Coming up on DTNS, MediaTek's latest system on a chip can claim a lot of firsts. Microsoft wants to make Edge the all-in-one browser. And are you ready for robots in your company cafeteria? This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, November 19th, 2021. In Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm lovely Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Richard Raffalino. And from Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. Completing the Ohio trifecta and drawing the top tech stories. I'm Len Peralta. And from nowhere near Ohio, I'm the show's producer, Roger Shane. Roger and I, we are outnumbered today. We've got the Ohio trifecta. That's how you know it's good. A show full of buckeyes. It's a good Friday. We were talking before the show about getting into car accidents. And I don't know how to protect yourself in those situations. There is a longer version of the show. It's called Good Day Internet. If you haven't joined yet, please do by becoming a Patreon at patreon.com slash DTNS. Also, big thanks to our top patrons. Today, they include Paul Reese, Dr. X17, and Dustin Campbell. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Flipkart acquired a majority stake in the online pharmacy startup Sastra Sundar, which works with over 490 pharmacies in India. Flipkart plans to use the stake to launch a healthcare vertical called Flipkart Health Plus. Competitors like Amazon India, Reliance Retail, and Tata Digital have all either launched or acquired online pharmacies in the last year. The US Federal Reserve and FTIC formalized the computer security incident notification requirements for banking organizations and their bank service providers. Under this new regulation, as of May 2022, so in the future, but only by a little bit, banks must report major cybersecurity incidents to federal officials within 36 hours. It also outlines when banks must report cybersecurity incidents to customers as well. Twitter updated its developer documentation to state it was in the process of discontinuing support for AMP sites. AMP support will be fully retired in Q4 2021. Twitter's Android and iOS apps currently load full web pages rather than AMP versions, so well on their way. Twitter also began rolling out its in-app tipping feature on Android after launching on iOS in September. Facebook said it's testing controls to adjust people's ranking preferences in its newsfeed. This could potentially increase posts from friends and family while decreasing content from groups, for example. The company would also make existing features that impact newsfeed content like favorites and snooze easier to access. And next year, the UK will update the highway code to bar drivers from using devices to take photos or to take photos or play games while driving. The rules will specifically make clear these bands apply even when stopped at a traffic light or otherwise stopped in traffic, but you are still driving the car. Calling and texting while driving has already been illegal under the highway code. Hands-free devices are still legal while driving and the rules will exempt contactless payments using a phone while stationary, so Starbucks is still in luck. All right, let's talk a little bit more about a flagship chip that potentially could change things going forward. Rob tells us about it. Absolutely, strap in, because this is a long one, you're about to go ahead and read this. So seeing a media tech SOC on mobile devices can often lead to an assumption that the device won't have top-notch performance. While the company made stabs at a flagship SOC a few years ago, it's found a lot of success in the mid-range and budget segments. With this strategy, media tech now has 40% of the mobile SOC market share along with 28% of 5G SOCs. Now the company is trying its hand at flagship performance with the ambitious Dimensity 9000 mobile SOC. Media tech is going for a lot of firsts on this new 9000. It's the first publicly announced chip to use the newly designed core in one high power, three mid-tier and four efficiency core configurations. Media tech claims geek bench multi-core performance on par with Apple's A15 chip. In the Android world, media tech says it offers 35% better performance while bringing in 37% more efficiency than other flagships. It claims 35% better graphics performance and 60% improved power efficiency with its 10-core Mali G710 GPU compared to other flagships. Its AI processing unit claims 16% better performance than Google's Tensor SOC. Its ISP will support AK AV1 decoding, support up to 180 Hertz HDR displays, supports up to 320 megapixel image sensors or up to 332 megapixel sensors used simultaneously. Even its 5G modem claims some impressive specs with the first use of 3CC carrier aggregation at sub six gigahertz to support downloads up to seven gigabits per second. The modem does lack millimeter wave support, which is media tech is saying that is based on needs outside of the US. Commercial devices for this chip are expected in Q1 2022. So what I think is gonna go on here, you're gonna see companies like Oppo, One, Nokia, even Samsung on their lower devices like the A32, they are about to get really, really competitive with higher end devices that generally come from Samsung and Apple, but you're still gonna see them at this mid-range or maybe higher mid-range price point where you can get a really high-end phone as far as the way that it works, but at the prices of a six, seven, $800 device as compared to one that may cost as much as twice as much as that. And I know TSMC's new N4 mode is, it's a big deal of the announcement. And Rob, it does sound like if you're interested in this, you're pretty pumped, it's pretty cool. But for someone like me who's like, cool, how does this make my next smartphone better? So I think that what this is doing is that, you still wanna have folks who I wanna get whatever Samsung S is the high end, I still wanna get whatever iPhone, the new Ikean 14, whatever the highest end model is, you're still gonna have that. Well, this really does, particularly folks who are into Android, it's gonna allow you to get a relatively high-end phone at a mid-price. I don't think anyone would expect these MediaTek SOC-driven devices to cost the same as what like the new Galaxy S22 will when it comes out next year. But you might see specs that actually operate like that. So I think you're just gonna see, once again, the utilitarianism of phones to where I don't need to have the highest end, I can get kind of close to it and maybe pay half as much.  Obviously they have, they make a lot of chips, but if they're the first to announce this, but not necessarily based on this new ARM design, not the first to ship with that. I know they're saying Q1 2022, not too far off, you should maybe see devices at CES or something like that, they're gonna be using this new chip. That comparison to the Apple performance though, again, as a chip nerd, a lot of things to be excited about here, just kind of cool design choices that they're making, cool specs that they're showing off. As an end user, you just really care, it's like, okay, is this laggy? Can it support? Does the display look nice when I scroll on it? You know what that high refresh rate does? Can I watch all of my media on it? It's not gonna be a problem. Are my games playing nice? That benchmark of Apple A15 performance is kind of top of the mobile field, depending on the benchmark that you're looking at, obviously all those caveats, if it can hit that, and again, not necessarily hit the Apple price point, like Rob was saying, a big shift in how we perceive media tech chips going forward for sure. Rich, I think you're, go ahead, Rob. I just wanna say like the tensor processor, it just came out. I don't even know, you can say a few months ago, but this is saying that these devices are gonna have 16% better performance than something that Google just released. So like I said, I think you're really gonna see high-end devices with that low mid-range to mid-range price set, which is gonna excite a lot of Android users. Well, should we talk about robots, everyone? Please. Please say yes. Okay, because we're going to. Wired had a great write-up today about everyday robots. You might say, everyday robots, what's that? Everyday robots is actually a fleet of 100 robots, 100 plus, in Alphabet X's Mountain View headquarters. And those robots have a job, and that is to keep things nice and neat within those headquarters. So for example, picture this, at 1.30 in the afternoon, a one-armed robot enters the company's cafe, has four wheels, has some cameras, light our sensors on the head to understand where to go for navigation. The point of this robot is to clean the tables in the cafe, because, I don't know, maybe somebody left a mess after their sandwich, and have as little disturbance to humans who might also be in the cafe as possible. So after determining a table is empty, and again, the lighter and the cameras are going to be able to do that to the best of its ability, the everyday robot covers the surface of the table with a disinfectant, it's clear, using a squeegee arm, which is connected to its arm, and then withdraws the arm to squeeze out the excess fluid into a bucket attached to a space. Now, Wired notes that after a few weeks, people eating lunch are seemingly already used to sharing their space with the fleet. Now, you might say, how many people are really in the cafeteria? Well, not that many people are in an office 100% of the time at this point, but it's not nobody. It's sort of a good time to test this type of thing. Everyday Robots is a project of X. The cafe is one of several testing spots on the Google campus, where a small percentage of employees have returned to in-person work. The Everyday Project wants to act as a bit of a proof of concept that robots can operate in the wild, living amongst the rest of us, not just in controlled environments like factories, where they already do really well. Previously, the company tested robots sorting trash into proper recycling bins, for example. Norwegian engineer Hans-Peter Brandmo joined X back in 2015. Now the leading everyday robot effort after Andy Rubin departed the company, and you might say, okay, well, Everyday Robots sound useful, but what about the robots that do backflips? I've seen those YouTube videos, or scale walls, or buildings, or do superhuman Spider-Man type stuff. Brandmo tells Wired, quote, you might say our robots are slow, but what they're actually doing is fully autonomous, and they're working in the world that we live in, and they're actually learning to do things, simple tasks that are getting more and more advanced. We're bringing robots that can live and work alongside us into the world that we live in, as opposed to us moving into the world that they live in. Cleaning tables, not the only thing that Everyday Robots has learned to do, a project to help them open conference room doors in order to check carbon levels inside closed conference rooms to make sure that humans are safe to go in after the fact, took about 10 hours, and then once you get it right with one robot, they all learn it. There have been ballet trials to see how well they can mimic the moves of a classically trained human dancer, for example. So we're not stopping with conference rooms, everybody. And one of the things that's really interesting about this is that Google has been using, or Everyday Robots has been using virtual training to amplify this, right? So you're not limited to, oh, there's not a lot of people in the cafeteria, so perhaps you're not gonna have this huge sample size, or you're limited by the amount of robot runtime that you have, like theoretically, these robots can literally only be in one place at a time, so you're limited by that. This has been a huge trend that we've seen with Waymo, we've been seeing this with what Facebook is kind of offering with a lot of their toolkits for like kind of the soft robotics and stuff like that, where you're able to, with machine learning, kind of do this virtual training much more rapidly, so you can do stuff in 10 hours that would ordinarily, you'd have to build up a huge real-world data set. And then with that, you can then refine it going forward, which is theoretically just opening the door for a lot of these more autonomous use cases, and if they can figure out the economics of this, it makes it very interesting. I like the fact that they are using that AI learning, where they're running simulations to figure out what the robots are gonna do, because you pretty much know how the robots are going to act. What is nice, or the timing is nice, is that we are still in this post-pandemic, the cafeterias are not gonna be that crowded, so the unpredictable part are gonna be people. I know me.  So... Rob, how did you? Fewer people, while these things actually fine-tune, they're training, they fine-tune how they operate. It's probably a good thing as compared to just having a full campus of people, and you have a fair amount of them like me, you're gonna mess with the robot to see if you can get it off this game. I mean, I gotta say, not that those of you who are like, I work for Alphabet, and I don't wanna go back to the office ever, and those of you who say, I want to go back to the office, and there's a small crossover of people who actually are in the office at least part-time. This is a great time to test these sorts of things. Now, sure, Google's campus is one of the largest in the world. All companies can't perform the same trials as Google, certainly not, and this is very early stage days, but it sounds like, and again, this wired article, they spend a little bit of time just observing and seeing if it, I don't know, seemed like some crazy novelty where everybody was like, oh my God, the robots are coming in, and that was not the case. It sounded as though at least the folks, and again, these are folks that probably work in the ex-department in some form, so they're sort of used to this, but felt that it was pretty unintrusive. All right, well, next up here, Microsoft will expand its online shopping tools and Edge plan to roll out support for price tracking on recently viewed items. Microsoft already offers a lot of kind of e-commerce-related tools like price comparisons, price history, and built-in coupons. Microsoft is also piloting a feature to make it easier to change a leaked password. Edge already includes a leaked password monitoring feature, but this new feature would then automatically navigate you to the site to change your password directly, and then Edge has a password suggestion tool to create a strong unique password as well. In other browser news, Brave announced this week it was adding integrated crypto wallet support to its browser rather than using an extension, and it offered an official Brave extension now that it's just built in the browser. This adds to a number of cryptocurrency and privacy features that really has been the browser's hallmark since it's kind of been out there. Seems though like kind of the bigger narrative about this is that across the board, we're seeing browsers just getting more complex. Some would call this feature rich. Other might say, hey, everything's getting a little bloated out there. Seems like every major browser is adding features. Just this year, Chrome has offered things like instant captioning for video as well as text fragment linking so you can link directly to jump to a specific text. Firefox is at focus mode and expanded user profiles. Opera launched cashback shopping features, kind of following along with what Edge has been doing. Kind of like looking at these features added to there. Are we past the point where browsers can be, I don't know, just a browser, Rob? I'm curious what your thoughts are. Yeah, I think so. In the case specifically with Edge, they have for last year or two, it's been faster than Chrome. It opens up faster than Chrome. It's actually a really nice browsing experience when all you want to do is browse. The problem for Microsoft, people are still using Chrome. Chrome is, it is the browser of choice for just about Earth. So I think what Microsoft and with Brave what they're deciding to do is like, well, you know what, we have the speed, let's try to keep the speed, but let's add other things into our browser. Now we know that that's going to make the browser heavy and maybe run a little slower, but can we pull some market share by putting things in our browser that maybe Chrome has to have added with an extension? It's just, you can just do this thing and as you can just do this thing in Brave and see if we can pull some market share there because honestly it's not really close compared to what Chrome has over these other browsers. And I think this is kind of a side effect, another side effect of basically every browser outside of what Safari being Chromium based also is like, you literally can't, I don't want to say you can't, it's very hard to differentiate in performance when you're all using the same open source, you know, kind of platform to build off of.  And we've seen Microsoft utilizing their OS advanced, you know, they're baked in OS advantage with Edge to kind of push people to the browser as well. That's kind of a little bit of a separate issue. And I think the other thing is this also, you know, kind of going to Brave with moving an extension into a core browser feature is that extensions, I've just seen like they're just kind of an endless security nightmare. And so the ability, like the idea of, oh, it's nice to be able to extend only get the features that I want. I think a lot of browser makers are rethinking that from a security perspective as well. You know, Brave announcing the integrated crypto wallet rather than extension into the browser. Now this is Brave, Brave known for security, privacy. That's what Brave does well. That's great. I've had a little experience with this sort of stuff in extension land with other browsers. Shall not be named, Chrome, Firefox looking at you. And you know, where you're kind of like, even with a VPN, this is a little, it's a little squirrely. I think that what Microsoft is doing seems to be catching up with what some other browsers who may have less market share just do better. And that makes perfect sense. It will be interesting to see what a browser does, six months to a year from now. And I guess if you want just like a completely stripped down browser, there's still like the open source Chromium browser which theoretically has a lot of this stuff stripped out that is available. And there are some open source options and stuff like that that definitely don't have the market share and don't have the development resources necessarily but can still provide you I guess with that purely stripped down version.  One way to let us know is in our subreddit, submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Our friend Nika Monford is back with an entrepreneur who's created an app that offers automated investment and education tools for the black community. Take it away, Nika. Hi, this is Nika Monford, AKA TechSavidiva of The Snava West Show. In the Tech In While Black segment, I will bring awareness to a black technology leader who is advancing the tech community through their innovations across the spectrum of industries. Today in Tech In While Black, the spotlight is on Trevor Rozier-Bird, founder of Stack Well Capital Inc., a fintech company aimed at helping build generational wealth in the black community while making investing more accessible to those who have historically been shut out. The mobile application delivers automated investment portfolio tools and education to help build black wealth. Trevor has nearly 20 years' experience in the asset management community, first as a lawyer and then as a business executive. He earned his BA in political science and theology from Boston College and his JD from Boston University's School of Law. He has worked as several law firms as an associate and senior associate. He then transitioned to become an accomplished Wall Street executive by serving as vice president and managing director at State Street, which is one of the world's premier and largest investment firms. Additionally, he is a member of Launchpad Venture Group where he serves as an angel investor advisor and mentor. Stack Well is currently taking names on its early access waiting list through its website, stackwellcapital.com and will conduct a private beta later this year with an expected full public release in early 2022. The work that Trevor and Stack Well is doing is most certainly vital to my community. This is game-changing, I mean, live-changing work and I for one cannot wait to see this venture flourish. To find out more about Trevor Rozier-Bird and his work, you can follow him on Twitter at trunnerrb and by visiting stackwellcapital.com. History is being made in real time every single day, so let's celebrate it now. When we are aware of all innovative voices, especially those in underrepresented groups, the tech community thrives. Be sure to tune into the next Teching While Black where we highlight black tech innovators from around the globe. Thank you, Nika Monford, obviously, of the Snob OS podcast and NF Frequent Contributor to us on this very show. Thank you, Nika. All right, well, Sarah, Rob, here's a new thing you need to hear about NFTs. Just kidding, they're everywhere just today. This is just the rundown of NFT stories we saw in the headlines today. We had the NFL is selling NFTs attached to game day tickets with Ticketmaster. We had Macy selling Thanksgiving Day Parade themed NFTs with proceeds donated to charity, and Adidas will sell NFTs tied to an unspecified event and you don't really own them. Anyway, it can be a lot. If you can't keep up on all the NFT twos and believe me, you probably can't. Australian artist and programmer Joffrey Huntley has a solution for you. The NFT Bay, modeled to look almost identical to the Pirate Bay. The site actually offers a 15 terabyte torrent that claims to offer all the NFTs from the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. That'd be clear. Huntley considers this to be an art project, not like he doesn't really expect you, I guess, a ton of people to download all of the 15 terabytes even if you could. But he does make an interesting point about NFTs kind of as part of this. Huntley claims that most NFTs don't actually store any media on the blockchain itself. Rather, most often they just hold a link to the content the token is attached to. If this links out to an online data store or some other web server, like Google Drive or even AWS, something like that, it likely at some point may not be available, potentially compromising the value of the NFT itself. Huntley himself thinks NFTs have a future as a form of digital representation, but is skeptical that it actually requires a blockchain. He's thinking about the value of, he compared it to the blue check mark on Twitter as that kind of token having value, but it's more about expression of representation than necessarily being tied to the blockchain. So, Rob, are you gonna be downloading the 15 terabytes to get all your NFT artwork? I won't be downloading the 15 terabytes. That I won't be doing. But I am interested in just seeing how NFTs are being used with media, with music, with art. And I had someone explain it to me, and that's it, just put in layman's terms, because why would I pay money for something that I can get for free? And the way they explained it to me was that, think of when you do a Google image search. You can go see millions, hundreds of millions of images when you search for them on Google. You don't own that image. You don't necessarily have a right to that image, but you can actually see the high resolution expression of that image when you go look at it on Google. When you have the NFT, you have a license, or you have a right to say that you have a piece, or you have some, you know, ownership is probably not the right way to say it, but you actually have some license to that image, to where you could then sell your version of it to someone else, that you could pass it down to someone, and there is an associated value, whereas you can't just go take a copy of the Mona Lisa or a picture of the Mona Lisa that you get off of Google and say, hey, I want to start selling these. I now own this, but with an NFT, in some ways you can kind of do that. I know that I'm probably have NFT experts are saying, oh, Rob, you're doing a horrible job, but you know, the way I understand it is that you don't own the thing, you own a right, or a license to the thing that you are ultimately able to pass on for monetary value. And one of the things that I think Huntley kind of points to, but I think also deserves some clarification, is that whole point about, hey, this just points to a URL, so like if you buy this, an NFT representing a digital artwork, that may actually, you know, not be available in the future. There is an incentive though, for whoever the creator is, or the owner, or like the platform that's hosting that, because there is a royalty dynamic to NFTs. So like, that's one of the reasons they're really, they're interesting to a lot of artists, is they get a royalty anytime the NFT changes hands. So like if you're an artist, you have an incentive to keep that piece of art available in the way that it's documented in the blockchain, so that you can, that it won't decrease the value of the NFT and kind of go forward with that. So I do think that is something that as a consumer facing product, sometimes it does get forgotten, in that, you know, the artist or whoever the, I guess the maintainer is, has a vested interest in keeping that available. Huntley's point is still well taken though, that you know, if it's just pointing to a URL, that may not be there at all times. This kind of just, you know, to go back to our conversation about the all in one browser and what a browser can't do, this feels like the same idea.  And if there is a more central repository, sort of browser ask, you know, that is able to make a lot of this, these commodities more available to people who are interested, even if they're just browsing or even if they're buying, I think that that's gonna be what this looks like in the not too distant future. Yeah, and I think that's, it kind of reminds me of the challenge of the web initially, like when we think about, like the blockchain seems like this othering thing, like where it's like, all right, it's this ledger, it exists out there, it's permanent, but like, I feel like as we become more comfortable with that, the idea of, like to your point about central repository and NFT enthusiasts tell you, the blockchain is your central repository that you can always find all this stuff. And that would be like, But as a browser, that's what I'm talking about. And I feel like it's, a lot of it is a front end problem and also a still newness to this as a consumer product, certainly. And the same way that the early internet, when it was text-based had the same, you know, kind of a same perception issue. We need, we're at the links version of blockchain right now, and we need Mozilla or the Netscape navigator to come in, right? Something like that. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. I will just say this, if you buy digital art, download it along with your NFT, save yourself from trouble because you're right, it could, that link could go to nothing at some point. So if you're buying NFTs, make sure you download them and physically have a copy of whatever digital thing it is you purchased. Rich, what's in the mailbag today? Sarah, I'm so glad you asked, because Michael wrote in with some thoughts about the whole Apple repair program that they announced this week. He said, I thought of a different angle on Apple on the whole right to repair part sales thing. They're gonna be able to sell specialized tools for phone repair to thousands of individuals who otherwise would have gone to a central repair shop. There's probably decent profitability in enabling people to repair their own devices using a guide that you provide. I view it as a, oh, I need the special action, or Apple suction cup to remove my glass, and also this Apple screwdriver. There's gold in them, their hills. And Michael, I would say certainly, like just kind of reading this, certainly Apple could make some money off of that. I would just say though that like, I fix its level of profitability is at a several orders of magnitude different than Apple's existing level of profitability. So maybe that was definitely a consideration. I'm sure they wouldn't do it to lose money, but you know. There's a limit. Well, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this whole story. Apple sells a $20 microfiber cloth that has an Apple logo on it that you could get without the Apple logo for like a $1.99. Why not do this with other stuff? It's just, is one of those things to where, you know what? We have to allow people to fix these things. You're gonna have some people who are gonna want to do it themselves. They'll sell them the official Apple branded version of the screwdriver, let's just, you know, they'll sell them the Apple branded version of the suction cup as compared to letting them go to some other company where they can buy those things and we not actually make a profit off of it. Well, if you have feedback on anything that we talk about on this show, anything we might talk about on a future show, we would love your feedback. The way to send it to us is via email, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We also want to give a special thanks to Najee Najumi, who's one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support. Najee, keep it coming Najee. You're the best. Also thank you to Lynn Peralta, who's been drawing up a storm this entire show. Lynn, what do you got for us? Well, you know, before the show started, I was gonna draw everyday robots versus pirates. I think, oh man, who is the winner? In the end, I went with the pirates because pirates are fun to draw. Robots, I've drawn robots before, but I don't think I've ever drawn a pirate for this show before. And this is a pirate, you know, and it's also a great idea to use all the pirate vernaculars. So he's saying, yo-ho-ho, 15 terabytes of NFTs, maybe quite the booty. You own nothing, scurvy dog. Arr, so I don't know. That was taken for what it's worth. This is actually, I'm probably gonna turn this into an NFT after the show as well. So that could be in that 15 terabyte group of stuff as well. If you want to get this, if you just get it at my Patreon, patreon.com forward slash Lynn or at my online store, lendperaltastore.com, where of course I am drawing custom holiday cards for all who want them. So check it out, lendperaltastore.com. Excellent. Yeah, you might have said, well, you know, robots versus pirates, the pirates kinda take over the robots. They're good pirates. I agree. After all. Rob Dunwood, also good to have you on the show today. Let folks know where they can keep up with what you've been up to lately. Well, just chugging along with a couple of podcasts, the SMR podcast and my new show, The Tech John. And you can reach me at Rob Dunwood at all things. So just at Rob Dunwood, you'll find me. Excellent. Well, folks, you probably already know this, but just a reminder, we're live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 21 30 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We would love to have you join us live if you can. We'll be back on Monday with Robert here. Talk to you then. This week's episode of Daily Tech New Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer, Tom Merritt, host producer and writer, Sarah Lane, executive producer and booker, Roger Chang, producer, writer and host, Rich Stravolino, video producer and Twitch producer, Joe Coontz, associate producer, Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer, Dan Campos, news host, writer and producer, Jen Cutter, science correspondent, Dr. Nikki Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator, Zoe Dettardine, Armad's Beatmaster, W. Scottus One, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Jack Shid, Steve Guadirama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, J.D. Gallup, Bodden Hustina by Dan Christensen, video host and other, video feed by Sean Wei, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, ACAST, Creative Arts Arts and Len Peralta, live art performed by Len Peralta, ACAST ad support by Trace Gaynor, Patreon support from Stephanie Brown. Contributors for this week's show include Justin Robert Young and Rob Dunwood. Guests on this show include Stephanie Humphrey and thanks to all our patrons who make every show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.


Bosses of Nerd Night East Bay. This is Nerd Night East Bay number 61. We've been doing this for a while One of the things we like to do is we like to make super discounted tickets for next month's show So if these talks sound appealing to you get on your phones because this is only Zane can you please bring my mic up? All right, hopefully that's louder Sort of I'll fix it for the speaker So we have a few matters of business before we start the show first of all the speakers get paid and beer and love So please give them lots of love, especially tonight. Ah, that sounds better. I could hear myself Give them love tonight. You'll notice that there's no laptop on stage All of the speakers are basically working without notes because we had a last-minute HDMI cable snafu so The show will go on in the back. There's a grilled cheese guy He just started a brick-and-water restaurant So if you're in San Francisco, look him up get grilled cheese there and then get grilled cheese here tonight We love having him here and he comes out because you guys eat likewise We're here because the bar likes having us here because you drink so be sure to grab a drink between all the talks It also makes things like audio or HDMI cable snafu's and audio levels just go a little bit smoother We have a great lineup Before I get started It's now just Scott and I I don't know if people were here last month, but our long-term co-boss Rebecca Cohen Had to move to New York So Scott and I would love your help if you want to help volunteer for the show Come find us if you want to give a talk about something you're passionate about you could be a nerd about anything Sign up. There's an email list next to the library table now on with the show Tonight's lineup is awesome. We have fruit flies. We have Star Wars and we have trauma So I want to talk to you about astronauts not that astronaut, but earth-based Astronauts in particular animals in space anyone know who this is Anyone know what like is famous for? Yeah, she's a dog. She's in space Turns out there were dogs in space since about the 50s. She's the first one to go in orbit around the earth 1957 she's not the first animal to come back alive. In fact, she didn't come up back alive these dogs did in the 1960s, so that's a Belka and Again, I don't have my notes. I could almost read that These dogs went up in 1960 with 42 mice and two rats and they're almost the first animals to leave earth and come back alive This this poor monkey did not beat them. This is Albert He did actually make it back into sub orbit alive, but he had a parachute failure, so But before Albert in 1947 we sent these guys into space So a v2 rocket left white sands, New Mexico traveled a hundred nine kilometers up All these guys on board all of them came back alive The reason we sent them up was we wanted to use these fruit flies to understand how radiation affects DNA It turns out that we've been doing that for a while too This is science articles saying artificial transmutation of the gene Basically in the 40s we started to understand how x-rays affect DNA how Radiation from outer space and high orbital altitudes affects DNA and that's essentially because fruit flies are a really easy animal model and We still send them to space, so this is a call for the International Space Station to send our fruit flies into space Fortunately, not all fruit flies are astronauts some get to have fun research as well, so there's a surprising amount of research on feeding alcohol to flies This this paper may I've shown you a lot of papers here. This science article may have my favorite visual abstract essentially they Let you know flies fall in love or they paired flies that you know wouldn't have sex with this broken heart and Basically put the male and flies from each of those populations into a tube that tube contains some lines that only had food and some lines that only Sorry that had food and ethanol and turns out that the popular presses way of reporting This is much much funnier than the grass and such It turns out if you feed Different flies they'll get drunk at different rates, so that's cool And it also turns out that some of the flies are actually getting real benefits from drinking So in this study, they fed alcohol to fruit flies They saw that these fruit flies did not become as infected by wasps or wasps that had already been infected them Died due to the alcohol exposure, and so wasp into infected flies also drank more I guess to alleviate their pain or to kill the wasps So now to talk a lot more about fruit flies and eating and drinking please welcome to the stage our first speaker That's good. Okay. I'm a graduate student. I'm a graduate student in Kristen Scott's lab at UC Berkeley And in the Scott lab we study an animal that I'm all I'm sure you're all already pretty familiar with because you've seen it Accumulating in your in your kitchens on hot summer days and that animal is of course the fruit fly Drosophila lana gaster What we do with the fruit fly in the Scott lab is use it as a tool to understand fundamental questions in neuroscience Can everyone hear me now, okay Well, yeah, we use this little flight understand fundamental questions in neuroscience and we do it all in this room on the UC Berkeley campus Which as you can see is filled with boxes and boxes of vials and each one of these vials actually contains like hundreds of fruit flies So we spend all of our time here sitting in this room basically looking very carefully at fruit flies That might seem like a strange way to spend your time let alone like the bulk of your 20s But nonetheless in fact around the world there are hundreds of labs that look just like this and they're filled with boxes of fruit flies and Based like 24 year olds looking very carefully at those fruit flies And in the US alone those labs receive hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding So your taxpayer money for the exclusive purpose of understanding how these tiny creatures work So what I'd like to do tonight on the next 20 minutes or so is is two things first I want to tell you a little bit about why we think it's a good idea to study fruit flies And why we think it's a good idea to use your money to do that And then I want to tell you a little bit about what I've learned by studying fruit flies in particular what I've learned about how their nervous systems Regulate a really fundamental decision that every animal including humans makes every day And that's a decision of whether to eat food or drink water I want to start though with this question because the answer to this question is really the reason that We do what we do and the short answer is that people who study fruit flies are motivated by Fundamental mysteries about how the natural world works The mystery that motivates me and that motivates other people who study the the nervous systems of fruit flies is The fact that animals like for example fruit flies and humans In contrast to every other living thing that we know and in fact in contrast to everything that we know of in the universe Have this special property and that property is that Animals do things they move around the world and they interact with each other in a way that's totally unique and I don't see if you ever seen a dog run around in a backyard pretty remarkable So another way to kind of communicate this mystery is just ask the question What's so special about this dog that allows it to run around in the backyard and bark and have fun And what's so special about the the human behind this camera who's taking this movie and then for example Posting it on YouTube that sets that sets these animals apart from everything else in this video Which is essentially inanimate just standing still And so of course obviously people have asked that question for a long time What's special about us and what's special about dogs that allows us to do these weird and amazing things and To a first approximation the answer is that the dog in this video and the person behind this camera Both have a special organ that nothing else in this video has and that organ is the nervous system And actually humans have known for a long time that nervous systems are in a pretty important way The the reason why animals do what they do and the way that nervous systems do that is They take on some information from the external world They do something to that information and then they use it to make animals do stuff like bark or run around in the backyard Or or post things on YouTube or give talks at bars So then the the mystery then really becomes not just what makes animals special But how do nervous systems do the things that they do that that make animals behave in these weird and remarkable ways And in a very real sense This is like the central question of neuroscience today How do nervous systems take an information do something to it and then use that Processed information to make animals do stuff if we want to even have a chance Of answering that question we really need to know three things or to have kind of three tools at our disposal And it's actually not until very recently that we've had all three of these tools The first tool is to have an animal to study And the reason you need an animal to study is that there's no nervous system in the universe that we know of that Doesn't exist inside a particular animal So if you want to study nervous systems, you have to pick a particular animal to study The second tool you need is is a way to observe the fundamental activity of the nervous system Which in the case of animals is the electrical activity of the cells that make up this this organ the cells of course the neurons And finally if you want to be able to Understand the relationship between this neural activity and some behaviors You're gonna want to be able to manipulate that activity and ask What's the effect of that manipulation on on some behavior that you care about So the next few slides I want to kind of go in a little bit of detail how in fruit flies We have achieved kind of all three of these tools So of course the answer to the first question is is fruit flies they are indeed an animal and we can study them Okay, okay closer. Is that is that better? Okay, you should you should just tell me what you can hear. That's okay So on the left here is the head of a fruit fly and about the same scale on the right is The brain of a fruit fly so in magenta Kind of the first thing that is pretty obvious from this picture is that fruit fly brains look kind of weird and very different from And maybe pictures of brains that you see in that represent the human nervous system And that's because fruit flies are very different from humans. So for example, they're they're obviously much much smaller And actually as a result of being smaller, they have many many fewer neurons And as a result of that those neurons can interact with each other via the structures called synapses In many many fewer ways than then for example the neurons in a human nervous system can So the point of the slide is not just that flies are different from humans But in fact, they're they're much the nervous systems of humans Operate by it so for example What neural activity means in a human nervous system is the same thing as what it means in a flies nervous system So that's just the electrical activity of the cells the neurons that make up the nervous system We call that that electrical activity action potentials Neurons communicate with each other in in humans and in flies using actually exactly the same molecules those molecules can be Inhibitory or excitatory some examples are GABA and glutamate And finally some some molecules that we actually associate with like pretty complex emotional states in humans Are actually also found in fruit flies and at the extent that we can understand They're doing exactly the same thing in fruit flies that they're doing in humans So for example flies get diabetes and that's because they they don't use their insulin properly Okay, so the take on message is that They're the same fundamental principles and one result of that is that fruit flies actually do Fundamentally many of the same things that humans do so for example, they When they get thirsty, they will seek out and consume water When they get hungry, they'll seek out and consume food And when they get tired, they'll take a nap Food flies also do some more kind of complicated behaviors that maybe will will surprise you maybe not I don't know For example fruit flies fight they fight in much the same way that humans fight by boxing hitting each other in the face This is a picture of two male fruit flies boxing over a food source Fruit flies also sing so they don't sing with their vocal cords like like humans do because they don't have vocal cords But they sing with their wings and the songs that they create are actually quite sophisticated And finally the behavior by far that flies spend the most time doing is is cleaning themselves is grooming It's actually fruit flies are among the cleanliness cleanliness of insects Maybe even more so than humans, but that's maybe a story for a different day So to kind of summarize what we need to understand nervous systems while we need a good organism to study and so far Hopefully you'll agree with me that fruit flies are at least a pretty good pretty good organism to pick But it turns out that there are two more reasons why why flies are not only just a good organism to pick to try to understand nervous systems They're a pretty excellent one and the first reason is that If we want to be able to observe and manipulate neural activity We're gonna need to engineer some genes to be able to To be able to observe and manipulate neural activity and it turns out that in fruit flies Engineering genes is easier than it is in any other organism So I want to tell you about an extra slides are two tools to engineer genes that I've used in my own research to and that Everyone in fact who studies fruit flies uses if they want to understand their nervous systems and those tools are Two engineer genes one of them allows us to observe neural activity and one of us one of those Tools allows us to manipulate neural activity. Okay, so the first tool is called g-camp. This is an acronym I honestly forget what the letters stand for but it doesn't matter.  It's useful because it turns out that being filled up with calcium is one of the best Indicators that you can have that a neuron is active is firing action potentials So if we put this g-camp molecule in a neuron We can actually indirectly monitor its activity just by looking at whether this molecule is fluorescing or not Okay, so I can kind of show you what that looks like. I want to contrast G-camp to another engineer gene that you may have heard of it's called GFP or green fluorescent protein You can think about GFP is kind of a dumb version of g-camp it fluoresces But it'll fluoresce no matter what's going on around it So for example, if you put that in the neuron or in the nerve in every neuron in the nervous system of a fruit fly larvae Which I'm showing you here The that larvae's nervous system will turn green That can be really useful if you want to understand the the anatomy of that nervous system But it's not so useful if you want to look at the activity of the neurons that are that are green That's what g-camp allows us to do So for example if you put g-camp instead of GFP in every single neuron in a larval flies nervous system and then you took a movie of that nervous system as For example Thank you. Thank you So if you took a movie of a nervous system in which every neuron was labeled with g-camp or expressing g-camp Then you followed a fruit fly larvae that was for example crawling around you would see something that looks like this If the clicker will work here, yeah So you'll see these beautiful patterns of Neural activity as fluorescence changes over time and what we're watching here is literally the entire nervous system at work and we can try to understand these patterns of neural activity by by By trying to understand these patterns of fluorescence changes of g-camp So g-camp is a tool that we use to monitor neural activity and fruit flies as well as in other organisms Yeah, and there's that So second tool that is really essential to studying nervous systems and that I use it in my own work Is another engineer gene. It's called channel rhodopsin This gene encodes again a protein that looks like this in cartoon form The channel part of the channel rhodopsin name Comes from the fact that this protein forms a channel and the membrane of a neuron if you put it inside a neuron And ions can go through that channel and when they do essentially the neuron becomes electrically active and it turns on and fires action potentials The rhodopsin or the r part of this name comes from the fact that like the rhodopsins in our eyes These channels are sensitive to light and in fact the channel will only open if you shine a particular wavelength of light on it This is super useful in flies because their skin their exoskeleton is translucent So we can actually shine light on them and the light will pass through the cuticle and hit whatever neurons are expressing Channel rhodopsin and those neurons will turn on and in that way we can test the role of those neurons in and its behavior And it's got like we've looked for neurons that regulate this behavior and we've tested the role and test its role or observe its activity The reason we can do that is because the community of people who study fruit flies have decided Few years ago about I guess a decade ago to put all the effort into making Fly strains at once that would express G camper channel rhodopsin in any neuron that we wanted to study And then make that resource available to everyone else who studies fruit flies So the result of all that work was a library or rather four libraries So there's there's one in Illinois one in Virginia one in Vienna and one in Kyoto These are libraries not of books, but of fruit fly strains There are over a million of them and Each strain has been specifically engineered so that the flies from a given strain express Can express either channel rhodopsin or g camp in a particular neuron type that we might want to study But in no other neuron types So for example here are 12 of those approximately million strains in magenta is the brain of the fruit fly And in green are the neurons in each of these strains that express either g camp or channel rhodopsin This is a really useful resource because if you have a behavior that you care about and that you want to study In principle, you could go one by one through each of these lines in a live fly activate the neurons that are Expressing channel rhodopsin in each of those lines and ask is the behavior that I care about influenced in some way So that's kind of a slow Stupid approach, but it's a pretty good one because if you work long enough You're very likely to find something that will be relevant for the behavior that you're interested in So to summarize this part of the Presentation I've told you that flies are a pretty good way to learn about how nervous systems work I think actually they're not just a pretty good way They're one of the best animal models that we have to understand how nervous systems work And one of the reasons for that is that in fruit flies we can learn about nervous systems using engineered genes In a way that we can't really do in any other any other animals So in the last few minutes, I want to tell you about kind of a real-world example That comes from work that I've done in the Scott lab that you see Berkeley this real-world example is Kind of a study whose purpose was to try to understand the neural regulation of this essential behavior That's required for the survival survival not just of fruit flies, but of almost all animals including humans And that's the ability to eat food and drink water one of the most essential things that all animals do The key questions of this study were first of all, what are the neurons that are important for those behaviors and fruit flies? And second, how do they work? How do they regulate the ability of fruit flies to eat food and drink water? So to answer this first question which neurons are important actually I along with a colleague in the Scott lab Brendan Malini We actually just searched through exactly that library that I told you about and we used exactly the approach that I just mentioned We went one by one through a few thousand of these lines and live flies activated the neurons that expressed Channel rotopsin in each of those lines and we asked does that influence the ability of the fly to eat food or drink water? That was obviously a lot of work, but it was worth it because we came across a line in which Which I'm showing you here. This line has just four neurons in the entire nervous system. They're in green here Only four neurons in the entire nervous system in this line express either channel rotopsin or g-camp So we can very specifically ask the role of these neurons in the behaviors that we care about And what we found is that In fact, if you activate these neurons if you turn on their activity in fed flies Then those flies will behave as if they're hungry even though they're fed And that I'm showing you that this is the real data here on the y-axis is the amount of time that flies spend Consuming a food source one molar sucrose when given the opportunity to do so And white is what a normal fly would do kind of the distribution of what normal flies would do And in magenta is a distribution of what flies would do if these four neurons are activated So if you activate these four neurons flies actually eat about twice as much as a normal fly even though they're actually not hungry So that was really exciting because it meant that these neurons maybe played a role in regulating food ingestion in flies But what was even more exciting about these neurons is that if we gave these flies water instead of one molar sucrose Actually, there was an exact opposite effect on ingestion of water when those neurons were activated And that meant that these four neurons were sufficient not just to increase food ingestion But also to suppress the ingestion of water so that this opposing effect on ingestion depending on what the fly was tasting And that was really interesting because it was kind of an observation that had been made a long time ago in the 60s But had never really been followed up on and here using these genetic tools and fruit flies We had again observed this reciprocal effect on a food and water ingestion So to try to understand the kind of the second key question in this study, which is how are these neurons? Causing this effect on on food and water ingestion We turn to this genetic tool G camp So we hypothesized that maybe these neurons were sensitive to some key internal signals for hunger and thirst And it turns out that in in flies as in as in as in humans The key internal signals of hunger and thirst are almost identical So the key internal signal for thirst in both flies and humans is a change in the osmolarity of our blood And osmolarity is just a different word for what the water content of our blood is So when the water content goes down and our blood and the blood of food flies That's the key signal that the nervous system senses to tell us that we're thirsty The second key signal which is a signal and not of thirst, but of hunger is a protein It's a small protein which we like to call a peptide sometimes and it's called glucagon You might have heard of it. It has the opposite effect of insulin and in both humans and fruit flies glucagon Plays a really essential role in signaling hunger So we try to test that hypothesis. In fact, we did test that hypothesis by putting G camp in these four neurons Using a microscope to take a movie of their activity as we either Changed the extracellular osmolarity around those neurons or applied glucagon to them this small protein And this is what that this is the data that we we got from that experiment Think I'll maybe I'll back up and start again Sorry. Yeah, okay Sorry, I haven't been kind of quiet But the result is that when we change the extracellular 200 milos mole units really greatly increased Like a prenatal thing because I still thought that the brain developed In utero, but really it's a result of chronic childhood trauma So You've probably heard when you think about trauma the first thing you've probably heard is fight or flight There's also freeze and a couple of other responses, but I'm not really going to talk about those Because it gets more complicated because it's not actually affected by the sympathetic nervous system It's affected a little bit differently like your natural opiates and things like that, but I will talk about fight or flight so the first thing that happens when you experience even a huge stress is Your amygdala gets triggered like holy shit something stressful is happening and then the amygdala Tells the hypothalamus like holy shit something Stressful is happening. You've got to kick in the sympathetic nervous system and what this does is Raises your heart rate slows your digestion. You'll see people's pupils get bigger pretty much when you think of like anxiety or like Stress, that's what's happening. So normally once the stressor is gone and in an acute situation The gas gets shut off by the break the brakes put on and the parasympathetic nervous system brings things back to homeostasis so in In the wild you'll see this like Robert Sapolsky talks about this and why Zebras don't get ulcers They'll be like running through the savannah and some lion tries to eat them and they're running and they get away And then the next thing you know they're like calmly like eating some grass or drinking some water because their break has kicked in They don't need to run away anymore but if the stressor doesn't going away your body then triggers the HPA access which is sort of like a loop that then Keeps the body keeps the sympathetic nervous system going We're not wired for that level of stress and then eventually cortisol is released. So if you hear people talk about Like autoimmune illnesses or other things like that, which I'm going to get to some of the effects. That's what's happening. It's a The HPA axis is producing cortisol And it's not shutting off Sorry my foot I'm in a lot of pain and I'm trying to remember things while my foot's hurting I can do this though. Okay Now I'm good Normally I'd be walking all around so it's probably good for you that I have to stand here Okay, so you can't really see this slide very well.  So it's a bidirectional Science I'm fascinated by this So this all of this your microbiome is affected there's three bacteria in particular that they found are affected by chronic stress and It actually affects the immune system Moving away from like what happens biologically to what the consequences of this are These are just some of them. There's a lot if you go to the ace's connection Are the and the CDC aces study? They're doing a lot of research on Flood in some ways because it's talking about only 10 different kinds of stress chronic stress and how it leads to later outcomes But the science is there so psycho-emotional Anxiety ADHD other learning disabilities Normal person under enough chronic stress hypervigilance hypervigilance is when you're caught in that HPA access where your sympathetic nervous system not being shut off and you're just like freaking out at things that normally in your right mind you would freak out about but on the opposite end of that is Really More there's research showing that people who had chronic stress as a child are more prone to being victims of Domestic violence or other kinds of violence as an adult. They're also more likely to be accidents And then medically there's been the research especially the ace's research tying chronic childhood stress Because your heart your the sympathetic nervous system is not supposed to be Be city cancer auto-immune illnesses and most of the cancer and the auto-immune illnesses in the IVS are due to the I wanted to explain for people who work familiar with this model. I wanted to explain the basics of like what The narrative is about trauma, but part two of this is the problem with trauma in a different way, so Western medicine and Western psychiatry in general is seen as The science the only science but it can be pretty problematic and although it can be helpful to Understand that like maybe my amygdala is too big and that's why I'm really stressed out. It can sometimes cause more problems than it So So Super racist way of explaining other people's cultures the way they define mental illness as being this like exotic thing that's like Like usually So Describing a specific type of like Mental illness that is culturally bound But we use that word a little bit in English so When I think of Trauma as a culture-bound syndrome I think about the two things that Western psychiatry in general Western medicine really likes to apologize the person the person like that's behaviorally or biologically damaged Their brains didn't develop correctly. So I often hear people are like I've just got a diagnosis of CPTSD And it's good to know that I have this mental illness and that my brain didn't develop correctly It's like is that really the effective way of thinking about the situation and then for marginalized communities Western psychiatry and Western medicine in general has really built itself on the black slaves or just anything else It's like it's marginalizing scientifically the other and one of the examples of this UC Berkeley and I'm at UC Berkeley and Stanford are pretty complicit in this like 5,000 children were sterilized in the day area So from the 1927 I think so the science of inferiority is deep so when we use this model of like This person experience chronic stress So they are biologically damaged So they don't know how to compare themselves and they need to be fixed by outside It's not necessarily putting the blame where blame is due. So in my work, I really talked about context So Phenon talked about the sociology of Psychopathology So he talked about the importance of not looking at the person who's suffering from the mental illness But taking a step back and looking at the context Which causes that and that maybe it's not the person who has the problem Maybe it's the context that has the problem so sticking with the Phenonian for those of you don't know Phenon, he was a black psychiatrist in the 50s He was a colonial psychiatrist and really studied how colonization affects affected the black tolerance and saw that the psychopathology that other people were diagnosing Using that as a backdrop thinking about it in modern times with the population I work with, I work with young people who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated So when I talk to people and I try to explain that what if you spent your whole child to worried that the cops were going to shoot you And then you actually see this around you see people in your community get shot You see it on TV, you see it like around so it's a it's the definition of trauma because it's a perceived threat of death So if that young person ends up having symptoms whether it's a outward aggression Inward aggression for substance use, because substance use is actually with young people is tied to to anxiety, so they're trying to deal with their anxiety Is it the kid that's fucked up or is it the society that's fucked up? Right, so the Phenarian, the coal mine, so For those of you who aren't mine, it's really a thing, a good idea But it was the idea that if you bring a canary, a sentient being down into the coal mines with you If it stopped singing or if it died, it meant that you probably should get out of the coal mine because there's toxic gases there So is it right to blame the canary for dying or was it the not-just gases that made it die? So really in my work, I really tried to take that step back instead of apologizing the young people I work with It's like, well, what caused what happened to happen, not your amygdala Around this, it's sort of when I read about it, it's really minimized that these epigenetic changes are actually adaptive changes So it's we humans want to survive so even on a like an epigenote genetic level We want to survive So these adaptive changes that may seem like the over-reaction of the sympathetic nervous system These like brain development changes, all these things are actually adaptations to try to deal with a like chronic stress That no human should have to deal with. So is it the problem with the person who's trying to adapt or is it the problem with the world that is So fucked up that it's hard to adapt So Instead of like I really am trying to move With the young people I work with to move away from the sort of trauma informed like we talk about trauma informed all the time But there's a lot of inherent racism and pathologization that happens with trauma informed So it looks at the individual as being damaged as opposed to looking at the individual as being So awesome that on a cellular level, they are adapting to change So I'm really trying to change that narrative. I think about Like it's no measure of health to be seen in society. He only begins with a word This is my one of my favorite quotes by Alice Walker if instead of trying to heal the individual who gets the diagnosis of developmental trauma or PTSD or the other I was always told when I was younger when I was first working as a counselor that you probably could take the whole And condense it into maybe like Because really you're just reiterating the same But when I was working with young people pretty much all the things that I saw that were like mental illness were actually So Alice Walker's quote makes me think of Instead of trying to fix the kid or fix the people or fix ourselves those of us who have that diagnosis Maybe we should be looking outwards and fix the causes of the things that cause us to chronic stress Okay, so that's it and if anyone has any questions remember it's really complicated. I can talk about methylation I can't do that any more complicated. I'm just gonna tell you it's really complicated because I am an educator Education is really moving into trauma informed models. Oh Can I repeat the question? What is education? What should education do about this meaning schools? By the time we're in college There was a study that just came out that said that That grad students have a higher Chance of mental illness just like seriously you had to do a study about We all could have told you that We're talking about K-12 so right now schools are really trying to like take on these trauma informed models And they are really dangerous because now we have teachers who are not Experts and however we think of like experts. They're the ones now diagnosing kids so Now kids are getting the label of this sort of like biologically damaged kids I don't know what the solution is But I feel like the stuff needs to be taken back and the sort of like inherent racism and other problems in the education system need to be dealt with before we can deal with like How are we treating our kids? I mean on one hand it seems like it's better. We're moving away from the school to prison pipeline Right, so we're not like punishing kids because we think they're criminals, but now we're diagnosing them because we think they're brain damaged So is it really better? So I don't know the solution is I just know that where we're going is not So there's a trauma and education conference, I mean there's so many things that happen at our school that Yeah, I'm actually going to give a Go to a meeting where they're trying to really get county-wide trauma-informed models and all the schools Hopefully I'm now an expert enough that like they'll listen the best you can do is come up with Compensate or what's happening, but as in the past few years They're really doing more research on them. You have neurogenesis throughout our lives. So even as adults where the belief was Sorry, that's Probably on that biological level we'll get more of an understanding of how we can undo But until the things this for me the way I see it is until those stressors are changed How is the person supposed to be able to change? You talk about like resilience The kids need to have resilience, they need to learn to self-regulate, but if nothing else is changing on the outside I don't know how much it's going to be able to change. Paging children is traumatizing and it actually Fucks the world into that same traumatizing situation they were in before so it compounds the effects Like what I didn't mention is like trauma there's a dose relationship to trauma so the the severity the frequency and The intensity of the trauma affects like it's in direct relationship of how much like how many consequences you're gonna have I guess if you look at it that way so throwing a kid in jail I mean throwing a kid into solitary confinement because they're having a trauma response of violence is Traumatizing So the kids most of the kids that are in the Like violent offenders really when you look at it They're actually the ones that have the most trauma than any other children. Oh, no, there's a fight.


I may be doing tardigrade research, but today you will not see a single teacher of tardigrade because my talk today won't be about tardigrade. That would be about single tardigrade. Well, let's start with a simple question. Why won't we make a flying tower? Well, not that we really need one at the moment, but like imagine, why not? It would be funny, yes, a cow flying somewhere in the sky. Well, we do have genetic engineering. We can transfer genes from one organism to the other. We can make a mouse which glows because it has a gene from the jellyfish. We can make a bacteria which produces some medicine, some hormones for example for humans because it has a gene from humans and so on. So, why won't we just take some genes from a pet, transfer it to a cow and then we'll know that a cow is a giant bat wing, amazing. However, the problem is that currently we're not able to do that. And that's not the problem of the tools. We have quite efficient tools. We mentioned CRISPR and other tools. They are wonderful. They help to do amazing things. But the problem is that we do understand many traits so well as for now. Well, genetics as a science of hereditary temperature started not so far away, by the way. So, we are now here, somewhere in Greco, whereas that is the place in the city of Vermont where Gregor Mendel made his discovery. Well, Gregor Mendel was a monk. He lived in the monastery. That's what monks usually do. And he made experiments. At first, he did experiments with mice. He tried to breed mice, but then they had the monastery pendulum. And then Mendel switched to pea plants and he crossed pea plants of different varieties which were different in some particular trade like purple flowers versus white flowers, yellow seeds versus green seeds and so on. And by doing quite a lot of work, quite a lot of field work, he discovered the principles of genetics which we now call Mendel's principles or sometimes Mendel's laws. And one of those discoveries was basically that we really have some hereditary units. And we inherit one hereditary unit from our father, the other from our mother. And the combination of them may give us this or that effect. Mendel did know what these units were, but today we know that they are genes. Genes are pieces of DNA molecules which are found in our chromosomes inside of almost each of our cells in the body. And today we know how genes work. We know that these pieces of DNA encode RNA molecules. RNA molecules are necessary to create proteins and proteins are everything in our body. Proteins contribute to all of our traits like hair color, color of the eyes, color of the skin, blood growth and so on. There are many of them. And that's really great. It's all based on the discoveries of President Mendel and on the central document of the molecular biology which you see here which was proposed by Francis Greene in the 1950s. But there is one very old idea of classical genetics which is actually not so true but many people still believe in that. Well, this idea is as follows. A gene corresponds to one particular protein and that corresponds to some particular trait. So we can talk about genes of four traits. Well, nobody recognizes that seriously in genetics and science but many people still think of genetics something like that. Yeah, there are genes for traits and you can read these. Scientists discovered a gene for ability. Scientists discovered a gene for alcoholism. A gene for that and a gene for this. Well, one of the reasons why many people still believe it is the way genetics is usually taught in schools, possibly. Well, here is the typical picture from the textbook for genetics. Here you see two parents which have some particular trait, the same trait, different traits, and well, they cross and among their offspring we can see offspring with different traits. For example, well, it's a funny moment from basic school genetics that if we cross two black cats, theoretically in their offspring might be a white cat because each of these black cats might be a carrier of the variant of a gene which is actually for, like, white for, not for, black for. And that is very helpful in teaching basics of genetics, of course, and learning it. However, it confirms that outdated idea that genes somehow corresponds to traits. And if we try to apply this idea to people, well, we may try. And that's also an example from a textbook, yeah? You see? A parent with brown eyes, another parent with brown eyes, and they might have some children with blue eyes. Yeah? Well, very similar to the people at Gregor Mandel. But the problem is that this funny table, this funny squares about human traits are actually wrong because it doesn't work like that. If you think about the color of their eyes, the color of the iris, it's very dangerous. People might have darker brown eyes, hazy eyes, light blue, dark blue, and many, many different variants. And so it's very hard to people with exactly the same shade of color of eyes, in fact. Well, some textbooks deal with that a little bit better. They present pictures like that, that the model is two genes. So they say, okay, yeah, there is not a single gene. These are two genes interact with each other. And of course, this model is closer to truth. But even that model with two genes does not represent the reality like 100% correctly. Because in fact, yeah, there are two genes which mainly influence color of eyes, but there are dozens of others which can also influence that. So in fact, a single gene and two genes do not correspond to that simple trait, color of eyes. And often in the genetics classes, a teacher offers us to do some funny game. Well, we can play it like now, by the way. Well, raise your hand. Well, who can roll the tongue? Yeah, we'll try to do that and like, okay. And who can not? Well, I can not for sure. There are not so many people. Yeah, I'll admit that, yeah. That's not so bad at all. But as they say, well, okay, that would be like, well, a dominant trait, that would be a recessive trait, and that is somehow related to the people Yeah, green seeds, yellow seeds, people who can roll the tongue, people who cannot roll the tongue yet, and then there are many more traits to follow. Well, people with dimples and people without dimples, people having widows peek on the Caroline, and people with straight Caroline, people who, when they cross their fingers like that, and the right is on the top, and the left is on the top, and so on. There are many different characters like that. But the problem is that actually none of these is an indelible trait. Yeah? Because for some of them, we have a strong doubt that they are indelible, that they are inherited in the indelible way, or for some of them, we certainly know that they are not inherited in this way. So there are no good examples which can be demonstrated in the class for single gene traits. And my opinion is that single gene traits in humans actually almost do not exist. The only thing which can be really called, more or less, like single genish in people, would be in the field of medical genetics. That would be the story of single gene disorder, single gene conditions. Yeah? So in the Internet, there is a nice database called OMIM online and daily inheritance in men, and that is the database listing mostly territory conditions, many of which really result from a mutation or a change in a single gene. For instance, there is a disease called sciatic fibrosis, or eukopithecidosis. That's a rare disease, but it affects more than 1,000 people in Poland still, probably even more. We know the reason of that disease. That is a mutation that is a change in one particular gene, CFTR gene, which is situated at the chromosome number 7. So we know its genetic origin very well. And the main symptoms of the disease are problems with the respiratory system, mainly in the lungs and bronx, and also some problems with the pancreas. Well, why did that happen? When the mutation affects that gene, one of the proteins called CFTR stops working, but what kind of protein is that? That is the protein situated in the membrane of the cell. Well, basically there are a lot of proteins in the membrane, and there is also a different function, but some of them really transport substances into the cell or from the cell or both. So CFTR is of that kind. Well, if it works, it should transport chloride ions from the cells, and it is also associated with the transfer of water molecules. What's important? That's important for the normal mucus production. If a mutation affects the gene and the protein would be abnormal, it won't be able to transport chloride ions in the water, and as a result of that, the mucus will be very thick and viscous. It won't be removed from the respiratory tract, and that would result with frequent infections and also with inability to breathe normally. And earlier, when the treatment was not available, people with cystic fibrosis experienced early tests at the age of like 20 years, even earlier. And yet, we have a mutation in a single gene, we have a single protein infection, but we have problems not only in the lungs, in fact. The whole list of cystic fibrosis would be very long. You see, it affects so many things in the body at the same time. So even if there is something like single gene, it may affect so many things in the body at the same time. Well, it's hard to think of it. You can still imagine our genome as a blueprint of the body. And as for example, here is the technical scheme of simplifiers, of course, of the car. And there are different parts of the car, the doors and the wheels and so on. And if you think, well, the genome, each gene corresponds to some body parts, to some organ, to some structure in the body. It's hard to imagine why one gene has problems all over the body. But in fact, our genome does not look like that. I would rather compare it to the recipe. Yes? So how to cook something in the kitchen. Yes? So we have some ingredients, some oil, sugar, yes, yeast and so on, water. We mix them, we do some procedures and we obtain the dish. And we cannot say in many cases which particular slide, which particular part of the dish corresponds to each ingredient. There is no such a correspondence. But what we can say sometimes is what happens if we change the recipe? Yeah, for example, for this recipe for homemade pita, I didn't put that on my own, but, if we take 10 spoons of salt instead of half, well, I can predict what happens. Yeah? It would be whole. And we can, well, do the same thing with the organ. See, I don't know if some mutation happens, we can sometimes predict what would be the results. Well, for instance, I will tell a story about hedgehog. Yeah, I don't know, everybody likes hedgehogs. Well, hedgehog is the name of a gene in a fruit fly. And the reason why it's called so is that a mutation in the gene changes the value of the larva. Well, that's an adult fruit fly, and that's a larva that's with warm light. But if it is a mutant larva, it becomes not only warm light, but also like hedgehog light. Because these dental bands all fuse together, the body is shortened, and the larva looks like a small hedgehog. So, you see, the gene is named, not after what it normally should do, but the gene is named on like what happens if it doesn't work properly. And by the way, in genetics, especially in early times, that was the usual way to name the genes. For instance, well, there is a gene called tinman. Yeah, we don't know. Tinman didn't have the heart, yeah? And the gene tinman, basically, the mutation in it affects the structure of the heart. Where is the gene called can and barbie? Well, you can guess what it does, but the mutation of it affects the structure of sexual organs. There is a gene called sweet cheese, and the mutation in it just follows in the brain, well, not so funny, of course. And there is a gene called van Gogh, yeah, just imagine. And the fruit flies, which have mutation in them, the gene has their wings curled like this, like famous painting. So the genes are commonly named after their particular mutations, and that gene was named Hedgehog, but that was not the end of the story, by the way. Later, after the gene was discovered in fruit flies, similar genes were discovered in vertebrates, and there were three of them, not one. And so each of them was named after some particular Hedgehog, yeah? Two of them were named after two species of Hedgehog which really exist. Somewhere in the planet, there's a Hedgehog, and in there, Hedgehog, and the third one, well, possibly the most famous one, was named after Sony Hedgehog, after the Hedgehog from the computer game and later movie. Later, like, was that thinking? What does that Hedgehog do, actually? And in fact, it does so many things. It affects central neural system development, eye development, finger development, disc development. That's one of the most important genes. Well, we still call it Hedgehog because of that mutation in the fruit fly, but in fact, that's one of the most important genes in our own development. So you see that the same gene affects so many things in the body at the same time. And on the other hand, if we look at some particular function, like eye development, and we think how Sony Hedgehog influences that, we'll see something like that. Well, here is it. Here is our Sony SHH, yeah? That's our gene. But there are many other genes interacting with that. So Sony Hedgehog alone is not enough to make an eye, yeah? There's interaction of many genes and environment for that. So from one side, one gene may influence a lot of traits. On the other side, the same trait is influenced by a lot of genes. So there is no straightforward correspondence. Well, and I will finish with one of my favorite cartoons, you know, the Soviet cartoon. And I like it for two reasons. First of all, it's quite psychedelic, and certainly it could create that they used some substances. But I like it not for that, mainly. I like it because it demonstrates how genetics works, yeah? On the first glance, well, you don't see why, what is the correspondence between these and genetics, but I'll tell you. That's the story of a boy who went into the music box, so his music box was broken, so he became very small and he got into the music box. And there he found a single detail, which was broken. He repaired that and music box started playing music again. So why do you use that for, too? Well, I insist that, yeah, a single detail if it is broken can stop the music. But this single detail is not creating the music. To create the music with it, a lot of details inside of the music box are interacting with each other. The same is with our genome, so a mutation in a single gene or a single gene mutation can really cause a disease and can cause some particular abnormal traits. But there is a necessity to use a lot of genes in order to make a normal trait still. So when we are discussing genetic engineering, when we are playing God, creating and changing the organisms, yeah, it's a good thing to think playing our own music or we are just trying to break something in the music which is already playing or we are trying to modify it to sound better. That's for me, that's a very good question. Well, thank you for watching.