On air going away August 1st. What that's my birthday. That's not a very soon That's the worst birthday present ever Thanks YouTube For the worst birthday present ever I'm going to have to figure things out, but that's okay. I like figuring things out. That's what I do Everyone we're starting a show. Are you excited? We're here. We're live and we are starting in three two This is Twists this week in science episode number 728 recorded on Wednesday, July 3rd 2019 treating OCD Hey there, this is dr. Kiki and tonight on this week in science We will fill your head with HIV OCD and mold but first Yeah disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer the 4th of July Independence Day the day we celebrate as a nation with great pride and a plethora of pyrotechnics in memory of the illegal immigrants who despite the odds declared land stolen from a native population by the British Empire to be there's Instead guess our founding immigrant fathers and mothers had no right to the land by law and by defying a tyrannical Monarchy were by definition illegal trespassers in their own homes They should have been deported back to the many many many many nations that they had fled in search of freedom But instead they stood tall spoke half truths to power and declared America to be a nation of free people Except for the Negro and of course not extending all rights to women to be fair These were newcomers to America sometimes immigrants need time to adjust to a new society first settlers could barely feed themselves needed the assistance of the native population to survive and The founding immigrants brought with them more than a few cultural hang-ups that needed to be worked out over a few hundred years of Assimilation it would be a hundred and forty-four years between 1776 and 1920 when women first got the right to vote Oh Most native nation American cultures women had either equal or in some cases were the only voice an internal tribe issues such as choosing who would be the chief whose duties usually lied outside of actual core tribe Institutional matters so as we celebrate this 4th of July Let us not forget that this is a nation of immigrants and that Independence Day is a day of declaring yourself Independent from a foreign nation and finding a home instead here on this weekend science coming up next Oh And a good science to you too Justin Blair and everyone out there welcome to another episode of this weekend science We are back again. Oh There's so much science And we're on the eve of a holiday as we record this episode So everybody get ready to get your US independence party hats on but that's not what our shows about at all At all we're talking about science not politics. I have stories about cutting out the HIV We got another story about mold on the space station and We have an interview tonight with dr. Susanna Mari. She's going to be speaking with us about her research into OCD But before we get there Justin What did you bring to the show?  Okay, Blair What's in the animal corner? I brought some bats. I brought some unusual crocodiles and some turtles that don't need any oxygen Uh-huh Never well, you'll see an oxic turtles. I don't get it. Yeah They're they're a hero and a half-shell one would say oh my Okay, as we move into the show I want to remind everyone that if you are not yet subscribed to this podcast Why aren't you because you get more punny things like that out of Blair? Ah Yes, we are everywhere you can find podcasts iTunes Google Spotify Spreaker Pandora radio tune in all the places you can also just find us at twist org We are also on YouTube and Facebook All right. Now it is time for our interview. I would love to welcome to the show our guest doctor Suzanne Amari She is an associate professor of psychiatry By the university at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine She has an MD and a PhD doctor doctor doctor doctor from Stanford University and she completed her postdoctoral work at Columbia University She studies the neural mechanisms underlying obsessive compulsive disorder and other Disorders of the brain welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here I actually feel so at home now that I know you guys like puns as much as All that nervousness it just goes away. Oh my honey family. There we are If yeah, if it's if it's possible and it fits in later There's one I'd like to immortalize, you know to because basically I have a graduate student who is trying to get out Of the lab as fast as possible to avoid my puns and I Going to just pun my graduate students into their thesis Get out of here. Otherwise, I'll do another one Okay Okay, first question right off the bat obsessive compulsive disorder OCD. I think everybody has a sense of what they think it is Yep, we you know, there is the common phrase. Oh, I was so OCD about that It's like the word literally not quite being used properly Yeah, yeah, I would love I would love your help. Would you please tell us what obsessive compulsive disorder is and also why we really Shouldn't be saying that oh You know putting it lightly in our conversation really. Oh, thank you so much for starting that way because it is one of the things So if you don't if anyone out there listening doesn't remember anything else about this Night just try to think about taking that phrase out of your vocabulary Take it out of your lexicon the I'm so OCD I do XYZ because if you are saying that you probably do not have OCD, you know It's possible. It's possible But most people who have OCD aren't going around saying, you know I'm so OCD that it took me eight hours to get here in the morning And I had to wake up at 2 a.m To do all my rituals and I was late two hours for work because I had to do all this stuff So so it's really it just first and foremost it it had and I think it's really great That we're starting that way because I think part of the problem has been that the media in general Has tended to portray it as kind of a funny quirk odd behaviors Things that actually can make you perform better in life, right? It's like this idea that having OCD is actually a good thing because it means you're meticulous It means that you are really attentive to detail and it means that you know you're gonna get the job done and do it better than another person would do and You know people with OCD can be extremely high-functioning they can be incredibly intelligent They can do really fantastic things in life, but it's not because of their OCD Their OCD gets in the way of them doing even more than they could do otherwise, right? So what people are typically talking about when they say oh, I'm so OCD It's things like I need to have things ordered in a particular way I need you know the my refrigerator to be organized in this way I need to load the dishwasher this particular way I Basically, I need to have control over my space and there certainly is some overlap with those kinds of things with OCD Properer, but what that tends to fall into the category of is Something we call obsessive compulsive personality disorder, which is kind of an entirely It's a different thing that has a lot of comorbidity, but it's probably got different circuits in the brain And there's a really really clear distinction between them and that is someone who has OCD Obsessive compulsive personality disorder or someone who doesn't even have that but just likes things done their way, right? Like, you know all of us like to have me So, you know and like yeah have your space organized have your things need and clean Is that that's actually something you want to do. It's something that makes you happy. It's something that you think is good And it's something that you think the other people are wrong and that you're right and you're doing it the right way And again, the most important thing is it's not impairing your life. It's not impairing your ability to actually Have a job to have friends to have a family to take care of all the things that you need to do in your daily life OCD on the other hand is We're lucky in a way that the the diagnostic criteria unlike some things in psychiatry. They're pretty clear-cut. So It's having obsessions and Compulsions which is not surprising because it's called OCD of obsessive compulsive disorder and an obsession is a recurrent intrusive thought an impulse or an image that pops into your brain And then a compulsion is something that you do in order to neutralize that thought image or impulse or get the anxiety associated with that thought out of your brain and so that anxiety part that That that link between that obsession actually causing this intense Overwhelming fear and anxiety or distress and then the compulsion Helping to kind of get rid of that anxiety That's a really key we think actually in the research that we're doing we think that's a really key hallmark in This particular illness and we think Understanding those links understanding those links between obsessions compulsions and anxiety might help us to figure out How to break this cycle for people and so We'll be talking about it from kind of the behavioral standpoint and also the brain standpoint Okay, so you've got the obsessions and the compulsion so Behaviorally you focus on something and then you have to do a behavior to free yourself of the anxiety But then it can be recurrent and so it happens in a cycle that happens over and over again What do we know if there's we haven't gotten to the brain part yet? But do we know if there's a difference between? you know that Recurrent obsession compulsion loop that loops on itself over and over and say You know somebody who goes out did I turn off the oven? And you have to go back and turn off the oven or go check even though you think to yourself I must have turned it off, but you have to go back and check like yeah, is there what's the link? That's a great question. It's And it's kind of a key question right because We the so the answer is we don't know what the relationship is between that what I would call this continuum this spectrum Because if you think about You know the kind of random intrusive thoughts that pop into one's brain. We all have these So we actually all have intrusive thoughts, you know, it's an example I gave a lot when I used to live in New York, which would you know New Yorkers would immediately understand but I think many of the general population would do is that idea of you know You're on the subway platform Whatever wallet was I was pressed back against it Train came to a stop. This is I had this over you haven't even said what it is Overwhelming fear that when the train came I would somehow be on the tracks. Yes, you so you nailed it This is exactly what I was gonna say, right? So you have had that thought you had that intrusive thought that popped in your head This is awesome. Did you did you read my mind? Well, there will totally Boucher me I would literally Against the back wall of the station and I was there right at the yellow line Yeah So it's that part right and so like half the people are like, oh Yeah, I totally get that I'm afraid I'm gonna jump on the platform Half the people are like, of course, I've never had that thought you can take it one step further and then half of the people I mean, this is this is a non scientific poll I've taken but half the people have also had the random thought they see someone on that yellow line They see Blair out there and they're like, oh, what if I pushed her onto the tracks, you know To do that you have you're not going to do it There's no chance that you're going to do it but the calculation of just how much force it would take Time Being a human with a brain, right?  And then you talk about it, you know over beers or whatever But the problem is with someone with a and so that that's kind of the point, right? Is that everyone has these thoughts these thoughts that are random that are what we would call ego? Distanic you would not want to do them. You would not hope to do them yet the thought pops into your head But for most of us they float in they float out and we move on with our day for someone with OCD That thought can essentially essentially get trapped, right? So it's like they have the thought that thought then sticks in their head. They're like wait Why did I have that thought? What what maybe I had that thought because I do want to jump onto the tracks Maybe I had that thought because I do want to push that person in the tracks.  It isn't necessary. There's not necessarily a logic between the thought and then what needs to get done To to kind of neutralize the anxiety in some cases there is in some cases It would be I am concerned about being contaminated with germs and therefore I'm going to wash my hands repeatedly over and over again in order to decrease the fear of contamination but for someone with the You know the thought about the person jumping on to the tracks. Maybe it would be that they have to you know Touch touch the the subway platform ten times and then they've neutralized that thought They've gotten rid of the bad idea and then they can move on with their day But maybe they have to touch the subway platform ten times in a particular way Until it feels right until it's the right, you know until the signal that it's okay is kind of turned off and For you know for some people depending on how stressed they are how anxious they are or how bad their OCD is You know that could be something where you'd only need to do two or three cycles And then you could actually get on the next train Or that could be something where you need to do it for an hour and you're late for work Or or that may be something where you can't even tolerate it and you have to go home for the day And so that's the kind of thing, you know that that that We're talking about and the interesting thing back to Kiki's an original question about You know how are those kinds of thoughts that pop into our brain? Are they the same but then them, you know, then the mechanisms that make them stick are different That's it's a crucial question and it's one we would love to answer But we don't have the answer to it But what we do know is that if you take it's there was an interesting study that was done where they took people who didn't have any evidence of OCD You know didn't have family members with OCD. They were just your quote-unquote, you know, healthy controls and They engage them in this task where they were having to check a stove over and over again Yeah, they were basically asked it was a it was not a real stove But it was a simulated. Yeah, it was like a picture of a stove I believe and they had to check over and over again to see if in fact the stove was turned off They had then they were asked to recall later or not whether the stove was turned off and you know And it was a stressful situation. It's in the lab and basically people even without OCD Started to tend to engage in more and more checking behavior over and over again So it's what that suggested in some ways is like, you know And again, I do not think this is across the board, but I think there are kind of fundamental Circuits that can potentially be primed more in some people than others To start to engage in these kinds of repetitive loops, right? It sounds a bit like, you know, that it's like training that your brain there's the idea in neuroscience, you know the the neurons that fire together wire together Right and so you're saying, okay, you this happens go check the stove this happens go check the stove and it's like Operant conditioning for people Yeah, so this is reminding me of when I was a zookeeper and I worked in the carnivore department I would leave at the end of the day and I would get to the very end of the space that I needed to exit And I'd lock the door and I'd go are all my locks locked Yeah, never in the two years that I was a keeper Did I leave a lock unlocked that was supposed to be locked? But there were many many days where I would have to turn around have to go all the way back through all of my Enclosures to make sure everything was locked and I got to the point where I would take pictures This is right after I got my very first smart phone I would take pictures of all of the locks and they would have a date and time and Location tag to them so that when I would have those anxious thoughts I could open up my phone and I could scroll through and see all my locks So your phone became the compulsive behavior because it sounds like those that it I mean that these are these are sounding like coping mechanisms I'm and if I'm hearing it right the person who's tapping the platform ten times wasn't getting on the train before Was not going to get on the train and and somehow invented a way of doing it now That that sounds like something that needs to be cured, but on the other hand, then you're thinking immediately it is something like a bulimia or another Something that causes, you know There's this horrible story of this woman who drowned their child after hearing voices that told her to you know If if it could be actually implemented to do a Compulsive behavior when faced with something that's otherwise disruptive more disruptive than perhaps the compulsive behavior So it's an it's interesting like I actually hadn't thought of it from that perspective before of you know It's like can there always be a worse thing That you aren't doing it's like is that compulsive behavior better than you know, yeah again like yeah being addicted to heroin or being you know or being suicidal But I think what I want to stress and probably didn't come through clearly enough yet is When someone has really really severe OCD and even when someone has like mild to moderate OCD It can be extremely impairing, right? So, you know, it it can be so disabling that That you might need neurosurgery. We were actually we had Evaluated someone, you know, who hadn't been able to leave their house for three years So this is when it's at its most severe. It's just as severe as someone who has You know very severe schizophrenia very severe substance abuse, you know, any of those things And I think part of the issue is most people at least don't don't realize How severe it can be because most people haven't met someone with OCD that is that severe that has admitted to it, right? It's we often call it the hidden illness because people are very often good at hiding the symptoms that compensating for them and kind of making do by by, you know I kind of alluded to this before by decreasing the amount of sleep they have by kind of limiting their choices in life by Deciding that they never have a partner by, you know, all these kinds of things. So so they're aware of this I mean, there's not there's not a like if you're caught in this loop It's not that you have a memory loss or a memory situation where you don't realize you've already done this This loop absolutely. It's you realize this is the 16th time and now I have to get to the 20 Absolutely, yeah, and it's actually and it's it's interesting you bring up the memory thing because so And it gets to kind of Blair's story because you know, I mean honestly, that's that's getting towards the verge You know of that kind of experience, right? Which is not that surprising two to three percent of people have full-fledged OCD in this country and many more have You know low-level again, it's a spectrum There's low-level symptoms that you know aren't going to be impairing But that can get activated in times of stress or again when the consequences of not doing it are really high Like in your case if you hadn't on, you know, if the locks had been unlocked that would have That would have been on the news, right? Rhino escapes But what's interesting though and and I really like that example in a way because you could take those pictures on your phone You could look at them and that was enough reassurance to you that it was fine You could move on but someone with OCD with respect to that that would not That would likely not be reassuring enough to them, right? They would be like but and this is a not again another key part This is it defies logic This is even when people are completely aware like a hundred percent You know ninety nine point nine percent sure that the evidence is telling them that there is no problem They still have to do the rituals They still have to do these loops even though logically they know there is no way that it's necessary And so and so that's really the key thing is that they know that they're engaged in these loops that are Not going to give them the outcome that they want That's necessary that they don't have to do this thing in order to keep you know To keep the bad thought to keep the bad outcome from happening But they do it anyways and they and it's not that they want to do it They are they're compelled to do it and and actually I think they're I thought I saw this there was the image that popped up the Also cycle because it I like the example that I have there. I've used it a Few times are quite a bit in talks And so, you know, this is an example a lot of people are familiar with contamination related OCD so it's this idea that there's Contaminations with you know from the environment of various kinds and so a classic example of this is seeing someone with a Cut on their hand and saying, oh, you know by seeing that cut I'm going to get HIV so it immediately triggers this obsessive thought I'm gonna get HIV because I saw that now this can be you know, if you're You know standing 200 feet away from the person if you know like logically that there's absolutely no way a virus can be Transmitted that way it can be even if you're pretty much a hundred percent sure that that person doesn't have HIV They can show you their test results from And it doesn't matter that's still going to trigger what I label here is inappropriate fear and it's inappropriate because it really Defies logic and that level of fear. It's really hard to convey unless you've known some of with this illness It it's really a life. It feels life-threatening to them, right? So it's it's as if they will die if they don't do that And it's like if I dropped a tiger into the room with you guys right now and it was going for you you would you could feel that level of fear and distress and when you have one of these OCD triggers and so then that leads to these ritualized behaviors again I mean this is actually up for debate and that gets into kind of the brain circuitry of it You know what drives what but at least in one theory of the illness it's this anxiety that's driving these compulsive behaviors and then and then the one of the the things that we're studying in the lab right now that we're really interested in this idea is that the kind of the problem and I think Again, it's a hypothesis but the idea is that one of the reasons why These cycles might get perpetuated going back to the idea of firing together and wiring together is even though the person doesn't want to do this Nothing about it is something that they actually want to do But when they do that compulsive behavior, the problem is for many people It can lead to relief. It can lead to anxiety relief, but it's really really temporary It's really fleeting and so it can make you feel momentarily better And you can imagine if I took that tiger back out of the room from you guys you would so exactly you feel so relieved and That is such that kind of removal of that horrible thing is Really rewarding actually it's it's such a relief that you feel safe again, right? And so that in and of itself can be really reinforcing we think and so part of what might kind of perpetuate these OCD cycles is that if you do get that that kind of rush of relief that that in and of itself might be a way of Operant conditioning Brain to want to do this again and again and again even though it gets the relief It's kind of that reward pathway exactly the reward of in and that's we call it negative reinforcement It's like the the removal of a bad thing is rewarding, right? If you take away a bad thing, then we're actually happy, you know And we're in that relief is something that's actually not been studied as much And so we've we've actually got a an ongoing study with one of my clinical collaborators here Dr. Rebecca Price and and we're actively recruiting so if anyone in the in the greater Pittsburgh, Ohio West Virginia area We're looking for people to join our study to actually look at the circuits that might be underlying that process So this is a wonderful segue into questions about the brain and how we know What we know about OCD circuitry to date? How have we looked at this and what do we know? Yeah, so We're it's interesting So in the field of OCD, we're actually pretty fortunate in that we know quite a bit at least about What circuits we think might be involved in OCD and we certainly don't know all the players, but there's been a lot of Really good neuro imaging work done over the years that's highlighted abnormalities in particular regions of the brain So we have abnormalities and part portions of the prefrontal cortex Which is really important for things like decision making deciding what actions you're going to do Assigning values to action and in particular We have as shown on the slide here the orbital frontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex. So all of these These these particular regions have been shown to be hyperactive Both at baseline and when symptoms are provoked in people with OCD It always it yeah, if you get into the details, it also gets complicated because in some cases there can be decreased activity But you know in general You know if you look at At baseline these are the kinds of things you see then you also see increased activity in parts of the brain including the caudate which is a part of the basal ganglia, which is important for Against executing actions executing the kinds of things, you know movements and Sequences of behavior, etc. That would make sense. Yeah, and then there's also problems hyperactivity I should say in the thalamus and what we know that the The cortex and the striatum and the thalamus all talk to each other in loops And so you you can have signals transmitted between cortex Striatum thalamus and back up to cortex. So this has led to lots of theories over the years in the field of OCD that OCD is You know really a problem of abnormal communication within these cortical striatal thalamus cortical loops so so we have good evidence for that from human studies and Then some of the work that we do in the lab is really geared towards trying to dissect those circuits and trying to see How these different regions of the brain are actually communicating during compulsive behaviors And yeah, and we can talk more about that we can show the fireworks movie actually So I was looking and back in 2013 you had you were one of a couple of teams that had come up with kind of opposing experiments on this circuitry in mice Using a Technique that it involves light in the brain. Yes, and yeah So I was wondering if you could kind of give us the background because that kind of that study from 2013 kind of set the stage for Understanding things that we that you've moved forward on. Yeah So this was a study that was basically using something as you said using light to do activation in the brain It's called optogenetics And so what optogenetics allows us to do is take advantage of the discovery of light activated ion channels from Actually from unicellular green algae and you can take these channels You can put them into neurons in the brain and essentially what they do is they act like sodium channels And so a sodium channel in a neuronal membrane If you open it up it lets sodium in if you close it Let sodium in it lets potassium out you generate an action potential you get neurons firing in the brain now if you put some of these channels into axons you can essentially Use light to turn These channels on and off and you can effectively cause neurons to fire action potentials in real time And so this was really exciting because it allowed us to gain real control Over neuronal firing patterns in the brain and we could start to test some of these hypotheses about how Hyperactivity in the brain of these particular regions might actually be linked to behaviors that might be relevant to the ocd And so in the work that we did we took normal mice And put this one of these molecules called channel adoptson into this connection between the orbital frontal cortex and the striatum And then hyper activated that to see if it would generate ocd like behaviors. Now, that's a whole other question It's like what it's basically you basically you took the optogenetics and put the light in and said go neurons more Can we make ocd happen if we add more firing? Exactly exactly and we found something really interesting Which was that if you if you turned on those circuits you essentially If you turn them on you didn't immediately see anything that looked like it might be relevant to ocd But if you repeatedly stimulated the circuits over the course of multiple days You saw a gradual evolution of an increase in grooming behavior in its mice And what was interesting? So the light had to be there for this to happen but it actually the The the abnormal grooming behavior wasn't happening when the light was on It was happening when the light was off, which was suggesting that there was some kind of plasticity process Like we were talking about before that was slowly building up gradually to lead to this change in in the behavior over time and then we did We basically combined that optogenetics with electrophysiology So being able to record in the brain at the same time as we were doing the stimulation And then saw in fact that yes when we were repeatedly stimulating We saw over the course of time if you put another pulse of light into the brain If you put a pulse of light into the brain you kind of you got more activity out over the course of time So essentially we were strengthening that connection between the orbital frontal cortex and the strident at the same time and the interesting thing is so you know Not only like was that showing you that you could get this progressive increase in the abnormal activity and in the abnormal grooming behavior If we then didn't have the light on you know left them alone for a couple weeks came back two weeks later You still saw that there was a persistent change in this behavior even though it had decayed slowly over time So that was just showing us that if we if we kind of broke this circuit by hyper stimulating it We could actually lead to this manifestation of the abnormal behavior And other work that we're doing is actually kind of taking that animal model that was used in the other paper You were referring to the it's it's a transgenic mouse model. It's called the sap f3 knockout mouse And and that'll segue into some of the the newer work we're doing in humans Human post mortem work And in the sap f3 knockout mice what's interesting is that at baseline they have a completely different brain So in a way Yeah, what we were doing with the optogenetic stimulation was much more You know kind of taking A normal brain and seeing if we could push it which is You know done in an adult animal And so potentially not as similar as what you would expect might be happening in ocd Which we know is an illness that has a huge genetic component to it um, and so what the the other mouse model did was essentially Uh, it was it was a mouse that was made by knocking out this particular protein called sap f3 It's a post synaptic density molecule. It's important for kind of holding, you know Holding synaptic shape together Especially so that the neurons connect with each other. So yeah, so that they're effectively able to connect and communicate properly um, and if that gene is knocked out throughout the whole life of the animal essentially the the The animal develops this very Compulsive grooming behavior and I and it is truly compulsive in the real sense in that it does it despite there being negative consequences to this action So it it continues to groom despite it being painful and developing painful lesions Um, it disrupts ability to sleep to eat to take care of pups to mate, etc And it'll continue to do that. Um, and so at baseline the brain is very very different and so Then what we've been doing is taking those animals that have essentially grown up with this genetic change and using technologies including optogenetics including In vivo microscopy where we can take these tiny little microscopes and put them into the brain of the mouse and See neurons actually flashing and firing and watching them communicate in real time as the animal is engaged in compulsive behavior um, and if we're lucky we might get yes, I was just going to Because so yeah, so this this what you're what you're seeing here is basically a view down the lens of the microscope So this is a a tiny lens 500 microns across that we place into the stride on this kind of action control center in the brain and it Each of those flashes of light that you're seeing Is essentially one neuron firing and communicating with these other neurons And this particular movie was taken when a mouse was engaged in this compulsive grooming behavior And so what we're trying to do now is decode the patterns of activity That are occurring in the compulsively grooming mice versus the non compulsively grooming mice and seeing what the you know If we can essentially figure out How the signal in this behavior that outwardly might look the same might be different in the brain Yeah, that's fascinating the question of Something that behaviorally looks the same Yeah, having a completely different neurological basis exactly exactly and it's interesting and and that It's interesting because it's like You know, so so people there's many different tasks that we can look at and people who have OCD And see how they perform differently on these different tasks from people who don't have OCD and one example of a task like that that were We're testing in the lab in animals. It's called reversal learning and it's a pretty simple task You know you in in the way that we're doing it The animal has to learn to press a lever to get a chocolate reward pellet And then it has to learn to change the rule it has to learn that actually it's the other lever That's going to give it the chocolate reward pellet and the mice in general can learn that pretty well and people with OCD Can have problems with that activity so they can have problems in actually switching these tasks switching the rules of a particular task and Which may or may not exactly be correlated with their symptoms, but it might be essentially a marker of the symptom might be a tell Yeah, yeah, and then the the thing that's interesting is when we look in these genetically changed mice What we see is that they in fact Half of them have Normal reversal learning. They can do it completely the same as as the normal mice. Half of them Do not they completely fail And then we can so what we have is this spectrum of these mice being able to succeed or fail on this task And we've we've gotten some clues that we published relatively recently About what the brain might be doing to compensate in the case of the mice who can succeed on this task Versus the mice who couldn't even though they're genetically identical. They have the same genetic change And similarly and people with OCD if you have, you know, they might be able to perform the task well but That's because their brain is actually acting in a different way than someone without OCD might have So they have these potentially compensatory mechanisms that are being put in place in order to to make those changes The research that you have published recently that led to this interview has to do with cadaver brains looking not at mice because As if we talk about this over and over on this show is as interesting as mice are They're not people And so how can we actually Little mass people And eventually when that when the mice do become sentient and take over there if they'll really appreciate all the hard work Yeah, for them. Yes, but it is they're not not everything is evenly applicable or adequately applicable to human therapies and treatments and so the the looking at humans is more is Much better, but humans are hard because you can't slice up living people brains. That is correct So how did you go from fmri to looking at molecular? um profiles of Deceased the brains of deceased individuals with OCD Yeah, so this was actually something that started when I when I started my lab at the University of Pittsburgh. So Pitt has a really fantastic resource and it's a human post mortem brain bank It's part of this national consortium of human post mortem brain banks There's six in the country that are within this particular consortium and It is an amazing resource Because you know, basically Very very generous people and their family members have decided to donate their brains For for science and for and honestly less I mean it is for science, but it's for human health. It's to try to actually Really advance our understanding of these diseases and you know, and it's not At at Pittsburgh in particular. We have a really strong concentration and history of doing research in schizophrenia major depressive disorder, etc And but when I moved here, I thought, you know, actually there's At the time that I moved there had been no post mortem studies that have been done in OCD And again, it gets to this idea that you know, it's an under recognized illness It's something that people don't think is that severe And it's something that again goes under the radar in terms of people even reporting that they have it because of stigma that's associated with it and so You know and and the reason it's important to think about that research That that that question is because I'd started by saying we know a lot about circuits that are involved in OCD from the imaging studies But we know very very little about the molecules and genes that are abnormal in OCD again despite the fact that there's estimated between like a 40 and 60 percent genetic genetic basis of the disease probably closer to 40, but and that's in part because There have not there basically haven't been enough resources put into trying to identify the genetic causes and I can I can get into You know, I can get up on my soapbox about that, but But basically, you know, essentially in order to get there now in a relatively recent study There were like a hundred genes that were identified as being potentially important for schizophrenia in order to Find those genes they needed to examine on the order of 36,000 people with schizophrenia in 113,000 people without schizophrenia In OCD the similar genetic studies that we're trying to do to identify the genes at this stage they've had around like 2,500 people with OCD and Around 7,000 people without OCD so And we so far have not found any genes, but it's likely because we're drastically underpowered to find it So I'm not a geneticist, right? So I'm that is a problem that other people are trying to solve But what I could do with the help of wonderful collaborators here Is to look at our postmortem brain bank and see if there are actually any people who've donated their brains who had OCD and so I had a really amazing graduate student shampionta dosi An amazing undergraduate student britney chamberlain They combed the brain bank to try and find any cases that had OCD we found eight So there were aprons that we had to work with And we found eight really well matched controls and honestly it was so few Brains that we were not expecting to see much But so we we looked we we didn't have money to do this study at the beginning. So we we did a very kind of Surface level examination initially just take looking at genes that had been suggested to be potentially Relevant to OCD and so we took those genes. We did PCR on them qPCR to make it quantitative and then looked at the amounts and the controls versus the people who had OCD and we saw We we weren't because there were so few subjects. We weren't expecting to see much. We saw really striking changes and they they were pretty unexpected which was what was exciting so We looked in regions of the brain that we know from imaging studies are likely to be involved We looked in orbital frontal cortex. We looked in striatum And what we saw when we looked at glutamate related genes, which are the excitatory Like the ways that excitatory Synapses talked to each other. We saw a striking down regulation of Oh, and now we're seeing the the kind of picture of the glutamate The glutamate associated synapse so what we saw were many of the proteins that are being shown here The genes that that encode them were actually being down regulated In the brain of people who had OCD compared to people who did not have it And if we can show the graph, yeah, there's the graph So so essentially what what this is showing you here is that we have we've grouped The the transcripts that were involved in synapse. There's a little type of there, but it was like synaptic Structure protein. So the the the transcripts that are really important in holding those synapses together Those are shown here on the left and you can see in the orbital frontal cortex That's those first two bars. You see a really significant down regulation there in the striatum There's also some evidence of down regulation, but it's not nearly as striking And then again, if you look at the graph on the right the receptor level and the Level in these glutamate synapses again, you see this down regulation within the orbital frontal cortex so what was really interesting was that that all everything we saw was down regulated and this was Quite surprising and it's really kind of opened up new ideas to us about How things might be happening in the brain of of people with scd that we wouldn't have come to without this amazing resource right well, and you think of you know, you you you think of the previous work and kind of hyper exciting the orbital frontal cortex and that circuitry with your with With the light stimulation around you're hyper exciting it and so you're thinking okay It's going to be hyper excitement and up regulation that will lead to this activity and then molecularly. It's like no well, and that was in in in that and also it's like you have these decades of of human Imaging research showing you that it's increased activity in the brain You know in all of these regions and then you see that That these transcripts are in the opposite direction, but but this is the difference between f m r i and actual molecular like Level stuff because f m r i you're looking at uh at glucose up up take and you're looking you're not looking at The receptors themselves you're looking at Hundreds of neurons and their activity in small areas and so it's this kind of a mast A mass net activity right that activity of hey blood flow oxygen Glucose yay activity, but it's not What the activity is yeah, yeah well, but so It's funny because I actually just had this conversation with my grad student Sean who was the first author on this work today Because we've been we ever since we got these data. We've been debating about what it actually would mean if it were translated into activity And so because like at the surface level You know it's like you look at all of these excitatory transcripts and you see okay, they're all down That must mean the brain activity is down but Actually, that's that's too Too broad of a stroke here because what we have is we have So in some cases for example, there's the protein that's actually the same one that's down regulated in that knockout mouse the sap f3 knockout mouse We saw it down regulated too in our in our in the human postmortem brains And if you look in these sap app knockout mice, so again, they have the down regulation But we can get into their brains and we can like probe them And what you see is you see increased activity in their striatum Right, so even though they don't have that protein in their striatum It's gone and in theory that should be leading to fewer You know let less excitation You actually see an increase in excitability and that gets to the point that these are complex networks that are all doing many different things So while we have a down regulation of that particular transcript that particular Synapse associated protein we also have down regulation of a particular glutamate transporter Which normally serves to soak up glutamate and kind of sequester it not not at Super high levels so not to the point where it actually does that much to synaptic transmission on a daily basis But you know, but that would tone down hyperactivity a little bit. So it's Or sorry, uh, other way that would that would actually increase the activity a little bit so So there's all these complex in you know, if you have down regulation of nmda receptor subunits versus ampereceptor Subunits and how much of one versus the other is actually going to change plasticity maxis and then different in a particular way It can be hard to figure out how all of those different changes are going to translate into Yeah, it's the different It's the different levers because you've got the levers that say go and you've got the levers that say slow down And how much each of those levers is turned on is going to influence the amount of overall activity Yeah, exactly. Exactly and any time I Love the human post-mortem brain research because again, it is the human brain It is brains from people with reported symptoms that have been carefully described By by clinicians, you know, we know what we're dealing with in terms of the symptoms that they have This is not the same as an as a mouse, right? Um, and so it's it's wonderful amazing Information that we can get that we can't get another way But it is a snapshot and so that's that's the kind of thing where you can think, okay, so Yeah, maybe it is overall this idea that it's a down regulation That that there's this down regulatory process, which then I can dream up hypotheses about what that might mean that Maybe the thalamus is having tons of input and then the cortex is trying to you know Turn the signal down and that's why it's down regulating all of that But again, that's based on the premise that That we can translate these changes into the activity patterns that we actually understand that But it could also be something like maybe I mean there's also evidence from human imaging studies of structural changes in people with ocd that they have There they have less volume in the orbital frontal cortex And so maybe this is almost synapse loss right and that you know, that's that's different all together Exactly, and we're actively testing that But that can also I mean can't structural changes come from like having had ocd for a very long time or something of this nature So that that's an affect of the disease and not the Yeah, and not the cause absolutely And that's what's very difficult to tell in these kinds of studies because we don't have very good longitudinal studies where you're tracking people at risk um And and then see whether they're developing it and see what's the cause and effect and that's actually why I like to use animal models And humans in combination Because then you can try and go back and forth and take findings from the humans And put them into the animals and vice versa because you know that is You know Really one of the challenges of working with human people suffering from illness is It is very difficult to test causality But we are getting closer actually and and this is you know, interesting work that's going on now where You know, you can use things like transcranial magnetic stimulation To actually up regulate or down regulate particular circuits in the brain and the precision isn't great yet But it's getting better and better And so it's not that you know, and you know, we of course are thinking about this as a therapeutic as opposed to you know And but there's some really interesting studies going on right now including some at university of pittsburgh again by my colleague Dr. Price who who's who's looking at whether turning up or turning down orbital frontal cortex activity might actually help to Help people with exposure therapy for ocd things like that So I guess my question is based on all of this information that we're getting about physiologically What's happening in the brain with ocd? but then also you have this whole side that we started talking about about behaviorally what's happening and So the behavior side of things you can really attack with more counseling and and therapy and stuff like that Then there's the the physiological stuff which you could attack other ways kind of hands on So when you're talking about treatment for ocd does that mean it's like diet and exercise It's like always both, right Actually, yes, so it's it's funny with respect to Treatment for ocd. The really interesting thing is that so, you know, we have medications for ocd And the first line therapy for ocd is serotonin reuptake selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and Well, also one called clomipramine, which is not selective And those are the only first line monotherapy for ocd, but they're only effective In a proportion of people like full remission is about 10 to 15 percent And most people get kind of a partial response like 40 to 50 percent Which can be super helpful, but it's not necessarily going to get you the whole way there And then on the other hand, we have exposure therapy Which is a behavioral therapy approach which when it's performed Correctly and the patient is able to do it Which I say it that way because again in the the kind of um the The the way it's done the mechanism by which it works is you kind of step up through a hierarchy of people's obsessions and compulsions and say okay in this trigger situation now you have to resist doing your compulsion And it can be incredibly as you can imagine challenging for people to actually comply with that treatment But if people do it it's it can be highly highly effective But so the combination therapy has been shown to be the best in the real world So both are important, but it's also really important. You know when we're thinking about dissecting The biological mechanisms underlying these you know abnormal repetitive behaviors in the lab It's also really important to think about okay. We want to dissect how treatments work when they work And so we're doing work to look at you know when Serotonin reuptake inhibitors work. How are they working in the brain? And we're also using a model that was generated by another lab doctor gray quirk's lab Where they they're kind of like developing a way to look at mechanisms underlying exposure therapy like things in animals And so then we can think okay, how you know, we know that that's working For a good proportion of people. How might those mechanisms? You know be how can we figure out those mechanisms and potentially use that to facilitate treatment or to maintain gains for Help people maintain the gains that they make when they do that kind of therapy What are your next steps and how can people help so many? So many next steps So I mean we're so we're engaged in a lot of different work in the lab Because we are kind of trying to bridge things in the animals and in the people So on the animal side of things, we're really interested in exploring this intersection between negative reinforcement anxiety and compulsive behavior and also to We're exploring some potential regions of the brain that one is called It's it's an analog to something we call the the pre supplementary motor cortex, but very involved in planning actions and planning what you do And we have evidence from another paper. We we recently published that this may be hyper active and an animal model And so essentially kind of diving into that area a little bit more and seeing what might be going on in the brain um So those are the kinds of you know, those are some of the things that we're excited about in the mice on the human side We are really diving in to the post mortem brain in a real way We are really fortunate to get funding from some ocd organizations in our brain to work And um and basically what we want to find out is number one if other regions that have been implicated in ocd such as the thalamus Might have abnormal changes as well and trying to Get information about particular molecules that might even be new drugable targets So the thalamus for example is really good at firing rhythmically. That's one of the things it does And again, this is pure speculation. We have no idea what we're going to see but you can imagine Okay, so maybe if there is more likelihood that that you know The ocd thalamus is going to be firing synchronously. This might show up in a molecular signature And now that we have the um the support to do this We're able to look at things in a much more broad spectrum way as opposed to picking out genes that we think might be important We can actually look across the all the spectrum of the expressed RNAs But and and actually see what pops up And then an important thing is, you know, so far we've just looked at gene expression Proteins are really important because you know the gene expression how that translates into the protein That's still unclear as well. And so, you know another another thing that we're really interested in is actually looking into the proteins And and seeing if there are proteomic changes in the in the brains of people who had ocd versus those who did not And then and then to be able to see whether like you said a certain percentage is genetic and a certain percentage is not I'm so between individuals. What are the different cohorts of changes? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah There's a lot of heterogeneity in the illness and I think, you know, we're really interested in trying to figure out where that lies That is fantastic And to the other part of the question, how can people help you mentioned earlier?  Yeah, why not that's It's an organ organ Well, brain transplants are currently not yet On okay And so and I was that I didn't I didn't actually realize that the organ organ donation Checkbox was only for transplant like if something needed a thing right then exactly. Yeah, so and it's and it's really essentially a thing It's it's difficult unless you've organized it ahead of time it's difficult in those kinds of situations in which organ donation is typically at play To coordinate both a brain donation and donation of the rest of the organs at the same time because of course for organ donation It's really crucial to get those organs out as quickly as you can In order to transplant the freshest most healthiest organ that you possibly can into the person who's receiving it And you know and but again if there's advanced planning and you want to do both of these things it is possible It's just that the teens have to work together. So the people who are who are getting the organs for Um for a transplant They don't have the expertise to remove the brain and preserve it in the way That needs to be done in order to get good high quality brain tissue for the kinds of studies that we're doing So it's yeah, so it's just important to have forethought in in kind of deciding to make that Make that decision and also for family members You know, it can be you know, it's it's a distressing time for many people when this issue comes up of whether or not You want, you know, your your loved one's brain to be taken for research like this Um, and so if you want to do this It's a really good idea to talk to your family about this and to to kind of get all the answers that they might Want about it and it's really important to realize that we need all kinds of brains We need and you know brains across the spectrum Healthy brains not healthy brains and you know, but without that really precious resource We just can't do the work that That we're trying to do to identify these molecular Molecular potential causes of things like OCD and other psychiatric illnesses So I feel like this is this is a need That maybe some somebody needs to figure out a nonprofit. I don't know, but there's so many people out there I'm one of them that says I want to donate my body to science. Yep What that means actually can be a million different things you can end up in a body farm Which would be super cool. You can give your I could give you my brain, which would be awesome I could help train doctors, which would be amazing, right? But there's all these kind of different menu options and I don't even know how to go about saying I want this to go here and that to go there and just use me for whatever science deems fit like There needs to be some sort of coordinated effort here because I chances are a body farm Maybe doesn't need a brain in the body for some of it that they're doing right So you could get the brain and they could still go study maggots that live in tortos So it would be totally it could be a coordinated effort for science to get all the different parts from somebody that's passionate about it Yep, use the whole body And it and it is only on shows like this week in science where you will sound hear somebody Extremely excited about the possibility of donating their body to a body farm. Yeah, I think it's so cool Can we go kiki? Can we go on a field trip? I would love it Yeah, but it is a good point also that uh in order to make these donations. Uh, it's best to do them while you're still living Yes, uh, like she was saying we need to plan you need to have conversation You have to do it before you die It's too late if you're like, okay. I'm done with my body now. I will give it to oh wait It's too late Exactly and that's when you know, at least the coordination is hard and yeah, the woman who um, who started the Organization brain donor project It is totally nonprofit. It was like she actually had the experience of her her father passed away from I believe it was frontotemporal dementia And she wanted to donate his brain. He wanted to donate his brain But she was having an incredibly difficult time figuring out how to make that happen and so Her name is tish hevel and so she took it upon herself to just start this project and try and coordinate efforts across the country And and really make this happen. So And it's yeah, so it's a fantastic resource and I Highly recommend it And and it's very useful to you and your research Suzanne thank you so much for joining us tonight. I know it's very late where you are at this point in time Talk about ocd so much People don't want me to talk about ocd this No, bring it. This is what we want. This is fun. Yeah, uh, where can people find you online? You have a twitter account your lab has a twitter account and also If they're interested in finding out more about your studies, where can they go? Yeah, so we have a web page www.amari lab dot Edu I believe I will check And I will get you the exact Information for that. But yes Yeah, Amari lab at the university of Pittsburgh Okay, Amari lab at the university of Pittsburgh and we will have links on our website so that you'll be able Yes, people can find you but yes, we will make that available Once again, thank you so much for joining us tonight. It has just been Wonderful Thank you so much. It's been great. Yeah, it's been awesome now I'm wondering if my compulsion my fear of the subway is because I'm afraid of Jumping in of pushing somebody or being pushed I actually think it's that I would get so distracted that I'd be in the middle of a conversation all of a sudden All of the above These are the deep thoughts that we'll keep justin up tonight All right, it is time for us to go to a break everyone. This is this weekend science Thank you for joining us for the first half of our show. We've got science news still to come in the second half Stay tuned for more Music Thank you for listening to this weekend science I am so glad that you chose to enjoy your day with us to listen to us to watch us Thank you for bringing us into your lives. 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She says also The promise of a vaccine for Alzheimer's disease makes me giddy Yes, so yeah, so there's there is actual Applicable Science effect there science degree science learning Science job There you go. There's also the promise What will science do? What is research now going to bring us? And I'd say will It is It will this is something that is going to happen I mean we can't say oh five or ten years, you know, we don't know exactly when it's going to happen but the research is moving that direction and Yeah, I see it I see it So jessica, thank you for your What science has done for you lately because it's true. It's what's you know, it does for so many of us If you have an idea of what science has done for you Lately this week last week today Send me an email kirsten at thisweekandscience.com Or leave us a message on facebook click that mess facebook message button Send us a little note And we'll be able to read your story your idea your thought on the show and we appreciate you keeping this part of the show going We can't do this part of the show without you All right, let's jump into the science. Are we ready for this? Okay, we are going to do this. Let's get this 30 45 minutes for a whole half of the show. Yeah, we can do it. Yeah Okay researchers publishing in nature communications this week Big study researchers from temple university school lewis cat's school of medicine and also university of nebraska medical center Have worked together. This is collaboration two teams working on different things with relation to hiv one team was working on antiretroviral therapy and so if You if you're familiar with hiv people take the antiretroviral therapy drug cocktail To keep their virus in check so that they don't get sick and these are drugs that they if you have hiv You pretty much have to take these drugs for the rest of your life. However This group came up with a new kind of twist On art our antiretroviral therapy. They call it laser art Yes long acting slow effective release Antiretroviral therapy. Oh, it's not real lasers. It's not real lasers But what it's like a time release it's these drugs that are there instead of going in and There's all the drug and they have their half-life and they wear off over time. These are Long lasting and slow effective. So they're they're more of a time release Kind of system they stay in the system longer and so suppress the virus with and keep it within the cells So it's not replicating longer So that was one part of team they've been working on this thing on their own And then another team had been working on crisper cast 9 going maybe we can identify the hiv genes in the Chromosomes and figure out how to use crisper cast 9 to edit them out And so then the teams came together and they're like, what if we did this and they worked together over several years Um, and they humanized mice, which means that they took mice and then they gave them T cells which respond to which which are human t cells basically they respond to human viruses and Human treatments and so they're called humanized. They're not human mice. They're human eyes mice because of this particular t cell aspect of their immune system These t cells are susceptible to hiv human induced the human immuno deficiency virus and So the two teams they're like, all right, what we're going to do. We're going to try different confirmations We're going to do this laser art and we're going to be like, hey, let's give them that and see what happens It puts the hiv to sleep for a little while, but then it rebounds and so they still have issues And then they're like, well, what if we do a repeated laser art where we give it to them multiple times And they wanted to do that and then they were like, let's do that with the crisper cast 9 So that we try to cut the hiv out. Well, the virus is sleeping One third of the mice that they treated over a series of experiments Are completely cleared Of the hiv virus Yes, so in human experiments and human things we've had two people in the entire world as a result of of therapies uh Where they go in and they they switch they switch things around. Um, I'm not remembering the name of the therapy But two people in the world have basically had their hiv cleared out of their systems Because they had I think it was they had bone marrow transplants where the t cells and things were replaced had been had been switched up genetically This is a small mouse study a third of the mice not a hundred percent So there are still things they don't understand about when it is effective and when it is not But a third They find absolutely they looked at all sorts of tissues in their bodies. They looked at their genes And they couldn't find The hiv So I have my question about this would be When jumping from a small mouse study to a human trial, obviously it's not there yet but in a way What would you have to lose? And no, this is a legitimate question I'm actually asking like what could possibly go wrong with a chrisper cast 9 gene editing trial Where it has proven successful in mice. What can go wrong? So question number one is the chrisper cast 9. Is it going to be accurate and efficient? There's the question of whether they're all the off target effects in the mouse study They found zero off target effects So we don't know if it'll act the same in the human Genome though, we don't know if it'll cut as accurately in the human genome for whatever reason. So, you know, you need to test it But they're not going to jump directly. The researchers are currently working on primate studies Great So they are doing these experiments in a more closely related organism to humans There we go Yeah, and in one where it, you know, these mice had to be given these T cells that are susceptible to HIV right in uh In primate studies, they have simian immunodeficiency virus. So it's a completely self-contained system that is Running kind of in parallel. It's similar to the human disease system So it's the primate model could actually be a much more accurate model than what we're what they're looking at in the mice So that hopefully a paper will be coming out in even by the end of the year. We don't know. We'll see Yeah, and the thing to remember too when we're talking about these off target effects Uh, is there's very few drugs they call them side effects when you're talking about a drug Yeah, yeah, that's true What a good point they still have these off target effects and they're like no sell them anyway. Just tell them. Yeah You know and and when they and they don't always know them all like it like you see the laundry list of potential side effects When you're seeing the disclaimer on a drug It's not that you're necessarily going to get all of them It's that there's a lot of things that they saw in the trials and they don't know why Uh, otherwise they could potentially have eliminated them from being off target effects. So, uh Yeah, I mean if if anything this with these and it's hard to say it's hard to We're talking about no off target effects in a mouse Who cannot tell you that they can no longer remember where they left their keys Right. There's there's there's problems that way as well. Um Right. So we don't yeah, we don't know if there are other side effects From the treatment of from all of the tests that they did and they did a lot. They didn't see any Side effects the mice still behaved like mice. Um The tissues still looked like normal tissues Yeah, we'll see we will see but this is a very interesting what they're calling it as a proof of concept And it's the it's a Interesting starting point to see, you know, is this, you know, this is a an interesting question. Can we With with diseases like this where it's this is a virus that takes itself and puts itself in our genome this isn't a question of Messing with human genes. This is can we use crisper cast 9 and other? other drugs and whatever we have to clean A disease a virus out of our genome. Can we cut it out? It's kind of it's an interesting question. I I yeah We will see so far so good Uh, and then moving on from hiv. I have a very Uh, a very short yet interesting story about probing atmospheres NASA is wonderful at looking out into the universe and one of our Uh, nearby ish a hundred light years or so away star solar system called gleezy We've talked about it before has several exoplanets orbiting around This uh, this star one of the worlds In the gleezy system three four seven zero b to be exact It's kind of weird. It's like wants to be earth It's got a rocky core, but it's kind of like I want to be a gas giant also And so it's not it's like I I'm like my mass is not Earthy, but it's not as big as neptone either. I'm kind of in this weird in between space I don't know who I am and so Hubble and spitzer telescopes Took a look at this exoplanet And delved into its atmosphere, which is one of the first times that we have ever really looked at an exoplanet atmosphere before which is You know in itself a huge step so this planet Is it has a thin atmosphere and it is composed of mostly hydrogen and helium So it's kind of like our sun except at the planet Yeah And so it sits very Wait, it sits pretty close to its star And they think what happened is that it formed close to its star and that it grabbed onto the ring of dust and gas that was Kind of clumping up as the gleezy system three four seven zero system was being put together and it Was maybe had enough gravity because of its rocky core to Grab a bunch of the gas that was in this primordial disc And it didn't lose all of it Because it had enough gravity because it has this it's like it's like earth It's kind of massive. It's massive enough to hold on to an atmosphere And the gases are relatively light But it didn't end up puffing up It didn't grab all the gases because it wasn't quite big enough And it was close to the star and the star itself was probably burning off some of those gases as it was grabbing on to the gases And so it ended up with this thin atmosphere instead of turning into a hot jupiter. It's kind of a meh neptune Or should I call it a meh tune? Yeah, definitely that one that one. Yes Um, yeah, so it's still pretty small, but it has an atmosphere which is very interesting and it gives us Another look at a planet beyond our own solar system With an atmosphere to ask and even potentially answer more questions about how planets form how some planets turn into Gas giants and others just gain atmospheres So we're looking beyond it's pretty cool. I think it's pretty neat nice Too glazy and beyond and then when james webspace telescope ever gets out there Maybe in two years now. I don't know. It'll be able to look at it more closely Yeah, wasn't it supposed to go out there pretty soon after we had that interview in baltimore and then yeah Yeah Yeah, oh well. We're waiting. We're waiting as patiently as we can always waiting. Yep Justin I do not need a burger right now, but please tell me what I'm missing Okay, so uh, this is the future of lad made foods and the potential downside Is that people won't buy them? So we talk a lot about this and I've been convinced that meat is murder Not necessarily to the animal That's uh survival of the top of the food chain this But it's really bad for the environment the resources that we use are contributing massively to global warming One of the reasons that people are afraid of a resistance to lab Food that wouldn't require the same resources is that it is not produced in the natural way These people have probably never seen the manufacturing floor of a food processing plant To think that food is naturally Made or produced in any way No, the breakfast sausage that you are frying up in the morning Wasn't from a fat farm pig that farmer Olga picked because it had gotten plump enough for the breakfast feast Then lovingly hugged it to death Carving choice meats under sanitary conditions. No, this is not how this takes place It's in some dirty warehouse with lots of uh blood from the cow that was there 30 seconds before are still on the ground and another one is going down This is it's just brutal process and then it goes to a place and then it sits and it's cool Maybe it's the right time. Well, but never mind also what part of the chicken is the nugget from right? So you have this whole question of the processing after that Yes, so in the near future though, we may be able to either come up with a synthetic meat product that is manufactured by microbes or a we may be able to mass produce in a similar method Meat directly from animal cells a bioreactor That would save the world from the negative effects of raising Catalan poultry and pork With the massive amounts of water and land and nitrogen resources and everything else goes into it Writing in frontiers of nutrition researchers warned the most common media framing of cultured meat as a high tech innovation As a cutting-edge thing May actually be the less least effective way to get people to accept it Uh, because of course if people don't buy into this it will never happen Don't you think though if if you if you marketed it as a meat alternative Like a vegetarian product it might actually gain a lot of traction like the impossible burger, right? That's gaining all this traction everywhere. It's an impossible burger is but these would still be animal cells, right? Which is where it gets weird because like for I example don't eat red meat, but Because I do not the environmental impact. So if this is environmentally But then there's just this whole existential issue of like is it meat? I mean technically yes chemically it's meat, but it didn't come from an animal so So I don't know actually and then the animal cruelty the ideas The animal cruelty ideas aren't there anymore because it sells It's meat. It's cells. It's lab-grown cells. It's cell culture It's similar to so many systems. We already have in place where Cells bacteria algae other things are vat grown It allows for a certain removal Of that concern And if it's a lot of stuff taking place in one place, maybe that would Reduce the need for resources Yeah, so this is basically you've uh paraphrased the quote from lead author Christopher Bryant University of Bath who says cultured meat has the potential to reduce the ethical environmental public health burdens associated with conventional livestock farming and then co-author Dr. Courtney Diller to Portland State University And Bryant assessed how framing the cultured meat as an innovation which benefits society one or a high tech development Or as very similar to conventional meat Affected that the attitudes and behaviors behavioral intentions of people who were being presented with this meat So they did priming basically This is an alternative This is high tech. This is basically the same as what you've already been done They put this in front of 80 or 480 people 88 percent were meat eaters. So we had a 12 percent of the vegetarian context there And they found that those who encountered cultured meat through the high tech priming Had significantly more negative attitudes towards the concept and were much less willing to consume it High-tech framing group was least likely to consider cultured meat safe Healthier environmentally friendly they rated themselves on average 14 percent less likely to try cultured meat compared to the societal benefits or same as meat groups So Kind of interesting about this. It's the 480s. I think a decent sample size the the idea that they Just the way that they presented the framing of it could drastically alter people's reactions I'm honestly not surprised because people hate the idea of gmo's right even though Pretty much all of the food that we is genetically modified So that's a whole silly thing that they're like, I don't want any franken foods and it's kind of the same, right? That's that's the whole thing. It's framing. And so they're testing framing message How can how can we talk about this with the public and have them react in a positive way? I mean the truth is it's mold. There are multiple publics. And so they're gonna have to be multiple messages But yeah, and that's the other thing is that this is not genetically modified So So gmo is the concern This isn't it, but it's associated with science and synthetic Oh bad if it's like, oh, here's a way to keep from having to use resources and kill animals. That's a great idea. So, uh Humans are really like not rational creatures. Ah new flash, right? Yeah news flash from there. Take me into your science Other Yeah, the other story. Yeah, so, okay So the best way not to worry about a thing is to not look at the details of the thing too closely Or or if that's still not enough You could hire highly trained people to look at the details for you so you don't actually have to And then you can just assume highly trained people have looked at this. It'll be fine But what if the highly trained people who you assume are looking at the details Actually aren't looking at them at all Not a problem as long as you don't know you still don't have to worry But of course the reason you were worried and didn't want to think about the details too much Is because they were so worrisome and so the fact that you're not thinking about them isn't the point The point is there's something to worry about And and you can explicitly be ignorant about how little you know until you hear that I'm talking about the Food and Drug Administration And the fact that these highly trained people don't seem to be looking at the details of any food or drug Regulation you assumed it was involved in the thing that you were eating or the drug that you were taking at this point No big deal. No big deal as long as you don't care how things are made or what goes into your body or what might potentially kill you So this is uh, you know FDA compliance and enforcement uh for Looking over and monitoring how food is prepared how drugs are manufactured What is or is not safe for public consumption? And according to charles peeler and this is uh, he's a contributing correspondent in the news department at science Uh, they're down a third Of their of their warning So their their FDA is the adult when it comes to supervision regulation of clinical trials food safety product recalls medications medical devices other things They do warning letters. They flag violations Saying, okay, this is a dangerous food. That's a dangerous medical device You should pull this off the market. You should relook at this. We're you know warning warning. We have a problem Those are down a third since the current administration has taken place and they're actually down Uh, they're trending down from the first year to the second year Uh, this is also, um We're also looking at a time when the usda Uh, which also has similar regulations and research into what is or is not impactful to our environment Our livestock and the rest of it is being told largely unmasked to move to kansas or get fired in two weeks So we have like a very interesting dismantling of the protections of food that we eat Which brings me back to the story that I was bringing up before You have scientists making your food in a lab under a separate condition where they uh, 100 pure Where they where yeah where it is a highly controlled environment uh You want you want a regulatory organism Like the fda to be doing its job Yes, and if they only have to look at a giant bad bioreactor and not try to legislate from The office that hasn't been built yet that they're supposed to move to in kansas Yeah Uh, or get fired and just do away with the usda An fda that doesn't seem to be being prompted to do and they don't know why I'm reading into it, but they can only see that the The reports that the fda puts out are down and when uh, when asked There was a written statement from the fda that did not dispute the findings of the report So they're not making a counter argument they're saying Yep That's what's happening Didn't elaborate didn't explain Why that's why nope just yep when we're not doing as much as we did Yeah Okay, well fingers crossed that policies people things will turn around Exactly Thinking of turning around I think I know what time it is That's time for players the animal corner Oh, I gotta turn that out If you want to hear about the animal Except for giant What you got there I have two fun good news stories this week So the first story I have is about white nose syndrome and bats We've talked about it on the show several times, but it is a problem This is not the good news part of the story It's coming white nose syndrome has destroyed bat populations across eastern north america It is showing no signs of stopping It spreads in the winter it causes bats to leave their roost during hibernation It's a fungus we've discovered since I started reporting on it And the fungus kills the bats over several months. It depletes their bats fat store their bat fat stores Say that five times fast And when it depletes the fat stores it forces them to expend more energy on finding food In the winter when they're normally sleeping. So that is what eventually kills the bats They die of starvation or exposure to the cold The specifically the little brown bat northern long-eared bat indiana bat and tricolored bat populations have declined by 70 to 99 Percent across 44 states since 2006. So this fungus is wreaking Havoc a lot of these bats are now considered functionally extinct. They do not fulfill Their role in the environment any longer So this is a big problem But a new study from virginia tech and uc santa cruz Was looking at the impact of probiotics on white nose They found that overall it did reduce the impact of the disease So they did this in two stages, which I think is really interesting So the first thing they did is they actually had in a natural kind of wild Cohort that they treated. So this is an abandoned mine in wisconsin. They tested the efficacy of a Bacteria pseudomonas fluorescence Um, so p fluorescence in two simultaneous experiments So in one of them the the bats were caged. So it was controlled and in another they were free flying So they were all tagged with a passive integrated transponder p i t a pit tag Which allowed researchers to identify and keep track of the individuals over the time And they wanted to see what happened when the bats had freedom of movement when they could go out into the natural field And when they could interact with the environment like they would normally versus when they're held in a cage What they saw was that treatment with this bacteria lengthened the amount of time that bats Stayed in the mine when they had the option to leave So this delayed emergence time Which ultimately is what they think is the the final kicker in what kills bats from white nose syndrome So the delayed emergence time puts the bats emerging closer to spring when there are more insects available Which gives them a greater chance of survival and recovery in the caged experiment there were individuals that got really sick and That influenced survival estimates But they found that the amount of fat that the bat had was the only important factor in predicting their survival in the cage trial Not how infected they were so if they were infected at all it would appear that they were waking up They were stirring they were needing more nutrients And so it depended how much fat they had on them But the level of infection didn't seem to matter In the free flying experiment their controls only had 10 survivability While their treatment group had 50 survivability. So they're considering this a five fold increase in survivability, which is huge They were thinking of ways that the probiotic treatment could be developed for The wild for a more increased application or trial So currently researchers are testing to see if pairing probiotics with other treatments Some of which we've talked about on the show can increase survival Even more since a lot of you are probably wondering I had to do a pretty deep dive into the paper to figure out Exactly how they were treating the bats with probiotics. No, they're not giving them yogurt They actually do a spray Liquid spray onto their wings to apply the probiotic Which is interesting because their control they don't spray at all because their control as they saw it was Treatment versus no treatment not type of treatment. So in this particular study They didn't get a wet spray at all if they were control and so Okay, so the ones in the cages didn't get the spray So the bats in cages and the bats free flying both got both treatment sets Okay, but so they wanted to see kind of what ultimately was killing the bats and it appeared that when they were free flying It was the act of going outside searching for food exhausting themselves getting cold Which would then stress their systems potentially and also because they're flying and if they don't catch food Then they're depleting their fat stores. And so they're less able to Protect themselves immunologically. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. So Interesting stuff probiotics not just for us. Yeah, so we should just go spray caves with Bacteria, I mean we could Yeah, that would be so Julie. Yeah, go out there with one of those Sprayers that used to spray fertilizer on your lawn Just just spray all the bats and be on your way. It could actually work and that could be a thing that happens So stay tuned like their wings Yeah Next let's move on to the other good news story that I have here A turtle may save your life What it may save your life when you are again When you are suffering from heart attack Let me explain. Yeah, please what this does not make any sense Study from University of Manchester and University of North Texas and this is looking at snapping turtles And specifically why they can survive up to six months without oxygen So in the wild these guys will be under frozen ice Sometimes they'll be under water. They'll they'll find all these situations where these turtles will be Without access to air for up to six months And so how are these turtles making it through? They're really good at holding their breath. Yeah, basically so Yes, but why is the question? So this study looked at the embryonic living heart And how it can be programmed to survive low oxygen environments as adults Yes, so this is looking specifically juvenile common snapping turtles And how biological mechanisms early in life Help them survive later on in low oxygen environments So low oxygen during embryonic development specifically way way way way early During embryonic development being low oxygen programs the animals hearts to be resilient to hypoxia And that resilience lasts for the rest of their lives So hypoxia is also what happens to a human during heart attack And it can also damage a heart during transplant surgery So knowing how to to use this on humans could have a huge impact on On the quality of life and even staying alive for a lot of humans So hypoxia during development in these turtles Actually causes epigenetic changes to the genome It turns genes on or off that are key to the ability of the turtle to tolerate zero oxygen So is it Zero oxygen are they able to just really low skin absorption? It's really low. The skin absorption isn't really part of it because when you think about um When you think about You're right. That's a little bit of something but ultimately it's not enough It's not enough to completely supplement the thing turtles can do which Like most non, but it's not it's not equivalent to like Yeah, no, I think that I think that's an important note. We know that turtles can absorb oxygen through the skin in their anus but they It's not like having gills No, no, it's certainly not and it's not like having amphibian skin where your entire body is performing that So it's not enough to supplement a fully developed heart and circulatory system Just with that. So when we've heard of it, it's like when river turtles will go dive for like You know an hour, but this is six months. Just six months. This is so this is this is a totally different level So this is Looking at the specific epigenetic signatures that help turtles survive in low oxygen environments They isolated heart muscle cells from juvenile turtles Which lived as embryos and either normal levels of oxygen, which is 21 percent or half levels of oxygen, which is 10 percent This mimics what happens in nature. So eggs at the bottom of the turtle's nests are more exposed to hypoxia So some turtles Are more used to it than others what would happen as they subjected the juvenile turtles to lower levels of oxygen They measured intracellular calcium, which finds the the proteins in the heart In the myofilaments the pH and the reactive oxygen species. So this is a Reactive oxygen species are molecules which can become toxic when tissue Reoxygenates too quickly. So basically they just monitored all the stuff going on inside of their heart And they showed that early exposure to hypoxia hypoxia in these animals reduces the amount of reactive oxygen species They could protect them from damage and allows them to contract Contract normally the heart to contract normally in the complete absence of oxygen So if we had a drug that was able to switch on mechanisms to protect the human heart from oxygen deprivation That could be huge to humans, especially Americans that's the number one right cause of death in america is some sort of heart disease. So That would be a pretty significant breakthrough if these turtles could tell us how to Even temporarily help with a hypoxic environment in your heart Yeah, that would be amazing Oh turtles. I love this research for two different levels though where it's this is just telling us about this really interesting aspect of turtle Physiology physiological development Right, we're just learning about this is this interesting thing that happens in turtles But we could learn from it and potentially if we can turn these things on in our own bodies It could have similar effects. Yeah Maybe we can learn from the turtles. Maybe there's something Years back. Oh, but you know what? Researchers right now. They're also trying to learn from mold in space Did we bring it there? I feel like we brought it there, right? Yeah and apparently Apparently it is a pretty big problem that uh mold Grows a lot on the International Space Station and did Karen leave her sandwich out again Karen no I think Karen may have uh, yeah, so uh, they're Apparently there are areas where moisture Builds up because you know, they have it's all a closed system if there is any moisture It's going to stay there on the inside not going into the electronics. Hopefully right and mold gets into surfaces and can potentially just start growing and so Mold is a big problem on the inside of the space station. It grows on everything and So researchers decided they wanted to look at Some of these species of mold that have grown very well on the space station And they took a common black mold called aspergillus Niger Grows on the space station very well and so of course they decided let's let's expose it to radiation And we want to see how much radiation these things can take Is mold in space like could it have gone between or could it travel to mars with us?  So um a there's the terminology for the Measurement of the amount of absorbed radiative energy is called a gray People get radiation sickness at 0.5 gray. They get killed when they are exposed to five gray These spores of aspergillus Niger survived 500 to a thousand gray Depending on the type of radiation they're exposed to you're exposed to a bunch of different kinds of radiation But they were they survived a whole bunch. They survived large amounts of high energy ultraviolet radiation Which is what is used as hospital disinfectant? Uh-oh And that is used or has been proposed to be used to sterilize the surface of spacecraft so Hold on what if mold isn't from earth Mold is from earth. I mean it is biologically genetically it is part of the DNA family tree that we've got going on that goes but maybe that's the panspermia Was mold maybe mold if it can survive that Then you know it could could hitch a ride on something and end up here Yeah, um, there are there are studies that suggest I'm never going to to follow to be working a hood by logic cabinet that has been used by anybody in the fungal group Because obviously even leaving contaminants light on overnight is not going to do it Not going to do it. No, uh, the researcher who did this work marty core to sow a microbiologist at the german aerospace center in And her her she Was quoted as saying we will have spores with us for sure in our space travels Fungi have been forgotten for the past 20 or 30 years, but it is time to go back to them Yes, we need to find out. Uh, yeah, so these uh There is an older study that says that suggests that mold spores might resist radiation even better in a vacuum So hey, not just on the inside of the spacecraft, but on the outside. Yeah, that's that's what I was thinking. Yeah Yeah, so anyway, we really need to take a look at the stuff that we may be taking with us And my last story quickly for the night is If you're going to exercise Hey, no that you really are Doing something good for your brain Researchers from oregon health sciences university Discovered a gene in mice that gets turned on With exercise and not with like marathon running type exercise But in what they call a short bout of exercise something equivalent to about 4 000 steps or A pretty vigorous game of basketball one-on-one basketball or something um This gene that got turned on is called mtss1l It had previously not stood out in studies in the brain these researchers. They're like, hey Exercise studies. I look at the body all the time. We want to know what's happening here in the brain ms mtss1l encodes a protein that Leads to the development of dendritic spines on neurons in an area of the brain Called the hippocampus So what they think okay dendritic spines Are the places where synapses form good stuff So if you have more synapses you have more connectivity. So The location of the brain is indicative of what that activity might be related to the hippocampus is involved in learning and memory and so A short burst of exercise might be enough To prime your brain To learn and remember how sure better like 4 000 steps, man 4 000 come on. Let me cut it down a little bit. Can you do that in three minutes? Not three minutes. No not three minutes, but we're talking like maybe you could do this in like 20 minutes 15 minutes 20 minutes Vigorous 20 vigorous 15 to 20 minutes of exercise That's great could be Turning on your hippocampus getting those neurons in there ready for more activity learning and memory That's great. You know, I I do workouts many mornings, and it's usually about 25 minutes and uh lately I've noticed sometimes I wake up with a headache and my headache will sometimes go away, which I realize is not Related to this really at all, but I just recognize that it's part of my brain, right? So it's just about circulation.  Yeah Anyone got one quick story? Yeah, um, did you know that crocodiles were once vegetarians? No, what yes, you'd have to go way back about 200 million years But it turns out new fossils looking at around 146 teeth from 16 crocodiloforms Looked at by University of Utah identifies. Yes These were not just carnivore teeth. These appear to be teeth that ate vegetables Hmm. Yeah, so um, they were non carnivorous And um, it looks like and now they need babies and now Sure, um, but yeah, not only that they ate plants occasionally, but they were actually herbivorous Crocodile forms so not just eating both but eating just plants So this means there are there were lots of different types of crocodilians that were around and The meat eaters won out, but they weren't always that way and uh team led by Nubav Jane sciences Berkeley lab in uh labs energy storage and distributed resources division Has collected 3.3 million abstracts of published military materials on science papers That have been then fed to an algorithm called word to vek This is taking basically 100 years they went back to 1912 up to the current day Uh in a field where a dozen papers or more are filed each week in material sciences And fed them to this thing and had it just read it and see what it could do without specific instructions, uh Without telling it anything about material science It learned concepts like the periodic table the crystal structure of metals said jane That hinted at the potential of the technique But probably the most interesting thing we figured out is you can use this algorithm to address gaps The materials research things that people should have studied at some point, but it haven't gotten around to Uh, the paper establishes that the text mining of scientific literature can uncover hidden knowledge And that pure text based extraction Can establish basic scientific knowledge says cedar one of the people that helped them to study. Um, Yes, if you read your textbooks, you could learn something Shouldn't be surprising interesting that this robot was able to they so they put in 3.3 million abstracts this uh machine learning read uh all of this between it was between uh 1922 and 2018 It came up with not only like could it go back and say pretty good Degree of certainly picked 10 materials that it thought would be good thermoelectric Uh compares And it came up with these 10 some of which we're already working on some of which we Haven't looked at because they're very rare or very toxic and you maybe haven't considered So it made some predictions They said okay, that's that's close, but then they did something which I find very interesting they cut off Uh, the text that they fed it to the year 2000 to see if they could predict what we discovered since 2000 in the last 18 19 years top predictions uh turned up That turned out to be things that were showing up in later studies Four times more than if the materials had just been chosen at random. For example three in the top five predictions trained using the data Uh up to the year 2008 have since been discovered and the remaining two are Uh are things that are rare So which with what this what this makes me think is you know, this is great for future You know coming up with ideas for future studies because basically people read literature And they come up with ideas for studies because of what they learn And so that's what this computer algorithm did is it read a bunch of studies and said these are possible things So so did a little bit more it read All of the studies Yeah, and by it was but it was kind of it's like it was able to Extract relationships between frequency of words how closely they were associated with each other and created Uh, they're calling it a 200 dimensional abstract Vector of how this information related to its other bits of information And it constructed it to the point where it could predict materials that hadn't been discovered up to the point of that Uh of that level of research Which which i'm glad I did the backwards one because then it can give them confidence in using it this going forward but this was Not a a a learning system for new materials specifically That's just what they fed it Which means you could feed this thing Uh potentially any large data set of Of science discipline of papers within a as narrow a gap as you know can produce millions of papers having been written on And it could make predictions and it might be able to like give you fill in gaps that nobody has studied yet Yeah, that's pretty incredible. That is a an active machine learning that looks like it has some really great potential That's great to hear you say because you're you're very skeptical of the machine learning No, no, I'm not skeptical machine learning. I'm skeptical of the deep learning thing That's the one where you have to give it all of the things in advance What's what's uh really fascinating about this system that they created is they didn't teach it how to read And it came up with learning it put the things together itself. That's the thing That's the version of this, you know of a big data Machine learning that's that has that exciting feel to it is the thing where you didn't tell it what to do And it figures it out when you tell it everything to do it's going to be limited by the input Yeah, there was another one this last last week researchers did They created a system to simulate the universe to try and Figure out the structures in the universe and they're trying to improve upon past computer models for simulating The universe but in this particular situation it modeled the universe. It's much better than the last models that have been done and It predicted things like dark matter and they don't understand How the program came up with that or is coming up with the things that it's coming up with So there's there's this interesting feedback where the computer is coming up with stuff that They didn't really expect it to and they have to go back and figure it out Yeah, so this is a quote from jane actually this is this which is echoing what you just said I honestly didn't expect the algorithm to be so predictive of future results I had thought maybe the algorithm could be descriptive of what people had done before But not come up with these different connections. I was pretty surprised when I saw not only the predictions But also the reasoning behind the predictions Uh things like it you it throughout the half Uh who slur structure, which is a really hot crystal structure for thermoelectrics these days So he's even pointing out like I did not like this was not the scope of what we were doing This thing exceeded Uh what they thought their project was Yep, it's exciting. Yeah Does that do it? I did it All right, everyone. We have come to the end of our show. It's a good long one But so full of good information so much good stuff this week Thank you co-hosts for an amazing show. Thanks for doing this with me Thank you to fada for helping in the chat room Monitoring things over on our youtube chat. Thank you for helping with the social media and those show notes Thank you to identity four for recording the show. 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coming away so everybody listen to everything we say and if you use our methods that are rolling to die we may rid the world of toxoplasma Ghani-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai I've got a laundry list of items I want to address From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote more rational thought And I'll try to answer any question you've got The help can I ever see the changes I seek When I can only set up shop one hour a week This week in science is coming your way You better just listen to what we say And if you learn anything from the words that we've said Then please just remember it's all in your head This week in science this weekend's science, this weekend's science, this weekend's science, this weekend's science, and we have come to the end of a show, which means it's time for the after show. It's time. Which may be a short after show because. I am late tired. Everyone's, yes. It's short week because of the holiday in the United States tomorrow. And then many people are probably taking Friday off as well, which makes it just like, and that's a three day week, which we get like, you gotta get all the work done in the three days. Yep. I don't know when I'm going to get the show posted. So I'm going to be on the Daily Tech News Show. Oh, crud. I forgot to mention that. I said, yes. And then I went, boop. I went right out of my brain. I'm going to be there on Monday. Yay. Oh, anybody watching or listening or watching? It's Monday at 1.30 PST, 4.30 EST. On Daily Tech News Show. Yay, I'm so glad that you're doing that. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. They told me to bring animal tech news. I'm like, what is that? What's animal tech? Cyborg polar bears. One of the stories I was going to bring tonight that I pushed potentially in the next week might actually count, which is all about being able to use, what is it, a different subspecies of rhino to birth another species of rhino? What is it? Scientists successfully transfer first test tube rhino embryo. Oh, test tube rhinos? Yeah. So I guess it's kind of tech, kind of. It's neat. It's a cool stride in the idea of having like the animal version of the seed vault, right? Yeah. It's a lot easier to just stick seeds in the ground, for the most part. But you can't do that with animal sperm. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, in the end, it comes down to what can we archive the genetic sequences? And would that be enough if you have any living relatives? Right. So it could be hosts. Yeah. So right now, they're trying to save sperm and eggs. But ideally, it would be much easier if you could just kind of like put the genetic code into the printer. One sperm, please. Well, I mean, one egg, please. Yeah. I mean, the problem is we know we're learning so much now. I mean, honestly, I keep coming back to RNA and small molecule RNA and how it's like basically shuttling the epigenome and these extra instructions all over the place.  And that you can't necessarily package the epigenome. We don't know how the histones get wrapped up, the sugars that get attached to make things wrap a certain way and code a certain way. There are certain aspects. We got the genetic code, but we don't have the wrapping and the other stuff that would come with the sperm and the eggs when a baby is being made. But that's not coming from outside the house. That is coming from that is being generated from the code. What I find the thing that we're talking about needing to host for is much more likely to give a viral and microbial biome start. Yeah, that's without that. Because we know how much gene expression, and then therefore RNA, interaction, anything else, is actually therefore controlled by the microbial environment. And before that, the viral environment that determines the microbial environment is, yes, life is a complicated thing. You can't just cookie cutter, print it out, and get it to be. Now, remember all that for next Wednesday, because I might bring this story next week. Yeah. Because that's an amazing point. And I think it's something we could spend 10 minutes talking about, and I think it would be a good one. So we will. Not tonight, but not tonight. But this is the thing, though. This is actually something I've been. It's a story from 2015 that's never left, which is I mention every once in a while is the high viral diversity. And then we don't know where it comes from. We don't know if it's potentially these are like retro type viruses that are just getting expressed through DNA, through the genetic code that are then showing up. If this is something that's from the mother, if this is something that a newborn is capturing in April if this is connected at all to the study in which viruses were being transported from the stomach through the wall, not just slipping through, not finding a weakness and getting into the bloodstream, but being transported in bloodstream. There's a level of interaction taking place that we have yet to fully comprehend, which is wonderful for somebody who likes to go in and look at these things and study these things. But it's awful if you want all your answers right now. Yeah, studies that need to be done for us to get there. There's work that needs to be done. So many studies. So many studies, so much work. Work, work, work. Blair's tired. Where's Yawning on the air? I'm so sorry. I had a good time with Roger last week. Yeah, that was fun. Great. It was especially fun when his toddler toddled into his room and he was like, I'm so sorry. We were like, it's fine. Take your time. This will be edited out later. Don't worry about it.  It's a little more forgiving. It's not like that viral video of that guy that was on that political show and the toddler and the little like play gym came in. It's fine. What do you talk about? You're doing television. I'm doing television from home.  Like, there's, yeah, no, at a certain point, every once in a while the kids come in and they're like. Dog barks, the kids are like, I need some. Like, I'm amazed he made it that long. I don't, yeah. Five minutes is the interval I'm allowed to get away. Five minutes of sitting or doing something on my own before they need something or five minutes. Now, now, now, now. Yeah. Real quick before we go to Hot Rod's point in the chat room, Justin, did you hear that Hangouts is going to be dead on August 1st? Yeah, I'm kind of, I wonder if it really will. It is, they're killing it. They're not going to be like, oh, we decided to, like they are going to have, they are having, they will still have a live video component, but it is not going to be this, but I have not seen anything that would allow us to do multiple people. So the question is. I think what I, what we'll have to do is I have to get VMIX working. I have to be able to get more than three people on at a time and, or when I like VMIX, it works really well. OBS would be the other one, but it would be more complicated to put together. So the question is this, okay. So here's my confounding misunderstanding of how the universe works. This works really well. Why isn't this a thing worth keeping? The fact that they maybe aren't profiting out of it, sure. But it seems like they could just wrap this in a little package for a small dollar amount and get a large revenue stream from it. Like I don't understand why you would kill something that works more efficiently than, I'm sorry, these wonderful options that we are not going to turn to. This works better, which is why we've been doing. It works better than, it works better than many, many, many, many other options that are out there. That's why we've used it, because it's great. So how do you have this thing out there? I want specifically with its ability to simulcast to YouTube. I mean, I use so many video conferencing softwares through work that works super well, but I don't know how you would do this. I don't know how you would simulcast to YouTube. Yeah. Seems like a bad idea. I gotta figure it out. I have to, I have to, I have a month to put my head into fix it mode and make it fix. Well, it's Hangouts Meet, but that's not gonna be for these live, it's not gonna be the live broadcast. It's a completely, what's happening here with Hangouts and YouTube is different from the Meet thing that is Hangouts Meet, that is video conferencing that's you can have a call. This YouTube live, live integration and that, like these are two different things. That's so upsetting. We can't be the only ones who do this. We're not, but so DTNS had been doing it for a long time, but they have now, because of what's gonna be coming down the pipe, they have switched their production. I mean, I think they're still using Hangouts for the moment, but they are switching their production as well and they're gonna be not on YouTube and going to Twitch. Or they are on Twitch and they do Twitch and then they take it over to YouTube or they simulcast or something like that. Can we still do that if we do the VMIX to Twitch thing then it would show up on YouTube later? Yeah. Okay. That's not so bad. We could live stream on Twitch and then there's like, if we wanted to simulcast it to YouTube, we could not be a Twitch partner. If we wanna be a Twitch partner and be like possibly be able to do that, then you have to wait like 24 hours before. That's fine. That's honestly fine. Yeah. Yep, yep, yep. I don't know. It's all very, I don't know what to do. I mean, so. I'm like, I put time and energy into the YouTube thing and now I'm like. So as long as they still go to YouTube, I mean, we have all these subscribers and when you look at the views of the videos, the grand majority of them are after it airs. Yeah. So in the end, I feel like the people who are seeking us out live will still seek us out live. Yes, we will be able to do that. And I think seeing, I mean, seeing Tom and Roger and the whole DTS, having, seeing them move to Twitch makes me confident that that is, and we've been talking about it for a while. We just haven't done it. I could buy a server hosting package and do my own broadcasting. That's expensive. And I would have to have an IT tech. Yeah. That's expensive. I don't have. You really have to take a step up. Yeah. My brain gets tired. I am so responsible for too many things. Oh, stream at less than the 1080p? Oh, interesting. Yeah. Identity four. YouTube allows multiple options of streaming. So you can have 480, 720, 1080p. You can watch at various resolutions and Twitch, they stream at the source, which is 1080p. So, yeah. So it could be, if you have a laptop that's slow, it could be like me when you're watching it. I don't like that speed. Anyway, I don't know what's happening. All right, we'll figure it out. And you'll follow it. We always do. Over on YouTube, the YouTube chat room says, Dataful and says, this Twitch stream to a YouTube simulcast, switch platforms for twists. Aw, thanks. That's awesome. Thank you for that. With Zoom, I can stream to YouTube. Oh, really? With Zoom, interesting. I could look into that. Yes, I use Zoom for all my video conferencing at work and it's really, really good. But I don't know much about, I don't know if it can go out live through other avenues. I've never heard of that happening. I've only been able to join a Zoom meeting even if I'm just watching it as a Zoom participant, like you have to call in. Yeah, and Eric in Alaska is saying, might cost more money for that feature. Yes, Zoom costs money if you stay on a call more than I think it's two hours. Well. Which makes sense, they're a business and they're making money. Yeah, it's just balancing, figuring out what, I gotta go do all that cost-benefit analysis and maybe just talk to Roger. Yeah. Say, Roger, how do I do what you did? What are you doing? I wanna do that. Can I do that? What you doing? Yeah, yeah. It's fine. This is not the first time twists has had to adapt and... It's what we do, change is good. I know, this was... Shake things up a little bit and try something new. It's good. I was having kind of funny flashbacks. So when we transitioned last time from doing to it and how I was like, I was still pretty new to the show. And I was like, is this it? Is this, is this how it dies? Like I'm so sad, I love this. And you said, no, we're gonna figure it out. We will be here next week. We will figure it out in just some mere days as we needed to. And just like I have a month. There we go. Yeah, you have a month. And here we are, years and years and years later and it's time to adapt again. This happens, technology changes and we stay. So it's time for us to adapt once again to the changing technology, we'll be here. You know, it is, it's always this kind of transition out of necessity because when something works, for me, I'm like, it works. I don't wanna mess with it, too many details. I don't wanna mess with it. And even though there might be something better out there, it's like, but this works. This is working great. Why do I wanna do something else? Yeah, and so, yeah, evolution, exactly identity for. We're gonna have a little, it's forced evolution, but we're gonna work with it. Luckily, we've done the V-Mix thing a few times and it works. It's not like, it works really well. It's totally foreign. So we'll get it. It'll be fine, it'll all be fine. It'll all be fine. As long as you say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair, say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night, Kiki. Good night, everyone. Thank you for enjoying another episode of This Week in Science with us. We really enjoyed this evening. I did, I'm saying we as if I'm speaking. Oh, you speak for me. Okay, good. Yeah. Puppets, my puppets. We will be back here next Wednesday, as I said. Blair will be on Daily Tech News Show on Monday. So don't miss that. I will probably miss the Twitch stream that I've been missing recently because of summertime change in my schedule up. I'm really gonna keep trying to work on getting that fixed up but holiday weekend and everything. So I will not be on that most likely, but we'll be back here next week. And I hope you enjoy. If you're in the United States, just have a wonderful 4th of July celebration. If you're not in the United States, just have a wonderful July 4th. We will see you next week. Thanks again. Bye.