Are we live? Are we here? We're here. Wait, Justin, you're out of frame. You're flying away. There you are. Out of frame on the other side. Which way? If you only see Justin's ear, is he even here? Ain't your proverb? Yes. Can you hear if he's here? Hello, everybody. Welcome to another podcast broadcast for This Week in Science. Yes, we will be spending the next hour and a half or so discussing science stories from the past week, having a wonderful time. And, you know, that's the live part of it. So, if you're here live or even watching on the YouTube or the Facebooks or the Twitches later, you're getting the whole recording, the whole shebang. If you do surprise, if you subscribe to the podcast, however, it's nicely clipped and edited and made to sound wonderful as much as we can. So, please do subscribe to the podcast or our YouTube or Facebook or our Twitch. All the places. But it's time for a show, right? Yes. Justin is running away. This is completely autofocus. I don't know why that happened. I'm not supposed to have an autofocus on this camera. It is autofocus. I think it's updated. Oh, updates. It's time for us to update everyone on science. So, let's start the show. Beginning in. A one. A two. This is twist. This weekend, three. Let's screw it up, Gigi. Try it again. Cut. Chop. Take two. You know you're driving the editor nuts right now. Two. This is twist. This weekend science, episode number 833 recorded on Wednesday, July 14, 2021. How do pandas eat bamboo? Hey there. I'm Dr. Kiki and tonight on the show, we will fill your head with ripples, pandas, and plasticity. But first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The future is coming. The future is coming. Right now, wherever you are, whatever you happen to be doing, the future is about to change things. It might be for the better. It might be an anticipated change. Something overdue that has taken a long time in getting here. It might be a change that improves your life. In ways that maybe even right now you can't imagine because you don't know what they are, but they could change everything for the better. It also might be a future that is worse. Where the weather is always too hot and getting hotter. One where robots take all the jobs from humans, or worse, one in which the robots don't take all the jobs from humans. The future can be good. The future can be bad. The future is the future. It's just how the future works. But one thing about the future, it's often predictable. Global warming is predictable. Pandemics are predictable. Automation taking over manufacturing, that's predictable. The only thing we can't predict is how humans will react once they learn that the real driving force behind every change the future has in store started with a conversation on This Week in Science coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I want to know Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science on Bastille Day. Is it not? July 14th? I still don't know what a Bastille is. Yes. It's Bastille. It's Bastille. Yeah? Speaking in French doesn't really help. I still don't understand. I'm trying to help you out here. Happy Bastille Day to any of our, any and all of our French listeners out there and everyone else. I hope you are ready. Everyone else? No, French listeners as well. I do hope that everyone is ready for a great episode full of fun science facts, tidbits, explorations and curiosities. I have got stories about ripples, ripples in the earth. I've also got a story about some new math related to black holes. And I've got some brain psychedelics and plasticity science for the end of the show. So everyone who makes it to the end of the show, we get to take some psychedelic science. Nice. Yeah. Justin, what you got? I have got blurry lines between friends and lovers. I have got while you were sleeping, robots took over farms. That just happened. Oh, a three sexed, three species with three distinct sexes was discovered. As well as why friends of cantopolas just really aren't racist, even though they're the only ones still using race in science. Let's go up. Okay. We will see what you mean by that when we get there. Blair, what is in the animal corner? Yes, I have video games, pandas and cockatoos. All the animals and video games. Has somebody made a panda cockatoo video game? Is this? No. No, but animals are related. Right. Well, I hope everyone is ready for these science games tonight. And if you have not yet subscribed, I would like to remind you that we are on YouTube, Facebook, Twitch as this week in science. We are also on most major podcast networks, platforms. Look for this week in science and our website is twist.org. All right. Let's dig in to cosmology, the math of the universe. What it is that makes the universe tick. Black holes are a big thing in the universe, right? We're trying to explain black holes and we've had a few stories last week. Justin was talking about herds of wild black holes roaming the cosmos. The plurality of singularities. The plurality of singularities. I do like those words to describe it. I came across a study this week related to the way that black holes lens light. Now we know that they have a massive gravitational field because of their mass and this gravitational field can actually bend the pathway of light through space time.  And in the process, depending on how close to the black hole it was, it may be distorted on the other side or not. The closer to the black hole without getting sucked in, the more distortion there actually is. Well, a mathematician just published his treatise, his mathematical proof of the way that the universe, the universe's light gets bent around black holes. And for around 40 years we have known that it is an exponential function of 2 pi, which is about 500 times closer that the light you have to look from one image to the next to get... to see light bent around a black hole. So I'm going to find myself a couple of images here to pull out and help describe. I need a picture. We need some pictures for the people in the viewing audience, people in the listening audience. I need a picture or I need a slice of that pie. I like pies. Pies are good. Okay, so let me get the share screening going. All right, so light coming past a black hole. If it is within the gravitational field of the black hole, it will be bent around that black hole. And what we have found is that it actually will travel around the black hole. It will travel around the rim of that event horizon, but bent around it and travel back out toward us. It's kind of like a bendy slingshot. But if it has just the right trajectory, it could get spun around a couple of times. Or one time it spins around, goes around the black hole at a decent distance. But then it gets 500 times closer and you get it going around again. And if there's room left yet to get closer to the black hole without getting sucked in, it can even get 500 times closer to the black hole from where it was previously. And each time it goes around and comes out and bounces out, it allows us to take another image.  We would see the lensing and that bent the magnifying effect of the gravitational field. We would see that supernova blasting off the one time that it looped around or went past the black hole. Now if it were at a different trajectory that allowed it to get closer and closer and to loop around to get bent a couple of times, what you see are successive images of that supernova. So in time we could see that supernova going off once, twice, three times, maybe more depending on the trajectory of the light and how many times it gets spun around the black hole. Because I've seen those lensing images before where you see like, there's all while you can see all this stuff that's been magnified in the distance and then a little footnote is actually those are all the same thing that you're seeing. You see different versions of like the same galaxies or stars in the background that are just getting, you know, sort of actually that illustration that you had up there was perfect because some of them do look kind of smeared and then some of them look like you would expect. But that's interesting, I didn't realize it's because they're going round and around and around at different orbits basically. Yeah, so the light is getting closer and closer and closer and the more it goes in toward the black hole the more smeared out it gets, the larger it gets, but the more distorted and smeared out it gets. And so we can use that effect and we have used that effect to be able to magnify images of distant galaxies, supernovas, other things. Because they've reversed it before, right? They've taken that smeared image and been like, ah, here's how it's supposed to be and like re-lensed it back to look like the thing that they could see behind. Yeah, and the, so this mathematician who, this Dutch researcher who has formalized now a mathematical description of how the light bends around black holes. What it's going to do is like, we've known about this, we've known the exponential, the exponential equation of two pi, blah, blah, blah. We've known this for a long time, but we haven't known exactly why the relationship works or how exactly it works. So this will help us understand black holes a lot better and the gravity that's associated with black holes. And in addition to kind of formalizing the math of how the light gets bent, he also integrated the spin of black holes. And so this, this 500 times factor, the E to the two pi that we've known about, that is for a stable black hole that doesn't really have a spin.  And what he was able to show through his mathematical equations is that the faster that a black hole is spinning, the smaller that that equation becomes. It's no longer necessarily E to two pi anymore. Instead of 500 times, it can be 50 times or even 10 times depending on the speed of rotation of the black hole. So the speed of the rotation of the black hole affects the gravitational effect on the bending of the light. Which is very, you know, so it's the spherical cow just is doing ballet now and it's very, it's going to get very interesting. And the last paragraph of the paper that he wrote, I think has a philosophical, a philosophical aspect that I think is really interesting that I just want you all to think about this for a moment. Philosophically, there is a mathematical beauty within the dual exponentials of these equations. The exponentials prescribe that an observer at infinity will see the entire black hole's event horizon and anything accreting onto the black hole mapped infinitely when looking closer toward the photon capture radius of the black hole. Just beyond the photon capture radius, the exponentials dictate that the observer will also see the entire universe mirrored in exponentially smaller slivers until the quantum limit. A divergence which certainly merits further reflection. I understood some of that. It's the philosophical, the philosophical idea that potentially the because there's light being emitted from all things in all places that if that there's could be light coming from all over the universe and each black hole in the universe could also be a mirror of the universe. Yeah, because this is also the weird thing, you know, just looking at that first graphic, like, okay, so light goes in and depending on the angle, it pops back out. And that's how the light we're seeing actually went around a little while and then popped out again. But light has this weird tendency to kind of go everywhere. So it's probably popping out in more than one location. So why can't we see everything from every direction when we look at a black hole? And maybe that's why it's black. Yeah, I was seeing all the light from everywhere and most of the light is from space, which is dark. It doesn't make sense either. I was wondering if this was an explanation for what people consider ghosts and photos. No, different.  That's a black hole. That's what it is. It's the universe. It's the universe being reflected in this photograph. That's what it is for sure. For sure. Anyway, some mind bending, light bending physics. But what I love that the researchers have been attempting to describe these things, to formalize the math, to write these equations. And it's just wonderful when these kinds of advances get made, when proofs are made of concepts that kind of understood. But now we can understand them better. What doesn't suck, Justin? Relationships? That was a bad segue. That was a terrible segue. That's a great segue.  It's true. According to scientists, two-thirds of romantic couples start out as friends, whereas the last third never liked each other. I like the way you have framed this study. Here we go. According to University of Victoria researchers who published a new study in social, psychological, and personality science. It actually says two-thirds of romantic relationships start out platonically. So we're used to, I guess, movies, a lot of stories show romance sparking. Two strangers meet, passing in the night, eyes across the room. Real life turns out couples like hang out for a couple of years, just being buddies. And then finally give up on dating, because it's too hard to meet anyone else and wind up together. I have multiple questions. My first one just being, is this just any romantic couple at any stage in their life? Is this all of the romantic couples that you have been a part of in your life as a survey respondent? Is this successful, like in terms of successful, like, yeah, are they still together long term? How many of these friendships became romantic that then ended in sadness? So I do believe, I do believe, and I could be wrong about this actually, but I did get the impression that they interviewed people while they were heavily in their relationship, about how their relationship started in the first place. But I could be wrong about that. It says, well, the researchers had noticed 75% of studies previously done on how relationships start focused on that whole spark of romance thing, like, how does that get started, and then what happens? And it turns out that that's only about 8% of romance that develops. Oh no, sorry, I take that back. It's the other 25%. Only 8% of the studies were done on people who were friends and then became in a relationship, even though that is two-thirds of the relationships. The lead author, Stinson, a psychological professor at the University of Victoria-Canda, we might have a good understanding of how strangers become attracted to each other and start dating, but that's simply not how most relationships begin. They looked at 1,900 university students and crowdsourced adults as well, and they came up with a 66% reporting that the current most recent romantic relationship that people had, there's the answer to the question, it's the current most recent relationship that these folks had, began as a friendship. There was very little variation across gender, level of education, ethnic groups, however the rate of friends first initiation was highest amongst 20-somethings, and within the LGBTQ plus fluid communities, 85% started. So this whole being relegated to the friend zone... That's on track! You're on track! This will work out in the end! Well, so 20-somethings, I would expect that to be the case because your entire friend group, or your entire world is based on friend groups, right? Especially if you're, for many years prior to that, and you've only just started going to bars and doing other things, so you're going to meet people other ways. I do wonder though, since there is such a large number of people who use apps, the Tinder app and online dating programs, to be able to meet people and you wouldn't necessarily, if that leads to along a committed relationship, you wouldn't say that you met that person, that person was a friend first necessarily. Like that's, you met them online or you met them on an app. So I think it is interesting. Yeah, I think it'll change. I think if they repeated this study in 20 years, even 10 years maybe, I think it might be different because of that, because of the app-based model and how more common that is. But I also do wonder, since they were looking at university students and the public, if it did skew younger and therefore it skewed from this previous way. Because even people who aren't currently with somebody who started out as a friend, if you ask them about their first however many relationships, I would be willing to bet those have a very high rate of that being the case. You should do a study, Blair. It just seems like, yeah, if you're starting a relationship in your teens and 20s, chances are you've known that person. It's a friend, yeah. Yeah, someone you've met. I don't know. I do think it's very interesting that even for this with the college age crowd that it wasn't apps first, that it was friends, yeah. Friendship, it's great for a commitment. It's nice to like the person first. Yeah. And it does track with what you're talking about there, Blair. It says among university students, they were friends for one to two years before getting a romantic relationship. That is a long friend zone. That is a long friend zone. It is. That's commitment to friendship. Maybe one of the two is dating someone and then they're interested and they become friends first. They wait for their opportunity. Yeah, it could be that. Or it could be that the young people... I'm raising my hand. That would be me. It could be that the young people are all just having sex all the time. And don't have as many committed relationships. The starting of the relationship is just when you've narrowed down the list. Right. That could also be true. Become exclusive, yeah. And before that, you were friends. Yeah, we're just friends. Which meant never mind. All right, you know what friends love to do together these days? Play video games. Yes! So did you know that a video game could teach you about conservation, even if that's not the initial intention? Okay, I just got uninterested in playing this game. Well, I told you it was Red Dead Redemption 2. What? Yes! So this is a study from University of Exeter, and they looked at players of the game Red Dead Redemption 2 to learn if it helped teach them how to identify American wildlife. So this game, for those of you that don't know, have you been living under a rock or whatever? No, actually, I've never played it. It takes place in the American West in 1899. And there's simulations in the game of about 200 real species of animals you could have found in the American West in 1899. So after having played, they challenged gamers, and they also challenged a small cohort of people who'd never played the game before for, you know, a sample, kind of a control. And so they wanted to see if they could identify photographs of real animals based on their experience playing the game and having the computer-generated animals. And on average, the players of Red Dead Redemption 2 were able to identify 10 of 15 American animals in a multiple-choice quiz, which was actually three more than people who had not played the games. And the best performers were people who had completed the game's main story that beat the game, right? And usually it takes 40 to 50 hours to do that, or if they had played extremely recently. One gamer in particular said in relation to him being able to spot a ram who's able to charge saying, quote, no joke saved me from breaking a leg in real life. So I do wonder what he was doing to be around that ram. And yes, I said he. I don't know for sure. It's a boy, but I feel it anyway. So anyway, they didn't just learn about the specific animals, but they also learned about animal behavior because they also behavioristically in the game. They interact with each other. So for example, an opossum might play dead if another animal came near it. A bear might bluff charge, and you might see eagles hunting snakes. These are all things that can happen in the game, and these kind of avatars for animals end up doing things with each other, which is really interesting. The other really interesting thing is that they had oddly couched a real conservation messaging in there. And so the picture that Kiki's showing right now is of the Carolina parakeet. This is an extinct species, but it was around in 1899. And hunting played a role in their extinction. So in the game, if players shoot that species, they are warned that the species is endangered. And if they continue shooting, the species will become extinct in the game. If they keep killing these Carolina parakeets, they'll stop showing up in the game. So there actually is an environmental consequence of the player's actions. So for a game where you're running around as a cowboy shooting people, it's very interesting that they decided to add this extra layer of realism. It is so wild. So the first layer of the quiz, they just asked what is this called, and they had to try to enter text. And if they were unable to, then they would show the multiple choice options. And so also interestingly or not surprisingly, the greatest difference between players and non-players in identification came with animals that were useful and used in the game. So for an example, a fish that you can catch and eat. So they were able to identify that fish because they had to catch and eat that in the game. So it's just an interesting kind of look at how you can try to make educational games, but you can also try to make games educational. So if you're trying to do a historically accurate or a geographically accurate game, it's possible to add layers of realism that can actually help these indoor kids, you know, people playing games inside, interact with nature, which seems crazy, right? You would want to say, like, get off that video game and go interact with nature, but they actually learned about nature. Yeah, which is the best of both worlds, right? We want them to know about nature. We want them to care about it, but we don't want anybody going anywhere near it. Right, this is what you keep saying, Justin, and pushing this perspective. And maybe through video games, we can achieve your goal. We found a middle ground between me never wanting people to go into nature again and Blair thinking that there's an important lesson and that they need to care about nature by going out into it. Here we have it. Hey, we'll have a video game with lots of nature, but you're not allowed to go into the forest anymore. Have you played Hiker 2.0 yet? Yeah. No, I don't think this would replace the real natural world, but it is, I think, an important bid to make sure those layers of realism are included in games since it's possible now. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, there are lots of games where having that kind of accessibility, that information ability, as Gord is saying within the chat here, that there's the possibility of all these different games that have history and mythology brought into it. Why not ecology and conservation? There's no reason that the attitude that has started to pervade Hollywood where there are scientists and educators working to help make films more accurate and actually have science and technology integrated better into films and television that that shouldn't be happening in video games as well, especially as they become more realistic. Although animal crossing has been great for teaching kids about animals as well, and it's very not realistic. It's cartoony. Totally. Yeah. Well, you've got to meet people where they are. They're not going to say, oh, I'm going to put down Red Dead Redemption and I'm going to play the conservation biology of the game. Yeah. You've got to meet them halfway, right? I mean, it's conservation biology of the game where you actually get to go out and edit more like Red Dead Redemption on the poachers, maybe. I don't know. Oh, my gosh. From conservation to death, I'm going to take us back in time to the Chixa Club impact.  This impact, we know that there were major tsunamis when it happened. We know it affected the biosphere. There were fires. It changed weather. There was a study last year or two years ago about water that was pushed up river well into the middle of North America and we've been finding evidence of mud being pushed and fish and other animals being just devastated by the flooding that occurred. Researchers have also thought that there might be other evidence of ripples within the planet and one thing that a group of researchers did is they got imaging data, seismic imaging data from a gas company, Devin Energy. This data is used by gas companies around the world to figure out, they bounce radio waves, radar waves, basically off the sediments, off the crust of the earth to figure out where there are pockets of gas underneath the surface. This is what the gas companies use it for so they can find the big places where they should stick their wells. But this researcher, Gary Kinsland, geophysicist at University of Louisiana, Lafayette thought that maybe they would be able to use this seismic data to be able to find ancient buried ripples from the tsunami, from these giant seismic waves and actual physical waves that affected the sediments when the asteroid impacted the planet. And so they analyzed a layer of earth, of sediment, about 1500 meters underground that the timing of what they estimate it should be at about, the sediment should have existed at about the same time on the surface as the asteroid impact. And they saw fossilized ripples. They're calling them mega ripples spaced about a kilometer apart. They're an average of 16 meters tall. And they think that these ripples are this imprint of the tsunami waves that basically they're underground. They're buried under 1500 meters of earth and yet they were able to use seismic waves bouncing them off the under-earth to be able to see them. Hey, we found this dirt under this other dirt. Exactly. Yeah, this stuff is trippy to me. I don't understand how you can measure dirt under other dirt. That's basically what they did. That's the magic part of science where they tell me they can do it and I'm like, yep, sounds good. I don't get it, but I believe you. Yeah, well, it's the, you know, they know now based on the way that bounces happen the bounce back tells them about the, how firm the dirt under the dirt is, what it's bouncing off of, potentially the density, what kind of material it could be bouncing off of. You know, whether it's empty, like a gas chamber possibly would be or very liquid filled, that would have a different bouncy reaction, a different timing of seismicity. Yeah, so this, it's fascinating. Yeah, researchers, studying dirt under other dirt to determine the history of our planet. So cool. Yeah, so yeah, if we can say there's one benefit, I mean, yes, our modern society has benefited from gasoline, petroleum, all the gas companies, you know, the seismic measuring that they have done, there's a treasure box of data that potentially has a lot more information similar to stuff like this, that if researchers can get access to the data that these companies have, there could be potentially more discoveries about our planet, which I think, oh, it's very exciting to me anyway. Very interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, what do you have next, Justin? While we were sleeping, farm robots were unboxed and put to work. Yeah, over the last weekend, farming robots have replaced humans in agriculture work and they have, apparently it's just working fine. Yeah. That's great because robots are not going to suffer from heat stroke as much as people will be. No, and what's also great is that they don't feel the ill effects of using chemicals in the field as well. So we can use a lot more chemicals on our crops than we used to. What? So this is a couple of different scenarios are being created. A couple of extremes about the future of agriculture and its impacts on the environment, according to agriculture economist, Thomas Dome in a science and society article published on the 13th, which I guess will be yesterday, and the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. So Dome sort of paints two pictures for us. One, the pictures of utopia where fleets of small intelligent robots farm in harmony with nature to produce diverse organic crops of future where every announcer speaks with a mid-Atlantic accent. The other is dystopia in which large tractor-like robots subdue the landscape through heavy machinery and artificial chemicals, all the while playing heavy metal by hair bands of the 80s. And midway through, the announcer starts to joke and die from chemical exposure and all that hair band music. Dome describes the utopian scenario as a mosaic of rich green fields of streams and wild flora and fauna where fleets of small robots with sustainable energy flit around the fields. There were intermixed with insect chirping and bird song like a futuristic garden of Eden. Dome is a research fellow at the University of Holenheim, Germany, studying agricultural development strategies. Says that small robots could help conserve biodiversity and combat climate change in ways that were not possible before. One of the things he's afraid of, though, is you could also replace humans with automation in fields by creating super-industrial machinery that pollutes and destroys resources and does massive development of monocrops throughout areas that kills off biodiversity, da-da-da-da-da-da. His warning is that we could go a little both ways. We could easily go the bad way because chances are chances are it'll be more slightly more efficient for whoever's owning the land and the robot initially, you know. If it's just their pure profit that they're worried about, that might be the little bit cheaper way to go. But this sort of small farmer-friendly or farmer replacement farm-friendly little robots in the diverse ecosystem growing organic is also we could put in the same resources really and we could end up there. I wonder if we can just put in the same resources for all these little things. So they've done, that's the analysis. They've figured out that the batteries, the electricity, all of the resources to create these multiple little tiny robots that can work on small family farms as opposed to the large monoculture giant behemoth big enough to dig dirt on Mars kind of giant robots. Yeah, so that's the way it works out. We can do, we can have utopia. Well, the problem is we're not going to kill our planet in the process. The problem is it's going to come down to putting guardrails on where this technology goes because if the funding for robot farming and if the emphasis on robot farming is for giant monoculture crop large scale activities that's the robots you'll end up with. If on the other hand you do a little bit more of a focus on the organic farmers needs focus on the small family farm. I mean the actual like there's a family with the last name that's associated with that farm and they're living on that farm and they're working that farm. That kind of size family farm. You can actually, you can achieve that as well. It just depends on which way this technology takes off. And usually, usually in the past industry has driven a lot of technology changes, but more recently sort of a consumer. Make corporations and consumers. Consumers have driven a lot of a lot of tech for what they like about tech and what individual people make about tech makes a big difference. So what it would come down to in this is choosing your tech through your food source through your food chain. Being choosy about your food chain will push the future robot domination of farms towards the small organic biodiverse farm with the, what was it? The flitting and the whirring? I think that's tough. Idealic kind of sounds, yes. I think putting the onus on the consumer is always really difficult and it's kind of like pushing a cart up a hill alone. But it's, I think what you have to do is you have to ask for legislation or some sort of financial support or backing of the family farm model because otherwise corporations have too much to gain. Yeah. And there's also consumers only choose from the choices they're given. So there has to be something to start the chain of choices. We buy products that are wrapped in plastic because we haven't been given choices for products that are not wrapped in plastic for 20 years or so. It's a lot to do. The onus is put on consumers when there's a lot of the manufacturers just making those choices first and that's all we get. So if those little robots, if those little farms go by the way side too soon, the choice won't be ours to make. And then there's the next wave too, beyond all of this where you get nature robots. Just go around looking for humans and kicking them out. No. No, no, no. We'll have robots in nature maintaining the forests. This is my dystopia. There are robots out there getting ready to kick me out of nature. That's not okay. We'll talk about that in the after-show though. Okay, I have one more story for our starting of the show. In this Blair, I know you're aging. We're all aging. Don't talk about it. I found another gray hair today. I'm losing my mind. Well, researchers at Stanford University and the Buck Institute they've come up with a new measure of aging. They're calling it I-AGE. Like iPhone except I-AGE. Oh, no. Isn't that trademarked? Apple owned the letter. I think they own that letter. I think you cannot start any sentence with that letter. That lowercase I I don't know anymore. I don't know. I don't know anything about. What I do know is that these researchers have based this system off of research involving the 1000 Immunomes Project. The 1000 Immunomes Project has blood samples that have been taken from 1001 healthy volunteers ages 8 to 96 over a period of about seven years 2009 to 2016 and they analyze the blood samples for immune signaling proteins. Cytokines. We know cytokines. You hear of cytokine storm when you have an overreaction to something like the flu. They looked also for the activation status of immune cell types in response to different kinds of stimuli. So how did the immune system in the blood sample respond and the overall activity levels of genes that were in the cells? And then they figured out a whole bunch of data from this and they're calling it their inflammatory clock and so what instead of using an aging clock based on epigenetics, they have decided that they want to use an aging clock based on inflammation because whereas we can't necessarily change our epigenetics very easily because you have to get down into the cell and change methylation and there are targets epigenetically but it might be harder to get those therapeutically. Addressing inflammation is something that's more targetable. That's something that we might actually be able to do more easily. So they decided, they figured out that strongest predictors of inflammatory age were a set of 50 immune signaling cytokines and then they came up with a number score that they could track with a person's immune system response and how they would, whether or not the likelihood, the probability of how sick they would become or not and they looked at a whole bunch of project participants and they measured their speed at getting up from a chair. So it was like a period of time after they had had their blood drawn and their immune systems like checked and they came up with a number and all that kind of stuff. You're healthier, young immune system, inflammatory and they looked at these other measures, physical measures of whether or not they had aged and how they had aged and basically they found the older people had inflammatory ages averaging 40 years less than the calendar age and one 105 year old man had an inflammatory age of 25. Wow. Yeah. Give me his blood. But how fast did he get out of a chair? Yeah, so and these getting out of the chair, these people, their inflammatory age, these were so this group of people that they looked at were long-lived people, like the centenarians, people who were living, they came from long living lineages, they were living very old, they had started aging, but their inflammatory system had not. And compared to other individuals that they looked at who were younger but had older inflammatory systems, these older people were more sprightly. Of course, they're going to live longer, their bodies aren't turning on themselves and starting to attack themselves came down to determining one substance CXCl9 is like the biggest contributor to their inflammatory age score and they can look at this specific compound and usually after about age 60, it starts to just go up. And so it's been implicated in cardiovascular disease. They are implicating this compound in a number of inflammation related disorders that contribute to cellular dysfunction and they think that if we could inhibit this compound, maybe we could reduce our risk of cardiovascular disease and potentially help people live longer better. This is nice. I like this. There's also the study we did a while we talked about a while back about the speed that people walk determines the length of their life and I think just how quick you get out of a chair will tell you a lot there's a point in life when you notice getting out of a chair there's a point in life where young enough you're sitting, now you're standing didn't really notice the transition at all and then slowly over time you're like well I'm going to need to put a hand over here one down over here now I'm in position to stand I will now commence standing with a little bit of a groaning sound here we go that just right there tells you how much time you have left take care of your inflammatory system reduce inflammation and you will potentially be able to live healthier longer without having to stand up so I need a healthy person's immune system I see what you're saying healthy person's immune system healthy person's immune system and do some chair exercise I don't think people really practice getting in and out of a chair enough because right now you're young and you're like I can get out of a chair anytime I want but you lose those muscles they stay going so anyway this may become an easy test to check your blood and see what your immune inflammation score is to let you know how quickly you're aging whether or not you need to work on reducing inflammation whether or not your body's doing fine maybe this kind of a test will really give people be a predictor for people of how they're going to age and if people can start measuring this early then you know follow them until they're older yet another story also by the way that confirms that vampires probably are living forever they're just taking young blood that's just young blood vampires vampires you were right all along I'm not a vampire are you a vampire I mean maybe I'm a vampire if I stay up all night long but that doesn't happen that much anymore I'm cold now I'm trying to work on the inflammation here people if you're listening thank you so much for joining us for this week in science this week you know every week we bring you the down to earth reasonable trustworthy news we hope we try and educate you on what science is digging into and help you find your way through the amazing diversity and amount of scientific information that is out there and give you a kind of sane perspective sometimes not so sane vampires but anyway anyway if you're enjoying the show really would appreciate if you headed over to twist.org and clicked on that patreon link click on the patreon link you can support us at any level of your choosing to help us continue to keep bringing twist to you every single week so head over to patreon head over to twist.org click on the patreon link select your level of giving and know that you're helping to bring science and twist to more people we thank you for your support we can't do it without you alrighty it's time to come on back here and it's time for no more video games no no no it's not time for video games it's time for Blair's Animal Corner with Blair she loves our creature great and small by pet milliped no pet at all if you want to hear about animals she's your girl except for giant pandas that's grown and then up no more no more whatcha got Blair I have a story about pandas okay so now I am just ready for the panda bashing let it begin so this is a study all about panda teeth we've talked about panda stomachs we've talked about panda reproduction we've talked about panda navigation now it's time to talk about panda teeth so this is a study performed by researchers in the institute of dentistry at the university of turkey and the university unit of the university of turkey together with researchers from the china conservation and research center for giant pandas of course you have to include them because that's your only way to get access to pandas this has been the first in the world to look at the mystery of how giant pandas can eat bamboo now aside from the stomach side this is just physically how do they eat it the reason this is a big question mark is because as we have discussed pandas come from carnivores so they have carnivore teeth they have canines but they are in practice in herbivore they eat bamboo so they need to be able to grind bamboo and they also need to be able to kind of shuck kind of like pull off the abrasive and toxic compounds on the green outer skin of bamboo they need to be able to peel that and then they need to be able to chew bamboo so herbivores have ridged molars that help them grind plant materials they have jaws that allow them to move their jaw back and forth sideways like a camel which they use for grinding their food and so large canines don't prevent sideways movement so for example we can do that but the reason that that movement is possible is the temporomandibular joint so they were trying to figure out because normally bears can't do that they can't move their jaw back and forth they can only chomp so they use 3D scanning methods they found yeah they found that panda's temporomandibular joints evolved to differ from brown bears and polar bears so there is some evolution happening that allows them to eat bamboo so in addition to the open clothes they also can move their mouth sideways I'm not sure what that side would be alright so this is required I'm in a mood this is required to peel the bamboo okay so their large canines do not get in the way and they do need these large canines to fight with each other because they're so active all the time so they this change in their temporomandibular joint is what allows them to do the side to side versus just the up and down and so it does appear that evolutionarily this part of their body caught up to the expectation so they use their premolars to peel the bamboo and then they are able to use their molars to chew it so this also helps us understand how how our teeth work because our teeth occlude very similar they come together very similar to a carnivore but we do eat plant matter and so we are able to do that grinding motion that carnivores usually can't so this could be a key into how that works for us as well so this solves they say quote-unquote it solves the long prevailing mystery of the ecological interrelationship between pandas and bamboo plants I say it solves the long prevailing mystery of the teeth and bamboo but it does not solve the stomach stuff the reason they gave up higher caloric intake for bamboo just all of it it doesn't explain the rest of why pandas are but it explains the teeth which is cool there's a little bit on the gut microbiome being shared with other herbivores so there's some stuff going on in there too that's not straight up carnivore yes but they still do have a lot of microbiota from carnivores so that's why one of the researchers on that study however long ago said it appears that pandas kind of always have a stomach ache maybe that's why they don't like doing a lot of things they just don't feel good most of the time and if you're a wild animal and you don't feel good and you don't want to do stuff why do you exist? hey honey no, not tonight, I have a stomach ache it doesn't matter we don't need to get in the bashing this is ultimately just hey, we figured out how they eat bamboo mechanically that's cool so they have these adaptations that allow them to eat bamboo when other carnivorous bears would not be able to that's great jaw differences, teeth differences they changed they've adapted a bit, see this is good there's a bit of adaptation, okay does this make you like pandas a little bit more? no okay, just checking I had to ask they gotta catch up or go away that's how evolutionary radiation works it tries a bunch of stuff and some of it works and some of it doesn't this isn't working buddies figure it out figure it out next yes, that's for animals that should be extinct let's talk about animals that should not be extinct but are going extinct this is a study from the University of Hong Kong and I'm always very interested in using scientific technology to prevent poaching and trafficking of endangered animals because there's a big problem with, okay, so cites, the convention on international trade in endangered species of wild fauna and flora has a list of animals that you cannot traffic between countries on our planet they have set up, okay you cannot trade in merchandise or live animals created by this endangered species it could be plants, it could be animals but they have this expectation but the problem remains that once that stuff makes it through customs and it is in a consumer's hand if they're getting a wild animal as a pet or if they're buying alligator shoes or whatever it is, right all of those things, once they're in those hands if that person who owns that thing A, didn't know it was an illegal trade or B, wants to lie about it, it's pretty difficult to prevent that from happening and so I am fascinated by new scientific technologies to for better word police that trade to make sure people are being honest about where this stuff comes from so this is done by ecologists from the conservation forensics laboratory of the research division for ecology and biodiversity at the University of Hong Kong that's a big mouthful to say conservation forensics, that's cool they applied stable isotope techniques to determine whether birds and pet trade are captive or wild caught so most parrots most parrots that you see as pets were not born in captivity they do not do well in captivity breeding this is a sweeping generalization there might be specifics that are different but as a sweeping generalization lots of reptiles and lots of tropical birds do not breed well in captivity so if somebody has one as a pet more than likely that animal was taken from the wild where it was born the person who has that as a pet might not have known that, might have been lied to might not be a bad person but that is a situation and yellow-crested cockatoos are one of those situations they are endangered, they are from Indonesia then they have a global population of less than 2,500 but they are traded as pets and the pet trade is the main reason for their endangerment in Hong Kong alone they have about a population of 150 to 200 individuals that are outside town and so that was all through release of birds that were transported as pets so they wanted to find okay, if you have a pet cockatoo, did you get that from a pet store that bred that cockatoo or did you get it from somebody who snatched one from the wild and sold it to you maybe claimed it was born in a pet store, right and so this is what's really cool they looked at these cockatoos they observed 33 of them that were for sale between 2017 and 2018 and I should mention that the official import number into Hong Kong was 10 so something was going on there and so they some of them could have been bred by home breeders but as I mentioned that's really hard to do or they were trafficked from abroad which of course is illegal or they were taken from this free flying colony also illegal so two out of three options they are illegal they looked at the stable isotope analysis and compound specific stable isotope analysis on their feathers and they were able to tell a difference between wild cockatoos and pet cockatoos because their diet was different so their diet related to different isotopes in their feathers that's amazing so it's like hey people you eat too much corn and we know that now with birds yes exactly and so they were able to identify this difference and so they do think that they could apply this test in the future to determine whether a cockatoo being traded has been raised in the wild or captivity I say bring it a step further and sanctioned captive breeders of animals that are protected should be required to use certain foods in those captive breeding facilities so you are saying you have this isotope that means you are a legally traded animal so that that would make sense you take the variability out of what are they eating in the wild did they fly into somebody's backyard and eat somebody's dog food and that messed up with the isotopes you are saying okay I put this non-native food as a marker so that I know what is allowed and what is not so that's my pitch based on this technology but I absolutely love it that's a clever application you know what also could prevent poaching in nature robots this is okay robots are the answer the other ultra simplistic amper is don't have wild animals as pets I could do a type 20 on right now but I won't but there you know is that tight is 20 minutes it could be an hour but it's a type 20 anyway if you cannot for sure know where that animal came from and that animal is often trafficked maybe don't have that animal as a pet is all I'm saying so do your research before you get a pet that animal is being sourced ethically and is not endangering wild species because no matter how reputable you think a dealer is they might not be right yeah anyway make sure that your bird has the right isotopes yeah so this is the demonstration the very first demonstration of the applicability of stable isotope techniques in wildlife forensics so obviously there's more work to be done they want to validate this as a robust forensic test they need to test it amongst different types of animals and so this is a promising first study to continue this in research and maybe eventually employ it in law enforcement of cites yeah I love the idea that's actually like your idea that's a business idea I mean you could start a business with your bird food that has its special isotope in it as long as it's safe for the birds but measurable by the technology and get everyone to agree to it and then tada suddenly the pet stores and the breeders and everybody knows what they need to do just get the test and oh yeah this is bird is validated as as a well sourced bird I'm sure it would work for other animals as well because these isotopes end up in hair and maybe the scale is a little bit less but you could definitely a snake shed you could test for isotopes for sure sure very cool very very cool this is This Week in Science thank you for listening to the show hey Justin what you got oh that's a good question ok let's do it this one race is a social construct that was invented by a racist people which is funny because you think there couldn't have been racist people before somebody had invented race there but it was already they were already racist they just put it into words very well defined why and how and who racist about it's othering so one of the constructs of that though is a lot of the basis for how a lot of sciences progressed beyond that one of those fields where it's still persistent is the field of forensic anthropology where they have quotients that rate a skull for instance for whether it is white or whether it is black or whether it is Hispanic with some caveat for Asian and for Native American and this study is saying here that this is Anne Ross corresponding author of the study professor of biological science at North Carolina State University forensic anthropology is a science and we need to use terms consistently our study both highlights our disciplines challenges in discussing issues of ancestral origin consistently and suggests that focusing on population affinity would be a way forward so part of the problem is for a long time forensic anthropology has used race and then they kind of started to move towards calling things ancestry the problem is nothing else changed about what they were doing if you look at the old chart the ancestry quotient is both based on you're going to find a race chart it's the same ones the problem with getting away with it or getting away from it is that it's exceedingly useful there are morphological differences in the skull if your ancestors came from Africa compared to if they are indigenous Native American if they are from East Asia European there's different features that can give clues this is exceedingly important because even if you had a thing that wasn't even based on on race or ancestry we had some number quotient or some group we have a person of five who we have found eventually you're going to be taking this information to the police department and you're going to tell them you have a number five person that we believe based on our analysis of the skull who was murdered and you might want to see if you have any missing people who are of a five and the police officer is going to go are we looking for a black guy or a white guy or like an Asian guy because that's going to help narrow down the missing person that you're looking for because there's things that still can we can identify within our society that are visible differences that they're not being used to divide us if they're being used to track down a missing person become exceedingly expedient so you're not going to get rid of ancestry conversation in forensic anthropology because it's a lot of identification can be done in this way they've already kind of switched it from race to ancestry but other than that word pretty much nothing has changed I think that's really interesting the idea that yeah it's not race because you have people who have moved all over the world you have people from Africa who have moved to North America you've had people from Europe moved to South America you've had Asians Indians and you know people from all over are mixing and matching and going different places and they're within hundreds of years thousands of years there still might be local selection on things but it's for the large part not going to overpower those broader geographical differences and it's really just geographic we're not because we're all human human race can we just talk about the human race and then we have geographical differences and natural selection that has led to changes in ancestry now there's a three year old skeleton found in the woods right as quickly as possible you want to be able to identify who that might have been yeah and there is morphological differences and it's important actually to understand them because for instance if you you can date like say it's a child you can actually tell the age of a child based on which teeth have erupted what stage of development teeth are in they're a very fine indicator but if you don't have the wherewithal to say this is a Native American child most likely based on the morphology of the skull and everything else and we're going to throw it into Native American category okay then if you don't do that then you don't understand that those teeth erupted at a different rate and so then your age could be off by as much as a year yeah so it's you still need to and so there's a thing that I think people go too far and saying you know we can't say an Italian guy anymore we have to say a southern European geographically located ancestry of it's okay it's still kind of okay if it's in the right hands if it's in the right hands talking about things is not a problem well I think I think it's the conversation around equity and color blindness has mostly gone away right that was like a that was a mythos from the 90s like if we can just make everyone not see color everything will be perfect and now it's kind of used as a shroud for everything's fine but in reality not just in this situation but when you're trying to create equity you have to identify who's missing from the table right and so if the idea that you can erase whatever you want to call it geographic ancestry ethnicity however you want to call it the idea to erase that from any equation is probably incorrect also because we know that certain people have been left out of studies if we're talking about science we know that some people have been ignored in the medical field so you have to include that information I think this is a really great way for the brunt of the study is that the terminology needs to be consistent that because of different decades of different teaching styles different emphases different goals and needs they're using different words to describe the same thing and erasing people when people shouldn't be erased or highlighting other people when it should be more egalitarian and so I think it's this consistency that they're calling for that's really important and it's also there's a very large requirement for greater actually greater regional definition you can if you're using if you're using a very thorough method you can distinguish not what Asian is like this one of the categories that most you know forensic anthropologists will have but there is actually differences between if it's a Korean versus a Japanese versus a Vietnamese versus a there are but you have to be working on those changes to understand and yes at some point we've all moved and had babies people from far-flying places and it's like I don't know where this person this person looks like they're from Africa and Japan and then you go oh well that's amazing because we're missing an African Japanese person from like oh my gosh well then we found them but it's still if you're if you're doing police work this is not just arbitrary and yeah to your point Blair if you don't see color you can't see racism when it's happening there you go what else do you have Justin this is this is a story that I thought for sure Blair was gonna bring this is a there was a professor for 30 years was traveling our west of his home in Tokyo to visit the Sagami River collect algal samples to understand sex it's not how everybody figures out sex but this man for 30 years professor an hour from his home each way was trying to find sex in the river and apparently he found it and found it amazingly he found this is the Pleo dorina starry eye algae determined this this algae has three sexes they can be male female and a third sex that researchers are just calling bisexual in reference to the fact that it can produce both male and female sex cells in its own single genotype and it exists due to normal expression of the species so you have then three different types of pairings of sex that can take place within this within this species so this isn't just a hermaphrodite or it's not like the fish the goat whatever the finding Nemo fish who decide to change sexes when someone is missing no it's its own it's like its own yeah like in the old days in the old days it would have had its own bathroom it would have been if this is the same in human societies there would have always been three bathrooms so then you know so the part of the reason I didn't bring this story is that I don't remember if we talked about it on the show or not but I think last year it was discovered that there was a slime mold that had like 500 sexes so I was like oh three three that's nothing really just three I mean this comes back to that and what you're saying there Blair comes back to a lot of conversations that we've had in the animal corner and throughout the history of twist related to what we consider sexes and how it's a biologic what we are defining in our human awareness and it's also a biological construct it's how what are different bits of the organism individuals of the organism that act a particular way to create next generation how does reproduction take place yeah it's about well so this is the other thing is when we're talking about sexes we're talking about the way proteins are expressed that identify ways other beings with other proteins that have been expressed can be combined to create offspring so like if you turn it into the super vanilla textbook definition of what sex is then yes a life type that does not have sex organs will naturally have lots of different DNA combinations that pair different ways with other DNA combinations and I think that's really what you know you read the headline you think about sex organs and the way copulation works in multicellular big organisms that's not what's happening with the algae right and with the algae it's really just like hey you have a little column A you have a little column B you have a column C you can mix A and C you can mix B and C or you're a slime mold and you've got a giant array it's the big buffet of options so is there this particular algae species are they gonna it's the first fungi that they have found that has been identified with three sexes this has been seen in some invertebrate species and plants before as well where they have three distinct sexes that are present I think it's cool very cool fungi I love the fun guys hey hey hey this is three wild crazy fun guys sorry bad SNL joke I do that occasionally this is This Week in Science thank you for joining us do you want some twist merchandise like a sweatshirt like a wonderful sciencey goodness mug head over to twist.org and click on our Zazzle link and support twists while you shop I have some fun neurosciencey stories for you all yeah I want to dig into some neuroscience brain plasticity what do you both what do you understand brain plasticity to be by the amount of microplastics that we're omnipresent in our environment tissue is slowly being replaced by plastic well I mean we do have a problem with microplastics and yeah that's a different story but not brain plasticity recovery is what I think of when I think of plasticity am I getting to it yeah so there's recovery and it's also it has to do with our brain's ability to change and adapt to learn new information plasticity is the ability of our neurons to shoot out new connections new dendrites and to make new connections to new neurons to create little spines on those dendrites little synaptic boutons that reach out and touch other synaptic boutons across which action potentials can propagate chemically we need synaptic plasticity when you get depressed your synaptic plasticity is reduced and the ability of your neurons to make connections is reduced that your brain kind of pulls itself back you can imagine the neurons in the brain pulling themselves back and not reaching out to touch anyone and so one of the aspects of antidepressants is that they help our brains start to make those new connections again there are many disorders of the brain and also aging which can lead to reduced synaptic plasticity as you get older some researchers were interested in how synaptic plasticity is related to our ability to form long term memories and these researchers at Scripps Research Institute were looking not just at the dendrites touching other dendrites they were looking at the inside of the neurons and the infrastructure that allows proton not protons, proteins that allows proteins to move from the cell body out along the axons to the dendrites where little where different commands can be made last week we talked a little bit about how they discovered these different frequencies these different signals that were taking place in the cell bodies and out at the dendrites and so I find this study following on that a little very interesting these researchers discovered that there is a network of courier proteins these molecules they're kinesin molecules which are motor molecules and if you've ever seen some of the visualizations of kinesins walking down the actin highway in the neurons you've got these long strands of highways and they start near the nucleus of the cell body and they'll go all the way out the axon out to the end and there are these long highways and these little motor molecules these kinesins have little legs and they walk and they carry their transport load out to wherever it's supposed to go and there are about 50 of them they're called kifs and they've been numbered the kinesin family kifs k-i-f-5-c k-i-f-3-a experiments they discovered that if they knocked out these kifs the neurons lost their ability to branch out dendrites and create spines and they lost their ability to touch other neurons when they get added and did gain of function experiments the k-i-f-5-c it enabled the neurons to send more dendrites out and to make more spines and to make more connections and so we think a lot about neurotransmitters as being the key it's like oh these messengers the messengers are the ones that are sending the message well you also have to have the highway that allows and the trucks you know you have to have the transport medium that's taken everything out there to build the infrastructure to make it work and if you don't have that it'll never happen and so the researchers through these gain of function and loss of function experiments discovered that there was a large number of these molecular kinesin machines that are involved in carrying some 650 different RNA molecules from the cell body out to the ends of the dendrites to maintain the neurons and the dendrites and the messaging that goes on the RNAs are involved in sending they're the instructions that are being sent out changing what happens along the dendrite at the ends of the dendrites so they are really interested in the potential and they did mouse experiments not just neuron and a dish experiments with these knock in and knock out and they discovered that not only did it block the loss of function not only knock out the dendrite growth ability it also made the mice unable to form new long-term memories so it affected their ability to form new memories lost the dendrite building lost the memories added the dendrite building their memory got better so could this effect could this understanding affect treatment for Alzheimer's disease for diseases of aging or general depression are there new targets to treat the mental aspects of depression so it's starting to dig into the infrastructure of the brain and the cells that hold the brain together right yeah this is very I think inside information as to how the brain works but it's like these are all the building blocks it's like if you don't have them so what can I eat to get more of them right yeah I don't know this is yes how do we figure this out is it running do I have to run to get more like I want to know how to maintain this system to keep a plastic brain right and I think that we don't this is something that we don't understand enough about like this is not an area that like people we know about these kinesins we know they're there but now we're like oh they have this big job and they are essential I definitely thought we had more of the brain figured out than we do it's kind of the most important thing in our body and we're like oh ours and it's why it's so difficult to study also because not only is it complicated but you know it's not a thing that you can like pull out and put back in yeah yeah I don't think somebody's going to lose and be like I guess I don't need that anymore yeah you need all of your brain if you can have it so there's a study in neuron from like about a week ago out of Yale University School of Medicine they gave psilocybin to mice to see how psilocybin affected their their measures of depression these mice had been trained on a behavioral task that is has been shown to leave the mice depressed it's a foot shock experiment where the mice are shocked and they can't get away from the shock and so the mice eventually just kind of go okay that's it I'm getting shocked yeah but psilocybin helped the mice get out of like try and not accept their foot shock fate and they in addition to that behavioral part they also saw a 10% increase in neuronal connections and those connections were about 10% larger so they're stronger as well according to the senior author Alex Kwan and this didn't just last for 24 hours after this administration of psilocybin the effects on the brain lasted up to 30 days and a lot changes in the connectivity of the brain and so I'm looking at this psilocybin experiment in conjunction potentially with other antidepressant experiments ketamine experiments you know all the things that we're looking at as potential tools to treat depression I'm wondering if we should be looking further back and if these studies should also be looking at the infrastructure what are the kinesins doing with psilocybin affecting the kinesin activity in the brain that's so interesting that's like so many antidepressants focus on hormones which are on a much larger scale than looking at the building blocks of how brains function and so it's in the end it potentially is treating a symptom and not the problem right so they're trying to treat the symptom of depression with the problem of hormones blockers but then really the hormones are the problem and the cause is actually potentially at a lower level right and thank you for that comment because this takes me to an entirely different study we were talking a lot about microbes affecting the brain and this the study out in nature this week discovered that there is an enterococcus bacterium in our guts well maybe not our guts this is of course another mouse study but they determined that that bacteria specific species of bacteria regulate mice mouse ability to socialize so mice can get stressed out when they're hanging out with other mice and meeting other mice and if they don't have they found in this study if they had no bacteria had had all their bacteria wiped from their body their brains produced way more cortisol than normal and so they were much more stressed out about social interactions than they would normally be and they did a bunch of different strategies to work through the experimental design to nail it all down but what they ended up saying is that via microbiome profiling and in vivo selection we identify a bacterial species enterococcus fecalis that promotes social activity and reduces corticosterone levels in mice following social stress the studies suggest that specific gut bacteria can restrain the activation of the the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis and show that the microbiome can affect social behaviors through discreet neuronal circuits that mediate stress responses in the brain microbiome affecting hormones stress hormones in the brain so we've got hormones we've got infrastructure we've got microbes this is all connected man boy I can't mix it um we're a system we're a bio we are a bio we're a Goldberg machine nothing John Snow now the human as biome is a pretty fascinating concept it really is there's so many things living in us and we have we've gone for so long without even understanding that they were there and the implications of their interactions or the things that we fed ourselves or exposed ourselves to what chemicals plastics that maybe we want to eat plastic and put it in our brains I didn't know before the show tonight no no we do not are you just taking your own comment home with you is that not what happened no I need to pay closer attention to the show obviously listen to it when it drops as a podcast yes is it different I mean it's edited it's the show it's twist I think we've come to the end of another wonderful episode have we have we done it have we science star brains out I feel like my kiffs are just walking down the dendrites they're making making long term memories right here making some brain plasticity changes thanks to these conversations everyone thank you for listening to the show thank you for being a part of this week in science this week and hopefully every week shout outs to fada for helping with social media and show notes gored thank you for manning the chat room identity for thank you for your work recording the show and Rachel thank you for your assistance now editing the show and I would also love to thank our patreon sponsors for all of their support thank you too Pierre Velazar Ralph E. 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Science. Science. Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. Science. Science. Science. Science. Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in Science. This Week in... this week in science. We made it through another episode. Yes, mods. Thank you mods. Thank you, R and Lord. Thank you everybody in the chat. Thank you everyone for joining and being here. Yeah. Thanks Blair. We're just in go. He's like, I got to run away, do my normal run away thing at the end of the show. So like we're that scary. No, I don't think we're scary. Some people have gotten stickers and t shirts from Patreon. I do hope because I realized that I am really terrible at male taking care of things. Patreon is taking care of fulfillment for me on some things, which is fabulous. I do hope the quality of the twist stickers and shirts that you're receiving on Patreon are good. So let me know if they're okay quality, if they're all right, if they're working for you. And yay, our snap got a sticker. Yes. Oh, I watched the video on last week tonight on ox, ox, the pusses. And I was hoping that Blair was actually on the video and I was disappointed to find out that she wasn't. I mean, he needs to get my number somehow. I know. Does anyone know John Oliver? And Zaynter was on John Oliver for a second, but that was, yeah, that was an interesting ep. Did you see that one? Which one? What happened? Oh, he talked about biohacking. This was like two years ago and they showed a bunch of footage of Josiah and I was like, are they going to show us? Are they going to show us? Are they going to, no, no. We're always this close, this close. Yeah. I think we're a little, I think we're a little further. No, this close. Distance is relative. I don't, maybe I just don't know the scale, the legend that's being applied. Exactly. You have to know the scale before you know what that means. I mean, it's missed it by this much. What does that really mean? Yes. What is the margin of error? You might ask. You always must know the relative aspects of the measure of which you are speaking. How many standard deviations from the mean is that? Oh, ouch. Not enough, obviously. I forgot your CV on top of it. Oh gosh. I've been tutoring Brian in statistics, so that's why. I mean, it's fresh. Sadistics are, they're, yes. Sadistics are sadistic. Yeah. Sadistic, that's fine. Identity four, don't eat the stickers. You're not supposed to eat the stickers. I mean, there's probably some paper in there. At any force, it was at a hard time swallowing the twist sticker. I mean, it's sticky, so that's going to be an issue from the get-go. Oh, those of us who drink coffee, this is news that did not end up on the show, but those of us who drink coffee potentially have less of a chance of getting infected with COVID. Great. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Say this again? Yeah, it's a study. I mean, it's correlation. This is why, this is one of the things that I'm not going to bring up on the show. Yeah, should we do it on whatever. Talk about the show at the show with that. Do you drink coffee? You're protected from COVID. No. Perfect. That's the kind of information everybody needs right now. Those with outdoor pools are least likely to be struck by lightning. Like what? Huh? What? No. I was against having one until you said that. There's a whole book of correlation graphs that are really good, and one of them is like Nic Cage Films versus... Willy Wonderland. Do you have to see it? Versus natural disasters. And so it shows that I think the more Nic Cage Films are released in the year, the least natural disasters there are, but obviously it's all correlation. All correlation? So I'm worried though, if it's actual causation, because this summer right now there's a Nic Cage movie coming out called Pig, in which he would, I guess he was in Portland shooting a movie, and I missed the whole thing, but it's located in Portland, and he's upset he had a pig that hunted truffles for him, and somebody abducts his pig, and so the movie is about him trying to get his pig back. The movie is called Pig, and it's a real movie, and it's out now, and I do not want the big earthquake to hit Portland. Oh, okay. It's your standard Hollywood plotline, really.  Then something happens where man loses pig. Man must go through a challenge and question, and maybe make a change within himself.  Pig is kid. Yes, kid is pig. It's a, really it's a father, son, or maybe daughter. I'm not really sure what kind of pig is it.  Hey, it was made, it's not the first time. Do you remember the movie Babe? The first one? Yes, that was a, that was a sad, scary movie. It was scary, and it was sad, and that is not a children's film. No, the second one, the second, Babe 2 was frightening. The first one was a pig in the city or what? Yeah, pig in the city was dark, man. That was a dark tale. The first pig was just like, yeah, pig, you can't do it.  Where's the faces of the Joseph Campbell mythological figures going, taking on the challenges, and learning something about himself and others along the way. I feel like we're describing an episode of Wishbone. It is, it's an episode of everything. It's the episode of everything that we've watched over and over and over and over again. The only one that changes is the situationals. And what's, actually what's kind of fun is if you watch, there's the iconic version of this. They only have so many characters, and usually one character will be like the protector, and somebody's the doubter, or maybe the protector is the doubter even, like they do all these weird combinations, but you have to have all of these things that are pushing against your protagonist in every movie. The best explanation that you'll ever get of it is if you, if you watch Toy Story, with the list of who those characters are that are elements in character, sometimes the character has four or five of these. They split every element that is a support character to your protagonist into a different toy. So Mr. Potato Head just doubts things the whole time. Oh, I don't know Woody. I think you're doing the wrong thing. And then Slinky's like the believer. Oh, it's all right Woody. I think you're doing just fine. Like they all have their, and they just play that one note for each toy. And it's, you know, worked in the movie. But if you, if you take Toy Story and figure out who those characters, who the different toys are. Who is the scary, decapitated doll head on a spider body? Which one is that one? That's the antagonist. That's the villain. That's the one you have to overcome who's like so scary and powerful. But then at the end of the movie, what is it? What happens?  Now he's got a dog. He might not ever play with any toys again. And the toys will get eaten by the dog. All for nothing. It's just at the very end. It's like the, it's like, no matter, I love it. It's like, it's gonna end badly no matter what you do. There's also a little fatalism right there at the end of that. Sure. Babe versus Charlotte's Web. Charlotte's Web is so much more kid friendly. Well, Charlotte, spoiler alert dies, dies, right?  Sorry. Yeah, spoiler. Are we, is it okay to spoil things that are like generations? 200 years old? Yeah, I would hope so. Charlotte's Web was also a hero's journey for sure. Pretty much, pretty much every single movie you've ever seen has been that. Pretty much everything that Hollywood has made for 50 years has been the same movie where they've changed what character is playing, which elements of the choir, which, which, uh, what the situationals change. Oh, we're in space now. Okay. And there's a guy, he's got a challenge that he's got to overcome and learn something about himself along the way. Wait a second. Wait a second. Wasn't that that pig movie? Yeah, but this time it's in space with aliens and lasers and stuff. Okay. But the plot, it's the same plot. Basically it's the same one over and over and over and over and over and then and then always the hero. No, no, no. Sometimes it's like the phoenix rising from the ashes, you know, kind of like the hero's journey. It's still, no, it's not the hero's journey. It's different. It's not. It's a redemption, that's a redemption story. Yeah, it's a very specific cycle. But the, but the same things, the same beats at the same pages. If you, if you read page 12 of a dozen scripts of movies that were successful, the same action is taking place. The same, the same beat then happens at page 30 or about page 45 is when now things seem like there's, there's, you can't turn back. Now, now the characters are committed. They're going on this. It's in every single one. It doesn't matter if it's a redemption or a love story or any kind of story. Turn to the halfway point in one of these things and it's the dough turning back point. Now they've made up their mind. They're committing to being in the rest of this movie because they realized I can't get out now. Movies halfway through, I have to go through with what we set up in the first half. And so there's just, I gotta keep going. So, so, so one of the wonderful things actually about this Netflix revolution of bringing back episodic television shows is they have gotten to do a lot more situational stuff with these same characters and making them go through more than one. But now instead, now they turn into these little mini quests. Now every episode of anything has to have like seven different mini quests that need to be, oh, here's the thing we need to do. How are we going to do it? Let's find a way. Did we do it? Yes. Okay. But there's a problem. What is it? There's another quest we need to go on. There's another quest, but we just, yes, but there's another one after that too. So don't worry. We just got to keep moving. If you have, I think it's, is it HBO? HBO, Mythic Quest? Have you seen Mythic Quest? I've heard of it. I haven't seen it yet. I'm gonna guess it's a quest movie. It's not a movie. It's a series written by some of the people from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. And it's got a few of the same actors that are in there. Community actor, actor from community. But it's great cast, wonderful writing. It's a video game, RPG role playing, role playing game kind of video game. And it's just all of this. It's the quests. It's the hero's journey. It's like got all of these things built into its entire story. It's really great. And television's also been able to do like, you know, why comedy is often really good and TV and why all those procedural shows where it's like, it's a cop show. It's a lawyer show. It's a cop lawyer show. No, no.  The one on Netflix? No, the one on Netflix. That's a devil cop drama show, which I love. Usually the wonderful sort of the relief of those shows is that the characters don't have to change by the end of the thing. They can just stay the same through 50 episodes of a thing. There's a wonderful thing about Seinfeld. Like nobody evolved on that show at all. Not at all. They just kept going, let's come up with 15 more situations for this next, you know, or 30 more for the next like eight episodes. And we'll just do a couple, have a couple of situations and we'll awkwardly work our way through them. Nobody ever has to grow in a comedy. No, no. So in Lucifer, thank you for that. Thank you. Love Cabo and HNK. Yes, Lucifer, they grow because Lucifer, it's like all his family drama with the other angels and with God and there's like all this stuff. And yet at the same time, they're like having cop dramas and song like murders and all this stuff. And then he's having a relationship with the cop and like then they're like, but I don't know if I can be together because you're like the devil and I'm not. It's so great. So I understand this show is very successful. It's so fantastic. Very successful show. If I'm the producer, not even if I'm the producer. Lucifer is on a hero's journey. If I'm a script writer. Lucifer is trying to find himself. I looked at that and went, this is a hard pass. I'm not even gonna. I love it so much. The logline killed it. I'm like, no, nobody will like this show. I love these things. Oh gosh. I have terrible taste. I must because nothing that I like is any good. Nothing that I like is any good. To other people, you mean? I mean, if you like it, it must be good to you. So it's great. But I mean, nothing. Okay, nothing. Nothing I like appeals to the masses with enough with some few exceptions. Yeah, a lot of the things I've loved most in terms of TV and stuff have been canceled, so. Womp. Anyway. Womp, womp, womp. Well, Blair, we're not canceled, but maybe we should go to bed. I'm going to go. You're going to go. We're not talking about the science of how TV shows are written, not tonight. But yeah, so we're all in the same time zone. So shouldn't someone say? It's moonlighting. It's moonlighting. But Bruce Willis's character is the devil. He's like literally the devil. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Keegan. Good night, Justin. There you go. Good night, DT. Good night, Blair. Good night, everyone. I wish all of you well on this week's hero journey. Yes, we are all on our own hero's journey. Questing. Towards something. Great. Questing for science, yes. Have a wonderful week, everyone. And if you have anything to do this, if you're looking for things to do this weekend, you can check out the CosmoQuest, CosmoQuesticon. CosmoQuesticon. Pamela Gay and the Universe Today people are having a CosmoQuesticon 80s party this weekend, Friday through Sunday. And you can find information about this. If you go to CosmoQuest.org forward slash X forward slash CosmoQuest dash a dash con CosmoQuesticon 2021. It'll be airing on Twitch. And you can also buy tickets and help support CosmoQuest. So anyway, I'll be on Saturday and Sunday talking about Psycom and podcasting and stuff. Yeah. And maybe I'll be wearing my cool pink 80s wig, but that'll be a fun thing this weekend. If people are looking for something virtual to do, Blair, have a wonderful night. Justin, have a wonderful night. Everyone take care and we'll see you again next week. Thank you for joining us for this week in science. I can't do that.