating that when the child died, it was buried quickly. This is not scattered bones that were windswept or left out in any other way, but it was actually buried. So they did, like I said, the carbon dating, which showed it would be around 41,000 years old on the bones, they got the mitochondrial DNA showing it was a neanderthal and proteins that confirmed the human as well. So this is one of the most recently directly dated neanderthal remains. The new information proves that the body of this two-year-old neanderthal child was purposefully deposited in a pit dug in the sedimentary layer around 41,000 years ago, soon after it had died. This is yet another piece of evidence that neanderthals had burial rights, that they had a much more complex society than we historically considered them to have. Yes, and it's also because we considered that to be a very human trait, bearing a dead, caring for a dead. These sorts of things as being very modern, current, modern human at least. We don't want to share that with any other animal, let alone with other humans at one point at least. They've still slowly been having to discard all of these myths of the unintelligent cousin. It seems like they were just as smart as we were. But it's also sort of interesting that when you look at Homo Naledi, which is a much older, very different human, very more sort of apish or in between missing linkish, and what we know of them is from a cemetery, where they didn't bury their dead, but all the dead seemed to get put, I guess it'd be buried. If you put something way deep down in an intricate cave and leave it there, I think that's on par with bearing the dead. You don't have to dig the hole. Gary and this says maybe humans buried them. Actually, it is in a timeline when there would have been some overlapping starting to take place too. You're right, you want an older example to show that Neanderthals did it first, I suppose, but definitely a Neanderthal child. Sorry, I'm having a technical difficulty here. I had a nice website with a nice video, but when I click on things, it takes me to places I don't want to be. Yes. Oh no. But it is a... Stay back in the lane, Kiki. Don't stray off the path. Don't stay off the path, not with this one. Okay, here I come. Here I come. Back I come. Moving away from burial sites and our ancestors or cousins and how they buried their family and their friends. Let's talk about bees and how they protect themselves. I totally thought you were about to do the COVID update right there. I was like, I don't know this segment. No, we're going to talk about protecting. Protection is bees. We know about certain tactics that honeybees have to protect their hives. Blair, you've talked before about the heating process that they do where a bunch of honeybees will start vibrating and flapping their wings very quickly to heat up the inside of their hive to make it too hot for wasp invaders and other parasites or predator species that come in to attack the nest, the hive, make it unsustainable for them to stay and even possibly kill them. Well, there is a new technique that has been discovered in honeybees in Vietnam. Honeybees in Vietnam have to contend with the murder hornet, the Asian hornet Vespasura. We've decided to call it the murder hornet here in North America. It has been unfortunately introduced into Canada and has been making its way, trying to spread into the rest of North America. We keep trying to catch those hives and hold off the influx because our honeybees are really not prepared for this hive predator. They're homebodies. They're homebodies, yeah. Anyway, these honeybees in Vietnam have been dealing with murder hornets for a very long time. And a researcher from the University of Guelph was looking at some of these honeybees and determined that talking to Vietnamese honeybee farmers and farmers in the area who had these hives, talking about what their bees were doing, what they had seen them been doing, how they were dealing with the murder hornets, because we need to learn tactics for other honeybee species and for potentially these honeybees that we have in the United States. New discovery, Vietnamese honeybees take buffalo poo and they smear it in front of the doorway to their hive. I'm listening. Yes! So they took pictures and they have found that these honeybees will go out. They put piles of dung around to see if the bees would come and pick them up. And yes, indeed. They found lots of honeybees. They really liked the stinkier the poo pile, the more they liked it. And they have pictures of the bees going and getting the poo from the dung piles, bringing it back to the nest to the hive and placing the poo and shaping it and forming it into little artistic welcoming mounds smeared on the front of the hive. And it keeps the murder hornets at bay. Is it an odor thing? Is it because the smell of the dung overpowers the scent of the honeybees? Yeah, it would be like a masking. Yeah, they also looked, it is some kind of a masking, they also looked and found that hives that did not have dung smeared at the doorway were much more likely to be invaded by murder hornets. Is that what murder hornets look like? Yeah, they're about the size of a golf tee. They're about an inch, three quarters to an inch long. They're pretty long, maybe an inch and a half. They're very big. They have these dark back sides. Those don't look like bees. They're like red and orange. And yeah, so I guess I've only ever seen the murder hornets pictures face, face on like head on. So yeah, they're wild looking. I had no idea. Yeah, so it, they are. And as the murder hornets make their way into North America, our honeybees are completely unprepared Can we smear dung at the doorways of the hives? Can we train the honeybees to do this and protect themselves? Will the honeybees learn in the Americas to use the poo for protection? Important question from Shoebrew in the chat room. Does this impact the honey at all? Well, if you are carrying poo, you're probably not carrying much pollen. You have a different job. I think he's more asking if it impacts the flavor profile of the poo. Of the poo of the honey. I have no idea. These are questions not yet to be determined. You heard me right. I want to know. How's the taste of my buffalo poo going to be affected by all of this honey in it? How will it? Yeah, I think the American honeybee is the hybrid poodle of the species. I would take it that any wild form would probably exhibit greater intelligence, greater health, greater anything. Flexibility. So I think, I don't know. I don't know if that would be, but it's definitely, you know, if the buffalo poo works, a lot of these bees are raised on farms. Maybe there's cattle. Cow pies. You could just put a shovel to hide somewhere and maybe that would be fine. Just remember to not step in it next time you go to check on your bees. And this is the important question. Does goat poo work? Or is it only softer poo? They don't know yet. They suspect it's an odorant repellent, but they don't know what aspect it is. Is there some aspect of buffalo dung that works particularly well? If it's pugnant enough, I would suppose I would think it was just sort of hiding, masking the molecules that the wasps are looking for. Maybe emanating from the hive. Maybe it's honey itself. I don't know. Yeah. There was an aspect. The researchers took a chemical pheromone that is applied by the hornets to the hive. They mark the hives as a target with their pheromones. When the pheromone was applied to the entrance of the hives, that's when the honey bees started to apply the dung. So maybe it simply masks the scent of the murder hornets. Just murder hornets don't have the little GPS dance that bees can do to the community. They actually put a marker out there somewhere. Yeah. So very interesting is this tool use by bees? I don't know. I just know it's pretty smart. Yeah. I mean, I'm the one who's always saying everything is tool use, so I'm not the one to ask. But it sounds like tool use to me. Sounds like tool use. Let's say bees use tools now. It's awesome. Okay. And then the question is how bad is the smell of these pheromones if they're like, we're gonna need something to cover it up. Strong. Buffalo poo. Yeah. Anything to get that pheromone stink out of here. Just wipe it out. Use the buffalo poo. Oh, my goodness. This is This Week in Science. If you just tuned in, you're listening to This Week in Science or watching This Week in Science, watching or listening. One of the two you can do both. If you are interested in a twist shirt or mug or other item of twist merchandise, head over to twist.org. Click on the Zazzle Store link and you'll find our store where we have all sorts of wonderful items with the twist logo and also with art by Blair from previous twist calendars. Also, there's a link to buy calendars. Supplies are limited. Make sure you get your order in if you have not yet. Get them before they're gone. Get your calendar today. Alright, we're going to come on back right now. Time for the COVID update. Time for the COVID update. Blair, if you're like me, you're getting tired of this thing. Yeah. Right? Are we all just tired? So tired. Why is it still a pandemic? Why do I have to keep doing all the things? Well, we do have to keep doing all the things to continue to protect ourselves, our neighbors, our loved ones. It is part of the process. However, some researchers at Georgia Tech decided that they wanted to take a look at the relationship, the oscillations between this psychological and physical fatigue that is wearing on people from the constant vigilance that we all have to do with the actual oscillations of the virus itself in our population. So what happens as we're moving through? Basically what they published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is that if people are aware of the epidemic, they might change their behavior and if they change their behavior there's going to be fewer severe outcomes and so that awareness is important but short-term awareness is basically what we're good at. Long-term vigilance is very hard and this fatigue sets in and the virus comes back again. So there are plateaus and oscillations that are balanced in between cautious behavior and then relaxation of that behavior. The main take-home message is that it's really important to understand that our behavior drives epidemic outcomes. It's not just the data on how many people are infected or dying or in hospital beds or in ICUs. It's not just that data that's important. It's our actions that are important because we are part of the dynamic system that is this pandemic. So please remember to be vigilant to continue to wear your masks to social distance to do what you can because if you do what you can it's going to reduce impacts on the pandemic later. Right? It's very easy to be like, here we go again without taking any personal responsibility which I understand it's not fun to take personal responsibility. It's not fun. I get it. But also clearly a lot of people traveled for Thanksgiving and we're not done with the spike from that event. No and because of the delay in symptoms, in hospitalizations it's going to be with us for quite a while and we are from Thanksgiving and then you add Christmas to it we're going to be seeing the effects of it in our hospitals into 2021. It's not like oh there was this and then people are going to get sick and then it'll all be better before the end of the year. Our ICUs are going to be are going to be impacted for a while to come. Right. Well and because of the delay the spike from Thanksgiving and the spike from Christmas is going to overlap with ICU time. Yes. Which is going to be really bad. It's going to be really bad. A million people have said it at this point but I'm just going to say it again. Yes. Your holidays might be sad and lonely this year. But that might be the decision that you have to make so that you can have a holiday season with your loved ones next year. Yep. Long term thinking. Now in terms of long term thinking in terms of this long term thinking you know mice, we cure them of everything in all the research that we do. We cure them of depression we cure them of things they didn't even have. Well this is one of those things they didn't even have mice cannot get COVID-19. The spike protein does not recognize the mouse version of the ACE2 receptor. This is directly related to my COVID story. I can't wait to hear. Yes. So it doesn't recognize the receptor and so of course researchers were like well we have to cure mice so we have to give mice COVID-19. So scientists at UCLA genetically modified mice so that they have human ACE2 receptors and then they injected them with SARS-CoV-2 and they got sick. They're looking at the effects of that sickness in the animals. They saw lost weight. They saw increases in immune cells swelling of heart tissue wasting away of the spleen. This is all very very similar to what we see in humans who have COVID-19. Additionally they looked at genes that got turned on and off in the mice that were infected and they saw that energy generating processes had gotten turned down or turned off in the heart, kidney, spleen and lungs. And the researchers say if a virus snuffs out the energy generating pathways in multiple organs of the body that's going to totally wreak havoc and it does. The study revealed also that in these mice that were given human ACE2 receptors and got COVID-19 they found the virus made epigenetic changes to the structure of the DNA in the cells in those organs and the epigenetic changes may explain the long lasting effects of COVID-19. Because if your epigenome is getting changed that's a methylation or a twist or a turn in your DNA that shuts off certain genes from getting translated down makes it harder for things to get turned into proteins that normally would get turned into proteins and while this is not a study in humans this can potentially tell us a lot about how things are working in the human systems. Anyway for once we actually gave mice something instead of curing them a bit but it might help. So if you can make an epigenetic change in human organs I'm wondering if this is inheritable from the children who have gotten this may or may not have had symptoms but have caught and survived although there was a study that we didn't bring tonight I don't think that there is a much bigger impact on children than we initially expected. I wonder what of those changes are then inheritable if this is taking place in a prepubescent youth. It depends where it infects I would imagine and what cells are affected. If the epigenetic changes are in germ cells then yeah those epigenetic changes could be passed on but if they're just in somatic body cells then but if they're in somatic body cells that could lead to lifelong problems and who wants a kid got a cold and now has a lifelong struggle with fatigue or with long issues or heart issues yeah no good. Blair what was your COVID story? Speaking of how mice can't get COVID this is a study out of Stanford University so it's a bit north of where your study was taking place they looked at specifically why some animals are more susceptible to COVID-19 than others which we've reported on a fair amount saying okay looks like cats can get it maybe a tiger got it no pigs can't get it minks can get it ferrets can get it yes so it's been kind of this constant discovery over the past year so trying to figure out who can get COVID-19 in the animal kingdom and so right now where it stands we know cattle, cats, weasels can get COVID-19 but others this point pigs, chickens for example cannot there was a report as I mentioned of an infection some tigers at a zoo but that's still you know no scientific papers on that yet but as far as researchers can tell it's all about the spike proteins to the ACE2 receptor on the surface of the animal cell so in the study they used computers to simulate the proteins 3D structures and investigate how the spike protein interacts with the different animals ACE2 receptors so basically they just figured out which lock the key fit in and tried to cross all these different models certain animals ACE2 lock fits the key better and that these animals including humans are susceptible and when they looked through their analysis they also suggest that other species are immune because they're ACE2 lack these features so the key does not fit in the lock so it's a weaker interaction of spike proteins all that's pretty consistent with what we thought so far but this model is really what's interesting because it could a development of antiviral strategies that uses artificial locks to trap the virus so that would be one way to prevent the virus from infecting animal cells have it locked to the wrong thing and prevent it from interacting with human receptors this could also this is the thing that I thought was very interesting help improve models to monitor animal hosts where a virus could potentially jump to humans so we could prevent future outbreaks by recognizing when there are these locks these receptors that have similarities between humans and animals if we know there is a growing infection in an animal species you can look at the receptor that is being attacked see if it is similar to a human receptor and batten down the hatches accordingly so overall it's not a whole lot of new information here but I think really the technology is the thing that could be helpful in preventing future pandemics or at least lessening how bad they get so if we already know in advance that next wave of a virus or something that comes along if we can see what it's attacking compare it to our animal models we can say ok it turns out you need to keep your goldfish away from this because that would probably be an airborne but still whatever it is we could see what matches up ahead of time then like we do in agriculture as it is if there is an outbreak of some foot and mouth thing or foot and hoof and mouth of disease or something that happens you have quarantining that takes place around where cattle are you have quarantining precautions or if there is an outbreak of something animal shelters do this a lot they'll have you step in bleach I can't even remember what it is that they're trying to keep from getting in or out or spreading it's usually just a lot of bacteria that is through fecal matter you can always put that little shield of precautionary steps around something if you know there's a problem there and if you know in advance I'm sure there's been a huge economic or transmission problem all the better that's fantastic I love predictive science I love the stuff that you can do before it happens that's someone's like preparing in advance for a pandemic and having let's think about let's do that yes so there are a couple of questions that I wanted to answer to talk about very quickly before we move into the next section of the show Caroline is wondering if any of this is going to help a vaccine for Nipah virus as well Fada is wondering can we remove all H2 receptors from humans and then Gorov Sharma is asking can CRISPR modify our spike protein to be unlockable by any key now CRISPR is we could we don't want we don't have a spike protein we have a receptor so we have the ACE2 receptor in our cells the spike protein is on the virus I don't want to modify that spike protein I just want to lock it up so just recognize it and have some kind of molecular lock that goes nope you're not going to recognize anything and you're not getting into my cells yeah so that's I mean that's basically what your antibodies do is they they give this virus a big old hug they're like you're not going anywhere yeah and then the question of whether we would want to CRISPR our ACE2 receptor or as Fada said remove all of our ACE2 receptors no we need those they're very very important don't mess with the ACE2 receptors they are a critical part of a regulatory regulatory processes throughout the body it's the angiotensin converting enzyme 2 angiotensin renin angiotensin system and it is involved in water balance in blood pressure in inflammation it is also involved in wound healing and it is a very essential part of metabolism and your physiology so let's not CRISPR it and let's not get rid of it and then along the line of whether or not any of this is going to help for vaccines for NEPA virus or any other virus yes all of the stuff that we are learning for this SARS-CoV-2 virus is going to be information that we can apply to future viruses or to other viruses that we are already working on treatments and vaccines for and it's very different viruses work differently there is a report out this week for a clinical trial of a universal flu vaccine that had very positive results it's very exciting and in the flu the flu vaccine the flu virus there is the hemagglutinin and the neuraminidase two parts that is the H and the N so you have H1N1 H1N5 all of these confirmations that are the flu virus that we are dealing with the hemagglutinin part is the head of the structure of the molecule that our body responds to and it's the head part of it that very often is changing and becoming different enough that our body doesn't know what to respond to however we have seen that there is a stock that that hemagglutinin head is on it's got a neck portion and that neck portion is much more conserved it doesn't mutate as often and people who naturally produce antibodies to the stock as opposed to the hemagglutinin head can have protection against multiple flu viruses so that's what the universal flu vaccine that they're trying to create now is doing it's targeting that stock that supports the hemagglutinin head there are issues related to it but this strategy is one of targeting these particular molecular segments that don't mutate that don't change very much that are potentially going to get us where we need to go yeah and I think also hopefully hopefully we have learned our lesson I think we had the absolute worst response and actually still continue to because as much as everybody seeing the light at the end of the tunnel with this vaccine on the way or vaccines the virus spread has never been greater the daily impact has never been greater than it is now this is the worst it's been and yet there was they were talking about sending kids back to school in New York and trying to open everything up again there's a there's a real disconnect from reality going on now if we ever needed that shut down it's now until we can get to the virus because we're they're opening it up they're opening it up because we have more tracing and testing right because we have a better ability to manage when things do pop up right it wasn't the whole thing that contact tracing is like it's too widespread for contact tracing to work because of the the lapse in time that it takes for you to get a positive test form when infection happens so that's absolutely untrue it's a contact tracing is useless if you're opening up and staying open then it's pointless but if you're sequestering if you're doing your stay at home orders if you're not going to grocery stores if you're doing contactless everything if you're wearing the masks then knowing that a friend of a friend got it prioritizes your need to go get tested and so contact tracing works fantastic it's really important if we are staying as isolated as possible if we're not quarantining then contact tracing is meaningless because it doesn't matter if a friend of a friend got it you've run into 30, 40, 50, 60 other people you're still in the same level of jeopardy whether or not you knew somebody through somebody who got the thing so we are at the point where we really should be doing an actual heart shutdown now more than March who cares about remember we did that couple of weeks or whatever back in March or whenever that was that was when we had like 20,000, 15, 20,000 cases there was nothing compared to now and now we're like oh yeah we got this no we don't in fact we're shutting down around the local area here because we're getting to the the next county just got to that only having 15% ICU capacity which is where the state has said stop going to restaurants but we've been very irresponsible with it continually now so the thing I was going to say was hopefully we have learned from this not just in technology but in importance of addressing things I think that you will see financing for vaccines going forward in research in these areas to be at a higher level I think this is going to be really good for the science community to actually get to have to show here's what can happen they've talked about it before and stopped these things from happening but it's taken one to actually happen for much of the world to go oh that's the thing they were talking about and warning about that's why they had crews in China monitoring every emerging disease that's why they had all these stockpiles of PCR machines okay so I think with technology going forward we're learning a lot about how to address these things but I think we're going to learn a lot as a global society to take these threats more seriously going forward even though we're not still now maybe I'm wrong maybe this is just I was listening to one interesting thing somebody was commenting about the Spanish flu and the fact that our elders don't really talk about it that much there's not a whole lot of movies about the Spanish flu there's not a whole lot of stories that came out of that there's not a whole lot that you would have heard from your right grandparents or your grandparents about the Spanish flu because once that thing was over nobody wanted to talk about it ever let's just get past this now and it could be like that could happen with COVID we could be talking like a year or two from now and it's like remember that thing I don't want to talk about it anymore I can't even go to a doctor's office if they're wearing a mask I can't even nobody's going to want to talk about this and that's a problem because that's how we forget that's how we forget but we need to be prepared and it is time for us to prepare for the rest of our show we got some good news we got more poo coming up in just a moment thank you for watching twist thank you for listening and thank you for being a part of our audience if you think this is great share it with a friend tell someone about twist today alright we're coming on back now and you know what time it is it's time for Blair's Panda Poo Corner with Blair she loves our creature great and small buy pet, milliped if you want to hear about Panda Poo she's your girl except for giant Panda Poo what's your cap Blair well I'm saving the panda poo for last you're just going to have to wait but first I have a story about dog vocabularies this is from it's this Laurent university in Hungary and they actually they put electroencephalography EEG machines on awake dogs these are not trained dogs these are not research dogs these are just family dogs and they wanted to see if dogs could distinguish specific sounds in human speech they were passing over specific things when it came to things that sounded like a particular word that they were familiar with so the first step was to invite dogs to the lab and they let the dogs get familiar with the room and the experimenters experimenters asked the owner to sit down on a mattress with their dog and hopefully get the dog to relax good luck then the experimenters put electrodes so far sounds really relaxing to an average dog and then with the electrodes on dogs listen to tape recorded instructions of words they knew for example sit they also listen to similar nonsense words like sut and to a very different nonsense word like bet which I'm going to adopt bet into my vocabulary I think it's an excellent word but I'm going to figure it out anyway it's what you say when you don't want to fully say burp it's a little bet well what they found was that most of the dogs learn a few words throughout their lives even if they live in a human family and are surrounded by human speech I have lots of thoughts already about this but anyway we'll continue their hypothesis was that despite dogs human like auditory capabilities generalizing speech dogs might be less ready to attend to specific differences between speech sounds so they might for example think sit and sut are the same word so based on this EEG they looked at brain activity they looked at muscle movements they wanted to make sure they were relaxed they also wanted to make sure that they were only measuring brain stuff related to what they were listening to that's why they were looking at muscle movements some of the dogs who came to the experiment couldn't settle down no surprises there I can tell you right now my dog could not be like okay sure I'll come to this brandy room full of brand new people let you tape things to my head and just sit sure no that would not happen so anyway some of the dogs couldn't settle they didn't get to do measurements but here's something that's interesting the dropout rate was similar to the dropout rate EEG studies with human infants so that's funny yeah so far looking good the dog brains clearly and quickly discriminated the known words from the very different noises like sit and bet from about 200 milliseconds after the beginning of the words so that actually is in line with similar studies on humans which show that their brain responds differently to meaningful and nonsense words within a few hundred milliseconds so that's so far dogs are doing really good but the dog's brains made no difference at all between known words and those nonsense words that differed in a single speech sound only so sit and sit to these dogs seem to be the same and the pattern that they found in the EEGs were similar to human infants around 14 months old so next time you're mad at your dog just keep in mind they're like a 14 month old infant with their capabilities in their brain so the researchers speculate that the similarity of dogs brain activity for instruction words they know and for similar nonsense words reflects not perceptual constraints but attention and processing biases so dogs might not attend to all details of speech sound when they listen to words but that they could find with further research whether this could be a reason for them to be able to pass to its dogs or acquiring a more sizable vocabulary so a few things one is when testing household dogs there is a huge variability in the amount of training that any particular household does with their dogs there are border collies that know 200 words there are household dogs that can't even sit and that is not the dog usually I mean the border collie thing that is extra special to that breed it seems a lot of the dogs that have the largest vocabularies are border collies so there's something going on there for sure but you can tell that within even specific breeds depending how much time you put into training a dog they can have a much larger vocabulary and pay way better attention to their human and potential human speech based on that so there's a lot of confounding variables here related to the home environment that this dog has and the prior training they have had yeah absolutely so there's that I've met dogs that verbally could be told at Christmas morning this is a great example at Christmas morning as this dog they would tell it this time go get your present and the dog would go under the tree and sniff for the thing that smelled like a squeaky toy and grab that one toy out and then whatever it was they would name it and they could throw that thing and this is I think it's just a lab like a golden lab or something I believe it yeah they could throw this toy out with the pile of the other toys and ask for it to go get a specific toy by name and it would go get that specific toy and bring it out so dogs do have this amazing capacity to pick up words and do association with words and human language that and they pick it up very quick I found for some reason I only speak Danish to dogs still haven't quite figured out why that is but when I'm talking to a new dog and I speak Danish to it after a while instead of treat getting kicks they pick it up really quick and it's kind of interesting how well they pick up language for the assumption that we have that they don't really use it it could also be the sound that you're making and your body language a combination of the things because I think that helps the learning process absolutely I think that absolutely like you could go blah blah blah and they're like uh oh yeah I'm sure it's part of that learning process but there's a point where you can remain kind of stony face and just say the word like if you say walk around a dog like there's people who if you got your audio up and I'm like want to go for a walk all their dogs are freaking out can I say it really loud for Sadie Sadie doesn't care about that word actually she goes but yeah I don't I don't feel like that's it I feel like the one is I tell her it's time for dinner she starts barking okay I'm excited but so I think the main thing if I can try to interpret this a little bit more I think what they're trying to get at is dogs don't have complex language skills to the extent that you know they could understand the nuance of complete sentences I think that's really what this is about is that in order to master a language you need to understand variance on words and it's way more complex than something that say a toddler can understand so I think that's kind of what this is starting to get at is like this is really cool dogs seem to have language understanding about at the level of a 14 year old 14 month old infant and so yes we don't expect them to get to a 5 or 10 year old because they're never going to be able to create complex language themselves with our vocabulary so right not with our vocabulary they're not going to use our words they're not an alex the parrot exactly yes so it's definitely they're on the spectrum though some dogs that are really close to alex the parrot because they have the same recognition of him where they can understand yellow car yeah so I think it's a little more complicated than the story but I think it's an interesting study in using dogs that are not specially trained which I think is a great first step in trying to just figure out what the average dog understands very cool but also really taking a good look at language recognition so for all of you out there that think you have really well trained dogs maybe it's time to start messing around telling them to suck and see what happens I'm going to do it and I'm going to see what happens I think it's going to be very interesting or you know how much vocabulary have you actually tried to teach your dog how much time have you spent do you read to your dog at night you do that with kids that's how they pick up their vocabulary I do talk to her a lot I do have like full narratives which is great I really like having a dog because you know with my husband working he's asleep during the day especially now that I'm working from home I'm just walking around the house by myself talking to myself talking to myself through my day and having a dog here means I can tell her about my day and it's a lot less insane and so yes she gets a constant dialogue for me and much safer than having a cat for sure we just haven't found out about all the diseases that dogs carry that they give to humans because they have bigger poos sure this is my transition to your next story I want to tell you about HMR in giant pandas HMR you ask oh I'd love to tell you it is horse manure rolling horse manure rolling by giant pandas this is something that the Chinese Academy of Sciences have worked with Beijing Zoo to study in a decade long study looking at HMRs in giant pandas why does this have its own acronym you ask it's because about 10 years ago the research team observed a giant panda in the wild pausing and rolling itself in a large pile of horse manure intrigued they began watching for other observations and over the past decade they documented documented documented 30 8 instances HMR by wild giant pandas hence needing the acronym it happens a lot was this the same weird panda over and over you ask no it was dozens of them they were not just rolling in manure they were working very hard to cover their entire bodies in the feces and it was only in cold months specifically when temperatures dropped below 15 degrees celsius and it's specifically horse manure or is that just specifically fresh fresh horse manure this is a big question why would you do that why indeed they suggest that the bears are benefiting from the manure somehow related to the cold so they studied the manure as you do pandas only as I said only bothered with fresh manure they found in this fresh horse manure or F, H, M if I may coin a germ two chemicals beta carofylene and carofylene oxide they are aromatic they smell and they dissipate quickly they applied the chemicals to hay in the panda enclosures in the bejing zoo and they found that the pandas also liked it but only when it was chilly next they tested it with mice and they found that it made the mice less averse to cold conditions so let me remind everyone bears they're good at the cold that's like one of the things about bears think about polar bears so I can't help but wonder if part of this is because they're supposed to be eating meat but they're sitting there eating bamboo are they not as good at staying warm because they're not consuming fat I don't know just a question not studied in this particular research but this is the crux of it is that they found these two chemicals they were again they were aromatic they dissipated quickly they gave the pandas and mice they think a feeling of warmth similar to Vic's Vapo rub because it was aromatic and it dissipated quickly it doesn't help them stay warm it does nothing to help them stay warm it just takes the sting out of the cold air because of the sensation how long does the sensation last I mean they have to go find fresh manure to roll in on a regular basis it cannot be long I mean think how long how does your Vic's Vapo rub last probably like a half an hour hour right but that's direct to skin so I would guess it's actually way less than that oh pandas you're just bad at everything and now you don't even look like pandas because you put so much poo on your fur you're brown you're literally covered in poo do you understand yeah just how can I be more of a panda let me think why I'm gonna cover myself in poop make myself more of a useless critter let me just no no no I mean cover myself in poop I know it'll make everyone like me poop cover myself in poop manure yes anyway weird animals are fascinating oh boy yeah that's a weird question are these all the bears or just individuals I mean dozens dozens hmm alright there's more to that story there's gotta be I can't wait to hear more about the poo covered pandas perhaps in 2021 research update pandas roll in poo because they think it looks cool yeah guess what pandas you're wrong oh boy but our listeners are not wrong to be listening to this week in science thank you for listening to this week in science once again for bringing us into your ears into your brains and hopefully into your thoughts for the rest of the week as you contemplate the stories from this show reminder calendars are available for 2021 Blair's animal corner calendars are available now at the twist website head to twist.org to order yours today while you're there you can also click on our Patreon link Patreon is a is where it's our community of supporters people who support our endeavors to bring science and curiosity and wonder to the world to share science with you and with others if you appreciate the show and want to help us continue to do what we do click on that Patreon link and select your level of support we have now started annual memberships there is a discount for becoming an annual member if you are interested in just paying once as opposed to monthly but yes annual memberships now available at Patreon we thank you for your support really can't do it without you alright Justin what do you have to say for science so this is actually not me saying this but this is a a letter it's called a call to action marshaling science for society that was put together by current and past presidents of the American Institute of Biological Sciences we're going to have a link in the show with the actual them saying all of the words but it's pretty long I have an abridged version but I did want to read their statement because it's reminiscent of a collage of disclaimers on the show over the years but here it goes we find the assault by politicians and special interest groups on the use of scientific knowledge to guide public policy decision making alarming and dangerous the marginalization of scientific information and decision making has significant negative effects on our public health and safety our environmental sustainability and our general well-being we need not look further than the disruption and deaths that have resulted in many countries including the United States from failing to use scientific evidence in making decisions on how to control the 19 pandemic many politicians in the United States and around the world have continued to spread misinformation to promote goals they consider desirable in the face of this problem all policy should be based on sound science and its application to dealing with any policy of consequence including those that address the existential threats to civilization they go on to explain how science works very like here's what we do kind of a way they illustrate the failure of politicians to follow or amplify scientific guidance in the face of COVID-19 which leaving the public to be open to suggestion and opinion that they hear as opposed to the sound knowledge of expertise and research and doctors going on the progress of science over the centuries has led to our deep understanding of natural phenomena we must find ways to benefit from that understanding as we move into the future let us join together scientists of the world unite let us join together to insist on acting logically and rationally in a world so plagued by self-centered short-term goals and the false information that they all too often generate so this is again American Institute of Biological Sciences they get involved in things like debunking bad information or misinformation about science and promoting good science it's a wonderful organization you should definitely check it out put the full version as well as the audio they sort of did an audio collage of past presidents saying those words and more but I think that's a very important thing we've talked about a lot about science the scientific community putting their voice out there more forcefully speaking louder and I hope again as much as I think we've learned a lesson or two or many from this pandemic that we're still at the height of so we haven't learned the lesson because we're still at the height of and we still haven't taken action but hopefully the scientific community goes oh okay this is our job and we need to be more dedicated to that than to caring what a politician thinks and it's a political world so it's difficult but there needs to be there needs to be more expertise in policymaking because we can't do this again we can't keep doing this we can't keep following this path it's a dead end there and then oh yeah talking about using scientific data and policymaking armored personnel carriers long range acoustic devices assault rifles submachine guns flashbang grenades grenade launchers that go with them sniper rifles with night vision scopes are not military equipment well they are military equipment the toys local police have been equipping themselves with while dressing up like soldiers in tactical gear and flak jackets to go and helmets and right here to go interact with the public new research shows that the militarization of local law enforcement through all these armors and combat attire and weapons does not reduce crime there's not even a correlation of crime reduction with militarization of police additionally research has found that the evidence that the police use to say that they need equipment is full of discrepancies they're creating their own data in a sense to say that they need things which is absolutely unscientific and unreliable says here scholars rely on accurate data to track and analyze the true effects of police militarization on crime policymakers also need accurate data to base their decisions upon however to date we do not have reliable data on how the surplus military equipment transfers to local police and sheriffs through our federal government and is used this is LSU department of political science assistant professor Anna Gunderson whose lead author on the paper which was published in Nature Human Behavior so much of the militarization was stopped after the police brutality protest in Ferguson in 2014 and then that decision was reversed in 2017 and we saw what we saw over just this last summer one of the things that they looked at they looked at some data releases that were showing all the use of this military equipment within law enforcement data was released in 2014 there was another record released in 2018 and they found that the 2018 data didn't even match the 2014 data in terms of going back and saying what these departments had researchers then concluded that promoting claims about the efficacy of police militarization especially crime rates based on research relying on these data releases by the Department of Defense and local police departments was absolutely and totally unreliable when they conducted their own analysis using updated data combining all the data from all these different sources authors find no evidence that the military equipment transfers from the Department of Defense to local municipalities, police departments and sheriffs departments there was no reduction of crime contrary to what these locals are saying then asking for their toys so we need policy making that is based on reality if you let anyone make a Christmas list you have to show a need for your Christmas list they'll probably come up with some reasons why they need it that's why you need a third party to actually analyze these things and see if there's something actually we did see a tremendous frightening use of militarized force against peaceful protesters it's one thing if you have gotten these things you're thinking the terrorists are coming it's red dawn the Russians are going to parachute in from the all that's going to happen you want some backup response for it for the locals put that in a vault somewhere train with it once a year but they're busting all of this out on peaceful protesters so obviously there's a very big difference between what they said they needed it for and what they used it for and what they said they needed it for they didn't need to do anything it didn't work so roll it back send it all back you don't need a tank to stop petty crime petty theft they got one in Davis they got one of these armored personnel cars and they got an MCAT in a little college town happy low crime rate town of Davis California and the people when they found out like it was hush hush they found out and asked for it and they got it the town made them give it back or give it away the people were like no no you're not driving around our town no you absolutely can't have that toy and that's exactly what it was it was a toy it's so that they could play soldier which is very frightening it is frightening yeah I mean I think it the management of these things how violence works how crime works gun fatalities all of these things understand having the data to make better decisions will be very helpful having people in place to use the data to make better decisions you're pointing out it's glassed over but yeah the CDC hasn't been allowed to collect data on gun accident gun fatalities police departments don't always report when they have the information about people that they have interacted with that ended lately they don't make the same reports there that they do if they arrest somebody it's less paperwork but then it's the question of you know what do what do we want the police to be doing what is their role their job in society and that is a you know local question for localities but it's something that people should be thinking about a very low amount of time dealing with violent crime or crime itself I mean outside of you know there's a lot of what do they call it misdemeanor kind of stuff for traffic violations or responding to somebody's parked in front of the driveway stuff like that I think that we need police in a society that's absolutely something that we need but I don't think that they need to be trained that the way that they are unless we're really the worst country in the world and need to be the highest imprisoned and need the half of every city's budget to go to policing us because we're just that big of a criminal society in which case we need to change everything well in which case we shouldn't be going to other countries and trying to help them sort things out so that's a whole other thing oh jeez these are big issues that should be discussed after the show this is a rabbit hole for personal opinions and discussions so let's move on to my last couple of stories I have brains to talk about because we like using our brains I love my brain and even in the wintertime I'm using my brain and I'm trying to keep my brain healthy by learning new things trying new skills trying to you know I exercise I keep my brain fit strong I try to keep it from withering away and shrinking like the shrews brain I had no idea according to a study out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences there are shrews the Etruscan shrew and is one of them but also a different group of shrews as well they they lose their brains in the wintertime their brains shrink they there is a small there is a group of shrews the red the red toothed shrews and those shrews their whole body shrinks down the red toothed shrews in the they grow a little bit after they're born in the summer season and then in the fall winter everything shrinks and it is a cycle called denel's phenomenon these shrews just shrink away and then in the spring they don't they don't hibernate and then in the spring everything starts growing back again they get big and strong they eat lots of food and then they mate and then they die and that's what happened they just ought to be a shrew no thank you oh yes alright so researchers wanted in Wisconsin University of Wisconsin La Crosse wanted to know whether other shrew species excuse me also had this brain shrinking phenomenon and they discovered that yes indeed the Etruscan shrew which is not related in the same shrew group to the red toothed shrew it also has a shrinking brain very specific very specific I don't know if I like the fact this is our line of animal on the planet aren't we like originating from a shrew we originated from a thing that was like a shrew but not not really the shrews still you know have we really checked brains shrinkage do we check brain size do humans have do humans have seasonal brain shrinkage maybe we should we should look into it but they're doing like brain slices and stuff probably to do pulling out the brains probably to measure them in these shrews I don't imagine it's an easy experiment to do on humans these days no but they didn't pull these brains out of the shrews they stuck them in little tiny MRIs oh good magnetic resonance imaging scanning and they looked at 10 shrews over a year each season they scanned their brains and looked at brain volume and at thickness in different areas of the brain over time and they discovered that the brain volume in these Etruscan shrews decreases in the winter even though they kept the animals under 12 hour light and dark cycle so 12 hours light 12 hours are dark shrews shouldn't have known that it was winter but their bodies did and their brains shrank because they were counting down to sex and then death right isn't that the whole the countdown I only have a year I have to follow this pattern I only have a year this is it it's the countdown they also gave unlimited food to the animals during that time period and had a very consistent temperature so there was no temperature swing and other cues that would potentially make the body's metabolism want to conserve energy or resources by shrinking the brain and it indicated that this whole thing is related to internal cues as opposed to external cues in a different group they gave them they they took away some of their food in the summertime and then they were able to find out that there was a decrease in brain thickness then as well so there are cues like food availability that will influence the resources in the body and where they go in these shrews but their internal internal clocks that really drive the shrews and their brain size they found a layer of the smetacensory cortex decreased and it's it's thickness by 28% in the wintertime and then grew right back the following summer and the question is now we know in mice and rats and we have some evidence that we talked about on the show over the years about where new cells get where new cells in the brain come from and so they now are going to start looking at the hippocampus of these shrews to see whether or not the cells originate in the hippocampus when the brains grow back to their thickness to try and figure out exactly what's going on there yeah yeah okay so then then we're talking about if somebody has I don't know fallen on a spike that went through their eye and came out the back of their head but they survived and they're missing a bunch of their brain matter now because of this accident but the plasticities allowed them to continue going on in their lives is this potentially a brain regeneration right therapy thing? how's it working? yes because I don't know of anything that's just been like I'm going to get rid of a bunch of brain and I'll put a quarter of it back again there's no big deal like regrowing a tail on a on a lizard or something just regrowing brain tissue I didn't know that was an option right and so now if we're looking at it beyond we've seen it in in mice and rats but to see the seasonal growth in a shrew that's another mammalian species that gives it some robustness yeah yeah it's in the family tree somewhere distant distant distant cousins but then the thing is too you know maybe maybe you've gotten this far in life and you're not happy with the brain that you have you know maybe I want to you know roll the dice a little see see what would happen if I got rid of a quarter of this brain and let it regrow back maybe maybe that brain will work better than the one I started with yeah yeah it's a huge question though of you know what is happening to them in the winter that you know is their cognition is their ability to think to to function is it impaired when their brain is less thick when that's a matter of memory and behavior from one summer to the next teach the shoes a bunch of stuff this summer and see if they retain it after the brain is shrunken grown back again see if their personalities change in any way now I'm really fascinated with how shoes are from year to year are they like a completely different shrew the next year is it just like yeah I can't remember where I put my keys but that's okay I don't I don't drive I'm a shrew that's cool I'm a shrew I was one one shrew in the fall and I'm a completely new shrew in the spring look at me now yeah the shrew takes Manhattan it's gonna be the next Pixar movie yeah so these little little teeny tiny shrews there's a lot go a lot more going on than maybe we had thought they lose almost a quarter of their neurons it's in their somatosensory cortex it's huge it's massive and then moving on from shrew brains to how we remember where and when things take place there are two studies out this last week both of them led by University of Texas Southwestern and one published in the proceedings of National Academy of Sciences another in Science that are adding to what we understand about space and time and memory and our brain time cells are cells in the brain they've been discovered in rats they have a pattern of firing that's like a clock and they fire and they fire and they fire it's this very regular firing and this reproducible firing sequence of this activation of the brain is controlled by five hertz brain waves that are called theta oscillations and the process is called procession and the researchers at UT Southwestern wanted to know whether people also have these time cells and in their study they used a memory task that involved time-related information they measured the brain's hippocampus hippocampal region in epileptic patients so these were people with epilepsy who were going in for surgery on their brain so their brains were going to be opened up anyway and during that time that it was open before the surgery actually took place they had them do some free recall experiments reading a list of 12 words for a certain amount of time like 30 seconds and then doing a quick math problem to distract them from remembering and rehearsing the lists and then try and do that recall of the lists over again for another 30 seconds and there is a word that is associated with each segment of time so the list is within a certain 30 seconds the next 30 seconds is recall another 30 seconds we're going to have to recall some words and so it's this timed memory and lo and behold time cells in the human hippocampus we have firing cells that if they fire more reliably they actually predict better how well you remember things related to a particular time and they call that temporal clustering so just like in rats people have time cells and in science they also looked at hippocampal cells looked at place cells place cells are cells that fire when you are in a place and these cells are activated when you go to a new place and they fire in a particular sequence and it's been hypothesized that these place cells are what really help you remember spatial locations in the in the brain they're kind of like these it's like a sweep of a spot they will fire before an animal this is being recorded in rats they fire before an animal will go into a space and then they also fire as a review of what was just seen in that place and the researchers determined that there is this forward and backward playing of these cells that alternate back and forth and the researchers say while the animals are moving forward their brains are constantly switching between expecting what's going to happen next place cells that are just learning a location and then those place cells firing again in the exact same sequence recalling what just happened and it happens within a split second fraction of a second time frames so your brain when you're going into new places potentially this is in rats not in humans but potentially when you're entering and exploring a new place you can imagine that you have a little neural radar in your brain that's going what's here oh that's what's there what's in this next spot oh that's what's in that spot okay we're going to play it we're going to figure it out okay we're going to replay it we're going to remember it looking forward and looking back and our brain has these cells that are constantly active telling us where we are and when we are combining both of those stories me and a friend play this game where you say a movie and then the other person has to guess what year it came out so bad at that it has to be during our lifetime we don't go back and try to do the 50s or something we do our lifetime kind of a movie and what's funny is the way that I remember when a movie came out is where I saw it and who I was with and those two things if I went to a movie alone I guess I don't remember it because I remember where I saw the movie and who I watched that movie with and that's usually enough to narrow down the year or two when that movie came out so that's really interesting because it's immediately like that's how my brain absolutely works it remembers things in time based on the room that I was in and the individual next to me yeah our brain is this amazing association processor so if you've got these regular time marking cells firing in your brain and you have the place cells checking to see where you are and you have other cells that are recognizing people around you and your brain is taking all that information in and putting it together in these split these slices of creating slices of reality where these they're networks of neurons just firing together the time cell, the place cell the face cell all firing together to put a memory into your brain where you can go oh that was that theater on D street and it was this person and it was this movie in 1992 you know yeah the brain, the inner workings at some point we'll be able to you know at some point we'll understand it and I that's amazing to me I think those spaces must be stored pretty close together at least in my brain because I will dream where I am walking from one actual known location to another to another all within that dream but they're all physical actual spaces it's not like making up new architecture my brain is lazy it just grabs from oh we need a new room the house you lived in when you were 7 years old okay we'll make that the next room and then you walk through and it's like oh here's the high school you went to we'll make that the next thing that you walked through should I keep stalling keep you look like you're really looking hard for something I was really looking hard for something because I had a letter from a listener that I had entered into the show run down that suddenly is not there anymore I was looking for the one yeah it was there and now it's gone and I don't know why it's not there is it on a different day nope I don't think so oh the little things those details you're doing a show trying to make a thing go and then something disappears where did it go where did the letter go but it was a correction it really is what it was and let's see we have my inbox and I can read it do we get something wrong that happens from time to time we did get something wrong it was a very kind letter from Jennifer Harrex who wrote in to say hello twist team on the last episode I heard you mention at the end that we no longer need to get polio vaccines however we do still receive polio vaccines we live in the United States and both of my kids were recently immunized against polio and that's absolutely true there is still a polio vaccine I think you were thinking of smallpox I probably was which was globally eradicated thanks to vaccines because of the polio vaccines we are close to eradicating polio which is still endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan but we are still on science thank you for catching that Jennifer sometimes doing a live show we say things and we get it wrong when we are using our fallible human memories yes as opposed to things that are written down in front of us but I appreciate the correction and it's an important one to make but the point still being that at this point in time we don't have to worry about polio anymore because vaccination made it disappear and for a large part we really don't have to worry about polio here in the United States thanks to vaccination there are wonderful and that was I think the big point that you were trying to make Blair in that comment but accuracy is very important and so yes everyone children probably have had polio vaccines if you had children you've probably had a polio vaccine probably have not had a smallpox vaccine probably not any more thoughts before the end of the show friends no let's have an end to this show we're going to bring it to the end we've done it thank you for listening I hope you enjoyed the show shout outs to Fada for help with social media and show notes Gord thank you for manning the chat room and identity for thank you for recording the show hopefully the show recording didn't go so long that we totally got things deleted and things didn't work out last week things were crazy all over the place what am I talking about talking about things about not being prepared again we dropped some of our show last week it was the after show that was dropped yes alright let me open up the thank yous because of course I didn't have that open either end of the show I gotta be ready for this stuff what is going on oh computer crashy problem we had a lot of computer crashes last week I guess at the end of the I guess at the after show got cut off last week I guess I don't need to apologize for the profanity laced rant that I went on for I think half an hour was it it was a long one so I guess I could save that one for a future apology one when I really need one I like that you're passionate passion is important in life it is important so now I would like to say thank you thank you to the boroughs welcome fund and also to our patreon sponsors for their generous support of this week in science thank you to woody ms andrei beset Howard tan rp rp rp rp rp rp rp rp rp rp rp rp rp Paul Stanton, Paul Disney, Patrick Pecoraro, Ben Rothig, Gary S. Tony Steele uses Adkins, Brian Gondron, Jason Roberts, and Dave Freidl. Thank you for all of your support of Twist on Patreon. And if you are interested in supporting us on Patreon, please click the Patreon link at twist.org. On next week's show. We will be back Wednesday, Pacific Time, 8pm broadcasting live from our YouTube and Facebook channels and from twist.org slash live. I don't know how we're getting to all those places at once, but we're going to be in all of them. It's magic. If you want to listen to us as a podcast, you can search for this week in science wherever podcasts or phones. So figure it out yourself, I guess. If you enjoyed the show, get your first to subscribe as well. And if you'd like more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes and links to the stories will be available on our website, www.twis.org. And you can also sign up for a newsletter that apparently we've started. It'll come. You can contact us directly, email Kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com, Justin at twistmedian.gmail.com, or me, Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twistTWIS in that subject line, or your email will be spam-filtered all the way into Justin and my quarantine birthday cake. If you want to tweet at us, you'd have to go to Twitter, where we are, at twistscience, at Dr. Kiki, at Jackson Fly, and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you would like us to cover or address, a suggestion for an interview, a hi-coo that comes due in the night. Please let us know. We'll be back here next week, and we hope you'll join us again for more great science news. And if you've learned anything from the show, remember, it's all in your head. The science is in. I'm gonna sell my advice. Know them how to stop their robots with a simple device. I'll reverse all the warming with a wave of my hand. And all it'll come in your way. So everybody listen, I'll broadcast my epic in science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science, this week in science. This week in science, science, science, science. I've got one disclaimer, and it shouldn't be news. That's 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 understand. That we're not trying to threaten your philosophy, we're just trying to save the world from jeopardy. So everybody listen to everything week in science, this week in science. This week in science, science, science, science. This week in science, this week in science. This week in science, science, science. On a list of items I want to address. From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought. And I'll try to answer any question you've got. The hell can I ever see the changes I seek When I can only set up shop one hour into what we say and the ions. This week in science, this week in science, science, science. 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, this week in science. So Blair, I love your decorations in the background. It's very holiday, holiday spirit over there. It's Hannah birthday Christmas at your house. It always is. Yeah. So the mention, the brief mention was made of birthday cake in the end of the spam filtered into your quarantine birthday cakes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If people don't remember if you're not looking at your twist calendars, it is Blair and Justin's birthdays within this next week. They will have passed by the time we have our show next week. I hope not. I mean the birthday days. Just the days. Well, birthday's don't count, right? I'm still focusing on that. Yeah, no, birthdays in 2020. You can have your birthday. It doesn't count. You're not actually getting another year older. Right. I didn't use this one. You didn't use this year exactly. You can't get another year older. Or maybe you will get a, I don't know, did we all age a decade this year? Yeah, maybe. I just, I do think it's very funny. I like think back on like March, right? Like March, April, May, like people had birthdays. They're like, oh man, I'm so sorry you had to have a quarantine birthday.  Let me make this extra special for you. And you know, I'm sitting here with a December birthday like, it won't hit me. I'm so sorry that you had to deal with this.  And then, then here we are. And not only is it still happening, but it was actually better for a minute. And then it got terrible again right before. So that's fun. At least you got to get married. Yeah, that's true. I did get to get married. I didn't get to have my wedding, didn't get to wear my dress, but not yet. Not yet. Not yet. It'll happen. It'll happen. 2021. Yeah. So every, every one, if you have the time, the 11th and the 12th, be sure to send birthday greetings to Justin and Blair as their birthdays will be here. I forgot. I remember like the day before yesterday.  Yeah. What day is it? Oh, cool. I literally forgot. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I do think this is a year off. I think you should just, yeah, you should just take it off. I'll just do this your age over again. Might take a few of them. We're about to have our 45th president. That's exciting. You know, a lot of resets. Are we getting 40 or 45th president ever again? That's what I'm counting. I'm calling this one 45. Yeah. Oh no. That's funny. Sadie's got back. Oh my goodness. Actually, we did, we took her to the vet because she's a year old now and they were like, she's chonk. Go for a walk. So it's funny too because I have been very careful because corgis are prone to being overweight and not just that, but them being overweight is what contributes to their number one health issue, which is back and neck related because of the shape of their body. They're so long that like all they are is back and neck. Exactly. That's the problem, right? So if they're heavy, then that's like pulling on their spine and it causes them disc problems. So anyway, I've been like very careful and I've been paying close attention and, you know, all of my time at the zoo doing body scoring on animals, I keep like looking at her from the top. Like, can I see a dip? Like looking at her from the side like, I don't know. But also corgis are shaped so weird that it's really, it's extra hard to tell. So anyway, point is, she needs to do a little bit of weight. She's a little chonk. Just a little. But she's, we run for two and a half miles every morning and then I take her for like a mile long walk in the evening. So it's not so much the exercise, I think. I think it's the food, but it's also funny because according to her weight and age, she should be getting, I think, gosh, almost twice the amount of food that we're giving her according to like what it says on the back of a dog food bag. But again, listen to the dog food bags. The dog food bags want you to feed and feed and feed and buy more dog food bags. Sure. But also, it's, you know, again, her shape is so bizarre. It's, it's very different from a year old 30 pound dog that's proportionate. Right. Okay. Laura asks, what's the evolutionary advantage to being shaped like a corgis? Oh, that's actually a really good question. So again, it's not evolutionary, it's engineered. It's people with people genearing. But it's so that when they herd cattle, they don't get kicked in the head. Oh, because they're so short. Yes. I thought they would have been like burrowing after like something. No, no, no. They're too thick, I think for that. But yeah, it's for her. Interesting. Yeah. That is very interesting for herding, which she does on our run. She nips at my ankles a little bit. Although it, although it, it is, it is fun to think about dogs as being evolutionarily natural. I'm trying to pick, I always picture the, the big herd, the giant herd of Chihuahuas that once en masse would take down bison on the Great Plains. Well, that's like what I used to teach about guinea pigs. They're the Montaigne guinea pig or the Patagonian cabbie are both like relatives of the domestic guinea pig. And they run in herds in giant herds. So that the it's like being a school of fish. Like if there's a predator coming and they run in herds. Sorry. Wow, that was so weird. You responded to yourself because you said they run in herds. And then you said, absolutely. Oh Blair, you're right. They do. They run in herds. Blair with Blair. So I just heard an echo of myself, which is crazy. And now he's barking at a mirror image of herself in the window. That's a pretty good sign of intelligence. A lot of dogs don't react to reflection or the dog that is currently here at this place, which I think is part corgi and part some sort of Japanese dog. It's very intelligent squat long. Good night, noodles. Looking thing. Which I think is part corgi at the television. Some sort of Japanese dog. Oh, there's that echo again. What are you doing Kiki? Are you trying to like isolate drops? Bam. For the morning show or what? That's right. I'm going to kind of get it. Your DJ monitor is bleeding out into the. It is. I didn't I didn't turn off my monitor. Yeah, I want what I'm trying to do is I had to get into my Twitch channel to block somebody who is posting spam in the comments. So I see that. Yeah, I don't want to become famous. I already am. Yeah. How do I delete that though? Can I delete that comment? How do I delete it? Goldesator, I see you in there. I want to just go boop. Delete comment. I don't know how to moderate. I'm not. I have to learn how to be better at the twitching. Speaking of twitch gaming. I just want to say thank you to everyone who watched our show tonight instead of playing. What is it? Cyberpunk 2777. What is that what it's called? It's a new video game. It's a it's a world game called Cyberpunk 2077 and it's supposed to be amazing, but it just came out today. And so for those of you who may have downloaded it already, maybe you're playing it and watching us at the same time or maybe you're just watching us and thank you for watching our show instead of playing a brand new video game. Or thank you for tuning in to us now knowing that you need a break from the last 72 hours. But wait, did you have a question? Wait, why are you talking about this video game? Because it just came out and I think somebody very, very, very early on in the chat at one point said, oh, there are people here not playing video games. And I remembered that and I was, I just wanted to thank everybody for being here for the show instead of a new video game. I do appreciate that. There's gonna be plenty of time for video games tomorrow. I don't know. Marshall got it.  Oh, I thought you were gonna say just like walking across the TV field of vision in opportune moments. That's also funny. Yeah. No, can't do it. He plays, he plays on his office computer so not down in the living room. Thank goodness, I would get so annoyed. Video games are overrated. It depends on the video game for sure. And it depends on the time and the place and the people for sure. I've been thinking I want to get back, Myst is in VR and I was thinking it would, I was thinking it'd be fun to play Myst in VR. Spooky. All by yourself in the virtual Myst world. No thanks. Solving puzzles. Spooky. So, I don't really have a video game machine or play video games. I have in the past. But I don't think they're necessarily overrated Steven Rain. One of the things that I do appreciate about video gaming, especially with kids who like to video game quite a bit, is that it's interactive. You know, as opposed to watching a television or a, you know, movie or Netflix, which is intriguing as it may be, it's very passive. You're just the observer.  You might get into the excitement a little bit. But you aren't thinking through anything. You're not deciding anything. You're not really interactive. It's one thing that I think that is intriguing about the modern day video games that are immersive stories in these worlds and all of this, is that you, the player is driving the story to some degree. Which I don't know. I think there's something at least, at least it's requiring some mental faculty to apply to the thing as opposed to just watching a television screen. But you know, reading is probably better than both. Reading is better than all of the above. Yeah. Although I will say that Alien Worlds on Netflix is super fun, if not a little creepy, but it's really fun. Have you seen it? Yeah. I was actually thinking about it in something we're talking about today. I guess I thought it was about the COVID causing potentially fatigue and this sort of thing. One of the storylines in there is about the fungus that grows, that attracts this creature to it, and then this predator eats that creature that got attracted to it. Because they get attracted to it, they lose their sense of fear, then this predator comes and eats them, but then is poisoned by the fungal infection, drops to the floor, and the fungus uses it to be the host to recycle its life cycle. So there was some weird, it didn't go into it, but it was something when you were saying it was like causing all this fatigue. I pictured all, us humans is dropping from this tree so that the virus could continue its life cycle. Oh, that's funny. It slows down. Or you could apply it to all the different ways in which the cat vectors, the cat vector diseases are attempting to create psychosis in humans. Just trying to turn everybody into the crazy cat lady. Because then, with enough cats surrounding her, there'll be enough of them to take her down at some point. Message. Oh, Hot Rod is messaging me over on Twitch. Which book, Angela Saini is supposed to be amazing. I have not read it myself, but she's, over the last year, people have been talking about her books. I've just set that aside and I will go look for it. Yeah, it's supposed to be a good one. Oh, Kevin Ballard. Oh no. Ditches, what did I, oh gosh, this is a bad memory. What did I just watch tonight? I don't know. So we got a suggestion via AAAS for, is it to name a scientist? Is that what it was called? Oh, no. This was from Paul Ronovich. Oh, we shouldn't say that because we might not have been supposed to get access to it. We'll change the subject right away. That's fine. Oh, my computer system. Okay, here we go. Did I delete that? Picture of a scientist. Yes. Picture a scientist. Picture a scientist. Yes. Which is a short documentary on sexism and racism within STEM. And it is brutally non-flinching.  I don't, I guess it's not out yet. This is, was a sneak preview. Yeah, it's doing a bunch of tours right now. It's playing at online conferences and other things. But yeah, they're doing private screeners and touring it around. And one of the voices in there, because it's all about, some of it is about the implicit bias that we have in all of us. And the book that I recommended to all you twist listeners, Blind Spot, one of the authors is in there. If you haven't read Blind Spot yet, you need to go find this book and read it as audio versions. Actually, I think there might be an audio version of it on YouTube as well, that you can go find. But Blind Spot, the, something about why good people think terrible things or whatever, however it's at. Some, some of it in there is some of the exercises, which I think is at the Stanford site. There's a, actually, I should have a better memory of these things. But there's, there's a place where you can go and take these, these implicit bias tests. Everybody who takes some complaints about the test, saying that it's not accurate. But there's some consistency to it that people find frightening within themselves.  And this is one of the, these things that this is sort of unveils how entrenched some of our thought patterns are that they are biases that we would not expect that we even have in self-evaluating. But come across very, very clearly through these association, word association tests and tasks that they created here. But anyway, some of that comes up during a picture, a scientist as well. But Blind Spot, everybody goes check that out. That's a, that's a must read or must listen to. And I encourage you to participate. In fact, I think if you Google implicit bias test, you should be able to find a website for actually taking the test yourself. I'm sure I have. I like to pretend I don't have any implicit bias, but I'm sure I have plenty. Everyone does. Everybody does. We've all got it. Okay. It's at Harvard. Yeah. Harvard has the implicit, implicit association test. That's, we're not calling it bias. Bias is what the result shows, I guess. But yeah, it's through Harvard. It's online. You can take it there. I think I figured out how to make somebody a mod on our, on our Twitch channel. Are these all tests? Justin, there's like a whole list of them. And it, it's just word association. Michael's 68. And they're tired. Things are quiet, but they're not lockdown lockdown. I don't, I mean, people say lockdown. There's no lockdown. It's just bars and restaurants, restaurants are delivery and takeout. And I think bars are closed right now. Yeah. Don't try to take it right now, Blair. It's impossible to do it while you're distracted, but they're tired and, and it's part of the fun of it is also knowing. Like one of the ones, one of the ones actually I got, I flipped the script on the bias because I think it was like, there's some stuff like you're associating, first test is associating flowers with positive words. And you'll find that you do this very quickly. Associate. And when you see an inch, if it's an insect, associate it with the negative word kind of a thing. And when those match, then that one's pretty quick. But then when you try to associate flowers with negative words and insects with positive words, that's when all you do is slow down. It's not that you're going to get them wrong.  And it's that time difference that shows.  It just depends on where your biases lie. I just feel like I'm bad at this. But you got to do it. You got to do it when you're not Yeah, talking to other people and not yet. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, I already messed up. It's this is like, hand-eye coordination also, though, is the problem. It's not it's not so much that but there is there is it's just, I mean, then it shouldn't your your hand-eye coordination shouldn't change from when they flip the script on you on the test. And you know what I'm saying? It's what it is, is how long it actually takes you to do the thing that's going to reveal your bias. Right. Oh, interesting. You know, and as simple as simple one of the I think the simplest version was with a deck of cards. How long if you were going to only pick ones that matched like black card, black card, red card, red card when they came up, those were quicker than if they were you picking out all the ones that didn't match. And then it was like slower, like these weird things where we combine concepts together. And so one of the things that you'll find is that positive concepts are attached to Caucasian more and negative are easier to associate to African American in these biases test. And this even happens when African Americans take this test is they'll show at least a slight Caucasian bias most of the time. And it's because we've been without that's the world we were raised in. We've been media and word trained to associate words with race that we don't even realize until you jump into one of these tests like this.  And yet, boy, the time slowed down, you know, trying to trying to call, you know, flower, lovely, very easy flower death. It's harder. It becomes more difficult if you don't have the word association there, which makes perfect sense in a lot of scenarios. But then you apply it to race, then you apply it to gender, then you apply it to apply it to all these other things that you don't think that you have these word associations and these mental biases connecting things concepts together. And they slow you down. And you realize we do all have this. Okay, I'm starting to understand how this works. But this is like, it's still I feel like I would be better at this if I was good at video games. It was like a hand I coordination thing to shouldn't really be. It's just clicking, right? Yeah, but I keep meeting to click one and then click the other one. Well, that's your hidden bias. That's the whole thing. That's what that is.  I've had the first round second round questions first that people make a lot of excuses about this test. But it affects everyone largely because we are, we are trained by an environment, we are influenced, we are nudged into decisions by our environment that we're not aware are influencing decisions. Yeah, so I mean, I understand the theory here. So like I'm going through the like fat based biased one. Because that was the first one, I just kind of wanted to see how it worked. And I guess the idea is like, if you're biased towards thin people or you think being fat is being is bad, basically, right? Like when they pair fat with bad, then you're going to go faster than when they do the opposite. Yes. Obese, agile. You'll be slower than thin agile connection. You could be slower to connect if you've been instructed to do it, right? Thunderbeaver missed the show because cleaning a van. Glad you made it. I'm not in that chat room because it'll break my computer right now. But what kind of van is it? An ableist test. Well, you can call it ableist, but it's, I mean, that's the terminology that people, that's also kind of a... There's an implicit bias right there. Implicit bias to that terminology as well. Yeah, but it's... Trust me, there's a lot of linebackers or offensive linemen who move much more agile than I do. Yeah, but it's just trying to teach people about these. You pick things up whether or not you're aware of them and you hold views whether or not you really think you do. And there are things in your head that you didn't explicitly learn or don't explicitly talk about. And being aware of them and knowing what they are makes it easier for you to learn how to counteract them and how to be more, you know, how to work with more people. How to better live in a reality that's based on reality? A diverse reality. In a weird way, like forgetting about all of the diversity bias that this has shown, all the race and gender and sexual orientation and whatever biases this thing can eliminate. Despite all of those, forget any specific one, but it really did the frightening things that illustrates that we are often operating in an unreality. We are operating in the realm of word association. We are living in a realm of previous association applied to a thing that has no relevant connection to that other event, which means in a large way we often live in a false reality in our perceptions of the world around us. And I think we forget very often, especially, you know, if you consider yourself intellectual and thoughtful and critical of evidence and critical of things in the world around you, you forget how much of our neuropsychology is based on immediate emotional reaction as opposed to those deeper logical rational thoughts. And yeah, if you've been thinking about stuff and internalizing things over time, then those emotional reactions are probably going to be, you know, maybe a little better for a situation. But for many of us, maybe, you know, we try, but maybe you haven't internalized things enough. And it's going to be that gut reaction, that the thing that comes out first is or the feeling that you have about something, the reaction you have is not going to be intellectual. Because we use heuristics and we use shortcuts and our brains like to jump on things.  Control the emotion with your logic and your reason. Yeah, and I think it also does show the need for what you were saying, the diversity in media and storytelling and voices that are heard. Because the more that we have, when it does apply to race, gender, preference, orientation, body, language, nationality, ethnicity, everything but politics. I think we reserve a hard line there. All those, all those, when you, if you can alleviate those biases within yourself, you do less harm to the world around you in a better place. I would like to be in a better place, a world of compassion, empathy, thoughtfulness, sustainability. Now, having said that, planning for the long term, living for our great grandchildren and not ourselves. Having said that, I do believe we do need to keep most of the world away from those who think this way until we can get them to think that way. I've lost faith in humanity this year. I haven't because we have this amazing group of people who join us every week for this show. We have amazing listeners who pull us into their ears every week. We have, it's a reminder every week coming back, I think, has been a reminder to sit here with both of you and with everyone in the chat room and everyone who's watching and be able to go, yeah, okay. Yeah, things are really bad and people are acting like, they're acting like toddlers, but at the same time.  Toddlers are actually really, but it's not everybody, but it's not everybody. There are lots of thoughtful, amazing people in the world and there are lots of thoughtful, amazing people. There are lots and I am reminded of that community by our community. So one of the really cool things you can do is help elevate those voices, right? So that's definitely something that I spent a lot of time learning about this past summer, especially as a white person in something going on like this.  It's more to elevate voices of people who are underrepresented is one of the best things you can do because one of the implicit biases that people have is that sometimes people listen to white people more than others. And so if you can elevate a non-white voice, use that implicit bias to help give voice to those who don't have as much of a platform. That's something that you can do. It's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, giving other people using your platform to lift other people up. It's very important. Yeah. We've got it figured out. I don't know about other people. Everything, we fixed it. I would like to figure out, I need to get a new pair of headphones before next week. Yeah, let's stop looking good whatever you're doing here. Yeah, I haven't figured out what's up with that. I think it's also more than just my head. So there's a glitch. This is an Apple earbuds that you can change the volume by pressing the little thing on the cable, right? Except it doesn't stay. And so I have to hold it so that I can hear you. But the other headphones, there's something wrong with the connection or the cable on the other headphones I was using because they kept going in and out. So you'd get a good volume and then suddenly you'd be whispering. And then you'd only be in my left ear. And then you'd get good volume in both ears again. I told you we shouldn't have messed with her. Oh, yeah. That was such a cool thing. I don't know what you're talking about. I'm talking the same volume this whole time. I don't know what you're talking about. I think I'm going to be looking into a new Scarlett USB interface and headphones or maybe just a new headphone plug. I gotta figure it out. But it could just be a loose connection. And maybe if I just get a little tiny screwdriver and undo some screws, maybe I can fix a connection. But yes, Apple is going to have they have new earbuds. They want $5 million for the new earbuds. And let me guess, they have a plug that no other earbuds or phones have. Right, that nobody else does. Yeah, noise canceling is not going to be great for music with your in-ear monitors. In-ear monitors are great. There's a company I've come across called New Hira that has Bluetooth in-ear earbuds. And so you can listen to podcasts or books on tape, you know, connect through the Bluetooth and hear things, connect to your phone, all that kind of stuff. But it's noise canceling and it also is personalizable. So you can listen to sounds and it adjusts the frequency ranges depending on how your ears work. So they're being used, they were made for people who are experiencing hearing loss and hearing decline. So they're made and people who talk about using them, they will wear these earbuds to concerts and it allows them to be able to turn down the crowd and actually hear the concert that they want to listen to. So they sound like really cool. I'd like to try them out before, you know, they're about, I think they're going to, I think they cost about $350 or $400 for an earbuds. So it's a pretty little penny to throw into something. Yeah, but it's actually pretty cheap. It's actually pretty cheap if you could like, if you think about it. Tune out that one person in the office. Exactly.  Worth it. Yeah. Worth it. Totally worth it. Yeah. Anyway, as my tinnitus increases and my, I don't know, maybe it's not the earbuds, maybe it's my ears. I do find myself going, what? A lot more to my child. That could also be, have its own reasons. What? You want to talk about video? What? No. What? Huh? I don't want to hear about Breath of the Wild again. No. Yes. Will they sell you one earbud? I don't know about that, Kevin Jones. Sound Blaster headphones. Those sound incredible. A gaming headset with a detachable boom mic downloadable equalizer for voice changing and sound. Well, all that work just to mute all the other players whenever you play one of those games. Brian's playing a game now where people can like talk to each other and You want those headsets. Can you mute that please? Because it's always just when people go like, Oh, man. It's just like that over and over. And I'm like, I don't need to hear that. Brian, I'm good. It's that or like weird bullying. Yeah. Also, I'm good. Because he's playing with 14 year olds. Yeah. You know, Thunder Beaver, I, no, Beats is all marketing. Beats had, yeah, that's all marketing. They are not, they're not super high quality. They look good. Yeah. No, I was, I was writing in the chat. I had a pair of the Bluetooth ones and they lasted a year. The sound was great. The functionality was very cool, but they lasted a year. It was a big buffer. The button broke and they wouldn't charge after a year. Yeah. If you're, if you're like an audiophile music person, you're not going to buy Beats. Yeah. Beats are, Beats are fine, but. And you're not going Bluetooth. You're going to be plugged in. Yeah. You want to be plugged in. Bluetooth compresses and it's not great for audio quality and there's all, yeah. Bluetooth. Voice changing might be fun for the podcast. You know what? It could be fun. I have a new computer coming because the other one turns out everything that got bent was attached directly to the motherboard. No. It was like designed to do exactly the way it died. Oh. There's no cards anymore. What? Everything's just little components soldered on to whatever onto the, so forget it. I just got a new computer, but when I get it back, when I get this new computer, it's on its way. There's that plus Kevin's saying if we did voice changing on the show, gots me a vocoder. Oh my God. You got a vocoder. I've had this for a long time. I've got this vocoder. Plus I've got, I've got some other, some other toys that I might be able to run audio through some plugins and such. And we're going to play around and see. It may be a different host every week. Could be. You never know. I mean, I could change all the, the pan and the low, mid and high frequencies on my, no, I'm not going to touch anything. Do people do, do motorcycle racing near where you are? Yes. Yes. Yep. And I can never tell when they're coming. It's not like I could be like, Oh, here they come. Let me mute. No. It's the motorcycle. Yesterday, last night, I think it was like three cars were racing on the freeway. Woke me up a little at night. I swear. I thought that aliens were coming down. Strayer. Because, oh, we haven't talked about this because the galactic federation. You've heard about the galactic federation, right? No. No. Yes. Yes. I have heard about this. Okay. Yes. Yes. Because the galactic federation of light. No, it's been waiting for us to have a space force to militarize space so that they'd be like, Oh, welcome to like the universe. Former Israeli space security chief says extraterrestrials exist and Trump knows about it. Is that what you're talking about? Yes. Yes. There it is. Yes. Because that man could keep a secret or not say the obvious thing that's a lie and make it sound like it's a lie. If there's one thing he's known for, bop, bop, bop. It's not being able to hide a lie. Okay. Galactic federation has been waiting for humans to reach a stage where we will understand what space and spaceships are. Thank you, Carol. Do we have to? Says Justin. Says Justin. This should be the red flag for what's coming. Go ahead. Go ahead. So many things, but this is really X security guy. It has a book coming out apparently. So this is just this is a big media blitz so that this guy can sell a book. So it sounds like the Galactic Federation follows the prime directive. They were just waiting for us to get the technology where we could handle first contact. You can't handle the truth. With a militarized space force as opposed to Voyager. Right. Yes, the Voyager golden record would have been a good start for sure. Let's take the military to space because then suddenly people want space people want to talk to us. What? Have you guys watched it? Did you see Space Force? Did you see the first season? I saw the first couple of episodes, the first episode fantastic and then it just kind of went downhill after that. I loved it. I cannot wait until the next season, but really? It explores kind of this idea of like what happens when you put military in space. Wasn't there a monkey? There was the monkey. There was a chimp. The chimp. That was the last episode I saw. Yeah. That was a rough episode for sure. That was rough. I was like, wait, the chimp is going to the Russians now and now the Russians have a chimp. I don't know what's going on. Oh, no way. The White House and Israeli officials did not immediately respond for comment. I am a shaw. I cut her. I ain't it. I ain't it. Surprise. Really? Is this how we're going to find out? This is so dumb. So that's interesting. I didn't know about that, but I thought there were aliens last night. That's funny. It's just the three pitches of these cars racing on the freeway made it sound like it was like descending down. It was very scary. We all know they're sending spacecraft. Sounds like an impairment. Which if aliens had the technology for space flight, they would have cloaking and stealth technology. Just saying. Probably. Really going to tell me that they're going to be like, it's kind of loud. It's fine. It's fine. It's no problem. We developed interstellar space flight, but do we want to work on this road noise? No, it's fine. Doppler is cool. Yes. Doppler. What are some good hard science sci-fi shows or movies or books? Okay, I really liked Battlestar Galactica. Agree with you, Michael68, until the end of the last season. It just went like they had to wrap it up and they ended it. The end of Battlestar Galactica was not satisfying for me in the least. I, from a book perspective, love Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. Great book. There are a couple of books in the series about they're kind of like noir detective, but sci-fi and pretty great stuff really well written. Those became Netflix series or Amazon's Netflix series. I think it was Netflix. And that went two seasons and it was pretty good. It wasn't great, but it was entertaining and pretty good. I enjoyed it. The, what are some other good ones? The Expans is amazing and that's going until what six seasons they're going to be doing. They got extended to do through the sixth season and then shut it down. Everybody seems to be on hold right now because of the COVID, but The Expans is definitely. But they have a season five coming out pretty soon. If we're talking hard science fiction. Expans is an amazing book series. They do a really good job of, you know, you have to leave voicemails in space because you do