Yes. Yes, we can. We can. We can do it. We can do it. We can do a podcast there. I don't need so much of my bookcase showing. I'm just gonna move that camera. There it goes, the top of my head. Oh, we're live. We are live, live, live. Going to start a podcast. Y'all ready? Y'all ready for the... Ah, Dance Party Twistcation. That's right. This is your weekly Wednesday evening Twistcation. It's like a vacation with twists from the rest of the world. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Okay, we're gonna start. You know what's funny is I can't even tell you what decade it was from. But I know it was a real... I know it was before your time. It had to be a really long time ago. It had to be. It had to be. Everybody, lion's breath. There we are. Okay, we're gonna do this. Okay, ready to start the show in three, two. This is Twist. This Week in Science, episode number 657, recorded on Wednesday, February 7th, 2018. Space is now open. Hey, everyone, I am Dr. Kiki, and tonight on the show, we are going to fill your heads with a Tesla in space. Reciprocal grooming and urine. But first... Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The next great discovery might be hiding right under your nose. No, it's not a mustache. Lips are even an adorable chin. But it could be that some of our greatest scientific finds are already well within our grasp. Just waiting for us to notice them. And when we do, we often wonder why we didn't before. So much of what we discover seems obvious in retrospect. We often forget how much work went into making it so. That's because that's what science does. It's an endless pursuit of the obvious confounded at every turn by a universe that makes no sense. Until, by keen observation, it obviously does. And the rest of the results of a billion observations is what has made the modern age. That and This Week in Science coming up next. What's happening? What's happening This Week in Science? Good science to you, Kiki and Blair. And a good science to you too, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We're back again. And such an exciting week this week is, oh my goodness. I honestly think his momentous occasion occurred this week. Something that is one for the history books. And we're going to talk about it. I have stories today about space, X and urine. What do you have, Justin? I've got dead Vikings. Why India will be patient zero. Rising mercury and blue pee. Ooh, that's two for urine. That's right. That's why it needed to be, needed to be. People needed to be warned right up front about this program. Okay, Blair, what's in the animal corner? I think this is the one time I don't have urine, which is very upsetting. He took a potty break before the show. Yeah, I have cooperative rats. I have woodpeckers and football players, what they have in common. And I have catastrophe. No. Why? Why do you have to be bringing the catastrophe? You'll have to find out what's killing you right now. Up next at 11. Of course, it's something always trying to kill us. It's called life. As we jump into the show, everyone, I want to remind you all that you can subscribe to our podcast. You can also subscribe to us on YouTube and on Facebook. If you look for us this week in science, just about everywhere good podcasts are found and also on YouTube and Facebook, you will find us and you'll be able to subscribe. Also, you can subscribe and find information by visiting twist T W I S dot org. But now it's time for the science. Rock it. Biggest. You're doing the countdown. It's a star man. Taking to the. Yeah. So the story is not about David Bowie, but it is about. Space X and Elon Musk's old Tesla. And a space suit that's supposed to be like a star man who's sitting in a Tesla on its way to the asteroid belt at this moment. I'm not sure I haven't. I've been trying to keep track, but earlier today, somebody who keeps track of objects that humans have put into space, who is on Twitter. He is keeping track of this and was letting us know that it is well on its way past the lunar orbit within today. So as of the broadcast, the airing of this podcast, there is a Tesla with a spaceman outfit just jetting itself through the emptiness of space. And I will admit to having been insanely busy this week and only caught like a some sort of headline that was being. Cars in space. Yeah. I thought I thought David Bowie was actually in the Tesla. His body. We finally found a good way to do it. And like, okay. I'm like, I bought it. Like I didn't read the article, which would have been well actually David Bowie is not in the space, but that's. That's my thing. So I'm like, did I really have a body space in the Tesla? Cause that would be pretty awesome. Yeah. Well, the Tesla is the big folly of this news piece actually the Tesla. It is the thing that people are kind of talking about, but it is not the thing that is the most exciting at this moment in time as of yesterday afternoon. Space X launched the Falcon Heavy Rocket, which is about twice the size of any other rocket on Earth. And they launched it with almost 100% success. The rocket itself launched quite successfully. No mishaps whatsoever. It jettisoned its two boost, two of its three booster rockets, which landed in this choreographed beautiful belay, beletic landing at almost exactly the same moment. It was beautiful to observe. That was the coolest part by far. Yeah. The fact of engineering and technology enabling such precision in, in, in these big explosive things that go boom and have, you know, rocket fuel involved. But this Falcon Heavy Rocket, it successfully, this was its test launch to show proof of concept that this is a lifting vehicle for extremely large payloads to be taken, not just into Earth orbit, but to be taken past Earth orbit. And that was the point of the jettisoning of the payload Tesla cargo that if it was able to reach a speed and a velocity that would allow it to escape Earth's gravitational field and to move into a trajectory that would take it past Mars. So proof for Elon Musk and his dream of one day putting people on Mars that we can get a vehicle there using his rocket. And additionally, it will go past Mars and out to the asteroid belt. It will obtain the, the Tesla will obtain a fairly stable orbit that should last at least 10,000 years, if not longer without anyway, without much decay. Now, the, the rocket itself, because it was so successful showing proof of concept, what it means is that we are going to see companies hiring SpaceX and the Falcon Heavy rocket system for launches, for scientific and other payloads in the future. And it says to SpaceX, go for your big Falcon rocket. The BFR is the next rocket in line. It's going to be, I mean, that F in the middle may or may not actually stand for Falcon. Big Falcon rocket, is that what it stands for? Big Falcon rocket, yeah, that's obvious. Big Friendly rocket. The BFR is the next rocket in line for development. And since this was so successful, it means that they may put something even bigger on the launch pad, which will enable very large manned missions into space. So, as of yesterday, Wednesday, for all the folly of the Tesla, the rocket launch itself was proof of concept and did indeed open up our future in space. Yeah, I think the really, the really exciting thing that I heard that I had to kind of read a second time was the fact that these rockets had already been used before. The boosters. Yeah, and so they, this has a huge implication for the future of space travel in general, because the amount of money and metal and all this kind of stuff that we use to make everything from scratch every time, this is a huge breakthrough to be able to reuse this stuff. That's pretty great. Yep, yep, it makes it, it makes it, you know, this isn't sustainable in the least. I mean, it's, it's, this is a lot of rocket fuel. There's a lot of parts involved. There are things that are not reusable, but the fact that parts of it are reusable makes it cheaper and easier to do it over and over again. And I hope, and I really do think yesterday's launch will be an inspiration for today's generation of youth who may be interested in a future in space. I mean, this opens up the asteroid belt to mining. Yeah. Right. The expanse will be true soon. Exactly. We may be heading there faster than we. Although I'm still trying to figure out like why we would need to mine an asteroid. Like we're on a pretty big one that should have everything. But let's not mess up this asteroid that has life on it. Why not go mine resources if we can get to them easily so we can preserve the planet that we have. Yeah, it's for the unobtainium. Eric in Alaska is commenting that he's not sure he would agree that the Tesla was a folly. Fair enough. It got attention. Absolutely. I think it's one of the best, most amazing bits of performance art ever. It's beautiful. But he said the dragon capsule itself was first tested. And when it was, it flew with a large wheel of cheese on board. So we're talking about folly. Yeah. And other test vehicles throughout our space have flown with test payloads of water, sand, concrete. And yeah, cheese. Yeah. So what if Elon wanted his original roadster up there? And who knows maybe when our expanse future actually happens that Tesla might be a historical monument in space that people will go visit. Yeah. That's right. The purpose that I had was like, I wonder how many decades will pass before some other billionaire decides that would be a great trophy to have and sends a mission out to have it retrieved. To collect it. Let's put it on a museum. Yes. Well, as we look out into the universe, we see all sorts of stuff out there. Maybe one day leave this earth or to find other habitable planets where life may have gotten its start. And one of the groups of planets where we have been looking is the the trappist one star system. Now, trappist one is a pretty small, not very bright star. It's pretty cool. But it is surrounded by a number of planets, seven in all that are very close in orbit, much closer than the earth is to to our sun. But close in orbit, they orbit around the trappist star very quickly. Several of they're all rocky and seems as though they have atmospheres of interest. And so NASA has been training the Hubble on the trappist system and previously in May of 2016, the inner trappist one planets D were observed. But now they have reported on three more of the exoplanets D, E and F. And these atmospheres are of of particular interest because they if when you look at the spectra, the waveform spectra of of planets, they look at how there are particular signatures, light signatures that occur as light passes through those gases. And the technical description is gas giants have a puffier atmosphere because they are made, that atmosphere is made up of lighter elements like hydrogen and helium. Whereas atmospheres like like earth has have much heavier elements. So we've got the carbon, we've got oxygen, we've got nitrogen, we've got elements that actually are a little heavier and make the gases a bit denser. So in looking for atmospheres that might be conducive for life and might indicate atmospheres that would lead to maybe water oceans on the surface of the planet. They're looking for these indicators of a denser atmosphere rather than a puffy atmosphere. That's exactly what they found. So in these three trappist planets, they don't see puffy. There's no puffy. So the next step, they don't know if there is water on the surface of these planets. This is not something that they are able to look at at this point in time. But when the James Webb telescope gets up into space, it will be able to take a much closer look at the trappist system. So what molecules might be present in the atmospheres of these planets and whether or not oxygen and even water are a major part of them. So next step on the trappist system, this system is very interesting and exciting. It formed very differently from our solar system. So in addition to being of interest because there are these rocky planets within the quote unquote position of its star where life could potentially be growing, it's also allowing us to look at a star system that has rocky planets that came to be in a different manner than our own solar system. So it can help us through observation, kind of answer questions about solar system development over time. What kinds of situations lead to certain kinds of systems? And that might lead us to being able to train our telescopes on to more likely contenders for habitable systems in the future. I think there's also a fair bit of envy and imagination at work and that if our own earth was in that sort of a system, then the other planets which could also be potentially habitable are right close by can be seen in the night sky. I mean, there's something of a little bit of sci-fi romanticism about that as well. And it's great, you know, if it has the atmosphere, one of the things that one of the reasons why water we think is so crucial for life to exist isn't necessarily a characteristic far beyond water being such a good solvent that things get to mix and interact at a much greater level than they would in any other condition. So water is possibly the best overall solution to start life in. So that's part of why we look at a planet like that that could have an atmosphere that could have water and go, okay, that's where we need to look versus, you know, an rocky frozen tundra type of location. Yeah. And then my final story to start out the show is another look even further. The Trappist system is within the Milky Way Galaxy. And so far, all of our observations looking for exoplanets has been, have been within the Milky Way Galaxy. I mean, we haven't even looked at the entire Milky Way Galaxy, but because of the places that we have looked, we have an estimate that there's probably only about one planet per star in the Milky Way Galaxy. Right. Yeah. That's the estimate.  It's a mind-bogglingly big number. Where did that come from? I thought our number was that our planet or that our solar system actually was turning out to be pretty average. Oh, really? Yeah. I don't know about this one per star. I thought it was into like seven, eight, nine range. That's curious. Well, I will look. I will look that up. Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. Something just started.  That was big in my ears. Hello, website. That was annoying. Now, this is something that we will that I will look up to confirm. Yeah. But as far as I am aware, there's about an average of one planet around every star. Now, because of the different types of stars that there are, that doesn't mean that all of the big, big stars that maybe they don't have planets. And so there's it for the type of star that we are. We're probably an average solar system, but not all stars have planets. And not all planets have stars, right?  Yeah. The rogue planets. But that's not exactly what this study is about. This study published February 2nd in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Researchers used information from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and a technique that's called microlensing which we've heard of before to study a distant quasar galaxy. But in their distant quasar galaxy, that's a galaxy. That's not in the Milky Way galaxy, right? This is not something within our own galaxy. We use this micro, this gravitational lensing usually to be able to, as space-time is warped around highly gravitational objects, massive objects. We can use the way that it is warped to be able to bring distant objects kind of into closer focus. As if there were a lens in between us and that distant object. That lens is just space-time, which is fascinating. But now they're not just using this gravitational lensing. They're using microlensing, which allows them to get even higher resolution on very distant objects. And what they have posited is that their microlensing technique has enabled them to spot exoplanets in this quasar galaxy. Planets, little teeny tiny planets in a galaxy far, far away. So this is, it's still, they're publishing their work in the hopes that other researchers will take a look at what they've done and help them determine whether or not they're right. But as objects move very quickly and they say that planets, because they're so small, and in this lens, this lens, micro lens that they have, they'll just pass these objects, planets will move really fast through the lens, and so they'll move faster than stars, which are larger and not moving in the same direction and moving differently. And as a result, they want to know whether or not other researchers think they've gotten it right. But if they have gotten it right, it brings the estimate outside of our galaxy that there are approximately 2,000 extragalactic planets for every star beyond the Milky Way. So whereas there's possibly only one planet per star in our own galaxy, there are 2,000 times that number beyond us. I'm having trouble with this. But I mentioned the rogue planets. That's one aspect of this, that there are possibly these, that many, many galaxies contain rogue planets wandering through the galaxies. They possibly, maybe there are rogue planets wandering between galaxies. But Kiki, that's so many. It's so mind-bogglingly huge. It's trillions upon trillions of possible planets. But then at some point, galaxies is called asteroids? Yeah, I guess so. Really big asteroids. Tom, it's like, I don't think definitions. Oh, come on. If you're not around a planet, if you're not in orbit around a planet. You mean around a star? A star. Thank you. If you're not in orbit around a planet, not orbiting a star, you're cold and dark. If you're not in orbit around a planet, you're not a moon. If you're not in orbit around a sun, you're not a planet. I mean, this just, we've got to get the definition because if Pluto's not a planet, then neither are these intergalactic big objects floaty-ing about. We'll just call them BFOs. Yeah. Yep. Big, friendly objects. Big, friendly objects. Big, free-range objects. Yes. That's right. Free-range planets, as says Bleak in the chat room. Yeah. That's a lot. That's a lot of planets. A lot of planets. There are probably many dark ones, but it's and cold ones, but the mind boggles at the possibilities of what is out there? What's outside our solar system? Yeah. What's outside our solar system? Outside our galaxy? What's outside? Let's keep looking out, everyone. Up and out. Up and out. There's just so many. Well, Blair collects her wits a little bit. She's mind-blowing a little bit. Justin, what you have? What do you mean? You know what's not friendly? What? A great heathen army. True. Or the great Danish army, depending on who you ask. The ancestors. The big friendly army. They're really, they're really with them. So this was a great big group of Vikings led by the three sons of Ragnar Lopebook against the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. It's a team of archaeologists led by Kat Jarman from the University of Bristol's Department of Anthropology and Archaeology. He's discovered that a mass grave, which was uncovered back in the 80s, dates to the right timeframe to be a burial site for the Viking army fallen. Early dating of the site had put the precise dating into some question. The results they got from these large groups of bones were coming back scattered over several hundred years. Now, part of the problem was they found things like coins that were dated within the 872 to 875 AD. So the coins were all minted within three years of each other. There were Viking weapons and artifacts, axes, knives, those sorts of things that you would expect to find with the Vikings. Those were there and yet the carbon dating was coming back over hundreds of years, confounding any definite pegging down. And there's historical records that also show that the Viking armor wintered in this location. This is Reptyn Derbyshire. There's records that say that the Viking army wintered there in 1873 and it drove the Mercian king into exile at this time. So there's good records everywhere except with the hardcore science record, which was railing about a wide range. So pretty interesting place they found here. There was several Viking graves and deposits of nearly 300 people underneath a shallow mound in the garden of a church. Probably had really good roses growing there. Well fertilized. So there was an angle of Saxon building that was partially ruined before being turned into a burial chamber for a lot of these bodies. One room was packed with commingled remains of about 264 people, around 20% of whom were women. So again, we find female Vikings being right there in the midst with the dude Vikings. And it doesn't say that 20% of Vikings were women. It's just 20% of the dead. They may have been 50-50, but maybe women were much better fighters. Maybe they survived much better, right? So, okay, so everything that is pointing to this is that great heathen, great Viking, great friendly army, but the dates are wide ranging. So previous radiocarbon, this is cat yarn, the previous radiocarbon dates from this site were all affected by something called marine reservoir effects, which made them seem much too old. So the idea here is when we eat fish or other marine foods, we incorporate carbon into our bones that is older than the carbon that is on the surface of the planet that we're usually interacting with. And since radiocarbon dating is a system that was really designed for dating things in reference to carbons on a land-based level, the carbons that these fish were interacting with that these Vikings were probably eating a lot of were affecting the radiocarbon datability of their bones. So they went back, they did some estimates on about how much seafood each individual may have been eating, and it kind of gave them, set them back into the right range of the late 880s. There's some interesting artifacts. One grave contained two men, one of which was buried with Thor's hammer pendant, which is a very old Viking sort of trinket, Viking swords, several other artifacts. One of those had received numerous fatal injuries around the time of death, including a large cut to his femur. Intriguingly, he had a boar's tusk placed between his legs, and it has been suggested that the injury may have been a severing of his own boar's tusk. Whoa. Yeah, they're like, let's try to put them back together this best weekend. Yikes. Yeah, there was another grave with four juveniles between 8 and 18 buried together in a single grave with a sheep jaw at their feet, signs of traumatic injury. So, pretty interesting overall. I was not aware of this thing of the eating fish can give your bones older carbon. I have all the old carbon. I might. I eat a lot of tuna fish. I wonder if I have like, like if you were to radio carbon date me, would I be like 300 years old? I don't know how this works exactly, but I feel like I might eat almost as much fish probably. Take a liking to a viking.  In other news, research shows that die and methylene blue. You know what methylene blue is, right, Kiki? Yeah. What do you use it for? All sorts of dying things blue. Right. Is it like tina? Do you use it for tina? No, no, no. It's like for cell counts, for cell viability. Right. You mix your cells that you want to count with this methylene blue and the dead cells because the outside of their cell walls have decayed take on the die whereas the living cells don't.  So turns out it may be an anti-malarial drug in usage. It apparently kills malaria parasites at an unprecedented rate. Within two days, patients are cured of the disease and a little bit more importantly perhaps no longer transmit the parasite if they're bitten again by a mosquito. That is huge. Right. This is a discovery made by Redboud University Medical Center scientists and international colleagues during a research project conducted in Mali. As a side effect, if somebody accidentally pokes you, do you bleed blue? No, but you do pee blue. Ooh, that's fun. Now you've peaked my interest. So, okay, so malaria parasites are increasingly resistant to the therapies that we're currently using. In addition, these medicines that we currently use do not really stop the spread of malaria because the parasite remains in the blood. And if another mosquito comes along and bites a person who has been cured, they can still transmit malaria to somebody else for weeks, right?  So these was it gamma sites are still present and then taken up. Gametes. Gametes get taken up into the mosquito's stomach, fertilized, come back out in the mosquito's saliva. That's the sort of life cycle of that parasite. So, yeah, biting cured patients still spreads the disease. So in this study, the researchers added methylene blue to the current therapy. So it's not methylene blue by itself, right? It's with the current combination of drugs that they're using to fight malaria. But when it's added, patients were no longer able to infect mosquitoes within as little as 48 hours, which is just fantastic. Patients who were not given were still able to affect, infect other mosquitoes for at least a week. They had done some previous laboratory experiments, but this is the first time these effects were seen in humans. And yeah, it makes your PRP turn a bright blue. Although I'm wondering if those patients, if they like started taking vitamin C pills for a while, could they get it to turn green? I want to try it. I think it's funny. One of the comments about the side effect of the blue urine is that they need to solve this problem because patients might stop using the treatment if they see their blue urine. Whereas I find that kind of a fun side effect. Yeah! That'd be a blast! That's new and different, hey! No, that's exactly what Justin was talking about too. Like what happens if I take some vitamin C? What happens if I eat some Asperius? What's going to happen? I'm so excited to find out. Yeah, this is, I mean, but I'm just wondering, I mean, from your disclaimer at the beginning of the show, you know, it's like once you find something, you're like, oh, of course, we know that, but how was this not discovered and used sooner? What are the challenges? I want to know what the issues are here because we've had methylene blue for decades. It's in every lab, everywhere. It's in every lab of anywhere that's ever worked on malaria. Exactly! So what's the, there's a schism here somewhere that I don't understand and I want to know more. And part of what I want to, the story I want to hear is, why would you try this in the first place? Like, was it like an accident in the lab? Like, oh no, those you weren't supposed to give to the rats. That's actually what we're supposed to put under the microscope. Oh, look how well they're doing. Oh my goodness. Like, I don't know. That's, I think, probably the hidden story that's even more fantastic than the P-turning blue. But there's an article, so this article probably, this methylene blue for treating malaria from the article, the description of the intervention. Paul Ehrlich discovered that dyes that target certain microorganisms and leave the surrounding tissue unharmed could be used as drugs. In 1891, methylene blue was discovered to fit into this category for malaria treatment. 1891, it was first discovered. It has high affinity for plasmodium parasites and low toxicity to patients. Ehrlich's students continued to trial methylene blue, but it was not sufficiently effective to supplant the standard treatment with quinine. But since then, methylene blue has been approved for the treatment of methymoglobinemia, prevention of urinary tract infections in the elderly, treatment and prevention of ifosphamide-induced neurotoxicity and intraoperative visualization of nerve tissues, endocrine glands, and fistulae. It is a tricyclic phenothyazine drug with a characteristic blue color. Its half-life in humans is up to five to 10 hours. Usual daily dose is 200 milligrams. The bioavailability of methylene blue after oral administration is 72% with peak plasma concentrations after two hours and an elimination half-life of 18 hours. So I can maybe bison this over the counter and turn my pee blue just to... It sounds like it. It sounds like it. That is pretty great. And perhaps the next twist, short. Oh, my, oh, my. Yeah, so this is fascinating, and I would love to know how well this works in a clinical setting and if patients go for it. That would be great to know. What do you want? This is this week in science. We're here. I think we have covered one of our urine stories. That means there's another one yet to come in the second half of the show. But right now, it is time for Blair's Animal Corner. With Blair! Oh, I have some exciting news. First, rats cooperate. Wait, we knew about that. So there's a new story about how rats cooperate. This is a study on Norway rats from the University of St. Andrews and the University of Bern in the UK in Switzerland. And they wanted to see how rats would... how they would interact with each other if they both needed something. So one got saltwater applied to their neck in a place that they couldn't reach to create a situation where they needed help. They needed to groom to get that saltwater off. It was bothering them. And then another rat had access to... didn't have access to food, but the rat that needed grooming did. So they had partner rats. They had them have the ability to pull food items toward the rat that didn't have access to food. So after that, then they had the opportunity to reciprocate the favor, grooming the rat, or offering food to the rat after being groomed. So they did this in multiple directions. Grooming, then eating, eating, then grooming. And they found that grooming was a cooperative action that was provided to food providers more often than those who had not been provided food. And rats provided more food to groomers. So it went both ways. So there was this very clear exchange for goods. Kind of like goods and services. It was kind of like... It's not described this way in the article, but to me it sounds like payment. It sounds like here's some food. Now will you do me a song and take care of that salt water? I scratch your back. You scratch mine. Yes, exactly. So it's a little bit different because it went both ways. If it was only ever here's food, now take care of me. It would be more of a payment structure, I think, but because sometimes it was here's food, now take care of me. Oh, you took care of me. Now here's some food. Since it went both ways, it was more of just a reciprocal action. So the fact that they're trading surfaces shows direct reciprocity. I help you because you help me. So this is something that, you know, this is the age old story that this is something that previously was thought to be cognitively demanding and therefore unlikely to show up in non-primate species. Well, shocking. Here it is. The thing that I found so interesting about it though is that it does kind of have this weird similarity to a bartering or payment structure. So it's not grooming for grooming food for food. It's not, I remember, much much later that you took care of me a long time ago, so I like you. It's an exchange one for the other.  There you go. Exactly. So that's why the paper is called Reciprocal Trading of Different Commodities in Norway Rats. So this is something like a barter or a payment system that rats do. We know rats are very smart. We know rats know who their friends are and show kinship. But now we also know that they're willing to exchange food for goods and services. Yeah, I think the different goods and services is the most interesting aspect that it's not simply the food-related thing. And we talk sometimes taking it to the anthropomorphization. In psychology, reciprocity is a huge aspect of sociality that reciprocity is part of the glue that builds social ties. Where if you do something, we've talked about it before, so if Justin at the car dealership gives somebody a cup of coffee, hey, do you want a cup of coffee? Then the person is really good. He has to buy a car. He has to buy a car. Well, they're less likely to assume that you're ripping them off, really. Yeah, it starts building a little bit of trust back and forth. It's this I gift you. You give something back to me. It's often why if somebody invites you to dinner or to visit their house, you bring a gift with you when you come. You are exchanging these goods for a social evening. It's something that definitely is part of human behavior. We don't often understand exactly why we do these things, but you know that it is good to do it. And sometimes just saying thank you or being kind is a gift in itself. So there are multiple levels to the reciprocal behavior. We've talked on the show a bunch about the biological root of quote-unquote morality. Is that something that a lot of people think is uniquely human? But a lot of these things that we consider to be moral, helping those in need being kind to your neighbor. This is written into our being because it's how you stay alive. Absolutely. I mean, we've shown this in extremely social animals like rats. We've shown it in really solitary animals.  Ultimately, there's a reason. There's a reason we call jerks jerks and why we don't like them. It's because it's beneficial to everyone to be nice. It is. Yeah. That's right. You people out there. It's beneficial to be nice, says Blair. And moving on to something that's not so nice, hitting each other repetitively. Did any of you watch the Super Bowl? I did. It was a fabulous game. Well, in light of that, let's talk about our favorite little element of football, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Yeah. And there was one player early in the game who got his head knocked and he hit it on the ground and he was out on the ground. He did some really weird thing. Actually, what was odd is when I saw it, he looked disoriented actually before he got hit, but he got hit helmet to helmet and was out. And that was probably the scariest hit I had seen, the collision I had seen all year. And it was there in the Super Bowl. And he wasn't the only one. But he was out for the rest of the game. For the rest of the game. So the problem. Also at the end of a play, the opposing player did this to the refs to indicate he was unconscious on the ground in that same game. Well, when you get hit really hard in the head, there is often brain damage. And the signature of brain damage that you can see usually comes in the form of tau proteins. So Kiki knows all about this in her many, many hours over a hot brain, right? Maybe? No? Well, in brains, you have your neurons. You have your axons, which are like the telephone wires that connect the neurons. And then what happens is normally in a healthy brain, you have some tau proteins around those axons. But from trauma, you get a buildup of tau proteins. And that's often a signature, a telltale sign of brain damage. And so researchers from the Boston University School of Medicine wanted to look at woodpeckers to see what was going on in their brain. We've talked about this a little bit on the show before. Why? Why don't woodpeckers have CTE? Why are they able to stand up straight? How are they just not riddled with brain damage? Well, they've got padding in their heads, and they've got special elastic bits in the back of their necks to absorb the shock. So the brain is not right, right? That's what we learned, right? So we've learned that by looking around the brain. But apparently nobody has done a large-scale study on woodpecker brains themselves looking for brain damage. So this study is fascinating because the Field Museum and Harvard loaned researchers' bird specimens from over 50 years of specimens. All of these specimens were pickled in alcohol, and they used downy woodpeckers, and then they used non-head injury prone red-winged blackbirds as a control.  No, blackbirds, they're singing in the dead of night. So that's a very good baseline to look at the brain. And then you can look at the downy woodpeckers. They took these bird brains, quote, the brains themselves were well preserved. They had a texture almost like modeling clay. Kiki, yes? Maybe? Pickle brains? I've always thought of them more like garbanzo beans. Okay, garbanzo beans, very good. Then they took incredibly thin slices, less than a fifth the thickness of a sheet of paper. And then they stained the brain tissue slices with silver ions to highlight tau proteins. And they found woodpecker brains had far more tau protein accumulation than blackbird brains. So based on what that usually means in animals, we would call that a sign of brain damage. But we can't say that for sure. All we know is that there's extra tau present in woodpecker brains, which is a brand new discovery. But now we have to look at is if, if pecking was going to cause brain injury, why over 25 million years of woodpeckers would they still be banging their head against wood? So there's something else going on here and the expectation is that potentially tau proteins in woodpecker brains are part of a protective adaptation and might not be pathological. So the next step one would expect is to try to dissect brand clean woodpecker brains from woodpeckers that have never hit their head upon wood. So this is a very interesting question to me also because there is a question among the Alzheimer's literature as to whether or not, and this is where the tau and the chronic encephalopathy disorders, this tau protein, we're using it as a marker for disease because we see the plaques, these tangled proteins building up in diseased brains, in damaged brains. So it's correlation, but we don't know if it's causation. And so this is an interesting point to be bringing in comparatively and evolutionarily, what are the tau proteins doing? Are they just a byproduct of damage? So is the cause, whether it's smacking your head around being a football player for the brain damage that leads to disorders and degeneration later in life, is that the cause, the physical damage, the stretching that leads to other metabolic issues in the nerve cells and then the tau protein production? Same for Alzheimer's disease, but a more immune system cause that leads to damage that leads to tau production that's a marker, but not the cause. And is this again a marker and not a cause in the woodpecker brain, where though maybe the brains themselves are not damaged enough to cause debilitating neurodegeneration within their lifetimes? Right, and so the further we can figure out what's going on here, believe it or not, this could actually help us on our way to figure out how to treat neurodegenerative diseases and how to prevent them. This could actually help us save brains in the future. So the more we can know about the origin of the tau proteins, the function of the tau proteins, why they're there and how the woodpecker is able to exist can actually help us protect brains, which would be pretty great. The other thing that's really special about this study, which I think we've talked about a little bit on the show before, but for anyone who's gone through a museum collection and seen thousands of dead birds in jars or in rollout drawers or all these sorts of things, this is exactly why those collections currently exist and this is exactly why they're so important. So the Field Museum, they have one of the world's biggest and best bird collections, most diverse, all these sorts of things, and they get hundreds of requests for specimen loans every year. They specifically chose this one because it had real-world applications and they were able to send specimens that were collected as far back as the 1960s. These specimens, these bird brains and jars were cared for for over 50 years until they were eventually cut up and used for this experiment. So these museums hold an immense catalogue of information that we don't even know yet and as much of a bummer as it can be for someone who loves animals to see drawers full of dead birds, that could actually not only help us but help other species in the future. And museum collections are just so important to the field of science. It's a really good demonstration of that. And if you don't love dead things, you really don't love animals. You know what? Fair point. Fair point about dead things. Yeah, that's very true. It's very, very true. All right, everybody. It is time for us to take a quick break. This is This Week in Science. We will be back in the second half of the show with urine and thermometers and a lot more. So I hope that we will see you there in just a few minutes. Stay tuned for more This Week in Science coming up in a minute. Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us this evening. We do appreciate you being on this pleasure cruise of science that we like to call Wednesday evening. Everyone, if you're here tonight, if you're here listening to the podcast right now, you know that we do this every single week and we do it because you're here with us. But we also need your help to keep doing it. So I would like to ask you all to head over to twist.org where you will find all sorts of ways to help twist out. This Week in Science is supported by your donations. We are not currently supported by any advertising. It's you who help us keep this show going, help us keep the lights on. So here is how you can help us out and how you can make things happen. Twist.org, we have donation buttons. So if you scroll down to the side, you'll be able to find a nice yellow donation button that leads you to a PayPal interface. So if you like PayPal and just donating through the PayPal system, click on that button. 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If you're not able to help out financially, if you're not able to keep, help us keep paying the bills, what you can do is tell people about twist. Lead people to twist.org. Lead them to our Facebook page. Lead them to our podcast. Get them to subscribe. Help us out that way. Grow the twist family and help us just keep doing what we do and bringing you twists week after week. Thank you so much for your support, for your ongoing support because we really could not do this without you. And we're back with more This Week in Science. We are back and I know what time it is right now. What? It's time. It's time for This Week in What Has Science Done For Me? Lately. This is coming in from Minion Brian Von Wirt. He writes, What has science done for me lately? I have what used to be called Asperger's and is now known as high functioning autism. One of my conditions is I have a lot of issues with directions. My wife called me directionally challenged. I must stop and think before I know my left from my right. When it comes to travel, I need to travel a path several times before I learn how to get there on my own. GPS has been a great advantage to me, helping me to get to work, home and many other places without a personal navigator. Now I'm going to add also without getting lost. That's awesome. Thanks to GPS, I have been able to see Gettysburg, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. I haven't seen those places yet, so I'm jealous. Road trip, twist road trip. Twist road trip. Yeah, GPS is amazing. I remember years ago, not having these wonderful GPS devices, these palm of the hand, amazing magic computer machines that we have now and having books of maps and compasses, my trunk full of maps to be able to navigate to various places and print out a map quest map. That was later. That was a little bit later. Yeah, but it is a different world now and I can just imagine the freedom that it would be allowing you, Brian, to be able to get places easily and hopefully without mishap or minimal mishaps. Yeah, just make sure. Mishaps are just adventures you didn't plan on. That's right. As long as it wasn't mishap, like you're looking at your phone and not looking up and you step into the road. Don't do that. Brian, thank you so much for writing in. I appreciate you sharing this with us and sharing it with our audience, allowing me to read this on the air tonight and to take a moment to stop and think about the wonders that GPS and technology are allowing us today and people who are directionally challenged, which every time you go to a new city, sometimes it's hard to get your bearings and GPS can really help you out. Everyone out there, if you would like to write in, please do let us know what science has done for you lately. What has it done? Share it with us. Tell your story because it does. Give us time to stop and think about these things. I think we all need a moment to stop and think and appreciate what it is we have in this moment. That is the future. We live in the future. Come on. Tell me how science is helping you, everyone. Leave us a message on our Facebook page, facebook.com, slash this week in science. Or you can email me, kirsten, k-i-r-s-t-e-n at thisweekinscience.com. We're going to keep it going. Keep it going. I want to get this full year in. Everyone, help me make it to Earth Day. One year of what has science done for me lately. Let's do it. You need to write in if you haven't yet. Come on. Get on the computer. Send me a note. Carry your pigeon. Write it in. Justin, what kind of science do you have for me? Right now. Inja. Maybe home to the next multi-antibiotic-resistant pandemic. Retro. Not yet. However, millions of unimproved antibiotics are being sold there according to a new study by researchers at Queen Mary University of London and Newcastle University. Published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, they found that multi-national companies continue to manufacture many unapproved formulations of antibiotics despite publicly pledging to tackle rising antimicrobial resistance. So these findings highlight serious hurdles for controlling antimicrobial resistance in India, which has among the highest antibiotic consumption rates and sales in the entire world. Researchers examined figures for fixed-dose combinations These are antibiotic formulations composed of two or more drugs in a single pill as well as single drug formulations of 118 formulations of fixed-dose combinations being sold in India between 2007 and 2012. The team found that 64% or 75 out of the 118 were not approved by the Central Drug Standards Control Organization and only five of the formulations were approved in the UK or US. The 118 fixed-dose combination formulations gave rise to over 3,300 brand-named products made by almost 500 pharmaceutical manufacturers, including the multi-national companies. So by 2011-2012, this form of antibiotic combo pill made up a third of total antibiotic sales in India, yet 34.5% of these sales were unapproved formulations. That's 300 million units of unapproved formulations. And many of these combination formulations were poorly chosen and likely to exasperate resistance problems. So they also found that multi-national companies manufactured nearly 20% of these and the single formulations that were sold. Wow. 20 of the 118 formulations manufactured by multiple multi-national companies had no record of approval and only four of the 53 formulations had US or UK regulatory approval. And they keep throwing that in as though I suppose because I guess the UK and US are supposed to be higher regulatory standard. Right. They know more and regulate more strongly. However, there has been a lot of controversy in India about its Central Drug Standards Control Organization's ability to implement or even not able to implement or to regulate force. Yeah. Any of the standards that they propose. So that's also part of it. Lead author Patricia McGuettin from Queens Mary says, selling unapproved, unscrutinized antibiotics undermines measures in India to control antimicrobial resistance. Multi-national companies should explain the sale of products in India that do not have the approval of their own national regulators. And in many cases, do not have the approval of the Indian regulator in which they're selling these products, manufacturing and selling. So, you know, this is just a really bad situation. Where are you? I mean, and I guess, and I guess it's, you know, from the way at least this article, the impression I was left with was that perhaps because actual physician care, I'm assuming this isn't going through physicians prescribing. Some of it probably is that there's that physicians are definitely going to be prescribing unapproved antibiotics. It's possible. The impression I kind of got from this is that it might be more along the lines of not having a direct physician access. And so these non-prescript like people are self-medicating antibiotics to treat what all ails them. Yeah. Well, I know here, people in the United States often, if they can't get what they want from their own doctors or insurance companies and pharmacies that tend, there are people who order from India and other places where things are available. Oh, sure. The greater availability of items and the greater use of items. Yeah. Right. And I don't want it to sound like the United States standards of self-medicating are much higher than in the rest of it. No, no, no, but we self-medicate in a way that kills people. And so it doesn't spread. That's different than creating a resistance amongst diseases that then no other nation or peoples can counter. That's a little bit of a frightening pandemic type situation, brewing in these wild unregulated usages of antibiotics. This sounds like a good reason for an awareness campaign worldwide. Only take prescribed antibiotics and take them for the full course, or we're all screwed. Follow the instructions. Make sure you read the instructions twice and follow them. All the way. I feel better. I don't need to take it. No, take it. Take the whole bottle. I really need to know. You're missing the whole concept of this.  Yeah, it is scary. It is very scary. But one of the interesting ways that we are hoping to get past antibiotic resistance is looking at the bacterial world itself and what informs us very often is how bacteria interact with their own viruses, the phages that live to prey on bacteria. Yeah.   And all right, I got a story now about bacteria and phages and urine. You are in luck. So researchers from Loyola University, Chicago, published in the Journal of Bacteriology, their findings of the bacteria and phages that exist in the bladder microbiome. And they have discovered, well, it's been long known, according to one of the researchers, Catherine Puttanti, she says the thought that there's not bacteria in urine is false. Big picture is that there are a lot of viruses that are part of these bacterial communities as well. So that whole thing about you can drink urine because you can drink urine because it's sterile. Actually, it might be true. You can probably drink your own urine because it's your own microbiota. But you wouldn't want to drink someone else's urine. And there's this whole clean catch versus not clean catch kind of stuff. Look, so here's where I'm going to get ahead of your story a little bit because I haven't read it.  What are you going to say? Then it doesn't matter if it's sterile. If the viruses are eating, are protective, if they're filtering, if they're killing bacteria that you wouldn't want in your bladder, then they may be helping prevent infection. This might be a layer of the immune system. And so, yeah, it might actually be safe to pee on your skin to knee or whatever. There might be something to it and to the extent that it hasn't gone horribly awry when people have done that, not that it has a health benefit. I'm not condoning or promoting this activity. But it may be that it doesn't have a negative result because the viruses that are there in the bacteria that have been screened in that sort of way. But that's just my point. Yeah, so these phages, these viruses of bacteria, yes, they can be very beneficial and they may be involved in fighting infections like bladder infections. They may be involved in the entire health of various systems of the body. And so, of course, researchers want to find out more about how these ecosystems work. And so for this particular study, they looked at 170 urine samples from women with or without urinary tract issues. Women are more often likely to contract urinary tract infections just as a matter of anatomy and how things are set up. The samples were collected by people studying the issues in women and they used catheters to collect the urine from the bladders themselves so that skin or vaginal bacteria weren't messing up their analysis. This is a direct sample from the bladders themselves. They found 181 bacteria across various families of microbes and they looked at their genomes. They analyzed the bacterial genomes using a tool called VirSorter, which uses modeling and viral genetic data to look for what are known as profage sequences. Now, profage sequences are segments of DNA that are like dormant viruses within the bacterial DNA. So when phages infect bacteria, particular phages, they will get into the bacteria and insert these sequences of DNA so that when certain environmental situations pop up again, they can use the bacterial cellular machinery to replicate and then feed on the bacteria once again. So these profage sequences are indicative of having these bacteria having been infected previously and the potential of the phage to reassert itself at some point. The researchers found 457 potential phage sequences in the genomes that they looked at and about 86 of those bacterial genomes had at least one phage, if not more, up to like 10 phage sequences in some. 226 of the phage sequences were pretty right on the bullseye. They're considered high confidence sequences in that they're very likely to be these profages. 97% of those 226 were similar to profages found before that have been seen before and 129 have never been seen before. So these are, yeah, they're mystery bacterial viruses. And they noted in the article that certain phages, mycetaceae, were found in women with overactive bladders. And so there may be these phages for the acetonomycetaceae. Oh my, I can pronounce these very large bacteria. The phages, the viruses for that family of bacteria were really active in these women whose bladders are overactive, which may indicate that phages are involved in the health of the bladder or at least in that aspect of the health of the bladder. And so this is bringing things together in a way that has not been observed before. And next they're going to hopefully start looking into more aspects of the ecology of the bladder, these bladder to determine whether or not phages can be used to manipulate that ecosystem in the future. Are we going to, do you take an antibiotic to treat your bladder infection? No, maybe you'll take a phage in the future. Oh man, that'd be so cool. So it's potentially different. And I keep referring back to what we were thinking about, which is that viral load in infants when they get to around age two, they have the highest viral load in their guts that they're ever going to have. And those bacteria phages, their viruses that are feeding on bacteria are sort of screening. And so while we're all sort of focused on the probiotics, really the pro bacterial phages might be the real thing that you want to put into that system that can defend it beyond that first meal or second meal of probiotics, but actually get in there and sort out what human body is kind of designed not to have by way of... Yeah, I mean this is a long-term evolutionary relationship that we're talking about. And maybe not only just phages on their own, but potentially phages in conjunction with antibiotics. So maybe the combination of antibiotics and prophages or in different combinations could allow us to make things work really well. And if the antibiotic is a bacteriophage virus, then... Antibiotic, anti... Yeah, that's sort of what I'm... Yeah, I think that's the thing, right? Like we may just turn out... Viruses are our best friend. Viruses, that's right. You like the viruses. I don't like the flu virus these days, but who needs a thermometer? Do you need a thermometer? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm ready for my treatment. Sorry, I'm making a second. Yes, as the mercury continues to rise with global warming, the mercury will continue to rise with global warming. Researchers have discovered permafrost in northern hemisphere stores massive amounts of natural mercury, defining with significant implications for human health ecosystems worldwide. In a new study, scientists measured mercury concentrations in permafrost cores from Alaska and estimated how much mercury has been trapped in permafrost north of the equator since the last Ice Age. Turns out, it's a lot! Study reveals northern permafrost soils are the largest reservoir of mercury on the planet. Storing nearly twice as much mercury as all other soils, the ocean, the atmosphere, combined. That's a lot, people. That is a lot. If you're curious, the study is published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. This discovery is a game-changer, quoting voice Paul Schuster, hydrologist of the U.S. Geological Survey in Boulder, Colorado, lead author of the new study. We've quantified a pool of mercury that had not been done previously, and the results have profound implications for better understanding the global mercury cycle.  Wait, what? No, no! Actually, it's going to be fine, because now mercury is in everything. Unavoidable. Yeah, thawing of the existing permafrost layer in the northern hemisphere, thawing could release a large amount of mercury that could potentially affect ecosystems around the world. Mercury accumulates in aquatic and terrestrial food chains, has harmful neurological and reproductive effects on animals. So, there would be no environmental problem whatsoever, though, if everything remains frozen. But it's not going to. Oh, damn. Just set up some fans, quick! I mean, we're all worried about the methane that's going to get released from the permafrost, but mercury? That's going to end up in the rivers and the streams like we used to. And it's going to influence the tuna, it's going to influence the salmon, it's going to high level, it's going to build up. Sharks have a higher mercury content than they do. I don't eat sharks. Well, I hope. Hopefully not. And since it's going to cause neurological issues, then you're going to have like crazy sharks. Right? Bad tuna! Vicious salmon will be eaten by bears who will go all catty wankas honest. So it's... Yeah, it's... That's like, of all of the the global warming stories, this slow change and that quick change, and this is going to happen faster, and that's going to happen, and the silver linings of Florida being underwater. All of a sudden we get a mercury dump on top of that. Stop it! That's too much.  Yeah. This just, we need to, we really need to start working on solutions, people. We need to... I mean, we launched a big rocket into space. We're going to be doing a lot more space stuff. We have technology and really smart people to make better technology. Let's start doing more solutions for solving climate change. Reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere so that we don't warm the atmosphere as much as now is estimated it will warm. Please, can we do that? That would be really great, okay? Yeah. Well, we could if the planet and the warming is not going to...  We could just try to live forever. I mean, maybe we'll be like Elon Musk and live forever on another planet. But so last week I talked about naked mole rats, right? There's another story this week about naked mole rats. They're the gift that keeps on giving. They are. So last week was the question of, all right, they don't have senescence. They don't have the aging, right? And you were bringing up, well maybe it's telomeres and, you know, what's going on at the cellular level? Well, our questions are being answered because there's a new study that just came out this week in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looking at cellular senescence in these animals to determine whether or not their cells are acting like and aging like the cells of normal lifespan or the average lifespan of their related species. So naked mole rats live upwards of 30 years which is very long for a rodent and the question is how exactly do they do that? They seem to stay eternally young and they don't get cancer. Well when they are irradiated with gamma radiation it turns out that there is something going on. Their cells can handle a lot more radiation than the cells of other rodents. So there is something going on there but just as in the cells of normal rodents when damage is done to the DNA it turns on cellular apoptosis processes which is programmed cell death to lead to which is basically senescence and there are metabolic cellular pathways that are turned on so yeah the cells die just like in normal aging mice. They also have cellular senescence during development which would be which is kind of understandable because they go through a developmental period in which you can't just have everything dividing and differentiating and doing what it does forever. So for example in the brain we have a bunch of neurons in the brain and then they get pruned and it's this cellular senescence process that helps with the pruning of the branches in our brain to highlight the pathways that are the most important the ones that actually work the best. Same thing happens in limb development if you want to have fingers you need to have some kind of cellular senescence that will have little gaps between the digits otherwise they'll all be stuck together and they won't be individuated. Right like a horse and so there are processes that cells divide and die so the cells that connect areas they die away and then areas are separated so these are important processes during development and naked mole rats have them during development as well and then during aging when they actually hit old age, cellular senescence happens like normal and so they don't live forever right. So there is definitely something going on we don't know why exactly they are able to live so cancer free but it's not because they don't have this process by which cells die so like cancer you would think that naked mole rats would have tons of cancer if their cells aren't dying off because that's part of cancer is unregulated cell growth unregulated cell division and so normal processes in the body try and stop cell division it's when you have this unregulation, this dysregulation that you have tumor growth and so you would think naked mole rats would have tumors all over the place but they never get them but it's not because they have this dysregulation that's not what's part of it so there's something else going on so we know what it's not we know what it's not yes they have senescence there's something else metabolic that's going on that we need to learn more about and additionally another species not a rodent but a bat myotis myotis it's also very long lived can live up to 35 years even though it has such a very small body size, normally small body size animals they live fast, die young they burn up all their energy quickly well this is another study into a creature that is long lived compared to its body size published in science advances researchers looked at these bats and discovered they have a whole bunch of genes involved in telomere maintenance that are regulated and upregulated compared to other related small-bodied animals give me those right, yeah so these bats this is ruining my it's ruining what? it's ruining my whole theory that long life and body hair are inversely related they've got, yeah, bats have body hair yeah, you don't have to be naked they live long time, humans, elephants, dolphins we all seem to live a long time and then boom very little bat very little bat yeah, so interestingly is that these bats though they don't express telomerase in their blood cells and the researchers say this suggests that telomere maintenance in this species is unlikely to be mediated by telomerase which is what's implicated in humans and so if it's not the telomerase that is involved in maintaining telomeres then there's something else going on and they have identified 21 maintenance genes in this work that could be involved and so this 21 was pared down from 225 genes they're finding that some are evolving differently in bats or are expressed in a different way and drive our understanding of how better to find ways to lengthen human health span without driving cancer dun dun dun so naked mole rats, bats give me it all give it all to us come on, all the information give me a million rats and bats naked mole bats I'll just acquire their power that's how you acquire their power by looking like a naked mole bat Blair's Halloween costume for this year folks heard it now, the naked mole bat that's good get on it Blair, I want to see it okay and in other crazy weird news did you know that there's a whole bunch of clones invading the world no what? yeah, oh Marmore Krebs the marbled crayfish researchers love the marbled crayfish it's just a crayfish pet store anyway, publishing in nature and ecology and evolution researchers have told the story of the marbled crayfish and it spread from a German pet shop across Europe over the last 25 years it has spread over the entire world in pretty much less than 25 years yikes yes, this German pet shop was selling a species procambaris phallus that came from streams of Georgia and Florida and then in the pet shop suddenly there was a different crayfish and they named it Marmore Krebs Marbled crayfish because it was parthenogenic and that was great we love parthenogenesis it's all females the females produce viable eggs and then more females come you don't need males they just keep reproducing very easily easily maintained species you can put one in a tank and that single female would fill a tank that could then be sold and eaten or put in other fish tanks around the world and that's what happens and so this wonderful cloning parthenogenically reproducing female species has ended up in the wild and it in 25 years spread around the globe spread around the globe and it's an amazing story because the success in its ability to end up in all sorts of ecosystems and it invades environments from Madagascar to Sweden and there are genes in its gene sequence obtained by the authors that allow it's got some pretty neat adaptations it can break down cellulose so it can eat all sorts of things that other animals can't there are a lot of things that this wonderful little species can do but anyway genetic changes self-cloning it's now taking over the world yes story to 11 folks well you know what else is spreading around the globe no what microplastics we've talked about them so many times in the frame of ocean pollution but have we yet talked about microplastics on land no it's a problem for ocean dwellers it's a problem in fact terrestrial microplastic is a higher threat to marine microplastic pollution there is an estimate of 4 to 23 times more microplastics on land than in the water sewage for example is full of microplastics 80 to 90% of the particles contained in sewage are often microplastics garment fibers things of that nature and that then gets processed in a sewage processing facility where they often make something called sludge which is exactly what it sounds like that is then applied to fields as fertilizer then microplastics end up in the soil so a new study actually looking at the amount of microplastics in soils in fresh waters and just in general on land have shown it is a problem earthworms make burrows differently when they have microplastics present and they also have a lot of health effects relating to microplastics in us we've shown that microplastics actually can cross the blood brain barrier or the placenta so microplastics already all over our food in our soil everywhere it's already inside of us and it's not just from fish in the oceans so every time I start yelling about cut out the single use plastic here you go Kason point alright straws straws could be the first to go straws can definitely go and things like like lunchables that have plastic and plastic on plastic surrounded in plastic don't buy that well but I think microplastics wrapped in plastic and then in plastic don't buy that I think that sludge problem think of all the plastics in clothing that's a big problem the micro fibers we'll think about these things all up in the news these days tide pods the thing about tide pods that bother me is the fact that they're wrapped in dissolvable plastic which is going to be little pieces of plastic but I think a big point too like all the laundry we do wandering around the environment you have bits of fuzz coming off your clothes the laundry we do we have little bits of fuzz coming out in the water also coming out in the dryer lint and little plastic fibers polyesters plastics they're everywhere I don't expect everyone to start wearing hemp and like never buy another plastic thing ever again but just keep it in mind and then also out in the aura our filtration systems need to be better they can be better we need to make them better on our washing machines for our clothes there should be better filtration systems to filter out microplastics we can do it if we can put a car in space we can filter out some darn microplastics yes we can we can filter we can filter we can do it Justin do you have another story the headline caught me headline is child aids paleontologists in the discovery of new ancient fish species it's a 90 million year old fish never seen before discovery was made when this kid was taking a tour of a monastery in Columbia noticed this sort of flag stone on a walkway that looked rather fish like took a picture of it later was visiting a museum showed it to the people there and they went like a fish fossil they send it to their colleagues in Canada and turns out yeah this is an ancient fish never been seen before but I think my favorite part of this is the fact that this obvious fish fossil was sitting in stone outside of this monastery just a mile or two away from the museum but that nobody from the museum had ever visited the monastery so it remained a secret much longer than it maybe otherwise would have there you go science hiding in plain sight right there under your nose all along all along oh have we done it we did it we have come to the end of another episode we have we have and it's time for me to say thank you to everyone thank you so much for joining us tonight thank you to everyone in the chat room in the over on YouTube over on Facebook chatting thank you so much for being here and being a part of our show and enjoying and conversing with the other people watching love that there are people watching and being part of the community thank you to fata for doing show notes thank you to identity for for recording the show and to Brandon for 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I'm sleepy, bro. hey yo yo yo yo hey i yeah we were sleepy i'm not too sleepy right now i'm doing well all good it's all good what are you guys sharing in the chat room emigrants emigrants what else is in there i didn't know lol i didn't know lol hello welcome to the show kenji was here bye kenji and what else who else is in there i didn't know about uh youtube donations that was a pretty cool surprise and it's pretty cool that was kind of neat a little donation during the show that was fantastic how awesome i want to introduce you to my little elephant you do have a little elephant this elephant is made completely out of hemp old plastic oh really yeah look he's fuzzy yes fuzzy did they take it and turn it into polyester i don't know i don't know what the story is i just know he's made of old bottles he's made of old bottles yeah and melted them down and turned them into polyester is he soft he's very soft that's kind of frightening crazy plastic is weird plastic is really weird it's a weird thing plastic can be anything plastic community thing that's why it's uh it's everywhere short twist clips i'm posting to facebook oh cool yes thank you that would be fata's doing um how is that is that going over nicely now um yes we are posting on facebook fata has been doing that but he uh he goes through the show after the show is done the show notes and um and breaks it down finds the time codes and gets a little link for each story when the stories get started and then he shares a little image a fun little image and a little snippet about what the story is about along with the link that lets you go directly there hear that particular story so it kind of turns it into twist clips and then you just started doing audio on a thing that's small yes yeah so i'll uh i'll show i can't like because the way my audio is set up i can't play it for you but i was just um when i was screen sharing at the end of the show there i was starting to show it there is a company called entail e n t a l e that enables um chapters so i can go in to i i upload our file our audio file to their server and then do a little little edit and break it into these chapters that's really cool yeah and this is an embeddable player that can be put all sorts of places but it's like uh the the video aspect of what fata's been doing but is the um but is the audio equivalent so if i could hear it i would clip i would click directly on chapter two yeah that's really cool so that has replaced the audio bar that used to be on our website it is not replaced it it is in there so the audio bar is still right there so people can just play the whole show right there um or they can click into the chapters that is really cool here yeah i love that yeah so i'm hoping and if people want to use the video that's where that is also you can all of these social media links that fata is sharing uh that take it uh that allow you to let me see if i can find an example is it my internet like or facebook but uh an example here so it's a little a little comic and the link that would take you directly from there to youtube to be able to watch that specific clip clip on youtube um or you can just go to the youtube channel after he has finished the show notes and click on the time codes and be able to see the same thing so i'm trying to make it really easy to access particular stories for people so they can find information things that they are really interested in and i am hoping this will set us up to start really being able to do some supplemental materials for classrooms if i can if i can figure out how to actually make that something that um people pay for right yeah i mean i want to be an educational resource i do but you know like you make supplementary curriculum materials and then how do you make that work right yeah well that's yeah well that's let's chat yeah maybe when i'm in portland might be over a beer my dear yeah speaking up do i need to book a flight you should yeah come to portland players come into portland for a science communication conference it's gonna be great going to be great it's a great conference science talk it's a conference you can find out about it at sciencetalk.org in portland oregon march 1st and 2nd so it's coming up very soon but for people interested in science communication and how that happens and how to communicate science better that's what's gonna be going on there um let's see oh hey fecal lord that is a skill wielding the soldering island iron well drunk there you go um hot rod yes i like big screens and i cannot lie i just got a new i'm so excited for the basement studio we have all of the parts for making a new computer oh yes all of the parts so the computer will be made soon we will assemble the computer um marshall and kai are gonna build it it's gonna be a daddy kai computer building project which i think will be awesome and then we also i have i bought some new backdrops for the wall for the studio and i've got lights now and i have the mevo to be able to use i want to see if i can um which could be great for just going into youtube like we have been i don't know how it'll work for the google hangouts thing i gotta figure that out um yeah brandon computer build yes and identity four i didn't get a computer monitor i got a i think it's 40 some odd inch maybe 42 inch 4k television that you know hdmi inputs and outs so i'm gonna use it as a monitor yeah that's uh that's what i use as my second monitor yeah i i guess it's my first monitor i have a tiny monitor down low for my second monitor that's uh that's a good idea too yeah i've got i've actually got gonna be 40 i think i can show this here's my setup i've got oh my cool doesn't get me that's craziness going on over there i've got two of you on a screen down low this is this is the this is your direct feed and then above that i've got the screen with the rundown stuff yeah well currently it's the chat room sometimes it's the rundown sometimes it's my stories but i keep the two of you uh on the little screen down low so i can uh feel like i'm talking to you face to face i love that i think that's great yeah i have my fairly large uh screen just one screen though but i've got i've got faces pretty much in front of me oh yeah two screens that's a way to go you need a second screen just get yourself like a cheapo little you know i think this is i don't even know if it's 19 inch maybe it is because it's a little wide maybe it's a 19 inch is my little uh google hangout dedicated screen for the convo part and then i've got a screen above that i can read and it kind of looks like i'm looking near the camera i think when i'm reading from that screen um and fecal lord was saying there's a horrendous video card shortage going on and yeah huge gp gpu's graphics processor units are uh in super short supply right now and vidya has been asking the retailers not to sell to uh to bitcoin and bitcoin miners and blockchain uh blockchain currency miners because they are taking the gpu's and using them for the mining and nobody can get them at uh msrp for actual video work so whether it's gaming or video production and editing or live streaming they're just too they're super expensive the only reason we got one is because my husband had has insomnia he had his computer you can do things like um like set up a uh an alert there are there are ways out there to set up an alert when a retailer gets something that you want into stock so that you can get on it and buy it immediately and he just happened to be awake at four in the morning when an alert went off and about 32 of them there was only one and he got it he was a one one and he got it so uh we got we got lucky on that one but yeah it's ridiculous it is ridiculous right now i know and look anybody who's into any of these crypto coins you're all the shoe shine boy anybody who's making money on it right now just take the money out and put it in your bank account where the real money is rocker feller rocker feller was sitting there stock markets in all time high he's getting his shoe shined and the shoe shine boy gave him a stock tip you know what i like this stock right now i'm gonna i'm gonna take the the half bit to 18 cents i don't know what a shoe shine cost magnet it wasn't very much i'm gonna put it in that and the guy's like you're in the stock market and rocker feller right you're in the stock market it's like oh yeah i got like three dollars in there and rocker feller the story goes went out and got rid of all of his stocks and a few days later the stock market collapsed the led to the great depression happened and and his reasoning was if that kid is in the stock market there's nobody left and so when when i started hearing people around me right i don't i don't travel in a high investment category we started talking about this crypto coin that crypto coin i'm gonna invest in the crypto coin i was like yeah i told him the story of the shoe shine boy and you're like i only goes up it just goes up and up and up and you just put money in it you make more money the next day it goes up and this all happened right around christmas right before like bitcoin halved in value right and and it's that's the thing if if you're like me and you don't have a massive investment portfolio and you haven't been tracking stocks you're in you're out day in day out watching me up and downs watching the financial channels paying attention and by the way they're no better than a coin flip and predicting there's there's if you want financial advice you are just as well off flipping a coin or consulting with the foam at the edge of the tide then you are a financial expert there is no rhyme or reason to any of this stuff it follows trends unforeseen by there's like 18 people whose money is actually represented in the stock market the rest of us are just watching them switch it around okay so i tell this story sure enough these things start to plummet if people around me are investing in something that's the surefire sign that the shoe shine boy is in and there's nobody left right and that probably goes for the rest of you okay exactly these people are investing at bitcoin i don't know if it was at 19 but it was like 17 18 000 and yeah now it's like around eight or nine and then and then there's coins that you can only buy with bitcoins there's other coin markets and and i looked through this list somebody had this list of cryptocurrencies up there and it was like you could have a twist coin you could have a if you like fuzzy animal coin there's a fuzzy animal coin there's a rainy day coin there's a everything you could think of icon coin have you heard about the kittens the little the cat blockchain there oh what's it called um but there's a there's a there's a blockchain oh yeah it talks about yeah that's what i'm saying there's a coin but you put money in to buy these cats and then you can breed the cats and there are some cats that are really really expensive like thousands of dollars for these little the cats that you can breed with other people's the digital cats oh good that you buy through blockchain oh god it's not it's you know it's not a currency itself but it is kind of because the cats breed and then certain traits in the cats or they like them and so you can get into it by right so in principle i actually love this whole idea because the actual stock market only kind of pretends to be backed up by a company like there's a company there you can look at it's it's everything she is and it's no kitties here it is but really the value of the stock is people's confidence in that in that investment and it has nothing necessarily to do with the actual company really ridiculous we really need to do a twist coin the stock market the cryptocurrency we were talking about science island coins a long time ago yes and i still think that's a brilliant idea but it happened digital look that's still even if it was digital it's which is i should have thought of that which there are communities there's communities in new york that has its own currency and you if you're living that community you can go to the barber shop and pay with your science island coin whatever they're calling it and then you can take if you're the barber you got you know you got paid in in science island coins you can take it to the the cafe and buy a cup of coffee and then the barista or the cafe owner can take that and they can go over and get local joe's plumbing to do some work for them and like there's a there's a way where an internal community currency that can can work and i and that's part of what i like about this idea i actually don't i don't completely dislike the idea you know i i have a hang up about using credit cards and debit cards not credit cards mostly the debit card because it has replaced paper currency right and so we pay or the re the merchant and therefore us anybody pays you know one and a half to three percent fee to the credit card company to spend us currency on every transaction that's really ridiculous that means we would need literally it's overdue a national digital currency credit that we can spend without having everybody have to pay an extra surcharge for running the thing that should just i went to the bank the other day and i asked them to cut me a check because i didn't have my checkbook with me and i said okay that'll be ten dollars so you're charging me ten dollars to write on a piece of paper for me that i have money okay but withdrawing cash is free okay right well it's also like depending on your bank like at my at my bank if you something like if you deposit a check you got to wait like 24 hours to access it but you can cash the check they will hand you cash immediately and then you could deposit that yeah and it's immediately available like yeah but that's like banker weirdness but seriously so i love the idea of a cryptocurrency um but obviously it would have to be separated from an investment a concept right like that's part of the problem is that this was both a currency and a stock like this is this is what the Glass Deagle thing was about we're not going to use an investment and your savings as the same thing because that's gambling with your money and we didn't want that to happen in impact economy so you create a mechanism which is both and obviously you're gonna have that problem i just discovered that some of these crypto kitties are worth over 80 million dollars oh boy each ethereum is 802 dollars and 65 cents and this crypto kitty is for sale for a hundred thousand ethereum are many of them for sale for a hundred thousand ethereum ethereum oh boy yes this one's a 170 thousand ethereum how much it's for sale for that over 80 million dollars for a little kitty cat it's a digital piece of artwork who has other little kittens and it's it was bred online boy they because because because that my brain just broke sorry crypto kitties crypto kitties breaks my brain um yeah twist science island coin i always that'll be fabulous um players tired we were yawning before the show it's true there were yon's going around there were yon's going around well i maybe want to book this flight do you want to do that off air yeah we could do it off air come to portland it's going to be fun portland science communication it's gonna be awesome gonna be a party well it's gonna be busy lots of learning my favorite part about it is i don't have to prepare anything i just have to show up and talk about my life whoo that's right whoo that's right being on a panel there we go it's my favorite way to what day is it oh never mind i'm working you're working you're working are you still working every single day for the rest of your life yeah okay good night fodder good night uh good night tater good night people out there midi and brewing you've got scientific beer fabulous i like a science beer all beer through the science of fermentation oh yeah i'm only there one night ed so we'll have to figure out um i know which beer there's a brewery uh two doors down from where kiki lives if i'm not mistaken uh it's a good it's not a brewery it's a brew pub it has many options it is dumberly distance not yet night that's done well kiki hasn't offered for me to stay at her house yet so let's wait for that to happen first oh i thought that was a given you're staying in my house yeah you're staying in my house yeah they have a basement set aside for you it almost has a computer totally it almost has a computer it has a 4k tv it doesn't have a computer yet fabulous concrete basement with an elect with a uh with an exercise bicycle and some weight cannot and what's nice about that is when you crawl back from the brew pub it's all downstairs from that yeah have you done this before justin this sounds like a thing i've done before doesn't it it sounds like sounds like i know the path like i've counted you know the path so well there wasn't much stumbling let's just lay over for a flight ah i was gonna say justin you went to portland without me i'm so hurt for like five minutes yeah long enough for me to pick him up for the air from the airport and then for us to eat food go right back to the airport yeah oh your internets are slow identity a tale of two airports i must say i i think i think i i i landed in the old airport that was built in like the 1940s and then like took off from the one built like a day before i got there it was that a terminal discrepancy is it yeah there was there was like like old airport wing brand new airport wing and they were just so radically different and and in the eras that they came from like in the old airport ring everybody there was like smoking cigarettes and wearing fedoras or whatever yeah all the men were in suits and ties and the women were in school skirts yeah that's women were in dresses but then you went back out into the other one and then suddenly it was like in color again yeah it's really weird yeah all right oh jd packet packet paquet paquet paquet over on youtube says i love your guys channel i watch every week oh okay thanks good night beckham who else good night tater good night i guess dale poko already took off it is that time and yeah erican ak i like the portland airport too it now has a movie theater that's interesting so if you're just having to stay for a long time in the airport yeah go if you have like a four hour layover yeah go watch a movie enjoy yourself thank you hot rod yes i often forget to talk into the mic different than it does when i talk right yeah i'm getting some audio from identity four we got files coming at us oh coming in hot the nanny four's internet is not is just being stupid stupid uploading downloading streaming and has too many windows open all at the same time you guys i can i could fly first class to portland for only three hundred and twenty five dollars that's first class for yeah an hour and a half flight yeah i know no first class just even on these short flights you know why risk it yeah i always roll not just on this really short meanwhile i could play i could fly basic economy in which i'm not allowed to carry on for very cheap yes you can but as a zookeeper you always travel with carrion that's true back to the conversations you're having before about how i love dead things i had a conversation with my daughter about um i think did i already talk about this maybe this was two weeks ago but she was she was telling me she wanted to be a animal doctor but not the zoo kind uh-huh i was like oh okay so but if you're not the zoo kind you know you're only gonna be seeing like either dogs and cats maybe birds or horses and cows maybe right like those are the other kinds of animal doctors if you're not the zoo doctor you don't get to see all the animals because oh no i want to be a zoo doctor i mean she's not asking me like how do they get the how do they get like the the lions all the way to the zoo doctor because as we have this thing it's a window you can walk by when they do yeah the lions don't go there and i know that's like i took pause i'm like well okay they don't put them on a leash i'm like maybe they put them to sleep and then put them on a big cart and i'm like no no you know what they probably for the big animals they probably bring the doctor equipment to the animal and that's what they do yeah that was correct okay cool and it's just like how do they get in there like do they climb over the the well first you do this that's step one that's step one no legit so this is one of our vet staff has an actual old-fashioned long armed blow dart wow because it's not as hard on impact as a dart gun so if if you're doing it in fairly close quarters like a hundred feet or less he'll just wow but if it's any further than that then they use an actual dart gun right wow but i had to explain that there's like a backside a separate space back there where the animal goes at night and that there's an access door on that side from but like i had to like kind of break it up but i think she needs to wants to and needs to see a behind the scenes of those um and i've had that tour at my local zoo when i was a kid but i've never seen it offered anytime since so i would look into the zoo camp that is offered right i did at your zoo and ask them if they do hospital tours as part of zoo camp because that is often the case okay i'll i'll hit them up next time yeah so at um at the same versus goes you some of the older kids like we have a conservation camp for seventh graders they usually tour the zoo hospital and i don't know that they let the you know four and a half five years i don't know if they want but they might who knows what i'm saying is like different zoos depending on um how their hospital is set up sometimes they can accommodate the little ones so and the zoo that we have does have like it's it's behind the glass when they're where they do the checkups and so we've seen uh we've seen a fair amount we've seen everything from a wallaby and to a snake uh getting a checkup or over the but um my favorite is when um when some of the primates need particular medical care they'll actually call in human physicians because it's similar enough so um like we've had human cardiologists come in and do um heart surgery on gorillas in the past and we had a an optometrist come in and work on our sea lions eyes recently and then we'll um for the for the primates again we will also have human dentists come and work on their teeth can't be tough if you're a sea lion you need glasses because you don't have ears to support well sea lions do that's one of the differences between sea lions and seals sea lions have ear flaps i'm picturing seal yeah yeah yeah oh bleak has shared a cute elephant video with us blare oh well i i left the check because i thought we were leaving yeah yeah no he just bleak just said there's an adorable elephant video on your twitter so check your twitter we'll do for the adorbs adorable uh yeah i did not see the story of the king cobra that got chemotherapy i didn't either wow interesting really snake at the denver zoo got chemotherapy wow i can't believe we went to denver and didn't go to the zoo we do chemotherapy but we also do um actually acupuncture for some animals and cold laser therapy all those things are done yeah i know acupuncture for animals i'm not i'm not gonna get into it but it exists wow it's not my department it's actually administered by a porcupine uh oh yeah sometimes a hedgehog yeah sometimes a hedgehog oh my goodness uh what was i gonna say right before we were gonna leave we were gonna leave and you're gonna book tickets to come here and is there anything else happening this weekend ah science so much science there's so much i'm running a blank because i've got a lot of things on my mind and i don't know what to say if kiki uh there's a lot of things to say it must be time for me to say say good night blare good night blare say good night justin good night justin good night good night kiki good night everyone have a wonderful week we will be back next wednesday and we will see you on the internets in the meantime hope you have a good week